JOSÉ LUIS BELLÓN AGUILERA

Bourdieu's Field and critical minefield of the 1898

Generation
*In Buffery, Davis and Hooper, (eds.) (2007) Reading Iberia. Theory / History
/ Identity. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 43-61. [Proofread version]

Se penser soi même en revenant par l'analyse à la

société proche de soi, et de son propre passé familial'.

(Eribon, 'L'anti-hériter’, p.27).

Bourdieu's notion of ‘field’ (‘champ’) is rapidly becoming a critical

commonplace in the world of Hispanism, yet there is little
accompanying reflection on the adequacy of its application. Bourdieu’s
sociology is characterized by the concrete analysis of material
situations with theoretical tools that develop their potential in the very
process of analysis. As any careful reader of his works knows, the
French sociologist always insists that his sociology advances with
extreme caution, undertaking continuous scrutiny of the analytical
apparatus used throughout the process of analysis. One of his last
works, Meditations pascaliennes, turns almost obsessively on the
epistemological limits of some of his most important concepts:
habitus, hexis and field.1 Whilst it is beyond the scope of this chapter
to provide a sociological reading of a sociologist of Bourdieu’s
standing, reflection on the concept of ‘field’ from outside the field of
sociology will provide an introduction to the concep’ts potential
applications and limitations.
According to Bourdieu, the very configuration of the fields of
production of symbolic goods has a determinant effect on the creation
and legitimation of a large number of epistemological problems. The
eternal question of method (whether empirical, positivist, historicist,
hermeneutic or otherwise) that is the investigator’s nightmare and a

1
Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997).
philosophical minefield, is underpinned by social structures. The task
of the researcher is one of self-analysis, of his/her own social
conditions of possibility. Many of the problems of Althusserian
Marxism, for instance, can only be illuminated by taking into account
the specificity of the French intellectual field in the postwar period
and the changes it underwent in the 1960s.2
My interest in the notion developed from research into the
contemporary Spanish novel in Castilian, where one of the main
analytical tools was based on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and
findings. To Bourdieu’s theories I added a number of other approaches
to literature, creating a somewhat unstable balance between feminism
(Nancy Armstrong, Toril Moi), Marxism (Althusser, Balibar Eagleton,
Juan Carlos Rodríguez) and psychoanalysis (Žižek, Lacan). The
intention was, ultimately, to explore the operational capacity of the
different theoretical lenses in order to confront them with the theory (or
theories) developed by the novels themselves. This would allow
comparison of theory as interpretation with the interpretation of theory
that resulted from the process. Of course, all literary artefacts contain in
their very texture a particular conception of their own process of
production and, hence, of the language in which they are written. My
project was not, in other words, a practical application of a series of
theories forced into mutual dialogue, but a self-reflexive application of
theory to the theoretical process, as if the object demanded its own rights
and refused to submit to the supposedly impartial analysis of pure
criticism. For the object is not simply invaded or negated by theory but
sets out its own traps, seductive as the sirens in its own particular
odyssey, pervading all interpretation.
The reasons for my examination of a series of schools in analytical
practice were of a scientific and philosophical nature: no one system or
methodology held all the answers to the various waves of questions
posed by the texts, and there remained a suspicion that each theory
generated its own question marks, by virtue of the way in which it
imposed the limits of the playing field, establishing its own problems

