By the end of the nineteenth century, a deep sense of disillusionment and exhaustion had settled over Spain. While the perception of decay and lost opportunities was generally felt throughout Europe, in Spain the circumstances were particularly striking. Despite a century of enormous progress and changes, the Old World was ill at ease with itself, a feeling of crisis at hand. Somewhat belatedly, Spain, too, had participated in the economic and social advances of the period, but always with the awareness of having once been an empire. Indeed, by 1898 the loss of empire was almost total after the disastrous war with the United States in Cuba. The sense of having come undone nationally, however, coexisted paradoxically with another feeling: the growing suspicion that the nation had never really coalesced ideologically or historically. Both regionalistic and political differences became more pronounced at the same time, as elsewhere secularization signaled a crisis of spiritual and moral values. On a personal level, Unamuno expressed Spanish isolationism thus: “Every soul lives alone among other souls alone, in a naked, sterile desert, where they twist and turn like the poor spirits of skeletons shut inside their anemic skins.”1
This inwardness suggests both atomization and the fin de siglo desire to evade unpleasant historical realities. Similarly, narrative tends to break down into smaller fragments, thus on the one hand mimicking the perceived instabilities of the period and on the other problematizing an uneasy relationship with the present. In this essay, I shall use the texts of Ramón del Valle-Inclán as exemplary of decadent writing in fin de siglo Spain, placing his work within his native Galician, Spanish, and European contexts of historical decline, local nationalism, and pan-European aesthetic movements. On the local and national levels, Valle’s early work Femeninas (‘Feminine Portraits’) and the Sonatas can be seen as heavily committed to a cultural and literary genealogical imperative. Here, through the figure of his creation of the Marqués de Bradomín, Valle invents his own new “lineage” of the self through writing, thus accomplishing two things: the establishment of his own originality and the legitimatization of a renascent Galician culture. Paradoxically, he does so ideologically on the basis of Galician and Spanish historical decadence. Even more paradoxically, he creates this new, peculiarly Galician-Spanish lineage by inventive borrowings from the European tradition of aestheticism, which begins with Baudelaire. Decadence as a generative metaphor produces artistically a genealogy of the literary imagination. This notion of lineage is often literally part of the narration itself in the form of decaying aristocracies and enfeebled anciens régimes. Such characters and their family histories symbolically serve as figures of a socio-historical crisis, the crisis of a decadent society faced with the arrival of the modern. These figures function in a positive sense as a way of working around the problem of decline, because as tropes they also represent a new style, a new vision of things, albeit fragmented and unstable. This genealogy of the writing self is, in the final analysis, anti-genealogical in nature.
An obsessive preoccupation with decadence defines the last years of the century throughout Europe. But decadence is not simply a central theme: it becomes the explanatory metaphor, closely related to the way degeneracy theory in clinical medicine, science, politics, and religion seemed to explain why societies did not work properly and therefore did not conform to the expected scheme of things. As Stuart Gilman points out, a generative metaphor like degeneration (or decadence) occurs “in situations where there are dilemmas – social circumstances where there are stubborn conflicts of perspective.”2 At the same time, he adds, the “closeness of ‘fit’ [of degeneracy theory] with accepted perceptions of reality makes it acceptable, and, in a sense, makes it generative.”3 Thus, for example, inequalities between the sexes or domination over colonized peoples could be “explained” without having to deal seriously with the problems and conflicts engendered by such relationships.
Decadence as a generative, or explanatory, metaphor could be used, like degeneracy theory, to justify cultural or historical decline, scientific alarmism (the end of the universe, as revealed in the second law of thermodynamics), or moral corruption, among other things. By the same token, decadence, which can only be understood in relation to such normative concepts as progress, health, and nature, is implicitly an unstable idea, subject to differing interpretations and dependent on a range of shaded meanings. Why, for example, did there persist a feeling of decline in post-1870 France, despite the country’s rapid recovery from the Franco-Prussian War? Clearly, subjective understandings of decay come into play here. Decadence suggests, etymologically and historically, a falling away; and temporally points backward to the past. The relation between the past and the present becomes fraught with dissonance and disjunction. Preoccupation with decadence is only partially about the past, and has more to do with the present, with dissatisfaction over present realities, which are viewed through the prism of pastness.
