SOURCE: “Nationalist Texts and Counter-Texts: Southey's Roderick and the Dissensions of the Annotated Romance,” in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 4, March, 1999, pp. 421-51.

[In the following essay, Saglia compares the text of Southey's last epic poem Roderick, the Last of the Goths with actual historical events, and discusses how the poem reflects Southey's interest in cultural and national identity.]

On 18 July 1811 the radical poet, thinker, and reformer John Thelwall invited Robert Southey and Henry Crabb Robinson to dine at his home. Robinson had recently returned from Spain, where he had been sent as a reporter for the Times, while Southey was a staunch supporter of the Peninsular campaigns and one of the major British experts on Iberian culture. Thus conversation at Thelwall's table soon centered on the war that the British army had been fighting for over three years against the Grande Armée on the Peninsula.¹ Even if pessimism was by then the prevalent political feeling, Southey still firmly believed in the Spanish cause, and his interventions at dinner confirmed that despite the recent defeats his hopes for the Spaniards' final success were unchanged. But as recorded in Robinson's account, political topics soon gave way to a literary discussion about the latest publications on the market. Southey, who had been working for some time on a poem about the medieval legend of the fall of Spain, was eager to comment on two other texts sharing the same subject matter: Walter Scott's The Vision of Don Roderick, published early in 1811; and Walter Savage Landor's Count Julian, which was about to be published. Highly dismissive of Scott's poem but more laudatory toward Landor's tragedy, Southey relished this competition, which certainly stimulated him to write his own poetic transfiguration of the Spanish events.²

That Southey was more than willing to discuss Spain and the Napoleonic campaign is obvious from the frequent references to these issues in his own letters from this period, where he often writes about his “Spanish fever.”³ As Nigel Leask notes, Southey's Hindu epic The Curse of Kehama (1810) indirectly addressed the Spanish situation, for the poem might be read as an allegorical denunciation of French imperialism. The Indian despot Kehama would then represent Napoleon in the guise of an Oriental autocrat, whereas Kailyal's peasant revolt against Kehama's tyranny topically hinted at the Spaniards' uprising against the French invasion of 1808.⁴ These roman à clef transmutations make the geopolitics of Kehama look toward colonized India and the European political theater, and Southey was not only flattered by Canning's appreciation of his poem but also hoped that the Prime Minister “would but compare Bonaparte to Kehama in the House of Commons,” which might result in a good boost of the sales.⁵

Nonetheless, Southey was not particularly adept in the poetics of indirectness and displacement, and in general his metrical tales offer themselves as exhaustive illustrations rather than cryptic allegories. Besides, as the major hispanist of his generation, he could and wanted to be more straightforward than in Kehama. A few months after the dinner with Crabb Robinson and Thelwall, on 29 November 1811, Southey wrote to the poet James Montgomery:

That which at present employs the little time I can afford for poetry, is upon the foundation of the Spanish Monarchy by Pelayo. It had long appeared to me a fine subject, and the deep interest which I take in Spanish affairs induced me at this time to select it because the circumstances sufficiently resemble those of the present contest to call forth the same feelings.

(New Letters, II, 14-15)

Like Landor and Scott, Southey intended to address the reading public's demand for narratives on Spain and its patriotic inhabitants, and he found a suitable subject in the tale of the invasion of Iberia by the North African Moors in the eighth century A.D. and the origins of the modern Spanish nation. As Southey told Montgomery, the legend had obvious analogies with recent Spanish history. The Moorish invasion of 711 was allegedly helped by a traitor, Count Julian, whose daughter Florinda, la Cava, had been raped by the Gothic king, Don Roderick. This legend bore an ominous resemblance to the fact that the penetration of the French armies into Spain was made easier after Manuel de Godoy, the lover of Queen Maria Luisa, and King Charles IV's favorite, signed the treaty of Fontainebleau with Napoleon in 1807.

Taking these analogies as my point of departure, in this essay I will investigate the correlations between history and textuality in Southey's last epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). Southey's increasing interest in the mechanisms of cultural and national identity and the issue of the “condition of England” weigh heavily on the contents and organization of the book. Specifically, these concerns and their nationalist overtones enter the text through its marginalia, a series of voluminous endnotes that both support and undermine the poetic narrative. I will examine how Southey's celebration of Spanish patriotism and the nation is riven by contradictions and ambiguities because of the complicated relation between the book's textual levels.

The Spanish rebellion of 1808 and the ensuing war struck Britain like a shockwave. After a series of unsuccessful military ventures, such as the Walcheren expedition of 1809, and several failed alliances against Napoleon, the Spanish events revived enthusiasms and hopes for a quick conclusion to the long anti-French conflict. Debated in every public forum, from Parliament to the local daily press, Spanish affairs became a central theme in contemporary literary production, and, as contemporary critics remarked, they inaugurated a “tuneful campaign which has been prosecuted with almost as much vigour as the actual warfare.”⁶ Having been the advocate of Spain and its literature since the 1790s, Southey was one of the foremost promoters of this literary campaign, and he continued to support faith in Spain by way of his articles, reviews, letters, and poetry. As a consequence, the interaction of these different genres bears importantly on the genesis and development of Roderick. And since poetry was increasingly becoming one among several of his writing projects, Southey's Spanish poem was the result of a multiple reflection on war, nations, and history animated by both his “Spanish fever” and his contemporary historiographic projects. Thus, because it remained a work in progress for a long time, Roderick was involved in issues such as the function of state religion, anti-Catholicism, national history, and the question of historiography—issues that, as David Eastwood points out, Southey was developing in the 1810s in works such as the History of Brazil (1810-19), Omniana (1812), the Life of Nelson (1813), and The Book of the Church (published 1824).⁷

Despite its entirely casual circumstances, the discussion at Thelwall's dinner table is indicative of the transitivity between the war and the literature about it. It evidences the impulse to move from event to history and eventually to fiction that characterizes Southey's literary activity at this stage of transition from poetry to historiographic prose. At this junction, story, history, and fiction constitute a triple structure that engages Southey's search for a definition of the “meanings” of evolution in time. These three ways of reading and writing events also point out a pattern of literary composition that becomes evident in the structure of Roderick. Divided into poetry and notes (the latter collected at the end of the volume), Southey's poem confirms the conflictive interrelatedness of fictional and factual narratives and the difficult collaboration between fiction and history. Roderick's structure bears testimony to the tensions produced by history within Romantic fiction, describing a conflict in which historiography is discovered to be fictional, while history recognizes itself as especially connected to the real because it was meant as the opposite of fiction.⁸

First and foremost, the interconnections of history and fiction in the poem serve to answer the ideological quandary raised by the Peninsular War, worded by the Edinburgh Review in the following exemplary terms: “whether or not the Spaniards are likely to succeed”; “how are they to seek success?”; and “What probability is there that the popular spirit, now so gloriously prevalent all over Spain, will last, for one or two years … ?”⁹ Southey's poem stages this abstract “popular spirit” and materializes it in characters, families, alliances, and objects, thus showing the transhistorical permanence of the nation, a recurrent principle in his sociopolitical writings of the period. The poem's narrated nation is an answer and an alternative to the Edinburgh's model of history based on discontinuity, fractures, and the loss of tradition. In this perspective, Roderick's tuneful campaign against Whiggish defeatism is waged by means of the weapons of both poetry and prose, the verse tale and the erudite notes appended to it.

Roderick represents a particularly interesting case, for even Southey's correspondents and reviewers were variously impressed with the sheer bulk and almost independent status of its notes. Charles Lamb wrote ironically to Southey in 1815: “The notes to your poem I have not read again,—but it will be a take-downable book on my shelf, and they will serve sometimes at breakfast or times too light for the text to be duly appreciated.”¹⁰ Though he sincerely admired the poem, Lamb could not resist sarcasm when it came to the notes, which are objectively so voluminous that they would make the most unwieldy type of breakfast reading. Moreover, the notes to Roderick are a mass of such different and sometimes jumbled material that one could easily subscribe to Peacock's vitriolic dictum in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) that “when he [Southey] has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, [he] strings them into an epic.”¹¹ Other contemporary critics, however, simply saw the notes as a useless mass of writing that readers normally overlooked and that unpleasantly raised the price of the book. Thus, although the British Review praised the poetry of Roderick, it eloquently denounced the practice of heavily annotated romances and burst out: “We cannot conclude without entering a strong protest against the modern fashion of encumbering a poem with a body of notes, swelled by quotations, which nobody reads, and every body must pay for.”¹²

Southey's tendency to complement his metrical tales with prose impedimenta owed much to his fascination for details, for unusual and recondite facts of which, as Peacock noted, the Laureate was a devoted collector. Southey himself recognized his “dangerous love of detail,”¹³ fed by his varied reading and his custom of developing several projects at the same time. It was an aspect that characterized his writings from his diaries to the gigantic digression of The Doctor (1834-47). In particular, although prose notes were a visible encumbrance in the verse tales, they also turned such works into less volatile, less “romantic” artifacts. And in Roderick Southey's assertion of authority becomes visible from the frontispiece, which introduces the author as “Poet Laureate and Member of the Royal Spanish Academy,” the official body to which Southey had been admitted in 1814. Roderick is then offered as the work of an expert in Spanish history and civilization, almost an adopted Spaniard—a statement of scholarly reliability that complements the erudite notes at the end of the poem. These marginalia stand out as a site of “virile” factual concerns that establish the poem's credibility, the value of its historical reconstructions, and its antiquarian status. But their function is not only intratextual, joining the precision of prose to the fuzziness of verse, because they do not simply act upon the poetry to give it authority or supply further meanings to the poetic word. The notes apparatus also influences the poetry as an additional discourse addressed to its readers, sharing the ideological mandate of the poem, which is the subversion of the Edinburgh's (Whig) doctrine of doubt. Documenting the tale of King Roderick and the rebirth of Spain, the notes establish the nation's genealogy. They circumscribe that wealth of literary, legendary, historical, and traditional precedents that define the nation as a cultural continuum and give it material presence. Endowed with extension by being narrated in the historical drama of the poem, the nation is also given depth because it is based on solid evidence of its development through the ages.

In this context, the notes interact with the ideological project implicit in the poem's construction of history. As Shari Benstock has remarked, notes in fictional writings bestow credibility on the work itself, reinforce the author's position, and neutralize the disadvantages of the gendered distribution of genres proper to Romantic literature.¹⁴ Nonetheless, as defined in Jacques Derrida's early deconstructive work, notes may also work against textual unity and the idea of a unified presence behind the text. By pluralizing the latter, the notes undermine authorial control and multiply signification, thus making explicit Derrida's image of the dispersion of writing when he states: “Each ‘text’ is a machine with multiple reading heads for other texts.”¹⁵ Being both that which supplies the text with extra meaning and “a plenitude [added] to a plenitude,” the notes expose the impossibility of origins and seminal histories within a textuality that is always a reproduction and a transcription of other texts. In Derrida's words, “the text we call present may be deciphered only at the bottom of the page, in a footnote or postscript.”¹⁶

This definition of the note as a Derridean supplement complicates the issue of any fountainhead of textual meaning, and it offers an insight into the economy of such a heavily annotated romance as Roderick. A reading of Roderick as a poem that signifies belatedly because of the hold of the margins on the textual “center” may illuminate the discrepancies between notes and poetry, thus repositioning any consideration about authority and intention. This kind of interpretation has been masterfully carried out by Jerome C. Christensen in relation to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) by applying the principle that “the marginalium is … both an enrichment and a deprivation of its host, just as it is, equivocally, neither inside nor outside the text.”¹⁷ In this definition, Christensen's investigation of the “marginal method” confirms that the advantages of such an interpretation are mainly intratextual. Tending to identify balances and imbalances within well-defined discursive zones, a deconstructive reading of Roderick's textual economy would leave out the variety of intervening discourses that, as noted above, contribute to the development of the textuality and thematics of the poem.¹⁸ The exclusive relation between main text and notes within approaches such as Derrida's and Benstock's must then be relocated in the plurality of discourses that bear upon, and are intertextually inscribed in, Southey's poem. This cumulative intertext will be made up not only of literary and non-literary works but also of any type of discourse that contributes to the stability or dispersion of Roderick, the whole work thus becoming a “fix” among several domains of signification, as opposed to the exclusive relation supposed by supplementarity between the text and an other text always/already contained in it. The connections between poetry and notes in Roderick will then be analyzed through a multiplication of this Derridean “ghost-text” and its principally linguistic ties with the verse narrative into a plurality of submerged and displaced discourses.

On the one hand the notes in Roderick perform what seems to be their original function of explaining and illustrating. But on the other hand, by staging a series of discourses different from that of the poetry, the notes often deny and reverse its statements, consigning the poetic text to the status of fictional invention. The relation between the two textual levels is both collaborative and antagonistic, completing and supplanting the poem at the same time through a variety of intervening social, political, and historical discourses acting as diverging and converging forces. And even if margins and center in a text cannot be separated, here the two levels of Southey's work will be examined independently, first to reveal how the notes support the discourse of the poem and, then, how they subvert it by offering a complicated reversal of the poem's message.

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Narrating the half-legendary, half-historical events of the fall of Spain, Roderick, the Last of the Goths posits its subject matter as an exemplary pattern of national resurrection, as well as describing the historical development of the national spirit through a plot of increasing verbal violence and military aggressiveness. Roderick harnesses the “epic” patterns that Southey had been elaborating since Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)—the fight of the righteous hero against an evil empire, the reconstitution of a just social and political order, the active role of the exotic and the fabulous—in order to describe “the foundation of the Spanish Monarchy.” Reading Roderick according to a quasi-medieval scheme of semiotic levels, Edward Meachen has remarked that the poem can be interpreted literally (as a narrative of the Moorish invasion), analogically (exploiting the similarity with the Napoleonic invasion), and allegorically (a representation of the human predicament emblematized by Roderick's life).¹⁹ After a careful analysis of these three levels, Meachen points out that the poem revolves around the theme of the family as the basic social structure: “The institution of the family is the most important motif in Roderick, for the justification of violence is developed in reaction to the dangers which threaten it” (p. 605). Yet even if Southey's communal fantasies and large epic vistas of human history constitute an allegorical culmination, they start at a more local level than the family. By focusing on Roderick, the initial cantos narrate the gradual reorganization of an anti-Islamic league and introduce the strategies by which the poem turns the personal sphere into a necessary prelude to the national one, the latter posited as a natural extension of the former.

This ambivalence is reflected at the level of genre in the poem's combination of epic and romance. Trying to define the genre of Southey's narrative poems is a laborious enterprise, as from Joan of Arc (1796) onward he constantly aimed at writing epic in competition with Milton, Klopstock, and Ariosto, while actually creating generic hybrids that mixed classical models with a variety of influences from other genres. Roderick itself was subtitled “a tragic poem” and prefaced by a list of dramatis personae. In view of this complexity, I will use the term “epic” to refer to the eclectic genre of Southey's Spanish poem, whereas “romance” will be employed only in phrases such as “annotated romance” or “verse romance.” Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to examine the way in which elements from the two genres are elaborated in Roderick, for their combination is consonant with Southey's conception of the Peninsular War as a mythical conflict.

Looking back on the Spanish campaigns in the introduction to his History of the Peninsular War (1823-32) Southey declared: “this was no common war … it was as direct a contest between the principles of good and evil as the elder Persians, or the Manicheans, imagined in their fables: it was for the life or death of national independence, national spirit, and all of those holy feelings which are comprehended in the love of our native land.”²⁰ The war is extracted from all of the other, necessarily interlinked, episodes of the Napoleonic conflict and turned into a fable endowed with the mythic urgency of a romance where order is under threat and has to be reconfirmed.²¹ In this way the Peninsular War acquires the hieratic authority of a genetic myth in which something “holy” is safeguarded and perpetuated. But any appreciation of the imaginative displacements at work in Southey's Roderick should not ignore that the poem does more than just illustrate one culture to another, familiarizing it with the other's difference or constructing a mythic reinterpretation of the war. As Southey had written to James Montgomery, his is a discourse on the foundation of a nation that continues through time. Roderick, then, is also a demonstrative discourse that calls for a stable grounding of facts in reality exactly because the “Spanish monarchy” is not some legendary structure but rather is continuous with the state that collapsed after the Napoleonic invasion of 1808.

Within this documentary project, comparing the notes and the initial section of the poem confirms that one of the functions of the notes is to guarantee the historicity of the fictional narrative. The notes then amplify several sections of the tale—especially by proving the existence of certain objects—and in so doing they fulfill their “archeological” vocation: the reconstruction of a geographical, historical, and cultural other and the creation of an explanatory link between past and present.²² Thus Roderick's “royal car” and the horned helmet he wears at the final battle against the Muslim invaders are authenticated in the notes with all of the accuracy that Southey's documents might afford him. In the battle scene Roderick is depicted wearing a “helm / Whose horns, amid the thickest of the fray / Eminent, had mark'd his presence.”²³ To substantiate the existence of this distinctive piece of armor the notes describe the faces of kings as they appear on coins minted during the Visigothic era, especially invoking the authority of the sixteenth-century Spanish antiquarian Ambrosio de Morales, compiler of the Crónica general de España (1574). To this documentation Southey adds a personal discussion of Morales's conclusions, comparing them to those of other scholars, such as the Portuguese Jeronymo Contador de Argote in Memorias de Braga (1732) and the Spanish Enrique Flórez in Medallas de España (1747-73) (see pp. xi-xii). In the notes, through a polyphony of learned opinions, Southey creates the simulacrum of a debate and the impression of a convergence of knowledge and facts that flesh out what the poetry only gives as one object among others. Additionally, in orchestrating this virtual debate of savants and antiquarians Southey places his voice and opinions at its center, posing as a mediator and thus employing the notes as a constitutive part of the authorial function by their reinforcement of his own subject-position within the poem.

Moreover, the fact that Southey needs to confirm that there was an object such as King Roderick's helmet reveals the necessity of authorizing the story of Roderick as history, and thus also reveals a tension between reliable and unreliable forms of representation. In other words, the notes reinforce the poem's fiction but also point out its nonfictionality, its being made up of fact “in poetic dress.”²⁴ While it is evident that the notes are an archeological reinforcement of the poem, they also complicate the rapport between fiction and nonfiction inside the work as a whole. In this fashion Southey is obliquely adressing the issue already presented by Walter Scott in his Vision of Don Roderick, where he formulates it by way of a rhetorical question: “Hath fiction's stage for truth's long triumphs room?”²⁵ Scott's poem answers in the negative and, in its concluding section, limits its scope to the facts of the anti-Napoleonic War and in particular what are (at least for Scott) the incontrovertible victories of Wellington's army. Unlike Scott, though, Southey tries to maintain both fact and fiction by distributing them between the verse and the notes or by making them interact within the notes, each level collaborating differently to narrate the origins of modern Spain. Southey does not award different degrees of priority to fact and fiction, and, without turning the legend into history, he seems to toy with their different stories. Thus in the initial sections of Roderick the notes bring in the real but do not delimit a contrast between historical and fictional truths.²⁶ The notes are not an anti-narrative, because more or less “positive” data or “archeological” hypotheses do not undermine the poetic tale but rather support it by locating its more fanciful version of facts within a recognizable tradition.²⁷

Although, to repeat Peacock's criticism, Southey's notes often appear as jumbled observations straight out of the poet's commonplace book, they have a special coherence in that they reproduce and reinforce the transition from personal to public, from the “family romance” to the communal epic, on which the poem is based. In this process the fictional element is ultimately enhanced, and the notes reconstruct Spanish history, culture, and lore as a unitary tale that underpins the individual stories of the poem. And this coupling of verse and prose is put to the task of countering all expressions of anti-Spanish feelings, such as the Edinburgh Review's dictum, in the review of Whitbread's Letter, that any definition of Spain as a nation is merely a “figure of speech” (p. 442). In Roderick it is rather the opposite that proves true, for speech—both fictional and factual discourses—is an essential component of the nation. The community is realized in and through forms of speech such as Roderick's confession, the characters' dialogues, invocations, prayers, legends, tales, and, obviously, the notes' documentary narratives. Likewise, poetry endows the narrated nation with an extension and depth similar to that of the real, invisible nation “out there,” thus turning an immense and largely imaginary community into a commensurable object.

If the actual nation is a network of institutions and citizens that cannot be rationalized by the individual, then the time and space of fiction, and its multiplication of individuality into mass identity, reproduce the impression of the extension of the “real” nation. Southey's notes convey the slow accretion of the nation and its gradual enlargement by documenting its physical embodiments such as the helmet, the “royal car,” or the Visigothic coins. The accumulation of legends, documents, artifacts, dates, and names is then a factual investment that not only swells the bulk of the work, by increasing the number of pages, but also enlarges the temporal and spatial extension of the patria depicted in the poem.

The notes supplement the consecration of newborn Spain by further accumulating objects that make the nation visible and tangible. Canto 18, “The Acclamation,” refers to twenty-two separate notes in which Southey quotes a variety of sources to demonstrate the faithfulness of his reconstruction of Pelayo's coronation. Large extracts from British histories of the Church provide quotations from ancient missals and breviaries that serve to justify the poet's re-creation of Visigothic ritual, particularly regarding the coronation prayer that begins: “Lord God of Hosts, / … of Angels and of Men” (p. 227).²⁸ In this section the notes also effect a reification and materialization of the patria by a substitution of new objects—which metonymically convey the newly formed Spanish nation—for the old symbols of Gothic power. Thus whereas “The standard of the Goths forgotten lay / Defiled, and rotting there in sun and rain” (p. 223) together with “the rubied crown, the sceptre, … [the] ermines, aureate vests, and jewelry” (p. 223), the new flag flies high over the confederates' heads: “the rampant Lion, red as if / Upon some noblest quarry he had roll'd, / Rejoicing in his satiate rage, and drunk / With blood and fury” (p. 224). This poetic fragment is duly accompanied by a note in which Southey provides the historical background for the choice of this national symbol by quoting a passage from Francisco de Pisa's Descripción de la imperial ciudad de Toledo (1605) that describes how Pelayo came to choose the new flag. There the nation is still created through the individual:

La primera ciudad que gano dizen fue Leon, y desde alli se llamo Rey de Leon, y tomo por armas un Leon roxo en campo blanco.

(p. ci)²⁹

The procession of national symbols is expanded in the poetic narrative and reaches its climax with the creation of the first Spanish warrior. Alphonso's investiture as knight represents a change in continuity and an amelioration of the past, and it is an essential part of the overall process of consecrating the new national compact. The armor in which he is clad during the ceremony is yet another emblem of regeneration, stressing his role in the reconstituted polity while metonymically incorporating the destiny of the newly born Spanish nation (pp. 147-48).

Bringing national rebirth to its poetic climax, the investiture firmly establishes Spain as a renewed organic pact encased within the anachronistic structures of chivalry and the feudal organization of society. Specifically, the investiture responds to Southey's ideal of feudalism as a period of social stability, and it represents his reaction to the unrest of the 1810s. The notes to the investiture section, accordingly, confirm the importance of the chivalric ideology in the work as a whole, while highlighting Southey's wholehearted commitment to a system that in eighth-century Iberia was obviously not yet formed.³⁰ Nonetheless, contemporaneous research into the Middle Ages allowed Southey to suppose the opposite. Cultural historians considered chivalry even older than the civilization of the Spanish Visigoths and somehow inbred in their Germanic roots; they found early evidence of this in the world described in Tacitus's Germania (98 A.D.). The notes to Roderick support, and comment on, the lines describing the ritual of investiture and the purification process of “the bath, the bed, / The vigil” (pp. 148-49) by drawing upon such texts as the Siete Partidas, a collection of medieval Castilian laws, and the Catalan chivalric romance Tirant lo Blanc (written 1460-66). In addition, to prove the generalized precociousness of chivalry Southey adds a lengthy description of “a representation of Roland from the porch of the Cathedral at Verona, which is supposed to have been built about the beginning of the ninth century” (p. lxxiii), drawn from Paolo Canciani's authoritative legal history Barbarorum leges antiquae (1781-92).³¹

This impressive display of antiquarian erudition, which runs on for several pages of notes, raises a barrage of information whose role is to authenticate Southey's early dating of chivalry and to give credibility to his Goths as early knights. If for Southey's contemporaries Spain was the “hotbed” of chivalry, then this image had to be confirmed by his writing in order to satisfy the horizon of expectations of the readers and, more specifically, to fulfill his own plan of grounding modern Spain in age-old traditions.³² Besides, in transporting bath, bed, and vigil to an unfamiliar locale, Southey is making a conscious use of early-nineteenth-century British theorizations of chivalry as a typically European cultural formation. To represent the endurance of chivalry within contemporary civilization, Southey fashions the old Spanish legend of Roderick according to the feudal myth and its ideological connections with largely conservative interpretations of European history and culture. The historical inaccuracy in his use of chivalric rituals is, then, another discursive procedure that places the nation within its own cultural genealogy, or, better, what early-nineteenth-century theories pointed out as the required components of the nation. By also having to fit certain conditions of nationhood, the nation's past in Roderick is both created and found by the “archeological” discourse of the notes. As observed so far, the notes design a narrative of replacement because they link the symbols of regenerated Spain to stories that increase their historical depth and national significance.³³

Offered as tangible embodiments of the birth of modern Spain and a renewed Spanish monarchy, the objects described in the notes are fragments of the nation, and they provide this otherwise ideal construct with an extension similar to that of real objects. But this kind of collaboration between notes and poem is far from stable. Ironically, these objects are themselves fragmented narratives in an endless play of verbal conjurings of the national, so that the depth they can bestow on the narrated nation is yet another virtual projection. It follows that, within the structure of the annotated romance, the notes illustrating specific objects and symbols exhibit the complementary nature of the marginalia in terms of the supplement. By describing an object, each note “becomes” that object inside the doubled textual economy of Roderick, thus supplementing the poetic narrative and its verbal nation with an objectively justified nation. The notes provide the things that complement the signs of the poetic narrative. The paradoxical functioning of supplementation becomes evident precisely in the verbal medium that produces the object in the notes, and it emerges as a kind of underlying, implicit rift even where notes and poem seem to support each other.

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Narratological approaches explain the relationship between text and notes as fraught with complexity, but it is a complexity that usefully negotiates the distance between author and reader, and notation thus offers an insight into the processes of meta-narration. Southey's notes punctually evidence this loyalty toward the poem and thus organize the objects and tales of medieval Spain into a temporal and cultural scheme that can still be recognized as valid for early-nineteenth-century Spain. Roderick defines the contemporary Spanish nation by objectively positing its nationhood as an uninterrupted tradition that may be traced back to the darkest ages. Nevertheless, it is within this energetically furthered process that notes and poetic narrative in Roderick most visibly diverge so that, instead of carrying on an intratextual collaboration, the two levels frequently contradict each other.

To give an obvious example of this reversal, Southey's narrative of an integrated world requires him to postulate a Spanish Ur-nation, so that he is obliged to define the ethnic identity of the patria's forefathers, clarifying who was a Spaniard, and who was not, at that obscure historical juncture. This is a particularly significant case considering the importance of the name of a nation or a people as a rhetorical device of unification, and as a function of what Benedict Anderson has called “unisonality,” the possibility of simultaneously voicing the nation with one act of speech.³⁴ The issue becomes even more meaningful when we remember that Spain was not de facto a unified, centralized nation when Southey was writing and that, in contemporary discourses, images of a unified Spain responded to ideological needs more than to any actual state of affairs. Thus whereas during the Peninsular War the Quarterly Review frequently depicted Spain as a unity of extremely diverse people who fought in the name of their nation, the Spaniards themselves often fought for local allegiances that could only be remotely related to an overarching loyalty to the monarchy. Similarly, whereas Napoleon's decrees addressed the people as generically espagnols, the Juntas invoked and provoked local loyalties, calling the people “Zaragozans” or “Aragonese.”³⁵

However aware he was of the actual regionalisms of Spain, Southey does not avoid the pitfalls involved by this denomination when he takes both “Spain” and “Spaniard” as unified, incontrovertible signs pointing to equally fixed referents. This unity is made clear when Pelayo is crowned as the new king for being both a prince of royal blood and a descendant of a mythic race of original “Spaniards,” the first inhabitants of the Peninsula and the ancestors of the modern-day nation. Invoking the Urvolk theme enables Southey to sanctify his construction of an original tribe later subjected by the invasion of foreign conquerors. The first official address to Pelayo by Bishop Urban explicitly links the issue of racial purity to that of the repeated invasions of the Iberian Peninsula:

                                                                       … For sure it seems,
                                         … Heaven's high will to rear
Upon the soil of Spain a Spanish throne,
Restoring in thy native line, O Prince,
The sceptre to the Spaniard. Worthy son
Of that most ancient and heroic race,
Which with unweariable endurance still
Hath striven against its mightier enemies,
Roman or Carthaginian, Greek or Goth.

