Francisco Rico, professor, critic, RAE academic, editor and essayist, must have seen himself as a fictional character, half moral and half rogue, half legend and half Public Administration official level 27. For years, Rico has been attributed powers, friendships, manias and phobias that he always treated as a jokey misunderstanding. Today, the academic has died one day before his 82nd birthday.
Rico was, above all, part of an academic tradition that time has ennobled: his teachers at the University of Barcelona, José Manuel Blecua and Martín de Riquer, modernized Hispanic Philology and the knowledge of Spanish literature at a time. in which the Spanish university seemed paralyzed. Rico, who arrived at the university in the 1960s, was a step forward in that work: he studied the connection of Spanish literature in its first centuries with that of other European languages. Above all, with Italy, which was the most aesthetically and intellectually creative country in Europe and which led Rico to Petrarch, his main object of study.
Another Italian, Indro Montanelli, said of Javier Maras that write “in European”. Rico was a close friend of Marías and could have been explained with those same words. Rico’s view of Spanish literature in its first centuries consisted above all of showing it in its cosmopolitanism, removing its self-absorption and, at the same time, delving into its essence. The picaresque novel and the point of view (1984), for example, noted that what was truly new about the Spanish novel of the Golden Age was that grant the privilege of narration to the dispossessed character. Rico argued in those pages that this gesture, probably spontaneous, was the key to all subsequent European narrative.
Rogues and humanists were always mixed in Rico’s academic work. The counterpoint of The picaresque novel and the point of view may be The dream of humanism. From Petrarch to Erasmus, an essay that dialogued with the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance to outline an almost intellectual biography. Rico explained the authors whom he had most idealized and through them he explained himself. From the whole, one idea stands out or, rather, a longing and a nostalgia: that of knowledge as a wholein the style of the ancient humanists, opposed to the modern world of hyperspecialization.
At the midpoint between the rogues and the humanists were Don Quixote and Cervantes, the writer who traveled to Italy and ended up making a poor living almost like a rogue, and the universal character he invented. Rico was for Cervantes something similar to what Harold Bloom was for Shakespeare: a formidable popularizer, capable of finding essential gestures in apparently secondary details. His reading of Quixote I was melancholic. His favorite passage was the one about returning to the village of Quijano, who in a banal conversation agreed that Dulcinea was a dream that would never come true. But it was also a moral reading, since she discovered in Cervantes a form of love for life in the simple and painful.
Rico not only law Quixote; He also worked it as a scientist. In the 2000s, he delved into all of his texts, among the multitude of editions that Cervantes’ work has had, he collated them and was able to synthesize them, eliminating what was added and what was superfluous. Rico maintained as a hypothesis that Cervantes himself would have synthesized the text of his novel even more if he had been able, that he would have made a Quixote that it was more Quijano and less an adventure book, as happened in the second part of the work. But that was just a theory. In practice, the philologist was in charge of the RAE edition of Don Quixote on its centenary, a version that was also an intellectual map of the masterpiece of Spanish literature.
The metaphor of the map can be used in relation to the other great work of Francisco Rico, History and criticism of Spanish literaturea collective set (but coordinated by the UB professor) of nine volumes that It began in Santo Domingo de la Calzada and San Millan de la Cogolla and ended in the author’s generation.. Today, such an endeavor seems as anachronistic as building a pyramid in the desert, but the focus of the work is recognizable: Spanish literature appears treated in the collection as a guide with which to explain the intellectual history of the men who have spoken a language, Spanish, and they have lived in a territory, Spain. Freedom, poverty and equality were the themes of History and criticism of Spanish literature as much or more than the Italianate sonnet or the realist novel.
Each volume of History and criticism of Spanish literature He had a playing card in his deck. The new names 1975-2000, her first supplement, signed with Jordi Gracia, carried a nine of swords, as if it were an invitation to fight. That read more like a journalistic book, rather scathing, than like an academic work. Much of Rico’s fame as a feared and somewhat quarrelsome critic comes from that time. Was it a fair fame? The world is full of former students of the professor at the University of Barcelona who leave that same question in the air. They remember it as a teacher who could intimidate and, at the same time, as an extravagant and charming artist of the transmission of knowledge. He himself seemed to feel comfortable in that ambiguity.
Rico was also a modern character in his way of connecting the academic world with the outside world. Flirty, hedonistic, ironic, unpredictable, charming despite his guise as an angry, theatrical professor and critic… Rico was at the heart of Spanish cultural life of his generation, He was a friend to all and an enemy to some and became the great cultural prescriber of his time.. Two of his books, A thousand years of European poetry y A thousand years of Spanish poetry, They show Rico’s talent for understanding art as a meaningful whole. In addition, they are two perfect objects for lovers to give to each other, an idea that Rico, half mischievous and half humanist, could consider with good humor.
The last books published by Francisco Rico now seem, in his death, to be two farewell monologues in the style of medieval theater. In A long loyalty (2022), Rico wrote about his teachers and about the tradition in which he was inserted: Ramón Menndez Pidal, Eduard Valent, Dmaso AlonsoMartn de Riquer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jos Manuel and Alberto Blecua, Roberto Calasso, Fernando Lzaro Carreter, Claudio Guilln, Jos Mara Valverde, Yakov Malkiel, Mara Rosa Lida…
Lastly, Petrarch. Poet, thinker, character, Published in 2024, it included four articles by Rico about the figure to whom he had dedicated the most efforts in his academic career, the one who had accompanied him since high school. One of these texts explained that the Italian philosopher divided his self between a more or less inaccessible intimacy and an image before the theatrical world, today we would say that performative. It is difficult to avoid the temptation to think that Francisco Rico must have been in the same game, that he made his self something similar to a work of art.