Death and tragedy in Spanish Baroque and Romantic literature

Death in Spanish Literature

While the Renaissance in Europe bred abundant literature on every lively intellectual subject, the Baroque period was filled the Spanish nation with disappointment. In Europe in 1567, the Netherlands revolted against the rule of Spain under Philip II, and a costly war began. England gave their support to the Netherlands, and Philip sent the Spanish Armada to conquer England in 1588. The Armada was defeated in a humiliating sea battle and this drained the Spanish treasury.

Tragedy and death permeated the history and literature of Spain. Despite political upheaval, literature entered the Siglo de Oro (Golden Age) in Spain, spawning many creative and prolific writers in the late 16th century. The Spanish writers wrote of how talents were no match for violence, injustice and ignorance, nor from greater forces beyond Spain's borders. The writers expressed these sentiments, along with feelings of disillusionment with human foibles and the great age that had gone on before (Weller 2).

A period of political and cultural change began in Spain during the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Philip V, the grandnephew of Spain's king, Charles II, of the French royal family of Bourbon, was left the Spanish throne in 1700. Thus began 100 years of Bourbon kings rule in Spain. Philip introduced the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, while he united Spain and France. Faith in reason and science through education to solve the problems of the human condition and to transform society brought literature back to a belief in the inherent goodness of the human soul and reason.

For nearly a hundred years, very few writers of major importance appeared in Spain. In general, literary works of the 18th century outlined critical and philosophical arguments regarding what literature should be in relation to the ideas of the Enlightenment (Weller 2).

However, there were soon to arrive writers of great distinction, talent and popularity. Writing about the tragedies of their history and times, these writers expressed their characters' lives in great emotional fiction. Their lives, filled with death and sorrow, as well as many observations of human weaknesses and wit, were to carry Spanish literature into the 20th century. Their lives also were full of personal tragedies, which gave them great authority to write on such subjects. The following authors experienced great sorrows and undeserved death among them.

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer was born in Seville in 1836. Orphaned as youths, he and his brother went to live with an uncle. At 18, Becquer set off to seek fame and fortune as a painter. He lived in Madrid in poverty, married the daughter of his doctor when he contracted tuberculosis, fathered three children and died in 1870 from tuberculosis. He was 34 years old. His written works were influenced by Hoffmann and Heine and displayed great original talent. He is the founder of modern poetry in Spain. His Obras (Madrid, 1871), have been published repeatedly. He was undoubtedly the most important romantic writer in Spain. He was the hero of Romantic novels, as the end of his life was filled with despair. He had separated from his wife, his brother died, and Becquer himself died, never having found the fame and fortune he sought.

Becquer's best-known work is a collection of lyric poems called Rimas (Rhymes, 1860-1861), focusing on idealized passion and melancholy, harboring a dark and impossible love. Becquer wrote prose, as well as poetry. His Leyendas (Legends, 1871) is a collection of fantastic legends linking people and events from the mysterious and idealized Middle Ages with situations in his own day (such as France's occupation of Spain). (Jehl 15).

Below is a short poem, "What is poetry:"

Que es poesia? (Hills 3)

Que es poesia? --dices mientras clavas en mi pupila tu pupila azul.

Que es poesia? ¿Y tu me lo preguntas?

poesia... eres tu (Walsh 2000).

What is poetry? - you say between bites in my pupils your pupils blue

What is poetry? You ask me?

Poetry - is you.).

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

During the Romantic period, the armies of the French emperor Napoleon I swept across Europe and took control of Spain at the beginning of the 19th century. Faith in reason could no longer hold sway. While the monarchy was restored in 1814 after Napoleon fell, it was weakened. Throughout the 19th century there were clashes between forces of liberalism, who identified with French writers who lauded the rights of man, and conservative forces who supported the Spanish monarchy. Throughout Europe, literature and the arts pictured this atmosphere of crisis and change in a movement called romanticism.

Most Romantic writers idealized the Reconquest and the old aristocracy. Women were paragons of goodness and beauty. Love was the most powerful emotion of all and the salvation of humankind. Nature was the background and echoed human nature. Popular costumbristas, were Spanish writers who wrote picturesque descriptions of regional dress, customs and language.

