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The
Third Annual Pérez Galdós Lecture:
Sentimental Genetics:
The Birth of the Intimate Human Sphere in Narrative (Miau)
by
Professor
Germán Gullón (University of Amsterdam)
A Cultural Frame for Narrative
Without discounting the value
of the inward spirals generated by text-centered criticism, my aim here
is to reconsider the worldly aspects of a Galdosian text - Miau
(1887) - to reach beyond mimesis and the first referent in order to grasp
the more comprehensive cultural referents on which texts necessarily depend
to deliver meaning. Since texts are neither read nor written in a cultural
vacuum, such dependence exists from the moment a text is written, persisting
through every moment of its changing status as commodity, cultural artefact,
or historical exhibit, up to the moment when it is read - or no longer read.
While the attempt to consider the supercontexts that surround any given
text may seem an impossible task because of the sheer magnitude of input
and analysis required, those who prefer to isolate the text should be reminded
that any textual analysis which takes deconstruction into account leads
to equally vast and, for all practical purposes, infinite possibilities.
I believe that we have sat
long enough in the cave, obsessed with deciphering the human in the shadows,
in the signifiers. We crossed the threshold of reading literature not
as a set of words but as a scene of writing around the time of Gustave
Flaubert, and perhaps the new leap forward should be to recognize that
texts and scenes are now, more than ever, in a word I borrow from Edward
Said, 'worldly'. As he puts it,
Whether a text is preserved
or put aside for a period, whether it is on the library shelf or not,
whether it is considered dangerous or not; these matters have to do with
a text's being in the world, which is a more complicated matter than the
private process of reading.
(Edward Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1982), p.35).
The glut of public concerns
characteristic of our own times - women’s rights, the plight of minorities,
conflicts between political separatism and unification, the population
explosion, starvation, ethnic 'cleansing' (the list goes on) - together
with their global and instant delivery to our awareness, penetrates every
corner of our lives, including that corner we have set aside for the study
of texts. Understandably, many scholars are stonewalling to protect their
careers, fencing off challenges to tradition, constructing elaborate defensive
positions, or simply burying their heads in the sand. Instead, we might
again become the cultural beacons of centuries past. This would mean reading
texts with a more flexible hermeneutic approach, one that places as much
weight on the interplay of signifiers as on the elusive referent, one
that includes the I and the other, the text and the world, the author
and the reader. For a literary text is more than a string of letters and
spaces; it is a complex cultural artefact caught in an ever-changing worldly
net. The writer's inspiration and skill, for example, are perforce associated
with such ordinary cultural objects as the paper on which a draft is written,
and with such extraordinary cultural forces as those of the marketplace
and technology. Indeed, if Don Quixote once had to compete with
the stained-glass images and icons of cathedrals, it, and all other texts,
must now compete with infinitely more powerful, pervasive, and persuasive
multimedia - whether interactive or not.
It is difficult to say how
this comes about, but man today seems smaller than at the beginning of
the Twentieth Century. We realize, when we read books, that the importance
of the human being has diminished, that the public sphere has grown. Just
imagine a man standing next to one of the many public buildings raised
during the last century in any Western capital city: he would seem like
a midget. (One recalls the characters in Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard
et Pécuchet (1881) at the beginning of the novel, and how
they liked to entertain themselves on Sundays inspecting the progress
of the public works in Paris). Curiously enough, if you read a book, the
human character is always bigger than anything else in it. The discrepancy
in these hypothetical images comes from the unacceptable fact that man
is smaller than his creations. Perhaps for this reason the topic of perspective
made its appearance in the philosophical arena of the twenties, as a last
attempt to maintain the reverse order of things: man with a foot planted
on the globe.
This is one defining characteristic
of western civilization: our centuries-long tradition of subordinating
all efforts to the mental component of our cultural life. It is a tradition
that leaves many other human components out of consideration. Our cultures
lock out all resonances from the world, as if there were no connections
whatsoever between the palpable and the life represented in the text.
