The New Ruralism: An Epistemology of Transformed Space 9783865279972

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THE NEW RURALISM: An Epistemology of Transformed Space Joan Ramon Resina / William Viestenz (eds.)

THE NEW RURALISM: An Epistemology of Transformed Space

Joan Ramon Resina and William Viestenz (eds.)

Iberoamericana • Vervuert • 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The new ruralism : an epistemology of transformed space / Joan Ramon Resina, William Viestenz (eds.). p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-8484896562 (iberoamericana editorial vervuert : alk. paper) -ISBN 978-3-86527-708-4 (vervuert : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-936353-10-1 (iberoamericana vervuert publishing corp : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-3-86527-997-2 (ebook) 1. Country life in literature. 2. Rural conditions in literature. 3. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Rural-urban migration in literature. I. Resina, Joan Ramon. II. Viestenz, William. PN56.C686N49 2012 809’.93321734--dc23 2012023944

Reservados todos los derechos © Iberoamericana, 2012 Amor de Dios, 1 — E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2012 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 — D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 978-84-8489-656-2 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-86527-708-4 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-1-936353-10-1 (Iberoam. Publishing Co.) e-ISBN 978-3-86527-997-2 Depósito Legal: Cover design: Carlos del Castillo Printed in Spain The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706

Contents Introduction: The Modern Rural Joan Ramon Resina ...................................................................................

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1. Neo-ruralism in the European Context. Origins and Evolution Joan Nogué .................................................................................................... 27 2. A Semi-Peircean Essay on «New Ruralism» by Means of Nature Pere Salabert ................................................................................................ 41 3. Can Suburbia Think? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

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4. Sertão, City, Saudade Marília Librandi Rocha

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5. The Come Back of the Province. Giovannino Guareschi’s petits récits As Postwar terza via. Joan Ramon Resina ................................................................................... 77 6. The Priorat and the Landscaping of Catalan Terroir Robert Davidson ........................................................................................ 93 7. Rural, Conceptual: The Non-Urban as a Significant Practice in Contemporary Catalan Culture Margalida Pons .......................................................................................... 109 8. Leaving the City on Foot: Four Observations on Walking, Thinking and Writing in Contemporary Catalan Culture Xavier Pla ..................................................................................................... 125

9. De mots a terra: Linguistic Ruin in Francesc Serés’s L’arbre sense tronc William Viestenz ....................................................................................... 139 10. A Catalan Peasant: Dalí’s Renewal of Surrealism Enric Bou ...................................................................................................... 157 11. Geology and Literature Francesc Serés .............................................................................................. 173 12. That Perejaume

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Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 195 ...................................................................................................

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Conceptual index Name index

About the Contributors

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The Modern Rural Joan Ramon Resina

There is no way of speaking about the urban without automatically conjuring its opposite, the rural. It can be said that the rural is the urban unconscious, that which the urban rejects, the great outdoors. There is nothing strange about this. The urban is merely a fold in nature, a state of exceptionality that began historically with physical demarcations (walls, gates, ditches, shrines) intended for protection and eventually becoming the seat of certain privileges and immunities (a more advanced form of protection). Binary concepts such as the urban and the rural perform as alternatives but also as complements. In his classic The Country and the City, Raymond Williams observed the tendency to reduce the historical manifestations of this opposition to abstract symbols and to give them a psychological or metaphysical status. Much 19th- and early 20th-century literature set up images intended to convey suprahistorical values that were, in effect, rooted in the history of social organization and management of the territory. Renewed interest in non-urban spaces, from border studies to concern with bioregions and the study of landscapes is in all probability a phase in the long history of this dialectical pair. Williams believed that the persistence of certain ideas and forms through periods of change revealed the existence of some permanent need, one that is, however, created by historical processes (89). The new ruralism is not a new modality of nostalgia for a lost paradise, but a turn in the history of this dialectical pair

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brought about by large-scale processes that represent an acute phase of the social and economic phenomena underlying Williams’s observations. As it is approached in this book, the new ruralism is not synonymous with the late nineteen sixties movement of “return to nature” known in Catalonia as “neoruralisme”, or with the slightly later emergence of rural cinema in France, precisely at the time when peasants were suffering the slow and painful attrition of their traditional way of life. It is at this point, Christian Bosséno observes, that “neoruralism begins to embellish the scene. Literature, cinema, commercialism in all forms take hold of the last peasants of yore, of their houses, their customs, their memories, their family pictures, to make money – a lot of money – but also to bear witness” (16). This sociological form of neoruralism arose in order to sing a paean to a dying way of life – in effect to a culture – transforming its agony into a repertoire of images that banked on the exotic moment. In 1970s Catalonia the back to the land movement – neoromantic in character – was a naïve attempt on the part of city youth to graft itself onto the old peasant stock. These phenomena, quixotic or commercial, were only a part of the ampler phenomenon this book seeks to understand, one that can be described, perhaps optimistically, as the return of a social consciousness of the dignity and importance of the non-urban. The epistemological privileging of the city since the19th century correlates with the clustering of industry in towns, which exacerbated the urban concentration of wealth and thus of markets, labor, administration, and education, conditions that necessarily implied a periphery of dependent territory that supplied the raw elements, both material and human. Later, postindustrial cities relied on obsolete concepts of modernization to retain, and whenever possible, intensify the capitalization of resources in urban centers. Deprived of their traditional economic engine, cities now found themselves in a situation similar to that of the agricultural community subjected to extreme capitalization. The proletarian masses of the earlier 20th century were now as disposable and unnecessary as the masses of peasants and journeymen had become when agriculture was mechanized and ceased to be a labor-intensive way of life. But if the surplus of the rural population could be displaced to the cities and employed in factories, urban masses trapped in mandatory leisure could not be shipped back to the country. Capitalism is unable to reverse the processes that it sets in motion. It understands economic growth only in the form of reckless exploitation of non-renewable resources, and it is only slowly dawning on observers that the country and its basic form of habitation, the rural com-

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munity as the historically most enduring resource of capitalist “development”, is reaching the point of exhaustion. Because the misuse of this fundamental precondition of urban life has been experienced predominantly as cultural struggle (one with a predictable outcome), its devastating consequences have remained hidden for a long time. Who could resist modernity and oppose, in the name of traditional forms of community, the direction of history that was blessed with the conveniences of progress? In the late seventies, as the industrial organization of society began to disappear from the West, cities were re-signified as centers of consumption. Culture, long an urban privilege, was commodified so as to take up the economic slack caused by delocalized industrial activity. The myth of the city as creative center presupposed a perennially lagging village, the provincial backwater of so much 19th-century literature. This myth neglected the economic truth that peasant frugality – a condition of economic survival – made education a dispensable luxury from which only the landowner and, to some extent, the merchant and professional class (the doctor, pharmacist, veterinarian, notary public, schoolteacher, priest) benefited. In the second half of the twentieth century, the near simultaneous disappearance of the peasantry and the urban proletariat brought the traditional relation of rural society to the urban community to a crisis. Yet precisely at this time of dissolution of the inherited social forms, an unparalleled concentration of art and conference centers, universities and research facilities, libraries and archives, museums, galleries, theaters, multi-cinemas, and concert halls, the communications industry and publishing houses, cultural tourism, festivals, and a constant “production” of “events” supplied the livelihood of urbanites on an unprecedented scale. If until the mid twentieth century the world was divided between industrialized and agricultural regions and countries, today culture is the strongest gauge for the relation of center to periphery. Current levels of capital concentration in the production of symbolic commodities have pushed the dichotomy of developed and undeveloped countries to a new limit represented by a hierarchy of urban centers of symbolic production. So-called world cities now appear detached from their countries, as denationalized nodes in a network of global cities disengaged from traditional notions of territory. With regard to this nodal system the rest of the world falls into a subsidiary role comparable to that of the 19th-century province in relation to the capital. Older centers of regional and even national importance fall into the vast provincial expanse of the new global cartographies, downgraded on the scale of informational significance until

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they become virtually invisible. World culture expands by erasing former national cultures just as, at an earlier historical stage, national cultures spread by expunging regional cultures. New ruralism refers to this vast eco-political territory rather than to romantic agrarian notions. And the question it raises is, formally, the same that Max Weber raised a century ago when he identified the social problem specific to the countryside in the following terms: “Whether and how the rural community or society, which no longer exists, can arise again so as to be strong and enduring” (363). Weber’s formulation of the problem did not entail nostalgia for a bygone social form; it stemmed from an insightful reflection on the unequal results of the development of capitalism in specific societies under different conditions of land tenure, geographic accident, and political institutions. He understood that in Europe – in what he called “the old civilized countries” – the flare of capitalist competition fed a counter-current of conservative agrarianism. The backlash was triggered not by sentimental clinging to old life forms but by the use of the land as capital investment. By pushing up the price of land and the capital required for agricultural business, capitalism caused an increase in the number of renters of land, i.e., of idle landowners in contrast to traditional peasants, and it was these contrasting effects of capitalization of the land that according to Weber created the impression of a separate “rural society” (366-67). This “rural society” was based on cultural premises that were the opposite of traditional rural life. If the old agrarian order aimed to sustain the greatest possible number of people on a piece of land, capitalism seeks to produce as many crops as possible for the market with the smallest deployment of human labor, thus transforming self-sustaining economies into market economies. From this contrast ensued a cultural conflict of world-historical proportions, which Weber observed in its early formative stages: “The thousands of years of the past struggle against the invasion of the capitalistic spirit” (367). Under the conditions set by triumphant capitalism, the question before us remains largely the same as Weber’s: whether something like a rural society, or more precisely something that inherits modes of experience from a no-longer existing rural community can emerge from the wreckage of urban, i.e., capitalistic exploitation of the land. The answer, to the extent that we grope toward one, needs to take into account the cultural forms under which deep transformations of man’s relation to the territory take place, and not only or even primarily the economic and infrastructural modifications of land use, which are often contingent on ingrained

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sociocultural patterns of behavior. Weber’s understanding of the culturally differentiated responses to capitalistic development in the American South and in the old countries of Europe and within the latter still holds for any theory of neorural social formations. Today, over a century after Weber’s essay on the sociology of rural life, the country’s subjection to extreme conditions of profitability is manifest. What is meant by this is not only the industrialization of farming and the land’s subsequent inability to support former demographic densities, but also the harnessing of the country’s symbolic resources and the proliferation of a rural urbanism that upsets the traditional relation between the two concepts without surmounting their opposition. Williams’ injunction “to ask not only what is happening, in a period, to ideas of the country and the city, but also with what other ideas, in a more general structure, such ideas are associated” (290), retains all its relevance, not least because the rural, as Michel Duvigneau remarked, is an embarrassing concept that sociology does not like to deal with (7) – perhaps because sociology developed alongside city studies. But from this refusal comes a severe misrepresentation of ruralism as mystique or ideology; thus the onus is on those who refuse the refusal to throw some light on the question whether forms of experience inherited from rural life are still possible in our time. One idea the concept of the country is associated with is that of the landscape. So tight is their association that landscape today seems inherent to any notion of the rural. And yet the landscape is only as recent as the emergence of reflexivity as preeminent cultural factor. At the beginning of our era the rus inspired a good number of Roman writers but these were not interested in distilling aesthetic values from the land but pragmatically interested in the arts of husbandry. They catered to their readership, and agriculture was the backbone of the Roman republic. Cato’s De Re Rustica and Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum Libri, Virgil’s Georgics, and the elder Pliny’s Natural History are concerned with the preparation and plowing of the land, with the seed, irrigation, the seasons and pests; in short with the conditions of a successful yield and, indirectly, of a healthy state. The landscape arises much later as a consumable object in its own right – an object to be consumed visually, hence its pictorial importance. But with the thoroughgoing capitalization of the land, the landscape ends up losing its contemplative value and is now intertwined in promotional schemes that place the traditional exploitation of the rural on an altogether different footing. If the classic form of value extraction was the centripetal removal of farm and forestry products and of labor force to the cities, today econom-

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ic growth is elicited through a massive projection of city folks to the countryside for on-site consumption of “genuine” local products, the detoxification of sensory experience, and the creation of surplus value through parceling of the land for residential development and holiday colonies. This dynamic is driving the proliferation of communities of weekenders and retirees in villages throughout Provence, Roussillon and Empordà, with intensive exploitation of the landscape for the benefit of people who, not forming part of a rural community, only meet the traditional residents in the guise of service providers. Furthermore, unbridled transference to the country of infrastructure required by the great conurbations has led to a record increase in the consumption of land in the space of few years, and this development, as Joan Nogué observes, “has produced in a very short time an intense territorial fragmentation and landscape defacement that has questioned in depth the identity of many places” (276). There is nothing primordial or eternal about the identity of place, and Nogué does not bemoan change in itself. Identity has to do not so much with a static reality as with change that can be recognized and participated in by the human communities that live with and act on the features of place. Identity of place refers to a tempo and scale of transformation that goes hand in hand with the generational relay in a human community and can be absorbed through ordinary processes of social and personal adaptation. But to destroy a landscape, says Nogué, is quite different from transforming it. It is above all an ethical matter (279). Alain Roger observes that the land is the zero degree of landscape (68). The landscape, according to him, is the result of “artification”, that is, an aesthetic mediation of the primary reality of the land. One is reminded of the flexibility with which Josep Pla deploys the term “país”, providing it with a pliable semantic range that allows him to articulate the immediacy of his experience in different contexts. “País” refers to a meaningful unit of social and territorial experience based on empirical – rather than ontological, not to say political – criteria. Roger believes that the appearance of the landscape depended historically on the fulfillment of two conditions. First the laicization (that is, demystification) of natural elements that had functioned as signs in sacred space, and then their aesthetic unification in painting, that is, in a framed space or “window” opening to the outside. Both conditions, detachment from mythology and unification through a viewing subject brought about the invention of perspective, which subjected the natural elements to a distancing representing the selfreflexivity of the observer. Self-reflexivity entailed separation from a pre-

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vious relation to the land, the end of an intimacy that often conveyed the emotion of the holy. Such primordial experience, typical of the romantic sublime, predates the subject-object dichotomy. In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto cites a passage from Ruskin’s Modern Painters in which the art critic describes how in the landscape, independently of religious sentiment, he used to feel “the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit” (215). Romantic pantheism ran counter to the secularizing forces that were responsible for the appearance of the landscape as an aesthetic object. If the landscape is an extension of the garden and an appendix of the city that results from the taming and colonization of the country by urban life, as Camporesi believes (143), the romantics tried to reverse this relation by seeking an unmediated nature in which they could renew the tension between the protective effects of culture and the awe inspired by the natural forces. And yet the romantics remain among the greatest landscape devotees and originators. How is this paradox to be explained? Quite simply, through their emphasis on reflexivity. Their pantheism pointed away from the ancient world of theocentric symbols and to the sublime as subjective experience for which the external world is allegorical. Whether it be one of Caspar David Friedrich’s figures looking into an abyss from on high or William Wordsworth on Mont Blanc, the romantic landscape is the expression of self-awareness, where the “self ” is larger than the ego and the natural world a medium for the realization of the ego’s cosmic insignificance. Notwithstanding the premium placed on spontaneity, romantic landscape is nature that has been cultured through and through. “Culture” derives metaphorically from the cultivation of the land, a millennial technique for harnessing the earth’s fertility to the ends of human evolution. Civilization, that is, the possibility of organized society or civitas that emerged with agriculture, not only guaranteed the permanence of human settlements but also promoted their internal complexity. Once it slid into metaphor, however, “culture” became detached from the land and through dialectical inversion ended up denoting its contrary. Broken up in the binarism of country and city, culture came to represent an abstract, free-floating category associated with “trends”, “movements”, and people in transit: performers, artists, lecturers, exhibitors who correlate with the global flow of capitals and commodities. Under the word’s new semantic determination, the earth became material for the subject’s internalized imperative to change. But the subject cannot change without effectively transforming its external references. Hence, since the advent of idealism, the liquidation of the physical world proceeds alongside the de-

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struction of values slowly forged through the millennial relation of human communities to the features of the land. One does not have to partake of anything like “metaphysics against the city” (White: 21) to grant that value liquidation accelerates in cities and in the vast stretches of land sucked into the maelstrom of the urban process. Liquid life, Zygmunt Bauman’s term for today’s hyper individualism, refers to the instrumental appropriation of the world in the cause of self-reform (11). Such appropriation and the attendant extinction of all value except the instrumental explain why cities have ceased to incarnate the utopian ideals of a mankind bent on self-improvement. “Liquid life – writes Bauman – feeds on the self ’s dissatisfaction with itself ” (11). If permanent dissatisfaction is the engine of change, its obverse is the retrofeeding drive to consume. Unbridled consumption feeds on the frustration it is expected to quench; it enhances dissatisfaction and stimulates desire by confusing subject and object in the reification of achievement. Consumption and politics, the principal modes of urban action, underpin the city’s hegemony as the privileged stage of a humanity bent on selfreform. Much of this activity is driven by the insecurity that stems from the increased inability to accept the basic fact of existential uncertainty. There is logic to this condition, for the polis arose historically from insecurity, while political power, as we call the force concentrated in and through the city, stems from the skill to make people believe in the neutralization of uncertainty through regulatory processes and the advanced deployment of expertise in ever growing areas of life. Much socially legitimate thinking participates in the compulsive fabrication of certainty and its outer expression: the modern state and its visible correlative, the metropolis. If modernity has been the metropolis’s chief ideological propeller, backwardness and stagnation characterize the spaces colonized by the urban myth: the province, the region, the communal forms of life organized through memory and regulated by tradition. Memory involves a sense of identity, which can be defined as the certainty of presence at two separate moments of consciousness – whether it be the subject that is present to itself or the community that renews itself through intergenerational making present of its central values and wisdom. Modernity presupposes historical consciousness, a new factor in the organization of experience that emerged in the 14th century, at the same time as the process of urbanization began. To be modern was to refashion oneself by outdistancing one’s predecessors and constantly recreating the gap by recasting it as insurmountable difference. Interest in the past

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as past characterizes modern society; pre-modern collectivities were not keenly aware of the categorical disparities between them and their forerunners. There is a strong connection between that awareness and the selfreflexivity of the present; so strong in fact that the injunction to be modern translates into the exhortation to historicize. If the past is a foreign country (in L. P. Hartley’s phrase), then the community’s sense of continuity disappears and deracination sets in. Permanence is un-modern and thus tends to be associated with the rural, that is to say, with a sphere of predictability in which relations are governed by memory rather than by history. There is little doubt that the mid 20th century’s meaning of “rural” no longer denotes an objective reality. Over the last sixty years the rural has become inextricably intertwined with the city in many ways, ranging from the ubiquity of the media and Internet to the sprouting of urbanite colonies and second residence developments with their attending restaurants, shops of “typical” or “genuine” products, and services on mountain and at seaside alike. But if the rural has changed, buried under tons of concrete, there is no more ground for the reconstitution of a romantic approach to nature, and a new ruralism can only refer to a critical form of disenchantment, or better yet detachment, that challenges modernity’s epistemic superiority and culture’s alleged dependence on the city’s tempo and intensity of exchanges. Post-romantic precursors of the neorural turn are often assimilated to nostalgic reaction. Emerson’s exaltation of nature or Thoreau’s experiment in self-reliance were still too close to the New England ideal of simple, self-regulated communities of responsible individuals not to be considered part of an expansive democratic society. Even so their uneasiness at the growth of cities during a period in which the American urban population increased eleven-fold, spelling the death-knell of the ideal of a pastoral republic, made them belated targets for the champions of urban civilization at the peak of its success. Thus Morton and Lucia White blast Emerson (and a string of Emersonians that include some of the most distinguished American thinkers) for a holistic and organicist anti-urban metaphysics, fortunately overcome by the skill of the city planner who, nonetheless, should not entirely disregard the critical tradition (236-37). But by mid twentieth-century, Heidegger’s attachment to the province, Guareschi’s predilection for a small world vitally dependent on the Po river, or Pla’s identification with the Catalan peasantry, to name three writers who were deliberately anti-modern, were each and for different reasons

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identified with political reaction. In Heidegger’s case, involvement with National Socialism made his choice of “provincial” life suspect of essentialism and of feeding directly into the Nazi mythology of soil and blood. His existential bond with the Black Forest and his dependence on creative retirement to his hut at Todtnauberg could be seen as evidence of his adherence to dangerous and, in the event, murderous prejudice. In relation to Heidegger’s aloofness from trendy currents of thought, Adam Scharr asks poignantly: “Is hostility to the fashions of cultural debate the beginning of a dangerous totalitarianism? Where the transcendence of ‘nature’ is evoked, might it not allow an unhealthy detachment from human responsibility? Moreover, might not biological determinism and the rhetoric of blood and soil follow close behind?” (109). Although Scharr does not answer these questions, others have, affirmatively, and on the strength of this indictment have passed judgment on rural artistic preference and on intellectual partiality for the local and the rootedness of thought, i.e., for genuine radicalism. Again Scharr formulates the issue with clarity: “Heidegger’s biography brings the cloud of fascism lower over provincialism, asking forcefully whether it must always be invidious and authoritarian” (109). This statement touches on the methodology by which general ethical inferences are drawn from an individual’s biographical data. It raises the question of contingency, of whether an individual’s political choices must always be seen as full-fledged consequences of his intellectual preoccupations, and the latter as symptoms of an existential paradigm that is a-historical and ubiquitous, subject to abstract determination rather than to the concrete traditions of place. In other words, the question is whether a critique of modernity is inevitably authoritarian, and whether authoritarianism (relinquishing individual agency in face of a superior force) is fascist of necessity. If the correlation of provincial to authoritarian is accurate, there is still the possibility that fascism was Heidegger’s existential misinterpretation of intuitions that, while decidedly anti-modern, did not necessarily entail membership in National Socialism, or any other party for that matter. Without such membership, would Heidegger’s work ever have come under suspicion of Nazi allegiance? This question is avowedly rhetorical, for there is no historical alternative world in which Heidegger did not carry a Nazi party card. But the question refers us to a more fundamental and potentially answerable one: Is a person’s biography determined? More explicitly formulated: is there a logical progression linking Heidegger’s birth in conservative Catholic Meßkirch, his early contributions to Catholic publications, his existential philosophy,

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and the propaganda speeches delivered during his rectorship at Freiburg university? If one answers affirmatively, then must go on to yet another question: could the internal coherence among Heidegger’s life stages and his philosophical production, a cohesiveness that some of his unforgiving critics have discerned in everything ever touched by his thought, be a post-facto illusion? If so, the critical question would turn out to be: without Heidegger’s biography, would the cloud of fascism ever have hung so low over provincialism? But what is, or was, provincialism? In his 1908 book The Philosophy of Loyalty, California-born philosopher Josiah Royce spoke of a “higher provincialism” in the sense of a recuperation of the spirit of community in the midst of centralizing modernity which, in his view, generated uniformity and a leveling of individual thought and creativity. Drawing on Hegel’s concept of alienation, Royce claimed that the heteronomous management of formerly self-governing social formations could only be restrained by recreating social units in which the individual’s action could be commensurate with his social consciousness. “On the other hand – he wrote – , the social life can be that of the great nation, which is so vast that the individuals concerned no longer recognize their social unity in ways which seem to them homelike” (White: 181). Royce was echoing reflections set in circulation in Spain by Valentí Almirall in 1886. Instead of provincialism, Almirall spoke of particularism, which he defined as the political organization into complex states made up of smaller self-governing states (149), a proposition that turns up in Royce when he associates the provincial social mind with the mind of small commonwealths such as the original thirteen American colonies (White 181). Almirall’s stress on the diversity (and not just the size) of the particular states, and Royce’s assertion that in the province alone the social mind is aware of itself as being at home, that is, as having surmounted alienation to a strange law, chime with Heidegger’s view of the spatial limitation of consciousness as a condition for the disclosure of phenomena that spring from Being. For Heidegger, the province was unequivocally related to the horizon and hence to the limits of the self. Such limits presuppose the far side of the horizon as the non-self, with the understanding that the other side of what is perceived as the objects of the world is indispensable to their appearing. For him the province, or more philosophically, the region, was inseparable from thinking. Consequently, rationalism’s assumption of a boundless reason hitched to a subject stood corrected by the sense of a gradually self-disclosing truth. In his 1944-45 “Conversation on a Country Path”,

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he described the horizon as “the side facing us of an openness which surrounds us” and then answers the question about this openness by saying: “It strikes me as something like a region, an enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests” (64-65). If medieval poets imagined enchanted space as a hortus conclusus, Heidegger conceives the region as an opening beyond representation that re-appropriates beings (“everything belonging there”) into their belonging, that is re-situates them into the ground of their existence, which the region is. The image is one of dislocation through the modern subject’s conflation of thinking with representation, followed, through a more pliant (gelassen) form of thinking, by relocation to the region in which beings can rest in the law of their belonging. The theological undertones are unmistakable, and Heidegger’s peripatetic “discourse” in three voices resembles Dante’s exploration of the medieval cosmos through sojourns in regions before he discerns the law that produces motion out of the motionless (Paradiso, Canto XXXIII: 145). But with Heidegger we remain in secular space, even though his stress on surrendering willful thinking and the tortuous description of receptive thinking infuriates the partisans of a philosophy of consciousness in which homo rationalis is in command. Heidegger is responsible for a Copernican reverse in the philosophy of consciousness, through which the subject is displaced from his central position and made to progress in asymptotic fashion toward the self-disclosure of Being. For his “provincial” thinking, the region does all the work, surpassing idealism’s a priori conditions of experience through a temporality that is not that of the transcendental subject. “The region gathers, just as if nothing were happening, each to each and each to all into an abiding, while resting in itself. Regioning is a gathering and re-sheltering for an expanded resting into an abiding” (66). The reformulation of the substantive “region” into the verbal “regioning” introduces a typically Heideggerian paraphrase for an idea that lacks conventional expression: “that-which-regions” (66). “That-which-regions” is neither an entity nor a representable object, but the active condition of the gathering into pre-objectual status of that which appears to us dispersed and fragmented as objects. If we now retreat from Heidegger’s cryptic thinking to a still philosophical but more intuitive description of the region, we obtain the following: Regions hold their constituent places together in an intricate dovetailing of space and time. They act to individuate space and time, endowing them

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with a local habitation and a name: the name of a region in fact often reflects its spatiotemporal individuation, and its local habitation is based on the places that populate it and create a basis for shared experience. (Casey: 75)

In what is perhaps inadvertently a post-Heideggerian approach to the region, Edward Casey retains the dynamic sense of the term whereby “regions” actively gather what appears within their horizon (“their constituent places”). Regions, furthermore, change the transcendental nature of space and time by “individuating” them not in the perception of the epistemological subject but in the external world, so to speak. Yet, while individuation of space inheres in the normative understanding of “region”, it is less clear what is meant by the region’s individuation of time. Apparently, spatiotemporal individuation manifests itself in the possibility of “shared experience”, and shared experience on the temporal axis refers us to history, which is the name we give to the contents of experience insofar as they reveal the unfolding of human nature. This is how Heidegger formulates the intrinsic relation between “regioning” and history: “The historical rests in that-which-regions, and in what occurs as that-whichregions. It rests in what, coming to pass in man, regions him into his nature” (79). While for Heidegger the history in question “does not consist in the happenings and deeds of the world. ... Nor in the cultural achievements of man” (79), but in the self-disclosure of Being, for Casey the individuation of space and time is inseparable from the foundation of a local habitation (what Heidegger subsumes under the notion of “dwelling”) and from the act of naming. Naming, as a poetic act, is not a determining action; it does not define or convey the thing named. “The name of a region”, says Casey, “often reflects its spatiotemporal individuation”, where the word “reflects” does not stand for “represents” or “encapsulates” and even less for “metaphorizes”, but returns a meaning (like light bouncing off a polished surface) that is shot through with the temporality of its unfolding. “Because a word does not and never can re-present anything; but signifies something, that is, shows something as abiding into the range of its expressibility” (Heidegger: 69). With the poet Verdaguer, says Perejaume, the Pyrenees became a thread of ink (117). Perejaume himself undertook to invert the effect by inscribing the name Verdaguer in the landscape of his birthplace, Folgueroles, using its natural accidents as writing materials. And just as Verdaguer’s epic poem Canigó does not re-present the Pyrenees but individualizes the region, compressing it into a stream of ink from which history emerges

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only to come to rest in a sort of natural eternity, so does the poet’s name, traced by the artist in the flow of a country stream, restore to nature a meaning which, by virtue of its regioning, constitutes the full range of the sign’s expressive possibilities. For the word “Verdaguer” no longer names a poet born in the region; rather, what it names is the region itself, or, more precisely, naming is the poet’s or artist’s gesture by which something that was previously nameless is regioned. Perejaume’s landart in the form of inscription endows the name with the paradoxical instability of a constantly changing signifier, since the water that traces the calligraphy of the poet’s name is, like Heraclitus’s river, always different from itself. By becoming a thread of water through that-which-regions, Verdaguer achieves nobility in Heidegger’s sense: Noble is “what abides in the origins of its nature” (82). “Verdaguer” thus names the region and comes to rest in its abiding, while individuating the Heraclitean temporality of a nature that produces itself in and through its regioning. It would be a mistake to suspect essentialism in artistic or simply human responsiveness to the rural world, a charge that has been leveled against Heidegger’s provincialism. Yet his mythologizing of the presencing of things in the vicinity of a long-settled community and his late introduction of the fourfold as the composite nature of dwelling (saving the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the divinities, and preparing for one’s own death) (Heidegger 1971: 150-151) are not a regression to pantheism or the cult of local idols. Heidegger’s reflection on the intrinsic dependence of humans on the most primary of matrices is neither totalitarian nor mystical; it is radically phenomenological, positing another side (the open side) to that which appears to consciousness. If the reflection ended up acquiring cosmological features, this has less to do with Heidegger’s alleged descent into irrationality than with the austere, almost ascetic quality of his thinking. Absent from this thinking is the idea of the landscape emotionally offsetting the discord between humans and nature, although possibly there is a remnant of the romantic idea of the landscape (through the notion of the horizon) as the determined form of the undetermined. Joachim Ritter, commenting on Schiller’s conception of the landscape as the aesthetic content of freedom, writes: “Freedom is existence (Dasein) above subdued nature. Hence nature as landscape can only exist under the condition of freedom on the basis of modern society” (162). If the landscape has become such an unquestionable value, it is precisely because it conjures up a space of self-determination that is everywhere denied by modern society. In this light, the experience of the landscape would be

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the aesthetic compensation for the tension between nature and spirit, a tension that resolves itself into a beautiful for-itself nature and a nature given over to human exploitation and devastation (Zimmer: 30). There is no such sentimental alibi in Heidegger. On the contrary, he strives to rescue nature from the (for him, destructive and self-destructive) metaphysics of representation. Aestheticization of the landscape is also absent from another precursor of the new ruralism, Josep Pla. To be sure, he describes fields, mountains, forests and shores, but does so in a way that revokes the split between a nature objectified as aesthetic object and as raw material. Acutely conscious of the economic subjection of the country by the city, Pla always observes the landscape in relation to its historical utilization and modification by human settlement. He often expresses his predilection for landscapes organized with a view to profitability and, at the antipodes of the romantic sublime, for landscapes that are subdued with a view to human comfort. Where Heidegger perceives divinities, Pla observes concrete economic agents; in the earth he sees property; in the sky, the color of the atmosphere and the direction, strength and humidity of the winds; and instead of mortals (for Heidegger the only beings who die), universal dissolution. But Pla too was skeptical of the alleged advantage of the city for a true grasp of the human condition. His supple use of the term país, somewhat similar to the German Heimat, has the quality of a niche, as in ecology, but also of a horizon, in Heidegger’s sense of the visible and visible-making side of that-which-regions. País, for Pla, is also the sounding box of a language, the space in which its meanings are organized through the concrete experiences of humans molded by a millennial struggle with the features of the land, the sea, and the climate. With Pla it is not a question of authenticity but of honesty and its failure, self-delusion. Hence the impression of cynicism that he projects, hardly underplayed by his impersonating the peasant as an ontological and not just sociological type. In Pla’s world people are always preying and being preyed upon; it is the law of life. But in this form of living that is reduced to primary, almost biological impulses, there is, as if by magic, an interval of radiant presence, the gift, or, in his own homely language, the tip that existence sometimes grants for no discernible reason. Like Heidegger, Pla inaugurated a new rural sensibility at the height of the urban myth. He challenged the doxa of modernity when it was unconditionally hegemonic and miscreants were ridiculed and burned at the intellectual stake. Today the dichotomy between metropolitan and provincial exudes

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an odor of stagnant thinking. The city is no longer just a market for the country’s surplus production but has become the source of products and services consumed in the country, thus reversing the traditional relation of dependence, as agricultural production is now industrialized and relocated to areas with cheap labor, or, when this is not possible or profitable, low-wage labor is imported, upsetting the communitarian basis of country life. In Catalonia, between 1999 and 2007, 12,128 farms disappeared, a loss of 18% in less than a decade. In human terms, this figure represents four peasants quitting every day. They did so mostly for economic reasons, as cultivation of the land became non-profitable. Every time this happens, the intergenerational transmission of an ancient way of life is broken since it is mostly the young who leave the farm to seek other ways of making a living (Tort). At the same time, the population is growing and its distribution changing, so that centripetal migration is no longer the norm. Now people settle across the territory. Projections until 2021, when Catalonia’s demography is expected to reach eight million, suggest that growth will be higher outside Barcelona’s metropolitan area, with the city losing population (Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya). Given Catalonia’s similarity to other postindustrial societies, its pattern of territorial redeployment could suggest a wider trend. What emerges is a hybrid territory of suburbanized villages and mid-size towns that feature many of the city’s conveniences, whose residents are often linked to the Worldwide Web and participate in national and transnational debates through the Internet. Many of these “rural” sites are now cosmopolitan microspaces, with permanent or temporary residents of diverse origins and cultures, who move in either as migrants or as retirees, vacationers, or weekenders. Whether, in face of the new demographic reality, it is still legitimate to speak of provincial thinking and regional cultures is certainly moot, but the new ruralism does not aim to reverse the myth of modernity and re-mystify the country as the locus of genuine culture. It has no truck with the neoromanticism that reinvests nature with allegorical significance and conceives human communion with the natural sublime as an expression of man’s metaphysical destiny (Tomatis: 26 and passim). Myths die hard. The myth of the city’s effect on the development of rationality and higher forms of intelligence has transcended human culture and set up shop in the biological sciences. The 19th-century form of discrimination between urban and rural populations, as between different races, finds unexpected support from studies that assert that city

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birds have a bigger brain and higher capacity for innovation (Maklakov: 2). Brain size would be, according to such studies, the boundary between species inside and outside urban environments. Popular as well as academic culture has been instilling this notion for a long time, and evolutionary science shows itself indebted to this tradition when introducing into its hypotheses a value judgment whereby city conditions are the test of adaptive behavior and larger brains proof of species superiority. What if the findings merely reflected the prejudice that man-made, that is man-distorted environments, point the way to evolution’s allegedly blind force? What if the city proved to be an evolutionary dead end? Or if the great migrations into cities were to undergo a reversal, whereby, as has already occurred in many American cities, brainpower and wealth migrate to suburbs whose remoteness from the downtown is often measured by social success? A new urban exodus is silently taking place in Catalonia, this time without the ideological underpinnings of the 1960s and 70s neoruralism, whereby urban youth look in the mountains for the work they cannot find in the city and thus help to revitalize decaying villages (Altarriba). The new ruralism takes as its premise a Catalan politician’s ironic observation that there is intelligent life beyond the metropolitan area (Orteu 52), drawing from this long-forgotten truism the working hypothesis that from that intelligence new paradigms of thought might emerge. Paying heed to the crisis of modernity, which is also and everywhere an urban crisis, such thought would hopefully retool our conceptual apparatus to operate less aggressively toward the concrete aspects of life and in ways that are sensitive to the sensual cultures whose traces we recognize in works such as Pla’s. As Nogué puts it, “we have been capable of thinking the city but not the rest of the territory. We have intervened with considerable skill in the city, in compact urban space, but we have not been able to do the same on the territory that spreads beyond the imaginary walls of the traditional city” (282). The new ruralism takes up the challenge to think the territory, though not necessarily in the spirit of intervention as theorized by Nogué and others from the Observatori del Paisatge and similar institutions. Territorial planning and landscape management are perhaps inevitable consequences of the modernization that has led to the exhaustion of resources which, like the landscape, appeared to be inexhaustible because they were predicated on a subjectivity that seemed boundless. With the crisis of the subject it was inevitable that the landscape would undergo devaluation. Not for nothing its emergence was bound up with

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self-reflexivity and the opening of an inner space of freedom that compensated for the encroaching determinations that characterize modern society. Describing Petrarch’s legendary ascent of Mont Ventoux, Ritter glosses: Tired from clambering, Petrarch compares his physical mountaineering to a spiritual climb, turning away from the landscape and toward the soul, which alone he finds worthy of contemplation (143). Paradoxically, Augustinian reflexivity rules the moment when Petrarch reaches the summit and gains the coveted view for whose sake he had undertaken the climbing. Turning the gaze to his own subjectivity, Petrarch shuts out the view, producing an ideal representation of the ascent in the form of an allegorical pilgrimage of the soul. Preoccupation with the self to the exclusion of the non-self, blindness to the great opening beyond the subject’s horizon, were part of the metaphysics that Heidegger tried to surmount through his critique of representation. Although the landscape emerged and thus belonged to “the age of the world picture”, this does not cancel the fact that the conditions under which it is being destroyed do not appear to inaugurate a new form of thought that, by turning reflexivity inside out, retrieves something like Schiller’s idea of freedom. This retrieval, were it to come about, would not be located in the aesthetic experience of the land, which is otherwise hostage to modern urban society, but perhaps, quite simply, in the renewed ability to listen through the land to an ancestral knowledge that is vaster than that of a single individual, era, or nationality, though at the same time requiring each of these specifications in order to be experienced. The new form of thinking may be related to Heidegger’s notion of “releasement into that-which-regions” (74), but has also found a name in Perejaume’s concept of oïsme (“hearingness”), which is perhaps best described in the epigraph to his essay of that name: “Of how the lower strata of the air are also a geological stratum, although more fluctuating and changeable, where the air brings into play summits of voice ‘where snow can’t linger’” (45). Hearing, in this sense, is akin to Heidegger’s notion of waiting for releasement into the open of that-which-regions. It is also detecting a necessity of things that is spelled out in their names, entering a linguistic space in which words are not the product of communicational poverty but traces left by the natural features of the world in the flow of Being; glimpses, or even better, souvenirs of the “regioned” modality of the air. Pneuma or spirit touches human lips as the wind fingers heights where snow does not linger. A flatus vocis produces sounds, and the sounds are animated by intuitions that become conventions to which the experi-

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ence cannot hold for long. Humans try to appropriate the sounds with the vanity of deluded demiurges, only to realize that words that are hitched to the will deteriorate with the speed of our degrading landscapes. New ruralism is not about retiring to the country or rebuilding ruined landscapes, nor about conserving quaint forms of life. It is rather about asking if the forms of thinking that led to the hegemony of the dissociated modern subject – forms that have produced extraordinarily complex subjectivities but also a tremendous wasteland in which the subject risks self-consumption – are giving way to thinking that knows how to turn the world into full forms of presence, thinking that reflects on, rather than away from, the regioned specifications of space and time, and foregrounds them – this place, this hour – instead of burning them as dispensable fuel for the production of abstract, empty-formed, interchangeable thinking.

Neo-ruralism in the European Context. Origins and Evolution Joan Nogué

The term neo-ruralism has always been subject to different interpretations. This chapter focuses on one of these interpretations, which defines neo-ruralism as the back-to-the-land phenomenon that took place in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s, led by young urban people seeking an alternative way of life in rural areas. This is not exactly the meaning given to the term in this book, as explained by the editor in the introduction. There are, of course, contemporary migratory processes to the countryside that bear no relation to what we usually understand by the neo-rural phenomenon (Boyle, Halfacree, 1998). However, I believe that it is important to refer to this phenomenon for two reasons. Firstly, in most parts of Europe – and especially in France, England, Catalonia and other parts of Spain – the term “neo-ruralism” still holds its original acceptation, or connotation. Secondly, the phenomenon as such is not dead but is still very much alive, although with two major nuances. Neoruralism has become much wider and more diversified both from the geographical and sociological points of view; and the cultural, economic and social context in the early 21st century is radically different from that of forty or fifty years ago. The neo-rural phenomenon exists and everybody, even the media, continues to use the term in its original sense. However, the phenomenon has branched out so much, and the city-countryside re-

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lationship is so different from that of half a century ago, that one sometimes has the feeling that the concept may no longer apply to the complex, diverse reality of today’s world. This chapter begins with an overview of the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and then ponders whether the neo-rural aim was, or is, nothing other than a new territoriality, a new way of understanding the relationships between the individual and the environment. It continues with an attempt to discern what is left of the movement today, and ends with a few brief conclusions.

