The Grotesque in Valle-Inclán’s Bohemian Lights
Historical and Literary Context
In Spain, theatrical renewal attempts faced all sorts of obstacles, the biggest difficulty being their premiere. The public and employers gave their support to a theater that was aesthetically and ideologically conservative, while those who sought renewal were denied support and marginalized. The successful theater of the time included Benavente’s comedy, drama, and humorous verse drama.
It is more difficult to establish homogeneous blocks within the theater of renewal, which reflects the individual genius of its cultivators, belonging to the three generational moments of the period:
- Generation of ’98 (Grau, Jacinto Benavente, Unamuno, and Azorín)
- Generation of ’14 (Gómez de la Serna)
- Generation of ’27 (Alberti, Lorca, Salinas, Casona)
In this context arises the figure of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936), creator of the grotesque. Although this is identified with theater, it is an aesthetic that also occurs in other genres (e.g., in the novel Tirano Banderas or the poems of La pipa de kif).
The Aesthetics of the Grotesque
The scene of Bohemian Lights (Scene XII) offers the foundations of the new aesthetic:
- Background: Goya
- Procedure: Classical heroes reflected in concave mirrors
- Purpose: To capture the tragic sense of Spanish reality, which is nothing more grotesque than the degradation of European civilization
- Result: The absurd
The Scarecrow is a great aesthetic achievement characterized by deformation:
- Thematic: Mockingly through the parody of melodrama
- Psychic: Men have a condition of grotesques, animalized, doll-like
- Language: Use of Madrid street slang, the last stage of deformation of popular parlance
- Even of things: Strident and exaggerated, like children’s cards or expressionist paintings
Bohemian Lights: A Parable of National Asphyxia
Bohemian Lights, the first published “esperpento” (1920-1924), features the final night of Max Estrella, a blind poet and bohemian (inspired by the novelist Alejandro Sawa, the same who inspired the Villasuso of The Tree of Science by Baroja). The work becomes a parable of national asphyxia, through the scenarios Max visits on his last night. It is a kind of Dante’s descent into hell, culminating in death, whether from alcohol, hunger, cold, or disgust.
The work is structured in fifteen scenes, through which pass swindling politicians, police repression, insensitive bourgeois, epigones of Modernism… everyone (and everything) is subject to criticism. But there are also overtones of humanity in Max himself, the Moon (a child prostitute), the Catalan workers killed in the application of the Law of Flight…
The dialogue is brilliant and has a literary importance far beyond the merely functional. Its complexity and a certain cinematographic staging (its traveling space) made its representation difficult; it was only possible in the 1969-1970 season.