The Re-Generation of '98

Abstract: If the so-called Generation of 1898 reacts to an industrializing, dehumanizing occidental world, it will reportedly turn inward into Spain to regenerate a nation suffering from “abulia” after the loss of the country’s last colonies and in the wake of domestic turmoil.  Many of the Generation of ‘98’s traditionally accepted members employ innovative literary forms to position themselves as artists and intellectuals who shall guide Spain on its spiritual journey.  While each author approaches regeneration differently, they converge in their belief of salvation by way of an individualistic, spiritual journey meant to question the current political and social state.  It is a progressive journey.  Among this generation’s traditionally accepted members, Miguel de Unamuno and Pío Baroja offer male protagonists on such an individual, spiritual journey; Ramón del Valle-Inclán depicts the impossible success of such a journey in his experimental esperpentos.  In each instance, the authors’ work exposes a traditional stance vis-à-vis females and marriage.  Additionally, they either explicitly denounce sexual otherness as counterproductive--as is the case with Baroja’s Camino de perfección--or they denounce it implicitly by perpetuating heterosexual normativity as also with Baroja’s novel, Unamuno’s Niebla and Valle-Inclán’s  Luces de bohemia Carmen de Burgos offers a somewhat different perspective in her short novel, El veneno del arte. The group of authors, sharing a fin de siècle concern for Spain, experiments with form, often with nationalistic, propagandizing ends.  The Generation of ’98 systematically reinforces heterosexual normativity and marriage for nationalistic purposes, thereby banishing, punishing, or disallowing promiscuity, homosexuality and incest, among others.  By addressing instances of such otherness, though, the works in question already point to their own instability and reliance on difference for their own constitution.  Therefore, though history is portrayed as progress, it is better understood as a process of difference.

Keywords: Generation of 1898, Miguel de Unamuno, Ramón de Valle-Inclán, Carmen de Burgos, Pío Baroja, Queer Theory, Hetero-normativity.

“We have paid a high enough price
for the nostalgia of the whole and the one….
Let us wage war on totality; let us be witness to
the unrepresentable; let us activate the
difference and save the honor of the name.”
-Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question:  What is Postmodernism?”[

If the so-called Generation of 1898 reacts to an industrializing, dehumanizing occidental world, it will reportedly turn inward into Spain to regenerate a nation suffering from abulia1 after the loss of the country’s last colonies and in the wake of domestic turmoil.  In Spain, the First Republic (1873-1874) had been dissolved by governmental division leading up to the Third Carlist War and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.  Alfonso XII was proclaimed King.  This generation of authors and philosophers oppose the Catholic restoration that was underway, and openly criticize the academic repression evidenced by the dismissal of liberal academics from the Central University of Madrid.  The Generation of ’98 adheres, at least in part, to the Krause2 promotion of academic liberty and tolerance.  Drawing from and contributing to a modernist aesthetic, the writers of this generation experiment with literary form in order to promote their regenerative plan.  This emerging modernist aesthetic elevates the artist above others.  Many of the Generation of ‘98’s traditionally accepted members employ innovative literary forms to position themselves as artists and intellectuals who shall guide Spain on its spiritual journey.  While each author approaches regeneration differently, they converge in their belief of salvation by way of an individualistic, spiritual journey meant to question the current political and social state.  It is a progressive journey.  Among this generation’s traditionally accepted members, Miguel de Unamuno and Pío Baroja offer male protagonists on such an individual, spiritual journey; Ramón del Valle-Inclán depicts the impossible success of such a journey in his experimental esperpentos.  In each instance, the authors’ work exposes a traditional stance vis-à-vis females and marriage.  Additionally, they either explicitly denounce sexual otherness as counterproductive--as is the case with Baroja’s Camino de perfección--or they denounce it implicitly by perpetuating heterosexual normativity as is also the case with Baroja’s novel, Unamuno’s Niebla and Valle-Inclán’s Luces de bohemia. Carmen de Burgos offers a somewhat different perspective in her short novel El veneno del arte. However, the modernist aesthetics and regenerative plans in these works purported to question social norms fall quite short of this goal. The group of authors sharing a fin de siècle concern for Spain experiments with form, often with nationalistic, propagandizing ends. These ends either silently or vociferously exclude sexual otherness, and they offer no valid place for its expression in the Peninsula’s spiritual regeneration.

