SLOW
FOLK
AT WORK!
LITERARY APPROPRIATIONS OF LOCAL MATERIALS BY IRISH, SPANISH
AND BULGARIAN MODERNISTS
by
Plamen Ivanov Gaptov
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2009
Copyright 2009 Plamen Ivanov Gaptov
ii
Dedication
For Dyado Petar who taught me how to play backgammon
iii
Acknowledgements
The course of dissertations never did run smooth. I needed the help of an international
motley crew to make this study happen. In many ways, then, it is – like much of literary
modernism – a group project. In the first instance, I would like to thank my distinguished
committee for their kind guidance, probing questions, advice, encouragement and
understanding. Without them, this dissertation would not be what it is. Two seminars at
the University of Southern California have been especially instructive as well as
inspirational: I owe an intellectual debt to Dr. Karen Pinkus and Dr. Daniel Tiffany. Their
seminars on sound and vernacular poetry, respectively, have instigated much of the
pabulum which has nourished the initial conception of this project.
I had a lot of help in Bulgaria: from my mom and nephew (two of my main informants),
my grandma Maria (who also served as an informant about the old rural ways of keeping
the folkloric tradition alive), my dad (who is an excellent chauffeur), my sister (my right
hand and devoted research assistant), Marcho Nikolov (technical support), the librarians
in Sofia and Burgas who had to run up and down reading rooms to provide me with
materials, the cabdriver Zhoro who got involved with advice on how to find rare audio
materials, Dimitar Valchanov who kept me on track.
On this side of the Atlantic, I was lucky to have known Misha Mazor in New York
(geek support and companion in my field work), Sarah Baird in Charleston (who gave me
important research advice), Vinu Krishnan in Florida (who offered me excellent Indian
food and a comfortable couch), Alphonso Brown (who was my main Gullah informant).
iv
My thanks to Adam del Monte for being an inspiration and for sharing ideas about his
own work with flamenco and to Ivelina Katalieva for forwarding, however grudgingly,
important knowledge about the experience of being a performing musician. Many thanks
to Roshni Toorkey-Cincoreimas who sat with me and spoke verses to musical notes.
Together, we discovered how difficult it is to revive old traditions.
Finally, I would like to thank the Doheny Library (for scanning numerous articles and
locating books at the click of a mouse) and all the copyists and librarians in photocopy
shops and libraries in Burgas, Sofia, Los Angeles, and other places.
v
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vii
Introduction: Folklore and Modernist Poetry at the Limits of Europe 1
First principles 7
“Sung”poetry : gymnophonetics and folk grammar 18
Who are the folk after all? 24
Nationalism’s use of folklore 45
Accelerated development of culture 65
Folklore and Literature 72
Folklore in literature 85
Folkloristics and the study of literature 92
Chapter 1: Dialectism 100
Standard, Non-standard, Sub-standard 104
Modernist Dialectism 110
Literary Language as Inter-language 115
Translational Aesthetics 143
Dialects of Paradise 161
Tongues of the Common Folk 168
Dialect as Folklore 195
Chapter 2: Poetic Folklorism. Yeats’s Act 198
The craft of verse 215
Speaking to the psaltery 222
The method 227
Quarrelsome domain: Yeats among modern musicians 259
Modernist Balladry 266
Chapter 3: Vernacularism 283
“Popularismo”: Federico García Lorca and vernacular aesthetics 288
The Lectures: Folklore as Aesthetic Theory 298
A) Lorca’s discovery of the hidden treasure of folklore 299
B) The theory of the duende as vernacular theodicy 306
Flamenco Ole! 308
Lorca’s Poetic Juerga 314
Geo Milev and vernacular expression 335
Articles of poetic faith 339
There’s only one – the people 346
vi
The vernacular logic of inverted syntax 348
The Edenic plural anon 350
The sound of it 352
The chanting tradition as collective memory 353
Space and the collective memory of the chant 358
Naming in the chanting tradition 359
‘September’: an audio-print experiment 361
Coda 386
Bibliography 389
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Abstract
Folklore plays a crucial role in the construction of modernist poetry. Especially in a
conflict or post-conflict social context, literatures seeking to renew themselves often turn
for inspiration to local traditions which they seek to appropriate. When literary criticism
studies the link between folklore and literature, it usually does that from a thematic point
of view, laying the stress almost exclusively on themes and folkloric motifs. Rarely is the
sound of folklore emphasized as a formative influence on modernist poetry. Lying
somewhere among the fields of linguistics, folkloristics, ethnomusicology, and literary
studies, the present project aims to trace very specifically and directly the crucial
influence of local traditions on four modernists.
Chapter one (‘Dialectism’) examines the ways in which modernists forge an “original”
language using folk speech. I examine the hybrid English of J. M. Synge via the prism of
second language acquisition, particularly the concept of inter-language. Chapter two
(‘Poetic Folklorism’) studies Yeats’s theories of performance, particularly his theories
regarding the speaking of poetry and drama, and their indebtedness to folklore. I look at
several examples of the ‘more practical side’ of his work. The centerpiece of the chapter
is Yeats’s collaboration with Florence Farr in the speaking of verse to musical notes.
Chapter three (‘Vernacularism’) mixes the football chant – a vernacular poetic genre as
well as an example of urban folklore – with Geo Milev’s poem ‘September’. It is an
audio-print experiment in sounding expressionist poetry. I also examine García Lorca’s
“flamenco” poetry, his aesthetic theories and their debt to a vernacular vision. I have
viii
presented excerpted audio examples as well as a modicum of original work in the CD
accompanying the dissertation.
1
Introduction: Folklore and Modernist Poetry at the Limits of Europe
First principles
“Sung” poetry: gymnophonetics and folk grammar
Who are the folk after all?
Nationalism’s use of folklore
Accelerated development of culture
Folklore and Literature
Folklore in literature
Folkloristics and the study of literature
To my knowledge, no claim has been made about the decisive influence of folklore on
modernist literature. This study aims to fill the gap. Stephen Benson recognizes the
lacuna when it comes to European and American literature written in ‘the past 50 years.’1
As far as modernism goes, he agrees that to claim an importance of folklore for European
literary modernism – except perhaps in the case of Yeats – would be untenable. Lacking
general models for the study of the link between 20th century literature and folklore,
Benson takes music as a model. In some ways, it is understandable that music should
have attracted more attention than literature has done when it comes to the connection
between high art and folklore. It is a more universal language – a tune travels easier than
a poem written in a “minor” language. For this reason, there are many who have heard of
Bartók but not of Petöffy.
The importance of folk materials for modernist aesthetics should not be reduced to
studies of individual authors such as Yeats. Even in the case of Yeats, the progress of
Yeats studies was slow in catching up with this crucial aspect of his poetry. Mary
1 Benson, Stephen, Cycles of Influence. Fiction, folktale, theory, Wayne State University Press: Detroit,
2003, p. 1.
2
Thuente’s informative study blazed a trail which had been as yet unexplored.2 But
folklore’s decisive importance for modernist literature goes far deeper and wider than the
work of individual authors. Yet its influence on modernism has remained understudied.
This may partly be due to the fact that folklore is a hidden wonder with a simple façade.
It is simply too difficult and time-consuming – not to mention the additional expertise
needed to study its specific technicalities – to repay the effort. But authors such as Yeats
and Synge from Ireland, Lorca and others from Spain, Geo Milev and a whole slew of
confirmed avantgardist modernists from Bulgaria, prove the point that folklore was
important not simply as a theme or motif in an individual work but as a driving
mechanism of both the culture in question and of modernist experimentation in particular.
Another difficulty might be the need to define two areas which seem to be so at odds
with each other. On the upper side of the pyramid stands modernist artistic
experimentation, on the lower side is the putative simplicity and conservatism of the
folkloric tradition. But it is precisely as a possible consequence of the linkage between
modernism and folklore that modernism itself begins to be re-defined. As with any other
“ism”, the more instantiations of it one gathers, the more complete is its conceptual
profile.
This, apart from the link to folklore, explains the strange-looking constellation of
authors examined in the present study. The first line drawn here connects two Irish
authors. At this point, the geography of literary folklorism is not untypical for criticism
(particularly in post-colonial studies or in individual works concerned with the link
2 Thuente, Mary Helen, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, Gill and Macmillan, Barnes & Noble Books,
Totowa: New Jersey, 1980.
3
between literature and anthropology or ethnography) whose focus is literary production
in the English language. Later, the trajectory extends from Ireland to Spain only to end in
Eastern Europe. At the limits of Europe – at least – folklore seems to be crucial for the
formation of both popular literature and of poetic works one is accustomed to see in
discussions of literary modernism. But I want to make a stronger claim: viz. that it would
be impossible to study modernism in these cultures and at the same time ignore the folk
connection.
But what is the influence of folklore on literature? Benson assumes too readily,
together with most literary scholars, that folklore ‘becomes incorporated into literature’.
The question then (and it is rare when a literary scholar goes even this far) becomes:
‘how do we deal with the intersection, with this interactional dynamic?’ Benson’s
answers are simple: the so-called ‘modes by which writers incorporate folklore’ include
the mimetic, the referential and the like. But modernist writers’ appropriations of folklore
certainly deserve a more sophisticated attention whereby one is able to avoid ending up
with statements like: ‘Folklore is “in” literature, then, because art imitates life in a variety
of ways, both obvious and subtle.’ To add insult to injury, ‘[i]n many instances … a
writer takes the folklore at face value, accepting its existence in the real world and, in
imaginatively moving it to a fictional one, re-situates and validates its communicative
relevance in a mimetic exposition of its power.’3 As I will show a little later, this is what
nationalist ideology does with folklore, i.e. it imitates its power. Modernists, on the other
hand, do not take folklore at face value but update its currency. They do that precisely
3 Cycles of Influence, pp 12, 10, 14, 23.
4
because they are aware of the currency’s existence in real life. Awareness of the life-cycles
of folklore allows the modernist to re-evaluate it by factoring in a kind of inflation
quotient. There is a grain of truth of Benson’s statement, however. As chapter three will
attempt to show, a modernist poet may opt to imitate the power of folklore, as it were,
naïvely. If folklore is found in nature, and if the naïve treatment (as in Schiller’s
discussion of the naïve and sentimental) of nature/folklore imitates its power, then we
could be talking about something like Benson’s mimesis.
When working with folkloric items, one finds the need to tap into the history of the use
of folk materials for ideological purposes. Like banknotes, folkloric materials cannot be
taken at face value without awareness of the history/evolution/devolution/devaluation of
folk-use. Few works on the give-and-take between folklore and literature explain this
dimension; in some it is implicit, others mention it, still others take it for granted or
assume that it is a different concern, more or less unrelated to the ask at hand (which
usually boils down to tracing folklore’s place in literature by studying themes and motifs).
The use of folklore for ideological purposes has received a lot of attention in histories of
(cultural) nationalism, but there, very little is said about the intrinsic merits of folklore,
let alone about its value as a rich source for literary appropriation. Some studies by
literary scholars emphasize the link between (cultural) nationalism and literature but
rarely with any detailed analysis of what folklore actually is.4 The role of folklore is seen
as crucial to the construction of national identity but little, other than a brief mention, is
4 E.g. Rob Doggett’s Deep-Rooted Things. Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler
Yeats, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana, 2006.
5
said about actual folk forms. A later section of this introduction attempts to relate the
three fields which are rarely brought together: folklore, nationalist ideology, and
literature.5 I bring up this interdisciplinary overlap not because it is the focus of my study.
My central interest is performance and sound – but it often becomes very difficult to hear
the sound of folklore precisely because its use and abuse by nationalist ideology occludes
its unique character. In many ways, this abuse has become part of the very etymology of
the word folklore. Nationalism seems to have forever cast its etymological shadow over
folklore. My claim is that the presence of folklore should not be reduced to discussions of
cultural nationalism. Rather, the haunting presence of folklore – what I will later song –
requires some acquaintance with the specifics of folk forms. In that sense, to appropriate
folklore is not simply to re-situate it within a literary work, but to perform it with the
seriousness and virtuosity of a folk performer aware of the reality of the burden of the
folklore tradition.
***
What, then, of Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian poetic folklorisms? The three stories are
unique and therefore irreducible both to a generic conception of folklorism and to one
another. Yet, all three cultures, in very similar ways, serve as a complex backdrop for the
study of literary modernism on the margins of Europe.6 Several important points about
5 David Lloyd’s explorations which bring the three areas together are significant exceptions; see especially
his Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987) and Anomalous States (1993).
6 Ireland was fighting to gain its independence; Bulgaria had just shed the 500-year-long colonial yoke;
Spain had just experienced the final spasms of its demise as an empire. Thus, all three contexts can be
designated as post-colonial. Additionally, in all cases, we are dealing with cultures which posit the question
about the limits of Europe. In the case of Spain, it was Andalusian (Gypsy) culture which paradoxically
placed Spanish modernism on the European map. In Ireland, it was the marginalized culture of the peasant
6
modernist appropriation of folklore and about modernism in general emerge in all three
cases. These will be the main tenets of the present project: a) literary modernism is often
a dynamic game of cultural leapfrog, a progressive look backward as well as a
mechanism of accelerating culture; b) the ways in which folklore inhabits a literary work
need not be reduced to the presence of themes, characters, motifs, or narrative structure; c)
far from being an exclusively individual phenomenon, modernism has a significant
collective aspect which is different from the cliquish participation in a movement or
“ism” such as vorticism, imagism, etc.; d) modernist poesis could be read as a folkloric
enactment, while a poet’s task may be considered similar to that of the folk performer; e)
a significant trace of the relation between folklore and poetry is present in the poem in the
form of what we may call songfulness – this is the acoustic/sonic dimension of poetry.
