SOURCE: Osiek, Betty Tyree. “De Sobremesa: Silva's Modernist Novel.” In José Asunción Silva, pp. 94-139. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

[In the following essay, Osiek provides a complete plot summary and textual history of Silva's only novel and discusses its autobiographical elements and prominent themes.]

I THE EDITIONS

The single novel written by José Asunción Silva … was lost in the sinking of the ship L'Amerique, on his return from Caracas. But when his friend Hernando Villa, who feared Silva was going to commit suicide, asked him to rewrite one of the lost manuscripts, Silva allowed his friend to choose the one he preferred. Villa chose the novel, De Sobremesa (After-Dinner Chat), which Silva duly rewrote in his distinctive handwriting, before his suicide.¹ However, the manuscript was not published until 1925, when the first edition was produced by Cromos of Bogotá.² It was a small edition, and a second edition came out in 1928³ by the same publishing house. After that, it has been included in several editions of the complete works of Silva, such as the one by the Bank of Colombia.⁴

Even after the publication of the first edition of the complete novel in 1925, several of the interpolated essays or digressions were published separately many times in anthologies, obviously out of context. The titles of the essays were often selected by the editors. Citations from these essays were used to prove different ideas that the author could not possibly have meant.

The date of Silva's death, 1896, together with the subsequent date of publication of the first edition of De Sobremesa in 1925, twenty-nine years later, surely reflects the attitude of his family, which delayed the publication of the manuscript in its entirety. It was not a book which in his time would have been favorite reading. The same shock value is there which often appeared in his “Gotas Amargas” (“Bitter Potions”). The family did not wish the complete manuscript to be published, fearing it would hurt his reputation or his family name. It was published when the times had changed enough, or Silva's worth as a poet had consecrated his name.

Even after its publication the work was mainly ignored, even though the newness of the prose style in Spanish and the subjects treated were related to those used in earlier Modernist renovation in prose. (It was similar to such novels as A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, published in Paris in 1884; II Piacere, by Gabriele D'Annunzio, published in Milan in 1889; and The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, published in London in 1891.) But in Spanish America, Modernistic prose was being written in the 1870s by José Martí and Manuel Guriérrez Nájera and others, as well as by Silva, as we can see in some of his earlier essays. The first writing of De Sobremesa⁵ probably dates from one decade later than the Modernist revolution in prose. The same currents are visible in his search for new and more aesthetic ways of writing, clothing his ideas in an original, more flexible form.

II THE PLOT

To facilitate further reference to the novel De Sobremesa, a detailed summary of the novel follows. Although portraying Silva's lack of organization, the résumé seemed best in a chronological arrangement, with his interpolations summarized as they appeared.

The novel begins with a Modernist description of a luxurious interior in semidarkness: “Concentrated by the gauze and lace lampshade, the tepid light of the lamp fell in a circle upon the scarlet velvet of the carpet and illuminating entirely three china cups, glazed in the depths by a trace of strong coffee, and a cut crystal glass filled with a transparent liquor glimmering with golden particles, left hidden in the dark purple shadow produced by the tone of the carpet, the hangings and tapestries, the rest of the silent chamber.”⁶

Then as the candelabra is lit, we see the poet-protagonist, José Fernández, and his friends Juan Rovira and Oscar Sáenz, who are conversing after finishing a sumptuous dinner. Sáenz explains why he is silent, awed by the luxurious contrast in his friend's house to the life to which he is accustomed, that of a poor medical doctor. He enumerates the many elements which surround him in the Fernández house, which only a rich man can have. He then points out that all his friends envy Fernández because of these things, as well as his amorous adventures.

Sáenz urges him to write more poetry and not to rest on his laurels after having published only two books of poems. He reproaches Fernández for not having written a line for two years, and for dissipating his life in many different directions at the same time. Fernández replies that he is not a poet when compared with the great poets of past ages. He also attests that one cannot write poems by force of will, that they are formed within the poet by his inspiration and come out already formed. Fernández also tells his friends that many of his poems are inspired by his reading of the great poets of the past. He discloses that he dreamed and still dreams of writing great poetry by suggesting the many obscure things he feels within. But he informs them that he cannot consecrate himself to that when he has so much curiosity and enthusiasm for living and for many other things than poetry.

Sáenz says that his isolation in a luxurious house where he has social contacts with only some ten of his friends, most of whom are also somewhat eccentric, is not the most propitious way for living real life. Fernández replies, giving a long meditation on “real life,” and begins by asking. “What is real life, tell me, the bourgeois life without emotions and without curiosity?”⁷

The protagonist affirms that most of the people who are alive have not really lived, and that he is doing his best to really live in every possible way. His medical friend discloses that all the refinements should be taken away from him so that he would write poetry. Fernández tells him that the skull he keeps on his desk to remind him of death shows him that his only duty is to live life to the fullest.

Yet he explains that he is still tempted to write the verses which often seem to be formed, struggling to emerge. However, he is convinced the readers would fail to understand his poems, as did the critic who called him a pornographic poet.⁸ Again he reiterates the Symbolist tenet that he does not wish to express his ideas openly, but only to suggest them in his poems. This requires readers who are artists, and unfortunately, according to Silva, the public lacks artistic understanding.

Rovira interrupts this conversation between Fernández and Dr. Sáenz and urges him to read from a book which has some connection with: 1) the name of the house Fernández is building, Villa Helena; 2) with a design of three leaves and a butterfly hovering above them; and 3) with a pre-Raphaelite painting he owns. At this moment two other friends arrive, Luis Cordovez and Máximo Pérez. Luis Cordovez begins to ask also that Fernández read to him and the others from the notes he took during a trip to Switzerland. Pérez, who is ill, chimes in and asks that he read about an illness Fernández had in Europe.

Fernández begins to meditate on Helena and attributes to her supernatural power the vision he has seen that very day of a butterfly, and then, that same evening, the four requests by his friends that he read about her. He considers that perhaps these happenings are a message from Helena on the anniversary of his discovery that she had died, a time of the year when he is always emotionally ill.

Fernández commences reading from the diary covered luxuriously with an encrustation of the emblem of a butterfly fluttering over three leaves. He wrote this subjective diary during a brief stay in Europe. The first entry is dated Paris, June 3, in the 1890s. From the first line its introspective quality is obvious. It deals with José Fernández's most intimate personality. The work has a great many interpolated essays which reflect his reactions to certain happenings, books he read, and things he heard during the European trip. The essay included later in the first part concerns the reading of two books, works which were popular in the 1890s: one is a book by Max Nordau. Dégénéréscence, cited by Silva from the first French edition, translated from the German and published in 1894.⁹ The other is the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, published for the first time in Paris in 1887.¹⁰ Nordau, a psychologist, judges the artists of his time according to his specialization, coming to the conclusion that they are neurotic or psychological cases. Fernández is especially incensed with Nordau's treatment of Marie Bashkirtseff, a Russian artist who died of tuberculosis in Paris on October 31, 1884.¹¹ In her diary we see the same desires of Fernández, carried to extremes, of living life abundantly; being, seeing, and doing everything.

Silva discusses Marie Bashkirtseff's diary, in which she recorded her experiences from the age of twelve until eleven days before her death. She describes her life of luxury and her enjoyment of it, but also her rebellion against its meaninglessness. She recounts her struggles to educate herself to a higher level, her arrogance, her romantic fancies and daydreams, as well as her ambition to live to the fullest extent, and especially to gain fame as a painter. Until her death she worked at the Académie Julian, a well-known painters' academy. She also describes her struggles with her increasing pain and suffering in the final days of her fatal illness.¹²

In his work Nordau analyzed with an implacable harshness the pre-Raphaelite painters, the work of the great composer Wagner, Verlaine, and many other writers of high literary acclaim, as well as Marie Bashkirtseff. He called them “the degenerates” but admitted in his preface that they were not all criminals. He believed that many were artists who had gained numerous admirers and were the creators of a new kind of art. But all were rebels against society.¹³ His book was very popular during the 1890s, and he probably made Bashkirtseff famous by including her with the other outstanding artists.

Silva was often said to have known Marie Bashkirtseff, but he did not arrive in Paris until the same month she died. Although he speaks of the Passy Cemetery, where she is interred,¹⁴ he knew her only literarily, and perhaps not until the year before his death, when he was writing anew De Sobremesa. He was familiar with the article “La Légende d'une cosmopolite” by Maurice Barrés, which was included in the long section, “Trois stations de Psychotérapie” (one of the works found beside Silva's bed when he committed suicide), in which Barrés characterizes Marie as “Our Lady of Perpetual Desire.”¹⁵

The inserted critical essay by Silva-Fernández of the books by Bashkirtseff and by Nordau, the latter work especially, shows that Silva was familiar with the literary currents of the period in France and was also aware of the great furor caused among the so-called decadent writers by the German psychologist's work. Silva was familiar with these artists, who were often considered to be decadent, because of an attitude which Silva shared, a predominantly aesthetic attitude toward art.

After this critical digression in which the author displays his literary knowledge, the protagonist, Fernández, talks about his own life. He tells of years of constant action and of passion for the luxuries of life, as well as a desire for social prominence in his native country. He describes the growth of his infinite curiosity concerning evil and complains of having tired of operating in his country, which he considers limited, with its vulgar women and its business with little challenge. These factors inspire him to leave the country and to act the part of the rich South American snob in Europe, hunting with the noblemen, dancing cotillions, and spending time in tailors' establishments. But, on the other hand, Fernández describes his opposite side. He is the collector of eighty oil paintings, four hundred water-colors and etchings, medals, bronze, marble, and porcelain pieces, tapestries, outstanding editions of his favorite authors, on special paper, bound luxuriously to his order. He is a student of science who frequents the Sorbonne to hear lectures, a speculator in the stock market, a gourmet, horseback rider, lover of magnificent women, of fine furniture, of wines thirty years old, and, above all, an analyst of himself who believes he sees clearly all the multiple impulses of his psyche.

Yet in spite of all these activities, Fernández discloses that the intense life he is living does not satisfy him, that perhaps of more worth is the laborer, or the anarchist executed for throwing a bomb, since at least he had a plan and a purpose to which he dedicated his life. But such a plan according to the protagonist is very different from the useless plans he elaborates, for example a house of commerce established in New York, a trip around the world, or a pearl-fishing trip.

An entry of June 23, in Bâle, Switzerland, gives a hint of what happened the previous day. There was a violent scene and he had to flee. He implies that by now the woman must have died, and the police probably are looking for him, although he has registered under a false name and identity. He communicates to his readers that he is to go to Whyl, Switzerland, to wait for a telegram from Marinoni, his financial adviser.