Re-centering the Text
Most of Benito Pérez
Galdós' critics have at some time quoted his famous definition
of the novel:
Imagen de la vida es la novela
y el arte de componerla estriba en reproducir los caracteres humanos,
las pasiones, las debilidades, lo grande y lo pequeño, las almas
y las fisionomías, todo lo espiritual y físico que nos constituye
y nos rodea y el lenguaje que es la marca de la raza, y las viviendas
que son el signo de la familia, y la vestidura que diseña los últimos
trazos externos de la personalidad: todo ello sin olvidar que debe existir
perfecto fiel de balanza entre la exactitud y la belleza de la reproducción.
(Benito Pérez Galdós, 'La sociedad presente como materia
novelable', Discurso de entrada en la Real Academia, 1897).
At the risk here of some apparent
discourtesy, I would venture to say that the definition covers far more
than we normally read into it. My illustrious predecessor in this forum,
Professor Geoffrey Ribbans, framed the comments made in the above quotation
with the following assertion: 'The emphasis placed on observation and
portrayal of society makes for an identification of fiction and life,
which is understandable but simplistic.'
And he goes on:
This rather conventional statement
stresses the undoubted importance of detailed circumstances and contains
one or two interesting features like the precedence given to 'lo espiritual'
over 'lo físico' and the importance of language, but it is inadequate
as a definition of narrative technique, whether realist or not. The criterion
of 'imagen de la vida' takes too little account of essential difference,
so much emphasized by practising novelists and by modern criticism of
fiction, between living and the inevitable process of selection and organization
involved in writing.
(Geoffrey Ribbans, Pérez Galdós: Fortunata y Jacinta,
London: Grant & Cutler, 1977, p.14).
Ribbans is one of the Spanish
novelist’s truly distinguished readers; nonetheless, he questions the
validity of the text because of what it does not say. Galdós’ understanding
of narrative composition was 'inadequate', our critic argues; certainly
other Western writers, Gustave Flaubert or Henry James, wrote with more
ability about novelistic technique (p. 14). On the other hand, Galdós
was a good observer: 'Much more acceptable is the stress laid on the importance
of keen observation', states Ribbans (p. 15), as he goes on to praise
the acute visual alertness of the Canarian writer. But the question I
pose to my friend Ribbans is this: what about what Galdós does
say about human passions or the spiritual side of being? Neither Flaubert
nor James had a greater aptitude for getting under the skin of the characters
to tell us how they feel. And Galdós excels, among other things,
in portraying life as no other novelist achieves it. To be valid, the
argument advanced by Ribbans must balance not observation versus ideas
about literary technique, but life and the efficacy of its representation.
Galdós was the lover
of his famed contemporary, Emilia Pardo Bazán for close to a decade. We
know today of a telling incident in their relationship: she had a brief
love affair with another man. When don Benito learned of her infidelity,
he complained bitterly to his lover. She excused herself in a letter saying
that a young and handsome fellow had caught her fancy in a moment of weakness
and solitude. The brief relationship had no consequences, she added. (See
Emilia Pardo Bazán, Cartas a Galdós, ed. Carmen
Bravo-Villasante (Madrid: Turner, 1974). Curiously, both artists used
the experience to write a novel (Insolación and La
incógnita); even Galdós’ Tristana, a third
title, shows a character writing in the same style as the Condesa de Pardo
Bazán. So, life enters into fiction in many ways, and perhaps the novel
is the best vehicle to include life in the images created by writing.
Criticism of those novels,
Insolación and La incógnita, has much
to say about the naturalism of the first and the epistolary form of the
second. Few critics make the connection between the biographical and the
fictional, and if they do, it is in an anecdotal manner. Even studies
which were written after knowledge of the affair had emerged go on ignoring
this seminal incident. It seems to me an odd situation. Pardo Bazán in
the closing pages of Insolación defines the novel as a
genre that captures memories and an apt instrument to examine human conscience;
perhaps that working definition of the novel should be taken into account
more often.
