CONTEMPORARY

ALICIAN
CULTURAL STUDIES
BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL
2011 by The Modem Language Association ofAmerica
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LlBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLlCATION DATA
Contemporary GaHcian cultural studies : between the local and the global / edited by
Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa.
p. em. - (World Hteratures reimagined, ISSN 1553-6181 ; 3)
Indudes bibliographical references and indexo
ISBN 978-1-60329-087-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-60329-088-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Galician literature-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Literature and
society-Spain-Galida (Region) 3. Galicia (Spain)-Intellectuallife-20th century.
I. Hooper, Kirsty. 11. Puga Moruxa, Manuel.
PQ9458.C68 2011
869.09'9461-dc22 2010045089
World Literatures Reimagined 3
ISSN 1553-6181
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Lobato, from his series Camino de Santiago. Used with permission of the photographer
Published by The Modem Language Association ofAmerica
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1he Postmodern Avant-Gardes in
'Post-1975 Galician Literature:
ROll1pente, Antn Reixa,
and Suso de Toro
Burghard Baltrusch
Aviso: un fantasma recorre Galicia
-Rompente, Slabario da turbina.
Warning: A ghost is haunting Galicia
n 1975, the first recital of the Grupo de Resistencia Potica ("Poetic Re
sistance Group") took place; the group would be active until 1983 under
the name Rompente, Grupo de Comunicacin Potica CPoetic Commu
nication Group"). 1he project's collaborators were the instigators of what
I call postmodern vangardismo in Galicia.
1
1hree decades have passed since
then, with many great achievements made in the fields of fine art, music,
performance, and literature. 'lhe means of creating and expressing identity
that emerged during these years often contrast strongly with those we might
superficially characterize as traditionalist, folkloric, or lyrical, which have
monopolized the Galician literary canon.
largue here that the creators of this vangardista movement introduced
Galicia into Western postmodernity2 and that they initiated an unprece
dented diversification of artistic forms in the Galician cultural field during
the last quarter of the twentieth century. In reference to the nineteenth
century Rexurdimento and the first Galician Statute ofAutonomy in 1936,
I propose to speak in cultural terms ofa second Rexurdimento, whose emer
gence coincides with the second Galician Statute ofAutonomy in 1981. 1he
poetic boom that has occurred i n ~ the 1990s also brought new vangardista
tendencies, only recent1y classified (H. Gonzlez, Elas). 'lhe proliferation of
experimental and vangardista production since 1975 suggests, on the one
hand, that there were strong systemic influences from other cultural fields.
On the other hand, it demonstrates to us the existence of a pronounced
._CJJ
1
238 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
political desire for progress and innovation in the Galician cultural poly
system.This Galicianizing impulse, predominantly nationalist in character,
sought to overcome the impediments of diglossia, the inferiority complex
created by Francoism, and a negative collective memory based on a history
of poverty and emigration. Although a large proportion of these vangardista
works are still not included in the literary and artistic canon and although
they are very heterogeneous in character, they have had important and di
verse repercussions. Some creative artists achieved considerable success; oth
ers remained relatively unknown or were temporarily silenced. The mecha
nisms of reception, too, and their understanding. of aesthetics (determined
i
by both poltical and economic interests) decided who would enjoy what
1
kind of dissemination.
The vangardista works use traditional forms alongside generic trans
j
gressions, multimedia forms, theoretical reflection, and performance. Taking
into account the great diversity of styles, genres, and themes that character
ized vangardista creative artists, academic readers and critics are confronted
with a series of fundamental challenges. How should we describe and define
the notion of avant-garde--or, in its Galician context, vangardismo-in the
Galician cultural field in relation to the established concepts of modernism,
postmodernism, and translation?3 How should we evaluate the principal
vangardista lines of thought and practice in Galicia since 1975 from the
perspective of a transcultural dynamic between the symbolic composites of
local and European and Western, and global and intercultural,
which characterize our present situation? Why to the inclusion of
antisystem texts in the literary canon? I can only offer partial responses here,
starting with the hypothesis that a large part of the twentieth-century Gali
cian cultural polysystem, in this particular case its literature and aesthetic
thought, need to be analyzed in terms of postcolonialism, postmodernism,
and cultural translation. In this context, it is essential to relocate the old
questions: What do we mean by vangardismo in Galicia? What function did
it have in twentieth-century Galician culture?
As a concept, avant -garde is naturally vague and heterogeneous; the
concept of modernism, in its anglophone or lusophone uses, is equally.
problematic, since it is nor generally used in Galician literature and criti
cismo For this reason, I have chosen to define avant-garde as rupture and
provocation, which emerges periodically in the history of particular cultures
with contextual specificities like a constant alternation of modernism and
postmodernism (Lyotard). Almost all the postmodern vangardismos that can
Burghard Baltrusch 239
be seen in post-Franco Galicia engage in a critical revision of history and
its metanarratives, driven by the clear desire to fuse more or less rupturist
ethical and aesthetic motivations. 1hese aesthetic-political impulses relegate
the formal characteristics of postmodernism-such as hybridity, carnival,
self-reBexivity, and irony--to the background.