2
See Pierre Bourdieu & Jean-Claude Passeron, ‘Sociology and Philosophy in
France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without a Subject’,
Social Research 34.1 (1967): 161–212.
without seeing others. Using terms borrowed from Bourdieu, this could
be described as an effect of the circularity in the chain of signifiers in the
field. In Althusserian terms, it would be explained from the perspective
of his theory of vision: each ideological horizon creates its own
problems and is only capable of seeing (from) its own problems,
negating that which it cannot see or is hidden from view by its
ideological unconscious.3 Whilst we could proceed to consider what
these theories see and un-see in their field of vision, this is not to be the
aim of the chapter. Instead, we will focus on one of the most careful and
searching theories used, that of Bourdieu, in its self-interrogation about
the possibilities of intellectual production. The intellectual is him/herself
produced as an intellectual, who is authorized and legitimized, provided
with a voice by the institution, in which social myths are both set up and
rooted. There is no room here to consider fully the lacunae in Bourdieu,
above all his lack of attention to the birth and evolution of the ideology
of the subject.4
The field explored in my original project was that of
contemporary Spanish literature in Castilian. Yet the majority of
works by Bourdieu on art, literature and philosophy are on French
society, with the exception of that incredible book The Political
Ontology of Martin Heidegger and the analysis of Faulkner in The
Rules of Art.5 My reservations and doubts about the concept of field
were confirmed by Derek Robbins: ‘It seemed to me that Bourdieu’s
approach to literature has developed mainly in the context of the French
literary tradition with which he feels an affinity’.6 Although it may seem
to be stating the obvious, it is important to take this statement seriously.
3
Louis Althusser & Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: NLB, 1970).
4
This has been amply addressed by Professor Juan Carlos Rodríguez in La
norma literaria (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1994 [1984]) and
Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica (Madrid: Akal, 1990 [1975])
(trans. Read).
5
Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991); The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary
Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp.327 onwards.
6
Derek Robbins, ‘The English intellectual field in the 1790s and the creative project
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: an application of Bourdieu’s cultural analysis’, in
Bridget Fowler (ed.), Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2000): p.197.
Any research using the notions developed by Bourdieu runs the risk of
essentialising his theoretical apparatus whilst forgetting the peculiarities
of the particular literary field under study, which always possesses its
own logic, its own theory. As Robbins insists: ‘We must guard against
the possibility that the concepts developed by Bourdieu become
components of an arbitrary culture that is imposed unreflexively on
others’.7 It is for this reason that I found it necessary to examine the
concept of field not only from Bourdieu’s but from other perspectives,
including those afforded by the particular dynamics and conditions of
possibility of the analysed (and analysing) texts, through the
metaliterary mechanisms incorporated within them.
To follow my argument it is necessary to consider what Bourdieu
understands by literary field and by cultural field. He defines field as
an autonomous social space that possesses its own rules:

There is a political space, there is a religious space, etc.: I call each of these a
field, that is, an autonomous universe, a kind of arena in which people play a
game which has certain rules, rules which are different from those of the game
that is played in the adjacent space. The people who are involved in the game
have, as such, specific interests, interests which are not defined by their
mandators.8

Agents (or individuals) do not move, live and act in a vacuum, but
rather in concrete social situations ruled by a series of objective social
relations. Bourdieu developed the concept of field in order to account
for these situations or contexts. Certain practices and perceptions are
not the product of what he calls habitus, or familiarity with the rules
of the game, but of the relationship between this and the fields (the

7
Indeed, Robbins reminds us, in relation to Bourdieu’s famous essay on Flaubert,
that the sociologist positions himself within his own intellectual field: ‘His analyses
of Flaubert are elements of a confused position-taking in relation to Sartre –
confused because, I think, Bourdieu remained sympathetic to Sartre’s early view
of the status of texts expressed in What is Literature? but hostile to the attempt
made by Sartre to reconcile his existentialism with Marxism in the Critique of
Dialectical Reason and subsequently, to operationalize that reconciliation in
literary biographies, such as that of Flaubert’. Ibid., p.197.
8 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Polity Press, 1992), p.215.
game) in which they take part. However, the habitus is not always
consistent with or fully adapted to the rules of the game, the two
cannot always be articulated without complication: there may be a
quixoticisation of dispositions.9
The field is, then, a competitive system of social relations that
functions in accordance with its own internal logic, which is itself
formed and moulded by institutions or individuals (agents) who
develop different strategies in the struggle for domination, recognition
and status. Hence, the field is a space structured by positions in which
all the positions and the interrelations between them (the real is
interrelational for Bourdieu) are determined by the distribution of
different forms of resources or capital (understood here as
accumulated human work, whether economic or symbolic, that is the
accumulation of recognition and authority). Within the academic field,
for instance, there is invisible capital in the literary Canon.
In the case of literature, Bourdieu developed the concept of
literary field, which should be understood in relation to the
philosophical, cultural and intellectual fields. As can be seen from this
list, the lines between the different fields are not particularly clear, for
the notion of cultural field or intellectual field seems to cover all of
the fields, and it is difficult to tell where one field ends and another
begins. The Althusserian notion of overdetermination provides an
epistemological anchor here, as it seems evident that it is almost
impossible to study the rules of the different fields without taking into
account the way in which they, and the different determinant factors
within them, overlap. What Bourdieu does is add nuance to
Althusserian overdetermination.10 If we think of the relationships
between cinema, literature, criticism and the academy, things become
even more complex. In any case, the hermeneutically fertile
invocation of the concept of overdetermination does not remove the
vagueness of the notions of ‘cultural field’ and ‘intellectual field’.
So far, then, the question of the nature of the literary field, its
specificity and difference with respect to other cultural fields, remains

9 Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations Pacaliennes, p.190.

