[In the following essay, Rosenberg explores Larra's difficult ethical position as a practitioner of Spanish romanticism vacillating between self-imposed marginality and engaged participation in contemporary discourse.]

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant proposes an epistemological reversal that reflects a major step in the transformation from neoclassical to romantic ideology. He writes: “It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge has been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition” (qtd. in Philosophical Writings 6). This “Copernican turn” (as he called it), when joined to the work of Fichte, Schiller and the Schlegels, attempted to help resolve many of the unacceptable consequences deriving from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinking. Hans Eichner has pointed out how the romantics inverted classical epistemological systems in order to escape the limitations placed on free will by the concept of a mechanical universe. During the last thirty years this romantic ideology once again has become fashionable. In the speculative arena deconstructionists have found the notion of romantic irony, with its premises of paradox, deferment of meaning, and inclination toward self-subversion, to provide prototypical texts for their analyses. Even in the physical realm—the hard sciences—in which romantic ideology always had to surrender to the more pragmatic and predictive mechanistic models, Romanticism is now being seen as a system capable of describing the universe. For example, James Gleick and Katherine Hayles have published books on chaos theory that point out that behind the apparent order of nature we find chaos, a belief that seems to be a distant echo of Friedrich Schlegel's fragment: “Only that confusion out of which a world can arise is chaos” (155).

In spite of the recent redemption of romantic thinking we must be careful not to lose sight of the ethical dilemmas enclosed within the orbit of Kant's Copernican revolution. The radical notion that “objects must conform to our cognition” (Kant 6), though a partial solution to the problem of free will presented by the mechanistic view of the world, must respond to the ethical predicament of the subject in isolation who creates (or recreates) the world in his own image. Gary Handwerk has explained how this romantic irony can be seen only as “infinite absolute negativity because of its reliance on an unverifiable private criterion of truth” (45). In other words, how does the romantic subject that privileges imagination and invention as the primary perceptive modalities communicate with those around him? How does he avoid the black hole of solipsism? How does the prophet descending from the mountain share his message without becoming alienated from the environment that produced his insight? The romantic ego vacillates between two extremes of a series of binary oppositions: the inspiring mountain and the desert city, the midst of the crowd and the sweetness of solitude (Emerson 263), genius and madness, and “delusions and luminosity” (Siebers 167).

This same ethical conflict surfaces among the authentic romantic writers in Spain. Pulled between their idealism and the political realities surrounding them, and between their vision of a better society and their own hypocrisy, they found themselves, to paraphrase Donald Shaw, teetering on a narrow ledge bounded on one side by the tyrannical machine of orthodoxy and on the other by the void. The ethical problem central to Romanticism itself is perhaps most evident in its most problematic practitioner in Spain, Mariano José de Larra. His persona incarnates a grotesque fusion of the dandy and the seer. He is pharisee and messiah. He excoriates the mask wearers of his time from behind his own protective façade. His Artículos de costumbres represent an emplotment of his life through the stages of solitude, alienation, delirium (as manifested by the degeneration into multiple personalities or doubles), and finally death. These stages of Larra's ethical conflict may be seen best in, though they are not limited to, his most famous essay, “La Nochebuena de 1836.”

Larra's initial position in the article is one of superiority. He is the demiurge who in isolated superiority looks down on the world while seeking to inspire it. He employs language as an instrument of power: others may commit violence with a knife or a club, but as the accusing servant reminds the narrator, language is the most potent weapon of all (330). In this article, as in his other later essays, he is the personification of alienation. He lives in the midst of the desert city but isolates himself from its movement. He stands on the margins, and by removing himself from his world is able to attack it. He is not society's victim but rather he has withdrawn voluntarily from the fallen world.