1he postmodern avant-garde in the widest senses consists of alI at
tempts to think of and represent Galician present reality beyond current
stereotypical hegemonic discourses and discourses of power: for exampIe,
forms of literary representation, the institutionalized canon, traditional
ist nationalism, purely Iyrical styIes, conventional literary bases, mythical
symbolism, the patriarchy, and sometimes cuIturalism itself. In a narrower
sense, the literary vangarda would be primarily what is formally most novel,
the most attenti,on-grabbing, what offers most resistance to the institution
alized cuIture, which it attempts to subvert or replace. 1he texts of this
vangarda are often unintelligible or untranslatable (whether intraculturally
or interculturally), a fact that contributes to the fascination it evokes, and
even more so when it touches on what is prohibited or taboo. 1his van
gardismo, for ethico-political reasons, strongly supports and contributes to
the construction of an autonomous Galician art through radical methods.
In Galicia, this understanding of vangarda assumes a fundamental impor
tance, when we take into account the relative weakness, the isolation, and
the lack of inBuence of experimental tendencies in the literary field before
1975, something that has hindered linguistic and cultural normalization in
Galicia. Mer 1975, it became necessary to turn to the postmodern perspec
tive to describe, for example, the ironic way in which different types of
performance related to Galician nationalism and to the language, and how
the Galician literary field has been recovering modernist aspects and incor
porating postmodern values at the same time.
Another important component of the concept of vangardismo is the
aesthetic questiono Since 1975, the criteria for understanding beauty and
the sublime in the Galician literary system have become more Bexible. 1he
canonizing inBuence of paratexts (Genette) isalso beginning slowly to be
taken into account, together with the introduction ofideological values into
the aesthetic-ethical processo 1his is not the place for an exhaustive discus
sion of the semiotic complexity ofbeauty, the sublime, and the transIational
contexts of their relation with the vangardas. But at least from the earliest
time until the post-1975 period, it. is evident that innovative aesthetics in
the Galician cultural field has always been dependent on the immediate
240 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
political dep:1ands of nationalist ideology, which traditionally used popular
or ethnic symbols and values.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant
gardes were emerging and expanding, Galicia was in a peculiar situation.
4
1he
natural reaction to being a historical nation subordinated to a centralizing
state was to exalt Galician language and culture. Detailed studies were made
of the authors of the Rexurdimento, and of Galician folklore and ethnogra
phy, creating publications that echoed these discoveries and creating assem
blies, later to become poltical parties, which would be capable of defending
and reevaluating the autochthonous in comparison with the foreign. 1hus,
the objective ofthe Xeracin Ns ("Us Generation") in the 1920s-ofDaniel
Castelao, Vicente Risco, and Ramn Otero Pedrayo-was to restore dignity
to a people that had lost it, demonstrating that the Galician language was as
valid as Castilian for scientific, philosophical, religious, or literary discourse.
1his is the onlyway to understand the specific nature ofthe vangarda pactada
(X. Pena 192; "avant-garde pact") in this period, which did not manage to
break with the past, because that action would have left the nationalist argu
ments without abasis. 1he timid formal renewal of already explored genres
and themes comes to be known as hilozosmo and neotrobadorismo.
5
But a
real avant-garde is also born in this context, embodied in the single figure of
Manuel Antonio (1900-30). In collaboration with the painter lvaro Ce
breiro and withAntn Vilar Ponte, he wrote the manifesto "jMis al!" (1922;
"Further Still!"), followed by his only collection of poetry published during
his lifetime, De catro a catro (1928; "From Four O'Clock till Four O'Clock") .
. 1he collection is characterized by a hitherto unknown vision of the sea from
the sea itself, constructed with the powerful force of surrealist and cubist
images. His premature death is also the death ofthe early-twentieth-century
Galician avant-garde; its traces remain, faintly, only in lvaro Cunqueiro's
early poetry and some letters and a small number ofpoems by Vicente Risco.
Rompente
1he civil war strangled avant-garde creative possibilities, and during the sub
sequent dictatorship the Galician language itself was silenced (literary work
carried out in exile deserves to be considered separately). When publica
tions in Galician begin again, they are traditional in style, and only with the
death of Franco in 1975 do innovative works begin to reappear, with poetry
such as Mesteres, by Arcadio Lpez Casanova (1976; "Professions"); Alfonso
Burghard Baltrusch 243
cis transition from a rural to urban-or popular to elite-cultural identity.
The vangardista identification of life and art now erupted as a vindieation of
modernity in Galician culture. Modernity was
acepta-Ia complexidade da realidade; e non a renunciar que a actividade crea
dora se plantee a interpretacin desa mesma realidade, na que, endefinitiva,
literatura e vida loitan por se-la mesma cousa.
(Reixa, "eon Edoardo Sanguinetti")
accepting the complexity of reality, and not rejecting it, so that creative acdv
ity focuses on interpreting the very reality where, ultimately, literature and life
struggle to become the same thing.
Rompente portrayed the gradual transition to postmodernity of Galician
society, the massification and democratization of technologieal and stylistie
media-.as is evident, for example, in the hybrid formats and materials and
in the artistie design of the series of books published by the Three Sad Ti
gers.
8
Along with the strong presence of irony and parody, there is a critieal
revisitation and a postmodern fusion of tragedy and comedy. The result is
unha poesa cmica, non para facer rir senn para crear unha situacin de
risa tola que enlace copunto climtico do trxico, coma a risa esquizoide que
senda Kafka mentres escriba O Proceso.
a comic poetry, not to provoke laughter, but to create a situation of crazy
laughter that connects with the climax of the tragedy, like the schizophrenic
laughter Kafka felt as he was writing 1he Tria!.
