Lugubrious Nights: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Romance (review)

Undoubtedly one of the recurrent difficulties facing scholars working on Spanishlanguage texts of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century is that the lack of translations can limit the possibilities for creative dialogue with those studying other literatures and cultures. By providing an English-language version of Cadalso’s short, but highly significant work, Noches lúgubres, from the early 1770s, Russell P. Sebold has, therefore, filled an important gap. The text is remarkable, aesthetically and intellectually. Set over three nights, and written in dialogue, it traces the efforts of Tediato to disinter his dead lover, take her home, lay her in a bed next to his, and ignite the domicile around them. This he does not accomplish, at least within the confines of the work itself. The Lugubrious Nights are a provocation on many levels: narrative progression is overtaken by repeated failure of the tale to reach completion; the work is dominated by Tediato’s musings on his thoughts and feelings about his own death wish, his near necrophilia and, ultimately, his aspirations to group suicide, couched in terms not unfamiliar to contemporaneous thought.

Sebold has been one of the key figures in sustaining and developing modern thinking about the Noches. He has been particularly interested in relating them to his broader concern with arguing for the formative role of eighteenth-century Spanish literature in the modern period, and especially in the emergence of ‘Romanticism’. In line with these concerns, his introduction stresses both the innovations of the text itself, and its extensive debt to European sensationalist thought (that is, theories that look primarily to sense-data as the source of knowledge). Sensationalism opened up the possibility of human experience cut off from direct contact with the divine and, thus, of extreme forms of alienated individuality and of explorations of subjective experience. Sebold advances the claim that ‘Before Lugubrious Nights, there existed in no literature a work in which the principal subject matter was the rejection of an innocent hero by heaven, by his fellow men, and by all human institutions’ (p.16). It is in this sense that he sees the work as defining, as regards what he calls the ‘literary cosmology’ of European Romanticism (31). Sebold situates this development in relation to Cadalso’s own biography (the work was famously conceived after the death of his lover), and in terms of the work’s demonstrable subsequent influence on Spanish letters. He is preoccupied with showing that Romanticism may be discerned in Spain as early as the 1770s and, thus, with broadening the definition of this periodization.

Beyond even disputes about periodization, the real use of a translation such as this is to enable the further integration of the study of works that originated in Spain with broader topics of cultural research, not least by facilitating the incorporation into wider theoretical and thematic debates of consideration of the text itself, and of the critical discussions around it, from Glendinning to Iarocci. The rise of Gothic Studies and, recently, of ‘Global Gothic’ is a case in point, and points to a broader series of cultural debates within which Lugubrious Nights is a reference point. Such debates range across the socio-historical origins of modern subjecthood, the relationship between psycho-sexual approaches and historicisms and, more broadly, the history of sexuality and of psychology, the exploration of the ‘forbidden, thanatic realms’ (in the phrase of Byron and Punter) and its relationship to conceptions of knowledge, the role of visuality (both metaphorical and literal) in relation to other senses, and aesthetics. In these respects, consideration might be given as to how exemplary a figure Tediato is or is not meant to be. Perhaps, too, the translation of this work into English may be a reminder to Hispanists working on the modern period of how important the text is, and of its potential to illuminate the debates on sexuality, subjecthood and knowledge, with which they are often preoccupied...