The origin of the Spanish and Portuguese nations in Romantic
literary history1
Santiago Pérez Isasi
Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Universidade de Lisboa
1. INTRODUCTION: HISTORY, LITERATURE, NATION
The last decades of the 20th century, and the first one of the 21st, have seen a
intensification of the seemingly never-ending debates which surround literary history,
and which question its teleological narrative form; its ability to grasp its object, which at
the same time evades temporality and resists chronology; its ideological and
nationalistic debts, or its guilty relations with power, nation, institution and canon,
among other aspects.2 At the same time, however, its academic and editorial continuity
are more than granted, at least in countries such as Spain or Portugal, in which literary
history has been traditionally and closely connected with the development of academic
curricula and even scholar publishing politics (Carolyn Boyd 2000; Pérez Isasi, 2011;
Cirujano et al. 1985.), and which have been, at least apparently and for now, less
stricken by the theoretical wave of Cultural Studies.3
This, of course, doesn’t mean that the discussions around literary history haven’t arrived
to Spain or Portugal: much to the contrary, literary historiographical research has gained
relevance in both countries in the form of projects, groups and publications. In Spain,
they go back at least to the works of José Carlos Mainer (Mainer 2000, 2003, among
others), and continued by the group of researchers lead by Leonardo Romero Tobar, or,
1
This work is a result of an ongoing investigation on “Spanish Romantic literary history in its European
context: translation, literature, identity”, funded by the Basque Government (2010-2012) and developed
jointly at the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas (Universidade de Lisboa) and the Universidad de Deusto
(Bilbao, Spain).
2
See the works by Perkins (1993), Hutcheon and Valdés (2002), for an overview of the different angles
from which literary history is being reconsidered in the last two decades. In the words of Lawrence
Lipking, ‘literary history used to be impossible to write; lately it has become much harder’ (Lipking
1995:1).
3
Let us mention, just as an example of this success, only in the field of Spanish historiography, the
publication of The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature edited by David T. Gies (2005); the
continuity of the ambitious Historia Crítica de la Literatura Hispánica, coordinated by Francisco Rico, or
the recent creation of a new and extensive historiographical work, the Historia de la literatura española
published by Editorial Crítica and coordinated by J. C. Mainer (the first volume to be published is
chronologically the sixth one, dealing with early 20th century Spanish literature and literary criticism). As
Epps and Cifuentes put it, ‘the concept of literary history is as troubled as that of the nation-state. And
yet, as should by now be more than evident, like nation-state, literary history persists, indeed insists’
(Epps and Cifuentes 2005:13)
from a more trans-national and comparative perspective, by the team of the
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.4 In Portugal, Vitor Aguiar e Silva was also a
pioneer in his interest for literary history as a genre and as an epistemological problem,
which was also tackled by Alvaro de Cunha (2002) or Graciete Silva (not yet
published).
This paper, and my present research project, also deals with the development of Iberian
literary history during the Romantic period (1800-1870),5 from a comparative
perspective, with a special focus on how it relates with the formation of national
identities, in a bidirectional fashion: literary history was the expression, but also the
foundation, of the newly born national identities. In fact, the development and
expansion of the concept of Volksgeist (national character or ‘people’s spirit’) by
Johann Gottfried von Herder radically modified the practice of historiography and gave
it a new objective: to trace and reconstruct —the two are obviously not synonyms—
that ‘national spirit’ in past deeds, and the literary works, of the nation. Both August
Wilhelm Schlegel in such works as Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1809–
1811), and his brother Friedrich Schlegel in Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur
(1815), as well as Madame de Staël in his influential De l’Allemagne (1810), applied
this concept of ‘national spirit’ to the study and historization of European and world
literature,6 which then expanded, more or less rapidly, to the rest of the European
countries.
It is possible, then, and could prove to be extremely fruitful, to investigate literary
history as an expression of 19th century nationalist movements and as a tool to be used
(and which was effectively used, in fact) by 19th-century nation-states in their quest for
identity and singularity. More precisely, I will focus on how Spanish and Portuguese
literary histories struggled to define their starting point: the (imprecise and somewhat
arbitrary) moment in which their respective national literatures are born.
