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The Mad Doctors: Medicine and Literature in Finisecular Spain

By Richard A. Cardwell
The University of Nottingham

Published in:
Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 4 (1996), pp. 167-86.

This essay forms the prolegomenon to what will be a

major study of a particular aspect of the history of
ideas and the cultural experience in Spain between 1880
and 1920 presently being written. This book will
consider and analyse the relationships, interfaces and
interpenetrations of artistic endeavour - painting, the
decorative arts, literature and criticism - and
culture, in the broadest sense, with the sciences,
especially the medical sciences. The study will be
principally concerned with literature and the critical
essay but, necessarily, will trace the process of
exchange which had begun earlier in the century and
will project its impact on the cultural experience of
the 1920s. In so doing, the study will challenge many
of the hallowed tenets of literary history, not the
least the theory which posits two antagonistic
finisecular literary groups, modernismo and Generation
of 1898.

'Me devora la fiebre', wrote the unnamed author of Azor�n's Diario de un

enfermo (1901) in the entry for 25 February. 'Ayer estuve escribiendo toda
la tarde, toda la noche, r�pidamente, fren�ticamente. No paro, no sosiego,
no duermo en estos momentos de laboriosa excitaci�n. �Estoy loco? La cara
se me inflama, el cerebro estalla, el cuerpo todo tiembla...'.1 In the
editorial note to the diary Azor�n wrote: 'En ellas [estas p�ginas] palpita
el esp�ritu de un angustiado artista. A retazos, desordenadamente,
supremamente sincero, fue dejando en estos diarios y tormentosos apuntes su
alma' (692). Baroja's fictional hero, Fernando Ossorio, reveals that he is
'un hist�rico, un degenerado'.2 He goes on to conclude that 'La influencia
hist�rica se marca con facilidad en mi familia' (14). In the early chapters
of Camino de perfecci�n (1902) Ossorio suffers a three-month period of pain
and mental stress. ' - "Voy a tener convulsiones" - se dec�a a s� mismo, y
esta idea le produce un terror p�nico. [...] A veces sent�a como un aura
epil�ptica, y pensaba: me voy a caer ahora mismo; y se le turbaban los ojos
y se le debilitaban las piernas...'. Soon afterwards Baroja has Ossorio
confide that '�ntimamente su miedo era creer que los fen�menos que
experimentaba eran �nica y exclusivamente s�ntomas de locura o de anemia
cerebral' (31). At about the same time Juan Ram�n Jim�nez described the
tragedy of death, one very similar in its terms to those evoked in the
early novels of "Azor�n" and Baroja. 'Una de esas enfermedades venenosas
que llevan tantos ni�os del mundo hab�a matado, despu�s de una agon�a
horrible, al pobrecito ni�o; y la madre, una muchacha abandonada, una
m�rtir vestida de negro, divina belleza marchita, besaba loca de dolor la
boquita c�rdena y fr�a del ni�o muerto, para envenenarse tambi�n para ir
con �l al cementerio'.3

In the critical essays of the period immediate to these writings we find

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similar preoccupations, terms and language. As early as 1887, in a series

of articles on Baudelaire, Leopoldo Alas ('Clar�n') remarked that
'Baudelaire es poeta del drama interior, de la indecible vaguedad en que
necesariamente quedan los interesantes fen�menos de la profunda vida
ps�quica'.4 Yet even earlier, in La Regenta (1884-85), it is clear that
Alas was very much in touch with the recent advances in psychopathological
medicine. In chapter XXVII of Part II, which recounts the exchange of
letters between Ana and her young doctor, Ben�tez, we find an interesting
reference to two scientists who were already recognised pioneers of modern
psychiatric medicine.

Ana escrib�a:

'Buenas noticias. Nada m�s que buenas noticias. Ya no hay

aprensiones; ya no veo hormigas en el aire, ni burbujas, ni nada
de eso; hablo de ello sin miedo de que vuelvan las visiones; me
siento capaz de leer a Maudsley y a Luys, con todas sus figuras
de sesos y dem�s interioridades, sin asco ni miedo. Hablo de mi
temor a la locura con Quintanar como de la man�a de un extra�o.
[...] Contin�o mi diario, en el cual no me permito el lujo de
perderme en psicolog�as, ya que usted lo prohibe tambi�n.'

That Alas should cite these two preeminent figures seems to suggest that he
assumed a familiarity with them in his readers and that the reader would
understand the context in which these names were cited.5 But even earlier,
in La desheredada of 1881 Gald�s demonstrated more than a passing interest
in clinical states of depression and madness, both hereditary and female,
themes he was to investigate in other novels. Pardo Baz�n, too, begins her
Insolaci�n of 1889 with a vivid account of a disturbed mental state and its
concomitant physical symptoms. It was evidently a common theme. In 1895,
Fernando Santander y G�mez blamed French poetry and Baudelaire for the
pervasive effect of 'sentimientos ignominiosos, malsanos y sucios' and
their 'religi�n del sufrimiento humano [que] tiene algo de morboso'.6 In
the next year Juan Valera, in 'Fines del arte fuera del arte', likewise in
full cry against the French, checked himself in mid argument with the rider
that 'no quiero yo convenir en que sea el genio algo a modo de enfermedad,
locura, o torpeza que incapaciten al hombre para todo lo pr�ctico en la
vida'.7 Nevertheless, for all his apparent denial, he suspected the
abnormal powers of the genius. Emilio Ferrari, in his 'Discurso de ingreso'
to the Real Academia Espa�ola in 1905 felt no need for cavils when he
denounced 'el aura epil�ptica retorciendo el arte con las m�s estrafalarias
contorsiones [y] la hinchaz�n an�mica; en suma, una miseria despilfarrada,
propia de aquella que dij�rase generaci�n de indigentes atacada del delirio
de las grandezas'.8

If we look at the paintings and drawings of Nonell, Rusi�ol, the young

Picasso and others beginning their careers in the fin de siglo in Spain a
similar preoccupation with disease, convalescence, nervous afflictions and
the process of death is present. Wherever one looks in the literature and
painting of the period (both in Europe as a whole as much as Spain) we find
a deep fascination with the pathology and the psychology of the human
condition. By way of explanation of this phenomenon we might allege the
huge impact of the biological sciences on the public mind and body in the
closing decades of the century and the enormous advances made in the
treatment of disease. No one could have been ignorant of the singular
advances medicine had made. Each age has its buzz words, its fashions and
obsessions. Medicine, and especially psychology, was evidently a
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fashionable topic at the end of the last century. It was, in a way, the
near-end product of a process which had begun all over Europe in the midst
of the Romantic movement where, in Spain at least, by the 1830s, the
language of medicine had begun to colour the language of critical and
literary discourse. Some of the titles of the fin de siglo reflect that
continuing vogue: Literaturas malsanas: estudio de patolog�a literaria
contempor�nea (1894) by Pompeyo Gener; Historia del progreso cient�fico,
art�stico y literario en el siglo XIX (1895) by Fernando Santander y G�mez;
La mujer, bajo los puntos de vista fisiol�gico, moral y literario by Julio
Jos� Virey; M. Sales y Ferr�'s 'Psicolog�a del pueblo espa�ol' (1902);
Rafael Altamira's Psicolog�a del pueblo espa�ol (1902); Vicente Gay's
Constituci�n y vida del pueblo espa�ol (1905) or Gustavo de Iglesias's El
alma espa�ola: Ensayo de una psicolog�a nacional (1908). In La Lectura in
1911 and 1912 Jos� Deleito y Pi�uela wrote two long pieces on El
sentimiento de tristeza en la literatura subsequently reprinted as a book
in 1920, shortly followed in 1925 by R. D. Silva Uzc�tegui's Historia
cr�tica del modernismo en la literatura castellana. (Psicopatolog�a de los
corifeos del modernismo). Wherever one looks, in major or minor creative
artists, in literary criticism and commentary, in caricatures in reviews,
in moralists and detractors, even in the essays of literary historians, the
discourse of the science of medicine underlies or forms the substrate for
their vocabulary, their metaphors and images, even the basis and form of
their arguments.

