I consider Javier Cercas one of the best writers in the Spanish language, and I believe that, after oblivion has buried his contemporaries, at least three of his extraordinary books — Soldiers of Salamis, The Anatomy of a Moment, and The Imposter — will still have readers who turn to them to learn what our disordered present was like. He is also a man of courage. He loves his homeland of Catalonia, and his articles inveighing against the secessionist demagoguery of the Catalan separatists are persuasive and incontestable.
In an urbane debate some time back with Antonio Muñoz Molina on the subject of the nineteenth-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, Cercas admitted that he didn’t care for the prose of the author of Fortunata and Jacinta. As my grandfather Pedro used to say, entre gustos y colores, no han escrito los autores, which roughly translated is the old adage that there is no accounting for taste. Everyone has a right to his opinion, and writers do too, but to make such a declaration on the centenary of Pérez Galdós’ death, when everyone else was lauding and commemorating him, was certainly a provocation.
I don’t care for Proust. For years this embarrassed me, and I kept it under wraps. Not anymore. I confess I read him lethargically; I struggled to get through his interminable novel and its long sentences, its author’s fussiness and frivolity. His small, selfish world repelled me, not to mention those cork-lined walls meant to buffer him from the distracting noise of the outside world, which I love so much. Had I been a reader for Gallimard when Proust submitted the manuscript of his first volume, I fear I would have advised against publication, as did André Gide. (He regretted this error for the rest of his life.) All this is to say that, in the polemic in question, I took the side of Muñoz Molina, in opposition to my friend Javier Cercas.
A few months later, in a column in El País entitled “The Merit of Galdós,” Cercas was far more generous and, I believe, accurate, in his treatment of the writer. He admitted that in the immense vacuum in Spanish literature that followed Don Quixote, Pérez Galdós had embarked upon “a literary project of unprecedented ambition and breadth in an attempt to consolidate a novelistic tradition conspicuously absent in Spain.” And he affirmed that neither Pio Baroja’s Memoirs of a Man of Action nor Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclán’s The Carlist War were conceivable without the National Episodes, the extraordinary corpus of forty-six historical novels about Spain that Peréz Galdós produced between 1872 and 1912. I could not agree more.
It is unjust to say, as many did in his day, that Benito Pérez Galdós was a bad writer. He was not a genius, but he was the best Spanish writer of the nineteenth century, the most ambitious, and probably the first professional writer that the language had. In those days, whether in Spain or Latin America, it was impossible for a writer to live from royalties. (Many journalists, instead of receiving a salary, wrote solely for the purpose of making themselves known.) Pérez Galdós had a prosperous family that admired him and kept him afloat for a long time, letting him exercise his vocation, granting him the independence that he needed to write freely. His novels and his essays were brought out by different publishers (sometimes even by himself) under contracts that he did not always believe were honored. And yet he became famous, and soon set to writing the National Episodes.
For a long time, I wanted to read Pérez Galdós from beginning to end — as a student I had read Fortunata and Jacinta, of course, but I was ignorant of his work as a whole — and it struck me that the coronavirus pandemic would provide a fine occasion to do so. After eighteen months, having finished the plays, the novels, and the National Episodes, I was impressed by the tranquil, wounded world that he invented. I have yet to read all his essays and articles: they represent an immense labor, and I am still making my way through them. I doubt that more than a few scholars have tackled them all. The reason for this is simple: Pérez Galdós was not a great thinker, like Ortega y Gasset or Unamuno, and though he did compose a few interesting essays, the better part of his journalistic work has been rightly unremarked upon, being transient and superficial. There is little point in devoting so much time to literature of so little weight, even if there are a few nuggets of value in the lot.
Pérez Galdós was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, or the Canary Islands, on May 10, 1843, the son of Lieutenant Colonel Sebastián Pérez, the military leader of the island and a landholder who devoted much of his time to his assorted businesses. Benito was the youngest of ten siblings, and his mother, Dolores de Galdós, a woman of great character, was known to wear the pants in the family. It was she who decided that Benito, apparently in love with a cousin she disapproved of, should go to Madrid at the age of twenty to study law. Yolanda Arencibia, a great promoter of Galdós and the author of what is far and away the best (and most voluminous) biography of him, has tried to determine whether his love affair with his cousin Sisita was the true cause of his departure from Las Palmas. But she ran up against a wall. In that family, secrets were not to be broached.
Pérez Galdós used his first vacation period in Madrid to return to his home island and see her. But, according to Arencibia, Sisita was soon to depart for Cuba — she was a native of its most beautiful colonial city, Trinidad — to marry the landowner Eduardo Duque, who would give her a son, Sebastián, who lived only a few years. After the death of her first husband, Sisita married a relative, Pablo de Galdós, but died at the young age of twenty-eight of a postpartum infection, which in those days was known as puerperal fever. Some believe that Pérez Galdós was forevermore in love with her and remained single to honor her memory, but this is pure speculation, as neither he nor those close to him ever addressed the subject directly or allowed pertinent details to come to light.
Obedient to his mother, Benito attended the Complutense University in Madrid, but soon became disenchanted with the law. Journalism was more attractive to him, and he devoted a great deal of time to it — and to bohemian Madrid, the vitality in its coffee houses full of painters, scribblers, reporters, and politicians, which he abundantly described in his writings. He turned increasingly toward literature, starting with theater, his first passion, writing comedies in verse and prose. According to his own account, none of them made it to the stage, and one day he burned them all. He would return to the genre years later.
He loved Madrid extravagantly, more than any other writer before or after. He was the most faithful and refined connoisseur of its streets and dive bars, its shops and boarding houses, its salons and gossip mills, its human types, its customs and professions and businesses, the errors in spoken Spanish common to its less cultured citizens, and, of course, its history. As an example of the depth of Pérez Galdós’ love for and acquaintance with Madrid, it suffices to read the first two chapters of Prim, one of the best of the National Episodes; the streets and their residents seem to come to life as though touched by a magic wand — the author’s prose — as the character of Santiago Ibero, a fervent young admirer of General Prim, prepares the two men’s vertiginous escape to Mexico. The same novel includes also a wonderful description of the Atheneum, where Pérez Galdós studied and read voluminously; the passage is splendid for its prose and its measured summary of Spanish politics in April 1862. The writer’s vision is tranquil, patient, serene, and diligently portrays a world immobilized by religion, which possesses the virtue (or the fault?) of holding it in an almost painterly stasis, but which at other times is its tragedy, its doom.
The hostility that Pérez Galdós awakened in his country in the years when he was writing his novels, his plays, and the National Episodes now strikes us as hard to believe. Of course he had his supporters, but his adversaries were apparently more numerous. It was said that his books “stank of pork stew,” that he wrote vulgarly and inelegantly. Famously, in 1924 in his play Bohemian Lights, Valle-Inclán insulted Pérez Galdós and his naturalist style with the nickname garbancero, or “the chickpea man,” which he was never able to live down. This animosity became particularly evident in 1912, in the widespread opposition to the then-seventy-nine-year-old writer’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which had been proposed by some five hundred writers, journalists, and artists with the support of the Spanish government. The Swedish Academy is said to have received more petitions against his candidacy than for it, with the objections coming principally from far-right Catholic circles that saw in him a republican and an extreme freethinker. No man is a prophet in his own country, and in the Spain of the time, dominated by narrow and sectarian Catholicism, Pérez Galdós was considered a fiercely anticlerical liberal. This was never quite true: his liberalism and his republicanism were scrupulously tolerant. With typical logic and clarity, the poet and writer Andrés Trapiello said of the conspiracy against Galdós, “It was the triumph of Spanish mange and meanness in the face of liberal principles.”
In his works, Pérez Galdós described primarily the middle classes — or so it is said; but he did not ignore the aristocracy or the humbler fringes of society. As a writer he climbed up and down the social ladder at will, and one of the late Episodes, entitled A Coterie of Imps, begins with a splendid description of Madrid at its poorest, “one of its most destitute and hideous streets, the one called Rodas, which rises and falls over the hill between Embajadores and the Rastro,” where a village woman, Lucila Ansúrez, lives. She has taken refuge with Captain Bartolomé Gracián, a man she loves who is being persecuted by the powers that be.
Photographs depict the huge crowds in Madrid that accompanied Pérez Galdós’ mortal remains to the Almudena Cemetery on January 5, 1920. According to the press, at least thirty thousand people came to pay homage to him in death. What was the source of this popularity? Above all, the National Episodes. He did what Balzac, Dickens, and Zola had done for their countries, and what he admired them for doing: telling, in fiction, the history and the social reality of their nations. Though as an artist he did not surpass the first two (with some of his novels he may have exceeded Zola, only three years his elder), his Episodes exist in the same line, and convert the lived past into literature, putting within reach of the broader public an even-handed, pleasurable, wise, and well-written version of the nineteenth century, with living characters and solid reportage — and this was a decisive period for Spain, encompassing the French invasion, the independence struggles against Napoleon’s armies, the reactionary absolutism of Ferdinand the Seventh, the invasion of Morocco, the Carlist Wars (a series of nineteenth-century conflicts over the legitimate heir to the Spanish throne which laid the ground for the legitimist and traditionalist forces of twentieth-century Spanish fascism), the short-lived First Republic, and finally, the Bourbon Restoration. Unlike other European countries such as Germany, France, and England, Spain cannot be said to have experienced the industrial revolution, and much of its time was wasted in these years in anachronistic wars of religion, which left it fatally backward after centuries as the supreme power on the continent.
Pérez Galdós’ merit lies not only in documenting this period in his novels, but also in his way of doing so: with objectivity, with a comprehending and generous spirit, without taking sides ideologically, putting the ethical above the political, separating idealism from fanaticism, seeing the generosity and the misery in the hearts of both sides of the debates of the time. This is what stands out most when we read the plays, the novels, and the Episodes: a writer struggling to remain fair and impartial. His approach seems to freeze the Spain of his time in a sure objective gaze, immobilizing his subject to give a more faithful account of its nature.
This is the furthest thing imaginable from the obstinate, peremptory caricature of Galdós that we have come to know. He was a civil man, a liberal who in his old age supported the Republic; but more than a politician, and a representative in the Cortes, he was a decent and thoughtful man. When narrating a tumultuous period in Spain’s history, he strove to do so equitably and with detachment, singling out the good from the bad and recognizing the presence of both in friends as well as foes. The exception to this, perhaps, was his view of the frivolity of the upper and middle classes, particularly at the time of the Restoration; about this he was often implacable. Yet the general absence of moral censure confers an air of justice upon the National Episodes, from Trafalgar to Cánovas, and brings his readers very close to the writer.
He wrote as he did because he was a man of substance — muy buena gente, as we say in Peru. Not all writers are like that; some are quite the opposite. The differences in temperament have nothing to do with differences in talent. Pérez Galdós’ temperament was enriched by a spirit of fair-mindedness that made him lovable and credible. His remarkable composure gave his tales a certain stillness easily confused with immobility, as if his narratives were photographs.
Something similar was the case in his private life. He was a lifelong bachelor, but his biographers have noted the presence of three long-term lovers and many other fleeting ones. The first, Lorenza Cobián González, a humble Asturian who gave birth to his daughter María (whom he recognized and made his sole heir), was illiterate, and he taught her to read and to write. His affair with the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, a woman of passion (except when she wrote her novels), was rather torrid. “I will crush you,” she says to him in one of their letters. This may not have been only poetic license: this feminist writer appears to have been a devilish libertine in her private life. The last of the three was an apprentice actress, a good deal younger than him, named Concepción Morell Nicolau. Pérez Galdós supported her career in the theater, and to all appearances he behaved very badly toward her. It must be said that she was a difficult woman, and something of a cadger. Their breakup, which involved numerous friends, was drawn-out but diplomatic.
His great defect as a writer was his pre-Flaubertian idiom: his failure to grasp that the first character that the novelist invents is the narrator, whether he realizes it or not. This is true whether the narrator is omniscient or implicated in the action of the story; as a figure, it is he (or she) who grants independence and autonomy to the fictional creation. Despite his vast literary production, this is something that Pérez Galdós never grasped. And so the omniscience of his characters is of the classical sort, and his Gabriel Araceli and Salvador Monsalud have an impossible awareness of the thoughts and the feelings of other characters, in this way detracting from the realism of the novels. As the narrator of the Episodes and other novels, Pérez Galdós — in Amadeo I, for example, from the fifth series of the Episodes, where he appears under the name of Tito Liviano, a caricature of Titus Livius — attributes this awareness of the contents of other minds to historians and eyewitnesses or, still worse, to fantastical occurrences narrated in the realist mode, which gives an unnatural and artificial air to the otherwise naturalistic works in question.
In the later volumes The First Republic and From Carthage to Sagunto, which tell of the chaos and disorder of the First Republic in Spain — with constant crises in the ministries, the siege of Cartagena during the Cantonal War, the threats of putsches, and the Civil War against the Carlists — the historian Tito Liviano, shyster, dwarf, and tireless fornicator, will fall in love with a teacher, Floriana. She will turn out to be a nymph and will drag the historian into a subterranean passageway full of magical surprises, such as monumental bulls that serve as mounts for the delicate feminine figures populating underground Madrid. This is, of course, an imaginary recreation of ancient Greece — a dream. It interrupts the plot arbitrarily, introducing an obtrusive and far from convincing element of fantasy. With time, such embellishments vanished from the Episodes, but attentive readers must make their peace with such backsliding into the fictional styles of the past, aware that Flaubert had already put forward a revolutionary conception of the narrator as a central, if invisible, character in the narrative — an idea that he worked out in the letters he wrote almost daily to Louise Colet as he fashioned and re-fashioned Madame Bovary.
In From Carthage to Sagunto, the second-to-last of the Episodes, there is a description of the siege of Cuenca by the Carlist army at the orders of a woman on horseback, María das Neves, wife of Alfonso of the House of Bourbon. Here reality mingles with the diabolical in ferocious battles, beheadings, pillages of indescribable cruelty and savagery. It is proof that at times the mild Pérez Galdós’ narrative may be wild and brutal, but this is an exception. In general his tales proceed serenely, in quiet prose that moves with unruffled steps.
In 1887, Fortunata and Jacinta, the novel that his critics and his posterity consider Pérez Galdós’ masterpiece, was published in four volumes. It originally had a subtitle, suppressed in certain editions: Two Stories of Married Women. He devoted two years — interrupted by a trip to France and Germany — to the composition of this ambitious tale, which many regard as the great Spanish novel of the nineteenth century. Others feel that this accolade should go to La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, which appeared in two volumes in 1884-1885, but such a debate is rather absurd, given the eternal difficulties of fully describing the achievement of two first-rate novels representative of the entire era of the Spanish nineteenth century. The nineteenth century has generally been considered the zenith of the European novel, characterized by such crowning glories as Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and the works of Dickens and Balzac, of which Pérez Galdós was an enthusiastic admirer. All debates aside, Fortunata and Jacinta is without a doubt Pérez Galdós’ most significant and ambitious novel.
Of particular importance in this chef-d’oeuvre is his perspective on Madrid, where the main episodes of the story take place. Fortunata and Jacinta elaborates a comprehensive vision of the city, describing its streets, its squares, its buildings, and especially its cafes, integrating them brilliantly into the action, and encompassing all of the city’s social strata, from the cream of the aristocracy to the middle classes and the very poor in a totalizing vision distinct from, but in no way inferior to, that presented in other works. I have now read this massive work three times, and the story has captivated me every time, from the first words to the last, demanding an absorption and commitment characteristic of the finest novels that I have known.
Its story is quite simple, but Galdos’ way of telling it is not: there is a wealth of subtlety and detail, and a deftness in its prose, both in the descriptions and the dialogues, not present in anything Galdós wrote before or after. Here again the story is told in the first person by a narrator apparently well-informed about the matters at hand, but eventually this artifice vanishes, and without the reader realizing it the narrator-as-party-to-the-events is displaced by a more conventional omniscient narrator. Like virtually all nineteenth-century novels, Fortunata and Jacinta tells the story of a romantic passion. Where it differs from its counterparts is in the duration of the passion recounted, and in the humble young woman who embodies it and who experiences passionate love — by which I mean a total surrender to a kind of love that becomes the essence and purpose of an entire life, a kind of religion — long before the Surrealist invention of the idea of l’amour fou.
Fortunata lives this in the flesh, and in her abandonment displays a generosity without limits, until her devotion to her lover becomes the core of her existence. She gives herself completely to the young and wealthy Juanito Santa Cruz, making him her reason for living and the lodestar of her heart. Despite the obstacles and the neglect that she endures, her love will never flag, not for a single day, convinced as she is that he is everything for her. In her pledge, she does not expect reciprocity; her constancy, her stubbornness, attest to what is, in the end, her own obsession; and she is prepared to suffer humiliation and disgrace from friends and family. In a way, she meets a triumphant end, departing this world as events follow the very course that she had foreseen.
