The subject in question: early contemporary Spanish literature and Modernism

3. From the Labyrinth: The Spanish Modernist Novel and the “New Man”

c h a p t e r 3 From the Labyrinth The Spanish Modernist Novel and the “New Man” In the introduction to a recent edition of Estación. Ida y vuelta, in which the editor designates Rosa Chacel as the female writer most worthy of keeping intellectual and artistic company with the “Generation of 1927” (“la escritora del 27” [“the female writer of 27”]),1 Chacel pays homage to the major talents of the early-twentieth-century Spanish novel, most of whom had been prominently identified with the “Generation of 1898”: Unamuno proyectaba la sombra de su persona [.....] Valle-Inclán era un ejemplo de riqueza y complejidad verbal [.....] Baroja conquistaba con la simpatía de sus personajes antipáticos [.....] Ramón [Gómez de la Serna] [.....] ocultaba el horizonte con su volumen [.....] Estas eran las anfractuosidades de la vertiente literaria: de los caminos llanos no hay por qué hablar. (74) Unamuno projected the shadow of his person [.....] Valle-Inclán was an example of verbal richness and complexity [.....] Baroja conquered with the sympathy of his unsympathetic characters [.....] Ramón [Gómez de la Serna] clouded the horizon with his literary volume [.....] This was the upside of the literary slope: concerning the lower there’s no need to say anything. 85 1. Rosa Chacel, Estación. Ida y vuelta, ed. Shirley Mangini (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), 20. < Since these figures are writing at the moment that modernism is achieving prominence elsewhere in Europe, Chacel’s opinion also provides an appropriate point of departure for a discussion of the modernist novel in Spain. Later in her remembrance of a work that after more than half a century is finally achieving recognition, Chacel maintains that the central motivation of her novel is to examine the private intricacies of a character that she identifies simply as an “ente pensante” (“thinking subject ,” 80) and that her novel represents “[lo que] pasa en la mente de un hombre. [.....] El encadenamiento de las ideas, imágenes, sentimientos [que] conduce a decisiones, aclara o agrava dudas, ahonda abismos, enreda o desenreda laberintos, etc.” (“[what] happens in the mind of a man. [.....] The linking together of the ideas, images, feelings [that] lead to decisions, clarify or aggravate doubts, deepen abysses, entangle or disentangle labyrinths, etc.,” 80). Chacel is also sketching here the primal scene of the Spanish modernist novel, the dilemmas and opportunities presented to characters in quite familiar company with protagonists from the “Spanish tradition”: cerebral, thought-obsessed heroes/ anti-heroes who must deal with a seemingly labyrinthine reality that is primarily the construct of their own monstrous intellects. The novels chosen for discussion—Baroja’s El árbol de la ciencia (The Tree of Good and Evil, 1911), Unamuno’s Niebla (Mist, 1914), Gómez de la Serna ’s El novelista (The Novelist, 1923), Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas (1926), along with Chacel’s Estación. Ida y vuelta (Season/Station: Round Trip, 1930; perhaps the most notable among a group of experimental works by young novelists including Antonio Espina, Francisco Ayala, and Benjamín Jarnés)—are exemplary of the evolution of the Spanish modernist novel. From a strictly formal perspective, these works impressively fulfill Eysteinsson ’s requisite criterion that a work identified as modernist will be engaged , to varying degrees, in interrupting the realist illusion. Indeed, all of these novels are splendid examples of modernist meta-literariness. Yet despite their considerable formal innovation, they are perhaps more important as meditations, revealing portraits of the modern dilemma and the crisis confronting the pivotal cultural construct of European moder86 from the labyrinth nity, the autonomous thinking subject—Chacel’s “ente pensante”—from an individual and collective perspective at the outset of the twentieth century . As such they also participate in the much broader and ongoing Spanish reflections on the appropriate constitution of human subjectivity. The crisis of the “autonomous thinking subject” calls into question the very concepts of human autonomy, the role of thinking, and the processes of thought; indeed, conventional ideas of subjectivity as the guiding definitions of the late nineteenth century are progressively understood no longer to suffice. Perhaps nowhere is the dilemma of the “new man”—the new modernist man—better represented than in Baroja’s El árbol de la ciencia.2 This novel has never been associated with modernism . Rather, it has been consistently identified with the guiding nationalist ideology ascribed to the “Generation of 1898.” It strongly critiques a spiritual malaise in Spain, one of consequences of the ignominious defeat in the war with the United States. It despairs of a political solution to Spanish social problems, while it seems to be obsessed with a desperate search for the means to regenerate national values and virtues. Indeed, perhaps more than any other, this novel seems to embody the values that Salinas and Laín Entralgo so closely associated with “los perfiles exactos de un nuevo complejo espiritual perfectamente unitario que irrumpía en la vida española: la generación del 98” (“the exact profiles of a new and perfectly unitary spiritual complex that erupted in Spanish national life: the generation of 98”). Yet the nationalistic interpretation of this novel is not satisfying. The lamentable demise of the protagonist, Andrés Hurtado, may just as well be attributed to his remaining in Spain instead of seeking his fortune beyond the Pyrenees. Indeed, Hurtado’s friend Fermín Ibarra, whose entrepreneurial ideas are soundly rejected in Spain, is able, and rather easily so, to secure patents and financial backing for his ideas in other parts of Europe. Arguably, this could also have been Hurtado’s fortune (his 2. Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia, ed. Pío Caro Baroja (Madrid: Caro Raggio / Cátedra, 1985). from the labyrinth 87 materialistic friend Julio Aracil also becomes, in Madrid, a rich “society” doctor). Yet rather than to emulate this type of character, Hurtado, progressively disillusioned with the largely unrewarding and often sordid practice of medicine, instead withdraws from public life into himself. Eventually, he makes his living by translating articles from French medical journals. Indeed, this allegedly most Spanish of novels is infused with almost constant references to things European: Hurtado’s decrepit science professors’ name-dropping of famous European scientists with whom they were allegedly fast friends; the competition with French wines that eventually helps sink the economy of Alcolea del Campo (Andr és’s provincial medical post); European capital that allows Spaniards like Ibarra to start a lucrative enterprise; and scientific and medical advances that Hurtado submissively reports, secondhand, to the Spanish medical profession. More evident, however, is the pervasiveness of what prove to be troubling and problematical European ideas, especially when Andrés discusses the natural-ethical order of things with his uncle and mentor Iturrióz. This is particularly prominent in the novel’s fourth part, which consists entirely of a philosophical exchange at the uncle’s house, in which it becomes very difficult to understand who is speaking or advocating which position at a given moment. This purposeful confusion of the reader, the blurring of the discursive space in the colloquy between the two “thinking subjects,” reiterates a more somber, debilitating , and, eventually, tragic confusion in the consciousness of Andrés Hurtado. Above all others, he is the one character who struggles to af- firm a consistent position—to uncover what is repeatedly referred to as “una fórmula de vida” (“a formula for life”)—regarding his geographical , political, and intellectual circumstances that closely corresponds to “modern” ideas, the then-current vogue of deterministic, sociologically oriented writing identified with French naturalism. From the outset , Hurtado identifies with such a position: “Hurtado era enemigo de la burguesía [.....] partidario de los escritores naturalistas” (“Hurtado was an enemy of the bourgeoisie [.....] a partisan of the naturalist writers,” 88 from the labyrinth 39). Indeed, he demonstrates a disposition to embrace uncomplicated explanations of the structure of reality. At one point Andrés is strongly attracted to the “genio trascendental” (“transcendental genius”) José de Letamendi, who advocates the fanciful notion that “la vida [.....] es una función indeterminada entre la energía individual y el cosmos, y que esta función no puede ser más que suma, resta, multiplicación y división, y que no pudiendo ser suma, ni resta, ni división, tiene que ser multiplicaci ón” (“life [.....] is a indeterminate function between individual energy and the cosmos, and that this function cannot be other than addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and that unable to be addition, subtraction, or division, it must be multiplication,” 69). He becomes quickly disillusioned of finding “algo que llegase al fondo de los problemas de la vida” (“something that would get to the core of life’s problems ,” 70). Above all, Hurtado desires intellectual clarity, a position that will allow him to contemplate, understand, and interpret the social and moral reality he must confront. What he hopes for, therefore, is actually something akin to the perspective of the typical narrator of a naturalist novel, that is, a thesis or rational formula from which to explain the workings of reality. This, of course, is something that Andrés invariably fails to attain as the Spanish social reality proves resistant to any hypothesis about its constitution and functioning. As much as it portrays the Spanish political-moral circumstance at the end of the nineteenth century, El árbol de la ciencia, therefore, also functions as an extended parody of the premises of the naturalist novel. Here a supposedly “objective observer” of the slice of life chosen as its subject —in the manner of Claude Bernard’s clinical methodology, himself a doctor like Andrés—is instead victimized and left progressively confused and desperate by virtue of his very observations. In his pursuit of ciencia, the comprehensive yet formulaic explanation of reality, Hurtado achieves precisely the opposite of what he covets, discovering instead the same confusion, degradation, and mortality of his counterparts in the biblical story of Genesis from which the novel takes its title. Indeed, the more Andrés struggles to attain an objective view of things, the more bewilfrom the labyrinth 89 derment he encounters. Yet Hurtado’s “anarquismo espiritual” (“spiritual anarchy”) is more than spiritual. It also displays physical symptoms: “La vida era una corriente tumultuosa e inconsciente donde los actores representaban una tragedia que no comprendían [.....] Estos vaivenes en las ideas, esta falta de plan y de freno, le llevaban a Andrés al mayor desconcierto, a una sobreexitación cerebral contínua e inútil” (“Life was a tumultuous and unconscious current where actors represented a tragedy that they did not understand [.....] These swings in ideas, this lack of a plan or restraint, carried Andrés to the greatest uneasiness, to a continual and useless cerebral over-excitation,” 84–85). The failure to achieve the sense of an “objective distance” to cushion him from an unforgiving reality progressively leads to his own deterioration, in a moral yet also in a physical sense, something akin to brain fever. Closely paralleling the progressive collapse of Andrés’s sense of existential-intellectual space is the novel’s principal aesthetic strategy characterized by the narrator’s incessant violation of the customary realist-naturalist mode of rigorous narrative detachment from the principals and their predicament. The narrator