On the Interpretative Style of Dámaso Alonso: The Art of Definition

Gonzalo Sobejano

University of Pennsylvania

In considering so rich a personality as that of Dámaso Alonso -poet, critic, theorist of literature, linguist, historian, biographer, teacher, psychologist- it is difficult to choose the angle from which the essence of his character can most quickly be shown. Fortunately, the choice was made for me when it was proposed that I speak of him as a critic, and I will so limit my comments. I shall attempt to demonstrate that what best defines Alonso the critic is precisely his art of definition, his extraordinary ability to see and express the essential features of a literary object. Having been privileged to study under Alonso at the University of Madrid and since then to enjoy his generous friendship, I should like now to imitate his own attitude and method: I should like to define him by defining his art of definition. And since this preliminary statement begins to sound like «the reason of non-reason», I shall set to the task, a daring one certainly but, I hope, not entirely foolhardy.

The qualities of the ideal literary critic are a sense of mission, a sufficiently broad field of erudition, a method of investigation proven by one's own experience and an effective use of language. Other qualities, such as vocation, sensibility and taste need not be mentioned, since they, like a soldier's bravery, are taken for granted: without them it is impossible for the critic to provide even the most modest service.

The critic who has no sense of mission will perform a task which may not be useless but will have no direction. One whose field is not broad enough and who has not worked it with his own hands will easily fall into the narrow confines of specialization. And one who lacks a method which he himself has found to be good will be tempted to try one method after another capriciously or expose himself to the passing winds of fashion. The critic who cannot express his findings in effective language will be doomed to live in the involuntary hermeticism of intranscendency -these are the dangers which threaten the literary critic. The critic who avoids them or overcomes them, achieves the ideal, an ideal which for many of us is an illusion, but not for Alonso, the finest example of achievement.

The principal mission, although not the only one, which he set for himself and which has guided his steps and enabled him to reach goals which no one before had achieved, was, from the historical point of view, a new understanding and evaluation of Spanish lyric poetry of the Golden Age in its embodiment of universal qualities; and from the critical point of view, the study of the literary work as a work of art in language. The breadth of his studies is such that there is no literary genre which has not won his attention, no neighboring literature which has not attracted his curiosity, no century in Spanish letters (unless it be the eighteenth) which has not been the object of his fruitful research. As a researcher of style, it is well known that Alonso maintains that «for each poet, for each poem, a different approach is required»¹, but this varied procedure is harmonized in the unity and logic of a method of his own: stylistics. (When he is at work as a biographer or historian, it seems that he sets stylistics aside, but he continues to use it, although transposed to a personal or collective psychological plane). Finally, Alonso's critical language is a model of precision, vitality and suggestive transposition, a testimony to his unique personality. (The best proof of this is that he has imitators).

A precise purpose, a vast area of erudition, a personal method, effective language. Fortunately, some other, though very few, Spanish critics also possess these basic traits to one degree or another. What is it then that sets him apart in comparison with those critics? In others there undoubtedly are, to a lesser degree, qualities which Alonso possesses: an insistence on raising and discussing ideological, ethnological and historical-cultural questions; the ability to interpret the designs of a writer within his social setting; the tendency to describe the major outlines of an epoch or the rhythm and design of a single work or the entire production of one artist; an interest in relating and analyzing constant themes and leitmotifs in one poet or one period; the observation of relationships between several genres; the interrelated study of the text and history. But in no other contemporary Spanish critic, not even in the one whose name so closely resembles his, have I ever found, to such a high degree and with such revealing fidelity, the desire and gift to define briefly and distinctly, in the way a definition should be made, the nature and essential traits of one literature, period style, literary movement, generation, genre-especially of one writer, one work, and one or another technique of expression. This is what best sets Alonso apart from the critics of his time and country and what best distinguishes him personally, because this exercise of defining is in him principle, constant dedication and major goal. Singularly and repeatedly. And because the arena in which he Works unceasingly is language.