4
Let us mention just a few of the most salient of these works which should be mentioned as immediate
antecedents for this article: for instance, the works by the research group of the Universidad de Zaragoza
Romero Tobar 1997, 2006; or Ezpeleta, 2008) or, from a more comparative point of view, in the
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Cabo 2006, Domínguez 2006, Abuin 2004). José María
Pozuelo Yvancos (2000, 2006) also offered a theoretical and historiographical approach to the question of
literary canon, an approach that was also followed by Pérez Isasi (2006, 2011).
5
For a general review of Romantic literary theory, see Ernst Behler (1993) Derek Flitter (1992, 2006) and
Buescu (1997).
6
In the words of Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes: ‘From its inception in such influential works
as Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten neuen Literatur..., literary history has tenden to partake of a Romantic
conception of nationality in which land, spirit and people are tightly tied to artistic and linguistic
production’ (Epps and Cifuentes 2005:11)
2. A
BRIEF
CHRONOLOGY
OF
IBERIAN
LITERARY
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The decision to study Iberian Romantic literary history from a comparative point of
view is not an arbitrary methodological decision: it is conditioned by the critical,
aesthetic and historical circumstances in which Spanish and Portuguese literary
historical traditions were born. Firstly, as we mentioned before, they are both influenced
by the same foreign (mainly, German) Romantic principles, which considered Spain and
Portugal as “Romantic nations” to which the classical neo-Aristotelian rules were not
applied;7 but also, because they have a parallel, sometimes even common, tradition and
evolution.8 This is a tentative chronology and typology of literary histories and
textbooks published in Portugal and Spain during the 19th century:
a) Inaugural foreign texts of Romantic Spanish and Portuguese literary history: apart
from the studies by Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, already mentioned, 19thcentury Iberian literary history is founded on Friedrich Bouterwek’s Geschichte der
Poesie und Beredsamkeit seit dem Ende des 3. Jahrhundert (1801-1819), or De la
litterature du Midi de l’Europe (1813) by Simonde de Sismondi, which included
extensive analysis of Spanish and Portuguese literatures, and which were translated
into Spanish (but not into Portuguese); other essential texts of this first period
include George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature (1849), Ferdinand Denis’s
Resumé de l’histoire litteraire de Portugal (1826), Adolf Friedrich Schack’s
Geschichte der dramatischen Literatur and Kunst in Spanien (1845-6) or Ferdinand
Wolf’s
Studien
zur
Geschichte
der
spanischen
und
portugiesischen
Nationalliteratur (1859)
b) First Iberian adaptations of the Romantic principles: this group of works constitute
a crack in the Neoclassical paradigm, and the first signs of penetration of the
Romantic ideas and methods in the Iberian Peninsula. In the case of Spain, the socalled “polémica calderoniana” between Böhl de Faber and José Joaquín de Mora,
7
It is obvious that at least some of the first and most influential modern ideas and works on Spain and
Portugal, its (literary) history and its ‘national character’, were, as J.M. Pozuelo (2006) has pertinently
pointed out, at first developed by foreigners, and later, quite quickly in fact, adopted by Spaniards and
Portuguese themselves.
8
The complete list of works quoted in this article can be consulted in the final bibliography, under the
‘Primary sources’ section. This is, obviously, just a representative selection of the histories or textbooks
of Spanish and Portuguese literature published during the 19th century.
on the significance of Golden Age drama, combined literary, aesthetic, ideological
and even personal aspects; Agustín Durán’s Discurso sobre el influjo de la crítica
moderna en la decadencia del teatro español (1828) or his collections of
“romances” are similarly key to the development of Romanticism in Spain. On the
Portuguese area, the Bosquejo da história da poesia e língua portuguesa by
Almeida-Garrett, with its embryonic historical form, also announces the birth of a
new textual genre, and of a new way of understanding both literature and nation.
c) Hybrid historiographic texts: after those first attempts and symptoms of
permeability to Romantic ideas, the 1840s and 1850s show the apparition of a
group of texts written by Spanish and Portuguese authors, and destined in many
cases to be used as textbooks in the classroom, which have yet to be analyzed in
some depth, and which may be highly significant in relation with the way in which
the new ideas slowly settled in the Iberian Peninsula. This set of books show a high
degree of hybridism between the old Neoclassic models (biographic quasiencyclopedic texts, erudite compilations, essays on Poetics and Rhetoric, etc.) and
the new Romantic ideas (national segmentation, narrative history, aesthetic limits of
literature). Some (non exhaustive) examples of this hybridism are Gil de Zárate’s
Manual de literatura española (1844) which included a segment on Principios
generales de Retórica y Poética and a Resumen histórico de la literatura española;
or Francisco Freire de Carvalho’s set of books entitled Lições elementares de
Eloquencia Nacional (1834); Lições Elementares de Poetica Nacional (1840) and
Primeiro Ensaio sobre Historia Litteraria de Portugal (1845), with a parallel
structure.
