Galician literature begins its rebirth in the nineteenth century in a context of nationalist claims that is an echo of the movement that runs throughout Europe since the mid-eighteenth century. Faced with the need to justify the defense of a differentiated collective identity, the project of recovering a silenced and distorted history from the hexemonic culture with the intention of assimilation and standardization is imposed. Thus, through the historical discourse, the postulation of the Celtic origin of the Galician people, an idea that will function as a mythomoteur on which the nationalitarian discursive formation is based and which, from the ideological point of view, is immediately transferred to literary creation, acquiring a fundamental aesthetic dimension. This myth has an extraordinary internal effectiveness for the formation of the Galician collective imaginary and for the nationalist discursive formation, since it serves to provide an ethnic group of identification -the Celtic peoples- and, at the same time, an ethnic group of exclusion against which the new group can be affirmed, since Celtic Galicia stands out against the rest of the Peninsula of Iberian origin.
Following the semiological analysis of myth proposed by Barthes in his Mythologies, in the case of the Celtic myth the “signifier” -the claim of the Celtic origin of Galicia- is naturally linked to the “concept” -the Galician nationality-. The relationship that links the concept of the myth to the form is, basically, a relationship of deformation (Barthes, 1957: 207) that, in this case, transmutes history into nature; thus, the signifier seems to give rise to the signified -the Celtic origin justifies the existence of the nation-, when in reality the mechanism that works to create the myth is the opposite: the need to demonstrate the existence of the nation requires the belief in a common past from the most remote origins.
Author: María Xexús Lama López
Edition: María Jesús Botana Vilar e Claudia Mariño Gómez
Year: 2022
ISBN: 978-989-9127-14-2
Number of pages: 180
Esta publicação também está disponível em: Portuguese (Portugal)