13 Global Citizenship Made in Asturias: Xuan Bello’s Paniceiros
Simplistic portraits of global citizenship in the twenty-first century paint the world as one contiguous hypermodern nonplace. Our world is described as one of erased borders, flattened differences, and ceaseless market flows, of global goods and services, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and superempowered individuals wielding influence that grows at a rate for which Moore’s Law—that now somewhat famous prediction that the amount of information you could cram on a microchip would double every two years for the rest of time—becomes the favorite operating metaphor. In this brave new global world, transnational and nongovernmental powers whittle away at the sovereignty of old-fashioned nation-states. Technology overcomes the old dictums of space and time. Global citizens, armed with Google Translate and a smartphone, flow like the goods they purchase and the capital they wield to do so, across borders and in and out of markets—hyper, cyber, and occasionally flesh-and-blood, but ever emerging. In this new global reality, place would hardly seem to matter.
While this may hold true for some, contemporary human subjectivity in general still experiences material constraints. We humans evolved in lockstep with powerful material confines. They still matter—materially, emotionally, and psychologically. We care about our place in the world. And we can’t help but tie our place therein to the actual places we inhabit. Place matters.
Over the last half of the twentieth century, the number of nation-states across the globe doubled as the peoples of the world demanded places of their own. From Lesotho to Luxembourg, difference, however small, is recognized today and given a home. Of the fifty-four nation-states on the African continent, all but four gained their independence in the latter half of the twentieth century. At approximately the same time, over on the Indian subcontinent, the state of India broke free of Great Britain, then Pakistan from India, then Bangladesh from Pakistan. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Sudan willingly departed with its southernmost third. Today 190 nations enjoy officially recognized sovereignty over their own affairs.
Even so, plenty of others remain untethered. Kurds, Tibetans, Rohinga, and many more speak their languages and keep their traditions while stretched across political borders or persecuted within them. Even where oppression isn’t explicit—Eduardo Lalo’s Puerto Rico comes to mind here—there is still little to no mechanism for determining one’s own fate.
But as we noted in our reading of Lalo’s novel Simone, twenty-first-century conditions don’t always make for the straightforward push for local rights that facilitated the nation-state cause of so many in the mid-twentieth century. Lalo’s Puerto Ricans may have no rights, but the inertia of certain US protections lulls the general populace into ideological malaise. What is this lobbying for modern statehood, they intuitively ask, when global economic models rule the day and media-driven postmodern, post-identity possibilities chip away at increasingly antiquated political stances? Whence the obsession with a tradition-based identity in a materially located place? Is this not a world of smooth and fluid global spaces, or at least of new centerless political systems that challenge the sovereignty of even the most established states? Why would one seek hard-and-fast identities, when those who have them look to be jettisoning the same as quickly as their social-media profiles will allow?
At the opening of the twenty-first century, there was possibly no better place to find a host of artists and intellectuals wrestling with these problems than Spain. As we noted in chapter two, entering the new millennium, Spain was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. It enjoyed a stable democracy. It had experienced decades of important if inconsistent economic growth and boasted one of the world’s strongest economies. Moreover, it was entering the new millennium with a new currency and an expansive, experimental new partnership that willingly relinquished state sovereignty to an entity, the European Union, that was described by experts as a government without a center, a new kind of place of identification that unlike the nation-states that would constitute it, had no borders. And yet, within Spain there were officially three historic communities, plus several others with historical arguments on their side, that still chaffed under the yoke of a government that denied them a simple sense of home. Basques, Catalans, Galicians and others, with unique languages, customs, and histories, embraced on the one had their new European and even global identities. On the other, they still clamored for a clearer sense of home.
The tensions inherent in their clamor were, not surprisingly, manifest in the cultural work of the artists of Spain’s historically homeless communities. From the Basque Country’s Bernardo Atxaga to Galicia’s Manuel Rivas to Cataluña’s Carmé Riera, writings from these “postmodern homeless” manifest the tension between global and local. Their work develops a dialogue with cosmopolitan literary traditions that would secure global cachet for their works, while at the same time betraying a sometimes desperate need to sustain, rescue, or even resuscitate local cultures that may at times appear a bit quaint, if not downright old-fashioned after so many decades of official or quasi-official suppression.
Despite these efforts from Spain’s mainstream periphery, one of the more successful recent attempts to pull off this global/local balance in Spain comes, not from one the more separatist or the more cosmopolitan of Spain’s historic regions, but from the very rural and what many would imagine as not very “separatist” region of Asturias. For many non-Spaniards, and possibly some of its very citizens, it might be surprising that the place from which modern Spain arose over a millennium ago would have not only its own particular language but its own literature. We might expect that such a literature would wear the nationalist scars typical of a place so long both geographically and politically left behind. It is surprising that Xuan Bello’s Paniceiros (2005), while a profoundly local text, is a model of writing about space and place in a global era. Deeply situated in a lovingly depicted rural idyll, Paniceiros nonetheless creates what we may call, borrowing from theorists Deleuze and Guatarri, an experience of smooth space and place appropriate to the demands and opportunities of readers who, while escaping momentarily into the dreamworlds of authors and artists, are ultimately citizens of an increasingly global world.
A World Called Paniceiros
Until the 2003 publication of Historia universal de Paniceiros [Universal History of Paniceiros], Xuan Bello was best known as an Asturian poet, not only writing from Asturias but in Asturian. From 1982 to 1999 Bello published five books of poetry in his local tongue including a self-translated bilingual Asturian/Spanish anthology. In 2003, Bello’s first book of prose, Universal History of Paniceiros, won the 2003 Gomez de la Serna prize. The following year Bello published a second collection of stories, essays, and poetry, Los cuarteles de la memoria [The Barracks of Memory], compiling the two the following year into an unclassifiable collection of literary forms entitled, plainly, Paniceiros. The work bears the name of Bello’s birthplace, a tiny village in western Asturias midway between Oviedo and the Galician city of Lugo.
Filled with historical photographs, local folktales, lyric poetry, alphabetically ordered definitions of local keywords, and personal and family memories, Paniceiros, at first glance, is the kind of nationalist paean easily dismissed as inappropriate to fomenting effective global citizenship, a collection fitting the description, “relatos que transmiten una lejana y lancinante melancolía”
[stories that transmit a distant and cutting melancholy] of which outspoken critic Jon Juaristi has written (33). In an introductory prologue entitled “Alfa,” Bello calls the collection “un viaje imposible a mi pasado” [an impossible journey into my past”], a study of “un mundo que se muere” [a dying world] (9–10). Like the nationalist mythmakers Juaristi has raged against, Bello links his romantic longing for the forgotten homeland with a nostalgia for a magical mother tongue: “Aquella gramática y aquel vocabulario, leídos una y otra vez, fueron algo así como un conjuro que me abrió las puertas del alma” [That grammar and that vocabulary, read time and again, were something like an incantation that opened to me the doors of the soul] (10). He reflects on personal loss connected to his family’s move from the rural paradise of Paniceiros to the local capital of Oviedo where he and his sister found themselves “atrapados por las reglas de la ciudad” [trapped by the rules of the city] (11).
The collection’s first poem sustains this apparent nationalist logic of loss. Entitled, like the name of the collection and the lost idyll, “Paniceiros,” the poem describes a once glorious realm on the verge of collapse:
Conozco un país donde el mundo se llama
Zarréu Grandiella Picu la Mouta Paniceiros
Un mundo que perdió sus caminos
Jerusalén en la palma de la mano de un niño
Un mundo que era alto luminoso esbelto
Naciente y fuente y vocación de río
Donde los hombre callan y el silencio es renuncia
Donde olvidamos el ser Donde claudicamos
Un país donde la casa cae Cae el hórreo el puente
el molino la iglesia el hombre también cae
Donde la Mirada era pura sencilla
la huella que había dejado la nube en el cielo
Donde tan solo nos queda la memoria
corrompida de la infancia Nuestra soledad
Este abandono nuestro
[I know a country where the world is called
Zarréu Grandiella Picu la Mouta Paniceiros
A world that lost its pathways
Jerusalem in the palm of a child’s hand
A world that was tall bright slender
nascent and fount and river’s vocation
Where men don’t speak and silence is giving up
where we forget being Where we renounce
A country where homes collapse The grainery collapses the bridge
the mill the church humanity all collapse
Where the Gaze was pure simple
the impression left by the cloud in the sky
Where for us only the corrupt
memory of childhood remains Our solitude
This our abandonment]
Judging by appearance (the dozens of old black-and-white photos of Asturian village life that dot the collection) and by story titles (numerous references to local places, names), the more than five hundred pages that follow would seem to confirm the profound nationalistic nostalgia the poem and prologue suggest. Lovingly composed and compiled, Paniceiros is an aesthetic delight, a hymn to lost places and lost times far in its intentions from answering the necessities of the global citizen perusing an online catalogue in search of a read that would bring her up to speed on confronting the challenges of globalization. At the same time, the first verse of the above poem, with its association of first-person local knowledge and global vision, typifies an ongoing connection within this work between local place and global space, finding a key to effective twenty-first-century citizenship in a seemingly antiquated cultivation of place.
Asturias Made in America
The association superficially sketched in the verses above is actually first introduced in a story, “Memoria del Capitán Bobes” [Memory of Captain Bobes]. This piece features three characters: a nomad, an exile, and a sailor. The former narrates an experience that a certain Víctor Fuentes once shared with him when the latter was his graduate professor at UC Santa Barbara. One day while strolling along a local beach, Fuentes spies a castaway struggling in the surf. The professor rescues the man, only to discover that this stranger is a fellow Asturian exile, Ramiro Bobes Fernández. Bobes is, in fact, a veteran of the Asturian revolution of 1934, a member of the Consejo Soberano de Asturias y León, a veteran of the Battle of the Ebro, a French resistance fighter, and a liberator of Paris. Most recently Bobes has served as official tutor and clandestine lover to the daughter of the president of Guatemala. When the daughter became pregnant, Capitán Bobes relates, he threw together a makeshift raft and set sail, following the route of the whales until the currents cast him up on the Santa Barbara coast.
While the story is interesting in and of itself, its significance to its various narrators and audiences is the connection it draws to their Asturian homeland. Its collocation at the beginning of the collection suggests its bearing on the work’s evocation of Paniceiros and Asturias. Ironically Asturias, in the collection’s first short story, comes into being outside of official place and at a remove from historical time. The first “Asturias” that the reader encounters has its foundations in Santa Barbara, California, USA. Temporally Asturias is even more dispersed. It is first an experience shared in the surf many years after initial exile, then a story recounted between professor and student years later, and lastly a tale that the now former student shares with his readers. This is not to say that Asturias is merely an idea. The contrast between the experience of Asturias and an abstract notion of the nation is established in the reference to Fuentes as an academic expert on Asturian exile. Fuentes’s work is to think about Asturias. But the experience of Asturias is different, cast up almost by accident on the California shores by ocean currents, then shared in poetic form between a professor and student, and finally from student to reader who may or may not be Asturian at all but who, as chance would have it, is virtually inhabiting Paniceiros at this moment.
Bello’s story concludes with a final anecdote from Fuentes, who relates that Bobes, unemployed, ends up passing his days as a sculptor living in a California hippie commune. One day he is commissioned with a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. “En cuatro días la tenía hecha,” relates Fuentes, un Lincoln alto, bravo, aventurero y libertador. Pero aquella estatua era un autorretrato. La imagen, inconfundible, del Capitán Bobes” [It was done in four days, a tall, brave, adventurous, and liberating Lincoln. But that statue was a self-portrait. The unmistakeable image of Captain Bobes] (23). The final addition perhaps serves merely to wrap the tale in absurdity, inviting readers not to take too seriously any of the stories of Asturias and its citizens to be found in the coming pages. On the other hand, Lincoln is known as the savior of his nation, the nation that one day would offer Bobes, Fuentes, and our narrator a second home. Lincoln saved a nation. And in that nation, another nation discovered, or recovered, itself one day, if only for a day. That nation wears the face of Capitán Bobes. In the moment of encounter, Lincoln matters only because of Bobes and therefore is, metaphorically, Bobes. The statue, in all its absurdity, foregrounds the presence of being in the processes of material encounter. The rough (un)likeness of Bobes as Lincoln draws attention to the coming into being of Asturian space in a place preserved by Lincoln.
This play between place and space dominates the collection, manifest most apparently in the movement between small-town Asturias and a typically cosmopolitan elsewhere. In fact, while memories, stories, and certainly the place itself of Paniceiros blanket the collection, more than one third of the entries either take place or give significant attention to spaces and places beyond Asturias. France, Italy, Ireland, China, Cuba, Portugal, India, Japan, Guinea-Bissau, the United States, and the Congo feature in select stories. In many of these there is no direct mention of Paniceiros or Asturias, only that the protagonists or merely our narrator once had some Asturian connection. The longest story in the collection, “Una historia vulgar” [An Ordinary Tale] is set in New York and Cuba; the name Paniceiros never arises. While one of the major characters is an Asturian exile and his bookstore, which forms the backdrop for some of the story’s intrigue, is called “Librería Asturias” [Asturias Bookstore], neither fact figures significantly in the story’s detectivesque plot. If the bookstore might be considered a site for the experience of Asturian citizenship, the mishmash of characters who gather there for weekly card games and later strategy sessions are a strange kind of citizenship: an Argentine anarchist, a German Jew, a once-upon-a-time Lincoln Brigade reject, and just one other fellow Asturian. The group leaves an empty seat at these gatherings for the late cofounder of the group, a fellow Spanish exile, but from Galicia. We inevitably read this story, embedded within the Paniceiros collection, as part of the Asturias-building project of the work as we do the many others set outside the ancient homeland. Hence we inevitably look for Asturias in this motley crew of mostly non-Asturians. With this group, our idea of Asturias is reinforced with emotions associated with unrepentant political commitment, enduring friendship, and, above all, an unavoidable, constant sense of loss and homelessness. Once again, these are the emotions of romantic nation building. But, also again, in the larger structure these abstract emotions are only available as embedded within specific places or, in other words, in a structure that arrests any attempt to establish direct connections to an abstract notion of an affixed, stable nation-space. Certainly Asturias is embedded in place—in the case of “Una historia vulgar,” in the name of a bookstore—but the place is tragically temporary, subject in the story to arson and bankruptcy.
The nomadic nature of the Asturians in these two stories calls to mind a particular notion of space described in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Modernity has championed a certain understanding of space and place as affixed, measurable, and marketable. Modern places can be located on maps. Their borders can be negotiated and reapportioned. They can be bought and sold. A modern cadre of cartographers, economists, and politicians arises around this “striated” spatiality (Casey 301–08). For all the power of modernity and its army of “striators,” alternative approaches to space and place remain. Deleuze and Guattari describe a sense of space they refer to as “smooth.” Smooth space is exemplified by the spatiality of the nomad and the sailor, beings who, in their connection to their lived environment, are intensely emplaced and yet unlocatable, inhabiting as they do ever-shifting sands and ocean tides (Deleuze and Guattari 381–83). In the world of nomad and sailor both human subject and physical geography slide across each other. The spaces they inhabit are only locatable by way of ongoing and very material relations with geographies, which ultimately prove to be more process than product. The concept of smooth space is at once more fluid than the modernist understanding of a gridded, striated space, and at the same time, more affixed in a solid notion of home. This spatial concept is key to understanding the dynamics of space and place in the postmodern, globalized, and virtualized reality of twenty-first-century Western civilization. Xuan Bello’s Paniceiros works through the tensions between local and global, between nationalist nostalgia and global cosmopolitanism through a representation of space and place that can likewise be described as smooth.
This unorthodox “smooth” sense of Asturias as place—manifest in the collection’s opening story and repeated throughout in stories such as “Una historia vulgar”—inevitably problematizes the simple nostalgia we might feel on reading the numerous fully Asturian stories that the collection also contains. Several factors facilitate this. From the beginning, our narrator introduces the town Paniceiros as a home that was never fully home to the author. It was, from the beginning, a place that he would visit with his family, though sometimes for extended stays. Consequently, many of the tales he tells are explicitly the visions of an outsider, someone always passing through. His most potentially nationalist stories—local legends that find their way into his broader anecdotes—are clearly stories he has picked up from locals whose paths he crosses over the years. The romanticizing and nationalizing content of the stories then is problematized by a layering of narrative voices that draws as much attention to the art of storytelling as to the content of the tales themselves. The nostalgia for the old ways is immediate, possessing the materiality of the storytelling process. As noted earlier, many of the stories in the collection could be more accurately described as essays, commentaries, or simple recollections—all literary genres that foreground the presence of a storyteller feeling his way toward his story. For example, the introductory piece in the collection, “El cuento del lobo” [The Tale of the Wolf], is comprised of a first paragraph in which the author explains his narrative philosophy, a second paragraph in which he lays out his plan to recreate the world of Paniceiros, and a final, third paragraph in which, after singing the praises of not telling the truth, he at last shares a brief memory of an experience in Paniceiros when a childhood lie evokes, to his horror, a new reality. Readers consequently see their place within this storytelling process likewise foregrounded. The Paniceiros they experience, though a real place where a real lie appeared to become a reality, is at the same time an ongoing experience—just as it was for their narrator at the moment of his lie. Paradoxically, as always, the self-consciousness produced by the two paragraphs of preface to the tale comes from within the world of Paniceiros. The awakening to self-consciousness itself helps to create that world. But it is a world that from the beginning proves discursively constructed, performatively experienced, and thus impossible to pin down. The anecdote simply provides a brief moment of rest before we move on to the next story, poem, or photo.
The Image(ned) Text
The myriad images included in Bello’s Paniceiros reinforces this foregrounding. The dozens of old photographs throughout the text would appear to sustain the previously noted notion of the collection as a nostalgic, nationalistic paean to a lost homeland. The vast majority of photos are, after all, shots of traditional rural Asturian life: farmers working their fields, families posing before their cottages, hunting parties celebrating a kill, or women toting piles of laundry on their heads after an afternoon at the washboard. The photos appear to affirm the truth of the stories they accompany. They almost cry from the page, “See, we really were here. We really did go bear hunting, we really did fall in love, we really did live that way once upon a time.” María Luisa Fernández Martínez argues that photography “makes the private public and lends to the small and domestic, by way of repetition over time and across generations, the privilege of archetype and the almost abstract quality of anthropologic and ethnographic commentary” (447). Per Fernández Martínez’s logic, photography should affirm the nostalgic power of the lost homeland of Paniceiros; it should convert it into an archetype with the kind of ethnographic power desired by nationalist defenders of disappearing states.
The inclusion of photography in literary works, however, is never so straightforward. For example, the poem “Paniceiros” (quoted earlier) is accompanied on the facing page by a black and white photograph of an Asturian village, a place we have no reason to doubt is the same site named by the poet as reduced now to “la memoria corrompida de la infancia” [the corrupted memory of childhood] (39). The juxtaposition of photo and verse, like the combinations of the photographic and the literary, affirms the reality of Paniceiros, or at least of towns just like it. The photograph solidifies a certain image of the village, presumably that described in the poem, connecting the pain of loss related therein to an actual locale inhabited by real people.
Yet through the juxtaposition of the two objects, the presence of the photograph simultaneously calls into question the absence the poem suggests. While the poem describes a town without roads, a place of fallen buildings and of views that reveal no more than the impression of a cloud, the accompanying image depicts a well-appointed town with at least one connecting road and implicitly an active citizenship potentially awaiting our always-possible visit. Plenitude counters loss. The work of melancholy is curbed if not contained. The sense of “presence” induced by the photograph, moreover, gives its viewer somewhere to go, a place wherein to deposit their potential melancholia. Its actual presence suggests a real place available to me, the reader, at least at this moment of reading. It “smooths” out what a cursory reading of the poem might turn into a striated space. The phenomenon opens up a gap for reader/viewer agency in the tight fictional apparatus of Bello’s erstwhile romantic hymn. (To be sure, such a gap, on returning to the poem, is already implied there through its expansion from singular to plural subjects [“Conozco un país” to “Este abandono nuestro”], its move from limited concrete knowledge to more abstract and widely available vision and thought [“Conozco un país… un mundo que…” to “Donde tan solo nos queda la memoria / corrompida de la infancia Nuestra soledad”], and its play between general history and intimate memory [“Un mundo que perdió sus caminos…que era alto luminoso esbelto” to “la memoria de la infancia”]).
The gap opened up by the juxtaposition of photography and poem alerts the reader to reexamine Bello’s play between photograph and text. While many images appear to confirm the historical truth of the tales told from Paniceiros’s past (a photo of a hunting expedition accompanies a tale on the same subject; a shot of a family at dinner is inserted into a story that includes recollections of a calendar that bore that image), others only partially resemble the tales they accompany. In some cases the resemblance is actually significantly misleading, such as the photo of a small boy used to supposedly illustrate the tale of a diminutive older gentleman. In the case of the hunting expedition, the photo in question, though clearly documentation of an actual hunt, is hardly proof of the reality of the accompanying tale. An irresolvable play opens here between photography as documentary media and its use in the collection as either a kind of near truth or as outright deception. Susan Sontag has noted that photographs in and of themselves explain nothing but are rather “inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy” (23). Patricia Holland argues that photographs are never “unmediated representations of our past” but that in looking “at them we both construct a fantastic past and set out on a detective trail to find other versions of a ‘real” one” (Spence 14). This is particularly interesting when they figure within works that are marketed as fictional, since the inclusion of the images would appear to serve the purpose of affirmation. The reader is inevitably drawn in that direction, but on further examination in relation to a text that—as the reader is reminded more powerfully by way of the juxtaposition—is fictional, the photograph becomes more overtly fictional than ever, foregrounding the truth of another Sontag statement on photography: “To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to experience the unreality and remoteness of the real” (164). Fernández Martínez agrees: “Photography is as much an invitation to reconstruct the private and domestic past, thanks to its indexical and documentary nature, as it is a demonstration of the futility of this exercise thanks to its silence…. Because it’s a supplement, an additional look that permits the multiplication of available images and that increases the ways in which the world can be presented for our contemplation… it is able to inaugurate a space of silence inside a story, operating also as countermemory” (445). In sum, while the photographs feel like a confirmation of a longed-for lost homeland, they ironically become the mechanism whereby the reality of the entire project —at least as an abstract, “striated” space—comes under erasure. If photography encourages a vision of history as a collection of anecdotes, as Sontag has argued, then the images within this collection, which is indeed a series of anecdotes, serve to foreground the very constructed nature of the entire project (see Sontag 22). A tension arises, then, between the ontological and the epistemological. The combination of genres solidifies the reader’s sense of Paniceiros as place while subverting reader confidence in the intellectual mechanisms by which that sense of place is generated. In the Paniceiros of Bello’s elaboration the reader finds a home but then immediately sets about shoring up its foundations. Yet in doing so, the reader returns repeatedly to the poems, the tales, and the images, each of which in turn reproduces the experience of home. The rigor of the process (resolving the contradiction) becomes associated with the pleasure of the desired product (inhabiting the homeland), turning the process into a kind of homemaking, like the nomad repeatedly pitching his tent across shifting desert sands.
