Voice and Genre in Gabriel Miró's «El humo dormido»

Roberta Johnson

Roland Barthes asserted that the advent of a linguistically based structuralist literary criticism signalled the remarriage of language and literature, which had, before their divorce in the Renaissance, enjoyed a long and fruitful union in rhetoric¹. Perhaps this reunion finally provides us the proper perspective and tools to understand a writer like Gabriel Miró, whose language nearly all critics agree², is the heart of his work. That is, with Miró, linguistic concerns -vocabulary, syntax, morphology and dialect- obscure the traditional categories that guide critics in their methodology. Edmund King, in the introduction to his edition of El humo dormido, warns of some of the difficulties awaiting the reader who ventures into Miro's text: 1) the book defies generic classification, failing to meet the minimum requirements for a story collection, an essay, autobiography or even the most hospitable of genres, the novel, and 2) it offers a dismaying lack of unity in viewpoint, attention, speaker and tone³. Since it has been impossible to analyze El humo dormido and many others of Miró's books by the usual reductionist method of applying the conventional criteria of genre (i. e., structure, thematics, narrative voice and so forth) these works have received almost no critical attention⁴.

Relying on the insights of Roland Barthes mentioned above and on Mikhail Bakhtin's linguistically rooted contributions to genre study⁵, I approach El humo dormido on its own terms. And in so doing, I discover that what appears to be a kind of Bildungsroman, an «I» («yo») narrating youthful experiences very like those of Miró's own life⁶, is in fact a dialogic search for the nature of reality. The philosophical content emerges latently obscured by the overtones of autobiographical fiction and by a strong storytelling configuration. These textual delaying tactics are significant because memory or retrospect -el humo dormido- is fundamental to Miró's conception of reality: «hay episodios y zonas de nuestra vida que no se ven del todo hasta que los revivimos y contemplamos por el recuerdo; el recuerdo les aplica la plenitud de la conciencia...»⁷. And memory shares this status of primary reality with language (and thus literature): «como hay emociones que no lo son del todo hasta que no reciben la fuerza lírica de la palabra, su palabra plena y exacta» (p. 101).

Traditionally memory, language and literature have been considered the delayed reality, secondary to another reality that is necessarily primary. Miró turns this conventional conception around saying that reality is a fusion of self and other, a union consummated in memory, language and literature, and his theory has consequences for his literary practices. Since memory is collective, incorporating self and world, literature is likewise a communal enterprise that includes the writer and the reader in their respective literary traditions. Miró projects these complex notions through shifts in narrative voice that enlist the reader in subtle ways and through dialogic generic strategies that ask the reader to call upon his or her experience with the collective genres inspired by the Bible and folklore. Miró warns us that «no han de tenerse estas páginas fragmentarias por un propósito de memorias; pero leyéndolas pueden oírse, de cuando en cuando, las campanas de la ciudad de Is, cuya conseja evocó Renán, la ciudad más o menos poblada y ruda que todos llevamos sumergida dentro de nosotros mismos» (p. 56). These are not memoirs in the traditional personal sense; instead, they will call up the collective voice that resides in all of us.

Roland Barthes's notion of person as a strictly grammatical category is more germane to the way voice functions in El humo dormido than is the usual concept of narrative voice as the perspective of a character with a particular psychology, biased viewpoint, etc. Thinking in terms of grammatical person situates the guiding narrative position in a context that includes other grammatical persons and the corresponding relationships between them (I-thou; we-they, etc.). Barthes points out that «I» always calls up «thou»; «thou» can become «I»; and «I» «thou». The narrative person in El humo dormido is inconsistent; the autobiographical «I» or «yo» frequently dissolves the «I» «thou» dichotomy into a collective «we» that incorporates the narrator's companions in some instances and in others suggests a pact between the narrator and the reader. On occasion the first person narrative voice (be it singular or plural) disappears entirely and the narration is carried by the impersonal passive-reflexive construction, a narrative situation that invites narrator, reader and characters to participate in the action as equals. These passages seem designed to do what Roland Barthes believes such writers as Mallarmé. Proust and Joyce were attempting, namely to use a middle voice to write themselves into the text and diminish the distance between themselves and the language. In such passages the writer is not anterior to but interior to the process of writing (p. 143). Barthes further explains the implications of this absence of person: «Today, however the literature of which I speak is discovering fundamental subtleties relative to temporality. In reading certain writers who are engaged in this type of exploration we sense that what is recounted in the aorist doesn't seem at all immersed in the past, in what has taken place, but simply in the impersonal [la non-personne], which is neither history, nor discursive information [la science], and even less the one of anonymous writing». (The one is dominated by the indefinite and not by the absence of person...) (p. 138).

