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The
Fifth Annual Pérez Galdós Lecture
Galdós:
Our Contemporary
by
Associate Professor
of Spanish
and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin
It is a real pleasure,
in delivering the Pérez Galdós lecture, to be associated
with the outstanding research being undertaken in this University of Sheffield
through the Pérez Galdós Editions Project, which is breaking
new ground in the area of the use of computers in literary study. The
vision of Professor Nicholas Round and the patient, painstaking skill
of Dr Rhian Davies have established and advanced the Project with admirable
provision and execution. It is also an honour indeed to have been selected
to complete the first of the five-a-side teams chosen for the task of
giving this lecture, in the illustrious company of my predecessors: that
of a civic statesman of the stature of Roy Hattersley; of Geoffrey Ribbans,
one of the giants of Galdós studies; of Germán Gullón,
a hugely influential figure in the area of Spanish nineteenth-century
narrative; and of Rodolfo Cardona, who may be called the father of modern
Galdós studies, having founded the scholarly journal Anales
Galdosianos and the Asociación Internacional de Galdodistas.
The comforting reflection that I draw from my earlier analogy is that
at least in the five-a-side game there is plenty of room for everybody
on the pitch. So, in thanking the distinguished team manager Professor
Nicholas Round and the noble club of the University of Sheffield for honouring
me with selection for this particular team, let me proceed without more
ado to my offering on the field of play.
My title is borrowed
unashamedly from a book that made its mark in the 1960s, called Shakespeare:
our Contemporary by the Polish writer Jan Kott. In it, Kott sought
to link contemporary experiences to the representation of violence in
the plays of Shakespeare. Galdós in his historical novels was no
stranger to war, because Spain had seen plenty of it on her home soil
and sea in the nineteenth century. His first historical novel bore the
resounding title Trafalgar, charting Nelson's destruction of the
Spanish navy. The consequences of that defeat are still very much with
us in our world today. The feeble heirs of that Spanish navy devastated
by Nelson were also blown out of the water by the Americans in the dispute
over Cuba in 1898. The Treaty of Paris (in reality, the Spanish surrender
in Paris) in the following year paved the way for the United States's
emergence as a world power. Galdós's subsequent novels on the Spanish
Peninsular Wars, and on the Spanish civil wars of the 1830s and 1870s,
saw the consolidation of an abiding theme that was also transferred into
what the writer dubbed his 'Contemporary Novels', namely the conflict
between the social and political conservatives and those who wished to
see progress in the country. Usually in Galdós's work the conservatives
hold the trumps and the others must use all their ingenuity to circumvent
or overcome established conventions, suffering for their beliefs along
the way. The classic liberal stance, however, (to which the liberal Galdós
is no exception) is to wish for a rapprochement between tradition and
progress. In these Novelas españolas contemporáneas
Galdós is able to play off nineteenth-century conventions against
what he expected his readers to see and accept as a more equitable and
up-to-date means of regulating social exchange, and it is this area that
I will concentrate on for the purposes of this lecture.
What never ceases
to amaze those of us who have given over significant portions of our lives
to studying Galdós's work is how this Canary Islander, from the
then very provincial backwater of Las Palmas, is of relevance today. He
came from a background and a period many of whose great social institutions
of his time, which were the subject of his novels, have since passed into
history: the power of the Church, the culture of arranged marriages, the
tight restricting bonds and conventions of family and social life, the
legal and social subordination of women, the pivotal role as social centres
of the coffee houses of Madrid, the marginalization of what the Victorians
called the lower classes. Galdós was able to use such institutions
and conventions when writing about the personal search for some authentic
means of finding one's role in the human drama. Galdós was fortunate
to live at a time when the tension between the search for personal authenticity
(following the European Romantic movement) and the demands of institutions
and social conventions was at a sufficient pitch to enable him to exploit
this tension, for artistic as well as for commercial purposes. It is in
his artistic conjugation of these three words, 'personal', 'social' and
'human' that Galdós found a voice in his contemporary novels to
speak to us today.
In the immense
panorama of Galdós's production of 78 novels there is an astonishing
cluster of four works composed between 1884 and 1887 that I will use to
give some examples of how Galdós exploited this tension between
convention and progress. These novels are Tormento, La de Bringas,
Lo prohibido and Fortunata y Jacinta. One of the ways that
Galdós most touches our lives today is in the very ordinary and
down-to-earth manner in which he sets out his narrative stall. The four
novels listed above could be summarized in the order given as, 'getting
married', 'being married', 'finding a house that will be a home', and
finally 'finding one's role in society'. A famous description of Galdós's
novels by the novelist and playwright Ramón del Valle Inclán,
labelling him as a 'garbancero' or chick-pea vendor is indeed a very apt
one. Readers of a romantic disposition, in other words that part of the
human race that reads novels, will sometimes be impatient with Galdós,
who may appear on first reading to be somewhat grey and insipid - rather
like the chick- peas themselves - and in need of something sharp or piquant
to liven up the flavour of the narrative. Dickens obliges his readers
by dramatizing or 'symbolizing' the ordinary, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
treat us to the contemplation of a grander and more overtly tragic destiny,
Henry James's dissection of character is performed using a steel scalpel
as a pen. Galdós, on the other hand, allows the reader and re-reader
themselves to bring along the spice for what may seem at first savour
to be without much taste. As he wrote in an early article, prophetic of
his own later novels: if we change because of what we read, fine; if not,
the novel has done what it had to do ('Si nos corregimos, bien. Si no,
el arte ha cumplido su misión').[1] It is this
relentless concern with creativity rather than making a point or even
scoring one that makes Galdós a jewel in the crown of the wonderful
cultural phenomenon that we call the nineteenth-century realist novel.
