4 The regional novel: evolution and consolation
For the intellectual historian of nineteenth-century Europe, certain words flag critical foci of interest: “revolution,” “evolution,” “nation,” “travel,” “industrialism.” These words are no less important in the literature of the period, and in Spain they have a particular relationship with the regional novel. Of these words, “evolution,” habitually associated with the ideas of Darwin, will be central to the discussion in this chapter. Common usage has accustomed us to apply it retrospectively and rather indiscriminately to areas of nineteenth-century life which, in their day, were innocent of such concepts. Yet the term “evolution” itself is one that has evolved. Coined by Haller in 1744, it initially indicated “preformationism,” the gradual unfolding of a form of life already perfectly formed. In the course of the nineteenth century, “evolution” came to have the force of “transmutation” with which we associate it today.1 Thus the shift was one from a consoling thought to a challenging one, from a position that maintained that change was, as it were, always and already foreseen, to the idea of evolution as a much more disturbing and challenging perspective, signaling that a change effected might become something new. The evolving concept of the term “evolution” thus moves from the idea of change as part of a pre-existing master plan (evolution as development) to the idea of change as a process lacking linear certainty (evolution as variation). When seen in the context of the regional novel, the other terms, such as “revolution,” “nation,” “travel,” and “industrialism,” are either symptomatic of “evolution” or act as stimuli to its discovery (in either of its two meanings – as development or variation).
While the term “regional novel,” when applied to the literature of nineteenth-century Spain, is not precisely a misnomer, it does cover a variety of positions. For example, the term does not include literature from all the regions but primarily refers to literature of the North (both Cantabria and Galicia) and of Andalucía. Its origins are generally held to be derived from a mixture of foreigners’ travel writings, such as those of Ford (Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 1844) and Borrow (The Bible in Spain, 1842), and locally produced Romantic costumbrista vignettes of life and manners. The two best-known collections, those of Mariano José de Larra and Mesonero Romanos, depict Madrid.2 Compared with the major novelistic productions associated with realism and naturalism, such as the novelas contemporáneas (‘contemporary social novels’) of Galdós or La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas (“Clarín”), the novels associated with regionalism in Spain run the risk of being sidelined for their political predictability and of being classed as inferior for their literary naivety. Such critical dismissals do not do them justice; examples such as Juan Valera’s Pepita Jiménez (1874) and Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa, 1886) by Emilia Pardo Bazán hold their own alongside the major works of realism.
The novels of regionalism do not, of course, habitually conform to the canons of realism, and if we read them according to expectations associated with realism, we are likely to be disappointed. If, however, we read these novels as examples of literary and political consciousness, viewing them as vehicles of cultural exchange, even if, at times, their enterprise turns out to be misdirected or failed, then their role in the history of the Spanish novel appears crucial. Furthermore, the positions adopted by the novels of regionalism, symptomatic of Spanish culture and politics at the time, extend far beyond the nineteenth century. Attitudes and ideologies will echo with a regularity as striking as it is chilling through the course of the twentieth century. For example, the return to the pueblo and the scrutiny of rural life to see whether it signals sickness or holds out hope of recovery to good health will be salient features in the writings of the Generation of 1898, essayists, novelists, and poets of the turn of the century whose concern was Spain’s national identity and potential decadence. Subsequently, the appropriation during the Franco regime of the myth of rural idyll,3 a prevalent theme in the novels of Goytisolo and Martín Santos, will come under attack in the 1960s and 1970s. In another rhythm of appropriation, Larra moves in and out of favor. His articles on Madrid life in the 1830s provided a biting satire of Spanish customs and a critique of bourgeois pretentiousness underpinned by his liberal political convictions. Echoed in the novels of Galdós and Clarín, Larra’s critique and innovative narrative style4 will be subsequently rediscovered by the Generation of 1898 and by Juan Goytisolo.
Literary history as a discipline encourages us to look longitudinally, seeking trends, causes, and effects. We are inclined to think of origins, influences, and developments. According to such a model, we might surmise that the regional novel in Spain grows “out of” costumbrismo and the literary products of Romanticism, grows “into” some other product labeled as the “regional novel.”5 This view is consistent with the fact that travel writings of foreigners were published in the 1840s, that costumbrista writing in the form of articles in the periodic press, notably by Larra, Estébanez Calderón, and Mesonero Romanos, was published through the 1830s and 1840s, and that the novels of regionalism were published from the middle of the century to the 1890s; examples are La gaviota (‘The Seagull’, 1849), by Fernán Caballero (Cecilia Böhl de Faber); Alarcón’s El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874); Sotileza (1886) and Peñas arriba (‘Toward the Summit’, 1895) by José María de Pereda, Juan Valera’s Pepita Jiménez (1874) and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s linked pair of novels Los pazos de Ulloa (1886) and La madre naturaleza (‘Mother Nature’, 1887). Seco Serrano emphasizes the close relationship between the tormented life of Larra (1809–37) and the turbulence of Spanish history.6 This link is possibly the closest parallel between a writer and the context from which he comes. Nonetheless, a fundamental feature of the writing of regional novels is the context of history, philosophy, and politics that justifies, at least initially, a longitudinal approach.