In terms of style, the confluence of genres, word games, and chaotie collages
is the rule; in ideologieal terms, the dialectieal hierarchies between high and
low, colloquial and erudite, popular and bourgeois are abolished.
Rompente's warning in Silabario da turbina CABe of the Turbine"),
published in 1978, that a ghost is haunting Galida, beyond expressing their
disagreement with some of the politieal positions of nationalism and the left,
is also a call to an artistic revolution that will overcome the traditional concepts
of literature and art. In this sense, Rompente pose an objection to identity, a
characteristie aspect of modern art (Adorno), and they add with typieal post
modern irony a paradoxieal twist that helps avoid simple propaganda: commu
nieate with the masses (working classes) but by means of abstract techniques
that tend to negate that very communieation, techniques that furthermore cre
ate dissonances that irritate the masses. Echoing the project ofBertolt Brecht's
244 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
epic theater, they make extensive use of defamiliarization to avoid the simple
and deceptive identif1.cation of the public with the artistic product. 1hey try
to ensure that Galician cultural and national identty no longer dings to an
Aristotelian aesthetic or a simple fraternization between artist and publico
Rompente fed off models from other cultural contexts, such as the
Catalan Jon Salvat-Papasseit, the Englishman Christopher Logue, the T urk
Nzlm Hikmet, and the Italians and Pier Paolo Pasolini. 1hey
also enriched their work with ideas from a fluctuating but omnipresent
group of collaborators: writers like Farruco Sesto Novs, artists like Menchu
Lamas and Antn Patino, musicians like Julin Hernndez and Enrique
Macas, and dramatists like the Artello group. Many of the acts carried out
by Rompente took on the characteristics of a happening, as Hernndez
1
remembers:
i

A travs de el [E. Macas] y con Juventudes Musicales de teln de fondo,
1
nos conocimos todos. . . . Se trataba de montar folln. La poesa de Rom j
pente pretenda librarse del fantasma de Rosala de Castro, entrar en la mod
ernidad por fin y que Galicia enterrase para siempre el Cardenal Gelmrez. 1
Los recitales de Rompente eran algo nunca visto por all y poco visto por
l
otros sitios. Montbamos cintas de magnetfono con collages musicales, que
1
sonaban mientras los tres poetas recitadores iban soltando textos a cada cual
I
ms incendiario, los escenarios los pintaba Antn Patino y Menchu Lamas, se
proyectaban diapositivas y pelculas de super-8 .... Los espectculos eran un I
xito de pblico. Lstima: no tenamos (no exista) vdeo in ilo tempore.
J
(Turrn and Babas 22; qtd. in Valverde, O grupo Rompente 60)
I
1hrough [Macas] and with Juventudes Musicales ["Musical Youth"] in the
background, we alI got to know one another.... Ir was all about kicking up
a fuss. Rompente's poetry was trying to free itself from the ghost of Rosala
de Castro, to enter modernity at last, and to makeGalicia bury Cardinal
Gelmrez once and for alI. Rompente's recitals were something never seen be
fore in Galicia, and rarely seen anywhere else either. We played tapes with mu
sical collages while the three poets recited ever more incendiary texts, Antn
Patino and Menchu Lamas painted the scenery, slides and super-8 films were
projected.... 1he shows werea public success. Shame we didn't have (there
wasn't) such a thing as vdeo back then.
1he painter Patino, talking about Heiner Mller's Hamlet-maschine,
gives a synthetic def1.nition perfectly applicable to Rompente's ttajectory:
rlU'r,orlJ7'r/J Baltrusch 245
Escrita da escena nun teatro total, acontecemento que taladra os nosos senti
dos e se instala na nosa memoria. Espectculo en progreso a partir dunha idea
sinttica (expansiva). (57)
Stage writing in a total theater, an event mat drills through our senses and
remains in our memory. A spectade in progress stemming from a synthetic
(expansive) idea.
Antn Reixa
1his idea of the artistie object as a synthetie, unfinished product or work
in progress persisted after Rompente broke up in 1983, and it continued to
be applied as Galician culture experienced huge transformations toward the
end of the century. Antn Reixa, for example, had as early as 1982 begun his
career as singer for the rock group Os Resentidos, whieh lasted until1994.
1his group pioneered rock in Galician with ludieo-critical texts that devel
oped the synthetic ideas begun by Rompente (Reixa, Alivio and VZva). Reixa
became an authentic multimedia artist; in the mid-1980s, he directed and
introduced the program Galicia sitio distinto ("Galieia a Different Place"),
produced by Video-Esquimal on Televisin de Galieia (broadcast between
1990 and 1991). 1he serieswas a real nonconformist, postmodern, van
gardista jewel, in many ways ahead of its time; it gave rise to his innovative
videopoem Ringo Rango, which includes contributions by Menchu Lamas
and Patifio. Reixa also published prose (Transporte de superficie [1991; "Sur
face Transport"]) and vangardista poetry (Historia do Rock and Roll [1992;
"History of Rock and Roll"]). He began the musical project Naein Reixa
(1992-97; "Reixa Nation");9 created the first Galieian soap opera, Mareas
vivas (1998; "High Tides"); brought out the solo poetry record Escarnio
(1999; "Derision"); and adapted Manuel Rivas's best-seUing novel O lapis
do carpinteiro ("1he Carpenter's Peneii") for einema in 2003. 1he self-titled
"ironia do resentimento" ("irony of resentment") that Reixa had cultivated
in the time of Os Resentidos continued to aspire to a total work of art (in
avant-garde and revolutionary terms) in which life and artistic creation be
come confused.
Reixa renders thematic the growing aesthetieization of our reality, in
whieh the aesthetie aura is given more value than the product itself, and he
criticizes in iyrieal form that aesthetic posturing of postmodernity whieh,
with its characteristie playfulness, distances itself from reality. He was thus
246 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
able to avoid the ghetto culture of Galician literature, which Suso de Toro
had been denouncing since the early 1990s. 1he metanarrative retranca
("irony") of his aesthetic discourse consists of the re-creation of a plural,
telemediated culture, which in turn is subject to a critique as sarcastic as it is
sophisticated.
lO
Fragmentation and the restoration ofa new function for the
literary text are an opposition that his aesthetic of production tries to syn
thesize. Reixs culture remains basically Galician, but his aesthetic of pro
duction has already become universalized as it turned into a critique of the
aestheticization imposed on everyday life by technology and the market.
Reixa succinctly deflned the point ofdeparture ofhis work in an inter
view with the Spanish newspaper Elpas in 1995. 1he conclusion he draws
from his interpretation of contemporary culture is that "[tJodo artista debe
ser cronista do caos contemporneo" ("Antn Reix'; "every artist should
be a chronicler of contemporary chaos"), which also implies chronicling
from the perspective of a peculiarly Galician way of thinking and of ex
pressing irony (retranca), as his work clearly illustrates. 1he literary tech
niques and othr elements he uses (ethical impulse, ludic character, irony,
fragmentation, self-reflexivity, paradox, eclectic collage) bring him closer,
furthermore, to a clearly postmodern aesthetic. 1he flow of free association
so frequent in his texts creates a kind of esperpento of this chaotic reality,
bringing together different cultural and diastratic leveis (urban vs. rural, the
media vs. traditional orality, etc.).l1 His artistic interpretation -translation of
the chaos of an ever more aestheticized contemporary world is character
ized by movement toward a multimedia work of art. AlI statements become
unstable, given that they consciously reflect their own contradictions. From
this perspective, ironic resentment is justifled by an aesthetic-political re
tranquismo ("ironizing") and by the complementary tendency of Galician
thought to introduce a third perspective into traditional Western dialectics.
Reixa defends his retranquismo as "barricada antropolxic' ("an anthropo
logical barricade") although he accepts, critically, an intricate and aestheti
cizing reality. 1hrough this artistic reworking, the games he plays with the
media could easily fall. into an artistie economy devoid of ethical values. 1he
poltical intention of littrature engage adapts itself to the market and runs
the risk of being substituted by a capitalist culture of organized chaos-a
simple Dionysian game with Apollonian apolitical values.
Ringo Rango, which Reixa composed from texts and videoclips that
he had already used for the series Galicia sitio distinto, is an outstanding
example of multimedia art in Galicia, even approaching a postmodernized
248 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
melanChOly and the hyperbaton of derision in general but there is no curefor
the summertme blues and then the obsession with sending christmas cards in
august th<;; waves arriving (alka seltzer effect): greet the old ocean martin lau
treamont and codax too: the electric octopus electric shock! and/or lobotomy
when you .possess me engels style private property sappho luxemburg leda
mand'eu as manhanas frias on going to work: diesel happiness / proud punkies
talk about portugal in english / an italian song that always says per che / a ner
vous thing / problems with toom decay-william ofaquitaine's answerphone:
pero drai vos de con, cals es sa les-and with epic derision one radio ham says
to another says to him: they are going to shit themselves (interference).
'lhe allusions to seemingly disparate realities have a double objective:
on the one hand, to hypercodify the narration itself to parody diverse tradi
tions; o'n the other, to contextualize symbolically estltica galega posmoderna
"Postmodern Galician ethicl aesthetics" (Baltrusch, "Estticas" and "Teora").
Taken literally, the bibliography is directed against the lndian Nobellaure
j
ate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who was popular in Spanish intel
1
j
.j
lectual circles in the 1970s and who had already influenced Spanish writers
like Ortega y Gasset and Juan Ramn Jimnez. Tagore's desire to preserve
lndia's national unity against the aspirations to independence of its many
cultures functions here as a metaphor for a colonizing, centralizing power,
against which Reixa composes a subversive bibliography ofhistorical and lit
erary voices. 'lhe secondary though critical and interventionist character of
this bibliography works as a means of resistance as well as an ironic decon
struction of the orthodox discourse of nationalism in minorized cultures, by
highlighting not only the content of its claims but also its sometimes stiff
and petrified bookness.