I will end this preliminary section with a definition of the term folklore. In this study, I
follow the established definition of folklore which has gained currency within the area
folkloristics over the past three decades. Since 1977, the year which has proved fateful
for folkloristics as a discipline, folklore has become a much enlarged term which includes
things like playground chants, counting and all sorts of other verbal games, games of
many different kinds, gestures, foodways, occupational folklore, family folklore, and
many other forms and types. The definition of the “folk” has also expanded considerably.
The “folk” is ‘any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common linking
that was the center of the Irish literary renaissance. As for Bulgarian modernism, it was a strange hybrid,
combining the foreign and the local/ traditional, that allowed Bulgarian literary innovation to enter the
larger family of European modernisms.
7
factor.’7 Local traditions of any kind (whether rural or urban, street or fireside) all belong
in this extended definition of a ‘linking factor’. Nor is longevity a factor any more, i.e. a
tradition need not be centuries old in order to be considered folklore. Folklore’s lifecycles
can now be shorter than a generation.
First principles
"one's own"
Viewed as a collective project, modernism begins to disengage itself from its customary
association with the notion of the author as a single all-important creative center. A kind
of group effort, this type of modernism is consciously envisioned by its author as playing
a potential and sometimes actual part in a wider (for instance a folkloric) tradition. The
notions of mastery, of individual authorial presence, of a highly personal, distinctive
signature, etc., begin to lose their pre-eminence without ceasing to be important. This
paradox has wide-ranging implications. It is customary, for instance, to look for an
author’s signature in a modernist work. If there is a question about modernist literature
which can be considered settled, it is the question of the modernist’s distinctive
voice/style/signature. And yet, the poetic/dramatic projects studied here seem to preclude
such easy assumptions. Who is speaking – the ‘I’ or the many? Whose voice is
empowered to speak and where does this voice imagine to be gaining its legitimacy? In
what sense can we say that modernists borrow the voice/style/signature of the folkloric
tradition and make it their own?
7 See International Folkloristics. Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes,
Rowman & Littlefield: Lahnam, Maryland, 1999, p. vii.
8
The question of voice ownership becomes even less easy to answer in a cultural
situation where modernism coincides with a nation’s efforts to rebuild itself. Authorial
energies are harnessed for the purposes of building national literatures as authors attempt
to become part of local traditions. In a post-colonial situation, for example, the nation
attempts to regroup and escape the shadow of the colonizer. Arising from the ashes of
cultural isolation (typical cases would be Bulgaria and Ireland), the nation looks outwards
with an almost necessary openness. In both cases, the attempt was to assume one’s
rightful place amidst European civilization – a right of which the colonized nation had
been deprived for centuries. Thus, cultural cosmopolitanism creates a vibrant scene
which is fully attuned to the latest fashions of Europe. In this game of catch-up,
translation of cultural practices plays a vital role. Foreign languages begin to assume the
cultural capital necessary for the participation in an elite. Literary exploits assume an
adventurous spirit. Grafting of foreign schools on the domestic arena creates a living
anthology of literary practices. Since this is all done in the context of accelerated
development of culture, a particularly exciting telescopy is the case. Sometimes this is
evident in the work of one single author. Whatever the actual “school”, movement or
faction, the important thing is that all energies work in a context of simultaneity as
various literary “isms” (which are usually drawn over a horizontal time-line) tumble over
one another with the aim of resolving the same big issue: how to move a nation’s culture
forward…This pell-mell literary context creates multiple foreign-own reverberations
from one work to another. The result is that the production of literature assumes a special
kind of urgency as each pen is still smarting from the most recent skirmish and has a
9
point to prove. The modernist smithy resounds with the noise of the trenches. No longer
hidden in a quiet lab, the modernist is on the frontline.
One of the fronts is that of the national tradition as it tries both to invade the hitherto
unattainable “foreign” and to prevent incursions into one’s own. All is not quiet on this
front. For one thing, embracing foreign cultures (in a kind of ready cosmopolitanism or
Europeanism) can seem like surrender to foreign influences just when the nation is
emerging from centuries of colonial oppression. To be a foreigner in one’s own country
could be a horrendous offense. The opposition between the foreign and one’s own is thus
both an author’s personal issue and a concern of the wider culture.
But the issue is even more complicated. As P. J. Matthews points out, the definition of
local culture is often unclear. Referring to Lady Gregory’s essay ‘Ireland, Real and Ideal’,
Mathews finds that the impetus of the Anglo-Irish literati ‘to win respect when they
appeared in their own form’ rather than in ‘the mask thrust upon them for too long’
resulted in ambiguity: ‘What exactly “our own form” should be was decidedly uncertain
as the nineteenth century drew to a close, due to the steady abandonment of Irish cultural
practices and the rapid assimilation of colonial cultural forms.’8 Small wonder that, as
Yeats exclaims in Samhain, even ‘the most highly trained audiences’ which Dublin had
8 Matthews, P. J. Revival. The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and Co- operative Movement,
Critical Conditions: Field Day Monographs, University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day,
2003, p. 45.
10
produced ‘of late’ ‘drift between what is Irish and English in confused uncertainty, and
have not even begun the search for what is their own’.9
The modernists studied here all borrowed from local culture – albeit in a way which
was their own.
“the choric”
Very closely related to the idea of ownership is the “choric” principle in modernist
poetics. This takes us to the notion of a collective voice. It is instantiated in the works of
the modernists studied here: in Lorca's vernacular aesthetics which accord a central role
to folkloric traditions; in the use of dialect by J. M. Synge; in the poetic voice of Geo
Milev’s ‘September’ which borrows, after a fashion, the voice of the people; in Yeats's
performative models where speakers are not merely exponents of his political or esoteric
views but are part of Irish folk traditions. The choric principle challenges the very idea of
the monolithic speaker in modernist poetry; one feels entitled to talk, rather, of a
disembodied presence, a depersonalized voice desiring a baptism in the local tradition.
In a related sense, the choric pertains to what Julia Kristeva calls the chora. This is the
semiotic dimension of language, the maternal substratum which always cuts through the
symbolic dimension. The semiotic is expressed in cries of emotion, in the cadences of
speech, in interjections, in the melody of poetic speech. The voice of the crowd,
borrowed by the modernist, lends a choric (in this sense of the word) quality to his or her
work. Kristeva is very much part of a tradition of philosophizing about language which
9 Yeats, W. B, Samhain, No. 7, p. 6 (in Samhain. October 1901 – November 1908. Numbers One to Seven
Reprinted in One Volume together with Paragraphs from the Unpublished Number of 1909, with an
introduction by B. C. Bloomfield, Frank Cass and Company Limited: London, 1970).
11
includes Ernst Cassirrer, Herder and Max Müller. These philosophers look for the
primitive beginnings of language. Kristeva calls this primitive origin the semiotic
dimension and finds its best instantiation in poetic language:
Consequently, one should begin by positing that there is within poetic language
(and therefore in a less pronounced manner, within any language) a
heterogenousness to meaning and signification. This heterogenousness, detected
genetically in the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonation anterior to
the fist phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, sentences; this heterogenousness,
which is later reactivated as rhythms, intonations, glossalalias in psychotic
discourse, serving as ultimate support of the speaking subject… this
heterogenousness to signification operates through, despite, and in excess of it
and produces in poetic language “musical” but also nonsense effects… We shall
call this disposition semiotic (le sémiotique)…10
This disposition which houses the ‘indeterminate articulation’ before the advent of
signification is not thetic but pre-literary. The receptacle of this ‘unnamable, improbable’
‘hybrid’ is the chora.11 To capture its essence, one cannot rely on themes and motifs
since it emerges as a surplus to thematics. Significantly, its heterogeneity subverts the
very notion of literary language and of literariness.12
“the leap-frog”
In a game of leap-frog, all players except one are arranged in a line. Each of these
players assumes a position which allows the only player left standing to leap over him or
her. The standing player (the leaper) moves to the front of the line, goes a little distance
from the group and turns back to face the arched backs offered as so many spring-boards
10 Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, transl.
by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez, Columbia University Press: New York, 1980, p. 133.
11 Ibid., p. 133.
12 See chapter one for a discussion of the ways in which Synge’s language subverts the idea of canonicity/
literariness.
12
on his/her way. The leaper starts his/her run. Once the first back is reached, the leaper
leans over, props him/herself with both hands and leaps off that back. Each successive
back is easier to leap over as the leaper uses the momentum gained over the course of
his/her run. The avant-gardist principle of turning one's back on one's immediate
predecessors often leads the modernist back to the very beginning of the chain of
tradition: ad fontem. Initially one is concerned with innovation (for instance, second- or
third-wave modernists in Bulgaria dissatisfied with the work of the generation
immediately preceding them). In cases where the leapfrogging gains exciting momentum,
one may reach as far back as the imagined origin of the tradition in question or even to a
more ancient (and in most cases) hypothetical origin. In this sense, modernism is what
Yeats called ‘dreaming back’. Paradoxically, the concern with the new forces modernists
to face the old, even the ancient. They go back in time – even to a space of nothingness –
before there was literature. In Bulgarian culture, this is the space of the folk song to
which modernists returned time and again. Some modernists returned a long way. For D.
H. Lawrence, for instance, the Greeks would not suffice – they too had to be leapt over.
The Etruscans exemplified better than the Greeks (to whom Nietzsche had dreamt back)
a truly naturally aesthetic race, before conquest destroyed the picturesque simplicity of
their art.
The return to lost origins, even more so than the return to previous stages of the literary
tradition (viewed by T.S. Eliot as extra-historical), is a modernist concern which
resembles in some key aspects the spirit of nineteenth-century etymology. This link has
hitherto been altogether neglected as modernism is usually seen as a sibling of
13
Saussurean linguistics. Nineteenth-century philology, with its often ludicrous derivations
and myth-making, is seen as clearly a thing of the past. In this way, literary criticism has
achieved what Finnegans Wake called the ‘abnihilization of the etym’. But in many ways,
the literary projects of modernist authors can be profitably studied by leaping over
Saussure for a moment. Modernism may be seen as a dreaming-back to lost origins, of
which the origin of language is one.
The notion of the leapfrog has its tempting – but ultimately unsatisfactory – double.
The leapfrog can often be misconstrued as a wide availability – on a synchronous plane –
of various stages of a tradition. Ronald Schleifer refers to Hugh Kenner’s dictum that
“Romanticism skipped Ireland”. What this amounts to is that Ireland ‘lost the nineteenth-century
historical sense’, the sense, in Kenner’s words, of ‘the sheer otherness of the
past.’ In Ireland, Schleifer argues, ‘the past is not other, neither continuous nor
discontinuous with the present; it is simply identical with it.’13 This creates an extra-historical
sense of tradition which is co-present with contemporary literary efforts.
Regarding such a cultural context, it is tempting to imagine a synchronous plane of
literary echoes which, like a dictionary of folkloric motifs, treats the items found on its
co-instantaneous surface as part of one logical nexus where the origins of things are lost.
What matters is the motif in its participation in a web of relations with other such-like
items. On the face of it, this extra-historical plane could form a good context for the game
of leap-frog.
13 Schleifer, Ronald ed., The Genres of the Irish Literary Revival, Pilgrim Books, Inc., Norman, Oklahoma
and Wolfbound Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1980, p. 5.
14
Aside from the fact that Schleifer’s history-less cultural surface is remarkably
inapplicable to Ireland, such a synchronous plane of available pasts has one major
disadvantage as a theoretical model for the leapfrog in that it misses out on the leapfrog’s
most crucial aspect. This is its sheer motility, the momentum which the backward bounce
gathers, the intensification of the excitement of having arrived at an ever-receding point
from the starting point, the thirst for past-ness and lost-ness, and also the desire to reach
the final point where no one has yet leapfrogged. The leapfrogging player is about to go
farther and farther back in a line of arched backs. For a concentrated moment (the
moment when the player makes contact to lift him- or herself), the offered backs act as
spring-boards. Leaping on, the player sees the ultimate aim coming within view – the
final position of the chain of arched backs. The player approaches its triumphant
loneliness – until he/she too must arch a back and offer it as a springboard for some one
else.
“the clearing”
This is the space which the modernist stakes out for him- or herself based on his or her
excavation work among the folk. The journey in the thick forest of folklore leads to a
miraculous sighting of an unexplored, free space where the folk has made a camp hidden
from easy view. This is the space of folkloric enactments. In many cases, it is a magical
circle: the Bulgarian circle dance (horo) or the fire circle of the nestinarka (a dancer on
glowing coals); the circle of the flamenco juerga or of the Gullah “ring shout”; the ring-shaped
rath or fort which is always fairy-haunted. It is also any space, circular or not,
where folkloric enactments take place: e.g. the calypso ‘yard’ as well as the calypso ‘tent’;
15
an isolated cottage with its tell-tale fireside; a football ground with its long-lived tradition
of chanting; the prinkum (in Connaught) which is the soirée or hoolie in Ireland, which in
Bulgaria is the vecherinka (lit. ‘a little nighter’) and in Spain the velada; the sedyanka (in
Bulgarian villages; lit. ‘a sitting’) where the folks take turns to tell stories and sing songs.
