Ganivets EL ESCULTOR DE SU ALMA

Ganivets EL ESCULTOR DE SU A L M A
- an Interpretation
By Dona/d L. Shaw, University of Edinburgh
Ganivet’s last work, El escultor de su alma, has received little serious critical
attention. Doris King Arjona in a wellknown article1 dismisses it with contempt; M. Fernåndez Almagro2 deelares it to be pura tiniebla; while A. Espina3
somewhat more revealingly demands that it be set aside from the canon on
the grounds that it refleets with undue clarity “el morboso desorden espiritual
que acompano en su ultimo periodo a la vida de Ganivet.” Even those critics
who have attempted to discuss the play seriously are discouraging. C. Barja
concludes dolefully “No es probable que el lector haya podido formarse una
idea cabal del drama por este resumen, pero tampoco es probable que se la
forme si llega a leer la obra.” 4 F. Garcia Lorca in turn complains of “la inefieaeia de los simbolos empleados” and criticizes the work’s “tono delirante.” 5
In what follows it is not intended to suggest that El escultor de su alma is in
any sense a neglected masterpiece, or anything but an anachronism in the
Spanish theatre of its time. It is, however, intended to suggest that the abovementioned critics, allowing their private convictions in some cases to colour
their judgment, gravely overstate the case against the play, and secondly, that
the play has a meaning which is of importance for the understanding of Ga­
nivet’s final ideological position.
Here we find ourselves at grips with the well-meaning but misguided tendency on the part of many Spanish critics to deny, or at any rate minimize,
1. King Arjona, “La voluntad and aboulia in Contemporary Spanish Ideology,” R H ,
L X X IV (1928), p. 604.
2. Vida y obra de Angel Ganivet, Madrid, 1952, p. 271.
3. Ganivet, el hombre y la obra, Buenos Aires, 1942, p. 127.
4. Libros y autores contemporåneos, Madrid, 1935, p. 33.
5. Angel Ganivet, su idea del hombre, Buenos Aires, 1952, pp. 41, 260.
298
Donald L. Shaw
in the face of the evidence, the unorthodoxy of a whole series of modern
Spanish writers from Larra to Unamuno, including Ganivet. Thus in the prologue to the 1906 (Granada) edition of El escultor de su alma we find
. en
todas las obras de Ganivet . . . hay un pensamiento fundamental . . . de honda
y trascendental filosofia del cual nunca se separa el espiritu del escritor, åvido
de inculcarlo a los lectores: el alma humana posee una fuerza creadora casi
omnipotente, y su verdadera mision no es otra sino obrar sobre si mismo para
su propia perfeccionamiento” (p. 12). This assertion, comfortably disguising as
it does Ganivet’s real position by stating as a conviction what was never more
than a hope, has been followed by practically all subsequent critics. The import­
ant problem of squaring their statements with others of a diametrically opposite
nature made by Ganivel, is resolutely ignored.6 The most important assertions
ever made by Ganivet with reference to positive ideals, individual or other­
wise, are probably those of his letters to Navarro Ledesma of the second and
fourth of January 1895. In the latter we read “No hay fines propios del hombre . . . pero . . . nosotros, para que el engano sea mås agradable echamos
varias cosas hacia fuera y creemos que son algo, siendo asi que lo que hay
positivo es la måquina de nuestra especie a la que vamos uncidos como esclavos.” 7 These letters emphasize and partly explain the discrepancy between Ga­
nivet’s positive outlook, especially with regard to the national problem of Spain,
and his increasingly negative and despairing personal standpoint. In effect,
Ganivet’s spiritual trajectory can be divided into three main phases. The first
is that of Espaha filosofica contemporånea, the relevance of which I have discussed elsewhere.8 In this early work Ganivet reve als his awareness of an estado
patologico intelectual pervading Spanish society, to which he gives the name
escepticismo cientifico, and which he seeks to combat by demanding the reaffirmation of certain undefined ideas madres. The characteristic of this first
stage of Ganivet’s ideological development is the false distinction which he
draws between individual and collective scepticism, the former being for the
moment ignored. The second, central, phase is that of the Idearium and Pio Cid:
the attempt to identify the collective spiritual problem with the national prob­
6. The only attempt, apart from some comments by Lorca, of which I am aware to set
the matter in serious perspective is a short article by D. Castro Villacanas, “Angel
Ganivet, su contradiccion,” Clavileho, X X V (1954), 49-54.
