By Isabel Cawthorn, PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham
Leopoldo Alas (‘Clarín’) is most prominently known as the author of La Regenta, which was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1885 and is now well ensconced in classic Spanish literature. However, aside from this realist novel, he also published hundreds of experimental short stories, of which ‘Cuervo’ was one, first appearing in the newspaper, La Justicia, in 1888. Clarín begins his short story, ‘Cuervo’, with the following lines: ‘El paisaje que se contempla desde la torre de la colegiata no tiene más defecto que el de parecer amanerado y casi casi de abanico. El pueblo, por dentro, es también risueño, y como está tan blanco, parece limpio’.[1] [‘The landscape that can be seen from the collegiate church has no other defect than appearing slightly affected and almost fan-like. The village itself is also pleasant, and because it is so white, it appears clean’.][2] The quotation foregrounds the importance of the concepts of cleanliness and ‘defect’ in relation to people and places. Specific to this story is how sanitation and disease are used to pathologise the past, making ‘Cuervo’ an interesting example of how, in late nineteenth-century Spain, pathology and illness were given a temporal significance.
The title of the story is also its central character, who could be described as a village shaman who arrives in the fictitious town of Laguna, posing as a rival to Resma, a doctor who had been called in response to Laguna’s high mortality rates. Resma’s role is clearly a medicalising one; however, after garnering the support of the public and the press, Cuervo successfully drives out Resma and his rationalising, hygienic discourse. Cuervo’s role, however, is starkly different to that of Resma. He is depicted as a death doctor, not a medical doctor, as his role is defined not by healing or curing, but by ‘aiding’ the process of death to regenerate Laguna. The reader quickly discovers that it is not actually the death of the moribund subject that Cuervo ‘aids’, but the death of their memory in the minds of their relatives. Cuervo’s raison d’être is the destruction of memory.
Cuervo’s approach to eliminating traces of the deceased is compared to cleaning: ‘Y seguía su inspección por la casa adelante, vertiendo vida por todas partes, borrando vestigios del otro, difunto, como desinfectando el aire con el ácido fénico de su espíritu incorruptible, al que no podía atacar la acción corrosiva de la idea de la muerte’ (376). [‘And he continued his inspection of the house, pouring life everywhere, erasing traces of the other, of the deceased, as if disinfecting the air with the carbolic acid of his incorruptible spirit, which could not be attacked by the corrosive action of the idea of death’.] The presence of death is considered destructive; the dead body becomes abhorrent and abject matter as it is ‘othered’ by Cuervo’s sterilising regime.
Degeneration by Max Nordau was published in 1892, the same year as Clarín’s ‘Cuervo’. It popularised a concept that had been spreading throughout Europe during the nineteenth-century. Disease and social ‘decline’, ‘decadence’ or ‘crisis’ became semantically intertwined in degeneration theory, as ‘many of those who sought to diagnose the causes of Spain’s decadence resorted to a sort of pathology of the nation; […] writers and politicians mobilized the language of medicine to describe the symptoms and remedies’.[3] Degeneration theory and ideas around decadence and decline meant that the terminology of contagion and containment, habitually associated with infection control, were deployed in order to regulate emotional responses to ‘crisis’ and ‘degeneration’. Hygienic discourses thus became methods of social management which aimed at ‘combining the physical and the moral in the governance and regulation of the mind, will, and body’,[4] in turn proposing that the triad of psychological, spiritual and corporeal authority over the population would regenerate Spain and drive out decay.
