Literary discourse analysis - Güell, Ramis i Cia: Business History

Güell, Ramis i Cia: Business History

2.1.5 Literary discourse analysis

Up till now we have analyzed this biography by studying its author, the setting of its production, its public and historical context, and we have speculated on various objectives which it may have served, for example in commemorating Joan Güell, exonerating his wealth, and monumentalizing the Barcelonian Bourgeoisie. These are all examples of an externalist framework of analysis, in other words, analyzing this text with the inclusion of historical/sociological/political contextualization. For all of the richness that these outside perspectives add to our understanding of the book, limiting our analysis only to these frameworks can have the effect of disrupting our experience of the story.³⁰ It is true that this book is an ideological instrument and must be viewed as a historical, social, and political object. At the same time, it is literature, and whatever the political designs may have been for this book, the means and medium of their realization was limited to that which could be conveyed through the story-- either written down on the pages of the book, or read aloud in Barcelona’s City Hall. This story quality, or what you could call “historiography” in fact, had been my first surprise when I first approached the text. I guess I had been expecting something a bit more objective and academic-sounding. That, at least, is the way I had read about the life of Joan Güell in the other, later accounts, and most of them had cited this one as their principle source.

The more I studied Argullol’s story, the more convinced I became that any analysis of this text would be incomplete without including an internalist perspective-- an analysis of the text as literature. This is one of the reasons I have thought it appropriate to include some rather lengthy translated passages, without modifying the tone and content of the original.

30 The framework of Actor-Network Theory has been proposed by literary critic Rita Felski as a solution for interpreting and engaging with literature in a way that avoids a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion.’ She characterizes typical critical qualities as sceptical, dispassionate, adversarial, mildly paranoid, embarrassed with the open and affective, and a preference for irony over passionate engagement. Felski argues that Latour’s model allows us “no longer to diminish or subtract from the reality of the texts we study but to amplify their reality, as energetic coactors and vital partners.” (Felski, Rita. (2015). The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press.)

88 This gives the story a bit of space to speak for itself, apart from my incessant questioning and contextualization. Reading the original passages demonstrates Argullol’s use of various elements of literature in crafting this story such as plot, setting, characters, imagery, symbolism, style, point of view, etc. I think that the importance of these literary elements is more than anecdotal. After all, my goal in analysing this first story of the Vapor Vell is to identify the types of industrial discourses that it presents and the field of literary critique offers a wide range of methodological tools for carrying out a discourse analysis.

My inspiration for taking this discourse approach to evaluating musealization initiatives comes from Heike Overmann and Harald Mieg’s edited collection of case studies on industrial heritage management, published in 2015.³¹ There, they perform a synchronic discourse analysis of the types of discourses used by city planners, architects and heritage professionals in debates regarding the management of urban industrial heritage sites in various European cities. In this study I will follow the example of Overmann and Mieg in attempting to classify each discourse in terms of its stakeholders, objects, concepts, objectives, and values. While this system is not ideal for working with every kind of discourse, the exercise of classifying discourses within these bounds is often illuminating, and standardizing this discourse analysis practice within this investigation makes it easier to compare and contrast the different types of stories told about industrial Barcelona. This, after all, is the main goal. With this disclaimer, let’s see how the biography of Joan Güell might be represented in terms of these discourse components:

● Discourse: In a sense, literature is in itself a broad type of discourse, but we can classify the discourse of Argullol’s story more specifically by narrowing it down to a genre, such as commemorative biography. Furthermore, Argullol uses the symbolism of Joan’s childhood skirmishing to inform his audience of the type of narrative arc they should expect. It’s to be a hero story, and although it lacks the complexity of a fully developed, Joseph Cambell-style “hero’s journey,” this classic story structure is used repeatedly throughout the book.

● Stakeholders: Within the hero’s journey narrative we expect to find represented two main stakeholders- the hero (protagonist) and the villain (antagonist). In this case, the hero is Joan Güell, and his antagonists are played by various competitors, whether they are the children of Altafulla which he bested in pretend battle as a child, or the competing business houses of Cuba which he bested through his port monopoly, or the competition of the international corduroy market which he sought to neutralize through protectionist policies.

● Objects: This category can be interpreted in many ways, but perhaps the most general objects in this book are the various business ventures which Güell sets out upon.

Argullol represents these ventures like battles in which Joan Güell, the “soldier of work” struggles to obtain his objective: the victory of his various businesses.

31 Mieg, Harald A. & Oevermann, Heike (eds.). (2015). Industrial Heritage Sites in Transformation:

Clash of Discourses. New York: Routledge.

● Concepts: In these “battles” Joan Güell makes use of various business principles which Argullol outlines in detail in chapter two, including hard work and humility, saving, forming an association, competition, monopoly, price fixing, and, later on when he founds the Vapor Vell, protectionism.

● Values: This last category is often the most important in order to arrive at an understanding of a given discourse. It can be tempting to represent discourses that one doesn’t agree with in a critical and negative light, and this can keep one from truly understanding them. Identifying the values of a discourse is an exercise in imaginative empathy. Here, for example, the value which motivates the majority of the narrative arc of this biography is economic in nature. The hero sets out on a particular economic venture, struggles through various difficulties, and eventually triumphs over his enemies. The type of victory represented here is the victory of Joan’s business ventures over the competition.

Discourse Stakeholders Objects Concepts Objectives Values Hero’s

Despite the fact that this model of discourse analysis involves somewhat ambiguous distinctions between, for example, categories like “objects” and “concepts,” framing the biography in these terms does help me clarify a bit more a feeling I had as I neared the end of the book. It was the feeling that, despite the storytelling flourishes that Argullol implements in crafting this narrative, the character of Joan Güell remains almost completely flat throughout the entirety of the book. By the end of it, I don’t actually get the feeling of knowing who Joan Güell “the person” was at all. Instead, everything in the book is about Joan Güell the businessman. This businessman identity is something which Argullol struggles to define in an exciting way. Biographies of soldiers seem to have less trouble manifesting the humanity of their protagonists than this one of a soldier of work. Argullol’s abundant praise of the personal qualities of Joan Güell don’t seem to help much in this regard, and come across as a public relations stunt-- a type of mask. Even today, the businessman identity is often subject to a similar kind of critique, for example, the insult that somebody is just a “suit.” This one-dimensionality makes it hard to empathize with the character of Joan Güell. The economic values motivating the story are so absolute that they leave little room for developing other aspects of his personhood. Nowhere is this illustrated so vividly than in Argullol’s cringe-worthy attempt at deviating from the story of Güell’s economic affairs to discuss, not Joan the businessman, but Joan the lover. Look at how he sets it up:

“D. Juan asserted, in the resolution of the most important subjective problem, that he did not seek it as a means of fortune and, as he did not believe that marriage

90 was the pretext for the union of two bank accounts but rather the sincere union of two mutually attracted hearts, the problem was resolved when he noticed the reciprocal attraction in a particular person without any circumstance that could be an obstacle to the joining of the two souls. In his good and practical sense in all things he was repulsed by the idea of considering marriage as a means of increasing his assets;

although it did not seem to be an issue that when choosing the woman to be his wife, in addition to her personal qualities, she also had the quality of possessing some fortune.”³²

I have to say it: this is one of the most stilted love stories I’ve ever read. Argullol goes so far out of his way to try to distance Joan’s love life from a matter of economics that in the end he talks more about economics than he does about love, a word he seems incapable of bringing himself to utter, choosing instead to call it “the most important subjective problem.”

A few sentences later he calls it “the business of the soul,” and laments that in this respect Joan Güell was unable to obtain the same success as he had with his industrial companies.

This strikes me as an odd way of putting the issue- that both of the women Joan married died shortly after in childbirth.

If Argullol was trying to humanize his protagonist, it didn’t work for me. Instead he awoke my suspicion. After digging around a bit I would later come across Gary Wray McDonogh’s 1988 book, Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era³³. McDonogh’s fascinating ethnography of Barcelona’s economic elite discusses the ways in which marriage and the family were used in the propagation of power from generation to generation within certain “good families.” In this respect, Güell’s marriage to Francesca Bacigalupi i Dulcet (and, when she died, to her sister Camil.la Bacigalupi) acted as a merger between old and new forms of power, between the traditional landed aristocracy, of which the Bacigalupi family was one of the most powerful, and the modernizing bourgeoisie. According to some historians, this marriage secured Güell even more wealth and power than did his time in Cuba.³⁴ So in the end, even this marriage was a sort of business--another source of triumph. It is this narrowness of scope and lack of humanity which drain this book of literary interest.

Conclusion

There is no denying the importance of this book in defining our knowledge of the life of Joan Güell and the founding of the Vapor Vell. The historical contents of this book, if not its dramatic literary style, has been copied by everyone who has subsequently written on

32 Argullol y Serra, Jose. (1879). Biografía del Excmo. Sr. D. Juan Güell y Ferrer. N. Ramirez y Compania: Barcelona.

33 McDonogh, Gary. (1986). Good families of Barcelona: A social history of power in the industrial era. (Republished in 2014; p. 139.)

34 Farràs, Andreu. (2016). Els Güell. La història d’una de les famílies més influents a Catalunya els últims dos segles. Edicions 62.

91 these topics, sometimes without even their knowledge of who they were copying. This is the case, for example, in a publication from 1985 of didactic materials regarding the Vapor Vell to be used as a resource for local teachers.³⁵ In this packet of materials, two lengthy historical texts are reproduced-- one is the biography of Joan analyzed here, and the other is a passage from Vicens Vives’ book on 19th century industrialists and politicians.³⁶ Unbeknownst to the compilers of this set of materials, the passage they quote from Vicens Vives is actually a passage which Vicens Vives has copied, almost word for word, from Argullol. This type of bibliographic confusion makes it appear that there are more historical sources of information regarding the Vapor Vell than there really are. In actuality, a lot of what has been written has been a rephrasing of Argullol’s story.

