The Sixth Annual Pérez Galdós Lecture
Galdosian Odysseys
by
Professor Diane Faye Urey
Distinguished University Professor
of Spanish,
Illinois State University
I have long believed that the most important factor in the transformation wrought by Galdós in Spain’s literary sensibility was the First Series of Episodios nacionales, published between 1873 and 1875. Spain’s mood in 1873, together with a growing middle class and increasing literacy rates, positioned the Episodios uniquely to have a profound impact on society. The 1868 Revolution had brought down Isabel II and the monarchy with her, initiating five years of turmoil. These events were part of a turbulent century, which left many Spaniards confused and disillusioned, anxious to “recover” a more acceptable sense of national identity. To this nostalgia, the First Series, centered upon the War of Independence, offered the initially welcome impression of unreservedly championing an epoch of great patriotism, already the stuff of legend though still just within living memory. But the series also encouraged readers to look beyond that recent “heroic age,” and examine the rivalries, wars, and ongoing socio-economic stagnation of the ensuing years. Spaniards, reconsidering their recent history, might perhaps avoid past errors, and so achieve a better future.
The First Series
begins in 1805 with the Battle of Trafalgar; its ten novels trace the
onset and history of Spain’s War of Independence through to decisive
victory at the battle of Salamanca. The narrator, Gabriel Araceli, an
octogenarian by the time of writing, is suddenly transformed from senility
to youth through a “¡Maravillosa superchería de la
imaginación!”; “el tiempo no ha pasado; tengo frente
a mí los principales hechos de mi mocedad” (Trafalgar, 1: 184). Remembering as though it had been yesterday, he relives his own
and Spain’s “penas y alegrías” in those tumultuous
years. The series thus becomes a “coming of age” story, whose
particular appeal for young people suited the educational purposes Galdós
appeared to have in mind. These, indeed, were amply realized in the use
of these novels (and some later Episodios) as history textbooks in Spain
and Latin America; still more in their extraordinary popular and critical
success.
For over a century the early Episodios remained much the most widely read
of Galdós’s works, enjoying “greater commercial success
in Spain” (Ribbans, 257) than his other novels, though modern-day
scholarship has foregrounded the Novelas contemporáneas. Admiration
for the Episodios transcended ideological boundaries. The sense of artistic
renewal that the novelist and critic Leopoldo Alas, then a radical student
in Madrid, discerned in them in the early 1870s (Alas, 35-36), like the
“Horatian” patriotism in which the traditionalist Menéndez
Pelayo saw them as delivering such admirable lessons and as playing such
a vital role in Galdós’s revival of the Spanish novel (Menéndez
Pelayo, 60-63), derive from the remarkably skilful and varied ways in
which these novels bring home their ideas and values to their readers.
The First Series already illustrates many original narrative strategies
that the later Galdós would develop: characters and scenes typifying
what writers of 1898 would call esperpento or intrahistoria; a de-familiarized
discourse enabling readers to see things in new ways; a pervasive metafictionality
that enhances the myriad ways of reading his texts. One hitherto under-explored
contribution comes from Galdós’s exploitation of Classical
mythology. Although myths differ as between epochs and cultures, the stories
they tell, essentially the same throughout these transformations, appeal
to archetypal motifs and universal experiences. They are our inner history.
Readers, consciously or subliminally recognizing these perennial human
themes, find in them points of comparison defining the dilemmas, trials,
and triumphs of past and present. Myths underwrite powerful critiques
of individual or collective folly; they also captivate, educate, and delight.
As part of an ongoing study, I will offer some examples of how the Episodios
weave their mythical histories, seeking to transform their readers, as
Galdós writes and rewrites the odysseys of Spain, and will indicate
some of the multiple paths through Galdós’s words and worlds
by which readers might pursue a deeper understanding of their country
and themselves.
Classical intertexts abound in the First Series, epic precedents (the
Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, and Ovid’s quasi-epic Metamorphoses)
predominating. Often the myths invoked were as familiar to readers as
Trafalgar, the War of Independence, the Reconquest, or Numantia. This
familiarity enabled novice or uncritical readers, their interest already
engaged by Galdós’s intriguing plots and compelling characters,
to appreciate and respond to elaborate or unconventional narrative techniques
as readily as Galdós’s more educated public. Archetypally
significant myths and motifs allowed him to write on many levels at once,
inviting a multitude of interpretations, thus ensuring for the Episodios
a unique popularity among a diverse and dedicated following. They invited
readers to penetrate the surface of official histories, social norms,
and ultimately Galdós’s own texts, undermining simplistic
notions of objectivity or truth. These Galdosian histories interwoven
with myths and texts from many epochs, genres, and cultures resemble the
tela sin fin that Inés, the heroine of the First Series, is sewing
when Gabriel first sees her. Their beginning and end cannot be discovered
or named, except conventionally. By exposing the illusory relationships
between language, individuals, and society Galdós encourages readers
to evaluate the systems that create culture, including language, the most
powerful of all.
Odysseus, “shrewd and cunning tactician,” knows the power
of words, as does his protectress, Athena, goddess of wisdom, weaving,
and war. “We’re both old hands / At the arts of intrigue,”
she tells him. “Here among mortal men / You’re far the best
at tactics, spinning yarns / And I am famous among the gods for wisdom,
/ Cunning wiles, too.” (Odyssey, XIII: 326-31) Athena and Odysseus
both speak with “winged words,” as do Homer and the other
epic poets and bards. Like theirs, Galdós’s works endure
through the voices of his characters, speaking to readers in many different
ways.
Gabriel Araceli’s need for skill in speaking is as urgent as that
of Odysseus. The latter’s gift is linked with Athena; Gabriel too
owes his early formation in persuasiveness to a woman, Countess Amaranta.
First appearing in La corte de Carlos IV, she is always a compelling force
in Gabriel’s life, though not always on his side. Later in the series,
deploying her arts for love’s sake, she becomes a fully admirable,
Athena-like figure. Her early attempt to make Gabriel her personal spy
about the Court swiftly instructs him in the power of words. He rejects
this role and soon must duel with Amaranta, using words for weapons, for
the release of an incriminating letter, entrusted to him, which she has
acquired for her own cunning designs. His eloquent defence that returning
the letter to its owner is a question of his personal honour impresses,
but does not sway her. That he achieves through tactics she has taught
him, disguising as fable (“No la he leído en ningún
libro viejo, sino que la oí…”) the true story of a
child born to a young damita. Both know the child to be hers, though not
yet that it is Gabriel’s cherished little seamstress, Inés.
As Amaranta, beaten at her own game, furiously hurls the letter at his
feet, Gabriel reminds her that it was she who taught him to spin such
cunning tales: “desde que entré al servicio de usía
hasta hoy no he desperdiciado el tiempo.” (La corte de Carlos IV,
352)
Such deceptions may perturb Gabriel’s innate sense of honour and
his need to prove worthy of Inés, but on occasion, as with Odysseus,
language alone can extricate him from danger. Time and again, from his
dealings with Lobo at El Escorial in La corte de Carlos IV to his contact
with the French soldiers in La batalla de los Arapiles, he uses “winged
words” to manipulate others and outwit his enemies when all else
fails. As narrator too, he is forever manipulating his words and his readers.
Though in this he most resembles Odysseus, my main point of reference
here, his character embodies aspects of many epic heroes, and occasionally
less heroic figures.
The broader relationship between classical epic and the Episodios goes
far beyond their scenes of war and shipwreck. Bernard Knox attributes
Homer’s hold over the Greek imagination to the “simplicity,
speed and directness” of his narrative, his exciting action, and
the “imposing humanity” of his characters. These poems offered
memorable images of the gods, and the “ethical, political and practical
wisdom” of Greek culture, yielding a vision of life whose forms
seem “moulded by gods rather than men.” (1990: 11-12) Much
of this is implicit in Lind’s observations on the Aeneid: “rapid,
plain and direct in thought and expression, [and] in substance”;
an underlying “good story” with the deeper resonances of both
the Iliad and Odyssey; “self-preservation and the heroism to which
this instinct can give way; the menace of both gods and elements; conflict
and conquest on a national scale.” (xi- xii) Ovid, especially in
Metamorphoses, his “epic of transformation,” shares some of
these features. His rapid unfolding of narrative and direct psychological
detail reach out towards more universal visions; readers, as Gregory observes,
“saw in his characters […] their own moments […] of
being overpowered by forces greater than their conscious wills.”