The writing of travel books has frequently been the cultural response to periods of crisis and upheaval, particular examples being the writings of the Generation of 1898, such as Azorín’s Castilla (1912). This response can be observed also in writing after the Civil War (1936–9), an example being Viaje a la Alcarria (‘Journey to Alcarria’) by Camilo José Cela. To some degree the writing of regional literature can be considered as constituting a similar response. These writings are, as it were, narratives of internal travel. Certainly the costumbrista sketches of Mesonero Romanos and the articles of Larra need to be framed in the context of the agitation following the Napoleonic Wars, the brief period of the liberal constitution (1820–3), and the blow to liberalism formed by the restoration of Fernando VII to the throne first in 1814 and then in 1823. La gaviota, the first major example in Spain of a regional novel, can be seen as part of a Romantic reaction to that uncertainty as well as a search for the national soul. The remaining major examples of the regional novel, produced during the concluding three decades of the nineteenth century, have as their backcloth a divide between conservatives and liberals (moderados/progresistas), one stemming from the liberal revolution of 1868, the ensuing search for a suitable successor to Isabel II, the eventual, implausible choice of Amadeo of Savoy (1871–3), the First Republic (1873–5), and the years of the turno pacífico, a placid system of rotation in which liberals and conservatives took turns in and out of power, which characterized the Restoration (1874/75–97).
Within this historical context, a longitudinal view of the regional novel immediately becomes problematic. It would be as difficult to argue that the novel evolves (progresses) as it would be to assert that the history of nineteenth-century Spain does also. What the historical panorama reveals is that there is an alternating movement of national political development between conservative and liberal governments. The alternations characterizing the history of Spain in the nineteenth century (pronunciamientos [military coups]) followed by periods of relative calm, and then more pronunciamientos, finally resulting in the political turno pacífico, indicate patterns of repetition which have their parallels in the literature of the century.
If, however, we consider the actual form which regional writing takes through the century, there is little doubt that a longitudinal approach is valid. Thus the costumbrista articles of the 1830s and 1840s are followed by a novel, La gaviota. Although Eugenio de Ochoa’s “Juicio crítico” at the time welcomed Fernán Caballero’s novel as one that could compete with those of Cervantes, Fielding, and Scott,7 a salient characteristic of La gaviota is the static impression given by its series of vignettes of Andalusian life. In her exemplary discussion of the novel, Susan Kirkpatrick shows how these tableaux or set pieces form a plot line through their sequence.8 The actual action, however, and the sense of time as durée are relegated to the silences between chapters (a much-debated technique employed in 1884–5 by Leopoldo Alas, who places the final seduction of Ana Ozores in the silence between chapters 28 and 29 of La Regenta). Thus when we look at later novels of the genre, through the 1870s to the 1890s, narrative complexities develop. Valera’s Pepita Jiménez is a novel whose epistolary form lends a subtle, ironic focus to the narrative. Peñas arriba by Pereda contains multiple narrators and perspectives, resulting in an embedded narrative in which the protagonist, Marcelo, takes over the stories of others. Meanwhile Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa and La madre naturaleza, reflecting a debt to the author’s high regard for Zola and his narrative technique, contain high proportions of free indirect style and a narrative focused through characters of variable reliability.
When we look at regional novels laterally rather than longitudinally, and geographically and politically rather than chronologically, different patterns emerge. Particularly noticeable is a sense of continuity or repetition of political reaction within individual works. One of the most characteristic patterns evolves from a tension between the political views of the center and what the regions represent. The position of the center (Madrid) is commonly that of an advanced location in the Peninsula. But according to the politics of the regions – whether conservative, or questioning and critical as in the case of Pardo Bazán and Alas – the center and its possible influence on the periphery is regarded in a different light. Conservative writers see influence from the capital as threatening the life-affirming values of the regions. Liberal and critical writers see the center as a site of enlightened ideas in contrast to the backwardness and closed-mindedness of the regions. This second group nonetheless displays an attachment to the regions that motivates their novelistic elaborations of provincial life. Thus while it is important to perceive the distinction between the positions (political, cultural, religious) of the diverse literary works of regionalism, in one essential respect the various novels evince a unity based upon their concentration on the regions and their valuation of what is to be found there.
