Gabriel Miró's «El abuelo del rey» and the Politics of Spain
Ian R. Macdonald
The texts of Gabriel Miró have often been set in a geographical, a paisajista, context. They have also been given universalist readings. But though they have from the start been enmeshed in the great Spanish debates between left and right, there has been less interest in readings that insert them into history, or any broad political context. Rafael Bosch made an important start in 1970 in the first volume of his La novela española del siglo XX, but while his Lukácsian approach is valuably provocative, his reading of particular texts can be disappointingly crude. Thus, of Las cerezas del cementerio he writes: 'La muerte de su protagonista es un mero símbolo distorsionado de la extinción de su clase'
1. And in a more extended comment on the Oleza novels, full of ideas, he reads the bishop as an entirely negative figure, stylistically turned into an object. Thus Miró becomes the
acusador de las causas de esta deshumanización de la vida, producida en una sociedad atrasada y semialdeana cuando las antiguas estructuras se derrumban y dan los últimos coletazos de su poder mientras se anuncia su sustitución por las nuevas fuerzas efímeras y destructivas de la cultura industrial. Miró no ha sido en este aspecto sólo un precursor, sino también el señalador del verdadero camino de la representación estilística de la reificación. Tiene sus limitaciones novelísticas... pero las supera con la objetividad de su visión última y con el sentido de protesta que le mueve a presentarnos a su obispo leproso y su efecto sobre la ciudad dormida de un rincón atrasado del campo español2. |
In 1975 José-Carlos Mainer, writing on both the Oleza novels and El abuelo del rey, again presented Miró as a liberal reformist: 'Es evidente que Miró ha elegido transformarse en impávido pero implacable testigo de un cambio social, visto con la óptica reformista con que sus compañeros de generación miraban el desmoronamiento de la España arcaica ante la España moderna'
3. This is a useful and straightforward contextualisation, but as with Bosch, perhaps because of their brevity the comments on the novels themselves can become simplistic, as when the Oleza railway is a 'símbolo de la modernidad amenazadora' or the bishop 'víctima de su impotencia'. Another attempt is of course the Historia social de la literatura española of 1978, but this, contradicting its project, retreats disappointingly to a traditional image of the 'escritor puro'
4. We have only the beginnings of a discussion of this complex problem.
I read Miró's work as essentially a making-sense-of-oneself-in-one's-context. Part of that making sense was to write novels about his mother's town, Orihuela, and his father's, Alcoy. In order to clarify part of the historical context, I have chosen to look at El abuelo del rey, the paternal novel, along with the articles Miró was publishing during the period when we may presume he was completing the writing of El abuelo, 1912-19155.
On 8 September 1911 Miró began a collaboration with the conservative daily Diario de Barcelona that would last for almost two years and be followed by a year-and-a-half with the independent La Vanguardia. Almost all of the Libro de Sigüenza appeared here first, but an even greater number of articles, well over thirty, were never reprinted by Miró. It is among these that we find the most open comments on affairs of the day. His is a tender spirit, against cruelty in all forms, but specifically bull-fighting, corporal punishment, racism, and war6. He constantly attacks traditional right-wing Spanish values and foreign images of bulls and flamenco, and regrets the historic sack of America7. He pleads for progressive education8 -a significant stance soon after the execution of Ferrer- and admires modern psychiatry9.
A favourite antipathy is, of course, business. But it is important to be precise here. It is the merchant who is most scorned, the man who becomes rich simply by handling the produce of others. The manufacturer and the hacendado at least produce, though Miró's manufacturers are usually as dull as Sr. Llanos, the hatmaker of El abuelo. Miró's class position is quite clear, the son of a salaried professional, a civil engineer, with family links to landed property south of Alicante and manufacturing in Alcoy10. Alienated from his class as an intellectual and aesthete (in the 1913 article 'Asuntos crematísticos' Sigüenza and a friend -Germán Bernácer- indulge in a jocular discussion of the social and economic role of the intellectual and Sigüenza laments that a shoe-shiner has more savings than himself)11, his original loyalty is to the professional bourgeoisie and its historically progressive values, suspicious of the fraction that lives by inherited or accumulated wealth, but also fearful of 'los avanzados' and conspiring revolutionaries. For his progressive values are always limited in the direct comment of these articles by an insistence on a universal and atavistic impulse to cruelty, 'aquel hecho ciego', as Sigüenza calls it12.
An interesting example of this ideologeme appears in 'El parricida', a commentary published in 1912 in the Diario de Alicante13. Appearing the day before the trial of one Juan Bautista Carreres, accused of strangling his mother, the article speculates on the motivation of the wretched peasant charged with the parricide. Carreres' defence lawyer was José Guardiola Ortiz, Miró's friend and, later, first biographer, who pleaded 'locura' on his client's behalf. Indeed, since Miró's article, which is partly constructed around the futile irony of garrotting a strangler, is followed by the newspaper's commentary pleading for the death penalty to be rejected on the grounds of madness, the whole coverage in the Diario de Alicante can be read as an attempt (successful as it turned out) to influence the judgement the following day. It appears from the article that Miró was allowed to interview the prisoner, but clearly his dialogue allowed no ultimate conclusions:
The commentator's ambivalent feeling towards the peasant, captured in the alternating presentation of his hands as 'garras' and 'manos para los bancales', can only be resolved by looking forward to a kind of moral evolution: '¡Benditos sean los siglos que nos apartan de las ferocidades primitivas y los siglos que alejarán las nuestras!'
But these difficulties for the progressive, so clearly expressed in the celebrated Mironian 'falta de amor' are only a starting-point. More interesting is Miró's compulsion to undermine even his most straightforward views. An example. In 'Ellos y nosotros' the Mironian yo (Sigüenza is not yet always used at this stage), meets a French diplomat:
Pasado algún tiempo, me ha preguntado con mucha dulzura: -¿Ustedes qué quieren en Africa? -¿Nosotros...? Nada. Esto lo he contestado apresuradamente; no pude remediarlo porque él ya proseguía. -Si no quieren nada en Africa, ¿por qué no se marchan ustedes? Entonces he sentido dentro de mi ánima un rumor, un encrespamiento, un vocerío de muchedumbre guerrera y hasta un galopar de caballos. ¿Sería el paso de la tradición de la raza? Yo no sé lo que sería, pero una réplica delgada y suavísima que ya tenía apercibida quedó atropellada por un ímpetu encendido de aquella fiereza tradicional, y dije: -¡No nos marchamos de Africa, porque no nos da la gana! -Perfectamente -murmuró el diplomático... El león legendario seguía rebramando por mi boca14. |
In a piece attacking war and racism the yo implicates itself in the continuation of the very horrors it condemns. In one sense this is a predictable strategy for the progressive intellectual, a sophistication of the 'hecho ciego/falta de amor' theme. But in another this radical division of the self is of course also one of the roots of Miró's art, the cause of Sigüenza, and the sign of Miró's belonging to modernism in the English sense. This split between the observing and the observed selves was later presented by Miró himself as the foundation of his aesthetic in 'Sigüenza y el mirador azul'
15, and it is in the consciousness of this split that the alienation of the artist lies. In another article of the time, 'De los comerciantes', Miró spells it out: 'La vida se le ofrece [al mercader] con una objetividad cercana, clara, todo delante de sus ojos'
16. No split consciousness, no linguistic brokerage for the merchant.
At times Miró could, however, write without irony. A notable occasion was the death of Canalejas, assassinated on 12 November 1912. On 19 November the Diario de Barcelona published Miró's comments, 'Abandono y amor'
17. Appropriate to the lack of irony the piece is set in what might be called a lyric framework with the first four short paragraphs being reworked at the end as a refrain. Miró laments the fact that Canalejas' friends appeared to have abandoned him at the time of his fatal walk across the Puerta del Sol. The piece is headed and ended by a quotation from St Matthew 23,38: 'He aquí que os quedará desierta vuestra casa'
, part of Jesus' reproach to Jerusalem 'thou that killest the prophets', which implies that Canalejas too will be abandoned and killed in the capital city. Though Miró had frequently mocked politicians in the past, Canalejas is presented as the potential saviour of Spain.
For the reader of such an article in a newspaper the production of meaning depends on the day's issue as a whole, as well as on previous issues, the ideology of the paper, the media in general, and so on. I want therefore to suggest that not only such articles as 'Abandono y amor' and, as we saw, 'El parricida', make more sense in their printed context, but also many others, of which I shall look at two well-known ones from the Libro de Sigüenza.