'lhe text is presented as a stream of consciousness interrupted by a
question that alludes to responsibility for the loss of Galician culture in the
twentieth century. 'lhrough a sequence of quotations, different diatopic and
diastratic levels are mixed up, reproducing spoken language and structuring
both the text's political-cultural and ethical intention and its aesthetic-
rhythmic characterJ2 'lhe symbolic hybridity of a Galician epic poet (Pon
dal) and a Roman epic poet (Vergil) gains intertextual strength through the
onomatopoetic allusion to the Aeneid (2.52). Hammered (stetit illa tremens)
by the body of post-Franco Galician culture is a question turned into an ac
cusation: "os nenos rin pero dque fan os pais?" ("the children are laughing, but
what are their parents doinf}"). Galician culture and identity are threatened
by theTrojan horse ofhegemonic Spanish culture. A cultural and linguistic
Burghard Baltrusch 249
transformation threatens to reduce Galician to the exotic status f a minor
ity language in the process of extinction, like Inuit. The new generations are
already experiencing this linguistic-cultural change, so that the continuation
of Galician identity will depend on an education that takes its Galicianiz
ing responsibility seriously. The many different quotations evoke historical
and literary relations, political commitments, and even colloquial contexts.
The ideological memory of Rompente is omnipresent, whether in the in
~ vocation of Rosala de Castro's revolutionary poem "A xusticia pola man"
(Folias novas, pt. 2; "An eye for an eye") or the symbolic juxtaposition of
"lobotom' ("lobotomy," an allusion to the paradoxical situation of post
colonial Galician identity) and an "Engels style" that postmodernizeshis
torical Communism.
1his bibliography positions itself, therefore, against alI hegemonies,
also adding a critique of usury, probably in reference to the beginning of
Ezra Pound's canto 45, where usury is denounced as the root of corruption
in the modern world. 1he colloquial "interference" that brings to an end this
diversifying referencing of Galician culture in a postmodern world evokes
retranca. 1he referent of "hame cajar na cona que os botou" ("they are going to
shit themselves") is undetermined: it might be a tribute to the subversion of
old and petrified cultural values and models as a critique of overconfidence
in modernity (technology) and the effects it has on cultural identity. But
there would be no retranca if there were no third intention-in this case, the
possibility that cultural identity will survive thanks only to interference, lin
guistic and otherwise, made possible by modernity and postmodernity. An
example is the fatalism of"escarnio pico" ("epic derision"). But the fatalism
of epic derision is not so fatalistic in the end: melancholy is "desposud'
("dispossessed"), an allusion to the withdrawal of trade union rights and
political autonomy under Franco, and it is based on "hyperbaton"-that is,
I
on a (revolutionary) change to the established order.
I
! Suso de Toro
I
!
Irreverent, ironic sadness or epic derision also marks the first phase of Suso
1
I
de Toro's work, which is even more cynical and self-critical than Reixs.
j
I
De Toro represents a means of recovering Manuel Antonio's legacy inde
I
pendently of Rompente. At the end of the manifesto "Mis Al!" (1922),
Manuel Antonio sacralized "a individualidade at o estremo de desexar que
,
a definicin de cada un de ns sexa unha verva: .0 seu propio nome" (qtd.
1
j
250 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
in Gonzlez Gmez 207; "individuality to the extreme of desiring that each
one of us be defined in a single word: our own name"), an individuality that
de Toro radicalizes in a postmodern manner:
[AJ maneira de que unha literatura sexa til socialmente e ademais sexa
literatura, non catecismo, expresando encarraxadamente ao individuo.
("En confianza")
The way for a literature to be socially usefuI and remain as literature rather
than catechism is by furiously expressing the individual.
Berween Caixn desastre (1983; "Miscellany") and Tic- Tac (1993), the
Santiago-born author admits to having' followed "o programa literario do
'modernismo'" ("the literary program of'modernism"'),B dedicating himself
since thert to what he calls "mythifications," a phase I do not discuss here
because it does not fit in to postmodern vangardismo. One of the general
characteristics of the first phase of de Toro's work is self-reflexive metastruc
turing (Baltrusch, "Teori'); it weaves through alI his work. In the photo
graphs that illustrate Polaroid and Tic- Tac, for example, me author-narrator,
poorly disguised by stylistic fragmentation and by the multiple narrative
voices, mirrors himself and reveals himself psychologically. Both Polaroid
and Tic- Tac are presented as instantaneous takes on the aesthetic of produc
tion, which is commented on, illustrated,disguised, and reworked. 1he un
derlying self-irony consists above alI of flIrtation both with the aspiration to
a total work of art and with its failure. Even in me prologue to Polaroid, the
author confesses that "o que fago eu probablemente estao a facer mellor o
Sr. Joyce" (10; "What I do, Mr. Joyce probably does better"). Tic-Tac repeats
this relativist exhibitionism with its evident attempt to reinvent a Galician
Ulysses mrough the monologues of various characters" including Nano, a
recurring alter ego in me first phase of de Toro's works. But the reflexive
use of ironywith the aesthetic of literary production conceals another self
irony. In Polaroid, a chapter enumerating retranqueira ("ironic") responses
CAi si, oh" [41]) is contrasted with a "Manifesto Kamikaze" (89-90). 1he
manifesto is an attempt to break from a retranqueira aesthetic as a possible
understanding of Galicianness, for it rebels brutally against all the images,
whether positive or negative, of Galicianness. Ir is a retranca that produces
an aesthetic against itself, intentionally annihilating itself-to recover free
dom and create an aesthetic clean slate.