(xix) Like all these, Galdós was a re-teller of tales whose messages
speak agelessly to the human soul, appealing subliminally to archetypal
forces, emotions, and dilemmas. Infusing their excitement, romance, and
wisdom with such universally recognizable sentiments, the Episodios of
the First Series integrate Gabriel’s personal odyssey with the public
theme of Spain’s recovered nationhood. No gods appear, but the desires
of the powerful – Fernando el deseado or Napoleon – can prove
as destructive as Poseidon or Zeus. Like the epics too, the Episodios
offer displays of exemplary heroism, yet persistently put that heroism
to the question: can glory or national advantage justify the loss of so
many lives?
Sometimes Galdós’s epic framing of Spanish history seems
to approve such sacrifices. Of the siege of Zaragoza, Gabriel insists
that the reduction of the city to ashes with the loss of 53,000 Spanish
lives did not happen in vain: it preserved “la idea de nacionalidad
que España defendía contra el derecho de conquista y la
usurpación.” Because of that martyrdom Spain’s “permanencia
nacional” is forever assured. (Zaragoza, 30: 748-49) Yet the lesson
already learned by Gabriel five years earlier at Trafalgar radically challenges
that conclusion. He sees the victorious English treat the defeated Spaniards
honourably: he hears both grieve for their own fallen leaders, and express
respect for those lost by their opponents. Veteran survivors wonder aloud
whether either defeat or victory can justify such losses – a question
poignantly reinforced by the thoughts, remembered in old age, of the boy
Gabriel. Amazed, he watches those who fought so fiercely the day before
collaborate to transfer wounded from the sinking ship, moved to mutual
support by common danger and the “santo sentimiento de humanidad
y caridad.” These experiences alter forever his naïve idea
of nationality: “islands” battling to wrest territory from
each other. Wars, he concludes, stem from the greed and ambition of evil
men in every nation. The day must come when “los hombres de unas
y otras islas […] se abrazarán, conviniendo todos en no formar
más que una sola familia.” (Trafalgar, 13: 230-31) That day,
he reflects nearly seventy years later, has not yet arrived. Homer, too,
implies strongly that humanity must learn to make peace, not war, or be
doomed to repeat the same deadly errors. Gabriel realizes at Trafalgar
what Athena finally teaches Odysseus in his own epic. But both ancient
and modern epic recognize that such lessons may never be learned –
a recognition implicit in those very displays of heroic grief which affirm
a shared humanity.
Spanish and English after Trafalgar lament mutually the loss of their
great commanders (in a moving digression (12: 225-26) Gabriel gives details
of the death of Nelson). Odysseus, an unknown guest among the Phaeacians,
weeps as the bard sings of Troy’s fall. (Odyssey, VIII: 590-98)
When King Priam comes as a suppliant to ransom Hector’s body, Achilles,
most ruthless of epic heroes, weeps with him for the great king’s
grief and for the dead Patroclus. (Iliad, XXIV: 592-99) Yet Achilles,
having “had his fill of tears,” sees this shared sorrow as
proving man’s ultimate powerlessness against the whims of the gods: “So the immortals spun our lives that we […] / Live on to
bear such torments […] / There are two great jars that stand on
the floor of Zeus’s halls / and hold his gifts, our miseries one,
the other blessings.” (XXIV: 613-16) Or perhaps, as Zeus asserts
in the Odyssey (I: 36-40), human recklessness is to blame for human suffering.
Homer clearly lays some responsibility on men and women for their own
misfortunes, as when Odysseus, having angered Poseidon by blinding Polyphemus,
foolishly reveals his own name.
Important to any epic hero’s growth is understanding how fatality
and responsibility coexist. Dilemmas like Gabriel’s irresolvable
hesitation over whether to remain with the crippled old sailor Marcial
on the sinking ship (Trafalgar, 15: 244-46) recur as late as the final
episodio, but become rarer as the series progresses. Still, individual
courage seems in the end unaccountable. In myth, the gods intervene to
promote courage or sudden fear: blinding Hector in his combat with Achilles;
selecting, as Achilles believes of Zeus, a favourable or hostile outcome.
