In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 53 ] Chapter 2 Beginnings without End José Cadalso and the Melancholy of Modernity In moving from questions of history and metahistory to the first work we shall consider, let us imagine for a moment a gathering, the coming together of a literary tertulia sometime in the summer of 1775. A group of young literati assembles in the university town of Salamanca to hear a new work that José Cadalso, friend and mentor to many of them, has sent. There is some expectation, for the manuscript has been circulating , albeit guardedly. In the correspondence that accompanies the papers Cadalso has forwarded to his protégé Juan Meléndez Valdés, the author calls for discretion in the dissemination of his work: “Supongo en Vmd, o mejor decir, creo y me consta en Vmd, bastante discreción para no fiar este papel a mucha gente, ni leerlo al profano vulgo” [I suppose, or better said, I believe and know for a fact that you have enough discretion not to entrust this sheet to many people or to read it to unthinking commoners] (Cadalso, Escritos, 102). The text to be read is a dialogue, but if its form recalls classical and Renaissance philosophical antecedents, its tone and content quickly signal that dispassionate inquiry is not among its most immediate concerns. Indeed, as the reading begins, the opening words of the text’s protagonist, Tediato, conjure a world that could hardly seem more distant from Enlightenment ideals of lucid, rational exchange:¡Qué noche! La oscuridad, el silencio pavoroso interrumpido por los lamentos que se oyen en la vecina carcel, completan la tristeza de mi corazón. El cielo también se conjura contra mi quietud, si alguna me quedara. El nublado crece. La luz de esos relámpagos . . . ¡qué horrorosa! [ . . . ] No hay hombre que no se crea mortal en este instante . . . ¡Ay si fuese el último momento de mi vida! ¡Cuán grato sería para mí! ¡Cuán horrible ahora! ¡Cuán horrible! Más lo fue el día, el triste día que fue causa de la escena en que ahora me hallo. (Cadalso, Cartas marruecas. Noches lúgubres, 229) [ 54 ] ProPerties of Modernity [What night! The darkness, the frightful silence interrupted by the laments heard in the nearby jail, they complete the sadness of my heart. The heavens too conspire against my restfulness, should any of it remain. The storm clouds grow. The flash of those lightning bolts . . . how horrible! { . . . } There is no man who does not believe himself mortal in this instant . . . Oh, if it were the last instant of my life! How pleasant it would be for me! How horrible it is now! How horrible! It was even more horrible on that day, on that sad day that was the cause of the state in which I now find myself.] The work in question is Cadalso’s Noches lúgubres [Lugubrious Nights], which along with his Cartas marruecas [Moroccan Letters] stands not only as one of the most edited and critically discussed eighteenthcentury Spanish texts, but also as the centerpiece of a longstanding historiographic debate within Hispanism concerning “the origins” of Spanish romanticism.1 Its basic plot is disturbingly simple: Over three consecutive nights, a gentleman dialogues with a gravedigger he has hired to exhume the body of his dead beloved. His aim is to return to his home, lie with the corpse, and commit suicide, but the work ends before readers learn if he accomplishes his objective. My intention in sketching the hypothetical scene of reading with which we begin, however, has been to foreground the role that historical imagination—the imagining of a particular past in which the text might be located—has played in modern critical appraisals of the work. For to notice that this scene of reading is, in a sense, already a map of some of the work’s potential meanings—the seemingly antithetical status of its “goyaesque” nocturnal with respect to Enlightenment rationality (Helman, “Caprichos”; Sebold, Noches, 163; Ilie, Age, 371); its semipublic, primarily aural mode of reception (Lama, “Noches”); and its influence on the so-called “poetic school of Salamanca” (Real de la Riva)—is to acknowledge that the qualities ascribed to the past in which this text is imagined have often defined the parameters of subsequent inquiry into its interpretation. I recall this historicist truism primarily because a review of the debates concerning the status of romanticism in Noches lúgubres suggests that the conflicting critical characterizations of Cadalso’s...

Share