'Plática que tuvo Sigüenza con un capellán' appears in the Libro de Sigüenza dated 1909, a date added by Miró only in the 1927 edition. Edmund King in his introduction to Sigüenza y el mirador azul has shown that Miró's dates are unreliable18. If we accept this and take instead the date of first publication, 18 October 1911 in the Diario de Barcelona, the piece acquires a quite specific meaning19. In September 1911 Canalejas was faced with a severe test of his liberalism in the form of a general railway strike. Considerable violence took place, the worst episode being the death of a local judge and his assistant in a riot at Cullera, south of Valencia. Canalejas dealt with the problem by conscripting all railway-workers into the army. Meanwhile ABC reported the whole strike as the work of anarchists led from Barcelona with 'sucursales' in Alcoy, Vigo, and Gijón20.
When Miró's piece appeared originally it was in the first person. For the first book edition in 1917 Sigüenza replaced the yo in a third-person narrative. No date was given, and the title became 'Plática que tuvo Sigüenza con señor capellán después de algunas revueltas en el país'. Those last words show that Miró felt some explanation of the circumstances was needed six years after the events, confirming that the first version was closely tied to its political context. It is also plausible to suppose that the date 1909 was added in the 1927 edition and the 'algunas revueltas' deleted to suggest a link with the by then better-remembered Semana trágica.
Standing alone the piece laments violence and has Sigüenza ironically reveal the hypocrisy of the capellán; it is also prefaced by a passage showing Sigüenza's fallible perceptions. But taken in context the piece has also to be read as implying that the recent conflicts were no better than a fight over a dead worm. Traditional values of heroism are attacked, but there is no hint of sympathy for the other side. We can conclude that Canalejas' severe measures against the strikers did not weaken Miró's admiration for him.
The other chapter of Libro de Sigüenza that I want to look at is 'Recuerdos y parábolas'. None of the bibliographies gives the date of first publication of this piece, to which Miró again added the date 1909, again only in the 1927 edition. In fact it appeared in La Vanguardia on 6 May 1914, so that Miró's date is again wilfully misleading21. Another clue to the political context lies in the claim by the Duque de Maura, the son of Antonio Maura, in his preface to Volume 12 of the Edición conmemorativa of Miró's work, that the publication of this piece in 1914 was a defence of his father22. The critics who have paid attention to this chapter (Landeira, Román del Cerro, Feliú García and José Mas), have generally found it somewhat puzzling, though all emphasize the parallel between the 'hombre muerto' and Jesus23. In fact if we put together the real date and Gabriel Maura's remarks the piece reads diaphanously. The 'hombre desaparecido' is Antonio Maura, the Conservative statesman, who left political life as a consequence of his handling of the Semana trágica of 1909 -'un humo de hoguera' writes Miró24. There follows a clear and critical reference to the socialist leader Pablo Iglesias' controversial remarks about assassinating Maura. Then 'otro hombre llegó'. A Jesus-figure. But also obviously Canalejas. 'En todas partes resonaba su voz, su aviso; los otros no decían nada. Las gentes murmuraron: «La casa está llena, llena de amigos y discípulos que se han dormido después de cenar»'. The biblical resonance is obvious, but so is the reference back to Miró's complaint in 1912 that Canalejas' disciples had not protected him.
'Una mañana lo mataron'. Canalejas' assassination is followed by the 'hombrecitos', evidently Romanones and Dato, 'the man of vaseline'. The two parables that follow fit the situation: the first, 'parábola del pavo', serves to involve Sigüenza, as usual, in collective blame, the second, 'parábola del perseguido', prophesies that Maura will be chased in a circle back to the abandoned city where the chase started.