But let us get
down to concrete examples in the Galdós novels mentioned, taking
the large topics roughly in the order in which they were outlined above:
religion, family and social life, marriage, the position of women and
of the so-called lower classes of society.
In his portrayal
of Father Pedro Polo, the unfrocked priest who has a sexual affair with
the eponymous protagonist of Tormento, Galdós was able to walk
the tightrope between his liberal sympathy for the priest's inability
to conform to the strictures of the Church's requirements of chastity,
and his simultaneous disdain for the priest's bullying misogyny. (The
latter tries to blackmail Tormento, who is engaged to the wealthy Agustín,
either to have one final love tryst with him or to accompany him on his
ecclesiastical banishment to the Philippines.) As a prophetic snapshot
of a church in turmoil over matters sexual, the representation of Polo
could hardly be bettered. Slumped in his chair in his dirty apartment,
his formerly potent energies now dormant but not extinct, the domestic
image provided by Galdós resonates far beyond its narrow confines.
Amparo (Tormento's real name) cleans the house for Polo and brings him
food, while he looks on, a mixture of seigneurial indifference and injured
unrequited lover. Galdós delighted in the creation of hybrids,
monsters even - characters, that is, who are 'de-synchronized' from their
milieu - and in having them appear in the most awkward places for those
who aspire to a singular humanity. So it is with Polo, we are told, who
would have been better off had he been born into the time of the conquest
of the New World, which would have provided an outlet for his bursting
energies. Polo's raw, physical passion, that to some degree he wishes
to channel into domesticity with the unwilling Amparo, is a graphic artistic
expression by Galdós of the terrible dilemma of the Roman Church
in facing or facing down its hidden sexuality. This is wonderfully presented
in an understated way in the brooding Polo, who also has the power to
do the conventionally right thing - expose Amparo's guilty secret - for
all the wrong reasons. Aside from blackmail, Polo is not above using his
considerable physical strength to keep Amparo prisoner - a parodic image
of domestic violence that also resonates back in time to the Spanish Inquisition
and its violent methods. Incidentally the secular arm is represented in
the other three novels, La de Bringas, Lo prohibido and Fortunata
y Jacinta, in a beautiful ironic twist, by Franscisco Torquemada,
a moneylender who tortures financially the men and women who fall into
his power. Torquemada, described as half clerical, half military in appearance,
is another glorious Galdosian monster who preys on society and, at the
same time, lectures his victims on their social shortcomings.
Another notable
social hybrid, this time in Fortunata y Jacinta, is Guillermina
Pacheco, an unmarried lady who dresses like a widow or a nun. Not for
her, Galdós tells us, the constrictions of the convent. She is
happy enough, however, to send other women there for the salvation of
their souls, with disastrous results. The convent in Fortunata y Jacinta
prides itself on its modernity. In the original manuscript Galdós
had given it the name of Las Adoratrices ('Sisters of the Adoration
of the Sacrament') but in a later draft of the novel he gave the convent
the more militantly active name Las Micaelas, chosen by the nuns
in honour of the archangel Michael. The active philanthropy of the nuns,
however, in caring for fallen women, is shot through with the irony attaching
to the source of the financial patronage which enables them to carry on
their work. In the case of Fortunata, a girl from the slums of Madrid,
it is none other than the very family whose scion, Juanito, is, both before
and after her convent incarceration, the cause of her downfall. Juanito
is also the likely client and sexual patron of Mauricia, a prostitute,
who becomes Fortunata's convent friend. The monstrance used to enclose
the Host for adoration (in this way Galdós retains to superb effect
something of his original manuscript concept of the nuns as contemplatives)
turns out to be a gift from Juanito's family. It then becomes a magnetic
focus for Fortunata at prayer to brood on her callous upper-class lover.
Fortunata's other convent friend, Doña Manolita - another informant
in matters regarding Juanito's relatives - tells her that the robe for
the statue of the Virgin Mary, which Fortunata has been asked to clean,
was a thanksgiving gift from that family - this time from Juanito's wife,
Jacinta - for her husband's recovery from pneumonia. Seeing her listener's
amazement, Manolita, 'gozándose en el asombro de [Fortunata]',[2]
cannot resist telling her interlocutor that the monstrance was also a
gift from Juanito's mother for the same reason. Galdós thus extracts
the maximum return from his artistic investment, by making the gift of
the monstrance a thanksgiving offering from the family for Juanito's recovery
from pneumonia, acquired through his imprudent and unfaithful search for
Fortunata in the freezing Madrid winter of a few months earlier. Thus,
another bastion of the old order - the wealthy patronage of religious
institutions - is revealed as self-serving and ruinous for all those who
are caught in its meshes.