Burghard Baltrusch 251
In Tie- Me, de Toro produces an apologia for individualism as an at
tempt to overcome the incommensurable nature of the fragmented dis
courses of modernity through the epic self-derision of a protagonist who
becomes a postmodern Galician Ulysses. De Toro reactivates James Joyce's
narrative techniques to create these effects. He interweaves different literary
genres, diastratic and diaphasic levels, even associating them with photo
graphs that function as an ironic pictogramiccommentary. In this staging
of the cult of the ego, the narrator's relativism is expressed byexistentialist
melancholy,an aphoristic philosophizing disguised as doeta ignorantia, and
pseudonatural1sm that fluctuates between the folkloric and the vulgar until
it reaches a kind of aesthetic neoliberalism.
1he ultimate formal irony in Tie- Me is represented by two photo
graphs of the author's eyes, which frame the novel, staring out at the reader.
1he retranqueiro pragmatism of this metanarrative technique presents the
polyvalence and polyphony of the discourses confined in this gaze, facing
simultaneously outward and inward, sending and receiving, as if happening
in a single head, a single brain. 1he brutal conseq uence of this situation is
the desire to experience postmodernity as the empty space of the unfounded
(Vattimo) and a Iack of foundationalisms that reveals itself as androcentric.
1he critique of androcentrism goes hand in hand with an identification of
ephemeral time with the idea of the eternal1y cruel and dominating father,
embodied in the figure of Chronos or, in the Galician version of the bogey
man, the Sacantos ("Fatsucker").
1he leitmotiv of cruel father culminates in the penultimate chapter of
Tie- Me, in a single-act pIay with the title "Breve resume do teatro universal"
C'Brief Summary ofUniversal1heater"). In an esperpento environment, the
story ofHansel and Gretel and the myth of Chronos who devoured his chil
dren are fused in an acidic, mythical-religious critique (Baltrusch, "Sein").
Two characters, EI ("He") and Ela ("She"), synthesize the whole range ofpa
ternal and maternal images that have emerged throughout the novel: God,
Chronos, Sacantos, phallogocentrism, patriarchy, Mary, Galicia, the pun
ishing, dominating, repenting mother:
(Ponndose os dous unhas batas de casa de buatin.)
El: S os rapaces me conecen, s eles me ven tal cal sono Son listas os ra
paces. Si, ho, si. S os nenos me ven e me conecen. Se non houbese
nenos ...
,.J
252 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
Ela: (Coa vista ida, fregando as mans.) jAqu, aqu anda anda unha mancha!
jFra mancha condenada! iFra che digo!
EI: (Mirando para ela.) Xa empezou esta tola coas sas lerias. Boh. Pois si,
ho. Se non fose polos nenosxa non sabera quen son de tanto andar
disfrazado. Pero eles si que me conecen sen dubidar. "iO Sacantos,
o Sacantos!," berran en vndome. Mesmo en sonos me conecen "iO
Sacantos, o Sacantos!"
Ela: (Ida.) ~ D e que habemos de ter medo? 2Quen vai sabelo, se o noso poder
ten que dar contas a ningun? ,E que non vou dar limpado nunca estas
minas mans?
El: Vela est esta louca cos seus remorsos. Merda para ela. Se non me fose
de utilidade xa a tina despachado hai ben tempo. Trosma. (Brralle a ela,
que non lle oe.) ,Pois o que mis me gusta comer os fillinos que me
ds, namais sarenche da barriga!Ben tenrinos.as perninas, os bracinos.
(Pon voz de neno.) "jNon me comas, Pap Cronos, non me comas!" iSi
que te como, si que te como! jNam, nam! Ha, ha. Parva.
Ela: Anda segue o cheiro do sangue. Todos os perfumes de Arabia non han
abondar para limpar estas mans tan pequenas. . .. (287)
(Both are putting on dressing gowns.)
He: Only the children recognize me, only they see me as Iam. Children are
dever. Oh, yes. Only the little ones see me and recognize me. If there
were no children ...
She: (Looking away, scrubbing her hands.) Here, there's still a spot here!
Out, damned spot! Out, I say!
He: (Looking at her.) 1his crazy woman has started her raving again. Hmph.
Oh, yes. If it wasn't for the children I wouldn't lmow myself, I'm so of
ten disguised. But they do lcnow me, without a doubt. "1he Bogeyman,
the Bogeyman!" they cry when they see me. Even in dreams they know
me. "1he Bogeyman, the Bogeyman!"
She: (Not quite present.) What should we be afraid of? Whocould know,
if our power is accountable to no one? Will I never get these hands of
mine dean?
He: Just look at this madwoman, with her remorse. Bollocks to her. If she
wasn't so useful to me, I'd have done away with her long ago. Fool. (He
..J.
Burghard Baltrusch 253
shours ar her, butshe does nor hear.) Whar I like best is to eat the lime
children you give me, the momem they emerge from your belly! 50
sweet and tender, the dear little legs, the dear litde arms. (He puts on a
child's voice.) "Don't eat me, Father'Chronos, don't eat me!" I certainly
will eat you, oh yes I will! Yum yum! Ha, ha. Idiot woman.
5he: 1he stench of blood lingers. AlI the perfumes in Arabia wouldn't' be
enough to clean these tiny hands ....
