—66→ —67→ —68→ —69→
Traditionally, Hispanists have tended to concentrate on the front-runners the great names of a literary age. For the Generation of 1868, we have devoted, and deservedly so, thousands of pages to Benito Pérez Galdós, Leopoldo Alas, and Juan Valera, and, in the process, we have made certain, underlying assumptions about the significance of some writers and the nature of literary relationships. First, there seems to be a tacit assumption that those lesser lights, such as José Ortega Munilla, Armando Palacio Valdés, and Jacinto Octavio Picón, are unworthy of our time and our analysis. In failing to explore this second string of Restoration novelists, moreover, we slip into another presupposition, the consequences of which are far more profound for our understanding of the literature of late nineteenth-century Spain: the perception of the Generation of 1868 from the sole point of view of those writers we of the late twentieth century consider the giants of the age. This neglect of those remaining writers whose significance must be judged not only from our standpoint but from within their own temporal and cultural context, has resulted in an impoverished comprehension and oversimplification of the complexities and nature of novel writing in the last quarter of nineteenthcentury Spain. The Generation of 1868 is not just Galdós, Valera, Pereda, and Clarín: it is the sum of all novelists, great and small, and the interweaving among them, which produces a vision of reality, simultaneously at odds with itself and yet of a piece, a wholeness whose individual parts we grasp without really perceiving its totality. To read Galdós and not Picón, as well, gives us an unbalanced, incomplete picture of the period.
In this study, I propose to do two things. First, I would like to reexamine' an early work, Juan Vulgar (1885), by one of the Generation's neglected novelists, Jacinto Octavio Picón;145 and, second, to demonstrate a hitherto unnoted literary and ideological relationship between Picón and the Generation of 1898. Jacinto Octavio Picón (1852-1923), like his contemporary Galdós, allied himself quite early in his career with the liberal and radical forces of nineteenth-century, divided Spain. The dispatches sent to the Madrid daily, El Imparcial, in which Picón reported on the events of the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris, are representative of a spirit imbued with a progressive, secularized, and even afrancesado approach to society and the arts. In these articles, France becomes the ideological and cultural model Spain should emulate, for «España es un cuerpo social enfermo de gravísimos males; el empeñarse en desconocerlo así no es buen camino para poner remedio a nuestras desgracias; conozcámoslas, estudiemos, y que cada uno en la medida de sus fuerzas contribuya primero a apreciar la importancia y el alcance del mal, después a remediarlo. Nos parece más patriótico el trabajo de confesar lo que —70→ sea de triste condición, que la tarea de citar tan solamente lo bueno que haya traído España».146
For the Madrid novelist, «la tradición y la rutina ejercen todavía un imperio que es necesario destruir a toda costa».147 That he included within that tradition religious intolerance is indisputable.148 Because of such critical attitudes in his journalism and in his first novel, Lázaro (1882), as well as in El enemigo (1887), Picón was labelled a rabid anticlerical, a judgment which has persisted, with rare exceptions, to this day.149 Yet the same man would write a glowing encomium on the French bishop of Orléans, Félix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup (1802-78), who represented for him «la figura del sacerdote caritativo y del ciudadano virtuoso».150 Akin to the example of Clarín, Picón's work is infused with an intense moral tone, which, with its secularized idealism, seeks the kingdom of heaven on earth, «la esperanza y la fe de una nueva era que sea el eterno siglo de oro, de la justicia y de la libertad».151 Illustrative of this moral fervor is the short story, «El Olvidado» (Cuentos de mi tiempo, 1895), in which mankind has forgotten Christ and his message of charity and non-materialism.