More generally, this is the place inhabited by the folk: an island (e.g. the Aran Islands), a
small town or a larger geographical territory where traditions still live strong (e.g. the
town of Sligo, the Westernmost parts of Ireland, Andalusia in Spain, the Rhodope region
in Bulgaria). The modernist stumbles upon this clearing, and a new world is disclosed in
front of his/her gaze. To be part of the clearing is a privilege. In many cases, this
idealized space is a fantasy which serves as a model for poetic performance. Finally, the
clearing is a creative space (a niche carved out by the modernist), a fertile ground marked
by its difference from literary schools and fashions.
When a larger group of authors meet one another in the same clearing (Lady Gregory,
as the story goes, saw Synge in the distance when they were both doing fieldwork on the
Aran Islands), the new folksy movement begins to look like a phase within the larger
folkloric tradition. This phenomenon of the crowded clearing is particularly relevant to
literary movements/modernisms which share the communal goal of driving a nation’s
culture forward. Bulgarian poetic and musical modernisms, much like Irish literary
modernism, were communal projects of this type.
“song”
Song informs the very essence of poetry. This is a typical mantra repeated time and
again by nineteenth-century seekers of the lost origin of language. The music of speech
16
was a constant concern of the authors studied here. But this is not equivalent to the
musicalization of poetry (as in Verlaine’s dictum ‘Music above all’). More than simply a
carrier of vocality, song – as defined here – is responsible for what one may call the sung
aspect of modernist poetry. I take song to be a haunting presence in poetry. For my
purposes, it will also serve as the archetype of folklore. And since modernism sometimes
uses folklore as its model, it appears that song, and more specifically the folk song, may
be an archetype for modernism. This is a strange view, but (as the modernisms studied
here amply testify) not an unlikely one.
It is difficult to make claims about folklore because it comprises an endless array of
genres. Often, such claims are based on a narrow selection of examples and, for this
reason, simply cannot apply to all of folklore. One needs a short-hand term which both
captures folklore’s crucial qualities and serves as a more approachable reference point.
Depending on the qualities one wishes to stress, certain folk forms become more or less
appropriate. For the purposes of this study, the folk song will be considered the “ideal” of
folklore.
Song has a funny habit of persisting all the way from the bottom to the top levels on the
hierarchy of appropriation. Like a semiotic chora, it cuts through the symbolic discourses
– from antiquarianism with its folk song collections through poetic folklorism to the
scientific project of folkloristics – which echo the song. Sometimes, as in Yeats’s poetry,
the song is a haunting presence. Poetic projects (over and above individual poems) of this
sort make sure that song gets a new lease on life. From being a herbarium lying between
the pages of a field-trip book, the folkloric material gets picked up, re-collected, and ends
17
up playing a central role in poetic systems. Descending from on high, the judgment of the
professional folklorist (and of the critic of culture) sings its own version of the folk tune.
The poetics of scientific folklorism (and of cultural critique) often include a song of
lamentation – that folklore (and culture) is dying, that it needs to be saved. This lament of
the folklorist (critic of culture) appears with the perverse regularity of a folk motif across
widely different cultures. Sometimes, the folklorist sees the folksy poet as an impertinent
intruder. The poet – with his/her own hidden agenda – is seen as interfering with the
natural lifecycle of folklore. This allows the folklorist to take up the mournful song of the
loss of song.
Song is dialect in its sensuous sonority (the subject of chapter one); it is also an essence
inherent to speech (chapter two will attempt to tie the loose threads of Yeats and Florence
Farr’s ideas about the music of speech); it is also the sound of a musical tradition (e.g. the
flamenco tradition) with its haunting presence in the poetic work (this is the focus of the
Lorca section of chapter three); finally, it is the traditional singing voice of an imagined
speaker permeating a poem (the Geo Milev section of chapter three traces the presence of
the collective voice of the uprising folk through the prism of an urban folkloric tradition,
the football song).
Ultimately, song is an escape from the customary analysis of folkloric motifs in literary
works. The literary scholar often ends up entangled in an ideal of literariness which
involves an almost exclusive focus on themes – as if that is all folklore has to yield which
could be of interest to the literary analyst. As if literariness itself, which is customarily
thought of as residing in the written, cannot tolerate the hybridity of the spoken. But there
18
is a viable alternative to this exclusivist conception of the literary which, as I hope to
show, is to be found in the very sound of folklore. Even when the acoustic dimension is
invoked by literary criticism (as in, say, Ann Saddlemyer’s discussion of J. M. Synge’s
soundscapes), it is rarely more than a musical metaphor. Even when it is actual musical
principles which are invoked, it is quite customary to talk about symphonic mechanisms
underlying particular literary works, sonata structures, music as a motif, etc., – in other
words, it is classical music serving as analogy or as direct source. Rarely is folk song
discussed as a song, as sound. But the song-ness of song will sound if we could but sound
it.
“Sung” poetry: gymnophonetics and folk grammar
Song takes us directly to the sound of poetry. Here I will only give a small illustration of
one of the many ways in which the tradition of folk performance inhabits a poetic work.
Hristo Botev (1848 – 1876), the archetype of the poet-folklorist in the Bulgarian literary
canon, is not a modernist proper but his work with the Bulgarian folk song was both
influential and paradigmatic for subsequent episodes in the history of Bulgarian literature.
It would stand on its own right even if it was not crucial for later authors (including Geo
Milev) as his poetic effort to sound and perform the voice of the folk song remains
unsurpassed. Known for his habit of reciting variants of his poems long before their
publication, Botev naturally gained preeminence in the folkloric chain of transmission.
His poetic gems quickly became songs in the hands of the people before they reached the
printed page where they merely look like great literature. The following strophe (Strophe
1) performs what it describes:
19
Nastáne vécher, mésets izgrée
Zvezdí opsípjat svoda nebésen
Gorá zashúmi, vjátar povée
Balkánat pée haidúshka pésen14
This is a rather tame transcription which does not even begin to register the sound of the
poem. For starters, it needs to be supplemented by a short exercise in phonetic
gymnastics in addition to a few diacritical improvements.
Discussions of poetry’s music usually focus on vowels. But musicality should not
simply mean vowels. For one thing, certain sounds like l, m, n, etc., are hard to place in
only one category (Indeed, the very operations of affrication, voicedness, plosiveness etc.
– all pertaining to the discussion of consonants – already contain musical aspects.
Consonants are the hidden cache of musicality).15 For another, the contortions of the
tongue are a lot more intriguing, and one does not want to miss out on this by limiting
oneself to, say, six sounds.16
***
Exercise One: In RP, the t, d, l, n, are realized by the tip of the tongue pressing against
the mouth’s roof (or alveolar ridge). In Bulgarian, as in Irish, no such exertions are
required. Instead of being alveolar, these sounds are dental. Try loosening the taut
curvature of the English “t” and let the very tip of the tongue comfortably slide between
14 Cf. CD, Track 1.
15 The Calypso singers from Trinidad, for instance, often rhyme on ‘n’, ‘ng’, ‘l’, etc.
16 The six vowels in the Bulgarian language are ‘a’ (as in ‘cup’); ‘uh’ (a kind of reduced Bulgarian ‘a’ and
quite curt as in ‘yes suhr’ or ‘cuhrt’); ‘o’ (as in ‘top’ but pronounced in the British way); ‘u’ (as in the
Spanish ‘curva’); ‘e’ (as in ‘bed’); ‘i’ (as in ‘tin’). In quick succession: a – uh – o – u – e – i.
20
the upper and lower front teeth. Then release easily with little aspiration or fricative
effect: T as in toy (‘he’).
Exercise Two: Let the tongue stay where it is for T. Then draw it up very slightly and
place the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth (there is still no “English” curvature): N
as in ne (‘not’).
Exercise Three: And finally, the Scottish R – heavily vibrating like a rattlesnake. The
tongue draws back yet further and is now heavily curved.
Exercise Four: These three progressive gradations of curvature from T through N to R
allow the tongue to start between the teeth very straight and easy, then curve ever so
slightly behind the front teeth before finally assuming the curvature (much more
ergonomic as in yoga’s back-flip) of R: R as in umira (‘dies’). In succession, this
amounts to T-N-R…T-N-R… Practice this!17 This tongue-work accounts for the
consonants of toy ne umira (‘he not dies’, i.e. ‘he never dies’). Here is the full couplet
(perhaps the most famous piece of Bulgarian poetry): Toss (dialectal contraction of
tozi ,‘this one’), koyto (‘who’) padne (‘falls’) v boy (‘in fight’) za (‘for’) svobóda
(‘freedom’), toy ne umina…(‘He who falls fighting for freedom/ He never dies’). Of
course, there are some further necessary intonational additions to account for the fact that
this is a sententious statement which, like any famous slogan, is surrounded by a Delphic
aura and is followed in its footsteps by the history of its past usages:
17 You will find that for the Bulgarian T and N, the difficulty is in loosening the tongue. The reverse
process of tautening and tightening the tongue was necessary for the ergon-laden phonology lab of RP-oriented
Sofia University.
21
Toz koyto padne v boy za svobóda,
toy ne umira…
In order to sound Strophe 1 better, one needs a few orthographical additions. However,
diacritical improvements can only go so far, as we will see from the study of William
Barnes’s dialectal poetry. I will only add one here: the second –a in vjátar is a rough
Bulgarian vowel not unlike the –i of ‘Yessir’, when it is pronounced emphatically, or the
-u of ‘murmur’: Yessir ~ vjátir. Of course the –r is the rough Scottish R: VjátiR
povée…18
On a more global level – and focus on individual sounds should never be the end of the
affair – one hears in the background the tradition’s tremulous eee which accounts for no
small part of the mystery of the Bulgarian folk song.19 Like the ay of flamenco, the
trembling vowels of the Bulgarian folk song are a traditional vehicle of indexical
meaning as well as a carrier of emotion. In this sense, they function more as tones most
of whose intent is dampened when they become transcribed as letters. The otherwise
rough uh is also a favorite choice with folk singers for tremulous modulation. These
prolonged vowels can carry the sad melody of a song and become even more significant
in terms of semantic content than the words themselves.
But phonetic play in folk-based poetry allows mere sounds and the imitation of the
sound of the folk song to go beyond phonetics. Strophe one is also an example of the
grammatic playfulness typical of Bulgarian dialectal speech. The feel of this folk
18 Cf. CD, Track 4. One critic of Bulgarian culture in the 1920s asserted that the whole spirit of Bulgaria
resided in the ‘uh’: Buhlgaria.
19 Cf. CD, Track 1.
22
grammar is very difficult to convey in another language, but some of its complexity could
still be captured. The verb forms in strophe one follow a pattern: nastáne (is beginning to
become), izgrée (is rising), opsípyat (are strewing), zashúmi (is beginning to whisper),
povée (is blowing), pée (is singing). I have used the present progressive, but there are
complications. For one thing, the prefixes na- (of nastane), op-, za-, and po- change the
aspect of each verb. For instance, instead of stava (is becoming), which is in the
progressive aspect, we have na-stane where the na- is a marker of the perfective aspect.
Thus, a peculiar mixture is created between perfective (has become) and progressive (is
becoming). The finality (what linguists call telicity) of the perfective is undercut by the
non-finality (atelicity) of the progressive. The atelic event of becoming is at the same
time the telic event of having become. Since the verbs in the strophe are marked as both
telic and atelic, the sense conveyed is of something which is in the process of becoming,
but this is a process which is seen as having already reached its end (telos).
This universal markedness is further complicated when we take into account the
dimension of temporality. Verbs can be either finite or non-finite; for instance the
infinitive (‘to become’) is a non-finite form as are the gerund (‘becoming’) and forms
which are part of phrases like ‘let it become’, ‘is to become’, ‘must become’. Finite forms
of the verb ‘become’ include: ‘I become’, ‘he/she becomes’, etc, which are all marked in
Bulgarian (i.e. ‘I become’ is marked differently than ‘we become’) for gender and
number. The verbs in the strophe straddle both possibilities, i.e. they could be translated
as both ‘the night has become’ (nastana) and ‘the night [is to] become’ ([da] nastane) or
‘[let it] become’ ([neka da] nastane) except for the fact that the full phrase which marks a
23
verb as non-finite (‘is to …’ or ‘let it …’) is only suggested by the special suffixes of the
verbs (-e and –i). In the same breath, one hears both the finite ‘it has become’ and the
non-finite ‘[let it] become’. It seems as if the verbs try to suggest a space of atemporality
– an absolute “now” which straddles both possibilities of the two binaries (i.e. finite:non-finite
and progressive:perfective).20
Things would have been much easier if the poet had stuck to the simple past tense to
which all the extemporized forms of the verbs in strophe one are very similar: e.g. the
root of nastane (–stane) is different in only one sound (the all-important tremulous –e of
folk song) from the past tense form stana (‘became’), which is in any case the expected
form in a descriptive passage of the becoming night: the night came, the moon rose, the
wind started to whisper, etc. A full translation of the verbs would look strange in English
but will do more justice to the mix of tenses and aspects in the original, which, strangely,
sounds natural.21 A possible reason for the facility with which poets in the Bulgarian
language may naturalize grammatical oddness is the brevity (sometimes only one vowel
will do) with which verb tenses and aspects tend to be marked. Thus, individual sounds
become the carriers of grammatical innovation as well as musicality.
