Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation
Date: 2017-03-16 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Performing Arts; Film; General; Social Science; History & Criticism; Literary Criticism; European; Photography; Techniques; Cinematography & Videography; Anthropology; Cultural & Social
Description: This book presents the first English introduction to the broad history of the Gothic mode in Spain. It focuses on key literary periods, such as Romanticism, the fin-de-siècle, spiritualist writings of the early-twentieth century, and the cinematic and literary booms of the 1970s and 2000s. With illustrative case studies, Aldana Reyes demonstrates how the Gothic mode has been a permanent yet ever-shifting fixture of the literary and cinematic landscape of Spain since the late-eighteenth century. He proposes that writers and filmmakers alike welcomed the Gothic as a liberating and transgressive
Publisher: Springer

SPANISH GOTHIC

National Identity, Collaboration
and Cultural Adaptation

Xavier Aldana Reyes

Palgrave Gothic

Series Editor

Clive Bloom

Middlesex University

London, United Kingdom

This series of gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many interrelated, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and horror and how that taste became, not only international (with a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested in the subject.

Editorial Advisory Board

Dr Ian Conrich, University of South Australia

Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK

Professor Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA

Professor Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK

Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK

Dr Alison Peirse, University of Yorkshire, UK

Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Professor William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK

More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14698

Xavier Aldana Reyes

Spanish Gothic

National Identity, Collaboration and

Cultural Adaptation

Xavier Aldana Reyes

Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester, United Kingdom

Palgrave Gothic

ISBN

978-1-137-30600-5 ISBN

978-1-137-30601-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932752

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover image © akg-images / Album / Oronoz. Francisco Goya, Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent (1788)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

This book is dedicated to my good friend Marina Cuní i Palacio.

Parem per on parem, ànimes bessones.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for their support of this project, which took the shape of a British Academy Small Grant (2014–16) to cover some vital research trips to key libraries and film archives in Madrid. It is safe to say that, without their help, this book would not exist in the shape that it does.

I would also like to thank the Gothic series editor, Clive Bloom, for his interest and encouragement, and Felicity Plester, Sophie Auld, Karina Jakupsdottir and Lina Aboujieb at Palgrave for their patience and support.

I would also like to thank Manchester Metropolitan University for covering the costs of reproducing the cover picture and AKG Images for their advice. I would especially like to thank Berthold Schoene and Jess Edwards at my institution for their confidence in me. A half-sabbatical term and marking relief granted me much-needed time to collate my research and complete the write-up process.

I would also like to thank the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional de España and the Filmoteca Española, especially Trinidad del Río Sánchez, whose assistance made a big difference to my research trips, and to Alicia Potes, who went above and beyond to help me with my press book enquiries.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would also like to thank Sara Martín Alegre, Ann Davies and Christopher Weimer for their advice on this project. I would like to thank Rocío Rødtjer in particular for many conversations on the Spanish Gothic and her many textual suggestions; her expertise has made this a better book. I am also very grateful to Miriam López Santos, David Roas and Abigail Lee Six for their inspiring work on the Gothic in Spain.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and partner for their enduring love and understanding. Muchas gracias one and all.

contents

1 Introduction: Defining and Delimiting the Spanish Gothic 1

Part I First Wave Gothic (1785–1834)

39

2 Imported Terrors and First Genre Hybrids

41

3 The Early Spanish Gothic Novel (1800–34)

63

Part II From Romanticism to the Fin-de- siècle (1834–1900) 85

4 Spanish Romanticism and the Gothic

87

5 From the 1860s to the Fin-de-Siècle: The Development
of the Gothic Short Story

109

Part III Modern and Contemporary Gothic Literature

(1900–2016)

133

6 The Twentieth Century (1900–75): Modernist

Spiritualism and Political Gothic

135
ix
x CONTENTS

7 From the Death of Franco to the Present: The

Establishment of Horror and the Gothic Auteur

159

Part IV Spanish Gothic Cinema (1906–2016)

183

8 From Segundo de Chomón to the Rise and

Fall of ‘Fantaterror’

185

9 The Post-Millennial Horror Revival: Auteurs,

Gothic (Dis)Continuities and National History

209

10 Conclusion: A Language of Collaboration and

Liberation

231

Index

235

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Defining and Delimiting
the Spanish Gothic

Unless readers of this book are art aficionados, it is likely they may not recognise the picture on its cover. Despite it being the work of Spain’s foremost Gothic painter, San Francisco de Borja y el moribundo impenitente /

Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent (1788) is not one of Francisco Goya’s best-known pieces. Its image, an unrepentant man in his final agonic throes seemingly being exorcised by a priest figure yielding a crucifix, is also not as universal as the one in his El sueño de la razón produce monstruos / The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797–99).1

I have chosen it, however, because it subtly captures the struggles that the Gothic has been perceived to experience in Spain throughout its history. In this country, the Gothic has, until recently, been thought of as an imported imaginative impossibility peremptorily censored by the zealous self-righteousness of Christian Catholicism, especially in its Inquisitorial guise, and later by the Francoist regime through similar ideological repressive processes. The dominant religious faith, one sanctioned by God in his divinity and embodied by the haloed priest in Goya’s painting, could be seen to have ‘exorcised’ its faithful national brethren and thus kept it from impish influences or superstitious pagan beliefs. The flames around the monstrous creatures make it clear, in case there was any doubt, that these are the minions of Hell. The Spanish Gothic, like these figures, has often been perceived in intellectual circles to have a touch of the frivolous, and even of the impure: there is no value to it, and its effects might even

© The Author(s) 2017

1

X. Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2_1

2 X. ALDANA REYES
be pernicious if left unpoliced. The logical resulting critical approach has been to ignore the Gothic, to bury it and, when uncovered, denigrate or belittle it. When compared to social realism, the Gothic has always been on the losing end of debates around artistic merit and nationality.

Goya’s painting is, of course, much more historically specific than I have thus far granted and, as has been noted, does not actually depict an exorcism (Heckes 1985). The priest portrayed on the right is Saint Francis Borgia, a Jesuit who, despite descending from a lineage associated with murder and debauchery, did become an emblem of virtue—he would be canonised in 1671—but crucially, he is not saving anyone. Instead, he stares in wonderment (as his left hand indicates) as his crucifix spurts blood onto the impenitent. The man’s soul is past saving; Jesus Christ on the cross is seemingly returning the blood spilled for him, unduly scorned, so that it may serve the sinner in his eternal unhappiness (see Schulz 1998: 666–8). The impish figures hovering over the impenitent’s head emphasise the man’s sure damnation. Under this new light, and for the sake of argument, the Gothic in Spain could be read as that which has deliberately doomed itself to the pursuit of transgression and of that which is not religiously or culturally sanctioned. Like the symbolic impenitent, in this book I will be reading the Spanish Gothic as an artistic mode in literature (prose) and film that has both survived against all odds and despite constant attempts to suppress it, and as one that, for its many practitioners, may have provided a liberating artistic and expressive language. 2 This is
where Goya’s painting may be read against the grain: it creates, at least in this writer, a pronounced sympathy for the devil. I want to know more about the choices the impenitent has made, about what led him to damnation and, above all, about the repressive system that decides what is worthy of celebration and preservation.

The notion that Spain never nurtured a Gothic tradition was, until the late noughties, widespread. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the Gothic is generally acknowledged to be a natural product of, or a reaction against, the return to a Renaissance aesthetic and cultural values during the Enlightenment. Since, as Felipe B. Pedraza (1981: 24) notes,

‘Spain lacked a powerful Enlightenment like those of Britain and France because, in previous centuries, the development of the Spanish bourgeoisie had been under attack and the modernisation of science, technology and ideas stalled’, Spain would have had no need to birth a Gothic mode.3

The Gothic is intrinsically connected to Protestant countries and a sense of social revolution—as has been indefatigably argued by critics from David

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ANISH GOTHIC 3

Punter (1980) and Victor Sage (1988) to Diane Long Hoeveler (2014)—
and ‘the [Spanish] aristocracy and the nobility […] did not suffer from decadence or social defeat, so it did not need to purge itself with the artistic catharsis of a bourgeois revolution that would take its social universe away and question the imaginary one’ (Ferreras 1991: 191). Where the Gothic novel made it to Spain, therefore, it must have done so in an ‘inau-thentic’ form, and should have left no legacy other than the recycling of certain ‘scenarios’ emptied out of their social and political power (Ferreras

1991: 196).

Neither would Spain have had a viable way to support a truly transgressive Gothic, given the cultural stronghold of the Inquisition and the government during the late-eighteenth century. Despite Spain being the background for many a British Gothic novel, the Gothic had no business there; the political and religious climate was not the most encouraging.4

Although it has been argued that Catholicism should not be made directly responsible for the possible lack of a horrific literature of the supernatural (Vigil 2000: 124), given that some of the greatest Spanish Gothic writers happened to be staunchly Catholic and that Catholicism privileges a form of engagement with the supernatural that eschews the real (especially materialism), it would be short-sighted not to acknowledge that religion has had a significant effect on the shape the Gothic has taken. To this we must add the fact that Spanish letters privilege social realism, which is seen as the country’s intrinsic writing mode, and that, like France and its roman noir, it has actively avoided using the term Gothic to describe its literature and cinema. Luis Vigil neatly encapsulates the problems at the heart of the critical devaluing of the Gothic:

Spain, despite being the home, for example, of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Espronceda, does not possess a fantastic literary tradition comparable to those of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic cultures. Our folklore is, however, certainly rich in the north of the peninsula. To cite the ‘meigas’ [witches], the ‘lobishome’ [werewolf], the Santa Compaña [the Holy Company], the Basque ‘akelarres’ [covens], rural exorcisms, ghost stories or the legends and local tales told by the flickering light of bonfires from generation to generation should have legitimised the development of a fantastic culture that, despite this, never manifested. Instead, what has been truly valued is realism, even hyperrealism; the fantastic, the unreal and the imaginary are the stuff of subculture. […] [S]omething atavistic must linger on in the spirit of Spanish culture if what seems to come naturally to the English, the German, to Central and Northern Europeans is here so drastically marginalised. For

4 X. ALDANA REYES
that reason, in my view, the topic of the fantastic has always been repudiated by the factual intellectual powers that be and the pseudo-intellectuals. (Vigil

2000: 54–5)

Although I will be covering the implications of privileging the ‘fantastic’

over the Gothic later, something typical of Continental European national traditions and which has, in those countries, superseded the revival of the Gothic in Anglo-American academia from 1980 onwards, Vigil’s point may be taken a step further. The perceived foreignness and reviling of the Gothic has led to a process of cultural amnesia that means the mode is still absent from general introductions to Spanish literature (see Labany 2010;

Franco 2010; Alvar et al. 2014). Where the Gothic is mentioned at all, it is registered as little more than an exception or curiosity (Álvarez Barrientos

2004b: 317–18; Llopis 2013: 73–7). 5 This book takes issue with this narrative, one that has started to be challenged in some academic quarters, by providing the first thorough introduction to the Gothic in Spain.

The main aim of this book is thus twofold: on the one hand, I seek to pave the way for further studies in the overlooked area of Iberian Gothic Studies. There is much yet to be researched, and I can only but probe the surface in the space I have. On the other hand, I want to introduce Gothic researchers and students to the exciting world of the Spanish Gothic.

Because the bulk of works that constitute it are still largely untranslated, this academic community is unlikely to have encountered the novels, short stories and films I discuss in this book. For them, I hope this book will serve as a first port of call and that it will give them a flavour for the way in which the Gothic developed in Spain. Similarly, with a few exceptions, Hispanicists may not have encountered the more obscure and least canonical of the texts included herein. With this in mind, I assume no prior knowledge of them. Since my audience is primarily Anglo-American and, by virtue of the nature of this publication, English-speaking, I have used English translations of all texts, where these were available, in the hope that readers will seek them out. Where no translation is available, I have provided my own.6

The Origins Of The spanish gOThic

There are other symbolical reasons why Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent offers a useful springboard for discussions of the Spanish Gothic. It was Goya’s first painting to include supernatural beings, which

INTRODUCTION: DEFINING AND DELIMITING THE SP

ANISH GOTHIC 5
became central to his later Pinturas negras / Black Paintings (1819–23), considered by some to be his best. The piece also dates from 1788, the same decade when the first translations of Gothic novels arrived in Spain.

Taken together, both events signal towards the beginning of a new period in Spanish art, especially literature, which, if largely stifled by censorship, begins to develop a Gothic penchant considerably earlier than was initially thought. I am taking the 1780s as the beginning of the Spanish Gothic because the slow but gradual introduction of the Gothic into Spain via translated editions, as well the cultural adaptation of its elements in adventure novels like El Valdemaro / Valdemaro (1792), explored in Chap. 2, constituted a minor revolution (López Santos 2010: 46). Although the role and existence of these early translations has been underplayed, and national production reduced to Agustín Pérez Zaragoza’s Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas / Funereal Gallery of Spectres and Bloody Shadows (1831), they constitute a very influential first point of contact. 7 The brief relaxation of publishing laws that was a result of the short-lived Liberal Triennium (1820–23) led to the immediate publication of the most controversial novels by Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and William Henry Ireland, which demonstrates that there was an appetite for the Gothic and its transgressions. Early Gothic writers, like the exiled Joseph Blanco White and Luis Gutiérrez, would continue this trend from abroad in their anticlerical works, and Pascual Pérez Rodríguez would duly develop his own version of the Radcliffean supernatural explained.

While the 1830s is when the Spanish Gothic really gained momentum, there are a number of largely forgotten texts that paved the way for this peak. Chapters 2 and 3 of this collection explore this relatively obscure period of the Spanish Gothic, which was nevertheless essential to its evolution and, in some instances, to its demarcation as a political or socially committed mode.

It is important at this stage to say a few words on my use of the Gothic.

Although initially very historically delineated by critics—thought to start in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (reprinted in a second edition in 1785 with the subtitle A Gothic Story) and ‘end’ in 1820, with the publication of the late Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin—Gothic scholars have increasingly begun to posit the Gothic as a transmedia, transnational and transhistorical ‘mode’ (Warwick 2007: 6). However, as has been argued in modern (post-1980) Gothic Studies, since the mode may be seen to have mutated throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Gothic trappings of the ‘first wave

6 X. ALDANA REYES

Gothic’ novel have become less binding. As Spooner (2006: 8) has claimed, the Gothic is in itself a revival form. In its contemporary manifestations, it continues to develop a number of themes that are as relevant today as they were in Walpole’s time: ‘the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present; the radically provisional or divided nature of the self; the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or “other”; the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased’ (Spooner

2006: 8). Fred Botting (2013: 2) even speaks of the Gothic as a ‘negative aesthetics’, because Gothic texts are ‘not beautiful, they display no harmony or proportion’, and ‘register revulsion, abhorrence, fear, disgust and terror’. For this reason, my focus is almost exclusively Spanish works that could constitute an ‘art of pleasurable fear’, or what, in the twentieth century, begins to be called horror fiction (see Aldana Reyes 2016b: 13–16). In other words, I privilege narratives (literary and filmic) that aim to have negative effects on the reader, even where I try to read beyond the elements that might Gothicise a text. My emphasis is less what makes a piece Gothic and more why this might be relevant, what it tells us about the construction of the Gothic in Spain at a particular time, as well as what type of critical or imaginative work its use enabled.

Although the Gothic is not dependent, like the fantastic, on supernatural or magical elements, it is not unusual for it to be described as such, especially given that the rise of supernatural fiction coincides with the beginnings of the Gothic as a literary formula (Clery 1995) and that the mode has been distinguished from visceral or explicit horror in its preference for the spectral and the uncanny (see Palmer 2012; van Elferen 2012; Watkiss 2012). Assuming this to be our guiding principle, there is a long tradition of ‘fantastic’ literature, or literature with fantastic elements, that dates back to at least the Castilian tales of Calila e Dimna / Calila and Dimna (1251), a collection of Orientalist exemplary tales, the Sendebar (1253) and Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora / The Miracles of Our Lady (c.1260), and later, to Don Juan Manuel’s El conde Lucanor / Count Lucanor (1330–35)—whose eleventh example features a necromancer (in this context, someone who performs black magic) and its forty-fifth a pact with the devil that inevitably leads a selfish man to his execution—and to Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita’s El libro de buen amor /

The Book of Good Love (1343). This type of medieval moralising prose often recurred to magic (fables or tales told by animals) or miracles in its attempt to get across particular messages about appropriate behaviours, and could take the shape of conversations. The equally medieval poem

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ANISH GOTHIC 7

Libro de Alexandre / Book of Alexandre (1178–c.1250?) and Gran conquista de ultramar / Big Overseas Conquest (1291–95), as well as Libro del caballero Zifar / Book of the Knight Zifar (c. 1300), also include a number of magical and supernatural phenomena, merged with historical events in the case of the former two, and the chivalric romance in the latter.

During the medieval period, the Matter of Britain—the literature and legends associated with Britain and Brittany, and especially the Arthurian cycle, which would lead to key works like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae / The History of the Kings of Britain (1136), the French Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette / Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (1177–81) and Perceval, le Conte du Graal / Perceval: Story of the Grail (1181–90), both by Chrétien de Troyes, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century) and eventually, Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)—started to influence Spanish letters.

Beginning with Pedro de Corral’s Crónica sarracina / Saracen Chronicle (1443, published in 1499) and swiftly followed by the epic tale Tirant lo Blanch (begun by Joanot Martorell but published and edited by Diego de Gumiel in 1490), Garci Rodríguez de Montalbo’s Los cuatro libros del vir-tuoso caballero Amadís de Gaula / The Four Books of the Virtuous Knight Amadís de Gaula (1508), which kick-started the found manuscript trope so popular in the Gothic novel, Beatriz Bernal’s Don Cristalián (1545), incidentally, the first European work of some length to be written by a woman, and Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de príncipes y caballeros / Mirror of Princes and Knights (1555), all manner of supernatural elements were introduced into the popular imaginary, from enchanted women who could turn into dragons to the ghosts of knights who would attempt to drag the unwary into boiling vats.

The formulaic nature of these supernatural happenings would be ridiculed, alongside the rest of the components of the chivalric romance, in the two parts of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605; 1615).

Significantly, chapter 17 of the first part sees Quixote mistaking an inn for an enchanted castle and, in a passage oddly reminiscent (in retrospect) of the beginning of Walpole’s Otranto, explaining how ‘a hand attached to some arm of some enormous giant came down, […] and delivered such a punch to [his] jaws that they are all bathed in blood’ (Cervantes

2003: 130). Not only does the hidalgo refer to the supernatural being as a

‘ghost’, but he also confuses an ordinary peace-officer with ‘an enchanted Moor’ (131). A similar scenario occurs in chapter 11 of the second part of the novel, in which a troupe of travelling actors are thought to be a

8 X. ALDANA REYES

Dantesque tableau Quixote compares to ‘Charon’s boat’ (553). The procession includes an interesting figure:

Driving the mules and acting as carter was a hideous demon. The cart was open, without any sides or awning. The first figure that presented itself to Don Quixote’s gaze was death itself, but with a human face […]. Don Quixote was somewhat ruffled, and fear was struck into Sancho’s heart. (553) This reaction, particularly Gothic when compared to the more generally fantastic giants of the mills chapter, is in keeping with Quixote’s wild imagination. An excess of fancy caused by exposure to chivalric romances leads to an unhinged perception of reality. Cervantes’s thorough deconstruction of this genre, however, is not just important because it shows its workings to have become fit for parody, with fantastic elements becoming mere opportunities for thrills and excitement. In its constant setting up of situations that point towards the exceptional—although the effect is gradually eroded, as readers know Quixote to be an unreliable narrator—Cervantes’s novel also constitutes an interesting proto-form of the supernatural explained we associate with Ann Radcliffe and other British Gothic writers. This format becomes particularly interesting in the chapter that takes place in the Cave of Montesinos (chapter 23 of the second part) where, among other things, Quixote encounters the talking corpse of a man who had his heart removed. Crucially, because the events cannot be disproven by the other characters, the book’s editor feels the need to intercede and explain to the reader that it is possible the story is ‘apocryphal’ (648). Yet, he hastens to add that he cannot confirm ‘that it is false or that it is true’ (648). As is characteristic of Don Quixote, and of Cervantes’s last novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda / The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617), which features witches and werewolves, what was once formula becomes something more ambiguous.

The ‘novela cortesana’ (courtly novel) that was popular during the seventeenth century made comparable use of unsettling events and, for some, may be a possible origin for the horror tale as we know it.8 For example, Joan Estruch (1982: 13, 12) refers to Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s ‘La fuerza del desengaño’ / ‘The Force of Disappointment’, a story in Sucesos y prodigios del amor / Events and Wonders of Love (1624), and to Gonzalo Céspedes Meneses’s ‘La historia del capitán Céspedes’ / ‘The Story of Captain Céspedes’, from Varia fortuna del soldado Píndaro / Adventures of the Soldier Píndaro (1626) as belonging to the ‘terrorífico’ (the horrific)

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ANISH GOTHIC 9
because, in them, there is a well-applied ‘horrific atmosphere’ and ‘a taste for the macabre that turn [them] into a curious precedent of the English Gothic novel’. Similarly, Gerardo González de Vega (2015: 381) sees in the work of the female writer María de Zayas, especially her collection Desengaños amorosos / Disillusionments of Love (1647), ‘a renovation of the horror genre’. Although I would hesitate to call this fiction ‘horrific’

in the strict sense, given that the genre did not exist then, there are elements in these stories that do pre-empt scenarios which would eventually crop up in the Gothic novel: excessive and gruesome examples of revenge and cruelty (a woman is almost completely walled-up in ‘La inocencia castigada’ / ‘Innocence Punished’ [1647], a scenario that Poe would later popularise in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ [1846]), black magic and macabre love spells (a species of voodoo doll subdues the will of the beloved in the same story by Zayas) and returns from the grave (the dead come back by God’s will to aid the living or request adequate burial in ‘El ahorcado servicial’ / ‘The Helpful Hangman’ (1647) and in ‘Casa de tales riesgos’ /

‘House of Such Perils’ (1647). Since the main focus of these stories is also romantic attachments and their tensions, some representatives of the

‘novela cortesana’ could indeed, like José de Cadalso’s unfinished Noches lúgubres / Lugubrious Nights, a lyrical poem written in 1771 (published 1789–90) influenced by Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742), be understood as clear precursors to the Gothic. However, it is just as important to note that it was not the main intention of the ‘novela cortesana’

or of Cadalso to begin a serious and sustained artistic project around the notion of pleasant fear. The gradual arrival of the Gothic novel, preceded in England by treatises on terror and the sublime by John and Anna

Laetitia Aikin (1773: 119–37) and Edmund Burke (1757), unequivocally
marks this fictional turn.

TerminOlOgical cOmplicaTiOns: The fanTasTic
versus gOThic

One of the main difficulties attending anyone aiming to explore the history of the Spanish Gothic is the country’s reluctance to use this word to describe national outputs that would, if considered under the parameters by which the Gothic is measured in Anglophone countries, be found to be part of the canon in either content or intent. Much like the French have privileged terms like ‘roman noir’ or ‘fantastique’ to refer to texts that would sometimes fall squarely within what Anglo-Americans call the

10 X. ALDANA REYES

Gothic, Spain has favoured other words to define its engagement with the literature of fear and the supernatural. In some cases, this is understand-able. For example, the ‘cristiano maravilloso’ (the Christian supernatural) is strongly connected to Spain’s Catholic miracle-based oral tradition and to the historical ballads of the ‘literatura de cordel’ (literally, ‘literature
on a string’ because of the cheap way in which it was published).9 More importantly, as a genre, the ‘cristiano maravilloso’ eschews the horrific effects of the Gothic in lieu of religious awe and the reification of belief in the power of divine intervention, something that clearly separates it from the literature of fear. Supernatural fiction, very often including either Gothic creatures / situations or else seeking to generate fear, is almost ineluctably called ‘fantastic’ in the Todorovian sense. In the twenty-first century, where the Gothic is used at all, it normally defines a type of horror text, for example, the Gothic horror of Alejandro Amenábar’s Los otros

/ The Others (2001).10 Horror, or its Spanish variant ‘terror’, has gradually taken over as a recognisable literary and cinematic genre in the twenty-first century, as I go on to cover in Chap. 9, with Gothic understood as a distinct subgenre.11

Readers may naturally ask why I would want to rescue a term that appears to have been of little use to the critics and writers of Spain. How can the Gothic be helpful in navigating literary and filmic outputs that have generally been ascribed to other genres or subgenres? There are three main reasons. First, there are some methodological problems with current theorisations of the type of literature of fear analysed as ‘fantastic’. The predominance of this term to describe what would be more intuitively characterised as terror or horror denies the Gothic its eminently transhistorical, transmedial and transgeneric nature, and also confuses overall effect with the intrinsic nature of the fantastic. Recuperating a Spanish Gothic tradition allows me to situate the referential works of contemporary writers like Carlos Ruiz Zafón on a continuum with the legends of Bécquer, with which it shares its dark sensibility. Second, looking at the Gothic as a form of cultural adaptation can help it shake off the referential ties manifest in the ‘influence model’, whereby, if Spain is seen to develop a clearly defined Gothic, it is always under external parameters that are strictly not the country’s own. By beginning to challenge this position and argue for the possibility of a Spanish Gothic that both draws from foreign models and develops them in nationally-specific ways, we may begin to picture it as the truly transnational mode it has become. The Gothic is easily adaptable by a process of assimilation that maps itself onto

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the country’s psyche and literary tendencies to the point where it may become assimilated, even recognised under different labels. Reclaiming the Spanish Gothic, then, is not about giving things a different name for the sake of it, but about fostering intertextuality and the highly personal value of recurring elements, tropes and images. Third, the process of rethinking Spanish literary canons according to Gothic coordinates and terminology is already taking place through the work of scholars like Abigail Lee Six and Ann Davies (and Ángel Sala, in the Spanish context), as I will show later in this chapter.

Let me focus on the need to challenge the popular notion of the fantastic as it has been conceived in the predominant critical models used to define some of the literature that will be considered Gothic in this book (Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rafael Serrano Alcázar or Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, to name a few). David Roas, the main theorist of the fantastic in Spain and true modern pioneer of the recuperation of this literature there, has clearly set out its basic tenets in various publications. For him (2011: 10, 9), the fantastic is not a genre but an ‘aesthetic category’—insofar as it can be applied to different media—that functions ‘as a discourse in constant intertextual relationship with that other discourse which is reality, understood always a cultural construction’. Taking his cues from Tzvetan Todorov (1975) and, to a certain extent, Roger Caillois (1965)

and Rosemary Jackson (1981), the fantastic is defined by ‘the problematic confrontation between the real and the impossible’, has a ‘subversive ethos that, above all, seeks to transgress the homogenising understanding of reason which organises our perception of the world and ourselves’, and has the ‘fundamental effect’ of generating ‘worry’ or ‘restlessness’ (‘inqui-
etud’) (Roas 2011: 14, 88). The key aspect of this definition is the role the fantastic plays as something impossible which nevertheless manifests in the real world, a world that coincides, empirically and roughly, with that of the reader. This is what distinguishes this category from that of the

‘maravilloso’ (fantasy literature), which takes place in a different reality and in one where, therefore, there is ‘no rupture with the systems we have developed to understand and explain reality’ (47). The difference is that between texts like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), seen as fantastic because the Count represents an irruption of the impossible into the reality of Victorian England, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954), a ‘maravilloso’ text because Middle Earth is a reality in which orcs and hobbits do not suppose a transgression of the laws of intradiegetic reality.

Roas situates the rise of the fantastic in the eighteenth century, as this is

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the time when science, religion and superstition began to separate, reason to dominate, and the sublime developed as an aesthetic discourse. The Gothic novel is seen as the first example of the fantastic, but one which is left behind in the nineteenth century, when ‘readers [grow] tired of those macabre stories set in ruinous castle and the foggy Middle Ages, too far away in time to be taken seriously’ (Roas 2011: 20), and Romantic writers relocate the fantastic to the present day and the mundane. For Roas (20), Hoffmann starts this process, which culminates with the work of Poe, and later, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant.

There are various problems with such a theory of the fantastic. First, the term ‘fantastic’, however popular in some academic circles, is still not widely used by the average reader to refer to a novel like Dracula. In fact, the term ‘fantastic’ (as in, ‘una novela fantástica’, a fantastic novel) has a completely different meaning in the publishing world, where it defines, precisely, the epic fantasies of a writer like Tolkien.12 I therefore find it very counter-intuitive as a term, even if, as Roas proposes, the category is not intended to define a genre. 13 Second, the fantastic seems to confuse overall
fictional effect—say, the emotions connected to ‘horror’ that define this genre—with the effect that the individual fantastic elements aim to have.

The work of Jorge Luis Borges, read by Roas as fantastic, is never overtly horrific or indeed interested in creating a sense of restlessness comparable to Count Dracula’s uncanny presence. 14 More importantly, if effect really is the defining factor of the fantastic, then the genre par excellence that exploits feelings connected to fear is horror, and seems a much more obvious choice of a word to define texts seeking to generate emotional states like dread, shock or abject repulsion. 15 Third, Roas’s proposition that the fantastic evolves in the nineteenth century by turning its back to the settings of the Gothic novel both historicises the Gothic in a way that goes against its remarkable capacity for adaptation, and remains oblivious to the fact that Victorian texts like Dracula or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) are now two of the most recognisable Gothic texts for contemporary readers (alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818]), way ahead of the still comparatively little-known novels of Lewis or Maturin. I struggle to see why referring to Dracula as a fantastic text is useful, especially when we take into consideration the fact that the novel purposely draws on heavily Gothic iconography.

These types of taxonomic imprecisions lead to fantastic readings of stories with very different readerly purposes, like Benito Pérez Galdós’s ‘Celín’

(1879), an oneiric allegory, or Antonio Ros de Olano’s playful ‘Maese

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Cornelio Tácito’ (1868). Instead, I think it is more productive to see the Gothic as itself developing through exactly the fantastic parameters Roas identifies (internalisation, relocation to urban settings and everyday life) in the nineteenth century. Although the Gothic is not strictly a genre but a mode that, predominantly, relies on a set number of tropes, characters and situations, I will be using it throughout precisely because, when paired with horror, it offers a stronger thematic and effective grounding and more overtly defines a literature and cinema of fear. What I therefore also hope to do with this book is to mark out the type of Gothic horror texts that have been read as fantastic, by including them in my study, from those that simply utilise fantastic or supernatural elements yet do not use them for the overall purpose of creating fear. The latter would be best served by a term like ‘supernatural fiction’, and belong in a different book.

I cannot finish a consideration of the inherently Spanish terminology surrounding the Gothic without referring to the ‘esperpento’, a literary style connected to the canonical writer Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who developed it in his play Luces de bohemia / Bohemian Lights (1920). 16 Overlapping strongly with the grotesque and the carnivalesque, and defined as ‘a concave carnival mirror in which the boundaries of the possible and the credible blur’ (Chandler and Schwartz 1991: 82), the esperpento works as social and political critique via hyperbole or exaggeration. Allegedly ascribing the genesis of the esperpento to Francisco de Quevedo and Goya, Valle-Inclán suggested that the style allowed artists to

‘use […] the deforming mirror and its grotesque projections to come to grips with a more truthful and profound reality’ (Chandler and Schwartz

1991: 82). Although I do not wish to deny the esperpento its value within the Spanish literary context, it is safe to say that the term is predominantly used when referring to Valle-Inclán’s oeuvre, and that it has not replaced the ‘grotesque’ and the ‘carnivalesque’, readily recognised and used by Hispanic scholars, Gothic or otherwise, to refer to similar aesthetic concerns and critical purposes. For this reason, and because I do not think fear lies at the heart of the esperpento, I am not considering it in this book.

spanish gOThic cinema

The notion of a Spanish Gothic cinema is, for the reasons highlighted above, similarly problematic, and needs to be thoroughly qualified and contextualised before I begin proposing a tentative canon and history.

While it is possible to, retrospectively, find aesthetic traits that betray a

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Gothic sensibility—a predominance of dark settings or of stock characters and situations, reliance on chiaroscuro techniques, the generation of suspenseful atmospheres, a desire to scare, the presence of apparitions—there has never been an autochthonous, self-acknowledged form of Gothic

Spanish cinema. Renowned film critic Ángel Sala (2010: 321–2) sees in

Marcelino pan y vino / The Miracle of Marcelino (Ladislao Vadja, 1955) or El extraño viaje / Strange Voyage (Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1964) a

‘Gothic of clear Hispanic origin with a strong national-Catholic component’, but only after having made it categorically clear that ‘a big part of Spanish Gothic cinema does not have national points of reference but is often a “costumbrist” translation of imported models’.17 It is true that, referring to Marcelino or Strange Voyage as Gothic is helpful insofar as it allows us to connect certain thematic and cinematographic concerns to a recognisable transnational and transhistorical tradition. This way we may engage with how these films use characters like the double, the ghost or the evil monk in order to explore native anxieties connected to Spain’s long history of religious and political oppression. However, it is difficult to do so without feeling a slight pang of insincerity: the films were not marketed as Gothic or could, overall, be generically ascribed as such—

Marcelino is a religious melodrama and part of the child-star system of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Strange Voyage is more readily a suspense thriller—neither was there an established Spanish Gothic cinematic tradi-
tion that the filmmakers could have used as a visual template.18 Gothic conventions were therefore assimilated and adapted from abroad.

We can see a direct influence of Universal Horror in Spanish productions like El clavo / The Nail (Rafael Gil, 1944), based on the Pedro Antonio de Alarcón short story of the same title, and La torre de los siete jorobados

/ The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (Edgar Neville, 1944), based on the novel by Emilio Carrère analysed in Chap. 6, as Sala also proposes, but then neither were Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) or Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) advertised as Gothic films. 19 If anything, these Spanish films
were Gothic-inflected horror, via adaptation. Spanish Gothic, then, could more productively be said to have borrowed horror filmic techniques and explored similar thematic terrain in its own Gothic-flavoured national stories. Whether these films constitute pieces of Gothic cinema will depend on how elastic the word is for readers and on whether they connect the Gothic to emotional or affective imperatives. In a sense, I think it is more appropriate to view a text like Marcelino as a religious melodrama with Gothic touches than a straightforward Gothic horror film, as Marcelino’s

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ultimate aim is not to scare the viewer (if certain scenes might do so). For this reason, but also because Gothic is an aesthetic and tropic marker and hence capable of appearing in many a genre, it will always be difficult to speak of a strictly Gothic tradition of Spanish cinema. In the most obvious cases, as in that of La marca del hombre lobo / Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (Enrique López Eguiluz, 1968), we may identify films that are actively referential because they either use or expand well-known myths or monsters (Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the wolf man, the mummy or the zombie, among others), either letting them remain foreign, or else adapting them to a Spanish context. 20

However, even in the case of these relatively straightforward referential films— Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror includes a Christopher Lee-inspired Count Dracula in the shape of Dr Janos Mikhelov (Julián Ugarte), and very obviously draws its imagery from Universal and Hammer’s respective horror cycles—nomenclature is still far from clean-cut. In fact, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror would be more readily defined in Spain as

‘fantaterror’ or ‘fantaterrorífico’ cinema (a portmanteau of the words

‘fantastic’ and ‘terror’, understood here as supernatural horror) than as Gothic horror. 21 Fantaterror as a term, apart from acknowledging a primarily fantastic form of horror cinema (i.e., one that is distinct from the ‘giallo’), has been useful because it points towards the industrial context in which these films were made. Produced during the golden age of Spanish horror, which ran from the late 1960s to the late 1970s (1980, for some), with 1972 being the standout year, the films share a number of common traits: they were, partly, money-making and highly exportable ventures, made cheaply, filmed with either foreign, mixed or national (dubbed) casts and, in general, leaned towards the exploitative side of the horrific. The term fantaterror has also therefore lingered in the cinematic subculture likely to collect and celebrate this output, even if ‘contemporary horror’ is still preferred to refer to horror in its post-The Others revival period. This may be the case because production values have changed, as have parameters of cinematic censorship, which constrained production in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, the term Gothic horror is, at the time of writing, rarer than ‘(cine de) terror español’ (Spanish horror cinema). 22 Of course, this may well be connected to the relative newness of ‘Gothic’ as a modal artistic marker in the Spanish academic world. The relative ease with which the same word is used in Anglo-American scholarship is heir to the strong activity in this area since the early 1990s, when the International Gothic Association was formed, and

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especially 1999, when the journal Gothic Studies, housed at Manchester University Press, was founded. 23 Proof of this is the very book readers are holding in their hands, which comes from my own investment in this research culture, or the work of Abigail Lee Six (2010) and Ann Davies

(2016a, 2016b), also working within the British academic system. Anglo-American academia is less reluctant to embrace the critical possibilities of the Gothic or to mobilise readings of Spanish cinema that remove the mode from its strictly historical literary context. This is not to say that

‘Gothic’ is the only label being employed to refer to films like [•REC]

(Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007), which continue to be studied as ‘horror’ (see Lázaro-Reboll 2012).

Spanish Gothic cinema, like Spanish Gothic fiction, has suffered from a similar process of cultural, social and political censorship. Since the development of cinema only occurs in the late-nineteenth century, Spanish Gothic cinema was not subject to the same form of religious control as imported and translated Gothic novels were during the late Inquisitorial period and under publishing laws that made it compulsory for specialised panels to approve new books. However, although publishing regulations had become less stringent by the beginning of the twentieth century, it would be wrong to suppose that a strong and repressive religious ideology did not affect Spain’s filmic production. In fact, as Carlos Aguilar (1999: 16) has noted, the ‘crudity’ that has been seen to tie together the films that constitute the Spanish Gothic cinema canon may be a result of the

‘political-cultural development of the country throughout so many centuries of intransigent Catholic hegemony, with everything this entails with regards to artistic mentality, popular taste and outlook on life’. Moreover, as will become clear in Chap. 7, where I cover the history of Spanish Gothic cinema up until the fall of fantaterror in the late 1970s, the most notorious and well-known period for Gothic horror in Spain coincided with the tail end of a repressive totalitarian government, Franco’s dictatorship, which had a comparable grasp over popular culture and the film industry.24 As with its literary counterpart, Spanish Gothic could be seen, despite its connection to the exploitation cycle of the 1970s, as a liberating cinematic language, particularly given its conditions of production.

More importantly, its existence is a testament to the need and taste for the Gothic in Spain; Spanish Gothic cinema blossomed despite social and political circumstances that made its production and exhibition difficult and risky.

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Finally, it is worth noting that Spanish Gothic cinema, like Spanish Gothic fiction more broadly, is stuck in a dynamic that forces films to either attempt to be an endemic product of interest to a national market, or else to compete with foreign markets, especially Hollywood, whose production budgets and circumstances are very different. This is beginning to change, with someone like Juan Antonio Bayona now working in the US industry. Spanish Gothic horror cinema has two choices: to mimic international formulas, as it did during its fantaterror period (and thus lose part of its Spanishness), or else look and feel Spanish but risk limiting itself to a national market still sceptical of horror. To make matters worse, critics continue to privilege Spanish horror that has an international look, appeal and projection. For example, Pedrero Santos (2008: 325), in a
chapter covering fantaterror, praises the quality of La residencia / The House that Screamed (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1969) not just because it sold an alleged 3 million tickets (more than any other horror film in 1960s Spain), but because ‘[i]ts photography, cast, production values and mise-en-scène make one think of a film made in Hollywood or of British settings’. Interestingly, the same critic goes on to praise the film’s inherent Spanishness, which he associates with its ‘lascivious details’ (325), as if the exploitative quality of the film was not also perceptible in the work of Italian and French films of the time. As a result, only two other films, Pánico en el Transiberiano / Horror Express (Eugenio Martín, 1972) and No profanar el sueño de los muertos / The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974), the most international and less Spanish-looking of the fantaterror era, are seen to be worthy of mention. 25
recuperaTing The spanish gOThic

Spanish Gothic seeks to be the first thorough, if not exhaustive, study of the Gothic in Spain from 1788 to the present, but it also aims to contribute to our understanding of the Gothic mode in a global context. The rise of Gothic Studies in the Anglo-American world meant that the Gothic of those countries was quickly mapped out, from surveys to monographs on key periods, texts or writers. 26 Attempts to recover other forms of national Gothics swiftly followed in the 2000s. Among others, key works include Neil Cornwell’s chapter on ‘European Gothic’ for David Punter’s A Companion to the Gothic (2000); Terry Hale’s chapter on French and German Gothic for Jerrold E. Hogle’s The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002); Hogle’s own book on Gaston Leroux’s Phantom

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of the Opera (2002); Avril Horner’s edited collection European Gothic

(2002), which included articles on French, Russian, Polish and Spanish Gothic; Daniel Hall’s ground-breaking monograph French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (2005); Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik’s edited collection Le Gothic (2008), which began to make
a case for the ‘cross-fertilization [that] has taken place in Gothic writing from Europe and the USA over the last two centuries’, and suggested that we need to find a model that does not rely on a view of non-Anglo-American Gothics as simple cases of ‘mimicry’; Barry Murnane’s German-
language volume on Kafka’s Gothic (2008) or Maria Purves’s The Gothic and Catholicism (2009). Publications in the 2010s have intensified the interest in European Gothic, especially after the success of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research network ‘Global Gothic’, led by Glennis Byron from 2008 to 2009 and which pushed the agenda for a more international outlook on the Gothic, something already
begun by the rise of postcolonial Gothic(s).27 The result has been a number of country-specific volumes, like Andrew Cusack and Barry Murnane’s edited collection on German Gothic, Popular Revenants (2012), Stefan

Andriopoulos’s Ghostly Apparitions (2013) and Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie’s edited collection Irish Gothics (2014); of books turning to the European Gothic more generally or to areas of contact between countries, like Diane Long Hoeveler’s Gothic Riffs (2010), Angela

Wright’s Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 (2013b), Matthew Gibson’s The Fantastic and European Gothic (2013) and Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall’s Transnational Gothic (2013); and of studies
of regional Gothics, like Monica Germanà’s Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (2010), Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (2013) and Timothy C. Baker’s Contemporary Scottish Gothic (2014). In all these volumes, the main driving force has not just been to recuperate marginalised or forgotten national-specific forms of the Gothic but to ‘explore the central role that cross-cultural exchange play[s] in [its] development’ (Marshall and Elbert 2013: 1), whether this be through a focus on stand-out texts or on
the significance of translations.28

The Spanish Gothic has not been forgotten, but it is probably fair to say that its study has lagged behind when compared to the French and the German Gothic, undoubtedly for the reasons I have glossed and which have led to the perception that it either never existed or was not influential and only negligently practised by Spanish writers. 29 This is not to say that
the Spanish Gothic has been ignored completely, especially in Spanish-

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language publications. After being reduced to the work of Agustín Pérez Zaragoza in larger surveys of the eighteenth-century novel by critics like José F. Montesinos (1955) or Juan Ignacio Ferreras (1973), early sketches of the Gothic and horror began to appear, especially from the 1980s onwards, such as those by Guillermo Carnero (1983, 1993), María José Alonso Seoane (1985), Javier Herrero (1988), Nigel Glendinning (1994),

Enrique Rubio Cremades (1997) and Luis Alberto Cuenca (1994, 1995),
albeit sometimes as part of wider discussions on the fantastic. Most of this criticism intended to map out the limits and limitations of the Gothic in the Spanish context, and all assumed that there was scarce national interest in this literary mode. It would not be until the 2000s and David Roas’s path-opening study, De la maravilla al horror / From Miracle to Horror (2006), that the Spanish Gothic would be explored in more depth, from Gothic translations to overviews of Gothic drama and work from national
writers, as well as the context in which they developed.30 His historicist approach, which takes the Gothic to end in the early-nineteenth century, means that his focus after 1830 becomes the ‘fantastic’ tale. Roas’s focus on the ominous ensures that his survey of this area is relevant, as supernatural transgression (sometimes aligned with horror) is central to his conception of the fantastic. Unfortunately, this study has not been translated into English and is out of circulation at the time of writing.

Two studies that have centred more strongly on the Spanish Gothic (as opposed to the fantastic) were published in 2010 and these, together with Roas’s, have been most thorough in their digging up of relevant material. The first is Miriam López Santos’s invaluable survey of the Gothic novel in Spain from 1788 to 1833, which contains the most detailed bib-liography of early translated Gothic novels and original Spanish Gothic fiction yet. Apart from producing an indispensable and well-researched sourcebook and guide for beginners, López Santos (2010: 15) makes a
paradigm- shifting proposition: not only was the Gothic not marginalised in Spain, but, considering the fierce censorship it had to sidestep, it was actually quite popular. López Santos also identifies three stages in the adaptation, or process of ‘generic transference’ (14), as she calls it, of the Gothic novel to the Spanish context: a first manifestation of the Gothic as a specific atmosphere and at the level of narrative staging; a second phase where the British and French Gothic novel is heavily translated; and a third period where Spanish writers create their own Gothic novels. Significantly, this means that the ‘imitation’ (13) model must be left behind in favour of one that acknowledges the Gothic novel in Spain as

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‘imported, of course, but accepted as our own’ (14). For López Santos, the specificity of the Spanish Gothic resides in its preference for a type of

‘monstrosity’ that is human in essence. As she puts it, ‘if they [Spanish Gothic writers] rummaged in human consciousness and experimented with their most shameful terrors, they preferred to resort to everyday ones, which, in the case of the Spanish was more connected to the despotism of kings, but also that of parents, with inquisitorial tortures, with savage revenge’ (280). However, López Santos’s book ends abruptly in 1833 with the death of Fernando VII, and thus fails to account for the legacy of the Gothic beyond this first phase.

In Gothic Terrors (2010), Abigail Lee Six, more attuned to the transhistorical approach to the Gothic in vogue in other country-specific studies of the mode, suggests that, by the 1840s, the Gothic had become well-known, but was not very respectable when compared to historical Romanticism, from which it was distinguished. Although Lee Six goes on to explore canonical writers who have produced very Gothic texts, such as José de Espronceda or Emilia Pardo Bazán, and her book moves forward to more contemporary periods to consider the work of writers like Espido Freire or Javier García Sánchez, there is a curious reluctance, as in older criticism, to acknowledge the intrinsic Spanishness of the Spanish Gothic. Instead, Lee Six (2010: 15) focuses on examples from social realism to
argu[e] that even in texts that do not display the obvious outer signals of the mode and that may be principally acknowledging another type of agenda, authors draw on it selectively, utilizing Gothic motifs with a range of effects, such as metaphorical, parodic, or cautionary.

Even though it is undeniable that the Gothic does not find a home in Spain in the same context and circumstances as the British or US

Gothic did, Lee Six’s approach, which focuses on three Gothic tropes—
incarceration, duplication and bloodlust—necessarily paints a partial picture. For one thing, she does not see in Spain’s national production a deliberate attempt to engage with the Gothic tradition specifically, and thus runs the risk of fragmenting the Gothic into constitutive elements to the point where one may begin to question the overall Gothicity of individual texts. Is the use of the double, for example, an inherent Gothic marker, even when the intention of a text is not to scare? Does incarceration make a text inherently Gothic? Rather, the study of Gothic elements

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allows Lee Six to show how given texts ‘can shed light on both universal anxieties relating to the human condition itself and particular preoccupations of the times and of the authors concerned’ (147). What is still missing is a wider narrative about what the Spanish Gothic has offered writers through its specific form and content, a narrative, in other words, that connects the various uses of the Gothic and traces its development beyond atomised elements.

Ann Davies, in the first monograph-length study of the Contemporary Spanish Gothic has been more explicit in suggesting what may be at stake in the Spanish Gothic, as well as what may be of interest in it for Gothic Studies more generally. Defining the Gothic as a ‘nexus’ that travels through time, rather than a specific national form of filmmaking or artistic
practice, Davies (2016b: 171) suggests that

[t]his way of considering the Gothic would again be a positive one, seeing it as one genus sharing DNA but changing according to its environment.

As in plants, so the Spanish Gothic has also lain dormant or hidden away on occasion, only to flower and flourish sporadically. This again raises doubts about how far we can claim the Gothic to be ubiquitous. The Gothic may be everywhere but it is not everywhere at once, while its specificities can vary from location to location without totally losing touch with its origins or with other Gothic flowerings elsewhere. There is a sense of cross-pollination occurring frequently but not necessarily continuously. The nexus, then, is a more optimistic way of perceiving and studying the Gothic; and it enables us to see how the Gothic works in a particular culture without having to be too prescriptive as to where the boundaries of that culture lie. The concepts of circulation and cultural flow do not assume a Gothic that is ever on the move but one that comes to rest here and there, rather like the copies of Las nueve puertas that move around Europe in El club Dumas. At these resting places and crossing points the Gothic can be seen in operation. The seeds and spores of the Gothic can also come to rest in any discipline, offering new permutations on the original Gothic DNA.

In this passage, Davies expands her thoughts on the circulation of the Gothic as ‘a mode that crosses national borders and indeed takes no notice of them’ (1). Its imagery and tropes, from the medicalised body to the haunted house, goes beyond the national specificity of the dominant cultures, the British and the American. This approach, I would argue, necessarily pushes us to move beyond the imitation models too, as the Spanish Gothic becomes more than an adapted imported form, a virus able to

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infect back. This is perhaps more obvious in the cinematic context, where films like [•REC] can be seen to have shaped the look of found footage horror. However, the same cannot be said for early Spanish Gothic literature, which has not always been translated and has not been as influential as that of Britain or the USA. Beyond Don Juan, it is hard to think of a Spanish Gothic figure (produced by a Spaniard) that has become part of the European imagination. And yet, this should not detract from the value the Gothic has had for Spanish writers, who have found in it a less travelled and more transgressive road than that of state-sanctioned art.

naTiOnal idenTiTy, cOllabOraTiOn and culTural
adapTaTiOn

Following critics like Roas, López Santos, Lee Six and Davies, Spanish Gothic is keen to tread the line between the national, the transnational and the international and thus to lay bare exactly what the Gothic, as an imported artistic language that can nevertheless be recycled and even developed by countries where it was not initially forged, can tell us about the writers who decided to turn to it as a means of artistic expression. In other words, looking into what made the Gothic exciting and appealing will necessarily help us attain a fuller understanding of the contexts in which given writers and filmmakers were operating, as well as the potential sense of national identity that pervades the texts they produced. This is in itself a complex matter, least of all because Spain has not been a solid country with a coherent sense of national consciousness for a long time, as modern conflicts and political unrest from the Basque country and Catalonia, which held an independence referendum in 2014, have made clear (see Álvarez-Junco 2011). These subdivisions are pertinent at the cultural level too, so that it would be perfectly legitimate to argue that Galicia, with a very rich folkloric tradition that mixes Celtic, Germanic, Roman and Christian mythologies, is markedly different from that of Andalusia. I am aware of this regional diversity (being myself of Catalan extraction), and, while I think that it would be perfectly possible to discuss discrete regional forms of the Gothic, I am choosing to focus on the Spanish context more generally. This is not simply because the idea of a dis-united, potentially federal, Spain was not the dominant national model in 1788, but also because I find enough connections between regional artists and Spanish identity that individual works by, say, a Valencian writer like

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Vicente Martínez Colomer (whose Valdemaro is considered in Chap. 2),
may still speak for the overall country. This is why I have studied authors in exile, like Joseph Blanco White, who wrote and published his Vargas: A Tale of Spain (1822) in England, in this book. Blanco White’s work betrays a Spanish sensibility adapted to an English context, as well as the disgruntlement of the political émigré.

Rather than separate out individual writers according to their origin, I have decided to take them here as widely representative of Spain. I think this is much more indicative of the profusion and richness of national identities currently defined by the ‘Spanish’ label. Interestingly, the Spanish Gothic rarely takes inspiration from regional specificities, although exceptions will be duly noted, as in the work of Wenceslao Fernández Flórez.

My study of the Spanish Gothic, then, is inflected by what the mode has enabled the Spanish to do and explore, instead of by how it might reflect a true or hidden sense of identity. I am not, in other words, turning to the Gothic for what it might have to reveal about repressed national or personal traumas, apart from where this is central to the texts themselves, as in Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo / The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and El laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). I am much more interested in the synergies between Spain and the Gothic as a transnational mode to which the Spanish have consistently turned since the late-eighteenth century. Spanish writers have very often explicitly used the Gothic to channel anxieties that they could perhaps otherwise not express through other forms of literature. This is not to grant the Gothic an exclusive political insight, but, in its preference for the dark, the taboo and the transgressive, the mode does present myriad possibilities for engaging with the status quo and thus with what it means to live under systems of political or religious oppression.

Another reason why I feel it is important to resist a thorough ‘repression’ model, or rather one without nuance, is that the Spanish Gothic, especially in its cinematic context, has very often been a result of collaboration. This fact is not surprising given that, as has been noted (Dapena et al. 2013: 17), Spanish cinema was essentially transnational from its very beginnings. This is so much the case, and the Spanish Gothic has often taken such strong inspiration from imageries that were imported in order to give a voice to its own dark fantasies, that I find it more helpful to talk of a shared vocabulary. The Gothic thus more usefully becomes the result of collaboration between countries. For example, Jess Franco drew from Anglo-American Gothic productions in his creation of films like

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Gritos en la noche / The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962), and he, in turn, influenced grindhouse cinema from Europe and the USA. Similarly, although Paul Naschy’s Waldermar Daninsky was a figure steeped in a very clearly imported model of the werewolf, the one developed by Universal in The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941), his rewriting of the werewolf would have a particularly large following in the USA—not least because the aesthetic of the film, and those that followed, did not look immediately Spanish. These aspects, together with the tensions between a Gothic cinema spoken in Spanish and with distinctive Spanish themes, as opposed to a more traditionally international one that might be sold to external markets, characterise Spanish Gothic cinema to the point of defining it.

Similarly, Spanish Gothic writers have put imported Gothic frameworks, from settings to characters and situations, in dialogue with national folkloric figures. The huge impact of Gothic translations, from Ann Radcliffe to Hoffmann, Poe and, more recently, H. P. Lovecraft, have in turn shaped national forms of the Gothic, so that it is impossible to speak of an insular form of the Gothic, or of one that is strictly independent from the Gothics from abroad. The imported Gothic needs to be understood as a catalyst that opened up possibilities for writers who may have otherwise not really engaged with fictional ‘terror’ as a pleasurable, and potentially also political, artistic form. It is important, at this point, to return to my understanding of the Gothic throughout this book.

In her brilliant Gothic Literature (2011), Sue Chaplin explains that there might be some difficulty with what she terms the ‘reader-response’

approach to the Gothic, that which privileges ‘the reader’s experiences of a given text’, in this case ‘fear’ (4). The latter is a variable emotion that is historically contingent and its sources are far from universal. Personally, I do not see historical contingency as a necessary problem and have, in fact, proposed that the feeling of being under threat might be the one emotional dispositional state that marks out the Gothic and horror from other modes and genres (Aldana Reyes 2015, 2016a). One may no longer be scared by an older text, but this does not mean that it may not have been horrific to the original readership and that we may not be able to understand its intended effects (say, by studying the context). Chaplin’s suggestion that one way of conceptualising the Gothic might be to see it as a mode that ‘concerns itself with forms of psychological and cultural disturbance (emanating out of specific historical contexts) that cannot receive easy articulation through other modes of artistic expression’ (2011: 4)

is more useful, insofar as it aligns the Gothic with an unsettling artistic

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discourse that has the possibility of going where more traditional or sanctioned artistic forms dare not. As I have previously hinted at, in this book I see the Gothic as a mixture of both: as an artistic mode predominantly based on fear which often (but by no means always, as there is such a thing as reactionary, even conservative Gothic) aims to challenge the status quo.

There is no perfect formula; there have been times where form has been more relevant than content, and we should be specifically aware, even sceptical, of the real transgressive value that literature and films had within a context of strict censorship and prosecution. Even then, I would like to begin to suggest that Spanish Gothic literature and cinema, like other national and transnational forms of the Gothic, are marked out by what I will keep referring to as a ‘language of liberation’. For writers like Luis Gutiérrez, as I shall show, the Gothic offered the possibility of critiquing the abuses of power of the Inquisition; for Emilia Pardo Bazán, the plight of women; for Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara, the detrimental effects of modern science.

The first part of this book, ‘First Wave Gothic, 1785–1834’, begins by tracing the roots of the Spanish Gothic and by recognising it as an evolving form, first imported, then adapted to its readerly context, and, crucially, as a publishing reality where religious and cultural censorship made transgression—supernatural and social—a virtual impossibility.

Chapter 2 begins by looking into what type of translations made it to Spain in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The Gothic books translated during this period tell us about the perceived dangers of the Gothic as an artistic force. Gothic translation was very important; in fact, the most popular Gothic text to be published in the early- nineteenth century, 1831’s Funereal Gallery of Spectres and Bloody Shadows, by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza, was a translation of various short stories. The chapter then turns to Colomer’s Valdemaro, an example of the type of early novel of ‘delightful instruction’ that could flourish in Spain around the turn of the century, to begin considering original national production. This novel, which contains a number of Gothic elements, is significant because, like others mentioned in the same chapter, it relocates the appearance of an autochthonous form of proto-Gothic to the eighteenth century, rather than the nineteenth. Chapter 3 centres on the rise of the early Spanish Gothic novel between 1800 and 1834. The Gothic novel in Spain at this point tended to be subdivided into two subcategories, what we could call ‘Spanish terror’, best epitomised by Spain’s only early writer to practise the Gothic assiduously, Pascual Pérez Rodríguez, and

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the non- supernatural anti-Inquisition novel, exemplified here by Luis Gutiérrez’s Cornelia Bororquia and Joseph Blanco White’s Vargas.31

The former is indicative of the type of cultural adaptation the British and French Gothic novel experienced in Spain, whereas the latter type may be conflated, in its revolutionary spirit, with wider anticlerical fiction.

The second part of this book, ‘From Romanticism to the Fin-de-siècle’, moves forward to the Romantic movement, which, like the Gothic, is thought to have never really taken off in Spain. While it is true that Romanticism was not as successful there as it was in other European countries and that it did not crystallise into a solid group of writers, it captured a similar sense of nostalgia and morbid passion in José de Espronceda, the
most obvious exponent of Spanish Romanticism. In Chap. 4, I turn to his El estudiante de Salamanca / The Student of Salamanca (1840), a long poem that updates the trope of the dead lover, to examine the imagery and value of the Gothic in his work. I then move on to consider the prose of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, whose Gothic legends, published in the late 1850s and 1860s, have been largely ignored by Gothic Studies, and yet constitute a perfect example of folkloric Gothic. The nineteenth century was also the period in which the ‘fantastic’ story developed, especially as a result of the influence of Hoffmann and Poe, the positive reception of which legitimised the artistic pursuit of disturbing forms of literature. In Chap. 5, I consider the ambivalent and parodic horror of Rafael Serrano Alcázar, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón—author of the first piece of prose in Spanish literature to call itself a ‘horror’ story—and Emilia Pardo Bazán.

Finally, I turn to the way in which some of the Gothic stories of the fin-de- siècle, written by Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara, among others, prompted by developments in science and technology, produced a small strand of mad science tales. These stories continue the development of the Gothic as an artistic mode that allows authors to voice contemporary concerns about modern society.

The third part, ‘Modern and Contemporary Gothic Literature (1900–

Present)’, brings my discussion of literature to the present day. Chapter 6
begins by concentrating on the spiritualist movement of the twentieth century. Despite being neglected by histories of the Spanish novel due to its formulaic and didactic nature, I see in this early form of twentieth-century fiction, especially the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) occult-spiritualist hybrids of Emilio Carrère, a great example of the modern Gothic. His sensational writing experimented with content and violence in innovative ways. Naturally, the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 affected writing of

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all kinds, and the ensuing Francoist government, conservative and church-heavy, stifled the development of the Gothic significantly. Despite this, Alfonso Sastre, whose Noches lúgubres / Lugubrious Nights (1964) is as political as any piece of fiction published in Spain could be at the time, includes an interesting preface in which the author attempts to explain the appeal of horror writing: the transgressions that its dialectic of the imagination enables. It should not come as a surprise that Sastre, predominantly known for his revolutionary theatre, was in constant conflict with

Francoist censors. Chapter 7 moves on to address the opening up to the Gothic and the horror genre following the death of Franco and the transition years. Specific case studies focus on writers that have consistently developed the Gothic in interesting ways. First, Pilar Pedraza’s brand of the Female Gothic, one that often modernises the historical novel, is considered for its innovation within the context of the Spanish Gothic and of the Gothic more broadly. Inevitably, the second author considered here is Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose name has become synonymous with the Spanish Gothic as a mode. I explore the notion of ‘nuanced Gothicism’ in his work and the tensions inherent to his internationalisation of a national type of the Gothic.

As I have explained, in this book I also consider cinema because, in recent years, it is much more visible and international than Spanish Gothic literature. As the previous section began to show, Spanish Gothic film shares a lot with its literary counterparts, as it has predominantly been produced from the financial and ideological peripheries and has, until the 1980s, had to either hide or censor itself. Interestingly, Gothic cinema has also been the vehicle for anti-repression messages. In fact, exploitation and horror director de rigueur Jesús Franco (2005: 393) once described
his cinematic aim as ‘want[ing] to become the most modest and virulent guardian of a libertarian cinema, without taboos, or limitations of any kind’. As Luis Alberto de Cuenca (2000: 157–60) has argued, this utopic vision necessarily comes with the horror director job itself, as there often is little or no financial investment from big production companies or institutional help, and filmmakers constantly face critics who have only rarely shown the slightest inclination to take horror cinema seriously. And yet, horror has prevailed and, as Chaps. 8 and 9 show, evolved into one of Spanish cinema’s main exports. For a number of directors making horror films throughout Franco’s final years, the genre offered not just an easy way to make money, but an obvious platform where social taboos (like sexuality, power abuses or institutional punishment) could be explored at

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a representational remove. Contemporary directors continue to see horror—and the Gothic—as offering a sincerity that few other genres and modes can afford.

The fourth part of this book, ‘Spanish Gothic Cinema, 1906–2016’,
begins in Chap. 8 with the ground-breaking trick films of Segundo de Chomón, and moves swiftly through the early years of the twentieth century to focus on the first bout of Gothic horror films in Spain, the fantaterror cycle. Although there are earlier examples throughout the 1960s that show some of the defining traits of the Spanish Gothic in cinema—
transnational collaborations made cheaply with an international market in mind, heavily influenced by Anglo-American horror and exploitational at heart—the period between 1968 and 1980 saw the production of doz-ens of films. I concentrate here on the type of monsters that were developed in the most notable examples, especially the work of Paul Naschy, and which I divide into two categories: the glocal myths, expansions of well-known figures like Count Dracula, and the ‘national’ monsters, more Iberian figures like the Blind Dead and Alaric de Marnac, a supernatural vengeful knight based on the real knight Gilles de Rais. Chapter 9 cen-
tres on the post-millennial horror revival. It explores the continuities and differences between this new period in filmmaking and fantaterror, centring on the new markets and characteristics of the films. Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth are taken as great transnational examples of how the Gothic can explicitly serve to engage with repressed national memory, in this case that of the Civil War. Finally, I turn to the openly referential Gothic of the Valdemar films of José Luis Alemán, La herencia Valdemar / The Valdemar Legacy (2010) and La herencia Valdemar II: La sombra prohibida / The Valdemar Legacy II: The Forbidden Shadow (2010), and discuss the potential reasons for its commercial and critical failure. These seem to signal the problems of a thoroughly derivational Gothic cinema in light of the development of Spanish tropes, like the ghostly child, that have more readily appealed to both national and international viewers.

The Spanish Gothic, as it will become clear, cannot be reduced to a national mode that imported the British and French Gothic late and badly.

If nothing else, the fact that the Gothic novel was received via translations of French editions, themselves sometimes adapted from English, short-circuits this model right from the start. Although, at times, under different names (the fantastic, most notably, but also the macabre), the Gothic has been present in Spanish arts since the late-eighteenth century and

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evolved in different, not always cohesive, ways. What I hope to prove is that, despite the contextual and historical differences and gaps, Spanish Gothic writers tend to either show a desire to rethink the Gothic under an intrinsically national, although not necessarily nationalistic, lens that may speak to Spanish readers, or else seek to channel a species of anti-establishment rhetoric. In both cases, I challenge the misconception that the Spanish Gothic is somehow less interesting than its Anglo-American cousins. In national texts, the Gothic is adapted culturally to suit specific needs that the original form, unchanged, could not have done. In the case of the overtly transgressive texts, the Gothic gains a political impetus that jars with the more widespread belief that this mode in Spain was anodyne and did not resonate with readers or viewers. As I hope to show, a thorough look at the history of the fictional Gothic, like my initial double-take on Goya’s Saint Borgia, reveals a very different picture from the one to which we have grown accustomed.

nOTes

1. The Gothic sensibilities of the latter painting have even been recognised in the general fiction market. It appears in the 1996 (and current) Penguin edition of Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse / The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1800).

2. I am focusing on literature and film because these are the two artistic mediums that I know well. There is a vast theatrical side to the Spanish Gothic that I have no space to cover here, which would run from precursors like Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega through to the anonymous Gothic comedy La condesa

Jenovitz / Countess Jenovitz (1793) and Manuel José Quintana’s loose adaptation of Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) as El duque de Viseo / The Duke of Viseo (1797). It would also encompass more modern dramatists like Federico García Lorca and

Ramón del Valle-Inclán and even contemporary performances by the collective Fura dels Baus. For an introduction to early Spanish Gothic drama, see Roas (2006: 103–10).

3. See Monleón (1995). It is important to remember that literacy levels were incredibly low—around 6 % at the turn of the century and only 10 % in the 1860s (Ferreras 1973: 49); levels of schooling were also low (Serrano García 2001: 151)—and that the literate
would have been the aristocracy, the clergy and the growing (but proportionally very small) bourgeoisie.

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4. I have no space cover the representation of Spain in the British Gothic meaningfully in this book, but see García Iborra (2007).

For the representation of the Spanish Inquisition in the British

Gothic, see Long Hoeveler (2014: 147–96).

5. Examples of literary criticism linking Spain to social realism and understanding the fantastic as exceptional go back to at least Menéndez Pidal (1918) in the twentieth century.

6. Due to spatial constraints, I have made the difficult decision not to include the original text in quotations from Spanish, although I signpost any ambiguities. Should this book ever see a Spanish translation, this omission will be remedied for the Spanish reader.

As for titles, originals are provided first, and then either the official translated title or, if none available, my own translation.

7. See, for example, Curbet (2002: 174), who argues that, given the censorious context of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the Gothic mode in Spain ‘could not develop’.

8. González de Vega (2015: 51) has gone as far as to argue that it is possible to think of Horace Walpole’s Otranto, and the Gothic novel more generally, as a rediscovery of the ghostly fortress of the chivalric romance—‘a trope that had been so overused as to have been forgotten’.

9. For more on the ‘literatura de cordel’, see Álvarez Barrientos (2004a: 324–5).

10. A significant exception is the ‘Gótica’ imprint of the publishing house Valdemar, which specialises in Gothic novels. See Chap. 7 of
this book.

11. It should be noted that the Spanish language does not really differentiate between these two words, and tends to use ‘terror’ where English speakers would default to ‘horror’ (‘cuento de terror’ and not ‘cuento de horror’; ‘película de terror’ and not, usually,

‘película de horror’). Hence, The Others would technically be a

‘película de terror gótico’.

12. The Lord of the Rings appears classified as Books > Fiction > Fantasy

> Epic on book retailer Amazon. By contrast, Dracula appears as

‘horror’.

13. I would like to thank Sara Martín Alegre, who first suggested this idea to me.

14. Attempts to palliate the effects of this methodological problem are provided by allowing for in-between categories, like the ‘pseudo-fantastic’, which conflate the supernatural explained and those

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stories that use fantastic elements allegorically or for grotesque purposes.

15. This is what drives López Santos (2009) to argue that horror does not, strictly speaking, constitute the genesis of fantastic literature.

16. I am not covering ‘magical realism’ here because it is much more obviously cultivated in Latin America, although some Spanish fantastic texts, especially after Borges and Julio Cortázar, could fall under this fictional category. As Lucie Armitt has suggested (2000: 315), there is a crucial difference between the Gothic and magical realism: while, in magical realism the supernatural elements or characters are ‘simply “there”, usually giving testimony to the voices of those whom society has silenced or rendered “disappeared”’, in the Gothic they are ‘that central source, manifesting a secret that disturbs, even chills’. In other words, although elements may be similar, their effect is very different in the two literary modes.

17. ‘Costumbrismo’ is traditionally a Spanish form of realist writing that focuses on the lives and experiences of people and on local customs. Unlike other forms of realism, especially in Europe, it does not purport to analyse the society it depicts. Recent studies on ‘costumbrismo’ have argued that the term is, in fact, an e x post facto label used to depoliticise the works it defines and to create a precursor to ‘native Spanish realism’. This has helped some establish an intrinsic realist stream of Spanish literature ‘unpolluted’ by foreign trends. See Peñas (2013) and Dolores Thion Soriano-

Mollá (2013).

18. The first mansion sequence in Strange Voyage homages horror films openly.

19. The slipperiness of the term Gothic has also affected English-language film studies. Remarkably, there was no global compen-
dium of Gothic cinema until James Bell (2013). It is true, however, that the British national Gothic cinema, especially Hammer, has received a lot of attention, especially after David Pirie (1973).

20. I am not including ghosts or witches here because I do not think they are as readily importable as other monsters. My point is that there have been ghosts and witches in Spanish literature for centuries, but the figure of Count Dracula has naturally been adapted from US and British productions. The werewolf myth has been present in Galician culture for centuries, but not necessarily as the ‘hairy man’ of the Universal films, which was the model for Paul Naschy’s own development of werewolf Waldemar Daninsky.

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21. See Díaz (1993); Naschy (2000). It is worth noting that, at times,

‘horror’ can be dropped completely in favour of a fantastic cinema label that covers exactly the same ground, or else the term ‘psychotronic’, which also encompasses fantasy and science fiction. See

Sainz (1989); Ordóñez (1996). For more on psychotronic cinema, see Weldon (1989).

22. Sala’s own hesitant use of the Gothic in the title of his aforementioned article (‘¿Cine gótico español?’), presented as a question, is, to my mind, representative of the relatively strange ring the term has for the contemporary Spanish viewer.

23. The majority of Gothic academic activities still take place in Great Britain, and it is the only country to have research centres dedicated exclusively to Gothic Studies (the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University or The

Centre for the History of the Gothic at the University of Sheffield).

24. For studies on the specific effects of Francoism in the film industry, see Higginbotham (1989); Marsh (2005).

25. In fact, Horror Express, which features Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, could reasonably be mistaken for a Hammer horror film.

26. So much so that publishers like the University of Wales Press, Palgrave Macmillan or Edinburgh University Press began series specialising in the Gothic in the twenty-first century.

27. The network led to, at least, two main publications: Byron (2013);

Byron and Townshend (2013). On the postcolonial Gothic, see

Wisker (2006). For other global and international forms of the Gothic, see the chapters in Part V, ‘The Globalization of Gothic’

(367–454), in Punter (2012).

28. For work on translations, see Wright (2013a); Murnane (2013).

29. One must add, at least in the cinematic context, a deep feeling of
national shame, as Pulido (2012: 47) suggests, born out of decades where Spanish cinema had to subsist on minimal budgets and
means. The natural consequence is a critical focus on, and predilection for, international texts over Spanish ones.

30. See Roas (2006: 77–114).

31. This modal subdivision was already suggested by López Santos (2010).

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Lee Six, Abigail. 2010. Gothic Terrors: Incarceration, Duplication and Bloodlust in Spanish Narrative (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University).

Llopis, Rafael. 2013. Historia natural de los cuentos de miedo, rev. edn (Madrid: Fuentetaja).

Long Hoeveler, Diane. 2010. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press).

———. 2014. The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).

López Santos, Miriam. 2009. ‘La novela gótica: ¿Génesis de la literatura fantástica?’, Arena Romanística, 5: 98–116.

———. 2010. La novela gótica en España (1788–1833) (Vigo: Academia del Hispanismo).

Marsh, Steven. 2005. Popular Spanish Film under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Marshall, Bridget M., and Monika Elbert. 2013. ‘Introduction’, in Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 1–16.

Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1918. ‘Algunos caracteres principales de la literatura española’, Bulletin Hispanique, 20.4: 205–32.

Monleón, José B. 1995. ‘Vampiros y donjuanes (sobre la figura del seductor en el siglo XIX’, Revista hispánica moderna, 48.1: 19–30.

Montesinos, José F. 1955. Introducción a una historia de la novela en España en el siglo XIX. Seguida del Esbozo de una bibliografía española de traducción de novelas (1800–1850) (Valencia: Castalia).

Morin, Christina, and Niall Gillespie (eds). 2014. Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Murnane, Barry. 2008. ‘Verkehr mit Gespenstern’: Gothic und Moderne bei Franz Kafka (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag).

———. 2013. ‘Gothic Translation: Germany, 1760–1830’, in The Gothic World, ed. by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London and New York: Routledge), 231–42.

Naschy, Paul (ed.). 2000. Las tres caras del terror: Un siglo de cine fantaterrorífico español, Paul Naschy, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Jesús Franco (Madrid: Alberto Santos).

Ordóñez, Marcos. 1996. The Spanish Fantasy Picture Show (Sitges: PC/IMGESA).

Palmer, Paulina. 2012. The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).

Pedraza, Felipe B. 1981. Manual de literatura española. Siglo XVIII (Pamplona: Cénit Ediciones).

Pedrero Santos, Juan A. 2008. Terror Cinema! Cine clásico de terror (Madrid: Calamar Ediciones).

Peñas Ruiz, Ana. 2013. Hacia una poética del artículo de costumbres (1830–1850), doctoral thesis (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia).

Pirie, David. 1973. A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946–72

(London: Gordon Fraser).

Pulido, Javier. 2012. La década de oro del cine de terror español, 1967–1976

(Madrid: T&B Editores).

Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London and New York: Longman).

——— (ed.). 2012. A New Companion to the Gothic (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing).

Purves, Maria. 2009. The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).

Roas, David. 2006. De la maravilla al horror: Los inicios de lo fantástico en la cultura española (1750–1860) (Pontevedra: Mirabel Editorial).

———. 2011. Tras los límites de lo real: Una definición de lo fantástico (Madrid: Páginas de Espuma).

Rubio Cremades, Enrique. 1997. ‘Recepción de la novela gótica y sentimental europea’, in Historia de la literatura española: Siglo XIX, vol. 1, ed. by Guillermo Carnero (Madrid: Espasa Calpe), 614–17.

Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (London: Macmillan).

Sainz, Salvador. 1989. Historia del cine fantástico español: De Segundo de Chomón a Bigas Luna (Tarragona: Film Festival DL).

Sala, Ángel. 2010. ‘¿Cine gótico español? Un viaje a las mazmorras del subdesarrollo y otros infiernos’, in Pesadillas en la oscuridad: Cine de terror gótico, ed. by Antonio José Navarro (Madrid: Valdemar), 321–50.

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Schulz, Andrew. 1998. ‘The Expressive Body in Goya’s Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent’, Art Bulletin, 80.4: 666–86.

Serrano García, Rafael. 2001. El fin del Antiguo Régimen (1808–1868): Cultura y vida cotidiana (Madrid: Síntesis).

Spooner, Catherine. 2006. Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion).

Thion Soriano-Mollá, Dolores (ed.). 2013. El costumbrismo, nuevas luces (Pau: Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour).

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (New York: Cornell University Press).

van Elferen, Isabella. 2012. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).

Vigil, Luis. 2000. ‘A modo de referencia de una Edad de Oro: El extraño caso del Doctor Molina y Mr. Naschy’, in Las tres caras del terror: Un siglo de cine fantástico español, ed. by Paul Naschy (Madrid: Imágica Ediciones, 2000), 48–99.

Warwick, Alexandra. 2007. ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9.1: 5–15.

Watkiss, Joanne. 2012. Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).

Weldon, Michael. 1989. The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film (London: Plexus Publishing).

Wisker, Gina. 2006. ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, in Teaching the Gothic, ed. by Anna Powell and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 168–81.

Wright, Angela. 2013a. ‘Gothic Translation: France, 1760–1830’, in The Gothic World, ed. by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London and New York: Routledge), 221–30.

———. 2013b. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

PART I

First Wave Gothic (1785–1834)

CHAPTER 2

Imported Terrors and First Genre Hybrids

The introduction began by hinting at some of the hoops Gothic writing had to jump through in order to surface in Spain. To the censorship of texts that precluded any negative comments about the Inquisition, Catholicism or the king, we must add eighteenth-century approaches to the use of literature—it must be remembered that, as Rebecca Haidt (2003a) has noted, the intrinsic value of fiction was still under question at the time—
and the general condemnation of superstition among writers, who were
often priests themselves.1 Although we would have to wait until the 1830s for the first fully fledged articulations of the Spanish Gothic (explored in the following chapter), a number of turn-of-the-century Spanish writers did attempt to adapt the Gothic, which they had read in the original or, more often, in translations from the French, in the form of genre hybrids that either brought the chivalric romance into contact with imported Gothic elements, or else evinced the influence of the pre-Romantic graveyard school and its predilection for a melancholic aesthetic of the sublime.2

It needs to be pointed out that to produce this type of fiction, especially of the anticlerical type, was a dangerous endeavour, and that, as a result, the development of Gothic horror in the vein of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) would have to be undertaken from exile, published in more progressive countries like France and England or not at all. But autochthonous writers could approximate the Gothic by transforming it into a literary language intelligible to its home audience and acceptable to the watchdogs of the nation’s moral and spiritual health.

© The Author(s) 2017

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X. Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2_2

42 X. ALDANA REYES

The specific socio-historical circumstances that surrounded the production of literature in the mid-to-late-eighteenth century meant that, while the Gothic blossomed in other countries from the 1760s onwards, the mode arrived later in Spain. 3 The Gothic would have been experienced
first through the acquisition of copies of some of the original novels, and then through the gradual translation of specific texts from the French translations themselves. These started being published, slowly but steadily, from the 1780s onwards, and account for a significant percentage of the fiction imported at the time. Overall, an estimated forty-five Gothic novels, mostly from British and French origin and almost exclusively translated from the French, entered Spain between the 1780s and the 1830s, and a significant number saw several editions over the course of those 50
years.4 The first translations in the mid-1780s were from works by minor French Gothic writers, such as Caroline-Stéphanie-Felicité du Crest (the Countess of Genlis) and François Ducray-Dimini, but these would soon be followed by the translation of Sophia Lee’s The Recess, which appeared in 1795 as El subterráneo, ó la Matilde, and Elizabeth Helme’s Louise, or The Cottage on the Moor (1787), which was published in 1797 as Luisa, ó la cabaña en el valle. After the turn of the century, more translations began to appear, especially during and after the Liberal Triennium (1820–23), a short three-year window following the revolution of 1820. The Liberal Triennium saw liberal ministers being granted new powers and the reinstatement of the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which had established progressive principles such as suffrage and freedom of the press. Some of these new translations included, notably, the anti-Catholic works The Italian (1797), by Ann Radcliffe, Lewis’s The Monk and William Henry Ireland’s The Abbess (1799), all published between 1821 and 1822, alongside works by Pigault-Lebrun and the Viscount of Arlincourt, and, later, novels by Catherine Cuthberson, Mrs M. Harley, T. J. Horsley, Pierre Blanchard, Regina Maria Roche and George Moore. 5 Although, there were no early translations of key texts like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) or Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), possibly due to their unexplained supernatural phenomena, writers such as Regina Maria Roche or Elizabeth Helme, who are not as well-remembered today, saw a substantial number of editions of their works published in Spain. This can be easily explained by turning to the contemporary literary market.

The supernatural explained of Ann Radcliffe and her followers was compatible with Spain’s own interest in moralistic and didactic forms of

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literature. The privileging of sentimentality and the championing of reason, especially of a reason that would dispel superstition and showed, for example, phantoms to be mere wax models hallucinated by the overexcited imagination of sensitive heroines, made these works easier to prepare for, and sell to, Spanish readers and censors. In this way, the translator’s preface to the 1830 adaptation of Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), like many others, makes a point of introducing the novel not merely as an exercise in suspense and mystery, but also as a work which hides, in its heart, the purest and most Christian of morals, and is incredibly useful in vanishing the vain and stupid terrors which torment certain individuals whose education has been overlooked or is too worrisome, the daughters of ignorance; it, thus, shows us that some events, apparently extraordinary and unbelievable, and which cause fear when observed coldly and without warning, are actually very natural and simple. (Alvarado y de la

Peña 1830: v–vi)

Prefaces would justify the possible dangers of a text, the passions they could awaken, by highlighting the utility and morality of an overall message (Álvarez Barrientos 1991: 216). With the intention of making Gothic novels less sanctionable, editors would also remove some passages—the most significant case being the excision of the three chapters recounting the story of the bleeding nun in The Monk—or rewrite them, and additional paragraphs or sentences would be added to give works a more
didactic feel.6 In essence, these translations were a form of cultural adaptation: the selection of the novels, in the first place, meant that the arrival of the Gothic privileged the terror school, and subsequent changes to the works brought them even closer to the native reader. The extant volumes suggest that the Gothic novel was indeed very popular and that numerous editions of the best-loved works, Ann Radcliffe’s in particular, were sold and circulated as early as 1818.

Although translations would be the main source of Gothic literature at this time, it was not the only one. Cultural and historical constraints meant that Spanish writers were not really able to develop self-professed Gothic novels quite in the same way that the British or the French did. This does not mean, however, that the Gothic was not practised at all; it manifested in a variety of ways. First, sublime landscapes and Gothic settings, especially ruins, were exploited for effect. For example, Juan Idarroc’s collection La noche entretenida / The Entertaining Evening (1798) includes two

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stories, ‘El solitario de los Ardenes, novela francesa’ / ‘The Solitary Man of the Ardennes, French Novel’ and ‘Morton y Susana, historia inglesa’ /

‘Morton and Susan, English Story’, a romance and a tragedy, respectively.

Generically, the narrative drive and concern of these stories is different: one aims to generate suspense and the other pity for the main characters.

Yet, both, especially ‘The Solitary Man’, rely on Gothic locales: a solitary abode in the middle of the forest described as a ‘sepulchre’ in the former, a dark prison in the latter (Idarroc 1798: 47). Both are used to conjure up fearful feelings, even though these are not predominant at the narrative level. Similar passages and uses of the architectonically macabre may be found in texts such as Alejandro Moya’s El café / The Café (1772–74), Pedro Montegón’s El Rodrigo: Romance épico / Rodrigo: Epic Romance (1793), Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor’s La Leandra: Novela moral que comprende muchas otras / Leandra: Moral Novel which Includes Many Others (1797), Pablo de Olavide’s El evangelio en triunfo ó historia de un filósofo desengañado / The Triumphant Gospel or the Story of a Disabused Philosopher (1798–99), Gaspar Zavala y Zamora’s La Eumenia, ó la Madrileña / Eumenia, or the Madrilenian (1805) and Jerónimo Martín de Bernardo’s El emprendedor, ó, Aventuras de un español en el Asia /

The Enterpreneur, or, Memories of a Spaniard in Asia (1805). All of them belong to genres connected to the Gothic, like the chivalric romance, the sentimental novel, the didactic novel or the exotic travelogue, yet simultaneously contain strong Gothic elements at the level of the action and the mise-en-scène.

Most of the time, the Gothic appears sporadically, when the story requires either a turn to the suspenseful or the macabre, but does not pervade narrative intent. In this respect, we can talk about an episodic use of the Gothic that bespeaks both an interest in its affective possibilities, and yet, also belies its peripheral function within largely didactic and instructive fictional works. Although Spain did have a history of the ‘miracle’

fable and of the ‘cristiano maravilloso’, it is possible to identify a general move towards an increasing use of the Gothic that generates fear rather than amusement, puzzlement or awe. The early Gothic texts of the late-eighteenth century are mostly generically ‘other’ (collections of stories, chivalric and adventure stories, love stories) and resort to the Gothic for atmospheric reasons. The history of the Gothic in Spain, until the late-nineteenth century, could be summarised as the gradual acceptance of fear as a valuable endeavour in itself, isolated from further purposes connected to moral or sentimental education, and as the appropriation into Catholic

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territory of a foreign and exotic imagery that resonated with the country’s own religious and cultural concerns.

A Gothic trAnslAtion: AGustín Pérez zArAGozA’s

Funereal Gallery oF

SpectreS and Bloody ShadowS (1831)

Given the lack of copyright laws in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, a number of the Gothic translations that made it to Spain were apocryphal— El sepulcro / The Sepulchre (1825) and the novella El castillo de Nebelstein / Nebelstein Castle (1843) were disingenuously ascribed to Ann Radcliffe, possibly by the French translators before they were adapted to Spanish—or else were passed off as originals. This was not necessarily a problem, and there is no evidence that readers or critics gave much thought to the sources of works or were actively concerned with plagiarism. Although some of the translations, or free adaptations, limited themselves to adding new didactic prologues or to the odd, additional moralistic phrase, other texts were different enough that, as López Santos

(2010: 147–8) has argued, they deserve to be considered original in their own right. The most famous of these, and certainly the most popular early Gothic piece of fiction in Spain, was Agustín Pérez Zaragoza’s Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas / Funereal Gallery of Spectres and Bloody Shadows (1831). 7 Upon publication, it was widely read and discussed in the newspapers of the time (Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa 2004: 8–9), and criticised, like the Gothic novel in Britain, for the detrimental consequences its reading could have on young, impressionable females.8

Most importantly, it was the relative commercial and lucrative success of the endeavour that gave the collection notoriety, not the least because it was a monumental twelve volumes in length, and therefore, expensive. In any case, the Funereal Gallery came to stand for the Gothic of the early-nineteenth century; so much so, that Agustín Pérez Zaragoza (Zaragoza henceforth) is sometimes portrayed as the main Spanish Gothic writer of the period. 9 Although there were a number of Spanish writers producing texts that we could class as Gothic as early as the 1770s, it is perhaps accurate that Zaragoza was the author who most obviously aligned his collection with an imported artistic tradition of fear. After all, his Funereal Gallery is the closest thing to a horror story collection Spain had ever produced. The book is also a perfect example of the tensions between the

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censorious context of the publication of fiction in the early-nineteenth century and the need to develop a new genre in this country that would capitalise on the success of the Gothic novel elsewhere.

Anxieties regarding the perception of Zaragoza’s text as a purely exploitative piece needed to be assuaged and countered by the author, who, in his prologue, and later in his own ‘Analytic Introduction’, proceeded to defend his project. Explaining that history provides for a perfect textbook example of morality, Zaragoza claimed that the present collection would help the general public, in a line of thought that harks back to Aristotle’s notion of artistic catharsis, to understand and govern their passions, which, when excited, can be the source of crime and tragedy.

He defended the Funereal Gallery as ‘a new work of its type, mixing fiction with truth so as not only to entertain, but also to instruct in what human weakness has been and is capable of’ (Pérez Zaragoza 1977: 64).

He thus (misleadingly) appealed to the historic truth of the horrific events in the Funereal Gallery, although it is not transparent exactly what truth, beyond an implied universal one, may lie behind its sensational moments.

His justification, made in part because a number of the stories rationalise what appear to be horrific events, is particularly jarring when one considers Zaragoza’s subsequent argument about the need for a literature that will help dispel superstitious beliefs. According to him, the stories in the Funereal Gallery would help show how magical beings are the product of overactive imaginations. Positioning himself as an entertainer who writes against ‘crime and error’ (49), his ‘healthy terror’ (51) was defended on the grounds that an exaggerated portrayal of the wrong passions would make them more recognisable to readers and, hence, more reprehensible and abhorrent. As he put it:

If some novels based on wholesome morals tend to have healthy effects on readers, these may be generated much more forcefully when faced with true, horrific and surprising events like the ones in this work, where virtue wins over vice, and which are derived some from other works, and others from different national histories. (49)

Zaragoza thus established himself as a chronicler, writing and passing down historical facts coated in fiction, and as a champion of virtue, more in tune, in his own words, with the work of Edward Young and less with the ‘nocturnal dreams of the sepulchral Rosdeliff [ sic, meaning Radcliffe]

or the mysteries of Udolpho’ (50). His aims appear commendable and not

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unlike those of the Gothic writers of the early-nineteenth century but for the fact that they seem to be at a disconnect from the stories found in the Funereal Gallery, themselves a true hotchpotch of sentimental moralism, tragedy, terror, horror and cruelty. To begin with, some of the stories are clear fabrications and intend to scare and amaze via the supernatural. In some cases, such as in ‘La bohemiana de Trebisonda, ó un sequin por cabeza de cristiano’ / ‘The Bohemian from Trabzon, or a Lira for Each Christian Head’, unexplainable happenings lie at the heart of the action (a severed head comes alive and grants its possessor the ability to see into the future), and little concession, beyond events taking place in a remote past, is made to history. Second, although virtue is rewarded, it does not receive anywhere near the amount of space that vice and cruelty do, making it clear that the purpose is more exploitational than strictly moral.

Zaragoza’s insincerity is, however, not necessarily condemnable, but an indication of the publishing context of the early Spanish Gothic novel.

The Inquisition, although disappearing by this date (it was finally abol-ished in 1834), still had a stronghold on what could be printed and sold, as did the government, so that writers and editors had to make a case for the usefulness of their proposed volumes. This would have been even more relevant for a sensational work that made use of the supernatural.

Zaragoza’s dedication of the book to María Cristina de Borbón, then wife of Fernando VII, can thus be read as a smart move to stifle any potential discontent the collection might have caused. The insistence on the Funereal Gallery’s didactic commitment can also be understood as part of this drive to receive consent, and even endorsement, from Zaragoza’s possible critics. This means that any un-Christian behaviour is, in these stories, severely punished and almost inevitably ends in the death of the sinner, sometimes even despite their repentance. Retribution, exerted by characters with short tempers or in moments of madness, leads to veritably gruesome passages, such as the torture that Nicolo undergoes in ‘El alcalde de Nóchera, ó Nicolo, señor de Forliño’ / ‘The Mayor of Nocera, or Nicolo, Lord of Forlino’ in retaliation for his seduction of the mayor’s wife: he is stabbed repeatedly, his heart is extracted from his chest while still alive, and his body is dismembered, the various parts stabbed again for good measure. Horror then, goes beyond terror to embrace the abject nature of violence through a treatment reminiscent of the antics of the bloody tragedy.

Some of the contradictions in Zaragoza’s project stem from the framing of the collection as a new text. The reality is that the Funereal Gallery,

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although introduced as the work of its editor, comprises twenty-one translated short stories from different sources and centuries. The disparities of time and style account for the juxtaposition of moral intent and for the mixture of genres. Despite plagiarism accusations in the press from the editors of Poderosa Themis / Powerful Themis (1830), there is no evidence to suggest that contemporary readers and reviewers spotted the book’s unacknowledged adaptations, especially throughout the first six volumes, of eight of the eleven stories in J. R. P. Cuisin’s Les ombres sanglantes /

The Bloody Shadows (1820), a late original Gothic collection. 10 Reshuffled and cannily interspersed with other stories adapted from different sources, such as short novellas from Matteo Bandello, an Italian sixteenth- century writer, or Emile Dupré de Sainte-Maure, Zaragoza’s translation of Cuisin’s collection has to go down in Spanish letters as one of the most effective
cases of adaptation.11 Rafael Llopis, whose famous Antología de cuentos de terror / Anthology of Horror Tales was well-received in Spain upon its publication in 1981, listed ‘La princesa de Lipno, ó el retrete del placer criminal’ / ‘The Princess from Lipno, or the Abode of Criminal Pleasure’

(1831), a Cuisin translation, as a Zaragoza original. In 2006, the authorship of the collection was questioned by Roas (2006: 94–5, n. 120), but the status of the stories as translations was still hard to ascertain due to the scarcity of the Zaragoza and Cuisin originals.12 Cuisin’s own derivative Gothic, abusing well-known formulas and tropes, means the stories have been largely forgotten. The fact that, to my knowledge, The Bloody Shadows has not been officially translated to English has, no doubt, helped preserve their relative obscurity.13 And yet, turning to them is useful, for, although formulaic to the British Gothic reader, these stories appeared as transgressive and innovative to the Spanish public, who was simply not used to such high amounts of gore, cruelty and supernatural occurrences.

Zaragoza, by virtue of his clever adaptation of a particularly sensational collection, thus managed to position himself as innovative and mildly provocative.

It is important to note that, although the collection is now understood as a Gothic text, the number of stories in the Funereal Gallery that we could deem Gothic is actually very small.14 Twelve of them relish in various degrees of cruelty and general nastiness, the latter generally employed in the descriptions of the deaths of characters at the hands of cruel murderers or avengers, but belong firmly to other genres, such as the tragedy or the love story. There are no supernatural elements in them, no use of Gothic tropes or motifs, and the general intention is not to scare, or to

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teach a lesson by frightening the reader. Instead, these are heavily moralistic tales of virtue rewarded and crime punished, and deal, thematically speaking, with the hardships of lovers, adultery and, most importantly, bloody revenge (stabbings, hangings and defenestrations). In a couple of them, ‘Las catacumbas españolas’ / ‘The Spanish Catacombs’ and ‘Las víctimas de Belona, ó la muerte gloriosa del príncipe Poniatowski’ / ‘The Victims of Belona, or the Glorious Death of Prince Poniatowski’, the horror is derived from the disasters of war, especially through very explicit descriptions of corpses and the ruthless killing of civilians. Three other stories, ‘El pescador, ó rasgo de nobleza de Mansor, rey de Marruecos’ /

‘The Fisherman, or Features of the Nobility of Mansor, King of Morocco’,

‘Angélica, ó los Salimbenes y Montanes’ / ‘Angelica, or the Salimbenes and the Montanes’ and ‘El judío bienhechor, ó Elisa y Teodoro’ / ‘The Good Jew, or Elise and Theodor’, are not even presented as cohesive parts of the collection: they are given the name ‘novela’ (a term indicating prose writing of some length), as opposed to the other ‘historias trágicas’ (tragic stories), and are intended as interludes for readers, since ‘the cruelty in the previous stories may have caused great grief and pain in those who are sensible and humane’ (Pérez Zaragoza 1977: 325). Of the twenty-one stories
that make up the Funereal Gallery, only seven use Gothic elements, and, in all but three of them, these are used very sparingly. It is significant that a collection with such a Gothic title could be so generically undevoted to the mode, but before I explore the possible reasons for this mismatch, I want to expand on the seven stories, all from Cuisin’s book, and unpick their Gothic elements.

The four stories that are less Gothic tend to resort to horror at the end, where supernatural occurrences break into the real world to either punish sinners directly or stand as reminders of their crimes. In ‘Bristol, ó el Carnicero asesino; La morada de un parricida’ / ‘Bristol, or the Killer Butcher; The House of Patricide’, a robed, masked spectre with a bloodied hand is seen throwing the dagger that kills a baron into a river below. The appearance of the presence is also marked by the groan-ing of the victim and by the sounds of a storm. On the second anniversary of the murder, lightning strikes the offending castle and burns it to the ground, from whence emerges a mausoleum to the memory of the murdered man. The nature of the liminal spectral place is different in

‘El falso capuchino’ / ‘The False Capuchin’. The room where Desuyten is justly killed becomes a living hell: the floor opens up to reveal a pit of flames where the villain can be seen running away from angry furies. His

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living, yet disembodied, ‘infernal head’ (382) also becomes a reminder of his crimes, and the nearby neighbours record sights of shadows stabbing each other, as well as ghosts on the roof and supernatural echoes warning passers-by of the dangers of the house. In ‘The Bohemian from Trabzon’, Olmasis-Kipsán, the husband-master of heroine Talmir, whom she kills in order to escape his tyranny, becomes a haunting talking head. Talmir cannot get rid of this presence—when she tries to bury the head, ‘a horrid noise [is] heard, like that of a subterranean current; a horrible moaning escape[s] the bloody lips of Olmasis, and his eyes emit… blazing sparks’

(196)—and its capacity to foretell the future ends up getting her killed.

Divine providence is responsible for the moral punishment of the Arab slave in ‘El esclavo moro, ó crueldad sobre crueldad’ / ‘The Arab Slave, or Cruelty upon Cruelty’. After killing the wife and children of his owner, who had severely mistreated him, and ending his own life by jumping into the sea, the slave is cursed and visited by fierce beasts from hell. As in ‘The House of the Patricide’, a commemorative building replaces the previous site of haunting; this time, a chapel is built in honour of the martyrs. The Gothic in these four stories, then, serves a thoroughly didactic, if prepos-terous, purpose that both underscores the message that evil should not go unpunished, and contradicts Zaragoza’s apparent interest in historical accuracy. No superstition is dispelled here. Instead, Christian iconography, especially Hell, is mixed with Gothic images, like the bedaggered apparition, and shaped into hypocritical cautionary tales. Fear, in other words, is concocted, with a mixture of religious damning and spectral returns, into a moralistic yet sensationalist tableaux.

The three stories in the Funereal Gallery that rely on Gothic trappings for their overall effect are very different, although they still work within the same moral mind frame. The third story of the collection, ‘The Princess from Lipno’, is the most Gothic in the conventional sense of the word. A Radcliffean heroine marries a villain and ends up living in a dark castle. Visions of bloody shades, accompanied by subterranean echoes and whistling noises, soon follow and on a day when her husband is hunting, she is visited by the severed head of her father and by ghosts wearing white robes. She then discovers that her husband once led a group of banditti and swore revenge on the Lipno family, who have been his enemies for a long time. After her escape, the various apparitions are explained away as ‘phantasmagoric art’ involving stage machinery, traps and optical illusions. The fear of the supernatural is thus dispelled and the story does not end on as strong a didactic message as the others. The intention

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is clear: to frighten readers and, once this effect has been achieved, reas-sure them by rationalising events (rather implausibly, it must be added).

‘Clotilde y Lirinio’ / ‘Clotilde and Lirinio’ is even more obviously moralistic, as the story seeks to show how exacerbated love, especially for a virtuous married woman, must have terrible consequences. A plot to shake Lirinio out of his obsession for Clotilde leads his friends to convince him to resort to a Satanic spell that will make Clotilde love him. A farfetched ruse involving inserting the teeth of a dead man in his mouth and hugging a corpse that appears to come back to life ends in tragedy when Lirinio is literally scared to death. The story thus uses fear, Lirinio’s, to wax lyrically about unchecked passions, but also to make a point about the risks of black magic, which can never be justified in the eyes of God.

Gothic motifs are employed from the middle of the story onwards, but the feelings excited on potential readers are different, since they possess knowledge that the main character does not. Finally, in ‘Dompareli Bocanegra’, the dark arts are also invoked, but this time in real life and with real supernatural consequences. The main character, a bandit, makes various pacts with the forces of Hell, including one that turns him invincible for 24 hours. Dompareli eventually gets his comeuppance and is killed by Giacomeli, who rescues his wife from the terrible hands of the villain. The use of the Gothic here, through the trope of the Faustian pact, is highly allegorical and designed to showcase the deleterious effects of licentiousness and lack of piety.

There are a number of reasons why the Gothic of the Funereal Gallery is uneven, even when its nature as a selection of translations is taken into account. Although the aim is, in some of them, to scare, this can never be the legitimate intention of the stories. Even in the ‘The Princess from Lipno’, the most visceral, the attack on the reader is tacitly justified by having the castle burn to the ground and by reassuring readers that Dourlinski went down in the annals of Russian history as one of the nastiest of criminals. The Funereal Gallery is typical of first wave Spanish Gothic because its use of horror is largely cautionary and moralistic, whether individual Gothic motifs are a significant part of the stories or not, and are Catholic: the Gothic in them is allegoric and didactic; the concept of an artistic mode that simply explores the pleasure of fear is, at this point, still developing. Inquisitorial and governmental censorship, although becoming less stringent by the 1830s, frowned upon any unaccounted expression of the supernatural that was not benign or miraculous (allowed by God), and persecuted and destroyed pieces of work considered frivolous.15

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Zaragoza’s collection was published in a Spain where what could be sold was never what editors and writers exactly intended, and therefore the Funereal Gallery is caught between the desire to pleasantly terrorise readers and the need to ensure that the process is morally justifiable. A certain sense of hypocrisy is inevitable, as is the predilection for romantic stories that focus on the right way of governing the human passions. Naturally, the point can be made that the Gothic in these stories is largely French and not strictly Spanish, since all of them are adaptations from Cuisin’s book and some of them are translated word for word. But this stance would be missing the point that Zaragoza made the stories his own by selecting and placing them alongside a string of otherwise tragic stories. The Gothic becomes associated with cruelty, revenge and sin. Seemingly, the tragic stories gain new meanings in the process: the crimes in them accrue a sense of the horrific that makes them more powerful.

Although not exclusively, or even predominantly, a Gothic text, the Funereal Gallery managed to corner that market, and it is therefore a landmark in the Spanish Gothic. A nuanced understanding of its purposes, as well as its historic coordinates, helps us understand that the manifestations of the Gothic in the late-eighteenth and the early-nineteenth century were as much a result of the mentality of the ‘Ilustración’ (the Spanish word for Enlightenment) as of the impositions of the cultural state of affairs. In many ways, this early Spanish Gothic is the natural product of a heavily rational, yet extremely Catholic, Spain, a deeply religious country preoccupied with eliminating superstition. If the Gothic in some of these stories can feel imported (the stagecraft in ‘The Princess from Lipno’, the atmospheres, the bloody shadows), their function as vehicles for moral lessons reinforcing faith in God, the ephemerality of earthly life, the importance of justice, piety, forgiveness, contrition and, above all, of self-control, make them very Spanish texts. In this respect, the Gothic adaptations that reached Spain can be said to bridge the generic gap between the British Gothic, unequivocally foreign, and national production, which was still influenced by the chivalric values of the romance, and the religious messages of the moral allegory and miracle fiction. Spain’s own obsession with religious iconography, especially damnation, would also resonate with Britain and France’s exploitation of the supernatural and of Satanic dealings. The Funereal Gallery, a late, transgeneric, adapted hybrid, was not a success despite its confused nature. Rather, its confused nature shows how the Spanish Gothic manifested at the time: as a monster patched together from different traditions and writing practices.

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First sPAnish Gothic Fictions: the ‘DeliGhtFul
instruction’ oF Valdemaro (1792)

If Gothic translations mark the first solid entry of this artistic mode into Spain, there was also some limited domestic production at the turn of the century. It is crucial to note that, although I am referring to them as Gothic in these chapters, the first novels to draw from the Gothic in Spain only did so in part and never presented themselves as generic products.

Spain had no real equivalent to Horace Walpole’s path-breaking Castle of Otranto. The novels that appeared in the late-eighteenth century were still largely written in the chivalric romance tradition and, in the case of Vicente Martínez Colomer’s El Valdemaro (1792), took inspiration from Cervantes. As such, these novels are interesting because they show the tension between a literature still caught in the didactic trap of the Ilustración—a didacticism further enhanced, as I have explained, by censorship—and a growing desire to move beyond the limits of realism. Most notably, some of the novellas collected in Pablo de Olavide’s Lecturas útiles y entretenidas / Useful and Entertaining Writings (1799–1801) resort to the Gothic for dramatic effect or to conjure up a specific atmosphere akin to their broader moral message. An interesting game is played out in this early fiction, one between stylistic extremes (of passion, of exacerbated sensibility, of sublime landscapes and architecture), narrative excess and the appropriateness of the moral lessons to be learned. As with the Funereal Gallery, the texts may indulge in the Gothic only if this is justified and a clear purpose spelled out for the reader. The result, at least in Olavide, makes for a slightly hypocritical experience that simply adds to the pleasure of reading ‘transgressive’ literature. 16

To offer an itemised list of the Gothic tropes in these early novels is a seemingly pointless exercise in a volume of this length and scope, and would only have the benefit of translating for the English-speaking reader
the exhaustive work of Miriam López Santos (2010: 120–45) in this
area. Instead, I find it more useful to turn to an illustrative example of early Spanish Gothic-inflected literature in order to establish the extent to which a reliance on the Gothic speaks to the religious specificity of its contemporary writers. The novels’ Christian Catholic morality shapes not only the message and purpose of Gothic texts but their very form.

Ghosts, where they appear at all, tend to be benign and very rarely does non-allegorical evil go unpunished. As in my discussion of Zaragoza, the use of the Gothic in these circumstances protected the writers as well as

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the readers: it could be indulged in because its gruesomeness was necessary in order to paint a picture of sin that would, at the same time, allow for the need to underscore the benefits of blind faith in the scriptures or the intentions of an omniscient God. Valdemaro, which constantly pits the passions of its main character against the tribulations of old wise men who ask him to trust the power and reason of Providence, deserves attention as a particularly effective novel written in this literary vein.

Perhaps the most popular of the early Spanish Gothic novels, Valdemaro was the second work of fiction by the Franciscan chronicler for the province of Valencia, Vicente Martínez Colomer (henceforth Colomer). Published two years after a series of four novellas collected in 1790 under the title Novelas ejemplares / Exemplary Novels, Valdemaro shares their didacticism and past settings. Like them, Valdemaro also intends, as Colomer neatly put it in the introduction to his El impío por vanidad / Heathen by Vanity (1795), to ‘instruct by delighting’ (Martínez Colomer 1795: n.p.). This point is highlighted in the prologue to Valdemaro:

Pleasure and usefulness are the two main characteristics that a work of art should possess if it is to be recommendable. Pleasure can intoxicate the spirit of readers and drive them mad in flavourful ecstasy, but it will never lead to understanding; neither will usefulness ever be able to fill this void when it focuses on dry instruction and arid proposals. This is why Horatio is in favour of those who know how to mix the useful and the sweet with ingenious astuteness.

(Martínez Colomer 1985: 51; italics in original) Colomer goes on to make the case that the novel intends to be mostly useful because the author’s imagination may be compromised by a life of isolation in the cloister. As he explains, his capacity to write ‘ a fable of wonder plausibly sustained’ (51) is necessarily limited, and thus, his best hope is to produce a novel that will not be ‘ completely useless’ (52). Valdemaro will avoid this fate by showing how ‘ God’s providence assists us in all events in our lives’ and by arguing ‘ that man [sic] , far from resisting his dispositions, must let himself be governed by them’ (52). Indeed, Valdemaro is peppered with a number of dialogues and, on occasion, monologues that explore the role of providence, humanity’s resistance to its dictates and, more interestingly, the confusion that arises from believing in fate when tragedy strikes.

The novel begins precisely with a man in deep despair, Valdemaro, who is stopped from jumping off a cliff by a stranger. Calling him up on his

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weakness of character, the man begs Valdemaro to have faith in God and in the designs of providence for ‘it all depends upon this’ (56). The old man then takes him to his abode, a picturesque grotto where Valdemaro proceeds, in the confessionary style that would be popularised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Melmoth the Wanderer, to recount his turmoils. These began after Cristerno, his power-hungry and tyrannical brother, committed fratricide and forced Valdemaro and his sister into exile. Heroldo, their father, was the King of Denmark and Valdemaro his rightful heir. As it transpires, and as befits a Gothic text, appearances are deceiving; the old man turns out to be Andrónico, a minister and friend of Heroldo, who also escaped Denmark.

After an initial period of exposition that takes up approximately one third of the novel, Valdemaro is persuaded to return to Denmark and reclaim the throne. However, Valdemaro is keen to find his sister, Ulrica-Leonor, as she disappeared after Valdemaro was wrongly accused of killing their father. After he eventually finds her aboard a random ship, the novel provides an account of her experiences. The rest of the text follows the adventures of Valdemaro as he, once again, becomes stranded. Accidentally ending up in the arms of an over-sentimental lady of wealth who develops a crush on him, Felisinda, Valdemaro finds his moral strength being tested once again. After deciding that helping his sister and father’s friend is more important to him than a life of luxury, both siblings learn that Cristerno, burdened by guilt and remorse, has taken his own life. Valdemaro returns home and reigns.

Beyond the fact that the story is set in an archaic past (it is not clear whether Valdemaro’s are medieval times, but this is plausible) and Gothic motifs such as the reinstituted heir—most notably in Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777)—captivity or the constant references to death and suicide, Valdemaro is, in terms of the core narrative action, perhaps closer to the adventure novel and the chivalric romance than the Gothic.17

Its histrionic and oversensitive language, with strong dashes of gloom and doom on Valdemaro’s part, is also more Romantic, or, more accurately, pre-Romantic, than strictly Gothic or horrific. This is not to say that the novel does not use the Gothic; it does so very explicitly. Certain passages, iconography and settings, as well as the personification of evil, are thoroughly macabre and morbid. More importantly, these dark motifs and images are crucial to the parts of Valdemaro that seek to inspire fear or to startle the reader. In other words, although the Gothic does not permeate the wider framework of the novel, it is resorted to when specific dramatic

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effects become desirable. Although these are not simply introduced for their own sake—the perceived frivolousness of fear alone is countered with strong didactic and morally informative lessons and with the intention to delight through instruction—Colomer’s attempt to adopt a macabre language through which to describe the darker side of human existence is remarkable and needs to be analysed in some detail.

The Gothic has two main functions in Valdemaro. On the one hand, it serves as an allegory for the doubts and passions that can overtake human reason and steer individuals away from the right path, that is, the one set out by religion and, more specifically, by the belief in divine providence and monarchy. Visions and allegorical representations of feelings and passions, alongside references to dark characters of classical mythology, actively work to discourage Valdemaro from continuing with his journey and returning to his throne. On the other hand, the Gothic helps to visually encapsulate despair and its resolution: Valdemaro’s existentialist and metaphysical crises are both described in Gothic terms and resolved via supernatural intervention. Let me examine these instances separately.

During his escape from Denmark, Valdemaro ends up adrift at sea and lands on foreign territory. Exhausted, he lies down on a rock and waits to regain his strength. Suddenly, a ‘horrible spectre’ takes him by the hand and leads him to a dark, shadowy cave that makes Valdemaro feel ‘terror fall upon [him], [his] hairs stand on end, [his] knees are weak, cold shivers take over [his] body, [his] heart freezes and the blood does not manage to circulate through [his] veins’ (99). The alchemical and necromantic setting, which includes a floor covered with pins holding ‘locks of half-burnt hair’, ‘walls stained with blood’ and piles of ‘scavengers with open wounds whose insides are still pulsating’, is a clear catalyst: ‘I could not help but watch that hideous room in horror; all the objects that were in it filled me with terror’ (100). Setting, alongside silence, is thus utilised to generate apprehension in both the character and the reader, as well as to set up the even stranger events about to take place. Piromanto goes on to describe himself as ‘the wise man par excellence’ who has managed to learn the

‘science of prediction which was developed by the Egyptian, the Persian and the Babylonian’ (100). He has achieved ‘despotic power over nature’

(101), which he now bends to his will. He also tells Valdemaro that he should not fear him, for he is there to help him abandon a life of misery, and proceeds to make some markings on the floor, at which point he uses some magic powder. The result is a supernatural ‘dark light’ (101) which

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conjures up a vision of Valdemaro and his sister burning on a pyre. The horror of this scene is described meticulously:

I could see the hungry fire roasting their delicate flesh, covering them with a dark and horrible scab, their bodies giving in to the extreme pain and twist-ing into violent positions. I could see their burnt lips opening weakly, unable to utter a word… Poor me, the distress! (102–3)

But as soon as Valdemaro has paid witness to his terrible fate, he awakes to find that the cave has gone and he is back on the rock where he landed. Although his ‘soul’, as we are told, has gone through the tribulations of this most stifling of experiences, it would appear that it has all been ‘an illusion of [his] fantasy, excited then more furiously by deep meditation and consideration of [his] misfortunes’ (103). In this particular case, although not homogeneously in the novel, the Gothic episode is dismissed as a flight of fancy brought upon by a moment of depression and weakness. A similar episode in book IV sees Valdemaro in yet another lugubrious setting—this time a cemetery, at night, full of mausoleums and corpses—and confronted by yet another gloomy figure: an anthropomorphisation of time, presented as an old man with a sickle.

Once more, the meeting leads to the arousal of ‘terror’ (131) and, again, the horror is explained away as a vision, another product of Valdemaro’s agitated disposition.

The rest of the Gothic moments in the novel are a direct consequence of the games the Gods and the furies of the netherworld play with humans. ‘Despair’, which in the novel is personified and described as a ‘rabid infernal fury’ with ‘coiling adders’, dressed in ‘sad clothes inked with blood’ and wearing a ‘terrible snake’ (120) as a belt, does not approve of Valdemaro’s reunion with his sister and takes it upon herself to redress the situation. Flying at night to Valdemaro’s bed, she whispers in his ear until he manages to convince him that his sorry lot in life is not about to end and that he would be better off killing himself. When the support of his friends saves his life once more, Despair holds council with God Pluto, who resides in a species of hell, the ‘dark centre of the kingdom of shadows’, in ‘a bleak palace full of wonder’, where silence is perpetual and shadows ‘ceaselessly fly about’ (171). Her proposal to Pluto, who is also keen for Valdemaro to become his victim, is that she be allowed to intervene and lead Valdemaro to perdition. His approval leads to a second episode of temptation, quite similar to that of Ulysses and

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Dido in Homer’s The Odyssey (eighth century bc) and to a third, and final one, in which a storm is summoned with the aid of Poseidon. Neither is successful and Valdemaro survives. Crucially, significant as these mythical characters and their evil endeavours are, the novel never returns to them and their last attempt to lead Valdemaro astray. For some, this authorial decision might be an indication that Despair and Pluto are mere allegories; they cease to be of interest when the story finds a happy ending. But Colomer’s refusal to dispel the darker side of Valdemaro can also be read as a measured and quiet acceptance of their actual existence, especially when one considers that the ultimate deus ex machina turns out to be the ghost of Heroldo.

Although Andrónico spends most of Valdemaro trying to persuade the hero not to give in to self-destruction and return to Denmark to reclaim his throne, it is not until ‘the celestial image’ (221) of his father admon-ishes Valdemaro that he finally reacts. This supernatural episode is reminiscent of the famous scene in act I, scene IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1602?), where King Hamlet beckons his son to avenge his murder, except that, to dispel any actual acknowledgement of the supernatural, the vision is experienced during Valdemaro’s sleep. Heroldo’s speech is a repetition of the lessons that have been taught throughout the body of the novel: the need to believe in ‘supreme providence’ (223), the uselessness of a weak heart and the certainty that God’s masterplan is unmoveable.

That these ideas have been conveyed to Valdemaro previously could lead us to believe that this episode is simply another hallucination, a projection of his inner turmoil. But such a reading does not account for the fact that Heroldo prompts Valdemaro to go to Stralsund, where his sister and Andrónico will arrive after their aimless wanderings aboard a ship. Since there is no real or plausible way Valdemaro could have sourced this piece of information, the presence of the supernatural needs to be acknowledged. This is significant, as I say, because it means that the Gothic episodes in the novel cannot be dismissed as outright fancy.

The indeterminacy I have been laying down, the use of the Gothic in an ambiguous way that both allows for the exploitation of affect through setting, atmosphere, clothes and characters, yet can gain moral protection from the teaching of lessons and the possibility that all events may be the result of an overexcited, sentimental mind is what makes Valdemaro a key example of the early use of the Gothic in the late-eighteenth century. The novel is excessive in the passages that indulge in Gothic iconography, but it has a pious and disciplined heart and makes a strong case, repeatedly,

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for the need to trust, and believe in, divine providence. A text caught between the precepts of the Ilustración, the sentimental stylistics of Romanticism and the compelling effects of the Gothic, Valdemaro is also a good illustration of the type of Gothic novel that could be published at the turn of the century. The text would have found severe resistance in the form of censorship if it had tried to be more supernaturally obvious or less didactic. Valdemaro is proof that a national form of the Gothic did exist in late-eighteenth century Spain, that of ‘delightful instruction’, but that it was markedly different from the one found in a protestant country like England or in revolutionary France. Valdemaro’s is a form of Catholic Gothic that both draws on the British and French traditions, whose translations had started appearing in Spain during the previous decade, and does something very different with it. The deep religious belief in God and the various moral messages in the text, like the support of the monarchy as a key moral and ideological body, are intrinsically Spanish and colour the workings of the Gothic. In a state of tension between the frivolous and the instructive, these fictions epitomise the passage from an eighteenth century that valued didactic literature to a Romanticism that would embrace the supernatural more openly and begin to delight in the Gothic’s capacity to generate emotions and extreme affective states for their own sake.

notes

1. For more on the role and state of the Inquisition at this time, see Muñoz Sempere (2008, 2010). For more on book censorship, see Zavala (1971: 15–33); Romero Tobar (1976: 77–118); Fuentes Aragonés (1990).

2. Translations of British texts in Spain begin largely in the eighteenth century, and they intensify in the early years of the nineteenth century (Urzainqui 1986: 313).

3. This is not to say, of course, that Spain did not consume the Gothic until the nineteenth century. There is evidence to suggest that Spanish writers were familiar with titles such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), even though that novel was not
translated into Spanish (López Santos 2010: 46, n.77).

4. These figures are extracted from an analysis of the data in López Santos (2010: 282–91).

5. See Alejandre García (2003); Establier Pérez (2012).

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6. It is important to note that the bleeding nun chapter had already been excised from the French translation from which the Spanish version of The Monk was adapted.

7. Sometimes referred to as Agustín Pérez Zaragoza y Godínez.

8. The famous incident of a young lady mistaking a fly on a curtain for a dark apparition upon reading the Funereal Gallery was reported in the magazine Cartas españolas in September 1831. A transcript of the original may be read in Cuenca (1977: 19–20).

9. See, for example, Ferreras, who, in his Los orígenes de la novela decimonónica (1800–1830) dedicates his chapter on the horror novel exclusively to the Funereal Gallery (1973: 249–65).

10. The collection Powerful Themis, by Julián Anento and Basilio S. Castilians, adapted work from the same Cuisin sources, but was less successful. A case could be made that Zaragoza did not hide the fact that he was translating Cuisin’s novel. In a letter to Correo Literario y Mercantil / Literary and Mercantile Post in 1831, he explained that if he had wanted to pass the collection as his own, he would have changed the title and not included the frontispiece from Cuisin’s second volume (Alonso Seoane 2007: 13). He, however, does not openly acknowledge his sources in the book.

11. Further research needs to be carried out in order to identify the sources for the rest of the short stories in the Funereal Gallery.

12. In a new edition that year, published by Rizoma, Pura Fernández (2006), in charge of the introduction, does not mention Cuisin or the fact that the collection is largely a translation.

13. The recent digitalisation of the French text has changed matters. It becomes obvious that Cuisin’s stories are translated almost
verbatim.

14. In fact, in an article, Rebecca Haidt (2003b: 116) questions ‘how

Gothic’ the collection actually is.

15. The imported novel, indeed the form in general, suffered from censorship, especially those texts that were perceived to lack Catholic restraint or were seen to foster profane understandings of religion. Thus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and the works of Walter Scott were initially forbidden on the grounds that they celebrated surrendering to human passion, and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) was not passed for publication because it features a married priest. See Defourneaux (1973: 49–74); Llopis (2013: 73–4).

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16. I am not using this term lightly, especially since a significant number of the early Gothic writers were religious and political émigrés, or else, like Olavide, got into trouble for their ideas and writings.

17. Unsurprisingly, Valdemaro has received critical attention mostly for its debt to Cervantes. See Carnero (1985); García Illana (2008).

reFerences

Alejandre García, Juan Antonio. 2003. ‘Un paréntesis en la Censura Inquisitorial de libros y folletos: Lecturas en la España del Trienio Liberal’, Cuadernos de Historia del Derecho, 10: 9–47.

Alonso Seoane, María José. 2007. ‘La Poderosa Themis y la Galería fúnebre: Una polémica en prensa en el contexto de la traducción de colecciones de relatos en España’, Anales de Filología Francesa, 15: 5–16.

Alvarado y de la Peña, Santiago de. 1830. ‘El traductor’, in Adelina, ó la abadía en la selva: Novela histórica escrita en inglés, ed. by Ann Radcliff [ sic] (Madrid: Imprenta de L. Sancha), v–viii.

Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín. 1991. La novela del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Júcar).

Carnero, Guillermo. 1985. ‘Introducción a El Valdemaro’, in El Valdemaro, ed. by Vicente Martínez Colomer (Alicante: Instituto de Estudios Juan Gil-Albert), 10–46.

Cuenca, Luis Alberto de. 1977. ‘Prólogo’, in Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas, ed. by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza (Madrid: Editora Nacional), 15–41.

Defourneaux, Marcelin. 1973. Inquisición y censura de libros en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Taurus).

Establier Pérez, Helena. 2012. ‘Novela anticlerical y traducción en el Trienio Liberal: Diderot, Lewis y Radcliffe en España’, Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica, 30: 67–92.

Ferreras, Juan Ignacio. 1973. Los orígenes de la novela decimonónica (1800–1830) (Madrid: Taurus).

Fernández, Pura. 2006. ‘Los asilos del crimen: Agustín Pérez Zaragoza y la Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas (1831)’, in Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas, ed. by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza (Madrid: Rizoma), 11–28.

Fuentes Aragonés, Juan Francisco. 1990. ‘ El Censor y el público’, Estudios de historia social, 52–3: 221–30.

García Illana, Pilar. 2008. Una obra levantina con tintes Cervantinos: El Valdemaro (Málaga: Ediciones Didácticas y Pedagógicas).

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———. 2003b. ‘How Gothic Is It? The Galería Fúnebre, Panoramic Seeing, and Enlightenment Visuality’, Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, 26.1: 115–29.

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———. 2013. Historia natural de los cuentos de miedo, rev. edn (Madrid: Fuentetaja).

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———. 1985. El Valdemaro (Alicante: Instituto de Estudios Juan Gil-Albert).

Muñoz Sempere, Daniel. 2008. La Inquisición española como tema literario: Política, historia y ficción en la crisis del Antiguo Régimen (London: Támesis Books).

———. 2010. ‘The Abolition of the Inquisition and the Creation of a Historical Myth’, Hispanic Research Journal, 11.1: 71–81.

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———. 1977. Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas (Madrid: Editora Nacional).

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Romero Tobar, Leonardo. 1976. La novela popular española del siglo XIX (Madrid: Ariel).

Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa, Alberto. 2004. El horror de Mesonero Ramos: La Galería fúnebre de Agustín Pérez de Zaragoza (Madrid: Imprenta Municipal).

Urzainqui, Inmaculada. 1986. ‘Anuncios y reseñas de traducciones de obras inglesas en la prensa española del siglo XVIII’, in Scripta in Memoriam: José Benito Álvarez-Builla (1916–1981), ed. by Departamento de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana de la Universidad de Oviedo (Oviedo: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo), 313–32.

