The nineteenth-century realist novel is in general founded on a bedrock of history. The status of history as the modern scientifically based humanism was largely unchallenged at the middle of the century and little doubt was entertained about the finality and accuracy of historical knowledge, “as it actually happened,” in Leopold von Ranke’s words. Similarly, the accuracy and reliability of the mimetic procedures of fiction tended to be taken for granted: the novel’s purpose, it was thought, was to reflect objective reality precisely, and it was to be judged by its success in accomplishing this aim. Clearly, there are important reservations to be made concerning this forthright and confident approach. First, it is evidently not shared by modern theorists like Hayden White, who react sharply against concepts of historical certainty and even against the relevance of history in general (Roland Barthes).1 Second, in their practice novelists were by no means fully observant of these norms.
It follows, nonetheless, that history – viewed as the objective reality of the past – plays, from the socially based novels of Balzac onwards, a vital role in the portrayal of the present in the contemporary novel. Lukács is correct in establishing a direct link between Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels and Balzac’s Comédie humaine.2 In fact, in Spain it would be broadly true to say that imitation of Scott’s much-admired model divided into two divergent directions, corresponding to the Romantic, exotic, or costumbrista side and the realist side of his achievement respectively. The first gave rise to the proliferation of Romantic historical novels like El doncel de don Enrique el doliente (‘Henry the Infirm’s Page’, 1834) and El señor de Bembibre (‘The Lord of Bembibre’, 1844), the second to the near-contemporary realistic development in Balzac, which entered, or reentered, Spain with Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) and his contemporaries. In one of the most substantial of his rather meager pieces of critical writing, his prologue to Clarín’s La Regenta, Galdós links naturalism, a substantial bone of contention at the time, with the Spanish picaresque and Cervantine tradition of a “humorous quality which was perhaps the race’s most brilliant attribute.” He sees the course of the novel as “a circular current like the gulf-stream [which] brought more heat and less delicacy and wit” as it makes its way onward, incorporating English humor and French analytical skill. The revived Spanish novel has regained, he declares, the “art of being natural with a felicitous harmony between the serious and the comic.”3 Such an emphasis on indigenous humor (a sly type of humor: socarronería), attenuates, we should observe, the solemn note of the historical realism we are discussing.
Historicity in its broadest sense is, then, intrinsic to the realist novel as formulated and practiced by Galdós, the pivotal figure in any discussion of the issue. The type of historical narrative he is concerned with deals with events not too distant from the present. In speaking of historical novels, in fact, it is important to distinguish between those concerned, like Salammbô or The Last Days of Pompeii, with the remote, potentially exotic, past, which have little direct relevance to the contemporary situation, and those which treat of the immediate past. “’Tis Sixty Years,” the subtitle of Scott’s Waverley, provides an excellent example of an effort to assess in fictional form the lasting influence of a decisive event two generations earlier – the Jacobite defeat – on contemporary Scotland.
Thus Galdós commenced his novelistic career with historical novels of immediate relevance (La fontana de oro [The Golden Fountain Café, 1867–8], El audaz [‘A Daring Man’, 1871] even though an enduring note of fantasy is struck up in La sombra [The Shadow, 1870]). At the same time, this approach also embraces a concern with continuous social development and mobility, with the result that, in his programmatic “Observations on the Contemporary Novel in Spain” (1870), he singles out the rising urban middle class as “the great model, the inexhaustible source” for fiction.4
In establishing around 1870 his criteria for an analysis of past and present, Galdós seems to have felt a need to separate two somewhat disparate objectives. One is to trace in detail events of the not too distant but not immediate past, “memory at one remove,” in Tillotson’s phrase,5 in order to explain present circumstances; the other to take near-contemporary subjects, of more direct relevance, and show the inherent social conflicts within them. Hence, the creation of a new form, the episodio nacional (‘national episode’) to tackle the first, and the writing of the novelas contemporáneas de la primera época (‘contemporary novels of the first period’) for the second. While the first impulse, which quickly gained him popularity and income, gave rise to a rapid production of twenty narratives covering the periods 1805 to 1824 (first series) and 1824 to 1834 (second series), the second conception yielded, at the same time as the initial undertaking of writing historical chronicles was completed, to the more complex and objective representation found, from 1881 onwards, in the full novelas contemporáneas.
Later, at a time when the essential thrust of his great contemporary novels was spent, in 1898, came a renewal of the writing of episodios nacionales, giving rise to three more series (the fifth incomplete, with only six narrations, the last one in 1912), chronicling the events from the First Carlist War (1834–40), through the reign of Isabella II and the revolutionary period (1868–74) until the Restoration of 1874/75. The episodios nacionales and the novelas contemporáneas, though obviously closely interrelated, have very different points of emphasis, and should by no means be taken, as they sometimes are, to be identical. As we shall see in what follows, the differences between them cast light on their divergent objectives.
In the novels individual historical events are used, frequently but not in any systematic fashion, to provide a kind of factual stiffening – which is more than just background – for selected fictional occurrences, to indicate parallels between private and public behavior, and to broaden characterization. Political figures and events from both the present and the immediate past are utilized in a shorthand fashion; moreover, the fictional characters are normally firmly locked into the overall political and social context. Thus Auerbach’s remark on Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir that its characters are “embedded in a total reality, political, social, economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving,”6 applies no less to Galdós. Not all the major events of the time of action are included, as is required in the episodios; nor are those that are necessarily treated in more than a partial and limited way. What is conveyed, rather, is the immediate impact of certain crucial events and an acute awareness of the continuity of past and present: in Peter Bly’s words, they are “stepping-stones of historical data which lead to the novel’s overall historical dimension.”7 Thus, while it is inappropriate to classify Galdós’s fittingly named “contemporary novels” as historical novels, just as it is regarding Balzac’s Comédie humaine, there is no doubt that they are historically conscious novels. The term used by Bly in his thorough and perceptive study, the “novel of historical imagination,” is perhaps the most suitable.
Broad parallels are on occasion established between characters and major historical developments. Two of the most notable examples are the dishonorable course, parallel to that of Spain, pursued by Isidora in La desheredada (The Disinherited Lady, 1881), as she accepts a moral degradation consonant with that suffered by the country through the murder of the principal revolutionary general Juan Prim, and the parallel between Spain’s public life veering between law and disorder and the private life of Juanito Santa Cruz in Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–7): “There occurred in him what don Baldomero [his father] had said about the country: he suffered from alternating fevers of freedom and peace” (II: 56).8 Some fictitious characters are grafted into historical situations: the Bringas couple, deeply implicated, within the Royal Palace, in the fall of Isabella II, and Villalonga, the opportunistic parliamentary deputy who in a masterly scene describes in parallel fashion General Pavía’s coup d’état in Congress in 1874 and Fortunata’s return to Madrid. Torquemada, the sordid moneylender turned banker and nouveau riche, serves as the barometer of economic developments throughout the period, as Villaamil does of the vicissitudes of a redundant civil servant’s (cesante) existence in Miau (1888). Manuel Infante (La incógnita [The Unknown, 1888–9]) represents the somnolent parliamentarism and caciquismo (‘local boss-ism’) of the full Restoration period.
Another type of historical reference characteristic of the novels consists of historical recapitulations in no way integrated into the plot. Characters are chosen to provide a rapid and purely superficial listing of the salient events of recent history, thus inducing a broader awareness of the past or simply jogging the memory. The best examples are two characters from Fortunata y Jacinta: Plácido Estupiñá, whose historical memory goes back to politicians declaiming histrionically from a balcony from the time of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph I, onwards, and doña Isabel Cordero, whose many children are born on key historical dates and who herself dies on the same day as Prim is assassinated. The same function is fulfilled by Beramendi’s children in the episodio La de los tristes destinos (‘A Woman of Ill Fortune’, 1907), which describes the expulsion of Isabella II. Normally, however, this recourse is not required, given the historical continuity of the genre.
Similarly, consecrated historical figures or incidents from the past, which no longer form part of the ongoing historical process, are evoked in the novels as models, warnings or justifications of some current action. Prim is frequently recalled in this way, but the outstanding example is the harrowing memory Ángel Guerra has of the horrendous public execution of sixty-six sergeants from the San Gil barracks twenty years before, in 1866. Another device is to indicate the physical likeness between a character and an eminent historical figure, normally foreign, usually with ironic intent. Notable examples are the stingy and blinkered bureaucrat Francisco Bringas, consistently identified physically with the French economist and statesman Thiers; the pompous Basilio Andrés de la Caña’s resemblance to the Italian statesman Cavour; and the constantly evolving iconographical comparisons made between Mauricia la dura (‘Tough Mauricia’) and Napoleon in Fortunata y Jacinta.
History is not, however, treated in fact as a fixed series of great events, and the absolute confidence of nineteenth-century historical determinism is accordingly mitigated. While Galdós frequently flirts with the suppositions of the deterministic approach to history, he never accepts them fully. Perhaps a striking sentence from La desheredada, in which Fate, Chance, and the army all play their part, most clearly expresses his viewpoint: “Fate and Chance play chess about Spain, which has always been a board with squares [but also barracks] of blood and silver.”9 An essential method by which diversity and flexibility, and at times ambiguity, is established is by the extensive use of everyday illustrations of social evolution, what has been called “la historia chica” (‘minor history’) as opposed to “la historia grande” (‘major history’). The historia chica not only includes the largely unrecorded undercurrent of steady yet unobtrusive historical change – what Unamuno later termed “intrahistoria”10 – but also embraces fictional invention which is itself historically representative. In these more domestic issues the fictional story lends life and credibility to the historical process. The essential thing is that both major and minor happenings must interact constantly and consistently in close metonymic relation. Galdós’s talent in this respect is one of his outstanding qualities. In the novels la historia chica or the fictional story is the predominant factor, whereas in the episodios the situation is to some extent reversed: while la historia grande gains in importance, la historia chica, even if no longer fully autonomous, remains essential, coordinated and intertwined as it is, in a highly effective way, with the major events.
Both forms of narrative use recurring characters, but Galdós does not utilize the device to the same degree as Balzac and does no rearranging of previously published material. Recurrence evidently enhances the plausibility and coherence of the mimetic world of fiction, and thus lends it a greater historical verisimilitude, but while in contemporary novels the device is optative and selective, in the episodios it is organically required. Once firm relationships have been established between fictional characters and real-life historical personages or situations, the former have become part of the structure and cannot be realistically abandoned in subsequent volumes; they can only be gradually modified or replaced.
The quantity of historical data which has to be accommodated in the episodios is far larger than in conventional novels and more extensive, too, than in standard historical novels. The episodio nacional therefore needs to be treated as a highly individualized type of historical novel, a subgenre that makes special demands, like an overall factual exactness in its historical content and an easily intelligible chronology. It has a characteristic structure of ten narratives per series and is relatively short. Unlike the novels, the distance between the time of the action (“story time”) and the time of the narration (“discourse time”)11 is invariably and inevitably very great, with a time scale lasting as much as sixty years. In most of them “discourse time” is not allowed to intrude upon “story time” and readers are induced to view events as contemporaneous. While the narratee is closely involved in the situation, the implied reader is very remote from the events taking place, though he may identify imaginatively with them. What is present, but without breaking the immediacy of the presentation, is what Lukács (The Historical Novel, p. 68) calls the “necessary anachronism” associated with any reconstruction of the past.
