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

Abstract

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, 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. 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).