Clearly, as has been suggested, all these echoes of what was, arguably, the
major scientific discipline of the day reflect the response of other forms
of intellectual endeavour to it, they testify to a type of symbiotic
relationship (if I may be permitted the biological term) with the dominant
one. But are these sufficient grounds to explain this phenomenon? Why is it
that the critics are, in the main, the first to employ terms more
appropriate to medicine rather than the discourse of aesthetics? Why is it
that the creative artists almost simultaneously take up the same discourse?
Let us consider an example where an underlying process reveals itself very
clearly, one which may help answer these questions, one on which we might
focus and one which will go a long way to help towards an understanding of
the issue considered here.

Let us turn to the writings of one of the foremost fin de siglo writers in
the period between 1893 and 1908, the Nicaraguan poet Rub�n Dar�o. In an
essay, 'N��ez de Arce', collected in P�ginas del arte (1902), he relates
how, on the occasion of the visit to his house by N��ez de Arce, the
national and civic poet noticed a copy of Verlaine's Sagesse on a table.
Another guest, a Naturalist novelist, described by Dar�o ironically as 'uno
de los de la Plaga' (with a capital P), was prompted to ask the old man's
opinion of the French poets of the day. The reply is most revealing.

- Algunos, se�or, enfermos...

El prosigui� entonces, lleno de fuego nervioso, vibrante, con su
sonora voz personal, que resuena simp�tica:

- S�, esa es la palabra: enfermedad. Toda la literatura francesa

est� enferma, est� decadente, en el leg�timo sentido de la frase.
Esos neur�ticos, esos diab�licos est�n demostrando que la Francia
contempor�nea ha deca�do, en lo que a la poes�a toca, despu�s de
la muerte de V�ctor Hugo.9

Note the medical register - plague, illness, disease, degeneration - and

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the easy shift from 'neur�tico' (psychological) to 'diab�lico' (religious,

moral). Underlying his critical observation, a censorious ruling of the old
literary establishemnt which seeks to uphold, defend and impose its own
standards of artistic taste, lies the ill-diguised affirmation of the value
system of the Restoration and, beneath that, the hidden, (un)conscious
pressure of the authority and power of the discourse of the medical
scientist. We note that he makes no appeal to literary values at all.
Rather he adopts criteria which are readily identifiable with another
discipline. This may seem an unnecessary academic point but it takes us to
the heart of the matter. For those gathered in Dar�o's tertulia the choice
of such terms was natural (Dar�o even uses it ironically) and suggests that
they bear associations which may be lost to the modern reader. They reveal
an attitude which became progressively systematised during the final
decades of the nineteenth century as new views regarding the nature of art
and the role of the artist were to be shaped by a series of cultural forces
which were powerful enough to modify the criteria for literary judgement
which had held firm since the late 1830s. Derek Flitter's study of the
idealism of the response to the spiritual crisis of the late 1830s and his
recent article tracing the evolution of that idealism through Krausism up
to the end of the century establishes the necessary background against
which the changes I am describing took place.10 In what Dar�o reveals,
however, the remarks made must be related to the belief that the rapidly
developing discipline of psychopathology had an important part to play in
explaining the forces behind the creative impulse of the artist. Hence the
colouring in N��ez de Arce's terms. But there also remains the ageing
poet's comment that France has somehow lost its poetic preeminence, that it
has gone downhill, has, as he says, "degenerated". Now this viewpoint
brings us to another singular change in the way in which the world - and
literary creativity - was conceived.

Attention has been drawn to the colonisation by the discourse of medicine

of the literary and critical domain. Medicine, of course, was a highly
visible and a major means of diffusion, in the public mind, of the
scientific method and the theories through which it operated. It brought
the scientist (doctor) and the layman (patient) together; it studied
illness and, thus, life; it studied the material (and thus the tangible,
visible) body of man; it had a huge technological success in preventing the
spread of disease and in curing it. Along with the successes of civil
engineering, which made possible the rapid progress of high industrial
capitalism, medicine, too, brought huge social changes in the cities as
infection and disease were better understood and controlled. But the
advancement of medicine brought other singular changes in public attitudes
as it came into contact with other, new scientific theories. F. H.
Garrison's An Introduction to the History of Medecine (Philadelphia, 1929)
highlights one of the more important of them: 'The advancement of
scientific medecine in the second half of the nineteenth century was
characterized by the introduction of a biological or evolutionary view of
morphology and physiology ... [there] came new modes of seeing disease and
its causes' (51). Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Rudolf
Virchow's Die Cellular-patologie in ihrer B�grundung auf physiologische und
pathologische Geweblehre of the previous year were fundamental to this
change in emphasis. Their findings were given added scientific weight by
the work of Charcot. The work of these pioneers of modern psychology and
psychiatry highlighted the noble evolutionary struggle of man and the
materialistic physiology of his life and offered an explanation of them.
Interest shifted in medical studies from the description of mental states
to the neurological disorders and events behind them. The growing branch of
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science of comparative psychology was augmented by the work of Charles

Letourneau and Prosper Lucas11 who were strongly influential on the
Naturalist writers in Europe, especially in France. Added authority was
given to scholarly debate by Darwin's On the Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals (1872), which placed man at the top of the evolutionary
scale and made widely acceptable the notion of heredity, the mechanism
whereby traits are passed on, and especially mental and psychological
characteristics. The work of these scientists was well known to creative
writers, either directly, in translation or through critical essays on
them. This had its effect in the way Taine and Maurice Barr�s, and later
Unamuno and Ganivet, interpreted and tackled their several national crises
in terms of the 'soul' or 'spirit' or 'psychology' of the nation. Herbert
Ramsden has given more than adequate testimony to the Spanish dimension.12
Another significant impulse to this shift in attitude was made by B. A.
Morel's Trait� des d�g�n�rescences (1857) where psychopathology rather than
pathology was used to underpin a theory of degeneration, especially mental
degeneration. But the Trait� also identified as a particular cause for
concern 'les d�g�n�rescences fixes et permanentes, dont la pr�sence, au
milieu de la partie saine de la population, est un sujet de danger
incessant' (ix) (My italics). Mental degeneration, then, was viewed as a
bacterium which could infect the healthy body of society. Morel based his
view on evolutionary theory in that degeneration threatened the
evolutionary progress and the amelioration of the human race. It was
necessary, therefore, to confine or to eradicate factors which did not
favour man's advancement. Psychology and pathology, thus, embraced the idea
of evolutionary perfection; the struggle for life was the highest ideal. A
society which does not concern itself with its evolutionary health, Morel
seems to argue, is a society which is doomed. This is the substance of
N��ez de Arce's judgement of French poetry and, by extension, since French
models were widely imitated in the Peninsula, of Spanish poetry too. It was
therefore the duty of society to ensure that man fulfilled his true destiny
and the clinician could assist in the process. Failure or inability to
participate in the process of advancement became the basis for the
definition of degeneration and abnormality. In the competetive world of
European high capitalism notions of normality and abnormality in all
sectors of human endeavour acquired favourable or unfavourable overtones
respectively. Such terms had lost the dispassionate and objective
scientific tenor of empiricism and had acquired a moral and ideological
significance: normal = good; abnormal = bad. A binary had been established
which privileged the one and marginalised the other. The potential of
medicine to generate a system of moral values and an order of social
usefulness (that is, of control and authority) had been realized. Where
before the doctor could only act crudely to incarcerate or confine, now he
could 'criminalize', stigmatize and contain in a less obvious way. The
binary construct of normal (healthy, good, approved, acceptable) and
abnormal (degenerate, bad, rejected, unacceptable) had come into being.
Objective scientific method had been transformed into a question of social
value and morals. Empiricism and scientific enquiry had become the exercise
of power.