The episodio nacional also professes an evident if secondary didactic aim of providing information and stimulating thought about the issues of the immediate past. As Galdós himself declared in 1885, his work is “free from any purpose other than to present in a pleasant form the main military and political actions of the most dramatic period of the century, with the aim of entertaining and also of teaching, though not a great deal those people who are fond of this type of reading” (my italics).12 The very titles adopted for the episodios makes their sustained purpose abundantly clear: every one of the forty-six refers explicitly to a historical event, date, or personage, while not a single title of the contemporary novels after La fontana de oro contains any direct historical or political allusion. In every episodio some major historical figure or development, from Godoy to Cánovas, from the Napoleonic period to the Restoration settlement, is shown in action, even though the historical figure, in accordance with Lukács’ dictum (The Historical Novel, p. 33), is never the protagonist of the work.
The priority necessarily given to political history over the fictional story does not make these narratives real contributions to historiography, for the content is entirely second-hand. What it does do is to give the form of the episodio a more inflexible and unmodifiable structure. As Galdós himself says in a discarded comment in 1875, “the action and plot are made up by a multitude of events which must not be altered by whim” (my italics).13 It appears that the story was normally added subsequently: “Now I am preparing the canvas, that is, the historical set-up [ . . .] Once the historical and political background has been sketched in, I shall invent the intrigue,” Galdós declared in July 1910.14
This scheme is, however, merely the starting point. It does not indicate a lack of concern for the fictional story, on which the effect and quality of the work must essentially depend. Thus the narratives are two-pronged: “the novelesque genre with a historical base.”15 The panoramic and comprehensive view embraces society as well as politics, and for this the episodios depend on their fictional scaffolding. Nor is any absolute predominance of large political issues implied. Unrecorded or overlooked personal events – la historia chica once more, and as such mostly fictional – form a large and indispensable part of the totality of history:
The personal tangles and incidents between individuals who make no claim on the judgment of posterity are branches of the same tree that produces the historic timber with which we put together the external structure by which countries and their princes operate, with their convulsions, statutes, wars, and peace treaties. With timber of one sort or the other, joined together as best one can, we raise up the tall scaffolding from which we see, in luminous perspective, the soul, body, and humors of the nation.16
The protagonist Pepe Fajardo, on returning from Italy to chronicle Isabeline Spain, characterizes the role of the individual and his impact in a most effective metaphor:
History is the continuous process of the birth of some events in the womb of others. It is the daughter of Yesterday, the sister of Today and the mother of Tomorrow. All men make unrecorded history; everyone living is continually creating ideal volumes that are not printed or even written. Anyone who in some way leaves the trace of his/her existence on passing through the world will be worthy of Clio’s praise, like snails which as they slowly move along leave behind a thread of slime imprinted on the stones. This I shall do, a snail with a long trail still ahead of me; and don’t tell me that the trace of slime that I am leaving doesn’t deserve to be seen by those who come after.17
The progress of intrahistoria may not be much – the image of the snail’s track is a very modest one – but it is continuous and accumulative.
Initially, in the first series, Galdós adopted a technique of autobiographical reminiscence, with Gabriel Araceli describing events from his old age. Despite the advantages of continuity, this procedure suffered from inevitable limitations, and by 1875 Galdós was inveighing vehemently against the rigidity of narrating for so long from the viewpoint of just one person. First-person narration is therefore abandoned for “free narration” and relatively autonomous development in the second series. A major exception is Memorias de un cortesano de 1815 (‘Memoirs of a Courtier of 1815’, 1875), narrated by the sycophantic Juan Bragas, which casts an ironic light on the reign of Ferdinand VII. Galdós also indicates a second change, which emphasizes the novelistic qualities of the works: “as the action passes in them from battlefields and besieged garrison towns to political jousts and the great theatre of common life, the result is more movement, more novel, and therefore, greater interest. The historical novel thus becomes confused with the novel of everyday living” (my italics).18 The shifting balance between the two constituent elements – history, fiction – of the episodio nacional is thus clearly established.
Moreover, the successive volumes are accumulative and interdependent to a remarkable degree: “linked between themselves, but without undue effort.”19 Various techniques are used to provide a thread of continuity between individual episodios and even across series. One is the use of key figures. An outstanding example is Jenara Baraona, so conspicuous in the second series through her unhappy marriage to Carlos Navarro and her amorous entanglement with the series’ protagonist Salvador Monsalud, among others, and as narrator – the only woman so employed, a remarkable fact in itself – of Los cien mil hijos de San Luis (‘The Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis’, 1877). She thus plays the crucial role of linking public and private events, with much greater personal involvement than characterized Estupiñá, from Joseph Bonaparte’s time right up to Espartero’s regency (1841–3) and beyond.
On returning to the subgenre with the third series in 1898, Galdós tackles the First Carlist War, which, with its pointless cruelties and frequent executions, lasted until the 1839 Peace of Vergara agreed between Espartero and Marote. The events of the war alternate with attempts at economic reform (Mendizábal, 1898) and descriptions of Romanticism (La estafeta romántica [‘The Romantic Mail’, 1899]). Largely third-person narrators continue to be used: the priest, José Fago, for the first narrative; the Carlist hero Zumalacárregui, and Fernando Calpena subsequently. On several occasions, however, seeking greater immediacy, Galdós introduces a modified first-person form: the epistolary mode, already used in the novel La incógnita. Letters, from some dozen correspondents, constitute the entire structure of La estafeta romántica and play a considerable part in Luchana (1899), Vergara (1899) and Los ayacuchos (1900), – ayacuchos were soldiers who supported Espartero. Such structural devices militate against pure historicism. So does the degree of selection exercised. The first sentence of the last episodio of the third series, Bodas reales (‘Royal Weddings’, 1900), already concerned with the young queen Isabella II, makes an important distinction between History, which fixes and retains all human occurrences, great and small, and Time, which is memoryless.20 By indicating the inexhaustible abundance of historical reference available, this statement demonstrates, not the rejection of History, but the variety of evidence that needs sifting and selecting to provide specific significant examples – to offer, in other words, “stepping-stones,” in Bly’s apt phrase, in the inexorable course of undifferentiated Time.
