Readers gain a rare and privileged glimpse into the extended, yet implicit, dialogue that all texts possess when writing becomes the object of description, commentary, or meditation in a novel or essay. While commentary by critics and self-reflexive allusions to writing, embedded in the fiction itself, often aspire to the authority of scientific assertions, such reflections form part of complex cultural debates in which good taste, common sense, truth, verisimilitude, and originality are affirmed rather than questioned. As literature evolves, we can easily recognize that the periods of Romanticism and Realism are different; criticism also evolves, reflecting changing cultural perspectives and styles. When Juan Goytisolo writes in Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (Count Julian, 1970) that “erudition deceives,”1 he alludes to scientific imperturbability and detachment, a view held by certain critics. Criticism’s desire for Olympian stability, demonstrated by Menéndez y Pelayo in the nineteenth century and José Montesinos in the twentieth – each convinced of the propriety of his own values – was seen as opposed to the flux of the novel. In recent decades, concepts steeped in relativity recognize that the vantage point from which we are observing is also in motion and fully engaged with its own time. A close look at how books are represented within novels as well as at the opinions expressed about writing in novels and essays during the modern period will explore this deep commonality between creation and criticism.
The invention of modernity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries produced a clean break with the past; previous ages had located authority in classical tradition and mythical reiteration. Rousseau, who uncomfortably straddles an aristocratic past and a democratic future, still speaks of the revival of the old, while Condillac, coming later with greater confidence, sees the new period as superior to the past and inferior to the future, the characteristic attitude that defines progress. The “new” was produced and marketed during the industrial revolution with the same profusion as mass-produced shoes or machine-made china are today. Spain, however, presents a significant difficulty, since there is little doubt that the first modern novel and one of the most meta-fictional of all times is Don Quijote. Cervantes’s novel, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, appeared at a time when Quevedo, Zayas, and Lope were writing texts that still interest us today but which can hardly be called modern. These authors found few imitators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Cervantes’s traces could be found everywhere. For example, two of the most committed cultivators of personal writing characteristic of the modern are Unamuno and Juan Goytisolo. Both are deeply steeped in Cervantes and many of their most acute meditations about writing are motivated by Don Quijote.
Cervantes developed a strategy that consisted in dividing the modern from the obsolete. Cadalso, in his Cartas marruecas (‘Letters from Morocco’), observed how this attitude had become pervasive and commonplace in eighteenth-century Europe:
In our present century Europeans have become unbearable in the flattery they heap upon the age in which they were born. If you were to believe them, according to their new chronology, you would say that human nature brought about a prodigious and incredible crisis precisely around the year 1700. Each individual attaches enormous personal vanity to having had many ancestors not only as good as he but much better, and yet a whole generation abhors those that came before. I don’t understand it.2
Therefore, in reading any text about writing, a reader should be alert to the rhetoric of progress, invoked to push the writing of previous generations into the background. Such rhetoric either declares former authors to be less aware than contemporary readers of the underlying biases and assumptions of texts or considers those authors less sophisticated regarding the problematic issue of representation.
Ortega’s Meditaciones del Quijote (‘Meditations on the Quijote’, 1914), which occupies a privileged place in reflection about the modern novel, offers a telling example of the rhetoric of progress. His essay includes a denunciation of the period previous to his: “Greatness did not see itself as so; purity hardly struck the heart. The quality of perfection and of the supremely excellent were invisible to those people, like ultraviolet light.”3 The beauty of Ortega’s prose cannot hide the unconvincing nature of his sweeping assertion. We may ask: for half a century was it possible that all human beings in a country could have lost their feelings, intelligence, and ambition? And how would a country recover from such collective blindness? We are reading not a statement of fact but a rhetorical erasure of the forefathers meant to increase the stature of present-day culture in Ortega’s time. Skipping over several centuries to find a viable and recognizable ancestor is Ortega’s way of stressing the novelty of the present, its changed nature amid progress. For Ortega, then, Don Quijote is “the first novel in time and in value” (Meditaciones, p. 95) in which he finds the congenial whiff of modernity: “Scanning those old pages, [the contemporary reader] finds a modern tone that draws this venerable book closer to our hearts: we feel it to be as close to our most profound sensibilities as Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, makers of the contemporary novel” (ibid.). Our sensibility is tacitly opposed to theirs – that of our recent ancestors, blind to the light of greatness. This paradox of finding modernity before the modern period cannot be easily dismissed: nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists learned their most valuable lessons from the Quijote, written two centuries earlier. Appropriately, but also symptomatically, the first chapter of the present volume, which deals with the novel from the sixteenth century to the present, is dedicated to Cervantes and the genre of the picaresque novel.
