Finding
Díez Borque's Historia de las literaturas hispánicas no castellanas is an example of this: a series of independent historiographic accounts are offered ignoring a fundamental common characteristic: their processes and functions within the same interliterary or polysystem (on the theoretical framework of interliterariness, see !uri"in; on the polysystem approach, see Even-Zohar; on the Iberian polysystem, see, e.g., Casas).
Paper
Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System
Abstract
In his article "Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System" Santiago Gutiérrez García explores the notion that the possibility of carrying out a comparative study of Iberian literatures is determined by its interliterary system. Gutiérrez García postulates that the said interliterary system comprises a series of peripheral literatures which seek their self-affirmation through opposition to the hegemonic center, namely Castilian literature. He uses the example of Galician Portuguese medieval poetry and illustrates the problematic nature of his approach elaborating that despite the fact that this medieval poetic tradition is shared by both Galician and Portuguese literatures, as literary subsystems they carry out diverse strategies of symbolic appropriation in which a confrontation arises between two national literatures in asymmetric relation: the hegemonic Portuguese literature and the emergent Galician literature. Santiago Gutiérrez García, "Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González Santiago GUTIÉRREZ GARCÍA Translated from the Galician by Belén Iglesias Arbor Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System Pilar Vázquez Cuesta writes in José María Diéz Borque's Historia de las literaturas hispánicas no castellanas that "what most surprises the reader on first contact with Galician literature is the lack of continuity and scarcity of certain genres in contrast with the brilliance achieved by others such as the lyric" (621; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are by Gutiérrez García and Iglesias Arbor). In literary history, Iberian Galician literature is characterized by the discursive discontinuity in which periods of richness alternated with silence in three major periods: a literary height during the middle ages followed by decline and the re-emergence of Galician literature. This sequence constitute also for Martí de Riquer one of the notable aspects of Catalan literature: "the comparison between both examples [i.e., Catalan and Galician] reveals how two historiographic discourses that share the same cultural field, the Spanish, are constructed in independent ways and avoid the common circumstances which would facilitate a correct understanding of the historical evolutions of both literatures" (12). We can see the triumph of the "national" in Iberian literary history in several cases and in the few works where attention is paid to the interliterary system we see description and analysis restricted to the juxtaposition of diverse historiographic discourses. Díez Borque's Historia de las literaturas hispánicas no castellanas is an example of this: a series of independent historiographic accounts are offered ignoring a fundamental common characteristic: their processes and functions within the same interliterary or polysystem (on the theoretical framework of interliterariness, see !uri"in; on the polysystem approach, see Even-Zohar; on the Iberian polysystem, see, e.g., Casas). Difficulties arise upon applying the concept of the interliterary system Iberia for it determines the minority condition of peripheral literature not only with regard to a hegemonic center constituted by Castilian literature, but also through a series of common strategies which arise from a dialectical relation (see Cabo Aseguinolaza). Thus, Historia de las literaturas hispánicas does not constitute a literary history, but a juxtaposition of literary histories grouped together based on their belonging to a specific geocultural region. Marginalization also explains certain discourse strategies: ethnic minority literatures look for their reaffirmation through the involvement of antithetic aspects and according to their character as emergent identity discourses (see Casas, "Sistema interliterario," "Problemas") and this reveals the direct links between literary historiography and the mechanisms of the construction and formation of national and ethnic minority identities (see Domínguez, "Literary Emergence"). For this reason, the recovery of Iberian "peripheral" literatures has not only run parallel to the process of political decentralization ongoing in Spain from 1975, but has also been accompanied by the development of literary historiography in a process in which political and cultural intentions are mixed (see Santana). Because of their need to reconstruct a past of which they feel they have been deprived, peripheral literatures on the Iberian Peninsula have found a tool in the narrative procedures of literary historiography not only for the construction of a national identity, but also for the capacity to organize information and construct a literary canon. This has helped establish it as one of the most effective tools in the emergence of national literatures, while its crisis runs parallel to an overcoming of the romantic and positivist model in which European states achieved cohesion (Casas, "Sistema" 71). Literary historiography has a performative function which predisposes it to be used by cultural and political institutions in the construction of national identity. In Iberian peripheral literatures the abundance of literary histories published in recent decades has been accompanied by the application of postulates found in the frameworks of the interliterary and polysystem approaches, although not sufficiently theorized (see Godzich). The latter aspect turns out to be symptomatic of intentions underlying the use of literary history, which, based on national myths, prevents the deconstruction and conceptualization of national mythology and favors their survival with the result of the interpretation of the nation in essentialist terms. Iberian literary historiography, then, will have to pay attention to the postulates of the interliterary process in order to avoid a historiography characterized by its discursive inflexibility and this at the time when its multiplicity of functions is derived from its subordination to the national macrotext (see González-Millán). Santiago Gutiérrez García, "Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System" page 3 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González In view of the importance assumed by literary historiography in the processes of consolidating peripheral systems, it is not strange that many of the studies dealing with them do not manage to move away from the thought processes that traditional literary history imposes. Approaches according to a national logic project these national schemes to historical stages previous to the emergence of the nations. Clearly, minority systems exercise an anachronistic reconstruction of the past, both as part of a mechanism of auto-affirmation, but also because in this re-appropriation an absent past is posited so as to fulfill the need to identify a moment of grandeur that compensates for the insufficiencies of the present. These reconstructions investigate the reasons leading to the posterior decadence of the literature involved and the history leading up to it. The result is a tendency to see the middle ages as a resplendent epoch, a trend one notices in Galician and Catalan literary historiography — although not in Basque literature, which developed later, in the sixteenth century — which are systematized in a teleological construction. A paradoxical situation is thereby established owing to the fact that the prejudices elaborated in the contemporary epoch are projected on the literature of the middle ages and neglecting its peculiar production conditions. The literature of this period is characterized by its intersystemic condition, organized around a common cultural substratum of Biblical, Latin, and Germanic roots. Latin was the linguistic code used by the intellectual medieval elite and yet, because of its a-national condition, the study of Latin medieval literature has remained subordinated to the study of texts which used vernacular languages. Of these, it is the former that provides a more suitable comprehension of the culture of these centuries. Prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the borders among different literatures were more fluid and language was not working as mechanism of ethnic demarcation. This aspect favored the use of a language in a situation of allophony, since it was perceived as forming part of an artistic code. This happens, for example, with the French language of northern France used in the epic, in prose romans, or in encyclopedic works; or with Occitanian adopted in Catalonia and in the north of Italy as the language of the lyric poetry. We find Galician Portuguese in a similar situation, a language of lyric poetry in the center and to the west of the Iberian Peninsula during the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth century. For the Catalan troubadours, who sang in Occitanian, the existence of a consolidated plurilingual tradition — based on the complementary relation between Latin and neoLatin languages — was fundamental. Despite the fact that historical circumstances favor the study of the medieval literature with a comparative approach, the few researchers using this method and the limited results obtained warrant discussion about a failure of the comparative method in an area that should be one of its more profitable fields of study (see Domínguez, "Literatura"). If we center our attention on the Hispanic area, one must first bear in mind the secondary interest that comparativism has always awoken in peninsular academic circles (see Cabo Aseguinolaza). It is logical then that only some isolated attempt could be outlined, as the Breve historia de la literatura es
Authors
Santiago Gutiérrez García
Journal
Clcweb-comparative Literature and Culture