Regional novels communicate a type of cultural myopia that restricts the concept of viable life to regional boundaries. The novels commonly suffer from lack of farsightedness, of a perspective that might have permitted the concept of Spain as a whole to be entertained. Returning to the example of La gaviota, we find that the concept of nation – as inherited from Romantics who were enthused by Romantic nationalism elsewhere in Europe – is that of the patria chica, the homeland consisting of the immediate region, rather than one encompassing the whole of Spain. This emphasis contrasts with the national perspective offered by the novelistic corpus of Galdós, as shown in Geoffrey Ribbans’s chapter on history and fiction in this volume. Regional novels always constitute a site of a tension, either explicit or implied: that of the contrast with other regions or with the world of any territory beyond the region, be it within the nation or outside it, a contrast experienced as conflict or the fear of conflict.
The geography of Spain as depicted in the novels of the nineteenth century is unevenly mapped. A preponderance of works focus on either North or South, in which the region in question is characteristically set in play against Madrid. Cantabria is the focus of Pereda, Galicia that of Pardo Bazán, and Asturias the region of Alas’s novel La Regenta. Fernán Caballero, Alarcón, and Valera depict Andalucía. If we include the novels of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, such as Flor de mayo (The Mayflower, 1895) and La barraca (The Holding, 1898), or the vignettes of customs such as Notas de color (‘Notes of Color’, 1884) and Figura i paisatge (‘Figure and Landscape’, 1892) by the Catalan novelist Narcís Oller, further areas of the map appear, firmly rooted in Valencia and Catalonia.
The political agenda of the novelists, however, presents this divide along a different axis. The writings of Alarcón, Fernán Caballero, Pereda, and Valera are traditionalist in contrast to the socially concerned writings of Alas, Galdós, and Pardo Bazán. Further, there is a difference of perspective: the first group works from imagination and faith, while the second works from the observation of social realities.9 If we integrate the writers of costumbrista articles into this division of political focus, Larra takes his place with the second group, i.e. those who write inspired by a commitment to social realities and by dislike or despair at what they see, while Mesonero Romanos, in Escenas matritenses, and Estébanez Calderón, in Escenas andaluzas (‘Andalusian Scenes’, 1847), taking Madrid and Andalucía respectively as their focus to emphasize what was to be preserved, align with the conservative approach of the first group.
A related axis of difference may be inferred through the degree of openness towards Europe and its developments. According to her arguable inheritance of German Romanticism, Fernán Caballero (née Cecilia Böhl de Faber, a name revealing her German parentage) might be expected to be European in outlook. Caballero, however, with the enthusiasm of a convert, espouses the cause of Spanish nationhood, doing all she can to enshrine its customs in prose. Writing before her, Larra had evinced a much more radical awareness of the shortcomings of Spanish mores, viewing them through a prism formed by European civilization. Later in the century writers who continue in Larra’s disenchanted vein – Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Alas – will produce troubled narratives of the Spain of their times. They share with Larra awareness not only of gaps in Spanish life (in education, politics, and economics, when compared to life elsewhere in Europe), but also of currents of positivism, Naturalism, and Darwinism. Thus in La cuestión palpitante (‘The Burning Issue’, 1883) Pardo Bazán gives a balanced account of Naturalism in Europe. Conversely, in his Apuntes sobre el arte nuevo de escribir novelas (‘Notes on the New Art of Writing Novels’, 1888), the conservative Valera not only held a view of the European novel as decadent and dangerous but disarmingly admitted that he had not read any Naturalist novels. He already knew enough of their underlying philosophy to be sure that they could in no way be good. Significantly, reflecting the metaphors of illness characteristic of Naturalist writing, Valera declared his essay to be an attack upon the malady of foreign culture. He noted “with distress” that “Civilization in its totality is suffering today from a grave malady that holds sway in France more than in any other part. It is against this malady, and so that someone at least may find its remedy, that I write these articles.”10
Regional articles and novels claim on their own terms to be mimetic and to be devoted to a labor of preservation endowed with a moral value. The agenda of some early works of this nature is clearly that of preservation. Thus in her prologue to La gaviota, Fernán Caballero is at pains to emphasize the degree to which she is simply “copying” what is there (p. 63). The proclaimed intention of Estébanez Calderón in his Escenas andaluzas is to remind the reader of what he may have forgotten and to urge him to recreate as he reads. Estébanez narrates without hesitation “those unparalleled scenes, those Spanish features” (p. 136). In this connection Noël Valis makes a useful distinction between art and photography, pointing out how costumbrismo shares with physiognomy and physiology, and indeed with caricature, an interest in what is lasting, what endures of types and customs, whereas photography records the ephemeral variations.11 The desire of the costumbristas like Mesonero Romanos, Estébanez Calderón, and Fernán Caballero, who wish to preserve for future generations types seen to be enduring examples of Spanishness, thus contrasts with the despairing snapshots of variation presented in Larra’s articles.
