The subject in question: early contemporary Spanish literature and Modernism

2. Modernism and Spain: Aesthetics, Ideology, Tradition, Subjectivity

c h a p t e r 2 Modernism and Spain Aesthetics, Ideology, Tradition, Subjectivity The unwillingness of Spanish criticism to consider an expansive concept of modernism as a viable aesthetic standard for early contemporary literary history has had adverse consequences for literary appreciation as well as for the standing of Spanish authors and texts in relation to other European writing. The aim of this chapter is to develop an artistic-ideological framework for a Spanish modernism that as it identifies a pertinent agenda also seeks to integrate this model with a revitalized concept of the “Spanish tradition.” From this perspective , the most important area of interaction between Spain and an international modernist movement centers in the issue of subjectivity , what can be called modernist elaborations of fresh subjective models. As in the case in the renaissance, which witnesses the creation of a new sensibility, the most ambitious affirmative contribution of modernism is the creation of its own version of a “new man.” A broader and more inclusive context for modernism begins with a brief overview of historic evolutionary patterns in Europe. A productive area for comparison is the degree to which a “realist” aesthetic—values of mimesis, symmetry, orderliness, rationalism, and even scientifism—competes with more eccentric styles that extend and modify this dominant paradigm. The manner in which earlier historical patterns have been characterized—the gradual ex- < 51 tension of the renaissance into the baroque in contrast to the much more abrupt shift from neoclassicism to the heterogeneous eruptions of romanticism1 —is relevant to a fuller understanding of modernism. In relation to nineteenth-century realism-naturalism, modernism manifests itself in a rather complex fashion, displaying an evolutionary aspect of more gradual innovation and departure from realist conventions and values , as well as displaying more radical proclivities, which at the height of such experimentation often calls for the overthrow of mimeticism altogether . It is useful to understand modernism’s emergence and consolidation , therefore, from the perspective of both predominant traditions of historical literary evolution. There is a substantial transition period between the initial stirring of modernism in the latter part of the nineteenth century, which many now date from between 1850 to 1870—specifically, in the work of Baudelaire and Flaubert and in Matthew Arnold’s celebrated lectures on “modernity ,” as well as, slightly later, in Rimbaud and Nietzsche—and its most authoritative presence around the time between the two world wars, often referred to as “high modernism,” as even more distinctive forms of literary expression gain fuller public attention. Accompanying the more aggressive aspects of modernism’s revolutionary eruptions, therefore, is a much longer evolutionary trend that builds throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Even earlier, however, romanticism ’s abiding interest in the psychological dimension of the human constitution—which effectively serves to finish the work of the renaissance and the enlightenment, to extend the “autonomous thinking subject ” as consolidated in the triumph of the European middle class that consequently comes to regard itself capable not only of self-definition but of psychological individualization—signals a prelude to what later becomes a marked tendency to differentiate between multiple dimensions of “reality”: outer vs. inner, public vs. private, and, eventually, con1 . See especially Ronald Paulson, “Goya and the Spanish Revolution,” in Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 286–387, in relation to Spain. 52 modernism and spain scious vs. unconscious. Perhaps as much as any other factor, the hegemonic dispositions of late-nineteenth-century middle-class culture very much aware of its own modernity motivates dissenting responses to what is progressively understood as an ideology of “completeness” and a growing cultural-aesthetic impasse between bourgeois society and a new mode of art and artist, succinctly characterized by Luis Cernuda in “La gloria del poeta”: Oye sus marmóreos preceptos Sobre lo útil, lo normal y lo hermoso; Oyeles dictar la ley al mundo, acotar el amor, dar canon a la belleza inexpresable, Mientras deleitan sus sentidos con altavoces delirantes; Contempla sus extraños cerebros Intentando levantar, hijo a hijo, un complicado edificio de arena. [.....] Esos son [.....] Los seres con quienes muero a solas.2 Listen to their marmoreal precepts On the useful, the normal and the beautiful Listen to them dictate the law to the world, limit love, canonize inexpressible beauty, While they delight their senses with delirious loudspeakers; Contemplate their strange brains Trying to raise, child by child, a complicated edifice of sand. [.....] Those are the ones [.....] The beings with whom I die alone. Eysteinsson’s characterization of the “interruption” of realism as modernism ’s fundamental aesthetic principle (202–3) implies that modernist art—and as Cernuda here laments—can never achieve complete autonomy from the dominant tradition of realism. Thus, it should not be surprising that, even as the more radical aspects of modernist art continue to attract critical attention, those zealous endeavors invariably fall 2. La realidad y el deseo, ed. Miguel J. Flys (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), 117. modernism and spain 53 short of stated or implied goals. Modernism is a multivalent movement whose aesthetic projects range from the relatively modest to the openly experimental. Nevertheless—position papers and manifestos notwithstanding —the conventions and ideology of realism remain the primal scene from which modernist views of new dimensions of the human constitution begin. The conflicts within modernism itself also underscore its incapacity to realize the more radical forms of expression that many had envisioned , which suggests that modernism is perhaps more succinctly characterized in an aesthetic sense as adaptive, rather than independent, of realism and that divergences in expressiveness are better characterized as degrees of departure—that is, nonessential differences—from such norms. The challenge for criticism of the early contemporary period—and this is especially the case in a Spanish context—is to resist the temptation to focus on what are often spectacular avant-garde failures and instead to embrace a more extensive milieu of modernist texts. As Richard Murphy has examined at length, what often parade as comprehensive accounts of the avant-garde are almost invariably quite limited in scope, the most egregious example being Bürger’s influential treatise premised almost entirely on dada/surrealism and largely ignoring the remaining preponderance of the avant-garde, much of which does not conform to his thesis. Ironically , the greatest difference between the approaches to the fragmented history of early contemporary Spanish literature, owing to the prominence of the literary generation, and attempts to theorize the avant-garde is not their scope or their approaches to literary history but simply the fact that the Spanish avant-garde continues to be considered inconsequential while other European forms of “national” expression are postulated as decisive. Both “traditions” are better served by acknowledging that nationally defined movements belong to a more inclusive phenomenon . As Richard Sheppard has noted, it is also less productive to approach modernism in terms of overly specific “characteristics” which may or may not be evident in given varieties of modernist writing.3 Similar prob3 . Sheppard, “The Problematics of European Modernism,” 2. 54 modernism and spain lems have arisen in criticism of the baroque and romanticism, which many scholars have long considered to be overburdened by a bewildering array of often contradictory “defining features.”4 Since the critical focus on modernism has also emphasized the particular, the continuing attractiveness of nation-centered approaches is understandable, as is the fact that few Spanish critics have been interested in linking Spanish writing of the early contemporary period to a transnational context. Nevertheless , the tremendous flowering of writing in Spain from before 1898 to 1936—that is, precisely during the plenitude of modernism elsewhere in Europe—demands to be approached with greater conceptual rigor, as part of a multidimensional, multinational phenomenon. An “aesthetics of interruption” is also suggestive of the incapacity of modernist form to sustain itself without recourse to wider structure, a sustaining ideological context that situates it in a quest for a “better” modernity while it grapples with the conventions of realism, the mimetic tradition that has prefigured it. A significant impetus for an awareness of structure emerges from early-century theories of semiotics (Peirce, Saussure) that consolidate preexisting notions (as early as the eighteenth century, e.g., Edmund Burke) that language is a convention-determined construction. The emergence of semiotics as an instrument of literary appraisal (Russian Formalism, Jakobson)—and early seminal tracts proposing that modernism is about the creation of myth (Eliot), another type of structure, or the abandonment of historicity-temporality in favor of “spatial