of El árbol de la ciencia does not properly observe and represent but rather interprets for the reader via an interminable succession of explicit interruptions of conventional expectations of “objective” novelistic narration. Andrés finds himself in the same predicament as “[e]l estudiante culto, [que] aunque quisiera ver las cosas dentro de la realidad e intentara adquirir una idea clara de su país y del papel que representaba en el mundo, no podía” (“the cultured student, [who] even though he wanted to see the things in reality and tried to acquire a clear idea of his country and the role that it represented in the world, could not,” 41). Yet the reader is also repeatedly denied clear and unimpeded observations of Hurtado in favor of a pattern of unrelenting interpretive interruptions of the narration from a narrator incapable of performing, or unwilling to perform, a conventional function . The events of this novel do not exist independently of the narrator but rather are communicated in hybrid form. The reader almost invariably receives them as commentary, strongly biased commentary, and not 90 from the labyrinth as “objective” observations. Narration and interpretation are constantly intertwined, their separate functions blurred and confused to such an extent that the reader can hardly be said to receive “narration” in any customary sense. It is a further irony that the reader’s knowledge of a protagonist obsessively committed to the type of empirical understanding that had been the hallmark of the realist-naturalist novel is communicated almost exclusively via a narrative mode that emphatically repudiates such an approach. The sense of narrative distance and empirical objectivity, hallmarks of the realist-naturalist novel, become instead the collapse of distance and the blurring of the boundaries between narrative subjects and the objective means of their representation. This novel, in the final analysis, tells the story of the collapse of hope of a protagonist who in an ideological-intellectual sense is fully invested in an epistemology that had been premised on the capacity of the human consciousness to achieve an “objective” position, the expectation to remain above the possibility of such a catastrophic disintegration. More than any single motivating factor in Andrés’s struggle for ciencia is his steadfast conviction that such knowledge and understanding can come only with a sense of distance and detachment from his empirical circumstance. Baroja underscores this explicitly at the conclusion of the first section, in which Hurtado encounters a character by the name of “hermano Juan” (“brother John”), a charitable cleric who ministers to the infirm yet whom Andrés considers repulsive because he seems so attracted to suffering and squalor: Andrés comprendía el otro extremo, que el hombre huyese del dolor ajeno, como de una cosa horrible y repugnante, hasta llegar a la indignidad , a la inhumanidad; comprendía que se evitara hasta la idea de que hubiese sufrimiento alrededor de uno; pero ir a buscar lo sucio, lo triste, deliberadamente, para convivir con ello, le parecía una monstruosidad. Así que cuando veía al hermano Juan sentía esa impresión repelente , de inhibición, que se experimenta ante los monstruos. (91) Andrés understood the other extreme, that a man would flee from another’s pain, like a horrible and repugnant thing, even to become indignant , to the inhumanity; he understood that one would avoid even the idea from the labyrinth 91 that there was suffering around one; but to go looking for the dirtiness, the sadness, deliberately, to live with it, seemed to him a monstrosity. Thus when he would see brother John he felt this repellent impression , of inhibition, that one experiences in front of monsters. Perhaps the most significant irony of the novel is that the outlook that Andr és obsessively embraces in order to distance himself from people like Juan,“monsters”whoentanglethemselvesinthesufferingofothers,leads him inexorably along this very course and to the eventual realization that there is no place—given the terms of his peculiar nomenclature—where he can avoid the type of “monstrous” circumstance he abhors. Hurtado ’s own “dream of reason,” his quest to achieve the equivalent of the detached , scientific, observational perspective of nineteenth-century naturalism , creates instead the monstrous conditions whereby the raw materials of reality progressively unsettle and disrupt the domain of thought itself. As the novel’s last sentence (“había en él algo de precursor” [“there was in him something of a precursor,” 303]) makes clear, Hurtado presages the emergence of a new man on the European scene, a “modern” attitude that exposes the shortcomings inherent in the conventional order of things. The name “Andrés Hurtado”—from the Greek EµRHVEØ, “man,” and from hurtar, “wounded,” “hurt,” but also “hidden away”—epitomizes an attitude, as long as the “Spanish tradition” itself, that at the outset of the twentieth century has become the harbinger of tragedy. Andrés’s progressive withdrawal from an intractable modern world brings him to a perverse reenactment of the position of “hermano Juan.” The elimination of distance between sufferer and healer, progressively enacted in the novel in Andrés’s tortured consciousness, produces an even more serious disease as Hurtado moves inexorably inward, into himself and the confused labyrinth of his tortured intellect. However, not only Andrés suffers from this affliction; seemingly everybody in the novel experiences a similar one. For example, the deluded bohemian Villasús refuses to “sell his conscience,” but not his daughters, to live a “life of art.” La Venancia ’s “extraña filosofía” (“strange philosophy,” 122) affirms that the rich deserve their wealth and, moreover, the poor deserve their poverty, 92 from the labyrinth while the prostitutes whom Andrés examines are infected not only with syphilis but also with “el espíritu de la esclavitud” (“spirit of slavery,” 266), which justifies their status to themselves, in their minds. Attempts to systematize thinking, to philosophize, and to defend a consistent ideological position pervade every level of this society. Indeed, Baroja’s parody of European rationalist doctrines manifests itself most resonantly in the specific “thinking subjects” in whom these “principles” have been conceived and made monstrously incarnate. Andrés Hurtado, however , is different from the others who use their “philosophies” to insulate themselves from despair. His ever-deepening involvement with European ideology and his progressively more desperate quest to find an intelligible explanation for the workings of a reality far more complex, irrational , and aggressive than he could ever imagine, eventually claim him as their thought-obsessed victim. Andrés encounters forces in the world that all hoped-for “fórmulas de vida” prove inadequate to confront. The crisis of the European thinking subject incarnate in Andrés Hurtado becomes at this juncture yet another occasion to reaffirm, in the “Spanish tradition,” the essential inadequacy and monstrousness of this approach to life. Hurtado’s desire for expansive understanding and intellectual clarity cedes to progressive disorientation, confusion, and solipsistic despair , which culminates in his suicide. The themes of intellectual obsessiveness, incomprehension, confusion , self-doubt, and suicide are also prominent in Unamuno’s Niebla,3 in which, as Chacel has suggested, the “sombra de su persona” is nowhere more evident. In relation to El árbol de la ciencia it reaffirms and intensifies the recognition of the hollowness of conventional European subjective models, revisited here in the tragic, yet also comic, Augusto Pérez. While the ever-serious Andrés Hurtado’s many experiences progressively expose him to the seamy side of modern life and while Augusto is a sheltered and rather pampered señorito who never ventures far from home, both are nevertheless quite similar in their capacity for extended and excessive intellectual speculation that ultimately brings 3. Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Madrid: Cátedra, 1985). from the labyrinth 93 them to doubt their status as autonomous subjects. The incapacity to achieve intellectual clarity is reflected at the formal level in both works via the significant disruptions of the narrative space. The constant interruptions of the narrator in El árbol de la ciencia continue in spectacular fashion in Niebla with Unamuno’s appearance as a character in his own work. This and other disruptions of conventional novelistic expectations underscore the precariousness and undependability of the intellectual process for protagonists for whom freedom of thought and action prove elusive. As Pérez’s friend Victor Goti explains: “pensar es dudar y nada más que dudar [.....] no se piensa sin dudar” (“thinking is doubting and nothing more than doubting [.....] one cannot think without doubting,” 252). Yet in the same breath he qualifies his statement by asserting as well that “es la duda lo que de la fe y del conocimiento, que son algo estático, quieto, muerto, hace pensamiento, que es dinámico, inquieto, vivo” (“it is doubt that faith and knowledge, that are something static, quiet, dead, make thought, that is dynamic, unquiet, alive,” 252). To be able to consider that one is alive in a meaningful sense, therefore, virtually requires doubting that such is the case, which means, paradoxically , that the most productive form of thinking is that which leads not to clarity but to confusion. Doubt, the offspring of thought, also becomes the primary source of human vitality and, paradoxically again, the very source of resistance to despair, the logical outcome of doubting one’s permanence and presence in the world. The type of thinking most worthy of the name eventually leads to befuddlement and confusion: the amorphous niebla, reality in its barest and most truthful form. Yet from here there also arises a dissatisfaction that becomes the basis for a defiant resistance to feelings of hopelessness, resignation, and absent existence . Although Augusto Pérez’s struggle ultimately brings his life to an end, it nevertheless leads him beyond Andrés Hurtado’s intellectual blind alley to the purported source of his confusion, where he is able to confront, and to confound as well, his averred creator. If in the final analysis to think is to become confounded by what one thinks, it also provides the capacity to confound others in just the same 94 from the labyrinth way, as a consequence of the resentment at having been confounded and bedeviled by the processes of thinking in the first place. To be in the world, therefore, means not only to be able to endure the humiliation and impotence of understanding that one’s existence offers no certain course but also to bring others into this vortex as well. As Victor Gotí in the prologue , speaking on behalf of Unamuno, declares: “Y si nos han arrebatado nuestra más cara y más íntima esperanza vital” (“And if they have taken from us our most precious and most intimate vital hope”)—that is to say, the fundamental human intellectual desire for self-understanding, the capacity to validate one’s subjective position in relation to an expansive circumstance—“¿por qué no hemos de confundirlo todo para matar el tiempo y la eternidad y para vengarnos?” (“why not confuse it all to kill time and eternity and to get our vengeance?” 