The cleaning that surrounds the attitudes towards death and oblivion in ‘Cuervo’ points to a wider discourse of social cleansing: ‘[…] la limpieza consistía en la ausencia de todo signo de muerte, de toda idea o sensación de descomposición, podredumbre o aniquilamiento’ (370) [‘[…] cleaning consisted of the absence of all signs of death, of any notion or sensation of decomposition, putrefaction, or expiration’]. Cuervo attempts to ‘clean up’ Laguna by expulsing ‘decaying’ or ‘disorderly’ agents in order to establish his regime of oblivion; in other words, that which belongs to the past, the deceased, is deemed threatening to his desire for social hygiene, social order, and, ultimately, a ‘social forgetting’. This forms part of an authoritarian conceptualisation of society as organic matter, whereby a policy of extracting or eliminating ‘rotten’ or ‘diseased’ elements becomes the modus operandi of Cuervo’s ‘regeneration’ of Laguna. As a result of the ‘social cleansing’ in ‘Cuervo’, the living exist in a sterile present shrouded in oblivion, the past (the deceased) having been silenced and eliminated:
Era un corruptor, pero sin echarlo de ver él, ni los que experimentaban su disolvente influencia. Ayudaba a olvidar; era un colaborador del tiempo. Como el tiempo por sí no es nada, como es sólo la forma de los sucesos, un hilo, Cuervo era para el olvido de eficacia más inmediata, pues presentaba de una vez, como un acumulador, la fuerza olvidadiza que los años van destilando gota a gota. (375)
[He was a corrupter, but neither he nor those who experienced his corroding influence realised it. He helped to forget; he was a collaborator of time. As time in itself is nothing, as it is only the form, or thread, of events, Cuervo was the most immediately effective force for oblivion. For he acted at once as an accumulator [of time], a forgetful force that the years gradually distil drop by drop.]
Clarín thereby critiques the pathologisation of society which attempts to jettison memories of the past to obsolescence, encouraging a forgetting that risks what might be called a temporal and historical unconsciousness.
What is interesting about ‘Cuervo’ is its exploration of the temporal and historical implications of death and disease as metaphors for perceived social, moral, or epistemological degeneration. In Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag discusses how the association of disease with wider socio-cultural ‘ills’ occurs as a product of profound temporal uneasiness bound up in a difficulty of locating the ‘modern’ present within wider spatiotemporal histories:
Our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our shallow attitude to death, for our anxieties about feeling, for our reckless improvident responses to our real ‘problems of growth’, for our inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasingly violent course of history.[5]
The idea that an obsession with death and disease, and their elimination, stems from the uneasiness that derives from temporal disorientation and the (mis)construction of the future, reveals Cuervo’s compulsion to drive out symbols of decay and disorder as a placebo for ‘progress’ and ‘regeneration’ against a backdrop of profound temporal and mnemonic fissures. A pathologised past, therefore, originates in a dysfunctional present as ‘preoccupation with decadence is only partially about the past, and has more to do with the present, with dissatisfaction over present realities, which are viewed through the prism of pastness’.[6] The disorderly present viewed as a transgressive past compels Cuervo to eliminate traces of memory; Clarín thus questions whether a regeneration project can be regenerative at all when it deprives a society of its ability to remember.
Isabel Cawthorn is writing a PhD thesis at the University of Birmingham on memory, modernity, and temporality in the short fiction of Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’ (1852-1901).
[1] Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’, Cuentos morales, ed., intro & notes by Carolyn Richmond (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000 [1st ed. 1892]), p. 363. Further references to ‘Cuervo’ are to this edition.
[2] All translations into English are my own.
[3] Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898-1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 66-67
[4] Rebecca Haidt, ‘Emotional Contagion in a Time of Cholera: Sympathy, Humanity, and Hygiene in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain’, in Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández and Jo Labanyi (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), pp. 77-94 (p. 77).
[5] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 87.
[6] Noël Valis, ‘Decadence and Innovation in fin de siglo Spain’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel, ed. by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 138-52 (p. 140).
Works Cited
Alas, Leopoldo, Cuentos morales, ed., intro & notes by Carolyn Richmond (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000 [1st ed. 1892])
Balfour, Sebastian, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898-1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
Haidt, Rebecca, ‘Emotional Contagion in a Time of Cholera: Sympathy, Humanity, and Hygiene in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain’, in Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández and Jo Labanyi (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), pp. 77-94
Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor (London: Penguin, 2002)
Valis, Noël, ‘Decadence and Innovation in fin de siglo Spain’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel, ed. by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 138-52