Resultados de la caracterización de los establecimientos comerciales

The Protestant background from the hypotext becomes in this transposition Catholicism.

One of the reasons why the melodrama genre form appeals to the Mexican film industry (especially in the 1950s) is the Catholic religious background. López explains how “sin” and

“suffering abnegation”, “the staples of the family melodrama”, are essential components of the Catholic tradition, which regards passion as a sin which “must always be punished”. However, it is sin what allows passion to exist, and passion “justifies life” (508). The films directed by Buñuel (Abismos included) depict passion in a similarly ambivalent way. In Abismos, Catholicism is mixed with pagan rituals, embodied in the character of José/ Joseph (Francisco Reiguera). Although he is as fervent and obsessive a Catholic as his counterpart is a Protestant, José is also a kind of

“santero”. Like Joseph in WH1939, he mainly serves as comic relief, but he has more sinister connotations, which is coherent with the association of religion to repression in this hypertext.

José performs a strange ceremony, a mixture of Christian rite and popular superstition: believing that Alejandro “has the Devil inside”; he exorcizes the house with a cross and a burning toad. His ritual is as ridiculous as Joseph believing Cathy the daughter is doing black magic on him (WH 57).

We have mentioned before that the mixture between paganism and Christianity is common in colonized communities like México. José’s “exorcism” is also an example of the reconciliation of the sacred and the profane, and so it is the depiction of sin and passion as complementary. As we said, this motif was present in Bataille’s essay (21) and will be later used in Onimaru (Okumura 126).

At first glance, it seems difficult to transfer the Gothic elements from the hypotext into a Catholic context. Morgan (63) and Davenport - Hines (224) point out that the Gothic genre is predominantly anti-Catholic, depicting it as sinister, related to torture and the Inquisition (The Monk, The Italian). However, this vision perfectly reflects Buñuel’s attitude about religion, which was always portrayed in his films as an instrument of oppression, whose main function is to keep the old-fashioned structured of established society. The Spanish filmmaker had a complex relation with his own religious background. Catholicism influenced him deeply, but he was an atheist. This attitude (not uncommon in Spain) created him problems with Mexican audiences (i.e. there were demands for him to be expelled from the country because of the uncompassionate portrayal of the children in Los Olvidados). In Brontë’s writings, we do not find the strong anti-Catholic views that Charlotte had (evident in The Professor or Vilette), but her views are unorthodox (i.e. the line “Vain are the thousand creeds” from her poem “No coward soul is mine” CP 182). It cannot be said she was an atheist but, like Buñuel and the Surrealists, she despised organized religion.⁹⁰ Both Brontë and Buñuel are characterized by a concern with obsessive, unfulfilled desires, a blurring between dream and reality and an objective presentation of human cruelty and violence (Hughes 111). The depiction of cruelty in the films Buñuel directed shows the influence of the Marquis of Sade. He had a materialist and atheist conception of the world, according to which the inexistence of god does not need to be proved, because it is obvious (Monegal 188). Sade rejected the Divine Order proposed by the Illustration, inhabited by the Natural Man and the Noble Savage, in which animal passion was controlled and equilibrated by a rational and compassionate soul remitted to god. For Sade, humans are capable of the worst cruelties, which god does not punish, because god does not exist. Then, our real dignity and mission in life is to resist any restraining of our personal liberty by law, religion or the men (Baxter 67).

Despite their negative view of organized religion, both for Brontë and Buñuel religion is an important topic, as an obsessive, ironic subtext, which is subverted and presented as incongruous (Hughes 111). While Elizabeth Rigby complained about Brontë’s “heathenish doctrine of religion”

(111), Buñuel was accused of irreverence thorough his career. We have commented the scandal provoked by L’âge d’or (1930) (with images like a custodia being used to hold a car door). In Brontë’s and Buñuel’s defence, I argue that they attacked the external image of religion, its iconography and paraphernalia, making them look ridiculous by transposing them to a strange environment (Seijo-Richart. “Buñuel’s Heights” 31). This is the aesthetic technique the Surrealists call depayssement, which aims to shock and disorientate the spectator. We have already compared Lockwood’s dream

90 Buñuel declared his loss of (Catholic) religious faith was a progressive process which started in adolescence, with the reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It was also influenced by the repressive religious environment in which he grew up, with its continuous emphasis in Hell, condemnation and punishment (Aub 39-40).

of Reverend Branderham’s service in the novel to Buñuel’s gag La Sancta Misa Vaticanae. Abismos’

Catholic context is as repressive as Brontë’s Protestant one. The events related to religion in this hypertext follow the hypotext closely, but they have been transformed to reflect Buñuel’s personal obsessions. Edgar got sulky when Cathy praised Heathcliff (WH 137). In Abismos, Eduardo/

Edgar accuses Catalina of being unfaithful ‘in her thoughts’ (“Me engañas con el pensamiento”), which reflects Buñuel’s belief in the absolute power of the unconscious (Seijo-Richart. “Buñuel’s Heights” 29). While the mind is free for director Buñuel, it is not for this character. Contrary to Christian dogma and as an influence of his discovery of Sade, Buñuel defended the right to commit sins with the imagination, as a form of liberation of the guilty impulse to do it in real life (Sánchez Vidal. Luis Buñuel 59). Having this in mind, it becomes difficult to condemn Catalina for loving Alejandro. She correctly points out she has been “a good wife”. Moreover, when Cathy rejects heaven in the hypotext (120), she is showing a similar religious attitude to many characters in the films directed by Buñuel. Catalina in Abismos declares “I love Alejandro more than the salvation of my soul!”. Desire is always preferred to the idea of Heaven. Buñuel’s characters never find comfort in the love of God, but they systematically reject it in favour of earthly love. In a scene which seems directly taken from Sade, the dying woman in Nazarín (1958) refuses the extreme unction: “Not Heaven. Juan” (her lover). Then, her lover kisses her without caring that she is afflicted by cholera. His attitude is similar to Alejandro in Abismos final scene, when he kisses Catalina’s corpse.

Although reading from sacred texts is not as common in a Catholic context as it is in a Protestant one, there are two significant scenes involving Bible-reading in Abismos. Just after Cathy’s death, José reads aloud a passage from the Book of Wisdom (2, 1-7) in which the heathens encourage people to search for pleasure in life, as there is nothing after death. It is a variant of the

“carpe diem” motif (Seijo-Richart. “Buñuel’s Heights” 32). Buñuel considered it the most beautiful passage (his favourite) in the Bible, as it resembled the atheist ideas of his admired Marquis of Sade (Mi último suspiro 200-201).⁹¹ The text exposes the contradiction between the topic of “love after death” and Buñuel’s atheism. As Hughes points out (125), the view of religion in Abismos is far more pessimistic than the hypotext. The presence of the ghosts in Brontë’s novel suggests the possibility of an afterlife. On the contrary, for Buñuel, death is simply the end: the close-up of the tombstone falling over the dead lovers at the ending leaves it clear. In fact, as we will see in the subsequent sections, none of the Surrealist transpositions give the possibility of a hereafter reunion to the lovers, while all the commercial ones do.

91 Bits from the same passage were also read in his Robinson Crusoe transposition (Monegal 134).