The fourth series, devoted to Isabella’s reign and her fall, uses a mixed narrative technique, providing maximum flexibility, of roughly alternating first- and third-person narrative. It commences with Fajardo’s first-person memoirs in the twin narratives Las tormentas del ’48 (‘The Tempests of ’48’, 1902) and Narváez (1902). Then comes an intercalated third-person narration for Los duendes de la camarilla (‘The Goblins of the Antechamber’, 1903) before we return to Fajardo’s memoirs in La revolución de julio (‘The July Revolution’, 1904). What is now sought is an adequate method of conveying a contemporaneous situation: a historical reconstruction of the past that occurs before our eyes. Diachronic time or consecutive time yields, at intervals at least, to synchronic time, or past events viewed simultaneously. Historical and fictional figures are seen in the process of playing their role in the present – their present – and are therefore subject to the pressures and uncertainties of the moment. The narrator and the story, and so the narratee, are thus extremely close, but are remote in time from the implied author and implied reader. By this alternation convincing immersion in an earlier contemporary reality is achieved. The third-person narration, used in the last three narratives, allows, by extensive use of “summary,” a faster narrative pace than the memoir and establishes a certain distance in time and space from the events while still mirroring the attitude of the leading characters, with whom the reader is already acquainted.
Similar techniques continue into the fifth series, dealing with the revolutionary period from 1868 to 1875. The first volume, España sin rey (‘Spain without a King’, 1907–8) has an anonymous personal narrator, as amid lively fictional incidents the extended search for a constitutional monarch is undertaken. The second, España trágica (‘Tragic Spain’, 1809), on Prim’s murder, is centered on Vicente Halconero and includes lengthy extracts from his diary. A break comes, however, in the last four volumes, from Amadeo I (1910) onwards. These are concerned with particularly important issues for later generations: the failed experiments of the Savoyan monarchy and the First Republic and Cánovas’s problematical success in restoring the Bourbon dynasty. At the same time they are characterized by a radically new first-person technique. They are narrated directly by the extravagant figure of Tito Liviano, from the narrator’s present, that is, “discourse time,” now deliberately acknowledged, at a great chronological distance from the events narrated, and are laced with much explicit commentary. The earlier balance, by which “story time” prevailed over “discourse time,” is thus destroyed. Instead, there is bitter, unmediated denunciation of traditional politicians and of the church, culminating in a famous defense of Revolution at the end of the last episodio, Cánovas. The dialogic structure of previous narratives has been lost.
To return to the second batch of episodios as a whole: in all of them procedures aimed at providing continuity remain important. Thus a few families exercise a tentacular hold over the structure of several volumes. The most evident is the extended Ansúrez family, to a large extent a repository of primitive Celtiberian values and fierce independence, in the fourth series. Although the symbolism may at times be rather wooden, such figures have an essentially representational function. The most important is Lucila, the Celtiberian beauty who entranced Beramendi and Santiuste, became Bartolomé Gracián’s lover, made two middle-class marriages and was the mother of Vicente Halconero. Also symbolic in name and character are the two Santiago Iberos, father and son. Coming from the “Rioja alavesa” – a mixture therefore of Castilian and Basque – they exemplify for Galdós the honesty and tenacity of the primitive Iberian race. Another family example, of a more adaptable sort, are the Fajardos, to which the key figure of Beramendi belonged. All these groups and many others are interlocked by ties of personal relationships or marriage or political affiliation. Links are also provided with earlier series and between generations. In all the intricate web of fictional relationships historical underpinning is never lacking.
Historical involvement on this scale evidently poses problems for modern theorists hostile to conventional history. Purist writers like Henry James have always objected to what appeared to be a hybrid form. Structuralists and deconstructionists decry the presence in a work of creation of such extraneous features as history and politics. Diane Urey adopts the interesting criterion of minimizing the effect of the historical structure and extolling the fictional story to which Derridean concepts can be applied: “Derrida’s critique of history is applicable to the Episodios nacionales overall because it questions any form of representation and the indissolubility of the linguistic sign.”21 Accordingly, Urey’s work has the merit of paying overdue attention to the story and narrative structure, rightly discerning in them “an amazing artistic virtuosity” (Novel Histories, p. 10) and a “brilliant manipulation of language [that] could surely only be achieved by a keen perception of its intrinsic and inseparable role in every aspect of life, including what is called history” (pp. 11–12). She is also fully conscious of the open-ended quality of Galdós’s presentation of historical events, in which an extraordinarily broad spectrum of contemporary opinions is assembled, whether the event is the Ministerio Relámpago (‘Lightning Ministry,’ 1849), when the Liberal prime minister was accused of coercing the young queen, or the assassination of Prim (1870).