Back to the land from the s onward As we have already mentioned, neo-ruralism usually indicates the process of abandoning the city to settle in the country by a group of (mainly) young people seeking an alternative life project, which may extend to include a wide range of activities (Chevalier, 1981). The definitions provided by the first geographers and sociologists who became interested in the subject all point in the same direction. Garcia, for example, writes that “Neo-rurals are individuals who, independently of age or gender and of whether they live alone, with a partner or in a community, voluntarily decide to leave their social, professional and residential environment in order to take up, either exclusively or not, farming or artisan activities in rural areas” (1977: 103). Some authors (Barnley, Paillet 1978) sub-divide the new communities by primary professional activity, such as “neo-farmers” or “neo-artisans”, but the term neo-rural is undoubtedly the most frequently used. In Europe, the phenomenon began to take shape during the 1960s, particularly after May 1968 in France (Mendras 1979). Groups of young people who were tired of urban life, and in opposition to the social model emerging out of the new capitalism and the prevailing type of progress of the age, left the city in successive waves and went to live in houses and villages abandoned by small farmers and artisans only a few years previously. For the first time in many years, migration began to flow in the opposite direction. However, this “return” to the countryside was in no way comparable, in demographical or sociological terms, to the preceding exodus that had depopulated the rural areas. We should bear in mind that the rural population was rapidly abandoning the countryside in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. The pro-

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cess started in the outlying zones where it was harder, or impossible, to make the huge investments needed in order to convert traditional farms into modern capitalist ventures with a market-oriented production. High and medium-high mountain areas were the first to lose their population: thousands of villages in the Pyrenees and Pre-Pyrenees, the Massif Central, and the Alpine spurs of France and Italy became empty of inhabitants over a short period. The same was true of thousands of Catalan masia farmsteads (the cornerstone of rural settlement in Catalonia). Lack of space prevents deeper analysis of this question, but it is fundamental in order to understand the ease with which the neo-rurals found houses: there was an embarras de choix. The offer was so great that rural property owners were often willing to let out their houses and lands in return for maintenance to prevent them from falling into decay. Moreover, the newcomers could often purchase rural property at a ridiculously low price. Today, as we all know, the real estate situation in these areas is very different. The idea of a “return” to the land is both curious and symptomatic. In order to return to a place, one has to have left it previously, which is not necessarily the case of neo-rural settlers, who are mostly of urban origin. The term is used – even among the neo-rurals themselves – because it indicates a symbolic return to the “countryside” as value as opposed to the “city” as value. However, we should really speak in terms of “recourse” rather than “return”. Hervieu and Léger point out that “faced with recession, unemployment, pollution and the widespread bureaucratization of social life, utopian immigrants take recourse to the land, to nature, to a rural world which has been magnified by their imagination as a symbol of harmony, solidarity and community ...” (1979: 9). The neo-rural phenomenon, as defined above, appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in two specific geographical areas, i.e., the USA and what we then knew as Western Europe. There was a certain amount of ideology common to both, but the movement took on slightly different characteristics on either side of the Atlantic. In the USA, one of the main influences behind neo-ruralism was the counter-cultural movement, which comprised a wide range of cultural, artistic and political manifestations (Roszak 1970). This was a libertarian protest movement arising out the new cultural and political awareness, also called underground culture (especially in the USA), youth sub-culture, cultural revolution, and so on (Cánovas, 1985). Among the main manifestations of the movement were the hippy-inspired rural communes, which come directly under the subject of this chapter. A 1971 survey commissioned by The New York Times

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found some 2000 of these communes spread across the USA and Canada, mainly concentrated in California, the depopulated mountain areas of Vermont, the valleys of Virginia, and in the forests of Washington and British Columbia (Vollmar 1984). Thousands of young Americans became involved in an attempt to seek alternative ways of personal and social transformation through community life in the countryside. Many took their inspiration from the utopian migrations to which we will refer later on and, in particular, from anarchism. Vollmar visited many of these rural communes and described anarchism as being a very important factor: “In the majority of communes that I visited, I found books by Bookchin and even Kropotkin” (1984: 21). Protest against the American way of life, a rejection of an alienating, dehumanizing technology, a new environmental awareness, together with the social and generational make-up of the movement were among the factors that differentiated this return to the land from a similar movement in the previous century. At the beginning, the mere presence of hippies incited furious reactions from people living in their vicinity but, from 1967 onwards, society assimilated and commercialized them into a “hippy fashion”, and the protest movement went into a progressive decline (Cánovas 1985). However, the communes managed to survive the death of the counter-cultural movement and remained as the last bastion of alternative social and economic organization, or else morphed into new forms of work organization (Guthman 2004). The youth protest in Europe was slightly different to that of North America. The student revolutionary movement in the 1960s culminated in France with the famous May ’68 protests, the last great revolutionary uprising of the 19th century, according to Alain Touraine, or the start of the first revolution of the 20th century, according to Henri Lefèbvre. Graffiti slogans on the streets of Paris added a modern dimension to this revolutionary movement and, in some cases, might have contained the seed of the later neo-rural phenomenon. “Beneath the cobblestones, the beach”, for example, was a lyrical, metaphorical demand for a re-encounter with nature as an integral part of the struggle for freedom. The back-to-the-land movement in France – and all over Europe – began after May ’68. Over the space of a few years, about 100,000 people made their way into the countryside, seeking a more conducive atmosphere than that of the city for putting their alternative lifestyle ideas into practice. The French neo-rural groups were concentrated in the Midi (in particular the southern part of the Massif Central), the Eastern Pyrenees, the mountains of Provence and the foothills of the Alps, attracted by the

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Mediterranean or sub-Mediterranean climate, and the availability and accessible prices of land and houses in these marginal areas, as mentioned above. This first wave was composed of young urban middle-class students and professional people, most of whom organized themselves into communes of a radical, anarchist nature. Conflicts with the local population, together with their lack of training to make the farms produce even a minimum yield, explain why 95% of these communities had disappeared by 1973, just a few years later (Hervieu / Léger 1979). From 1974-1975 onwards, a new back-to-the-land wave started up in most European countries, very different in make-up and philosophy from the former (Vuarin 1982), and much more similar to today’s situation. In the case of France, the new neo-rurals did not only settle in the Midi but all over the country. These groups were less radical, less antisystem, and more influenced by the ideas of the environmentalist movement. The main aim was no longer to set up a Utopian community but rather to live in direct contact with nature, in small communities (usually couples) working in crafts or agriculture. They were no longer concerned with putting great Utopian theories into practice or of convincing people that the theories might work. The members of this second wave managed to consolidate the neo-rural phenomenon and, gradually, to increase the number of groups and persons fitting within this definition. Their aims may have been less ambitious, or they may have been more predisposed to endure life in the countryside, but this second wave of back-to-the-land migrants generalized the phenomenon and attracted the attention of sociologists, geographers and other scholars. In fact, they represented only a tiny percentage of the rural population (2% in the French departments of Lozère and Ariège, for example), but their qualitative importance was undeniable. Moreover, if we analyze the phenomenon on a smaller, more detailed scale, the demographic impact was sometimes surprising. We know that in the early 1980s, in the Cévennes, for example, almost half the population was neo-rural (Clout 1984). Nevertheless, authors such as Jegouzo (1977) claim greater significance for the phenomenon, as the return to the land under those conditions and with those characteristics was an anomaly within the dominant theory of capitalist economic development. The neo-rural movement made its appearance in Spain slightly later than in other European countries such as France (Nogué 1985 and 1988). The socio-political situation in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s did not encourage the advent and spread of the political and philosophical ideas behind neo-ruralism, although many of the new ideas from the counter-

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cultural movement and May 68 managed to seep across the Pyrenees. The two stages described above for France and the rest of Europe took place in Spain after a certain lapse of time. The first stage of the neo-rural movement, characterized by the political and ideological radicalization of commune experiences, occupied the 1976-1979 period, coinciding with the libertarian effervescence of those years. We need only recall the particularly intense summer of 1977 in Barcelona, with the huge C.N.T. (anarchist trade union) assembly, the International Libertarian Congress, etc. The libertarian magazine Ajoblanco was a symbol and standard-bearer of this first phase, during which every single issue mentioned the subject of the communes. The magazine’s “Communes” section published all sorts of reports and articles on the movement. At one stage, there was even a commune steering committee, although with scant results. The second stage of the neo-rural movement started in 1978-1979 and was symbolized by the magazine Integral, which took over from Ajoblanco. The headings in the “Contacts and Information” section of Integral perfectly reflected the new direction undertaken by the movement: “Agriculture and Natural Products”, “Friendship”, “Alternative Crafts and Technology”, “Maternity and Childhood”, “Medicine and Health”, “Work”, “Back to the Land” (illustrated by an idyllic rural landscape) and “Other Issues”. Integral did not run a “Communes” section like Ajoblanco. In both stages, there was much more evidence of neo-ruralism in Catalonia than in other regions in Spain. This may be because Catalonia had always maintained closer links with France and the rest of Europe, or because there was a solid tradition of social and cultural associations, even at the height of the Franco dictatorship. The fact is that Catalonia had a notoriously high concentration of neo-rural settlers, especially in comparison with the rest of Spain. Nevertheless, in New Catalonia (comprising Tarragona province and the southern part of Lleida and Barcelona provinces), there were fewer neo-rural settlements. The population in these areas is more concentrated, with fewer outlying farmsteads. The neo-rurals occasionally sought out (usually uninhabited) villages, but they usually preferred to carry out their life projects in freestanding farmhouses surrounded by fields and woods. In my opinion, however, the large concentration of neo-rurals in Old Catalonia (Girona province and the mountain areas of Lleida province), with its traditional masia farmhouses and uninhabited villages, was also due to another factor: the landscape. As perceived from the city, Nature is associated with green fields and abundant

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water (note that the environmentalist parties call themselves the greens). These two elements are present in Old Catalonia but are not a characteristic of New Catalonia.

In search of a new territoriality Neo-ruralism is a unique migratory movement with a major ideological content, the fruit of conscious decisions and choices by the people involved, which once again affects the rural world. As opposed to the exodus from the countryside forced by the logic of capitalism, this new movement partly takes place outside the logic of the system. It is a new phenomenon, the study of which requires a revision of the usual analytical categories. For example, we cannot automatically apply the concepts of labor, land and capital to this subject, because they depart from their usual meaning in a typical rural society. The new concept of labor is in itself a proposal of social change, an alternative to traditional political and social movements. The neo-rural aim is not to achieve increasingly higher productivity, but a more pleasant and human way of working. The aspiration is to control the whole production process, from beginning to end. Neorurals regard work as an autonomous, non-dependent activity. The capital needed for setting up initiatives is often scarce and seldom redeemed. The land, which new settlers can rarely afford to purchase, is usually off the beaten path and unproductive, even if worked. All these reasons may explain why some scholars have grouped this particular city-country migration together with utopian migrations (Martínez 1986a and 1986b). The idea may be somewhat audacious, but neoruralism certainly contains a utopian component linking back to a historical tradition. Utopian migratory movements, both political and religious, have always existed. The utopia of return was not born out of the American counter-cultural movement or the French May ’68: it simply adapted to the social, economic, political and cultural context of the 1960s and, by extension, of the latter part of the 20th century. In the religious sphere, for example, we should mention the centuries-old utopian migration of the Jewish people, always hoping to reach Jehovah’s Promised Land. The concepts of place and land have a special meaning for the Jewish people (Houston 1978), and a territorial dimension is inherent in Judaism (Davies 1983). We can find another example of this in the medieval Christian millenarians who sought to establish God’s Kingdom here on Earth.

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Contemporary back-to-the-land movements inspired by religious and/ or spiritual ideals also fit into this category of utopian migrations to the countryside. Examples include the Community of the Ark (founded by Lanza del Vasto in France), the Arc Iris community (Arenys de Munt, Barcelona), the Casamaría community inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical ideas (Herrerías, Santander) and the Ilícitis community (Eltx, Alacant). This minority sector within the neo-rural movement was possibly the most heavily imbued with ideology. Hervieu and Léger (1983) carried out an in-depth study of the subject in France. The authors agree that the sector represents a condensation or crystallization of certain aspirations present in a society immersed in a major economic and environmental crisis. The above-mentioned communities are indeed utopian, but based on territorial stability, authority and rules. Salomon (1979) and Séguy (1971) also contributed work along the same lines. In the more political field, there have been many utopian returns throughout history. We particularly wish to draw attention, however, to the rich utopianism of the 18th and 19th centuries. In contrast to former utopian philosophers such as Plato and Thomas More, 18th-century thinkers began to conceive of utopia as something achievable, ideally not in the city but in the countryside, in nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) extolled the return to the natural state of the human being, in Emile, ou De l’éducation (1762), written at a time when living conditions in major cities were beginning to deteriorate, as denounced some years later by Engels and Reclus, among others. However, it was not until the end of the 18th century that some of these projects would eventually materialize. Utopian socialists such as Robert Owen (1771-1859), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) were the first to put into practice a series of community life experiments in rural areas. North America offered more favorable objective conditions than Europe for such experiments. The United States was a young country, boasting a Constitution that began with a Declaration of the Rights of Man, as well as social and political structures that were free of the oppressive influence of the European Ancien Régime. Moreover, America was virgin territory, offering the possibility of acquiring huge tracts of land. This was the land of freedom, the new “Promised Land” (Moos, Brownstein 1977). However, most of these communes fell through very shortly after they were set up. The experiments exercised considerable influence on education and urbanism, but the communes themselves never really took

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root. Robert Owen’s New Harmony commune lasted for two years, as did Charles Fourier’s Brook Farm. The Icarian community founded by adepts of Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1839) also lasted for two years (1848– 1850). The most enduring community was one in Monmouth County, also founded by Fourier, which lasted for twelve years. Later attempts followed from anarchist communities. The best known of these was probably La Cecilia, founded at an altitude of 900 meters on 278 hectares of land in Paraná (Brazil) by Italian botanist and agronomist Giovanni Rossi. Apart from probable connections with utopian migrations, the neorural phenomenon definitely represents more than a simple return to the land. In fact, neo-ruralism expresses a change of territoriality, i.e., a shift in existing relationships between individuals and their bio-social environment (Mercier / Simona 1983) or, if you prefer, new socio-spatial practices in the rural domain (Halfacree 2006). Neo-ruralism reacts against today’s model of society, economy and way of life. This type of reaction logically implies a different concept and assessment of the prevailing ideas. It does not react merely to an abstract model of society but to the predominating concept of nature, natural resources, landscape and geographical space. From the perspective of humanistic geography, in experiential terms, the neo-rural idea is to move from a space to a place (Tuan 1977), to settle in a non-standard place. These geographical terms and concepts take on special meaning in the anthropocentric, holistic and hermeneutic perspective of humanistic geography. The new approach contributes an existential and phenomenological interpretation of the fundamental concepts of space and place, as basic components of our individual experience of the world. Place refers to a portion of space, a limited area with a distinctive internal structure and attributed with a meaning that evokes an affectionate response (Tuan 1977). Places, as “centers of meanings or intentions, either culturally or individually defined” (Relph 1976: 281) or as “temporally and perceptually bounded units of psychologically meaningful material space” (Godkin 1980: 73), have a clearly existential dimension. Places endow space with character; places humanize space. In the words of Tuan (1977: 3), “place is security, space is freedom”. Human beings need a space “with places” in it; we need to feel rooted in one place, to have a place from which to look out on the world; we need to establish psychologically and/or spiritually meaningful links with one particular place. On the other hand, Western post-industrial society is creating a “placeless” space, without distinctive meaningful centers to unite us experientially to the world. This tendency towards “placelessness” (Relph 1976), towards

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standardized, stereotyped, insensitive landscapes, is the result of the homogenization and destruction of place-specific features brought about by mass culture and technology. Harvois (1977: 88) describes how the neorurals are fleeing from all of this: “Non-conformists in search of something new, utopia dwellers, ... executives or civil servants, ... these emigrants are not only capable of repopulating the French desert but also of firing the imagination of those who want to change society and way of life. Whether they head for the forests in Velay, the hills in Ardèche or the mountains in Ariège, they are all seeking a new life system, a different concept of work and money, of space and time, of nature, of the Other ...”

The neo-rural phenomenon today What is left today of this phenomenon? What has happened in the interim between the early 1980s (when the neo-rural movement had fully consolidated) and the present day? To start with, the social, economic and cultural context has undergone major change. The post-Fordist production system has been progressively implanted, and post-modernism, or the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Harvey 1990), is creeping into Western societies. Cities continue to grow and we are witnessing a metropolitanization of the territory and an extension of the process of urbanization. This urban sprawl has spread throughout much of Europe. At the same time, the unprecedented revaluation of historical urban centers and districts has given rise to a major gentrification process in cities, e.g., Barcelona, and a certain ‘city’ revival. Cities have acquired new cultural amenities and media icons that were unthinkable in the industrial 1960s and 1970s, and have lost part of their negative image. For a few years to come, the city will cease to send away its well-educated young population and may even attract newcomers. However, generalized use of Internet and new communication and information technologies facilitate online connection and, most importantly, the possibility of working from home. We are witnessing a sort of “shrinking” of the territory: faster transport systems and modern telecommunications enable us to reach any part of the territory within a short space of time. For the first time in history, people are able to consider the idea of living in the countryside while enjoying practically the same comforts as in the city or, at least, remaining connected to the city and its services from a distance. This is of the utmost impor-

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tance in order to understand today’s neo-ruralism. The rules of the game have changed radically, and it is now possible and feasible for a city person to live in the country without necessarily buying into the full ideology of the original neo-rural movement. This also explains the huge diversity of contemporary rural inhabitants (Yarwood 2005) in Western Europe, and particularly in Catalonia. In rural areas today, besides the depleted autochthonous population, there are still classic neo-rurals, either the original settlers from decades ago or newcomers who share some of their characteristics (Mailfert 2006). They all aspire to live in pleasant surroundings, in unspoiled countryside where they can enjoy all things “natural”, which is now often synonymous with “local”: farm produce, organic agriculture, revived craftwork etc. The original ideology of the first wave of neo-rurals has been toned down, whereas the range of options of the second wave has widened and strengthened. The latter are more concerned with environmental questions and the general quality of life in healthy, pleasing surroundings. The links between landscape-territorial identity-local produce are now stronger, and this often leads to economic opportunities for many territories which, only two or three decades ago, had an uncertain future. Priorat County (Catalonia), for example, was formerly an economically depressed area with a constant demographic exodus but is now a top-quality wine-producing zone. This has largely been due to people of many different occupations (intellectuals, artists, singers, small entrepreneurs, and young independent professionals) returning from Barcelona to live in the area and clearly (and successfully) opting for the landscape-territorial identity-local produce trilogy. The leaders of this economic reconversion and new territorial drive are currently applying to have the Priorat County landscape listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We could provide many other examples. Similarly, we should note the role of artistic and cultural initiatives undertaken by the new neo-rurals in their efforts to revive areas with dwindling populations. The case of Farrera Art and Nature Centre (www.farreracan.cat) high up in the Pyrenees is particularly enlightening. These young people have managed to turn a longuninhabited Pyrenean village into one of the most interesting cultural centers in Catalonia and an international place of reference. The same is true of the Quim Soler Centre in Priorat County (www.centrequimsoler.cat) and the Contemporary Rural Representations initiative in the village of Nulles in Alt Camp County, Tarragona. We have been discussing the role of young people who left the countryside in order to seek training or education and who returned later as

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neo-rurals. In fact, etymologically speaking, these are the real neo-rurals. Interesting cases abound, but the Pyrenees region has probably seen some of the boldest initiatives, which are also the hardest to carry out in such adverse environmental conditions. Lack of space prevents further detail, but the following initiatives are good examples: the Rurbans Association for the Revitalization of Mountain Areas; Creative Strategies for Local Revitalization (mainly women); and the successful Farming and Shepherding School, which mainly caters for young neo-rural students. The Pyrenees and the Pre-Pyrenees, like most mountain areas in Europe, are fundamental for understanding the diversity of today’s neo-rural phenomenon. Members of the residual local community, original neo-rural settlers from several decades ago, and holiday home residents all share the space with popular sports activities (e.g., skiing), traditional agriculture and stockbreeding, organic farming, and the hugely important rural tourism industry, as a complement to farming (with over 170 rural accommodation houses in the Catalan Pyrenees alone).

Conclusions The neo-rural movement that started in the 1960s and 1970s expressed a deep shift in territoriality, an essential transformation of the relationship between individuals and their bio-social surroundings. This transformation became manifest through a new concept of work and a series of new attitudes, behaviour patterns and appreciation of the environment. Today’s neo-rural phenomenon has widened its range of lifestyles, due to the changing social, cultural and economic context of the early 21st century, as we have discussed above. In Europe and North America, we are now witnessing rural resettlement processes that have little or nothing to do with those described in this chapter. Much of this resettlement is actually neo-rural, although it is no longer easy to group the wide range of situations and life projects under the same heading (Hagmaier / Kommerell / Stengal / Würfel 2000). The exact scope of the phenomenon is difficult to quantify; Keith Halfacree (2007) points to the lack of studies existing on the subject, except on a local scale. My personal impression (obviously not demonstrable until more time has passed) is that the neo-rural phenomenon will increase in the near future, simply because it dovetails with a profound social and cultural demand for new ways of relating to our environment. This demand has been

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present for some time but has only now risen to the surface, due to a variety of reasons that go beyond those of the current economic and financial slump. Many of us hope, however, that this harsh period of recession will help us to re-assess our values and priorities, i.e., that it will be a “good recession”, in the words of Jordi Pigem (2009). A few years earlier, a deeper, more creative movement was gathering impetus by questioning the economic growth model and the prevailing social values of competitiveness and individualism. Jordi Pigem expertly describes this in Bona crisi. Cap a un món postmaterialista (2009), and points to solutions for the current recession. He demonstrates how we identified the world with mathematical language and reduced reality to what was quantifiable. This geometricalization of the world may have given us enormous power, but we have ended up by reducing it all to a series of figures, statistics, bar codes and abstract networks. Pigem claims that the collapse of the seemingly infallible material and ideological structures has finally opened up new paths to plenitude. I believe that we are now witnessing a paradigm shift, in the widest sense of the word. The classic material and ideological structures that we trusted to be watertight are now cracking and losing their appearance of solidness and consistency. The hegemonic pillars of the production and consumption system are showing fissures; and new attitudes to work, natural resources and the environment are questioning the economic growth model and the prevailing social values of competitiveness and individualism. The Slow Movement proposes a fuller, more meaningful life, in which individuals may become the masters of their own destiny, control their own time, eat healthier food and, in a word, reach greater happiness. The gradual growth of environmental awareness has produced a worldwide reaction to the climate change caused by global warming, and a more responsible attitude to natural ecosystems and the biodiversity of the planet. To all this we can add the fact that people have now learned how to organize opposition to a rigid, inflexible administration and a political class that is often far removed from the real interests of the people. This has come into sharp relief with the current economic recession, which has revealed the blatant lack of control of a financial system enriched by shamelessly exploiting its customers, i.e., the citizens. Something is happening, something is moving in the cultural world, in the social and even the ethical spheres. It is this “something”, this notable paradigm shift, which explains the return of many of the values that drove thousands of young (and not so young) people into the countryside to try out an alternative way of life to that of the hegemonic model of society.

A Semi-Peircean Essay on “New Ruralism” by Means of Nature Pere Salabert

(Nature and ruralism) I I shall endeavor to discuss a topic designated by the words ruralism, rurality: the “new ruralism”. I start with a question: what does the “new” ruralism mean? Does it not refer to a kind of devotion to the rustic countryside, or what we consider to be the opposite of the city? Indeed, the opposition Country/City, or Town, is parallel to another that is as useful as it is simplistic: Nature/Culture. Recovering the Country, then, – moving towards a rustic sphere from another that is more exquisite, from the smooth to the rough – is the counterpart of a moving back to Nature. It is obvious that this new ruralism is a return – a comeback – after a going away. It is therefore a homecoming after a departure. From this point of view, it seems clear that the problem may be thought through by other means. One of them is an historical approach, which points towards a previous interest in nature that gave rise to landscaping. Throughout the eighteenth century, the picturesque (in the sense of aesthetic picturesqueness) is predominant in art, especially in painting. In this respect, we have to bear in mind somebody like Baudelaire in the nineteenth century as well as Nietzsche’s concept of the “free spirit”, a will to freedom concerning a need felt by some people that impels them to move away. So this Nietzschean concept seems to be a prediction, a forecast, of the vulgarization in a homecoming whose goal is the Country – a rural seat, a country house – , that somehow we ought not forget is an indefinite operation concerning identity

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by way of a fictitious autonomy. This would be one approach but there is, however, a second way of considering the problem: theoretical speculation, which would begin by interrogating the words that we are taking into consideration – new, ruralism – and their semantic relation.

II The new ruralism concerns a subject whose etymology (ruralis of rus-, rur-, from late Latin), refers to the country, that is, what we can consider to be an instance of Nature thought of as a categorical term. Here we find not only an origin of the word rural, but also – regarding the “new” appraisal of ruralism – its final meaning, since from the point of view of Nature, there does not seem to be a great difference between the countryside and a rural place. Therefore, such a contemporary – modern and postmodern – appreciation of the rural thing must be, effectively, a sort of attraction to Nature. With this we ought to begin our research. However, since we wish to remain on a realistic level, we are already aware that “nature” is not a word whose significance refers to a real object in its effectiveness, but rather a possibility that when coinciding with irreality turns into a chain of natural instances. In so far as this is true, we could see here the semiotic structure of the sign according to C. S. Peirce: possibility is the Representamen, reality the Object, and mediation the Interpretant. We could assert therefore that Nature is first possibility and rurality (or rusticity) its second effectivity in the scope of the real. But for the Peircean Interpretant, which works like a regulator between the first and second categories, or possibility and reality, Nature must be here again as long as nature is, first of all, a mental image or an idea. Two natures are here emerging: one of which I have an idea within consciousness – inner nature – and a second that is external to me – outer Nature – that I must suppose to be effective and quite real (Collingwood 1950: 16ff). Why not refer to these two natures as Peirce does: nature and Natura? But we then discover that although I can consider nature to be a single unit, following the idea that I obtain of it through the Latin Natura, which is a possibility term, it only becomes present in a cultural unfolding that surpasses the minimum difference – if there is any difference – between rustic and rural things, both terms that refer to the country. So then, how do I know to which term the “new ruralism” – this modern interest and taste for rustic things – refers? Is the new ruralism a specific will, a will of this or that thing, or a sort of unstable,

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perhaps metamorphic penchant, whose subject matter is nothing other than an indefinite horizon? I shall suggest three historical moments that will allow us to move forward, though I do not want to develop this at length. The first moment, concerning nature, is a simple observation made by Goethe. He remarks that it is quite unusual for men to understand and use nature. In fact, “between knowledge and use men introduce frequently with joy a mirage” and as a consequence they forget “the object and its implementation” (Goethe 1991: 379). This is a word of warning about the difficulty of acquiring knowledge from nature and being able to take advantage of it. Nevertheless, one must realize that these words contain three distinct types of nature: an “original” Nature; a derivative, pragmatic one; and a third that exists on a mental (eidetic) level. The next two historical moments relate more closely to ruralism by thinking of nature as a kind of disturbance that entails changing, a making us move away. Let us begin with Aristotle when he remarks that in everyday life men find pleasure both in repetitive acts (habits, routines that make everyday life easier) and in disruptions that entail change (taking away, varying things, taking a vacation). A modern concept, and therefore one close to us, similar to Aristotle’s is Baudelaire’s poetic idea of the voyage or the trip. This highlights the need for change, to move about seeing other horizons that are often figments of our imagination: “But the real travelers are those who go away just to go away” (Baudelaire 1975-76: 130). This is a sort of preliminary thought that leads to Nietzsche’s thinking concerning freedom, the “free spirit”. There is a need to move and emigrate, leaving ideas, places and things already known in search of unfamiliar horizons. Nietzsche describes this phenomenon as a waking will, felt as a call for a great departure. There is in it “a wish of a virgin world” (Nietzsche 1988: 22 ff). We must bear in mind that the two previous quotations are inspired by the Romantic movement and its participants’ curiosity about a particular idea – a shared idea, by and large – of knowledge, nature and travel.

(Nature and its occurrences) I There are still a few reasons to question why it is that we hold Nature to be an earlier category, an origin that doesn’t allow us to speak rightly of

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it except by means of its occurrences. I mean here the Nature that, as we have already seen, C.S. Peirce distinguished from another, more common concept, with the Latin name Natura: “The word natura must originally have meant birth; although even in the oldest Latin it very seldom bears that meaning” (Peirce a: 214). There is no reason to make use of the Greek Physis when referring to the Latin Natura, a term freed from the former’s heavy metaphysics. Although this is not the place to return to Plato’s chora, it is worth mentioning the existence of a proto-nature in both Timaeus and in De rerum natura (of Lucretius). Peirce alludes to a virtual Natura, which has become a main feature in a cultural display that overcomes all difference – if any exists – between country and rurality, both relative to the field in a broad sense.

II In the eighteenth century, inspired by the Platonic tradition, Shaftesbury saw Nature as a sort of active ground, a generative power that he described as holy and yet rough and wild. To the extent that the artist used nature as the source of his work, he moved away from the faithful imitation of sensitive forms toward a power he believed gave his work a real life, which constituted his “originality” (Brett 1959: 105 ff). Indeed, the Latin sense of natura is connected to birth, birthing, and therefore with the idea of origin. From this point of view, Nature may be judged as part of a virtuality in the same measure in which each of its updates are, so to speak, “domesticated” samples, that is to say, occurrences of a concept whose role is primarily symbolic.1 They are concretions, then, or replicas in Peircean terminology. Take, for example, a specific field, a garden where one often goes to sit and read because of its peaceful environment, or a park where one occasionally likes to go and walk: these are all occurrences of a symbolic Nature. The same goes for a Nation’s flag, an object that one can see, have and use: they are all occurrences, effective realities, of the Flag as a general sign or symbol.

1. It “should be three classes of signs; for there is a triple connection of sign, thing signified, cognition produced in the mind. There may be a mere relation of reason between the sign and the thing signified; in that case the sign is an icon. Or there may be a direct psychical connection; in that case the sign is an index. Or there may be a relation which consists in the fact that the mind associates the sign with its object; in that case the sign is a name [or symbol]” (Peirce a: I: 196; I: 372).

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The idea that nature is a product of the human mind is an old one (Collingwood 1950: 19 ff). But this does not prevent a few Romantic figures from enjoying immediacy with nature. This is an immediacy that does not occur through intellectual means, according to Shaftesbury, but rather through a perception based on imagination that is located on an aesthetic level. Such experiences often occur as a return to some kind of “origin” that I like to call paradisiacal. A good example would be the mental deliberations of Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. On his frequent walks from Paris to the countryside stretching beyond the city, Rousseau was taken hold of by ecstatic trances (reveries, daydreams). In these reveries, he identifies himself with outer nature, with which he confuses the idea of Nature. In short, Rousseau is brought together with his natural environment; a separation of two worlds, outer nature and inner self, ceases to exist except in the writing that comes afterwards to verify the experience reported by memory. Outer nature is no longer in the field, much less in the landscape: this is the true Nature, which the subject of experience cannot discern from any other part of his self-consciousness.2 Thus, “what delights us in such a situation? Nothing outside the self, nothing if not the very self and its own existence, as long as this state persists we are as self-sufficient as God” (Rousseau 1997: 114). Rilke’s thoughts on nature, particularly when he explains the emergence of landscape in pictorial representation, leads us to an aesthetic, visual understanding that Rousseau makes clear with his words. When humankind no longer gives credence to understanding nature, the time begins to start understanding it: “as I felt it otherwise, like a reality that does not integrate, which is not endowed with senses to perceive us, even we have come from her. ... Just this was lacking to become an artist for her mediation. We had not felt her [Nature] as a subject matter, with the significance she had for us, but as an object, like a great reality located there” (Rilke 1966: 372). Rousseau’s is an example of a purely aesthetic experience; Rilke’s conviction, by contrast, is that the necessary condition for being an artist is to move away from Nature and look at her from afar.

2. “Night was coming down. I saw the sky, some stars and a little greenery. ... I was born in this moment to the life, and it seemed to me that I pervaded with my slight existence all things I perceived. ... I had no concept separate from my individual, nor the slightest idea concerning what had happened, I did not know who I was or where I was. ... I saw my blood flowing as I could see a stream” (Rousseau 1997: 68).

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III Is Nature a set of occurrences3 – natural or urban parks, orchards, gardens, etc. – , or is it a philosophical concept, as surrealist author Louis Aragon asserted in Le Paysan de Paris? Aragon asserts that in Nature there are only unclear, vulgar and superficial ideas. It seems that in order to approach the philosophical nature of Aragon we ought to turn to painting and view it as distant nature, which Rilke defines as a Nature-object free of all meaning. I am thinking in particular of William Turner or Claude Monet. In fact, the late “landscapes” of Turner, as well as the number of nymphéas (or water lilies) of Monet in Giverny, represent original Nature to the same extent that they exude the highest expression of any other occurrence, particularly that of the landscape and landscaping practice, which is the final manifestation of original Nature.

(Rural, or countryside, and landscape) I In a pragmatic sense, the Country is an instance in that it is a land worked for practical needs. Its opposite is the Landscape, a limited territory that is an object of aesthetic contemplation. In both cases, Nature is invested and applied, functionally in the former instance and as an image or a feeling in the latter. Now, is it possible to mix up the two? Can one talk about the Country as an aesthetic figure, or see a landscape as a countryside? The Countryside is certainly a Landscape to be seen, so to speak, as a slice of Nature in the distance, providing us with a better visibility. This is, for Rilke, nature as it becomes landscape. The same is true for the so called “urban landscape”, the town seen in perspective by architects and city planners. The reason for such a transition is that when perceived from close up, an object suffers in its visual definition: contours become faded, visual sharpness tends to disappear. All of this allows us to say that the Landscape is one of several forms – a hypostasis, in fact – of Nature in a performing act of submission, for the purposes of a more enjoyable viewing. Simmel wrote that if nature “in her being and deeper sense knows nothing about individuality”, it is because the human eye re-creates it in the measure that divides and shapes what is previously divided “in its co-

3. Which may be increased at will by changing the point of view (Godin 2000: 9).

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rrespondent individuality ‘landscape’”. This is accurate in my opinion. That the Landscape is an aesthetic instance of Nature becomes clear in Simmel’s remarks, and we understand them better taking into account Rilke and the need to be separate from Nature, to leave it there in front of us like an object.

II Indeed, it has been quite a long time since we’ve known the feeling produced by the contemplation of nature (the beginnings of such a detachment are usually pinpointed in Petrarch ascending, in 1336, to Mont Ventoux, to contemplate the “views” available from that height). Thinking of the landscape as a natural occurrence, a self-realization, is a modern idea, and became autonomous “because its creation requires a detached feeling from the unitary nature in its entirety”. We have to bear in mind, however, Simmel’s warning concerning a fundamental tragedy of the human spirit: that a “part of a whole”, as the landscape is, “becomes a whole in itself, springing from it and asking for its own right vis-à-vis the whole” (Simmel 1986: 176 ff). There are several reasons for this, though for our purposes we can reduce it to one: that the “new rurality”, which we must understand as a sort of simile concerning a return to nature, is most likely a psychological illusion of contemporary individuals who believe that they have found their real objective in a derivative image. What I mean is that, having taken the landscape from Nature, individuals now only see Nature in the landscape. Did Goethe not speak of an illusion, a mirage? So, after creating an illusion that avoids reality, we find reality in the mirage.

III We spoke of only three natures: an outer Nature, or physis; another that is eidetic, let’s say private; and a range of derivatives or hypostases. First of all, the Peircean original Natura; second, our own idea on the first, which for better or worse finds its setting in the Landscape; and, finally, the Park or the Garden, the Orchard (Latin Hortus) or a Natural Park or Forest. In the first two, neither one nor the other is a place in which to live. I mean that the landscape lacks practicality as it is a visual projection between outer Nature and its internalized counterpart. Language itself makes this obvious, as the following statements are in reality completely meaningless: “I go for a walk in nature”, or even “I live in the landscape”. How can we effectively offer some semblance of reality to this return to nature denoted by the “new rurality”? One might articulate an answer in simple terms: by considering the country as a goal and, at the same time,

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accounting for everything that makes the countryside a feasible territory, a place for living. In these terms we can indeed talk about walking, leaving the city and going to live in the Country. This is how we might express a fondness for rural life or a ruralist inclination. I’ll say it again: rurality should be defined here as a return to Nature through the Country perceived as a Landscape. Why “perceived as a Landscape”? Because a “Ruralist” man appears to a farmer or a peasant like a tourist to the citizen of a foreign nation: one party is physically located there and lives onsite, the other is always mentally in front of him, separated. A tourist may be defined by his attitude as a detached subject as he is always at a distance from things around him. A ruralist subject seems like a tourist in that he looks at, sees, admires and provides judgments, but lacks concern and involvement. From an aesthetic point of view, there exists an ambiguous relationship between the countryside and the individuals who are in it, whether they be strollers or peasants. Van Gogh suggested as much in a letter to his brother by rejecting the notion that he was a landscape artist. He is not, Van Gogh writes, because in the landscapes that he paints there is always someone, some individual, most usually a peasant. For Van Gogh, who wants to be esteemed as an artist and attract buyers to his works, it is plainly obvious that the landscape is not a feasible territory, a country place to delve into, and by no means some place to live by farming, cultivation or raising livestock.4 I would add that for Van Gogh the human figure is merely an occasional part of the landscape, like a tree or a rock, or any other earthly contingency.5

(City-landscape) Judging the City as a cultural instance halfway between the country on one side and the landscape on the other, both with a relation to Nature, allows us to view the City in the landscape perspective, especially sin-

4. As Sánchez de Muniaín wrote, it seems clear that cultivation is generally the least aesthetic element of the landscape. Anyhow, as far as a cultivated part of a land is a product of a collaboration of man and nature, it is necessarily aesthetic (1945: 267). 5. This all suggests a development that I shall describe by means of two examples. On one side, a text by Rilke, “Worpswede” (1966: 373), and, on the other, the concept of “visagéité” faciality) (Deleuze-Guattari 1980: 230 ff and 1991: 158 ff).

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ce we have blurred, with Rousseau, the line between City and Nature (or country).

City (culture)

Country

Landscape

Nature Now suppose that Surrealism in the twentieth century were not so much a break in artistic tradition as a “contentious” referral from the previous century’s Romanticism. We would then understand that for individuals assigned to that cultural movement the city is the natural sphere for searching around and dreaming; that is to say, still more precisely: the city of Paris. With Baudelaire as a background figure, the Surrealists live in the city and wander through it like tourists eager to discover its forgotten corners, ready to unearth its secret stories that are linked in a way that is similar to a terrain left to its own natural fate: species develop and vegetation tangles, geological layers overlap, elements spring up and others disappear in a process with no other motivation than to restore chaos. For both André Breton and Aragon, the City-landscape is a field of operations devoted to the imagination. In Aragon’s novel Le paysan de Paris, the Passage de l’Opera is a kind of machine for stories, and the whole city of Paris is a territory invested in a time of endless wealth, a panoply of debris and waste from the past, and at the same time the evocation of a future. Instead, the public park of the Buttes-Chaumont is literally Nature on hand, a source of unexpected emotions. Vertigo is the feeling we have here, which is the same vertigo that Rousseau experienced in his spiritual union with nature and is the most common experience presented to the City’s denizens. Thus, Aragon writes: At the limit of two days between the reality outside and the subjectivism of the passage, like a man who stands at the edge of his own abyss, sought as

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Pere Salabert

much by the flow of objects as by the eddies of oneself in that strange area where everything is lapsus, slips of attention and inattention, let us stop just enough to experience the vertigo. Here, a double illusion grasps us and confronts our desire for absolute knowledge. (1926: 60-61)

Here a claim rests on the brink between an outer and inner world, the way open and the passage closed, comparable to sleep and wakefulness, to consciousness and unconsciousness. It is a double learning: a mere feeling in our desire for knowledge and the experience given by vertigo.

(Three points and a diagram) I We have arrived at the focal point of our endeavor, which I will set out by way of three arguments. In the first, there is the City as a contrary instance to Nature (the anthropological opposition Nature/Culture, especially from Lévi-Strauss); in the second, the different occurrences of Nature in its becoming real; in the third, the human need for moving, variation and alternating contrasted with the opposite desire to remain unchanged. I will argue, briefly, that the “new rurality” should be placed more or less where the force lines that formalize these three arguments intersect. But let us clarify things a little more. The relationship of nature and city remains a contrary one – not contradictory – and this is enough by itself. The various occurrences or hypostases of Nature jointly develop a long chain linking two opposite sides, the pragmatic and the aesthetic. This is a succession, more precisely, that runs through the space of the country for practical needs – agricultural production or animal rearing – up to the Landscape for aesthetic contemplation. And between these two boundaries, the Garden and its variations are closed to the landscape, while on the opposite side is the cottage garden (jardin potager) and the orchard (Latin hortus), so that between them comes the Park as a manner through which nature has to make its way into cities (urban park as Central Park in NY, Hyde Park in London or Buttes Chaumont or Bois de Boulogne in Paris), or has to save itself through protected zones or territories like the National Forest, Natural Reserve or National Park. On a third level, there is man with his propensity to be in motion, to change or move away: alternative residence, traveling vacations, in short: changing horizons. Here we refer to touristic Travel for either pleasure

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or as a resource with which to temporarily avoid one’s habits, or, beyond that, to avoid the routine of everyday life. Let us also take into account, far from the vacation movement, the change of residence from the city to the countryside. And let us not forget tourism, which has as a goal aesthetic pleasure and knowledge. In Goethe’s Italian Journey one finds good observations on the well-known combination, around the year 1800, of rustic areas with old ruins.6 There is very little variation in Stendhal’s work on tourism – Voyages en Italie, Mémoires d’un touriste – , where egotisme contributes to the trip an attraction to an outer as well as to an inner world (Salabert 1995). From all these cases, it is most important for our purposes to make a kind of pattern that reflects the present taste for a “new” ruralism, that is to say, the moving away from cities to the rustic country. In my opinion this is a ruralism that does not entail an unchanging position; on the contrary, ruralism is dynamic – sometimes a bit nomadic – , so it is not only a displacement, but also a need for some kind of improvement; not a changing of place but a moving around whose feeding grounds are composed of variation. There is a logic to this structure. Abandoning the City for the Country has an aesthetic, and therefore imaginative aim: to see Landscape as if it were plain Nature, or in other words, Natura. This being done, there comes a return: a leaving of Nature, which is already seen on the horizon of the Landscape, back to the City in a pragmatic homecoming back to reality. II We must admit however that forsaking an urban site for a rural one doesn’t often place the entirety of its goals in the countryside. This would make rural displacement a pragmatic action. No: there is something else to it, a supplementary thing, some kind of extra thinkable as an “aesthetic initiation” by confusing nature with landscape, which is its more pleasant occurrence, its “artistic” and thus affective side. This is, in my view, the “new” ruralism: a shift from the city to the rustic country that entails looking forward to an enjoyable Natura with a landscape feature. In short, the new ruralism is a path of aesthetic purpose, even if it is unconscious. This frames the current sensitivity as primarily touristic. Trained by pu6. See the event in the village of Malcesina where an attentive reader will discover a starting point for tourism (Goethe 1991: III: 1054 ss).

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blicity and mass media, we have each become clients, an impartial public ready to contemplate an environment – our own, more accurately – that we perceive as a changing scenery, a display in which it is often better not to be involved. In such a context, Natura is the imaginary horizon of a homecoming, a return to a “source” that is illusory in all senses. We are speaking of the Earth, our Planet, and the World as a property inherited from our ancestors that we must love and protect for it is mankind’s patrimonial theater. Rural country and landscape, so often interchangeable, are merged into this process and produce a hybrid ersatz of nature made attainable, on hand. III In the next diagram I attempt to represent the relationship between the City and the most important occurrences of Nature through a semiotic square simile – inspired mainly by J. A. Greimas – that demonstrates the rural movement. When Peirce explains his theory about the structure of the sign and wants to clarify its first element, the Representamen, or sign, he writes: “A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity”. There are three points to bear in mind: (a) something standing (b) for some other thing (c) to somebody (d) in some respect. First, it addresses somebody, that is, “creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign or perhaps a more developed sign” and “that sign which it creates I call Interpretant of the first sign”. Let’s cite Peirce just a little more: “the sign stands for something, its object”. And finally, the most important point: “[the sign] stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen” (Peirce b:228).7 Nature – the Latin Natura to which Peirce refers – is really close to the Peircean ground as a persistent idea. I would say that it is almost a platonic idea, since it is what remains after the various ideas that we all have about nature give way: Countryside, Orchard, Park, Garden, Landscape. These

7. “The conception of a pure abstraction is indispensable, because we cannot comprehend an agreement of two things, except as an agreement in some respect, and this respect is such a pure abstraction [as blackness]. Such a pure abstraction, reference to which constitutes a quality or general attribute, may be termed a ground” (Peirce a: 551). Then Nature, or Natura, is this ground for its real materialization: from Country to Landscape and its other occurrences.

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(GROUND) NATURE

CITY

contrary aesthetic path

pragmatic path contradictory

COUNTRY

LANDSCAPE “NEW” RURALISM

are the derivative ideas that disquieted Louis Aragon when he was inspired by nature in an urban park (Buttes Chaumont) and thereafter recalled the kinds of understandings people have about nature. Of all these secondary ideas, one seems most effective and powerful: Nature as a first Possible. Nature is just the background for everything else, a faraway horizon for this theater of Landscape as a representamen, or Peircean sign, which stands for something. The Country is its object, instead of the City, which is there “in reference to a sort of idea” (Nature, of course). Thus, Landscape, Country and City, as can be seen in the diagram, are all on ruralism’s spectrum supported by a primary mental support: Earth, or the back-Ground for all human attempts to search for roots.

Can Suburbia Think? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

As we speak about the “New Rural”, most of us, living in those early twenty-first century environments that have been reached by the difference-eroding waves of globalization (or, alternatively, living in the zones where these waves had their origin), are situated between two facing existential horizons and do not notice that these horizons are (and may have always been) two illusions. One of them we like to imagine as the untouched horizon of Nature, denying or ignoring the insight that since the first humans began to dwell on this planet we have transformed the supposed innocence of Nature into the cultural worlds of the countryside. (This is one of Martin Heidegger’s insights, among others, but does one always need a philosopher to see the obvious?) Meanwhile, even the countryside and its villages shaped by stable traditions of peasant life have morphed into dormitory towns for a population that works and enjoys itself elsewhere. The space remaining between different dormitory towns has been eagerly filled with wind farms. Future generations will only be somewhat familiar with villages, if at all, from cineastic works such as the marvelous German serial “Heimat”. The other existential pole, called “the City”, has become an object of desire and a medium of intellectual legitimacy for those who take pride and claim an aura of sophistication for having recognized that an uncontaminated Nature and the world of peasants are no longer available. For over a hundred years now, the friends of the City have found themselves

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Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

resistant enough to brave the noise, the smells, the traffic and the sufferings, the dangers and all the other unpleasant complexities of large agglomerations because they felt obliged to confront the aggressive Reality of the present. But, mostly as a reaction to their self-flagellating enthusiasm, the City has now been gentrified into ensembles of clean pedestrian zones with neatly restored cultural monuments, architecturally ambitious concert halls, themed restaurants, and shopping malls which, desperately, unnecessarily, and sometimes even successfully, try to hide that they are, of course, really about consumption and profit maximization. ••• Between the illusions of natural Nature and of real Reality, between the no longer existing Village and the no longer existing City, we are all sleeping, eating, intermittently working, and even procreating in intermediate spaces that have ceased to be “intermediate” because nothing is really left to surround them. It is as if one of Jean-Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s dreams from his late eighteenth-century novel, The Year 2440, If It Ever Came True had materialized in an excessive fashion. Mercier wanted all “dirty” professions, like the business of butchers, to happen outside of the City and to be executed, if possible, by legal immigrants. But now that many of us crave so much the “urban” reality of (in)gloriously dirty business, it is no longer to be found, while the immigrants of yesteryear have become citizens who are eagerly looking for fresh supplies of immigrants. Only the presence of new immigrants, as a backdrop, can make the old immigrants savor what they have achieved. If you look for the industrial Reality of Silicon Valley, you find only buildings that might well be residential, complete with more shopping malls, both filled by people with expensively casual clothes and a soft Indian accent that no longer belies their American passports. ••• We call “Suburbia” those seemingly intermediate but in reality unlimited spaces that we inhabit, and as long as we continue to think that we should rather live in natural Villages or real Cities, we try to hate them as best we can – and we feel obliged to hate ourselves for not being able to escape Suburbia. Like in that truest of all fictional tales, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, we still pretend to know that the City is Reality, and we

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therefore dispose of a collection of handy apologies and explanations for when we are exposed to the inquisitor-sounding question of why we are living in places with populations of less than a million. Those among us who are able to claim that it is just for the sake of our children’s education will barely get away with it, and then hasten to promise that we will move to the City as soon as the kids go to college, the earlier the better. As a footnote, we then meekly affirm that meanwhile we, too, of course, continue to despise Suburbia. ••• But when that time of supposed freedom arrives (as it has for me), one perhaps begins to wonder why you should put up with several hours of commuting per day, staggering rental fees, new neighbors, and more solitude, just for the sake of replacing a suburban environment that calls itself “Suburbia” with more of the same under the label of being a “City”. This is where Heidegger can perhaps offer consolation and advice that will indeed make a difference, at least if you are an academic. For he famously and repeatedly stated that “die Provinz” was the best, if not the only place for thinking. And should we intellectuals not make our self-esteem depend on the degree to which we manage to think well? If Suburbia has inherited all the blame and all the prejudice that was formerly heaped upon “provincial life”, it will also share, on the other hand, its closeness to thinking. Heidegger himself tried Todtnauberg, a small village in the beautiful Black Forest, and a modest cabin that was far away even from Todtnauberg’s farm houses. There, he said, all of his good philosophical ideas had come to him and there he pretended he had written all of his books and essays – although we do know that at least Being and Time, the book that made him world famous, was primarily produced in Marburg which already then, in the mid-1920s, must have looked like an early version of academic Suburbia. Independently of Heidegger, as far as their choice goes, but in a truly Heideggerean mood, my good and much admired friends Robert and Joan Ramon live in the midst of suburban gardens, have become competent gardeners, and finish one impressive book after another. Robert, whose latest and very successful title is Gardens – an Essay on the Human Condition, no less, gave me his earthy definition of what he finds “provincial”. Provincial are those places, he said, where when you pick up a stone and turn it around, you find its bottom side wet.

