The Culture of Cursileria: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain (review)

Professor Valis argues that cursileria and, in more recent times, kitsch, and camp, is characteristic of Spain's middle class from the third decade or so of the nineteenth century to the present. She aims to demonstrate that careful consideration of the attitudes, practices, texts, and artifacts these related terms describe may lead to significant insights into how the Spanish middle class has responded to modernity. The author meticulously traces the several possible origins of the word cursi and concludes that just as it is difficult to pin down its origins, it is also difficult to define its manifestations through the years in question. Early on in her study she writes that "Lo cursi, is more than anything else, particularly lower middle class, reflecting the need to keep up appearances and the inability to do so in a satisfactory way" (11). As the author deepens her inquiry the term takes on added meanings. Valis's purpose (14–15) is to study cursilería's marginal, "disempowered desire" as expressed in social pretensions and cultural shallowness on an individual level and then to reveal how cursilería parallels a collective identity crisis on the national level. The author borrows her working definition of modernism from Marshall Berman: it is "the struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world" (23). "Modernity, then" writes Valis, "is shaped by the way a society adapts to unceasing flux and evolution. It is this continual adaptation to change" (23). The dynamic that cursilería embodies is crucial to an understanding of Valis's thesis. Cursilería feeds on nostalgia for the past but its "disempowered desire" projects it into the future. Thus its relation to modernity is not merely that of a static, nostalgically disconsolate condition, but rather that of an agitated, striving, affective process. Raymond Williams's concept of "structure of feeling" (a kind of practical consciousness, "what is actually being lived") serves Valis's argument by indicating how change may be shown in process. She also notes that Anthony Cohen's concept of culture as a "body of symbolic form" (rather than as a "body of substantive fact") governs the conception of her book. Valis concedes that middle classes elsewhere experienced the same "tension" in the transition from pre-modernity to modernity, but she insists that the feeling of being caught between two ways of existence is what characterizes modernity in Spain. She grants as well that while the feeling of being marginal as embodied in lo cursi is essential for an understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain, it is only one image of modern Spain's self-representation and representation by critics.

The author begins her study with a personal reminiscence—a recollection of Tierno Galvan's funeral procession in Madrid in 1986 and the thoughts prompted by the sight of the carriage that conveyed him to his grave. In the course of the book the author's voice is seldom absent for long. Valis invites the reader to participate in a kind of dialogue, prompting memory and reactions, urging different perspectives, occasionally registering uncertainty. As with all of this author's work, the reader senses a deep personal commitment to the study at hand. It is no doubt reassuring as well for readers to maintain contact with the author's always engaging voice as she guides us through a rigorous course of inquiry constituted by the closely-argued theoretical discussions and scrupulous erudition on offer in her book.

Theoretical discussions do, in fact, precede and accompany the analysis of the particular texts, artifacts and practices Valis examines. Her first chapter "On Origins" for example, delves into a discussion of structures of feeling, metaphor and metonyms before turning to a text by Unamuno, a survey of explanations of the origins of the word cursi, and the introduction of the notion of cursilería's appearance as...