(p. 96)

“Spaniard” here defines the prehistoric inhabitants of the Peninsula, those peoples against whom the Romans fought, and probably those very Celtiberians whose strenuous defense of Numantia was construed as the nucleus of Spanish nationalist feeling. In addition, the poem is punctuated with references to the power of male seed, a biblical semen Abrahae, “That precious seed revered so long, desired / So dearly” (p. 237). The imagery of a male line of descent elaborates on the ideas of both genus and gens, while mapping the existence and development of the nation onto that of the family. Thus Pelayo's task will be to ensure symbolically the racial purity of a nation made up of “All proud distinctions which commingling blood / And time's long course have fail'd to efface” (p. 59). Southey solves the racial dilemma of Iberia by having a true Spaniard as a king, although the adjective “true” defines a race that is no better qualified.

According to Southey's scheme the Goths are not Spaniards but rather the last in a long line of usurpers. And he reinforces this view by quoting the Portuguese antiquarian Contador de Argote in a note to assert that “they were a proud nation and barbarous, and were long time heretics … and can be praised as nothing except as warriors, who were so greedy for dominion, that wherever they reached they laid every thing bare like locusts” (p. xlv). Still quoting Argote, Southey describes the generic “people who dwelt in it [Spain] before” as “a better race, always praised and feared and respected by the Romans, loyal and faithful and true and reasonable” (p. xlv). Poetry and notes thus collaborate to evoke a primeval state of purity and an ideal society that existed before all invasions and cultural minglings. Steering clear of a complicity with the British Whig myth of a Saxon Arcady, Southey's medievalism is poised between a nostalgia for racial purity and a decided support for an interracial culture unified under the authority of a leading ethnie. Pelayo is the emblem of national unity because “in him the old Iberian blood, / Of royal and remotest ancestry, / From undisputed source flow'd undefiled” (p. 99). Southey dutifully provides the character's genealogy in order to explain his relationship to the Gothic royal family. Both a Spaniard and a Goth, Pelayo has a “double right” to rule over the whole nation, uniting the different peoples under his symbolic link to the Iberian forefathers.

Accordingly, the notes to this crucial passage negotiate the status of Spanishness as a clear-cut category by ruling out all other contenders to the name of Spaniard. Yet elsewhere in the notes the myths of an original race and of the father-king's genealogy are crossed by a series of contradictions. Indeed, the note that should illustrate Pelayo's ancestry does not confirm his royal descent, and Southey's editorial aside disavows the very genealogy displayed in the poem and ironically writes it off as another piece of superstition: “There is a fabulous tale of Pelayo's birth, which, like many other tales of no better authority, has legends and relics to support it” (p. li). Ironically, this commentary contradicts Southey's own project to reconstruct the antiquity of the Spanish nation starting from material evidence of its existence. By the same token, Southey also discards the very archeological artifacts that he has been using so far to substantiate the historicity of his narrated nation. Archeological exactitude is harnessed to operate an effect that goes against the genealogical preoccupations of the respective poetic segments. Prose commentary and poetic narrative assert two opposite views (with the former actively undermining the latter), so that on this occasion the notes create an actual antinarrative displaying different meanings from the fictional poetry or diverting the poetry toward other, conflictive interpretations.

But the fact that the notes commentary in Roderick often works against the poetic narrative is not an entirely new observation. Indeed, it was noticed by contemporary critics of Southey's work such as the reviewer of the Evangelical Christian Observer, who denounced the different tone of the notes and their incongruity with the poetry:

In their general effect, [the notes] differ materially from the text, not merely as prose might be expected to differ from poetry … but in the different style of thinking and feeling which they appear to shew in the poet and the commentator.³⁶

The poetic narrative is appreciated because of its “ingenuity,” the straightforward way in which feelings and ideas emanate from Southey's verse. This critic sees Roderick as the work of a naive mind whose poetry is the expression of simple primary feelings untrammeled by the dangerous inversions of irony or the excesses of knowledge. Here the poem is essentially valued because of its direct narrative, unmediated by culture and, especially, ideology. Yet in the notes the critic finds the opposite strain:

There is considerable information in them undoubtedly, and, in what is original, there is talent, and spirit, and ease; but, taking their whole effect, there is something hard, something sarcastic, something scoffing. And there is too much of an approximation to that free, all-assured, sneering species of writing which has grown up in the present day, and which, for want of a better term, may perhaps be called, “the knowing style.”

(Critical Heritage, p. 189)

The notes are perceived as a compact structure whose signification moves away from the poetry that, for this critic, is where the truth of writing must be found. Moreover, the prose commentary is informed by an ironic attitude that is missing in the poem—for the Christian Observer reviewer these are hard facts against the poem's “soft” naïveté. And although Southey cuts a very improbable figure as a Romantic ironist, Roderick as a whole works through reversals and contradictions, evoking that discrepancy of languages and tones that signals the ironization of the real. It is interesting that the Christian Observer reviewer defines this cynical debunking of the poem's material as a quality of writing itself; he does not ascribe it to the figure of the author but rather detaches the notes from Southey's omnipresent control. And indeed, irony in Roderick cannot be explained in terms of authorial intention: Southey was generally too keen on expanding the pars construens of his work—its archeological, explanatory, and celebratory sides—to undermine it by way of an ironic pars destruens. The irony found in the margins between prose and verse in Roderick is a feature that escapes authorial control; it is rather an aspect of the work's internal organization of the balance between its different levels. If seen in relation to the author function and Southey's creative process, “the knowing style” looks rather like an afterthought, the involuntary result of an accumulation of often contradictory materials and documents.

The presence of facts startles the Christian Observer reviewer because, instead of confirming and reinforcing the fictional tale, these facts run counter to the poem's ingenuity and directness and replaces them with sarcasm, undermining the transparency of poetic language and turning the poem into an other discourse. The critic, however, reassures his readers by clearly separating notes from poetry. In his view, “the evil of possessing the commentary” is “infinitely overpaid by the gratification of reading the poem” (p. 189), and he adds that the prose cannot greatly corrupt the verse as the former is condensed and displaced at the end of the poem. This critic's defense against the possible primacy of the supplement, or the discourses of the prose commentary, evidences the anxiety produced by the divide between fact and fiction in Southey's text.³⁷ Additionally, the reviewer's concern and reaction point to the necessity of integrating both levels of writing rather than dissecting and separating them, so that the marginalia must be considered as providing an alternative, complicating discourse in the space between verse romance and prose documentation.