What is clear is that we cannot explain this phenomenon in terms of the

history of vogues and fashions where one area of culture simply adopts the
language of another, even if the second is a powerful one. The process is
neither an innocent nor a causal one. Indeed, an historicist explanation or
any attempt to adduce a system of homogeneous relationships in favour of a
general history, seems most inapproriate here. Rather we might seek to
employ the model set out by Michel Foucault in various essays, but most
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notably his Histoire de la folie (1961), translated in 1965 as Madness and

Civilisation. Foucault's thesis is that, up until the classical age, the
mad and the insane were allowed to circulate with relative freedom since
they were held to possess hidden truths about the human condition and,
thus, not beyond humankind. In the classical age their Unreason prohibited
their entry into the category of human Reason and, as such, they were
exiled by a process of internment. The many asylums which sprang up in the
late-seventeenth century and after were not simply medical institutions but
juridical ones attached to the central power of the day. This gesture of
segregation, for reasons philosphical, economic and ideological, produced
the figure of the asocial. The aura of the visionary and the imaginative
which had surrounded unreason, for all the Romantic exaltation of the
visionary imagination as a token of individual liberty, became an
identifiable and discrete object of perception, a quasi-objectivity in a
real social world and one which could be subjected to concrete propositions
for control. When Foucault comes to the nineteenth century he claims that
the advances of positivistic medicine are underpinned by the
Enlightenment's belief that the essential unity of man is made up of the
juridical theory of madness based on the person as a subject of law,
exempted from responsibilities, and as a subject of society implicated by
his madness in the field of culpability. In terms of the psychpathology of
the nineteenth century, Foucault argues, the madman is not situated in a
natural space but in a social, juridical and medical system. What began as
social reform ends up as the constraint of freedom. The process, Foucault
suggests, is a double movement of liberation and enslavement. While
psychiatric positivism is linked to the pursuit of knowledge, in effect it
seeks to fix a mode of being outside madness. Its apparent empirical aim
disguises its status as an arm of bourgeois power since madness is placed
in a field of perpetual judgement, either inciting the insane to remorse so
that they might return to a status of free and responsible subjects or
confining them to the margins of society as dangerous aberrations. In fine,
what Foucault argues is that a dominant culture maintains its status first
by relegating differences to oppositions and then by 'a ritual of division'
and 'exclusion' it forcefully condemns one pole of the binary contrast to
silence and confinement. The powerful institution forces expression into
straightjackets of permissibility, into architected places of confinement.
The doctor, the scientist and his locus of power, the asylum, represent
authoritarian control. Their discourses are rooted in that power.

It has been suggested that the discourses of medicine had permeated the
critical essay as early as the mid 1880s in Spain. In the novels and essays
of Gald�s, Valera, Pardo Baz�n, Clar�n, Emilio Bobadilla and others less
well-known the discourses of pathology and, more often, psychopathology are
commonly used. One of the major sources was, almost certainly, the writings
of Cesare Lombroso: Genio e follia (1864), (later expanded as L'uomo di
genio [1888]: French translation 1889), L'uomo delinquente (1876) and Genio
e degenerazione (1897). His work were a huge success and his prolific
studies went through many editions in the major European languages,
including Spanish.13 Lombroso was one of the first to use scientific,
psychological terms for literary criticism and for the study of creative
artists. His principal subject was Charles Baudelaire whose work is used as
a casebook for symptoms of disorders of the psyche. Indeed, there lurks a
very sinister aspect in the way in which Lombroso uses his scientific
discourse to 'control', 'confine' 'differentiate' and (rarely) privilege
his subjects. Literature was simply used as documentary evidence of
disorder and degeneration rather than the experimental field of the
writer's body itself. In the 1830s the Romantic writer was seen as a
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visionary figure, a member of what Eugenio de Ochoa, in 1835, called 'la

aristocracia de la sensibilidad'. By 1838 Campoamor saw the poet as tending
'a conmover las pasiones del hombre para hacerle virtuoso' and Salas y
Quiroga, in tune with Shelley's effusions in the Defence of Poetry,
conceived the poet as a social engineer.14 Nevertheless, literature (and
the writer) were also seen as able to cure wounds, console the sick, able
to provide "el b�lsamo celestial que la Providencia derrama sobre las
sociedades moribundas e infestadas, para infundirles nuevas fuerzas, para
cicatrizar sus heridas para purificar la sangre de sus venas, y para
restituir la alegr�a y el consuelo al seno de los pueblos afligidos y
desesperanzados".15 Soon, in the circles of the Krausists the poet was a
high-priest and therapist of art capable of inaugurating a process of
social regeneration. The underlying theme, of course, was organicist,
betraying yet again the constant presence in the nineteenth century of
scientific concepts and discourses. Yet, just thirty years later, in a
reversal of this tide of idealism, Lombroso saw the 'genius' in very
different terms. For him the modern literary artist was to become a patient
in the clinician's surgery. The creative writer was, for Lombroso, a
classic case of psychological, even psycho-pathological, degeneracy since
he manifested latent forms of neurosis and madness. For Lombroso,
'inspiration' in the man of genius was connected with degenerative
insanity. 'The creative power of genius', he wrote, 'may be a form of
psychosis belonging to the family of epileptic afflictions', 'the effective
sensibility, that loss of moral sense, [is] common to all men of genius'.16
It was this type of attitude which underpinned Valera's statement in 'Fines
del arte fuera del arte' when he expressed the misgivings quoted earlier.
To avoid the suspicion of a lack of 'objectivity' and iconoclasm in his
'scientific' methodology Lombroso formulated his theory as a scientific
'fact'. The link between genius and insanity, he argued, was a fact of
evolutionary biology since it obeyed the theory of compensation: 'it has
been in losing these advantages [of lower animal forms] that we have gained
our intellectual superiority. [...] Just as giants pay a heavy ransom for
their stature in sterility ... and mental weakness, so the giants of
thought expiate their intellectual force in degeneration and psychoses. It
is thus that the signs of degeneration are found more frequently in men of
genius than even in the insane' (v-vi). We might note, en passant, the
force of that 'expiate' with its resonances of Original Sin, another theme
which lurked within the discourse of the theory of evolution in the
nineteenth century, notably in the writings of Charles Darwin and Francis
Galton. When Lombroso goes on, a few pages later, to state that 'the normal
man is not the man of letters or of learning, but the man who works and
eats' (ix), we can see just how far the discourse of power has come in
setting aside, marginalising and isolating those who indulge in 'aesthetic'
or 'literary' pursuits. The containment derives from the authority of
medicine but the effect is social and cultural. The inspired literary
artist, that is the artist who expressed thoughts unacceptable to the
central consensual authority, had been quarantined. In fact, as Lombroso's
argument develops, we note how 'normality' ceases to be portrayed in terms
of psycho-pathology and comes to be characterised with reference to
behavioural qualities and intellectual virtues: loyalty, patriotism,
constancy, perseverance, moderation, soberness, equilibrium of the
faculties, etc.; that is, the embodiment, in terms of conduct, of the moral
and social precepts and aspirations of establishment thought. Abnormality
is the stated or unstated absence of them. The genius becomes a moral
renegade, incapable of respecting moral codes. In Lombroso's words: 'Men of
genius are lacking in tact, in moderation, in the sense of practical life,
in the virtues which are alone recognised as real and which alone are
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useful in social affairs' (x). Who sanctions the 'recognition'? Who decides
what is 'real' or what is 'useful'?

