The Culture of Cursileria: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain David K. Herzberger Valis, Noël . The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 405 pages. At first glance, the culture of cursilería appears extraordinarily artless. Its forced and often exaggerated contrivances convey immodest pretense; somewhat wondrously, cultural expressions of lo cursi seem to lack simplicity as well as complexity. In other words, as a form of human behavior or as an embodiment of an aesthetic ideal, the culture of cursilería would seem largely unimportant and easily dismissed as the unmitigated divulgence of bad taste. However, as Noël Valis explains, there is more to lo cursi than the coarseness of bad taste, and she sets out to reveal its many meanings in a learned and imaginative study that both delights and instructs. Valis's exploration of cursilería is fruitfully interdisciplinary. She seamlessly integrates traditions of social and psychological behavior, visual imagery, and multi-faceted narratives into patterns of meaning that emerge in Spain from the early 1800s to the end of the twentieth century. Valis constructs her study with attention to detail, covering the linguistic and historical terrain of cursilería while pointing to its persistence in Spanish middle-class culture, which often strains against the slow progression of modernity. Yet the term "cursi" itself resists efforts to assign origin or to pin down its meaning with overarching precision. Valis suggests a possible early source for the term during the 1830s in Cádiz (linked to the Sicur sisters and their Frenchified affectations), as well as a connection to the tradition [End Page 255] of English cursive writing during the same period. On the whole, however, Valis's project is to construct a usable conceptualization of the term rather than a fixed definition. Indeed, lo cursi remains always an amorphous, even slippery concept as Valis builds around it a cluster of identifiable traits: e.g., it grows from the transition to a modern, consumer-oriented society; it is most often associated with hand-made objects and personal behaviors of inadequacy marking class distinctions; it is overrun with commonness; it manifests bad taste. Following a chapter devoted to origins, in which she traces the uses and meanings of lo cursi in relation to the uneven growth of the middle class in Spain, Valis moves to the heart of her study and the strength of her work as a critic: the analysis of texts using an array of critical tools. In chapter two, she explores the discursive side of lo cursi linked to handwriting in certain commercial practices, and shows how circulation and exchange function metaphorically in middle class culture, as objects (e.g., fans, albums, parasols) come to form metonymic pictures of the self. Chapter two moves broadly in time and space in its exploration of lo cursi and yields unanticipated insights into authors ranging from Larra to Clarín. Valis remains primarily in the nineteenth century in the next three chapters, beginning with a focus on the social practices of Romanticism as structures of feeling in upper middle-class society. Lo cursi emerges in salons and other middle-class spaces through the self-conscious display of people unself-conscious enough to practice ostentation and who are willing to use poets such as Bécquer and Antonio Grilo to define themselves and their obsolescent cultural behavior. In chapters four and five, Valis turns to Galdós, keen observer of the middle class in Madrid, as lo cursi spreads from the provinces to take firm hold of cultural life in the capital. In Galdós's 1884 novel, La de Bringas, Valis makes the important point that personal behavior and cultural capital (derived from the accumulation of the individual's finances, social behavior, and personality) commingle in the middle classes to produce various manifestations of cursilería linked to the insufficiency of self-identity and social standing. These manifestations appear in many of Galdós's later novels as well, including Cánovas (1912), which for Valis brings to the fore the link between middle-class aspirations and the multiple uses of history. In...