SOURCE: Iarocci, Michael P. “Between the Liturgy and the Market: Bourgeois Subjectivity and Romanticism in Larra's ‘La Nochebuena de 1836.’” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 33, no. 1 (January 1999) 41-63.

[In the following essay, Iarocci asserts that Larra's critically acclaimed essay “La Nochebuena de 1836” is a fusion of individual romantic subjectivity with contemporary social and political concerns.]

The word is the medium in which occur the slow quantitative accretions of those changes which have not yet achieved the status of a new ideological quality, not yet produced a new and fully-fledged ideological form. The word has the capacity to register all the transitory, delicate, momentary phases of social change.

—M. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Among the most widely anthologized of Mariano José de Larra's works, “La Nochebuena de 1836” continues to rank, along with “Horas de Invierno,” “El Día de Difuntos de 1836” and “Necrología. Exequias del Conde de Campo Alange,” as one of the most canonical and critically celebrated essays in his production; and the immediate reasons for its privileged status are not difficult to discern.¹ As the work of critics as methodologically disparate as Ricardo Gullón, Susan Kirkpatrick and John Rosenberg has demonstrated, few of Larra's essays so efficiently convey the hallmark topoi of romanticism—introspection, anguished self-consciousness, alienation, suicidal exhibitionism—while fusing these subjective elements with the collective concerns—social, political and historical life—that sustain the satirical impulse throughout his work. In this regard “La Nochebuena de 1836” seems to promise the best of both worlds for cultural historians: it is a densely poetic and highly subjective discourse that simultaneously renders Fígaro's consciousness an image of the contradictions of the emergent bourgeois culture wrought by Spain's uneven and intermittent liberal revolution.²

Indeed, the essay has aptly been understood as representing a kind of labyrinthine dead end in the well known trajectory of Larra's psycho-political development. The Enlightenment faith in the liberal project evident in essays such as “Literatura” gives way to concern and uncertainty about the means and ends of liberalism in the reviews of Anthony, and this skepticism in turn cedes to the highly subjective, quasi-solipsistic, mal du siècle pessimism of the winter essays of 1836 (Kirkpatrick, El laberinto 285-88, “Spanish Romanticism” 459-71). Concomitantly, as Larra's satirical gaze turns inward, the social reality that was the object of his scrutiny appears to be subsumed into an ever expansive self. To recall Paul Ilie's words, “insofar as social reality corresponded to or mirrored his inner incongruities, it produced an integrated political nightmare whose center was an anguished, modern liberal” (166).

The status of that center, the modern liberal self, and of its representation in “La Nochebuena de 1836,” however, remains somewhat of a paradox, as even a cursory review of recent analyses of the essay suggests: MacCurdy has read Fígaro and his servant as Jungian “opposed tendencies of the psyche” (143); Del Vecchio has described the encounter as an emblematic representation of the romantic imagination's fateful struggle with the vitiated medium of language (140); Teichmann has construed the narrating subject as a magician who symbolically produces a ritualistic act of expiation (120-26); and Kirkpatrick has identified the divided self as a paradigm of romantic subjectivity (Las Románticas 98-109). More recently, Rosenberg has argued that Larra is “a clear example of the ego's entrapment within itself; he represents the dangers of a solitude that collapses on itself” (388).

While such critical pluralism undoubtedly reflects the richly nuanced range of meanings that the essay has been capable of putting into play, it also suggests that a reconsideration of the socio-historical forces that suffuse Larra's subjectivity in “La Nochebuena de 1836” may be especially fruitful. For as Ilie's words suggest, it is precisely that turbulent romantic encounter between the self and social reality that imbues Larra's essay with its rhetorical force. The following pages are an attempt to reevaluate that encounter. More specifically, this study aims to historicize more fully the writing subject constituted in the essay by delineating heretofore unexplored contours of the modern selves that are constructed—and there are several—by re-examining the social forces for which those selves are figures, and by analyzing the ideological function of the very gesture by which Fígaro and Spanish social life are seemingly fused. In a broader sense such a reading is also an attempt to displace the expressive poetics that have framed so many discussions of the essay, in order to ask not merely what it represents, but also what the social functions of that representation might be.

In this regard it will be useful to begin with a phenomenon as seemingly distant from social realities as is the question of literary form. Among the initially striking and scarcely commented rhetorical features of Larra's essay is its repeated, dramatic juxtaposition of two distinctive narrative tempi. Fígaro's account of Christmas Eve 1836 consistently oscillates between what appear to be temporally unmarked, meditative passages on the one hand and discretely punctuated moments of the essay's rudimentary narrative on the other.³ From the seemingly atemporal, discursive present of the narrator's opening musings on superstition in the first paragraph—for example, “El número 24 me es fatal: si tuviera que probarlo …”—Fígaro and the reader pass to the historically specified beginning of the action per se in the second paragraph—“El último día 23 del año 1836 acababa de expirar en la muestra de mi péndola” (604). And this initial juxtaposition establishes a pattern that will be repeated throughout the essay. The discursive time of Fígaro's reflections is systematically disrupted by intrusions of a more immediate, historical hic et nunc, such as the sequence in which his commentaries on office life are interrupted by his servant's call:

¡Dichoso el que tiene oficina! … Al menos no está obligado a pensar, puede fumar, puede leer la Gaceta.