The complications attendant on the divide between poetry and prose can be further illustrated through the most recurrent of Southey's sarcastic attitudes, that relating to Spanish superstition. This controversial subject, ridden with clichés of all sorts, was in fact a constant feature in contemporary representations of Spanish culture, appearing in discourses both favorable and hostile to the Anglo-Iberian alliance.³⁸ In order to counter any sort of stereotyped criticism Southey avoids the supernatural, which had been greatly criticized in both Thalaba and Kehama, and thus downplays the connection between Catholicism, idolatry, and superstition. Yet the division between poem and notes becomes again particularly obvious in Roderick's treatment of the stereotype of the Catholic cult of icons and relics. In the notes referring to canto 18 Southey extracts a long passage from Morales's Crónica general de España to illustrate the tradition that, after the Moorish invasion, the holy relics were transported from Toledo's Cathedral to a cave in Cantabria, near Oviedo. In the poem he ascribes this decision to Bishop Urban, who “Consulting first, removed with timely care / The relics and the written works of saints, / Toledo's choicest treasure, prized beyond / All wealth, their living and their dead remains” (p. 220). Southey's lines heighten the value of these objects as vehicles for the cohesive power of religion: Toledo's relics are a treasure of the community at large and are prized because of their power to link the people, to excite “the dear idolatry / Of multitudes unborn” (p. 220). But Southey's qualms about relic worshiping are not easily assuaged, and despite the attribute “dear,” his sturdy anti-Catholic sensibility still perceives this cult as a striking token of paganism. Consequently, he concludes the long note, drawn from the Crónica general de España, with a scoffing reference to the emasculating power of “abject superstition” (p. xcix), a supplementation of the poetic narrative through its opposite, which also emerges in scattered references to the “damnable acts” of the Inquisition (p. vii).³⁹

Of course, by the time he was composing Roderick Southey was a steady supporter of Evangelical activism, sharing many of the positions of the pressure group known as the Clapham Sect and feeling it to be his duty to defend the established Church against Catholic vindications, as it was part of the national identity and an institution on which the strength of his country was grounded.⁴⁰ Southey's ambiguous position toward Catholicism in Roderick becomes even clearer in what he wrote to his friend John Rickman in September 1808: “Religion has done much for Spain; in what light I regard it, you will see by the introduction to the Cid written six years ago, and only re-modelled now, and that before these late events took place” (Life and Correspondence, III, 169). In the Chronicle of the Cid (1808), as in the later Roderick, Southey recognizes the cultural relevance of Catholicism for the Spanish people while also voicing a proviso that nuances his position. The history of the Peninsula and, in particular, the social structure of Spain are grounded on secular depotism and religious intolerance, and this development culminates in the Inquisition, which, as Southey explains in Roderick, “by its damnable acts put all former horrors out of remembrance” (p. vii).⁴¹

Yet additionally and, in a way, paradoxically, the notes make clear that in terms of national structure Catholicism in the Spanish context works just like Anglicanism in Britain: the knowing style complicates the issue of national religion by projecting it into the future and referring it to the British “here and now.” It is telling that in 1811 Southey opened a review for the Quarterly on several books on the Inquisition—among them Blanco White's A Letter upon the Mischievous Influence of the Spanish Inquisition (1811)—by stating that “despotism and intolerance have subverted the two kingdoms of the Peninsula. Of the first of these evils we are in no danger, though it has never wanted partizans in any country when the tide sets that way.”⁴²

Spain is the model of a state that at the beginning of the modern age had achieved a unique fusion of Church and State interests, an issue that Southey felt to be very close to England and, on a larger scale, to Britain. Despite the somewhat heterodox tenets he expressed in The Book of the Church, he still was a committed supporter of the High Church, which he saw as a constitutive part of the nation and of that cultural compound called Englishness. In an 1809 essay entitled “On the Catholic Question” Southey clearly stated that “the religion of the country is the law of the country.”⁴³ Seen in this perspective, the Spanish historical union of spiritual and temporal powers into a form of absolute despotism is a negative example that has to be avoided by Britain. Thence Southey may infer that his nation is not in danger of despotism because of the British Constitution, which keeps the monarchy under control, and because of the balance and mutual support existing between Church and State. But he also warns, in the Quarterly review of books on the Inquisition, that intolerance and persecution may arise if the British nation does not safeguard this balance, which protects it from menacing forces: “Intolerance is closely connected with those religious opinions which of late years have been gaining ground among us with fearful progression; and persecution would be as necessary and inevitable a consequence of their ascendancy as it has been of the Romish faith” (p. 314). All extraneous bodies, such as Low Church confessions and especially Methodism, have to be controlled and kept at bay in order to maintain that balance and avoid the recrudescence of persecution.

In this context the insistence in the notes to Roderick on the Spanish Inquisition, its cruelties, and its superstition is something that the reviewer for the Christian Observer would have again ascribed to “the knowing style.” It is in fact a display of knowledge about Spain with ironic and sarcastic tones, something that the worried commentator interprets as the author's masochistic attempt “to unplume in his notes the ‘eagle-genius’ which soars in his text” (Critical Heritage, p. 189). Likewise, Southey's ironic stance toward the Catholic material of Roderick was perceived by Grosvenor Charles Bedford, the dedicatee of the poem as well as its reviewer for the Quarterly, who observed in his review: “Mr. Southey … certainly would be a very good Spaniard if he were not, as we have reason to believe, a very good protestant” (p. 106). Intermixing religion, nationalism, and poetic activity, Bedford's remark provides an apt summary of Southey's predicament in his attempt to portray Spain as an ideally organic and chivalrous society, while remaining strongly attached to his British and Protestant cultural identity.

Additionally, the polemical character of the notes constitutes a relocation of what has long been defined as the Laureate's unbounded love for Spain. Southey was enthusiastic about this land and its civilization, but at the same time he was not blind to its negative sides, and thus Roderick as a whole is not an uncritical exaltation of Spain as a romantic place and a setting for heroic adventures.⁴⁴ When Bedford stresses Southey's Protestant Britishness he confirms that although Roderick never mentions Britain, the Peninsular War, or Wellington (as Scott abundantly does in his Vision), Southey's poem was still read with an eye to the military events of the Iberian campaign, the Catholic emancipation bill, and the debate on the “condition of Britain.”

What was initially presented as a straightforward poem on the origins of the Spanish monarchy and a paean to Spanish heroism thus turns out to be a work ridden with conflicting problems distributed along competing levels. The confrontations between Britain and Spain, or between a sympathetic and a dismissive attitude toward Spanish civilization, point to the annotated romance as an unstable balance between fiction and nonfiction in which the authorial function is at once confirmed and subverted. As a result, the division of poetry and notes is the site of a precise ideological turn, because whenever the readers are led to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction, the legend/poem appears to possess a lower epistemological potential than the historical commentary. The naïveté of the poem comes up against the denials and reversals that are in place in the marginalia.

In the space of incongruity between poem and notes, Roderick, the Last of the Goths indicates that the nationalist text and its bold assertions of an epic ideal exist only through subtle negotiations displaced in the thresholds between competing discourses, such as those of ethnic continuity, religious unity, or patriotic archeology. On the one hand the poetic narrative fixes the Spanish nation as an object scattered across a number of compromises: Southey's fictional Spain is given a coherent shape through the exclusion, reshaping, and containment of its components. On the other hand the prose commentary problematizes the state of things by reworking the materials of representation so that the notes both disperse and reconfirm the poetry, whose “identity” becomes realized only a posteriori, both temporally and spatially, in the prose notes that are appended to it. The whole machinery of the nation as a transcendental entity is refocused in the notes through that knowing style that is here an intratextual condition of the nationalist narrative rather than any manipulative project on the author's part. The nation-making annotated romance is a site of struggle that necessarily influences the relation between fact and fiction, prose and poetry, or history and legend. Thus nation-making textuality is contradictory here, because what is expected to be a tale about transhistorical stability is in fact a construct of mutable elements deployed along different textual levels.⁴⁵

Despite all of its generalizations, this cross-referenced reading of Southey's poem and notes cannot be a wholesale explanation of the annotated romance. Indeed, a general and generic tendency has been reconfirmed—notably, that the tensions in this genre mirror the Romantics' preoccupation with the status of literature within the increasing division of literary and nonliterary discourses at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet here the focus is on a poem with a clear political and ideological agenda comparable to Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos I-II or IV.