Despite the agenda of preservation common to many regional writers, the perception of what is enduring leads also to idealization. This tendency is particularly characteristic of representations of Andalucía, presenting us with a fascinating phenomenon not restricted to the nineteenth century. In his dedication to the reader that precedes the Escenas andaluzas, Estébanez Calderón acknowledges and justifies the feature of lo andaluz as a feature both characteristic and problematic of costumbrista writing, namely that the recurrent interest of the costumbristas is in the marginal. This interest can take the form of “marginal” regions and “marginal” type. Indeed, one could extend his view of the value of the marginal as one which not only refers to the andaluz types and customs that he will portray, but to a more generalized valuation of regions within Spain that are not those of the geographical and administrative center. In a peninsula, what could be more marginal than the regions constituting the periphery? In contrast to the generation of 1898, which will view the peasant of Castile as the enduring type, the Romantics and costumbristas focus repeatedly on the peasant from Andalucía. Two interesting examples illustrate this emphasis. There is the idealization by Lorca and Falla in 1922 of Andalucía’s Cante jondo (‘Deep Song’) as the heart of the most ancient music and poetry in Spain.12 More controversial is Ortega y Gasset’s essay “Teoría de Andalucía” (‘Theory of Andalucía’, 1927), in which, true to the tradition of the idle nobleman in the Lazarillo de Tormes, he singles out the holgazanería (‘laziness’) of the peasant as an indication of the physical lushness of a region that requires only minimal effort for the maintenance of life.13 This point of view is shockingly at odds with the lived realities of the landless poor of the region.
While Estébanez Calderón focuses on the marginal, he presents his cuadros (‘picturesque sketches’) in a manner that makes Andalucía sound like Arcadia. In “La rifa andaluza” (“Andalusian raffle”), for example, he addresses specifically female readers (“beautiful subscribers, dear friends”) and clearly intends a reading that will delight rather than shock. He sets the scene, and pulls no punches in his creation of a non-realist scenario: “imagine a clean and entirely picturesque hermitage, such as one finds at every turn in that land of poetry.”14 The keynote is magic: when, in “El bolero,” he watches a dancer, he is instantly “borne away to another enchanted land” (p. 145). The embedded reaction of this writer to what he sees – being swept away into a world of perfection, which nonetheless is represented as the one of the fundamental realities of Spain – is typical of the Escenas andaluzas.
Uncertainties of tone and narrative approach in La gaviota present a contrast to costumbrista articles that convey a positive or idealized view of regional life. Instead of using a pen-character typical of costumbrista journalists like Larra, who writes as “Fígaro”, or of Mesonero Romanos, who signs off as “El curioso parlante,” La gaviota filters the narrative through the character of the young German doctor Fritz Stein, both narrator and observer. Just as we may discern the degree of influence that travel books of other Europeans exerted upon early nineteenth-century Spanish writing through being perceived by outsiders, something which arguably encouraged self-observation, so too in the regional novel the figure of the visitor becomes part of a necessary discovery of the terrain. We might also remain open to a facet of the novels highlighted by modern anthropology: the visitor is not without effect upon the community. Even as an observer or tourist, the visitor intervenes through his observation and does not leave untouched those whom he observes.15 In La gaviota, the selection of a Germanic male protagonist, through whose eyes the vision of the region is initially focused, is simply a more extreme version of what we will find in other novels: Marcelo (Peñas arriba), Luis (Pepita Jiménez), and Julián (Los pazos de Ulloa) all act as surprised and impressionable newcomers to areas revealed to be rough diamonds of social models, or, in the case of Julián, a disturbing slough of decadence produced by isolation. In all cases, there is an element of some innocence in the visitor: whether simply a city lad (Marcelo), foreign doctor (Stein) or man of the church (Luis and Julián), each possesses a kind of civilized knowledge; each proves, however, to lack a knowledge of life and experience that come only as each makes contact with the region.
