Carlist Carnage: War in Valle-Inclon's Carlist Novels and in Voces de gesta

This study investigates Ramon del Valle-Inclan's view of war in the Carlist series (three novels and a tragedy) that appeared between 1908 and 1911. The subject of the series was the Spanish civil war of 1872-1876 known as the last Carlist War, a conflict in which insurgent troops and peasant guerrilla bands revolted to defend their traditional forms of life against modernizing trends: secularization, republicanism, and bourgeois economies. Central to the argument is the focus on situational irony, a device that structures all four works and calls into question readings that discover an heroic exaltation of war in the series. This essay proposes that Valle-Inclan "disenchants" such a view by presenting war as rooted in fratricidal murder, political corruption and the passion for revenge, a vision that influenced the shift in his art toward a poetics of the grotesque.