Zaragoza (Episodios nacionales. Serie primera nº 6) (Spanish Edition)

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La batalla de Arapiles Se cierra la primera serie episodios nacionales de forma totalmente satisfactoria. La calidad literaria por momentos brota con la intensidad de las mejores obras galdosianas.

Un episodio repleto de aventuras y muy bien logrado que cierra la serie con una muy buena nota. David rated it it was amazing Dec 28, Noelia rated it really liked it Nov 21, Jorge lahey rated it really liked it Nov 17, Josu rated it liked it Feb 20, Vicente Mulero Carbonell rated it really liked it Sep 02, Pedro rated it really liked it Sep 16, Ale rated it it was amazing Dec 30, Rafael Cantero rated it it was amazing Dec 16, Ignacio rated it liked it Feb 22, Aitor Cotelo Mouriz rated it it was amazing Oct 30, Javier Gonzalez Bernal rated it it was amazing Jan 03, Alejandro rated it it was amazing Jan 23, Sebastian rated it liked it Jan 13, Catalina rated it really liked it Jan 08, Alex rated it really liked it Aug 04, Judith rated it liked it Jan 01, M rated it really liked it Apr 28, Ignacio rated it it was amazing Nov 23, Gladys Menendez rated it it was amazing Jan 13, Francisco Javier rated it it was amazing Sep 24, Juancar rated it really liked it Apr 01, Fede rated it it was amazing Jul 20, Noelia rated it really liked it Dec 02, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Some authorities consider him second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist.

He was the leading literary figure in 19th century Spain. As recently as , few of his works were available translated to English, although he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world.

History and fiction would thus appear to walk harmoniously hand in hand. The ease with which the routine violence of empire and war can turn into unexamined givens, along with the particular generic framing of these novels, appears to have contributed to a relative downplaying these issues.

I hope to explore these issues primarily by focusing on sovereignty, which as it happens, is a thematic concern that spans the first series of Episodios: Sovereignty is in this sense a subject that binds the imperial, the national and the individual in these Episodios , and my intention in what follows is to make clearer some of the ideological valences of the way the concept is configured in each of these domains.

The first proposition is that imperial sovereignty—understood as the exercise of ultimate authority over extranational polities and peoples— is other ; it is almost without exception marked as geographically or temporally elsewhere or foreign, not something pertaining to the Spain of the early s.

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To put it more simply, in the first series of Episodios the exercise of imperial power is consistently represented as something in which other nations engage. In subsequent novels, as the narrative moves into the Napoleonic occupation proper, the logic whereby imperialism is figured as exterior to the idea of the nation remains curiously intact, despite the physical presence of Napoleonic forces on the Iberian peninsula.

Steeped in patriotic sentiment, it is a list that as many have noted offers a rudimentary sketch of the Episodios to come: Muchas cosas voy a contar. This logic is particularly on display in siege novels such as Zaragoza and Gerona , where the conceptual opposition between empire and nation is spatialized: At the height of the siege of Zaragoza, for example, the narrator evokes the city in terms of a quasi-eternal, disembodied force that in effect stands in for the spirit of the resistant nation.

The city of Zaragoza comes to incarnate a national essence forged in anti-imperial struggle:. Zaragoza no se rinde. Again, the implicit logic is clear: French forces are imperial while Spanish resistance is merely national; imperial is literally made synonymous with foreign, non-Spanish. The correlate to this conceptual structure leads to a second basic proposition running through the first series, which is that Spanish sovereignty is not only not-imperial but is in fact constitutively anti-imperial.

In the first series of Episodios the nation in effect comes into being through anti-imperial struggle.

Episodios Nacionales: Primera Serie

Opposition to empire is what makes the nation congeal as such. In El 19 de marzo y el 2 de mayo , for example , Gabriel describes the crowd amassing for what would become the famous May 2 nd uprising as follows:. As a representation of national community, the passage is extraordinarily rich in detailing many of the tell-tale features of nineteenth-century nationalism as a metaphysical, quasi-spiritual phenomenon, conveyed here by the basic acoustic metaphor of a calling that has no identifiable form or source and that is nevertheless simultaneously both intimate and colossally unanimous.

