Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire

1. From the Narratives of the Modernity to Spanish Romanticism

[ 1 ] Chapter 1 From the Narratives of the Modernity to Spanish Romanticism In the closing lines of his 1990 Nobel Lecture, “La búsqueda del presente” [The Search for the Present], Octavio Paz openly grapples, like others before him, with the elusive character of the modern. “Perseguimos a la modernidad en sus incesantes metamorfosis”—he writes—“y nunca loy nunca logramos asirla. Se escapa siempre: cada encuento es una fuga” [We pursue [We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses, yet we never manage to get a hold of her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight] (20).1 Moments later, as Paz brings his observations to an end, the quest for the modern, which he has figured in the language of Eros throughout the lecture , finally comes to find its object in the paradox of evanescence itself, a sense of the fleeting that, once acknowledged, becomes the threshold of an epiphany: La abrazamos y al punto se disipa: sólo era un poco de aire. Es el instante, ese pájaro que está en todas partes y en ninguna. Queremos asirlo vivo pero abre las alas y se desvanece, vuelto un puñado de sílabas. Nos quedamos con las manos vacías. Entonces las puertas de la percepción se entreabren y aparece el otro tiempo, el verdadero, el que buscábamos sin saberlo: el presente, la presencia. (22) [We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to apprehend it alive but it opens its wings and vanishes, transformed into a handful of syllables . We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.] In its rapturous figuration of the modern as the ever-vanishing trace of the present, this formulation and the modernist poetic tradition to [ 2 ] ProPerties of Modernity which it belongs eloquently bear witness to the challenges of coming to terms with a word-thought that is most at home in the impermanence we call time.2 The convergence of modernity and the present in Paz’s lecture , however, also speaks to an intuitive understanding of the modern as a particular way of conceptualizing contemporary times, a manner of distinguishing the way things are now from the way they were then. The concept of modernity is born under the sign of discontinuity. It is, among other things, an attempt to transect historical time into a before and an after such that the two moments no longer recognize their family resemblance . It entails an othering of past and present; but the irony behind modernity-as-discontinuity is that the discontinuous itself then becomes a category capable of binding disparate historical times. Modernity comes to share something fundamental with the very past it would eschew. It shares its passing, for the today from which the modern looks over its shoulder to tell the past, “we are different, you and I,” is a moment to which tomorrow will also be able repeat the same words. Like Paz’s bird, the modern appears to be everywhere and nowhere. As an abstract, formal relation to the past, the modern flirts with temporal ubiquity. Paz comments, for example, that “la modernidad rompe con el pasado inmediato sólo para rescatar al pasado milenario y convertir a una figurilla de fertilidad del neolítico en nuestra contemporánea” [modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the Neolithic into our contemporary] (22), and the poet seems to smile wryly at the claims of a postmodernity that is often unaware of the way it apes the hallmark proclamation of the modern, now things are really different. “¿Pero qué es la postmodernidad ”—Paz asks—“sino una modernidad aún más moderna?” [But what is postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity?] (14). And yet, as if to remind us of the longstanding quarrel between Poetry and History, this aesthetic sense of a modernity in perpetual flight is almost immediately countered by the weight with which the modern has been imbued as one of the fundamental categories of Western historiography. For history, modernity is not just any perceived break with the past, not just any moment of discontinuity. Clio does not easily tolerate a ubiquitous modernity -as-vanishing-act that would leave...