In this sense, decadence, which is a pan-European preoccupation, contains within it both a backward and a forward movement, making it difficult to assess precisely the standpoint from which the phenomenon is being viewed. Marx, for example, perceived the bourgeoisie as decadent. Yet cultural refinement and aesthetic sensibility, which are characteristic of decadence in the arts and literature (Oscar Wilde, the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, the Naturalist turned decadentist writer Huysmans, Valle-Inclán), spring, ultimately, from that very same bourgeoisie. Decadence is usually seen in opposition to progress; yet some nineteenth-century observers considered progress itself, such as the intensive industrialization of England, a sign of decadence. As David Weir points out, “the paradoxical nature of decadence and its resistance to definition are among the most important elements of its meaning.”4
In the realm of aesthetics, decadence as style and as aesthetic creed emerges from the ashes of Romanticism, turning into the phoenix of modernism. Literary and artistic decadence is not only transitional in nature, but paradoxically innovative. Indeed, David Weir suggests that decadence “is less a period of transition than a dynamics of transition” (Decadence, p. 15). In narrative, decadent writing wavers between the mimetic drive toward realism and an anti-realistic impulse away from the present, away from coherent, linear plot and character developments. What realist and decadent writings have in common is a profound dissatisfaction with the material world of the historical present. Hence, a realist-Naturalist novel like Clarín/Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta (‘The Judge’s Wife’, 1884–5) is deeply absorbed in the presentation of everyday realities – the backbiting provincial world of Vetusta, the physical and psychological illnesses of the protagonist, Ana Ozores – as signs of cultural, historical and moral decadence without forsaking causality or the fiction of mimesis. Yet, like Zola and Huysmans, who were steeped in realism and Naturalism, Clarín drifted into another transitional mode of writing, clearly foreshadowed in the pervasive decadent motifs of his masterpiece and brilliantly developed in his second novel, Su único hijo (His Only Son, 1891), in which he deploys heavy doses of decadence, hysteria, and reverie. One could fruitfully read this later novel alongside narratives like Huysmans’s A rebours (Against Nature, 1884), the key text of decadent writing, and Zola’s Le Rêve (The Dream, 1888), drenched in symbolism and escapism.
In Spain, one of the best literary examples of decadence as both innovative art form and a generative metaphor is the early work of Ramón del Valle-Inclán, in particular Femeninas (1895) and the Sonatas (1902–5). Valle-Inclán’s first book, Femeninas, drew the notice of fellow Galician Manuel Murguía, a key figure of the Galician literary renaissance. In his prologue to Femeninas, Murguía hails the newness of Valle’s work: “Such is its merit that it speaks to us of what is always eternal, always young, in a new form, under a different style and with an original charm.”5 He adds, however, that the newness of Femeninas is relative, being new only in the place of its publication (the province of Galicia). Murguía’s argument joins originality to local nationalistic concerns, claiming Valle as a native son whose style and vision are intrinsically Galician (hence, original). The privileging of feeling, the lightly ironic tone, the fluid style, he says, are Galician, while the derivative character of Femeninas arises from the modernista mold (or decadent style).
Murguía also insists on an implicit realism in Valle’s text, suggesting that these exotic tales of love are based on actual experiences, not mere inventions (“Prólogo,” p. 47). Using Naturalist language, he refers to both the adventures and the women of these stories as “human documents” and the product of “experimentation” (p. 48). He considers the stories “confessional” as well. It is hard to judge how much Murguía really took seriously the “documental” or “confessional” nature of Femeninas. But the “nouveau frisson” (his words), or new thrill, he sees in Valle’s book, which he relates to the prose-poem form, is consistent with his insistence on the experimentation he finds in Femeninas (p. 51). Murguía slides over any possible conflicting understandings of the term “experimentation,” which suggests both Naturalistic and modernistic meanings in his prologue. This is important, because it provides us with a fascinating glimpse into one reader’s reaction to Valle’s early work. Murguía has captured the transitional form of the work, seeing it as “romantic, and yet quite new” (p. 50).
The prologue is illuminating in another way, as it is structured through an implicit contrast between the feminine and the masculine in Femeninas. The style of Valle’s text, he says, is “feminine,” possessing “a feminine, nearly sinuous, grace” (p. 47); it is feminine, too, in feeling and subject matter (p. 50). In contrast, Murguía places the author and the notion of authorship within a male context. I remember Valle’s father well, he exclaims; the son bears the same name and follows the same path of glory. He concludes on this note: “And in the name of his father, I say to him: Son, fulfill your destiny, and may the future awaiting you be good to you!” (p. 53).