A village woman — her proclamation that “I’m village through-and-through” has become a prominent theme in critical discussions of the novel — Fortunata is illiterate when she first meets Juanito. He is at once attracted by her beauty and repulsed by the sight of her eating a raw egg, which we must imagine dripping through her fingers. The girl lives hand-to-mouth in Cava Baja (where a plaque was recently placed in memory of her on the centenary of Galdós’ death).
Fortunata’s epic passion is a bit difficult to explain — but is an explanation of love even possible? — because, though he is handsome and elegant, Juanito Santa Cruz hasn’t much to offer. He is a social parasite, sponging off the fortune of his parents, Baldomero and Barbarita, who toil and save their whole life as cloth wholesalers, while he lives an epicene life of leisure, devoted to his conquests and his frivolous entertainments. In the course of the novel Juanito frequently leaves Fortunata for one of his paramours, and each time she just goes on with her life. She confesses to taking lovers herself — “eight or so,” she guesses — but they mean nothing to her, and she has no doubt that she will drop them as soon as Juanito appears, because he is the one true love of her life. She is happy with him, especially in the beginning, when he sets her up in an apartment where he can visit her alone, but soon he will abandon her. They will have a child before death takes her away. Fortunata’s love is total, composed of countless sacrifices, while Juanito’s is superficial and transitory, and has room for other affairs. And even for his wife Jacinta: their honeymoon in Burgos, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville is recounted in the first chapters of the book.
Jacinta, the other heroine of the novel, is a graceful young woman whose life is shadowed by tragedy. She loves children, but she cannot have any. The pain of this lack will follow her until she comes to care for the newborn Juan Evaristo, Juanito and Fortunata’s son. Just before dying, Fortunata leaves the boy in Jacinta’s hands for her to raise as her own. This is a great boon to Jacinta, who had taken Fortunata to be her moral superior, following her conviction that a woman incapable of giving her husband offspring had no right to be his legitimate spouse.
This is a brief synopsis of the central thread of the novel, which is otherwise densely peopled in a Dickensian way, with representative figures from every social class in nineteenth-century Madrid appearing and reappearing. Their ranks include a proud and unforgettable woman, Mauricia the Hard, so-called for her zealous, irascible character and her physical resemblance to Napoleon. She is one of Pérez Galdós’ finest and most striking creations, and whenever she shows up, she showers her companions with violence and rhetorical excess. Mauricia is a woman of humble origins, perpetually at war with the rich and noble. No one can tame or cow this natural born anarchist who, apart from being a rebel by nature, is subject to fits of genuine madness, one of which leads the nuns of the convent of Micaela — where penitent Catholic women go to be reeducated — to expel her.
No less notable is Maximiliano, whom Fortunata marries but does not love, knowing that she will deceive him whenever Juanito Santa Cruz comes calling. An ugly, sickly boy of scant education, he is bowled over by Fortunata, falls deeply in love with her, and is ready to do anything for her, marrying her and pushing her toward the Christian ideal of goodness, with no success to speak of. Later, in desperation, the poor devil goes mad, raving, dreaming of murder, inventing a personal religion designed to free all humankind from the demons that torment it.
Apart from its descriptions of representative types, the pages of Fortunata and Jacinta abound in detailed and historically accurate descriptions of Madrid in the second half of the nineteenth century, with fine-grained illustrations of almost every street, neighborhood, and house, as well as the political and social life of the city and the customs governing it. Particularly significant here is the portrayal of its cafes, which were centers for the literary world and for society; great attention is devoted to them in the third section of the novel, when we meet Juan Pablo, one of Maximilian’s brothers and yet another marionette in the story, who wiles away his days in them. The author gives the impression at times of omniscience, as if nothing that occurred in the Madrid of the time escaped his vision, which brings together all sorts of incidents and experiences, minor and major. His empathy seems infinite, and he knows and explains everything with precision and concision.
