SOURCE: Ilie, Paul. “Larra's Nightmare.” Revista Hispanica Moderna 38, no. 4 (1974-75): 153-66.

[In the following essay, Ilie examines Larra's work in terms of its aesthetic quality, which he describes as “grotesque.”]

With increasing exaggeration, Larra is becoming the hero of modern Leftist scholarship. His reputation reflects growing idealization both in the literary world and in some scholarly circles.¹ When writers like Azorín and Baroja marched to Larra's graveside and paid homage to his memory in 1901, everyone understood that a group of intense young men were eager to find a hero in their moment of need. But even as they fantasied the impassioned Larra as the supreme symbol of national tragedy, they recognized and spoke of his paradoxes and faults. Then later, during the Civil War, Communist Party member Cernuda wrote a commemorative poem on the anniversary of Larra's death in 1937, speaking only of his virtues and using them to denounce the Fascist effort to suffocate freedom.² The outcry against intellectual stiflement continues today among such Leftist writers as Juan Goytisolo, who singles out Larra's position as a “committed” writer. He praises not only Larra's moral honesty in dealing with censorship but also his efforts to “promover una cultura nacional auténticamente popular.”³ Goytisolo does not document his opinion about a popular national culture, and I believe it to be false. But the view does coincide with Seco Serrano's historical positioning of Larra among the precursors of “La toma de conciencia de la clase obrera y los partidos políticos de la era isabelina.”⁴ Here too the documentation is weak, and it belongs to that segment of Larra scholarship which tends to exalt its subject.

There is also a realistic group of scholars—Tarr, Ullman, Varela, Escobar—who have written on Larra objectively without sacrificing their sympathy for him. But it should be possible to approach Larra from a perspective other than those which seek biographical or political information, stylistic analysis, and literary sources. A contextual study making Larra visible in his aesthetic dimension can provide a focus to correct the exaggerations already mentioned. By examining the grotesque aesthetic in relation to Larra's self-image and his social values, we may raise (if not answer) psychological questions whose thrust can drive home the modernity of his writings more convincingly than his alleged revolutionism does. When the psychobiography of this liberal and bourgeois writer one day appears, his life and works will be revealing for their contradictions and for the incompatibility between his unconscious prejudices and his political ideas.

In fact, if Larra's voice is more authentic today than it ever was, the reason is due not to the sincerity mentioned by Goytisolo, but to the modern ring of his ironic hypocrisy. His articles are full of deliberate inhibitions, and behind his humor lies a number of class fears which betray his vulnerability as a committed journalist. He was a progressive who knew how to be extremely moderate. And by holding to his moderation against the exaltados he experienced a certain ineffectiveness that many of us are familiar with today, and which in fact is the political impotence of all intellectuals who find themselves in the democratic opposition.⁵ Larra did of course believe in reform, but he was far from a devotee of the people's revolution. It can be demonstrated that he literally shrank from the masses, as indeed in general he disliked being touched physically. He complained about the censor, but he managed to survive quite nicely under official censorship, including Mendizábal's. He watched ministers come and go, but confined his criticism to social generalities instead of specific political or economic programs. This is why, until recently, literary historians used to call him a costumbrista and, perhaps worse, a man of no true party due to his “esquiva naturaleza.”⁶ His good social manners as an upper bourgeois led him to avoid dealing ad hominem in print, and he often tried to curry favor with his readers. Finally, as a disappointed politician and a desperate lover, he decided that the charade of living was no longer worthwhile.

Larra left a legacy, however, of articles and sketches that demonstrate how conscious he was of his duplicity. After 1833, when Fernando VII died, and especially after the fall of Zea Bermúdez, he lived in a state of compressed rage which he vented in a variety of violent ways: through sarcasm, in savage caricature, in grotesque episodes, by literary self-mutilation, and finally by suicide. These mechanisms turn Larra into a fascinating specimen from the standpoint of liberalism's classic failure in Spain. And when we consider the diminished effectiveness of liberal politics in democratic societies today, we may regard Larra as the most relevant writer of Spain's 19th century.

I. POLITICAL NIGHTMARE AND THE GROTESQUE AESTHETIC

Not only did Larra participate in the social carnival of his age, but he perceived it as a “pesadilla política.” This was true as much for the last months of his life as for the first months of the Fígaro period and the regime of Martínez de la Rosa. In November and December of 1836 Larra published three of the four articles termed by Ullman the famous tetralogy of pessimistic essays. These personal texts are well known for their lugubrious and macabre elements, normally taken to prefigure Larra's death as well as the destructive nature of Spanish politics. In “El día de difuntos de 1836” the spectacle of Madrid as a vast graveyard extracted from Larra a frightened shout: “Fuera, exclamé, la horrible pesadilla, fuera!”⁷ One month later, “Horas de invierno” used the same metaphor: “Escribir en Madrid es llorar, es buscar voz sin encontrarla, como en una pesadilla abrumadora y violenta” (II, 290-91). The next day the subtitle “Delirio filosófico” served to characterize “La Nochebuena de 1836.” During these final months, Larra represented his reality as a bad dream, filled with absurdity and madness. He stratified his perception of reality, superimposing private desperation upon public conflict.

But these were not the first occasions that Larra the persona, the social critic, and the man had responded to crises with the metaphor of nightmare. During his residence in Paris in 1835 he composed the satire “Cuasi” and subtitled it “Pesadilla política.” He also composed—in French, no less—a lyrical monologue, later translated, which symptomized his loneliness and alienation, his street-wanderings where “me ardía la cabeza; mis cabellos revueltos descubrían mi frente pálida y agitada; sentía pesar sobre mí una mano de hierro que me oprimía … Era mi patria entera que se apoyaba sobre mí … Era la fiebre, y tras la fiebre la pesadilla” (IV, 331). Still earlier, in 1834, a more objective Larra recalled the recent panic during the cholera epidemic in Madrid: “Fue una pesadilla la que se apoderó de los espíritus” (IV, 335). And so we find with each step backward in Larra's career, that his increasing objectivity and greater emotional stability before 1835 still did not exclude the nightmare metaphor from his consciousness. In 1833 he ridiculed the Carlist position by describing the traveller in “Nadie pase sin hablar al portero” as someone who “creía que soñaba y que luchaba con una de aquellas pesadillas, en que uno se figura haber caído en poder de osos” (I, 294). And again in 1833, “en medio de mi pesadilla” (I, 315) he reviewed the history of Spanish liberalism and wondered “si fue realidad lo del año 20 o pesadilla, si fue obra de sonámbulos lo del 23, o verdadero candilazo de moro encantado” (I, 312). In other words, the intermittently nightmarish final four years of Larra's life deepened their stratification across the sociopolitical level and, increasingly after 1835, in the substratum of personal experience. Chiefly for this reason he embellished the structure of reality with appropriate images of distortion. The result promoted, as he intended, the vigorous condemnation of social manners. But the imagery indicated as well that Larra sensed the inevitable sham of his own role in the masquerade, although he acted it out with the decency of a sensitive liberal. In this way he exposed not only social absurdity, but also the incongruity of his own divided self through the medium of thin disguises and unconscious slips.

This interpretation of a self-contemplating Larra, of a journalist compromised by his bourgeois inhibitions, will not be popular, but it could easily be documented if space allowed. The snobbishness, the allusions to food and clothes, the changes in pseudonyms which amount to a heteronymic compulsion, the insomnia, the boyish insecurity, the remorse, the self-accusations—all these constitute the psychobiographical problem. Add to it the childhood experiences: changing cities and countries, forgetting Spanish and speaking French from age four to eight, relearning Spanish, lacking an authoritative father-figure, seeing the real father disappear frequently and later feeling betrayed by him as a rival. The evidence would demonstrate that Larra's adult sense of disdain and ridicule was a defensive mechanism as well as a class attitude, and that consequently it contributed to the ambiguity of his liberal position vis-à-vis political authority.

In any event, Larra's distaste for physical contact was symbolized by a monocle, and this emblem provides the key to his grotesque aesthetic: “llevo conmigo un lente, no porque me sirva [para ver], pues veo mejor sin él, sino para poder clavar fijamente mi vista en el objeto que más me choca, que un corto de vista tiene licencia para ser desvergonzado” (I, 290). This attitude was insolent, and only possible when the subject felt a sense of superiority toward the object of his contemplation—a human object, to be sure. But, we might ask, did not wearing glasses when not needed produce a deliberate nearsightedness, and did not this mean a mildly aberrant form of perception? The answer was yes, it did, though the practice conformed to a general definition of the satirical perspective and to this degree was not unusual. But then Larra went further, using another metaphor: “colocado detrás de mi lente, que es entonces para mí el vidrio de la linterna mágica, veo pasar el mundo todo delante de mis ojos” (I, 290). Here the perceptual conditions had changed. Instead of a simple eyeglass, Larra held a magic lantern which produced wondrous images. These marvelous scenes differed from normal reality precisely in their ability to amaze or astound. The purpose of Larra's magic lens was to focus on the strange wonders of Spanish society, customs which were ridiculous, comic, foolish, and absurd. To the extent that the lantern projected only spectacular or satirical images, rather than the normal features of daily life, it deformed reality. Therefore even though Larra claimed to be impartial, he reported what he saw with very little objectivity. That is to say, he selected primarily negative elements which he exaggerated in accordance with his critical motives. At certain moments, these deformations extended to the deliberate practice of the grotesque on the principle of selective magnification.

Now here, we must distinguish between the caricature of normal satire and the grotesque aesthetic which sprang from Larra's nightmare. Larra began to publish in 1828, and these articles involved a duende satírico who was witty, uncomplicated, and surgically clean in his attacks. Even the pobrecito hablador of 1832 appears to be free of the violence and distortion that characterize the grotesque mode. By the grotesque mode I mean, as I have indicated on other occasions, a method of deliberate plastic deformation whereby incongruous images acquire disturbing emotional overtones, or where the distortion derives from absurd or uncanny techniques of representation. This definition does not apply to Larra's early satire. The articles published between 1828 and 1832 display all of the comic distortions that fall short of grotesquerie: caricature, exaggeration, burlesque. If we compare a few examples from this period with those of later years, the differences will become clearer. Notice the early satirical portrait of his nephew, and how pale and abstract the graphic line appears when surrounded by moral sarcasm:

Este tal sobrino es un mancebo que ha recibido una educación de las más escogidas que en este nuestro siglo se suelen dar … monta a caballo como un centauro, y da gozo ver con qué soltura y desembarazo atropella por esas calles de Madrid a sus amigos y conocidos; de ciencias y artes ignora lo suficiente para poder hablar de todo con maestría … Habla un poco de francés y de italiano siempre que había de hablar español, y español no lo habla sino lo maltrata …

(I, 86)

In contrast, here is how Larra's lens distorts the image of the laboring masses in 1835, personified by “el hombre-raíz, el hombre-patata”:

… sólo el contacto de la tierra puede sostener su vida … su frente achatada se inclina al suelo, su cuerpo está encorvado, su propio pelo le abruma, sus ojos no tienen objeto fijo, ven sin mirar … un caos de fanatismo, de credulidad, de errores … Es la muchedumbre inmensa que llaman pueblo, a quien se fascina, sobre el cual se pisa, se anda, se sube; cava, suda, sufre. Alguna vez se levanta, y es terrible, como se levanta la tierra en un terremoto …

(II, 55-56)

In this portrait, the turgid quality of the texture, the earthy darkness, the moral degradation, belong somewhere between Goya's peasants in Viejos comiendo sopas and Van Gogh's Potato Eaters.

By way of contrast once again, notice the realistic spatial and linear description in 1828 of the writer covered with snuff:

… en una mesa bastante inmediata a la mía se hallaba un literato; a lo menos le vendían por tal unos anteojos sumamente brillantes, por encima de cuyos cristales miraba, sin duda porque veía mejor sin ellos, y una caja llena de rapé, de cuyos polvos, que sacaba con bastante frecuencia y que llegaba a las narices con el objeto de descargar la cabeza, que debía tener pesada del mucho discurrir, tenía cubierto el suelo, parte de la mesa y porción no pequeña de su guirindola, chaleco y pantalones …

(I, 10)

Here the hyperbole is limited to a few selected symbols—the glasses and the snuffbox—and these do not alter the realism or the placid emotional tone of the scene. On the other hand, “La Nochebuena de 1836” offers a grotesque and perhaps paranoid fantasy which includes a horrible and menacing vision:

… 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. Y aquella boca no hablaba. Pero el rostro entero se dirigía a los bulliciosos liberales de Madrid, que traficaban. Era horrible el contraste de la fisonomía escuálida y de los rostros alegres.

(II, 314)

In all these examples, the optical techniques of imagistic proportion and dimension fall into two separate categories: grotesque deformations or satirical caricature. But there are also differences in the psychological confrontation with reality, and here we must deal with the emotional disposition of Larra's nightmare.

The grotesque portraits just cited embody only one kind of distortion, susceptible to much less subjectivity than some of the other prismatic aberrations such as carnivals, masquerades, dream sequences, and dehumanized visions. If we return to the metaphor of the monocle or lens, we begin to understand the link between aesthetic practice and the tormented personality of Larra as narrator. This time the lens image takes place in the context of satirists and their functions. Larra is rejecting the notion that satirists are carefree writers who delight in tearing their subjects into pieces. And he says that “ese mismo don de la Naturaleza de ver las cosas tales cuales son, y de notar antes en ellas el lado feo que el hermoso, suele ser su tormento. Llámanle la atención en el sol más sus manchas que su luz, y sus ojos, verdaderos microscopios, le hacen notar la fealdad de los poros exagerados, y las desigualdades de la tez en una Venus …” (II, 164). Thus we find that even at the very moment when Larra was asserting his ability to be objective—“ver las cosas tales cuales son”—he admitted bluntly that he had a microscopic perspective when regarding the external world, and that consequently this microscopic focus was the factor responsible for his deformations. Moreover, his “don de la Naturaleza” was a source of “tormento” because it destroyed his sense of beauty—“Venus”—and this gift urged him to search more zealously for the ugly side of things. No man could be happy with this kind of predisposition. In the case of Larra's sensitive and turbulent spirit, the focus eventually sickened him and acted as a depressant to his already despondent temperament. It was a dangerous visual talent for a journalist to have, particularly when his literary selves were constantly dying and reviving among the ruins of Madrid's city-cemetery—el Pobrecito Hablador, el Bachiller Munguía, Andrés Niporesas, Fígaro—all popping up at one time or another in the mascaradas políticas of the city.

II. BEHIND THE VEILS OF HETERONYMY

These pen-names and satirical selves reflect the aesthetic sensibility just described. But they do not explain the man, that is, the man Larra wanted us to see behaving self-consciously. Who was this individual anyway? He was in fact a newspaperman and theater critic with a family to feed, a reputation to make, and a foreign background that never allowed him to feel at home with his countrymen. This should have been enough to drive him into a state of self-consciousness in his public role as writer. But instead of concealing his inadequacies he created a narrative persona willing to describe his idiosyncrasies with ironic and disingenuous humor. His quirks and characteristics are satirized along with the larger social conditions around him. Yet there is a second irony of a more serious kind that Larra might not have been totally aware of, an egotistical self-observation which despite the humor tells much about his personality.

Here Larra's personal remarks took an odd turn, because they revealed more about his self-image than about his true biography. For example his physical body greatly occupied his awareness. He followed an impulse to call attention to his small size, a fact which may have been inconsequential biographically but which suggested a wish to compensate for making so slight a visual impression on people. Such is the value of references like “miréme de alto abajo, sorteando un espejo que a la sazón tenía, no tan grande como mi persona, que es hacer el elogio de su pequeñez” (I, 199-200). Beyond the demands of mere literary descriptiveness came an urge to measure or situate himself materially in the world.

It also amused Larra to depict himself sitting inconspicuously in cafe corners on the pretext of eavesdropping for material to write about. This literary pose is unconvincing, for he could not have relied on so crude a strategy: “seguro ya de que nadie podría echar de ver mi figura, que por fortuna no es de las más abultadas, pedí un vaso de naranja” (I, 9). What did happen was that while writing his article subsequently he found it important to reestablish his psychological location in the cafe and to retrace his relationship to the people he would describe. He had an outsider sensibility, very much aware of himself and his alienation as he saw and traced the journalist-observer sitting in his mental corner. The cafe nook gave that feeling a tangible form.

What about more subtle allusions to estrangement, to the fact that he had been a Spanish-speaking schoolboy in France, or a French-speaking teenager in Spain? Such references are absent, and we find instead a psychic detachment narrated in terms of physical distantiation from the world. In Larra's worst moments he wandered the streets autistically (“no hay cosa que tenga a mis ojos color … indiferencia y despego a cuanto veo”); a dislocated prowler of places (“sálgome a la calle, éntrome por los cafés, voyme a la Puerta del Sol, a Correos, al Museo de Pinturas, a todas partes, en fin, y en ninguna puedo decir que estoy en realidad” [I, 290]). The exiled boy and repatriated youth return, in this spiritual expatriation, as symbolic recrudescences. Trifling details like insignificant stature and spatial distance from the world reinforced the dislocation experienced by Larra. A figure so unobtrusive in a city so colorless ought to have slipped into place somewhere, but no reality seemed tangible enough to contain his restless nature.

Larra's sense of corporeal self was anchored by moral isolation, and he wrote with an eye toward his body. The alien environment frequently assaulted his person, as when “un grandísimo brazo vino a descargar sobre uno de mis hombros, que, por desgracia no tienen punto alguno de semejanza con los de Atlante” (I, 114). That heavy arm belonged to the famous castellano viejo, a middle-class boor. And here the trifling detail begins to acquire some significance. Elsewhere Larra voices thick distaste for the close contact of large families that crowd together in coaches rented for special occasions. The lower classes also grow too familiar and must be kept at arm's length: “mi sastre es hombre que me recibe con sombrero puesto, que me alarga la mano y me la aprieta; me suele dar dos palmaditas o tres … cada vez que me ve” (II, 27). And how does Larra's social life fare? While he enjoyed rubbing elbows with the rich at carnivals and balls, “donde había codeado a la aristocracia,” he did indeed detest the mobs at the theater, “donde me había codeado a mí la democracia” (I, 347). The word-play was irresistible, but sentiment preceded the pun. He left no doubt that he resented the dirty world's invasion of his person and his property when he said, “lleve usted un cigarro encendido. No habrá aguador ni carbonero que no le pida la lumbre, y le detenga en la calle, y le manosee y empuerque su tabaco, y se lo vuelva apagado” (II, 28). These details can be multiplied, and suffice to suggest that Larra was not much of an egalitarian, and that he constructed his basic plane of reality in protective isolation: “¿Es posible que nadie sepa aquí ocupar su puesto? ¿Hay tal confusión de clases y personas?” (II, 28).

How contemptuous of the masses Larra really was can be debated. Much textual evidence needs to be assembled, but to do so here would be digressive. My point is that details like walking and sitting serve as self-revelations which under certain stresses uncover or at least insinuate still other attitudes. Individual examples of, say, body contact in the context of class feelings may be explained on perfectly innocent grounds. But the confluence of examples as a thematic pattern must also have some significance, and the matter will bear further study in future occasions. In any event, these physical problems bring us to the fact that Larra was unable to sleep very well. He said nothing of how often he awoke during the night, but his difficulty in falling asleep took the customary literary form of passing confessions which, upon examination, produce a cumulative effect that is more disturbing than funny. He projected the image of an insomniac amusing himself with the world's folly, but the elements are too incompatible to be persuasive. Playing the sly cafe-observer, he managed to “meterme en rincones excusados por escuchar caprichos ajenos, que luego me proporcionan materia de diversión para aquellos ratos que paso en mi cuarto y a veces en mi cama sin dormir” (I, 9). Surface and concealed meanings balanced each other. The literary subject was the oft-repeated need to gather material for articles, and so “en mi cama sin dormir” came ostensibly as an afterthought. Yet once the irony of “escuchar caprichos ajenos” fades, we begin to wonder what transpired during “aquellos ratos que paso en mi cuarto … sin dormir.” Was the entire sentence intended to be ironic, and if so why should Larra wish to humor us with his insomnia?

