Luces de bohemia

We live in times of uniformity. We endure, for example, a great crisis but we are not allowed to question the system. We cannot be clear and say: "gentlemen: this is not working." No, we must believe, we must be uniform. We live in times of uniformity and uniformed where few madmen remain, there are no longer crazy friends, there are no longer crazy... and even fewer thinkers who want or know how to transmute reality.

Max Estrella is a character who inhabits a strange space. A space that lies between the life of order, the proper life, and the bohemia, the life of art. Outside the system, the great Spanish poet has forever rejected the Academy and the obedient lifestyle. He is the artist, the clown, and the perfect writer. He travels through Madrid like a Don Quixote playing with fate, questioning what he sees and looking at things from another point of view. And with his blindness, he sees clearly. He crosses the threshold and is capable, like few others, of seeing beyond the uniformity that surrounds him.

Valle-Incán wrote Luces de bohemia from a radically critical attitude towards the official Spain of his time, being very aware that the political system of the Restoration was exhausted and that on one side were the politicians and on the other the social reality. He denounced the excesses of the system, through satire. And the work really goes beyond, explaining a way of understanding Spanish culture and at the same time proposing a rather tragic vision of existence. Between satire and grotesque elegy we find the complete journey of Esperpento. In Max Estrella, the bohemian artist of the previous century is embodied, to review, the failure of his ideas and his contradictions, with a certain elegiac tone. I copy all this from a book by Jesús Rubio Jiménez, and even further down I read: Valle-Incán has the ability to synthesize diverse and concrete elements, while also being able to pose big questions.

This is how Luces de bohemia is a review of the current political and social situation in Spain, and a profound reflection on Spanish culture and, at the same time, on existence.

Oril Broggi