A critical approach to the nineteenth-century folletín must begin with an examination of this widely used term and with a revision of some of the prevalent ideas that frame our understanding of the literary and cultural nature of this novelistic production. The term folletín is not without problems. Based upon well-established critical notions, it has become a kind of critical steamroller that, while stressing some generally defined common traits, effectively cancels out all aesthetic differentiation among the texts included in this category. As we will see, some of these deep-rooted critical notions have to do with the poetics of the novel; others, with the Romantic understanding of literature as the highest expression of a nation’s unique identity. Finally, the problematic nature of the term folletín is directly related to the highly influential distinction between High and Low forms of culture.
Folletín refers first of all to the form of publication of a novel. It describes the market-induced fragmentation a novel underwent when published in the folletín section of a newspaper. This section used to occupy the bottom part of one or more pages, or the last one, of a newspaper or journal, and was generally used to publish a miscellany of social news and recreational items. The practice was first introduced in France in 1836 by the editors of the newspapers La Presse and Le Siècle as a means to increase sales and, due to its great success, it was immediately adopted by most major newspapers and journals all around Europe and America: in Spain it was already a well-established practice in the 1840s. Describing a similar process of fragmentation, folletín is also often applied to novels that were published weekly or bi-weekly in serial form – por entregas – and sold to readers by subscription. But more often than not, folletín is used to describe not so much the method of publication of a novel, but rather its type – its content and style. In this sense, folletín is used to designate the tradition of melodramatic novel writing associated with popular and mostly female readership. More generally, folletín stands for commercial literature, that is, for novels created mechanically by the new publishing industry to secure a wide and immediate success among unsophisticated readers (folletín is thus often denounced as an example of the commodification of literature). Accordingly, folletin, novela popular, and novela por entregas are frequently used as synonymous terms and apply to an extensive novelistic production written from the 1840s to the early 1900s. In terms of number of writers and titles published, we can appropriately say that folletín designates most of the novel writing done in nineteenth-century Spain, and encompasses many of its dominant aesthetic forms. From the 1840s to the end of the century folletinistas such as Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (1801–73), Manuel Angelón y Broquetas (1831–89), Angela Grassi de Cuenca (1826–83), Manuel Fernández y González (1821–88), Ramón Ortega y Frías (1825–83), Julio Nombela (1836–1919), and Enrique Pérez Escrich (1829–97), ruled over the new market of the Spanish novel. Most folletinistas were prolific writers who authored anything from dozens of titles to over 170, as in the case of Fernández y González.1
We have become used to referring to the folletín as “paraliterature” and “subliterature,” thereby defining its existence as the product exclusively of the new market-oriented and mass-produced publishing policies of the nineteenth century, and to perceiving it as a writing that lacks aesthetic value. This is because our critical perception of the folletín still relies mostly on the cultural prestige assigned to realism and modernism – as the “artistic” forms of poetics – and, in particular, on their stand against the excess of imagination characteristic of the popular novel and other forms of Low culture. Recent important studies have explored the gender-and-class-based strategies used to establish the canon of the nineteenth-century novel, and, consequently, the criteria that support the exclusion of the folletín from it. These studies show the tactics of differentiation that have sustained the construction of the realist and modernist novel as mature male writing for a grown-up and select male audience in opposition to – and at the expense of – a supposedly feminine, childlike, and popular folletín.2 Regardless of these contributions, however, the critical evaluation of the folletín novel by the realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós and the philosopher of modernism, José Ortega y Gasset, continue to dictate our evaluation of the genre.3 We easily recognize in the critical approach of many contemporary critics Galdós’s famous condemnation of the narrative naivety and imaginative excess of folletín novels, and his praise of verisimilitude – his insistence on observation over imagination – as the foundation of literariness and as key for the aesthetic construction of the novel. We also recognize Ortega y Gasset’s contempt for popular forms of storytelling and their penchant for adventure and intrigue, as well as his idea that the novel, as a genre, evolves from aesthetically deficient early forms, in which pure narration dominates, to its modern and sophisticated version in which imagination has been definitively displaced by rigorous presentation.
