A Poetics of Time and Space: Ekphrasis and the Modern Vision in Azorín and Velázquez

8/9/2019 A Poetics of Time and Space: Ekphrasis and the Modern Vision in Azorín and Velázquez

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the visual arts, and wrote critically on both classic and contemporaryart forms; he was an inveterate visitor of museums, well-versed in thehistory and theory of art, and he counted among his personalfriends the contemporary painters Zuloaga, Beruete, and VaizquezDiaz. It is commonplace to attribute to Azorin, and especially toBaroja, the modern rehabilitation of El Greco whose portrait of theCaballero de la mano al pecho became an iconographic symbol of theSpanish Generation of 1898: reproductions of the painting gracedthe studies of many of its members. However, according to Gaspar

G6mez de la Serna, the name of Velazquez, the other Spanish classi-cal painter of note, is practically absent from the literature of theGeneration (42). G6mez de la Serna attributes this neglect of Velaz-quez to the unbridgeable spiritual gulf between the "aesthetes" ofthe Generation of 1898 who identified more easily with the refinedand elegant distortions of El Greco than with the human realism ofVelazquez (43). Velazquez's name is likewise absent from AntonioRisco's list of painters favored by Azorin (240), the member of theGeneration of 1898 most consistently attuned to the visual artsthroughout a career that spanned nearly 70 years. The truth of thematter, however, is quite different from what Gomez de la Serna,and others, would have us believe. It is my intent to dispel thenotion that Velazquez had no appeal for the Generation of 1898 andto query the intellectual and aesthetic interstices which account forAzorin inferring in Velazquez a kindred spirit. Through his absorp-tion with Velazquean techniques that today we have come to identifyas modern concepts of representation, Azorin, anticipating Ortega

and Foucault, saw in the master's work a contemporary phenome-nology of vision. I will consider the story "La casa cerrada" (Castilla)as an example of the way in which Azorin engages a painting byVelazquez in dialogue, utilizing the work of art as a visual referentfor what is, in reality, an essay that interrogates the dialectical rela-tions between word and image, and the displacement of painting,an art of natural signs, by literature, an art of arbitrary, linguisticsigns, in the creation of visual reality. In so doing, Azorin gives thetraditional topos of ekphrasis a decidedly modern turn by assertingthe priority and supremacy of language.

The year 1899 coincided with the third centenary of Velazquez'sbirth, commemorated in Spain by the organization of a "Sala Velaz-quez" at the Prado Museum, and the publication in France of thefirst modern catalogue raisonne of the master's work by Aureliano deBeruete, a landscape painter who, in addition to supervising the

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Vel6azquez activities at the Prado, was closely allied intellectually andaesthetically with the Generation of 1898 writers, and to whomAzorin would dedicate Castilla, his seminal book of essays, in 1912.Perhaps because of his friendship with Beruete, Azorin took an earlyand profound interest in the work of Velazquez. He was familiarwith contemporary bibliography on the painter, including not onlyBeruete's impeccable contribution to Velazquez scholarship, butalso those of the French painter-art critics Aman-Jean and Rafaelli(7:237-40). In Azorin's view there was no painter more modern or

more universal than Velazquez (7:237), and it is not reproductionsof El Greco's Caballero which hang in the studies of Azorin's "fic-tional" protagonists, but "grandes fotografias de cuadros de Velaz-quez" (2:94). Citations of Velazquez appear again and again inAzorin's work, whether in the form of references to actual paintings,or as mere pictorial metaphor such as the invocation of royal prin-cesses with their "pafiuelos de batista en la mano, como en losretratos de Velaizquez," a metaphor with many avatars which Azorinrecalled whenever he needed to evoke the atmosphere of classicalSpain.2

Of all Velazquez paintings, however, it is Las Meninas which seemsto have had an ineffable magnetism for Azorin, clearly enjoying aposition of privilege in his intellectual and aesthetic views. Thepainting has many different functional values in the writer's work,ranging from purely decorative intent, such as the carefully lit re-production of Las Meninas in the study of Antonio Azorin in theeponymous novel (1:1009); ajournalistic essay condemning the dis-

figuring coat of varnish applied to the painting in 1903 (Pintar comoquerer 12); an essay/short story devoted to Jose Nieto, the smallfigure on the background steps of the painting (2:467-69); an imag-inary visit to Velazquez's studio in which a discussion of perspectivein Las Meninas takes place (5:977-7); not to mention the photo-graph of a middle-aged Azorin standing in front of a reproductionof Las Meninas which appears on the back cover of Juan ManuelRozas's edition of Castilla.

