Esperpento

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Esperpento (German: grotesque , literally "mistake", "nonsense") is a literary genre that was introduced into Spanish literature and drama from 1920 by the Spanish author Ramón María del Valle-Inclán . Esperpento uses caricature-like, systematically distorting descriptions of reality in order to convey a message or morality that critically illuminates or exposes the situation, often also derisively mocking it. Terrifying or disgusting figures are used with preference. The leitmotifs are death , the grotesque and the reduction of people to objects; it is characterized by a tendency towards sarcastic irony .

The best-known Latin American Esperpento author is Jorge Ibargüengoitia .

Definition of the word esperpento

In the Diccionario de la Lengua Española , published by the RAE , the term esperpento is defined as follows:

  • a grotesque or nonsensical fact;
  • a literary genre created by Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Spanish author of the '98 generation ), in which reality is distorted to reveal its grotesque features. Colloquial and crude language is subjected to a very personal, elaborate elaboration;
  • (coll.) a person or thing that stands out due to ugliness, shapelessness or unpleasant shape.

The expression was also translated as “ Schauerposse ” in the literary context . The Kiel Lexicon of Film Terms translates it as " eyesore ".

The esperpento in the Valle-Inclán factory

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán

Valle-Inclán's statue in Madrid ( F. Toledo , 1972)

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, born in Galicia in 1866 , is assigned to Modernismo and the Generación del 98 . His works include u. a. the sonatas , which are rare examples of modernist prose. Politically, he changed from an ultra-traditionalist to a supporter of socialist positions. He came to Madrid at the age of 30 and lived the life of a bohemian . His Esperpentos were created in the period after 1920. Valle-Inclán died in Santiago de Compostela in 1936 .

The distorting mirror metaphor

Esperpento first came to light with the piece Luces de Bohemia (German: Glanz der Bohème ), which was published in the original version in 1920 and a revised version four years later . The drama book Martes de Carnaval (literally “Carnival Tuesday ”, German: Carnival of Warriors. Three Schauerpossen ), published in 1930, continued the cycle. The scenes in are partly inspired by real places. In the play Luces de Bohemia, for example, the "cat's alley" callejón del Gato plays a role, a small street in the old town of Madrid that is officially called calle de Álvarez Gato . The name Gato in the piece is therefore to be understood as an allusion to Juan Álvarez Gato († 1509), a poet who worked at the Castilian court in the 15th century and was known for his critical-satirical poetry, among other things. The well-known feature of the real calle de Álvarez Gato were two mirrors hung there, one convex and one concave, in which the bodies of passers-by were depicted grotesquely distorted. It was not until 1998 that the mirrors were damaged by vandalism. They are used by Valle-Inclán as a metaphor for his alienation paradigm.

Characteristic

The main feature of Esperpento is the targeted use of the grotesque and caricature as a serious form of artistic expression. The systematic alienation of reality plays a key role, which in particular also includes the reification of characters. The figures appear dehumanized and act like marionettes. Often human and animal life forms mix in them. Further features are the artificial use of obscene and vulgar colloquial language contrary to the conventions of the theater ("Suddenly the telephone bell pees and soaks the spacious lap of bureaucratic comfort"), an abundance of contrasts, distorted scenarios and the mixing of reality with nightmares . Death appears as a main character.

The dominant scenes are taverns and brothels , tastelessly furnished interiors and dangerous streets in Madrid . Characters on the street are drunks, prostitutes, failed artists, bohemians , all presented as puppets without their own will.

The idea of ​​Esperpentos is based on Valle-Inclán's perception that Spanish culture and society are characterized by a repulsive mixture of the deliberately sublime and the involuntarily grotesque. Spain is thus a grotesque caricature of European civilization. Valle-Inclán does not criticize Spanish society on a political, but exclusively on an aesthetic level. Valle-Inclán's son Carlos says that the author “presents absurd, farce-like, colossal individual events or contexts in such a way that they have serious or even tragic consequences [...] The audience is so distanced that it is critical between Differentiate between reality and illusion, but also recognize the connections between history and the formation of myths. "