—¡Las cuatro! ¡La comida!—me dijo una voz de criado, una voz de entonación servil y sumisa … Esta palabra me sacó de mi estupor.

(605)

Conversely, just as narrative sequences begin to build, they quickly dissolve into the time of meditative discourse, as when Fígaro dons his cape, pulls on his hat and finally steps out of the house in which he has been brooding, only to engage in new musings on the arbitrary nature of calendrical time:

Tercié la capa, calé el sombrero y en la calle.

¿Qué es un aniversario? Acaso un error de fecha. Si no se hubiera compartido el año en trescientos sesenta y cinco días, ¿qué sería de nuestros aniversarios?

(606)

While such oscillation might readily be understood as inherent to the loosely narrative structure of the costumbrista genre itself, the extent to which Larra's essay exploits the convention's figurative potential is striking, inasmuch as the abrupt shifts between these two extremes in narrative tempo mirror a more fundamental dichotomy that is thematized by the title of the piece itself; that is, the opposition between the ahistorical, cyclical time of the liturgical calendar—“La Nochebuena”—and the secularized, quantifiable time of linear history—“de 1836.” The essay's staccato tempo consequently functions as a figure of the two distinctive and ostensibly irreconcilable temporal modes that govern the essay from the outset; and not surprisingly, the selves that are constituted in the essay will be inflected through these contrasting forms of temporality. More specifically, two of those selves will alternatively be construed either as the protagonist of a liturgical ritual or quite literally as a commodity destined for consumption in the secular time and space of the market.

The Messianic dimension of Fígaro's self-representation in “La Nochebuena de 1836” has not gone unnoticed; and the initial semiosis of the opening lines of the essay, in which Fígaro identifies himself as having been born “en día 24,” immediately positions him as a Christ figure by tacit association with Christmas Eve.⁴ To the extent that this Christ figure efficiently figures the traditional, contradictory poles of exalted romantic subjectivity—the inspired deity on the one hand and the misunderstood outcast on the other, the supernatural seer and the sacrificial victim—such an identification is by no means an exceptionally novel rhetorical move. What is striking, however, is the extent of the symbolic itinerary this initial figurative gesture inaugurates, for in what is a typological inversion that would certainly not go unnoticed by readers schooled in biblical exegesis, the Nativity in “La Nochebuena de 1836” figures the Passion. Fígaro in fact explicitly states the central tenet of Catholic dogma which links the Christ-birth and death: “Hace mil ochocientos treinta y seis años nació el Redentor del mundo, nació el que no reconoce principio; y el que no reconoce fin, nació para morir. Sublime misterio” (606). To the extent, then, that he has consciously self-encoded as a Christ figure, Fígaro's wanderings through the streets of Madrid on Christmas Eve will in fact double for that centerpiece of the Catholic liturgy, the Passion and Crucifixion.

Indeed, the celebrated polysemic play Larra so often deploys in the service of acerbic political commentary, here becomes the vehicle by which Fígaro's night of anguish is repeatedly figured as Christian martyrdom. This figuration is already present in the initial coupling of “24” and “fatal” (604). It is reinforced by the ascetic rhetoric with which Fígaro describes his anticipation of the day—“desde el 23 me prevengo para el siguiente día de sufrimiento y de resignación” (604)—and it is underscored in the evocation of the time of Imperial Rome by way of the Saturnalia, the pagan palimpsest to Christmas that models the subsequent encounter between Fígaro and his servant: “Me acordé de que en sus famosas saturnales los romanos trocabon los papeles y que los esclavos podían decir la verdad a sus amos” (606).⁵

It is not difficult within this context to posit the biblical analogues onto which Fígaro's sojourn through Madrid might be grafted. In the introspection and brooding sense of impending doom of his study are the traces of Gethsemane. The description of the road that takes him to the theater by way of the market place remits to the via dolorosa with an ironic, almost counter-reformation severity: “Para ir desde mi casa al teatro es preciso pasar por la plaza tan indispensablemente como es preciso pasar por el dolor para ir desde la cuna al sepulcro” (606). And the reality that wounds and bruises Fígaro's sensibility as he wanders the streets after exiting the theater doubles for the torments preceding the Crucifixion:

Dos horas, tres horas, y yo rondo de calle en calle a merced de mi pensamiento. La luz que ilumina los banquetes viene a herir mis ojos por las rendijas de los balcones; el ruido de los panderos y de la bacanal que estremece los pisos y las vidrieras se abre paso hasta mis sentidos y entra en ellos como cuña a mano, rompiendo y desbaratando.

(607)

Moreover, it is precisely as the faithful are called to Midnight Mass, the liturgical reenactment of the Passion, that Fígaro returns to what will be his figurative crucifixion, the self-annihilating encounter with his servant.