7. A. Ganivet, Epistolario, Madrid, 1904, 283-4.
8. See my article, “Ganivet’s Espaha filosofica contemporånea and the interpretation of
the Generation of 1898,” H R , X X V III (1960), 220-232.
Ganivets EL ESCULTOR DE SU ALMA
299
lem of Regeneraciån, and the seareh for an individual solution via the restoration of collective spiritual values. The characteristic of this phase is the growing
realization that it constitutes an evasion of the real issue. This is confirmed by
the growing disassociation of Pio Cid himself, the demoralized dirigente, from
his collective ideal. The final stage is that of El escultor de su alma: the resurgence of the individual problem in its most intractable form. The characteristic
of this phase is the struggle of the individual will against la nada, against the
desolate conclusions of el escepticismo cientifico, and its final defeat. The “tragedia invariable de la existencia”, which Ganivet announces as the basis of
the play in the fifth trabajo of Los trabajos del infatigable Pio Cid, is the inevitable triumph of critical insight over simple faith.
Fiom the opening line: “^Qué es la vida que vivimos?”, Ganivet strikes
directly to the heart of the problem of existence and for the first time openly
allies himself with the current of criticismo, the existence of which in nineteenth-century Spanish literature he had deplored a decade earlier. With El
escultor de su alma, in faet, Ganivet takes his place within the pattern of acute
spiritual disquiet which links together the Romantics and the Generation of
1898.9 Pedro Martir’s first speech embodies the same anguished interrogation
as the prologue to El diablo mundo. The use of familiar romantic vocabulary
(<abismo, caos, fiction) and antitheses (pleasure-pain, illusion-reality, liberty-the
prison house) bespeaks a common response to an identical problem: that of
spiritual insecurity. What is missing, of course, is the principal romantic solu­
tion: the promotion of human love to first place among possible sources of
vital confidence. Traces of it remain, but only reveal how well Ganivet had
learned the lesson of romantic angustia: Vivir no es mås que correr / eternamente al redor / de la esfinge del amor. / . . . mas yo la he visto en secreto, /
y es la esfinge un esqueleto / y el amor en muerte para. (741)10 Death mocks
the attempt to invest human emotion with transcendental significance. The
problem of finality thus posed is central to the play as a whole. Torn between
insight on the one hand, and instinctive rejection of its conclusions on the
other, Pedro Martir vacillates, his outlook fluctuating wildly between extremes
of doubt and confidence. His assertion that reason is impotent to find out any
absolute truth except that of the imminence of death: ^Quién la realidad penetra / del mundo? Si nada sé. / i Solo sé que moriré! (743) is instantly followed
9. A discussion of this point will be found in my article, “II concetto di finalitå nella
letteratura spagnola delP ottocento,” Convivium, V (1960), 553-61.
10. All references hereafter are to A. Ganivet, Obras completas, Madrid 1943, vol. II.
300
Donald L. Shaw
by the enunciation of the mysterious law which Pio Cid had announced was
to be embodied in the play: the concept of self-transcendence via one’s own
efforts and suffering, independently of any divine intervention. The idea is
clearly akin to Unamuno’s aspiration to the personal conquest of immortality
expressed in his slogan “el cielo padece fuerza”. It represents a deliberate sup­
pression of the desire for a religious solution to the existential dilemma, a
resentful rejection of divine assistance disguised as a craving for liberty. It is
of no avail that reason indicates the futility of liberty enjoyed on such terms,
Pedro Martir, while half-recognizing the weakness of his position, defiantly
refuses to submit: Libre, quiero yo vivir / . . . j Aunque al cabo haya de ir /
a hundirme en el mar tenebroso! (744) Again like Unamuno, in the absence
of ulterior purposiveness, he transfers value to the struggle itself: \
Quiero
luchar! ;Quiero ser! / ^Qué? No lo sé; no me importa . . . (743). But whatever
his doubts about the final end, Pedro Martir persists in the idea of some form
of internal self-creation.
