Nostalgia’s emotive force undermines the apparent dominance of the narrator’s democratic value system over the dictatorial values he espoused in the past. Still, the modern value system would remain intact if what was longed for was an idealised version of the francoist past in which francoism itself had no place. In Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, the hierarchy of value systems is turned upside down by the importance accorded to sensory perception and eroticism. While they induce Manuel to break away from the values and norms of Catholicism and Franco’s Spain in the 1950s, they also lend a sense of perversion to the narrator’s nostalgic longing. Decay is inherent in the longed-for past. What the narrator really longs for is not a childish state of innocence, but the exact moment at which that perfection culminated and started its decline.
Nostalgia, then, involves a kind of haunting. Trauma leaves its traces precisely in the beauty that is evoked. Paradoxically, the fact that trauma’s presence putrefies the otherwise perfect nature of the past has a seductive rather than a repellent effect. Since trauma rides on the waves of nostalgia, it becomes an inextricable part of the emotional overflow to which nostalgia gives rise. Despite partaking in the evocation of nostalgic sentiments, however, the ghost of trauma successfully manages to undermine the ethical setup in Tranvía a la Malvarrosa. The narrator constantly criticises his own nostalgia for the dictatorial past, yet what attracts him most to it is precisely the trace of trauma that corrupts it. At the end of Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, the reader is left with the sense that the narrator’s past is now a forbidden fruit. Morally despicable, it is seductive precisely because of the “bad” francoist value system it contains.
John Su’s ethical structure, in which nostalgia is seen as a framework that encapsulates trauma, is thus deconstructed by the seductive emotionality of the narrator’s nostalgia. As it turns out, the novel’s nostalgia is not nearly as ethical as might appear at first sight. Does this also render Tranvía a la Malvarrosa more eligible for the status of world literature than might at first be assumed? On the one hand, the longed-for past and the specific trauma evoked in Tranvía a la Malvarrosa remain firmly rooted in the local. Yet the pleasure that accompanies nostalgic memory does seem to rise above this national rootedness, going in this case beyond the collective memory of Spain and focusing more on the nature of individual – one might even say human – remembrance. Nostalgia, despite its rootedness in place and time, always brings to a literary work a greater “global potential”.
WORKS CITED
Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern.” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory. Eds. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 189-207.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. “Time Against Time: Or the Hypermodern Society.” Hypermodern Times. Trans. Andrew Brown. Eds. Gilles Lipovetsky, Sébastien Charles and Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. 29-71.
Lowenthal, Daniel. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Vicent, Manuel. Tranvía a la Malvarrosa. Barcelona: Suma de Letras, 2004.
1 In a specifically Spanish context, Ulrich Winter’s use of the term “arte del olvido” (the art of forgetting) eloquently describes certain contemporary works of art that present an all too rosy image of the past. (Winter 32).
GRECO-ROMAN CLASSICS, NATIONAL LITERATURES AND LITERARY HISTORY IN THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE MODEL OF JUAN ANDRÉS
Tomás González Ahola, University of Santiago de Compostela
In this article I consider the relationship between the literatures of Graeco-Roman Antiquity on the one hand, and the various national literatures on the other, in the historiographical discourse of the eighteenth century Jesuit Juan Andrés Morell. The main objective is to show how, in a period that was dominated by controversy about the exemplary role of the classics and the tension between the Enlightenment and the Romantic model of literary history, Andrés was able to create a new, global, historiographical model that valued the individual contribution of each specific nation. In this model, the Greek and Roman literatures were analysed separately and compared both with one another and with the other literatures known in Andrés’ day. But, unlike the Enlightenment and Romantic historiographers, Andrés did not see the classical literatures as immovable models of all the literary virtues, nor as reflections of the “national specificity” of the Greeks and Romans.
First, it is important to note that until very recently scant attention was paid in comparative studies to the literatures of antiquity, not only those of the Greeks and Romans, but also the Indian, Persian, Sumerian, Hittite and others. Until recently, moreover, any history of the Greek or Roman literatures was structured in much the same way as the histories of any of the other national literatures. Today, this model has been questioned in an effort to expand the new paradigms of comparative literature and literary theory to fields that have traditionally been the domain of disciplines such as textual critique, classical philology or historical linguistics. The first problem that confronts the researcher in this area is that the literatures of antiquity possess a series of very concrete characteristics that are absent from the national literatures. In order to create a new epistemological model that accords with contemporary requirements, a thorough analysis of these characteristics is needed. It is not the aim of this article to undertake an exhaustive analysis of this kind, but I believe that we may have interesting reflections to offer on the subject to be treated here, and that these are intimately related to the links between the classical and the national around the last decades of the eighteenth century, when Juan Andrés was developing his ideas on comparative literature.
Over the centuries, the presentation of classical literature in the histories of European literature has undergone a number of changes. Among these has been a profound change in the notion of “the exemplary”. Focussing on the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, we see how, from a first model of Enlightenment history that inherited certain conventions from the normative paradigm, a new, very different, model emerged: the model of “National History”, which sprang from new currents of thought such as Herder’s philosophical ideas and Scottish primitivism. These ideas, along with the development of the new concept of the “nation”, enlarged the distance between “ancient literature” and “national literature.” Prior to this, especially in the Romance-language countries such as Spain and Italy, there was no consciousness of a barrier between these two worlds. The separation of “the ancient” from “the national”, which first occurred in the Germanic-speaking countries, soon spread throughout Europe, eventually affecting the entire field of classical philology – or rather, giving birth to what we today call “classical philology”.
It seems apposite to mention F.A. Wolf at this point. Known especially for his Prolegomena