As the article begins, Larra paints himself as the only being capable of suffering. Others march on unaware of the irony snapping at the heels of their existence. They celebrate, eat, and revel; he broods, contemplates, and judges. As Tobin Siebers notes in another context, the “Romantic always believes that he is le seul and that others, in comparison, hardly know the meaning of isolation. On the one hand, he condemns other people for closing themselves off and ridiculing one another. On the other hand, he refuses to give his heart to anyone, for it is on the brink of communication and isolation that he feels the most isolated and withdrawn” (168-69). Larra creates this same sense of isolation in the most poetic image of the essay when he notes:

volvía los ojos a los cristales de mi balcón; veíalos empañados y como llorosos por dentro: los vapores condensados se deslizaban a manera de lágrimas a lo largo del diáfano cristal; así se empaña la vida, pensaba; así el frío exterior del mundo condensa las penas en el interior del hombre; así caen gota a gota las lágrimas sobre el corazón. Los que ven de fuera los cristales, los ven tersos y brillantes; los que ven sólo los rostros, los ven alegres y serenos.

(325-26)

The romantic hero stands on the opposite side of the glass from the rest of humanity; from his vantage point he claims to see the world clearly while the world can never penetrate his isolation. Larra's dual cry of superiority and despair suggests a fundamental sense of otherness. He is enclosed in a self that cannot be penetrated and, like other Romantics, reasons that in the modern world his problem is emblematic since no one understands anyone else (Maupassant 310; also qtd. in Siebers 169).

Larra next abandons the spatial solitude of his piso to walk the streets of Madrid. As is typical of the romantic hero he seeks to break out of the isolation that, though endowing him with special vision, also is the cause of despair. Yet once he finds himself in the company of others he must demonstrate his own superiority. Once again he employs the pen to shatter the tranquility of the lives around him. He attacks the “miserable humanidad destinada siempre a quedarse más acá o a ir más allá” (327). He transmogrifies his city through a grotesque, Rabelaisian personification: “figuróseme ver de pronto que se alzaba por entre las montañas de víveres una frente altísima y extenuada: una mano seca y roída llevaba a una boca cárdena y negra de morder cartuchos un manojo de laurel sangriento” (327). He develops once again one of his favorite images, the theatrum mundi motif, showing that Shakespeare's world-stage has been turned upside down and that Segismundo's dream has become a nightmare:

Una representación en que los hombres son mujeres y las mujeres hombres. He aquí nuestra época y nuestras costumbres. Los hombres ya no saben sino hablar como las mujeres, en congresos y corrillos. Y las mujeres son hombres, ellas son las únicas que conquistan. Segunda comedia: un novio que no ve el logro de su esperanza; ese novio es el pueblo español; no se casa con un solo gobierno con quien no tenga que reñir al día siguiente. Es el matrimonio repetido al infinito.

(327-28)

The narrator is caught in an ethical double bind. One must assume that the satire itself incorporates some ethical value: satirists write with the hope that somehow their writing will bring about a change in the target of their attack. Benevolence must be found at the core of all satire; one attacks only what one wants to preserve; only silence is an effective form of scorn (Larra 874). Yet Larra seems to be caught in an ethical desert. He writes to convert, yet despises what he sees. The criado makes this double bind apparent when he insists, “despreciarás acaso a aquellos para quienes escribes y reclamas con el incensario en la mano su adulación” (331). The ethical combat becomes even more intense when we realize that the solitary soul at first strikes out against the world, then fails in its quest, and finally withdraws into itself. This process of inner alienation is the final result of the hero's attempt to isolate himself within his vision. Solitude no longer represents monasticism's revealed insight nor even Wordsworth's emotion recollected in tranquility, it now becomes a marker of the ego's alienation from itself (Engelberg 248-58). Larra begins to intuit this tragic descent into and away from oneself when he writes in “De la sátira y los satíricos”: “[el satírico] es como la luna, un cuerpo opaco destinado a dar luz, y es acaso el único de quien se puede decir que da lo que no tiene” (875).

