Tertulia: Literatur und Soziabilität im Spanien des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Tertulia is an important but understudied element of middle- and upper-class life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. The term describes many different types of informal gatherings at private and public places: political meetings, cultural performances, reunions of the extended family, coffeehouse culture, different types of clublike institutions, casual encounters of groups of friends, scientific meetings, and so forth. Tertulia was (and is) a kind of catchall term for all these gatherings that still did not have proper names. The 1739 Diccionario de Autoridades of the Spanish Royal Academy defines tertulia as "junta voluntaria, ò congresso de hombres discretos, para discurrir en alguna materia" and as "junta de amigos, y familiares para conversación, juego, y otras diversiones honestas" (voluntary meeting or congress of different men to discuss some topic and meeting of friends and family members for conversation, play and other honest diversions). Tertulia therefore is a key to understanding the private and the public spheres of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America in the transition from old regime to modern societies.

Andreas Gelz views the tertulia in Spain through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fictional texts. His focus is not the historical reconstruction of what the tertulia really might have been but the "societal perception" of the tertulia (19). According to Gelz, from its very beginning the tertulia was part of both oral and written communication because in the one form people spoke about written texts in the tertulia, whereas in the other form tertulia was an important topic for fictional and nonfictional literature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain. Authors often used tertulia as a framework to present their ideas about art, society, and politics, and in this way they contributed to its concept, that is, it in some ways shaped the real tertulias all over Spain. At the same time these "real" tertulias were models for fictional or autobiographical writing. Thus, according to Gelz, we cannot describe what tertulia was without looking at the texts written about tertulia(s). Because of the importance of these models, tertulias are mentioned in countless texts, and these are the ones on which Gelz's book is based: novels, plays, journal articles, memoirs, diaries, and pamphlets. It includes famous canonical texts as well as little-known and forgotten literature.

In a very detailed and sometimes overloaded description, Gelz shows that tertulia corresponded to the need to create new forms and places of communication. As the Church and the Bourbon monarchy did not allow open spaces of public interchange, tertulia stood between the private and the public. Until the early nineteenth century, tertulia was a subversive institution that undermined old-regime Spain. Many clerical texts condemned this kind of gathering because it distracted people from their religious duties. Writing about the tertulia therefore meant writing about a new "model . . . of social interaction" (364). It was impossible to do that without condemning or praising the changes Spain was experiencing. However, once the tertulia was a well-established form of middle- and upper-class life at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some authors tried to integrate it into a conservative vision of modern Spain. In these texts members of a tertulia did not meet as equals, and they did not debate societal and political matters in a critical way. Tertulia became a form of familiar meeting that protected Spanish people from modern life. It became something typically Spanish, a folkloristic element of a distinct tradition. Such a changing attitude toward tertulia could therefore be said to demonstrate its successful social integration.

Tertulia was probably much more common in other countries than many Spanish writers thought. Informal meetings of family members, friends, or business partners were part of daily life practices all over Europe and both Americas. Nevertheless, Gelz shows that these forms of gatherings held a special importance in Spain. Here tertulia played an instrumental role in the emergence of a public sphere. Gelz does not offer a...