La tragedia del jugador íntegro o la razón de la sinrazón

Abstract

Since the maduran from La Mancha made his expression «reasonless reason», already present in the miniature «quijote» which is the novel El licenciado Vidriera, many madmen of the same stock have made this contradiction in terms become reality. Within this genre we place one of Galdós' first novels, entitled La sombra —which has a madman as it's protagonist, doctor Anselmo— and also those which we are going to compare in our work: La novela de don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez by Miguel de Unamuno (Salamanca, 1930) and La defensa de Luzhin by Vladimir Nabokov (Zaschita Luzhina, Slovo, Berlín, 1930), both published in the same year, 1930. As much in Galdós' first novel as in the two which we intend to analyse, we can talk about «rhetoric of madness as a theme in these tales and, at the same time, a «madness of rhetoric» in Shoshana Felman's terminology in Writing and Madness, which causes the break-up of meaning and subverts the explicit meaning of the text. The compared novels in this short work come together with the intention of dramatizing the precarious destiny of the truth in the world and the extraordinary spiritual condition that dares to proclaim and defend it, which at times qualifies, ridicules or condemns it as foolish and stupid. This moral and philosophical teaching is expressed by means of the rhetoric of meaning which becomes a madness of rhetoric by the break-up of meaning and subversion of the text's statement. In short, the aforementioned teaching is expressed by means of a brilliantly appropriate and worth novelistic structure.