The entry dated June 29, in Whyl, discloses the contents of the telegram from Marinoni. It informs him that the girl involved, Lelia Orloff, has been seen in public and that apparently nothing serious had happened to her. Fernández does not understand how there was not a sign of a wound since he knows there was blood on his shirtsleeve.

The following day's entry explains the violence, but is lugubriously coupled with the news of the death of Fernández's grandmother, the last relative he had in the world. The letter telling of her agony describes her prayers for Fernández and repeats her last words of thanks that Fernández has been saved, by the “sign of the cross by the hand of a virgin, the bouquet of roses which falls in his night like a sign of salvation.”¹⁶

The impression caused by his proximity to committing murder and the death of his grandmother shocks him. Then the details are given of the cause of his murderous attack with a knife on Lelia Orloff, his beautiful mistress of the past several months. From the beginning she showed a natural taste for the most luxurious in refined furnishings and possessions, and like him she needed the most profound and exquisite sensations. Her natural aristocratic bearing and tastes caused her to be very attractive to Fernández, and when he first notices that Angela de Roberto was her occasional visitor, he protested. Later, on arriving unexpectedly and learning that the two women are in the bedroom together, he reacts violently, and after breaking down the door he describes the scene, saying “I threw the infamous group to the floor on the black bearskin which is at the foot of the bed, and began striking them furiously with all my strength, stimulating screams and blasphemies, with violent hands, with my boot heels, as someone who smashes a snake. I do not know how I took out of its leather sheath the little Damasquined Toledan knife, engraved like a jewel, which I always carry with me, and I plunged it into her soft flesh twice; I felt my hand soaked with warm blood. …”¹⁷

After feeling the blood, Fernández flees, leaving her screaming. He hurries to the office of Miranda, another of his financial advisers. After getting some money and his correspondence, he goes to his hotel, where his old servant Francisco packs his luggage so that Fernández can take the first train out of the city, to Bâle, Switzerland. As always, the hero analyzes his reactions, and in this case cannot understand his violence since he is never intellectually shocked by the abnormal. In fact, he points out that the abnormal has always fascinated him as a proof of the rebellion of man against instinct. He feels it was a stupid incident, comparing it to a senseless duel he provoked for no good reason with a German diplomat.

Affected emotionally by all these events, Fernández decides to stay out in the country in a small house of an old couple to be able to think. He has sent to Paris for the books and other articles he needs, and meanwhile is going to study prehistoric America and botany. He is living quite primitively since he was unable to eat the food they prepared for him and is drinking only milk. He is surrounded by simplicity in their house and is following a regimen of mountain climbing, study, and meditation. He views nature as a kind of nirvana in which he enters. He compares the sensation with one he felt in the crossing of the ocean, when the exterior spectacle seemed to enter into his being, and he felt a pantheistic ecstasy and union with nature. He only lacks the ecstasy in the Swiss mountains. These two instances are the only times the protagonist considers nature.

Fernández feels a supreme peace in the mountains after his previous months of dissipation. He has meditated until he has come upon a plan to double or triple his fortune by selling the gold mines inherited from his father. Then he will transfer the funds to New York and found the business he had thought of starting with Carillo, who is backed by the Astors. Fernández will try to learn all he can about the fabulous development of the United States, and from New York will go occasionally to Panama to direct the pearl-fishing in person. Then, with all the capital earned, he will proceed to put into effect his political plan.

The plan which Silva puts into the mouth of his protagonist is an ultraconservative, dictatorial theory of government to enable the young, rich South American to improve his underdeveloped country. But the vision is not so implausible, since it mirrors the actual mode of government for many South American countries. The plan centers on the protagonist himself, who is to ascertain first the needs of the people through a tour of the provinces, accompanied by selected engineers and scholars. After entering into a minor political post where he engages in two years of investigation and study of governmental administration, Fernández develops a financial plan which will solve all the problems of the country. He obtains a ministry office, and using his influence gained in that office, he directs the formation of a new political party of “civilized men” who believe in science and education, and are far from religious or political fanaticism. Fernández becomes the president, through an effective publicity campaign, and in that office continues to work for improvements in public education, agriculture, mining, commerce, and industry, while promoting immigration to form a new and powerful race. Finally, after long, peaceful evolution of the established government, Fernández retires, leaving the power in the hands of “competent persons.”

The protagonist discusses an alternative in case the utopian plan does not succeed through peaceful means. The people must be incited to a conservative reaction against false liberalism. The clergy must instigate the masses to arise. And a tyranny, later becoming a dictatorship, must be established through military power. A new constitution is promulgated, and revolts are kept down by the muzzling of the press, the exile of powerful opposition figures, and through confiscation of the property of the enemies of the government. With proper economic measures taken by the dictatorship with Fernández at its head, in a few years the country will be rich and peaceful. While it is impossible to be sure that Silva was considering these plans as a serious solution, even as fictional plans for his hero they show a naiveté concerning the simplicity of a government's operation, and one cannot fail to notice his lack of political ideological depth.

Fernández dreams of the success of these measures in bringing progress to his country. He visualizes the transformation of the capital to a delightful place as the Paris of Baron Haussmann. He hopes that the progress will not only be reflected in a material way, but in art, in the sciences, in a national novel, in poetry which celebrates the indigenous legends, the glorious wars of emancipation, the natural beauty, and the splendid future of the regenerated land.

He points out the incongruity of establishing a conservative dictatorship like that of Gabriel García Moreno in Ecuador or of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala in order to bring about the sweeping changes he encompasses in his plan. But he attests that the country is tired of demagogues and of false liberties in constitutions which do not function. He feels that the people prefer the cry of a dictator who follows through on his threats, rather than that of a more platonic promise of respect for law, which is never carried out.¹⁸

Fernández sees himself in that faraway future retiring finally from his position as dictator to write poetry containing the supreme elixir of his many experiences—poetry of mystic tone, and apocalyptic, very different from that written when he was twenty, full of lust and fire. His last years seem peaceful and replete with philosophical pursuits, but he prognosticates that “Over my still-tepid corpse, a legend will begin to form which will make me appear as a monstrous problem of psychological complication to the generations of the future.”¹⁹

Here he is talking about having been a dictator, and the mixed emotions that the people would undoubtedly have felt toward him. These lines are often cited as Silva's feeling about himself, yet it can be observed clearly that they are concerned solely with his fictional protagonist in his planned role as dictator.

At a break in the reading of the diary, Fernández says to his guests that he must have been mad while writing that plan. Sáenz says that it was the only time he had been lucid. Rovira tells him that being president of the republic would be degrading for Fernández. Asked if the financial part of his plan had been successful, Fernández replies that the earnings were more than expected. But when asked why he did not carry through with his plans, the doctor answers for him, saying it was because of the pleasures of life. Juan Rovira leaves, disclosing that while he loves to hear Fernández read his prose production, he does not understand anything of what he has heard. When Cordovez insists that Fernández return to his reading of the diary, Fernández begins with an entry from Interlaken, July 25. Again Fernández praises the effects of nature on man as a calmative agent and as a purification of those who retire to meditate, taking away all sensuous desires which abound in the city. With these ideas in mind Fernández thinks of the seductiveness of Lelia Orloff and laughs aloud as he savors his freedom from desire for her and for the sensual life.

The following day, July 26, Fernández continues in the same vein with a long tirade against life in the city and against the common people with their atrocious tastes unlike those of refined aristocrats such as he.

On August 5, Fernández's fifty days of abstinence are broken by Nini Rousset, a vulgar actress who had previously disdained him in Paris. She arrives at his hotel in Interlaken and seeing his name on the register comes to visit him and remains with him for the night for an orgy. Fernández detests her, but cannot resist her, even though for him she is the incarnation of all the Parisian vices.

On August 9, in Geneva, Fernández awakens after forty-eight hours under the influence of opium. He took the opium in revulsion after the night spent with Nini Rousset in his room, in order to escape from his memory of trying to choke Nini, probably because she had undone his rational and chaste plan of abstinence. She fled crying, half-dressed, from his room, and Fernández took a huge dose of opium to escape. The combination of the orgy, drinking, and the opium leaves him in a miserable physical condition when he comes to himself.

In Geneva, August 11, Fernández is having dinner in a small dining room when a young girl and her father enter. The young girl looks to Fernández like a painting of a picture by Van Dyck; her hands are like those of Anne of Austria in the painting of Rubens, and Fernández is unable to take his eyes from her. He feels that the attraction is mutual, but he is ashamed of his past life as he faces her in her innocence. He feels in her glance a compassionate tenderness resulting in peace of mind for him. He is overexcited and his imagination creates an intense understanding without ever speaking a word to the blue-eyed beauty. He hears them speaking Italian and they mention St. Moritz, among other places. Then they leave the dining room to have their after-dinner coffee served in their room. As they depart, Fernández meets her eyes again, and she seems like a supernatural being with an earthly beauty. Fernández finds on the floor a cameo which has a branch with three leaves and a butterfly fluttering above it with its wings open. He keeps the cameo to return it to her the next day and is pleased, since he thinks that it will enable him to make her acquaintance. Helena's appearance is never clarified, although isolated features are mentioned; her blue eyes, graceful carriage, and dignified poise. She shares with the Romantic and Modernist heroines such characteristics as her extreme youth, sixteen or seventeen years, her status as an orphan who had lost her mother at the age of four, her apparent physical frailty and seeming inclination to be consumptive, as was her mother.

Fernández learns that they had arrived a few hours earlier from Nice, and the Count Robert de Scilly had said that he and his daughter Helena de Scilly Dancourt, would remain two days. They did not give the name of a place where they were going. Fernández is glad that he has never had a love affair with a girl whose name was Helena.

An old friend, Enrique Lorenzana, comes to visit him and is surprised to see that Fernández looks so horribly disfigured and pale. He convinces Fernández to accompany him to a lecture on history. On walking back to the hotel in the moonlight, with the stars shining above, Fernández thinks of Helena and enters the garden of the hotel to continue his solitary walk. He looks up and sees one of the balconies on the second floor with the window open. A tall slender shadow of a woman can be seen against the gauze curtains. Fernández picks some flowers, puts his card with them, and throws them up through the window curtains into the room. Helena comes out, reminding him of a painting by Fra Angelico, and raising her hand she makes the sign of the cross as she throws him a bunch of white flowers. Fernández seems to hear the words of his dying grandmother and he nearly faints. When he recovers, all he has are the flowers, and the lights have gone out in her room.

