Modernism and the novel: Ramon del Valle-Inclan.

One of the most notable errors of scholars of Ramon del Valle-Inclan (1866 - 1936) has been to evaluate him solely within the context of Spanish-language literature, as a Spanish representative of Hispano-American modernism or, in Pedro Salinas' words, as "a prodigal son of the generation of '98, "The creater of the esperpentos is in fact one of the major actors in the renovation of the forms of European literature. Some have related his theatre to that of Jarry, Brecht, Beeken or Meyerhold. Others (myself included) have established equivalences with the founders of the modern novel, including Mann, Proust, Faulkner, DosPassos and Jules Remains.

Valle-Inclan was the Spanish writer most directly involved in that fertile wave of creativity that gave birth to the modernist renovation of literature during the first third of the 20th century. This is hardly surprising if we bear in mind the breadth ot his interests and experiences. The was familiar with the literature of nations such as Italy and Portugal, which he translated. He was witness lo two major historical events, the Great War and, during his second visit to Mexico in 1921, the institutional consolidation of the Mexican revolution. His theatre tour of Argentina in 1910, his visits to Cuba in 1893 and 1921, and his period in Rome as director of the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in 1933 and 1934, all moulded and testify to his cosmopolitan character. And few European intellectuals followed so closely as he the course of the Soviet revolution, which together with events mentioned above was decisive for the change in direction taken by his writings between the publication of La, medio noche (1917) and the final version el Luces de bohemia (1924).

What we might call the prehistory of Valle's narrative art is embodied in a series of novellas and shod stories published at the turn of the century, between 1895 and 1903. These writings are characterized by a symbolist and decadent aestheticism inspired by the author's early reading mainly of European writers and by the reinvigorating influence of the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario on the straitjacketed Spanish litetature of the day. At the same time, this phase produced a kind of literary granary to which Valle would return again and again to recover resources, characters and settings for the more substantial narrative works published between the start of the Sonata series in 1902 and the end of the Carlist war trilogy in 1909--a period that also gave us the novel Flor de santidad. A writer in whom the Bohemian and the professional were inextricably intermingled, Valle-Inclan constantly wove and wove his corpus, continually rewriting his works.

Though not marked by a radical aesthetic change, there is a clear change of tack in the writings of Valle's second period, following the publication in 1917 of one of his least renowned hut most transcendental hooks: La media noche. Vision estelar de un momenta de guerra. In 1920 this new phase also saw the first version of the play Lures de bohemia, which is so difficult to stage because of a vertiginous narrative syntax that already reflects the influence of the cinema--Valle was one of the first Spanish writers to follow Ricciotto Canudo in recognizing the cinema as "the seventh art." It is this play that includes, metaliterarily, the definition of a new expressionist aesthetics rooted in the nature at "Spain as a grotesque deformation of European civilization:" esperpento. In December 1926 Ttrano Banderas was published, followed shortly afterwards by the first two volumes of the first part ("Los amenes de un reinado") at the unfinished cycle El ruedo iberico. La corte de los milagros appeared in 1927 (though its final version was not published until 1931, when it appeared in instalments in the daily El Sol), and Viva mi dueno in 1928. "Visperas septembrinas," the first part of the the third volume, Baza de espadas, appeared in El Sol in 1932, hut was not published in book form until 1958, more than 20 years after Valle's death.

The modernism in which Valle-Inclan may he inscribed is not the poetic movement represented principally, in Hispano-American letters, by Ruben Dario, but rather the grand international upheaval that occurred chiefly in the first third of the 20th century and afforded its host results in the 1920s, the years in which Voile Inclan was writing his major works. His own concept of modernism--a question that has remained polemical to this day was first expressed in print in 1902, the year of his first novel (Sonata de otono), in an article so titled in La Ilustracidn Espanola y americana (an article he later reworhed and republished several times). Here, though wanting that the word "modernism" had acquired a meaning "as broad as it was suspect." he wrote that the essence of the idea consisted in the "analogy and equivalence of sensations," which was not mere extravagance but a consequence of a "progressive evolution of the senses; " (Valle-lnelan, Ramon del 1463), and in the 1908 version of this essay ("Breve noticia acerea de mi estetica cuando eseribi este libra" [Carte de amor]), he concludes that "If anything in literature may be called modernism, it is certainly a keen yearning for personality, and that is doubtless why we see young writers more bent on expressing sensations than ideas." (1) It must be borne in mind that the authors named by Valle as examples of modernism in 1902 were not Ruben Dario, Jose Marti or Gutierrez Najera, but French and Italian writers: Theophile Gaulier (as represented by his prologue to Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal), Rimbaud, Rene Ghil, Carducci and Gabriele d' Annunzio.