10 For a description of the notion of overdetermination, see Althusser & Balibar,
Reading Capital, pp.315–6.
rather indeterminate. How can we draw the outline of a particular
literary field in a concrete social formation? In works like The Field of
Cultural Production, The Rules of Art and Méditations pascaliennes –
which focus on their own particular epistemological limits –, Bourdieu
attempts to define what he understands by ‘literary field’.11 The
specificity of the literary field is the inverse of the economic world:

The literary field is the economic world reversed; that is, the fundamental law
of this specific universe, that of disinterestedness, which establishes a negative
correlation between temporal (notably financial) success and properly artistic
value, is the inverse of the law of economic exchange. The artistic field is a
universe of belief. Cultural production distinguishes itself from the production
of the most common objects in that it must produce not only the object in its
materiality, but also the value of this object, that is, the recognition of artistic
legitimacy. This is inseparable from the production of the artist or the writer as
artist or writer, in other words, as a creator of value. A reflection on the
meaning of the artist’s signature would thus be in order.12

Close reading of this quotation reveals the vagueness of the expression

‘cultural production’, when read alongside ‘artistic field’ and ‘artist or
writer’, an imprecision that clouds the possibility of delimiting the
boundaries of the literary field. The extract appears to imply that the
dynamic between the different cultural fields and the habitus of the
agents inserted within them, of the ‘artists’ (in general terms), are
more or less the same. Yet this presents a problem, for the world of
writers is not that of painters or film directors or photographers. Nor
should one forget, moreover, the effects of specialisation, which may
affect one’s capacity for analysis. If we take this into account, it may
reduce the problem, but it will not eliminate it entirely.
Bourdieu, in The Field of Cultural Production, places emphasis
on the specificity of the literary field:

This field is neither vague nor even a milieu artistique like a universe of
personal relation between artists and writers (perspectives adopted by those

11 But he attempts to reformulate this in other works like Practical Reason (1998),
Language and Symbolic Power (1992), Distinction (1984) and The Political
Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991).
12 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1993), p.164.
 who study ‘influences’). It is a veritable social universe where, in accordance
with its particular laws, there accumulates a particular form of capital, and
where relations of force of a particular type are exerted. This universe is the
place of entirely specific struggles, notably concerning the question of knowing
who is part of the universe, who is a real writer and who is not. The important
fact, for the interpretation of works, is that this autonomous social universe
functions somewhat like a prism which refracts every external determination:
demographic, economic or political events are always retranslated according to
the specific logic of the field, and it is by this intermediary that they act on the
logic of the development of works.13

This definition is obviously more precise. If, then, we accept the

notion of ‘literary field’, together with other concepts such as habitus,
hexis, cultural field (etc), what are the main elements that would have
be taken into account in the study of the Hispanic context? Without
entering into consideration of the question of genre, which is always
decisive, the investigator would have to consider, in the first instance
the question of the different languages and cultural identities, at least
since the creation of the different literary fields and sub-fields in the
nineteenth century (before this is another story). One would also have
to study the relations and interrelations with other fields of production
of symbolic goods (such as cinema) and with the different literary
fields. Anyone who has studied the Hispanic novel of the 1950s and
1960s cannot ignore the effects on its production of the polarisation
between Madrid and Barcelona, which becomes more accentuated
after the end of the Franco period. Furthermore, the investigator would
have to consider other elements such as class, gender and educational
background in order to identify, with Robbins, the ‘situation, position
and condition’ and the ‘elective affinities’ of the particular writer or
writers under study, in order to be able to compare what they say
about themselves with what the work says about itself.14 Finally, an
analysis must be flexible enough to enter into the territory of the
‘Homo Academicus’ (as Robbins also suggests), not only because of
the need to demythologize certain appropriations of literary artefacts
and traditions, but also to consider the different positionings and

13 Ibid, p.164.
14 Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2000),
pp.29 and 187, respectively.
representations constructed by critics and academics, as well as the
very effects of these appropriations on writers through the operation of
educational institutions. The self-reflexivity of academic production
will help to reduce the effects of specialisation as well as the tendency
to philosophize without a scientific basis.
The publishing market and its accompanying ideological
apparatus, such as marketing, is of key importance, as are the
phenomenon of literary prizes, which are especially important in
Spain in the canonisation process. As far as the publishing market is
concerned, one need only remember the case of the Latin-American
‘Boom’ novel, and the effect this had on the proliferation of the term
‘magic realism’ beyond literature written in Castilian.
As can be seen, the factors to be taken into account in the course
of a sociological or socio-historical study are multiple and complex:
another cliché that is rarely taken as seriously as it ought to be.
Accustomed in the academic field to excessively broad periodisation
and generalisations alike, whatever the analytical lens chosen
(speaking of the ‘spirit of the baroque’, for instance, or ‘the two
Spains’; reducing a decade of Spanish poetry to a single sentence) to
pause and think in the terms proposed by Bourdieu is quite a challenge
scientifically. None the less if the aim is to understand the social and
historical conditions of possibility of literary artefacts and how these
read the world which produces them, the traditional voyeuristic
comforts of an academicism ‘for all seasons’ are undoubtedly an
obstacle: it is almost impossible here not to think of Harold Bloom,
notwithstanding his excellent work on poetry. The indiscriminate use
of notions like habitus, hexis and field outside the contexts we have
analysed, lend themselves unproblematically to this academicism of
broad brushstrokes, as little more than a flirtation with philospohical
discourse and its totalising effects rather than the elaboration of a
sociological study proper. By contrast, Bourdieu and Passeron’s
article on ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and
Resurrection of a Philosophy without a Subject’ is a good example of
sociological rigour and epistemological profundity.
The internal or immanent reading of literary works, which is the
modus operandi of many literary specialists, is obviously necessary
and fertile; however, it encloses analysis in the dangerous circle
created by the notion of ‘representation’, leading to potential
entrapment by the stratagems laid out by the text itself (as in the case
of numerous readings of the ‘nueva novela’ or nouveau roman).
Bourdieu’s analysis of Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale, in which he
performs an internal reading from his own sociology, provides a
number of useful clues to understand how the (French) literary field
functions.15 None the less, however operative it may be, internal
reading can be little more than a mouse-trap.

