Biography
Ramón Pérez de Ayala y Fernández del Portal was born on August 9, 1880, in Oviedo, a major city of the mountainous Asturian region in the northwest of Spain—a region whose natural beauty would later find lyric expression in his novels. At the age of eight, he was sent to the Jesuit school of San Zoilo in nearby Carrión de los Condes. After studying there for two years, he went on to finish his baccalaureate at the Jesuit Colegio de la Inmaculada in Gijón, where he remained until the age of fourteen. His studies under the Jesuits, particularly in Greek, Latin, and the classics, gave him the basis of a sound humanistic education.
On the other hand, Pérez de Ayala would always consider the rigors of the Jesuit system of education to have done permanent damage to his sensitive nature. His second novel, A.M.D.G., whose title is taken from the Jesuit motto, “ad majorem dei gloriam” (to the greater glory of God), is bitterly critical of that early educational experience. The author later described himself as having possessed an inquisitive and discontented nature—thus earning the nickname the Anarchist.
After four years at the Jesuit school in Gijón, Pérez de Ayala returned to Oviedo to study law at the university under what was at that time a highly distinguished faculty. After finishing his courses in law, he traveled to England, where he wrote, read, and dabbled in painting. His sojourn was interrupted by the suicide of his father following the collapse of the bank in which his money was invested. It may have been as a result of this family tragedy that Pérez de Ayala decided to become a professional writer. At any rate, he moved to Madrid intending to study for a doctorate in law at the university, and there he became acquainted with the major literary figures of his time. In 1903, he helped found the journal Helios and went on to collaborate in many of the leading periodicals of the epoch. He published his first book of poetry, La paz del sendero, in 1904 and his first novel, Tinieblas en las cumbres (darkness on the heights), shortly thereafter. In 1911, he obtained a grant to study art in Germany and Italy. It was in Italy that he met the American Mabel Rick; in 1913, they were married in the United States. By this time, he had written his four autobiographical novels and was about to enter what he himself later called a “transitional phase” in his life andnarrative.
During this transitional period, Pérez de Ayala replaced personal themes with political ones, prompted by the outbreak of World War I as well as by his increasing involvement in Spanish politics. He visited the Italian front as a war correspondent and in 1917 published a collection of essays, Hermann, encadenado (Hermann, enchained), based on those experiences. In general, the many essays Pérez de Ayala wrote between 1913 and 1919 represent an attempt to gain a philosophical perspective on human history. His novels Prometheus, Sunday Sunlight, and The Fall of the House of Limón belong to this phase of his career. Between 1919 and 1920, Pérez de Ayala again traveled in the United States, sending articles to newspapers in Madrid.
The third period of Pérez de Ayala’s career as a novelist stretched from 1921 until 1926, and it was during those years that he wrote his three major novels. His last full-length novel, Tiger Juan, received the National Prize for Literature in 1926. In 1928, Pérez de Ayala published his last known work of fiction, the short novel Justicia; in the remaining thirty-four years of his life, he published no more fiction. This prolonged silence continues to puzzle critics and biographers, who attribute it in part to Pérez de Ayala’s disillusionment over the Spanish Civil War and the fall of the Second Spanish Republic, an ideal for which he and many of his literary colleagues had worked. Pérez de Ayala served the Republic as ambassador to London from 1931 until his resignation in 1936, upon the outbreak of the civil war.
Pérez de Ayala then spent the war years, 1936 to 1939, abroad, and during the next fifteen years, he would return to Madrid only for brief visits, taking up residence in France, Lima, and Buenos Aires and continuing to publish newspaper articles on a variety of topics. After his final return to Madrid in 1954, he lived a quiet and private life, receiving a few friends, reading classical literature, and publishing occasional articles on cultural topics in a Madrid paper. By the time of his death on August 5, 1962, he had been virtually forgotten by the literary world.