While She retains some memory of morality, He is interested only in the
pleasure he gets from the killing and eating of his children. She also repre
sents a subordinated Galicia, the repenting but denaturalized mother who
supplies the country's childrento a sadistic, arrogant, implacable God, hy
perbole for a central state that has kept Galicia, humiliated, as an exploited
region throughout the centuries. For this reason, She cynically pacifies the
already stupefied children at the end of the play: "Vena, non perdades tempo
que a hora de cear. Ides matar a fame" (289; ('Come on, don't waste time,
it's dinner time. You'll be staving off hunger").
Although some of the themes appear forced and although the char
acters lack a certain psychological dynamism, Tie- Tae makes the most of
a powerful historical-mythical framework, as Joyce's Ulysses did years be
fore, combining the national with the universal. The problem of a minority
culture in a precarious situation that many of the difficulties
of cultural (national) identification in a period of globalization is an od
yssey without a clear end point, without any real possibility of returning
to a foundational house of origino Setting the novel in .a minority culture
portrays the tension between reality and the memory of reality; between
immanence and transcendence in the postmodern world-although the
masculine perspective lmits the novel's claims to universality (as was also
the case with Ulysses).
The topos of mutilation that plays throughout Tie- Tae refers to the
alienation of beauty and humanity in the technological era of modernity,
but it also evokes the political and postcolonial situation of Galicia. In the
photographs, only sterile parts of the body appear, without a specific spatial
relation and never as a complete whole mat could have its own aura. The
photographic and literary images also negate any possible (positive) relation
with the countryside-that is, with Galicis physical-real body; they tend
rather to function as a metaphor for a castrated land (Fallon 146). The para
dox ofthe desire to achieve an autonomous (Galician) identity in the face of
254 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
the centrifugaI forces of globalized postmodern culture, in a still centralized
and colonizing Spain, is illustrated by the protagonist's obsessive attempts to
control his body, his sexuality, and the aging processo
Tie- Tae indirectly questions what Fredric Jameson evoked as the his
torie amnesia ofpostmodernity. Its narra tive voices are reduced to the reality
of their immediate experiences, illustrating historis loss of meaning. Nev
ertheless, the voices persist in criticaI dialogue with this history, for example
when they discredit the founding myths ofSantiago de Compostela and the
Saint James Way. Nano rejects Benedict Anderson's definition of nationness
on the basis of the supposed intentions ofhis forebears (the dead) , counter
ing them with a consciousness that stems from the individual in a limited
local and family contexto Linguistic peculiarities and popular, idiosyncratic
philosophy define Nano much better. 1his individualist, postmodern epic
invites the interpretation of decentered corporeal images of (Galician) so
ciety and the (masculine, Galician) subject as a critique and ironic saudade
("nostalgia') for national unity.
1he kinds of epic derision cultivated by Reixa and de Toro are paradig
matic in the postmodern vangardismo of post-Franco Galicia, representing
two ways of revisiting the traces of the classic avant-garde inaugurated by
Manuel Antonio. 1hey open up a line of postmodern vangardismo that be
gins with Rompente and with Mndez Ferrn's volume ofverse, Con plvora
e magnolias, and continues with the individual works of the group's former
members and collaborators. Reixas literary, musical, and audiovisual work
has been the most visible of these, but we should also keep in mind the
artistic works of Patino and Lamas, among others. De Toro's position with
regard to the new literary space opened up by Rompente is more difficult to
determine, for while he is not a direct descendant or inheritor, he cultivates
very similar ideas and techniques. Today, perhaps it is Xurxo Borrazs who
continues to develop de Toro's postmodernvangardismo in the areas of nar
rative and essay.
1he rebellion against the canon of Galician literature that Reixa and
de Toro instigated in the 1990s with their synthetic ideas of an aesthetics
ethics in progress, stemmed from the fundamental premise that postmoder
nity permits a description of reality only in the form of a conglomeration
of short narratives that compete among themselves (Lyotard 34).When it
comes to communicating ethical or postmodern messages (as Reixa does),
we see the paradox of the mutual incommensurability of discourses (95).
Burghard Baltrusch 255
But the intentional, refiexive use that Reixa and de Toro make of a renewed
Galician literary retranca also corresponds to a renaissance of the attention
that postmodern philosophy, revitalizing the ideas of Kant and Nietzsche,
gave to the aesthetic-fictional character of knowledge.
Today, from the 1990s on, we can clearly see Rompente's infiuence on
the Galician cultural field. One example is the magazine Anim+l (1990-91),
edited by Francisco Macas. Another example is the Ronseltz collective, their
use of parody and playfulness in an attempt to breakwith current trellds.
14
Other initiatives inspired by Rompente and by Reixa in particular are the
photographic series jalisia sitio distinto, Galicia terra nai ("Jalisia [phonetic
rendering of Galicia] a Different Place, Galicia Motherland"), by Xurxo Lo
bato (1994), and the brav movement, with groups such as the Skornabois,
the Rastreros, and the Diplomticos de Monte-Alto with their agro rap,
which clearly owes a debt. to Os Resentidos.