This Unamunesque attempt by Ganivet to salvage some notion of immorta­
lity from the wreck of his convictions finds its chief expression in the symbolism
associated with Alma. In the first auto this conveys Pedro Martir’s aspiration
in the most direct and simple way; Alma, the sculptor’s unfinished masterpiece, as yet little more than a formless piece of clay, is identified with his
own soul: jPorque esta estatua soy yo! / Mi obra estå dentro de mi . . . (744).
I cannot accept Barja’s assertion that the Alma referred to in this auto is Pedro
Martir’s daughter. While explicitly rejecting the solution, so important for a
time to Unamuno, of earthly immortality earned by artistic creation, Ganivet
employs the analogy with sculpture to convey Pedro Martir’s determination
to model his own soul via suffering and struggle in such a way that death
will ultimately be defeated. But the voice of insight is not to be stilled. Driven
to seek a finality within himself, Ganivet is unable to lose sight of the baselessness of the aspiration. Cecelia’s comment: Abrazado a su “Alma” estå . . . /
Es su obra predilecta . . . / y es solo barro liviano (745) reveals the underlying
recognition that no act of will can do the work of faith, outside which there
is no individual finality. Cecelia’s appraisal of the true position of Pedro Martir
is clear and significant. In stressing the difference between his incredulity and
that of the commonplace atheist or idolator she emphasizes with tragic insistence precisely those qualities: insight, will, adherence to a concept of absolute
truth, which in the absence of faith can only lead into deepening anguish.
Satanic pride is the root, for her, of Pedro Martir’s rejection of the faith and
Ganivets EL ESCULTOR DE SU ALMA
301
faith-consecrated love which she symbolizes and offers him. In the dialogue
which follows Pedro Martir accepts the conflict between his faith in his own
efforts and her faith in God and repeats his determination to take heaven by
storm: ;Con fuego, yunque y martillo / forjaré mi alma ideal! / . . . jPodrå
remontarse al Cielo / si tiene arranque y pujanza! / La fuerza yo se la doy /
con mis luchas en la Tierra (756). But the very violence of his reaction reveals
how nearly her comment touches his inner consciousness, and although he is
not dislodged from his vital conception: en este sonar incierto / del vivir, hay
algo cierto; / la lucha al alma acrisola (763), Pedro Martir’s final speech in
the auto ends on a note of anguish and despair.
The symbolism of Alma in the second auto is less clear. There is no longer
the possibility of a simple identification with the soul of Pedro Martir, though
the persistence of the name Alma, now no longer referring to a symbolic
sculpture but to a daughter, still implies a link of dependence. In effect Pedro
Martir’s earlier aspiration has begun to break down, its futility in the face of
death having become obvious. The defiant assertiveness which had sustained
him in his discussion with Cecelia, though flickering up momentarily during
his soliloquy near the beginning of the auto, gives way almost at once to
weariness and even acceptance of la nada on the other side of the grave. A
similar mood animates the décimas which mark the beginning of the auto's
climactic dialogue: ^Para qué tanto saber, / y luchar, y padecer, / si al cabo,
en la hora postrera, / cuando la muerte certera / me hiere, todo lo olvido?
