—98→ —99→
Though we sense that the massive array of details forms a coherent system, it is a difficult step to move from the relative values of individual novels by so prolific an author as Galdós to their meaning collectively. We tend to isolate features of his art and thought for the sake of critical clarity, and thus he has come to be recognized, in particular moments in his work, as a social historian, a liberal crusader, a student of moral evolution, a master of characterization, now a naturalistic and now a psychologizing writer, and many more things. Nonetheless, the consensus among critics is that, even when Galdós probes equivocal aspects of reality, he remains first and foremost a realist.
This term would not be so problematic if applied to Spain's greatest practitioner of realism solely in the context of Spanish literature; but as Hispanists discover -often with some chagrin- its standard definition in the European context still derives mainly from French attitudes and practice of the nineteenth century. Harry Levin recently documented in The Gates of Horn how, though an outgrowth from Romanticism, historically Realism became a movement centered in France.147 Manuel Durán and Antonio Regalado in turn objected that Levin ignored elements which precede French realism, especially in the case of Galdós, and insisted on a broader historical view:
La gran ola del realismo crítico, humorístico e irónico pasa de España a Inglaterra, de Inglaterra a Francia, de Francia -a través de la relación Balzac-Galdós- nuevamente a España. Pero Galdós recibe todavía, y fuertemente, las vibraciones de la oleada inicial de Cervantes.148 |
Levin himself had already suggested that the prevalent focus was too narrow to encompass the rich variety of realism and its national peculiarities and soon ventured to widen the definition in a controversial address «On the Dissemination of Realism» at the Fifth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Belgrade (August 30, 1967). He now distinguished between the modern movement and concept produced by the nineteenth century and the «realistic impetus» in general, seeing in the Renaissance ability to expose idealized precepts and reveal actualities the most notable new instrument:
Machiavelli had acquired his realism through disillusionment in ethics and politics. The literary realist would likewise be a disillusioned idealist, and his method would entail a systematic testing and unmasking of illusions. Here the seminal example is Don Quixote, wherein the preconceptions of chivalric romance are so conclusively discredited..., every realistic novelist is a professional iconoclast, bent on shattering the false images of his day. His novels deal, in their own way, with a set of presumptions which he demonstrates to be unreal, invoking as his touchstone the reader's sense of reality. The peculiar intimacy between writer and reader, made possible by the technology of printing, is a factor which has made prose fiction a vehicle of realism par excellence.149 |
—100→
Here Levin brings together a number of points which will concern us further below. Significantly, he finds that any pseudoscientific doctrine of realism is by definition limited, because the realistic impulse is (in the words of Durán and Regalado) demonstrably «critical, humoristic, and ironic.» In contrast, current socialist realism represents an idealistic tendency, a deliberately sponsored historical romance. Such literature might in the future indeed provide genuine empirical realists with images to break. Obviously, the framework behind Levin's corrective attack is no longer furnished by any specific movement such as naturalism, itself suspectly dogmatic in a number of ways, but by the broader tradition of the humoristic novel. In order to examine the fundamental technique of humoristic realism, its humane disillusionment, we must understand the epochal discovery which fostered it: the post-medieval realization of the role of literature in life and its puzzling relationship to mental processes, what gestalt psychology calls symbolization. We shall accordingly first dwell on the formation of a new kind of control through irony over the ambivalent potentials of fiction as, on the one hand, an entertaining escape from and, on the other hand, a revealing encounter with reality. Then we shall return better prepared to the proposition that Galdós' true place may be in a grander scheme of realism among the humorists.
A recent study with an unusual viewpoint affords access to the vast realm of humor both historically and structurally. We often speak of universality as an ultimate level, high mission, and special province of the novel. But only seldom do we encounter a critic like Herman Meyer who, through his felicitous insights into the problems of intellectual history and novel composition in The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (1968), can guide us toward a commensurate perception of that complexity we so admire.150 Before treating his main subject, the «Development of the Art of Quoting in Germany» since the eighteenth century (pp. 97-274), Meyer examines its «European Bases: The Art of Quoting of the Great Humorists», Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne (pp. 25-93). Thus his procedures also offer comparative, Romance, and English scholarship an intelligent model for the analysis of involved forms in their transmission and metamorphoses. His fundamental contribution is a working definition of artistic «quotation» as distinct in its referential character from casual borrowing or simple plagiarism.
