Abstract
In writing about the International Exhibition of 1868 in France, art critic and historian Ernest Chesneau expressed concern that future generations of French citizens would be unable to gain a sense for the France of the time by turning to French (high) art. Rather, their only recourse would be the works of popular artists: “Should France remain essentially as it has done for centuries, no doubt an authentic tradition will be established on the basis of our present customs: but it is certainly not in our modern pictures that our descendants will find the elements of that tradition—they will have to find them in our caricaturists … our true ‘peintres de moeurs.’”1 In Chesneau’s account, France has an essential identity the origins of which stretch far back into the past. The preservation and continuation of that national essence depends, curiously, on the ossification of not past but “present customs” into an “authentic tradition.” And it is only in the popular art of caricaturists, not high art, that this essential France can be found.
The epidemic of influenza [of 1889–90], which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone, made very little impression on the popular imagination. The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image, but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly.
—Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study in the Popular Mind
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Notes
Quoted in Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 373–74.
On Black Plague iconography, see Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000).
Brad Epps, “Seeing the Dead: Manual and Mechanical Specters in Modern Spain (1893–1939),” in Visualizing Spanish Modernity, ed. Susan Larson and Eva Woods (Oxford: Berg, 2005): 118.
As noted earlier, the category of race does not occupy a prominent place in flu discourse. More research must be done (additional archives must be combed) before we can know whether Spain’s relations with her African colonies were impacted by the epidemic in the same way as those of other European nations. For example, Terence Ranger has shown that for many Africans in the English colony, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the failure of Western medicine to explain the epidemic prompted the development of “new types of explanation and practice”: “When these new types emerged, breaking with both indigenous and colonial ideologies, they legitimated themselves by reference back to the pandemic of 1918.” Terrence Ranger, “The Influenza Pandemic in Southern Rhodesia: A Crisis of Comprehension,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), 172.
Biographical information about Francés comes from David Vela Cervera’s invaluable doctoral dissertation, Salvador Bartolozz (1881–1950): Ilustración gráfica. Escenografía. Narrativa y teatro paraniños. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2004. 13 Aug. 2006 <http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/FichaObra.html?Ref=13295&ext=pdf&portal=0>. For studies of caricature in its Spanish context, see María Ángeles Valls Vicente, “Antecedentes de la caricatura en España de la generación de los treinta,” Archivo de Arte Valenciano 85 (2004);
Rosa Perales Piqueres, “La imagen gráfica y la caricatura españo la en los conflictos del siglo XIX,” Norba-arte 22–23 (2002–03); Bernardo G. Barros, La caricatura contemporánea. Tomo I: El arte humorístico, Alemania, Francia (Madrid: Andres Bello, n.d.); Bernardo G. Barros, La caricatura contemporánea. Tomo II: Italia, España, Portugal, Inglaterra, otras naciones, América. (Madrid: Andres Bello, n.d.);
Jacinto Octavio Picón, Apuntes para una historia de la caricatura (Madrid: Est. Tipográfico, 1877);
María del Socorro Arroyo, “Política y periodismo: La caricatura de ¡Cu-Cut! desencadenante de la ley de jurisdicciones,” Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información 13 (1990);
Emilio Marcos Villalón, Luis Bagaría: Entre el arte y la política (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2004);
Joan G. Junceda, Assaig sobre l’humorisme gràfic (Barcelona: L’Institut Catalá de las Artes del Llibre, 1936);
José Francés, La caricatura (Madrid: Compañía Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones, 1930); and
José Francés, La caricatura española contemporánea (Madrid: Imprenta de Juan Pueyo, 1915). On the subject of graphic humor in Spain in the years surrounding the epidemic, see
José-Carlos Mainer, “El humor en España: Del Romanticismo a la Vanguardia,” in Los humoristas del 27 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2002) and
Emilio González-Grano del Oro, La “otra” Generación Del 27. El “humor nuevo” español y “la Codorniz” primera (Madrid: Polifemo, 2004). For more on the nature, role, rhetoric, and rise of caricature in general, see
Kenneth T. Rivers, Transmutations: Understanding Literary and Pictorial Caricature (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991);
Ernst Gombrich, “The Cartoonist’s Armoury,” Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963);
W. A. Coupe, “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11, no. 1 (1969); and
Lawrence H. Streicher, “On a Theory of Political Caricature,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9, no. 4 (1967).
Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 106.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 2008), 258.
Lorca’s theater company, La Barraca, provides an interesting example of the mixing of high and low culture. It traveled to peripheral towns to perform high-culture, canonical plays. For Lorca’s impact on Spanish theater, see Suzanne Wade Byrd, García Lorca: “La Barraca” and the Spanish National Theater (New York: Abra, 1975).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7.
In this vein, Nancy Fraser has criticized “the official public sphere [which] rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions,” including those of social class and gender. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 113.
Although a significant body of criticism now distinguishes between sexuality and gender, in early-twentieth-century Spain, the two were basically conflated. For the relationship between biology and gender in Spain, see Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas, 120–30; Wright, “Gregorio Marañón and ‘The Cult of Sex;’” Mary Nash, “Un/Contested Identities: Motherhood, Sex Reform and the Modernization of Gender Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain,” in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (Albany, NY: Suny, 1999); Sosa-Velasco, Médicos escritores, (especially Chapter Three); and
Gregorio Marañón, Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual (Mexico, D.F.: Diana, 1962). The facial hair of the feminized flu microbe has something of a precedent in José de Ribera’s La mujer barbuda. For a discussion of this and other similar works in relation to the monstrous, see
Nuria Valverde, “Discurso, evidencia y desagrado,” in Monstruos: Seres imaginarios en la Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 2000), 171–74.
Paul Yoder and Peter Mario Kreuter, eds., Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004), ix.
Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García, ‘Los Invisibles’: A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850–1940 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 97. In terms of their sexual evolution, the two microbes actually depict different degrees of hermaphroditism. The fact that the microbe in figure 5.2 has both female breasts and facial hair, while the microbe of figure 5.1 has male genitals and female breasts, would indicate differences in their internal secretions, following Marañón’s model.
Sarah Wright, “Gregorio Marañón and ‘The Cult of Sex’: Effeminacy and Intersexuality in ‘The Psychopathology of Don Juan’ (1924),” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 6 (2004): 717. For more on this context, see
Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García, ‘Los Invisibles’ and Alison Sinclair, Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). On Marañón, see Chapter Three of Sosa-Velasco, Médicos escritores en España, 1885–1955. New York: Tamesis, 2010.
Gregorio Marañón, “Notas para la biología de Don Juan,” Obras Completas, vol. 4 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968), 78.
For more on the tension between medical and cultural discourses about inter-sexuality, see Elizabeth Reis, “Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620–1960,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (2005).
Roberta Johnson, Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel, (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), 111–12.
David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 14.
Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 279.
H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 51.
Gonzalo Fontana Eljoj, “Etimología del aragonés gripia,” Archivo de filología aragonesa 54–55 (1998), 301, 302.
Brian McHale, “En Abyme: Internal Models and Cognitive Mapping” in A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, ed. John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci (New York: Routledge, 2007), 202.
Though as Payne notes, “no consensus, no hegemonic reform group, and no focused nationalist organization” emerged from this hand wringing. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain. 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 13. For more on the war and its aftermath, see
Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire. 1898–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Martin Blinkhorn, “Spain: The ‘Spanish Problem’ and the Imperial Myth,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980); and
Joseph Harrison, “The Regenerationist Movement in Spain after the Disaster of 1898,” European Studies Review 9 (1979).
Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1.
Tamar Meyer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Meyer (New York: Routledge, 2000), 12.
Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 79.
On the relation between the public sphere and the press, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and
David Ortiz, Jr., Paper Liberals: Press and Politics in Restoration Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), which deals specifically with Spain.
Akiko Tsuchiya, Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Fin-de-siècle Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 78–79.
For more on the Cybele myth, see Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatole Cybele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 237–59.
Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff, eds, Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1998), 10.
In speaking of the “few enduring images of the pandemic,” Niall Johnson mentions the Seattle (USA) policemen, the post office employees and bank staff in Sydney (Australia), and the street sweepers in Chicago (USA). See Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue (New York: Routledge, 2006), 120.
Gilbert Chase, “Barbieri and the Spanish Zarzuela,” Music and Letters 20 (1939): 33.
For a discussion of these issues in relation literary production, see Stephanie Anne Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
Paul Aubert, “Hacia la modernización,” in Los felices años veinte: España, crisis y modernidad, ed. Carlos Serrano and Serge Salaün (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006), 44.
Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 192.
On the relation between various “fashionable diseases” and American women, see Ann Douglas Wood, “‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 1 (1973). In the case of Spain, A. Díaz de la Quintana y Sánchez Remón linked the fashionable illness of neurasthenia to women and men, claiming “we all have the potential to be neurasthenics.” Quoted in Bernabeu-Mestre, Ana Paula Cid Santos, Josep Xavier Esplugues Pellicer, María Eugenia Galiana-Sánchez, “Categorías diagnósticos y género: Los ejemplos de la clorosis y la neurasthenia en la medicina española contemporánea (1877–1936),” Asclepio 60, no. 1 (2008): 92.
María T. Pao and Rafael Hernández-Rodríguez, eds, ¡Agítese bien! A New Look at the Hispanic Avant-Gardes (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002), xii.
Juli Highfill, “An Aesthetics of Transience: Fashion in the Spanish Avant-garde,” Agítese bien! A New Look at the Hispanic Avant-Gardes, ed. Maria T. Pao and Rafael Hernández (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002), 249.
See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47–54.
For an overview of the cultural context of fin de siglo Spain, see Pedro Cerezo Galán. El mal del siglo. El conflicto entre ilustración y romanticismo en la crisis finisecular del siglo XIX. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2003. (41–61).
Lily Litvak, España 1900: Modernismo, anarquismo y fin de siglo (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1990), 246.
Richard A. Cardwell, “Oscar Wilde and Spain: Medicine, Morals, Religion and Aesthetics in the Fin de Siglo,” in Crossing Fields in Modern Spanish Culture, ed. Federico Bonaddio and Xon de Ros (Oxford: Lejenda, 2003), 43–44.
Of the substantial number of studies on modernismo and decadentismo, I have found the following works to be helpful: Richard A. Cardwell and B. J. McGuirk, eds., ¿Qué es el modernismo?: Nueva encuesta, nuevas lecturas (Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1993); Cardwell, “Oscar Wilde and Spain”; Cardwell, “Médicos chiflados: Medicina y literatura en la España de fin de siglo,” Siglo Diecinueve 1 (1995) Chapters Six and Eleven from Lily Litvak, España 1900;
Mary Lee Bretz, Encounters across Borders: The Changing Visions of Spanish Modernism, 1890–1930 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001);
Cathy Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); and
Jrade, Ruben Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
Germán Gullón, Modernidad silenciada: La cultura española en torno a 1900 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006), 53.
Francisco Calatayud Miquel, De la gimnasia de Amorós al deporte de masas (1770–1993): Una aproximación histórica a la educación física y el deporte en España (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 2002), 34.
Enrique Perdiguero Gil and Rosa Ballester, “Salud e instrucción primaria en el ideario regeneracionista de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza,” Dynamis 18 (1998), 45.
Timothy Mitchell, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 145.
Beatriz Echeverri Dávila, “Spanish Influenza Seen from Spain,” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: New Perspectives, eds. Howard Phillips and David Killingray (New York: Routledge, 2003), 190.
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© 2013 Ryan A. Davis
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Davis, R.A. (2013). Visualizing the Spanish Flu Nation: Citizens, Characters, and Cartoons. In: The Spanish Flu. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339218_6
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