Critical tradition holds that in Spain, the eighteenth century is one “without novels” in the sense of those produced by realist and naturalist authors; eighteenth-century novels have been characterized as didactic works lacking the stylistic interest and psychological depth of later narrative achievements, or as simply scarce presences in a century which in Europe saw the flourishing of the form. Yet recent scholarship has developed a more nuanced picture of the novel during the eighteenth century in Spain, a century that may no longer be accused of dearth in terms of either production or quality. In scores of original and translated or adapted works, eighteenth-century novelists gave readers access to “what was ‘asked’ of literature: observation of people, a realistic description of their lives, and a knowledge of their souls based on experience and their relation to society.”1
Enlightenment fiction was the vehicle not only for moral instruction and lessons concerning virtue, but also for the observation of life and reality. Readers wanted fiction to represent experience as though it were happening before their eyes, and turned to novels for realist elements such as the portrayal of consciousness and the depiction of intense emotions, a key component of the most characteristic of Enlightenment fictional genres: the narrative of sensibility. Authors of fiction experimented with the possibilities of the form in many aspects, such as dialogical modalities and the narration of human experience in time. In fact, in the period of the Enlightenment the form was rehearsing crucial aspects of what later would serve as bases of the great Spanish literary movements which generated novels, realism and naturalism. How can we negotiate our way through didacticism and sensibility to the novel as conceived by writers such as Leopoldo Alas or Benito Pérez Galdós?
It will be useful first to review briefly some meanings of novela prior to the period under discussion, which for the purposes of this chapter extends over fifty years, from the middle of the 1770s to the end of the trienio liberal (The ‘Liberal Triennium’) in 1823. In the first half of the century the term novela designated not literary fiction but “lying, falsehood or calumny.”2 For much of the century novels, as works of fantasy appealing to the imagination, were decried by contemporary moralists as corruptors of youthful morals and as propagators of pernicious notions among women. Literary precepts adapted from Aristotle held that the novel, being a prose form, was not worthy of the esteem accorded genres such as tragedy or epic. The novel was theorized as more properly a variant of history; however, as it dealt in invented scenarios, it lacked that form’s venerable claim to truth. The few poetics that addressed the form placed the novel as part of the field of rhetoric and not poetry; due to its persuasive nature, fiction was “invented to instruct by pleasing.”3
Nevertheless, in the “Prólogo con morrión” to his novel Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio de Campazas (The History of the Famous Preacher Friar Gerund de Campazas; Otherwise Gerund Zofes, 1758), José Francisco de Isla recognized that despite the prescription that authors produce “novelas útiles,” anyone could create a novel:
Well, what did I do? Only what the creators of useful novels and epic poems do. They propose a hero, either real or fictive, making him a perfect model of arms, letters, politics, or moral virtue [ . . .]. From this, that or any other model they gather together whatever will serve to promote the perfection of their little idol, filling out the traits which they want him to exemplify. They apply a degree of inventiveness to the depiction of this figure, and with proportion and wit, imagine the adventures, incidents, and accidents they believe most natural so as to link story and action, deeds and history, and lo, you’ve got an epic poem, in prose or verse, exactly as required.4
As Isla points out, the rules for production of fiction were well established: develop a hero whose depiction “imitates nature in its universal aspect” (as Ignacio de Luzán put it in his 1737 version of Aristotle’s Poetics);5 exercise poetic invention so as to please the reader and attain verisimilitude; ensure unity of action. Yet Isla’s vocabulary reflects the variability of terminology for description of fictional narratives: both novelas and poemas épicos refer to the novel; as would, changeably throughout the century, romance, fábula (‘fable’) historia (‘story / history’) historia fingida (‘fictional history’), anécdota (‘anecdote’) and even memoria (‘memoir’).
The typology of fictional form also was flexible: the abate (‘abbé’) José Marchena, in the “Discurso preliminar” to his Lecciones de filosofía moral y elocuencia (‘Lessons on Moral Philosophy and Eloquence’, 1820), identified the novel’s similarity to “tragedy or comedy”;6 and José Munárriz’s translation of Blair’s Lecciones sobre la Retórica y las Bellas Letras (‘Lessons on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres’, 1789) grouped romances and novelas together in his section on prose fiction.7 Brown observes that the term novela was not used to refer to the form in the modern sense until 1788;8 until the end of the century, historia or romance frequently designated longer texts such as Don Quijote or Fray Gerundio, while novela often denoted shorter fictional works.9 Experimentation in the shape of fiction drew on and enhanced the variability of period typology: for example, José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas (‘Letters from Morocco’), an epistolary narrative, and Noches lúgubres (‘Dark Nights of Dejection’), a prose dialogue (both produced in the middle of the 1770s), offered readers innovative structure and unusual narrative framing.