It is high time, I think, that
we should consider the manifestation of life in the novel - all the more
so when we are dealing with realist authors, who managed to tell us, time
and time again, how much they relied on empirical knowledge of the world
in order to write fiction. The remarks which follow are geared to interpreting
how Galdós mediates between the world, the text and the characters
in order to represent life, to translate the life felt or imagined by
him into fiction.
The World and the Characters
The Nineteenth Century in Spain
was the Steam Age: the historical period when industrialization reached
its peak. The correlation between the human condition and the world was
dramatically altered, because man surrendered his privileged position as
master of the universe. He adopted a subservient position with regard to
his surroundings; he became another wheel in the forward motion of progress.
The machine came to stand between man and nature, or as the latter was soon
to be renamed, the raw materials. Human beings began their long journey
away from nature towards a more 'civilized' world, accepting in the process
the roles of maker and custodian of the machine. Thus we became the little
gods of the mechanical realm, while losing direct contact with living organisms
such as water or wood. The routine and repetition of working machinery replaced
the free exchange of man with his natural surroundings.
At the same time, the exploration
of the Earth took a more scientific turn: the measurable side of reality
was given pre-eminence over the imaginings of men. The Cervantine symbolic
substitution of giants for windmills seemed obsolete and laughable; few
would even grant them an existence as figures of the mind. Alongside the
administration used to order civil life a new one was created to regulate
the relationship of men with their earthly riches. Soon, an enormous cadre
of employees watched over the extension of man as manager of natural resources,
of forests or water, or even the treasures buried as minerals under the
earth. These tax collectors gained prominence in the new state of affairs;
nothing became more distanced from nature than this administrative branch
of the state, the Treasury, a formidable power in its own right. The main
character of the novel Miau, don Ramón Villaamil, is one
such employee dedicated to the management of public money in the Spanish
Ministry of Finance. Though, as it happens, we meet him at the point when
he has just lost his job.
The situation sketched out
above made employees utterly dependent on their work. They were what the
job made them, a wheel in the State apparatus. The Boletín
Oficial del Estado dictated the rank and value of a person; if a
man was erased from its pages, the person became a nobody. The loss of
a job was a tragic event, and not only because of the loss of salary -
there always seemed to be a way to get by. The real tragedy occurred when
the human being could no longer look for support from outside, but had
to seek psychological strength inside himself. That is what Galdós
fictionalizes in Miau: the difficulty of being oneself with one’s
own consciousness scrutinizing itself.
In an earlier novel (La
de Bringas of 1884), Galdós had fictionalized one of the primary
Spanish sins: the value given to appearances. The unforgettable protagonist,
Rosalía Bringas went so far in her love for clothes as to compromise
the family honor, destroying one of the basic pillars of bourgeois private
life: the trust binding husband and wife. In Miau, Galdós
will dig even deeper: in the intimate sphere, where looking good is not
enough: you must also feel good, even in the worst of circumstances, or
learn to live with permanent disillusionment.
The author had already shown
the power of consciousness, how individual strength of character and determination
could upset the best-established social order, in Fortunata y Jacinta
(1887). Fortunata, a woman of the lower class, regards herself as the
legal spouse of Juanito Santa Cruz, an upper middle class young man, married
to Jacinta, his cousin. Against all odds, this beauty of popular Madrilenian
extraction asserts for all the world to know that she is the real wife,
because Juanito loves her and together they make beautiful children, while
Jacinta, the legal spouse, cannot give the Santa Cruz family an heir.
At first the narrator adopts an ambiguous attitude towards the dilemma
thus created; later on, Evaristo Feijoo, a recognizable alter ego
of Galdós, insists that we must always take society into account
and uphold its rules. At the end, we find yet another ambiguous answer:
both claims are right in their own way. Fortunata’s child goes, after
the chulita's death to be the heir of the Santa Cruz family,
and through him her rebellious feelings live on. The narrator, to be sure,
kills the character Fortunata, and thus resolves the aforementioned dilemma
of a lower class woman imposing her will on society.
