Mapping the Landscape, Remapping the Text: Spanish Poetry from Antonio Machado’s by Renée M. Silverman (review)

Renée M. Silverman analyzes in Mapping the Landscape, Remapping the Text: Spanish Poetry from Antonio Machado’s Campos de Castilla to the First Avant-Garde (1909–1925) the ways in which landscape, painting, and poetry shaped Spanish identity processes. She investigates the work of three poets, ranging from Generación del 98 to the first avant-garde. She posits that the way in which Antonio Machado, Guillermo de Torre, and Gerardo Diego framed and reframed Castilian landscape in their poems by means of pictorial and prosodic techniques implies their stance on Spanish identity.

In chapter 1, Silverman claims that in Campos de Castilla (1912) Machado reproduces Castile’s geography and topography realistically. She postulates that the poet creates a frame for the Castilian landscape in order to help the Spanish people to remember their true identity after the crisis of 1898. Framing the landscape was a reminder of a forsaken path that had to be acknowledged in order to rebuild the national subject. Machado utilizes prosopopoeia to animate nature and relate it to Spanish identity. Azorín had linked nature with national character, as Krausism did before him, and Machado follows its lead. Moreover, Miguel de Unamuno provides Machado with his main ideological tenets: intrahistory furnishes the deeper layers of national identity. Hence, Machado focuses on quotidian events and countryside landscapes to show his readers the way to Spain’s historical paths. Furthermore, Silverman acknowledges the scientific instruction Machado received at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza as one of the main sources of his poetic vision of nature and landscape. The Institución Libre de Enseñanza taught that in order to understand Volkgeist (i.e. the people’s spirit), the observer had to behold the terrain in which people lived. Therefore, Machado reproduced in a realistic fashion the Castilian landscape in order to convey the Spanish identity to his readers. The poet uses Aureliano de Beruete’s impressionistic techniques so that sensorial perception is activated in the reader’s mind. This process also creates a Virgilian locus amoenus, which illustrates an attempt by Machado to counteract the crisis of 1898 by creating a Spanish idyll. Machado proposes a national regeneration that ultimately would lead to an Arcadia. He does so by framing the Castilian landscape employing realistic and impressionistic techniques.

Silverman proposes in chapter 2 that the avant-garde possessed a different way of understanding space and time than that of Generación del 98. Guillermo de Torre’s Hélices (1923) is her object of study to prove so. In efforts to create a more cosmopolitan country, Torre and the ultraístas wanted to open Spain’s borders. World War I had left vestiges of destruction and ravage, but Torre focused on the positive aspects of the aftermath: industry, trade, and a deeper relation with foreign artists and intellectuals, such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay-Trek, Jean Epstein, and Vicente Huidobro. In Hélices, Torre includes all sorts of technological artifacts of his time in order to create a different perspective of time and space: radio, telegraphy, airplanes, cinema, etc. These technologies open the frame of the poet’s eye and include multiple times and spaces. The I sees—with its eye—the world from above and beyond. The subjects recognize themselves as perceiving subjectivities and thus they are not bound by restricting borders. José Ortega y Gasset is the ideologue behind Torre’s aesthetical postulates. However, Torre did not propose a dehumanized art, but a subjective one based on a broader perception. From Jean Epstein, Torre drew the simultaneity of images, which he used to create a poem independent of reality, as Huidobro and Creacionismo proposed. His images are detached from the space-time continuum and therefore thrust sight towards the future.

In chapter 3, Silverman...