Author's Profile: Pablo Zambrano works in Comparative Literature, literary and critical theory, modernity, and Renaissance literature. To date, he has published La mística de la noche oscura. San Juan de la Cruz y T. S. Eliot (1996), edited the volume El sexo en la literatura (1997), and translated, with Carmen Pérez Romero, Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes (1996). He has published articles on Heraclitus, Sidney, Donne, Flaubert, Dickinson, Borges, and Paz. He is Associate Editor of Exemplaria: Revista Internacional de Literatura Comparada and teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain (zambrano@uhu.es).
Comparative Literature in Spain Today: A Review Article
Dolores Romero, ed., Orientaciones en literatura comparada. Madrid: Arco, 1998. Soft cover, 261 pages; María José Vega and Neus Carbonell [eds.], La literatura comparada. Principios y métodos. Madrid: Gredos, 1998. Soft cover, 265 pages; and Claudio Guillén, Múltiples moradas. Ensayo de literatura comparada. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998. Soft cover, 481 pages.
While Comparative Literature is being challenged
in many ways in its traditional and historical homes such as the USA, France,
or Germany, other "peripheral" countries such as Portugal, Mexico, Argentina,
China, or Spain are now beginning to make valuable contributions to its
reformulation and rebirth. However, the situation of Comparative Literature
in Spain cannot be called a "rebirth"; in fact, I would call it a birth.
For more than one hundred years Spain was heedless of the development and
various reformulations that Comparative Literature has been undergoing
since the late nineteenth century. To my mind, the causes explaining this
lack of interest in the discipline need to be linked to historical and
social reasons such as the gradual process of international isolation following
the decline of the Spanish Empire, a process that would eventually lead
to the 1936-39 Civil War and Franco's long fascist regime. After Franco's
death in 1975 Spain started a short but deep "counter-process" of radical
cultural change and international opening ending up in the incorporation
into the European Union. I think that this new international and cultural
context over the last two decades explains the recent "emergence" of Comparative
Literature in Spain. That is, the development of the discipline by increasing
university degrees in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, new journals
such as Exemplaria:
Revista Internacional de Literature Comparada, the growing number
of members of the SELGYC (Spanish Association of General and Comparative
Literature), and the creation of specific panels on Comparative Literature
within traditionally restrictive national associations such as AEDEAN (Spanish
Association of English and American Studies).
Despite suspicions still shared by scholars restricted
to national literatures within the impregnable fortresses of some departments,
I firmly believe in a bright future for Comparative Literature in Spain.
There are several reasons for my optimism: First, the contribution of an
increasing number of scholars such as Darío Villanueva (Universidad
de Santiago) is greatly helping to introduce in Spain new literary theories
which are in principle comparative, such as Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar's
polysystem theory (see Villanueva's Avances en... Teoría de la
literatura, 1994). This kind of theoretical contribution is complemented
by an increasing number of publications which have a pragmatic and practical
objective, namely textbooks and manuals. Second, Spain is currently undergoing
a much-debated process of self- and re-definition. The ever-procrastinated
answer to the historical question "What is Spain?" is now being faced --
perhaps for the first time in the country's history, especially from the
perspectives of multiculturalism, multinationalism, and multilingualism.
It is, in short, the recognition of the "Other" in a country whose plural
nature has been officially silenced over the last five centuries. Historically,
however, Spain was and still is one of the most multicultural countries
in Europe. In this sense, it is an excellent culture not only for traditional
comparative approaches but also -- and above all -- for the testing and
implementation of new approaches. Third, Spain's imperial-colonial past
in Latin-America and its powerful links to the past and present of Europe
make Spain one of the most important cultural bridges between America and
Europe. Moreover, the new European context of economic and political union
between different but related countries is becoming a fact. This condition
should be fully exploited by comparative approaches to literature and culture
and Spain appears to have seized the opportunity to do so.
It is within this optimistic context for Comparative
Literature where the publication of Romero's, Vega and Carbonell's, and
Guillén's books can be gauged and should be read. Dolores Romero's
Orientaciones
en literatura comparada and María José Vega and Neus
Carbonell's La literatura Comparada. Principios y métodos
are in most instances translations of previously published texts (in most
cases in English). That the volumes are such compilations of translated
texts is clear in the case of Romero's volume but not in Vega and Carbonell's
case; they appear as authors. However, both volumes greatly contribute
to introduce in Spanish a selection of classical articles on the theory
of Comparative Literature as well as such previously unpublished material
as Gilbert Chaitin's "Otredad. La literatura comparada y la diferencia."
Since it is a compilation, the Vega and Carbonell volume can be used as
a textbook but it is not a manual despite the statement on its cover. There
is still a need for a concise and sophisticated manual in Spanish -- as
well as in other languages, indeed, as Yves Chevrel (Sorbonne) has urged
comparatists for years -- intended to really help our students and guide
them not only through necessary theoretical discussions and descriptions
on the nature and history of Comparative Literature but also through literary
texts as the primary source of any theory.
As a kind of theoretical history of Comparative
Literature, the Vega and Carbonell volume is very well structured. The
book is divided into three main parts. Each part includes a selection of
representative texts (all of them translated into Spanish by Vega and Carbonell
themselves) preceded by a condensed but precise and useful introduction.
The first part is devoted to the origins and consolidation of the so-called
"old paradigm." The selection covers texts by Croce, Texte, Gayley, Baldensperger,
and Van Tieghem. The second part , "The Crisis and the New Paradigm" --
includes classical texts by Wellek, Remak, Fokkema, Ruprecht, and Laurette.
