Barbara Burns speaks to Elizabeth Drumm, whose edition of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán’s Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War has just been published in the MHRA New Translations series.

cover of Ramón María del Valle Inclán, {i}Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War{/i}

BB. The Spanish modernist writer Ramón María del Valle-Inclán was a prominent literary figure in early-twentieth-century Spain, but is little known in the English-speaking world. What was innovative about his work, and why did he not achieve the international recognition we might expect?

Elizabeth Drumm

ED. Valle-Inclán was a tremendous innovator, who wrote poetry, short stories, essays, novels, theater over his long career. These works can be difficult, using language in unaccustomed and sometimes shocking ways, mixing genres in an attempt to create something new, and experimenting with perspective and temporality, as we see in Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War.

A well-known public figure who was forthright in the expression of his views, Valle-Inclán presided over several ‘tertulias’ or café conversations in Madrid – some over many years – which attracted leading authors and prominent visual artists, both Spanish artists at the beginning of their careers like Julio Romero de Torres and established artists like Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse who would stop by when they were in Madrid. This contact with visual artists and art is incorporated into Valle-Inclán’s literary texts. One of the things I most admire about Valle-Inclán’s writing is his ‘painterly vision’, which is highly descriptive and often refers directly to painting and visual art. His artistic sensibility and knowledge about the visual arts was so strong that he was appointed Professor of Aesthetics at the Madrid Escuela de Pintura, Escultura, y Grabado (School for Painting, Sculpture, and Etching) from 1916 to 1919, and, at the end of his life, served as Director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

The café-intellectual world of the tertulia — the Spanish answer to the Parisian salon — is nicely caught by this monument, outside the Café Moderno in Pontevedra. (Photo: Contando Estrelas)

As to why Valle-Inclán is not better known outside of Spain, his artistic legacy, and that of other Spanish modernist authors, is a somewhat vexed one, in which convoluted inclusions and exclusions have caused an extremely innovative period of Spanish literary production to be politicized within Spain and mostly ignored in larger conversations of European modernism and the modernist period. There are, of course, many causes for this neglect, but the main culprit is the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and long years of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). Although Valle-Inclán died of natural causes in 1936, other Republican artists and public intellectuals were killed, died in prison, or went into exile after the war. Many of Valle-Inclán’s works were censored during the dictatorship. Several of his most important dramatic texts, for instance, were not produced in Spain until decades after their initial publication.

BB. Midnight grew from an eye-witness war chronicle which Valle-Inclán wrote during a visit to the Western Front in France in 1916. Why did he travel to France, and how did the events he witnessed there impact his writing?

ED. Spain was officially neutral during the First World War, but of course there was strong support for both sides, with authors, journalists, and public figures travelling to the front and reporting back. Valle-Inclán was one of several authors publishing war chronicles. What is interesting in the example of Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War, however, is how Valle-Inclán transforms the chronicle form. As his subtitle indicates, he was not content with one witness’s account, but attempts a simultaneous account of the action across the western front during one twelve-hour period – a view from the stars.

BB. The full title, Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War, is both intriguing and slightly obscure in terms of its meaning. Can you explain what the term ‘astral vision’ refers to?

ED. Among items found in Valle-Inclán’s library and personal papers, an archive maintained by the Grupo de Investigación Valle-Inclán and housed at the University of Santiago de Compostela, is a notebook which records Valle-Inclán’s experiences at the front: where he went, what he ate and with whom, impressions of various battlefields, anecdotes, etc. This notebook was published in 2016 as the Cuaderno de Francia (University of Santiago de Compostela Press) and is a fascinating record of Valle-Inclán’s first-hand experience. In the entry for one day, Valle-Inclán notes briefly that he went in an airplane for the first time. It is tempting to think that ‘astral vision’ is tied to this experience of flying over the front and witnessing its great expanse. However, although the experience must have impacted him greatly, ‘astral vision’, in my opinion, has more to do with his desire to evade a fragmentary perspective to provide a view of the whole.