Why publish this piece in May 1914? 18 March 1914 was the date of the first parliamentary elections since 1910. They had confirmed in power the rump of the Conservatives after Maura had broken away with his own new group. Eighteen months after Canalejas' death, it all seemed to confirm that hope of strong leadership had finally vanished. In a letter to Maura on 3 August 1914 Miró confirmed, even allowing for a substantial dose of patronage-seeking flattery, his sense of a need for leadership:
Sin merecimientos, ni crianza, ni gustos para la política, no he sentido nunca las tentaciones de ella. Si alguna figura de caudillo, digna de ser ungida por toda una raza, quería yo trazarme y sentir con recogida emoción de artista, la suya, señor, era siempre la que se me aparecía en el cielo de España. Y ahora que los hombres menuditos que bullían a sus pies se han apartado para jugar a grandes y queda Vd. como un bronce glorioso en una soledad histórica augusta, todavía destaca su contorno y se oye su palabra con más honda pureza25. |
We thus have Miró writing passionately in favour both of Canalejas the Liberal and of Maura whose opposition to the Liberals after 1909 was so strong that he was prepared to wreck the system rather than admit that the Liberals were fit to govern. No wonder that Miró should find fiction a better form for the task of making sense of himself. He needed Sigüenza, he needed irony, he needed self-conscious, modernist fiction.
El abuelo del rey was published in 1915 and I take it to have been largely written between 1912 and 1914. Though dated 1912 the date was only added in the 1929 edition and in the summer of 1914 we find Miró reading 'unas cuartillas recientes de «El Abuelo del Rey»' to Enrique Granados and Augusto Pi Suñer at the very time that he was lamenting in the press the lack of honest leadership in Spain26. Everyone agrees that El abuelo del rey marks an important stage in Miró's work27. He himself called it 'esta obra preparativa de Nuestro Padre San Daniel'
28, and it is obviously his first attempt at showing social change in a historical background.
What direct political analysis, first of all, does the text offer? While 'preparativa' is certainly the right word for El abuelo del rey by comparison with the great Oleza novels, the former is much more explicit in its analysis of class. Arcadio clearly belongs to the ancien régime. An owner of inherited land, his possession of an industrial tannery is only the remnant of a false start. As he declines into bankruptcy, his estate is taken over by his erstwhile socially inferior companion, the dreary Llanos, a hat manufacturer, who illustrates for us with great precision the nature of the new instrumentalism. He goes in for vertical integration by putting goats and cows on the ancestral almendral and selling their milk through his newly-built hygienic dairy. The transition to capitalism is, in Serosca's comic way, complete. By contrast Agustín had tried to save the almendral by a technique that nowadays even academics have learned to label not cost-effective.
This is the essential transition with which the novel grapples. The old values of raza, of land, of the system of inheritance that holds them together, and of a church that supports these values are replaced by mobility, capital, the market, and commodification. Alcoy, the model of Serosca, is in this sense no trivial choice of location. Not only the paternal town, it is a long-established centre where Miró's uncles had a textile and other factories29. It was also famous nationally in the nineteenth century for the events of July 1873 when, in the midst of federal republican and cantonalist rebellions, it was the scene of an uprising with a genuinely socialist content. A strike for higher pay and shorter hours turned into a bloody affair with some 35 dead or injured, including the alcalde. To give the flavour I quote from what the Bakuninists alleged were the 'patrañas' spread by the bourgeois press:
Seres arrojados por el balcón, curas ahorcados de los faroles, hombres bañados en petróleo y asesinados a tiros en la huída, cabezas de civiles cortadas y paseadas por las calles, incendio premeditado de edificios, quema y destrucción del edificio del Ayuntamiento, violación de niñas inocentes30. |
In Alcoy there was thus a deep memory of that special terror of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary mob.
Yet Miró represses that most memorable and terrifying episode or rather displaces it for though there is nothing resembling the 1873 events of Alcoy in the contemporary history of Serosca, we read early on in the novel that in 1804 'estalla la primera discordia entre el capital y el trabajo'
31. The abuelo's abuelo finds his new tannery burned down. But this must clearly be read as an act of Luddism rather than a revolutionary response -Spanish industrialists in more recent times, surely, rarely escaped the mob disguised as a priest as the first Arcadio does! The terror of 1873 is displaced to more harmless times. Of course Miró was in a sense at perfect liberty to reshape these critical events in creating his Serosca. In another sense it was inevitable that he should do as otherwise they would have opened up possibilities of change that Miró could not deal with directly.