Though the prose is exemplary throughout, the dialogues are superior to the descriptions, apart from those occasions when Galdós indulges his old vice of aping the malformed expressions of the less cultured. Often he manages to do so with grace and good humor, wishing to gently point out the errors and malapropisms of those whose grasp of language is less than firm, with an attitude less disrespectful than amused; but at times the attempt falls flat. Some have praised Galdós’ enthusiasm for documenting the jargon of certain of his characters, such as José Izquierdo, who receives the nickname “Plato” in the novel. But unless a writer aims for a thoroughgoing reconstruction of spoken language, this way of letting characters speak in uncultured argot seems like caricature, and contemptuous of them — the work of a condescending but entertained middle-class gentleman who delights in the barbarisms of country folk, with their lexical infractions and their mangling of words whose meaning they do not know.
What Pérez Galdós does is not re-creation: there is no labor of literary correction in his solecisms. His novels simply reproduce the speech of these people as he hears it. In this way, he does indeed ridicule his uneducated characters, who talk as they do because they know no grammar, and whose twisted speech serves only to divert an audience of people of the better sort. This is very different from, say, Faulkner, whose novels, situated in the heart of Mississippi, recreate the speech of poor whites and blacks without caricature. He can do this because his novels and stories involve a true act of literary reconstruction, whereas Pérez Galdós, the documentarian novelist, is a mere collector of expressions that distort proper and well-spoken Spanish.
Such disruptions are thankfully kept to a minimum in this great novel, as is the fustian prose of some of his other works. Everything is subordinated to the story itself, and the characters rarely depart from the frame of action proper to them, pushing the novel forward at a slow and steady pace. Even the secondary characters fulfill very precise functions. Consider the magnificently rendered Placido Estupiñá, the eternal chaperone of ladies out doing their shopping — we would call him a walker — with his almost clinical need to talk and be heard. Without such people, the novel would not be what it is. Another unforgettable creature is Doña Guillermina — the saintess, as she is known — a woman of aristocratic origins who has dedicated her life to doing good, that is to say, to squeezing every wealthy person she knows for funds for a building under construction where wayward youth will be put on the right track. In her spare time, she goes around offering counsel and aid to victims of poverty. Generous and selfless, she gives her life to the cause of helping others, doing good in the Christian sense of the term.
The novel is rich with evidence of its author’s human sensitivities — for example, in a chapter called “A Visit to the Slums,” we have this, in Agnes Moncy Gullon’s translation, about the defeated Izquierdo:
The most peculiar thing is that in his sadness he heard a sweet voice whispering: “You’re good for something….Don’t let yourself be dragged down….” But he couldn’t be persuaded. “If a man could tell me,” he thought to himself, “what the hell this mess of a man is good for, I’d love ‘im to death, love ‘im more than my own father.” The unfortunate man was, like many other beings who spend most of their life out of place, drifting, drifting, without ever stopping in the square on the chessboard that fate has marked for them. Some die never reaching it.
But “Plato” finally finds his place and achieves success as a model for contemporary historical painters. And Pérez Galdós comments: “There is no human being, no matter how despicable he may have been, who cannot stand out in something.”
Or consider the fineness of this passage about the inner volatility of Fortunata:
During the first few days she went through hours of intense melancholy in which her conscience, together with her memory, vividly presented to her all the wrong things she had ever done, particularly getting married and committing adultery only a few hours later. But suddenly, without a clue as to how or why, everything turned inside out in the unknown depths of her soul, and her acts seemed clean, and clear, and firm. She judged herself and found that she was guiltless, innocent of all the evil that had ensued, as if she had acted on impulses dictated to her by some strange, superior entity…..Her conscience spun on an axis that showed her first the white side, then the black. At times this abrupt rotation depended on a word, a whimsical thought that flew into her head like a bird whisking across the immensity of the sky. Fortunata stopped thinking of herself as an evil monster and suddenly felt like an innocent, unfortunate creature. A leaf falling from an already withered stalk and landing silently on the rug could cause the change, or the neighbor’s canary starting to sing, or an unidentified carriage rumbling noisily down the street.