Zavala, Iris M. 1971. Ideología y política en la novela española del siglo XIX

(Salamanca: Anaya).

CHAPTER 3

The Early Spanish Gothic Novel (1800–34)

The original Spanish Gothic novels published in the early-nineteenth century continue to show the distinctive traits of hybrids like Valdemaro, especially their exacerbated didacticism. For example, the prologue in Manuel Benito Aguirre’s El subterráneo habitado, ó Los Letingbergs, ó sea Timancio y Adela / The Inhabited Cavern, or The Letingbergs, Namely, Timancio and Adela (1830)—a novel in the vein of the exotic ‘Tale of the Indians’

in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)—states that the book, as it is presented to the reader, has a clear purpose: Taking the dogmas of Christianity as principles, it has been my intention to persuade my readers to follow the true path of virtue, introducing it as always victorious from schemes and imitations, and to keep them away from the path of crime, which is always punished horribly by unexpected means.

In this novel, the reader will see the results of the good and the bad education. (Aguirre 1830: 3–4)

In The Inhabited Cavern, as in virtually every Spanish Gothic novel that does not belong to the anticlerical Horror strand, the ‘good education’ is defined in very enlightened terms; it is the ‘light of reason’ that sees the main character, Timancio, teaching the ‘innocent savages’ of the novel the ways of ‘true wisdom’ (112, 160). Inevitably, it is eminently Christian beliefs that constitute ‘the principal support for society’ (161), and these are not compatible with those of the Letingbergs, who worship Rah, God

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2_3

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of the sun. Even where the didactic message of the novel is overtly anticlerical and anti-Inquisition, as in the writings of the political and religious exiles that I will consider later, the Spanish Gothic has a Catholic backbone that is notably more postural than strictly theological. As the anonymous author of another of the original Spanish Gothic novels, Las calaveras, ó La cueva de Benidoleig / The Skulls, or the Cave of Benidoleig, puts it, it is possible to summarise the Spanish Gothic of the early-nineteenth century as a fiction ‘adapted to the purity of the customs, and tightly fitted to a pure and Christian morality’ (Anonymous 1832: v).

Although the edifying Christian message in these novels, which justifies their gruesomeness or rare use of the supernatural—explained everywhere but for in Vicente Salvá’s La bruja, ó Cuadro de la corte de Roma

/ The Witch; or, Portrait of the Court of Rome (1830), where it serves an obviously satirical purpose—is a common trait, the reality is that the texts that make up the main novelistic Gothic output between 1800 and 1834 is rather heterogeneous. 1 The Skulls is a historical love story told in retrospect following the narrator’s accidental discovery of some skeletal remains in a cave in Valencia; The Inhabited Cavern uses Gothic motifs very sparingly, mostly in its description of gloomy forests and the initially scary cannibals (the Letingbergs); the narrative body of The Witch is composed of discussions on the dark history of famous Popes facilitated by a magical ointment-induced journey into the past of the Court of Rome; Narciso Torre López Ruedas’s Virtud, constancia, amor y desinterés aparece en el bello sexo / Virtue, Constancy, Love and Disinterest Are Found in the Weaker Sex (1834) is largely a sentimental novel with touches of the bloody tragedy in the style of The Funereal Gallery. With the exceptions of Pascual Pérez Rodríguez, Luis Gutiérrez and Joseph Blanco White, these texts could well have been included in the category of textual hybrids explored in the previous chapter. The novels show certain Gothic modal markers. First, the events take place in a barbaric, and often medieval, past.

Second, stock characters include the damsel in distress, the gallant lover who turns out to descend from nobility or else be the rightful heir, and the dark, corrupt villain (usually of ecclesiastic background). Third, the texts are fully or partially anonymised, and are presented as found objects—the long subtitle of The Witch states that the story was ‘found among the manuscripts of a respected theologian, a great friend of that court’—or as edited (his)stories or translations. Fourth, they rely on Gothic imagery and language to produce scenery-based fear, generally through Gothic architecture (ineluctably Inquisitorial prisons in anticlerical fiction), but

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also in nocturnal passages that include excursions into ominous forests or caves. These motifs often mix, more or less successfully, with those of the chivalric romance, the adventure story or the historical novel championed by Walter Scott. It is, in fact, more accurate in places to speak of historical novels with supernatural elements that are eventually explained away, as in Ramón López Soler’s Los bandidos de Castilla, ó el caballero del cisne / The Bandits of Castilla, or the Swan Knight (1830), Estanislao’s de Kotska’s La conquista de Valencia por el Cid: Novela histórica original / The Cid’s Conquest of Valencia: An Original Historical Novel (1831), Juan Cortada Sala’s La heredera de Sangumí: Romance original del siglo XII / The Heiress of Sangumí: Original Romance from the Twelfth Century (1835) and José García de Villalta’s El golpe en vano: Cuento de la 18a Centuria /

The Futile Blow: Tale from the Eighteenth Century (1835).2

In general terms, Spanish Gothic fiction could be subdivided into two main categories: the supernatural explained, a more direct heir to the British and French Gothic traditions, and the anticlerical Gothic, which was written from exile, often by friars, and was heavily political. 3 In what
follows, I begin by focusing on the works of Pascual Pérez Rodríguez, whose Gothic novels constitute a national form of the supernatural explained—a supernatural foretold, in fact, as I will show—that is both distinctive and an eminent result of cultural adaptation. I then turn to the anticlerical Gothic of Luis Gutiérrez and Joseph Blanco White, who use the Inquisition, or rather accentuated tellings of their cruel, macabre and barbaric deeds, as the source for a very human, non-supernatural form of artistic fear. Taken together, their respective novels Cornelia Bororquia and Vargas, which draw on the same ‘historical’ character, showcase how early Spanish Gothic could be socially minded and decry religious oppression. More broadly, these early-nineteenth-century original works show a continuation of tropes and elements that is testament to the influence of the Gothic in Spanish literature.

SpaniSh Terror: The SupernaTural ForeTold
oF paScual pérez rodríguez

Although anticlerical Gothic is more intrinsically Spanish, a result of its ideological context, the supernatural explained, practised in Britain by Ann Radcliffe, found its followers much more readily because it paid lip service to existing moral and religious beliefs. In its native, adapted form, Spanish terror developed through a series of novels published by

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the friar, writer and photographer Pascual Pérez Rodríguez (Rodríguez henceforth). His La torre gótica, ó el espectro de Limberg / The Gothic Tower, or the Spectre of Limberg (1831), El hombre invisible, ó las ruinas de Munsterhall / The Invisible Man, or the Ruins of Munsterhall (1833) and La urna sangrienta, ó el panteón de Scianella / The Bloody Urn, or the Pantheon of Scianella (1834), his magnum opus, are all good examples of the type of transferral the foreign Gothic novel underwent in order to appear acceptable to censors and to resonate with Spanish readers. Because superstition and belief in phantoms, ghouls or any other type of supernatural creature was seen as socially and religiously indefensible and pernicious, an even more strongly didactic version of the British supernatural, concerned with divine justice and retribution, came into being. The ‘supernatural explained’ can be loosely defined, rather tautologically, as a Gothic subgenre where the spectres that generate reading affect are eventually revealed to be a mirage or subterfuge, usually ‘the acts of a human agent who has intentionally simulated [them]’

(Ferguson Ellis 1989: 169). 4 In Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), an obvious influence on The Gothic Tower, the discovery of human intent behind what, at first, appear to be encounters from beyond the grave re-establishes reason as the governing force for understanding the meaning of the narrative and, more broadly, the world. The thrills and chills of Spanish terror are thus justified on two grounds. First, the spectres in the novels are not really spectres, so the writers cannot be accused of corrupting the minds of gullible readers. Second, they serve the purpose of instructing the reader against belief in the supernatural.

Spanish terror’s commitment to veracity and moral instruction is evident in the novels’ long dialogue exchanges, where the need not to fall prey to the failings of superstition is discussed in detail in passages that delight in characters overcoming temptation, and in the prefaces, which spell out the intentions of the writer. In their exploitation of spectres as conduits for moral lessons, the novels of Rodríguez closely align themselves with the work of Radcliffe, but Spanish terror’s allegiance to the supernatural explained does not arise just from similarities in the structure and mechanics of the stories. Rodríguez specifically acknowledges his debt to the Gothic works of Charles Victor Prévot Arlincourt in the preface to The Gothic Tower, especially Le Solitaire / The Solitary, or The Mysterious Man of the Mountain (1821) and L’étrangère / The Mysterious Woman (1825), which served as models. He writes that he has strived for the ‘greatest degree of veracity possible in the events that concern the

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supernatural and prodigious, without resorting in its denouement to the extraordinary or to miraculous powers’ (Pérez Rodríguez 1831: ix–x). To do otherwise, he argues, is to inevitably produce a narrative that would not be verisimilitudinous or a character that would exist outside history and

‘only for the capricious fantasy of the writer’ (x). To indulge in exercises of pure fantasy would ‘dispel the prestige’ (x) of the work of art, a point he illustrates by referring to T. J. Horsley Curties’s Ethelwina, or The House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) and to Jacques Cazotte’s Lismor, ou le Château de Clostern / Lismor, or the Castle of Clostern (1799), whose apparitions are ‘real’ and, because of this, ‘inspire tedium without satisfying curiosity, which prefers the extraordinary but not the implausible or the absurd’

(xi–xii). 5 By contrast, Ann Radcliffe, to whom he refers by name, is seen to have managed to combine ‘the art of pleasantly suspending disbelief with that of piquing the curiosity of the reader through the outcome and the clarification of enigmas’ (xii). Her particular version of the Gothic, replete with ‘extraordinary, arcane and occult events that, nevertheless, do not escape the order of nature’ (xii), is posited as the true and ultimate model for The Gothic Tower. This is true in many respects, including the location and periodic setting of the novel.

The subtitles for The Gothic Tower and The Invisible Man, a ‘Historical Novel from the XIV Century, Original from Spain’ and an ‘Original Historical Novel from the Time of the Crusades’ respectively, situate their actions in a medieval past. They also signal that, despite the events taking place abroad (in Germany and in Egypt), the novels are very much an original national product and not a retelling or translation. Interestingly, the term ‘historical’ is favoured over ‘Gothic’, even when the contents here, as well as in Rodríguez’s third novel, appropriate and exploit most of the trappings of the mode. The reason for this choice remains unclear, although the preface for The Invisible Man seems to suggest there is a generic conflation of the terms ‘Gothic’ and ‘romance’. In fact, the latter appears to be treated as a genre that delves in mysterious happenings and that features Gothic buildings.6 In any case, The Gothic Tower and The Invisible Man are established as home-grown, ‘castizo’ (born-and-bred and genuine) texts that acknowledge their own heritage—the ‘spectres’

and ‘Gothic temples’ being a ‘natural return to the customs of our ancestors […] and […] religion’, as Rodríguez acknowledges himself—and avoid the Gothic’s frivolous and dangerous connotations by introducing themselves as connected to the past in historically ‘accurate’ (1833: vii) terms. 7 This rebuttal of fantasy, which takes place at a narrative level when

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the spectres are revealed not to be supernatural entities at all, situates the novels within the Spanish Gothic terror tradition and bespeaks the tensions of the genre in its second generic incarnation. The novels are both foreign and national; they reach out to an imported artistic tradition yet remain resolutely Spanish.8 Rodríguez’s Gothic oeuvre is interesting to study, not only because he is the closest thing to an author self-consciously writing in the Gothic mode in early-nineteenth century Spain, but because his work provides an insight into the changes the Gothic underwent at this point.

From the perspective of narrative motifs, Rodríguez’s novels are recognisably Gothic. In fact, they are not particularly different from the British and French models they draw upon. Dramatic turning points hinge on the return of characters thought to be dead (a rightful suitor and his apparently buried wife in The Gothic Tower), on characters who look alike and are mistaken for each other (Alberto and Alfonso in The Invisible Man, the brothers Ambrosio and Eugenio in The Bloody Urn), on women persecuted by men whose ardent love is unrequited (Ana in The Gothic Tower, Mandina in The Bloody Urn) or on the guilt and remorse that certain crimes of passion bring upon the corrupt characters who commit them (the baron of Limberg in The Gothic Tower, who does not show enough concern for his daughter, or the perverse Ambrosio in The Bloody Urn, who kills his father and attempts a forceful marriage).

When the twist is revealed at the end, the reading experience becomes one of piecing together a puzzle that, in places, misdirects and obscures facts. 9 The resolution of events, which centres on the true identity of the apparently supernatural characters in them, are, as is often the case in the Gothic, convoluted, far-fetched and even implausible. The settings are also familiar and iconographic: pantheons, caves and subterranean passages with either locked doors, hidden chambers or blocked entrances.

Crucial moments of terror take place at night. In The Bloody Urn and The Gothic Tower, such moments are accompanied by the obligatory storm or thunder and lighting. Additionally, Gothic edifices, whether they be the eponymous Gothic tower, the ruins of the monastery of Munsterhall or the walls of the Scianella castle, serve as the background for ‘supernatural’ happenings. Typical characters include damsels in distress, virtuous knights, corrupt friars (Coscia in The Bloody Urn) and banditti (Scoroncóncolo in The Bloody Urn), and images such as rotting corpses, apparitions, poisoned chalices and bloodied daggers abound.

What, then, is distinctive about Spanish terror?

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Perhaps the most important change the Gothic novel suffered during the process of cultural adaptation is the underscoring of didacticism and, more specifically, of the moral lessons connected to superstition.

According to this modification of the Gothic formula, encounters with apparitions (the spectres of an armoured knight and a woman in white in The Gothic Tower, the invisible man in the novel of the same title and the sylph in The Bloody Urn) represent moments of terror but also, primarily, become vehicles for moral lessons on the need to stoically refuse the apparent evidence of the supernatural world. The less well-educated characters, mostly servants or foreigners, such as the Transylvanian Palotski in The Gothic Tower, allow the writer to have its cake and eat it too: their reactions to noises, explosions or sightings of supernatural beings guarantee the frisson of terror, whereas characters who embody stealth and strength of mind appease the others’ excited fantasies and, in turn, those of the reader. Inevitably, the spectres are revealed to be real human beings: the armoured knight was the long-thought-dead Gualtero of Guttenberg, who feigned control over lightning and thunder by using gunpowder; the invisible man turns out to be the Crusader Adolfo, believed deceased; and the sylph is none other than Ambrosio’s wife, Lucrecia, who designs an elaborate plan involving emptying out the walls of her castle in order to pass for an immaterial presence. Most importantly, although the spectres are feared by virtue of their supernatural qualities, they do little themselves to scare. The invisible man is a particularly telling example, for not only does he actively avoid terrifying people, he is actually found to have helped those in need. In other words, the terror that these creatures inspire is an ontological one that stems from the perceived impossibility of their existence. The need to find out their true identities thus becomes a quest for the truth that is rather different from, say, Emily St Aubert’s victimisation in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Whatever chills the apparitions manage to instil on the reader, however, are swiftly justified, and their moral worth is underscored by the narrator.

Justifications are also made for the gory or violent elements of the texts.

In what we could see as the second stage in the process of cultural adaptation of the Gothic, the recounting of reprehensible acts is legitimised on the grounds that they are faithful to history and that they help paint a picture of the just deserts of vice. This means that no bad deed, however small it may appear, goes unpunished and that all actions ultimately lead to the reification of divine justice.10 In The Gothic Tower, Rodríguez begins by explaining that he chose Wenceslaus VI as a character because

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the ‘repugnant tableau of evil upon evil … [and] the horrific series of evil deeds that make up the life of a monster’ offer ‘terrible lessons which convince readers of how little a solid and Christian education can do when mean adulation and a perverse nature corrupt its nurturing’ (1831: vi, vii). The didactic purpose of the fiction is once more foregrounded and offered as the reason for indulgence in transgression. In other words, the end justifies the means, which are free to be as extreme and shocking as necessary. 11 There are, of course, places where decorum forces the author to acknowledge the extremity and lack of taste of a particularly bloody scene. For example, towards the end of The Bloody Urn, and after having recounted in detail how Ambrosio stabs his servant and ditches him in the same coffin where the former’s poisoned dad rests, Rodríguez feels the need to suggest that the it might be best ‘for the moment, to draw a veil over such repugnant scenes’ (2010: 278). The fictional aims continue
to be to delight and instruct, as in Valdemaro, but the extremity of some of the scenes simultaneously highlight the pleasure to be gained from the encounter with terror itself.

In Rodríguez, the supernatural is not simply explained, however, but anticipated and, significantly, foretold from the very prefaces that precede the novels. This is perhaps the third, and last, distinctive marker of the process of cultural adaptation the Gothic underwent in Spain. In supernatural terror, part of the supernatural excitement is generated by the

‘indeterminacy’ of the ‘aesthetic experience’ (Clery 1995: 107), whereby readers are terrified by something only to have their wits and sense of order restored at the end. But in Rodríguez’s Gothic novels this never takes place completely. In a sense, because readers are forewarned about the nature of the artifice before the fact, the experience is necessarily different. Readers of The Gothic Tower, even if they had skipped the book’s preface, are warned time and again against superstition by characters such as Múller or the Baron of Limberg, who refuse to give in to the weakness implied by beliefs in the supernatural. Readers may, therefore, find themselves in the strange situation of wanting to be invested in the events just enough to be emotionally carried away by suspense and fear, yet remain safe in the knowledge that empirical and natural laws will prevail. Indeed, Rodríguez makes it clear in the preface to The Gothic Tower that the magical and mysterious events therein told are ‘a collection of enigmas not solved until the very last pages of the novel’, and that this should lead to a ‘pleasant suspension of disbelief which will make the reader emotional

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upon its finishing’ (1831: ix). The intention is to create a form of fearful mystery that will lead to cathartic release.

As E. J. Clery (1995: 107–8) has suggested of the rationalising process behind the supernatural explained, it is easy to read ‘the history of the Enlightenment’ in the Gothic’s narrative structure: the reader could be seen to be ‘reliving the passage from gothic to modern times, a process here invested with a pleasurable blend of relaxation and control, licence and restraint’. In the case of Spanish terror, this process is modified: one never really leaves modern times behind, but simply looks back. ‘Divine justice’, and ‘providence’, are always invoked as the only two non-human forces that can influence characters’ lives. Didactic and reason-driven discourse offer a species of buffer-zone for those who might otherwise be too negatively affected by the spectacle of excess. The pleasure in this new fiction lies in the enjoyment of terror with the certainty that reason and religion will stifle any real leap in the dark. Spanish terror is a controlled form of fearful art, a prototype for the literature of fear to come.

anTiclerical and anTi-inquiSiTion goThic:

The SymbioTic caSe oF Cornelia Bororquia (1801)

and Vargas (1822)

Choosing not to rely on supernatural artifice at all, anticlerical literature made an innovative use of the Gothic to put forward radical political messages under cover of the distant past. Luis Gutiérrez’s Cornelia Bororquia, o víctima de la Inquisición / Cornelia Bororquia, or Victim of the Inquisition (1801), often credited as Spain’s first anticlerical text, and Vargas: A Tale of Spain (1822), published anonymously by the exiled theologian, poet and journalist José María Blanco Crespo ‘Blanco White’

(known in England as Joseph Blanco White), are the two main exponents
of Spanish anticlerical Gothic.12 Since the latter novel is partly a homage to the former that uses some of the same characters and expands or alters their stories, and since both novels were written with different audiences in mind, they form a perfect comparative case study of the Gothic mode of the time. Cornelia Bororquia, an epistolary novel critiquing the cruel practices of the Inquisition, was published in France, where it became popular due to its Napoleonic echoes. It was so popular, in fact, that a second and expanded version, which underscored the anti-Inquisition spirit and included passages offering a broader condemnation of the Catholic church

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and an explicit call for religious tolerance, was published only a year later.

Despite the fact that it would only see the ‘official’ light of day in Spain during the Liberal Triennium, 20 years later, five different editions would crop up in the space of only 3 years, and it continued to be a controversial (banned and destroyed) popular novel. Since the 1990s, it has also been recuperated as a key text in Spanish literary history. On the contrary, Vargas, also published during the Liberal Triennium (albeit in London), met with a very small readership and has gone virtually unnoticed in Spain, perhaps due to its cultural duality and relative unavailability in the Spanish
language (the first translation was published in 1995).13 The novel was
addressed to a very different audience, an English protestant one, which means the text is rich in explanations of Spanish customs, terms and expres-sions, as well as in open jives at Catholicism.14 Like Cornelia Bororquia, the Gothic treatment of the Inquisition allows the writer to examine the institution and morals of the Holy Office and, by extension, those of the people governed by it. Focusing on what the two writers do with the fictional story of Cornelia and Vargas, especially from their different contexts and cultural backgrounds, facilitates an exploration of the different ways in which the Gothic helped construct strong and powerful critiques of organised religion. It also allows me to include writing by exiles (Gutiérrez lived in France and Blanco White in England) as part of the national production of the Spanish Gothic, and to challenge the notion that novels in this mode need to be written in Spanish or be aimed at Spanish readers. Interestingly, the two novels reveal similar rationales and conclusions, despite their different styles and intended audiences.

Cornelia Bororquia, a self-professed ‘romance’ that takes place at end of the sixteenth century, sets itself the mission, in the editorial preface to the first edition, of restoring the story of its eponymous heroine in the same way that Voltaire recuperated the memory of Calas in his Pièces originales concernant la mort des Srs Calas et le jugement rendu à Toulouse /

Treatise on Tolerance on the Occasion of the Death of Jean Calas from the Judgment Rendered in Toulouse (1763). A justification for the subject matter is provided: ‘the tragic ending of this noble damsel is an incontest-able fact that took place during the centuries of barbarism and ignorance in which a man was as easily burnt [at the stake] as we now roast a quail or chicken’ (Gutiérrez 2005: 73). The novel is intended as a corrective to the unjust treatment Cornelia has received from the general public, oblivion, but it also packs another, more socially invested punch. As the editor puts it in the second preface (added a year later for the second

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edition of the text), ‘there has been a time during which the tribunal of the Holy Office has liberally committed all manner of excesses and atrocities’

(75). Giving a tragic story a sensational treatment serves to remind readers that, although the Inquisition in its present day (1801, when the book was published) may be but a ghost of what it used to be, it remains ‘an unjust and tyrannical tribunal, alien to a free and illustrated nation’ (77). What is perhaps most significant, but would have probably gone unnoticed by the novel’s contemporary readership, is that Cornelia is a fictional character.

Despite the preface’s insistence that her name may be found in the writings of Nicolas Antoine Boulanger, the Marquis de Langle, Philipp van Limborch and Jacques Marsollier, she did not actually exist.15 The irony of deliberately relying on a fictionalised tragedy to legitimise a novel’s worth should not be lost on the modern reader. It is by introducing her predicament as real—hence the preface, epistolary form and, in some editions, accompanying official documents—that the message of the text can be reinforced. 16 Sentiment, pity and compassion are more easily aroused when the suffering of the martyr, who, not coincidentally, shows herself to be religiously devout from her abduction to the eventual auto-de-fé that ends her life, seems to have had real consequences. 17 Unsurprisingly, the novel would only become available in 1820, and was included in the Inquisition’s list of banned books.

Cornelia Bororquia needs to be read as an early manifestation, in fiction, of the anticlerical spirit of The Witch, which was also apparent in José Joaquín de Clararrosa’s (the pen name for the friar Juan Antonio Olavarrieta) heavily condemnatory treatise Viaje al mundo subterráneo y secretos de la Inquisición revelados a los Españoles / Journey to the Subterranean World and Secrets of the Inquisition Revealed to the Spanish People (1820). Taken together, these texts show a strong discontent with what was perceived to be a barbaric relic of the past, the Inquisition, and anticipate its abolition in Spain in 1834. As a result, the Gothic tropes in the texts are not a conscious exercise in the production of fear, although the language used in describing Inquisitorial dungeons and the feelings they connote in Cornelia Bororquia are intentionally horrific. 18 Instead, they are a social vehicle, a language that allows the writers to point out the unfair-ness embodied by the tribunal and its doings, the only way that frustration may be expressed outside religious treatises or memoirs. Satanic interfer-ence is replaced with clerical Inquisitorial villains, with human evil, a characteristic trait of this form of the Spanish Gothic of the early- nineteenth century. Although the trappings and narrative aims are similar to those of

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the British or French Gothic novel, namely, to scare the reader by recounting the reprehensible and perverse actions of tyrants (Ambrosio’s moral corruption in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk [1796] being the most iconic), fear is created by fanaticism and un-Christian behaviours predicated by those who claim to be moral superiors. In other words, the Gothic offers a language through which to challenge religious tyranny.

The moral of Cornelia Bororquia is spelled out in its preface: Cornelia is a charitable, pious and religiously devoted soul who will nevertheless become the tragic victim of the ‘impure desires’ (77) of the fictional Archbishop of Seville.19 This man is described in very Gothic and unchristian terms. Cornelia, in a letter to her Dad, refers to him as a man who

‘has abandoned himself to wickedness, coarseness and barbarism’ (89) and as ‘a horrible monster, better suited to life in the arid deserts of Arabia than to government in learned Christian lands’ (90).20 Patently, he stands for the evil deeds and unrepressed lust of the entire Inquisition, who are equally portrayed as ‘ infernal’ (190; italics in original), as a ‘blood-thirsty’

‘system of terrorism’ (172, 177) happy to deceive their prisoners and threaten them with torture. Cornelia’s exacerbated religiousness, a fact underscored by the fact that several phrases in her letters are borrowed from the Bible, shows her to be a true beacon of faith. 21 In her endur-
ance and persistence, she comes to embody the qualities and virtues of the true Christian believer. The reader is naturally intended to empathise with Cornelia and her compassionate and honourable temperament, and is expected to suffer and experience the tragic situation as particularly incensing because unjust, especially when the Archbishop confesses to his crimes after being stabbed by Cornelia during a rape attempt. Her eventual and unfair death at the stake is more harrowing because the reader knows her to be innocent, and her prosecutors to have manipulated events. The feeling of frustration is heightened by the fact that the efforts of Vargas, her fiancé, combined with those of her repenting father and his friend Meneses, prove inefficient. The horror stems from the cruelty of the arch-bishop of Seville and of the Inquisition, as well as the spaces they inhabit and signify, all set in stark contradistinction to the world of the heroine.

The novel outlines the problems with blind faith and fanaticism (the Inquisition are, at one point, described by Meneses as ‘the disgrace of religion’ [109]) and promotes ideological tolerance. Although ‘bad faith’

wins the day, its victory is painted in decidedly dark colours. In its own way, like Chartist fiction, it could be argued that Cornerlia Bororquia is functional literature insofar as it seeks a reaction, ideally a call to arms.

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These ideas, expanded in the second edition, take the shape of reflections in the letters, or else appear in the form of Socractic dialogues, epitomised by the exchange between Vargas and the Reverend, who defends the punishment of the guilty. While the latter uses the Bible and history to justify the massacring of the damned, Vargas voices his rejection that religion should ‘proscribe prosecution’ (122) and that the Bible should not be taken literally. In this way, Vargas, the other main sympathetic character, demonstrates that logic and reason shy away from the retrograde and brutal discourse of punishment (corporeal or otherwise) utilised by the Inquisition and its supporters, their ‘hatred, fury, vanishings, property repossessions, tortures [and] flames’ (124). Importantly, Vargas decries the Inquisition for their perversion and abuse of the system, but does not suggest that the fault lies within religion itself. In fact, he appeals to God often—a God which is not the same ‘vengeful’ one ‘imagined’ (134) by his enemies. Importantly, as his brother explains in a letter, Vargas’s beliefs are greatly shaped by the forbidden ‘English books’ (131) he has been reading. Although not openly a protestant, as Vargas is in Blanco White’s novel, his belief in a different form of ‘Christian faith’ (135) still gets him branded a heretic, and his necessary escape to progressive Holland at the end of the novel acts as a reminder that the tolerance and liberal ideas Vargas stands for have no real place in a Spain ‘where betrayal and perfidy are laudable virtues’ (165). The barbarism of the country is underscored in the last scene, which sees a pure and contrite Cornelia addressing God as she burns in front of the unquestioning, deceived people of Seville.

Blanco White’s Vargas uses the same characters and broadly tells the same story as Gutiérrez, but over three volumes and roughly 1000 pages.

The plot follows Vargas, rather than Cornelia, and is more concerned with the gradual unravelling of his real identity. Although this part of the novel does not seem to be relevant to the narrative, it turns out that his nobility means he could be legally engaged to Cornelia (Vargas secretly marries her before she is captured by the Inquisition). The various adventures that follow focus on Vargas’s long journey from Aragon to Seville and back, and are revealed to be connected to his origins, so that local legends involving the miraculous survival of a child by Satanic means end up gain-ing a significance they do not at first appear to have. Cornelia is a much more evidently secondary character, and her fate, alongside that of the Archbishop of Seville, who does not die by her hand, is strikingly dissimilar, to the point where we might want to consider Vargas an alternative telling of the same story. The tragic ending in Gutiérrez is replaced with a

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successful escape to France and then England. The Archbishop of Seville meets his deservedly horrific end in the dungeons of the Inquisition, where he is given the same cruel and merciless treatment to which he subjected Cornelia. A number of new characters, from comic muleteers to the equally carnivalesque Father Cachafuto, radically suffuse the tragic tone of Cornelia Bororquia. In fact, the only two key elements that remain largely the same are the reliance on a recognisable Gothic rhetoric in the anticlerical passages and the overall anti-Inquisition message.

Vargas is difficult to categorise. On the one hand, it is a historical novel in the vein of Walter Scott, with whom Blanco White has been compared, especially in the sections set in Aragon and which chronicle the unfair treatment and eventual escape to France of Antonio Pérez, a secretary of King Philip II accused of the murder of a Spanish politician.22 On the other hand, Vargas has more than a touch of the chivalric Romance to it and a meandering structure that some critics have claimed was directly influenced by Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The novel is also comic in parts, with satirical passages on the life of Spanish peasants and their superstitions.

Among this narrative hotchpotch, one finds well-known Gothic tropes and motifs, such as the revelation that Vargas is really the son of a nobleman; the inclusion, twice, of an angered killer mob; the sublime and picturesque vocabulary used to describe some landscapes; or the reliance on ‘sombre’

architecture to reflect ‘dark deeds’ (Blanco White 1822, I: 184) in the
case of the Moorish castle of Alange. Additionally, the novel is presented as one historical tale amid the many found in the papers left behind by the late Cornelius Villiers, a retired Englishman who left his home to join the trade business in Cadiz as a young man and, upon his return to England, decided ‘to attempt to illustrate the history, and delineate the character and customs of the people among whom he had spent so large a portion of his life’ (xi). The anonymous editor proposes to share one of these tales (Vargas’s) with the public due to his admiration for Villiers.

But the most Gothic parts of the novel are those that either evoke the Inquisition’s palace in Seville or else take place there. The ‘dark dungeons […] never illuminated by the bright sun of that happy country’ are introduced early on by Antonio Pérez, who, upon being handed over to the Inquisition for the second time, ‘reflect[s] upon the tortures he had undergone at Madrid and anticipate[s] with horror the too great prob-ability of their repetition’ (27) in Aragon. This is the case because, as we are told, ‘even though it is a fundamental law [there] that torture shall not be inflicted within its favoured limits […] it was in vain to hope

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that its laws would be respected’ (27). The Aljafería, the headquarters of the Inquisition in Aragon, is soon after described as ‘a large Gothic fortress, built for the residence of the Moorish monarchs upon their first establishment at Zaragoza’ (78). It was given over to the Inquisition by King Ferdinand II of Aragon precisely to increase the respect for the religious institution and sits, when the action begins, ‘about three hundred yards without the gates of the city, where it frowns in Gothic gloomi-ness’ (78). The fortress’s dungeons are described as ‘the regions where hope, that cometh to all, cometh not’ (305), and later as ‘infernal’ (II: 115). Although specific scenes involving a wooden horse torture device are spared the reader because Cornelia pretends to be pregnant, it is clear these instruments are tokens of a dark barbaric age or, as the novel puts
it, ‘execrable engines of fanaticism’ (III: 57).23 Its representatives are similarly terrifying: as the writer makes it quite clear, their simple mention is enough to conjure up ‘nervous trepidation’ (II: 116) and even terror. In the first volume, the licentiate Alonzo Molina de Mediano, the General-Inquisitor, has made a name for himself through ‘the boldness of his opin-ions’; his character is one ‘before which the common minds of his fellow inquisitors shr[ink] with awe’ (88). Similarly, the grotesque Archbishop of Seville is an excessively proud man whose ‘cheerfulness […] is debased by the evident character of sensuality and animal satisfaction’ (I: 281).

He ‘had early fallen into the hands of the most degraded of the degraded clergy at that unhappy period of the history of Christianity’ (II: 109) and become ‘a mis-shapen demon’ (III: 45). Vargas’s mixed feelings towards the end, when he suspects the odious man might be his father, are met with vitriol and threats, and the novel’s poetic justice naturally sees the Archbishop succumbing to the merciless lack of concern and desire for secrecy characteristic of the very same Inquisition that once helped him become an honoured and feared man.

Magic, or rather miracles, are also a crucial part of the novel, for they establish a dividing line between the superstitious peasants and members of the church, both of which act as either comic relief or incitement to fear, and Vargas. The latter is initially forced to flee Seville because he refuses to enter holy orders at his adopted father’s (Cornelia’s real father) request and runs the risk of being accused of heresy. Vargas’s refusal to accept reclusion is symbolic, an act that gains meaning precisely because his decision comes after an early life dedicated to the study of theology that has left him ‘disgusted with the inconsistencies of papal infallibility’

(I: 228). His determination not to become a priest despite the negative

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effects he knows this will have on his future reinforces the value of reason. The novel drives this point home: ‘[i]n throwing off the bridle of religion he did not take upon himself the yoke of the spirit of evil’ (232).

In fact, Vargas’s exile to England will open up his eyes to a new religion, Protestantism, that presents itself as the opposite to the one he has always known, as liberal, progressive and tolerant in its celebration of sim-plicity. Protestantism makes Vargas regain his interest in the Bible and in theology, and is pitted against Catholic superstition. Since the alleged writer of the novel, Cornelius, as well as the readership and Vargas himself, are Protestants, it is not surprising that the rest of Vargas emphasises the triumph of rational thinking. Superstition is openly connected with Catholicism in the episodes of the bull of the St Mark celebrations in Estremadura (chapter 19), seen as pagan and blasphemous by Vargas, or in Father Lawrence and Father Cachafuto’s elaborate, yet implausible, explanations for the survival of Vargas after being pushed down a precipice.

That Father Lawrence claims he was tempted by Satan and accuses Vargas of being possessed himself only underscores his delirious nature and overexcited imagination, so that his praying and tending to God come across as excessively devout. Superstition in Vargas is even more strongly linked, as it was in Cornelia Bororquia, to the barbaric religious throwback the Inquisition represents, epitomised by monstrous torture and by overzeal-ous and ignorant preachers. In a passage that betrays the Protestant qualities of the text, the writer goes as far as to praise the Reformation because

‘by the light … [it] has shed over the whole Christian world, either direct or reflected, the growth of despotism, which thrives in darkness, has been stunted’ (II: 212). The ‘dark days’ (II: 212) of a medieval Inquisition are replaced with the light of an Enlightened protestant present (and, more specifically, ‘a free and enlightened England’ [II: 296]) that can challenge and illuminate the dungeons of a previously highly secretive tribunal, as well as pity ‘the incurable blindness of the degraded minds’ (III: 274) of Spanish peasants.

Vargas and Cornelia’s affirmative escape at the end of the novel, a significant change from Gutiérrez’s version, highlights the message that good and rational faith lead to happiness, and that vice and corruption, symbolised by the Archbishop, are justly punished by divine providence.

This message constitutes a radical view of religion that would have been unvoiceable in Spain, and which encapsulates brilliantly the predicament and thoughts of the Spanish religious exiles. In the writing of Gutiérrez and Blanco White, the Gothic becomes a means to challenge a form

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of state-sanctioned faith that imposes without questioning, which tortures without giving a chance for dialogue. It should not come as a surprise that the Gothic villains in these works are the shady and vicious members of the much-feared Inquisition. Protestant beliefs, connected with learned education and rationalism (both significant tenets of the Enlightenment), are levelled at Catholicism and defended for their inclusive and tolerant approach to faith. In a sense, it was not simply the dynamics and machinery of the Gothic that was adopted during the early-nineteenth century, but its potentially subversive aspects. In the context of a censored press and a still largely illiterate and Catholic Spain, this was most certainly radical.

The drive towards a more national version of the Gothic would escalate during Romanticism proper, as Spanish writers began to locate supernatural phenomena in Spain and to use Spanish folklore and legends as the backbone to their tales. The ‘first wave’ of original Gothic fiction, however, needs to be recast as foundational, and as one that establishes models for the cultural adaptation of the mode that go beyond simplistic concepts of imitation and influence.

noTeS

1. Manuel José Quintana’s poem ‘Al panteón del Escorial’ / ‘To the Escorial Pantheon’ (1805) is another great example of Spanish Gothic satire.

2. For more on the supernatural and Gothic elements of these novels, see Carnero (1973).

3. See Muñoz Sempere (2011).

4. I am not suggesting that this is how all supernatural stories were handled at the time, as there are ‘unexplained’ ghosts in, for example, Anne Fuller’s Alan Fitz-Osbourne (1787). However, the supernatural explained did develop into ‘an identifiable school of writing’ (Clery 1995: 106). For more on the Gothic ghost story,
see Briggs (2012); Smith (2012).

5. Ethelwina appeared in Spain in 1806, without an editor or translator, under the title Etelvina ó Historia de la baronesa de Castle Acre and in two volumes. Lismor is attributed to a W. Sheridan by its editor, J. –B. –D. M, and is introduced as a translation from the fourth English edition. It looks, however, like it could be a republished edition of Jacques Cazotte’s romance Le lord

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impromptu / Lord Impromptu (1771), itself misguidingly credited as a translation of a fictitious book, The White-Witcherast, or, The Strange Success of Richard Oberthon, although I have not been able to verify this. In any case, the novel appeared in Spain in four volumes between 1814 and 1815 as Evaristo y Teodora ó el castillo de Clostern / Evaristo and Theodora, or Clostern Castle, and was edited and translated by Francisco Grimaud de Velaunde.

6. In The Invisible Man, Rodríguez (1833: vi) discusses the contem-
porary passion for ‘romances extracted from tales of the Middle Ages’ featuring ‘frightening descriptions of subterranean passages, mysteries and gothic buildings’.

7. López Santos (2010: 210) has proposed that this genre correlation feels ‘forced’ and ‘incongruous’, that it ‘smacks of paradox’.

Rodríguez signs The Gothic Tower with ‘P.J.P.’, initials that do not even spell his own name, in order to preserve anonymity. His other two novels are fully anonymised.

8. In a sense, the modal rebuttal takes place at the level of the title itself, where the terms ‘spectre’ and ‘Gothic’ are combined with historical fact. This is unlikely to be the story of a real ghost, and thus, readerly interest will rely on the desire to uncover the mystery behind it.

9. The found manuscript framing device is also used in The Bloody Urn, whose introduction is reminiscent of Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797).

10. The most extreme example appears in The Bloody Urn, where the murder of Cecilia, Mandina’s carer, is justified on the grounds that she forced Mandina to leave her mother, even though the latter was tyrannical. As the text puts it, ‘she had no right, under any pretext, to deprive the woman from her motherly rights’ (Pérez Rodríguez 2010: 241).

11. Another excuse is also found for ‘the dark colour of vice’ which is

‘highlighted in excess’ (Pérez Rodríguez 1831: viii) in the novel: the author pronounces that this is an inevitable result of vying for historical accuracy.

12. It has been suggested (Benítez 1995) that Cornelia Bororquia may have seen a first edition in 1799 or 1800, prior to its publication in Paris in 1801, but there is no documented evidence of said edition.

Blanco White’s authorship has also been contested, although the majority of critics now agree that Vargas is his work.

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13. As Garnica Silva (1997: 86–9) has suggested, the obscurity of

Vargas may also be a result of Blanco White’s own disdain for the novel and his willingness to make it disappear. Garnica Silva explains that Blanco White became disenchanted with Anglicanism in the late 1820s and also wanted to be seen as artistically accomplished, something which would have been difficult had he tried to establish himself as a writer of novels. For contemporary critic J. G.

Lockhart, the novel may have come a bit late to capitalise on the

Gothic boom of ‘ten years ago [the 1810s]’ (1822: 730), and
which had faded by the publication of Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

14. Rubén Benítez and María Elena Francés (1995: 9) have specu-
lated, although without providing actual evidence, that the novel may have first been written in Spanish.

15. The deliberate falseness of this statement was remarked upon as early as 1812 (Llorente 1812: xxii). This is not to say that Cornelia was not potentially based on real cases. Doña María de Bohorques, burnt at the stake along with her sister, has been offered as a possible model (see Benítez 1995: 100). For more on the links between the sources for the name and the choice of the texts as proof of Cornelia’s existence, see Dufour (2005).

16. Similar cases were indeed recorded at the time. See Dufour (2005: 50–1).

17. The Romantic and sentimental language and style is another.

18. The prison is described by Cornelia as evoking ‘horror’, and she explains that ‘[t]he darkness, the humiliation, the silence, the anxieties of a prison where I am granted no sign of life other than my breathing, bring to my mind, despite myself, sad and sombre
reflections’ (105).

19. The term ‘deseo’ in Spanish can mean both ‘wish’ and ‘desire’ in the sensuous or erotic sense.

20. He is also compared to a ‘wolf’ (107).

21. As Dufour (2005: 92, n. 32) notes, Cornelia’s writing often cites the Bible.

22. For the Scott comparison, see Murphy (1995).

23. Blanco White shows reserve in front of the potential spectacle of torture, unlike more obviously titillating writers like William Henry Ireland. Blanco White’s intention is to decry injustice, not to mine it for spectacle.

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reFerenceS

Aguirre, Manuel Benito. 1830. El subterráneo habitado, ó Los Letingbergs, ó sea Timancio y Adela (Madrid: Oficina de Moreno).

Anonymous. 1832. Las calaveras, ó La cueva de Benidoleig. Novela histórica original (Valencia: Imprenta de Gimeno).

Benítez, Rubén. 1995. ‘ Vargas, novela española de Blanco White’, Anales de Literatura Española, 11: 89–106.

Benítez, Rubén, and María Elena Francés. 1995. ‘Introducción’, in Vargas: Novela española, ed. by Rubén Benítez and María Elena Francés (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert), 9–69.

Blanco White, Joseph. 1822. Vargas: A Tale of Spain, 3 vols (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy).

Briggs, Julia. 2012. ‘The Ghost Story’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David Punter (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 176–85.

Carnero, Guillermo. 1973. ‘Apariciones, delirios, coincidencias: Actitudes ante lo maravilloso en la novela histórica española del segundo tercio del XIX’, ĺnsula, 318: 1–15.

Clery, E. J. 1995. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Dufour, Gérard. 2005. ‘Introducción’, in Luis Gutiérrez, Cornelia Bororquia, ed.

by Gérard Dufour (Madrid: Cátedra), 46–50.

Ferguson Ellis, Kate. 1989. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press).

Garnica Silva, Antonio. 1997. ‘La novela anticlerical española: Estudio compara-tivo de Cornelia Bororquia y Vargas’, Exemplaria, 1: 75–95.

Gutiérrez, Luis. 2005. Cornelia Bororquia, o víctima de la Inquisición (Madrid: Cátedra).

Llorente, Juan Antonio. 1812. Anales de la Inquisición de España, tomo 1: Desde el establecimiento de la Inquisición por los Reyes Católicos hasta el año 1508 (Madrid: Imprenta de Ibarra).

Lockhart, J. G. 1822. ‘Review of Vargas’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 12 December, 730–40.

López Santos, Miriam. 2010. La novela gótica en España (1788–1833) (Vigo: Academia del Hispanismo).

Muñoz Sempere, Daniel. 2011. ‘Góticos, traductores y exiliados: La literatura sobre la Inquisición española en Inglaterra (1811–1827)’, Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo, 13: 141–69.

Murphy, Martin. 1995. ‘The Spanish Waverley: Blanco White and Vargas’, Atlantis, 17.1–2: 165–80.

Pérez Rodríguez, Pascual (P.J.P.). 1831. La torre gótica, ó el espectro de Limberg (Valencia: Oficina de López).

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ANISH GOTHIC NOVEL (1800–34) 83

———. 1833. El hombre invisible, ó las ruinas de Munsterhall (Valencia: Imprenta de Cabrerizo).

———. 2010. La urna sangrienta, ó el panteón de Scianella (Madrid: Siruela).

Smith, Andrew. 2012. The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

PART II

From Romanticism to the

Fin-de- siècle (1834–1900)

CHAPTER 4

Spanish Romanticism and the Gothic

It is difficult to establish a neat break between the early Gothic novel and the mode’s development through Romantic texts in Spain because, due to the late flourishing of both movements, they were largely contempo-
raneous.1 For example, Pascual Pérez Rodríguez’s La urna sangrienta, ó el panteón de Scianella / The Bloody Urn, or the Pantheon of Scianella (1834) was published only a year before the first performance of one of the Spanish Romantic plays par excellence, Don Álvaro ó la fuerza del sino /

Don Álvaro, or, the Force of Fate (1835), by the Duke of Rivas, and seven years before his Romances Históricos / Historical Romances (1841)—a significant influence on the Gothic legends of post-Romantic writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. José de Cadalso’s Noches lúgubres / Lugubrious Nights (1789), which were well-read and came to be known as one of the most significant works in Spanish Romanticism, belie the Gothic sensibility of graveyard poetry. To further complicate matters, it is also unclear whether the darker side of the ‘folletín’, novels such as Juan Martínez Villergas’s Los misterios de Madrid / The Mysteries of Madrid (1844–45) and Torcuato Tárrago Mateos’s El monje negro, ó el hambre de Madrid / The Black Monk, or, the Hunger of Madrid (1857), should be considered late examples of the Gothic novel. Like its British cousin, the penny dreadful, the folletín’s interest in ‘[m]urders, suicides, madness, vengeances, forged documents, and, in some cases, fantastic elements and events’ (Martí-López 2003: 72) was Gothic in essence. 2 The folletín’s debt to adventure writers like

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2_4

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Jules Verne and the ‘capa y espada’ (cloak and dagger) tradition makes it possible to think of it as a hybrid genre that borrowed heavily from the Gothic tradition.

The noticeable reticence in Spanish letters to name anything ‘Gothic’ is, problematically, accompanied by a marked persistence to find national precursors where imported sources seem a more obvious influence. This is the case with the found manuscript motif, present in some of José Zorrilla’s Gothic-inflected legends. While it was strongly cemented in the Gothic imagination by the early-nineteenth century, Salvador García Castañeda connects the use of this framing device to previous Spanish works such as Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina / Celestina or Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615). 3 Necessarily, this means that the work of some of the Romantic writers—Zorrilla’s, but also José de Espronceda’s or Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s—is potentially de-Gothicised in favour of an understanding of their oeuvre in purely legendary, historical or, at a push,

‘fantastic’ terms (García Castañeda 2011: 28). 4 Similarly, Gothic settings, firmly in place by the 1840s, and even the source of parody and satire in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), have been read as a result of the Romantic interest in religion, as the following passage demonstrates:

The Catholic world provides a scenery of abbeys and convents, of cemeteries and chapels, of cloisters and crypts; with Godly judgements, gloomy funerals and splendorous processions, and with a multitude of pious monks, miracle-working hermits and wandering pilgrims. In this way, religion comes to be a part of Romantic staging, independently of the beliefs professed by each author. (García Castañeda 2011: 44)

These iconic landscapes and sets, although undoubtedly drawing on a tradition that goes beyond the iconography and formulae of the Gothic as it flourished in the late-eighteenth century, are juggled for readerly affect. In other words, these elements do not merely appear by chance, but are an intrinsic part of Romantic texts. They are not there for historical purposes, but for narrative ones.

I would not want to suggest that the Gothic is a term that should be used indiscriminately, or indeed, that it might be useful to describe texts like Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio (1844), despite the play’s use of supernatural elements like statues coming to life. This famous Romantic play is more closely connected to the ‘capa y espada’ tradition and with religious folklore, and was, as the writer acknowledged in his own memoirs,

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ANISH ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC 89
influenced very specifically by the Don Juan legend, popularised by Tirso de Molina in his El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra / The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (1630) and by Lord Byron’s own satiric poem of 1819. Neither would I want to suggest that the Gothic predominates in Spanish Romanticism. In the cases of key writers like Fernán Caballero (pseudonym for Cecilia Francisca Josefa Böhl de Faber) or Mariano José de Larra, whose fictional writings fall within the ‘costumbrist’ realist tradition and the historical novel, this is most certainly not true. Instead, my intention is to acknowledge the existence of the Gothic in Romantic writings and to analyse how this mode may have intertwined with artistic anxieties that were Romantic at heart. Since, as I proposed in the introduction, what distinguishes the Gothic from fantastic literature is its desire to scare or disturb readers, my focus will lie on the Romantic Spanish texts that attempted to achieve this most uniformly.

Aside from the well-known, one could almost say iconic, landscapes of ruins and desolation, Spanish Romanticism, like Romanticism elsewhere in Europe, was fascinated by the past (especially medieval times), from which it took inspiration. The movement delved into the codes and characters of the chivalric romance and, most importantly, often turned to magic and miraculous happenings for either resolution or didactic illustration. The supernatural, not invoked anywhere near as assiduously as in British literature, tended to be of the religious type, so that it was as much intended to scare or unsettle as it was to moralise and encourage a pious, humble and disciplined attitude to life. It is important to note that, unlike Rodríguez, Spanish Romantic writers could hardly be said to be part of a Gothic lineage. The authorial reliance on various different adjectives to describe the texts (‘fantastic’, ‘traditional’, ‘a legend’) leave little doubt in this respect.

However, the effects to which specific elements are put reveal the influence of Gothic writers, especially Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who, for some, could be seen to have shaped the look and feel of the nineteenth-century ‘fantastic’ short story in Spain. 5 A writer like Zorrilla even wrote a well-known tale, ‘La Pasionaria’ / The Rose of Passion’, after his wife prompted him to imitate Hoffmann’s style.6 But the Gothic in Spanish Romanticism shows a marked desire to go beyond the limits of realism and to delve in the magical, the supernatural and, in places, the horrific.

The Gothic and Romanticism in Spain share their transgressive ethos, and show thematic and narrative similarities. As Donald L. Shaw explains, when the word ‘Romanticism’ began to circulate in Spain after its introduction in 1818, and during the development of the movement proper (1834–77), its meaning had already travelled beyond the strictly literary

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one of writings connected to a medieval past. Romanticism came to be seen as radical, its practitioners ‘subversive, not merely of literary standards and traditions, but also of ideas and beliefs, particularly in the political and religious spheres, on which the stability of society was thought to
depend’ (Shaw 1972: 340). Like the Gothic, Romanticism can be said
to have fought against the existing representational and stylistic literary forms of its time. In Spain, the creeping rise of the realist novel, after the popularity during the eighteenth century of the historical novel, would give way to the endemic view that Spanish literature is inherently realistic.

Romanticism in Spain would show intrinsic concerns such as an interest in freedom, or patriotism, passion and Christianity, and would yield a form of alternative fiction whose active challenge of the status quo may have doomed it to early failure (Shaw 1972: 341). 7 The language and imagery of the Gothic tradition, so akin to the sentimental and existentialist view of the world prevalent in the Romantic mind, would become attractive to the Spanish writer. The eventual symbiosis of transgressive literature and social issues is perhaps best epitomised by the work of José de Espronceda, whose idealist politics—he was part of a young secret liberal society, conspired against Ferdinand VII and was deported to London—translated, for some, into ‘verses [that] express attitudes which were felt to be subversive, even dangerous’ (Cardwell 1991: 2).

In the work of two of the two most notable literary figures of the time, the aforementioned Espronceda and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the Gothic would be recast through the lens of tradition and popular legend. Their landmark texts, Espronceda’s lyrical poem El estudiante de Salamanca /

The Student of Salamanca (1837) and Bécquer’s short stories in Leyendas /

Legends (1858–63), serve to illustrate the lengths to which the Gothic mode allowed writers to go in order to express their specific artistic and philosophical concerns; their texts are both recognisably ‘other’, not part of the literary mainstream, and yet, eminently national in their sources and inspiration.

Gothic Romanticism: José de espRonceda’s The

STudenT of Salamanca (1840)

José de Espronceda has, in the past, been hailed as ‘the true incarnation of Romanticism’ (Valera 1951: 152) and as its ‘most brilliant and popular poet’ (Varela Jácome 1989: 11). Much acclaimed for his style and use of verse, as well as his intention to debunk absolute values, less has been

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written about his use of the Gothic, which is directly connected to the transgressive nature of his oeuvre. As with other writers of this time, it would, however, be incorrect to refer to Espronceda as a Gothic author.

Some of his work—his long lyric poems La canción del pirata / The Pirate Song or Himno al sol / Hymn to the Sun (both published in the same volume, Poesías / Poems [1840])—is low on Gothic imagery or motifs. But Espronceda did produce a number of texts that are horrific in flavour and which explore the supernatural. In the short story ‘La pata de palo’ / ‘The Wooden Leg’ (1835), an adaptation of a European myth, an Englishman who has lost a leg visits a specialist in prosthetics and asks for one that may walk by itself. His wishes come true. When the wooden leg arrives, it takes on a life of its own. But, in a nasty twist of events, the man is unable to stop it, and is forced to walk onwards to his eventual death. The use of the Gothic here is, as it is in some of the short stories that will concern me in the next chapter, as humorous as it is horrific.8 Espronceda’s unfinished lyrical poem El diablo mundo / The Devil World (1841), which features the ghost of Death itself visiting an old man is reminiscent of Goethe’s Faust (1808). Finally, his only full-length novel, Sancho Saldaña o el cas-tellano de Cuéllar / Sancho Saldaña, or the Castillian of Cuéllar (1834), could be read as a Gothic novel in its own right. It is set in the thirteenth century, and it contains castles, knights, apparitions, witches and exacerbated passions. I turn to The Student of Salamanca because, unlike Sancho Saldaña, Espronceda does more than simply recycle the Gothic in this piece. He uses it to Romantic effect. It also interestingly updates the Don Juan legend, which was not exclusively cultivated in Spain. The transnational appeal of this figure is significant, and Espronceda’s interest in its development indicative of the wider appeal of local traditions that would lead to Bécquer’s celebrated legends. These will be considered in depth later in this chapter. 9

Although presented in 1840 as a unique text, the four parts that make up The Student of Salamanca were written between 1835 and 1839, and they do not necessarily constitute a coherent whole. Thematically speaking, they are very different. While the first part sets up the scene and shares with part four its lugubrious setting and Gothic elements (anticipated in the former, exploited to their full potential in the latter), parts two and three chronicle relatively mundane events: a scorned woman expresses her feelings as she dies from a broken heart, and a card game takes place, respectively. The main action, inasmuch as an imagery-driven poem may be said to be interested in action, concerns Don Félix de Montemar,

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a Don Juan figure that borrows from characters created by other European authors like Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, Molière and, especially, Byron.10 However, as Marrast (2013) has noted, the sources for the poem do not end here: Espronceda also took direct inspiration from the story of Miguel de Mañara, which features a duel, the vision of one’s own funeral procession (itself an old literary motif) and a meeting with phantoms from Purgatory, which Espronceda may have read in Prosper Mérimée’s Les Âmes du purgatoire / The Souls in Purgatory (1834). The predicament of Lisardo in Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas / Garden of Curious Flowers (1570) also shows some similarities with that of Don Félix, as both characters witness a spectral procession and follow an enig-matic woman until they encounter death personified. Finally, the skeleton bride is reminiscent of Death taking Lenore to her lover’s grave in the German ballad of the same name (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger. The Student of Salamanca brings all these sources together to tell the story of a gambler and bon vivant who, having spurned many women, is led by a veiled figure into a cemetery for his comeuppance. There, he has a vision of his burial and, in a mausoleum, witnesses a danse macabre. The story ends with the mysterious figure revealing her skeletal body and smother-ing Don Félix in a final embrace. As should be apparent, the Gothic does not simply feature in The Student of Salamanca, as it had done in the anticlerical and terror novels that I covered in the previous chapter. Here, it is central, it drives the action and has a clear purpose. But let us begin with the Gothic imagery.

The Gothic aspects and tropes of The Student of Salamanca permeate the entire text: from thematic concerns about death, grief and the passing of time, to the more formulaic settings and the atmosphere of gloom and doom. The latter is largely conjured up in part one of the book, and is later expanded, in its full thematic implications for the action and meaning of the poem, in part four. The tone is established from the very beginning, where the use of the pathetic fallacy is spelled out for the reader, and where the ‘tomblike ancient city’ (Espronceda 1991: 43; I, 34) of Salamanca is painted in the darkest colours possible:

It was late, well after midnight,

In legend it is explicit,

When, with earth quietly dreaming,

Dead men appeared to be living,

The living corpselike in slumber,

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Enwrapped in thick darkness, grisly;

The hour when it can happen

That slurred sounds of voices, whisp’ring,

Are echoed, and hollow footsteps,

Falling slowly, indistinctly,

Of spectres, grim and foreboding,

Aimlessly floating and drifting,

Frighten the dogs, that start howling,

As in thick night’s shade so flitting;

In which from some ruined belfry

The call goes out to the witches

To meet in their weekly coven,

In echoes of muffled ringing,

The bell mysteriously clanging,

Tolling anathema grimly;

The sky was dark, threat’ning, gloomy,

Empty, of starlight no inkling,

The wind howled, whistling its sadness,

On high, black, like ghostly spirits,

In silhouette against the sky

The church towers loomed, forbidding;

Outlined too the gothic castle,

With its lofty ramparts bristling,

Where sentries stood, praying maybe,

Or soothing fears with a ditty. (43; I, 1–30)

This is no ordinary night, but one where the dead appear to the living. The Student of Salamanca thus weaves a sense of fear and solem-nity from the start. It also casts Don Félix as a species of arrogant and misogynistic ‘Juan sin miedo’ (fearless John) figure who will be punished for his temerity. These lines, and many others in part one, are crucial in establishing the poem’s Gothic credentials. They generate a sense of unease that is effective and affective (it aims to have an emotional impact on readers), and adapt Romantic concerns such as melancholy, the natural world, sadness or unbridled passion. The last lines of the poem, ‘ And if you were to say ’tis fabrication, / I am only reporting information! ’

(147; IV, 1703–4, italics in original), encapsulate the piece’s spirit: this is an urban legend about revenge from beyond; it is a cautionary tale that does not demystify the supernatural because it does not need to. The reader is the ultimate arbiter of truth, as happens in Bécquer’s folkloric legends.

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Part four of the poem is the longest, and it is where the Gothic completely overtakes at the narrative level. Although the action technically follows on from part three—Don Félix having killed Elvira’s brother—
the scene picks up where part one leaves off and returns to the same lugubrious iconography. It is night-time, there are ‘dense mists’, and, as the ‘vision wrapped in flowing railment white’ appears to the hero, the horizon is described as ‘gloomy’ and ‘dark’ (97; IV, 721, 720, 727).

When Don Félix follows the apparition deep into the cemetery, the scenery becomes much more obviously the source of unease. Consider this passage:

The quiv’ring tapers feebly radiated

Flickering beams, funereally glowing,

Surrounding them with shadows that vibrated

And hesitated, coming now, then going.

Arches and sepulchres dilapidated,

Courtyards uneven, weeds aplenty growing,

Statues and urns, sad columns lying broken,

Neglect ’mid damp and darkness betoken,

All that there was, was strangely vague and dark,

’Twas a building that, lacking a foundation,

Was lurching like a phantom sailing barque,

Compelled to drag its anchor from its station.

And so, congealed in icy silence, stark

Terror ruled, no-one’s breath, no exhalation,

Ever was heard in that place: evanescent

Fading, time slid away, in sleep quiescent[.] (123; IV, 1213–28) In these lines, the architecture signifies decay and sadness; the melancholic ruins are a reflection of Don Félix’s downfall. His demise is prolep-tically announced by the apparition herself, who warns him that ‘[a]s [he]

stride[s] along this way / [He] draw[s] to death ever nearer’ and proceeds to ask him, ‘does no dismay / Within your heart make it clearer / That to cross Death’s path you stray?” (119; IV, 1160–2, 1163–5). These reflections are interspersed with more general musings on the passing of time and on the nature and effects of grieving.

The journey progresses very quickly, yet is subject to the structuring dictates of the ghost’s speeches. She proffers three warnings, all of which

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are ignored. In each instance, Don Félix chooses to plough onwards, disregarding any dangers attending him. These choices summon further cautioning spectres and end in the aforementioned funeral procession.

Instead of taking these as bad omens and retire, especially after one of the attendees refers to him as ‘devil’s own slave’ (117; IV, 1125), Don Félix resumes his journey in the hope that he will be able to reach the mysterious lady. After their descent into an underground passage, described as

‘the Pit’s wide open jaws’ (129; IV, 1324), he sees the woman standing by a tomb which contains a coffin in the shape of a marital bed.

Loud noises are heard as ‘[s]traight from Hell with a din tremendous /

Crowds of spectres before him ar[ise]’ (137; IV, 1488–9). The strange figure eventually unveils herself, and what is revealed is reminiscent of the nightmare scene in Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797): ‘not a token / Of beauty, but a grim, repulsive skull’ (141; IV, 1520–1).