The Alphabetized Nation
A final idiosyncrasy of Paniceiros is its inclusion of the aforementioned alphabet of key words interspersed over the course of the collection. Following a prologue (entitled “Alpha”) and three stories, the reader encounters the entry for the first key word entitled simply a. Beneath, in boldface, are the words Aves migratorias (migrating birds), separated by a colon from a short three paragraph text. By appearances this feature of the collection looks to be a kind of dictionary or encyclopedia of Asturian life or of Paniceiros itself. The immediate impression is, once more, of a text that sets out to capture a complete sense of a lost place—to be, as the title of the original collection stated, a “universal” text. The remaining twenty-six letters of the alphabet follow every ten to twenty pages. The letter b stands for biblioteca (library), c for ciudades (cities), while two entries feature under d : Diversions públicas de invierno (wintertime public amusements) and Diversiones públicas del verano (summertime public amusements). The inclusion of this alphabet likewise suggests to the reader a certain organization to the stories, poems, and essays that follow. An implied order imposes itself upon the reader who continues her reading now in search of connections to “Aves migratorias” [Migratory Birds] or to a “biblioteca” [library]. The play with the idea of an alphabet to correspond to his evocation of a lost place is similar to Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga’s own fascination with alphabets (Olarizegi 98). Like Bello, Atxaga has spent years building up a literary universe that celebrates the rural traditions of his homeland. As with Atxaga’s alphabet, Bello’s, however, ultimately deconstructs the very notion of an organized, ordered, and organizable homeland comprehensible to cartographers and capitalists, to say nothing of politicians.
To be sure, the literary talents of leading authors have long been an attraction to promoters of nations. With their alphabets, both Bello and Atxaga foreground this co-opting of literature for political ends. “We are your leading lights and here is the dictionary by which to organize the myths you seek,” they seem to be saying. What they offer, however, is a deconstruction—or we might say, a “smoothing” out—of that very organization. Bello’s dictionary is Borgesian in both its randomness and its inconsistencies with regards to the very idea of a definition. Some definitions look the part; those for g and l are brief and helpful with respect to understanding Asturias. At the same time, the definitions they give are at least as poetic and humorous as they are informative. The definition for Gobierno reads simply: “Haberle, hayle. Pero está lejos y no molesta” [There ought to be one, there is one, But it’s far away and doesn’t bother us] (139). L for Lengua [Language] reads, “Cada palabra, cada frase deja que se sienta, hondo e íntimo, el aliento del mundo” [Each word, each phrase leaves the deep and intimate impression of a breathing world] (268). Other definitions are nearly impossible to distinguish from the stories, essays, and poems that their organization frames. The entry for v is Vacas [Cows] and tells the story of an old woman crying over the loss of her only companion, a dairy cow. There is little attempt at definition here. Rather, the chaos challenges attempts to “striate” Asturias, to convert it into a marketable or politically negotiable entity.
For all that, the entries do not surrender their claim upon Asturias and Paniceiros as a kind of home. While the storylike definition for Vacas, begins its final sentence stating, “De nada vale hacer alabanza del pasado,” it goes on to warn of the need to hold on to a disappearing place, “pero cuando ya no se entienda nada de esto será tarde, quizá demasiado tarde” [There’s no value in praising the past,but when none of this is remembered any longer, it will be late, perhaps too late” (413). The final entry of the collection, z for Zaguán [Hallway], a treatise on the multiple homes the author has occupied over the years, concludes, “De alguna manera, eso es la vida: estar siempre de mudanza, cerrando puertas que nunca se volverán a abrir, hasta que un día quieres volver y encuentras la casa en ruinas, la yedra amiseriando las paredes y una puerta que temes abrir y que conduce a lo oscuro” [In a way, this is life: always on the move, closing doors that will never reopen, until one day you decide to return and you find your house in ruins, ivy destroying the walls, and the door that you fear opening and that opens onto darkness] (497). As with Bello’s definition of government, within this collection there is nostalgia in spades, plenty of talk of a longed-for homeland. And yet, Bello’s selected organization keeps nostalgia always removed from the abstracting desires of intellectual reason. It is lived but impossible to pin down: “It’s far away and doesn’t bother us.”