Similarly, our understanding of the folletín is dominated by the politics of identity that define what constitutes a national literature. In Spanish literary historiography, folletín is associated with imitative practices and dismissed as a copy of the foreign writing of popular French authors such as Eugène Sue, Frédéric Soulié, Alexander Dumas père, and Victor Hugo. The rejection of folletín as imitative writing hardly comes as a surprise when we consider both the Romantic foundation and the nationalistic purpose of most histories of literature. As it is well known, the discipline of national literary history is a by-product of the notion of Geist, the belief in the unique spiritual configuration of a nation – the constant actualization of its origin in all its members. Imitations – perceived as lacking originality and authenticity – are said to stand for the voluntary resignation of a supposedly authentic expression (both personal and national) and the acceptance of an alien mask as true identity. The intrusion of foreign patterns of writing upon the sacred whole of native creativity is perceived as disruptive of the self-sufficient national tradition. This is particularly true for the history of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel, which, as Alda Blanco tells us, was written under “the obsessive fear of cultural invasion”.4 As imitations of foreign works, the folletín is said to perform a double shameful gesture – that of cultural submission and alienation; consequently, it is rejected as spurious literature and discarded as alien to Spanish processes of cultural formation and national construction. Critical awareness of the historical and ideological conditions that gave rise to the notion of Geistesgeschichte has not been able to forgo the nationalistic project of most literary histories. Thus excluded from the prestige and authenticity associated with the notion of national uniqueness, the folletín is still constructed as aesthetically deficient, and its derivative writing (as a rewriting of a foreign text) is denied any legitimacy.
Consistent with the traditional understanding of national literature, folletín novels – as imitative and market-oriented writings – have been deprived of aesthetic qualities and cultural prestige and, consequently, have been said to lack individuality. In many studies, they become mere examples of a statistical category, multiple and repetitive samples of an identical negation of poetics itself: works with no style, examples of non-literary texts. Accordingly, no literary difference is acknowledged to exist between, for instance, the socio-historical imagination of a work such as Los misterios de Barcelona (‘The Mysteries of Barcelona’, 1844) by José Nicasio Milá de la Roca, the Romantic nationalism of a historical tale such as El pendón de Santa Eulalia (‘The Banner of Saint Eulalia’, 1858) by Manuel Angelón y Broquetas, or a domestic and recreational story written for the social instruction of women such as Celeste (1863) by María del Pilar Sinués de Marco. Similarly, the author of folletines is often described exclusively by his or her relation to the market and defined through production-oriented terms such as “workman” or “laborer.” These definitions deprive the folletinistas of their own individual names and, consequently, of authorship, and, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, an author’s name is precisely the signifier for both the existence and the status of a discourse within a society and culture: a discourse “that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten.”5 Indeed, most writers of folletines are unknown to us since the name folletinista stands precisely for the lack of individual originality. Widely encompassing terms, folletinista and folletín continue to signify the depreciated mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of numerous nineteenth-century novels within literary histories. But the fact that many of these novels had close ties to the market should not prevent us from analyzing them individually as aesthetic works. We should remember that most nineteenth-century novels, including the canonized realist and Naturalist works, shared the same publishing infrastructure as supported the folletín, since such works also were published in serial form.
More importantly, although it is accurate to say that many novels included in the term folletín did imitate foreign popular works, we need to approach the nature and necessity of imitation in nineteenth-century Spain as the result of new publishing conditions and policies and, more generally, the influence of hegemonic foreign forms of the novel in Spanish writers throughout the century. When analyzing the imitative nature of many Spanish nineteenth-century novels we should remember that by the middle of the nineteenth century Spain had no novels but foreign ones. We should take into consideration the conditions created by the new publishing industry and how the new system of production and consumption of literature radically modified the practices of cultural exchange among different countries: for the first time in history, European literary processes were subjected to a ruthless centralization which effectively established the artistic dominance of Paris and London. These two cities dictated the succession of literary movements and, specifically, the mode of the novel, while their powerful publishing houses actively exported them to foreign cultural markets. The constitution of Paris and London as the hegemonic spaces of cultural creativity and production transformed most European book markets, whose functioning became progressively more dependent on French and English fashionable trends. The dependence of Spanish publishing houses on French literary production was not new; however, it is in the 1840s that we perceive the radical change that affected the middle and late nineteenth-century Spanish literary market.