Undoubtedly the most daring and imaginative experiment of the later period is the transformation in Prim of the character of Juan Santiuste, now known as “Confusio,” into the creator of an imaginary “Logical-Natural History of the Spaniards of the Two Worlds in the Nineteenth Century.” Under the patronage of Beramendi, who shares his profound dissatisfaction with the course of Spanish history, “Confusio” constructs an idealized historical frame in which what occurs is what ought to happen, not what did actually happen. Thus, Ferdinand VII, instead of being rescued by a French invasion, is shot by the patriots at Cadiz, and the civil war that followed is turned into another war of independence, after which Isabella II (transformed into the daughter of the earlier queen Isabel de Braganza) marries a Ferdinand of Aragon. Under these new Catholic Monarchs the military opponents, represented by Serrano and Prim, are reconciled, and eventually Alfonso XII leads Spain into a long period of peace and prosperity that lasts well into the twentieth century. These extravagant notions have met with much criticism as being the outpourings of a madman, but we should bear in mind the utterly desolate character of Spanish history before and up to the time when Galdós was writing. The purpose of the “Logical-Natural History” may well be to demonstrate how arbitrary the course of national life had been, to offer a sort of antidote against the pessimism and despair engendered by the true history of the period, and to confound a rigorously deterministic interpretation of Spain’s failures. Moreover, in creating such an imaginative stimulus to meditation on recent Spanish history, Galdós is also making clear the limitations of the narrowly scientific concept of history with which we started.
Another flirtation with a certain type of historical novel is found in La tribuna (Tribune of the People, 1883) by Emilia Pardo-Bazán (1851–1921), centered around the key event of the recent past, the “Glorious” Revolution of 1868 and its consequences. Among the novel’s many innovatory merits is its creation, in an age of social unrest that purported to offer promise of social equality, of a major female protagonist within a working-class setting, at the cigarette factory at La Coruña. Amparo, naively believing in the slogans of the Revolution, becomes a “tribune” of the people, and at the same time allows herself to be seduced by a prosperous middle-class youth who promises to marry her. By ending the novel with two simultaneous events, the birth of Amparo’s son (with a notable physical description of such a previously untouchable subject as child-birth) and the euphoric triumph of the proclamation of the ill-fated Federal Republic (11 February 1873), the prospects of both the child and the country are left poised in a parallel uncertain future.
José María de Pereda (1833–1906), untypically, also tried his hand at a novel with strong historical implications, Pedro Sánchez (1883), in which the July Revolution of 1854 is powerfully evoked. The most effective moments are those in which Pereda’s ingrained hatred of urban laxity and corruption is expressed before the inevitable return of his hero to the moral tranquility of the country. The Catalan novelist Narcís Oller (1845–1930), a realist with a sentimental streak (Zola writes accurately of his “étude de personnages légèrement idéalisés et traversant un milieu très exact”22), has some works with near-contemporary historical themes. The extensive novel La febre d’or (‘Gold Fever’, 1893) is an impressive analysis of the fever for investment, which inevitably led to a market collapse, in an industrializing Barcelona during the early Restoration period (1875–85). In one of his best, a short novel entitled La bogeria (‘Madness’, 1899), the deranged protagonist, Daniel Serrallonga, is an unconditional supporter of Prim and assiduously collects pictures of his hero. The character’s delusions are skilfully intertwined with references to a politician of special significance for Catalonia, whose accomplishments and defects are directly enumerated by the narrator.
The thrust of the major work of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) is radically opposed to the historicist tradition, but he has one substantial early novel that broadly fits into that tradition. Significantly enough, his Paz en la guerra (Peace in War, 1897) is closely related to Galdós. Unamuno sent him a copy and rather persistently sought his support. The novel is an unwieldy study of the Third Carlist War, but with considerable reaching back to the first, known as the “guerra de los siete años” (‘seven years’ war’: 1833–40), in which his subject overlaps with Galdós’s third series of episodios nacionales. In fact, Unamuno took great pride in his unproven belief that Paz en la guerra influenced the episodios, notably in the treatment of the battle of Luchana and the Peace of Vergara.23
Unamuno’s purpose, however, is to examine the struggle within the Basque community between the millennial rural tradition and the liberal affiliations of Bilbao. It is a conflict between country and town, rural barter and modern commerce, local rights (fueros) and centralizing policies, Basque and Castilian, clerical intransigence and religious tolerance. Such disputes are viewed with deep sympathy for both sides involved, as for example in the profoundly felt scenes of the country wedding attended by Ignacio, where he experiences for the first time the strengths of rural tradition and its expression in Basque; in the traditionalist tertulia (a gathering to discuss philosophy, politics, art) of Pedro Antonio, which embraces the varied opinions of characters like those of el tío (‘old’) Pascual, don Braulio, don Eustaquio, etc.; in the mercantile atmosphere of the Arena family; and in Pachico’s political indifference. The crisis of a society in turbulent evolution is presented, no doubt in excessive detail, as Unamuno himself later came to feel. This presentation alternates with a series of fluctuating personal problems, which correspond to certain phases of the author’s spiritual anguish.
