Pereda and the Closure of the "Roman a These": From Don Gonzalo Gonzalez de la Gonzalera to Penas arriba
2002; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3247207
ISSN1553-0639
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoIN recent years, the vogue of Post-Structuralism has paved the way for a radical transformation in our assessment of Realism. Far from taking for granted the transparency of language, that is, the unmediated copy of reality through the verbal medium, today's reader looks carefully for those gaps which render the textual reproduction of the outside world a problematic, if not untenable, concept. At the risk of falling into the representational fallacy, the Spanish roman a these in the 1870s-a forerunner of the Realist-Naturalist masterpieces of the 1880s-cannot thus be reduced to a tension of mutually exclusive forces embodied in a dialectics of tradition and modernity. At the same time, a sheer formalist approach fails to account for the particulars of an era that conceived of art as truth and promoted the novel to the loftiest literary form, that which could recreate the intricacies of contemporary consciousness with the best degree of accuracy. An analysis focusing on the intrinsic quality of this narrative, on the other hand, ultimately leads to its depreciation by virtue of its platitude and lack of psychological depth. When taken separately, then, neither the ideological, nor the semiotic, nor the aesthetic approaches suffice to explain the impact of the roman a these in the years immediately following the Bourbon Restoration in 1875. In light of the difficulties of establishing a poetics that would do justice to the roman ad these, I have suggested elsewhere the need for a reevaluation of the metadiscourse which accompanied these works upon their publication. By this I refer to the colaboracion sistematica de teoria y practica (Dorca 273), originating in the reviews that appeared in the journals of the time-most prominently, Revista de Espana, Revista Europea, and Revista Contemporanea. The symbiosis between the critic and the writer was instrumental in fostering a type of novel which did not so much degrade literature to propaganda-still the prevailing notion in most scholarship-as it did seek to enhance its philosophical significance: El discurso critico de Revilla, Clarin y Gonzalez Serrano concibio la novela como vehiculo cognitivo con el que aprehender un sistema de verdades solo al alcance del artista privilegiado (Dorca 277). The dependence upon the value of the thesis, instead of bringing about the demise of the novel, did in fact contribute to its ascendancy. As Ignacio Javier Lopez has recently emphasized, critica 'impura' ha de redundar en beneficio de la novela como genero pues ... empieza a ser considerado como un medio literario que ... hay que tratar con respeto y tomar definitivamente en serio (11). Therefore, only by acknowledging the positive reception of the roman d these by its contemporaries can one begin to contest those critics who disclaim it as a pseudoartistic, monologic genre.1 A second assumption I would like to challenge here has to do with the origins of the roman et these as a byproduct of the 1868 September Revolution, a position pioneered by Juan Lopez-Morillas in his article, La Revolucion de Septiembre y la novela espanola. In his view, after 1868 [l]a nueva fiction fija.rd su mirada en los `tiempos presentes'. Y comoquiera que esos tiempos son de hipersensibilidad ideologies, de odios y suspicacias, de esperanzas y fracasos, todo ello habra de incorporarse en la novels que esta en trance de nacer (101). The popular upheaval that forced the abdication of Queen Isabel the Second was succeeded by a chaotic transition that came abruptly to an end in December 1874, when General Martinez Campos's coup d'etat dashed the hopes for a constitutional regime that six years earlier had mobilized the Spanish people against their monarch. In January 1875 Isabel's son, Alfonso, returned from exile to take the reins of a nation shattered in profound discrepancies. His Prime Minister, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, was soon able to attain a certain reconciliation at the expense of curtailing democratic freedom. …
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