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Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

••• Like some people who simply do not click with religion (Jürgen Habermas – some competent readers interject that it was Max Weber – once called them “religiös unmusikalisch”), I do not relate much to plants and to their watering, growth and decay, as much as I adore to have dinner in the little patio of our condo that my wife keeps looking like a garden. But I am a hugely (perhaps even pathologically) ambitious professor of literature, and therefore the conviction that I can think well matters. I also have a tendency to embrace and profess opinions that rub people in my world the wrong way, which means I have strong reasons to argue that my better thoughts, if I ever produce any of those, have to do with Suburbia. Only, none of my colleagues or my students would believe a word I say if I told them that those ideas come from sunflowers or from the wet bottom side of pebbles. In this situation, which began to feel like an intellectual offside trap, I remembered a text with the strange title “Ersiegerungen” that the great and much regretted Jean-François Lyotard had written back in 1989. It refers to a visiting professorship that Lyotard held at the University of Siegen in Germany during the late 1980s and, counter to the excessively existentialist reading of his editor who translated “Ersiegerungen” as “paying back debts at Siegen”, the intended pun with the toponym should be translated as something like “conquering something through Siegen”. As “Siegen” happens to mean “victory”, it also is funnily tautological. Now Siegen, where I once happily lived for six years, is unbeatably provincial and suburban. The most recent edition of the “Brockhaus” (before that glorious Encyclopedia fell victim to the evil empire of electronic communication), said only a few banal things about this town of approximately 120,000: that it had more precipitation than any other place of its size in Germany; that it used to be right in the middle of the “old Federal Republic” (i.e., of Germany before the 1989 reunification); that it lies next to an important freeway; and that Peter Paul Rubens had been born there while his father was held at a local jail for embezzlement. So what could a sophisticated Parisian philosopher like Lyotard possibly have “conquered” for his thinking from this German epitome of Suburbia? Lyotard himself had a double answer, an answer, which I believe, is true for all Suburbia that dares to speak its name. As Lyotard and as, with him, all the doctoral students of the “Graduierten-Kolleg” where he was teaching had noticed and discussed, Suburbia inevitably undercuts our feelings of being rooted. This realization has become a general condition of life in

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a world that excludes the possibilities of real Reality and of natural Nature. But unlike the City, whose invocation will provide a self-deceiving excuse and a disguise for such rootlessness, Suburbia obliges us to think through the permanent situation of displacement that is our fate. In Jean-François Lyotard’s own, very Eurocentric, and of course translated words: “The Europe that we built at Siegen, briefly and to some extent, will only be made in Europe if its nationals emigrate right where they are. Become indeterminate. Kollegiaten, we were certainly not good villagers, and we did not want to be the talented messengers that the megalopolis claims for its own. We tried to work through our moments of rootlessness”.

Sertão, City, Saudade Marília Librandi Rocha

“Cidade acaba com o sertão. Acaba?” “Infância é coisa, coisa?” João Guimarães Rosa

From an analysis of two short stories by the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967), “The Bounds of Happiness” and “Treetops”, published in Primeiras Estórias (First Stories) in 1962, I propose to offer a definition of the feeling of saudade.1 According to this definition, saudade is a “temporal landscape”, i.e., a feeling of intimacy related simultaneously to the environment in which we live, move, and breathe, and to the passage of time. In Brazilian history, the feeling of saudade finds special resonance at the moment of the inauguration of the city of Brasilia in 1960, when the immense area of rural savanna or cerrado starts to be occupied and populated. This habitat (the largest savanna in South America and the richest in the world biologically) was to be later covered by soybean plantations and other types of agribusiness. Contemporary to this development, Guimarães Rosa, a diplomat and a writer, including of sensitive ecological novels, raises questions in his fiction about the borders between the city and the sertão (the backlands of Northeastern Brazil). He asks: what would be the consequences when and if the sertão were to become a city? At the same time, Rosa’s short stories published in 1962, two years

1. As suggested by Joaquim Nabuco, we need four English words to translate the Portuguese meaning of saudade: remembrance, love, grief and longing (Nabuco, 1909, quoted by DaMatta: 28).

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Marília Librandi Rocha

after the inauguration of Brasilia, are still highly relevant to Brazil’s world position nowadays (after the success of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s government and the recent election of Dilma Roussef in 2010, who promised every Brazilian access to the benefits of civilization). Some latent questions in Rosa’s stories could be translated contemporarily as: will the city and its (intellectual and technological) lights eliminate the shadows of native forests along with their beauty and biodiversity? Will a wealthy Brazil be able to preserve and invent alternative ways of thinking and being in the world? Preserving and reflecting on stories such as Rosa’s could certainly help us take care of our landscape, now and for future generations, as well as understand the constant Luso-appeal of saudade, a feeling that comes after (or with) destruction and death. Or is saudade an inescapable feeling? Both senses of saudade are indeed present in Rosa’s short stories.

The Temporality of Saudade I begin by elaborating on an oral insight proposed by H.U. Gumbrecht in a meeting at Stanford University, when he suggested that, in the Brazilian case, saudade might be related to the impulse toward the future. This impulse dominates the self-description of the country and its people as portrayed in the famous title of Stefan Zweig’s book, Brazil, A Land of the Future (1942) and, especially during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitscheck (1957-1961), who was responsible for Brasília’s construction and proposed “advancing fifty years in five”). Saudade in Brazilian history is thus related to an acute awareness of change and of the losses that occur before one can receive the hoped-for benefits of a future that, being the future, never arrives (or is it already here in present-day Brazil?). Elaborating on this idea, I can say that the feeling of saudade is intensified in three directions: 1) With an impulse toward the future, the present moment is immediately felt as the past, for we know that this present will no longer exist because it will be destroyed by the onslaught of the future and the continual production of pasts, such that one feels saudades for the present. 2) At the same time, the impulse toward the future is always renewed, because the present never corresponds to the dreamed expectations. Thus, one feels saudades for the future, in other words for the ideal that has not happened but could have happened. 3) In consequence, one certainly feels saudades for the past, a time that is better than the insufficient present or the future still to come.

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“Aqui tudo parece que é ainda construção e já é ruína”, (“It seems here everything is still under construction and is already a ruin”) says Caetano Veloso’s verse in the song “Fora da Ordem”, coinciding perfectly with this complex temporality of saudade. Construction that comes to redeem the country’s misfortunes and miseries destroys what constructions it already possessed (as seen, for example, in the constant demolition of historic buildings that are replaced with the ugly façades of large commercial buildings or that, abandoned, look like exposed ruins in public squares). On the other hand, the newly built already looks like ruins, because the impulse toward the future condemns what is new to be seen as old. The ruin of the new is also related to the fact that the promise of redemption as hope projected on the landscape under construction cannot get rid of the old misfortunes, which are reborn from the ashes of the old structures that we wanted to change. The building and unveiling of Brasília in 1960 were especially charged with this meaning: it had been built in order to change and improve social relations as part of the utopian plan of the architect Le Corbusier. Reinvented by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa in the Brazilian sertão, the city would become a perennial stage used by the political machine to the benefit of few. It was besieged a short time afterward in 1964 by the military coup that lasted twenty years and, in the recent democratic period, Brasília would become the setting for a constant fight to include the outcast and cast out corruption from the “donos do poder” (operatives of power). Thus this city, the “capital of hope” as André Malraux expressed at its inauguration, is described as early as 1967 as a “futuristic ruin”.2 The election of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003 and his reelection in 2007 appear as a key turning point in this history, as a moment in which the country seems to be finally ready to confront the future and come face-to-face with its promise of riches and redemption. Not coinciden2. “Almost immediately on completion, Brasilia’s architectural imagery began to date. Moreover, its rhetoric of progress began to look suspect. In the decade after its inauguration, Brasilia’s construction began to appear shoddy, its failings as a social project became apparent, and from 1964 it became associated with a military regime that inadvertently have found in its epic open spaces a representation of authority. All this was widely reported in the international press. A good example of this critical representation of the city is the planner Colin Buchanan’s short but pungent photo-essay of 1967 for the British RIBA Journal, “The Moon’s Backside” (the title is an apocryphal description of the city by Jean-Paul Sartre). Here Buchanan shows the city as a futuristic ruin; the floors of its marble museum are pools of stagnant water; raw sewage pours from newly built apartments; low-income housing flats look like prison cells; the Free City is a slum” (Williams: 122).

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Marília Librandi Rocha

tally, in his first speech in office Lula evokes the “old new story”3 of Brazil as the country of the next millennium, and declares, “hoje é o dia do reencontro do Brasil consigo mesmo” (“today is the day that Brazil finds itself once again”). Once the future seems to have arrived in the country as a real possibility and not only a dream, how does one consider the inadequacy between the time and the desires that have defined the country in its intimate connection with the sentiment of saudade? Would Brazil no longer be the land of the promised future, but of the present-day achievement? What happens, then, with this impulse toward the future when the future arrives and meets us face to face? In her excellent study, João Guimarães Rosa and Saudade, Susana Kampf Lages highlights a similar notion of “futurity” associated with saudade (in the analyses of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry by Jorge de Sena, for example), as well as the performative (and non-essentialist) aspect of the word in LusoBrazilian literary texts. In her analysis of Guimarães Rosa’s novella Dão-Lalalão, saudade as “agent of temporalities” (70) is complexified: in the present, we feel saudades of a primordial past that may possibly be reencountered in the future. It is thus “an evanescent saudade that brings up remains of pleasure felt long ago” (67). In this case, she writes, “Saudade functions as the leftover mourning for a primordial time of unlimited pulsation, creating the motion capable of conciliating in a possible future beauty and good with the dark and unformed” (67). It is precisely a variant of this “evanescent saudade” associated with mourning and hope of rebirth that I find enacted in the two stories that open and close the book Primeiras Estórias. Before I begin a more careful reading of the stories highlighting the idea of a “temporal landscape”, it is necessary to describe briefly the terms sertão, gerais and cerrado and the way these are incorporated in Guimarães Rosa’s writing and transformed when the city of Brasilia arrives.

SERTÃO, a Place of Paradox The name sertão derives from the noun desertão (big desert), and has been used since colonization “to name the bush or the non-colonized space, far from the seaside villages” (Hansen). It is part of the Gerais or

3. “Old New Story” (“Nova Velha Estória”) is the subtitle of Guimarães Rosa’s short story “Fita Verde no Cabelo”.

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‘General Backland’, a wide region in Central-western and Northeastern Brazil where the land is sparsely occupied by pastoral economic activities. As we can read in the opening pages of Rosa’s masterpiece Grande Sertão Veredas: “The sertão describes itself: it is where the grazing lands have no fences; where you can keep going ten, fifteen leagues without coming upon a single house; where a criminal can safely hide out, beyond the reach of the authorities. ... The surrounding lands are the gerais. These gerais are endless. ... The sertão is everywhere” (1963: 4). What is important to retain is that the sertão is a paradoxical place: instead of being a central part of Brazil’s map, it is a marginal space, for in Brazilian history and imagination it represents an obscure and uncivilized place that separates coastal peoples from people in the “interior”. The word “interior” carries the important idea that sertão is something that remains exterior to reason, the “sertão is inside ourselves” (Rosa 1967), and it is better understood as the space of Brazil’s unconscious, which explains its enormous importance in Brazilian literature. At the same time, the name of the undergrowth vegetation that covers this space cerrado is also synonymous of fechado (closed), but it is used to designate this open space that is impossible to close or fully interpret. As highlighted by the most important readers of Guimarães Rosa, in his fiction the sertão is enlarged to encompass the whole world.4 Remembering that his fiction belongs to the post-1945 era (his first book, Sagarana, was published in 1946), we can affirm that the effects of World War II are latent in this space called the sertão. At the same time, the building of Brasilia was also a Brazilian answer to this moment: “[Brasilia] appealed particularly to Europe, where for a large section of the architectural profession it represented everything that was desired but could not yet be achieved in a continent still suffering from the after-effects of the Second World War” (Williams: 95). Brasilia was built to develop and civilize the “interior” space of the sertão. This was precisely the plan of Lúcio Costa in his Report of a Pilot Plan for Brasilia: “Founding a city in the wilderness is a deliberate act of conquest, a gesture after the manner of the pioneering colonial tradition ... its foundation will lead, later, to the planned development of the whole region” (quoted in Niemeyer). Thus in the Brazilian sertão one of the largest architectural

4. See especially Antonio Candido (1978) and Cavalcanti Proença (1958) among Guimarães Rosa’s first readers, and more recently the analyses proposed by Finnazi-Agrò (2001) and Bolle (2004).

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Marília Librandi Rocha

projects of modern times took shape, a “JK’s Greece” as filmmaker Glauber Rocha called it (10), or as Angel Rama suggested, the “most fabulous dream of a city that Americans were capable of ” (23), a cause for marvel and admiration the world over. Williams describes it well: The city’s inauguration was an event on a global scale. The pope offered a special Mass by radio; 150,000 people crowded into the city; and 38 tons of fireworks were detonated. […]. It was the culmination of an extraordinary adventure in which a new city of half a million was created from scratch, in a zone of unpromising upland scrub where few had even ventured, let alone set up home. (Williams: 95)

As Holston observes, “To understand the intentions of building Brasilia, it is first necessary to see the city as the acropolis of an enormous expanse of emptiness” (3). This emptiness will be existentially and metaphysically represented in Guimarães Rosa’s fiction.

First Stories It took a sharp critic such as Luiz Costa Lima, in the heat of the first release of Primeiras Estórias in 1962, to write a review of the book in the year following its publication that interprets the title, Primeiras Estórias, associating it with the new moment of Brazilian history and Brasilia construction: “These are the first stories of a new Brazil beginning to emerge. … The reality of the gerais is being modified and Guimarães Rosa announces this change” (500). This was a period of optimism in which Brazil seemed able to modernize and at the same time maintain its pre-industrial ways of life (Mammi). The two stories in Primeiras Estórias are thus set during a new time, and on the border between sertão and city. It is precisely this simultaneous connection and opposition between a planned city and the sertão that is dealt with in these two short stories. The construction of the futuristic city of Brasilia in the middle of the backlands known as the sertão created a temporal conflict between the preservation of the environment and the leap into the future. My hypothesis is precisely that this time collision (past preservation and projected future in the present) together with the spatial collision (city-sertão) are the roots of the feeling of saudade understood as a “temporal landscape”. Thus, to think of saudade as a “temporal landscape” means understanding the relationship between this intimate feeling with physical movements in space and

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the passing of time. As we will see in the stories of Guimarães Rosa, saudade is a feeling that involves both the movement of the body in space and the movement of time in the body. In his foundational essay, “The Anthropology of Saudade”, Roberto DaMatta shows how the word saudade acquired a performative aspect in Luso-Brazilian culture. If the feeling of nostalgia is universal, in Luso-Brazilian culture, saudade is something that one learns to feel before any experience of loss or departure. Thus it is possible to feel saudades for what we have never lived, but have only heard of, and we also learn to feel saudades for saudade itself (for example, when a loved one returns from a trip it is possible to feel saudades for the saudade that we felt in their absence). What I would like to highlight in DaMatta’s acute reading is the definition of saudade as an internalized time. In the case of Guimarães Rosa, as we will see, this internal time of saudade appears intimately related to space that is also experienced and thought of as “inside of us”. I thus suggest the term “temporal landscape” as a precise phrase for understanding the space-time configuration of saudade in the writings of Guimarães Rosa. In both stories, a small boy travels to see the big city being built, taken by his Uncle and Aunt.5 The boy is thus plucked from his maternal home to see the new space of the fatherland. The voyage from one place to another is by small plane. Traveling in the sky, flying over the city under construction, is seen in parallel to the apparition of birds that the child admires: in the first story, a peacock with its exceedingly beautiful tail; in the second story, a toucan that appears every morning high in a tree. The airplane flight is associated by the readers of Guimarães Rosa with the design of the city of Brasília, which itself imitates the shape of an airplane or a bird. In Williams’ words, “The [pilot] plan is still startlingly clear from the air, resonating with primal imagery: it is a bird, an aeroplane, a tree, or the sign of the cross, depending on whose account you read” (95). This aerial imagery in Brasilia’s design is a clear trace of Le Corbusier, the architect who incorporated aerial visuals in the creation of modern architecture and who in 1929 flew over Rio de Janeiro and designed a tunnel connect-

5. The importance of uncles and aunts in the symbolic economy of Guimarães Rosa’s stories is similar to the economy of kinship relations of the Amerindian indigenous tribes and their system of cunhadismo (from Portuguese cunhado “brother in law”), which makes the so-called “regionalism” of Guimarães Rosa an “indianism” present in the roots of the sertão universe (Viveiros de Castro 2008: 246-247; Finnazi-Agró 2001).

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ing the coast to the sertão (interior) of the city (Morshed), just as Brasilia was built to install the developed civilization of the coast in the broad, not yet fully colonized space of the sertão interior. Neither the child’s age nor the places are referenced explicitly, just as no character has a name. This lack of specificity is responsible for the leap from the local to the cosmic, characteristic of the universalizing literature of Guimarães Rosa. Writing about the Brazilian sertão and about the city of Brasilia, the local and historic aspects are eliminated so that the story is presented with a latent universality, potentially happening in any place on Earth.

The Bounds of Happiness As noted previously, a small boy travels by plane for the first time to the place where the big city was being built, “It was a journey conceived in the glow of happiness”, similar to a dream. This trip through the skies comes with heightened emotions, joy and hope, and is comparable to growing in time and getting larger in space: “A swelling, as it were, and a feeling of release – as sure as the act of breathing – so was this flight into the blank space” (21). The blank space is made up of clouds in the sky that play an important role in the economy of images in Guimarães Rosa’s work (Librandi Rocha). The blank space is also the paper upon which the pilot plan is drawn up, the cartography of the newly planned city. The blank space is also the space of the sertão waiting to be written, designed, colonized, civilized. The blank space is, above all, the open potential not yet occupied and it is a space of passage “to the mobile world” (Rosa: 3). When he arrives at his uncle’s house, what attracts the boy is the yard, the space between the house and the forest that surrounds it. In other words what attracts the boy is not the city being built, but the place where human habitation borders on plant and animal habitat: “a short clearing out of the trees, for they’re not allowed indoors. Tall trees, lianas and little yellow orchids dangling from them. Could it be that Indians, wildcat, the lion, wolves, and hunters would come out of there? No, just sounds. First one bird – then others – with songs that went on and on. And it was this that unlocked his heart” (22, 23). It is in this space, in a clearing between the house’s yard and the surrounded forest, that an imperial peacock appears with his imposing tail, “Handsome, so handsome! He had a warmth, a power about him, and

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something flower-like, brimming over” (23). The Little Boy sees this apparition for only a brief moment, for then they call him to visit the place where the city was being built: “He’d only been allowed to have it for one great, fleeting, lingering moment” (24). The intensity of this vision is paradoxically “great” and “fleeting” as a moment of epiphany. Thus, in the same way that the space in Rosa’s text leaps from the local to the universal and from universal to cosmic, this shortest instant of time lasts an eternity. On the journey by jeep through the gerais, the boy, like a small Adam, “said the name of each thing” he saw. But he only thought of the peacock when he would return home “waiting in store for him in the yard, in the clearing out of the wild woods” (24). For the boy, the city is the peacock; the novelty is not in the city being built, in the work of men, but in the presence of this animal from the cerrado, in the clearing between the house and the forest, such that for him the greatness of the city is the beauty of the peacock: “This big city would be the tallest in the world. He [the peacock] was unfurling himself, puffing out, bursting open, swelling up ...” (24). Upon returning home, the Boy runs to see the peacock again: “So – where? Just a few feathers, some remains, on the ground. – “Oh dear, it’s got killed. Isn’t it your birthday tomorrow, sir?” The indirect speech that dominated the narrative gives way to this short dialogue. The violence of this rupture in style is similar to the shock of the traumatic news that the cook gives the boy: the peacock was killed for the celebration of the Uncle’s birthday the next day. “The eternity and certainty went out of everything; in a puff, in a flash, you were robbed of the loveliest things. ... In the insignificant seed of a minute, the Little Boy had absorbed a milligram of death” (25). Without the peacock the city loses its charm and is only seen with “grief, sorrow and disillusionment” (25). What he sees now is the world of “bulldozers, dumper trucks, steam-rollers”, and the cutting down of trees: “He was discovering how other adversities were possible in the world of machines, in the hostile space between” (25).

An Evanescent SAUDADE If it had ended here, the story could be read as a parable or allegory for the destruction of nature by the city. But the text advances and closes with a new joy. The boy sees the blinking of a firefly in the night. The fleeting glow in the forest reawakens hope and the movement between win-

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ning and losing, as well as the passage between the day and “the coming of the night ... ever and patiently thus, everywhere”. The tiny firefly flies like the plane that brought the boy to the city and concentrates in miniature the movement of the story, its passage from local to global to cosmic in the variation between day and night, life and death, light and darkness (“ever… and everywhere”), as well as the trajectory of the boy placed in the bounds of an evanescent saudade. The word saudade appears in the text in the moment after the peacock’s death. The Boy doesn’t want to go back “there”, to the clearing anymore because “there was an abandoned longing (saudade) an uncertain remorse. Not even he knew exactly. His little thoughts were still in the hieroglyphic stage” (4). A child cannot recognize or decipher precisely what he or she feels: longing (saudade), abandonment, uncertainty, remorse. This confusion of emotions has no translation in our alphabet because the boy’s thoughts were “in the hieroglyphic stage”, in other words, in a time before the Phoenician alphabet was created in which signs become an arbitrary union between a signal and a sound. In the hieroglyphic phase, what is written is “sacred”, not only because it was destined to be inscribed on monuments and temples, but because its design was the image of the thing expressed. Thus, in Rosa’s stories, I can say that saudade appears as a hieroglyphic feeling in the sense that the marks of the landscape incorporate the passage of time, and the loss of what existed but is no longer. The clearing, site of enchantment and joy, is now the site of mourning and loss, which coincides with the abandonment of the place where city and forest communicate, the borders between them.

Treetops In the last story in the book, the Boy returns to the city, but the journey is a sad one now because his Mother is sick and “they were sending him away” back to the city. Afraid of losing his mother, “the Little Boy was there deep inside himself, in some little corner of himself ” (30). When he looks at the clouds, “ephemeral sculptures” (30), the sight is a somber one: “black fish were flying past in the air, beyond those clouds, for sure: backs and claws. The Little Boy suffered in stifled silence” (31). When the boy is in the airplane, the movement through aerial space opens up a complex reflection on temporality: at the same time that the movement of the flight seems stopped in the air (“as if it were standing still”), it seems that “life never stopped”, and that happiness “only came in brief

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moments”. In other words, the Boy leaves for the city, but his wish is to return to his mother, “backwards”, to when he was happy and she was free of illness. But time past does not return and the trip away is the path of distance and imminent loss: “Even if you wanted it to, nothing could stop, or go back to what you knew, and liked” (32). The little boy’s feelings are thus suspended (or stopped in the middle of this contradiction) in a space-time conflict that differs from his wishes. It is precisely this suspended/stopped movement that could also serve as an image of the feeling of saudade: in his present inside the airplane, the little boy felt saudades for the past and saudades for a better future on a trip that seems stopped (or suspended) between these different directions. When he gets to the city, the Boy is illuminated by elevated and clear thoughts. At this point, a concept of the relationship between beauty and temporality is presented as part of the child’s thoughts (“as if he were able to copy into his mind a grownup’s ideas”) (32). And what the Boy thinks is: “you could never, properly, enjoy the things that happened, not even the nice or the good ones” because “they came quickly”, when “you weren’t even ready for them”. Or else they were expected, but then they didn’t taste as good, they were just a pale imitation. “Or else, because other things, the bad ones, kept on coming from all sides ... Or else because there were still other things missing” (32). The difficulty resides in their duration too: “even when they were happening, you knew they were already moving on and would end up ground down, crumbled away to nothing by the hours that passed ...” (33). This is another excellent example of how Guimarães Rosa could be read as a writer of saudade located in this disjunction between expectations and reality. At daybreak, another bird appears, a toucan “splendidly suspended” (171). It is an apparition that, like a miracle, makes the boy believe in the possibility of his mother’s recovery. For a month the toucan returns each day at dawn while “those thousands and thousands of men were working ever so hard to make the big city” (35). Finally, a telegram arrives with the news that his mother is well, healed, and that the boy can return home. Now “The bird’s flight was occupying a bigger and bigger place within him” (37).

An Aerial SAUDADE The story ends with the boy back in the airplane, on a return trip home far away from the city being built. Upon returning home where his

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Mother has finally recovered, the Boy wishes to stay in the airplane. When the Uncle tells him the trip is over, he says “– ‘Oh, no. Not yet ...’ (39): “In this meanwhile he lingered in his longing [saudade], still loyal to the things back there [in the city]. The toucan and the the things down below, but everything, too, from those days that had been so much worse ... all that was growing more rarefied, now, in the near-blue of his imagining. Life really never did stop” (38). The boy now misses “there,” “where people and things were always coming and going. ... A landscape, everything a frame can’t contain” (39). Without wanting to stop the voyage, and the continual coming and going, the Boy now wishes to stay in the “meanwhile”, in this aerial space, where saudade is lived as a continuous state in-between, high up: neither here nor there. During the trip, he feels saudade for what was left behind and for what is ahead in time and space. Saudade in this case protects one from the contingencies of the here and now, launching one backwards or forwards, taking one up into the air or in an aerial transcendence. It is precisely this raising oneself above contingency that the city of Brasilia represents. In sociological terms analysts show that the removal of the capital from Rio de Janeiro to the central plains of Brazil was an excellent strategy for distancing the government from the pressure of the population, whose education and dissent were growing. This departure also favored the union of capitalist interests with agrarian business in the development of the country, holding back or delaying even more the clamor for agrarian reform and the fair distribution of wealth.6 On the other hand, in the Brazilian imagination, the departure to the blank space of the central plains reinstated the gesture of founding a time/temple (remembering that the pilot plan is rooted in the “monumental”), a transcendental time in a space that is not only atypical but also a-topic and utopian. In Luis Alberto Brandão Santos’ beautiful description: “The desire to orbit in empty space, free of references, unrestricted space, suited for total independence in flight. Space without pre-determined paths, where it is movement that creates the trail. Searching the high elevations, a non-space is found, a utopia free of contingencies where one can inhabit the space of desire itself ”.

6. For an analysis of these aspects of Brasilia in relation to Grande Sertão:Veredas, see Bolle (311-320).

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The Temporal Landscape of Intimacy As clearly stated by Costa Lima, “what Rosa’s story does is think of the world from the inside” (512). By rejecting the division between inner and outer worlds, and by not reproducing the dichotomy between nature and humanity, the concept of landscape proposed by Tim Ingold fits perfectly to understand the invented world of Guimarães Rosa: “through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it” (152). Ingold establishes a distinction between space (a disembodied apprehension of place present for example in a cartographic view) and landscape (as a living and embodied place). The difference between space and landscape, he suggests, is similar to a difference between bodily perception and mental recognition. On one hand, we have an “intimate connection to landscape” by moving through it (“the landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them” (156). On the other hand, we have the cartographer’s or surveyor’s job devoted to representing space “by taking an aerial or ‘bird’s-eye’ view”, in order to produce a picture “of the world as it could be directly apprehended only by a consciousness capable of being everywhere at once and nowhere in particular” (155). The plan of Brasilia was designed precisely through mimicking “an aerial or bird’s-eye view”. The short stories of Guimarães Rosa, nonetheless, transform this distant point of observation into an internally lived experience. The bird’s flight inhabited the Boy, it was “inside him”. Thus, when Guimarães Rosa portrays a child travelling in an airplane for the first time to see the city (that has the shape of a bird/airplane) and then connects this child’s experience to the beauty of a bird, he is transforming the space of the projected city from an outside/exterior apprehension into an internal, embodied perspective. In this movement he subverts the projected intentions of Brasilia: the futuristic city of concrete, which appears as a frozen place not made for human lives, becomes inhabited by birds and trees that are being expelled by the millions of men working there. In other words, he transforms a disembodied space into a lived landscape that corresponds to the mingling of city-sertão represented by the clearing where the peacock used to live and where he was killed. In Rosa’s stories, Brasilia is not separated from the environment such as was intended in its plan, which is devoted to creating new social relations by producing a rupture with the geographical and historical past. Rosa’s text shows that there is no human agency dissociated from environ-

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ment. This environment is the sertão, and Rosa’s stories show the process of this change and its dangers. His texts bring to readers the experience of the environment, the sounds and colors of the birds, the sun, the trees, the non-human world in intimate relationship with the human world. The boy grows as the city grows, and has to learn to lose the more immediate contact with nature around him. The sadness of this separation is that there is no way to advance without loss. This is the dilemma of Brazil today: will we be capable of taking care of the beauty that resides in the clearings, on the borders of what we call civilization, and which today the planet depends on? The game played in Rosa’s stories is thus the greatest game played in Brazil today: cultivating the culture of the city with its lights (intellectual, electric and technological), and snuffing out the darkness of the sertão, understood as a specific landscape and a place with an imagery. It is interesting to note that Brazil today is in the hands of “mothers” (Dilma Roussef, president-elect, and Marina Silva, presidential candidate after being Environmental Minister), which gives greater present-day relevance to the analogy between the child and the country. Guimarães Rosa suggested learning both meanings of growing: losses and saudades. Via an allegorical process created by a growing union of analogies, the boy is the growing Brazil, learning to lose and win continuously; the boy in the plane has the same aerial design as the city under construction, in the transition between countryside and city, the past and the future, life and death, in which joy, fusion and fullness last only an instant, fleeting and fragile. It is here that saudade as “temporal landscape” is delineated as a feeling intimately related to the space inhabited and time lived. Tim Ingold is also responsible for the conceptualization of landscape as temporality: “To perceive the landscape is ... to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past” (153). This is precisely what is at stake in Rosa’s “The Bounds of Happiness” and “Treetops” stories. The state of aerial suspension is what the boy desires and it is the space in which Rosa’s stories are set, between the sertão and the city, the third margin; like the space in which Brazil is situated. A space of potentials, the suspension is also the state of saudade’s time. On one hand, saudade is the effect of destruction (of the peacock, of the trees, the announced death of the cerrado); on the other hand, saudade is the inescapable emotion a child learns and from which he cannot and does not want to be free. A hiero-

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glyphic emotion, in which the sertão-city landscape represents an archetypal and archeological time projected into the future. The landscape of the sertão may be being buried by the pastures of industrial agriculture and by sojeira (a conjunction of the words [soy]) and sujeira [filth]) (Viveiros de Castro 2008: 243) that are afflicting the country. Its signs however are signaled and incorporated in Guimarães Rosa’s text. Whereas the sertão/ cerrado is disappearing as a geographical site due to devastation, slashing and burning, it endures and persists in the Brazilian imagination, and what we know about it is what has been described and invented by authors like Rosa. He has configured for us and for future readers a temporal landscape that could become a ruin or that could be reborn as part of the collective history of Brazil.

The Come Back of the Province. Giovannino Guareschi’s PETITS RÉCITS as Postwar TERZA VIA Joan Ramon Resina

In Mondo Piccolo, Giovanni Guareschi’s collection of stories about postwar Italy, there is a passage in which Peppone, mayor of il Boscaio and leader of the local section of the Italian Communist party, wants to call a general strike and is reminded by his comrade Brusco that cows need to be fed and milked. And if you milk them, says Brusco, you can’t throw the milk away, so the dairy factory must remain open. “This is the curse of agricultural regions!”, bursts out Peppone. “In the city it is easy to organize a general strike! Close the factories and offices and good night. It is hardly necessary to milk the machines! And even after fifteen days of strike nothing happens because all you have to do is set the machines in motion and they work. Whereas if you let a cow pop no one can get it going again” (197-98). And so Peppone grudgingly admits that reality will always beat ideology. Peppone is the sympathetic caricature of a former partigiano intent on carrying out a soviet revolution from within Italy’s traditional institutions. The contradiction plays itself out when, on occasion, he splits his public persona and as leader of the Communist party overrules the town council in a splendid exhibition of democratic protocol. Peppone’s Nemesis is Don Camillo, a gun-wielding priest who personifies la Reazione and argues sophistically with the crucifix in the church of his small parish. There is hardly a more poignant commentary on postwar Italian politics than these lively sketches of small town life drawn sine ira et dissimulatio. Critics do not need to make a judgement of intentions, because

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Guareschi declares outright that his stories take place in a specific political climate precisely situated between December 1946 and December 1947, that is, in the immediate dopoguerra and the period leading to the decisive elections of April 18, 1948. Furthermore, he labels these tales journalistic chronicles, although the stories are made up, and for this reason, he claims, all the more realistic (x). We do not have to take this self-assessment at face value, though every critic accepts Guareschi’s account of the origin of the Don Camillo stories in an editorial emergency. A gap had to be filled in an issue of Candido that was due at the printing shop. But if we accept the notion that Guareschi’s political parody is a statement on postwar dilemmas, we can then hazard some provisional hypotheses about the long-term implications of the conflicts of those years. Specifically, I am interested in the renewed relevance of writers like Guareschi, who were judged, under pressure of the circumstances, as if the critical verdict could itself resolve the social dilemmas their writing exposed. In a world that has forged ahead beyond the dichotomies of the postwar, it becomes possible to search in the mid-century for answers to questions that were not yet posed and could not be posed as long as the future hung in the balance between those dichotomies. Can we now discern, in Guareschi’s parody of the political stalemate, a capacity to look beyond the ideological deadlock? Is his irony relevant to the world that crystallized with the fall of the Berlin wall? In other words, does his humorous reflection on the first dopoguerra contain the seeds of significance for the dopoguerra that was ushered in by the end of the Cold War? In 1945, Italy, like most of Europe, was in ruins. Not only were its historical cities reduced to rubble, the state was too. France, Italy, Germany, even the “neutral” Spain, lay in material and moral degradation. The formidable expansion of Soviet power made Communism the great beneficiary of the war. After 1944, French Communists, who opposed the war in 1939-40, were posing as the biggest contributors to the war sacrifices, calling themselves parti des fusilés.1 Under the pretext of punishing collaborators, they liquidated most of their enemies. This allowed the Parti Communiste to emerge from the war as the largest and most influential of the French political parties, increasing its vote from 1.5 million in

1. While the party claimed 75,000 Communist had fallen in the resistance, the official French figure for the total killed under the Occupation was 29,660, and the Communists never produced the names of more than 176 Communist martyrs (Johnson: 588).

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1936 to over 5 million in 1945 and 5.5 million in 1946. In the late 40s, the French Communist Party had 900,000 dues-paying members. Under the leadership of Maurice Thorez, the party created its own society within French society, complete with its own media and culture industry (Johnson: 588-89). In Spain, during the Civil War, the Communist party, marginal before 1936, grew in direct proportion to the Republic’s dependence on Soviet arms. By the end of the war, Communists were in charge of the Republican army and key government posts. During the dictatorship, their efficiency as underground organization made them hegemonic in the Spanish left well into the 1970s. Spanish Communism won the ideological battle all the more easily in that Christian Democracy, which in Italy functioned as anti-Communist bulwark, was smothered by national Catholicism, the Spanish form of Catholic aggiornamento. But ideology aside, the true victory, from a social point of view, was the incorporation of Spain to the West through the transformation of an agricultural subsistence economy into a consumer society. This achievement was the work neither of Fascists nor Communists but of so-called technocrats, Catholic economists who were responsible for the compromise between liberal economy and political dictatorship that characterized Francoism in the 1960s. In Spain, the longevity of the dictatorship allowed the dichotomy Fascism/anti-Fascism to overstay its historical relevance, disguising the fact that Spain’s recovery followed a similar, though more tortuous path, to that of the leading continental nations. Not coincidentally, the three men who, more than anyone else, were responsible for the economic miracles of their countries, Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, and Charles de Gaulle were pre-totalitarian figures, that is, representatives of an older world order. They were called upon to democratize their respective states even though democracy was not for them an end in itself but a means to a higher ideal. For De Gasperi the ideal was a Catholic society, while Adenauer saw in the Christian ethic a guarantee that collectivism would not crush the individual. A federal country with a modest capital on the Rhine, at the meeting point between Germany and the Western democracies, was for him the condition for the eventual consolidation of European strength under the leadership of a German-French alliance. Historically, the Rhine had been the axis of romanization in central Europe, and Adenauer saw it as the guarantee against the renewed Prussianization of German life. De Gaulle also placed democracy second in his order of priorities. Of the three great leaders of post-war

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times, he was the only one for whom the nation was an absolute concept. De Gaulle, like Adenauer, and to a lesser extent De Gasperi, believed that history is essentially determined by geography, a view that Albert Sorel had championed in L’Europe et la Révolution française (1885). Emphasis on geography meant for de Gaulle that France had Carolingian roots and thus a common history with the Germans. That common history, far from being anachronistic, could be renewed in the hour of Europe’s need, when Soviet power had deprived Germany of its non-Carolingian additions. France could now embrace as an ally a Germany that had moved its axis back to the Romanized Rhineland. When de Gaulle described his meeting with Adenauer at the château at Colombey-les-deux-églises on 14 September 1958 as “the historic encounter between this old Frenchman and this very old German” (Johnson 598), he was not referring to the advanced age of the German Chancellor. Adenauer, wrote de Gaulle, was “imbued with a sense of the complementary nature of the Gauls and the Teutons which once fertilized the presence of the Roman Empire on the Rhine” (Johnson: 598). In this view the Rhine emerged as the geographic condition of a longue-durée to which both de Gaulle and Adenauer considered themselves tributaries. Traditionalist at heart, both statesmen were futuristic in their vision of a supranational European structure that, to become possible, required the modernization of their countries. De Gaulle loved provincial France and yet he undertook a deep transformation of the economy, eliminating three quarters of the peasant-based agriculture while encouraging industrialization. Without these changes, German industrial efficiency could turn France into a market for German-produced goods. The scale of the task can be gauged by considering that in the early fifties France had one industrial worker for every agricultural worker. About half the working population lived in rural or semi-rural communes. Changing this ratio involved a social upheaval of enormous proportions. Tilting the demographic scale in favor of the city produced what Henri Lefébvre called the urban revolution. In postwar Italy, as in France, Communism was able to capitalize on the prestige of the resistance. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly of 1945 Communists took 18.9 per cent of the vote, against 20.7 for the Socialists, which gave their combined vote a majority of 39.6 per cent, but were defeated separately by the Christian Democratic Party led by De Gasperi. Then in January 1947 the Social Democrats split from the Marxist Socialists, allowing De Gasperi to form a Christian Democratic government and win the first elections under the new Constitu-

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tion in April 1948, with 48.5 of the vote and an absolute majority of the seats, inaugurating the so-called De Gasperi era. During the 8 years from 1945 to 1953, Italy obtained political stability and solid economic development, accepting the Marshall Plan, becoming a member of NATO and the Council of Europe, and entering the European Coal and Steel Community, which was the kernel of what would later be the European Economic Community. Under the aegis of Christian Democracy, Italy was beginning to create the kind of material culture which the Futurists had envisioned as indivisible from war and dictatorship. De Gasperi was not only the opposite of Mussolini but also a natural alternative to the statism advocated by the Communists. He was a Catholic who put religion first, patriotism second, and democracy third, in the order of Don Camillo’s priorities. But if his party enjoyed political hegemony for twenty years, the cultural hegemony belonged to the Communists since the publication, between 1948 and 1951, of Gramsci’s Quaderni dal carcere. Thus, in postwar Europe, the convergence of urbanization, industrialization, and ideological reinforcement of Socialism and Communism contrasted with the ascendancy of Christian Democracy, i.e., with a form of political conservatism that was responsible for the modernization of the countries that became the core of the European Economic Community. This paradox would not begin to unravel until the 1980s with the collapse of Communism, the urban crisis, and the suspicion that modernity had run its course. A significant inflection took place, however, in the 1960s as a result of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the 1968 student movement, but this far-reaching contestation of traditionalism portended nothing so much as the demise of Communism. By the mid 60s the revolution had become a utopian proposition in the West. An increasingly affluent society could no longer be politically radicalized; any challenge had to aim at its moral fiber. Without purporting to undertake a political analysis of this long period, I would like, however, to suggest that the stakes in the contest between Realpolitik and ideology were as much a consequence of the war as of the challenges of the Cold War. The outcome of the war forced the contenders to revise the premises that had led them into conflict, as typically happens in postwar times according to Peter Sloterdijk. Under pressure from competition, says Sloterdijk, cultures need to face the consequences of their conflicts with other groups and to incorporate those consequences into their group memory (16). He cites Heiner Mühlman, who speaks of a post-stress relaxation phase and self-testing of the combatants in the shad-

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ow of stress. As the ideological polarization relaxes after a war, the former contenders revise the usefulness of their cultural premises in light of the outcome. Winners tend to interpret the result as a sign to reinforce their outlook and behavior, while losers face the need to investigate the reasons for their failure (17). If losers reach the conclusion that they were defeated not only by the strength of the rival but also by their own incongruity with the objective situation, they then revise or entirely discard the nuclear component of their locally binding norms and way of life. In the case of France the magic transformation of the defeat of 1940 into the victory of 1945 permitted the country to be tolerated at the table of the winners, thus creating a political dichotomy based on an evasion of the facts. On the one hand there was Charles de Gaulle impersonating France and claiming victory for an army that was assembled in time for the triumphal march into Paris on 25 August, 1944. On the other hand, there was a left that, if one believed the Communists, had won the war at the side of the Red army. The hermeneutic struggle for hegemony of the French “victory” continued well into the postwar. The retired General, on being asked by André Malraux, his former minister and a former resistance fighter, why hadn’t he given greater credit to the resistance in metropolitan France in his wartime speeches, answered lamely “I gave it a great role”. Malraux insisted: “In 1944 or ’45 when a journalist asked you where the First Army’s underground forces got their weapons, you said, ‘From Africans discouraged by the winter, and from the Americans’. But there were the arms we took from the Germans: the submachine guns from the Alsace-Lorraine brigade on exhibit in the Strasbourg museum are German”. And de Gaulle dodged again: “I suppose I wasn’t aware of that at the time” (Malraux: 46). Perhaps he was not aware of it because he saw himself as the crystallization of all patriotic energies: “I was the Resistance of France against Germany” (Malraux: 47). Placing France on a false footing with regard to its status as a victorious power helped it to avoid revising its cultural premises with anything near the urgency of its neighbors. “Not being aware at the time” also meant that de Gaulle could ignore the overlap between his modernization of the French economy and that initiated effectively by Pétain. But Italy and Germany had no occasion to ignore the dismal consequences of their attempts to remake world history. The unambiguous collapse of the fascist regimes precluded a Gaullist-type solution, leaving the door open for non-nationalist leaders like Adenauer and De Gasperi, whose engagement with Christianity was at once a correction of the pagan premises of

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the fascist ideology and an alternative to Hegelian models of historical progress. Culturally, postwar Italy opposed a sobering view of the present to the grandiloquent historicism of the pre-war, consumed in films like Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) or in the cinema of Enrico Guazzoni. The sobering begins with Roma, città aperta, a film that shows the consequences of Italy’s imperial delusions and corresponds to the revision of cultural premises by a fleetingly fascist Rossellini who emerged a Christian Democrat from the war. Roma, città aperta is often considered the source of neorealism, but I would suggest that in foregrounding the figure of don Pietro as martyr of the Gestapo, it points to the role of Christian spirituality alongside the Communist-led resistance in the restoration of the Italian state. From the same period as Rossellini’s masterpiece, Guareschi’s small world is perhaps the most explicit attempt to close the historical tragedy that had opened with the march on Rome, that is, with the execution of Marinettian actionism in full d’Annunzian theatricality. In Mondo piccolo we find again the pair Manfredi and Don Pietro in non-tragic garb in the characters of Don Camillo and Peppone. The two have fought shoulder to shoulder in the resistance, but unlike Rossellini’s heroes, they have survived Fascism and now vie for hegemony in irreconcilable struggle that is always arbitrated and often resolved by the strength of tradition. Tradition is, for Guareschi, not merely the store of collectively acquired habits but a spiritual reserve of mankind’s adaptation to the environment, a millennial process in danger of being disrupted through arbitrary intervention. Communism, modernism, capitalism; to him it is all the same hubris seeking to undo the slow, cosmic work of nature, of which man is but a part intent on subjecting the whole. Guareschi’s idealism, responsible for the happy endings of his stories, is not a humanism. Men are incapable, by their own lights alone, of remedying the catastrophes they call upon themselves. But the solution is only apparently metaphysical. Under the mantle of religion, Guareschi advances a theory of proportions, a natural balance symbolized by the river that both gives life to the region and threatens to destroy it with its rising waters. This natural “philosophy” is contained in his categorical distinction between a river and a road. “It is impossible to compare a river with a road because roads belong to history and rivers to geography” (x). Guareschi was interested in permanence, and this led him to place value on the physical conditions that shape the human spirit. “History is not made by men: men undergo history just as they undergo geography. And history is in fact a function of geography”