103). The modern confusion that ensues as the consequence of the indefensibleness of previously foundational rationalist principles also constitutes the only principle, the only hope, that one can cling to in the defense of one’s existential position , which, when all is said and done, can affirm no position at all. In the intellectual ground that is the niebla, truth is the labyrinth and thus also an aspect of a formless phantom. In what may be considered something of a reply to the situation that develops in El árbol de la ciencia, in which the will to clarity leads Andrés Hurtado to a desolate and progressively desperate confusion, the only appeal to the corrosive hopelessness that makes suicide seem a rational alternative becomes precisely the contradictory imperative of a conscious struggle to “confundirlo todo.” What distinguishes it is the steadfast will to continue and, indeed, to enlist others to the camp of confusion. Hurtado’s enduring will to clarity becomes in Niebla, therefore, a “clear” and persistent will to confusion. The only “rational” response to the crisis of the European rational tradition is, indeed, to prolong and intensify this profound sense of confusion. To acknowledge the collapse of the sense of distance between thinking subject and the objective world, therefore, one must affirm a new formula. To continue to think in the conventional sense for the “new modern man,” therefore, means that it from the labyrinth 95 is no longer possible to affirm that “I am.” The structure of thinking has the consistency of mist. Unamuno poses the question of subjectivity in terms of the location of being: does it reside exclusively in consciousness or does it find fuller expression in the embrace of a wider structure? Given the fundamental contradiction with regard to the products of thinking, it is not surprising that the answer seems to be less than clear. While this novel, or nivola, has more than its share of less than admirable characters, especially considering the subsidiary cast (such as Paparrigópulos) in the intercalated stories, the most negative and least likeable of all is clearly the character of Unamuno himself. In the “Post-Prólogo” he grows indignant at the prologue writer, Victor Goti, who offers the opinion that Augusto Pérez does, indeed, commit suicide and is not simply eliminated as Unamuno , the author-creator of his story, has ordained: “debe andarse mi amigo y prologuista Goti con mucho tiento en discutir así mis decisiones, porque si me fastidia mucho acabaré por hacer con él lo que con su amigo Pérez hice” (“my friend and prologue writer Goti better tread lightly in quarreling with my decisions, because if he annoys me too much I will wind up doing to him what I did to his friend Pérez,” 107–8). Unamuno plays the role of a vengeful god who, if he does exercise his “libérrimo albedrío” (“most free will,” 107) as he claims, does so cruelly at the mortal expense of his character-creation, who is denied both his expectation of an autonomous existence and a freely arrived at decision to end it. The dilemma, however, extends as well to his creator-author, who ultimately possesses no more authority than his creature. As Goti’s remarks, infuriating to Unamuno, in the prologue make clear, the capacity to impose a definitive conclusion to this narrative that reflects the “clear” intentions of an autonomous creative will is also a casualty of a new and “modern” mode of writing, a nivola and not a novel. The true protagonist is not Augusto Pérez or Miguel de Unamuno but the niebla itself, the structure of thought and consciousness that is always and simultaneously in formation and in collapse, an ultimate reality that is primordially formless. The recognition that modern subjectivity is grounded in little more 96 from the labyrinth than a mirage revisits the scene of the subject as well in the “Spanish tradition ” that tends to equate the idea of autonomous consciousness with monstrosity. Unamuno is decidedly in line in this regard in that try as he might to affirm a larger structure in which to situate thought and consciousness , such an avowal is invariably thwarted. This structure is conditioned upon the presence of a subject desperate to affirm something beyond itself yet always frustrated by the fact that structure and subject are of the same nebulous consistency. Augusto Pérez’s dilemma and that of his author are ultimately that their subjectivity is tenuous at best since they are both trapped in a system whose limits coincide with the limits of consciousness. Clarity of thought, therefore, is anathema since only in confusion, or the will-to-confusion, can these limitations to any degree be circumvented. Human effort, therefore, must be directed toward reestablishing the notion that there is something beyond the “clarity” of solipsism that at every turn threatens to overthrow this hope. The most fundamental human aspiration in the modern age, therefore, must be to resist the monstrous excess of self-propagation to the exclusion of everything else. Unamuno’s position here represents a modification and perhaps a parody of attitudes that became prominent in Europe in the preceding century, in which monstrosity becomes associated with the idea of a selfpropagating vital power, “that rather than something gone awry during formation, monstrosity was the result of the formative capacity.”4 The monster theme taken up by Kant in an aesthetic sense to refer to those things that exceed representation considers that the monstrous describes an entity whose life force is greater than the matter in which it is contained (434). Thus rather than something that malfunctions during the course of its production, monstrosity is associated during romanticism with “overexuberant living matter” (438) that extends itself beyond its natural borders in order to affect a much wider sphere. The idea of the monstrous is closely related to the more familiar concept of the sublime, which is in 4. Denise Gigante, “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life,” PMLA 117 (2002): 434. from the labyrinth 97 turn instrumental in the development of modern theories of the imagination that, like monstrosity, are characterized by self-generation and selfaggrandizement , or as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgment, the “extension of the imagination by itself.”5 As Francis Ferguson has noted, “the increasing attenuation of authorial subjectivity” in all accounts of the sublime is upheld especially by Kant, who “explicitly establishes the sublime as an arena of aesthetic experience in which authorial intention is totally irrelevant.”6 Unamuno’s stance in Niebla corresponds well to the selfprocreative capacity of the monstrous that, as with the sublime, eventually brings the effacement of the initiating agent. Monstrous growth is dynamic and aggressive but also self-consuming. Unamuno in the role of monstrous creator—a self-creator—can propagate a world only with versions of himself and, consequently, can destroy or take vengeance on himself only when he proclaims his intention to “confundirlo todo,” which, among the many paradoxes of this work, also heralds the negation of intention. Exercising his will to eliminate Augusto Pérez is effectively to embrace solipsism and to expose further the distance between the possible solace of confusion and uncertainty and the certain desolation of realizing the destructive consequences of thinking and intentionality . In his extratextual decision to validate the contention that he and not Augusto Pérez is the agent of this character’s destruction, Unamuno reenacts the “original sin” of this mode of approaching the world. To validate his interpretation of events over those of others is to embrace the concept of clarity and the idea of the finality of thought. Yet to do this is to turn his back on the only possibility for even the illusion of salvation , which can only come from confusion. The suggestion in the title of Baroja’s novel becomes explicit in Niebla : to taste the fruit of the tree of wisdom, of good and evil, is to find oneself isolated, trapped in a labyrinthine predicament in which the only consolation is the dubious knowledge that such confusion can be shared 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1914), 108. 6. Francis Ferguson, “A Commentary on Susanne Guerlac’s ‘Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,’” New Literary History 16 (1985): 296. 98 from the labyrinth by, if not necessarily with, others. This sentiment is touchingly underscored in the epilogue that features the lament of Augusto’s dog Orfeo, a creature whose relationship to his master parallels at a “microcosmic” level that of Augusto and his creator. Orfeo’s observations invoke another biblical story, the tower of Babel, that underscores the impotent consequences of thinking about things best left unthought: Cuando el hombre aúlla, grita o amenaza le entendemos muy bien los demás animales. ¡Como que no está distraído en otro mundo! [.....] Pero ladra a su manera, habla, y eso le ha servido para inventar lo que no hay y no fijarse en lo que hay. En cuanto le ha puesto un nombre a algo, ya no ve este algo, no hace sino oír el nombre que le puso, o verlo escrito. La lengua le sirve para mentir, inventar lo que no hay y confundirse. Y todo es en él pretextos para hablar con los demás o consigo mismo. Y hasta nos ha contagiado a los perros. (297) When man howls, shouts, or threatens we the other animals understand him quite well. When he is not distracted in some other world! [.....] But he barks in his own way, he speaks, and this has served to invent what isn’t there and not to notice what is there. As soon as he assigns a name to something, he ceases seeing it, he only hears the name he has given it, or sees it written. Language serves only to lie, to invent what isn’t there and to confuse you. Everything is a pretext to talk to others or himself. And he’s even infected the dogs. Thinking, consciousness is a sickness, a contagious disease. It unites humanity in the sense that the human condition is ultimately that of a shared solitude. Like the loyal Orfeo and his master, humanity also invariably finds itself in movement from, toward, and between “la niebla de que brotó y a que revertió” (“the mist from which he sprang and that to which he reverted,” 300). Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas also seems to be about movement (rebellion against a ruthless dictator), inexorable social movement and revolution in the fictional Latin American country of Tierra Caliente.7 While seeming to offer a panoramic view of the corrupt structure of Latin American society, the prominence of expatriate Spaniards (“gachu7 . Ramón María Valle-Inclán, Tirano Banderas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1972). from the labyrinth 99 pines”) among the ruling clique, and the social tensions that underlie the unrest and violence in the great expanse of colonized territory imbued with Spanish and European cultural values, this novel ultimately turns upon causes and effects that have little to do with the many issues facing postcolonial Spanish America. Tirano Banderas, in fact, is not about national aspirations or the expansive possibilities that a new regime may open for the citizens of Tierra Caliente but rather quite the opposite : the bankruptcy of the individual and collective imagination, stagnation , and immobility. At the center of this morass is the assemblage of characters who combine to produce a collective reincarnation of monstrous subjectivity, beginning with the dictator Banderas yet extending to virtually everyone in this wretched “sucesión de imágenes violentas y tumultuosas” (“succession of violent and tumultuous images,” 55) constituting Tierra Caliente. Banderas presents a monstrous physical countenance often compared to a mummy whose head “parece una calavera con antiparras negras y corbatín de clérigo” (“looks like a skull with black glasses and a cleric’s collar”); he has acquired the habit of constantly chewing coca leaves that produce “siempre una salivilla de verde veneno” (“always a little spittle of green poison”) that dribbles down his chin. The adjective most consistently employed to describe him is “inmóvil” (“immobile,” 40). Indeed, except for the defection of the Coronelito de la Gándara to the forces of Filomeno Cuevas and Zacarías el Cruzado’s murder of the pawnbroker Quentín Pereda to avenge the death of his son, the greater part of the novel consists simply of physical descriptions of characters , locations, or trivial conversations, all in a state of general inactivity and immobility. The iconic dimension of the novel is striking, especially in comparison to