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Article Excerpt
¡Aquí le tienes! En el arte de mal vivir un maestro, y el hacha del verdugo suspendida sobre la cabeza. Este malvado que tengo por hijo, medita mi muerte ... (Cara de plata)
... sólo me rodean ingratos y traidores. ¿Crees que no leo en el corazón de esa gente? ¡Todos desean mi muerte, y mis hijos los primeros! (Aguila de Blasón)
¡Le había reconocido! ¡Que no hubiese dejado muerto a ese hijo de Edipo! ¿Hijo de quién, mi amo? ¡Del Demonio! (Aguila de Blasón)
¿Y pueden los hijos comer a los padres, mi señor? (Romance de lobos)
¡Ay, cuñada, por cismas te despartistes de tus familias! (Divinas palabras)
Let us assume it to be a fact, then, that in the course of later development of religions the two driving factors, the son's sense of guilt and the son's rebelliousness, never became extinct. (Totem and Taboo)
But why had the Hero of tragedy to suffer? ... He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the Hero of the great primeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a tendentious twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had to take on himself in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs. (Totem and Taboo)
... the sense of guilt {is} the most important problem in the development of civilization and ... the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt. (Civilization and its Discontents)
After painstaking rationalization, case studies and comparative socio-cultural investigation, followed by vague and often disconnected insinuation in earlier publications, Sigmund Freud would finally succeed in redefining the Oedipus complex as the point of convergence of individual development in terms of civilization's collective notion of the Original Crime, sense of universal guilt and cultural evolution (Totem and Taboo, XIII, 156). In Totem and Taboo (1912-13) Freud follows the findings of social scientists and anthropologists such as J. J. Atkinson, Charles Darwin, Robertson W. Smith and James George Frazer in separating out the common threads between myth, history and religion toward the ultimate goal of re-contextualizing psychoanalytic theory within the framework of Man's collective sense of remorse within the context of the primeval murder, totemic cannibalization and apotheosis (deification) of the tyrannical father by the primal horde living together in forced celibacy (142). (1) Steadfast in his conviction that man's sense of guilt is the most important problem in the evolution of civilization, Freud crystallizes his theories further in a subsequent seminal essay Civilization and its Discontents (XXI, 1929-30). It is here that Freud would fully articulate his psychoanalytic theory on the precise parallel between individual psychological development and civilization's cultural progression by way of a highly developed "Community Super-ego" as the driving force of Oedipal guilt (XIII, 157-59; XXI, 141). Ironically, the main obstacle which Freud was forced to acknowledge and reconcile in terms of Western culture's identification with the Father-Complex was differentiating the sexual drive, which he had originally perceived to be the core mechanism of guilt in individual development, from the aggression impulse as the true root cause of civilization's collective sense of guilt (Reik 23-33). Freud's groundbreaking discoveries notwithstanding, he remained hesitant to apply psychoanalytic theory concerning the aggression impulse toward the explicit purpose of controverting the theological notion of Original Sin as primarily a sexual transgression (XIII, 146). This mantle is taken up by Theodor Reik in his study Myth and Guilt: The Crime and Punishment of Mankind. Inspired and outlined during conversations with Freud himself and his circle of fellow psychoanalysts precisely during the time the Austrian psychiatrist was penning Totem and Taboo (1913), Reik too needed to overcome an unspoken or unconscious prohibition to explain religious doctrine through science. In fact it would take more than 40 years, in 1957, before this psychoanalyst would be able to fully articulate his study (ix-xiii). The theories Reik outlines in Myth and Guilt essentially pick up where Freud left off in asserting that the concept of the Original Crime is rooted in the act of the primordial parricide committed collectively by a band of brothers. He argued further that Christ constituted the second Adam whose mission was to serve as the symbol of atonement and redemption for this primeval transgression:
In the Last Supper and in the rite of the Eucharist that developed later from it, the son of God offers Himself as victim. He does not only sacrifice His life, redeeming the company of brothers from the original crime, but He also offers His flesh and blood as atonement for the cannibalistic, gruesome devouring of the primal father. In the sense of the lex talionis, this has to be considered the most important part of the evidence that the original sin was the devouring of the terrifying father of the antediluvial horde. (313) (2)
In this study I will show how the direct application of Freud's Oedipus Complex to Valle-Inclán's Comedias bárbaras offers a distinct reading of the trilogy as an internal or psychical versus strictly formal continuum. This interpretation does not preclude, by any means, other parallel and no less insightful critical perspectives which argue for the trilogy's coherence as essentially a single three-part construction; amongst these are the questions of genre (theater versus novel, tragedy versus comedia), structure (chronological, stylistic and ideological coherence on the part of Valle-Inclán between 1907-1922), theme (historic versus mythical-religious allegory), and ideology (Valle-Inclán's socio-political commentary on Spanish society from medieval to contemporary times).
This psychological approach may help reconcile certain perceived critical ambiguities which linger to date in several of these same areas. I should clarify from the start that the parallel chronology between Freud (1856-1939) and Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) notwithstanding my intent is not to argue for a direct influence of Freud or even psychoanalytic theory on the literary production of the Galician artist. Quite to the contrary. As previously stated, notwithstanding timid allusions in earlier essays, Freud did not crystallize the application of the Oedipus Complex to collective society until years after Valle-Inclán's publication of his first two Comedias bárbaras: Aguila de blasón (1907) and Romance de lobos (1908). Moreover, the fact that Valle-Inclán completes the third element of his Comedias 15 years later, Cara de plata (1922), when Freud was penning the theories which are pertinent to our discussion, may in fact provide further clues to Valle-Inclán's initial versus later artistic and ideological motivation and lend a fresh critical perspective to the internal and external coherence of the trilogy. One may conclude from the outset that Valle-Inclán's aesthetic intuition led him to psychoanalytic discoveries prior to Freud's elaboration deduced strictly from empirical evidence. From a strictly practical perspective, it remains inconsequential whether Valle-Inclán was influenced by...
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