When I mention «define», I am by no means thinking of the activity of the magister who sets forth a logical proposition extracted from the clear sky of pure essence and later descends to the easy task of covering the living forms with an abstract formula, whether or not they fit the rigid mold. Rather, the meaning I intend is the opposite: a direct perception of living forms followed immediately by the discovery in them, through what they have in common with others, of that which is unique and incomparable. I mean, therefore, the art of defining specific essence through character, and not the artifice of subordinating character to generic essence. Dámaso Alonso's art of definition is not aprioristic, deductive or generalistic, but intuitive, inductive and, in its ultimate form, psychological and physiognomical.

Let us recall some of his definitions. Menéndez Pelayo ended his monumental «Anthology» with Boscán and never did understand the poet of the Soledades. Alonso began his studies with Góngora; he understood him and made him intelligible to everyone, as never before and for all time. From that moment his main task as an interpreter of Spanish literature was defined; he himself confessed this when he began his work and again when he considered it done. When he began, he said, «We shall carry out a truly Hispanic task, explaining and propagating those literary values which unite us to universal currents of thought and art»². When he believed his task finished, he said, «my major effort as a critic has been to bring to the Spanish people and the world in general an understanding of that group of powerful, contrasting individuals (Garcilaso, Fray Luis, St. John of the Cross, Lope, Góngora, Quevedo) -each one a distinct example of achievement- as an outcry, as a longing for a higher goal, as an example of the magnificent variety of poetic inspiration, joined as it were in its center to the divine mystery but expressed in quite different forms and directions»³.

The study of Góngora soon brought him to a new interpretation of Spanish literature; not only is it realistic, regionalistic and popular, but also idealistic and universal, constantly straining between opposite extremes which at times confront one another, at times blend in a single text or in a single poet. This definition of the peculiar nature of Spanish literature emerges in opposition to the unilateral definition dominant until that time, not as abstraction or theory but based on his scrupulous examination of the work of Góngora. «Escila y Caribdis de la literatura española» is the now well-known title of that 1927 essay, which was first published in 1933. Although its author called it a «capricious» title, the doctrine contained in the study was not so. Alonso has since corroborated this in his researches into the mixture of serious and comic elements in the Poema del Cid and in Gil Vicente, popular and aristocratic duality in the lyrics of St. John, Góngora and Lope, the compatibility of the suprahuman and infrahuman worlds in the work of Quevedo, or the popular inroads found in the learned verses of Manuel Machado.

«Escila y Caribdis» gives perhaps the broadest definition achieved by Alonso in his studies of Spanish literature, but it is not the only one. We recall his definition of Spanish realism, outlined in works on the Cid, Gil Vicente, Fernández de Heredia, Martorell and the Lazarillo: the realism of souls which create themselves as they speak, a realism which does not describe things but allows them to appear «tacitly and implicitly»⁴, a realism which reaches the Quijote and from there goes on to engender the modem novel of the whole world. We may also recall our debt to Dámaso Alonso for his presentation of Spanish «traditional-type» poetry in a memorable anthology which enriched the historical sensibility of his own generation, and his later editions such as the Soledades. In this way it is he who explains to Romance scholars and to non-specialized readers the importance of the jarchas, that poetry which is the first spring of the European lyric, and it is he who deciphers and evaluates the note from San Millán (nota emilianense), an important indication of uninterrupted traditionalism in the epic, a traditionalism which in his opinion is the basis of Spain's originality among the Romance nations. Other essays defining Spanish letters contain such luminous pages as the ones devoted to commentaries on the earliest manifestations of Spanish literature, the literature «in the divine manner», the relative orientalism of the Book of Good Love, or the tragic outburst of Spanish expressiveness in Federico García Lorca.

Alonso confesses his feelings of love and sorrow for Spain. Such passion, and passion it is, does not interfere with his intellectual pursuit of truth: it sharpens his mind and leads him more directly to a clear vision of the essentials.

