Introducción a «El humo dormido»
Edmund L. King
In the last decade of the nineteenth century a number of Spanish writers began to show concern for what they believed to be a profound crisis in Spanish culture. After a century of anarchy mixed with hypocritical expediency in politics, of intellectual backwardness, of sterile imitation in the arts, where, they asked themselves, should they turn for a renewal of the spirit? «Inward» was the answer given by Unamuno and taken up sooner or later by Azorín, Baroja, Antonio Machado, Valle-Inclán, Maeztu, and their less well-known colleagues and disciples. Inward, in a variety of way's -lyrically, satirically, dramatically, novelistically, reflectively- they turned, into the Spanish past and its cultural achievements, into the mother kingdom of Castile, into the hearts and minds of Spaniards ruled by loyalties little esteemed in the rest of the world and questioned even by themselves in their moment of «failure». Their quest was given a peculiar urgency by a public, national crisis, the final dissolution of the Spanish Empire in 1898 as a consequence of the war with the United States. It was thus all but inevitable that this group of writers, roughly of the same age and all determined to experience the confrontation between Spanish past and Spanish present and between Spanish present and European present as deeply as they could in their search for new spiritual strength, should come to be called the Generation of '98.
Indispensable as such groupings are, however, for the orderly presentation of literary history, there is a double danger in the use of this one. The first is that we force upon all writers of a given .period the characteristics that belong to only those few who attract or arrogate to themselves, through the characteristics they plainly have in common, the label «Generation», without consideration of the possibility that a writer may be in but not of a generation. This has happened to Gabriel Miró at the hands of many critics and historians, who call him either a «member» of the Generation or, because he was only nineteen in 1898, an epígono, i. e., one who follows in the footsteps of his preceding generation, and then find in him a manner and concern that do not truly belong to him in significant degree. The second is that a writer belonging chronologically to the Generation but in whom the preoccupations of the noisy and commanding figures are absent may be relegated to secondary status if not overlooked entirely. This too has happened to Miró. Gabriel Miró must be detached from the label that doesn't fit him and be seen for what he is, an anomaly and an artistic figure of superior stature.
But it is not easy to see an anomalous figure for what he is except by seeing him as what he is not. Unlike his contemporaries Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1881-1962) and José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) and his elders of the Generation of '98 proper, Miró never became or sought to become a member of a group or a public figure. He was intelligent, well-read, and even fairly well educated, in the way that any other writer of his time might claim to be, but not an intellectual. If he had a political attitude toward the governments of Alfonso XIII, he never showed it the way Unamuno and Azorín did. He was a very minor bureaucrat in the Ministry of Education in the time of Primo de Rivera, but neither in his published writings nor in his private papers does one discern the slightest sense of participation in a government or even of ideological hostility toward it (compare Valle-Inclán and Unamuno). He aspired to an appointment in the judicial civil service (unsuccessfully) with the hope of providing a more secure living for his family, but it never occurred to him to run for public office as Azorín did. To set himself up as critic and intellectual physician to the Spanish nation was for him as unthinkable as it was natural for Unamuno, Azorín, Maeztu, Baroja, Antonio Machado, Valle-Inclán, Pérez de Ayala, Ortega, and almost every other Spaniard of the time that one can think of. Even the Royal Spanish Academy, to which he was presented by friends for election, refused him the public status of one of its chairs. Although, as in this case, he was a cause célèbre of his friends in public life on several occasions, he remained always an intensely private person, a Spaniard of course, but lacking the preoccupation with the «problem of Spain» that dominated the minds and sensibilities of his contemporaries (and, for that matter, most of the nineteenth century before him), not a recluse yet aloof from cliques, tertulias, literary factions, and political groups, devoted to his family, his friends, his art, and, in the best possible sense, to himself.
Since the public dimension of Miró's life consisted only of the kind of reaching out to readers implicit in the impulse to write, to «publish», he knew little of those «public» experiences that might provide the raw materials of literature or an «interesting» biography, or that might have influenced the direction of his literary concerns. But even Miró's private life was not rich in the trying kinds of experience out of which we suppose writers ordinarily fashion their tales and poems. He was never a soldier and so had no experience of warfare, nor was he, even as a victim, involved in violence. He lived comfortably with his parents and brother until he was grown; his father died in 1908 at a rather good age; his mother, brother, wife, and children outlived him; so he did not suffer unusually cruel bereavements. Because his understanding of erotic relationships was subtle, profound, and sympathetic, his biographers and friends have guessed and hinted at amorous adventures in his youth and after he was married, but there is no indication that his conduct as a lover and husband was anything but tediously exemplary. The many women who more or less admitted to being in love with him he rewarded with benign, tolerant, avuncular affection. A devout Catholic in his childhood and youth, when he became a man he evidently put away his belief in the dogma of the Church without passing through a memorable religious crisis. He never traveled outside of Spain.
The point of listing all these kinds of experience that Gabriel Miró did not have is to remind the reader that almost every modern Spanish writer one can think of has had some combination of them to stimulate, to scar, to form, to fuel him one way or another. Miró's life was different, marked neither by public nor private dramatics. It was a life of inward development and fidelity to self.
The chronology that precedes this introduction lists the principal events in that life. The compass of the introduction will allow a treatment in some detail of only those elements of Miró's background and experience demonstrably influential in the formation of his artistic personality: childhood in Alicante in the 1880's, education in the studio of Lorenzo Casanova, education by the Jesuits in Orihuela, early reading and literary affinities.
On Miró's mother's side his forebears were well-off landowners and farmers in the region of Murcia and Orihuela. His father's family, seated in Alcoy, were bankers and industrialists, pillars of the burgeoning middle class that achieved and benefited from such economic progress as Spain knew in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Miró's father, Don Juan Miró Moltó, a chief highway-engineer in the Spanish civil service posted to Alicante, married Doña Encarnación Ferrer Ons on July 4, 1876. Their first child, Juan, was born on June 21, 1877; their second and only other child, baptized Gabriel (for his paternal grandfather) Francisco (for his maternal grandfather) Víctor (for a saint of the day), was born on July 28, 1879, into a conventionally devout family with a strong sense of solidarity.
The collateral family was numerous, and life was busy and warm. Doña Encarnación, not the typically youthful Spanish bride, was still handsome at twenty-eight, when Gabriel was born. Although not much educated, she was full of religious lore and stories of her native region, and, true to her unpretentious origins, she was plain-spoken, direct if not blunt, sometimes sharp-tongued, and fond of speaking her mind. She divided her affection rather unequally between the two boys, favoring the elder, but it was Gabriel, the younger, who throughout his life gave the greater share of affection in return. Don Juan was thirteen years older than his wife. He had given up studies for the priesthood to become a civil engineer, was well-read with the tastes proper to the son of a substantial bourgeois family, and, if insistent on the dignity of his title, Ingeniero Jefe, nonetheless given to an almost motherly tenderness toward his sons as he worried over their illnesses and well-being and took pride in their first sparks of intelligence.
