Science and Literary Culture During Spain's Edad De Plata
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Science and Literary Culture during Spain’s Edad de Plata (1923 – 1936) by Anna Eva Hiller A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Milton M. Azevedo, Co-Chair Professor Dru Dougherty, Co-Chair Professor Winfried Kudszus Spring 2010 Science and Literary Culture during Spain’s Edad de Plata (1923 – 1936) © 2010 by Anna Eva Hiller Abstract Science and Literary Culture during Spain’s Edad de Plata (1923 – 1936) by Anna Eva Hiller Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Milton M. Azevedo, Co-Chair Professor Dru Dougherty, Co-Chair “Science and Literary Culture during Spain’s Edad de Plata (1923 – 1936)” is a five- chapter study of the dissemination, expression and manipulation of scientific ideas within Avant- garde literature. In it I advance the hypothesis that science and its associated imagery served as a metaphor for the process of modernity and modernization in Spain. I begin the study with a history of the unique trajectory of Spanish science as it developed between the Enlightenment and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. Thus established the historical grounding, I take up two of the main organs of cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s, José Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente and Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s La Gaceta Literaria, examining the presence and presentation of overt scientific content therein. Based on my findings within the periodicals, I then construct a discursive framework that establishes the way in which scientific discoveries and ideas of progress were both embraced and critiqued by the Spanish avant-garde, I conclude the dissertation with two chapters dedicated to the examination of a specific literary corpus, comprised of a variety of genres and authors, whose construction of science as a cultural phenomenon is symptomatic of the wider discussion(s) of modernity and its implications for Spain both internally and internationally. In the final analysis, I approach works by Pedro Salinas (Víspera del gozo), Federico García Lorca (Así que pasen cinco años and Poeta en Nueva York), Jorge Guillén (Cántico), Rafael Alberti (Cal y canto and Sobre los ángeles), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (“El dueño del átomo), and Valentín Andrés Álvarez (“Telarañas en el cielo” and ¡Tararí…!) using a scientific lens based on the princples of Einsteinian physics, quantum theory, and the controversy over the rise in importance of technology during the early 20th century. My principal conclusion is that science was a vital part of cultural discourse during these years, and that by examining the ways in which scientific ideas were disseminated and transformed by literary production, we can understand more clearly the aesthetic, social and—as a consequence of these—the ideological complexion of the era in question. 1 To Mark, who believed i Table of Contents Introduction …............................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................... ix Chapter One: “Spanish Science from the Enlightenment to the Civil War”…………………… 1 Chapter Two: “The Revista de Occidente, the New Physics and Spain’s Edad de Plata”……. 26 Chapter Three: “Zones of Contact—Science as Culture in La Gaceta Literaria”…………….. 57 Chapter Four: “Literature as Investigation and Discovery—The Spanish Vanguard and the Scientific Paradigm”…………………………………………………………………………… 97 Chapter Five: “Maleficent Modernity: Critiques of Science by the Vanguardia”……………. 141 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………. 185 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….. 191 ii Introduction: Science and Literature in a Changing Universe—Two Cultures in a Shared Space In 1941, Gerardo Diego, one of the preeminent poets of the Spanish vanguardia, published a collection of poetry titled Alondra de verdad, a work comprised of forty-two poems written between 1926 and 1936, years that witnessed the zenith of the vanguardista movement as well as its decline and decadence (Gallego Morell 76). Diego, classified frequently during the early 1920s as a disciple of Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s creacionismo, and later, much to his own chagrin, as un poeta fascista by Ernesto Giménez Caballero,1 showed an enormous flexibility in his work. He had an equal passion for form and experimentation, often willing to extend the boundaries of poetics, and was one of the major promoters of the vanguardia who contributed to its solidification through the publication in 1932 of his Poesía española: antología (1915 – 1931).2 Of this flexibility, which some perceived as inconsistency, the poet wrote in the prologue to the Primera antología de sus versos (1918 – 1941), that he was not responsible for the fact that me atraigan simultáneamente el campo y la ciudad, la tradición y el futuro; de que me encante el arte nuevo y me extasíe el antiguo… Todas estas inquietudes se reducen en mí