form,” a synchronic structure (Frank)—serves to advance the emergence of a formalist aesthetics, the most influential expression of which is Anglo-American “New Criticism.” During the middle decades of the twentieth century, a modernist canon is established primarily on the authority of the concept of the literary work as a discrete, autonomous structure, or “verbal icon” (Wimsatt). The momentary tizzy of “synchronic structuralism” (Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Todorov, et al.) quickly defers to a much easier-to-accept “poststructuralism,” a loose version of Derridean “philosophical deconstruction” that ensures 4. See Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”; Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism.’” modernism and spain 55 the preservation of the “interpretive imperative” of the New Criticism (Miller, Hartman) while replacing its iconophilic bent with a severe form of iconoclasm (De Man). This continuation of such a formalist agenda gives rise over the last two decades to diverse feminist, “new historicist,” neo-Marxist, and “cultural” criticism that as it has largely succeeded in supplanting formalism also has advanced the concept of postmodernism , at the expense of the modernist canon. The seemingly unassailable status of any number of modernist masters has been diminished to at least some degree by their alleged or actual associations with rightist politics, sympathies, or beliefs with which formalist criticism never concerned itself. Early semiotics in the context of modernist production of literary signs stops well short of endorsing the post-structuralist depiction of literary expression as a “free-play of signifiers.” Referentiality, or at least a hybrid form of it, is pivotal to the goals of all forms of modernist expression in that signs are not considered ends in themselves but rather the means to achieve fuller expressive meaning—whether univocal and precise as in Pound’s imagism or extended and seemingly indeterminate in the language of surrealism. For this reason Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite configuration of a semiotic order—based on his concepts of “symbol,” “icon,” “index” and strongly premised on degrees of referentiality , in contrast to the solitary linguistic minimal unit of Saussure, “the sign,” which has dominated contemporary semiotics and whose more recent proponents have been generally unconcerned with the question of referentiality—is more advantageous in providing a structural basis for approaching the multivalent aesthetic agenda of modernism. Peirce’s “symbol” is analogous to Saussure’s “sign” since the symbol’s status and meaning is fully conventional. The “icon” or “natural” sign, which present-day orthodox semiotics does not recognize (see especially Eco; Barthes is the notable exception),5 achieves its meaning by virtue of a comparison, which involves reference to an extra-linguistic source. The 5. See especially Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979); Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), is the notable exception. 56 modernism and spain “index” indicates the proximity, direction, or location of its referent. Demonstratives and personal pronouns are linguistic indexes, yet also included in this category are a variety of physical objects as well as visual and/or sonorous phenomena—weathervanes are indexes of the presence of wind, thunder of lightning, smoke of fire, and other indexes are fingerprints , some types of photographs, and so on. The index is thus a special instance of representation that has an intimate relationship with various domains of referentiality. Without intending to join a debate about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Peirce’s system that, certainly among contemporary semioticians, does not seem to hold much currency, I do believe that such an ordering of “signs” does, indeed, correspond to the understanding of a great many modernists who are deeply concerned with questioning the boundaries between conventional representation and more immediate and direct forms of expression for which the Saussurean model does not account. It is thus not inappropriate to understand modernist aesthetics from the perspective of the succinct formal grid provided by Peirce, whatever the current thinking about the “nature” of signs happens to be. All varieties of modernist expression are challenging a representational paradigm that dominates European literature and art for four hundred years, the perspectival model, that is, what an autonomous free-thinking subject, one pair of eyes, perceives situated in a specific space-time and from a specific distance. The vogue of impressionism in the late nineteenth century presages the limitations of subject-centered representation. Among many examples is Monet’s series of the Rouen Cathedral (1892), in which the artist believes it necessary to render, on multiple canvases, acts of vision under a variety of conditions of empirical lighting, to express the greater fullness of a subject that a single perspective is inadequate to convey. This is a prelude soon thereafter to cubism ’s overturning of perspective to refute long-held aesthetic opinions that painting is strictly a spatial medium, whereas poetry, literature, is by “nature” temporal.6 Cubist paintings are not projected from a single 6. See G. E. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). modernism and spain 57 point of view at one precise moment, but rather require the viewer to reassimilate an apparently fragmented object or landscape in the imagination and thus to convert the previously instantaneous activity of viewing into a type of “narrative.” Vision cannot occur as a discrete act; rather, referentiality is achieved primarily through the retrieval and reconstruction of the painting’s subject in an inner, mental realm, that also becomes a meta-artistic parody of mimesis.7 The cubist painting demands a “doubled” reality since the viewing subject does not simply receive a pictorial content but also must reassemble the painting in more familiar, referential, conventional terms in order to see it fully. Analogously, the most typical modernist literature challenges the temporality of writing. Eliot’s defense of Joyce’s Ulysses in “Ulysses, Order , and Myth” critiques the realist-naturalist novel’s incapacity to confront the degradations of a chaotic modern order that Joyce supplements by providing it with a mythic structure.8 Joyce’s novel is not situated in time or history but in a superior structure, the Homeric myths that underpin European culture and provide a sense of order that the external world cannot do. Eliot’s decisive influence on subsequent criticism is epitomized in Joseph Frank’s “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which touts Eliot’s capacity to suspend the temporality of language, and thus to interrupt “the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.”9 Reading a modernist text, analogous to the viewing of a classical painting , effects a “transformation of the historical imagination into myth— an imagination for which time does not exist” (60). Forty years later Jameson represents the modernist sensibility as a fragmentation of the psyche and of its world that opens up the semiautonomous and henceforth compartmentalized spaces of lived time over against clock time, bodily or perceptual experience over against ra7 . See Johanna Drucker, Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 46–53. 8. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Dial 75 (1923): 480–83. 9. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 13. 58 modernism and spain tional and instrumental consciousness, a realm of “originary” or creative language over against the daily practice of a degraded practical speech [.....] and of the growing independence of the various senses from one another—in particular the separation of the eye from the ear.10 This, in effect, is a succinct conceptual restatement of Eliot’s early formulation of what the new art is about. What changes is the view that the “passionate private languages” of modernism are innocent. Upon “entering the field of force of the real social world [they] take on a [.....] wholly unsuspected power” which, in the aftermath of world political events left “many of them quite genuinely shocked to discover the things for which the words really stood” (Fables 177). Modernists tended to be “anti-liberal” that is, political rightists or leftists (or sympathizers) who had lost faith in the “democratic center.” The pervasive aggressiveness in modernist expression—whether by a fascist Ezra Pound or a Stalinist Rafael Alberti—is a function of the need to create a new model of being in the world. Integral to the affirmation of a “second reality,” invariably conceived as superior to the middle-class version, is the giving over of oneself to unconventional forces. Force expresses itself in a strongly willful, active aspect, frequently in an exalted , aggressive consciousness dedicated to refashioning the literary, and sometimes social, reality in which he/she is obliged to reside. Yet equally prominent is a corollary aspect that ascribes agency to supra-personal, telluric, or historical forces against which personal will is largely ineffectual . Modernists participate in a literary agenda that accommodates both the fabbro, the willful maker, a craftsman of alternative “worlds,” and the visionary vates, who seems to occupy transcendent perspectives. The collapse of the bourgeois medium of mimetic, empirical space cedes to the production of a meta-literary “space,” not a space at all in any conventional sense of the word, but an artistic substitute where the personal struggles to express new understandings of subjective positions are situated . Since all modernist production is to some degree meta-literary, the development and evolution of this phenomenon is central to any account 10. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 14. modernism and spain 59 of modernism. Spain is no exception, and meta-literariness extends to all modernist works in all genres, indeed, intensifying as the early twentieth century progresses. It most certainly includes most of the writers traditionally identified with the early-century literary generations as well as many others. The realist concept of a unified reality to which the writer must confine the scope of art is progressively rejected. Mature expressions of this phenomenon—via a type of poetics—are offered by, if we are to believe Dámaso Alonso, the so-called traditionminded talents of the generation of “1927.” Instructive in this regard are Luis Cernuda’s “Palabras ante una lectura” (1935), his introduction to the first edition of La realidad y el deseo, and private correspondence in 1928 between Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén regarding the forthcoming appearance of the first edition of Cántico. The attitudes revealed here underscore the artificiality of generational groupings since their aestheticideological differences are quite sharp. Cernuda’s often difficult personality , his public homosexuality, and his blistering attacks, in essays and/or in his later poems, against Alonso, Aleixandre, and Salinas clash sharply with the idea of a “generación de la amistad” and the view of a homogenized, gentlemanly, professorial, even conservative group of artistic colleagues and friends. In a letter of 1928 to Juan Guerrero, Cernuda proclaims that “es cierto : hay una segunda realidad. ¡Tanto como yo la he deseado! Mas ahora sólo tengo la forma. Si llego a poseerla algún día” (“it’s true: there is a second reality. Just like I have desired it! But now I only have the form. If only I could possess it one day”).11 “Palabras ante una lectura” recounts Cernuda’s experience in the first edition of La realidad y el deseo, his incapacity to resist an all-consuming force, likened to Moses’ experience of the burning bush, “un poder daimónico” (“a daimonic power”), to which he ascribes an aggressive agency in his life and art: “la poesía [.....] no es sino la expresión de esa oscura fuerza daimónica que rige el mundo” (“poetry [.....] is but the expression of this obscure daimonic 11. James Valender, “Cuatro cartas de Luis Cernuda a Juan Guerrero (1928–1929),” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, no. 315 (1976): 53. 60 modernism and spain force that rules the world”).12 His experience with this force brings him to the conclusion that “la realidad exterior es un espejismo” (“exterior reality is a mirage,” 872) and that he finds himself ultimately in the role of mediator between antagonistic realities. The poet is a type of daimon, a creature who inhabits the ordinary world yet who has periodic contact with this “poder indefinido y vasto que maneja nuestros destinos” (“unde finable and vast power that controls our destinies,” 874). In a variation on Eliot, Cernuda understands that his mission is to formulate a personal myth that embodies the elite status and desolate understanding of the modern—that is, the modernist—poet. Anecdotal, temporal life experiences become occasions to shape “myth,” a “segunda realidad” far superior to the bourgeois phantoms with whom he is condemned to reside (recall “los seres con quienes muero a solas”). Cernuda’s poetry is strongly meta-literary in that it is concerned with revealing an alternative reality that the bourgeois cannot acknowledge. A quite different attitude finds expression in the first edition of Jorge Guillén’s Cántico as succinctly expressed in Pedro Salinas’s private assessment in a letter written slightly before the volume went to press. Guillén’s poetry exemplifies the willful act of fashioning Un mundo. [.....] Un mundo como no lo tiene hoy nadie. Tuyo, inventado , erigido con materiales nuevos e intactos. Mejor, materiales conocidos pero pasados por algo lustral, por un medio clarificador. [.....] Ni sentimentalismo, ni misticismo, ni realismo. [.....] Mundo selecto, escogido . [.....] No del verso, no de la técnica, no como creen los necios, sino del cosmos nuevo, de la vida en poesía.13 A world. [.....] A world like nobody has today. Yours, invented, constructed with new and intact materials. Better still, familiar materials but passed through something lustral, through a clarifying medium. [.....] Not sentimentality, or mysticism, or realism [.....] A select, chosen world. [.....] Not of verse, or of technique, not like the idiots believe, but of a new cosmos, of a world of poetry. 12. Luis Cernuda, Prosa completa, ed. Derek Harris and Luis Maristany (Madrid: Barral , 1975), 875. 13. Andrés Soria Olmedo, ed., Correspondencia (1923–1951). Pedro Salinas / Jorge Guillén (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992), 90. modernism and spain 61 In sharp contrast to Cernuda’s impotent attempts to deal with a force that dominates his existence, Guillén’s poetry is produced by a much different force, an active, aggressive consciousness, in order to bring forth an alternative “world” also incomprehensible to the horde of “necios” incapable of understanding that aesthetics (“la técnica”) is but a means to display an elite intellect, a qualitatively different type of dominant subjectivity that has fashioned a “cosmos nuevo” by means of art. While these poets are dedicated to similar goals—the elaboration of a superior meta-literary reality—the means of production are exactly opposite. Force is a fashioning tool for Guillén, whereas for Cernuda it is the summoning agent of a poet subservient to its demands. What they share in common, however, is the idea that force is responsible for the emergence of a “new world,” a “new reality,” and a “new man,” new subjective models. Generally speaking, Cernuda’s experience of daimonic power forces him into greater contact with the desolate, public world of ordinary reality against which he incessantly recoils, while Guillén remains faithful to his elaborations of a superior, elitist, private world that rarely portrays him in social settings. More significant than the fact that Cernuda and Guillén also reflect political attitudes that make them more than simply “liberal” or “conservative” in the conventional sense is that these attitudes reflect differences in the more important modernist enterprise of superseding bourgeois subjectivity. To refer to the general title of Pablo Neruda’s poetry of this time, Residencia en la tierra, modernists , indeed, tend to regard themselves more as “residents” of the planet with alienated, divided allegiances rather than as “citizens” loyal to their ordinary historical circumstance. The modernist’s allegiance is firstly to his/her “ideological” intuitions of the expansive and extended experience of a superior alternative reality, or, falling short of that exalted goal, at least to a more truthful exposition of the insufficiencies and ugliness of such an existence. As I shall discuss below, the positive agenda of modernism that makes it more than the expression of ingenious “pointless rites” is the bringing forth of new, unconventional, and antibourgeois models of subjectivity. 62 modernism and spain Before turning in earnest to this issue of the “Spanish tradition” in the context of modernism, it is necessary to examine other aspects of modernist expressive possibility that present more formidable interpretive challenges. If an “aesthetics of interruption” may be characterized by “meta-literary effects,” one of the more intensified expressive pathways of such an aesthetic is profitably characterized as a type of iconic, or “hieroglyphic ,” expression (Peirce’s second type of sign), which historically and generically finds greater expressive strength in the poetry of the later 1920s and ’30s. Although it is not essentially different from earlier expressions , the hieroglyphic mode adapts conventional language to a new context in which traditional referentiality has apparently been rendered inoperative. Readers are confronted with syntagms that, while they form recognizable phrases and sentences containing subjects, verbs, and objects , initially convey little in the way of conventional meaning. Like the viewer of a cubist painting, the reader is required to assume a much more active role, this time in order to decipher what on the surface may seem to be an incomprehensible jumble. Language, however, continues to function in the same manner as conventional, public modes of speech and writing. What is significantly different is that there is a wholesale displacement of conventional signifiers from signifieds. This means that the modernist is embracing not a concept of “free play,” but rather an aesthetic position that demands an imaginative reorientation on the reader ’s part in order to discover—that is, to decipher—the code or pattern of signification that will allow the structure of conventional language to function in its accustomed sense, albeit in a new referential context of an “inner space” or “geography.” The difference between the hieroglyphic mode and meta-literary expression