The town of Alicante, in which Miró grew up, is succinctly described by an encyclopedia of the time thus:
| (Brockhaus' Konversations-Lexikon, 14th ed.) | ||
The dense detail of the article from the venerable German reference work is not only charming, it also conveys very clearly the general tendency in the life of Alicante to look at its habitat as a station between the world and Castile, to look outward into the world as much as inward toward Madrid. Although Alicante was connected with Madrid and the heart of Spain by a recently built railway and by road, it had been connected by sea routes for centuries not only with the other ports of Spain, especially Valencia and Barcelona, but also with the lands across the seas, Mediterranean and Atlantic. The language of the country people was, and still is, although to a declining degree, a dialect of Valencian (itself a dialect of Catalan). On the other hand, for reasons embedded in history, Alicante did not develop a Catalan culture as Catalonia proper did. Castilian has, since its establishment as the language of Spain, been both the official and the cultural language of Alicante, the only language spoken by many of the townspeople. Yet since its people could look outward perhaps more easily than inward, they were as likely to complete their education in Valencia or Barcelona (with its strong sense of regional identity) as in Madrid, they traveled and traded in the Mediterranean countries, particularly Algeria and Morocco, and their inevitably regional culture had in the last quarter of the nineteenth century a remarkably cosmopolitan tinge, reinforced by the presence in the small community not only of a German consul but also others, including a French one, with the dual mission characteristic of French diplomats -that of propagating the culture no less than the commerce of France.
In Miró's time the French consul was Antonino Maignon, whose daughter Clemencia was born less than two months after Miró, on September 19, 1879. In those years the consul, like the Miró family, lived in downtown Alicante, and when Gabriel was taken by the older of the family retainers, Francisco Coloma (the Nuño el Viejo of El humo dormido) to play with his brother in the Paseo de la Reina, he was joined there by Clemencia Maignon and another playmate, Eufrasio Ruiz, Miró's lifelong friend. When, in 1883, Alicante was invaded by a plague of cholera, both the Mirós and the Maignons along with many other families moved to the barrio of Benalúa, newly built up on the high-lying ground to the south of the old city. Childhood friendship turned into youthful courtship and engagement, and Gabriel came to spend almost as much time at the Maignon house as at his own. For most people the encounter with a foreign culture is a deliberate and rather dramatic process undertaken with a marked degree of self-consciousness, with a strong sense of the difference between «we» and «they»; for Miró, the process was as effortless and natural as the process with which it was intertwined, the one by which he gradually turned his childhood playmate into his wife. Yet it would be a mistake to think of Miró as becoming an afrancesado. He was simply at home in the little society in Alicante in which French was spoken and French books were read and discussed, even though his efforts -apparently he was by nature a poor linguist- to speak French, like his efforts to speak Valencian, were the occasion of some mirth among his family and friends.
The citizenry in general of Alicante, where Miró is now ranked first in the hierarchy of local heroes and extolled as if he had been produced by the Chamber of Commerce, treated the struggling young writer with disdain till he brought them a measure of reflected glory by winning a national prize in 1908. Miró felt the same way about them, and their belated flattery he hardly found pleasing. Yet to his small circle of true friends, to the town that was ineluctably his, no matter how he felt about its society, to the region, to its natural beauties, and to the simple humanity of the country folk, he remained spiritually bonded all his life.
In 1885 an aunt of Miró's, María Teresa Miró Moltó, married a painter born and raised in Alcoy, Lorenzo Casanova. Casanova was a man of indisputable gifts, as revealed in his portraits -in the best tradition of Goya and as «modern» in conception and technique as the French Impressionists- even though these gifts were obscured in his better-known works by neo-Romantic sentimentalism and costumbrismo. Casanova, the son of a butcher, was trained in Alcoy, Madrid, and Rome, and in the year of his marriage he settled in Alicante, opening a studio, an Academia, where he spent most of his time not painting but reading and teaching. He was, of course, an uncle by marriage of the boy Gabriel Miró. In one of Miró's few directly autobiographical statements, a letter in reply to Andrés González Blanco on about March 10, 1906, Miró wrote: «Pasablemente yo sería pintor, si no hubiera muerto el maestro Lorenzo Casanova. [...] Según dicen, muy chico yo, sin saber dibujar todavía, ya logré estilo propio. Mi pereza no entibió al maestro»
. (González Blanco, Los Contemporáneos, Vol. I, pt. 2 [Paris, 1907], p. 291). Casanova made three portrait studies in oil, halt life-size, of Gabriel at the age of six, and Miró frequented his uncle's studio till the painter's death in 1900. The master's doctrine, to which Miró was most certainly exposed as he grew up, was recalled in 1899 by the art historian Luis Pérez Bueno: «Dibujad [he says to his pupils] -con cualquier cosa: carbón, lápiz, pincel; pero mucho ejercicio. Acostumbrad la vista a medir el modelo; abarcadlo en conjunto y detalle. El color que no se preocupe; vendrá luego insensiblemente. Lo primero de todo es que el artista haga del órgano visual una verdadera cámara obscura». (Artistas levantinos, Madrid, 1899, p. 22).
Surely it was not the master's death that kept Miró from becoming a painter, for at that time Gabriel was twenty-one and his literary inclination was already clear to him. More likely, it was Casanova's own preference for letters over painting that set the young Miró on his course, for we are told that Don Lorenzo «es un erudito de gran competencia en materias artísticas y literarias. Avalora lo que sabe con su pasión favorita: la lectura. Al año pintará un mes; los once restantes se los pasa leyendo cuanto notable se publica en Francia y en España»
. (Pérez Bueno, pp. 16-17). If the amiable circumflex accent of French culture spread out over Miró from the Maignon household, its acute accent doubtless fell upon him from Lorenzo Casanova and his avid reading of French literature.
But the expansion of his intellectual horizons, the sharpening of his vision, and the beginnings of an aesthetic doctrine were not Miró's only acquisitions from his uncle's studio. He also learned to share the attitude of painters as artists. It should be remembered that although poets, painters, and musicians are all, in Spanish as in English, quite properly called artists, it is the painter's activity on which by common consent the term art has settled most squarely, as if to say, painting's useful function is only apparent: its true function is to be beautiful; its practitioners are artists. Moreover, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century even a respectable citizen like Miró's friend Pérez Bueno could speak of an artist's studio as the temple of a new religion founded in Paris. (As far as religion proper was concerned, Casanova had the reputation of being a freethinker). A poet- and although Miró claimed never to have written a line of verse, Jorge Guillén and Dámaso Alonso have not hesitated to call him a poet- a poet should not be some kind of painter-with-words, but Miró, from the age of six to the age of twenty-one, absorbed the painter's ideals while he played, dabbled, and read with his uncle in the Academia de Bellas Artes de Alicante. If he was to be a poet, an artist, and not just a writer, he must be utterly faithful to the experience of his own clearest vision.
Certainly Lorenzo Casanova was the most important source of Miró's education, but not the only one, nor did the young Gabriel spend all his time in the painter's studio. His formal education had to go on, and to this end his parents sent him at the age of eight to be a boarding student at the Jesuit Colegio de Santo Domingo in Orihuela, a journey of two or three hours inland by train from Alicante; so that from 1887 till 1892, when he left the Colegio, his tutelage under his gentle, freethinking, cosmopolitan uncle was limited to the periods when he was at home on vacation. To a child schooled at home in tenderness and family love and no doubt somewhat indulged by middle-aged parents and a numerous clan of grandparents, aunts, and uncles, the vaunted severity of the Jesuits was bound to seem harsh, their strict formality and the military organization of the school, inhumane (they addressed even the younger children as señor with last names and usted), the rigorous academic classicism, suffocating. Indeed, the dour yet worldly sons of St. Ignatius were to inspire some, of Miró's finest pages of ironic portraiture (in El libro de Sigüenza, El humo dormido, Nuestro Padre San Daniel, and El obispo leproso), pages that earned him the Jesuits' implacable enmity as long as he lived.