In this manner, the paternal order is passed on, not only personally but collectively since it is also part of a Galician tradition (“the pride and glory of this poor Galicia”, p. 53). Murguía links Valle-Inclán as author biologically and culturally to a genealogy, which is not only familial but textual. His prologue inscribes the text and writing as feminine, while authorship, though male-centered, becomes equally internalized, made textual as it were, by being linked in a cultural genealogy to a line of Galician “fathers.” Murguía makes note of Valle’s forebears, who were great captains and notable men of science and literature. It is for this that Galicia is remembered. Ironically, we remember Manuel Murguía today mainly for being the husband of the poet and novelist Rosalía de Castro, one of those proverbially strong-minded Galician women of whom Emilia Pardo Bazán spoke so forcefully in La mujer española.
An exquisite verbal bibelot or decorative object, Femeninas may strike us today as hopelessly dated and derivative writing. Nonetheless, Murguía’s intuition was essentially correct. Femeninas is Valle-Inclán’s first significant experiment in what has variously been called modernismo, decadentismo, or simply aestheticism. As such, the stories of Femeninas anticipate the novelist’s more mature writing of the Sonatas and later works. As decadent style, content and form, both Femeninas and especially the Sonatas are supremely narcissistic texts, reflecting a heightened artistic self-consciousness which insists on writing as verbal artifact, privileges the superiority of art and artifice over nature, explores new sensations, presents a fragmented sense of reality, and evades the present.
Like other decadent writers, Valle-Inclán deliberately exploits what Max Nordau, author of the influential study Degeneration (1895), and others harshly criticized as decadent, weak, or immoral as a way of simultaneously glorifying the artist and artistic originality and of criticizing what Valle, Huysmans, Wilde, Rachilde, and others considered truly decadent: the dull middle-class spirit of conformity and cowardice. Valle-Inclán found an alternative world in the recreation of an idealized, aristocratic Galician past, an invented genealogy of quasi-biological and cultural significance. Yet the really fundamental genealogy created here is more textual than literal or biographical: textual in the sense that what Valle legitimizes as his true “lineage” is writing itself, symbolized in the melancholy posturing of the Marqués de Bradomín, a don Juan whose greatest conquest is not of women (with whom he more often than not fails) but of language (his memoirs, or the Sonatas). Brad Epps has argued that in Valle’s Sonata de otoño (Autumn Sonata, 1902) “genealogy, and the generative force it implies, is at once deadened and melancholily preserved in and as autobiography, itself repeatedly posed, and posing, as a not so distant relative of fiction.”6 Epps’s helpful insight encourages us to examine further what the “autobiographical” might mean and what place it holds within a literary frame of highly self-conscious writing. I would suggest that Valle’s constant recreation of himself through writing and through the mask of the Marqués de Bradomín is not literally autobiographical (as Epps also sees), but a symbolic genealogical impulse which ultimately deconstructs itself into something else. That something else is writing itself.
Murguía unconsciously saw the link between genealogy and writing, when he spoke in the same breath of Valle’s new style and his family history. Valle’s texts are indeed about families. But as with many other decadent texts, such realist/Naturalist rootedness, which appears ideologically and causally determined, is an illusion. The classic work of this kind is Huysmans’s Against Nature, which begins with these lines: “Judging by the few portraits that have been preserved in the Château de Lourps, the line of the Floressas des Esseintes consisted, in bygone days, of muscular warriors and grim-looking mercenaries.”7 The first sentence of Alas’s Su único hijo is: “Emma Valcárcel was an only child, and spoiled.”8 Emma’s family tree, like that of des Esseintes, is long and illustrious but decayed, having begun to retrogress atavistically back to the tribal state. She, too, is the last of her line.