The first section of El humo dormido, narrated entirely in the impersonal passive mode, establishes the special relationship between narrator and text described by Barthes: «Los domingos se oía desde una ventana el armónium de un monasterio de monjas, pero se oía muy apagado, y, algunas veces, se quebraba, se deshacía su dulzura: era preciso enlazarla con un ahínco de imaginación auditiva» (p. 57). The absence of person makes this experience a universally present one, rather than a moment embedded in a specific personal past. A collective «we» voice intrudes midway through the narration of this incident to seal the collective, inward-outward nature of the experience: «Aprovechémonos de lo que pase y nos llegue a través de las ventanas cerradas por el invierno...» (p. 58). The impersonal narrator believes that the incomplete auditory experience will be completed by a fuller one in summer when the nun plays before wide open Windows, but alas in summer, the nun naps instead of practising at the siesta hour. It is significant that with the emergence of the «we» voice the role of memory likewise emerges. The narration tells us that we need not be limited to the muffled winter-time concert; memory or otherness does not simply complete reality, it is reality: «Limitados no es limitarse a nosotros mismos. Proyectémonos fuera de nuestras paredes» (p. 58). The «we» of this invocation is as encompassing as the impersonal mode of the verb but in a different way; it joins the narrator and reader in experiencing el humo dormido or the submerged city of Is. Thus by shifting narrative positions from the absence of person to «we» at a judicious moment, Miró confirms in the very narrative technique the collective nature of reality.

After the first segment «Limitaciones», an «I» narrator asserts himself in a series of vignettes from his childhood, establishing the «I»-«thou» dichotomy of which Barthes spoke. But, while «I» is the guiding perspective, «we» is equally in evidence here -this time not as a pact between narrator and reader, but between the narrator and his contemporaries. The reader now becomes a thou along with all the adults in the novel. The «thou», the other, is the mirror of the self, and thus an important part of its development and recognition. Take, for example, the passage in which Don Jesús's cotertulianos comment in his absence that they are certainly glad they aren't like their quarrelsome friend. However, they do not feel themselves to be themselves when Don Jesús is not present: «Y se aburrían con la máquina de sus virtudes inmóvil, ociosa sin don Jesús» (p. 118). Don Jesús also serves as a mirror for the vagrant Englishman, who has wandered into town to die: «Fue recogiendo los ojos, y miró a don Jesús, y semejó mirarse a sí mismo, y reconocerse, y recordarse» (p. 121).

The narrative shifts between the «I» or «we» which refers to the young boys and the «we» that includes the reader reinforce Miró's notion that memory is an inward-outward process. The inwardness is reflected in the passages whose grammatical subject is «I» or when «we» refers only to the narrator and his friends; the outwardness asserts itself when «we» encompasses the reader. Miró discovers this narrative maneuver with its unique capability for reaching beyond its own borders for the first time in El humo dormido, and it becomes the hallmark of his narrative technique in the best-known novels Nuestro Padre San Daniel and El obispo leproso. Ricardo Gullón, who has studied the lyrical qualities of the latter novel, calls this narrative voice a conciencia-espejo: «Lo recordé no hace mucho: el espejo tiene mango y pide una mano que lo sostenga: la del autor implícito. Conciencia primero, cuando el espejo se muda en reflector sugiere una doble función, refleja e ilumina, recibe imágenes y va descubriéndolas al proyectarse en el espacio»⁸.

Thus by moving away from the notion of character and examining the grammatical category of person, El humo dormido seems less like a failed autobiographical Bildungsroman that frequently forgets the main character to indulge in philosophical disquisition. The grammatical categories reveal that the book is not the story of a young man growing into adulthood, but an «I» or a «we» discovering the nature of reality. These implications of the narrative voice -a juxtaposition of self and other- are underscored by generic considerations. Looked at without the prejudicial eye of one searching for the traditional characteristics of a novel, El humo dormido emerges as a series of interpolated tales or stories, often responding as much or more to the requisites of those genres than to the life of a central character who is maturing and developing⁹. The tales, like many Biblical or folkloric narratives, have a purpose -a kind of moral- though it be aesthetic, epistemological or ontological rather than ethical in nature. Mikhail Bakhtin says that passages written in contrasting modes within a single novelistic context live a double life and engage in a dialogic relationship. These passages written in contrasting modes serve two speakers at the same time and express simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the speaking character or of the genre the passage, and the refracted intention of the author¹⁰.

