Madrid 1900. The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture (review)

Among the large and still growing number of works on literature of the city, surprisingly few deal with Spanish cities in more than a casual, unsystematic way. There is of course a substantial historical, sociological, and urban studies bibliography on particular cities, but few attempts at tracing the constitution of these cities’ literary image. Even in the case of Madrid, Hispanism’s traditionally privileged site and the object of an extensive primary literature, we lack serious studies tracing the interplay between urban and literary history, and I know of no significant contribution to the history of sensibility or to the critique of ideologies attempted from this point of view. Edward Baker’s Materiales para escribir Madrid remains one of the few useful studies in a bibliographical landscape best characterized by the banality and mythographic purpose of Manuel Lacarta’s Madrid y sus literaturas. Madrid has been much talked and written about but we still lack a work that adequately examines the literary construction of the capital in a way even remotely suggestive of Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire book or, more recently, Karlheinz Stierle’s study of the Paris myth. Ugarte does not fill this gap but diligently lays the groundwork for the laborious task awaiting cultural historians and literary critics.

His book deserves attention and will get it. It’s, as the academic jargon goes, essential reading on at least two counts: in its focus on the literary mediation of urban reality and in its approach to canonical authors of one of the most canonical periods in Spanish literary history. Even the chapter on Carmen de Burgos, a non-canonical writer, heeds the most recent canonizing demands through a feminist critique of the traditional disregard of women’s urban perception. And by focusing on fin-de-siècle, subtly elating the critical flight as dusk engulfs a century that in Spain has ticked off under the sign of the authors Ugarte studies.

Yet, for all the book’s compelling interest, it also raises expectations which it fails to satisfy. Advertising a synchronic framework, the title leads the reader to expect an account of turn-of-the-century Madrid in its various aspects, from the everyday and leisure life of the bourgeoisie to the incipient labor organizations, from centralist anxieties about peripheral nationalisms to the expansion of the Castilian hegemony over the national ethos, from the reappearance of republican political philosophies to the sowing of the seeds that will later flower in fascist essentialism. But if the reader expects an inclusive picture of turn-of-the-century Madrid, it soon transpires that he or she is on a false track. Ugarte divides his study into a general nineteenth century and five twentieth century monographic chapters on commanding Madrid authors, from Larra and Mesonero Romanos to Pérez Galdós and Pardo Bazán in the nineteenth century, and Pío Baroja, Carmen de Burgos, Gómez de la Serna, Valle-Inclán, and Azorín in the early twentieth century. The synchronic frame is ruptured not only through the retrospective first chapter but also through the wide temporal frame of the subsequent monographic chapters. To give but one example, the chapter on Valle-Inclán is centered on this author’s most important Madrid text, Luces de Bohemia, not a turn-of-the-century work by any stretch of the imagination. But if Madrid 1900 is not a synchronic history like, let us say, Paul Morand’s 1900 A.D., neither is it a diachronic analysis of Madrid’s literary constitution. Despite the varying angles of his urban “take,” Ugarte does not produce a “moving image” of the city unfolding from authorial frame to authorial frame. The synthesis that the reader is expected to arrive at through these various glimpses is not a city produced by the literary imaginary, but a city which, for some unexplained reason, produces its own literature and even literature tour court, as the book’s...