The form’s pliability, along with the array of publications flooding the markets of Madrid and Valencia and stocking the import trade – adventures such as Jerónimo Martín Bernardo’s El Emprendedor (‘The Entrepreneur’, 1805); satires such as Diego Ventura Rejón y Lucas’s Aventuras de Juan Luis (‘The Adventures of Juan Luis’, 1781); Rousseauian considerations of love as in José Mor de Fuentes’s La Serafina (1798); epistolary novels such as José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas (1788–9);10 narratives of sensibility such as those collected in Ignacio García Malo’s bestselling Voz de la naturaleza (‘The Voice of Nature’, 1787–92); parodies of the Quijote such as Bernardo María de Calzada’s translation of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quijote (1752) as Don Quijote con faldas (1808) – suggest that in the second half of the century the novel was a form of greater variety and availability to readers than traditionally acknowledged by criticism. Indeed, the 1780s and 1790s were a thriving period for production of the novel in Spain; one gauge of the genre’s popularity – and profitability – is the dissemination of collections of both Peninsular and translated foreign novels, such as the El ramillete o los aguinaldos de Apolo (‘Apollo’s Sweets and Soups’, 1798–1801) to a public hungry for examples of the form. As Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor noted in the “Prólogo” to his novel La Leandra (1797), the 1790s produced an “amazing multitude of novels” for a booming readership.11 Owing in part to publishers’ and authors’ financial motivations and in part to changing aesthetic standards, the novel was rehabilitated by century’s end: as the prospectus for the Colección universal de novelas y cuentos (‘Universal Collection of Novels and Stories’, 1789–90) stated, “novels have the honor of being one of the first kinds of known literature and one to which the republic of letters owes a great measure of its progress.”12
During the first half of the eighteenth century many types of literature, such as the essays of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo’s Teatro crítico universal (‘Universal Theatre of Criticism’, 1726–40), cultivated readers’ enjoyment of writings in prose.13 Frequent reprintings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works such as novels by María de Zayas, Cervantes’s La Galatea, picaresque narratives, and devotional texts indicate a steady market for the consumption of both fictional and non-fictional narratives in prose. In addition, as Hunter observes, characteristics of “the novel” – e.g. the depiction of everyday existence, language unfettered by privileged style, subjectivity, vicariousness14 – were present and under development in a variety of prose texts popular in Europe in the first half of the century, such as saints’ lives, accounts of marvels and wonders, or urban “guides.” In Spain, Diego de Torres Villarroel’s Los desahuciados del mundo (‘The Hopeless of the World’, 1736–7) employed everyday language within the genre of the satirical urban guide – a template for which in Spanish narrative was provided by Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El diablo cojuelo (‘The Devil Upon Two Sticks’, 1641) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El mundo por de dentro (‘The World From Within’, 1612) – to escort readers through the vice-ridden spaces and practices of the court; and Torres’s hugely popular autobiographical Vida (The Remarkable Life of Don Diego, Being the Autobiography of Diego Torres Villarroel, 1743) inscribed the author’s adventures as a dancing master, healer, astrologer and Salamancan professor, vicariously engaging readers in his exploits.15 By the middle of the century the novel was further aided in development through print media such as journalism. In periodicals, such as José Clavijo y Fajardo’s El Pensador (‘The Thinker’, 1762–7), the dialogic structuring of social criticism offered readers diverse psychological attitudes and narrative personalities.16 By so variously supplementing the range of literary ideas available to the public in the popular theatres, writer and publishers of prose made it possible for readers to imagine themselves in dialogue with an author, undertake a personal reading of a text, and find rhythms and conventions not possible in verse.17
By the middle of the century the way was paved for the immense popularity of Isla’s satirical Fray Gerundio de Campazas (1758).18 Fray Gerundio depicts characters in everyday situations – dressing, taking a walk – and incorporates non-fictional texts, such as sermons, within the larger form of a moral tale concerning education, ambition and the dangers and pleasures of the imagination. Entwining invented episodes from the life of a young preacher with discussions of rhetorical theory, Isla trains the reader to shed ignorance of the differences between bad and good preaching and, thereby, to become a more thoughtful and less gullible Christian and citizen. Critics have faulted the characters’ lack of psychological depth and the plot’s episodic structure. Yet the eager reception of Fray Gerundio indicates that the text certainly offered mid-eighteenth-century readers key aspects of what they were looking for in fiction: fulfilling its didactic mission through a consistent presentation of the reform required in sacred oratory, the narrative complies with the dictates of precept in its combination of the useful and the pleasurable, and incorporates a variety of prose forms – e.g. sermons and rhetorical instruction – appealing to audiences of the period.19