Fernández cannot sleep without the aid of two grams of chloral hydrate, and he dreams of all the day's images, awakening at ten in the morning. He bathes, and when he is served breakfast he asks the waiter to find out if Count Scilly and his daughter have gone out. Fernández learns that they left very early in a private coach and the concierge did not hear to which station they directed the driver to take them.

Now the desperate search for the ideal, the chaste Helena, begins. Fernández has fallen in love with her, and he begins an anguished search for her as his last chance for salvation. He has only seen her twice and has dreamed of her more than actually seeing her clearly. She represents a creature of light, and he feels that she alone is capable of saving and redeeming him. The reader knows from the beginning of the novel that Fernández will never find her, but her person never dies in his soul, and in homage to his pure love for her he is constructing a villa in Colombia which is named for her. He has difficulty in beginning his search since he has no idea where she was going. He preserves the bunch of white roses in a crystal box to take with him. He has received a letter saying that the buyer of the gold mines has agreed on the price and he must be in London on the fifteenth of the month to sign the papers. He plans to go to all the places he heard Helena and her father mention in the dining room, as soon as he finishes his business with his English bankers.

Painting is one of the main themes in De Sobremesa, since it creates imaginatively the dreams of the protagonist. Helena, who belonged to the family of Rossetti, a painter of the pre-Raphaelite school, is a shadow which the protagonist forms into a painting from the first time he sees her. Later, when he owns the painting of Helena's mother, the wife of the count, Helena becomes even more of an icon for him. Fernández searches for her and for her father all through Europe, finding her only in the grave, leaving him with his ideal intact but without solutions for his emotional future. From the beginning her beauty causes him to remember museum pieces, and in his first encounter with her we see the Modernist techniques of the fusion of painting and fiction.

In the entry of October 11, in London, Fernández mentions that during the two months spent in London finishing up his business deal he has taken the time to send telegrams to all the major European hotels asking about the count and his daughter, and has written letters to travel agencies trying to find them. At night he evokes her figure as he reads the poetry of Shelley and Rossetti and sometimes he calls her name and seems to see her come toward him without touching the floor. He thinks of her in terms of purity and innocence, and the phrases he uses are the verses of Dante concerning Beatrice. He meditates upon the seventy days spent chastely in London, without mixing with the society he knows would have welcomed him. His friend Enrique Lorenzana, who came to see him in Geneva after his bout with opium, sees him in London and tells him that he looks like another person. Fernández has the sensation that this is true, but wishes that he did not have the incurable nostalgia for the blue eyes of the love he has lost.

In the London entry for September 10, Fernández is preparing himself in the daytime, for development of his country, studying armaments and military maneuvers for when they will be necessary. He is still buying works of art, such as watercolors and paintings, but is experiencing no strong emotions. Nevertheless he has horrible nightmares when he again sees the three leaves on the branch and the butterfly fluttering above them. He feels that his love for Helena is like an obsession. When she appears to him he always thinks of the Latin phrase “Manibus date lilia plenis” (Give handfuls of lilies).

Fernández knows that although all this is wonderfully sentimental and ideal, he needs physiological fulfillment with some of his old mistresses. But none of them is in London. And he is revolted by the idea of buying caresses, feeling such a practice to be nearly impossible for him.

The entry for November 13 describes how an assignation is arranged by his friend Roberto Blundel with a beautiful woman, Constanza Landseer. But Fernández is unable to consummate the union because of a vision of his grandmother and of Helena, and because of a bunch of white tea roses (which Constanza has received from Nice) from which a butterfly escapes, fluttering above the flowers. Another coincidence is that the flowers are tied with the same cross-shaped ribbon as the ones which Helena tossed him. Fernández flees superstitiously from the union, hoping desperately that he can find Helena soon.

Still in London, on November 17, Fernández has talked with his Greek professor about his friend Dr. John Rivington, who has studied the pessimistic attitudes of humans and other works of experimental psychology and psychophysics. Fernández has already read the books of Rivington, and finally goes to consult with him, carrying two letters of introduction. Fernández says that he is an atheist but he is coming to the scientist with faith in his properties as a corporal and spiritual director. Rivington asks Fernández to tell him his life history, about the antecedents of his family, his life in his own country, the city in which he was raised, the present organization of his life, his plans for the future, and his present occupations. He tells the doctor of his monastic existence since his meeting with Helena, the plans he is elaborating concerning his country, and the incident of his sexual failure in the bedroom of Constanza Landseer. Asked by the doctor if he intends to marry Helena if he finds her, Fernández becomes confused, showing his shock at the idea. Dr. Rivington urges Fernández to make all his body functions a regular habit, and not to go to extremes with anything, to regularize his sexual necessities so as not to confuse them with his feelings toward Helena.

Rivington tells him to search for the girl and marry her and not to make her into a supernatural being because of the coincidence of some words said by his dying grandmother which seemed to foretell the meeting with Helena. Then Rivington begins to question Fernández about the description of Helena and finally asks him if he wishes to see his vision in a painting. Rivington takes him to see a pre-Raphaelite painting he owns which is so like Helena that Fernández feels sure it is a likeness of Helena. The doctor tells him it is a likeness of Helena's mother. He questions him about his visit to London ten years earlier and whether or not he has ever viewed paintings like this one in museums. Rivington feels that Fernández might have imagined a good part of his feelings toward Helena after seeing such a painting in his youth. Rivington advises Fernández to live a more normal life, to concentrate on less ambitious undertakings, and to search for Helena, the girl he wishes to marry. He diagnoses in Fernández a double inheritance from his ancestors; on the one hand ascetic tendencies, and on the other a desire for a wild and active life of sexual and other kinds of excitement. He advises him to leave all drug usage such as morphine, opium, or ether, because he has a predisposition for drugs and thus could easily become an addict.

Fernández blames part of the duality of his personality on his intellectual cultivation without an orderly method which, according to him, destroyed his faith and gave him an ardent curiosity to experience all the possible activities in life, both good and evil. He analyzes the feelings of terror which come to those who have intellectually denied God, and yet he fears that some of the teachings of his childhood might be true. He considers the terror of madness, sometimes induced by taking drugs, and even considers moments of deep depression, when he has felt that death by his own hand would be the only solution, but is lacking the energy to perform the act. Returning to the theme of madness he points out that he, just as many others, has felt its nearness. And he questions why it should be so disgraceful to go mad if such great artists as Baudelaire and others of equal stature have gone mad. But then he thinks of Helena, who is going to save him from all of these things he has mentioned and give him absolution.

Once again there is a break from the reading of the diary when Sáenz breaks in and tells Fernández that he has not lived the life advised by Rivington for the last eight years. Fernández says that his life is different now because he has distributed his energies equally amongst pleasure, study, and action. Also he has left off having violent, emotional affairs with women because he scorns all women, and for that reason has two affairs at once so that they counterbalance each other. Once again Fernández continues when Máximo Pérez asks his friend to resume his reading.

In the entry from London, November 20, Fernández analyzes himself and the contradictory inheritance from the side of his family which was ascetic and the side of his family which was violently active, both of which make him so changeable in his impulses. He relates the death of his mother when he was ten and his internship in a Jesuit school, from which he was then sent to the ranch of the Monteverdes, his cousins, where he lived the brutal life of the rich “patrón” (ranch-owner). The Monteverdes alternated between all types of violent activities and sexual orgies in which Fernández also took part. He feels that all these factors are the causes of his alternating between epochs of savage action, and of meditation, when he enters into a state of ascetic continence.

In the entry dated December 5, London, Fernández begins to investigate the pre-Raphaelite painters, which he admits is an example of his impracticality. But, in a long disquisition, Fernández elaborates on the idea that practical persons are inferior to the impractical ones like himself. He decides to make a return visit to Rivington and goes to his office. There in the waiting room Fernández becomes upset by the psychologically ill persons waiting to see the doctor. When he enters the office he begins to cry, and asks the doctor to assure him that he is not crazy like the people in the waiting room. He also asks the doctor to have a copy made of the painting of Helena's mother. The doctor urges Fernández to search for the girl and dream no longer. Fernández decides to go to Paris to seek her. He thinks of all the things he has done in London, studying Greek and Russian, the arts of war, agronomy, and also his studies and viewings of art, especially the pre-Raphaelite. He also enumerates all the various things of value that he has collected during his stay.

Rivington only has partial success and admits it to Fernández. Finally, Fernández recurs to Charvet, actually a pseudonym invented by Silva for Charcot, precursor of Freud. His malady is diagnosed as neurasthenic ailments. The protagonist is ironical concerning the fancy medical terms which the psychiatric practitioners use, but nevertheless, he is cured twice from the nervous collapses he falls into.²⁰

Psychotherapy is discussed at great length in Rivington's office concerning the problems of Fernández. His diagnosis seems to be a neurosis attributed in part to his contradictory inheritance, with one side of the family fanatically religious, inhibited persons, and with wild, orgiastic, antireligious persons on the other. Also, Rivington suggests that some of the protagonist's problems have resulted because he was an orphan, losing his mother when he was ten years of age, and other family members at a relatively early age, leaving him without relatives at the death of his grandmother.

With such fluctuation in his emotional states, where drugs, mysticism, and sexual orgies alternate with periods of sexual abstinence, Fernández apparently has mental aberrations. These problems cause numerous allusions to psychotherapy in the novel. It is a theme used as subject for some of the essayistic digressions, such as those on madness.²¹

On December 26 the entry explains that, once again emotionally ill, Fernández consults with Charvet. When Charvet hears of his five months of sexual abstinence, he says that Fernández should not follow such capricious behavior. But on learning that the protagonist is stubbornly bent on such behavior, he prescribes violent exercises, long hot baths, and large doses of bromides. But the suggestions give no results, and the protagonist continues to feel a violent depression. On December 27, Fernández is somewhat better, but then he becomes worse again and stays in bed for a few days. His servant, Francisco, goes to see Fernández's friends the Mirandas, who bring two doctors to diagnose his illness. The friends gossip while the doctors consider his case. Silva is very ironical in this passage, making a long enumeration of all the neuroses and psychological terms for illness which the two doctors use. They finally prescribe a purgative for Fernández, which he does not intend to take. Then his friend Marinoni says that he will go for Dr. Charvet, who comes that evening. Fernández asks for drugs to allow him to escape the horrible, anguished feeling he has. Dr. Charvet finally prescribes a medicine which has a positive effect, and within a few days Fernández is able to get out of bed. But the doctor warns him that he can have a relapse which might prostrate him at any time.

