Gods, Heroes, and Myths: the Use of Classical Imagery in Spanish Avant-Garde Prose

CHAPTER 5 Gods, Heroes, and Myths: The Use of Classical Imagery in Spanish Avant-Garde Prose

Juan Herrero-Senés

The importance of Greco-Roman myths to modernist literature is well known, and in this respect, Spanish production is no exception. Successive generations of writers – from the older generation of 1898 to the young avant-garde writers, the focus of this paper – made extensive use of the materials provided by antiquity.1 This was fostered decisively by an educational system that con- tained a strong component of classics. Not only were Latin and ancient history and culture studied, but the study of Spanish literature, especially that of the Golden Age, involved regular contact with a rich classical tradition. All of this left writers with an extensive repertoire of themes, motifs, characters and sym- bols at their disposal. Making use of this symbolic capital involved the clear awareness of a common heritage, a sense of belonging to a civilization with deep roots and the recognition (sometimes explicit) of the present feasibility of a legacy of the past and its aesthetic possibilities. In that sense, the classical element was not a mere addition of something strange, it was part of a deeply- established entity in the cultural imaginary of the time. The beginnings of the Spanish avant-garde can be placed in the years immediately following the end of the First World War. A group of young writers attentive to developments abroad, especially Futurism, Dadaism and Expressionism, decided to lead a cultural renewal. They gathered themselves around little magazines, promoted artistic gatherings and began to pen mani- festos and critical texts, praising new aesthetic guidelines while rejecting the values of the past. In the mid-20s, this renewal made possible the most ambi- tious undertakings in the fields of fiction, novel, and poetry. The “Generation of 1927” (Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Alberti, to name the most

1 The stage productions of Miguel de Unamuno or the use of the Iliad in the novel La aldea perdida [The Remote Village] by Armando Palacio Valdés serve as examples. (All translations from the Spanish are my own.) See the works gathered in Heroes, Myths and Monsters in Contemporary Spanish Literature, and Myth and Subversion in the Contemporary Novel, reviewing the presence of mythological components in production since the late nineteenth century to the present.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004335493_007 GODS, Heroes, and myths 107 well-known figures) advocated formal difficulty and aesthetic purity, lea­ving aside sociopolitical concerns with an elitist gesture. Thus, they implicitly accepted the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera which, focused prima­ rily on issues of economic interventionism and curbing the intense revolts of the lower classes, cared little about intellectuals. The Spanish avant-garde was dedicated­ almost exclusively to artistic endeavors, seeking the modern- ization and internationalization of Spanish culture until 1929, at which point the dictatorship began to accumulate excessive failures, the global economy collapsed and the weakness of liberalism, under the pressure of fast-growing fascist and communist discourses, became undeniable. There is no contradiction between the young Spanish avant-garde writers unapologetically using the classical tradition while proclaiming their hatred of the past. Firstly, because the past that the Spanish avant-garde wanted to leave behind was the immediate one, that is, the perceived nineteenth-cen- tury bourgeois mediocrity that dominated Europe until the First World War. Secondly, because the Spanish vanguard tended towards a synthesis between radicalism and respect for tradition; that is, they promoted merging, dialogue and entanglement over confrontation. And thirdly, because Spanish artists were fully aware of the creative possibilities that existed in intertextuality and other mechanisms of rewriting: allusion, pastiche, irony, parody and so on. In this sense, the modern Spanish writer did not feel the obligation of the writer of the Golden Age to use classical tradition but he took it as another source of inspiration.2 The proliferation of myth has yet another source directly related to the interwar cultural atmosphere, that strange mixture of feelings such as confu- sion, joy, disappointment, freedom and emptiness. It was the nihilistic per- ception that the worldview of reality – one that for centuries had provided stable ethical and metaphysical foundations – had disintegrated, and individu- als lived like misfits with no new standards, not knowing what to believe in. That feeling of chaos and transience – not necessarily negative – led art to

2 Among the most iconoclastic writers, there were also those who advocated against the uses of antiquity. In his article “Al margen de la moderna estética” [“Outside the Modern Aesthetic”] (1920), a young Jorge Luis Borges called for pure creation without relying on earlier traditions, and he especially demanded ignoring the rhetoric, mythology, and symbolism of all previous poetry. The most important critic of the Spanish avant-garde, Guillermo de Torre, stated in his article “Bengalas” [“Flares”] (1924) that it was “unnecessary to fly up to the mythological attic”, although three years later he would adopt a less radical position and would welcome artists that deal with topics of the past (“the eternal themes”), as long as they approached them from an avant-garde perspective (“del tema [. . .]” 13).