La canonizacion del diablo. Baudelaire y la estetica moderna en Espana (review)

This book is squarely aimed at literary critics within Spain and, to a lesser degree, beyond it. González del Valle begins by focusing - and rightly so - on the local, often excessively provincial and nationalistic approach to modern Spanish literature that has prevailed, with notable exceptions, to this day in Spain. Perhaps it is for this reason that he feels compelled to insist on the significance and impact of Baudelaire on modern literature in general, a point that is past dispute elsewhere. For the same reason, he reviews in some detail the traditional split between modernismo (Spanish aestheticism) and the Generation of 1898 (shorthand for a form of literary nationalism), in literary histories of fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, categories and concepts that increasingly have come to be regarded merely as convenient ordering devices and, more importantly, to be subsumed within the broader, western phenomenon of modernism. Again rightly so, González del Valle rejects the nationalistic focus here in favor of a comparatist's view that situates both the aesthetic and the ideological aims of Spanish literature within a larger scheme of things.

His book is divided into five chapters and a brief epilogue. The first chapter lays down the theoretical and critical groundwork as noted and stresses above all Baudelaire's oft cited dictum on modernity as "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable" from "The Painter of Modern Life." While he also discusses what are treated here as other motifs of modernity in Baudelaire, such as non-conformism, the theory of les correspondances, and the privileging of language, it is the artistic aim of distilling "the eternal from the transitory" that González del Valle most develops, especially in the longest section of the book, Chapter 2, which focuses on the notion of intemporality in Valle-Inclán, Unamuno, and Azorín. Here, he relates Valle-Inclán's "aesthetic quietism," Unamuno's "inner history," and Azorín's "beauty of the ordinary" ("primores de lo vulgar," as Ortega y Gasset called it) to Baudelaire's aesthetic outlined in "The Painter of Modern Life." This strikes me as a suggestive, fruitful idea. I am not sure, however, if Mircea Eliade's (or Nietzsche's) notion of the eternal return, which he uses in close association with Baudelaire and these writers, is altogether appropriate in this context. More significantly, González del Valle heavily emphasizes the "eternal" side of the Baudelairean aesthetic in discussing Azorín, Unamuno, and Valle-Inclán, thus downplaying the transitory, the very quality that Baudelaire cites as characterizing modernity, in the conclusion to his essay: "the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life, the distinguishing character of that quality which . . . we have called 'modernity.'" González del Valle's insistence on the intemporal in Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Unamuno tends to convert that quality into something absolute (and essentialized), the very opposite of what Baudelaire is talking about.

Chapter 3 of La canonización del diablo examines the relationship between caricature and Valle-Inclán's Esperpento de la hija del capitán, tying it to Baudelaire's ideas on caricature. Chapter 4 looks at the issue of literary self-consciousness in the Machado brothers' metatheatrical drama, Las adelfas, as it is related to the French writer. He concludes that the play contains a number of characteristics found in "Baudelairean modernity": ". . . experimentation in the fusion of genres . . ., the preeminence of the human consciousness of things, the anti-realist attitude inherent in such self-consciousness . . ., the obsession with the expression of the essentiality of things by means of the transcendent Word which contains, at once, the infinite in its finite shape . . ." (267). One could argue here that...