Romantic writers in Spain, however, experimented with various forms, images and ideals. Love did not always triumph in their work, some women were human and imperfect, nature was a force beyond control, and individuals were sometimes blindsided by society and ignorance. Disappointment in reality led some romantics to an excess of emotions, melancholy, pessimism and even suicide (Weller 3).

Spanish life and customs were recorded by Mariano Jose de Larra in his Art'culos de costumbres (Articles on Manners, 1832-1837).His works were filled with fierce and violent attacks on decadence, irony, and satire. Larra illustrated romanticism, its biography and its suicides, influlencing generations of Spanish writers, such as Buero Vallejo, Juan Goytisolo.

Below is an except from Vuelva usted manana (Art'culo del bachiller)

El Pobrecito Hablador, 14 de enero de 1833

Gran persona debi de ser el primero que llam pecado mortal a la pereza; nosotros, que ya en uno de nuestros art'culos anteriores estuvimos mas serios de lo que nunca nos hab'amos propuesto, no entraremos ahora en largas y profundas investigaciones acerca de la historia de este pecado, por mas que conozcamos que hay pecados que pican en historia, y que la historia de los pecados ser'a un tanto cuanto divertida. Convengamos solamente en que esta instituci n ha cerrado y cerrara las puertas del cielo a mas de un cristiano.

Translation: Return Tomorrow

Article of the bachelor)

And after you lost your senses, what happened?

Rafael started to answer and I heard the words, as if they were words pendant with the secrets of life and death, when suddenly the coach stopped..

Ah! We are already at the Consejos where I get off. -- said Rafael.

What a contrary person! He's leaving and I don't know the end of the story

Caballero, caballero, one word -- I said upon seeing him exit.

During 1898, a period of loss and decay, Spanish intellectuals began the literary movement called the Generation of 1898. It was centered at the Institute of Free Education, which Spanish educator Francisco Giner de los R'os had founded. After the government had dismissed many renowned university professors for their liberal ideas, this school was determined to graduate students who would feel responsible for the state of their country. Teachers and writers from the school attempted to explain why Spanish society had deteriorated and to provide some impetus for reversing that decline (Weller 5).

Leopoldo Alas (Clarin) (1852-1901), was a short-story writer, and critic who writing under the pseudonym Clar'n, b. Zamora. Although a journalist, he became a professor of law at the University of Oviedo. Best known for his naturalistic novel La Regenta (1884-85), which is an analysis of provincial life, his other works include the novel, Su Unico Hijo [His Only Son] (1890), and short stories.

Valis spoke of his novel La Regenta in flowing terms and describes its intricacies well:

Reading the one thousand and more pages of La Regenta (1994-1885) by Leopoldo Alas (also known as Clarin), is an experience in entrapment. The more deeply we penetrate its reading surfaces the more exasperated and bewildered we as readers feel Folded and double-folded in multiple layers, Clarin's novel has the fearful capacity to absorb, to pull the reader in. This of course is exactly what a great novel should do: it should uproot us from our unwanted and various selves and repot us in more conducive soil. But what if the reader-critic stumbles in his understanding and experiencing of the text, and finds that apparently smooth, even impenetrable surfaces, once tapped in the right place, break into disquieting fragments? What if the order sought for isn't any order at all? (246).

La Regenta has novelistic order in form. It is highly organized and belongs to the mimetic tradition. It treats death and its role in life in such a skilled way that it is similar to bathing in a river where currents sweep one under and reveal it as the dark undercurrents of life.

Miguel de Unamuno was a Spanish poet, novelist, and playwright who wrote on death. Born on September 29, 1864, in the Basque city of Bilbao, His father died when the poet was six, and his mother, Salome Jugo, gave her children a Catholic upbringing. Unamuno went to the University of Madrid, studying languages and philosophy and receiving a Ph.D. In 1884. He returned to Bilbao and taught Greek at the University of Salamanca. Later that year, he married his childhood sweetheart, Concepci n and had ten children. In 1900, he became the rector of the university. Throughout his life he published essays on travel; metaphysics, religion and politics as well as ten novels and many plays. His novels and plays bring the sorrows of death to the forefront.