The night has-is becomecaming
The crescent has-is arisening
Stars a-bestrewning the heavenly arc
The forest a-whisper, wind ablowen
The Balkan singing a haiduk song.
20 I owe a large portion of this analysis to the professional advice of Ivan Arsenalov.
21 Indeed, if one was asked to name the grammatical tense of Botev’s famous strophe, the question would
appear to be serious.
24
Curiously, the only grammatically “correct” verb of the sequence is the verb pée (‘is
singing’) which is in the present progressive tense. More curiously, its grammatical
regularity becomes twisted and warped since it participates in a context of grammatical
oddness. But since this oddness is quite masterfully naturalized (i.e. the extemporized
verb forms sound as if they actually existed in the grammar of the Bulgarian language),
the oddness is once again perceived as regularity. In the present progressive form pée, we
hear correctness become deviance become correctness. In turn, the verb’s doubly
tremulous vowel (better rendered as –éé) seems to naturalize/correct the other verbs in
the group as the whole strophe sequence is made to sound – for lack of an existing
grammatical term – present progressive. The Balkan mountain sings with the voice of
tradition whose own éé’s reinforce the haunting presence of the folk song (pésen).
Examples of such lyrical oddments could be multiplied easily; they share one thing in
common: they are all profoundly indebted to a sonic vision of poetry borrowed quite
consciously from folklore.
Who are the folk after all?
In E. J. Hobsbawm’s view, the “folk” helps define the fictive nation.22 Quite apart from
the idea that nationalism is itself an imitation of the folkloric worldview (a bad one!),
nationalist ideology depends on a programmatic identification of the national mass with
“the folk”. Thus, the folk is the logical center of a conceptual system. This definition of
the folk can be expanded to include not only nationalist ideology but also philosophical
22 Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, myth, reality, second edition,
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
25
or poetic projects. It is a slightly cumbersome definition, one of whose virtues is that it
depends not so much on a necessarily reifying analysis of folk consciousness (often
assumed to be un-conscious, pre-logical, primitive, etc.) as on the logical function of “the
folk” in these systems. This reading of the folk as a kind of generic fictional character
allows one to link the construction of the folk in modernist poetic projects to the systemic
role which the figure of the folk plays in other discourses: e.g. in philosophical works
starting from Herder and Rousseau via Humboldt and nineteenth-century philology (Max
Muller and others) and ending with Ernst Cassirer whom I see as having the last say in a
tradition of philosophizing about the origin of language.
Depending on the logical/fictive requirements of a given system, the folk may appear in
many different guises. For John Locke, as for Schiller (in his essay on the naïve and
sentimental) and Julia Kristeva, the logical center is the figure of the child. The child
carries a conceptual load which allows the three philosophers concerned with the
beginnings of idea formation, with simplicity, and with language acquisition respectively,
to build their arguments. In other systems, the folk could be the proletariat, the mad, the
peasant, the savage, natural man, etc. Philosophical works stage the figure of the folk as
much as do the poetic systems of modernist poets. For Lorca, this central character is the
Gypsy; Geo Milev’s folk is a new vulgar race with iron teeth; for Yeats, as for Synge, the
folk is the Irish peasant. This figure changes shape according to the requirements of the
poetic system.23
23 For a Caribbean poet such as Claude McKay, it is the Jamaican of 'pure black blood' as well as the Afro-
American.
26
Discussing the folk of folkloristics, Susan Ritchie, taking her cue from Donna
Haraway, compares it to the figure of the fetus in abortion debates. It is a handy logical
center since it is speechless, hence needing someone to rescue it from its voicelessness by
constructing a theory about its inalienable rights.24 ‘Ventriloquist representation does
allow marginalized groups visibility, but only if they first surrender meaningful
difference.’25 It is this ‘meaningful difference’ which philosophers, theorists of
culture/language, and poets seek.
Wolf-child, “Wild Boy of Aveyron”, savage, monster, cyborg, peasant, Aryan, Semite,
Bulgar, caveman, Ruritanian, Iranian, Scythian, Gael, proletarian, primitive, pre-literate,
unconscious, mummy, Liliputian, natural, indigenous, Phoenician, vagrant, tinker, Gypsy,
nanny, Adam, Iroquois, islander, Arab, Huron, Hottentot, Trobriand, Lapp, Turk, Goth,
giaour, “mere” Irish, Paddy, Sambo, E.T., Leo Africanus … The list of folk-figures in
various systems is inexhaustible. In all cases, the folk carries crucial qualities which
logically prop the system.
Maurice Olender traces the figures of the Aryan and the Semite in nineteenth-century
debates on language.26 From a logical center in the discussion of the origin of language,
this folk couple assumed racial qualities and became substantive proof of biological
24 For Ritchie’s discussion, see her article ‘Ventriloquist Folklore: Who Speaks for Representation?’ in
Western Folklore, Vol. 52, No. 2/4, Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives on the Politics of
Culture (Apr. – Oct., 1993), pp 365 – 378.
25 ‘Ventriloquist Folklore’, p. 371.
26 Olender, Maurice, The Languages of Paradise. Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press: 1992; first published as Les langues du paradis:
Aryens et Sémites, un couple providential, Editions du Seuil, 1989.
27
theories. In the nineteenth century, language study was intricately linked with cultural
critique and the representation of race. Thus, Ernest Renan (1823 – 1892) and others
derived qualities for each figure based on language differences.27 The Semites had
capacity for emotion, passion, primitive feeling, poetry, tradition, and timeless truth.
Opposed to these qualities were those possessed by the Aryan: capacity for intellect,
analysis, conceptualization, science, progress, ever-evolving truth. In more negative takes
on the Semite, he, being primitive, possessed timeless truth, which could be construed as
mere superstition and refusal to follow humanity’s inevitable progress as it was ordained
by divine dispensation.28
What is important to note here is not the specific racial type but the easy crossover, in
19th century racial theories, of key qualities (presented as racial characteristics) which
could be summoned up to fill the profile of any racial group as occasion required. The
empty slot for superstition could be filled just as easily by the Irish, for instance.
Needless to say, scientific truth, in this Arnoldian argument, was apportioned to the
English. This particular argument was often meant to serve as a compliment to the Irish.
27 Discussing Renan’s racialist theory of language, Olender says: ‘Onomatopoeia dominated in Semitic
languages, whereas Sanskrit possesses certain words that seem always to have had a “conceptual
meaning” … Ultimately the abstract reason of the Aryans achieved supremacy over the religious exaltation
of the Semites.’ (The Languages of Paradise., p. 74)
28 ‘Many specialists … attributed to all Semitic groups characteristics ostensibly derived from the Hebrews
of the historical period. As a corollary, Renan and many other nineteenth-century European scholars
ascribed to the groups they called Aryan (or Indo-German or Indo-European) characteristics they attributed
to the Greeks. Within the Aryan universe, the energy and abstract intellectual gifts of the Greeks prefigured
the progress of the Indo-European world, while the Vedic pole represented the power of the primitive.’
(Ibid, p. 12)
28
Thus, a folklore aficionado like Sir William Wilde (1815-76) could enthuse on the Irish
predilection for spiritual knowledge:
A wild and daring spirit of adventure – a love of legendary romance – a deep-rooted
belief in the supernatural – an unconquerable reverence for ancient
customs, and an extensive superstitious creed has, from the earliest times,
belonged to the Celtic race. We cannot, therefore, wonder that among the but
partially civilized, because neglected and uneducated, yet withal chivalrous
inhabitants of a large portion of Ireland, a belief in the marvelous should linger
even to the present day.29
The slippage from this benign formulation to views embodying explicit hostility was easy.
From legendary to superstitious to perniciously obstinate in believing in wild fantasies to
backward and even degenerate, the figure of the folk never ceased to yield ‘meaningful
difference.’
But this racial othering may sometimes have unpredictable consequences. Luke
Giddens has catalogued the ways in which ‘notions of degeneracy’, ‘imputations of Irish
savagery’ and a host of other rhetorical slights of hand (typical of 19th century racial
theorizing) placed the Irish in ‘wider systems of prejudice’ which Giddens associates
with the Gothic as a literary genre.30 What he calls ‘the demonology of race’ is part and
parcel of the poetics of the gothic. At the same time, the ‘Gothic as a literary and cultural
form could be turned, through acts of semiotic and narrative appropriation, against itself,
thereby becoming a weapon of the weak.’ This is an interesting example of the folk’s
resistance to the appropriative power of othering discourses. To make such resistances
29 Wilde, Sir William, Irish Popular Superstitions, Rowan and Littlefield: Toronto, 1973, first published
Dublin 1852, p. 5.
30 In Gaelic Gothic, Giddens traces the systematic ways of constituting the Irish variously as disease-carriers,
savage, biologically inferior, insurgent/Fenian, etc.
29
possible, the systematic appropriation of the folk as a conceptual center must also allow a
self-reflexive response on the part of the folk to the generic requirements of the racialist
discourse. As Giddens explains, Gaelic gothic ‘was still a genre’ and, as such, could be
turned upon itself. ‘By redressing rather than disavowing the sins of the past, Gaelic
Gothic rattled the skeletons of its own vaults, thus going some way towards exposing the
calcified cultural deposits that underlie the ideology of race itself.’31 In other words, the
systematic appropriation of the folk has its logical risks – and this is true of folkloric
items more generally in that once they have been appropriated as elements within a
system, they do not cease to have a life of their own. This logical insurgency has its
political counterpart in the historic role of agent which the folk often forcefully re-appropriates
from the colonizer.32
A similar rhetorical turning of the tables is a central strategy in subaltern studies where
the philosophical project is to see the folk as someone who can speak, indeed as someone
who has already spoken through meaningful acts of resistance. It is the insurgency of the
folk which becomes the center of a rhetorical vindication on the part of authors interested
in a redemption story that will give back to the folk some of the agency he had lost
through systematic political and rhetorical erasure. One such case of erasure is when the
31 Giddens, Luke, Gaelic Gothic. Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture, Arlen House, 2006, pp 10, 12, 15.
32 In the chapter ‘The Vampire Strikes Back’ (pp 77 – 87), Giddens explains that the incorporation of the
Gothic genre by racial theory ‘carried its own ideological risks, for, as a genre residing in the protean
nature of language and symbolic form, it did not lend itself to absolute mastery or control.’ The figure of
the vampire represented in magazine caricatures by Charles Stewart Parnell – ‘who is portrayed as a
vampire preying on the innocent … body of Hibernia’ – is also, historically, the bloodsucking Protestant
landlord. Thus, ‘the very rhetorical force of Punch’s image draws upon – releases – a semantic field of
counter-associations that stands as an indictment of colonial rule in Ireland.’
30
folk is denied historical agency even when he appears to possess it: e.g. instances of
insurrection are appropriated into a causal view of (colonialist) history whose primary
concern is to point to the putative progressive aspects of repressive colonialism. For
Ranajit Guha, the ‘importance of such representations can hardly be overestimated. By
making the security of the state into the central problematic of peasant insurgency, it
assimilated the latter as merely an element in the career of colonialism.’ Since the peasant
‘has been [in the process] denied recognition as a subject of history in his own right even
for a project that was all his own’,33 the analyst of historical records on insurgency
(records sponsored exclusively by the colonial government and thus exemplary of the
causal view of history) must read against the grain documents which appropriate the folk
only to mark him as a non-agent. Guha’s critique begins with a recognition that a lot of
ideological detritus has accumulated regarding the figure of the folk. Much of the
prejudice goes back to assimilative interpretations which proliferate images of ‘pre-political
people’ (Hobsbawm). But in order to understand the experience of colonial India,
one must realize that ‘there was nothing in the militant movements that was not
political’.34 To the charge aimed at insurgents by colonial discourse that peasant revolts
were spontaneous outbursts of unorganized energy, Guha flatly replies: ‘There was
nothing spontaneous about all this in the sense of being unthinking and wanting
33 Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford University Press:
Delhi, 1983, p 3.
34 Elementary Aspects, pp 5-6.
31
deliberation.’35 In place of the figure of the folk inherited from colonial discourse, Guha
stages an uprising folk the semiotics of whose ingenuity clearly mark him as the agent of
his own history. This is largely the ideological angle which subaltern studies as an
academic project adopts, and it is no wonder that one of its pioneers should have proved
an exemplary model of how to re-install the folk on a sort of historic pedestal. Much like
in Giddens’s treatment of Gaelic gothic, the folk of subaltern studies strikes back with a
rhetorical force derived from a close reading of the symbology of cultural and political
practices.