Larra's pain increases as his walk through Madrid progresses. For three hours he traverses the crowded streets, peers into the windows that now hide images from him, and finally notes that all have retreated to their homes behind closed doors, leaving him alone in the street. His eyes are “wounded” by the light that emanates from the balconies and the noise from the celebrations “se abre paso hasta mis sentidos y entra en ellos como cuña a mano, rompiendo y desbaratando” (328).

The pain of otherness—an otherness that the narrator systematically cultivates throughout most of his newspaper articles—now becomes so intense that he begins the descent into delirium. The process of fading into madness described in the second half of the article is not unique to Larra. Siebers has chronicled similar movements among most of the major romantic figures of the century: from Gautier, to Baudelaire, to Poe (167-89). Larra's journey into delirium seems clear from reading not only the “Nochebuena” but also his other confessional articles, particularly “Día de difuntos,” “Horas de invierno,” and the “Necrología” written for his friend Campo Alange, but which has been interpreted traditionally as Larra's autoepitaph. The descent ends in suicide on February 13, 1837. What is less certain is the emblematic value of that suicide. Do we trivialize the event by concluding that the writer shot himself because of the failed affair with Dolores de Armijo? Or do we mythify the man by painting him as the prototypical romantic hero, living on the margins, endowed with prophetic vision, carrying on his shoulders the pains of the world, and finally taking his own life because he was incapable of redeeming the world through his art? Even in his death, the ethical ambiguity stays with us; we are uncertain whether to read his life as that of a madman who dies from the maladie that plagued the century, or as a creative genius whose delirium was merely a cover for his vision.

In a provocative review titled “Delirium as System” René Girard points out that delirium is never solitary, that it must engage in dialogue, even if that dialogue is only hallucinatory. Frequently, delirium manifests itself in the creation of doubles. Girard explains:

Implicitly at least, [Dostoevski] structures and explains delirium as a function of doubles. It is delirium itself that insists on making the doubles a fantasmagoria without importance. The two partners experience exaltation, that divine possession, then depression, or more precisely depossession, much too passionately for them to grasp a conception of the whole, to recognize that they occupy in turn the same position in the same system of relationships.

(94)

The pattern clearly fits the outline of Larra's experience. The subtitle of “La Nochebuena de 1836” explicitly defines the experience to be narrated as a “Delirio filosófico.” We watch Larra descend from productive isolation to painful alienation to a delirium which produces an accusing double in the person of the criado. That the author intends for the reader to identify the servant as a double requires little imagination: he tells us twice that the truth that is being spoken during this night of carnivalesque madness is produced by the wine purchased with the coins acquired through the sale of the artículos. The dialogue is really a monologue—a monologue Larra describes in the article published the day preceding the appearance of “La Nochebuena.” “Escribir en Madrid,” he notes, “es realizar un monólogo desesperante y triste para uno solo” (855). Once again we are confronted with the problematic ethical posture of the romantic. The article postulates the presence of a community of readers, yet in the final analysis that community is rejected and the narrator recoils back into himself.

Though it apprehends the problem of doubling in delirium from a different angle, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization outlines a system of madness that seems to describe Larra's “delirio filosófico”:

presumptuously identified with the object of his delirium, the madman recognizes himself as in a mirror in this madness whose absurd pretensions he has denounced; his solid sovereignty as a subject dissolves in this object he has demystified by accepting it. He is now pitilessly observed by himself. And in the silence of those who represent reason, and who have done nothing but hold up the perilous mirror, he recognizes himself as objectively mad.

(153-54)

Larra's double experience is clearly delirious. The entire scene takes place in the darkness as if the experience were a dream or hallucination. Attempts to escape the darkness fail: “buscaba inútilmente un fósforo que nos iluminase” (329). The description by the criado of the narrator's physical demeanor as well as his language could just as easily describe an internee in an asylum: “¿Por qué ese color pálido, ese rostro deshecho, esas hondas y verdes ojeras que ilumino con mi luz al abrirte todas las noches? ¿Por qué esa distracción constante y esas palabras vagas e interrumpidas de que sorprendo todos los días fragmentos errantes sobre tus labios?” (330). The narrator's experience takes place on the margin between hallucination and perception, between the natural and the supernatural. The criado, invisible except for his eyes that in the darkness “brillaban como dos llamas fatídicas” (329), begins to speak the truth. He becomes the mirror into which Larra's delirium allows him to see his alienated self.