In El humo dormido there is an ongoing dialectic between the traditional, communal nature of each incorporated tale and the overall design of the book as an individual's autobiographical narrative. There is constant interaction between the apparent Bildungsroman and the interpolated Biblical or folkloric tales, and this interaction involves the reader. «I»'s autobiography, which is personal and intimate, relegates the reader to the position of a voyeur peering into «I»'s life. But the Biblical, folkloric aspects of these vignettes give «I» and the reader equal status before what is narrated. Thus, just as with the narrative voice, the generic properties of El humo dormido set up a dialectic between self and other, «I» and the world. Ultimately Miró is exploring the possibilities of the text -the written word- for revealing the selfs relation to other and for the retention of that relationship in memory. The book's «Dedicatoria» announces such a project for El humo dormido itself. It opens with a passage narrated in the collective, impersonal voice, fusing reality outside ourselves with us through language: «De los bancales segados, de las tierras maduras, de la quietud de las distancias, sube un humo azul que se para y se duerme. Aparece un árbol, en contorno de un casal; pasa un camino, un fresco resplendor de agua viva. Todo en una trémula desnudez» (p. 56). This landscape offers itself to us: «Así se nos ofrece el paisaje cansado o lleno de los días que se quedaron detrás de nosotros. Concretamente no es el pasado nuestro, pero nos pertenece, y de él nos valemos para revivir y acreditar episodios que rasgan su humo dormido» (p. 56). But we only take full possession of this offered landscape by means of memory and language: «Tiene esta lejanía un hondo silencio que se queda escuchándonos. La abeja de una palabra recordada lo va abriendo y lo estremece todo» (p. 56). Without words, the memory that could be called up by this scene would remain dormant.

The book begins with a series of three vignettes or tales that appear to have little to do with the scenes of childhood narrated in the remainder of the work. These initial tales, which serve as a kind of overture to the novel, reduce the personal focus to a minimum. The autobiographical «I» appears hardly at all, and there is no indication that the events narrated contribute to «I»'s story. The first scene «Limitaciones», already discussed in terms of narrative voice, also provides clues to genre. Recall that the vignette ends with an invocation to project ourselves outside our own walls («Proyectémonos fuera de nuestras paredes»), and thus, like an Aesop's fable, ends with a tag that extracts a universal message from the specific story narrated. Here, however, the message is epistemological: perception includes sensory perception and memory. The narration goes on to say that people are always limited in their perception to their own familiar surroundings and that the rest of the world becomes interpreted by each individual according to that personal view.

The last of the three initial scenes or vignettes concludes the exposition of Miró's theory of perception and memory in the universal «we» voice. We do not normally see what is unfamiliar, says the narrator, but one day, for whatever reason, our attention may fix on a stranger. And in our memory the image of that person remains stronger than his actual physical presence, because sensual experience always repeats itself without any greater depth, while remembered experience is clearer and more refined. The extraordinary experience that is able to reach the depths of memory is like «la palabra que no lo dice todo sino que lo contiene todo» (p. 60). Thus memory and language are wed in their potential for containing the ultimate reality, and a Biblical text is invoked to confirm this truth: «Siempre se alza ese hombre entre el humo dormido... Y el rumor de sus pisadas trastorna las palabras del Eclesiastés, porque si hay cosa nueva debajo del sol, del sol y de la tierra hollada; todo aguarda ávidamente el sello de nuestra limitación; todo se desgarra generoso y se cicatriza esperándonos...» (p. 61).

These words, which remind us of the discrepancy between the message of «Ecclesiastes» and the way life really is, prophesy the nature of the remainder of the book. Although narrated in the first-person, from this point forward El humo dormido is in fact a series of Bible-like tales, but with a purpose very unlike the Biblical narrations. The ancient narrative genre becomes an empty shell filled with a modern content. Nuño, el viejo, is designated in the title of the second personal vignette «Don Marcelino y mi profeta» as the young narrator's prophet. But rather than a Biblical prophet, whose word contains the truth at the time it is issued, Nuño's word shapes the narrator's world and experience. When Nuño says, «-Pues yo en la Mancha...!», the narrator and his friends begin thinking of La Mancha: «la veíamos como un continente remoto, porque Nuño el Viejo estuvo allí...» (p. 63). And he projects the young boy's future by making him conscious of it, frequently emitting the dictum «Cuando éste acabe los estudios...» (p. 68).