But this was only an accidental consequence of Miró's days in the Colegio. More important for his artistic development were the Spiritual Exercises, that method of self-examination and purgation bequeathed to the Society of Jesus by its founder. Although originally intended for use only by the clergy and religious, in the eighteenth century the Exercises were introduced for use, with appropriate modifications in St. Ignatius' prescriptions, by the laity. It appears that late in the nineteenth century they were required of boarding-school boys twice a year, with the original four-week period reduced to four days and with various other simplifications which did not, however, alter the general lines and character. These involved, for the purpose of examining one's own sins and repenting and bringing one's will into harmony with the will of God, the method called compositio loci, that is, the use of what Ignatius calls the eye of the imagination to compose the physical setting of a particular event in the life of Christ as well as to visualize, to sensationalize, the particular details in the punishment or salvation of sinners. Thus, for the meditation on Hell, St. Ignatius prescribes as follows:
The constant injunction throughout the Exercises is to employ the five senses imaginatively in calling to mind the divine realities, the penitent's frailties and sins, and his possible punishment or salvation. No experience, however spiritual it may be, is allowed to escape into the realm of abstraction. The most ultimate as well as the most immediate realities must be contemplated sensorially as seen, tasted, smelled, heard, touched. Miró tells us very little of what the Exercises were like in Santo Domingo, but we may suppose they were no different from those prepared in another Jesuit school at about the same time according to these instructions: «Estará muy recogida la capilla; sólo se permitirá entrar aquella luz que se necesita para no tropezar, y que en lo demás este muy oscura. Esto es muy importante para que los niños mediten, examinen y rumien mucho... No habrá recreos en los cuatro días, que serán todos de silencio»
. (Pérez de Ayala, A. M. D. G., Madrid, 1927, p. 137).
Children vary greatly in their susceptibility to the influence of such experiences, but there can be no doubt that the child Gabriel Miró was affected by them deeply: On days at home from school one of his favorite diversions was to preach the seven sermons on the last words of Christ, to the members of the household gathered in the darkened attic around an improvised Mount Calvary, while his brother, hidden from sight, produced the appropriate sound effects. (Guardiola Ortiz, Biografía íntima de Gabriel Miró, Alicante, 1935, pp. 58-60).
The most obvious literary precipitate of Miró's education by the Jesuits was to be the Figuras de la Pasión del Señor (1916, 1917), but the literary sensualism that has its dual origin in the doctrines of Lorenzo Casanova and of Ignatius Loyola is not limited to those Biblical evocations. It is the foundation of Miró's art. «Nadie burle», he writes in El humo dormido, «de estas realidades de nuestras sensaciones donde reside casi todo la verdad de nuestra vida» -not the doctrine the Jesuits intended to teach, but evidently the one Miró learned from them.
The truth of this doctrine was doubtless intensified for Miró by the first developments of his aesthetic sensibility. At the Colegio he suffered from an inflammation of the knee that caused him to spend several periods in the school infirmary. There, he wrote later, looking out through the window at the countryside, «He sentido las primeras tristezas estéticas, viendo en los crepúsculos, los valles apagados y las cumbres aún encendidas del sol... Amo el paisaje desde muy niño»
. (Letter to González Blanco). An awareness of transient moments of beauty is the beginning of aesthetic experience, which Miró equates with melancholy. Manuel Machado sums the matter up in twelve lines of verse:
Miró was a law student alternately at the Universities of Valencia and Granada from September 25, 1896, to October 13, 1900. There is no indication, however, that he had any intention of becoming a lawyer. He lacked both talent and vocation. He transferred from Valencia to Granada to take advantage of what he fancied to be lower standards, then back to Valencia, apparently for its greater convenience, and again back to Granada for final examinations with the lowest passing mark and graduation as a licenciado. Only in Valencia during the period of his first matriculation was he a student in residence. Otherwise he studied the prescribed syllabi at home -an approved and widespread practice at the time- presenting himself at the universities only for examinations.
This less than assiduous pursuit of his law studies had other causes than merely Miró's feeble interest. One was his health. Miró's biographers have represented him as sickly -no doubt something of an unintentional misrepresentation. Spaniards -at least bourgeois Spaniards- frequently display what to the foreigner seems an unwarranted concern about their slightest indispositions. In this Miró was no exception. Moreover, his carefully cultivated awareness of his own sensations -by the time he was an adult he could be described almost clinically as hyperaesthetic- as well as his growing «literary» inclination led him to dramatize his ailments, half ironically, half seriously, even more than was customary in middle-class society. But whatever may be the truth about his health, on the basis of the inadequate diagnostic procedures of the time, Miró began to complain as early as December 1894 of heart trouble. For this reason his university studies were frequently interrupted, and he spent most of the years studying at home or resting in the mountains around Busot or at Villa María, his uncle's house in Alcoy. (The opinion of various physicians that knew Miró later is that the supposed «lesión del corazón» of his youth was probably a secondary infection originating perhaps in the tonsils; Miró simply outgrew it). Although studying at home allowed him greater freedom, he had in fact a meticulously arranged daily schedule: periods set aside for halfhearted study of law and whole-hearted reading of ancient and modern literature; hours with Clemencia, who, after their engagement was formally announced, would join him at his house or wait for him at hers, where music was the principal pastime (Miró had a fine voice and liked to sing but had no musical training; Clemencia and especially one of her sisters were gifted pianists); and literary sessions with his young friends in Benalúa.
Miró's reading was thoroughly eclectic and much of it was done aloud for the benefit of his friend Francisco Figueras Pacheco, blind at eighteen. One wonders at once which writers in the history of literature have been readers to the blind. Is it too much to suppose that the experience returns the spoken word to the reader with interest? In the society of the word that is written and silently read, the passage of meaning from writer to reader may possibly become so smooth that the particularities of the meaning, the peculiar edges and wrinkles in the word, may scarcely be perceived. Any word within a certain range of synonymity will do. Can we not see in this phase of Miró's development as an artist a kind of unsought training? First, he strengthens his power to grasp sensorial values by compensating for another person's blindness and then he necessarily refines his awareness of language, the means of expressing these values. When we consider certain qualities of Miró's art -the importance of sensation, the importance of words, and the tempo lento in which Miró seems to form and savor every word separately -we have no reason to think that we will find the sources of its special grace and effectiveness, but it is reasonable to look for experiences that might have furthered the growth of such qualities: Casanova's doctrine of the eye as a cámara obscura, the imaginative employment of the five senses required by the Spiritual Exercises as a means to salvation, the use of the spoken word to supply Francisco Figueras' lost sense of sight.
This part of Miró's reading was thus important for his development as an artist rather independently of its content, literary characteristics, weltanschauung, etc., which, however, are of primary interest in any effort to determine his position with respect to the continuing literary tradition in Spain. Of course Miró not only read aloud to Figueras (and for that matter to his other young friends, who took pleasure in his elocution even though they had no need of it as a substitute for their own eyes); he read privately through a vast number of works ancient and modern. The Spanish moderns for Miró were those nineteenth-century poets and novelists that we all read as the representative writers of the time -Espronceda, Alarcón, Pereda, Galdós, Bécquer, Valera, Alas, and the like- and that we tend to see through the scornful eyes of the Generation of '98, who read to reject as a way of affirming their own revolutionary originality (notwithstanding their gradual rediscovery of Galdós). Miró, far more revolutionary as a writer than the Generation of '98, never expressed, and apparently never felt, any animadversions against his nineteenth-century predecessors. He believed simply that he was continuing where they left off, and for some of them he felt positive affection -for Bécquer, the poet in vain search of words adequate to his vision; Valera, prophet of the doctrine of art for art's sake in Spain; Galdós.
