—126→ —127→ —128→ —129→
—130→
Finally, after many years of waiting, English readers have access to Galdós' masterpiece! How should galdosistas feel about this momentous event? In this volume of Anales galdosianos we print two views: V. S. Pritchett, a longtime admirer of Galdós, expresses his delight in the review that appeared in the August 17, 1973, number of The New Statesman, and which we are reproducing with his special permission. Michael McGaha, acquainted with an excellent, yet unpublished translation of the novel, dwells on the defects of the present translation put out by Penguin Books. For our part we share in the delight expressed by Pritchett and think mainly of the wonderful service rendered by Penguin Books in making this novel available to the English reader. At the same time we regret that the editors of Penguin Books did not have the opportunity to read the masterful translation by Agnes Moncey before making their final decision to publish the English version of Fortunata y Jacinta. One hopes that in the future there will be an opportunity to see in print a second and better translation of this novel, a fact that would increase considerably our delight and the possibility for Galdós' novel to achieve the status of a world classic which it deserves.
The Editors
—131→
Pérez Galdós is the supreme Spanish novelist of the 19th century. His scores of novels are rightly compared with the work of Balzac and Dickens who were his masters, and even with Tolstoy's. Why then has he been almost totally neglected by English readers? One reason is that wherever Spanish city life, had anything in common with Western European societies, it appeared to be out of date and a provincial parody; and where there was no resemblance it was interpreted by foreign collectors of the outlandish and picturesque. One of the anglicised characters in his longest novel Fortunata and Jacinta returns to England saying, bitterly, that all the English want from Spain is tourist junk -and this in 1873! One could read the great Russians without needing to go to Russia; their voice carried across the frontiers. To grasp Galdós -it was felt- one had to go to Spain and submit to Spanish formality, pride and claustrophobia. Few people outside of academic life did so.
These objections no longer have the same force and it is more likely that the great achievement of Galdós can be recognized here today. A few years ago, his short novel The Spendthrifts (La de Bringas) was translated by Gerald Brenan and Gamel Woolsey and now we have Lester Clark's complete translation of the 1,100 pages of his most ambitious novel. It takes its place among those Victorian masterpieces that have presented the full-length portrait of a city.
The originality of Galdós springs, in part, from the fact that he was a silent outsider -he was brought up in the Canaries under English influences. He learned how to drift in time to the Spanish pace and then, following Balzacian prescription and energy, set out to become «they secretary of history». He is reported to have been a quiet and self-effacing man and this novel gets its inspiration from the years he spent listening to the voices of Madrid. His intimacy with every social group is never the sociologist's; it is the personal intimacy of the artist, indeed it can be said he disappears as a person and becomes the people, streets and kitchens, cafés and churches. This total absorption has been held against him: the greatest novelists, in some way, impose -the inquirer does not. Yet this very passivity matches a quality in Spanish life; and anyway he is not the dry inquirer; his inquiry is directed by feeling and especially by tolerant worship of every motion of the heart, a tenderness for its contradictions and ist dreams, for its everyday impulses and also for those that are vibrant, extreme-even insane. He is an excellent story-teller, he loves the inventiveness of life itself. Preaching nothing overtly, he is a delicate and patient psychologist. It is extraordinary to find a novel written in the 1880s that documents the changes in the cloth trade, the rise and fall of certain kinds of café, the habits of usurers, politicians and catholic charities but also probes the fantasies and dreams of the characters and follows their inner thoughts. Galdós is fascinated by the psychology of imitation and the primitive unconscious. He changes the «point of view» without regard to the rules of the novelist's game. We are as sure of the likeness of each character as we are of the figures in a Dutch painting —132→ and yet they are never set or frozen, they are always moving in space in the Tolstoyan fashion. The secret of the gift of Galdós lies, I think, in his timing, his leisurely precision and above all in his ear for dialogue; his people live in speech, either to themselves or to each other. He was a born assimilator of speech of all kinds from the rich skirling dialect of the slums or the baby-language of lovers, to the even more difficult speech of people who are trying to express or evade more complex thoughts.