So, displacing, as in a Freudian dreamwork, the possibility of violent and radical social change, the text treats both the old, Arcadio, and the new, Llanos, with scorn. Instead there arises in the gap between them a favourite Mironian Romantic motif, the alienated artist. Out of the old world comes Lorenzo, generous, wise, perceptive, a successful pianist on the European circuit, and, it is worth adding, an embodiment of Miró's fierce and distinctive anti-racism. But he retires early through 'cansancio de todos los nervios y de otros íntimos dolores'
(OC, 502), and he dies mumbling: '¡Es que ya no me queda medula!'
(OC, 537). The artist, on the other hand, who corresponds to the new quantifying age is the engineer, or even better, the inventor, but both Agustíns, who reject raza, land, and inheritance, turn out to be parodies of what an artist might be in a mobile, market-led world. Dreams of empire of a monarchical old order have turned to irrelevant failure or miserable bureaucracy.
This pattern of apparently insoluble contradictions is a familiar one in Miró's work. It is often articulated in terms of space, of decisions about staying or going, of the impossibility of being both here and there, of reaching the horizon32. (There is an added poignancy in reflecting that this was the time of Miró's own decision to leave Alicante for Barcelona). Such spatial decisions play a vital part in the plot of El abuelo with its endless goings and comings as alternatives to the stasis of Serosca. But more generally they express a sense of insoluble dilemma built into social as well as individual existence.
The novel, then, rejects the decrepit old social structures, but also laments what is taking their place. (The watch that does not work captures this melancholy emptiness: the grandfather's faith in the spiritual value of this Kempis of watches is a pathetic and childish sham, the grandson's 'grown-up' inability to give credit to anything but measurement is a sign of the break-up of older values [OC, 531-32]). The novel also proposes the well-worn but deeply-felt solutions of art and love -with a special emphasis on the silent suffering of women- only to reveal them blocked by profoundly repressive societies. We can now also draw in Miró's contemporary newspaper texts and see the frustrated search for honest leaders as a parallel blockage. We might then draw the conclusion that in all these cases the texts display a common resistance to exploring possible paths of progress beyond the values of Miró's own class. The terror of the mob expressed in support for Maura and Canalejas and in the displacement of the 1873 violence in the novel on this view produces a vision of a society that can neither advance nor receive the love, art and leadership that might save it. This blockage in turn tends to deflect all hope into a sense of an unchanging human condition, an original flaw, 'aquel hecho ciego', that conflicts with the sense of history that seemed at first to be the project of the novel.
But such a conclusion by itself would be too reductive. First we must remember that Miró's work repudiates nineteenth-century realism. We saw that he needed modernist fiction. His early work all reveals the problematic of the narrating subject: the fragmented reportage, the invention of Sigüenza, the transposition of Las cerezas del cementerio from epistolary to third-person mode, all these show us a Miró struggling with his own relation to his narratives33. In El abuelo del rey he finally dramatizes the problem by inserting himself into history, for Agustín III, like Pablo in the Oleza novels, is born at around the same time as Gabriel Miró. All three are born into a world of instrumentality and quantity -at the end of El abuelo the municipio cut down the roadside trees on the Murta road because the road width has to be increased from 7 to 7.15 metres (OC, 564). It is a world where value itself is disappearing.