Historically, Meyer argues, the esthetic integration of references first appeared as a structural principle in Rabelais. Through choice illustrations of his Dis comica in its ennumerative fullness, we are reminded vividly of the difference between ordinary Renaissance polyhistory and the new trait of serious play with a multitude of contemporary topics in Rabelais. The novelist's method is convincingly related to his famous hints about esoteric versus exoteric meaning; it is clearly our task, as readers, to open the grotesque box and find the precious oinment or patiently chew on the bone to extract its marrow. Meyer posits that, whereas the discrepancy between literal quotation from the corpus of sacred writings and parody or travesty of its contents creates a dialectical tension, the carefully modulated measure of distortion establishes certain classical references as an ideological instrument for shaping meaning. Whether or not Meyer is correct about all the emphases, the point is important that Rabelais —101→ seemingly wanders over a range of joviality and ridicule, but actually in such a manner as to establish relative values. His operative technique is contrast in tone and style, accelerated and braked by constant shifting of subject or focus.
Master Frangois' material is literature in all its reaches, from the classical heritage to folklore. He not only remoulds everything, but in so doing concocts a comic-serious «new» tradition which rapidly assumes mythic dimensions. The network of stories, anecdotes, and disquisitions -contained within larger forms such as the progress of a hero, the quest for fulfillment, and the allegorical voyage- constitute a whole world of interpretable fantasy. Incorporated into the fiction are key elements of contemporary culture and thought; the supreme narrator's mind so thoroughly subordinates these that we gain the impression of exploring a coherent universe with all its problems, conflicts, and movement. What is more, in addition to Rabelais' ridicule of medieval practices of interpretation grounded on his Renaissance experience of literature, Meyer indicates that he conceived some stories with characteristically grotesque fantasy directly from Biblical quotations; and their narrative uniqueness hence depends wholly on these nuclei which he manipulates for a readership familiar with scriptural writings. This feature bears a fascinating resemblance to the better known use by Rabelais of literary suggestions such as the flood of works on marriage in his day, booklore which he transmuted into narration in his thematic Book III. Pantagruel's fifteen consultations are, of course, a grand device for exuberant display of the author's enormous repertory of contemporary knowledge. But most revealing, in Meyer's view, is the manner in which Rabelais, prompted by the appearance of Habert's verse narrative Le Songe du Pantagruel, based on his own Books I and II, switched from the adventure form to intellectual game in a sort of double reaction to literature. The artist's sporadic, sometimes irrational play of fantasy, which bestows unsuspected new implications on given topical materials, interacts throughout with his rational will to control structure.
When we turn from this attractive conception of Rabelais' sovereign freedom as narrator to the case of Cervantes', Meyer assumes that we will recognize the spiritual affinity between the Frenchman, in his response to the imitable, new literary «reality» of Pantagruelism to which he himself had given birth, and the Spaniard, in his intensified creative consciousness in Quixote II, after being provoked by Avellaneda's spurious continuation of his novel finished ten years earlier and already renowned. If a number of relevant points are slighted in this impressively compact chapter, the Introduction has duly warned that «the connections are often of such a nature that they will become wholly apparent only to a reader who is willing to think them through for himself.» For this reason Meyer hopes for readers who, in line with Goethe's expression [and, we might add, the spirit of the humoristic tradition], «have 'something to add' on their own» (p. 22). Hence Meyer contents himself with simply noting that Quixote I and false II became «pragmatic elements of motivation in the second part of the novel», in which the «empirical book and the imaginative world within the book» collide (p. 59 f.). Only a few highlights of the complicated process of the Quixotization of Sancho, a development so strikingly parallel to the internal discussion of the novel in reflective Book II, receive mention.
We might add here that, if the original purpose in the Quixote is to remind us of reality by attacking romance, a secondary impulse soon evolves therefrom and at times threatens to become primary. By dealing with a suspect realm of literary fantasy, the humorist inevitably incorporates it in his work as a factor of human nature; accordingly, earthbound Sancho comes to depend on his master's imagination in many —102→ instances and even imitates and assimilates some of his traits. When we witness how Quixote's idealism and generosity transform the ordinary world about him, how his folly encourages Sancho to dare to fulfill a dream of governorship, ultimately it is difficult to deny validity to those aspects of romance which express mankind's nobler aspirations. Meyer would probably agree that a deliberately reconstructed romance like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) represents an obvious earlier step to the Quixote. The poetic form of the Italian art epic and its theme of splendid madness afford it full license, under the pretext of parody, to rescue values which were threatened by historical changes of outlook, as well as to expose by imaginative contrasts the actual conditions faced with the spread of the new courtly ethos of the Renaissance. Ariosto captures his sophisticated readers by allowing them the pleasure of rediscovering how «charming» the clichés of romance are; their feeling of superiority he encourages through his own sovereign playing, but by these means elements of romance penetrate the weakened defenses of a shrewd, worldly audience.