In a memorable
article published in 1984, Harriet S. Turner wrote of the 'family ties
and tyrannies'[3] in Galdós's masterpiece Fortunata
y Jacinta. Together with the culture of arranged marriages, the conditions
of family life then prevailing, as seen by Galdós, form a huge
area of the conventional social domain that he exposed and exploited artistically,
as a source of social pressure which the novelist can bring to near-boiling
point. However, Galdós prefers to maintain the temperature at a
slowly simmering level, creating in the process (if I may be allowed to
mix the metaphor) a form of artistic death by a thousand cuts for his
characters, as they struggle to satisfy the incompatible demands of self
and society. No matter whether desire is socially constructed or inwardly
incited, it still drives the major characters in Galdós's novels
to express and experience it. Even the hateful Rosalía Bringas,
Amparo's most deadly and despicable enemy in Tormento - more hateful
even than the mahogany-faced and utterly hypocritical Doña Marcelina,
Pedro Polo's sister - even Rosalía becomes an object of pity for
the reader, when she succumbs to the innocent, quasi-sexual caress of
a silken shawl. In La de Bringas she buys it on credit and falls
into the hands of the moneylender Torquemada. In one of those extraordinarily
creative throwaway lines in which the works of Galdós abound, Torquemada
greets his distraught female client with what seems like an expression
of mild social concern : '¿Y la familia?'[4] But
this, in reality, is a reminder to the woman that if she does not pay
up on time, that same family, the husband in particular, will hear of
her guilty burden of debt.
What is arguably
the most socially devastating and artistically highly wrought scene in
the whole of Galdós's work occurs in the same novel, La de Bringas
as Rosalía, frantically attempting to keep the secret of her purchases
from her husband, has to resort to borrowing the money from Refugio, Amparo's
sister. Although not overtly stated, it has to be understood that Refugio
is a prostitute. The agonizing scene takes place in Refugio's apartment
in the intolerable heat of a September day in Madrid, just hours before
the due repayment time. Rosalía, who imagines herself to be a pillar
of the Palace establishment (her husband is a Palace employee), nearly
combusts with unexpressed rage at having to beg from such a person, who
is the despised Amparo's sister to boot. The result of this encounter
is the destruction of Rosalía's formerly close-knit family unit,
as she herself decides to take to prostitution, ostensibly in order to
maintain her family in the wake of her husband's loss of his position
in the Royal Palace following the Spanish Revolution of 1868. In reality
she does so in order never to have to undergo again the humiliation that
she has suffered at the hands of Amparo's sister. In his portrayal of
this process Galdós calmly tears to shreds the concept of personality
as a recognizable and trustworthy medium of social exchange, and anticipates
the phenomenon of the privatization and fragmentation of society in our
own time.
And what of Lo
prohibido? Here too Galdós exposes the myth of the supposed
cohesion of Spanish family values and shows us that some 'kissing cousins'
can certainly do more than kiss. The forbidden fruit of the title are
the three female cousins of the narrator-protagonist, with each of whom
he has, or attempts to have, sexual relations even though all three are
married by the time he arrives in Madrid. This handsome, wealthy and cultured
narrator is Galdós's vehicle for breaching, in the case of two
of the female cousins, the carefully constructed marriages arranged for
the daughters by their parents. The culture of arranged marriages into
which Galdós was born gave him ample scope for bringing his characters
together in matrimonial misalliances. One of the cousin's marriages in
Lo prohibido is with a terminally ill aristocrat, the other with
a wealthy dwarf; in both cases, social status and money were the prime
targets, to the detriment of any authentic personal relationship. The
third marriage in Lo prohibido, condemned as a social disaster,
because it was not arranged, turns out to be a spontaneous marriage of
minds and bodies. It becomes the rock on which the narrator's advances
perish, or on which he comes to see the error of his ways: the choice
is the reader's. Here too the fact that the narrator is indeed as cultured
and observant as he appears to be offers no guarantee that he can avoid
creating mayhem in the lives of those supposedly nearest and dearest to
him. For Galdós, the possession of education and 'culture' does
not ensure automatic entry into communion with goodness and truth. The
two characters who are the object of the narrator's destructive impulses,
the married couple Constantino and Camila, have not had the benefit of
much schooling and yet can give real lessons in living to all who are
ready to listen. Nobody does so in the novel, as it turns out, except
for the narrator at the novel's end, and only then because he finds himself
at death's door.