Set adrift in southern Spain, Stein “discovers” the rural idyll of an isolated community that harbors an even more isolated (and culturally neglected) young girl, known as la gaviota (‘seagull’) for the strength and quality of her voice. Although irony is almost unknown within the tone of this narrative, the characterization of an apparently beautiful singing voice as that of a seagull presents an interesting problem: either Fernán Caballero is being ironic about her rural subjects (they lack the discrimination to discern the raucous from the melodious) or she shares their lack of discernment. La gaviota turns on the motif of civilization and barbarism, offering a model of a rural life of virtue placed in danger by contact with the sophistication and pretentiousness of the city. This beatus ille plot, in which rural life is idealized, concerns a young girl, María, who is “rescued” from rural brutishness only to “fall” into immorality when removed to the city from her original environment. This plot is no more convincing than is the self-conscious costumbrismo of Fernán Caballero as writer. The text is littered with folkloric detail (not infrequently in footnote form) in a manner more suited to a Baedeker than to a work of fiction.
Of the novels under consideration in this chapter, La gaviota stands out for its strained idealization of chosen characters and its improbable plot; elements essential for credibility have been relegated to extra-textual silence. That the plot is somewhat strained and stilted is not due solely to this technicality. In contradistinction to the novels of realism, novels of regionalism tend to endow characters with a symbolic function, however ill defined, as evidenced by the plot of La gaviota. However, three features merit comment: the thematic relation to the idea of a patria chica, ambiguity of characterization, and symbolic connotations. The regions serve as a patria chica, a graspable experience of the national. They are places of value, the repository of what is enduring, representing all those features of the pueblo and its habitat later celebrated by Unamuno in En torno al casticismo (1895). In La gaviota the village of Marisalada, Villamar, is the patria chica, a place of innocence that contrasts with the pretentiousness and artificiality of city life in Seville. Concerning the ambiguity of the characterization of the female protagonist, Marisalada, we are given conflicting signals.16 Apparently there is no doubt about her real musical talent; yet she has a type of moral frailty or shallowness that renders her fascination for Stein questionable – or at least questionable if she is to represent the Spanish pueblo. Kirkpatrick argues that this ambiguity of characterization stems from the female authorship of the novel: Fernán Caballero simultaneously desires to make her female character worthy while lacking the conviction to render her fully admirable. Her symbolic function appears to demonstrate the folly of moving outside the worthy regional home. Lastly there are the curious connotations of the seagull. Not only is its cry raucous, but it is also famed for its rapaciousness.
Part of the difficulty of La gaviota is the uneasy contact between the idealized world of the region and the artificial life of the town. In the case of two other novels of Andalucía, El sombrero de tres picos by Alarcón and Valera’s Pepita Jiménez, this simplified contrast is avoided by two strategies. The novels are restricted entirely to the original location, and there is a decided literariness which pre-empts complications that might result from attentive social observation. In his preface to El sombrero de tres picos, Alarcón states that the novel constitutes the preservation not simply of custom, but rather of literary custom. Thus the tale of the miller, his beautiful wife, and the successful outwitting of her suitor, the corregidor (a law officer appointed by the Crown), is a traditional one, based on folklore. That this is a literary device is not in doubt, and one might observe that Alarcón deploys considerable skill in retelling traditional tales, endowing them with local color.
The note struck by Alarcón contrasts with that of Estébanez Calderón. Indeed, one could posit a sliding scale that runs from evocations of Arcadia (Estébanez Calderón) through isolated innocence (Fernán Caballero) to a bucolic but decidedly Hispanic rustic setting (Alarcón). While local features – the corregidor, the nature of the miller, his wife, and their life together – represent a type of idealized rustic life, their robust vivaciousness is not unlike what we find in earlier literary tale-telling in Europe, notably in Boccaccio and Chaucer. Local custom is recounted in detail – Chapter 2 is entitled “Of how people lived in that time”; the minutiae of daily diet are followed by the exclamation “Oh blessed time in which our land continued to be quietly and peacefully possessed by cobwebs [ . . .]!”17; at the same time, pleasure is taken in storytelling, in contrast to the clarity of intention and resolution in La gaviota. El sombrero de tres picos is a narrative of consolation, like many conservative novels of regionalism. Even at the most dramatic moments there is no doubt of the eventual triumph of the quick-witted miller’s wife over her adversary, in contrast with the troubling and uneven charting of Marisalada’s fate in La gaviota. The difference may be that Alarcón takes pleasure in storytelling rather than being driven primarily by an agenda of regional worth.
The novels of Juan Valera are ostensibly set in the real world rather than the literary reality of folktale as revivified by Alarcón. But like the patria chica of La gaviota, Valera’s “real” world of Andalucía is an isolated one. Repeated depictions of an implied Edenic innocence in the region convey the message that in isolation lie safety and comfort. A comparison of the plot of Pepita Jiménez with that of Pardo Bazán’s Los pazos de Ulloa reveals the degree to which Valera’s novels concentrate upon the creation of idyll rather than on the revelation of a less palatable world. In both novels, the arrival of a youthful cleric in a remote regional location sets in motion a sequence of events. While in Los pazos de Ulloa a priest faces the failure of his endeavors and a marriage ill conceived and catastrophic in outcome, in the case of Pepita Jiménez the cleric’s arrival ultimately leads to the predictable happy end of marriage and children. This happy ending highlights the determination of Valera, not unlike that of Alarcón, to divert, to please, and to present literature for the reader’s delectation.