After the spectre (the heartbroken woman from the second part) forgives him for having driven her to an early grave, she attempts to kiss him as, around them, other ghosts begin to sing and dance. Although Don Félix’s exact ending is uncertain—presumably he suffocates in her ex-lover’s skeletal arms, but all the reader is told is that ‘[t]he night went by and with it there receded / All women’s ghosts and spectral visita-tion’ (147; IV, 1690–1)—he does not repent or reappear in the poem.

He is not absolved, apparently damned to stay in the realm of the dead forever.

What is most interesting about this episode, and about The Student of Salamanca more generally, is that the poem embodies a very Romantic view of life, one negative at heart and which permeates ‘a sense of metaphysical unease and disquiet’ (Cardwell 1991: 15). Given the emphasis on
divine punishment and the three warnings that lead to Don Félix’s eternal damnation, it would be tempting to suggest that The Student of Salamanca is very much in keeping with the Catholic Gothic of Valdemaro. After all, part two of the poem, which focuses on Elvira and her misery, seems to indicate that the text emphasises the need for retribution on the face of lack of contrition. And yet, Espronceda manages to go beyond a simple story of crime and punishment, and offers a reflection on the nature of life. Thus, the denouement of The Student of Salamanca also acts as a memento mori; it serves both to universalise Don Félix’s tragedy and to turn his death (or spiritual banishment?) into an existentialist cry of despair. This is achieved through the incorporation of the danse macabre episode, described as follows:

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Then the spectres began their fandango,

Pulsing high in the air they gyrated,

Swiftly upwards in circles rotated,

But too quick to be grasped by man’s mind

As they dizzily twisted and spiralled,

Like a furious wild hurricane swirling,

So in eddies the dust rises curling,

Lifted high with dry leaves in the wind.

As they gestured, their bony hands lifted,

Came an echo of desolate mourning,

Welling up, out of emptiness spawning,

A shrill howl that was pregnant with fear[.] (Espronceda 1991: 141, IV, 1570–81)

The scene includes another proleptic reminder that the hero’s end is near: Don Félix has defied God (even the Devil!) and will have to atone for his boldness. As the spectres continue to chant about ‘love and devotion’

(141; IV, 1588), they also act as scary props to prepare the reader for the ending. But the danse macabre, an artistic genre of medieval allegory that acts as a reminder of the universality and inescapability of death, should makes us rethink Espronceda’s intentions. If we grant the poem the gravitas and intellectual ambitions it aspires to, Don Félix’s journey towards his own end becomes a quest for meaning. Like Manfred in Byron’s dramatic poem of the same name (1817), Don Félix is eager to find out if there is an afterlife and, unconcerned about his safety and vulnerability, pays the price for his metaphysical curiosity. This idea is developed one last time in the concluding paragraph, which explains ‘[t]hat, spectral, as a woman dressed, and pretty, / Ready at last to take him in his keeping,

/ The Devil came to Salamanca’s city / For Montemar, while everyone was sleeping!…’ (147, IV, 1699–702). The lines are somewhat confus-ing—Elvira has clearly been presented as a spectre of herself throughout, and not as the devil in disguise—but they serve to draw the story closer to the Mephistophelian pacts in Goethe’s Faust. Ultimately, The Student of Salamanca resorts to Gothic imagery and tropes not just to generate suspense and fear, but to explore the morbid interest characteristic of the Romantics, their fascination with fate.

The irruption of the supernatural, which causes fear and is increasingly deadlier, either rights the wrongs of humankind or else stands as a

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reminder of its weaknesses and flaws. The exacerbated sentimentality and agony of existence in the poem are in tune with Gothic histrionics; the latter offer the perfect setting for the exploration of the relationship between humans and nature. But, as Richard A. Cardwell has noted, Espronceda’s form of Romanticism is, at the same time, a singular one. It flies in the face of traditional moral and ideological standards. It questions the basic suppositions and axioms on which society has rested since the earliest civilised times. It opposes the central presumption which underlies the history of Western civilization, that to the central questions about the nature and purpose of men’s [ sic] lives, about morals, about death and the hereafter, true, objective, universal and eternal answers can be found. (Cardwell

1991: 3)

Espronceda’s indeterminacy is observable in his reluctance to offer an explanation, beyond that of supernatural intervention. While the Gothic does not, here, lose its didactic purpose—bad behaviour is punished with what we assume is either death or purgatory—the fantastic events are not explained away. Although the Gothic helps put forward a thoroughly Romantic understanding of life as tinged with pessimism, cynicism and the awareness of the perishability of the flesh and the passing of time, Espronceda’s poem takes relish in the creation of pleasurable fear.

The Student of Salamanca is thus the first Spanish text of some length and intellectual standing to conjure up a sustained sense of unease without feeling the need to legitimise or rationalise evil. Gothic motifs and images still serve to make significant moral points—that men who treat women like Don Félix does will inevitably get their just deserts and that excessive interest in what lies beyond the known world might have tragic consequences—but these are largely played for spectacle and effect. Setting, atmosphere and mood are shamelessly exploited to generate specific startling and gloomy emotional states.

FolkloRic Gothic: Gustavo adolFo

BécqueR’s leGends

When Espronceda based his The Student of Salamanca on the Don Juan urban legend, he did not do something totally new. Traditions, legends and local stories were a huge area of interest for the Romantics, the majority of whom took inspiration, at one point or another, from them. One of

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the genres that developed during the early and mid-nineteenth century as a result of this passion was the prose legend, which has been seen as the origin of the fantastic short story in Spain. Although it developed elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, where it originated, the legend in Spain would be filtered through the lens of the traditional romance.

Notoriously difficult to pin down because, as Mariano Baquero Goyanes

(1949: 211) has noted, there is no real thematic cogency to the genre, and the tone and intent vary from the tragic to the sombre, legends are loosely influenced by popular lore.11 Begun in London in 1830 by the exiled writer Telesforo Trueba Cossío, they soon found a national market in Spain through the works of Miguel Hué Camacho, Manuel de la Corte Ruano and many others. The newspaper Semanario Pintoresco / The Picturesque Weekly (1836–57) also began circulating a number of German legends, among which featured the ballad ‘Lenore’. The craft was perfected by José Zorrilla, one of the key Romantic poets and dramatists in Spain, who, between 1837 and 1840, published seven volumes of poetry entitled Poesías / Poems and Cantos del trovador: Colección de leyendas y tradiciones históricas / Songs of the Troubadour: Collection of Legends and Historical Traditions. These included a number of legends written in verse and collecting religious and popular traditions. In them, slights against God, Christianity and men are typically punished and virtue rewarded, so that the stories become conduits for didactic messages regarding faith, the church and social interactions. Legends like ‘Para verdades el tiempo y para justicias Dios’ / ‘Time Tells the Truth and God Imparts Justice’ or

‘Margarita, the Turner’ / ‘Margarita la Tornera’ would go on to influence writers like Bécquer, whose prose legends—gathered today in the collection Leyendas / Legends but published separately in newspapers during his lifetime—are still the best known and most widely read.

Like a good Romantic, Bécquer brought passion, vehemence and sensibility to the legend, understood by this point to be a type of short story characteristic for its choice of topic, generally involving magic or the supernatural, and its period setting, often mediaeval times.12 There are traces of the Gothic in Bécquer’s poetry, especially the later rhymes LXXIII and LXXVI, whose subject is death and the passing of time, and in letters six and eight of his Desde mi celda / From My Cell (1864), which deal with local stories about witches. But it is his short fiction that is most thoroughly Gothic. In his legends, the supernatural elements are of pri-mary importance and even drive the plot forward, a significant difference from the work of Zorrilla, where the supernatural is often incidental or

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only evoked at the end of the narration. The Legends are, together with The Student of Salamanca, the most patently Gothic texts produced in the Spain of the Romantic period. In ‘El gnomo’ / ‘The Gnome’, one of Bécquer’s wildest short stories, its mythological creatures are described in terms that would not feel out of place in Lovecraft’s tales of the Cthulhu mythos:

strange beings, part human, part reptile, or both at the same time, for, transforming constantly, now they seemed small deformed human creatures, now bright salamanders or fleeting flames which danced in circles over the apex of the water fountain. There, moving in all directions, they ran on the floor in the shapes of repugnant and hunchbacked dwarves, climbing on the walls, salivating and shifting into reptilian forms. (Bécquer 2010: 310)

The gnomes’ evil intentions are confirmed later in the story, when a particularly depraved-looking creature kidnaps one of the three heroines, who is never heard of again. Similarly, the undine spirit in ‘Los ojos verdes’ /

‘The Green Eyes’ (1861) drowns the tale’s hero, and Pedro, in ‘La ajorca de oro’ / ‘The Golden Bracelet’ (1861), is driven mad by the moving statues in the cathedral of Toledo after he attempts to steal a golden bracelet from the Virgin of the Sacred Chapel.

It is important to note, however, that the supernatural in these stories does not always aim to scare. For example, the supernatural elements can, as in ‘La corza blanca’ / ‘The White Deer’ (1863), be there for tragic effect or act as correctives to arrogance or similar character flaws. As in ‘La Cueva de la mora’ / ‘The Cave of the Moor’ (1862), the supernatural can be a source of melancholy, the haunting an excuse to tell a tale of sadness and loss. Finally, in stories like ‘El Cristo de la calavera’ / ‘The Christ of the Skull’ (1860), where a Christ figure appears to magically extinguish the light of a lantern, the supernatural may not be a source of apprehension at all but, in fact, a form of Divine intervention to prevent two friends from killing each other over an unfaithful woman. Thematically, the supernatural ranges from spectres (‘The Cave of the Moor’), Oriental mythology (‘El caudillo de las manos rojas’ / ‘The Red-Handed Commander’ [1858]), dead Templar monks (‘El monte de las ánimas’ / ‘The Forest of the Souls in Purgatory’ [1861], ‘El miserere’ / ‘The miserere’ [1862]) and proleptic visions (‘Creed en Dios’ / ‘Believe in God’ [1862]) to animated objects (an organ in ‘Maese Pérez, el organista’ / ‘Master Pérez, the Organist’

[1861]), statues that come to life (‘The Golden Bracelet’, ‘El beso’ /

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‘The Kiss’ [1863]) or the transformation of humans into flowers (‘La rosa de pasión’ / ‘The Rose of Passion’ [1862]). In the case of the famous ‘El rayo de luna’ / ‘The Moonbeam’ (1862), the elusive figure the narrator chases through the forest turns out to be the moonbeam of the title. The narrator’s pursuit of the ideal woman, a trick of the light, is an allegory for the human desire for the unobtainable.

It cannot be said that Bécquer’s use of the supernatural is predominantly Gothic insofar as it does not always seek to scare, even if his fiction is unsettling. And yet, his most well-known and oft-anthologised short stories, ‘La cruz del diablo’ / ‘The Devil’s Cross’ (1860) and ‘The Forest of the Souls in Purgatory’, could be described as horror stories, and actively borrow from the Gothic tradition. 13 I will focus on the former to illustrate my points regarding Bécquer’s use of the Gothic in his legends.

Their melange of well-known Gothic tropes and local Spanish legends constitute a form of Spanish folkloric Gothic about which virtually nothing has been written. It is necessary to see in this turn to the oral tradition and the legendary past a shift of perspective not unlike the one that led Horace Walpole to build Strawberry Hill, for reimagining the past, as Bécquer did, was considered a form of artistic anachronism. Out of the mingling of traditional lore with a form of storytelling that was undergo-ing significant changes in the second half of the nineteenth century came some of the most original and colourful texts of the Romantic Gothic.

Still eminently religious in outlook, didactic at heart, the Gothic begins, as in The Student of Salamanca, to celebrate its own existence as popular entertainment.

‘The Devil’s Cross’ opens, precisely, with a framing narration that aligns the legend with oral tradition. The first lines state, quite clearly, that the narrator does not ‘much care whether you believe it or not. My grandfa-ther narrated it [the tale] to my father, my father related it to me, and I’m now telling it to you, even if it’s only to pass the time of day’ (Bécquer

2006: 81). Combining the found manuscript trope with the transgenerational legend, the short story is positioned halfway between the pure invention and the possible truth before it has even started. 14 The lines also serve to create certain expectations: it is likely the story will involve unbelievable events and that our suspension of disbelief might be pushed to the limit. These expectations are soon fulfilled when the narrator continues, in the second part of the story, to explain that the action is set in a spot of

‘profound solitude’ (83) in Bellver (Catalonia) and that the inn where the narrator ends up spending the night is ‘the remotest and the gloomiest’

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(85) in the area. His unnamed expedition has reached a cross that stands near one of the banks of the river Segre. But this is no ordinary cross: ‘[i]

ts shaft and arms are of iron; the round base on which it rests is of marble, and the flight of steps that leads up to it is of dark, badly joined fragments of dressed stone’ (81). The metal is now rusted, and the passing of time has equally split and decayed the rock, so that the cross is a ruin, ‘a simple mute expression of the beliefs and piety of bygone ages’ (83). Impelled by an unexplainable religious urge, the narrator kneels down to pray, but he is asked to leave by a local guide who, in a fit of terror, tells him the cross is ‘accursed’ and ‘belongs to an evil spirit’ (85). What follows, as the narrator and his companions gather around the fire, is the legend of the devil’s cross. Deftly told through the introduction of a second layer of narration—a tale within a tale—the cross’s origins become the main story.

After relocating the narrative to a time before the Crusades, Bécquer introduces the villain, an ‘evil knight’ (89), baron of the region and owner of a nearby castle. Getting insufficient thrills from mistreating neighbours and servants, and learning that Christian expeditions will soon leave southwards to win back the sepulchre of Christ, he decides to part for Arabian lands. Three years of peace go by and rumours warn that the evil knight, now described as ‘an abortion out of hell’ (89), has returned to wreak havoc. His deeds worsen and, since the townspeople refuse to bend to his power, the baron decides to set fire to their crops. The king’s intervention proves ineffective, and eventually there is a rebellion. On a dark night, some men enter the castle and set it on fire while the baron’s men are drunk. The following morning, all that is left is ‘the suit of armour of the greatly feared leader, whose corpse, covered in blood and dust, lay amid the tattered tapestries and hot ashes, mingled with those of his obscure companions’ (91). The baron, described using the language of Satanism and black magic, had previously ‘summon[ed] the devil to his aid’ (89).

As time goes by, tales begin to circulate around the armour, who no-one dares touch. It seems to burst into flames when the sun hits it and to groan during the night, as if alive. Fear descends upon the land. Lights are seen at night among the ruins, cattle start disappearing and people die. As a gang of criminals settles in the demolished castle and engages in Satanic rites, the armour appears to take a life of its own and to continue his wrongdoings. The story then includes the confession—a third story and layering—of one of the banditti, who explains that the baron is responsible for the misdeeds. He is now apparently invincible, no swords can pierce

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his armour and no fire can burn him. Upon capture, the knight’s armour is found to be empty; the object was animated by evil forces. It is then agreed that, after a three-day penance, the metal should be melted and made into a cross that will stand on what is left of the castle grounds. The process ‘fill[s] with fear the minds of the dismayed inhabitants of Bellver’

(107), for as the metal dissolves,
long, deep moans seem […] to escape from the large pyre, and the pieces jump […] from between its logs as if they [are] alive and fe[el] the action of the fire. A whirlwind of red, green, and blue sparks dance […] at the pin-nacle of its burning tongues, and the pieces writhe […] and rattle […] as if a legion of devils [a]re mounted on them, striving to free their master from that torment. (109)

Twenty men are needed to hold down the cross, as ‘the glowing devil-ish mass’ keeps ‘twist[ing] again as if in a fearful convulsion’, ‘coil[ing]

up in rings like a snake or bend[ing] into a zigzag like a lightning bolt’

(109). The malignant spirit finally quelled by a mixture of holy water, faith, prayers and labour, the armour takes on the ‘the symbol of […]

redemption’ (109), and the tale returns to the framing story. The narrator is told that the cross still has the devil inside it. Needless to say, the spot is shunned by all those who know the legend. The cross is forsaken and attracts catastrophes: wolves gather around it, wayfarers are murdered and buried there and, in the story’s most vivid line, during storms ‘lightning bolts change course and, with a whistle, wrap themselves around the shaft

[…] and shatter the masonry of its pedestal’ (109). The legend ends here, without an actual intervention from the first narrator, perhaps an indication that, as I mentioned, the focus remains the events and their telling rather than their empirical truth, and that ambiguity is important.

Given its structure, it could be argued that the narrative’s present cor-roborates the legend. After all, the narrator of the framing story, upon hearing the name of the cross, feels an ‘involuntary fear which beg[ins]

to grip [his] mind, and which […] repel[s] [him] from that place like an unknown force’ (85). Similarly, the ruins of the castle, still standing, act as a physical reminder that something terrible did happen in the region.

This is part of the legend’s charm: it indulges in the supernatural without ever actually acknowledging its existence. Actually, ‘The Devil’s Cross’

actively partakes of its construction and builds mystery into the reading experience. As the local guide puts it during the telling of the evil knight

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story, ‘[a]ll that I’ve said, if you deduct from it the fantastic element with which fear exaggerates and rounds off its favourite creations, contains nothing supernatural or odd’ (95). This comment is cleverly positioned.

It is clearly meant for the narrator of the framing story, but, at the same time, it addresses the reader. The point here is not just to leave the story ambiguous, but to thereby increase the sense of dread.

‘The Devil’s Cross’ is, for this reason, one of the most accomplished of Bécquer’s legends. Its atmosphere is chilling and its reliance on Christian symbols and on superstition truly inspired.15 Although most of its ele-
ments appear in European and, more specifically in this case, Catalan popular traditions—the evil knight, the miraculous prayer—the story behind the devil’s cross is an original invention. As it has been argued (Benítez

1971: 177), Bécquer may thus be seen to be using oral tales as models for his own legends. In ‘The Devil’s Cross’, the novelty does not so much stem from the constitutive ingredients or the telling, although it should be evident that both are complex in their own right. Overall effect is more important. The story does not have a happy ending. In fact, the reader is not even sure of what will happen to the narrator, or indeed of who they are. What matters is the object of fear, the cross and the rumours that circulate around it. ‘The Devil’s Cross’ plays with its own artifice, pretending that the supernatural may be explained away only to then centre on the armour’s evil powers and intent. This is religious Gothic horror, not simply because evil is contained by a cross and vanished through holy water, but because, to be truly scared by it, one must believe in the existence of the Devil.

The cross represents an oxymoron, for its emphasis on the transplanta-tion of a Christian symbol as a receptacle of evil, especially in a story driven by the belief in superstition and by an unearthing of the folkloric past, cannot help but stand for Christianity’s own blasting of paganism, perceived in similar blasphemous terms. The reification of the Catholic faith, and the celebration of heroism in the shape of a pious holy man, are markers of the text’s Catholic nature, and consequently, of its Spanishness. Most importantly, the story constitutes an example of Christian Gothic that is unique. ‘The Devil’s Cross’ is a Gothic tale in the spirit of those written in Britain and France, as it aims to confuse, entertain and scare, and employs motifs that are not exclusive to Spanish lore. At the same time, it relies on Catalan popular traditions and is inherently national—hence, perhaps, its obscurity outside Spain and Romantic academic circles. Like the other Bécquer legends, it brings together the Romantic obsession with the past

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and indigenous folklore, and mixes it with a new interest in accentuated emotions.

Some more legends would be produced after Bécquer until well into the late 1880s by writers like Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch or Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, but these would not be as influential, and the genre would lose its discursive currency, swiftly replaced by the novel as the legitimate fictional channel through which to debate the state of the nation. Bécquer’s legends stand as a swan song to the genre. Although the reach and nature of Romanticism in Spain is a hotly debated topic in Hispanic Studies, it is safe to say that the movement produced some of the most thoroughly Gothic texts in the country’s literary history.

notes

1. Navas Ruiz (1990: 36) suggests that, although Spanish

Romanticism can be traced back to Cadalso, its real beginnings may lie in an artistic discussion between Nicolás Böhl de Faber and Joaquín de Mora in 1814 and, fictionally, in Rafael de Humara’s Ramiro, Conde de Lucena / Ramiro, Count of Lucena (1823). For David T. Gies (1987: 61; italics in original), ‘the popularity of horrific drama and Gothic narrative form the substratum on which all Romantic literature is built’.

2. For more on the ‘folletín’, see Martí-López (2002). Very little has been written on the Gothic elements of the ‘folletín’, but, for an introduction, see Delano (2011).

3. It is important to note that Zorrilla did read authors who wrote Gothic works, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann or Alexandre Dumas.

4. What is most interesting about this reluctance to acknowledge the Gothic is that the same cannot necessarily be said for the English-language tradition, which has readily used the term to refer to elements in the work of the very same writers. See Parker-Suárez Bertsche (2000).

5. For in-depth explorations of the impact and influence of Poe in Spain, see Englekirk (1934); Roas (2011). For the impact and influence of Hoffmann in Spain, see Roas (2002).

6. Interestingly, in an introductory note added to the poem later, Zorrilla seems suspicious of the endeavour, as Spain, ‘full of sun

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ANISH ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC 105
and life’, apparently dispels the mysteries of ‘the fogs of Germany’

and ‘its ghosts, apparitions, imps and gypsies’ (Zorrilla 1847: 359).

7. As Shaw (1963) has argued, one of the first thorough surveys of Romanticism in Spain, Peers’s (1940), actually saw the movement as indigenous to Spain. The nature and reach of Spanish

Romanticism remains an enduring epistemic space where the place of the country in the cartography of modernity may be discussed.

For a revision of Spanish Romanticism and its critics, see Iarocci (2006: 1–52).

8. Some critics have called this story a ‘fantastic’ tale, but it was recently included in a horror story collection. See Muñoz Puelles (2011).

9. For the legend behind ‘The Wooden Leg’, see Vega Rodríguez (2011). For the specific influence of Espronceda on Bécquer, from the point of view of the stylistics in his poetry, see Esque Torres (1963).

10. Espronceda has, in fact, been compared to Lord Byron. See Pujals (1951).

11. As Baquero Goyanes (1949: 88) points out, part of the problem is also generic, as the legend was originally associated with the epic poem but had become prose-based by the time of Bécquer, at
which point we can speak of short stories. Incidentally, the nineteenth century is when the short story as a narrative form
develops.

12. I have no space here to enter the debate on whether Bécquer is a Romantic or a post-Romantic writer. Even if the latter label is favoured for chronological reasons, his concerns and anxieties are evidently Romantic.

13. This is so obviously the case that these stories, together with ‘The Miserere’, were adapted for the Bécquer-inspired horror film The Devil’s Cross (John Gilling, 1975), the script for which was penned by Spanish horror legend Jacinto Molina.

14. This alignment is further emphasised in the story. For example, the tale of the ‘evil knight’ is said to have begun making the rounds in

‘the repertoire of old women, who, during endless winter social gatherings, would relate it in hollow, frightening tones to the awe-struck children’ (Bécquer 2006: 89).

15. Izquierdo (1995) goes as far as to say that Bécquer manages to construct a crepuscular microatmosphere.

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ReFeRences

Baquero Goyanes, Mariano. 1949. El cuento español en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas).

Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo. 2006. Rhymes and Legends: Selection, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications).

———. 2010. Leyendas (Madrid: Cátedra).

Benítez, Rubén. 1971. Bécquer tradicionalista (Madrid: Gredos).

Cardwell, Richard A. 1991. ‘Introduction’, in The Student of Salamanca, ed. by José de Espronceda, trans. C. K. Davies (Warminster: Aris and Phillips), 1–40.

Delano, Cristina. 2011. ‘Spain’s Gothic Misterios’, ‘ The Mysteries of Madrid’, ‘ The Mysteries of Barcelona’ and ‘ Los misterios de Sevilla—A Lost Text?, The Gothic Imagination, 7, 18, 26, 31 October 2011. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/cat-
egory/guestblog/cristina-delano [accessed 11 July 2015].

Englekirk, John Eugene. 1934. Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature (New York: Instituto de las Españas en Estados Unidos).

Espronceda, José de. 1991. The Student of Salamanca, trans. C. K. Davies (Warminster: Aris and Phillips).

Esque Torres, Ramón. 1963. ‘Presencia de Espronceda en Bécquer’, Revista de Filología Española, 47.3–4: 329–41.

García Castañeda, Salvador. 2011. ‘Introducción’, in Leyendas, ed. by José Zorrilla (Madrid: Cátedra), 11–104.

Gies, David T. 1987. ‘Larra, La Galería Fúnebre y el gusto por lo gótico’, in Atti del IV Congreso sul Romanticismo Spagnolo e Ispanoamericano, ed. by various authors (Genoa: University of Genoa), 60–8.

Iarocci, Michael. 2006. Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire (Nashville, TX: Vanderbilt University Press).

Izquierdo, Pascual. 1995. ‘Presencia de lo lírico, atmosférico y maravilloso en las leyendas de Bécquer’, in Bécquer, origen y estética de la modernidad, ed. by Cristóbal Cuevas García and Enrique Baena Peña (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga), 33–62.

Marrast, Robert. 2013. ‘Introducción crítica’, in El estudiante de Salamanca / El diablo mundo, ed. by José de Espronceda (Madrid: Castalia), 9–27.

Martí-López, Elisa. 2002. Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain (London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses).

———. 2003. ‘The Folletín: Spain Looks to Europe’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Present, ed. by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 65–80.

Muñoz Puelles, Vicente (ed.). 2011. Cuentos españoles de terror (Madrid: Oxford University Press).

Navas Ruiz, Ricardo. 1990. El romanticismo español. Madrid: Cátedra.

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Parker-Suárez Bertsche, Allen. 2000. The Unseen Spectre: The Gothic Mode in Nineteenth Century Spanish Narrative, doctoral thesis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin).

Peers, Allison. 1940. History of the Romantic Movement in Spain, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Pujals, Esteban. 1951. Espronceda y Lord Byron (Madrid: CSIC).

Roas, David. 2002. Hoffmann en España: Recepción e influencias (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva).

———. 2011. La sombra del cuervo: Edgar Allan Poe y la literatura fantástica del siglo XIX (Madrid: Devenir).

Shaw, Donald L. 1963. ‘Towards an Understanding of Spanish Romanticism’, Modern Language Review, 58.2: 190–5.

——— 1972. ‘Spain: Romántico – Romanticismo – Romancesco – Romanesco –

Romancista – Románico’, in ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. by Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 341–71.

Valera, Juan. 1951. Florilegio de poesías castellanas del siglo XIX (Madrid: Insula).

Varela Jácome, Benito. 1989. ‘Introducción’, in El estudiante de Salamanca, ed.

by José de Espronceda (Madrid: Cátedra), 1–48.

Vega Rodríguez, Pilar. 2011. ‘Sobre las fuentes del cuento fantástico de Espronceda:

“La pata de palo”’, Decimonónica, 8.2: 60–90.

Zorrilla, José. 1847. Obras poéticas, ed. by Ildefonso de Ovejas (Paris: Baudry, Librería Europea).

CHAPTER 5

From the 1860s to the Fin-de-Siècle:

The Development of the Gothic Short Story

Bécquer’s legends were the last significant spark of the Romantic fire in Spain. By the 1860s (the agreed start of the realist novel is 1868), the movement had died out and, while it would go on to influence writers like Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s early writings, it would largely be replaced by a return to realism in the form of ‘costumbrismo’, conservatism and a national form of poetic commitment to the mimetic representation of the world. The writings of Zorrilla, Larra and Espronceda gradually gave way to heavy-weight social writers who, following the influential Mesonero Romanos and Fernán Caballero, established realism as the most successful literary register of the late-nineteenth century. Alarcón, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Juan Valera, José María de Pereda, Amando Palacio Valdés figure among these as, most significantly, does Benito Pérez Galdós, whose mammoth Episodios nacionales / National Episodes, a collection of forty-six historical novels recreating Spanish history from 1805 to 1880, was begun in 1872 and would dominate the publishing market until 1912.

This period also produced some of the most significant and well-studied novels in Spanish letters, especially Leopoldo Alas Clarín’s La Regenta (1885), which chronicles the intricacies of Spanish provincial life during the Spanish Restoration, and Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa / The House of Ulloa (1886), a genre hybrid that resorts to images of ruination and decay in order to chronicle the fate of the aristocratic classes in Spain.

Even the break imposed by the generation of ’98, the writers who were

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affected by the political crisis that followed the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, would not necessarily spell out a significant return to the Gothic.

A good example of how the lugubrious landscapes of the Gothic Romantic imagination had lost their affective attraction by the late-nineteenth century appears in a vignette in Rosalía de Castro’s El caballero de las botas azules / The Gentleman in the Blue Boots (1867), published only a few years after Bécquer’s last legend. One of the few examples of the fantastic novel in this century, mixing supernatural elements with a fierce social critique of the upper classes in Spain and the state of the country’s literature, The Gentleman in the Blue Boots includes a character, Mariquita, who, in her love of melancholic cemeteries and her passion for death, becomes Spain’s answer to Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1818). Mariquita’s mother reminds her daughter of the importance of remaining a good Catholic when she tells her that ‘[w]e should only think of death when it may deliver us from doing evil, or else, when, at the cemetery, we may pray for the souls which no longer belong in this world’ (Castro 2000: 142). And yet, Mariquita’s Gothic Romantic affectation gets the best of her, and she becomes a recurrent source of comic relief in the novel. To constant requests that she marry, Mariquita’s response is that she ‘prefer[s] the cemetery to the man they want to marry

[her] to’ (141), and when she sees an open tomb, she is so drawn to it that she jumps into the pit in a parodic take on the premature burial trope.

Although Mariquita is portrayed as an innocent character, not necessarily deserving of the vitriolic attacks of the Duke of Gloria (the supernatural character whose mission is to set right the moral and artistic compass of contemporary Spain), she is still a source of ridicule. Her imaginative excesses, demonstrated in her picturesque—almost sublime, in places—
portrayal of tombs and cemeteries indicates that the melancholic aesthetics of graveyard poetry and the Gothic no longer befit the more rational and scientific context of the latter half of the century.

Beyond the legend, a few Gothic short stories of a more traditional cut were produced throughout the early-to-mid nineteenth century.

Eugenio de Ochoa’s ‘Hilda’, published in 1867 but written in 1836 during the decade in which interest in the Gothic novel peaked, adheres to the tenets of early Spanish Gothic literature. Initially entitled ‘Luisa’, the name of the story was changed to resonate with the Germanic tradition by which it was influenced—interestingly, Ochoa was the first translator of E. T. A. Hoffmann into Spanish—and the plot, which involves a

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lover- turned- skeleton who saves Hilda from her father, owes an obvious debt to Gottfried August Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ (1774). 1 The story is recognisably Gothic: the events are set 300 years in the past (1530s) and are part of a manuscript written by a priest; they involve a tyrannical baron and a damsel in distress, a cave, and a skeleton horseman whose visage

‘constitute[s] a veritably horrific tableau’ (Ochoa 2001: 152). However,

‘Hilda’ is also notoriously Spanish in its resolution. As the young girl sees her dead lover floating on the river, she jumps into it and both are carried away by the current. There is here an intimation that the young man, previously the skeleton horseman, may be alive, but actions are focalised through Hilda and her potentially unhinged imagination. Her body is later found in the forest. The story concludes by noting that, although the monastic chronicle states that the young woman jumped to her death,

‘popular tradition has preferred the supernatural explanation’ (155) given by the deranged baron, which involves the revenge of the horseman’s mother (an undine). It is ultimately up to the reader ‘to choose, as they please, between history and tradition’ (155). This distinction between fiction and fact allows Gothic writing to be risky and uncertain, and is representative of how the mode continued to be caught in a tug-of-war between the appeal of the foreign and transgressive and the more conservative literary precepts of nineteenth-century Spain.

As in the Spanish Gothic novel, the national aspect of the Gothic short story is apparent in a marked emphasis on strong moralistic religious messages as a means of justifying horror and suspense. The moaning corpse in Manuel Jorreto Paniagua’s ‘El esqueleto vivo’ / ‘The Living Skeleton’ (1879), for example, tells the story of its owner’s tragic death and includes a unique mummy danse macabre in which bones are broken and gnawed in a surprisingly visceral passage. The spectacle is, however, justified: Thamar, the corpse, deserved her gruesome death because she was unfaithful to her husband. In the anonymously published ‘Las brujas de Barahona y la castellana de Arbaizal’ / ‘The Witches of Barahona and the Castilian from Arbaizal’ (1841), a comparable hypocritical dynamic is at work: the many hellish numbers presented in the story, featuring all sorts of demonic figures, goblins and witches, are in the end justified moralistically. When Guzmán, the main character, is given a talisman by the witch Belífea (‘fea’ means ugly in Spanish, and much is made of her grotesque looks), this is in reality a test to see whether Guzmán can live an exemplary life of restraint. When he fails to accomplish this, the witch engineers things so he accidentally kills his beloved and is

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forced to confess his deeds in writing. In José Soler de la Fuente’s ‘Los maitines de Navidad: Tradición monástica’ / ‘The Christmas Matins: A Monastic Tradition’ (1860), subtitled ‘una advertencia’ (a warning), a host of skeletal apparitions, the dead monks from a Franciscan convent in Andalusia, return from the grave after being summoned by Father Custodio to show their lazy living descendants the importance of keeping to their monastic duties. The nocturnal parade, played for horrific effect, ends with a line from Allegri’s Miserere that reads ‘ Tibi soli pecavi et malum coam te feci! ’ (to you alone, I have sinned, and done evil before
you) (Soler de la Fuente 2002: 104; italics in original).

Evil in these Gothic stories is ineluctably bad and a temptation for Catholic believers who must learn to conquer earthly carnal passions and act according to Christian dictum. In Gaspar Núñez de Arce’s complex

‘Sancho Gil’ (1872), dealings with the devil serve as a barometer through which to measure faith and, consequentially, whether individuals should be rewarded or punished. Catalina resists temptation by rejecting Satan himself, who, impersonating Sancho, tries to deflower her. Sancho himself does not fare so well. Angry with Satan, he follows him to hell, where he is captured and only released 70 years later. In the tale’s ‘Rip van Winkle’

ending, after Sancho realises his beloved is long dead, he reflects on the severity of his punishment in an illuminating way: ‘[h]ow have I suffered in this world for having dared to challenge the wrath of the Devil! But I feel consolation in the thought that I will be fortunate in heaven, next to my Catalina, because I have always had faith and believed in God’ (Núñez de Arce 2001: 301). Similar tests, always with detrimental consequences, take place in Luis García de Luna’s ‘El diablo en Sevilla’ / ‘The Devil in Seville’ (1863)—where a man desecrates a tomb in order to win a woman’s heart only to be driven to madness by her transformation into a skeleton—and in Juan Tomás Salvany’s ‘Los estornudos del diablo’ / ‘The Devil’s Sneezing’ (1882). In the latter, the requests of the Devil, who appears as a temptress and is finally revealed to be Satan’s daughter, are so extreme that they demand the protagonist’s literal sacrifice as proof that he has not been corrupted by selfishness.

Although I have been homogenising the production of Gothic short stories during the nineteenth century for the purpose of establishing general modal patterns, it is important to note that there were some significant differences between the early ones and those produced after the 1860s. The earliest Gothic short stories, such as the anonymous ‘Cartas del otro mundo’ / ‘Letters from the Other World’ (1818), Blanco White’s

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‘The Fortress of Seville’ (1825), the anonymous ‘Diálogo de muertos’ /

‘Dialogue between Dead Folk’ (1828) and Serafín Estébanez Calderón’s

‘Los tesoros de la Alhambra’ / ‘The Treasures of the Alhambra’ (1832), were published predominantly in the press, which became a veritable repository of the supernatural and fantastic after the launch of El Artista /

The Artist (1835–36), the most significant Spanish Romantic magazine.2

In a sense, these magazines constituted a species of pulp fiction publishing alternative comparable to Weird Tales in the American context of the 1920s. 3 This is one of the reasons that the Gothic manifested predominantly in the short story format during the early-nineteenth century in Spain. As ‘high’ literature began to be associated with social realism, the novel (sometimes itself serialised) gradually became the preferred medium for sprawling urban narratives. A concomitant process of denigration of genre fiction, especially of the supernatural, meant that the Gothic novel continued to be perceived as imported and foreign literary models unfit
for Spanish writers.4 The short story, by contrast, solidified as the narrative form best suited to experimental writing and flights of fancy. 5 These
connections were strengthened after E. T. A. Hoffmann’s work began to be translated into Spanish in the 1830s. His ‘fantastique’ model, which involved the irruption of the supernatural into the everyday and privileged the oneiric and hallucinatory, was well-received and influenced a number of Spanish writers, from Pedro de Madrazo, whose ‘Yago Yasck’ (1835) could best be described as a Hoffmannesque Gothic tale, to Miguel de los Santos Álvarez, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Augusto Ferrán, Carlos Peñaranda and Antonio Ros de Olano. Hoffmann’s success does not mean his writing did not meet with resistance; as David Roas (2002: 144) points out, his thematic involvement with the supernatural defied the ‘realist verisimilitude’ popular in literary fiction. It must be remembered that very little European transgressive supernatural literature, beyond the work of Matthew Lewis and a few French writers, had actually made it into Spain, where it had been developed by Spanish writers (Zorrilla or Bécquer), in whose hands it had morphed into the more native and intelligible forms of the Christian miracle or the legend. But for the fringe writers, Hoffmann legitimated the use of the short story as vehicle for pleasurable horrific and startling effects, and made possible the publication of short story collections that mined similar thematic concerns. The examples are numerous, but include Tomás Aguiló’s Cuentos y fantasías / Tales and Fantasies (1863), José Selgas’s Escenas fantásticas / Fantastic Vignettes (1876) and Mundo Invisible: Continuación de las escenas fantásticas / Invisible World:

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More Fantastic Vignettes (1877), Carlos Coello’s Cuentos inverosímiles /

Unlikely Tales (1878) and Manuel Jorreto Paniagua’s Cuentos fantástico-morales / Fantastic-Moral Tales (1884). The context of their publication is another distinguishing trait of the late-nineteenth-century Gothic short story. They would be found in fiction collections, as well as in the press.

But if Hoffmann was responsible for a surge of interest in the supernatural, and to a certain extent, for the development of the fantastic in Spain, it was the long shadow cast by Edgar Allan Poe, whose popularity would very quickly trump Hoffmann’s, that would be responsible for the national production of Gothic short stories. Poe’s trademark abnormal (often mad or obsessive) psychologies and grotesque vignettes led to the gradual move inwards of the Gothic, a move that saw its best examples in fin-de-siècle novels like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The privileging of urban settings, as well as a very contemporary interest in science, kick-started earlier in the century by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), are also noticeable traits of the Gothic present in Poe’s oeuvre.6 Spanish readers encountered Poe’s nineteenth-century Gothic, in great part, through his short stories, which began to be translated in the 1850s to great critical acclaim. As Roas (2011: 12) has shown, Poe was the most translated fantastic writer of the late-nineteenth century, and ‘the way in which he cultivated the supernatural and terror was adopted by a number of Spanish writers’, from Rafael Serrano Alcázar to Pedro Escamilla. The production of the Gothic was peripheral, but it should not, for this reason, be thought to have been any less significant or relevant. In fact, the Gothic became an interesting and liberating language for canonical writers like Galdós, Pío Baroja or Miguel de Unamuno, a fictional space in which they could explore daring concepts that would ordinarily lie outside the realm of the realist novel and its thematic limitations. In what follows, I focus on the new ambivalent horrors of Rafael Serrano Alcázar, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and Emilia Pardo Bazán before moving on to the fin-de-siècle mad science tale. I see these as the main manifestations of the Gothic in the late-nineteenth century.7

New Horrors: rafael serraNo alcázar, Pedro
aNtoNio de alarcóN aNd emilia Pardo BazáN

Rafael Serrano Alcázar’s collection Cuentos negros, ó historias extravagantes / Black Tales or Extravagant Stories (1874) is a very good example of the type of new Gothic tale that developed after Poe, not really a copy as

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much as a product of a process of cultural adaptation. In a letter included in the prologue, the author made it very clear that the intention of these tales, all of which, apart from ‘El espíritu de Demócrito’ / ‘The Spirit of Democritus’, were written early in his life but were left unpublished for

‘fear of the present age’, did not subscribe to ‘historical fact, have moralistic intentions, or aim to teach anything, and did not belong to a specific literary genre’ (Serrano Alcázar, quoted in Fernández-Guerra y Orbe

1874: xix, xx). More importantly, they were nothing other than ‘a whim of the quill’ (xx), an expression the author used to remark on the freedom he felt when writing them. Indeed, the stories are very disparate. The only thing that ties them together is a certain macabre undercurrent that permeates the overall narration and events. In this way, the tales which show less allegiance to the Gothic tradition in terms of their mise-en-scène and are more allegoric in intent, such as ‘Martirologio’ / ‘Martyrology’, which makes a case for the need to stop cruelty against animals by describing torture scenes of geese being force-fed, still manifest a dark Gothic sensibility. 8 The supernatural is mostly skewed, and horror is present in different but stark ways.

In ‘La casa del ejecutor’ / ‘The House of the Executioner’, it is the setting which becomes the main character and is described as a species of Gothic dungeon. The intention is to lay bare the sinister quality of such a terrible profession and for the need to stop the death penalty. 9 In two stories ‘El cuervo blanco’ / ‘The White Crow’ and ‘La carcajada de un muerto’ / ‘A Dead Man’s Laugh’, the moment of horror is exploited for chills before it is explained away. What appears to be a premonition in ‘The White Crow’ turns out to be a gypsy woman’s acute powers of observation, as a bird identifies the burial ground of four missing corpses. Similarly, the laughter of the dead man in the story of the same name haunts the narrator after he replaces the body of a saint with that of a friend. ‘Alma en pena’ / ‘Lost Soul’ is the closest Serrano Alcázar came to Gothic horror. In it, Goyito, who has returned to his old house, is haunted by the noise of a hammer slamming into iron bars—the same sound he heard the night when he killed his wife with that very same tool. Although the haunting is persistent and effective enough that Goyito ends up killing himself, Serrano Alcázar (1874: 91) does not confirm the supernatural, but leaves readers to make up their own minds (‘I reserve the right to profess my opinion’). Interestingly, he offers a potential natural explanation—‘[s]ome suppose the phenomenon at hand must be occasioned by electricity as it interacts with our planet, to

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which the essentially volcanic nature of the land would seem to contribute’ (91)—only to challenge this hypothesis immediately after by pointing out that ‘naturalists’ have not found it satisfactory. He ponders what might happen ‘if those who believe that they [the sounds] are mysteries from beyond were right?’ (91) Like his contemporaries, Serrano Alcázar is concerned to challenge an unquestioning belief in the supernatural that he ascribes to the ‘vulgo’ (uneducated masses) so that an ending that would reinstate it becomes unviable. 10

More generally, Serrano Alcázar’s work continues to engage with the older Gothic forms—hauntings, lugubrious buildings, corpses coming to life, an emphasis on death—but updates them according to nascent trends: more contemporary and realistic settings, the appearance of madmen (and women), a growing scientific interest, the use of the horrific supernatural and a more visceral aesthetic. These elements should not necessarily be understood as a direct influence from Poe; that is, we should not think of Serrano Alcázar as an imitator or lesser writer. If we are to believe his writings, he actually wrote the stories in the collection before he was introduced to the work of the American author. In the letter mentioned above, he attempted to clarify this situation to the possible critic: Will they [the stories in Black Tales] be similar to Poe’s Extraordinary Tales?

I don’t know, but I can guarantee that when I published the first of mine I had not read Edgar Poe. My friends then told me about his works, which I sought out immediately and read with great pleasure […]. But I declare that I didn’t want to follow that path because it would have been as good as asking the literary critics to send me packing. (Serrano Alcázar, quoted in Fernández-Guerra y Orbe 1874: xx)

Serrano Alcázar knew that the type of writing he was producing was minoritarian, and that, like the fantastic, it would either be dismissed, go unnoticed or be misunderstood. Again, the Gothic, as part of a wider investment in the liberating potential of the supernatural, is presented as a language that allows writers to escape the mundane limitations of reality and realism, but which sadly relegates them to the literary margins. It is safer to say that the influence of foreign authors like Hoffmann or Poe simply helped broaden and redefine the artistic possibilities already introduced by the imported Gothic novel and the national production of the early-nineteenth century via a progressive process of legitimisation of the need for, and pleasure to be derived from, indulging in artistic fear.

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For all his darkness, Serrano Alcázar cannot be said to have revelled in fear for its own sake. If a rational explanation is not provided in his stories, then a moralistic conclusion is drawn (sometimes quite radically and appositionally) with the intention to justify what could otherwise be perceived as frivolous thrills. This is why Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s ‘La mujer alta’ / ‘The Tall Woman’ (1881) can be seen as a veritable turning point for the Gothic in Spain. Not only did this story cherish the engendering of pleasurable horror, but it did so by locating events in the present day and by proposing an unresolved ending that reinforces the possibility of the supernatural through the accumulation of impossible coincidences. The only short story of the time, and, to my knowledge, the first in Spain, to be subtitled ‘un cuento de miedo’ (‘a horror story’),

‘The Tall Woman’ has also been read as a direct heir to Poe’s conception of the fantastic. To this critic, however, the story feels more like a first committed attempt to leave behind outdated models of the Gothic than a concerted effort to imitate Poe. Given Alarcón’s mostly realist output,

‘The Tall Woman’—together with the macabre suspense story based on real events, ‘El clavo’ / ‘The Nail’ (1853), and the oneiric supernatural end-of-the-world visions of the novella El amigo de la muerte / The Friend of Death (1852)—seems a good example of the prospective experimental-ism, formal and imaginative, that the Gothic could still allow for when transplanted to quotidian life.

‘The Tall Woman’ is an ambiguous tale that deliberately leaves its potential horrifying proposition (a grotesque tall woman appears to a man whenever someone in his family is about to die) a very real possibility.

Told in the style of the ‘cuento de vieja’ (old woman’s tale), the story is significant for its Russian doll structure and for its development of the monstrous character’s presence in order to generate ‘horror and fright’

(Alarcón 2011: 191). If The Friend of Death briefly touches upon the horror produced by the personification of Death, ‘The Tall Woman’ overtly seeks to explore the narrator’s theory that ‘strange happenings occur on Earth; that is, things that cannot be explained away by reason, science or philosophy’ (187). Although the story frames the appearance of the woman as horrific and connects her to the devil, it also allows for a reading that dispels her presence as a bad and deadly omen. ‘The Tall Woman’ is sufficiently open-ended, and the narration sufficiently unreliable, that a case could be made for the terrible creature being a result of Telesforo’s inherent (and unaccountable) fear of women walking on their own at

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night, a characteristic fixation of his that he acknowledges. At one point, he himself questions the nature of the strange phenomena he is experiencing, extending the number of possible metaphorical readings of the apparition to the allegorical-metaphysical: ‘[i]s she human? […] Is she Satan?

Is she Death? Is she Life? Is she the Antichrist? Who is she? What is she?…’

(203). ‘The Tall Woman’, however, ultimately refuses to confirm or disprove any of these options. As is revealed, the external narrator, a friend of the now deceased Telesforo recounting his story, eventually met the mysterious woman in the same cemetery, but that was 15 years ago and he is still alive. Was Telesforo really haunted by a bad omen (as the impossible concatenation of coincidences seem to suggest), or was the tall woman simply a product of his excited imagination? The pleasure of the story lies precisely in this inconclusiveness, which, like Serrano Alcázar’s ‘Lost Soul’, can no longer rely on a simple, rational explanation. The narrator’s suggestion that ‘each reader will have to judge the case according to their own feelings and beliefs’ (206) is significant in that it provides an escape clause largely undermined by the events and the story’s insistence on that which lies behind human comprehension. 11 This type of ambivalence and
open-endedness is very typical of the Gothic of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as the nightmarish scenarios become central to the action and overall effect of narratives.

As the Gothic gradually turned into a well-known language, its motifs, themes and stock situations recognisable, it also became a tool for criticism through parody or deconstruction for those who were interested in using the mode to articulate ideas that would not get a strong purchase on realist fiction. The most evident case is that of Emilia Pardo Bazán, who produced numerous Gothic short stories during her lifetime.

Although some of her works rely on the Gothic simply to subvert expectations and provide an unexpected punchline (as in ‘Reconciliación’ /

‘A Reconciliation’, ‘La máscara’ / ‘The Mask’ or ‘Cuento inmoral’ /

‘Immoral Tale’, all published in 1899, in which Death or the Devil’s traditional appearance and purpose in Gothic stories are turned upside down or else made the target of laughter), others show a very personal sensibility impossible to disentangle from Pardo Bazán’s preoccupation
with the rights of women.12 Pardo Bazán’s literary status as one of the great naturalist authors in Spanish history and most notable female writers means that her work, or at least some of it, is widely researched. Her Los pazos de Ulloa / The House of Ulloa (1886), a classical novel still

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studied in schools and available in a variety of editions (most recently in an English translation), is the perfect example. The sustained attention this novel has received has led academics in the late- twentieth and early-twenty-first century to concentrate on Pardo Bazán’s deliberate use of the Gothic in it as a way of exploring ‘paranoiac-centred fear of female procreation’ (Hart 1995: 226). Even more recently, academics have turned to her other novels with Gothic elements, La quimera / The Chimera (1900) and La sirena negra / The Black Siren (1908), as well as her short story output, even though the latter remains thoroughly under-researched.13 This is not the place to propose an all-encompassing general approach to the study of Pardo Bazán’s short fiction. 14 I want, however, to raise awareness of what we could call Pardo Bazán’s Female Gothic, for it shows that the Gothic could be, and was, appropriated for feminist purposes as early as the late-nineteenth century.15

The most significant of her Female Gothic stories are probably

‘Vampiro’ / ‘Vampire’ (1901), ‘La resucitada’ / ‘The Revived Woman’

(1908) and ‘La emparedada’ / ‘The Walled-Up Woman’ (1907), although other stories, such as ‘Sor Aparación’ / ‘Sister Apparition’ (1896), ‘El fantasma’ / ‘The Phantom’ (1898), ‘Posesión’ / ‘Possession’ (1899), ‘Un destripador de antaño’ / ‘A Ripper of Olden Times’ (1900), ‘El oficio de difuntos’ / ‘Office for the Dead’ (1901), ‘The Godmother’ / ‘La mad-rina’ (1912), ‘Aire’ / ‘Air’ (1909) and the novella Belcebú / Beelzebub (1913), all utilise traditional Gothic settings or elements—the phantom of a nun, hallucinations, demonic possessions, vicious murderers, bad omens and madness—to examine the relegation of women to a small number of social roles. For example, madness appears as one logical outcome of limiting female aspirations to romance and marriage in ‘Air’, when a woman’s lack of acknowledgement by the man she professes to love drives her to believe she is vaporous. ‘Vampire’ is, aside from perhaps the first example of vampiric fiction in Spanish literature, a really interesting story that exposes the problematic relationships that grow out of marriages of con-
venience.16 In it, a young teenage girl who has been advised to marry Don Fortunato Gayoso because of his advanced age and substantial fortune ends up becoming his victim. Don Fortunato is really a vampire capable of sucking the youth out of the women he marries. The sentence describing Inés’s ailment and death—‘[c]onsumption, fever, something which con-ferred in the most significant way the ruination of an organism who had given its entire capital over to another’ (Pardo Bazán 2010a: 72)—turns

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her into a product that may be bought and sold, thus underscoring the expendability and objectification of the female body. The effect here is horrific, at least in the scene where Fortunato drains Inés of her breath and blood.

‘The Revived Woman’ and ‘The Walled-Up Woman’ are similar in their treatment of female invisibility through the Gothic tropes of the premature burial and of captivity. 17 ‘The Revived Woman’, the more comic and parodic of the two, sees its female heroine wake up in the family’s mausoleum. What seems, at first, to be a nightmarish scenario influenced by Poe soon turns into a different type of tale. Dorotea exits the crypt and church easily—this is not, it would seem, a tale about actual premature burial—but she is not welcomed back in quite the way she expects. Admittedly, she cannot shake off the ‘wet vapour of the pantheon’ (Pardo Bazán 2010b: 114) from her clothes, but the rejection from her family is meaningful. The household carries on regardless of her actual existence—so much so, in fact, that Dorotea decides to return to her sepulchre, as she feels redundant. The Gothic serves here a feminist purpose; it allows for a commentary on the invisibility and lack of social influence of women. A similar scene is painted in ‘The Walled-Up Woman’, in which the wife of the Tzar is unfairly walled-up for life.

Trapped in a room with views over the cemetery where her remains will eventually lie, her tragic fate is dictated by the whim of a dictatorial male.

The response she receives when she asks for help from some pilgrims is telling: ‘[w]e cannot understand the Tzar or Christ, the Tzar of the sky, but both are always right. Suffer and be quiet…’ (Pardo Bazán n.d. ).

The process of silencing here, one that encompasses the ignorance of pain and an emphasis on injustice and inequality, is horrifying and politically charged.

The messages in the stories gain relevance when we remember that Pardo Bazán founded La biblioteca de la mujer / Library of Women in 1892, and lobbied for women’s right to education throughout her life.

Although her feminist politics did not manifest exclusively through the Gothic, Pardo Bazán resorted to it in her short stories because the mode’s well-known trappings and effects allowed her to explore the plight of women in contemporary Spain.18 This use of the Gothic is very different from the ambivalent horror found in Serrano de Alcázar and Alarcón, and already pointed towards what the Gothic might still be able to accomplish artistically.

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mad scieNce: tHe sHort stories of Justo saNJurJo
lóPez de Gomara

Ambivalent and feminist horror were not the only forms of Gothic short stories to flourish in the literary landscape of the late-nineteenth century.

As Juan Molina Porras (2006: 22) explains, ‘developments in science, in positivist ideology, in practical common sense, and in realist verisimilitude’

were responsible for significant differences in the treatment of the supernatural and the unknown. For example, the relationship between characters and the undead began to change. By the turn of the century, Spanish writers, although still very much defined by a Catholic mindset that made certain fictional manoeuvers unthinkable or improbable, were beginning to use Gothic motifs in a much more openly deconstructive way. While I want to resist a linear narrative that sees advances in scientific rationality gradually taking over blind faith in religion—as Rocío Rødtjer (2015) has pointed out, in nineteenth-century Spain religion and science were compatible and did not exist as fixed categories—Darwinism and evolutionary theory, as well as a growing belief in unseen natural forces, colour much of the literature of the time.

Mesmerism (or animal magnestism), for example, plays a significant part in an episode of Antonio Ros de Olano’s novel El doctor Lañuela / Doctor Lañuela (1863), where it is described as ‘a supernatural and imposingly divine energy’ (Ros de Olano 1975: 56), and in Benito Mas Prat’s La redoma de Homúnculus / The Flask of Homunculus (1880), where a man is made to experience carnal temptation by staring at the phantasmagoric display created by the ‘luminous water of different colours’ (Mas Prat 1926: 57) contained in the flasks of a Cabalistic doctor’s laboratory. Similarly, stories that centre on experiments involving teaching animals to behave like men, or vice versa, abound. Carlos Coello’s ‘Hombres y animales’ /

‘Humans and Animals’ (1871) chronicles the unparalleled rearing of a dog-man that leads to an animal upheaval and a political revolution. Similarly, José Fernández Bremón’s ‘Gestas, ó el idioma de los monos’ / ‘Gestas, or the Language of Monkeys’ (1872), which opens with an orangutan writing very successful ‘zarzuelas’ (a Spanish lyric- dramatic genre), ends in a war between humans and monkeys after the latter learn about the French

Revolution.19 But the most significant story is perhaps ‘Un crimen científico’ / ‘A Scientific Crime’ (1875), which predates H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) by almost two decades, and proposed nightmarish

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visions involving ophthalmologic transplants between men and animals.

The rise of spiritualism, already present in the séances in Serrano Alcázar’s

‘The Spirit of Democritus’ and Pío Baroja’s ‘Médium’ / ‘Medium’ (1899), became even more pronounced in the early-twentieth century, as I show in the next chapter. Inevitably, this affected the hauntings and apparitions common to the Gothic. Ghosts grew more material and human, less the stuff of hellish nightmares and more proof of a spiritual beyond.

The discovery of ‘scientific’ means through which to rethink the afterlife affected the ghost story specifically, but also Gothic fiction more generally, where the old black magic and Faustian gambits of the early Gothic were transposed onto the enigmas of modern science. 20 Vicente Rubio Díaz’s

‘Adelina’ (1866), for example, recasts the old druidic magic potion as a blood-based brew able to mesmerise its drinkers and enslave them to the magnetist. In Salvador Rueda’s ‘El doctor Centurias’ / ‘Doctor Centurias’

(1887), the figure of the scientist and the necromancer are collapsed into one another when Centurias deploys ‘a spiritualist formula’ (Rueda 1887: 209) to bring back deceased scientists to aid him in the search for immor-tality. Corpses themselves became more eminently material in these fin-de-siècle narratives as operations and autopsies started to map out the biological quality of the dead. In an extreme example, in ‘En la mesa de disección’ / ‘On the Dissection Table’ (1894), also by Rueda, the corpse of a man who promised enduring love to his beloved asks the living to leave his heart, his most meaningful organ, alone. This story is not significant merely because the revivification of the corpse is left unexplained, but because science is portrayed as a cruel probing discipline, its enlightened scalpel a demystifying weapon that reduces the human to meat: ‘the metal entered the flesh […] and that urn of feeling was left broken, that sanctu-ary where so many times the heart had officiated on love’s sublime altar’

(Rueda 1894): 11). Science is portrayed as an imperfect, paradoxically blunt, tool useful to help us see how the body is ‘a world in miniature’

(11), yet useless when it comes to understanding the human soul.

It should not be surprising that science, as a new source of terror and wonder, would be the thematic focus of a number of late-nineteenth century writers. The already mentioned Fernández Bremón examined the properties of ‘magical’ plants in ‘La hierba de fuego: Episodio del siglo XV’ / ‘The Herb of Fire: A Fifteenth-Century Incident’ (1874) and bicephalism in ‘Miguel-Ángel, ó el hombre de dos cabezas’ / ‘Michael-Angel or the Man with Two Heads’ (1878), and Rafael Comenge, in the two short stories that make up Cuentos Maravillosos / Wondrous

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Tales (1879), showed a marked interest in chemistry (the creation of a type of essential matter that channels human genius in ‘Sal neutra’ /

‘Neutral Salt’) and Darwinism (‘El Dr. Hermes venidero’ / ‘The Future Doctor Hermes’). Mad science allowed for the exploration of concepts and obsessions more in tune with the concerns of the Gothic novel, like the nature of life and death or what constitutes the human. The mad scientists (and occasional ophthalmologist) are not related to Frankenstein and Moreau simply in their creationist and natural law-defying schemes, but are also governed by obsessions that turn them into comparable laboratory villains.

The short stories that Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara (Gomara henceforth) collected in Locuras Humanas / Human Madness (published in Buenos Aires in 1886 and then in Spain in 1888) are particularly eye-opening in this respect and deserve more attention. Unlike the grotesque or simply supernatural work of other writers, Gomara used science to create a specifically horrific effect. While a writer like Fernández Bremón dif-fused tension through humour or irony, Gomara blended a scientific form of the sublime with the moral horror behind inhumane experiments. ‘Vida cerebral’ / ‘The Life of the Brain’ is, in fact, the first truly horrific mad science short story of Spain. But let me turn first to the collection where it was published, for the Gothic undercurrent that permeates it is equally interesting.

The need to excuse fictional flights of fancy is common among Spanish writers, as I have shown, as is the guilty feeling that the resulting text indulges in a free form of the author’s imagination. It is indeed important to remember that the term fantastic did not, at this time, designate a well-delimited genre of writing but, more widely, as David Roas (2002: 227) has proposed, ‘everything which [was] not interested in realism’. In the preface to Locuras humanas / Human Madness (1887), entitled ‘Al público’ / ‘To the Reader’, Gomara (1888: 4) warned that he may ‘have inadvertently attacked good taste and common sense’ by publishing the collection, and asked readers to either absolve him (if the stories be deemed worthy) or condemn him (if found not to be). Simultaneously, he made a case for the liberating and creative qualities of the exercise:

‘imagination has played the biggest part and I haven’t worried to guide or detain it; […] I have not worried at all about your tastes or inclinations, letting my quill and its whim run free’ (4–5). Unlike Fernández Bremón, who, although interested in scientific advances, was morally and religiously quite conservative, Gomara harboured more radical and

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liberal ideas. Despite being born to a mother with aristocratic connections, Gomara studied Political and Ethical Sciences in Ghent, where he wrote La Religión Nacional / The National Religion, a treatise censuring what he saw as the mistakes of clerical religion. After he became a journalist, Gomara also published ideologically progressive articles on the death penalty and political banishments. His only book of short stories, Human Madness, is interesting because it stands as an extension of his ideals.