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(x). Humans, he suggests, intervene in nature at their own risk, just as they forget the supreme court of their conscience, which haunts them in unexpected ways. “Men seek to correct geography perforating mountains and diverting the course of rivers, and doing so they are under the illusion of changing the course of history, but they don’t change anything, because one fine day everything will go topsy-turvy. And the waters will engulf the bridges, will break the dams, and flood the mines; houses and palaces and hovels will crumble and the grass will grow over the ruins and everything will go back to the ground. And survivors will have to fight the beasts with stones and history will start all over again. The usual story” (xi). After two world wars and a devastating dictatorship, Italians were on the point of starting history all over again. According to Norberto Bobbio, two conceptions, liberalism and communism, vied for ascendancy within the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale. One of these, interpreting fascism as an exclusively political phenomenon, emphasized its dictatorial aspect and considered the struggle against it as a struggle to restore liberty. The other, seeing in fascism not just a dictatorship but also a bourgeois dictatorship, considered the struggle against it as a struggle to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie (cit. de Mattei 55). Bobbio does not even mention Catholic thought among anti-Fascist positions, and de Mattei considers that this omission permits us to conclude that in the ideology of Bobbio’s party, the Partito d’Azione, Catholicism was not seen as alternative to but as complicit with Fascism (57). Bobbio’s actionistic party, based on the ideals of the resistance, expected to draw from this historical experience the energies necessary for the Italian revolution. It was a typical case of the winner’s affirmation of his cultural premises, but the revolutionary expectations failed to materialize. The azionistas had misread the sense of the antifascist struggle and failed to grasp the pre-political reasons for the failure of fascism, in a way that Ignazio Silone, for instance, did not. In their profound knowledge of human dependence on the land and ownership of the land, Silone’s peasants cannot be enlisted in the cause of the revolution, nor are they seduced by fascism. Their world is ruled by time, not human will. The contadini are skeptics and materialists who nonetheless bow to magic and superstition. To them religion means something tangible; the state is an abstract concept graspable only in its embodiments: the tax collector and the carabinieri that enforce the evictions. The Catholic thinker Augusto del Noce saw fascism and anti-fascism as one single continuous project of laicization which, through the grams-

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cian notion of total revolution, led to nihilism. Del Noce believed that the future would not bring a compromise between liberalism and socialism, as in Bobbio’s horizon, but the conciliation of communism with capitalism in a new and more radical form of totalitarianism, which could no longer be of right or left, because it had its origin in revolutionary thought and precluded dissensus, not through physical coercion but pedagogically, through moral “persuasion”. Democracy could thus become the most radical form of totalitarianism when it lacked an ethical basis, having replaced the natural, objective order of things with a utopian, revolutionary pseudo-order (de Mattei: 64). Guareschi also saw democracy compromised by the continuity between fascism and antifascism: “I am a man who does not accept impositions from the one who has established this dictatorial democracy that has replaced the eagles – those of my compatriot Benito Mussolini, who put eagles everywhere – with castrated roosters. They must have something in common because both have wings” (cit. Morra 45-46). Del Noce’s notion of a natural order of things, which men tamper with at the price of their own ruin comes very close to Guareschi’s indictment of history. In il Boscaio, accionism, that is, attemps at modifying the village’s long-standing way of life, come across as stupidagine, as the foolishness and arrogance that blinds people to the nomos of a natural or communal balance, which in Guareschi’s homely universe always ends up asserting itself. His Rousseauan viewpoint privileges the Italy of the villagios and contadini for the simple reason that they have grown organically with the landscape. Their temporary adherence to the slogans of the Soviet revolution is as misplaced as the fascist aspiration to turn contemporary Italy into a resumption of the Roman empire. Fascism was anachronistic and communism is exotic. Rather than turn back the clock, Guareschi focuses on what remains after history has blown over, and what he finds is the Italy of peasants, traditions, intergenerational feuds, greed and generosity, of life and death sprung from the indubitable fact of the river. He knows that this reality is vanishing and awareness of this fact prevents him from adopting the ineffectual pose of the conservative. “What is there to conserve in this sort of Italy? Find me anything to conserve and I will be conservative too. But in the era of ‘Cathocommunism’ what is there to conserve? Absolutely nothing” (cit. Morra: 45). “Cathocommunism”, the compromise between history and absolute values, was abhorrent to Guareschi in that it turned the Church, namely the guarantor of tradition, into an accomplice of the political thought that twists Christian fraternity into class solidarity and class hatred. For this reason, he blasts De Gasperi when the

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leader of the Christian Democracy asserts in a speech that Jesus “two thousand years ago founded the international based on equality, on universal fraternity” (Ferrazzoli: 68). Guareschi’s privileging of the rural over the urban is part and parcel of the re-evaluation of the cultural premises that had led Italians to overestimate their historical mission. Fascism was a product of the city and an ecstasy of modernity. Correction of the one, implies Guareschi, requires correcting the other. In the city things are possible that look absurd when natural laws are taken into account. Cows disagree with a general strike, and nature, simple bios, sets limits to a human will led astray by abstract reason. A certain folly characterizes quelli della città, as urbanites are referred to in Mondo Piccolo. They irrupt into the quiet paese when the strike is over, waving banners and singing slogans with an obvious lack of purpose, and end up fatally at the tavern, where they find nothing better to do than taunt Don Camillo and get thrashed by him. Modernity is a problematic concept in Guareschi, but we would be ill-advised to draw overhasty conclusions and identify him with la Reazione, the name Peppone loves to call don Camillo and Guareschi adopts defiantly for himself. The pejorative sense that the term “reaction” acquired in modern political struggles arose out of the need to designate the action that opposed progress, and thus the existence of two agents working against each other, none of which was a priori good or bad. But the main point is that this binomial structure of political modernity is precisely modern. It became a tool of political rhetoric after the French revolution. In 1797 Benjamin Constant defined the nature of reactions, making it plain that the term was linked to the notion of human perfectibility, itself developed from the middle of the eighteenth century. Constant correlates scientific reason and the Revolution, and asserts that reason serves political progress whereas reaction is a matter of passion (Starobinski: 333-34). And indeed Peppone alludes to don Camillo as an obscurantist, reiterating a cliché from the philosophes. But Guareschi plainly thinks that the term “reaction” has used up its powder and embraces it in a subversive spirit, turning the tables on his enemies through an oxymoron that cancels the classic meaning of the word. “I am against progress and want to revive the things of the past. But I am a very relative reactionary, because the true, sinister reactionary is the one who, in the name of progress and social equality, wants to dominate a mass of advanced but uncivilized brutes” (Ferrazzoli: 200). “Reactionary” is no longer the semantic opposite of “progressive” but its synonym, from the moment that progress becomes the dominant thought and change the secular state of grace.

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To Guareschi, however, perfectibility appears a questionable notion, at least in the civilizational sense that the word obtained in the eighteenth century. Time spent in a German concentration camp during the war and his imprisonment, from May 1954 to July 1955, in the San Francesco prison in Parma as a result of the defamation lawsuit filed against him by De Gasperi, brought him face to face with the one reality he considered superior to any other, namely the individual conscience. In a published letter to his son Alberto (Candido 26 April 1963), he writes: My reasons are those of a common poor devil and are based therefore not on the authoritative opinions of illustrious thinkers, but on my modest personal observations, and this either through lack of culture or through innate peasant diffidence that leads me to trust more what I see than what others think … And so, long live reaction! (cit. Perry 190)

Peasant suspiciousness underlies this radical empiricism that refuses to pay homage to received ideas. Thus ensues the paradox that the intellectual who, according to Marco Ferrazzoli, has probably exerted the highest political influence in postwar Italy (201), accepts no political doxa but instead dares to subject his thought to the evidence of the senses. This decision was fraught with consequences. First of all, a concretely situated viewpoint was incompatible with utopian horizons. Secondly, it entailed replacing modernity’s universal perspective with a limited perspective of human proportions. And in connection with this honest shortening of the radius of attention, it entailed the replacement of the collective with the individual and of the general with the particular. The literary implication of these epistemological choices is that he abandons the broad narrative of cosmic proportions for the short story that builds up to a “small world” with the anecdotal materials of the everyday, underpinned by a “philosophy” or a “theology” that supplies the relevant categories to the understanding. Guareschi’s skepticism toward collective utopias gave him insight into the crisis of history as an informing category of human action. This skepticism allowed him to grasp a philosophical truth that was unfashionable in the 1940s but moved center stage in the late 1970s with Lyotard’s awareness of the break up of the grand narratives and climaxed in the early 90s in Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of the end of history. History had become obsolete as faith in its directionality, meaningfulness, and progressive ascendancy could no longer be sustained (69). With the master narrative of modernity receding, came the end of the Enlightenment’s dream of

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disembodied, universally valid truths, and suspicion of abstract reason came to an end. Acknowledging the limits of reason and tracing knowledge back, not to transcendental, but rather to the physical and even the circumstantial conditions of apprehension, underwrites a modest epistemology that turns the boundless Kantian categories into limiting possibilities and recognizes in those very confines the resistance that permits the mind to fly. This is the truth that emerges from many Don Camillo stories, but nowhere as trenchantly as in the discussion between the priest and his “capo”, the crucified. When, in view of tangible proof of a debated donation, Jesus concedes: “You were right, Don Camillo”, the latter replies: “It’s perfectly understandable. Because you know humanity, but I know the Italians” (33). Things happen in specific places to specific people. Grand récits are useful to create a parallel reality in the realm of theory, but down below even Christ has to bow before the evidence that life is tangled up in particularity. Guareschi appears to be saying that Catholicism, like all universalistic dogmas, is neither more complex nor more elevated than the struggles, the wrath, the remorse, the compassion and the unflinching faith of a stubborn country priest. But even this observation remains hopelessly abstract and misleading if one does not add that all of these psychological functions come to life amid the conditions of the postwar, and this is a period in which, as Sloterdijk points out, former combatants revise their cultural premises in light of their fortunes. Italy’s status as a country that incorporated a civil war within a war of aggression rendered self-analysis particularly intricate, laying the foundations for its chronic political instability. Guareschi’s rejection of the revolutionary belief in a grandiose transformation of history led him to affirm small-scale daily life, of which, according to Indro Montanelli, there was no better interpreter in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s (cit. Perry: 6). Guareschi deflates Communist rhetoric merely by placing its slogans in a traditional context. Peppone may speak for il Popolo, much as de Gaulle spoke as France, but the female side of Communist families belongs to Don Camillo’s faction, and Peponne’s band shows up in force for Sunday mass. Peppone lives out the myth of the conquering working class, pitting his short-lived successes against the stubbornness of Don Camillo, who represents an enduring reality, like cows unable to go on strike. Peppone fails to realize, as the post-war European left did, that the relation between a political force and its electoral base can remain extrinsic and cliental (Glucksmann: 113). If the peasants vote for him because he is the local strong man, such contingent homage does not make them

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a unified mind mastering the future through a privileged understanding of history. Guareschi knew that the myth of a self-conscious class responsible for the decisive events of modern society was an illusion. By 1980 André Gorz could see that Marx’s demand on the proletariat to live up to its essence could not be fulfilled because “it is impossible that individuals should totally coincide with their social being” (90). By then it was already a question of a post-industrial society whose cultural translation was the postmodern supplement to modernity, a colonization of every temporal region by means of which the future ceased to be the sole or even the preferred horizon of meaning. It is possible, of course, to historicize Guareschi’s repudiation of history, perceiving in it anticipated nostalgia for a world that was about to disappear through the industrialization of agriculture, the elimination of traditional peasant life, internal and external migrations, and the intensification of the anonymous relations that led from “community” to “society” (Tönnies). He looks sentimentally on the figures that populate his small world. At the same time, though, this world’s china-cabinet quality subordinates them to a suspended temporality that, for all its apparent immobility, appears in retrospect as the threshhold between a past that had broken away from history, like a huge chunk of ice adrift on the ocean, and a future that could only be imagined in its radical difference. This sense of in-betweenness is probably the reason why Guareschi becomes the conscience – in a way political leaders, bound by pragmatic concerns, could not – of the postwar paradox, namely the polarization of those societies that had lost militarily – Germany, Italy, but also France – between a governing traditionalism that could no longer draw on its traditional cultural values and an ideologically hegemonic left that was insensitive to the pragmatic requirements of power and blind to the geographic condition of politics. Guareschi’s unpopularity among the intellectual elite stems from his refusal to consider traditional values the cause of the Italian catastrophe, seeing them rather as solid principles with which to resist the dictatorial culture of the recent past and of the immediate present. In 1951, he wrote in number 9 of Candido: “We are not at the window to look at the others, but from 1945 until today we have been fighting openly for our basic principles, which are three and the three remain precise and unchanged: the defense of the Christian idea, the struggle against all forms of dictatorship, the defense of the spiritual values of the fatherland” (cit. Gnocchi 149). In the context of the Cold War, militant attachment to the Chris-

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tian “idea” and the “spiritual” values of the fatherland sufficed to identify a writer with the political right. But this was to mistake Guareschi’s concept of Christianity and even of the fatherland, for far from wielding these principles as weapons of a particular class, he considered them prior to and above the political fray. Refusal to instrumentalize these values explains his break with Christian Democracy and his unhesitant denunciation of the party’s leader, as well as his rejection of clemency (which was his for the asking) in order not to compromise his conscience to political expediency. As Ferrazzoli observes, “if Peppone is in fact a Communist, with all due provisos but unequivocally, Don Camillo is ‘only’ a priest. A man of the Church. And Catholicism, as we have abundantly remarked, should not be trivially confused with politics” (220). For this reason, says Ferrazzoli, in the polar society of Mondo piccolo, the right is absent. In this the fiction reflects the Italy of the postwar, in which the only self-declared right was the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a party devoted to vindicating the reasons of the losers. Guareschi never espoused the viewpoint of the former fascists. Nor was he a Christian Democrat, because he did not approve the confusion between the altar and the ballot box. He was monarchical, but the crown was not for him a segment of the political arena but a pre-political fact (221). This did not make Guareschi politically equidistant. As Ferrazzoli remarks, Guareschi does not stand in the middle ground between Peppone and Don Camillo, but makes the latter the privileged interlocutor of a third figure, the crucifix, which represents the conscience, or the pure reflection on the intentions attending every action. With this I come to the point where it is possible to risk two hypotheses. The first is that Guareschi’s explicit anti-modernism makes Mondo Piccolo relevant to the new cognitive paradigm that has been slowly emerging since the end of the Cold War. In this paradigm, time – the dominant axis for the moderns – along with its inherent teleologies, is replaced by space, and history by geography. This is true also for their respective negations. Utopia – which haunts history – is at home in the small world of La Bassa, while memory – the ghost forever haunting space – defaults to tradition, which is the form time takes in the province. It is not that things do not happen in the rural world. On the contrary, Guareschi’s peasants are always on to something and the village teems with intrigues, secrets, and tiny dramas. The point is rather that none of this has the power to shake the perennial cycle of life, which always regains its balance after every bout of intemperance. And so these people, rather than

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wishing to awake from the nightmare of history, seem intent on rousing themselves from the slumber of tediousness by magnifying petty and for the most part innocuous provocations. If the first hypothesis proposes that Guareschi anticipates the dissolution of history into space, the second is implicit in his narratological choices. Embedding his story in the column of a newspaper, thus fragmenting the grand récit of the 19th century novel into self-contained episodes that nonetheless add up to a totality, emphasizes their immediate relevance and paradoxical urgency. At the same time, the humor and benevolence that lighten the little dramas of the paese lift the anecdote from the transient category of the chronicle. It is possible, therefore – and this is the second hypothesis – that his ironic detachment, which is the modality of his ethical involvement, is the necessary condition for grasping the plane that extends between the Apenines and the Po River as a world, however small. Of course, it is possible to read Mondo Piccolo as the work of a diehard conservative and to leave it at that, but then one would be missing the force of Guareschi’s creation, which resides in two strategies: one methodological and the other stylistic. Methodologically, Guareschi resorts to dialectics by building his microcosm on the axis formed by two archenemies who compete within a relation of mutual dependence. Thesis and antithesis are always reconciled by a superior third, which is not a synthesis of the historical contradiction but a sublation of the entire situation to the level of conscience, understood as equilibrium or transcendental common sense. The second aspect, which I call stylistic since it bears on the mode of representation, is Guareschi’s refusal of abstract diction and his preference for everyday language with a touch of the dialectal. This predilection is not only intended for realistic effect, but entails a criterion of authenticity that relies on the prioritizing of experience and a local and quite literally parochial worldview. Only, parochial has here reversed its usual derogatory value. Guareschi’s new relevance to a world that has replaced the abstraction of history with the abstraction of space comes from the fact that, by rejecting collectivism and the dictatorship of the doxa, he bequeaths us intellectual principles to combat the newest form of abstract domination in the dogma of global thinking. Thinking from the province and turning the life of the contadini into an insurmountable objection to standardization, he proposes tradition as a source of strength and reconciliation. But Guareschi doe not understand tradition in the sense of looking back

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nostalgically to an irretrivable past that was not a golden age in any case, but in the etymological sense of the word, as a “carrying forward” and a “passing on”. What is carried forward and passed on, as the gift from one generation to the next, is in his view the mainstay of identity. It consists in those physical and cultural references that humans always find around them, that shape their personalities and guide their behavior. And it is the inevitable diversity of those references that constitutes human life into limited, self-referential, and always differentiated little worlds.

The Priorat and the Landscaping of Catalan TERROIR Robert Davidson

Change has come quickly to the Priorat region in southwest Catalonia. In less than a generation, an area that had long carried a reputation as an out-of-the-way backwater has become a world-renowned locale. Fuelling its transformation has been a global increase in demand for quality wine and the concomitant interest and appreciation of the culture of authenticity that elite products carry. The notion of terroir – the literal and figurative “taste of the land” – and its economic potential now permeate the Priorat. In this essay, I consider the region’s transformation through the lens of this eminently subjective concept.1 While the specifics of what exactly constitutes terroir may be in question, that the Priorat has become one of the more recognizable “brands” in Catalonia as a result of having received special “denominated” status (DOCa/DOQ) for consistent quality in winemaking is undeniable. The fact that this honor and mark of excellence in terroir had only been held by one other region in the Spanish state – the Rioja – points to the exclusivity of the club it has joined. Of particular interest here, though, is not only the seemingly inexorable inte-

1. The present work is part of a larger project in which I explore the new relationships between the land, 21st century consumer-citizens and the attempts of various levels of government in Catalonia to codify the particular difference that is ascribed, imagined and observed in its geography and daily life.

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gration of terroir as a guiding principle for an entire region, but also how the revalorized Priorat landscape has been – and is being – transformed by market forces that have profited from this codification of perceived quality, thus contributing to current debates surrounding the nature of Nature itself. That this globally-inflected discourse, which arrived as a savior, has begun to meet with resistance from various groups inside the Priorat points both to the potential – and ironic – obfuscation of local voices as part of the embracing of terroir and to the specific treatment of the Priorat’s landscape according to the competing needs of stakeholders from both inside and outside the region. With these elements in mind, I argue that the Priorat’s relatively recent experience with the modern power of terroir represents a unique manifestation within the Catalan context of what we now call the “return to the rural” or the “new ruralism”.

TERROIR In agricultural terms, the French word terroir refers to the special characteristics that the combination of geographical qualities and human intervention are deemed to impart to food products cultivated in a given area. The effects of terroir, then, connect taste directly to space. This transmission of qualities from a parcel of earth to the product of that land in the form of foodstuffs is most patently evident in the fabrication of wine, cheese and coffee – goods that employ terroir as a common category of differentiation and for which artisanal knowledge is also brought to bear in their elaboration. Regarding this latter observation – and as the Guide Hachette, one of the almanacs of French oenology points out – the notion of terroir viticole is really an umbrella concept that, in addition to the actual make-up of the soil (schist, gravel or in the case of the Priorat, its remarkable slate), also takes into account what types of grapes are used, any and all weather during the growing cycle, as well as specific strategies to maximize concentration or varietal character through green harvests, leaf thinning and other ways of manipulating vineyards and vines (Le Guide Hachette Des Vins: 10). Terroir, then, depends too on the human element – on the grower making adequate use of what nature has provided in a given area. That all of these intrinsic and intermediary factors associated with terroir are still highly subjective and often dependent on the approval and interpretation of experts points to a distinctly elitist quality regarding the

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capacity to understand and employ the concept as either an element of production or as a critical filter for the reception of the actual taste of an item.2 That said, even though the actual extent to which terroir trumps other factors in the elaboration of a product may be unclear, it continues to gain traction amongst Western connoisseurs and regular consumers alike as part of the growing predilection for local produce and sustainable, organic agricultural practices. Here is where the Guide Hachette’s almost throwaway comment that one must add human, historical, and commercial factors to one’s understanding of terroir is highly suggestive in that it extends the term’s inherent sense of place to the spatial and social practices of production and consumption as well (10). In response to this dynamic, national and regional bureaucracies have embraced the “denominations of origin” system as a way of providing ostensible guarantees of quality for products of local terroir.3 Catalonia has followed suit and a bevy of foodstuffs, from hazelnuts to chickens, pears to sausages, now sport distinctive markers in the hopes of both attracting customers and raising awareness of local artisanal practices. These indicators of distinction literally name the rural product as it enters a larger market and economy, taking the taste of its land along with it. In my earlier work on terroir in the Catalan context, I considered how one should interpret the dual tension inherent in an essence that is grounded yet nevertheless transferable, by reading terroir as both immanent and transcendent in the Kantian sense (“Terroir and Catalonia” 4446). For example, in the first a priori instance, the qualities of specificity and locale anchor terroir to its prescribed boundaries; I see this pervasiveness as its noumena, the presumed thing-as-itself that constitutes reality, the “purity” of the thing that is supposedly independent of experience, the thing as it is inherently and essentially. However, terroir’s theoretical por-

2. These factors, while noticeable for many, are still highly subjective and often the bailiwick of experts (such as Robert Parker Jr., whose love of massive, jammy, high alcohol wines has not hurt the Priorat’s ascendancy in the wine world); the difference between different regional Bordeaux wines, for example, is not so great or immediately recognisable that many consumers will notice. Such subjectivity points to a necessary initiation or apprenticeship so as to access the expert level and, presumably acquire the required category for an appreciation of the intricacies of terroir. 3. The French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée was established in 1919 and originally applied only to wine before branching out to other food products. Italy followed the same path in 1963 (“European Designation”)

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tability – my ability to eat a “Lleida pear” in Barcelona and taste western Catalan terroir – points to a transcendent property that bridges geographic essence and the communication of that fundamental nature. These are Kant’s phenomena, the manifestations that comprise our experience vis-àvis human cognition. The bridging experience does not occur in terms of actual spatial displacement, though, rather, via taste and sensation. That is, one does not need to go to the space in question to apprehend a fundamental part of it; taste transcends or manifests like phenomena “transcend” noumenal reality in terms of subjective perception. Thus, the essential characteristics that comprise a thing’s terroir and, as such, the thing-initself, pass into experience through sensation. Now, the important part of these philosophical observations for the present case is that these sensations and their attendant taste are so subjective that they need to be keyed, maintained or even simply described by experts, convention or by policy. This in turn points to nothing less than the ideological overlay inherent in terroir’s a posteriori experience. Here one sees how terroir and its valuation are exposed to co-option, political manipulation or simply the raw realities of the market. It is in this crux between the essence of the land – its inherent qualities – and the possible political articulation of taste that one sees how Catalan nationalism’s relation to the rural is changing both in terms of its internal expression as a recuperative mode and, moreover, as an external proclamation of stateless nationhood working within the parameters of international conventions regarding food products and artisanal procedures.4 The Priorat as a physical and imagined space has been caught up in the terroir dynamic from various angles and as a result, offers intriguing insights into how place and taste are coalescing and quite literally changing the landscape itself.

The Priorat The human, historical and commercial factors that are part and parcel of considerations of terroir are of fundamental importance to a dis-

4. In June 2010, the Catalan government announced plans for an umbrella designation that would attempt to bring together all of the region’s different local denominations in a more cohesive way. The effectiveness of the so-called “:DCAT” program remains to be seen. For more on this announcement, see “DCAT El distintiu dels aliments catalans”.

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cussion of the Priorat’s distinctive experience. They are particularly acute for two reasons. First, winemaking in the region has an exceptionally long history and when it has flourished, it has served as a pillar of the local economy. Second, technological advances in viticulture have contributed to both the literal and figurative transformation of the Priorat landscape. That is to say, terroir and its keen appreciation in the Priorat are not static – they are literally dynamic – with the literal referring to the modernization and expansion of the terrace system that makes up the vast majority of useable land in the region, and the figurative pointing to how the recent success of the revitalization has led to creeping urbanization and tourism, both of which have brought with them increased infrastructure needs that have an impact on the physical and social landscapes of the region and with which I engage in more detail below. A common thread that runs through and informs many of the past and present dynamics of the Priorat is that of poverty. The Priorat is one of the most scarcely populated and poorest of Catalonia’s forty-one comarques [districts] and has suffered a long trend of depopulation that only began to level off after 1996 when newcomers began to supplement the aging local populace (Armesto López / Gómez Martín2004 : 86-87). This recent change in visibility and fortune notwithstanding, the overall picture and history of the Priorat vis-à-vis other areas of Catalonia and the Spanish state has been one of steady marginalization. Since 1887 the region has lost a staggering 62% of its population (“L’altre Priorat” 4). It was left on the sidelines during the beach tourism boom of the 1960s and then again during the shift to alternative tourism destinations inland during the 1980s (Armesto López Gómez Martín 2004: 86-87). While the massive depopulation of the Priorat was partly a result of the industrialization that saw general emigration from the country to the city during the early and mid-twentieth century, it was also due to a specifically wine-related cause. In the late 1800s, a phylloxera plague utterly devastated the Priorat’s vineyards. The blight first appeared in Catalonia in 1879 and by 1893, the insects had reached the municipality of Porrera (Figueras: 8). By 1900, the entire region had been contaminated and the slow process of replanting and grafting phylloxeraresistant American rootstalk had begun. These initiatives could barely address the economic ramifications, though, and in the three years between 1897 and 1900, the Priorat lost 17% of its population (9). As a result of this grim demographic shift and given that its agricultural base

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was tethered to the only two crops that could withstand the area’s harsh conditions: olives and grapes, economic development in the region was stifled. As the authors of the “L’altre Priorat” study from 2009 note, in terms of regional identity, the result of a century and half of depopulation and economic misery left a legacy of self-deprecation. Consider, for example the words from the Consell Comarcal’s own website, which in 2004 greeted visitors by stating: “The Priorat (…) might disappoint you at first but its untamed, virgin, rocky and unique landscapes, as well as its kind and helpful people will charm you as you get to know them” (“L’altre Priorat” 4). As go the vines, then, so goes the Priorat. The first reliable reports of vineyards in the area date back to the 12th century – just after the Reconquest and just before the arrival of the Cartoixan monks who, along with other orders and feudal lords, worked the land and consolidated winemaking in the region, quickly expanding the production of grapes (3). While originally tied to liturgical uses only, wine subsequently became part of people’s diets, adopted first by the upper classes and then by the lower. It would be the religious orders though, that would express the first understanding of Priorat terroir and thanks to their close connections to Italy, would import winemaking knowledge and varietals suited to the area’s difficult conditions (Figueras: 4). We shall consider in a moment the second aspect of the ancillary features of terroir – the modern practices and circumstances that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century have helped propel region’s ascendancy in modern wine culture. First, however, it is important to note a previous period, long ago, in which the Priorat’s reach had already been global in nature. Thanks to the proximity of the market in Reus, Priorat wines – and especially aiguardent [local firewater] – had been exported to Northern European ports in France, Holland and England as well as to Spain’s Latin American colonies (5). This fact further reinforces the economic link between winemaking, international recognition and the region’s prosperity and sets up a compelling counterweight to the modern situation in which the area’s specificity has been “rediscovered”. When considered in terms of economic flows, the increasing sophistication of the Priorat’s practices owes its success in large part to decisions made some 800 years ago. That the fluctuations that have affected the region in this past century have been played out before points to the cyclical nature not only of the land but also of the economic and social circumstances that condition it.

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The Priorat’s Distinctive TERROIR The mountainous Priorat has a harsh climate yet it is one that is especially propitious for the growing of grapes.5 To this end, the introduction of the garnatxa or Grenache grape during the fourteenth-century was a seminal moment for both future production and the region’s basic terroir. And regardless of whether Grenache came from northern Aragon (where some speculate it was indigenous) or was imported from Sardinia by the Cartoixans, the fact that this particular vine prefers hot, dry soil with good drainage and produces a strong woody canopy, made it even more ideal for the Priorat’s geographic conditions. The region’s steep hillsides expose the vines to the elements while the unique llicorella [slate] terrain, which has little-to-no topsoil, allows at once for deep root growth to the abundant underground water and excellent drainage for what little precipitation does fall. In terms of red varietals, along with Grenache, the “Consell Regulador de la Denominació d’Origen Qualificada Priorat” authorizes and recommends Carignan, a grape that has shaken off its reputation as a filler varietal and of which old-growth vines still exist on the Priorat’s slopes. Also allowed under the Consell’s rules are the Priorat-specific Hairy Grenache and more commonly found varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Tempranillo, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Syrah and Red Picapoll (“Varietats”).6 The latest rebirth of the Priorat began in the 1980s when a small group of wine-making pioneers became convinced of the area’s potential as a premier region for producing high quality product. They faced an uphill battle in more ways than one; for while there had been over 15,000 hectares under vine in the nineteenth century, by the late 1980s, only 900 remained and they were the most inaccessible and hard to work parcels located high up on steep slopes (Brook). Among those who almost singlehandedly turned around an entire region’s fortunes by pooling their resources and, until 1992, collaborating on a single wine, were René Barbier of Clos Moga-

5. Temperatures can reach 35C and above in summer and -5C in areas in the winter with scant rainfall during the hottest months. 6. The Consell has also approved a number of white varietals, among them: White Grenache, Macabeu and Chenin. Authorization for the use of Viognier is pending. Regardless, the production of red wine far outstrips that of white. For example, in 2009 producers harvested a relatively modest 234,789 kilos of white grapes against 4,733,703 kilos of red (“Producció”).

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dor; Álvaro Palacios, owner of Finca Dofí and L’Ermità; Josep Lluís Pérez who ran the Mas Martinet vineyard; and Dafne Glorián of Clos Erasmus (Brook). Through this small group’s revalorization of grapes over the almonds and olives that had been progressively replacing vine stock, the area’s distinctive wine terroir was allowed to recuperate and reassert itself. While it took the specific expertise of these pioneers (particularly Barbier) to identify and then realize the potential inherent to the Priorat’s landscape, the fact that their enterprises coincided with specific government policies at both the local and European levels to aid in rural economic diversification was not inconsequential. As Armesto López and Gómez Martín point out: The success of this territory linked with the Denomination of Origin has coincided with the benefits of a rural development group, LEADER II (1994–99), which contributed € 4,722,000 and later Leader + (currently functioning), which has a budget of € 3,606,072 from the government which is supplemented with private investment that takes the total to € 9,720,000. (Armesto López Gómez Martín2006: 175)7

The fact that support of this sort was forthcoming was indicative of changing views on the future of rural areas throughout Europe. As the researchers observe, “The idea that [the] survival of the countryside was totally dependent on rural activity being plural in nature was raised at the Cork conference on rural development back in 1996, and continued to form part of the Salzburg Declaration of 2003” (173).8 This meant that regions had begun to actively pursue Jouen’s “extrovert” view of rural development – one that incorporated tertiary economic activities such as tourism and cultural heritage promotion alongside primary foci on agriculture or aquaculture (173). The government-sponsored gastro-tourism boom with which the Priorat’s initial wine tourism would later merge stands as a particularly successful product of the “official” diversification in rural endeavors that began in the 1990s.

7. LEADER stands for “Liaisons Entre Actions de Development de l’Economie Rurale”. 8. The Salzburg Declaration considered sustainability and rural development in Europe with an eye on expansion of the Union. According to Robert Savy, former chair of the Committee of the Regions’ Commission for Agriculture and Rural Development, rural policy must “embrace the full range of activities that the rural community could take up” in light of the Committee of the Regions’ belief that “the present approach to rural development, whereby it is regarded merely as an extension of agriculture, is too restrictive” (“European Conference”).

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The fact that those who initiated the revolution and recuperation of the Priorat were outsiders adds another layer to the distinctive development of the nature and appreciation of terroir in the Priorat. The presence of the outsider at the centre of change and renewal stands as an inversion of the idea that local knowledge is a static trump card for adversity or for countering imposed solutions from above or beyond. Until the arrival and flourishing of this small group of experts who brought with them the specialized knowledge necessary to tap the Priorat’s potential to be successful in a new market, what little wine production remained in the area was mainly cooperative-produced bulk wine (“Priorat”). The relatively rapid turnaround in the region’s fortunes and the subsequent exponential growth in high-end wine production are thus indicative of how the internationalization of the Priorat’s intellectual capital directly influenced the rate of geographic transformation. This in turn would lead to palpable tensions regarding the land, its form and function and how the region would position itself in the future. What exactly do I mean by this? The progress and revitalization of the Priorat has seen massive increases in revenue for local land and business owners, and a concomitant increase in demand for services, housing and other amenities by those who have migrated to the region to take part in the economy. This progress has also brought other changes to the economic and natural landscapes in the form of increased vehicular traffic and growing tourism at the same time as the area is contending with the controversial growth of wind farms. In a region where problems associated with urbanization have never before been a concern, the tension between old and new that many areas are experiencing has, in the case of the Priorat, inflected the concept of a “return” to the rural in a unique way. That is, in the experience there, “return” has literally meant a re-population of villages and towns as newcomers arrive and the flight of younger generations of Prioratins has been staunched. Here, then, one sees a different dynamic than that of the Barcelona urbanite’s “rediscovery” of the Empordà or the daytripper’s excursionisme to Catalonia’s hinterland. What has occurred in the Priorat is a return of a different sort. That the refocusing on the region through the lens of an internationally codified sense of terroir has been successful in reviving a moribund economy is clear. Nevertheless, questions and concerns remain as to how the revalorization of the Priorat landscape at the heart of its terroir has been managed and what a reliance on terroir’s cult of authenticity has done to that landscape as it has grown.

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Terracing Since the earliest period of winemaking in the Priorat, a terrace system of planting has been employed to increase surface area. Soil conservation, which is often a goal in creating terraced steppes was not so much a concern although its corollary, better penetration of water and reduction of runoff was a desirable side-effect given the high rate of drainage available on the slate soil. Terracing is a tactic, a strategy to maximize and, I would suggest, also a metaphor for the “new” Priorat – one with a double edge. Terracing is no less than the geomorphing of the landscape and its maximum expression today is indicative of the ways in which human activity in the Priorat have shaped the relationship to the land and literally created even more economic surfaces out of the same steep inclines that had previously been part of the cause of the region’s intense poverty. Unlike other winegrowing regions in Catalonia, such as the Penedès, where mass, level planting is possible depending on one’s parcel, practically every surface must be made to have potential in the Priorat. This impulse to maximize – especially acute in the wake of the DOQ’s worldwide success – has led to a wholescale modernization of terraces, complete with irrigation and custom tailored beds carved out to increase sun and wind exposure. Of course, the growing boom only served to inspire more winemakers to set up shop in the Priorat and thus, as of 2009, the area had some 1,767.08 ha under vine serviced by 608 registered wine professionals and 89 wineries (“Hectàrees”). As an indication of just how intensive this process of land transformation and maximization of production capacity has been, reports prepared by the DOQ Consell show that between 2001 and 2009, overall grape production had almost doubled from 2.5 million kilos to nearly 5 million (“Producció”). Nevertheless, one must recognize that, rather than the mass production of the past, it was the very restricted and controlled production of the 1980s and ’90s that served as the motor of the new Priorat’s renaissance. Barbier, Palacios and the others initially came looking to take advantage of the unique soil and the old, low yield vines on narrow, hand-tilled terraces that produced concentrated grapes propitious for the unctuous, jammy and high alcohol style that has come to characterize wines from this Denomination. This type of wine, which is the easiest to make in this region given the varietals present and prevailing climatic conditions, has been blessed by the acceptance and approval of the world’s most influential and powerful wine critic, Robert Parker Jr. This, in turn, allowed producers to charge premium prices – some of them astronomical, such as the € 400 or more required to purchase a bottle of Finca Dofi or Ermità by Álvaro Palacios.

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While many fledgling wineries suspended or cut back production in the wake of the global economic crisis that hit Spain particularly hard beginning in 2009, the boom in the Priorat had already left its mark. Terroir had been “written” – both in the reviews lionizing the region’s wines and, I contend, in the landscape itself. One can now read the concept’s power as expressed in its transformative capacity evident in the many re-developed terraces. Terracing may not be as recognizably exploitative as mining (another industry with a small presence in the region), but its large-scale employ alters the landscape in a unique way. The eminent visibility of the renewed terraces imposes rationality in the form of market potential on the natural terrain in a visual cycle that conforms to the seasons. Intervention is most plain during winter, when potential has yet to be replaced with the plenitude that restores “natural” surface integrity to the mountain through the cosmetic greening that comes with the growth of vine leaves. That the experience of each year is further codified by the declaration of the quality of the vintage points to how laboring and tending to the mountain slopes is an ongoing activity. The interest in maximizing all possible vine-bearing land on a parcel has pushed the re-terracing phenomenon. What is more, the EU promoted redevelopment and mechanization as a way of increasing yields and competiveness as part of its 2003 Common Agricultural Reforms (Martínez-Casanovas: 11). As Ramos, Cots-Folch and Martínez Casanovas further observe, “Vineyard restructuring in the Priorat region of NE Spain has transformed both traditional vineyards and abandoned cultivated hillslopes into mechanized vineyards” (1). A major problem that Ramos et al. encountered in their 2006 study in the Porrera area, though, was that the building of the terraces, which was carried out by heavy machinery, led to material displacements of about 9460 Mg ha−1 (2). They contend that the desire to plant two rows of vines per terrace probably influenced the construction of bench widths that were slightly narrower than recommended for mountain terracing of this type (6-7). Their insightful conclusions, which point to a flaw in the EU’s promotion of mechanized vineyards in a sphere such as this, are important and worth quoting at length: EU Council Regulation policy for vineyard restructuring has encouraged wine producers in the Priorat region to transform both traditional vineyards and abandoned agricultural areas into new mechanised and more profitable vineyards. The EU subsidizes up to 50% of the restructuring costs. However, the applied land terracing operations may not be sustainable under the adopted loose design criteria and rainfall conditions in the region. The only criteria seriously taken into

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account when building terraces, width of the benches to allow for mechanized works based on the expertise of retro-excavator drivers, have been shown to be inappropriate when designing a stable system. Terraces are constructed with higher risers than those expected for the high slope angles of the area. The results of the present case study show that, in the few months after vineyard establishment, during which only one high intensity rainfall event was recorded, landslides occurred. After three years, when the terrace survey was carried out, the area affected by landslides was 4950 m2, 75% of which was in the area located in the lower third of the slope. Maintenance or restoration of the risers is impossible due to the low accessibility of heavy machinery and risk of further damage to plantation infrastructures (irrigation, training systems and vines), if they have been already damaged by mass movements to some extent. (Ramos: 10)

The knock-on effects of terroir, then, have had real consequences for both the social and physical milieux of the Priorat. And while farmers have been complying with environmental protection guidelines as they expand their businesses and acreage, as Martinez Casanova pointedly states, “CAP [Common Agricultural Policy] support is not accomplishing the objectives for which it was conceived: the protection of the environment by the reduction of impacts of the agricultural activities” (11). What is more, as regards vineyard reconstruction, land terracing measures have received the most subsidies from the EU Council, with some 26.9% of the total subsidies for the creation of new plantations (20). Most worryingly, according to Martínez Casanova and his colleagues, though, is the fact that this intense and rapid redevelopment has led to a surplus of wine in the Priorat, which may in turn lead to the abandonment of non-profitable terraced plantations over the medium-term (20).

A Changing Landscape Modern technology has made possible the extensive reengineering of the mountains. That this changing of the visual nature of the Priorat’s landscape goes hand in hand with wine and is covered over by green for a substantial part of the year, however, has made it more acceptable than other interventions on the landscape such as those brought about by wind farms, pipelines and nuclear facilities. That said, acceptance of the larger impact of a terroir-driven wine industry has not been unanimous. Several alternative voices have emerged that contest a purely market-oriented or expedient approach to the natural environment in the Priorat and in so

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doing have inflected the way that terroir is understood, enacted and even resisted in the region. Groups like “Prioritat” [Priority], the social mapping project “L’altre Priorat” [The Other Priorat] sponsored by the Consorci Xarxa Joves.net and the Priorat Centre d’Art, along with the more established “Plataforma per la Defensa del Patrimoni Natural del Priorat” [Platform for the Defense of the Natural Patrimony of the Priorat] have all put forth arguments for a reevaluation of land use policy in the region. The umbrella group “Prioritat”, which counts among its diverse members olive oil producers, agro-tourism stakeholders, and various historical and archival groups, has as its main goal attaining UNESCO Cultural Landscape Heritage status for the Priorat and neighboring Montsant region. The proposal, which was forwarded to the Catalan government in April 2010,9 recognizes the inherent connection between land and social practice that one finds in terroir. What stands out, though, is a more acute understanding and respect for the past than has been evident in the recent boom’s rush to maximize land. This is exemplified in the group’s understanding of the agrarian landscape as a “permanent sum of memories, knowledge and practices… the materialization of sedimentation and evolution, at times brutally visible, at times imperceptible on account of its slowness” (Prioritat). For its part, “Plataforma”, which was formed in 1999 in response to “continual attacks on the natural environment in the Priorat area”, offers a very concise list of objectives: - Rational, sustainable development in the Priorat area: we support the planned Landscape Charter and the Priorat’s candidature as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its cultural landscape. - The defence of our natural and cultural heritage - Raising public awareness of the need for a new culture of natural resources (water, energy, territory). - The rational implementation of wind power in Catalonia (“Plataforma”). While the group has shown a keen interest in controlling the rapid growth of wind farms in the region,10 their resistance to the proposed

9. See “L’entitat Prioritat presenta el dossier per a la declaració de patrimoni de la humanitat”, El Punt. 20 April 2010. http://avui.elpunt.cat 10. In their manifesto on the issue, the group contends that many of the established and proposed sites are within “areas included in the PEIN (a national catalogue of areas of natural interest) or other areas of great natural, ecological or landscape value” (Priorat Manifesto on Windfarms). The vague yet suggestive term “landscape value” is not defined.

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nuclear waste dump at the Ascò nuclear site has also been very vocal and serves as a reminder of the presence of other major factors in the economic politics of the Priorat: namely, the power generation needs of the rest of Catalonia and the continued view of the region as one that is scarcely populated and thus ideally suited for projects that would encounter even greater NIMBYism in other locations. Different from the other groups mentioned in that it stands as a oneoff engagement with the social tensions in the region, the “L’altre Priorat” project is an original and compelling investigation of the symbolic context of the Priorat that seeks to reflect those parts of the region that have been excluded from touristic and institutional discourse (3). From its initial swipe at Plataforma’s adoption of the “Wine + Oil + Landscape = Future” formula for future success to its psychogeographic and Situationist attitude towards the rural environment, “L’altre Priorat” offers a refreshingly new take on the questions of authenticity that a terroir-based approach to landscape provides. This iconoclastic posture is made even clearer when, in their concluding remarks, they juxtapose tourism’s “fiction created in offices” with what they call their own “somewhat ironic experience of the narratives of the Priorat’s everyday” that they encountered during their study (27). An important part of their resistance to what they see as the transformation of the Priorat into a “Theme Park of the Authentic” lies in their surprising contention that the region should be considered in paraurban terms on account of the growing tourist dynamic and the insistence by external forces on the construction of wind-generated power for export (27-28). While these arguments may not be totally convincing, the authors’ approach is laudable and stands as a challenging perspective on an area that has seen its conception and experience of rurality and landscape drastically altered by recent economic success.

Conclusion The Priorat is a social and physical landscape in which the primacy of a virtual monoculture has become a given. That the crop in question results in a product that has come to embody the very notion of terroir, the taste of place and all of the human and geographical factors that combine to craft it and key how it is to be received, makes the Priorat an ideal laboratory for its study. Terroir in the Priorat, though, is not just an elite appreciation of flavor that is confined to tasting rooms and tourist routes; it is

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a concept that dictates daily life and, during the boom of the early twenty-first-century, literally moved mountains. This transformative capacity is both impressive in its scope and sobering when one considers the problematic way in which its promotion can adversely affect the very ground that bestows its phenomenon in the first place. The Priorat’s long history as a region in which a harsh agrarian landscape has been a barometer for social conditions reminds us that, like fashion, the vagaries of the market can change quickly and leave hard traces on our environments for all to read. Terroir has left its mark on the Priorat. It remains to be seen how this ongoing transformation of the landscape will evolve as the rural condition continues to reassert itself not only in practical discussions about sustainable energy production and cultural heritage but also as regards the nature of Nature itself.