The dramatic thread that runs through the panorama of life in Madrid in 1873 is the story of the love and destructive jealousy of two women. Fortunata is a beautiful and ignorant slum girl who is seduced by the idle son of rich shopkeepers before his marriage and bears him a son who dies. Jacinta becomes the young man's beautiful but pathetic wife, tormented less by her husband's love affairs than by the fact that she cannot bear children. The deserted Fortunata takes up a life of promiscuity from which a feeble and idealistic young chemist sets about rescuing her. She longs to be a respectable wife and is bullied into going into a convent for a time so that she can be reformed. But she cannot get over her love for her seducer and although she comes out of the convent and marries the chemist, she feels no affection for him. He is indeed impotent, and going from one philosophical or religious mania to another, ends by becoming insane and murderous in his jealousy of her first lover who has resumed the pursuit. It becomes a battle, therefore, between the bourgeois wife and the loose woman. Fortunata is a tragic figure of the people, a victim of her own passionate impulses who, in the end, has a second child by her seducer and regards herself as his true respectable wife because the other is barren. But her child is taken over by the rich and legitimate wife and Fortunata dies raging. The scene is overwhelming. The last time I wept over a novel was in reading Tess when I was 18. Fifty years later Fortunata has made me weep again. Not simply because of her death but because Galdós had protrayed a woman whole in all her moods. In our own 19th-century novels this situation would be melodramatic and morally overweighted -see George Eliot's treatment of Hetty Sorrel- but in Galdós there is no such excess. The bourgeois wife is in her limited way as attractive as Fortunata.
Among the large number of Fortunata's friends, enemies and neighbours, there are two or three portraits that are in their own way as powerful as hers. First there is Mauricia la Dura, an incorrigible, violent and drunken prostitute to whom Fortunata is drawn against her will in the convent. Mauricia attracts by the terror and melancholy of her face. She is a genuine Spanish primitive. There is a long and superb scene in which she manages to get hold of some brandy in the convent and passes from religious ecstasy to blasphemy, theft and violence. It is a mark of the great novelist that he can invent a fantastic scene like this and then, later on, take us into the mind of the violent girl after she has got over her mania. Galdós knows how to return to the norm:
Doña Guillermina, a rich woman who has given up everything for the rescue work, is another fine portrait of the practical good-humoured saint, a sort of Santa Teresa who -and this shows the acuteness of the novelist's observation- can be frightened, a shade automatic, and sometimes totally at a loss. Against her must be placed Doña Lupe, a lower-middle-class moneylender. She is a miser who shouts to her maid:
|
Clean your feet on the next-door shoescraper... because the fewer people who use ours, the more we gain. |
But at the wedding of Fortunata to her nephew we recognise Doña Lupe as more than a grotesque. Galdós is superior to Balzac in not confining people to a single dominant passion:
The final large character is Max, the husband of Fortunata. She dislikes him, but he has «saved» her. Puny and sexless, Max begins to seek relief in self-aggrandisement, first of all in prim and ingenuous idealism; when he realises his marriage is null and that his «cure» of Fortunata is a failure, he turns to experimenting with pills and hopes to find a commercial cure-all. His efforts are incompetent and dangerous. The next stage is paranoia caused by sexual jealousy. He moves on to religious mania; thinks of murder and then invites his wife to join him in a suicide pact, in order to rid the world of sin. For a while he is mad and then, suddenly, he recovers and «sees his true situation» -but recovery turns him into a blank non-being. Hare we see Galdós' belief in imitative neurosis, for in a terrible scene poor Fortunata is infected with her husband's discarded belief in violence. She declares she will love him utterly, if only he will go and murder her libertine lover. But Max has fallen into complete passivity: he enters a monastery where he will become a solitary mystic -and he does not realise that the monastery he has chosen is, in fact, an asylum.
It is surprising to find this Dostoyevskian study in Galdós but, of course, Spanish life can offer dozens of such figures. They are examples of what Spanish writers have often noted: the tendency of the self to be obdurately as it is or to projet itself into some universal extreme, to think of itself mystically as God or the universe. But usually -as Galdós showed in his portrait of the ivorycarving222 civil servant in The Spendthrifts- such characters are simply bizarre —134→ and finicking melancholics. Around them stand the crowd of self-dramatisers in the old cafés, the pious church-going ladies, the various types of priest, the shouters of the slums. What is more important is his ability to mount excellent scenes, and in doing so, to follow the feelings of his people with a tolerant and warm detachment. He is never sentimental. There is one fine example of his originality and total dissimilarity from other European novelists in his long account of Jacinta's honeymoon. The happy girl cannot resist acting unwisely: little by little she tries to find out about her husband's early love affair, mainly to increase the excitement of her own love. No harm comes of this dangerous love game, but we realise that here is a novelist who can describe early married life without reserves and hit upon the piquancy that is its spell. I can think of no honeymoon in literature to match this one. The fact is that Galdós accepts human nature without resentment.