Meyer's dinstinction between the levels of «ideology» (unambiguous abjuration of the mendacious courtly romance) and «meaning» (paradoxically victorious defeat, irreconciliable antinomies of ordinary existence and imagination, or realism and idealism) cogently sums up the Quixote's structure. The vital feature endowing the novel with a capacity for universality is that the parodied «forms themselves... becomes dramatis personae» and «are subservient elements under the domination of a will which makes of its own subjectivity the bearer of a new, more complicated, and more comprehensive form» (p. 58) -a view already held by the German Romantics. The realization that literary conventions did not have the authenticity of life yielded a fundamental ironic perspectivism, which is most explicit in Cervantes' changes of narrator between the supposed «editor» and the wise «author» Benengeli. Meyer delightfully illustrates how the shift from peril to travesty in the adventure where the African lion turns his back on a madly courageous hero is a transmutation of stylistic mode analogous to the fluctuating narrative point of view. Indeed, Quixote's character actually amounts to «quotative life» (p. 63 f.), being as it is a composite product of literary references, for he himself associates his own feelings and actions with passages from the romances. His identity reflects a gradually tested model, collectively embodied in the literature he adulates; his personal disillusionment with the power of ideals on which his conduct was premised is, therefore, tragically shattering. It is also a disillusionment of painful acceptance, in humility, of ordinary human reality with its burdensome imperfections. Unfortunately, in this connection, Meyer remains almost totally silent on the huge realm of quotation in Cervantes' constant references to the World Theater. We regret the omission of commentary on the novelist's technique of integrating the most involved concepts -e.g., the «Court of Death»- since he was both a (disappointed) playwright and an exponent of particular views in Spanish drama.
Although Meyer does not weigh the impact of ironic consciousness based on the pervasive influence of metaphors of life as a play in Cervantes' day, he goes constructively beyond the approach of Curtius or Auerbach to the tradition of «imitation of nature» by showing how, in the Quixote, a new principle of imitatio has arisen which involves intricate mirrorings of correspondences, «thematic long-distance responses», «figure and counterfigure, like a musical theme and its inversions» (p. 68),and not simply a manipulation of stylistic levels of speech and familiar formulas for —103→ comic effect. Even the knight, Meyer observes, is sometimes quite conscious that the point of his «imitatio is pure art for art's sake» (p. 66). This reminds us of the deliberate pleasure in known and mastered commonplaces in Ariosto and Levin's remark about the «peculiar intimacy between writer and reader, made possible by the technology of printing», which facilitates sharing awareness of the nature and experience of fiction. Books have become a key object and subject in the Renaissance; indeed, much of the fervor of the Renaissance, especially fostered by Humanism, is focused on books. Or as McLuhan would note -The era of book culture has dawned, bringing about by necessity a new kind of reflective consciousness of the printed parallel universe of man, a grand product of his mind.151
Space forbids following the analysis of the functions of quotation in the German novel from Wieland to Mann, but a brief look at the chapter on Sterne will indicate the nature of the impulses transmitted to the future by the admirers of Rabelais and Cervantes. For example, Sterne's calculatedly eccentric, quirky structure and joke footnotes in Tristam Shandy recall Rabelaisian moments of parody of a fustian tradition which no longer possesses immediate relevance, while his narration saturated with reflections about itself has a Cervantine stamp. The Englishman's favorite «trick of maximum deflation» (p. 78) continues to be an important device in all ironic imagination. The particular new factor in Sterne's aesthetic of imagination, which exploits the «potential distortion latent in [a] term's range of associations» (p. 80), Meyer believes, is skepticism toward language itself, and not just toward literature. The «inorganic stringing together of commonplaces» (p. 84) serves Sterne as a primary means of characterization, and with supreme irony, he «plunders a plunderer» (p. 82), namely Robert Burton, the compiler of the sententious Anatomy of Melancholy, to reveal the futility of classical education torn loose from its real sources. No matter how prestigious it appear to be, the novelist exposes all literary heritage encumbering perception of vital truth. This impressive dismissal of the perennial charge of plagiarism undergirds Meyer's excellent analysis of how through the structure of the novel itself Sterne conveys the difference between original, creative thought and barren learning. Once again we discover the ironist in the role of iconoclast, attacking the enfeebling inbreeding of book culture generally, the modem equivalent of the romance. The foibles of a particular age and class in Sterne's England come under scrutiny. Practically every German master of the art of quotation will use it at some time in ways analogous to Sterne's manner to characterize, criticize, or expose particular strata or the entirety of his society. The techniques are already evident in Wieland's «ethical mirrorings» (p. 102), «multiplicity of perspectives» (p. 107), and dunciadic thrusts against boors, pedants, and false idols. Similarly, the voices of rationalism, skepticism, and subjectivism are brought into confrontation already in Wieland's disillusionism, a cromantic: irony ante datum» (p. 109).