This New York Times pictorial from 1917 captures some of the glamour, verging on mysticism, which attached to aviation in what was otherwise an un-glamorous war: also, perhaps, its sense of escape. Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince in another war, learned to fly on planes like these in 1920. For the night flyer, it was essential to land in daylight, so that the voyage was always a journey from darkness to light.

Like many modernist authors, Valle-Inclán was interested in how to represent multiple perspectives and more complex forms of subjectivity. ‘Astral vision’, with its desire to express simultaneous action and to synthesize the experience of all affected by the war, is his attempt. Interestingly, at the end of the introductory ‘Brief Notice’, he announces the text a failure. I am not quite sure how to read this: false humility? Recognition that expressing various perspectives as simultaneous is not possible? Failure or not, Valle-Inclán’s provocative, innovative attempt to synthesize experience certainly makes for interesting reading.

BB. The story consists of a series of episodes or snapshots of various individuals in different locations along the front, creating a montage effect, rather than a linear storyline, which intensifies the sense of immediacy and chaos and fragmentation. Can you give us an example of one of these vignettes which you found especially memorable?

ED. There is a notable episode in which a group of Breton sailors rig with makeshift sails the bodies of Germain soldiers and set them adrift. The sequence is grotesque in its details, but beautifully describes the situation of young soldiers confronted by death and by the practical reality of what to do with the bodies. When a sailor exclaims at the end of the scene that he is no longer afraid of death, we see the effect of a collective coping mechanism and feel the loss of innocence as these young men cope by turning human beings into objects.

BB. Does Valle-Inclán’s first-hand experience of modern armed conflict lead him to question concepts such as heroism or the justification, or even mythification, of war?

ED. After many vignettes describing in detail the effects of war on individual soldiers, it is jarring to read chapters which mythologize war, referring abstractly to its generative potential. This is not unusual for Valle-Inclán: an early trilogy about the Carlist Wars also mythologizes war. What is interesting in Midnight, however, is the tension created by two sometimes opposing views: a view from the stars that allows for mythification, and the view of a witness that is personal and unflinching in its description of war’s horrors. Valle-Inclán may call for a synthesis of individual experience of war, a perspective that demands abstraction and allows for mythification, but this view is tempered by descriptions of war’s horrific effects on human beings, especially pronounced in this period of great technological advances in warfare.

Ramón and Elizabeth. Valle-Inclán was much caricatured — and, it must be said, only too happy to play along: he would not have minded this whimsy at all. But the slightly odd posing of his many statues and portraits — turned sideways, or with arms behind back — perhaps also comes from a less comical truth, that his left arm had been amputated in 1899 after a bar-fight led to gangrene.

BB. How did you become interested in Spanish modernism, and in Valle-Inclán’s work in particular?

ED. I was introduced to Valle-Inclán’s works in a graduate school seminar on the theatre of Valle-Inclán and Federico García Lorca, led by the great Hispanist Francisco Ruiz Ramón. Lorca’s theater is, of course, fabulous, but Valle-Inclán’s works – the language, the tone, the visual images – blew me away. I wrote my dissertation on his trilogy the Comedias bárbaras (Savage Comedies — also available from MHRA, in an edition translated by Christopher Colbath and Luis M. González) and am currently finishing a manuscript on La lámpara maravillosa (Lamp of Marvels) and Henri Bergson’s aesthetic theory. I have worked on many interesting projects in between, projects which I have enjoyed immensely, but consistently seem to find my way back to Valle-Inclán.

BB. You teach at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Are today’s students in the US interested in the literature of the First World War? How do you present this type of material to them?

ED. I wouldn’t claim that Reed students are particularly interested in literature from the First World War, but they are deeply interested in the types of representational questions Valle-Inclán and other modernist artists address. The problems wrought by perspective and the expression of subjective experience in language that fragments that experience are memorably evoked from the first paragraphs of Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War. My approach would be to hook them with questions about representation and let this beautiful text take over from there.

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