161
Professor Rodolfo Cardona has also suggested to me that Juan's Walter Mitty qualities could be equally interpreted as a form of moreauisme, since Picón's character here runs parallel with Flaubert's Frédéric Moreau in L'Education sentimentale. Flaubert's treatment, of course, goes far beyondthe Spanish novelist's in its complexity and presentation of character.
162
During his adolescence, Juan Vulgar is fond of the Romantics (Espronceda and Bécquer) and the declamatory Bernardo López García (p. 190).
163
On Picón's interest in reforming the traditional oposiciones, see his article, «Carta abierta sobre oposiciones a cátedras», El Imparcial (14 Feb. 1911).
164
Picón's description of Juan's early years in Madrid (Chs, II-V) -the tertulias at the Café Suizo, opera at the Real, concerts and strolls in the Retiro Park- seems to emit autobiographical echoes. See also Juan Gualbert López-Valdemoro, «De mis memorias. Jacinto Octavio Picón y Bouchet», Boletín de la Academia Española, 20 (1933), 243-51; Sobejano, p. 18. For a contemporary description of concert going in the Retiro Park, see Antonio Peña y Goñi, «Los conciertos en el Retiro», La Ilustración Española y Americana, No. 32 (24 Aug. 1873), p. 526.
165
It is interesting to note that Clarín's Antonio Reyes of «Una medianía» (1889), another Hispanic example of an egotist, also evidences a parallel physical solipsism, in his directionless, almost somnambulistic ramblings through Madrid (see Noël M. Valis, «A Spanish Decadent Hero: Clarín's Antonio Reyes of 'Una medianía'», p. 57). Alas's fragment has recently been reprinted as an appendix to a new, carefully annotated edition of Su único hijo, ed, Carolyn Richmond (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979).
166
Occasionally, however, Juan is made aware of the frequently absurd figure he represents in society. María, for example, admires his sartorial elegance when she sees him -hypocritically- dressed in mourning for a long-lost and forgotten Andalusian love, Luisa. «Para su conciencia», writes Picón, «fue aquel momento muy amargo. Por primera vez en la vida se vio ante sus propios ojos despreciable y ridículo» (p. 252). The moment of humility, however, does not last.
167
Curiously, the historian Melchor Fernández Almagro was to use the same phrase to describe Restoration Spain: «sumido el país en enorme calma chicha» (cited by Pedro Laín Entralgo, La generación del noventa y ocho, 7th ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1970, p. 46).
168
Picón himself, it will be recalled, was born in 1852, Thus both author and character share an almost identical age.
169
For background on the Narcissus figure in literature, see Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967). Havelock Ellis in his essay, «The Conception of Narcissism» (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, VII, Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1928), interestingly enough, cites the specific Spanish example of Valera's Rafaela in Genio y figura (pp. 354-55). During Picón's youth, E. Martínez de Velasco, in La Ilustración Española y Americana, No. 26 (8 July 1873), p. 421, made note of a prize-winning sculpture called «Narciso», by Elías Martín, which was also given a full-page illustration (p. 424).
170
Katherine P. Reding, «The Generation of 1898 in Spain as seen through its Fictional Hero», Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 17, Nos. 3-4 (1935-36), 125 pp.; and Doris King Arjona, «La Voluntad and Abulia in Contemporary Spanish Ideology», Revue Hispanique, 74 (1928), 573-672.