An onset of individual courage or terror, a sudden shift in collective
morale, are inexplicable matters for Galdós, as for Greeks or Romans
– or ourselves. Gabriel’s reflections on heroism in Zaragoza
make divine intervention seem as good an explanation as any: “Jamás
me he considerado héroe; pero… en aquellos momentos ni temía
la muerte, ni me arredraba el espectáculo… que a mi lado
veía…. el heroismo, como cosa del momento e hijo directo
de la inspiración, no pertenece exclusivamente a los valerosos,
razón por la cual suele encontrarse con frecuencia en las mujeres
y en los cobardes.” (Zaragoza, 23: 721) Andrés Marijuan in
Gerona finds a clue to the mystery in the merger of the individual with
the collective will: “Era la rueda de una máquina, y me dejaba
llevar engranado a mis compañeros. No era yo quien hacía
todo aquello: era una fuerza superior, colectiva, un todo formidable que
no paraba jamás. Lo mismo era para mí morir que vivir. Este
es el heroísmo.” (Gerona. 19: 807) Heroism and solidarity
go hand in hand.
In defeat, storm, and shipwreck at Trafalgar, Gabriel begins a quest for
self-knowledge and knowledge of responsibilities; both kinds of knowledge
are inseparable from honour and from Spain’s national struggle.
His miraculous escape from drowning (like those of Odysseus) appears fated.
Thus symbolically baptized and reborn, he nonetheless quickly realizes
that while fate will determine some of his journey, its outcome depends
on his own choices. The ships repeatedly beaten back from Cádiz
– recalling Odysseus driven from Ithaca – suggest “la
cruel aberración de una divinidad.” But Gabriel also recognizes
something less arbitrary: “era la lógica del mar, unida a
la lógica de la guerra. Asociados estos dos elementos terribles,
¿no es un imbécil él que se asombre de verles engendrar
las mayores desventuras?” (14: 238)
That logic is still inexorable. For Gabriel, as for Odysseus when his
raft founders off Calypso’s island, worse is to come. Trafalgar
will seem child’s play beside the War of Independence: the fields
of corpses at Bailén and Salamanca; Zaragoza with its more than
50,000 dead; Gerona starved into surrender after holding off over 40,000
French troops for seven months. Against such backgrounds, heroism is never
unmixed; no hero enters battle unaware of imminent death. Andrés,
the narrator of Gerona, cannot sustain the optimism of his farewell to
Siseta as he goes to captivity in France: “Por cierto que carecía
completamente del ánimo y entereza que a los demás recomendaba.”
(Gerona, 24: 826) Of all forms of heroism, this outward entereza seems
to him hardest. Under such pressures, death can seem attractive. It does
so for Andrés, for Agustín in Zaragoza, for Santorcaz (whose
youthful love and sacrifice for Amaranta prefigure Gabriel’s for
Inés), and often for Gabriel himself. His readiness to die for
honour at Salamanca involves a suicidal urge, familiar among the heroes
of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. Odysseus, his homeland finally in sight,
relaxes his vigil and sleeps. Awakening to find that his men have released
the winds, he asks, “Should I leap over the side and drown at once?”
(Odyssey, X: 56). This temptation, as Knox (1996: 32-33) observes, is
a naturally recurring response to the stresses of the long voyage home.
Women too, grieving for loved ones, or appalled by their own fate, can
yearn for death, as Helen does. Even Inés, realizing that her captor
and enemy, Santorcaz, is her father, whom she also comes to love and pity,
wants to kill herself. Such emotions are credible because archetypal;
they speak to readers from knowledge deep within themselves.
For Gabriel, as for the protagonists of epic and myth, the heroic path
exacts a great cost, perpetually testing his willingness to die for honour.
His choice of duty above even his own life and love has both a public
and a personal dimension, as do the choices of Hector, Achilles, or Aeneas.
These choices determine whether they achieve the goal of any hero’s
quest: self-knowledge through suffering. They also determine the fates
of Greeks and Trojans, imperial Rome, and French-occupied Spain. But the
suffering remains; these outcomes cannot alter that. Like Classical epic,
the Episodios clearly condemn war, while celebrating those who accept
the challenge of their quest.