What could have been, with a bit more selection, a coherent Bildungsroman is confused by having the reader’s attention divided between three key characters, even though each represents a different facet of the conflict: Pedro Antonio standing for underlying historical continuity (intrahistoria, already discussed), Ignacio for an ideological-spiritual conflict resolved in death, and Pachico, a survivor who seeks, in an idiosyncratic fashion, peace from within war. The peace (reflected in the title) that Pachico so precariously constructs in the ending to the novel is of purely personal dimensions, political considerations having vanished from his consciousness. In all this we have an example of the extremely fragile conjuring trick with which Unamuno is seeking to satisfy his own spiritual yearnings. The Tolstoyan aspiration for resolution of conflict is very different from Galdós’s, for it depends not on conciliation or fusion, but on the maintenance of tension between two irreconcilable objectives, a sort of truncated dialectic that never resolves into a synthesis. Paz en la guerra is a work of transition and an anomaly. As Nicholas Round has indicated, it both continues and concludes the realist novel, without leaving any descendants.24
The major novelist of a slightly later generation who retains an interest in the historical novel in a way comparable with the realist tradition is Pío Baroja (1872–1952). At the same time his concept of history is very different from that of Galdós, as he himself indicated in a well-known passage: “Galdós has turned to history through affection for it; I have turned to history through curiosity toward a type of person; Galdós has sought out the most brilliant moments to chronicle them; I have insisted on those moments given me by the protagonist.”25 Even if Baroja’s characterization of Galdós’s episodios is not entirely accurate – his undoubted affection for history is tempered by agonized frustration at its failure to achieve progress and he hardly pursues “the most brilliant moments” where few exist – it is clear that Galdós has a concern for elucidating the major events of his time, even when, as they usually did, they ended in futility. By contrast, Baroja is concerned, as he notes, with individual biography, treated in an informal, unchronological and unsystematic fashion, without any integration into a broader framework: a sort of demythification of history, as Marsha Collins put it.26
In writing his major historical sequence, the twenty-two-volume series on the political intriguer Eugenio de Aviraneta entitled Memorias de un hombre de acción (‘Memoirs of a Man of Action’, 1913–34), Baroja clearly – even obsessively – has Galdós, as author of the episodios nacionales, in mind. It is evident, for example, that at times Baroja is concerned to put Galdós right. This is particularly evident in his urge to rectify Galdós’s somewhat low opinion of Baroja’s hero Aviraneta, described in Un faccioso más y algunos frailes menos (‘One More Rebel and Fewer Friars’, 1879) as “a colossal genius of intrigue and an inimitable showman.”27 Baroja is also concerned to confront his senior rival’s concept of Juan Martín el empecinado (‘the stubborn warrior’), the guerrilla leader of the Peninsular War. Their respective attitudes pinpoint an interesting contrast between the two writers. As Carlos Longhurst indicates in his excellent study of Baroja’s historical novels, El empecinado is one of the very few historical figures whom Baroja praises unconditionally and treats as “a symbol of early Spanish liberalism.”28 For Galdós, on the other hand, El empecinado scarcely enters the mainstream of the historical process. Baroja also seeks to cover the campaign in El Maestrazgo by Ramón Cabrera during the First Carlist War more thoroughly and with greater vehemence against the bloodthirsty Carlist general than Galdós had done.
The most important coincidence of subject matter concerns the murder of police chief Pedro Chico during the 1854 revolution. Baroja’s brief description of the spectacular apprehension of this official coincides with Galdós’s in such features as the white shirt, the red cap, the action of fanning himself. Pereda also has a similar description in Pedro Sánchez. As we would expect from its author, Baroja’s narrative is more vivid and direct, with a great deal of emphasis on physical and sartorial details: “he went along half naked, covered with a white shirt and a handkerchief round his neck, a red cap on his head and carried a fan in his hand with which he calmly fanned himself. The expression on his face was sullen, bitter, and almost mocking.”29
Where Baroja differs markedly from Galdós is in ignoring the social and political background. Baroja attributes the murder almost exclusively to a personal rivalry between Chico and a certain brigadier Castelo for the favors of one Paca Dávalos. It was Castelo who instigated the stirring up of the people by a bullfighter nicknamed Pucheta. Baroja is not concerned with Chico’s own record, but takes his execution as a fine example of stoic equanimity in the face of death. His only comment on the motivation for the uprising speaks of “that simplistic feeling of the crowd” which imagines that by getting rid of Chico they will get rid of injustice.
It is a good example of Baroja’s refusal to countenance any cause and effect factor in history, and his preference for seeking examples of human conduct in isolation. He is not at all worried by questions of political morality affecting his hero Aviraneta in his relations with the queen mother María Cristina and her morganatic husband Fernando Muñoz, Duke of Riánsares. The issue for Baroja is a personal one, to such an extent that he links Pucheta with Riánsares on the quite arbitrary grounds that they share the same surname, Muñoz: “So we had a Muñoz above [Cristina’s husband] and a Muñoz below [Pucheta]. The revolution of ’54 was a conflict between two Muñozes.”30 One might as well say that the American War of Independence was a war between two Georges!
Baroja takes great pride in his research and his visits to historic places, and these no doubt help give his writing a personal authenticity. He cherishes an almost superstitious respect for factual documentation, and chides Galdós for his failure to gain similar personal experience. His essential interest therefore is to follow the course of Aviraneta’s individual intrigues and adventures. He is resolutely opposed to a purely scientific view of history, claiming that subjectivity plays an important part in any historical judgment, and that complete objectivity is impossible.31 By failing to conceive of the interaction of forces and persons on more than an individual level, he adopts a purely casual criterion that concedes supreme importance to chance: “History for Baroja is a succession of events occurring by chance, without order or concord.”32 Evidently, too, it has no didactic role.
Since he is from a younger generation than Galdós’s and clearly influenced by Nietzsche, Baroja’s concept of time is more cyclical than linear, and he thinks of it in terms of flowing water, with frequent references to Heraclitus: “Becoming is an eternal game which has its objective and its justification in itself . . . it seems that this theory of the closed circle and of periodical cataclysm contains some truth.”33 His conception still has something of the nineteenth century about it. Perhaps the closest comparison is with Thomas Hardy, who conceived of History as a stream rather than a tree, its directions not determined by any law but casually, by mediocre individuals. Baroja shares this concept of the randomness of history, but thinks rather of men of action and intrigue determining events against the odds, within a context of historical inconclusiveness.
