(Even I, a miserable poet, before a cop puts me in prison for the clear truths I speak, and I pay the price of my satires, or I die in a miserable hospice for beggars, I want to flee two hundred yards from risk: for one cannot even speak, where fear places her impossible gag over the tongue. Pity the first person who dares to speak!)
He mentions the fear that Fernando inspires, and fear will be a word he uses frequently in his articles until his trip to Paris in 1835. In order to avoid danger, he writes about the theatre (rather than government, or society, directly), although it is possible that entire articles from the fourth and seventh notebooks were suppressed in addition to one-third of his “Sa´tira contra los malos versos de circunstancias” (“Satire Against the Bad Poems of Circumstance”). Nevertheless, when he writes “Filolog´ıa” (“Philology,” 1832) he confesses that he understands the power of the word, that “la lengua es para el hablador lo que el fusil para el soldado: con ella se defiende y con ella mata” (“language is for the speaker what the gun is for the soldier: with each he defends himself and with each he can kill”). He knows that the game is no longer a game, but a battle of sorts, and when he takes stock of this period of his life in “Un reo de muerte” (“A Condemned Prisoner,” 1835), he will describe his profession with martial imagery – every article is a battle, the pen a weapon: “Esgrim´ı la pluma contra las balas” (“I brandished my pen against the bullets”) he will say, making continued use of this warlike terminology. “Di la cara a dos enemigos” (“I faced two enemies”) he writes, in memory of his articles against the rebels fighting against Queen Regent Mar´ıa Cristina’s moderate government in the Carlist Wars,1 and against the “justo medio” (“happy medium”) of Mart´ınez de la Rosa, in order to be “desalojado
1 The Carlist Wars, named after Fernando VII’s brother Carlos, were civil wars which broke out following the death of Fernando in 1833. Carlos and his followers challenged
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36 6 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century
De mi u´ltima posicio´n” (“kicked out of my last position”), an allusion to the censorship that forced him to cease writing because of “temor de ser rechazado en posiciones ma´s avanzadas” (“fear of being rejected from more advanced posts”) and being obligated to “parapetarme en las costumbres” (“take cover in local customs”).
Thinking of literature as a battle, Larra was not interested in costum-brismo as a mere painting of traditions, as he describes them in “Carta u´ltima de Andre´s Niporesas al bachiller don Juan Pe´rez de Mungu´ıa” (“The Last Letter from Andre´s Niporesas to the Young Don Juan Pe´rez of Mungu´ıa,” 1833): “Sencilla relacio´n de las cosas que natural y diaria-mente en las Batuecas acontecen” (“A simple retelling of the natural and daily things that happen in Batuecas [Podunk]”). The author is a soldier with a clear mission in life: to forge a better life with the (s)word. Writing is an uneven battle in which the author does not intend to annihilate, but rather illuminate; however, as in every battle, the winner is not necessarily the most reasoned individual, but the one who kills the most. For this Larra, “enlightenment” means not prescribing social behavior but uncovering abuses; until things are seen as abuses, he believed, they will never be changed and a new society will never be created. As he states in “Vuelva usted man˜ana” (“Come Back Tomorrow,” 1833), “es muy dif´ıcil convencer al que esta´ persuadido de que no se debe convencer” (“it is very difficult to convince the man who is already persuaded that one should not be convinced”). It is for this reason that the disadvantage of the writer originates from ideas and persistence, because, somewhat paradoxically, his worst enemies are those who should make up his army: mankind. However, “cada hombre tiene su cara” (“every man has his own side”), he affirms in “Empen˜os y desempen˜os,” and “cada hombre [es] un tirano” (“every man [is] a tyrant”), he writes in “Un reo de muerte.” Furthermore, since “el hombre es so´lo lo que de e´l hacen la educacio´n y el gobierno” (“man is only what his education and his government make of him”) (“Conclusio´ n,” 1833), in the particular case of Spain the government has educated the people with fear, so that men “se mueren del miedo de morirse” (“die for fear of dying”), he says in his second letter to Andre´s (El Pobrecito Hablador, 1832). The instability of various governments, caused by the negative reaction of the populace to new ideas, led liberal politicians to “tener miedo hasta del gas que los ha de levan-tar” (“fear even the gas that will lift them up” (“El hombre globo” [“The Balloon Man,” 1835]). In this manner, fear can be used to justify political inertia and communal indifference, according to the criticism he makes
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