Spectacle and Topophilia: Reading Early Modern and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures

10. Cultural Landscapes: Luis Cernuda's Exiled Poetry

191 u 10 Cultural Landscapes: Luis Cernuda’s Exiled Poetry Goretti Ramírez (Translated by María José Giménez) The culture of the Spanish Republican exile during Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) is still far from being clearly understood. Although advances in archival research already enable a description of its fields of cultural production , its ideological processes remain obscure. The culture of the Republican exile encompasses a geographically dispersed community of intellectuals with divergent positions, who were representatives of all the movements that had converged during the Republic (1931–1936). Despite such a varied orography, the critical avenues explored thus far have been rather uniform. In particular, exile cultural production has been understood as a discourse on identity: that is, as a manifestation or construction of one of the multiple modalities of the Republican identity, such as woman, Catalan, Basque, or participant in a political or philosophical movement, among others. In this study, I have gathered critical findings of the existing bibliography to propose another perspective, starting from two interrelated hermeneutic considerations. First, although culture is a concept of elusive definition, it can generally be considered as an “active construction of meaning, or the processes and codes through which meanings are constructed, negotiated, conveyed, and understood” (King 138). A fruitful way to approach culture in the Spanish Republican exile would be not as a product, but rather as a process characterized 192 GORETTI RAMÍREZ by irreducible ideological aporias and contradictions derived mainly from the constant appropriation and redefinition of cultural signs of the Franco period into a divided, conflictive modernity. Rather than defining modernity, we can describe the tension among various ideologies within modernity itself. Secondly , rather than interpreting it only as a discourse on identity, the Spanish Republican exile can be placed within the framework of representations of space in modernity and interpreted as a spatial category. In this context, the representation of natural and architectural space becomes the sphere in which the Republican exile complicates (affirms and negates at the same time) the cultural and political hegemony of Franco’s Spain. Luis Cernuda’s poetry of exile offers representations of three types of landscapes in nature and the architectural world: urban landscapes, mostly in Anglo-Saxon settings (parks, cemeteries, and city ruins); Edenic landscapes, mostly in Hispanic settings (gardens, other cemeteries, and other ruins); and Spanish historic landscapes (Castile and the Escorial palace complex). Although the existing bibliography emerges from a variety of approaches, his poems have been interpreted largely as the tension Cernuda (1902–1963) felt between the Edenic spaces of his memories of Spain and the spaces of exile . However, if these same poems are inscribed within the theoretical framework of cultural landscape studies, it can be argued that the representation of landscape in Cernuda’s poetry of exile shows a paradoxical coincidence with the ideological principles used by the culture of Franco’s Spain (for example, José Ortiz Echagüe’s photographic pictorialism), specifically in the attempt to restore the Spanish imperial and spiritual past in reaction to the cultural processes of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. From this perspective, the representation of the landscape of the Republican exile provides a foundation for considering the ideological framework of Spanish modernity as a struggle for the definition of cultural signs. Landscape and Ideology Beginning with the publication of The Country and The City (1973) by Raymond Williams and John B. Jackson’s proposal of the term “cultural landscape ,” and continuing with the conception of landscape not as a static text but as a process in the formation of identities (Mitchell 1), the field of cultural landscape studies has developed revealing tools for the study of both rural and urban spaces. According to these conceptual parameters, landscape is a sign drawn by man in nature and, as such, a cultural product subject to readings CULTURAL LANDSCAPES 193 and interpretations. Of particular interest is the dialectical relationship between landscape and history as described by Fred Inglis, among others: landscape is “the most solid appearance in which a history can declare itself” (489). Alan R. H. Baker elucidates the relationships between landscape and ideology: Ideologies, moreover, contain within themselves a contradiction: they seek permanence and continuity but argue for change. . . . “Actual” landscapes are constructions , ‘ideal’ landscapes are conceptualizations. At the same time, “actual” landscapes are moulded by ideologies and ideologies are themselves fashioned by “actual” landscapes: the relationship is reciprocal, the product is a dialectical landscape which...