The parallelism between Voile and other European authors was noted in the obituary written in 1936 by Juan Ramon Jimenez, who defined him as "a genuine Celt" on a par with "his contemporaries the best Celtic writers of Ireland." Among them, he saw greatest kinship with Synge and Yeats: "That similarity is to be seen in everything, body and soul. Galicia and Ireland remain twins. And just as Ireland freed Yeats and especially Synge, Galicia freed Valle-Inclan from exoticist modernism, which he fortunately entertained only fleetingly, and from the Castilianist modernism that has had such a lamentable and lasting influence on some others." (2)

Yeats was born in 1865, just a year before Valle-Inclan. In the year in which Sonata de otono was published, be presented the final, augmented version of The Celtic Twilight, a bunch of anecdotes inspired by Irish folklore that Joyce described as his happiest book. (3) His essay "The Celtic Element in Literature" begins with quotations from Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, for whom the Celtic peoples--Valle's Galicians among them--were charaterized by their passion for nature, imaginativeness, and melancholy (Yeats The Major Works 370). Yeats' peasants, like Valle's, talk with the dead, for in Ireland, as in Galicia, there is no discontinuity between this world and the next, There thus arises a kind of "timid affection" between men and spirits in that damp green land where emigration (Yeats The Celtic Twilight 92), shipwreck and Fenian bands share everyday life with fabulous treasures and faery beings, There, in the words of the verse that introduces The Celtic Twilight, "time drops in decay / like a candle burnt out ...," but in the spirit of the folk there lives on a tradition of imagination that modern society has cast from its bosom.

There are tales in The Celtic Twilight that are very close to the Galician world of Flor de santidad: historia milenaria, which Voile published in 1904 before concluding the Sonatas. Thus "Happy and Unhappy Theologians" relates the glorious death of a serving-maid who hangs herself for love of God ; while Adega, the heroine of Flor de santidad, is an ingenuous shepherdess who is seduced by a pilgrim en route to Santiago de Compostela and, following the pilgrim's death, believes herself to have been left with child by God Himself. And in "The Last Gleeman," the events surrounding the burial of the blind Dublinese rhymer Michael Moran are genuine esperpento, in the same aesthetic sense of the concept as is shared, for example, by Luces de bohemia and Joyce's Ulysses. These motifs, and many others that could he mentioned, reappear elsewhere in Valle, notably in the "tales of saints, souls in torment, sprites and thieves" collected in Jardin umbrto.

In "And Fair, Fierce Women," one of the shortest pieces in The Celtic Twilight, the "heroic beauty" that bad been "fading out of the arts since that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place" was reclaimed by Yeats in a hybrid English as thickly peppered with Irishsms as Valle's Spanish is peppered with Galicianisms, slang, Romany and Americanisms of all origins. This is one of the marks of kinship between the Irish and Galician writers: they all enriched the language of the metropolis from its outer regions, with zero regard for maintaining its purity. Juan Ramon Jimenez described Valle, together with his Irish peers, as "loose-tongued." because "each word of his was a tongue, and I believe lie eared for nothing but to let loose his tongue, for better or for worse." (4)

In a way, the Sonatas are another hybrid in their relationship with their fictitious narrator, a character conceived by Valle prior to 1902 and destined to reappear in Aguila de blason (1907), Los cruzados de la causa (1908), Una tertulia de antano (1909), Luces de bohemia (1920 - 1924), and the above-mentioned three episodes of El ruedo iberico (1927 - 1932), as well as in El Marquis de Bradomin (1907), the stage play based on the Sonatas. On the one hand, Bradondn evidently delights in narrating a series of amorous adventures and the tangled situations associated there with; his model as a writer of memoirs is Giacomo Casanova, whom he cites explicitly when in Sonata de invierno a shocked Sister Simona reveals that his latest conquest is his own daughter. But it is no less evident that throughout the tetralogy Xavier de Bradomin strives to establish the singularity of his persona, constructing it with deliberate artifice, rather than sincerely to record his personality. The cynicism and diabolic aura that characterize the Marquess undoubledly place the Sonatas closer to the letters of Pietro Aretino (1537 - 1557) , the gallant memoirs of Casanova (1822) or the libertine literature at the Marquis de Sade than to the Confessions of St. Augustine--the late 4th century germ of autobiography or to those of Rousseau (1771-1778), both of whom are mentioned in a famous passage of Sonata de invierno.