From the 1840s on, Spain actively adopted the publishing practices that had already transformed the novel into a commodity in other European markets: first, the introduction of French – rather than English – bestsellers and fashionable authors (which allowed Spanish publishers to participate in European cultural and commercial trends); secondly, the adoption of the serial form of publication (and, consequently, the facilities of payment by subscription); and thirdly, the exponential increase both in the number of foreign titles published and in print runs. French bestsellers saturated the nineteenth-century Spanish book market and deeply transformed it, as the French novel became the focus of Spanish publishing activity: all commercial publishing resources were invested to promote the French novel, which eventually supplanted the Spanish novel in the national market and determined the habits and expectations of Spanish readers, thus depriving the incipient Spanish novel of the national resources that could have supported it. In these conditions, the urgency to satisfy the reading public’s request for French novels redirected the creative energy of writers toward translation and imitation, and the close collaboration – both economic and artistic – between publisher and author that sustained the emergence of the novel as new hegemonic genre in nineteenth-century France and Britain was often replaced in Spain by a strictly economic transaction between publisher and translator and/or imitator.
Modern culture came to be identified with the events and artifacts produced by Paris and London and a new literary geography, highly hierarchical, was created: nations which were going through different narrative periods became contiguous literary markets. The interference of the prestigious nineteenth-century English and French models of novel writing in the literary life of other nations decisively modified the conditions for the production of autochthonous novels within those countries and radically limited their aesthetic options. As Franco Moretti explains in his Atlas of the European Novel (1800–1900), “‘diffusion’” was “the great conservative force”: “One form; and an imported one [ . . .] [I]n an integrated market – latecomers don’t follow the same road as their predecessors, only later: they follow a different, a narrower road.”6 Thus to be a novelist in Spain at the time required the framing of one’s work within the modes of writing dictated by the commercial success of the foreign novel. For the first time, to be a writer meant to have – or to aspire to have – a socially wide readership, and to imitate, to some degree, those foreign narratives whose commercial fortunes seemed closest to the social imaginary. In this context, imitation is no longer an individual, sporadic and shameful phenomenon (the influence of author A on author B), the characteristic of a particular genre (the folletín novel), or the sign of the alleged discrepancies between civilized nations and those other belated cultures that are continuously trying to catch up. It is rather a literary practice circumscribed by the narrowing of morphological freedom imposed by the conditions of dependency of the literary markets.
We need, then, to reconsider the imitative practices present in the folletín – and, in general, in all nineteenth-century novels – as part of the process of creation of autochthonous novel writing in Spain. Itamar Even-Zohar has commented that where a translated literature holds a central position – that is, when translations are “by and large an integral part of innovatory forces” – no clear-cut distinction is maintained between original and translated writings, and it is often the leading writers who author the translations.7 Original writing, translation, and imitation often came to be one and the same thing in nineteenth-century Spain and numerous folletín novels attest to the blurred borderlines that supposedly separate imitation from original writing. There was no real alternative to translation and imitation in nineteenth-century Spanish literary and cultural practices. However, contrary to established critical views that reject those works that show signs of foreign writing, in the de-centered cultural consciousness of translation and imitation – in that hybrid voice both alien and indigenous – Spanish cultural and historical processes managed to find a voice. In this sense, under a translator’s name pokes out an incipient novelist, and under an imitation, the effort of whole generations to create an autochthonous writing for the novel.