This deep and sensitive study sets high standards. It suggests, moreover, some very useful approaches to the problem of «intention» when a work of fiction exhibits multiple points of view. If the modem ironist has learned anything from his humorist forbears, Meyer informs us, it is how to manipulate both language and genre as symptomatic, and not absolute, elements. For the realist, who maintains critical distance, speech patterns ultimately reflect social and personal situations, and attitudes towardart are projections of collective or individual thought patterns.
—104→
Galdós' affinities with realists of the early nineteenth century and appreciation of Cervantes have received much notice, but Michael Nimetz' very recent Humor in Galdós: A Study of the Novelas contemporáneas (New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 1968) offers the first adequate treatment of the features involved. A good bibliography and thorough index enhance the usefulness of the arrangement by subject areas -«Realism and Humor», «Satire», «Irony», «Methapor», «Caricature and Type», «The Humor of Familiarity»- a carefully staged order from which this discussion will, however, depart for the sake of freer evaluation. Presupposing our acceptance of the history of the humoristic novel more or less as Meyer outlines it, Nimetz opens with a theoretical survey of realism for Galdós' day. Like Levin, he contrasts the limited serious conception of realism as a specifically nineteenth-century movement centered in France and the spacious humorous temperament shared, despite different nuances, by England and Spain. Galdós, he argues, was more lastingly the conscious heir of Spanish naturalism, a tradition far older than doctrinaire French naturalism, which though it certainly left a deep imprint on many works was «peripheral to Galdós world... more philosophic than literary» (p. 37). Don Benito was in no wise disqualified because he grew skeptical of many social practices and attitudes smugly premised on contemporary materialistic science. «A novelist... can react against more than one thing; Galdós' eventual disenchanment with positivism marks him as a realist just as do his joshing thrusts at unhinged imaginations and romanticism» (p. 13).
In the realm of letters, we might add, the positivistic spirit of the nineteenth century manifested itself principally in the fascination for «history», the documentation of facts and cases. The task was to dig up evidence of experienced reality or to reconstruct important aspects of reality illustratively. The romantic novel had already developed techniques for rendering a life as a growth pattern in the sentimental and educational genre and for depicting historical atmosphere and milieu. Actually, the shift in emphasis from spiritual to material was not so abrupt, since positivism absorbed a number of ethical and psychological assumptions as verifiable components of human nature and therefore also as factors in history. Further, as Nimetz points out, both romanticism and then realism «reject the strictures on subject matter imposed by neoclassicism. Theoretically, then, there is continuity rather than cleavage between romanticism and realism. Balzac and Dickens» -in reverse order, it should be noted, of signal importance in Galdós' development- «are the two novelists who best exemplify this continuity; perverse proof of this is the difficulty one has in labeling them» (p. 21). He accepts Levin's designation «romantic realists» as apt. As in the case of Don Quixote, the newer realistic novel, too, absorbs that which it criticizes, and poetic substance enters into reality as an observed part of human nature, thereby acquiring the aura of authenticity. We shall turn, with Nimetz, to what distinguishes Galdós from Dickens on the one hand Balzac on the other in the way they tend respectively to characterize protagonists. For the moment let us stress his important insight that «what is true of isolated portions of a novel may or may not be true of the novel as a whole» (p. 25); indeed, extended to Galdós' fiction in its entirety, this stricture suggests a framework for understanding the many levels in Galdós' «universality» Nimetz arrives thus at a key definition of Galdós' use of literary conventions —105→ as vehicles to convey that which otherwise would often be dull, palid, or hard to communicate -the ordinary! Literature as a theme and literary forms subserves characterization and larger novelistic structure.
The higher controlling principle is irony, but Galdós also often roams the simpler fields of satire, having his natural roots in costumbrismo or the depiction of Spanish manners. With prodigious memory he sketches in fine detail in the Novelas contemporáneas the appearance, attributes, fetiches, and habits of such types as the señorito, the chauvinist, the miser, the cursi, the misanthrope, the poet, the indiano, the social climber, the nurse, the cesante, etc. Other targets are fashions in literature and philosophy, the nepotism, corruption, and hollow rhetoric in government, the toils of bureaucracy, the grip of romanticism on the thinking of the masses, the farce of ceremony and theatricality in public life, and similar imperfections. He brings to the rather external portraiture that was the rule in this genre new social and economic dimensions. But often elements of the fantastic or grotesque, as in Miau, remind us of the «visionary» technique of much older forebears like Quevedo and Goya. Pages such as 56 and 57, citing various exposures by Galdós of the mores and speech of immutable types like the philistine, politic, successful Peces, show Nimetz' own skill as a satirist. Here is one of those rare occasions when a critic does not maladroitly ape what he should be explaining and when, accordingly, Thomas Mann's injunction «Mitsingen verbotem» does not at all apply. For Nimetz' incisive turns of phrase carry the reader, with a few reminders and illustrations, rapidly over the very experience which Galdós affords us; we sense quickly what it involved and are grateful, since our delight in the novelist is increased or -if we do not yet know himcertainly awakened by anticipation of rich pleasures.