Anautobiography is necessarily characterized not only by the chronophamic nature deriving from the semantic value of time, but, above all, by its focus on the identity of a single individual. And as a "rereading" of the author's past experience, it tends to reconstruct his or her life as a coherent whole, incurring thereby in excessive rationalization and making sense of events that may have had other senses or none at all. But the Sonatas go much further, their creator seeking not just to endow his legend with meaning, but to construct it from scratch. For if anything characterizes Bradomin it is his constant striving to adapt his behaviour, Lon-Chaney like, to fit models to whom he is especially attracted. Thus at the beginning of Sonata de estio, upon disembarking in Veracruz, Xavier struts before tim Nina Chole "as proud and arrogant as a conquistador of old," remembering his ancestor Gonzalo de Sandoval, founder of the Mexican kingdom of New Galicia.

The "autobiography" at the Marquess of Bradomin is thus doubly fictitious: Firstly, because its narrator is a fictitious character, not the real author Ramon del Valle-Inclan, in spite of continual insinuations of genuine alter ego status ; and secondly because Xavier is a great impostor of himself, of what he wishes to be for others, regardless of his authentic personality. When he acts before others rather than speaking as narrator, he leaves us with an intense sense of theatricality, of for ever acting the part at a Don Juan a la Tirso de Molina or Zorrilla, though with certain singularities of his own--notably his cynicism. Thus the theme of the four Sonatas is not the life of Bradomin, but how Bradomin gradually created his persona by dint of imposture, finally consolidating his opus by means of what is always but another, subtle form of pretence: autobiography, In short, literature to the power of two, full of oblique allusions aimed at readers who can no longer be innocent. Herein lies the chief originality of the Sonatas: with Xavier de Bradomin, Valle-Inclan concocts the immoralist literature of a feigned self in continental ironic and metaliterary defiance of reality. And finally, we should not overlook tile significance of the designation of these four works as Sonatas: for the sonata is both a form in which musical themes may he organized, their initial presentation being followed by successive variations and a final recapitulation; and that conjunction of four independent, conventionally structured movements that culminated in the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Sonata de invierno also contains elements that exemplify that "fictitious sincerity" that I have contrasted with the theatrical cynicism with which Bradomin constructs himself. I refer to its Carlist setting and subject matter, which make this novel a bridge between the Sonatas and the Carlist War trilogy published between 1908 and 1909, Right from the first description at Carlos VII in the church of San Juan, the narrator exhibits an allegiance to the Pretender that is no less effective for having an aesthetic basis an origin acknowledged explicitly in a well-known passage in which Bradomin confesses that he has always found fallen majesty more attractive than majesty enthroned, and that he defends tradition on aesthetic grounds, seeing in Carlism the solemn charm of the great cathedrals. (5) Margarita Santos Zas (6) finds proof in these words that, at the time he was writing Sonata de invierno. Valle-Inclan had not only a profound knowledge of the history of Carlism and the personality of its leader, but also pronounced ideological leanings in that direction in spite of which he would later support the Mexican and Soviet revolutions, and later still be seduced by the paraphernalia of early Mussolinian fascism.

It was this affinity and familiarity of Valle's with Carlism--the affinity half aesthetic and half ideological, the familiarity both personal and derived from his readings and research that gave birth, immediately after the last Sonata, to the trilogy camprising Los cruzados de la causa, El resplandor de la hoguera and Gerifaltes de antano (this last

title taken from a line of Ruben Dario's "Los cisnes"). All three are set in Galicia and feature such important Valleinclanesque characters as Bradomin himself, the family of Don Juan Manuel Montenegro, and Cara de Plata, who also links this trilogy to the world of the Comedias barbaras. In contrast to the cynicism, distance and imposture of the Sonatas, the prose of La Guerra Cadista strikes a note of authenticity, of involvement with the vicissitudes of the Cause, and displays a narrative treatment that tends to the epic sublimation of the story told and its protagonists. Gaspar Gomez de la Serna once noted (7) that in a talk given in 1910 Valle stated that in this trilogy he had tried, in painting its characters, "to augment them with what they had not been." A beggar must be like Job, a guerillaman like Achilles--the very opposite of what characterizes the esperpento of the banana republic of the tyrant Ban deras or the Isabelline court of miracles of El ruedo iberico. In the twelfth scene of Lures de bohemia, Max Estrella defines esperpento thus: "Classical heroes reflected in concave mirrors produce esperpento. The tragic sense of Spanish life can only come about through a systematically deformed aesthetics; (8) which is not to say that certain premonitory hints of esperpentic expressionism are not already present in La Guerra

In September 1902, in the same month as Sonora de otono was puhlished, Emile Zola died. Sixteen years earlier, Clarin had written that "naturalism is a thing of the past; if you do not believe me, look at decadentism and symbolism, which if they have not yet had much impact, son will do. Fashions, isms! Vode retro! We have all sinned, let us all repent. Long live art, long live artists!" This state of opinion typifies the purling of the ways that was perceived in the autumn of French naturalism, and which gave rise to the vast literary process--studied by Michel Raymond in La crise du Roman. Des lenderaains du Naturalisme aux annees vingt (2nd edn., 1967)--that renovated and modernized the European and American novel. Far from sentencing to death a genre that in the 19th century had indeed reached its highest degree of influence and social acceptance, this process of renovation simply replaced the narrative system or poetics of the 19th century with something bettez filled to the society and ways of drought of the 20th, innovative narrative forms springing simultaneously from the pens and typewriters of authors who were not in contact with each other, but who responded in the same way to some of the profound social, philosophical and artistic changes that were afoot.