As a depreciated form of literary writing, the folletín novel has become identified with a series of formal and thematic traits, a narrative uniformity that constitutes its well-known literary stereotype. Although the appropriateness of this typological description of folletín is questionable, we cannot ignore it: first, because it does describe certain literary traits of the works included in this extensive novelistic production; secondly, and more importantly, because it shows how much the narrative uniformity associated with these novels is, first of all, the result of the assumption of knowledge and the application of generalities that characterize our critical approach to the popular novel. The vocabulary and syntax of a folletín novel are said to be simple; the paragraphs, short; and the size of the letters, big. The fragmentation of the paragraphs is also due to the fact that writers were often paid by the line. The writing, dictated by the fragmentation in the publishing process of the work, is regarded as episodic; the story, as punctuated by multiple intrigues, constant surprises, and interruptions. In this generalization of the poetics of folletín, action predominates over description (and, consequently, dialogue over narration), imagination over reality, and stock characters over psychologically differentiated ones. In these novels good and evil are clearly differentiated, moral certainties conveyed, and happy endings secured. Thematically speaking, they encompass a wide range of subjects: sentimental novels, historical novels, detective stories, social novels, adventure novels, etc. As commercial literature, folletín is said to be an alienating fiction satisfying and promoting the escapist needs of both women and the working classes of the new industrial cities. Accordingly, the plot of these novels follow what Karl Marx, and later Umberto Eco, identified as the highly successful (as well as politically conservative) formula known as “literature of consolation”: plots that create the illusion of breaking with the monotony and prosaic rhythms of modernity, and satisfy both readers’ need for adventure and heroic deeds, and their belief in a transcendental (and paternalistic) justice.8
In a folletín plot, the figure of a helpless orphan (normally a beautiful and virtuous young woman) often represents the social cost and human suffering of industrialization as well as the alienation brought by the new cities – the loss of an individual sense of family and community. The orphans, being alienated from their families, are exposed to misery and the abuse of unscrupulous and greedy men and women. Widows and honest workmen are also popular figures in the catalogue of victims. Stories about schemes to usurp someone’s name and fortune proliferate, and adulterers, prostitutes, usurers, moneylenders and a diversity of criminals (thieves, murderers, forgers, etc.) often carry out the threats posed by unconstrained desire to the bourgeois patriarchal system. These characters (the villains) perform numerous assaults on the authority of the father (as citizen and proprietor) and the organization of society according to a hierarchy of class and gender. Against them, the folletín novel opposes compassionate figures of authority: kindhearted doctors, generous aristocrats, wealthy patrons, virtuous priests, etc. Murders, suicides, madness, vengeances, forged documents, and, in some cases, fantastic elements and events, organize the stories. The pure and chaste affection between young lovers is surrounded by numerous conspiracies; the marriage that normally signals the end of the story reconciles all opposites: love and duty, religion and politics, ambition and honor.
It is interesting to note that when we speak about folletín and folletinistas we often give the impression that we know our subject very well, that we know all there is to know. Yet we hardly read these works. With a few and important exceptions, especially the recent research on women’s writing, we lack studies that analyze the literary mode and the individual literary practices of these texts.9 We know very little about the system – or systems – of significations that underlies the numerous works encompassed by the term folletín, the textuality that sustained the pleasure of their reading, or the dominant forms melodrama adopted in Spanish fiction. Also, it is often said with regard to the folletín that the genre reached a crisis point during the revolutionary years (1868–72), that its stories and techniques became stagnant, and that the emergence of the literary realist novel definitively segregated Spanish readers. At the same time, and in contrast with the supposed decadence of the genre, the late 1880s saw the rise of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), a very successful writer who captivated the imagination of Spanish readers and whose novels can be considered the culmination of the Spanish popular novel. Many questions and issues regarding the folletín novel need to be reconsidered. The fact is that we lack extensive and conclusive documentation about what titles were most popular, when, and why; the number of editions these novels had and the number of copies per edition; the forms in which they were published, and, in the case of folletines properly so defined, in which newspapers and magazines they appeared. We have only a general knowledge about who were the most widely read foreign writers (and, presumably, the most imitated ones), but we do not know how the popularity of their titles changed during that long period. Neither do we have studies on the circuits of distribution and sale nor on lending libraries. In fact, we do not know exactly who read what.