The stories in Human Madness have a general goal: to disturb and surprise. For instance, ‘Expectamus Dominum’ is a good example of the new ghost story of the Catholic persuasion. In it, a man sees his dead son inside a Gothic pantheon. The vision, however, does not engender horror, but sparks a reflection on the transience of all earthly life. ‘Nacer despues de morir’ / ‘To Be Born after Death’ is a fairly standard ambivalent supernatural story exploring the possible return of a dead son in the body of a stranger. ‘Pasión sin frenos’ / ‘Unbridled Passion’ is of a different and rather licentious nature. A historical story serving as a ‘sad and repugnant example’ (24) of vice, it traces the decadent pleasures of a woman of high society who lures her lovers to the family mausoleum so she may have sex near the tombs of her dead children. Most of the stories in Gomara’s collection, however, especially the most accomplished, deal with science and its potentially detrimental effects. In the futuristic ‘La ciudad del siglo XXX’ / ‘The Thirtieth-Century City’, humans have found a way to use the dead for the common good: they are recycled as construction materials like bricks or limescale, and as gaslight or fuel. Although Gomara does not go into detail, the story does end on a disquieting note; man ‘was getting too close to God. This could not last’ (Sanjurjo López de Gomara

1888: 189). Similarly, in ‘Los hombres de palo’ / ‘The Wooden Men’, an anatomic sculptor’s dreams of building perfectly-crafted human models out of wood, wax and pumpkin flesh has tragic consequences. As the wooden men come to life and begin to reject that they were created out of mere ‘matter’, they revolt and hang their maker, only to then find themselves helpless. In ‘El vencedor de la muerte’ / ‘The Man Who Overcame Death’, a German doctor invents a machine capable of restoring life, but he grows selfish and only allows very rich people to use it. When he himself falls ill, nobody knows how to operate the machine, so he dies.

The two most complex and innovative stories in the collection are, without a doubt, ‘El hombre microbio: Apuntes de un sistema filosófico tan aceptable como cualquier otro’ / ‘The Microbe Man: Notes on a

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Philosophical System as Valid as Any Other’ and ‘The Life of the Brain’.

The former is less a Gothic short story than an essay in praise of the microscope, which allows men to see what had previously remained invisible.

Although more concerned with portraying scientific awe, the discoveries of the narrator are presented in a language that overlaps with that of the Gothic. A magnified drop of water causes ‘surprise and fright’, as its components become ‘giant and agile snakes, restless, repugnant and threatening’, and the microscope itself ‘magical’, a thing of ‘marvel’ (117–18).

Obsessed, like his fellow mad colleagues, with the mystery of life, he asks a friend who works in a hospital to provide a body they can use to investigate the process of insemination. Looking into the egg of a suffering woman, the narrator discovers a miniature of humanity (in the shape of a cavorting couple), which leads him to wax lyrical about the potentially infinitesimal smallness of humans in relation to ‘superior beings’ who may be ‘observ[ing] us with the same curiosity that we do the microorganism: let’s not be too proud, for we are nothing but a microbe’ (126). The proposition is actually a first step towards a wider metaphysical hypothesis, that the thing humans call ‘the spirit’ may be ‘nothing more than matter, more or less dense or tangible’ (129). The initial moment of fear is thus turned into a paean to science and technology, as these have gifted man with a form of humbling supravision.

More straightforwardly Gothic is ‘The Life of the Brain’, which is less essayistic in intention and mixes very successfully new scientific themes with more traditionally horrific settings and scares. In the first part, the narrator, traveling by mule to a small village in the Pyrenees to visit a friend of his father’s, Charcot, is ominously warned that the man is a

‘witch doctor’ (195). The guide proceeds to tell him the story of this most modern ‘man of positive science’ (196), who arrived in town in the ‘first locomotive’ (197) and is suspected of having made a pact with the Devil.

His laboratory, full of ‘human skeletons and deformed animals, hands, heads, etc.’ (197), makes the narrator believe that what the village people are decrying as black magic may, in fact, be an example of science. As he puts it, ‘electricity well applied, a cataract skilfully extracted, potassium permanganate, antipyrine and a hundred other new scientific resources are enough to explain logically and naturally my friend’s miracles’ (200).

The narrator is also introduced, at this point, to another very significant character, the captain of the banditti, the Marked One (‘el Señalado’), named after the deep scar on his forehead, who, having escaped prison with some of his men, was condemned to death by decapitation. Since

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the head of the Marked One was never recovered, despite the fact that his body was eventually buried, rumour has it that the scientist is keeping it alive in a secret room. The narrator, quite naturally, thinks the story a tall tale ‘inspired by the fear and ignorance of people without an education’ (207–8), and believes the doctor to have preserved the cranium for phrenological study.

The second part of the story ushers in Charcot, a strong man of 55
who looks affable and not like the demented madman described by the muleteer. His arrival also introduces the medical-philosophical heart of the story, as the doctor makes an unexpected confession: he has indeed been keeping a head alive for the purposes of studying the nature of the human soul, more specifically, whether it can be kept suspended in time independently of the body. As he admits, the main drawback of this experiment is that test subjects suffer in horrifying agony, for they are not allowed to die. Having had his curiosity piqued by the possibilities of ‘a spectacle capable of moving the most energetic character’ (208), the narrator asks to see the head. It is at this point that the tale takes a decidedly Gothic turn. The head on display is, as expected, that of the Marked One. Having had his neck sliced very precisely so as to avoid ‘cerebral commotion and the decay of […] organs’ (215), the head demonstrates that, if the blood is renewed, it can live in exactly the same conditions it would have done when attached to the body. The head, incapable of speech, provides for a truly nightmarish image:

[It] was suspended in the air by its black and tangled hair. Its appearance was horrible and repugnant. The fierce expression which the bandit must have already had in life had doubled in that species of artificial existence; the eyes looked like they were going to jump out of their sockets; the forehead was swollen, divided in two by the disgusting scar that gave the man his name; the lips contorted and opened from within the thick and wild beard; the muscles of his face, contracted and bruised from the constant effort. There could be no doubt: it was alive! The teeth chattered with violence, and the eyes, half-closed as if the light was damaging them, were blinking and, above all, giving the doctor ferocious and hateful looks that were the best testament to conscious life. (218–20)

It is precisely after this revelation that the narrator begins to wonder if the villagers might not be right about the doctor’s diabolical inclinations, and questions the cruelty of his test. The doctor does not feel remorse because the experiment is being carried out for the greater good of humanity and

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the advancement of science. The narrator leaves shaken, and is soon awakened by a servant, who tells him about the doctor’s terrible end. He was killed shortly after the visit, while freeing the head from its constraints; the Marked One freed itself and bit him in the neck. The final scene, a ‘horrific tableau’ (230), which revels in the blood and looks on the face of the now inert head, is very powerful. The moral of the story is clear: scientific advancement cannot be premised on cruelty of any kind, even when it would initially appear to be justifiable.

‘The Life of the Brain is interesting for its combination of horror and scientific language. I have excluded from my consideration some very lengthy explanations of how doctor Charcot manages to keep the head living under circumstances that would normally lead to direct decay of the tissue and organs. 21 These go on for more than two paragraphs. On the one hand, the story is coloured by its progressive wish to reconsider life under the new technological coordinates that have brought humans closer to the animal world and made them much more aware of the material specificity of their bodies. The soul, in Gomara’s story, is portrayed as almost physiological, something that can be captured and kept in suspension. On the other hand, the searching spirit of science can be suspect when it neglects its duty to morality. Interestingly, especially since Gomara seems to have no problem punishing creationist passions elsewhere, the story is rather secular and disregards the position of the divine within its Frankensteinian equation. Charcot is not killed for his delusions of grandeur—he is not even portrayed as a real villain, always respectful and courteous, rational to his last breath—but for his incapacity to relate to other human beings. The abstraction of the Marked One into a subject of science, in the service of a grander scheme aiming to shed light into the human spirit and what sustains it, ultimately ignores the individual.

Gomara’s story can be read as a productive step forward for the Gothic.

It overcomes the crisis of verisimilitude in social realism by sidestepping superstition altogether. Although the story raises this spectre early on, through the muleteer’s speech, it is laid to rest through the language of science. Hence, perhaps, why Charcot’s explanations go into such minute anatomic and medical detail. Science provides a form of safety net as that which seems supernatural is rendered real via complicated surgical manoeuvres. It is, therefore, possible to reconcile a Catholic faith in God with the science that apparently demystifies it. This explains, for example, the inclusion of the story ‘Sesiones de espiritismo’ / ‘Spiritualist Sessions’

in Human Madness, in which believing in the soul and its materiality does

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not equate to believing in those who claim to have a contact with the spiritual world. Sensational stories are suspect and must be subjected to the scrutiny of the microscope. Ultimately, Gomara seems to suggest that science should not be practised without a clear moral doctrine and understanding of the divine. The narrator of ‘The Microbe Man’ concludes the story by threatening that he might try to find a telescope through which to look for God. It should hopefully be clear that, by the fin-de-siècle, the Spanish Gothic story had begun to break free from some of its most constraining chains and adapted to more modern concerns. It would continue to change significantly throughout the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Another of Ochoa’s stories, ‘El castillo del espectro’ / ‘The Castle Spectre’ (1835), is also a perfect example of a Spanish attempt to replicate the European Gothic short story. This one is distinctive for its Spanish setting.

2. It is worth noting that ‘The Fortress of Seville’ was published in the London magazine No me olvides / Forget Me Not (1824–29).

3. Other significant magazines responsible for publishing a number of these early stories include El Correo de las Damas / The Post for Ladies (1804–07), Correo Literario y Mercantil / The Literary and Mercantile Post (1828–31) or Cartas Españolas / Spanish Letters (1831–32). See Roas (2003: 16–17); Trancón Lagunas (2000).

4. See, for example, chapter XIX of Fernán Caballero’s La gaviota /

The Seagull (1849), in which the author makes the claim that the

‘costumbrist’ novel is the Spanish ‘novel par excellence’ (Caballero

2006).

5. Another option was, of course, the serialised longer narrative, as is the case of Galdós’s own treatment of the double in his La sombra /

The Shadow, published in La Revista de España / Spanish Magazine from November 1870, and finally in book form in 1871.

6. Writing of this time was also influenced by the work of Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier,

Washington Irving and, especially, Guy de Maupassant from the 1890s onwards. Their writings entered Spain, as was the case earlier in the century, via France.

7. For a survey on the fantastic short story of the time, see Molina Porras (2001).

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8. It is only revealed at the end of the story that the victims are geese.

Their anthropomorphic treatment connects human and animal
suffering.

9. The story includes a lengthy declamatory footnote in which the author explains why the death penalty is indefensible.

10. This point is made clearly in ‘The White Crow’, where the narrator exclaims that he ‘reject[s] superstition’ (25) after having previously complained that the uneducated masses resist scientific advances.

11. Interestingly, Alarcón (1943: 10) would later suggest that the story was true, a fact he confirmed with ‘the greatest fear that can be felt by the human soul!’.

12. I am reverting to their date of publication as part of the collection Cuentos sacro-profanos / Sacred-Profane Tales, not to the stories’

initial date of publication in the press.

13. For considerations of The Chimera and The Black Siren, see Latorre (1999: 213–16) and Clúa Ginés (2008). For a study of the short story ‘A Ripper of Olden Times’, see Lee Six (2010: 109–21).

14. Among many problems facing such an endeavour is the large quantity, over 600, of short stories the author is estimated to have written, many of which are still ‘lost’ in South-American and Spanish newspapers.

15. Emilia Pardo Bazán’s friend, the conservative Blanca de los Ríos, best remembered as an eminent Golden Age scholar, also penned tales that could be labelled Female Gothic, including ‘El espejo’ /

‘The Mirror’ (1899), ‘La Rondeña’ / ‘The Rondeña’ (1902),

‘Metempsicosis’ / ‘Metempsychosis’ (1906) or ‘Los diablos azules’ /

‘The Blue Devils’ (1910). Their contemporary Julia de Asensi also contributed to the Female Gothic, most notably with ‘La sombra de D. Luis de Arce’ / ‘The Shadow of D. Luis de Arce’ (1883), ‘La casa en la que murió’ / ‘The House in Which She Died’ (1889) and ‘El vals del fausto’ / ‘Faust’s Waltz’ (1889).

16. Jesús Palacios (2012: 69) proposes Vicente Rubio Díaz’s ‘Adelina’

(1866) as the first Spanish vampiric story, but the drinking of blood in it is not connected to vampirism. The Catalan legend of Count Estruch would seem to place the first Spanish vampire (a blood-drinking demonic being) in the twelfth century, although merely at the folkloric level. Pardo Bazán’s story shows some reliance on the aristocratic vampire developed by John William

Polidori in his ‘The Vampyre’ (1819).

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17. Another story that explores this issue is ‘Mi suicidio’ / ‘My Suicide’

(1894). See Clúa Ginés (2000).

18. For some of Pardo Bazán’s social realist stories that deal explicitly with gender issues, see Tolliver (1998).

19. Another of Fernández Bremón’s short stories, ‘El último mono’ /

‘The Last Monkey’, channels atavistic fears by having a man devolve into a human. His ‘Hombres y animales’ / ‘Humans and Animals’

(1902) also includes a Circean transformation of humans into animals.

20. For these connections, see Frayling (2006: 48–59).

21. Presumably named after the French scientist Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the father of modern neurology, and infamous for his experiments with hysterical women at La Salpêtrière hospital.

refereNces

Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de. 1943. Historia de mis libros (Madrid: Ediciones Fax).

———. 2011. La comendadora, el clavo y otros cuentos (Madrid: Cátedra).

Caballero, Fernán. 2006. La Gaviota (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes),
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/la-gaviota--2/
html/fedc6c3e-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_19.html#I_52_ [accessed 2

February 2015].

Castro, Rosalía de. 2000. El caballero de las botas azules (Madrid: Cátedra).

Clúa Ginés, Isabel. 2000. ‘Los secretos de las damas muertas: Dos reelaboraciones de lo fantástico en la obra de Emilia Pardo Bazán’, Cuadernos de investigación filológica, 26: 125–35.

———. 2008. ‘La hija de la decadencia: Artificio y enfermedad en La Quimera, de Emilia Pardo Bazán’, in Escribir con el cuerpo, ed. by Beatriz Ferrús and Núria Calafell (Barcelona: Editorial UOC), 27–38.

Fernández-Guerra y Orbe, Aureliano. 1874. ‘Prólogo’, in Cuentos negros, ó historias extravagantes, ed. by Rafael Serrano Alcázar (Albacete: Est. Tip. de Sebastián Ruiz), vii–xxiii.

Frayling, Christopher. 2006. Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (London: Reaktion).

Hart, Stephen M. 1995. ‘The Gendered Gothic in Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa’, in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth Century Spain, ed. by Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 216–29.

Latorre, Yolanda. 1999. ‘Lo monstruoso en Pardo Bazán’, in Brujas, demonios y fantasmas en la literatura fantástica hispánica, ed. by Jaume Pont (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida), 205–16.

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Lee Six, Abigail. 2010. Gothic Terrors: Incarceration, Duplication and Bloodlust in Spanish Narrative (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University).

Mas y Prat, Benito. 1926. La redoma de Homúnculus: Novela fantástica (Madrid: Giralda).

Molina Porras, Juan. 2001. El cuento fantástico en la España del realismo (1868–1900) (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla).

———. 2006. ‘Introducción’, in Cuentos fantásticos en la España del realismo, ed.

by Juan Molino Porras (Madrid: Cátedra), 11–54.

Núñez de Arce, Gaspar. 2001. ‘Sancho Gil’, in El esqueleto vivo y otros cuentos trastornados: Antología del relato fantástico español del XIX, ed. by Ildefonso Salán Villasur (Madrid: Celeste Ediciones), 271–301.

Ochoa, Eugenio de. 2001. ‘Hilda’, in El esqueleto vivo y otros cuentos trastornados: Antología del relato fantástico español del XIX, ed. by Ildefonso Salán Villasur (Madrid: Celeste Ediciones), 143–55.

Palacios, Jesús. 2012. ‘Vampiro cañí: Breves notas sobre vampiros y vampirismo en la literatura española e hispanoamericana’, in Drácula, un monstruo sin reflejo: Cien años sin Bram Stoker, 1912–2012, ed. by Luis Alberto de Cuenca et al.

(Madrid: Reino de Cordelia), 69–90.

Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 2010a. ‘Vampiro’, in Vampiros de papel, ed. by Melquíades Prieto (Madrid: Edaf), 67–73.

———. 2010b. ‘La resucitada’, in Cuentos españoles de terror, ed. by Vicente Muñoz Puelles (Madrid: Oxford University Press), 107–16.

———. n.d. ‘La emparedada’, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, http://
www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor-din/la-emparedada--0/html/ffb6bac4-

82b1- 11df-acc7-002185ce6064_1.html#I_1_ [accessed 14 February 2015].

Roas, David. 2002. Hoffmann en España: Recepción e influencias (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva).

———. 2003. ‘Introducción’, in Cuentos fantásticos del siglo XIX: España e Hispanonamérica, ed. by David Roas (Madrid: Mare Nostrum), 7–36.

———. 2011. La sombra del cuervo: Edgar Allan Poe y la literatura fantástica del siglo XIX (Madrid: Devenir).

Ros de Olano, Antonio. 1975. El doctor Lañuela (Madrid: Doncel).

Rødtjer, Rocío. 2015. ‘Oculists and Other Modern Visionaries: Epistemological Myopia in José Fernández Bremón’s “Un crimen científico”’, in Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine, ed. by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), 64–84.

Rueda, Salvador. 1887. El cielo alegre: Escenas y tipos andaluces (Madrid: Administración de la Academia).

———. 1894. ‘En la mesa de disección’, La ilustración ibérica, 6 January, 10–11.

Sanjurjo y López de Gomara, Justo. 1888. Locuras humanas (Barcelona: Estab.

Tip. Ed. de Henrich y Cª en Comandita).

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Serrano Alcázar, Rafael. 1874. Cuentos negros ó historias extravagantes (Albacete: Est. Tip. de Sebastián Ruiz).

Soler de la Fuente, José. 2002. ‘Los maitines de Navidad: Tradición monástica’, in El castillo del espectro: Antología de relatos fantásticos españoles del siglo XIX, ed.

by David Roas (Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores), 89–104.

Tolliver, Joyce. 1998. Cigar Smoke and Violet Water: Gendered Discourse in the Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán (London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses).

Trancón Lagunas, Montserrat. 2000. La literatura fantástica en la prensa del Romanticismo (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim).

PART III

Modern and Contemporary Gothic

Literature (1900–2016)

CHAPTER 6

The Twentieth Century (1900–75):

Modernist Spiritualism and Political Gothic

It is commonplace to concentrate on the Spanish-American war, the so-called ‘disaster of ’98’, and the generation of writers that responded to it (the ‘generación del ’98’), as a turning point in Spanish letters.1 It is not difficult to see why. The political crisis led to a strong creative investment in finding real solutions, ‘Regeneracionismo’ (‘Regenerationism’), and to a shift towards a more nationally specific, less class-inflected, type of fiction. Although still technically realist, subject matter began to change, and writers like Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Rubén Darío or Ramón del Valle-Inclán have, in hindsight, been established as an innovative and politically dissenting canon. For this reason, and for the sake of chronological convenience, I have chosen to separate this chapter on the early-twentieth century from the one on the fin-de-siècle. It is, however, more useful to talk about a series of continuities than of strict ruptures, at least as far as Gothic writing is concerned. While the impact of Modernism elsewhere in Europe can be felt in novels like Unamuno’s Niebla / Mist (1914), Symbolism (especially Baudelaire) and the decadent landscapes of writers like Oscar Wilde or Joris-Karl Huysmans had long been artistically influential. It is fair to say that the a novel like El monstruo / The Monster (1915), by Antonio de Hoyos Vinent, is as much an heir to Modernist writing as it is to fin-de-siècle decadence.

If, as Antonio Cruz Casado (1994: 24) claims, the fantastic literature of the early-twentieth century in Spain was everything but homogenous,

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Spanish Gothic was strongly affected by the spiritualist craze that had already taken over Europe in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, there was a curiosity about the spectral from canonical writers who were active as part of the Modernist movement. Most notably, Pío Baroja would end up producing such fantastically eerie pieces as ‘El trasgo’ / ‘The Goblin’, ‘Médium’ / ‘Medium’, the diabolical ‘La sima’ / ‘The Chasm’

or ‘La dama de Urtubi’ / ‘The Dame of Urtubi’, all published in Vidas sombrías / Sombre Lives (1900) and later the supernatural explained of Los espectros del castillo / The Castle Spectres (1941) and the nightmarish hallucinations of El hotel del cisne / The Swan Hotel (1945). 2 Miguel
de Unamuno, who also explored the Gothic in short stories like ‘El que se enterró’ / ‘The Man Who Buried Himself’ (1908) or ‘La sombra sin cuerpo’ / ‘The Shadow without a Body’ (1921), would publish Abel Sánchez: Una historia de pasión / Abel Sánchez: The Tale of a Passion in 1917, a treatise on envy and an uncanny retelling of the Cain and Abel myth. Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Jardín umbrío: Historias de santos, de almas en pena, de duendes y ladrones / Sombre Garden: Stories of Saints, Lost Souls, Imps and Thieves, published in its definitive version in 1920, brought together a collection of local Galician folklore tales, and included ‘Beatriz’

and ‘Mi hermana Antonia’ / ‘My Sister Antonia’. The first is a Gothic story featuring an aristocratic family, a licentious monk and a deadly curse.

The second a contemporary tale of demonic transformation (into a cat!).3

A marked interest in the applied sciences and positivism also led to a series of explorations of the afterlife, and in some cases of the occult. Artistic production became entangled with the ‘espiritista’ (spiritualist) revival in the early-twentieth century and would yield a very distinctive type of literature concerned with new forms of mind sciences like hypnosis and telekinesis, madness, hallucinations and oneiric states, as well as the mysteries of the spiritual world. The beyond was understood as both a psychic and material dimension, as per spiritualist tenets (Ena Bordonada 2007: xliii).

The twentieth-century spiritualist craze was not a true novelty. There is evidence of medical interest in spirit-operated turntables in 1853 (Palacios

2009: 20), and the first Spanish spiritualist society was formed in Cadiz as early as 1855. The works of the founder of spiritualism, Allan Kardec, began to be translated into Spanish at this time. Books on the subject were also produced by Spanish writers like Alverico Perón (Enrique Pastor y Bedona) in the 1860s and Anastasio García López, Ermido la Key or Baldomero Villegas in the 1870s. Specialised magazines such as El criterio espiritista / The Spiritualist Criterion (1868–91) or Revista espiritista /

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Spiritualist Magazine (1869–75) proliferated in the peninsula, and the first ever International Spiritualist Conference was held in Barcelona in 1888. It would be held again in Madrid in 1892. Theosophy, a connected religious doctrine, developed contemporaneously, with the first Spanish theosophist society founded in 1889 and interest peaking between 1902 and 1912.

Spiritualism had therefore made it into the literary popular imagination well before the slew of literary works of the 1920s. The transmigration of souls had been treated in Enrique Gaspar’s ‘La metempsicosis’ / ‘Metempsychosis’

(1887) and would reappear in Blanca de los Ríos’s ‘Metempsicosis: De las

“memorias” del doctor Hipnos’ / ‘Metempsychosis: From the Memoirs of doctor Hipnos’ (1906) and Ferraz Revenga’s ‘El hombre gato’ / ‘The Cat Man’ (1913); and books transcribed from conversations with the dead had existed since 1870’s Marieta, a very popular story allegedly dictated to its protagonists by the spirit of a Galician peasant. It is also possible to argue, as Ildefonso Salán Villasur (2001: 14) has done, that by the turn of the century, ‘esoteric doctrines had been incorporated into modernism as a means of rejecting positivism and traditional religion, and in them was present the idea of reincarnation’. The dead coming back and committing murderous revenge became a pervasive trope and came to supplant the more traditional benevolent ghosts of writers like Pérez Rodríguez.

Although not all ghosts were spectral—Emilio Carrère, discussed later, seemed particularly sceptical of this type of apparition in his later fiction—
they did become much more patently the source of evil.

Spiritualist writers need to be perceived as progressive, if not necessarily transgressive. 4 Spiritualism did not contradict Catholicism, but its scientific basis—it was not strictly a belief, since its explanatory aims left it open to revision—could, and would, be pitted against the church’s amassing of material fortunes and thus used to advocate gender equality.

The sixty-four short stories collected in Amalia Domingo Soler’s Cuentos espiritistas / Spiritualist Stories, published posthumously in 1926, are a good example of this literary trend. Thematically, they explore most of the metaphysical ideas that preoccupied spiritualists, from the possible return of spirits in subsequent reincarnations and the possibility of past lives, in ‘Espérame’ / ‘Wait for Me!’ and ‘Quiero ir al cielo!’ / ‘I Want to Go to Heaven!’; and the search for compatible souls beyond death, in ‘El amor no es un mito’ / ‘Love Is not a Myth’; the possibility of establishing communications with the dead, in ‘El ramo de viole-tas’ / ‘The Bunch of Violets’, ‘El vestido blanco’ / ‘The White Dress’

or ‘Murió de frío!’ / ‘He Died from the Cold’; to spiritual possessions

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and psychic transcriptions, in ‘El caminito del cielo’ / ‘The Little Path to Heaven’. Common to all these tales, and to longer narrative works, especially Carmen de Burgos’s 1922 vignette-driven sensational novel El retorno: Novela espiritista / The Return: A Spiritualist Novel, was the intention to demystify spiritualism, to explain its workings, to portray it as a scientific approach to nature and, ultimately, to convert the materi-alist sceptic to its teachings. In other words, as Amelina Correa Ramón (2002: 48; italics in original) has suggested, these stories have a clear

‘ evangelising purpose’. This means that, for all their apparent interest in the beyond—the texts are sometimes referred to as ‘novels from the beyond’ (‘roman de l’au-delà’)—there are only a handful of stories, like

‘Sombras’ / ‘Shadows’ or ‘Alma loca’ / ‘Mad Soul’, by Ángeles Vicente and published in her collection Sombras: Cuentos psíquicos / Shadows: Psychic Tales (1911), which seek to generate an overall feeling of fear or unease.5 In the former, a cluster of spirits take the shape of a horrific gigantic spider which ends up swallowing the protagonist. It is perhaps the most effective of the Gothic spiritualist tales.

More playful are what we could term the ‘madmen’ stories of Hoyos Vinent and Miguel Sawa, whose respective collections Los cascabeles de Madama Locura / The Bells of Madame Madness (1920) and Historias de locos / Tales of Madmen (1910) are distinctive for the ambiguity they create around supernatural encounters (scary ghosts in Hoyos Vinent) through an emphasis on the fragile and suggestible minds of characters.6

For example, in Sawa’s ‘Judas’, an update on the trope of the wandering Jew, a man claims to be Judas himself and to be condemned by ‘Jehovah’s
anger’ (Sawa 2010: 42) to bring death and desolation to anyone who
loves him. Yet, the story breeds uncertainty: the man purports to still have rope marks on his neck from when he attempted suicide, but the narrator is sent to an asylum for a murder, presumably because he is mad.7

The reader must decide which version of events they want to believe. A related type of horrific narrative is that of the Lenore-type ‘dead lover’

story, which would be revamped by Carmen de Burgos in ‘La mujer fría’

/ ‘The Cold Woman’ (1920), and by Rafael Cansinos Assens in La amada fúnebre / The Funereal Beloved (1922). 8 In the latter, the eponymous beloved resigns herself to a life of mourning, as those who fall in love with her inevitably die, perhaps, as is suggested, as a result of the wrath of the jealous spirits of her dead relatives.

The Galician Wenceslao Fernández Flórez also merits some space as a writer who returned to the Gothic during the 1920s and early 1930s. His

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early collection Tragedias de la vida vulgar: Cuentos tristes / Tragedies of Common Life: Sad Stories (1922) includes two remarkable short horror stories subtitled ‘cuento de pesadilla’ / ‘Nightmare Story’: the vampiric

‘El claro del bosque’ / ‘The Forest Clearing’ and the ghostly ‘La mano fría del misterio’ / ‘The Cold Hand of Mystery’. They both betray the influence of more traditional Gothic models (Fernández Flórez’s is a distinctly foreign vampire, not the aristocratic one of Bazán) and the desire to produce surreal pieces driven by a florid style and narrative twists (is the protagonist a ghost who cannot escape the place where he died? Is the vampire real?). This interest in the macabre and disquieting tales would be further explored in another collection of stories, Fantasmas / Phantoms (1930), whose story ‘El fantasma’ / ‘The Ghost’ would be adapted to the big screen in 1945 as El destino se disculpa / Destiny Apologises (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia). But it is Fernández Flores’s earlier La casa de la lluvia / The House of Rain (1925), adapted to film in 1943, that shows the greatest debt to the spiritualist craze. The novella brings together the captive woman and mad science tropes in an innovative tale of hypnotism (after George du Maurier’s Trilby [1894]) that also includes a failed Satanic ritual. Eighteen-year-old Alina finds herself in a decrepit, leaking manor house in the rainy Portuguese village of Gondomil with her uncle Elias. The man uses his knowledge of mesmerism and the occult to try to force her into loving him, but pretends they are both ill and in need of seclusion. Luciano, the landlord, decides to help the girl after he finds out about the uncle’s treachery, but at the expense of falling in love himself and losing interest in his wife. Apart from conjuring up a great sense of atmosphere (the constant rain and storms, the dark rooms and hypnotism sessions) and of place (the ruins of a nearby chapel, the brilliantly decaying manor house), Fernández Flórez’s novella is also a great realist examina-tion of stagnating village lives and middle-age anxieties.

If Fernández Flórez’s novella was innovative, Eduardo Zamacois’s novel El otro / The Other (1910) is one of the most accomplished Spanish Gothic novels of the twentieth century. Very popular upon publication—
the book was adapted in 1912, although the film was lost— The Other tells the story of an English nobleman, Juan Enrique Halberg, haunted by his lover’s dead husband, whom he helped murder. The novel is interesting because it is both original and yet illustrative of the type of Gothic fiction written in Spain before the Civil War. First, the main character shows a pronounced interest in the world of the dead, expressed through references to materialism, Maeterlinck and even an extended passage on

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the existing empiric evidence for the continued presence of the deceased.

Halberg appears to believe, like the other characters, that if souls are forces of nature, then they are not ‘organic’ (Zamacois 1968: 73), as they leave
this world behind to become energies. These, naturally occult since it cannot be seen, are at the heart of Halberg’s existentialist crisis. He thinks, like his lover Adelina, that Dr Raiza (Adelina’s ex-husband and their victim) is responsible for the deaths of their son, who withers away strangely at the age of two; Halberg’s father; and, eventually, Adelina herself, shot in an attempt to destroy Raiza’s shadow. Second, although the novel is peppered with instances where the effects of Raiza on others are emphasised, The Other remains ambiguous about its spectral presence. Halberg suffers from neurasthenia, and, as he starts to hallucinate that his hands are covered in blood towards the end of the novel, a reading of Raiza’s haunting as a literalisation of Halberg’s guilt becomes plausible. The novel always downplays Raiza’s presence by focusing on the psychology of those perceiving him; moreover, Raiza is never seen but ‘felt’, and thus is not an apparition in the strict sense of the word. As Halberg puts it later in the story, ‘he d[oes] not believe in ghosts, or that those corpses that appear in water tanks or in rivers, and whose death remains unexplained, are bodies dug out by their souls; neither d[oes] he, however, deny the existence of the supernatural’ (249). Third, The Other is set in an enlightened present rather than a barbaric past, as only modern conceptions of science and matter are able to shed light on the afterlife. Zamacois’s novel is exemplary of the spiritualist turn in Gothic writing; it shows an interest in the new nature of death and rewrites hauntings as the effects of evil, unseen forces.

But The Other deserves a special mention because it is one of the few examples of early-twentieth century novels that openly deals with ‘terror’ (horror), a word that recurs over twenty times throughout the novel.

As Zamacois himself explained in a later ‘prologue’, added to the 1968
edition, The Other is concerned with ‘metaphysical fear’, described as ‘a new cry that the grieved, despairing heart directs to the Enigma; a new peephole on the undecipherable Tomorrow which, at times, appears to speak to us’ (16). This is important, for the text is above all a psychological horror novel that aims to align the reader with its characters so they too may question the possibility of hauntings. Its use of the language of horror is modern, for in Zamacois this experience is corporeal. The endpoint, in other words, is a pleasurable form of artistic fear, of fictional readerly thrills.

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The same artistic intent registers in the Gothic writings of Emilio Carrère, where it finds a more sustained expression. His fiction shows perfectly how a deep fascination with the spiritual world can blend well with a scepticism towards the traditional ghost and the return of the dead in the early Gothic. I turn to Carrère because his oeuvre is the most significant, in quantity and ideas, of the Gothic production of the early-twentieth century. The second part of this chapter is devoted to the patchy recuperation of the Gothic throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, after the Spanish Civil War and within the context of the censorious and repressive forces of the Francoist regime. I move on to discuss the work of Alfonso Sastre, a controversial and politically transgressive writer, to show how, in politically turbulent times, the Gothic was still perceived as a referential language that could enable social critique.

The OcculT-SpiriTualiST GOThic FicTiOn OF emiliO
carrère

Emilio Carrère (often styled as Carrere, without the accent), like other writers of the early-twentieth century, investigated the relevance of spiritualism in his fiction and came up with his own ambivalent version of the ghost narrative, tinged by his passion for the occult, the ‘folletín’ adventure story, magic and religion. Carrère was known for his Modernist bohemian poetry, especially the poem ‘La musa del arroyo’ / ‘The Muse in the Stream’ (1908) and the collection El caballero de la muerte / The Knight of Death (1909), and although very famous in the 1910s and 1920s, has been largely forgotten, perhaps, as has been suggested by Jaime Álvarez

Sánchez (2007: 191), because his Modernism was received by critics as a throwback to Romanticism.9 He was also a consummate journalist and a prose writer who contributed to the then-burgeoning ‘novela’ format (publications that included short-to-medium length fictional pieces), such as La novela de hoy / Today’s Novel (1922–32), La novela de noche / The Night Novel (1924–26), La novela semanal / The Weekly Novel (1917–27) or La novela corta / The Short Novel (1916–25), and wrote a number of social realist novels like El sacrificio: Novela de la Guerra / The Sacrifice: A Novel of the War (1922), one of the few Spanish works set during the Rif war (1820). An unashamedly pulp writer—Álvarez Sánchez (2007: 114) refers to him as possibly the first popular intellectual of Spain, ‘a habitual presence in the day-to-day life of the masses’—Carrère would often reuse

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parts of stories or, in the case of La torre de los siete jorobados / The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (1920), even hire another writer to finish his work.

More importantly, Carrère’s fictional repertoire made a number of concessions to the fantastic and the Gothic, particularly the spectral world and witchcraft, topics to which he returned time and again. Carrère’s work is not just an heir to the contemporary fascination with the spiritual and to the various theoretical attempts to understand and taxonomise it (he was strongly influenced by his theosophist friend Mario Roso de Luna, often mentioned in his work), but also exhibits an interest in the occult, Satanism, the Inquisition and, more generally, Spain’s history that is very personal and speaks to the continued relevance of the Gothic during the early-twentieth century.

Carrère’s thorough engagement with the spiritualist world, and more importantly the foundational writings and discoveries behind some of its practices, is evident in his journalistic articles. These often speculated on the possible truth behind claims like those of Thomas Edison, who allegedly invented a phone with which to speak to the dead, the ‘talking’

horses of Eberlfeld, as covered by Maeterlinck’s in his The Unknown Guest (1914), or the famous case of a death foretold of 1888. 10 His knowledge
of key spiritualist and occult figures like Léon Denis, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, Papuss (Gérard Encausse), Alessandro Cagliostro, Jean-Martin Charcot or Miguel Servet is only matched by his acquaintance with important historical events of a religious or spiritual bent. These are seamlessly woven into his writing. For example, in ‘Lo que vió la reina de Francia’ /

‘What the Queen of France Saw’ (1922), the physician Franz Mesmer performs a ritual for Marie Antoinette in which she glimpses her own behead-ing on the surface of magnetised water, a great vignette that not only connects future horror with the age of ‘terror’, but also points towards the influence of Mesmer’s thoughts on pre-revolutionary France. 11 This
blending of historical figures with either interpretations, exaggerations or incorporations of supernatural anecdotes or elements, something particularly evident in ‘Una rara anécdota escalofriante’ / ‘A Strange Terrifying Anecdote’ (1918), makes Carrère’s work fascinating. His story ‘El diablo de los ojos verdes’ / ‘The Green-Eyed Devil’ (1922), set in the eighteenth century during the reign of Charles IV, chronicles minutely the process of Inquisitorial enquiry of one Luis de Velasco (as far as I have been able to establish, a fictional character). Claiming to have experienced episodes of demonic possession during which the clergyman had sexual encounters with a number of Ursuline nuns in his convent, Luis is eventually

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taken to a Cabalist Black Mass. There, in a scene reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835), he discovers the queen of the coven is none other than the real María Luisa de Parma, the Queen consort from 1788 to 1819. 12

Yet, some of Carrère’s work remains inconclusive; as in the ending of The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, ambiguity reigns. Consider this passage:

The reader will accept the explanation that is more in consonance with their fantasies.

The author, of course, is not weak enough to believe in witches…; but I will tell you a secret: when midnight strikes, on Saturday nights, he lifts the muslins on his windows with the hope of seeing them fly by, amazons on their brooms …

And he experiences that icy feeling that we experience when mystery brushes past us with its wings… (Carrère 2004: 290)

Carrère’s later stories, like ‘Gil Balduquín y su ángel’ / ‘Gil Balduquín and His Angel’ (1926) and especially ‘Los muertos huelen mal’ / ‘The Dead Smell Bad’ (undated, republished 1933), show a strong scepticism towards traditional ghosts. In ‘The Dead Smell Bad’, allegedly a real story of a man who was buried alive having suffered a cataleptic attack, the

‘spectre’ is forced into real death by the people who have benefited from his disappearance. The trope of the revenant is ridiculed and shown to be a question of superstitious belief that may be manipulated to suit individual interests. The story ends with a clear message: ‘the dead, real or apocryphal, have no right to bother their families. […] Nothing is eternal. Nothing is unforgettable’ (Carrère 2009: 180). This is not to say that scepticism towards the materialisation of ghosts is incompatible with a belief in something lying outside human comprehension, especially because Carrère’s understanding of the afterlife and its mysteries is, at core, scientific. He only believes in magic insofar as it reveals a part of nature whose workings are yet to be fully grasped, and offers an alternative to the ephemerality of carnal life, or as he puts it, ‘the infinite emotion of feeling eternal, over the abyss of death!’ (Carrère 2010: 133). For this reason, in most of his fiction, especially the collection Almas, brujas y espectros grotescos / Souls, Witches and Grotesque Spectres (1919), Carrère seems eager to let the readers have the final say and follow their personal convic-tions. Like the early Gothics, he offers possible rational explanations to the supernatural: hallucinations or visions in ‘Las visiones de Amichatis’ /

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‘The Visions of Amichatis’ and ‘El “chato” de El Escorial’ / ‘The Snub-Nosed Man from the Escorial’, and superstition in ‘La senda del santuario’ /

‘The Path of the Sanctuary’ (all 1919).

His fascination with Satanism and other forms of occultism, Carrère’s ambiguous position regarding the supernatural and the existence of spirits, the mingling of historical persons and events with fictional ones, the connection between evil and fleshly sin via (often erotic) temptation, they all manifest most strongly in the overtly Gothic fiction. The two most notable of his Gothic stories are ‘La conversión de Florestán’ / ‘The Conversion of Florestán’ (1921) and ‘La casa de la cruz’ / ‘The House of the Cross’ (1924), both of which include black masses and potential demonic possessions or exchanges with the Devil.

The former story centres on the illicit desires of Florestán, a bohemian Don Juan, for a Miss Angélica, a theosophist and devoted follower of Helena Blavatsky who, in her mysticism, can only conceive of religious passion. Frustrated, Florestán asks his friend, Professor Avernino, expert in occultism, for help. His intervention leads to a Faustian pact in which Florestán concedes to give up his soul and to attend a ceremony held by the ‘Orden todopoderosa de los Tenebrarios’ (all-powerful order of the ‘Tenebrarios’, those who hold the ‘tenebrario’

or triangular candelabrum with fifteen candles). After having drops of his blood, mixed with those of the Master of Ceremonies, burnt over a pyre, Florestán is introduced to the other guests, quite literally ‘the aristocracy of the Satanists’ (Carrère 2001: 159), who turn out to be well-known members of Madrid’s high society. In an ending that draws from Poe, a woman that looks like Angélica, who presumably died during an explosion that destroyed the venue where the black mass took place, turns out to have been kept alive by Florestán’s pact. After having sex with him, Angélica proceeds to putrefy in one of the goriest moments in twentieth-century Spanish Gothic fiction. The passage alone marks out the story as horrific:

He touched that body of magnificent beauty and his fingers sank in a white and purulent mass. He held her blonde hair and, when her head moved, two streams of viscous liquid, like two cascades of putrefied blood, came out of her mouth and nostrils. […] Her stomach had blown up into an amorphous swelling both tragic and grotesque. (176)

This vision makes Florestán convert to Catholicism in an attempt to find redemption. The motif of the temptress with a decomposing face was later

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revisited in another horror story, ‘La mujer sin cara’ / ‘The Woman without a Face’ (1923).

‘The House of the Cross’ also features a similarly gruesome scene, although this time adapted from an apparently real episode narrated in Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers / Of the Demon-Mania of the Sorcerers (1580), a treatise on witchcraft prosecutions which also discusses pacts with the Devil. The events, narrated historically in another Carrère piece, ‘El oráculo de la cabeza sangrienta’ / ‘The Oracle of the Bleeding Head’ (1919), concern Catalina de Médici, who seeks a cure for an unknown malady affecting the king. The most monstrous of all Satanic practices is proposed, that of the eponymous ‘oracle’, whereby the blood of a decapitated innocent child who has taken communion must be consumed by the ailing man. The ritual, undertaken by an apostate priest, is not successful, as Hell chooses not to offer succour to the monarch. In

‘The House of the Cross’, this episode, set during the reign of Charles II and about 230 years before the present time of the story, is retold by a dead spectre, that of the priest, who is cursed to preach the same mass every night until redeemed by a willing witness. Exili, the wizard who proposes the demonic solution to the Catalina figure, is the true villain here. Although not always as coherent and accomplished as his other work, ‘The House of the Cross’ is an interesting example of Gothic horror that, like Carrère’s other fiction, seems preoccupied with emphasising the potentially detrimental effects of succumbing to the most ‘terrifying of superstition[s]’ (Carrère 2001: 300).

Carrère’s only long Gothic work is the aforementioned The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, although it is technically a palimpsest of previous stories featuring the ghostly Mr Catafalco—‘El señor Catafalco’ / ‘Mr Catafalco’

(1916) and ‘El mal de ojo’ / ‘The Evil Eye’ (1917)—and sections from other stories featuring the adventurer Sindulfo del Arco—‘Mascarillas pintorescas: Sindulfo, arqueólogo y cazador de alimañas’ / ‘Picturesque Masks: Sindulfo, Archaeologist and Hunter of Vermin’ (1918) and

‘Retablillo grotesco y sentimental: El amigo Fandul’ / ‘Grotesque and Sentimental Tableau: The Friend Fandul’ (1919). 13 To further complicate matters, it is believed that Jesús de Aragón, author of adventure stories and the equally Gothic La blanca sombra de Casarás / The White Shadow of Casarás (1931), was contracted to complete the unfinished novel, which has led to much speculation over which parts were written by Carrère and
which expanded by de Aragón.14 In the interests of space, I will refer to the novel as if it had been exclusively authored by Carrère, especially since my concern is more thematic than purely stylistic.

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Initially, the novel appears to pose yet another spiritual conundrum, one that could be explained away as hallucinations brought about by brain fever (the reader is told that the protagonist’s family has a history of epi-lepsy). Basilio, a shameless gambler, begins to notice a strange man, one Mr Catafalco, or Dr Robinsón de Mantua, while out gambling. Characteristic because he wears a top hat and has a ‘turbid eye’ (Carrère 2004: 44), he
is revealed to be a ghost in need of a confession from the man responsible for his murder. Basilio can help because, as he discovers, he is a medium.

Catafalco’s violent death was foretold by a patient who warned him he would ‘be assassinated from a long distance’ (64). The resolution is simple and, in itself, not necessarily connected to the bulk of the narrative that follows: Catafalco was blamed for the death of one of his patients, whose father, Victorio Sabatino, an Italian hunchback doctor, sought revenge.

Whether by voodoo or by simply hypnotising his servant Ercole, Catafalco is killed as Sabatino disappears. These events are seemingly linked to a spate of thefts in the city of Madrid. Noises and laughter can be heard from behind walls and dog-like figures are spotted at night, yet no-one is found in the rooms where jewellery goes missing. In one of the crime scenes, a card with a strange code is found. After a man with blue glasses (later revealed to be Sindulfo) decodes it for Basilio and ‘el Duende’, a journalist who joins the investigation, the situation becomes somewhat clearer. The message was left behind by accident and contains the means to infiltrate a secret community of hunchback counterfeiters inhabiting a series of underground passages riddled with hungry rats, booby traps, deathly swamps and chained prisoners. To add to the Gothic ambiance, the system of caves turns out to be a city built by the Jewish during past periods of prosecution, and the seven hunchbacks are not simply running a criminal plot, but are part of a mask-wearing Cabalist sect. The man kidnapped is not wanted for ransom, but as a victim to be sacrificed in an initiation ritual.

That the tower turns out to be a Jewish temple, and one that was later raided by the Inquisition, is significant. For if the plot appears to demo-nise the Jewish and paint a grotesque portrait that accentuates their otherness (as grotesque underdogs), the novel also seems concerned with recuperating their buried history. The tower, and the city more generally, lies under the modern Madrid, which is built over it and is blissfully unaware of its existence. The novel thus echoes a long history of repression (forced conversions to Catholicism) and homicide that dates back to the late-fourteenth century, especially the anti-Jewish riots of 1392, and the Alhambra decree of 1492. It is no coincidence that the Inquisition is

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also mentioned as having inhabited the underground city, especially given that the tribunal was formed in the fifteenth century as a watchdog for converted Jews. In this way, The Tower associates the inequalities of the present (the sect being irredeemably evil) with the intolerance of the past.

It simultaneously shows the capital city of Spain to be divided and full of secrets, a move that seems to echo previous national divisive conflicts, such as the Peninsular War, the Carlist wars and the cantonal insurrection of the 1860s, and is eerily prescient of Franco’s eventual coup d’état. The novel’s resolution, which involves digging up an Israelite synagogue where a prison for Jewish people was built, is similarly symbolic. The exit, leading to the contemporary church of San Pedro, is marked by a writing in Hebrew: ‘[u]nhappy captive, under this tile lies your freedom’ (255). This last twist seems to recast the hunchbacks as social outsiders, punished, like Catafalco, by either their looks or religion, and driven into darkness and secrecy. Their underground dealings may be read as a form of resistance, and even as an attempt to fight back the powers that be. The characters’

own experience of imprisonment reflects that of the Jewish who suffered a similar fate in that very same space only a few centuries earlier.

On a more prosaic level, Carrère’s magnum opus is a thoroughly and celebratory Gothic text, its pulp origins acknowledged in its own winks at the ‘folletín’ tradition. It constitutes a perfect example of the author’s thoughts on spiritualism, namely, his scepticism regarding magic and the afterlife. Carrère’s passion for occult rites is especially apparent in the last ceremony scene, which returns to Satanism. This novel also speaks to Spain’s Catholic past in its references to the tower that gives name to it, and from whose past it is inextricable. As with the British Gothic, The Tower is as defined by its plot twists as it is by its dark passages, trapdoors and secret chambers of evil. It both chills and thrills, and manages to use the Gothic to paint a complex picture of the ‘real’ and forgotten Madrid.

In the process, the latter is ‘othered’, its problematic past dug out and exposed in cold daylight.

aFTer The War: The DialecTic GOThic OF alFOnSO

SaSTre

It is generally agreed that, following a liberal spell from 1931 to 1936, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war had a very strong impact on journalistic freedom and on cultural production. An ordinance passed on 22

April 1938 adapted to books, pamphlets and any other form of printed

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information a law passed only a few days earlier to restrict the power of the press. If the latter made newspaper editors responsible for the publication of articles, the law affecting books would punish the writer, the editor/publisher and even the bookseller who dared sell publications attempting to besmirch the image of the nation or the state. All books would also have to be submitted to a ‘Servicio Nacional de Propaganda’

(National Propaganda Service) in the first instance, which would assess the appropriateness of any given text and had the right to censor them forthright. The beauty of these regulations was precisely their vagueness.

Their phrasing made it possible to deny publication on the grounds that material was offensive to the regime in any possible way, and relied on ancillary rationales that were hard to disprove.15 Moreover, foreign publications or texts from outside Spain could not be sold or circulated under threat of hefty fines, a task made even more difficult after borders with other countries tightened. This left Spaniards with only a small amount of regime-sanctioned works to read. The ‘new’ law introduced in 1966, at surface level more liberal, as it repealed the need for prior submission of texts to censors, turned out to be little more than an exercise intended to sanitise Spain’s image to European and American eyes. The reality is that fines were still in operation and the same principles affecting the content of publications remained (Martínez-Michel 2003: 29–31; Gubern

1980). An effective rule of terror on the ideological sphere necessarily led to self-censorship for many writers who would see their work perpetually silenced. The dearth of a Gothic from the late 1930s to the 1960s and the return to realism is therefore easily explainable as a result of a new censorious system and the devaluation of popular culture. The majority of the Spanish literature published from 1936 to the late 1970s is largely realist and, if sometimes dissentive in its fictional situations, often conformist.16

Apart from those authors who would write fantastic literature from exile, like Rosa Chacel, Max Aub, Ramón J. Sender, Rafael Dieste or Francisco Ayala, there were, naturally, some exceptions, but, in general, the Gothic was forced to mask any potential or critical intentions or else be rendered
politically anodyne.17

José Mallorquí’s short stories for the Buenos Aires magazine Narraciones terroríficas / Horror Stories (1939–52) and Carmen Laforet’s Nada /

Nothing (1945) aside, Noel Clarasó’s aptly-titled Miedo / Fear (1948) was one of the few explicit concessions to the Gothic in the 1940s. 18 The stories in the latter are mostly concerned with ghosts, vengeful, as in ‘Era una presencia muerta’/ ‘It Was a Dead Presence’, or else sympathetic, as

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in ‘El fantasma de Anita Flores’ / ‘The Ghost of Anita Flores’, where the eponymous ghost saves her previous lover from a sure death at the hands of banditti. Clarasó is careful not to confirm the existence of the supernatural. In some of his stories there is room for doubt (was it a hallucination, a coincidence or a misremembrance?), and Clarasó seems keen to establish a form of horror writing that allows for multiple readings. ‘I don’t know if in my horror stories the lie wins over the truth or the other way round’

(Clarasó 1972: 9), he tells the reader in the introduction. Stories like ‘Tres Citas’ / ‘Three Dates’ and ‘It Was a Dead Presence’ manifest this preoccupation through the use of thoroughly unreliable narrators. Clarasó’s stories are more interesting as a rarity than as strictly innovative, either formally or thematically, and they stick quite closely to the ghost story tradition. Other writers would continue the development of the short story in more experimental ways, albeit from speculative quarters, in the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly noteworthy are the Catalan-language authors Pere Calders and his Cròniques de la veritat oculta / Chronicles of the Hidden Truth (1954) and Mercè Rodereda and her La meva Cristina i altres contes

/ My Christina and Other Stories (1967), a story from which, ‘La salaman-dra’ / ‘The Salamander’, was included in a recent ‘weird’ fiction compen-dium (see VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2011).

As a result of the war, a more confrontational form of writing arose that would challenge oppression and tradition in the contemporary sense of the word. This was the case of the eponymous story in Juan Benet’s Una tumba

/ A Tomb (1971), which has been read as an active negotiation of the break in historical narratives of the country (the republican and the nationalistic), and, more systematically, of the work of Alfonso Sastre.19 Sastre, to some ‘one of the most important playwrights of twentieth century—and
we might even extend this to the twenty-first—drama’ (Ascunce 2007: 7)

and author of some of the most political and censored plays of Franco’s Spain, was also a prose writer. His Noches lúgubres / Lugubrious Nights, published in 1964 and ignored by journalists and critics at the time, is fully invested in an ironic, yet socially committed, form of the Gothic. This book is made out of two novellas—‘Las noches del espíritu santo’ / ‘The Nights of the Holy Spirit’, in two parts, and ‘Delirium’—and of twenty-four unconnected short stories collected in a third part entitled ‘Las células del terror’ / ‘The Cells of Horror’. Since the content of the stories is too variable to establish meaningful patterns, ranging from foreboding fears (‘Damocles’) to the tortures of the Inquisition (‘La Santa Hermandad’ /

‘The Holy Brotherhood’), I focus on the two novellas here.20

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Sastre is known mainly as a playwright, and it is in this medium that his work was perhaps at its most socially committed. Having signed, with José M. de Quinto, the Theatre of Social Agitation Manifesto in 1950, Sastre would go on to write two plays banned by Franco’s regime, Death Squad

/ Escuadra hacia la muerte (1953) and La mordaza / The Gag (1954), the latter being a mordant exploration of repression and dictatorship. Open in his rejection of censorship, Sastre would use the Gothic as a language through which to continue his political activism, as an imaginative valve of escape through which to rethink the world and reality. Before I discuss the radical import of Lugubrious Nights, however, it is important to focus on the novel’s cultural referents, as well as its focus on the Gothic. Sastre has shown a passion for, and thorough knowledge of, the Gothic in his writing, from plays like El cuervo / The Raven (1957) and Ejercicios de terror / Exercises in Terror (1970)—which includes the mini-plays El doctor Frankenstein en Hortaleza / Dr Frankenstein in Hortaleza and El vampiro de Uppsala / The Vampire from Uppsala—to long poems like El evangelio de Drácula / Dracula’s Gospel (1971), a homage to Stoker’s creation, or the novels El lugar del crimen / The Crime Scene (1982), a wandering Jew narrative that expounds on the notion of the ‘siniestro’ (sinister, although intended as a translation of Freud’s notion of the ‘unheimlich’).21 The last of his Gothic incursions, Necrópolis / Necropolis (1994), was a continuation to the Lugubrious Nights that weaves together various horror stories told by the members of the fictional ‘Friends of Bram Stoker’ society as they try to comfort each other during a zombie apocalypse.

Although Sastre does not use the word Gothic in his first preface to Lugubrious Nights, he does invariably refer to the text as ‘horror’ (1982:

9).22 Additionally, the novellas that compose the book are, loosely, horror stories in plot and characters, and in other artistic choices and deliberate references. ‘The Nights of the Holy Spirit’, a retelling of the vampire myth, uses the found manuscript trope, as well as Victorian explanatory subtitles and a confessionary style reminiscent of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1853). This first novella is also preceded by a collection of quotations from Gothic classics: Paul Féval’s La Ville Vampire /

Vampire City (1874), Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’

(1839) and ‘The Raven’ (1845), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Guy de Maupassant’s ‘La Nuit: Cauchemar’ / ‘Night: A Nightmare’ (1887), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and José de Cadalso’s own Noches lúgubres / Lugubrious Nights (1771), from which the collection borrows

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its title. ‘The Nights of the Holy Spirit’ also contains references to real anthropological and cultural studies like those of Montague Summers and Antoine Augustin Calmet, and passages where vampire lore is explained to the reader. The plot, concerning the life and death of Zarco and Amalia, either two blood-donors or else real vampires, is steeped in the ‘superstition or reality’ games of much horror comedy.23 Their child, who appears
to suffer from a rare atrophying illness, is either a vampiric creature killed by the narrator in self-defence or a poor murdered child. The duality of the narrative thus allows for a reading of events that is either a result of the irruption of the supernatural (the vampire) into the real or ‘a product of the ignorance and the lack of education of a girl who fell, without being able to help it, into […] a crime—which is nothing but a reproduction of the old myth of the bloodsucker’ (Sastre 1982: 160). This novella is particularly timely in its recuperation of the vampire. Not only had Dracula been published in a major translation in 1962, but Juan Perucho had recently written his own vampire novel, Les històries naturals / Natural History (1960), set in nineteenth-century Catalonia during the Carlist
wars.24 It is worth noting that Perucho had himself relied on the vampire as a social metaphor, aligning Onofre of Dip with Carlist oppressive forces.

The second novella in Lugubrious Nights, ‘Delirium’, is told initially by the Jewish Annabel Neuman and her fiancé, as they report a strange case to a policeman. Their complex tale involves encounters with various doppelgängers of one doctor Ponce—a group of men who have been induced, via psychoanalysis, to believe that they are him—and chilling adventures in an undercover Nazi hospital in a remote valley. The events are thoroughly uncanny: it is unclear whether what the characters are experiencing is a species of delirium tremens caused by excessive drinking or a veritable time-bending déjà vu. Mental illness is offered as an explanation after the report (the story) is presented as a potential forgery by the couple, exposed as communists hunted down by Third World War-plotting Nazis. But this is further challenged by one final revelation. The editor of the papers we have been reading is himself a German Nazi-sympathiser. Nothing is clear in this narrative that twists and turns constantly other than the difficulty in separating past from present, reality from fiction. It is not a coincidence that the doctor in charge of the asylum in which the characters end up is named Hoffman.

Themes of persecution, conspiracy, mad science (mind control) and experimentation connect the story to the Gothic canon.

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In the first preface, Sastre establishes a clear link between the Gothic imagination and the liberating artistic aims of his work. He explains that the book is not just ‘a literary excursion’ tantamount to a narrative ride or game. It is ‘also an experiment around realism in literature—an attempt, one would say, at determining the ceiling of dialectic imagination’ (9). Although the latter term is not really unpacked beyond its capacity to shed light on the limits of ‘pure fantasy’ (12) and as a way of imagining which is ‘integratory and goes above cyphers’ (11)—that is, which considers the human cost of events—Sastre is keen to push the boundaries of what constitutes the real and the imagined. As I have suggested, most of the stories in Lugubrious Nights have at least two possible readings, one that is realist in essence and another that involves the mythical or the magical. By appealing to ‘the imagination of the reader’ (11) and making a case for the need to recuperate it in a present where the majority of the population is ‘alienated, impoverished by an asphyxiating social-political structure’ (11), Sastre recasts writers as those who vouch for ‘peace’ and their art as a space where other realities may be made possible. Importantly, for him, this prodding of the limits of reality is carried out via ‘an exploration of a certain reality: horror’

(9), and not just any horror, but the ‘invisible’ (10) kind. Sastre thus distinguishes between visible horror, epitomised by the actions of a torturer or a gun pointed at someone, and the horror caused by the invisible ‘threats whose source is indeterminacy, ambiguity and disquieting misunderstandings’ (10). As Sastre demonstrates in this collection, he knows how to toe this line carefully, proposing nightmares that are both wildly imaginative yet develop well-known ‘horror myths’ (10) such as ‘the invisible presence, the lived anticipation of the future (almost always of death), vampirism, metamorphosis, resurrection or the return of the dead, the creation of a human being, the destruction of the world’

(9). The goal is to explore ‘some of the most significant current motifs of horror’ (9), which, for him, include social alienation, the potential return of Nazism, social exploitation, nuclear war, witch-hunting or police repression.

Farris Anderson, considering how Sastre’s more fantastic writings may relate to his ‘revolutionary commitment’, expands on the connection between the real and the imagined:

[M]an’s [ sic] ability to imagine realities beyond those immediately available to him is key to [Sastre’s] ability to change his world. This capacity has been

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undermined by social and political institutions which thrive on mental leth-argy. Mind-dazzling tricks, the terrifying collapse of daily reality, and disconcerting humor are some of the means by which Sastre attempts to liberate the human imagination in Lugubrious Nights. The unusual prose creations of this book represent yet another aspect of Sastre’s long exploration of the interrelationships of art, psychology and revolution. […] Sastre’s prose writings suggest a dialectic, a tension between the everyday world and another world that is vaguely perceived. There arises from all this work a persistent, awesome suggestion that man’s very survival may depend upon his ability to believe that, for better or for worse, that “other” world can become a reality.

(Anderson 1971: 143)

The possibility of another world resonates with Sastre’s own later conception of the ‘sinister’, whereby the process of making the familiar unfa-miliar, in his words, may have ‘the double effect of estrangement from, but simultaneous recognition of, reality’, so that ‘the common reveals itself as strange and thus lays bare its terrible depths’ (Sastre 2012: 10).

Particularly noteworthy about this creative outlook is that the fantastic needs be filtered through horror, for it is presented as a genre—and the Gothic as an aesthetic—particularly well-equipped to chronicle social anxieties. Sastre’s use of the Gothic in his narrative and poems to mount a form of social critique is effective because, while not openly political, it allows for multiple readings via ‘the constant superposition of the real and the imaginary’ (Albornoz 1993: 89), never proposing an actual resolution or conclusion.

Although Sastre’s narrative was, and continues, to be of interest to a small minority of readers, I recuperate his work here because it shows the potential for social commentary the Gothic still had in the twentieth century, even when under strict censorship laws. Sastre’s case evinces the persistence of this language and its inseparability from imaginative powers and from ideological liberation. In Lugubrious Night s, this anti-establishment zest translates into a study of the hardships suffered by the working classes, bled dry for the benefit of the wider community, or the persecution and abuse of those who challenge the status quo (communists in ‘Delirium’, deserters in ‘The Cells of Terror’). The Gothic allows Sastre to expand on themes prominent in his plays by using an artistic language that conjures up different realities and vouches for a multiplicity of view-points and perspectives, thereby forcing readers to question the mono-lithic truths behind long-standing social myths.