One answer is that lack of sleep was a problem which lingered in his consciousness the morning after, disguising itself subsequently as one of several literary allusions to working habits. The reference held a private meaning known only to Larra, who was too subtle to rationalize his problem openly. Thus he dissimulated and wrote pretentiously: “cuando en un día de esos, en que un insomnio prolongado, o un contratiempo de la víspera preparan al hombre a la meditación, me paro a considerar el destino del mundo …” (II, 38). Such lofty detachment on the morning after would have been admirable if true. The more common reaction might be irritability toward the world due to exhaustion. At best Larra may have been too wrapped in himself to ponder events philosophically; his work did not, in any case, permit direct self-absorption. We can only conjecture what sentiments he felt while sitting at his desk, but we are obliged to note that he could not resist mentioning his sleepless affliction and the after-effects that weighed physically upon him.

These references were Larra's only concession to the need for subjectivity. His personality kept a visible presence without creating a preoccupation with self as a literary topic. He eschewed details that would have gained credibility among middle-class readers—clothes, living conditions, family—and instead casually selected the aberration of insomnia. This detail went unnoticed by a public either indifferent to his newspaper altogether or concerned only with those paragraphs dealing with manners. But the stratagem helped Larra to escape the burden of loneliness in moments of self-contemplation. Without this extraliterary dimension it is difficult to account for Larra's dual role in the preliminary material of his articles, a duality whereby he becomes the reader's confidant in a perspective outside the topic and yet slips himself into the content as a character.

By means of these insinuations he signalled a code of mute anguish, his otherwise gratuitous remarks carrying undertones of acute self-awareness: “No sé por qué capricho extraordinario, y en oposición con mis hábitos antiguos, el 31 de este diciembre que expira hubo de asaltarme el sueño mucho más pronto de lo que acostumbra …” (II, 50). This easy slumber, however, was followed by an unpleasant dream. Once again Larra seized the opportunity to narrate himself into his article for reasons independent of the prefatory remarks required for the subject. His readers cared little whether he fell quickly asleep, nor would they remember previous references to his nocturnal habits. But for Larra, the rarity of a nightly repose made the topic irresistible, something to celebrate secretly in public.

On the other hand, he left no doubt about his customary torment, at times making light of it but also defining it by the metaphor of civil war: “ya estaba yo agachado esperando el aguacero y sin poder conciliar el sueño. Así pasé las horas de la noche, más largas para el triste desvelado que una guerra civil” (II, 313). However prophetic the metaphor in its social dimensions proved to be for Spain, it was just as symptomatic of Larra's private disorder. If ever two organisms existed which never learned the rhythmic mechanisms of rest and recovery, they were Larra and Spain, both of whom qualified as specimens constantly at war with themselves. Political antagonisms seemed as interminable as sleepless nights.

Here we must remember the convergence of Spanish political conflict during the 1830's with the internal strife that plagued Larra. He was challenged by the duality of the liberal movement. He remained ambivalent about class identifications. And he seemed insecure about siding definitively with political positions, finding it easier to attack satirically than to advocate soberly. The strain drove him to weariness and despair, with neither condition eased by financial certainty. Thus he pursued his newspaper career, arising in fatigue, sitting despondently at his desk (in a modish swivel chair), and composing half-mad dialogues with alter egos in the hope of counteracting, and eventually banishing, his warring emotions. He even invented a servant-valet who could give him the following advice: “Escucha: tú vienes triste como de costumbre; yo estoy más alegre que suelo … ¿Por qué te vuelves y te revuelves en tu mullido lecho como un criminal, acostado con su remordimiento, en tanto que yo ronco sobre mi tosca tarima? ¿Quién debe tener lástima a quién?” (II, 316).

In this way, Larra afflicted himself with public secrecy. His dialogue in “La Nochebuena de 1836” offered him a form of punishment whose self-lacerating method remained concealed from the reader. Why he allowed his servant to expose him as an alleged “criminal” will never be known, but it is clear that his sense of guilt for something—his ambiguity?—egged him on to make public atonement. He published the Unamunian-style dialogue, or monodialogue, structured on the process of desdoblamiento. And then he boldly accused himself through the voice of his fictitious “acquaintance.” The technique afforded subtle and contradictory ironies that fulfilled Larra's confessional wish and desire for punishment. By creating an independent prosecutor to hint mysteriously at unspecified crimes, he exposed himself without having to make a direct statement of guilt. He could also objectify the self-torture by assigning the role of his accusatory self to another person who, moreover, belonged to a different social class. Thus Larra was able to see himself condemned by the outside world while being satisfied that his self-incrimination would remain secret.

The key word here was remordimiento, an inexplicable allusion in the shifting perspectives of Larra's self-contemplation. These shifts suggest frightful psychological stresses that compounded chronic insomnia with deep-seated concerns surfacing to his consciousness and keeping him awake. The original causes of Larra's failure to sleep, therefore, include several related possibilities: (a) an excessive self-awareness and consequent inability to extricate himself through a falling away from consciousness into its opposite state of sleep; (b) a tight grip on his bodily and emotional sense of self which prevented sleep from exercising its obliterating power over him. It is pointless to review the rich psychoanalytical literature on this subject, for Larra provided the material in his metaphors of fragmentation and in his allusions to both physical size and his spatial relationship to the non-self. Taken together, these references comprise the primary evidence of a sensibility that deformed the world in periodic moods of dejection.

