Not surprisingly, given the revolution of 1868, the Third Carlist War (1872–1876), and the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in 1875, a basic Realist focus was the comparison and contrast of life in liberal, cosmopolitan Madrid and the more conservative, traditional provinces. Mindful perhaps of Alarco´n’s Diario and De Madrid a Na´poles, as well as Cartas desde mi celda (“Letters from My Cell,” 1864) by Gustavo Adolfo Be´cquer (1836–1870), a product of his historico-nationalist Romanticism, Galdo´s in Don˜a Perfecta, Pardo Baza´n in Los pazos de Ulloa (“The Ulloa Manor House,” 1886), and Pereda in Pe n˜as arriba (“To the High Country,” 1895) explicitly studied the differences between the center and the provinces of Spain. By recording their city-centered protagonists’ travels among the – for them – different, almost foreign peoples and realities of the provinces and their outlying districts, these novelists created an
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The Realist novel
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Obvious structuring device for observation of and comment on what their protagonists were seeing, and for the responses of the locals as they in turn regarded these visiting strangers. Even though other novelists and these novelists themselves did not normally structure their narratives so obviously through the journey motif, it is clear that much of Realism was a kind of anthropological narrative. Galdos made this explicit in Nazarin (“Nazar´ın,” 1895), albeit the journey was only from the solid middle-class parts of upper Madrid, from the Plaza Mayor northward, to the southern, lower-class reaches spreading across the terrain sloping down to the Manzanares River. The narrator of the first of the five parts of the novel cannot tell at first if Nazar´ın is a priest or an Arab. Then, upon observing the “diversidad de castas humanas que. . . se reun´ıan” (“diversity of human castes which. . . gathered themselves”) where Nazar´ın lives, he decides his visit to this part of Madrid unknown to him “iba resul-tando de grande utilidad para un estudio etnografico” (“was becoming very useful for an ethnographic study” [Nazarin, Part I, chapter 2; cf. I, 5]). Ethnography was, from the first issues of Mesonero’s Semanario, as integral a part of the graphico-lexical texts of illustrated magazines as it became in Alarcon’s Diario and De Madrid a Ndpoles, and - changing countries, but not literary “-ism,” - in Owen Wister’s proto-novel of the American west, The Virginian (1902), with its travel by train from the civilized east to the increasingly wild and technologically backward west, and intercalated graphic text by Charles Russell.
Another significant ethnographic dimension to the Realist project is revealed in the exchanges of letters among Pereda, Galdos, and Oller. As their Yxart-promoted relations became more frequent and frank, Pereda and Galdos who spoke and wrote in Castilian, came to urge the Catalan Narc´ıs Oller to write his narrative work in the same fine Castilian in which he corresponded with them. At a time when translations from Catalan to Castilian - or from Galician - were not at all so common as they are today, they reasoned that Oller would gain what his work richly merited: many more readers. What they failed to understand, or chose to subordinate to more practical concerns, was Oller’s explanation that the complete socio-mimetic recreation of his characters must include the linguistic dimension in which he and they thought and acted.
From our perspective today both sides in this debate were right and wrong. In those centrist times even Castilian-speaking provincials could find themselves at a notable socio-political disadvantage when dealing with linguistically centrist speakers (as can be seen in the linguistic deprecation and control of Sevillians by Sanjurjo’s “high” Castilian in Palacio Valdes’ La hermana San Sulpicio [“Sister Saint Sulpice,” 1888]). Indeed, the fact is that, because of the linguistic barrier, Oller’s narratives never found their way into the canon of the Spanish Realist novel and remain
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Poorly known today. Nevertheless, recalling the “touchstone” formula of Realism, it was necessary to render late nineteenth-century Catalans confronting the challenges of their daily lives in their proper linguistic medium. In this context a new virtue of Alarco´ n’s Diario, emulated mutatis mutandis by Galdo´s in the avoidance of anti-French chauvinism in the “Episodios,” was its growth toward inter-cultural understanding. That the Realists were not always successful in that enterprise, as happened with Alarco´n himself in reporting on Paris in De Madrid a Na´poles, and with Galdo´s and Pereda, only reflects our human imperfections.
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