Each episode in the narrator's life is recalled through a deep memory image of the kind explored in the opening tales. A tutor is remembered for his one long fingernail, a schoolmaster's father is recalled by the glasses he wore. And artifacts serve as reminders to other characters within the novel as well: Don Marcelino is reminded of his potential love by a carnation she gave him, and Don Jesús wears a mourning ribbon with a portrait. Ultimately words, texts themselves, become the supreme pneumonic device, especially the great classic texts like the Bible and Don Quixote which are embedded in the Western collective memory. Rather than analyze all segments of the novel, each of which is so rich and complex that a complete study would occupy a book, I will concentrate on two chapters that develop the young collective «we»'s fascination with Don Jesús, a wealthy landowner and member of a tertulia that includes a canon, a professor of natural history and a magistrate.

An oil lamp, «la lámpara de la realidad», is the presiding image of the first scene on which the narrator's memory focuses. The magistrate, who is old-fashioned and backward in his ideas likes the lamp turned down low as he is afraid of fires. Don Jesús, a progressive liberal, always arrives last at the tertulia and turns the lamp up. The young boys (the «I» or «we» narrator) watch from outside the grillwork on the Windows as the conversation on the nature of reality unfolds in a series of folkloric tales. The magistrate proclaims that reality is the same for everyone. And Don Jesús, turning up the lamp, contradicts the magistrate, illustrating his point with the tale of the assembled canons of Pamplona who determined that Adam and Eve spoke in the Basque language: «y desde que los canónigos se alzaron de sus bancas hasta que mudasen de parecer, fue una realidad el éuskaro en el Paraíso» (p. 107). One person can hold two views of reality simultaneously, and Don Jesús relates the example in which the photograph of a dead person falls on that of a living person. One rationally knows that it is mere superstition to feel compelled to separate the photographs so that the living person will not suffer the same fate as the dead one. But one separates the photographs anyway, because superstition, even though unfounded, is a reality in the mind. Then, apparently changing the subject, Don Jesús tells of an article he has just read about a criminal who, when given the opportunity to choose his method of execution -either by hanging or by participating in an experiment to determine if leprosy can be contracted through inoculation-, chose the experiment. Fourteen months later, the criminal was still healthy, but after five years, leprosy appeared. For the magistrate justice has been served, but Don Jesús reminds him that such a conclusion is only his interpretation of the situation; for the scientist the experiment proved that leprosy can be inoculated, and for the criminal leprosy was slower than the noose. And there is yet a fourth point of view revealed in the fact that there were lepers in the criminal's family.

Don Jesús turns up the oil lamp and approaches the canon, who has been searching for his tobacco pouch during the narration of these exemplary tales. The venerable philosopher turns this activity into an example as well. Things send us messages, which compel us to search for them, then suddenly the lost item turns up, as though waiting for us to find it. The magistrate dims the oil lamp as Don Jesús says, «Nadie burla de estas realidades de nuestras sensaciones donde reside casi toda la verdad de nuestra vida» (p. 110). Next Don Jesús tells the story of a poor mute boy who, when given the left over candy from his saint's day celebration, said nothing by way of thanks. The young Don Jesús, unaware of the boy's handicap, remarked that «la gratitud es muda», but, upon learning of the boy's condition, he felt that his pronouncement had mutilated him. Upon finishing this tale, Don Jesús turns up the lamp, «la lámpara de la realidad» that has the power to illuminate truth through words or tales, whose universal nature subverts their subjective narrative voice to a collective purpose. The reader, like the young boys peering in on the scene through the window are drawn in by the familiar format of the Biblical or folkloric genre, forgets the distance between his or her own world and that of the text.

One of the best examples of the way in which traditional textual types are incorporated into El humo dormido is the section entitled «Don Jesús y el judío errante», which follows the scene analyzed above. Both its narrative form and its content, which fuse the Bible, Don Quixote, and the narrator's personal history, illustrate the importance of the written word to memory and reality. When an adult warns the children that a tall, wizened quixotic Englishman who has arrived in town may be «el Judío errante» (p. 112), the unfamiliar is transformed into the familiar by equating the stranger with a well-known figure from the Bible. The man soon becomes el Judío errante for everyone in town: «Pero "aquel" judío errante que nos ha hecho incurrir en "literatura", según dicen los mismos literatos, no traía barbas semitas, ni sandalias, ni túnica, sino que iba afeitado y usaba gabán, sombrero gris de castor y un junco con puño de hueso» (pp. 113-14). Physical reality and literary reality meet in the mind, and the literary reality becomes the pneumonic touchstone calling up this stranger who might not otherwise have occupied an iterable space in the narrator's memory.