There is a general mood or atmosphere in Fortunata and Jacinta that reveals the character of its author: comprehending, tolerant, always looking to understand rather than to judge the conduct of others, the moral sphere they move in, their beliefs, fixations, and obsessions, softening their defects while emphasizing their virtues. And so, despite the horrors that it recounts, the novel is no more pessimistic or dark than life itself. Notwithstanding the hopelessness and the pain that appear in its pages, Fortunata and Jacinta portrays existence as full of light, comprising more happiness than sorrow. The author’s temperament seeps into the characters — all of them, with the exception of Mauricia the Hard — who remain optimistic about life throughout the harsh situations that they find themselves in. This is one of the great merits of the book, and of Pérez Galdós’ novels, plays, and essays in general.
The description of Spanish society that emerges here is one of decadence in comparison with the European nations which, at the time, were undergoing an industrialization that would change the nature of capitalism, raising incomes and promoting workers’ rights even as Spain was left behind, its antiquated economy still the fruit of agrarian exploitation and a commerce that depended on inherited wealth, state-backed speculation, or — in the case of Torquemada, who will appear briefly here but will take a starring role in future novels — outright usury. Missing out on the industrial revolution that would propel its neighbors toward the future, Spain remained mired in a gargantuan bureaucracy packed with well-connected layabouts who only showed up to their respective ministries on payday. Spain’s decadence, which many trace to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, truly took root in the nineteenth century, as Pérez Galdós’ vast novel shows. In it, he points out, among much else, the antiquated nature of Spain’s political system, its social anachronisms, how far the political and economic elite have strayed from the common people who form the crux of the novel, and the country’s underdevelopment in relation to many of its European neighbors.
In such circumstances, it was inevitable that the venerable Spanish Empire would cease to stand at the head of Europe, as it had for centuries, becoming — and this, perhaps, is the central lesson to be drawn from the political and social standpoint that dominates Fortunata and Jacinta — a backward picturesque land, a reminder to European artists and travelers of “beautiful and ancient” customs, with bullfights, flamenco, and Andalusian bandits: an exotic vision of Old Europe appropriate for literary fictions, such as Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, which was read far and wide.
Oddly, the critics were silent when Fortunata and Jacinta appeared. This stung Pérez Galdós, who complained in a letter to his friend Leopoldo Alas: “By then I had forgotten ever having written such a work, given the dreadful silence that befalls every product of the imagination here that is not La Gran Vía,” referring to the main thoroughfare, the Broadway, of Madrid. Time, however, put paid to that silence, so much so that the sole rival to Fortunata and Jacinta in the scholarly study of Spanish literature is Don Quixote itself.
Was Pérez Galdós a great writer? He was. It would be too much to compare him artistically to Cervantes, nor was rivaling Cervantes his ambition; but in the nineteenth century, and even into the beginning of the twentieth, none among his compatriots had the dedication, the inventiveness, the enthusiasm, the powers of observation, and the literary gifts of Pérez Galdós. Not to mention his stamina and his persistence: not one of his contemporaries has left behind a body of work as monumental as his.
It is true that, with the exception of Valle-Inclán and Azorín (the nom de plume of Jose Martinez Ruiz), there were no great writers in Spain during this period, but this dearth in no way undermines Pérez Galdós’ achievement. Even if, like all writers, he had his low points, these only draw one’s attention to the grandeur of his successes, particularly in his best novels and plays. That said, he was not an innovative writer, one who opened roads through which other writers could discover their voice. He was, rather, a hugely talented follower of the great serial novelists of France and England in the nineteenth century. Pérez Galdós would not have existed without Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Dumas, or Dickens, whose Pickwick Papers he translated into Spanish.
As I have noted, the most surprising and unexpected defect attributable to him is not having assimilated Flaubert’s lessons about the function of the narrator in the novel. This limitation makes many of Pérez Galdós’ novels stretch on too long. In presenting himself as the narrator, he must append an autobiographical thread that runs on and on and on; and at times he forgets his own comments about the sources of the story that he is telling.
He was uneven, as most writers are, particularly as he refused to rework his texts, preferring superficial corrections and the hasty deletion or insertion of the odd word. The fate of his manuscripts was to be published or put aside; there was no middle point, no question of extended reconsideration and revision. And yet he produced a series of classics: Fortunata and Jacinta, Misericordia, Doña Perfecta, Torquemada at the Stake, Our Friend Manso, and others that even today can be read and admired. And he was no less accomplished a playwright, even if his theater, too, followed his rhythm of alternating masterpieces with works that may be entertaining but are of little or no consequence. It does a write no dishonor to boast of great successes and great failures. Few escape this curse; most hit the mark sometimes and sometimes miss it wildly. In truth, it takes only a single instance of greatness to mark one’s place in the history of literature. And Pérez Galdós managed it several times over.
