Through a glass darkly

There's a genre of Spanish literature, relatively unknown in the Anglosphere, called Esperpento. We could learn a lot from it, especially now.

First popularised by Spanish novellist and playwright, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, in the 1920s Esperpento employs bitter irony and distorted descriptions of reality in order to critique society. It utilses grotesqueries and reification (the reduction of human beings to objects) to explore the human condition and its recurring image is one of distorting mirrors. In visual art this style is probably best recognised outside the Spanish-speaking world in the darker works of Francisco Goya. In Latin America, the author most well-known for his use of the form is Mexican author, Jorge Ibargüengoitia.

In the context of contemporary UK politics, it seems we have discovered the spirit of Esperpento without actually possessing an adequate English synonym to describe the phenomenon. Pantomime is a term often employed to describe the bizarre goings-on in Westminster but that is really too cosy a description. It masks the grim underlying reality by inviting us to laugh off the corruption and mendacity as a bit of harmless knock-about, a travesty entirely divorced from everyday lived reality. This is a mistake. By dismissing it in pantomime terms as 'yah-boo politics' we like to delude ourselves that its villains are easily overcome by ridicule. Oh yes we do!

The reality, of course, is much more sinister and the mock-gothic setting of the Palace of Westminster provides the perfect stage for this theatre of the absurd. 
Boris Johnson would have been a gift to Valle-Inclán, though perhaps even he would have struggled to make him up. The concave and convex mirrors used by the author in his play, Luces de Bohemia, are, metaphorically, reflecting back to us some deeply disturbing images of our contemporary body politic - not so much spitting as maniacally grinning. 

The "something rotten in the state" has been graphically exposed as the Honours System itself. The exercise of Prime Ministerial patronage through the awarding of titles, decorations and medals - the so-called 'gongs' -  has always been questionable but now Johnson has weaponised it.  The Labour Party's pledge to abolish the House of Lords has been given added impetus by Johnson's shameless resignation honours list, which surely gives them all the ammunition they need to bring down this utterly discredited system.

And why stop there? The monarchy is often referred to as 'the fount of honour'. In reality these days the sovereign simply signs off on a list of names coming to Buckingham Palace from 10 Downing Street, but when those lists are as devalued as Johnson's the institutions of monarchy and peerage are both tainted by association.  The current honours sytem is truly "more honoured in the breach than in th'observance" and the two major constitutional institutions it sustains (monarchy and House of Lords) are so deeply compromised by it as to put themselves beyond reform. Both should be swept away in a parliamentary cleansing of the Augean Stables.

English author, Lewis Carroll, in his story Through the Looking-Glass has his young heroine, Alice,  transported to a topsy-turvy world in which, like a reflection, everything is reversed, including logic. His is a very English dystopia, more whimsical than grotesque - and intended for children, of course - whereas Valle-Inclán's vision of humanity is a mature one, refracted by a much darker lens. For his part, by holding his own distorting mirror up to nature, Boris Johnson has revealed the warped reality of a modern British politics reshaped by thirteen years of Tory misrule.

It is unrecognisable and nothing about it will ever look the same again.

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