Rural, Conceptual: The Non-urban as a Significant Practice in Contemporary Catalan Culture Margalida Pons

The horses go trotting through the stubble as the mares graze. Corn buntings, crickets and solitary shrikes fly through the honeyed air of a dark and gloomy September: We spit lumps of honey, junket and bread made with wine and bran, caressing leaves of ivy, fennel, and rosemary, indecisive, their eye on the rabbits, genets cross fields, scrubland and fallow fields. Damià Huguet

Damià Huguet begins his “Camp espiritual” [“Spiritual Field”] with these verses, included in the book Carn de vas (1976). Apart from being an obvious intertextual nod to the spiritual canticles of Ausiàs March, Saint John of the Cross, Joan Maragall or Jorge Guillén, the title of the composition also calls to mind the other world of fauna, flora and the flavors of the Mallorcan peasantry. Diverting the sound (cant, canticle) to the realm of space (camp, countryside), speaks not only about a ruralisation of subjectivity, but also about the possibility of reading the non-urbanised environment as a sign where the history of a social and economic change is compressed. Falling within the experimental line of poetry from the 1970s, Huguet’s writing is always based on a certain craftsmanship. He does not draw from ostentatious theoretical discourses on the text nor does he seek formal scan-

1. This article is part of the research project Experimental Catalan Poetry from 1970 to 1990: Discourses, Representations, Reception, Diffusion and Sociocultural Context (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: FFI 2009-07086 FILO). Translated from the Catalan by Mary Black (Servei de Llengües de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

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dal; rather his writings don the appearance of the patient toil of the peasants who reap the underpinnings of tradition. Of the mystical tradition in this case: the rhetoric, lexis and very implications of the idea of spirituality now come to be associated with matter and the physicality of the land. The obscurity of “Camp spiritual” stems from the destruction of the discourse, not from the graphic play, nor from the conceptual enigma; rather it comes from resorting to a rural lexis that, with its meaningful materiality, stands in opposition to the automatism of an eroded language. Sól·lera (corn bunting), capsigrany (shrike), pletó (field), reveller (scrubland). ... Merely with their presence, all of these words implicitly clash with the world of mass tourism and the so-called Balearisation (the model of unbridled, disorderly urban growth that has prevailed on Mallorca since the 1960s and 1970s). At the same time they instil a strangeness that forces the reader – the reader who is unfamiliar with ruralia, of course – to stop on the textual surface. The rural, then, appears not only as a sign of the survival of a virtually extinct world, but as a form of protest against the emergence of certain models of economic development that are perceived as alienating. In these pages, I aim to analyze a series of images, appropriations and interpretations of ruralism in contemporary Catalan culture. First of all, I will ask a series of questions about the definition and delimitation of the rural. Secondly, I will examine several uses of this concept within the sphere of countercultural writing and conceptual art; to do so I will start with the hypothesis that we have entered a paradigm in which the representation of the non-urban has ceased to be the nostalgic remainder of a pre-industrial past to become a significant practice with a strong power of protest. Finally, I shall briefly dwell on the interpretations that critics have made of some contemporary authors with strong rural underpinnings – such as Miquel Bauçà and Jesús Moncada – often marked by insecurity and unease with products that are difficult to plot on the cultural map where any innovation or aesthetic drift seems, by default, to be readily associated with the urban. The first question that arises when one tries to define the rural has to do with the possibility of understanding it from either a territorial perspective or a pragmatic one. Is the rural a given conceptualization of space or is it performative in nature? In other words, it is a place or an activity? Is it possible to define it beyond the vague label of non-urban that I used to cover myself when writing the title for this chapter? In the opening article of the Journal of Rural Studies, J. Cloke (4) identifies three ideas that were repeated in different definitions of rurality that emerged in the 1970s: a) “rural is synonymous with anything non-urban in character”,

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which “suggests that the rural environment has no specific character or qualities of its own, and thus characterises rural studies as residual rather than sharply focussed”; b) “rurality can be positively defined in either univariate or multivariate form”; and c) “user perception is the principal agent of rural-urban definition”. K. H. Halfacree (34), in turn, believes that the problem of definition “stems from a failure to distinguish between the rural as a distinctive type of locality and the rural as a social representation – the rural as space and the rural as representing space”. Within the framework of this vacillation between locality and social representation, the evolution of Rural Studies has been seen (Cloke / Thrift: 2-3) as a succession of stages which at first equates rurality with particular spaces and functions (rural areas are dominated by extensive land uses, have small settlements which are strongly tied to the surrounding landscape and engender a way of life characterised by a cohesive identity) and later replaces these functional definitions with more pragmatic concepts suggested by the use of political economic approaches. Today Rural Studies are dominated by the conviction that rurality should be seen as a social construct. Some scholars in the field of Geography and Agricultural Economics even suggest that we stop using general or universal concepts like urban or rural and instead focus on a post-rural realm of action (Murdoch / Pratt: 425).2 Therefore, the term rural appears as a notion with blurred boundaries hovering somewhere between a variety of disciplinary approaches that use perceptive, functional and socioeconomic criteria to define it. Based on these debates, I can state three assumptions: first, the relativity of the term rural, which is often defined from the parameters of the urban and poses an uncertain opposition to it; secondly, the problematic nature of associating the rural with nature and/or the landscape, which is misleading because it implies the immutability of the countryside contrasted with the dynamism of the city; and thirdly, the consideration that in the field of Literary and Cultural Studies, the growing interest in the rural is perhaps nothing other than a tentacular extension of Urban Studies, which sees one field of research as depleted and is trying to find new

2. Murdoch and Pratt write the following about the term post-rural: “The aim of introducing this term is to highlight the reflexive deployment of ‘the rural’. We would not want to give the impression of periodizing ‘the rural’. We are not suggesting that we have just entered the post-modern period, hence all of our experiences of places are ‘post-rural’. Rather, we are trying to foster a sensitivity to the production of meaning that makes possible particular ‘rural experiences’” (425).

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realms of academic exploration. These three premises imply that nowadays the rural is dependent on (or supplementary to, in Derrida’s twofold sense of “surplus” and at the same time “necessary”) the urban, which “otherizes” it. As Antoni Vives (38) states, the representation of the countryside as the other is nothing more than a power strategy of the institutional webs that are identified with the city.3 Thinking about this raises certain questions: Can the rural speak? Is it not the case that when we talk about the ontology of the rural we always speak from an urban point of view? Wherein lies the novelty of the new ruralism which should act as a glue to bind together the studies in this volume? Is it a functional novelty (related to the way certain spaces are used) or a perceptive novelty (related to the way they are seen and reinterpreted)? Bearing these considerations in mind, we must see whether in the realm of artistic creation, beyond being a language (a lexical or iconographic option) and a kind of backdrop (a setting, a topos), the rural can also become a way of generating social and aesthetic discourse within the framework of contemporariness. This possibility does not appear to be accepted by everyone. Despite the fact that the majority of Catalan dictionaries associate the term rural with everything related or belonging to the countryside, it is surprising that the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española also includes another meaning of it, unquestionably a more tendentious one, according to which the rural is anything that is “uncultured, coarse, attached to local things”. Is it important that the prescriptive dictionary of a language with a state of its own identifies the non-urban with a lack of cultivation? Is this implicit association not a way of claiming that the cultural capitality (and the values that are attached to it: universality, modernity, etc.) can only be urban? And even further: when we speak about capitals and peripheries in Catalonia, to which centre are we referring? The consolidation of Barcelona as a “brand” has led to exclusions not only from the standpoint of the cultural representations we are concerned with now but also from the standpoint of identity. Back in 1991, Josep Murgades spoke about the

3. However, the uncritical application of the concept of otherness to the rural has also been questioned by some scholars: “Too many studies have rather glibly labelled groups or individuals as ‘other’ with seemingly little recognition of the power relations and processes of transgression involved in such a categorization. Studies of the rural other cannot and should not be undertaken without some reference to the basis of a particular form of othering; why are certain identities othered, who gains or benefits from such positioning and who are those who are ‘the same’” (Little: 438).

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“traditional macroencephaly of Catalan society”.4 Much more recently, in 2009, in a monographic volume of the magazine Cultura, whose headline was the question “Barcelona: Capital of Catalan Culture?”, Patrícia Gabancho politically opposes “Barcelonism” and “Catalanness”, two positions that she regards as engaged in what she dubs “a perverse struggle”: The Barcelona steamroller erased the name Catalan, but not for everyone everywhere. Only in those who were modern like the city was modern. Precisely because it was (and is) an alternative identity. While the official culture of the Generalitat was conventional and restrictive, the Town Hall hung out the label of Barcelona to herald the new culture: design, architecture, fashion, certain films, Spanish literature ... all that was divine, everything that, deep down, was part of Pasqual Maragall’s personal court. So a frontier was laid down between the culture made in Barcelona and Catalan culture, which was only the kind that could not be Barcelonized, that is, “local” culture – rock would be a good example and made in Catalan: literature, performing arts, music, that is, the classic format. But I have seen newspapers refer to Antoni Tàpies as a “Barcelona painter”, because the association between Barcelona and modernity prompted the prejudice that anything Catalan was so shabby and provincial that it could not be applied to everyone (16). Barcelona’s association with artistic modernity is part of a discourse that some critics (Resina 2008: 262) have summarised as the preference for Catalonia-city over Catalonia-nation, which they have understood as a symptom of the denationalization of the territory. However, we should note that this binary opposition between the divine and the local is constructed on the assumption of a single, indisputable capitality, that of the city of Barcelona. Other alternative centers are left outside the debate, such as the comarca (county) capitals and – a curious thing if we bear in mind that the monograph of the magazine where Gabancho’s text appears speaks about Catalan culture – any city that does not belong to the Principality. Therefore, over the problematic division between urban and rural, another no less questionable division is superimposed, that of center versus periphery.

4. “Here, the unbridled, savage growth in the golden decades of capitalism did not make but, in the sense we are concerned with now, even further accentuated the traditional macrocephaly of Catalan society. ... The equally beastly growth of a certain periphery, on the coast, often in detriment to the inland regions, has also contributed to the internal breakdown of the country” (Murgades: 36).

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In the new paradigm to which I have alluded, the classical opposition between the city as a palimpsest where a multitude of images and interpretations are superimposed – and often collide – as opposed to the countryside as a plain, innocent place with neither importance nor history is no longer valid. Many years ago Raymond Williams spoke about the instability of the boundaries between country and city, especially since the development of agricultural capitalism. In other studies (Pons Revulsió estètica and New loci), I have upheld the stance that the non-urban can be interpreted, beyond its landscape or panoramic dimension, as a lieu de mémoire of a dialogic nature. And I am not only referring to the patriotic connotations of the Catalan mountains and countryside propounded by the Renaixença movement – studied from the geocritical perspective by Joan Nogué (6871) and from the literary-cultural perspective by Josep Miquel Sobrer (Sobrer 2000), which views the mountain as an ambivalent symbol.5 Nor am I referring to the symbolic opposition between the masculine language of the modernist rural drama and the civility propounded by the Noucentistes. Instead, I am primarily referring of the capacity of the rural today to be an instrument and vehicle of aesthetic experimentation and therefore to refute the more bankrupt forms of artistic expression. Counter to what is usually assumed, the city is not the only possible scene for the avant-garde. Speaking about the representations and perceptions of the urban, Joan Ramon Resina has coined the term after-image to refer to “a theoretical domain” influenced by forces that destabilise the traditional notion of the image through ideas of temporality, process and commitment (Resina 2003: 1). Counter to the conventional understanding of the image as something that can be analysed in a static or serial way, the after-image is a configura-

5. Thus, while Eugeni d’Ors “called for bringing his arbitrarisme to the mountain, for moving the mountain out of the way”, contrarily “Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família can be seen as an attempt to build a mountain in the middle of Barcelona” (Sobrer 2000: 186). In a subsequent study, Sobrer claims that “[w]henever rapid industrialization occurs, the imagination of a people is altered. Typically, a pastoral ideal reemerges” and that “[t]he mountain as a locus symbolically opposed to the city generated a cluster of significations that dominated Catalan intellectual life for decades, from Verdaguer’s Canigó of 1885 to the Noucentista poetry of Guerau de Liost in the first and second decades of the century. The symbolism of the mountain in the minds of many Catalan intellectuals virtually obliterates the distinction between text and referent. The ensuing ideological and symbolic connections appear as inspiration and motif, as material metaphor and great thematic project, à la Wagner ... They involve notions of nationalism as well as individuality, of religion as well as rebellion. They affect Modernistes as well as Noucentistes” Sobrer 2002: 218).

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tion of the social imagination, a dynamic notion that implies a dialogue between different forms and different times of representation and perception. Resina has upheld the relevance of this term for Urban Studies because of the possibility it offers to gain an understanding of the city as a process, as an accumulation of texts, interpretations and signs all vying with each other. Applying the concept of after-image to the interpretation of the rural opens the doorway to new forms of mapping the field of culture. To make this application, one fundamental condition is to see ruralia as something that is legible, the way certain expressions of writing and conceptual art have done. The poet and artist Perejaume is one clear example of this (Pons Revulsió estètica and New loci), but now I would like to discuss other cases in which ruralia emerges as an avenue of aesthetic inquiry. In the essay Dalí, un manifest ultralocal, Patrick Gifreu – an investigative poet and prominent practitioner of textualism in the 1970s – mentions the importance of several prototypical characters from the Empordà in Dalí’s oeuvre, “regarded as minor but whom Dalí has hailed as ultra-local geniuses and from whom he has borrowed concepts and behaviours: the poet Fages de Climent, the philosopher Francesc Pujols, the witch-hostess Lídia de Cadaqués, the chemist-historian Alexandre Deulofeu, the doctor-researcher Marcel Pagès” (10-11). To Gifreu, the ultra-local is “this movement that would serve as a centre and circumference at the same time, an axis of the world and the world itself. It allows us to find a random place which, through a systematic process of alteration, is revealed to be the repository of an imaginary world of infinite richness. It would be like the baroque, the resistance in modernity of a heterogeneous, alien, inassimilable element” (19). We can find precisely this resistance of the heterogeneous in modernity in one of the poets mentioned by Gifreu, Carles Fages de Climent (1902-1968), a country writer from the comarca of the Empordà admired by Dalí who illustrated his books Balada del sabater d’Ordis and Les bruixes de Llers. Fages expresses the tedium provoked by the city in two Baudelaire-style sonnets entitled “Enuig ciutadà”, the first of which ends with the verse: “City, you are everyone’s like a prostitute” (63). He wrote Somni de cap de Creus, an epic poem on the Empordà where the Greco-Latin world mixes with the local toponyms,6 and signed his satiri-

6. Jaume Guillamet is the author of several studies on “Empordanisme” as part of the political and cultural movement of Catalanism. In one of them he claims: “Literary Empordanisme got a second chance after the Civil War, and it assumed, unexpectedly

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cal epigrams as Lo Gayter de la Muga, a pseudonym that turns the river (Muga) into a multilayered image because it simultaneously harks back to the mediaeval troubadours, the new troubadours from the Renaixença, who were so fond of using river names as their nicknames, and the present of the territory itself. But what interests us now is not the ultra-localism of Fages’ verses, but rather the claim of poets like Enric Casasses – linked, like Gifreu, to the most speculative branch of Catalan poetry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and himself the author, incidentally, of a poem entitled “Drama rural”. What might the link be between a plein-air, politically ambiguous poet like Fages – after the Civil War, he and other members of Barcelona’s Athenaeum signed a text adhering to Franco – and a poet with close ties to the so-called “second avant-garde” of the 1970s and the counterculture? To Casasses, Fages is related to the poor, small-town baroque: “having begun in a mood somewhere between surreal, Horatian and populist, he ends up inventing the first lofty Catalan literary baroque. It is common knowledge that in Catalonia the baroque had always been simple, poor, small-town” (44). What shortens the distance between both is the belief in the possibility of speaking about the All by speaking about the most immediate, the recycling of popular verse, and a new look at the local. Not in vain, Josep M. Lluró defines Casasses’ oeuvre as an “apologia for cantonalism” (95). In the prologue to the book of poems by Casasses , La cosa aquella, Julià Guillamon (10) sees him as a poet whose roots are in psychodelia, yet also in the Catalan tradition of the Renaixença: he is a poet for whom Verdaguer is not kitsch but pop because he represents the very essence of popular, anti-rhetorical poetry, which turns into the natural expression of Catalan psychodelia. In fact, both in the book D’equivocar-se així and in several interviews, Casasses has compared Bob Dylan to Jacint Verdaguer: “Back in his day, Verdaguer was as popular as Bob Dylan is today” (Mateu 2010 “they are the same: a country preacher and a rocker who both draw from popular poetry” (Colomer 1999).

and yet more genuinely – though in a more limited way – than at any previous time the Maragallian function of the part that represents the whole. The glorification of the Empordà is now one possible way of glorifying Catalonia, but without any other political agenda than issuing a claim for identity. Joan Maragall and Josep Pla are the main referents of this movement” (Guillamet 2006: 18). See L’Empordà dels escriptors for a compilation of studies on the subject.

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Guillamon also invokes the “psychedelic Gaudianism” of Casasses, with a heavy rural component: the Modernist (Catalan Art Nouveau) baroqueness of the Sagrada Família becomes the material correlate of the organic, delirious forms of psychedelic strokes, and Parc Güell, where Casasses sets one of his poems, appears as “the materialisation of the pre-Adamite orchard which is reached in an inverted return flight to the origin, and at the same time, the forest of hallucinatory experience of elves and peasants, of the psychedelic mushroom and the poppy” (12). In the end we must wonder whether Gaudí’s trencadís, his use of ceramic shards to make mosaics that adorn architecture – which Josep Miquel Sobrer (2002: 212) defined as “a popular technique, decidedly countercultural” that “exalts the poor, the broken, the outcast” and “elevates the lowly into the lofty” – bears any relationship with Fages’ poor and small-town baroque. Albert Roig, in turn, finds traces of the baroque poet Francesc Vicent Garcia in Casasses’ book No hi érem: “In the hollow of his hands there are fleas, lice, chickens, bread spread with tomato, heads of cabbage, bunches of leeks, punches, carts with bent wheels, flies, thousands of cows and gulls that curse and the handsome angel and white heroine and the God substitutes and the saint’s pimp. They are baroque nonsense, post-punk rhymes, broken glass, post-utopia” (2006 166). In several writings (2002, 2006), Roig has defended a tradition of plein-air, baroque poetry that includes J. V. Foix as well as contemporary authors like Dolors Miquel and Hèctor Moret. And he has noted the curious fact (2002: 86) that Barcelona’s young, urban poetry reborn in the rubble of what he calls the “second Catalan avant-garde” (in reference, we must assume, to the conceptual writings of the 1970s) shows itself to be a close cousin of country writers like Josep Espunyes. Casasses is not the only one to suggest a possible connection between ruralism and psychodelia. Genís Cano, who was actively linked to the 1970s counterculture, titles his book of poems Els sots psicodèlics, a syntagma that echoes one of the most famous Modernist rural novels, Els sots feréstecs, by Raimon Caselles. And singer Pau Riba heads his record Cosmosoma, issued in 1997 – many years after his hippie stint on the island of Formentera – , with a quotation from Fages’ Balada del Sabater d’Ordis. Yet apart from this psychedelic Gaudinianism, the political perception of the non-urban takes on special importance in authors who span art and writing. In the oeuvre of artist and poet Andreu Terrades, the territorial, which is often expressed using the formula of the country/city conflict, is always invested with a political dimension. This dimension is empha-

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sized through his participation in some of the ecological and countercultural mobilizations in the 1970s, such as the Fester Salvatge to prevent the urbanization on the islet of La Dragonera just off the west coast of Mallorca. In Palma 9 km, a sequential poem published in 1977, the breakdown of the agricultural world is symbolized by the course of a Seat 600 car driven along the nine kilometres separating the airport from the city of Palma. The icons that the vehicle finds along the way twin physical displacement with social change: in this particular drive, the windmills and talayots (small towers) in ruins give way to the motorway billboards, advertisements for products from the world of unbridled tourism. Back in the 1990s, another of Terrades’ graphic poems, Míster Mark, suggests the opposite route: through collage it describes the wanderings of an individual who lives oppressed in a world dominated by urban signs, who feels the need to strip down, to cry out “no!” and to find a way out that will save him – conveniently indicated by the sign Exit – in a typically rural setting represented by a range of emblematic elements from the Mediterranean countryside: a wicker basket, a stone wall, Barbary figs, olive trees. ... Beyond the Rousseaunian idea of the return to nature to flee from the perversity of the city, the poem also conveys the notion of the countryside as not an anti-urban but a post-urban space, not as a journey backwards to the past but as an incursion into the future. In other cases, the artist’s relationship with the countryside takes on the guise of an action that suggests the transformability of nature. In the late 1990s, the artist Alícia Casadesús made twelve interventions in twelve different places in the comarca of Collsacabra (compiled in the book Llauró. 12 cites). She invited artists from different disciplines (dance, writing, the performing arts, art, music, etc.) to create specific actions for the site where they were to take place (cliffs, streams, waterfalls), always with the underlying premises of the ephemeral nature of the actions and the presence of an audience. One of these actions by poet Víctor Sunyol is called “Rerellum”. The action, defined as a “ritual”, took place over the course of two hours along the pathway leading to anthropomorphic tombs in the town of Tavertet, where poems by Andreu Vidal and Sunyol himself were read aloud. The audience had to gather words deposited in a series of recipients they found along the way, combine these words to make sentences and then write their impressions of what they saw and experienced. Randomness thus operates as a mechanism that produces meaning. Errancy, the walk that gradually constructs meaning as the subject moves, has usually been seen as a typically urban phenomenon. Proof of this is the flanêur of Baudelaire and Wal-

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ter Benjamin (the latter the product of the Industrial Revolution), or the psycho-geographic component of Guy Debord’s situationist drift. In fact, Manuel Delgado actually says – and it is curious that he would cite a writer like Josep Pla to support his claim – that the walker, the stroller, with his everyday movement through the city, is “the cornerstone of the urban” (163). But “Rerellum” shows that what is found on the drift is also possible in other settings. The Casadesús-Sunyol itinerary fosters the union between the “natural” signs along the way with the signs of culture (the words that, like objets trouvés, the participants can collect on the walk). Pilar Bonet (14) interprets these experiences from the coordinates of Land Art, as a symptom of a moment in the 1960s in which the Cartesian ideals about the conquest of nature failed. She specifically relates Casadesús’ work with that of American artist Robert Smithson: the point in common would be an entropic perception of the world which rejects the Arcadian notion of nature and replaces it with awareness – both theoretical and political – of the environment generated by post-industrial societies (15). But if Smithson’s earthworks entail permanent changes in the environment, with a monumental nature that makes it impossible to dissociate them from the signature that “authorises” them, in contrast, the transitory, fleeting nature of Casadesús’ actions speaks about mutable landscapes open to the unforeseen, and about artists who interact with it in a system of semi-anonymity. Even though Fina Miralles defines her practice as independent from Land Art, her conceptual actions situate her along the same avenue of exploration of the limits of urbanity and rurality. In 1973, she displayed the installation “Naturaleses naturals” at Barcelona’s Vinçon gallery, a mixture of soil, potato plants, pebbles from a river, hens – both stuffed and living – and sand. The rural elements conquer an urban space where they are necessarily alienated, yet at the same time they alienate this conquered space. Sometimes these elements are rendered out of place. In the action “Translacions”, Miralles changes the context of a series of natural elements: she paints the shells of living snails and releases them in the Parc de la Ciutadella, she floats rectangles of grass on the sea, she moves sand from the beach to a crop field. ... Thus, the assumption that there is a necessary tie between the natural object and original setting is invalidated. Indeed, as Alexandre Cirici claims when commenting on her oeuvre, today “it is impossible to separate the elements from my realm into natural and artificial, because both are instrumentalized through personal or social use and because the natural ones, through this instrumentalization, have such a heavy semiotic load that they are actually worth more for what culture –

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use – has added onto them than for the primitive, uncontaminated – natural – reality that they no longer have for anyone” (50). Pilar Parcerisas also relates Miralles’ work with the natural-artificial dialectic (Parcerisas: 76-82) and further connects it with the abolition of the concept of the workshop and with the processual nature of arte povera (“De la naturalesa”: 33). This processual component refers directly to the dynamic nature of non-urban spaces, whether they are farms, seas or mountains. The works of artists like Francesc Abad, Àngels Ribé, Benet Rossell and Francesc Torres can be framed within the same paradigm. In the realm of photography, Joan Fontcuberta also inquires into the problematic character of nature, in this case from a standpoint that is concerned with the relationship between photography and truth. His Fauna series, made in conjunction with Pere Formiguera and released in the late 1980s, is a catalogue of “false” animals which, however, are presented in an apparently scientific, documentary format. The exhibition recovers the finds of a supposed German zoologist, Peter Ameinsenhaufen, who mysteriously disappeared in the 1950s after having discovered novel animal species verging on the monstrous, such as a twelve-footed serpent, a winged monkey and a fish with hairy legs. The show presents photographs, documents, stuffed animals, Dr Ameinsenhaufen’s personal effects and a documentary explaining how Fontcuberta and Formiguera found the zoologist’s archive. Fauna, which plays with the audience’s consensual deception and twists the mechanisms of suspension of disbelief, is also a parodical game. Not only does it cast an ironical look at the scientific rhetoric of naturalists’ photographs, the solemnity of natural history museums and the taxidermist’s art, it also does so with respect to the fallacy of our view of the natural world as impermeable to lies. This is the same ironic approach we can find in other works by Fontcuberta, such as Orogenesis and Herbarium. The cases described until now fall within the sphere of the countercultural and conceptual. However, I am also interested in noting how contemporary critics have interpreted the features of ruralia present in two authors who are far removed from this conceptual-experimental world: the poet Miquel Bauçà and the novelist Jesús Moncada. The way the figure of Miquel Bauçà has been constructed as a “poet of the Eixample”, hermit, misanthrope and heterodox, is curious. It is true that urban settings are very much present in Bauçà’s work after a given point; he titles one of his novels Carrer Marsala and subtitles the encyclopaedic volume El Canvi with an explicit “from the Eixample”. And it is also true that in El Canvi there are surprising – and contradictory – notes on cities. Bauçà

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expresses this in the entry on “City, to be born in one”, where he states that he would like to have had the experience of being born in a city, which he associates with freedom: I am convinced that there is a high wall between people born in cities and people born in the country. We see things very differently. Unquestionably the first really strong impression I had was when I discovered the existence of a city, of the city. ... I imagine that the cause was simply the discovery of freedom. I imagined that since there were so many humans together they were not controllable like we country folk are, sparse but more visible, determinable and nameable. (92)

But shortly thereafter, in “Cities of the future”, he claims that towns should be torn down, and he imagines future cities as mounds indistinguishable from nature that can be assembled and disassembled: The “cities” would be small mounds that could be disassembled, which would be confused with nature: people would see a beech stand and it would be a city. ... People assume that vehicles would have disappeared and motorways covered again with earth and sown. The “streets” would be a grass carpet without any solution of continuity. ... The factories, hospitals, ... would be underground or underwater ... Cement, concrete would only be used for that. ... In NY only the Statue of Liberty and the most conspicuous buildings would be left – whose windows people would be opened conveniently. ... They could be set up as nests for the migratory birds. (93)

Despite the abundance of comments on urban space,7 I know of no analysis of Bauçà’s oeuvre approached from the parameters of Urban Studies.8 However, the insistence on presenting him as a restless flanêur who disappears in the web of streets in the metropolis, underscored by the paratextual appearance of some of the books – the cover of the reissue of Carrer Marsala portrays a fragment of a map from the city guide to Barcelona – only serves to reveal an interpretative limitation: Bauçà can only be so unusual, or so heterodox, in a given place, which is precisely contem-

7. We can also find the follow entries in El Canvi: “City, The” and “New city, The” and the extensive “People from the Eixample”. 8. We can find a notable exception in an alternative, non-academic platform: the post “La ciutat de Bauçà” within the blog Palumbus Columbus, which alludes to the work of Georg Simmel to explain the poet (http://palumbuscolumbus.wordpress.com/20 08/10/24/la-ciutat-de-bauca/).

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porary urban space. Contextualised in non-urban locations, his discourse loses its lexical eccentricity: in fact, all it does is reflect, like the outcome of a careful lexicological search, words of trades and activities no longer in use (ocatera [goose-keeper], raier [rafter], lleuder [market tax charger], etc.) from Catalonia, which reveals the importance of temporality and spatiality in his writing, its palimpsestic nature. Bauçà uproots his rural origins in Felanitx and makes them converge in a “global Catalan ruralia”: he makes the lexicographical barriers vanish and uses words from all the Catalan-speaking lands, which is tantamount to taking a political stance. The metaphor of the hermit that has often been used to describe him loses all meaning if we read him from this perspective: there is no poet more “connected” than Bauçà. On the other hand, we should not forget that the grid of streets in Barcelona’s Eixample district is neither an innocent nor hypo-connoted space; rather it appears with the density of the afterimage: it is clearly associated with the bourgeois class. As Brad Epps (179) noted ironically, the fact that the Eixample has figured so prominently in people’s minds says a great deal about the strength of the bourgeoisie and the economic system that supports it. The case of the narrator Jesús Moncada is somehow comparable to that of Bauçà. When Camí de sirga (1988), his most famous novel, was published, there was a debate in the press that pitted urban and rural writers against each other (Moret 37-38). In an interview, Moncada distinguished clearly between localism and folklore (“It has nothing to do with folklore. I’m interested in localism when it can be universally interpreted”), and a few years later he stressed the sterility of the opposition: “That was a totally artificial controversy, a dead-end controversy. Plus, Camí de sirga is a novel that is far removed from the assumptions of the rural genre. Books are good or bad, and that’s that” (quoted in Moret 38). In the article “Cabòries estivals”, he ironically pondered the need to make ad hoc laws to protect rural writers, as if they had become an endangered species: As the first measure, the Parliament should declare rural writers “an endangered species” and enact (I do not know whether with the counsel of the Department of Livestock, Hunting and Fisheries because the bureaucracy has a hidden agenda) urgent provisions to ensure their conservation. However, the situation is so delicate that purely passive measures would be insufficient, and an entire urban writer repopulation plan must be implemented for the most affected zones, subjected previously to an intensive retraining course according to a carefully studied programme (and this justifies the creation of an

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organisation where dozens of friends and acquaintances and an expert or two in the matter could be squeezed in). (Moncada: 2)

Underneath these lines you can read a profound lack of interest in applying the rural/urban division to literature, which in Moncada’s case is added to another marker which fell on him like a brick: his linguistic “peculiarity” and “marginality” as a Catalan-speaking Aragon native, a label that he always rejected in favour of Catalan writer. It was precisely an author who, in theory, was the antipodes of Moncada who most vehemently deemed him right. In 1987, in the Sant Jordi supplement to the magazine El Temps, Quim Monzó light-heartedly commented: Right from the start, the reviews and criticisms of Jesús Moncada’s first book found it fascinating that stories which were set far from the city could work. Not five years had passed since they had hidden the collection of earthenware jugs – to be able to embrace the new faith of neon, the metal chair and urban narrations – and now suddenly a spaced out fellow emerged who wrote simple narrations bereft of many pretensions, meaningful yet – oh my God! – rural. (186)

Monzó declared that he felt almost like Moncada’s relative because he had had the same experience as the writer from Mequinensa, but the opposite: “For years, I have had to read in the reviews and criticisms of my books reiterated surprise (from the critics and reviewers) because there was finally an urban narrative. It was repeated ad nauseam that I am the urban writer par excellence. And I am convinced there is more than one ignorant soul who believes that I invented, if not the concept of city, at least its use in literature” (186). Even though it is true that perhaps Monzó himself indirectly encouraged the application of the rubric of urban author to himself when he wrote stories so clearly marked by irony as “Literatura rural”, what he was positing was the need to replace written criticism based on thematic and environmental motifs with another kind where the structure and success of the story would come to the fore. And in the end, he wondered: Why does it matter so much if a story is set in a city or in a godforsaken village? Fiction has interest – if it does – in itself. ... I, myself – the paradigm, according to the herd, of the urban writer – much prefer a story set in Mequinensa with bars where the locals play dominoes, but with living and breathing characters and settings, than the stories of a “modern” writer, who, incapable of writing fiction that captures our interest, says that it is the effect of mescaline. But if the virtue is in the mescaline, pass it along and save us having to read the book. (187-188)

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Margalida Pons

Víctor Martínez-Gil, who has carefully studied the subtext of the critical debates on urban and rural narrative in the 1980s (and who includes the cases of both Moncada and Monzó in his analysis), warns about the distortions that can arise from the division between rural and urban when applied to the interpretation of recent novels: “With this way of seeing things, the fact that Jesús Moncada’s stories have a great deal to do with those of Pere Calders is hidden, as is the fact that the voice of Maria Barbal has a clear precedent in Mercè Rodoreda and that the latter’s treatment of the city has nothing in common with Quim Monzó’s” (65). In effect, taking the setting or the dialectal affiliation of a work as a criterion that is not descriptive but evaluative means the critic’s refusal to deal with more abstract aspects like voice, authority or Weltanschauung. In contemporary Catalan culture, the representation of the non-urban has become a contradictory phenomenon. First, it has lost its status as a romantic, idyllic and pastoral practice and has become an open – and henceforth unexplored – avenue of artistic inquiry. On the other hand, critics seem to resist acknowledging the validity of this avenue of inquiry and try to exorcise the unease that it prompts in them: they value rurality as a factor that can provide modernity despite itself. Thus, these critics situate the new ruralism in a periphery that does not question urban centrality: they situate it as an excess, as a necessary plus, as a practice that only gains validity through eccentricity, an eccentricity that comes from the avant-garde nature of the products or their lexical or environmental specificity – which is described as strange or exotic. All of this together creates a dynamic of dominances and submissions that is difficult to justify. Today the boundaries between rural and urban have lost their validity as intrinsic distinctive elements of the artistic artefact and have become critical parameters for designating factors as banal as the setting of the works or the geographic provenance of the artists. For this reason, perhaps the question is not whether the city still has or has already lost its cultural center in the literary and artistic realms. Perhaps the issue today is that the new representations of the rural have appropriated the qualities that had been used to define the city as a sign of modernity (heterogeneity, heteroglossia, palimpsestic nature), which requires us to redraw all the maps. If the cases described in this paper show us anything, it is that the place of art is never exclusively physical; rather it contains time and therefore memory and the possibility of dialogue – and conflict – between the different poetics – and politics – that inhabit it.

Leaving the City on Foot: Four Observations on Walking, Thinking and Writing in Contemporary Catalan Culture Xavier Pla

One of the most thought-provoking scenes from Francesc Serés’s novel L’arbre sense tronc (Serés 2001)1 is found in Chapter IX, entitled “The cart for everything on the road to nothingness”. One night a small cart pulled by a tired mule and carrying all the knowledge in the world is travelling along a muddy mountain track. The cart, loaded down with books and unsteady from the enormous weight, carries copies of Romeo and Juliette and Madame Bovary, works by the troubadours and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, as well as works by Aristotle, Machiavelli and Voltaire, Stevenson and Jules Verne. Sometimes the protagonist has to get down from the cart in the dark, push it around puddles and help the enormous wheels snake their way up the mountain. After a while the books, despite being well wrapped beneath some blankets, start to get wet, so the protagonist decides to take some off the cart and bury them for a few days. Working in the dark, he digs a huge hole with a shovel in the wet earth and buries a small multitude of authors. Horace and Virgil, Poe, Proust and Thomas Mann spend the night sleeping together under a black sky on a mountainside in the Catalan Pyrenees. Twenty centuries of literature beneath the wheat fields! The narrator decides to spend the night in an old, aban1. One can read a short story by Serés, “The Keys”, in English translation in Serés 2008: 125-132.

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doned barn to rest and dry out both his clothes and the jackets of dozens of damp and spoiled books. While he is doing this he finds a copy of War and Peace and also a book by Neruda, which had fallen off the cart as he was moving his literary load. He then makes a fire and sits down to think about his long, hard day’s work. But where are the books from? They come from the capital of Catalonia, from the library of the University of Barcelona, where the narrator works as a librarian cataloguing books, moving through the bookshelves of the library as if they were city streets. Beneath the cold, sad, fluorescent lights of the university library storerooms, this country boy starts to imagine the ideal library for his village. He starts to steal books – old, un-catalogued and forgotten books; books which have never even been opened and would never find a reader there. The narrator decides to create a second library in his village – the first dates from the Franco era and only offers literature written in Spanish, the Quixote and authors like Lope de Vega or Azorín. The second library will be Catalan and universal, carefully put together over the course of a month, with books transported in sacks by train and then by oxen. Then at daybreak on the last morning former farmers will take them by cart to the mechanic’s workshop from where they will be distributed to the young people of the village, eager to give life to the books. The scene where the books are transported from the city to the mountain village has undeniable metaphoric value. It reflects the tension between the city and the countryside central to Catalan culture throughout the 20th century. It also introduces the journey, on foot away from the city, as a unique literary genre and a characteristic element of how many Catalan writers relate to the rural world. The need to get away from the city is a constant feature of Catalan literature. The number of writers who decide to ponder the modern world from outside the city is significant, and the countryside is one of the most singular elements of Catalan culture. In a small country like Catalonia, with such a rich variety of landscapes, representations tend to shy away from abstraction and look towards more concrete forms of reality, both in visual art (Dalí, Miró, Tàpies, Barceló, Perejaume) and in literature. The Catalan literary landscape, so closely related to subjectivity, perspectives and journeys, is just as important as the visual. Catalonia’s varied landscape and geography has meant that it has been subject to multiple interpretations, from the mountains of the Pyrenees of modernist authors with their particular interpretation of Catalan culture, to civilised nature and the artificial and

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ordered landscapes of the nineteenth century gardens. The classic twentieth-century Catalan authors, poets and narrators, have created a kind of human geography where the landscape, the world, opens up as a horizontal panorama where every detail is revelatory. Francesc Serés, born in 1972, is one of the leading authors of recent Catalan narrative. He comes from Saidí, a Catalan-speaking village in Aragon, in an authentic border region on the banks of the river Ebre. Long gone are the days when Serés, winner of the Premi Nacional de Literatura in 2006 for his book La força de la gravetat, was known only as the author of the three impressive novels collected under the title De fems i de marbres (2003). Within a coherent literary framework, he has produced narrative reports on “real reality” in Matèria primera (2007), and a proposed theatrical piece, Caure amunt (2008), in which he reflects on the narrativization of memory through the figures of Ramon Llull, Ramon Muntaner and Jaume Roig. In seven published books he has gone about constructing a cartography of collective memory aimed at restoring the dignity of Pierre Michon’s “vies minuscules” (Michon) – of the lives of teachers and laborers, farmers and students, of the elderly – seemingly without biography but including all the obstacles, hardships, heartaches and also great and small joys. On more than one occasion, Serés has referred to the immense richness of the oral narratives told by previous generations – the stories recited by day laborers as they pick fruit, or around the fire at night. The center of his world as a writer is the counties of La Sagarra, Les Garrigues, El Segrià and Les Monegres, a hard, reclusive rural world of extreme climates whether in winter or summer, blanketed in an almost eternal fog with great desert plains surrounding the Ebre River. Serés’ literature is born of Marcel Proust and Juan Rulfo, of Camilo José Cela and Miguel Delibes, and the idea of the desert is central to it; in his books and his treatment of the landscape there is an almost epic will to imbue wide desolate spaces with a literary quality, a sort of “far-west” that draws him voluntarily toward Anton Chekov, but also William Faulkner, two of his main references. At the core of his literary project is a daring and radical investigation of one of the immortal themes in the history of literature: the conflict between the customs of the old world and the ways of the new, the clash between an ancient way of life and the new rituals which seek to destroy the old. Serés gives voice to an established way of life, one which is inseparably tied to the earth, and he does so with stylish virtuosity, polish and efficiency. The main characters are everyday people who fight to overcome

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the life-denying forces of gravity. They live discrete, hidden lives at the peripheries, the genuine “no man’s lands” of a society that has crushed them, that doesn’t know how to make room for them and that doesn’t allow them any right to representation. Serés has a way of seeing the present that is both clear and direct, without any apparent filters, characterized by a sort of internal tension that borders on accusation but that never leads to an elegy of lost time. It is a view that has more in common with that of some young Catalan cinematographers like Marc Recha than to the copious Barcelonian narrators permanently obsessed with the “great novel of Barcelona”: the consequences of modernity in rural life, with strong lyricism and an ethical slant. Yet the rural settings of Serés’ novels are described in all their rawness and without nostalgia. Serés takes the reader through a Catalan landscape which is not usually explored in literature, the Catalonia burned by forest fires, the hidden Catalonia of the Mercabarna lorry drivers, the silenced one of the fishermen of the Costa Brava getting rich by selling fake amphoras, the one where old ladies live in hardship on the terraces of the blocks of flats in old Barcelona, the Catalonia where the factory and mine workers, with resignation, fear and misery, sacrifice their anonymous lives for the sake of their children. And, most of all, the abandoned and disparaged rural Catalonia, today revitalized in part thanks to new waves of immigration and global economic needs. The author’s unfiltered way of looking pushes him to the verge of accusation but never to lament for times gone by. It is as if Serés had decided to confront the present with his feet firmly on the ground, paying tribute to it. This is “the reality of the real”. And the reality hurts (Campion). The English writer and art critic John Berger and his reflections on the Central European farming class form a strong presence in the work of Serés. But the Berger who is present in Serés is not so much the one of his renowned work Ways of Seeing (Berger 1972), but more that of Pig Earth (Berger 1979), with its utopia of a more just society and with its extraordinarily simple evocation of a rural world of survivors so resistant to history, so sensuous, and as unexpected as Gabriel García Márquez’s town of Macondo. For Berger, it is impossible to abandon the experience of the countryside as a relic of the past that is irrelevant to modern life. It is also fruitless to imagine that thousands of years of rural culture have not left us with any inheritance for the future simply because it has almost never been in the form of enduring objects. Nor does it make sense to continue to maintain, as has been done for centuries, that it is a life lived on

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the margins of civilization. Accepting this attitude would be to negate far too much history and far too many lives. One cannot strike a line through a part of history as one might cross out a line in a to-do list. The title of L’Arbre sense tronc evokes feelings of absence and emptiness. What exactly is a tree without a trunk? A tree comprised of only roots, a connection to the earth, and branches and boughs, connections to the sky. But a tree without a trunk ceases to be a tree; it lacks something essential. This image is clearly a parallel for the novel, which is, to put it one way, basically an elliptical narration which lacks a central argument. This extraordinary book chronicles the story of an almost ethereal main character, Assís, but the reader perceives only the branches and roots, advancing with some difficulty as a result of the empty spaces, the silences and the ellipses, jumping through space and time. Serés gives us a classical narrative structure to describe the growth, maturation and death of his character; on the other hand, because he is never conceded any biographical information, the reader must go about filling the space of indeterminacy between the text and the reader described by Wolfgang Iser (Iser). This is done not without a certain amount of strain. It is a novel of few characters, constructed of clues and allusions; it does not narrate any cause-and-effect situations. We see Assís in places, key to understanding the book, where traces of his memories remain, and we see him from infancy to death, from the Francoist School to the University of Barcelona. In L’Arbre sense tronc, the majority of these places are educational: a school, the church, the movie theatre, and the library. Central here is Claude Lévi-Strauss’ idea that myths reproduce themselves and that men can become simple appendices to a vast net of meanings that float above their heads, stories told to us and to each other. In the chapter in the cemetery, Serés seems to say that every place must be “covered” by a story. In L’Afrique Fantôme, published in 1934, Michel Leiris tells the following anecdote that takes place during an ethnographic and linguistic expedition to Dakar-Djibouti, a mission to collect ethnographic objects and revalorize indigenous cultures through an understanding of their customs. At some point they stop to attend a Dogon ritual. Michel Leiris does not stop writing at any time in his little notebook as they toss entrails and intestines and blood at him. Meanwhile, Marcel Griaule, director of the expedition, looks at him. Everyone looks at everyone else and they all do what they can to get to know each other. In La força de la gravetat there was already an epigraph signed by an Irina Medelèieva, author of some Contes de color rus. It spoke of inhabitants

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who had resigned themselves to living with forces of gravity stronger than in any other country. Now, the same idea is explored in “La guerra dels voromians”. In Voromir, everything takes extra effort. The forces of gravity are stronger than in the rest of Russia and indeed the rest of the world. The inhabitants’ voices change and when they speak they stretch their vowels out longer than in any other place. The repopulation of Voromir with Russian-speakers creates problems: the newcomers get hunched backs, their heads become too heavy and their spines curved… Contes russos (Serés 2009) is a splendid volume of narrations presented as a fictitious anthology. Serés invents an anthologist and a translator, Anastassia Maxímovna, through whom he has selected twenty-one stories from five false contemporary Russian authors. The narratives seem ordered from present to past, and writers are presented along with their biographies, published works and their reviews, with hints of Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Bulgakov, but also Jane Austen, Isaac Babel, Kafka, Nabokov and Salinger. In these six different invented themes, styles and eras, masked behind these new characters who never quite become heterogeneous, Serés develops one fiction after another, approaching something which to a hypothetical Russia remains unreachable, ineffable and profoundly literary. Over the years, Serés has gradually abandoned that solemn and judicious style that marked the trilogy and in which the writing sometimes became too obvious (despite always being effective) and has adopted rapid, effective narrations that move and entertain, and that are somewhat abrupt, and often written in the first person. With this book, Serés repositions himself at the center of debates over today’s literature: the dignity of everyday life, the uses and abuses of memory, the manipulation of history, the failure of utopias. His Russia obviously acts as a sort of mirror. Serés has left the dusty, filthy Catalonia of his earlier books and focused instead on a clean, icy Russia with “a cold of solid transparency”. But as the author himself admits, Saidí is Russia and Incerta glòria by Joan Sales could be a great Russian novel. Serés adopts the attitude of the person whom the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann called “the second-hand observer”: the one who observes the observer as he observes. As professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht says in his book Production of presence: “The emergence of this self-reflexive observer realized that each element of knowledge and each representation that he could ever produce would necessarily depend on the specific angle of his observation” (Gumbrecht: 39). This is perhaps the only way of expanding the potential and the imagination of Contemporary literature.