Analysis
Ramón Pérez de Ayala’s novels can be divided into three categories: the four interrelated autobiographical novels (Tinieblas en las cumbres, A.M.D.G., The Fox’s Paw, and Troteras y danzaderas), the transitional novels of Spanish life (Prometheus, Sunday Sunlight, and The Fall of the House of Limón), and the mature works that focus on major themes (Belarmino and Apolonio, Honeymoon, Bittermoon, and Tiger Juan). Despite the author’s development between the composition of his early novels and that of his later ones, several features remain constant: the tragic sense of life and the humanistic spirit that inform his work, the classical vision that conceives of the universe as an ultimately harmonious confluence of antitheses, and the narrative techniques that are necessary for expressing the complexity of such a worldview.
Pérez de Ayala’s novels reflect the various influences that were brought to bear on them. At the basis of his vision is the excellent foundation he had in the classics of Greek and Latin literature. His novels abound in allusions to classical heroes and mythological figures, and he often gives their names ironically to rural characters singularly devoid of grace. More important, however, is his classical conception of the universe as an assemblage of warring elements. Individuals, from their limited perspectives, can discern only the discontinuity of the parts rather than the harmony of the whole. Because the perception of cosmic unity is beyond the grasp of the rational mind, the happy coexistence of contradictory truths may approach expression only in aesthetic orders. Thus, the task of the novelist is to challenge constantly the partial truths that constitute the individual perspective and open them up to new vistas.
Pérez de Ayala’s technique is, on the whole, Jamesian. It serves his belief in a multifaceted reality and his advocacy for the virtue of tolerance. By providing multiple points of reference and juxtaposing conflicting opinions, Pérez de Ayala reminds readers of the inadequacy of the individual perspective and of the necessity to expand the mind to encompass alternative realities. In Troteras y danzaderas (mummers and dancers), a spokesman for the author insists that all so-called golden ages have been social states brought about by a few conspicuous thinkers who believed in the compatibility of intelligence and strength, art and money, science and religion, philosophy and arms. By way of encouraging such marriages, Pérez de Ayala constantly reminds his readers that what they perceive as truth is merely one side of a coin. For example, in the prologue to the stories of El ombligo del mundo (1924; the umbilical center of the world), the narrator explains that everything that happens in the world is equally a cause for laughter and tears. The comic and the dramatic, he asserts, depend on one’s perspective. Pérez de Ayala’s own worldview as presented in the novels is tragicomic.
Pérez de Ayala’s literary friends and associates, among them many prominent members of the Generation of ’98, had a hand in shaping his views on art and life. Among his acquaintances were Antonio Machado, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, José Ortega y Gasset, and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. An outspoken admirer of Darío’s poetry, Pérez de Ayala appears to have been affected by his sense of the burden of consciousness. Pérez de Ayala’s early novels bring to mind lines from Darío’s well-known poem “Lo fatal” (“Fatality”): “For there is no greater grief than the grief of being alive/ No greater affliction than conscious life.”
Unamuno’s basically existentialist philosophy and his “tragic sense of life” also exerted an undeniable influence on Pérez de Ayala, whose humanism, like Unamuno’s, arose from his knowledge of pain and his sympathy for the suffering that is the lot of all people. These feelings were no doubt intensified by the historical events of the period: the two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. Particularly in his later works, Pérez de Ayala deplores the shortsightedness that makes adversaries of people. His response to the events of his time took the form of a comprehensive humanism and desire for social reform—much the same spirit expressed in Ortega y Gasset’s famous statement in Meditaciones del Quixote (1942; Meditations on Quixote, 1961): “I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
Tinieblas en las cumbres
Pérez de Ayala’s first novel, Tinieblas en las cumbres, is a fitting introduction to his canon. It is the story of a young artist, Alberto Díaz de Guzmán, resembling Pérez de Ayala himself, who makes a trip to a mountain summit with a group of friends and prostitutes to witness a solar eclipse. Nearing the summit, they are enveloped in a dense fog; this fog becomes a symbol for the crisis in consciousness that Alberto is about to experience and is thus a precursor of the mist of Unamuno’s novel Niebla (1914; Mist, 1929). As Alberto approaches the peak, he engages in a colloquy with an intellectual friend, a discussion that leaves him questioning the meaning of existence. His friend, Yiddy, demolishes his romantic illusions concerning the transcendent value of the natural world and the immortality of art, and also informs him that consciousness is a nervous phenomenon.