Bohemian glamor

Front cover of the 1924 Spanish edition of Luces de Bohemia

The piece Glanz der Bohème consists of 14 scenes. It's about Máximo Estrella, a blind impoverished poet who lives in Madrid and is portrayed as the loser of the modern age. In the figure of Máximo, the author Valle-Inclán is mirrored in a grotesque manner. Máximo and his companions often criticize Spanish society. So he says in the second scene:

The misery of the Spanish people, their great moral misery, rests on their absurd stupidity about the riddles of life and death. Life is a meager stew for him; death, a monster wrapped in sheets and baring its teeth; Hell, a giant cauldron full of boiling oil, in which sinners are boiled like anchovies; heaven a germ-free fair, without any indecency. [...] These wretched people turn all the great ideas into a drivel of pious seamstresses. His religion is the stupid sentimentalism of old women who stuff their cats when they die.

During the course of the play, Máximo is briefly arrested and also meets Rubén Darío .

A conversation between Máximo Estrella and Don Latino de Hispalis, his publisher, in the twelfth scene of the play is considered the founding manifesto of Esperpento. In this dialogue, the poet presents his poetics, which he believes go back to Goya's paintings :

The classic heroes, reflected in concave mirrors, create the esperpento . The tragic meaning of Spanish life can only be understood with a systematically distorted aesthetic. [...] My current aesthetic is to break through the classical norms with the help of the mathematics of the concave mirror.

The linguistic expression should also be distorted by the same concave mirror. At the end of the twelfth scene, Máximo dies. Rumor has it that his wife and daughter will also commit suicide after his funeral. The piece ends with a dialogue between Don Latino and the lizard pecker:

The world is a nonsense! - A shiver farce!

Carnival of the warriors

The Martes de Carnaval drama collection from 1930 consists of three Esperpentos, namely La hija del capitán (The Captain's Daughter ) , Las galas del difunto (The State Skirt of the Deceased ) and Los cuernos de don Friolera (The Horns of Lieutenant Firlefanz) .

The captain's daughter

The play consists of seven scenes and is about the daughter of a captain, who is called a sergeant chop in Cuba because of his alleged consumption of human meat . La Sini, the captain's daughter's name, had a relationship with a penniless stray dog. She is present at a card game between the captain, a general and his four cronies. The conversation turns to the absent Don Joselito. At the end of the scene, the stray walks in and reports that he killed Don Joselito. La Sini advises him not to surrender and runs away with him. In the third scene, the captain and the general discuss how to dispose of Don Joselito's corpse without calling the press on the scene. They decide to put the body in a package and ship it. In the fourth scene the stray tries to redeem a token from Don Joselito's possession at the Club of Fine Arts. In the sixth scene the captain is suspected of killing Don Joselito, as the newspapers report this. The token was redeemed by a blonde woman. Enraged by this rumor, the captain and general are planning a coup. The last scene shows La Sini and the stray at a shabby train station. There the king is received with military honors. The piece ends with La Sini's pronunciation: “Don Joselito, my dearest friend, I will pray for your salvation! Sakradi, if you hadn't died, Dear Fatherland would have died. I'm bursting with laughter. "

The state coat of the deceased

The play The State Rock of the Deceased consists of seven scenes. It is about the prostitute Ernestina ( Die Kokotte ) and her suitor Juan Ventolera ( Hansel Hochhinaus ). Ernestina is the daughter of the rich pharmacist Don Sócrates Galindo. She would like to ask him for money in a letter. The letter is handed to the pharmacist by a messenger, the Mummeleule, who is a mixture of human and animal. Don Sócrates Galindo initially refuses to accept the letter. The mummy owl looks the pharmacist deep in the eye, and the blow hits him. After Galindo's funeral, Juan Ventolera stole the state coat in which he was buried. He goes to the pharmacy and, since he pretends to have received the deceased's coat in a bogus swap, pretends to be the administrator of the estate. He promptly receives the money and returns to the brothel. There he gives the money and at the end reads Ernestina's letter to her father.