Miró, when older, realized that in his admiration for Galdós he stood apart from his contemporaries:
Los que por humildad, resignación o fuerza están en apartamiento, lejos de la vida amada, que sin gozarla nunca, la contemplan remota, perdida como una costa vaheante y azul, los que se han formado solitariamente, sin avisos ni ejemplos, aman un maestro. Tal vez le aman más que los trabajados en la labor diaria de ciudadanos literarios de la corte [Madrid]... La palabra «maestro» aplicada a Galdós, es palabra viva, sentida con ardimiento y honradez, y emociona noblemente. Por los que sean compañeros míos, por aquellos que como yo se asomaron al cercado del huerto literario y no pueden ser cultivadores de sus tierras sagradas ni disfrutar de sus sombras, ofrendo este pobre recuerdo manifiesto. El íntimo y elusivo maestro nos acompaña en tardes de paz campesina, en horas de inquietud, en lecturas amigas. |
| («A Don Benito Pérez Galdós: El maestro», La República de las Letras, July 22, 1907) | ||
He has sought in Galdós not the «duca o maestro solemne, fraguado en frío, todo cráneo, que diga cuestiones graves y codicie el trípode de oro que se disputan los sabios de nuestra edad», and has found in him rather the «maestro tierno y llano, amigo de la juventud, fácil al perdón, como si también él pecara muchas veces, dócil a la risa leve y amable, que tenga en sus ojos y en su palabra, el recogido dolor, la buena alegría y la fortaleza de que hizo sus héroes y puso en nuestras almas como levadura de tristezas selectas y contentos honrados para heñir el pan que conforta, sacia y no ahíta...»
(Unbeknownst to Miró, Galdós had already repaid this admiration by sending a copy of Del vivir to a friend with the comment that «se lo había leído de un tirón, y que era un buen libro».- Diario de Alicante, April 24, 1908).
Galdós in his uninstitutional Christianity of compassion and love, indeed, in his constant obsession with Christlike personalities at large in the world is the figure on the receding literary horizon Miró in some ways most closely resembles. Because Don Gabriel's artistic (as distinguished from human) values are so different from Don Benito's, it has not been noticed that Miró even uses as the mounting for his portrait of Oleza (Orihuela) in Nuestro Padre San Daniel and El obispo leproso the essential plot of Doña Perfecta.
Miró's realized artistic values are likewise so different for the most part from those of Don Juan Valera that one is surprised to find a strong connection there, but the fact is that Miró's first novel, La mujer de Ojeda, is a transparent imitation of Pepita Jiménez -the division into an epistolary part one and a narrative part two; the young, beautiful wife and widow of an old man of wealth; the rivalry for her love between two closely related suitors; the play with the relationship between platonic and sensual love; the patches of costumbrismo; the protagonist-narrator's sensitivity to nature; the assumption of an objectively «artistic» way of using language and constructing a novel. Once Miró decided to be himself, his writing ceased altogether to resemble Valera's, but his aesthetic has strong support in the doctrine of Spain's early advocate of art for art's sake, especially as this doctrine is expressed in the dedicatory preface to Juanita la Larga:
No sé si este libro es novela o no. Le he escrito con poquísimo arte, combinando recuerdos de mi primera mocedad y aun de mi niñez, pasada en tal o cual lugar de la provincia de Córdoba... [Yo soy] en cierto modo, más bien historiador fiel y veraz que novelista rico de imaginación y de inventiva... [Mi obra] no tiene valor porque eleve el alma a superiores esferas, ni porque trate de demostrar una tesis metafísica, psicológica, social, política o religiosa. Juanita la Larga no propende a demostrar ni demuestra cosa alguna. Su mérito, si le tuviere, ha de estar en que divierta. Yo me he divertido mucho escribiéndola, pero no se infiere de ahí que se diviertan también los que lo lean... Mi libro puede considerarse como espejo o reproducción fotográfica de hombres y de cosas de la provincia en que yo he nacido... Aunque las pinturas o retratos que yo hago carezcan de gracia, entiendo que en ellos resplandece el amor con que los he hecho... |
Everything Valera says of himself here can be said even more appropriately of Miró, who, years later, having come not to destroy but to fulfill, writes in an unpublished, unfinished essay entitled «La época de cada uno»:
Se puede ser abogado para algo que convenga o halague. Pero no se es artista para nada, ni siquiera para echarse por los mundos a ver cómo se refocilan los demás. Se es artista porque se es. Un padre carmelita leyó un libro mío; y me dijo: «¿Qué se ha propuesto usted demostrar al escribirlo?» Yo no me había propuesto nada... «Piense en la responsabilidad que usted tiene». Lo pensé; y no sentí ninguna; ni siquiera la de escribir mejor o peor. El que no escribe o no pinta o no esculpe mejor, es porque no puede. |
Valera is fat and possibly frivolous, whereas Miró is lean and pungently sincere, but the doctrinal agreement is evident, and there are other areas of concord between the younger and the older writer: Miró constantly expresses doubt about the genres to which his writings might be assigned (what he has offered as cuentos in a competition may have the character of crónicas but they are «arte serio» [letters to Eufrasio Ruiz, 1906]; La mujer de Ojeda is called «ensayo de novela», an expression of probably insincere self-deprecation that invokes the image of Valera on the very title page; another early work is entitled Hilván de escenas); experience remembered and careful historical documentation far outweigh invention even in his most fictitious works. (It is known that Miró drew not only on his recollection of his days in Orihuela as a schoolboy but on the endless Orihuela lore stored in his mother's memory, in composing the Orihuela novels. While the absence of invention in Nuestro Padre San Daniel and El obispo leproso would be most difficult to prove, it is more reasonable to assume than to doubt that his method in these works was no different from what it was in those cases for which there is relatively good documentation). To all these circumstantial evidences of Miró's affiliation with the genial, cosmopolitan, uncommitted nineteenth-century stylist may be added the charming fact that if one takes from the shelf of Miró's library his copy of Pepita Jiménez and opens it to the frontispiece, an engraved portrait of Valera, one finds written in Miró's still youthful hand (surely no later than 1901 or '02), the phrase «¡Bendito seas!»
If Miró, unlike his contemporaries, looked upon the retiring generation with something akin to filial devotion, his attitude toward his contemporaries was altogether different. No doubt he read what they wrote. He eventually got to know one and another of them -after the shape and tenor of his art was fixed. But he never got involved in the intellectual dueling that went on among Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Azorín, Baroja, Machado, Maeztu, etc., and there is no indication that he had much interest in any but one of them, Azorín, like Miró an Alicantino, although from the inland town of Monóvar. Whether Miró in his formative years actually knew the young intellectual rebel José Martínez Ruiz (who was eventually to adopt the pseudonym Azorín) is not certain, but there is clear evidence that he read the early iconoclastic works such as La evolución de la crítica with their attacks on the dead, paragraphic style of nineteenth-century prose. And while the superficial similarities between the two writers have been exaggerated and the remarkable differences ignored, Miró himself recognized in Azorín a decisive magisterial function: «Marca y enseña en el estilo castellano el paso del párrafo a la palabra» (recalled by Ricardo Baeza in Comprensión de Dostoievski y otros ensayos, Barcelona, Editorial Juventud, 1955, p. 177). When Miró learned this lesson from Azorín, when he realized that his admiration for Galdós and Valera did not oblige him to look at life through their eyes or to use the literary language they had worn out, he was suddenly ready to speak for the person that he truly was in the volume Del vivir, whose appearance was in turn saluted by Azorín thus:
Todo el paisaje levantino vive con vida intensa en estas páginas. El autor es, ante todo, un paisajista; mas un paisajista originalísimo, que se ha creado en la lectura de los clásicos (especialmente de Santa Teresa, la gran desarticuladora del idioma), un estilo conciso, descarnado, lapidario, reseco, que nota los detalles más exactos con una rigidez inaudita y que llega, en ocasiones, a producir en el lector una sensación extraordinaria de morbosidad y de inquietud. |
| («El espíritu de Grecia», ABC, Madrid, Sept. 27, 1905) | ||
Miró presents the rather exceptional case of the writer who does not evolve gradually from youth to maturity but rather who abandons one mode of writing -writing, that is, the way he fancied a writer should write about subjects he fancied a writer should writer about- to take up another, utterly different mode -the one which is recognizable as his own. While he would grow in knowledge and wisdom and literary skill after writing Del vivir (1902, published 1904), Azorín's description of the style of this work would be equally applicable in 1918 to the chapters of El humo dormido.