In my book Estructura y tiempo reducido en la novela (9) have discussed extensively the fundamental ingredients of this renewal of the forms of the novel. Some limit the onmiscience of author and narrator, imposing a relativist perspective; others eliminate the traditional hero, who in some cases simply disappears (Katfa, Musil), and in others is replaced by a collectivity; while an important third group concern time as the central pillar of the structure of the novel. In contrast to the linearity and chromological progression of the 19th century novel, time is now the object of all kinds of significant manipulations: timelessness is achieved by weakening the sense of duration, or by making time cyclic ; the tyranny of strict chronological order is overthrown to allow divers anachronies; or the time narrated is strictly limited, enhancing the vividness of its duration and opening the way to the achievement of simultaneity.

It would be hard to point to a European write," who can be better identified with this zenovational project than Valle-Inclan--which is why his works retain an attractiveness that has been lost by those of some contemporaries. By his own efforts, Valle arrived at conclusions that set him on a par with the great figures of modernism--Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Andre Gide. Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, Herman Hesse, or James Joyce himself--conclusions that allowed him, without in any way reneging his previous work, to reorient his writings in consonance with an aesthetic and ideological avant garde.

The year 1916 is crucial in this respect. For one thing, it was the year in which Valle acquired first hand acquaintance with the Great War. This had a considerable influence on his relationship with history: whereas previously it had been characteristic of him to identify with the past, he was now open to the present and the future--a change immediately reinforced by the Soviet revolution of 1917 and shortly afterwards by his travels in post-revolutionary- Mexico (1921) and by the political upheavals in Spain, where the monarchy was replaced first by the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and then by the Second Republic. Secondly, 1916, marked by the death of Ruben Dario, is a turning point it, Valle's aesthetic evolution, the year in which he put behind him that "other modernism. " His essay La lampara maravillosa, parts of which bad already appeared in 1914 and 1915, was placed at the front of the collected works that began to be published that year, as a recapitulation of the aesthetic theory underlying tile period now brought to an end; by October be was publishing by in stalments a work that showed his transition to giber aesthetic positions (distinct but not in all respects radically different; see below) and his integration in the modernist renovation of narrative: La media noche. Vision estelar de un momento de guerra (1917).

In La media noche Valle tackled two issues of major importance in the renovation of the novel: the point of view of the narrator, and the spatio-temporal coordinates of the narration. Illuminated by the extraordinary experience spoken of by Corpus Barga (288-310) (10), his night flight over the baulefront in a French fighter (later described in esoteric, occult vein by Valle himself), he managed to provide a structural, bolistic vision a vision proper to what Benjamin Jarnes would call tile "poly graphic novel"--of such a typically collective event as a great battle, combining a multiplicity of narrative perspectives with the simultaneity of a text conceived as the depiction of a single timespan in multiple arenas. That this enterprise was not wholly divorced from his earlier aesthetics is clear from his having written, in La Lampara maravillosa, of human limitations being overcome by an eagle's eye view. a view such as he had from the fighter over the battlefront; but beyond this confused, imprecise phraseology, his actual narrative praxis in La media noche shows him advancing in a modernist direction taken by John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1930 - 36), by Gorky when he propsed the A Day in the World project (later realized on film, twice, by Dziga Vertov), and in particular, by Jules Romains in the unamimism film began to appear publicly in his novels in Mort de quelqu' un (1911). In his prologue to the first two volumes of Les hommes de bonne volonte, Romains claimed that his unanimist style of composition freed him from focusing on the individual; and according to Andre Cuisenier Romains lifts us out of the world of individuals to a higher level, a vantage point from which they can be surveyed like the individuals of a hive or ants' nest (Romains 42). Nothing defines this superior vantage point better than the vision estelar, from "beyond the hounds of geometry and chronology," that was discovered and mythified by Valle in La media noche (Valle 1 904)

