Against the Damnatio Memoriae of Regional Identities: José María Sbarbi's Critique of the Homogenization of National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

In 1886, José María Sbarbi published his one-time novel Doña Lucía in which he mocked the vast inadequacies of the Real Academia's twelfth edition of the Diccionario oficial. Within the greater context of Sbarbi's critical writings on national language, this analysis examines the tension present in the novel that arises between official language controlled artificially by the nation-state and the cultural production of inherited and spontaneous language practiced by the people. The former advocated for a homogenized and exclusionary official language centered on Castilian, while the latter was a heterogeneous practice that embraced the essential diversity of the nation. Sbarbi's condemnation of a homogenized national language that excludes peripheral identities and practices takes shape as a form of cultural aphasia among the people who he portrays in his novel through the mental and physical deterioration of the eponymous character.

Keywords:

• cultural aphasia
• Diccionario official
• identity
• language
• memory
• nationalism
• José María Sbarbi
• Spain

Notes

¹In Bergson's account of aphasia, memory functions are blocked preventing individuals from interpreting and thus adapting to their social and cultural environment. As perception is greeted by recalled images that bring about recognition, it prepares an individual to take an action; in the case of language, it assists in choosing socially appropriate contexts and lexical and conceptual vocabularies to interact in a given environment. When the connective links between perception, recognition, and action are impaired, individuals experience varying levels of disorientation. This is not exclusively ascribed to lesions or damage to certain areas of the brain, but also to psychological impairment. In more recent work addressing nationalism and postcolonialism, Ann Laura Stoler defined aphasia as a blockage of cultural knowledge among the disenfranchised: “In aphasia, an occlusion of knowledge is the issue. It is not a matter of ignorance or absence. Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things. Aphasia in its many forms describes a difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical vocabularies and, most important, a difficulty comprehending what is spoken” (125).

²In his recent work, Javier Ignacio López described the degenerating social climate in regard to the religious question. Rather than frame the Restoration within a redemptive social and political discourse, he demonstrated that the ideological conflict was in fact worsened after the failed revolution.

³Álvarez Junco noted that Napoleon's invasion, a historical event par excellence for creating a narrative to unify national identity, was renamed Guerra de Independencia some 20 years after the invasion to infuse historical-cultural memory with this teleological design.

⁴“Con el título de Doña Lucía se ha publicado una originalísima novela, cuyo objeto es satirizar los errores del Diccionario de la Academia Española. Desde luego se advierte en la obra un supremo conocimiento del idioma y una fina gracia, que es el principal encanto de Doña Lucía. El autor de la obra se encubre bajo un anónimo muy transparente para la gente de Letras, entre la que se atribuye esta punzante sátira al Sr. D. José María Sbarbi.” El Imparcial Julio 5, 1886.

⁵This position reflects more current studies in postcolonialism. Homi Bhabba in The Location of Culture and Leela Ghandi in Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction posited that official nationalism is a process of silencing heterogeneous voices that could potentially expose the artificiality of the myth of the nation.

⁶Oftentimes throughout the novel, the unsanctioned language was designated as blasphemy or heretical. This reflects how official nationalism superimposed itself on the notions of sacred religion as it became the referential structure of identity during the nineteenth century in Spain.

⁷All vocabulary and phrases from the novel in italics are in the original. Sbarbi created a visual display of the coexistence between authorized and unauthorized language to emphasize the rich tapestry of language usage that extends beyond the limits of the sanctioned pages of the dictionary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Sierra

Sarah Sierra is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Tech. She works on Spain's cultural discourse in the construction of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.