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I often like to quote the eulogy that Santiago Ramón y Cajal dedicated to our first Nobel Prize winner for Literature José Echegaray for his work El gran Galeoto.
I frequently hear comments referring to that “great unknown” for the general public that was José Echegaray. This is Cajal’s eulogy defending the fusion of science and literary art:
“Some are astonished that an engineer, a physicist, a geometer, whose fantasy should have been exhausted by wandering through the austere moor of algebraic formulas, should have cultivated poetry so beautifully and gallantly; but those who admire such a happy conjunction of faculties are I could ask them if they happen to know of any scientific talent that is not something or even a lot of poet”.
“What is science ultimately if not a profound, clairvoyant, infinitely ambitious poetry? Penetrating to the bottom of things, the scientist appears to us as an inspired bard who, dragged by the inextinguishable thirst for the ideal, irreverently rips with the scalpel of the He analyzes the mysterious veil that hides eternal realities from us. But, unlike the poet of appearances, the scientific poet does not sing admiring and emphatic stanzas to the murmuring stream or to Diana’s pale sparkles; he wants to drown once and for all in the unfathomable sea of beauty and be dazzled, to the point of blinding, in the powerful light of truth”.
This panegyric of Cajal was endorsed by Juan Valera and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo.
José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (Madrid 1832 – 1916) was an engineer, playwright, politician and mathematician. He is a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Central University.
He is considered the best Spanish mathematician of the 19th century. He introduced in Spain the geometry of Chasles, the Galois theory and the elliptic functions.
He premiered 67 plays, of which 34 were in verse. His first dramatic period was romantic and later he cultivated a more social theme close to the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen. A statue of Echegaray stands in front of the Bank of Spain in Madrid, of which he was the founder.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904, which he shared with the French writer Frederic Mistral, for his work Mireya, in the Occitan language. She competed until the end with the work of Àngel Guimerà.
Other Spanish Nobel Prize winners were Santiago Ramon and Cajal (1906), Jacinto Benavente (1922), Juan Ramon Jimenez (1956), Severo Ochoa (1959), Vicente Aleixandre (1977) and Camilo Jose Cela (1989).
The Great Galeoto makes reference to the episode of Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Divine Comedy and has been considered as a sample of the author’s ideas about the theater.
The plot is that of a young writer, Ernesto, faced with Don Julián because of his wife Teodora. The rumors that they have romantic relationships and the death of Don Julián in a duel are in the central plot of the work.
It was translated into English and released in England and the United States. Much admired by the public. Rafael Gil directed a film version.
The term “galeoto” means pimp or person who arranges a love relationship. José Echegaray considers that “it is society that acts as the Great Galeoto” by propitiating with its rumors the passion between Ernesto and Teodora. It is a sharp criticism of the society of his time.
Echegaray’s work was criticized by Leopoldo Alas Clarín and Emilia Pardo Bazán and highly admired by Pirandello and Bernard Shaw. Baroja, Azorín and Unamuno did not like him either.
The Swedish Academy issued this report on his work in awarding him the Nobel Prize:
“One of the most fertile dramatic traditions in European literature and the rare coincidence of poetic imagination and scientific erudition found in the eminent Spanish mathematician, landowner, engineer, playwright and statesman.”
“Great and copious work, in which he has revived an independent and original way of the great traditions of Spanish theater.”