But perhaps the most compelling allusion to Fígaro-as-Christ is the densely figurative passage that in a sense sets the wheels in motion for the final exchange between master and servant; it is the scene in which Fígaro sends his servant out with a few coins to celebrate the evening:

Miré a mi criado y dije para mí: “Esta noche me dirás la verdad.” Saqué de mi gaveta unas monedas; tenían el busto de los monarcas de España; cualquiera diría que son retratos; sin embargo eran artículos de periódico. Las miré con orgullo:

—Come y bebe de mis artículos—añadí con desprecio. (606)

This parodic re-staging of the Last Supper, with its echoes of “This night one of you will betray me,” its reminiscence of the coins that bought Judas, and its play on the very words of consecration that the priest utters over the communal host, would certainly not be lost on readers with even a rudimentary religious education; and the liturgical underpinnings of the passage, specifically the latent image of the host, extend to the encounter itself, which will be framed not only as a crucifixion, but also as a kind of grotesque communion.

The figural complexity of the passage, however, is by no means exhausted by this frame of reference, for in what is perhaps one of the most astounding rhetorical maneuvers of the essay, it is from within the evocation of this very core of the Catholic liturgy that the reified, self-as-commodity augured by the aforementioned time of secular history literally rears its head as the busts of temporal kings inscribed on coins. The chain of metonymic association initiated by the transformation of coins into articles leads to the pending, unexpressed metonymy, articles as Fígaro. In turn, this new triad (coins as articles as Fígaro) fuses with the preceding sequence (Fígaro as Christ as Communal Host) by way of the tacit metaphor, coin as host. The result is a most dialectically charged image of Fígaro as both the suffering incarnation of a transcendent logos and as an inert unit of material exchange. The image captures with extraordinary economy one of the central dramas that unfolds in the process of Spain's nineteenth-century secularization: that encounter between the desacralizing machinery of an incipient modern market culture on the one hand, and a profoundly entrenched, Catholic culture of the sacred on the other.

The ostensibly incommensurable spheres to which both images belong, however, are in fact bridged by the shared semantic fields of “consumption” and “representation” in which both coin and host operate: that is, the communal consumption of the host and its function as a sign of divinity on the one hand, and the market consumption enabled by the coin as a sign of exchange value on the other. It is consequently no small coincidence that the two primary public spaces occupied by Fígaro in the essay—the market and the theater—which are in a sense, emblems of the secular, are dialectically linked to the liturgy and its communal centerpiece. For the images of consumption that preside over the market scene are the degraded, secularized counterparts to the meaning-endowed, transcendent spiritual consumption of communion:

¿Hay misterio que celebrar? “Pues comamos”, dice el hombre … Montones de comestibles acumulados, risa y algazara, compra y venta, sobras por todas partes y alegría … Todos aquellos víveres han sido aquí traídos de distintas provincias para la colación cristiana de una capital. En una cena de ayuno se come una ciudad a las demás.

(606-07)

Similarly, the theater remits to Catholic liturgy both by way of its historical origins and by way of the privileged role each phenomenon accords the act of representation.⁶ Again the link is dialectical. The two plays Fígaro views disapprovingly are summarized as “una representación en que los hombres son mujeres y las mujeres hombres” and “un novio que no ve el logro de su esperanza; ese novio es el pueblo español” (607). Stable meanings, significantly figured here by gendered vehicles, are either subverted or eternally deferred. And this crisis in representation is the negative, secularized analogue to that fusion of representation and meaning that is codified in Catholic dogma by the tenet of Transubstantiation, which construes the liturgy not merely as a representational act, but as a ritual that actually brings about the incarnation of transcendent meaning in the host. To reiterate, then, both the market and the theater might be said to invert dialectically or secularize the respective values of consumption and representation as they are figured in the liturgy.

And just as the call to Midnight Mass that is juxtaposed with Fígaro's return home is no mere backdrop to the narrative action but actually gestures figuratively to a self that is plotted in terms of the liturgy, so the market and theater are more than the mere secularized analogues of liturgical ritual. They too perform a deictic function, pointing as they do to the alienated and commodified subjectivity that is figured by the articles and coins. Indeed, it might be claimed that it is through the mechanisms of theater and market that the self is in fact commodified. For readers familiar with his writings, the theatricality of Larra's subjectivity would be anything but novel; his public persona is not only inextricably linked to his role as the preeminent theater critic of his time, but the very distinction between public and private and the very notion of a discursive “persona” are thematized by the many dramatis personae behind the pseudonyms that span Larra's production: Duende Satírico del Día, Bachiller Juan Pérez Munguía, Andrés Niporesas, M. J. de Larra, Fígaro, etc.

In the metonymic chain, Fígaro as articles as coins, then, is the embedded history of a Larra who has come to acknowledge fully and exploit both the shifting identities that are inherent to the writing process and the market value of these various writerly selves. And as Ermitas Penas Varela demonstrated in his classic documentation of the publishing contracts that explicitly stipulate the pseudonym under which Larra was to write, publishers were by no means oblivious to this value either. Beyond this personal history, however, are also the traces of that more general history of the material conditions of literary production. It is the history of that gradual but profound eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transition in which, with the emergence of a burgeoning public sphere, aristocratic patronage cedes to market forces as the primary engine of literary production.⁷ In the context of this ever-intensifying commodification of writing, the logic of the commodity form takes over, such that by the time of Larra's writings, a radical schism has opened up between—to use the terms of Marx's classic critique—the use value of writing and writing subjects on the one hand, and their exchange value on the other.