Velazquez was an intertextual painter. His canvasses, including

2 Whether alluding to Velazquez or not, Azorin's art metaphors are often synec-dochic in the sense that they frequently refer only to a small portion of a painting orto a painter's general style. In such cases, delivery of the metaphor's full symbolicimpact presupposes a reader's familiarity with the painting, series of paintings, orartistic movement inferred by the writer. All citations from Castilla refer to InmanFox's 1991 Austral edition and will be included parenthetically in the text.

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LasMeninas,

oftenduplicate either his own work or that of otherpainters and, in some cases, as Ortega pointed out, the master re-

casts ancient mythology in modern, irreverent terms. Azorin's spe-cial fondness for the Meninas can be accounted for by his ownpredilection for the self-reflexive: in literature we have only to men-tion the triumphant, late novel Dona Ines, replete with Velazqueanstructures of self-referential works of plastic art. There is evidence,as far as painting is concerned, that Azorin was fond of the Flemishmasters so proficient in the games of visual embedding that we know

today as mise en abyme: considering Azorin's citations of Memling,van Eyck (La voluntad 109) and Petrus Christus (Pintar como querer65), it is safe to assume that he must have known reproductions ofthe classic Wedding Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini by van Eyck with itsreflecting mirror strategically placed in the background, or Mem-ling's Martin van Nieuwenhove diptych in which a convex mirrorplaced behind the back of the madonna in the left-hand panelreflects not only her back, but also the donor van Nieuwenhove,depicted in prayer in the right-hand panel of the diptych. The Pe-trus Christus Saint Eligius has a convex mirror which reflects a streetand two passersby located outside the frame of the painting, and it isalso quite possible that Azorin may have known Quintin Matsys's TheBanker and His Wife, housed in the Louvre, in which the crucialmirror is placed at an angle facing the spectator and reflects notonly the space represented, but also a figure and a street scenepainted in perspective within the mirror, a technique anticipatingthe controversial mirror and interior canvas Velazquez placed at an

angle in Las Meninas.3 Azorin's interest in the Flemish school mayperhaps also be attributed to what Giner de los Rios noted was vanEyck's, Memling's, and Matsys's "extremada conciencia en apurarlos pormenores del natural" and their human subjects "que respirande una verdad extraordinaria, carecen de aquel amaneramiento yaquella afectaci6n que por entonces privaba" (20:271-72). Well-known is Azorin's own attention to naturalistic detail, especially themundane aspects of rural life-the "primores de lo vulgar" madefamous by Ortega who likewise argued that Velazquez was the first

3 Although Azorin visited Paris in 1905 and again in 1918, he never went to theLouvre until his exile to Paris during the Spanish Civil War. In his memoirs, however,the writer does say that before actually setting foot in the museum, he knew itscontents quite well: "por libros, fotografias, por postales, por reproducciones varias,conocia yo estas obras" (5:853). For discussion of Memling and Van Eyck, see Dallen-bach (10-11); for Petrus Christus, see Risco (69 n26); also Maravall (109).

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modern painter to depict objects not in their idealistic, genericforms, but as displaying their quotidian and prosaic idiosyncrasies(8:523).

In his study of Velazquez, Ortega dates the beginning of modernpainting to the conscious attempt made by the artist to introducethe temporal element into a normally spatial medium. According toOrtega, painters before Velazquez avoided the temporal, while thegreat discovery of the Spanish master was that of "freezing the in-stant": "Eso es lo que eterniza [Velazquez] y esa es, seguin 61el,a

mision de la pintura: dar eternidad precisamente al instante"(8:487). Critics from Ortega to Foucault have invariably cited LasMeninas as the painting most exemplary of Velazquez's desire toarrest time, to detain movement in space.4 In Las MeninasVelazquezshows not only himself standing before a canvas, brush in hand,poised to begin his task, but also Jose Nieto with one leg raised,clearly about to step through the back door and out of the room,and the Infanta with her meninas appearing as if surprised by thearrival of something or someone else located outside the frame ofthe painting.