a dos únicas intenciones. La de una poesía relativa, esto es, directamente apoyada en la realidad, y la de una poesía absoluta o de tendencia a lo absoluto, esto es, apoyada en sí misma, autónoma frente al universo real del que sólo en segundo grado procede… (Diego "Prólogo" 15-16)3 In Alondra de verdad, there exists a stunning instance of this duality in Diego’s poetry— the poem “Eclipse parcial de sol (playa al amanecer)” and its immediate successor, “Variante del eclipse”. While both poems are sonnets, adhering to the strictures of form, they are prime examples of the way that Gerardo Diego, poeta vanguardista, managed to embrace a form that could simultaneously conform to and challenge the traditional paradigms of poetry. Mostly, however, these two poems address the issue of the changing conceptions of the universe in the early 20th century, ones that invaded the cultural matrix—a term that will be fully explained in Chapter Four, used to describe a field model for cultural history—and permanently altered the manner in which scientists conducted their research. The image of the eclipse is significant in that it was via a total eclipse of the sun that Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity. Both sonnets contain several verses that appear to reference the new significance of the eclipse. In the first version, the final stanzas, we have the following: Qué lejanías, cuántas libertades, qué ilimitadas elasticidades la débil luz naranja ahondarme quiso 1 See Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ""Gerardo Diego, poeta fascista"," Visitas literarias de España (1925-1928), ed. Nigel Dennis (Madrid: Pre-Textos, 1995). 2 See Gerardo Diego, Poesía española, antología, 1915-1931: Unamuno. M. Machado. A. Machado [y otros] (Madrid: Editorial Signo, 1932). 3 Cited in J. Bernardo Pérez, Fases de la poesía creacionista de Gerardo Diego, eds. Alva V. Ebersole and Vicente Soler (Valencia: Albatros Ediciones Hispanófila, 1989) 24. iii para el verde emigrar de mi mirada. Nunca vi tan distante el paraíso, perdida en el confín la última grada. (“Eclipse parcial de sol (Playa al amanecer)” vv. 9 – 14) In the second poem, a significant variation after the first two verses: Qué lejanías, cuántas libertades, qué ilimitadas elasticidades para el verde emigrar de mi mirada. Nunca vi tan sin fin el firmamento como a la luz de aquella madrugada, luna en el sol, eclipse a barlovento. (“Variante del eclipse” vv. 9 – 14) In the poems, there is a distinction made between the universe of “lejanías”, “libertades” and “elasticidades”—all words that suggest the new shaping of space by relativity, a theory that astounded physicists and the educated public alike with knowledge of the great distances of the cosmos, as well as of the way that light and space bend when they encounter matter—and traditional concepts of “firmamento” or “paraíso”, which conjure up antiquated, baroque notions of a pre-Copernican universe, or the Christian belief in heaven. In Gerardo Diego’s “Eclipse,” we therefore witness a universe in transition—and a poetics in transition as well. What sonnet of the Golden Age of Spanish literature would include words such as “isoscélica” to describe the unfurled sail of a ship? This was a new poetry of precision that often appeared to reflect a similar precision in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, and physics as scientists struggled to measure the seemingly infinite and the infinitesimal quantities of the known universe. Science is often construed as a sterile pursuit,4 in the sense that it lacks moral value, is by nature agnostic if not atheistic, and has the reputation for being (at least with regard to the so- called “hard sciences”) “inhuman”—a cold world of facts amid the lively chaos of existence. In contrast, literary culture, at its most basic, is meant to be a reflection of our human nature, that which is unquantifiable and intuitive rather than empirical. “Human nature,” in the view of most humanists, is not the sum of our organs, the chemistry of our blood—rather it is that ineffable essence that we, as creative beings, struggle to express through, in large part, the arts. While science can indubitably tell us, for example, that we have an illness and are dying, it is the responsibility of the arts and philosophy to interpret and communicate that dying from our individual experience of it, opening it to a wider public understanding that will, in turn, provide an exegesis for that interpretation. Science gives us facts; literature gives us a context for those facts. The two disciplines appear to be at loggerheads, as they have been for hundreds of years, with each successive generation taking up the dichotomy and shaping it according to the times in which they find themselves. The “Two Cultures” debate is one that, though it may shift in scope and face mighty challenges, refuses to disappear entirely. 4 Or, in the words of one of Thomas Kuhn’s critics, Brian Maricle, “dry and mundane.” See Brian Maricle, Thomas Kuhn: In the Light of Reason (S.I.: The Author, 2008) 102.