It is in the wake of these simultaneously deified and reified selves that “La Nochebuena de 1836” finally turns to Fígaro's third self, the self towards whom he has been traveling throughout the circular itinerary of the essay, the self that is his servant. The process by which the servant is at once constituted as an independent agent and subsumed into Fígaro echoes the dialectal tension between the liturgical Fígaro and the commodified Fígaro. This time, however, the tension is played out within the field of literary creativity: the servant is marked as both Fígaro's autonomous antagonist and as his creation, the displaced voice of his own conscience. One can trace a readily identifiable humanizing and individuating process at work in Fígaro's progressively less disparaging representations of the servant. He is first described as nothing more than “un mueble cómodo,” then as “un ejemplar de la grande edición hecha por la Providencia de la humanidad” (608) and finally as a speaking, reasoning subject: “mi criado encontró entonces, y de repente, voz y palabras, y habló y raciocinó” (609). But the moment in which the servant seems to be accorded this fully-fledged expressive autonomy is also the moment in which Fígaro links him with his own narrative voice: “los fabulistas hacen hablar a los animales, ¿por qué no he de hacer yo hablar a mi criado? … En fin yo cuento un hecho” (609). And this dialectic between identity and difference, that is, between the servant as self and the servant as accusing other, in turn remits to the two frames in which the encounter has been figuratively positioned—the frames of communion and crucifixion.

Significantly, Fígaro's return from the public spaces of Madrid to the domestic sphere in which his servant awaits is governed by a passage that explicitly continues the metonymic chain initiated in the Last Supper parody:

¿Qué es esto? ¿Va a expirar el 24 y no me ha ocurrido en él más contratiempo que mi mal humor de todos los días? Pero mi criado me espera en mi casa como espera la cuba al catador, llena de vino; mis artículos hechos moneda, mi moneda hecha mosto se ha apoderado del imbécil como imaginé, y el asturiano ya no es hombre; es todo verdad.

(608)

The new chain of figuration—coins as wine as truth—brings the servant into the previously outlined symbolic logic of communion and consumption. On the one hand, he again figuratively communes with Fígaro. He has partaken of the body—coins as hosts—and blood—coins as wine—of his master in order to experience the truth of him. On the other hand, in a secular sense he has “ingested” Fígaro to the point of inebriation, and the wine is about to talk: “has de oír al vino, una vez que habla” (610). Moreover, to the extent that the servant will himself be identified with Fígaro's voice, it is the image of self-consumption that will loom large as servant launches into drunken diatribe against master.

The shift from the first person narrative and monologue that have predominated throughout the essay to dialogue as the confrontation begins formally conveys the oppositional or self-oppositional nature of the exchange. The seemingly heterogeneous burst of accusations that follow are thus loosely structured by the dialogical pronominal opposition (“tú-yo”) that is repeated throughout the encounter. The servant almost seems to take pleasure in hammering away at Fígaro with these pronouns: “tú vienes triste como de costumbre; yo estoy más alegre que suelo” (609), “tú buscas la felicidad … yo nada busco” (610), “yo estoy ebrio de vino, es verdad; ¡pero tú lo estás de deseos y de impotencia … !” (611). At the same time, this closing allusion to questions of desire and power names the two processes that accord the dialogue as a whole its oft-overlooked thematic coherence. Power and desire are in a sense the conceptual anchors around which the various charges coalesce. Interestingly, however, these very questions are communicated within a rhetoric of Fígaro's personal suffering that almost renders them invisible.

As part of a bourgeois power structure that defines the very terms within which the criminal justice system operates, for example, Fígaro is free to commit crimes with legal impunity, and thus must face the excruciating pain of his own recriminating conscience:

No pareces criminal; la justicia no te prende al menos; verdad es que la justicia no prende sino a los pequeños criminales, a los que roban con ganzúas o a los que matan con puñal; pero a los que arrebatan el sosiego de una familia seduciendo a la mujer casada o a la hija honesta, a los que roban con los naipes en la mano, a los que matan una existencia con una palabra dicha al oído, con una carta cerrada, a ésos ni los llama la sociedad criminales, ni la justicia los prende … Tú acaso eres de esos criminales y hay un acusador dentro de ti.

(609-10)

Similarly, as an actor within the bourgeois sphere of public discourse, Fígaro is doubly engaged in a never-ending, frightfully paralyzing power struggle, both to maintain the readerly approbation on which his status and critical authority depend, and to subdue the potential political rivals who constantly threaten his position:

Tú eres literato y escritor, y ¡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! … Hombre de partido, haces la guerra a otro partido; o cada vencimiento es una humillación, o compras la victoria demasiado cara para gozar de ella … Adulas a tus lectores para ser de ellos adulado, y eres también despedazado por el temor, y no sabes si mañana irás a coger tus laureles a las Baleares o a un calabozo.

(610)

More blunt even is the servant's ideological unmasking of Fígaro's liberalism as merely a bourgeois grab for power. “Te llamas liberal y despreocupado, y el día que te apoderes del látigo azotarás como te han azotado” (610). Significantly, the price Fígaro pays for this power seems to be, once again, the recriminating thrust of the accusation itself.