Ramón Villaamil is another
type of victim of the established order, who has been studied by Professsor
Round. ('Villaamil's Three Lives', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies,
63 (1986), 19-32). He was content with his job; the Villaamil family could
go about spending money and entertaining friends, when suddenly a change
in the political make-up of the government left him without the means
of earning a living. His lack of savings and the absence of any kind of
social safety-net reduces him to begging for handouts from friends and
to incurring debts. His new role as a person in search of help reduces
him to a caricature of a human being. He wears elegant clothes, he goes
to the Ministry, talks to friends about current affairs, but ends up annoying
everybody and not getting paid. His family, good people to be sure, provide
him with little support; his wife and sister in law think of nothing but
how to get free tickets for the opera. Villaamil’s world narrows to a
dark alley with no exit, and he is not used to hearing his own voice in
the confines of this most intimate of spaces.
The Public Sphere
The background of the novel is
the revolutionary period 1868-1875. Queen Isabel II had been dethroned by
two generals, Prim and Serrano. They failed to establish a liberal constitutional
monarchy on the English model. Their eventual choice of monarch, Amadeo
of Savoy, had no real opportunity to govern before being sent back to Italy,
whence he came. The Spaniards then experimented briefly with a federal Republic
(1873). Chaos and the army generals between them held the initiative throughout
this period, until a shrewd politician, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo,
put an end to it. He took control of events and brought back the Bourbon
monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, the son of the dethroned Isabel II.
The plot of our novel begins in the year 1878, during the months of February
and March. A month prior to the opening of the story, King Alfonso XII had
married his cousin María de las Mercedes, the daughter of the Duke
of Montpensier. The exact date was January 1878. These events corresponds
to the beginning of a new historical period known as the Restoration; Spain
was on its way to recovery following years of political unrest. In fact,
the greatest achievement of the Restoration period was the peace it brought
to the country; Cánovas, the leader of the conservatives, and Práxedes
Mateo Sagasta, the leader of the liberals, alternated in power giving the
country a chance to heal itself after three quarters of a century of civil
wars.
The years of tranquillity allowed
successive governments to address the country's business, including among
other matters the reform of the overgrown civil service, the warm breast
which nourished so many Madrilenian families. The inevitable trimming
down of bureaucracy produced numerous casualties, and Villaamil was one
of those. In writing this novel Galdós must surely have been inspired
by some actual case, for the telling details are carefully given, and
match to the smallest item those specified in the administrative law of
the time.
This is what appears in Miau
(I quote from J. M. Cohen's translation):
To console himself he called
up the whole of his life as an official, a slow and honorable career at
home and overseas which had begun when he entered to serve abroad in the
year '41, at the age of twenty-four (when Señor Surrá was
Finance Minister). He had seldom been out of employment before the crisis
in which we meet him: for four months in the time of Bertrán de
Lis, for eleven during the two years of progressive government, and for
three and a half in Salaverría's time. After the revolution he
transferred to Cuba and then to the Philippines, which he left after an
attack of dysentery. In short, he was now sixty, and had spent a total
of thirty-four years and ten months in the service. He was now only two
months short of retirement on four-fifths of his statutory salary.
(Benito Pérez Galdós, Miau, trans. J.M. Cohen (Baltimore:
Penguin, 1963), p.32. All subsequent references are to this English version
of the novel.)
The passage reports Villaamil’s
central misfortune: after thirty-four years and ten months as a civil
servant he fell short of acquiring a vested right to a decent retirement.
He needed two more months of service.
Another relevant fact is that
the action of the novel takes place in Madrid. Our author presents an
urban stage similar to the one he successfully used in Fortunata y
Jacinta. That novel was located in the heart of the city, the Puerta
del Sol and the Plaza Mayor. Now Galdós moves a bit further north
of that centre.
Around the time when the young
Galdós arrived in Madrid to study Law in the early sixties, the
capital underwent the last stage of the transformation from a court-dominated
city to be the political centre of the country, an actual public sphere.
Before the Revolution of 1868, most of the city buildings were conceived
and designed by and for the use of the monarchs (the Palacio de Oriente,
the Buen Retiro, etc.). Galdós witnessed the construction of many
of the civic buildings of Madrid, paid for through taxes, and the birth
of the citizens’ awareness that these buildings belonged to them.