The use of extrapersonal categories which are usually applied in historical study has never particularly appealed to Alonso. Since his primary objective is the stylistic study of a poem «as a perfect individual system of values» (PE, 201), division and subdivision in that sense is for him a complimentary task which is useful at times to shed light on the cultural core of a work, but not on its uniqueness and timelessness.

Nevertheless, Alonso, because he is also an accomplished historian, has the power to detect the structure of literary periods, esthetic trends and generations, and to bring them into play to better delineate individual style. The mission of a literary historian who aspires to be other than an arsenal of information consists for him in «differentiating, evaluating, linking and serializing the particular style of different writers»⁵.

Poets such as Garcilaso, Fray Luis de León, Medrano and Jorge Guillén have led him to reflect on classicism and to arrive at a very delicate extraction of its essence: «Classicism is modesty of expression, voluntary limitation» (PE, 132), «the classic gift of knowing when to be silent» (EPE, 156), «a sense of containment, of sobriety, of well-timed silence»⁶. Classicism in art is «that which responds to a desire or a permanent longing of Humanity»⁷. He uses no fixed notion of classicism to describe such poets: the style of each of them, when studied with penetration, inspires in the interpreter the definition of one or another kind of classicism.

Something similar occurs with Renaissance and baroque concepts. In «Escila y Caribdis» the young critic replied to those, like Wantoch and Klemperer, who had denied the existence of a Renaissance in Spain, and pointed out that in Spain the new Renaissance spirit had been grafted on the traditional trunk of the Middle Ages thus engendering the synthesis and achievements of the Golden Age (EPE, 22). Alonso, after a thorough stylistic analysis, calls the dramatic poetry of Gil Vicente «Renaissance and medieval spirit combined» (EPE, 128). One verse alone by Garcilaso -«cestillos blancos de purpúreas rosas»- in its bilateral counter-equilibrium, provides him with the «quid» of the Renaissance attitude: balanced serenity. (PE, 101).

Alonso avoids facile generalizations about periods and cultures with a healthy sense of caution. Only once does he mention the «baroque man» and this is to lament his slight acquaintance with such a respectable guest (PE, 114). He does nevertheless speak of baroque art when this is appropriate for rounding out the definition of the uniqueness of Góngora, Lope or Quevedo, to point out what is comparable among them and what differentiates each one from Garcilaso or Medrano. Some statements on the baroque: «an achievement in complexity and dynamism» (EPE, 222), an enormous «coincidentia oppositorum» (PE, 413), «an immense force which, when born, encounters Renaissance molds» and fails to find the free new form which it would have required (PE, 509). Each definition depends on the perspective from which the critic views different subjects: one does not invalidate the other; they all are similar but each one contributes a different nuance or contains a particular purpose. Even greater acumen is revealed by his discovery of that «realism in miniature» which in Lope and Góngora compresses turbulent, many-sided nature in a cluster (PE, 507-508). This acumen helps him to perceive something new in Quevedo, a lucid existence of something which is neither Gongorismo nor conceptismo, and which he dares not define (an exception confirming the rule of his art of definition): «there is another novelty in the 17th century», he says, «not captured in these words», «an elusive and not always visible novelty that I cannot define». There follows an admirable paraphrase of that inexpressible affectivity which is felt to flower in that century and cannot be ascribed to any tradition: «But», Alonso concludes, «I will not attempt to define what reaches me only as a vague sensation» (PE, 590-92).

Modernism was early judged by our critic to be more a technique than a world concept. And this evaluation enabled him to unveil expressive intentions, such as, e. g., the «utilization for rhythmic purposes of secondary accents» in the alexandrine verse (PEC, 61), an observation which says much more about modernist art than those ideological generalities which continue to inundate it even today, perhaps promoted by the sterile desire to label as modernism what could adequately be called modernity.

