Días felices: Aproximaciones a El jardín de las delicias de Francisco Ayala by Carolyn Richmond (review)

Francisco Ayala’s El jardín de las delicias (1st ed., 1971) may be called a novela de la vida real. At the same time it is also a text illustrated with reproductions of well-known works of pictorial and sculptured art, and particularly with the two side panels of Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490–1510). The lexical text presents sections of short, apparently auto biographical, sometimes dated, narratives with other sections where invention seems to dominate. Moreover, the four subsequent editions of the book add new graphical and lexical materials while reordering the presentation of the materials found in the first edition. And even though critic Richmond bases her study on the fifth and definitive edition dating from 2006, the spirit of the book may well require that the most dedicated reader experience too the changes and additions in the four earlier editions.

Now the ideal reader of each edition must process words and images as a single written-graphic hybrid text. The quality and fullness of this experience will vary according to the success had in seeking and identifying how words and images—placed together, not intercalated strategically through the text—relate to and reinforce each other.

Central to the construction of this kind of text is Ayala’s own decision to stress two independent periods of his life in Spain. The first begins with his birth, childhood and youth in Granada, extends to his family’s early-1920s move to Madrid, and ends with his obligatory exile to Argentina in 1939 following the defeat of the Second Republic by the forces led by Francisco Franco. During the Civil War his father and a brother were executed as Republicans, and the same fate awaited Francisco, a young member of the government, were he to have stayed in Spain. That said, the apparently autobiographical narrative sketches center on the youth awakening as he develops a taste for beauty under the tutelage of his artistically-gifted mother, as well as a sense of right and wrong. The second period begins in 1960. Then he returned quietly to Spain for a tentative summer visit to his home country. Subsequently he built upon this short stay to re-integrate himself gradually into the cultural—not the political—life of his home country by speaking at such public venues as the Santander summer programs.

Eschewing the full-blown analysis not proper to this review, it can be suggested nonetheless that these two autobiographically-oriented periods of Ayala’s Spanish life and the related short narratives of the book have their graphic correlative. The youthful Granada period constantly evokes Bosch’s pre-lapsarian side panel which portrays God’s presentation in the Garden of Eden of Eve to Adam following her creation. Nonetheless, not even this Eden is perfect beauty and peace. In the lower foreground a cat crosses the scene with a dead mouse in its mouth, and cranes spear hapless frogs for their dinner; in the middle ground a serpent coils around a tree trunk. The more complicated second period develops against the backdrop of a separate peace. Ayala must accept Francoist Spain as the price of return to his homeland as little more than a Spanish-speaking summer tourist from America. Only in 1976, a year after the dictator’s death, did Ayala assume full-time residence there.

The complexities of this second Spanish period seem well indicated in the other Bosch side panel. Its upper third may be construed as a graphic correlative of the violence, destruction and death of the Civil War. A city in flames covered with dark clouds dominates over scenes of battle and naked, motionless bodies. The lower two thirds portray a chaotic world. It shows many “separate peaces” in which individuals indulge often carnal pursuits while an expressionless face near the center of the panel takes in the panorama. This...