d) Consolidation of the new historiographic model, with the publication of a growing
number of histories of Spanish and Portuguese literature during the 1850s and
1860s, and their adoption of the new narrative and national model. This period
could be considered the zenith of Romantic literary history, which would however
soon start to develop towards a more positivist methodology. Amador de los Ríos’s
1861-6 Historia Crítica de la Literatura Española (unfortunately left incomplete by
the author) o the Curso de Litteratura Portugueza, by Andrade Ferreira y Castelo
Branco, are representative of this period of consolidation.
The limits of this chronology are obviously imprecise and porous. It is not possible to
establish a distinct ending moment for the Romantic historiographic model, specially
considering its penetration (in terms of national definition of literature, teleological
narrative configuration and exaltation of popular forms of poetry, for instance) well
into the 20th century. However, such influential figures as Teófilo Braga and Marcelino
Menéndez Pelayo (although ideologically and even scientifically divergent) mark, for
their respective countries and traditions, the beginning of a new period, with new
methodological and theoretical configurations, which justifies our decision of setting the
ending limit of our investigation in that point.
3. MYTHS OF ORIGIN
3.1.- The Spanish case
In 19th-century Spanish literary history, the most common conception of the national
origin established that it was born in an imprecise moment of the Middle Ages. This
decision, which was, as can be imagined, nor automatic nor completely arbitrary, was
justified in two main ways: either for linguistic or for ethnic reasons. In other words,
literary historians argued that the nation dates either from the moment when the Spanish
language (Castilian) was born, or when the Spanish people (again, mainly the Castilian
people) acquired their defining characteristics. Schack’s Historia de la literatura
dramática en España is a good example of the first type of justification:
La historia del teatro español, rigurosamente hablando, sólo comienza en la época en
que la nación llamada España, surgió con su lenguaje especial de los restos de los
diversos pueblos, que invadieron sucesivamente la Península pirenaica (Schack
1885:I,165)
While Sismondi’s Historia de la literatura española seems to opt for the second
reasoning:
La dignidad castellana que admiramos hasta en el mendigo, las consideraciones y
respeto que se tributan en España a todo hombre, cualquiera que sea su fortuna, han
nacido sin duda en las costumbres españolas en aquella época. La forma del lenguaje,
los hábitos de civilidad y de decoro, que parecen como innatos en los hijos de esta
nación, han conservado hasta nuestros días esa dignidad de que hablamos.
(Sismondi 1841-2:I, 8)
In many cases, both considerations are simultaneous but implicit, and many Romantic
literary histories just start, in media res, with the analysis of the first literary works
written in Spanish. This is the case of the Historia by Friedrich Bouterwek: “Aunque el
verdadero origen de la poesía castellana se pierde en las tinieblas de la Edad Media, no
puede dudarse que los primeros acentos poéticos que resonaron en el norte de la España
fueron romances y canciones populares” (1829: 25). This conception of the birth of the
nation during the Reconquista, as I said earlier, is not automatic (other posible “birth of
the nation” myths were at hand, and were in fact used by a few historians), but it also
wasn’t completely arbitrary: to identify Spanish literatura with Castilian (in a broad
sense) allowed for a diferentiation from other surrounding national literatures, with
different national languages; and it also offered a comfortable explanation for what were
considered at the time to be the main characteristics of the Spanish Volksgeist: chivalry,
piety and orientalism, all of which could be acquired, or so the historians say, by
“contamination” from their enemies and invaders:
Así surgió el espíritu caballeresco español, que representaba en el fondo el espíritu
caballeresco general de la mayoría de los pueblos europeos de la época en una forma
especial, porque en esa forma imprimió carácter oriental en el español de vieja
raigambre europea, al igual que imprimió carácter europeo en el árabe español.