Desire, the correlate to such power, is not surprisingly related to the new economic conditions in which the bourgeois class is beginning to flourish. It is the desire generated by an expanding commodity culture forced to guarantee ever-increasing appetites for its products, for example, that informs the servant's following accusation: “yo en fin no tengo necesidades; tú, a pesar de tus riquezas, acaso tendrás que someterte mañana a un usurero para un capricho innecesario … o para un banquete de vanidad en que cada bocado es un tósigo” (610-11). Transposed to his readerly habits, this frustrated desire similarly structures Fígaro's search for truth: “Tú lees día y noche buscando la verdad en los libros hoja por hoja, y sufres de no encontrarla ni escrita” (611). And it is the desire for an all too illusory amorous plenitude that sets the stage for Fígaro's inevitably tragic liaisons:

… tú echas mano de tu corazón, y vas y lo arrojas a los pies de la primera que pasa, y no quieres que lo pise y lo lastime, y le entregas ese depósito sin conocerla. Confías tu tesoro a cualquiera por su linda cara, y crees porque quieres; y si mañana tu tesoro desaparece, llamas ladrón al depositario, debiendo llamarte imprudente y necio.

(611)

Finally, language itself can only frustrate the sublimated desires Fígaro futilely attempts to satiate with words, as the servant observes in a pivotal passage that I will return to shortly: “inventas palabras … y cuando descubres que son palabras, blasfemas y maldices” (611).

Such are the charges that lead to the closing image of a sleepless Fígaro, deliriously eyeing a mysterious yellow box inscribed with the word “mañana” and asking himself what that tomorrow will bring. That box would of course become famous just over two months after the essay's publication, when in addition to the firearm with which he killed himself, a revolver box of the same color was found at the scene of Larra's suicide. But in this sense the end of the essay was paradoxically a kind of beginning, for it was certainly a two-way bridge that went up between the boxes at that moment of discovery. If Larra's death reframed “La Nochebuena de 1836” as a kind of literary suicide, it is also true that Fígaro's rhetoric of martyrdom in the essay was instantly extended to the accounts of Larra's death and, subsequently, to much of the criticism dedicated to his work. Indeed, in varying degrees, the martyrdom narrative continues as the dominant interpretive paradigm through which Larra's late work is approached. The observation, therefore, that Larra's suicide immediately became a sign itself, or the proposition that the yellow box in the essay became at that moment a simulacrum, or sign of a sign, may still carry with it traces of the sacrilegious. It is, however, an unavoidable preliminary step in any attempt to demystify the ideology of romantic suicide, and it not only opens up a scarcely explored line of inquiry with regard to both Larra and “La Nochebuena,” but also offers a potentially new vantage point from which to approach that seemingly perennial and increasingly contested issue of the ideology of Spanish romanticism itself.

The question that must be asked, then, is the question of the ideological significance and function of the representation of Fígaro's self-annihilation in “La Nochebuena.” And it will be useful in this regard to retrace our steps in order to consider once again the selves that the essay constitutes, for it is through those selves that the text's ideological dimensions may be more readily apprehended. Indeed, from a distance, Fígaro's subjectivity seems to have been the stage for an allegory of history.⁸ The liturgical time and space of Fígaro-as-Christ figures the stable, hieratic metaphysics associated with the ancien régime; the secularized time and space of Fígaro-as-commodity is a figure of the emergent bourgeois market-world; and the mostly silent Fígaro-as-servant who cannot yet make an appearance in this new public sphere but who, given the opportunity, lashes out at his master clearly doubles for a working class that has begun to understand the relations of power behind the nineteenth-century bourgeois cult of freedom. (In this latter sense, the class tensions that characterize Beaumarchais' Le Marriage de Figaro, from which Larra drew the pseudonym, become especially relevant.) What is more, the discursive dialectical play we have seen between Fígaro's various selves and between the spaces they occupy appears to figure the social dialectic between the forces that those selves and spaces represent. “La Nochebuena de 1836” seems to have textualized the very gears of the ancien régime grinding against the new secularizing forces of the market.⁹ It has figured the desacralization inherent to this process in the communal host that is also a coin, and it has attempted to represent the emerging opposition between the bourgeois and working classes at the level of pronouns. The question that remains, however, is to what end this history has been deployed. More specifically, what has been the purpose of this Saturnalian slave revolt?

Historical narrative is, of course, always more than the disinterested representation it may try to be. As Frederic Jameson has observed, “the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (79). And it is precisely this dimension of “La Nochebuena de 1836,” its status as an ideological act, that has been veiled by Larra's suicide and the rhetoric of martyrdom with which it has been fused. It would, however, be a mistake to continue to allow the martyrdom narrative, along with Larra's celebrated perspicacity as a social critic, to obviate a much needed consideration of the ideological mystification in which Larra's critique inevitably engages. The agenda behind the essay's historical allegory is ultimately anything but complicitous with the figurative revolution it enacts. Indeed, the carnivalesque inversion of the roles of master and servant imaginatively resolves the ever-intensifying social problem of class friction by giving the proletariat a figurative voice and power it does not in fact have in 1836. It is, in the Jamesonian sense, a kind of collective wish-fulfillment, a symptomatic palliative for the latent, unresolvable contradictions lurking in Spain's early nineteenth-century political unconscious.

One need only scrutinize the representation of the servant, however, to begin to outline the class interests served by this highly touted social critique. While the vehemently accusatory rhetoric directed at his master quite successfully draws attention away from the way the servant himself is characterized, the image of him that emerges from the encounter is nothing short of a bourgeois dream about the working class:

Yo nada busco, y el desengaño no me espera a la vuelta de la esperanza … ¿A mí quién me calumnia? ¿Quién me conoce? Tú me pagas un salario bastante a cubrir mis necesidades.