Walking in a minefield: the 1898 Generation

‘Atemos la aventura del arte a las sólidas estacas del hogar’.
(Roland Barthes, Mythologies, p.52).

‘Ya don Quijote, por otra parte, hubo de expiar el error de imaginar que la
caballería andante era igualmente compatible con todas las formas
económicas de la sociedad’.
(Karl Marx, Capital, I, p.100).

When talking of ‘familiar’ fields, one that immediately springs to

mind is that of one of the most emblematic and, hence, mythologized
literary groupings in the history of Spanish literature: the so-called
‘1898 Generation’. The name refers to a group of writers who,
according to the received critical wisdom, shared a common concern

15 Flaubert’s novel ‘supplies all the tools necessary for its own sociological
analysis: the structure of the book, which a strictly internal reading brings to
light, that is, the structure of the social space in which the adventures of
Frédéric unfold, proves to be at the same time the structure of the social space
in which its author himself was situated’. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p.3.
with the problems of Spain and a special sensibility about life. Today
their ideas are somewhat like fossils that speak of a remote past;
fossils or myths of stone, hard and persistent like gods of marble, but
discoloured by time.
The concept of ‘generation’ is incredibly problematic, but given
that there are always problems of periodisation in literary history, it
appeared as a necessary concept in order to classify and pigeonhole a
series of writers.16 At least, it appeared necessary for essentialist
criticism, with its tendency to consider men and women as a uniform
whole, only separated by time, and independently of their social
origin, education, sex and the accompanying social expectations and
world view these endowed, thus eliding the biting problem of social
class. It is well known that the concept of generation was devised by
Julius Petersen in the 1930s and imported into Spain by Ortega in
1933, to be applied to the ‘men of 1898’ by Pedro Salinas in 1935.
Indeed, a German Hispanist, Hans Jeschke, wrote an earlier book on
Die Generation von 1898 in 1934. The term, nowadays often modified
by the word ‘group’, has enjoyed enormous fortune in literary
criticism, in large part due to the enormous of influence of Laín
Entralgo and his La generación del 98.17 Laín tried to include Ganivet
(who died in 1898) in the group, together with Unamuno, Benavente,
Machado and Ramiro de Maeztu and Valle-Inclán. Indeed, as
Gregorio Morán observes, Laín’s was to remain the ‘official’ vision of
the Generation of 1898 until our time.18 Let it be remembered that
Francoist historiography was keen, if not ‘anxious’ (in the Bloomian
sense of ‘anxiety of influence’) to erase the Republican political past
of forty years of literary production, an elision that was mirrored in
the invention of the 1927 Generation by Dámaso Alonso. The use of
1927 conveniently associated the group with the dictatorship of