But it was Max Nordau's Entartung (1893), translated into French in the
following year as D�g�n�rescence and widely read and quoted in Spain long
before Nicol�s Salmer�n's translation, Degeneraci�n, in 1902, which also
powerfully conditioned the discursive formations of the age and the
language of literary judgement. Again we find an anti-French animus.
Baudelaire reappears as the enfant terrible of creative writers and his
works once more serve as experimental data for analysis. Among the many
abnormalities manifest in Baudelaire's character, Nordau lays emphasis on
his 'ego-mania' and its effect in alienating the sufferer. For Nordau the
artist-genius is a case of arrested development. Proper consciousness
flourishes in healthy human beings and it is important for society, the
individual and the true, scientific and evolutionary destiny of mankind
that psychological development should follow its natural course. Thus
Nordau states: 'Not till he attains to altruism is man in a condition to
maintain himself in society and in nature'.17

A second, more dangerous, condition was a perversion of the natural,

healthy instincts and a loss of the moral sense, often accompanied by a
predilection for evil: 'the patient is attracted by, and feels delight in
acts which fill the sane man with disgust and horror' (260). The
artist-genius, for Nordau, is an evolutionary failure. The artist is 'above
all restraints of morality and law' (265). He lists further degenerative
features citing each symptom as proof of anomalies or abnormalities in the
sexual nerve centres or as products of an impaired nervous system. For
these 'scientific' reasons, French poets and their works were dismissed as
degenerate abnormalities. Supposed scientific, empirical enquiry becomes
moral condemnation and social quarantine as well as very suspect literary
criticism. We witness the discursive formation of one profession, that of
medicine and psychology, shaping that of critical commentary and, through
it, stating the hegemony of the centre, exerting its control, its
authority, confining and marginalising the 'other'.

While many, including Leopoldo Alas and Pardo Baz�n, were suspicious of
Nordau's methodology (even though they agreed , in varying degrees at
different moments, with his opinion of modern poetic trends in France and
unconsciously absorbed his language) the influence of Nordau's discursive
formations was soon apparent. The year after Entartung, Pompeyo Gener's
Literaturas malsanas of 1894 sought to classify 'los estados anormales de
la literatura contempor�nea que constituye verdaderos casos patol�gicos'
(5). For the Catalan the fundamental responsibility of any individual - and
especially the writer and intellectual - and any society is to progress
towards its most perfect form by fulfilling its evolutionary potential.
'Nuestro m�s alto deber es la elaboraci�n del Hombre superior, en Fuerza,
en Belleza, en Justicia, en Ciencia' (380). Literature, wrote Gener,
because of its 'acci�n altamente comunicativa', had a central role in
achieving evolutionary designs: 'hacer una obra de Arte, hacer un buen
libro, es tarea superior a la de criar un hijo. El artista, el literato, es
un acumulador de fuerza nerviosa que debe ser para vivificar, para
reconfortar, para superiorizar a los dem�s' (382). There is a strong
influence of Krausist teaching in these words but they are taken to a
supposed empirical and deterministic limit of which Giner de los R�os,
Coss�o or Rubio would have disapproved since their own emphasis was on the
spiritual model which good aesthetic practice and strong ethical behaviour
might achieve among the masses. Something of Gener's idea, but with a
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different slant, is soon to be found in the writings of Angel Ganivet and

Miguel de Unamuno. By 1900 it was something of a commonplace. Literature,
like people, argues Gener, was prone to disease and degenerate tendencies.
In contemporary literature, as Jos� Llanas Aguilaniedo was to argue in Alma
contempor�nea (Huesca, 1899), Gener found anti-evolutionary forms which
'contradicen a los elementos vitales de nuestra civilizaci�n europea, y ...
responden a sus deviaciones morbosas' (4). Negative sentiments, attitudes
and patterns of behaviour - all symptoms of psychological degeneration -
could have dire physiological consequences in society. Such forms, Gener
went on, were anti-social, immoral. 'Todo lo que propenda a deprimir la
vida, a desesperanzar, acortar la serie del esfuerzo, a matar la evoluci�n,
a disminuir la personalidad, a rebajar el impulso humano, a hacer aceptable
el sufrimiento, ES MALSANO, CRIMINAL Y PUNIBLE, POR DELITO DE LESA
HUMANIDAD. ... S�panlo los escritores y los artistas; el que produce una
impresi�n deprimiente, es un envenenador y, por tanto, un asesino' (381).
In other words, finisecular literature, filled as it was with pessimism,
doubt and expressions of despair, was, in effect, a blow against the body
moral and politic of Spain (in all its resonances), a statement of criminal
intent. We move from the discourse of medicine to a decided privileging of
the Transgression - Punishment relation, the juridical. We move nearer to
the discourse of legality and justice, we move towards that aspect of the
asylum which Foucault was to call 'the carceral society'.