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••• In 1898 the painter Santiago Rusiñol, accompanied by his friend Ramon Casas, made an entertaining trip around Catalonia by horse and cart to catch a glimpse of the arrival of modernity and afterwards published a book on the subject. Since then many writers have been attracted to this literary form. In fact, the last few years have seen a veritable explosion of books about journeys around Catalonia written in a variety of forms, mainly by young authors: journeys on foot, by bicycle, by horse and cart, hitchhiking, by train or car, and even by hot-air balloon and by boat along the coast. It is as if they had collectively decided to repudiate the famous quote by Julien Gracq: “So many hands to change this world, and so few looks to contemplate it!” (Gracq: 169). In Catalonia, walking took on almost mystical associations, but one can say that it was a German literary masterpiece, Robert Walser’s 1917 novella The Walk, which set the literary precedent. Its lyrical, digressive rhythms remain evident in the work of two other great German-speaking writers of more recent times, Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald, both of whom have been successfully translated into Catalan. Those writers, and others like Claudio Magris and Milan Kundera, have influenced modern Catalan writers in the past 20 years or so. Older and newer forms of travel writing have appeared. Some writers have been able to refresh the genre by employing experimental textual practices or including pictures, and they don’t worry about the difference between fiction and non-fiction. For example, two young philosophers very recently published the book Dos en un burro. Per Catalunya en carro, with a prologue by Xavier Rubert de Ventós (Guinart / Sabadí).2 There is no need to remind ourselves of the symbolism of the donkey for Catalan people, but I have to say that the donkey was called “Amèrica”. In 2006 Toni Sala wrote the book Autostop. Viatges per la Catalunya d’ara (Sala), and the English writer Mathew Tree published CAT. Un anglès viatja per Catalunya per veure si existeix (that is: An Englishman travels around Catalonia to see if it exists) in 2001, is an on-the-road description of a journey around Catalonia, based on his experiences of travelling for a month by public transport. These writers tend to shun certain landscapes, for example Empordà and old Catalonia, those green, damp, historical lands, the victims of excessive symbolic and patriotic mythology. Instead they give priority to the rugged, secluded Catalan Pyrenees, huge industrial cities like l’Hospitalet, and to southern Catalonia, the

2. On Rousseau, see Montandon: 89-125.

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region of the Ebre River, as yet unspoilt by tourism and providing historical sights from the Spanish civil war. How do we account for the resurgence of travel literature? Perhaps the continuing appeal of the genre reflects the increased interest in all forms of non-fiction in recent years, as Alison Russell admits in Crossing boundaries. Postmodern Travel Literature (Russell: 2). Travel literature offers a reflection of the dramatic and complex changes of the world or, perhaps more importantly, it captures our changing perspectives of borders, boundaries and other spatial concepts. ••• The illustrious forerunner of contemporary Catalan travel literature is, of course, Josep Pla (1897-1981), who in the 1930s published the celebrated work Viatge a Catalunya, a poetic representation of the journey, a real “invitation au voyage”, inspired by Goethe and the Mémoires d’un touriste by Stendhal. A compulsive writer, journalist and autobiographer, Josep Pla was also made known as an intelligent and untiring traveller, by one of his favourite readers, the Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela. His work consists basically of fake personal diaries, pseudo-autobiographical narratives, biographies and artists’ portraits, and he could be considered the moderniser of Catalan prose (Pla 1999: 126-136). As an example of “egotist” writing and as a reader of Stendhal’s writing, Pla is a writer who has fun undermining the most rigid rules of literary history in order to elaborate a literary work which does not belong to any literary genre, but which integrates and surpasses all of them at the same time. To get closer to the truth, Pla always stated that the he “only” intended to relate his life, always hiding his identity as a writer and producing literature while pretending that he was not doing it at all. In fact, Pla writes with a kind of dissimulation, which always consists in camouflaging the formal procedures and linguistic artifices he uses (Pla 1997). For all these reasons, therefore, the autobiographical writings of Josep Pla, including travel literature, are basically textual architectures, which allow him to elaborate the “self ” by writing. Pla adapts with great freedom the autobiographical register, without ever exclusively respecting those requirements of the genre such as verification, fidelity or exactitude, in order to elaborate an “oeuvre” in which it is never quite clear whether the protagonist is actually himself or not since, this work affects the re-creation of a lived experience, but not from any particular identifiable one. However, Pla’s most recognised books were splendid travel books published in the 1940s, in Spanish, in which the author turned his profound

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gaze upon the misery of post-war Spain, Viaje en autobús, published in 1942, and Viaje a pie, in 1948: “In order to profit from a journey it is essential to take it as a goal in itself. Traveling around the world a bit aimlessly is very pleasant. To travel without a concrete goal is truly marvellous … One must travel to discover with one’s own eyes that the world is very small and thus it is necessary to make an effort in order to dignify the vision until one sees things on a large scale. One must travel to realize that a passion, an idea, one man are only important if they resist a projection through time and space. There is nothing like taking some distance in order to recover from the psychosis of nearness, of the distortion caused by nearness, which affects us all. It is necessary to travel in order to learn, nonetheless, to conserve, to perfect, to tolerate. It is in this sense, I think, that the ancients recommended wayfaring” (Pla 1942: 8-9). After the Spanish civil war, Pla lived in an isolated country house in Llofriu, a few miles outside of Palafrugell, and observed everyday life with attention, reading Goethe and Leopardi. In that period, Pla was a fervent reader of three significant quotes from the Journal by French writer Jules Renard: “To flee into a village in order to make it the center of the world”, “My village is the center of the world because the center is everywhere” and “The fatherland? All the strolls that one can take around the village” (Renard: 1244). In his book Viaje a pie, Pla starts with a quite naïf “invitation au voyage”: “To those congenial boys who when they are at life’s door feel the noble grip of personal ambition and – I assume – the archnoble ambition to serve and who ask: ‘What should we do? Would you kindly give us a hint and tell us what we can do?’, I would recommend a journey on foot” (Pla 1948: 7). For post-war Spain these rhetorically dissident Catalan books provided a welcome distraction from the triumphant rhetoric of Francoist literature. Viaje en autobús was, in times of jubilant patriotism and fascist ideology, such a banal book, so lacking in pretentions; as read today, it is an approximation of reality and the result of unequalled literary genius. Pla always told young writers eager for advice: “Know the country and you will know yourselves”. ••• The poetics of the journey on foot, by Josep M. Espinàs (Barcelona 1927) is one of the most original adventures of recent Catalan literature. The protagonist is the writer himself, Josep M. Espinàs, and his journeys of self-discovery made on foot. To date, he has published twenty books

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Xavier Pla

about these journeys, which, as he says, are not simply excursions but explorations of ‘the art of walking’, or a kind of wanderlust. Espinàs has been all over Catalonia and the island of Majorca, and to some regions of València, Aragon, Galicia and Murcia. He is a popular phenomenon, with thousands of readers waiting for the latest instalment in a series, which is the result of a cohesive literary choice. Espinàs always works the same space with both tenacity and the conviction that by excavating the same spot of land, the same fragment of reality, or the same text over and over again, unbeatably rich results can be obtained. Each new book about one of Josep M. Espinàs’s journeys on foot is another transformation of this space, a variation designed to enrich that space and to bring to it new sounds and voices. As a young man, Espinàs published some good novels. He was interested in existentialism, the NorthAmerican novel and the police. Both readers and critics liked his novels, which were translated and won prizes. But suddenly the author, who had already stopped writing poetry, thought that the time had come to abandon the novel as well, as if fiction should make way for journalism, travel and coffee table books, and autobiographical writing. Convinced that life is a continuous process of substitutions which forces the writer (and the individual) to leave progressively behind all that he has achieved and all that he has become bored or tired of, Espinàs will not go back to writing novels, except on very rare occasions. It is as if he has decided to adapt the “normal observational capacity of experience” to his own literary ambitions. Travel books, understood in the wider sense (and taking Josep Pla and his travel companion in Viaje al Pirineo, Camilo José Cela, as references), end up becoming one of his favourite narrative spaces. Of course, Espinàs shuns exoticism and the adventure novel, because he knows that adventure can be found just as easily in a hotel room, in a café in Barcelona or in a department store, as in a dry and bumpy landscape somewhere in Aragon. The person who walks on foot adopts an open attitude and a different, slower, pace. At one point, for example at the spa where the trip ends, Espinàs feels a pang of sadness, longing and loneliness. That’s when the reader realizes that the journey through space is a journey through and against time. Travel has to do with death, and is perhaps a way to postpone death; there is an impulse to defer arrival for as long as possible. The journey on foot has its own poetry, which has to do with the road of no return as described by Claudio Magris in L’infinito viaggiare. It is not a circular, traditional, classical Oedipic journey like that of Joyce, whose Ulysses returns home, but a one-way road, a journey that goes ever on-

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wards, a journey in the tradition of Nietzsche, like that of Musil’s characters. As Magris asserts, there are at least two kinds of trips. On the one hand, there is the circular journey where the main character who has set himself goals and accomplished them, finally, having discovered a “truth”, returns home to confront the world. And then there is linear travel, during which the traveler moves forward and does not believe in returning, and is always open to pauses, random digressions, unexpected deviations, and is immersed in the present and the suspension of time. The latter is the traveler who is always moving ahead, clearing himself of his previous identity, erasing past footsteps, not wishing to “return home” because, somehow, he knows how to live simultaneously away from home and at home, or perhaps because he is convinced that home, one can not possess any (Magris). In the journey on foot the subject, the I, goes onwards, and his progression annihilates and leaves behind his former identity. “Drop everything!” wrote André Breton in 1922, exhorting the dépaysement or change of scenery which unequivocally advocated: “Drop everything, drop dada” (Breton: 262). Therefore, a journey on foot is not simply an exercise in observation, but a mental and literary construction. And its narrative techniques give these books a novel-like quality far superior to that of many failed works of fiction. It is not about the excursion, or the crossing, or the walk. As Rebecca Solnist says, “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it”, and it allows us to know “the world through the body and the body through the world” (Solnist). The walker-philosopher is, after all, a key figure of the Enlightenment. And of course walking is the defining characteristic of human development (and human exceptionalism), related to the development of thinking itself. One of the most famous walkers of the history of literature is the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who admitted in his Confessions that “I cannot think except walking; as soon as I stop, I no longer think, and my head only works with my feet”. Moreover: “I love to walk at my pace and to stop when it suits me. Ambulatory life is the kind I need. Traveling leisurely on foot in good weather and in a beautiful region and with a pleasant object as the journey’s purpose: of all the ways of life this is the one I like best” (Rousseau 1959: 410). And later in Les rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, walking sets the tempo of his thinking. Thoreau was the key progenitor of the idea that life, metaphorically, might best be regarded as a walk through unknown country. While acknowledging the spiritual function of the religious pilgrimage, he preferred to emphasise a utopian sense of limitless possibil-

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ity and rugged free will, which emerged from a walk on the wilder side of nature. And one can remember Thoreau’s belief in Walking: “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we only walked in a garden or a mall?” (Thoreau: 52). Montaigne, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Kierkegaard were among other famous meditative walkers, captured artistically in the Rückenfigur, the lone wanderer so frequently at the centre of the paintings of the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich. He who travels on foot adopts an open-mind and a slower pace. He accepts the unforeseen, and he does not pursue anything or anybody; his milestone may be a carob tree or simply a woman saying hello from a window. The walker is not concerned with cultural questions; what interests him most is people, be they men, women, children or the elderly. He accepts that to reach what lies before him he must sometimes be patient and take the long way round. The present is the protagonist of the journey on foot, but sometimes the leisurely pace and meticulous observation bring back the personal or collective past, such as autobiographical or involuntary memories. There is a subjective selection of detail and stimulation; the author uses the most unexpected material, but in the end, like the perfect construction of a Gothic window arch, everything must form part of the whole, of the dynamic narrative. Does the postmodern travel book originate from the postmodern journey? How can innovative narrative forms and literary devices resuscitate a dying genre? In the winter of 2004 the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid invited Perejaume to do a workshop. Perejaume (Sant Pol de Mar, 1957), who defines himself as a painter, writer and excursionist, suggested leaving Madrid on foot. Madrid is a huge and isolated metropolis surrounded by motorways, tunnels, and railway lines, a place where all kinds of communications networks converge, making it seem impossible to find your way out: “What does it mean to leave Madrid on foot with three drawings from the 18th century […]? What is all that? What does it become? Are we talking about a work? Can we call it a work? Whose work?, or of what?, of how many?” (Perejaume 2008: 38). Where does the city begin and end? French sociologist Michel de Certeau believes that: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language” (Certeau: 97). Just as the woods and hills are best explored, and their mysteries penetrated, by foot, so too are the streets and enclaves of the city. Perejaume has reflected upon the similarities between walking and writing, and he has studied the landscape and

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its visual and literary representations. He has compared the efficiency of the word with the effectiveness of walking to create heterogeneous spaces. At the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando he discovered three 18th-century paintings of the anatomy of the foot. Two of these studies were anonymous and the other had been signed by José Vergara Jimeno. Perejaume put them into folders and planned his walk. It was 22 March 2007, and dressed in reflective clothing and carrying backpacks he and three others walked some thirty kilometers out of the city, following the river Jarama and surrounded by water purification plants, warehouses and abandoned cars. They made a fire and spent the night outdoors in a tent, and the next day they made the return journey, a little disappointed at discovering that this huge city was limitless, overflowing, never-ending. The city defies empirical study, it cannot be measured, like a monstrous illusion devouring the countryside for ever more: “Walking is an extremely complete, complex, sophisticated action. To begin with, the foot, like the step, are units of measurement and a kind of sequence …. Until that subtle moment when, with every step, the feet, the head, breathing and sight automatically command us and share decisions. But also fatigue, the percussion of circulating blood, optical and cerebral fluidity…, everything participates in the subtle art of walking, until reason, yielding to fatigue, turns itself over to rhythm. Some times we experience this as profoundly as if the throbbing we feel came from the places we pass through. The walker in action leans so passively and copiously on the places he crosses, that the steps themselves do not know if they belong to the draftsman or to the draft” (Perejaume: 48). A last observation must be made. New Catalan cinema offers many examples of journeys on foot, which provide fresh visions of rural Catalonia, like the magnificent El somni (A Dream, 2008), by Christophe Farnarier, a documentary about the last shepherds to practice seasonal shepherding in the Pyrenees. Internationally recognised young film directors, like Marc Recha and Albert Serra, also offer new visions of the landscape and the rural world in films like Honor de cavalleria (Honour of the Knights, 2005). Using non-professional actors and adopting a minimalist attitude, Serra invokes Quixote through two characters who simply walk, talk, swim in the river and rest. Serra shows patiently the quiet moments between Quixote and Sancho Panza, and the miraculous passage of a cloud’s vast shadow over a mountainside gives a note of melancholy otherworldliness and genuinely moving quality to the film. Dies d’agost (August Days, 2007) is a slow, descriptive film in which Recha manages to turn the contempla-

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tion of the landscape into an aesthetic experience. The director focuses on uninhabited villages and abandoned farms, and on the church spires that emerge ghost-like from the waters of the reservoirs, finding therein the ideal space to express an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia, desolation and perplexity about the passing of time and the meaning of life. As the French philosopher Frédéric Gros wrote, when a man (or a woman) walks, he will not find himself. When a man walks, he will not capture his real self. When a man walks, he will not find a lost identity. When a man walks, the very idea of identity escapes (Gros 2009: 15). And this, speaking of Catalan literature, leads to reflection.

DE MOTS A TERRA: Linguistic Ruin in Francesc Serés’s L’ARBRE SENSE TRONC William Viestenz

The land is a head that speaks Joan Brossa

“What does a head say?” The first line of Francesc Serés’s novel L’arbre sense tronc [The Tree Without a Trunk], is suspended within a structure of desire, as one only asks when in need of a certain thing.1 For the novel’s narrator, this desire may only be placated by the linguistic address of an Other. For the reader, this invites several questions: What sort of privation on the part of the narrator is satisfied by the enunciation of a cap? Does the use of an indefinite article before cap indicate an investigation into the consistency of being embodied within a universal voice which is not particular to any one locality? To whom does the cap direct its address? Thinking in terms of readerly expectations, it is tempting to correlate the focus on linguistic annunciation in the work’s opening salvo with a potentially nationalist underpinning in the author’s ideological shadow. Serés is a native of an area of the Spanish province of Aragón called la franja, which serves as both a provincial and linguistic border, separating the language of the nation-state, Castilian, and the minority Catalan tongue. Whether through both internal and external immigration, the pressure of being a border territory, or a long history of state sponsorship of Castilian, the existence of Catalan in the franja d’Aragó is increasingly threatened, especially

1. All translations of Serés’s work are my own.

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in urban areas. The slow yet earnest resurgence of literature written in Catalan since the end of Franco’s dictatorship mirrors, and is often the cultural staging ground for, political calls for regional autonomy and recognition of national distinction. Serés’s decision to write in Catalan could naively be taken therefore as a political gesture – particularly if one takes at face value this statement from the novel’s third chapter, where the protagonist discusses a childhood ambivalence towards instruction in Castilian: “the chalkboard has now become a cheap mask, black on the inside and painted on the exterior, like those made of thin cardboard with round eyes and white rubber, and you read with an artificial voice letters that aren’t yours” (256). The appearance of this discourse in a chapter ostensibly criticizing a State-aligned educational system would certainly distinguish Serés’s novel from a literary discourse serving as a narrative of the nation that, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, formally presents the “meanwhile” simultaneity of an imagined community acting within a homogenous empty time (421–428). Serés would appear, rather, to be articulating what Homi K. Bhabha takes to be a “structure of cultural liminality” that is performed at the edge of a nation’s borders as the companion to a double-writing that reacts to a pedagogically-transmitted historical idea of nationhood. The pedagogical will to a national identity institutes a self-generated time of historical moments that is interrupted by the spaces at the limit of national borders where one is “confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population” (212). Bhabha’s main objection to Anderson, the notion of national “meanwhile” time being aligned with the homogenous calendrical time typical of the nineteenth-century realist novel, transforms into a commentary on the disjunction essential to a will to nationhood that involves an “obligation to forget” the different minority and subaltern voices in an effort to formulate a totalizing yet “problematic identification of a national people” (230). Upon closer examination, L’arbre sense tronc most unexpectedly appears to be not at all interested in the possibility of “imagining a community”, whether from an elevated hierarchical space or from a subaltern one, but instead with the perhaps impossible search for a methodology that might permit a return to an abandoned space that is largely vacated of its cast of human actors. Indeed, the novel, the second in a trilogy entitled De fems i de marbres [Of Manure and Marble], is described by the author as possessing a tone inflected by “the impossibility of return and the bitterness of having lost places” (Serés 2008). This same sentiment is repeated in L’arbre sense tronc, when the narrator asserts: “when one leaves,

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it’s forever, you can only leave a place once, there’s but one opportunity to leave, places don’t allow it more than once, they don’t allow returns” (72). Indeed the entirety of Serés’s triology unerringly presents protagonists who have left the countryside only to find years later that the land obstinately resists allowing them to return. The countryside is bereft of its former inhabitants and littered with debris and detritus, yet it is the possessor of narrative agency – imbuing in leftover things essential predicables that, when unearthed, reveal the shape of what they once were. The land envelopes returnees with a kind of mood that demands a devotion to unintentioned listening. In the third book of the triology, Una llengua de plom [A Language of Lead], the narrator returns from political exile in Venezuela as a land surveyor charged with creating a map of his native valley for the purpose of constructing a dam. His attempts at translating his observations onto paper are continually resisted by the countryside, which unrelentingly shifts positions when gazed at through a leveling instrument. The narrator, feeling a new form of exile from his native region, is eventually forced to give in to the countryside’s demands, and allow himself to be inundated with a series of forgotten memories. In lieu of imagining, in the style of Benedict Anderson, Serés attempts to capture the archaeological vestiges of a bygone community that are trapped within the earth but obstinately attempt to return to narratological consciousness. In Serés’s work, language, understood as an object, tends to be the noema that offers up the content that serves as a gateway to a place’s past. After going to the capital to study languages, the protagonist of L’arbre sense tronc becomes the translator: he who performs noesis upon returning to an emptied out landscape. The plot of L’arbre sense tronc is divided into three parts which chronologically follow the development and maturation of the protagonist Assís, a “novel of formation” in the most classic understanding of the Bildungsroman. Like the Picaresque and the Bildungsroman, the novel also narrates the journey between markedly different spaces, from the province to the capital and then back to the province once again in the third part. The first two sections establish many of the same geographical oppositions that Franco Moretti perceives in his atlas of the Bildungsroman: old/young, family/strangers, and so on (65). The provincial chapters focus unerringly on anecdotes narrating the origin and dissolution of family life, while the period the protagonist spends in the capital studying languages is marked by correspondence with his mentor, an aged priest named pare Lemozi, and also by the unfamiliar disarray of the urban landscape’s strange sights and plethora of sounds.

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Assis’s commentary after having fallen face-first in the middle of the city’s central plaza deftly communicates the latter: People surrounded me, making a circle atop the discolored and rock-hard zebra-patterned crosswalk, a forest of legs that only allowed me to perceive at its periphery quickly passing cars, while I placed my face next to the ground, I stretched my arms and breathed slowly, and with an ear against the ground I could diaphanously and precisely hear the trembling of the asphalt reproducing the bellowing of the subway ... (99)

The circle of mutually-unknown faces interpolated amidst the polyphonous din of traffic and the mechanical trembling of the subway replicates the same horizontal ties that Moretti sees in the city-phase of the Bildungsroman (“unknown congenial faces seen in the gardens” (61)) and Benedict Anderson’s notion of traversive simultaneity (“An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. ... But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (423)). These examples prove that the imposition of the temporal structure of the realist novel onto national narratives (or vice-versa) is also contingent on the city becoming a preferred literary setting for the novel, as an essential category of urban spatial make-up is the mass conglomeration of citizens sharing a common geographical rootedness without, or at least very rarely, participating in face-to-face communication. The initial section of the book, however, which narrates Assís’s childhood and adolescence in the province, establishes the same vertical, intergenerational relationships that Moretti perceives in the village of the Bildungsroman: “In the village, not only are mothers (or substitute mothers) always present, but every important relationship takes the form of a family tie: early sweethearts are sister figures ... while early friends are as often as not older brothers” (65). Without question, the novel’s opening chapters present a series of paternal figures that, in some form or another, all assume the role of instructor in the protagonist’s moral and intellectual education. There is the aforementioned rector of Assís’s seminary, for example, and also a roving grapefruit and date merchant whose knowledge of worldly languages and cultures plants the seed in Assís’s mind that will later result in a desire to eschew provincial life: The market was the center of the world where for free you sold your soul and desired to be any one of the merchants that had a life different than yours,

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the place where you dressed up with words in order to speak like the fishmonger, the mackerel, the fish belly, the cod, the scallop. (59)

The acquisition of a certain dialect, or in Bakhtin’s terms, of a particular heterogloss that does not necessarily require a switching of a linguistic code, allows one to use language as a sort of enveloping robe that alters the speaker’s social identification. The intrusion of extrinsic words into the provincial place assembles a collection of signifiers whose signifieds originate far beyond the land on which the market takes place every week. This single chapter exemplifies the plasticity and openness of the novelistic form, which Bakhtin sees as particularly appropriate as a staging ground for “the image of another’s language and outlook on the world ... simultaneously represented and representing” (45). As an image, the Other’s discourse – that which the cap enunciates – makes an aesthetic appearance in the dialogic discourse of the novel, yet by containing a particular worldview it simultaneously expresses a meaning encompassed within the language. The education imparted by the fruit merchant at the market feeds in part Assís’s fascination with the multifariousness of language (indeed, heteroglossia) that exists outside of the purview of the isolated province. The protagonist’s disavowal of his heritage takes place through a transaction that exchanges a connection to the land for a kind of knowledge derived from written texts: “languages were my passion from the beginning ... In fact I went to the capital to learn languages” (64). Assís’s belief in the impossibility of return, or of perhaps going beyond a point of no return, seems logical under the bylaws of this transaction, which mirrors in a certain sense the Edenic myth or the Faust legend.2 The passage from country to city initiates a pedagogical transference from the land as primary educator to the authority the printed page. At the beginning of the second part, as Assís succumbs to the centripetal pull of the capital, he remarks that the education instilled by the land has provided the fortitude to overcome the melancholy that follows leaving: “On the outside, I act

2. The reappearance of the Bildungsroman structure or the thematics of a Faustian tale reveal a strong identification between Serés and Lévi-Strauss, a reference the author notes in an interview: “Listeners prioritize a narrated history, because they are circumstantial. This has to do with Lévi-Strauss’s idea that myths explain themselves to one another through the thoughts of humans. Reading him helped me to understand a story’s capacity to reproduce itself ” (Serés 2008).

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as though I’m sleeping, nobody sees the tears, the most intense weeping is that which is done on the inside. In the village, nobody ever cries because the land has taught us to harden the heart and to transform weeping into rage; and now, away, I begin to hate, and to feel strong” (67). The instruction doled out by the land is not centered on linguisticity or dialogical understanding. Instead, it centers on the arduous experience of tilling the ground from which one was taken. To note this one may profitably refer, for example, to the manner in which Assís’s father utilizes the harvest as a mnemonic handle for accessing his stock of accumulated past experience: My father, on the other hand, when he had to remember something, went to the crops and using the bundles of wheat he remembered all that had occurred that year, a green memory from the sowing or a yellow one from a harvested husk, winter and summer evoking all the important happenings, those which the head doesn’t let flee amongst all the reminiscences that unstably accompany those principal events. (20)

The uncomplicated and single-minded nature of the father’s existence reduces his horizon of experience to a single cycle of nature, a process of cultivation that ranges from the planting of seeds to the full maturation shortly preceeding the harvest. In the case of the father, the identity of the enunciating cap refers not to a human agent but to the message communicated by the numerous husks of wheat and ears of corn that reflect the traces of the cultivator’s labor in the course of a growing cycle. Intimacy with the land, then, permits a dialogue with a natural, decidedly non-human voice. The contradiction of Assís’s familial heritage and his newfound life as a university student comes to a head in a chapter in which the protagonist attends a meeting of academic colleagues and simultaneously reads a letter sent to him from the province by father Lemozi. The priest admonishes any effort to forget the distinction between the linguistic register of his rural dialect and the institutional language of the university. He writes: “and you, Assís, you come from churning butter and cleaning pigs, and you can be proud that you bring with you into the university that kind of world that the school itself rejects, because there’s no word within the university’s walls that’s close to the world” (95). The way in which one transports particular worldviews is through the language that one employs – a notion certainly developed in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, where taking a cue from Humboldt, he asserts that the underpinning of the notion that the world is “linguistic in nature” is that the world “is

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‘world’ only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is re-represented within it” (401). Meaning, therefore, is not merely communicated through language but is also embedded within it. Language, in being understood as meaningbearing, goes beyond simple instrumentality. Adopting another’s language, returning to the metaphor of a robe used earlier, allows a projection of a distinct worldview that may differ from that of the subject speaking. This concept also brings us closer again to Bakhtin’s polyphony in the discourse of the novel, which is precisely a staging ground for “another’s worldview” because “all words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (293). Every time a word is voiced, it bears the marks of the others who have voiced the same word in the past. The notion of taste stresses the very sensation of the word in the process of its formulation. The word, then, is understood as a historicallyevolved substance shot through with discreet qualities over the course of time. With respect to heteroglossia and polyphony, one can perceive great difficulty in maintaining a stable sense of place when the text is inundated with multiple social and national languages and also includes words containing a plethora of distinct voices that all identify with a different manner of interpreting the spatial world set before them. What also arises in Lemozi’s correspondence is a clear tension between the modern ideal of personal transformation, the individual pursuit of ambition, and the unbreakable connection to the conditions and environments that provide the foundational basis for what constitutes identity. Assís’s trajectory is not unlike a linked chain at the beginning of the novel that keeps a rabid dog firmly caged within a certain circumference of land. Assís’s grandfather uses the individual links of the chain to count down the important events of the recent past, and more importantly Assís himself asserts that the structure of his personal narrative resembles such an interlinking that extends outward as one attains experience but is ultimately tied down to a specific, unchanging origin: In my memory, the wheat fields are all the places and the chain links are the other people, those who have lived with me in each of the moments in which I’ve had life, those which I now have curiously ordered, like a commemoration of facts that are chain links, the cinema, the tavern, the farm, the city or the market. (21)

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The wheat fields – the emblematic image of the province – are the originary “places” and the lived experiences, “the chain links”, are what come after, are that which extend outward from the foundational spatial base. Not coincidentally, the ordered places that the narrator here names (the cinema, the tavern and so on), serve as main themes of later chapters in the novel. From the beginning therefore the reader senses that the narrative voice projected in the text is not an ethos that slowly matures over the course of the plot. Instead, and very much like the grandfather in the second chapter equating his life’s principal events with the links of a chain, L’arbre sense tronc is the discourse of an aged, melancholic figure attempting to trace his own line of existence through memory back to the primal, formative provincial spaces of his origin. Having understood this formal principle, we can look at the final two chapters of the second part and the entirety of the third which suggestively narrate the attempted return of the protagonist to the province, a curious reversal of the novel’s previous centripetal pull towards the city. The narrator, now grown old, returns to a village and landscape markedly different from the one he left and the sense of uncanny is quite palpable in the shifting tone of the work. The transference to a centrifugal pull in the direction of the rural stands in opposition to the progressive Bildungsroman ideal of finding happiness through the realization of individual ambitions as one passes from youth to matured adulthood. The shape of Serés’s novel, rather than following a straight line, resembles something like a bell curve. In terms of literary motifs, Serés’s protagonist transforms himself into a librarian in the style of Borges (he works in a library while attending the university) but thereafter assumes the Odyssean guise of returning to a ransacked, ruined home after a period away. The plot’s arc could conceivably allow for the story to digress into a type of stylistics suffocated by nostalgia, which often occurs in works which try to “rescue or resuscitate a world through literature”. The author himself, after all, says that a part of the work’s project concerns the reconstruction of a lost world through the presence of one’s own memory and also the dispersed memories of others.3 I argue that Serés avoids this tone by crafting a work

3. This topic of nostalgia, one might add, has had a long history in Catalan literature, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, as a bourgeois class, many of whose members were second-sons of the landed aristocracy who did not inherit the family estate and therefore had to find wealth in the industrializing city, led a literary revival

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that serves as a meta-commentary on a vocation to care for the linguistic remains of one’s ancestors left buried in provincial soil and etched into the ruins of abandoned edifices. The cycle of Serés’s novel could easily be read in parallel with Balzac’s Lost Illusions, also a tryptich following provinces-Paris-provinces. Dickens’s Great Expectations is another, lesser exercise in the same structure. Why does a geo-cultural model, that of the Bildungsroman, that arises in the first half of the nineteenth century still hold up so well at the dawn of the twenty-first? In Lost Illusions, Lucien Chardon also arrives in the city to cultivate his talent and acquire a fame not possible in the provinces. He ultimately falls victim to competing social interests, the allure of wealth and the pull of boundless personal ambition at the expense of others. In a letter to his sister announcing his intention to commit suicide, he bitterly notes that “while you became better people, I allowed a deadly poison to infect my life” (645). Lucien’s return to the countryside is more of a cowardly exile than anything else, a fleeing from creditors and personal failure to a family whose paternal name he had actively worked to replace by begging for a royal edict which would allow him to adopt his mother’s aristocratic surname. As for a geo-cultural explanation for this sort of text, one need only look to the French Revolution and one of its emblematic texts, Rousseau’s Second Discourse. Lucien’s “deadly poison” points towards Rousseau’s corruption of natural man, who in society exchanges amor de soi-même for amor-propre. As inequality between men accentuated differences in rank and social standing, “it was necessary in one’s own interest to seem to be other than one was in reality. Being and appearance became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose insolent ostentation, deceitful cunning and all the vices that follow in their train” (119). Rousseau’s distaste for Parisian salon life manifests itself through his work in very much the same way that Lucien represents the elements of French society that Balzac detested, such as the rise of journalism and the role of the market place in creating literary success. Assís initially travels to the city in search of the same personal transformation and education as many Bildungsroman protagonists, but his experience in the second part of the novel is closer to the beginnings of a blasé attiude, in the style of Georg Simmel, than to the banishment of illusions

that propagated a return to the rural in part due to a nostalgia for an environment they had left.

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following Rousseau’s vision of society. The excess stimulation through the myriad sounds and voices that Assís encounters mirrors closely what Simmel perceives as a “rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulation of the nerves” within metropolitan life. In the “forest of legs” that swirls around Assís as he lies face down on the city’s crosswalk, one sees the “blunting of discrimination” (414) that Simmel places at the core of the blasé disposition. As if all the colors of the spectrum had disintegrated and collapsed in on each other, the city comes to resemble a constantly shifting barrage of pixels whose multifariousness yields a grayish hue. Serés entitles the chapter of the novel narrating the protagonist’s clumsiness in the city’s plaza “The Maps’ Thin Four-Color Diagrams: The City”, and ends the chapter saying: “We are all thin four-color diagrams on a map” (112). Is not a four-color diagram a strikingly suitable emblem for the city’s heterogeneous reduction of difference? The individual actors who populate Serés’s city may be understood, therefore, as the fragmented dispersal of a discreet number of colors that, by co-existing within a defined and compressed urban horizon of experience, blend into the same indistinct, opaque color. Homogenous hybridity, a paradox if there ever was one, becomes an essential category of urban topography. As a response, or defensive mechanism, against the sensual assault of the metropolis, people fled back to the countryside last century by exchanging servitude in the city for a place in the country. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams sees in twentieth-century Britain a mythologized vision of the English rural as “home” (Williams: 282). Denizens of the city left to find “the real place” with “the birds and trees and rivers of England; the natives speaking, more or less, one’s own language: these were the terms of many imagined and actual settlements” (282). As Williams succinctly notes, “the country, now, was a place to retire to” (282). Assís certainly does not retire to the countryside to rediscover, in a congealed form, his lost youth, nor does his leaving the city appear to be a defense mechanism. His return is, however, compelled by a call to hear the atavistic voice of his origin in a discriminate manner. Earlier, I came to the conclusion that so long as a text remained heavily polyphonous and populated with multiple languages, a sense of stable place would be difficult to achieve. In accord with this notion, Assís’s refinement of the multiple literary and national language he acquires while studying in the capital through translation is essential to his ability to reformulate a stable and dense image of the countryside in the final part of the novel. Assís’s compulsion to go to – and eventually leave – the city is essentially an expli-

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cit preference, authorially speaking, for a certain narrative form that differs greatly from the polyphony that Bakhtin might interpret in Dostoevsky.4 In the letter that he sends to Assís while at the university, Father Lemozi precisely warns the future translator against producing work where the authorial voice is drowned out and lost amidst the cacophony of the “meaningful discourse” of languages and voices embedded within his objects of study. He writes, “study languages, and don’t let languages study you. One must always avoid letting others speak in your place; make it your mission to be the one who centers conversations” (94). I submit that this warning presages the protagonist’s return to the province, which results in a having “the last word on the world”. The denouement of the novel may be understood as a shifting of the emplotted setting in order to close the zone of contact between the multiple national and temporal languages that all try to occupy the same stage. At the end of the novel, Assís contemplates a countryside emptied of its inhabitants and principally dotted with ruins: The old man is seated under a winter’s noontime sun, with his hands resting atop his knees, looking over his shoulder at the ruins that dot the landscape from top to bottom, there where the village ends, while I see in front of me the infinite extension of the plains ... and I also see all the people who, year after year, have gone about forging this scenography, now empty. (181)

Unlike specters from the past who appear involuntarily to the living, the voices of this setting may only be voiced through the archaeological endeavors of the translator as they require release from the densely compact ground in which they reside. Reflecting the symbolic function of a tombstone, those who no longer exist are meaningful only through the inscription that they have let sink into the earth or have chiseled onto objects such as books or architectural edifices. Since these voices are no longer alive and performing a meaningful discourse, hermeneutics is crucial, as the interpretation of ruinous artefacts and any subsequent “handlings”

4. With respect to the latter, Thomas Pavel stresses Bakhtin’s belief in the freedom that exists apart from the author’s intention in Dostoevsky’s characters. Pavel writes: “Bakhtin indeed makes the extraordinary claim that Dostoevsky’s main characters are not mere objects of the author’s discourse, but subjects of their own meaningful discourse. … The characters, not the author, have the last word on the world and on themselves” (581).

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of them by the now-returned prodigal son provide the only possibility for outdated forms to acquire vitality in the face of decadence. Returning to the words of Assís, the writer is capable of first reading and thereafter “seeing” people who formerly existed in a now vacated image. This concept closely mirrors Gadamer’s notion of hearing. Gadamer postulates that listening is not a purely receptive activity but belongs to a language in which it takes on an expressive function: In the light of our hermeneutical question this ancient insight into the priority of hearing over sight acquires a new emphasis. The language in which hearing shares is not only universal in the sense that everything can be expressed in it. The significance of the hermeneutical experience is rather that, in contrast with all over experience of the world, language opens up a completely new dimension, the profound dimension whence tradition comes down to those now living. (420)

Hearing, then, can be expressive when the traces of past models appear in the work of those who are living. The new generation communicates through hearing and thereafter puts forth an original utterance that accepts certain parts of tradition as is or alters it through tropes and the intermingling of new worldly experience. Of course, it may also be rejected altogether, but what is critical for Gadamer is that tradition is the linguistic equivalent of the manner in which the present moment lies before sensual perception: “Everyone who is in a tradition – and this is true, as we know, even of the man who is released into a new apparent freedom by historical consciousness – must listen to what reaches him from it. The truth of tradition is like the present that lies immediately open to the senses” (420). Gadamer is here describing a passive hermeneutics that fits Serés’s narrator of L’arbre sense tronc quite well. His return to the countryside is not due to an intentional act of deciding, but obeys a call to care5 that is passively received but thereafter requires a movement of interpretation.

5. Portraying Assís as an Odyssean figure was not simply a gratuitous comparison of a return voyage home. The motivations for turning back towards the toils of maintaining one’s land responds to a vocation to care that Robert Harrison, in his book on gardens, perceives as what archetypically defines humankind as mortal, an extrapolation of Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein’s primordial Being as care in Being and Time. Odysseus flees the paradisiacal promise of immortality on Kalypso’s island due to a longing for “a life of care. More precisely, he longs for the world in which

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This interaction laid out by Gadamer is beautifully novelized by Serés in a chapter towards the end of the narrative when an aged Assís, now returned to the countryside and working in his study, sees himself surrounded by the different texts in his study that he has accumulated throughout a lifetime and remarks: On the bookshelves, the voices of my ancestors resonate all around the room. It was the work I had done always, translation, I had never done any other thing except translate, from the time I left the village, from dead languages to live ones, and from the live languages – though foreign – to my own ... those texts I have carried around with me since time immemorial, like my grandmother’s anecdotes, like each one of the stories she told me. (166-7)

Translation is here portrayed not only as an activity that switches one referent belonging to a specific linguistic code for another, but also as the same exercise of which an agent of cultural production partakes when absorbing aesthetic antecedents into his own proper work. A clear parallel is established between literary writing and the maintenance of historical memory at the most quotidian level, as Assís returns to the vertical familial structure in relating his work to his grandmother’s storytelling. Elsewhere Serés communicates a similar sentiment that goes beyond the literary, observing that in cinema, “everyone knows that movies watch each other through the eyes of men, and that the enormous, arid planes of the franja are the Utah deserts in Centaures del desert, when John Wayne leaves through the door, without a jacket, enveloped in darkness” (37). The influence of Lévi-Strauss clearly intensifies in this passage through the inference that similar forms, styles and thematics all pass from one work to another, slowly becoming refined as they are reinterpreted (or translated) through a series of languages. Serés postulates that the core of representing one’s own geographical space through a particular form, whether

human care finds its fulfillment; in his case, that is the world of family, homeland, and genealogy” (Harrison: 5). Odysseus is responding to the call of a more austere God, Cura, who forms humans out of humus, meaning that “it is only ‘natural’ that her creature should direct his care primarily toward the earth from which his living substance derives” (Harrison: 6). It is in this sense that Assís does not leave the city due to a banishment of illusion or with the objective of a retreat into an idealized and static image of a land teeming with flora and fauna.

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it be cinematic or the novelistic, derives from a relationship with structures erected by members of other cultural groupings. This is, of course, very close to Lévi-Strauss’s take on myths, which transform themselves along similar lines: These transformations – from one variant to another of the same myth, from one myth to another. from one society to another for the same myth or for different myths – bear sometimes on the framework, sometimes on the code, sometimes on the message of the myth, but without it ceasing to exist as such. (2000: 104)

Relating mythological transference to the novel, an author may be influenced by other narratological variants with respect to the rules for constructing the work’s structure, to the different languages present in the text or to the particular thematic intentions pursued in the plot. LéviStrauss presumes a linear curvature in the evolution of form, as authors either maintain or trope aesthetic conventions that are dominant but on the verge of creative exhaustion.6 Serés, on the other hand, when writing that “the enormous, arid planes of the franja are the Utah deserts in Centaures del desert” presents an idea that goes beyond the simple assertion that spectators of cinema use film to relate to their surroundings. In keeping with philosophical and scientific theories of the eternal return, however, Serés implies that aesthetic content appears finitely interpolated into an expansive and undefined cycle of time, where two distinct forms may share an exact equivalency of content (in this case les planes enormes within the film and la franja). This relationship, then, allows different formal containers, each containing the deposited material of a particular local region, to connect through a common denominator and therefore observe one another. The ordering of events that make up the links of Serés’s narratological chain places Assís, the translator, in the same role as Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur. Lévi-Strauss’s concept most readily communicates the image of a handy-man working with a closed “universe of instruments” that consists

6. Specifically referring to the theory of the novel, a similar argument is advanced by Viktor Shklovsky, who argues that the form of all art works “is determined by its relationship with other pre-existing forms … all works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model” (20).

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of “whatever is at hand” (1968: 17). Importantly, the bricoleur’s work, returning to Gadamer’s notion of understanding, only begins with a “turning back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it” (1968: 18). Assís, the bricoleur, produces a theory of form that revolves first and foremost around a principle of anteriority where the translator takes the raw linguistic matter he discovers and distills until it is useable. The events must originate from somewhere, and late in the work Assís recognizes that his own literary antecedents coalesce into a family of resemblances that is very much like his own genealogical tree. To assemble this genealogical tree – which is no doubt a part of the puzzle contained in the novel’s title – the family member must return to the land, much like the translator who must return to the tools and materials already existent in his personal library. In discussing a walk through his family’s cemetery, Assís comments: They will have already heard me, I have awoken them by heavily stepping onto the ground ... There are things that one never forgets, I have stepped strongly and that will have kept them awake; like the first car in the morning on the paved highway or the first swings of the axe which awaken the fields; like how the opening of one’s personal library rustles awake the books, little by little walking atop the wooded ground. (163)

Like an archaeologist, the bricoleur must resurrect the entombed and ruinous artefacts from their state of entrapment in the Earth and it is only then that they may be hermeneutically read. In an interview, Serés describes the assemblage of memories he used in order to supplement the project behind De fems i de marbres in this way: “there are many explicated fragments, others that are torn apart and others still that end up eroded” (Serés 2008). Without question, this line of thought mirrors the bricoleur theme developed by the personage Assís in L’arbre sense tronc. The task is to respond to a call to care signaled by ancestral voices embedded in the ground through a series of ruinous, disintegrated fragments and thereafter reassemble the pieces into a coherent mosaic or constellation of family resemblances. Returning to the rural is the way in which the protagonist centers these variegated languages and voices because it coalesces all of them into a single, unequivocal language through translation. Assís, in other words, makes it his mission to put into practice Father Lemozni’s counsel to be the one who

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“centers the conversation”. For Bakhtin, the notion of centering is a counterweight to heteroglossia, and it approaches the kind of language that exists in poetry. While a prose writer “measures his own world by alien linguistic standards”, to the poet “language is present to him only from inside, in the work it does to effect its intention” and there one sees “language at its full weight” (286-7). While it would be extreme to say that Assís actually attains a poetic linguistic register, the desire exists to employ a language loaded down with the muddy, turbid material of the countryside that would establish the primacy of that particular worldview. Nomadic parcels of time which retain bygone memories swirl around and attach to Assís and, elsewhere in the trilogy, the narrator of Una llengua de plom, a novel whose titular meaning, refers to a language that possesses the weight of lead. These parcels create a mass of density which pulls the narrators closer to the earth by coalescing dispersed matter. This same phenomenon is also outlined time after time in Serés’s collection of short stories, La força de la gravetat [The Force of Gravity], whose title is also prima facie relevant to this discussion. One may reference, for example, the story “Les abelles” where beekeepers are shrouded from head to toe in bees while extracting honey; also “El foc” where the work of resuscitating one’s land after a wildfire encases farmers in ash; and finally “El do” where a woman magically cures people’s ailments by literally assimilating the sickness into her own body. Assís’s call to care is moreover reflected, mutatis mutandis, at the end of a story about a country doctor who will “never let anyone perish without doing all that is possible to cure them, it is the only path available to him amongst all these mountains”. The latter two stories demonstrate that the call to care requires a throwness into risk that deprives one completely of individual character at the expense of adopting – as if it were an infectious disease – the traits, words, memories and hardships of others. One does not make oneself lived by the world, but rather lets one be lived by what possesses the strongest gravitational force. For Assís, this is a sedimented, perhaps poetic, language centered through his work as a translator. He yearns, in other words, for the words of “the first years” that “are profound and biting ... buried daily under sediment at the bottom of it all” (25-6). In conclusion, I return to the title of the work and postulate that discovering a central, dominant language has the effect of providing the “tronc” that the genealogical tree lacks. The heavy, sedimented language weighs the tree down, provides physical contact with the empirical world (mots a terra [words to ground]) and keeps place and linguistic ruin co-extensive.