Not allowing the underdog of history to remain in its erased position looks somewhat
like a syntactic maneuver whereby the subject-less sentence (a sentence which seemingly
lacks a doer of the action) is rephrased to make room for the ‘rebel consciousness’ of the
subject to loom large. Rebelliousness and insurgency have proved attractive qualities of
the folk for the purposes of historiographical analysis. There is perhaps an irony in all this:
the understandable liberal desire to lend the folk some agency results in the construction
of a museumized folk – a kind of statuesque hero – who is capable, despite assertions to
the contrary, of a deliberate political consciousness, which is nonetheless a consciousness
that remains to be verified. But the process of verification (and for Guha it is largely a
semiotic reading – against the grain – of official documents written for the benefit of the
colonial government) leads to a necessarily reifying analysis of peasant consciousness
which is said to possess certain ‘common’36 qualities. Rebel consciousness assumes the
35 Ibid., p. 9.
36 Ibid., p. 12.
32
qualities of a fictional character which is then handily categorized. The resulting
categories are taken to be exemplary of peasant consciousness more generally. These
‘patterns cutting across particular expressions’ prove to be the elements (or elementary
aspects as Guha calls them) of a generic figure of the folk. The aim, as in a lot of
mystifying constructions of the folk, is ‘to study the elementary aspects of rebel
consciousness in a relatively “pure” state before the politics of nationalism and socialism
begin to penetrate the countryside on a significant scale.’37
In spite of this perhaps inevitable reification38, Guha’s analysis is fascinating and goes
some way towards filling in the figure of the folk who would otherwise remain an empty
cipher in the annals of colonial history. Guha’s methodology is also interesting if a bit
schematic. ‘[F]rom the terms stated for one it should be possible, by reversing their
values, to derive the implicit terms of the other.’ This antonymical method39 whereby the
unmarked is reversed in order to become marked allows Guha to extract a code – which
in its representative generality is not unlike Vladimir Propp’s morphological analysis of
the wonder tale – which turns the tables on the oppressor and highlights ‘the presence of
37 Ibid., p. 13.
38 Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his account of the history of subaltern studies, is aware of this reification but
expressly denies that subaltern studies is inevitably a victim of this logical necessity: ‘Guha thought of
consciousness – and therefore of peasant subjecthood – as something immanent in the very practices of
peasant insurgency. Elementary Aspects is a study of practices of insurgent peasants in colonial India, not
of a reified category called consciousness.’ (Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Habitations of Modernity. Essays in the
Wake of Subaltern Studies, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, p. 15) Actually, as Guha
himself states, the elementary aspects of consciousness are derived directly from the categorical
representation of peasants in colonialist discourse. Indeed, at times Guha seems all too comfortable with
pitting two consciousnesses against each other in structuralist terms. Even the metaphors he uses are telling:
parallel tracks, opposite terms of a polarity, etc.
39 Antonyms: pure peasant reason.
33
consciousness’40 embodied in insurgent practices. This code – extracted by an
imaginative reading athwart the official purpose of the actual documents – allows the
analyst to read folk consciousness as a text. The decisive qualities which Guha’s
rehabilitated folks possess include things like solidarity, territoriality, etc. – in other
words, this is a bundle of markers which constitute the profile of the subaltern folk.
Guha’s attitude to what he terms folklore is curiously negative. For one thing, folklore
is unreliable because it is scanty. ‘An equally disappointing aspect of the folklore relating
to peasant militancy is that it can be elitist too. Not all singers and balladeers took a
sympathetic view of it.’41 Folklore is therefore not an avenue leading one to the
consciousness of Indian peasants. But why should elitist points of view have no place in
folklore? Why should the folk be only insurgent? Clearly, and quite understandably, the
quality of mute unmarkedness is not part of the bundle of markers which the project of
subaltern studies uses to constitute the folk. And yet, despite his avowed dismissal of
folklore, Guha offers an engaging analysis of the complex symbology of peasant folklore
(without calling it folklore) in his study of the semiotics of rumor. In chapter six of his
book (‘Transmission’), we are in the verbally and visually sensuous space of the Indian
peasant where ‘aural signs’ carry a special meaning that remains impenetrable by the
governing authorities. This coded meaning which folklore often carries allows a sign
placed in traditional circulation to function according to a semantic range which could be
constantly invigorated with new meanings. The hermetic nature of Indian peasant
40 Ibid., p. 16.
41 Ibid., p. 15.
34
tradition, like much of folklore, results in a‘miscognition’ on the part of the outsider.42
What Guha’s analysis establishes is that Indian peasants, far from being mute, can
produce ‘a welter of meanings’ and symbols.43 What such analysis ultimately does (and
in this Guha exemplifies subaltern studies as a whole) is to return the sense of agency to
the folk. Instead of the subject viewing himself as alienated from his own destiny (‘a false
consciousness if ever there was one’44), he is now able to view history as a force of his
own making. As Dipesh Chakrabarty exclaims, ‘Guha insisted that, instead of being an
anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of
colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in
India.’45 The void left by the erasure of the folk has been filled, as it often is, by a textual
intervention which constructs the folk as a carrier of a specific conceptual load.
Subaltern studies as a discipline directs a profound critique at theories of nationalism
which build a figure of the folk as an unconscious mass waiting to be mobilized by a
nationalist elite. Often, this approach leads the subaltern scholar to launch a critique at a
42 See especially pp 235-9. A similar instance of miscognition of the traditional symbology of peasant
insurgency can be found in popular movements in 19th century Ireland against landlords, tithes, etc. These
secret associations (the list which Sir William Wilde gives is long: Hearts-of-Steel, Caravats, Shanavests,
Croppies, Defenders, Chalkers, Houghers, White Boys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, etc.) had special
modes of secret communication such as signs, passwords, gestures, dress-code, etc. As Sir Wilde states:
‘[T]he grand feature of the ribbonism of that day was of a dramatic nature.’ (Irish Popular Superstitions, pp
79 ff) Public functions utilizing “code” included also mock wakes and funerals since these were the only
permitted amusements. (Ibid., p. 83) The proliferation of coded meanings conveyed through traditional folk
forms is a widely attested phenomenon across cultures. The Gullah slaves, for instance, used to
communicate important news to each other by means of coded songs which had insurrectionary messages.
The song ‘Go Down Moses’ is of this kind.
43 Ibid., p. 246.
44 Ibid., p. 268.
45 Habitations of Modernity, p. 9.
35
nationalist theory and its assumption that Western rationalism and bourgeois ideology
must necessarily be universal models for nationalist thinking everywhere around the
globe. But, as Partha Chatterjee’s work has shown, Western historicism – which reduces
peasant struggle to isolated or spontaneous and unconscious outbursts of pre-political
consciousness – cannot do justice to the complexity and inherent hybridity of popular
forms of resistance. These forms, which, if anything, transcend universal categories and
in their very heterogeneity present a challenge to totalizing historical narratives and their
reduction of the folk, are ‘stamped on the living beliefs and practices of the people’.46
Popular history, according to Chatterjee, is not a rubble of superstitious beliefs disinterred
by local elites in order to create a usable past. Instead, they constitute a powerful
challenge on Western-style rationalism. In place of the usual equation between
nationalism and political consciousness awakened from above, Chatterjee stresses the
spiritual dimension (particularly through the notion of dharma) which distinguishes the
nationalist imagination in India from its European counterpart.
But again, as in Guha’s positing of antonyms to the Orientalist conception of Indian
peasants, Chatterjee’s analysis proceeds along the grounds of negation of the negation
which leads him to an opposite end of the spectrum. ‘[W]hat the principle of community
as the characteristic unifying feature of peasant consciousness does is directly place it at
the opposite pole to a bourgeois consciousness.’ Again: ‘We must grant that peasant
46 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1993, p. 169.
36
consciousness has its own paradigmatic form, which is not only different from that of
bourgeois consciousness but in fact its very other.’47
Despite being, once again, somewhat schematic, Chatterjee’s critique of universalist
histories of nationalism does two things which most “Western” theoreticians of
nationalism do not: it suggests that popular political consciousness is to be discovered by
a sustained effort to plumb the depths of local traditions and shows how nationalist
ideology actually uses local traditions.48 Nationalism’s success was due to its retrieval of
an ‘inner domain of sovereignty’ from the recesses of national culture, a domain which it
‘constituted in the light of the discovery of “tradition”.’49 It seems that the folk which
Indian (in particular Bengali) nationalism constructs is endowed with different (though at
times schematically different) qualities from those of European nationalism’s folk.50
47 Ibid., 163-4.
48 See ‘The Nation and its Peasants’ chapter of ibid.
49 Ibid., p. 117. Chatterjee is here talking about nationalism’s strategy of locating the women’s question
within the arena of national culture but the argument is valid for Indian nationalism’s use of tradition more
generally, as the analysis of dharma also shows.
50 In all fairness to Chatterjee, it is probably impossible not to reach this (or a similar kind of) position
given the inherent paradox within nationalist thinking in colonial societies. As Chatterjee has explained
elsewhere (cf. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A Derivative Discourse, University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1993), ‘nationalist texts were addressed to both “the people” who were said
to constitute the nation and to the colonial masters whose claim to rule nationalism questioned. To both,
nationalism sought to demonstrate the falsity of the colonial claim that the backward peoples were
culturally incapable of ruling themselves in the conditions of the modern world… [Nationalism] thus
produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also
accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based’
(Nationalist Thought, p. 30). In this sense, nationalist discourse is ‘derivative’; it is ‘a different discourse,
yet one that is dominated by another.’ (p. 42) If there is such a deep-seated relation between the two
discourses, and if at the same time one is explicitly pitted against the other, then the task of disentangling
the two discourses becomes very complex. Chatterjee solves the problem by dividing nationalist thought
into three stages or ‘moments’ (pp 50-1). The ‘moment of manoeuvre’ is where the peasant mass gets
involved by being acted upon from above. Since its consciousness cannot be transformed by its
reconciliation to ‘rationalist forms of an “enlightened” politics’ (p. 81) – something which, as Chatterjee
37
Similarly, it is possible to draw a map of ‘a “modern” national culture that is
nevertheless not Western’ and whose development ‘does not allow a simple transposition
of European patterns.’51 Those patterns usually posit a folk who is refused a passport to
modernity. The backward, un-modern folk cannot possibly play a major role in the
nationalist agenda of modernization of local culture. But as some subaltern and post-colonial
theorists have shown, this is not always the case in marginalized (folk) cultures –
that is to say, the popular is not always ‘the repository of natural truth, naturally self-sustaining
and therefore timeless’ and stuck in traditional backwardness.52 The folk’s
heterogeneity vis-à-vis a modernity conceived along the lines of Western historicist
models is often seen – falsely, as these critics aver – as a kind of ur-mentality, before
modernity. Small wonder, then, that nationalist elites – according to the perspective of
Eurocentric histories of nationalism – had to invent a solution to a seemingly irresolvable
paradox concerning the local culture’s progress to modernity: to create a modern cultural
model based on timeless tradition. Since timeless tradition has nothing modern to offer,
avers, is impossible since it would involve ‘a total transformation of agrarian economy’ – it has to be
appropriated. The figure of Ghandi (who is himself later appropriated as a kind of fictional folk hero by
nationalists such as Jawaharlal Nehru) is an example of this ideological procedure. As Chatterjee’s
description of ‘the moment of departure’ shows, his critique of nationalism is more or less in agreement
with the standard view of historians of nationalism when it comes to the perception of the peasant masses
as actable objects unable to bring about ‘true modernity’ on their own. ‘This ideal [of true modernity],
however, necessarily implies an elitist programme, for the act of cultural synthesis [of the superior material
qualities of Western cultures with the spiritual greatness of the East] can only be performed by the
supremely refined intellect. Popular consciousness, steeped in superstition and irrational folk religion, can
hardly be expected to adopt this ideal: it would have to be transformed from without.’ (p.51)
51 Ibid., pp 6-7.
52 Ibid., p. 72.
38
then clearly hybrid “modernized” traditions had to be invented which would both tap into
long-standing local cultures and facilitate the progress to modernity.
It is instructive that even a subaltern critic like Chatterjee owes something to this
general formulation of the post-colonial dilemma. Of course his interest in recuperating
the folk does not allow him to agree with the view that local culture is indeed timeless but
he does see a conflict between local tradition and modernity. What is not permitted in this
picture is the folk’s own ability to issue a plea to modernization. The agency, even in
Chatterjee’s critique of nationalism, is placed outside – in the hands of a local nationalist
elite. The dilemma is not the folk’s own to settle, it is a dilemma of nationalism as an
“ism”.53
Negotiating a similar terrain, David Lloyd finds in Irish culture alternative
‘imaginaries’ (opposed to state-oriented nationalism and its modernizing institutions)
which are nonetheless not backward or un-modern but constitute a decisive influence on
modernization and hence allow us to see the modern as well as the traditional in a way
which transcends the usual narrow conception of these terms as forming two polar nodes
in a dichotomy. State-oriented (nationalist) ideology occludes these ‘nonmodern’ spaces
from its progressive version of history while postcolonial and subaltern historiography
should seek to reinstall these modalities as important undercurrents of modernity.54 This
53 See note 50 above.
54 See ‘Nationalism against the State’, ‘Regarding Ireland in a Postcolonial Frame’, and ‘Outside History’
in Lloyd, David, Ireland After History, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1999, pp 19-36, 37-
52, 77-88. ‘The non-modern is a name for such a set of spaces that emerge out of kilter with modernity but
nonetheless in a dynamic relation to it. It is … not the traditional, nor even, strictly speaking, the subaltern,
but it is a space where the alternative survives, in the fullest sense of the word, not as a preserve or an
39
interesting way of resolving the dilemma places an emphasis on instances of
‘contradictory modernity’55, while the folk emerging from Lloyd’s discussion is no
longer the pre-modern mass awaiting its transformation from above56 but a transgressive
agent provoking the state to invent modern structures.