The chapters of El humo dormido were first published as separate articles in La Publicidad, a Barcelona newspaper. All the articles except those on «Semana Santa» and «Santiago» appeared as a series in what we would today call a column, under the general heading El humo dormido, and even those that did not belong to the series were interspersed with it chronologically, so as to suggest that even in their newspaper versions the articles belong to the same aesthetic impulse1.
In June 1919 a new house in Madrid, Atenea, S. A., founded by Ricardo Baeza and Fernando Calleja for the purpose of bringing out translations of foreign writers (e. g., Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde) and works by Spanish writers (Miró was specifically in mind) addressed to a select minority, published the collected articles as a book under the title El humo dormido, the only complete edition of the work seen through the press by Miró himself and the basis of all posthumous editions including this one. In turning the articles into a book Miró suppressed the parts entitled «Pentecostés» and «Corpus Christi», rearranged the order and revised the text slightly, and added «Viernes Santo», especially composed for the book. (The chapters relating to the days of Holy Week were subsequently excerpted by Miró for lavishly printed and illustrated Spanish and French editions [Semana Santa, Semaine Sainte], of special interest only to bibliophiles). The changes made by Miró between the newspaper and the book versions, while interesting as indications of what his concerns as a writer were, are not extensive and would not, except for the one most obvious change from a series of articles to a book, weigh significantly in any analysis of the author's style.
Miró has never been a success with the great mass of readers because he never practiced -even to the slight degree that, say, Azorín could be accused of doing so- literary demagoguery. He elicits the reader's interest as a private person, not as a citizen, a churchman, a member of any class or group. He even declines to satisfy the reader's desire to know what he is getting into generically. A novel? A collection of short stories? Essays? Autobiography? And once inside the book the reader still does not know where he is. This, he says to himself, is not only written in the first person, it has the intimate tone of autobiography; yet the principal character disappears for pages at a time and is rarely the object upon which the reader's attention is focused. The book often turns to the free-ranging exploration of thought, opinion, and sensibility, in a personally idiosyncratic, ironic way that makes one think that it is an essay, yet the style is too elliptical for prosaic comfort, sometimes more luminous than clear, and deficient in the kind of informative verbal tissue which keeps the reader of an essay comfortably on the track of the author's thought. Many of the pieces can be read as short stories -whatever that ill-defined term may stand for- and some have even a rather obvious structure of beginning, middle, and end (notably «El oracionero y su perro»), yet the qualities that speak for an essay or for autobiography obtrude and distract and make one think, this is what the author really did, really thought. The autobiographical thread, if assumed to be a fiction, at first conveys the feeling that we are embarking on a loose-jointed, episodic novel, but the joints become looser and looser, till there is finally no structural connection at all, and we realize that even a genre as hospitable as the novel has no room for El humo dormido.
Gabriel Miró wrote a fair number of works that he quite properly called novels, some having the proportions we expect for the genre (Nuestro Padre San Daniel; El obispo leproso), others more on the order of novelettes (La novela de mi amigo; El abuelo del rey). He also wrote what he called cuentos, short stories (e. g., «Corpus»; «El ángel»). But the larger part of his work consists of the kind of thing we have in El humo dormido -e. g., Del vivir, Libro de Sigüenza, Figuras de la Pasión del Señor, Niño y grande, Años y leguas. When the term was appropriate, Miró called the separate pieces that made up these volumes estampas. So, for instance, he designated the chapter «Santiago, Patrón de España» when it appeared in La Publicidad. And so, in the book of El humo dormido he brings all the pieces on the days from the liturgical calendar under the rubric of a synonym for estampas, namely, tablas. Yet these designations -estampas, tablas, as well as viñetas and glosas, used by Miró on other occasions- instructive as they may be about Miró's intention, are, with the possible exception of tablas, not original with him but rather borrowed from other writers; and they do not cling to his work as rima does to Bécquer, as palique does to Clarín, or as glosa does to D'Ors. Which is an indication that the short prose piece by Miró as we have it in El humo dormido is sui generis. This is what the poet Jorge Guillén implied when he dedicated a copy of Cántico, his first volume of verse, to Miró with the words, «el único gran poeta que no quiere serlo», which does not say on the one hand simply that Miró is a poet or on the other hand that he is not, but that he is the kind of writer for which we have no label.
Miró himself, the reader will observe, defines his work in negative terms: «No han de tenerse estas páginas fragmentarias por un propósito de memorias». To be sure, Miró sometimes recounts his own experiences (it is safe to assume in a general way that the pages about his childhood refer to life in Alicante, that the ancient city referred to in «La sensación de la inocencia» and elsewhere is Ciudad Real, that the Colegio is that of Santo Domingo in Orihuela), but it would be a mistake to assume that every detail of El humo dormido could be incorporated into a biography of the author. Moreover, details from the life of Miró that would be of primary interest biographically are often missing from episodes unmistakably autobiographical as far as they go in El humo dormido; names of real people are changed; Miró puts himself into the middle of episodes of which he had some knowledge but in which «truthfully» he had no part; actions are transposed from the scene of their occurrence to other places in such a way as to bring out special qualities both of the action and the scene to which it is transposed and to produce an artistic reality unusually independent of the «historical» realities which provide its matter and of which it gives the illusion of being a mere chronicle. It is difficult in referring to El humo dormido alone to cite unimpeachable examples of all these types of «falsification», since of those few who could give testimony in this regard, almost none is still alive. Some assertions can be made, however. The family servant on whom Nuño el Viejo is modeled was actually named Francisco Coloma; a younger servant also named Francisco was surnamed Lidón. While it is indeed true that the old servant used to keep watch over the young Gabriel and his brother Juan as they played in the Paseo de la Reina, Miró conceals from the reader the fact that the boys were usually joined by two playmates, Eufrasio Ruiz and the daughter of the French consul in Alicante, Clemencia Maignon, eventually Gabriel's wife. Miró, even as his own biographer, is under no obligation to tell everything, but the nature of the alterations and suppressions clearly shows that he has no interest at all in telling the story of his life, that rather he has pressed his memory into the service of his art.
The process is often more complicated, however, than these simple alterations and suppressions would suggest. Take the case of «El oracionero y su perro». On internal evidence the action must be dated before 1899 (the year in which the Republican patriarch Emilio Castelar died), yet not much earlier, since Miró represents himself as an apparently adult spectator of some part of the action, and in 1899 he was only twenty years old. Yet this date, c. 1898, let us say, is historically false, for the oracionero and his dog are remembered by Miró's daughter Doña Olympia from her childhood visits in the company of her parents about the year 1910 to Villa María, the mansion belonging to her great-uncle Santiago Miró on the outskirts of Alcoy. But if Gabriel Miró observed the blind prayer-singer at Villa María, then the scene of the story is likewise historically false, for Villa María is not a masía, not an isolated Levantine farmhouse of any kind. The apparent location of the masía is the village of Almudaina, at the end of a country road about twenty kilometers from Alcoy. (Francisco de Almudaina means Francisco «of the town of Almudaina»; Almudaina does not exist as a Spanish surname). The «event» of the oracionero is thus transferred from its «historical» moment and place to another «real» place and combined, it is safe to assume even in the absence of specific proof, with other «real» experiences to produce the «composition». This, however, is only the more obvious part of the process of literary creation. The inscrutable part goes on in Miró's vividly sensual imagination, an instrument uniquely his, no matter how common the materials it works with, where, as the composition grows its skin of language, it becomes the «story» we read. This is the only way to explain how works that are in content so slightly inventive -even offering, as in the pieces on certain of the holy days, no pretense of invention- are so readily identified as something other than mere prose or even mere poetry, as peculiarly Miró's own.