After 1760, a good indicator of fictional form’s post-Gerundian possibilities is found in a definition of the novel offered by Marchena in his “Discurso preliminar”: the abate divides novels into pastoral and all others, which either “paint the origin and progress of a passion” or narrate the life of a hero, “linking it [the individual’s life] with the events of a human life, gradually unfolding the character of the subject they depict.”20 Marchena identifies elements that readers would come to crave in fiction during the period of the Enlightenment and afterward: the workings of emotions on the mind and body, and the growth of a character in tension and resonance with the society surrounding him or her. Gerundio is indeed a character of imagination and passion whose inclinations bring him both success and failure. Yet his depiction does not include the sharing of others’ pain; he is rarely mindful of his own feelings; he is not, in other words, an aware, social being. One cannot lay Gerundio’s characterization at the doorstep of the novel’s didacticism, for even in one of the most didactic of novels produced during the eighteenth century, Pedro Montengón’s El Eusebio (1786),21 the protagonist exhibits a keen awareness of self: Eusebio is a thinking, reacting character through all his travails; he feels compassion for others, cries, worries, and is confused by conflicting thoughts and impulses; he imagines, remembers, and reflects upon his mistakes and his desires. Gerundio, on the other hand, is a character developed before a period in which readers increasingly sought contact with individual, immediate personal experience through fictional accounts. If earlier categorization of the novel as romance or historia fingida emphasized the shaping of the form within the dangerous domain of the unreal, later in the century the novela encoded concern with the “array of possibilities” inherent in real human existence.22 From the 1770s onward, what Enlightenment readers began to appreciate was the novel’s capacity to depict the complex mix of emotion, passion, desire, thought and circumstance that was the truth of human life.
Observation of the self was of prime importance to Enlightenment thought, which privileged the consciousness of the individual and taught the awareness of sensation as a source of knowledge of the truth. The Enlightenment cultivated a citizenry trained to be observers of “the real” as something that encompassed both the internal and the external, both underlying cause and surface appearance; the popularization of observation was an important factor informing what eighteenth-century readers and authors came to think of as “reality” in fictional characterization.
The eighteenth century saw the production of numerous and widely read works treating the role and methodology of “observation” and “experiment.” In his 1730s treatise on observational method, Petrus van Musschenbroek advocated that above all the observer “must be persuaded that as a thing may be [peut être] in two different ways, ordinarily it will be so in the way most contrary to appearances.”23 Van Musschenbroek cautioned the observing subject to avoid single-minded adherence to any one ideology, perspective or instrument so as to get beyond the surface of things and find the truth. In the 1770s Jean Senebier reminded readers that observation was integral to the lived self: “all moments of life impose upon men the obligation to survey themselves, to re-enter the past, to glance toward the future . . . [and to] always have the senses alert”; the role of the observing self is that of a “reader of nature” who interprets the complexities of experience.24 By the 1780s, enlightened Spanish readers were well acquainted with these and other works on experimental observation.
A more general audience was aware of the variety of public entertainments in urban theatres that featured visual and perceptual demonstrations with the camera obscura or electricity. Throughout the second half of the century, exhibitions of experiments in hydraulics, physics, and chemistry were advertised in El Diario de Madrid. Popularized science demonstrations played an important role in “the initiation of beholders into concealed causes,”25 that is, the orientation of observers toward inquiry into the causes underlying the illusory, into that which lies below the exterior of things. In other words, a public increasingly comfortable with and trained to observe phenomena and recognize effects of “the real” and its relationship to inner or hidden experience was well under development by the end of the eighteenth century.
Enlightenment philosophy emphasized inquiry into links between feeling and morality; between the physical operations of sensing and their moral transcendence. These links could be traced through the concept of “sentiment” or “sensibility” (sensibilidad). Sensibility had as its intellectual basis the sensationalist philosophy of Locke and Condillac, in the assumption that the source of all knowledge is individual human experience as operative through the senses, such as sight. Sensibility was both a physiological condition and a moral practice. On the plane of morality, sensibility was engaged through sympathy or innate responsiveness to the sight of another’s suffering or extremes of emotion. The notion of an innate human capacity to respond sympathetically to what is experienced by others was augmented during the eighteenth century by medical demonstrations of sensibility as a physiological process: the sense of self and of that self’s relation to others in society was grounded in raw physical experience and the ideas of the mind arising from bodily impressions. In the concept of “sensibility,” scientific and literary discourses converged in investigations of questions such as the function of sight in the links between mind and body, the moral grounding of physical impulses, and other aspects of what from the middle of the eighteenth century onward was termed “psychology.” An immensely popular genre of fiction, the narrative of sensibilidad, provided readers with opportunities to imagine that they were observing the resonance of the experience of feeling. Sentimental fiction postulated the basis of the moral life in bodily feeling; narratives of sensibility demonstrated that in the “progress of a passion” (as Marchena put it), the workings of inner emotion are visible upon the bodies of characters and observable for evidence of moral relationships among members of society.