Madrid during the second half
of the Nineteenth Century offered new attractions and comforts to its
citizens. New public services, such as the railway, appeared partly because
successive governments were responsive to the wish of their citizens to
move around quickly. Much the same can be said of the parks and the sewers:
recreation and hygiene were coming to occupy a higher place on the public
agenda. Those who paid for the services were listened to as never before.
Public space also became more
dangerous. The numbers of people going about in trams, or simply crowding
the streets, gave rise to unforeseen accidents. The streets were dangerous
places, especially when compared with the home, the safe haven of the
bourgeoisie.
The People
a. The Private Sphere
The most commonly explored sphere
in realist fiction is the home, the site of private life. Miau,
indeed, offers many insights into the family environment, and questions
of domestic economy play a central role in the development of its plot.
We must realize that, in order to maintain their bourgeois status, as many
members of the family as possible had to work, and the solidarity created
by this common goal resulted in the birth of the modern family unit. Its
characteristics, then, were clear: the development of blood and educational
ties, a shield against outside intrusions. The relationships between brothers
and sisters, uncles and aunts, husband and wife, developed a network of
family ties and affections that displaced the vertical model in which the
father ruled through the authority given to him by tradition.
The nurture and preservation
of such feelings as love, or human feelings in general, demanded an appropriate
environment: the family home. It came to be seen as a norm that parents
should love their children and vice versa. They were expected to care
for each other; when a character with a different set of values appeared
in a novel, that character was not well thought of by readers; he or she
was something of a monster. Víctor Cadalso, the son in law of Villaamil
and the father of Luisín, is that sort of person. He married into
the family under false pretences; his frivolity made his wife, Luisa,
suffer, and she died young. Nonetheless, he comes back to the Villaamil
house, seeking the warmth of the family or so he says. The narrator implies
that he comes in search of a refuge, but he buys his way into the family,
paying for his stay in the house. The money was needed, so a pretence
was made that he stayed with them because of the child.
The private sphere provides
Villaamil with no relief. He is let down by the members of his family
as well as by society. The expectations he had are gone. The disappointment
he feels marks a rupture, the end of something, that places him 'nowhere'
with respect to where he was before. (For an explanation of this notion
see Thomas Dunn, 'Resignation', Critical Inquiry, 25 (1998),
57). There remains the possibility of resignation to one's fate, but Galdós
is going to go deeper yet.
b. The Intimate Sphere
Towards the end of the last century,
man developed another sphere: the interior corridors of being. Historically,
religion had provided the space to expand our reach into the confines of
the mind and conscience - what we call the soul or the spirit. Catholic
religion in particular was surpassed by none other in the invention of three
vast lands or utopian loci: - heaven, purgatory and hell - where
the spirit found its home. The representation of the soul wondering through
those mental territories gave birth to a great Christian tradition of thinkers
and writers, and Dante's Divine Comedy is perhaps the best known
example of all. Universal education during the 1800s caught up with the
naive beliefs of the average man and woman - the Age of Reason had already
dealt the illusion of life after death a severe blow. A little later, a
transformation took place: the human being began to separate his feelings
from the movements of the soul. Besides the feelings born to be ruled by
conscience, there appeared those which emanated from a rebel will. Conscience
found an opposite, whose name was Consciousness.
Miau shows one of
the first representations of an intimate sphere, the space where individual
consciousness keeps the innermost movements of the soul hidden from others.
Because human laws have failed - to say the least - to meet Villaamil's
expectations, and religion could neither improve his predicament nor offer
him comfort, this grandfather has to pause and get in touch with his feelings.
It is a dark corridor never before visited by him, the intimate sphere
- a strange and scary place. And he loses his way in his hurry to get
out.