Velazquez's meditation on the nature of time and his personaldesire to attenuate its chronological sequentiality was also a concernof Azorin. As he describes it, Azorin's "dolorido sentir" consisted inthe fact that all his life the writer was obsessed with "esa sensaci6nvaga ... del tiempo y de las cosas que pasan en una corrientevertiginosa y formidable" (2:90). Azorin's attempts at preserving, orreliving time thematically in his creative work, his revival and restitu-

tion of the Spanish classics in his essays on literary history, and hispenchant for the use of the present perfect or historical presenttense throughout his work, are all instances of what Ortega so per-ceptively called an "ensayo de salvar . . . al mundo inquieto queproperante va hacia su propia destrucci6n" (2:174).

In his desire to surprise and to suspend the present moment onits flight into history, Azorin engaged in the same kind of exercise,albeit for different personal reasons, as did Velazquez. In separateessays on painter and writer, this similarity of intent was noticed bythe cultural historian, Jose Antonio Maravall. In his monographicstudy of the painter, Maravall notes that Velazquez tries to petrifyinstances of existence: "trata de captar el objeto individual en elmomento en que este pasa por dentro de el ... en un instante

4 See Foucault 3, Maravall 80-82, Ortega 8:486-87, and Searle 248.

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plenamenteindividualizado"

(80). Writingon the idea of microhis-

tory in Azorin, Maravall observes the manner in which quantumtheory revolutionized the modern conception of time, suggestingthat Azorin thought of time as consisting of fundamentally discreteunits. Maravall's assessment of the writer's preoccupation with tem-porality is nearly identical to his appraisal of Velazquez when healludes to "Esos 'momentos'-quanta de significaci6n, los hemosllamado-que trata de captar Azorin con su observaci6n . . ." (53).

By representing physical movement frozen in time, Velazquez in-

troduced the issue of temporality and implied the notion of narra-tive sequence in painting, inherently a spatial form of art. Azorin,on the other hand, frequently attempts to suspend the inherenttemporality of narrative through the spatializing poetics ofekphrasis: a topos which subverts the diachronicity of literature byverbally recreating within the parameters of language art forms, thesynchronic and spatial/visual qualities of the plastic arts. Perhapsunbeknown to himself, Ortega perceived Azorin's ekphrastic imper-ative in his 1912 review of Lecturas espanolas, a review which alsohappens to adumbrate similar observations Ortega would makeabout Velazquez:

El arte de Azorin consiste en suspender el movimiento de las cosas haci-endo que la postura en que las sorprende se perpetue.... De este modo,se desvirt6a el poder corruptor del tiempo. Se trata, pues, de un artificioanalogo al de la pintura. (1:239)

Ortega's comment infers the debate between the "sister arts" origi-nated

bythe Greeks and taken

upin

neo-classical aesthetics byLessing in the Laocodn (1766), a work in which the philosopherpretends to distinguish painting from poetry by contrasting thetemporal nature of literature with the spatial characteristics ofpainting.

Azorin himself was aware of the time/ space controversy involvingliterature and art, and he addressed the "discrepancias que habiansurgido en torno a los limites de la pintura y la poesia" in a chapterof Capricho, itled "El critico de arte" (6:915). Thinly disguised as the

art critic, Azorin recalls "los razonamientos de Lessing en su Lao-coonte" s he considers whether painting can truly be said to portraya single, discrete moment apprehended synchronically by the hu-man eye, and literature a series of moments meant to be understoodin diachronic progression.

Although most students of the ekphrastic impulse in literature

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acknowledge that the verbal and visual arts can never entirely re-place one another, and therefore maintain a perpetually dialogicrelationship, the verbally created plastic object is, nevertheless, fre-quently interpolated into a literary work in an attempt to retard itslinear movement. Because the plastic arts are essentially timelessand their "temporality" follows a circular, or repetitive pattern, su-perimposing the "frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships" uponliterature has the effect, as Murray Krieger expressed it in his classicessay on the subject, of stilling "literature's turning world" (Ekphrasis265-66) .5

The ekphrastic moment is therefore a conflictive one since itimpels the work of verbal art to accommodate the inserted, generic"other" by temporarily suspending its internal laws of linear succes-sion. The final intent of such literary mimesis is to coax the lan-guage art into imitating as closely as possible the style and techniqueof the visual arts. Literature is thereby empowered with the uniquecapability of reproducing the atemporal simultaneity of painting,sculpture or even architectonic configurations within the confinesof its own chronological irreversibility, although, as Krieger re-marks, this type of literature shall always be accompanied by an"archetypal principle of repetition, of eternal return" ("Still Move-ment" 125).

