Generational Discourse

Intergenerational Discourse by Paul Ilie, University of Southern California The current dissatisfaction with the concept of generations is remarkable to observe, considering its widespread use, especially in poetry criticism. It’s important to understand the reason for the dissatisfaction and to see how the concept can still be useful for literary history and also for the history of ideas. Let me start with a declaration of working assumptions. Then I’ll give a brief description of where we are now in regard to the concept of generations and where we’ve come from. Later I’ll be outlining an ambitious project that can bind literature to the history of ideas, and that requires making a distinction between movements and generations. And finally I want to look at a series of statements conceivable by critics and literary historians, hypothetical statements that highlight their varieties and make precise the textual conditions that permit one variety of statement rather than another. My first premise is that literature is in some way an expression of sensibility and not just a bundle of structured signs, and that writers are like any other reader—they respond to the conventions of language according to the formative experiences of their times. Theirs is no different from our own as critics in this room. Even as we share experiences contemporaneously, we live in psychological compartments by age group because we were first shaped by expectations and formative readings received from the teachers we had and especially the teachers and readings we did not have, and finally affected by the social events we lived through rather than only read about. The fact of different birthdates seems to me pertinent to both literature and critical analysis. A corollary therefore is that the same historical moment reveals distinct critic-cohorts and writer-cohorts clustering around chronologically divergent formative experiences. My second premise is that the text has historical reference, not in the hermetic foreground whose autonomy everybody respects but in the intertextual registers that permit comparison with other texts, past or present. My third premise is

that the referent is not located in literary history alone but in human history as well. Many aspects of the history of societies are relevant to understanding literature, and I don’t see that any defense is necessary for this axiom. That relevance, when distilled by literary scholars, carries them to the field of intellectual history. 20th-century Spanish scholars have available a treasurehouse of relevant texts, from the Generation of 98 to the novelists of Miró’s generation and the novelists of the other Generation of 27, Díaz Fernández, for instance, in surrealism, in poesía impura, and then in the long Francoist period. What I propose is an organized study of the tropes, images, motifs, themes, concepts —all the relevant utterances as they endure throughout the 20th century and as they comprise, by their classification and their intertextual registers, a network of interwoven meanings or a braid of threads, strands, and filaments that inserts itself into the larger epistemé postulated by historical philosophers. I am not proposing that Foucault’s example in the handout be followed, but I will be taking his model to illustrate the problems involved in conceptualizing abstract temporal relationships by means of spatial metaphors. But first, where are we now and how far have we come? Regarding the role of generations in literary history, we have not come very far in twenty years or in fifty years. Neither among writers, nor among critics. First, among writers. Poets often speak in the name of other poets in their own generation. And they are almost casual in creating intergenerational registers in their poems. Early in the post-Civil War period, José Hierro called attention to his immediate age group in the title Quinta del 42. He polarized himself against earlier estheticism, in one case by constructing his poem around an epigraph taken from Rubén Darío. The dialogue continued in the 1970s and 80s, among sophisticated young poets. Antonio Colinas wrote “Trae más violetas, Juan Ramón, más violetas/ No dejes tu locura así, a medio camino.” Coetaneously with Colinas, Agustín Delgado wrote, “El rayo inclinado se posa en la palabra más exacta,” a verse that invoked the “nombre exacto” of Juan Ramón in a poem that turned away from him. Martínez Sarrión began one poem with the couplet “Ni arma cargada de futuro,/ ni con tal lastre de pasado,” while another of his poems is titled “Brindis a Boileau.”

