Goya
Page 34
Goya, Los desastres, plate 5, Y son fieras (“And they are like wild animals”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.19)
There is, and always has been, some art about war that poses as a kind of remedy: if only everyone felt the same way as the artist, there would be no more massacres, no rape, no lunacy, and art would have demonstrated its power to mobilize the moral imagination. At no point in the Desastres does Goya allow himself, or us, to indulge in this sentimental fiction. He was the first painter in history to set forth the sober truth about human conflict: that it kills, and kills again, and that its killing obeys urges embedded at least as deeply in the human psyche as any impulse toward pity, fraternity, or mercy. Most of all, he drives home the undeniable message that there is nothing noble about war: that, in the words rasped from the throat of General Sherman to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
The truth of war lay beyond rhetoric. This was the irreducible fact that, in a time clogged and sugared with every kind of false promise about the chivalrous nobility of war, Goya brought back from the killing fields of Spain and put in the forefront of his work. There were no “triumphs” to give what commentators are apt to call “balance” or “perspective” to the Disasters. This, too, is part of his modernity.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 32, ¿Por qué? (“Why?”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.20)
War turns the words of its partisan commentators into fustian. Goya bluntly and scrupulously rejected this. You never feel the presence of the kind of sentimental claptrap that likes to chatter, like some modern American “historians” of World War II, about “the greatest generation.” Each of the plates of the Desastres bears a caption scrawled below it, ancestor of the captions of modern political cartoons. But they are extremely laconic, even more than the captions of the Caprichos. “That’s tough!” (“¡Fuerte cosa es!”), he writes under a macabre scene (plate 31) of a hairy, frazzled ape of a French soldier sheathing his blade as he turns away from the wretched body of a hanged villager, on whose feet another invader is pulling, the better to strangle him. In plate 32, the same situation—a victim slowly choking on a rope tied to a tree that is too low to suspend him, so that the strangling tension must be supplied by one soldier tugging on his legs and another shoving at his shoulder blades with his boot—is simply captioned “¿Por qué?” (“Why?”). No answer is expected; there is no “why,” Goya implies, because that’s the nature of war. No quieren—“They don’t want it”—says the caption to plate 9, in which a French soldier is struggling to rape a resistant young woman who tries, ineffectually, to scratch his face while an older one, perhaps her mother, comes from behind him like an avenging Fury, about to plunge a knife into his back. Tampoco, “Nor do these,” says the next, plate 10—a chilly understatement, given the nature of the scene: a brutish and incoherent tangle of bodies, where three French soldiers (their sabers laid almost demurely aside as their penises, by implication, take over) struggle on the bare ground with their women victims, under the lowering murk of the evening sky. Ni por ésas—“Nor those”—says plate 11, compositionally the most developed of the three rape scenes, an image that shows to a sublime degree what power Goya could develop when his talent for showing awful events in terms of utter compositional starkness was fully at work. The design is like the quadrant of a clock face: half of a low arch through which light shines, and a man and a woman, brightly lit, stretched across it at forty-five degrees, like a minute hand. The man, a French soldier, is dragging his victim backward over some obstacle. There is a brutal tension in their arms, which create the unifying diagonal of the design: the man pulling, the woman’s body helplessly extended. On the earth, at her feet, is a naked baby, torn from her and thrown away. Behind them, a second soldier is overwhelming another woman, who holds up her hands in a useless prayer of supplication.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 10, Tampoco (“Nor do these”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.21)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 11, Ni por ésas (“Nor those”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.22)
You cannot always tell whose side the dead were on, or whether the atrocities are “bad” (committed by French against Spaniards) or “good” (by Spaniards against the French or traitors to the Spanish cause). This is not, of course, because Goya equated the two sides or was indifferent to Spanish suffering. On the contrary: it reflected, as in a dark mirror, what he felt the essential subject of the Desastres had to be. If he read them, as he probably did, he would surely have agreed with the words of Jovellanos’s close friend, the liberal patriot Manuel José Quintana (1772–1857): “Puesto que es absolutamente necesario un sacrificio de sangre, mejor es ofrecerla en holocausto a la Patria que a la ambición de un tirano” (Given that it is absolutely necessary to shed blood, better to offer it as a holocaust to the fatherland than to a tyrant’s ambition.)15 Goya’s excoriating cycle of prints is neither pro-Spanish nor pro-French, but against war as such. It could hardly have retained its eloquence, its sense that, in Wilfred Owen’s words, “the Poetry is in the pity,” if it had been otherwise. Part of the brilliance of this series, strange as this may seem at first, is to be found in its ambivalence. Its sympathies oscillate without settling into the kind of plain resolution that one expects from propaganda. How often has one heard, or read, Goya’s interpreters dilating on the sympathy and loyalty the Desastres express toward the common people of Spain? And yet there are plates that invert that simplicity.