16 For the origin of the concept of ‘generation’ in Spanish literary history, see
Julius Petersen, ‘Die literischen Generationen’ (1930), Henri Peyre, Les
Générations littéraires (1948), Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation
(1926) and Eduard Wechssler, Die Generation als Jugendreihe (1930).
17 Pedro Laín Entralgo, La generación del 98 (Madrid: 1945).
18 ‘... el “98” por antonmasia hasta nuestros días’, in El maestro en el erial
(Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998), p.106-111.
Miguel Primo de Rivera rather than the Second Republic, with which
many of the writers would have preferred to identify themselves.
As an alternative to ‘generationalism’, the concept of field
captures more completely the radical historicity of symbolic
production. In reality, the label ‘1898 Generation’ or ‘Group of 1898’
may be little more than the intuition of a particular literary field. One
hypothesis would be to approach the ‘1898 Generation’ as being
primarily a sign of the entry into the Spanish literary field of an
avantgarde or of a certain heterodoxy in the struggles for power within
it. Furthermore, the theories of the ‘1898’ intellectuals might be seen
as their way of giving literary-philosophical form to Spain’s entry into
the chain of international capitalism: hence their insistence on the
traditional Spain, of casticismo and milenarism, in contrast with
modernity. As a metaphor, we might think of the steel boats of the
USA versus the wooden ones of the Armada.19 In addition, we must
add to this the centralism of these writers’ concerns. Their focus on
Castile, and that of the critics who were to canonize them, led to the
effacement of relations with the other literary fields in the Iberian
Peninsula, particularly those literatures produced in other languages.
Here we intend to focus on the question of ‘identities’, but first it is
necessary to provide a brief sketch of the literary field.
The group of writers who burst on to the literary scene at the
beginning of the twentieth century present a reaction against Realism
and Naturalism, and like all ‘ground-breaking’ heterodoxies they
formulate this with a manifesto: the 1901 Manifesto of the ‘group of
three’, comprised of Azorín, Maeztu and Baroja. In art and literature,
the end of the nineteenth century appears to shatter the scientific
illusions of the different forms of realism. There is a complete change
in perspective. On the one hand, reality is no longer considered to be
fully reflectible, as the mirror of the eye is now considered incapable
of reflecting it in all its complexity; on the other, there is a
reaffirmation of individual liberty, creativity and the imagination. The
specular conception of realism is no longer accepted, because its

19 On 3rd July 1898 the battle of Santiago de Cuba took place, on which Admiral
Cervera faced the superior fleet of William Thomas Simpson, four times the
size of his own. Cervera’s fleet was destroyed within four hours.
objectivity threatens one of the underlying myths of the dominant
unconscious matrix: the liberty of the subject. Note that the problem
here is not the impossibility of representation of the object, the
position is blind to its own limits, but that the object cannot be
reflected because it is a splitting of the subject. It is as if, on the one
hand, the cultural world was reclaiming its rights and saying no to
scientific determinism and to the market, but on the other this
perspective is a reaffirmation of individual subjectivity, of the I
created by the dominant ideology since the eighteenth century. The
contradictions are inescapable: at the same time as reaffirming its
autonomy with respect to the economic and political fields, the
cultural field is fomenting a new model of relations between the
intellectual and politics.20 Yet it is also the period in which culture is
subsumed into the market, into exchange value, and subjected to
market forces. One need look no further than Baudelaire’s ‘Albatross’
to find the expression of the artist’s separation from the world, the
perspective taken by the cultural field regarding society.21
Of course, things are never quite so simple. In Spain, literary
naturalism itself had innoculated itself against scientific determinism,
in the interests of its own ‘creativity’. Emilia Pardo Bazán shows us
how this is done in chapter 2 of La cuestión palpitante, where she
considers how to read Zola:

Puede y debe el arte apoyarse en las ciencias auxiliares; un escultor tiene que
saber muy bien anatomía, para aspirar a hacer algo más que modelos
anatómicos. Aquel sentimiento inefable que en nosotros produce la beeleza, sea
él lo que fuere y consista en lo que consista, es patrimonio exclusivo del arte.

20 See Bourdieu’s analysis of the complexity of Zola’s positioning on the Dreyfus

affair, in which there is evidence of continued hostility to the world of politics.
The Rules of Art, p.130.
21 ‘L’albatros’ is based on affirmation of the transcendental superiority of the poet
(the majestic albatross), thus reinstating the autonomy of the literary field and
its values. The albatross presents with a poet capable of soaring over sea and
skies in the course of his elegant flight, but also over a clumsy and useless
earth. The sailors (‘the masses’) are incapable of recognising the grandeur of
the great seabird and thus reject it. For Bourdieu this poem is a symptom of the
impossible position in which Baudelaire places himself, as a transformer of the
French literary field of his period. Méditations pascaliennes, p.108.
 Yerra el naturalismo en este fin útil y secundario a que trata de enderezar las
fuerzas artísticas de nuestro siglo, y este error y el sentido determinista y
fatalista de su programa, son los límites que él mismo se impone, son las
ligaduras que una fórmula más amplia ha de romper.22