Nimetz terms as «metaphoric» those devices of Galdós which amount to mechanisms of compensation, which humorously -in the broad sense of the wordtransform his subject matter, the mediocrity of Spanish life in an unheroic era of transition. Whether by drawing analogies between prosaic individual destinies and the course of history (historical metaphor); by allowing figures to construct their own exaggerated or delusional interpretations of things, especially under the influence of fictionals models (literary metaphor); by establishing religious, cosmic, or natural correlatives; or by physiological portraiture -the purpose is to heighten and reveal. Nimetz readily concedes that «metaphor skirts so close to caricature that at times the two coincide» (p. 140), but the latter is more dintinctly hyperbolic. Faced with the inevitable complaint of critics who «have set restrictions on literary realism by confining it to the narrow berth of normalcy», he refuses to «accept the premise that realism in literature includes only that which is normal or verifiable» (p. 141) and legitimizes caricature, too, as having a logic of Aeliberate distortiom» (p. 145) which, since the Renaissance, has been understood as another instrument for mirroring by foreshortening reality, an instrument especially appreciated by the Spanish from Quevedo to Galdós. Amply illustrated is the latter's mastery of the comic principle in speech mannerisms, psychological obsesions, mimicry, ridiculous repetitions, and other elements which stress the mechanical side of human nature, as well as of pictorial exaggeration.
Yet, remarkably, Galdós but seldom falls back on the usual nineteenth-century formula (or fallacy) of a ruling passion in the sense of a ruthless dynamism; that is why his personajes «differ radically from their counterparts in Dickens and Balzac» (p. 150). Rather, they are embodiments of manias and obsessions which frustrate, and —106→ on the whole his major figures -despite sometimes strong elements of caricature acquire a certain human «roundness» through the presence of social and psychological detail; though at moments they may act like «types», they tend eventually to be integrated into the larger web of humanity with individual color. This context in which human intercourse takes place mitigates the self-containment of caricature or stereotype. Nimetz hereby adds a corroborative dimension to the observation by Gullón that less flexible personajes of Dickens arrive on the scene already shaped, whereas those of Galdós unfold with the rhythm of life and we enjoy predicting their final state in response to eventualities.152 Gullón notes further that Galdós differs, on the one hand, from Dostoyewski in being interested in common rather than exceptional problems; and on the other hand, from Balzac in having a better sense of proportions of perfection or monstrosity tolerable in man. Whereas revolutionary and rebel types are present in Balzac and his work is gripped by the overriding financial theme as a kind of inimical threat, Galdós' imagination is more cautious and educative. As the latter stated in his Discurso de ingreso en la Academia Española, mannerized and conventionalized characterization, a mark of societies with hardened categories, is broken down in times of change and movement-such times as he considered Spain to be going through.
Nimetz points to the Torquemada tetralogy to illustrate this strength of Galdós. The typical usurer of nineteenth-century fiction is a caricature with fixed traits and ideas, whereas Torquemada is a «usurer-positivist, willing to transact with the spirit of the age» (p. 160) and ultimately conforms to no traditional model. The emotionalism that erupts in Torquemada en la hoguera when the moneylender's son dies signals a potential «roundness» which the later three novels then realize. Ultimately they render a bitter critique of positivism, that is, materialism. We watch Torquemada return again and again, for all the surface changes which increase his respectability, to his particular form of egoism centered around business acumen and bookkeeping ethics; this is the comedy of repetition, based on the ruling drive. But finally it is Torquemada himself who pierces the fraudulant claims and insufficiencies of the new dominant group of financiers, entrepreneurs, and politicians in Spanish society, even though they celebrate him as its epitome. Through such episodes as the banquet in Torquemada en el purgatorio, when he criticizes his fellow fools of the business and professional establishment who are so easily duped by empty rhetoric, the moneylender ceases to be a conventional costumbrista sketch or caricature of a fixed type (avarice). Through the process of absorption into the middle classes, however, he emerges as a socially representative type «in the Marxist sense», incorporating the social mobility that arose from capitalism and the simultaneous leveling of classes, so that -as Nimetz rightly says- we must regard the last three novels Cas, a single, sweeping historical metaphor» (p. 173). Torquemada sheds his mere generic role as a miser of Balzacquian or Dickensian stripe because Galdós ironically fashions him gradually, as philistine, believer in science and progress, and finally opportunist marrying into the older aristocracy, into «the transcendent symbol of laissez-faire economics and Comtian philosophy)» (p. 173). His life becomes the objective correlative of a vast process of social assimilation.