It may be pointed out that, together with Valle, the great novelists mentioned above, and others that might have been, another to pursue the goal of holistic presentation was that archetypal renovator of contemporary narrative. James Joyce. Ulysses, a complete metaphor of human life condensed in a single day, is paralleled by the total vision of the collective drama of war presented by Valle-Inclan in a few hours of nocturnal flight. The stellar perspective that allows Valle to see simultaneously the separate fates of the aviators Jr, Chapter IV (or in Chapter XXVIII to take in the coming of dawn, the roads behind the front, the bombed villages and cities in ruins, the military cemeteries, and the recuperation barracks of the exhausted troops) is the same as is adopted in Ulssses in Episode (10) ("Wandering Rocks") , for example; according to Stuart Gilbert, Joyce too aspired to rise above the category of time and see a simultaneous universe, adopling, as it were, God's view of the cosmos. Elsewhere (11) I have observed that Ulysses has compositional, thematic and aesthetic similarities with Luces de bohemia, in spite of one being a novel and the other a play. the explanation of this apparent paradox being Valle's having identified narrative and dramatic forms when he found that dialogue was ideal lot guaranteeing objectivity in the narration of action. This impassiveness of the narrator, which conforms to the objectivist trends current in the theory and practice of the novel of the time (Joyce, Faulkner, Perez de Ayala and others resorted to dialogue for identical reasons), already stood out in La media noche, where the stellar vision placed the narrator at a distance that promoted objectivity.

In a conversation with Gregorio Martinez Sierra published in ABC at the end of 1928, Valle explains quite transparently one of the fundamental aspects of the composition of Lo media noche, Tirano Banderes and El ruedo iberico:

   I believe that the novel advances parallel
   to history and political movements. In
   these days of socialism and communism, I
   dont think society g principal hero can
   be the human individual, but social groups.
   History and the Novel scrutinize tile
   phenomenon of the masses with the same curiosity. (12)

A few years earlier, in a letter to Cipriano Rivas Cherif published under the title "Autocritica" in the magazine Espana (13), he had already presented a perfect rationalization of the most decisive temporal characteristic of all his post-1916 works:

   You are quite right in saying that the action
   walks a tightrope; it's like an oniric
   stage effect, with larvae talking with the
   living. True. This effect is contributed
   to by what we might call tile straitness of
   time. An effect similar to that of El
   Greco, with the straitness of space. Velazquez
   is full of space. His figures can
   change their posture, spread out and make
   room for others. But in the Entomb
   merit only El Greco could arrange them in
   such a small space [...]. This
   straitness of space is straitness of
   time in the Comedias. The scenes that appear
   to be placed quite arbitrarily are
   consequents in the chronology of the events.
   Cara de Plata begins at dawn and ends at
   midnight. The other parts also take
   place without interruption. In something
   I'm writing now I'm occupied with this
   idea of filling time like El Greco filled
   space. Some of the Russians understood
   all this. (14)

As he explains later in this letter, the work in progress to which he alluded was "An American novel of tyranny and Spanish avarice." (15) Tirano Banderas: novela de tierra caliente, a prodigious creation that was Valle-Inclan's own favourite among his novels, and in which we once more detect the presence of renovational narrative poetics and further foretastes of El ruedo iberico.

The title of Tirano Banderas is somewhat misleading in that the objective of this work is not so much the portrayal of a tyrannic individual as the denunciation of the degradation of man by tyranny. The pursuit of holism that characterizes Voile leads him to conceive an imaginary repubic, Santa Trinidad de Tierra Firme, as the quintessence of Spanish America with its three castes: the creoles, the despised Spanish gachupines, and the Indians among these last the tyrant Santos Banderas, who is not modelled alter just a single dictator but, as Valle revealed in a letter In Alfonso Reyes in 1923, after "Dr. Francia, Rosas, Melgarejo, Lopez, and don Porfirio." (Hormigon 310) This complete social and historical plan, which rules out any possible epic or individualistic interprelation of the novel, extends to its language, which as the same letter goes on to explain is "an aggregate of all the Spanish-speaking countries, from vulgar slang to the speech of the gauchos," (16) In Tirano Banderas, the dialogue does not only contribute to objectivity, but also to the sense of holism that permeates this work. which Ricardo Gullon, in Iris excellent study of Valle-Inclan's techniques, describes as "a sketch for a gigantie parable declaring the destiny of mankind "(35).