In the Quijote, Cervantes created the semblance of the new by incorporating and transforming old genres – novels of chivalry, sentimental and pastoral novels – within his own text. Ironically enough, often he points out the shortcomings of this incorporated literature as he describes the actual life of his readers. Don Quijote, by putting to the test the books he has read, proves in a peculiarly warped and cautious way their inadequacy as guidelines for daily life. The long-lasting discussion about the madness and wisdom of reading books attests to the complexity and ambiguity of literary tradition. Following the Quijote, the lesson frequently echoed is that the novel must debunk illusion and offer insight into the real state of society. In a hermeneutical orientation that has its roots in the Enlightenment, Don Quijote and later novels celebrated in the canon are highlighted because they convey truth. Their continued use as a pedagogical tool, in our times when humanism often has been declared to be in crisis, is related to this thread of thought: fiction conveys truth even when it shows us how difficult truth is to attain. Novels like Galdós’s La desheredada (The Disinherited Lady, 1881) and Clarín’s La Regenta (‘The Judge’s Wife’, 1884–5) exploit this interaction of reading and reality, showing us characters led astray by books. These texts write off a whole category of writing, while at the same time, in a literary trompe l’oeil, they smuggle in another form of writing – their own – presented as pure transparency. Since the Cervantine lesson has been well learned, savvy readers also become privy to the secret that the author of a realist novel is aware that in fact there exists nothing but writing. In novels like El amigo Manso (Our Friend Manso, 1882) and Misericordia (‘Compassion’, 1897) Galdós provides the most salient examples of the technique of flaunting illusion in the guise of realism.
The ambiguous relation between authors, texts, and readers can be found at the very beginning of Spain’s early, albeit uneven, modernity. An assiduous reviewer, Mariano José de Larra wrote extensively about other writers. He often lamented the servile imitation of the foreign in the form of translations and second-rate adaptations, and the retrograde nature of Madrid’s culture. While he could not embrace modernity completely – his pervasive irony bleeds even into his images of progress – he understood the inevitability and the necessity of change. His novel El doncel de don Enrique el Doliente (‘Henry the Infirm’s Page’, 1834) begins with an ironic paragraph that expresses his detachment from the nineteenth century’s claims of progress:
Readers are well advised to travel with us to remote ages and centuries in order to live, one might say, in another social order not at all like ours – today’s nineteenth century – which marks the most advanced civilization of a sophisticated Europe. Whether living in happy or unhappy times, neither the beauty of our cities nor the ease of communication among people of faraway countries nor the individual security that our up-to-date, enlightened legislation almost guarantees, nor, in sum, that multitude of refined, exquisite necessities – fictional all – enjoined to satisfy our desires could ever convince a Christian man or woman of that bygone era that we pass through this life but once, as dogma teaches, on our way to a better life in another world.4
Literature is conceived as a time-machine, and the journey of reading as an instructive experience. The late medieval world, viewed through the Romantic prism, works as a corrosive contrast to the “advanced civilization of a sophisticated Europe.” Larra continues his ironic counterpoint by introducing a reference to another sort of writing – legislation – insinuating that it contains a utopian strain that reflects more the expression of wishful thinking than an accurate mapping of the real. His last critical barb against the proliferation of desire generated by commerce and publicity (another form of competitive writing that shared the same page in the newspaper as Larra’s reviews) evokes the nostalgic echo of religious dogma and mythic and ritual writing dismantled by the Enlightenment. That his nostalgia is not for the transcendent is soon evident in the novel, concerned with private heroism and worldly love. As much as Larra appears to reverse the wheel of progress, valuing the past over the present, the final madness of one of the protagonists in El doncel de don Enrique el doliente shows the world ruled by the medieval sword to be inhospitable.
Nonetheless Larra’s novel casts a dubious light upon the values brought about by modern science, transmitted in books of scientific discovery. Don Enrique de Villena, a character based on a historical figure and the villain of the novel, is distinguished by his erudition, for he has dedicated his time to “languages, poetry, history, and the natural sciences” (El doncel, p. 115). According to Larra, literature at that time was not highly esteemed: “songs and poems by troubadors served only momentarily to kill boredom during a banquet for ladies and courtiers while a well-handled lance brought down an enemy – in those warring times, there was more to fear from enemies than from boredom” (p. 204). Here Larra expresses a preoccupation about the diminished role of literature in a utilitarian society. He also shows a strong Romantic fascination with heroic deeds, with epic themes more than he does with the quality of the text. In order to emphasize action rather than literariness, he describes a knight who can hardly read, who makes his points with his lance, and who is, therefore, “a man of action [ . . .] who would not have played a bad role in the nineteenth century” (p. 205). Writing in the early nineteenth century carries for Larra a double burden, since the country revels in repetitive and derivative texts. The virtues Larra values – freedom, imagination, feeling – have shriveled away. In a review of a French history of Spanish literature, he expresses his disillusion brilliantly:
Times and tastes follow one another in rapid succession and people should recall that they were not born only to live a bitter, desiccated reality; daring writers tried to shake off the yoke imposed by instructors; in the end, everyone should find, in politics as in literature, the freedom for which they are born; from this moment on, Spanish literature should arise more radiant than ever before, shining like an immense globe of light, obscured for so long by a thickening mist.5
This reinvigorated literature remains only a wish, conceived in terms of light, the traditional emblem of the Enlightenment. Yet only a few lines earlier he had criticized the desiccated world of pure reason, which the previous century had seen as a liberating capacity. In his review of a book of poems, Larra wrote these lines, following his assertion that there was no one seriously dedicated to literature in Spain:
These bleak reflections respond to what happens whenever an original, published piece of writing gingerly raises its head among us. It is like a voice crying in the wilderness: no echo ensues, no ear shelters it, no people listen. Only heaps of sand, here today, blown thither tomorrow – and a violent hurricane. Nothing more.
