In El estudiante de Salamanca (“The Salamancan Student”), a long narrative poem first published in its entirety in the 1840 collection, Espronceda splits his central paradigm of human subjectivity between two characters: the fatal will to transcend the limits of reality is represented by the protagonist, don Felix de Montemar, a “second don Juan Tenorio” who brooks no obstacle to the satisfaction of his desires, while the mortal anguish of lost illusion is exemplified in dona Elvira, an innocent young woman he has seduced and abandoned. Narrating the heroine’s Ophelia-like descent into madness and death, the poem emphasizes the pathos of her surrender to love: she refuses to relinquish its intensity even when the hopes love inspires have been transformed into the pain of loss and despair. The remaining three sections foreground the masculine brio, arrogance, and willfulness of don Felix, yet his also turns out to be a story of descent into death.
The narrative moves from don Felix’s duel with Elvira’s brother in the shadowy precincts of the Calle del Ataud (“Coffin Street”) on to the fantastic journey of the protagonist’s soul as he pursues a veiled feminine figure who mysteriously appears to him. He cannot comprehend the sob with which the veiled phantasm responds to his questions, a sob communicating “su inmenso dolor” (“its immense sorrow”), because he accepts no limits to his will. Indeed, don Felix represents that aspect of the Romantic psyche that strives to transcend the limits of the human condition. As his pursuit leads him into fantastic, otherworldly galleries, his defiance of fear and death becomes grandiose, revealing him as a “segundo Lucifer” (“second Lucifer”):
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
374 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century
Alma rebelde que el temor no espanta, hollada s´ı, pero jama´s vencida: el hombre, en fin, que en su ansiedad quebranta su l´ımite a la ca´ rcel de la vida.
(rebellious soul undaunted by fear, / battered, yes, but never conquered: / man, in sum, who in his yearning breaks / the limits of life’s prison.)
His defiance cannot bend the ineluctable law of life, however; when he reaches the figure he has been pursuing, she is standing at the foot of what is at once a marriage bed and a tomb. The two sides of the human experience have been brought together, but their union reflects Espron-ceda’s pessimism: don Fe´lix’s struggle to evade Death’s embrace ultimately expires in a “leve, / breve / son” (“light, brief sound”). Espronceda’s virtuosity as a poet, manifested in the color and dynamism of the imagery and the expressiveness of the varied meters and rhythms, fuses with powerful thematic material to make El estudiante de Salamanca an artistic achievement that no poet of his time was able to match.
Espronceda’s most ambitious work was his epic poem, El diablo mundo, which remained unfinished at the time of his early death from diphtheria in 1842. Moved, like many other European Romantics, to find a poetic form capable of comprehending the vast and contradictory range of human experience, he sought to combine the philosophical poem modeled by Goethe in Faust with the ironic self-consciousness of the Byronic mock-epic. Like the over-reacher evoked as the figure of the human spirit, the poem fails to achieve its impossible ambition and thus in its very incompleteness conveys the poet’s vision of the world as an unresolved tension between imagination and corruption, aspiration and frustration.
The introductory canto presents the human condition in terms of a fantastic allegory in which the Luciferian figure of man defiantly challenges the secrets of God from an abyss of desolation and impotence where he is besieged by demon voices expressing contradictory desires and realities. Canto I concretizes the human spirit in the form of an old man seated at a pine table by the light of an oil lamp, a setting that includes everyday contemporary life within the scope of aesthetic representation, in contrast to the medievalizing exoticism of the more conservative brand of Spanish Romanticism. Visited by supernatural spirits, the old man chooses the ceaseless, desire-driven movement of life over the peaceful stasis of death, thus launching the main narrative of his rebirth as natural man in the social world. This canto also introduces Byronic digressions that add irony by representing the relationship between author and readers. By referring to such things as the author’s aesthetic intentions, the commercialization of poetry, and contemporary politics, these comments signal his aim of creating a “fiel traslado, . . . cierto trasunto / de la vida del
Romantic poetry
375
Hombre y la quimera / tras de que va la Humanidad entera” (“faithful copy, . . . exact transcription of man’s life and the chimera pursued by all Humanity”). The dedication of the entirety of Canto II to the elegy to Teresa further demonstrates this commitment to representing the multiple levels on which the dialectic of desire and disillusion plays out in human life.
Buy custom Literature essay, Literature term paper, Literature research paper.