As an example
of the way in which Galdós was able to exploit the social conventions
of his day to bring about an exquisite juxtaposition of the desire of
intimacy with the wall of reserve confronting it, I will analyse a little
scene in Fortunata y Jacinta. It occurs towards the beginning of
the last chapter of Part III, 'La idea
la pícara idea' (II,
pp. 238-43), when the aspiring lover, Manuel Moreno-Isla and his hoped-for
lady, Jacinta, appear together. The scene, set fictionally in 1875, takes
place in Moreno-Isla's rooms in the building also occupied by Guillermina,
the philanthropic lady we encountered earlier, who is Moreno's aunt. Introducing
the chapter, the narrator speaks of 'aquel día que debía
de ser memorable' (II, p. 238), doubtless thinking of the meeting later
that morning between Guillermina and Fortunata, which will result in Fortunata's
decision the following day to return to her lover Juanito, and put into
effect her 'pícara idea' of conceiving a child with him to prove
her natural superiority over her rival Jacinta, Juanito's wife. But the
chapter's first scene, describing the presence of Guillermina and Jacinta
in Moreno's study, is in no way inferior; it is very far indeed from being
a mere prologue to the later confrontation between the saintly lady and
the woman of the streets. Its note of tantalizing proximity between Moreno
and Jacinta and the strict distance between them required at the same
time by protocol is presented in an exquisite social key, a grating melody
produced by social conventions that Galdós was able to express
and exploit to the full. He does so here, by using the quite close family
relationship between Moreno and Guillermina (she is, we remember, his
aunt) and the much more distant social one between him and Jacinta, which
he longs to bridge and breach.
The moment Jacinta
enters, 'avanzando hacia la mesa' where Moreno is sitting at work, the
tempo of the scene is increased as she directly accuses the wealthy bachelor
of not wishing to give the amount needed to finish the main floor of the
orphanage projected by Guillermina as part of her philanthropic plans.
There follow a series of socially choreographed movements subtly placed
in the text by Galdós. First Jacinta, 'avanzando más y poniendo
la palma de la mano sobre el pupitre' asks Moreno, with her hand open
(but always with the desk between them) for money for the charitable cause.
Moreno sits back in his chair and gazes in prolonged fascination at Jacinta's
hand, 'sonrosada y gordita', provocatively repeating his reference to
it ('esta mano que pide, mano del Cielo es'), to which Jacinta responds
by wiggling her hand, in a kind of fiscal flirtation, renewing her request.
Her language, of course, cannot contain any sexual innuendo, but her plea,
phrased in the way that it is - 'Si me echa la limosnita, Vd. me estrena'
- causes the wishful Moreno great disquiet. Indeed in an earlier manuscript
version (removed at the galley stage) Jacinta's reply makes him jump out
of his chair. If we recall Moreno's reference to Jacinta's hands earlier
in the novel, and his rather forward compliment '¡Oh, puerta del
paraíso!, que manos te abren
!' we will remember that Jacinta
did not answer this greeting (II, p. 68). In the later scene Jacinta replies
to the compliment in a very affirmative way ('Y tan del Cielo'), presumably
causing Moreno's jump of surprise, not to mention the wonderfully provocative
juxtaposition of pronouns and verb in the phrase 'Vd. me estrena'.
It is now Guillermina's
turn to use her hands to make him confirm his offer, taking the key of
Moreno's bureau in order to oblige him to put his promise to Jacinta into
practice. Moreno intercepts his aunt's attempt 'sujetándole la
mano' - she all the while 'luchando por desasirse'. Guillermina then shouts
to Jacinta to open the bureau and take out Moreno's bank book. Jacinta
becomes excited, but does not take the key from Guillermina because, without
Galdós having to tell us (he merely leaves it to the reader's understanding),
she runs the risk that Moreno might try to stop her in the same way that
he had stopped Guillermina, by catching her hand. At this moment Jacinta
withdraws her hand from the desk, shrieking at Moreno to get out his bank
book, and clapping her hands as she does so. Moreno now uses his hand,
putting it on his heart, to formally promise the money to Jacinta. It
is the nearest both Platonic lovers get to the recognition of a solemn
promise between them. The section ends as Guillermina reassures Jacinta
that Moreno will keep his word: 'Como tenerlo en la mano' is how she puts
it.
Doubtless Galdós
is using these 'hand signals' as a kind of metonymy, or synecdoche, to
show how little Moreno has advanced in his pursuit of Jacinta, because
the latter's hand is only offered to advance the construction of the orphanage,
not in any emotive way. As an acute observer of his society, Galdós
used the choreography of hand-touching to great effect. In a crucial scene
in the penultimate paragraph of Chapter VIII of Lo prohibido, the
narrator and his cousin Eloísa make their decisive sexual assignation
through a handshake that causes them both to tremble with guilt and anticipation.
In the scene with Moreno, Jacinta is incredulous to the end that she can
influence him so much, but it is Guillermina who unwittingly sows the
seed in Jacinta's consciousness of the likelihood of Moreno's sexual interest
in her when she confides in Jacinta that 'a ti no te había de negar',
and that 'Has estado muy hábil'. Jacinta's incredulity, on the
other hand, has had the effect of making her treat the whole incident
as a game. This attitude on Jacinta's part, together with Guillermina's
more businesslike and singleminded high spirits, and Moreno's altogether
more earnest reaction to Jacinta's petitioning (at times disguised as
a game of robbery) brings about a finely ironic blend of frivolity and
deep seriousness, of social intimacy and the distance required by protocol.
Jacinta's physical closeness to Moreno increases as the scene advances,
her hand kept extended, but only to receive and not to give. The whole
mixture of the comic and the serious in the scene involves a tensely wrought
level of ambiguity of dialogue that has the effect of stretching Moreno's
nerves to breaking point, while at the same time continuing to raise his
hopes that he may win over Jacinta to his desires.