—135→
Admirers of Galdós have long lamented the English reading public's abysmal ignorance of the great Spanish writer. It is indeed shocking that an author whom astute critics have compared favorably with Dickens and Balzac should be virtually unknown in the English speaking world. This situation has been due in great part to the lack of translations of Don Benito's works. The fact that so few of his novels have ben translated into English would be astonishing but for the fact that Galdós' novels -with their multiple stylistic levels and colloquial language- pose formidable problems for the translator perhaps unequalled by those encountered in translating any other modern Spanish writer. Even the cultured Spanish reader has difficulty in understanding many passages in Galdós.
The dearth of Galdós translations has been somewhat alleviated in recent years. The appearance of J. M. Cohen's excellent translation of Miau (Methuen, 1963; Penguin, 1966) was a noteworthy event. In 1973 Penguin Books published a long-awaited translation of Galdós' masterpiece Fortunata y Jacinta.223 In spite of the book's forbidding length, it was to be hoped that this translation would mark a significant breakthrough in bringing Galdós the popularity he so well deserves among discriminating English readers. Unfortunately, this translation does such violence to the novel that it is doubtful whether anyone not familiar with the Spanish original will be able to perceive the work's greatness. The review of the translation published in the Times Literary Supplement (October 12, 1973) clearly states the most serious charge that can be brought againsi it: «[...] the translation gives the impression that Galdós writes in a ponderous, awkward manner, that he is often extremely tedious, and that his humour is laboured and infantile; in short, that, compared with the real masters of the realist novel, he was some sort of bumpkin-come-lately who did not rightly understand what he was about».
Apart from the translator's failure to give a faithful reproduction of the style and tone of the original, he also commits a host of errors which at times grossly distort the author's meaning. I propose, in the following pages, to present some of the more glaring cases of mistranslation. A full list would be much too lengthy for a review. A case which would be laughable were it not so pathetic occurs on page 222. José Izquierdo, describing his adventures in the revolution of 1854, says «and then I was with Don Pascual a Palacio himself, and Don Pascual went up to speak to the queen...» The highly colloquial original- the flavor of which, by the way, is completely lost in the translation- clarifies this odd statement: «[...] y aluego juí («I went», not «I was») con el propio D. Pascual a Palacio, y D. Pascual subió a pleticar con la Reina...» When Jacinta makes a visit «al Cuarto Estado» (Badly translated as «to the slums»), she hears a blind boy sing a song. The translator gives us the lyrics in the original Spanish: «A Pepa la gitanilla / cuando la parió su madre / sólo por las narices / le dieron siete calambres». Unfortunately, he errs even in transcribing the Spanish, changing —136→ the «por» of the original to «para». In a footnote he explains that this is «a traditional song which makes little sense to modern cars» (p. 232). Oddly enough, a few lines further along in his translation, he points out that an old man standing nearby was the author of this «traditional song». The song, which could be roughly translated «When Pepa the gypsy girl's / mother gave her birth / it took her seven cramps / just to get her nose out», makes just as much sense to modern ears as to any previous ones.
Another confusing mistranslation occurs on page 521. After Fortunata has married Maxi, her friend Mauricia visits her to tell her that Juanito has rented the apartment next door to that of the newlyweds. She goes on to say that «[...] a woman they call Cirila heard it from him (Juanito) - You don't know her; I do. She's also been going around selling things, and she had a guesthouse. She's married to a man who knows about it and now your gentleman's let her into the secret». A quick glance at the original text will show just how far this «translation» departs from the meaning the author intended: «-Lo ha tomado por cuenta de él una que llaman Cirila... Tú no la conoces; yo sí: ha sido también corredora de alhajas y tuvo casa de huéspedes. Está casada con uno que fue de la ronda secreta, y ahora tu señor me le ha colocado en el tren».
In describing the clientele of a café, the translator tells us: «[...] and then came the soldier priests, so called because three or four priests, of the type one might call unattached, used to gather at the table» (p. 586). The English reader is sure to be mystified by the expression «soldier priests», since there is no indication that these good fathers have anything to do with the military. The translator has missed the point of Galdós' expression «curas de tropa», which could mean «a gang of priests», but is also a pun on the French de trop, meaning superfluous».
In a scene on page 647, Don Evaristo Feijoo tells Fortunata: «What you need now is to laugh at Lara's little plays and variety acts». One would assume that this «Lara» was a playwright. Galdós is, of course, referring to two famous theaters in Madrid -the Lara and the Variedades. One of the most comical mistranslations occurs on page 656 when Don Evaristo asks Fortunata: «What need have I to be called a 'boyish old man'?» Anyone who doesn't know the difference between a «boyish old man» and a «viejo verde» has no business translating Galdós! Equally inexcusable is the translation of «embarazada» («pregnant») as «embarrassed» (p. 919).
A number of the most glaring mistakes in the translation seem to result from the translator's lamentable ignorance of the novel's Catholic cultural background. Thus, when Doña Lupe tells Maxi: «We're between the Cátedras de Roma y Antioquía, which, as my husband Jáuregui used to say, is the worst time for weather in Madrid», Mr. Clark explains in a footnote that the reference is to «the (university) chairs of Rome and Antioch» (p. 339). Doña Lupe is clearly referring to the church holidays of the Chair («Cátedra») of St. Peter at Rome (January 18) and the Chair of St. Peter at Antioch (February 23), which indeed fall at a bad time for weather in Madrid. On page 747 Mr. Clark twice translates «custodia» as «remonstrance» and renders «el Santísimo» («the most Blessed Sacrament») as «the Holy of Holies». Later on, Don Manuel Moreno-Isla remarks that Jacinta «[...] with her frigidity and irony, has turned me head over heels and —137→ flattened me like the Virgen de la serpiente...» (p. 877). This is surely a peculiar title to add to the litany of the Virgin. The Spanish text reads: «[...] con su frialdad y su ironía me ha puesto el pie sobre la cabeza y me la ha aplastado, como la Virgen la de la serpiente» («as the Virgin crushed the Serpent's head»). Even an evangelical reference to a woman who is a «whited sepulchre» («sepulcro blanqueado») comes out strangely as a «gleaming white tomb» (p. 188).
Often common Spanish idioms seem to confuse the translator beyond belief. He sometimes renders them literally («he wants to give us a cat instead of a rabbit», p. 704) and at other times completely distorts their significance. When the author says of Fortunata that «[...] No le importaba trabajar como el obispo con tal de poseer lo que por suyo tenía», Mr. Clark gives us the following version: «[...] she didn't care for working like a bishop does, to possess what he thought to be his spiritual right», (p. 542) when in fact the sense of the passage is: «[...] she didn't mind working like a dog if only she could have what she thought was rightfully hers».
Many of the characters in the book are commonly referred to by nicknames. Mr. Clark translates some of these but leaves others in the original Spanish without even an explanatory footnote. Some examples are «el Sordo» (p. 151), «Pitusa» and «la Melaera» (p. 105). The comical ambiguity of the nickname «Platón» («Plato», but in this case a man «who used to eat from a big plate») also goes without explanation. Non-Spanish proper nouns, too, are often left in their Spanish form, and this sometimes causes confusion. For example, Doña Lupe tells us on page 363 that Juan Pablo is in Bayona», but on page 411 she says that she has sent him a letter «to Bayonne». A reference to Linnaeus is inexplicably left as «Linneo», and in an explanatory footnote-surely unnecessary in this case-Mr. Clark gives the Swedish naturalist's date of death as 1788 instead of 1778. On the other hand, a footnote would certainly have been desirable when two characters show up with «a little friend who had just come from San Juan de Dios», (p. 601) not a place, as the reader would infer, but a hospital.
It often seems that when the translator didn't understand a Spanish phrase, he simply left it untranslated. In a discussion of the Teatro Real, we are told that Jacinta «could tell him everything she had seen at the Regio coliseo», (p. 145) given without italics and as if it were a separate place. The card-playing expression «órdago» (shoot the works») is twice left untranslated (pp.164 and 984). The word «Pachasco» («pa chasco» in the original), which would be totally unintelligible to the English reader, is several times interjected into José Izquierdo's conversation on page 223. Other examples are «engarzarrosarios» (p. 440) and «Tié gracia» (p. 479 and 480).
Mr. Clark prefaces his translation with a «map of modern Madrid simplified to show some places mentioned in Fortunata and Jacinta». A map of Madrid at the time of the novel would have been a most helpful addition, but this map is virtually useless, since street names are given in their modern form and the places of greatest interest to the novel (e.g., the home of the Santa Cruz family in the Plaza de Pontejos) are not indicated.
Penguin Books' decision to publish this translation is very difficult to understand in view of the fact that the other translations in the Penguin Classics —138→ series are generally excellent. Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this book's appearance is the fact that it may dissuade another publisher from printing a worthy translation of Galdós' brilliant novel. This would be a tragic error, for one can only conclude that Mr. Clark's travesty is worse than no translation at all.
Pomona College. Claremont, California
—139→
Anyone who still questions the value of Galdós' contribution to the theater should be referred to Escelicer's recently released Teatro Selecto de Pérez Galdós for a handy self-contained corrective.224 Volume I contains three of Galdós' greatest plays, a joint Introduction by Rodolfo Cardona and Gonzalo Sobejano, and a bibliography of articles and books that study various aspects of Galdós' theater.
The text of the plays (Realidad, El abuelo, and Doña Perfecta) agrees with Aguitar's editions of the Obras completas, volume VI, but the scenic divisions, the quality of the paper, and the general layout of each page make the Escelicer edition easier to handle and read. Three portraits of Galdós at several stages of his life and a photograph of the Retiro statue add to the attractiveness of the volume. Furthermore, for once the theater is not tucked away with the novels and can be studied discretely. The improved format should bring Galdós' theater within the reach of more students of Spanish literature, who now will have the opportunity to read the plays for themselves. Too many generations of students have uncritically accepted the generalizations and commonplaces found in the standard manuals of literature. Galdós' reputation as a dramatist has suffered from the cloak of invisibility wrapped about his plays; they have not been seriously considered in the «histories» of literature nor have they been performed in recent times. It is ironic that the closest approximation to a Galdós play performed during the 1974-1975 season at the Teatro Pérez Galdós in Las Palmas -or anywhere else to my knowledge- was an adaptation of the novel Misericordia. The legend still persists that Galdós' theater is not representable, and that he should be judged only by his novels. This, in spite of Electra, for example, a play that probably provoked the greatest audience response in the history of the Spanish stage.
Professor Cardona has made a happy choice in his selection of the three plays included in the first volume. From the point of view of pure theater, dramatic art, and technique, it is difficult to imagine a better ending to an act than the perfectly-timed histrionic finish of Act II of Doña Perfecta, complete with bugle calls announcing the arrival of soldiers who will come to the aid of Pepe Rey. Yet Pérez Galdós was no mere technician, but a seeker of meaning in history and in the very human essence.
The entire country had become «Orbajosoído» in the twenty years since Galdós had written the novel Doña Perfecta. Oligarchic government through caciquismo functioned as effectively as it had in 1876 when Doña Perfecta had Pepe Rey murdered for the first time. It is through the creation of such characters as Doña Perfecta and Pepe Rey that we see the profound and lasting effect Galdós has had on the playwrights who followed him. In his section of the Introduction, Profesor Sobejano points out a twentieth-century incarnation: «García Lorca recrea en Bernarda Alba a Doña Perfecta, dando una dimensión sobrerrealista a este mito español de la imperatividad, la clausura y el resentimiento vengativo» (51)
—140→Careful reading of El abuelo can only lead to a greater appreciation of Galdós as a dramatist. Here Galdós succeeds in presenting the anguish of a man in search of truth. There is a parallel with Oedipus in his quest; however, Albrit is not destroyed but regenerated through truth. El abuelo provides a fundamental insight into Galdós' view of the healing power of truth. Modern man is destroyed by hypocrisy and by the social myths which guide his conduct in spite of his own feelings of right and wrong. El abuelo's parallel with the masterpiece of Greek tragedy holds true, however, in the dramatic impact of its final image. Dolly's devotion to her ailing grandfather as they leave lerusa recalls Antigone leading her blind father from Thebes.
Any selection of Galdós' plays that did not include Realidad -the play that brought the new drama to Spain- would be incomplete. Realidad was a revolutionary play in theme, plot, and technique. The use of interior monologue to reflect the inner lives of the characters was an extraordinary experiment reflecting the author's boldness in dramatic innovation.
From a scholarly point of view there is no doubt that a critical edition of the plays (based on the multiple manuscripts of several dramas that have been found) is sorely needed. There are at least three different manuscripts of Voluntad, and three of Gerona, all of which differ from the standard version published by Aguilar. Although the Escelicer edition of the Teatro Selecto has no notes and is based on the same text as the Aguilar version, it deserves unconditional recommendation both as a classroom text for students of Spanish literature and theater, and as a companion with which to approach Galdós as a playwright. The extraordinary Introduction, which provides a framework and a key to the plays, should be required reading for students of Galdós.
Rodolfo Cardona's opening essay, «Semblanza del Galdós dramaturgo», draws a convincing portrait of the young Galdós with his early efforts at drama, and suggests that he turned from the writing of romantic plays to the realistic novel as a result of reading Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, a novel in which the hero learns that the romantic theater is only a point of transition in his development.
Complementing Professor Cardona's essay is Gonzalo Sobejano's classic «Razón y suceso de la dramática galdosiana», with which readers of this journal may already be familiar.225 Professor Sobejano describes the rationale for Galdós' return to the theater by way of the dialogued novel, the major themes of his dramatic works, and some of the effects of his theater on later critics and playwrights. Sobejano soundly argues that Galdós deliberately sought to regenerate the drama by infusing it with the novelistic technique, which was more appropriate to the bourgeois worldview. A triple process is at work at the close of the nineteenth century: the novel moves toward the drama, the drama toward the novel, «y de aquí nace el subgénero novela-drama» (30). The «novela-drama» or dialogued novel was the bridge that Galdós used to cross from one genre to another in his search to express meaning through form; he knew the technique, but he deliberately avoided writing the «well-made play», that Swiss watch of dramaturgy.
Professor Sobejano suggests that the term «transcendental realism» best describes Galdós' approach to the drama because his plays reflect a realism that is «animado y dirigido por una intención de trascender del tablado a la vida social» (35). The term is aptly chosen. A study of Galdós' theatrical criticism —141→ before 1892 and his later plays shows that he stressed pertinence, contemporary history and relevance. In Nuestro teatro we read that «cada época tiene su género literario que le es peculiar, y este género expresa sus costumbres, la diversa manifestación de sus pasiones».226 In arguing that even genres are subject to social change, Galdós intimates that theater both as a representation of reality and as an expression of the author is not only entertainment but also a social process in which characters are engaged in fictional situations as social beings. The nature of Galdós' aesthetics inevitably led him to the reform of the Spanish stage.
In a joint essay, «Clasificación de las obras dramáticas de Galdós», the plays are divided into two major categories: «dramas of Separation» and «dramas of Conciliation». Each category is subdivided into two themes: Separation» subsumes the themes truth and liberty, while «Reconciliation» subsumes the themes will and charity. This sharp division into four distinct groups eliminates the large degree of overlapping found in S. Griswold Morley's earlier (1921) threefold classification by subject matter, and produces a valuable thematic classification of all twenty-four plays.
There is a minor oversight in the section «Nuestro teatro selecto», which deals with the plays to be included in the volumes. Doña Perfecta (Separation-liberty) and La loca de la casa (Conciliation-will) are listed as the only members of their respective groups to be included in the Teatro Selecto, yet the next volume is to include Electra and Mariucha, both of which belong to the former group, and Alma y vida which belongs to the latter. This slight lapse does not detract from the importance of the Teatro Selecto de Benito Pérez Galdós as an affective vade mecum, regenerating Galdós' theater and making it more accessible.
* * *
Volume 18 of Estudios Escénicos, Cuadernos del Instituto del Teatro (September, 1974), contains a rare surprise: the complete text of Galdós' hitherto unpublished one-act play in verse, Quien mal hace, bien no espere, preceded by an introductory essay by Ricardo Doménech who found the play in the Biblioteca del Instituto del Teatro in Barcelona in 1970. The manuscript, dated 1861, is now the earliest dramatic work by Galdós that we have intact. Its 683 lines of verse (romances, serventesios, and redondillas), occupying only thirty pages, provide a distinctive example of Galdós' early romanticism. Prompted by the discovery the editors have devoted the entire issue of Estudios to Galdós' theater. There are ten articles dealing with specific plays, five general essays studying aspects of his theater, and one bibliographical essay. Two of the «general» essays are only tangentially related to Galdós' theater: Emilio González López's «El drama social contemporáneo: Pérez Galdós y Gómez de la Serna» deals primarily with the latter's La casa nueva; and Jorge Campos' «Nota sobre dos capítulos de La desheredada», which treats the two dialogued chapters of the novel and concludes that they are «unos intentos novelísticos experimentales... [and] reafirman el sentido de diálogo, tan presente en Galdós aun fuera de su teatro» (172). Señor Campos fails to discuss the most revolutionary aspect of the two chapters; they contain the earliest example of interior monologue in the —142→ literature of Western Europe. Galdós' use of this new technique is a trenchant demonstration of the artist's ability to use form to illuminate content. It was a bold stroke, indeed, in 1881, before joyce or Proust or james, for Galdós to employ interior monologue as an instrument for psychological penetration with a triple purpose: to externalize the inner world of the characters, to depict their alienation from the external world, and to solve the problem of a realistic psychological drama.
Realidad is the subject of two articles. In his thought-provoking essay, «Efectos de Realidad», Gonzalo Sobejano demonstrates that the play is a triple drama involving three meritorious protagonists. This explains the necessity for the «anticlimactic» final act, for the dramas of all three protagonists must be resolved after Federico's suicide. Professor Sobejano's interpretation of Augusta's silence is challenging: he sees it as an act of fidelity to the man she loved, a «permanente entrega a él más allá de la muerte» (47).
In «La acogida pública y crítica de Realidad en su estreno» William Shocmaker cites most of the opening-night reviews and concludes that the critics' first impressions were generally accurate with regard to what took place physically; however, there was no general agreement on what the play meant. It is interesting to note that as early as 1892 the critics were interpreting the applause that Galdós received in the theater as appreciation for his past work with the novel.
Ildefonso Manuel Gil's «Dos encuentros con El abuelo» provides a change of pace, a poetic interlude in which the writer describes his first encounter with El abuelo in the wings of a small theater in Daroca at the age of ten. Fifteen years later he again was touched by its magic as he read the play while being held captive in Teruel during the Civil War. Ildefonso Gil's sensitive narration testifies to Galdós' powerful ability to widen the range of human sensibility and transform consciousness. We may never be able to judge the full extent of Galdós' theatrical contribution simply because one of the least studied aspects of art is the after-effects it produces, what I. A. Richards called «the permanent modifications in the structure of the mind».227
In «Voluntad y el ideario galdosiano» Gilberto Paolini argues that Galdós turned to the theater because he needed an intimate form of communication with the pueblo in order to transmit his message of societal rehabilitation. Voluntad is a key play for Señor Paolini because it advocates the renovation of society's moral and spiritual values through the improvement of the individual. The critic compares Galdós with Tolstoy, who also believed that it was necessary to change the character of the individual before seeking to rehabilitate the community.
The first half of Joaquín Casalduero's «Alceste: Volver a la vida» deals with Galdós' early desires to reform the Spanish stage and do away with the artificialities surrounding plot and character. Galdós dared to bring the modern world to the Spanish theater through the introduction of universal themes. Casalduero demonstrates the complexity underlying Galdós' drama by drawing on La de San Quintín, an apparently simple play whose didactic symbolism often escaped critics and audiences. A close examination of the Buendia family, for example, reveals that each member represents a different stage of Spanish history under the Hapsburgs. Casalduero observes that the author finally abandons didacticism in Alceste, for he wishes tocreate happiness in his old age (122). Galdós relives —143→ his past: like the demigod Hercules he too has striven to destroy the monsters that threatened Humanity.
Quite a different view of Galdós is taken by Isaac Rubio in «Alma y vida, obra fundamental del teatro de Galdós». Señor Rubio's theses are simple: Galdós was a muddled thinker whose posture on the problem of clericalism displays an «actitud tan indecisa que desdice de su liberalismo original» (175). His indecisive attitude toward clericalisrn is proved by his attack on caciquismo in Alma y vida, a subterfuge to excuse his earlier position «en la vanguardia de los combates anticlericales de la época» (175). In matters of form Galdós also regressed because since Realidad, his plays «se acercan cada vez más al modelo que éste [Galdós] había anatematizado: Echegaray» (176). Galdós' main purpose in Alma y vida was to defend «a la burguesía contemporánea de las amenazas proletarias» (182).