Given Azorin's life-long obsession with the notion of eternal re-turn and his attempts to sabotage the forward march of time, it isnot surprising that he would make extensive use of the ekphrasticimperative in his work. That he should also empathize with Velaz-

quez, a painter intent on capturing the instantaneity of a scene orpassing moment, is also understandable. Azorin surely recognizedin the painter's work parallels to his own: Velazquez's experimentswith the introduction of temporality into the "stilled" movement ofpainting complement Azorin's resolve to delay the chronology in-

5 Joseph Frank was the first to study the subversion of narrative linearity via thespatializing effects of the ekphrastic impulse in his ground-breaking "Spatial Form inModern Literature" (1945). Although unrelated to the intrusion of verbally gener-ated works of art into literature, similar displacements of narrative linearity werenoted by Gerard Genette who classified the techniques through which an authormight induce conflict between story (histoire) and the manner in which that story istold (discours). Azorin's "La casa cerrada" is a case in point: the protagonist's blind-ness, information which logically should be given at the beginning of the essay, isonly fully revealed analeptically; that is, the reader is provided information withwhich to decode the narrative long after its most propitious moment.

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herent in narrative by introducing into the arts of the word, thecircular, self-reflexive movement connotative of the visual arts.6Although a number of paintings by Velazquez engage in the exer-

cise of freezing an instant of physical activity-Ortega mentions Losborrachos nd Las lanzas as two examples (8:486) -it is Las Meninaswhich takes this Velazquean theme to its limits as it portrays not onediscrete action, but, as we have seen, that of many. Referring to LasMeninas Foucault observed the circular pattern of movement towhich the painting compels a spectator's eye (13), and the figure of

Velazquez himself "caught in a moment of stillness, at the neutralcentre of this oscillation" (3). For these, and many other reasonsthat will become apparent, Azorin chose Las Meninas as the struc-tural axis and visual emblem for his essay "La casa cerrada" (Castilla,1912).7

On first consideration "La casa cerrada" appears to be a simplenarrative about two men who return after a considerable absence tothe home where one of them had lived as a child. In true Azorinianfashion, despite the passage of time and an important physiologicalchange wrought in the protagonist, there have been no major trans-formations within or without the walls of the house: "todo estai lomismo que hace quince anos." Neither the family portraits nor thephotograph of Las Meninas in the study has become discolored; thedining room, too, appears as if dinner had been served there justthe evening before.8 While mention of Las Meninas in this essayseems rather casual and purely decorative, it is tempting to ask whyAzorin chose to place this particular painting in this particular nar-

rative, and why the protagonist would say that the figure of don Jose

6 The art historian Enrique Lafuente Ferrari notes that one of Velazquez's great-est achievements was to "realizar en la pintura, arte espacial, la captaci6n del tiem-po" (131).

7 Another favorite painting of Azorin's was Rembrandt's San Mateo, most likelybecause he saw in it another instance in which a painter arrested his subject inmotion: "veia al retradado con la pluma en alto . . . abstraido, pensando en lo queiba a escribir" (8:352).

8 The return to a closed or abandoned home is a symbol Azorin favored to repre-sent "time capsule" effects. "La lucecita

roja"(Castilla), "La casa

vieja"and "La casa

abandonada" (Leyendo a los cldsicos) recapitulate similar themes. Murray Kriegerremarked that circular structure narratives which find their ends in their beginningsare "spots of time" demonstrating a conflation of time and space (qtd in Kestner 77).Inman Fox proposes that in his battle against the clock, Azorin conflates time andspace purposefully in order to nullify time's destructive power and to create a newreality in which past and present coexist ("Lectura y literatura" 154).