This, then, is the archival background to the increasingly virulent

diatribes by the 'gente vieja' against the new, young, progressive and
'modernist' writers of the period 1895 to 1914 and, as has been argued
elsewhere,18 of the historians of literature who arbitrarily divided the
finisecular movement into those who were to be marginalised (the
modernistas) and those who were centred with approval (the Generation of
1898). At the same time they also falsified the history of modernismo with
the "invention" of Rub�n Dar�o as the founder and leader of that movement
in Spain. Indeed, in the ideological offensive which was mounted in Spain
between about 1895 and 1905 to confront and contain the new subversive
literature now known as modernismo (properly the Spanish Symbolist
Decadence), the language of medicine and the discourses of Nordau and
Lombroso and their camp followers are ever present. In 1905, Emilio
Ferrari, as we have noted, adopted the same ground as Lombroso when he
attacked a 'generaci�n de indigentes atacada del delirio de las grandezas'.
Three years later, Andr�s Gonz�lez Blanco, with others, began the campaign
to promote the conservative poet Salvador Rueda as the 'first'
modernista.19 Rueda, as argued elsewhere,20 was far from a modernista in
the proper sense of Modernist, progressive, liberal, experimental,
dissident. If anything, Rueda, with his latter-day espousal of the theories
of Leibnitz, was deeply conservative and Catholic. From the moment of
initial and, in retrospect, na�ve sympathy with the young writers, Jim�nez,
Villaespesa, even Dar�o, in 1899, he soon found himself in growing sympathy
with the gente vieja and began to attack his erstwhile colleagues and
friends and sided with Ferrari's anathemas. It is not surprising, given the
pervasive influence of the medical sciences, to find Rueda attacking the
gente joven in these terms: 'Hay que tirar pu�ados de cloruro de cal
antifranc�s en deredor del gran surco y sanear el aire americanizado de
imitaciones barriolatinescas'.21 The only method to rid Madrid of the
stench and corruption of the Latin American Dar�o and his adopted French
literary manners, a variant bacillus of the Plaga N��ez de Arce had railed
at over fifteen years before, was to adopt the procedures of the
gravediggers of the years of the Black Death or of the cholera epidemics of
the nineteenth century: throw on large quantities of quicklime and
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disinfectants. By 1910 the battle against the gente joven had been lost.
Yet, in the same year, a new campaign had begun to re-write literary
history. 'Azor�n' had written the first of a series of articles which
brought the notion of the Generation of 1898 into being.22 Very soon, as
Blasco Pascual and the present writer have argued,23 a process had begun
which was, effectively, to marginalise the Symbolist-Decadence aspect of
the Modernist experiment in Spain. Even Manuel Machado, whose experiments
in Symbolist writing had dazzled his contemporaries, for reasons still
incompletely understood,24 was to turn against his erstwhile progressive
allegiances to attack and explain away their idealistic intentions. In so
doing he readily turned to the discourses which continued to colour and
shape the expression of the contending ideologies of the period. Machado
was at pains to explain away a phase which, clearly, had become an
embarrassment. Supported by the Ministruy of Education and Propaganda and
shortly to join the staff of the State-controlled Cuerpo Facultativo de
Archiveros, he carefully neuters the threat of the ideology of the
modernistas and, with a dextrous sleight of hand. He not only turns
political dissent into artisitic individualism, but calls up the spirit of
Cesare Lombroso and those who readily accepted his findings and employed
his methods, when they argued that the genius, as an evolutionary error,
had had to pay for his intellectual superiority with degenerative and
anti-social weaknesses. Having suggested that 'anarqu�a' was the prevailing
characteristic of modernismo, he hastily attempted a corrective. 'No hay
que asustarse de esta palabra pronunciada en su �nico sentido posible. S�lo
los esp�ritus cultivad�simos y poseedores de las sapiencias del arte pueden
ser an�rquicos, es decir, individuales, personal�simos, pero enti�ndese
bien, an�rquicos y no anarquistas' (42). In effect, Machado wants the
argument both ways. He recognises, as a former 'anarchist' among the gente
joven, that modernismo was transgressive, artistically, ideologically,
morally and, in many ways, politically. Yet, by 1910-1912, he had changed
his allegiances and turned, conscious or unconsciously, to the discourses
of disapprobation which had formerly been used to attack him and which,
now, had begun to colour his own analysis. But what of the 'gente joven',
the artists themselves?

We should not forget that the way in which discourses of power operate is
by and through binary differentiation: normal / abnormal; health / disease;
useful / harmful; evolving / fixed; etc.. But, power, as Foucault reminds
us, always has a double effect: it is negative in its effect insofar as it
constrains both those at the top and those at the bottom in frozen gestures
of domination and submission; but because this inevitably leads to
counter-strategies of evasion and subversion it cannot help but also be
productive.

For, if it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a

permanent condition of their existence there is an
insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of
the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power
without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power
relationship implies, at least in potential, a strategy of
struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not
lose their specific nature, do not finally become confused. Each
constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of
possible reversal.25

In other words, since every will to power (disguised as a will to

knowledge: medical, theological, artistic, etc.) cannot but meet with
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opposition from other wills, oppression must perforce open channels for its
own subversion. The margin depends on and is inseparable from the hegemony
of the centre; there can be no separability, immersed as they both are in
the discursive formation, even though it might be at a point of rupture and
discontinuity.

It is appropriate now to trace the development of the counter response to

the discursive threat described in the first part of this essay. Let us
begin with the Romantic vision of the poet alluded to earlier. In 1857 the
high priest of Krausism, Juli�n Sanz del R�o, exhorted his fellow teachers
in the Universidad Central of Madrid with these words: 'Deb�is honrar
vuestra ense�anza con el testimonio de vuestra conducta y defenderla como
la religi�n de vuestro estado'26. Social example and priestly function.
Within two decades the majority of his circle had been excathedrised and
had taken the first steps to establish the Instituci�n Libre de Ense�anza,
the most effective of the dissenting circles for the rest of the century
and beyond. By that time the organicist relation between poet and society
and its dress borrowed from the discourse of theology and medicine had
undergone a subtle transformation. Now the new theory of evolution and its
attendant doctrine of determinism had taken precedence. The Romantic notion
of the poet as a visionary social engineer with an aura of therapeutic
divinity had undergone a metamorphosis in the light of evolutionary
science: 'sin duda, es todav�a muy limitado el n�mero de los hombres que
viven en tal esp�ritu, o para decirlo de otra suerte, con una vida
verdaderamente humana; acaso en los m�s duerma aun esa voz interior. Es ley
que todo despertamiento se inicie siempre en una minor�a; y tal vez a la
hora en que estamos ... esa vida ideal es monopolio de una peque�a
aristarqu�a, en medio de una inmensa demagog�a de vientre'.27 The speaker
is Giner de los R�os, but it might have been Jos� Enrique Rod� with his
opposition of a repugnant democracy of material concerns with a rapidly
evolving aristocracy of elevated ideals28 set out in Ariel in 1900 or
Baroja, in 'Contra la democracia' of the year before, who contrasted
Liberty and conscience with Socialism and stomachs. Indeed, their attitude
is very similar to that of the English intellectuals described by John
Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London, Faber, 1992). In these writers,
and especially the Spanish writers, the marginalised men of imagination are
presented not as a hindrance to evolution but as the very propellent
itself. They highlight the positive aspects of evolutionism praised by
Gener and avoid the degenerative tendencies he categorises as dangerous.
Very soon the essential link between the Romantic idea of the beneficent
and therapeutically organic role the literature of the visionary artist can
play and the discourses of psychopathology and evolutionism is made. Angel
Ganivet (neurotic and suicide for some) had initially overlaid aesthetics
upon the theme of ethical, moral, social and, above all, spiritual
regeneration of the individual and the nation. In 1897, Los trabajos del
infatigable creador P�o Cid he spoke in terms of 'el arte de vivir ... el
arte de trabajar'. 'Lo bello ser�a obrar sobre el esp�ritu de los hombres'.
But he added an evolutionist tone. 'Los h�roes del porvenir triunfar�n en
secreto, dominando invisiblemente el esp�ritu y suscitando en cada esp�ritu
un mundo ideal'29. Contact with Nature and Art will, he adds, speed the
evolutionary process of this spiritual renewal. But he went on to elaborate
the idea that men like P�o Cid (that is, men like himself and other
sympathetic progressive intellectuals) were exceptional in evolutionary
terms. These 'genios' were, in effect, 'redentores' (note the theological
pressure again), but they possessed a special nervous or spiritual quality
which he calls 'unidad ps�quica'. In a letter to his friend Navarro
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Ledesma, shortly before his suicide in 1898, he elaborated on the theme and
revealed that the driving spirit he had attempted to describe was, in fact,
a process: 'la ley fundamental del universo no es la atracci�n, es la
psicofan�a o sea la manifestaci�n gradual del esp�ritu'.30 The end of the
process, he asserted, was the evolutionary transformation of man into a
ps�cope, a new type of being whose only developed faculty would be his
brain, converted into an organ of transcendental spiritual vision. Every
effort by individuals to ennoble man spiritually was part of this
evolutionary process. In the same year, 1898, after a reading of Idearium
espa�ol, Unamuno wrote to Ganivet: 'En tal estado de cosas (the looming
national crisis), al contacto espiritual con obras como su Idearium, se
fortifica el �nimo el santo impulso de la sinceridad'.31 He had already
spoken of a chosen few of 'm�dicos espirituales' who were capable of
diagnosing the ills of the nation and prescribing the necessary remedy in
En torno al casticismo in 1895. In 1901 he wrote of Manuel Machado's Alma:
'que ... el poeta me haga so�ar y refresque con recuerdos mis esperanzas.
Se lo debo al poeta'32. But the underlying force of Unamuno's arguments in
his essays on the profound pessimism and scepticism of inspired poets like
Machado and Silva, at this time, is one which subordinates the messianic
and Romantic idea of the artist as guide and planner for the future to the
idea that the artist has special spiritual, or rather psychological and
mental powers, insights which can plumb the very depths of the human
condition and expose it unflinchingly for what it is. The 'm�dico
espiritual' of the 1890s, who was able to diagnose the ills of Spain and
prescribe adequate remedies for them, now becomes a sort of confessor and
psychological clinician, a man who can expose to the patient the burden of
his anguish and convert that pain into a positive force for life. The
'hombre ag�nico', born from the 'hombre contemplativo', can offer a 'cure'
as well as a redemption. The artist-genius can regenerate (rather than
degenerate) the spiritual strength of the nation. The whole thrust of
Unamuno's work could be described as that of a dissecting clinician laying
bare the nerves and sinews of the soul of Spain. Just as the anatomist
seeks the nature of life in a body so Unamuno seeks it in the soul, a view
he expressed clearly in 1902: 'Avanza, pues, en las honduras de tu esp�ritu
y descubrir�s cada d�a nuevos horizontes'33. His work is filled with
references to and images of inner structures, often human physical and
anatomical structures, evidence once more of the pressure of the discourse
of the life sciences.