One of them is 28, Populacho. A prone and broken body, lifeless or nearly so, is stretched facedown on the ground. It has been dragged there by a rope knotted around its ankles. A muscular woman of the people, a villager, is whaling at it with a stick, or perhaps a metal bar. The horrible detail is what her peasant companion is doing, under the gaze of an assembled crowd. He has an implement commonly used in bullfighting, a razor-sharp sickle blade on a wooden shaft that was known, for its shape, as a media-luna, or half-moon. The media-luna was used to sever the hamstrings of bulls, to render them helpless and unable to move. The brave villager is about to shove it into the anus of the man on the ground, who—since he wears no identifiable uniform—we may take to be a civilian French sympathizer, one of the afrancesados hated by the Spanish peasantry. The title of the image is one contemptuous word, spat on the page: Populacho, which does not mean “people” but “rabble.” This is not the utterance of a sentimental populist. Goya has no doubt, and leaves us none, that the patriots can be as brutal, sadistic, and depraved as the invaders; and sometimes he leaves open the question of which are the murderers and which the victims. The naked, the dismembered, and the dead wear no uniforms to identify them, which makes it impossible to know in which direction one’s pity should extend.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 28, Populacho (“Mob”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 17.7 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.23)
There were cases in which the French killed and mutilated Spanish partisans, and left their wretched remains exposed as a warning to villagers and passersby. However, there were ample instances when the patriots did the same to the French, or to other Spaniards whom they believed, without any trial at all, to be collaborators. Impartially and unblinkingly, Goya set both before his viewers. You realize, for instance, that the men hanging from the three trees by a roadside in plate 36, another one called Tampoco, have to be patriots because a French officer leaning on a stone with a sort of grisly detachment is contemplating them. In the same way, it is clear that the main figure in plate 37, Esto es peor (“This is worse”)—impaled from anus to neck on the sharp branch of a dead tree, his right arm chopped off—cannot be other than a Spaniard, because the figures behind him,
one brandishing a saber and the other dragging a second corpse into position for some (no doubt) equally disgusting mutilation, are also French. But how is one to read an image like plate 39, ¡Grande hazaña! ¡Con muertos! (“Great feat! With dead men!”)? This is a sickeningly effective play on the Neoclassical cult of the antique fragment. Bits and pieces of human bodies—a headless and armless trunk, two arms tied together, a bodiless head, and a castrated corpse—are hung on a tree, to terrify the passerby. They remind us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabers, neoclassicists like Mengs would have been in esthetic raptures over them.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 37, Esto es peor (“This is worse”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.24)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 39, ¡Grande hanzaña! ¡Con muertos! (“Great feat! With dead men!”) 1863. Etching and aquatint, 16.5 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.25)
But whose dismembered flesh is this? Goya offers no clue. They might be patriot bodies. Equally, they could be French ones, or the remains of afrancesado collaborators, done to death by Spaniards.
The ruin of the human body is paralleled, in the Desastres, by what Goya sees inflicted on nature itself. Nature suffers a similar death: the process of stripping and schematization that began in the background of the Caprichos ten years or more earlier is now almost complete.
When Goya painted his Highwaymen Attacking a Coach for the Osunas in 1786–87, some twenty years before that, the frame for human death was an exuberantly leafing slice of nature, irresistibly alive and in ironic contrast to what men were up to. Now, one might say, man and nature are in harmony: ravaged, exhausted, equally threatened by death. The backgrounds to the Desastres are pared down to their simplest constituents: a band of earth, a hill, a dark, opaque sky, a rock. There is little or no detail. Shadows are looming and abstract, and all the more forcible for that. This is a landscape without resources. Its physical exhaustion is an emblem of the human moral exhaustion of war. Most of the trees Goya shows us are oaks—traditionally, emblems of hardiness, long life, and nobility—but they are perverted, by implication, because they no longer have the wholeness of nature; they have been reduced to stumps or turned into gallows or racks on which human carcasses are held up to execration by their enemies. The landscape of the Desastres is perhaps the first realization, in graphic art, of the landscapes that would become so ominously familiar to Europeans a century later: the almost featureless deserts of mud, shell holes, and blasted trees into which trench warfare had turned the once bountiful fields of Flanders and the Somme Valley. This is no accident, since Goya’s landscape is also the first representation in art of Mother Nature plowed up and dismembered by the fury of artillery bombardment against fixed positions.