We have only a little research on the specific – and changing – conditions of production that framed the writing of folletines over six decades. Thus basic questions that explain the market-oriented character of the folletín novel are still to be answered: what kind of contracts existed between publisher and writer? How much were the authors paid? How much did an entrega (a serial ‘instalment’) cost? What kind of creative control did the publisher have over the author? We lack studies that analyze the literary consequences of the interference of the new publishing conditions in the writing processes of a novel. How did authorship work, and what did collective authorship (when a novel was written by two or more authors) mean in terms of writing practices? We are also ignorant of the literary relationship that existed between a writer of popular novels and his or her public. We do not know when the folletinistas incorporated in their writing suggestions from their readers and, consequently, the kind of cultural and social processes to which this open writing (and its aesthetic forms) gave voice. Finally, we know very little about the control exerted by authorities (official and religious censorship) over publishers and writers. We do know, however, that those in power were always very concerned about popular literature and its destabilizing effect on social order, and that powerful people often moved to suppress particular titles such as Madrid y sus misterios (‘Madrid and its Mysteries’, 1844), Los misterios de Córdoba (‘The Mysteries of Córdoba’, 1845), or Francisco Suárez’s Los demócratas o El ángel de la libertad (‘Democrats or the Angel of Liberty’, 1863). The truth is that, like Leonardo Romero Tobar twenty-five years ago, we are still struggling with the term – or terms – that will describe better the diverse aesthetic and cultural nature of the so-called folletines. Indeed, the extensive and varied body of nineteenth-century Spanish novels known as folletines is still a “confusing universe,” and our knowledge of these works continues to be highly limited and quite muddled.10
To perceive the complex cultural processes and the diversity of literary practices sustaining folletín writing (and, consequently, the diversity of audiences these novels addressed), I will briefly examine the group of folletines known as the Spanish Misterios: novels written in imitation of Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris, 1842–3). This group of novels is also known as folletín social since its melodramatic plots are set within contemporary social situations and often, but not always, convey the political message of progressive liberals or utopian socialists.11 Specifically, I will comment on two works – Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco’s María o La hija de un jornalero (‘María or the Daughter of a Journeyman’, 1845–6) and Ceferino Tressera’s Los misterios del Saladero (‘The Mysteries of the Prison-House’, 1860). It is not my intention to take these novels as representatives of the group – rather the contrary. I would like to point out their distinctive writing among the diverse aesthetic configurations that constitute the Spanish Misterios and, more generally, the folletín novel.
The Spanish Misterios, mostly written between 1844 and 1870, belong to a cultural period when the new market-oriented literary practices were in full swing but the cultural denunciation of mass-produced popular culture – although in process of being conceptualized – was yet to be set in place. Only after l’art pour l’art emerged as the dominant aesthetic doctrine in Spain, during the revolutionary period beginning in 1868, was the question of the construction of a national literature framed by the distinction between High and Low cultures. Consequently, the writing of the mid-nineteenth-century Misterios, although constituted by many market-oriented narrative techniques, is characterized by the conspicuous absence of the strategies of cultural hierarchization so important later in the century. In this sense, the Misterios are both a commercially oriented narrative, since as imitation of Sue’s works they reproduce some of his successful narrative formulas, and a literary enterprise undertaken by an educated elite, driven by the desire to create a modern Spanish novel while engaging in the aesthetics of that foreign and popular genre. As Juan Martínez Villergas stated, referring to his writing of Los Misterios de Madrid (‘The Mysteries of Madrid’, 1844–5), his novel was part of the aesthetic trials that were bringing forth the autochthonous Spanish novel: “Indeed I have the satisfaction,” he said, “of having contributed to the cultivation of a national novel.”12
The identification of the folletín with the unsophisticated and childlike reading habits said to be found in the working classes and women again proves to be far from accurate in the case of the Misterios. Studies on the social and economic conditions supporting readership in mid-nineteenth-century Spain have established the middle-class background of most readers of the early novel. In the case of the Misterios, the dense page composition, the use of footnotes, addenda, and small fonts – all distinctive traits of these novels to a greater or lesser degree – seem to point to an audience with far more sophisticated reading skills than those of the barely literate working class. The proclaimed “extraordinary luxury” of the first editions of María o La hija de un jornalero, in addition to confirming the high cost of the book, seems also to be in agreement with the desires of a middle class anxious to acquire both social prestige and cultural capital. Similarly, and against the established idea of a mostly female readership for the folletín novel, the intended audience of the Misterios seems to have been male. The male readership of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris and its Spanish imitations is consistent not only with their often highly political nature but also with nineteenth-century printed and written records.13 Rafael del Castillo, in the opening pages of his novel Misterios catalanes o el obrero de Barcelona (‘Catalonian Mysteries or the Worker from Barcelona’, 1862), not only identifies men as the appropriate readers of his text but, concerned with the serious matters undertaken in his novel, also warns off any possible female reader: “Our readers may go to the trouble of interpreting it in their own way. We abstain from any interference as we do not wish to offend the modesty of those few daughters of Eve who experience the delicious or fatal whim to read us.” The social spectrum of the Misterios readership in Spain – male and middle class – is well exemplified by José María Álvarez (owner of a cake shop), who after his death in 1846 left a library consisting, among other unspecified books, of Los misterios de París, Los misterios de Madrid, El Judío errante, Nuestra Señora de París, Hans de Islandia, and La vida de Espartero.14
This does not mean, of course, that women did not read these novels. We need to remember that despite their intended male readership, various sources point also to a large female audience for the Misterios and other mid-nineteenth-century political novels: among them, the proliferation of the figure of the “bluestocking” (la marisabidilla) in the fictional and non-fictional writings of the time, and the numerous warnings by politicians and social commentators about the dangers of mixing political discourse and entertainment, precisely because it was creating a politicized female readership. In any case, the intended portrait of contemporary social issues by the Misterios, as well as their small font and dense page format, points to both an educated and socially aware national audience that enjoyed recognizing – or expected to find – their own social concerns, political anxieties, and aspirations in fictional narratives.