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It provides, most importantly, a linguistic master code that makes all of the heterogeneous parts collectively intelligible. In the end, it is increasingly clear that Serés’s novel is responding to a different geo-cultural environment than that which Raymond Williams proposes in Britain of the early 1970s. Serés’s rural is barren and enveloped by dust. The traces of the living are slowly sinking back into the Earth, and the ravages of the wind and the bleaching of the sun are quickly fragmenting and scattering these archaeological artifacts, making them increasingly difficult to interpret, or better, listen to. They are objects that seem doomed to be discovered archaeologically through the same attitude that Martin Heidegger would argue leads to perceiving entities as “present at hand”: things that when encountered will self-evidently shows themselves to be fragmented and useless.7 What lies dormant in Serés’s countryside requires cultivation, digging and reconfiguration. The Catalan artist and essayist Perejaume, surveying the century-long effects of traditional paisatgisme on our perception of landscape, remarks that we have obliged and condemned the land to “pure visuality” (36). The task that remains to be fulfilled is whether or not with our voice we can interact with “a more ample and indiscriminate voice, even if it’s at the very bottom, if it is of a thing or if it is from someone” (35). Beneath the images and representations that, from the city walls, we have imposed onto the landscape, there exists “underneath all things and all places, whatever they may be, there is a millennial deposit of human voice, and so we have a certain debt to all that people who have preceded us” (37). This “human voice” is that which calls; it is the vocatio to which is owed a debt of care. Serés’s protagonist responds to this ethical call to his ancestors, distancing himself from Balzac’s Lucien Chardon and offering hope that the dispersal of genealogical traces can come to resemble a tree, whose rhizomatic extension refurbishes a connection to the land and reinvigorates a humanizing call to husbandry and care.

7. In Being and Time, Heidegger broadly defines the “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden) as corresponding to the “what” of entities and is a particular mode in the categories of Being (71). Describing the “what” of a certain thing is predicated on a self-evident usefulness, or lack thereof, in its form that is immediately knowable upon phenomenologically encountering it, which contrasts with Dasein: “Dasein does not have the kind of Being which belongs to something merely present-at-hand within the world, nor does it ever have it. So neither is it to be presented thematically as something we come across in the same way as we come across what is present-at-hand” (69).

A Catalan Peasant: Dalí’s Renewal of Surrealism Enric Bou

Landscape is nature that is aesthetically present to the gaze of a sensitive and feeling observer. Joachim Ritter

. Nature and Landscape One of the most salient features of Dalí’s works is the transformative omnipresence of his native landscape in his paintings. A beach becomes a table and later on fills the canvas with the immensity of the Empordà plain. The importance of his Catalan roots is equally prevalent in his writing. The Empordà also constructs the picturesque linguistic background of his prose and poetry, noticeable in a strikingly innovative intonation, unexpected lexical choices, and imagery derived from this particular geographical realm. In all aspects of his art, Salvador Dalí’s homeland is always at the root of the basic structures for the idiolect of this writerpainter without just one language. As Dalí’s art matures over the years, the connection between his artistic expression and geographical idiosyncrasies grows. There is a startling difference between Dalí’s early writings from 1919 to 1923, particularly in Un diari 1919-1920, in which we perceive an adolescent romantic voice, and the provocative voice we hear in his first prose poems and manifestoes published in L’Amic de les Arts or in the surrealist Paris journals, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. Gone is all the adolescent romantic paraphernalia and attitude, which have been replaced by a strong voice, equally innovative, yet shaped primarily by the light and atmosphere of the Empordà, the “most concrete

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and the most objective piece of landscape that exists in the world” (Dalí 1942). There is still a lingering, albeit much more sophisticated reference to nature, very noticeable in his first “modern” prose, “Sant Sebastià”. In his surrealist writings Dalí uses examples and situations extracted from his summer landscape at Cadaqués and Port Lligat, as is the case with his widely provocative “Rêverie”, full of sexual confessions (attempts to seduce a minor, masturbation, voyeurism, etc.) intertwined with vivid descriptions of the light and nature of his native land. In both his writings and paintings, Dalí consistently made connections to the new surrealist aesthetics, using the rustic landscape of Empordà. His unique combination of ancestral words and images, aromas and sounds, may be considered one of the most radical contributions to Surrealist aesthetics, while at the same time maintaining alive a peasant tradition at the heart of Surrealism. I want to address this persistence of nature’s presence in the work of this most remarkable avant-garde artist. It is a persistence which we cannot explain only in terms of longing for a lost paradise, but rather in terms of a sophisticated aesthetic program, which was crucial to the survival and renewal of Surrealism. In a famous 1963 essay, “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft”, Joachim Ritter clarified the difference between nature and landscape. The landscape experience is disinterested, marked by a freedom from duties. This view of nature is specifically urban. As Ritter reminds us, in his “The Philosophy of Landscape” Georg Simmel had already made a useful distinction when he stated that landscape is apprehended through perception-based emotion: We relate to a landscape, whether in nature or in art, as whole beings. The act that generates it for us is immediately one of perception and feeling, and it only gets split into these separated constituents through subsequent reflection. An artist is someone who carries out the formative act of contemplative perception and feeling in such a pure form and with such vigour, that the given material gets completely absorbed and then, seemingly out of its own, comes to be created anew. (Simmel: 29)

The main distinction between nature and landscape is human intervention, or a process of intellectualization. Ritter constructs his theory of landscape on the basis of a careful reading of Petrarch’s “Ascent of Mont Ventoux”, published in Epistolae familiares, and Schiller’s poem “Der Spaziergang” (The Walk). He concludes that sky and earth, nature as a whole as seen by human beings is only possible under certain conditions, sta-

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ting that “nature as landcaspe becomes apparent in modern society only under the condition of freedom” (162). Freedom is crucial for society’s existence and comes into being through the domination of nature, which becomes its goal. In other words, artists and writers contribute to express this sense of domination through a sense of landscape, Simmel’s idea of “Stimmung”. Dalí wrote a very special chapter in this hermeneutical sequence, when he established unexpected relations with his familiar natural surroundings and used contrasting concepts related to Modernity to introduce a sense of domination. In the prose “Sant Sebastià”, for example, he introduces, through Heraclitus, the idea that nature likes to hide itself from view. This he perceived as a result of nature’s relation to human beings. Dalí goes on to mention Alberto Savinio’s thought, that this “self-modesty” is the cause of irony. This type of irony is an important element of Dalí’s works in general, as it demonstrates the intrinsic and at times contradictory relationship between nature and its artistic expression, as a process of “coming out of hiding”. As an example he narrates an encounter with a Cadaqués fisherman, Enriquet, who, when observing one of Dalí’s paintings, a representation of the sea, proclaims: “It’s the same. Because there the waves can be counted”.1 In another section of the same prose, “Vents alisis i contralisis”, Dalí presents a forest of apparatus in startling contrast with shells and rocks: “On the sand covered with shells and mica, precision instruments of unknown physics projected their explicative shadows, offering their crystals and aluminums to the disinfected light. Some letters drawn by Giorgio Morandi indicated: Distilled Instruments” (Gimferrer 1995: 17). This is a text dedicated to his friend Federico García Lorca, and obviously the reference to “Aparells destil·lats” is one of the first appearances of those apparatus or gadgets. These hybrid constructs, part nature, part technology, are not only the essential components of one of his most striking paintings of the 1920s, “Apparatus and Hand”, and “Forest of Gadgets” (a painting also known as “La mel és més dolça que la sang”, “Honey is Sweeter than Blood”), but also become the innovative trademark of his art in general, aimed at renovating the arts by creating a “systematization of confusion designed to destroy ‘the shackles limiting our vision’” (Radford: 88).

1. All translations from Dalí’s early poetical prose come from Finkelstein 1998.

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Dalí’s renewal of Surrealism, his particular contribution to the renovation of the arts, feeds upon hybridism and confronting elements of nature (always seen as landscape and understood against the backdrop of the untamable and mysterious Empordà) with civilized, controllable society. In this crucial text from his pre-surrealist period, Dalí organizes his ideas around a dual structure, confronting concepts such as “Saint Objectivity” and “Putrefaction”. Saint Objectivity is related to the industrial world of cars, phonographs, cinema, and shops filled with mannequins (or “tailor’s dummies”). Against this he opposes “putrefaction”: “cry-baby transcendental artists, removed from all clarity, cultivators of all germs, ignorant of the precision of the graduated double decimeter; families that purchase art objects to be placed on top of the piano; the public-work employees; the associate committee member; the university professor of psychology …” (Finkelstein: 24). This concept of putrefaction condemned by Dalí echoes Breton’s proclamation that “reality is elsewhere”. This superior (sur)reality is found, according to the Catalan artist, in his peasant landscape, which he believed had been able to preserve a unique prehistoric, antediluvian quality, and whose “atavismos del crepúsculo” (crepuscular atavisms) (Dalí 2002: 117) become an important inspiration for his renewal of the arts. Another important aspect of Dalí’s radicalism is his lack of separation of life and art, art and artist. As nature and its representations are one, so are the artist, the native of Empordà, and his work. The presence of Dalí’s private natural space, the landscape of his youth, allowed him through the years to intensify his self-representation as some kind of “pagès” (peasant). At the height of his brilliant surrealist period, representations of Millet’s peasant from “L’angelus” became a psychological image of Dalí himself. Millet’s peasant reflected the artist’s own neurosis, his private obsession, written and painted, with incest and masturbation (Rojas: 129). At a later stage in life he perfected the fusion of artist and work, and even dressed up in a peasant’s costume, wearing only “espardenyes” (espadrilles) and a “barretina” (a traditional Catalan peasant hat). Although this particular interest in the peasant as an innovative object of art is not uniquely Daliesque, his use of peasant imagery is still in sharp contrast with the much gentler one created by Louis Aragon in his Le paysan de Paris (1926), where to Walter Benjamin’s delight, the author mythologized the arcades and parks of Paris. What Aragon was doing was creating a new kind of novel that would break all the traditional rules governing the writing of fiction and declared fuel pumps as “modern divinities (45). The work celebrated the city as a place of stimulating encounters in its cafés and parks. For a con-

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temporary reader, Aragon’s Paris appears rather idyllic and innocent, and one cannot but wonder if Benjamin had read Dalí. Compared to Dalí’s writings, Aragon’s portrait of the city sounds like a slightly updated recreation of 19th-century “costumbrista” writings (descriptions of popular mores), such as Robert Robert’s depiction of Barcelona or Mesonero Romanos’ of Madrid. By contrast, Dalí introduces in his surrealist writings a notion of landscape which is very close to that discussed by Joachim Ritter. It requires some distance from the objects observed, an aesthetic attitude. He makes the Empordà become a landscape while observing it with no practical purpose but his enjoyment in order to find himself in nature (Ritter: 150). In this self-reflecting view of the world, Dalí not only plays with a remembrance of his own country, but also introduces a mechanism to transform it into a surrealist apparatus.

. Reactions to an Industrialized World Dalís renewal of the arts is based on contrast, confrontation, hybridism and anthropomorphism. The unique geographical features of his homeland, as captured in his paintings and writings, forged his radical perspective on nature, technology and civilization. This complex relationship between civilization and nature is of course deeply rooted in the tradition of modern Western thought as implied by Ritter’s reading of Petrarch and Schiller. A brief recapturing of some key points, such as the rejection of city life, the identification of soul and nature, or the elegiac attitude towards country life, may shed even more light on the radicalism and originality of Dalí’s art. A contrast between country and city has been permanent in human life: the joys and freedom of nature, as opposed to the rigors of life in the city, have made their mark on human thought. A recent Canadian film by Denys Arcand, L’âge des ténèbres (2007), presents a bleak picture of a conventional subject, Jean-Marc, and his monotonous, intolerable, and gloomy life, caught up, as Dalí would say, in the putrefaction of bourgeois (un)reality. The film is diverted from realistically depressing scenarios to humorous absurdity thanks to active imagination and escapism. It portrays a depressing picture of our contemporary society: dismal bureaucracies, violent gangs, life in boring suburbia, ridiculous marriage situations (what is left after love is gone). By the end of the film a possible yet utopian solution is presented to the spectator. A way out can be found in a

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return to nature, a purer lifestyle. Some long forgotten activities become full of meaning and are thought to be a solution: caring for your own garden (growing vegetables), peeling an apple, possibly alluding to the end of Candide, Voltaire’s philosophical novel about the search for knowledge and happiness. The last images of the film fade out into a “still life” painting modeled upon Cézanne’s work. It makes perfect sense: at a time of deep financial, moral, and political crisis, yearning for a backward way of living may be the best remedy for a sick society and its illnesses. This film makes us enter into the realm of Utopia. After Thomas Moore, and particularly during the 19th century, several alternatives to industrial society were offered: utopian, imagined places or a state of things in which everything was perfect, opposed to dystopian societies in which life was characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/ or pollution. Even science-fiction offered alternatives to a consumer society. This utopian approach (and its surrogates) has emphasized the best and the worst in our (post) industrial world: on the one hand authoritarian attitudes, asceticism, and uniformity. And on the other hand a push in favor of the fulfillment of desires, pleasures, gaiety in the hope of a world where everything is possible, and any individual need will be satisfied. Works by Bacon, Fénelon, Diderot, Sébastien Mercier, Saint-Simon, Fourier, William Morris and many others can be considered products of “sublime dreamers”. In his novel Candide, Voltaire presented a Turk who lives on the land. He acknowledges that he has no more than twenty acres, which he cultivates with the help of his children: “Our labor wards off three great evils: idleness, vice, and want”. To which Candide adds: “we must take care of our garden”. A remarkable sentence, which is amplified by Pangloss: “when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it; and this proves that man was not born to be idle” (Voltaire: 355). This powerful metaphor addresses one of the on-going discussions of Modernity: how to live with less, how to learn to be content in an “aurea mediocritas”, or golden mean, the felicitous middle between the extremes of excess and deficiency. Dalí’s constant return to nature as landscape brings about a reenactment of this metaphor. His recreation of a familiar landscape can be easily related to this attitude. As Josep Pla has argued, Dalí’s work is put at the service of discovering the landscape of Alt Empordà. He even mentions the “miratge de l’apropament” (mirage of proximity): “everything in Dalí’s painting is tarnished precisely by the mirage of proximity, by an inclination to be invaded by landscape, to get closer to our senses, to make us feel their presence” (Pla: 161).

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A second way of connecting civilization and nature can be perceived in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782). There we encounter yet another version of the appropriation of nature, in a sort of precursor of Eliot’s “correlative objective”. In Rousseau’s account, the narrator walks by a lake in the evening of his “fifth promenade”: the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge it into a delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unaware. The ebb and flow of the water, its continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, ... and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought. (1045)

For an aging Rousseau, reverie supplanted both social life (as a path toward happiness) and philosophy (as a path toward understanding). T.S. Eliot expressed a similar idea (the “objective correlative”) in a more elaborate way in his 1919 essay on Hamlet. What he meant by “objective correlative” is an objectification of emotions that transmutes abstractions into feelings. He explained it in these terms: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; … a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (145). In Dalí’s work we may detect a reelaboration of this approach in his treatment of landscape. Through painting and writing he depicts a surrealist version of the objective correlative, one correlation that breaks away from standard logic. By hiding the direct connections between emotion and what he uses as objective correlative (Empordà’s nature), he transforms the Eliotian definition of objective correlative, taking it a step further. In his doing so we can recognize the surrealist use of imagery in his quest for a transformation of the world, as seen in texts and paintings, such as “Peix perseguit per un raïm” or “Platja antropomòrfica”, both from 1928. A third way of incorporating nature’s separation from the city into literature is through elegy. A disappearing world or way of living is fixed thanks to reminiscent images. Pere Gimferrer in his Dietari (1979) made an acute remark about what had changed in the perception of nature in the (post)industrial world. Commenting on “Ode to Autumn” by John Keats, he writes: We do not feel the sun’s warm air on the fields of that distant September in Winchester; our eyes, which are blackened by the smoke of the industrial world,

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do not understand the diffuse light of the fields where the year’s cycles kindle and deaden things; in nature we have become forever passersby, intruders. (55-56)

Gimferrer’s reaction to Keats’s poem reminds us of how difficult it is to have a sense of nature when living in the city. He is painfully aware of what has changed in a world that has lost sight of nature’s cycle. This experience of loss permeates Dalí’s work as he recalled in many passages of The Secret Life. Dalí cultivated his own garden, used nature as a powerful and innovative objective correlative and he longed for a disappearing way of life. Had he only done this he could be only considered an example of late Romanticism, a late bloomer, anguished by the disappearance of his world. Dalí, nevertheless, reacted in an original way, renewing the plea for a lost paradise with exciting new words and combinations of images, which in turn renewed surrealist aesthetics.

. Dalí’s Renewal From the start of his career, Dalí showed a knack for expressing violent disparities. His inclination towards provocative thought is already visible in his diary from 1919 and 1920 (Dalí 1994). In a sort of manifesto, “Nous límits de la pintura” (New Limits of Painting), he embellished the text with acrostic illustrations, which express the core of his current aesthetics (dynamism/ lightness/ onirism/ superrealism, etc.). The text ends with a series of gaudy images, which stress an oxymoronic approach to reality: Does it matter that today’s artist neglects the concerns that, for a brief moment, appeared fundamental, for the sake of physically miniaturized concerns? And that very far from cold and hot things, he finds the true fire and ice in trying only to let the embers freeze in the pupil of the rotting donkey, and lets the feather duster, its feathers dyed in blood-red, become by a skillful transformation a ball of fire, slowly moving in the night of our amorous simplifications? (Gimferrer 1995: 87)

His prose poems of the 1920s, published in L’Amic de les Arts, “defy the reader’s attempts to perceive a consistent narrative structure” (Finkelstein: 17). The so-called “strange metaphors” are based on an accumulation of elements, which refer to his past provincial world (Figueres and Cadaqués) and the cosmopolitan one, which he is discovering, first in Madrid and Barcelona, and finally in Paris. Many of the “peasant” elements have an origin: the beach, where he spent his summers: fish, fish spines, sea urchins, snails, seashells,

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cork, stones of varied colors and shapes. As Finkelstein indicates, “these ‘small things’ undergo incongruous metamorphoses of matter; they are the protagonists of a dialectic involving the juxtaposition of hardness and softness” (17). But this apparently chaotic enumeration hides (as in the case of Picasso’s surrealist poems from the time when he painted Guernica) a deliberate mixture of elements from the peasant and the cosmopolitan worlds. Let me discuss some of these problems in a specific text from 1929, “Peix perseguit per un raïm” (“Fish Pursued by a Bunch of Grapes”). In this prose poem Dalí presents what seems to be a “story” filled with enigmatic, incoherent, irrational, absurd, inexplicable elements. As was the case with “Un chien andalou”, Dalí’s position was to reject any attempt to interpret the film (or the text for that matter), since he considered such attempts as reflecting the “imbecile” notion that facts are endowed with clear significance and coherent sense (Finkelstein: 118). When describing Dalí’s writing Finkelstein mentions the presence of a voice, and he explains that it is “a voice that we can almost hear with all its idiosyncratic diction, strange inflections, and exaggerated pronunciation” (11). His writing has an “acting” constituent, as if it were the text for a theater performance. His writings can thus be related to perlocutionary acts, that is, they provoke an effect in the audience because of the way they are spoken/expressed by the speaker. Dalí imposes his ideas through the perlocutionary energy he uses when speaking or writing. This use of writing seems to go against “supplementarity”, one of the principles described by Derrida as fundamental in writing. Writing is a supplement because it is a sign of a sign, occupying the place of spoken discourse. In the case of Dalí we are facing the opposite situation. Spoken discourse becomes a supplement to written discourse.2 Finkelstein has declared that Dalí’s poetry “tends to fluctuate between the conceptual or abstract and the visual, with the visual often taking the lead” (17). The reason for this is his dual activity as a painter and writer, but with the same notions to be explained. Rattray has stressed the fact that Dalí’s poem begins with a detailed description, in intricate detail, of “a surreal still-life”. The presence of the Cadaqués coastline, which provides the backdrop for many of Dalí’s famous paintings, was also the inspiration for his experiments in the paranoiac-critical method (213). But the critic fails to notice the striking combination of rural and cosmopolitan elements. This is especially noticeable in a series of parallelisms. 2. “If supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant” ( 281).

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Enric Bou

In the poem we can distinguish a central section (lines 5-34) where Dalí describes the still life, the beach, until the beginning of the car chase. In this section there are four specific links between landscape and a cosmopolitan world: a) First he introduces the pebbles: “On the beach there are eight pebbles: One is the color of a liver, six are covered with moss, and one is very smooth.” (10). These elements are amplified in great detail, adding connections between the rual and the cosmopolitan: “The pebbles are none other than its sweetness; the livercolored pebble, its venomous sweetness; the others covered with moss, the six new and latest phonograph records” (14-16). These links can be represented in a series of oppositions: Eight pebbles Liver colored pebble Six covered with moss A very smooth pebble

Sweetness Venomous sweetness Six new and latest phonograph records Bleeding blues

b) Secondly, we read another two sentences in which elements from a beach are anthropomorphized: “There is also a damp cork that dries up in the sun; there is a round hole in the cork in which nest feathers.” (11-12); “the cork, its skeleton; the feathers; the seeds; the tender reed broken in its center, the wings” (16-17). Cork with a hole Feathers Tender reed

Skeleton Seeds Wings

c) Thirdly, there is a direct link between champagne and the wine grapes from Cadaqués: “It was this same bunch of grapes, submerged at the bottom of a goblet of champagne, that evoked in me the clarity of the vines of Cadaqués.” (20-21). Bunch of grapes, submerged at the bottom of a goblet of champagne

The clarity of the vines of Cadaqués

I would like to stress particularly the case of “raïm, submergit en el fons del cap del xampany” (bunch of grapes, submerged at the bottom of a goblet of champagne), a syntagm that Dalí makes up in the same way as other

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Empordà expressions: “He who has no hair is called a cap pelat (“peeled head”), cap de catúfol (“crock head”, Empordà), cap de llauna (“tin can head”, Empordà) (“Diccionari català-valencià-balear”). The copy of this poem at the Fundación FGL has an inscription. It is dedicated “to a conversation between Federico and Lídia” (Gibson: 161). Lídia is obviously “Lídia de Cadaqués”, the woman infatuated with Eugeni d’Ors, about whom Dalí wrote in Vida secreta: Lídia possessed the most marvelously paranoiac brain aside from my own that I have ever known. She was capable of establishing completely coherent relations between any subject whatsoever and her obsession of the moment, with sublime disregard of everything else, and with a choice of detail and a play of wit so subtle and so calculatingly resourceful that it was often difficult not to agree with her on questions which one knew to be utterly absurd. She would interpret d’Ors’s articles as she went along with such felicitous discoveries of coincidence and plays on words that one could not fail to wonder at the bewildering imaginative violence with which the paranoiac spirit can project the image of our inner world upon the outer world, no matter where or in what form or on what pretext. The most unbelievable coincidences would arise in the course of this amorous correspondence, which I have several times used as a model for my own writings. (Dalí, 1942: 265-6)3

These lines corroborate the deep correlations between his surrealist appropriation of the world and many experiences from his youth in this particular setting, the Empordà, which gave him a sense of the peasantry. Moreover, this is the way that Dalí appropriates nature transforming it into landscape, including a compelling notion of his intellectual contribution and alteration of it. d) Finally there is a fourth link, which in fact permeates the entire poem, gives a possible meaning to the whole text and expresses a series of transformations: salt > fish > ring’s diamond bunch of grapes > bird shot

3. A presence of a cosmopolitan nature landscape can also be perceived in BuñuelDalí’s film, Un chien andalou (1929), particularly in the final part of the film, when the central character walks on a beach and discovers a copy of Vermeer’s “De Kantwerkster” (Talens).

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Enric Bou

What is happening here, as is the case with many poems from this period, is an experiment with critical paranoia, something which would become Dalí’s trademark in later years, and a major contribution to surrealism, an aesthetic movement locked between the constraints of automatic writing and communist political commitment (Santamaria). Dalí’s critical paranoia, with its characteristic combination of elements from different worlds – rural and cosmopolitan – meant a radical upheaval of the surrealist movement. As I mentioned at the beginning, in his writing and art Dalí combines atavistic words and images, aromas and sounds with the most avant-garde elements. The combination of tradition and innovation expresses the opposition between country and city in Dalí’s proposal for a reenactment of ruralism. Dalí’s use of this dialectic is his way of contesting Noucentista notions of “Catalunya-Ciutat”. Anchoring his art in the atavistic surroundings of his native Empordà allowed Dalí to reconcile traditional peasant elements with surrealist imagery. The continuous tension in his work between ahistoric nature and controlling modernity, between the radically innovative and the fundamentally traditional, recalls Raymond Williams’ concept of “knowable communities”.4 From this perspective, Dalí can be seen to express the loss of a “structure of feeling” that Catalonia was experiencing. But his way of expressing this loss was not straightforward. As mentioned before, Ritter’s idea that freedom is crucial for society’s existence and comes into being through a domination of nature can be seen in Dalí’s attitude. Like other artists and writers Dalí contributed the expression of a sense of domination through a sense of landscape, Simmel’s idea of “Stimmung”. By representing a certain landscape in its “Stimmung”, he developed a new way of reading it and provided Surrealism with the means to overcome the limitations of “automatic writing”. His later work on critical paranoia provided Surrealism with its final foundation. Only a cosmopolitan peasant with a sense of landscape could have overcome such an impasse.

4. “Identity and community became more problematic, as a matter of perception and as a matter of valuation, as the scale and complexity of the characteristic social organization increased. ... The growth of towns and especially cities and a metropolis: the increasing division and complexity of labour; the altered and critical relations between and within social classes: in changes like these any assumption of a knowable community – a whole community, wholly knowable – became harder and harder to sustain” (Williams 165).

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APPENDIX PEIX PERSEGUIT PER UN RAÏM Aquell peix i aquell raïm no eren res més que cosetes petites: eren, però, cosetes més rodones que totes i estaven quietes dalt dels indrets. Hi ha cosetes que són estels amb cua, i quan se les canvia de lloc ho deixen tot mullat. Aquella coseta, que era un estel amb cua, estava dalt de la taula. Hi ha cosetes planes; hi ha cosetes que s’aguanten amb una cama. D’altres són un pèl, d’altres havien estat sal. El peix en qüestió havia estat petita sal; aquesta petita sal brillava i fou portada a Europa entre els pèls d’un arrissat abric d’esquimal, arraconat a la popa d’aquell yacht que tenia un nom d’illa. Ara aquella petita sal era un peix, gràcies a un xec especialíssim. A la platja hi ha vuit pedres: una de color de fetge, sis plenes de molsa; i una de molt llisa. Encara hi ha un suro mullat que s’asseca al sol; el suro té un forat rodó on fan niu les plomes. Al costat del suro, una canyeta tendra, partida pel ventre, és posada dalt de la sorra. Tot plegat no és res més que un ràpid i veloç gotim de raïm. Les pedres no eren sinó la seva dolçor; la pedra color de fetge, la dolçor envenenada; les altres cobertes de molsa, els sis darrers nous discs de fonògraf; el suro, el seu esquelet; les plomes, els grans; la canyeta tendra trencada pel ventre, les ales; i la pedra més llisa de totes, ¿em caldrà encara dir que es tracta del blues més dessagnat que em cantà l’altra tarda la meva amiga, posant els ulls guenyos, i arrufant el nasset com una petita bèstia? Era ben bé aquell raïm, submergit en el fons del cap del xampany, el que m’evocava la claror de les vinyes de Cadaqués. Jo provava de fer entendre a aquell peixet, mitjançant el lleuger tremolar de les meves cartes i sense per això interrompre la partida de pòker amb la baronessa de X, com allà a les darreries d’agost, quan para l’aire, se sent el soroll de l’endolcir-se les vinyes , que ve a ésser un soroll semblant al que fa la pluja sobre les perdiuetes. Fou en aquest just moment – i potser a causa de l’agitació que promogué, en el brill de les joies de l’esmentada baronessa, el record momentani de l’origen de la petita sal del peix – que el raïm es llançà, emocionat i veloç, a la persecució d’aquell peix. Aquest, gràcies a una hàbil transformació en el brillant de l’anell de la meva nòvia, fugia dissimulat en el seu dit, i endut vertiginosament per l’auto que jo mateix guiava. Llavors el petit raïm decidí d’adoptar la forma de velocitat diferent, que era la mateixa que havia vist adoptar als pinyols de préssec, les llargues temporades que han de passar tancats en els indrets buits. Així és que començà a disminuir de tamany, fins a esdevenir un petitíssim raïm, de qual ben aviat només en restà la pinyolada, la qual romangué volant, suspesa com una petita constel.lació de perdigons. A cada moment era més gran la munió d’autos carregats de bandits, que ens perseguien a trets; els bandits portaven petites gorretes de llana i, alguns,

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Enric Bou

ulleres per al vent; el camí era un flabiol de 8 forats, i a cada forat hi havia un petitet ase podrit. Sentim a la vora llurs motors. Llancem l’ampolla de Whisky. S’eriçà la terra de fulles de Gillette. Un pinyol de raïm és llurs ulls. Sentim el galopar vermell de llurs cavalls. Dos pinyols de raïm són una petita sal. Tirem el tub de carmí. Neu. Sentim el lliscar de llurs trineus. A la fi t’has desprès, i llançat el teu vestit de ball d’argent; i una ampla mar, il.luminada per la lluna, ens ha allunyat dels nostres enemics. La petita sal volia explotar com una cendra. Ara, si volguessis, podríem perllongar aquell bes interromput en el dancing. Però, ¿no som a la tarda? ¿No és el sol encara alt? Les herbes més fines tenen un costat il.luminat, i l’altre ombrívol com els planetes. Allà, darrera la casa, sé l’indret on hi ha un petit escarabat sec. Dalt de la pedra, una oliva està quieta. Si apreto els teus dits, aixafo grans de gotim de raïm del meu berenar; i si vull recordar les teves cames, no aconsegueixo sinó reveure aquell torbador ase podrit amb el cap de rossinyol. L’oliva quieta porta una petita faldilla. Jo tinc una bonica foto de Nova York.

[FISH PURSUED BY A BUNCH OF GRAPES] [That fish and that bunch of grapes were nothing more than very small things, yet small things rounder than most, and were kept up quietly in their place. There are small things that are shooting stars, that get altogether wet when their place is being changed. That small thing, which was a shooting star, staved on the table. There are small things that are flat; there are small things that stand on one leg. The others are merely a hair, the others had been salt. The fish in question had been fine salt. This fine salt glistened and was brought to Europe in the hairy of a frizzy coat of an Eskimo, left in the stern of that yacht that bore the name of an island. This fine salt is a fish now, thanks to a very special check. On the beach there are eight pebbles: One is the color of a liver, six are covered with moss, and one is very smooth. There is also a damp cork that dries up in the sun; there is a round hole in the cork in which nest feathers. Alongside the cork, a tender reed, split in its midst, is placed in the sand. All these together are nothing more than a small bunch of grapes, swift and hasty. The pebbles are none other than its sweetness; the livercolored pebble, its venom-

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ous sweetness; the others covered with moss, the six new and latest phonograph records; the cork, its skeleton. the feathers, the seeds; the tender reed split in its midst, its wings; and the smoothest pebble of them all, do I still have to say that all this has to do with the most bleeding blues that my girlfriend sang to me the other afternoon, her eyes crossed and her nose puckered, like a small animal? It was this same bunch of grapes, submerged at the bottom of a goblet of champagne, that evoked in me the clarity of the vines of Cadaqués. I tried to make this small fish understand, by means of the light trembling of my cards and, for all that, without interrupting the poker game with Baroness X, how over there toward the end of August, when the air stands still, one hears the sound made by the sweetening of the vines, a sound resembling the sound of rain coming down on small partridges. It was at this very moment – perhaps because of the agitated flickering of the jewels of the said Baroness, caused by the momentary recollection of the origins of the fine salt of the fish – that the bunch of grapes launched itself, excited and swift, in a pursuit of that fish. The latter skillfully transformed itself into a diamond in my fiancée’s ring, fled by hiding in her finger, and was vertiginously carried away by a car which I drove myself. The small bunch of grapes decided then to adopt a different form of speed, the same one he had seen taken by the pits of peaches during the long periods in which they had to remain locked up in empty places. He then started to diminish his size, thus becoming a very small bunch of grapes, of which finally there remained only a cluster of pits which kept on flying, suspended like a small and frantic constellation of bird shot. From moment to moment there grew the number of cars filled with outlaws following us with their shots; the outlaws had woolen caps on, and some wore goggles against the wind; the road a flageolet with eight holes; in each hole there was a very small rotten donkey. We hear their motors close behind us. We throw out the whiskey bottle. The ground bristles up with Gillette blades. A grape seed is their eyes. We hear the black gallop of their horses. We cast off the fan made of feathers. The road is a river of blood. We hear the red gallop of their horses. Two raisin pits are a fine salt. We throw the tube of rouge. Snow. We hear the sliding of their sledges. Finally you unfastened and threw off your silvery ball gown, and a vast sea illuminated by the moon distanced us from our enemies. The very small salt wished to explode like ash. Now, if you wish to, we could continue the kiss interrupted at the dancing. But is it not the afternoon? Isn’t the sun still high? The finest herbs have one side lightened up, with the other side shadowy like the planets. There, at the back of the house, I know a spot with a small dry beetle. An olive is motionless on a pebble.

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Enric Bou

If I squeeze your fingers, I crush the seeds in the bunch of grapes I have for an afternoon snack; and if I wish to remind myself of your legs, I only see that donkey with the Nightingale’s head. The motionless olive wears a little skirt. I have a beautiful picture of New York. ]

Geology and Literature * Francesc Serés

I live in a region that has many volcanoes. There are more than forty, all of them dormant, and some of them completely unknown. Every once in a while someone discovers that some hill is, really, a volcano. This may seem strange, stated this way, but the truth is that Garrotxa is a very rainy region, covered with a thick blanket of oak and beech forests that very often hides the relief that supports it. Nearly every day I drive on a highway that is situated on the slope of the Croscat volcano, that was active just eleven thousand years ago. The incline of the highway allows one to see the successive layers of lava that the volcano ejected as well as the soil layer created first by the plants and then by the trees. The green of the oaks contrasts with the various shades of reddish ochres into which the different layers of clay have separated. Without the cut left by the highway we would see a surface that is nothing like what lies beneath. The configuration of the entire landscape that we have before us passes through the superficial gathering – in the literal sense of the word – of what our gaze offers us. The interpretation, here, would beg the contrast offered by the cross section of the slope in order to go not just to the interior of the earth, but to the interior of the concepts that explain it. The interpretation of that which is not seen. What is there beneath the landscape? Does one scrape off its importance as a literary genre, the importance of the necessity and of the truth of its descriptions, to be more precise? * Tanslated by Todd Mack

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Francesc Serés

The house in which I live was built during the years prior to 1587. Aside from the cornerstones and the lintel, which are made of sandstone, the rest are fragments of different types of basalt. The walls are also made of this volcanic rock, as are the outside stairs. Some of this rock has crystallized into geometric forms that the different bricklayers from different periods of time have utilized more or less effectively. I sleep on a basaltic outcropping, my bed leans on it. I sleep in a bed in which dozens of people have slept before me. Geology has left precise marks of the time that has transpired. We can narrate the different periods, their succession, the rhythms in which they succeeded. The story of the men who have inhabited the house is also a plausible story. The house is mentioned in documents by the name Can Mau more than four hundred years ago. Today it is called Can Campaner and I have lived there as a tenant for the past five years, the last layer of life on top of so many years of basalt and the one that can create this story. The story is basic. It is basic in the most profound and intrinsic sense of the word: it is that which lies beneath everything, that which is real. The fact that the story constructs itself through the materials that it finds along the way allows us to speak of an autonomous entity, almost structural, in which the storyteller, the writer, becomes a necessary, essential element. ••• I was born in a zone the characteristics of which are situated at the antipodes of the one which harbors Cal Campaner. The Baix Cinca, the extension of hills and plains that continues to Segrià, the Monegres, and the Urgell, is a flat region with absolute and total geologic stability. The table-like relief seen everywhere indicates that there have been no significant earthquakes. Some geologists say never, but let’s just leave it in literary terms: not for a long, long time. Many hills don’t have peaks but instead elongated plains. Limestone strata alternate with those of loam and clay. Erosion – which in geologic terms is called differential erosion – wears away unequally at the hard layers of limestone and the softer layers of clay. There are parts of the history of the zone that last through time in a way that the other, softer, clayish parts can’t. This configuration of the landscape has been one of the constants over which my gaze has been projected over time. In Saidí, the town where I was born, the landscape imposes itself in a greedy manner and, with that landscape, a determined concept of the passing of time. I speak of the landscape from a point of view that, as can be verified,

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is far from the decoration, from the atrezzo and from the forms of accompaniment with which the figure, the character, the protagonist is often cloaked. One may speak of a kind of encrustation between the way of understanding time and the story – and therefore, that which is lived – and the makeup of the landscape. Sedimentary rocks have gone on superimposing themselves until they have become masses hundreds of meters thick that describe, as if it were a horizontal bar code, the identity of past geologic times. The sea that occupied this whole land, the swamps and lake zones that emptied into rivers that flowed into a greater sea, precipitated these materials that have come to us. Every layer becomes a story, the narrative of the past, of an epoch. Every layer is a page. ••• I remember perfectly the first time I went to see how an irrigation system is prepared. The owner of the farm made a reservoir, dug several wells, and made ditches that traversed the field from one end to the other in a grid. The machines started to scrape away at the surface of the field. A never-ending screw dug into the ground and with more or less velocity it extracted rocks that had been hidden since time – the cliché here is justified – immemorial. This image impressed me and has stayed with me throughout my entire life. The idea that most of the material that we have and that supports us is opaque, that what we see is only a film upon which is reflected the light that hides the near totality of things, or the fact that the gaze becomes useless for understanding everything we have beneath us, everything bursts out like the water that the machine found... That was why I chose the study path that geology offered. There I found a correspondence that was not just a metaphor of the different historic periods that academic history explained to us. The interpretation of geologic maps, in particular of cross sections of strata, was a way of understanding the passage of time. The sedimentary strata, the faults, the folds, the magmatic intrusions, and the metallic veins lay on top of, cut through, and hid each other as if they were an enigma that demanded to be deciphered. How did it happen, all of that which lies beneath our feet? What had been the forces that had created the foundations of a landscape that could not be understood without understanding any of that which lay underneath us. The verb “to compare” does not have the same semantic field as “to confuse” does, but interpretation must often distance itself from rigid

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Francesc Serés

precepts in order to find the forms and the figures that allow for the reconstruction of what it has found already broken and mixed. Is not the chaos of the different subsoils an adequate metaphor for understanding everything that shapes us and that, in the end, subjects us? ••• This landscape, the fields, the farmhouses, and the scattered barns, the lines of fruit trees ... I read novels and stories that due to something on the covers or pages can be qualified as rural, but the interesting part is not the substantive but the adjectival, combined with other attributes. What is certain is that we very often confuse that which is rural with the localization of the stories’ settings outside of an urban environment. Rurality – “ruralism” presented as a still photo with sepia tones – is something I have never seen anywhere. The abstract substantive is too abstract. When one describes the rural, most of the time, he or she refers to a still photo, sometimes an image found in local history museums. The temporal relationship is basic, necessary, constituent. In the face of stasis we only have dynamics. Historical processes affect the landscape and the communities that it accommodates. What is, to be exact, the train that passes through there? I lived the times of my grandparents as if they were my own. I lived their times and also their passage through time. I lived an experience of slow changes, my grandfather did not know how to drive. My grandfather’s time was a time of cold machinery where nature still governed the possibilities of human actions. I would dare say that my grandfather, my grandmother, and her brother – my great uncle – handed me the idea of a traditional society, of time that was immemorial, solid, and resistant to change. My grandparents and my great uncle died during my adolescence, as if there were some script that had to be followed. The time of my parents – which I also lived intensely – is that of hot machinery, of advances provoked by external causes and by historical conjunctures that have a determining role. Those were the years of democratic repression in Catalonia and in Spain, the seventies and the eighties, a time with some hopes that reality did not hesitate to qualify as excessive. I would say that I am the fruit of disenchantment in the most profound sense of the word. Not disenchantment understood as a disillusion, but that which describes the emergence from a deception – probably to enter into another – that had accompanied the lives of those who preceded me. I suppose, because one way of understanding the implicit narration im-

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plies orienting oneself in time in order to be able to situate oneself in the middle of one’s dilemmas, in the difficulties that this time has provoked for those who have surrounded me. Time has dilated around me. It always has. When I was young, one minute contained the minutes of my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. I have lived the time of others, of those who came before me. I spent many hours with parents and grandparents, in the fields. Our tractor had no radio and we had to talk in order to pass more easily the very long summer hours. In the summer, the suffocating heat dilated the hours; in the winter, the cold and the fog, stopped them. How many times did I hear the same stories? Stories that happened in Saidí, in my region, in Lleida, in Barcelona ... Year after year, I found that they changed: why did they sometimes explain things to me in one way and at other times in another? When did they change, the stories? Were they lying? I could see that there were modifications that could not be explained only due to loss of memory or of the referents that shaped it. No, there was something else that had to do with the passage of time, with the accumulation of plots, with the way they situated events, the way they justified their decisions, in order to explain themselves to themselves. The only way to make time more entertaining was to make it pass, to make it pass through the present, to make the past pass through a present that would update it. Sometimes I have thought that we talked because we had to do something to bestow meaning on that monotonous work. What meaning did it have, picking fruit? What meaning did it have, repeating over and over that work, pruning one tree and then another? Fill a box, then another, then another, until there were one hundred boxes full of fruit ... In an of itself, it had no meaning, that work, aside from giving some highly reduced economic yield. Their lives – and mine – were and are limited and those stories that transcended them were obliged to repeat themselves. They spoke of friends and enemies of the family, of the beginnings and of the times that followed the beginnings, of the vicissitudes that accompanied the farms, of the problems of caring for them years ago, of the people who had passed through their house, working there ... I could live in the 20th century in Saidí because they narrated for me a way of understanding the world. Fiction is extremely powerful. Years have gone by and I have understood that what they wanted to do when they explained to me all of those stories, every year the same, every year slightly modified, was the same thing that I try to do when I write, to find a bit of meaning in the passage of time.