Dámaso Alonso's acceptance of the «generation» concept is very weak in spite of the vogue it enjoyed in Spain from 1940 to 1960, the years of greatest productivity for the writer we honor. According to him, the generation is a valid category for the history of culture; in literary history there exists no more than the individual poet, or better yet, the poem (PEC, 191). Who does not recall, however, the description of his own generation in «Una generación poética (1920-1936)», depicted with such warm biographic emotion and subtle discernment of the esthetic ideals of himself and his friends?

There are a few other instances in which Alonso has made fortunate use of classifying concepts: the highly animated revelation, rooted in solid erudition, of a whole area of Mexican and Spanish internal history in the study on «El Fabio de la Epístola moral»; the recognition of a sort of neo-mannerism in Calderón, who submitted baroque exuberance to serene order by stylizing, cataloguing and regulating it (VOM, 212); the recognition, in the period between the wars, of a «hyperrealism» or realism raised to the second power, a term applicable both to science and art, and more apt than the overused term of «surrealism» (PEC, 286); or the differentiation between rooted and uprooted poetry, essential for the understanding of postwar Spanish poetry (PEC, 366).

Alonso's stylistics finds its most fitting subject in that area where individuality appears as a unitarian whole: in the poet, in the poem. The examples cited here, because the field is so broad and so obvious, must be greatly limited. Poem of the Cid: «constant dramatization», «disjunction» of the sentences, souls which reveal themselves by speaking, slow time and broad brush strokes, insinuation without emphasis (EPE). St. John of the Cross: «an impetuous flame, swift, lightly wounding, at times eddying in perfume and calm music» (SJ, 145). No, this is not celestial music, it is the metaphorical but highly lucid definition of the alternating effect of unencumbered rapidity and serene plenitude emitted by St. John's «Cántico». Fray Luis de León: he was made for harmony but never possessed it and only expressed it as a longing (PE, 170); his main spiritual trait was «integrity» (PE, 171), and the secret of his poetical work «what sets it apart» is a Horatian art which is more complex than Horace, with greater relations and contrasts (PE, 166). Medrano: «art always omits», «elimination of din», «razing of clichés», «knowing when to end» (VOM, 235, 247, 270). Góngora: «radiant clarity», «allusion and evasion», «constant prolific power of words» (EPE). Lope de Vega: he turns «the substance of life into the material of art» (PE, 458), «vital plurality... which is never silenced in achieved perfection» (PE, 510). Quevedo: «Unleashed energy... affectively; condensed intensity conceptually» (PE, 532), the extrapoetic word produces a «fierce rending», a scandal, in the milieu of Renaissance tradition (PE, 583). Bécquer: his gift to the poetry of Spain is «that which is suggested and not expressed, the veiled harmony, the minor tone» (EPE, 275).

I will compress other definitions even more at the risk of giving them the appearance of schematic formulas, which in Alonso they never are: The prose of the Archpriest of Talavera: «not sketches of one single thing», but an «umbrella of... possibilities»; his most outstanding trait: «Constant multiple crossings» (SQ, 134-35). Tirant lo Blanc, «idealism and positivism not in conflict as in the Quijote, but in a curious state of coexistence»⁸. Lazarillo when conversing with the nobleman: «the most wise, most tender, most slow and highly nuanced study of a double psychological process» (SO, 227). Menéndez Pelayo: «rapid intuition together with enormous erudition» and «a constant flow of exact expression»⁹. Maragall: Reality is idealized, the ideal is humanized, a technique of «emphasis» in the first part of «La vaca cega» (CPE, 123). An ample interval, in Jorge Guillén, from the almost sensory «initial burst» to total abstraction (PEC, 224, 236). The «bristle-like» quality of the poetry of Blas de Otero (PEC, 371).

