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Goya's Enlightenment Protagonist-A Quixotic Dreamer of Reason

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.1997.0034

1086-315X

John J. Ciofalo,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Goya's Enlightenment Protagonist--A Quixotic Dreamer of Reason John J. Ciofalo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait. Not unlike Dr. Jekyll who has stumbled to the mirror after swallowing his last drop of elixir—anticipating yet dreading the gradual appearance of his double Mr. Hyde—Goya anxiously confronts his own reflection in a surprisingly meticulous and diminutive drawing from ca. 1795–1800, contemporaneous with the public sale of his first series of prints, Los Caprichos (fig. 1). This physiognomic [End Page 421] countenance, although neither distorted nor disfigured grotesquely, is nonetheless harrowing for what it reveals: the unceremonious wedding of two halves of disparate faces. The right half, Goya's right, covered by a ghastly, diaphanous shadow, is unquestionably malevolent looking. The dark eye, eerily opaque and partially concealed by a drooping lid, is unable or wills not to focus in conjunction with the other eye, thus plummeting in a lost yet intense descent. The lower lip on the right side of the mouth, raised a bit higher than the left, reveals a gangster-like ire. The disheveled hair, a sign of psychological perturbation, falls in thicker, darker waves on the right side of his face as compared to the billowy, uplifted curls on his left. Stranger yet, but revealing that things are not as they should be, the odd upside-down signature emblazoned in a type of ceremonial badge is severed in two by an unnatural shadow, a shadow that theoretically should fall on the left side of the badge to match the shadowed left half of Goya's face. In this very disturbing self-portrayal which appears to embody a split character, a double, Goya seems to have looked very closely at his reflection and realized: where there is light there is also darkness and where there is reason there is also madness, a normative model of Romantic self-representation. Goya's face visually maps the act of creation. This valiant process, an ordeal and a touchstone of sorts resembles that of writing and rewriting, an act whereby, according to Foucault's assessment at the end of his life, "one must come face-to-face, again and again, with one's diabolical double." 1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Francisco de Goya, El sueancisco de Goya, ew York, Metrop, Plate 43 from Los Caprichos. This outcome of Goya's private, confrontational meditation with his own face is the result of a quandary he struggled with for more than three years. Although his first series of prints was most likely to be purchased by Enlightenment intellectuals, they portray the dream of reason as not only fruitless, but also dangerously idealistic, even producing madness. In this extremely provocative process, heretofore unacknowledged, Goya brilliantly embraces as a most appropriate and recognizable model Cervantes' narrative of Don Quijote. Once we identify this connection, we clearly discern that the protagonist of Goya's Los Caprichos, the famous figure sleeping at his desk in Plate 43 (modeled upon an Enlightenment intellectual) is synonymous with the characterization of a quixotic dreamer (fig. 2). Don Quijote provides a description of one who is quixotic: "'the reason for your unreasonable treatment of my reason, so enfeebles my reason that I have reason to complain of your beauty.' Of this sort of rhapsodic reasoning, the poor gentleman lost his wits." 2 As we shall see, what is at stake for Goya is the creation of a quixotic protagonist who dreams that reason will right the wrongs of the world to the point that he loses his mind. This interpretation contradicts the widely accepted view of Plate 43 of Los Caprichos as a pictorial echo of Enlightenment ideology, that is, that the "sleep of reason produces monsters." This essay challenges such an interpretation by demonstrating that the figure sleeping at his desk, because he incarnates the mad knight from La Mancha and an Enlightenment intellectual, is literally caught in the act of dreaming of reason. In this particular Cervantine context, it is evident that the Spanish word sueño is most properly translated into English as dream and not sleep. 3 By adapting the model...