While from time to time some genius shines forth, our literature is only a heap of dead ashes in a brazier wherein a hidden spark still glows, pale and wavering. Our golden age has already passed and our own nineteenth century has hardly arrived.6
Whereas in the previous quotation Larra evokes the image of a lantern or beacon, shining over open seas, that image recurs now scaled down as the lowly domestic brazier. The hurricane puffs in vain, shifting aimlessly mountains of sand: time upon time, the weight of a dead tradition. Stranded in a wretched epoch, writing remains a memory and a wish but not a reality. As the title of one of his essays states, “What one cannot say is better left unsaid.” For Larra, too many limitations have been placed by official and unofficial censorship, by public apathy, and by the narrow-mindedness of the Spanish intellectual establishment, reluctant to believe that true writing can exist. The Romantic critic sees lack and loss even in what he praises, and invites us to imagine a superior literature, one that is sublime, beyond the limitations of the present age.
Thinking they had responded to Larra’s lament, Realists believed they had created at long last a literature for their time. Galdós wrote in 1882 an encomiastic prologue to Pereda’s El sabor de la tierruca (‘The Taste of One’s Homeland’, 1882) in which he portrays himself in a scene of revelation:
I met Pereda eleven years ago, when he had written Escenas montañesas [‘Mountain Scenes’] and Tipos y paisajes [‘Local Types and Landscapes’] Reading this second collection of picturesque sketches made an intensely lively, indelible impression on me. It felt like the discovery of unknown, unseen regions of which one had not even dreamed. Sensing in myself a modest aptitude for such writing, for the skills to reproduce what was natural, Pereda’s marvelous ability to combine truth and fantasy in a vigorous, bewitching style, revealed to me a new direction in narrative art, a direction that later became assured and affirmed, in the end a triumph, in which he [Pereda] who began the process played a major role.7
While Galdós may be politely exaggerating what he owes Pereda, the dramatic scene of reading he presents is unmistakably a foundational myth similar to St. Augustine’s conversion: Galdós describes a timid search for a language that could reproduce the landscape and the speech of Spain, a revelation, a change of approach, and the triumphant access to truth. Progress gains the day. Once again, precursors are thrown into the region of the blind. Galdós, like Cervantes, incorporates into his novels all forms of writing that circulated in his time, deploying the same ambiguous strategy. On the one hand, these genres are devalued and shown to be distorted, exaggerated, trivial, and deceitful in comparison to the novel that encompasses them. Once appropriated, however, these “other” kinds of writing reappear transmuted and transformed in the main body of the novel. Tormento (Inferno, 1884), for example, presents Agustín Caballero, an indiano who has made his fortune in America and returns to his native country to construct a house with a library in Madrid, now a city entering the European mainstream. It is the very moment “when the modern capital began to arise above the commonness of its lowly origins as an overgrown village.”8 Along with the comfortable furniture, the large kitchen, the gas lights, Galdós includes “two shelves, one full of books about commerce, the other of books about literature, which set off nicely the display of figurines, for his literary collection consisted entirely of decorative works, as remarkable for their content as for their bindings” (Tormento, p. 69). Juxtaposed to the chinoiserie, the French decorative objects of Egyptian design, and other proliferations of bourgeois respectable exoticism, the books divide into the useful – commercial texts – and the entertaining – literary texts.
The description of the library and its furnishings is a way of graphically writing about reading. Galdós was, of course, aware of the imbrications between literature and commerce, of the marketability of novels, and the fact that reading involved a money transaction. In the above instance, however, it is rather the collapse into the decorative and frivolous that he laments, creating, in a very Cervantine fashion, an ironic distance that both includes and relegates at the same time. The realist novel takes for granted the fundamental economic underpinnings of society. The fluff of fashion, bric-à-brac, and ostentatious trophies of the well to do, while tenderly described, simultaneously convey the anxious message, tinged with Romantic ambition, that this text, dear reader, that you hold in your hands is, above all, austere, insightful, detached, based as it is upon the disinterestedness of pure science. Writing must be rescued from indifferent consumption and the threat of reduction to one more commodity, as had occurred with the delightful and non-nourishing bodegones (still life paintings) that enlivened the dining rooms of merchants, bankers, and politicians described in Galdós’s novels.
In Tormento the wonderfully named Ido del Sagrario is “a former teacher of writing” (p. 984) whose novels do not sell. He is reduced to a sort of escribidor – a hack writer – rejected from Parnassus, expelled from the sagrario or inner circle (as his name implies), now selling only a few handwritten pages from his latest novel. He pathetically offers these as a model of penmanship. In Fortunata y Jacinta Ido reappears, selling from door to door such books as Mujeres célebres (‘Famous Women’), Cortesanas célebres (‘Famous Courtesans’), Hijos del trabajo (‘Sons of Labor’), and similar editorial concoctions aimed at an undiscriminating public. Peering over the shoulders of Juanito Santa Cruz and his wife Jacinta, as they entertain with mixed emotions this demented representative of the fringes of respectable society, the reader immediately understands that what Ido offers is inferior forms of literature, and that the exemplary and fallen women of Galdós’s own novel, Fortunata y Jacinta, compared to Ido’s Mujeres célebres, are of a more refined and complex nature – that is, they are more real.