The hero's experience of seeing the image of his isolated self is not unique to Larra nor to Spanish Romanticism. Gautier's dandy in “Jettatura” discovers in a mirror the image that others have formed of him:

Il se mit devant une glace et se regarda avec une intensité effrayante. …

Paul se fit peur à lui-même: il lui semblait que les effuves de ses yeux, renvoyées par le miroir, lui revenaient en dards empoisonnés: figurez-vous Méduse regardant sa tête horrible et charmante dans le fauve reflet d'un bouclier d'airain.

(202-03; also partially qtd. in Siebers 181).

This insight into his own nature leads to blindness and then finally to suicide. Poe's “William Wilson” also exploits images familiar to readers of Larra. The story contains multiple references to masks and masked balls. The world described is carnivalesque, and the underlying cosmovision embraced by the story is ironic: “Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution” (627). The lament might be identified with a number of Larra's later essays or even with Espronceda's narrative poetry and the paradox reflects once again the dilemma of the isolated subject. In the same sense that Paul d'Aspremont encounters his image in the mirror and that Larra sees his subject objectified in the voice of the criado, William Wilson, confronted by his double, explains:

You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou has murdered thyself.

(641)

Both the similarities and differences between these stories and Larra's article are striking. In all three instances the sense of alienation produces a delirium that results in a doubling or an objectification of the hero's own ego. In each instance a bitter rivalry results between the subject and its own image and in each death follows shortly after the conflict. What sets Larra's artículo apart from the others is that his narrator already is a desdoblamiento of the author and already has worked through several different personae: el Bachiller, Andrés, Fígaro, etc. The criado is a doubling of the double and the suicide that results is not that of the fictional character (William Wilson or Paul d'Aspremont) but of the author.

The creation of the double is the final sign of the sense of alienation that plagues the hero. In the first stages of alienation the marginalization of the subject is a moral victory: the ego writes itself as a victim of society's shallowness and by doing so is able to occupy the ethical high ground. In the final stage, however, the self becomes aware of an inner isolation, of an alienation and marginalization from within that is signaled by the appearance of the uncanny and threatening double. Larra's alter ego acts as a prosecutor in an internal trial in which the narrator's ethical fitness is cast into doubt. We should not be tempted to see the criado as the Freudian superego, however. The narrator is careful to strip the servant of any moral superiority: the asturiano is happy only because he refuses to confront the absurdity of his own situation. Thus, Larra's delirium is emptied of any sign of hope; neither the subject nor its double demonstrate any ethical stability. The only source of truth—the articles—already have been shown to be signs without referents (the satirist gives what he does not have) and are further prostituted by materialism and deformed in a Bacchic frenzy.

Larra's double is not an angel who appears to call the sinner to repentance; his glowing eyes and his voice suggest he is a demon. He strings together a frightening series of accusations: “¿Por qué te vuelves y te revuelves en tu mullido lecho como un criminal, acostado con su remordimiento”; “hay un acusador dentro de ti”; “apostatáis de vuestros principios,” and the series continues for the final pages of the essay (330-32). Perhaps the most devastating attack, and the accusation supports my premise here, indicates that it is Larra's isolated subject that is responsible for this demonic descent into the underworld of delirium:

qué tormentos no te hace pasar tu amor propio, ajado diariamente por la indiferencia de unos, por la envidia de otros, por el rencor de muchos. … Despedazado siempre por la sed de la gloria, inconsecuencia rara, despreciarás acaso a aquéllos para quienes escribes y reclamas con el incensario en la mano su adulación: adulas a tus lectores para ser de ellos adulado, y eres también despedazado por el temor.

