Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image - Hardcover

Resina, Joan Ramon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804758328 ISBN 13: 9780804758321

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's "coming of age" in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, Resina establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, Resina draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the "post-historical" city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.

About this title

About the Author

Joan Ramon Resina is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. He is the author of a number of books, including El cadáver en la cocina: La novela policiaca en la cultura del desencanto (1997) and El postnacionalisme en el mapa global (2004). Among his distinctions are the Fulbright Fellowship and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity

Rise and Decline of an Urban Image

By Joan Ramon Resina

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-5832-1

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Table of Figures, 
Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION - The City as Social Form, 
CHAPTER ONE - The Bourgeois City, 
CHAPTER TWO - Imagined City, 
CHAPTER THREE - Like Moths to a Lamp, 
CHAPTER FOUR - A Sojourn with the Dead, 
CHAPTER FIVE - The Divided City and the Divided Self, 
CHAPTER SIX - The City of Eternal Returns, 
CHAPTER SEVEN - From the Olympic Torch to the Universal Forum of Cultures The After-Image of Barcelona's Modernity, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Bourgeois City

Barcelona is good if money clinks in the purse.

— Popular saying

* * *

Arriving in Barcelona by train in 1873, Edmundo De Amicis caught sight of an entrepreneurial city teeming with dynamism. Both what he saw and the way of seeing merit attention, for the object of his vision was a city in the throes of development; but the vista was itself a modern feat. Travel by train was a recent phenomenon, and the rolling views that it opened up for the first time decisively changed human perception. De Amicis's impressions are worth quoting as an early document of the transformation that only a decade and a half later would crystallize in Barcelona's coming of age as a self-conscious modern city.

After passing the station of Clot, which is the last before reaching Barcelona, one sees on every side large brick buildings, long boundary walls, piles of building materials, smoking towers, factories and workmen, and one hears, or seems to hear, a dull, diffused, increasing sound, which is like the labored breath of a great city that is moving and working. In fine, one takes in at a single glance all Barcelona, the port, the sea, a wreath of hills, and everything shows itself and disappears in an instant, and you find yourself under the roof of the railway station, with your blood in a ferment and your head in confusion [De Amicis 10].

As the train enters Barcelona, the city itself is moving. Barcelona is a huge locomotive pulling the region and the nation, with smoke streaming from its stacks. This remarkable proto-cinematic view, reminiscent of the city symphony films of the 1920s, anticipates the camera's ability to claim transparency where the organic eye encountered only opaqueness and illegibility. The unimpaired vision was possible because the motion that De Amicis saw as a conspicuous feature of Barcelona was related to his own moving location. He owed to mechanized locomotion the panning view that sent blood to his head and threw it into confusion. Barcelona owed its own ferment to the very same technology, which lies literally at the origin of its modern image.

Barcelona, the first Spanish city to introduce the railroad, was transformed by this innovation. After bursting asunder its medieval enclosure, the city began to expand toward the hills, engulfing the intervening villages. With distances shortened by the railroad, Catalonia was shriveling to the size of a large conurbation, the Catalonia-City, as Eugeni d'Ors would call it at the turn of the century. Such forward leaps in urbanization permanently changed Catalonia's territorial and economic structures, at the same time that mechanized locomotion replaced the traditional conception of time and space and affected human perception along the lines made evident in De Amicis's excited epiphany of a modern city.

But the enjoyment of a panorama animated by the steady motion of a window sliding on rails was not the only outcome of such changes, or the principal one. Certainly, the filmlike sequence of brick buildings, long walls, and smokestacks observed by De Amicis from his compartment was an effect of the train's motion. But the transformation of space under the impact of mechanized locomotion was neither illusory nor a matter of perspective. Increasing speed condensed space, and the resulting centers gradually detached themselves from the countryside. It was the time of the emergent metropolis.

CONNECTING BARCELONA TO WORLD TRAFFIC

In 1848, the Barcelona-Mataró line was inaugurated. It was the first in the Iberian Peninsula and the eleventh in the world. In four months, 187,000 passengers traveled on this train (Tasis). Between 1848 and 1863, four lines connected Barcelona to other Catalan municipalities: Mataró, Martorell, Granollers, and Sarrià. By 1862 the Granollers line reached Girona and in 1878 the border with France. A branch of this line had linked Barcelona with Saragossa through Sabadell, Terrassa, Manresa, and Lleida since 1861. In 1865, the Martorell line was extended to Tarragona and then to Valencia two years later. In 1875, the companies servicing the Barcelona–Port Bou and the Barcelona–Tarragona lines merged into the T.B.F., or Tarragona-Barcelona-France Railway Company, which dominated the Catalan railroad system.