As Lloyd’s transgressive revision of Irish historiography points out, there are
alternative forms of nationalism which do not amount to a vertical integration of the
masses whose own (‘other’) ‘modes of social organization’ are mistakenly termed “proto-nationalist”
by ‘most Western accounts of nationalism’ interested in charting a historical
trajectory from the pre-political (inchoate and unorganized) to the rational and politically
motivated nationalist efforts culminating in the formation of the state.57 Excluded from
the official memory which sees the state as the flowering of all anti-colonial struggles,
marginalized social movements, for instance, represent ‘different modes of subjectivity
than those of the liberal political subject of modernity.’ As such, they remain
‘[u]nhistoricized because … the alternative memories of the past are constituted always
outside, but as an incommensurable set of cultural formations historically occluded from, yet never actually
disengaged with, modernity.’ (Ireland After History, p. 2)
55 Ibid., p. 81.
56 The idea of the folk as a mass awaiting its vertical integration or ideological motivation by an élite is
hotly contested by all the postcolonial (subaltern) authors examines here. Heather Laird (see below),
following Guha, stresses the fact that conspiracy theories aimed by the authors of official records to explain
peasant insurgency cannot do justice to the complexity of the relationships between peasants and their
“leaders”. It is not the case, Laird shows, that Irish peasants must wait for an outside agency to show them
the way; ‘the relationship between Land League branches and agitating tenant-farmers and labourers was
far more complex, variable and ambiguous’ than the official account shows. On many occasions, ‘agrarian
agitation was shaped by the poorest members of the rural population.’ (see Laird, Heather, Subversive Law
in Ireland, 1879 – 1920; from ‘unwritten law’ to the Dáil Courts, Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2005, p. 70)
57 Ibid., p. 23.
40
in relation to the relentless forward movement of developmental historicism that
constitutes the alternative as passé.’58 These movements were crucial but forgotten by
official nationalist historiography which produces ‘the modern citizen-subject as the
subject of the nation-state’ and in the process of this ideological interpellation has to
exclude these alternative forms of subjectivity which are hybrid and heterodox in that
they do not follow the exclusive logic of state-oriented nationalism even if they
sometimes include the goals of nationalism in themselves.59
The liberating effect of subaltern and postcolonial historiography60, vis-à-vis the
hegemony of Western-style accounts of nationalism, has been, as Lloyd explains, ‘to
challenge both the assumption of the inherent conservatism of the Irish populace and that
of the traditionalism of Irish republicanism.’61 In the case of Irish popular resistance, such
histories have shown that the ‘non-élite subject oscillates’ between various subject
positions of which the citizen-subject is only one. The ‘formal hybridity’ of this subject is
not merely an elementary (antonymically derived) difference (as it was for Guha) from
the subject posited by colonial historiography. Rather, this ‘inassimilable’ subject has ‘a
58 Ibid., pp 98-9.
59 As Lloyd points out, social movements implicated with the Irish struggle for independence such as ‘the
social feminism of Constance Markievicz’, ‘the racialist nationalism of Arthur Griffith’, and ‘the
republican socialism of James Connolly’ moved ‘at their own paces’ and had ‘distinct ends, only one of
which could be subsumed in the declaration of independence of 1916 and the struggle for autonomous state
institutions.’ (Ibid, p. 28)
60 Writing in 1999, Lloyd claims that ‘[i]n the wake of a still dominant “revisionist” history, Irish
historiography has yet to produce anything as self-conscious and theoretically reflective as Subaltern
Studies. Nevertheless, it is clear that the last fifteen years or so has seen the emergence of a large corpus of
non-élite histories: histories of agrarian movements, local histories, social histories of the complex
intersections of class and colonization in rural Ireland…’ (Ibid., p. 80)
61 Ibid., pp 85-7.
41
mode of rationalization’ which is ‘simultatenously and paradoxically disintegrative and
homogenizing’, traditional and modern, interpellated and non-interpellated, fragmentary
yet able to resurface ‘in moments of danger.’ This historic folk is no longer re-installed in
dominant history (once the aspects of its consciousness have been reconfigured) but is
conceived of as always remaining in ‘excess of possible histories.’62
Thus cultural formations may be “traditional” in one sense and “progressive” in another,
but the larger point is that such terms do not do justice to the heteronomy of the folk.
Similarly, agrarian movements in nineteenth-century Ireland ‘cannot be seen simply as
reactionary or traditional: they represent continuously imaginative responses to new
situations that participate in the production of modernity, but in ways which evidently
cannot be seen as “modernizing”.’ Since these movements required a response from the
state (e.g. the construction of a national police force), they participated in the production
of a state-sponsored institution ‘long before any such “modern” institution emerged in
Britain.’63 How does one come to terms with such movements of popular unrest without
changing the very terms of dominant historiography?
More recently, Heather Laird has shown that there were ‘secret and unrecognized’
forms of legality/resistance in Ireland.64 Between 1879 and 1920 65, Irish popular
62 Ibid., p. 84.
63Ibid., p. 44.
64 Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879 – 1920; from ‘unwritten law’ to the Dáil Courts, Four Courts Press:
Dublin, 2005.
65 This is the period Laird’s account focuses on; popular forms of resistance, as Laird stresses, go at least as
far back as the second half of the eighteenth century with its Whiteboys and numerous other resistance
formations (Subversive Law, p. 25).
42
resistance focused its efforts on constructing a “legal” system of their own which was
more immediate in both its appeal and the discharging of its function. Like Guha, Laird
reads official history against the grain, and this allows her both to resurrect the folk’s
historical agency and to show that alongside – and even before – state-oriented
nationalism, the Irish rural poor had invented effective forms of political resistance.66
These non-official systems of control (the “unwritten law”) included ‘institutions [e.g.
alternative courts] that paralleled in their proceedings and procedures those they were
invented to subvert’ as well as practices (e.g. the boycott) whose punitive logic was
‘substantially different to anything that could be found in British state institutions’.67
Alternative courts, the saving and plowing of crops, the boycott, methods to delay
eviction or to frustrate sheriff’s sales, various creative forms of resistance to the seizure
of goods, anti-hunting agitation (e.g. poaching or the wren hunt), and other forms of
organized resistance lend to agrarian agitation (conceived by dominant historiography as
a threat to the just unfolding of history) the character of a systematically unwritten
attempt to write history.
These communal practices often had a ‘ceremonial and carnivalesque quality’, but for
Laird their importance lies not merely in the fact that they were a symbolic ‘inversion of
social hierarchies’ but also in that they represented a ‘conflicting approach to the concept
of law’ which was based on ‘just retribution’ against the law. Folk culture, with its non-
66 In the 1880s ‘two conflicting systems of control’ operated in Ireland; ‘popular disaffection towards one
of these systems – official law – allowed for its displacement by the other – subversive or alternative law.’
(Ibid., p. 16)
67 Ibid., pp 27-8.
43
official concepts and symbolic apparatus, was ‘shaping Irish resistance to the colonial
state and its legal institutions.’ Lawlessness and disorder functioned in this ‘alternative
system’ as ‘law and order.’68 But the folk which emerges from Laird’s account is no
longer merely anarchical, while the popular forms of resistance are no longer the unruly
haphazard efforts marginalized by official historiography. Rather, these efforts represent
a complexly symbolic – and crucially – an effective means of resistance to the legality of
the colonizer which (to some extent because of popular forms with such widespread
appeal) never managed to gain hegemony.
In this way, resistance is both culturally complex and pragmatically successful in
effecting change – it possesses these two crucial attributes while at the same time
remaining marginalized by historiographic discourse. Heather Laird’s larger theoretical
claim is that subaltern studies allows these popular efforts to remain marginal, but what
her work (like that of Guha, for instance, with whose project she must by and large be
sympathetic) does is to chart a space which seems to coincide with the theoretical efforts
of subaltern studies which, too, desires to redeem the folk from the margins of
historiography. For all her purported theoretical disagreements, the thrust of Laird’s
archival work seems to benefit subaltern theory in that the folk whom she allows to gain
the spotlight of history is no longer an anarchical and futilely resistant disorganized mass
awaiting its political and ideological activation – for the purposes of decolonization – by
68 Ibid., pp 18-20.
44
an enlightened (nationalist) elite.69 The popular forms of resistance which Laird traces
seem to fit David Lloyd’s category of the non-modern: these are forms which constitute a
current running parallel to70, but ultimately remaining marginalized by, state-centered
versions of history.71 By remaining marginal, this resistant folk announces the limits of
official history from which the folk has been ostracized.
***
Driving through the mist along a narrow winding road in the Strandja Planina, I could
not but slow down and pause before one of the most spectacular sights that can be seen
early morning in the higher elevations. The road passed by a hillock moderately steep and
69 The resistance of the Irish rural poor (their ‘battle with the law’ as the Freeman’s Journal tendentiously
put it in 1879) ‘should not be interpreted … in terms of elite stimulus and subaltern or non-elite response.’
(Ibid., p. 15)
70 As Laird emphasizes, ‘alternative forms of control outside official law are not always a by-product of
conquest.’(Ibid., p. 23) They are sometimes, like folklore, an ingrained part of traditional culture whose
lifecycles are larger than the historically limited moments (however long and momentous) of colonization.
71 In her discussion of the boycott (Ibid., pp 28 ff), Laird distinguishes her approach from two views of this
popular phenomenon: the view which sees the boycott as a pre-modern (communal, familial) form of
resistance and the view which traces the similarity of its punitive mechanism to that of the English official
(i.e. modern) law. The second view sees in the boycott a modernizing tendency while the first insists on its
functioning as an alternative to the official arrangement. Laird sees in the boycott a hybrid structure
containing both ‘semi-feudal’ and commercial elements. Thus, it cannot fit either the pre-modern or
modern category. Despite Laird’s own assertion that the boycott escapes also its categorization as ‘non-modern’
(in Lloyd’s sense), it is not clear from her discussion why that should be the case. Laird’s
insightful analysis of the boycott stresses the non-modernity as well as the modernity of this phenomenon
(pp 35 ff). It was modern in that it posed ‘a substantial threat to the state’ (But it is precisely in this sense
that it is also ‘non-modern’, in Lloyd’s sense of the word.) In the end, she offers an account of a
phenomenon which follows a logic different from that of the official law but which also cannot be
contained by revisionist (and state-oriented) historiography with its investment in ironing out popular forms
of resistance or cultural undercurrents which do not obviously square with an ideology positing the state as
the center of decolonizing efforts. The effective marginalization of popular practices by state-centered
historiography finds its parallel in the inability of the English legal system to come to terms with the illegal
act of the boycott whose criminality is not easily categorizable. But pointing to these parallel exclusions
manages to emphatically expose the logic of state-oriented ideology which marginalizes communal acts
just as it criminalizes individuals in the name of the whole. It is clear that these alternative forms persist
outside of both the state (i.e. Lloyd’s non-modern) and the legal system (i.e. Laird’s examples of subversive
law).
45
positioned at such an angle as to allow an open passage of sunlight coming in between
the higher peaks. The dew had fallen heavy and was making everything hang. And then,
on a sudden, as if by a miracle, a resplendent spectacle came into view: a multitude of
spiders’ webs, well-defined in their minutest contours and lineaments by the glistening
water of the dew hanging on them, peppered the hillside as if the whole mountain
consisted of nothing but spiders. Positioned thickly at various spots along the down-slope,
all in full view, the webs threatened to come out as far as the road as if these invisible
masters of the homespun were competing for pole position suitable for the display of
their work. Evidently, the anonymous organizers of this special event had racked up their
gossamer trousseaux purposefully angled to be seen by those who drive past. This
confident exhibition put me in mind of all anonymous spiders on all well-lit hills of all
road-pierced mountains with all of their invisible knitwear. Ultimately, this unseen
multitude, glimpsed only in fragments, viewed only from the right angle, stands for the
folk who is, like the spiders, off-the-road, non-apparent, and prolific.
Nationalism’s use of folklore
A more or less dismissive attitude to folklore is the accepted view within the
“modernist” branch of nationalism studies. Tom Nairn’s playfully petulant sarcasm
pretends to cover, in one fell swoop, the rich terrain of folklore:
Did no one ever fall asleep sitting through the 200th rendition of Homer (albeit
creatively modified by local bard, touches of homely color added, etc.)? Given
an opportunity, the folk themselves have invariably voted for the movie-house,
the tabloid and then the home TV screen.72
72 Nairn, Tom, Faces of Nationalism. Janus Revisited, Verso: London, New York, 1997, p. 5.
46
As an exasperated riposte to a folklorist – who keeps insisting that various misuses of
folklore by non-professional outsiders amount to a willful brushing aside of its holy
daylight by an eagerly decadent, blind owl of Minerva in a hurry to announce the
beginning of his nocturnal tenure – the gesture is almost understandable. For, in this
scenario, it would be commentators like Nairn who are the blind owls.
