Second blog meditation-- by Profesora

I am really enjoying your blog postings this week, on Romanticism. Several of you have made great observations about how terminology and classifications change over time-- in particular, how cultural phenomena or practices persist across centuries, no matter what they are called or how they are categorized.

During the period in which El estudiante de Salamanca was produced, some authors made fun of the expressiveness of "Romantic" writers. In 1837 Ramon Mesonero Romanos, for example, wrote a famous essay called "El Romanticismo y los Romanticos," in which he parodied the passionate and emotional aspects of Romantic writing. (Here's a link to an online version: http://www.ensayistas.org/antologia/XIXE/mesonero/mesonero2.htm). Mesonero singles out the intensity of Romantic writing (which he makes fun of, in an unforgettable part of the essay, by adding multiple exclamation points to everything), and takes aim at some of the key Romantic themes, such as nature, love, the (medieval) national past, experimentation in art, exoticism, and mystery.

Many of you have made observations this week in your postings, that echo some of what Mesonero talks about in this essay. For example, he facetiously says that a relative of his, who wanted to appear like a moody poetic "Romantic" type, changed the way he dressed and the way he looked, and adopted a "gothic" appearance: "Porque (decía él) la fachada de un romántico debe ser gótica, ojiva, piramidal y emblemática." What's funny, of course, is that the relative looks at books about history and architecture (the "gothic" arch that we saw in the videos about the difference between Romanesque and Gothic architecture, is also known as an ogive arch) to try to get ideas for his way of styling his hair and dressing. But one can also come away from reading Mesonero's essay-- or, as many of you have noted, from reading Espronceda's text itself-- feeling rather unsettled and/or amazed at how recognizable so many aspects of "Romantic" expression are in today's culture and society.

And yet so much has changed. What valence do labels from nearly 200 years ago retain? Shouldn't we have a new terminology to describe what back then was understood as "Romanticism"? As at least one of you pointed out, the term "emo" does a lot of duty nowadays to refer to some of what used to be connoted by "romantic." Another class member questioned how it is that we can be so sure of our interpretations of the literature produced so long ago. That's an excellent question. Everything is of course more complex than a label can capture.

Mesonero himself points out some of what made Romanticism such a thorny and compelling subject back in the 1830s and 1840s: the first French "Romantic" writer, Victor Hugo, had lived in Spain as a boy and studied in Madrid; but "el picaruelo conoció lo que nosotros no habíamos sabido apreciar, y teníamos enterrado hace dos siglos con Calderón; y luego regresó a París, extrayendo de entre nosotros esta primera materia, y la confeccionó a la francesa, y provisto, como de costumbre, con su patente de invención, abrió su almacén, y dijo que él era el Mesías de la literatura, que venía a redimirla de la esclavitud de las reglas, y acudieron ansiosos los noveleros; y la manada de imitadores (imitatores servum pecus, que dijo Horacio) se esforzaron en sobrepujarle y dejar atrás su exageración; y los poetas transmitieron el nuevo humor a los novelistas; éstos a los historiadores; éstos a los políticos; éstos a todos los demás hombres; éstos a todas las mujeres,y luego salió de Francia aquel virus ya bastardeado, y corrió toda la Europa, y vino, en fin, a España; y llegó a Madrid (de donde había salido puro)." The Romantic "virus" that infected all of Europe, including Spain, started in Spain (as Mesonero observes), where the young Victor Hugo learned to appreciate the many upheavals and passions and mysteries and ghosts haunting the Spanish past. Romanticism isn't just "French" or "Spanish" or even "European," as Mesonero suggests-- it spread, and mutated, and adapted through time and across borders. And maybe even beyond the capacities of language to describe all the periods and places that fed into what it seemed to be. Mesonero seems to be making fun of the word "Romantic" itself: one can almost hear him asking, "how can all these nineteenth-century city people think that they look, act and feel even remotely like the people who built Gothic churches or fought infidels on battlefields of the Middle Ages?!"