(Bouterwek 1829:11-12)
...el primer acento de la musa castellana es el eco del sentimiento popular, la primera
piedra que sirve de cimiento a la literatura nacional es una voz que se oye entre
combates y batallas, entre acometidas y algaradas; en una palabra, la primera
composición de la poesía española es la expresión de la energía y heroísmo que
animaba a la población cristiana, y le hacía acometer una lucha reñida de más de
siete siglos, que debía concluir con la total expulsión de sus enemigos. (Ticknor
1851-6: I,10-11)
This was, as I said before, the dominant tendency among literary historians of the first
half of the 19th century, and specially for foreign historians such as Bouterwek or
Sismondi, Schack or Ticknor. Needless to say, this chronological delimitation of the
Spanish nation also implied an implicit linguistic, geographic and even cultural (or
religious) delimitation: not all inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula (not even of the space
currently occupied by the Spanish nation-state) were considered to be Spaniards; only
those who lived in the “Northern [Christian] kingdoms”, and who spoke Castilian, or
any other romance dialect (as opposed to Arabic or Hebrew, for example) are
considered purely national, and therefore connected (by an undefined cultural, historical
or ethnical link) with the current Spaniards: they are members of “… una raza cuya
imaginación y fogoso carácter han sobrevivido a las convulsiones y trastornos que por
tantos siglos la han agitado” (Ticknor 1851-6: I, 8), “...un pueblo indígena, que, a pesar
de su mezcla con otras razas, aún no ha perdido los rasgos distintivos de su carácter,
igual al descrito en las más antiguas historias (Schack 1885:I, 87).
However, as I mentioned before, the identification of Spanish and Castilian was not the
only option available for literary historians. In fact, the author of the first history of
Spanish literature written by a Spanish autor, Amador de los Ríos, chooses a completely
different approach towards Spanish history, the birth of the nation and the definition of
its external (linguistic, cultural and chronological) limits.9 Indeed, Amador de los Ríos
considers equally Spanish all literary productions in the history of the Iberian Peninsula
(with the somewhat paradoxical although almost inevitable exception of modern
Portuguese and Basque literatures): Hispano-Roman, Hispano-Arabic, HispanoHebrew, Catalan and Galician authors are part of his extensive canon. This obviously
implies a wider chronological definition of Spanishness, which in his case extends back
to the period of the Romanization of the Spanish territory: “He aquí, pues, lo que sucede
con la literatura española: sus verdaderos orígenes arrancan de aquel grande
acontecimiento, porque sólo bajo el manto de los Césares despiertan los ingenios
españoles” (Amador de los Ríos 1861-5: I, 29). This allows him, on the other hand, to
establish further cultural or ethnical connections between different periods, identifying
as equally Spanish, for instance, the writers of the Roman Empire and those of the
Catholic Empire of the Habsburgs:
La misma índole, las mismas cualidades e inclinaciones encontramos en los poetas
que brillan en la corte de los Césares que en los que ilustran la de los Felipes; siendo
a la verdad notable en gran manera que después de tantos siglos de guerras y
trastornos, en que han entrado a dominar la Península diversas generaciones de
gentes, resplandezcan los mismos caracteres, tanto en los ingenios andaluces como
en los que nacen en el suelo de la antigua Celtiberia. (Amador de los Ríos 1861-5:I,
145)
It is quite revealing of the way in which Romantic literary historians operate, the fact
that, even if Bouterwek, Sismondi, Schack or Ticknor, on one hand; and Amador de los
Ríos, on the other, choose different chronological limits, and therefore different authors
and texts for their histories, they define the same set of characteristics for the Spanish
Volksgeist, and they are able to identify those characteristics in the texts they analyze, of
9
It is probably no coincidence that Amador de los Ríos was already a renowned expert on the history of
the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula when he started writing his Historia Crítica.