In the late eighteenth century, the notion that had presided over the nature of the novel – that the novel can and should be useful – is simultaneously mocked and reinforced by Galdós and other contemporary authors. Only the right books – their own – map out society and its tangle of emotions. Madame Bovary provides the most salient modern example of this strategy that I call backgrounding and relegation. As stated earlier, this strategy finds its model in Don Quijote. For example, in Fortunata y Jacinta we read that Maximiliano Rubín, Fortunata’s not-too-bright and cuckholded husband, “devoured Faust and Heine’s poems.”9 This is a cruel joke: while the reader can perceive how Goethe’s drama offers a mirror in which Maximiliano could see his own pact with the devil and the destructive, yet also redeeming, power of love, this perception completely goes over Maximiliano’s feverish head. Equally ambiguous is the commentary by Maximiliano’s brother, Nicolás Rubín, as he seeks to persuade Fortunata to marry: “Women today let themselves be perverted by novels and by those false ideas about love that other women put into their heads. What bald-faced lies and indecent propaganda Satan makes through the mediation of poets, novelists, and other lazy bums!” (Fortunata y Jacinta, p. 649). While the priest Rubín’s conclusion – that only spiritual love matters – is proven untenable for Fortunata, the series of practical arrangements she will enter into later, counseled by her lover and mentor Feijoo, are also inconceivable in the still-Romantic models of Goethe or Heine. That was then, this is now. Those models are literature, this is life. Just as Cervantes brings in a canónigo – a high ranking priest – to show how a novel written according to the standards of the period would be very different from the novel Cervantes himself is writing and we are reading, Galdós also brings in, rather abruptly, a literary critic after Fortunata’s burial. Once he hears her story, this critic concludes:
The high-flown pronouncer of literary works said that [in Fortunata’s story] there were, indeed, dramatic or novelesque elements, although, in his opinion, the artistic weave wouldn’t turn out to be showy enough without introducing certain strands, which were absolutely necessary for transforming the commonplaces of life into aesthetic material. He couldn’t stand the idea that life as it is could be transferred to art without being garnished, seasoned with fragrant spices, and placed on the stove until it had been well cooked.
(p. 977)
What matters here, as the critic and his friend come to agree, is not that “raw fruit, well-ripened,” is as good a thing as “stewed fruit” but that the whole novel itself be set against a backdrop of other novels less faithful to reality, cooked up with traditional recipes, and therefore not truly contemporary, not representing life as it really is.
In Fortunata y Jacinta, Galdós affirms that for the character Estupiñá “his library was the social scene, his texts, the lively words of real people” (p. 475). “Reading” – in the opinion of another character, Juanito – “is artificial, borrowed from life; it is an enjoyment that takes place through the mental operation of appropriating the ideas and sensations of others; it is only the acquisition of treasured human truths through purchase or swindle, not from work” (p. 450). Jacinta, we are specifically told, “had no kind of learning. She had read hardly any books” (p. 488). One should not set aside these observations as idle commentary. They go to the core of modernity: truth, reality, democracy, progress, and the sciences endanger the privileged activity of literature, which will have to be reasserted through the claims of art as scientific observation or through art for art’s sake. Literature seems threatened, becoming at the same time one more piece of merchandise and a frivolous decoration.
In authors such as Pereda, Valle-Inclán, and Gabriel Miró, who describe the declining grandeur of a landed gentry, the references to books are surrounded by a halo of reverence and nostalgia, with mentions of religious and history books that contain the spirit of a vanishing time. When Fernando, the agnostic anti-hero of Pereda’s De tal palo, tal astilla (‘A Chip Off the Old Block’, 1880), arrives to visit the good priest who may help him to recover his faith, thus enabling him to marry his beloved who is fervently religious, the reader is provided with a description of the priest’s house that includes “three shelves of books in Latin.” The priest “had open on the table the Flos Sanctorum and was reading the life of the saint of that day.”10 Instead of reading these ancient books, the fact that Fernando has dabbled in “the roiling seas of [today’s] ruling ideas” (p. 1155) is suggested as the reason for his rejection by the town and his subsequent suicide.
This novel of 1880 can easily be seen as Pereda’s response to Galdós’s Doña Perfecta (1876), since these two novels offer clearly diverging views on the same topic, the difficulty of bringing progress to a country mired in traditional ideas. Books carry either the seeds of a healthy growth into modernity or the virus of decay, depending on the reader, but in both cases the importance of these foreign ideas, imported by travel and the circulation of printed matter, is unmistakably stressed. In a vignette included by Pereda in Tipos trashumantes (‘Transhumant Types’) and ironically entitled “Un sabio” (‘A Wise Man’), he rails against the nineteenth century, “a legitimate son of the glacial philosophy of the eighteenth century” (p. 1740), and concludes with a warning to his readers:
This is so, reader: in no other age, since the world has been the world, have such major efforts been made to drag human reason to extremes that reason itself abhors; never has one seen such a heap of nonsense presented as seductive lures – in religion, in philosophy, in politics, while it seems useless to point out that such clusters, differing widely among themselves, coincide on one point: a declared hatred of older institutions and beliefs.11
Gabriel Miró, who peppers his texts with Latin words as if they were gold doubloons (an ancient currency no longer in circulation but of high value) describes in El obispo leproso (‘The Leprous Bishop’, 1926), the conversation of a missionary with a group of teachers who praise their own library:
“Oh, Monseignor! I’ve had the glory of finding in my hands the editio princeps!”