There is initial titillation in the beginning of the novel. Just as Valera will add a layer of piquancy to Juanita la Larga (1895) by making his eponymous heroine of illegitimate birth, so in Pepita Jiménez he injects a dash of excitement by making his heroine a young widow and the young man who arrives on the scene, Luis, a seminarist, also illegitimate. Like La gaviota, Valera’s novel is a narrative of growth and development. Valera, however, avoids the uneven and uncertain development of plot that characterized his earlier novel. In this case the heroine, Pepita, is exceptionally virtuous. By submitting, when in her teens, to marriage with an elderly man she proves herself an eminently acceptable female icon. In her widowhood she is both beautiful and cultured, and the narrative lets the reader understand that she awaits fulfilment through a more appropriate union. The more dramatic development is the arrival of the stranger Luis, on vacation from the seminary. His case represents growth from childish, untutored ways into mature masculine stature. He emerges from the avowedly innocent state of the seminarist into the man who will give comfort to his father’s old age through marriage and the fathering of children.
This plot is one of sexual consolation for the masculine reader; key examples include Luis’s transformation from one unable to ride to one who can manage a spirited horse. By simple sexual symbolism, in which horsemanship is equated with virility, an indication is thus given of his achieved masculinity and readiness for participation in a plot of marriage and procreation.18 When viewed in terms of the regions and national vitality, we can see how this novel, like others by Valera, repeatedly insists upon the vitality, indeed the virility, of its masculine character, which will not only win him sexual prizes but will also win him, and all the others, the adoration of women who are as passionate and lovely as they are youthful. This kind of plot line represents a masculine myth of vitality, one of consolation in the face of aging and sexual waning. Just as the novels retain the reader in an idyllic form of Andalucía (evoked by the splendor of light and color rather than by the sombre qualities that Lorca will evoke in his essays on the Cante jondo), time is held in suspense, even within the plot. Further, Luis as future priest is far from blind to the pleasures and beauties of the material world. As he states in his letter of 4 April to his uncle, he does not want to be distracted from spirituality by the contemplation of natural beauty; yet his articulation of the delights of that beauty show him to be fully susceptible to it.
There is a clear contrast between Pepita Jiménez and Los pazos de Ulloa in the ‘result’ deriving from analogous initial plot situations. Why should one find such a clear North/South difference in Spain? Part of the answer lies in geography: the arid mountains of Andalucía, offset by fertile, lush vegas (‘plains’), contrast with the rugged and difficult mountainous region of Galicia and Cantabria. Harsh winters and battles against the rigors of sea (Sotileza), land (Peñas arriba), or untamed wilderness (Los pazos) frame a hostile environment. In addition to these physical characteristics, two social distinctions are paramount: the degree of difference in the presence of the church and its institutions in North and South19 and differing patterns of dependence/independence, mobility/immobility, arising from the markedly different systems of land-tenure in North and South. The relative sparseness of the clergy in Andalucía, contrasting with a more pronounced religious presence in Cantabria, is one factor of difference; even more significant is the fact that the priests of the mountainous North were habitually local to the area, while those of the South came from elsewhere. Within narratives dealing with the North the different land-tenure systems of Cantabria (family-held farms and cooperatives) and in Galicia, characterized by the wasting effects on property and wealth of minifundismo, in which land was divided between heirs instead of being inherited by a single family member, may have considerable bearing on the positive values given to Cantabria by Pereda and the negative vision of Galicia produced by Pardo Bazán.
The motif of isolation is arguably more significant in novels of the North than in those of the South. To understand the effects of isolation shown in regional novels, two models obtain. Conservative narratives, evidenced in those works celebrating Andalucía and the patria chica, extol the virtues of isolation: paradise untouched is paradise untainted; innocence can be preserved; beauty is ‘natural’, whether physical or moral. A similar approach to isolation characterizes the Cantabrian narratives of Pereda. By contrast, liberal (and hence negative) narratives of the North perceive the isolation of the regions as cases where entropy must inevitably ensue. The lack of exchange or contact with the outside world causes the internal and isolated social worlds depicted to fester and degenerate. The naturalism of Emile Zola, the late nineteenth-century French novelist, anticipated the theories of Max Nordau, author of the influential and widely translated work Degeneration (1892), and of Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist who argued that physique and the tendency to crime were closely related. These writings exhibit all the case-material required in the depiction of rural degeneration by Pardo Bazán: reversion to “stock” is the consequence of inbreeding; it leads to atavism, criminality, and the eventual extinction of the race.