III. THE GUILT-RIDDEN LIBERALISM OF BOURGEOIS SATIRE

The psychobiographical profile, therefore, essentially portrays a young bourgeois liberal who wrote under a variety of stresses: pressure from his family, who kept him alert to their censure; pressure from himself as he succumbed to the clowning behind his satire; pressure from his “other” self, the doubting, objective observer in his desdoblamiento. This cogito pushed him into a state of perpetual self-dissection, including special moments when he contemplated his literary death and wrote his own epitaph. No wonder he appeared distempered and bitterly indifferent. Yet at the same time, beneath his anguish, there swelled a secondary awareness, a knowledge of his semi-fraudulent relationship with the reading public. After all, his readers were solid citizens of the professional, business, and political worlds. He needed their subscriptions and so curried favor, at times, with his middle-class peers by using phrases like “confesemos ingenuamente,” as if he didn't realize that his next words would shock and titillate them.

Indeed, Larra tried to draw sympathy from his readership by showing boyish charm or by adopting a false naïveté. Occasionally he apologized to his well-mannered readers in advance of impolite remarks. But in all this he knew exactly which expressions corresponded to what feelings, and he probably despised himself for wearing his poses as naturally as the masks worn by other people at the balls he described with such frequency. In sum, a basic part of his existence ran contrary to his role as social critic. He craved attention, needed compassion, and longed to be accepted by his own kind—the very middle-class individuals whom he criticized so often. The fact is that he seldom acted without taking a side-glace at social opinion, and in this regard let us remember that he did not defy society in the vigorous manner of a Romantic rebel or a bohemian. On the contrary, his sincerity as a satirist faltered when it came under the eroding influence of middle-class preoccupations. In his mind he was truly divided and he wavered accordingly. On one hand, he presented himself as a distracted thinker driven to melancholia by the folly around him, though he seemed to draw solace from this image. On the other hand, he hated that maladjusted condition and yearned for normalcy in the bourgeois way: “mala crianza será, pero …” (I, 290); or he would say, “la disposición de nuestro ánimo, que no sabemos dominar” (II, 248); or else, “el mal humor, que habitualmente me daba todo el aspecto de un filósofo” (I, 331). Curiously, Larra combatted the mischievous image that he sought to create. While persuading everyone of his malice, he anxiously tried to dispel the image, “la mala interpretación que se da generalmente al carácter y a la condición de los escritores satíricos” (II, 161). As we can see, he could not have it both ways.

For these reasons, Larra's commitments were indecisive. He moderated his reactions in the very midst of his extremes. Even melancholia was a commodity to capitalize on, now as he gaily disguised it and now as he bared his breast for the edification of readers. It should be obvious that his dejection did not end as “la cosa más alegre del mundo,” although this was how he defined satire. And plainly his writing a phrase like “la idea de servir yo entero de diversión” (II, 280) must have provoked a certain anguish. Proof of this came in the metaphor describing satirists, offered while disabusing readers of their misconceptions:

Supone el lector, en quien acaba un párrafo mordaz de provocar la risa, que el escritor satírico es un ser consagrado por la Naturaleza a la alegría y que su corazón es un foco inextinguible de esa misma jovialidad que a manos llenas prodiga a sus lectores. Desgraciadamente … no es así. El escritor satírico es por lo común como la luna, un cuerpo opaco destinado a dar luz, y es acaso el único de quien con razón se puede decir que da lo que no tiene. Ese mismo don de la Naturaleza de ver las cosas tales cuales son, y de notar antes en ellas el lado feo que el hermoso, suele ser su tormento.

(II, 164)

He saw himself living in shadow, like the moon, providing amusement without being able to laugh himself. On the contrary, signs of laughter sprang from his general emotional extremism and suggested a touch of schizoid mania. The metaphor of an opaque moon was especially meaningful in this regard, as one of many images of reflection and transparency which Larra used to convey distorted or absurd facets of reality. Here, the incongruity of the unlit moon giving light, or a sad clown inspiring laughter, expressed the discomfort of the actor whose mask was worn so tightly.

Understanding this, Larra disguised his self-knowledge so subtly that the famous dialogue on Christmas Eve 1836 is barely seen as the shockingly self-lacerating text that in reality it is:

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! Preciado de gracioso, harías reír a costa de un amigo, si amigos hubiera, y no quieres tener remordimiento … Ofendes y no quieres tener enemigos … Te llamas liberal y despreocupado, y el día que te apoderes del látigo azotarás como te han azotado … Ente ridículo, bailas sin alegría … Yo estoy ebrio de vino, es verdad; pero tú lo estás de deseos y de impotencia!

(II, 316-317)

All the themes discussed thus far were recapitulated here: the vanity and the need for friends or approval, the loneliness and remorse, the naive hope for a double standard, the acknowledgement of hypocrisy, the joyless laughter. A new theme, the sense of impotence, also appeared to dominate all others and to suggest their motivating source. Yet this theme sprang not from psychological problems but from the political etiology of Spanish society. Social conditions propagated the excrescences of impotent malaise. The uneasiness that pervaded Larra's consciousness formed part of his psychic symptomology, and it nourished a more active malevolence—satirical in nature.