Readers of periodicals such as the 1780s Correo literario de la Europa (‘Literary Courier of Europe’) could learn of novels of sensibility along with the most recent foreign publications. As either imports or contraband the demand for such novels was high, as was the impact of such works in translation. Spanish readers embraced the literature of sensibility, thanks in part to publishers who commissioned translations of preponderantly French foreign novels as a means of capitalizing on a lucrative market, and in part to the work of numerous translators (such as Marchena himself, who rendered works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire), some of whom sought to bring important currents of European thought to Spanish audiences, and some of whom hoped to gain financially in the market for translated literature. Translations of foreign novels injected new prose styles and narrative techniques into the repertory of Spanish authors and introduced readers to a variety of characters, themes, and situations not available in native productions: for example, Bernardo María de Calzada’s 1791 translation of François Vernes’s El viajador sensible (‘The Sympathetic Traveler’, 1786) presented readers with a narrative voice imbued with Deist enthusiasm.26 Reginald Brown observes that “the reading of translations [ . . .] awakened the taste of the public at large and helped formulate the criterion by which the cultivated elites only a few years later would judge romantic literary productions.”27 Despite the Consejo de Castilla’s 1799 prohibition of new licences for the publication of novels and a royal decree of 1805 that increased the difficulty of book publishing, readers were able to obtain copies of Spanish translations published in cities such as Bordeaux and Paris. Between the 1770s and the 1820s, some of the most popular and celebrated European fictional works by Chateaubriand, Richardson, Rousseau, Vernes and others, including many novels of sensibility, were made available in Spanish translations or adaptations.
By the 1780s, Spanish readers had cried with Richardson’s heroines and experienced Rousseauian transports in considering nature and virtue.28 While both El Eusebio and Fray Gerundio are didactic narratives of a protagonist’s education, a crucial way in which their protagonists differ is signaled by the depiction of Eusebio’s “ardent sensibility” (p. 277) – that is, of Eusebio as emblematic of the emotional nature of human perception of reality, which by century’s end had become the novel’s province. And though a wide variety of novels were produced during the latter part of the century, the narrative of sensibility is the Enlightenment fictional form par excellence for its encoding of preoccupation with the workings of the senses, the role of the feeling, imagining body in moral conduct, and the importance of observation to an individual’s ability to reach his or her own conclusions about “the truth.”
Indeed, the novel of sensibility claimed intense emotional agitation as the ground on which a moral character manifested itself. Within the culture of sensibility, the exhibition of extremes of affect when confronted by others’ pain or joy was an important indicator of a person’s virtue. In both autocthonous and translated foreign narratives of sensibility available to Spanish readers during the period of the Enlightenment, characters are overcome by feelings displayed through exterior signs of inner agitation, such as sighing, weeping, falling to one’s knees, incoherent babbling, and fainting. When in Louise Brayer de Saint-Léon’s Maclovia y Federico (1804; published in Spanish translation in 1814) the narrator informs the reader that Maclovia “tried to pronounce a few words, but fainted . . . succumbing to the force of the cruel sensations that she experienced,”29 and when in Ignacio García Malo’s 1787 Flavio e Irene Flavio “could find no words to express his pain” and so “took to weeping and sighing,”30 the reader is provided an opportunity to learn that the feeling body evidences the person bound by social consequence.
Yet the novel of sensibility equally features scenes of emotional agitation as devices by which to illustrate the superiority of reason’s capacity to distinguish and organize. As the protagonist of García Malo’s La desventurada Margarita (‘The Unfortunate Margarita’, 1787) put it, “Passions are moderated by reason.”31 In Vicente Martínez Colomer’s El Valdemaro (1792), the protagonist’s mentor Ascanio counsels that the best man “imposes silence [ . . .] upon his senses as he judges appropriate, and, delivered to himself through that silent repose, knows the essence of his being.”32 In Montengón’s El Eusebio, the passions of the soul are “sinister” and are to be combatted by thoughful resistance. The ability to feel is the basis of moral existence in society; but a telling marker of virtue is found in the ability to harness human reason to convert the force of affect into orderly perception of the truth.
Providence is the benevolent guiding hand that must be acknowledged in order for a person to understand his or her place in the world: as the narrator of El viajador sensible states, “I was less confused by wondering where Divine Providence might place me, than I was by imagining how it had been able to find me” (p. 12). Yet although characters in these texts endure dishonor, disgrace, deception, and disasters such as war and shipwrecks, their resignation in the face of what they understand to be divine design provides moral underpinnings to plots dealing in what might seem to be merely episodic accidents. “Let yourselves be governed by Divine Providence,” cautions Ascanio in El Valdemaro; “Nothing happens that does not owe recognition of its beginnings to the supreme and absolute Being that has created all” (p. 134). While in El Eusebio the protagonists Hardy and Eusebio embrace Senecan philosophy when faced with the rigors of destiny, paramount throughout narratives such as La Eumenia and El Valdemaro is the message that Providence guides friends toward the happiness and just rewards for which their virtuous conduct renders them worthy. In this respect, the Spanish novel of sensibility grounds what later will become one of the chief themes of Romantic fiction: the inevitability of the dictates of Fate.
“‘All God’s judgments are beyond the comprehension of man’,” states the protagonist Termonio in La Eumenia, “affectionately taking the hand of the discouraged old man; ‘but we must have faith in His compassion.’”33 Termonio’s outstretched hand exemplifies an important aspect of sensibility: it was conceived as a social virtue, a “kind virtue” among enlightened citizens, as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos phrased it in his 1788 “Elogio fúnebre de Carlos III” (‘Funeral Elegy for Carlos III’).34 Sensibility was a state of social affections emanating favorably toward others, postulating a depth of connection among members of society. “How tender and gentle is the bond of friendship when formed by two sensitive and suffering hearts!” exclaims the narrator of La Eumenia; “How such feeling grows when it is based in love and virtue!” (p. 101). Scenes of suffering and joy encode the inextricable bond between moral goodness and the naturalness and complexity of feelings. The characters in narratives of sensibility exemplify the Enlightenment prizing of sociability as an ideal means by which persons might learn from and with one another and, in thinking about others’ experiences, begin to think for themselves.
Within the Enlightenment discourse on sensibility, not only virtuous conduct, but also virtuous conduct among others who feel, is the basis of development of the moral compass. Thus the novel of sensibility predominantly features scenes in which several feeling persons are united, demonstrating emotion and sharing cognizance of one another’s behavior. Often such scenes are staged around the simple occasion of suffering on someone’s part; frequently the pretext is a re-encounter between family, friends, or lovers. As characters reveal themselves to one another or recount their tales of woe and hardship, their very grouping provides tableaux or living pictures of virtue and of the human capacity for sympathy. The tableau of the narrative of sensibility assembles persons in a scene of suffering or joy in such a way that the experience of each is detailed clearly for the reader’s “eye,” while the group’s sympathy enhances depiction of pathos and conveys a moral message about the resonance of virtue.35 In Maclovia y Federico, for example, “the agitation of the canoness, the tumult felt by Maclovia, and Federico’s joy upon seeing his most beloved companion [ . . .] offered a most interesting scene” (pp. 199–200). And in El Valdemaro, anagnorisis grounds a scene in which Valdemaro hears that a stranger on a ship is his sister: “Such an unexpected blow could not fail to overwhelm the most stalwart heart. Valdemaro fell in a faint, Rosendo stood stupefied, and the old man was hardly less than confused” (p. 114). The three men are grouped in mutual shock; the reaction of each is clearly detailed for the reader’s imagination; and as his two companions share Valdemaro’s agitation, the reader witnesses sympathy in the response of such virtuous sensibilities to distress.
Experimentation in poses and attitudes expressive of emotion was a constant in both theatrical (e.g. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s 1773 El delincuente honrado, ‘The Honorable Delinquent’) and narrative (e.g. Laurence Sterne’s 1768 A Sentimental Journey) literature in the second half of the century across Europe, fueled by factors such as Addison’s and Steele’s critical appreciation of pantomimic style in acting, Diderot’s enthusiasm for Richardson’s sentimental scenes, and reappraisal of classical theories of gesture and persuasion such as those of Quintilian and Cicero, who in the De oratore instructed that as emotion “is often so confused as to be obscured and almost smothered out of sight,” the person who would have the most impact on audiences will “dispel the things that obscure [emotion] and take up its prominent and striking points.”36 Sentimental fiction cultivated a rhetorical visuality designed to maximize the reaction of readers; techniques such as the tableau were crucial to sentimentalism’s invocation of readers’ emotional responsiveness to the illusion of observation.
Further engagement of Enlightenment interest in observation is achieved through depiction of the act of seeing. For example, the narrator of El viajador sensible describes the “easy violence” with which he feels compelled to observe a person (p. 78); in Maclovia y Federico, a character, “pierced by the compelling spectacle before her eyes, could not for a moment” remove herself from the scene she had witnessed (p. 114). In such scenes, the represented act of seeing functions as a means of enhancing the truthfulness of the character’s experience. The importance of scenes of observation to developments in fictional form during the period of the Enlightenment and afterward cannot be overstated. In fact, the great nineteenth-century Spanish literary movements that focused on depiction of “the real” – costumbrismo, realismo, and naturalismo – have complex eighteenth-century origins in a wide-ranging public disposition to observe, which was stoked by the availability and popularity of narratives of sensibility.
As Russell Sebold has pointed out, the majority of Spanish poets and authors of the second half of the eighteenth century knew, from Locke, that ideas in the mind originate with sensations in the body:37 with “such an impression or motion,” as Locke put it, “made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding.”38 The role of sensationalist philosophy in the literary ideas of the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for later, Romantic thematics such as the dynamism of nature and the universality of pain and feeling. As early as the 1770s, José Cadalso harnessed the properties of sensationalism to render the reader witness to a being awash with sensations that produce perceptions. The Noches lúgubres (which, through its numerous printings from 1789 onward, became one of the most popular and influential works of fiction produced during the Enlightenment) represent a character’s cogitations as his physical being is stimulated by his sight and other senses. This brief and important text, in which the reader is made witness to not only the protagonist Tediato’s manifestations of inward suffering but also his thoughts during every experienced sensation, is a meditation on the role of consciousness in the development of the sense of “self.”
The Noches is centrally concerned with the depiction of a mind at work in its own consciousness of itself. Tediato is a character constructed through consciousness in the sense that Locke described: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind [ . . .] and it cannot be less than revelation, that discovers to another, Thoughts in my mind, when I can find none there myself” (vol. II, i, p. 115). What passes through Tediato’s mind – every thought that passes through Tediato’s mind – is narrated in the course of the Noches as the constitution of his experience. But it is the discourse of sensation that engenders the succession of thoughts constitutive of the character’s “self.” “Self is that conscious thinking thing,” observed Locke, “[ . . .] which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and is so concern’d for itself, as far as that consciousness extends” (II, xxvii, p. 341). Tediato has ideas of horror, of coldness, or of pain in connection with the data brought to his mind by what he sees, touches, hears, or feels upon his skin. Yet Tediato agonizes in his awareness: his universal suffering (“fastidio universal” as the poet Juan Meléndez Valdés would term it in 1794) is that of the sentient conscious self existing through time in a body whose sensations lead to ideas confounding reason.39
Cadalso’s text inserts itself into a discourse on consciousness and self-awareness channeled through a variety of eighteenth-century European works, from Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754) to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). In El viajador sensible, for example, the narrator minutely records his awareness of the sensations to which he is subject with each new experience: “Signs of pain attract me more strongly than those of pleasure,” he avers (p. 62); “How many painful sensations I had to keep experiencing continously!” he exclaims during a dark passage on the return journey (p. 175). Enlightenment awareness of consciousness would later inform the agonized, ironic analyses penned by the costumbrista author Mariano José de Larra, who in essays such as “La Nochebuena de 1836” (‘Christmas Eve 1836’) and “El día de difuntos de 1836” (‘All Souls Day 1836’) narrated his perplexity and pain at “not understanding clearly all that I see” and at watching himself wander the streets “at the mercy of my thoughts.”40 The fiction of the period of the Enlightenment developed narrative techniques that permitted the reader-observer to have the impression of being “inside” the space of self, to see moral choices and struggles from within a character’s perspective.
Experimentation with dialogic modalities generated new means of representing the experience of self. Epistolary narrative, for example, offered readers the illusion of access to a multitude of characters’ intimate thoughts. In José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas, the interwoven letters of three distinct personalities function as interior monologues and provide “narrative immediacy” of individual experience.41 Typographical markers, such as the alternation of italics and plain font, served to distinguish characters’ voices and foreground individual utterances: in El Valdemaro, italics divide reported speech from a speaking character’s first-person interventions (e.g., pp. 80–96, 131–5), enhancing the effect of that character’s authentic persona or speaking self. The dialogue form of the Noches lúgubres alternates first-person, present-tense utterances as a means of representing the characters’ awareness of experience in the very moment they live it. Yet another technique, used to advantage in novels of sensibility, is that of the narrator’s sympathetic exclamations. In these instances, the narrator interjects what he or she imagines the character is feeling, but without encoding the information as either direct or indirect speech. In Maclovia y Federico, the narrator shifts abruptly from describing Maclovia’s features to informing the reader “How she would have liked to remain alone until Bathilde returned . . .!” (p. 79); in El viajador sensible, when the narrator shifts from stating that a grieving man had to be pulled from the grave of his daughter to exclaiming “Ah! . . . What will never be again!” (p. 104), the emotional charge is not imputed to the character, but rather originates from within his or her consciousness.
The greatest impression of a character’s interior experience is obtained through narratorial omniscience. The prevalence of an omniscient narrator is an eighteenth-century innovation that in nineteenth-century Spain became essential to realist depictions of characters’ lived experience. Omniscience is grounded in narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse, which permits an apparently seamless transition from description to representation of a character’s inner state, and is identifiable when the narrator “places himself, when reporting the words or thoughts of a character, directly into the experiential field of the character, and adopts the latter’s perspective in regard to both time and place.”42 Though with greater frequency narratives of the period aimed for the effect of an “experiential field” through techniques such as sympathetic exclamations, readers could encounter free indirect discourse in many texts, in particular in translated (French) novels of sensibility. For example, in Maclovia y Federico, the narrator both reports Maclovia’s thoughts and represents her perspective:
The events of the day arose reproduced in her tumultous imagination, and in that moment a torrent of tears sprang from her eyes and unburdened her oppressed heart. It was certain that the Emperor had decided her fate, how could she possibly resist complying with his high command; and above all, how could she renounce her beloved Federico . . .?
(pp. 56–7)
By directly entering Maclovia’s thoughts, the narrator appears to have complete, unmediated commerce with her mind. Verbal tense is key to the transition into the character’s experiential field, indicated by the introduction of the imperfect (“It was”). As Pascal says, the use of the imperfect tense in place of the preterite heightens listeners’ or readers’ “sympathetic self-identification with the subject of the verb concerned” (The Dual Voice, p. 11). Through the technique of free indirect discourse, the purveyor of such perfect access to a character’s consciousness tempts readers with an eighteenth-century dream of the objective observer as the supremely sympathetic self.
In “The Experimental Novel” (1879), Emile Zola posits a novelist who would depict reality as an objective observer who can, in the mode of scientific experimentation, muster facts and data observed from “the body of man, as shown by his sensory and cerebral phenomena, both in their normal and pathological condition.”43 Zola’s proposal of the union of scientific objectivity with both “cerebral” and “sensory” phenomena – that is, both mental and physical data – within the fictional experiment was augmented by Leopoldo Alas, who notes in his 1882 essay “On Naturalism” that depiction of “the real” must incorporate subtle and difficult combinations of cerebral and sensory phenomena, in such a way that characters are products of “natural action combined with prior forces, composed, received and assimilated over a long period of time, and in accordance with the individual character.”44 In other words, “observation” must take into account multiple, shifting, and even ephemeral factors such as time and memory, their repression and interpretation by characters, their uncertain meanings and complex effects. In the realist or naturalist novel, only the depiction of such messily mixed cerebral and bodily experiences will engage the reader-observer in recognition of the “real.”
Enlightenment texts such as Noches lúgubres and narratives of sensibility equally aim to represent mixed cerebral and bodily experiences as “real” to the reader-observer. One key difference between these works and the novels of a century later is the absence of irony from many Enlightenment narratives engaged in the work of depiction of consciousness; another difference is suggested by the reliance of later novels on the imperfect tense in the free indirect discourse that became typical of nineteenth-century realism, corroborated by Alas’s stipulation that to seem “real,” characters must be the products of action developed over a long period of time. Nevertheless the Enlightenment opened the field of possibilities in literary representation of “natural action” (as Alas put it), generating fictional techniques and forms that permitted readers to engage in the practice of observation, crucial to the later realist project of representing complexities of character spanning memory and time.
1 J. Álvarez Barrientos, La novela del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar), p. 16.
2 L. Almanza, “Notas sobre la voz ‘novela’ en Feijoo y en la literatura de su época,” in II Simposio sobre el Padre Feijoo y su siglo (Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 1981), p. 199.
3 G. Mayans y Siscar, “Retórica,” Obras completas, 5 vols., ed. Antonio Mestre Sanchís (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Oliva, 1984), vol. III, p. 285.
4 José Francisco de Isla, Fray Gerundio de Campazas, ed. Russell P. Sebold, 4 vols. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1969), vol. I, pp. 10–11.
5 I. De Luzán, La poética, o reglas de la poesía en general y de sus principales especies, ed. Russell P. Sebold (Barcelona: Labor, 1977), p. 172.
6 J. Marchena, “Discurso preliminar,” Lecciones de filosofía moral y elocuencia . . . de los mejores autores castellanos, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: Pedro Beaume, 1820), vol. I, p. xxvii.
7 H. Blair, Lecciones sobre la retórica y las bellas letras, tr. José Luis Munárriz, 4 vols. (Madrid: Ibarra, 1816–17), vol. III, pp. 291–9.
8 R. Brown, La novela española 1700–1850 (Madrid: Dirección General de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1953), p. 13.
9 Álvarez, La novela del siglo XVIII, pp. 16–29.
10 The Cartas were composed in the early 1770s but not published until much later.
11 A. Valladares de Sotomayor, La Leandra, 2 vols. (Madrid: Antonio Ulloa, 1797), vol. I, p. 16.
12 Quoted in Álvarez, La novela del siglo XVIII, p. 222.
14 J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 23–4.
15 The first four parts (what Torres termed “trozos”) of the Vida were published in 1743; the fifth part appeared in 1750; the sixth in 1758; and all six parts were published together in an edition of 1799 (as volume 15 of Torres’s complete works).
16 I. Urzainqui, “Autocreación y formas autobiográficas en la prensa crítica del siglo XVIII”, Anales de literatura española 11 (1995), pp. 194–5.
17 Álvarez, La novela del siglo XVIII, p. 39.
18 The first part of the novel appeared in 1758, its edition of 1500 copies selling out in three days; the second part was not published until 1768. The first complete Spanish edition with both parts appeared in 1787.
19 The novel was prohibited in 1760 as a response to denunciations from outraged preachers and members of religious orders, which led to numerous pirated and foreign editions of the work.
20 Marchena, “Discurso preliminar,” vol. I, p. xxvi.
21 P. Montengón, El Eusebio, ed. Fernando García Lara (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1984).
22 Álvarez, La novela del siglo XVIII, p. 171.
23 P. van Musschenbroek, “Discours sur la meilleure manière de faire les expériences,” cited from Cours de physique experimentale et mathématique, 2 vols. (Leyden: Luchtmans, 1769), vol. I, p. 182.
24 J. Senebier, Essai sur l’art d’observer et de faire des expériences, 2 vols. (Geneva: J. J. Paschoud, 1802; earlier edition Geneva, 1775), pp. 3, 25.
25 B. M. Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 150.
26 Vernes’s original was published in 1786 as Le voyageur sentimental, ou Ma promenade à Yverdun.
27 Brown, La novela española, p. 25.
28 For example, Rousseau’s Emile was well known in Spain by the 1780s and was a model for Montengón’s El Eusebio; Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos knew of (and had probably read) both Richardson’s Pamela and his Clarissa by 1785 (cited in Álvarez, La novela española del siglo XVIII, p. 205). Both Pamela and Clarissa were available in Spanish from 1794.
29 L. Brayer de Saint—Léon, Maclovia y Federico y las minas del Tirol. Anécdota verdadera traducida del francés (Valencia: Miguel Domingo, 1814), p. 55. The original French title was Maclovie ou les mines du Tyrol.
30 I. García Malo, Flavio e Irene, in Voz de la naturaleza, ed. Guillermo Carnero (Madrid: Támesis, 1995), p. 256.
31 I. García Malo, La desventurada Margarita, in Voz de la naturaleza, p. 195.
32 V. Martínez Colomer, El Valdemaro (1792), ed. Guillermo Carnero (Alicante: Instituto de Estudios “Juan Gil-Albert,” 1985), p. 61.
33 G. Zavala y Zamora, La Eumenia, Obras narrativas, ed. Guillermo Carnerod (Barcelona: Sirmio-Quaderns Crema, 1992), p. 69.
34 G. Melchor de Jovellanos, “Elogio fúnebre de Carlos III,” in Colección de varias obras en prosa y verso, 6 vols. (Madrid: León Amarita, 1830), vol. II, p. 400.
35 The scenes described here differ from the eighteenth-century performance genre of the tableau vivant. See Kirsten Gram Homström, Monodrama. Attitudes. Tableaux vivants. Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion 1770–1815 (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells, 1967).
36 Cicero, De oratore, tr. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), vol. III, 1, vii, 215: 171–3.
37 R. P. Sebold, “La filosofía de la Ilustración y el nacimiento del Romanticismo español,” Trayectoria del Romanticismo español (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1983), p. 94.
38 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John E. Yolton (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1990), vol. II, i, p. 117.
39 R. P. Sebold, “Sobre el nombre español del dolor romántico,” in El rapto de la mente: poética y poesía dieciochescas (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1979), pp. 133–4.
40 M. José de Larra, “El día de difuntos de 1836” and “La Nochebuena de 1836,” in Artículos varios, ed. Evaristo Correa Calderón (Madrid: Castalia, 1976), pp. 543 and 553.
41 S. Dale, Novela innovadora en las “Cartas Marruecas” de Cadalso (New York: Hispanic Institute, 1997), pp. 38–47.
42 R. Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the Nineteenth-century European Novel (Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 9.
43 E. Zola, “The Experimental Novel,” in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, tr. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), p. 32.
44 L. Alas, “Del naturalismo,” in Leopoldo Alas: Teoría y crítica de la novela española, ed. Sergio Beser (Barcelona: Laia, 1972), p. 141.