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Nieto always had a profoundly suggestive influence upon him (203).We note, first, thatJose Nieto is portrayed arrested in the motion ofdrawing back a curtain, "con un pie en un escalon y otro pie enotro" about to exit the room (202). Second, the protagonist speaksof Nieto as "ese hombre lejano-lejano en ese fondo del cuadro yen el tiempo" (203)-a figure remote both in time and in the man-ner in which Velaizquez has placed him within the painting. ThusLas Meninas conflates the representation of time and space that sointerested Azorin.9 In the same way that Las Meninas preserves the

"stilled movement" of a group of people as they were caught at aspecific moment inside Velizquez's palace studio, Azorin's "La casacerrada" is modelled along the lines of a "time capsule" which hasjust been re-opened, disclosing its contents to the spectator/reader.

Upon closer scrutiny, Azorin's verbal homage to the perspectivalschematics which "frame" Jose Nieto in the doorway is not sui gen-eris, but one in a congeries of frames, mirrors, windows, and paint-ings within Las Meninas, all of them bespeaking the structural orga-nization of Azorin's essay. From the outset, "La casa cerrada" issituated within the paradigm of the visual arts through Azorin'sconstant use of frames and framing devices which tend to convertwhat is seen through them into a "picture." As in several of hisessays, Azorin begins "La casa" with the ascent of the protagonist tohigh ground, in this case to a mountain pass, from which the valleyand town below can be apprehended in bird's eye perspective. Theview described is seen through the window of the carruaje n whichthe men travel, its borders marking off the interior of the vehicle

from the scene beyond, effectively transforming the valley into alandscape framed by the carriage window.10?Once Azorin's travelling companions enter the home they repeat

the ascensional movement which opened the essay, this time to asecond-floor gallery from whose windows the protagonist remem-

9 Las Meninas and the background doorway where Jose Nieto stands and beyondwhom a brightly lit corridor recedes even further into the distance is recreated againin "Las nubes" (Castilla) where Azorin recalls a "puertecilla de cuarterones en elfondo-como en Las Meninas, de Velazquez-deja ver un pedazo de luminoso pa-

tio" (159).10 Mary Ann Caws mentions that placing a protagonist or an action at an unusualheight or "enclosed in a noticeable set of limits and openings," contributes to thecreation of a framing effect (22). In his "Meditaci6n del marco," Ortega argues thatthe window frame as a compositional structure is similar to a picture frame sinceboth isolate their contents from the reality which surrounds them, moving what isseen through either picture or window frame closer toward the aesthetic-ideal(2:311).

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bers he liked to contemplate "el panorama de la vega" (201). Thegallery windows, like the windows of the carriage, transform theview described into another framed landscape. Proceeding to the li-brary, the protagonist asks about the portraits which hang on itswalls. Assured that neither moisture nor time has harmed them, theprotagonist asks they be taken down so that he can run his handsover the paintings which he differentiates by their frames: "los dis-tingo por sus marcos" (201). It is at this moment that Azorin makestwo analeptic revelations: first, he confirms the reader's growing

suspicion that the protagonist may be blind; therefore, the readerbecomes aware that the narrative is experienced not through theprotagonist's eyes, but through those of his companion who be-comes metonymic not only for the protagonist's vision, but also forthe eyes of the reader. What is "seen" is thereby doubly framed bythe companion's eyes which themselves must peer through manydifferent types of "frames" as they apprehend the narrative scene.11

The framed family portraits of "La casa cerrada" appropriategreater significance when the reader is able to recognize them asbelonging to the larger series of verbally framed pictures and land-scapes which materialize within Azorin's discourse. As a structuraldevice narrative frames possess greatest importance when they jux-tapose a narrating present with a narrated past, leading a reader orfictional character to a "retrospective vision as an occasion for as-sessing the past and measuring one's present against it" (Dittmar192). In the case of "La casa cerrada," the analeptic revelation ofthe protagonist's present blindness, emphasized when he must feel

the portraits of his ancestors with his hands, confronts not only theman's past and present, but also functions as a narrative frame thatestablishes a considerably altered manner and scale of values bywhich to engage the essay in a second reading.

Additionally, the two family portraits of "La casa," visual represen-tations embedded within the representational medium of literature,mimic the two pictures Velazquez painted on the rear wall of LasMeninas, itself a painting encompassing a myriad of portraits.Through these background pictures, identified as paintings after

sketches by Rubens, an artist twenty-two years older than Velaizquez

11 Cf. Caws (262 and 28-29) on the metonymic function of an included observerand the framing technique of "seeing an observer see." Viola Hopkins suggests that itis at moments where sight (in Azorin's case, the lack of sight) merges with insight(the reader's awareness of Azorin's visual games as fundamental elements of plot,theme, and stucture) that the framing device is used to greatest effect (563).