Larra's dual career as Fígaro illustrated how the satirist lived at the heart of liberal failure and intellectual impotence. He epitomized the emotional core of this condition by a “cloud” of melancholy on his brow, “pero de aquellas melancolías de que sólo un liberal español en estas circunstancias puede formar una idea aproximada” (II, 279). In Fígaro's first life, he was “regañón y malhumorado,” and then he emerged from the political ruins of the cemetery to a second career in a “mundo de dolor y de amargura” where he could write, “¿qué verdad más triste que un periódico de la oposición?” (II, 304). The blame lay with the hopeless social sphere which thwarted the best-intentioned political efforts and which drove sensitive men to hyper-frustration. The causality was relentless and irrevocable. Here was Larra the writer, whose life's role depended on the social context, taking as the prime subject for his criticism that very social context. The absurdity of this contradiction baffled him, placing many stresses on an already delicate sensibility. Had he been either a revolutionary or a reactionary, his dilemma would have diminished. But as a liberal, Larra depended on moderate thought structures that reinforced rather than alleviated the pressures convening on him from the social dimension. For example, he opposed censorship on ideological grounds and fought it on the day-to-day journalistic level; yet he lived with the censors to the point where he could carve out a career and meet the required deadlines. Other examples of contradictory moderation can be found in his social philosophy, but they would take us far afield.⁸ The point is that these paradoxes stretched the framework of his political nightmare. As a bourgeois liberal with a special class upbringing, he harboured prejudices incompatible with his other values, and the effort to reconcile them wasted his emotional energy. His sense of decency and respect for the individual was repeatedly declared. But his good manners tarnished the role of social critic with the film of hypocrisy. The “progressive” liberal—some might say the revolutionary—in Larra was impotent precisely because the bourgeois in him insisted on maintaining good relations with a society that he fundamentally repudiated.

It was impossible to remain intellectually resolute with a mind so quick to see paradoxes, to make inversions, and to draw antithetical conclusions. Yet while he changed his mind often he felt defensive about it. Each new position was sincerely believed, like a fresh beginning offered to an agile thinker who, unfortunately, all to quickly glimpsed the defects of every position. Parallel to this came the changing literary identities and the newly invented pen-names adopted for changing circumstances. Each shift in character brought with it another point of view, yet the cause of liberalism in Larra's generation embraced fixed purposes. When we reach the deathbed scene of the Bachiller Munguía, we find him confessing with his last words that “siempre tuve mis opiniones como mis vestidos, y cada dia me puse uno … Arrepiéntome en la hora de la muerte” (I, 154-55). There is deliberate irony here, but it fades before an unconscious irony in which Larra witnesses his own demise. He often killed his literary self, and this fact should suffice to demonstrate his need to purge himself. He allowed part of himself to die with each alter ego, and this too is proof of self-castigation following confession of “sin.” But the fact that his resurrection always took the form of a new literary personage calls attention to the ambiguity of his orientation as a social critic. Like the well-dressed bourgeois who wore different clothes every day, the middle-class Larra cast aside one liberal mask for another whenever necessary. There was no hypocrisy in this in the traditionally moral sense, although Marxist critics might find contemptible an apologetic remark like “batuecos hay que no tienen nada que echarme en cara” (I, 154). In the 19th century, no one could ask for more than what Larra freely gave: an admission of guilt and a symbolic suicide.

But what about the psychological effects and their literary form? On the mildest level they consisted of ironic distance and evasion by means of pseudonymic disguise. At times there was a stranger level of turmoil and self-contemplation, which resulted in a numb detachment where he said: “Recibo insensible las impresiones de cuanto pasa a mi alrededor; a todas me dejo amoldar con indiferencia y abandono; en semejantes días no hay hermosas para mí, no hay feas, no hay amor, no hay odio” (I, 290). And at other times his attention turned inwardly to inflict sharp incisions upon his psyche. These occasions were moods of self-accusation phrased in a language that gave insight into the nature of his psychosocial pathology. Larra isolated his allegedly “criminal” character on the one hand, and summoned his bourgeois exterior self to appear as the chief witness for the prosecution. He arraigned his guilty middle-class nature before the tribunal of his divided personality in the form of a monodialogue that went as follows: “—Tú acaso eres de esos criminales y hay un acusador dentro de ti, y ese frac elegante, y esa media de seda, y ese chaleco de tisú de oro que yo te he visto son tus armas maldecidas.—Silencio, hombre borracho …” (II, 316).

It is hard to imagine a more callous assault on one's own personality, yet Larra proceeded with a battery of images as pitiless as his moral judgment of himself. He dressed impeccably for the tribunal, and appeared before the sessions of his febrile thought with an elegance that he assumed other people saw him as possessing. Clothes were his weapons, the armour which protected him against the threat of class confusion, and the armament which he would use to cow his opponents. He would face the overfamiliar tailor, the rude water-carrier asking for a match, and the boisterous petty-bourgeois family—and he would keep them in their places by this sartorial strategy.

