STYLIZATION AND DEFORMATION IN VALLE-INCLÁN'S LA REINA CASTIZA

Abstract

The year 1920 was a momentous one in the development of Valle-Inclán literature. Four major obras dialogadas were published in rapid succession, each of them revealing fundamental changes in stylistic and thematic orientation, and all of them manifesting a new and vital integration of style with moral and psychological substance. Evil, immorality and perversity had been things of beauty designed to be contemplated, savoured and shared solely for their esthetic magnificence, with no moral judgement expressed or even implied. The depiction of immorality in the post-war period betrays an artistic growth from an amoral appetite for the esthetics of evil without implications of reprehensibility to the confronting of immorality as an operative human force because it is in fact human failing and worthy of censure. Integrated with morally purposeful themes, the art of Valle-Inclán now stems from the particular stylized view of the ugly and the immoral which are recognized as being reprehensible. Never given to moralizations and didactic only on rare occasions, don Ramón conveys his position through the depiction of the negative, with the attitude of the writer ranging from jocular irony to ferocious sarcasm while still affecting an illusion of objectivity. The world which Valle-Inclán scrutinizes in his post-war works need not be different from that viewed in his earlier writings. When it is the same, the essential difference is in the approach. Galicia, for example, is no longer a painting with the physical depth of an artist's canvas drawn for esthetic suggestion and evocation and without physical substance. The “ new ” Galicia is a world with physical and moral depth which is penetrated for a view of its human entrails and to which the writer reacts as a moral being as well as an artist.

BSS Subject Index:

• ESPERPENTO
• HISTORY [AS LITERARY, CULTURAL & IDEOLOGICAL THEME]
• REINA CASTIZA, LA [R. DEL VALLE-INCLÁN]
• VALLE-INCLÁN, RAMÓN MARÍA DEL (1866–1936)

Notes

¹The four works : Luces de Bohemia, Farsa italiana de la enamorada del Rey, Divinas palabras, and Farsa y licencia de la Reina Castiza.

²The early Comedias bárbaras (Águila de blasón, 1907, and Romance de lobos, 1908) contrasted with Divinas palabras and the third comedia bárbara, Cara de Plata (1922).

³For Valle-Inclán's esthetic attitudes and intentions compared to those of a painter, see Amado Alonso, “ La musicalidad de la prosa en Valle-Inclán ”, in Materia y forma en poesía (Madrid 1955), 366.

¹Melchor Fernández Almagro, Vida y literatura de Valle-Inclán (Madrid 1943), 206.

² Farsa infantil de la cabeza del dragón (1910) and the two published in 1920.

³ Luces de Bohemia, sc. xii.

¹ Obras completas de Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Madrid 1952). References to the works of Valle-Inclán refer to volumes and pages of this edition.

¹A pernicious descendant of the doddering old soldier of La cabeza del dragón picturesquely named Fierabrás ; but whereas the latter is an hilarious figure in a good-natured farce, Tragatundas is a vicious satire of army generals and a forerunner in miniature of the absurd depiction of the military in the Friolera (1921) and the attack on the generals in La hija del capitán (1927).

¹A phrase used by Pedro Salinas in his distinguished study on Valle-Inclán, “ Significación del esperpento o Valle Inclán, hijo pródigo del 98 ”, in Literatura española siglo XX (Mexico 1949), which is basic for any consideration of esperpentismo and the Valle-Inclán trajectory.

²Fernández Almagro, 204.

³Instances of animalistic disfigurations are found also in the esperpentos, notably in the treatment of the bruja doña Tadea Calderón and the militarotes of the Friolera, but these occasional metamorphoses are seldom perpetrated with the direct Goyesque vision with which they are created in La Reina Castiza.

¹For instances of parody of traditional drama in other post-war works of Valle-Inclán, see “ Reflejos menores en el espejo cóncavo ” by the author of this study in Ínsula, XVI (July–August, 1961), 16.