However, there is no doubt that most of the awful things done in the Desastres are done by the French or by their allies, such as the Polish soldiers, whom the Spanish combatants regarded as the most barbarous of all. They rape; they hack the genitals off patriots with their sabers; they hang and garrotte and strangle and bayonet, and dump their victims anonymously in mass graves; they kill women and children and priests, and set villages on fire; they pillage churches, and are seen sneaking by a dead friar in the gloom of the apse with sacks full of silver candlesticks, processional crosses, ciboria, monstrances, and chalices.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 18, Enterrar y callar (“Bury them and shut up”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 22.8 cm. (illustration credit 8.26)
Goya, Los desastres, plate 12, Para eso habéis nacido (“For that you were born”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 22.8 cm. (illustration credit 8.27)
The main human response to such events is defiance, which Goya identifies over and over again. The second is disgust, the kind of impotent, life-poisoning doubt of the very possibility of human dignity that turns every speech about the hope of the transcendent human spirit into fatuous sermonizing. This appears twice, in its naked form, in the first “movement” of the Desastres: in plate 18, Enterrar y callar (“Bury them and shut up”), where two survivors, hands and handkerchiefs stuffed to their faces to block the stench of decay, scan a heap of stripped bodies, now beginning to rot, in the hope of finding a friend or a relative. You probably won’t, Goya implies, and if you do, it won’t matter: the dead are dead, so just get them in the hole. Another, plate 12, Para eso habéis nacido (“You were born for this”), shows a similar heap of bodies filling the ground space of the etching right to its horizon line—Goya’s horizontal crowd, so to speak—with one standing figure, one only: he is leaning forward, racked with nausea at the sight, puking right on the corpses. The daring of this image can perhaps be assessed from the fact that, a century later, during World War II, neither the British nor the German censors would have permitted a newspaper to publish a photo of a corpse—much less a heap of corpses, and still less a man vomiting on them.
At plate 48, the general setting of the Desastres changes. It becomes specific. We are now in Madrid instead of unidentified parts of provincial Spain. What we see is the suffering of people in the nation’s capital, mainly from food shortage and the ensuing general starvation. Goya does not concern himself with the causes of the shortage. This is perhaps just as well, since the famine that paralyzed Madrid in 1812 was not simply the fault of the French. The worst culprits were the patriot guerrilla bands, who threw the supply roads from country to city into chaos and so made it next to impossible for ordinary folk to buy the staples of life: flour, legumes, meat, vegetables. The French authorities, from José I down the chain of bureaucratic command, could not handle this crisis and were powerless against it. José decreed the creation of a Charity Establishment, funded to the tune of 50,000 reales a month, but it could not possibly meet the needs of the starving city. In 1812 the municipal authorities reported to the king that
The ills afflicting this town are so great that their needs cannot be met.… [S]helters for incapacitated citizens contain more than 8,000 people, who daily receive nourishment from the town.… This … is a tiny fraction of those who clamor for the same help: houses, streets, churches all resound with the outcries of the suffering and the needy; all of them deserve a consolation we cannot give them.16
The Desastres images do not suggest Madrid. There is practically no architecture, and none that is identifiable, to be seen. (This had always been a trait of Goya’s work: he did not care about buildings.) What he shows instead is great masses of shadow: humps and lumps of darkness that frame, or bear up as on a catafalque, the poor humans. In plate 48, the dead and dying lie in a heap, with a man who can still stand upright (but only just) holding out his cap for alms, a gesture that doubles as pointing to the jumble of dead at his feet: “Cruel lástima,” the caption tersely says, “Cruel misfortune.” In plate 50, ¡Madre infeliz! (“Unhappy mother!”), it is night, and the blackness—velvety, speckled with tiny aquatint flakes—presses in on a group of figures: three men carrying the corpse of a woman, whose head lolls downward. It is a group with several resonances in Goya’s earlier work. The men carrying the helpless woman appear in the Caprichos, as in plate 8, They Carried Her Off! (this page)—a scene of abduction and rape. In another form, bearing up a helpless male victim, they are the witch trio of his 1797–98 painting Witches in the Air (this page). Here, they are emissaries of pity—it is too late for charity. And to the right of them is one of the most heartrending figures in all of Goya’s work: the little bereaved daughter, screwing her small fists into her eyes as she sobs. The space between her and her lost mother is a truly psychic space, a separating gulf of darkness that now can never be bridged, a darkness that seems to be the very essence of loss and orphanhood. It is part of the measure of Goya’s power that he could take essentially the same figure group and invest it with different meanings, each of the utmost intensity, each time he used it. He quoted himself, new every time. He also quoted others: a long line of Burials of Christ connects Desa
stres images like plate 56, Al cementerio (“To the cemetery”), and even 64, Carretadas al cementerio (“Carted off to the cemetery”)—that shocking glimpse of a girl’s white, desirable, bare, dead legs as she is hoisted onto the cart—back to their ancient prototypes in the pietà militare, the dead hero being borne off to burial by his Greek or Roman comrades.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 50, ¡Madre infeliz! (“Unhappy mother!”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 15.2 × 20.3 cm. (illustration credit 8.28)