In contrast, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) appears to swerve from the same kind of opening: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”9 Then Wilde moves on, first to a painterly, distanced description of nature as seen from within the studio, and next to a full-length portrait of a young man. Similarly, Rachilde in Monsieur Venus (1884) begins with the realistic setting of a tenement in which she places a young aristocratic woman, Mlle Raoule de Vénérande: “In the dark, narrow passage that the concierge had pointed out, Mlle de Vénérande was groping for a door.”10 But the differences are only apparent, for like Huysmans and Clarín, both Rachilde and Wilde rely on genealogy as the literal and symbolic generative metaphor for their narratives. Dorian Gray is the last grandson of Lord Kelso, and an orphan with “an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were” (p. 35). His mother, carried away by “a mad passion,” married unsuitably. Mlle de Vénérande is also orphaned, with a blue-blooded debauché for a father and a mother with “the most natural and violent appetite” (p. 282). Joining this decayed aristocracy is Valle-Inclán’s Marqués de Bradomín, whose inveterate don Juanism brings him to the brink of commiting incest in Sonata de invierno (Winter Sonata).
In all of these decadent narratives, something has gone wildly wrong with the family histories contained therein. These stories are not about the biological imperative to reproduce or generate a family (or text). They are framed by artifice. It is the “frame” of art that is really the focus of these texts. Thus, Dorian Gray’s picture becomes more central than Dorian Gray himself, who is “simply a motive in art” to the painter Basil Hallward (p. 11). Prefacing the novel are a series of aphorisms about art, beginning with: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” (p. xxiii). Against Nature privileges art over story with an opening series of family portraits in the prologue. As Nicholas White suggests in his introduction, Huysmans is writing against (à rebours, literally the wrong, or opposite, way) plot, against conventional storytelling as represented by family history (Against Nature, pp. xiv–xv). Clarín also underplays plot in Su único hijo, centering instead on the dreamy character of Bonifacio Reyes, whose initial presentation seems like a portrait from the Romantic era: “He was good-looking in a romantic sort of way, regular stature, pale very oval face [ . . .]” (p. 51). The only thing exceptional about Bonifacio, says the narrator, is his handwriting, which is fantastic and capricious, that is, artistic. For Bonifacio, like des Esseintes, Dorian Gray, Raoule de Vénérande, and, of course, the Marqués de Bradomín, possesses an artist’s soul – or at least he, like they, likes to think he does. In all these texts, one could say that the portrait, or the pose, takes over, in the guise of the archetypal decadent figure, that of the dandy. (Even Mlle de Vénérande is a cross-dressing dandy.) The dandy, as Baudelaire saw in one of the key texts to decadence, “The Painter of Modern Life,” glorifies the self and individuality, being “in love with distinction above all things.” In dandyism, he continues, there “is first and foremost the burning need to create for oneself a personal originality.”11 To be decadent is not simply to cultivate but to create the self as though it were a work of art. The decadent places artifice and the artificial above nature. Decadence, then, is a peculiar form of heroism for Baudelaire, because the dandy must strive for the perfection of distinction, of singularity, set apart not only from the deadening conformism of middle-class life but from the apparent formlessness of nature itself.
The dandy, or the decadent, I would suggest, represents the figure of art itself in texts like Against Nature, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Sonatas, in which the trick is to convert life into art. The cult of personality which the Marqués de Bradomín espouses in Valle’s narratives moves us away from the weight of biological heredity (family histories), and thereby mimetic representation of the “real,” and toward art as autonomous verbal artifact, toward a “poetics of the real,” in which language begins to efface the traces of representational writing. Thus there is a continuous line connecting such decadentist texts as the Sonatas, Against Nature, and The Picture of Dorian Gray to modernism, in which all of the characteristics noted above are fully realized, in this sense incorporating the achievement of decadent writing (Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Azorín, Miró, etc.).
If decadent writing innovatively looks forward to modernism and the avant-garde, it also looks backward, to decline and the past. The styles and concept of decadence are, ultimately, inseparable in this sense. One can only understand decadent style in the light of what such writers felt they were missing. Decline is conceivable only because of what came before, a presumably more glorious and splendid time. The loss of empire, among other things, becomes a key image in decadent writing. Huysmans not only incorporates the fall of the Roman Empire into the more essayistic portions of Against Nature, but discursively exploits the development of Late Latin, partly as a way of illustrating des Esseintes’s love of things deliquescent, including linguistic decomposition.