This conversation is typical of Pérez de Ayala in its presentation of radically opposing viewpoints and metaphysical speculations that digress from the action of the novel. Also typical is the author’s statement at the beginning of the “digression” that the reader may skip this “superfluous colloquy” if he or she desires. This section, rather than being expendable, contains the key to the novel. A person’s unique ability to contemplate his or her own death forms the basis of the “tragic sense of life,” as defined by Unamuno. A corresponding alienation from nature is a logical consequence of this awareness of impending death. Alberto’s question at the end of Tinieblas en las cumbres is how one should live in the face of such understanding. He seems to decide in favor of hedonism, a decision that is followed by intimations of the Apocalypse. It has been suggested throughout the expedition that this solar phenomenon might signal the end of the world. Certainly, for Alberto it means the end of innocence as he feels a permanent darkness engulfing his soul. Deciding to embrace momentary pleasures, he proceeds to drink his way home and falls unconscious in his room as the novel closes.
Tinieblas en las cumbres is interesting as a first novel in that Pérez de Ayala begins his narrative career by exploring the existential void of a man overwhelmed by the reality of death. Unlike certain bildungsromans, such as D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), in which the character is formed by his experiences of life and becomes the author of his own existence, this novel sees the character-artist stripped of his certainties and left half-dead. It was, for Pérez de Ayala, a fit beginning. In fact, his art—his humanism and his search for meaning—grew out of such an existential necessity, but before he was able to develop completely the comprehensive philosophy that shaped his later novels, he pursued the causes and effects of Alberto’s mental state in the three autobiographical works that followed Tinieblas en las cumbres.
A.M.D.G.
Pérez de Ayala’s second novel, A.M.D.G., continues the story of Alberto Díaz de Guzmán by flashing back to his education (based on the author’s own) in a Jesuit school, which is presumably at the root of his spiritual dilemma. The novel itself created a scandal upon its publication because of its shocking, and perhaps overstated, portrayal of the cruelty and hypocrisy of the Jesuits’ methods of educating the young. Artistically, it is a failure, but it reveals both the best and the worst aspects of Pérez de Ayala’s work.
Pérez de Ayala’s novels being typically novels of ideas, the essayist is never far from the surface. Occasionally, the proper balance is not observed and the message becomes obtrusive. A.M.D.G. is an impassioned criticism somewhat lacking in the aesthetic detachment and spirit of tolerance that characterize Pérez de Ayala’s best novels, yet the motivation behind it, to expose and thereby correct injustice, is also characteristic of his best work. Ortega y Gasset praised the novel for that very reason. Having had similar experiences with the Jesuits, he claimed that the novel transcended literature and was a valuable document for pedagogical reform. Pérez de Ayala never forgot his case against the Jesuits, but he did gain greater artistic control over it. Representatives of the order appear in unflattering contexts in his later fiction, and many of their basic principles, such as the separation of body and spirit, are severely criticized.
The Fox’s Paw
The Fox’s Paw resumes the story of Alberto Díaz de Guzmán at the point where Tinieblas en las cumbres concluded. The title is a reference to the fox’s strategy of biting off its own paw when caught in a trap. Alberto wakes the morning after the eclipse feeling trapped by the conditions of life. Existence, he feels, is a flame between two shadows. Thus begins his search for meaning. Throughout the novel, Alberto vacillates between the desires of the flesh and the possibility of artistic commitment. Whenever he finds himself lured into demeaning emotional or physical involvements, he longs for the detachment from life that art affords. Life, he finds, enslaves the man, but the artist controls life. There is one possibility available to him for incorporating the real and the ideal, the flesh and the spirit. This is in the love offered him by his fiancé Fina—a love he has not the wisdom to accept nor the will to pursue.
Alberto, it is clear, has not made much progress since his setback on the mountaintop in Tinieblas en las cumbres. In fact, he seems to be moving in reverse. In the course of the novel, and in the process of trying to find himself, he joins a circus, travels to England, lives in Madrid writing books, and goes bankrupt. At his best moments, he is able to feel himself part of a cosmos that is harmonious and all-encompassing. He is never able to sustain that feeling; hence, he wanders. At the conclusion of the novel, he decides to return once again to Fina, but as a punishment for his moral failure, he is told by her furious old aunt that she is dead and that his desertion killed her. Pérez de Ayala’s later novels show the main characters achieving the wholeness that eludes Alberto here. This novel, however, like Tinieblas en las cumbres, ends in a void. The last novel in the series, Troteras y danzaderas, fittingly descends with Alberto into the underworld of the Madrid literati and accounts for a gap in the chronology of The Fox’s Paw.
