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Article Excerpt
En 1795 el Diario de Madrid publicó una serie de cartas sobre una nueva figura que se había observado en la capital: el currutaco, un hombre frívolo que se vestía de última moda y que no tenía más estudio que las nuevas contradanzas. De la noche a la mañana, el tipo se puso de moda: los currutacos empezaron a aparecer en artículos, poemas, estampas, obras de teatro y tratados paródicos. Este ensayo traza el fenómeno de la currutaquería a una serie de obras francesas del siglo XVIII--los libros multicolores del marqués de Caraccioli--y analiza cómo los tratados de moda de los años 1790 comentan sobre las nuevas ideas e ideologías de la Revolución francesa.
In 1795 the Diario de Madrid published a series of letters about a new figure that had been observed in the capital: the currutaco, a frivolous man who dressed in the dernière mode and whose only expertise was in the latest contradances. Almost overnight, the type became a fad: currutacos began to appear in articles, poems, prints, theater pieces and parodic treatises. This essay traces the phenomenon of currutaquería to a series of French works from the eighteenth century--the colored books of the Marquis of Caraccioli--and analyzes how the fashion treatises of the 1790s comment on the new ideas and ideologies of the French Revolution.
The Currutaco Craze
In early May 1795, Juan Antonio de Iza Zamácola, writing under the pseudonym of Don Preciso, published a letter in the Diario de Madrid, which gave birth to a new fad: currutaquería. Serious and fastidious as his name suggests, Don Preciso has noted with envy the social success of four caballeritos who, though only four feet tall ("una vara y media"), are the heartthrobs of the yard-high señoritas de nuevo cuño. After overhearing a conversation among the latter, Don Preciso realizes that the attraction of these diminutive men is their skill at a new form of contredanse innovated by one Don Currutaco and his companion the Abate Pirracas. Hoping to improve his own prospects, Don Preciso resolves to master this new style, to become a "profesor científico" of choreography and composition "por ver si con mi estudio y aplicacion podia algun dia ocupar el lugar que hoy tienen los Currutacos, los Pirracas, y los demás varones ilustres que han hecho descubrimientos en la ciencia contradanzaria." (1) To this end, he invents music and dances, which win him (or so he believes) great acclaim among the modern ladies. Don Currutaco, however, is not impressed. In a letter of reply, probably written by Juan Fernández de Rojas, Don Currutaco rejects Preciso's fashionable pretensions and accuses him of insulting "la parte mas brillante y numerosa de Madrid, es á saber, á los Currutacos, Pirracas, y Señoritas del nuevo cuño." Defending his tiny camarades, he advises the oversized Preciso to dance with the trees of the Prado or the Giralda of Seville. And in the process, he converts the terms currutacos and pirracas, used in Preciso's first letter to refer to the leaders of the señoritos de ciento en boca, into common nouns alluding to the class as a whole. (2)
The currutacos would become even more common in the weeks that followed. The debates about the tiny dancers filled the Diario de Madrid and soon spread to Barcelona, Zaragoza and other areas. Within months, the polemic had spilled out of the press and into other genres such as vaudeville theatre and mock treatises, the most flamboyant of which was the Libro de moda en la feria, attributed to Fernández de Rojas. In August 1795, Luis Moncín produced a fin de fiesta titled Las currutacos del día, which features as one of its protagonists Don Preciso himself, who brags that his "nombre ya las prensas fatiga." And fatigue it did. So voluminous was the literature on the subject that one writer claimed it had driven up the price of paper. (3) Fernández de Rojas --Don Currutaco himself!-- began to complain about the phenomenon in his monthly "Censor Mensual" column in the Diario de Madrid. And soon it became common for currutaco letters to begin by lamenting the commonness of currutaco letters. (4)
