Ramón Saizarbitoria's High Modernist Novel in Contemporary Basque Literature

Ramón Saizarbitoria's High Modernist Novel in Contemporary Basque Literature Ibon Izurieta is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado at Denver. He completed Master 's Degrees in Spanish and Comparative Literature and a PhD in Spanish at the University of Iowa. Several of his publications focus on Miguel de Unamuno as a philosopher, author and politician within the liberal project of the regeneration of Spain while his other articles research post-Franco Basque Narrative and Film. He incorporates an aesthetic-based textual and discourse analysis into a historical approach that analyses the role of capitalism in the cultural discursive constructs of today. Ramón Saizarbitoria is a leading Basque novelist not very well known outside of the Basque Country. His literary work (always originally written in Basque) seeks to create a textual legacy for a language that has historically been by and large oral and does not have a strong literary tradition. Saizarbitoria is not content with just writing , he also wants to elevate Basque literature in one dramatic leap through the history of literature all the way to modernity. To accomplish this goal, his recipe is advancement of the literary technique through the use of formal devices that disrupt traditional narrative linearity. His purpose , as he states, is to place Basque literature among the literatures of culturally advanced nations. However, this seemingly innocent desire for progress should be scrutinized to uncover its traces of bourgeois ideology as part of the liberal, humanist obsession with technical and scientific evolution. Progress, innovation of technique and technology, the emergence of modern art and its obsession with novelty and its estrangement effect are herein analyzed in Ehun metro (Cien metros) (1976), Hamaikapauso (Lospasos incontables) (1995) and Bihotz bi: gerrako kronikak (Amor y guerra) (1996) to reveal the political unconscious ofthose values as modernist teleology. The presentation of the central argument of my analysis should not be understood to be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is a historically conscious recognition and validation of "vanguardist aesthetics"1 which embrace the obvious political role of literature. Such a historically conscious reading of literature does not imply the imposition of impoverished, orthodox, realist aesthetics. I Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 76 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies propose, on the contrary, a "historicized" reading that seeks to uncover the ideological traps of the aesthetics of a modernity that refuses to consider its allegiances with capitalism. A study of progress that equates the existence of a culture with its textual record should be suspect, especially if that textual record is judged according to a concept of aesthetics developed since Romanticism. The mistaken belief that the presence of a textual record reflects an historiographie notion of the receptacle of the soul of a people is ideologically laden. Blind also is any concept of language that keeps up with technological advances yet refuses to parse out the allegiances of such progress with capitalism . At the same time, any reading of literary innovation that denies value to vanguardist aesthetics should also be condemned . Regarding the Basque language, the reason for creating a textual record should not be to document the soul of a people or to keep up with technological innovation or even so that Basque literature can be counted among the "developed" countries in the world. The answer I would propose is that the written form recovers a re-historicization of human existence in the Basque Country. This conclusion still leaves unresolved the problem Basques are facing, which is how to write literature in Basque since there are few antecedents who have dealt with problems involved in the craft of writing. The craft of textual production requires particular technical innovations for basic problems such as how to phrase the sentence "he said" in Basque. In English any writer has a plethora of choices: he stated, affirmed, surmised, mumbled, declared, spoke, etc, and they all exist because of preceding texts that have already resolved basic problems of textual language. In Basque, however, authors literally have to invent new words if they want to avoid repeating "he said" constantly when writing a dialogue. The lack of textual antecedents...