Double review (2012) of Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900-1936 by Susan Larson and Construyendo la modernidad: escritura y arquitectura en el Madrid moderno 1918-1937 by Carlos Ramos

Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900–1936, and: Construyendo la modernidad: Escritura y arquitectura en el Madrid moderno (1918–1937) (review) Benjamin Fraser

Hispania, Volume 95, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 353-356 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/hpn.2012.0067

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hpn/summary/v095/95.2.fraser.html

Access Provided by College of Charleston at 06/16/12 2:19PM GMT

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reads more like a contemporary account of Catalan culture. As Keown rightfully acknowledges in the introduction, this volume would be a welcome step in the publication of other texts that postulated broader or even alternative agendas (6). Keown’s edition is a much-needed and timely step in the right direction for Catalan Studies. Antón Pujol University of North Carolina–Charlotte, USA Larson, Susan. Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900–1936. Madrid: Vervuert/ Iberoamericana, 2011. Pp. 204. ISBN 978-84-8489-557-2. Ramos, Carlos. Construyendo la modernidad: Escritura y arquitectura en el Madrid moderno (1918–1937). Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2010. Pp. 246. ISBN 978-84-8409-377-0. The publication of these two recent books—both on the topics of modernity, cultural production, and Madrid’s built environment, and both focusing on cultural production in early twentiethcentury Spain—cannot but draw our attention to the existence of changes that have long been brewing in the field. Over the years there have been, of course, a number of moments in which the discipline of Hispanism has been forced to reassess its intentions; forced, that is, to carry on a conversation regarding what defines the scope of its practice, or what is the nature of its method. It has often proven difficult to reach a disciplinary consensus on such issues. Regarding questions of scope and method, there may no longer be (there may never have been) one single notion of Hispanism, but rather many coexisting, overlapping, and contradictory notions. There is no doubt that these strikingly original books by Susan Larson and Carlos Ramos form part of a concerted attempt to redefine the field—by prioritizing the modern city and folding cultural production into that new vision of the urban experience. Despite the fact that these are not the first books or studies to grapple with urban modernity in Spain, they are nonetheless badly needed contributions to a configuration of Hispanism that may seem to many traditionally minded critics to be either too daunting or too interdisciplinary—in either case requiring knowledge that has often been seen as peripheral to the discipline’s literary core. Nonetheless, even more traditional readers will surely find these books to be wonderfully and unquestioningly literary. Make no mistake, Larson and Ramos consciously build on an existing corpus of work on the city and the Spanish urban experience. Each cites a common list of previous urban-themed publications by Cristián Ricci (El espacio urbano del Madrid en la narrativa de la Edad de Plata (1900–1938) [2009]), Michael Ugarte (Madrid 1900 [1996]), Edward Baker (Materiales para escribir Madrid [1991]), Carlos Sambricio (Madrid, urbanismo y gestión municipal [1984]), Aurora Fernández Polanco (Urbanismo en Madrid durante la II República 1931–1939 [1990]), among others. And yet, in each case, they remain critics who have great respect for literature and literary analysis—even as they sustain enviable interdisciplinary conversations. To wit: Larson’s book devotes entire chapters to authors Carmen de Burgos (chapter 3, 69–105), José Díaz Fernández (chapter 4, 107–41), and Andrés Carranque de Ríos (chapter 5, 143–71) as grounded in a notion of modernity derived from such figures as Henri Lefebvre, Marshall Berman, and, above all else, David Harvey; and, Ramos’s text traces the “polinización entre artes diversas” (17; emphasis mine, see also 97, 123), effecting the collision of art and architecture through explorations of authors and architectural thinkers alike: José Moreno Villa (chapter 4, 97–112), Vicente Huidobro (chapter 5, 113–30), Ernesto Giménez Caballero (chapter 6, 131–46), and Fernando García Mercadal (chapter 7, 147–66). This he does within a framework that draws on the likes of Baudrillard, Benjamin, Eco, and more, as a way of emphasizing the intimate relationship between aesthetic questions and material matters. As this review discusses not one book but rather two—both readable yet sophisticated texts that clearly intersect with and diverge from one another in numerous ways

