Descenso a los infiernos de la Gran Guerra: Pérez de Ayala en Italia (1916)

Abstract

A leading spokesman for Spanish support of the Allies in World War I, Pérez de Ayala saw the conflagration as a contest between two notions of European civilization: one based on State authoritarian power, social hierarchies and discipline, the other on individual rights and democracy grounded in popular sovereignty. This rational and civil framing of the war was put to the test when Ayala traveled to Italy, in 1916, as a war correspondent for the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa. His experiences at the front challenged his faith in war’s intelligibility, plunging him into an existentialist crisis as he confronted the absurdity of mass slaughter. Countering this descent into the hell of modern combat was his free exercise of the imagination, the one human faculty, in the end, capable of dignifying the senseless, recurring violence of war.