In the lively conversation Baroja sets up between Aviraneta and Leguía in the Prologue to “Las figuras de cera” (‘Wax Figures’, 1924), the former represents a factual, more historical, criterion against Leguía’s insistence on imaginative freedom: “Aviraneta was dogmatic, a supporter of realism, and he believed that sooner or later truth shone forth, like the sun among the clouds. Leguía thought that in the cemetery of History, full of bones, ashes and knicknacks, each investigator chooses what he wants and puts it together as he pleases.”34 Here the question is left open, but when he speaks with his own voice, Baroja, under the influence of Schopenhauer (as Longhurst notes, Las novelas históricas, pp. 148–54), argues for the superiority of literature: “A good novel is more exact in reflecting a social environment than an excellent historical work.”35 At the same time, he equates history and fiction in a parallel formlessness: “The novel, in general, is like the flow of History: it has no beginning or end; it begins and finishes where one wants it to.”36 As a result, Baroja takes pride in rejecting any unity of action or structure, for fiction as well as history, “a novel is possible without an argument, without architecture and without composition,”37 in taking a strong interventionist line as far as the narrator is concerned, leaving entirely out of account any balance between the historical and fictional plots, which in fact vary enormously throughout the series. In compensation, his concern is always for the thrust toward capturing the vital spirit of his subject. His merits lie in his lively penetration into individual eccentricity, his capacity to treat such individuals with dignity, his hatred of cruelty, and his consistent sense of the arbitrariness of human destiny that leads to an idiosyncratic type of existentialism. All his novels are full of the most varied and often highly concentrated incidents, expressed with great narrative verve and sense of melodrama, with an engagingly naive openness to new experience.
One of the most creative writers of the early twentieth century, Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936), takes a very different view of the historical novel. Immersed in his early work in a decadent esthetic akin to modernismo38 and professing scant respect for detailed description or realist chronology, Valle-Inclán early became fascinated by heroic figures of the immediate past. In a first trilogy of historical novels (1908–9) entitled La guerra carlista (‘The Carlist War’), comprising Los cruzados de la causa (‘The Crusaders of the Cause’), El resplandor de la hoguera (‘The Glow of the Bonfire’), and Gerifaltes de ataño (‘The Bigwigs of Yesteryear’), set during the ill-fated Federal Republic (1873–4), he is concerned with the dissolving of old traditionalist values, which he treats with a certain ironic sympathy and sardonic detachment. His most original work in this genre, however, is the unfinished series entitled Ruedo ibérico, which consists of two completed novels, La corte de los milagros (‘The Court of Miracles’, 1927), Viva mi dueño (‘Long Live My Master’, 1928), and a considerable portion of a third, Baza de espadas (‘Trump in Spades’ or ‘Sword Trick,’ posthumously published in 1958), all of which deal with the last year (1868) of Isabella II’s reign. Valle-Inclán has by now developed, in both drama and narrative, a highly original technique known as the esperpento (‘grotesque farce’), consisting of the systematic distortion of classical models. Drawing on popular satire and intercalated official documents, the distortion lies more in the expression than the content: a joy in the incongruous, in juggling chronology, and in a devastating iconoclasm which delights in “mocking, mocking everything and everyone.”39 Valle-Inclán develops a bewilderingly rapid set of visual impressions full of theatrical elan, forming a circular structure, the effect of which is appropriately compared by Valle-Inclán himself to pointillisme.40 He concentrates on a few well-chosen themes: the ludicrous honoring for her virtue of the notoriously promiscuous reina castiza (‘the Ultra-Spanish Queen’) by the Pope with the Rosa de oro (‘Golden Rose’); the death of her strong-arm protector Narváez; the intrigues and maneuvers of Prim, toward whom Valle shows special animosity; the scurrilous love-life of the queen herself, all expressed in the most lively and impressionistic language.
Later developments of the historical novel also connect, not surprisingly, with Galdós. The most conspicuous example is Ramón J. Sender (1902–82), who before the Civil War cultivated fictionalized history of the relatively recent past, particularly in his recreation, in Míster Witt, en el cantón (‘Mr. Witt in the Canton’, 1935), of the revolutionary canton of Cartagena in 1870, the subject of two of Galdós’s later episodios, La primera República (‘The First Republic’) and De Cartago a Sagunto (‘From Carthage to Saguntum’, both 1911). It is a remarkable novel that combines in equal proportions a notable density of historical reference and a substantial fictional story of the vacillations and treachery of the English engineer of the title, the husband of Milagritos, a local patriot.
The key figure, for Sender as for Galdós, is one of the historical leaders of the insurrection, Antonete Gálvez, who combines a genuine compassion toward the underprivileged with a capacity for command. Another important figure, Colau, whom Sender decisively relates to an earlier revolutionary, Froilán Carvajal, provides the link with the fictional story, since Carvajal was Milagritos’s admirer and was killed through Mr. Witt’s deceit, as is gradually revealed in the course of the action. A second act of treachery concerns Colau when the ship El Tetuán is blown up, apparently but falsely claiming Colau as its most prominent victim. Mr. Witt personifies all that is at odds with a revolutionary stance like Gálvez’s or Colau’s: indifference versus active engagement; cold calculation versus spontaneity; hypocrisy, resentment, and jealousy versus serene confidence; cowardice versus resolution. The culmination comes when he explicitly recognizes that he deserves the label canalla (swine) rather than his preferred pose of an honorable lack of involvement. The opposite applies to Milagritos, whose suppressed tears when the Canton falls express grief for all those implicated in the tragic events – Carvajal, Colau, the Canton and herself – and who, while heroically staying with her husband in the hope of having a child, continues to represent the spirit and lost hope of an impossible dream.41
The Spanish Civil War (1936–9), the historical circumstances that occasioned it, and its long repressive aftermath could not fail to trouble the consciences of contemporary novelists. Some historical novels still reminiscent of the realist tradition, but with little innovation, were produced, the most notable being Ignacio Agustí’s Barcelona-based series entitled La ceniza que fue árbol (‘Tree into Ashes’) comprising Mariona Rebull (1941), El viudo Rius (‘The Widower Rius’, 1945), Desiderio (1957), 19 de julio (‘The Nineteenth of July’), and José María Gironella’s massive trilogy, beginning with Los cipreses creen en Dios (The Cypresses Believe in God), followed by Un millón de muertos (‘A Million Dead’, 1961), and Ha estallado la paz (‘Peace Has Broken Out’, 1966). Max Aub’s multi-volumed Laberinto mágico (‘Magic Labyrinth’, 1943–68) and Sender’s post-war novels maintain an effective balance between a continuing debt to Galdós and more modern techniques. Other fine novelists, writing from abroad or within Spain (Francisco Ayala, Camilo José Cela, Miguel Delibes, Mercè Rodoreda, Ana María Matute, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Carmen Martín Gaite, Juan Goytisolo, among others) thoroughly assimilate echoes of those traumatic years into wider narrative or structural perspectives very different from those we have been discussing. In them diachronic time gives way decisively to synchronic time.
