In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Diccionario tragalológico y otros escritos políticos (1820–1821)
  • Andrew Ginger
José Joaquín De Clararrosa, Diccionario tragalológico y otros escritos políticos (1820– 1821). Edited by Fernando Durán López. Textos Clásicos del Pensamiento Político y Social en el País Vasco, 9. Zarautz: Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco. 2006. 316pp. ISBN 84-8373-806-6.

Spanish cultural achievements of the period from 1814 to the early 1830s, from the fall of the first constitution to the establishment of liberal government under Isabel I, remain a fairly neglected area of study. Hispanists have never quite managed to acquire a taste for their peculiarities. This is not least because of the difficulty in seeing them as anything other than either a postscript to the Enlightenment and age of Sensibility, or a build-up to the later kinds of ‘Romanticism’ practised in the 1830s. Still, it can be worth the effort to try to shift one’s perceptions so that the distinctiveness of the period’s works comes to light: Tully (2007) has recently recast Bohl von Faber as a ‘transcultural pioneer’, Almeida (2006) sees in Blanco White a transatlantic and transnational figure, whose cultural production cuts across linguistic bounds to create a metropolitan Romanticism. This new edition of works by the dissident, left-liberal (exaltado) ex-priest, José Joaquín de Clararrosa, and especially of his important Diccionario tragalológico (1821) helps contribute to such rethinking, and makes key texts available to modern readers.

In his introduction, Fernando Durán López traces the writer’s chequered life, including his persecution early in the century for materialism and atheism, and his adoption of the persona of medical doctor Clararrosa in place of his original identity, Fray Juan Antonio Olavarrieta, in order to escape his past. Durán López sees this biography as an exemplary, if rather extreme tale of the impossible struggle to reconcile liberty with a normal life in the Spain of the time (12). More importantly perhaps, Durán López situates Clararrosa’s work within the transnational flow and even in the copying of ideas and published material from across Europe, and also underlines the writer’s significance in the emergence of modern Spanish journalism, building up to the importance of the Diccionario tragalológico itself. As Clararrosa persists in his personal and political struggle for liberty, so he turns more and more from abstract theorizing to the production of shorter articles engaging directly with the immediate practical struggles over opinion and matters of actuality. Clararrosa begins to cultivate key stylistic traits: a mixture of sarcasm, ideological responses to the trivia of everyday life, concise prose, a strong ever-present personality, and enigmatic insinuation (67). In turn, Durán López situates the Diccionario within the context of Enlightenment dictionaries and their efforts to create a new ‘philosophical’ language for new times. But, Durán López argues, Clararrosa’s dictionary tips the balance away from essayistic entries on abstract or philosophical concepts towards an apparently random accumulation and multiplication of lexical entries, ‘extraña, imprevisible y desordenada’ (73), as if by a literary ‘francotirador’ (72) using earlier intertexts primarily as a ‘detonante para su propia imaginación’ (75), and stressing popular humour, parody and material realities (72). The very adjective tragalológico in the work’s title stems from the exaltado revolutionary song, the Trágala, born of the violent conflicts of the liberal Trienio (1820–1823), contributing to and underlining the dictionary’s peculiar flavour, found ‘en esa palabra, en su brusquedad soez y en su violenta irracionalidad’ (69).

The significance of the Diccionario tragalológico does seem to rest on its particular exploration of literary and political violence through a sprawling structure of loose ends. Clararrosa provides two distinct images of ingestion to describe the characteristics of his creation: in the one, intended for political sympathizers, the book is a collection of bocadillos, from which the reader may select at will (230); in the other, the work is a many-legged beetle to be swallowed whole by Clararrosa’s opponents (229). Either way, the ingestion will be transformative, but the definitive title...

pdf

Share