This revolution in transportation had enduring consequences. Multiplying the relations among formerly scattered centers, the railway transformed Catalonia from an imagined community into a perceived one at the very moment when industry disenchanted the natural world. The Renaixença poets sang Catalonia's landscape while its rivers were being harnessed to industry. Although nostalgic, their "vision" was aided and probably stimulated by the ease with which they could now move through the land. In his memoirs, Gaziel has left us a snapshot of the poet Joan Maragall in 1907. Maragall is on the train, going back to Barcelona from Lleida, where he had won first prize in that year's Jocs Florals, a neomedieval poetry competition. As night began to fall, says Gaziel, Maragall straightened up in his seat and brought his face closer to the window of the train, looking out "like the bird that watches all around earth and sky" (226). This circular scrutiny of the horizon, which generates the illusion of an encompassing view, had been virtually unknown. But from midcentury on, the train ride made it possible to bring the nation's concrete totality into the visual field. The nation is not so much an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson's catchy turn of phrase, as the community contemplated from an inclusive horizon whose ultimate metaphor is the bird's-eye view. The moment is liminal. The previous year, Enric Prat de la Riba published La nacionalitat catalana, the first explicit theorization of Catalan nationalism. There was no coincidence; to the poets' sensory intuition the politician responded with visionary energy. Prat systematized and thus brought to a higher level of consciousness the vague effusions of political regionalism, just as Maragall represented the evolution from romantic jocfloralisme to modern urban poetry.

The train ride boosted the country's cohesion by lifting remote regions from their isolation and opening them up to outside influence and political control. Thus it contributed powerfully to structuring the national territory even as it changed the consciousness of place. In Doña Perfecta (1876), Benito Pérez Galdós describes the spatiotemporal leveling of territories that, not without violence, were being homogenized into a national geography. Far from being imagined, the nation could now be comfortably surveyed from a train carriage, as the newly wed Juanito and Jacinta Santa Cruz do, one decade later, in Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87). As one of the characters in this novel points out, the bourgeois tour of the provinces by train has replaced the aristocratic grand tour abroad. Galdós bears witness to the inflexible articulation of the territory by means of the fixed tracks and offers a glimpse of the hublike perspective imposed on the map by the combination of technology and political centralism. Spain was becoming a nation, and the train spearheaded the internal conquest of areas hitherto removed from the government's reach. Henceforth the Spanish nation state could be visualized in the radial system that held the peninsula together like an iron mesh. Conversely, Spain's detachment from Europe was nowhere as manifest as in the broader track gauge of 1.672 meters, beginning south of the Pyrenees.

Whereas Galdós considered the train an envoy of the capital's civilizing mission to the slumbering provinces, it fell to Narcís Oller, a Catalan novelist, to place the new technology of communication at the center of the great transformations brought by the industrial revolution. Oller (1846–1930) was coeval with both the railroad and Barcelona's expansion, and he understood the relation between urban vitality and rails. His short novel L'Escanyapobres (The Miser, 1884), is about the railway's impact on local economies. The village of Pratbell owed its affluence to its strategic location on the road linking a grain-growing region to Madrid, but when the train dispensed with intermediate stopping places Pratbell lost its former prosperity ("An eternal slumber seemed to take hold of the village, the slumber that weighs on rural districts"; 215). The revolution in communications brought on a new hierarchy of places, and the power to define the itinerary reached demiurgic proportions. An engineer, a railway manager, a minister could make or break a place by linking it or leaving it outside the route. The train aggrandized the differences among municipalities, further isolating the rural seats while promoting development of the main depots. Pratbell's slowdown was the other side of Barcelona's hubbub. "Where is this train going?" asks one character. "To sate the large cities.... What is growing today? The large cities.... The new civilization is bent on concentration. You've seen it: of your friends, those who are not in heaven are now in Barcelona" (L'Escanyapobres 217–18).

This observation was accurate, and the trend would only increase. By the turn of the century, Barcelona had become the principal grain market in Spain. Between 1878 and 1908, the Madrid line, which ran through the fictitious Pratbell, shipped around 24,000 metric tons of wheat per year to Barcelona. That amount, however, represented a steadily decreasing percentage of the shipments, dropping from 68.5 percent in 1878 to a mere 13.1 percent in 1908. As the railway expanded, other regions began to capture larger shares of the Barcelona market. Shipments from Aragon and Lleida increased from 2,446 to 41,565 metric tons, accounting for 6.9 percent of the freight at the beginning and 24.3 percent at the end of this period. Even remote regions such as Extremadura found it possible, after the loss of the colonial markets, to redirect their production to Barcelona despite the 1,200 kilometers the wheat had to travel before reaching its destination (Gómez I).

Disconnected but not segregated is the condition of Pratbell after the coming of the railway. The village remains within the geography of modern communications, only not on their clock. It has fallen behind schedule; rather, it is not in the schedule. Pratbell does not stir when the train whistles the "alarm call of a brisk and bustling new civilization" (L'Escanyapobres 215). It could hardly do so, because it had lost most of its population to bustling Barcelona.