In 1900, the young Juan Ram�n Jim�nez, turning the tables on the anticuados
and the viejos who were pillorying the new generation and himself,
described the ruling class in terms of degeneracy, 'sociedad soez, rastrera
que ... sumi� otra vez en sus inmundos vicios el lijero soplo de alma, ...
miseria escondida que ... corrompe'(LPr, 214) Man's Ideal is undermined and
frustrated by the degenerate majority who lack the special spiritual ideals
of the artist. 'La juventud intelectual espa�ola', a group who, through
superior qualities of mind and of evolved aesthetic refinement must stand
separate from the corrupted masses, could, he argues, effect a
transformation. The supposedly degenerate artist and his creative work
were, in fact, the only hope for evolution. By 1902 Jim�nez was on the
offensive: 'hab�a que so�ar a la poes�a como una acci�n, como una fuerza
espiritual que anhelando ser m�s, desenvolvi�ndose en s� misma, creara con
su propia esencia una vida nueva'34. Note the mixture of religious pietism
and evolutionary science. Indeed, his prologue to Villaespesa's La copa del
rey de Thule of 1900 had established the law of evolution as the major
feature of his age and of all endeavour, especially artistic endeavour. In
1904 he recorded in a letter to Dar�o that he had created the magazine
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Helios specifically as 'un alimento espiritual'35. Note the organicist

image with its religious overlay. In the same year the aesthetic Azor�n
argued that 'este arte inutilitario e incorruptible ... tiene una utilidad
�nica, excepcional, maravillosa, suprema'. It will make men better by its
appeal to the higher senses and to the spirit; it will create 'una nueva
conciencia social'36. In effect, this is a restatement of what Salas y
Quiroga, Ochoa and Pastor D�az had been saying in the late 1830s but now
with an more powerful gloss of evolutionism, medicine and the life
sciences. Again, in the same year, 1904, we find Antonio Machado arguing,
against Pompeyo Gener, that psychological depression can be a positive
factor in the regeneration of a society:

Existe hoy m�s traj�n espiritual, y un buen deseo de saber, de

ense�ar, de trabajar, que en la �poca anterior a nuestros
desastres definitivos (before 1898). Injusticia ser�a negar la
labor que realiza la juventud: todos, aunque por diversos
caminos, vamos en busca de mejor vida. [...] Y los gestos de
compunci�n, de tristeza, de melancol�a, y las palabras pla�ideras
y eleg�acas de la juventud m�s l�rica �qu� son sino expresi�n del
mismo descontento y ansia de nueva vida?

From the late 1890s onwards in the poetry of Francisco A. de Icaza, Jos�
S�nchez Rodr�guez, Juan Ram�n, Mart�nez Sierra, Antonio Machado himself and
others there is a marked emphasis on the inner world of spiritual suffering
and of the creative imagination. This can be explained, of course, in terms
of the impact of Romanticism and Symbolism. However, in addition, it could
be argued that the new sciences of pathology, physiology and psychology
also had much to do with the process. In Examen de cr�ticos of 1894 Icaza
argued that the artist needs to understand 'la emoci�n est�tica'(42). He
went on, specifically, to link artistic endeavour and the psychic or
imaginative inner life: 'Pues, hay dentro de la vida del arte mucho [...]
de nuestra vida interior' (42). Nearly a decade later this idea had been
further clarified into a statement which is strongly coloured by the
scientific theories of von Hartman and Wundt, clinician philosophers who
were widely discussed in the serious journals of the fin de siglo. The
critic E. G�mez Baquero, in 1902, noted that the major theme of the poetry
of the day was 'el sentimiento de y c�mo las ra�ces del sentimiento
penetran a la parte inconsciente de nuestro ser... [...] pues lo
inconsciente es m�s nuestro, es m�s nuestro propio yo que el conocimiento,
en que s�lo ponemos el espejo para reflejar cosas ajenas'.38 This critic
was very sensitive to the processes of change in the literary world of the
fin de siglo. Earlier, in the same article, he had argued that 'El progreso
mental ha hecho que el sentido est�tico se intelectualice (sic). [...]
Pretenden tambi�n los modernistas remozar el fondo psicol�gico de la
poes�a. [...] No deja de ser resbaladizo este terreno de la nueva psiquis,
y es muy explicable que algunos de los modernistas se deslicen en sus
psicologismos. [...] Su asunto principal es el sentimiento'(168). Not the
world of empirical knowledge (pathology) but the world of the unconscious
(psychology). It would seem that these poets and writers were engaged in
more than an artistic revolution. They seem to have been occupied in the
task of discovering an alternative way of understanding the human condition
through the experimental sciences of medicine and psychology which were
mediated through their writings. In the same year, 1902, for example, in a
critical article on Manuel de Palacios Olmedo (note 34), Juan Ram�n Jim�nez
deliberately declined to speak of the work preferring rather to address his
friend's inner self, his "alma". "Sue�a mucho dentro de la vida", he noted,
"[e]n todo esto se adivina el predominio del cerebro". An understanding of
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this faculty, he went on to argue, would bring about a revolutionary change

in the way men perceive the world and would usher in "una vida de amor y de
piedad". By 1905, after the experiments in laying bare the inner world of
the creative spirit and the mental anguish of spiritual despair set out in
collections like Alma, Soledades, Rimas and Arias tristes, Mart�nez Sierra
wrote a series of essays, collected in Motivos (1905), and later refined in
La vida inquieta (Glosario espiritual) (1913), investigating further the
nature of artistic sensibility and man's inner life. He concluded,
revealingly, that 'las emociones intelectuales ... son las emociones
contempor�neas' (27).