Nimezt' category «metaphor» provides perhaps the most useful approach that has yet emerged in Galdosian criticism for understanding the relationship between Don Benito's skill as an ironist and his tendency to reach beyond the limits of character and create symbols. It has been suggested elsewhere that «Our world is not peopled —107→ by 'round' characters alone. Indeed, most individuals of the human race are in our vision quite limited to a few exaggerated traits and features. We cannot see anything but their 'flatness' until we learn about their inner life-and even then, we remain to one another and to ourselves largely hidden. From chapter to chapter and novel to novel, Galdós bridges the way as do our minds. After fleetingly perceiving, we may discover more profoundly... The complexity of life converges in a symbol, and that is what Galdós' 'flat' characters make us feel upon first encounter as well. The ability to expand into three and four dimensions his own stereotypes, to see his formerly 'round' figures as accessory shadows on the fringe of a tale, permits Galdós to use the so-called panoramic technique without the introduction of burdensome doctrines to govern or explain their behavior.»153 Nimetz suggests further from another angle that Galdós may be «an unconscious parodist of his own work» (p. 60). Ignoring the problematic term cunconscious», it is reasonable to expect that one by-product of long involvement with subjects and types and genres would be the artistic questioning of one's own structures. Nowhere perhaps does the paradoxical nature of existence and identity emerge more strikingly than in Galdós' reflective novel El amigo Manso, in which a philosopher tells his story and examines himself and his world as elements of fiction.
Ostensibly he defines himself as, and might be expected to be, an insubstantial figment of dream or imagination, without real existence. The «romantic-ironic device enters on its own terms, in the guise of a self-conscious narrator» (p. 97); it is «not Galdós, but his fictitious 'idea', who meditates on vanitas vanitatum»; yet, «although a mirage, Manso never quite disappears» (p. 98). Because content and form are successfully united (in contrast to Nazarín, Nimetz judges), the structure lends special esthetic interest. The congruence between what and how Manso thinks and our puzzlement in listening to him slowly yields an awareness of the autonomy of fictional characters and of a work of art. We accept him as more than a «flat» representative of some trait or thesis when, through the inclusive capacity of his consciousness, he recognizes his own psychological peculiarities. The detachment, intellectual superiority, and disillusionment of Manso inevitably bring forth the quality of «roundness» extolled by E. M. Forster. Manso's philosophic idealism may be a new satirized romanticism which is tested against realism or experience, but significant is that, by endowing himself with ironic knowledge such as a novelist might possess, he bursts the limitations of his own life or type as a destiny. «Manso evolves while Pez is static» (p. 61).
Regarding the matter from another angle, Gustavo Correa views this novel as Galdós' venture onto the metaphysical plane of encounter with art as a process of symbolization.154 Even if, as Pattison holds, Galdós' own predilection for idealism as a counterbalance to nature was shaken at the time of composing El amigo Manso by his awakened admiration for the new naturalistic writing,155 his critical scrutiny of his own artistic premises certainly led to discoveries with implications reaching far beyond naturalism. For Manso's thought patterns are not opposed to life in the manner of obsessed, pathological dreamers like Isidora Rufete in La desheredada; rather, he deals with fundamental questions about the polarization around art and the mind, as contrasted with orientation to nature and the body. Following his teacher Correa, Nimetz points out how carefully Galdós characterizes personajes by their reliance on particular kinds of literature. For example, Alejandre Miquis reads romantic literature, whereas Isidora reads the literature of romance. «The distinction is an important one, for it separates what is genuine from what is false» (p. 69). Galdós actually respected —108→ the great romantic writers for their gifts and insights -and if in Manso he reveals the mind's problematic rebellion against and enmity to ordinary life, it is with considerable compassion. Indeed, at times Don Benito seems to exhibit the visionary irony of a Quevedo taking a hard look at existence, the less than satisfactory way things really are.
Even when we retreat to the acknowledged heart of Galdós' work, his abiding trust in natural law, we detect the operation of «metaphor.» Nimetz posits that he was critical of leveling in the Torquemada series, but not in Fortunata y Jacinta, because he feared a monopoly of culture by the middle classes, yet approved of an infusion of new vigor by the pueblo. The new blood, he hoped, could be absorbed without universally imposing lower tastes and standards. Thus since Fortunata represents organic strength, not dangerous economic power, her assimilation contains no revolutionary threat. As Nimetz says, only the Russians could have dealt with the subject of Fortunata y Jacinta with anything remotely approaching the Spanish ideal of charity or Galdós' typically Spanish faith in the personal reality of regeneration, which relieves his novel of sordidness and allows it to take on the «glow of a fairy tale» (p. 196); for in it nature is not cruel as in doctrinaire naturalistic literature, but herself a great ironist revealing men to themselves (p. 202). The surprising phrase «fairy tale», applied to this eminently realistic book by so cautious a scholar, compels us to reconsider the case advanced by a number of critics that, on the highest plane of his creativity, Galdós is a modern myth-maker. Gilman, for example, deals in his article on «The Birth of Fortunata» with the special importance of the specific occurrences and the theme of birth for Galdós. Fortunata, whom we first meet sucking a raw egg at a poultry shop, is later connected recurrently with bird and angel motifs, but lacks any known antecedents. Gilman detects in this some covert analogy or spiritual affinity with the Aristophanic myth of the birth of Eros from a germless egg laid by the night.
