Introduction

Madrid Writing/ Reading Madrid Guest Editor: Edward Baker Plan for redesign of die Paseo de la Castellana looking north. Graphic design by Tau Diseño, SA. for project by Desarrollo UrbanÃ-stico Chamartin. Reproduced with permission of DUCH and Tau Diseño SA. Introduction Edward Baker is a schoUr of modem and early modem Spanish letters. He has taught in American and Spanish universities, and is the author ofLa. lira mecánica. En torno a la poesÃ-a de Antonio Machado (Madrid, 1986), Materiales para escribir Madrid: literatura y espacio urbano de MoratÃ-n a Galdós (Madrid, 1991) and La biblioteca de Don Quijote (Madrid, 1997). At present he is working on An Archeology Of Spanish Literature, a book-length study of the origins of Spain's national literary canon. Let us begin with a simple observation of fact: prior to the decade of the 1970s there was virtually not a single piece of critical work on Madrid literature that conformed to contemporary methodological standards. This is a remarkable statement because it suggests that the intellectual level not solely of literary criticism but, more broadly, of literary writing on Madrid around the middle of the twentieth century was inferior to that of the middle of the nineteenth. Nonetheless, it is not exactly the case that authors writing about Madrid's literature and culture forty or fifty years ago did not measure up to, let us say, Mesonero, for if they failed to do so it would be unfortunate but this, of itself, would pose no serious critical problem. Spain's past, including its cultural past, presents to the beholder a picture of marked discontinuities, and this would be one among many others; no more, really, than a pale reflection of that far more dramatic historical discontinuity, the civil war and the dictatorship's thirty-six-year state of emergency. The truth, however , is that the writers of our mid-century were not exactly inferior to Mesonero; rather, they were trying to emulate him and, what is worse, more often than not they succeeded. I will not burden the reader with a list of authors and titles, but anyone familiar with the writings from those years of Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles, Antonio DÃ-az-Cañabate, the sea of anecdote that comprises Federico Bravo Morata's purArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 3, 1999 ΊΑ Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies ported history of Madrid, and virtually every article on Madrid themes printed in the pages of ABC and BUnco y Negro between 1939 and the present, knows whereof I speak. ' This compels us if not to a conclusion at least to a working hypothesis , however roughly hewn: although costumbrismo as a viable form of literary expression with an internal aesthetic dynamic of its own disappeared following the septembrina, the revolution of September , 1868 (Ferreras), there existed at midtwentieth century, and, alrliough in a diminished form, still does, a sensibility that connected with and responded to costumbrista forms of literary expression and, more broadly, the repertoire of social and discursive gestures, in short, the structures of sentiment that constitute Madrid castichmo . That sensibility floated comfortably on the anecdotized trivialization of the city's history and it deployed a methodology which could function only by going unrecognized. The method entailed the reduction of the city's inhabitants and their culture, especially the working classes and popular culture, to a nature, and the further reduction of that nature to a collection of tics, so that with the aid of a complicit public, art imitated life, but only to the extent that life imitated the género chico. This unhappy state of affairs was deeply rooted in romanticism, and that fact should make us mindful of something which, as historians of literature and culture , must command our attention. Romanticism , unlike all literary and artistic movements prior to the nineteenth century , cannot simply be the object of an archeological recuperation, for it is the only one which, long after it was emptied of aesthetic life, did not disappear. On the contrary, as the originary artistic moment of a bourgeois culture long ago turned in on itself, it remains with us in a static...