Like Galdós and Clarín, Picón is very much a product of the Revolution of 1868;152 and, similarly, he too, as an example of the Gloriosa, the first Republic, and the Bourbon Restoration, can be perceived as a link between his own generation and that of 1898. In that fatal year, moreover, the author of Dulce y sabrosa is to manifest one more tie with the Generation of Azorín, Unamuno, and Maeztu: he joins the staff of the short-lived but significant Vida Nueva (12 June 1898-18 March 1900), contributing not only short stories but also several essays in which he harshly criticizes an incompetent, corrupt government and the indifference of Spanish society toward the disastrous course of events in Cuba.153
In the ideological sense, then, Jacinto Octavio Picón is in tune with the younger Generation of 1898, in that he is equally obsessed with the defects and evils of a backward Spain, with the vision of a new, reformed Spain of justice and tolerance. His too is a patriotism al revés. But there is also a more specific example which links Picón with the Generation of 1898: his third novel, Juan Vulgar.154 Critical opinion appears to be divided on the worth of this short, compressed novel. «Orlando» (Antonio Lara y Pedraja) thought Juan Vulgar deficient because for him the depiction of lo vacío and lo ñoño «no será nunca objeto digno del arte ni constituirá una obra bella».155 He faults the novel for its colorlessness and lack of emotion; the book is, in a word, a mere bagatelle, eminently forgettable. A later critic, Peseux-Richard, disagrees, stating that «Juan Vulgar n'est-elle pas la vulgaire histoire de beaucoup de nos contemporains? Celle de tous les illusionnés, de tous les ratés, de tous ceux qu'un faux départ a mis dans une infériorité définitive, de ceux qui, se jugeant toujours supérieurs à leur tâche du moment, sont obligés, pour garder cette supériorité illusoire, d'accepter des taches de plus en plus basses, et qui, voyant sombrer leur idéal, se raccrochent à toutes les branches et les sentent casser successivement».156
Though following the Flaubertian (hence, Cervantine) tradition of thenovel of disillusion, Juan Vulgar, unlike its predecessors, presents a case of desengaño in extremely condensed form.157 And it is in the delineation of Juan —71→ Vulgar's character as he reacts to a series of disappointments and collisions with brute reality, where we find a thematic and characterological bond with the works of the Generation of 1898 (I am thinking of Antonio Azorín, La voluntad, Camino de perfección, El árbol de la ciencia, etc.): for what Jacinto Octavio Picón creates, in this albeit limited but quite readable novel, is a character whose weaknesses and faults, set as they are within a defective society and educational system, anticipate the abulic and narcissistic daydreamers of Azorín, Unamuno, and Baroja. How do we account for Juan Vulgar? I would suggest a chain of nineteenth-century literary associations deriving from Flaubert (L'Education sentimentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet); proceeding to a transitional stage with a work such as Picón's Juan Vulgar (or Clarín's «Una medianía»);158 and thence to the fin de siglo Hispanic (and European manifestation of disillusionment and impotence).
Who is Juan Vulgar? He is an intelligent, young man from the provinces, who, in leaving his parents, also forever abandons his rural and peasant roots in a vain attempt to become a successful man of the world in Madrid. It is an old story. And Picón is well aware of that fact, for in his symbolic onomastic choice for both title and character the author stresses the typical, the ordinary in Juan Vulgar's fate and character. Picón's protagonist is another example of that long literary line of mediocrities whose unheroic dimensions do not, however, preclude definite, though unmerited, feelings of superiority over the rest of human-kind. Juan Vulgar's ill-founded superiority complex and self-enclosed psychological state, which form the nucleus of his personality, should also be viewed from within a definite Hispanic context, since it is the particular nature of Juan's character which points, in embryonic fashion, to the later fin de siglo characterological approach of the Generation of 1898.
What is Juan Vulgar like? Picón begins his narrative within a biographical frarnework by stating that his protagonist «tiene, al comenzar este verídico relato, diecisiete años. Su infancia ha sido la de casi todos los muchachos de pueblo» (p. 177). The use of an almost impersonal present tense (commencing without reference to any name or character: «Tiene...»), followed by the present perfect, accentuates the typicality of Juan Vulgar's life. Nothing extraordinary is going to happen in this verídico relato, plainly told but with an eye to ironic distancing. The reader has already been tipped off, from the very title and opening sentences, that Juan Vulgar is no hero. Even the Andalusian land of his birth both reflects and predicts an unbrilliant, sterile destiny: «La llanura amarillenta del campo se confundía en el horizonte con el intenso azul del cielo. La tierra estaba grietada, sedienta... el paso perezoso de una bestia cansada o el brincar de un chicuelo, bastaban para alzar del camino una nube de polvo» (p. 181).
Regrettably, Juan Vulgar himself doesn't know that. Like his ambitious father, Juan is certain he will be a shining success in the capital, but, as the novelist remarks in Chapter II, «Juan tenía más imaginación de la que conviene al hombre: la loca de la casa, dominaba imperiosamente en su espíritu... su fantasía, alterando las impresiones de la realidad, todo lo engrandecía y poetizaba» (p. 187). Juan possesses an artist's soul -or at least, the makings of it- but his is essentially a passive nature. When he sees a group of —72→ country girls and boys picking oranges, he is entranced by the contrasting vision of greenness and brilliant southern light, but he does not associate hard labor with the group nor does he attempt to translate the moment into an artist's version of it. Juan is, in sum, a receiver of impressions, not a maker of them, or as Picón writes, «su fantasía, vigorosa al fingirse esperanzas, era indolente al concebir remedios» (p. 188). And later: «Creyéndose, tal vez, capaz de todo, nada acometía con empuje. Su voluntad, siempre indecisa, parecía la aguja de un barómetro descompuesto» (p. 206).159
The suasive force of imagination and the inability to put it to work will characterize Juan Vulgar throughout the novel. In large part, Juan's impotence in the real world can be ascribed to a grave defect in his intellectual equipment, a flaw which the novelist analyzes with admirable acuity. In the same way his senses accept, in the example given above, the elements of color and light, just so does his mind easily absorb ideas, patterns of thinking, and systems of thought, for Juan manifests an apparently limitless capacity to assimilate («El rasgo distintivo y más notable de su inteligencia, era una extraordinaria fuerza de asimilación», p. 201). His mind, then, is like a sponge, soaking up everything he encounters during his university career: it is unfortunate that, like the household product I have compared him to, Juan is also unable to discriminate: «Nunca supo escoger entre teorías y sistemas opuestos... Lo claro de su entendimiento daba envidia; lo débil de su juicio inspiraba lástima...» (pp. 202-03). The absence of critical discernment in Juan is compounded by yet another defect, a lack of constancy and intellectual vigor. Juan is convinced that, after years of study, he has acquired fixed principles and beliefs (p. 189). The author tells us otherwise: «De aquí que no adquiriese en nada principios fijos, y que para él, aun las nociones más claras, fuesen como imágenes prontas a desvanecerse cediendo el puesto a otras distintas. Con la misma facilidad que aprendía, desvirtuaba lo aprendido; y al modo que un río ancho y sereno refleja sin detener su curso celajes infinitos, así su imaginación, impresionada un punto por lo que la hería, continuaba luego su carrera sin término» (p. 202).160
I have cited generously here from Picón's novel because, first of all, it is so little known to nineteenth-century specialists; and second, because the quotations selected demonstrate the novelist's ability to dissect character. In this particular instance, Picón has succeeded in etching a sharply drawn portrait of what could very well be called protean man; for Juan Vulgar is everything and nothing. Like the light, swiftly moving clouds, the celajes infinitos unceasingly reflected on the surface of a serene and wide river, to which Picón compares his protagonist, the unheroic hero of this little novel possesses no form of his own and can only mirror other forms, second-hand dreams and images. This he proceeds to do at will throughout the thirteen years of his life which the book covers (from age seventeen to thirty). If he reads, for example, of the recent publication of a new and extraordinary historical study, immediately he imagines he too, an Hispanic Walter Mitty, could write a marvellous book on the «Influencia del espíritu religioso en la decadencia española». And Picón continues: «Y con tal vehemencia acariciaba la idea, que a poco de concebirla se le figuraba ver el libro recién salido de las prensas, todavía húmedas las páginas, oliendo a tinta de imprenta y ostentando —73→ en el lomo de la cubierta el nombre del autor en letras negrillas, muy visibles: ¡¡¡Juan Vulgar!!!» (p. 204). The gap between illusion and reality could not be more evident.161
In love as in work, Picón's hero consistently avoids the prosaic realities of life. He romanticizes his first love affair in Madrid, exaggerating the fineness of his lady friend and the obstacles to his success in courting her. The ironically recounted episode comes dangerously close to the caricaturesque proportions of the well-known Mesonero Romanos' costumbrista sketch, «El romanticismo y los románticos».162 In another example of unrealistic obtuseness, he prepares for oposiciones in Spanish literature by embarking on a course of «largos estudios, tan trabajosos como mal dirigidos y desordenados» (p. 257). After all, how hard is it to discourse on one's own native literature?: «La única dificultad estribaba en saber demostrar al descuido mucha erudición y ser muy original en las apreciaciones» (p. 256). Here, as in the unconsciously burlesque account of Spanish history given by the protagonist in the preceding pages, Picón is evidently satirizing not only the superficiality and chaotic quality of Juan's mind but the inadequacies of his country's educational system.163 To some degree, then, Juan Vulgar's insufficiencies can also be attributed to the faulty education he received at the University of Madrid. It should also be mentioned that, in addition, the author criticizes the cliquishness of Juan's circle of friends during his university years. Hostile to outside influences, the group is strong in its friendship, but, as Picón writes, «dándose el fenómeno de que estando juntos [the friends] tuvieran más ingenio que separados, como si su entendimiento fuera un compuesto de partes que al disgregarse se debilitaban» (pp. 196-97).164