What Barges wrote of Ulysses in a sonnet dedicated to Joyce in Elogio de la sambra ("En un dfa del hombre estan los dias / del tiempo ... Entre el alba y la noche esta la historia / universal") is also to he seen in Tirano Banderas, in which time is characterized by straitness, anachrony or flashback, and simultaneity. Its structure as a sequence of fragments, which so facilitates the achievement of narrative simultaneity. is at times reminiscent of cinema, of the aesthetic and expressive potential of which Valle was already convinced in 1926. Valle's work in fact provides fine exam pies of the experimental fusion of theatre, novel and cinema, and this syncretism may in large part explain the air of modernity that his literary work still exhales. In Tirano Banderas time is registered in multiple spatial enclaves of Sante Fe de Tierra Firme, providing us with an in-depth perception of the contrasts among the various social classes and individual positions, the wrongs suffered by the people, how the rebellion is forged, and the pitfalls placed in the path of the just cause by the tyrant and his allies. For this purpose, the technique chosen by Valle is ideal; seven years later, Andre Malraux would employ it in La condition humaine (Man's Fate) to recount the collective, unanimous and simultaneous impetus of communist freedom lighters in 1927 Shanghai. Both in Malraux and Valle-Inclan, simuhaneity is not just a technical tour de force, but a tool that is essential fur a comprehensive treatment of the theme of the novel.

The simultaneity of Tirano Banderas also emerges in a suggestive fashion, one that is likewise related to space, but in this ease the space of painting. I refer to those concise, swih sketches such as the famous passage that ends Don Roque Cepeda's meeting in Part 2, Book 2: "The police began to swipe right and left with their swords, Splinters of broken lamps, cries, hands raised to heaven, bloody faces. Convulsion of lights going out, The angled ring bracken. A cubist vision of Harris' Circus." (17) Cubist art certainly consists of a kind of visual simultaneity, since it allows details from all dimensions of space to be contemplated in a single plane, that of the canvas. Valle makes masterful use of this procedure, generally on the last page of one at the books that constitute the second of the three levels into which Tirano Banderas is divided (part, hook and chapter), combining extreme narrative economy with a gripping climax; though elsewhere the cubist paragraphs of the novel seem to be put together following artful techniques of film ediling, such as cross curling (rapidly switching to and fro among two or more arenas of action).

Compositional circularity, perfectly achieved in Tirano Banderas, is the Fundamental aesthetic element in the conception of El ruedo iberico, where it moreover has implications of alternative history and timelessness that I believe to he absent from the "novela de tierra caliente", Temporal circularity, alternative history and timelessness, which were also present in other landmark novels of the twenties and thirties, had indeed been rooted ill Valle's aesthetic ideas since La lampara maravillosa, but alternative history--in spite of the hesitant assertions of certain critics only appears in Tirano Banderas as a suggestion at the end of Part 5, Book 2. In Tirano Banderas time is strait but also active and progressive, leading towards the final downfall of tile tyrant ; the reader perceives the tense maintenance of the movement as a painful parenthesis, not an inexorable property of history--remember that Valle was writing under the influence of the excitement produced by the Soviet and Mexican revolutions at a time when he was himself suffering the effects at the Dictatorship of Primo tie Rivera in Spain. That tile prologue and epilogue are chronologically adjacent does not mean that the novel is a circular negation of time, but that, thanks to the unstoppable advance of time, the barbarity now firmly seated in power may tomorrow he swept away by the hilberto downtrodden.

A very different attitude, if not the very opposite, is shown by the author of El ruedo iberico, a work impregnated with pessimism vis-a-vis the history of the Spain portrayed in La carte de los milagros and Viva mi dueno: corrupt and decadent from palace to people, an immense and tragic cacophony, a paradise of conflict and dissent. violence and death, Technically, El ruedo iberico does indeed conform to the new narrative parties that we have seen developing since 1916. In a famous interview with Jose Montero Alonso in 1926, Valle explains that

   El ruedo iberico will have no leading character. Its principal
   character is the social medium, the atmosphere ... I want to bring
   to tile novel the Spanish perception of things as shown by Spanish
   reactions to events of importance, For me, how a people reacts to
   such events reflects and is the measure of its perception of things
   (296). (18)

In this same interview he speaks of El ruedo ibgrico as pointillist--just as Tirano Banderas was cubist--in its simultaneist fragmentation of its narrative discourse. This characteristic is especially conspicuous in Viva mi dueno, where Queen Isabel's chief minister Gonzalez Bravo attempts in vain to control a situation in which the anti-Isabelline conspirators include revolutionaries, espadones (19) and Montpensierists in Spain, political exiles in Paris, Lisbon and London, and the pretender Don Carlos in Gratz. Viva mi dueno exhibits a kind of revolutionary unanimism that is continued in Baza de espadas (though now concentrated in Madrid, London and Cadiz, where the revolution of 1868 was brewing), and that makes these works comparable with Eisenstein's October (1927), Mahaux' La condition humaine (1933), and the second part of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, Le sursis (The reprieve 1945).