El árbol del la ciencia and Niebla, which provide almost no information about the physical appearance of the principals or the physical scenarios they inhabit. The novel’s strong visual dimension is accompanied with the division of the novel into multitudinous “parts,” “books,” and numerical chapters—also grouped in a numbering pattern that alludes to quasi-mystic theosophical “magic numbers.” In addition, 100 from the labyrinth the intricate vocabularies drawn from virtually all the many regions of the Spanish colonial empire enhance the illusion of immobility in that it serves to interrupt the reader’s movement through the text, effectively isolating one episode/section/chapter from the next. This specialized vocabulary, often perplexing to Latin American readers and Spaniards alike, is both a visual and an intellectual impediment to easy comprehension of what is ultimately a series of trivial scenes related to a coherent whole only by the principals’ relation to Santos Banderas. The real action takes place during the prologue and epilogue as the local ragtag army composed of Cuevas’s serfs and Gándara embarks upon its mission and, at the appointed hour, storms Banderas’s palace, where the dictator’s defenders offer scant resistance and the dictator is killed. His severed head is then placed on a spike for all to see. What seems to have transpired is that Cuevas’s rather small group of hired hands accomplishes in a few minutes what the official revolutionaries —whose leadership, the “Cuartel General del Ejército Revolucionario ” (“Revolutionary Army Headquarters,” 35), located in the remote mountains—had not been able to do for years. In fact, the first argument that Gándara has with Cuevas is over the latter’s unwillingness to follow orders from a central command, which produces an immediate rift between the two since Gándara, a professional soldier, claims special expertise in leading troops. The reason that Gándara defects is that, in spite of the fact that he is one of Banderas’s most competent lieutenants , the dictator decides to honor a complaint against Gándara for having broken, while drunk, a few glasses that were worth almost nothing but were the property of Doña Lupita, a camp follower and Banderas loyalist of long standing. As fate would have it, Gándara is warned of his impending arrest by another Lupita, called “la Romántica” because she is a prostitute. He then escapes to join the rebels. Although the reason that the second Lupita is able to warn Gándara is likely the loose lips of another client of hers and associate of Banderas, Nachito Veguillas, and not as Lupita believes, that she has a vision of what is happening in her capacity as a “medium of the present,” these trivialities set up a chain from the labyrinth 101 of events that tips the balance of power. The rebels, who infiltrate the All Saints/Day of the Dead festival ongoing during the time of the novel, have a surprisingly easy task of overthrowing Banderas. In fact, perhaps the only casualty besides Banderas’s daughter (whom the tyrant kills to spare her the degradation of being raped by the victors) is Banderas himself . The dictator’s soldiers shoot into the air rather than at the attackers, and the once mighty dictator falls in a matter of minutes. With Gándara certain to become more prominent in the new regime, if not to be Banderas ’s actual replacement, it is also clear that the “new” Lupita will take the place of the old woman in the new hierarchy. As Banderas laments to the old camp follower on the eve of his overthrow: “¡Doña Lupita, por menos de un boliviano me lo habéis puesto en la bola revolucionaria! [.....] Doña Lupita, la deuda de justicia que vos me habéis reclamado ha sido una madeja de circunstancias fatales: Es causa primordial en la actuaci ón del Coronel de la Gándara” (“Doña Lupita, for less than the pittance of a boliviano you have put him into the revolutionary party! [.....] Doña Lupita, the debt of justice that you have demanded from me has become a web of fatal circumstances: It is the primordial cause in the action taken by Colonel de la Gándara,” 215). The inconsequential causes upon which the change of regimes ultimately turns underscores both the radical fragility of this society and the horrifying prospect that literally anything—in the present cycle, breaking a few glasses—can become a “causa primordial” in a disastrous chain that leads to “circunstancias fatales.” This disproportionality between cause and effect is further highlighted in the story of Zacarías el Cruzado’s family as the tumbaga, the supposedly valuable ring that the otherwise penniless Gándara gives him to help him escape, is recognized immediately by Quintín Pereda as belonging to Gándara, who had pawned it previously many times. As a consequence Pereda cheats Zacarías’s wife, offering her a pittance, and then denounces her to the police, who take her off to jail, leaving their child behind to be eaten, no less, by pigs. After Zacarías understands what has happened, he exacts vengeance by ringing his lariat around the gachupín’s neck and drag102 from the labyrinth ging him to his death. In the novel’s bewitching circumstances, in which literally everybody is strapped for cash—“bruja” (“broke”) is the word most commonly used—the failure of the ring to generate value accentuates a more fundamental problem in Tierra Caliente with regard to all mediums of exchange. They simply do not function according to conventional expectations. The ring’s true worth is as an icon/index of its bankrupt owner. Ownership cannot be transferred, and the ring’s consequent value as an economic commodity is naught because it remains exactly what it is, self-contained and self-referring, with its ultimate worth actually negative since the consequences of having it in one’s possession prove catastrophic. A similar pattern of negative cause-and-effect relationships exists with virtually every character, social class, and political tendency in Tierra Caliente, consistently interpreted by friend and foe alike as referring to a “first cause,” invariably negative, an origin that is not the recent or even the remote past of Tierra Caliente but rather Spanish and European. The temporal setting of the novel is All Saints/Day of the Dead, November 1–2, at some point in the mid-1870s during a time when the liberal (and homosexual ) Emilio Castelar is prime minister of Spain, yet after the first Spanish Republic, which is followed by the Bourbon Restoration, the Second Carlist War, and a return to a much greater conservatism. The narrator, however, invariably locates the coming together of the effects of multiple “first causes” in a remote time and place. The many allusions to the close relationship between the present-day Tierra Caliente and a long history of repeated spectacles in the same place but at different times begins in the novel’s first moment: “San Martín de los Mostenses, aquel desmantelado convento de donde una lejana revolución había expulsado a los frailes, era, por mudanzas del tiempo, Cuartel del Presidente Don Santos Banderas ,—Tirano Banderas—” (“San Martín de los Mostenses, that abandoned convent from where a long ago revolution had expelled the friars, was, as a consequence of the movements of time, Headquarters of President Don Santos Banderas,—Tirano Banderas—” 39). The same evening, at the Circo Harris, while imploring his audifrom the labyrinth 103 ence to “escuchar las voces de las civilizaciones originarias de América ” (“listen to the voices of the originary civilizations of America,” 72), the verbose orator of the opposition forces, the apparently socialist Doctor Alfredo Sánchez Ocaña, rails against the evils of bourgeois Europe, which he portrays as under attack globally by all people of color ready to “destruir la tiranía jurídica del capitalismo, piedra angular de los caducos Estados Europeos” (“destroy the judicial tyranny of capitalism, cornerstone of the decrepit European States”), the same “colorless” race that includes the “criollo rancheros” (“creole ranchers”) such as Filomeno Cuevas, who only extend the life of “la sórdida civilización europea, mancillada con todas las concupisencias y los egoísmos de la propiedad individual” (“sordid European civilization, stained with all the greed and egoisms of private property,” 74). Yet unlike many a doctrinaire ideologue , Sánchez Ocaña’s ultimate take on the new revolutionary order is subject-centered, much more “spiritual” than political: el ideal de una nueva conciencia [.....] más que revolucionarios políticos, más que hombres de una patria limitada y tangible, somos catecúmenos de un credo religioso. Iluminados por la luz de una nueva conciencia, nos reunimos [.....] para crear una Patria Universal [.....] donde se celebre el culto de la eterna armonía, que sólo puede alcanzarse por la igualdad entre los hombres. (74–75) the ideal of a new consciousness [.....] more than political revolutionaries , more than men in a limited and tangible fatherland, we are the catechumens of a religious credo. Illuminated by the light of a new consciousness , we gather [.....] to create a Universal Fatherland [.....] where the cult of eternal harmony is celebrated, that can only be achieved by equality among men. Later that night, at Santa Mónica prison, the reader discovers the deeper source of such grandiloquence, Don Roque Cepeda, the revolutionary leader who hardly seems so. Cepeda is a theosophist and mystic more intent on contemplating the cosmic order than economic inequality and class distinctions: buscaba en la última hondura de su conciencia un enlace con la conciencia del Universo. [.....] Para Don Roque, los hombres eran ángeles des104 from the labyrinth terrados [.....] Las almas, al despojarse de la envoltura terrenal, actuaban su pasado mundano en límpida y hermética visión de conciencias puras. Y este círculo de eterna contemplación—gozoso o doloroso—era el fin inmóvil de los destinos humanos [.....] Cada vida, la más humilde, era creadora de un mundo, y al pasar bajo el arco de la muerte, la conciencia cíclica de esta creación se posesionaba del alma, y el alma, prisonionera en su centro, devenía contemplativa y estática. (174) he searched in the ultimate depths of his consciousness for a connection to the consciousness of the Universe. [.....] For Don Roque, men were exiled angels [.....] Souls, upon becoming removed from the earthly covering , acted out their worldly past in the limpid and hermetic vision of pure consciousness. And this circle of eternal contemplation—pleasurable or painful—was the immobile end of human destinies [.....] Every life, even the most humble, was creative of a world, and upon passing under the arch of death, the cyclical consciousness of this creation took possession of the soul, and the soul, prisoner in its center, became contemplative and ecstatic. Don Roque’s revolutionary “conciencia nueva,” spiritual rather than political , is actually a modern version of the other-worldly mysticism made famous in the Spanish sixteenth century by Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. Don Roque’s vision, which understands human life as a cyclical migration and return of the soul to a contemplative, static point of origin , actually coincides with that of Banderas in that both men idolize immobility . This so-called revolutionary agenda is thus ultimately grounded in the definitive absence of movement. Descended from a Spanish-European origin, Tierra Caliente has already fulfilled this vision to a stunning degree. Literally everybody and everything, and especially the economy, is paralyzed. If Cepeda considers that all life longs to return to a static, self-contemplative immobility , the characters actually portray this. Bereft of a transcendent dimension , these characters are nevertheless “pure presences,” in their monstrous physicality, fully what they purport to be. To a remarkable degree Roque’s idea of the theosophic paradise has already been realized. It is not at all surprising that the tyrant and the revolutionary, as near mirror reflections of each other in an