almost any period. In Amador de los Ríos’s case, religion plays a specially significant
role, since for him all truly Spanish writers are Christian (although this contradicts his
own selection of authors): “los héroes españoles son esencialmente cristianos” (1861-5:
III, 11). Other stereotypical characteristics of Spanishness, such as loyalty, honor or
gallantry, also play a part in Amador de los Ríos description of Spanish literature:
Así el amor, la lealtad y el honor llega a ser entre los castellanos las prendas de más
alto precio formando el triple dogma patriótico y sirviendo de base a las costumbres,
al fundirse en los dos grandes principios, que eran la piedra angular del edificio
político y religioso. (Amador de los Ríos 1861-5:III, 12)
However, this ample vision Spanishness, which is paralleled with a different set of
myths of origin (the expansion of latinization or Christianity, for instance) is later
somewhat betrayed, when Amador de los Ríos distinguishes between this primitive
Spanish proto-nation, and the Spanish nation “strictly speaking” (“propiamente dicha”),
which, just as in Bouterwek, Sismondi and all the others, is born during the Middle
Ages in the midst of the Reconquista: “Fórmase en esta lucha [la Reconquista] el pueblo
español propiamente dicho... ella es el campo siempre abierto, donde se fortalecen sus
creencias, donde nace y florece su patriotismo, donde se crea, finalmente, su carácter.
(Amador de los Ríos 1861-5: I, XCIX)
In any case, Amador de los Ríos was not the only historian or scholar to oppose to this
medieval origin of the Spanish nation: Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo also rejected the
idea of a truncated history: one which started with the first works of literature written in
Castilian, as if nothing before them existed in the Iberian Peninsula:
Bien sé que los principios son en todas las cosas áridos y enfadosos y que es mucho
más cómodo y hasta artístico (si el arte de la historia fuera como el de un poema o
una novela) comenzar a la manera de Ticknor (en otras cosas tan loable) con un
capítulo en que se describiese el amanecer de la poesía castellana entre arremetidas y
algaradas, entrando ipso facto y sin más explicación en el Poema del Cid... Por tales
razones he juzgado oportuno seguir el buen ejemplo del señor Amador de los Ríos
(mi maestro de dulce memoria) comprendiendo en el programa la literatura hispanolatina y las tres vulgares en toda su extensión y desarrollo. (Menéndez Pelayo
1878:11)
Therefore, he defends the need to include other languages and cultures, and to follow
Amador de los Ríos’s example by starting any Spanish literary history with an account
of Hispano-Latin authors, and to include any other work written in the Iberian
Peninsula, no matter in what language. However, Menéndez Pelayo’s considerations
didn’t have a strong influence in the literary histories of the beginning of the 20th
century, which preferred the early Romantic vision of nations being born as their
respective languages developed; this vision was also helped by the work of Menéndez
Pidal, without a doubt the most influential historian of the Spanish language and
literature, and firm defender of the idea of Spanishness being constructed around Castile
and Castilian attributes. After his influential works on the history of Castilian, the
history of Spanish epic poetry or the Cantar de Mío Cid, the centrality of Castile was
(almost) forever established in the core of the mythical narrative of the birth of the
nation.
3.2.- The Portuguese case
This same opposition between medieval and Classic Age origins of the nation can be
found in the case of the Portuguese nation and literature, with the same prevalence for
the first option: the idea that both the Portuguese nation and the Portuguese literature
were born altogether with the Portuguese language. This idea dominates, for instance,
the foreign literary histories of Bouterwek and Sismondi, both of which, as we said
before, included in their original versions long chapters devoted to Portuguese
literature10; and it is also very clearly present in Almeida Garrett’s Bosquejo, the first
attempt at a history of Portuguese literature written in the Iberian Peninsula: “A língua e
a poesia portuguesa (bem como as outras todas) nasceram gémeas, e se criaram ao
mesmo tempo”. (Almeida Garrett 1826: 13). Furthermore, Garrett adheres to the idea
(implicit in most other historians) that a language, in order to become “national”, and
therefore a proper language (as opposed to “dialect”) must develop a literature on its
own:
O castelhano e português, que mais tarde se cultivaram, permaneceram pelo sabido
motivo da conservação da independência nacional, e vieram a completo estado de
perfeição e carácter cabal de línguas cultas e civilizadas. O biscainho, catalão,
galego, aragonês, castelhano e português e outras mais foram e são ainda alguns
distintos idiomas: porém só os dois últimos tiveram literatura própria e perfeita,
10
None of these histories, nor Denis’s own Resumé, was translated into Portuguese, for reasons difficult
to establish.
