The garden at night: Revisiting Madrid’s public landscapes in Valle-Inclán’s Luces de Bohemia and Baroja’s Noches del Buen Retiro

If nineteenth-century notions of order and decorum reached something of an apotheosis in realist representations of Madrid’s gardens, works such as Valle-Inclán’s Luces de Bohemia (1924) and Pío Baroja’s Las noches del Buen Retiro (1934) present gardens as an image of twentieth-century urban society’s excesses and limits. Valle-Inclán’s nocturnal garden with prostitutes and shattered glass suggests the bleakness of protagonist Max Estrella’s social orbit, while Pío Baroja’s vision of Madrid’s Jardines del Buen Retiro pleasure garden conceals hostility and alienation under the guise of nostalgia and social refinement. Both gardens symbolize the ‘degeneration’ of what Jo Labanyi has described as the object of the modernizing state: to define the private self through the assumption of publicly defined roles.