Esperp table is in one piece:

  • The transformation of people into animals: "The old witch pulled the cloak over her ears as a hood and fluttered away, transformed into a crow."
  • Macabre passages: "Not that the dead all get up at the same time and finish us off!"
  • The use of coarse, often sexualized language: "He strives for heaven, my dick."
  • The distorting mirror metaphor: "The creased octopus jump and the grimace that shatters the face make life a concave mirror effect."
  • The self-referentiality. So the piece ends with the saying: “Juanillo, turn over the notes. After this dime novel you need a decent coffee. "

The horns of Lieutenant Frippery

The piece begins with a prologue. At the fair in Santiago el Verde on the Portuguese border, the intellectuals Don Manolito and candidate Überkandidelt talk about aesthetics. Don Manolito says: “We have to love, Candidate over-candidate. Laughter and tears are God's ways. That is my aesthetic and hers. ”Candidate Überkandidelt replies:“ Not mine. My aesthetic is an overcoming of suffering and laughter, as relieved as the conversations of the dead have to be when they tell each other stories of the living. ”You meet a juggler who tells the story of Lieutenant Foolish with his hand puppets. You are discussing this type of poetry. Candidate Überkandidelt believes that this play does not follow any Castilian tradition and finds it “more appealing than all of Spain's rhetorical theater.” He notes that the Spanish theater is otherwise only found in the Bible, its cruelty and dogmatism. He continues:

“Spanish cruelty celebrates the whole barbaric liturgy of the burning of heretics. It's cold and repulsive. [...] If our theater vibrated like the festive rituals in the bullring, it would be great. If it could have conveyed the force of this aesthetic violence, it would be heroic theater - as heroic as the Iliad . Since he misses that, it seems as repugnant as any law book, from the constitutional text to the grammar. "

The prologue is followed in eleven scenes by the story of Lieutenant Firlefanz, who learns in a letter that his wife has a lover. He wants to take revenge on her for it. His superiors urge nonsense to request his dismissal. Lieutenant Firlefanz ambushes his wife and shoots her. It later emerges that he shot his daughter. This is followed by an epilogue in which Don Manolito and candidate Überkandidelt listen in a different city than in the prologue to a banter who recites the story of Lieutenant Foolish. Candidate Überkandidelt then comments: “This is the plague, the nasty plague that emanates from literature and spreads to the people.” Then Candidate Überkandidelt comes back to the plot in the prologue and says: “How far away from this Roman filth that naive little doll that we saw on the Portuguese border! How far away that malicious folk joke! "

  • The title of the piece refers to the description of frippery in the prologue as a chimera of humans and animals. In a figurative sense, it can also refer to the role of frippery as a betrayed husband.

Valle-Inclán over the Esperpento

Model for the Esperpentos: Goyas Caprichos

In a famous interview with the playwright and experimental theater maker Gregorio Martínez Sierra (1881–1947), Valle-Inclán stated in 1928: “I believe there are three ways of looking at the world artistically or aesthetically: on your knees, standing upright, or high up . the air charged "the first form associated Valle-Inclán with the classic epic poem about Homer : the protagonists come gods, demigods or heroes that are far superior to the ordinary people and at least represent an unattainable status from the perspective of the narrator. He sees the second point of view as exemplified by Shakespeare . The point here is to look at the protagonists like fictional characters at eye level, as people like you and me, "as if they were our siblings, as if they were ourselves, as if the character were a duplication of our selves, with our strengths and our weaknesses." This depiction, which is aimed at empathy and identification , is undoubtedly the most successful and widespread dramatic genre. “And there is a third way, namely to look down on the world from a higher level and to show the characters as being inferior to the author, with a pinch of irony. The gods will Fluctuating figures . "The arrogant conceit of the Demiurge , the doing of his creatures persecuted amused, traces the narrative perspective in Esperpento out. Valle-Inclán thinks this is a typically Spanish move and already sees it at work with Cervantes , who presents his antihero Don Quixote without compassion and at the mercy of his readers.

Valle-Inclán also saw the forerunners of Esperpento in the literature of Francisco de Quevedo and in the paintings of Francisco de Goya .

The essential question in Esperpento is whether the drama paints a caricaturally deformed picture of reality or whether it shows the realistic picture of a reality that has been deformed itself.

