The Tragicomic Don Juan: Valle-Inclán's Esperpento de las galas del difunto ( The Dead Man's Duds )

Abstract

The Tragicomic Don Juan: Valle-IncIan's Esperpento de las galas del difunto (The Dead Man's Duds) DRU DOUGHERTY The esperpenro consists in searching for the comic side oflife's tragedy. Imagine, for a moment, that a husband is upbraiding his wife, accusing her in the melodramatic style ofan Echegaray .... Well, for the characters it would be apainful scene, perhaps even abrutal one. For the audience. on theotherhand, it would be asimple, grotesque farce. Valle-Inclan, El Heraldo de Mexico, 21 Sept. 1921 . The general reaction against realism, which affected tum-of-the-century theater throughout Europe, was led in Spain by Ram6n del Valle-Inchln (1866- 1936). With two Maeterlinckian sketches published in 1903,1 the Galician playwright initiated an experimental dramaturgy that led, in the eady 1920'S, to the esperpenro, an avant-garde form whose association with the ideas of Gordon Craig and other twentieth-century theorists is finally coming to light.2 Central to this mature dramaturgy was the technique of contrasting heroic figures with their own "degenerated" reflections in modem bourgeois art. Thus Max Estrella defined the esperpento in Luces de bohemia (1920) as a conjunction of classic and grotesque forms: ''The classic heroes have taken a walk down the camivalesque Callejon del Gato ... . Even the most beautiful images, repeated in a concave mirror, become absurd." Faced with our era's distortion of classic beauty, Valle-Inclan suggests, the artist must protest, not by seeking nostalgically to redeem the forms of Homer and Shakespeare, but by fashioning a new art from the very grotesqueness of modem life: "The tragic sense of Spanish life can be given expression only with an esthetic ofsystematic deformation . ... My current esthetic is to transform classic nonns with the precision of a concave mirror" (Scene xii).' The first classic hero subjected to this grotesque dramaturgy was Don Juan, whom we recognize in the protagonist of Valle-Incl~n's first comedia barbara (1907). Likewise, Don Juan became the final such figure to be paraded before the esperpento's distorting mirror: in 1930 Valle-Inclan published his last Valle-Inch!n's Esperpento de las galas del difunto 45 collection of plays, which included Las galas del difunto (The Dead Man's Duds) - the work that supplied his definitive vision of the mythical hero.4 It is commonly assumed that Las galas is an ingenious parody of the Don Juan tradition, and critical disagreement arises only with regard to the specific target of Valle-Inelan's burlesque. Thus, some have argued that the playwright ridiculed himself in Las galas, mocking the still heroic Don Juan characters that appear in his early works'> Others have claimed that the play is a parody of Zorrilla's famous Don Juan Tenorio, if only because Valle-Inelan's characters - tum-of-the-century urban outcasts - are so clearly caricatures of the Romantic writer's idealized figures. 6 And, finally, there are those who conclude that Las galas is an assault on the Don Juan myth itself, the basic features of which suffer a process of deformation so severe, we are told, as to destroy them.7 These parodic readings of Valle-Inclan's play greatly resrrict its meaning and obscure, as a result, its "esperpentic" effect. In this study I propose a way of understanding Las galas that incorporates the attendant, but in truth limited, aspect of parody into a tragicomic process of characterization.8 My contention is that the play turns on the depiction of the protagonist as both a hero and a buffoon - on the creation ofa twofold dramatic effect that far from burying Don Juan forever. resurrects him for Qur own time. The prevailing view that Las galas offers an "anti-mythic presentation of Don Juanism" (Avalle-Arce, p. 30) rests on the failure to grasp the play's essential traditionalism. Both in theme and in characterization (the aspects that I shall examine) it follows well-worn conventions that carry us back to Tirso de Molina's EI bur/odor de Sevilla y convidado de piedra and even beyond to the Spanish roots of the legend. After I discuss the traditional features of the myth that subsist in Las galas, my task...