Nor ought Pérez Galdós be judged like other authors of his era. With the National Episodes, his art turned in a specifically historical and pedagogical direction that none of his contemporaries followed, and it is to his enormous credit that he brought many significant historical events into the grasp of the broader public in the manner of Hugo or Dumas. He did so with verve, and this makes the best of the Episodes stand tall over many of his other writings. He helped to create an integrated society in which people from different regions, with different customs, came to feel themselves heirs to a common past. Pérez Galdós was the only Spanish writer of his time to contribute to the sense of homeland. In doing so, he carried on the legacy of Cervantes, whose great book has been read and reread by virtually all who have the good fortune to read and write in Spanish, making us all legatees of a common origin, a community epitomizing the greatest virtues of the Spanish and Latin American people, not to mention some of their more visible vices. The solitary Pérez Galdós helped to cement this brotherhood across the seas.
His polemics regularly hit the mark. Spain’s great problem was its strictness, the implacable character of the Catholic Church with its grim prohibitions and intolerable prejudices. Unlike others in his time, Pérez Galdós seems not to have been a dyed-in-the-wool rebel, let alone a revolutionary. He could even be called a believer in the modern mold, well-versed in the teachings of the church but unable as a matter of liberal principle to accept its intolerance or its high-handed interventions in private and public life. Often his work proposed solutions to social matters that are out of place in a novel or a play — for the rich to redistribute their fortunes to the poor, for example. These critical interpolations speak well of him, even if his solutions themselves were extraordinarily unrealistic.
Pérez Galdós was typical of the liberals of his time, who had no interest whatsoever in economic realities and proposed solutions to social ills that invariably hinged somehow on religion, and to this degree were divorced from matters as they actually stood. Spain was not the country that would produce the most profound and rigorous notions concerning the elimination of poverty. It did not dream of the equality of opportunity that distinguishes the most advanced societies from the rest. In this regard, British, American, and Austrian economists contributed more than any French or Spanish writer. Pérez Galdós was ahead of his time, though, in being an “engaged” writer, clearly disturbed by the problems of his era and bold enough to plunge before any of his colleagues into the marrow of his country’s tremendous flaw: namely, the immense material difference between the poor and the rich, which he examined in numerous writings.
He traveled widely in Europe, and of course across Spain, gathering material for his National Episodes, and he knew a few languages — Italian, a smattering of French and English. He wasn’t much of a reader of foreign literature, and he failed to notice, or to see the significance of, the revolution in the novel initiated by Flaubert that would produce — passing through Joyce on the one hand and the great Russians on the other — something utterly different from and superior to what the genre had been before. He lived until 1920, but there are no traces of modernism in his work. We must read Pérez Galdós as a representative more of the classic novel than of the modern.
His limitations are those of the country in which he lived more or less his whole life. He never seriously considered leaving Spain or writing about realities beyond its borders. In his most fertile years as a writer, Spain was isolated from the literary world, and this is reflected in Galdós’ work, in the limitations of his style and his themes. His preoccupation with Spanish history and Spanish tribulations are the source of his reputation, but they show also a certain narrowness, and even symptoms of provincialism.
His rejection or ignorance of literary experimentation, of the avant-garde that existed, for example, in Paris, limited the diffusion of his work outside his country. He did contribute to the daily La Prensa in Buenos Aires, and he published a few articles elsewhere in Latin America, but what leapt inevitably to his eyes, what he read every day in the paper at home, what he talked about with his friends, was Spain, and it was natural that this would come to dominate his literary production.
Yet all this is not to say that he was a conventional writer. Pérez Galdós wrote against the grain, he was calm but not complacent, and he endured attacks from all sides, some of them quite brutal. Years would pass before their intensity would wane, making him a respectable figure and, eventually, a source of pride, someone who would bring honor to Spaniards everywhere. I do not doubt that, among the thousands who attended his funeral, there were many who had attacked him in his younger days. And I do not doubt that some of them regretted it.
