UC Irvine

This dissertation investigates the rationale behind Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s culminating theatrical technique, his morbidly dark, culturally caustic, and societally damning esperpento. I am specifically interested in the religious, historical, cultural, artistic, philosophical, and theatrical factors that contributed to its development. From modernist beginnings (exemplified by several of his short stories and Las sonatas), he artistically travels through a post-feudal period in Spanish history when its final vestiges of nobility sink into disrepair; the supposedly noble values associated with this caste, like its bearers, have been abandoned. All that remains, as Max Estrella somberly concludes in the twelfth scene of Luces de Bohemia, “es una deformación grotesca de la civilización europea.”

As a whole, I will consider Valle-Inclán’s novels, plays, and poetry in order to recognize a latent, albeit ever-present, current of decadence and degeneration in his works. I propose that primary manifestations of the same characteristics that critics have come to integrally associate with his esperpentos―brazen anticlericalism, aesthetic deterioration, apathetic immorality― appear throughout his works as a whole. Such an assertion implies that Valle’s dramatic theory of the esperpento represents the accumulation and adaptation of the theme of decay, absence, and estrangement in a diverse array of textual forms, ranging from poetry and drama, novel and short story. Like Valle’s own gradual disillusionment with his nation, his people, and his politics, the esperpentos are forged by an agonizingly decadent society whose depiction―partial images of corruption that can be found throughout the full spectrum of Valle’s literary and dramatic productions―only fully materializes in the esperpentos themselves.