I am not going to mention any others. I will point out that in not a few of these definitions the deep-rooted will of precision leads the critic to use metaphorical, unusual, or neologistic terminology: desligamiento, refreno, desgarrón, varillaje, plurifurcación, coevidencia, destaque, prorrupción, hirsutez, desarraigo, poligénesis. Juan Ramón Jiménez, the sovereign physiognomist of The Spaniards of Three Worlds, left us a description of this trait in his lyrical caricature of Alonso. It begins: «His voice rolls uphill (I mean up his larynx) and stops below his tongue, where the word is tied up in a whirlwind of meaning and hurled out into the air ends at that moment when, after struggling to shake off dizzying restraints, imaginary obstacles, Alonso finally launches another wise and difficult word, perfect, solid, wrapped up like a ball».

Alonso has barely concerned himself at all with literary genres abstractly, but when he has done so in relation with this or that concrete commentary, his thought has crystallized with prodigious precision. A poet himself, his preference has been the interpretation of lyrical poetry, from the early ripples of the jarchas to the visionary floods of Aleixandre: he is enamored of both learned and traditional poetry, of the well-carved ode and the rustic villancico, of the sculptured sonnet and the fluid couplet. The objective of poetry, he has written, «is not beauty, although it often seeks and strives for beauty, but feeling» (PEC, 83). He has also written, however, «Poetry is nothing more than one of the most effective and rapid ways which man has to rise above the accidental to the absolute» (PEV, 238). The fundamental theme of poetry in his view is «man in his totality» (CPE, 75).

For some time Alonso has been promising us his book, «Spain and the Novel», in which all of us would like to see collected and expanded his harvest of observations and thoughts, scattered through his studies, on the art of dialogue and presentation in the Poem of the Cid, the pre-novelistic exercises of the Archpriest of Talavera, the «coevidence» of reality in the precocious Tirant lo Blanc and psychological realism in the third episode of the Lazarillo, in whose pages he believes he sees the first attainment in world literature of his definition of the novel: «Esthetic fidelity to life, unconcern with traditional constraints, united with a profound reasoning of man and his surroundings in the casting of a few eternal characters» (PT, 240).

Alonso has not turned his back on the theater, which is demonstrated by his thoughtful analysis of the structure of Calderón's comedies and his lucid interpretation of the pure dramatic poetry of Gil Vicente. Pointing to possible methods for dramatizing a non-theatrical work (transposition, germinative development and reductive projection), he has correctly identified the first essential law of the stage: the «law of velocity» (SO, 146). But Alonso's greatest brilliance in the art of definition has been achieved in the analysis of the components of expression: structure, rhetoric, syntax, imagery and symbolism, vocabulary, versification.

Today when everything is structure and the earth appears to be inhabited, as they say, by structural man, we may be surprised to see structure defined as «beginning, union, transition, variation, end» (PEC, 68), i. e., the disposition and articulation of the most wide-ranging signifiers. Strange or not, this concept serves Dámaso Alonso admirably to uncover the secret of Fray Luis's odes in their inter-strophic relationships, and the magic of the poetry of Medrano or Manuel Machado in their «art of ending».

For our critic, rhetoric is «beautiful variety in speech» (EPE, 78, 156), and it is in the field of rhetoric that he has laboriously thrown light on such revealing stylistic period techniques as pluralities, correlations and symmetries, and traits of generational literary speech, e. g., the oratorical impetus of Lorca, Alberti and Aleixandre in their surrealist period (PEC, 300), or personal literary techniques, e. g., the effects of clipping and flowing in «La vaca cega» (CPE, 124). But Alonso has been reluctant to accept the preponderance of Curtius's topology. There is no reason, he believes, for the topoi to invalidate individual expression in a writer, whether it be the humble Gonzalo de Berceo or the proud Luis de Góngora; proven coincidences in the signifier are necessary to explain as topology what may otherwise be an example of polygenesis.

The stylistic focusing of syntax is indebted to Alonso for such fertile distinctions as the one made between «progressive and non-progressive» syntagma, the various types of hyperbaton, and the unusual formulas used by Góngora to give an ingenious personal stamp to his learned phraseology.