This vulgarization of the term --its journey from proper noun to common noun to commonplace-- has at times led to a distorted vision of the figure in the criticism of the period. The earliest incarnations of the type were midgets with "vocecillas chillonas de gallo", fantastic, allegorical creamres identified in one text with Swift's Lilliputians (Iza Zamácola, xxxvii, 20); in Las currutacos del día, the Abate Pirracas hangs himself from his door at night in a futile attempt to stretch himself to normal human length. Later writers, however, were not always in on the joke and assumed that currutacos and pirracas actually existed. (5) By 1797, two years after the fad began, Fernández de Rojas would lament that the term was frequently misused, applied to "todos los que visten a la moda." (6) Indeed, as the word became common, it was often used as a synonym for petimetre, the term for the dandified men throughout most of the eighteenth century. (7) An adaptation of the French petit-maître, the petimetre was from its beginning a Francophile of afrancesado, an absurd figure with which satirists reacted against Bourbon dominance in Spain and against an imported luxury that threatened national industries and values. (8) As the currutaco and petimetre were confused in later writings, the currutaco would take on this feature and by 1800, as the fad was dying down, reactions against his Francophilia became common. (9)
But if we look back to the early Madrid texts --those identified with Don Preciso and Don Currutaco-- it becomes clear that the originators of the fad consistently avoided ascribing to it the Francophilia of the earlier petimetre. The Libro de moda en la feria eschews references to France and French clothing and considers London to have assumed "la dirección interina de modas" (36). In the currutaco family tree, which includes almost all of Europe --even Germany gets a tiny, if distant, branch!-- France is pointedly absent. When Don Preciso resolves to dedicate himself to the study of the "ciencia contradanzaria," he turns not to French but to Spanish sources, cribbing from a treatise on Valencian dance. And where he finds most inspiration is in the traffic patterns of the Puerta del Sol, the very center (kilómetro cero) of Spain. In these early texts, currutaquería involves a conscious Hispanizañon of the petimetre figure, a repression of its Frenchness. This is clear even in the name of the figure. As Corominas and others have observed, the word currutaco derives from curro (a nickname for Francisco, which came to designate a majo or affected, Andalusian man) and retaco (small). What I would add is that this combinadon is simply an inversion of the French term (petit + maître). The new term, it would seem, de-Gallicizes the existing convention, turning it on its head.
René Andioc, who has most exhaustively and insightfully studied the currutacos, relates the figure to the equally absurd type of the incroyable, which became a staple of Directory France. lo Here too, however, some clarification is necessary, for the currutaco actually precedes the incroyable chronologically. The latter was born of a series of caricatures published by Carle Vernet in Nivôse, Year V (January 1797), and quickly inspired the same comic outpouring that the currutaco had in spring of 1795. This literature influenced currutaco works published from 1797 on (most notably, as Andioc argues, Goya's Caprichos) but cannot be the source of the figure. Nor is the currutaco simply a Spanish version of the muscadins or jeunesse dorée of the Thermidorian reaction. For while these figures are certainly in the background (as will become clear in the "Suplemento" of the Libro de moda en la feria), the Spanish literature around currutaquería takes on a decidedly different feel and form. The muscadin is almost always a derogatory term and target of satire, not a persona that writers adopt and play with, and the writings of the jeunes gens and their leaders (Fréron, Martainville, etc.) have a polemical, strident tone that is lacking in the more ludic Spanish texts.
In this essay, I will attempt to trace a somewhat different genealogy for the playful, metatextual and flamboyant literature of currutaquería: a lineage that is at once a rainbow. The first part of the study will consider the Spanish reception of a relatively unknown series of French works written in a light-hearted, rococo spirit. Then it will examine how two texts published in the 1790s --the anonymous El tocador (1796) and Fernández de Rojas' Libro de moda en feria (1795)-- tap into the playfulness and dandyism of this tradition to explore the radical instability and flux introduced by the French Revolution.
Coloring Books
Discussions of the currutaco's precursor, the petimetre, often cite as evidence a 1785 text called the Libro del agrado and signed by one Luis Eijoecente. (11) The vast majority of the text, however, is an unacknowledged translation of a French book, Louis-Antoine Caraccioli's Livre à la mode...
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