In this scene
Galdós brings together a number of criss-crossing character motivations,
representing them in terms of the 'hand signals' analysed above. Gullermina
wants to have her orphanage built; the childless Jacinta wishes to embark
on a compensatory life of philanthropy with Guillermina; the wealthy bachelor
Moreno wants Jacinta. The way in which Galdós can make these currents
of passion and institutional realities flow into each other, is beautifully
illustrated here, crossing the boundaries of time, making the reader sort
out the mixed-up signals that the characters send out to one another.
It is in this highly discriminating collaboration between reader and author
that these volumes of Galdós can span the centuries.
As regards café
life, one example from Fortunata y Jacinta must suffice to show
how Galdós integrated such scenes of commonplace, daily social
exchange into his narrative, as he reprises several elements from Part
I of that novel in the fourth and final part. This is the scene in Madrid's
Café del Gallo on the feast of St Joseph, the nineteenth of March
1876, the saint's day of two characters from Part I, José Ido and
José Izquierdo, who now reappear in Part IV. Ido celebrates the
feast by eating too much, Izquierdo by drinking to excess, and the latter,
who is Fortunata's uncle, unwittingly reveals her hiding place to her
estranged and deranged husband Maxi, who is in the café. The equally
mad Ido's fantasies of wife-murder are reprised from Part I of the novel,
but he now includes Maxi in these fantasies. His words to Maxi in the
café are: 'los que tenemos la desgracia de ser esposos de una adúltera
los que tenemos esa desgracia, no podemos responder de aquel mandamiento
que dice: no matar' (II, p. 426) This repetitive tic in Ido's speech ensures
that Maxi clearly registers the slight to his own honour as a husband.
Then Izquierdo's drunken verbosity (also a feature of Part I of the novel)
gives Maxi the final key to Fortunata's hitherto hidden whereabouts, and
both insinuation and revelation become part of Maxi's reflections in a
friend's house, after dinner that evening. He can thus think decisively:
'The moment for punishment has come' ('Llegó la hora de castigar'
[II, p. 428]). As an example of the way in which Galdós can project
the fantastical (Ido's impotent wife-murder fantasies of Part I of the
novel) into the 'real' (Maxi's decision to punish Fortunata, which Ido
now brings about), there can be few scenes in any novel that improve on
this ironic relationship between prolepsis and analepsis.
Galdós's
description of this café scene and its immediate aftermath is itself
a miniature masterpiece of composition. On his return home from the café,
Maxi eats his dinner quietly ('sosegadamente'), tells his aunt Doña
Lupe 'algo' of what has happened, to which she responds, advising him
not to go back there, 'porque en él [el café] siempre encontraría
una sociedad inculta y ordinaria' (II, p. 428). Lupe's reply leaves the
reader to infer that Maxi has told his aunt of Izquierdo's drunken antics
in the café, but not of Ido's dangerous fantasies. The adjective
'inculta' is the perfectly ironic authorial word to remind the reader
that it was precisely from Ido, a schoolteacher, and hence the only educated
person present in the café (apart from Maxi himself, who is a pharmacist)
that the latter has received the advice to kill Fortunata - one of the
many instances of the oxymoronic 'razón de la sinrazón'
in this chapter that bears the same title.
The novel Fortunata
y Jacinta may be read in myriad ways, but one of the attractive interpretations
is to view it as representing the development of a consciousness of self-worth
on the part of a representative of the marginalized social class, in the
figure of Fortunata. In this regard, the key encounter in the book is
that between Guillermina and Fortunata, immediately following on the 'hand
scene' between Moreno, Jacinta and Guillermina, when the latter, with
her protegée Jacinta secretly listening in an adjoining room, attempts
to interrogate Fortunata about her relationship with Jacinta's husband
Juanito, and to persuade her to give him up. Galdós took a great
deal of care in writing the scene, and it would be impossible here today
to do justice to its stages of composition. Suffice it to say that Guillermina's
compromised situation vis-à-vis the hidden Jacinta encourages Fortunata
to pursue her own destiny with Juanito, and use him as an instrument,
by becoming pregnant, in order to justify her claim that she is his legitimate
wife, since Jacinta and Juanito have been unable to have children.
In his final version
of this scene, Galdós raised the emotional temperature considerably,
in particular on Fortunata's side. This is very well illustrated in the
shift from Fortunata's act of formal, indeed ceremonial, obeisance in
the early version of the MS (where she kisses Guillermina's hand, sobbing
as she does so), to the later version, in which she grabs both her interlocutor's
hands, to prevent her from shutting her ears to her 'pícara idea'.
Galdós's narrative strategy in the early MS version had been centred
on Fortunata's unflappable belief in her theoretical conjugal rights
vis-à-vis Juanito, arising from her original affair with him. In
the later version he moves this belief into the practical realm
of Fortunata's conviction that she can have another child with Juanito.
At one stage Guillermina in the earlier MS cannot help exclaiming: 'Las
cosas que dice esta mujer con esa calma' (AB III, p. 629)[5],
so that in the later version Fortunata's outrageous further claim about
having a child with Juanito increases the tension to breaking point. When
Guillermina, in this early version of the MS, accuses Fortunata of 'la
mayor de las locuras' for continuing to consider Juanito as her true husband,
Fortunata is described as replying 'con calor'. This phrase was written
in interlinearly, in the smaller handwriting Galdós used for later
insertions, an indication that his mind was already turning towards a
more spirited response from Fortunata than heretofore.
In the later version,
indeed, Fortunata is described in very radical terms: as being surrounded
by 'una aureola de inspiración que le envolvía toda la cara',
possessed by 'la inspiración de un apóstol y la audacia
criminal de un nihilista', and like 'el exaltado artista que no tiene
conciencia de lo que dice o canta'. Her words are compared to 'una bomba
explosiva', and she is willing to go to hell for her beliefs (B III, p.
636). There is nothing to compare with this type of description of Fortunata
in the early MS version. In fact the nearest thing to it in the earlier
version is the phrase used of the now revealed Jacinta's anger: 'Estalló
su ira como una mina' (AB III, p. 648). The impact of her rage is such
that Guillermina actually makes a movement to protect Fortunata - something
which would be inconceivable in the printed version given the ways in
which Fortunata is described there. There is no doubt that in rewriting
this scene for the printer Galdós made the firm decision to raise
the status of his heroine by overturning the acoloyte/mentor relationship
between the lowly Fortunata and the middle-class Guillermina. He thus
paves the way for Fortunata to claim towards the novel's end that she
is as good as, and better than, the best of those who inhabit and inherit
the domain of the socially privileged. However, in the final encounter
between the two women towards the end of Part IV- a stunning reversal
of this scene from Part III -Galdós also used his rewriting of
the manuscript version of the death of Fortunata in Guillermina's presence
to allow the latter some final benign influence over her adopted protegeé.
In the process, as we shall now see, he radically altered the pages depicting
Fortunata's final moments of life.
Galdós's
rewriting of the scene of Fortunata's death (II, pp. 525-28 in Caudet)
is a truly major change to the manuscript, and probably the most important
of the MS changes affecting his conception of any character in the novel
- doubly important, indeed, because of Fortunata's role and status in
it. With the earlier text in front of him, Galdós began the later
version in broadly similar fashion, as Guillermina expresses Jacinta's
gratitude for the gift of the child. In the earlier version this is then
followed by Guillermina's attempt to extract a promise from Fortunata,
that should she recover, she will not interfere with the Santa Cruz marriage.
There then follows Guillermina's appeal to Fortunata to set aside her
'idea mala' that a childless marriage is not valid, and that Fortunata,
through having had his children, is Juanito's wife. (In the subsequent
version, as we shall see, this was used at a later stage in the scene.)
The following is the early MS version of Fortunata's death:
Fortunata no respondía
nada. Su cabeza echada hacia atras, se movía sobre la almohada
con cierta inquietud, y los ojos los tenía clavados en el techo.
Después se llevó la mano á la frente como quien se
va a recoger un mechón de pelo ó á quitarse algo
que le estorba. Quería arrancar la idea. Guillermina vió
que inflaba el pecho. Hacía grandes esfuerzos por activar los pulmones
y llevar aire a la laringe y hacerla funcionar para decir algo. Por fin,
con una voz que mas parecía suplica que voz, sudorosa la frente
y los ojos muy abiertos soltó estas palabras: 'No puedo, no puedo'.
La santa se recogió
en sí. Creía sentir los tirones que daba el diablo para
quitársela.
'Pero hija mía,
haga V. un esfuerzo. Comprende que su idea es la fuente de todos sus pecados.
Quítesela, quítesela
Con la cabeza
siguió expresando que no podía. Guillermina dijo para sí:
'Ah! Si no estuviera [tan abatida] acabando, el padre Nones la convencería;
pero ya es muy tarde. Dios mío, ten compasión de ella
(En alta voz) Y si viniera Jacinta, y se lo pidiera á usted, lo
haría?
'Tampoco, - dijo
Fortunata casi con el mecanismo de los labios, y sin que el sonido se
oyera.
La santa se dió
por vencida, y poniéndole la mano en el pecho, le dijo con voz
dulce y patética: 'Dios lo verá'.
Y se puso a rezar.
El último resplandor que echó el pensamiento de la infeliz
mujer antes de extinguirse, como una llama moribunda fué este:
[Le doy mi hijo á la mujer de mi marido] 'Si el viniera ·
verme le diría 'cásate con Jacinta, y hazte cuenta de que
aquel hijo te lo ha dado ella
Pero es un pillo
no viene
Estará con Aurora
Bribona, si la cojo
!
Alguna de las
palabras de este soliloquio fué articulada. 'Habla V.?, le dijo
Guillermina. (AB pp. 769-72)
At this point
Galdós ended this first version of the death scene, and penned
the following few words as notes for the continuation of the plot:
Abajo Jacinta,
Barbarita, contentas.
Maxi y Da Lupe en su casa.
After jotting down some figures and other notes extraneous to the work
in hand he began to write the final MS version of the above, for the most
part the one that was to become the version in the printed edition as
well, though with an important galley change ['G'], to be dealt with later.