Troteras y danzaderas
Something of a departure from the other autobiographical novels, Troteras y danzaderas shifts its focus from Alberto in order to portray several of the literary figures with whom Pérez de Ayala associated in Madrid, among them Valle-Inclán and Ortega y Gasset. An involved, intelligent, ambitious, and finally an ungainly novel, it is interesting from the viewpoint of literary history and also for the insights into human nature and the lectures on art that the author delivers through Alberto, who in this work has become more of a mouthpiece than a character.
Nevertheless, the novel does not lack for characters; it contains innumerable starving artists, politicians, prostitutes, and related entertainers. Ultimately, it is a novel about people of mainly mediocre talents living a bohemian existence that has been divested of the innocence of Bohemia. The nadir of this Madrid underworld is an expedition Alberto and some friends make to the brothels, with each successive visit more horrifying than the last. The novel ends with the death of one tubercular artist, a discussion of politics, and Alberto’s ironic response when asked what Spain has produced: “Mummers and dancers, my friend, mummers and dancers.”
If, on the whole, this work appears to be a collection of loosely related episodes, many of its parts are excellent. One particularly noteworthy feature is the author’s experimentation with multiple narrative perspectives. In one instance, Pérez de Ayala calls particular attention to his perspectivism: He describes a comic situation in which a “kept woman” is surprised by her keeper in a tête-à-tête with a poet, providing in separate paragraphs an account of the incident from the perspectives of the three principals in addition to that of a baby who happens to be in the room. He then laments the fact that no one knows the viewpoint of the pet turtle. More seriously, he later describes the dying poet from the perspectives of both sympathetic and unsympathetic observers. His mature works show a mastery of this technique and of the philosophy of tolerance and the necessary coexistence of opposites that underlies it.
Alberto’s statement at the conclusion of Troteras y danzaderas provides an appropriate introduction to the novels belonging to this transitional phase of Pérez de Ayala’s career. It concludes the autobiographical series with a shift of focus from individual concerns to national ones and indicates the overwhelming pessimism of Pérez de Ayala’s political sentiments at that time.
Prometheus
Strikingly unlike any of his other novels, the three-poematic novels of Spanish life are tales of failure and utter despair, related in a highly lyric style. Prometheus, the first of these short novels, begins with a humorous adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.). Juan Pérez Setignano, who prefers to think of himself as Marco de Setiñano, is a modern-day Odysseus and a professor of Greek. A man of thought, like the author himself, he dreams of begetting a son who will be a man of action. He will call the son Prometheus, and Prometheus will redeem humankind. Juan sets out seeking a mother for Prometheus. He finds and marries his Nausicaa, who is called Perpetua Meana. The son is born precocious but deformed and malicious, and at the end of the novel, he hangs himself from a fig tree. The story appears to be an allegory of Pérez de Ayala’s own desires—to engender from his art a corresponding action in the world—and a measure of his feelings of failure. A comment made by Juan’s uncle confirms this reading. He wisely tells Juan that Prometheus is born of men yearning to soar and vanquished by their aspirations.
The other two works are somewhat less allegorical, referring as they do to existing political and social conditions.
Sunday Sunlight
Sunday Sunlight, despite its promising title, is a tale of injustice. It takes place in a town controlled by a large family of aristocratic bosses, the Becerriles, whose power comes from Madrid. The Chorizos, an opposing faction of workmen and merchants, are fighting for power in the town. The hero, Cástor, is caught in the middle. When he refuses to support the Becerriles, a group of them take turns raping his fiancé in what is probably the cruelest scene in any of Pérez de Ayala’s novels. Cástor tells her she is still innocent and marries her, but the stigma remains. By this point, the fault is not only with the Becerriles but also with the society that punishes the victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. Cástor, of course, represents the only humane attitude. Wherever the couple go, they are unable to escape the gossip that follows them. Even on a boat bound for the New World, they meet with people who know their story and tell them that the Chorizos, now in power, are even worse than the Becerriles. While in Pérez de Ayala’s later fiction a merging of polarities will generally be cause for optimism, here it can only mean despair. Thus, when the ship sinks, Cástor and his wife are grateful to go to a land where there are neither Becerriles nor Chorizos.
