Kneading, Eating, Longing: Rye Bread and Hunger for Memory in Contemporary Galician Literature

1. Why White Bread Is Not Worth Remembering (But Rye Bread Is): Manuel Rivas Reads Xosé Neira Vilas with Henri Bergson

As indicated in my title, the “hunger for memory” topos will be a main conceptual focus of the present essay. With that purpose in mind, I will reinterpret and adapt to the study of Galicia’s vanishing vernacular cultures the oft-misunderstood modernist critique of historicism and teleological patterns of memory put forth by Henri Bergson. Thematically speaking, my discussion will also feature a reconsideration of an important leitmotif in Galician culture: the contrast between wheat-based pantrigo (or pan branco) and the rye-based pan negro (or pan centeo) of yesteryear. The contrast in question was first noted by the sociolinguist and literary critic Xesús Alonso Montero (Lingua, literatura e sociedade 33–35). This critic’s inventory features Padre Sarmiento, Rosalía de Castro, Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao, and a popular saying in verse in which pantrigo becomes a metaphor for all kinds of auspicious occurrences and conditions (e.g., marriage, woman’s fertility, economic prosperity generally).¹ He nonetheless neglects to mention the foodstuff’s full treatment in Xosé Neira Vilas’s vernacular Bildungsroman titled Memorias dun neno labrego (1961), which I will connect to Manuel Rivas’s poem “O pan negro” (1985).² Another noteworthy absence from Alonso Montero’s brief survey is Ramón Otero Pedrayo’s landscape writing, which I will also summarily engage.

In Rivas’s “O pan negro,” the speaker—an undisguised authorial persona—travels in his imagination to Neira Vilas’s bleaker rural world of the nineteen-forties.³ The bread motif belongs to a larger cluster of topics, including hunger and scarcity, which has played a central part in defining Galicia’s differential consciousness in the course of the twentieth century. In fact, hunger/scarcity, migration, and saudade were frequently used by highly influential intellectuals as vectors of cultural self-differentiation during the forties (the anos da fame) and in the ensuing decade. Some of these authors were torn between, on the one hand, making the socio-cultural specificity of Galicia visible, and, on the other, attenuating the signs of the region’s economic underdevelopment, or even concealing them under a spiritual guise.

In the aftermath of the hunger years, Ramón Piñeiro argued in “Pra unha filosofía da saudade” (1953) that the Galicians’ chronic tristesse was a metaphysical trait—the saudade proper—rather than an environmental condition. What the fiercely anticommunist Piñeiro tried to avoid was the uncomfortable connection of Galicians’ psychologically depressed condition to the economic, social, and cultural factors of longstanding marginalization and underdevelopment. To put it in the terms of Karl Kautsky’s Marxist anthropology, he resisted the notion that the malaise he continued to call saudade could instead be the combined result of the “overwork” and “underconsumption” experienced without pause by one generation of impoverished country dwellers after another (Kautsky qtd. in Lenin 127). In Marcos da Portela’s Catecismo d’o labrego (1889), the definition of labrego includes the following characteristics in keeping with Kautsky’s critique of the minifundium: “he works a lot but eats little” [traballa moito e come pouco] (6).⁴

Hunger had an undeniable economic root for the more scientifically minded Domingo García Sabell, who was a practicing physician and co-headed with Piñeiro galeguismo’s culturalist front in late Francoism. Collective neurotic responses to food scarcity abounded due to the famines historically endured by the common people.⁵ Nevertheless, like Piñeiro, García Sabell took a leap of metaphysical faith when noting that the three “negative” (because disabling) traits shown by underfed Galician rustics (suspiciousness, skepticism, and inaction) were the result of their centuries-old self-adaptation to food scarcity. He cavalierly connected this adaptation to the patterns of scarcity experienced by the ancient Celts, who also endured “inadequate and insufficient intakes” [dietas inapropiadas i escasas] (258–65). In García Sabell’s estimation, Galicia’s paisanos/ paisáns did not live in the “preterite,” by...