Por Marta Álvarez
Publicado en:
www.elcorreogallego.es
Evocar sensaciones, construir cromatismos, contactar con un mundo más abstracto, crear impresiones etéreas y subjetivas conformaron el universo expresivo de Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Vilagarcía de Arousa, 1866 - Santiago de Compostela, 1936). Todo este corpus artístico y revolucionario caracterizó a los escritores de finales del siglo XIX y principios del s.XX. Este cambio de paradigma estuvo protagonizado por el Modernismo, ese afán de ruptura con las normas clásicas. La disección y el análisis de esta vorágine es el cometido de
La escritura modernista de Valle-Inclán: orgía de colores (Ed.
Verbum), el último trabajo de José Manuel Pereiro Otero (Santiago, 1970), actualmente profesor de Lengua y Literatura españolas en la Universidad de Texas (EEUU)."Este ensayo ha sido el producto de ocho años de trabajo", señala Pereiro. Parte del libro está basado en su tesis doctoral, que fue dirigida por su mentor, Luis González del Valle, además "está enriquecido por artículos adaptados". El objetivo de este libro es "recuperar la vanguardia de la obra de Valle-Inclán".Según Pereiro, "el escritor arousano pertenece a una generación de autores cuyo principal problema es el material que utilizan, el lenguaje". Durante esos años (finales del siglo XIX y principios del s. XX), se consolida un proceso que se venía fraguando desde hacía tiempo, "el lenguaje como elemento material, no como medio de expresión". El escritor moderno se distancia de su obra, "yo soy yo y mi obra es otra cosa", en contraposición con el escritor clásico que utilizaba el lenguaje "como una extensión de sí mismo", explica. Valle-Inclán es un escritor moderno en todos los sentidos, transgresor, intérprete de sensaciones, libertador de la palabra, amante de la pintura, abanderado del color. Así, hace del color un sustantivo, ya no califica, sino que se convierte en un ente propio, en sujeto. Las tonalidades evocan sensaciones a través de la
sinestesia que asocia objetos con colores que no les pertenecen como 'luz negra'. Recrea un juego antagónico, intedeterminado, abstracto, subjetivo, en el que el lector tiene, paradójicamente, la última palabra. Pereiro expresa que "el color es la cualidad más
etérea que podemos apreciar. Hay grandes diferencias entre lo que podemos decir y sentir".
Miradas futuras al pasado Pereiro Otero continúa con su labor de disertación literaria. La figura de Don Juan es su próximo trabajo, personaje por el que "Valle-Inclán sentía fascinación".También el escritor santiagués prosigue su cometido dentro de la Cátedra Valle-Inclán de la Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, dirigida de "forma encomiable por Margarita Santos Zas, que pretende mantener viva la herencia artística de Valle-Inclán", señala Pereiro.
JOSE´ MANUEL PEREIRO OTERO, La escritura modernista de Valle-Inclán: orgía de
colores. Madrid: Editorial Verbum. 2008. 291 pp.
Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 16:11 10 July 2009
Pereiro Otero uses chromaticism in this monograph as a means of understanding a paradigm shift evident in selected works by Ramo´n del Valle- Inclán. This transformation moves away from classical thinking, rhetoric and artistic expression and towards the free play of signifiers and meanings evident in Hispanic modernism (modernismo) and its avant-garde aftermath.