The nation constitutes itself as a spirit that is dialectically linked to imperial power by way of opposition. The bell that rings when hearts are ready to beat in accord with the hymn of the nation is in this regard an alarm bell warning that imperial subjugation threatens. The Napoleonic Wars everywhere evoked a wave of national feeling, of national resistance to Napoleonic conquests, an experience of enthusiasm for national independence.

Nowhere is this mutual implication of empire and nation clearer than in one of the more celebrated closing passages from Zaragoza , where the very essence of the nation is posited in terms of resistance to imperial power.

As the narrative of the siege comes to an end, Gabriel recalls the Napoleonic years as follows:. Empires, it would seem, belong to the winds of history, while the nations they buffet take on a quasi-eternal permanence. In consonance with nineteenth-century national imaginings more generally, the nation is outside of history or at the least impervious to it.

And this despite the ultimate capitulation of the city of Zaragoza to Napoleonic forces in this novel. More subtly, however, the passage also suggests that national sovereignty is embodied in violent struggle itself, as if to say that there is nothing more quintessentially Spanish than armed resistance to empire. At the same time, the atavistic temper of this template for the nation is not difficult to discern. In the guerrillas is the Spain that has always been, the Spain of primitive times, the Spain that has eternally defined itself in struggle against empire: It is no coincidence that these personages figure prominently across the first series, and were we to look into their eyes we would undoubtedly see the same thing we would find in the faces of the rebelling masses: Indeed, if one of the basic effects of historical fiction is to underscore and exploit the proximities between narrative fiction and historical narrative, it is partly in order to explore the way in which these two narrative modes and their representative strands reciprocally engage and illuminate one another.

An early encounter between the two characters in La corte de Carlos IV conveys the power-relations that govern their initial interactions:. The scene in which the marriage is arranged is tellingly simple, divested of the markers of social distinctions, and inclusively colloquial.

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Just as important as the transformation itself, however, is the primary mechanism of this metamorphosis over the course of the ten novels, and to put it succinctly, that mechanism is war. The phenomenon registers the social mobility that soldiering in fact afforded men of all stripes throughout the nineteenth-century, to be sure, but it also insinuates a third proposition that I believe subtends the first series.

If the guerrillas are a template for the nation collectively, it follows that the soldier-guerrillero becomes the template for the new citizen. The closing image of Gabriel on the battlefield in La batalla de los Arapiles is as follows:. Yo vi aquel glorioso signo de guerra a una distancia como de cinco varas. To put it in symbolic terms, after the eagle is vanquished, middle class domesticity is promptly ushered in. Indeed, the links between anti-imperial soldier and bourgeois pater familias have been structurally embedded in the series all along, for these two personae are in effect the two faces of Gabriel as soldier-protagonist and Gabriel as aging bourgeois narrator.

In step with most first-person narrative, then, the process by which the character has become the narrator comes into relief toward the end of the tale. Its collective resonance is clear: With these ideological structures in view, it will be useful to turn finally to more direct consideration of the representation of war itself in the first series of Episodios nacionales.

War is the very crucible in which both the new nation and its emergent social identities are forged. Most fascinating about this proposition, however, is that it emerges from a discourse also characterized by a consistent criticism of that very violence. No Episodio transpires without the attempt to represent and tacitly condemn the consequences of orchestrated killing. Neither he nor the readers of his tale are spared the details of the suffering that is unleashed at battle:.

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Similarly, in Zaragoza , Araceili gives grisly, first-hand accounts of the cumulative effects of war, hunger and disease on the inhabitants of the city:. To ascribe a quasi-pacifist dimension to such gestures, however, misses the point that, rhetorically, such violence is ultimately narrativized as a materially and symbolically productive force. In contrast to earlier, romantic-historicist constructions of Spanish identity as essentially Christian, medieval, and premodern, the first series of Episodios delivers a narrative in which struggle against imperial oppression becomes the touchstone for the birth of modern Spain.

In this regard, the project may in fact be the most protracted Spanish literary construction of national identity in terms of the political struggle for freedom. In the basic dialectic of nation against empire, the first series in effect eclipses the history of Spanish imperialism. In the first series of Episodios Spanish imperialism is symbolically expunged from the national imaginary, which is constructed in opposition to French imperialism.

In this regard the first series suggests something that recent historical inquiries into nineteenth century Spanish nationalism can easily overlook; that is, the conceptual separation of nation and empire that was undoubtedly operating below official political discourse at the level of the everyday living experience of most Spanish citizens.

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