One of the still active elements in our Romantic heritage is the high value we assign, especially in the arts, to individuality, idiosyncrasy, uniqueness, and it is not uncommon for critics to make the best case they can for a work's uniqueness by way of demonstrating its superiority. But it has not yet been demonstrated that a work's artistic value is directly proportional to its uniqueness. In fact, an absolutely unique work would be absolutely incomprehensible, and we would not know whether it was of any value or not. Such a work is inconceivable, of course, as inconceivable as the total comprehension of the most commonplace artistic event. But in any case, no claim is being made here for the kind of uniqueness that would make of Miró's work a literary oddity, a construction of hermetic exclusiveness inviting penetration by its very hostility to all comers, an enigma. The sense of uniqueness we experience when we confront a text of Miró's derives from his intense fidelity to himself, to the reality of his own sensations conceptualized in a mind as free of ready-made, secondhand language and images as it is loyal to the data of its own experience -but always within the limitations of rationality. This honest love of self -much deplored by superficial moralists but taken for granted in such splendid admonitions as «love thy neighbor as thyself»- makes it possible for Miró to achieve a remarkable degree of objectivity, that is, for him to express his sense that the world which he perceives through his senses is really there, as real as himself, that it is, therefore, the way it is and is not to be reviled by acts of false perception. «Sólo hay un heroísmo: ver el mundo según es, y amarle». Such is a maxim Miró liked to quote, gleaned from his reading of Romain Rolland. When Miró puts the principle into practice, he creates certain difficulties for his readers not because he is trying to be difficult but simply, first, because he insists on looking with his own highly cultivated eyes and telling us as exactly as he can what he sees, and, second, because he insists on looking at the world as it is. The result is the expression in words of a vision of such particularity that to the reader it seems unfamiliar, as if he were reading a language he did not understand. He is, as it were, blinded by the light Miró sheds on experience. Once he begins to grow accustomed to the light, however, he finds it serving its natural, miraculous function of illuminating more and more of the particularities of human experience in such a way as to make the reader feel that he is experiencing them for the first time. The so-called difficulties of Miró's style then are nothing but the artistic consequences of his intensely vivid, luminous imagination, the light made word.
By explaining in advance some of those features of Miró's art that lend themselves to isolation and analysis, perhaps the editor can reduce the experience of perplexity and lead the reader to experience them as enhancing Miró's power and meaning. The most notable of these features, some of which have been mentioned above, are: (1) The absence of purely informative verbal tissue that would tell us such things as from what point of view a scene is being observed, who is speaking, why an unexpected remark is made, and the like. (2) Sudden shifts in point of view, attention, speaker, tone. (3) The elaborate distortion of chronological order in the events represented or mentioned. (4) The frequent disregard of conventional grammar (fragmentary sentences, shift from singular subject understood to plural, the use of the preterit where one would conventionally expect the imperfect and vice versa, etc.). (5) An immensely rich vocabulary. These features of Miró's style can be related either to his procedural methods or to his linguistic methods, the first three to the former, the last two to the latter, and it is under these general headings that they will be studied.
Let us take the first, probably the most difficult, chapter, «Limitaciones». What does the title mean? Miró will not tell us precisely; rather he will allow us gradually to experience its meaning through his insinuations. He might, if he were not Miró, have begun the chapter with an explanatory paragraph something like this: «There are two kinds of limitations to our experience of the world around us: one is the limitation that the world opposes to the power of our senses -a closed door, the wall around a garden, a season of the year, the skin of an orange; the other is the limitation inherent in ourselves, in the range and power of our senses. We have the choice of acting as if this were not so and living in a world of pseudo-experience, or of accepting the limitations and confronting, probing, the world as it is with our senses and minds as they are, and living thus in the world of truth».
And then we could rewrite Mirós first paragraph, rearranging it and stitching in bits of informative verbal tissue, something like this: «I am reminded, in this connection, of the time when we used to live in a third-floor apartment in Barcelona at number 339, Calle de la Diputación. That was between February 1914 and June 1915. Our balcony looked out on the patio and gardens of a convent across the way, and on Sundays we could hear the music of a harmonium coming from inside the convent. Because it was winter, and the nuns kept all windows tightly closed, the sound of the music was very faint, even at times completely inaudible, and we had to imagine the passages that we couldn't hear. Besides, the music was drowned out by the uncouth noises of the street -and in those days automobiles were more uncouth in their noise than ox carts- so that the street seemed to be running over the organ. We realized that to hear the music properly we would have to wait for summer, when the nuns would have to open up a little the most concealed and venerable rooms of their house. Open a little, I say, because if they opened the windows and doors wide, the music would be heard as clearly as if it were in the street and with it all the other inside sounds, and what we wanted to experience, the sound of music from inside a convent, would be lost. Well, summer came, and with it the hour for the celestial harmonium, the hour of midafternoon. The fruit trees in the convent garden, enclosed like the mystic garden of the Song of Songs, were green and motionless, and spread their cool shadows over the garden like an eyelid. The street outside was asleep, and everything seemed to be watched over by a lamp of silence which vibrated with the flutter of swallows, martens, and bees... And the organ was not to be heard. We had to imagine its music completely -the sister-musician was taking her afternoon nap. No matter that we longed to hear the music, the Lord permitted his servant to be silent. And no matter that we long for absolute truth, the music of heaven, it is not being sounded for us to hear, and if it is, our ears are not made to hear it; we cannot, as we can with earthly music, connect the fragments, because there are no fragments to connect. Let us make the most of such experiences as are offered to us».
Thanks to Miró's original inspiration, this revision (incorporating biographical details supplied by Doña Olympia Miró) does not come out, perhaps, as altogether bad, though it comes out, even when allowance has been made for translation, as something altogether different. What we have is a philosophical homily which appeals, if it does appeal, to the intellect. The recollections of winter and summer afternoons with their sounds and silences are subordinated, as examples, to the logic of the argument, and while they are not eliminated, the fact that they must share our attention with the argument diminishes their intensity as it alters their intent. The argument is implicit, of course, and slightly explicit, in Miró's version, else it could not be inferred. But its very latency, its subordination to the truth of experience, the quality of experience, is, while at first puzzling to the reader, ultimately discovered to be part of the charm of Miró's art. The truth of the argument is not for Miró independent of experience. Without experience it would not exist, and its only meaningful expression is through the evocation of the experience from which it derives its character as something real.
On another occasion Miró might very well tell us the name of the town he was talking about, or let us know that what he is describing took place some four years prior to the time of writing, or present the reasoning behind the philosophical conclusion, but only if one of these realities were the substance of the experience whose quality he wished to evoke, or if the information were absolutely essential to following the movement of his mind and sensibility in their confrontation with experience remembered.
