Why Authorship Cannot be Erased in Minority Literary Studies: Etxepare’s Authorship of Linguae Vasconum Primitiae (1545) as a Minorized Identity’s Literary Performance

Summary

Linguae Vasconum Primitiae (1545) is the first book ever published in Basque, written by Bernard Etxepare, a priest from the Northern Basque Country. This collection of poems explores religious and romantic themes, but more importantly, it serves as a defense of Basque, a minority language. This article examines Etxepare's poems, with a particular focus on the apologetic verses. The hypothesis posits that the authorship of this book is a performance (Taylor 2011), through which a sense of border identity (Anzaldúa 2015) is conveyed, marking the beginning of a new era of performance that asserts the value of Basque speakers. From this perspective, Barthes and Foucault's argument for erasing the author to achieve a neutral interpretation fails to recognize the text's socio-historical significance and the author's intentionality. Anonymity cannot coexist with ideology or intentionality, rendering these claims ineffective for a neutral interpretation. Furthermore, I argue that Etxepare initiated a socio-political movement, a metaperformative project that catalyzed the development of a literary tradition and the normalization of the Basque language. Erasing the author would thus mean erasing history, and disregarding the context would lead to a loss of understanding of the text's ideological and symbolic dimensions.