On New Year's Eve, Fernández goes out but soon begins to feel ill again. In front of a shop window, which has a great marble clock, he begins to experience all the terrors he felt before and finally loses consciousness in front of the window. He becomes conscious again in his own bed with Marinoni and Francisco his servant, accompanying him. Fernández says that he is saved, even though he has a horrible headache, since the anguished feeling which has tormented him has disappeared. In bed that night in a feverish condition, nevertheless, he is improving, and in succeeding days he finally regains his health. Charvet tells him again to enjoy life, but not excessively, and to marry and be happy.

On March 10, Rivington sends Fernández a copy of the painting of the mother of Helena, and the protagonist makes a kind of chapel, with the painting of Helena's mother on one wall and the picture of his grandmother painted for him by James McNeill Whistler on the other wall. Below the painting of Helena's mother is a bronze table he keeps filled with several different varieties of flowers ordered by telegram from Cannes. He has a chair there on which to meditate and read, a box where he keeps the jewels he has bought for her and the cameo Helena dropped in the restaurant. He also has a crystal box in which is preserved the bunch of flowers she tossed to him.

On March 10 Charvet, in one of his consultations with Fernández, sees the picture and mentions that Scilly Dancourt is an acquaintance of his. Charvet tells Fernández that Helena's mother died of tuberculosis while he was attending her, and the husband, who had a daughter four years of age, was deeply affected by his wife's death. Charvet tells Fernández the name of the only other person he knows who corresponds with Scilly, General des Zardes.

On March 20, Fernández goes to see the general. He does not know anything about Scilly at that moment, but tells Fernández that a Professor Mortha has contact with him. On seeing Mortha, Fernández is told that the only connection he has with Scilly is by mail through his bankers, Lazard, Casseres and Company. They are also financially connected with Fernández, and he goes there to investigate. He learns that they know little, but that the last check of Count Scilly was cashed in Alexandria.

Fernández meditates on April 12 on what little he has learned from his investigations except about the life of the father, previously a military man who on the death of his wife has turned to a study of religions, traveling through the world with his daughter. Fernández discloses that he has sentimentally rented for ten years the room where Helena slept in that Swiss inn, and he maintains it closed, as well as the room in the house back in his native land where his grandmother died.

On April 13 there is a long digression about what he would like to do for Helena if he were to find her. He would build her a castle and he sentimentally describes what he feels would be the reaction of the country people to her beauty: “There will be sunny mornings in which they will see us pass riding on horseback on a pair of Arabian horses over the roads which extend through the plain, and the rough country people will kneel upon seeing you, thinking you are an angel, when you look at their bodies deformed by their rustic chores with your shining blue eyes. …”²²

Dated April 14 is one of the long essays in which Fernández treats of various themes such as: Ibsen, the Russians, Nietzsche, neo-Mysticism, and the theosophical centers of Paris. Sometimes one does not really understand whether Fernández is being serious about what he discusses or whether he is speaking ironically; for example, the long analysis of the trends of the epoch, where it is difficult to see whether Fernández is on the side of the anarchists or not. At times one seems to see an obvious irony, and at other times one could interpret his thoughts and ideas as his serious opinions; for example, in the following lines: “Thus with explosions of dynamite in the foundations of the palaces and striking down the most profound moral foundations, which were the older beliefs, humanity marches toward the ideal reign of justice. …”²³

Another passage in which Fernández is talking about the religions of the present and especially about the Buddhists gives the reader the same doubtful feeling as to whether or not the author believed in what he was saying: “Do you still doubt concerning the Renaissance of Idealism and neo-Mysticism, you, spirit which questions the future and sees the old religions collapsing? … Look: from the obscure land of the Orient, the home of the gods, Buddhism and magic are returning to conquer the Western world. Paris, the Metropolis, opens to them its doors as Rome opened its doors to the cults of Mitra and Isis: there are fifty theosophical centers, hundreds of societies which investigate the mysterious psychological phenomena; Tolstoy abandons his art to publicize in a practical way charity and altruism; mankind is redeemed; the new faith lights her torches to shed light on her shadowy way.”²⁴

Although it is not possible to cite all the passages which would give a clearer view of Fernández's often quite perceptive ideas about the spirit of the present, this section reflects deep thought and meditation.

On April 15, the entry contains more of his evocations of the profound love he feels for Helena. The section of the diary dated April 19, however, is very different in tone from the previous evocation. Fernández enters a jewelry store, which provokes a favorite technique of the Modernists, a word picture of all the gems he sees, as well as all those which he can imagine. The following citation is only a small part of the world's gems which he paints: “Oh, sparkling stones, splendid and invulnerable, you vivid gems which slept for entire centuries in the depths of the earth, delight to the eye, symbol and summary of human riches. The diamonds shine with iridescence like drops of light. …”²⁵

While Fernández is in the jewelry store, a girl with a Yankee accent comes in, and when she asks about a diamond necklace, she indicates that it is too expensive. Fernández offers it to her but she refuses; however, they make a date for nine that evening. After she leaves, Fernández buys the necklace to take to her as a gift. When he gives her the necklace that evening, she offers to pay for it since it is the one that she has asked her millionaire husband to buy for her without convincing him. Only after she learns he is the famous poet José Fernández does she soften and permit him to give her the necklace, thus opening the door to her seduction, not in her hotel but in his. She told him she was leaving the next day for New York, and Fernández knew that this would be his only night with Nelly, the wife of a Yankee millionaire.

Five months later, on the first of September, Fernández remembers the night with Nelly as having been only a droplet incapable of satisfying his horrible thirst. He gives a party and seduces three different girls, but none of them is really what he wants. He is searching for his lost love, Helena, and the caresses of these girls leave him with a feeling of bitterness and scorn for everything. He comments on the empty heavens because of his lack of faith. He is sure his thirst for the supreme, the absolute, is part of what causes his dissatisfaction.

His friend Rivas asks Fernández to stay with his wife, Consuelo, while he and three other friends spend the evening with four females whom he calls “horizontals.” Fernández brings Consuelo flowers from his greenhouse, orchids the same as grown in Colombia and which in their youth they had looked at together. In those long-ago times, Consuelo and Fernández had felt fondness for each other before her marriage to Rivas. Fernández tells her that he has always loved her and asks her pardon. She, in turn, tells him he is her only love. Fernández asks her to meet him the next day, which she does, and their love affair begins.

Another conquest, the blonde German baroness, is seduced by the use of other wiles; Fernández playing hard to get and cool toward her. He challenges her to kiss him, and to meet with him the next afternoon. She tells him that what fascinates her in him is his scorn for the current morality. Julia Musellaro, an Italian girl, also seduced by Fernández, has libertinous conversations in her house, where she receives her guests every Tuesday evening. Fernández invites her to come to see him on Thursday morning, when they can be as pagan as they like. Fernández considers that he is perhaps behaving as a Don Juan, except in the case of Consuelo, his childhood sweetheart. He feels that he does not seduce anyone, that the seduction is mutual because of a common desire for pleasure and adventure. He meets the Italian girl later, and she has what he feels is a false story to tell him about a piece of jewelry that a “friend” needs to sell. He tells her to have it sent to him and he will send her a check.

Rivas continues sending his wife to Fernández, urging Consuelo to go sightseeing in Paris with their friend, and seems not to feel the least bit worried about his wife. Consuelo tells Fernández that everyone, including her husband, calls him “el casto José” (the chaste José).²⁶ Although Consuelo had been ill, she begins to improve with the affection of José and making love to him every day. For three months their idyll continues, then Rivas and his wife leave for San Sebastian, and although they invite José to accompany them, he declines. Rivas thanks Fernández for the time spent with his wife, which has resulted in her great improvement in health. In his short observations dated September 18, Fernández indicates that he does not wish to accompany them and that if they return he intends to tell Rivas that his wife should not be trusted to spend her evenings with him.

His personal record of October 1 recounts a conversation with Camilo Monteverde, first cousin of Fernández, who is considered by the protagonist to be ignorant in the subject of art, and for that reason they hardly ever talk of such themes together. His cousin's philosophy of life is to praise others' possessions highly in order that they be given to him as gifts. He lives as easily as he can without studying or working very much and says that although both are from the Andrade tree, Fernández is like Don Quixote while he on the contrary is like Sancho. In this section, as was pointed out by Bernardo Gicovate, for the first time in Spanish, Silva writes a burlesque of Ramón de Campoamor, using him as an example of intellectual mediocrity. Fernández is convinced that Monteverde has absolutely no taste in poetry because his favorite poet is Campoamor.²⁷ It should be remembered that Silva has often been compared to Campoamor in some of his “Gotas Amargas.” It is obvious that the poet-protagonist of De Sobremesa was not seriously impressed with Campoamor's poetic talents, and that whatever respect Silva had felt for him probably no longer existed.

In his observations dated October 15, Fernández remembers Helena strongly again and returns to his meditation in the room of the paintings after an absence of several days. The flowers that had been placed there last were dead, and the room smelled of death. Fernández decided to move the things to other parts of his living quarters, and to put the paintings in his bedroom.

The diary for October 25 describes another period of searching for Helena, sending telegrams and spending ten days in investigation, with no success.

The diary now jumps to January 16, where it is revealed that Fernández has been unconscious for ten days, and again Charvet has had to be consulted. Between life and death for a few days, Fernández finally recovers and decides to leave for America to try to forget his failure to find Helena through immersing himself in mercantile operations. He returns to a cemetery where he has spent several afternoons, and there sees the emblem he has come to connect with Helena, the three leaves and the butterfly. He nearly faints, and catches himself by a column. His friend Marinoni comes to his aid, and as Fernández starts to lose consciousness in the arms of Marinoni, he sees the inscription of Helena's name and the date of her death. He mourns her death and says that perhaps she never truly existed, but that she was his dream and was more real than what men call reality. Her early death prevents the consummation of the love Fernández feels for her, and she can then enter completely the realm of the ideal, without loss of chastity, in word or deed, becoming the perfect object for the protagonist's adoration. Fernández ends the reading of the diary and closes the book. His friends remain silent and Silva gives a last artistic description of the luxurious interior as though it were a painting.

III GENERAL CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON THE PLOT, SCENES, AND CHARACTERS

De Sobremesa lacks a well-designed and constructed plot, as most critics who have studied the novel have noted. For example, Arias Argáez cites Sanín Cano as having said that De Sobremesa was a work of defective construction, of arbitrary analysis and of purely subjective truth.²⁸ Yet there are paragraphs in which Silva shows some talent as a storyteller and also reveals his stylistic command of the Spanish language. De Sobremesa is a series of short narrations dated as entries in a diary. It includes incidents and episodes as well as digressions which in reality are essays. This interpolation of essays makes the novel seem rather unorganized and hard to summarize and to follow except for the unification of the plot provided by the hero of the work, José Fernández.

