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Bécquer and the Romantic Grotesque

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Paul Ilie
Paul Ilie*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Abstract

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's grotesque involves a bizarre distortion which is neither tragic nor comic but disquieting. He conceives of the imagination as having an abnormal region that produces absurdities and monstrous forms. Grotesque motifs draw upon two spheres of reality: a nether-world coexistent with Nature, and the everyday historical world. The “other side” of Nature, uncanny and capricious, is inhabited by deformed beings governed by different laws of harmony and dissonance. There, non-Ovidian metamorphoses produce admixtures of satanic beauty and monstrosity, with Becquer's description of them eschewing Dantesque moralism and approaching gratuitous estheticism. In contrast, the historical world attracts the imagination by means of architecture and its fantastic motifs. Other links to social reality appear in the detached sensibility of the grotesque. For example, the carnival is described by a mood of hollow gaiety atypical of the ebullient Romantic carnival. Mannequin images also express disillusion and the advent of an anti-Roman tic reaction, as does the presence of gratuitously induced incongruities. Thus, Becquer stands between the Romantic grotesque, with its healthy distortions, and the self-destructive grotesquerie of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , May 1968 , pp. 312 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 In addition to the two general books, Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske: seine Gestaltung in Malerei una Dichtung (Hamburg, 19S8), and Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford, 1965), see Paul Ilie, The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968); Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesquein German Post-Romantic Prose (Berkeley, Calif., 1963); Max Milner, Le Diable (Paris, 1960); Eric Newton, The Romantic Rebellion (New York, 1962); Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1933); Patricia M. Spacks, The Insistence of Horror (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Nicholson B. Adams, “The Grotesque in Some Important Spanish Romantic Plays,” Todd Memorial Volumes (New York: Columbia Univ., 1930), I, 37–46; Edward Bostetter, “The Nightmare World of ‘The Ancient Mariner’,” Studies in Romanticism, I (1962), 241–254; David Sices, “Musset's Fantasio: The Paradise of Chance,” Romanic Review, Lviii (1967), 23–37; and John Van Eerde, “The Imagery in Gautier's Dantesque Nightmare,” Studies in Romanticism, i (1962), 230–240.

2 “… ridiculo y extravagante por la figura ? por cualquiera otra calidad,” as in these examples: “… si un pintor se atreviese a introducir esta figura grotesca en un cuadro de aquel asunto, se burlarian de él los inteligentes …” (L. F. de Mora tin); “Vienen, en fin, a acabarla de desentonar las dos figuras grotescas de Don Quijote y Sancho” (M. J. Quintana). Also “irregular, chocante, grosero y de mal gusto,” as in these examples: “Bulle el grotesco tumulto/En algazara infernal :/Ya de la excitante orquesta/Al voluptuoso compas” (Campoamor); “… comparten (las pilastras) de arriba abajo la fachada con grotescos de graciosa invencion y capricho” (Jovellanos). Aniceto de Pages, Gran diccionario de la lengua castéllana (de Autoridades) (Madrid, 1902).

3 Obras complétas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1954), p. 609. AU references are to this edition and hereafter will be cited in the text. Translations are mine.

4 There is, however, this fantasy while Becquer reflects upon his death as a glorious poet: “A graceful ogive—rippling with tangled and sharp-pointed leaves, through which are coiled, showing their deformed heads, a griffin here, one of those winged monsters there, the stunted issue of the craftsman's imagination—will bathe my sepulchre in dark shadow” (pp. 573–574).

5 The rest of this passage is worth quoting for its biographical interest: “I have changed, for I come not on the wings of faith, dressed in rude sackcloth and begging the bread of pilgrimage from door to door, to prostrate myself at the threshold of the sanctuary, or to respectfully gather the dust of the plain, the witness of bloody combat, but rather, guided by fame and in the most comfortable manner possible, I arrive at this farthest corner of the Peninsula to satisfy an artist's curiosity or an idler's caprice.”

6 “Just imagine a serene night, a dark blue sky studded with pinpoints of gold, a sea of silver [where] the moonlight is shattered and glistens in the waves, a very light skiff that cuts the waters, leaving behind a wide and radiant wake, the profound silence of immensity and the notes of a song that float on the air, where the melody, pregnant with voluptuous languor, rocks to the cadenced beat of the oar. There is no Romantic poet, no novelized girl who has not at one time dreamt of this picture of the sea, the little song, the little bark and the moon; a magnificent picture, a situation filled with poetry, which perhaps has been abused but which undoubtedly is beautiful” (p. 780).

7 This study was made possible by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.