The Narrated Home
The story, “Inventario de fantasmas y apariciones” [Inventory of ghosts and apparitions], provides a final illustration of the smoothing of space in this collection. “Inventorio,” is, like so many other contributions to Paniceiros, simultaneously a story and a commentary. It has pretensions to serving as a kind of inventory of local ghost stories, offering four examples that, for the author, capture the variety and power of the local tales. It begins with a brief explanation of how various local legends haunted his childhood. Again Bello does not fail to describe a nostalgic sense of lost times and places. Indeed, Bello mentions, in passing, ICONA, a company that purchased and then razed Paniceiros’s haunted forest in search of lumber profits. Bello also avails himself of the opportunity to theorize on the nature of literature and particularly ghost stories. Following this lengthy, heterogeneous preface, Bello gets to work on the main story, framed by the recollection of a train ride from Madrid to Oviedo. On the train Bello meets an elderly gentleman who, learning of Bello’s origins, shares his own personal experience of a year spent in a nearby village. He tells how, as a brand new medical doctor, he overcame depression and incompetence through the reassuring presence of a stranger on a balcony he passed every morning as he commenced his rounds. Coming to view the man as a kind of father figure, he imagines him calling out to the young doctor each day: “Resiste. No te derrumbes. Tú serás un buen medico” [Hold on. Don’t falter. You’ll make a fine doctor] (163). At the conclusion of the year, now moving on to practice in the city, he stops by the house to, at long last, make the acquaintance of his accidental savior. To his consternation he discovers that no one matching the description lives there. Forty years later, the now veteran doctor returns to the village where he finds that same house transformed into a small inn. He decides to take a room there for the night. Stepping out onto the balcony the next morning to have a look at the village where he had toiled that first lonely year of practice, he spies, passing by on the road below, what looks to be a young doctor on his way to a house call. Within him he offers a kind of silent prayer, “Resiste. No te derrumbes. Tú serás un buen medico.”
At that moment, to his consternation, he at last understands who the stranger was.
Bello’s Paniceiros builds home like the doctor’s experience builds courage. Bello’s doctor initially seeks a fixed person in a fixed place at a fixed time. The doctor’s tale and Bello’s retelling of it both work as ghost stories because both audiences, at the moment of reception, have similar aims: locating a specific person in a specific place and a specific time. We readers have been educated and conditioned to think of space and place in an abstract, striated fashion. For all his education, the hapless doctor, however, is saved by local, immediate experience, not through abstract knowledge. The Asturias that saves him is indifferent to his book learning. When at last the doctor determines to make sense of what, until then, he has merely been living, the place, time, and figures of that experience vanish. Only when he returns forty years later does he understand that the place could only be personal, immediate, and lived.
So it is with our reading of Paniceiros. The Asturias it creates is both hauntingly beautiful and hauntingly on the verge of disappearance. As we read, we witness a bold attempt to preserve its language and its memory. But through an equally haunting and bold exploration of the very processes of preservation, Bello creates not the illusion of a nation demanding ideological allegiance but the experience of a place and space calling us to engagement. It makes of the reader not a nationalist but a nomad. It teaches them, by way of experience, an alternative to the striated space and place of late-capitalist modernity. But crucial to the success of Bello’s project, the experience of Paniceiros gives the reader a place from which and within which to journey. The nomadic reader is not an exile, is not homeless, is not a mere cipher of a postmodernized globalization, but a global citizen.
***
Pulling back from the world of Paniceiros and returning to this paper’s opening paragraphs, it behooves us to consider the nature of global citizenship. The term citizenship refers to membership in a community, as well as to the rights and responsibilities associated with such membership. If the political community in question is the entire world, then citizenship is global in its view, with rights and responsibilities of an equal scope. And yet, it is essential to keep in mind that for all the technological achievements of the modern era, human consciousness remains in many ways premodern. Wire transfers and global conference calls may transcend certain ancient space/time conditions, and the pundits of posthumanism may claim the dispersion of human nature across cables and wires and now amid “the cloud,” but still there remains an inescapable materiality to human subjectivity.
