Lugubrious Nights. An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Romance by José de Cadalso

Abstract

R e v i e w s Cadalso, Jose de. Lugubrious Nights. An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Romance. Translated from the Spanish with an Introduction by Russell RSebold. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. 86pp. Russell P. Sebold’s elegant edition and translation of Jose de Cadalso’s Noches lugubres {\77\) is zv/c\come. contribution to 18th-century European literary studies that will increase awareness about the place and importance of 18 th century Spanish literature in the development of European Roman¬ ticism. Often considered an oddity in Spanish literary history (its genre and movement affiliation are hard to catalogue), this dialogued prose poem, divided into three sections corresponding to the three nights in which the action (or lack thereof) takes place, focuses entirely on the cosmic grief of its protagonist, Tediato, crazed with pain after the death of his young lover. For three nights Tediato tries to recover her corpse from the grave with the aid of Lorenzo, apitiful gravedigger. He wants to take the body to his home and then commit suicide, burning the house on top of the ill-fated lovers’ corpses. But every night his wish remains unfulfilled. The first night dawn arrives before they can take the body out. The second night he is mistaken for acriminal and put in jail, only to be released once the true killer is cap¬ tured. The third night (strikingly shorter than the other two, being barely two pages long) remains unfinished, with Tediato still philosophizing about life’s miseries and walking with Lorenzo towards the tomb. The text ends inconclusively with the words “[IJet’s go, fnend, let’s go.” (76), appropri¬ ately so, says Sebold, since suicide in this work constitutes not aliberating act of finality, but “a slow, much more painful form of suicide, aprotracted wasting away of the spirit.” (26). Sebold’s claim in the introduction is indeed an audacious one: he states and argues that this book is the first romantic text in European literature, since its date (1771) places it before works traditionally considered the pio¬ neers of Romanticism, such as Goethe’s Werther (1774) or Chateaubriand’s Rene (1802): Before Lugubrious Nights, there existed in no literature awork in which the principal subject matter was the rejection of an innocent hero by heaven, by his fellow men, and by all human institutions. No protagonist who at the same time sees in his own grief the synecdoche of all human grief and who hopes to find no compassion except in nature, over which he seems to be raised up like anew terrestrial divinity and with which at the same time pro¬ poses to fuse himself through the liberating act of voluntary death. [...] Tediato’s view of the world is indebted to the ideas of philosophers, poets 1 7 4 I N T E R T E X T S and essayists like Locke, Shaftesbury, Thomson, Young, Akenside, Gold¬ smith, Rosseau, and Johann Robeck [...]. But none of these authors goes as far as Cadalso does. (16) Sebold gives adetailed account of the book’s philosophical background and, in doing so, he rectifies some of the common assumptions about the forging of Romanticism in Spain. He discards the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling as influences and points to Locke and Condillac (as proponents of sensationalist epistemology) and Rousseau (with his the¬ ory of the noble savage, and the corrupting effects of civilization), informing the philosophical background of Lugubrious Nights and therefore the current of Spanish Romanticism that would depart from this seminal book. This affirmation of the existence of native roots for Romanticism in Spain constitutes another stimulating claim that diverges from placesinSpanishliteraryhistory.Itisusuallyassumed(especiallybecauseit so stated by the post-romantic generation, the deeply culturally nation¬ alist Realist group of writers and critics) that Romanticism in Spain was a foreign import, mostly acopy of French and English authors, lacking areal national personality. Sebold underlines the fertile combination of both EuropeanandSpanishsourcesatthebaseofCadalso’sseeminglystrange andanomaloustext.HereplacesEdwardYoung,traditionallybelievedtobe the direct source for Lugubrious Nights, for different English authors (Aken¬ side,Goldsmith)moreattunedwiththedesolateviewofdeathandtheplea foruniversalsolidarityatthecoreoftheSpanish1771text,butalsobrings to the forefront the Spanish roots of Cadalso’s thought: the work of ascetic moralists, such as Luis de Granada, who dwell in...