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

Michael Iarocci's book Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire convincingly pushes the notional critical limit of modernity in Spanish literature into the eighteenth century. His study advances the theory that Spanish Romanticism enjoyed a uniquely peripheral standpoint from which to perceive the upheavals of European history, especially the French, Scientific, and Industrial Revolutions (xiii). He contends that northern Europe considered Spain incapable of giving rise to an authentic literary Romanticism, since it was itself Romantic, an object upon which the northern European Romanticizing gaze could work rather than a subject of its own Romantic discourse.

Iarocci's work is as much about the critical construction of Romanticism as it is about the three authors he studies (Cadalso, the duke of Rivas, and Larra). His first chapter studies the position of Spain in a European narrative of modernity. Iarocci accuses northern Europe of denying historical agency to Spain, of a belief that Spain may be Romantic, but cannot generate its own Romanticism. In consequence, northern European writers were free to ignore Spain's former political predominance and exclude the country from the locus of the "civilized." As Romanticism became more widespread in northern Europe, some writers conceived of modernity in spatial terms—Spain is located in the Middle Ages, while the home of the modern is elsewhere. Unlike previous judgmental attitudes, however, Romantic northern Europeans celebrated Spain's un-modernity, perceiving the country as "untainted." Like Torrecilla in La imitación colectiva, Iarocci identifies a Spanish belief that the "national spirit" is fundamentally un-modern, even in critical inquiry (28). Iarocci also presents a concise history of the criticism of Spanish Romanticism. The range of critical understanding of when, if, and how Spanish Romanticism developed is astonishing, from del Río's broad belief that a Romantic medieval character is present throughout Spanish literature, to Silver's assertion that Spain did not experience a true Romanticism until the twentieth-century Edad de Plata (30-36).

Iarocci's second chapter, on Cadalso's Noches lúgubres (1775), shows that it combines the Renaissance technique of the dialogue with more emotional overtones. Iarocci's account of the text discusses the difficult critical location of Noches lúgubres. While some would place Noches lúgubres in the genealogy of Romanticism, Iarocci prefers to consider it an early example of Romanticism itself. He points out the protagonist's desire to constitute himself as a locus of suffering, and the consequent narrative requirement for the loss of his beloved (68). Iarocci also considers Romantic the criticism that Cadalso's protagonist Tediato makes of the economic worldview subsumed in the term interés. Iarocci reads this criticism as the creation of a powerful societal critique prefiguring Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of instrumental rationality (86-87).

The third chapter of Properties of Modernity examines the duke of Rivas's play Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino in terms of an evolving Romantic understanding of what poetry does: he compares the eighteenth-century notion of the technical "art of verse-composition" with the Romantic preference for emotional inspiration (106). In the play, the mestizo protagonist don Álvaro speaks in verse, as does his beloved's family, the Calatravas, showing thereby a capacity for subjective agency equal to theirs; his desire to marry the daughter Leonor is thwarted by her father due to Álvaro's race, however, and by the end of the play the father, Álvaro, and Leonor's two brothers have all died violently as a result. Especially because the ongoing processes of liberalization and decolonization were linked, Iarocci sees that don Álvaro's racial alterity cannot be reduced to or dismissed as merely a "Romantic topos" (124), but must be read as a dramatic linkage of freedom and equality unusual for the 1830s (134).

The fourth and final chapter of Properties of Modernity deals with the later days of Mariano José de Larra and a "tetralogy" of the pessimistic, often...