The Last Good Land: Spain in American Literature by Eugenio Suárez-Galbán (review)

The critical label “transatlantic studies” can adopt a myriad of meanings. In fact, such a polysemy is also found outside academia, as the example of Turkey’s membership in NATO suggests. Which begs the question, where does the Atlantic as a political or cultural concept begin and end? Scholars in departments of Spanish or Latin American studies have the tendency to draw a linguistic line that excludes non-Spanish-speaking countries. This perspective has resulted in a rich understanding of cultural exchanges, such as the introduction of Hispanic modernism in Spain in the late nineteenth century, the Spanish exile in Mexico or Argentina after the Spanish Civil War, or the Latin American novelistic “boom” during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this language-based interpretation also precludes a comparative analysis of the relationship between Spain and the United States, a critical void that this book by Suárez-Galbán aims to fill.

The main goals of Suárez-Galbán’s analysis are twofold. From a cultural, almost anthropological standpoint, the author embarks on a “pursuit of American views on Spain that may in turn be revealing of how and what Americans think and feel of themselves” (86–87). That is, the images of Spain crafted by a series of American writers can be viewed as a negative in which an image of their own country was imprinted, either consciously or not. Second, on an individual level that includes both psychological and artistic development, Suárez-Galbán attempts to “record how an author may transcend simple subject matter and reveal his personal, national and literary personality through the theme of Spain” (179).

As outlined respectively in the preface and the introductory chapter that follows, there are two basic premises grounding the critical framework of this book. The first, more objective one is the lack of comprehensive studies on the representation of Spain in U.S. literature. While there is no shortage of criticism on individual authors who have written about Spain—particularly the most celebrated ones such as Hemingway or Dos Passos—more general works are so scarce that they can actually be reduced to a single title: Stanley T. William’s The Spanish Background of American Literature (published in 1955 and reprinted in 1968, this two-volume study does not include any examples beyond 1913). With respect to the second, more subjective critical premise, Suárez-Galbán declares himself a disciple of Américo Castro’s school of thought and goes on to use Castro’s historical theories as the backdrop against which he assesses the validity, accuracy, or relevance of the literary representations of Spain by American authors. In fact, an explanation of Castro’s theory of the three castes (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) and their role in the creation of Spanish national identity takes up a good deal of the first chapter. Later on throughout the book, those writers who seem to foreshadow or share Castro’s views receive high praise (like James R. Lowell or Waldo Frank), even when the similarities are so striking that they might be interpreted as unacknowledged influences (as in the case of Barbara Probst Solomon). The same sense of validation can be observed in relation to other Spanish writers and intellectuals such as Ganivet, Unamuno, or Ortega y Gasset.

Works by twenty-one American authors are studied in The Last Good Land. They are arranged in a loosely chronological order, which helps underscore the importance of intertextual relationships among them—for example, Washington Irving’s legacy is almost a constant presence either as a model to follow or as a source of stereotypes in need of rebuttal. This set of authors can be distributed in five historical periods: the romantic era (Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); the second half of the nineteenth century, marked by the American Civil War and the Spanish–American War (Herman Melville, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane...