Reference to the second sense first appeared in the supplement to the nineteenth edition (1970): Literary genre created by Ramón del Valle-Inclán.
[Note 3] The real street's most distinguishing feature was the advertising front, where a concave and a convex mirror hung, distorting the image of all those who passed by.
[Note 5] The idea of esperpento is based on Valle-Inclán's perception of the mixture between the great and the grotesque, which he considered typical of Spanish society.
He employed this method of portraying reality in all his works from then on, including in Martes de Carnaval (Carnival Tuesday), La hija del capitán (The Captain's Daughter), Las galas del difunto (The Galas of the Deceased), and Los cuernos de don Friolera (The Horns of Don Friolera).
The second method is to view them "as though they were our own selves", and the third is "to look at the world from a superior plane and consider the characters in the plot to be inferior to the author, with a point of irony.
The world of the esperpentic—as one of the characters in Bohemian Lights explains—is as though the ancient heroes have become deformed in the concave mirrors of the street, with a grotesque transportation, but rigorously geometric.
Characters on the street include drunkards, prostitutes, rogues, beggars, failed artists, and bohemians, all presented as marionettes incapable of voluntary actions.