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nOTeS

1. It should be pointed out that feelings of decay and degeneration are not the sole property of Spain, but echo the intellectual climate of fin-de-siècle Europe (Blasco Pascual 1993: 61; Uría 2008: 145–6), as epitomised in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Nordau. However, the dwindling influence of Spain in the new geopolitical order and the loss of its last significant colonies in 1898 significantly accentuate this sensibility of decline.

2. La dama de Urtubi was written and added to the collection later.

3. Valle-Inclán’s particular Galician Gothic also appears in his play El embrujado / The Bedevilled (1913).

4. Their transgressive qualities are not simply a matter of speculation. There were book burnings of spiritualist texts in 1861 and 1867.

5. It is worth noting that the work of Vicente is less moralistic and much more experimental. Her short vignettes often feel like
mood pieces, rather than stories with a plot, and are not always resolved. For more on the fantastic spiritualist tale, see Litvak (1994).

6. I could also include here some of the short stories by Silverio Lanza. Hoyos Vinent’s first collection, Del huerto del pecado /

From the Orchard of Sin (1919), also included the Gothic tales ‘El señor Cadáver y la señorita Vampiro’ / ‘Mr Cadaver and Miss

Vampire’, ‘Fantasmagórica’ / ‘Fantasmagoric’ and ‘Sombras chin-escas’ / ‘Chinese Shadows’.

7. I can only gloss over these madmen stories very briefly in this chapter. For more on them, see Ezama (1994).

8. It is, of course, possible to read ‘La mujer fría’ as a response to the archetypal docile vestal blonde popularised by decadent literature, an aesthetic that often reduced women to a mere artistic motif to be conquered.

9. It is worth pointing out that work on Carrère has blossomed in the twenty-first century. Aside from Álvarez Sánchez (2007), see Riera Guignet (2011).

10. The articles in which these ideas are discussed are ‘La comuni-cación con “Los del Más Allá”’ / ‘Communicating with the

Beyond’ (1922), ‘ El huésped desconocido’ / ‘ The Unknown Guest’

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(1921) and ‘Unas extrañas anécdotas de Pi y Maragall’ / ‘Strange Anecdotes of Pi y Maragall’, all in Carrère (2009: 227–34; 235–42; 221–5).

11. See Darnton (1968).

12. Not incidentally, Goya painted María Luisa de Parma. This is noted in the story itself, where we are told that, according to Manuel Machado, she was ‘arrogant […], voracious, frenetic’ (Carrère

2010: 38).

13. An abbreviated version of the novel, Un crimen inverosímil / An Implausible Crime, published in 1922, was once believed to be the source of the longer novel. For more on the authorship of this work, see Labrador Ben and Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa (2002, 2004).

14. See Palacios (2004).

15. The most significant of these was the scarcity of paper following the Spanish Civil War. As Martínez-Michel (2003: 26) asks, how would it be possible to demonstrate that there really was no paper to print a particular book? The system was, therefore, open to abuse.

16. For more on the dissentive potential of this fiction, see Herzberger (1999).

17. For an overview of the fantastic literature of this period, which was more abundant than the Gothic, see Martín Maestro (1991).

18. Although published from Buenos Aires due to the Spanish Civil War, Narraciones terroríficas was edited by Mallorquí, at least initially, and belonged to Editorial Molino, a Spanish publisher who opened a branch in Argentina.

19. See Minardi (2012).

20. A number of the conclusions I reach are, however, equally applicable to the short stories in Lugubrious Nights.

21. Very little has been written about the Gothic in Sastre, but for the use of the ‘sinister’ in Exercises in Terror, see Balestrino (2008: 267–97).

22. The word used in the original is ‘terror’.

23. Incidentally, the book is also very funny and uses humour to enhance horrific effects.

24. It is important to note, however, that Sastre emphasises the filmic afterlife of the vampire in his novella. He hints at the fact that this might be how his characters are familiar with the myth.

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reFerenceS

Albornoz, Aurora de. 1993. ‘La prosa narrativa de Alfonso Sastre’, in Alfonso Sastre, ed. by Mariano de Paco (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia), 81–96.

Álvarez Sánchez, Jaime. 2007. Emilio Carrere: Un bohemio? (Seville: Renacimiento).

Anderson, Farris. 1971. Alfonso Sastre (New York: Twayne Publishers).

Ascunce, José Ángel. 2007. Alfonso Sastre en el laberinto del drama (Hondarriba: Editorial Hiru).

Balestrino, Gabriela. 2008. La escritura desatada: El teatro de Alfonso Sastre (Hondarribia: Editorial Hiru).

Blasco Pascual, Francisco Javier. 1993. ‘De “oráculos” y de “cenicientas”: La crítica ante el fin de siglo español’, in ¿Qué es el modernismo? Nueva encuesta, nuevas lecturas, ed. by Richard A. Cardwell and Bernard McGuirk (Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies), 59–86.

Carrère, Emilio. 2001. La casa de la cruz y otras historias góticas (Madrid: Valdemar).

———. 2004. La torre de los siete jorobados (Madrid: Valdemar).

———. 2009. Los muertos huelen mal y otros relatos espiritistas (Madrid: Valdemar).

———. 2010. El diablo de los ojos verdes y otros relatos (Madrid: Salto de Página).

Clarasó, Noel. 1972. Miedo (Barcelona: Libros Reno).

Correa Ramón, Amelina. 2002. ‘Amalia Domingo Soler: Una escritora “en la sombra”’, in Cuentos Espiritistas, ed. by Amalia Domingo Soler (Madrid: Editorial Clan), 7–50.

Cruz Casado, Antonio. 1994. ‘El cuento fantástico en España (1900–1936)’, Anthropos, 154–5: 24–31.

Darnton, Robert. 1968. Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Ena Bordonada, Ángela. 2007. ‘Ángeles Vicente, una escritora de principios del siglo XX’, in Sombras: Cuentos psíquicos, ed. by Ángeles Vicente (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo), xiii–lxiii.

Ezama, Ángeles. 1994. ‘Cuentos de locos y literatura fantástica: Aproximación a su historia entre 1868 y 1910’, Anthropos, 154–5: 77–88.

Gubern, Ramón. 1980. La censura: Función política y ordenamiento jurídico bajo el franquismo, 1936–1975 (Barcelona: Península).

Herzberger, David K. 1999. ‘Novela e identidad durante la época franquista’, in Del 98 al 98: Literatura e historia literaria en el siglo XX hispánico, ed. by Víctor García Ruiz, Rosa Fernández Urtasun and David K. Herzberger (Pamplona: RILCE), 105–12.

Labrador Ben, Julia María, and Alberto Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa. 2002. ‘Génesis y autoría de La torre de los siete jorobados de Emilio Carrère’, Revista de Literatura, 64.128: 475–503.

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———. 2004. ‘Nuevas pruebas documentales acerca de la autoría de La torre de los siete jorobados de Emilio Carrère’, Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 44: 929–36.

Litvak, Lily. 1994. ‘Entre lo fantástico y la ciencia ficción: El cuento espiritista en el siglo XIX’, Anthropos, 154–5: 83–8.

Martín Maestro, Abraham. 1991. ‘La narrativa fantástica en la España de pos-guerra’, in El relato fantástico en España e Hispanoamérica, ed. by Enriqueta Morillas Ventura (Madrid: Siruela), 196–209.

Martínez-Michel, Paula. 2003. Censura y represión intelectual en la España Franquista: El caso de Alfonso Sastre (Hondarribia: Editorial Hiru).

Minardi, Adriana. 2012. ‘ Una tumba: Lo oculto, lo perverso, lo tatuado’, Revista Crítica de Narrativa Breve, 5: 1–12. http://lejana.elte.hu/PDF_5/

Adriana_%20Minardi.pdf [accessed 12 January 2016].

Palacios, Jesús. 2004. ‘Prólogo: El misterio de una novela de misterio’, in La torre de los siete jorobados, ed. by Emilio Carrère (Madrid: Valdemar), 9–39.

———. 2009. ‘Emilio Carrere y los espíritus bohemios’, in Emilio Carrère, Los muertos huelen mal y otros relatos espiritistas, ed. by Jesús Palacios (Madrid: Valdemar), 9–48.

Riera Guignet, Alejandro. 2011. Emilio Carrere: Bohemio de Madrid (Madrid: Ediciones la Librería).

Salán Villasur, Ildefonso. 2001. ‘Elogio del trastorno’, in El esqueleto vivo y otros cuentos trastornados: Antología del relato fantástico español del XIX, ed. by Ildefonso Salán Villasur (Madrid: Celeste Ediciones), 7–22.

Sastre, Alfonso. 1982. Noches lúgubres (Madrid: Emiliano Escolar Editor).

———. 2012. El lugar del crimen (Barcelona: Montesinos).

Sawa, Miguel. 2010. Cuentos de locos (Seville: Renacimiento).

Uría, Jorge. 2008. La España liberal, 1868–1917: Cultura y vida cotidiana (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis).

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2011. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (London: Corvus).

Zamacois, Eduardo. 1968. El otro (Barcelona: Editorial).

CHAPTER 7

From the Death of Franco to the Present:

The Establishment of Horror
and the Gothic Auteur

The death of Franco in 1975 had immediate repercussions in Spain. Beyond the gradual relaxation of censorship laws and the establishment of the socialist government (1982–95) after the transition to democracy years, the publishing world would open up to new literary trends. Change had been in the air for a while. As Bradley Epps (2003: 193) suggests, the end of the dictatorship ‘occurr[ed] after a generalized break with social realism, an influential doctrine of representation that […] tended to limit creativ-ity and to place few intellectual demands on its reader’. The political and social potential of realism had proven ‘ineffective and artistically stagnant’

(Epps 2003: 193), and a number of writers like Juan Goytisolo, Miguel

Delibes and the aforementioned Juan Benet—and later, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and Juan Marsé—had already broken away from mimetic fiction and from traditional uses of language even before the end of Francoism.

Concomitantly, there was a surge of interest in popular genres like the Gothic because, in their formulaic and escapist nature, they allowed for a

‘de-historicisation’ (Moreiras Menor 2000: 135) of the recent past. This fictional re-enchantment was also aided by the success in the 1960s of the first two seasons of the television series Historias para no dormir / Stories to Keep You Awake (1966–68), which led to a (re)discovery of Gothic classics and the dark science fiction of Ray Bradbury (much favoured by the series director, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, an important figure considered in Chap. 8). From 1967 to 1974, the publishing house Juan García

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Peri released a magazine, in 53 issues, which collected some of the stories used in the TV programme, especially the work of Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Beaumont or William Hope Hodgson. From 1973 until 1980, Bruguera also published a long series by Spanish authors writing under foreign pen names like Silver Kane (Francisco González Ledesma), Ralph Barby (Rafael Barberán Domínguez), Curtis Garland (Juan Gallardo Muñoz), Burton Hare (José María Lliró Olivé) or Clark Carrados (Luis García Lecha). Although these writers did not work exclusively on the Gothic, and sometimes wrote under more than one pseudonym, their ‘bolsilibro’ pulps (inexpensive, cheaply printed books for sale in kiosks) for Bruguera’s Selección Terror /

Horror Selection drew inspiration from the Gothic tradition in their covers and plots. Some notable titles included the evocative La muerta que vivió seis veces / The Dead Woman Who Lived Six Times (1973) or El buque del terror / The Ship of Horror (1973), both by Kane, and Anoche salí de la tumba / Last Night I Came out from the Grave (1973) or Mujeres vampiro /

Vampire Women (1973), by Garland. Apart from showcasing the influence of cinema, especially Hammer, Universal Horror and the developing

‘fantaterror’ (see Chap. 8), these novels demonstrate that Spain was more than ready for a Gothic intervention by the mid-1970s.

The first important series to publish Spanish translations of Gothic stories was Narraciones terroríficas / Horrific Narratives, which began in 1961 with a first volume that included fiction from Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Washington Irving and Margaret Oliphant, and concluded in 1974 with a tenth volume of fiction from Charles Robert Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu and Thomas De Quincey. Two Gothic aficionados were key in the introduction of a number of Gothic texts to a wide audience, sometimes for the first time in Spanish and often in their own translations. The first, Rafael Llopis, edited his first book in 1963, the 600-page Cuentos de terror / Horror Stories, an anthology that included well-known international Gothic classics by the likes of Matthew Lewis, John William Polidori, Bram Stoker and M. R. James, alongside Spanish writers like Lope de Vega, Pérez Zaragoza, Bécquer, Noel Clarasó and Wenceslao Fernández Flórez.1 This was followed by the volume Los mitos de Cthulhu /

The Cthulhu Mythos, published by Alianza in 1969, and which included first translations by Francisco Torres Oliver of weird writers like Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, August Derleth and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft, as well as a long

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introductory essay by Rafael Llopis and a rare Catalan attempt to write in the style of Lovecraft, Joan Perucho’s ‘Amb la tècnica de Lovecraft’ /

‘Using Lovecraft’s Technique’ (1956). 2 In 1974, Llopis would write the
first significant work of horror scholarship in Spain, Historia natural de los cuentos de miedo / Natural History of Horror Short Stories, and in 1981
he edited the three-volume Antología de los cuentos de terror / Anthology of Horror Tales, an ambitious project that expanded his first selection of 1963. As for the second of these genre enthusiasts, Torres Oliver, he was responsible for the main translations into Spanish of countless Gothic stories from 1969 onwards.

These new publications found a foothold in a market eager to unearth treasures from a vault of largely forgotten literature that had previously had to be read in the original. They also set a precedent for other horror and Gothic book series, such as the Biblioteca Oro—Terror / Gold Library—

Horror series (1964–74) published by Molino; the Narraciones Géminis de Terror / Gemini Horror Stories series (1968–89) run by Géminis, which also included translations from more contemporary horror and mystery writers like Robert Bloch or Robert Turner; the short-lived Biblioteca de la Novela Gótica y Folletinesca / Library of the Gothic Novel and the Penny Dreadful series (1969–70) run by Táber, which included Altadill’s The Mysteries of Barcelona (1860) and Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco’s La bruja de Madrid / The Witch of Madrid (1849), alongside Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) or Paul Féval’s own Les Mystères de Londres / Mysteries of London (1844); and the Antología de relatos de espanto y terror / Anthology of Tales of Fright and Horror (1972–75), whose first number featured the face of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Moreover, there were many Gothic novels published in the Romantic-heavy Nostromo imprint of Alfaguara (1973–78) and Táber’s own sporadic translations of classics like Dracula (1897) or Carmilla (1872), as well as other one-off collections like Leopoldo María Panero’s Visión de la literatura de terror anglo-americana / Overview of the Anglo-American Literature of Terror (1977). These series, collections and translations would be complemented throughout the 1980s and 1990s by other specialised and short story collections from Acervo (1982–87; 1986–96), by Martínez Roca’s Super Terror series (1983–89) and by the Gran Super Terror / Big Super Terror (1987–91) series, which published contemporary horror novels by writers like John Farris, Richard Laymon or Poppy Z. Brite. These translations would make canonical Gothic works accessible to a younger audience in search of escapist fiction.

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By comparison, national production was more moderate, at least initially, and more influenced by the postmodern and magical realism of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar or Jorge Luis Borges. With the exception of Juan Benet, writers like Juan José Plans Gonzalo or Torrente Ballester were more fantastic and playful than strictly horrific. The 1980s, with their changing critical and editorial attitudes towards non-realist and fantastic works, helped destigmatise
the fantastic (Roas and Casas 2008: 41) and make the Gothic more attractive to writers. More importantly, the boom in international horror fiction that took over the publishing world in America and Britain, and which catapulted authors like Stephen King and Clive Barker to fame, travelled to Spain. The impact of film, as well as horror magazines, both internationally ( Fangoria) and nationally ( 2000maniacos) was also remarkable.3 Cristina Fernández Cubas’s fiction, especially her early short story collections Mi hermana Elba / My Sister Elba (1980) and Los altillos de Brumal / The Attics of Brumal (1983), began to update the Gothic tradition for a modern audience, focusing on warped psychologies and unreliable narrators (‘Lúnula y Violeta’ / ‘Lúnula and Violet’), deconstructive narratives (the ghost story is revisited in ‘La noche de Jezabel’ / ‘The Night of Jezebel’ and the double in ‘Helicón’ /

‘Helicon’) and metafiction (in ‘In the Southern Hemisphere’, the main character discovers, to his horror, that he is actually living in a novel a friend is writing). But perhaps Fernádez Cubas’s most significant early story is ‘The Attics of Brumal’, where the heroine, uprooted from the small village where she was born, is forced to return to it following her mother’s death. The events that unfold are unclear: were they a dream?

Did they really happen? Upon arrival, the narrator is locked in an attic by the local priest after a visit to a ruined church where she hears the voices of her old school friends calling her. Recovering in a hospital, she decides to return to the barren land of Brumal as a way of defying her mother and ‘confront[ing] a desired and unknown past’ (Fernández Cubas 2014: 164). Fernández Cubas’s follow-up masterpiece, and perhaps her most accomplished engagement with the Gothic, would come in the shape of the title story in El ángulo del terror / The Angle of Horror (1990). In it, the characters who discover in dreams this strange angle—a new way of looking at the world—are systematically driven to madness. Fernández Cubas has continued to produce Gothic stories in the twenty-first century in collections like Parientes pobres del diablo /

Poor Relatives of the Devil (2006).

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Other writers, like Pilar Pedraza (discussed below), Ricardo Doménech, Laura Freixas and Ignacio Martínez Pisón, nurtured the genre during the 1980s and early 1990s, if never as strictly Gothic authors and in plots that mixed the Gothic with other genres like the detective story or the historical novel. The most successful example of these new fictional hybrids is El club Dumas / The Dumas Club (1993), by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, equal parts adventure novel, bibliophile mystery in the vein of Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa / The Name of the Rose (1980) and Satanic Gothic horror. The reception of this novel, like that of Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Catalan-language La pell freda / Cold Skin (2002), a Lovecraftian Gothic romance story set in a lighthouse in a deserted island which won the Ojo Crítico / Critical Eye prize and was translated into 37 languages (published in English in 2006), or the uncanny and eerie novel Fin / The End (2009) by David de Monteagudo, have undoubtedly helped consolidate the Gothic as a commercially and critically viable form of artistic expression. At the same time, these literary writers have only published one or two successful novels and assiduously work in other genres. For example, after the equally Gothic Pandora en el Congo / Pandora in the Congo (2005), Sánchez Piñol switched gears and turned to the historical novel in his Victus series (2012–15), Pérez-Reverte works mostly in the adventure genre, and Monteagudo now seems more interested in the apocalyptic genre. The exception is Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose Gothic career I consider later in this chapter.

With the development in the 1990s of the Gothic as a recognisable and more visible mode, Valdemar, a publishing house founded in 1989, began what is now the only Spanish Gothic imprint to specialise in translated Gothic classics. Starting in 1991 with Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Valdemar Gótica has published over 100 of the best international Gothic novels and short story collections, featuring fiction from key writers from Britain (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Lewis, James Hogg, Le Fanu, De Quincey, the Shelleys, Maturin, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, E. F. Benson, Blackwood, Machen, M. R.

James, Vernon Lee), America (Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Irving, Henry S. Whitehead, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, Lovecraft, Howard, Shirley Jackson, Bloch, Richard Matheson, William Hjortsberg, Thomas Ligotti), France (de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas, Marquis de Sade, Gaston Leroux, Alexandre Chatrian, Petrus Borel), Austria (Gustav Meyrink), Germany (E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hanns Heinz Ewers), Poland

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(Jan Potocki) and Uruguay (Count of Lautréamont). Their lavish and pricey hardbacks (most of the books in the series cost over 30 euros), are obviously marketed at a small discerning audience well-versed in the Gothic tradition and eager to own ornate editions of classics that have long remained untranslated. Aside from the odd story in some of their anthologies, the omission of Spanish writers is interesting. Perhaps no Spanish writer is considered to have produced an ‘essential classic that laid the foundation for the Gothic genre and horror literature’, which would go some way towards legitimising my argument regarding Spain’s own perception of its literary history earlier in this book. 4 This is not to say that Valdemar does not publish Spanish Gothic writers. Their catalogue includes the work of Pilar Pedraza, José María Latorre and Emilio Carrère, but these are published under a different imprint, ‘El Club Diógenes’ /

‘Diogenes Club’, which includes anything from literary novels to adventure, fantastic and detective fiction. This may be due to the fact that the Spanish Gothic writers they publish are more modern (twentieth and twenty-first century) or simply because selling their work in paperback makes them more competitive in a market saturated with international figures.5 In any case, Valdemar’s Gothic efforts are worth mentioning because the series has been operating successfully for twenty-five years, a fact that reinforces the contemporary revival of the Gothic and its continued relevance to a self-selecting readership. Valdemar’s efforts are part of a wider recuperation and celebration of the Gothic and of horror in literary and popular fiction.

Although the initial production of Gothic novels in Spain was thin on the ground when compared to that of other European countries, the
same cannot be said of the post-millennial years.6 The amount of material available to readers has multiplied exponentially, especially with the advent of digital publishing. Spanish writers have both tackled traditional Gothic monsters and narratives, although often adapted to the Spanish context, and more personal ones that explore cultural anxieties connected to Spain’s traditions and customs. Novels that have revived and invigo-rated the vampire myth include Javier Sánchez García’s Ella, Drácula /

She, Dracula (2005), Clara Tahoces’s Gothika (2007), the stories in Julio Ángel Olivares Merino’s Los desvelos de Lilith / Sleepless Lilith (2009), Fernando Gómez Hernández’s El vampiro de Cartagena / The Vampire from Cartagena (2010), Emilio Bueso’s Diástole / Diastole (2013), María José Tirado’s Entre Vampiros / Among Vampires (2014), Carlos Molinero’s Un verano de miedo / A Summer of Fear (2014) and Javier Herce’s Matar

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a un vampiro / To Kill a Vampire (2011) and La venganza de un vampiro /

A Vampire’s Vengeance (2014).7 Lovecraftian horrors have been recuperated and expanded by Jesús Cañada in his Los nombres muertos / The Dead Names (2013) and by Emilio Bueso in Extraños Eones / Strange Aeons (2014), and by the various anthologies of original material in Edge Entertainment’s series ‘Los Mitos de Cthulhu’ / ‘The Cthulhu Mythos’

(2012–present). The zombie, which peaked in popularity after the success of the comic and television series The Walking Dead (2003–present; 2010–present, respectively), is responsible for a similar horde of zombie apocalypse narratives in Spain, like Seve González’s Spanish Zombies: Genesis (2014), Juan Carlos Sánchez Clemares’s Madrid Zombi / Zombie Madrid (2014), Jaume Noguera’s España: Guerra Zombi / Spain: Zombie War (2014) and Herce’s Zementerio / Zemetery (2015). The demand for these titles is such that Dolmen editorial now has a ‘Línea Z’ series dedicated exclusively to the publication of zombie novels. As for less traditional Gothic narratives, if such a concept is still tenable in a global context of fragmentation and cross-cultural influence, it is worth mentioning novels like José Luis Caballero’s La ciudad silenciosa / The Silent City (2013), set in a post-apocalyptic Barcelona where people suffer from a strange type of agoraphobia that forces them to live underground, or Mado Martínez’s La Santa / The Saint (2014), about the Galician procession of the dead (la Santa Compaña). José María Latorre, with novels like Visita de tinieblas /

Visit of Darkness (2008) and La ciudad de los muertos / The City of the Dead (2011), and short story collections like La noche de Cagliostro y otros relatos de terror / The Night of Cagliostro and Other Terror Tales (2006) and Música Muerta / Dead Music (2014), is also fast becoming a national Gothic horror auteur, even though his work has had little repercussion internationally as of the time of writing. Finally, it is worth remarking on the fact that a number of Spanish horror writers continue to set their novels in foreign lands, perhaps hoping to compete (or capitalise on) the success of established American and British authors. Some key texts include Vicente García’s La herencia de Hosting / The Hosting Inheritance (2014), Edgar Cantero’s El factor sobrenatural / The Supernatural Factor (2015) and David Rivera’s El secreto de River Side / The River Side Secret (2016).

While the Gothic is not, like Horror Studies, an area studied in higher education in Spain—unlike Britain, where the Gothic is an A-level option, is present in most BA English degrees and the subject of specialised MAs at a number of universities—the term is beginning to gain traction. Notably, Madrid saw the founding of its first Gothic festival in 2009—the ongoing

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Semana gótica de Madrid / Madrid’s Gothic Week— which includes round-tables and Q&As with Gothic writers. The 2000s have also seen the creation of Nocte (Spanish Association of Horror Writers) and their annual horror prizes (since 2009), as well as the launch of the specialised website Mentenebre and of the academic journal Herejía y belleza / Heresy and Beauty (2012), the first dedicated to the study of the Gothic in the Spanish language. The cross-over between music, literature, fashion and art is perhaps a lot more significant in Spain than in countries like England or America, given that the term ‘gótico’ means both Goth and Gothic.8

This is having a very positive effect, as it is bringing minoritarian horror writers and their work into contact with a wider audience with similar tastes and sensibilities. The challenge will be for the Gothic to overcome the populist rhetoric that sees it as an area of studies unworthy of serious attention, a problem that has largely been surmounted in Britain. Given that Cultural Studies have had a hard time in Spanish universities, this is unlikely to happen any time soon. There is, however, evidence of a growing culture around the literary meaning and value of the Gothic. As it increasingly becomes a brand that sells across the world, Gothic writers may well find their work vindicated by the younger academic generations.

In what follows, I want to focus on the fiction of Pilar Pedraza and Carlos Ruiz Zafón as a way of shedding light, from two different perspectives—that of the cult writer (Pedraza) and of the international bestselling author (Ruiz Zafón)—on the contemporary value and status of the Gothic in Spain. I will begin with Pedraza’s hybridisation of the Gothic for gender purposes and then turn to Ruiz Zafón’s brand of local, yet transnational, Gothic, one that has resonated with tourism and put forward a Gothicised version of the city of Barcelona.

The Female GoThic oF Pilar Pedraza

Beyond Fernández Cubas, other female authors have tackled the Gothic in recent years, most notably Espido Freire, in her psychological and oneiric novels Irlanda / Ireland (1998), Donde siempre es octubre / Where It Is Always October (1999), Melocotones helados / Frozen Peaches (1999), Diabulus in musica (2001) and Nos espera la noche / The Night Awaits Us (2003), and the short stories in her collection Cuentos malvados / Evil Tales (2003). But Pilar Pedraza is perhaps the best-known female writer of the contemporary Gothic.9 Sometimes called ‘la dama del gótico español’

(the lady of Spanish Gothic), Pedraza has displayed an awareness of other

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European and American Gothic traditions, especially of myths like the Frankenstein monster, the vampire, the undead and the werewolf, which recur throughout her oeuvre. She has also championed erotic-sadistic models of femininity that, like Angela Carter’s, often challenge tradition and patriarchy.10 Her fiction could be understood as a Female Gothic—and I am considering her output under this lens here—not because Pedraza is
a woman, as per Ellen Moers’s (1977: 90) original definition, but because
her fiction shows a thorough engagement with the position of women in society and their desires, either rewriting Gothic myths or developing a modern Spanish version of them. As Pedraza herself has explained, her update of the mode is intentional and, to a certain extent, inevitable, for to write Gothic novels ‘in the style of Ann Radcliffe nowadays would make little sense’ (Pedraza, quoted in Villalba Álvarez n.d.). Rather, her work incorporates foreign Gothic influences (Poe, de Sade, Mary Shelley, Potocki, Prosper Mérimée, Maupassant, Gustav Meyrinck or Jean Ray), but owes a debt to wider literary and cinematic traditions that range from experimental art and horror cinema to the historical novel and ancient epic poetry.

As may be gauged from this, Pedraza’s Gothic is multifaceted. It ranges, historically, from the Imperial Rome of Lobas de Tesalia / She-Wolves of Tesalia (2015) and the Greece of La perra de Alejandría / The Bitch of Alexandria (2003), to the seventeenth century—in Las joyas de la serpiente / The Jewels of the Serpent (1984), La fase del rubí / The Ruby Phase (1987) and Las novias inmóviles / The Immobile Girlfriends (1994)—to an indeterminate twentieth century—in La pequeña pasión / The Small Passion (1990), Paisaje con reptiles / Landscape with Reptiles (1996) and Piel de sátiro / Satyr Skin (1997). Thematically, her work is just as varied.

Her novels include lycanthropic adventures in El síndrome de Ambras /

The Ambras Syndrome (2008), the history of a monkey-woman in Lucifer Circus (2013), quests to bring peace to distressed ghosts in her epic novels, stories reminiscent of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and even unclassifiable stories, like the oneiric break-up novel The Small Passion and the science fiction metamorphic Landscape with Reptiles. Her characters and settings are much more straightforwardly Gothic: ruins and cemeteries, Hell in its different iterations, abandoned houses, sanctuaries and places of religious adoration recur throughout her fiction, and her novels are normally inhabited by blood-sucking fiends, the undead, evil women (especially witches), werewolves, animal hybrids and mad scientists. Although by no

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means ubiquitous, one of the uniting threads of Pedraza’s fiction is the partial recreation of the historical past, which seamlessly merges superstition, magic and reality. Belief in mythological creatures and their habitats is crucial, as the supernatural does not violate the real in her fiction, but bleeds into it. Since a number of Pedraza’s novels are set in pasts where, either through personal or institutional religion, the beyond is not an extraordinary concept, magical elements blend into the narrative in ways that do not require a reconfiguration of human values or the characters’

conception of the world. Hades is a real place that may be visited in She-Wolves of Tesalia and The Bitch of Alexandria, as is Hell in The Jewels of the Serpent. Even the yellow oil stain turning people into reptiles in Landscape with Reptiles, or the zombies in The Ruby Phase, are unquestionably there, if their origins remain unexplained. They are part and parcel of the lives of their characters, who apprehend them as ‘normal’. Pedraza’s use of horrific elements and monsters is, therefore, slightly different from that of other writers of more traditional horror. In her work, the Gothic is influenced by ancient mythology and ritual, so that the mode is not simply driven by Catholic or Protestant imagery. This means that the supernatural can be both a source of fear and awe or fascination, even desire and love. Often, these conflicting emotions are connected. The ‘domán’ (perhaps short for

‘dog man’) in Satyr Skin, the result of the genetic cross-breeding between a gypsy woman and a bear, is both a figure that encapsulates exotic sexuality and bestial cruelty.

The Gothic, at the interplay between the forbidden, the law and the realm of the possible, becomes a liberating language for Pedraza, one that facilitates her prodding of the acceptable limits of different forms of subjectivity and identity politics. Gender, for example, becomes mal-leable and ambiguous in the figure of Adrián/Adriana, the androgynous stranger who mentors Bartolomé in The Jewels of the Serpent. Far from generating fear, as in the generic indeterminacy of the eponymous creature in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), her/his hybrid body is a thing of inimitable beauty: ‘it was the most gorgeous and rare mixture of male and female features that a mad delirium could conceive of. […] Mad of love and desire’ (Pedraza 1988: 100). Hybridity also serves the purpose of highlighting the animality of the human, especially where it is repressed by characters or their environments. Satyr Skin very obviously rethinks Moreau. Although the animals in the novel are not victims of appearance-changing vivisections, the bodies of ‘what previously were monsters and are now an emblematic trophy gallery of genetics’ (Pedraza 1997: 255)

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in Falomir’s laboratory are botched attempts at marrying the feral with the so-called civilised. The experiments go awry when one of the resulting hybrids cannot be successfully integrated into human society and is rejected for its alterity. Boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred in Pedraza’s ancient world novels, especially in the recurring motif of the ghost missing a vital piece of their unburied bodies (a hand in She-Wolves of Tesalia, a liver in The Bitch of Alexandria). In The Small Passion, the revenant, a frustrated sculptor who may or may not be a figment of the depressed narrator’s imagination, allows Leonisa to overcome an identity crisis following the realisation that her husband is cheating on her. His in-between status, deceased yet alive, mirrors Leonisa’s own lassitude and apathy.

But hybridisation is used, more often than not, in Pedraza’s Gothic to explore femininity, and enables the writer to break with the rigid corporeal regimes of beauty canons and ‘feminine’ behaviour, as well as to explore the dangerous aspects of lasting female myths. Always present in her fiction—the highly sexual and seductive Blanca in The Jewels of the Serpent, who dances naked with a snake and eventually becomes a vampire reminiscent of Dracula’s Lucy; the metamorphing Leonisa (‘lioness’) in The Small Passion—the hybrid female has tended to predominate in Pedraza’s later novels. Since Satyr Skin, her fiction has centred on exploring the animal-human hybrid from the point of view of the female of the species. The Ambras Syndrome, ostensibly the story of Lord Alexander Ashton and his transformation into a ‘lobishome’, or Galician man-wolf, as he travels through the Spanish North in some secret political trip, is particularly concerned with the figure of the gypsy Serranilla, a hairy woman rumoured to be half-simian. Not only is she perceived by the very refined Lord Alexander as ‘not a monster or a phenomenon, but a miracle’, she is also capable of arousing in him ‘a high degree of secret ravings, as if he thought himself in front of mythological beings with which the imagination populated mountainous and solitary counties’ (Pedraza 2008a: 51, 53). Her part-animal appearance is anathema to a highly regulated Victorian conception of social propriety. A Spanish lady comments on the significance of the Serranilla case:

The nature of that young girl, hairy like a monkey, was of interest to women’s clubs in relation to the debate of whether women were closer to nature than men, or, in other words, if in women the degree of animality was higher than in men, as the majority of philosophers and scientists opined.

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They also debated whether Serranilla’s life with Magnus [her master and circus owner], which looked like a form of slavery, was a reflection of normality, with what that would mean as regards illegitimate domination and oppression of one sex, the female by the male, and whether this could be applied to ordinary marriages. (116)

Crucially, the novel does not make Serranilla a victim of her lack of inhi-bition or intend to portray her purely as a temptress. Lord Ashton does eventually meet his death at the hands of officials when his savage male side takes over and he becomes an unfettered killer, but Serranilla, we are told, ‘was destined to follow her own path without beginning or ending, leaving a burning mark wherever she went’ (268). Not only does she gain independence after she is freed from her master, but, unlike Lord Ashton, Serranilla is capable of managing her wildness. The fact that Florence, Lord Ashton’s wife, is liberated from the curse upon the latter’s death is connected to Gothic folklore—destroy the beast and you save their infected victims. Yet, this moment can also be read as much more socially invested: Florence is finally redeemed from her cheating and unloving husband, who not only ignored her but treated her unfairly. Pedraza’s Lucifer Circus also features a simian woman, Ma Tara Kué, who is said to have rubies buried under her skin. Paraded through Britain as the evolutionary ‘missing link’ and catching the attention of Darwin himself, she is ultimately sacrificed by a Parisian occult sect. This is interesting, for only sparingly are central women in Pedraza’s novels killed. But, unlike Serranilla, who takes ownership and control of her own life, Ma Tara Kué is incapable of escap-ing the freak show parade her life is reduced to at the hands of a society more interested in spectacle than the human beings behind it. Like the freaks in Karen Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), Ma Tara Kué has no future in a context where the circus is understood as ‘a school of rarities’ and she as a rare ‘jewel’ (Pedraza 2013: 172, 220). Her innocence and purity, her lack of strength, are what ultimately render her a sacrificial offering.

Pedraza’s interest in defiant and unruly women has also manifested in her academic writing, especially in a trilogy of studies on the dark and dangerous female figure in literature, art and cinema. In La bella, enigma y pesadilla: Esfinge, medusa, pantera… / The Beautiful One, Enigma and Nightmare: Sphynx, Medusa, Panther… (1991), Pedraza turns to the seductive, yet deadly, hybrid woman whose animality connects her to a primeval form of unbridled desire. In Máquinas de amar: Secretos del cuerpo artificial /

Love Machines: Secrets of the Artificial Body (1998), she investigates the origins and relevance of the automaton and of preserved and artificial female

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bodies, and reads them as the result of past and present ideals of beauty and femininity, as well as their reverse. In the last volume, Espectra: Descenso a las criptas de la literatura y el cine / She-Spectre: Descent into the Crypts of Literature and Cinema (2004), Pedraza explores the Gothic trope of the dead woman, as Elizabeth Bronfen (1992) once did, and her return as a revenant. Pedraza has complemented this work with other monographs that belie a fascination for the Gothic female figure: a study of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), published as La mujer pantera: Jacques Tourneur / The She-Panther: Jacques Tourneur (2002), and a history of witchcraft from ancient times to cinema’s witches, Brujas, sapos y aquelarres / Witches, Toads and Covens (2014). In these writings, as in her fiction, the Gothic and its inherent transgression provide a background against which the fantasies and nightmares of womanhood and femininity may be explored. In Vigencia de lo fantástico en el imaginario moderno / Currency of the Fantastic in the Modern Imaginary (2008), Pedraza explains that she is interested in many aspects of horror and fantastic literature and film […].

One of the most important ones is that this type of creation manages to dissolve institutional and familial censorship, free up a path through which to travel to the territories of transgression protected by the freedom provided
by the imagination. (Pedraza 2008b: 46)

As it has done for a number of other Spanish writers, the Gothic tradition—whether this be understood in the strictly canonical sense or, as Pedraza herself has proposed in interviews, as the ‘sinister’, that which disturbs categories of the real and the unreal—becomes, for Pedraza, a means of commenting on the social role of women and of expanding the possibilities of Gothic heroinism. In her works, women do not simply challenge taxonomic and social boundaries, they very literally escape the confines of the home. For example, Lupercia, in She-Wolves of Tesalia, embarks on a life-changing journey that sees her sailing to Tesalia and even to Avernus in her attempt to appease the angry ghost of her dead friend and lover Póstuma. But it is Imperatrice, in The Ruby Phase, who most vividly encapsulates Pedraza’s free woman.

The wealthy daughter of a Spanish nobleman and a Venetian patrician, Imperatrice roams freely the streets and cemeteries of eighteenth-century Spain in search of high-octane experiences that will keep tedium at bay. A truly decadent figure, a female Dorian Gray with touches of Baudelaire, her many escapades include eating from a recent corpse alongside the hungry undead in a cemetery, attending an orgiastic coven or bathing in the blood

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of panthers. More importantly, however, Imperatrice is a murderer of young girls, an Elizabeth Bathory who, in her own words, kills and embalms her female servants because ‘she loved them a lot in life and she want[s] to save their bodies from turning into carrion’ (Pedraza 2009: 272). Her actions and capacity to command those around her even after she is captured—she triumphs over those who attempt to cut her hair for her auto da fé and succeeds in appearing ‘beautiful, radiant’ (279)—are contrasted with the male world of an inefficient and redundant Inquisition. As it happens, her brother, Torcuato, a secretary for the Holy Office, is more concerned with translating Tacitus than with prosecuting Antida, a local witch who stands accused of putting a spell on another woman, or investigating the possession case of Blanca, a nun from the Convent of Santa Librada who claims the devil may have raped her. That these superstitious cases turn out to be empirically true emphasises how out of touch with reality the learned men behind the official state bodies are. Their ineptitude is underscored by the escape of Imperatrice by supernatural means, as she disappears in a flash of lighting at the stake. The novel’s ending is decisive. Imperatrice, after all the violations of the social order she has perpetrated, gets the last laugh and goes unpunished in a Sadean celebration of female empowerment.

By contrast, Torcuato, who behaves according to common law, is forever unhappy, left feeling as if he had ‘lost his soul’ (283).

Pedraza’s Gothic is atypical. She is uninterested in passing trends, and has been committed to a form of fiction that, via the fantastic and the horrific, may provide her with fertile ground for literary experiments seeking to probe the boundaries of decorum, gender dynamics and even the purpose of literature. As in The Ruby Phase, the body of her writing is ultimately not moralistic. Pedraza simply imagines historical pasts and presents where women are free to embark on adventures where they are not reduced to their sex. Her creative melange, rich with colourful characters, settings and tropes, updates the Gothic for modern times, and manages to carve a new place for female characters away from traditional archetypes like the victim, the angel of the hearth or the whore.

inTernaTionalisinG The sPanish GoThic:

The ‘nuanced GoThicism’ oF carlos ruiz zaFón

According to his publishers, as of 2012, Ruiz Zafón’s (henceforth Zafón) books had been sold in 45 countries and translated into forty languages, which would make him the most widely published contemporary Spanish

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writer. Although others, like Javier Marías, Javier Sierra, Juan Gómez-Jurado and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, also command significant readerships, Zafón is also well-known among scholars and students, and is perhaps the only truly international figure currently writing in the Gothic mode in Spain. In England, his masterpiece La sombra del viento / The Shadow of the Wind (2001, translated and published in English in 2004) was even selected by the Richard and Judy Book Club as one of their books of the year, being subsequently promoted on television. Comparatively little has been written about Zafón as either Gothic, mainstream or popular, especially in English.

This may be the case because the last volume in his Cemetery of Books quartet has only recently been published, or because his previous work was predominantly in the young adult fiction genre. Regardless, I want to turn to Zafón here because he is the archetype of a new kind of international Spanish Gothic writer, one whose fiction is both incredibly site-specific in its relation to Barcelona and its history, and yet, recognisably generic. His books draw on the Gothic and its tropes (especially the return of the past) assiduously, and have been subject, at least in Britain, to strong Gothicising marketing campaigns that speak to the lack of perception of the mode’s relevance in Spain, where it does not have as neatly defined a market and where Zafón’s novels are sold as literary mystery fiction.

Although only translated into English from 2010 to 2013, after the success of the prequel to Shadow, The Angel’s Game (2008)—published as El juego del ángel in Spain a year earlier—Zafón’s young adult novels were originally published in the 1990s and predate the craze in supernatural children’s fiction that would follow series like J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (beginning in 1997 with The Philosopher’s Stone) or Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000).11 Although Marina (1999, translated and published in English in 2013) is often separated from the earlier trilogy composed of El príncipe de la niebla / The Prince of Mist (1993, translated and published in English in 2010), El palacio de la medianoche / The Midnight Palace (1994, translated and published in English in 2011) and Las luces de Septiembre / The Watcher in the Shadows (1995, translated and published in English in 2012), the novel shares its structure, concerns and sense of melancholy with the other three. I will therefore consider the four volumes together as precursors for Zafón’s later work and as interesting Gothic pieces in their own right. They establish the main areas of interest of his fiction, his recurring motifs, and are good indicators of the type of literary intervention he, as an author, has made in Gothic literature. Very few Spanish writers were producing fantastical

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works of this kind for young adults in the 1990s, and even fewer won a prize (Edebé) with their first novel.

Patently not as successful narratively, stylistically or commercially as his more accomplished later books, Zafón’s YA novels are out-and-out Gothic, more so, even, than the more measured Cemetery quartet. Despite Zafón not using this term to describe any of his books—he speaks of the early novels as ‘tales of mystery and adventure’ (Ruiz Zafón 2011: frontispiece page) and explains that he was ‘trying to give a nod to all the books kids in my generation used to read, from the mysteries of Enid Blyton to the great nineteenth-century classic stories of intrigue and adventure, from Dumas to Verne, Stevenson and beyond’ (Ruiz Zafón 2012: 247)—the reality is that a good percentage of the action in them stems from encounters with supernatural forms of evil. In The Prince of Mist, the villain, Dr Cain, is a demon creature reminiscent of Leland Gaunt in Stephen King’s Needful Things, also published in 1993, who likes to strike Faustian pacts with children. In exchange for fulfilling their secret wishes, he asks for a difficult favour. Apart from appearing in various shapes, including a killer clown, to the protagonists, Cain is made of mist and has the power of turning his victims into ice statues. In The Midnight Palace, the tormented spirit of a mad rail work engineer needs the body of one of his descendants to re-materialise in the present. The apparition of the spirits of 365
orphaned children aboard a train, who were taken on a symbolic journey starting at Jheeter’s Gate, the station the engineer himself designed, haunts the protagonists throughout the novel. In The Watcher of Shadows, a man sells his heart (a metaphor for his shadow or evil side), only to be later haunted by its anthropomorphisation. The same man, Lazarus, is a toy maker who has, among other things, built an automaton out of his wife’s dead body. In Marina, Mijail Kolvenik, victim of a deforming disease, operates on his own body to create an enhanced version of himself as a human-machine hybrid. He also happens to live in a closed and decaying theatre reminiscent of that in Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra /

The Phantom of the Opera (1909–10). In the style of Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ (1922), he also invents a serum that may bring people back from the dead.

These Gothic characters, iconography and situations did not go unnoticed by the novels’ English publisher, Orion, who added ‘Further Reading’ lists largely made up of old and modern Gothic classics like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Robert Louis

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Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) or Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996). Although it is true that such a decision can be understood as part of a marketing strategy seeking to foreground the Gothic elements of the novels to make them more attractive and intelligible to a foreign market, the fiction itself reveals these influences at the basic level of character naming. Protagonists are called Dorian and Dr Hoffman, in The Watcher in the Shadows, which features doppelgängers and automata, and Dr Shelley is inevitably the scientist in Marina, a novel where corpses are patched up with metal and wood and reanimated Frankenstein-style.

Ultimately, since the Gothic does incorporate elements from the mystery and adventure novel, as well as from fairy tales, the argument here really concerns strategic nomenclature and generic allegiances aimed at maximising specific reader pools. Where the Spanish market has sought to sell Zafón as a popular literary writer—and a writer of place, too—and focused on the suspense aspects of his work, the Anglophone market has exploited the Gothic elements. To Glennis Byron’s (2012a: 76) interesting remarks regarding the Gothicisation of Zafón’s Cemetery books in the author’s English language website, one may add that Marina’s British cover defines the book as ‘a Gothic tale for all ages’, includes a quotation from Glamour magazine describing the book as ‘a magical, gothic tale’

(Ruiz Zafón 2013: back cover), and has a thoroughly Gothic design: a red flower on a black background framed by a suitably ornate red pattern.

More Gothic than references, designs and character types is the often destructive power of the past, which permeates Zafón’s novels and the lives of their protagonists. Whether in the shape of broken promises ( Prince of Mist, Watcher in the Shadows), revenge ( Midnight Palace, Marina), curses ( Midnight Palace, Watcher in the Shadows) or apparitions ( Prince of Mist, Midnight Palace), the past features at the thematic level, and very literally comes back to haunt those who had hoped to leave it behind or else their descendants. It also traps people in the present. Lazarus is bound to the automated body of his dead wife, unable to move on with his life, as is Mijail, whose first instinct upon being brought back from the dead is to hunt the people who contributed to his downfall. Even for those with a bright future ahead of them—Irene in Watcher, Oscar in Marina—
melancholia is a real threat, as they are prone to ‘becom[ing] someone who lives solely in the past’ (Ruiz Zafón 2012: 245). As Zafón has noted, this obsession is really nothing more than a concerted desire to explore

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the themes of ‘loss’ and ‘memory’ (‘we are essentially what we remember’

[Ruiz Zafón 2013: 303]). In the case of Marina, this plays out at the level of landscape through the city that is the predominant setting of his later work. As he explained, he ‘wanted to make [his] peace with the ghosts of Barcelona, and perhaps learn how to give them a voice’ (303). For Zafón, these ghosts are connected to his own childhood in Sarriá and the many other Barcelona locations in the novel. Inevitably, as Barcelona becomes the predominant setting (previous novels were set in Normandy, Britain and Calcutta), the digging up of the past unearths other types of spectres, those of the Civil war, in The Shadow of the Wind, El prisionero del cielo /

The Prisoner of Heaven (2011; first published in English in 2012) and El laberinto de los espíritus / The Labyrinth of Spirits (2016; forthcoming in English in 2018). 12

Zafón has embraced the Gothic label to refer to his adult fiction, thus giving birth to what has been termed ‘Barcelona Gothic’, the title given to a 2008 short story collection (Zafón 2008).13 His own brand
of the Gothic, which Sergio Vila-San Juán (2013: 21) calls ‘a nuanced

Gothicism’, is marked by an awareness of the works of British Gothic writers like Stoker or Stevenson (both of whom are name-checked in his books), the use of architecture (in this case the Gothic and neo-Gothic buildings of a rainy, gloomy and mysterious Barcelona) and the return to tormented or demonic figures. It is also characteristic for its ‘wry humour and observations of ordinary life’ (21). Although comedy and gritty social realism are by no means a novelty in the Gothic, it is true that Zafón’s adult work contains a lot of witticisms (aphorisms, metaphors, rhetorical turns of phrase) and erotic allusions that set it apart from that
of other canonical Gothic writers.14 I would suggest, however, that the novels in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series feel different because they are elaborate Gothic romances, rather than straightforward pieces of Gothic horror. In fact, the more obvious precursors for Zafón’s quartet are the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins, especially The Woman in White (1859). Zafón’s Cemetery books rely on long flashbacks from different witnesses, as well as on the mistaken identities, twist-and-turning and mystery-solving typical of the penny dreadful so thoroughly condemned in The Angel’s Game. In this novel, the main character, David Martín, is himself the writer of The Mysteries of Barcelona (the first volume in a book series entitled City of the Damned), which obviously references Eugène Sue’s own serialised mystery novel Les Mystères de Paris /

The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43).15 This means that Zafón’s adult work is

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less interested in the supernatural and more concerned with the inherent capacity for cruelty of human beings.

The Shadow of the Wind, the book that launched Zafón’s career internationally, forms a blueprint for his later works. It has a self-contained main narrative which, nevertheless, bleeds into the other volumes in the series (the character of Sempere’s father reappears in The Angel’s Game, and Isabella, Daniel’s mother, plays a significant role in that novel and in The Prisoner of Heaven); it has a strong sense of location, a pre and post-Civil War Barcelona; it features the Cemetery of Forgotten Books; it involves the discovery of the effects of the past on the present via investigation of the dark history of a character; and it includes a twist ending. At heart, the story is reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, but adds a dash of incest to the mix. Julián Carax, a struggling and unhappy writer distraught by the death of his beloved Penélope (who, we find out later, was his sister), decides to burn every existing copy of his books and, in his wrath, ends up setting fire to himself. A disfigured and unhappy soul inhabiting the crypt of ‘The Angel of Mist’, the Gothic mansion where Penélope is buried, he is reawakened by Daniel Sempere’s enthusiasm for his novel The Shadow of the Wind. The boy, the son of a bookseller, is taken to a secret library where ‘books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever’ (Ruiz Zafón 2005: 4). There, prompted to find a book to look after, he selects Carax’s last novel. Soon after, Daniel finds he is being followed by a limping stranger in a dark suit with ‘a rasping, wounded voice’ (52), and Nuria Monfort, the daughter of the keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is murdered. Carax’s identity is not revealed until relatively late in the game, however, as the writer masquer-ades under a pseudonym, Laín Coubert, the name of the devil in one of Carax’s novels. The Shadow of the Wind does not simply end by turning the ‘monster’ into a sympathetic character—in a gradual process of unravelling that creates pity for the monster. In an interesting turn of events, Daniel ends up intercepting a bullet aimed at Carax with his own body.

Not only does the boy save Carax, he also returns him his inspiration and authorial voice. Carax does not come back in The Prisoner of Heaven, a direct sequel to The Shadow of the Wind, which tells the dark story of Fermín Romero de Torres, a spy imprisoned by the Francoist regime. His ploy to escape the castle of Montjuïc puts him in touch with one David Martín, the protagonist of volume two, The Angel’s Game.

In this novel, which rewrites the Gothic trope of the wandering Jew, David, himself a failed journalist, author of penny dreadfuls

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and, eventually, ghost-writer, strikes a Faustian bargain with Andreas Corelli, a demonic figure intent on founding a new faith via ‘a narrative that awakens the soul’ (Ruiz Zafón 2010: 196). Although his ulte-rior motives are not fully spelled out in the novel, it becomes obvious that they are not pure or innocent and that they involve the manipula-tion of the masses, something which eventually drives David to have second thoughts about his job. Things are worsened by the fact that David soon discovers he is inhabiting the Gothic tower house of one Diego Marlasca, who underwent a very similar experience, wrote Lux Aeterna, a book of prayers about the dead with some relation to a religious pamphlet about Lucifer, and ended up offering another man’s soul in exchange for his freedom. David is, however, a notoriously unreliable narrator. There are a number of indications throughout, as well as a reference to Mr Hyde, that signal the story may well be David’s version of events, according to which the blame for the deaths of innocent people is displaced onto his doppelgänger and a Corelli desperate for his manuscript. This possibility is further underscored by talks of David in The Prisoner of Heaven, where it is concluded he may be a paranoid schizophrenic, and by the implausibility of the end of The Angel’s Game, in which David is granted the gift of not ageing (something disproved in The Prisoner of Heaven) and offered the possibility of redemption through the education of a younger version of his dead lover, Cristina.

These novels recreate traditional Gothic situations: ghosts are explained away, houses and mansions contain deadly curses, and psychologically unstable narrators abound, as do Mephistophelian visits, forbidden texts and books, buried secrets and walled-up corpses. The Gothic quality of the novels is derived from the architecture and atmosphere of a Barcelona described in detail for the unacquainted reader. Recognisable Gothic settings are used (Marlasca’s tower house), and the city is made to feel estranging and eerie, its real face hidden to unobservant visitors. As Corelli puts it, ‘[v]isitors naively think that it’s always sunny and hot in this town

[…]. But I say that sooner or later Barcelona’s ancient, murky soul is reflected in the sky’ (Ruiz Zafón 2010: 281). This distancing move has the double effect of creating an intrinsically Spanish (even Catalan) type of Gothic fiction, in which the legacy of the Spanish Civil War or of indus-trialisation become a latent subtext, and Barcelona’s historical and artistic patrimony may be celebrated. The resulting ‘nuanced Gothicism’ appeals both to Spaniards, although often under the guise of mystery or literary

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fiction, and to readers outside Spain, who are likely to be more familiar with the trappings of the Gothic mode.

Zafón’s adult novels, and Marina, draw from foreign sources to produce an intrinsic form of the Gothic that is both tied down to locale (Barcelona as city, a connection emphasised in the proposed Gothic tour of its urban centre at the end of Orion’s tenth-anniversary edition of Shadow), yet functions independently from it. Even though Zafón’s stories are situated in the past, they have, with the exception of the flashback section of The Prisoner of Heaven, dealt mostly in stock suspense situations that have a universal and atemporal quality to them. The actions could take place somewhere else entirely, at a different time, just like Gothic romances are often situated in an unspecified vague past. Zafón’s Gothic, then, is just the right amalgam of influence, revision and innovation, offering varia-tions on a theme that feel nationally distinctive yet remain relatable to non-Spanish readers. Zafón thus encapsulates perfectly the spirit of post-millennial Gothic, which has grown increasingly transnational.

noTes

1. It is worth noting that, in 1958, Juan José López Ibor had already published a two-volume anthology of horror stories, Antología de cuentos de misterio y terror / Anthology of Mystery and Horror Stories, through Labor that totalled 1319 pages.

2. Some of these writers, like Lovecraft, had already been translated into Spanish and published in the Buenos Aires-based Spanish magazine Narraciones terroríficas / Horror Stories (1939–52), but the magazine did not receive wide circulation in Spain due to the Civil War.

3. For more on the development of horror fanzines in Spain, see Lázaro-Reboll (2012: 156–97).

4. The tagline is the one used in the Valdemar website to advertise the imprint. See Valdemar.com, http://www.valdemar.com/default.

php?cPath=4 [accessed 19 May 2016].

5. Confusingly, however, some of the books in the Club Diógenes imprint are published in hardback too, at least in their first print run.

6. A literary form I have no space to cover here is Gothic poetry, but see Palacios Albiñana (2001) for a representative modern and contemporary selection.

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7. Although not post-millennial, it is worth mentioning here Salvador Sáinz’s novel Estruch (1991), based on the legend of the Catalan Count Estruch, allegedly the first vampire in European folklore.

8. On the Goth/Gothic interface, especially in Gothic Studies, see Martin (2002).

9. Her writing, untranslated into English, has nevertheless led to a
monograph on her work (Pritchett 2015).

10. Pedraza is often asked about this nickname in interviews. She seems to both embrace it and reject it in lieu of the more highly intellectualised term ‘fantastic’, or else proposes she does not belong to a single movement. See Vilar-Bou (2016).

11. I am, naturally, not suggesting that YA Gothic did not exist before this date, or indeed, that it did not exist in Spain, but merely that it suddenly became mainstream and, importantly, more respectable as a type of literature to be enjoyed by older adults. For more on the history of YA Gothic, see Jackson et al. (2009).

12. For more on the past and Barcelona in Shadow, see Byron (2012b). The Labyrinth of Spirits was published in Spanish just after this book entered the production phase; as such I could not cover it in any meaningful way. It is worth pointing out, however, that the novel is largely a noir/thriller with only some sporadic Gothic elements and settings.

13. Zafón often uses the word ‘gótico’ in interviews. See, for example, Pita (2006).

14. For the role of comedy in the Gothic, see Horner and Zlosnik (2005).

15. Zafón does not mention Antonio Altadill’s Barcelona y sus misterios

/ Barcelona and Its Mysteries (1860), which was Spain’s response to the Paris ‘mystery novels’.

reFerences

Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Byron, Glennis. 2012a. ‘Gothic, Grabbit and Run: Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the Gothic Marketplace’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), 71–83.

———. 2012b. ‘Barcelona Gothic: Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento and the Omnipresent Past’, Journal of Romance Studies, 12.1: 72–84.

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Epps, Bradley. 2003. ‘Questioning the Text’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Present, ed. by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 193–211.

Fernández Cubas, Cristina. 2014. Mi hermana Elba y Los altillos de Brumal (Barcelona: Tusquets).

Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 2005. Gothic and the Comic Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis (eds). 2009. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (London and New York: Routledge).

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. 2012. Spanish Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Martin, Sara. 2002. ‘Gothic Scholars Don’t Wear Black: Gothic Studies and Gothic Subcultures’, Gothic Studies, 4.1: 28–43.

Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women (New York: Anchor Press).

Moreiras Menor, Cristina. 2000. ‘Spectacle, Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Spain’, in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. by Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosumas (London: Arnold), 134–42.

Palacios Albiñana, Joaquín (ed.). 2001. Antología de la poesía macabra española e hispanoamericana (Madrid: Valdemar).

Pedraza, Pilar. 1988. Las joyas de la serpiente (Barcelona: Tusquets).

———. 1997. Piel de sátiro (Madrid: Valdemar).

———. 2008a. El síndrome de Ambras (Madrid: Valdemar).

———. 2008b. Vigencia de lo fantástico en el imaginario moderno (Cuenca: Cuadernos de Mangana).

———. 2009. La fase del rubí (Madrid: Valdemar).

———. 2013. Lucifer Circus (Madrid: Valdemar).

Pita, Elena. 2006. ‘Carlos Ruiz Zafón: “El éxito no es una cuestión de ingredientes, como los flanes”’, ElMundo.es, 23 April. http://www.elmundo.es/suple-
mentos/magazine/2006/343/1145638782.html [accessed 3 May 2015].

Pritchett, Kay. 2015. Dark Assemblages: Pilar Pedraza and the Gothic Story of Development (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press).

Roas, David, and Ana Casas. 2008. ‘Prólogo’, in La realidad oculta: Cuentos fantásticos españoles del siglo XX, ed. by David Roas and Ana Casas (Palencia: Menos Cuarto), 9–56.

Ruiz Zafón, Carlos. 2005. The Shadow of the Wind (London: Orion).

———. 2008. Barcelona Gothic (Barcelona: Editorial La Vanguardia).

———. 2010. The Angel’s Game (London: Orion).

———. 2011. The Midnight Palace (London: Orion).

———. 2012. The Watcher in the Shadows (London: Orion).

———. 2013. Marina (London: Orion).

Vila-San Juán, Sergio. 2013. ‘The Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’, in The Prisoner of Heaven, ed. by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (London: Orion), 21–9.

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Vilar-Bou, José Miguel. 2016. ‘Los jóvenes deben crear sus propios ídolos culturales, y los nuestros deben quedar atrás’, ElDiario.es, 23 January. http://www.

eldiario.es/murcia/entrevistas/jovenes-deben-propios-idolos-cultura-
les_0_476652772.html [accessed 19 May 2016].

Villalba Álvarez, Marina. n.d. ‘Entrevista a Pilar Pedraza’, CiberLetras. http://
www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v08/villalbaalvarez.html [accessed 19 May

2016].

PART IV

Spanish Gothic Cinema (1906–2016)

CHAPTER 8

From Segundo de Chomón to the Rise
and Fall of ‘Fantaterror’

In the introduction to this book I pointed towards the limitations of the term ‘Gothic cinema’ within the Spanish context, as there has never been a self-avowedly Gothic cinema industry in Spain. More importantly, undeniable Gothic texts such as the unjustly forgotten La casa de la lluvia /

The House of Rain (Antonio Román, 1943), which underplay horror in lieu of the type of tension and atmospheric suspense of a film like Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), are likely to be filed under the more viewer-friendly ‘drama’ (or melodrama) genre. 1 Gothic cinema is thus trapped
between a rock and a hard place, destined to remain as intermittently in/
visible as the ghosts in its plots. If the events are too graphic or shocking, films are likely to be labelled horror, as with La residencia / The House that Screamed (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1969). If they lean towards magical or supernatural phenomena, films are likely to be termed fantastic or supernatural, like Las brujas de Zugarramurdi / Witching and Bitching (Álex de la Iglesia, 2013)—unless they contain humour, in which case, the may well marketed as comedies, like El día de la bestia / The Day of the Beast (Álex de la Iglesia, 1995). If they are realistic or psychology-driven, films are likely to be called thrillers, like Tesis / Thesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996). The Gothic thus often becomes associated with a certain aesthetics. It turns into a definitional modal category that qualifies and can be appended to mainstream, tried-and-tested genres. In the next two chapters, I offer a brief and selective history of Spanish Gothic cinema that seeks both to recuperate the ‘Gothic’ as a useful term to refer to work

© The Author(s) 2017

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X. Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2_8

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that showcases a noticeable Gothic sensibility or thematic investment, or else to films that have explicitly exploited, extended or adapted imported Gothic myths.