Thus, external circumstances - education and friends- combine with innate character flaws to produce an ordinary man, who, nevertheless, conceives of himself as an extraordinary human being. It is obvious that, in great measure, the process of bovarysme is at work here in the illusory transformation from el tipo to el individuo. Juan Vulgar's sorry plight is underlined in ironic terms by his inability to see that his entire life is based on illusion. Because he is a pseudoromantic, abulic daydreamer, Picón's hero is also a self-absorptive character; and it is this trait, above all, which defines Juan Vulgar: his narcissism. It is significant, for example, that when he passes through the streets of Madrid, he does not notice his surroundings and that he is continually bumping into people and even lampposts (p. 231).165 Even more significant, however, is the egotistical blindness of character which prevents Juan from perceiving other people and external events as separate from his own identity and erroneous notions of self-worth. In a psychological analysis of Juan's sentiments toward the wealthy and frivolous María Volandas, Picón observes that his protagonist is not really in love with the María of flesh and blood, but with a false, idealized image of the woman of superior social standing (p. 237). Juan is of an age to fall readily in love, not with a woman, but with love itself, because the condition of being infatuated flatters his ego, increases his self-esteem. When María, ceding to the demands of her father, willingly gives up her unsuitable lover, Picón's hero holds the father's supposed tyranny and not the girl's shallowness and caprice responsible for her rejection.In another example, Juan attributes his failure in the —74→ oposiciones to «la injusticia y su propia mala suerte» (p. 258), rather than to his own intellectual shortcomings.
During all these moments of frustration and failure, Juan suffers indisputably from feelings of disillusionment, and yet his desengaño is doubly deceptive, because it does not lead to self-revelation. Again and again he blunders into harsh reality and knowledge of self only to retreat into his ensimismamiento.166 In the end, nevertheless, Juan Vulgar does fall into the mold of the novel of disillusionment, as Picón demonstrates in the last scenes depicted of Juan's life, in which character and theme come together nicely in the relationship between the protagonist's narcissism and the notion of el desengaño. Juan, now a cog in the bureaucratic machinery of the court and married to an unassuming, domestically inclined young woman named Pilar, begins to feel a vague dissatisfaction over what he calls the «calma chicha» of his life.167 «No me ahogo», he says to himself, «pero no navego, es decir, no vivo» (p. 322). As he did near the beginning of the novel (Ch. IV), he turns, in the penultimate chapter (Ch. XIII), once more to the Retiro Park and again encounters his former sweetheart, María Volandas, married but unhappy with her lot. Misinterpreting her amorous intentions, he later discovers she has run off with his friend, a no-account traviato named Pipierno. His reaction is predictably negative: «¡He sido un necio! (quizá fue ésta una de las pocas ocasiones en que su imaginación no le engañó), sí, un estúpido. Ni ahora me miraba, ni antes me quiso. Se casó como se casan muchas... ¡así sale ello! ¡Vergüenza siento al recordar que la he amado! ¡Y en el drama la he pintado como una víctima, como una inocente sacrificada!... ¡Aquí no hay más víctima que yo!» (p. 340).
Juan's idealized conception of María having crumbled, there remains one more illusion which must give way to reality: his attempt to write a romanticized drama -in verse, yet- on his early love affair. In the last chapter (XIV), Juan returns home one evening to find his wife dutifully reading the manuscript of his dramatic efforts. Picón sets up the scene so that, as he describes it, «el espejo, colocado sobre el mármol de la chimenea, reproducía, encerrándola en su marco de molduras doradas la figura de Pilar, que apoyada de codos en el velador leía lentamente» (p. 345). Juan, allowing his wife more time by herself to read the play, decides he will sneak in later to observe her reaction as it is reflected in the mirror. Pausing a moment to pull off the leaves of a calendar, he is struck by the imperceptible passage of time: «¡Parece mentira! ¡Cómo se me ha pasado el tiempo! ¡Qué barbaridad! Pues no hay sino tener paciencia; ahora se lo diré a esa; de fijo que tampoco ella lo recuerda. ¡Hoy los cumplo; sí, señor!, treinta, treinta añitos, justos y cabales; eso es, 1853 y treinta, 1883. ¡Qué brutales son los números! Y conservando arrugadas en la mano las hojas que había arrancado al calendario, fue acercándose despacio, despacito, a la puerta del gabinete» (p. 350).168 Then, softly pushing the door, he looks into the mirror and is shocked to see that Pilar, after reading the second act, has fallen into a deep sleep! And the manuscript? «Allí estaba el drama, en el suelo, arrugadas las hojas por el golpe, abierto casualmente por donde más fuego y mayor sinceridad respiraban sus versos» (p. 351). Like the crumpled leaves of the calendar, the pages of the manuscript, symbolic drama of his life, have become —75→ wasted pieces of time, or as Juan murmurs to himself, «¡Dios mío! ¡Treinta años, treinta años! ¡La juventud perdida!» (p. 352).