Unamuno did not even begin to publish until he was forty-three. His first book, poesias (1907), used common Spanish language to offer impressions of travel and nature. In Dos Madres, he examined maternity, as well as family and death, a subject he also looked at in La ti Tula. Socialism, rationalism and positivism were eschewed here for the tragic sense of life where one desires immortality above all else, yet one knows that death is the end, so the solution is to have children.

In 1930, the dictator, Primo de Rivera, was removed and in February Unamuno returned home to regain his position as rector. However, when General Franco took power in 1936, Unamno's friends and colleagues were seized and executed. Unamuno angrily denounced Franco's rebellion and General Franco gave anyone permission to shoot him. However, to avoid an international incident, the poet was confined to house arrest, and he died on New Year's Eve, 1936. (Academy 25).

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet and dramatist, an artist and a member of the 'Generation of 1928', a group of writers who advocated avant-gardism in literature. Lorca deals with violent death and tragedy in his poetry, prose and plays. Among Garc'a Lorca's best-known plays is Blood Wedding (1933), a story of a bride who runs away with a previous lover, and is subsequently murdered by her husband. Having spent a time in great creative activity, Garc'a Lorca himself was shot by Falangist soldiers during the opening days of the Spanish Civil war. (Lorca 2007).

Most of the Madrid critics praised the literary and dramatic merit of Marina Pineda... They found in it an emotional power highlighted as much in the tragic phrases of Marina Pineda as in the sweet and sorrowful worlds of the little nuns when they set out toward the scaffold. This concept of Marina Pineda is the one that satisfies me most, because I sincerely believe that theatre is not and cannot be anything but emotion and poetry - in word, action, gesture (Cole 54)

Lorca's father, Federico Garc'a Rodriguez, was a prosperous farmer. Lorca's mother had been a schoolteacher before becoming Federico's second wife and he was born in a village on the banks of the River Genil, a few miles from Granada. The author returned several times to the Moorish city of Granada in his poetry and drama.

Before the publication of his first collection, Garc'a Lorca was already known as a poet, especially through his recitals of his texts. As a writer Garc'a Lorca made his debut with Libro De Poemas (1921).

Pride, passion, love and violent death are Garc'a Lorca's central themes, all of which marked his life. The Spanish Civil was begun in 1936 and Garc'a Lorca was immediately seen by the right-wing forces as an enemy. The author hid, but was eventually found. An eyewitness told how he was taken from a Civil Government building by guards and the 'Black Squad' on August 9 of 1936. Garc'a Lorca was shot without trial. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery. Buried in a grave that he had been forced to dig for himself, he was probably finished off by a coup de grace. Franco's government tried to erase Lorca's memory from the minds of the public. His books were prohibited, his name forbidden. Most probably, Garc'a Lorca wrote his last words under pressure on a note for a member of the 'Black Squad': "Father, please give this man a donation of 1000 pesetas to the Army." His father, carried the note in his wallet the rest of his years.

One of the first and most famous casualties of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca quickly became an almost mythical figure, a symbol of all the victims of political oppression and fascist tyranny. (CyberSpain)

Lorca is known for his symbolic death and his writings about the tragedy that consumes the Spanish people. Below is a section of Romancero Gitano dealing with the subject.

From Romancero Gitano

One section of # 12.

Muerte de Antonito El Camborio, a Jose Antonio Rubio Sacristan

Tres golpes de sangre tuvo se muri de perfil.

Viva moneda que nunca se volvera a repetir.

Un angel marchoso pone su cabeza en un coj'n.

Otros de rubor cansado, encendieron un candil.

A cuando los cuatro primos llegan a Benamej', voces de muerte cesaron cerca del Guadalquivir.

Each of these writers brings the subject of death into their generation in a unique and powerful way, treating it as part of the history of Spain. The history of Spain is one mixed in blood and sand, as in the bull ring, wars, battles, defeats, dictators and exiles. The country was overrun by Moors, the French and invaded many times by foreign nations. Struggling to maintain their national heritage and yet still managing to incorporate those mixed with theirs during invasions, the Spanish people have this heritage of literature that reminds them of their past.