In my introduction I appealed to the notion of hodology, the study of the paths; the elaboration of the arguments of this dissertation follows a chemin de désir, an emergent path, not the product of a plan or design, but rather of a desire to get somewhere. In its earliest stages, this dissertation was conceived as a study of the subjective experience of place in recent Galician fiction, interested in phenomena such as topophilia or, as the narrator of Ser ou non would have it, “o fodido apego á terra.” To a great degree, this focus reflected my interest in space and place as part of a literary aesthetics rooted in the phenomenology of space, the study of the relationship between consciousness and the world in which it emerges. From the phenomenological perspective, the concept of space is inseparable from the
subject’s experience of it, an experience which takes place “through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind” (Yi-Fu Tuan 18) and which consequently provides artists with an inexhaustible vein of aesthetic material to exploit. In reading the texts that would become the main corpus of this study, however, I found that my attention to the aesthetics of spatial representation led me to consider the political implications of these artistic strategies and the ways in which both subjective experience and its representation is embedded in social space.
This shift in my own approach is the origin of the microgeographic reading strategy I propose in this dissertation. The definition of microgeographies that I have proposed— “aestheticized representations of the highly individual ways in which places are lived,
experienced, and contested”—is meant to suggest an interdependence between formalist and political readings; in the foregoing chapters, readers may find that the focus shifts between these interpretive modalities. If those shifts are jarring, it is due, at least in part, to the tension inherent to the method I have employed and inherent to me as a reader; in other words, while my aesthetic sensibilities drive me to investigate the ability of literary art to produce beauty, my sensibilities as a citizen of the world compel me to attend to the role of literature as an ideological discourse. Perhaps even more to the point, in terms of the evolution of this project, aesthetic inquiry has led to political inquiry, and the results are for the reader to judge.
To move toward a conclusion, I’d like to offer an example of what I take to be the interleaving of politics and aesthetics. In November 2013, eleven years after the Prestige oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in Galician history, the Audiencia Provincial da Coruña absolved the individuals accused of “dano ao medio ambiente” and refused to impose monetary fines, in spite of the fact that the disaster cost the government some 500 million euros (Suárez n.pag.). After the verdict María Reimóndez tweeted, “Eles fixeron a desfeita, nós creamos dignidade dende as fendas e aí cómpre seguir” (“Eles fixeron” n.pag), a reference to the popular Nunca Máis movement that sprang up to protest the disaster and to the thousands of people from all over the world who volunteered in the clean-up effort. Reimóndez’s words illustrate how an ethics of resistance is linked to a poetics of fissure; how individuals, through the exercise of their sense of justice and dignity, can use that which is broken in the world as a motor of creativity and activism. In a similar sense, Rábade Villar has identified cultural fracture lines as an important driving force in the realm of Galician literary production, arguing that “[a] multiplicación das fracturas na historia da cultura galega
moderna converteuse nunha fonte importante de enerxía cultural para todos aqueles escritores que fixeron da linguaxe da creba un lugar de resistencia” (54).
Though they differ one from the other in many respects, I propose that the novels studied here all participate in the poetics of fissure, from Ameixeiras’s “dous mundos que se odian porque se tocan” to Rivas’s rift between a town and its past, from Reimóndez’s cracked urban pavement to Borrazás’s space between literary and orality. One conclusion of this study, then, is that political and ideological fractures—and the attempts to repair them— are often rendered as spatial or geographical phenomena: movement, emplacement,
uprooting, return, homemaking, mapping, and many others. Or, to put it a slightly different way, these novels use geography both as an aesthetic motif—an intraliterary phenomenon— and as thematic material that refers to the struggles in the world beyond the text.
One of the questions that emerges from this analysis concerns to what degree it is the task of literature—or literary criticism—to engage with and effect change in the world. Borrazás has written that “[i]ncapaz de afrontar directamente a realidade e conquistar o que desexan, moitos amantes da arte refúxianse nun universo de fantasmas que lles evitan ter que recorrer á acción” (Arte e parte 70). He goes on to criticize the frequent linkage between poetry and politics in Galician culture:
[u]n problema político expresado pola vía das palabras “fermosas” busca inconscientemente unha solución mítica, non só real. Os manifestos deberían lelos os mecánicos coas mans negras, as mariñeiras ulindo a sal, os
empregados de banca, as xardineiras, os camareiros, as condutoras de autobús. (70)
For Rábade Villar, both literature and literary criticism are bound to reflect the fact that “a historia cultural se alía con frecuencia coa vontade de dominio, adopte este a forma de
preferible a independencia na realidade que na literatura” (Fogar 56), Rábade Villar also contends that one task of the critic is to take into consideration the dynamics of domination and thence to “achegar as liñas de sentido que fan intelixible o xeito no que a periferia cultural—que non por acaso adoita coincidir coa periferia económica—respondeu á
desigualdade histórica” (Fogar 56). On this view, “a literatura galega sempre foi un lugar de conflito, un territorio onde se libraron e aínda se libran batallas importantes sobre os termos nos que se debería definir ese país remoto que se chama Galicia” (Fogar 56).
If, as Miguel Torga says, “O universal é o local sem paredes,” the problems of historical inequality to which Rábade Villar refers are not merely Galician problems but universal ones. María Reimóndez, in her role as social activist, has long recognized this intersectionality, the moral requirement that consciousness of one struggle must lead to a consciousness of the interrelatedness of all struggles; Implicadas, an NGO of which
Reimóndez is co-founder, uses this as a central operational principle in its work that connects socially conscious Galicians with the global south in an effort to understand and unravel the inequalities that structure our everyday lives. And while the creation and consumption of literature is perhaps not the most direct way of participating in this kind of political action, this dissertation has shown that by attending to literary representations of how space is lived, experienced, and contested, we can begin to radiograph the fractures that traverse our world, from the body to the globe, creating “dignidade dende as fendas.”