Valle-Inclan's idea of the tempo with which history should he narrated shows a radical change of mentality when compared, for example, with Benito Perez Galdos' Episodios nacionales. Galdos aimed to relate the progressive course followed by Spanish history over three-quarters of a century, between the battle of Trafalgar and Canovas del Castillo. Valle, in spite of his declared intention of portraying the evolution of Spanish perceptions between the revolution of 1868 ("La Gloriosa") and the death of Alfonso XII in 1885, in practice demonstrated Iris preference for the strait, profound account of events--the best fitted for their holistic, structural interpretation in contrast to their mete concatenation in a linear sequence.

However, temporal straitness and multiplicity do not by themselves suffice to define the narrative form of El ruedo liberico. On the contrary, the predominant impression in these volumes is of timelessness, a result of the circular structure that Voile had already experimented with, to different effect, in Tirano Banderas. From the stellar vantage point first assumed in La media noche, Valle sees Spain as a vast bullring in which a never ending spectacle of violence and death is staged. Violence engenders violence, over and over--witness the periodic series of Spanish civil wars--but nothing changes. Viva mi dueno, like the belated prologue "Aires nacionales" (1931), begins and ends with the same sentence, trivial variations apart:

   Disingenuous tidings spread the revolutionary message throughout
   the roundness of the Iberian Arena. And in old cities, under the
   arcades of the square, and in the sunbaked forecourts of little
   towns, and in Andalusian wineshops, and in the drinking houses of
   Madrid and Asturias, and in Basque playing courts, among grey seas
   and green meadows, the gossiping parrot opens the day with the news
   that the Darling One is coming. And the Darling One staying out
   every night to sleep in theoffing! (20)

At the beginning of the last of the surviving books of Baza de espadas we likewise read: "In all the roundness of the National Arena there circulated messages written in invisible ink, the accompaniment de rigueur of any revolutionary spree." (21) Space in Valle-Inclan realizes the metaphor contained in the title of the whole series: El ruedo iberico. Spain, as already noted above, like an immense bullring seen from the stars--hence a circular space. But this initial narrative dimension goes over into what E. M. Forster called pattern (140). In La corte de los milagros and Viva mi dueno, the text itself, as a written spatial object organized in nested units (chapters, books. etc.), exhibits a clearly circular pattern such that the correlations among these units fan he visualized as four concentric annuli and a circumference--theme and form-reinforcing a certain concept of time that in turn has an ideological interpretation. Behold here the clearest possible proof that an artistic text is a structure, a system of subtly interdependent formal and meaningful elements, and that time and space in the novel are two of the most intimately related compositional factors,

Works Cited

Forster, Edward Morgan. Aspects of the novel (1927). London: Edward Arnold, 1963.

Gullon, Ricardo "Tecnicas de Valle-Inclan" "Papeles de Son Armadans, XLIII, CXXVII, October (1996) : 35.

Hormigon, Juan Antonio, Valle-Inclan: Biografia cronologica y espistolorio, Vol, III, Madrid; Publicaciones de la Asociacion de Directores de Escena de Espana, 2006.

Romains, Jules. L' Unanimisme el "Les hommes de honne volonte", Paris:Flammarion, 1969

Valle-Inclan, Joaquin and Javier del (eds.). Ramon Maria del Valle-Ineclan. Entrervistas, conferencias y cuartas. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1904.

Valle Inclan, Ramon del. Obra completa, Vol. I. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 2002.

--. Obra completa, Vol. II. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 2002.

Yeats, W, B, The Celtic Twilight Myth, Fantasy and Folklore, Bridport: Prims Unity, 1994.

--. The major Works. Edward Larrissy (ed,). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Notes

(1.) "Si en literatura existe algo que pueda recibir el hombre de modernismo, es. ciertamente, un vivo. anhelo de personalidad, y por eso sin duda advertimos en los escritores jovenes mas empeno por expresar sensaciones que ideas." Valle, Vol. I, p. 200.

(2.) "Ramon del Valle-Inclan (Castillo de quema)", in Jose Esteban (ed.), Valle-Inclan visto por .... Las Ediciones del Espejo. Madrid. 1973. pp. 220-221.

(3.) James Joyce. "The soul of Ireland", Daily Express, Dublin, May 26th 1903.

(4.) "Cada palabra suya era una lengua, y yo creo que no le impoltaba nada que no fuera su lengua buena o mala. deslenguarse." See J. Esteban (p. 281) as shown in Note2.

(5.) Valle, Vol. I, p. 589.

(6.) Santos Zas. M. , Tradicionalismo y Literatura en Valle-Inclan (1889-1910), Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, Boulder (Colorado), 1993.

(7.) G. Gomez de la Serna, "Las dos Espanas, de don R. M. del Valle Inclan". Clavileno, No. 17. October 1952, p. 26.