(791). In both cases the dominating idea is not immortality, whether freely
given by God in return for faith, or wrested from him by individual exertion,
but envy of the inanimate which knows no fear of death: Torreones de la
Alhambra / . . . iQuién fuera como vosotros! (775-6); Quien pudiera rosa ser /
que en naciendo se deshace . . . (791). Fifteen years of suffering and effort have
served only to bring Pedro Martir closer to the realization of the unattainability
of his original ideal; small wonder if he now rebels against the human condition from which it springs. But now once more the balance swings back in
the direction of hope and a solution is sought, as in Unamuno’s Amor y peda-
gogia, through paternity. Alma now symbolizes not merely self-transcendence
via the spirit as before, but via the child, the creation of the flesh, also. An
image from the first auto: la lucha al alma acrisola / y, al cesar, el alma es sola /
cual diamante en un desierto. (763) re-emerges as a secondary symbol. The
diamond which Pedro Martir now gives to Alma is in effect his own soul
purified and embellished by suffering and struggle but only able to survive
302
Donald L. Shaw
and achieve finality through her. Hope lies in the union of the two and the
acceptance by Alma of the diamond, which will thus attain its final lasting
brilliance: Ponselo sobre el pecho / a mi hija idolatrada. / Verås brillar con
mås fuerza / del diamante la luz clara (795).
A difficult problem of interpretation, however, now arises from Pedro Mar­
tir’s promise to reveal to Alma, if she agrees to accept the diamond and participate in his lonely struggle: . . . una verdad: / i la sola que hay que saber! /
Verdad que yo he descubierto! / De los sabios ignorada (801). What is this
discovery, the fruit of Pedro Martir’s fifteen years of searching? It is not, as
he makes clear in the next line, simply the recognition that some form of im­
mortality is attainable through the agency of children. Its real nature is suggested later in the speech by the paradoxical reference to : el odio duro y cruel /
que a mi alma el mundo inspira. / Y este odio es amor santo, / y es la flor de
la belleza (801-2). To understand this curious assertion it is necessary to return
to the most clearly self-revealing pages which Ganivet ever wrote: Pio Cid’s
self-defence against Consuelo’s accusation of duality in the third trabajo of
Los trabajos del infatigable Plo Cid. Like Pedro Martir, Pio Cid reveals Ganivet’s
characteristic desire to evade the consequences of his own clear-sightedness,
and to twist his own admissions into some more hopeful formula at whatever
cost to logical consistency. Consuelo forces the issue by pointing to the obvious
contradiction between Pio Cid’s personal lack of faith, hope, illusion and joie
de vivre and his regenerative activities. In reply Pio Cid adopts three desperate
lines of argument, each plainly paradoxical, which seem to me relevant to the
understanding of the passage in El escultor de su alma just mentioned. The
first relates to the idea of death-in-life which Pio Cid had earlier introduced
in a dolora written for Consuelo. Just as previously at the end of La conquista
del reino de Maya Ganivet had forced himself to present destruction as the
fount of progress, so now he seriously endeavours to see death as the source
of life, “La muerte es fecunda y crea la vida, aunque sea solo para entretenerse
con ella; y un hombre que llevase la muerte absoluta dentro de su espiritu . . .
seria un creador portentoso” (255). The individual, in other words, who has
finally abandoned all personal hopes and ideals, by the very faet of his own
inner detachment and desolation is more fitted to serve an external ideal. This
first argument entails the second, which distinguishes between personal ideals,
which Ganivet professes to find false and mean, and human ideals which he
supports. Thirdly Ganivet approaches the question of finality. Although the
argument appears as a link between the first and second ones it is by far the
Ganivets EL ESCULTOR DE SU ALMA
303
most important of the three, and the weakest. If, it runs, existence is to be
conceived as a period of free endeavour bound in on both sides by la nada,
human ideals are to be preferred to personal ones.