(610)

—Concluyo; yo en fin no tengo necesidades … Cuando yo necesito de mujeres echo mano de mi salario y las encuentro, fieles por más de un cuarto de hora.

(610-11)

… el pobre asturiano come, bebe y duerme, y nadie le engaña, y, si no es feliz, no es desgraciado, no es al menos hombre de mundo, ni ambicioso, ni elegante, ni literato ni enamorado.

(611)

In short, he is an untroubled, simple, almost mindless man whose desires extend no further than easily satisfied bodily needs and who is fortunate to be free from the terrible injuries to which the exercise of power and unbridled desire have subjected his master.

Moreover, the servant's accusations have been figured, not as the expression of legitimate class interests, but rather as the terrible instruments of a symbolic crucifixion such that readerly sympathies fall with the master. Indeed, it is one of the essay's many rhetorical coups that bourgeois hegemony has been rewritten as suffering. To murder with impunity, to participate in a libidinal machinery the precondition of which is material comfort, to have a voice in the public sphere; in “La Nochebuena de 1836” these class privileges ironically become part of an extended proof of the servant's initial assertion to his master that, of the two, it is Fígaro who most deserves pity: “—Lástima—dijo la voz, repitiendo mi piadosa exclamación—. ¿Y por qué me has de tener lástima, escritor? Yo a ti, ya lo entiendo” (609). The extent to which mainstream critical receptions since 1836 have tacitly accepted and reproduced this sentiment speaks most eloquently both to the rhetorical power of such discourse and to the persistence with which the bourgeois subject continues to function, to this day, as an invisible, naturalized standard of reference.¹⁰

The essay also symbolically resolves the fundamental tension between those two contradictory impulses of the bourgeois revolution, freedom and domination, by staging—to use a term John Rosenberg proposes in a different context—an “ethical nightmare.” That is, by displacing the question of power relations into the language of ethics, such that while Larra's bourgeois readers might grapple with their consciences, they would not need fully to confront their own rise to class hegemony in political terms. To the contrary, “La Nochebuena” would serve as a convenient badge of conscience, an emblem of their morality if ever there was a question; and as Teichmann has argued, Fígaro's pseudo-Christian “sacrifice” would symbolically redeem the very culture ostensibly under critique. In this sense the allusion to the carnivalesque inversions of the Saturnalia could not be more appropriate, for the carnival's function in the essay is, in the end, to legitimize the status quo it momentarily subverts.

In this light it is well worth reconsidering the much commented linguistic skepticism that afflicts Fígaro, for it too is more than it seems: “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” (611). The disenchantment paradigm that structures the passage initially seems to replicate within language itself the tension between transcendence and material contingency that has characterized Fígaro's deified and reified selves. The quasi-religious transcendence that informs Fígaro's desire for words to be more than mere words, for example, is apparent in his decidedly sacrilegious reaction upon confronting their contingent, mundane existence. As a meta-commentary about “La Nochebuena de 1836” itself, this view of words might also be read as a kind of aporia or short-circuiting in which language turns on itself, much as the servant has turned on Fígaro. This crisis of referentiality, however, is not devoid of political implications. If on the one hand it enacts a powerful unmasking of the foundational ideals of the liberal cultural revolution—for which Larra has been amply credited—on the other it also undermines the very categories with which the prevailing order might be challenged. As Terry Eagleton has observed with regard to more recent but similar, postmodern gestures:

The anti-foundationalist road is perilous … only to a degree—for in boldly kicking out the foundations from under one's own life forms, one inevitably drags them out from beneath one's opponents too. They can now no more finally ground their challenge to you than you can metaphysically copperplate your defense against them … The move serves to swaddle the dominant system from any searching criticism, at the same time as it serves to enhance its liberal credentials.

(39-40)

Larra's disillusioning experience with words is, in this regard, a luxury made possible precisely because the political question of whose words ultimately count has already been answered.

The socially symbolic dimension of the essay, however, extends beyond its uses of historical allegory or its demystification of language. It is also at work in the epistemological preconditions that have allowed Fígaro's selves to fuse with each other, with their object-world, and with social realities in the first place. I am referring to that well known romantic shift to an idealist, subject-based epistemology, the famous Kantian “Copernican turn,” whereby the empiricist separation between subject and object is blurred, opening the door to the world of subjectivity at work in “La Nochebuena de 1836.”¹¹ The celebrated passage in which the windows of Fígaro's study become an emblem of the porous threshold between mind and reality thus thematizes the figurative process that is at work throughout the essay:

Ora volvía los ojos a los cristales de mi balcón … 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.