linguagem comum e científica, tudo enfim quanto constitui e caracteriza (se é lícita a
expressão) a independência de uma língua. (Almeida Garrett 1826: 13)11
Antonio Borges de Figueiredo, in his history of Classical (Greek and Latin) and modern
(Portuguese) literatures also insists in the same medieval heroic origin for the
Portuguese language, literature and nation, coinciding also with the “Reconquista”:
No celebrado Campo d’Ourique, onde cinco estandartes mouriscos cáem nas mãos
dos Portuguezes; proclamado rei, Affonso Henriques funda a monarchia, e dá as
primeiras leis a um povo amante da independencia e da victoria [...] Mas, no meio do
estrepito das armas e d’algumas dissensões intestinas, poucos progressos podião
fazer neste periodo as lettras portuguezas. Todavia o escasso numero de fragmentos
poeticos, que nos restão, offerecem uma prova da tendencia que a nação já tinha para
as lettras, e sobre tudo para a poesia. (Borges de Figueiredo 1844:153)
This passage also shows what we already stated when dealing with Spanish national
literary history: that the birth of the nation is intrinsically tied with the birth of its
fundamental character or Volksgeist. In this case, the ability for Arts is just one of the
topical characteristics of the Portuguese nation. Others, which appear with a high level
of invariability, are the “sweetness” (“doçura”) of its landscape, language and people; or
some characteristics shared with its Spanish counterparts, and which could be
derivations, from the Romantic point from their contact with the Arabic people, such as
chivalry and gallantry:
A grandeza cavalleirosa e as tradições do Oriente se combinão no seio dos
Portuguezes para exaltar as idêas do genio; um clima encantador, uma lingua sonora
e majestosa se prestão a todas as suas inspirações; assim se eleva e ostenta nossa
reputação litteraria. (Borges de Figueiredo 1844:151)
Not all historians, however, shared this idea: Francisco Freire de Carvalho, who also
wrote a Poética Nacional and an Eloquencia Nacional, in his Primeiro Ensaio sobre
Historia Litteraria de Portugal starts his account of Portuguese literary history from the
“times of Lusitania”, and finds in them the same national character as Borges de
Figueiredo did in the medieval Portuguese people: “...remontando aos primitivos
tempos da Lusitania, encontrâmos, bem como o valor e brio marcial, já naturalizado
11
Two details should be highlighted in this quote: firstly, that Basque is absent from the list of Iberian
languages; and secondly, that it cannot be coincidental that the two languages which, in Garrett’s opinion,
gained independence and therefore became true national languages, are the two who became the official
languages of both 19th-century Iberian nation-states; it is not necessary to insist once more in the way in
which nationalistic (literary) history projected into the past the national boundaries it was contributing to
build during the 19th century.
entre os habitadores deste paiz ingenho e applicação a todo o genero de Lettras” (Freire
Carvalho 1845: 17-8). And he expands this idea a little bit later:
Na verdade a propensão para as Letras e sua cultura data entre nós de tão longe, que
era opinião corrente, dominando o Imperador Octaviano Augusto, que os Turdulos
ou Turdetânos, isto é, os habitadores naquelle tempo de grande parte da Andaluzia e
Algarve, ou, para melhor dizer, os seus antepassados, que moravam entre o Tejo e o
Douro, eram os mais doutos dos Hespanhões; pois usavam de Grammatica [...] e
conservavam muitas poesias e leis, postas em verso, com varios monumentos de
grande antiguidade, em que não só mostravam as gloriosas memorias dos seus
progenitores, mas a elevada sciencia dos seus antepassados” (Freire Carvalho 1845:
20)
However, just as Amador de los Ríos did, Freire Carvalho also tends to limit the
importance of this first period, in comparison to that of the period after the creation of
the Portuguese monarchy and language:
Vai offerecer-se á nossa consideração um dos mais bellos períodos, que os Annaes
da Nação Portugueza nos apresentam, período a que dá principio a gloriosa
Acclamação do Fundador da Monarchia no anno de 1139, e donde podemos começar
a datar com maior abundancia e certeza as illustres memorias para a nossa Historia
Litteraria. (Freire Carvalho 1845: 40)
And in similar terms, although less precisely and explicitly, José María de Costa e Silva
also separates the moment of the birth of the monarchy, and the birth of the nation,
although this statement has almost no consequences for the configuration of his work,
which deals only with poets who wrote in Portuguese and starts with the “Eschola
Galega”:
Que a Poesia Portugueza nasceu, e se cultivou muitos annos antes da fundação da
monarchia, e quando a terra de Portugal estava unida á Galliza, e ambas as nações
fallavam o mesmo dialecto, é cousa de que ninguem dúvida, porque tem a seu favor
os monumentos historicos. (Costa e Silva 1850: 31)
There is a very interesting subcorpus of works, devoted to the history of Brazilian
literature, which may also be considered for this research, since, in their attempt to
explain the roots of their own national history, embark in the narration of the literature
of the “metropolis”, Portugal, accentuating the continuity and unity between both
literary histories at least until the moment of the political independence of Brasil:
Discordamos porém da opinião dos que pretendem enchergar uma nacionalidade, um
cunho particular nos escriptos d’alguns illustres brasileiros, compostos durante o
regimen colonial, ou ao crepusculo d’aurora boreal da independencia, quando as
preocupações politicas absorviam todas as attenções. [...] Não descrobrimos porém
em seus versos uma ideia verdaderamente brasileira, um pensamento que não fosse
commum aos poetas d’alem-mar. Para isso é certo que poderosamente contribuia a
educação que enta se dava á juventude, e para brasileiros e portuguezes era infallivel
o oraculo de Coimbra. Impossivel é pedir originalidade a quem não tem ideias suas.