A global, cosmopolitan citizenship cannot establish itself on merely abstract global foundations. Human beings yet exist in specific place and time—or rather space-time—even if such space-time is more elastic than in the past. My original “citizenships,” if you will, do not dissolve in the face of globalization. Rather, they are the very basis for meaningful global citizenship and hence successful globalization. Richard Slimbach refers to global citizenship as ultimately global “homemaking” (4). Slimbach, speaking of the formation of global citizens, explains, “the goal of a global education is not to loosen up and ultimately harmonize homegrown attachments with an imagined, ‘we are the world’ solidarity. It is to understand our lives as ‘placed’ somewhere and in relation to someone. The necessary starting point for shaping cosmopolitan sensibilities is within local communities. Properly speaking, caring for the whole world is simply not humanly possible; one can only love locally” (18). Coming at this problem from the opposite angle, Gaston Bachelard in his seminal work, The Poetics of Space, argues that the very human sense of being originates in the psycho-spatial experience of the childhood home. Analyzing the presence of home in a lifetime’s reading of literature, Bachelard claims that our experience of the childhood home provides psychic stability, allowing for life itself: “The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace…the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind…the house thrusts aside contingencies…Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world” (6).
Home, however, isn’t as simple a notion as it used to be. As of 2007 more than half the world’s population lives in urban settings, an astonishing change from a century ago when the figure stood at just 5%. In addition, more and more of the world’s population is on the move, an estimated 244 million in 2015, or over 3% of the total, being immigrants or exiles (UNFPA). Even for those staying at home, the effects of globalization prove psychologically disembedding and deterritorializing. McKenzie Wark quips that human beings in the twenty-first century no longer have roots, but aerials (x). To combat the loss of home, immigrants turn to satellite television, social media, and smartphones, establishing psychic networks that transcend the physical limitations of local geography. While such strategies may remind reluctant global denizens of a lost homeland, they are unlikely to forge effective global citizens. Mass media can prove as invasive as inviting. Indeed, media technology is one of the principle causes of the psychological displacement associated with globalization. Social media and mass media, moreover, are information heavy but often meaning light. Their end result is noise, hardly the stuff of home.
Can literature be of value here? Stories of the homeland—on screen or in text—can obviously have powerful effects. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, such media all too often tend toward nostalgic recollections of lost golden ages and sacred spaces. They prove, more often than not, politically reactionary. They may construct a sense of home for their audience, but the result is hardly a place from which to exercise effective global citizenship. More importantly, the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to mentally escape into the lost world evoked by the text is bounded by a discrete reading experience. While this phenomenon is as old as storytelling itself, it has only recently become a limitation. This is because the sense of rootedness produced in the text bears so little resemblance to the rootless—that is, the aerial—society particular to its audience outside the text. Arjun Appadurai has argued that the imaginative possibilities of contemporary Western culture now extend beyond the artistic work; global citizens armed with media technology imagine possibilities unthinkable only a few years ago (Appadurai 5–6). With so much media, information, and noise accosting them, the home evoked through the willing suspension of disbelief during the reading experience evaporates almost immediately at text’s end; its solidity melts into air. The world Appadurai describes suggests that the old-fashioned possible worlds of traditional literature may not have much of a role to play in our contemporary cultural milieu.
If literature is to offer a solution to the existential challenges of globalization and thereby serve as a tool for the preparation of global citizens, it must at once provide the stabilizing shelter Bachelard finds in traditional literary works and at the same time ensure that said shelter is appropriate to the realities of the nomadism demanded of would-be global citizens. It must be both sheltering and networking, stable and yet flowing. This would be my final argument in praise of Paniceiros. Bello’s work, as noted above, challenges modern understandings of Asturias, specifically, and of our concept and perception of space and place in general. But its mixture of genres and its play with reader expectations ultimately—perhaps inevitably—transcends textual limits. The photographs, the characters drawn from living history, the nonfictional disquisitions, the frequent autobiographical references, and the framing narrator’s conversational tone engage the reader in an imaginative experience that challenges boundaries between text and life, bringing the textual imaginative into the extratextual realm of the imaginary.
Space is not merely an idea or material construct. Space is process, simultaneously conceived, perceived, and lived. Xuan Bello, by mixing, at multiple levels, fiction and reality, text and image, Asturias and elsewhere, offers his readers the materials for a literary experience of space that becomes process, not just within the reading but—in a world where the imaginary bleeds increasingly into the material—in their own lives. With photos, memories, nonfictional essays, and the presence of characters whose lives clearly transcend the text, Bello gives readers a place at once extratextually concrete and yet—embedded as it is within an ongoing short-story collection—infinitely available to the imagination both within and beyond the text. This is a potentially habitable site for the postmodern global nomad/citizen for whom space is increasingly experienced as “smooth”—always intensely tactile and yet resistant to totalization. In Paniceiros rural nostalgia produces global citizenship as fiction flows into the territories of the material.