Time has won out. Like the mythical Narcissus, Juan discovers, upon literal and figurative reflection, that all is illusion.169 The image of the mirror gives back to him a measure of damning self-knowledge: that Juan Vulgar was never an individuo, and probably not even a tipo, but rather a paradoxical self-deluding emptiness. Like the earlier image of the celajes infinitos of his mind, reflected on the broad surface of a river, here the mirror reproduces the fraudulent insubstantiality of Juan's persona and life. And still, the selfrevelation is only partial, for though he recognizes his own vacuity, Juan does not perceive that his wife Pilar, like a modern-day Echo, with all her intellectual limitations, with her inarticulateness, loves him far more deeply than he perhaps will ever realize. The egotist, like the original Narcissus, even in his disillusionment, remains encapsulated forever within his bitter selfknowledge. Just as in his early ruminative monologues and musings aloud Juan's capacity for self-analysis is sterile, so in the end the view from the looking glass does not signal regeneration, but rather hopelessness and despair. Significantly, Picón observes that Juan, had he seen at that last moment the painful astonishment on his face, would have been fearful of his own image (p. 351).
In sum, Picón has created in this small but curious novel a character of such enormously inflated self-importance who, once deflated, shrinks to the rank of a cipher. How does his treatment of character compare with that of the Generation of 1898? The often cited and now classic studies of Katherine P. Reding and Doris King Arjona stress, among several, two principal traits in the work of the Generation of 1898: the excessive preoccupation of the individual with his ego and the problem of the Will.170 Juan Vulgar, as we have seen, manifests both these characteristics in the extreme. Reding also notes the «essentially intellectual point of view» which the man of 1898 utilizes in his work.171 Juan Vulgar, too, partakes of a similar kind of effort at intellectualization of theme and character -but with a key difference. Picón's analytical gift is, of course, firmly entrenched within the realistnaturalist vein of fiction writing, as the heavily ironic detachment of the third person narrator amply demonstrates. There is no subjective entwinement of writer-narrator and character so much in evidence in the Generation of '98. In addition, Picón's character lacks the complexity, the depth of personality of an Antonio Azorín or a Fernando Ossorio.
Yet at the same time, as Manuel Durán shrewdly remarks, there is at work within some of the Generation of 1898 a tendency away from the individual personality -at least, a well-defined one- and toward «el 'castellano medio'» in whom «los rasgos individuales tienden a veces a borrarse y desaparecer».172 The same critic also perceives what he terms an anti-novelistic inclination in the Generation of 1898 -in reality, an anti-realistic conception of the novel- in the sometimes static, abstract quality of life and human personality and in the relative plotlessness of the novels of '98. To a degree, Picón's little novel could be viewed in a similar light, for there is certainly a sense of circularity, or repetition in themistaken conception of reality Juan Vulgar bangs onto with unblinkable persistence. Nevertheless, —76→ the reiterative ordinariness of Juan Vulgar's life is probably due more to the aesthetic tenets of naturalism than to anything else (the early Huysmans in A Vau-l'Eau, 1882, is a useful parallel here). Interpreting Juan Vulgar along these lines, one would also have to say that the novel, a modest effort, suffers from an excess of unrelieved vulgaridad, a tendency to overexplain, and a failure to probe beyond the archetypal. This, however, does not cancel out the significance of the curious transitional nature of Picón's treatment of personality, nor does it diminish the evident symbolic and sociological value of Juan Vulgar's character flaws as representative of late nineteenth-century Spanish man and prescient of that insistent preoccupation with lo español which was to come to fruition in the Generation of 1898.173
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