The middle-class, mostly male and often politically progressive readership of the Spanish Misterios is coherent with the social base of Sue’s extensive European readership: according to Antonio Gramsci, Sue was “widely read by the middle-class democrats.”15 The widespread use of the serial novel – in particular, the Misterios type of narratives – by politically minded liberals and, in some cases, utopian socialists also questions the preconception of an uneducated readership seeking plain escapist entertainment. Although it is accurate to affirm that these narratives reproduce the formula known as “literature of consolation,” the Misterios are not alienating novels, nor are they all plainly conservative. The Misterios sanction basic forms of bourgeois authority and social order; however, we must remember that they also satisfied the symbolic needs of the political opposition to the moderado regime – progressive liberals, republicans, democrats, and utopian socialists. The ideological limitations of these political discourses (their ultimate alliance to bourgeois concepts of class and gender) should not prevent us from acknowledging the destabilizing role some of them had in mid-nineteenth-century Spain.
As the Misterios written by Ayguals de Izco and Ceferino Tressera show, mid-century writers, while using melodrama to express their social concerns and the consolatory formula to promote social reconciliation, questioned and pushed liberalism often to its limits before Marxist thought revealed the ideological shortcomings of their own critical discourses. These Misterios are definitively addressed to those social groups that made possible the 1868 Revolution and the First Republic, movements that stood for a social order that had little to do with the conservative regimes of the Estatuto Real (1833) or the Restoration (1874/75–1885). Thus, the Misterios locate themselves precisely at the center of the disparity between the rigid constitutional frame imposed by a system of representation based on strict property qualifications (liberalismo censitario) and the realities of a social opinion that, excluded from the system of representation, demanded its access to the new political system. Contrary to the perception of these novels as escapist and alienating literature, the emergence of the Misterios in the 1840s is related to the desire for political expression that gave rise to the daily press – a phenomenon inscribed in the process of raising the consciousness of an ever-wider reading public, set in motion by the middle class outside the boundaries of the prevailing constitutional system. In accordance with Raymond Carr’s assertion of the historical importance and political influence of the petty bourgeois sectors of Spanish society since the early 1850s, we can say that the Misterios are located at the center of the formal abundance, cultural complexity, and ideological contradictions experienced by the mid-nineteenth-century Spanish middle classes.16
Thus the imagination found in the novels by Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco and Ceferino Tressera is not detached from the historical conditions that gave rise to them, nor is it rigidly formulaic and meaningless. On the contrary, the novels by Ayguals and Tressera are the aesthetic response – the form that confers meaning – to the historical processes transforming Spain in the middle of the nineteenth century. María and Los misterios del Saladero, amplifying and multiplying Sue’s use of footnotes in Les Mystères de Paris, are characterized by the merging of newspaper reporting and novel writing. In these narratives, romance is accompanied by long footnotes (some of them extending for several pages) in which the reader is provided with excerpts from public and statistical reports, scientific treatises, promulgated laws, newspaper articles, parliamentary speeches, and so on. Ceferino Tressera in Los misterios del Saladero, for instance, following in Ayguals’s footsteps, uses statistics, maps, and salary and demographic tables to illustrate and support his political arguments. Furthermore, he not only discusses and quotes extensively from the political thought of utopian socialist authors, but also mentions Hegel and Darwin.
