Anyone who goes to Madrid ends up on the Gran Vía, sooner or later. A broad, bombastic avenue, it ploughs a six-lane furrow through the core of the Spanish capital, bounded by 1920s skyscrapers whose art-deco spires soar into a cloudless Castilian sky.
All day and all night this pulsating heart of the city is a flurry of people; apart, that is, from the hours of one to four in the afternoon, when every self-respecting Madrileño is having lunch. But duck down one of the inconspicuous alleys that slope down to the thoroughfare from the north and you find yourself in a different world. You find yourself in Old Madrid. You find yourself on the Calle de Desengaño.
It would be a crime to attempt a direct translation of the Spanish word desengaño – like joie de vivre or Weltschmerz, it is one of those phrases whose comprehension requires an understanding of the psyche that conditioned it. Imagine a conflux of ‘disappointment’, ‘disillusion’ and ‘eye-opening’ and you get the general idea, but the legend behind the name of Desengaño Street says it all.
The story goes that once upon a time, back in Madrid’s imperial heyday, two gentlemen agreed to fight a duel for the love of a beautiful lady. They had had just crossed swords when the ghostly figure of a woman dressed in black came past them.
Putting their dispute on hold, the two followed her curiously up the street until she came to a wall, where she turned around, and facing them lowered her hood to reveal the rotting face of a corpse. Both men were shaken to their senses and, recognising the transitory nature of superficial appearance, cast aside their quarrel, exclaiming ‘what desengaño!’
Indeed, this concept is a central theme of the literature of Spain’s 17th century ‘Golden Age’. As the sclerotic Habsburg behemoth, crippled by debt and bureaucracy, coasted into decadent disarray, its writers and dramatists immortalised the zeitgeist.
The Jesuit Baltasar Gracián exemplified the trend in his allegorical epic El Criticón (The Critic, 1651) in which the eponymous cynic, Critilo, introduces the optimist Andrenio, a noble savage, to the disillusionment to be found in the world.
When they jump ashore at the start of the book Critilo remarks ‘it pains me that you are here, because I know that you won’t like it one bit.’ The wise narrator adds that on one’s arrival in the world, ‘what can one do but make landfall, and try to make the best out of a bad situation?’ – for Gracián and his contemporaries, cynical desengaño was a wise and healthy response to an illusory universe.
Enshrined in the works of Cervantes, Quevedo, Calderón et al. is a rational distrust of the worldly, a zeal to root out the true nature of things and a basis for much of the doubting, sceptical thought of the modern era.
And so it was that many an enlightened cynic had cause to gasp at the prospect of Henry Porter, usually a dependable advocate of such humanist values, calling for ‘an end to this age of cynicism’ in the comment section of May 4th’s issue of The Observer.
In the offending article, Porter criticised the media establishment for ‘a gritty modern “realism”, forged by luxury, not by hardship and insight’ and asked ‘what right have these people got to be so disappointed?’
The flaw in this argument lies in its stated targets: ‘popular culture’, stand-up comics and in particular television shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You.
The affected world-weariness of the protagonists of these institutions, far from being cynical in the original sense of the word, is comprised of feigned disenchantment and the tacit reassurance that, for all the follies of Fleet Street and Westminster, all can be reconciled by a banterous 30-minute treatment of the status quo.
Light satire in the 9pm slot, a mug of cocoa and so to bed… the world is put to rights. Solemn realism? Hardened cynicism? Hardly.
Porter must surely know that true ‘cynics’ do not ‘believe with a vigorous but untested faith that we are doomed and that nothing can be done.’ So why does he tar a 2500-year old tradition of pragmatic moderation, one that spans Ancient Greek, Baroque and Enlightenment thought, with such unimaginative application of terminology?
Does he not recognize that this is counter-productive? The responses to his article certainly imply that it is. In the five letters that were published on Sunday, May 11th, cynicism was associated with sterility, scorn and tedium.
It is ironic that in an era increasingly defined by extremes of faith and nihilism, the media establishment should abnegate the value of such a reasoned mindset. Rather than demeaning or adulterating, real cynicism questions that which should be questioned – the ephemeral and the superficial.
It is only a value judgement in as much as it exalts the truth (the disordered nature of the transient world) and a cynic only suffers ‘disappointment’ if this truth contradicts a coexisting and mutually exclusive belief.
Yet cynics everywhere are seeing the name of their distinguished and laudable philosophy dragged through the mud and unthinkingly appropriated to describe any piece of indulgent pessimism. This has to stop.
Perhaps the nadir of Porter’s article is the comment: ‘Optimism is still held to be the preferred tipple of unrealistic fools; the optimist is still seen as Pangloss.’ What is this supposed to mean? Is the message of Candide no longer valid? Is now the time for blind faith?
Wearisome though the pseudo-cynicism of some elements of the entertainment world may be, there is no need to blame Voltaire. Indeed, a cursory glance at the work that he references would have shown Porter all he needed to know about the meaning of real cynicism.
At the end of the novella Candide and Pangloss return home and visit their neighbour, ‘a famous dervish who passed for the best philosopher in Turkey.’ When he is asked about his farm, the wise Turk replies ‘I have no more than twenty acres of ground, the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labour keeps off from us three great evils – idleness, vice and want.’
It is therefore no coincidence that after his experiences of all the disillusionment that Europe has to offer, Candide brings the book to a close with the famously pragmatic philosophical maxim, ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin.’
Porter’s article is symptomatic of a sidelining of cynicism by the very agenda that he, as a progressive journalist, can usually be relied on to oppose: anti-Enlightenment dogma. All ideologies and beliefs need limits: all must be conditioned by a realistic assessment of the truth. After all, to be cynical is to courageously seek the bigger picture, to accept weakness and deviation, to be reasoned, liberal and modern.
Cynics of all countries, unite! We must reclaim the word ‘cynicism’, rescue it from semantic doom, stray off the bustling Gran Vía of illusion… and onto the Calle de Desengaño.