What Huysmans really does is to make the fall of the Roman Empire an actual part of his narrative (in Chapter 3) and, indirectly, to suggest as a consequence the historic importance of philology as a kind of narrative. He writes: “The Western Empire crumbled under the impact [of the Barbarians] [ . . .] the end of the universe seemed to be at hand [ . . .] Years went by; the Barbarian tongues began to systematize themselves, to emerge from their sclerosis, to develop into true languages [ . . .]” (p. 31). In other words, language in Against Nature not only takes center stage but does so as a consequence of historical decline, of loss. Language takes an active role in constructing itself, according to this view. Philology in Huysmans’s text does what Edward Said says it does in another context: “Philology taught one how culture is a construct, an articulation [ . . .] even a creation, but [nothing more than] a quasi-organic structure.”12 The construction of philology, like that of decadent writing, is built on the remains of something lost, whether it be a common unifying language, the unity of empire, or the wholeness of the individual personality. This sense of loss produces feelings of ambivalence, because what is yearned for is often perceived as decayed, fragmented, or dissolving into thin air.
This same contradictory impulse, which in moving simultaneously backward and forward remains unresolved in the end, is also visible in Valle-Inclán’s Sonatas. The Marqués de Bradomín’s memoirs are shot through with ironically tinged nostalgia for a decayed Galician nobility, for a largely ceremonial ancien régime, for a vanished Spanish Empire. And yet, Bradomín laces gesture toward the past with the self-awareness that this past is a dream, impossible to experience though perhaps possible to recover through and as language. Language in the Sonatas turns Valle’s regressive, haunted narratives into a dream of decadence, akin to the darkly shimmering images of Gustave Moreau’s paintings, which give pale, intense life to figures reminiscent of the dead or of ghosts. The generative metaphor of decadence insists on decay but attributes a morbid specialness, a strange vitality, to it. Decay, in turn, is predicated on loss and fragmentation. We expect ruin. We expect ghostly presences. Valle gives us plenty of both.
The most spectral of the four narratives is Sonata de otoño. Appropriately, it begins and ends with a dying body. More significantly, Valle presents memory itself as the ruins of experience. The Marqués de Bradomín receives a letter from a dying woman, who is also his cousin and former mistress, Concha. “I had always believed,” he says, “in the resurrection of our love. It was a vague nostalgic hope which filled my life with the scent of faith: It was the chimera of the future, the sweet chimera asleep in the bottom of blue lakes, where destiny’s stars are reflected.”13 One might easily mistake this passage for Romantic prose, except for the subtle traces of irony present in the self-conscious use of words and phrases like resurrección and indecisa y nostálgica. “Resurrection” is a term more appropriately found in religious texts, while Bradomín’s “vague, nostalgic hope” suggests not a wildly romantic passion but rather the mere memory of an old love, which of course is what he is really resurrecting in this opening passage. Likewise, the “scent of faith” is already a contradiction in terms, especially when juxtaposed to what immediately comes after: the “chimera of the future.” Already on the first page Valle has deftly turned the sharp point of his highly self-conscious writing into the remains of romantic feeling expressed here. How fitting that this faint hope of a revived love be “vague” and “nostalgic,” for such terms express ambivalence toward the object of desire: not simply Concha, but the narcissistic yearning to be once more in the position of being loved and adored.
Stylistically, this moment, like many others in the Sonata, resonates with echoes of self-reflecting imagery. Thus, the chimera that sleeps at the bottom of blue lakes is an elusive image of the depths that invokes its opposite image, the reflection of stars on the surface of the waters. Valle repeats this image of specularity, of self-reflecting surfaces, throughout Sonata de otoño, creating multiple framing effects of images within images. Similarly, the settings he creates for this particular Sonata are labyrinthine, filled with garden mazes, endlessly long corridors, proliferating hallways of mirrors, and receding interiors. Mirror imagery abounds and is often associated with death.
Indeed, death is at the heart of this and all the Sonatas. One of the most haunting and yet grotesque images of death comes as Bradomín, in a panic to avoid scandal, stumbles through dark corridors, carrying Concha’s dead body back to her own room. Her long hair becomes entangled in a door, and he is forced to pull brutally at the strands:
I groped in the dark to loosen her hair. I couldn’t. It was getting more entangled by the minute [ . . .]. With horror I saw it was almost daylight. I grew dizzy and pulled . . . Concha’s body seemed to want to escape my arms. Anguished, I held on to her in desperation [ . . .]. [H]er waxy eyelids began to half-open. I closed her eyes, and holding Concha’s body in my arms with an iron grip, I fled. I had to yank brutally until those perfumed strands of hair I loved so much broke loose . . .