The reader of
the earlier manuscript version, comparing it with the final one, and faced
with another last-minute, but this time very substantial change in Galdós's
conception of the death of Fortunata, can only stand back in wonder at
the magnitude of the change here. This encapsulates everything that is
at the heart of the debate which began nearly forty years ago in Anales
Galdosianos between Stephen Gilman (1966) and Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (1968)
concerning the mythical heroine of Gilman's article and the historically
conditioned protagonist of Blanco's reply. In essence, what we see in
the printed version of Fortunata's death corresponds more closely to Gilman's
thesis (although the galley changes are also very significant, as evidence
that a less exalted interpretation is called for), while the early version
quoted above is nearer to Blanco's interpretation - always accepting that
the latter based his judgement on the printed version alone. Evidently
Galdós preferred as his superior and hence definitive version the
final one, where Fortunata forgives Juanito and Aurora, and claims to
be an angel, rather than the earlier account of her unyielding bitterness
against her rival and lover. In some ways it was a pity to lose Fortunata's
very understandable bitterness at Juanito's failure to appear at her deathbed;
nonetheless, that moment of psychological realism was excised in the final
MS version. Its removal, however, does inch the death of the heroine a
little more in the direction of a 'gloriosa ascensión'. In the
same deterministic mode which marks the early version are the more overtly
physiological descriptions of her death struggle that we also see in the
long passage quoted above.
Evidently, having
concluded the first version with Fortunata's determination not to forgive
Juanito or Aurora, and then decided to rewrite the whole episode, Galdós
turned the scene on its head, and began the final version where he had
left off in writing the earlier one. He thus inverted the concept of Fortunata's
resentment against the new lovers and in his final MS version turned it,
through Guillermina's initial and insistent questioning on the subject,
into Fortunata's forgiveness for them, individually. This left the thorny
question of the legitimacy of Fortunata's relationship with Juanito, introduced
by Guillermina as a memory of their previous encounter in her house nearly
a year before (another of those links that Galdós seemed to forge
effortlessly in this novel). Fortunata's earlier words, 'No puedo, no
puedo', and 'Tampoco' are without ambiguity, but the words deleted by
Galdós, in which Fortunata refers to Jacinta as 'la mujer de mi
marido', constitute a wonderful paradox, allowed by the Spanish language,
which makes it surprising that he should have decided against their eventual
use). Fortunata's advice to Juanito, to 'marry' Jacinta, presumably after
her death, is another variation on a solution to the legitimacy question
that was not used in the later version. However, Galdós did use
a variation on Fortunata's own deathbed imagining that 'aquel hijo te
lo ha dado ella', in Jacinta's birthing fantasies at the end of the following
section (XV).
Apart from the
conviction of her angelhood, twice expressed in the early version, since
Father Nones is indeed brought in at the later stage, the first description
that antecedes this declaration is also radically different from its predecessor,
and was, in its turn, changed significantly at the galley stage. The three
versions are as follows (in the interests of clarity of presentation,
the early version is given again, but without any of the author's deletions):
[First Version]
El último resplandor que echó el pensamiento de la infeliz
mujer antes de extinguirse, como una llama moribunda fué este:
'Si el viniera á verme le diría 'cásate con Jacinta
y hazte cuenta de que aquel hijo te lo ha dado ella
Pero es un pillo
no viene
Estará con Aurora
Bribona, si la cojo
!
[Second Version]
Fortunata volvió á tener la llamarada. La voluntad y la
palabra reaparecieron en ella; pero solo fué para decir: 'soy angel....
[Galley] Fortunata
volvió a tener la llamarada en sus ojos, al modo de un reflejo
de iluminación cerebral, y en su cuerpo vibraciones de gozo, como
si entrara alborotadamente en ella un espíritu benigno. La voluntad
y la palabra reaparecieron; pero sólo fue para decir:
-Soy ángel
¿no lo ve?
The three versions
do not show a steady incremental rise in Fortunata's stature in her death
scene. From First to Second Version there is an unimaginable leap in this
respect. The shining light of Fortunata's face has been materialized from
her thought to her features in the transition from First through Second
to Galley version, which the latter version amalgamates in the reference
to 'la llamarada en sus ojos al modo de un reflejo de iluminación
cerebral'. Guillermina's fearful sense in the early version that she feels
the devil pulling at Fortunata's soul is answered in G by the reference
to the 'espíritu benigno' that the narrator imagines entering her.
The addition of these two words in G also performed another function,
which was to echo and answer positively Guillermina's earlier assertion
concerning Fortunata's 'idea maligna' about the legitimacy of the Santa
Cruz marriage. There is no doubt that Galdós made this change in
the most deliberate way, since he had already changed the earlier version
from 'aquella idea mala' to the phrase 'idea maligna'. Of course the grammar
and semantics of the narrator's 'como si entrara en ella un espíritu
benigno' are much less direct than those of Guillermina's contention that
Fortunata 'tenía una idea maligna, origen de muchos pecados': Galdós's
tracing of Fortunata's death from first version to Galley in this scene
does not offer new certainties in lieu of the old ones propounded by Guillermina.
Yet neither can we echo Maxi's - and the novel's - last words - 'Lo mismo
da' - in respect of these two radically different versions of Fortunata's
death.
The last word
on Fortunata, indeed, might be left to Father Nones, as he is presented
in the final manuscript version. Before Galdós took Guillermina's
judgement on Fortunata's angelhood from the early version ('Dios lo verá':
see the transcription above) and assigned it to Nones at the end of the
scene (II, p. 528), he had represented the priest's words in this last
MS version as, '¡Pobrecita! Dice que es angel, y puede que lo sea'.