If we study the novels and the essays of Azor�n, Baroja, P�rez de Ayala and
others we find a similar process, but one with other emphases. Much of the
religious gloss disappears - although Azor�n does describe his literary
alter ego as a 'mystical atheist' and Baroja's Ossorio passes through a
decidedly heterodox 'mystical' phase - to be replaced with an aura of
psychological 'spirituality'. Yet that spirituality is again strongly
coloured by the discourse of pathology (arguably the impact of Naturalism)
and psychology. We might recall the editorial note to Diario de un enfermo
with its claim that the confessional notes form an insight into an 'alma',
a spiritual and mental landscape. In the case of these writers the
artist-hero is seen as a 'perturbado', an 'hist�rico', a 'degenerado' an
'angustiado artista', but also an 'alma vidente'. Their enterprise is one
allied to that of the poets, to chart the workings of a mind disturbed by a
national crisis, the loss of faith and ideals, a loss of trust in human
relations, a loss of a sense of vital directions. Rather than turn inwards
into the mind to the exclusion of reality itself they seek to situate their
clinical subjects in a what passes for a real physical world and in a
specific social and political context. Yet, for all the apparent realism,
as Herbert Ramsden has shown with regard to Baroja's La busca,39 the real
locus of their search is the mind of their subjects. And their search, as
we have seen from the quotations at the outset of the present essay, is
rooted in the discourse of medicine. Again we might interpret this
phenomenon as a response to those attacks and the marginalising discourses
of the 'gente vieja'. They take on the centre with its own discourse of
power. Rather than see their fictional characters as evolutionary failures,
even psycho-pathological degenerates, they present them as men of insight
and vision, potential leaders or, as Baroja suggests at the end of El �rbol
de la ciencia (1910), as precursors. They also take refuge in the idea
which is suggested in the title of P�rez de Ayala's novel, La pata de la
raposa, that the most superior are those, like the fox who lost his tail,
who are different from other men, who have been scarred by life and, yet,
lived to tell the tale.

The poles have been reversed, the discourse of the centre subverted by
itself. The discourses of the sciences of biology and physiology appear
continuously in the metaphor of spiritual 'nourishment' or 'growth'. The
'degenerate' artist is the single possible hope for mankind since he is the
most evolved. The new Modernist art is no longer a dangerous and infectious
bacillus, a 'Plaga' which will undermine the 'body' of society nor is the
artist 'abnormal' but 'natural', no longer "sick" (thus immoral), but life
giving (hence highly moral, even ethical). The Modernist (rather than
modernista and noventayochista) artist can bring spiritual regeneration,
new cultural life, a new sense of purpose, can save Spain and his fellow
men (note 23).

Thus we can view the literary debates of the fin de siglo and the histories
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of Spanish finisecular literature in a new perspective. We are forced to

reject the versions of a totalizing history in favour of an analysis of the
flow of discursive formations and the discourses which arise out of them.
Only rarely is the central discourse concerned with aesthetic problems,
colonised, adulterated and distorted as it is by the pressure and power of
other discourses. Thus the debate between the 'gente vieja' and the 'gente
joven' is not so much about literary styles or content, rather it is about
power and control. Nor is it appropriate to speak of two antagonistic
generations. I have sought to show how the discourses of the unconscious
speak through the conscious, how it conditions and shapes what is said. My
reading is an advance, in Foucault's words, 'in the direction of that
fundamental region in which the relations of representation and finitude
come into play'40. My reading is also an attempt to show the unreliability
of the 'history' of literature, a reminder that what is being said does not
only operate at the level of that which is (apparently) empirically
reducible to categorisation, of constitution into 'movements' or
'generations'. It is when we recognise the discursive formations for what
they are and for what they signify that the full richness of a literary
period becomes apparent. Neither 'literature' nor 'history', nor 'literary
history' are entities which can stand separate, innocent, inviolable from
the discursive formations and the 'archaeology of knowledge' of the age in
which they have their being. In recognising the power and the pressure of
dominating discourses, especially that of the natural sciences and medicine
in the late-nineteenth century, we perceive how seamless is the web of
literature, philosophical ideas, science, ideologies, etc. in any age, and
particularly in the fin de siglo in Spain.41

Notes

1. ('Azor�n'), J. Mart�nez Ruiz, Obras completas (Madrid, Aguilar, 1947),

I, 700.
2. P. Baroja, Obras completas (Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 1946-1951), VI,
10.
3. Juan Ram�n Jim�nez, Libros de prosa (Madrid, Aguilar, 1969), 91.
(Hereinafter LPr.)
4. ('Clar�n'), L. Alas, 'Baudelaire', La Ilustraci�n Ib�rica (1887),
reprinted in Mezclilla (Madrid, 1889), v.
5. Jules Bernard Luys (1828-1897) studied in the famous Salpetri�re
asylum in Paris as a physiologist but soon began to experiment in
mental pathology. His works were well known in Spain: Recherches sur
le syst�me nerveux c�rebro-spinale (1865); Le Cerveau et ses fonctions
(1875); Le�ons sur la structure et les maladies du syst�me nerveux
(1875); Trait� clinique et pratique (1881); Traitement de la folie
(1894). Spanish translations include: El cerebro y sus funciones, trs
J. Ortega y Garc�a (Madrid, 1878); Tratado cl�nico y pr�ctico de las
enfermedades mentales, trs V�ctor Cebri�n y D�ez (Madrid, 1891).
Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) was one of the outstanding figures in the
foundation of psychiatric medicine and mental illness which he related
to physical causes. He founded a hospital which bears his name. His
major works were translated into Spanish at an early date: The
Pathology of Mind (1867); Body and Mind (1870); Responsibility of
Mental Diseases (1874); Physiology of Mind (1876); Pathology of Mind
(1879); Body and Will (1883); The New Psychology (1900). Spanish
translations included: Fisiolog�a del esp�ritu, trs A. Ocina y
Aparicio (Madrid, 1880), El crimen y la locura, trs A. Ib��ez Abell�n
(Madrid, 1880); La patolog�a de la inteligencia, trs A. Ram�rez y F.
Fontecha (Madrid, 1880) and Responsabilidad del hombre en las
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enfermedades mentales, trs A. Ram�rez y F. Fontecha (Madrid, 1881). El

