6 - Against Seemliness: Excess and its Limitations in Popular Literature

Summary

A grisly detail of a ballad is quoted in Valle-Inclán's historical trilogy about Spain at the time of the 1868 revolution, in which banditry at the lowest social levels reflects the supposed ‘banditry’ at the level of government, and a boundary of decency is crossed. A woman serves up the fried livers of innocent victims to their killers. Like is reported as consuming like, and there is care in the preparation of the meal (ironically intimated through the diminutive of livers, ‘higadillos’) (Valle-Inclán 1969: 219). Here the boundary between excess and seemliness is crossed with delicate intent. Eating the body parts of another human being is, of course, not universally shocking nor necessarily considered excessive. Endo-cannibalism can denote respect for the dead (Conklin 2001), and cannibalism can indicate the desire to gain strength through eating one's enemy (Sanday 1986). Cannibalism occurs in some of the examples discussed below, marking the extreme end of the expression of excess in terms of what can happen to the body in the framework of wrongdoing, but it will be only one such marker.

This chapter sets out to explore the fine relation between seemliness and excess in wrongdoing, both in the commission and the reporting, and how it is presented in Spanish popular literature. There is no record elsewhere of the romance (ballad) that appears in Valle-Inclán's text. In its excesses it does not go beyond some of the more extreme examples we shall see from authentic pliegos sueltos, although its placing in the novel, as a comment on the nature of wrongdoing which is arguably one that spans the entire class system in Spain, has particular point. This chapter moves away from the literary text to look at popular literature, and argues that in this genre we are given a far from simple view of the wrongs done, and whether they are intended to shock or to be savoured is unclear. The discussion is not confined to what is conceived of as excess in the example given above, and we might generalize that if excess tends to be presented in simple terms, seemliness is more complex, even more elusive.