Critics have bestowed much
attention on a character called God - or, I should say, on a white bearded
person wearing long robes who appears in some strange fainting fits suffered
by Villaamil’s grandson, Luisín. Too many commentators assume that
the child is a reliable narrator when he identifies this biblical-looking
figure with God, though his testimony is certainly unreliable. Moreover,
the child's petition to God, that his grandfather should get his job back,
is not heeded by the Almighty as it should have been (in the novel). A
closer consideration of Luisín's interviews with 'God' tells us
that they are, in fact, the expansion of the child's consciousness in
search of a solution to his personal suffering. So, Galdós, through
the allusion to a religious experience, is transferring the supposed manifestation
of God to the more human place of our inner space - a warmer place than
that of religious dogma or beliefs.
Galdós, in my opinion,
intended to offer his audience a secular vision of human identity. A man
left without a job was a different sort of disinherited of the Earth than
those talked of in the Bible, but equally responsible for his own actions
and destiny. And this, I claim, is where we perceive the modernity of
Miau: when everything has failed, the human being must rely on
himself or herself and, furthermore, must perform a most difficult task:
to be oneself and to be able to live with one's personality.
Cervantes showed the world
that the human labyrinth was built upon earthly desire: the love of don
Quixote was inspired not by the beautiful Lady Dulcinea, but by a vulgar
Aldonza Lorenzo. Don Quijote will use a thousand words to cover his tracks;
he will deny the truth to Sancho, but at the end it is clear: our impulses
are so strong as to contradict the firmest of purposes. The commonplace
response is to accept the fact. Cervantes went beyond, trying to cover
it with words, and so don Quijote became the complex figure that he is.
The same thing happens in Galdós.
Our don Benito could have explained
the dismissal of Villaamil in black or white terms. The State is the villain,
because it took Villaamil's job away, or things went wrong because he
married the wrong person, a woman who spends in excess, or because his
daughter Luisa fell in love with Cadalso. The list of possible causes
goes on and on. Galdós points to all those factors, and only when
he turns to the character's personality indicates the real problem: Villaamil
is unsuited to facing life as it is. In fact, the greatness of the novel
comes from Galdós representation of the characters' personalities
and emotions. Almost all of them are incapable of balancing their feelings
and their reason; Víctor is different, because he is incapable
of feeling anything for other people.
In Miau, in fact,
Galdós merges a complex awareness of being with his invention of
the characters’ inner thoughts. I have selected four for commentary: Ramón
Villaamil, his daughter Abelarda, his son in law, Víctor Cadalso,
and his grandson, Luisín. The analysis lays bare a new cultural
situation: the birth of individual consciousness, the emergence of that
'I' that will be the central actor in the Twentieth Century.
The Genetics of the Intimate
1. Abelarda: A Prisoner of
her own Emotions
Abelarda Villaamil is, in my
view, the best drawn character in the book. At first glance, seen in an
external focus, she appears as a 'typical' spinster, ugly and resentful,
but when the narrator lets us into her mind we find that there is much
more to her than we were led to believe: she is more than a stereotype.
Let us listen to her thoughts:
'How plain I am! Goodness me,
I look like nothing at all. But I am worse than plain. I'm stupid, a nobody.
I haven't a spark of intelligence. If at least I had some talent; but
not even that. How can he possibly love me when there are so many beautiful
women in the world, and he a man of special merits, a man with a future,
handsome, smart with a great deal of intelligence, let them say what they
like?' [...] 'How stupid and unattractive I am! My sister Luisa was better,
although, really and truly, there was nothing very special about her.
My eyes have got no expression. The most they do is to show that I am
sad, but not what I'm sad about. No one would ever believe that behind
these pupils there is... what there is. No one would ever believe that
this narrow forehead and this frown conceal what they do conceal.' (pp.
112-13)
This interior monologue reveals
a great deal about the character's private feelings. We encounter a cruel
reality: Abelarda realizes that her looks make it impossible for her to
reveal her feelings to others. She is an ugly woman and nature has punished
her twice at least: Abelarda is unattractive, and incapable of letting
others appreciate her personal depth. She would like Víctor to
sense the profundity of her love, but her expressionless eyes fail to
accomplish the task. They remain mute.