And of course in their essays, the group of “Novísimos” expressed open disdain. Carnero wrote in 1986 about the regressive 1960s, dismissing Celaya’s “acto de la comunicación,” and condescending toward the “código caduco” of “envejecidos . . . procedimientos simbolizadores aprendidos en don Antonio Machado” (Provencio 188). And so on with sharp awareness that a new generation had arrived, variously denominated as the “Novísimos” by Castellet in 1970, and in 1972 as the poets of the “Resurgimiento” by Pozanco, but, in 1974 as the “postcontemporáneos” by the poets themselves in El Bardo. This self-declared generation also can claim other epithets, the most precise for periodology being the one adopted by Pedro Provencio’s anthology, titled . . . La Generación del 70. My point in citing examples is that the term "generation" will continue to be used in the Hispanic sector for at least another—do I dare?— generation, if for no other reason then because relatively young Spaniards are giving the term documentary status by using it in the literary magazines and in the anthologies. I mentioned Provencio’s anthology but as you know he published two anthologies last year, under the general title Poéticas españolas contemporáneas, which are of immense scholarly value and these periods are going to be identified individually as La generacion del 50, and La Generación del 70. Then there are the youngest poets who as yet haven’t any year attached to them, and who are nonetheless perceived as periodizing their work against predecessors by referring to their own “generación postnovísima” as distinct from the novísima Generación del 70. A novísimo poet like Luis Antonio de Villena sees his juniors as a weak "generación juvenil" between two “generaciones fuertes,” his own, naturally, and that of the year 2000. Villena claims that the postnovísimos look for their mentors not in the Novísimos but in “los abuelos, el magisterio de la Generación del 50. Shades of “los nietos del noventaiocho.” Villena’s introduction to his anthology of Postnovísimos is a fascinating example of poets as literary historians. They are participants and reliable eye-witnesses. They avoid academic textual analysis, which is refreshing, since their purpose is to furnish authoritative information of a

descriptive kind regarding style, themes, and sources of inspiration. At the same time, it must be said that Villena mixes the use of "generation" with the concept of “literary movement.” He mentions the “segundo movimiento generacional” of the Novísimos, as a historical phenomenon, but he really wishes to speak of their Decadent neomodernizmo, or of the Neobaroque verbal preciosity and the “venecianizmo” of those arising after 1970 whom he calls the “generación del lenguaje.” Villena’s goal is to make two kinds of statements at the same time, one historicizing and the other purely poetic. His need to do both is best illustrated in what he says about Blanca Andreu. Andreu is the oldest of the youngest poets and she emerged in the late '70s with her references to drugs and her pasota idioms. But Villena believes that Andreu is not quite in the classical, minimalist, or rock music trends of the "generación postnovísima" as constituted by Julio Llamazares, Miguel Mas, and Leopoldo Alas. This information is valuable for an outsider like me, but it shows only the literary characteristics of each orientation. It sorts out the characteristics of discourse by period. But the sorting out reveals the edges of several movements. It does not show the relation between their discourses: how vocabularies change or remain the same while shifting registers, how images persist under different semantic markings, how utterances enfold their literary temporality while exposing the continuous threads that endure over the generations. Examples of these shifts and markings are listed on page one of the handout. Now for the critics. We have come a bit farther than the poets academically, as I’ll mention in a few moments. But where have we come from? 22 years ago, a symposium was held at Syracuse University devoted to the Gen of 36. Juan Marichal began the summing-up: “no ha quedado muy claro . . . si existe la ‘gen. del 36 ... pero, además tampoco ha quedado muy claro, si el concepto mismo de ‘generación’ es válido,” valid that is as a working concept for Literary History. Then José Ferrater Mora said that “un problema insoluble” was|the existence of generations in the history of literature and more generally in the history of culture: “lo mejor sería prescindir del problema.” On the other hand, said Ferrater, it is also true that people do speak of a generation and persuade others, so that “me parece