In his studies of St. John, Góngora and Arabic-Andalusian poetry, Alonso has also definitely defined concepts so badly in need of demarcation as image, allegory and symbolic allegory (SJ, 149), equational metaphor, pure and impure or specified metaphor (EPE, 39-44). «In the periphrasis», we read in another place, «the imagination describes a circle, in the center of which is placed the intuited unexpressed word». (EPE, 218). And no one will be able to understand the art of Góngora without memorizing this mathematical ratio: «trivial metaphor is to momentous image in Góngora, as realistic language is to normal image in other poets». (EPE, 198). Archaisms, Latinisms, moderately precious or boldly innovative cultismos, ordinary or prosaic words rending the noble texture, flocks of nouns stripped of modifiers, keywords in a poet are some of the numerous lexical phenomena that Alonso has dedicatedly sounded out.

And finally, he, a great poet, has uncovered and made known the nature and effects of Spanish versification: the brilliance of words placed at the peak of rhythmic intensity in the Gongorine endecasyllable, the ambiguous instability of secondary accents in the modernist alexandrine, the material enrichment of a verse with an emphatic synaloepha and the expressive contraction produced by synaeresis, the different acoustical and symbolic impressions caused by the «soft» and «abrupt» enjambment (a nomenclature coined by Alonso which is in wide use today), the «restless freedom of the assonant» (MP, 48), the propensity of the lira to «swell at the end» (VOM, 248), the unfading excellence of the sonnet and many other statements on poetic form which remain imprinted in the memory of the attentive reader.

In a few circumstantial pages, barely five, which Alonso has written in «Praise of the Endecasyllable», his art of defining verses and poets reaches a level of transparent understanding as has rarely or never been found in Spanish criticism. The octosyllabic verse: «hidden, bitter salt and blood of our earth». On the 12-syllable verse: «an awkward bustard with its four flaps per line». Accentual meters with ten or more syllables, except the endecasyllable: «the music in all of them is too obvious». The endecasyllable: «protean magic, always one and always many, new and changing in caesuras and free quasi-hemistichs». With this verse, here compared to exaltedly noble instruments and bodies, Góngora «chisels the infinitely complicated», Quevedo «rents, or sculpts, the tight granite sentence». In Lope it is «vital variety and witty elegance», «silken nostalgia» and «tremulous voice» in Garcilaso. In St. John it emerges «full and luminous in nature, or silenced in the annihilation of the senses». A full course in poetic intellect in ten or twelve lines.

To define is to explain briefly, clearly and distinctly the essence of something, and it is logical that this be considered basic by someone who has put his greatest effort into the study of style: «Style is everything that individualizes a literary object, be it a work, an epoch, or a whole literature» (PE, 514). Like the hen and the egg, the problem of whether Alonso was led to stylistics by his personal gifts for defining individual essence, or whether he owes this ability to his assiduous work on stylistic method, seems to have no solution. I, however, would begin by emphasizing Alonso's dual vocation as mathematician and poet (an innate combination of precision and fervent clarity), keeping in mind the conforming imprint of two simultaneous factors: on the one hand, his spiritual education in a climate of intuitionism, phenomenology, the theory of expectation and perspective, the cubist predominance of abstract figuration, and critical formalism at its height; and, on the other hand, his continuous cultivation of a stylistics of language which began with his own direct dealings with Góngora's commentators and links up maintaining his own personal criteria, with the efforts of Amado Alonso of the Spanish critics and Leo Spitzer among the foreign critics. In my opinion, neither these nor other proponents of stylistics (such as today's Franco-American Michael Riffaterre) show so great a will and ability to define the individual essence of the literary object as Dámaso Alonso. Definition is his unwavering concern, and although this is easily discerned in his work as a whole and in each of his writings, I should like to condense it into four examples which I shall call a regret, a portrait, a gesture and a word.

