Tomorrow I get the opportunity to teach Spanish Romanticism. For the Medievalist in me, this is a bit of a stretch since contemporary literature holds no interest for me, especially anything written as recently as 1836. I mean, really, has enough time passed to really test if this material has any real value at all? I think not. But, on the other hand, teaching Jose Mariano de Larra does have at least one huge bright spot: melancholy. I get to teach literature that is concerned with feeling sad for the sake of feeling sad. “Christmas Eve of 1836” has to be one of the most self-deprecating pieces of writing ever penned. I don’t really know which is more interesting–his satire or his cynicism. Certainly, the literary voice narrating a horrible December 24th is pushing every social criticism button it can find, devastating the object of that criticism: the writer. The melancholy hits in waves like thunderstorms “training” over the same patch of flooded ground with no end in sight. Melancholy may be the opposite of happiness, but why anyone would want to continually wallow in it for days and weeks at a time is beyond me. For a moment, perhaps melancholy might be a literary posture that one might adopt for a moment in order to prove a point or illustrate a tight piece of irony, but why would a sane person perpetually gravitate towards a pitched mid-life crisis? So your plants die, you feel sad, but then you have an excuse to go to a greenhouse and replace that ugly thing that died: no melancholy. You feel bad for the baker across the street who lost his wife, but she was a horrific crab of a person who browbeat him endlessly–no melancholy. You sit on a dark, rainy evening, working on a poem about death, sipping a little something, scratching out a few words on your notebook. Raindrops are falling on the window, you pull on a warm woolen sweater, you write a few more words about gravestones, moss, old wrought iron, creepy trees, dark shadows, tears that silently fall across a cheek, an empty chair, a missing voice, and although the poem is not perfect, you now have something to work with: bones, dust, shadows, nothing. You are plumbing the depth of melancholy, but now it has become truly conventional, removed from your soul and converted into art.