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Francesc Serés

••• Without knowing it, we were doing geology. The stories were superimposed in the same way as those bands were in the form of strata. Some of them were harder and some softer, clearly; some of them eroded significantly; others resisted without being deformed as much by the passing summers, and, some were broken to bits, as if the river had undone them. We could not do any kind of archeology of knowledge, we did not know enough about it, all of our knowledge was approximate, it was story and fiction in their purest state. To this I owe, it seems to me, the special perception of time that I have used in some of my books, most of all the three earliest ones. The passage of time, the way things are, could not respond to a linear conception, with one point of departure and one of arrival. The bands, the strata, one after another, repeat patterns that can be followed in mountains and hills and, in order to support the earth on the surface, us. In the same way, stories were situated one on top of the others in order to support the current stories. How could we understand the world, without thinking of everything we could not see? The relationship between the different generations of the family has always been based on reality. Everyone explained what he was most interested in – in the end, an important part of what we do when we narrate is justify ourselves – and tried to counter the stories of the others. Memory, that first step of the story, is affective, it is based on the emotions, on the will to extend our own vision of the facts – what they call narrating ... – and in our intentions to lift the past into the present. One could also see there the way each one told her story. Who used the precise words; who needed to continually go back in order to move forward, who allowed their sentences to run on so long that they made subordinate clauses that subordinated all of us; who jumped into the void and into in the plot in order to move from one place to another in an erratic fashion ... Each of our whats and hows created ties between the stories, between the opinions that arose, and they changed just as the plots changed summer after summer, just as we changed and as the world changed. Was that, literature? Was that, geology, our own geology? ••• Near the field, where we talked, today the high-speed train line can be found. I have taken it some times to go to Lleida or to Madrid, from Barcelona. The landscape draws close and moves away, it is created and dissolves without decorating the hills that border the tracks. The view is

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blurry, but it does not have the delicateness of sfumato. The landscape is composed of and sums up the information it contains in the form of lines and spots that may or may not mean anything. Speed blurs the men and the landscape, the landscape without figures, means nothing. One minute on the train contains so much landscape, so much narration that it ends up meaning nothing. The vertigo of images means nothing. Whenever I take it I wait for the moment at which it passes by the town where I was born. The train passes through all the familiar places, and as we advance I can identify the names of fields, of ravines, of forests, of branches of the river, of canyons ... We pass over the Cinca river, the natural border between Catalonia and Aragon, between Catalonia and Spain. The people in this region demanded for many years that the authorities build a bridge to cross the river. It was as if the desideratum echoed in the crags of the other side of the valley. The desire was never fulfilled. When the high-speed train project arrived, then yes, the bridge was built (I insist, however: the desire was never fulfilled). It was all state-ofthe-art technology never before seen in the region; they were a joy to see, those machines. When the opposing sides were finally united I passed over. I would go there on Sundays, when the workers were resting and there were still no security guards. I would cross the river a bit higher up from the place where I had swum when I was little, I would pass over to the other side of the valley until I got to the tunnel that ran through the mountain, an enormous tunnel, very long. I had never seen the river from above, from the middle. The bed starts to twist until it reaches the foot of the crags. The orchards here and there divert the water ... I describe the landscape as if I had never done anything else in my entire life. I recognize myself in my own meanderings, my cliffs and my plains, but all of that, finally, is useless if the landscape is not capable of moving at the same speed as the train. The landscape cannot be perceived in a static manner, it may well be that the one who is moving is not the train, but everything that surrounds us, that the landscape is transferred from one place to another. Discourse and stories should move at the same velocity at which the world moves. If they are incapable of doing that it means they are neither sufficiently strong nor sufficiently necessary. The bridge was built, but the desire was never fulfilled. It is the high speed train bridge and only the train may pass. On either side of the tracks there are continuous fences from Barcelona to Madrid. The closest walls are thirty and eighty kilometers away. The people of the region continue

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without a way to cross the river. They worked on the construction of a bridge so that a train could pass right by them. Literature always remains with which to cross the river. Or only literature remains, with which to cross the river. ••• To read everything that has been written about a region is in some way to fly over it. The first narration that was written about this zone was written by none other than Julius Caesar. After this first narration, repeated silences until the end of the 19th and 20th centuries. The description given by Julius Caesar is precise; those of us who have been over these paths on foot can recognize hills, forms, changes in the riverbeds, the sensation that the legions must have had who crossed the shoreline forests ... It is easy to imagine the heat that they must have suffered during the summers, the uneasiness caused by the humid cold of the winter fogs and the lack of supplies ... I do not know who said that it was just as important to share the same time as it is the same space in different times. I do not even know for certain if anyone said it; maybe I have made it up like my father, mother and grandparents made up the parts that did not coincide. In fact, when I think about it, I do not even know if the writers, philosophers, poets, historians or sociologists that I have read have said what I think they have said. What are the books of Julius Caesar about the wars in which he fought around the Mediterranean? They are some of the first attempts to narrate a point of view, his own. So much his own that he writes it in third person, as if he also formed part of the vital, moral or physical landscape that includes him to the point of making himself an actor in his own story. Or a teller of a possible life; who knows, at this point? I read the Commentary of the Civil War in the bilingual edition that the Fundació Bernat Metge published with Joaquim Icart’s translation. I pronounce the words that Julius Caesar wrote on the left-hand page, next to the Catalan on the odd-numbered page ... “Accidit etiam repentinum incommodum biduo quo haec gesta sunt. Tanta enim tempestas cooritur ut numquam illis locis maiores aquas fuisse constaret. Tum autem ex omnibus montibus niues proluit ac summas ripas fluminis superauit pontisque ambos quos C. Fabius facerat uno die interrupit” (Cèsar: 87). The Roman army built some bridges in order to cross rivers and then “There came a sudden delay after two days of these actions. A storm formed so strong, that there is no record of anyone ever seeing in this region a stronger downpour. Then, on top of that, it made the snow melt in all the

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mountains and the water rose higher than the highest parts of the shores of the rivers, and in just one day it broke the two bridges that Gai Fabi had built”. I read the sentences in Latin next to the sentences in Catalan. And I read the circumstances in which those legions found themselves alongside the floods that I saw so many times when I was little, in the same place, with the fields ... I have been through there, I come from there, those flooded places: is it not a story that explains itself and that, in this telling, generates new stories to the point that everything is a story and there is nothing more than story? ••• Answering for stories is not a job that – here I am speaking from experience – can be taken lightly. In my first three books, for example, the setting I chose figured among those that the reader could expect, it coincided with that landscape that the train crossed. It was a combination of the Segrià, the Baix Cinca, the Monegres, the Garrigues, the Urgell and the Segarra. The treatment, however, the point of view, the structure, the characters, and I dare say everything that was not setting, needed to be justified. What did it mean that in the fields there was suffering? The landscape, so beautiful, could contain elements that contradicted it. I had read Jesús Moncada and Josep Pla. But I had also read Miguel Delibes and Camilo José Cela. Reading Camí de sirga and La vida amarga was a marvelous experience; Moncada and Pla taught me things that I never could have learned anywhere. Reading Camí de sirga and La vida amarga in the light or the shadow of Viaje a la Alcarria or of Los santos inocentes taught me that the stories spoke among themselves through me. And that is much more than literature. I would say that it is life, but it was a life that contrasted with the vision that people had of the place from which the stories originated. The gaze has been constructed through addition, through subtraction, rubbing characters against places ... The landscape of the Alcarria, the Galicia of Madera de Boj or the Extremadura of Los santos inocentes was different from those plains over which the train flew, yes, but the men there were situated in the same way. There were more pieces to the puzzle, from the Cristo si è fermato a Eboli of Carlo Levi to the Vies minuscules of Pierre Michon, moving through Of Mice and Men and so many other books by John Steinbeck ... Here I have to add the Russians: Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov ... Who was I talking about if not Tolstoy? Of the peasants of my town, clearly, of the times of my grandfa-

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ther and my great-grandfather. But my grandfather really met him. I have seen many photos of Tolstoy, and it could well be Tolstoy in Saidí ... He looks old to me, in the photos, and I think about some old men that I used to see pass by, with their old boots and their tattered clothes, dirty with mud and sweat. What difference is there between Russia and Catalonia? What difference between Yasnaya Polyana and the abandoned ramshackle houses of some now-forgotten landowners? None, the world had to be in Saidí because for me, as could not be otherwise, Saidí was the center of the world. Was not Saidí a declension of the world that the westerns showed me? One only need look at the places to see the similarities ... These landscapes were the center of the world. The proof is that this text will be read in Stanford, close to San Francisco. “The definitive texts either belong to religion or to weariness” (Borges: 267). I think so often of this phrase by Borges ... ••• Men will not stay put. Nor will the earth, nor stories. Men emigrate, travel, move for sometimes unmentionable reasons. The earth and stories have similar reasons. When they explained to me of what the theory of plate tectonics consisted, I thought that was the best story I had ever heard. The best plot anyone could ever imagine, without a doubt. There was a force that animated the movement of unimaginable quantities of earth, islands of earth that move in an imperceptible manner over islands of melted earth. The existence of the continents was pure coincidence, but seen in this way, the existence of man, of culture, and therefore of literature, was an even bigger coincidence. The earth moved, the earth moves. The magnitudes are immense, but the schema is comprehensible, achievable, narratable. It is not a matter of an astronomical abstraction that resembles poetry; no, the dorsals, the tectonic plates and the convection currents of the mantel are quite prosaic, intelligible. Each one is animated by a different will and direction, a trajectory that forms part of the plot which serves as the backdrop of history. In the same way, a second folding makes one think of the continental drift of stories: one can imagine that there are regions that could be like stories that crash into other regions that could also be stories, that rub sides, that there are plates that disappear underneath others, as though the stories melted and, through the mantel’s convection currents, emerge

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again. It is impossible not to imagine more and more written pages that smoothen each other, that fold until they form high mountains or that mix until they become masses of paper that sink into paper, texts and more texts; one no longer knows if these stories are strata just as one does not know if the pressure of all the sedimented texts will end up melding some with others. Stories are born, modified, transported; they crash and rub against far away stories, they mix, they mutate. Metamorphic rocks are created deep down in the earth and they finally emerge onto the surface after they have been pushed up or when the stories that cover them have eroded away. ••• Something like five years ago, for a few months, I was thinking about a text dealing with the literature of Atlantis. The literature that someone must have written or compiled in Atlantis. In any case, the stories that were produced there before the island, the continent or the bit of land that it was, sank and remained submerged under the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. What did they write about, the Atlanteans? What were their stories? We do not know, we never will know. We can think that they wrote a literature that had to do with their insularity, about their relationship with the continent, with land-based literature. They would complain about their isolation and, at the same time, would celebrate it as one of their culture’s distinctive traits. If they had been contemporaries of the Greeks they would possibly have shown some kind of rivalry, they would have spoken of the columns of the end of the world as one of the many limits that separated and protected them from the barbarians that had all kinds of gods ... In their literature, surely, they would express the heroic deeds of past wars, their fears about the future, and the experience of a cynical present ... There would be masterpieces that someone may have translated or copied, but most of the literature of Atlantis would have been lost. This “would have”, however, is a reflexive that implies us as well: we all would have lost it. One need only think of the possibility that the sinking could have happened south of Macedonia and that everything between Thessaly and the Peloponnese had been lost. Let us imagine that for a moment. Atlantis – does it not symbolize the fear that nations have of disappearing? Geologic forces are usually slow, but an earthquake or tsunami can wipe out a country in just a few seconds. The eruption of a volcano like Krakatoa has horrific consequences, modifying the geography of the

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zone and making several small islands disappear. Another like Vesuvius can bury cities in a kind of terrestrial Atlantis; the cold beds of magma on top of those who sleep remind us of the fragility of it all. I imagine an Atlantis buried under hundreds of layers of rocks that have sedimented and that press down on it, and, above that, hundreds of meters of ocean water, and I can not help remembering the bands of limestone and clay superposed in the mountains of Saidí. Thirty kilometers to the south crocodile fossils can be found in those limestones ... Atlantis is the perfect metaphor for the stories that have been lost, that will never again be told. We do not speak only of territories, clearly, we speak of cultures, of how these cultures can tell themselves and of how these stories will serve the cultures with which they will relate, with the cultures that will succeed them. Otherwise, what meaning would it have, writing? ••• The relationships that writers maintain with the territories they inhabit are, as they cannot be otherwise, multiple, diverse, and changing. There are situations, however, that mark the choice of some paths or others. What is the story of places that have had no story? How does a writer face a territory that has never before been narrated? Who will be his interlocutors? There has been discussion of the history of people without history but I have never heard anyone speak of the literature of a people without literature. Where does one start? It is curious to observe the importance of the setting of literature that tries to adapt itself to modernity as if it was trying to capture lost time, or, in the case of Catalan literature, various lost times. I am thinking about Catalan literature but I am also thinking about the new worlds that the 20th century has given us. The stories that have been produced in North America, South America, Africa, and Oceania are situated in a very specific terrain. It is the terrain of the substitution of some oral stories for other written ones, of Chinua Achebe and Peter Carey; of Mario Vargas Llosa and William Faulkner. In all of them, the presence of the space they inhabit and its characteristics has foundational value. But, what about the places where there was a story but this story avoided large parts of the population, of the territory, of wills? It seems as if literature was always searching for shelter in the closest landscape, as if it needed to begin to construct with the material it had closest at hand. It can be argued that this is what all literatures do and that urban projects

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are also constructed through the environment, but it is no less true that on many occasions they emerge from previous narratives that have elaborated the space. London, for example, has dozens of strata that have piled up, thousands of authors have spoken about it. What a subsoil! Works of theater have been set there, poetry has been made about it, it has seen Charles Dickens and Martin Amis walk by and the list would never end: thousands of strata, meters and meters of depth. But, in those places where there is no narration, where does it begin? What is the first step in order to narrate? There is, by obligation, an approximation to that which is first, a necessary look at that which comes next and, at the same time, an ennobling of this first proximity. It is that which has been given the writer because he begins to build. ••• Finally, the narration, the story. The story constitutes and explains, and most importantly, offers something that only a story, situated at some precise and concrete temporal and spatial coordinates, can afford. What will be the specificity of that space? What will be its characteristics? What, the interpretations and the re-elaborations? The strata of the world of V.S. Naipaul weigh down, to contradict and complement it, on those of Rudyard Kipling, next to those of Salman Rushdie. But also, in order to understand the culture on which they are founded, on the literature of the centuries prior to colonization. Clearly, none of these writers was the exclusive product of the territory of which he speaks. Precisely, all three have traveled and have the baggage of readings that have converted them into a tectonic plate that interacts with the thousands of tectonic plates that endeavor to find a place on the globe. In this, without needing to look for the excuse of cultural relativism, there are no cultural magnitudes that discriminate between cultures; in the end, there is only a literature that comes together in time and space. The largest plates, like that of the Pacific or that of Africa split at a point that turns into a Y, and little by little separate into three smaller plates. The smallest plates look to insert themselves among the bigger plates in order to become necessary. The Pangea of the English koiné is broken up into thousands of plates that try to survive with the oldest tool in the world: exchange. The stories that can survive are those that have something that makes them unique. Every plate has its interesting points. Every literature, every literary project, every author and every story as well. The capacity to offer new, unique elements is what will give value to everything we can write.

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Francesc Serés

When I think about my town, about my country and about my literature, I think about the quantity of stories that have come out of them and I try to look at all of the literatures I have around me, towards peninsular literature, but also towards the Mediterranean and, with this automatic translation mechanism that is called reading, towards everywhere. Commercial exchange could become here plot, aesthetic, ideologic ... textual, literary exchange. Definitely, this is the mechanism that allows us to appropriate the other’s story. The story is the ideal place for the exchange and symbolic appropriation of the universes of the other. The soil that supports it has a diverse, variable and at the same time peculiar composition. The stratigraphic maps that we writers and geologists draw, prove it.

That * Perejaume

Perhaps it is all that I write about, perhaps I haven’t pursued anything else in most of the works I have gone about writing and, at the same time, the word landscape seems enormously uncomfortable to me. I have tried for years to resist adopting the way the word is now commonly used. To some extent, the word, just as it sounds, with that carefree and mobile sense that we have attached to it, frightens me. One could say that it has lost its roots and, now, the word grows like a vine, aerial and exuberant, without sufficient contact with a firm foundation from which it once attempted to take flight in order to liberate itself. It seems very much as if the word landscape, stiffened by the very optical unbinding that brought it about, were to reflect now, uplifted from place and letter, the unhinging of localism currently in force. When, in any reality whatsoever, attention is deflected too far from the real thing to the concept, the result is that the thing fails to fulfill its primary function. And this is the case with the inmediate geographic concretion where both the primary function of the earth – agricultural production – and the locality – which we could understand as a fertile production of presence – have been relegated to second place. In Catalan culture Jacint Verdaguer was one of the first to detach his eyes from an enslavement to the solid ground. Since then, the degree of flight and the subjection that Verdaguer’s gaze instills have continued to resonate. The essential game between * Tanslated by William Viestenz

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Perejaume

settlement and the world, between the feet and the eyes, between subjection and extension, is what creates tension in the landscape. Consider a peasant’s localism and the increase in immediate reality that assumes a condition of losing sight of the rest of the world. And consider also, at the other extreme, the emptying of place that immediate culture presides over because, in a continuous alteration, in a constant process of disidentification, place fluctuates. There’s no question that, between these two points of tension, the currently inhabited parts of the world favor, on balance, a constant alteration of place: an alteration so strong and continuous that it’s as if the world’s places rippled while devoid of stable presence, as if the land’s fixedness wasted away – as if the earth were as mobile as a sign, vagabond like any other sign – in radical impermanence. Certainly, today, without us having to move an inch, place alone navigates adrift at sea, wherever it may come from, wherever it may be. Strange as it may seem, the world resembles us as it anxiously infects the worldly skin by appropriating it. The world is condemned to our impatience and, therefore, anxious, a traveler and as insecure as the humans that populate it. It’s almost as if it were never happy enough, as if it remade itself, and geology, in turn, had accelerated its velocity, as quickly as our physiognomy, if not more so. It goes without saying that any such modification of territorial conditions comes to alter, consequently, our affection, our needs and our attitude. Nor is there any doubt that the same occurs with landscapes, and that it occurs as much or more with the word that is addressed to them. Urban, tourist, mental ... speculation has ended up imprinted on the word, and the semantic condition of the word begins to be, currently, of a strictly speculative nature, imagistic and empty. A few lines back, I myself referenced Verdaguer in order to sketch a quick genealogy of the word landscape. Alright, it is done, I leave it as it is, without any further intellectualization. But agree with me that the word suffers from an abuse of conjectures and semantic skill. In this respect, because it has lent itself out to a wide array of essayisms, we could say that the world has accumulated a great elasticity, but that same elasticity makes the word indeterminate, and causes it to atrophy with respect to any and all stable semantic uses that it may yet be capable of borrowing from us. Above all, landscape, as word and material, has become, in the long run, ever more masticatingly confusing, bound up with human, inhuman and superhuman things, optically muddled, both logically and sentimentally, with a mixture of subjective and imponderable elements, suscepti-

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ble, all things considered, to letting itself become mixed up even more; so much so that it begins to seem to us to be a field interlaced with action, observation and of barely practical diction, absolutely slobbered, antropophagous, antisyntactic, a complete landslide. It so happens that there’s a lushness proper to the term landscape that carries us away. At times I believe that it is possible that the term plays with us. If nothing else the term has embraced, through our intervention, an excessive consciousness of itself. The term was produced by a literature that is incredibly diverse. I refer to the quantity of samples, articles, conferences, and debates: Petrarch on Mont Ventoux, landscape artists and architects, etc., etc. Such is the deformation of the word that its muddying ends up extending itself to neighboring words, such as territory, space, nature ... This verbal streetcar appears discursively loquacious, remaining connoted and totally eroded of definitive points by the recent wave of congressional urbanity. At times I have attempted to modify these generic words to see if they would tell us something new: the landscape, the nature, the territory ... But perhaps it’s more effective to adopt Joan Miró’s verbal mistrust and, with respect to landscape, refer to it simply as that. Miró opted for the exact opposite of Eugeni d’Ors’s well known theory that “naming a thing means becoming its master”. Pere Gimferrer writes of a time when, visiting the artist’s study, he realized that Miró, with quite a lot of effort, had named the objects within his workshop. He pointed to them and said this or that or this here or that there. (René Char: “Miró didn’t name, Miró indicated”.) As if we were returning to it its name, let’s call the landscape that. It’s as if the name, totally exhausted by so many vagaries, from so many twists and turns, had sunk into the ground, been lulled to sleep, incapable of rising up, and now we can only call it that. Because the that not only says, but gestures, redoes, returns, ... as if the name were once again a thing. Without question we are far from purely speculative topologies. Calling it that permits us to identify landscapes that possess the rockiness of an icon, filled with note cards containing toponymic roots from Joan Coromines’s filing cabinet. Calling it that allows us to move the same sayable letter to the spot where the brain and the world inscribe each other and thus exceed all analysis. Because calling it that links us with a basic strata of the earth that is profoundly imprinted onto us with all its strength. On the other hand, the atmospheric, physical and geographic that to which we are referring, said in this way, becomes prior to all discourse,

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Perejaume

and consequently subdues everything. If nothing else, meaning is suspended or reversed. This is, in fact, the case to the extent that we can equally speak of the progressive historical appearance of that, as orthodox landscaping asserts on the basis of the gradual take off of the background of representations toward the foreground, and of its progressive disappearance and remoteness if we start instead from the fastened cave paintings toward here, toward the nowhere that is here. Let me just say, on another level, that I have been reading about this theme for many years and, to begin with, I consider it outrageous that there isn’t, in any of the texts, a central presence of the peasant’s world. Academia’s dereliction of duty with respect to peasant culture is unforgivable. The argument that the peasant lacks an aesthetic perception of the world fails to justify the peasant’s exclusion from these texts. This is extraordinarily debatable. And perhaps it is unnecessary to privilege a disinterested perception, seeing where it has taken us, meaning to a place so little in agreement with an aesthetic point of departure. Certainly, with respect to agrarianism, the academic world has behaved with arrogance and a conqueror’s disdain. On the other hand, contrary to what occurs with academic culture, the nature of peasant culture is resistant to any fixation that isn’t a generational transmission and resistant to any support that isn’t the place itself. All the rest is quite fragile: bouquets, melodies, dances, manners, customs, vocal modulations ... The secret in particular fascinates me, the subtlety, the elegance in the manner in which this millenary culture has closed its eyes to us over the course of years. It’s a painstakingly slow disappearance. Both in my family and in my immediate surroundings, all my life I have heard the last words of a peasant from a particular area, seen the last performance of a particular activity, witnessed the final testimony of you name it, with one last thing after another, interconnected in a slow and repetitive rhythm – and if you will – : funereally slow. In fact, it’s very probable that this protracted disappearance alone can offer an idea of the extraordinary and unrepeatable dimension of that which we are burying. Another singularity of this vast culture’s farewell is the fact that any elegy whatsoever that we might dedicate to it ends up ridiculous, sentimental, and soft. Whether this is due to the discretion that we attribute to peasant culture or if it’s fruit of the uncomfortable relationship that we have with it, I have no idea. It is certainly true that, at any given moment, at the first signs of this world’s disappearance, academic culture, in the form of folklorists, linguists, and musicologists, has embarked on

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a series of rescue campaigns ... Academia’s contribution is nothing more than a fixation. There’s a manifest disconnect between the two cultures. A peasant would say: “That which repeats itself isn’t lost”. For an academic, however, that which isn’t lost is that which is fixed. In this sense, all the archival materials of the peasantry are nothing more than an extraordinary and copious archive destined to bring together a single culture, but, essentially, what they are collecting is inherently unfixable. Allow me another observation, this time from an absolutely personal point of view. Whenever I have been on an abundantly active farm, I have felt that I experienced the place not in a nostalgic or melancholic fashion, as one would suppose, but rather I have felt unabashedly fortunate and essentially revolutionary, in the sense of proclaiming that there exist other possible ways of life different from those the modern world tends to exclusively, globally and homogeneously impose on us. Beyond a concrete patrimony, the patrimony that the peasantry has contributed to our postcapitalism, is the experience of another possible imaginary. The challenge is to maintain a space for alternatives within our minds, because the peasantry offers an alternative reality of extraordinary value, despite its currently residual nature. I don’t know if this is the place to mention that, with respect to the agrarian world, there has arisen at this very moment, on the part of what we might call enlightened management, a pressing duty to establish a real dialogue with the sea, the fields, the forests, and the mountaintops. Up to the present, this dialogue has been carried out by fishermen, foresters, and peasants, created and cultured within their respective environments. Evidently, an environment so socially and physically transformed is no longer capable of offering these formations. As is the duty of enlightened management, a treatment not exclusively technical or theoretical, but rather physical, honest and with worldly immediacy is required. It might even be a relationship with a degree of mechanization, but which demands arms, a trade, a real life, cultured by these realities and from those realities in which it moves. That the academic world has been so refractory with agrarian reality is quite curious considering that in the cultural realm and particularly in the realm of Catalan culture the highest creators have praised it and defended it openly, even insolently I daresay. Recall the interchangeable badges of honor of Verdaguer, “I write like a till man”, and Miró, “I work like a peasant”. But also recall the sowable and staked agrarianism in their vertical works, which leads Verdaguer to write from his Atlànti-

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Perejaume

da to Al cel. This is nothing more than what leads Miró to sloppily and steeply paint the Atlàntida al cel. Gaudí, it goes without saying, is himself capable of ruralizing the city, a city constructed by peasants that came to live there, and he fills it with cliffs, mountains, grottos, and forests that also live there. That said, I want to again propose the idea of an mobile-everywhere-oflands-and-semantics-this-landscape-of-ours-of-just-now, so letter-inflated with different meanings that the more we talk about it, the more it distances itself from us. This, in all honestly, is how it is: saddled with improper labels that are uniquely ours, the world’s landscapes lean away under the weight of the many thick layers we’ve imposed on them: landscapes dripping with paint, landscape-landscapes, as if they themselves were pretending to be what they really are, like speakers at a conference, viscous from making themselves the theme of conferences and debates, landscapes urbanistically speculated, adjectified landscapes heaped with praise, landscapes protected by legislative wrapping. It so happens that we live in a halfway-place, a halfway-place that supports our weight, so strangely distant that it resembles us more and more, unanimously transitory, alone, foreign, defenseless. We said before that our anxiety infects our surroundings. But, beyond anxiety, we have also transmitted our expiration. And at times I think that, mortal and bereft of appearance, places no longer depend on us; we’ve disappointed them, they’re afraid of us. The very anthropogenic and familiarly helpless image that a place shows us is its own way of closing itself off, of withholding from us all intimacy, all genuineness. All things considered, maybe places hide in order to lie in wait for us, convinced that one day we’ll stoop down to their level. Returning to the issue of anxiety, it is worth noting the extent to which our multiple, diverse and distant landscape forms of relating to the world betray a kind of territorial pornography: a contact nourished by a great visual stimulation that’s nonetheless the flip side of a stunted experience. For the most part, it is because we are deprived of landscape that we use the term landscape so often. On the contrary, the urban, commercial, vacational, intellectual and propagandistic reshuffling of places is still in progress. It’s as if nothing calms our blood, not even for a second, as if each place were to last just long enough to awaken a desire for someplace new. Thus, in an unsatisfied and constant wavering, notice that merely by changing the word landscape for Miró’s that, one can earn back the land amidst chaos, at the very least a small slice of the land. Because the that, in

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an unavoidable, indicative manner, establishes a very immediate local permanence. Look at the that. Look at any place’s that, with its feat of gravitating. Listen and see how full and all-embracing this terrestrial presence, this terrestrial dependence is. I’ve always asked myself what makes one praise the consciousness of the present and, in turn, what makes one disdain the consciousness of a place. I now wish to take the nine letters of the word landscape and crush them, chew them, flatten them, compact them and then return them to their original order. Is it possible to return the land to a pre-landscaped reality? Can we replant such a reality into the ground? Can we at least act as though such a thing were possible? The last twenty years in my country have seen a coming and going of lands, hollows, basins, cements, ... everything completely landscaped, with the Pyrenees in the background like teeth sharpened by an excavator. Maybe it’s time to let the land be, perfectly at one with its surroundings, wherever it may be, with a restful tranquility. It comes to me like a flash, and I wouldn’t stir, / wouldn’t move from where I am and would be as I am: / it’s like a fear, candid, that by moving I could shatter/ a membrane / an extremely thin membrane, in my body, in my life: / that this order of tender, dried snail mucus, / of slender silkworms,/ this weightless world could break – if I speak, if I stir.1

What a carnal agrarianism described here by Vicent Andrés Estelles (Estelles: 1981: 274), of a celestial skin, of human and terrestrial skin mixed together, like an amniotic fluid that envelopes us in the world’s humid fecundity, in a friendly tenderness, with all the landscapes that are, without us realizing it, without them even realizing it, in a deep-seated, delightful grandeur, high and profound. Wouldn’t you guess, from everything, that it’s the place that now asks for a period of rest, or more exactly, for a time of cultivation? Don’t you think that, in order to step beyond an extremely narrow horizon, a listless floating along, the land is able to open itself up from within? Don’t you feel, doesn’t it seem to you, that we ought to choose a few common places, many exhausted from so much publicity, along with certain tendentious mottos such as “revealing is knowledge” or “homogenize for progress”, and submit places and mottos to a ten or fifteen year silence? Perhaps what the world demands of us, if we examine the matter closely, is that we treat it honestly and closely, with person to person contact,

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hand to hand dealings, contact by way of a hoe, by foot or by armfuls. Because the world is still open to our presence, it truly desires it and not at all from a distant, ocular and vague position. Nature, in fact, prefers to avoid eye contact with us – so said Heraclitus – because maybe it longs to feel the strength of our arms, the warmth of our chests and the tepid air that we exhale. Many artists such as myself have been called to walk the world, exalting the effort, rhythm, the prosody of step and, evidently, the contact with reality. That said, perhaps this kind of passing through the landscape, through the nature, through the territory has been privileged enough, and ought to be exchanged for working and making a life there, for belonging to it and burying oneself in it.

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Arturo / Gräbner, Cornelia (eds.): Performing Poetry: Race, Place, and Gender in Contemporary Performance Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. — (Forthcoming b): “Revulsió estètica i desurbanització. Territori Perejaume”, in: Muntaner, Maria et al. (eds.): Transformacions. Literatura i canvi sociocultural dels anys setanta ençà. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València. “Priorat Manifesto on Windfarms”. 15 April 2010. “Prioritat: Paisatge cultural patrimony mundial”. Handbill. “Producció de raïm”. 15 April 2010. Radford, Robert (1997): Dalí. London: Phaidon. Rama, Ángel (1984): La ciudad letrada. Hanover: Ediciones del Norte. Ramos, María Concepción, Cots-Folch, Roser / Martínez-Casasnovas, José Antonio (2007): “Sustainability of Modern Land Terracing for Vineyard Plantation in a Mediterranean Mountain Environment – The Case of the Priorat Region (NE Spain)”, in: Geomorphology 86, 1-11. Relph, Edward (1976): Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Renard, Jules (1986): Journal (1908). Paris: Gallimard. Resina, Joan Ramon (2003): “The Concept of After-Image and the Scopic Apprehension of the City”, in: Resina, Joan Ramon / Ingenschay, Dieter (eds.): After-Images of the City. Ithaca / London: Cornell UP, 1-74. — (2008): La vocació de modernitat de Barcelona. Auge i declivi d’una imatge urbana. Barcelona: Galàxia Gutenberg, Cercle de Lectors. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1966): Oeuvres, Vol. I, Prose. Paris: Seuil. Ritter, Joachim (1974): “Landschaft. Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft”, in: Subjektivität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 141-163. — (1989): “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft [1963]”, in: Subjekivität: Sechs Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 141-90. Rocha, Glauber (1978): Riverão Sussuarana. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Roger, Alain (2008): “Vida y muerte de los paisajes. Valores estéticos, valores ecológicos”, in: Joan Nogué (ed.): El paisaje en la cultura contemporánea. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 67-85. Roig, Albert (2006): Cecília de Florejats. Barcelona: Montflorit. — (2002): “Semença barroca, brossa barroca”, in: 1991 Literatura. Barcelona: Empúries, 81-88.

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Conceptual Index

A Aesthetics 158, 164 Agriculture, agricultural 8-11, 13, 22, 31, 32, 37, 38, 50, 75, 77, 79, 80, 89, 94, 95, 97, 100, 103, 104, 111, 114, 118, 187 B Bios 86 C

Capitalism 8, 10, 28, 33, 36, 83, 85, 113, 114, 191 Center, central 8, 9, 35, 36, 37, 87, 113,124, 127, 130, 133, 142, 144, 149, 153,154, 166, 182 Cerrado 61, 64, 65, 69, 74, 75 City 5, 7-9, 11-15, 21-23, 28-30, 32, passim. Civitas 13 Community 8-10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 20, 28-31, 34, 35, 38, 81, 89, 100, 140, 141, 168 Country 7, 8, 11-13, 15, 17, 20-22, 25, 28, passim. Countryside 10, 12, 27-31, 33

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Conceptual Index

D Development 9-12, 15, 22, 31, 48, 61, 65, 72, 81, 98, 100, 101, 103-105, 110, 114, 135, 141 E Economy, Economic Growth, Economic Development 8-11, 21, 27, 30, 31, 3339, 65, 67, 68, 79-82, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100-103, 106, 109-111, 122, 128, 177 G Geography 35, 80, 83, 84, 90, 93, 111, 126, 127, 183 Geology, as literature 173-186 Gerais 64-66, 69 H Hearing 24, 150 Hortus 18, 47, 50 I Industry, industrial, postindustrial, pre-industrial 8, 9, 11, 22, 35, 36, 38, 56, 66, 75, 79-81, 89, 97, 103, 104, 110, 114, 119, 131, 146, 160-163 L Land 8, 10, 11-14, 21, 22, 24, 27-29, 31, passim. Landscape 7, 11-13, 19-21, 23, 24, 32, 35, 37, passim. M Metropolis 14, 121, 136, 148, 168 Migration 22, 23, 28, 30, 33-35, 89, 97, 128, 139 Modernity 9, 14-17, 21, 22, 23, 81, 86, 87, 89, 112, 113, 115, 124, 128, 131, 159, 162, 168, 184 Mountain 15, 21, 23, 24, 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 84, 99, 103, 104, 107, 114, 120, 125 126, 137, 154, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 191, 192 Myth, mythology, mythological 9, 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 88, 89, 129, 131, 143, 148, 152, 160 N Naturalist 120 Natura 42, 44, 47, 51, 52 Nature 7, 8, 13, 15, 16, 19-22, 29-32, 34-37, passim.

Conceptual Index

213

Neo-Rural (Back to the Land Movement) 8, 27-39 New Ruralism 7, 8,10, 15, 21-23, 25, 41-53, 94, 112, 124 Non-urban 7, 8, 15, 109, 110, 112, 114, 117, 120, 122, 124 Nostalgia 7, 10, 67, 89, 128, 138, 146, 147 P País 12, 21 Periphery 8, 9, 113, 124, 142 Physis 44, 47 Place 10, 12, 16, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32, 33, 35, passim. Polis 14 Post-Rural 111 Province 9, 14, 15, 17, 32, 77-92, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149 Provincial, provincialism 9, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 57, 58, 80, 143, 139, 141-143, 146, 147, 164 Psychodelia 116, 117 R Regional, regionalism 9, 10, 22, 67, 95, 98, 140 Rural 7-25, 27-39, 41-53, 55, 61, 80, 86, passim. Rurality 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 50, 106, 110, 111, 119, 124, 176 Rus 11, 42, 129 S Saudade 61-75 Sertão 61-75 Sorge (care) Space 7, 12, 14, 18-21, 23-25, 29, 30, 35, passim. Stimmung 159, 168 Suburbia 55-59, 161 Surrealism 49, 157, 158, 160, 168 T Territory, territoriality 7-10, 22, 23, 28, 33-38, 46, 48-50, passim. Terroir 93-107 Tradition 14, 15, 23, 32, 33, 44, 49, 65, 83, 85, 90, 91, 116, 117, 135, 150, 158, 161, 168

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Conceptual Index

U Urban 7-10, 13-15, 21-24, 27-29, 36, 46, passim. W Walking 48, 125, 131, 134-137, 153

Name Index

A Adenauer, Konrad 79, 80, 82 Anderson, Benedict 140, 141 Aragon, Louis 46, 49, 53, 160 Aragón 99, 123, 127, 134, 139, 179 B Baix Cinca 174, 181 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 143, 149, 154 Balzac, Honoré de 147 Barcelona 32, 34, 36, 37, 96, 101, 109, 112-114, 121, 126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 161, 164, 177-179 Bauçà, Miquel 110, 120-122 Baudelaire, Charles 41, 43, 49, 115, 118 Black Forest 16, 57 Brasilia 61-68, 72, 73 Brazil 35, 61, 62, 64-66, 72, 74, 75 Breton, André 49, 135 C Cadaqués 115, 158, 159, 164-167, 169, 171 Casadesus, Alicia 118, 119 Casasses, Enric 116, 117 Catalan Culture, Catalan Literature 110, 113, 124-126, 133, 138, 146, 184, 187, 191

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Name Index

Catalonia 8, 22, 23, 27, 29, 32, 33, 37, 93, 95, 97, 101, 102, 105, 106, 112, 113, 116, 122, 126, 128, 130, 131, 134, 137, 168, 176, 179, 182 D Dalí, Salvador 115, 126, 158-161, 164-168 De Gasperi, Alcide 79-82, 85, 87 De Gaulle, Charles 79, 80, 82, 88 E Ebre, River 127, 132 Empordà, The 12, 101, 115, 116, 131, 157, 158, 160-162, 167, 168 Espinàs, Josep M. 133, 134 F Fages de Climent, Carles 115-117 Finkelstein, Haim 159, 160, 164, 165 France 8, 27-32, 34, 78, 80, 82, 88, 89, 98 Freiburg 17 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg 150, 151 Garrotxa 173 Germany 58, 78-80, 82, 89 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 43, 47, 51, 132, 133, 136 Guareschi, Giovanni 78, 83, 85-91 H Heidegger, Martin 16-21, 24, 57, 155 I Italy 28, 29, 77-83, 85, 87, 89, 90, 95, 98 L Lévi-Strauss, Claude 50, 129, 143, 151, 152, 181 Lleida 32, 96, 177, 178 Lyotard, Jean-François 58, 59, 87

Name Index

217

M Madrid 136, 161, 164, 178, 179 Malraux, André 63, 82 Massif Central 29, 30Moncada, Jesús 110, 120 122-124, 181 N Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 43, 135 P Paris 30, 45, 46, 49, 50, 82, 147, 150, 157, 160, 161, 164 Peirce, Charles Sanders 41-53 Perejaume 19, 20, 24, 115, 126, 136, 137, 155, 187, 188, 190, 192, 194 Pla, Joseph 12, 21, 116, 119, 132-134, 162, 181 Priorat 37, 93-99, 101-107 Provence 12, 30 Pyrenees 19, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 125, 126, 131, 137, 193 R Rhine, River 79, 80 Rhineland 80 Rilke, Rainer Maria 45-48 Ritter, Joachim 20, 24, 157, 158, 161, 168 Rosa, João Guimarães 61, 62, 64-71, 73-75, 182 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 34, 45, 49, 85, 118, 131, 135, 147, 148, 163 S Saidi 127, 130, 174, 177, 182, 184 Serés, Francesc 125, 127-130, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146-148, 150-155, 173, 174, 176, 178, 180 182, 184, 186 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 20, 24, 158, 161 Simmel, Georg 46, 47, 121, 147, 148, 158, 159, 168 T Thoreau, Henry David 15, 135, 136 Todtnauberg 16, 57

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Name Index

U United States of America, USA 29, 30, 34 V Verdaguer, Jacint 19, 20, 114, 116, 187, 188, 191 W Weber, Max 10, 11, 58 Williams, Raymond 7, 8, 11, 63, 65-67, 114, 148, 155, 168

About the Contributors

Enric Bou is Professor of the Department of Ibero-American Studies at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. His teaching and research interests cover a broad range of twentieth-century Spanish Peninsular and Catalan literature but particularly involving poetry, autobiography, the city and literature, and Spanish film. His publications include, Papers privats. Assaig sobre les formes literàries autobiogràfiques (1993), Pintura en el aire. Arte y literatura en la modernidad hispánica (2001). He was the editor of the Nou Diccionari 62 de la Literatura Catalana (2000), has published a general anthology of visual poetry, La crisi de la paraula. La Poesia Visual: un discurs poètic alternatiu (2003). His latests books are Daliccionario. Objetos, mitos y símbolos de Salvador Dalí (2004), the edition of Pedro Salinas’ Obras Completas (3 vols., 2007), and Panorama crític de la literatura catalana. (2 vols., 2009-2010). Robert Davidson is Associate Professor of Spanish and Catalan at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Jazz Age Barcelona (2009) and is currently completing The Hotel: Space Over Time. He has been Visiting Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins and Institut Ramon Llull, Visiting Faculty at Queen Mary, University of London. His current research continues earlier work on animate objects during the 20th century and he has recently begun a research project on the Spanish state and the concept of the Neighbor. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. Among his books on literary theory and literary and cultural history are Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (1990;

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About the Contributors

Spanish translation forthcoming); Making Sense in Life and Literature (1992); In 1926 – Living at the Edge of Time (1998); Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten (2002); The Powers of Philology (2003); Production of Presence (2004); In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006); California Graffiti – Bilder von westlichen Ende der Welt (2010), Unsere breite Gegenwart (2010), and Stimmungen lesen (2011). A book on the post-1945 era as a time of “latency” is forthcoming. He is a regular contributor to the Humanities-section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NZZ (Zürich), and Estado de São Paulo. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Professeur attaché au Collège de France, and has been a Visiting Professor at numerous universities worldwide; most recently, he was a Fellow of the Siemens Foundation in Munich, Germany (2009/2010). Marília Librandi-Rocha is Assistant Professor of Brazilian Literature at Stanford University. She studied Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where she received her Ph.D. She has also taught at the Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia before arriving at Stanford in 2009. Professor Librandi-Rocha’s current book projects are, Writing by Ear, which focuses on different processes of mimesis in fiction and Anthropological Fictions, which is devoted to understanding the interconnections between literature and anthropology in Latin American fiction. She is the author of Maranhã o-Manhattan, Ensaios de Literatura Brasileira (2009) and Poemas-Vida (2008). Joan Nogué is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Girona and director of the Landscape Observatory of Catalonia. Nogué’s research concentrates on the complementary relationship between geographic territorial thought and an analysis of landscape from a cultural studies optic. He is author of a number of books, including Urbanisme, Paisatge i Sostenibilitat (2009), which was awarded the Rei Jaume I Prize, Las ‘otras’ geografías (2006, in collaboration with Joan Romero), Geopolítica, identidad y globalización (2001), and Nacionalisme i territori (1991). Nogué has also edited such works as La construcción social del paisaje (2007) and El paisaje en la cultura contemporánea (2008). Nogué is also a frequent contributor to the “Culturas” supplement of La Vanguardia. Xavier Pla is Professor of Literary Theory and Contemporary Catalan Literature in the Department of Philology and Communication at the

About the Contributors

221

University of Girona. Pla is the author of Josep Pla: ficcióautobiogràfica i veritat literària (1997) and has curated editions of works by Eugeni d’Ors, Josep Pla and Eugeni Xammar as well as edited collected volumes centered on Jorge Semprún, Claudio Magris, d’Ors, and others. In addition to numerous articles and regular contributions to El temps and the newspapers Avui and Ara, Pla is currently investigating the birth of the journalist-writer and theories of everyday life. Perejaume is an artist and writer. He first exhibited his visual artwork in the mid 1970s but soon introduced other modes of expression: texts, photography, videos. He is the author of several collections of poetry and essays. His work has been exhibited internationally, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona and the Maison D’Erasme in Brussels being two notable examples. In 2005 Perejaume received the National Visual Arts Prize awarded by the Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya and in 2006 the Plastic Arts Prize by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Margalida Pons is Associate Professor in the Department of Catalan Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands, where she teaches a wide range of courses on Catalan Literature, Literary Theory, and Comparative Literature. She was also visiting professor at Brown University in 2009. She has written a number of studies on Catalan Literature, with special focus on twentieth-century poetry and experimental narratives. She is author of Blai Bonet: maneres del color (1993), Poesia insular de postguerra. Quatre veus dels anys cinquanta (1998), and Corrents de la poesia insular del segle XX (2010) and has edited several books, including Transformacions: Literatura i canvi sociocultural dels anys setenta encà (2010) and Escriptures contemporànies: Baltasar Porcel i la seva obra (2009). Joan Ramon Resina is Professor in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He specializes in the European novel, in cultural theory, Spanish and Catalan literature and film, and urban culture. He has taught in several universities in the United States and Europe as a permanent or visiting professor. His single-authored books include La búsqueda del Grial (1988), Un sueño de piedra: Ensayos sobre la literatura del modernismo europeo (1990), Los usos del clásico (1991), El cadáver en la cocina: La novela policiaca en la cultura del desencanto (1997), El postnacionalisme en el mapa global (2005), Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline

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About the Contributors

of an Urban Image (2008; Catalan translation, 2008; Portuguese translation forthcoming); Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos: Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural (2009). He has edited several collections of essays and over one hundred and twenty-five critical essays in refereed journals and collective volumes and writes regularly for the Catalan daily Ara. Between 1998 and 2004 he was chief editor of the journal of cultural theory Diacritics, and is currently a member of the editorial boards of various U.S. and European journals and is a consultant for various academic presses. Among other awards, he has received the Fulbright scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, and the Serra d’Or award for literary criticism. Pere Salabert is Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Art at the University of Barcelona. He works primarily on the philosophy of aesthetics with special emphasis on contemporary art, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. Salabert is the author of over a dozen books, most recently publishing La redención de la carne. Hastío del alma y elogio de la pudrición (2004 and 2005), Sphairos: Geografía del amor y la imaginación (2005), and El cuerpo es el sueño de la razón y la inspiración una serpiente enfurecida. Marcel.lí Antunez: Cara y contracara (2009). Salabert has also been invited to speak at a number of universities throughout the world, including Argetina, Cuba, Denmark, Brazil, France, and the United States. Francesc Serés is author of several critically-acclaimed novels and collections of short stories, including The Guts of the Earth (2000), The Trunkless Tree (2001) and A Lead Tongue (2002), which together form the trilogy Of Manures and Marbles (2003). More recently Serés published The Force of Gravity (2007, National Literature Prize and Crítica Serra d’Or Prize), Russian Stories (2009, City of Barcelona Prize), and a children’s book entitled A’s Long Voyage (2010). William Viestenz is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He completed his Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American cultures at Stanford University where he cocoordinated the New Ruralism Research Unit with Joan Ramon Resina. He has published several articles and book chapters on 20th-century Iberian literature, cinema, and visual arts.