Even at the height of Realism/Naturalism, the writers have their

doubts, as Zavala shows in El texto en la historia.23 It is as if there
were an unconscious desire not to be assimilated by scientific method,
as if the unconscious wished to save the liberty of the subject and
preserve the imagination against the attack of scientific rationality.
Most surprisingly of all, when the writers of the period come to define
‘beauty’ or the ‘imagination’ they fall into the Romantic cliché of the
ineffable. Literature is the unsayable, ‘un noséqué’, as in the words of
Pardo Bazán: ‘Aquel sentimiento inefable que en nosotros produce la
belleza, sea él que lo fuere y consista en lo que consista’.24
To summarize, then, on the one hand the cultural field is
reaffirming its rights with regards the science and the market. On the
other, there is a seismic shift at the level of the unconscioous: in the
nineteenth century, with the separation of the cultural and the
scientific fields, bourgeois hegemony decides to save the notion of the
subject from the knife of science, operating on three fronts: the
scientific discoveries of Darwin (that man is no different to animals),
Freud (that consciousness rests in the unconscious) and Marx (that the
individual is a carrier of structures, an ideological animal).25

22 Emilia Pardo Bazán, La cuestión palpitante, consulted via the Biblioteca

Virtual Cervantes. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras
/01361653177804509311802/index.htm [12/08/06].
23 Iris M. Zavala, El texto en la historia (Madrid: Nuestra cultura, 1981),
especially ‘El triunfo del canónigo: Teoría y novela en la España del siglo XIX
(1800–1875)’, pp.11–68.
24 Ibid.
25 Bourdieu describes the operation of fields as a cause of a determined way of
seeing the world, but he does not explore in his analyses the determinations
caused by the ideological unconscious; and only a ‘free-author-subject’ not in
the service of kings or the church, but who earns money from his publications
(the birth of the modern novel is inseparable from the book market) can believe
himself to be ‘autonomous’, take pride in this fact and publicly display his
difference (as a Bohemian). Bourdieu does not see the ideology of the subject.
His theory of fields would probably not work in the analysis of the modes of
 This is the context in which the men of 1898 appear, as if by
calling. As we have seen, the literary field ‘refracts’ external
determinations and retranslated them according to its own logic.26 The
group of 1898, with its influences from Impressionism and Hispanic
Modernismo, are an interiorisation, a partial negation of Naturalist
objectivity through the creation of a stylized literary reality.
Let us turn to the subject of ‘identity’ in order to focus our
argument in the ‘specificity’ of the peninsular literary fields. Whilst
there was indeed a centripetal, Castilianized, process, our perception
of this is unavoidably marked by Francoist historiography. There is a
need to study, in parallel with this, the processes of construction of the
different nationalist imaginaries, not only the invention of Spain (as in
Inman Fox), but also the invention of the other ‘nationalities’, and to
write a history of the relations between the different fields and sub-
fields. And this should not only deal with the other Iberian
‘nationalities’, but also with Latin America. In his article on
Unamuno’s representation of Spanish America, Pérez López reveals
how the writer’s vision is marked by the obsessions of Hispanic
intellectuals at the turn of the century: race, the phantom of the
volksgeist in their particular notion of ‘Spanishness’ (lo español), the
rancid elitist dichotomy between the individual and the masses, and a
world view that ultimately mythologized Latin America as a species
of compensatory myth.27 In other words, there is an ‘invention’ of
Spanish America in the wake of the ‘invention’ of Spain. Moreover,
Anna Sawicka shows elsewhere in an article on Unamuno’s
correspondence with Catalan writers about the use of Castilian, the
former’s ambivalence with regard to the latter and his trenchant

production of symbolic goods in pre-capitalist social formations, where there is

no ‘writer-subject’.
26 The Field of Cultural Production, p.164.
27 María Ángeles Pérez López, ‘Del modelo al retrato: la poética americana de
Miguel de Unamuno’, in Kateřina Drsková & Helena Zbudilova (eds.), Opera
romanica 6. El retrato en la literatura (České Budějovice: Editio Universitatis
Bohemiae Meridionalis, 2005), pp.52–64. She bases her argument on an article
by Nuria Tabanera, ‘El horizonte americano en el imaginario español’, in
Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 2 (1997).
http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/VIII_2 [31/08/2006].
Castilianism. In spite of an initial flirtation with Catalanism, this is
followed by uncertainty and finally outright rejection:

Unamuno pronto dejó de banda argumentos psicológico-literarios, como la

sinceridad del escritor, que postulaba antes, y empezó a hablar de patriotismo.
En uno de sus textos puso en relación directa el patriotismo español con el uso
del castellano, como condición indispensable. No le importaba que los
catalanes criticaran España. Dijo: ‘Mientras se habla mal de España en español,
todo va bien, porque, queriendo o sin querer, se habla mal de España
filialmente’. Luego añadía: ‘El que se sienta hermano mayor, no debe
abandonar la casa común, sino gobernarla para bien de todos.28