Galdós' own words, however, contradict most of these charges. Galdós does not sern to be using the typical antirevolutionary bourgeois rhetoric in Alma y vida when Juan Pablo, his protagonist, confronts the tyrannical Monegro and tells him what the future holds:
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Juan Pablo: [...] No temáis a los del cielo; temed a los de la tierra, a los que forja el hombre cansado de la esclavitud, de la miseria, de tanta y tanta iniquidad.228 |
It is difficult to imagine Galdós as being soft on clericalism when in the very prologue to Alma y vida we read the author's ringing denunciation of those who allow clerical authority to control their lives by regulating their tastes and influencing their convictions in matters of art and politics.229 Only one year had passed since Galdós opened the first month of the new century with Electra, a devastating attack on the excesses of clerical influence. Sensing the growing strength of reactionary forces in the wake of the defeat of 1898 and anticipating the change in the climate of opinion that would lead to further intransigenceclerical attempts to regain complete control of of primary and secondary schools, the events of the Semana Trágica, and the execution of Ferrer-Galdós launched a series of plays calling for stronger action in defense of progressive ideas and liberty of thought. Galdós would not falsify history in the denouement of Alma y vida, which is set in 1780. With Laura's death there will be no cultural or economic reconstruction. Heraldic Spain gives way to a divided nation whose polarized people will suffer a series of tyrannies. The plays of the first decade present a problem that will soon engulf the twentieth-century world: the evil of rule by force and the coercion that can be used to give legitimacy and apparnet consent to those who employ brute power.
Galdós layed bare the social abuses of the Law, caciquismo, and clericalism repeatedly in the series of nine plays -of which Alma y vida is only one example- from 1901 to 1910. (During the demonstrations that followed Casandra's premiere in 1910, there were shouts for Electra. Cries against the Jesuits and Pantoja echoed the reception and demonstrations caused by the earlier play.) If Galdós had been indecisive in his attitude toward clericalism, he would have abandoned the field in 1901. Casandra in 1910 was a far more radical play than the earlier Electra. In Casandra, Galdós accuses the Church and clergy of both poisoning and strangling through its power, influence and methods of miseducation. —144→ In this final play of the decade Galdós went one step further and linked clericalism and caciquismo through the person of Doña Juana. Casandra's tag lines to the play fulfill the warning of Juan Pablo to Monegro in Alma y vida:
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Casandra: [...] (Con bárbara entereza.) ¡He matado a la hidra que asolaba la tierra!... ¡Respira, Humanidad! (Telón.)230 |
The assertion that Galdós' plays approached Echegaray's melodramas, does not take into account the aesthetics of Galdós' theater. At the core of Galdós' dramas was a concept of honor and truth completely different from the absolutism that acted as a mainspring for Echegaray. The aesthetics of Galdós' dramas necessarily grew out of the relativism at the center of each play; thus a distance opened between his drama and Echegaray's melodrama that is immeasurable.231
Ambiguities are bound to arise if an attempt is made to judge Galdós as a political figure without examining the historical context of the play-the time within the drama and the time of production. If the historical factor is ignored or treated casually, Galdós can be made to appear conformist where he is critical and moralistic where he is political.
Let us dwell for a moment on the effect that Galdós caused. He was forever disturbing and unsettling people through his art.232 Like Shakespeare he was far more disturbing than the preaching revolutionaries of his time, for he turned to the most subversive element in creative activity to convey his message: Form. It is only through form -as Galdós well knew- that direct contact is made with society. While Galdós was attacking the destructive myths, evil prejudices, and narrow views that had led to the Disaster; Echegaray-whose backwardlooking dramaturgy reinforced the old illusions-was held up as an example to be emulated and awarded a Nobel Prize. (The Nobel Prize is ironic by its very nature, since the explosives that provided the original prize money have been used to blow up embryonic artists and scientists who might someday have won Nobel Prizes.)
A more balanced treatment of an individual play is Elena Cateria's contribution, «Circunstancias temporales de la Electra de Galdós». Using a sociological approach, Professor Catena describes the political and economic climate surrounding the play, and concludes that the great public reaction was due to more than simple anticlericalism. Catena also points out that one of the often overlooked aspects of the play is Galdós' anticipation of the expanding role to be played by the wife in twentieth-century society.
Other contributors to this unusual number of Estudios include Domingo Pérez Minik, Willa Sack Elton, Alfonso M. Gil, Luciano García Lorenzo, and Jesús Gutiérrez. Although there is some uneveness and a general lack of method or theme uniting the articles, Volume 18 of Estudios Escénicos should be warmly welcomed and a special note of thanks given to Ricardo Doménech for the publication of Quien mal hace, bien no espere.
Galdosian scholars should also be grateful to Professors Cardona and Sobejano for regenerating Galdós' long-neglected theater with the Teatro Selecto de Benito Pérez Galdós, which is certain to stimulate further students and studies of Galdós.
Salem State College