Chapter 1 provides a very thorough critical and historical overview of modernismo, in tension with the fields of Occidental modernism*which many Hispanist critics see as closer to the avant-garde than it is to modernismo*and with modernity itself. Pereiro Otero cites many of the vectors that contribute to the concept of modernity: the Enlightenment, rationalism, liberalism, the French Revolution, the growth of the nation-state, positivism, rapid change, technological and industrial development, capitalism. The consideration of modernity then serves as a point of reference to explore the multiple dissonances and contestatory manifestations of modernismo in tension with it, in its cosmopolitan, antirationalist, anti-positivist, atemporal formulation, in Latin America and Europe.Chapter 2 deals with the over-arching subject of chromatic evocation in modernismo, taking the synchronic reception of Rube´n Darı´o’s Azul as its point of departure. Pereiro Otero provides abundant examples of Azul’s critical reception to demonstrate how the use of chromaticism is interpreted as polemical in its inseparable association with aesthetic and socially destabilizing artistic practice. Chromaticism, for modernismo, is a challenge to aesthetic norms of mimesis, realism and rationalism. The latter, in turn, reproduce classical idealist norms; what could be considered a neo-platonic affirmation of discourse (including all cultural production) as a stable system of signs grounded in turn in the affirmation of the ‘immanence’ of reality. Pereiro Otero convincingly argues that colour constitutes an agency that modernismo deploys to articulate contradictions; a means of expressing epistemological indetermination as an essential quality of modernismo itself. The fact that colour is often foregrounded is symptomatic both of modernismo’s self-referentiality*art for art’s sake*and of its dissident expression vis-a` -vis modernity. Chromaticism in this context becomes an indicator of the sublime; something unrepresentable, immeasurable, contradictory, unstable, and outside of rational and modern social discourse. In Chapter 3 Pereiro Otero comments on Valle- Inclán’s 1904 text, Flor de santidad. This chapter focuses particularly on chromatic elements in the use of adjectives to create a supplementary excess, or surplus, of meaning, which simultaneously enriches and destabilizes the process of signification, incorporating multiple iterations and transpositions, weaving together sensorial and synesthetic possibilities. Epithetic, sensuous expressivity becomes a self-sufficient end in itself, semantically and symbolically charged with contradiction and irresolution that consistently distances it from the mimetic content it relays, at the same time that it undermines the stability of social values associated with the mimetic referent.
Chapter 4, on Valle- Inclán’s La lámpara maravillosa (1916), builds on the destabilizing aspects of modernismo’s expressivity, focusing on the use of mysticism and narcotic euphoria as analogies. These analogies convey a sense of ontological transcendence that is mediated by the associative intensity, synthesis, elimination of stable meanings, and ineffable and chromatic capabilities of modernismo expression. These three analogous experiences*mystic rapture, narcotic euphoria, modernismo language*facilitate other analogies, in a ceaseless chain of deferral revolving around a sense of the dissolution of subjectivity, its death-like, and orgasmic love-like annihilation subsumed in plenitude.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the intensified avant-garde expression at one end of the chromatic arch of Valle- Inclán’s artistry, in La medianoche (1917) and Tirano Banderas (1926), respectively. These texts multiply relativistic perspectives and suggest instability regarding any basis for transcendent, immanent human values. Pereiro Otero notes that in Tirano Banderas, even the presence of a narrative voice implying some sense of a unified epistemological project has ruptured, as has the representation of linear time, into simultaneous narrative fragments. Colour too is subject to fragmentation, forming part of an atemporal, transnational, translinguistic treatment of Latin America that questions the basis of modernity, the post-colonial foundation of nation, and the possibility of progress towards social justice. Chromaticism in the work as a whole comes to represent indeterminacy; in this case an avant-garde indeterminacy regarding struggle in a cycle of social injustice, combined with a lack of ontological and epistemological grounding that might point towards transcendence, in discourse, aesthetics or society.
In conclusion, Pereiro Otero’s study makes many valuable contributions to the field of Hispanism: it provides a useful overview of existing nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical conceptions of modernismo; it incorporates anti-rationalist perspectives of modern philosophy and post-structuralism to explore productively the contestatory relationship of modernismo to modernity; it includes insights associated with cultural studies, gender and nationalism as part of modernismo’s dialogue with modernity; it thoroughly explores the primacy of chromaticism as a manifestation of modernismo, in tension both with classicist aesthetics and rhetoric, and with modernity itself; it documents the extensive intertextuality between Rubén Darío’s work and Valle- Inclán’s; it analyses in depth the presence of chromaticism in four exemplary works by Valle- Inclán. Pereiro Otero conclusively demonstrates the significance of Valle- Inclán’s oeuvre as part of a continuum fusing modernismo and the avant-garde as an aesthetically and culturally combative cultural discourse active from the end of the nineteenth century forward. La escritura modernista is, in all of these ways, and no less because of its artful combination of erudition, wide-ranging cultural references and acute analysis, a splendid scholarly achievement.
VANCE HOLLOWAY