Si por empregarem alguns nomes indigenas devem esses auctores serem
classificados na litteratura brasileira injusto fôra excluir da indostanica Camões,
Barros e Castanheda. (Fernandes Pinheiro 1862: 10)
The same idea of unity and continuity may be found in Sotero dos Reis Curso de
literatura Portugueza e Brazileira:
A litteratura brazileira e portugueza são tão parecidas nas feições, ademanes e
attitudes, como o podem ser duas irmas gemeas que mal se distinguem por alguma
diversidade de forma e ar proprio, só perceptiveis para os que as estudão com muito
cuidado. (Sotero dos Reis 1866:I,77)
This strong connection of the literary roots of the old colonies with respect to the old
metropolis is extremely interesting, and would require further investigation, also in
comparison with the Spanish-speaking Latin-American countries; in any case, in
relation with our present investigation (the origins of the Portuguese nation), it is
interesting to notice that these histories of Brazilian literature do not represent an
innovation, but follow the same dominating trends as their continental counterparts. For
instance, Fernandes Pinheiro starts his history with an explicit statement of the relative
youngness of the Portuguese nation (not to say, of course, of the Brazilian nation):
Pensamos com o Sr. A. Herculano que Portugal é uma nação nova, nascida no XII
século n’um angulo da Galliza, constituida sem atenção ás divisões politicas
anteriores, dilatando-se pelo territorio do Al-Gharb sarraceno, e rejeitamos portanto a
tradição que a faz descendente dos antigos celtas, que por mais de tres mil annos
souberão conservar a sua vitalidade a despeito de todas as invasões porque teve de
passar a Peninsula Iberica. (Fernandes Pinheiro 1862: 1-2).
Let us finish this chapter on the origins of the Portuguese nation with a reference to the
(highly original and influential) theory developed by Teófilo Braga, one of the members
of the Geração do 70, who, in his Theoria da historia da litteratura portugueza
proposes a differentiation between the Portuguese “race” and the Portuguese “nation”:
while the second one was, in fact, born in the Middle Ages, with the creation of the
language and kingdom, the race is much older, dating back to the first inhabitants of the
Iberian Peninsula, and the intertwining of races and peoples that followed:
A constitução da raça precede a nacionalidade; a primeira é um facto organico, e
como tal não póde determinar-se ao certo o dia em que começa; a entidade naciopnal
essa é individual e dependente da vontade, coadjuvada pelo meio ethnographico e
pela tradição. A nação portugueza começou no seculo XII; a raça resultou de
migrações e de invasões anteriores. (Braga 1872: 9)
This distinction also helps Braga to explain both the similarities and the differences
between the Spanish and the Portuguese nations: while they both have common
historical ancestors, and a common origin in a shared territory, they also have a separate
historical evolution, with two main elements being the key to the formation of the
Portuguese Volksgeist: the contact with the Ocean (which would lead to the period of
the descobertas) and the influence of new foreign elements, which were absent or less
dominant in Spain:
O exemplo da historia mostra-nos que as raças puras para se constituirem em
nacionalidade, precisam de um elemento estrangeiro que venha, por assim dizer,
determinar esse ponto de ossificação [...] Esta mesma corrente veiu produzir os seus
effeitos em Portugal; o elemento mosarabe era bastante puro para poder consolidarse em nação. Como o ouro, que precisa da liga de outro metal para ficar mais
consistente, o mosarabe recebeu do francez o Conde Dom Henrique, e das colonias
gallo-frankas esse primeiro instincto de individualidade. As duas forças, a presença
do oceano e communicação com elle, e o novo vigor estrangeiro immediatamente se
combinaram. (Braga 1872: 13)
This conception of Portuguese history and identity offers an effort to conciliate both
main tendencies (the tendency to include all authors to write in the Portuguese territory,
and the one to include only those who wrote in Portuguese language) which is not
completely dissimilar (although it is more explicitly developed in the case of the
Portuguese historian) to that of Amador de los Ríos: to accept a continuity between the
older inhabitants of the territory and the most contemporary ones; but to establish, at the
same time, some kind of identitarian fracture or birth of the nation (which contributes to
setting limits and boundaries, and therefore excluded and non-national authors) in the
Middle Ages, coinciding with the birth of the national language to which it is attached.