“Princeps? How fine!”
“It’s Ratdolt’s. The edition in roman type, with the Elementos, the Specularia and Perspectiva. The volume Fenómenos is lost.”
“What a shame! Books . . .”12
This loss and lamentation makes a larger point than the literary gulf between the active missionary and the bookish instructors. It is not clear if the Monseignor laments the missing book or the fact that these teachers have lost their apostolic fervor and become sensuous erudites versed in books that distract from faith. In either case, however, the named texts remain indexes of changing and disquieting times encrusted in the polished modernist surface of Miró’s rich prose. In a similar vein, Valle-Inclán, in Sonata de otoño (Autumn Sonata, 1902) shows his Marqués de Bradomín, the suave seducer and decadent Don Juan, reading the Florilegio de Nuestra Señora, a book of sermons written by the bishop who founded the palace where the Marquis now finds himself. The description emphasizes the ancient and protected nature of the library by stressing the inclemency of the outside weather as opposed to the calm that radiates from the books:
At times, listening to the roar of the wind in the garden and the rustle of dry leaves scattering across the path lined by century-old myrtles would distract my attention. Bare branches brushed against leaden window panes. A monastic quiet invaded the library, a dreamy silence like that of canons engrossed in study. The atmosphere breathed ancient folios bound in parchment, humanist and theological books studied by a Bishop.13
This literary cocoon is disrupted by the entrance of Don Juan Manuel, the uncle of the Marquis’s lover, who comes in from the outside, drenched by rain, thirsty for good wine, and with plans to affirm the privileges of the family in a forthcoming legal challenge. The following lines could not express more clearly his opinion of reading:
“Nephew, are you shut up in here, reading? You’ll go blind!”
He approached the hearth and spread his hands toward the flames.
“It’s snowing outside!”
Then he turned his back to the fire and, drawing himself up before me, he exclaimed in his emblazoned voice of a great lord:
“Nephew, you’ve inherited the mania of your grandfather who also spent the days reading. It drove him crazy! . . . And what kind of huge book is that?”
His sunken, green eyes threw a scornful look at the Florilegio de Nuestra Señora.
He moved away from the fire and paced about the library, spurs clinking.
(Sonata de otoño, p. 69)
The clinking noise seems intended as a reminder that the family did not win its spurs through reading or womanly virtues. Since the Marquis can hardly be considered truly religious, the book he reads, at one time associated with a family legacy of warriors and priests, is now merely an entertainment for the bon-vivant aristocrat as well as an object of derision for the retired soldier Don Juan Manuel. As with most of what is touched by the modern spirit, the split between past and present splinters further into different forms of alienation and loss.
In a slightly different manner, in Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa, 1886), Pardo Bazán also writes about the physical repositories of writing in the old manors of Galicia. The priest Julián is confronted with a ruined library. Its chaotic disorder represents not only the disintegration of the family that owns it but also their incapacity to read any of the volumes. While the priest dusts and arranges these volumes, he chances upon traces of the old splendor:
All was placed in order now except one shelf of the bookcase; there Julián glimpsed the dark spines, edged in gold, of some ancient volumes. It was the library of an Ulloa from the beginning of the century. Julián stretched forth a hand, grasped a volume at random, opened it, and read the cover . . . The Henriad, a Poem in French, Translated into Spanish; the Author, Monsieur Voltaire. He returned the volume to its place, compressing his lips and lowering his eyes as he always did whenever something hurt or scandalized him; he was not an intolerant person, not at all extreme, but Voltaire . . . he’d crush him as he would a cockroach. However, he limited himself to condemning the library, not wiping the books with so much as a rag so that termites, worms, and spiders, ambushed everywhere, would find refuge in the smiling Arouet and his enemy Jean-Jacques, who also had slept on peacefully since around 1816.14
Few quotations better convey the power attributed to books by conservatives and liberals during the Spanish nineteenth century. Writing could never be simply writing, for it was always an interloper in a vehemently conflictive political life. While Julián looks away and condemns the enlightened library to decay, the reader cannot help but be reminded of the alternative that such books represented to the primitive society of the Ulloa manor house, a primitivism to which a noble family had degenerated. Those insects and worms persecuted by Julián’s cleansing zeal find a refuge next to Voltaire and Rousseau. The smiling, sentimental glow of these writers continues to protect the lowest forms. This library is not forgotten in Pardo Bazán’s second novel La madre naturaleza (‘Mother Nature’, 1887), centered in the same house. Gabriel Pardo, sophisticated and well read, comes from the city to the manor and searches for some intellectual entertainment in the old library that Julián had abandoned. In Pardo Bazán’s view, this library is a splendid emblem of the bleak fortunes of progressive ideas in the Galician region of Spain:
Upon opening the fronted shelves, casements lined with a wire screen instead of glass, a dusty cloud of musty, humid air escaped; ashen-colored termites scattered quickly from their preferred refuge. But, undaunted, he kept on pulling out volumes. Every book opened was a nest of larvae, a network of tunnels bored through by book-loving insects, and the cadaver of the eighteenth century, devoured by worms, arose from the grave.15
We already have seen how Larra described writing as a time-machine. Here Pardo Bazán sees books as a tunnel through which the spirit of the past can still become present. Yet in a characteristic strategy of modernity, those same books that are slyly invoked are at the same time shown to be weighed down by their foreignness to the present time, a period adequately described only by the novel in hand.
From a slightly different perspective, Unamuno made a similar point in an essay called “Examen de conciencia” (‘Examination of one’s conscience’): “And so literature lives on badly because it doesn’t respond to the naturally felt needs of the people. It doesn’t stem from life’s flowering nor is it a reserve of vital energies. This can only exist as an imitation.”16 For Unamuno, the novel, as he perceived it, was insufficient, lost in description, flat in emotion, and ultimately trivial. Typically, his opinion becomes a judgment, asserting the importance of his own feeling as a decisive tool for determining truth, an authority based on the individual that developed fully with modernity: “I’ve forgotten almost all the novels I’ve ever read in my life, and these haven’t been many; I only have a scant memory of a few, even less, any feeling at all” (I: 219). Writing becomes erasure, a willful clearing of the decks in order to start anew; out with novels, bring in the new, the nivola. Seen in this light, the apparently light-hearted discussion in Niebla (Mist, 1914) about the genre to which it belongs is the ultimate modern gesture: there is nothing that can contain Unamuno’s writing as it breaks away from all traditional molds; it is so new it merits the coining of a new designation. Unamuno never tires of repeating that the past, save for a few exceptional individuals, is unsatisfactory. In “Examen de conciencia” he affirms that the literature of the period immediately preceding his “was, in general, one of nonsense and fatigue for Spain; literature lacked liveliness. . . . [Novels] that once were hailed as daring fall from our hands today” (I: 282).
Given this opinion, it is not surprising that he remembers how “we all felt ourselves to be iconoclasts” (I: 325). Unamuno is too shrewd not to understand where this frenzy of the new will lead him: into the scrap heap of history, once his own work becomes part of the tradition that must be continually overcome. In Niebla, it is no accident that the final encounter with his character, Augusto Pérez, takes place in the library. Usually this scene is read at face value: Augusto, the character, tells Unamuno, the author, that a book will survive the writer, that a character is endlessly reborn in each reader’s imagination. By including in the text three images of his own self – one, as the author Unamuno who receives his character in his Salamanca house, another, as a portrait that hangs in the imaginary library where Unamuno welcomes Augusto Pérez, and a third, his own books included in this library – the text splinters the individual and anticipates his ultimate fall into mortality, not only as a physical body but also as a series of deceptive reproductions. They are deceptive because they can only allude to a life gone and relegated to the past.
However, backgrounding whole genres and modes of writing presents the considerable difficulty of also allowing them to persist, creating the plurality of voices that Bakhtin first accurately described as being the core of the modern novel. It is easier to declare the obsolescence of a book than actually to be assured of it. Thus the library becomes an oppressive place for writers who want to stake their own claim to a territory already occupied, to speak where so much has already been said. No one has captured better this fatigue with the weight of the past than Juan Goytisolo in a famous scene of Reivindicación. The main character (who only tenuously holds to this title in a text pervaded by self-doubt and the ironic hesitation between fiction and essay) visits a library described as “a rather shabby building” (p. 31), “a vast pantheon for learning” (p. 37). He has come armed with dead flies that he proceeds to squash within the pages of the Spanish classics, describing this action as a futile gesture of rebellion against the “exemplary weight of its [the library’s] heroism, its piety, its knowledge, its conduct, its glory” (p. 33). The lack of continuity between the pollution of the pages and the untouchable quality of the text, of which the book is only a version, reveals the impossible nature of this endeavor, similar to Don Quijote’s ill-fated charge against the windmills.
At the turn of the century some of the most distinguished literary critics were also writers: Valera, Unamuno, Ortega, Azorín. These authors seek for literature a unique space beyond the marketplace, distinct from science and insulated from progress. Yet they remain alert to new trends, sensitive to Spain’s marginalization from Europe’s intellectual center as they attempt to integrate the past. Valera values the aesthetic, elegant, and classical, claiming for literature a place of beauty and enjoyment. Unamuno transforms his literary criticism into polemics, intricate thought, and religious meditation, but clearly his topic is always the drama of the individual who is thrust into the whirlwind of the modern amid the obsolete bearings of the past. Azorín will empty out the narrative line of his novels to leave only atmosphere and feeling, so his criticism will also concentrate on texture and color, as if all texts were films, the visual taking precedence over the word. But his descriptions involve a criticism that Ortega points out:
Azorín has seen this radical fact that encompasses all others: Spain doesn’t live in the present – Spain’s current reality is the persistence of the past. Aristotle says that life is made up of transformation amid change. Well and good: Spain neither changes nor alters; nothing new begins, nothing old ever dies. Spain doesn’t change, Spain keeps on repeating herself, reiterating today what was yesterday and tomorrow, what was today. To live here is to keep on doing the same thing.17
What matters about this quotation is that one author reading another sees in the text not a description of towns or the story of a woman waiting for her lover but a diagnostic allegory of the country’s immobility. The lack of dynamic storylines, which Ortega would submit as the defining element of the contemporary novel, corresponds to Spain’s own stagnation. High literature and its criticism were involved in a national debate about the country’s soul, or what could be so imagined. Every text became the possible map for the soul of the nation. There is more to writing about writing than discussions about the novelistic craft. In fact, Ortega makes numerous disparaging comments about Baroja’s novelistic composition, characters, and language, including his mangled syntax, but still he finds in Baroja’s pages a vibrancy and verisimilitude that evoke life, especially a new sensibility for which usefulness is unimportant.18 The reader of these critics should be aware of the many hidden agendas that drive them as they comment upon each other’s work.
In an essay about modernity written in 1916 (“Nada ‘Moderno’ y ‘muy siglo xx’”), Ortega identifies the unease that the nineteenth century causes him when he writes and tries to be contemporary, that is, a writer of the twentieth century. How can one go beyond a century that has defined itself as progressive? To declare the nineteenth century superseded because we have progressed would be simply to imitate and prolong the previous century’s defining gesture. And yet Ortega introduces a wedge of dissent when he identifies a certain rigidity in progressive thought. In a sentence worthy of consideration, he observes: “Thus it is precisely that period which lays claim to progressive changes in ideas, in institutions, in human life as a whole that turns out to be the one that, ever so effectively, lends a semblance of eternity, of immutability, to its genuinely transitory behavior.”19 Yet modernity was not eternal, and it did change.
Of subsequent developments of the theme of writing about writing I can only give a glimpse, but the emerging contrast will allow a better understanding of what that phenomenon represented during modernity. It took at least fifty years, two world wars, a civil war, and other horrors of the twentieth century for the belief in progress to collapse into post-modernism. Along the way, writers and critics saw writing as an exploration of the self and its tragic existence, a denunciation of repression and class injustices, and an ironic purging of the accumulated evils of culture. Texts were declared revolutionary, contestatory, and subversive. Yet seen from today’s vantage point, these claims seem excessive. Most have been easily absorbed by the marketplace and the academic industry, and few, if any, have shaken the basis of society or affected the behavior of institutions.
In a collection of essays entitled ¿Por qué no es útil la literatura? (‘Why Isn’t Literature Useful?’), a contemporary novelist, Antonio Muñoz Molina, begins his contribution entitled “Las hogueras sin fuego” (‘Bonfires without Fire’), recalling Don Quijote’s love of books. Muñoz Molina reveals that he is a fellow enthusiast for reading and that his memory is also inhabited by literary creations: Homer’s, Quevedo’s, Flaubert’s, and Kafka’s, among others. He laments all that has been lost, whether by natural catastrophe or censorship. He has created his own memory informed by the solitary act of reading, a free and private choice he associates with modernity: “The modern world arose from the individual act of reading, promoted by the prestige of the press, which, for the first time, multiplied indefinitely the possibility of access to books.”20 This claim is not surprising, although on closer scrutiny one observes that the argument is based on the pleasure of reading, not on knowledge produced or an accurate description of reality, criticism of society, or even narrative innovation. The final image with which Muñoz Molina closes the lecture is an allusion to a painting, a silencing of the text in order to reflect on the reader, on his enjoyment:
Recall Holbein’s painting in which we see a humanist reading: he’s alone, attentive, absorbed, with a tranquil expression of happiness in his eyes, on his lips, which seem to be smiling. That man is any one of us when for a moment we break the bonds of reality and alight upon the pages of a book. I know no better paradise. Now, as we go out into the street, we’ll discover it on this May afternoon, in the open light of the street.
(¿Por qué . . .?, p. 76)
The final lines refer not to life going on in the streets but to the books for sale in Granada’s Eleventh Book Fair (1992) at which the lecture was delivered. A democratic society has promoted easy access to books, which Muñoz Molina celebrates; this access, however, would probably have been rejected by the founders of modernity, who proposed a strenuous and selective path to enlightenment. The Romantics and Realists also would have distrusted such ecumenism for reasons based on the idea of writing as exclusive to people of exquisite emotion, in the first case, and of true insight, in the second. And was the result of reading to be happiness, paradise? Unamuno would disagree, as would Juan Goytisolo. The point is not to deny that pleasure has accompanied the history of writing, which it obviously has, but to remind ourselves that other questions, other issues, generally prevail at times when writers feel compelled to write about writing.
Some contemporary examples will confirm the value of Muñoz Molina’s insight into the pleasure of reading. In Lucía Extebarria’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (Beatriz and the Heavenly Bodies), which won the 1998 Premio Nadal, the opening sentence finds the main character, Beatriz, rebuking her lover, Mónica, for what she reads. Mónica defends her rights to privacy, freedom, and pleasure:
“I can’t understand why you read that garbage,” I told her, piqued not because I wanted to censure her taste in reading but because I wanted to get her attention. . . .
She looked up, pushed her glasses to the bridge of her nose as if she were a teacher, and gave me a glance of amused superiority.
“Come on, don’t bug me by being a cultural fascist. Do you mean I’m supposed to spend the whole day reading Dostoevski or something like that?”21
Freedom from the canon is based not only on skepticism about universal values but also on another impulse of modernity: the erasure of a strong sense of history. The characters in Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes live in a world of simultaneity and reiteration where writing is so saturated with writing that originality is not possible. Beatriz expresses this idea not as a malaise but as a matter of fact:
There’s no new world nor new ocean, in life whatever you’ve screwed up stays that way wherever you are. I’m twenty-two years old and I speak for others.
These very same words have been said elsewhere. I’ve read them in books. Some were written a thousand years ago, others were published only in the last two years. It turns out that everything written ends up being only a footnote to something written before. There’s only one theme – life itself – and life is always the same.
(pp. 19–20)
If there is an echo of Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return, it is without the strain he imposes on his readers to overcome time and self with the creation of a superior man. The protagonist goes abroad, studies literature without much conviction, and falls in love several times. The narrative line is blurred, unaccented, ultimately unimportant. Moments of emotion, instants of happiness, illuminate the story. It is not surprising that in the concluding pages of the novel we find another meditation on writing: the need to free it from interpretation and the rigors of judgment. Beatriz has just told a friend that she studies English literature, and he responds:
“English literature . . . Shoot. In the first place, I can’t understand how anyone can study literature: you read books or you don’t, that’s all. You don’t study them. As for me, I’ve never understood this stuff about literary criticism. If someone has to explain it to you, you haven’t felt a thing when you read it. Bad news.”
“That’s debatable,” I contradicted him. “A text can’t be understood out of context – society, history, psychology, the degree of freedom . . .”
“Oh, knock it off. A text ought to lend itself to understanding, or at least each reader ought to understand it in his or her own way. But to give a text a context, an explanation, is to impose a limit, construe a definitive meaning for it, close it down.
“That is, each time sacrosanct criticism dictates an opinion, the text is interpreted. Victory for the critic, who controls the reader, not allowing that person to make up his or her own mind.”
(pp. 300–1)
It would be tempting to discard this opinion as naive. After all, any critic knows that control is impossible, that there is always another critic who comes up with a new, definitive interpretation. But the defense of the reader’s independence from an authoritative external opinion fits well with the dispersion of authority experienced in the contemporary world, a profusion of information that makes each voice or byte less final, more transient and partial. Muñoz Molina’s smiling reader, immersed in his own paradise, removed from reality, is part of the breakdown of the grand old narrative. Beatriz’s friends are representatives of a brave world that does not need to call itself new.
A second example is Luis Goytisolo’s novel Mzungo (1996). The narration itself is unremarkable, much less dense and meta-fictional than his previous texts. The story follows several Spaniards who travel in a ship to Africa and encounter all sorts of catastropic events. More significant is that the book includes a CD-ROM with a game loosely based on the characters and situations of the novel. The linear quality of writing becomes the random access of the hard disk. The written is now visual and whatever intellectual challenge the novel presented has now been shifted to the skills needed to transverse a set of tunnels in a small car liable to explode as it hits the walls of the labyrinth, or help a man walk along a road while a rain of coconuts threatens to knock him cold – unless a snake bites him first. On the CD-ROM sleeve we are told that the characters have escaped from the author and prefer solidarity with the reader. But more than this escape has happened: the shifts from author to reader, from truth to pleasure, from linearity to simultaneity, and from canonicity to plurality and freedom have slowly but inevitably created a different concept of writing from the one that existed at the beginning of the modern era.
1 J. Goytisolo, Revindicación del conde don Julián, 2nd edn. (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976), p. 26.
2 J. Cadalso, Cartas marruecas. Noches lúgubres, ed. J. Arce (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), p. 90.
3 J. M. Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote e Ideas sobre la novela, 8th edn. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1970), p. 55.
4 M. José de Larra, Obras completas de Fígaro, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Paris: Vve Baudry, Librería Europea, 1857), p. 101.
5 M. José de Larra, “Espagne poétique,” in Obras completas de Fígaro, p. 436.
6 M. José de Larra, “Literatura: Poesías de don Juan Bautista Alonso,” in Obras completas de Fígaro, p. 511.
7 J. María de Pereda, Obras completas, 5th edn., 2 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1948), vol. I, p. 1354.
8 B. Pérez Galdós, Obras completas, 6 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1973), vol. II, p. 68.
10 Pereda, Obras completas, vol. 1, p. 1554.
12 G. Miró, Obras completas, 2nd edn. (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1953), p. 1003.
13 R. del Valle-Inclán, Sonata de otoño; Sonata de invierno, 20th edn. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1995), p. 68.
14 E. Pardo Bazán, Obras completas, vol. I (Madrid: Aguilar, 1973), p. 178.
16 M. de Unamuno, De esto y de aquello, vol. I (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1950), pp. 27–8.
17 J. M. Ortega y Gasset, “Azorín, o primores de lo vulgar,” in El espectador, 4th edn. (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1966), p. 271.
19 J. M. Ortega y Gasset, “Nada ‘Moderno’ y ‘muy siglo xx’”, pp. 29–30.
20 L. García Montero and A. Muñoz Molina, ¿Por qué no es útil la literatura? (Madrid: Hiperión, 1993), p. 75.
21 L. Extebarria, Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (Barcelona: Destino de bolsillo, 2000), p. 13.