The Fall of the House of Limón
The third novel, The Fall of the House of Limón, combines the themes of defective offspring, political oppression, and human pettiness of the other two. It begins in a Spanish boardinghouse, a favorite setting and topic for Pérez de Ayala. Two sisters, Dominica and Fernanda Limón, arrive and arrange to have mourning garments made for the following day. The narration then flashes back to the history of the family, their father’s establishment of a political empire and his gradual transfer of power to Fernanda. The other daughter, Dominica, and the future heir, Arias, grow up in the rear of the family residence. They are left to themselves in this childhood kingdom. The boy, while not physically deformed, matures in a fantasy world that leaves him morally blemished and unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Neither Arias nor Dominica realizes that the town is beginning to rebel against the dominion of the Limóns. It is Arias who precipitates their downfall by raping and killing a young woman without quite grasping the reality of his act.
If justice is conspicuously absent in Sunday Sunlight, here the entire concept is called into question by Arias’s execution, a punishment as cruel as the crime. Morever, the smug pronouncement of the boardinghouse residents that justice has been done is deeply disturbing. Prompted by their sense of moral superiority, they proceed to insist, within hearing of the sisters, that Fernanda should have been hanged as well. As with Sunday Sunlight, readers are initially convinced that the evil resides in the political bosses, but Pérez de Ayala’s perspective is never that simple. Another framework reveals that the cruelty and pettiness so pervasive in these two stories are a function of human nature, a view that may have been the real reason the author felt the world was not ready for his Promethean redeemer.
In his three major novels, Pérez de Ayala uses the same themes and narrative techniques found in his previous fiction. Here, though, he puts aside disillusionment and existential anxiety to present a vision of wholeness at once optimistic and tenuous. In these works, he strikes what is for his purposes a perfect balance between fiction and essay. All three hinge upon a philosophical premise. At the same time, the author develops characters that are not mere vehicles of the novel’s message but are uniquely believable and sympathetic. These novels, particularly Belarmino and Apolonio, show Pérez de Ayala to be in full control of his perspectivist technique and the accompanying philosophy of mutually beneficial oppositions. Even while urging his own humanistic position, he uses the novels as forums for antagonistic points of view, in keeping with his insistence that all beliefs are valid, although some are less informed than others.
Honeymoon, Bittermoon
Honeymoon, Bittermoon is primarily a novel about male-female relationships and human sexuality. It focuses on two characters, Urbano and Simona, who marry without any knowledge of sex, even the most basic. Urbano’s mother, Doña Micaela, is a sterile, domineering, and rigidly spiritual woman; she recalls D. H. Lawrence’s cerebral and castrating females who will not give themselves over to sensuality. In fact, Pérez de Ayala’s novel, like those of Lawrence, his contemporary, has as its goal the exposure of the folly of the prevailing sexual attitudes of the time. Here, however, they are the unique product of Spanish Catholicism.
Doña Micaela has overseen her son’s education, even in his law courses, to the point of making certain that questionable pages have been torn from his books. At the end of this education, he is totally ignorant of the world, and his mother engages him to a young lady who is equally innocent. Urbano’s father does not agree with his wife’s actions, and their dispute constitutes one of Pérez de Ayala’s famous polemics. The ensuing events attest Doña Michaela’s error. Urbano, not knowing what is expected of him, leaves his wife on their honeymoon without consummating the marriage. Yet, Simona believes she is pregnant. For either lack of information or extreme modesty, no one is able to acquaint the pair with the facts of life. They are left to weather a series of catastrophes and separations until they gain enough knowledge of the world to be reunited.
The novel also considers some peripheral sexual relationships and attitudes, all highly unusual. Urbano’s tutor, for example, is redeemed from his sexual ignorance and lack of practical knowledge by a servant, one of the healthiest characters in the novel. Another character is not so lucky. He is in his fifties and has been engaged for thirty-five years because his mother thinks he is too young to marry. All in all, the novel is Pérez de Ayala’s perceptive analysis of the sexual foibles of his society and an argument for a reasonable, and humane, sex education.