(p. 83)
This is an extraordinary passage. It upsets all our expectations as readers of Romantic texts. Concha has died, and instead of the sadly dignified treatment we are waiting for, she is broken up, metaphorically speaking, like this scene, into individual body parts. Indeed, there is a fetishistic obsession with body parts in all these texts. In the passage just cited, Valle’s first-person narrator-protagonist focuses first on Concha’s hair, literally attempting to separate the snarled strands from the door, then on her half-opened eyelids and eyes. Her body appears detached, indeed even seeming “to want to escape [Bradomín’s] arms.” In another passage, he describes her in these terms: “Concha’s neck flowered from her shoulders like a wan lily, her breasts were two white roses perfuming an altar, and her arms, with their delicate and fragile slenderness, seemed like the handles of an amphora circling her head” (p. 26). Elsewhere, I have noted how this breaking up of the female body into individual parts (evident in all the Sonatas) miniaturizes Concha’s presence, turning her into a kind of bibelot or decorative object. This is a good example of the highly self-conscious writing of decadence in which language creates figuratively and linguistically objects of art, verbal artifice. Images taken from nature, such as the lily and roses, are deliberately made artificial by association with cultural artifacts like the altar/amphora comparison in the passage just quoted.
Significantly, Valle symbolically connects this concentration on fetishistic images, such as body parts, with death, for in all these texts the metonymic parts singled out refer to a “whole,” which is either dying or, in fact, dead. In Sonata de otoño Concha’s body is simply the spectral remains of a dead love. More importantly, her death signals yet another end, Bradomín’s own future death, symbolically figured in fetishistic imagery in the last line of the text: “I wept like an ancient god upon seeing his cult extinguished!” (p. 86). In Sonata de primavera (Spring Sonata), a literal idol in the hex shape of a small wax figure bears a grotesque resemblance to Bradomín.14 Other decadent writers also stressed the connection between the imagistic fragmentation of the body and death. Dorian Gray’s picture clearly takes on a spectral life of its own, worshipped as a kind of idol of the self. But this strange vitality of the portrait also points to the death of a soul. Rachilde turns the dead body of Raoule’s lover/husband into a wax figure, made up of artificial and natural parts taken from the corpse and possessing a hidden spring which “connects with the mouth and brings it to life” (p. 366). Villiers de l’Isle-Adam simply bypasses the human altogether and creates a completely artificial automaton in The Future Eve (1886).
Asti Hustvedt has suggested that the decadent aesthetic “disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty.”15 Yet the body, even fragmented, is never entirely empty in these texts, for this void points to an absence, a loss, which not even irony and self-parody, key components of decadent literature, can completely efface. Nor is it simply the human body that undergoes this fracturing process. In Sonata de invierno, for example, it is the politically lost Carlist cause, which, like the female body, has been emptied of its fullest significance. Bradomín has defended the Cause all his life in part because it is so closely identified with his family history and with Galician traditionalism. But near the end of the Sonata, he says to Brother Ambrosio: “I don’t mind saying I’m glad that the Cause is a lost one.” Seriously? asks Brother Ambrosio, and Bradomín replies yes: “And it was true. I’ve always found majesty fallen more beautiful than enthroned, and I defended tradition out of a sense of aesthetics. Carlism for me has the solemn charm of great cathedrals, and even in the days of the war, I would have been content had it been declared a national monument.”16 Seriously? Well, yes and no. As with all such decadent texts, the aesthetic pose is paramount here, meaning that irony forms the very core of Bradomín’s stance. Only an ironist could conceive of an unstable political movement of limited appeal like the ultra-traditionalist Carlism as a kind of “national monument.”
Carlism, like the Galician aristocracy that Bradomín represents, was, by the time Valle-Inclán wrote the Sonatas, largely a dead issue, having deteriorated through poor leadership and petty squabbling within the ranks. Yet the very decay of ideology and class appealed enormously to Valle, for like other decadent writers he saw an aura of specialness, of uniqueness, in both. Hence, the image of Carlism as a national monument possesses, like all things imbued with nostalgic feelings, traces of an earlier significance.