Ayguals’s and Tressera’s intensive resort to newspaper-like reports contributes decidedly to inserting their romances into specific socio-historical contexts: the journalistic reporting on current historical events gives a distinctive sense of a politically and socially motivated present to the Misterios narratives. The portrait of folletines as escapist fantasies is, in part, the result of the perceived ahistoricism of their plots. The notion of time organizing the events portrayed in the Spanish Misterios is often viewed through the historicist awareness of late-nineteenth-century novels and, consequently, perceived as lacking in historical consciousness and as falling into essentialist notions of time (an ahistorical notion of truth and reality). In fact, the journalistic writing found in the novels by Ayguals and Tressera (and other authors of Misterios), framed within a melodramatic representation of social evil and using strategies of consolation, plunges their readers into the calendrical time and familiar landscape that constitute national consciousness. They accomplish this by the appropriation of the journalistic purpose of recreating the present: its intent to give singular and current events a historical explanation and perspective, that is, a collective meaning. Ayguals had a name for this special kind of journalistic retelling of Spain’s transition from an absolutist monarchy to a liberal one – the story of those “great events that occurred in Madrid during the period of the Estatuto Real” – and its transformation into “contemporary chronicles”: he called it a “history-novel.”17
In the Misterios by Ayguals and Tressera, the fortunes and misfortunes of the characters are narratively inserted within recent and actual social events and connected to the political issues raised by them, extensively commented on in the newspaper-style digressions. In these novels, as has been observed apropos of the eruption of the political and the social into bourgeois sentimental novels, love affairs no longer face the opposition of hostile relatives or the prejudices of private morality, but instead the class and gender structure of society. Thus in these novels suicide attempts, seductions, love stories, plans of revenge, misappropriations, and restitutions of name and wealth are not only narratively framed by the profound economic transformations that characterized mid-nineteenth-century Spain (the proletarization of the work force, the first important migrations from rural areas to the cities, the introduction of steam engines, etc.). Their course also follows the political instability and intense social unrest in the Spanish liberal state during those mid-century years (the Carlist wars and the infighting among liberal groups). As one of the first representations of Spanish society struggling with modernization, these Misterios provide their own distinctive fictional answer to the disruption caused by historical processes in traditional forms of life, and reflect the anxieties and enthusiasm their readers themselves felt about the possibility of reinventing the country around a new modern state. In this sense, we can say that the romances written by Ayguals and Tressera show the ideological and aesthetic range – as well as the limitations – of melodramatic writing.
The last issue we must examine is the relation of the folletín to other nineteenth-century novel writing, specifically to realist and naturalist works. So far the few studies analyzing this question have focused on the impact of the folletín on the work of the realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós.18 The literary and cultural relevance of the folletín in the history of the nineteenth-century Spanish novel has been mostly limited to its role in the development of the realist aesthetics of this particular writer. The importance the folletín had in his writing, as well as the complexity of the role it played in defining his particular brand of realism, are generally acknowledged. Many critics have noticed the dependence of his novels and Episodios nacionales of the first period (1870–81) on folletín imagination and narrative techniques. At the same time, this dependence has often been denounced as a deplorable instance of literary contamination and explained as the result of the creative weaknesses of a young writer still unable to escape the corrupting effects of the folletín’s morbid aesthetics. The numerous references to the folletín – and folletinistas – that can be found in some of Galdós’s later works, such as La desheredada (The Disinherited Woman, 1881) and Tormento (1884), have been analyzed as part of the mature writer’s conscious parodying of the popular genre and regarded as one of the literary strategies that characterizes his own version of realist writing. But the relevance of the extensive production of folletines in the emergence of the modern Spanish novel – in the aesthetic trials that came to constitute the Spanish bourgeois novel in all its diversity – has hardly been explored. Of course, to acknowledge the presence of the folletín in the literary practices of the late nineteenth century would complicate the construction of cultural strategies of social distinction that characterizes the task of traditional literary history. It would also complicate the task of justifying the artistic legitimacy of the Spanish novel within the frame of modern European culture (as dictated by the prestigious French and English models). But it would allow us to understand fully what Stephanie Sieburth has identified as one of the characteristics of Spanish literary life: its “in-between” character, its participation in both High and Low forms of culture.19
New studies are approaching the folletín novel not as an alien form in the history of Spanish fiction but, on the contrary, as the result of different ways of appropriating a foreign and imported genre. Morever, the folletín is examined as a discursive solution to a crisis originated by the awareness of Spain’s provincial separation from modern cultural processes, and the hybridity of the Spanish novel as related to the uneven modernization of Spain. Franco Moretti has rightly observed that the European popular novel does not represent a betrayal of literature but rather “the coming to light of the limits of Realism,” that is, the dependency of realist poetics on the historical and social conditions of France and England and their middle classes.20 In this sense, while pointing out the lasting and important influence popular novels had all over Europe, he has linked the emergence of mass literature in the nineteenth century to the representation of those European historical conditions that were different from those experienced by its hegemonic centers, and to the social realities and imaginations that are obliterated by realist poetics. Moretti’s understanding of popular culture gives a whole new relevance to the extensive and lasting production of the Spanish folletín novel. In this sense, we need to explore how the weakness of Spain’s industrialization process, the violence of the civil wars, the unfinished character of its political revolution (the constant military uprisings), the well-rooted centrifugal forces of regionalism undermining the authority of the centralist state, the loss of the empire (when the most prosperous European nations were busy building new ones), and the repression and social stagnation of the Restoration period, found in the aesthetic diversity of folletín writing a distinctive vehicle of expression. In the successful narrative formulas of the popular novel – prone to unusual events and characters, to a clear-cut representation of conflicts and resolutions, and to the uncensored display of emotions – the off-center historical conditions of Spain with respect to the political and cultural hegemony of France and Britain, found a voice, or rather, many.