As the plot summary indicates, the diary relates the European trip of a rich South American, José Fernández, poet and art collector, who is beleaguered with psychological problems. He glimpses fleetingly a mysterious child-woman with whom he falls in love at first sight. He tells of the search, a kind of pilgrimage all across Europe in search of this ideal love whom he finds only in the grave.

The hero appears at times to be a stylized reflection of Silva. The character, however, is Silva and is not Silva, as in all autobiographical novels, where usually the author uses much of his own knowledge about many men, and not solely about himself. Sometimes the reader does not know whether or not Silva is referring to his own feelings or fictional ones. Nevertheless, this has not deterred many critics from quoting the majority of the words Silva puts into the mouth of his protagonist as his own thoughts and aspirations. Yet at times the character is a very different one from Silva, who at the moment of rewriting the novel was undoubtedly already decided concerning his suicide.

There can be no doubt about the reasons an author chooses to write a novel using an autobiographical approach. In this way it is possible to objectify his own contradictory psychology, and the novel is an exploration of the psychology of an artist. Since Fernández is a prose writer and poet, we are able to observe his ideas about writing poetry, ideas elaborated on by the author and put into the mouth of the hero. The narrative mode, the autobiographical novel, is one which reveals more fully the character of the hero, yet it gives a unilateral approach to the consciousness of a person, and such is the intimate diary read in a long after-dinner session with friends. Since the actual after-dinner chat is cut to such a minimum, perhaps it would have been better to entitle it The Reading of My Diary. The novel is so long that it does not seem plausible that it could be read at one sitting, but such acceptance of the illogical has been one of the concomitants of most types of art.

Silva wanted to write a psychological novel which would reveal the complicated psyche and soul of the artist, in this case a particular artist who showed a duality in his alternation between sexual orgies and periods of abstinence, when he would search for the ideal. When reading the summary of this unusually frank book for Silva's epoch in Colombia, it is easy to understand why his novel was not published until twenty-nine years after his death. As Juan Loveluck has said, the novel presents a kind of nonsystematic analysis of the man of the end of the nineteenth century and his basic conflicts in the world.²⁹ But the presentation was of a man as artist and aesthete, whose problems were often different from those of the majority of men of those years. The narration does reflect the consuming intellectual interests of the time when the pre-Freudians were beginning to elaborate their theories. The protagonist's interests are made manifest in psychology, psychopathology, and parapsychology, as well as the mental explorations which the author probably knew about personally, in Paris, when Charcot and other pre-Freudian psychological investigators were extremely popular.

In the case of Silva-Fernández, the artist (or other man), who is unable to find the sensitive spirit he craves in a woman, comes to feel completely frustrated, as if there were no being in existence who might meet him on his own footing. Then he creates an ideal of femininity, even though he must occasionally break loose and try to gain release by union with female flesh. Nevertheless, he has such revulsion for himself after these orgies that he destroys what little physiological relief he might have gained. Yet he must prove he is a man every day.

Fernández's ideal of perfect womanhood was Helena, an adolescent whom he sees only at a distance and does not know well enough to do anything but idealize her. The whole novel is in part a search for Helena, with the characteristics of a detective story in the investigation of clues to her whereabouts. But the search is fruitless and she becomes for Fernández the mystery woman, later his impossible love, and finally his muse. This idealization of Helena does not help the protagonist to have a more normal attitude toward women, nor does it prevent the sexual affairs which cause his self-revulsion. And, even though he does not leave off drugs or his encounters with other women, his self-hatred afterwards indicates that these were only substitutes for the ideal who lives solely in his memory. A less blunt and truthful writer would have left these amorous adventures out of the work, but Silva is illustrating the teaching of his day, the double standard which was ingrained in the young men from the beginning.

Often this novel has had very adverse criticism and a close study of it over many years does not cause it to gain in stature in the mind of this student of Silva's works. Yet it can be compared favorably with Modernist novels such as Idolos Rotos (Broken Idols) of Manuel Díaz Rodríquez, and others of the time. Perhaps it is not as good as the author would have liked it to be since it was reconstructed in the most terrible years which Silva suffered. He rewrote it after he had lost all the import business along with his capital and a great part of his personal property, after he had tried without success to make a career in diplomacy, after a shipwreck in which he lost much of his unpublished work, and after he had failed once again in starting the tile factory in Bogotá. He was, at the time, a complete failure, unable to find a way to maintain his mother and sister. Unemployed, he did rewrite this novel requested by his friend Fernando Villa before taking the suicide route out of all his problems. The mere fact of rewriting a long novel from memory without any notes means that it could not have the same consistency and organization of the manuscript lost in the ship L'Amerique. For that reason it is probably more equitable to characterize his prose writings in some of his short essays written at a much earlier time, as will be done in the next chapter.

The scenes where the novel takes place give us a cosmopolitan view of the world. It begins with the luxurious salon, where the reading of the intimate diary of a world traveler, a rich South American, takes place. The interior of the room where the protagonist reads his journal aloud, and chats with his friends, is in a South American city which is not identified, but it is probably Bogotá or perhaps Caracas. It is a novel, however, of taking a trip, an idea so dear to the mind of the young people of most epochs, especially today—taking a trip in every sense of the word. Most of the other scenes are in bedrooms where Fernández's conquests take place or in the interiors of luxurious houses, with the one exception of the few days when Fernández stays in the house of the Swiss couple. And only there, during his stay in the mountains, does the hero describe any scenes of nature. This indicates that nature did not enter into Silva's prose as an important element.

The setting is usually urban as in most of the Modernist novels. The characters also are urban. They are mostly rich, artistically knowledgeable, international, usually bilingual or trilingual, reflecting a universal culture. They are often expatriates from several different countries. Some of the characters are mature psychologists or psychiatric physicians. They are all adults or young adults. The youngest character is Helena, who is a teenager when the hero glimpses her. The protagonist is twenty-seven years old. The only child even mentioned in the novel is Helena, as a child of four when she lost her mother. This indicates that Silva was not concerned with a realistic portrayal of life, but with a psychological portrayal of the psyche of an artist. And he succeeds admirably, in spite of the disorganization apparent in the work.

IV AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS

The element of fiction which is always present should not be confused, as some critics have done, apparently believing that the character created by the writer and the writer himself in his historical person are one and the same. However, Silva did use the fictional character to reflect some of the same tortures he suffered. He depicts the suffering of a young man who could not adapt to the conservative and rigid society into which he was born and whose problems were exacerbated because he was an artist who could not adapt to the society in which he found himself.

It can be said that Silva drew upon his personal experiences, and those things also that he dreamed of doing but could never afford. Some of those elements which are autobiographical are the fact that both were poets, and that Fernández expresses many of the same ideas concerning poetic theory and other subjects which Silva made clear in essays and poems. But there are differences: no ideal love is known to have played a part of any importance in Silva's life. He was never anywhere near being a millionaire, nor did he have enough money to live the luxurious life the hero lives, as for example buying a magnificent diamond necklace for Nelly to enable him to seduce her and remain with her one night.

The work is in a way a complement of the biography of Silva in that it analyzes the crisis of a poet much like himself, and the intellectual surroundings he found in Europe in those days. It is a work which also demonstrates the wide knowledge of the author in art and in literature, as well as other fields such as neuropsychology. It also shows some of his mistaken ideas, as for example the idea that thirty-year-old wines would of necessity be good ones,³⁰ or that the aristocracy of Europe could trace their ancestry back to Roman times.³¹ There is no doubt that Silva did identify himself often with his protagonist, but it is a mistake to exaggerate out of proportion the autobiographical descriptions in the work, attributing them all to Silva, and not to the protagonist he has created out of his imagination.

One of the many ways in which Fernández is a reflection of Silva is in his dissatisfaction with his surroundings, with the bourgeois atmosphere which both the author and the protagonist reject as being mediocre, vile, and philistinian. Fernández is critical of the public, with its lack of understanding.³² He expresses his hatred of the bourgeois life without emotions and without curiosity.³³ He is scornful of Latin American politics, manifested by the plan he elaborates to make sweeping changes.³⁴ He is scornful of the admirers of mediocrity,³⁵ of vulgar mercantile work and all the institutions of a life which is empty without the sanctuary of art.³⁶ Some of the other themes toward which the protagonist shows a critical attitude, probably similar to that of Silva, were: religion,³⁷ reality,³⁸ socialists,³⁹ the Jews,⁴⁰ the United States,⁴¹ and even the visual pollution of Niagara Falls.⁴²

Silva himself had many psychological problems, often resulting from real tragedies in his life, which were a contributing factor in his suicide. But his protagonist in the novel had many that were different from Silva's, mostly as a result of his alternating abstinence and sexual excesses, as well as his search for the ideal which was never fulfilled. Silva had to concentrate on earning a living and had little time to search for the ideal.

One suspects that the friends who listen to the reading of the diary, and those whom he meets in Paris and London and the other places Fernández visits, are taken from real-life models. However, all the women, with the exception of Consuelo, who is delineated as a live person from his native country, seem to have come from the author's wide reading, or his imagination. They lack reality, since there is little difference to be observed among them, or among his feelings for them.

More than simply mirroring Silva, the protagonist delineates the spiritual disorientation of those years, reflected by most of the Modernist writers. Fernández is a walking compendium of all the weaknesses and vacillations the Modernist artists had in resolving their lives in those days.

Like Des Esseintes in A Rebours, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Fernández in many ways was the double of the author, and both writers were braving the stigma attached to the autobiographical novel, uniting the mystery of creation and autobiography. But not only in being both the creator and in part the created one does Silva show us his duality; his chosen protagonist is partly an aesthete and partly an unsatisfied man, tormented by his financial and personal difficulties. Silva therefore is behind Fernández and often comes forth with more force than the protagonist. De Sobremesa is a book halfway between pure autobiography and pure fiction, sometimes both at the same time, other times one or the other. De Sobremesa is, on the most profound level, pure autobiography; that is, on the basis of the aspirations of the soul and of the thirst for the absolute of the hero, Fernández. It does not matter that the autobiographical details of Fernández are not completely those of Silva, since the literary and artistic traits seem to blend.

Like Silva, Fernández is the author of books of poetry, two in the case of the protagonist, one in the case of the author, but Silva lost some manuscripts of poems in the wreck of the ship L'Amerique. The early poems of Fernández are said to be erotic, and are denigrated by him compared with the great creations found in the poetry of the past.