Analysed into these terms, Pio Cid’s defence resolves itself into a tissue of
unfounded and sophistical assertions dictated less by conviction than by the
need to ward off the truth. The idea of a Creative death is a contradiction
poorly disguised by the shallow paradox in which it is expressed; the distinction
between ‘human’ and ‘personal’ ideals is artificial since it is manifestly impossible to separate one from the other; finally the third argument is not only
an utter nonsequitur logically, but also a rational absurdity. If life is so, then
any kind of altruistic endeavour is futile. Unamuno answers for us, “Si todos
estamos condenados a volver a la nada, si la humanidad es una procesion de
espectros que de la nada salen para volver en ella, el aliviar miserias y mejorar
la condicion temporal de los hombres no es otra cosa que hacerles la vida
mås facil y con ello la perspectiva mås sombria de perderla . . . si no hay fin
en la creacion, todo esto es un verdadero absurdo.” 11 Consciousness of this
absurdo is in faet the cause of Pedro Martir’s constant shifts of attitude. The
essence of his character, like that of Pio Cid and Ganivet himself, is the contra­
diction between the assumption that “ha habido un Creador que ha creado
cuanto existe de la nada o de la muerte para que acabe en la muerte y en la
nada, y entre estos dos términos fatales ha dejado que la vida se desarrolle
libremente” (225) and the yearning to escape its consequence: ultimate personal
annihilation. The odio-amor paradox in the second auto of El escultor de su
alma is merely a re-make of the death-life paradox of Pio Cid. It illustrates
the same attempt to bend insight back upon itself, to force what is negative
into some positive significance, to see recognition of the problem of existence
not as it was, for Unamuno and Baroja as well as for Ganivet, a shattering
experience, but as a liberation. This is the secret which is offered to Alma.
She refuses, replying that Pedro Martir’s proposal arises from pure egotism
and represents a satanic attempt to rival God. Both these charges ring true.
At the end of the auto Pedro Martir recognizes with anguish and bitterness
that mortality can only be warded off at the price of an unnatural absorption
of his daughter’s spirit in his own (symbolized in the text by his repressed
incestuous passion for her) and by elevating her into a position of pseudodivinity: Mas ^donde? ^en qué mi amor fundo / si estoy con el Cielo en guerra? /
11. M. de Unamuno, letter to Ilundain 3/1/1898, R U B A (July-September 1948) pp. 66-7.
304
Donald L. Shaw
jCreando un Dios en la Tierra! (802). The realization is followed by the symbo­
lic extinction of the light from on high, and the second auto ends like the first
in anguish.
The third and last auto reveals that the process is not yet complete. Desperately clinging to the last possibility which remains, Pedro Martir is now compelled to accept the implications previously disclosed and demands the absorp­
tion of Alma’s spirit into his own, the unification of their two souls which
will ensure his survival: . . . renazco en ti . . . / hallo en ti el sueno sonado /
. . . jNo te escapes de mis brazos! (808-9-10). This is the climax of the play,
the recognition that in Alma Pedro Martir has found the incarnate fulfilment
of his aspiration: i Tu eres mi alma creada! At the point of being forced to
abandon his ideal of fighting his own way into immortality, he discovers in
Alma the force of character necessary to take up the struggle afresh: i vivo al
ver que eres fuerte / y vas a matar la muerte! (813). With this discovery, the
former attempt to present his vital situation in positive terms, to confer value
on his own anguish, revives once more: Ignoras que el noble asiento / del
vivir es el tormento (814). In the struggle now taking place Alma is detached
from ‘material’ love for Aurelio (symbolizing normal human love, and acceptance of existence on conventional terms) and absorbed by the ‘ideal’ love of
her father into a total identification. But at this moment, with a cry of rapture,
she is literally petrified, transformed into a lifeless statue of stone.
The meaning of this petrification presents the final problem of interpretation
in the play. I cannot for a moment agree with the view of Seco de Lucena
expressed on page thirteen of the introduction of the first edition, namely that
“Pedro Martir . .. logra la dicha de morir esculpido en forma eterna, de obtener el reposo después de una vida de lucha constante, abismandose en la
contemplacion del ideal de la Belleza, que simboliza su hija Alma”. Whatever
Alma represents is certainly not adequately expressed by the word Belleza.
Indeed I suggest that aesthetic considerations, even regarded as providing relief
from, or in a sense a solution to, existential malaise, are here wholly irrelevant.