Spanish Gothic cinema starts with the films of the pioneering Segundo de Chomón, a figure comparable to that of Georges Méliès from the point of view of his cinematic output (allegedly over 500 short, silent trick films) and the international impact of his productions. Like many of the later examples of Gothic horror, de Chomón’s films could be best understood as transnational products, where not explicit co-productions, as many of them were made in France for Pathé Frères. Although he was not the first Spanish filmmaker, de Chomón’s Pulgarcito / Tom Thumb (1904), an adaptation of the Charles Perrault tale, is the first example of Spanish fantastic cinema on screen. 2 Among the around ninety films the director made between 1905 and 1910, some of which would be best described as phantasmagorias, one can find the first substantial manifestations of Spanish Gothic cinema. The most notable of these are La casa encantada /

The Haunted House (1906) and Satán se divierte / Satan at Play (1907; also known as Le spectre rouge / The Red Spectre), but others, such as the famous El hotel eléctrico / The Electric Hotel (1908), come quite close to the Gothic in visual numbers where inanimate objects come to life. A number of familiar Gothic tropes and images appear in these trick films, so called because they rely on optical illusions and cinematic effects such as strop-track motion, rather than on narrative development. These include lightning storms, monsters in moving portraits, disappearing chairs, floating cutlery, Satanic magic shows and even a sheeted ghost. They also feature less conventional images, such as a house turning into a crazed face with rolling eyes, in the case of The Haunted House. Chomón’s early films are interesting because, while they do not aim to scare, rather to amuse and sometimes to incite laughter, they are evidence that the visual language of the Gothic was well-known to Spanish filmmakers even before German expressionism and clear referents like Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens / Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922). De Chomón’s phantasmagorias are a product of cultural assimilation and cinematic adaptation of a literary language that was well-established by the late-nineteenth century and which found a workable model in collaborations between national and international film companies. While the Spanishness of these early films is not always evident beyond their religious iconography, they demonstrate that Spanish Gothic cinema can be traced back to the inception of Spanish cinema more generally. De Chomón’s subsequent work for

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the Barcelona-based film company he co-founded with Joan Fuster Garí, Chomón y Fuster, has sadly been lost. However, Diego López and David Pizarro (2014: 25) have suggested, basing their conclusions on contemporary reactions to films such as the El puente de la muerte / The Bridge of Death (1910), which included a vengeful spectre, that these texts would have continued the earlier fantastic trend. Later work for Ibérico Films, a Spanish branch of Pathé in Spain, led to the oneiric Souperstition andalouse /

Andalusian Superstition (1912) and its fascinating nightmare scene, where a gypsy woman appears wearing the black garments of death.3

Some Gothic elements also appeared in many of the serial films developed by Hispano Films following the international success of the French Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913–14), although we often rely on reviews for details. Only La secta de los misteriosos / The Mysterious Sect (Albert Marro, 1916) and El beso de la muerta / The Kiss of the Dead Woman (Magí Murià, 1916) have survived, and in truncated foreign editions that collapse the serials’ various episodes into feature length films. 4 These, like the
immensely popular Los misterios de Barcelona / The Mysteries of Barcelona (Albert Marro, 1916), itself an adaptation of the ‘folletín’ Barcelona y sus misterios / Barcelona and Its Mysteries (1860), by Antonio Altadill, are good examples of the type of urban Gothic that developed in literature throughout the nineteenth century, more interested in criminal underworlds and legendary jewels than in supernatural frights. 5 Although a cas-
tle appears in The Mysterious Sect and the various characters that populate the dark city’s underbelly take over from the earlier forest banditti, these titles, like those that followed—Joan María Codina’s Mefisto / Mephisto (1917), El protegido de Satán / Satan’s Protégé (1917) and Las máscaras negras / The Black Masks (1918)—are really suspense stories with some Gothic elements, rarely supernatural or paranormal in overall effect. 6 The
mid-to-late 1910s also saw the release of the first proto-horrific films (Ruiz

2004: 208) with Gothic settings, tropes or characters. To the evocatively titled El fantasma del castillo / The Castle Phantom (Julio Rosset, 1916) and El espectro del castillo / The Castle Spectre (Aurelio Sidney, 1920), one can add Los llanos / The Plains (Bartolomá Serrador, 1919), Las tres cruces / The Three Crosses (Martínez Camba, 1921), Fue una pesadilla /

It Was a Nightmare (Miguel Ballesteros Pérez, 1925)—which manages to fit ghosts, a life burial and gypsy curses in its short running time—and, above all, El otro / The Other (Joan María Codina and Eduardo Zamacois, 1919). Based on the novel of 1910 by Eduardo Zamacois, it may well be the first Spanish attempt to make a serious ghost horror film.

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Gothic films also began to be influenced by foreign cinema movements.

The impact of German expressionism can be felt in La bruja / The Witch (Maximiliano Thous Orts, 1923) and La barraca de los monstruos / The Monster Shack (Jaque Catelain, 1924), which share the visual excess, suggestive use of chiaroscuro and exaggerated acting of films like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari / The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920). In fact, The Monster Shack predates Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) in its thematic narrative focus on the tragic story of a couple working for a traveling circus show. Universal horror would also be responsible for a number of national adaptations. Its influence manifested in truly deconstructive parodies like Eduardo García Maroto’s Una de miedo / A Horror Film (1935). Its comic off-camera voice narration warns against, and mocks, generic motifs (a stormy night, ‘a mysterious house’). In some places, it goes as far as to explain how certain cinematic effects are achieved, like

‘the beautiful and mysterious moment in which the candle the protagonist is holding is blown out for no reason’. The film’s irreverent abuse of horrific tropes (references to vampire bats, the lugubrious monastic setting and, in the words of the narrator, a ‘100% national Boris Karloff’

villain who looks like Nosferatu, but only lives on coffee and toast) shows an acquaintance with Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). This intertextuality, which ridicules Gothic formulae, would be further explored in García Maroto’s second parody, Una de monstruos / A Monster Film, one of the three short films that make up Tres eran tres / Three Were Three (1954). A more obvious reworking of Frankenstein, albeit one in which the monster is the hero and as soul-ful as ‘the sisters of mercy’, perhaps because his maker used the ‘remains of housemaids in the mix’, A Monster Film acknowledges its intellectual debt through a framing narrative in which a jury judges those involved in the film for having plagiarised the work of an international company.

Cousin Mariano (Antonio Ozores), the murderer in the Gothic castle of the horror segment in Jess Franco’s first film, Tenemos 18 años / We Are 18 Years Old (1959), shows a direct debt to Dracula, as well as to other key Gothic films like The Phantom of the Opera (Lon Chaney et al., 1925) or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931). However, the strong influence of Universal Horror on Spanish Gothic cinema did not manifest in straightforward horror films at the time, and would have to wait until the late 1960s.

Although the 1930s were not particularly fruitful for the Spanish Gothic, the 1940s and 1950s saw a flurry of activity that depended, with

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the exceptions of the romance beyond the grave of Noche fantástica /

Fantastic Night (Luis Marguina, 1943), the folkloric hellish hallucination sequences of Embrujo / Bewitchment (Carlos Serrano de Osma, 1948) and the genuinely creepy ‘feria’ (funfair) scene of El huésped de las tinieblas / The Guest of Darkness (Antonio del Amo, 1948), on adaptations of Spanish writings. 7 One of the most accomplished, the aforementioned The House of Rain, was based on Wenceslao’s Fernández Flórez’s novel of 1925 (discussed in Chap. 6). Although the film tones down the original’s transgressive elements, it manages to convey a cloying atmosphere through a great use of chiaroscuro and setting (ruined abbeys, a crumbling house that is slowly flooding). It is also one of the two most significant examples of the Female Gothic in Spanish cinema, taking its cues from the successful hybrid of romance, suspense and mild terror that is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The other key text is the adaptation of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón short story of 1853, El clavo / The Nail (Rafael Gil, 1944), which chronicles the sad story of Blanca (Amparo Rivelles), forced to kill the despicable man she was made to marry. The title of the story references the long nail with which she murders him, and which incriminates her years later, when the victim’s skull is discovered by cemetery workers. Shot, like The House of Rain, in black and white, the film is not as interested in creating a claustrophobic mood as it is in exploring the tortu-ous relationship between Blanca and her new lover, Javier (Rafael Durán), who, in an ill-fated turn of events, becomes responsible for conducting her trial. Other adaptations of literary texts included the dark comedies Eloísa está debajo de un almendro / Eloisa Lies Beneath an Almond Tree (Rafael Gil, 1943), also with a strong female presence, Las cinco advertencias de Satanás / Satan’s Five Warnings (Julián Soler, 1945) and Los habitantes de la casa deshabitada / The Inhabitants of the Uninhabited House (Gonzalo Delgrás, 1946), all from plays by Enrique Garciel Poncela; and two films by the director Carlos Serrano de Osma, Abel Sánchez (1946), based on the psychological novel by Miguel de Unamuno, and La sirena negra /

The Black Siren (1947), based on the novel by Emilia Pardo Bazán. The latter tells the story of a man haunted by the ghost of a woman who looks like his first wife and could be her reincarnation.

But without a doubt the most interesting early adaptation of a Spanish Gothic text, as well as the most accomplished pre-1960s Gothic film, is Edgar Neville’s La torre de los siete jorobados / The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks (1944), based on the 1920 novel by Emilio Carrère (discussed in Chap. 6 of this book). Although the material was toned down—the

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curse disappears, as do the references to freemasonry—further changes were made necessary by explicit order of the Junta Superior de Censura Cinematográfica (Superior Board of Cinematic Censorship), who found the supernatural elements of the film problematic. 8 The story would thus have to be framed as a dream, something to which Neville only conceded reluctantly in his letters to Fraguas, the censor, as he felt it would dispel the overall effect of the film. 9 Still, the story’s Gothic heart remained. The iconic ghost with an eyepatch and a top hat who asks Basilio (Antonio Casal) to protect his daughter from the hunchbacks is one of the most intriguing images of early Spanish Gothic cinema. The constant resorting to mirrors and mirroring betrays a preoccupation with doubling that also manifests at the geographical level (as explored in Chap. 6). Finally, the secret underground city, hosting a number of counterfeiting hunchbacks who have taken over from the Jewish community, exhibits the best use of expressionist scenery in Spanish cinema. Particularly memorable is the gigantic winding staircase scene, which includes a high angle shot focusing on the immense proportions of seemingly endless curving steps.

Carrère had already warned in 1935 that, should his novel ever be adapted to cinema, the result would probably be ‘the first horror film, the first mystery film […] to be made in Spain’ (Carrère, quoted in Santugini

1935). Although nowhere near close to the violent and titillating horror that would govern the industry only a few decades later, Neville’s film still stands as a noteworthy attempt, somewhat stifled by censorship, to build up an atmosphere of unease through reliance on Gothic settings and tropes. Its release among a filmic context of post-war patriotic and folkloric productions, such as Raza / Race (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941), ¡A mí la Legión! / Follow the Legion! (Juan de Orduña, 1942), Eugenia de Montijo / Eugenia of Montijo (José López Rubio, 1944) or Lola Montes (Antonio Román, 1944), which homogenised nationality and Spain’s past, makes Neville’s masterpiece particularly valuable. The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks is atypical, ground-breaking and portrays a divided, crumbling Madrid that metaphorically recorded the complex and conflicted state of the country.

The Beginnings of goThic horror
and The exploiTaTive exTension of glocal MyThs

As I have shown, there are clear Spanish Gothic predecessors in the history of this country’s cinema. 10 However, if the Gothic manifested here and there in the early half of the century, Spain would only see the first

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example of a full-blown national horror film in 1962, when Jess Franco’s Gritos en la noche / The Awful Dr. Orloff was released. 11 Although an iso-
lated example at the time—Enrique López Eguiluz’s La marca del hombre lobo / Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1968) and Narciso Ibánez Serrador’s The House that Screamed would only appear in 1968 and 1969, respectively—its plastic surgery experiments, themselves borrowing heavily from Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage / Eyes without a Face (1960), would influence further Spanish films such as La cara del terror / Face of Terror (Isidoro M. Ferry and William J. Hole Jr., 1962) and led to the many sequels in the Orloff series. 12 Changes in cinema regulations after the arrival of José María Escudero as Undersecretary of Cinema in 1962 and the economic failure of the Nuevo Cine Español (New Spanish Cinema), brought about by a costly production system and by the negative impact of television, led to a crisis in national filmmaking and to the survival of cost-effective genres, such as comedy (for the local market) and horror (for local and international audiences). 13 Given that, since the 1950s, double versions of films became
the norm, with the tamer, censored versions aimed at the Spanish market and the more explicit ones intended for the rest of the world (especially America), money was easy to recoup. Spanish horror was not completely stifled by censorship, but rather contributed to an opening up of what was acceptable on cinema screens. As Lázaro- Reboll (2012: 20) explains:

[T]he limits put on sexual and violent images had to adjust constantly to more ‘liberal’ attitudes to sex across the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s and, above all, to the economic demands of the market. In the context of the later part of the Francoist regime, the realities of dictatorship—
political repression, strict control of sexuality through Catholic morality, strict control of cultural production through censorship—ran parallel to an intense process of socio-economic transformation, facilitated by tourism revenue, foreign investment and the influence of those Spanish emigrants who had witnessed change abroad, that begins to align Spain with Western consumer society and introduces a changed set of values in moral and religious attitudes.

The cinema of Jess Franco, as well as that of other directors who tried to make a living out of horror, such as Amando de Ossorio or Carlos Aured, needs to be understood as engaging with these historical constraints. This means, among other things, accepting horror films as a survivor type of cinema, actively repressed but staying afloat thanks to its moderate success. Inevitably, a boom period followed that would gradually die out as productions became less inspired.

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I mentioned in the introduction that ‘fantaterror’ is a useful term, not because of the generic limitations it may impose, but because it points towards certain industrial, cinematographic and budgetary commonalities of the horror films made during this era.14 According to Lázaro-Reboll (2012: 53), the films were marked by ‘the intensity of their production and the time constraints imposed by demanding production schedules, the repetition of limited story plots and the interchangeable use of stock characters and devices, and the rhetorical excess and inclusion of shock elements’.

To this list I would add the unusually high number of co- productions, a testament to the need for external forms of funding (and recouping of financial investments) and the eminently transnational appeal of Spanish horror. 15 Although I do not feel the need to go into the particular socio-historical coordinates of the Spanish industry in the 1960s and 1970s in detail, as this is territory that has been well covered by others, it is important to acknowledge the exploitation credentials of Spanish horror cinema, especially after the genre took off commercially in 1968. 16 For one thing,
the form of Gothic it put forward was as liberating—the emphasis on transgressive thrills, from nudity (partial or total) to gore—as it was regressive—the objectification and sexualisation of women, the trivialisation of violence, the almost patent plagiarism of ideas and concepts. 17 This is why, in my approach to the massive body of Spanish horror films made between 1962 and the late 1970s, I focus on indicative examples that either show a continuation of universal myths as inflected by Spanish culture and cinema, or else develop new, unique figures. What interests me here is not necessarily the establishment of trends or patterns, but the hybrid nature of a cinema that was, on the one hand, eminently European (and not that different from the exploitation cycles of France and Italy), and yet, aimed to look like a foreign product (one distinctly not Spanish). The horror industry’s predilection for well-known Gothic monsters must be understood as the product of influence and of international business mandates, as well as of the intrinsic originality of screenwriters like Jacinto Molina.

It was apparently a viewing of The Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1960) that helped Franco convince his producers that making a Gothic horror film was a worthwhile venture. The end result, the French co-production The Awful Dr. Orloff, feels like a black and white Gothic film made in a foreign country. Its exoticism was foregrounded by the casting of Howard Vernon and, for example, the film’s credits, which state the script is based on a novel by one David Khune (likely a fictional alter ego of Franco), a name that does not sound Spanish, and that the film

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was directed by one ‘Jess Frank’, a stylistic rendition of the more decidedly Spanish Jesús Franco. 18 Visually and aurally, the film borrows from the British and American horror traditions. The opening is a standard monster- hiding-in-the-closet scene, and the Morpho (Ricardo Valle) character is equal parts Frankenstein monster (he has glazed eyes and is incapable of speech), Igor (he serves Orloff and has a grotesque face) and Dracula (he dons a long black cape reminiscent of the Count’s). 19 The mansion where Orloff carries out his skin-grafting experiments to repair his daughter’s fire scars is a direct throwback to the traditional Gothic castle. A scene in which Wanda (Diana Lorys), chandelier in hand, explores a dark staircase and a subterranean passage during a stormy night plays like a chapter in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The result is an update on the mad science of Frankenstein crossed with the serial killing sprees of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1884) and the real-life murders of Jack the Ripper. Orloff’s experiments before his daughter was harmed in a laboratory fire remain unclear, as do the motives for Morpho’s prior life of crime (he was a convict rescued by Orloff, who signed his fake death certificate). But these details are irrelevant, as narrative is not the source of the film’s charm. The Awful Dr. Orloff aims to chill and to make money by appealing to a visual Gothic language recognisable to the viewer. Its main selling point is the freshness of the variation on past Gothic glories that it proposes.

The film was a success, and it did much to pave the way for the development of horror in Spain. It became a stylistic and aesthetic blueprint.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, who had successfully launched himself as Spain’s first horror and suspense television auteur with his Historias para no dormir /

Stories to Keep You Awake (1966–68) throughout the 1960s, would try to tap this vein with The House that Screamed (also The Finishing School), another Gothic production with a much higher budget which subscribed perfectly to the logic of exploitation cinema.20 The film featured nudity and sexual perversion, it took place in a thoroughly Gothic setting (in this case a finishing school full with a dark attic, horrible secrets and sadistic teachers), and it featured a Psycho-style (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) murderer with mummy issues. Apart from being a really interesting experiment in what was beginning to look like a lucrative market, the film took Spanish horror’s interest in passing for an international product to new extremes.

The main cast was foreign, and the look of the film (if not the subject matter and its exploitative treatment, especially following the abandonment of the Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, in 1968) emulates

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Hammer’s period horrors. The press book for the film made this intention apparent in its blurb, which substituted the more usual plot summary with a thorough statement of aims. Although it is long, it is worth quoting in full: It is our intention that The Finishing School will be for us a stepping-stone from which we can break into the international market.

We are of the opinion, with all due respect, that the present Spanish film production considered as ‘commercial’ is created solely for the internal market, the main part of the production being concerned, for this reason, with the making of comedies in which, usually, local humour is overemphasised.

Commercially and with a view to the international market the above mentioned form of production is completely negative. Few, very few, are the films which in the entire history of the Spanish cinema have gained normal box-office takings in foreign cinemas.

It is our aim, therefore, to attempt to produce Spanish films which, always taking into account their cinematographic quality for its presentation, actor and themes, will be exportable, not in an attempt to compete but simply to figure as some more titles in the normal film programmes abroad.

The Finishing School, our first film, has been made in an attempt to combine artistic success with the commercial. We know that this is very difficult, but if we succeed we will have won the first great battle. 21

These intentions seem genuine. Spanish directors knew they simply could not compete with international products made with bigger budgets, better-known casts (although Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing would appear in some Spanish Gothic films) and well-known directors (Terence Fisher; Roy Ward Baker, from 1970 onwards). Ibáñez Serrador’s interest in popular films that would not be compromised by poor production values or a lacklustre cinematography—the reason he got ahead in Spanish television was precisely the perceived need, at the time, for Spain to gain European recognition in what was called the ‘operación premios’, or award mission (Serrats Ollé 1971: 50–5)—is laudable, even if it did not
effectively translate into The House that Screamed, which privileged shock over substance. 22

But if Orloff and The House that Screamed made it clear that Spanish horror had a future, and that it relied in its glocal (local yet global) extension of recognisable stock characters and situations somewhere between the Gothic horror film and European exploitation cinema, it was Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror that provided audiences with the most well-loved and remembered of Spanish Gothic monsters: the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky.23 Originally

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conceived as a Spanish werewolf, one José Huidobro from Asturias, Francoist censors requested that the action be relocated away from Spanish territory, where supernatural occurrences like lycanthropy could not be seen to occur. If we take into consideration that Paul Naschy, the artistic name of actor, scriptwriter and director Jacinto Molina, confessed time and again to his passion for Larry Talbot, the werewolf from Universal Horror productions, it should be easy to conclude that, despite its Spanish concessions (a marked sadistic eroticism, a cast of different nationalities, its status as a co-production), Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror was conceived, like the works of Franco and Ibáñez Serrador, as a decidedly exportable and international text. This is particularly interesting because Spain had already released a werewolf film before, the little-seen psychological thriller El bosque del lobo / The Ancines Wood (Pedro Olea, 1970), and had based its story in the autochthonous Galician myth of the ‘lobishome’ (werewolf) Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Spain’s first documented serial killer, who, in 1853, confirmed he had killed thirteen people yet claimed innocence under clinical lycanthropy. 24 Ditching the national specificity of this famous his-
torical case, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror acts as an expansion or extension of the narrative universe created by The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941) and appropriates the Dracula myth in the figure of Count Janos (Julián Ugarte). None of this stopped the film, the first one shot in 3D in Spain, from being well-received by national and international audiences. In fact, the film has been recuperated by horror critics as a true national myth.25

At the same time, it was responsible for popularising Naschy, deemed the Spanish Lon Chaney Jr for his long and metamorphic career in horror.26

The success of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror was such that it has yielded eleven sequels to date, the last one being the direct-to-video Tomb of the Werewolf (2004), still with Naschy in the same role that catapulted him to
fame.27 Particularly significant was the film’s vibrant use of Technicolor, its unrestrained Gothic credentials, especially as far as settings are concerned, and its return to the monster mash-up formula popularised by Universal in the 1940s. Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror would shape the Spanish horror cinema to come, especially Paul Naschy’s productions.28

Naschy’s borrowings from foreign myths and characters, and their conversion into what I would term glocal ones (both global in appeal, referentiality and intertextuality but made under specific national and contextual coordinates betrayed by the film’s production and final look), would continue in the equally notable and successful La noche de Walpurgis /

The Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman (León Klimovsky, 1971).29 Its

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Countess Wandesa Dárvula de Nadasdy (Patty Shepard) collapses the historical figure of Countess Bathory into the lesbian vampires of The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), itself a loose (and more explicitly lesbian) adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Other vampiric adaptations and extensions, sometimes yielding surprising results, included El conde Drácula / Count Dracula (Jess Franco, 1970), with Christopher Lee; La novia ensangrentada / The Blood Spattered Bride (Vicente Aranda, 1972), a psychedelic-erotic adaptation of Carmilla; La saga de los Drácula /

The Dracula Saga (León Klimovsky, 1973); and El gran amor del conde Drácula / Count Dracula’s Great Love (Javier Aguirre, 1973). The latter features one of the first lovelorn and sympathetic vampires, prepared to commit suicide for the sake of his beloved.

‘naTional’ MonsTers: The Blind dead and alaric de

Marnac

Malenka, la sobrina del vampiro / Fangs of the Living Dead (1969), an Anita Ekberg vehicle in consonance with other vampire films of the time, was also Amando de Ossorio’s first horror feature. Although it is traditionally Gothic in its setting and subject matter—Count Woldruk (Julián Ugarte) is a vampire consumed by the desire to turn his niece, Sylvia (Ekberg), into a child of the night—it also makes use of other Gothic tropes less common to fantaterror, like the family curse or physical similarities within the matrilineal line. 30 Although clunky in its plot, it kick-
started de Ossorio’s career in low-budget horror films, which led very quickly to the conception of the most interesting and nationally-specific of the Gothic myths developed in the 1970s: the blind Knights Templar.

Making their debut in La noche del terror ciego / Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) and reappearing in the three other films (parallel films, more than sequels) that make up the Blind Dead quartet, they represent one of the two most original monsters to come out of Spain and to have a following outside the country. 31 Although they may be seen to borrow from zombie films, it is important to note that the Blind Dead have very little in common with the living corpses of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) beyond their bite: they are blind, for one thing, and the result of a curse (and hence closer to the Haitian zombie). They move slowly, but not because they shuffle around aimlessly; they, in fact, can travel by ghostly horse. More significantly, they do not kill out of hunger for brains, but out of some instinct for revenge engendered by the

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tortures to which they were once subjected, and which involved having their eyes pecked out by birds. This means that, while the blind dead thematically navigate ground familiar from zombie and mummy films, their background story is new and based on the real-life medieval order charged with witchcraft and heresy. 32

Tombs could have drawn attention to its Spanishness a lot more explicitly, had censorship allowed for this, it prefers not to. Instead, the setting is Portugal, and the names of some of the characters (Betty or Roger) are not traditionally Spanish. 33 Neither are the historical Knights Templar exclusive to Spain. Instead, the ‘miserere’ soundtrack that accompanies the actions of the dead, as well as their featureless, shrivelled faces, seems to point to an amalgamation of Christian lore and pseudo-Crusadean Gothic imagery. 34 The film clumps together traditional Gothic settings, such as
an abandoned church and town or a foggy cemetery at night, with monsters that are eminently Catholic in their background and allegiances (their practices are described as Satanic, and the Knights were excommunicated by the Pope, as we learn from Professor Candal [José Thelman]). In many respects, Tombs is a perfect example of fantaterror. First, it combines scenes of horror—an especially eerie and claustrophobic chase sequence inside a ruined monastery—with openly titillating and licentious ones—a gra-tuitous lesbian flashback. Second, it was made on a very small budget.

Third, it was a co-production with Portugal. And fourth, it was marketed and sold to international markets as well as national ones.35 But at the same time, there is something patently different about the Blind Dead that makes them glocal and exportable. Their Gothic indexicality is defin-able through international approximates, the zombie or the mummy. This is aided by the fact that knowledge of the specific history of the Knights Templar is not necessary to understand the events, as the basic traits of the monsters are discussed within the narrative space of the film. The result is the closest thing to a genuinely original Gothic text Spanish cinema produced during its boom phase.

The other significant film, Latidos de pánico / Panic Heartbeats (Jacinto Molina), comes at the end of the fantaterror cycle, in 1983, although its villain, Alaric de Marnac, was conceived in El espanto surge de la tumba /

Horror Rises from the Tomb (Carlos Aured, 1973) and reappeared in El mariscal del infierno / Devil’s Possessed (León Klimovsky, 1974). 36 Of less consequence, and definitely less popular than the Blind Dead, de Marnac is nevertheless a thoroughly Gothic monster that, like de Ossorio’s undead legion, is decidedly original; in fact, screenwriter Naschy (1997: 104)

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considered him his most ‘totemic’ creation. 37 Apparently moulded on the real life fifteenth-century knight Gilles de Rais, a lord from Brittany who was eventually convicted for the murder of children, de Marnac would be given a colourful past involving alchemical experiments, virginal sacrifices in search of the philosopher’s stone and the obligatory torture dungeon in Devil’s Possessed. 38 In the first of the films, de Marnac and his lover, Mabille (Helga Liné), are executed in the fifteenth century for their crimes, which include black magic and cannibalism, but not before they have had a chance to curse the people who betrayed them. Back in the present, the descendants of the betrayers—one of them was de Marnac’s own brother, so the curse runs in the family—try to avenge their ancestors, with disastrous consequences. The couple are revived and wreak havoc, gorging on the blood-filled hearts of those who dare stand in their way. This story thus reimagines the Gothic curse, involving the sins of parents being visited upon their children, already present in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).

Panic Heartbeats returns to the de Marnac mythology one last time and manages to produce the most overtly Gothic film of the trilogy and, I would go as far as to suggest, of any other fantaterror title. Its opening sequence, which boasts a truly mood-enhancing and colourful blue cinematography, presents a damsel in distress running (naked, in true exploitation style) through a forest during a full-moon. The persecutor, a knight in full armour (Paul Naschy), yielding a flail, ends up murdering her. The film then jumps five hundred years into the future to introduce its protagonist, architect Paul (also played by Naschy in an interesting example of filmic doubling), who finds himself forced to escape to a quiet mountainous country house in Péruse in a bid to help his ailing wife (Lola Gaos) recuperate from life-threatening heart problems. As is expediently narrated, the mansion belongs to the de Marnacs, of which Paul is a descendant, and is the last vestige of the ‘family’s past glory’.39

Inside the house, which boasts all manner of decorations connected to a chivalric past, from an armour to weapons and shields, the cleaning maids discuss the de Marnac legend. 500 years ago, de Marnac began his career in crime by killing three of his five sons, whom he suspected were bastards.

After delving in witchcraft and Satanism, he became obsessed with the philosopher’s stone and lost his mind, torturing innocents and drinking their blood. Impaled on a spear by his brother, he was excommunicated and died in sin. The film proceeds to chart the manifestation of the cen-tennial curse, in which de Marnac comes back from the dead to murder his descendants’ wives.

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The film is not simply Gothic in its rethinking of the curse motif, its vengeful ghost in suited armour or its setting. The narrative itself aligns the film with the Female Gothic, especially the Bluebeard myth to which it is connected. 40 In a key sequence, Geneviève mentions Daphne du

Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) upon hearing from Paul that Mabile (Lola Gaos) likes to tell ‘tales of terror’ and ‘ghost stories, of monsters and apparitions’, explaining that, unlike Mrs Danvers, Mabile is a good house-keeper. Paul takes the opportunity to compare Rebecca herself with Alaric, whom he introduces as a medieval warrior said to have been sighted in the house. The film’s take on the Female Gothic is interesting because, rather than rely on the trope of the villainous husband looking to benefit from a helpless, younger wife, it situates the action within the parameters of the ghost story. De Marnac is the killer who will eventually attempt to murder Geneviève, we are led to suspect. Similarly, the function of the painting, which in the Female Gothic serves to establish a connection between the heroine and either the deceased women who came before her or her ancestors (in Rebecca, but also in Dragonwyck [Joseph L. Makiewicz, 1946]

and The Two Mrs. Carrolls [Peter Godfrey, 1947]) is reversed. Here, the painting brings together the old and current male de Marnacs. But there are two further twists in this story that make the doubling significant.

The first is the revelation that Paul, who is having an affair with Julie, has been pretending that de Marnac is back from the dead (quite literally impersonating him) with the intention of provoking Geneviève’s death by heart attack. The second is that, following Geneviève’s funeral, the real de Marnac comes to life to punish the wrongful heir to the house, Julie, as she herself murders Paul in a desperate attempt to inherit his fortune. This way, Panic Heartbeats deconstructs the Female Gothic and the de Marnac character only to then recuperate and reinstate both in a full-blown supernatural denouement. Suitably, Julie is killed by de Marnac in the chateau’s chapel in a contemporary update of the film’s opening scene.

Alaric de Marnac constitutes a ‘national’ myth insofar as it was produced by the imagination of a Spanish screenwriter (Jacinto Molina), was performed by his acting alter ego (Paul Naschy) and was shot by a Spanish company and director.41 Even more so than the Blind Dead, the character of de Marnac did not derive from existing myths as much as it did from a shared Gothic language evident in recurring stock situations, characters and settings. At the same time, Alaric de Marnac is not Spanish but French, and is not based on national legends or folklore only. De Marnac’s, and more specifically Panic Heartbeats’, claim to Spanish Gothic cinema is therefore articulated by and through the development of a new glocal

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monster, capable of being exported without prior national knowledge and of fitting within the large Gothic bestiary in vogue in the 1970s.

Where other myths drew on more evident predecessors, de Marnac, like the Blind Dead, was a genuine Spanish Gothic creation that exoticised the past and foreign lands in the same way that the works of Radcliffe or Lewis once imagined a barbaric medieval continental Europe.

There is something that ties all these various different myths to the Gothic mode and to horror as a genre: their transgressive spirit. They indulge in the repressed through images of violence, gore and nudity, and in topics like prostitution, necrophilia, the occult or sacrilegious anti-Catholic acts. These were clear no-go areas during the Francoist regime, known for its active sanctioning of sexual expression, championing of Catholic religion and use of threats as coercive tools. As Lázaro Reboll and Andrew Willis (2004: 13) have rightly pointed out, it is possible to see
in horror’s spectacles of ‘sex and nudity, titillation and repression’ a clear precursor of even more liberal forms of cinema, like the ‘cine de destape’

(nudies), and as a prefiguration of the lifting of censorship laws in 1977.

I would add that the strong fascination with monsters, often tyrannically cruel and merciless, only sparingly portrayed tragically (namely, Daninsky in Naschy’s werewolf films and Dracula in Count Dracula’s Great Love), can definitely be read as fictional negotiations of the cultural and ideological oppression of fascism and dictatorship, not least because the films suffered greatly at the hands of censors.

It is, nevertheless, crucial not to ignore the exploitative nature of some of this material. A number of fantaterror films are very problematic in terms of their gender dynamics and not all of them are ideologically progressive.

And yet, there was something definitely liberating about the international language of the Gothic, and of horror, that appealed to contemporary filmmakers. As Andrew Willis (2003: 75) has argued, there is a good reason why avant-garde Spanish directors and those who had been associated with oppositional filmmaking, such as Juan Antonio Bardem, Eloy de la Iglesia, Vicente Aranda and Claudio Guerín Hill, suddenly turned to horror. Not only did this type of genre-filmmaking allow them to work outside the more state-controlled context of New Spanish Cinema, a species of national filmmaking seeking to present a liberal image of Francoist Spain, but it also offered them the possibility of ‘continu[ing] to explore contemporary social and political issues in their films’ (75). As I have been arguing throughout, the Gothic provided a fictional space away from the crude realism of a repressive government and of an archaic understanding of what Spanish culture should entail.

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It is also important to acknowledge that, despite having traced what I take to be a significant moment in Gothic production for Spanish cinema, the ascription to this filmic mode was never explicit. By this I mean that there was no such thing as a Gothic film industry, but a horror one, and one that was not always neatly demarcated from fantastic productions, or indeed, in the case of Jess Franco, from softcore films and nudies. The Gothic is very rarely mentioned as a genre category (as in Gothic horror), and yet the majority of horror productions that included supernatural elements—I am distinguishing these from ‘gialli’ like Una libélula para cada muerto / A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (León Klimovsky, 1974) or Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota / Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (Carlos Aured, 1974)—could be said to have used tropes, settings or monsters that were in direct dialogue with the British and American horror traditions, from Count Dracula and Victor Frankenstein to the Lovecraftian monsters from beyond of El jorobado de la morgue / Hunchback of the Morgue (Javier Aguirre, 1973).

The horror industry would begin to falter under the new Miró law (so called because it was implemented by Pilar Miró, the then general director of cinematography) of 1983, which implemented state protection of cinema production and a selective subvention system. 42

The number of films made annually quickly dwindled, as did the number of Gothic horror films. 43 More visceral flicks, such as Juan Piquer Simón’s Mil gritos tiene la noche / Pieces (1982) and Slugs: Muerte vis-cosa / Slugs (1988), or monster flicks such as Serpiente de mar / The Sea Serpent (Amando de Ossorio, 1984) and Leviatán / Monster Dog (Carlos Aured, 1985), which starred shock rock singer Alice Cooper, came to replace the more obviously referential and intertextual Gothic cinema of the 1970s. There were a few exceptions, most notably, Eloy de la Iglesia’s adaptation of the famous ghost novella by Henry James, Otra vuelta de tuerca / The Turn of the Screw (1985); Gonzalo Suárez’s Remando al viento / Rowing with the Wind (1988), which tells the story of Shelley and Byron’s stay at the Villa Diodatti; and Francisco Lara Polop’s El fraile / Seduction of a Priest (1990), an oft-forgotten adaptation of Mattew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Largely, however, the production coordinates changed, and interest in ‘rough and ready’

Gothics faded. 44 The new cinematographic context forced a number of the directors who had thrived during the fantaterror craze to quit the industry. Amando de Ossorio, Carlos Aured and Sebastián d’Arbó’s retirements in the 1980s mark the end of a golden era, but not the death of Spanish Gothic film.

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noTes

1. Imdb.com does indeed list the The House of Rain as a melodrama.

See
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035718/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[accessed 18 February 2016].

2. The first Spanish films shot in Spain were actually made by French directors, but the first fictional Spanish film was Fructuós Gelabert Badilla’s Riña en un café / Row at a Café (1897 or 1899).

3. A number of films are also missing from this period, the most promisingly-titled of which is La maison des revenants / The Mansion of Ghosts (Segundo de Chomón, 1912).

4. A fire in 1918 destroyed the entirety of Hispano Films’s back catalogue. Approximately 95% of all Spanish films up until 1916 are thought lost.

5. Other notable serial films with dark elements include Albert Marro’s La echadora de cartas / The Fortune-Teller (1915), Elva (1916), Alexia ó la niña del misterio / Alexia, or the Mystery Girl (1916) and El testamento de Diego Rocafort / The Testament of Diego Rocafort (1917), Domènec Ceret’s La loca del monasterio /

The Madwoman from the Monastery (1916) and La herencia del diablo / The Devil’s Legacy (1917), as well as El doctor Rojo / The Red Doctor (Ramón Caralt, 1916) and El vindicador/ Vindicator (Magí Murià, 1917).

6. Doctor Bernard in The Red Doctor is invisible, a hypnotist and medium appears in Alexia, and a spiritualist session in The Black Masks. I have not been able to view Mephisto or Satan’s Protégé (as far as I can see, no prints exist), but Pulido (2012: 24) lists them as copycats of similar serials in American and France.

7. Although The Guest of Darkness is not a literary adaptation, it does adapt, roughly, the life of Bécquer.

8. Following the Spanish Civil War, the Junta Superior was created in 1938 to regulate filmmaking in Spain. By 1940, it was fully capable of censoring films and requesting changes to scripts for future ones.

9. These letters have been reproduced in the 186–page booklet accompanying the special edition of The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, released by Versus Entertainment in 2012.

10. I have deliberately left out El cebo / It Happened in Broad Daylight (Ladislao Vajda, 1958), often included in film handbooks as a horror film. To my mind, this film sits more comfortably within the psychological thriller tradition of Fritz Lang’s M (1931).

FROM SEGUNDO DE CHOMÓN TO THE RISE AND FALL OF ‘FANTA TERROR’ 203

11. It is important to note, however, that the original press book, consulted in the Filmoteca Española, does not use the words horror in its pitch for the film. The words ‘mysterious’, ‘suspenseful’ and

‘bloodcurdling’ (‘escalofriante’) are used instead. In any case, since the press book is signed by Delta films, the company, it is hard to know to what extent it represents directorial intent.

12. Especially Los ojos siniestros del doctor Orloff / The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff (Jess Franco, 1973) and Faceless (Jess Franco, 1987).

13. See Lázaro-Reboll (2012: 18–20).

14. For a detailed consideration of the industrial context of fantaterror,
see Aguilar (2002). For a discussion of debates around the usefulness of the term, see Pulido (2012: 41–2).

15. It is worth noting that co-productions were predominant at the time. Almost half of all Spanish films in 1970 were co-productions.

The percentage goes down to a third in 1971.

16. For some, this starts in 1965. See Matellano (2011: 19–31, 123–69). For work on this topic written in English, see Tohill and Tombs (1995: 63–9); Shipka (2011: 171–260).

17. A notable anecdote that reflects the money-spinning nature of Spanish Horror concerns the oft-mentioned case of Exorcismo /

Exorcism (Juan Bosch, 1975). The film, made hot on the heels of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), ended up being screened in Spain before the original due to the censoring of certain scenes.

18. Richard Valley is an English translation of Ricardo Valle, the real name of the actor, and Diana Lorys was the international artistic name of Ana María Cazorla Vega.

19. I say aurally because the film includes screams and prepares viewers for shock moments. However, the score is made up of a synco-pated, percussive, jazzy melange atypical of the more heavy-
handed, horn-led traditional orchestral scores of Hammer Horror.

20. It is worth noting that only a small number of episodes in Ibáñez Serrador’s Stories to Keep You Awake could comfortably be called

‘horror’, and some of the most notable are adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. About two-thirds of the episodes are thrillers or science fiction. The director himself seemed to acknowledge, in places, his reluctant embrace of the genre.

21. Emphasis added. This is not my translation, as the text appears, tellingly, in both Spanish and English in the press book consulted (published in 1969).

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22. Its twist ending, thoroughly chilling, feels somewhat forced, and adds little meaning to the events.

23. I must note the poor retitling of the American version of the film, which does not reflect the subject matter as well as its direct translation, Mark of the Werewolf. The UK version, Hell’s Creatures, is no better. For more on my use of the term ‘glocal’, see the conclusion to this book.

24. The first werewolf in Spanish cinema is Wolf (Goyo Lebrero), a secondary character in Un vampiro para dos / A Vampire for Two (Pedro Lagaza, 1965). For more on Spanish werewolves, see

Gómez Rivero (2010: 140–8). For more on Romasanta’s case, see Domínguez González (2012).

25. Gómez Rivero (2010: 97) goes as far as to call Daninsky an ‘eter-
nal myth’.

26. Naschy himself was deemed an ‘Iberian legend’ only 6 years after the release of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (Porto and Falquina

1974: 111).

27. Not surprisingly, his memoirs (Naschy 1997) would acknowledge this debt, in their title as well as their contents.

28. Los monstruos del terror / Assignment Terror (Hugo Fregonese, Eberhard Meichsner and Tulio Demicheli, 1970) would attempt
to outdo Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror in a no-holds-barred mega mash-up that included a Frankenstein monster, a Count Dracula, a mummy and a werewolf.

29. For Fernando Alonso Barahona, this film is even more important than Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror because it had a bigger ‘socio-
logical impact’ (2000: 156).

30. I say ‘appears to be’ because the film has two endings, a rushed one in which the events turn out to be a hoax, and an alternative one filmed later, in which Count Woldruk turns out to be a real
vampire.

31. The other films that make up the quartet, all directed by de Ossorio, are El ataque de los muertos sin ojos / Return of the Evil Dead (1973), El buque maldito / The Ghost Galleon (1974) and La noche de las gaviotas / Night of the Seagulls (1975). There are currently three international DVD box sets collecting the four films: the ones released by Anchor Bay and Wea-Des Moines Video in 2005, and the one released by Blue Underground in 2014. By contrast, the films have not been collected in a DVD release for the Spanish

FROM SEGUNDO DE CHOMÓN TO THE RISE AND FALL OF ‘FANTA TERROR’ 205
market, and Tombs is only available through a Divisa Red, S.A.U.

release from 2008.

32. In fact, the novelty of the myth led to some initial scepticism about the viability of Tombs, as Rafa Calvo, co-author of Ossorio’s biog-raphy, explains in an interview for the documentary Zarpazos! Un viaje por el Spanish Horror / Claws! A Journey through Spanish Horror (Víctor Matellano, 2014).

33. De Ossorio felt obliged to shoot in Portugal to avoid censorship, although his initial idea was to film in Galicia. Similarly, the Egyptian cross in the cemetery looked too much like that of the Order of Calatrava, so it had to be changed (Gómez Rivero 2009: 268).

34. The Knights were also allegedly inspired by the Gothic tales of Bécquer, especially El miserere / The Miserere (1862). See Gómez Rivero (2009: 268); Pulido (2012: 126).

35. A new version was recut for the American market to capitalise on the success of Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), with additional location shots. The film was also retitled Revenge from Planet Ape. This footage is included in the Blue Underground release of the Blind Dead quartet.

36. It is worth noting that in Devil’s Possessed, which tells the story of the knight, de Marnac appears as Baron Gilles de Lancré. However, the character appears to be exactly the same one Naschy played in Horror Rises from the Tomb.

37. Paul Naschy’s, that is, Jacinto Molina’s first (and last) novel was, incidentally, called Alaric de Marnac (2009) and explored the fictionalised life of this figure.

38. According to Molina (Naschy 1997: 216), ‘Alaric’ was a nickname de Rais would use to refer to himself. Alaric I was the first King of the Visigoths (one of de Rais castles used to stand on the ruins of what once was Alaric’s fortress), and Marnac was a region where de Rais had property.

39. It is also later revealed that the house is the third to be erected on the same grounds, where once stood the castle of the de Marnacs.

40. Gilles de Rais is believed to have been the inspiration for Charles Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ fairy tale of 1697.

41. Klimovsky, director of Devil’s Possessed, was Argentinian, but settled in Spain in the 1950s. His horror work was always made within the context of the Spanish industry.

42. See Pavlović et al. (2009: 150–1); Triana-Toribio (2003: 108–19).

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43. There are other industrial reasons for this decline in the production of horror films. Since ‘cines de barrio’ (local cinemas) were where these films would be predominantly screened, their systemic clo-sure from the mid-1970s onwards, due to the consolidation of television as the main medium of entertainment and to the increased mobility to bigger city cinemas, meant that the number of viewers descended. See Pulido (2012: 78, 92).

44. For a more detailed exploration of fantastic and horror cinema
during this period, see Aguilar (2005).

references

Aguilar, Carlos. 2002. Fantaespaña: Orrore e fantascienza nel cinema spagnolo. Un secolo di delirio filmico (Torino: Lindau).

———. 2005. ‘Fantástico, español, moderno: Un cine a caballo entre dos siglos’, in Cine fantástico y de terror español, 1984–2004, ed. by Carlos Aguilar (San Sebastián: Donostia Kultura), 11–42.

Barahona, Fernando Alonso. 2000. ‘A modo de historia fílmica nacional: El cine fantástico y de terror en España’, in Las tres caras del terror: Un siglo de cine fantaterrorífico español. Paul Naschy, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Jesús Franco, ed.

by Luis Alberto de Cuenca et al. (Madrid: Alberto Santos), 120–267.

Domínguez González, José. 2012. Romasanta, historia y leyenda: Nuevos mitos, nuevos misterios (Ourense: Auria).

Gómez Rivero, Ángel. 2009. Cine zombi (Madrid: Calamar Ediciones).

———. 2010. Cuando llora el lobo: Crónica de los licántropos cinematográficos (Madrid: Imágica Ediciones), 140–8.

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. 2012. Spanish Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, and Andrew Willis. 2004. ‘Introduction: Film Studies, Spanish Cinema and Questions of the Popular’, in Spanish Popular Cinema, ed.

by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Andrew Willis (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1–23.

López, Diego, and David Pizarro. 2014. Silencios de pánico: Historia del cine fantástico y de terror español, 1897–2010, 2nd edn (Barcelona: Tyrannosaurus Books).

Matellano, Víctor. 2011. Spanish Exploitation: Explotación a la española (Madrid: T&B Editores).

Naschy, Paul. 1997. Memorias de un hombre lobo (Madrid: Alberto Santos).

Pavlović, Tatjana, et al. 2009. 100 Years of Spanish Cinema (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell).

Porto, Juan José, and Ángel Falquina. 1974. Cine de terror y Paul Naschy (Madrid: Editorial Madrid).

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Pulido, Javier. 2012. La década de oro del cine de terror español, 1967–1976

(Madrid: T&B Editores).

Ruiz, Luis Enrique. 2004. El cine mudo español en sus películas (Bilbao: Ediciones Mensajero).

Santugini, José. 1935. ‘Una pregunta a los novelistas: ¿Cuál de sus obras cree Vd.

más adaptable al cinematógrafo y por qué?’, Cinegramas, 5 May, 36–7.

Serrats Ollé, Jaime. 1971. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (Barcelona: Dopesa).

Shipka, Danny. 2011. Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960–1980 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland).

Tohill, Cathal, and Pete Tombs. 1995. Immoral Tales: Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956–1984 (London: Titan Books).

Triana-Toribio, Núria. 2003. Spanish National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge).

Willis, Andrew. 2003. ‘Spanish Horror and the Flight from “Art” Cinema, 1967–73’, in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, ed. by Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 71–83.

CHAPTER 9

The Post-Millennial Horror Revival:

Auteurs, Gothic (Dis)Continuities
and National History

If the Miró decree sounded a death knell for the type of independent, shoestring Gothic horror cinema that blossomed from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, a change of government in the mid-1990s would revive it. A string of corruption scandals had eroded public trust in the long-ruling labour party, the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), in power since 1981, and led to the election in 1996 of the conservative party, the PP (Partido Popular). Although there were no massive changes to filmographic policies, an infrastructure of support for new directors was created. These would come to represent a new form of commercial and popular cinema following the government’s investment in an auteur-driven model of national production. One of the results was the development of what Carlos Aguilar (2002: 87) has called ‘freak’ cinema (‘cine freak’), characterised by bigger budgets and a clear sense of generic identity that manifested at the level of acquaintance with the fantastic and with horror’s past and present. Aguilar has proposed that what distinguished this new cinematic generation was that ‘it ha[d] not known the rigours of the Francoist dictatorship and [wa]s formed not so much by a cultural specificity born out of effort, […] but by an eclecticism connected to lei-sure and consumption’ (87). These directors did not suffer from the ideological struggle against a dictatorial system and its censorship laws that defined filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, their work belied a strong influence from popular culture, from high budget commercial American cinema to advertising, video clips, rock or pornography, and

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which translated into unashamedly postmodern melanges appealing to younger audiences and successful in and outside of Spain. The standout film was Acción mutante / Mutant Action (1993), a science fiction film by Álex de la Iglesia, one of the most significant and studied directors of contemporary Spanish cinema, which contained elements from comic books, superhero films and horror.1 The financial and critical recognition it achieved was only matched by de la Iglesia’s second film, the Satanic horror parody El día de la bestia / The Day of the Beast (1995). The latter adhered to the rebellious principles of Mutant Action (as expressed by the director himself): ‘1 to avoid the Civil War and the post-war era,/2 not to adapt a prestigious novel, / 3 not to recreate childhood traumas’ (de la Iglesia, quoted in Ordóñez 1997: 100). It is noteworthy that de la Iglesia, like the other directors covered in this chapter, very rapidly gained auteur status, and has continued to work in films that feature Gothic elements and imagery, especially Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus (2010) and Las brujas de Zugarramurdi / Witching and Bitching (2013). 2

It has been argued that ‘freak’ cinema was not particularly Gothic, and could even be read as an express rejection of the Gothic fantaterror of the 1970s, but this largely depends on one’s view of what differentiates the Gothic from horror.3 The tone of these new films was noticeably more comedic and referential, and more modern monsters like the zombie and the killer alien appear in Mucha sangre / Gangsters vs. Aliens (Pepe de las Heras, 2002), Una de zombis / A Zombie Film (Miguel Ángel Lamata, 2003) and the Troma-esque Kárate a muerte en Torremolinos / Karate Fight to Death in Torremolinos (Pedro Temboury, 2003). It is nevertheless important not to dismiss the many continuities between this new tradition and what came before it. For example, Paul Naschy, who appears in Gangsters vs. Nazis, would reprise his Daninsky character for Licántropo: El asesino de la luna llena / Lycantropus: The Moonlight Murders (Francisco Rodríguez Gordillo, 1997) and the American Tomb of the Werewolf (Fred Olen Ray, 2004), and would write and direct Empusa (Jacinto Molina, 2010). If the cultural coordinates of some of these modern texts resonate much more obviously with comedy than with horror, a lot of twenty-first- century directors are well-versed in Spanish fantaterror and the history of horror.

The work of de la Iglesia made it clear that the Spanish market had changed and that there was a young audience ready to engage with high-quality national genre productions. It would, however, be the feature- length film debut of Jaume Balagueró, Los sin nombre / The Nameless (1999), an adaptation of the Ramsey Campbell novel of 1981,

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which would be responsible for opening the gates to a myriad Spanish horrors.4 The film was a surprise critical success, winning several awards in Spain, Italy, France, Brussels and America, and it became very popular with cinemagoers in and outside Spain. Although Memorias del ángel caído /

Memoirs of the Fallen Angel (David Alfonso and Fernando Cámara, 1997) had already delved in specifically religious Gothic imagery, The Nameless linked faith with human depravity in its exploration of a cult interested in, as one of the characters puts it, ‘mutilation, torture, [and] the practice of straightforward horror as a way to purification. The sacrament of atrocity and fear’. Choosing to use a muted colour palette reminiscent of Se7en (David Fincher, 1997), and to exploit suspense rather than horror, The Nameless set the scene for a number of dark thrillers—among which Nadie conoce a nadie / Nobody Knows Anybody (Mateo Gil, 1999) and Nos miran / They’re Watching Us (Norberto López, 2002)—and also for another adaptation of a Campbell novel, this time Pact of the Fathers, published in 2001, as El segundo nombre / Second Name (Paco Plaza, 2002).

The film, based on the Abrahamites’ alleged sacrifices of their firstborns, did not garner the attention The Nameless did, even though it had similar thematic preoccupations and was produced by the same company, Filmax International. Balagueró and Plaza’s joint work for them would, eventually, end in two of the most popular Spanish horror films ever made,

[•REC] (Balagueró and Plaza, 2007) and its sequel, [•REC]2 (Balagueró and Plaza, 2009), where the rabid creatures of the first film are given a possession diagnosis. The Catholic backdrop, hinting at the exorcist films in vogue after The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005) and Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2009), was, in these films, combined very successfully with other prominent trends in twenty-first-century horror: the zombie film and found footage. 5

Filmax International, especially producer Julio Fernández, were quick on the uptake and, eager to capitalise on the success of The Nameless, quickly founded the short-lived Fantastic Factory label (2001–06) with the help of renowned director and producer Brian Yuzna. The label aimed to create and promote low-budget genre films (horror, but also fantastic films) for an international market, and, correspondingly, the nine films produced by Fantastic Factory were shot in English using both Spanish and international casts. 6 Their transnational aspects are remarkable, and indeed force us to consider what parameters are followed in determining a film’s nationality. Only three of the films were directed by Spaniards (Balagueró, Plaza and Luis de la Madrid) and, in the case of Beyond Re-Animator

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(Brian Yuzna, 2003), the film was much more readily identifiable as a third instalment in the Re-Animator series than as a Spanish product, despite the casting of national glories Santiago Segura and Elsa Pataky. Even the most interesting, in Gothic terms, of the Fantastic Factory’s offspring, Dagon (2001), was technically not all that Spanish. An adaptation of H. P.

Lovecraft’s ‘Dagon’ (1919) and ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ (1936) that relocated events to Galicia—to the fictional ‘Imboca’, which sounds like a literal translation of Innsmouth and an echo of the word ‘invo-car’ (to invoke)—it included a mostly Spanish cast, but was directed by an American, Scott Gordon, and was scripted by the equally American Dennis Paoli. Since both men had already worked on the Yuzna-produced Re-Animator (Scott Gordon, 1985) and From Beyond (Scott Gordon, 1986), it could be argued that the Fantastic Factory ended up becoming a vehicle for Yuzna’s projects instead of a label with a strong national flavour.

Although the quality of the films was variable— Arachnid (Jack Sholder, 2001), Rottweiler (Brian Yuzna, 2004) and Beneath Still Waters (Brian Yuzna, 2006) were badly received—the Gothic films produced were noteworthy and, in the case of Balagueró’s Darkness (2002), it constituted an even bigger box office hit than the director’s previous effort. Darkness’s was an interesting take on the fear of shadows exploited by Los otros /

The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), but also returned to Balagueró’s interest in cults and rituals. Romasanta gave the werewolf myth a new psychological spin only previously seen in El bosque del lobo / The Ancines Woods (Pedro Olea, 1970). Finally, Dagon was one of the most competent adaptations of Lovecraft of the 2000s.

But if Balagueró started making Gothic horror a respectable and potentially profitable business that did not have to comply with, or surrender to, the constraints of minimal budgets and investments, the most foundational director of contemporary Spanish Gothic film, Alejandro Amenábar, would reinstate this point once and for all. His The Others became the most successful film, not just of Spanish horror, but of Spanish film history (Sala 2010a: 250–1). Amenábar’s early films had already showcased a blossoming sensibility invested in horror and the fantastic— Tesis / Thesis (1996) was a film about a snuff ring in a Spanish university, a subject very rarely explored by Spanish filmmakers, and the quirky science fiction art-house Abre los ojos / Open Your Eyes (1997) became so well-known that it received an American remake as Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001) only a few years later—yet no-one could have predicted the success of The Others, or the influence it would have on Spanish cinema. A thoroughly

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Gothic masterpiece reminiscent of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), but with hints at more modern films like The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) in its twist ending, The Others relied strongly on the taut performances of Nicole Kidman, who plays Grace Stewart, a devout Catholic mother, and Alakina Mann and James Bentley as her two photo-sensitive children. Atmospherically, it is a film defined by claustrophobic spaces, foggy landscapes and faintly-lit surfaces, and it reprises, especially in the poster and promotional materials, the candelabrum-holding Gothic heroine motif of Ann Radcliffe’s fiction. Grace’s episode of madness following her increasing isolation on the island of Jersey after World War II lies at the heart of the film’s structure. The revelation that the haunted are actually, and unawares, the haunters, as Grace and the children discover they are spirits reluctant to leave the house in which they died, leads to a powerful rewriting of the ghost story that connects the afterlife with psychoses and trauma repression. The process of memory recuperation, via external séance, leads to one of the most interesting role reversals of any Gothic text. The film’s technical virtuosity, which led to a number of publications on its making and artistry even before its release, established a turning point in the Spanish Gothic. 7

Although Amenábar has not gone on to mine this mode outside of the Satanic rites and human sacrifices of Regression (2015), The Others did much to change the popular perception of Gothic film as a type of cinema that could be seen not just as a worthwhile exercise, but which even promised, as Ángel Sala (2010a: 245) suggests, to become ‘the great (commercial and artistic) hope for [Spanish] cinema’. Most importantly, it legitimised the role of the subtle, sober, expensive Gothic product over the explicit, low-budget exploitation horror of Spain’s cinematic past. The key for this new Gothic was to scare and shock, to hint and only rarely show, rather than to disgust or horrify in the strict sense of the word. The Gothic offered an escape route for genre films that did not want to be perceived as such. This commercial strategy had the added benefit of making the cinematic experience appealing to viewers outside of genre fandom, thus maximising audience potential. The Others was scary, but was also largely driven by mystery and suspense. The shock scenes were few and calculated, and the horror was largely psychological.

Some of the most notable tropes and cinematographic choices that made The Others exportable would be adopted by other films. These included the focus on children as the catalyst of fear, as well as their connection to trauma or repressed memories; the emphasis on setting, especially haunt-

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ing evocations through deserted or wild landscapes; the preference for films that looked international and had high production values; twist endings; and the perennial return of the ghost. Interestingly, another of the big successes of noughties’ Gothic cinema belies the influence of this new international formula. Juan Antonio Bayona’s El orfanato / The Orphanage (2007), which catapulted its director’s career internationally, could be considered a very competent variation on a theme. Focusing, in this case, on the story of Laura (Belén Rueda), who returns to the orphanage where she was raised with the intention of building an asylum for disabled children, the film is concerned with the ghost of Tomás (Óscar Casas), a boy who wears a sack mask with a face drawn onto it. The only person able to see Tomás is Laura’s own HIV-positive son, Simón (Roger Príncep), who, we eventually find out, is accidentally locked inside a secret underground room. As the truth emerges, so does the corporeality of the orphanage’s other ghostly inhabitants who, in the film’s scariest scene, play a game of ‘peek behind the curtain’ with Laura before they reveal the location of Simón’s corpse.

The Orphanage riffs off The Others in many respects, especially in the potential reading of events as Laura’s incapacity to accept Simón’s condition and her repressed desire for the boy’s death. The uplifting ending, depicting the re-encounter of Laura with Simón after she commits suicide, seems to counteract the powerful and nihilistic tone of the rest of the film, but, like The Others, The Orphanage is ultimately interested in human beings’ (in)capacity to deal with the loss of our loved ones. The film also borrows aesthetically and narratively from Amenábar’s masterpiece. For example, the use of shadows, rich and subtle textures, as well as careful lighting and its preference for a collection of well- orchestrated shock numbers (the bathroom scene where Laura runs away from Tomás, which gains a different meaning later in the story) are combined with more melodramatic scenes foregrounding grief. The film was widely screened in America after Picturehouse acquired the distribution rights, and did very well there, thanks, to some extent, to Guillermo del Toro’s patronage. Like The Others, The Orphanage paved the way for more creepy children Gothics: Eskalofrío / Shiver (Isidro Ortiz, 2008); Hierro (Gabe Ibáñez, 2009), perhaps the most visually arresting of them; No-Do /

The Haunting (Ekio Quiroga, 2009); Insensibles / Painless (Juan Carlos Medina, 2012); Mama (2013), a Spanish film directed by the Argentinian Andrés Muschietti; Purgatorio / Purgatory (Pau Teixidor, 2014); and Aguas rojas / Out of the Dark (Lluís Quílez, 2015), a co-production with Colombia.