Effect on the film

The “black comedy” by Luis Buñuel is significantly influenced by Esperpento . The films by Luis García Berlanga and Pedro Almodóvar are also inspired by the style of Esperpento.

literature

  • Martin Bernhofer: Valle-Inclán and Spanish Culture in the Silver Age , Scientific Book Society, 1992, ISBN 3-534-11200-8
  • Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer: Spanish literary history , Metzler, 2001, ISBN 3-476-01857-1 .
  • Ramón del Valle-Inclán: miraculous words. Bohemian glamor. Two plays . From the Spanish by Fritz Vogelgsang , Klett-Cotta, 1983, ISBN 3-608-95080-X
  • Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter . From the Spanish by Fritz Vogelgsang, Klett-Cotta, 1982, ISBN 3-608-95003-6

Web links

  • Entry in the film lexicon of the University of Kiel

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ esperpento in the PONS online dictionary Spanish-German ( accessed August 6, 2017).
  2. ↑ a b c Ansgar Schlichter: Esperpento. In: Lexicon of film terms. Edited by Hans J. Wulff and Theo Bender (online publication at the University of Kiel ), as of December 23, 2012.
  3. ↑ Diccionario de la lengua española ( Spanish ), 22nd edition, Real Academia Española,, p. 978.
  4. ^ Hans Joachim Piechotta, Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow and Sabine Rothemann: The literary modernity in Europe: Volume 2: Formations of the literary avant-garde . Springer-Verlag, March 13, 2013, ISBN 978-3-322-93605-9 , p. 348.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer: Spanische Literaturgeschichte , Metzler, 2001, ISBN 3-476-01857-1 , p. 329 f.
  6. ↑ Elena G. Sevillano: El esperpento vuelve a reflejarse en el 'callejón del Gato' (Spanish) . In: El País , February 28, 2008. 
  7. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Words of Wonder. Bohemian glamor. Two plays . From the Spanish by Fritz Vogelgsang , Klett-Cotta, 1983, ISBN 3-608-95080-X , p. 281
  8. ↑ Martin Bernhofer: Valle-Inclán and the Spanish culture in the silver age , Scientific Book Society, 1992, ISBN 3-534-11200-8 , p. 151
  9. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Words of Wonder. Bohemian glamor. Two plays . From the Spanish by Fritz Vogelgsang , Klett-Cotta, 1983, ISBN 3-608-95080-X , p. 224
  10. ↑ Quotation: “Los heroes clásicos reflejados en los espejos cóncavos dan el Esperpento. El sentido trágico de la vida española sólo puede darse con una estética sistemáticamente deformada ... Las imágenes más bellas en un espejo cóncavo son absurdas ... La deformación deja de serlo cuando está sujeta a una matemática perfecta. Mi estética actual es transformar con matemática de espejo cóncavo las normas clásicas ».
  11. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Words of Wonder. Bohemian glamor. Two plays . From the Spanish by Fritz Vogelgsang , Klett-Cotta, 1983, ISBN 3-608-95080-X , p. 365
  12. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982, ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 289
  13. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982, ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 15
  14. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982 ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 36
  15. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982 ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 23
  16. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982 ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 31
  17. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982 ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 73
  18. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982 ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 89
  19. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982, ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 95
  20. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982 ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 96
  21. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982, ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 211
  22. ↑ Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Carnival of the Warriors. Three shudder antics. The state coat of the deceased. The horns of Lieutenant Frippery. The captain's daughter , Klett-Cotta, 1982, ISBN 3-608-95003-6 , p. 211
  23. ^ First published in the daily ABC of December 7, 1928 ( Hablando con Valle-Inclán: de él y de su obra ), quoted a. a. from Rosa Ana Álvarez Menéndez: Sistemas de signos no verbales en los esperpentos. Análisis semiológico. Edited by the University of Oviedo , Edition Reichenberger, Kassel 1998, p. 19 in the Google book search. Quotes:
    “Comenzaré por decirle a usted que creo hay tres modos de ver el mundo, artística o estéticamente: de rodillas, en pie o levantado en el aire”. (...)
    «Hay una segunda manera, que es mirar a los protagonistas novelescos como de nuestra propia naturaleza, como si fuesen nuestros hermanos, como si fuesen ellos nosotros mismos, como si fuera el personaje un desdoblamiento de nuestro yo m defectos ». (...)
    "Y hay otra tercer manera, que es mirar al mundo desde un plano superior, y considerar a los personajes de la trama como seres inferiores al author, con un punto de ironía. Los dioses se convieren en personajes de sainete ».