(8.) "Los heroes clasicos reflejados en los espejos concavos dan el Esperpento. El sentido tragico de la vida Espanola solo puede darse con una estetica sistematicamente deformada." R. del Valle-Irelan. Obra completa, Vol. II. Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 2002, p. 933.

(9.) Published by Bello, Valencia. 1977; 2nd edition Anthropos. Barcelona, 1999.

(10.) "Valle-Inclan en la mas alta ocasion" . Revista de Occdente. 44-45. 1966. pp, 288-301,

(11.) "Valle-Inclan and James; Joyce: From Ulysses to Laces de bohemia", Revue de Litterature comparee, 1. 1991, pp. 45-59.

(12.) "Creo que la Novela camina paralelamente con la Historia y los movimientos politicos. En esta hora de socialismo y comunismo, no me parece que pueda ser el individuo humano heme principal de la sociedad, sino los grupos sociales. La Historia y la Novela se inclinan con la mismo cursiosidad sobre el fenomeno de las multitudes." Joaquin and Jailer del Valle-Inclan (eds.), Ramon Marta del Valle-Inclan. Entrevistas. conferencias y cartos. Pre-Textos, Valencia, 1994, p. 396.

(13.) Espana, March 8th 1924 Cited through Joaquin mid Javier del Valle-Inclan (eds.), Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan. Entrevistas, conferencias y cartas. Pre-Textos, Valencia, 1994, p. 259-260.

(14.) "Hale usted una observation muy justa cuando senala el funambulismo de la accion, que tiene algo de tramoya de sueno, por donde las larvas pueden dialogar con los vivos. Cierto. A este efecto eontribuye la que pudieramos Ilamar angostura del tiempo, tin efecto parecido al del Greco, por la angostura del espacio. Velazquez esla lodo llerlo de espacio. Las figuras pueden cambiar de actilud. esparcirse y hacer lugar a otras forasteras. Pero en el Enterraniento, solo el Greco pudo meterlas en tan agosto espacio (...). Esta angostura de espacio es angostura del tiempo en las Comedias. Las escenas que parecen arbitraiamente colocadas son loas consecuenles en la cromologia de los hechos Cara de Plata comienza con el alba y acaba a media noehe. Los otras partes se suceden tambien sin intervalo. Ahora, en algo que estoy escribiendo, esta idea de llenar el tiempo como llenaba el Greco el espacio, totalmente, me preocupa. Alguri ruso sabia de esto." Joaquin and Javier del Valle-lnelan (eds.) Ramon Maria de Valle-Ineclan. Entrevistas, conferecias y carta (Pre-Textos: Valencia, 1994)260.

(15.) "Una novela americana de caudillaje y avaricia gachupinesca."

(16.) "Una suma de todos los paises tie lengua Espanola. desde el modo lepero al modo gaucho".

(17.) "Los gendarmes comenzaban a repartir sablazos. Caehizas de faroles, gritos, manos en alto, caras ensangrentadas, Convulsion de lures apagundose, Rotura de la pista de angulos, Vision tubista del Circo Harris." Valle Vol. I, p. 1603.

(18.) "El ruedo iberico no tendra protagonista. Su gran personaje es el medio social, el ambiente ... Quiero llevar a la novela la sensibilidad Espanola, tal como se muestra en su reaceion ante los bechos que tienen una imporianeia. Para mi, la sensibilidad de un pueblo me refleja y se side en como reacciona ante esos hechos." Joaquin and Javier del Valle-Inclan, op. cit., p. 290.

(19.) Politically involved military leaders.

(20.) "Chismosos anuncios difundian el mensaje revolueionano pot la redondez del Rue'do Iberico. Y en las ciudades viejas, bajo Ins porches de la plaza yen los atrins solaneros tie los villorrios, yen el colmado andaluz, yen la lasca madrilena, yen el chigre yen fronton, entre grises mares y prados verdes, el periquito gacetillero abre los dias con el anuncio de que viene la Nina [Y la Nina, todas las noches quedundose a dormir pot las afueras! ..." Valle Vol. 1, pp. 1417 and 1718

(21.) "Por toda la redondez del Ruedo National circulaban los papeles escritos con tinta simpotica, que son el obligodo acompa? amiento de todas las jacaras revolucionarias " Valle Vol. I, p. 1878.

Dario Villanueva

Faculty of Philology, University of Santiago de Compostela. Spain

North Campus--Burgo das Nacions, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia. 15782 Spain

Email: [email protected]

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Author:	Villanueva, Dario
Publication:	Forum for World Literature Studies
Article Type:	Report
Geographic Code:	4EUSP
Date:	Apr 1, 2012
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