Similarly, the imperial shadow of Spain in the New World plays an analogous role in Sonata de estío (Summer Sonata), as well as in its earlier version, “La niña Chole” (‘Mistress Chole,’ from Femeninas). Bradomín embarks on a journey to the New World, where he has come to claim properties from an inheritance. He is filled with nostalgia remembering the history of the Conquest:
I recalled nearly forgotten books of my childhood that had made me dream of that land, daughter of the sun: stories that were half fiction, half history, in which men with copper skins, sad and silent as is expected of defeated heroes, were depicted.
He continues:
As it is not possible to renounce one’s own country, I, a Spaniard and a gentleman, felt my heart swell with enthusiasm, and my mind teeming with glorious visions, and my memory filled with historical memories. I felt the noble stirrings of History rising in my adventurous, Christian gentleman’s soul.17
The highly literary, bookish reminiscences of “history” in this passage suggest, once again, a narrative and aesthetic self-awareness that is ironically confirmed in the less than heroic but fictionally exotic adventure Bradomín has with “la Niña Chole” later in Sonata de estío. The Marqués struts his stuff like “a Conquistador of old” before la Niña Chole (p. 105). She is the “the captive princess” to his Conquistador (p. 141). Through Bradomín’s Western eyes, la Niña Chole incarnates everything exotic in the New World. She is the exotic. Exploiting a stereotype of the period, Valle draws a close parallel between the feminine (la Niña Chole) and the land:
la Niña Chole possessed that beautiful presence of an idol, that ecstatic, sacred quietness of the Mayan race, a race which was so old, so noble, so mysterious that it appeared to have emigrated from the depths of India [ . . .] My God! It seemed to me that from that body bronzed by the burning Yucatan sun came languid emanations, and that I was breathing them in, I was drinking them down, I was intoxicated with them.
(p. 89)
The protagonist then says: “When she turned toward me, my heart stopped. She had the same smile as Lili. My Lili, so loved, so reviled!” (p. 89).
The exotic figure of la Niña Chole, it turns out, is not so exotic after all. What Bradomín discovers in the New World is the inescapable presence of the Old World. While in the Iberian peninsula, the novelist Maurice Barrès looked out at the Atlantic, seeing “nothing in front of us, but the limitless Ocean. We heard some cries out to sea. It was, in the evening mist, the signal of ships doubling the cape and leaving for over there [là-bas]. But over there no longer has any unknown lands, nothing but repetitions of our Europe.”18 La Niña Chole not only reminds Bradomín of the Old World (Lili). She, like this entire episode of Sonata de estío, is conceived in the highly literary imagery of the West, which is to say, as Edward Said, Chris Bongie, and others have noted in general, that the New World, like the Orient, is an invention of the Old.19 The historical realities are one thing. But the image of the New World – as an exotic Other – is a creation, meant to supplement or to substitute for something that is missing from the Old World. Thus, Bradomín sets out for Tierra Caliente: “like an adventurer of old, I was going to lose myself in the vastness of the ancient Aztec Empire. An Empire with an unknown history, buried forever with the mummies of its kings, among the cyclopean remains that speak of civilizations, of cults, of races that once were, and can only be compared to the mysterious, remote Orient” (p. 84).
The repeated parallels between the New World and India or the Orient simply reinforce to what degree Valle/Bradomín finds mirror images in the Old and New Worlds. The idea of the “Orient” – the mysterious, the exotic – says much more about the Old World than the New. Bradomín, on the one hand, seeks to lose himself in the vastnesses of a former empire. On the other hand, it is clear that he has also come to find himself, or at least a role – that of Conquistador – which will serve to define him. But the posing, like the highly wrought, artificial rhetoric of the writing itself, is a half-confessed sign of inauthenticity. They are, like Dorian Gray, a “motive in art.” From our standpoint, they are also symbolic of an absence, what Chris Bongie in his discussion of exoticism has called “the sign of an aporia – of a constitutional absence at the heart of what had been projected as a possible alternative to modernity.” The exotic, he says, is “a space of absence, a dream already given over to the past. This is one half of the decadentist intuition that provides so much of fin de siècle writing with its largely unheard resonance. That such dreams can be followed up on, and traced back, albeit posthumously, is the second half of this intuition.”20
Remarkably, the dream of recovering what has been lost, or perhaps never existed – the dream, for example, of a common language, of a strong national or personal identity – is given extraordinary expression in one of Valle’s last works, not normally associated with decadence or aestheticism, the vanguardist Tirano Banderas (The Tyrant, 1926).21 In the Sonatas, Valle counterbalances the tendency toward fragmentation by the unifying rhetorical vision incarnated in the narcissistic personality and narrating voice of the Marqués de Bradomín. Bradomín may be an empty tomb of dated modernismo. But he covers up his emptiness with the seductive flow of words, with the comfort of art.