Fernández gives his theory of poetry, and it is a clear idea of Symbolist poetry, and perhaps it is the theory of Silva as well, since he has stated several times in poems essentially the same thing: “It is that I do not want to state, but to suggest, and in order for the suggestion to be produced, it is necessary that the reader be an artist. In imaginations deprived of faculties of this type, what effect can a work of art produce? None. Half of it is in the verse, statue, or painting, the other half in the head of the one who hears, sees, or dreams.”⁴³

According to a friend of Silva, Juan Evangelista Manrique,⁴⁴ the words of the protagonist of De Sobremesa concerning his education could be applied to Silva to describe his intellectual development: “An intellectual education undertaken without method and with crazy pretensions to universality, an intellectual cultivation which has ended up in the loss of all faith, in the burlesque of all human barriers, in an ardent curiosity for evil, in the desire to carry out all life's experiences, completed the work of other influences. …”⁴⁵

Silva always desired the luxuries which surrounded him in his childhood, and after entering into the world of business, burdened with the debts inherited from his father, he was unable to obtain them in the quantity he might have wished. He reflected his lack of fulfillment of these desires by having his protagonist enjoy all of them.

The hero is profoundly interested in his own health, in his physical and mental hygiene, and this reflects the preoccupation of Silva himself during his last days when he had hypochondriac moments. But in Silva's life the sexual excesses were not possible. These preoccupations were undoubtedly wishful thinking on the part of Silva or aggrandizement of the normal pattern of Latin American youths of visiting brothels in those days. By giving so much sexual prowess to his protagonist, Silva is able to counteract in a once-removed way the reputation he himself (as well as Fernández) had gained as being the chaste, virginal young man, without experience in sexual encounters.

Some of the doctors who attend Fernández are based on real-life characters, as Charvet, and perhaps others. Charvet, as mentioned, was the veiled identity of Charcot, a pre-Freudian psychologist. The detailed description of Fernández's illness seems to be imaginary; however, Silva was always interested in reading any kind of manual, especially in psychology or psychiatry. It is true that Silva himself visited in Europe and was at many of the places where his entries are dated, but his life could not have been that of the millionaire protagonist. He must have moved in entirely different circles, if he was lucky enough to move in any circles at all in European society, except for that of the expatriates.

The European setting reflects Silva's trip to Europe, but actually little is known about what he did there except to visit Juan Evangelista Manrique, who was a medical student in Paris. Manrique testifies that Silva tried to learn all he could from him and from the persons he talked to by going to all the lectures he could attend, and by reading all the latest books. Nevertheless, it is dangerous, in the author's opinion, to equate unequivocally Silva and José Fernández since undoubtedly Silva alternates real happenings with fictional elements and modifies many of the factual elements.

V ROMANTIC ELEMENTS

One of the most constantly used characteristics of the Romantic novel is vagueness, and concerning Helena the protagonist assigns an unknown or exotic origin to the heroine, revealing the truth only gradually. Fernández is vague about names and identities, and often one has to search for the name or the identity of the characters who are his friends, or girls to whom he is making love.

In some Romantic novels, symbols and mythology are used frequently. In De Sobremesa they are used somewhat differently than in Romantic works in that there is an element of foreboding and terror associated with the ideal attachment which will inevitably be frustrated, as is known from the beginning of De Sobremesa. The supernatural symbols in the novel are connected with the words of the grandmother on her death, the throwing of a bunch of flowers by Helena to Fernández from her window, the finding of her brooch with three leaves and a hovering butterfly, and the appearance of butterflies at crucial moments. Silva uses other techniques related to the Romantics such as premonition, and open anticipation of the tragic ending.

The Romantic elements in De Sobremesa are mainly in tone, an exacerbated consciousness of his scorn for life. And the Modernists added to the uncovering of the sentimental life a profound literary self-consciousness concerning style and form which modify profoundly the Romantic sentimentality.

The subtle use of augury in the work gives the reader the idea of impending tragedy of the death of Helena. But it is also Modernist in the use of the emblem of the butterfly as a supernatural indication of Helena's presence, and as an indication of Fernández's belief in the supernatural. It is evident that this use of augury is to increase in the reader the anguished hope that Fernández will find Helena, but in a way, for some more observant readers, it is known from early on in the book what the outcome will be, and the interest of the reader shifts to how the actions will be accomplished.

Considering that one of the characteristics most commonly connected with Romanticism was that of an uncurbed revelation of the most intimate self, the protagonist fits that characteristic as much as any of the heroes of the Romantic novels. The “yo” (I) of the hero is the most important thing in the work and is the main theme of the novel.

The emphasis on religion, which was one of the Romantic tendencies, is present in De Sobremesa but in a negative way, in the lack of religion of the protagonist. Yet he is obsessed by doubts concerning his agnostic or atheistic beliefs, and thinks always of his grandmother's prayer for him when she was dying.

Probably one of the main characteristics which seems Romantic and goes against the sensibilities of the twentieth-century reader of De Sobremesa is the sentimental dwelling on his sorrows. Fernández even says he prefers to suffer. He has a tendency to dwell on his own grief in an overly emotional way.

In general, Romantic literature represents a reality which destroys love; and a life without love, for the protagonist, has little meaning. Such is the case with Fernández and Helena, even though Fernández is not able to remain faithful to her physiologically. For Fernández, as for the Romantic hero, the noblest type of love is that which remains unfulfilled. The impossible love was one of the most common themes preferred in Romanticism. It became popular probably because of the belief that marriage brings out the imperfect in love, and for that reason Fernández is so shocked when he is told by Dr. Rivington that, of course, he will marry the girl. His love for her was more pleasing to him when posited from an idealizing distance. This attitude has resulted from the medieval traditions of courtly love, when marriage was not the desired state for a lover to feel an ideal passion for the beloved.

From the medieval courtly love tradition also comes the belief that the lovers who suffer the most are the most fulfilled. The suffering of Fernández is in a more modern manner with his various sexual affairs with other women. He certainly is not trying to immortalize Helena by his faithfulness, but perhaps this is a reflection of his modernity, where man no longer has the idea that he can only be happy with one woman.

Also, the preservation of the flowers thrown to him by Helena is somehow overly Romantic for the sensibilities of the present, and dates the work; but just because it reflects a taste not the same as is presently common does not mean that only in his time were such sentiments commonly felt and expressed.

Although Fernández does not compare his Helena or other lovers with blossoms or other aspects of nature as did the Romantics, there is a strong presence of flowers in the novel. The emblematic use of the three leaves and the butterfly has already been noted: Helena is identified with the bouquet of white roses she threw to Fernández, which he tries to preserve for as long as possible in a crystal box. The connection between Fernández and Consuelo is also related to flowers, orchids.

One of the most typical Romantic elements in De Sobremesa is the concept of love as entertained by the protagonist. The attachment is intense and spiritualized since their encounters have always been in shadows and without real communication except in symbolic gestures which, it is insinuated, might have been misinterpreted by the hero. The intensity and longevity of his attachment for Helena is reflected in his guarding zealously the bouquet of white tea roses, and also Fernández's desire to obtain a copy of the painting of Helena's mother, who was so like the daughter. His chapel, where he placed her painting and other emblems and relics, indicates these same ideas.

Although Silva rarely describes nature, in the few descriptions he does poeticize what he observes. Unlike the Romanticists, Silva does not use nature as a vehicle of his emotions. The observer does not reflect or parallel nature in his state of mind. Yet the scene in which Silva describes the ocean is a favorite scene of the Romantics, in which the hero sits alone contemplating the light of the moon. In Silva's novel it is not with melancholy feelings but in harmony with the Modernist idea that nature was the only place where the artist could expand and become part of the universe. Silva thus uses nature in two ways. One, by showing a pantheistic union with it, and the other by the Rousseauian idea of the return to pure and peaceful nature, contrasted with the vices of city life.

Also Romantic was the use of the theme of death. From the beginning it is known that the death of Helena is to terminate Fernández's search for her. This was a common Romantic approach: the story of the love of a beautiful, idealized girl ended by her death.

One of the characteristics which was Romantic as well as Modernist was Silva's preoccupation with the search for the source of the artistic inspiration, a theme returned to again and again.

VI MODERNIST TENDENCIES

In the work De Sobremesa there is a deep and constant reflection of a preoccupation with the new art of portraiture being painted in Europe during those years: pre-Raphaelite art. The ideal Helena of Fernández's dreams is the image of one of the paintings, and Silva adds to this emphasis by having the character descend from the family of the wife of Rossetti, one of the pre-Raphaelite painters. Fernández finally finds a portrait in the pre-Raphaelite style, not of Helena, but of her mother, who resembles her, painted shortly before her early death from tuberculosis. There is a spiritualization of Helena similar to the kind utilized in the art of the pre-Raphaelites. She is so spiritualized that she is often unreal, even in the mind of the protagonist.

In Modernist novels like De Sobremesa, the heroes were non-conformists and did not adapt to their society. They fought the practical businessman (even when they were as successful in business as José Fernández), and the battle was not ignored by the enemy, since they knew that the members of society looked for practical success and did not care in the least for the successes of art. Silva, however, was forced to live in both camps, at least until the liquidation of the bankruptcy, and even then had to search, without much success, for a Maecenas, a political sinecure that would allow him to live in his artistic world.

In Modernist fiction the heroes were generally “Los Raros” (the strange ones), as Rubén Darío called them, and the “neurotics,” as they were called by Max Nordau. However, these heroes were idealized by the other artists in their own intellectualized atmosphere and often were obsessed by art as the only world where they could exist. The Modernists had inherited much of the Romantic tradition in these elements; for example, the cult of the sacred artist, and protest at the lack of comprehension in a vulgar and practical society which tended to frustrate the artist completely. They were often considered economic outcasts unless they could find a friend with influence who would either obtain for them a diplomatic post or give them a stipend on which to live.

The Modernist novel might seem to be a very different novel from what is normally considered to be Spanish-American. However, the novel of Modernism many times had as subject the psychological analysis of the victims of bitterness, the rebels in society, the neuropathic artists, made neuropathic by society, the persons usually of an intense refinement and hyperaesthetic sensibility. Because of this interest in such themes, the novel of Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours, and his protagonist Des Esseintes were popular and well known among the Modernist fiction writers.

Rebellious individualism was a characteristic of Modernism, and the fact that Silva chose to rewrite this particular novel for publication after he had lost most of his manuscripts in the sinking of the ship L'Amérique, shows his rebellion. It was a work that would have been too disagreeable to the sensibilities of the Colombians to publish right after his death. Also, considering that when he rewrote it, he was probably already contemplating suicide, only a rebel would have chosen to redo such a shocking book, as it must have been for his times.