1 See, for example, Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, vol. III, ed. E. S. Schaffer (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 3–20.
2 G. Lukács, The Historical Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 34–5.
3 B. Pérez Galdós, Ensayos de crítica literaria, ed. L. Bonet, 2nd edn (Barcelona: Península, 1990), pp. 198–9.
5 K. Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 99.
6 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 462.
7 P. A. Bly, Galdós’ Novel of the Historical Imagination (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1988), p. 5.
8 B. Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta, ed. Francisco Caudet, 2 vols. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), vol.II, p. 56.
9 B. Pérez Galdós, Obras completas, ed. Federico Carlos Robles, 6 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968–71), vol. IV, p. 1067.
10 M. de Unamuno, “En torno al casticismo,” in Obras completas, ed. M. García Blanco, 9 vols. (Madrid: Escelicer, 1966–71), pp. 795–8.
11 I use the terms employed by Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 62.
12 B. Pérez Galdós, Los Prólogos de Galdós, ed. E. H. Shoemaker (Urbana/Mexico City: University of Illinois Press/Ediciones de Andrea, 1962), p. 56.
13 A. Smith, “El epílogo a la primera edición de La Batalla de los Arapiles,” Anales Galdosianos 17 (1982), p. 106.
14 H. Hinterhäuser, Los “Episodios nacionales” de Benito Pérez Galdós (Madrid: Gredos, 1963), p. 223.
15 Galdós, Los Prólogos de Galdós, p. 58.
16 B. Pérez Galdós, España sin rey, in Obras completas, vol. III, p. 785.
17 B. Pérez Galdós, Las tormentas del ’48, in Obras completas, vol.II, p. 1428.
18 Galdós, Los Prólogos, p. 58.
19 A. Smith, “El epílogo a la primera edición de La Batalla de los Arapiles,” Anales Galdosianos 17 (1982), p. 107.
20 B. Pérez Galdós, Bodas reales, in Obras completas, vol.II, p. 1307.
21 D. F. Urey, The Novel Histories of Galdós (Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 166.
22 In the letter-prologue to the French translation of La papillona (Le papillon [‘The Butterfly’], 1885), quoted in Sergio Beser (ed.), Narcís Oller, “Pròleg 8,” La societat catalana de la restauració (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1965).
23 Unamuno writes to Clarín on 9 May 1900: “Do you know what has given me the greatest private satisfaction? Well, it is to see, without my experiencing any doubt about it, the influence my novel has had on Galdos’s Luchana and other of the last episodios,” Epistolario a Clarín. Menéndez y Pelayo, Unamuno, Palacio Valdés. Prólogo y notas de Adolfo Alas (Madrid: Ediciones Escorial, 1941), p. 99.
24 N. G. Round, “‘Without a City Wall’: Paz en la guerra and the End of Realism,” in Re-Reading Unamuno, ed. N. G. Round, Glasgow Colloquium Papers 1 (Glasgow: The University, 1989), pp. 101–20.
25 P. Baroja, Memorias: “La intuición y el estilo,” in Obras completas, 8 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1948), vol. VIII, p. 1077.
26 M. S. Collins, Pío Baroja’s “Memorias de un hombre de acción” and the Ironic Mode: The Search for Order and Meaning (London: Támesis, 1986), pp. 81–104.
27 B. Pérez Galdós, Un faccioso más y algunos frailes menos, in Obras completas, vol.II, p. 316.
28 Carlos Longhurst, Las novelas históricas de Pío Baroja (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1974), pp. 98–99. See also Pedro Ortiz Armengol, Aviraneta y diez más (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1979), pp. 5–34.
29 Baroja, El sabor de la venganza, vol. III, p. 1155.
31 Baroja, Memorias: “La historia,” in Obras completas, vol. v, pp. 1124–8.
32 Longhurst, Las novelas históricas de Pío Baroja, p. 143.
33 Baroja, “La historia,” p. 1106.
34 Baroja, “Las figuras de cera,” vol. IV, p. 174.
35 Baroja, “La objetividad de la historia,” vol. VIII, p. 957.
36 Baroja, “Sobre la novela realista,” vol. VIII, p. 973.
37 Baroja, “La nave de los locos,” Prologue to vol. IV, p. 326.
38 An aesthetic movement of Hispano-American origin prevalent around the turn of the century.
39 L. Schiavo, Historia y novela en Valle-Inclán: Para leer “El ruedo ibérico” (Madrid: Castalia, 1987), p. 55.
41 For further discussion see my “El cantón de Cartagena en Sender y Galdós,” in El lugar de Sender: Actas del I Congreso sobre Ramón J. Sender (Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses/Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1997), pp. 627–33.