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blackbird27's review
4.0
I've been wanting to read this for what feels like forever, but is probably only about a year now; it was as simple as filling out an online Interlibrary Loan request. (Salable editions go for $400-$1,000, from a recent glance at auction sites.) I've had it in hand for about a week, but only read through it over the weekend; if you follow my Goodreads account you know that I'm constantly trying to catch up.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna is increasingly central to my literary worldview, insofar as my literary worldview has been intentionally frogmarched away from the British-American nexus in which I was raised towards a Hispanist model: the most complete European of the Silver Age of Spanish Literature (1898-1938), Ramón (there is a lovely convention in Hispanic studies that he is referred to by his first name where you would normally use the patronym) assimilated the avant-garde tendencies of the era -- German expressionism, Italian futurism, French surrealism -- into a lightweight, almost evanescent style which reminds me more of contemporary cartooning than of any purely literary comparison. His prime literary invention, the sentence-length greguería (from the Spanish for "hubbub," descended from "griego," or Greek in the "it's all Greek to me" sense) is little more than the practice of surprising metaphor or simile, the "defamiliarization" of the familiar which is the stock in trade of poets and sci-fi writers (and cartoonists). A synthesist and a humorist far more than a heroic poet forging in the smithy of his soul, etc., he was neverthless the guiding light of two distinct movements in Spanish prose during the latter half of the 1920s: the vanguardia movement of which Benjamín Jarnés was a central figure, and the humorístico movement typified by Enrique Jardiel Poncela. (In Latin America, Ramón was even more central, particularly after the Civil War, when he lived in exile in Buenos Aires, revered by the young Julio Cortázar and the middle-aged Borges.)
Movieland was the only translation of his work into English in his lifetime (he was much more welcomed by the French, where many of his works are still in print), a 1930 rendition of the 1923 Cinelandia, a fantasia (in the musical sense) on Hollywood as seen entirely from the screen or press clippings. Although conceived and written practically before Hollywood history as we understand it in the twenty-first century had gotten underway, it remains penetrating as an examination of the crosscurrents of lust, danger, death, and the endless consumption of female bodies, on screen and off, which the movies have always entailed.
It's also profoundly silly, a series of imaginative cartoons in prose, tying the Italian futurist mania for technology and speed to a Tex Avery-style passion for ludicrous exaggeration and sexual metaphor. Imagining Hollywood (or rather Movieland, a country of its own, surrounded by impassable desert and Negro shantytowns) as a jumble of set design and imitation palaces, "reminiscent of those vignettes that used to illustrate old magazines, wherein cathedrals, mosques and ancient baronial manors stood side by side," and where even the sun itself is brightened by the use of Klieg lights, Ramón paints an impossible but still recognizable picture, heightened only so that we can recognize the strangeness of the reality.
It's a book by a European in 1923: it's racist as hell, with chapters devoted to Japanese, Black, and Jewish members of the film colony. But the satire, some of which is definitely supposed to be aimed at the white Christian majority, doesn't really come off; when he shifts to a theme he knows something about, i.e. imitation bullfighters who prance for the screen, the satirical note rings truer.
There's no real plot. Characters appear, are followed for a time, then dropped for someone else. In typical Ramón style, it's little more than a collection of vignettes, sketches, burlesque essays, and precisely formulated similes; but once you get used to it and drop the expectation that anything will happen, he suddenly draws threads together, and something does. (Based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Hollywood's original sin, but cloaked in Ramón's ironic-idealist method.) The writer I most want to compare him to, similarly entirely forgotten in English, is Jean Giraudoux (see here and here for my reviews), but if I wasn't afraid of being misunderstood (Ramón is all for modernity and against the past), I'd compare him to the similarly discursive, every-line-a-paradox, novelist-as-essayist, voluminously-interested G. K. Chesterton.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna is increasingly central to my literary worldview, insofar as my literary worldview has been intentionally frogmarched away from the British-American nexus in which I was raised towards a Hispanist model: the most complete European of the Silver Age of Spanish Literature (1898-1938), Ramón (there is a lovely convention in Hispanic studies that he is referred to by his first name where you would normally use the patronym) assimilated the avant-garde tendencies of the era -- German expressionism, Italian futurism, French surrealism -- into a lightweight, almost evanescent style which reminds me more of contemporary cartooning than of any purely literary comparison. His prime literary invention, the sentence-length greguería (from the Spanish for "hubbub," descended from "griego," or Greek in the "it's all Greek to me" sense) is little more than the practice of surprising metaphor or simile, the "defamiliarization" of the familiar which is the stock in trade of poets and sci-fi writers (and cartoonists). A synthesist and a humorist far more than a heroic poet forging in the smithy of his soul, etc., he was neverthless the guiding light of two distinct movements in Spanish prose during the latter half of the 1920s: the vanguardia movement of which Benjamín Jarnés was a central figure, and the humorístico movement typified by Enrique Jardiel Poncela. (In Latin America, Ramón was even more central, particularly after the Civil War, when he lived in exile in Buenos Aires, revered by the young Julio Cortázar and the middle-aged Borges.)
Movieland was the only translation of his work into English in his lifetime (he was much more welcomed by the French, where many of his works are still in print), a 1930 rendition of the 1923 Cinelandia, a fantasia (in the musical sense) on Hollywood as seen entirely from the screen or press clippings. Although conceived and written practically before Hollywood history as we understand it in the twenty-first century had gotten underway, it remains penetrating as an examination of the crosscurrents of lust, danger, death, and the endless consumption of female bodies, on screen and off, which the movies have always entailed.
It's also profoundly silly, a series of imaginative cartoons in prose, tying the Italian futurist mania for technology and speed to a Tex Avery-style passion for ludicrous exaggeration and sexual metaphor. Imagining Hollywood (or rather Movieland, a country of its own, surrounded by impassable desert and Negro shantytowns) as a jumble of set design and imitation palaces, "reminiscent of those vignettes that used to illustrate old magazines, wherein cathedrals, mosques and ancient baronial manors stood side by side," and where even the sun itself is brightened by the use of Klieg lights, Ramón paints an impossible but still recognizable picture, heightened only so that we can recognize the strangeness of the reality.
It's a book by a European in 1923: it's racist as hell, with chapters devoted to Japanese, Black, and Jewish members of the film colony. But the satire, some of which is definitely supposed to be aimed at the white Christian majority, doesn't really come off; when he shifts to a theme he knows something about, i.e. imitation bullfighters who prance for the screen, the satirical note rings truer.
There's no real plot. Characters appear, are followed for a time, then dropped for someone else. In typical Ramón style, it's little more than a collection of vignettes, sketches, burlesque essays, and precisely formulated similes; but once you get used to it and drop the expectation that anything will happen, he suddenly draws threads together, and something does. (Based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Hollywood's original sin, but cloaked in Ramón's ironic-idealist method.) The writer I most want to compare him to, similarly entirely forgotten in English, is Jean Giraudoux (see here and here for my reviews), but if I wasn't afraid of being misunderstood (Ramón is all for modernity and against the past), I'd compare him to the similarly discursive, every-line-a-paradox, novelist-as-essayist, voluminously-interested G. K. Chesterton.
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