This is where we reach the essential value of Larra's work as a critique of liberalism in his own age and in ours. He recognized the failure of the liberal position as a political alternative and as a critical methodology. The words of his accuser summed it up perfectly: he was an “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” (II, 316). On the day that he would get control of the whip, he would lash out as he had been lashed at earlier. This shattering truth could scarcely be admitted, and only in the most despondent of moods did he face the implications. On days like Día de Santos, or the dying moments of the old year, he conceived the lugubrious thoughts which belong to his most famous articles. But if all Madrid was a cemetery, Larra was the keeper of the graveyard, chronicling the burial of each illusion and poking around the tombstones for signs of life. No one has ever doubted that Larra identified with the moribund aspect of Spanish culture, or that he suffered over it. Yet we must also see that a link existed between that cultural cemetery and the life and death of Larra's alter egos. His perception of liberalism's failure paralleled the death of Fígaro, and each new political regime brought fresh hope or despair which was echoed in articles that were correspondingly hopeful or desperate.

Since Larra's sense of impotence lurked behind even his most hilarious articles, it was inevitable that he resorted to morbid and even grotesque representations of reality during his pessimistic periods: “Heme aquí de nuevo saliendo entre las tumbas, impasible como un muerto; sacando la cabeza por entre las ruinas como un secretario de la Gobernación” (II, 303). Or, “¡Fuera, exclamé, la horrible pesadilla, fuera! ¡Libertad! ¡Constitución!” (II, 281). He was submerged in his emotions, and to gain distance he looked at the world through the lenses of distortive magnification. This method was facilitated for him by the conditions of Spanish history. But his personality encouraged the choice of method even more. It was no accident that his manic-depressive states took their most frequent literary form in the context of masked balls, nightmares, and drunken or macabre grotesqueries. Deformation was the most natural expression of Larra's self-destructive tendencies. And insofar as social reality corresponded to or mirrored his inner incongruities, it produced an integrated political nightmare whose center was an anguished, modern liberal.

Notes

1. A “revolutionary” Larra whose suicide is a positive refusal of a political situation rather than a negative political inadaptability is portrayed by C. Alonso in “Larra y Espronceda: Dos liberales impacientes,” Literatura y poder. España 1834-1868 (Madrid: Editor Alberto Corazón, 1971), pp. 15-55. A similar view holds that the suicide was “una profesión final de dignidad,” and that Larra, as a “diabólico perturbador de la paz de espíritu del buen burgués,” maintained an “actitud dignísima ante un mundo que se le hunde.” Manuel Lloris, “Larra o la dignidad,” Hispanic Review, XXXVIII (1970), 184, 187, 193.

2. Bearing the title “A Larra con unas violetas,” the poem includes these verses:

   Escribir en España no es llorar, es morir,
   Porque muere la inspiración envuelta en humo,
   Cuando no va su llama libre en pos del aire.

   Luis Cernuda, La realidad y el deseo (1924-1962) (México: Tezontle, 1964), p. 142.

3. El furgón de cola (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1967), p. 15.

4. In La revolución de 1868. Historia, pensamiento, literatura. Selección de Clara E. Lida e Iris M. Zavala (New York: Las Américas, 1970), pp. 25-48.

5. I follow Pierre Ullman in using the term “progressive,” which he contrasts with “moderate.” It is of course accurate to identify the two factions of liberalism as progresista and moderado during the ministry of Martínez de la Rosa, as distinct from exaltado and moderado during the Triennium. But when the progresistas themselves divide into extremists and moderates (i.e., mendizabalistas and the Istúriz clique), these distinctions lose their usefulness for the historical problem of liberalism vs. revolutionism. Modern Leftists view Larra as a strong progressive tending toward the masses but restrained by inhibitory scruples. I see Larra as a moderate defined by his inhibitions and drawn back upon his middle-class center of gravity. Ullman would doubtless disagree with me, since he compares Larra with Blanco White, who criticized Jovellanos and the moderates in 1812. Yet Ullman introduces two kinds of evidence in his excellent description of the liberal dilemma in Spain from the French Terror and the War of Independence to the Junta Central of 1812, the Triennium, and the 1830's. On the one hand, Larra “perceived the ineluctability” of progressives turning into fanatical exaltados while moderates evolved into “advocates of stagnation.” In this light, Larra's suicide becomes the only solution. On the other hand, he was prepared for “political compromise” as a member of parliament and had “stanched his satirical vein.” Not only had “Figaro sensed that this leftist rebellion against a Liberal régime had set a terrible precedent,” but he published his articles in “ultra-Moderate newspapers.” See Mariano de Larra and Spanish Political Rhetoric (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), pp. 30-34. The question remains as to the political significance of Larra's suicide (quite apart from its link to his love life). Does it signify his inability to be either an extremist or a moderate? If he could not be an extremist, then his moderation motivated the suicide. And if indeed he was a moderate, the act prevented him from becoming a conservative like Jovellanos.

6. Julio Nombela's opinion in 1908, cited by Ullman and contested in part (p. 66).

7. Obras, ed. Carlos Seco Serrano (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1960), II, 282. All references are to this edition.

8. One such contradiction is visible in a passage on censorship involving a pamphlet by Espronceda, in which Larra declares: “pero el escritor público que una vez echó sobre sus hombros la responsabilidad de ilustrar a sus conciudadanos, debe insistir y remitir a la censura tres artículos nuevos por cada uno que le prohiban … debe protestar … sufrir, en fin, la persecución, la cárcel, el patíbulo si es preciso” (II, 214).