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whom the Spanish painter came to know rather well duringRubens's eight-month stay in Madrid (1628), Velazquez measuresthe present of his own career against the legacy of a precursorartist.12 Just as Azorin introduces spatial qualities into his essaythrough the use of both figurative (narrative) frames and literal(picture) frames, conflating time and space into one discrete, sen-sory experience, so Velazquez, as he responds both to the work ofRubens and del Mazo in his own painting, permits the entry ofnarrative chronology into a spatial form of art.

From the portraits in the library, the nameless protagonist of "Lacasa cerrada" and his equally nameless companion ascend to thehighest level of the home where the blind man's study was located.In the study, the protagonist immediately proceeds to a windowfrom which he tells us he liked to observe "los huertos de la vega"(202), often drawing the landscape closer to his eyes by using a pairof binoculars, creating another of the many "dual frame" structureswhich pervade the essay. It is in this room, above the desk, that theprotagonist hung a framed reproduction of Velazquez's Las Me-ninas, its very status as a photographic duplicate an adroit restate-ment of the self-reflexive nature of the original with its infiniteregress of frames.13 In the same way that Velazquez creates theillusion of space and volume in his painting by situating frameswithin frames drawn in increasingly deepening perspective, Azorininvokes the literary frame in order to create a comparable illusionof space and perspective in "La casa cerrada." He further reinforces

12 Nina Ayala Mallory identifies the two paintings as copies made by Juan Bautistadel Mazo (Velazquez's son-in-law) of Rubens's Minerva y Aracne and Jordaen's Apolo yMarsias (162). Reproducing these art works in Las Meninas allows Velazquez a para-tactic evaluation of his own work against that of the precursor Rubens as well as thatof the younger, less-talented pupil and "heir," del Mazo. Eric Rabkin notes themodernist use of parataxis to promote a "dialectic between the synchronic and thediachronic aspects of reading to retrieve a coherent value system . .." (270). Velaz-quez's modernity, unappreciated until his "rediscovery" by Manet and the impres-sionists, is manifest in paintings such as Las Meninas which represents three genera-tions of painters, a diachronicity which the spectator, nevertheless, must graspsynchronically. The inclusion of works by contemporary artists in Las Meninas leads

the intertextuality and perspective embedding of Velazquez's painting to even great-er depths, taking the number of framed pictures in the masterpiece to an unprece-dented level of complication.

13 Don Jose Nieto framed in the doorway and the framed interior paintings arereiterated by the heavy, protruding window frame in the right-hand side of thepainting (revealed only by the light which streams through it into the studio), theframed canvas on which Velazquez is about to begin painting and, finally, the framedmirror which, in turn, frames the indistinct visages of Felipe IV and Queen Mariana.

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its frames and spatial qualities by inserting three paintings-onehistorical, two fictional-inside his narrative. Ultimately, however, itis the verbal art which implodes the still, circular movement of theekphrases, framing them within the boundaries of the essay's domi-nant, linear progression.

In his study of Velazquez, Jose Antonio Maravall suggests that amirror, a window, or an open door such as those which appear in LasMeninas are frequently placed in a painting to make visible and toaccommodate within the picture spaces or vistas that would other-

wise remain outside the purview of the work of art (110). While forthe Flemish masters who first explored self-reflexive painting, andwhose work is the intertext for both Velaizquez and Azorin, mirrorsusually played no role other than to duplicate in perfect mise enabyme the contents of the picture within which they were placed(Foucault 7), the mirror of Las Meninas makes visible a scene lo-cated outside the parameters of the painting.14 As the spectator'seye attempts to decide whether the subject of the picture is theInfanta and her entourage located within the painting, or Felipe IVand Queen Mariana located outside the picture frame but madevisible by the mirror, the spectator's eye is lured into an oscillatorydialogue between the interior and exterior contents of the painting.A similar kind of dialogic exchange between the inner and theouter, the visible and the invisible occurs in "La casa cerrada" as thereader's eye moves continuously between the inner spaces of vehicleand home to the exterior views of plain and town, doubly framed bythe eyes of the protagonist's companion and the carriage, gallery,

attic windows and picture frames through which he sees. In thesame way that Velazquez positioned himself at an interstitial loca-tion within his own painting; that is, as one who sees and is himselfpart of the scene, forming an axis between the inner and outerworlds of his painting, so in "La casa" the blind man's companionfunctions as a point of exchange between the "seen" world of theessay as apprehended by the reader and the scene as he describes orhelps to reconstruct it for the protagonist. As the mirror restoresvisibility to the "other" in Velaizquez's painting, so, too, the control-

ling eyes of the companion in Azorin's essay restore vision to theblind man and to the reader.