It is also worth remembering the differences between Southey's notation and Coleridge's use of marginalia in Biographia Literaria, for, as analyzed by Jerome Christensen, dispersion and loss of anchorage in the Biographia work within an internal marginal rhetoric that undermines the context it is ostensibly meant to serve (Christensen, p. 936). By contrast, my analysis of Southey's poem attends to the notes' archeological commitment and to their interaction with the poetic narrative. Further, my discussion reveals why the prose commentary is where the nationalist annotated romance explodes. In light of the Derridean notion of supplement, we can see how a variety of discursive interventions destabilize the seemingly exclusive relation between the notes and the poetry. And this dispersion of the nationalist discourse between notes and poetry resolves the question of deciding exactly where Truth is located in Roderick. Although the vagaries of the knowing style award a higher epistemological value to prose, marginalia and poem provide separate forms of truth about the nation, generated in the gaps between the two levels, through their discontinuities and contradictions. The nation narrated by prose or verse exists precariously in the constant rewriting of the objects and tales that make it up.

The combination of the annotated romance and the nationalist narrative takes the literary structure of the former to its extreme, exploring its capacity to conflate fictional with nonfictional representation. As made clear by the conversation topics at John Thelwall's table, the urge to talk about the Napoleonic Wars and Spanish patriotism was inseparably and fatally connected to the drive to reinvent these facts in fictional terms. Likewise, this “fatal connection” introduces the need for complementing any deconstruction of the relationship between poetry and notes through those literary, historical, and political discourses that insist on this seemingly exclusive binary structure. Such a conclusion usefully refocuses those traditional critical opinions that explain “Robert Southey” as an unproblematic author whose intentions are always already self-evident. In such readings Southey and his literary output are ideologically naive, the mature poet becoming the wholehearted supporter of High Toryism and High Church ideas just as he had been a fervent, unquestioning Jacobin in his Pantisocratic days.⁴⁶ Yet such partial pictures do not take into account the knowing style, the more complicated and shaded stance toward issues where the poem's allegiance should be theoretically unquestioned.

An analysis of the often noncoincidental rationales of annotation in Roderick provides an altogether different picture of Southey's output. Indeed, his work appears no longer as the easily decodable oeuvre whose ideological positions are based on unsophisticated assumptions, but rather as a kind of writing that cannot escape the contradictory multiplicity of, among other things, its nation-making discourses. Thus, if Southey harnessed the notes appendage in order to determine the deep-rooted antiquity of the Spanish nation against Whig defeatism, then his treatment of this documentary material often unsettles his ideally patriotic, unified, and unanimous Spain (and Britain). Rather than defining a stable reality, the annotated romance creates the nation as an object that is ultimately in balance between languages, discourses, things, and competing literary genres.

Notes

1. See The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: An Abridgement, ed. Derek Hudson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 6-7.

2. Robinson recorded in his diary: “The Vision of Don Roderick he [Southey] represents as an unsubstantial and insignificant performance. It will not maintain the poet's reputation.” But Southey's idea of Landor's play was more favorable: “He spoke highly of W. S. Landor, the author of Gebir, whom he is going to visit. Landor wrote lately a tragedy [Count Julian] which Longman and Rees refused to publish” (Diary, pp. 6-7).

3. See Southey, letter to C. W. Williams Wynn, 11 November 1810, in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), I, 542.

4. See Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 97-98.

5. Southey, letter to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 16 February 1811, in The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), III, 303.

6. Rev. of George Nugent Grenville, Portugal. A Poem; in Two Parts, Quarterly Review, 7 (1812), 151.

7. See “Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism,” English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 308-31.

8. See Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 201.

9. Rev. of A Letter from Mr Whitbread to Lord Holland, on the present Situation of Spain, Edinburgh Review, 12 (1808), 434, 441.

10. Charles Lamb, letter to Robert Southey, 6 May 1815, quoted in Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 188.

11. Thomas Love Peacock, Four Ages of Poetry, quoted in Critical Heritage, p. 5.

12. British Review, 6 (1815), quoted in Critical Heritage, p. 193. An influential precedent for the extensive use of notes in a poem was set by Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1791), and, following the success of its curiously doubled narrative, footnotes started to be introduced into poems, functioning as commentaries on the romance or lyrical narratives, readjusting their investments in the imaginary and the subjective by an accumulation of positive facts. On such notes as a strategy for the remasculinization of literature, see Alan Richardson, “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 13-25. On Romantic women poets' use of notes, see Judith Pascoe, “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 197-99. Notes were not only employed by male authors in order to create virtual debates with other male literati. There are also examples of this practice in poems by women writers, as, for instance, in the introduction to Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women, Exemplifying Their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations. With Miscellaneous Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1810). Here, by presenting herself as part of a community of knowing subjects, Aikin employs her notes to circumscribe and enlarge a field of shared knowledge for the sake of those who are not primarily readers of literature: “The historical and biographical authorities from which its facts and many of its sentiments are derived, will easily be recognised by the literary reader, who will know how to estimate my correctness and fidelity: for the use of other readers a few notes are subjoined” (p. vii).

13. Southey, letter to C. W. Williams Wynn, 5 November 1821, in Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1856), III, 282; also quoted in Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 291.

14. See “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text,” PMLA, 98 (1983), 204-5. Benstock's article is an excellent discussion of the function of notes in prose fiction, which describes notation as originally related to scientific discourse. Her approach is limited to novels, and notes are examined as participating in an ambivalent interplay between text, narrative voice, and audience. Her analysis is fundamentally concerned with the construction of the relation between text, author, and reader, which culminates with the experiments in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939).

15. Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom, et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), p. 107.

16. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 212.

17. Jerome C. Christensen, “Coleridge's Marginal Method in the Biographia Literaria,” PMLA, 92 (1977), 933.

18. The inescapable intersection between linguistic post-structuralism and other materialist critical currents are debated, for example, in Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15-36.

19. See “History and Transcendence in Robert Southey's Epic Poems,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 19 (1979), 604.

20. Robert Southey, History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1823-32), I, 1-2.

21. On the romance as a narrative of reconstituted order, see Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 1-3; Fredric Jameson, “Magic Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History, 7 (1975), 135-63; and Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976). The Peninsular War was frequently represented as a romance. For George Ellis and George Canning in 1809 the Spanish events present “a spectacle, certainly, not less improbable than the wildest fictions of romance” (rev. of Affairs d'Espagne, Nos. 1 to 5, Quarterly Review, 1 [1809], 1); for Walter Scott all of these events happened in “places mentioned in Don Quixote and Gil Blas” (letter to Thomas Scott, 20 June 1808, in The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 13 vols. [London: Constable and Co., 1932-37], II, 76); James Grant's once well-known novel on the Iberian conflict bears the title The Romance of War, or The Highlanders in Spain (1845).