In the Modernist movement, art no longer reflects reality; rather, it creates it and influences the external world.  The artist, then, decides what to create and how to affect the world.  In positioning himself as intellectual elite, the artist is above morality. The modernist novel becomes a site in which the artist blurs reality and fiction, in which the protagonist’s psychological journey reigns, and in which the artist imposes his will over his work.  Part of the regenerative plan surges from a critique of urbanization and a glorification of return to the espíritu del pueblo.  The authors’ works depict the metropolis as a place of dehumanization and debauchery, and the characters either flee Madrid or perish there.  In their flight from--or destruction in--urbanity, the male protagonists confront their existentialist crisis, and amorous relationships either complement or confuse the males’ spiritual development.  If the males’ spiritual progress parallels nationalistic regeneration, females are viewed as either support devices or detractions; rarely do they enjoy their own transformation.  Shirley Mangini explains:

While not all of the works in question here occur during or after the First World War, they certainly rely on silencing the sexual other to formulate and perpetuate their ideas.  Therefore, the regenerative plans these authors put to work rely on a systematic silencing of women, and more importantly, on a refusal of any manifestation of sexual otherness.

Roberta Johnson calls for a modification of the understanding of the modernist movement and of the Generation of ’98 vis-à-vis the role of women:

Not only does the new aesthetic disallow women’s voices and privilege the male as artist, as spiritual being, and as regenerator, but, taken an important step further, it also institutionalizes marriage thereby implicating promiscuous sex, incest, and homosexuality as aberrant and malicious toward Spain’s spirit.  However, these instances of alterity are never far from the surface.  The insistence on conventional marriage already indicates the status quo’s instability and its reliance on sexual otherness for its own constitution.  The aforementioned works reveal this tension.

Critics have begun to consider Baroja’s Camino de perfección (1902) as a novel quintessential of the generation’s experimental vanguard taste, and they note its novelty in spanning realism, naturalism, and modernism.  They do so with often congratulatory tones:  “Baroja was a pioneer of an exploratory kind of fiction which others would soon take to new heights of originality and liberation" (Longhurt 202).  Baroja does succeed in questioning reality in this novel by manipulating the form:  He allows Fernando Ossorio’s whims to dictate action, he changes the point of view from first, to third, to first person, and he distorts Fernando by playing with narrative voice.  However, the work fails to question a hegemonic morality imposing heterosexual normativity.  Contrarily, Camino de perfección subjugates lesbianism, incest, and sexual promiscuity to Fernando’s anti-revolutionary marriage to Dolores at the novel’s conclusion.

The narrator describes Fernando’s aunt, Laura, with the stereotypical adjectives to imply that she is a lesbian:  “parecía una mujer muy poco femenina y, sin embargo, había en ella una atracción sexual grande.  A veces su palabra sonaba a algo afrodisíaco, y su movimiento de caderas, hombruno por lo violento, era ásperamente sexual, excitante como la cantárida” (39).  The description reflects Fernando’s gaze, one that reduces her to a voracious sexual being and a step in the protagonist’s journey.  Though ideally her sexual appetite or lack thereof would be nonessential, here Laura’s aberrance thwarts Fernando’s self-realization:  “A Fernando [Laura] le parecía una serpiente de fuego que le había envuelto entre sus anillos y cada vez le estrujaba más y más, y él iba ahogándose y sentía que le faltaba el aire para respirar” (44).  It is not only her lesbianism that serves as a barrier to his spiritual journey, but also their incest.  The novel employs two instances of sexual otherness as counterproductive and counter-reproductive.

Homosexuality and incest cripple Fernando’s progress, thereby proving deficient in Spain’s regeneration.  In their place, Fernando’s “camino de perfección” couples him with Dolores, a more rural and traditional woman, in their country home.  He says of her:

If Dolores shows any signs of complexity, the novel assesses it as a rarity uncommon to women.  Again, a woman serves Fernando’s development and resolution; thus, conventional morality goes un-critiqued.  Similarly, the small town nuclear family models Baroja’s regenerative plan:  Fernando and Dolores reproduce a male child (curiously the female one has died, thus disabling her inheritance of Fernando’s journey) to repeat Fernando’s life.  Referring to Fernando’s journey and the Krausist influence in Camino de perfección, J.J. Macklin argues that art and spirituality intertwine in progressive fashion:  “Ossorio’s experience is construed in terms of contradictions and polarities which are progressively overcome” (554).  If Fernando and Spain are moving toward betterment, “progress” transpires at the expense of others.  Thus, Baroja’s artistic ingenuities work to shun difference.  Furthermore, the novel relies on refuting sexual otherness in order to propagate heterosexuality, and in doing so, it relies on it for its own constitution.

Unamuno’s metatextual Niebla handles sexual otherness similarly.  Augusto Pérez is the protagonist who walks through the world of Unamuno’s “intrahistoria:”  This is a fundamental concept pervasive in Unamuno’s work3.  Augusto Pérez’ existentialist crisis vis-à-vis reality occupies much criticism regarding the self-referential work in which the female characters created to assist Augusto’s development remain subjugated:  “Niebla would be the perfect example of the novel in which reality and fiction merge as both characters and author create themselves” (Weber 209).  Indeed, Unamuno’s “nivola4” succeeds in creating a fog in which the protagonist, author and reader find themselves unable to discern reality and fiction.  The modernist aesthetics at work here serve Augusto and Unamuno’s self-reflexive quest for a reason to be and for immortality.  Unamuno begins with a series of prologues that lure the reader into the compelling mist in which the novel functions:  Víctor Goti engineers the first prologue that contests Unamuno’s opinion of Augusto’s free will and suicide (later, Víctor appears as Augusto’s friend in the work); in the post-prologue, Unamuno establishes his authority over both Augusto and Víctor as the author of Niebla who possess free will; the third prologue’s historical tone works to establish Unamuno as the “real” person outside fiction.  Thus, the novel centers on this conversation between reality, fiction, and meaning; however, the philosophical piece reduces its females to stock characters in servitude of the metatextual, metaphysical debate.

Augusto’s journey beings with his obsession focused on an imaginary version of Eugenia, the pianist, the object of his gaze:  “’Mi Eugenia, sí, la mía – iba diciéndose – esta, que me estoy forjando a solas, y no la otra, no la de carne y hueso, no la que vi cruzar por la puerta de mi casa, aparición fortuita, no la de la portera’” (71).  He does not take an interest in her, rather in an illusion of her.  When Eugenia finally rejects him and leaves her boyfriend, Mauricio, after accepting Augusto’s money to pay the mortgage on her family’s home, Augusto decides to commit suicide because of the humiliation he feels spawned from his longing for self-affirmation.  Thus a fantasy of a woman has in part generated Augusto’s journey for meaning, and the woman she turns out to be catalyzes his suicide.  In the first instance, she is a conquest; in the second she is portrayed as an obstruction to the hero’s success.  Furthermore, the novel constantly reminds the reader that Augusto’s mother wanted him to marry well.  His failure to do so could be read as Spain’s obstacle to regeneration.  The heterosexual contract is not questioned; rather, it is reified and reinforced.

After Augusto’s decision to commit suicide, the novel moves away from Augusto’s amorous problems and into a realm of successive inwardness, or perhaps to the “real” concern of the work:  “the relationship between reality and fiction”.  Augusto’s relationship with females is secondary, as are all the female characters themselves--his mother Soledad, Eugenia, Rosario, Liduvina.  Additionally, each has played a stock role, as Paul Orson offers:  Eugenia’s name refers to genius, thus she represents intellectual love; Rosario’s name refers to the rosary which conjures the Virgin and virginal qualities, thus she represents innocent, heart-felt love; and Liduvina’s name refers to “luz divina,” thus she reaches Augusto physiologically.  Importantly, the one female with a voice, albeit an underdeveloped one, is Eugenia, which refers to “hermes-linda,” an androgynous connotation (Orson 54-61).  Certainly a woman may be outspoken without being labeled androgynous.  Each neatly categorized female serves Augusto’s search for meaning: Tthey are compartmentalized for his servitude. Contrarily, Orfeo, the dog, embodies a much stronger narrative voice than that of any female human character.  According to Robert Spires,  “authors and characters, since they are merely sign systems, alternately create and are created by one another.  And of course, this creative process is all for the benefit of a text-act reader, the third creator/creation paradox constituting the fictional mode” (41).  While this is true, the sign system at work is a patriarchal one.  Unamuno’s manipulation of form challenges the role of art, but it does not challenge the morality at work in the Symbolic.5  Unamuno’s art remains in servitude to conventional gender roles, and it criticizes manifestations of sexual otherness.  According to Judith Fetterly, to fully identify with the hero or with the author, the un-abiding reader is forced to compromise:  He or she either assumes the patriarchal, exclusionary gaze, or he or she must read from a distance.  Therefore, Unamuno’s “intrahistoria” underlying Niebla is a progress that benefits those who abide to hetero-normativity; others are voiceless or condemned.

Similar to Baroja and Unamuno, Valle-Inclán uses form to convey his philosophy and social critique.  He develops the esperpento which many critics see as a hopeless reflection of a decadent, corrupt society believing itself tragic.  An esperpento may be defined as a systematically deformed art necessary to reflect an early Twentieth Century deformed Madrid society.  Additionally, the esperpento is a theatrical work whose contains stage directions indicate the perverse atmosphere in which the action occurs.  Valle-Inclán creates it as a grotesque thing in order to distance the audience enough to enable a self-critique.  According Cardona and Zahareas, “by alienating an audience, esperpentos remove all possibility of traditional catharsis; anticipating or paralleling Brecht, they stand for a new process of provoking the Spanish public into reading literature or other media with more alterness and less sentimentality” (137). However, as Angel Loureiro explains, the author does in part align himself and the audience with the blind bohemian poet, Max Estrella, the protagonist of Luces de bohemia.  The play follows the final twenty four hours of Max’s life as he is swindled, as he drinks too much, and as he finally freezes and dies in the doorway to his own building.  Valle-Inclán means the work as a criticism of not only the repressive state apparatuses (military, police, government) that contribute to the absurd violence, but also of the capricious bohemians whose art and lives are insufficiently compromising vis-à-vis a society in such disarray.  While the author takes detailed care to implicate the “Ley de fuga”6 in the prison scene with Mateo, the Catalan anarchist sentenced to die, the episode’s message carries over into the street when bullets meant for a supposed fleeing prisoner kill a mother’s child.  Her name is simply “La Madre del Niño.”  The stage direction describes her, “Una mujer, depechugada y ronca, tiene en los brazos a su niño muerto, la sien traspasada por el agujero de una bala” (153).  She screams, “¡Asesinos!  ¡Veros es ver al verdugo!” (156).

The child’s death is certainly a tragedy; however, the woman’s only role is motherhood.  Additionally, when Max finally dies, his wife and daughter commit suicide, as if without him they have no place, no voice.  Of course, Valle-Inclán’s work is more than a mere distancing tool, as Loureiro explains:

However, though the author does rely in part on identification between audience and characters, the female characters are one dimensional.  They are mothers and wives and daughters, or undesirables (prostitutes, tavern employees).  The tragedy of destroying the nuclear family remains central to Luces de bohemia, and it also rein-scribes heterosexual normativity.  Though Valle-Inclán ingeniously creates a socially compromised vanguard art form, it falls quite short of any rigorous interrogations into conventional or conscripted sexual morality.  To the contrary:  Luces de bohemia re-institutionalizes it.

Finally, a female author, Carmen de Burgos, considers art’s role regarding the fin de siècle crisis.  Considered one of Spain’s feminist pioneers, Burgos contributed her time to working in favor of divorce laws, education for women, and equal pay (Starčević 73-80).  Though her work is similar to that of the Generation of ’98 as it relates to her social critiques and regenerative plan, her style is often considered more closely linked to that of the 19th Century.  She often self-defines as a romantic naturalist while critics have labeled her somewhat modernist.  Although the majority of Burgos’ work is dated after the turn of the century, she is often categorized with 19th century realism.  The oscillation between 19th century realist esthetics and her pioneering social critiques are evident throughout her body of work.  In a sense, Burgos’ work as a literary author, a journalist, and a feminist straddle the fence between the 19th and 20th centuries.  The title of her short novel El veneno del arte indicates from the start that she intends to question art’s modernist role at the turn of the century.  As in the previously cited works, modernism is at the forefront in Burgos’ novel. However, she experiments less with form and concentrates more on social critique through content. 

The first half of her work depicts Luis de Lara’s tertulia over tea, an aristocratic setting.  His friends are self-proclaimed bohemians, donning female names:  “La Reina de Chipre,” “Merluza,” and “Niapa,” among others.  The narrator sharply criticizes these “false” bohemians who neither understand canonical artists, nor possess any real talent or interest in work:

The narrator calls for an understanding of the world before criticizing it, specifically with reference to a capricious bohemia that values the aesthetic.  Their unsubstantiated art, a reference perhaps to the emptiness of some experimental art form, draws ridicule.  This section concludes with a conversation between Luis and María, an actress in self-imposed exile from the stage because she prefers the public to remember her as youthful.  They discuss their missed chances at love.

The second half deals with his life and those he meets nine years later.  The reader learns that the bohemian crowd has given in to lower middle class and petite bourgeois complacency.  María tells Luis, “Este ambiente les envenenaba, querían hacerse notar a cada costa.  No tenían paciencia para estudiar y trabajar, produciendo una gran obra; era preciso ser un genio infantil” (286).  Similary, Luis, who has been characterized as bisexual or homosexual, opts for marriage:  “Me dejaré convencer por mi madre, intrigaré en palacio, en política, escribiré obras graves…si me compran en lo que me tengo tasado…me casaré” (270).  The novel offers three interesting characters who have the potential to question imposed heterosexual normativity:  Luis, María, and Luis’ girlfriend Rosa.  Luis chooses conventional marriage, and María is a prisoner of her physical appearance.

Perhaps the only revolutionary character is Rosa who changes her name to Margarido and leads a life relatively free of gender convention.  Once described by Luis as innocent, he sees her again, and her change into an independent, sexually expressive person saddens him.  Therefore, Burgos’ novel in part questions sexual roles and imposed heterosexuality; however, it also falls short of enabling Luis to express his homosexuality and María her art.  According to one critique:  “Este deseo de orden y estabilidad, esta aspiración a la inmovilidad y a la vuelta al orden de la ‘novela provinciana’ parece contradecir la actitud progresista que en otras ocasiones guió la vida y obra de Carmen de Burgos” (Rodríguez 390).  Perhaps society disallows Luis and María their self-expression, but the author creates a space for Margarido.  With the exception of Margarido, then, the novel defers to gender convention, sexual normativity, and sameness.

While any category implies sameness which could be construed as totalitarian, they are certainly essential for political and social change.  However, the Generation of ’98 assumes sameness in a dangerous mode.  Though its modernist art challenges certain institutions such as government, religion, and class division, and though it bases its regeneration on an individual’s journey, the assumed commonality and uniqueness of the country’s spirit is essential to the Generation’s notion of regeneration.  Each citizen must work to regenerate Spain via this spiritual journey.  Baroja, Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, and in part Burgos offer history as a progression, holding that all individuals develop similarly.  In doing so, they silence manifestations of otherness.  Conventional marriage and reproduction become essential to their plots.  Roberta Johnson elaborates:  “Male novelists of the so-called Generation of ’98 who incorporated marriage into their fictions usually include it on the periphery” (“Carmen” 141).  Perhaps as a peripheral entity, it proves more insidious:  The heterosexual contract is so normalized it elicits no question in their work.  However, in cases where authors include “other” amorous encounters, they are portrayed as abject and counterproductive to the male protagonist’s development. 

Sexual otherness challenges this generation’s regenerative plan because it is never far from the surface of their works or from the imposed spiritual journey.  In each cited instance, the work relies on silencing for its own constitution.  History as progress, then, inevitably excludes those who fail to comply with the progressive plan.  The Generation of ’98 systematically reinforces heterosexual normativity and marriage for nationalistic purposes, thereby banishing, punishing, or disallowing promiscuity, homosexuality, and incest, among others.  By addressing instances of such otherness, though, the works in question already point to their own instability and reliance on difference for their own constitution.  Therefore, though history is portrayed as progress, it is better understood as a process of difference.


Notes