The decisive factor in Galdo´s’ Realist novels is story telling itself. The notion of “narraciones interiores” (“inside stories”)31 of characters who, in telling, become the makers of their lives, transmutes story telling into the illusion of immediate experience. Family ties, business interests, political affiliations, religious practices, money, fashion, adultery, prostitution – even the luck of the national lottery – fabricate the networks that engender the stories that give rise to the novel that beckons to the reader. In Fortunata y Jacinta, the first bits of news about Juanito Santa Cruz blow into the ear of the narrator from friends and acquaintances; thus the genesis of a story about birth and betrayal arises from itself – from its own living speech. The origins of the “Torquemada” series reach back to other novels. It is as if Torquemada, an insistently recurring character, had staked a claim not only to unpaid loans but also to the indignation of the narrator, who now feels compelled to write the four-part series.
30 Bly, “La de Bringas”, p. 51 .
31 John W. Kronik, “Narraciones interiores en Fortunata y Jacinta.” In Homenaje a Juan
L o´ pez-Morillas. Ed. Jose´ Amor y Va´zquez and A. David Kossoff (Madrid: Castalia,
1982), pp. 275–291.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Benito Perez Galdos
409
Another narrator–character, whining and waving his arms, had claimed Ma´ximo Manso’s story, trading pen and ink for a novel.
These examples show how, in Galdo´s’ Realist novels, the meaning of the term “novel” keeps changing as it becomes an image for those various forms of thinking, feeling, and imagining, of dreaming and dissembling, in which people engage as they tell their stories. Some “novelas” are copies or parodies of the social text. Others, evolving through the freedom to think and the power to imagine, redefine social norms and alter perceptions about morality. Still others deliberately deceive and some become letters that either deny or discover or both, while certain “novelas,” whole or in part, turn into dialogue, adapted as plays. In all Galdo´s’ novels, however, what is real is alive on the page. For even things as stupidly plain as a plate of beans, which the puffed-up priest Nicola´s Rub´ın compares to the probable outcome of Fortunata’s adultery, have an unexpected story to tell.
28 The Realist novel
STEPHEN MILLER
No one alive today has significant personal memories of Juan Valera (1824-1905), Pedro Antonio de Alarcon (1833-1891), Jose Mar´ıa de Pereda (1833-1906), or Leopoldo Alas “Clar´ın” (1852-1901). No active scholar or critic can recall Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920), Narc´ıs Oller (1845-1930), Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921), Jacinto Octavio Picon (1852-1923), Armando Palacio Valdes (1853-1938), or Jose Ortega Munilla (1856-1922). By contrast there are still great numbers of persons, in Spain and abroad, whose literary consciousness was formed by generations of novelists, critics, and teachers hostile or, at best, indifferent to much of Spanish culture between the late seventeenth century and the Restoration period. Especially unattractive to these Modernists, Vanguardists, and Postmodernists was and continues to be the Realist imperative to create socio-mimetic fictions centered on the typical or representative people, manners, conflicts, and particular times, places, and settings of regional and national life.
Hence, against the historically and societally homologous fictions of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Twain, and the Spanish Realists, there arose early in the twentieth century an opposed way of thinking about all genres of art. Since then this mindset has remained potent. A reminder of its prestige and force was the October 2001 death of the last surviving Spanish Surrealist, Eugenio F. Granell (b. 1914). In a necrologi-cal piece in the Madrilenian newspaper La Razon, Cesar Antonio Molina cited from Granell’s essay, “Apuntes sobre el realismo art´ıstico” (“Notes on Artistic Realism,” 26 October): “La realidad mayor en el arte es una independencia absoluta de la vida cotidiana y sus acciones. El arte esta fuera de lo diario al hacerse eterno - al hacerse arte y al margen de lo accidental” (“The greatest reality in art is an absolute independence from daily life and its actions. Art is beyond the daily upon making itself eternal - upon making itself art and beyond what is accidental”). Granell simply proclaims that the material of everyday life is not artistic. For all such anti-Realist thought - formulated famously by Ortega in La deshumanizacion del arte (“The Dehumanization of Art,” 1925) and later repeated, without acknowledgment, by Juan Benet in La inspiration y el estilo (“Inspiration and Style,” 1966) - Granell’s opinion is canonical truth.
Buy custom Literature essay, Literature term paper, Literature research paper.