(331; emphasis mine)

Larra's own subject, not the “década ominosa,” nor the “estatuto,” nor his failed affairs, has become the instrument of terror. His imaginative faculty that once isolated him and elevated him above the amorphous mass of the desert city has turned on itself and the mordant satire begins to devour its own subject. The double's final attack, “tú me mandas, pero no te mandas a ti mismo” (332), provides conclusive evidence of the dissolution of the authentic self. Solitude, rather than strengthening inner vision, has produced a vision that has destroyed itself.

In the end the narrator is “ebrio … de deseos y de impotencia” (332) and the delirium ends in silence. The article concludes with questions that are left unresolved (“¿Llegará ese mañana fatídico? ¿Qué encerraba la caja?”); the famous yellow box beside his bed labeled Mañana which he describes “con delicia” may well contain the pistol with which he ends his life but is also most definitely filled with silence. It is the same devastating silence we heard in the final conclusion to the “Día de difuntos”: “Mi corazón no es más que otro cementerio. ¿Qué dice? Leamos. ¿Quién ha muerto en él? ¡Espantoso letrero! ¡Aquí yace la esperanza! ¡Silencio, silencio!” (1187, emphasis in the original). A few weeks after he had written “Día de difuntos de 1836” the silence resurfaces when he writes: “Escribir en Madrid es llorar, es buscar voz sin encontrarla” (855). On the fifteenth of January he states, “el sentimiento ha apagado nuestra voz” (1225), and on the thirteenth of February he definitively silences his pen. It is possible that the silence is produced by the realization that his words, static markers on the page, can never apprehend the dynamic fullness of living that surrounds him nor can they redeem the fallen world. The criado notes: “inventas palabras y haces de ellas sentimientos, ciencias, artes, objetos de existencia. ¿Política, gloria, saber, poder, riqueza, amistad, amor? Y cuando descubres que son palabras, blasfemas y maldices” (332). But it is just as likely, as Larra intimated in the necrology written for Campo Alange, that anguish has extinguished his voice. As Siebers suggests, “If the madman falls silent, it is not because his pain is incommunicable, but because pain has robbed him of speech” (188).

Larra is at the head of the Spanish romantic movement that paraded a series of heroes and writers who cultivated their marginality only to find themselves locked out of meaningful discourse and enclosed by silence. This situation is tragic, but it is also emblematic. The double bind confronting the isolated self is located at the very heart of modern experience. The paradox faced by Larra, that to define one's self it is necessary to retreat to the mountain; that to communicate the essence of self demands a return to the desert city, that in the end blurs the image of what we first sought to define, is reworked constantly by artists in our own century. Augusto Pérez, Pascual Duarte, Martín Marco, don Pedro (from Tiempo de silencio), and the characters in new novels of the 1980s like Fernández Cubas's El año de gracia, Llamazares's La lluvia amarilla, and Juan José Millás's La soledad era esto, remind us once again that the problems raised by the romantics in their delirium go to the core of modern life. As Handwerk reminds us: “Romanticism is a critique of the isolation of the subject that anticipates the drift of much modern philosophy and criticism” (46). The ethical paradox as depicted by the delirium of doubles presents a picture of a world that refuses to be defined, that resists reduction into simple categories, that denies the pilgrim a clear destination or even an unambiguous path to follow. In this sense, some, though not all, romantic figures can regain their heroic status. Those who lived without any sense of ironic self-consciousness, who were blinded to the isolation of their own ego and who self-destructed believing naively that they were victims of a corrupt society, have little to say to us and their writings are destined to be silenced. Those like Larra, however, who perceived the ethical labyrinth, remain with us. It is this ironic self-consciousness that makes Larra's work so intriguing. His articles are a clear example of the ego's entrapment within itself; he represents the dangers of a solitude that collapses around the subject; his life and his work prove the dangers lurking behind the Kantian Copernican turn. Yet he also is painfully aware of the pit he excavates for himself and uses his pen as a final warning of that “gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution” (Poe 627).

Works Cited

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