De Sobremesa's construction and organization were certainly not the optimum, as many critics have pointed out, and it is somewhat difficult to read in its entirety, but it is original in the analysis of the protagonist, José Fernández. The novel shows Silva's striving for a unique way of expressing his ideas in a unique style.

God is not mentioned except in a rather insolent fashion or in a deeply doubtful concern referring to His existence. However, in the consciousness of Fernández there are bits and pieces of dead religions, and a concern with religious art, and perhaps religion thus serves as one of the main themes in the novel. Fernández makes the effort to establish a new mysticism and a new mythology with his Helena, reflecting a belief in a reality which common man did not understand and perhaps the artist was doomed never to find in this life. But art might serve as a way, a kind of religion, or perhaps an aesthetic philosophy by which the poet or artist could guide his life. Silva's disquisitions on the metaphysical implications he sees around him show only an intuitive understanding without his being able to form a system or come to any order in his beliefs.

Silva shows a basically aesthetical attitude due to his concept of artistic activity as being its own end, worthy in itself and with no need for justifying it. Therefore, his prose shows that it is a literature of the senses; it vibrates with sensual elements, and it is dazzling in its display of color. It often reads like poetry in prose, and Silva always seems to be searching for sonorous turns of phrases. Also, the history of art is almost always present, and serves as one of the inspirations, perhaps equal to Silva's own intimate experiences and thoughts. Thus he used established art works for source material in his new creation, adding more artistic qualities.

Silva's protagonist showed the typically Modernist bitterness toward mediocrity. Concerning intelligence, his attitude is that it is an aristocracy to which few, like himself, belong. For him art is noble, so noble that he feels unworthy to be named in the same breath with Shakespeare and other great artists.

The author takes refuge in distance in space, in Europe rather than South America, through his protagonist, freeing himself from his own tragic life. He then chooses from among the elements around him those which represent the most aristocratic and aesthetic world; none of the conquests of his hero is less than a famous beauty. Fernández is constantly acquiring some art object, and he tries to maintain an exquisite fictional ambience around him.

The Modernist characteristic of cosmopolitanism in De Sobremesa is visible in several ways. In the first place, the novel has as its scene various cosmopolitan places in Europe and, although the author describes all of them, no single one seems to attract him more than any other. He speaks very few times about the beauties of nature around him, and when he does it is solely comparing them to the unfortunate aspects of the life in a large city. But these attitudes are only displayed when he is tired of the life of dissipation he leads in the city. He projects in his protagonist the desire to assimilate the ways and values of the various European societies, to become a cosmopolitan citizen of all countries. He is always engaged in the study of different and unusual subjects both in Europe and in his homeland. This reflects an interest in subjects from many different countries. The novel itself, as Silva was rewriting it, manifests his desire to participate in the community of the elite, the aesthetically initiated. In this demonstration of the aristocratic nature of Silva's tastes and ambitions, he is the same as his protagonist. He reflects a world of books and of art, which is one of the most constantly recurring themes of the work. The protagonist cultivated collections of precious objects, whole museums of art, impressionistic refinements, antibourgeois philosophies, moral crises, and miniatures of poetic prose.

One of the impulses which aimed toward personal expression of extreme individualism was an extension and modification of a Romantic tenet, but it can be distinguished in its Modernistic modality by the peculiarly literary orientation and the artistic intensity. The Modernists were often said to be uninvolved with society, but this attitude has been discounted in the present since these writers, with their intense individuality and search for the self, contributed a great deal to the understanding of man himself and of his psyche.

Silva is trying to understand one single “I,” that of his protagonist, José Fernández, and exhibits a deep philosophical pessimism, considering that man's beliefs until that moment had been only illusion. According to Silva, unchangeable principles and fundamental ideals were no longer considered a standard part of man's life. The only reality, the only truth, the only irreducible core of reality was the “I.” Sensibility is one of the main elements in the philosophical ideas expressed by Silva's protagonist in De Sobremesa, and he negates the rational worth of the ideas that unite human beings. He denies many times the social worth of literature, making it a sublime and holy sport of the select and not understood by others, even the critics.

Modernist and Romantic tendencies and elements are combined with compatible characteristics. There are only a few lingering elements of Romanticism. One of the stylistic traits which marks Silva as a Modernist most clearly is a concern for a more subtle language and a use of vocabulary which is dissimilar to that of the Romantics. Silva's diction is ornamental, often sumptuous, and he uses the techniques of word pictures or portraits. He attempts to borrow pictorial equivalents, from watercolor, oil, pastel, or etching, and emphasizes stylistic experimentation. Concerning content, Silva forms a hero of art, showing us that the heroic concept of life is not dead, but that social and political circumstances in America have changed so much, the writers could no longer be heroes of action.

VII DECADENT CHARACTERISTICS

Bernardo Gicovate has studied De Sobremesa as a testimony or portrait of the European decadence which was in style during the years when Silva rewrote his novel.⁴⁶ The work De Sobremesa can be considered to be similar to decadent novels such as A Rebours⁴⁷ (Against the Grain), by Joris-Karl Huysmans, in style as well as, to a certain extent, in the plot.

In style, Silva's work is like A Rebours, following the definition of the novel in which the whole is subordinated to the parts, rather than a classic style, where the opposite would be the case. Silva was predominantly interested in detail, and for that reason, perhaps, his novel seems more disorganized than it really is, because of the often overwhelming mass of minutiae given to us.

But Huysmans was a master of irony in A Rebours and always got his point across without leaving his reader confused as to whether he was being ironic or serious, as is sometimes the case in Silva's novel. However, if it is considered that the aesthetic attitude toward art is a decadent point of view, such a tendency can be observed many times in De Sobremesa just as in A Rebours. The use of words to give the effect of painting, and also the mention of many different paintings used as a part of the work, are utilized in Silva's novel as well as Huysmans's.

Yet the decadent spirit did not arise solely with the novel by Huysmans since it was visible in the Romantic period as well in different ways. For one thing, the Romantic as well as the decadent view of Christian religion was through an artistic, aesthetic prism which watered down its message to that of a mystic beauty and used its imagery in nonreligious or antireligious modes. In De Sobremesa this is visible, as is another trait, the feeling of loss and of desperation which became more pronounced the further the protagonist got from believing that God existed. And the neurosis of the hero added to the loss of an unaccustomed psychological dimension.

The idea of evasion to another period in time is observed in De Sobremesa. Even more pronounced in the decadent novels such as A Rebours is the flight to another epoch.

The correspondence established between literature and the other plastic arts is present in De Sobremesa and is also clearly obvious in novels like A Rebours. This is mainly used as a means of choice of words which are colorful and which reflect the contours and outlines of the things described.

The words in De Sobremesa seem to be chosen, as in A Rebours, less because of their meaning than for their power of evocation, their musical and plastic qualities. Silva wished to suggest rather than name specifically in his poetry. But in his prose the same desire is also visible.

Similar to the Duke des Esseintes is José Fernández in his neuroses. Yet in other ways Silva's protagonist was more Romantic in character and less sophisticated. Des Esseintes was a more refined and more anguished character than Fernández.

Silva, like Huysmans, reflects a striving for the virtues of individualism in any possible way, as observed in the prose poem on all the different kinds of precious stones, inserted in the episode when Fernández visits a jewelry store. Silva did not follow frequently the practice of inventing neologisms, but he did arrange the syntax of the Spanish language, already more flexible than the French, in original ways.

VIII LOVE AND WOMEN

Although searching for Helena almost from the beginning of the novel and worshiping her image, Fernández relapses several times from his self-imposed state of chastity and has various love affairs with women. These adventures might reflect the physiological problems of a young man with normal sexual urges who decides contra natura to be chaste while searching for his ideal love. They might also represent Silva's erotic fantasies, since Fernández has relations with seven women in the novel: Lelia Orloff, a Lesbian; Nini Rousset; Constanza Landseer, an Englishwoman with whom Fernández fails to consummate the union because of a reminder of Helena in a crucial moment; Nelly, the wife of a millionaire from Chicago; Consuelo, his compatriot; a German baroness; and a passionate Italian, Julia Musellaro. The friends of Fernández envy these conquests, as his friend Rovira says: “… Your amorous adventures … we all envy them in secret.”⁴⁸

These conquests live in his memory only because they are names to add to his list, like that of Don Juan. Because of the envy of his friends and acquaintances, he is especially proud that one night when he gives a party he is able to add three to his list, although he does not pretend to try to understand them. He does them favors in turn for the physiological release he can obtain from sexual relations with them. The dichotomy is clear in the case of Fernández: on the one hand the misogyny, the hatred of those women who give him the release he needs, and on the other the idealization of the one who could never disappoint him in sexual relations because of her chastity and her death before having experienced such relations.

Silva reflects a lack of knowledge about sexual relations, and indeed about human relations between the sexes. He discloses to us that the aristocratic Lelia Orloff is of plebeian origins, and wonders how a common background could have produced such an exquisite creature. He portrays her with little intellectual capacity but an immense desire to enjoy life. Then when the protagonist encounters Angela de Roberto visiting Lelia, he is angry, does not like her, and when he inquires why she is there is told bluntly that she is a friend. Then when he discovers them in a Lesbian union, his reaction is scorn, hatred, hitting out at Lelia and her friend with his hands and booted feet, and trying to stab her. His actions indicate that he felt possessive about her and did not want to share her with anyone. But aside from his possessiveness, and in spite of what he calls his fascination for the abnormal, he shows a deep-seated aversion to that relationship between them. Lelia as a character in a novel is a closed personality; she is not understood by Fernández or by the reader, and this reflects that basically Fernández felt scorn for the women he seduced, implying the same attitude on the part of the author toward a woman he might use as a sexual object.

All the seven conquests made by Fernández are either professional prostitutes or adulteresses who acquiesce easily to Fernández's charms, thus providing him with little challenge. The accounts of his nights with these women seem strangely the same and are not always very convincing: “Of that night I only remember her smiling beauty below the full, velvet curtains of my bed, in the bedroom scarcely lit by the Byzantine lamp of dark red crystal; the impression of the strong freshness and the perfume of her adolescent body and the murmur of her voice begging me to go to the United States.”⁴⁹

One of the reasons might have been that during his time it was not customary to describe sexual relations explicitly, but in other descriptions, such as the use of drugs, he was more clear. The usual dimly lit interiors indicate shame concerning the most natural of human actions, sexual union.