(605)

Behind the rhetoric of suffering is the deeply utopian, romantic dream of a fragile unity between the perceiving self and the external world, and in this sense “La Nochebuena” and the other winter essays of 1836 are less distant from romantic lyric poetry than might be expected of the genre.¹² The reality that this utopian impulse necessarily carries with it as its conceptual antithesis, however, is not difficult to identify. Indeed, to negate the key terms of the conceit by positing a radical separation between subject and object, is to open a very different window onto that increasingly inert, atomized, quantifiable and alienated reality of the emerging world of modern market production. In this context it is not difficult to appreciate the ways in which romantic idealism itself is a kind of symbolic compensation, the counterpart to the increasingly desacralized, objective reality of modernity. Arguably, it is ultimately this utopian dimension of the “La Nochebuena de 1836”—evident in the dense play of subjective figuration we have traced—and not the essay's more explicit forms of civic self-flagellation, that invests the work with its most lasting ideological content. For the essay's profoundly anti-empirical epistemology models a romantic subject whose very fusion with social reality is paradoxically grounded in a desire to resist the alienating world that is coming into being, a desire to think beyond what is. (Not coincidentally, it is precisely this impulse that the realist novel will consistently target, both thematically and in its strictures against romantic metaphor.) It is perhaps one of the more poignant structural limitations of such romantic idealism, however, that the emancipatory dream is bound by its epistemological cage: all too often it remains trapped within the individual subject.¹³

In this sense “La Nochebuena de 1836” consistently points to the dreaming subject's deep complicity with the reality against which he dreams. Thus, at the level of the individual, the self-annihilating gesture in “La Nochebuena” is paradoxically anything but self-annihilating; rather, it is a powerful self-canonizing maneuver that with Larra's death would accumulate for him unprecedented amounts of symbolic capital.¹⁴ The essay defined the terms in which his suicide would be read, in essence founding the secularized romantic cult of the liberal martyr that would echo from Zorrilla's famous elegy at Larra's grave, to the Generation of 1898, to Cernuda's “A Larra, con unas violetas” and far beyond. And in what is a fascinating projection of the essay's dialectic between self-as-deity and self-as-commodity—note the absence of the servant—Fígaro's rhetoric of martyrdom has in fact played no small part in the literary canonization of Larra's work, thus ensuring his present-day circulation as one of the most anthologized and commercially viable Spanish romantic writers.

Such a reading of Larra and “La Nochebuena de 1836,” however, has claims beyond this necessary initial demystification, for it also has something to say about the ideological categories that have haunted critical accounts of Spanish romanticism throughout this century. I am referring to the schism that in recent years seems to be widening between those who have situated Spanish romanticism within the culture of a progressive liberalism (e.g., Navas Ruiz, Abellán, Kirkpatrick) and those who see a strongly conservative, nationalist historicism as the defining core of the movement (Juretchzke, Flitter, Silver). The fact that this very debate is a kind of critical mise-en-abyme, reproducing the nineteenth-century polemic between progressives and conservatives in the form of contending twentieth-century historiographies is a testament to the power that romantic rhetoric has had in defining the very categories of analysis with which it has been studied. Parallel to these competing views of the movement, there has also been a kind of critical pluralism, the genealogy of which can be traced through David Gies's “The Plurality of Spanish Romanticisms” to Arthur Lovejoy's famous injunction to conceive of “romanticisms” in the plural.

The model of Fígaro's subjectivity as allegory of social history, however, implies that the choice between irreconcilable politicized readings of the movement on the one hand and pluralist readings on the other may be a false one. “La Nochebuena de 1836” suggests that Spanish romanticism can profitably be read as an attempt to textualize and subjectify the very historical process with which literary historiography has contended. It is in this sense decidedly similar, structurally, to those models of British romanticism—from Hazlitt to Abrams's to McGann—that have posited the displacement of socio-political energies into more idealized, spiritual or internal localities as one of the movement's foundational rhetorical gestures. But Spanish romanticism differs most radically from its English cousin in terms of the socio-political content that drives this symbolic machinery. And if there can be little doubt, as Philip Silver has recently argued, that M. H. Abrams's model of British “High Romanticism”—a secular millennialism inspired by the French Revolution—does not adequately describe the Spanish romantic imaginary, it would seem that the task at hand is to explore more satisfactory explanatory models rather than retaining Abramsian romanticism as a transnational standard of romantic authenticity against which Spanish romanticism does not measure up.

The preceding reading of “La Nochebuena de 1836” offers the elements of an alternate model. What the essay suggests is that the political ur-text of the Spanish romantic imaginary is not the high drama of the French Revolution but rather the particular dynamics of Spain's own bourgeois revolution, a revolution construed broadly as the dialectical process by which the ancien régime and the emergent liberal order, in all of its internally fractured complexity, struggle to make, retain and/or adjust their claims on national life as part of the grander historical narrative that is the European transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production. Such a framework retains the logic of socio-political displacement that invests the romantic imaginary grosso modo, while specifying the political narrative that structures that imaginary in the Spanish context. To the extent that the highly compromised and intermittent quality of Spanish revolution as described above could not easily be collapsed into apocalyptic, millennial patterns of thought (as the French Revolution was by the Lake poets, for example) it is no surprise that the cohesive, secularized Christian plot of Abramsian “High Romanticism,” with its three fundamental moments—an initial Eden-like unity, a Fall, and final redemption via a newly invigorated imagination—does not adequately account for Spanish romantic production.