Hobsbawm et al seem to think that folklore is always and only a beautiful lie, a kind of
fakelore.73 One by one, national myths and traditions are debunked by Hobsbawm and
his allies as modern inventions sold to a country-loving folk by a group of individuals
with a vested interest in the whole mechanism of mystification. The Welsh eisteddfod,
the Scottish tartan kilt, et cetera – examples multiply the more one looks at folklore, and
traditional culture in general, from this vantage point – are all part of a universal monster
with many national heads. This celebrated but crude view of folklore has attracted
reactions from scholars of nationalism who are less sympathetic to the idea of a purported
modern provenance of nationalist ideology.
A. D. Smith complains that for some scholars nationalist ideology is narrowly
conceived as simply and essentially instrumentalist:
The return to the communal past is necessary if the masses are to be mobilized.
For Kedourie, the appeal to the past is part and parcel of the leaders’
demagoguery, playing on the atavistic emotions of the masses. For Tom Nairn,
élites in the periphery, realizing their helplessness in the face of the onslaught of
uneven capitalism, have to appeal to the sentiments of the masses. For
73 Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his essay ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’,
summarizes modern uses of folklore for nationalist purposes: ‘if they [the Scottish] indulge in music, their
instrument is the bagpipe. This apparatus to which they ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern …
Indeed the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention.’ (in The
Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 15)
47
Hobsbawm, the élites must fabricate a sense of community for the newly
enfranchised and mobilized masses, while for Benedict Anderson they must
create an imagined political community among people who will never see each
other through representations and narratives of the printed word.74
From the standpoint of the “modernist”/instrumentalist, the communal past forms a
repository/quarry from which materials may be dug out selectively in the construction
and invention of nations.75 Ideologues of the nation need a ‘usable past’ whose
parameters are determined by the needs of present-day élites. This is the attitude to (the
use of) folklore, and it may be folklore’s almost invariable link to nationalist ideology
which creates a picture of the former as material waiting to be consecrated, as it were,
from on high and put into use in a fake costumed ritual. The top-bottom approach, so
admirably summarized by A. D. Smith, to the transmission of nationalist ideology (a
view which, in turn, sees folklore as seeping through the pores of society until it
permeates a consenting mass) is meant to be an answer to a cluster of related questions
about the appeal, use, communicative value, and psychological force of an otherwise
conceptually and philosophically untenable doctrine. Thus, the philosophy of nationalism
is faced with the difficult task of having to explain the ism’s philosophical poverty.
Hobsbawm resolves the issue perhaps more easily than any of the authors cited by
Smith. For him, nationalism, a modern phenomenon, springs from the ‘insecurity and
74 Smith, Anthony, ‘The “Golden Age” and National Renewal’ in Myths and Nationhood, Geoffrey
Hosking and George Schöpflin eds, Routledge: New York in association with the School of Slavonic and
East European Studies, University of London, 1997, p. 36.
75 Ibid., p. 37. To this list we should add the pioneer of the school, Ernst Gellner.
48
resentment which were so characteristic of the lower middle strata and made the new
nationalism so attractive to them.’
Uncertainty about their status and definition, the insecurity of large strata
situated between the unquestionable sons and daughters of manual toil and the
unquestioned members of the upper and upper middle classes, overcompensation
by claims to uniqueness and superiority threatened by someone or other – these
provided links between the modest middle strata and militant nationalism.76
Here, nationalism is largely a petit bourgeois affair. The psychological explanations
Hobsbawm offers are hard to challenge conclusively; after all, insecurities of various
sorts play a large part in a sentiment which, as a psychological mechanism, amounts to a
withdrawal into the self-same and a denial of the external or different. In such cases, it is
easy and natural to try to overcompensate on the level of both the individual and the
larger culture or nation.
But the “modernist”/instrumentalist account of nationalist ideology still does not
address the irony of nationalism’s appeal, forcefulness, etc., as a core of ideas. It simply
explains away the problem by offering pragmatic explanations for the popularity of the
idea. Where Nations and Nationalism could have come closer to the idea of the ideology
is in the discussion of language-planning. For the author, this is a model for the way the
ideology works as a whole. ‘The identification of nation with language helps us to answer
such questions, since linguistic nationalism essentially requires control of a state,’ et
cetera. 77 Once again, appeal to centralized control – and not anything about the ideology
76 Nations and Nationalism, p. 118.
77 Ibid., p. 110.
49
of nationalism, let alone about language itself – is all that is needed to account for the
ways ideology functions.
A historian’s immediate concern need not of course be the poetics of an “ism”. In this
context, I propose a more direct (at least from the point of view of the literary scholar)
answer to the rather intriguing set of questions which Hobsbawm raises:
What we need to discover is what precisely national slogans mean in politics,
and whether they mean the same to different social constituencies, how they
changed, and under what circumstances they combined or were incompatible
with other slogans that might mobilize the citizenry, how they prevailed over
them or failed to do so.78
To an instrumentalist, language planning works by force and follows the logic of the
mechanism of construction/invention. Language is a mere cultural artifact – and that’s
that. Receptivity to centralized policies on language depends on practical conditions such
as the possibility to advance in society, to hold a non-manual job, to achieve a social
status of some sort, etc. And here, for a brief moment, Hobsbawm faces the inevitable –
to define language as an empowering social tool is to follow a narrow definition. So his
linguistic nationalism is restricted to the issue of language planning – that is to the
selection and privileging of one standard. The spoken language ‘raises no serious
problems’. It is the written/enforced standard which is both ‘symbolic of national
aspirations’ and indicative of a number of ‘practical and socially differentiated uses.’79
Less advantaged ‘common people’ such as poor workers, who, apart from their local
dialects, have no language, do not appear in the equation. But, as nationalist ideology
78 Ibid., p. 110.
79 Ibid., p. 113.
50
itself recognizes, an appeal to the down-at-elbows strata bound by their spoken dialects
and their folklore, must be made if one is to avoid the inevitable conclusion that these
strata have no interest in linguistic nationalism (‘The working classes … were rarely apt
to get excited about language as such.’80) – hence, that appeals to their linguistic and
cultural products have nothing to tell us about the way nationalism works. The non-nationalist
folk is unconscious, cannot be got to see through an ideology, and is only a
pawn in a larger game constructed by an élite.
Vis-à-vis this rigid scenario of the workings of nationalism, it would be interesting to
see precisely how components of nationalist ideology mix with each other, and especially
how the folkloric component functions in this mix. What is the role of the folkloric
element; how does it mix with other elements; what does it mean to use it as material;
where does its utility come from; is it really passive material ready to be mixed at will?
Generally speaking, a defense of folklore need not involve rescuing folklore from the
stigma81 of nationalism. To see folklore for what it is, one needs to come to terms with
80 Ibid., p. 117.
81 Cf. Fishman, Joshua, Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays, Newbury House Publishers:
Rowley, Massachusetts, 1972, p. 40: ‘The lingering hostility of American social science scholarship (as
well as of much Western social science scholarship more generally) toward nationalism has been
transferred to the role of the vernacular in nationalist movements.’ The same might be said of folklore,
which is often viewed as a suspect, minor, invented collection of popular materials precisely because of its
role in nationalist agendas. But folklore provokes doubt, suspicion, dismissal, and downright hostility based
on ignorance from another significant quarter: the unease of the “classicist” towards folklore (e.g. classical
as opposed to folk music) is based on antagonisms peculiar to the history of the form of art or genre in
question which interdepartmental tensions only intensify. Hence the scholar of literature, high art, etc., does
not approach folklore from an empty-slate position. But interdepartmental give-and-take allows the arrows
of accusation to point both ways. The standard complaint of the folklorist that literary scholars (and indeed
poets) interested in folklore do not know what they are getting into when they analyze folklore further
constructs folklore as material alien to the mainstream literary tradition. On the literary side, this has the
effect of vernacularizing literary genres which purport to merge with folklore as these ‘minor’ genres
51
the fact that there is something about it which makes it amenable to appropriation by
nationalist ideology. Nor is there any need to deny, as do the “modernists”82, the inherent
connection between early forms of folklorism and folklore collecting (as opposed to the
science of folkloristics) and at least an inchoate form of nationalism.83
To start from where the modernist stops, how precisely does nationalism use/abuse/re-use/
fuse folklore? ‘The critique of social constructionism furnishes the basis for an
alternative account of nations and nationalism.’84 Smith argues in favor of what he terms
an ‘ethnosymbolic’ account of nationalism where symbols are not fabricated by an upper
become ostracized and debarred from communion with the larger mainstream tradition. These down-at-elbows
genres will be the focus of Chapter 3.
82 The theoreticians of nationalism as a syndrome of modernity expressly deny the existence of nationalism
in its developed form before the industrial era. Nationalism is, according to this view, an exclusively
modern phenomenon constitutive of modernity (Tom Nairn goes as far as saying that it is the ideology of
modernity). This poses the serious and onerous logical task of having to deny a link, despite all appearances
and data that such a link does in fact exist, between nationalism and cultural movements and phenomena –
such as antiquarianism or the old philology of the 17th and 18th centuries – which historically precede the
proposed starting point of nationalism (for Hobsbawm this is roughly the end of the 18th century). In
response to this limiting chronology, other scholars have pointed to earlier nationalist cultural and linguistic
phenomena. Josep Llobera, who challenges the Gellnerian model of nationalist development, claims that
the ‘overemphasis on industrialism is the result either of ignoring the medieval national legacy or, what
comes to be the same, adopting a modernist definition of the nation.’ (cf. Llobera, Josep, The God of
Modernity. The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Berg: Oxford/Providence, USA, 1994, p.
104) I side with this latter view; if one views folklore from a larger historical perspective, one could safely
make the claim that it is implicated with nationalist ideology from a very early stage in its history. Even in
its ancient forms, it is anything but unconscious, apolitical, naïve, etc. The ideological core of nationalism,
as Llobera reminds “modernists” is ‘to a certain extent autonomous and independent of structures of
modernity.’ (Ibid., p. 132)
83 Hobsbawm (cf. Nations, p. 104) claims that folklorism is not necessarily political: ‘there is no necessary
connection between cultural revival movements … and subsequent national agitations or movements of
political nationalism.’ “Cultural” is, for him, “not political”, when it comes to nationalism; this is a familiar
refrain taken up by many literary scholars who wish to destigmatise authors working at the frontlines of
national revival movements. For instance, Yeats’s cultural nationalism begins to seem considerably more
palatable once it has been distinguished from the political nationalism of, say, the Gaelic League.
84 Smith, A. D., The Nation in History. Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism,
University Press of New England: Hanover, 2000, pp 62 ff.
52
social stratum but are to be found within the deep historical past of the nation. The past,
not merely the invented memory of it, lives on in a very real way. Traditions have for a
long time (Smith’s term is la longue durée) exercised a more or less overt influence on a
nation’s view of itself (i.e. its collective identity), and its members feel a solidarity
(through shared symbols, language, etc) with past generations which is independent of
individual will. If upper strata have focused a significant part of their ideological
intervention on manipulative construction of cultural institutions such as myths,
memories, symbols, and language, their “creative” work is not tantamount to invention
from scratch. If we add to this the idea that nationalist-style sentiments existed long
before the age of industrialism, it turns out that nationalism is not an invention of a
tradition but a re-invention of itself. Its ideological mechanism consists in re-harnessing
old energies which are latent in the material it uses. The ethno- part of ethnosymbolism is
the old symbol (land, mother nation, golden age, etc), while the ism part is the process of
making the symbol take center stage in an ideological apparatus.
Memories of territory, heroes, and golden ages form important elements of what we
may term the ethnohistory of each ethnie, its own self-understanding. Thus, the
ethnosymbolic account of nationalism clears the ground for an originary moment of
nationalist ideology – before the intervention of elites – by allowing the folk to speak its
lessons in its own way, without the necessity to imply a top-down transmission of ideas.
There are some good lessons to be drawn from the folk’s own national(ist) self-awareness
– which, according to the constructionist, is simply awakened from above – regarding,
most of all, the mechanism of transmission of symbols and of culture in general. Most of
53
the imagined/invented/constructed events of nationalist mythology ‘have been
remembered and handed down by successive generations of the community. They are all
the more powerful in scope and intensity when they are linked to particular institutions
like the law, the church, the state, or the schools.’ What is more, they ‘are embedded in
languages, customs, rituals and mores, as well as in the arts and crafts, music and dances,
of ethnic communities, all of which make up the ethnohistory of culture communities.’85
Invention, as A. D. Smith argues elsewhere, ‘must be understood in its other sense of a
novel recombination of existing elements.’86 But what exactly does the process of
recombination consist of? How can we go beyond Fishman’s schematic enumeration of
functions of folklore?87 A good start is Josep Llobera’s challenge of the modernist thesis.