is that language becomes even more hermetic in the sense that the reader’s disorientation is also “geographic .” Indeed, modernist hieroglyphics typically features the creation of an unconventional if identifiable “geography” or “world,” more extensive and more visually elaborated articulations of meta-literariness that often express themselves, if not as a “cosmos nuevo” then perhaps a “cosmos modernism and spain 63 extraño.” The location of all such spaces or geographies is invariably a private dimension of consciousness, or unconsciousness. The hieroglyphic mode, therefore, represents an intensification of earlier intuitions of a “second reality” or “private world” because it often not only confuses the conventional reader at the level of communication but also situates him/her in a bewildering alternate locale often described in detailed physical terms. The most ingenious manifestation of this phenomenon in a Spanish context is in the poetry of Vicente Aleixandre, whose elaborate geographic circumstances in his production of the 1920s and ’30s are actually psychic locales from which sounds, images, and words are portrayed as being communicated to the poet from an unsuspected and unidentified source. Even more interestingly, the poet himself assumes a role that parallels that of the uninformed reader and thus presents himself in a disoriented and confused posture in relation to this strange discourse that he must also decipher with great difficulty. Beginning with Pasión de la tierra, Aleixandre initiates an extended dialog with an incomprehensible yet personalized creative-destructive force that is also credited with teaching him a new language in “El amor no es relieve” (“Love Is Not a Relief”): “Tu compañía es un abecedario” (“Your company is a reading primer,” 96).14 His inner geography acquires “relief,” that is, a spatiality that is analogous to conventional space, in proportion to his capacity to extract meaning from unconventional expressions embedded in what is often portrayed as a domain of planeness. The structure of language is the same whether it refers to external or internal “geographies .” The difficulty lies in adapting the conventional system to a hitherto unsuspected set of meanings. Thus, even in this apparently autonomous “second reality,” there remains a continuing dependence on the “ordinary” system, albeit in extraordinary circumstances. The hieroglyphic mode marks the dismantling of conventional generic divisions as the realms of the visual and the verbal—eye/ear and space/time—acquire a different “nature” that nevertheless reveals a hid14 . Vicente Aleixandre, Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), 96. 64 modernism and spain den, secret order and system of conventions. Among numerous Spanish expressions of such an awareness is Rafael Alberti’s “Los ángeles sonámbulos” (“The Sleep-Walking Angels”) in Sobre los ángeles, where the eyes and the ears, organs of human perception / consciousness, acquire autonomy and assume an altogether different function: “Ojos invisibles , grandes, atacan. [.....] / [.....] oídos se agrandan contra el pecho. / De escayola, fríos, / bajan a la garganta” (“Huge, invisible eyes attack [.....] / [.....] ears aggrandize themselves against my breast. / Cold, plastered , they descend to the throat,” 356).15 Previously complementary, eye and ear now become antagonists that assume a new function at a different site of production, the throat, a locale of involuntary utterances that speak to the reality of both a new artistic sensibility and a different understanding of new subjective dimensions. As suggested in the idea of the hieroglyph, this mode of expression also marks an intensification of visuality as symbolic conventions are adapted to new contexts. It thus presents a certain analogy with the Peircian model of semiotics—in contrast to the Saussurean model that features only strictly conventional signs—in that symbolic expression acquires a striking iconicity. As in Peirce’s understanding of the icon, meaning is produced by means of a comparison. This comparison is effected, however, by the conscious efforts of the reader to translate one conventional system—ordinary language —to a new form of “nature.” Rather than a comparison of signs in relation to an external order, however, the comparison is undertaken in the vividly pictorial context of an “inner” geography. The concept of hieroglyphics, nevertheless, is also relevant to more rationally articulated modes of expression, for example, the imagism of Ezra Pound and colleagues, which is developed at length in Pound’s appropriation of Ernest Fenollosa’s idiosyncratic understanding of Chinese writing in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Chinese writing is conceived as a type of picture writing and not an expression of a convention-determined system. This provides an analogy for the type 15. Rafael Alberti, Poesía (1924–1967) (Madrid: Aguilar, 1972). modernism and spain 65 of expression valued by Pound, a return to a primitive and much more direct, verb-oriented system that lies in sharp contrast to what he considers a degenerated Western writing dominated by the copula “to be” that has drained language of its original active, action-oriented role. In Pound’s imagism there is an active disassociation of the visual and the verbal. Words lose their association with sound and become more fully related to images, not the copied images of nineteenth-century realism, but unique and more valuable “primary apparitions.” The desire becomes to transcend the phantom reality embodied in the copy premises of conventional representation. In the context of his “generation,” Jorge Guillén, in a reminiscence in El argumento de la obra, invokes Pound’s imagism to characterize, in his opinion, the dominant mode of poetic expression after World War I: “El nombre americano imagists podría aplicarse a cuantos escritores de alguna imaginación escribían acá o allá por los años 20” (“The American term imagists could apply to a number of writers of some imagination that were writing here and there during the 20s”) because his milieu was interested in a “realidad [.....] no reduplicada en copias sino recreada de manera liberrima” (“reality [.....] not duplicated in copies but created in the freest manner,” 20). Arguably the most extreme if nonetheless logical progression of the aesthetic movement away from mimesis in modernism expresses itself as an intention to transcend the mediation of language altogether. In this mode, the intention is to surpass the conventional circumstance of literary language as a secondary or borrowed medium from the structure that produces public discourse in the form of spoken language. The goal is to break through to a primary mode of communication that can only be described as an epiphanic mode of “presence,” the moment when creative intention or thought corresponds exactly to written expression. This is the expressive mode most often associated with surrealist “automatic writing,” which is purported to arise without the intervention of consciousness and exterior reality in order to communicate directly with an “under-reality” understood, again—as modernists typically understand the “second reality”—to be a superior domain. Indeed, Rosalind 66 modernism and spain Krauss considers surrealist automatism as the principal aesthetic means to convey an even more important existential-ideological tenet, that literary presence is inseparable from the phenomenon of the experienceexpression of the presence of “full being”: Automatism may be writing, but it is not, like the rest of the written signs of Western culture, representation. It is a kind of presence, the direct presence of the artist’s inner self. This sense of automatism as a manifestation of the innermost self, and thus not representation at all, is also contained within Breton’s description of automatic writing as “spoken thought.” Thought is not a representation but is that which is utterly transparent to the mind, immediate to experience, untainted by the distance and exteriority of signs.16 However, Krauss’s further association of automatic writing as analogous to photography—as with the production of fingerprints, photographic images are manifested “automatically” on a revelatory medium “as an imprint or transfer off the real [.....] a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers” (110)—parallels Peirce’s classification of some types of photographs as indexes, that is, not actual “presences” but rather “traces of presences,” indicators that lead or point in a direction toward a referent. Thus, arguably , the most revolutionary aspect of modernist expression, had long been anticipated by Peircian semiotics. This analogy, however, is important in completing the semiotic structure into which modernist aesthetic positions may be situated as well as to associate such positions with an ideology guided by the desire to formulate new models of greatly expanded subjective possibility. The desire for presence—typically envisioned as epiphanies or secular versions of “eternity” where conventional time-space is nullified—becomes a progressively more important theme of modernism even though for many such a possibility may be only a distant nostalgia (Cernuda, Alberti) or tragically conceived as an impossibility from the outset (Lorca). At a thematic level if not as a lit16 . Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 96. modernism and spain 67 eral aesthetic option, the question of presence in relation to existence, or “being,” is fundamental. It is here again where Spanish contributions to modernism in the development of new subjective models intersect explicitly with Europe. It is also here where the weight of the “Spanish tradition” in Peninsular critical thinking makes such a thesis most difficult to advance. It will be necessary, therefore, to examine this issue in some detail, from a less isolationist perspective, in order to suggest that for early contemporary writers it is an informed consciousness of the “Spanish tradition ” that allows Spain to participate in the “positive” agenda of modernism , as a true partner and not as another “imported” phenomenon. To varying degrees, the case continues to be made by many Hispanists (see, more recently, Parr) that every Continental literary period from the renaissance onward is in some sense “foreign” to Spain, that is, distant from the evolving discourse of modernity in the rest of Europe while ever faithful to its own “unique” tradition, perhaps even more so in the early contemporary period.17 The need to stress Spanish national values and differences becomes almost a requirement as Francoism makes itself their defender as well as a vigorous repudiator of internationalism. The postwar climate for literary criticism is thus not favorable for adopting critical arguments that align Spanish literature with a wider European milieu. Paralleling Laín Entralgo’s and Alonso’s advocacy of nation-centered literary generations during the late forties are “uniqueness” positions in Golden Age studies that emerge in earnest slightly thereafter. The most exemplary of such arguments is Alexander A. Parker’s seminal essay on the comedia, which establishes the direction for early modern criticism for decades. Although certainly well intentioned, Parker’s thesis is that Spanish plays from this period require special guidelines to be appreciated by contemporary audiences: theme is more important than action or 17. See, more recently, James Parr, “A Modest Proposal: That We Use Alternatives to Borrowing (Renaissance, Baroque, Golden Age) and Leveling (Early Modern) in Periodization ,” Hispania 84 (2001): 406–16. 68 modernism and spain “character drawing,” which as a consequence makes “realistic verisimilitude ” irrelevant; and principles of poetic justice and dramatic causality, used in plot construction in a manner that clarifies the moral purpose of these plays, assure closure (706–7).18 Reading early modern Spanish literature is thus a much more cumbersome activity than reading plays from the rest of Europe, which have achieved a high degree of realism. Europe has been able to “eliminate” conventions in order to make its literature seem more “natural.” Spanish literature, however, requires the reader to learn a complicated set of special conventions that in turn imply that such works are more “primitive.” The representational values of Europe have achieved a level of realistic expressiveness that makes reading effortless by comparison. Early modern Spanish literature, according to this line of reasoning , is burdensome and overloaded while it also lacks something fundamental . Although there are many objections to Parker’s methodology, the most significant is that he is making a comparison based on the values of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage, whose primary emphasis is, indeed, realistic “character building” grounded mainly in psychology. The standard explanation for such glaring differences is that Golden Age Spain is a theocentric culture still largely medieval in outlook and thus incapable of portraying the “new man” of the renaissance , whose secular values have liberated him and allowed him to consider himself an autonomous “free thinker.” This still relatively new yet decisive shift in Europe that creates the early versions of the “autonomous thinking subject,” therefore, is alien to Spain, still dedicated to the idea that full human subjectivity can never be achieved; the human subject is invariably less than “full.” The possibility of fullness exists as a consequence of an intimate association with a structure of salvation that leads to a “second,” incomparably superior reality that has been divinely instituted. Parker’s thesis is thus grounded on the concept of a funda18 . A. A. Parker, “The Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Method of Analysis and Interpretation,” in The Great Playwrights, vol. 1, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 706–7. modernism and spain 69 mental “lack” in characters not authorized to function as “subjects” by a theocentric ideology. Yet Golden Age literature is full of characters who are free thinkers . A much simpler explanation for the differences between Spain and a more secular-minded Europe is that whereas Europe seems dedicated to portraying secular subjectivity, the “new man,” in a rather positive light, Spanish writers by and large disapprove and dedicate themselves to critiquing such an attitude. This suggests, therefore, that the differences between Spanish and European literary characters arise on both sides of the Pyrenees from a strong awareness that this “new man” exists , the contrast being that for Spanish writers he is understood in negative , indeed monstrous, terms, whereas in other parts of Europe he is much more likely to be conceived of as heroic. An alternative hypothesis, therefore, begins by revisiting the modern era from the point of view that Spanish ideological differences with Europe promote what all ideology dedicates itself to advancing: the notion that a specific point of view is not simply one of many but rather “better” than others. The “Spanish point of view” does not merely present itself to its true believers, but also replies to European positions, dialectically . Spanish positions are not “alien” from Europe—in early modern literature or in subsequent periods—but rather in theme and content, and especially in many of its greatest literary and artistic achievements, are taking informed issue with the direction toward which this “new man” is leading European culture. What is important in a discussion of modernism is that the Spanish positions throughout modern literary history resist the evolutions of the European “autonomous thinking subject,” whose hegemonic triumph in the nineteenth century becomes one of the principal motivating factors for the emergence of modernism, which, in the aftermath of over three hundred years of protracted Spanish engagement with this issue, also begins to reject the autonomous thinking subject. The early contemporary period, perhaps ironically, witnesses the return of the rest of Europe to a discourse that in Spain had been ongoing since the Golden Age. This also serves to explain why signifi70 modernism and spain cant numbers of writers from one of the least “modernized” nations of Europe can enter into modernism as integral partners in what ultimately becomes another struggle to bring forth a new “new man.” Modernism can, indeed, be viewed from a variety of perspectives, significant among which is Europe’s rapprochement with a long “tradition” of consistent Spanish attitudes toward this central theme in its agenda. A brief account of representative Spanish viewpoints throughout the modern era concerning the insufficiencies inherent in the European “autonomous thinking subject” will serve to illustrate this idea more fully . A quite significant contribution to European cultural studies over the last quarter century—initially propounded by Michel Foucault and re- fined thereafter by Timothy J. Reiss—has contrasted a premodern epistemological model with attitudes that emerged subsequently and became dominant by the nineteenth century. According to Foucault, the decisive turn from a medieval, theocentric mode of understanding premised on analogical thinking toward the “discourse of modernity” based on deductive reasoning begins in the sixteenth century. For premodern understanding , which Reiss characterizes as a “discursive exchange within the world,”19 recourse to the referential world is fundamental to the production of any type of certain knowledge, which is effected only with great difficulty. Foucault characterizes this analogical mechanism as an unstable , almost interminable process in which resemblance never remains stable within itself; it can be fixed only if it refers back to another similitude, which then, in turn, refers to others; each resemblance, therefore, has value only from the accumulation of all the others, and the whole world must be explored if even the slightest of analogies is to be justified and finally take on the appearance of certainty.20 In sharp contrast to an organizing principle of “sameness” is the modern system centered around a new principle of “identity and difference,” which Reiss more succinctly characterizes as a “reasoning practice upon 19. Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 30. 20. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), 30. modernism and spain 71 the world” (30), a mode of ratiocination in which the human mind frees itself from referentiality in order to perform operations upon the external world. This fundamental epistemological shift allows for the emergence of the intellectual structure responsible for constituting “modernity”— that is, its successive redefinitions from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries—via a revolutionary expansion of knowledge. Fundamental to Foucault’s and Reiss’s concept of a discourse of modernity is autonomous, “free-thinking” subjectivity. The movement away from dependence on the experiential world toward an outlook in which the “world” becomes the vehicle by which to perform intellectual operations upon it is impossible without the construction of a subjective position aware of a distinctness and separation from one’s physical circumstance , in the classic statement of renaissance art theorist Leon Battista Alberti, that there is “a definite distance for seeing.”21 In art and literature , the “superior” imitative models from the renaissance onward are directly attributable to the invention of one-point perspective, which brings forth a “new man” whose subjectivity allows him to use signs in a different way. If premodern representation depends upon, as Foucault says, “the sign and its likeness [.....] nature and the world [.....] intertwine[d] with one another to infinity, [to] form for those who can read it, one vast single text” (34), the “new artist,” like his counterparts in other areas, becomes an active manipulator of signs that belong to him as the consequence of a much expanded imagination-consciousness that allows him to produce a multitude of autonomous versions of the world. While Spanish writers reveal an intimate familiarity with the values of the discourse of modernity, their responses to the variations on European representational themes throughout the modern era are less than fully accepting of it. Indeed, they are often distinguished by resistance to it, yet more importantly, by a willingness to engage, dialectically, their reservations about modern literary paradigms embodied in the ideology of autonomous subjectivity. In opposition to the “thinking subject” is a 21. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 57. 72 modernism and spain premodern “structural” model of consciousness that does not recognize a “clear and distinct” separation from the world and that considers such a “definite distance for seeing” as a source of error and even delusion. In fact, the enactment of such differences in relation to the question of subjectivity constitutes the major focus of the most important early modern Spanish masterworks—Don Quijote, La vida es sueño, El burlador de Sevilla, the picaresque novel, and many others. All of these works feature similar situations in that the protagonists find themselves, at least initially, at the margins of society for whatever reasons. The successful characters, however, are able to find their way toward the social and moral mainstream , while the unsuccessful ones remain at the periphery or suffer an even harsher fate. Foucault’s interpretation of Don Quijote, prominently featured in The Order of Things, considers Don Quijote’s madness as an embodiment of premodern thinking, a nostalgia for an earlier time when a system of similitudes and resemblances guided the production of knowledge that must now confront the windmills of an intractable, implacable reality in which words are no longer anything but what they are; words wander off on their own, without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness [.....] The written word and things no longer resemble one another [.....] there has opened up a field of knowledge in which, because of an essential rupture in the Western world, what has become important is no longer resemblances but identities and differences. (48–50) I believe, however, that precisely the opposite takes place in part 1 since in reading the long-discredited books of chivalry to great excess Don Quijote incapacitates himself to engage in a discursive exchange within the world and instead performs ludicrous reasoning practices. He fills his imagination with words and images that have no basis in referentiality and thus alienates himself from the all-encompassing structure, the “great text of the world,” in effect, willing himself into the madness of a self-created, subjective consciousness, the consequence of a devotion to a discourse of “difference,” which leaves him without an “identimodernism and spain 73 ty.” Don Quijote parodies the new discourse of modernism by embracing values inspired in his counterparts in Europe in order to become a monstrous caricature of the type of autonomous subjectivity that Cervantes and his Spanish colleagues consider to be the foundation stone of error and delusion. As a “free-thinking subject,” Don Quijote denies himself the capacity to participate in the discourse of salvation. Foucault’s reading is even more infelicitous in relation to part 2, a major motivation of which is to restore the madman to sanity by having him return to the world and to remember his real name, Alonso Quijano. Only by adjusting his intellectual position can Don Quijote undertake the type of “reading ” that will bring him redemption and give his life positive meaning. Like most contemporary interpreters of Cervantes’ masterpiece, Foucault ’s interest in Don Quijote stops at part 1. There are, however, a number of prominent Spanish characters who also begin at the alienated margins yet who do not succeed in reincorporating themselves into the mainstream . Principal among these are the pícaros (Lázaro, Buscón, Guzmán) whose names are also the titles of the books in which they relate their unhappy life stories. Like Don Quijote, the pícaro is an ingenioso, a man of wit who confides in his own free-thinking subjectivity only to outwit himself. Frequently associated with unstable watery mediums—Lázaro claims to be “remando a buen puerto” (“rowing to a safe port”), Guzmán writes his story as a galley slave, Buscón travels the sea to the New World to begin another unhappy chapter of his life—these characters delude themselves by their subjective perspectives in order to expose untenable lives built on a sea of “difference,” a self-engendered discourse that keeps them at the margins. Spanish resistance to the type of subjectivity that these characters exemplify is also prominent in the comedia. Examples abound of characters whose excesses of detached, self-absorbed thinking and imagining lead to delusional antisocial consequences. Calderón’s wife murderers in El médico de su honra and El pintor de su deshonra, who seize upon flimsy circumstantial evidence to avenge imagined offenses against family honor, as well as prosperous villagers in Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea and Lope’s Villano en su rincón, who represent for practical purposes an 74 modernism and spain incipient middle class unwilling to be governed by established laws and/ or authority, are further indications of the social confusion and personal delusion that accompany the appearance of a “new man” in Europe. The most powerful manifestations of the monstrous consequences of “reasoning practices upon the world,” however, are developed in Calderón’s La vida es sueño and Tirso’s El burlador de Sevilla. La vida es sueño parallels Don Quijote in that the “monster” Segismundo progresses from extreme marginality toward an affirmation of his proper role in his society by means of adjustments to his understanding of the world. Made monstrous because his father, King Basilio, imprisoned him at birth and thus made him unable to engage himself with the world, Segismundo finds that his considerable education is ineffective because his knowledge is groundless and therefore incapable of providing him an understanding of the all-encompassing structure with which it needs to be integrated. Even more monstrous than Segismundo is his father, who by means of deluded “reasoning practices”—his private , subjective determination that he can penetrate mysteries reserved for a higher power—produces a human creature who can think as an autonomous subject only apart from a structure that requires active participation with the natural and social world. It is by means of experiences initially understood as “dreams” that Segismundo discovers the capacity to affirm the values of “discursive exchange within the world” and thus to surpass his father’s intellectualizations and to affirm a transcendent structure that leads to an ultimate truth: Lo que está determinado Del cielo, y en azul tabla Dios con el dedo escribió, De quien son cifras y estampas Tantos papeles azules Que adornan letras doradas, Nunca mienten, nunca engañan.22 (v. 3162–68) 22. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño, ed. A. E. Sloman (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1961), v. 3162–68. modernism and spain 75 What is set in heaven, And which is on a tablet of blue Is written by God’s finger, From whom come the ciphers and imprints, The many blue pages That golden letters adorn Never lie, never deceive. Affirming a “better reality,” Segismundo’s message speaks as well to all of Europe: the “new European man” is the real monster. Tirso’s depiction of Don Juan Tenorio in El burlador de Sevilla delivers the most forceful message of all since his protagonist embodies the discourse of modernity to the fullest extent imaginable. Paying only lip service to the existence of a structure ordained by God as the proving ground of redemption, Don Juan uses his wit and intellect to commit repeated acts of treachery. God is so offended by Don Juan’s unrepentant state of mind that He intervenes directly to punish an anarchic subject who threatens the entire fabric and structure of society because he embodies a different set of values. Of all the brilliant Spanish characters that could have inspired replicas by other authors only Don Juan, and spectacularly so, captivates the literary, philosophical, and psychological imagination of Europe. Part of the reason for this is because Tirso’s character so closely corresponds, in his capacity for “autonomous free thinking,” to values that in Europe are worthy of emulation rather than condemnation. As Europe progressively invests in the rational thinking subject, Spanish reservations about its “dark side” continue. If as Foucault describes, Europe abandons the structural model of premodern consciousness, Spain does not, yet not primarily because of a continuing resistance to secularism. Spanish participation in the Enlightenment—represented here in Fray Benito Feijoo and Goya—extends the consistent Spanish position of dialectical opposition to the European construction of a rationalist model of autonomous subjectivity. Prominent among the topics of discussion in the Age of Reason is the nature and scope of what by mid76 modernism and spain century is reason’s most prominent counterpart, the imagination, which becomes a progressively more important topic during the eighteenth century, especially in the context of pronouncements on the nature of the sublime by influential thinkers such as Kant, in The Critique of Judgment and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, and Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. The high valuation of the “natural sublime” by these and other thinkers is another significant occasion for the strong enhancement of autonomous subjectivity since the colossal, form-defying nature of the sublime—and the delight that is integral to its experience—is accompanied by the aggrandizement of the scope of the imagination and, therefore , of human autonomous subjectivity as well. The imagination now becomes a partner of the intellect rather than to continue in its premodern subservient role. These philosophical enhancements of the capacity for “free thinking” prepare the way for an even greater role for the imagination during romanticism. Significantly, Spanish thinkers continue to resist these enhancements and the progressively greater independence of the human subject from the referential world. The most systematic Spanish advocate of the virtues of reason is Feijoo , who understands that his intellectual mission is to expose errors of all kinds, a primary source of which lies in the newer ideas regarding the imagination as an active, coequal partner of the intellect. The most signi ficant source of error is the imagination and its false products: idols of the mind, ungrounded images that disengage the intellect from the wider structure of the world. Indeed, as he advocates the importance of reason , Feijoo continues to adhere to the traditional epistemological model of the “rational soul” consisting of the intellect, will, and memory. In this model, the imagination is primarily a conduit that communicates external perceptions to the understanding in order for judgments to be made. Feijoo’s objection to an enhanced role for the imagination is that it separates the human subject from direct observation and experience in order to favor the represented image or idea. Thus, for example, he describes Descartes’s mind as being “de una imaginación vasta y elevada” modernism and spain 77 (“of a vast and elevated imagination”) that “duda de todo, hasta la existencia de Dios y del mundo” (“doubts everything, even the existence of God and the world”).23 He and others have abandoned the experiential world and the structural model of being for the “arbitrarias ideas” (“arbitrary ideas”) of the imagination. The means to avoid error is thus to “rendirse a la experiencia, si no queremos abandonar el camino real de la verdad; y buscar la naturaleza en sí misma, no en la engañosa imagen que de ella forma nuestra fantasía” (“give oneself over to experience, if we do not want to abandon the real road of truth; and to search for nature in itself, not the deceptive image of it that our fantasy forms”).24 Feijoo’s warning about the role of imaginative excess in the creation of a new and monstrous subjectivity is echoed strongly, if eccentrically, in Goya, whose fullest exposition on the role of the imagination in relation to reason is found in Los caprichos, especially the celebrated self-portrait accompanied by the phrase “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (“The sleep/dream of reason begets monsters”).25 This series offers strong testimony to Goya’s disenchantment with both the Enlightenment version of reason and the unchecked imagination that produces a fragmented consciousness incapable of affirming its stability and autonomy . Goya subverts traditional epistemology by denying the understanding a role. His vision here is more than simply modern, it is “modernist” in the sense that it decries the supremacy of the paradigm of “reasoning practices upon the world.” Like the unfortunate characters from Golden Age literature whose autonomous subjectivity condemns them to ever more severe alienation from the world, Goya as a character in a picture book and as a person heralds the unreasonableness of a rationalist doctrine that cannot account for his lived experience. As another exemplary instance of Spanish dialectical engagement with Europe, Goya’s radical leap into the “modern” in the process invalidates the conventional dis23 . Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro, Obras escogidas. Biblioteca de autores espa- ñoles, vol. 56 (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), 131, 64. 24. Feijoo y Montenegro, Obras escogidas, vol. 142, 340. 25. See C. Christopher Soufas, “‘Esto si que es leer’: Learning to Read Goya’s Los Caprichos ,” Word and Image 2 (1986): 311–30, for a fuller discussion. 78 modernism and spain course of modernity. His vision is grounded in an awareness of the monstrous constitution of the autonomous European subject. At the moment of the triumph of the middle-class political revolutions, Goya does not celebrate its victories but rather heralds the inadequacy of its ideology to interpret human experience. Goya is thus a precursor to what will eventually become prominent a century later as modernists throughout Europe begin to perceive, rather belatedly in comparison to Spain, the unreasonableness of modern doctrines of subjectivity. Spain’s minimal participation in romanticism is represented by José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, a play often cited for its “modernity” because of its many departures from realist conventions. It nevertheless continues the Spanish tradition of resistance to European subjective models. The play, in fact, offers a brilliant reply to the now institutionalized values of European subjectivity as they related to the discourse on the sublime and the beautiful. By the mid-nineteenth century, the figure of Don Juan had been fully appropriated by Europe and had certainly captivated the collective imagination. Zorrilla presents his audience in Don Juan Tenorio a character who fully embodies the most salient aspects of what Kant calls the “feeling of the sublime”26 and who is resisted and ultimately transformed by a character, the virginal and delicate Inés, who is consistently connected with the very terms that Burke uses to describe the “beautiful .” Given this perspective, the play is not so much about Don Juan’s improbable salvation but rather, at the level of legend and imagination where this character is most real for nineteenth-century audiences, about a redress of the imbalance between the subject values ordered around romantic concepts of the sublime and the beautiful. If the sublime affirms an aggressive, dominating, masculine form of monstrous subjectivity that fully affirms Goya’s vision of the human constitution, then the antidote is certainly a strong dose of “the beautiful,” a tempering element to such a self-begetting form of subjectivity, which Zorrilla provides in a play that, among other things, reaffirms the “Spanish tradition.” 26. See C. Christopher Soufas, “The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Imagination in Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio,” MLN 110 (1995): 302–19. modernism and spain 79 Even toward the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish consciousness of and resistance to what is by now the fully hegemonic bourgeois subject—that is, a mode of being that has acquired “naturalness,” that has transcended ideology and is aligned with the “objective” discourses of science—continues its dialectical critique. More significant than Pardo Bazán’s rebuff of the deterministic aspects of naturalism in “La cuestión palpitante” (“The Burning Question”) are the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, whose most notable characters reaffirm the consistent Spanish position evident since the Golden Age.27 Whether sympathetic or not, most of Galdós’s characters who persist in an attitude of performing “reasoning practices upon the world” are singularly unsuccessful . The downfall of Isidora Rufete of La desheredada, Ramón Villaamil of Miau, and the merciless usurer Francisco Torquemada of the trilogy bearing his name is their intellectual detachment from the world, their propensity to wrap themselves in their own isolating subjectivity that leaves them ill-equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of their lives. Isadora’s obsession that she is a displaced heiress leads her to identify herself with premises—quite similar to the heroines of popular novels—that guide her progressively into self-deception and, when reality fails to conform to her imagined idea, eventually to a dissolute life. Likewise, the unfortunate Villaamil, dismissed from his job only a couple of months before he can collect his pension, also devises pathetic, if entertaining, mental strategies that nevertheless lead to progressively more ungrounded fantasies and, finally, suicide. The supreme materialist Torquemada does not suffer poverty, but when a crisis arises that money cannot resolve, the death of his son whom he had imagined to be a genius destined to save the world, Galdós makes it clear that Torquemada becomes the victim of his own misguided self-importance, bitter and resentful toward a world whose only meaning is a material one. Ultimately, Galdós’s characters are not tragic but, as the modern representatives of a consistent Spanish attitude and “tradition,” delud27 . See Luisa Elena Delgado, La imagen elusiva: lenguaje y representación en la narrativa de Galdós (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 11–30, for a related discussion. 