Indeed, considering its very different political ur-text, one could expect the Spanish equivalent of the Abrams plot to be more complex, its categories more mediated. One might even venture the following hypotheses: 1) Although the first two moments of the secularized Christian plot frequently come into play in Spanish Romantic texts, the moment of redemption is largely absent or deferred. This pattern symbolically reproduces the deferred aspirations of Spain's incremental and often tenuous liberal revolution. 2) In place of secular redemption, Spanish romanticism tends to posit a more compromised telos—a “noble defeat” or a “sublime failure”—that mirrors the compromised nature of Spanish liberalism as it develops over the course of the nineteenth-century. 3) The privileged moments of the Abramsian psycho-drama are overshadowed in Spanish romantic texts by the priority of struggle, conflict and contradiction, just as it is incremental struggle rather than decisive revolutionary transformation that characterizes much of Spain's nineteenth-century political process. In this context Spanish romantic texts might be approached more fruitfully as the sublimated internalization of social struggle itself rather than as the expression of a transformative poetics.

The critical operation suggested by the above framework would involve at its simplest the recognition that the progressive-conservative dichotomy observed across texts and authors is at work within them as well, that the plurality of romanticisms are dialectically at work within writing subjects who are themselves being constituted by the historical forces they sublimate. In the case of “La Nochebuena,” for example, the various selves we have traced represent the dialectical struggle of contradictory modes of thought within the romantic subject itself. If, however, we have seen a subjectivity whose structure is still partially governed by the symbolic order of the ancien régime, and if we have also found an underside to the image of the progressive liberal martyr, it has not been to discredit one of the foremost icons of Spanish liberal romanticism. The purpose has rather been to underscore the necessity of readings attuned to the complex social dialectics at work within Spanish romantic texts. Such readings would not only redefine the current understanding of the cultural logic at work in liberals such as Larra; they would also complicate recent accounts of Spain's conservative romanticism by underscoring the necessarily compromised character of its categories, by revealing that within the medievalizing historicism of Spain's assimilation of Herder and the Schlegel brothers are the ghosts of a repressed modernity. In a broader sense such readings offer the possibility of further historicizing the crisis model of Spanish romanticism—present, for example, in the work of critics such as Russell Sebold and Donald Shaw—such that the individual, metaphysical and existential crises that are either operating or are actively being repressed within romantic texts may be transcoded as tropes of the social and cultural crisis that accompanies Spain's slow, intermittent, painful transition to modernity.

Notes

1. To use Ullman's term, these are the famous “tetralogy of pessimistic essays” (34).

2. For analyses of Larra's work in the context of the “properly bourgeois revolution” that begins with the Enlightenment (Jameson 96), see Escobar and Kirkpatrick (Las Románticas 3-9).

3. See Genette's chapters on “Duration” and “Speed” for a discussion of tempo in narratological terms (Narrative Discourse 86-112, Narrative Discourse Revisited 33-37).

4. In his study of Larra's ritualistic settings, for example, Teichmann makes the connection explicit: “Larra se considera un mártir a la manera de Cristo … es éste un papel que desempeña en su grado máximo en ‘La Nochebuena de 1836.’ … Larra se considera el chivo emisario, receptáculo de los pecados de sus conciudadanos” (124). The textual process by which this figuration is achieved, however, has not been analyzed to date.

5. For an exhaustive analysis of Larra's play on contemporary and often highly ephemeral political rhetoric, see Ullman. With respect to the Saturnalia, see Centeno, who reads the encounter as a modernization of Horatian satire (Satire 7, book II).

6. See for example, Young, Donovan or Hardison. For an overview of medieval drama, see Harris.

7. For a classic analysis of this process, see Habermas.

8. I use the term here in the most immediate sense, as roughly synonymous with “the social dialectic at work in the Spain of the 1830s.”

9. The more concrete analogue to this conflict would be the Carlist War, particularly the siege of Bilbao, that serves as the immediate political backdrop to the festivities underway in the capital.

10. I do not mean to construe Fígaro's suffering as merely a case of bourgeois mystification. The essay can clearly be read as representing the painful toll that modernity was beginning to exact on the bourgeoisie, even as it was rising to hegemony. My point, however, is that this representation of Fígaro's suffering has too often been read—erroneously, I would suggest—as ideologically neutral.

11. The evocation of Kant in this context, a familiar critical reference in discussions of romantic subjectivity, is of course, more emblematic than factual. The Copernican revolution mentioned in the famous second preface to the Critique is in fact quite limited within Kant's epistemology—it is circumscribed to what in Kantian nomenclature are known as a priori synthetic truths. At the same time, the foundational role of Kant for what would become a more full-blown German idealism cannot be disregarded, nor can his appropriation by the English romantics, particularly Coleridge, as the philosophical authority behind a new, creative “imagination.” For a reading of the Kantian legacy and its relationship to solipsism in “La Nochebuena de 1836,” see Rosenberg.

12. Such a subject-based epistemology is readily documentable throughout Spanish romantic texts, and the recent tendency to deny or downplay its role within the movement is as erroneous as to confuse this phenomenon with the more self-conscious theories of the imagination one finds in other national romanticisms.

13. To the extent that romantic idealism collapses reality into the subject, collective social transformation is also subsumed into the self. In this sense, as many critics of the movement have observed, the collective tends to be rewritten in terms of the individual psyche. The locus classicus in critical discussions of this phenomenon is Abrams. For a more recent treatment of the subject, see McGann.

14. For a discussion of this term and of symbolic economies in general, see Bourdieu.

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