Language of power versus language of prestige. In this turn of the

century polemic, not all writers felt Spain to be a problem. Indeed,
Maragall bade his farewell to Spain in his Oda a Espanya in 1898.
Yet the knot becomes even thornier if we consider the presence of
Europe in the debate, for Europe played its role, too, in the
development and representation of imagined identities. In recent
years:

Here [In Spain], as in Italy too, European integration represents upwards, not
downward, national mobility – an opportunity to rise above traditional identity,
rather than a potential threat to it.29

However, this has not always been the case, above all for the
conservative traditionalist bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, the main
contingency for writers in the Iberian literary fields, with the
exception perhaps of the Catalan field. Once more, let us consider
Unamuno, whose position on Europe went through two phases. In the
first phase (1902) he justifies the Europeanisation of Spain as follows:

28 Anna Sawicka, ‘La polémica de Miguel de Unamuno con sus corresponsales

catalanes sobre el uso del castellano’ in J. Butiñá, J. Ziarkowska, P. Sawicki &
A. August-Zarebska (eds.), Estudios Hispánicos XII – Miscelánea de literatura
española contemporánea –Homenaje a Roberto Mansberger Amorós
(Wroclaw: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Wroclaw, 2004),
pp.205–215.
29 Perry Anderson, ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity’, in A Zone of
Engagement (London-New York: Verso, 1992), p.275.
‘España está por descubrir, y sólo la descubrirán los españoles
europeizados’. However, by 1906 he is to write:

La verdadera y honda europeización de España... no empezará hasta que no

tratemos de imponernos en el orden espiritual a Europa, de hacerles tragar lo
nuestro, lo genuinamente nuestro, a cambio de lo suyo, hasta que no tratemos
de españolizar a Europa. 30

The Castilianization or Castilianofilia of peninsular literary history is

resulted from a process of symbolic production which mirrored
existing dispositions in the very fields of cultural production.
Moreover, these dispositions were marked by the pseudo-
philosophical ideas that have dominated the ‘deep’ view of canonical
literature, with its funereal sweep of history:

Défenseurs sourcilleux de leur monopole de l’histoire de la philosophie, ainsi

arrachée à la science historique, les desservants du culte philosophique
soumettent des textes canoniques éternisés par l’oubli du processus historique
de canonisation dont ils sont issus à une lecture déshistoricisante qui, sans
même avoir besoin d’affirmer la croyance dans l’irréductibilité du discours
philosophique à toute détermination sociale, met entre parenthèses tout ce qui
rattache le text à un champ de production, et, à travers lui, à une société
historique.31

This invention of a quasi-liturgical reading is what lends canonical

texts ‘la fausse éternisation d’un embaumement rituel’.32 In some of
the pseudo-philosophy we find in Unamuno, Ganivet or Azorín (such
as his Castilla of 1912 and the idea of an eternal, Apollonian circular
time), we can observe parallelism with other European fields of
production. The following quotation from Stern could apply equally to
the ‘men of 1898’, both in their intrahistory and their suspicion of
modernity:

30 Miguel de Unamuno, Ensayos I (Madrid: Aguilar, 1951), p.918. See Gómez-

Martínez for discussion of this and Unamuno’s influence on later historians,
such as Américo Castro.
31 Méditations pascaliennes, p.54.
32 Ibid, p.59.
 The conservative revolutionaries denounced every aspect of the capitalistic
society and its putative materialism. They railed against the spiritual emptiness
of life in an urban, commercial civilization, and lamented the decline of
intellect and virtue in a mass society. They attacked the press as corrupt, the
political parties as the agents of national dissension, and the new rulers as
ineffectual mediocrities. The bleaker their picture of the present, the more
attractive seemed the past, and they indulged in nostalgic recollections of the
uncorrupted life of earlier rural communities, when men were peasants and
kings true rulers. Most of them thought that this world had been destroyed by
evil hands; consequently they firmly believed in a conspiratorial view of history
and society. 33

Is this not the world view we find in that stylized rural world of
Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir? Of course, Stern’s comments
refer to some of the exponents of the conservative revolution in fin de
siècle Germany, and the passage concludes with the observation that
‘[t]he villain usually was the Jew, who more and more frequently
came to be depicted as the very incarnation of modernity’.34 Yet, this
too can be read in the following passage from Baroja:

El doctor Iturrioz, tío carnal de Andrés Hurtado, solía afirmar, probablemente

de una manera arbitraria, que en España, desde un punto de vista moral, hay dos
tipos: el tipo ibérico y el tipo semita. Al tipo ibérico asignaba el doctor las
cualidades fuertes y guerreras de la raza; al tipo semita, las tendencia rapaces,
de intriga y de comercio.35

Julio Aracil is described in El árbol de la ciencia as the ‘semitic

type’, locating him in the persecuted xueta tradition through reference
to Mallorca:

Julio era un verdadero fenicio; procedía de Mallorca y probablemente había en

él sangre semítica. [...] Con su sentido previsor de hormiga, calculaba la

33 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair – A Study in the Rise of the
Germanic Ideology (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1961), p.xviii. See also Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins.
The German Academic Community, 1898-1933 (Cambridge (Massachussetts):
Harvard UP, 1969).
34 Ibid.
35 Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia (Madrid: Caro Raggio/Cátedra, 1996), p.66.
 cantidad de placeres obtenibles por una cantidad de dinero. [...] Miraba los
bienes de la tierra con ojos de tasador judío.36

Of course, this antisemitism can be assuaged by reading these ideas as

being those of the character Andrés Hurtado, who is clearly imbued
with the Darwinist, hygienist and eugenicist ideas of nineteenth
century medical knowledge. For Baroja, to a certain extent, escapes
the continual tension of Castilianism, which we find in Azorín and
Baroja, not only because his work is in a continual process of
transformation, but because in his novels we find a world, that of the
writers who formed the literary field between 1890 and the
avantgarde, that is in collapse, and a tendency to negate the ‘real’.
Both Camino de perfección (published in 1902 and subtitled ‘Pasión
mística’) and El árbol de la ciencia are dominated by a dark sexuality
and fear of women and by the interiorization of reality, in the manner
of pictorial Impressionism. In El árbol de la ciencia the presence of
reality is dissove until we are left with only the corrupt interior of
man:

En El árbol de la ciencia –al disolverse Andrés en aconitina–, y pretender

disolver con él las ‘leyes objetivas’, el sentido global que se desprende del libro
es sobre todo el anuncio de la muerte de una manera de sentir el mundo, que el
estallido del catorce y la revolución de los soviets no harán sino confirmar: la
‘actitud precursora’ es anuncio de disolución.37

The 1917 revolution is a defining moment: a before and after in the

history of the peninsular literary fields. From then onwards it becomes
necessary to speak of something else, something represented by the
avantgarde who completely reconfigure the peninsular literary fields.
All this will be broken in 1936. What was to follow was the
hegemony of the generational theories and the generations of
generations, but this belongs to another historical moment,
characterized by the need to wipe clean the slate of history.
Literature, like theory, is the least innocent of occupations. But
sociology of literature should neither be grasped as a chance to settle

36 Ibid, pp.66–7.
37 Juan Carlos Rodríguez, ‘Estructura y superestructura en Pío Baroja’, in La
norma literaria, p.349.
the score, nor as the analysis of a pure bubble. And we say this with
all the respect we owe Hispanists like Donald Shaw, for their insights
into de 1898 Generation. ‘The question – according to Spinoza- is not
to laugh, deplore nor detest, but to understand’. And to understand
means the creation of a language. In this chapter I have simply tried to
show how use of a sociological toolkit that does not take into account
the specificity of the social world that produce the artefact and its own
theory (the text is analysed but also analysing), as well as the
indiscriminate and pseudo-sociological use of a series of notions leads
to a paradox: in trying to avoid traditional textual exegesis, one
continues to do the same in the name of a false heterodoxy. In this
sense, it would be preferable to continue with the Heideggerian ritual
of the text in-itself and for-itself.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London:

NLB, 1970.
---. Para leer el capital. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1970.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Meditaciones pascalianas. Barcelona: Anagrama,
1999.
---. Razones prácticas (sobre la teoría de la acción). Barcelona:
Anagrama, 1997.
---. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
---. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.
---. Language & Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
---. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991.
---. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
---. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
---. Distinction. London: Routledge, 1984.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. “Sociology and
Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a
Philosophy without a Subject.” Social Research 34. 1 (1967): 162-
212.
Eribon, Didier. “L’anti-héritier.” Le Nouvel Observateur. 31 en.-6
febr. 2002: 26-28.
Fowler, Bridget, ed. Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Gómez-Martínez, José Luis. Américo Castro y el origen de los
españoles, historia de una polémica, Madrid: Gredos, 1975
Robbins, Derek. “The English intellectual field in the 1790s and the
creative project of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: an application of
Bourdieu’s cultural analysis.” Reading Bourdieu on Society and
Culture. Ed. Bridget Fowler. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
186-198.
---. Bourdieu and Culture. London : Sage Publications: 2000. [b]
Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. La literatura del pobre. Granada: Comares:
1994.
---. La norma literaria. Diputación Provincial de Granada: 19942
(19841)
---. Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica. Madrid: Akal, 1990
(19751) ((),
---. Theory and History of Ideological Production – The First
Bourgeois Literatures (the 16th Century). Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2002. Malcolm K. Read Transl.
Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Mapping Ideology. London & New York: Verso,
1994.