Llobera defines nationalism as a kind of tribal religion, a communal performance rather
than a set of ideas developed by an elite think tank. ‘In this vision of the nation as a
phenomenological construction the emphasis is on the performative acts or celebrations
in which participants communicate and share values (land, history, ancestors, myths,
etc.)’.88 But what Llobera arrives at is a self-forgetful mass, an intoxicated tribalism, a
passionate song chanted on the fringe of civilization. In his conception, emphasizing as it
does the Herderian elements of nationalism, it is quite natural for nationalism to go to
85 Ibid., p. 68.
86 A. D. Smith ed., Ethnicity and Nationalism, p. 72.
87 The functions of folklore Fishman identifies include service as a link to a glorious past, as a link with
authenticity, and as contrastive self-identification (cf. Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays,
pp 44 ff).
88 Llobera, Josep, The God of Modernity. The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Berg:
Oxford/Providence, USA, 1994, p. 144.
54
folklore if part of its tool-kit of ideas is to include things like eternal links to the land,
nostalgia for the golden past, anti-rationalism, populism, etc. Folklore, in this circular
view, is itself an admirable example of all these qualities. Hobsbawm and his allies would
nod in agreement.
The emphasis on the performative aspect of nationalism returns some of the agency to
“the people” but in the end the agency ends up belonging to the ideology itself. If the
folkloric subject (e.g. the flamenco gypsy singing his deep song) is allowed to have
agency by nationalist ideology, it is only within the framework of the performative act
that this agency is allowed to function. Beyond the ideological enframing of folklore, the
actual folk (e.g. the Gypsy in real life) is nothing more than a cipher. Within the
ideologically framed performance, this folk is acarrier of crucial qualities. We see then
that nationalism as an ideology is an instance of borrowed agency. Thus, while the folk
does the performing, it is often various élites which supply, if not the rituals themselves,
then at least the ideological encouragement for their performance. Nationalism’s use of
folklore is, then, a subtly effective side-show. Without pretending to acquire the bragging
rights of a full-fledged voice, nationalist ideology is content to sit back and imitate the
movements of the main actors in a clever pantomime. The moves of folklore become the
functions of nationalist ideology.
Nothing illustrates the stereotypical image of the appropriation of folklore by
nationalism so well as the troubled history of flamenco as a musical genre. I can only
afford to give a brief sketch here. The story has all the important elements of the
interaction between nationalism and folklore outlined above: flamenco is very much part
55
of the ethno-history of Spain; it gave energy to Spanish nationalism which, in many ways,
used flamenco as a model to be mimicked; in its pseudo-idealist appropriations by
nationalism, it possesses that intoxicated tribalism into which ritualistic ideology often
degenerates; it is an original expression of communal drive which has its artificial
(“invented”) double; it has received a generous historical helping of the nationalist stigma
because of its abuse by the Francoist regime; its center-piece is the figure of the gypsy: a
folk figure designed by nationalist ideology for the expression of Spanish essence even as
the real Gypsy was being persecuted; its history allows us to answer the question which
the modernist school of nationalism rarely addresses: how exactly does nationalism
appropriate folklore?
Of course when it comes to flamenco (a folkloric genre with a relatively long history),
one can enumerate various phases of its history where flamenco becomes entangled with
nationalist ideology. William Washabaugh points to not one but six major isms with
which flamenco gets ideologically entangled. Some of these overlap while others
appropriate flamenco with conflicting (sometimes diametrically opposed) ends in view.89
To put it bluntly, nationalism’s use of flamenco amounts to cutting its rougher corners, a
strategy whereby what is excessive gets curtailed and ironed out. What was originally an
expression of a long tradition of folk singing became, under the aegis of Franco’s cultural
politics, a tame, adulterated, civilized song with sweet modulations of the voice
performed against a background of typical colorful costumes, flowers behind the ears, etc.
89 Washabaugh, William, Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture, Berg, 1996, pp 10 ff.
56
Gile Tremlett provides a succinct summary of franquista appropriations of flamenco:
The regime of the Generalisimo promoted what some people have termed, only
in jest, “national-flamenquismo”. The popular “copla”, and even the one
developed by many flamenco artists, was the radio music of the regime. In short,
Franco was pleased by the spotted shirts, tight jackets, and wide sombreros of
what may be called the “gypsy music-hall”. There was no lack of gypsies and
other artists who were happy to oblige. The singer Lola Flores, for instance,
frequently performed for Franco in El Prado.90
During the 1940s flamenco became nationalized was well as institutionalized: it moved to
the tablao91 – the official venue where flamenco (that is to say, its significantly diluted
double) became purged of extremes in order to become a highly artificial theatrical
performance. It also began to serve as an emblem of Spanishness. But the outcome of this
ideological transaction was that flamenco (that is the “authentic” art) now had to compete
with its own popularized image. Indeed, this proliferation of doubles has become such an
essential part of flamenco history that it almost impossible to point to one authentic (pure)
form amongst the multitude of spin-offs. As we shall see in chapter three, some years
90 ‘El régimen del Generalísimo auspició lo que alguna gente a denominado, sólo medio en broma,
“national-flamenquismo”. La popular “copla”, hacia la que derivaron muchos artistas de flamenco, era la
música de radio del régimen. En resumen, a Franco le complacían las camisas de lunares, los chalecos
ceñidos y los anchos sombreros de lo que podría describirse como “gitaneo de music-hall”. No faltaban
gitanos u otros artistas dispuestos a bailarle el agua. La cantante Lola Flores, por ejemplo, actuaba con
frecuencia para Franco en El Pardo.’ (Tremlett,Gile, España Ante Sus Fantasmas. Un Recorrido Por Un
País En Transición, Siglo XXI: Madrid, 2006, pp 173-4)
91 ‘The Tablao – from tabla – meaning plank as in a stage – is really the 20th century equivalent of the
original Café Cantante. A cross between a restaurant, cabaret and nightclub, tablaos consist of formally
presented flamenco shows which are generally staged at the end of a meal. Most tablaos have a bar area
and a restaurant style floor space with a stage at one end, and for a fixed price offer three course meals,
wine and flamenco show. Often critisised for presenting ‘flamenco for tourists’, the tablaos have fallen into
disrepute, and today the well known tablaos in Madrid are in a period of decadence…’ (Martinez, Emma,
Flamenco… All You Wanted to Know, Mel Bay: 2003, p. 69). The closest equivalent to the tablao in Los
Angeles would be El Cid. Its version of flamenco is precisely the mellow theatrical act designed not to
disturb the processing of food. A more pure version of flamenco can be heard at the Fountain Theater on
Sundays. Its biggest attraction is the voice of Jesus Montoya dubbed “the Pavarotti of flamenco”. The
flamenco capital of the US (if such a thing exists) is San Francisco with its relatively good dancing and
guitar-playing.
57
before the tablao, Lorca, too, became an ardent pugilist in the ideological battle for
flamenco. This time it was the café cantante – and particularly its association with the
demi-monde, with drunkenness, etc. – which had demeaned the true art; and it was
Lorca’s task to unearth the authentic version (what he and de Falla called cante jondo)
from its obscurity. But unlike the café cantante phase (which, in addition to
institutionalizing the art, had the virtue of serving as a breeding ground for artistic
innovation), the Francoist phase (what has become known as nationalflamnequismo)
discouraged new developments in the art form and focused on a universal, flattened,
theatrical caricature which included mellow depictions of happy Spanish life in the
costumbrista style.
As Washabaugh explains:
Between 1939 and 1975, Franco ransacked the past in search of symbols upon
which to build a new and unified Spanish identity that might be attractive
enough to lure tourists and centralized enough to be tweaked as needed to
promote the national interest… In this stifling cultural climate, folkloric
performances were cosmetically retouched to obscure any indications of
provincial loyalties. Traditional flamenco venues, such a bars and taverns, were
shut down because they spawned dissent and subversion.92
This universalizing tendency of nationalist ideology found a powerful antagonist in the
regionalism of performers like Mairena who, like Lorca and other modernist authors a
generation before, insisted on the Andalusian (i.e. local) and Gypsy origins of flamenco.
92 Op. cit., pp 13-4.
58
In the end, Franco’s cultural politics tolerated andalucismo but only to the extent to
which it did not threaten his centralizing ideological construction of flamenco.93
Another important venue for the staging of flamenco’s artificial double was the
españolada – a popular film genre in the 1940s whose main goal was to reassert the
authenticity of Spanish tradition and to build a unified portrait of Spanish identity. As can
be easily surmised, the music for these films was a sort of flamenco-like melodic song
(accompanied by the ever-present guitar) with artificially mechanic operatic trills which
are a far cry from the piercing modulations and the improvised coarseness of the
seguiriya extolled by Lorca and others. As Anne Hardcastle puts it:
Due to its comic and escapist vision of Spanish life, the españolada was so
common and popular a film product during the post-war years that is has
become nearly synonymous with Regime film- making. Its images of happy,
rural peasants in folkloric dress supported a controlled, hierarchical class
structure and the idea of Spanish “difference” embedded in a rejection of
modernity associated with the early National Catholicism of the Falange fascist
party.94
As both the tablao and t españolada show, nationalism uses folklore only as a
shorthand. Since, as nationalist ideologues well know, images which become part of the
communal memory have a staying magical power, it is quite natural for nationalist
ideology to select its material from folkloric traditions in a carefully planned but
ultimately hollow performance. Thus folklore/flamenco may, in the hands of nationalist
ideology, become nothing more than an invocation of images and symbolic associations
93 Franco favored artists from Madrid (which was trumped up to be the center of all culture) as part of a
regionalist “nationalism” which privileged everything coming from the capital.
94 Hardcastle, Anne, ‘Representing Spanish Identity through españolada in Fernando Trueba’s The Girl of
Your Dreams (La niña de tus ojos)’, in Film Criticism, Vol. 31, 2007, pp 15-35 (p. 18).
59
whose magical power nationalist ideology cashes out on. Ironically, the stigma which
folklore carries is explained by folklore’s own alluring power. Materials which were
created and worked out over a long period of time are simply taken out and used with a
vulgar, political purpose in mind. The way kitschy nationalism uses memoried materials
is by mere reference to established symbols. These symbols (erstwhile folkloric items)
function within the framework of the ideological representation as mnemonic devices
which trigger sets of pre-determined associations. The task of nationalist ideology as an
“ism” is to abbreviate: for each image it invents a mere reference. It only works on the
alphabetical and the shorthand level. It is content with establishing a chain of reference.
This picture of nationalism’s “vulgar” use of folklore is, however, incomplete. Just as
there are varieties of poetic folklorism, so there are varieties of nationalism. Not all
nationalist appropriations of folklore confine their ideological efforts to the mechanism of
referential abbreviation sketched above. John Hutchison’s typology of nationalisms95
throws cold water on the view of the appropriation of folklore as an ideological free-for-all.
In the case of what he calls “Greek” nationalism, ‘[t]he pliability of the preferred past
was an undisguised blessing not available to those movements related to Great Traditions
whose classical remains were widely known and highly regarded.’ In Greece, you would
not be able to substitute at will, to invent material as occasion requires, to scrap traditions,
or to freely recombine elements. Bulgarian and Irish nationalist folklorisms both roughly
conform to the “Greek” model.
95 Cf. Hutchison, John, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the
Irish Nation State, Allen and Unwin: London, 1987, p. 140.
60
Hans Kohn, the widely recognized purveyor of stereotypical dichotomies in his
typology of nationalism, adds an important idea which helps with the understanding of
the complexity of folkloric appropriation as a cultural mechanism. He saw “Eastern”
nationalism as a more passionate variant and an ideological legatee of Western influence.
In his view, nationalism spread from the West (center) to the peripheries in Eastern and
Central Europe and territories outside Europe.96 Eastern nationalism was marked by
appeal to folklore and to emotion/passion. It was a “hot” nationalism. The West’s nations
were ‘firmly constituted in their political life’, they were confident and their nationalism
sprang from rational ideals such as individual liberty. On the periphery, where cultures
lacked confidence, nationalism was marked by an inferiority complex compensated by
over-emphasis. Hence, this type of nationalism (German, East European, Indian)
‘appeared as something deeper, richer in problems and potentialities.’ Its hotness comes
from the heart-felt nature of its dedication. ‘The quest for its meaning, the musing about a
national “soul” or “mission”, the discussion of its relationship to the West, all these
became characteristic of the new nationalism.’ Kohn is here describing cultural trends not
limited to nationalism. Indeed, as my discussion of Bulgarian and Irish modernisms will
illustrate, the search for national differentiation, the juxtaposition with the West, the
outside-inside approach to the “ism” as an ideological corpus, all the soul-searching, the
struggle with definitions and the ways in which these definitions apply to the native
96 ‘Yet this very dependence on the West hurt the pride of the native educated class, as soon as it began to
develop its own nationalism, and led it oppose the “alien” example and its liberal and rational outlook.
Thus the new nationalism looked for its justification and differentiation from the West to the heritage of its
past.’ (Kohn, Hans, Nationalism. Its Meaning and History, revised edition, D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.:
London, UK and Princeton, New Jersey, 1965, p. 30)
61
context, the consciousness that, to an extent, a “foreign” system is being grafted onto a
local