It is also an important book for what it does. It is not a passive document. Argullol uses story-telling in order to commemorate, exonerate and monumentalize not only Joan Güell but a new class of urban heroes-- businessmen. In this process he generates a literary discourse in which the narrative of Joan’s life is used to tell a bigger story about economic values. But this economic story, I argue, is ultimately a constraint which inhibits the degree to which Argullol is able to produce good history, and even good literature. My first impression had been that this was a comic-book history, but by the end of the book it seems as though this is the type of comic which is made to sell you something. Except, instead of a breakfast cereal, here the product being pushed is an economic value system. A report from May 16, 1879 in favor of the monumentalization of Joan Güell speaks of “perpetuating the protectionist memory.” In the final chapter, Argullol makes this plain, presenting an argument in favor of protectionism to his City Hall audience and announcing a compilation of Joan Güell’s writings on the topic to be published the following year by the Ateneu Barcelones.

In my analysis, the literary discourse operates in this biography at the service of an economic discourse which, until the end, lies halfway submerged under the surface. It is the economic discourse, not the life of Joan Güell, that gives this book its structural coherence and most illuminates the question about what kind of book this is. Through our literary analysis we have seen how this discourse promotes and justifies that which it hopes to preserve: social and economic order.

In the following section we will broaden our scope, looking beyond this biography to the Vapor Vell’s earliest surviving documentation in order to investigate the nature of this class of economic discourses.

35 See pages 8-10 of: Col.lectiu de l'Escola de Mestres de Sants Les Corts (including A Bernaus i Salisi; F.X. Hernàndez i Cardona; P. Hornos i Garcia; M. Sales i Sebastià; R. Torras i Conangla). (1985).

Materials per a una Didáctica del Vapor Vell. [Accessed: Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat Barcelona.]

36 Vicens i Vives, Jaume; Llorens, Montserrat. (1972). Industrials i polítics (segle XIX). Ed. Vicens Vives, Barcelona.

92 2.2 ECONOMIC DISCOURSES

In the last section, we analyzed Argullol’s biography of Joan Güell in terms of the discourse it featured regarding Barcelona’s industrial past and, particularly, regarding the figure of Joan Güell as a “soldier of work” or businessman. I called this a ‘hero’s journey’

discourse because of the way in which the narrative was structured in terms of the protagonist having to overcome a variety of business challenges and eventually achieving victory. It is natural to think of literary tropes and genres in terms of discourses because the word discourse itself refers to language. A literary discourse is not just the things an author says about a certain topic, it is the way they talk about it. For example, it would be a very different kind of book if Argullol framed his narrative, not as the conquests of a businessman, but as the relationship of a husband and father (family discourse), or the socialization of a Catalan (cultural discourse), or the health of a male human being (medical discourse). These discourses might refer to the same person, but they project different identities and narratives.

In this section, our objective is to analyze the earliest surviving documentation of the Vapor Vell in terms of economic discourses. The first thing we need to do is understand what is meant by economic discourse, then we will look at the documentation and analyze the discourses using the same methodology we used in the previous section, borrowed from Oevermann and Mieg.³⁷ Finally, we will take a look at a collection of alternative economic discourses which figured prominently in the context of the Progressive Biennium (1854-56), a historical era marked not only by the clash of workers and owners in factories like the Vapor Vell, but also by the clash of discourses of capitalistic production with Luddite, Socialist and Progressive economic discourses.

Concepts and theoretical framework

As a child, I loved playing board games like risk and monopoly. Growing up in a rural North Carolinian household came with certain inherent benefits in this respect. For one thing, in a family of ten there is always bound to be enough people around to start a game.

For another thing, even on the rare occasion that my parents let me and my seven siblings watch television we only ever got one channel, and the only good thing that aired on it was the Olympics and that only broadcast every two years, and that’s including the Winter Olympics. So, for the most part, we were free to play board games; “free” in the double sense-- that we could play them, and that we didn’t have anything else to do.

Especially in the winter months, when the creek froze over and it was too cold to go outside, board games became an important part of my family’s coping mechanism for dealing with cabin-fever. When ten people are crammed into a two-bedroom house for four months of winter, the steady, collective spiraling into madness can be staved off for hours at a time through the protective micro-environment of perfect structure and rationality imposed by a

37 Mieg, Harald A. & Oevermann, Heike (eds.). (2015). Industrial Heritage Sites in Transformation:

Clash of Discourses. New York: Routledge.

93 board game. It didn’t matter who won or lost those countless games of monopoly and risk, ultimately it was social order, and my mother’s sanity, that triumphed.

Probably the best way of describing the type of order manifested by a board game is through the language of economics. A board game allows players to role-play as stakeholders within a particular economic system crafted by the gamemaker. This is made explicit in some games, like Monopoly, which was originally created in 1903 and called “The Landlord’s Game” as a way to demonstrate the economic theories of Henry George (1839-97). Part of the fun of a board game is in figuring out how the system works in order to strategize a way to swing things in your favor. Different kinds of board games involve different kinds of relationships between players. Sometimes teamwork is involved, sometimes it is an all-out fight. Sometimes one of the players takes a moderator’s role in the game. Besides the players, there are also game pieces, strategies, and rules for how to win. These are all useful metaphors for the stakeholders, objects, concepts, and objectives of economic systems. The board game metaphor is also interesting when it comes to analyzing economic systems in which one or

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