It is simply that she-the one character lacking in genealogy and birth, itself-has been hatched from the egg which she holds in her hand. On the literal and sociological level of course, she eats it, but on that of myth she emerges from it... as [juanito] later admits, as other lovers affirm, and as she proclaims on her deathbed, she is a related but quite distinct winged creature. She is an angel. Thus the resemblance of her genesis to that of the natural counterpart of both Eros and angels, to that of a bird... Later parts will continue the amalgamation of myth and novel with the apparently vain fluttering of life here among us («era de estos Angeles que hacen muchos disparates») and with the sublime purposefulness of her death and transfiguration.156 |
Certainly through Maxi's eyes, at least, we perceive Fortunata as a radiant, even mysterious phenomenon, incarnating the divine powers of Venus and life's attractiveness.. But many critics will complain: Does not Gilman here «imitate» Maxi in raising Fortunata, by virtue of an analogous imagination and metaphoric exaggeration, to the status of «actual» angelic creature, and simply indulge in a common twentieth-century fallacy in attributing metaphysical significance to the ordinary, that is, in assuming that a solid nineteenth-century realist would so structure his own thinking? And should he not rather accept that the outermost framework of narrative irony governs the instances of authorial use of metaphor, not to speak of the more extravagant metaphoric traits of personajes?
—109→Correa tries to provide an embracing answer to the issue of structural intentions with his thesis that a «mythic» and finally a «religious» impulse inform Galdós' best art and that, accordingly, these indicate the ultimate esthetic categories for appraising his «symbolism.»157 Like Nimetz, Correa sees a number of patterns which amount to objective correlatives linking single lives and the ways of the world or revealing the interplay between mankind's external and internal experience. He convincingly explains the dynamics of the interaction of events and trains of thought in Fortunata y Jacinta without any reference to either the Spanish or European humoristic tradition.158 Yet when Correa leaps beyond the obvious in the story of how Fortunata triumphs through donating her son to Jacinta and interprets it as a fundamentally religious metaphor, many critics will complain: Does he not force the matter by failing to give due weight to Galdós' pronounced faith in the evolutionary forces in human nature and the meaningfulness of organic processes? Granted some measure of affinity exists between genuine religious aspirations and natural strivings insofar as very different souls can engage our sympathy through the common trait of heeding valid emotional imperatives which the voice of society or reason cannot drown out, must we not attribute such outerings to some universal mechanism adumbrated in the works, such as the flow of directives from the unconscious mind? If Galdós was especially interested in psychological theory and constantly sought to define the wellspring of human motivations, we hardly have sure warrant to explain his ethical emphases by religious sentiment in the usual sense of that term.
A pure structuralist might cite the Quixotization of Sancho or other similar narrative dialectics in interpreting Fortunata's integration into society through the birth of her son and Jacinta's recognition of her through acceptance of the gift. Nimetz offers tacit sound counsel in this regard with his definition of «metaphor» as a fundamental procedure in Galdós. As a result, on a first reading at least, we need not presuppose any metaphysical intent in his symbolism, but only the obvious storytelling purpose. And of course, we must also weigh any theory of intent against the totality of his statements about the meaning of life. It is questionable to label him a religious symbolist simply because he employs a number of standard patterns with religious reference, such as the Christ figure (Nazarín), especially if these are carefully controlled in a humoristic framework. Nimezt' formulation that a «thin line separates referential irony from metaphor, a cornerstone of romantic realism» (p. 105) actually reiterates in modern terms the Romantic insight, best expressed by Friedrich Schlegel, that every true novel works out an idea of complex nature and therefore has to be by definition a symbol.159 The capacity of the genre was thus identified with its mission. That the breadth of romantic realism was appreciated by Galdós is indicated by his remark, which Nimetz cites and rightly asserts no student «can afford to overlook»: «Los Babeles... son de todo punto inverosímiles, lo cual no quita que sean verdaderos» (p. 114). Because of humoristic distance, the reader experiences everything affecting Galdós' personajes as though through «a play within a play» (119).