Nor can I support the view advanced by Lorca on pages 141 and 220 of his
book (see note 5 above) that Alma achieves immortality, while Pedro Martir
attains ‘una especie de divinizacion’. Two explanations of what has happened
are possible according to the reader’s decision as to which of Ganivet’s conflicting aspects of character was uppermost, his repressed desire for a religious
faith, fed by his yearning for immortality, or his revulsion against the human
condition caused by his inability to solve rationally the interrogations which
Ganivets EL ESCULTOR DE SU ALMA
305
it poses. My own view is that it was the latter. The petrification of Alma, at
the moment of yielding her spirit to her father’s, symbolizes Ganivet’s recogni­
tion that non-existence is preferable to existence on such terms, that is, of
struggle against the unknowable. The lesson of her sacrifice is not hope but
despair: Mås que la vida del hombre / vale la muerte en la piedra (816). Pedro
Martir accepts it, and with it the final abandonment of the attempt to impose
on life a finality which it does not possess on this side of the grave or on the
other. Life and death are equally unreal, but the realization makes preferable
death and the annihilation of consciousness: Si vida y muerte son sueno /
. . . i Yo doy mi vida de hombre / por sonar muerto en la piedra! (816). The
last scene reintroduces Cecelia with her lighted candle, the symbol of faith,
for a final attempt to press upon him the religious solution. But it is rejected
with blasphemous violence and the light falls extinguished from her hand.
Pedro Martir, left to the rapturous contemplation of his lifeless ideal, now
sanctified by Alma’s sacrifice, sinks slowly into “la muerte de piedra”, into
longed-for annihilation.
To conclude: Ganivet was living and, like his contemporaries of the Gene­
ration of 1898, knew that he was living at a time when traditional beliefs had
been overtaken by crisis. What makes the Generation important not merely
in Spanish literature, but in European literature, is their common recognition
at this very early date, compared with writers outside Spain, of the new existential situation which was emerging. Many definitions of it are current, but
none is more relevant to Ganivet than that proposed by Professor Eoff in his
recent book on the modern Spanish novel. “Contemporary man”, he writes,
“inclines toward the suspicion that a sinister unreason is dominant . . . he must
exist in an isolated rational loneliness that has the prospect of becoming an
eventual nothingness, or he must fall back to . . . a subrational and possibly
an irrational world . . . The God of old has disappeared leaving man by him­
self cogitating the mysterious abstraction that has taken his place . . . the
question haunts (man) with respect to the validity of the individual personality
in the sense of continuing self-consciousness after death.” 12 El Escultor de su
alma is an attempt to deal with this pressing question. In it we may discern
three main responses which illustrate the confiict in Ganivet’s mind. The first
of these is the orthodox religious solution represented by Cecelia. It is clear,
however, from his correspondence and from its treatment in the play that ac12. S. F. Eoff, The Modern Spanish Novel, New York University Press, 1961, pp. 13-16.
306
Donald L. Shaw
ceptance of this solution by Ganivet was never a serious possibility. The second
response is complex and fluetuating; its most positive aspect is expressed by
Pedro Martir’s final formulation of this ideal: Ser de mi alma creador, / crear
un alma inmortal / en mi alma terrenal, / ser yo mi propio escultor / con el
cincel del dolor; / solo, sin Dios . . . (809). But the whole development of the
play indicates Ganivet’s inability to find security on this basis. Flanking it
therefore we find acceptance of struggle and suffering as good in themselves,
allied to the proposition that possession of the kind of cold rational insight
which reveals the true facts of existence is somehow valuable in spite of its
conclusions, and confers a superior detachment and liberty. Beneath all, finally,
lies the recognition, against which Ganivet constantly struggled, but which in
the end prevailed, that the view of life laid bare by the collapse of faith is
intolerable. The impasse is basic to our modern sensibility and El escultor de
su alma, whatever its qualities or defects, is noteworthy as one of its earliest
open formulations.