But Miró's text does not simply rage against this new world, picking up the Romantic motif of the alienated artist, dramatizing a divided subjectivity, and retreat into a yet more sophisticated universalist pessimism. We can see most clearly what is happening by returning to Miró's beginnings. A notable feature of Del vivir, say, is that along with its narrative insistence on the subjectivity of Sigüenza, the writing insists on perception as a semi-autonomous activity. Observing that this insistence, so overwhelming in Del vivir, still remains present in the stronger narrative framework of El abuelo del rey we can escape from the thematic analysis that I have sketched so far by paying due attention to the characteristic language of Miró. Here I draw on a part of Fredric Jameson's reading of Conrad's Lord Jim in his The Political Unconscious, which I believe suggests a way of reading Miró also in an interesting political sense. Jameson argues that:
The very activity of sense perception has nowhere to go in a world in which science deals with ideal quantities, and comes to have little enough exchange value in a money economy dominated by considerations of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like. This unused surplus capacity of sense perception can only reorganize itself in a new and semi-autonomous activity, one which produces its own specific objects, new objects that are themselves the result of a process of abstraction and reification, such that older concrete unities are now sundered into measurable dimensions on one side, say, and pure color (or the experience of purely abstract color) on the other34. |
Impressionism, for instance, is plainly one example of the aestheticizing strategies typical of the later nineteenth century that correspond to the process described. Such phenomena, Jameson suggests, are not simply negative, but have both negative and positive features for which he proposes the terms 'ideological' and 'Utopian'. We can certainly see Miró's modernism (whose limitations we have explored) as ideological in this sense, something that is notably exposed -as geologists use the term- in his stoicism, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile readers with the anxiety of the new system35. But more importantly here we can read Miró's marvellous language as revealing unachieved potential, rebelling against the present. As Jameson puts it:
Yet modernism can at one and the same time be read as a Utopian compensation for everything... lost in the process of the development of capitalism -the place of quality in an increasingly quantified world, the place of the archaic and of feeling amid the desacralization of the market system, the place of sheer color and intensity within the grayness of measurable extension and geometrical abstraction36. |
Such a reading is made yet more pointed if we turn to the five letters 'de un señor de la Marina al yerno de Don César' that open the section 'El abuelo del rey' towards the end of the novel (OC, 555-58). Almost uniquely in Miró's work the smooth stylistic flow into which the material is assimilated is broken by the crass materialism of the language, a materialism that in its turn is only relieved by the tired Romantic myth of the eccentric and picturesque 'genius', bourgeois society's way of coping with rebellious spirits.
Jameson's reading of Conrad is also helpful in further ways, suggesting, for instance, how Miró's religious aestheticism is linked to the analysis I have sketched. He points out how this stance, in connection with Miró perhaps best exemplified by Renan, belongs with the secularization of life under capitalism, in that it is one of the ways in which the nineteenth century sought to explore the new world of universal instrumentalization. 'Because we can no longer think the figures of the sacred from within, we transform their external forms into aesthetic objects'
37. For Jameson this religious aestheticism takes its place alongside other themes such as the ideal of love or art that we saw Miró invoke hopelessly earlier. He further notes, as an example of the problematizing of value that we have also observed in Serosca, 'the way in which, in the new middle-class culture, for the first time people (but mainly men) must weigh the various activities against each other and choose their profession'
38. As the old Arcadian world disappears, the Agustíns have to choose professions. Their choices attempt to reconcile the new world with artistic and other values but end in ludicrous fantasies. As before we are confronted with the disintegration of traditional society and values under the impact of the Industrial Revolution, but with the bitter twist that the classic bourgeois liberal goals which are also part and parcel of that Revolution find themselves undermined by this disintegration with which they have advanced hand in hand.
Finally, the name Conrad also serves to remind us, in this attempt to think the complex relations between economic and social life and literary fiction, that Miró, like the Polish-born novelist, writes from a position on the margins of European industrial society. It is important to bear in mind this further dimension to which Roberto Fernández Retamar has so suggestively drawn attention by pointing out the common status of 'underdevelopment' shared by Spain and Spanish America at the turn of the century, and its role in the development of modernismo in the Spanish sense39. For Miró, his knowledge of, and feeling for, the mainstream of European cultural development obviously produced a fascinating desfase or asynchronicity between high capitalist cultural forms and the feeble or at least patchy and sporadic industrial development of Spain. Hence the sense of total farce that emerges whenever industrial advance appears in Miró's work. The target is known from the industrial heart of Europe, but in Spain it is a pathetic pastiche. Amidst solemnity it is always important to let Miró's humour preserve perspective, but in this case the humour also points us to another twist: that while the disintegration that accompanies economic advance has become painfully clear, Spain has not even benefited fully from the advance.
But these are large questions that await exploration for modern Spanish fiction as a whole. My aim has been simply to offer a section through the various levels at which Miró's texts are related to the politics of Spain and these suggest that what El abuelo del rey offers us is the impossibility of the old world, the danger of nostalgia, but also the disastrous losses of the new. The possibility of radical change is displaced, and where solutions are offered they are revealed to be self-contradictory. Instead it is in the Utopia of Miró's language that we glimpse the horizon of what might be. And we may find unsuspected depth in the words of the Alcoyano Juan Gil-Albert on the opening of the Figuras de la pasión del Señor: 'En ese «el azul de la tarde» está todo Miró'
40.