The textual aspects of the image created by this impoverished Englishman take on even greater complexity as he is always associated with reading the Quixote, especially the passage in which Don Quixote is pronounced dead after the brutal beating by Maritornes's muleteer-lover. At first the Englishman grows sad upon reading the passage, but he eventually laughs at the squad leader's mistaken interpretation of the scene. Don Jesús, who has befriended the Englishman, explains to the young boys how literature works. The stranger's initial reaction to the text was a product of seeing Don Quixote as a tragic character in the context of the novel, but in the second stage of his reaction, which now involves memory, he compares Don Quixote to himself, a poor foreigner lodged in a third class pensión with a «camastro pavoroso que semejaba enceparle entre sus palpos y rodajas de hierro» (p. 114). At the end of the vignette, the Englishman («the wandering Jew-Don Quixote») lies dying, and Don Jesús assumes the role of his Biblical namesake as he undertakes to save the soul of the this Protestant foreigner. The Englishman's last words to Don Jesús and the curious neighbors that surround him in his death throes are those of the squad leader at the inn in Don Quixote: «Ciérguese la puegta de la venta; miguen no se vaya nadie, que han muegto aquí a un hombre!» (p. 122). In his own mind he has become that literary figure whose image is so much a part of his mental apparatus. In thinking of himself, he remembers himself as literature.

Thus El humo dormido in its juxtaposition of generic types as well as in the messages of the interpolated stories projects the way memory and the written word are inextricably intertwined. The narrator comments that he is no longer certain Don Jesús really spoke of the Englishman in terms of Don Quixote: «Y no sé si puntualmente nos habló don Jesús de esa manera; pero la memoria de su figura me trae ese comento inicial del venerable libro» (p. 116). It is only in memory that this juxtaposition occurs; in life one focuses on temporary perceptions and disappointments: «Nosotros, entonces, sólo nos dolíamos de que el extranjero no fuese de veras el Judío errante...» (p. 116). The «wandering Jew» episode is illustrative of the types of scenes we find throughout El humo dormido that reflect Miró's purpose both in form and content: to demonstrate that reality is memory and language (literature). «I» am only «I» in the context of other (the communal «we»), and my reality becomes evident only in retrospect and through language. Thus Miró achieves a memoir-mirror that ends up not reflecting a particular life, but the nature of reality for all lives. And memory, normally only the handmaiden of autobiography and memoir -merely a means to an end- becomes the subject and the object of the work. Memory is not in Miró's view, a personal and solipsistic phenomenon; it is an event in which self and other fuse.

The final set of vignettes entitled «Tablas del calendario entre el humo dormido» tests the fusion of text and life in the mental imagery of memory. This section alternates passages in which the narrating consciousness imagines Christ moving through the events of Holy Week just as he lived them: «El señor sale de Bethania, y sus vestiduras aletean gozosas en el fondo azul del collado» (p. 133), with passages from the narrator's own physical present in which the Holy Week rituals are being observed: «Entre las piedras viejas palpitan las palmas desnudas y graciosas; tienden sus cuellos buscándose, y se conmueve su hoja como un plumón finísimo bajo la caricia de un lazo blanco, azul, morado, grana...» (p. 134). This section, which was not originally published in the series of newspaper articles entitled «El humo dormido», might seem to have been added merely to complete the length of the published volume, but when considered in the light of the underlying philosophical theme of the novel, it is really the capstone of the relationship between text, memory and reality¹¹.

Texts, like the Bible and the Quixote for most everyone in western culture (and El humo dormido itself for Miró) are memory's underpinnings. Thus we return to Barthes who claims that «modern literature is trying, through various experiments, to establish a new status in writing for the agent in writing» (p. 144). According to Barthes, discourse is reality or the referent: «The field of the writer is nothing but writing itself, but much more radically, as the only area [espace] for the one who writes» (p. 144). This was precisely Miró's goal in El humo dormido and in all the books he wrote during the rest of his career, but only in El humo dormido and perhaps in Años y leguas does he give us such concrete textual clues to this purpose¹².