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despite their similarly worded titles—I will not attempt to provide a totalizing look inside both, but rather a comparative perspective outlining in broad terms their contributions, method(s), and visions of urban modernity. In a sense, Larson’s Constructing and Resisting Modernity is perhaps the more radical of the two books. As she puts it in what is effectively a call for Hispanic Studies to embrace a Cultural Studies method (in my view a la Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams): “[I]t is capital and its circulation that ultimately shapes the culture of Madrid during the early twentieth century” (60). In this view, the critic gives equal weight both to literature—which is now properly contextualized as one (nonetheless important) aspect of cultural production—and Madrid’s urban space. The city is thus significant not merely as the background for narrated events, but moreover as a historical space in its own right shaped by (or “occupied by,” as Lefebvre wrote in The Survival of Capitalism [21]) capital. The Madrid that Larson interrogates—blending literary analysis with extraliterary accounts of 1) the employment of women under twentiethcentury capitalist industrialization (70–75), 2) visual images of women produced in tandem with marketing strategies (109–15), 3) the contribution of urban planning to the “chaotic, disjointed nature of life in Madrid in the 1930s” (162), and more—is ultimately complex. It is a space where consumerism obscures lived space, one where the notion of the woman as “ángel del hogar” confronts the image of the “nueva mujer moderna,” and even a space that “becomes an important and central space for the spectacle of political protest” (139). There is a pronounced political engagement here (one that is more subdued in Ramos’s text), and Larson makes no bones about it. Her interest lies precisely in bringing to light the relationship between art and capital (151), a relationship that she is able to define quite clearly in the book’s early expository chapters. “[C]apital,” she writes, “becomes increasingly urbanized and the discourse of the urban seeks to redefine itself by recourse to the symbolic” (22). Constructing and Resisting Modernity consistently harnesses intriguing discussions of cultural importance en route to matters of more urban—and in my reading, ultimately political—significance. In fact, the book kicks off with a bang: after first describing the 1928 premiere of German Fritz Lang’s classic urban film Metropolis (1927) in Madrid (9–12)—a classic film reference for scholars of urban culture from all disciplines—she writes: After Spanish moviegoers saw the film, when they left the movie theaters and stepped out into the street, they were located in the very center of Madrid’s newly-constructed version of the metropolis of money, power and entertainment where any evidence of the process of how the space was created was hidden from sight, down below, literally in the working-class neighborhoods of Cuatro Caminos and Carabanchel, and, figuratively, in the economic order of things. Madrid’s urban planning between 1890 and 1936 was focused almost exclusively on the construction of spaces where institutions of power and a new leisure industry would be housed—iconic spaces whose existence was intended to prove that Madrid was just as modern as other major urban centers. (12–13)

As is evidenced here, Larson is persistently intent on interrogating the relationship between culture and the “ideological framework from which it arises” (13) into her study; and reciprocally (i.e., dialectically), the connection between the production of urban spaces and their representations (13). Larson’s straightforward but thorough introductory material (chapters 1 and 2 both explore the notion of modern Madrid) is a welcome exposition, and the subsection titled “What is Spanish Modernity?” (13–23) in particular serves as an important corrective to the longstanding (and inadequate) paradigm of “Spanish exceptionality,” as of late denounced, for example, in volumes edited by Eugenia Afinoguénova and Jaume Martí-Olivella (Spain is Still Different [2008]) and even by Larson herself (with Eva Woods) (Visualizing Spanish Modernity [2005]). Larson’s summaries of the relevant work of Henri Lefebvre (23–25) and David Harvey (25–26)

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are succinct, and should prove to be of great use to those who would seek to “bridge the gap between the Humanities and the Social Sciences” (23). Although she folds in references to Benjamin, Simmel, and other theorists of the modern city throughout, no reading of her work can be complete that does not make use of what Harvey terms “The Urbanization of Consciousness” (26–28). Her vision of modernity is clear, as is her commitment to a Cultural Studies method. Ultimately, her work is a splendidly readable “experiment in what Madrid’s modern experience looks like when seen through the lens of a materialist cultural geography” (23). Ramos’s Construyendo la modernidad is written from an interdisciplinary perspective that—although its method may be perhaps more familiar to Hispanist critics—is not, for that reason, any less rigorous or significant. Although Ramos gives a nod to Lefebvre and Harvey at the beginning of his work, he gives priority to “la [aproximación] post-estructuralista, semiológica [a la ciudad]” (19), and this is the real strength of his work. Building on his previous book (Ciudades en mente [2002]), here, his engagement of architecture is primary, as he explores contentious debates over aesthetic concepts and ideals such as purity, ornamentality, feeling, form/function, color, space, and many more (27). Simply put, the work’s reach is extensive. Throughout, he draws from journals such as Arquitectura (begun in 1918, the start of his chronology) and A. C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea (1931–37), as well as writings by Le Corbusier and his colleague and collaborator Amédée Ozenfant, other architects and architectural critics (e.g., Rem Koolhas, Sigfried Gideon), and more. His text effectively frames architecture as a necessarily international engagement with the trends and ruptures related to the production of visual and also narrative art—from whence derives the work’s challenge and its potential. The challenge stems from the book’s encyclopedic character: its extensive entanglement with Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Rationalism, Minimalism, Functionalism, Modernismo, Noucentisme, art-deco, Creationism, and Expressionism; with architectural thought springing from England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Russia, the United States; with literary figures ranging from Camus, Joyce, Pound, Mallarmé, and Valéry to Aub, Azorín, Bergamín, Galdós, Góngora, Lope, Lorca, Jarnés, Salinas, and Unamuno (Borges); and even with the films of Almodóvar. This very encyclopedism is, of course, also its potential. As an introductory epigraph quoting Le Corbusier puts it so well, “[t]odo es arquitectura” (15), and if everything is architecture, then clearly nothing is off limits. Architecture is not a world unto itself, as Ramos makes clear. He, of course, delivers a number of careful and thorough discussions of the field’s history and figures (e.g., chapter 3 explores the fact that “[l]a arquitectura moderna llega tarde a España” [83] and that this late arrival subsequently leads to a polarity between two architectural tendencies, “línea vanguardista y línea moderna” [85]). And yet, he nonetheless elucidates an organic and deeply rooted relationship between architecture and the other arts. Ramos’s look at José Moreno Villa in chapter 4—who lived for twenty years at Madrid’s famed Residencia de Estudiantes (where he met such figures as Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí)—underscores that his creative work also included “la poesía, la pintura, la crítica de arte, el ensayo, el periodismo, la historia y el archivismo” (98), and his discussion of architect Fernando García Mercadal in chapter 7 portrays its subject as a similarly pioneering figure who “traspasó fronteras y trascendió disciplinas” (147). Architecture proves to be just as important as other arts in that: “Las calles y los edificios interesan no por lo que son, sino por lo que revelan de quienes los imaginaron y concibieron” (167). The modern city is invoked in Construyendo la modernidad specifically as the industrialized site of cosmopolitan encounters and not only technological but also artistic innovations. Change and progress seem to circulate easily in urban environments, he suggests—as evidenced in cultural enclaves (i.e., “los museos, el cinematógrafo, el teatro, el cabaret, el circo . . . , las universidades, las instituciones culturales y los cafés”)—testifying to the formation of a “conciencia moderna” (55). Ramos writes:

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Hispania 95 June 2012 La metrópolis es el ámbito indiscutible de la vanguardia, y el destino del personaje literario moderno está ligado a los condicionantes impuestos por su ubicación física y mental en el entorno urbano. La formación y el desarrollo de la conciencia artística moderna coincidieron con la expansión de las grandes ciudades, que fueron a su vez una consecuencia directa de la industrialización, de los aumentos demográficos del siglo XIX y de invenciones que, como la electricidad, el teléfono y el automóvil, estaban destinadas a cambiar las relaciones espaciales y temporales en las sociedades modernas. Más que coincidencia de modernidad y ciudad, se trata de una mutua y simultánea articulación. (55)

While he would seem to agree with Larson that the city’s role in literature is far from neutral (65), and while he is undoubtedly sympathetic to a view of the city as “sinécdoque del sistema capitalista y de la modernización” (56; see also 169), the real strength of the work lies in his intense and sustained interrogation of the interdisciplinary links between architecture and aesthetics, more broadly considered. Ultimately, Ramos proves to be just as comfortable with architectural history and theory as he is with more traditionally “literary/cultural” matters. It will seem to the general reader that both texts are almost eerily complementary. They are both equally aware of and conversant with Madrid’s early twentieth-century cultural context: both books mention, for example, Bauhaus, Buñuel, La Gaceta Literaria, Gómez de la Serna, Le Corbusier, Ortega y Gasset, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and the zarzuela, and each even discusses José Díaz Fernández’s work La Venus mecánica. Larson and Ramos each reference an almost identical score of locations in Madrid’s built environment that will be familiar to Madrilenians and urban scholars alike—Arturo Soria’s intriguing Ciudad Lineal, the Cuatro Caminos district, the Calle Alcalá, the Edificio Capitol, the Paseo de la Castellana, the Plaza de España, the Plaza de Cibeles, and, of course, the famed Puerta del Sol—and each nonetheless reserves a special place for the Gran Vía. It is this street, after all—perhaps the heart of Madrid’s urban core—that most speaks to what one might call (borrowing a phrase that Joan Ramon Resina has recently used to describe Barcelona) Madrid’s own “vocation of modernity.” Ramos appropriately devotes the final section of his book (167–97) to what his introduction frames as “una geografía cultural de la avenida” (18), while Larson returns to the Gran Vía again and again over an equal number of pages throughout her text (some 30+ pages, in fact). Despite what seems to be, on the surface, a shared subject matter, each text succeeds in outlining a slightly different vision of what it means for Hispanism to grapple with the urban built environment. Whether one’s vision of modernity is capitalist, cosmopolitan, or both at once (on this subject Lefebvre has much to say, indeed), there is no question that both Larson and Ramos make the case for a more broadly defined notion of cultural production. This notion emphasizes that cultural products of all types necessarily acquire their meaning when properly contextualized as part of the urban experience. In conclusion, these two books provide a nuanced set of answers to questions of great disciplinary significance, articulating a recipe of sorts for how to fold literature into a newly reconfigured notion of literary and cultural studies. In this reinvigorated Hispanism, literature— although it may no longer be exceptional—nonetheless remains a significant and even privileged site for cultural analysis. Both Larson and Ramos successfully argue that literature needs be understood as one important piece of broader processes of cultural production. Both venture outside of their original discipline—Ramos toward a reconfigured, interdisciplinary Hispanism that places architecture on equal footing with literature (grounding them both in the urban context), and Larson toward what I would call an Urban Cultural Studies proper. In the end, what is most important is to continue the conversation to which these two valuable works have contributed, each in their own way. That conversation is ultimately one that explores what it means for literary studies to grapple with the so-called spatial turn. Benjamin Fraser The College of Charleston, USA