Giménez Caballero and scatology

Ernesto Giménez Caballero, though not a writer of the first rank, is an influential figure in the Spanish avant-garde on two counts: as founder–editor of La Gaceta Literaria (1927–32) [The Literary Gazette], Spain’s nearest equivalent to La Révolution surréaliste, and as author of one of the most risqué works of the period, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas [I, Inspector of Drains] (1928). A precocious and enterprising figure, who liked to be known by his initials as Gecé or GC, Giménez Caballero had a strict religious upbringing and surprisingly reconverted to a church-based fascism during a visit to Rome with his Italian wife in September 1928, a change of heart that led to the demise of his journal. Fortunately, he had already written his most interesting work, Yo, inspector de alcantarillas, an uneven collection of scabrous stories with rather more scatology than eschatology in them, though we note that Spanish, significantly perhaps, has only one word to cover these two terms. The collection was published by Biblioteca Nueva, a progressive publishing house that had been making Freud’s works available in Spanish translation since 1922. Its stories owe much to psychoanalytical theory, as will be deduced from a title that suggests delving into the lower recesses of the mind where unseemly material is deposited. The author also acknowledges a debt to Surrealism epigraphically:

The book’s tripartite introduction sets out the title’s three elements in turn. First in focus is the ‘Yo’ [I] or inner self, which the narrator has come to realize is elusive, buried ‘dentro del estuche de mí mismo’ [inside the casing of myself]: