From
Reading Room/7:
Spanish Prelude
—Jenny Ballou
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For intelligence was out of style at the moment, and extremely
inconvenient. “We must recover our innocence.” And by force
of sheer will the advance-guardists managed to become so innocent—an
act of virtuosity on their part—that they were just about to sing the
praises of the dictatorship when Primo de Rivera fell. They had gone a step
too far in their innocence and were never to live it down—not even after
they denied shamefacedly in their weekly that such a thing as the vanguard
had ever existed.
Although their idea had originally been the laudable one
of disinfecting Spanish letters from blood and sand, they were in such thin
air by the time the censorship was lifted that even when it had ceased to be
dangerous to write lucidly they were to find that they had nothing new to say
with their new language. For in acquiring their agile technique, these literary
gladiators had lost sight of what they intended to do with it. They carried
their vanguard burlesque into the new Republic, of which they were destined
to become the playboys.
In their game they had learned that what is left unsaid is
of greater importance than what is said—and that it had far less consequences. This “impartial
silence’” praised by Mallarmé had stood them well during
the reign of the dictator’s censor; but after they were given portfolios
in the Republic it was too late to stop the impetus of parody. They were to
prove too enervated by their rhetorical debauches to make more than a
light opera of the beliefs for which men had rotted in prison. Victims of their
own jest, they were to become easy tools of the deadly reactionary forces
they had pretended to despise.
For when faced with the real problems of innovation and change,
they allowed themselves to be hypnotized by such slogans as “Injustice is preferable
to disorder.” Hadn’t Goethe himself said this? And were they not
all studying German, emulating their patron philosopher, José Ortega
y Gasset? If they had known how to read plain Spanish, they would have found
hidden in the depths of Ortega’s own writing these words that could have
guided them where their master did not dare to go:
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