In Honeymoon, Bittermoon, harmony hinges on the successful reconciliation of female and male, mind and matter. Most of the novel’s characters are grotesques, unable to fuse with their counterparts or join flesh to spirit.
Tiger Juan
The union of male and female sensibilities also supplies the theme of Tiger Juan, which surveys the related topics of matrimonial honor and “Don Juanism” in the context of Spanish cultural history. Tiger Juan, theprotagonist, is a misogynist. Females are altogether alien to his fiercely masculine, and egotistical, nature. Based on past experience, he links them with extramarital activities and the resulting dishonor to the unlucky husband. His perspective is, of course, limited, and the novel chronicles its growth. Initially, Juan esteems one woman only: Doña Iluminada, in whose widowhood he perceives complete faithfulness to her dead husband. He is unaware that she had, inexplicably and unwillingly, remained a virgin throughout her marriage.
Doña Iluminada is one of those bountiful virgins so prevalent in Pérez de Ayala’s novels who, denied happiness for themselves, contrive to unite others. At the opposite extreme, Tiger Juan’s male friend, Don Vespasiano, represents the Don Juan figure who, despite his apparent sexual activity, is barren. Tiger Juan’s inordinate affection for this man derives from his notion that the Don Juan type is the scourge of womankind and an avenger of Eve’s curse. Tiger Juan regularly argues with his son, Colás (a “child of air,” as Tiger Juan is “salt of the earth”), about Don Juanism and about a husband’s right to kill an unfaithful wife. Colás’s ample and humane perspective is counterposed to Tiger Juan’s selfishly narrow one. Tiger Juan receives an opportunity to broaden his views when he falls reluctantly in love with a young woman, Herminia. Repulsed by his bestial demeanor, Herminia is assured by Doña Iluminada that what she feels is the irresistible attraction of her opposite. When Herminia and Juan become engaged, without her ever having the opportunity to refuse, Juan anticipates marital disgrace. To ward it off, he gives Herminia a bracelet engraved with the words “I belong to Tiger Juan.” For the occasion of their wedding, he buys her shoes several sizes too small—in emulation, the narrator explains, of the estimable Asian practice of footbinding. Pérez de Ayala is at his tragicomic best in his portrayal of Tiger Juan; the reader wishes at once to cry for Juan’s ignorance and laugh at his folly.
Tiger Juan’s expectation of dishonor is nearly self-fulfilling. Rebelling against Juan and the society that demands her domination by him, Herminia escapes with Vespasiano; she loses the desire to be unfaithful, however, when she realizes that she is pregnant by Tiger Juan, her ideal counterpart. She returns home, and Tiger Juan has a corresponding change of heart. Instead of killing her for the blemish to his honor her desertion has caused, he opens a vein in his own arm. As proof that he has incorporated the feminine principle into his fierce male nature, when the baby comes, Juan howls in pain while Herminia preserves stoic silence. Later, he takes on the mother’s role by bottle-feeding the baby. As is so often the case in Pérez de Ayala’s fiction, while the individual perspective has been amplified, the society remains small-minded. The end of Tiger Juan finds Juan and Herminia leaving their home to escape the censure of their neighbors.
Tiger Juan, like Honeymoon, Bittermoon, concludes with the merging of the antithetical qualities necessary to human happiness: spirit and flesh, femininity and masculinity, self and other. In order to show the confluence of these polarities, Pérez de Ayala expands upon his usual perspectivist technique and juxtaposes the radically different forms of consciousness represented by Herminia and Juan. When Herminia deserts Juan, the author records their separate thoughts and experiences in adjacent vertical columns. Trapped by their subjectivity, the characters do not have the perceptual advantage of the reader, who recognizes the harmony between the opposing columns even before they flow together in reconciliation.
A related innovation that Pérez de Ayala had gradually developed throughout his fiction reached fullness of expression here: his open declaration of the fiction of his constructs. This exposure of artifice serves his perspectivism by opening the hermetically sealed work into a larger context: the world. He admits his fabrication in the “Parergon,” or accessory document, attached to the story’s conclusion. Noting that the careful reader will have detected a gap in the narrative, the author explains that his “characters” were at that time discussing their warring emotions. Not wanting to distract the normal reader from the plot, he decided to append those dialogues. As usual, these “superfluous” debates present the philosophical basis of the novel, affirming as they do that truth is the sum of individual perspectives.