crimen y la locura was also published in the Prometeo (Valencia)
series of cheaply produced scientific and philosophical books which
ensured a wide dissemination.
6. F. Santander y G�mez, Historia del progreso cient�fico, art�stico y
literario en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1895), 320.
7. J. Valera, 'Fines del arte fuera del arte' (1896), Obras completas
(Madrid, Aguilar,1942), 1068.
8. E. Ferrari, Discursos le�dos ante la Real Academia Espa�ola el d�a 30
de abril de 1905 (Madrid, Real Academia Espa�ola, 1905), 8.
9. Rub�n Dar�o, Obras completas (Madrid, Afrodisio Aguado, 1950), I,
664-65.
10. D. Flitter, Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1991; 'La misi�n regeneradora de la
literatura: del romanticismo al modernismo pasando por Krause', �Qu�
es el modernismo? Nueva encuesta, nuevas lecturas, ed. Richard A.
Cardwell and Bernard McGuirk (Boulder, Colorado: Society of Spanish
and Spanish American Studies, 1993), 127-46; 'Zorrilla, the Critics
and the Direction of Spanish Romanticism', Jos� Zorrilla (1893-1993):
Centennial Readings, ed. Richard A. Cardwell and Ricardo Landeira
(Nottingham, University of Nottingham Monographs in the Humanities,
vol. X, 1993), 1-15.
11. Charles Letourneau (1831-1902), Physiologie des passions (1868),
translated into Spanish by R. Ib��ez Abell�n as La fisiolog�a de las
pasiones (Barcelona, 1877) was widely read and discussed. His
Psychologie ethnique (1902) drew both determinist and racial theories
into the domain of experimental medicine. Dr Prosper Lucas (1805-1870)
was most famous for his Trait� philosophique et physiologique de
l'her�dit� naturelle (1850).
12. H. Ramsden, The 1898 Movement in Spain (Manchester, Manchester
University Press, 1974).
13. Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), Aplicaciones judiciales y m�dicas de la
antropolog�a criminal (Madrid, 1893); Medicina legal, trs P. Dorado
(Madrid, 1902); El delito, sus causas y sus remedios, Trs G. Bernardo
de Quir�s (Madrid, 1902); Los criminales, trs del Centro Editorial
Prensa (Madrid, 1911).
14. Eugenio de Ochoa, 'Introducci�n', El Artista, I (1830),1; Ram�n de
Campoamor, No me olvides, 3-4 (1837), reproduced in Pablo Caba�as, No
me olvides (Madrid, 1837-1838) (Madrid, Colecci�n de �ndices de
Publicaciones Period�sticas, CSIC, 2, 1946), 46-47; Jacinto Salas y
Quiroga, No me olvides, 1 (1837), in Caba�as, 98.
15. Nicomedes-Pastor D�az, Obras completas de Don Nicomedes-Pastor D�az,
Vol. I, ed. Jos� Mar�a Castro y Calvo (Madrid, Rivadeneyra, 1969),
103.
16. C. Lombroso, The Man of Genius (English translation) (London, W.
Scott, 1891), 336-37.
17. Max Nordau, Degeneration. Quoted from the reprint of the 1895 English
translation (New York, H. Fertig, 1968), 243.
18. "Una hermandad de trabajadores espirituales". Los discursos del poder
del modernismo en Espa�a', �Qu� es el modernismo? Nueva encuesta.
Nuevas lecturas, ed. Richard. A. Cardwell and B. J. McGuirk (Boulder,
Colorado: Society for Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 1993) and
'C�mo se escribe una historia. Rub�n Dar�o y el modernismo en Espa�a'
to appear in Marges (Crilaup, Universit� de Perpignan), 14 (1995).
19. A. Gonz�lez Blanco, Los grandes maestros. Salvador Rueda y Rub�n
Dar�o. Estudio c�clico de la poes�a espa�ola en los �ltimos tiempos
(Madrid, Pueyo, 1908). The post-script to this study gives some
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indication of the allegiances of the author: 'Comenz�se esta obra en

Madrid el d�a 12 de Octubre, festividad de Nuestra Se�ora del Pilar,
de a�o de gracia de mil novecientos ocho. Acab�se el 30 del mismo mes,
d�a en que se celebra a Nuestra Se�ora del Amparo, nombres los dos tan
resonantes y espa�oles; nombres de nuestras novias o de nuestras
hermanas; nombres sacrosantas y mil veces benditos que a todos nos
amparen y defiendan en la vida y en la muerte. Am�n.'
20. R. A. Cardwell, 'Rub�n Dar�o y Salvador Rueda: Dos versiones del
modernismo', Revista de Literatura, XLV, n�m 89 (1983),55-72.
21. Quoted in J. M. Mart�nez Cachero, 'Salvador Rueda y Rub�n Dar�o',
Bolet�n de la Biblioteca de Men�ndez y Pelayo, I (1958), 53.
22. 'Azor�n', J. Mart�nez Ruiz, 'Generaciones de escritores', O. C., IX,
1140-43.
23. J. Blasco Pascual, 'De "Or�culos" y "Cenicientas": La cr�tica ante el
fin de siglo espa�ol', �Qu� es el modernismo?, op. cit., 59-86; R. A.
Cardwell, 'Juan Ram�n, Ortega y los intelectuales', Hispanic Review,
53 (1985), 329-50; 'Introducci�n' to Juan Ram�n Jim�nez, Platero y yo
(Madrid, Austral, Espasa-Calpe, 1988) and '"Una hermandad de
trabajadores espirituales"...', quoted note 18 above.
24. See J. Blasco Pascual and M. P. Celma, 'Estudio cr�tico', Manuel
Machado. La guerra literaria 1898-1914 (Cr�tica y ensayo) (Madrid,
Bit�cora, 1981).
25. M. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow
(Brighton, Harvester Press, 1982), 225.
26. J. Sanz del R�o, 'Discurso pronunciado en la Universidad Central por
el doctor Juli�n Sanz del R�o ... en la solemne inauguraci�n del a�o
acad�mico de 1857 a 1858', quoted in K. Ch Krause, Ideal de la
humanidad para la vida (Madrid, Imp. de F. Mart�nez Garc�a, 1871),
344.
27. F. Giner de los R�os, Obras completas (Madrid, La Lectura, Espasa
Calpe, 1916-36), XVII, 150.
28. See H. Ramsden, 'Ariel �libro del 98?', Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos,
302 (1975), 446-55, for an interesting analysis of the evolutionist
cast of Rod�'s thinking.
29. A. Ganivet, Obras completas (Madrid, Aguilar, 1962), II, 436.
30. Quoted in the Ganivet Memorial issue of Revista de Occidente, III,
no.33 (1965), 98.
31. M. de Unamuno, Obras completas (Madrid, Afrodisio Aguado, 1951-63),
IV, 959.
32. Idem, V, 202. See also 'Almas de j�venes': 'Los versos de Antonio
Machado y Manuel Machado son de los m�s espirituales que puede hoy
leerse en Espa�a .... Yo veo la poes�a como un yunque de constante
actividad espiritual', III, 479.
33. Idem, 'Adentro', III, 420.
34. Juan Ram�n Jim�nez, 'Apuntes', Madrid C�mico, A�o XII, 24
(14-VI-1902).
35. 'Vamos a hacer una revista que sea alimento espiritual', quoted in D.
F. Fogelquist, The Literary Collaboration and the Personal
Correspondence of Rub�n Dar�o and Juan Ram�n Jim�nez (Coral Gables,
Fla, University of Miami, 1956), 13.
36. (Azor�n), J. Mart�nez Ruiz, Alma Espa�ola, 9 (3-I-1904), 4.
37. A. Machado, Poes�a y prosa, vol. III, ed. O. Macr� (Madrid,
Espasa-Calpe, 1988), 1480-81.
38. E. G�mez Baquero, 'Cr�nica literaria', La Espa�a Moderna, 159 (1902),
166-71.
39. H. Ramsden, P. Baroja, La busca, Critical Guide to Spanish Texts
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(London, Grant and Cutler Ltd in association with Tamesis Books,

1982).
40. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Random House, 1970), trs by Alan Sheridan-Smith of Les Mots
et les choses: una arch�ologie des sciences humaines (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966), 374.
41. In 1978 I began the supervision of the doctoral thesis of Dr Glyn
Hambrook, a dissertation submitted in 1985 in the University of
Nottingham under the title The Influence of Charles Baudelaire in
Spanish modernismo. In his study Dr Hambrook analysed the way in which
the writings and theories of Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau
conditioned the response to Baudelaire in Europe and, especially, in
Spain. I am indebted to the corpus of material Dr Hambrook assembled
in his thesis, material which stimulated a long process of thought,
subsequently conditioned by readings of the works of Michel Foucault.
These two trajectories led me towards this present attempt to re-read
fin de siglo Spanish literature from a new perspective.

The author

Richard Cardwell is Professor of Modern Spanish Literature in the

Department of Hispanic and Latin American Studies, School of Modern
Languages, at the University of Nottingham.

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