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My second premise is that the text has historical
reference, not in the hermetic foreground whose autonomy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.