Luces de Bohemia: A Grotesque Look at Spain’s Degradation
The Theatre of Valle-Inclán: Luces de Bohemia
Evolution of his Play
We can distinguish four stages in the evolution of Valle-Inclán’s play:
Theatre Poetic
This is his first stage, and it deals with realistic themes. It is refined to an almost ridiculous degree and close to the modernist style of the era. Works from this period include The Marquis de Bradomin or Wilderness of Souls.
Theatre and Mythic Rural Environment
Represented by the trilogy of The Comedy Barbarian, this stage is set in a mythical rural Galicia and addresses the issues of lust, violence, debauchery, arbitrariness of the powerful, and the unheroic. Its main character is Juan Manuel de Montenegro, a man with great virtues and great faults. His children, however, embody brutality and degeneration, inheriting their father’s vices. Their actions are dominated by greed, sacrilege, insanity, and crime. They murder their father and plunder their mother’s house, leaving her to die. With Divinas palabras (1920), this stage anticipates the grotesque (discussed below).
The Farces
To ridicule characters and situations, Valle-Inclán created farce, which is a step in the evolution toward the grotesque as it has antirealist, cartoonish, and outrageous situations. This stage includes the trilogy made up of Puppet Tablado, Education of Princes, and La Marquesa Rosalinda.
The Absurdity
This stage assumes the maximum contribution of Valle-Inclán to the theater. It is the distortion of characters, environments, and situations in a way that actually destroys the apparent, transforming its image to display it as it is and presenting it as something outlandish or ridiculous (“Politicians lie for power, artists lie to tell the truth” – Andy and Larry Wachowsky, V for Vendetta). Through this new genre, Valle-Inclán makes an incisive critique of society and the historical period he was living in. He expresses his dramatic vision of the world, and especially the political and cultural degradation of Spain in the early 20th century. With the pain of disappointment, he makes Max Estrella say: “Spain is a grotesque deformation of European civilization.” When there are no heroes or ideals, the characters become puppets. The main works are Luces de Bohemia and the trilogy Mardi Gras.
Luces de Bohemia
Luces de Bohemia is one of the most important plays of the 20th century. It is composed of fifteen scenes. The first twelve take place in a single night during which Max Estrella (blind, “hyperbolic Andalusian poet of odes and madrigals”), sentenced to starve after having lost his miserable job in a newspaper, wanders through the streets of Madrid with his cowardly and deceitful companion, Don Latino de Hispalis. The various places that come on the scene show a range of socio-cultural levels: the bureaucracy, the bohemian literary world, politics, world trade, prostitution, and marginalized populations. The evening ends with the agony and death of Max, while Don Latino takes the opportunity to steal a lottery ticket that is awarded the next day. Scenes 13 and 14 focus on the wake and burial of Max, and scene 15 takes place in the tavern of Pica Lagartos, where Don Latino spends the winnings of the stolen lottery ticket, while the woman and daughter of Max, facing terrible economic hardship, decide to commit suicide. The night journey of the two figures shows a corrupt and mediocre Spain where there is hardly anything left of the bright lights of Bohemia, when art and value were authentic and not sold to opportunistic interests. Of all the characters, only the Catalan anarchist preserves the dignity of the classic hero. Max himself betrayed his ideals by accepting the money that the minister gives him, spending it on a dinner and worrying about his wife and daughter.
Characters
Behind the characters in Luces de Bohemia, real people are hiding. Max was inspired by the poet Alejandro Sawa, Zarathustra (referring to Nietzsche) is the bookseller Pueyo, Don Gay Pilgrim is the writer Ciro Bayo, the Minister of the Interior is the Minister of Education Julio Borrell… Other characters are named openly, such as Rubén Darío and another modernist poet.
Language
The language is vivid, highly imaginative, and full of verbal wit. There are a variety of registers, from the richest and most literary to the colloquial and even vulgar. In general, each character speaks in accordance with their cultural status, but not always. For example, the prisoner and the mother of the dead child, to whom the viewer is not issued cults, are expressed with a lyrical language that approaches the grandeur of Greek drama. At the same time, other more learned characters use spontaneous expression, sainetera speech, and torn language. Valle-Inclán often ridicules the characters representing the more educated strata by making them talk with a bombastic and pedantic language. Moreover, popular characters use a supposedly educated verbiage with parodic intent to ridicule the institutions. Parody, caricature, and irreverence make the characters themselves puppets in the grotesque imagery. Of particular note are the author’s novel and literary quotations with which characters and environments are characterized subjectively.