Galdós plumbs new depths
here, far beyond those reached in La de Bringas. Rosalía
is proud of her looks, and her clothes complement her vanity. Abelarda
cannot be embellished; besides, she wants to show her soul not her limbs.
In fact, we can say that Abelarda lives imprisoned in her body. Her most
precious possession is her consciousness, her ability to understand her
situation; she feels physically attracted to Víctor and, at the
same time, she realizes that the man is out of her reach. In this empty
space between the desire and her realization of her own inadequacy a new
sort of consciousness is born. It is the space where human feelings, independent
of any religious content or actual contact with the body, are represented.
So, Galdós begins to
design the animic map of nineteenth-century humanity, its sentimental
genetics; hence the modernity which we find in this novel. We are far
from the soul and the spirit as occult recesses where spirituality is
preserved; we are equally far from the bourgeois conscience, the measure
of good and evil, according to established rules of society. We are close
to modern consciousness, that free flowing space where our feelings go
as waves from our feelings to our thoughts and back to conform our personality
to guide our acts. Sometimes, this space is our only personal domain,
where everything else is locked away from us.
2. Víctor Cadalso:
Perverted Feelings
Abelarda’s secret love is an
unworthy person, Víctor Cadalso, a Don Juan of the lowest kind.
He is good only at securing the love of women who are in distress. Let
us listen to him:
'I speak to you as one who
feels an affection for you... but an affection that now I do not wish
to define. A man who lives under the weight of his fatal destiny' (these
philosophical statements and others of the same kind Cadalso took from
certain novels that he had read). 'A man who is prevented from telling
you of his sufferings. And since I may not love you, and I cannot be yours,
nor can you be mine. I must not torture you myself or allow you to torture
me. Keep your secret [...] Do you love another? Do not tell me then. Why
inflame an incurable wound? And to avoid greater conflicts, tomorrow I
will leave this house never to enter it again.' [...]
And the minute after the disappearance of his victim [...] with a diabolical
little smile on his lips, he indulged in the following bitter and cruel
monologue: She'll quite unashamedly make me a declaration of love if I'm
not careful. But what an unattractive girl she is! Utterly brainless and
ordinary to the last degree. I could forgive her everything if she were
pretty. Oh Ponce, what a windfall you've got. A rotten apple, only fit
to be thrown on the refuse heap. (pp. 128-29)
Victor plays cat and mouse
with Abelarda. He says, 'I love you, but our attachment is impossible.'
Her affection for another man, the official boyfriend, Ponce, is used
as the artificial obstacle to their relationship, when he knows that he
himself is the man she loves. And the narrator makes us privy to Víctor’s
cynical thoughts: if she were a beautiful woman, perhaps I would consent
to a relationship. In sum, he is incapable of feeling and even his ability
to be sexually aroused can be questioned.
Why does Víctor play
with Abelarda? He is simply bored. He has nothing better to do than to
play with other people's feelings. It is a common psychological mechanism
among children that when they are bored they nag their siblings or friends.
Víctor is also a Don Juan who has no love for his victims; quite
a contrast with Abelarda. She brims with love towards the undeserving
Víctor and she is self-conscious, while he is empty of feelings
and consciousness. He is a superficial, unthoughtful man.
3. Luisín Cadalso:
The Richness of Emotion
As we observed earlier, much
ink has been consumed in commenting on the encounters of Luisín
with God,. The little boy suffers various fainting spells and during those
brief unconscious moments he holds dialogues with a white bearded person,
'God', whom he asks for a job for his grandfather Villaamil. Critics have
interpreted the fainting spells as epileptic attacks, but nothing is said
about this in the text. So the supposition seems insecurely founded.
The mild fainting spells are
a way in which Galdós can make Luisín speak with himself,
and with his conscience. He is a nine-year old boy, at the stage in a
child's life when play is beginning to be mixed with the understanding
of reality, and fantasies often take the place of play; it is a normal
way of relating to reality. The fictional dreams are, in my opinion, a
way of getting close to his grandfather, of attempting to solve the old
man's problem, of mediating between the harsh reality of life and the
mitigation of that harshness in its presentation to a young child.