First, the regret. Alonso the critic once tried to define Menéndez Pelayo the critic, and not too surprisingly defined him by his talent for definition, i. e., his ability to «grasp... what is most characteristic and intensive, and present it to the reader, thus opening up periods, men, literary manners and fashions, or the features of a work so concentratedly and provocatively that they enter the mind and are never forgotten» (MP, 101-102). This is such an exact statement that it seems as if Alonso was describing himself (what do we do when we judge another but judge ourselves in what we are and would like to be?). But, these other words of regret followed, «What a torment for the literary critic! Managing a few verbs and several dozen adjectives to describe the infinite shades of the sum of images, ideas and feelings in a literary work! What loathing when the same adjective which we've used five lines before comes into the imagination again for the next sentence and seems irreplaceable! I would not recommend the career of literary criticism to anyone; it's like the task of that wonderful child whom St. Augustine saw on the beach putting the sea in a hole in the sand».

Next, the portrait. Alonso, here the poet, wanted to portray the poet Luis Rosales, and Rosales appeared before his eyes (like everything comes to one's vision, especially if it is a man) as chaos resisting placement in coherent order. The good painter never aspires to reproduce a complete exterior resemblance, but the essential facial features of his subject. Like the good painter, Alonso hastened to tell himself, «Contradiction and chaos are ordered on an impulse (life), in a unique definition (personality)». «There is one preferential, hegemonic vein which polarizes and unifies giving sense to all the others». «The knack must be to select this defining vein well». «I again take up the parts of my chaotic enumeration and they fall into order in two series, which immediately become fixed or symbolized in physical features. Let us take a look». (PEV, 381-82).

Third, a gesture. I am not referring to the «blind, dark leap» of intuition (PE, 12) which is necessary, according to Alonso, for an understanding of the ultimate oneness of a poem. I am referring to a less mystical gesture (or one just as mystical, who knows), but more recollected: the closing of the eyes. After having sought and found through analysis numerous components of the art of St. John, the commentator still was unable to explain the feeling of freshness and virginity which emanates from this poet. He decided to let his intuition work on the problem. «At these times», he says, «it is usually helpful to step away, to close the eyes» (SJ, 134). Interpreting Quevedo, this same gesture reappears, «If we close our eyes and want to attribute a color to Quevedo, it would be ochre, or in the scale of red tones, the darkest red» (PE, 544), and in spite of the bright clear colors which seem to adorn some of Quevedo's poems, the initial perception is confirmed when a little later one comes across the expression «flushes of gold» which preludes the somber gamut. Regarding the efficacy of Manuel Machado's art: «If we close our eyes, we immediately see that Machado's art, the spell it exercises on us, is negative, an allusive insinuation, an escape, a dodge» (PEC, 58). And, regarding his brother Antonio: «What is it that characterizes this poet? Where can we find something which is truly common to all his art?» «On these occasions, it is good for the researcher to close his eyes and take an intuitive look with his eyes closed». «And we think of the art of Machado. What do we see? The first thing we see is space; something opens before us and acquires depth. In his poetry there is always a space which opens and is illuminated» (CPE, 168). This closing of the eyes has much of the mystical withdrawal into oneself which separates the deceiving shadows of one's immediate surroundings and allows the illumination of bared essence, but there is also in this gesture something of that squint from a distance to better focus the gaze and discern interior form from external appearance. The good painter not only squints but he should sometimes close his eyes altogether in order to evoke the remote memory of form in the darkened wilderness.

Finally, a word. The adjective which comes again and again to Alonso, and which appears to him to have no substitute, might well be «transparent». «Transparent», «transparency», «transparently»: there is no other word which more succinctly conjures up the critical-poetical prose of this critic. Such transparency sometimes comes from the text being interpreted: «the intact transparency» of expression and «the clear transparency» of Gil Vicente's imagery (EPE, 140), «the transparency of color» in Góngora (EPE, 203), and the «transparent, translucent» sense of his poetry (CPE, 60), the «transparent endings» of certain sonnets of Quevedo where passion is resolved in an «elemental, transparent, diaphanous world» (PE, 552). But many other times transparency is a result of the attitude and vision of the critic, for whom every poem is a «transparent, exact creature» (PE, 20). Seeking to create order in the midst of confusion in early Spanish Renaissance letters, he sees «the field transparently split itself in two» between La Celestina, an ingenious condensation of a world which is dying, and the Lazarillo, the summary of a sensibility which is already modem (CPE, 24).