Sometimes, Nimetz judges, artistic incongruity arises as a result of Galdós' habitual methods. Notably his use of the Quixote as a correlative in Nazarín supposedly fails because it is self-defeating; the «ironic detachment which the device produces is at variance with Nazarín's lofty subject matter» (p. 120).160 Though Nimetz is consistent in and clear about his own point of view, I would argue that the categories he himself adduces suggest just the opposite conclusion in this case. If the highest level of Galdosian novelistic control is irony, what right do we have to exclude any subject a —110→ priori from the scrutiny of the creative realist? If irony is not a suitable instrument for examining noble and lofty matters, what then is? To answer, traditionally, that the sacred must be approached with piety only takes us in a circle; shall the modern realist shape a different piety for each religious or philosophical subject he touches? From the perspective of a modern, secular humorist, the idea that «real» belief alone makes a man or author capable of «real» feeling or knowledge is a gratuitous truism, for he already has assumed a position by faith above older creeds which he examines with ironic distance. It little avails us, in our skeptical age, to prescribe absolute values when the author in question is so unlike the obdurate stereotype positivist and brims with indulgent acceptance of all manner of human foibles, including -as far as he is concerned- some religious urges. The sympathetic play with Nazarin as a Christ-Quixote is merely an instance where Galdós pushes our sensibilities forward a bit precociously, in advance of the times. He simply applies to Christianity the same tests which Cervantes applied to the romance, and the result is often enough the rescue of many «right» (i.e., historically ever correct) values, just as Cervantes salvaged the essence of high dedication and chivalric spirit. Galdós has the privilege, if not duty, to tell us how Christianity appears to the humorist's eye. Any neo-classicistic rule of «propriety» -even one derived from respect for religious feelings- is, as Levin points out, irrelevant in the broader realism founded on humor.
We find a further confirmation of Galdós' spiritual affinities with many of the great realists in the humoristic tradition in Nimetz' final chapter on «Familiarity.» It is not simply that we recognize the accuracy of his recordings of popular idiom free of artistic convention, but that we are enabled by his novels to grasp a civilization at least on several social levels; he quotes the world he knows and reveals it through its own utterances. In spite of personajes like Manso, it is sometimes said that Don Benito was not a «full» realist because he did not programmatically incorporate the intellectual, artistic, aristocratic, or other leading groups in any Western culture. Nimetz readily admits that Galdós' center of gravity is in the middle classes and ordinary populace, but argues that our view of key classes is still deeply influenced by French ideas whereas Don Benito has a broader Spanish attitude toward life in addition to personal faith in the profound reality of its organic bases. He reflects the essential, though less revolutionary, democracy of the Spanish people in his concentration both upon the great process of simultaneous leveling and regeneration and upon familiar phrases conveying the authenticity of everyday rife in his times. Nimetz claims that the Spaniards had not created sharp lines of class difference based on speech and that Galdós thus cultivated the actual spoken idiom rather than base his norms on any artificial language derived from an élite.
It would be quite mistaken, though, to assume that through «familiarity» Don Benito does not also expose the state of culture in its middle-class phase, when education has spread shallow learning over masses of newly arrived persons. We detect some genuinely erudite or sensitive minds, but for the most part confused, pretending, or phony titterers of philosophic and literary fragments. Anyone combing the pages of Galdós can easily establish distinctions based on the accuracy and degree of consciousness in the manner a personaje quotes the cultural inheritance, or isolate particular levels such as that of the folk with its unimpaired simplity and homely axioms, that of popular half acculturation, that of hollow oratory and professional jargon, that of deep education and ironic observation, etc. Theodor Fontane, chronicler of roughly the same period in a capital city with peculiar characteristics, Berlin, catches the very —111→ accents of the people he depicts -mainly the haute bourgeoisie- and in so doing renders an accurate account of the state of the culture. Galdós, concentrating on Madrid and a lower median, accomplishes a similar feat of creating an «artless» prose, flowing with the naturalness of actual speech patters, yet under subtle control. Reading Nimezt' remarks on «familiarity», we gain the impression that Galdós' uncanny ability to quote the flow of the quotidian is a new artistic phase of the «quotative» principle in the grander tradition of the humoristic novel as defined by Meyer. Like older masters, he can permit humanity to talk outloud so that its own words inevitably reveal the discrepancies between what is said or thought and what really is. Life speaks, as it were, and, maintaining his distance from the show, Don Benito listens with sympathetic and skeptical smile.
There are two things which, in closing, it would be wrong to omit saying about Nimetz' study. I leave it to others to decide whether they are separate factors or a natural unity. First, that no more productive an approach could have been taken to Galdós' Novelas contemporáneas, since the approach goes right to the heart of his greatness as a writer and man. Galdós emerges for what he is: a worthy link in a strong and powerful tradition, which he renewed with a spaciousness unequaled in his own nation in modern times. Second, that Nimetz, as a critic, is unusually gifted -if not by temperament, perhaps by sheer will- to recognize and convey these qualities of Galdós.
S.U.N.Y., Binghamton