The matter of grammatical irregularities is best treated in the individual instances and is therefore taken up in the notes. In the case of language proper, that is, vocabulary, we are faced first and largely with words whose equivalents in our own language, if they exist, we would not precisely understand because most of us are not at home in the activities or areas of existence to which they refer. For every reader, even for those whose language is Spanish, the list of such words will be long, though by their nature, no two such lists would exactly agree. Many would contain at least some of the following, which are but a random sample: bancal, casal (obviously a special kind of casa, but what kind?), almiar, binado, rastrojero, rodalillo, badana de ejecutoria, sándalo, maquilero, horco, acetre, meseguero, gomecillo, jara, tenebrario, anacalo, alhucema, cardencha, sacra (noun), filacteria, almanta. The problem here is the problem of deficient experience. All knowledge, including knowledge in the form of literary art, is the recollection of experience. As Miró says in «La hermana de Mauro y nosotros», «Hay episodios y zonas de nuestra vida que no se ven del todo hasta que los revivimos y contemplamos por el recuerdo; el recuerdo les aplica la plenitud de la conciencia; como hay emociones que no lo son del todo hasta que no reciben la fuerza lírica de la palabra, su palabra plena y exacta». For Miró the very act of naming the objects of his experience completes their existence, and it is this act, not informative, not utilitarian, but celebrative, that we participate in when we read him. (This doctrine connects Miró closely with his contemporary, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and with his young friends and admirers, the poets Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén; but no reader would mistake him in practice for any of these).
Is this different from regionalism, to which Miró is conventionally relegated because his critics have no other categorical receptacle ready for him? Different from costumbrismo? From realism? Of course it is. The rural activities are there, peculiar to the region in which Miró grew up, the liturgical customs are there, the patrimony of any child brought up in the bosom of the Church, the «things» are there in Alicante, in Ciudad Real, in the villages, as they are everywhere. Region, custom, the environment of his characters are not literary values as such, as they are for a Fernán Caballero, a Pereda, a Balzac. They are regional realities, customs, things that he takes possession of spiritually -particular, nongeneric realities seized through the word, unfamiliar to us as often as is the reality named. If his intention were artistically utilitarian, to inform, to explain, his whole approach to his material would be different, and he would steer clear of the precise names of objects not widely known (acetre) and agents of very special activities (maquilero), and in their place would have long explanatory phrases that the outlander and the uninitiated would more or less understand; for instance: the metal vessel with handles, carried in processions and other religious ceremonies and containing holy water that is to be sprinkled in blessing; or: the person who collects from a quantity of grain being ground the fraction that goes to the miller in recompense for his service. But Miró's precise language is the expression of his awareness of the world in all its individualized components; the enunciation of the right names is the climax in the process of seeing the world as it is and loving it. To eliminate the peculiarly regional from his artistic concern because it might be of too limited interest would have been for Miró to deny the basic premise of his art: fidelity to his own experience and vision. It is Miró's awareness of his particular world that makes that otherwise inert, neutral world interesting to us. Indeed, even as we read in partial lexical darkness, we sense the constant aesthetic experience behind the word. The regionalism is there because the regions are the regions of Miró's experience, not because the regions are somehow objectively interesting. We are not to be astonished at Miró's command of the regional lexicon, we are to be infected by the love he expresses through his lexicon for all created, and incidentally regional, things.
There are many other words, some unrecognized even by the dictionaries (although as one edition of the Academy dictionary succeeds another, more and more of Miró's words previously overlooked by the Academicians are included), words whose meaning we are not likely to command, although for a different reason, e. g., aguamanil, oxear, chafar, plana, leja, elictra, enregazar, companaje, gañiles. Here it is not a question of unfamiliar areas of existence but of lexical precision. One can, in Spanish as in English, drive or frighten away the barnyard fowls, but the verbs «drive» and «frighten» will serve in numberless other contexts as well, whereas oxear means only this. There is the generic verb aplastar, but chafar means precisely «to flatten things that are erect, such as plants under foot». Nonhuman mammals and amphibians produce their cries and growls with a larynx, but in their case it is more specifically their gañiles that are employed. We are not unfamiliar, in these cases, with the realities referred to; we need Miró to bring us his acute sense of reality in its infinite particularity. Experience is always of particularities, never of generalities, and the extreme particularity of Miró's language is the expression of the intense particularity of his experience.
While it is such particularity that counts with Miró and words; are generally not an end, a value in themselves, although they may seem so to those who read only words, it is nevertheless true that precisely because they are so important to Miró as means they do at times seem to become ends. That is, they are one more among the many realities which Miró seeks to possess spiritually. This attitude leads to the literary validation of dialectal words like torrente (not in the sense of «torrent», the only one the Academy dictionary allows, but in the sense it has in Catalan and in the Catalan-speaking region, «brook» or, most commonly, «stony, dry creek bed»), tela (a Murcianism meaning «membrane», «web»), esterón (apparently a Murcian augmentative of estera), leja (a Murcianism meaning «shelf for water jugs»). One could argue, regarding leja, for an example, with a good Castilian equivalent, vasar, that if the object known, as vasar is called leja in the Levant, Miró might prefer the dialectal word for either of two reasons: one, that he is describing a scene in the Levant and vasar would be a trifle more generic, less localized, less specific, somewhat less precise as a verbal correlative of his experience than leja, which is a special kind of shelf in the Levant; the other, that leja is much more his own word, he being himself a Levantine and something of a Murcian, than vasar, which belongs to everyone who speaks Spanish. But it seems more likely that he simply wanted to rescue the word from dialect status and enrich the Spanish lexicon. Obviously such an attitude is behind his preference for the less common usage, often rustic, of nouns ambiguous in gender. La puente, which he sometimes prefers in El humo dormido to the generally accepted modern usage el puente, has the advantage of euphony, if the combination lp be judged uneuphonious, and the same thing might be said of his preference for la fantasma, even though the dictionaries recognize a different meaning for the different genders of fantasma, (Miró's actual phrase is «la pobre puente», but the phonic difference is the same between el pobre and la pobre as between el puente and la puente -one consonant rather than two between vowels). More important, though, the usage is archaic: Miró likes archaisms that are still tolerated by the modern ear, not because he is an antiquarian but because he wants to keep as much of the language alive as possible.
When converted into style, this language, the reader observes immediately, consists for Miró much more in nouns than in verbs or other parts of speech. In fact one of the striking features of Miró's style is the use of sentences in which the verb is buried in a mass of substantives or omitted altogether so that sentences consist only of subjects, a technique often labeled impressionism. As Professor Joaquín Casalduero has shown, Miró's intention is quite different from that of the so-called literary impressionists, who believed that experience was of fleeting moments that impressed themselves on one's organs of sensation and were gone. Profesor Casalduero identifies Miró with the expressive intent of the cubist painters, who, beginning with Cézanne, bluntly opposed the subjective skepticism of the impressionists and sought in their own painting to reaffirm the objective reality, the «thereness», the thickness, the yellowness, the depth, the texture, the solidity of their subjects. In painting, the ultimate consequences of the view were pictures that brought out the ideal geometric forms latent in the subjects, and, since this pictorial quality is far from anything that can be done with words, the term cubist, suitable as it is for labeling pictorial characteristics, seems ill-suited for designating literary qualities. But Casalduero is surely right in his identification of the expressive intent -for which the term substantialism might be borrowed from philosophy- as exemplified in such passages as the one beginning «Era viejo y cenceño»
(p. 58) and ending «de la trilla». The effect of density, of substantiality, is achieved by the relative absence of verbs and by the use mostly of prepositional phrases instead of simple adjectives and adverbs, a device that necessarily increases the weight of substantives in the prose -de hombros cansados, de párpados encendidos, de una talla paciente y perfecta, por las argollas de sus puños, de un lienzo áspero, de heredad, con dos norias paradas, de olmos, de la paja, junto a la era, como una pescadilla, de olivera, de un bancal, de terrones, etc.
The qualities of the infinite elements of experience -be they atoms, events, or persons- are not presented as depending on Miró's perception for their existence: They are discovered, not invented, despite Miró's emphasis on sensation as the vehicle of truth. And the atmosphere of anticipation and wonder with which he invests the continuing discovery makes Miró a central character in all his writings, even though he may not place himself in the action. It is his object to capture and convey what he often calls, in a phrase pattern that may mislead some readers, the emoción of a person or situation -«la emoción del maestro», «la emoción del cielo». In this context emoción has nothing to do with emotion -sadness, happiness, fear, etc. It is the sum of the feelings engendered in the mind by all the sensations the object produces, a web of unified feelings, a total sense of the object's unique identity. To convey this, Miró will look for the signal feature of a person that brings all his other characteristics to mind, that is, the point upon which the full weight of personality bears, for instance, Don Marcelino's fingernail, the objective correlative, so to speak, of «la emoción de Don Marcelino» that establishes as an artistic reality Marcelino's spiritual-material uniqueness. When Don Marcelino in a moment of vexation smote his brow with his hand, Miró tells us, «exhaló un alarido pavoroso, porque se había quebrado la uña de su meñique, su voluntad hecha uña»
. («Don Marcelino y mi profeta»).
Even phenomena totally lacking in substantiality, that is, purely temporal in character, are treated by Miró as if they were spatial in order to bring out their reality in the sense of «something that can be physically experienced»: «semejaba parado encima de todo el domingo» -Sunday experienced as a material volume that a man can bestride; or the spectacular image «una banca torcida que había recriado una piel de tiempo».
We hear on all sides today -we have been hearing for more than a century- of alienation as man's modern tragedy. Man, we say, has lost his power, or sense, of transcendence -of reaching out and knowing reality, of knowing God, of speaking directly to his neighbor, of experiencing the fulfillment of love. Yet it may be that transcendence is not a natural power that has been lost but a delusion that has been unmasked, that alienation is man's true condition, and that such transcendence as may exist must be achieved by dint of moral or aesthetic effort. If this be so, then Miró's literary style, the evidence of a herculean aesthetic effort, is a transcending achievement, the instrument through which he turns the world of experience into his spiritual possession, into poetic knowledge. But knowledge of what? It is the knowledge that the longing for transcendence is mankind's most poignant problem, whose certain issue is pathos. Thus he focuses his attention on human beings suffering from isolation or cut off from the fabric of life (e. g., «el judío errante») or in the moment of absolute bereavement (the death and ascension of Christ in the «Tablas del Calendario») or caught up in the liturgical drama through which the Church believes that it repairs this bereavement by invoking the real presence of Christ under the forms of bread and wine in the Mass. In El humo dormido the human experience of the doctrine of transubstantiation is not treated directly (the article on Corpus Christi, the feast that celebrates the doctrine in elaborate ceremonies including, especially, the exposition of the consecrated wafer in churches and street processions, is omitted from the book), but it is invoked metaphorically in such a way as to leave no doubt that Miró sees in the Eucharist the expression of man's deepest need, the longing -whether answered or not depends on one's belief- for transcendence. In «La hermana de Mauro y nosotros», Miró writes:
Mauro would tell his sister about our walks, our discussions, our boasts, our ambitions. We of course suspected that Luz knew everything. And then, when we heard her laugh, or she teased us, or gave us a bit of advice, we saw her as so very much our own sister that we could have believed that's what she really was if we hadn't wanted her to be it so much. «Would you really like to have a sister?» We trembled in astonished delight. To us it seemed that in Luz's slender, pale hands a sister was going to burst into bloom in the form of a lily, one for each of us, and that as she gave it to us, it would be she herself, by virtue of a new Eucharistic miracle. |
To be sure, Miró's constant zeal to materialize spiritual realities (let the term be accepted to identify nonmaterial phenomena ordinarily considered to be real, whether their nature is «spiritual» or not) and to spiritualize the material betrays a certain anxiety about the need to do this, an anxiety about the very existence of the world of spirit, of noumena, which by the power of his transcending word he might save from imminent destruction. Indeed, the overwhelming adequacy, as Jorge Guillén terms it, of Miró's language itself to the expression of his vision is, in the face of positivistic skepticism, the sign of Miró's faith in poetic transcendence, but as a modern man he cannot help being aware of the problematical nature of such faith, of its uncertain anchorage in reality, so that behind his constant dialectic of materialization-spiritualization there is a still larger dialectic of irony, of humor constantly dissolving into pathos. So, when he is presented with a ready-made popular usage, la Justicia, meaning «the police» (rather like the American use of «the Law» to mean the same thing), that serves his need to materialize the spiritual, he says of himself as a little boy, «Yo nunca había visto la Justicia». Don Marcelino explains that the function of the police -Justice (tran)substantiated- is to seek the truth. But it is not recorded that they find it. Rather, the two animals that must have witnessed the cruel murder, the cat on its shelf and the turtle in its corner, «retained within themselves the image of the savage truth. They shared yet did not destroy the solitude in which the crime was committed, and now they remain before our eyes, graven images of manlike figures, because they bear within themselves the anguish of a human secret they cannot reveal».
If the reader will now turn to Miró's own pages, he will quickly see that at no time in the foregoing paragraphs of analysis has he been in danger of total clarification. The closer we come to perfect coincidence with Miró's vision of the world, the more aware we are of its ultimate mystery, ever elusive, ever inviting.
Without adding a separate preface, I should like here first to say why I have thought a new annotated edition of El humo dormido to be desirable, second to indicate the unaccounted-for sources of the information contained in the introduction, and third to thank those who have facilitated my studies of Miró, particularly with respect to what I have written about him here.
There are four editions of El humo dormido in print, that of the Obras completas, Vol. VII (Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva), that of the Biblioteca Contemporánea (Buenos Aires, Losada), that of the one-volume edition of the Obras completas (Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva), and that of the Biblioteca Anaya (Salamanca, Madrid, Barcelona). The first three are acceptable, readable printings without notes and, except for Clemencia Miró's brief preface to the one-volume Obras completas, without editorial comment. The fourth, with introduction and notes, is inadequate in its annotations and often factually inaccurate. A book so beautiful and yet so difficult demands a better effort.
The printed sources of information I have tried to acknowledge in the proper places. In the cases of certain very specific statements which I base on the oral testimony of those who knew Miró I have also tried to acknowledge the source. But there are other statements for which the reader might want some authority. I have tried to give proper warning where my personal opinion intrudes. Where such warning is absent, I mean to express what I have no reason to doubt are facts that I have elicited through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of conversation with as many people as I have been able to discover who knew Miró in life, most of them, alas, now dead. I should like to remember here with particular gratitude Don Eufrasio Ruiz, Don Francisco Figueras Pacheco, Don Manuel Lorenzo Penalba, Don Germán Bernácer, Don Óscar Esplá, Don Leandro Cervera, and Don Jorge Guillén.
Belonging to the same list but requiring a separate place are Gabriel Miró's late son-in-law, Dr. Emilio Luengo, and Dr. Luengo's widow, Doña Olympia Miró, now alone in the task of caring for the Miró archives put together largely by Don Gabriel's younger daughter, Clemencia (d. 1953). Studies carried on in the atmosphere of hospitality and interest that pervades the Luengo-Miró household are almost shamefully, if also sometimes sadly, pleasant.
I should add that my wife has been a faithful critic to the last word, and that Professor Vicente Llorens, Manchego and Valenciano, Spaniard and American, is the best editorial supervisor one could hope to find for this edition of El humo dormido.