The third part is an introduction to some of the newest tendencies of Comparative
Literature such as the systemic approach and others. The authors selected
for this section include Chaitin, Chevrier, Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin,
Gnisci, Snaider, Lanser, Lefevere, and Tötösy de Zepetnek [this
author's surname is misspelled several times throughout the book -- "Tötösy
de Zepetnec" instead of Tötösy de Zepetnek]. Apart from these
three main parts, there is a final section including a very useful updated
bibliography. As a compilation, the Vega and Carbonell volume shares many
links with Romero's book. However, as Romero states in her prologue, the
aim of her book is to probe into the current state of Comparative Literature
in order to show the Spanish reader a panorama of the discipline at the
end of our century. In this sense, Romero's compilation is an extension
of the third part of the Vega and Carbonell volume. The book is also divided
in three main sections, although this division responds to methodological
rather than chronological reasons. The first section presents three very
well-known notional contributions by Prawer, Marino, and Bassnett. The
second section, devoted to some theoretical orientations, includes texts
by Culler, Remak, Swiggers, Fokkema, Gillespie, Kushner, and Tötösy
de Zepetnek. Under the title "Didactic orientations," the third section
offers articles by Chevrel and Fokkema. A concise bibliography is included
in the final part. The only reproach that can be made to this valuable
compilation is the poor quality of some although not all of the translations
as some are very English in style and tone.
The Romero and Vega and Carbonell compilations of
translated canonical texts of Comparative Literature were complemented
in November 1998 by an exceptional book: Claudio Guillén's Múltiples
moradas. Guillén's critical mastery is his unsurpassed ability
to make the reader constantly accompanied by the pleasure of texts. To
some extent, the publication of this new book is a sort of privileged panoramic
view of Guillén's career as one of the greatest comparatists of
our century. Although all essays have been previously published, Múltiples
moradas is more than a mere compilation since all material has been
re-elaborated and rewritten by Guillén in order to integrate it
in a single and coherent volume. "How to think about multiplicity, the
multiplicities we are and those that surround us?" is the opening question
of Guillén in his preface (13). The study of our current complexity
as a consequence of our historical experience is -- I believe -- the key
to the understanding of the seven essays in Múltiples moradas.
The book is divided into two main sections. The first one consists of four
excellent studies covering the topics of "Literature and Exile," "Literature
and Landscape," "Literature and Epistolarity," and "Literature and Obscenity."
Little of importance can be added to the impressive reading and critical
basis of these four essays. In his beautiful study of literature and exile,
Guillén leads us through texts representing the (self-) isolation
of exile by Ovid, Dante, Du Bellay, Shakespeare, and others, rounding up
his discussion with two Spanish poets: Rafael Alberti and the Nobel Prize
winner Juan Ramón Jiménez. Although little attention is paid
in general to Spanish literature, Guillén is very much aware --
as his personal experience attests -- that the literature of Spain has
essentially been a literature of exile, above all after the end of the
Civil War in 1939.
I find the chapter on literature and landscape one
of the most attractive in the volume. Guillén firstly defines the
important concepts of ergon and parergon which will illuminate
his study of the evolution of landscape in literature and painting from
the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. His reflections on the poetry
of Wordsworth and Baudelaire are among the best I have ever read. However,
I really miss the presence of Flaubert and Madame Bovary in his
reflection on Realism. Much could be said about the links between Flaubert's
representation of landscapes in his novel and his criticism of Romantic
aesthetics, as in the passage referring the first sexual encounter between
Emma and Rodolphe (2nd part, chapter 9), and how it affects the supposed
realistic representation of life in the novel. As Madame Bovary
is considered one of the most important novels of nineteenth-century literature,
I am persuaded that Guillén's insightful critical ability would
have been another pleasure for the reader. The same applies to his study
of literature and obscenity, where, again, Flaubert's novel is undoubtedly
a landmark.
The second section of the book includes three essays
dealing with the concept of national literatures, national stereotyped
images, and the idea of Europe. Notwithstanding their historical perspective,
these three contributions -- especially those concerned with the concept
of national literatures and the idea of Europe -- are proof of Guillén's
engagement
with the political, social, and cultural processes that contemporary Spain
and Europe are experiencing. As I said before, the traditional definition
and articulation of Spain as a cultural and political unity is currently
being reformulated through the action on the one hand of the Catalonian,
Basque, and Galician nationalisms and, on the other, the regionalist movements
now emerging as a mimetic reaction to their demands. It goes without saying
that this process is also affecting long-established cultural concepts
such as the ideal of a well-defined Spanish national literature. Undoubtedly,
the growth of peripheral nationalisms in Spain is, to a certain extent,
a necessary act of catharsis which is beginning to help banish old stereotypes
or re-consider the Spanish literary canon. But, at the same time as Claudio
Guillén reminds us (311), this growth is the source of what he calls
"desvaríos provincianos" (provincial ravings): a conscious narrow-mindedness
on the part of some politicians and intellectuals firmly devoted to the
creation of artificial nationalities based on historically false myths
and new stereotypes. Unfortunately, Guillén's statement that "una
sociedad multilingüe es de entrada menos limitada y provinciana" ("a
multilingual society is at first less limited and provincial"; 320) is
being called into question in Spain by an increasing number of local policies
carried out in the name of a renewed sacred concept of nation. Evoking
-- as Guillén constantly does -- Edgar Morin's "Penser l'Europe,"
I would also say that once again Spaniards are "thinking Spain." Hopefully,
Guillén's book and arguments will make an impact in Spain to "penser
l'Europe" instead. As can be easily deduced, the interests prompted by
the reading of Guillén's new book are many. I sincerely consider
the publication of Múltiples moradas one of the greatest
intellectual events of the last few months in Spain. Along with Guillén's
classic Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura
comparada, it is one of the few essential contributions of international
scope in Spanish and one of the mainstays of the promising development
of Comparative Literature in Spain.