This illusion of a unifying personality vanishes completely in Tirano Banderas. For one thing, there is no longer a unifying voice or presence in the text. For another, everything tends toward dissolution, toward the rending of body parts, in a brilliant series of metonymically conceived images, starting with the literal decomposition of human remains in the horrifying episode of the Indian Zacarías’s baby (who is devoured by pigs) and ending with the mutilated corpse of the tyrant being strewn about in pieces from one end of the country to the other. More significantly, the very language of Tirano Banderas consists of pure fragments. Fragments of the debris of empire, which is what is left in the mythical country of Tierra Caliente. Fragments of language. For what Valle does is to incorporate a multitude of idioms, words, and expressions taken from several different Latin American countries, Spain and, in addition, invented by Valle himself. Language ruptures, breaks down, in Tirano Banderas. But one could also argue that underneath the disintegration, the decay, there persists the utopian dream of a common language, reminding us as well of Huysmans’s narrative of philology and lost empire in Against Nature. As in Huysmans, Valle’s imaginative construction of language turns linguistic invention into a structural component of his narrative, a narrative in which is implied the veiled desire to rediscover through words (or philology) a vanished unity of individual and collective identity.
Language reigns supreme in Tirano Banderas. In a curious way, this brings our trajectory full circle, back to Valle’s original decadent texts, Femeninas and above all the Sonatas. For what Valle created in the Sonatas and in the persona of Bradomín was a dream of language. Bradomín’s outer trappings and history – his Galician aristocratic roots, his conquests – are the external manifestations of a textual transformation. His genealogy – the family history to which he returns obsessively in the Sonatas – is a figure of another genealogy at work: the process of creating from scratch as it were, from the force of imagination and personality itself, one’s own history as text, as language. In this, the innovation of Valle’s style and vision, from the Sonatas to Tirano Banderas, remains undisputed.
1 Miguel de Unamuno, “Sobre el marasmo actual de España,” in En torno al casticismo, 7th edn. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968), p. 140.
2 Stuart C. Gilman, “Political Theory and Degeneration: From Left to Right, From Up to Down,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 167, 173.
3 Stuart Gilman takes the term from Donald Schön’s “Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-Setting in Social Policy,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 255.
4 David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 2. In my discussion of the meanings of decadence, I am indebted to Weir’s invaluable study.
5 Manuel Murguía, “Prólogo” to Femeninas. Epitalamio by Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1978), p. 45.
6 Brad Epps, “Recalling the Self: Autobiography, Genealogy, and Death in Sonata de Otoño,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 5.1 (1993), p. 152.
7 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours), ed. Nicholas White, tr. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 3.
8 Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), Su único hijo, ed. Carolyn Richmond, 2nd edn. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990), p. 51.
9 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1.
10 Rachilde, Monsieur Venus, in The Decadent Reader, ed. Asti Hustvedt (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 274.
11 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, tr. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 27.
12 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 148.
13 Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Sonata de otoño (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1985), p. 7.
14 Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Sonata de primavera (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1984), p. 66.
15 Hustvedt (ed.), The Decadent Reader, p. 26.
16 Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Sonata de invierno (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1985), p. 163.
17 Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Sonata de estío (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1984), p. 98.
18 From Du sang, de la volonté et de la mort (1894), quoted in Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories. Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 19.
19 See Jesús Torrecilla, “Exotismo y nacionalismo en la Sonata de estío,” Hispanic Review 66 (1998), pp. 35–56.
20 Bongie, Exotic memories, p. 22.
21 See Dru Dougherty’s Guía para caminantes en Santa Fe de Tierra Firme: Estudio sistémico de “Tirano Banderas” (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1999), for a thorough treatment of the reception of Tirano Banderas.