The Swedish Precursor of the Spanish esperpento : Strindberg’s Spöksonaten and Valle-Inclán’s Luces de Bohemia

Abstract

The esperpento is a Spanish theatrical modality conceived by Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) in his play Luces de Bohemia (1920) (Lights of Bohemia) that he applied in subsequent plays and also novels. The esperpento has been regarded as a quintessentially Spanish genre —although, it has been claimed, it roughly resembles Bertolt Brecht’s and Alfred Jarry’s absurdist plays, and Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. In this article, I will prove that the main features of the esperpento, as they appear in Lights of Bohemia, were previously employed coherently by August Strindberg in Spöksonaten (1907) (The Ghost Sonata). Although it is very likely that Valle-Inclán was familiar with Strindberg’s plays, it is impossible to demonstrate that Lights of Bohemia was influenced by The Ghost Sonata. The aim of this paper is to establish that the esperpento is not a product of Spain’s literary conditions in the early twentieth century, but rather a result of the Modernist mentality and aesthetics that had been developing in Northern Europe since the 1890s.