Spectacle and Topophilia: Reading Early Modern and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures

9. Exhausted Cosmopolitanism in Zamacois's Memorias de un vagon de ferrocarril

173 u 9 Exhausted Cosmopolitanism in Zamacois’s Memorias de un vagón de ferrocarril Robert A. Davidson Introduction Eduardo Zamacois Quintana’s 1922 novel Memorias de un vagón de ferro­ carril (Memoirs of a Railway Car) is an intriguing, if at times long-winded and ultimately forgotten, example of the way in which avant-garde and mainstream artists confronted the challenges of Spanish modernity by exploring different categories of being within the context of the social changes of the early twentieth century. Memorias is remarkable, though, for its unusual choice of a luxury railcar as the story’s narrator. In this essay I explore the ramifications of this narrative strategy by pushing further than a simple examination of the moderni­ zation of transport systems in Spain and the concomitant integration and disjunctures with northern Europe that this entailed at both the practical and metaphorical levels.1 Instead, I propose that through a reading of both the machine narrator’s unique birth and the role of the mechanical accident—modernity’s unnatural catastrophe—in its maturation, one sees how the initial exaltation of cosmopolitanism and avant-gardism eventually becomes exhausted in the thing-that-feels.2 In addition to offering a new version of the “Spanish” subject, I contend that Zamacois contributes to a growing reconsideration of modernist materialist aesthetics even as latent—yet explicit—Castilian Regenerationist 174 robert a. davidson concerns permeate his novel. And while the author may echo the work of the much-better-known Ramón Gómez de la Serna in his contemplation of inanimate objects, his is a different type of materialist history. Zamacois’s novel is a materialist autobiography in which the day-to-day felt over a lifetime is perceived from a radically different, avant-garde angle: that of the living object. From its registration as a cognitive being—a moment that stands as an instance of the cosmopolitan avant-garde “appearing to itself”—to the quiescence of aftermath and the loss of use value, the trajectory of the existence of the railcar named Cabal informs a concurrent reading of the Spanish state. Zamacois, who was born in Cuba and left Spain to go into exile in 1939, is somewhat of a forgotten figure in Spanish letters even though his literary production was prodigious and he can be credited for founding the influential journal El Cuento Semanal in 1907. Both this revue and another, Los Contem­ poráneos, provided an important forum for the publication of short novels in Spain.3 In terms of his own literary production, Soler points out that “Zamacois brought the style and the philosophy of positivism into this century, incorporating it into more contemporary tendencies” (307). One of the most interesting ways that the author did this is evident precisely in Memorias through his inclusion of the inanimate world in his naturalistic and positivistic-inspired renderings of modern Spain. This strategy offers a novel take on how both the social and built environments in the country were changing and adapting to the pressures of modernity and modernization. After a typical bourgeois sojourn in Paris, Zamacois led a bohemian life in Spain before he traveled to Latin America—later returning to Europe to work as a war correspondent during World War One. In 1916, he branched out to cinema and managed to secure financing for a silent film based on the daily life of great Spanish authors, Escritores y artistas españoles.4 During the period leading up to the Civil War, Zamacois was strongly leftist even as the old bohemian streak persisted in his creative work. Regardless of his political orientation , he was a highly productive writer, authoring over the course of his career twenty novels, forty-six short novels, eleven collections of short stories, four autobiographical works, two books of war reports, nine theatrical pieces, five collections of essays, five travel books and countless newspaper articles. Me­ morias offers an incredibly detailed treatment of Spanish geography and makes clear Zamacois’s keen enthusiasm for trains: indeed, by the end of his career he had traveled almost all of the railways in the country (Catena 264). Published first as a sixty-page novela corta that appeared in five chapters, it reappeared as a substantially larger, 379-page gran novela that makes use of intercalated stories and even employs a theatrical script form at one point in the narrative. EXHAUSTED COSMOPOLITANISM 175 The novel’s...