Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 1976"

The "Noventayochistas" and the carlist wars

Abstract: THE name "Generation of '98" suggests that its members have been profoundly branded by the national catastrophe: the loss of Spain's last colonies, a historic event with far-reaching political, economic, social consequences. The Cuban war provoked a strong opposition from the Socialists. The noventayochistas-quite outspoken in their anti-Marxist criticism on other issues-joined in the socialist protest against the war. But they focused the problem from a different angle, incorporating it to their main themes: preoccupation with Spain, and time. This article proposes to examine Baroja's, Unamuno's and Valle-Inclan's approach to them through art. A direct result of the circumstance full of conflicts is the revival of the historical novel. The noventayochistas give it a very special character. Prompted by present upheavals, they center their interest on wars that had ravaged the country several decades before. This is an important point in their focus on the problem as well as their technique: acknowledgment of the necessity of distance. That distance is not sufficient, however-according to the few theories that exist on the historical novel-to make their writing fit quite within the genre: a historical novel should not deal with immediate experience; at least fifty years-two generationsshould separate the writer from the events. Madeleine de Gogorza Fletcher, in a recent study of the historical novel in Spain, offers a solution: any book that includes events with which the author has come in contact directly should come under the heading of episodio nacional.1 As a matter of fact, none of these authors was concerned

The author's voice in "The lusiads"

Abstract: T HOMAS Greene surely speaks for many moder readers when he asserts that "Os Lusiadas today seems almost swamped by the twentieth century. Of the two great forces which animate it, imperialism and nationalism, the first is largely discredited in our time, and the second is beginning to be suspect . . . One can scarcely open Cam6es' volume without questioning those principles he takes most instinctively for granted." 1 I suspect, however, that the presence of such ideas in the poem is less disturbing than the fact that Cam6es presents them with no trace of irony. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg observe that "the whole movement of mind in Western culture from the Renaissance to the present ... has been a movement away from dogma, certainty, fixity, and all absolutes in metaphysics, in ethics, and in epistemology," and that as a result "a narrator who is not in some way suspect, who is not in some way subject to ironic scrutiny is what the moder temper finds least bearable." 2 This sort of narrator is doubtless just what many readers find in The Lusiads. Cam6es' poem is full of comments on a great variety of subjects, often in the form of general statements about matters illustrated by the events he narrates. Indeed, one is tempted to say that one of our major difficulties in finding a proper response to The Lusiads lies in our understanding of the word "sententious." In the sixteenth century, to call a style or a work sententious was to praise it as a ready source of wisdom and, especially,

Between Macías and Don Juan: spanish romantic drama and the mythology of love

Abstract: NO one today questions Larra's merit as an essayist and thinker. Indeed to many he is the only Spanish author of the period worthy of concern. The bibliography on him continues to mount; yet his theater, and even his essays on theater, await serious consideration. In 1919 Carmen de Burgos made a statement that in one form or another has been repeated ever since. "La obra dramatica de Larra," she said, "tiene mas importancia por ser suya que por su propio m6rito." 1 In 1937 Valbuena Prat wrote, referring to Macias: "Larra vela en el antiguo vate como su propio retrato." 2 And recently these words were echoed by Francisco Ruiz Ramon, a theater historian and fine critic: "Lo unico que interesa en esta pieza es justamente lo extradramatico: la transposicion del drama amoroso personal del hombre Larra, encarnado en el trovador Macias." 3 It appears that the temptation to link Larra's life-a tempestuous one in every way-with that of the legendary figure has been too great. The tendency in nineteenth-century criticism to find parallels between the biography and the work of a writer seems dominant. Now Larra's case lends itself beautifully to this situation: he fell in love with another man's wife, he had an affair with her but was later rejected by her; in despair he killed himself. Much of this, a curious amount, is reflected in the tragedy of the legendary Macias, the hero of Larra's romantic drama, and it led critics not only to draw the inevitable parallels

On sound-patterning in the "Poema de mio Cid"

Abstract: NE of the most interesting chapters, and certainly the most novel chapter, of Edmund de Chasca's El arte juglaresco en el "Cantar de mio Cid" (1967 [2nd ed., 1972]) is its eleventh, on "Rima interna," to which I made a sympathetic reference in the introduction to my edition of the poem (Oxford, 1972; p. xliii). It was also the chapter selected for special and somewhat unfavorable comment by Professor Michael in his review of de Chasca (BHS, 45 [1968], 310-13). The gist of the matter is that according to de Chasca, the ordinary assonance-structure of the laisses of the poem is often supplemented by internal assonances which link the endings of the first hemistichs; commonly two or three lines are linked in this way, more rarely four and even five. An example is: