A pioneering book in the study and vindication of "regional literatures"
Taurus reissues 'The Silver Age' by José-Carlos Mainer, a reference essay in Hispanic studies written in the early 1970s and published during the Franco dictatorship.
Barcelona"Today's Catalonia cannot please any young person of clear and high intelligence [...] The market-like, Jewish, Sancho Panza-like Catalonia, prude and counterfeiting must disappear before an educated Catalonia, aware of its worth, with its own education, free-spirited and quite expansive." This excerpt from the article Catalan youth today, written by Jaume Brossa (Sant Andreu, 1875 - Barcelona, 1919) and published in the magazine The Advance In 1893 it is found at the beginning of the chapter that José-Carlos Mainer (Zaragoza, 1944) dedicated to the so-called "regional literatures" - Catalan, Basque and Galician - in an essay of reference in the Hispanic world, The Silver Age, first published in 1975 in Los Libros de la Frontera by the editor and bookseller José Batlló, still during the Franco dictatorship, and now recovered by Taurus with a new prologue by the author and an epilogue signed by Jordi Gracia and Domingo Ródenas de Moya.
"The Silver Age "It still reads with the freshness and integrity with which the book was written," Gracia argues. "It is a complex puzzle of the country's intellectual life from the beginning of the 20th century until 1939." Mainer wrote it shortly after Falange and literature (Labor, 1971), when he was already teaching Spanish literature at the University of Barcelona, where he had earned his bachelor's and doctorate degrees with a thesis on the Galician writer and journalist Wenceslao Fernández Flórez. "I arrived in Barcelona in 1964, just before starting my third year of university," Mainer recalls. "I studied Catalan right away, and although I've never fully spoken it fluently, I've been able to write it well and read it without any problems." "In some dictation sessions, I even got better grades than the Catalan students," adds María-Dolores Albiac Blanco, Mainer's classmate and partner, who has also dedicated herself to studying the history of literature for decades at university. "José-Carlos and I could have finished our degrees with excellent results, but thanks to professors like Martí de Riquer "We ended up being saved," Albiac recalls. Both she and Mainer are aware of some of the medievalist's contradictions: "In 1966, the same year as Capuchinada, Dr. Riquer was capable of advising against the publication of a newspaper in Catalan and, at the same time, taking a chance on some students: we knew he visited his own police station."
Distancing oneself from solemnly boring textbooks
Although they defined themselves as "reds" at the time, Mainer and Albiac ended up joining the Romance Studies Department headed by Martí de Riquer. "I immediately became interested in reading and studying the authors of the exile, which I discovered thanks to José Luis Cano, poet, literary critic, and one of the founders of the magazine Island —admits Mainer—. Even though they were banned, it wasn't that difficult to access his work because many of Barcelona's bookstores had a secret closet with persecuted literature. I'm thinking of the old Casa del Libro, the Cinco de Oros, or a secondhand bookstore on Aribau Street where we spent many afternoons." "Mainer was raised during the Franco regime," says Domingo Ródenas, "but even so, he quickly saw, while preparing The Silver Age, that in order to reconstruct the plot of a cultural process that began in 1902, he also needed to talk about the literatures with their own language of the State that were re-emerging." "It is very meritorious that a book like this, of the scope and with the modernity of its approach, and also with the subsequent impact it has achieved, the Publi.
"I always looked for an independent form of expression and at that time the Spanish literature textbooks were solemnly boring," says Mainer. The Silver Age was Contemporary Catalan Literature, that Joan Fuster published in 1972 by Curial and covers the period from Modernism to the 1960s. The section on Catalan literature in Mainer's book also begins with the Modernist onslaught. Just as in Castilian literature, the proposals for change, promoted by a well-known article by Ramiro de Maeztu, Towards another Spain (1899), they did not make a hole due to "the absence of bourgeois spirit or industrial zeal" and "the tamed casticism", as can be read in The Silver Age, the Modernism of Catalan authors such as Santiago Rusiñol, Joan Maragall, Ignasi Iglesias and Victor Catalan "He knew how to insert himself with singular coherence into the artistic demands of a hegemonic bourgeoisie, which was progressive at the expense of bourgeois money."
Praise for JV Foix's "total book"
Other figures of Catalan literature parade through the pages of José-Carlos Mainer's essay, such as Josep Carner, Josep Pla, Joan Salvat-Papasseit and JV Foix. The latter's project stands out Diary 1918, "conceived as a variant of that total book that dreamed of symbolism and significantly identical in its titular enunciation to that other diary with which Juan Ramón Jiménez opened similar routes in the world of Spanish lyric poetry." This is one of the other successes of The Silver Age: Mainer not only brings the various literary traditions of the State into dialogue, but also integrates them into the European cultural production of the time. He even reviews the period's publishing catalogs to see which authors were most present and deduce their possible influence. In 1910, for example, essays by Nietzsche, Kropotkin, and Renan were widely circulated, but also novels by Tolstoy, Zola, Dickens, Hugo, and Dumas.
"Until my book, it was unthinkable to mention foreign authors in a manual of Spanish literature," Mainer comments. "My idea was to blow up some overly revered aspects with the aim of expanding the canon." He cites as an example the poetry of Antonio Machado, which for political reasons "had been cited until then anecdotally." If he had had the strength and desire to expand the essay now, José-Carlos Mainer would have added, among others: Manuel Chaves Nogales and Las Sinsombrero, the name that has been used for a decade to group the forgotten authors of the Generation of '27, among them Luisa Carnés, María Teresa León and Rosa Chacel.
