Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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