que no hay dudas de que hay algo así como una generación literaria,” and that it should be taken “. . . como uno de esos conceptos que . . . no tienen perfil definido . . . y se van extendiendo y mezclando con otros conceptos . . .” (Symposium 22(1968): 176-8). Then Manuel Durán suggested accepting the concept provisionally in order to see whether it was useful: he did find it useful for the Gen of 27, and certainly the Gen of 98 had been a construct that had remained intact. Durán also made a remark too self-evident to be appreciated. He cautioned that history does not develop in an orderly way and that generations cannot be expected to arise symmetrically or follow neatly-jointed into one another. This common-sense observation is not as simple as it sounds. The idea that history might be jointed is a linear metaphor, a metaphor of links in a serialized chain. It specifies detachable constituents more analytically than Ortega’s rhythmical metaphor of cumulative and eliminatory generations. The suggestion that history is jointed or not well-jointed introduces a third dimension. It invites a model of imbrication or of braiding, like threads that crossweave and intertwine. The idea is compatible with Julián Marías’s scheme of five generations coexisting at any given moment and identifiable by overlapping themes and styles or certain interfacing experiences and rhetorical gestures. The issue is really very simple, to distinguish between generations and movements, but recognize their crossings and couplings along the linear axis of chronology and the spiral axis of textual utterance. Claudio Guillén in his chapter “Second Thoughts On Literary Periods” writes: “A literary work ... is a response to experience, and it cannot be grasped . . . in social or historical terms, without reference to that experience. It is also a construction ... of forms transcending, or emerging from, the flow of time which had surrounded the response. This is the difficult, self-denying historicity with which the literary scholar has to deal” (425). This point seems not to have been understood by my elders at the Syracuse symposium, nor does the issue seem to exist for young Spanish poets. I said that we‘ve travelled a certain distance. We know that reading presupposes knowledge of conventions.

Consequently a text always displays the intertext with previous texts. An implicit question about intertextuality is beginning to be asked among Spanish literary historians. How does a text endure during its lifetime and where does it exist after its context becomes a past event? Current scholarship emphasizes the contemporaneous literary and sociohistorical context. Inman Fox shows in his valuable latest book Ideología y política, that when Galdós’s play Elec-tra is produced in 1901, there is instantaneous but complex approval by the members of the Generation of 98. Inman reproduces for the first time Baroja’s review of Elec-tra, titled “Galdós vidente.” Baroja rehabilitates Galdós’s image of a cold botanist who classifies with indifference. He converts Galdós into a fiery prophet, and Inman shifts laterally to study the ambivalent response to Elec-tra in Maeztu and the coetaneous Azorín. But the context is contemporaneous, what Baroja portrays as “una ansia inconcreta”: “Hay en la generación actual, entre nosotros . . . un ideal sin forma, . . . que solicita nuestra voluntad” (79), and that ideal is embodied by the till now old and cold Galdós. Or is it embodied by the Generation of 68? Inman Fox implies the kind of literary history that takes into account the problem of a shared generational goal, and a common vocabulary nuanced by different generational markings and registers. The approach is synchronic, but in two dimensions, contemporaneous and coetaneous. || The crossweave or intertwine has yet another strand, and this is implied by an observation made by Peter Bly in a forthcoming study of Galdós’s El caballero encantado, published in 1909, only eight years after Baroja’s review. Peter asks why it is that studies of Galdós and the Generation of 98 are so frequent while so little attention is given to his relation with his own Generation of 68. Peter does not himself move retrospectively, but the question is posed. There is further complication in what Roberta Johnson calls the uneasy coexistence of younger and older writers. Not only does she cite the “personal wars” of the 98 group in one article, Ortega and Unamuno for instance, she also speaks of “dynamic generations” that redefine themselves while they define the others. Roberta’s approach likewise involves a contemporaneous synchrony. It implies a double-jointed imbrication or the entwining of filaments and strands in a longer

thread. She hints at the means of sorting them out in another article comparing Jarnés and Unamuno, where the method of homologous tropes is applied to the concept of reason, showing that Descartes is taken by both novelists as a metaphor for harmful rationalism, though on different grounds. All of these studies illustrate the kind of literary history whose elements are synchronic in two dimensions, contemporaneous and coetaneous. Temporal relationships of this kind are given a spatial model by historical philosophers like Foucault, as can be seen in the handout on page 2. But there are too many problems in this model, and I find it simpler to use the model of the double helix and make it triple. An utterance by a single author can be called a filament. Its intertext with the coetaneous utterance of a kindred writer is a strand. It becomes a thread when joined by the intertext of a different generational utterance. The question now arises, where did those utterances go afterward? Where were they for later generations? A diachronic frame becomes possible in the kind of study made by José Olivio Jiménez on Antonio Machado and post-Civil War writing, where Machado is absent but remembered after being forgotten by the intervening Generation of 27. A triple intertwine is visible in the thread formed by the Generations of 50, 36, and 98. My own quoted examples are listed in the handout but cáveat lector: they belong to an unpublished lecture that I’ve given on several West-Coast campuses— and can repeat, if invited. The point now concerns the categories of statements about those quotations. Lterary historians seldom distinguish precisely the categories of critical statements about textual utterances and their relationships. Our statements fall into different descriptive and interpretive categories. I’ll just recite the major types of critical statements involving intertextual registers and intergenerational exchange. In one large category are statements regarding the conditions between text and text, conditions permitting hermeneutic comparisons of language, structure, and concept. In this category, one class of statement considers the entwining of the utterance of one text and a second coetaneous text. Examples of homologous utterrances inscribed in the same register are listed in the handout under “coetaneous

filaments.” Another class of statements considers the filament of one generation entwined with the filament of a contemporaneous generation. Examples are listed under “contemporaneous strand,” and their intergenerational nature is obvious. A third class of statements considers several strands as they entwine historically. Because such a statement relates utterances in time, I call it a first-degree inflection. A fourth class of statements considers a fully intergenerational thread of utterances. Because this class considers absent generations as well as contemporaneous ones, I call it a second-degree inflection. I mentioned a second large category , and it consists of statements that use texts to illustrate nonhermeneutic literary matters. These involve biographical relations between author and author, as when Unamuno, after the poet Guillén’s visit in 1929, composes his first décima, or in the young García Lorca’s editorial relations with Juan Ramón. In the same category are statements about an author vis-à-vis his or her coetaneous generation, as in Azorín writing about the Generation of 98. A third type refers to an author and a text, as in reception/influence studies like Howard Young’s elegant book on Juan Ramón’s readings of Blake, Shelley, and Yeats. A fourth and last type refers to an entire generation’s reception of an author, as in the Generation of 98 with Galdós, the Generation of 27 with Juan Ramón, the Generation of 36 with Miguel Hernández, the Generation of 50 with Machado, and the Generation of 70 with Brines. These varieties of statements can all be schematized hierarchically, so that the bottom plane displays hermeneutically a textual utterance in its autonomous function; the next level displays it in its referential function with respect to another text (how each varies as a text, structurally or intellectually); the next level display the utterance in its referential function with respect to the historical world. The levels still higher deal with collective intertextuality: how the utterance engages its own generation as a coetaneous unit, and how it engages another generation either past or contemporaneous. Now I’ll summarize in a final paragraph. There is a need for terms like the Generation of 36 or 50, and also for epithets that unwittingly challenge the concept of generations, as

when the Generation of 50 is called “the Rodríguez-Brines generation” by Andy Debicki but also called the “promoción Brines-Rodríguez y grupo de Barcelona,” by Carnero. These modifications raise important questions about filiation and privilege— why not the “Valente-González generation”, or the “Cabañero-Goytisolo generation”?—questions that require identifying those characteristics of a movement in single-author filaments that join to form a generation. I have not dealt this morning with the structure of movements, only generations. To say “generation” is to designate a synchronic relationship among kindred texts as they refer historically to writers of the same approximate age and as they refer literarally and intellectually to one other. The point however is that the same historical period reveals distinct writer-cohorts clustering around chronologically divergent formative experiences. Thus a diachrony of discourses can exist within a historical synchrony. Here, in the intergenerational discourse, textual utterances delimit a cohort both as a literary movement and as an intellectual posture. The concept of “intergenerational discourse” designates the way that a text can signify something besides what it signifies for itself, how a text can not only be read in its own autonomous codes but also how it may be interpreted beyond its textuality. Intergenerational discourse is a species of filiated textuality. Because its utterances join the threads extend temporally through homologous contemporaneous texts, or texts in other time frames bind the text to it satisfies the conditions of literary and intellectual history.