Two northern novelists, writing in the same period, construe questions of heredity in a completely divergent manner. In Peñas arriba Pereda opens his novel with a sort of surprise reminiscent of the opening of Calderón’s classic Golden Age play La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1635). But in contrast to this play, where the unknown world of civilization leads Segismundo to engage in the very monstrous behavior his father had sought to avoid by isolating him, Marcelo arrives at his uncle’s estate from the supposed civilized world of Madrid, only to discover that the environment he initially perceived as rude and uncouth is in fact of sterling human worth: the individual has a real social place through the dictates of lineage (Marcelo will be chosen by his uncle as the rightful heir of the estate) and obligation (being lord of the estate is to have duties to fulfil, not privileges to be exercised in flagrant disregard of the human rights of the underclass).
Moreover, Marcelo has been diminished by city life. Initially his relationship to his physical environment is seen as impaired; he needs the restorative experience of direct contact with the natural world. The return to the earth and to physical life contrasts with the existence of superficiality and artifice in Madrid, a “civilized” life lacking direction. There is a strong teleological thrust to Pereda’s narrative: life must lead to death, and that mortal end is kept firmly in view. Pereda puts dynamism into this mortal fate through the narrative of the bear-hunt. This “rural exercise” is part of Marcelo’s initiation into the difficulties of mountain life. It is used to demonstrate simultaneously the bravery and sense of solidarity of the participants, and the physical strength of the priest don Sabas, a strength finally equated with moral strength.
Shadowing the narrative is the declared imminence of the death of Marcelo’s uncle: this expected death is, after all, the motive for inviting Marcelo to stay, and the invitation itself should be read as an act of obligation and foresight. Continuity, lineage, and care of the community are not parts of life left to chance but are carefully predicted, motivating events. The necessity for forethought and planning responds, in extreme degree, to forces that determine life in the mountains – hazards of weather, vicissitudes of the natural cycles, and the risks of such an environment. Pereda proposes a social counter-balance to the elements that nature proposes as disruptive. Civilization itself must articulate the response to a barbarie that, in this case, is construed as that of the natural environment.
Pardo Bazán produces a different reading of the North. Her depiction of Galicia as a degenerate region, in contrast to Pereda’s vision of Cantabria as demanding and rough but socially stable, relates in some degree to the greater impoverishment of the region, its soil leached by the weather and its population leached by emigration. Los pazos de Ulloa and its sequel, La madre naturaleza, are set deep in rural Galicia. They can be read as a pair of Naturalist novels that explore the dangerous results of an unhappy mix of heredity and environment. Hence the failure of the marriage between Pedro de la Lage, rural overlord but already over the cusp regarding his procreative capacity, running fast toward the fat of degeneration that will characterize him in La madre, and Nucha, a city-bred cousin, who is frail and ill-equipped by temperament and upbringing for the rigors of rural life.
The marriage of Nucha to Pedro is conceived (a word we shall later see to be significant in relation to Julián) as the solution to Pedro’s immorality: his open living with his mistress Sabel, daughter of his steward. The role of go-between is carried out by Julián, a young, pale, “lymphatic” priest. Los pazos opens with his arrival at Ulloa, again a Calderonian surprise as Julián approaches the manor house while uncertainly mounted on his horse. The choice of Nucha is a preference over her sister Rita, a woman of outgoing temperament and ample hips – the obvious Naturalistic choice for the succession of the De la Lage family. There is an implicit (verging on the explicit) contrast between Nucha as an angelic figure and Rita, who, if not cast as whore (a role assigned to Sabel), is nonethless a potentially risky woman precisely because of that sensuality and fleshliness that fits her for the furthering of the race. It is with great difficulty that Nucha gives birth. Predictably enough, she produces a daughter, not a son, thereby proving her uselessness to her husband, and indeed his own folly, not only for having selected her as wife but for having allowed himself to take Julián’s advice on the particular choice of wife to be made. Meanwhile Julián and Nucha are thrown together after the birth of Nucha’s daughter, Manuela, forming a strange travesty of the Holy Family in which it is not clear whether Julián is to be read as father or replication of mother.
