Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire (review)

Reviews  111 ciable. Su publicación debiera ser bienvenida por todo aquel que esté interesado en la construcción de una historia de la literatura latinoamericana fiel a la sinuosidad de sus recorridos, más detallada y más compleja. REINALDO LADDAGA, University of Pennsylvania iarocci, michael. Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2006. 278 pages. This thought-provoking book begins with a page from the present, depicting a 24/7 television news channel announcing: ‘‘IN EUROPE TODAY . . .’’ Iarocci’s point: that the grand narrative of European modernity is not distant from the one that Spain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grappled with to unfair advantage. This scenario frames the familiar symbolic position of modern Spain on the periphery of European modernity. Iarocci uses the image of 24/7 television news to stress what he calls ‘‘the presentism of the digital age,’’ the ‘‘relentless, hypnotic now.’’ This stream of images also represents the power of representation, which he sees as analogous to the ‘‘news’’ of Spain’s relative invisibility on the screen of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The image is provocative but I think ultimately inappropriate. Presentism is not simply the unstoppable insistence on the now; it is the understanding that everything from the past is essentially irrelevant and is to be read through the prism of the present. It is the ultimate anachronism, the collective amnesia of modernity. The digital image Iarocci discusses is also unfortunate in one other respect: it is not present-day Europe that dominates, it is clearly the United States, and in that sense, the Spain-Europe relation of the past has little to do with the vacuum produced by the one remaining super power today. The perils of drawing the present too close to an increasingly remote past can be summed up in this sentence near the end of Iarocci’s introduction: ‘‘A brief afterword explores the ways in which reading Spanish romanticism against the narratives of Western modernity may yet speak to our present, particularly as the familiar tale of civilization against barbarity once again seems to structure the contemporary international politics of our day.’’ I fail to see the analogy. After such political correctness, I began with some trepidation to read the first chapter. Here, however, Iarocci lays out sensibly the European marginalization of Spain after the waning of empire. He points out how historiography and literary studies have often conveniently forgotten the impact of Spain’s early modernity , through empire, conquest, and colonization, on the concept and history of the European modern. By the nineteenth century Spain had become the quintessential backward country cousin, but that same blighted image eventually became a re-imagined and newly discovered picturesque ‘‘Romantic Spain’’ for other Europeans. He then reviews the various theories of Spanish romanticism (from Schlegel to Peers, Juretschke, Flitter and Silver), showing how all these studies are shaped by the northern European conception of Spain as nonEuropean and non-modern. This first chapter is useful, if over long in making its point; it takes fifty-two pages to say what several scholars, in both historiography 112  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.1 (2007) and literary-cultural studies, have reiterated in the past several years: that eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Spain was indeed modern. Of more interest is Iarocci’s observation that ‘‘while romantic rhetoric often affirmed liberal values, it also highlighted limitations within liberalism itself.’’ The vexed position of the liberal romantic is richly explored in the remaining chapters, which focus on Cadalso’s Noches lúgubres, Saavedra’s Don Álvaro, and Larra’s late essays. The strongest, most original contribution is to be found in the individual analyses of these works. Chapter two is titled: ‘‘Beginnings without End. José Cadalso and the Melancholy of Modernity.’’ Benefiting from first-rate earlier criticism, Iarocci emphasizes that Cadalso’s protagonist Tediato can be considered not only as the libidinal ‘‘subject of loss,’’ ‘‘but also as a ‘subject-in-struggle,’ a self in conflict with his social milieu.’’ He argues that Cadalso critiques the socially destabilizing influence of money and self-interest and that the unnamed beloved represents a superior soul ‘‘that has...