The train contracted distances even as it expanded the city's perimeter. By hitching the regional economy to the international, it helped the entrepreneurial class leapfrog national borders, and it accelerated the circulation of goods, therewith also the rate of capital accumulation and investment. But the new speed of communication (coupled with the telegraph, the other great invention of the age) transformed not only the production of value but also the risks. Speed magnified bonanzas and downturns. In his finest novel, La febre d'or (The Gold Rush, 1889–1892), Oller built a historical canvas of fin-de-siècle Barcelona, focusing on the social transformations and upheavals behind the extension of the railway. The novel shows the fortunes of joint-stock companies created to finance development of the modern system of transportation. Its interest, like that of all great novels, rests on the author's ability to show how those financial adventures reverberate in the whole society. Preoccupied with the question of the sources of value, like nineteenth-century political economists Oller was forced to explore various facets of modernization: social mobility, the strengths and limitations of the parvenu, the ebb and flow of capital as reflected in the pace of urban development, the appearance of an art market, production vis-à-vis social representation, the division between the private and the public spheres, the crossover between finance and politics, cycles of economic boom and bust, and not least the transportation revolution.

Expansion of the railway allowed commodities to move faster than ever before, driving up the financial markets. Stepping up the circulation of goods resulted in swifter accumulation of capital. Industrial Barcelona could now ship its production to all Spanish provinces and beyond. Besides a manufacturing center in search of markets, it was a growing market itself. This city was the principal destination of the textile merchandise produced in its province. By 1908, it was consuming 48 percent of the production, up 20 percent since 1878 (Gómez II). Better transportation also intensified overseas commerce with Spain's colonies. In Cuba, the Havana-Bejucal line, inaugurated in 1837, boosted production of sugar (Moyano), a considerable part of which was redistributed through Barcelona. The railroad's importance for the Catalan economy can be measured by the fact that, ten years after the inauguration of the first line, a Barcelona company, La Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima, was producing locomotives. The Catalans' enthusiasm for the train was so high that companies such as M.Z.A. and Norte de España, which built the Spanish railway with some foreign capital and crucial government guarantees, placed most of their stock (some 445,504 shares in 1862) in Barcelona. Thus Catalan money financed creation of Spain's railways. However, the government's irresponsible concession of permits for unprofitable lines and an unscrupulous operation by a Madrid banker, the Marquis of Salamanca, in 1865, flooded Barcelona's stock exchange with trash shares, provoking a crisis that led to the crash of 1866 (Vicens i Vives, Industrials).

After the deposition of Isabel II in 1868, and especially during the Restoration, the bourgeoisie enjoyed an economic bonanza. Known as "the gold rush," the decade of 1876–1886 was the brightest in the century, and Barcelona was its epicenter. The thrust of newly founded companies was measured in the stock trade, where futures in railroad companies led advances from 1877 to 1882. The market was bullish for six straight years before sliding into bear territory and falling into a recession in 1886 (Vicens i Vives). Oller brilliantly captured this effervescence and abrupt decline. Above all, he depicted Barcelona's transformation from a provincial town into a great city, a process that culminated in the Universal Exposition of 1888, sponsored by the railway companies among others (Fig. 1). Although this event, which took place in the midst of a recession, has been considered an illusive maneuver to dull consciousness of the crisis (Jutglar), there is no question that it was intended to proclaim the adulthood of Catalan industry and the new status of a city that had broken its provincial mold and grown into a European metropolis. At the time, no journalist or commentator failed to acknowledge the exposition as the most significant event to have taken place in Barcelona in many years. Oller shared this opinion. In La febre d'or, he said, it was his intention "to record for history the most splendid feat of the beloved Barcelona of my time" (Memòries Literàries105). Indeed, he produced an impressive canvas of city life in the period leading to the exposition. More important, he inaugurated Barcelona as a literary subject.

In 1873, when De Amicis saw it, Barcelona had not yet entered that feverish period, but the visitor could already perceive the humming energy pushing toward the portentous decade. If an insider such as Oller needed to comprehend the city from a variety of perspectives, De Amicis claimed to see it all at once from his vantage on the train. Engineering technology, the demiurgic power of the age, gave him an illusion of scenic totality comparable to that of Michel de Certeau's "solar Eye" looking down on Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Center. Only, whereas Certeau's voyeur belongs to the era of high-angle views and air travel, De Amicis's vision was formed by mobility at ground level. The new tracking perspective encompassed the horizon, as in a panorama. The panorama and the railway were in fact contemporaneous. In 1839 the first panorama opened in Paris, bringing the world to the spectator at the same time the railway was starting to turn the world into a spectacle. Both "machines" produced the illusion of a full-blown horizon, and both would eventually meet in the cinema, where static spectators enjoy moving vistas previously captured by an eye that is itself in motion.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity by Joan Ramon Resina. Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804758328
• ISBN 13: 9780804758321
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288