In Los pazos de Ulloa Julián and Nucha experience the region itself as hostile and as a place that fosters primitivism in its inhabitants, with whom, inevitably, they enter in conflict. Their ultimate fates contrast unhappily with the characters of positive regional texts. Whereas in Pepita Jiménez the seminarist is led, without loss of face, away from his priestly ambition towards marriage, and whereas don Sabas, the priest in Peñas arriba, acts as mentor to Marcelo, Julián reacts incompetently and disastrously in situations and in actions that he himself sets in motion. Nucha is weak, a hysteric, and an unfit match for the man she takes in marriage; she does not survive to bring her daughter to maturity. Meanwhile, those living in the region degenerate to the same level as the wild landscape around them.
In relation to twentieth-century Spain, Jo Labanyi argues that myths are there to console us. Such myths are almost inevitably regressive since they explain, round off, and offer a persuasively satisfying reading of the world.20 For similar reasons, conservative regional novels of the nineteenth century have much in common with these later, myth-creating Spanish narratives. All these narratives encode an awareness of change. Whereas Larra’s essays encapsulate the struggle for reform in a society that rejects or only adopts change on a superficial level, and whereas the writings of Pardo Bazán and Leopoldo Alas represent an awareness of change through forms of degeneration and decay, in the conservative narratives of Pereda and Valera consciousness of cultural transitions takes the form of narratives of denial. Denial is inflected differently according to region and to a model that assigns the most positive value to Andalucía and a lesser, more problematic value to Cantabria, Asturias, and Galicia. The variation of inflection, exemplifying the second meaning of “evolution,” largely characterizes many other aspects of writing in the nineteenth century, as will be evident from the following chapters in this volume.
Guide to further reading
1 Stephen J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 28–9.
2 M. J. de Larra, Artículos (‘Articles’, 1830–7), ed. Seco Serrano, Obras de D. Mariano José de Larra, 4 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, 1960); Mesonero Romanos, Escenas matritenses (‘Madrid Scenes’, 1836–42), ed. María del Pilar Palomo (Barcelona: Planeta, 1987).
3 Eduardo Sevilla-Guzmán, “The Peasantry and the Franco Régime,” in Spain in Crisis: The Evolution and Decline of the Franco Regime, ed. Paul Preston (Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 101–24.
4 Susan Kirkpatrick, Larra: el laberinto inextricable de un romántico liberal (Madrid: Gredos, 1977), p. 7. Alma Amell, La preocupación por España en Larra (Madrid: Pliegos, 1990), pp. 10–11.
5 For example, see Derek Flitter, Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 151–3, on the influence of Romanticism on Fernán Caballero.
6 S. Serrano, “Edición y estudio preliminar,” in Obras de D. Mariano José de Larra, 4 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, 1960), vol. I, p. vii.
7 E. de Ochoa, “Juicio crítico,” reprinted in Fernán Caballero, La gaviota, ed. Julio Rodríguez Luis (Barcelona: Labor, 1972), p. 79.
8 S. Kirkpatrick, “On the Threshold of the Realist Novel: Gender and Genre in La gaviota,” PMLA 98/3 (1983), p. 335.
9 G. Gullón, “La novela de Alarcón y en envés de la narrativa decimonónica,” Insula 535 (July 1991), p. 32.
10 J. Valera, Obras completas (Madrid: Tello, 1888), vol. III, p. 146.
11 N. Valis, “Pereda y la mirada turística,” Insula 547–8 (July—August 1992), p. 16; L. Fontanella, “Physiognomics in Romantic Spain,” in From Dante to García Márquez: Studies in Romance Literature and Linguistics. Presented to Anson C. Piper, ed. Gene G. Bell-Villada, Antonio Giménez, and George Pistorius (Williamstown, MA: Williams College, 1987), p. 110.
12 F. García Lorca, “El cante jondo: primitivo canto andaluz,” Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1954), pp. 1003–24; M. de Falla, El cante jondo. Canto primitivo andaluz (Granada: Urania, 1992).
13 J. Ortega y Gasset, “Teoría de Andalucía,” Obras completas, vol. 
(Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), pp. 111–20.
14 S. Estébañez Calderón, “Dedicatoria a quien quisiere,” in Escenas andaluzas, ed. Jorge Campos (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, 1955), p. 139.
15 Valis, “Pereda y la mirada turística,” 16.
16 Kirkpatrick, “On the Threshold,” pp. 323–40.
17 P. de Alarcón, El sombrero de tres picos (1874), in Novelas completas. Prólogo de Jorge Campos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1974), p. 124.
18 L. Charnon-Deutsch, Gender and Representation: Women in Spanish Realist Fiction (Amsterdam /Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), pp. 21–40.
19 A. Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 145–53.
20 Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 5–34; “Nation, Narration, Naturalization: A Barthesian Critique of the 1898 Generation,” in New Hispanisms: Literature, Culture, Theory, ed. Mark I. Millington and Paul Julian Smith (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Canada, 1994), pp. 127–49.