15
A second strand of postmodern vangardismo, not discussed in this es
say, stems from the boom of women writers since the 1990s. Many of these
works question premises of the classical avant-garde as well as its postmod
ern descendants, working through cultural, national, and gender identities
together with second- and third-wave feminisms in such a way that they can
not simply be subsumed into the Rompente tradition. Furthermore, there
are significant aesthetic differences between writers like Yolanda Castafio,
Lupe Gmez, and Chus Pato. Gmez's libertarian anticulturalism could even
be about to open up a third strand of postmodern vangardismo in Galicia.
We can distinguish significant differences in the Galician postmodern
vangarda-a range ofapproaches to the total work of art, to an identification
of art with life, and in general to the transcreation of contemporary Gali
cian reality without the lens of traditional commonplaces and discourses
of power. Aestheticist elements have always been accompanied by a strong
will to revise critically and to redefine identity as foundational-that is, as
an alternative model to exist on the margins of the institutionalized cultural
system. 1hese elements continue to need nationalism as the elixir of an au- .
tonomous culturallife, quite the opposite ofwhat is proposed by those who
claim the arrival of a postnational age. 1he achievements of the Galician
cultural field in relation to the Spanish in recent decades are mirrored by the
postmodern vangardismos in Galicia. 1hey have revealed themselves as an
individualist means for the subaltern arts, with ethics-aesthetics in progress,
to access the representational modes of a different and even antiofficial cul
tural memory. Rompente represented an identity of resistance. Antn Reixa
256 POSTMODERN AVANT-GARDES
and Suso de Toro (and also C h ~ s Pato, Yolanda Castao, and Lupe Gmez)
added new project identities, exerting pressure on institutionalized culture
and identity. 1his work demonstrates the existence of a dynamic culture in
a constant process of redefinition in Galicia today.
But the outside view of minority cultures tends to be that they are
becoming extinct and should be protected in the name of cultural diversity,
a view that complicates the status of the avant-gardes in these cultures, espe
cially when they reveal themselves asself-criticai. Continually pressured as
theyare to adapt to institutionalized values and perspectives, they enter the
vicious circle of the special treatment conceded to minorities. 1he antago
nism berween minority cultures and mass culture (as berween the avant
garde and the canon) to an extent promotes aesthetic selection based on
the demands of the market. Ir also obliges the minority culture to produce
national aesthetic innovations as strategies for survival in a contradictory
present, characterized not only by traumatic change but also by countless
cultural and politieal possibilities.
Notes
This essay was translated from Galician by Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga
Moruxa.
1. The translators leave the original Galician terms vangarda, vangardsmo, and van
gardsta rather than translate them as avant-garde, when reference is to the specifically
Galician contexto When talking about the wider Western context, they use avant
garde.
2. Bypostmodernity I mean a period characterized bya dynamic confluence ofethics and
aesthetics (in Galician, est/tica), which revises and critically translates both history
and the ideologies and metanarratives bequeathed us by history. For further defini
tion of this and related concepts, see Sim.
3. For the relation between modernism and postmodernism and the concept of para
translation, see Caneda; Baltrusch, "Sdn."
4. I acknowledge Mara Comesafia Bestdros's contribution to the definition of the his
torical framework for the early-twentieth-century Galician avant-garde.
5. Hilozosmo ("hylozoism") in the Galician context refers to poetry that combines tradi
tional personification oflandscape with avant-garde metaphoric strategies. Neotroba
dorsmo, a movement that emerges with hilozosmo in the 1920s, reimagines the poetry
of the medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, also using avant-garde strategies.
6. 1he only anthology currently available is that by Cochn and Gonzlez.
7. For a detailed description of the Folias de resistenca potica and Crebar as liras, see
H. Gonzlez, "Rompente."
Burghard Baltrusch 257
8. Reixa's As ladillas do travesty, Romn's Galletas kokoschka non, and Avendao's Facer
pulgarcitos tres, designed by Menchu Lamas and Antn Patino, artists from the avant
garde group Colectivo da Imaxe, were published by Rompente S.L. in 1979.
9. Nacin Reixa made two records with vangardista lyrics: Alivio rpido (1994; "Rapid
Relief"; also available in Spanish) and Safari mental (1997; "Mental Safari").
10. Retranca is a uniquely Galician form of irony. Its relativism is not dialectical, because
it includes a three-way rather than simply binary relation. In its use as a metanarrative
and stylistic element in contemporary Galician literature, it adapts itself very easily to
a postmodern aesthetic (see Baltrusch, "Teod').
11. Esperpento offers a distorted depiction of society. It 1S a specifically Spanish literary
form that originated in the work of Ramn del Valle-Incln at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
12. For an attempt to systematize the quotations fram a translation studies perspective,
see Montero Kpper.
13. Polaroid (1986), Land Rover (1988), Ambulancia (1990) and EM. (1991) also belong
to this phase.
14. In 1991, Colectivo Ronseltz published, as a manifesto, ''Anlise afortunadamente
pouco documentada da poesa galega dos ditent' ("Analysis, Fortunately Litde
Documented, of Galician Poetry in the 1980s") as well as the jointly authored book
Unicornio de cenorias que cabalgas aos sbados (1994; "Carrot-Unicorn You Ride on
Saturdays"). 1he collective broke up after this publication.
15. 1he literary work of Xurxo Souto, a member of Os Diplomticos, for example, de
rives direcdy from the brav concept but falls, like brav, at the intersection .of the
ideologies of rack and rap with ethnic-popular ideologies, thus losing its initial van
gardista impulse.