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A Spectre IS HAuntIng SpAIn: guIllermo del toro’S
gotHIc treAtmentS of tHe SpAnISH cIvIl WAr

The Others and The Orphanage centred on the trials and tribulations of childhood, a well-established tradition in Spanish cinema that goes back to films like Cría Cuervos / Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976) and, especially, the atmospheric El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973), which has been read as a strongly coded exploration of the monstrous nature of the Francoist regime in its intertextual references to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). 8 In these films, children are not just the source of fear, but of pity. Due to their upbringing during troubled times and in difficult families, they undergo challenging experiences that force them to come of age before they have even hit puberty.

The struggles of main characters with figures of authority, whether they be paternal or social, has naturally made the films ripe material for political-allegorical readings. The wildly, sometimes idealistic, imaginative reveries of the young (generally female) children are pitted against an asphyxiating, cold and desensitised adult world where power is exerted without taking into account the possible human toll or the health of the younger
generations.9 Obsessions with the oppressive presence of religion in everyday life, connected to Catholic fanaticism, have also been read as metaphorical engagements with the relationship between the state and the church, as the latter was essential to Franco’s dictatorship. 10 Guillermo del Toro’s own experiments in the Gothic recuperate this tradition as filtered through The Others. His El espinazo del diablo / The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and El laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) focus on children who are confronted with horrific supernatural experiences, but vouch for a subtler approach that privileges atmospheric build-up. Importantly, del Toro’s films are not necessarily susceptible to the metaphorical readings of Erice and Saura, as they are specifically about the Spanish Civil War. Their narratives are situated either during the end of the war ( Devil’s Backbone) or in the immediate post-war period ( Pan’s Labyrinth), so that the Gothic imagery and tropes are directly linked to the forces of oppression of Franco’s supporters. Even The Devil’s Backbone, which does not allude to the war as often as Pan’s Labyrinth, is visually haunted by its ghost and by the metonymic image of an unexploded, latent bomb.

Del Toro’s work in these two films marries the trendiness of contemporary ‘sober Gothic’ after The Others with what Jo Labanyi (2007: 95)

has called the ‘memory boom’ of the late 1990s, a resurgence of testimonies and fictional engagements with the Spanish Civil War that led to

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popular films like Libertarias / Libertarians (Vicente Aranda, 1996), La lengua de las mariposas / Butterfly’s Tongue (José Luis Cuerda, 1999), El lápiz del carpintero / The Carpenter’s Pencil (Antón Reixa, 2003) and Soldados de Salamina / Soldiers of Salamina (David Cerca, 2003), the last three based on contemporary literary works by Manuel Rivas and Javier Cercas. This literary and cinematic interest was accompanied, in social terms, by the creation of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, or ARMH (Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory), and the passing of the Historical Memory Law in 2007, which recognised the victims of the war and officially condemned the Francoist Regime. Del Toro’s recuperation, and in Pan’s Labyrinth part rewrite, of the Spanish past partakes of this social acknowledgement of the ills of the conflict, and is interested in emphasising the cost of the war on civilians, the negotiation of lived trauma and the process of resistance, whether personal or collective. Taken together, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth offer a good example of the type of heavily Gothic text that may be imbued with a sense of specific national identity.

As I will show later, the nature of the films as co-productions directed by a Mexican who had also previously worked within the Hollywood system must not be ignored. Yet, both films have come to stand for the most significant of Spanish engagements with war through the Gothic mode, and they therefore need to be considered under this lens in the first instance.

The Devil’s Backbone opens with a montage of images (a falling bomb and a wounded child who will turn up to be Santi [Andreas Muñoz], the revenant) accompanied by a voice-over establishing the connection between spectrality and the import of the past. The narrator asks and responds: ‘[w]hat is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? […] [P]erhaps something dead which still seems to be alive.

An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber’. The story, set in an orphanage in a remote and arid part of Spain, plays out, at a microscopic level, the horrors of the war. Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) is a cruel and merciless groundskeeper, a fascist figure not unlike Republican hunter Vidal (Sergi López), who will eventually be drowned by the ghost of the boy he shot. The ghostly child is, as Dolores Tierney (2014: 170) has suggested, very different from the ghost we have grown accustomed to from Hollywood, as Santi is introduced early on and not in exclusively horrific terms. The use of an ochre palette throughout the film resonates with the aforementioned prologue, as it establishes that

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the characters, like the Civil War in the historical unconscious, appear to be ‘suspended in time’, ‘trapped in amber’.

As is well-known, the memory of the Civil War was suppressed through the ‘pact of forgetting’ drawn between leftist and rightist parties after Franco’s death in 1975 to ensure a smooth transition to democracy, and was concretised in the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law. The direct effect of these policies was the promotion of historical ignorance and the forgetting of those civilians and opponents (especially the maquis, who appear in Pan’s Labyrinth) unlawfully killed and deleted from official records. Santi, murdered, his memory silenced, stands in for the war’s casualties and gives the Gothic ghost a much more overtly political meaning. Although his appearance and habitat (a dark cistern) align with the conventions of the Gothic, his role is different from that of apparitions in most horror films.

As in Pan’s Labyrinth, the true monsters are not just the supernatural creatures (the iconic Pale Man with stigmata eye-hands), but also, and especially, cruel adults like Jacinto, whose tyrannical acts have deep effects on the lives of others. The ghost, like the bomb that never exploded but could, theoretically, do so at any point, stands in for a past that may be actively repressed yet will inevitably resurface.

While failure to acknowledge the national past has little metaphorical value for the characters in The Devil’s Backbone, it would have had a significant one for audiences watching the film in 2001. I have already mentioned the Historical Memory Law, but it is just as important to remark on the unearthing of mass graves that has taken place in recent years. A grave containing 2480 bodies was dug up in 2008, and another containing several hundred was opened in 2011, following the publication in May of that year of the locations of 2000 unmarked graves. As Juan Medina and

Sonya Dowsett (2016) have suggested, this process of accounting for the Spanish dead ‘illustrates how [the country] is struggling to come to terms with a past, which is fading from living memory but leaves a mark on current affairs’. The ghost in The Devil’s Backbone can be read as part of this contemporary process of acknowledgement and reparation. The Gothic mode is a familiar language that can help negotiate the effects of war and national trauma. As David Archibald (2012: 135) claims, the ghost in del Toro’s film ‘represent[s] an anachronistic haunting, where someone or something from the past is stuck in the present, where it is, so to speak,
out of time’.11 Santi, as a metaphor for the silencing of the war, symbolises the need to unearth and redress senseless violence. The fact that children are those who bring Jacinto to his watery grave should not be ignored

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either. The film seems to signal, like Pan’s Labyrinth, that the process of unearthing and prodding must be started by the younger generations, those for whom the ‘past is stuck in the present’, ‘out of time’. The rejection of fascistic violence and murder runs parallel with a Gothic haunting that makes the exorcism of oppressive agents a necessary step towards a renewed sense of community. In this respect, the Gothic offers an iconography and set of motifs that is not limited to the Spanish Civil War.

Like The Devil’s Backbone, with which it shares many aesthetic and thematic traits, Pan’s Labyrinth channels the human concerns, toils and sacrifices of war, so that its casualties may stand in for those of any significant armed conflict with an impact on the lives of civilians. The plot follows the adventures of a teenage girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who is sent to a village in the north of Spain alongside her pregnant mother, married now to a Falange officer positioned near a forest full of political rebels (the maquis). The film is ambiguous about its main protagonist, who may be using her imagination as a way of overcoming the horrors of the war, or else may truly be a princess who needs to undertake a series of tests in order for her spirit to return to the underworld. The film rarely touches on the Spanish Civil War openly—the war is a subtext, even though the opening intertitles give basic contextual information and situate the action in 1944—so it is interesting that Pan’s Labyrinth may now be the best-known film about this period in the history of Spain, especially considering that the project was not initially conceived as such. 12 The film is first and foremost concerned with the ravages of war, and only on a secondary level with the specific shape these took in Spain. Its universality has been one of
its main appeals.13 It is not necessary to know much, or indeed anything at all, about the Spanish Civil War to be moved by Pan’s Labyrinth or to be emotionally invested in Ofelia’s story, which falls back on the equally transnational language of fairy tales.14 Its reliance on a type of mythology that is pagan and definitely not Catholic in origin (Celtic or Pre-Celtic, in fact, as emphasised by the film’s Galician setting) also seems to remove possible allegiances to the traditional folkloric images associated with (Southern) Spain. One may ask what, if anything, is Spanish about the Pale Man?

But the film’s polyvalent imagery is precisely what makes it interesting. Pan’s Labyrinth does not seek to appropriate an iconography that is inherently Spanish and/or Catholic in order to metaphorically negotiate the weight and horror of the Spanish Civil War. Instead, the film privileges an innovative visual code in tune with the director’s previous American

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work (especially his 2004 film Hellboy) and which proposes an alternative to the more traditional ghost of The Devil’s Backbone. As del Toro has explained in interviews, his greatest influence were the Gothic writers Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen: ‘[t]hey both speak about the pre-Celtic mythologies and pagan entities and how close they still are to us even in our “modern” world’ (del Toro, quoted in Diestro-Dópido 2013: 79). The faun of the Spanish title ( El laberinto del fauno) is a very good case in point, a recasting of the trickster figure presented in Gothic terms (always bathed in darkness, except for in the last scene) and embodying temptation, much like the Devil did in novels like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) or Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The Pale Man operates as the main punishing entity, a stereotypical ogre who channels the mythical danger and violence of the antagonists in the original Grimm fairy tales. At the same time, his physique and behaviour are innovative, and a new mythology is established around this monster, as per the tableau in his lavishly decorated den. Finally, the symbology behind the bug-eating gigantic toad is unclear, but, like a disease, we know it burrows in the roots of a fig tree and sucks the life out of a natural force for good. In this way, the creature may be aligned with the other figures of oppression in the film, particularly Vidal. 15

And yet, Pan’s Labyrinth is inherently Spanish in its conception of the Gothic. I have already mentioned the film’s investment in the struggling child narrative typical of late Francoist cinema and of modern Gothic.

Equally important is its look and feel. Del Toro himself has admitted that

‘everything in the movie was meant to look, in terms of light and shadow, like a Goya painting. I was very keen to find an aesthetic that was Spanish, but not like any other Spanish movie’ (del Toro, quoted in Archibald 2012: 146). 16 His interest in creating a new ‘aesthetic’ accounts for noticeable references to well-known monsters or nightmare scenarios that manage to remain personal and original. One of Pan’s Labyrinth’s greatest triumphs is precisely its capacity to come up with a new pantheon of disturbing monsters which borrows, in design, from the aforementioned fairy tale, the horror film and pagan religion. Del Toro’s reference to Goya is harder to justify, beyond a deliberate attempt to strengthen the links between the film and the national specificity of the country it takes place in. It is, however, true that the film does show an atmospheric affinity with the work of the artist. It is similarly important that some of Goya’s best-known series, beyond the Satanic Pinturas negras / Black Paintings (1819–23), is Los

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desastres de la guerra / The Disasters of War (1810–20), a collection of 82
prints that, despite having been read as the painter’s reaction to specific conflicts like the uprising of the ‘dos de Mayo’ (second of May) uprising or the Peninsular War (1808–14), manages to transcend the specifics of historical time to become an artistic rendering of the ills of wars. 17 Pan’s Labyrinth utilises a similarly polysemantic filmic vocabulary, reconfiguring the Gothic through, and into, different parameters from those more typical of the mode. This is significant because, as later del Toro’s films like Crimson Peak (2015) have demonstrated, the director is well-versed in the thematic preoccupations and tropes of eighteenth-century Gothic. 18

As in The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro harks back to the Gothic because it provides a shared iconographic language that, like the fairy tale, has transnational potential and allows for an engagement with notions of good and evil, oppression and liberation, power and insurrection. Along the way, he manages to create two of the most significant and politically engaged of contemporary Spanish Gothic films. In their exploration of violence within the context of the Spanish Civil War, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth also recast the Gothic from a very fresh national angle that resonates with the Francoist cinema of metaphoric resistance ( Spirit of the Beehive, Raise Ravens) and the social and political concerns of a country immersed in a momentous process of historical recuperation.

An unASHAmedly gotHIc Horror cInemA, or
tHe cASe of tHe Valdemar fIlmS

The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth are the best examples of contemporary Spanish Gothic cinema, but could hardly be called horror.

Undoubtedly, they both contain some horrific elements, but are better served by the Gothic melodrama label, as their focus is the psychological development of the characters and the troubled historical period in which they live. Spanish horror film has largely taken a different direction in the twenty-first century. It has been more concerned, as it was in the past, with exploiting contemporary trends popular in the international, and especially American, markets. As Lázaro-Reboll (2008: 65) has sug-
gested, some of the horror films that have imitated successful franchises may be best understood as working in a separate context from that of the international and transnational products of Filmax’s Fantastic Factory or Guillermo del Toro’s co-productions, because their ‘marketing practices, mechanics of distribution and exhibition, and critical reception abroad and

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in Spain’ neatly distinguish them as ‘product[s] calculated for the national market’. El arte de morir / Art of Dying (Álvaro Fernández Armero, 2000) is a great example of how early twenty-first-century national horror was influenced by Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy (1996–2000), as are the neo-slashers Tuno negro / Black Serenade (Vicente Martín and Pedro Barbero, 2001), School Killer (Carlos Gil, 2001), No debes estar aquí /

You Shouldn’t Be Here (Jacobo Rispa, 2002) and Más de mil cámaras velan por tu seguridad / More than a Thousand Cameras Are Watching for Your Safety (David Alonso, 2003). 19 Following the sustained interest, and endless outpouring of, found footage films, especially the surprise hits [•REC] and Paranormal Activity, a number of horror films also attempted to jump on this bandwagon, often from similarly ghostly and Gothic perspectives. Notable examples include Asmodexia (Marc Carreté, 2014), which crosses apparitions with both found footage and the possession film, and Quiroga’s The Haunting, which invokes the state-controlled newsreels run before cinema projections of films during the Franco years (specifically, 1943–76, and optionally until 1981), the No-Do, or Noticiarios y Documentales (news and documentaries).

But not all forms of the Spanish Gothic have been derivative. The most laudable and much-anticipated attempt at producing a Gothic horror film from Spain has been José Luis Alemán’s ambitious La herencia Valdemar

/ The Valdemar Legacy. Released in two films, it treads a thin line between the referential Gothic, drawing especially from Lovecraft, and an original story. 20 The first of the two films, under the aforementioned title, was released in 2010, but was not promoted as a first part, which led to a number of negative reviews from film critics like Javier Ocaña.21 The second part, the much inferior and more obviously adaptational La herencia Valdemar II: La sombra prohibida / The Valdemar Legacy II: The Forbidden Shadow, was released in 2011 to even poorer reviews. The films are indeed a rare occurrence in Spanish horror cinema. Not only is their scope ambitious, the project was also carried out without any financial aid or external funding, making them a true labour of love. I want to turn to Alemán’s films in what remains of this chapter because I think they illustrate the limitations that Spanish cinema still faces when trying to compete with larger international and transnational productions. The Valdemar Legacy, with its many flaws, stands as an interesting example of the type of Gothic melange popularised by fantaterror, yet remains part of the sober Gothic that has developed since The Others. As a film project, it is an experiment seeking to invest the mode with gravitas and artistic value that may help

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national Spanish horror escape the limiting exploitative parameters from which it has been forced to operate.

The first Valdemar film is set in the present, but very quickly turns to 1880 and to the source of the disappearances taking place at the Valdemar mansion after an estate valuer, Luisa Llorente (Silvia Abascal), on the footsteps of a vanished colleague, fails to report back to head office. The majority of the film follows the life and misadventures of the appropriately named Lázaro (Danielle Liotti) and Leonor Valdemar (Laia Marull), the inhabitants of the same house in Victorian Spain. Their story is told by Dr Cerviá (Ana Risueño), president of the Valdemar foundation, to detective Tramel (Óscar Jaenada) on their journey towards the mysterious site in what could be read as a modern reinterpretation of the ‘found manuscript’ motif. As well as an early nudge to what could be a ‘deep one’ or a cultist in a chase scene inside the mansion, the film is full of references to Lovecraft and contemporary Gothic figures that hybridise the Spanishness of the film and are intended to give it, in the director’s words, ‘more credibility’ (Alemán, quoted in Díaz n.d.). English occultist and magi-
cian Aleister Crowley (Paco Maestre) soon turns up on Lázaro’s doorstep to ask him for help with opening a portal to the beyond. The planned séance is attended by novelist Bram Stoker (Lino Braxe) and serial killers Belle Gunness (Laura Toledo) and Lizzie Boarden (Vanesa Suárez). In the second part, even Lovecraft himself, played by Luis Zahera, turns up to reclaim the Necromicon. The film’s very opening is a paean to the Gothic, featuring, as it does, a collection of sepia-shot images of old dusty books, a disfigured doll and a rusty till showing the amount ‘6.66’.

Luisa’s visit to the Valdemar estate is presented in and through recognisable Gothic tropes and images: a sombre Victorian mansion looms over a patch of land; its inner structure shows signs of decay, damp and collapse; its inspection must be undertaken via torchlight among a sea of shadows, and reveals a mutilated corpse tied to a stretcher that evokes Frankenstein’s monster; and a ghost manifests on the lens of Luisa’s camera when left unattended. Later, the house is painted in even more obviously Gothic shades when it is described by Dr Cerviá as a 180-year-old building that has remained ‘intact and unaffected by the passing of time’.

The legend of the house is woven into the lives of Lázaro and Leonor, a couple who made a living out of psychic photography and fraudulent spiritualist sessions. Dr Crowley hunts them down to explain that, despite their disingenuous business, there is real evidence of spiritual ‘contacts’ in their stills and that he requires their help in establishing a connection with

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the other world in their house, as it is ‘full of energy’. It is then he tells them about the ‘Dunwich rite’, which must take place during a full moon eclipse and is intended to invoke and bind a supernatural ‘being of the first order’. Accessing this other world, Crowley argues, could have infinite positive effects, as humans could gain unimaginable wisdom they could use to ‘eradicate leprosy, cure dysentery, improve crops, reduce poverty!’

Persuaded by the possibility that this window into forbidden knowledge might help his infertile wife become pregnant, Lázaro agrees. As may be surmised, the results are not quite those proposed by Crowley. Lázaro faints and breaks the circle just as the spirit is summoned. The creature, a

‘devourer’, is a Lovecraftian monster who loses corporeality upon surfac-ing, travels by turning into a cloud of smoke and seems to reduce to ashes the living bodies it overrides. The devourer eventually finds a cemetery and possesses a corpse, using the larvae corrupting it to recompose the tissues of their host. Channelling himself through Leonor, the real link in the séance, the spirit attempts to harm Lázaro, but Leonor fights back, expels him and is ultimately sacrificed. Her blood, the recap of the second film tells us, is forever bound to the devourer. At this point, The Valdemar Legacy returns to the present, where Dr Cerviá warns detective Tramel that it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie.

While the first film could be read, as I am arguing, as a variation on the haunted house narrative told in retrospect, The Forbidden Shadow is more overtly Lovecraftian: Cthulhu makes a cyclopean appearance towards the end as a sect worshiping the Great Old Ones is revealed to be the secret behind the house in present times. Lázaro, slightly crazed after the events of the first film, invests his remaining fortune on securing the Necronomicon, although his specific intentions are unclear. After a series of adventures involving Luisa’s escape, her eventual reunion with Tramel and two of her work colleagues, and a subplot that introduces the child of a gypsy woman and the return of groundskeeper Santiago (Santi Prego), events finally lead to a skeleton-ridden cave where the previous appearance of an unaged Lázaro is finally explained. The luring of fresh victims to the premises, where a new invocation will take place, is nothing more than the preparation for the last in a series of 666 human sacrifices, intended to resurrect Cthulhu and, at the same time, return the devourer ‘to the flames of hell’. Virtually every character, from Cerviá to Maximilian (Eusebio Poncela), who originally commissions the investigation, turns out to be part of the sect. When the ultimate offering, the killing of a child, does not go according to plan, a furious Cthulhu goes on a killing spree. The

224 X. ALDANA REYES
ritual seems to have partly worked, however; Leonor comes back, but ages immediately by 150 years. The Necromicon is destroyed as a result and flashes of gaseous light float towards heaven as the souls of the innocent are liberated.

As can be gauged from this precis, the very convoluted plot of the Valdemar films includes a number of overt references to the Gothic and to canonical Lovecraft stories (‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928), ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1929), ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ (1936)), but does not actually commit to them fully. Among the reasons provided for not offering a straightforward adaptation, the director mentioned the difficulty of visualising the work of Lovecraft and stated that his purpose was, instead, to ‘capture the essence of his books and to create a free script’ (Alemán, quoted in Díaz n.d.). While this is The Valdemar Legacy’s greatest achievement—namely, that it skirts around Lovecraft, employing Gothic themes more generally, and thus comes up with a piece original in its combination of tropes and iconography—this is also arguably its downfall. The film is so overtly referential, and referential of a tradition still perceived to be alien to Spanish culture, that it feels like an anomaly. The Victorian Gothic explored in the Lázaro and Leonor narrative seems more in tune with Hammer than with Spanish fantaterror. Ángel Sala’s article ‘¿Cine gótico español?’ of 2010 ends with The Valdemar Legacy, to which the critic refers as ‘the last bastion of the classic orthodoxy of the Spanish Gothic’ (2010b: 350). He concludes by wondering whether ‘Naschy’s
death [this was his last film] and the new themes now present in fantastic Spanish cinema will erase these Gothic temptations forever or whether new mutations of the concept might be yet to arrive’ (350).

Even though I disagree that The Valdemar Legacy has much in common with the 1970s work of Naschy or fantaterror more broadly—the treatment is more sober and less exploitational, the budget is higher, and the market is, in the first instance and primarily, a national one—it is true that the film can be aligned with it insofar as referentiality is concerned. Like El jorobado de la morgue / The Hunchback of the Morgue (Javier Aguirre, 1973), Alemán’s films are patchwork monster exercises that stitch together various Gothic motifs, not always convincingly and, sometimes, seemingly for the purpose of investing them with the quality status of the originals. On the one hand, the Valdemar films are the most significant aesthetic achievement of the Spanish Gothic in the 2010s. On the other, they simply literalise the problem the Gothic has faced in Spain: if given an imported intertextual treatment, films may appear foreign and will stand in direct competition

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with the cinematic production of other countries. If they remain too inherently Spanish, they might not be perceived as Gothic at all, and may even be understood as completely different types of texts by viewers. 22

The lack of a continued engagement with this form of ornately Victorian and heavily referential Gothic, and a preference for more obviously exploitational found footage and possession horror films, would seem to confirm Sala’s suspicions that Alemán’s may have been a (temporary?) swansong for Gothic cinema in Spain. The Valdemar films should be conceived as ambitious and exquisite experiments in a permutation of the Gothic that seems forever doomed to being perceived as un-Spanish, of the openly referential Gothic film. Despite their many problems (the action drags, the acting could be stronger), the uniqueness of Alemán’s scripts is what makes his films relevant to any history of the contemporary Spanish Gothic. Visually, they recreate the excess and nihilism of the Lovecraftian universe without falling back too heavily on the derivational. If the concept of a Lovecraftian Gothic romance exists, Alemán conceived it.

noteS

1. Other films that would fall under this label are La lengua asesina /

Killer Tongue (Alberto Sciamma, 1996), Solo se muere dos veces /

You Only Die Twice (Esteban Ibarretxe, 1996), El milagro de P. Tinto / The Miracle of P. Tinto (Javier Fesser, 1998), La mujer más fea del mundo / The Ugliest Woman in the World (Miguel Bardem, 1999) and See You Later Cowabunga! (José Roberto Vila, 2004).

2. For de la Iglesia as auteur, see Buse et al. (2007).

3. For example, see Aguilar (2005: 26).

4. As of 7 March 2016, Imdb.com lists 483 horror titles under Spanish horror. Of these, 231, nearly half of all listed films, were released between 2000 and 16 March 2016. See http://www.imdb.com/
search/title?at=0&countries=es&genres=horror&sort=moviemete
r,asc&title_type=feature [accessed 7 March 2016].

5. For more on the [•REC] films and found footage horror, see

Aldana Reyes (2015).

6. For more on the history of the Fantastic Factory, see Navarro (2005).

7. There are many articles on the film in Spanish and British publications.

Most notably, there is a Spanish book that includes the storyboard and

226 X. ALDANA REYES
interviews with the director and with some of the technicians, which was published in January of 2001 (the film was released from August through to December). See Amenábar et al. (2001).

8. See, for example, Marvin D’Lugo (1997: 56–7); Nestrick (1979: 312–15).

9. See Hardcastle (2004–2005); Langford (2006: 74–5).

10. See Acevedo-Muñoz (2008: 212–13).

11. See also Hardcastle (2005); Ajuria Ibarra (2012).

12. Allegedly, the first script for the film set the story during the Mexican Revolution. See Lázaro-Reboll (2007: 42).

13. Lázaro-Reboll (2007: 46) goes even further and calls the work of Guillermo del Toro a form of ‘transnational horror’ that borrows from different traditions.

14. So much so that, for some (Lukasiewicz 2010), it is possible to understand the film as magical realism.

15. There are further connections established between Vidal and the Pale Man, as the latter’s ostentatious table evokes the feast organised by the former in honour of his wife earlier in the film.

16. It is worth noting, however, that del Toro (quoted in Diestro-Dópido 2013: 83) has claimed that, for him, ‘the fantasy, religion and violence’ of the film are Mexican, not Spanish.

17. Critics have seen further echoes of Goya’s paintings in del Toro’s work. James Rose (2009: 31–2) argues that the execution scene in The Devil’s Backbone recalls El tres de Mayo 1808 / The Third of May 1808 (1814) and Diestro-Dópido (2013: 68–9) that the fairy-eating scene in Pan’s Labyrinth is a direct reference to Saturno devorando a su hijo / Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–1823?).

18. In fact, Crimson Peak is so formulaic that it may be read as a homage to the Female Gothic.

19. There have been other national, allegedly less derivative and more

‘Iberian’, forms of this serial killer narrative, like Marujas asesinas /

Killer Housewives (Javier Rebollo, 2001) or H6: Diario de un asesino

/ H6: Diary of a Serial Killer (Martín Garrido Barón, 2004).

However, I do not detect in them a sense of Spanishness significantly different from that already apparent in the post- Scream slashers.

20. The film was heralded as ‘the most ambitious […] in the history of Spanish fantastic cinema’ by the magazine Scifiworld, which published a separate issue the same month the film was released dedicated exclusively to The Valdemar Legacy.

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21. See Ocaña (2010). This was a source of embarrassment for the director, who apologised for this move and explained the difficult genesis of the project in an open letter. See Wanchope (2010).

22. I already referred to Marcelino pan y vino / The Miracle of Marcelino (Ladislao Vajda, 1955) and to El extraño viaje / Strange Voyage (Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1964) in the Introduction, but other examples mentioned by Sala include films that, as far as I can see, have not been widely read as Gothic, like Furtivos / Poachers (José Luis Borau, 1975) or La caza / The Hunt (Carlos Saura, 1966).

referenceS

Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto R. 2008. ‘Horror of Allegory: The Others and Its Contexts’, in Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, ed. by Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 202–18.

Aguilar, Carlos. 2002. Fantaespaña: Orrore e fantascienza nel cinema spagnolo. Un secolo di delirio filmico (Torino: Lindau).

———. 2005. ‘Fantástico, español, moderno: Un cine a caballo entre dos siglos’, in Cine fantástico y de terror español, 1984–2004, ed. by Carlos Aguilar (San Sebastián: Donostia Kultura), 11–42.

Ajuria Ibarra, Enrique. 2012. ‘Permanent Hauntings: Spectral Fantasies and National Trauma in Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo ( The Devil’s Backbone)’, Journal of Romance Studies, 12.1: 56–71.

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2015. ‘The [•REC] Films: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror’, in Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon, ed. by Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes (London and New York: I.B. Tauris), 149–60.

Amenábar, Alejandro, et al. 2001. Los otros: El libro (Madrid: Ocho y Medio).

Archibald, David. 2012. The War that Won’t Die: The Spanish Civil War in Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Buse, Peter, Núria Triana-Toribio and Andy Willis. 2007. The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press).

Díaz, Vicente. n.d. ‘Diálogo con José Luis Alemán, director de La Herencia Valdemar’, TheCult.es. http://www.thecult.es/entrevistas/dialogo- con-jose-
luis-aleman-director-de-la-herencia-valdemar.html [accessed 14 March 2016].

Diestro-Dópido, Mar. 2013. Pan’s Labyrinth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

D’Lugo, Marvin. 1997. Guide to the Cinema of Spain (London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).

Hardcastle, Anne E. 2004–2005. ‘The Guilt of the Innocent: Memory, History and Trauma in Saura’s Cría cuervos and Matute’s Primera memoria’, Letras Peninsulares, 17.2–3: 387–404.

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——— 2005. ‘Ghosts of the Past and Present: Hauntology and the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone’, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 15.2: 120–32.

Labanyi, Jo. 2007. ‘Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War’, Poetics Today, 28.1: 89–116.

Langford, Michelle. 2006. Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Bristol and Portland, OR: Intellect).

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. 2007. ‘The Transnational Reception of El espinazo del diablo (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)’, Hispanic Research Journal, 8.1: 39–51.

———. 2008. ‘“Now Playing Everywhere”: Spanish Horror Film in the Marketplace’, in Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, ed. by Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 65–83.

Lukasiewicz, Tracie D. 2010. ‘The Parallelism of the Fantastic and the Real: Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth/ El laberinto del fauno and Neomagical Realism’, in Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, ed. by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press), 60–78.

Medina, Juan, and Sonya Dowsett. 2016. ‘Spain Civil War Graves Exhumed’, Reuters.com, 10 February. https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/spain-civil-
war-graves-exhumed [accessed 13 March 2016].

Navarro, Antonio José. 2005. ‘La Fantastic Factory: Terror Made in Spain’, in Cine fantástico y de terror español, 1984–2004, ed. by Carlos Aguilar (San Sebastian: Donostia Kultura), 221–70.

Nestrick, William. 1979. ‘Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative’, in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed.

by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press), 290–316.

Ocaña, Javier. 2010. ‘Película sin terminar’, Elpais.com, 22 January. http://elpais.

com/diario/2010/01/22/cine/1264114808_850215.html [accessed 14

March 2016].

Ordóñez, Marcos. 1997. La bestia anda suelta: Álex de la Iglesia lo cuenta todo (Barcelona: Glénat).

Rose, James. 2009. Studying The Devil’s Backbone (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing).

Sala, Ángel. 2010a. Profanando el sueño de los muertos: La historia jamás contada del cine fantástico español (Pontevedra: Scifiworld).

———. 2010b. ‘¿Cine gótico español? Un viaje a las mazmorras del subdesarrollo y otros infiernos’, in Pesadillas en la oscuridad: Cine de terror gótico, ed. by Antonio José Navarro (Madrid: Valdemar), 321–50.

Tierney, Dolores. 2014. ‘Transnational Political Horror in Cronos (1993), El espinazo del diablo (2001) and El laberinto del fauno (2006)’, in The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, ed. by Ann Davies, Deborah Shaw and Dolores Tierney (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 161–82.

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Wanchope. 2010. ‘Carta abierta del director José Luis Alemán sobre La herencia Valdemar’, Elseptimoarte.net, 22 February. http://www.elseptimoarte.net/
carta-abierta-del-director-jose-luis-aleman-sobre--la-herencia-valdemar--7570.

html [accessed 14 March 2016].

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: A Language of Collaboration
and Liberation

Beyond a first attempt at painting a broad picture of the Gothic in Spain from the 1780s to the present day, foregrounding certain key writers/
directors and texts, the various chapters in this book have aimed to establish the Spanish Gothic as more than a simple process of national imitation of foreign models. While the Gothic first entered the Spanish artistic consciousness through translations that tried to make the mode meaningful to a national audience, this is not necessarily how it developed. First national literary attempts by writers like Pascual Pérez Rodríguez did not, as I have shown, prove very successful, if one compares their legacy with that of the historical novel popularised by Walter Scott. For the mode to really strike a note with the reading public, it had to be adapted to a new context. The Gothic manifested in anticlerical writings, rethinkings of the dead lover trope, folkloric legends deriving from the oral tradition or in hybridised ‘folletín’ forms. In the twentieth century, the political and transgressive aspects of the Gothic surfaced even during Franco’s regime.

The Gothic must, in fact, be seen as crucial to the development of literature in Spain. The lack of perception of the Gothic as an endemic national form is no doubt connected to the way in which the mode has dispersed and fragmented, something that is not exclusive to the Spanish context.1

Although I would not want to suggest that the Gothic ever came ‘ready-made’—and as Edward H. Jacobs (2000: 23) has pointed out, it is possible to think of the Gothic as always in ‘dispersion’—the fact that fear can

© The Author(s) 2017

231

X. Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2_10

232 X. ALDANA REYES
be found outside the horror genre (for example, in melodramas), means that identifying a product as Gothic, regardless of national origin, is either really easy or very complicated. Either anything that uses a Gothic trope is Gothic, by contagion, or else, pace David Roas, nothing is anymore, because the Gothic is a historically contingent literary phase superseded by the fantastic tale.

It should have become clear that I do not necessarily support the latter view, as I understand the Gothic as a transhistorical, transmedia and transnational artistic mode. The Gothic is not a genre, as this would genuinely limit its reach and effects. Although genres do evolve and can, like modes, adapt to specific circumstances, the Gothic is not synonymous with horror. Horror relies on the emotional and affective agendas it seeks to advance, but it is not tied down to specific generic markers like setting, characters and time periods, however ubiquitous monsters and dark places may be. 2 By contrast, the Gothic, also strongly connected to fear, relies more heavily on aesthetics, recurring motifs and iconography. This means that it can manifest in genres beyond horror, that, as in the case of Alfonso Sastre, fear may not even be the overall intended outcome. This is important for various reasons. First, the transmedia nature of the Gothic makes it ripe territory for the adaptation of figures and images which escape their original context: haunted and dark castles, like haunted and dark houses, are not the exclusive preserve of the Anglo-American tradition, but, like the figure of the ghost, become much more international. The Gothic can thus, as in Zamacois’s El otro / The Other (1910), not just adapt to a different nationality and culture, but also to specific trends, like spiritualism in 1920s Spain. This is not to deny its contingent originality. Britain did develop the Gothic, out of the chivalric romance and the novel of sensibility, but if the mode changed and morphed within that culture, so it did in others. The Gothic needs to be apprehended within national contexts as much more than just a matter of cross-fertilisation, as the cultivation of a mode eminently nationally specific, and yet, recognisably other.

I am driving towards two main points. The first one is that the Gothic is more than ever a mode shaped by international collaboration. The Gothic is no longer the remit of a specific country, a genre other nations are imitating. At a historical time in which transnational filmmaking is one of the few ‘save’ models for funding and investment, it is possible to argue, as has been done, that the lines between discrete national products are becoming blurred, even in Hollywood. 3 The same can be said about

Gothic literature, as I showed through Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s work, the

CONCLUSION: A LANGUAGE OF COLLABORATION AND LIBERATION 233

Gothic qualities of which have been ‘outed’ in the process of its marketing to specific reader demographics. In other words, the Gothic has become truly ‘glocal’, a term I am borrowing from work in other disciplines and which has recently been applied to literature. 4 As I am using it here, the glocal points towards a Gothic mode ‘that has international status in its global spread but at the same time expresses local identities’ (Pakir 2014: 55). As Brydon (2010: 112) has noted, this can ‘represent a turn towards an intense engagement with the particular as retaining some autonomy from global currents’, but it can also ‘mark a renewed awareness of how local and global are now intermeshed in ways we are still struggling to understand’. The Spanish Gothic, as presented in this book, is one such glocal mode, a product of collaboration between countries; literally so, in the case of the cinematic co-productions that cemented the look and feel of Spanish Gothic horror during the golden age of fantaterror, and more metaphorically in the work of individual writers who have adapted the Gothic to suit their personal visions.

My other point is a connected one. This book has proven that the Gothic can be radical, and that it has mattered to Spanish artists. The country’s repressive governments and religious belief systems, with their various permutations of artistic censorship and consequent self-censoring, have not managed to stifle what has proven a long-lasting mode of expression. This is because the Gothic privileges the dark, the taboo, the forbidden and the unknown, because its ambiguities make it ideal ground for explorations of repressed national memory, as I demonstrated in my consideration of Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish Civil War films. More generally, it has allowed for the negotiation of feelings of social and political unrest, as in the work of the exiled writers of first wave Gothic or the fiction of Pilar Pedraza. The Gothic constitutes a liberating artistic language which, like the fantastic, has enabled writers to travel beyond the mundane and to explore anything from the deep recesses of the unconscious to the possibility of hidden societies and alternative realities, as in the fiction of Emilio Carrère. To dare to dream is to think outside the box, and by extension, to rethink the present, with all its problems, away from totemic religious systems or repressive governments. It is not surprising, then, that the Gothic has not been condoned by the powers that be, and has been, like other forms of revolutionary literature, actively persecuted.

Instead of thinking of the Spanish Gothic as a frivolous reading endeavour, we must begin to see it as a potential force for artistic and social change. Although not all Gothic is progressive, Spanish Gothic writers

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have repeatedly returned to its shared imaginary to channel particular obsessions and concerns, both national and personal. This entails moving beyond an understanding of the Gothic as a mode symptomatic of a specific zeitgeist, which acts as a reflecting mirror of society, towards one that also perceives it as an active agent of disruption and progress. It is not that the Gothic did not gain momentum in Spain; rather it was actively repressed. That it has survived at all, and that it has continued to flourish for centuries, pushing social boundaries along the way, is indicative of the breadth and scope of its creative powers.

Notes

1. See, for example, Spooner (2006).

2. See Aldana Reyes (2016).

3. Whether transnational filmmaking can be truly global and transcend nationality is another matter entirely.

4. See Fraile-Marcos (2014).

RefeReNces

Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (Abingdon and New York: Routledge).

Brydon, Diana. 2010. ‘Cracking Imaginaries: Studying the Global from Canadian Space’, in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. by Janet Wilson, Christina Şandru and Sarah Lawson Welsch (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), 105–17.

Fraile-Marcos, Ana María (ed.). 2014. Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary (Abingdon and New York: Routledge).

Jacobs, Edward H. 2000. Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse (London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses).

Pakir, Anne. 2014. ‘Glocal English in Singapore? A Re-Exploration of the Localization of English’, in Dynamic Ecologies: A Relational Perspective on Languages Education in the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. by Neil Murray and Angela Scarino (London and New York: Springer), 49–58.

Spooner, Catherine. 2006. Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion).

Index

A

Barcelona y sus misterios, 180n15,

Abbess, The, 42

187

Aguilar, Carlos, 16, 203n14, 206n44,

Baroja, Pío, 114, 122, 135, 136

209, 225n3

Bayona, Juan Antonio, 17, 214

Aguiló, Tomás, 113

Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 3, 10, 26,

Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de, 11, 14,

87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 97–104,

26, 109, 114–20, 129n11, 189

105n9, 105n11–13, 105n15,

Alemán, José Luis, 28, 221, 222, 224,

109, 110, 113, 160, 202n7,

225

205n34

Amenábar, Alejandro, 10, 185,

Benet, Juan, 149, 159, 162

212–14, 225–6n7

Blanco White, Joseph, 5, 23, 26, 64,

Aranda, Vicente, 196, 200, 216

65, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80n12,

Asensi, Julia de, 129n15

81n13, 81n23, 112

Aured, Carlos, 191, 197, 201

Blind Dead, 28, 196–201, 205n35

‘Bolsilibro’ pulps, 160

Borges, Jorge Luis, 12, 162

B

British Gothic, 3, 8, 30n4, 48, 52,

Balagueró, Jaume, 16, 210–12

147, 176

Barby, Ralph (Rafael Barberán

Bruja, La, 64, 161, 188

Domínguez), 160

Bueso, Emilio, 165

Barcelona, 137, 161, 165, 166, 173,

Burgos, Carmen de, 138

176–9, 180n12, 180n15, 187

Burlador de Sevilla, El, 89

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2017

235

X. Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-30601-2

236 INDEX

C

Clavo, El (film), 14, 189

Caballero de las botas azules, El, 110

Clavo, El (short story), 14, 117, 189

Caballero, Fernán (Cecilia Francisca

Coello, Carlos, 114, 121

Josefa Böhl de Faber), 89, 109

Conde Drácula, El, 196

Caballero, José Luis, 165

Conde Lucanor, El, 6

Cadalso, José de, 9, 87, 104n1

Cornelia Bororquia, 26, 65, 71–5,

Caillois, Roger, 11

80n12

Calaveras, Las, 64

Cortázar, Julio, 31n16, 162

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 29n2

‘costumbrismo’, 31n17, 109

Calders, Pere, 149

Countess of Genlis, 42

Cañada, Jesús, 165

Cría Cuervos, 215

Cansinos Assens, Rafael, 138

‘cristiano maravilloso’, 10, 44

Cantero, Edgar, 165

‘Cruz del diablo, La’, 100–4

‘capa y espada’ (‘cloak and dagger’),

Cthulhu mythos, 99, 160, 165

88

Cuentos negros, 114–16

Carmilla, 161, 196

Cuentos sacro-profanos, 129n12

Carrados, Clark (Luis García Lecha),

Cuisin, J. R. P., 48, 49, 52, 60n10,

160

60n12, 60n13

Carrère, Emilio, 14, 26, 137, 141–7,

154n9, 154–5n10, 155n12, 164,

189, 190, 233

D

Casa de la lluvia, La (film), 139, 185,

Daninsky, Waldemar, 24, 31n20, 194,

189

200, 204n25, 210

Casa de la lluvia, La (novel), 139,

D’Arbó, Sebastián, 201

185, 189

Davies, Ann, viii, 11, 16, 21–9

Castle of Otranto, The, 5, 42, 53,

Diablo mundo, El, 91

59n3, 198

Domingo Soler, Amalia, 137

Castro, Rosalía de, 110

Don Álvaro ó la fuerza del sino, 87

Catholicism, 1, 3, 18, 41, 72, 78, 79,

Don Cristalián, 7

137, 144, 146

Don Juan Tenorio, 88

Cazotte, Jacques, 67, 79–80n5

Don Quixote. See Cervantes, Miguel de

Celestina, La, 88

Dracula (novel), 11, 12, 14, 15, 28,

Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 8, 53,

30n12, 31n20, 150, 151, 161,

61n17, 76, 88

164, 169, 188, 192, 193, 195,

Céspedes Meneses, Gonzalo, 8

196, 200, 201, 204n28

Chaplin, Sue, 24

Ducray-Dimini, François, 42

Chomón, Segundo de, 28, 185–7

Civil War, 26, 28, 139, 141, 147,

155n15, 155n18, 176–8, 179n2,

E

202n8, 210, 215–20

Emprendedor, El, 44

Clararrosa, Joaquín de, 73

Enlightenment, 2, 52, 71, 79

Clarasó, Noel, 148, 149, 160

Escamilla, Pedro, 114

INDEX 237

‘esperpento’, 13

Franco, Francisco, 1, 16, 27, 32n24,

Espido Freire, 20, 166

141, 147, 149, 150, 159, 177,

Espinazo del diablo, El, 23, 215–18

191, 195, 200, 209, 215–20,

Espíritu de la colmena, El, 215

221, 231

Espronceda, José de, 20, 26, 88, 90–7

Franco, Jesús (Jess), 23, 188, 191,

Estébanez Calderón, Serafín, 104,

196, 201, 203n12

113

Frankenstein (novel), 12, 14, 15, 114,

Estruch, Conde, 8, 129n16, 180n7

123, 127, 150, 161, 167, 174,

Estudiante de Salamanca, El, 26, 90–7

175, 188, 191, 193–5, 201,

Eumenia, La, 44

204n26, 204n28, 204n29, 215,

Extraño viaje, El, 14

222

‘freak’ cinema (cine ‘freak’), 209, 210

Fura dels Baus, La, 29n2

Ffantastic (‘fantástico’), 3, 4, 6, 8–13,

15, 18, 19, 26, 28, 30n5, 31n14,

G

31n15, 31n16, 32n21, 87–9, 97,

Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras

98, 103, 105n8, 110, 113, 114,
ensangrentadas, 5, 45–52

116, 117, 123, 128n7, 135, 136,

García de Luna, Luis, 112

142, 148, 152, 153, 154n5,

García Lorca, Federico, 29n2

155n17, 162, 164, 171, 172,

García Márquez, Gabriel, 162

180n10, 185–7, 189, 201,

García, Vicente, 165

206n44, 209, 211, 212, 220,

Garland, Curtis (Juan Gallardo

224, 226n20, 232, 233

Muñoz), 160

Fantastic Factory, 211, 212, 220,

Gaspar, Enrique, 137

225n6
generación del, 135

‘fantaterror’, 15–17, 28, 160,
ghosts, 3, 7, 14, 31n20, 50, 53, 58,

185–206, 210, 221, 224, 233

73, 79n4, 80n8, 91, 94, 95,
female Gothic, 27, 119, 129n15,

105n6, 122, 124, 137–41, 143,

166–72, 189, 199, 226n18

146, 148, 149, 162, 167, 169,

Ferdinand VII, 90

171, 176, 178, 185–7, 189, 190,

Fernández Bremón, José, 121–3,

199, 201, 214–17, 219, 222,

130n19

231, 232

Fernández Cubas, Cristina, 162, 166
giallo, 15, 201

Fernández Flórez, Wenceslao, 23, 138, glocal, 28, 190–6, 197, 199, 204n23, 139, 160, 189

233

Ferrán, Augusto, 113

Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 113

Ferraz Revenga, Emilio, 137

Gómez Hernández, Fernando, 164

Féval, Paul, 150, 161

González, Seve, 165

‘folletín’, 26, 87, 104n2, 141, 147,

Goya, Francisco, 1, 2, 4, 13, 29,

187, 231

155n12, 219, 226n17

Fraile, El, 201

Gran amor del conde Drácula, El, 196

238 INDEX

Gritos en la noche, 191–3

K

Gutiérrez, Luis, 5, 25, 26, 64, 65, 71,

Kane, Silver (Francisco González

72, 75, 78

Ledesma), 160

H

L

Hamlet, 58

Laberinto del fauno, El, 23, 215,

Hare, Burton (José María Lliró Olivé),

218–20

160

Laforet, Carmen, 148

Helme, Elizabeth, 42

Lanza, Silverio, 154n6

Herce, Javier, 164, 165

Larra, Mariano José de, 89, 109

Herejía y belleza (journal), 166

Latorre, José María, 164, 165

Herencia Valdemar II, La, 28, 221,

Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, 16, 179n3,

223–5

191, 192, 203n13, 220, 226n12,

Herencia Valdemar, La, 28, 221–3,

226n13

224, 225, 226n20

Leandra, La, 44

Historias para no dormir (TV series),

Lee Six, Abigail, viii, 11, 16, 20–2,

159, 193

129n13

Historical Memory Law, 216, 217

Lee, Sophia, 42

Hoffmann, E. T. A., 12, 24, 26, 89,

Le Fanu, Sheridan, 160, 163, 196

92, 104n3, 104n5, 110, 113,

‘Lenore’, 92, 98, 111, 138

114, 116, 163, 175

Lewis, Matthew, 5, 12, 29n2, 41, 42,

Hombre invisible, El, 66

74, 95, 113, 160, 161, 163, 200,

Horsley Curties, T. J., 67

201, 219

Hoyos Vinent, Antonio de, 135

Liberal Triennium, 5, 42, 72
literatura de cordel, 10, 30n9

Llopis, Rafael, 4, 48, 60n15, 160, 161

I
lobishome, 3, 169, 195

Ibáñez Serrador, Narciso, 17, 159,

Locuras humanas, 123–8

185, 191, 193–5, 203n20

Long Hoeveler, Diane, 3, 18, 30n4

Idarroc, Juan, 43, 44

López Santos, Miriam, viii, 5, 19, 20,

Iglesia, Álex de la, 185, 210

22, 31n15, 32n31, 45, 53, 59n3,

Iglesia, Eloy de la, 200, 201

59n4, 80n7

Inquisition, 3, 25, 30n4, 41, 47, 59n1,

Lovecraft, H. P., 24, 99, 160, 161,

65, 71–9, 142, 146, 149, 172

163, 174, 179n2, 212, 221, 222,

Island of Doctor Moreau, The, 121, 167

224

Italian, The, 42, 80n9

M

J

Madrazo, Pedro de, 113

Jackson, Rosemary, 11
mad science, 26, 114, 121–8, 139,

Jorreto Paniagua, Manuel, 111, 114

151, 193

INDEX 239

Mallorquí, José, 148, 155n18

Naschy, Paul, 24, 28, 31n20, 32n21,

‘maravilloso’, 11

195, 197–200, 204n26, 204n27,

Marca del hombre lobo, La, 15, 191,

205n36–8, 210, 224. See also

194, 195, 204n26, 204n28,

Molina, Jacinto

204n29
neo-slashers, 221

Marcelino, 14, 227n22

Nightmare Abbey, 88

Marina, 173–6, 179

Noche del terror ciego, La, 196–7

Marnac, Alaric de, 28, 196–201,

Noche de Walpurgis, La, 195

205n36–39

Noches lúgubres (Cadalso), 9, 87

Martínez Colomer, Vicente, 23, 53,

Noches lúgubres (Sastre), 27, 149–53

54

Noguera, Jaume, 165

Martínez, Mado, 165

No profanar el sueno de los muertos, 17

Mas Prat, Benito, 121

Northanger Abbey, 88, 110

Maturin, Charles Robert, 5, 12, 42,
novela cortesana, 8, 9

63, 81n13, 160, 163, 219

Novia ensangrentada, La, 196

‘memory boom’ (1990s), 215

Nuevo Cine Español, 191

Mentenebre (website), 166

Núñez de Arce, Gaspar, 112

Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de,

109

Miró law, 201

O

Misterios de Madrid, Los, 87

Ochoa, Eugenio de, 110, 111, 128n1
modernism, 135, 137, 141

Olavide, Pablo de, 44, 53, 61n16

Molina, Jacinto, 105n13, 192, 195,

Old English Baron, The, 55

197, 199, 205n37, 210. See also

Olivares Merino, Julio Ángel, 164

Naschy, Paul

Ombres sanglantes, Les, 48

Molinero, Carlos, 164

Orfanato, El, 214

Monje negro, El, 87

Ossorio, Amando de, 191, 196, 197,

Monk, The, 41–3, 60n6, 74, 161, 201,

201, 204n31, 205n33

219

Others, The, 10, 15, 30n11, 212–15,

Monteagudo, David de, 163

221

Montegón, Pedro, 44

Otro, El (film), 139, 187, 232

Moya, Alejandro, 44

Otro, El (novel), 139–40, 232

‘Mujer alta, La’, 117–18

Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 69, 193

P

Pánico en el Transiberiano, 17, 32n25

N

Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 11, 20, 25, 26,

Nameless, The, 210, 211

109, 114, 118–20, 129n15,

Narraciones terroríficas (book series),

129n16, 130n18, 189

148, 155n18, 160, 179n2

Pazos de Ulloa, Los, 109, 118

Narraciones terroríficas (magazine),

Pedraza, Pilar, 27, 163, 164, 166–72,

148, 155n18, 179n2

180n10, 233

240 INDEX

Peñaranda, Carlos, 113

Rodereda, Mercè, 149

Pérez de Montalbán, Juan, 8

Romance of the Forest, The, 43

Pérez Galdós, Benito, 12, 109

‘roman noir’, 3, 9

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, 163, 173

Romanticism, 20, 26, 59, 79,

Pérez Rodríguez, Pascual, 5, 25,

87–105

64–71, 80n10, 80n11, 87,

Romasanta, 195, 212

137, 231

Romasanta, Manuel (Blanco), 195,

Pérez Zaragoza Godínez, Agustín, 5,

212

19, 25, 45–52, 60n7

Ros de Olano, Antonio, 12, 113,

Perucho, Juan, 151, 161

121

Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 114

Rubio Díaz, Vicente, 122, 129n15

Plaza, Paco, 16, 211

Rueda, Salvador, 122

Poderosa Themis, 48, 60n10

Ruiz Zafón, Carlos, 10, 27, 163, 166,

Poe, Edgar Allan, 89, 114, 150, 160,

172–9, 232

174, 203n20

Potocki, Jan, 29n1, 164, 167

Prévot Arlincourt, Charles Victor, 66

S

Protestantism, 78

Saga de los Drácula, La, 196
psychotronic film, 32n21

Sage, Victor, 3

Punter, David, 2–3, 17, 32n27

Sala, Ángel, 11, 14, 212, 213, 224,

225, 227n22

Sánchez Clemares, Juan Carlos, 165

Q

Sánchez García, Javier, 164

Quevedo, Francisco de, 13

Sánchez Piñol, Albert, 163

Quincey, Thomas De, 160, 163

Sancho Saldaña, 91

Sanjurjo López de Gomara, Justo, 25,

26, 123, 124

R

Sastre, Alfonso, 27, 141, 149–53,

Radcliffe, Ann, 5, 8, 24, 42, 43, 45,

155n21, 155n24, 232

46, 65–7, 69, 163, 167, 193,

Sawa, Miguel, 138

200, 213

Selgas, José, 113

Rais, Gilles de, 28, 198, 205n40

Semana Gótica de Madrid, 166

[•REC], 16, 22, 211, 221, 225n5

Serrano Alcázar, Rafael, 11, 26,

Regenta, La, 109

114–20, 122

Renaissance, 2

Shadow of the Wind, The, 173, 176,

Residencia, La, 17, 185, 193–4

177

Ríos, Blanca de los, 129n15, 137

Soler de la Fuente, José, 112

Rivas, Duke of, 87

Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 60n15

Rivera, David, 165
spiritualism, 122, 135–55, 232

Roas, David, viii, 11–13, 19, 22,

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,

29n2, 32n30, 48, 104n5, 113,

12, 114, 175

114, 123, 128n3, 162, 232

Subterráneo habitado, El, 63, 64

INDEX 241

T

Valdemaro, El, 5, 23, 25, 53–9, 63,

Tahoces, Clara, 164

70, 95

Tárrago Mateos, Torcuato, 87

Valle-Inclán, Ramón del, 13, 29n2,

Theosophy, 137

135, 136, 154n3

Tirado, María José, 164
vampires, 119, 129n16, 139, 150,

Todorov, Tzvetan, 11

151, 155n24, 164, 167, 169,

Tomás Salvany, Juan, 112

188, 196, 204n30

Toro, Guillermo del, 23, 28, 214–20,

Vampiro para dos, Un, 204n24

226n13, 226n16, 226n17, 233

Vargas: A Tale of Spain, 23, 71,

Torre de los siete jorobados, La ( film ), 75–9

14, 142, 189–90, 202n9

Vathek, 42, 163

Torre de los siete jorobados, La (novel),

Vega, Lope de, 9, 29n2, 160

14, 142, 145–7, 189, 202n9

Vicente, Ángeles, 138

Torre gótica, La, 66–71

Virtud, constancia, amor y desinterés

Torres Oliver, Francisco, 160, 161
aparece en el bello sexo, 64

‘transición’, 27, 159, 217
translation/s, 4, 5, 14, 18, 19, 24, 25,

28, 30n6, 32n28, 41–3, 45–53,

W

59, 59n2, 60n6, 60n12, 64, 67,

Walpole, Horace, 5–7, 30n8, 42, 53,

72, 79–80n5, 119, 150, 151,

59n3, 100, 163, 198

160, 161, 203n18, 203n21,

Wolf Man, The, 24, 195

204n23, 212, 231

Y

U

‘Yago Yasck’, 113

Una de miedo, 188

Yuzna, Brian, 211, 212

Una de monstruos, 188

Unamuno, Miguel de, 114, 135, 136,

189

Z

‘unheimlich’ (uncanny), 6, 12, 136,

Zamacois, Eduardo, 139, 140, 187,

150, 151, 163

232

Urna sangrienta, La, 66, 68, 87

Zayas, María de, 9

Zofloya, 219
zombies, 15, 150, 165, 168, 196,

V

197, 210, 211

Valdemar (publisher), 28, 30n10, 163, Zorrilla, José, 88, 89, 98, 104n3, 164, 179n4, 220–5, 226n20

104–5n6, 109, 113

Document Outline

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Defining and Delimiting the Spanish Gothic

- The Origins of the Spanish Gothic

- Terminological Complications: The Fantastic versus Gothic

- Spanish Gothic Cinema

- Recuperating the Spanish Gothic

- National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation

- Notes

- References

Part I: First Wave Gothic (1785–1834)

- Chapter 2: Imported Terrors and First Genre Hybrids

- A Gothic Translation: Agustín Pérez Zaragoza’s Funereal Gallery of Spectres and Bloody Shadows (1831)

- First Spanish Gothic Fictions: The ‘Delightful Instruction’ of Valdemaro (1792)

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 3: The Early Spanish Gothic Novel (1800–34)

- Spanish Terror: The Supernatural Foretold of Pascual Pérez Rodríguez

- Anticlerical and Anti-Inquisition Gothic: The Symbiotic Case of Cornelia Bororquia (1801) and Vargas (1822)

- Notes

- References

Part II: From Romanticism to the Fin-de-siècle (1834–1900)

- Chapter 4: Spanish Romanticism and the Gothic

- Gothic Romanticism: José de Espronceda’s The Student of Salamanca (1840)

- Folkloric Gothic: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Legends

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 5: From the 1860s to the Fin-de-Siècle: The Development of the Gothic Short Story

- New Horrors: Rafael Serrano Alcázar, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and Emilia Pardo Bazán

- Mad Science: The Short Stories of Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara

- Notes

- References

Part III: Modern and Contemporary Gothic Literature (1900–2016)

- Chapter 6: The Twentieth Century (1900–75): Modernist Spiritualism and Political Gothic

- The Occult-Spiritualist Gothic Fiction of Emilio Carrère

- After the War: The Dialectic Gothic of Alfonso Sastre

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 7: From the Death of Franco to the Present: The Establishment of Horror and the Gothic Auteur

- The Female Gothic of Pilar Pedraza

- Internationalising the Spanish Gothic: The ‘Nuanced Gothicism’ of Carlos Ruiz Zafón

- Notes

- References

Part IV: Spanish Gothic Cinema (1906–2016)

- Chapter 8: From Segundo de Chomón to the Rise and Fall of ‘Fantaterror’

- The Beginnings of Gothic Horror and the Exploitative Extension of Glocal Myths

- ‘National’ Monsters: The Blind Dead and Alaric de Marnac

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 9: The Post-Millennial Horror Revival: Auteurs, Gothic (Dis)Continuities and National History

- A Spectre Is Haunting Spain: Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic Treatments of the Spanish Civil War

- An Unashamedly Gothic Horror Cinema, or the Case of the Valdemar Films

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 10: Conclusion: A Language of Collaboration and Liberation

- Notes

- References

Index

Table of Contents

- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents

- Chapter 1: Introduction: Defining and Delimiting the Spanish Gothic

- The Origins of the Spanish Gothic

- Terminological Complications: The Fantastic versus Gothic

- Spanish Gothic Cinema

- Recuperating the Spanish Gothic

- National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation

- Notes

- References

- Part I: First Wave Gothic (1785–1834)

- Chapter 2: Imported Terrors and First Genre Hybrids

- A Gothic Translation: Agustín Pérez Zaragoza’s Funereal Gallery of Spectres and Bloody Shadows (1831)

- First Spanish Gothic Fictions: The ‘Delightful Instruction’ of Valdemaro (1792)

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 3: The Early Spanish Gothic Novel (1800–34)

- Spanish Terror: The Supernatural Foretold of Pascual Pérez Rodríguez

- Anticlerical and Anti-Inquisition Gothic: The Symbiotic Case of Cornelia Bororquia (1801) and Vargas (1822)

- Notes

- References

- Part II: From Romanticism to the Fin-de-siècle (1834–1900)

- Chapter 4: Spanish Romanticism and the Gothic

- Gothic Romanticism: José de Espronceda’s The Student of Salamanca (1840)

- Folkloric Gothic: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Legends

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 5: From the 1860s to the Fin-de-Siècle: The Development of the Gothic Short Story

- New Horrors: Rafael Serrano Alcázar, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and Emilia Pardo Bazán

- Mad Science: The Short Stories of Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara

- Notes

- References

- Part III: Modern and Contemporary Gothic Literature (1900–2016)

- Chapter 6: The Twentieth Century (1900–75): Modernist Spiritualism and Political Gothic

- The Occult-Spiritualist Gothic Fiction of Emilio Carrère

- After the War: The Dialectic Gothic of Alfonso Sastre

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 7: From the Death of Franco to the Present: The Establishment of Horror and the Gothic Auteur

- The Female Gothic of Pilar Pedraza

- Internationalising the Spanish Gothic: The ‘Nuanced Gothicism’ of Carlos Ruiz Zafón

- Notes

- References

- Part IV: Spanish Gothic Cinema (1906–2016)

- Chapter 8: From Segundo de Chomón to the Rise and Fall of ‘Fantaterror’

- The Beginnings of Gothic Horror and the Exploitative Extension of Glocal Myths

- ‘National’ Monsters: The Blind Dead and Alaric de Marnac

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 9: The Post-Millennial Horror Revival: Auteurs, Gothic (Dis)Continuities and National History

- A Spectre Is Haunting Spain: Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic Treatments of the Spanish Civil War

- An Unashamedly Gothic Horror Cinema, or the Case of the Valdemar Films

- Notes

- References

- Chapter 10: Conclusion: A Language of Collaboration and Liberation

- Notes

- References

- Index