14 The mirror, in fact, may not be reflecting the King and Queen in the flesh at all,but their portraits which Velazquez is painting on the angled canvas within LasMeninas. Cf. Buero Vallejo ("Acerca" 2).

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In "La casa cerrada" the illusion of an eyewitness account given bythe protagonist is induced by his constant use of verbs of percep-tion: divisar, contemplar, ver, mirar, leer occur several times on each

page of this short narrative. The paradox, of course, is that the

eye(I)witness is blind and sees nothing at all. The physiological actof vision is therefore reconstructed through language; more specifi-cally, through a rhetorical pattern of questions posed by the pro-tagonist based on his surroundings as remembered by his "mind's

eye" and detailed, descriptive responses offered by the companion

who confirms or completes the blind man's recollections:

-Dime, ise ve a la derecha . una casa blanca que apenas asoma entrelos arboles?-Si, ahora parece que refulge al sol un cristal de una ventanita que estaien lo alto. (199)--Pasamos por la plaza ahora? jC6mo me hartaria yo de ver esta plazaancha ...-Alli esta todavia, han abierto algunas tiendas nuevas. En el centro de laplaza han hecho un jardincillo. (200)-mEsto sera un paquetito de cartas? Aqui debe haber tambien un retratomio a los ocho afnos.-Si, este es, esti casi descolorido. (202)15

The entire visually perceptible reality in "La casa cerrada"-thetown, its landscape, the interior of the house and the works of art itcontains-is recreated through language; more precisely, through aseries of speech acts emanating from the protagonist and his friendwho, together, verbally conjure the visual reality of the essay.

Focalization is equally problematic in Las Meninas and "La casacerrada." Velaizquez does not execute his painting from the custom-

ary artist's point of view at a location outside the picture. Rather hecedes that privilege to someone else by placing himself inside Las

15 The same technique of evoking visual reality through a pattern of questions andanswers is used by Antonio Machado in the poem "AJose Maria Palacio" (Campos deCastilla). The poet, like Azorin, also employs the future of probability to confirm avisual memory of place:

JTienen los viejos olmosalgunas hojas nuevas?Aun las acacias estaran desnudas

dHay arzas lorecidasentre las grises penias,

(...)Por esos campanariosya habran do llegando as cigfiuenfias.187)

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Meninas,and

portrayinghimself as

paintingthe

verysame scene

asobserved by the spectator or possible model who now occupies theoverdetermined "point of view." Vision resides with whomever occu-pies that position, perhaps the King and Queen who observe Velaz-quez observing and painting them while they observe their daugh-ter and her ladies who, in turn, observe the royal couple. Similarlyin "La casa," the privilege of sight does not reside with Azorin'sprotagonist, but with the reader who "observes" the companionobserving for his friend (and the reader).

In Las Meninas the images of visibility and non-visibility are sonumerous and overlapping that, in the final analysis, they displacethe intended subject of the painting. The royal couple, because oftheir location outside the picture frame, are seen only as indistinctimages reflected in the mirror on the back wall of Velazquez's stu-dio. As Foucault points out, the paradox of Las Meninas is that theroyal couple is neither "in" the picture, nor are they depictedclearly, and no one "in" the picture is looking at the framed mirrorwhich attests to their presence (7). Thus the ostensible subject ofthe painting is relegated to the status of object and the abstractnotion of point of view replaces Felipe IV and Mariana as the in-tended protagonists of Las Meninas (Searle 257).16 As the subject ofboth essay and painting slip out of focus, Azorin and Velazquez areable to create for themselves greater latitude in which to study theepistemology of vision.

Foucault proposes that the mirror in Las Meninas-and I wouldadd, the entire painting-"provides a metathesis of visibility" (8).

Ortegaalso concluded that

Velazquez's masterpiece reached thepinnacle of what the visual arts could achieve: "la retracci6n de lapintura a la visualidad pura. Las Meninas vienen a ser algo asi comola critica de la pura retina" (8:477). Indeed, another Spaniard, An-tonio Buero Vallejo, a painter before winning international recogni-tion as a playwright, made a similar determination in two criticalessays on Velazquez's painting, as well as the drama titled Las Men-inas. In the play, Buero portrays the painter's chief intellectual andtechnical pursuits as those of representing sight and the dynamics

of vision in his work. Responding to jealous accusations levelledagainst him by inferior palace artists, the character Diego Velazquez

16 Foucault attributes this dynamics to the impossibility of portraying both artistand King as having equal importance in the same painting. As the intended subjectof Las Meninas is elided, "representation freed finally from the relation that wasimpeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form" (16).

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two kinds: physical and metaphysical. Velazquez then inquires of hisvisitor whether he has not been successful in achieving both types ofperspective in the small figure ofJose Nieto portrayed at nearly theinnermost point of the deeply receding perspective in Las Meninas.For the fictional Velazquez, the figure of Nieto positioned on therear steps leading to the famous puertecita de cuarterones and theblaze of light in the corridor beyond, speaks of hopes and joys we donot know, pain which we have yet to experience, of destiny itself(5:977-78). In short, he is a personage which engages "Velazquez-

Azorin" in the same kind of meditation as he did the protagonist of"La casa cerrada."

Because of its status as a canonical work, the "hypericon" may,with time, shift from an image which stimulates discussion to that ofa reified sign (Mitchell 158). As Mitchell observes, one of the aimsof literary iconology is to "breathe new life" into visual emblemsreified by time and commercial or intellectual exploitation(158-59). In his use of the Meninas as an iconographic metaphorand visual referent designed to unveil beneath the exquisite narra-tive "miniature" of "La casa cerrada," a debate on natural and arbi-trary signs, Azorin reveals himself as a true literary modern, takingup the enterprise of pouring new wine into old wineskins recom-mended by Mitchell.18

In a penetrating essay on modern and post-modern art, CharlesNewman referred to Ortega's metaphor of the window and thegarden (The Dehumanization of Art), to illustrate the differences be-tween nineteenth and twentieth century approaches to the percep-

tion of reality. While naturalism and realism assumed that the win-dow glass was perfectly transparent, offering unobstructed views ofthe world, in the twentieth century the window of perception be-comes "fogged with authorial breath as much as nature's mist." ForNewman the twentieth century metaphor for language is a cognitiveprocess in which both observer and observed are dependent uponeach other. "The window of language is no longer in fact a window,but its own autotelic agency: Opacity as Reality" (66-67). This di-

18 In his study of Ortega's identification with Velazquez as exemplary of the "mod-ern," Thomas Mermall argues that what concerned Ortega most were the "historialvariations of the subject as creator of meaning" (240). In "La casa cerrada" Azorinappears to suggest a comparable idea: one who controls the verbal sign has thecapacity not only to create meaning, but to create meaningful visual reality throughlanguage alone. Eric Rabkin adds that the tendency to spatialize narrative is charac-teristic of the modern imperative to revitalize literary forms (270).

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vorce of the arbitrary sign from the natural sign which Newman seesat the core of modernist aesthetics is also the keystone of Azorin's"La casa cerrada." The windows, literal and figurative, throughwhich Azorin's reader "sees" are made possible by the protagonist'sopacity; that is, his inability to see. If the reader perceives anythingat all of the blindman's surroundings, it is due to the ability oflanguage to reproduce a visibly lived reality. And so well does thelinguistic sign recreate the perceptibly real, that the protagonist'sblindness never impedes understanding; in fact, it is not even con-

firmed until the essay's close.I suggest that Azorin chose Las Meninas to contextualize a reading

of "La casa cerrada" because he clearly understood Velazquez's mas-terpiece to be a painting about the dynamics of vision. In Azorin'sview, then, apprehension of the visibly real, generally associatedwith the natural signs of plastic arts, could be fashioned with equalvalidity through purely linguistic means. Language, because of itsautotelic nature, could displace, perhaps even supersede, vision. ForAzorin writing had-as Francoise Meltzer put it-finally "replacedthe portrait" (137).

Baruch College, CUNY

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A Poetics of Time and Space: Ekphrasis and the Modern Vision in Azorín and Velázquez

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