Luisín’s consciousness
matches Abelarda's. He too is a prisoner, incapable of influencing events.
It is the narrator who understands these things. To have consciousness
of oneself is to be alive, to be oneself, to enter into the space where
man is man. It is a step towards being a real man. The characters in this
novel are about to enter that realm, but they never do.
4. Ramón Villaamil:
Knowing Thyself
It is a truly difficult task
to know oneself and be able to confront destiny with a serene perspective
that encompasses both reality and one’s own potential. Villaamil has suffered
a range of setbacks common enough in life: he has lost his job, his family
is no help, nor are his friends, and money is a scarce commodity. In this
hour of truth, when the unaided 'I' must confront the world, he is alone,
and has to dwell for much of the time in a new space, the intimate sphere,
the last refuge and/or hell, while he decides upon an appropriate line
of conduct. He cannot handle it. Working in the Ministry of Finance, he
could be reasonably content when things went right. in the family circle,
but he is utterly despondent when he finds himself caged in the small
confines of the 'I'. Therefore, he kills himself. It was the only way
out.
For centuries man has relied
on the church and the symbolic figure of the soul, a context in which
all are equal, to act as a source of relief. Nothing can be more comforting,
I imagine, on one’s death bed than the idea of a heavenly journey as we
near the ultimate dead end. Catholicism, in fact, promises an unmatchable
reward: eternal life, during which the inequalities of the present world
will at last be made up. In the modern world the soul has found another
configuration: a place inside the body, imprecisely located, that answers
to the name of inner consciousness. It is a big step in the evolution
of human beings, from the person with a soul to the one possessing a conscience,
and the one having a personalized consciousness. Galdós is there
to show us the difference.
Miau is not only the
story of a cesante, a person out of work, a novel dedicated to
exploring the impact of the public sphere on the family or private sphere.
It is much more: it constitutes an exploration of the intimate. And the
whole novel is an experiment in sentimental genetics, dedicated to representing
the birth of the 'I' in its own cradle, the confidential reaches of being.
All the characters discussed here - Abelarda, Víctor, Luisín,
and don Ramón – contribute to the configuration of a consciousness,
of the inner life, the most important component of intellectual and real
life in the Twentieth Century.
I hope, in closing, that this
lecture will have made us think beyond the present impasse with regard
to the modernity of Galdós. My discussion of his work has focused
on the clash between society (the context of the novel) and the 'I' -
a clash that, in my view, offers at once a challenge and an opportunity
to understand those magnificent illusions of truth incarnated in unforgettable
fictional characters. Galdós, like all great novelists, mediates
between the world and the ways in which human beings, the characters and
ourselves, react to it.
GERMAN GULLON
University of Amsterdam
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Germán Gullón
is a graduate of Salamanca University and obtained his PhD from the University
of Texas. He has held chairs of Spanish in the Universities of Pennsylvania
and California, and was Director of the Instituto Cervantes in Utrecht
from 1996 to 1998. He is currently Professor of Spanish Literature in
the University of Amsterdam. In 1987 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is the author of ten books of criticism on modern Spanish fiction and
poetry, and has edited half a dozen important texts, as well as contributing
over 150 articles to major critical journals. He has also written fiction
of his own, and comes to Sheffield a few days after the launch of his
latest novel in Barcelona.
Germán Gullón
approaches the classic texts of nineteenth-century Spain (and Galdós
in particular) from the standpoint of a late twentieth-century reader;
in touch with the very different ways of writing which have emerged since,
and attuned to recently-developed theories of reading and criticism. But
his concern is never to reduce or to dismiss what earlier writers have
achieved. Rather, he seeks to interpret it afresh, opening up new dimensions
of life and relevance, even while paradoxically defining the limits of
interpretation. He is a memorable lecturer, and his re-reading of Miau
(one of the handful of Galdós novels reliably available in English)
has incited many of his listeners to explore that classic story of unemployment
and flawed family relationships.
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Summary
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