The Scene of the Firing Squad: Zambrano’s Delirium and Destiny and Goya’s The Third of May

Writing in exile in 1952, María Zambrano produced an anguished, poetic meditation on the immeasurable loss of life and of democracy in Spain. Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties focuses on the years 1929–1931 when Zambrano and her fellow students were engaged in the movement to establish a democratic republic. In her narrative—a memoir infused with philosophical reflection—she vividly recaptures their efforts to inspire a collective awakening by the Spanish people. Yet her account of those years of solidarity and hope, culminating in the proclamation of the Republic, is haunted by violent deaths of tens of thousands of Spanish citizens, among them her comrades and friends. Zambrano repeatedly invokes Goya’s painting, The Third of May, which portrays an anonymous fighter in the War of Independence, staring at his executioners, as he stands before the firing squad. That valiant figure, who in the moment of death embraces life, becomes a touchstone for Zambrano. His mute scream paradoxically becomes the voice of all the dead who cannot speak while filling the void of all that Zambrano herself cannot express, as she grapples with the immense pain of that historic catastrophe.