ideological sense, should ultimatefrom the labyrinth 105 ly agree to a cease-fire and a cessation of revolutionary agitation. Tierra Caliente is premised on a bedrock concept: immobility. With its economy paralyzed and its native population in a perpetual state of stupefied intoxication, its ruling classes have become interchangeable parts of a constantly changing monster that as it changes remains ever the same, as Banderas himself points out: “La Humanidad, para la política de estos países, es una entelequia con tres cabezas: El criollo, el indio y el negro . Tres Humanidades. Otra política para estos climas es pura macana” (“Humanity, for the politics of these countries, is an entelechy with three heads: The Creole, the Indian and the Negro. Three Humanities. Any other politics for these climes is pure silliness,” 48). Both Banderas and his enemies conceptualize their culture as “eternal” and already “full,” which every apparent change only reconfirms. In the final analysis, the immobility over which Banderas has presided remains intact. To remove him from power, to place his severed head on a stick for all to see, is not change at all because in Tierra Caliente “revolution” is, paradoxically , constant and unchanging. As likely the sole casualty in what is, literally , a coup, the change of heads of government actually reaffirms an unchanging , immobile order. Don Roque’s dream of a “new man” is also a mirage tainted, like everything else, by the ideology of immobility that has mesmerized the citizens of Tierra Caliente. The “new world” becomes the site where the old European world and its inadequate construct of consciousness, premised on autonomy and completeness, is exposed. This doctrine, however , is decisive in Roque’s dream as well as in La Romántica’s claims as a “medium of the present.” Eternity, like time and history, exists in an ever-present present. Likewise, Valle-Inclán’s intricate, composite vocabulary displays a denseness, an impenetrability, and thus a presence that directly mirrors the opaqueness of his characters. Language and characters are more like hieroglyphs that collectively embody a common meaning: in Tierra Caliente presence, the fullness of being, is hollowness , the fullness of absence; movement in the name of revolution brings the exact opposite, immobility, embodied in the tyrant himself 106 from the labyrinth “inmóvil y taciturno, [.....] una calavera [.....] agaritado en una inmovilidad de corneja sagrada [.....] mirando las escuadras de indios, soturnos en la cruel indiferencia del dolor y de la muerte” (“immobile and taciturn , [.....] a skull [.....] posed in the immobility of a sacred crow [.....] looking at the squads of Indians, silent in the cruel indifference of pain and death,” 40). The new is old, and the old is new. The monster subject finds new breath and gasps its last in Tierra Caliente. In sharp contrast to the static backdrops of Tirano Banderas is Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s El novelista, whose constant and abrupt shifts in locales and subject matter brings together in one work multiple “novels,” in reality fragments of novels, whose common denominator is that they are the products of the same fertile novelistic imagination.8 Consequently , the title is fully appropriate. This ambitious and challenging novel, in the context of those examined thus far, is also profitably interpreted as a meditation upon and reply to these writers and the positions they have taken in relation to the question of subjectivity. Recalling Baroja’s restless protagonist Andrés Hurtado is Andrés Castilla, the surname being a rather pointed reference to Hurtado’s vast yet ultimately constricting domain of activity, as is the title in relation to Niebla, which, ostensibly about a new theory of the novel, is actually about a specific novelist. Both these writers—and others from the “Generation of 98,” Valle-Inclán and Azorín—are points of departure for a wide-ranging meditation on the contemporary novel and the type of artistic sensibility that the times require in order to circumvent their becoming a breeding ground for monsters . A statement that has been used to characterize Gómez de la Serna’s attitude to novel-writing—“Toda obra ha de ser principalmente biográ- fica y si no lo es, resulta una cosa teratológica” (“Every work must be principally biographical and if it isn’t, something monstrous results”)9 — certainly suggests that the theme of monstrous subjectivity, and how to 8. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, El novelista (Madird: Espasa-Calpe, 1973). 9. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Una teoría personal del arte. Antología de textos y éstetica y teoría del arte (Madrid: 1988), 62. from the labyrinth 107 avoid it, is also prominent in Gómez de la Serna’s thinking. Throughout the work there are specific “novels” whose content focuses on monstrosity , beginning with Cesárea, a character whose name also titles her novel, identifying her as having had a caesarian birth. Later in the “novel ,” Pueblo de adobes, reminiscent of an Azorín setting in “un pueblo de Castilla dotado de detalles inacabables” (“a Castillian town endowed with unending details,” 156), features a “ser monstruoso de cerebro empedrado ” (“monstrous being with a pock-marked face,” 164), Engracia . Finally, there is the story of the conjoined twins Dorotea and Gracia , who live in a house “lleno de objetos teratológicos para soportar la teratología de aquellas hermanas” (“full of monstrous objects to complement the monstrosity of those sisters,” 226). In relation especially to writers such as Baroja and Unamuno, Gómez de la Serna’s above-cited assertion is particularly noteworthy. It would seem that in contradistinction to the “biographical” Ramón, Unamuno and Baroja may be considered “autobiographical.” The difference between autobiography and biography is one of distance. In the autobiographical mode there is much less distance between author and character. Indeed, there is a distinct possibility that distance will disappear altogether, as in Augusto Pérez’s confrontation with the character Unamuno in Niebla. Baroja’s Hurtado fares little better as his physical circumstance becomes progressively circumscribed , making his space, in the final analysis, almost exclusively a mental one. Yet these more experimental forms of the novel are hardly different from the conventional realist-naturalist novel that, even at the time El novelista appears, still remains influential. In both types of novel, the same relationships between subject and object obtain. This is underscored in the chapter entitled “El enemigo de las novelas” (“The Enemy of Novels”), in which Andrés Castilla engages in a discussion with another type of novelist whose ideal is not art but rather “science,” to write novels like an “hombre de ciencia” (110). This “enemy” is something of a petulant embodiment of the naturalist narrator who invokes the methods of science in order to make his observations of reality appear to be 108 from the labyrinth case histories, sociology instead of art. Castilla is so upset with his adversary that he shows him the door. In contrast, he advocates an expanded range of possibilities for novelistic subjects (“la novela es el factótum de la vida” [“the novel is a factotum of life,” 111]) and does not relish the thought of a novel “hecha para los médicos y los aceleradores de su velocidad o su telefonía” (“made for doctors and the accelerators of their speed or telephony,” 111). Similar positions emerge in his trips to other countries, especially France, where he has occasion to speak with the great novelist Remy Valey, who seems clearly enough to be a surrogate for Proust and whose novels take shape “en mi propia habitación, que es donde hay que dar con las cosas, no en la vida” (“in my own room, that is where one comes across things, not in life,” 184). Likewise, when he visits England and chats with Ardith Colmer— the allusion here is less clear, perhaps to Joseph Conrad and/or others— since Castilla “tenía envidia de aquellas novelas oscuras y psicológicas” (“was envious of those obscure psychological novels”), something that Andrés, being “el gran novelista de las novelas con luz” (“the great novelist of the novels with light,” 172), is apparently incapable of emulating . In his return to his writing of the improbable novel titled El faról 185 (Street Lamp 185), about the life and destiny of a street lamp, the reason for the reticence to explore psychology becomes clearer, as expressed by the street lamp’s observation about the true nature of reality: “La realidad [.....] es sordomuda y ciega, y no piensa nada [.....] Nosotros percibimos como nadie el silencio y el vacío de pensamiento que hay en la naturaleza durante la noche” (“Reality [.....] is deaf-mute and blind, and doesn’t think anything [.....] We perceive better than anybody the silence and emptiness of thought that there is in nature during the night,” 173– 74). In the realist-naturalist novel and its meta-novelistic successors, the illusion of structure is invariably provided by the consciousness of the novelist. What has happened over the course of the contemporary era is that the dividing line between the novelistic thinking subject and a fundamentally unstructured, unthinking objective reality has been breeched, not only by the likes of Baroja, Unamuno, and others but by the very nafrom the labyrinth 109 ture of the generic components that have come to produce the contemporary novel. The discovery and exploration of psychology has moved the novel inward, and finally into the subjective consciousness of the novelist. In relation to the statement that the failure to remain “biographical” produces monsters, the novel has, indeed, become instead “autobiographical ,” and monstrous, in that the domain of the novelistic object has been appropriated by a thinking, subjective consciousness that has contaminated it with the structure of its own thought. The failure to approach reality as an objective entity, the collapse of the unthinking external space of reality into the realm of the subject, has produced the novel of monstrosity , that has simply followed an inherent tendency present at the outset to its inevitable end. If a novel-nivola such as Niebla, an extreme example of the collapse of space, is “teratological” because the novelist becomes caught up in the very confusion he creates, making him effectively transparent and all but erasing the distinction between subject and object, then the antidote is the strong reaffirmation of space. By embracing a variety of concrete spaces, Andrés Castilla is able to write and thus to make room for himself . Novel-making must involve interaction and conflict between the novelist and an objective, autonomous space. To assure that the “biographical ” does not become “autobiographical” and monstrous, that the personality of the novelist does not dominate the artistic scene, novels must affirm the novelist but not his person. The writing of novels should reflect not identity themes but rather the centrality of the creative circumstance . Anything less limits novelistic possibilities. The antidote to monstrosity is the recognition of a larger structure upon which the individual consciousness can avail itself to surpass the solipsism inherent in the meta-novel. An equal temptation, however, is to embrace the structure of reality in all its raw and undifferentiated complexity and confusion. If Niebla portrays the monstrous excesses of subjectivity that leaves no space for anyone, Gómez de la Serna recalls its presence in the chapter appropriately titled “Vuelta a la nebulosa” (“Return to the Mist”) to portray “una novela en que la vida entrase sin tes110 from the labyrinth is y sin ser sectorizada ni demasiado individualista” (“a novel in which life enters without a thesis and without being sectored or too individualized ”) in order to communicate that “la vida tiene una unidad compleja , precipitada, revuelta que había que intentar dar en su propia tesitura [.....] Hay que dar la sensación de ese variado aburrimiento en que consiste la vida y en medio del que sin aislación alguna están los más divertidos acontecimientos” (“life has a complex, precipitous, scrambled unity that it has to try to give in its own state of mind [.....] It is necessary to impart the feeling of this nuanced boredom of which life consists and in the middle of which without any isolation whatsoever are the most entertaining happenings,” 117). Although Castilla’s notion may well be true, his representational strategy—in a novel that is titled Todos (Everyone ) and that consists of a paragraph each about a seemingly endless stream of persons who happen to be occupying the novelist’s field of vision —leads nowhere. He promptly aborts his project: “No, no podía ser. [.....] La nebulosa se traga las novelas y por el deseo de dar capacidad a la novela la perdía en la masa cosmogónica, primera, desprovista de formas , de géneros, de salvedades, de excepciones, de concreción [.....] El novelista rompió las cuartillas de Todos, novela vana, hija del deseo est éril de la universalidad y de la totalidad” (“No, it could not be. [.....] The mist swallows up novels and through the desire to give breadth to the novel he lost it in the cosmogonic mass, first, lacking form, material , qualifications, exceptions, concretions [.....] The novelist tore up the manuscript of Todos, foolish novel, a daughter of the sterile desire for universality and totality,” 124). Ramón thus understands that the attempt to acknowledge the complexity of the structure of reality brings with it the possibility for equal excesses. The capacity to navigate the labyrinth thus requires a dynamic compromise between the subjective and the objective. To embrace either extreme is to affirm labyrinthine confusion and monstrosity. The climax to Andrés Castilla’s novelistic career is represented in two stories about monstrosity and obsession, Las siamesas (The Siamese Twins) and El biombo (The Folding Screen), that appear very near the end of from the labyrinth 111 this repertoire of “novels.” The monster theme is evident in the situation of the conjoined twins, less so with regard to the prominence of the folding screen that, in fact, is the real protagonist of that story. In the context of Gómez de la Serna’s meditations, the conjoined twins, named Gracia and Dorotea, are also the embodiment of a situation, or at least a potential circumstance, that the novelist must confront every time he contemplates writing a novel. Andrés Castilla thinks of the sisters as one monstrous entity, “aquella doble novia de su fantasía” (“that double lover of his fantasy,” 231), which points to the problem of authorial subjectivity that in the making of a novel always runs the risk of becoming conjoined to the product of his imagination. The problem is always one of space or distance, the necessary distance between subject and object as well as the expanded possibilities for novelistic subjects within this space that are vital for viable products to emerge. In fact, the problem of the attenuation of space, symbolized in this segment in the composite body in which the twins find themselves and from which they cannot escape, is not recent, having been present throughout the period of the novel’s dominance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, a crisis point in the appearance of the godlike omniscient narrator. If anything, this type of narrator in Gómez de la Serna’s mythology , perhaps corresponding to a one-eyed monster, is the prototype of the monstrous creation that Andrés Castilla dedicates himself to avoiding . In this context, therefore, the experiments of Baroja and Unamuno do not represent a break with the traditional novel of realism but rather are simply clearer manifestations of a tendency already present. All these types of novels are, in a sense, meta-novels in that all of them portray the progressive collapse of space. Bringing a thesis to the novel, as is the case with the naturalist novel, is to diminish novelistic possibilities as surely as Unamuno’s Niebla ultimately collapses space, to the extreme of eliminating everyone except perhaps himself from the scene of the representation . Gómez de la Serna’s novel instead refuses to narrate from a position of omniscience in order to affirm the other side of the novelistic equation: the need for space and distance. Indeed, throughout the novel 112 from the labyrinth Andrés Castilla is accompanied by another, unnamed narrator who sets the scene but who does not write any of the novels, and, in turn, others often narrate Castilla’s stories. All these types of novels are, in the final analysis, “fratricidal,” as the plot of Las siamesas also reveals, in that the progressive incapacity to differentiate subject and object leads invariably to violence, upon the novel itself. The last “novel,” El biombo, ostensibly about the disconcerting effects that a folding screen exerts upon a variety of different characters, attempts to establish a symbolic presence in these narrations for the hitherto unmentioned yet fully integral component of the subjective equation. The function of the folding screen is to divide one space into two and in the process to enhance the illusion of the separateness of such spaces. In a conceptual sense, however, the screen may be understood in the role of the barrier that maintains the separation between binary combinations (recall Unamuno’s ridicule of them in Niebla).10 In short, the function of such entities embodied concretely in the screen can be said to be pivotal in the sense that before the presence of the screen the relationships inherent in a given space were understood much differently. As the narrator explains what happens when he brings the screen to his own home: “comenzaba el biombo a crear esa dualidad adversaria que crea de un lado la luz y del otro la sombra, de un lado la vida y del otro la muerte” (“the folding-screen began to create that adversary duality that creates from one side light and from the other shadow, from one side life and the other death,” 261). As events proceed, the screen is ascribed an agency that it obviously does not possess and that eventually leads the narrator to imagine as he returns home one day that there is someone behind the screen, whom he suspects is his wife’s lover, and toward whom he proceeds with a pistol. Upon discovering no one yet realizing that he was more than ready to commit violence, he decides to do away with the screen, and at this point the story ends. This rather extended vignette is climactic in the sense that it brings 10. Unamuno, Niebla, 105–6. from the labyrinth 113 into physical focus all the elements of the artistic formula. One’s attitude toward “dividers” is at an artistic level one’s capacity to situate oneself in the modern debate, to declare one’s allegiance to a subjective space as Baroja, Unamuno, and others have done, to the monstrous and metanovelistic , or to an expansive notion of a multivalent reality that holds the promise for success, and failure, in the furtherance of novelistic possibilities . Castilla and his narrator merge their voices at the novel’s conclusion to proclaim pues hay mil aspectos de lo real en sus mareas movidas por lo fantástico que hay que perpetuar [.....] se podría decir que está bien que existan todas las novelas posibles y que alguien tenía que tramar las que aparecieron viables [.....] Hay que decir todas las frases, hay que fantasear todas las fantasías, hay que apuntar todas las realidades, hay que cruzar cuantas veces se pueda la carta del vano mundo, el mundo que morirá de un apagón. (287) that there are a thousand aspects of the real in its ups and downs moved by the fantastic that must be maintained [.....] one could say that it is good that there exist all the possible novels and that someone had to give shape to those that seemed viable [.....] One must say all the sentences , one must fantasize all the fantasies, one must note all the realities, one must cross as many times as one can the map of the vain world, the world that will die from a power outage. Gómez de la Serna is certainly aware of the choices facing novelists at the apogee of modernism. Although his novel about novels and novel writing is certainly “meta-novelistic,” it achieves this status in a manner different from that of his contemporaries. There is a structure to reality that the novelist must uncover. One cannot fulfill the obligations of a novelist by retreating into a fantasy. Fantasy is also outside ourselves. As affirmed by Gómez de la Serna and, indeed, all the writers discussed thus far, creating the Spanish modernist novel, among other things, is a constant struggle between writing about someone or something and writing about oneself. Continuing this exploration of the relative importance of self and circumstance—subject or structure—in the creative process is Rosa Chacel’s Estación. Ida y vuelta, the last of the nov114 from the labyrinth els under discussion to be published and thus perhaps a work in a position to take advantage of what is, by 1930, both from Spain and the rest of Europe (Chacel specifically mentions the influence of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in her endeavor) a considerable body of dialogue on what the modern novel is and should be. Chacel’s is a portrait of young men and women, not necessarily artists, whose passage from one season of life to another—youth to adulthood—is paralleled by the physical passage from station to station and back again in a journey by train. Along the way she offers her self-critical reflection on life’s important passages as well as a meditation on the modernist novel as it also moves into a new phase. In her retrospective introduction to the novel of 1974, Chacel explains that she does not give her characters names—she calls the significant characters él and ella—so that they will not achieve coherence “más que mediante la exactitud rigurosa de las secuencias” (“more than by the rigorous exactitude of sequences,” 80), which will require the participation of the reader. The novelist further asserts that this novel is about what takes place “en la mente de un hombre que [.....] se ha debatido con su circunstancia externa [.....] y que, espectador de sí mismo, trata de salvarse salvando de ella—de su total, racional, homogénea esencia—lo que prevalece como verdad” (“in the mind of a man that [.....] has debated with his external circumstance [.....] and that, a spectator of himself, tries to save himself saving from it—from its total, rational homogeneous essence —what prevails as truth,” 80). Although steeped in the phenomenological credo of Ortega y Gasset, it is not warranted, however, that Chacel should be regarded a “disciple.”11 Chacel’s novel is an exploration of subjective possibilities to expand upon the modernist meta-novel and to surpass its appetite for self-absorption. A work about self, circumstance, and the creative means to confirm them both, it complements Gómez 11. Shirley Mangini overstates the case in “Women and Spanish Modernism: The Case of Rosa Chacel,” Anales de la literatura española contempoánea 12 (1987): 17–28; Kirkpatrick, Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España, 262–83, offers a compelling argument for Chacel’s independence. from the labyrinth 115 de la Serna’s response to the subject-centered meta-fiction of Baroja and Unamuno. Although Chacel’s novel is itself intensely meta-novelistic, its ultimate goal is to explore a different venue in order to bring the relationship between subject and object, self and structure, into clearer focus, which—and this is the irony upon which this novel turns—is ultimately unstable and unclear. The three parts of this short novel—and there is, I believe, something of an analogy here to be made with the three salidas of Don Quijote since these forays also represent a journey into error and confusion yet nevertheless conclude in a redemptive return—each mark an exploration of what it means to be an “ente pensante” (“thinking subject,” 80) in the modern age and, equally as important, what is entailed in writing about such subjects in a manner that will not diminish or deform them. Chacel introduces her hero, él, in the 1930 prologue in terms that echo Gómez de la Serna: “Aunque no coincide con casi ningún hecho de mi vida, le considero autobiográfico, y aunque él empieza a vivir ahora, es el reflejo una realidad mía ya lejana” (“Although it does not coincide with almost any fact of my life, I consider him autobiographical, and although he begins to live now, he is the reflection of my own reality now far away,” 85). Even though he is something of an absence, él nevertheless dominates the first part of the novel, whereas there is a succession of female subjects, the precise qualities of whom are difficult to distinguish. Although the reader knows nothing about ella except that she is él’s novia, that, along with him, she is a university student, and that she inhabits an apartment in the same building as her beloved, one can certainly suppose that ella may well be something of what, at the time, was known as a “mujer nueva” (“new woman”), not necessarily a feminist but logically , in a Spanish context, a “modern woman.” At the same time, it is also quite possible that she could be nothing of the sort. It is exceedingly dif- ficult to know anything significant about this couple except that as the school year passes their love affair becomes more important than their studies (“había llegado el tiempo de faltar a clase” [“the time had come to skip class,” 94]) and their conventionality. 116 from the labyrinth At about this time, él becomes much more introspective about ella and the meaning of their relationship as he also begins to become conscious of what he begins to call his “egoism,” a term that also recalls Joyce’s Portrait. El’s will to affirm his subjectivity is given free rein in the first part, which, along with what can be surmised from fragmented anecdotes , mostly in relation to ella, provides the groundwork for a theory of personality and existential possibility. Ella becomes associated with other women who either live in the apartment house—including Anita, the only character in this section with a proper name, who is the apparent murder victim of her novio, the watermelon seller adept with a knife, and who disappears from the women’s consciousness at the moment of her violent end. Yet much more intriguing to the couple is the shadowy presence of someone called the “chica del velito” (“girl of the veil,” 95), about whom there emerge contradictory details. The religious connotation of wearing a veil is countered by the assertion that she is a “falsa virgen ” (96). She and “ella” are “hermanas de día” (95), born on the same day, and her picture appears in the newspaper shortly thereafter in what seems to be the society section, announcing her debut into society, while the caption is said to read “Joven intoxicada” (“Drunk young woman,” 98), which may well be the other side of the coin, a candid photograph of an upper-class young lady misbehaving. These rather unsettling experiences serve to make the couple aware of a “velo de distancia” (“veil of distance,” 97) between them and slightly later what “él” terms “la zona de la distancia” (“zone of distance,” 101), a mental space in which one becomes aware of one’s existence. What has been happening in this first section, in fact, is an extended act of separation as what originally is presented as nosotros becomes él and ella, who evolve into more mature and autonomous personalities and who begin to confront the consequences of that relationship. As él becomes aware of his entry “de lleno en esa primera juventud” (“fully into that first youth,” 100), he takes note that “[n]ecesitábamos nuestra ida aparte, nuestra independencia” (“we needed our trip apart, our independence ,” 102), that ella is also changing: “me daba cuenta de que iba from the labyrinth 117 con una mujer” (“I was becoming aware that I was going with a woman ,” 103). He begins to see her as doubled, multiplied, and much more complex. The ultimate meaning of the visit of the “chica del velito” is the realization that “ya era hora de dejar de ser pequeñas” (“it was time to stop being little,” 106), that “su dualidad, su multiplicidad, si la hubiese, era [.....] como esas cajas japonesas que se cierran unas en otras [.....] la mayor llena de la pequeña; más bien llena de pequeñas” (“her duality, her multiplicity, if that were it, was [.....] like those Japanese boxes that close inside of each other [.....] the biggest full of the smallest; or rather full of all the smaller ones,” 107). This brings él to an extended meditation on repetition, that only through the multiplicity of repetition does he become aware of the nature of form and shape. He gives the example of the repeated pattern of a leaf in wallpaper, a form that would have never registered had it been only the unique “original.” This, in turn, leads to a generalization about the instability of all forms, including, and especially the “pose de ahora, en su timidez pensativa” (“pose of the moment, in her pensive timidity”) of ella that “avanza siempre al primer término, hasta hacerme sentir a veces la impresión de que le ha crecido, de que se le ha hecho más curva y de que es dentro de ella donde tiene esa pesadumbre interior” (“always moves to the foreground, to the point of making me feel at times the impression that she has grown, that she has become more curvaceous and that it is inside of her where she has that interior sorrow,” 110). The more profound conclusion is that it is futile to speak of a fixed position: “Desde fuera no tiene explicación; [.....] ya que toda posición es relación del individuo con el medio” (“From the outside there is no explanation; [.....] since every position is the relationship between the individual and the medium,” 111–12). To hope to discover form in any sense that pretends to be exact is to understand form as the consequence of a long sequence of events, likened to a road:¡Un camino! Mejor que toda posición. Un camino largo, sin montañas limitadoras. [.....] En los caminos no hay las rivalidades que en los puestos . Los que se sitúan hacen valer lo suyo, porque tiene lo suyo, saben 118 from the labyrinth dónde empieza y donde termina lo suyo. Pero los que van por el camino no tienen nada, pertenecen al camino, navegan en él siendo al mismo tiempo su corriente. (112) A road! Better than any position. A long road, without limiting mountains . [.....] On the roads there aren’t the rivalries that one finds in fixed places. The fixed ones have their own validity, because they have their own, they know where they begin and end. But the ones that go by the road have nothing, they belong to the road, navigate on it being at the same time its current. El’s insights on the intricacies of self and circumstance are complicated further by the presence of another element—“el chico” (114), the child, the physical index of what is also involved in “knowing,” or attempting to know, someone—in a scenario that has, up to this point, comprised only two. The added element of the child requires him to think now about the prospect of abandoning the liberating concept of the “camino” in favor of a “posición”: “El desenlace, el encasillamiento, la clasificación de mi historia vulgar de mal estudiante que tiene un contratiempo con la vecina y recurre a la burocracia, sin terminar el doctorado . Todos verán con desprecio mi historia vulgar” (“The denouement, the pigeonholing, the classification of my superficial history of bad student that has a mishap with the neighbor and has recourse to the bureaucracy , without finishing his doctorate. Everybody will look upon my ordinary history with contempt,” 115). Concluding that self and circumstance are not discreet entities but rather interdependent, penetrable, indeed, “pregnable,” él resolves not to allow the physical consequences of his amorous inclination to divert him from the understanding he has achieved: “Tengo mi destino, que yo prefiero llamar camino [.....] Yo no veré mi Destino; mientras yo lo vea será camino [.....] Claro que lo que no he hecho, ni haré, es modificar mis direcciones por complacer a los que miran” (“I have my destiny, that I prefer to call a road [.....] I will not see my Destiny; while I see it, it will be a road. [.....] Of course what I have not done, nor will do, is to modify my direction in order to please those who are watching,” 116–17). from the labyrinth 119 Yet this is exactly what he does in this section’s final moment in his encounter with a woman and her child, perhaps an unwed mother , whom he calls “la chica comunista” (“the communist girl,” 117), in part because of her political affiliation but, more importantly, as a consequence of the chance union that the trio forms as they happen to stroll together, which nevertheless attracts the approving attention of passersby touched by what appears to be “la ternura de nuestra escena familiar” (“the tenderness of our familial scene,” 118). This spontaneous representation , objectively false yet immensely gratifying, achieves its power because of the mutual participation of the players and their audience that appropriates them for such a role. The promise heralded in the experience of “aquella mañana comunistica” (“that communistic morning,” 119) proves conclusively to él that there is a higher, better form of truth than that which he had understood during his egoistic phase: “Crear estos momentos que repercuten en las vidas de los demás, divergentes de la nuestra. Partículas de nuestra personalidad, que se nos lleva la sensibilidad ajena, que se irán desenvolviendo con ese poco de esencia nuestra, según las mil modalidades de los que las perciben. Esta es la verdadera vida” (“To create these moments that reverberate in the lives of others , different from our own. Particles of our personality, that an outside sensibility takes away, that will go entangling itself with that little bit of our essence, according to the thousand modalities of those that perceive them. This is true life,” 119). It is toward the hope that the egoismsolipsism of youth can be surpassed, that “este comunismo unánime puede salvarnos del torpe instinto de propiedad” (“this unanimous communism can save us from the vile instinct of property,” 119), that the following sections address. In essence, what is true is not a product of an act of consciousness but rather what can be shared, which until this epiphany had seemed labyrinthine to a thinking subject supposedly full and autonomous. Since the first part of this novel was published separately, I believe that it is appropriate to consider it an autonomous episode to which the following sections respond. As the title of the novel suggests, the 120 from the labyrinth first part is, indeed, about an “estación,” the passage from adolescence into adulthood. The subsequent sections, via the pretext of él’s journey by train from Madrid to Paris and other French cities (“ida”) and back again (“vuelta”), represent expansions upon themes that were prominent at the end of the first section. The second section is populated by a number of new characters, notable among whom are two French women who move into the apartment house, the thirty-six-year-old Julia and a younger woman, Julia’s niece, referred to only as “la pantorrilla” (“the calf”), the part of her anatomy that seems to define her. What emerges in the second section is a further separation from the original intimate unit “nosotros” that began the novel. El becomes attracted to Julia but also to the idea of a therapeutic journey (“el viaje como una medicina ” [“a trip like a medicine,” 127]), to Paris, “la sede del sentido crítico” (“the center of the critical sense,” 127), during which he has the opportunity to clarify further his thoughts on life, reality, and art, the boundaries between which become progressively blurred. In fact, what begins as something of an existential meditation concludes in an extended re- flection on aesthetics (again, offering analogies with the progression in Joyce’s Portrait). The second part, therefore, offers an intermediate step between él’s earlier introverted egoism, his personal awareness of the limitations of such a perspective, and the novel’s final section when another actor, a third-person narrator (in relation to él) takes over the narration in order to make some more definitive statement about the writing of modern novels. In an otherwise excellent discussion of this novel, Susan Kirkpatrick suggests that, however much it may strive to escape a restrictive provincialism , Chacel’s novel is ultimately a representation of the “dilema del intelectual modernista español ante la peculiar e inconsistente modernidad del país” (“dilemma of the Spanish intellectual modernist in the face of the peculiar and inconsistent modernity of the country”).12 In my view, however, the round-trip journey from the cosmopolitan center of 12. Kirkpatrick, Mujer, modernismo y vanguardia en España, 297. from the labyrinth 121 modern art is not a return to the “heart of darkness” but rather an attempt to wed the existential meditation about the infelicities of the solipsistic subject position that, in the Spanish tradition, has been consistently associated with monstrosity, to a theory of the art of novel-making that, in establishing a position for this work and this author in the Spanish tradition, also undertakes a critique of the European modernist novel as well. What begins as the self-absorbed philosophic-existential meditation of a masculine subject about the limitations of the autonomous thinking subject concludes in the third part in an aesthetic analysis of the contemporary novel, via a narrator who, if not Chacel herself, is certainly feminine. The aesthetic meditation actually begins in earnest in the second section. On his journey to the heart of contemporaneity and modernity in virtually all things, él centers his observations on the question of a satisfactory narrative perspective and the appropriate distance from which to narrate. The dilemma of any subject-centered narration is precisely that raised by the question of distance: there is none, but if there were, the subject, as subject, would be erased. El is most reluctant to confront the contradictions of the subject-centered position: “repugnándome tanto la idea de sumergirme yo en su realidad [de los otros], no puedo menos de querer difundir en todos la mía” (“as disgusting to me as is the idea of submerging myself in their reality [of others], I have no alternative but to want to disseminate in others my own,” 139). The blame rests with the idea of distance propagated by the realist novel: “Precisamente en lo de la distancia está la diferencia; porque no hay la misma de acá para allá que allá para acá. La infranqueable es sólo para los realistas, para los que argumentan que entre dos cuerpos no hay distancia cuando al pasar se toca, ¡aunque al tocarse hayan sonado a leguas!” (“Precisely in the idea of distance lies the difference; because it is not the same from here to there as from there to here. The insurmountable distance is only for the realists, for those that argue that between two bodies there is no distance when they touch in passing, even that upon touching they may have been heard for miles!” 140). The distinction that continues to be 122 from the labyrinth drawn between “objective” and “subjective” distances is thus the major impediment to an ideal form of expression that employs them both simultaneously : Tiene ahora para mí mi propia vida el problema complejo que tenían las casas de cartón cuando yo hacía el pequeño arquitecto. Por un lado, su construcción, la delectación de su forma; por otro, su hueco, el sacar de mí la suficiente vida para poblarlo. No sé en qué había más arrobamiento , si en la contemplación de su perspectiva, de los accidentes de su fachada, o en la de aquellos tabiques irrreales que componían la interioridad de su organismo, lleno en todos sus rincones de un alma que era la mía. Hay que resolverlo, hay que enfocar el total y ser capaz de llevarlo a cabo: de ¡realizarlo!, lograr una construcción sólida con todas las reglas del arte, donde puedan encerrarse las reglas íntimas, las normas informulables . La cuestión es ésa: compaginar, armonizar, logranado la máxima tensión de actividad intelectual. (142) For me my own life now has the complex problem that the cardboard houses had when I played architect. On one side, their construction, the delight of their form; on the other, their hollowness, extracting from myself sufficient life to populate it. I don’t know in which was there more ecstasy, in the contemplation of their perspective, the accidents of their facade, or in those unreal walls that comprised the interiority of its organism , full in all of its corners of a soul that was my own. It is necessary to resolve it, it is necessary to focus on the whole and to be capable of carrying it through: of realizing it!; to achieve a solid construction according to all the rules of art, where the intimate rules, the unformulatable norms might also be enclosed. The question is that: to put in order, to harmonize, achieving the maximum tension of intellectual activity. The issue that Chacel raises here is not parochial but lies at the heart of what type of expression modernists throughout Europe and the world are trying to achieve. Nevertheless, it attempts to integrate her thoughts on what a “new” novel can mean to Europe in the context of the Spanish tradition and its misgivings on the limitations of subjectivity and subjectcentered art. from the labyrinth 123 The novel’s final section begins as él is still in France. The narrator, however, is now someone else—an authorial presence, perhaps Chacel herself—who occupies the position that él has had up to this point. Her presence is made manifest by fever, a form of delirium, that brings the narrator “back to her senses,” literally. The narrator-Chacel begins remembering the couple who began the novel and her relationship to them. The role of ella, she recalls—and this is, indeed, the case in the first part—had quickly become transparent: “la imagen de la mujer acabó por desaparecer. No por irse, sino por confundirse con la de él, como una cosa que se traga, como una idea que se olvida” (“the image of the woman wound up disappearing. Not by leaving, but by becoming blurred with his, like a thing that is swallowed, like an idea that is forgotten ,” 146). This, indeed, is the problem of all subject-centered narration , as well as the dominant techniques of the realist novel and its modern progeny, the cinema. Their capacity for omniscient narration-vision, which in spite of being “omnividente, perceptora de todos los planos, de todas las faces” (“all-seeing, perceiving of all planes, of all phases”) is also conceptualized as an “ojo desparejado” (“unpaired eye”) that provides only a “mirada monocular” (“monocular view”) (123), ideas that recall the Gongorine monster Polifemo with which Chacel’s poetic contemporaries are rather engrossed in 1927 as she writes her novel, as well as Gómez de la Serna’s anatomical anomalies recounted in El novelista, notably in the story of the one-eyed Beatriz (236–53). In fact, none of the modern representational vehicles—the novel, cinema (161–63), or theater (160–61)—are adequate mediums to express what it is that Chacel is interested in conveying, a narrative mode that will not obliterate one subject position by means of the presence of another, which is exactly what modern representation, albeit in a less-than-evident manner, has done all along. At the subjective level, the narrator wishes to represent, to convey memory, not as memory but as presence: “Lo que yo necesitaba era hacer acto de presencia para conmigo mismo. Claro que desde que decidí la vuelta empecé hacia mí. Pero sin la experiencia de los sentidos . [.....] Entonces fue el recordar lo nunca visto, lo nunca sentido, con 124 from the labyrinth su sabor inconfundible. El recordar sin idea de pretérito” (“What I needed was to make an act of presence for myself. Of course since I decided the return I began toward myself. But without the experience of the senses . [.....] Then it was remembering the never seen, the never felt, with its unmistakable flavor. Remembering without an idea of past,” 149). An important recognition in the furtherance of her goal is to acknowledge the primacy of interpretation as opposed to the poles of subjectivity-objectivity: “Acaso esto mismo es cínico, este interpretar, este descargar la conciencia en la creación. Pero no, este interpretar es lo único puro. La más aspera, la más intransigente disciplina mental, ahondar en la investigación con apasionada templanza, hasta encontrar la interpretac ón de más luminosa complejidad” (“Perhaps this very thing is cynical, this interpreting, this emptying of the consciousness in the creative act. But no, this interpreting is the only pure thing. The harshest, the most intransigent mental discipline, to probe the investigation with passionate restraint, until finding the interpretation of the most luminous complexity,” 152). This leads to an ideal vision of the type of narration that she wishes to achieve: “Fluctuará mi ‘yo’ movedizo alrededor del suyo firme. Pero llegaré a precisar, respecto a él, mi debida situación y distancia. Encerraré su yo y el mío en respectivas copas cristalinas, desde donde se vean sin mezclarse. Y saltaré de una a otra, colectando lo más escogido del yo y del él, sin confundirlos nunca” (“My moveable ‘ego’ will fluctuate around his firm one. But I will be able to determine exactly, with respect to him, my proper situation and distance. I will enclose his ego and mine in crystalline vessels, from where they will see each other without mixing. And I will jump from one to the other, collecting the choicest from me and him, without mixing them ever,” 153). Thus, as él is confronted with the news of the birth of his child via telegram , occasioning his decision to return to Madrid and what seems to be the acceptance of his adult role and responsibility as a father, the narration returns as well to the understanding of what has been undertaken and why. A major aspect of this has been egoism: “Pescaba mi yo; Más que pescarlo, lo rebuscaba. Mi yo no era entonces un pez ligero que nafrom the labyrinth 125 dase en agua limpia, yo lo buscaba en la baja marea [.....] Y algo encontr é” (“I was fishing for my ego; But more than fishing, I was meticulously searching. My ego was not then a fast-moving fish swimming in clear water , I was searching for it at low tide [.....] And I found something,” 154). But it is something of a necessary egoism because of the equal realization that the “objective,” third-person narrative mode of realism possesses “ninguna trascendencia” (“no transcendence,” 158). Chacel’s refusal to give names to her characters is also a recognition of a more profound form of subjectivity that resides not in a fixed position but rather within a larger structure. There is ultimately no means to circumvent that structure , just as Chacel herself understands that her works and her characters “quedarán siempre cortadas, sin punto final, como si me faltase saber algo para rematarlas, como si necesitase cursar finales [.....] Ellos necesitan seguir una vida recta, confiada; aventurarse por un camino sin ninguna dirección marcada” (“will remain always cut short, without a final point, as if I would be needing to know something more to complete them, as if I needed to study the endings [.....] They need to follow an unswerving, confident life; to venture down a road without any marked direction,” 168). Egoism thus gives birth in a sense to its opposite, the structureless structure that is an open road, of possibility: “Así partirá de mi un árbol genealógico” (“Thus, there will spin off from me a genealogical tree,” 168). Baroja’s image of the “árbol de la ciencia” with its bitter fruit is replaced here by the image and reality of new life. Refusing to acknowledge essential categories, Chacel charts a course beyond the monster subject and into the positive promise that awaits its progeny. 126 from the labyrinth ...