The oversimplicity of treatment of women by his protagonist shows that Silva was not truly acquainted with many women in his life, except for his mother and his sisters. The other women he came into contact with were stereotyped as either beings of sheer sexuality or idealized women of purity on a pedestal. He had not had the opportunity to react to an authentic, loving woman who could combine tenderness and ideal love with sensuality, and would have had difficulty adjusting to such a woman due to the dichotomy between these two in his personality.

Perhaps the heightened sensibilities aroused by the more common acceptance at the present time of woman, as well as man, as a human being with similar rights and privileges, makes the novel De Sobremesa seem so anachronistic. That men should scorn the personality of a particular woman who does not happen to be a virgin, making her into less of a person, into an object of scorn, is not so common in some cultures today. His double standard is not easily accepted now, although it is still in force in Colombia to a certain extent. It takes two to engage in sexual relations, and the masculine partner is no longer considered as coming out of the relationship with his virtue intact, leaving the stain solely on the female. Even in the case of the countrywoman of Fernández, Consuelo, in spite of the fact that long ago he did feel a chaste love for her, finally he scorns her. He says that if he sees her again he will close the door in her face, and will remind her husband that it is dangerous to leave his wife with a single man, even though he be called “el casto José.”

Looking from another point of view at the idea of women, there is the Romantic conception that the virtuous and chaste woman can save a man and make him into a more noble character. But then as in the present, the changing of a person is not always successful, nor does the effort always provide a happy and contented relationship.

In Silva's time men often took the position that it was sinful to feel any physical desire toward the women they intended to marry, and for that reason, on Fernández's being asked if he intended to marry Helena, he is shocked because his passion contains mainly ideal sentiments and only a minimum of sensual elements. This medieval conception, which still exists in Colombia and in other countries of Latin America, is that carnal love is considered to be divorced from spiritual love. This leads to the conduct of the hero in the novel where he seduces the women who offer him little resistance, in order to ease his physiological urges. Fernández shows a basic scorn toward these women, just as though they were prostitutes, and in fact Silva may have satisfied his physiological urges in brothels, making it impossible for him to think of finding a combination of physical and spiritual love in the same person.

Fernández was a misogynist, to use a term which is milder than some which might be used today. He felt scorn toward a woman of flesh and blood, of passions and faults. He wanted an ideal woman he could put upon a pedestal to worship. This halo of faultlessness around Helena makes her lack vitality and appear to be only the painting, which is the image, not of her, but of her mother. While he physiologically needs the seven women who are his paramours, he does not even feel humanly grateful that they are giving him at least this release. The women appear as types, types reflecting the author's and protagonist's conditioning, that of the “macho” (he-man) who must prove his sexual prowess daily. Yet while proving his sexual capabilities, when they acquiesce and accept his sexual advances, he hates them for giving in to his urgings. These are the author's fantasies of rich and beautiful women, but they are still probably based on the brothel women with whom he had the most experience. Both Silva and his protagonist, Fernández, believed in absolute male superiority with both ideal and brothel women inferior to the male.

IX LANGUAGE AND STYLE

The problem of Silva and the other Modernist novelists is how to arrive at a happy medium between the plot and action of a novel and the desire of the aesthete to write an artistically elaborated prose. Several times in the novel De Sobremesa germs of some of the poems Silva wrote earlier or later with the same turns of phrase are visible. But these lyrical sections which are like brilliant poems in prose do not assure the creation of a good, solidly constructed novel. However, Silva is a fine prose writer with a musical style and fills his prose with cultural experiences. Paintings form the most constant motif in the novel, for there are the scenes the author paints, then there are the persons who are similar to paintings of the past. He incorporates painting in his novel in several ways: art within art, but also he shows an obvious tendency to have his novel move from painting to painting, from scene to scene, filled with chromatic refinements. Fernández lives in galleries of paintings, and reflects the eternal mania of turning everything, even the plastic arts, into literature. At the beginning of the novel there is a long pictorical description of the typical Modernist salon. Other techniques he uses are the mentioning of different schools of paintings, and of different paintings, such as those by Rembrandt, Fra Angelico, Sodoma, and painters of the pre-Raphaelite school. This technique ennobles and gives prestige, revealing a vast knowledge of museums. This method is used in the description of persons and creates an aristocratic beauty. Silva also uses movement to create a ritualistic atmosphere, as when Helena appears, combining the descriptions of slow and deliberate movements with her likeness to paintings.

The descriptions of the luxurious and sumptuous rooms which abound in the novel are chosen to give the sensation of the exquisite tastes of the artistically educated poet-protagonist. In addition to stylistic considerations, this reflects the compensation of the author, who was escaping his own bitter reality of failure, and was living vicariously in his protagonist some of his own best dreams. But his hero is rich and is able to enjoy the perversions and decadence of those who have all the money necessary to buy what they want. The novel presents the characters and the typical mansions of European decadence. One of the fundamental stylistic tenets of the Modernist novel was to create an original prose, and incorporate at the same time into the narrative literature a new hero, inherited from the Romantics, with an aura of the gods: the artist, set in the proper intellectual atmosphere. They adored another divinity as well, that of the aristocracy of the intelligence.

Silva's writing was uneven in De Sobremesa perhaps because it was rewritten from memory. Some of his terms are unusually colorful, but are what might be called “rubendariacos,” using the terms he coined.⁵⁰ His irony at the expense of some of the characters is not comical but rather bitter, and some readers resent the author's parodies of his friends. Some of his long enumerations are boring, as for example when two medical doctors who are consulting concerning his case talk of some thirty ailments and cannot come to a common diagnosis except to give him a prescription for a purgative. Silva is inclined to give such voluminous pluralities chosen by his intuition, often felicitously, to create and give more depth to his ambience. Silva was not a bad writer of dialogue, except that speeches are sometimes longer than plausible when friends are conversing.

One other technique which adds to the poetic feeling of his prose was the use of apostrophe to give more stress to emotions. Also, he uses refrains in some poetic passages, at times repeating the same passage and at other times changing the wording slightly.

Silva reflects in the content what the writers of that period felt the novel to be, a work that does not give the reader a pleasant time, but causes him to have to think in order to penetrate into another human being, and thus perhaps to understand the universe better. Alfonso Reyes has spoken of the complex of the jungle in the Spanish-American novel, but the only jungle in De Sobremesa is the jungle of the complicated psyche of the protagonist, the jungle of the experiences of a man and of an artist.

Some of the most obvious elements in the Modernist style of Silva are the greater degree of intellectualism, the profound revelations of the consciousness of the ego, the sentimental projection of the principal characters as in the Romantic period but with Modernist differences. Above all, Silva reflects the profound desire to write in a new, artistic, more poetic, flexible prose, a more idealistic than realistic novel, leaving behind the nature settings which were favorites of the Romantics, and choosing cosmopolitan settings.

Notes

1. Miramón, [Alberto. José Asunción Silva: Ensayo Biogáfico con Documentos Inéditos. Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1937,] p. 161.

2. De Sobremesa, 1887-1896, 1st ed. (Bogotá, 1925).

3. De Sobremesa, 1887-1896, 2nd ed. (Bogotá, [1928]).

4. Obras Completas (Bogotá, 1965), pp. 123-310.

5. The author of this work is using the 1928 edition of De Sobremesa, listed in note 3. Any citations following this note will be referring to that edition. Notes will not usually be given while summarizing the plot since the elements will be chronological, giving the reader little difficulty in finding the pages.

6. De Sobremesa, p. 7.

7. Ibid., p. 15.

8. Ibid., p. 21.

9. The first German edition, Antertung, was published in 1893. The two-volume Dégénéréscence was translated from the German by Auguste Dietrich (Paris, 1894). Only in 1902 was the work translated into Spanish, by Nicolás Salmerón, Degeneración (Madrid, 1902).

10. The first edition, according to La Grande Encyclopédie, was published in Paris by her family, Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff avec Portrait, 2 vol., 1887.

11. Marie Bashkirtseff, Journal, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1914), p. 591.

12. Ibid., Vols. 1 and 2.

13. Max Nordau, Dégénéréscence, 2 Vol., translated from the German by Auguste Dietrich (Paris, 1894).

14. De Sobremesa, p. 28.

15. “La Legende d'une Cosmopolite,” in “Trois Stations de Psychotérapie,” L'Oeuvre de Maurice Barrès, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1965), pp. 357-68.

16. De Sobremesa, p. 50.

17. Ibid., p. 57.

18. Ibid., p. 63 ff.

19. Ibid., p. 74.

20. Ibid., p. 159.

21. Ibid., p. 129.

22. Ibid., p. 177. Daniel Arias Argáez in “Cincuentenario de la Muerte de José Asunción Silva,” Registro Municipal, Bogotá, June 30, 1946, pp. 254-55, cites the long digression and testifies that it belonged to another novel by Silva which was lost in the sinking of the ship L'Amerique, and that probably Silva added these lines because of their beauty.

23. Ibid., p. 178.

24. Ibid., p. 183.

25. Ibid., p. 186

26. Ibid., p. 220.

27. Bernardo Gicovate, Conceptos Fundamentales de Literatura Comparada: Iniciación a la Poesía Modernista (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1962), p. 124.

28. Daniel Arias Argáez, “Cincuentenario de la Muerte de José Asunción Silva,” Registro Municipal, Bogotá, June 30, 1946, pp. 242-65.

29. Juan Loveluck, “De Sobremesa, Novela Desconocida del Modernismo,” Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. 31, No. 59, January-June 1965, p. 25.

30. De Sobremesa, p. 46.

31. Ibid., p. 205.

32. Ibid., pp. 21, 183.

33. Ibid., p. 15.

34. Ibid., pp. 64-71.

35. Ibid., p. 133.

36. Ibid., p. 182.

37. Ibid., p. 183.

38. Ibid., pp. 133-34.

39. Ibid., p. 134.

40. Ibid., pp. 104, 172.

41. Ibid., p. 17.

42. Ibid., p. 176.

43. Ibid., p. 21.

44. Juan Evangelista Manrique, “José Asunción Silva: Recuerdos Intimos,” La Revista de América, Paris, Vol. 6, January 1914, p. 32.

45. De Sobremesa, p. 127.

46. Bernardo Gicovate, op. cit. (see above, note 27), p. 124 ff.

47. Oeuvres Complètes de Joris-Karl Huysmans, Vol. 7, A Rebours (Paris, 1929).

48. De Sobremesa, p. 10.

49. Ibid., p. 202.

50. Silva uses this term: “rubendariacos” (“in the manner of Rubén Darío”) in a letter to Baldomero Sanín Cano reproduced in José Asunción Silva, Obras Completas (Bogotá, 1965), p. 378.