La modernidad silenciada: la cultura española en torno a 1900 (review)

Beginning with the publication of his acclaimed La novela en libertad in 1999 (reviewed in these pages), Germán Gullón has adopted a particularly engaging approach to literary studies, one in which literature informs culture as much as culture informs literature. In this respect, anyone familiar with Gullón's constant and prodigious literary output is bound to recognize that his recent foray into producing his own short stories and novels has considerably enhanced the manner in which he reexamines the cultural status of literary movements and texts on which he was already an undisputed authority.

In the present volume, that enhancement is noticeable in two ways. Foremost, Gullón's first-hand knowledge of what it means to issue works of fiction into the world allows him to cast a more refined net over the literary landscape, one that captures not just authors and texts but also their social and historical milieus, as well as the (sometimes sinister) effects of their contemporary and long-term reception by readers, critics, and literary historians. Secondly, as he does so, Gullón seamlessly combines scholarly rigor with historical insight, unexpected anecdotes, and imaginative analogies that drive the point home and serve to make La modernidad silenciada highly readable.

Gullón argues that Spanish modernism represented a threat to the social and political currents that prevailed at a time when Spain was in the throes of grappling with the loss of its last overseas colonies in America and the Philippines. What is useful about this argument is not merely that it persuades us to revise the way we view and teach modernismo and its various offspring and congeners (vanguardia, decadentismo, erotismo, exotismo, et al.), but that the lines of reasoning and the kind of evidence Gullón puts forth in order to make the argument stick are in themselves captivating and worthy of being applied to other historical moments. A guiding premise of his thesis is that the very notion of "literary movement" should remain permanently open to question. While some authors may at first benefit from having their works placed (or pigeonholed) within this or that -ism, it is more often the case, especially over time, that categories and labels exert a stifling influence on the works they purport to illuminate—even if these are judiciously categorized in the first place. Rather than tossing the notion of literary categories overboard, however, Gullón suggests questioning them and reviewing their shortcomings and contradictions, and then follows his own advice by breathing fresh air into various movements, in particular, noventayochismo, modernismo, and, with special vigor, decadentismo. In doing so, he shows that the latter two posed a threat to the established order, which was more preoccupied with licking its wounds than with investigating how the disaster of 1898 might have been averted. Healing those wounds took the form of an inward-looking nationalism and conservatism that privileged the writings of the so-called Generation of '98 over the subversive musings of authors who, if not silenced, might have pointed the way for Spain to join the modern world sooner than it did. Gullón maintains that literary institutions took it upon themselves to compartmentalize these musings by closing the door labeled modernista on them, thereby exercising a subtle form of control over an emerging European attitude that, in the view of the Spanish establishment, was thought to transgress the limits of acceptable personal and social conduct. In a sense, noventayochistas helped history repeat itself, as Spain once again took to shielding herself from the intellectual winds that were blowing outside its borders, this time, by withdrawing into self-contemplation, in search of a glorious past— which Gullón unmasks as a futile logocentric quest for an ultimate and true identity. That isolationist move entailed rejecting every conceivable form of the other (the foreign, subjective, feminine, symbolist, erotic—in sum—modernista other), a rejection later sustained by the Franco regime...