1 See Juan Ignacio Ferreras, Catálogo de novelas y novelistas españoles del siglo XIX (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979) and La novela por entregas, 1840–1900: Concentración obrera y economía editorial (Madrid: Taurus, 1972).
2 See A. Blanco, “Gender and National Identity: The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literary History,” in Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain, ed. Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Jo Labany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 120–36; C. Jagoe, “Disinheriting the Feminine: Galdós and the Rise of the Realist Novel in Spain,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 27 (1993), pp. 203–8.
3 See Benito Pérez Galdós, “Observaciones sobre la novela contemporánea en España” (1870), in Ensayos de crítica literaria, ed. L. Bonet (Barcelona: Península, 1972), pp. 115–32, and José Ortega y Gasset, “Ideas sobre la novela” (1925), in Teoría de la novela (Aproximaciones hispánicas), ed. Germán y Agnes Gullón (Madrid: Taurus, 1974), pp. 29–64.
4 Blanco, “Gender and National Identity”, p. 123.
5 M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 123.
6 F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (1800–1900) (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 190–1.
7 I. Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” Poetics Today 11/1 (1990), p. 47.
8 U. Eco, “Socialismo y consolación,” in Socialismo y consolación: Reflexiones en torno a “Los misterios de París” de Eugène Sue (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1970), pp. 7–37.
9 See J.-F. Botrel, “Nationalisme et consolation dans la littérature populaire espagnole des années 1898,” in Nationalisme et littérature en Espagne et en Amérique latine aux XIXè siécle, ed. Claude Dumas (Lille: Presse Universitaire de Lille, 1982), pp. 63–8. For studies on women’s writing, see Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s contribution to this volume.
10 L. Romero Tobar, La novela popular española del siglo XIX (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 1976), p. 35.
11 We should remember here that the title of Eugène Sue’s novel had a great impact and produced a wave of other works entitled Misterios whose content and form have nothing to do with the imitations discussed here.
13 A male reader is depicted, for instance, in the caricature entitled “Lecture des Mystères de Paris” published in the magazine Charivari (22 November 1843). Similarly, the small library owned by Dussadier (the representative of the committed revolutionary low middle class in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale) consists of three books and includes the novel by Sue.
14 R. del Castillo, Misterios catalanes o el obrero de Barcelona (Madrid: Librería Española de E. Font, 1962), p. 169. See also J.-F. Botrel, “Narrativa y lecturas del pueblo en la España del siglo ,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 516 (1993), pp. 69–91.
15 A. Gramsci, “The Detective Novel, from ‘Quaderni del carcere,’” in Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 370.
16 R. Carr, Spain (1808–1939) (Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 61.
17 W. Ayguals de Izco, María o La hija de un jornalero, 2 vols. (Madrid: Ayguals de Izco, 1845–6), p. 384.
18 On the influence of the folletín novel on Pérez Galdós’s works, see Romero Tobar, La novela popular; F. Ynduráin, Galdós entre la novela y el folletín (Madrid: Taurus, 1970); A. Andreu, Galdós y la literatura popular (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1982). For a critical reformulation of Spanish Realism, see H. Gold, The Reframing of Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
19 S. Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 11.
20 F. Moretti, “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch,” New Left Review 206 (1994), p. 103.