80 modernism and spain ed, done in by their incapacity to acknowledge the world. The exemplary counterpoint to these characters is the servant Benina of Misericordia, who suffers the cruel injustice of being discharged from the family she so faithfully has served and kept together as the fortune of her mistress improves. Yet it is also clear that Benina, even though she eventually becomes a beggar, will certainly endure because she does not live exclusively in her consciousness. Like her counterparts, she is a “thinking subject,” yet one who believes in other dimensions of “reality.” However rich and original his characters may be, Galdós’s writing at the very moment that modernism is beginning to assert itself, also reaffirms the “Spanish tradition,” which, from the perspective of subjectivity, at no time during the modern period conforms to the conventional European model. As late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European writers and artists become disillusioned with the self-satisfaction of the middle-class subject, modernism emerges to offer its own critiques that in relation to Spain actually mark a turn toward consistent Spanish positions throughout the course of its modern literary history. If contemporary criticism is at somewhat of a loss to offer “positive” accounts of the contributions of modernism, perhaps tired of its verbal disruptions that today seem to some critics like rather meaningless word games, not to mention its often extremist ideological affinities, there seems little doubt that if a case is to be made for an affirmative agenda for this period it would seem to center around the issue of subjectivity. Judith Ryan has commented that by the end of the nineteenth century empiricist subjective models grounded primarily in sense perceptions were already undermining the idea of the middle-class subject.28 The growing awareness of what Ryan terms “the vanishing subject” thus becomes the basis for more intense explorations of alternative models during modernism .29 Analogous to the renaissance project of bringing forth a “new man,” therefore, a spectrum of artistic interests dedicated to new modes 28. See also, from the perspective of class and gender, Bretz, Encounters across Borders, 347–440. 29. Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 13–22. modernism and spain 81 of being in the world—that is, to the creation of another “new European man”—arises in modernism. In relation to middle-class norms, these efforts parallel the Spanish tradition to a great extent. While the rest of Europe must come to a somewhat abrupt and often alienated awareness of the insufficiencies inherent in its most important cultural product that is now understood as stifling and empty, Spanish writers who never fully invested in this ideology are poised in relation to Continental movements, as during no time in modern literary history, to continue a critique that elsewhere has only just begun. From the Golden Age to modernism, free-thinking autonomous subjectivity has been consistently portrayed in all the great characters and stories from the Spanish tradition as monstrous. The great Spanish characters have nearly always been cerebral types who parody their European counterparts’ capacity for free thinking. Excessive thinking detached from one’s social circumstance invariably leads to disastrous consequences for the individual and for his/her milieu. Those characters who can free themselves from their monstrousness do so because they recognize their interconnectedness within a structure much greater than themselves. The unsuccessful characters—who take the law into their own hands, who murder their wives, and the like—deceive themselves as they respond to mental scenarios that have no basis in reality. As they embrace a misplaced faith in reasoning practices in the face of a world capable of easily overturning all theories, enlightened or otherwise , about the proper scope of the workings of the autonomous rational mind, they become monsters. The antidote to the monster position harkens back invariably to a modernized version of a premodern model invoked here as a “structural” model of consciousness in which reasoning practices alone are never sufficient to bring about a desired resolution to a character’s dilemma. As modernists throughout Europe begin to reject the bourgeois subject and search out alternative positions, they typically embrace two predominant alternatives that correspond quite remarkably to the longstanding Spanish “monster” and “structural” models. Arguably, the most 82 modernism and spain productive agenda of modernist literature is the exploration of the evolutions which take place in relation to bourgeois subjectivity and to which Spanish models have much to contribute. Johanna Drucker characterizes a popular subjective model of modernism as fundamentally the psychoanalytic subject, “constantly in formation, psychically dynamic, open-ended and complex,” and further, that this “subject as such is never complete, whole, or intact: it is split from the very outset between self/ other, conscious/unconscious.”30 With the ascendance of the structural models of Freud, Jung, and others, the ego-centered subject is progressively understood as simply a public referent, part of something much more significant. “Being” is not centered in consciousness, and if there is indeed a core of being, it resides in a much wider structure. The modern structural models of consciousness, however, are not essentially different from the premodern structural model replaced by the “thinking subject” during the renaissance. The greatest difference between these constructs, of course, is the domain of being. Taking its clues from the romantic notion of the natural sublime, that sphere in modernism becomes an “oceanic” unconscious from which the “island” of consciousness emerges. In premodern terms, of course, this area was to be encountered , via one’s faithful reading of the “great text of the world,” in the realm of eternity. Full being did not reside in an earthly domain or in a subjective consciousness, but rather in the “second,” superior reality . Thus, for many modernists as well as the premodernist, being is not consciousness-centered but resides in a structure. The other pathway during modernism lies in affirming versions of what in the Spanish tradition is consistently portrayed as “monstrous” subjectivity, the invariably unflattering parody of middle-class “freethinkers .” This expresses itself during modernism in the also prominent tendency of many early contemporary writers to reject the supremacy of the unconscious and structural subjectivity and instead to infuse their works with characters and/or personae who dedicate their efforts 30. Theorizing Modernism, 109, 100. modernism and spain 83 to affirming the fullness of being on their own terms. This position may well be understood as a reaction to the more expansive structural model . In practical terms, this position represents an intensification, sometimes quite extreme, of the consciousness-centered bourgeois model of the nineteenth century. The appeal here is also to force, yet in the special sense that what is ascribed in structural models to unconsciousirrational force becomes instead a reassertion of the intellectual will in order to affirm in consciousness what structural models suggest lies beyond any such conscious control. This phenomenon is also prominent in many early contemporary Spanish masterpieces, in variant forms, either in affirmation of the experience of epiphanic moments of “full being” or in the form of an aggressive , willful subject position. What Eliot, Pound, and, after them, the early apologists for the new art proclaim is modernism’s will to create timeless , “eternal” myths in opposition to history is, in fact, part of a more ambitious project, the creation of a “new man” whose beliefs, values, and perspective on the world repudiate middle-class norms. This rather violent bifurcation of the nineteenth-century subject model is shaped, however, by the fact that in both positions the role of force is central: on the one hand the raw force of the unconscious, on the other the force of the will-intellect. Subsequent chapters will examine the extensiveness of Spanish participation in this central dimension of the aestheticideological agenda of modernism, in all genres and, as outlined above, in all expressive modalities, while also following, as much as possible, a chronological progression. 84 modernism and spain ...