22. Lionel Gossman recently made the point that history for the Romantics was a discovery of the other and a deciphering of the past as an approach to this otherness. Gossman's description of the practice of Romantic historiography throws light on Southey's use of historical documents in Roderick, especially Gossman's remark that “by revealing the continuity between remotest origins and the present, between the other and the self, [the historian] could ground the social and political order and demonstrate that the antagonisms and ruptures … that seemed to threaten its legitimacy and stability were not absolute or beyond all mediation” (Between History and Literature [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990], p. 258).

23. Robert Southey, Roderick, the Last of the Goths (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), p. 4. All further references, by page number, are to this edition and are included in the text.

24. On Southey's use of historical documentary sources such as Morales or Pedro del Corral to develop his poetical discourse, see Ludwig Pfandl, “Robert Southey und Spanien,” Revue Hispanique, 28 (1913), 89-154.

25. The Vision of Don Roderick, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1904), p. 605.

26. On the Romantic reflection about fact and fiction, see Gary Kelly, “The Limits of Genre and the Institution of Literature: Romanticism between Fact and Fiction,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 158-62.

27. It is interesting that while the nation becomes visible and believable through a romance plot, its origins are grounded in the realia that Southey inserts in his narrative of Gothic Spain. He acknowledges that the legend may be false but also adds that it might as well be true for “the best Spanish historians and antiquaries are persuaded that there is no cause for disbelieving the uniform and concurrent tradition of both Moors and Christians” (p. iii). Southey also retells Roderick's legend without disclaiming it as a fantastic invention in the introduction to his Chronicle of the Cid, Roderigo Diaz de Bivar, the Campeador (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), p. xiv. Additionally, the historian Thomas Bourke related the same events as entirely historical, going so far as providing the translation of a letter of Florinda to her father, Don Julian, in A Concise History of the Moors in Spain (London: Rivington and Hatchard, 1811), pp. 20-22.

28. Southey specifically refers to Joseph Bingham's Antiquities of the Christian Church (1726) and Thomas Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655). The narrative is also regularly propped up by notes on objects and garments relative to religious rites, such as the orary (pp. lxxxvi-vii), the mitre (pp. lxxxvii-viii), and the pall (pp. lxxxviii-ix). As for the lay symbology of the coronation scene, Southey's notes demonstrate the historicity of this cumulative archeology of national symbols, such as the banner of the new confederation (pp. ci-cii), Pelayo's buckler (p. c), and the cry of acclamation given to newly crowned kings that his source identifies as a “costumbre antigua de los Godos” (“an ancient Gothic custom”) (p. ci; my translation).

29. “The first town he conquered was Leon, and thence he called himself King of Leon and chose as his emblem a red lion in a white field” (my translation).

30. See Eastwood, p. 328. See also Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 107-14.

31. For Southey's description of the chivalric investiture and its relations to the Partidas and the romance of Amadís de Gaula, see Pfandl, pp. 128-32.

32. On Spain as the “hotbed” of chivalry, see Walter Scott, “An Essay on Chivalry,” in The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 30 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1880-82), VI, 18-19. See also Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1963), pp. 21-22.

33. On Roderick in relation to the contemporary chivalric vogue, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), p. 43.

34. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 145. “Spain” was not originally an Iberian denomination but an imported, probably Provençal term, that started to be used by neighboring states relatively late in the Middle Ages to refer to the whole peninsula. On the ideological constructions of the word “Spain,” see Américo Castro, “Español,” palabra extranjera: razones y motivos (Madrid: Taurus, 1970).

35. Stuart Woolf writes: “The popular struggle, from the risings of 2 May 1808 to the guerrilla ‘war by bands,’ owed far less to national than to regional loyalties: in keeping with the traditions of the Spanish monarchy, the risings were Catalan, Valencia, Asturian, Galician or Andalusian in the first instance, although this did not exclude at a more remote level identification with the legitimate king of Spain” (“The Construction of a European World-View in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Years,” Past and Present, 137 [1992], 100).

36. Rev. of Roderick, the Last of the Goths, Christian Observer, 14 (1815); quoted in Critical Heritage, p. 189.

37. Similarly, it was this kind of tension that pushed the publisher John Murray to object to the inclusion of John Cam Hobhouse's lengthy notes to the fourth canto of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818). The liberal and Whiggish slant of the notes, which evidently was one of the publisher's main worries, was also compounded by Hobhouse's choice of collaborators, such as the Italian exile and patriot Ugo Foscolo, who contributed a long essay on the present state of letters in the Peninsula. Murray eventually published both poem and notes, but Hobhouse's prose commentary later appeared separately in a volume entitled Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (1818). See Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), II, 736-37.

38. See, for instance, rev. of William Jacob, Travels in the South of Spain, Edinburgh Review, 18 (1811), 138-40; and rev. of Roderick, the Last of the Goths, Quarterly Review, 13 (1815), 108.

39. On Southey's Evangelicalism, see Marilyn Butler, “The Orientalism of Byron's Giaour,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 80-83. On Southey and anti-Catholicism, see Carnall, pp. 28ff; and Eastwood.

40. See David Pym, “The Ideas of Church and State in the Thought of the Three Principal Lake Poets: Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth,” Durham University Journal, 83 (1991), 19-26. The anti-Catholicism of the Spanish epic, moreover, is rooted in that of the preface to the Chronicle of the Cid and in the hostility apparent in Southey's Letters from England (1807), and it finds a counterpart in the opinions expressed in his two essays “On the Catholic Question” (1809 and 1812) and in his later poem The Pilgrim to Compostella (1829).

41. The anti-Catholic ideas found in the notes to Roderick are paralleled by the similar hostility at the center of The Book of the Church that Southey was writing in the 1810s. See Jean Raimond, Robert Southey: L'homme et son temps, l'œuvre, le rôle (Paris: Didier, 1968), pp. 420-24. During the composition of Roderick Southey's anti-popish feelings grew particularly strong after he became acquainted with José María Blanco White, a former Catholic priest and intellectual now converted to Anglicanism, who for a time was Southey's main informer and ally in his anti-Catholic crusade. See Vicente Llorens, “Blanco White and Robert Southey: Fragments of a Correspondence,” Studies in Romanticism, 11 (1972), 147-52; and G. Martin Murphy and André Pons, “Further Letters of Blanco White to Robert Southey,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 62 (1985), 357-72.

42. Southey, “Tracts on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions,” Quarterly Review, 6 (1811), 314.

43. Robert Southey, “On the Catholic Question,” in his Essays, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1832), II, 281.

44. For this interpretation, see Raimond, pp. 296-97 and 534.

45. This idea explicates Homi K. Bhabha's definition of the nation as a cultural construct wavering between vocabularies and “thresholds of meaning,” something that Roderick typifies as a crossing and colliding of discourses such as nationalism and anti-Catholicism (see Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha [New York: Routledge, 1990], p. 4).

46. This critical attitude is particularly evident in accounts that focus on Southey's work according to strict biographical schemes, such as Jack Simmons, Southey (London: Collins, 1945); and Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age.