Belarmino and Apolonio
Pérez de Ayala’s perspectivism and his “diaphenomenal vision” reach a brilliant culmination in Belarmino and Apolonio. The novel has a bipolar structure and theme, as announced in the title, that derives from the conflict between two shoemakers: the dramatist Apolonio and the philosopher Belarmino. Their rivalry begins quite simply when Apolonio establishes his business on the same street as Belarmino’s and they become competitors. Apolonio, although he quickly helps put Belarmino out of business, recognizes in his rival certain qualities that he does not possess, and he feels an instant antipathy that he assumes is mutual. There are many points of contrast between them, but the main conflict is that between philosophy and drama. As a philosopher, Belarmino invents his own language and eventually, when tragedy befalls him, lapses into silence. The ever-loquacious Apolonio borrows his language from tradition and is unable to refrain from speaking in verse. He converts tragedy to words, exploiting experience in the creation of dramas. Desiring fame, Apolonio produces a play that is a failure; Belarmino, without desiring it, becomes a prominent community figure because of his philosophizing. In fact, the town divides into two factions, Belarmines and anti-Belarmines, arguing whether he actually speaks a comprehensible language.
The dispute between Apolonio and Belarmino leads to a secondary bifurcation when Apolonio prevents the marriage of his son and Belarmino’s daughter. The son then develops into a gregarious, hypocritical priest, while the disgraced daughter becomes an innocent, introspective prostitute—in yet another of the novel’s unusual dichotomies. The narrator intercedes to reunite priest and prostitute, and when news of this event comes to Apolonio and Belarmino, now in a rest home, they embrace and speak to each other for the first time, admitting their mutual need.
These are but a few of the many schisms and reconciliations that make up the world of the novel. The conceptual and structural frame of the work is provided by two opposing points of view on the relationship between Belarmino and Apolonio, or drama and philosophy. The prologue records the musings of Don Amaranto, a boardinghouse philosopher, who believes that the dramatist immerses himself in experience while the philosopher removes himself to attain a better vantage point. The epilogue quotes from the notes of Froilán Escobar, who reverses these poles. He maintains that the dramatist acts out his life in borrowed gestures while the philosopher conceals his emotions with a cool exterior. Both opinions are correct, but in the context of the story, the latter is more informed. More important, these thinkers, like the narrator, affirm that philosopher and dramatist need each other.
On this level, the novel’s theme and technique coalesce. While Pérez de Ayala generally combines philosophy and drama in his fiction, in Belarmino and Apolonio, he engages both with the object of illustrating their interdependence. At the same time, he juxtaposes conflicting opinions and perspectives on events to demonstrate the relativity of knowledge. The second chapter of the novel, another of those essential digressions that Pérez de Ayala labels “superfluous,” contains a discussion of perspective and artistic creation. It begins with Don Amaranto’s ghost confronting the narrator with a disquisition on the limits of narration. The apparition insists that because the novel unfolds in time, it is unable to match the human visual apparatus, which sees in depth. The narrator responds with an exercise in point of view and narrative dexterity. He relates an anecdote about a poet, Lirio, and a positivist, Lario, viewing the street where Belarmino and Apolonio lived. In an involved dispute typical of Pérez de Ayala, Lirio insists on the absurd beauty of the street while Lario finds it ugly for its lack of symmetry. The debate concludes when Lirio shows Lario his painting of the street. Lario replies that the street is ugly but the painting is beautiful.
In Belarmino and Apolonio, Pérez de Ayala achieved an ideal balance between the fictional and empirical narrative modes that characterize his novels while making that balance the very subject of the work. As a measure of his success, when the narrator states in the epilogue that Belarmino and Apolonio have existed only as his creations but that he has loved them, the reader does not doubt it. Even as symbols of antithetical elements of artistic creation, they are uniquely real and lovable. Through their story, the author demonstrates once again that “there are as many irreducible truths as there are points of view.”