Even those four final words, constructed as hypothesis and subjunctive,
were deemed too affirmative, and the thin black line of the author's pen
deleted them from the novel, but not from the critic's absorbed scrutiny
of the manuscript of Fortunata y Jacinta. The thrust of this last
correction - from 'puede que lo sea' to 'Dios lo verá' - may be
the most wickedly contemporary comment of all on Galdós's part,
to the effect that where angelic status is concerned, it is best left
to the Deity, and not to mortal authors, critics or common readers to
decide.
In the 1880s Galdós
discovered that he did not need to write about 'war and war's alarms',
whether civil or religious, because the struggle for life looked out at
him from the streets and the buildings of his adopted city of Madrid.
Applying to Galdós Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, The
Hedgehog and the Fox, - the hedgehog digs deep in one spot, the fox
roams the surface of the land - we could say that Galdós adapted
metaphorically the habits of both these animals to the composition of
his novels of this period, digging deep into what binds and breaks families,
lovers, friends and acquaintances, and at the same time making his characters
traverse incessantly the urban spaces of his re-created Madrid. In so
doing he creates new links, among others, between the inhabitants and
frequenters of house and hovel, café and tavern, shops and stalls,
theatres, convents and churches, streets, parks and squares - places of
assignation all - in the search for self and the encounter with society.
Galdós's novels are not, of course, coaching manuals for life's
problems. What this valuable Sheffield encounter enables us to do is to
rejoice in the study and interpretation of Galdós's creative vocation,
one that bequeathed such riches of observation and expression to his and
our generation, and beyond.
-------------------------------------------------------------
[1] 'Observaciones sobre la novela contempor·nea
en España', in Benito Pérez Galdós, Ensayos de
crítica literaria, ed. Laureano Bonet (Barcelona: Ediciones
Península, 1972), p. 127.
[2]
Fortunata y Jacinta, ed. Francisco Caudet (Madrid: Cátedra,
1983), 2 vols., I, p. 623. All quotations here are taken from this edition.
[3]
'Family Ties and Tyrannies: a Reassessment of Jacinta', Hispanic Review,
51 (1983), 1-22.
[4]
La de Bringas, ed. Alda Blanco and Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (Madrid:
Cátedra, 1983), p. 261.
[5] The first
MS version, Alpha or 'A', did not contain this scene; 'AB' is used to
denote some writing that is intermediate between the A and B ('Beta')
MS versions of Fortunata y Jacinta.
WORKS CITED
Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog
and the Fox: an Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1967.
Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, 'On 'The Birth of Fortunata'', Anales Galdosianos,
3 (1968), 13-24.
Stephen Gilman, 'The Birth of Fortunata', Anales Galdosianos, 1
(1966), 71-83.
Jan Kott, Shakespeare: our Contemporary. London: Methuen, 1965.
Benito Pérez Galdós, Ensayos de crítica literaria,
ed. Laureano Bonet. Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1972.
--------------- Fortunata y Jacinta, ed. Francisco Caudet. Madrid,
Cátedra, 1983.
-------------- La de Bringas, ed. Alda Blanco and Carlos Blanco
Aguinaga. Madrid, Cátedra, 1983.
-------------- Lo prohibido, ed. James Whiston. Madrid, Cátedra,
2001.
-------------- Manuscript of Fortunata y Jacinta (MS Span 93).Cambridge:
Harvard University, Houghton Library.
-------------- Tormento, ed. Eamonn Rodgers. Oxford, Pergamon Press,
1977.
Harriet S. Turner, 'Family Ties and Tyrannies: a Reassessment of Jacinta',
Hispanic Review, 51 (1983), 1-22.
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James Whiston has been distinguished
throughout his career with Trinity College, Dublin, whose distinguished
graduate he was. His PhD there (1975) was followed in 2001 by the award
of a Doctorate of Letters for a long record of outstanding publication,
mainly - but far from exclusively - on Galdós. Appointed Lecturer
in 1969, he has been Head of the Department of Spanish since 1995 and
Associate Professor since 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the College
in 1991, and in 2000 became its first holder of a Berkeley Research Fellowship.
He is Vice-President (from 1999) of the Asociación Internacional
de Galdosistas, and has served for over ten years on the board of
Anales Galdosianos. In 2002 he became a General Editor of the Bulletin
of Spanish Studies, the oldest and most prestigious Hispanic journal
in the British Isles.
His publications range widely
across 19th and 20th-century Spanish themes, and sometimes further afield,
but the bulk of his work (four of his books and over two dozen articles)
has been concerned with Galdós. The Early Stages of Composition
of Galdós's 'Lo prohibido' (1983) and two subsequent editions
of that novel (1998, 2001) have set new standards of textual scholarship,
exemplary for the Sheffield Project (to which James Whiston has also been
a generous friend). But he shares with colleagues here the conviction
that work on texts exists to promote and inform better readings and better
understandings. Creatividad textual e intertextual en Galdós
(1999) confirms, along with his many shorter pieces, just how well
and how wisely he undertakes both these things.
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