Other synonyms or related terms, which are symptomatic of Alonso's interpretative language, accompany and modulate his preference for «transparency». It is true that we frequently find in his pages signs of bewilderment (elusive, bitter, sour, tremulous, panting, dart-like, wooded, stormy, confused, wind, mist, passion) and the attributes of darkness (dark, blind, lost, secret, ineffable, magical, astonishment, monster, portent, mystery). But these signs and attributes form the background against which the verbal indices of purity stand out (unripe, bittersweet, slender, silken, lean, narrow, untilled, thin, delicate, subtle, unblemished, virginal, intangible, immutable) and the splendid signs of clarity (neat, clear, exact, mathematical, transparent, crystalline, diaphanous, luminous, radiant, perfect). As forgetfulness makes remembrance memorable, as empty space makes objects visible, as silence makes words audible, so disorder and darkness are the elements in which this desire for integrity and transparency prosper.

Alonso's definitions frequently edify concepts cast in abstract formulas: for example, his definition of the peculiarity of Tirant lo Blanc as a novel in which caballaresque idealism and day-to-day positivism coexist harmoniously (PT, 241). But even more frequently his definitions are coined in images: analogical, metaphorical, sensorially evocative definitions. This is the case with almost all the images mentioned earlier in connection with the «Praise of the Endecasyllable»: the 12-syllable verse, an «awkward bustard with its four flaps per line», or Quevedo's chiseling «the granite sentence». It is not a matter of evasion into a facile image. He himself has explained it: «It is always necessary for us to use images to express the art of a poet, because this can only be done intuitively and because the literary phenomenon (like the mystical phenomenon) is in itself ineffable». (PE, 610).

We should not let ourselves be distracted by this and other statements regarding ineffability or the blind leap. Alonso invokes intuition as the point of departure and as the final boundary of his interpretative exercise. Intuition as the beginning of knowledge is necessary for him and for all of us in dealing with men, nature and art. To limit the use of reason in a final act of respect toward the unattainable may serve as a brake on the arrogance of reason and, in any case, is a gesture of quite noble humility. Alonso always pursues clarity through his unique art of definition, determined to limit the difficulty, eliminate confusion and propose a reason of love. He first intuits the essence of the text, allowing the text to inscribe its impression on the «clean slate» of his sensibility as an innocent reader. A detail or two, captured by that purposely unprejudiced sensibility, causes a perception which is opportune and can lead him on from there. Analytical penetration follows at once, from the signifier to the signified or vice-versa; a detailed, minute study of interior and exterior form, which makes a step-by-step delimitation of expressive techniques and groups the main or constant features in provisional synthesis. Just as ripe fruit falls from a tree, so at this moment the definition is born, either in a term, a short sentence, a summarizing conclusion, a title, a subtitle -a definition which expresses the substance of the object without simplifying it, gathering it in the semblance of its concrete and living oneness. After the definition, which has so enriched the pre-critical intuition, the interpreter looks back with excitement to the boundary which he believed impassable. That boundary, however, has been pushed forward considerably, widening the passage of light.

Alonso's art of definition, triumphing over the inertia of pure impressionism, ripping away stereotypes by the rational illumination of unique nuclei, approaching those nuclei with the deep sympathy with which one seeks the truth of a friend's soul, satisfies the intellect, awakens the imagination, nourishes the memory, and moves the will to a love of poetry. If he defined poetry as fervor and clarity, we might well say that his poetical criticism is an eternal witness to a will for unification and intense understanding: a model of fervent clarity.