4. CONCLUSIONS
The analysis of the previous pages should be enough, at least, to offer a superficial view
of the way in which the process of formation of national identity influence the creation
of literary canons; how the definition of the national character, and the external,
chronological limits are set a priori by the historians and therefore condition the corpus
of authors and texts which constitute the national literature. There is of course a circular
co-implication between (literary) history and national identity: the later conditions the
former, which then is used as justification and foundation of the later, especially
through the constitution of a national education system, which, apart from (obviously)
informations and abilities, also has the aim to teach the new generation the true meaning
of belonging to an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983).
Of course, as we have just seen, we are dealing with a period in which the conception of
both the Spanish and the Portuguese national identities are being constructed, firstly
with a strong foreign impulse, but then by the inhabitants of the nations themselves.
This period of national self-definition is characterized by the existence of various
options in relation with the topic of national birth or self-proclamation: in this case, they
crystallize in two (not strictly opposed) or mutually exclusive tendencies: one which
places this national birth in an imprecise but remote past, practically with the arrival of
the first inhabitants to the national territory (therefore establishing a cultural or ethnic
link between those distant relatives and their successors, i.e. contemporary Portuguese
or Spanish people); and another one which limits the chronological extension of the
nation, setting its starting point in the Middle Ages, with the creation of autonomous
national languages, and which therefore denies or disregards any continuity between
ancient and modern occupiers of the Iberian Peninsula.
This general overview is valid, I would argue, for both Portugal and Spain: in both cases
the narrow tendency was predominant –up to some extent, no doubt, because of the
influence of Central-European Romantic ideas about nation, language and literature–;
but in both historical traditions, too, we find significant examples of historians who
offer the wider, more inclusive perspective (Amador de los Ríos and Teófilo Braga
being the most salient manifestations of this option). In both cases, however, there is a
tension or pressure that forces them to include, by some explicit or implicit textual
subterfuge, the core idea of the narrow conception of the nation: the idea that Spain or
Portugal were born as nations ‘strictly speaking’ in the Middle Ages; therefore, any
kind of previous collective identity has to be considered pre-national (a “race” in the
case of Teófilo Braga; an un-named proto-nation in the case of Amador de los Ríos), a
distinction which obviously also has consequences in the evaluation of the literary
authors and works: the Hispano-Roman or Hispano-Arab writers, for instances, are
considered Spanish literature in Amador de los Ríos’ text; but there is no doubt that they
are not in the same level of “Spanishness” as, for example, Calderón, Cervantes or the
anonymous creators of the Cantar de Mío Cid.
I would like to conclude by stressing my initial point once more: the importance of the
study of literary history and literary criticism (obviously, among many other fields,
related or unrelated to literature) as a tool for understanding the mechanisms, conflicts,
paradoxes and pitfalls of collective identity formation processes, especially since this
identities are constructed, as Homi Bhabha has argued, by the construction of narrative
forms and genres –one of which, although not the one primarily studied by Bhabha, is
no doubt historical narrative–. Although historiographical studies have developed
greatly in the last decades, not only at Iberian, but European and world level, I am
convinced that there is still work to be done in order to properly understand the way in
which 19th-century nationalism impregnated the very fabric of Western culture,
including, of course, literature and literary studies.
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