Even in boyhood, Gabriel matches that challenge, with his innate rectitude,
honour, compassion, his budding wisdom and dedication to duty, while remaining
a “common man” with whom readers can identify. As Campbell
(e.g. 36-38) observes, the hero is as likely to be everyman as demigod.
Gabriel’s growth in wisdom, self-confidence, love, and honour exhibits
traits of Hector, Achilles, Aeneas, and especially the “quick witted
wanderer” Odysseus. Yet his rise from nameless pícaro to
a man of honour valiantly earned makes these attributes seem attainable
by anyone willing to persevere. Women whose beauty, wisdom, or power evokes
Odysseus’s divine guide Athena, or Aeneas’s mother Aphrodite
assist him. Other women sidetrack him, tempting his vanity or cupidity,
as Circe and Calypso tempt Odysseus, or Dido Aeneas. Like the heroes of
epic or of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gabriel can be torn between love
and duty, self-preservation and honour. Yet, like Odysseus, he doggedly
pursues his goals – honour, self-realization, love. His inherent
virtues develop as he faces ever more formidable obstacles.
Galdós’s integration of Classical characters and motifs into
his narrative reinforces their archetypal messages – perhaps most
fundamentally, here as in Homer, the waste of war. Gabriel compares the
commanders at Trafalgar with “los heroicos capitanes de la antigüedad,”
linking Nelson’s name with Alexander the Great. (16: 248) Nelson
did model himself on Alexander, who, in turn, is said to have taken the
Iliad with him on campaign. Like the historical record, Galdós’s
classical reference implies that some things do not change, that certain
cross-cultural continuities pervade humanity, attesting to what Jungians
call mythic archetypes. It also hints at how hard it may prove for Spain
or humankind to curb the appetite for glory that so often fosters instinctual
brutality.
Young Gabriel believes it possible, but he has much to learn. Already
his naïve appetite for war as an “hermosa fiesta” alongside
the quixotic Don Alonso and the battle-hardened Marcial has been chastened
by carnage and defeat. He is now more perceptive than his two mentors,
schooled in traditions of martial glory and Spain’s ultimate triumph.
They and the leaders who let Napoleon involve Spain in this battle illustrate
Gabriel’s new insight into how the self-seeking few deceive the
many. But any hopes of the many being undeceived remained unfulfilled
for the Gabriel of 1873, the time of writing, and remain so still. This
self-renewing tragedy is ageless, told and retold in stories that transcend
times and cultures. Yet, if anything can be learned from the past, Gabriel’s
words here and elsewhere in the First Series, still carry lessons for
Spain.
For the senseless destruction at Trafalgar only begins the process of
confronting Gabriel, newly initiated into the heroic path, with all the
personal and public obstacles he has ultimately to surmount. Yet for him
and for others who see the folly of the alliance with Napoleon it signals
new self-awareness, a more authentic patriotism, and a less illusory view
of war. Hector too, bidding farewell to Andromache, knows there is no
escape from war; he also knows its human cost. Odysseus, with similar
clarity, describes himself as one of those who, Zeus decrees, “must
wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end.” (Iliad, XIV: 106).
His epic, like Gabriel’s, confronts him repeatedly with forces beyond
his control, and hard choices he alone can make.
The language of Gabriel’s first apprehension of these things purports
to recollect a fourteen-year-old consciousness. It thus seems more “natural,”
and uncontrived, more truthful and morally right, because Gabriel is still
virtually unconditioned by society; he remains an outsider, with no established
social identity. This, combined with his heroic compassion and quick sympathy,
helps him to formulate a more inclusive concept of patriotism –
the first of many redefinitions of traditional ideals: heroism, honour,
courage, nobility, humanity. These invite thoughtful readers to re-consider,
with Gabriel, “tried and true” versions of history and explanations
of the past, and to exercise their own choices regarding time-honoured,
barely questioned commonplaces about self and Spain.
Heroism and valour, Gabriel discovers, entail experiences of suffering
and devastation, or, as when he finds himself stranded on the sinking
ship with the injured Marcial (Trafalgar, 15: 245), fear, doubt, and inner
conflict. For heroes of classical epic, courage and compassion involve
the same struggles, the same fears of death or dishonour, as they do for
Gabriel (and indeed Marcial, for neither here nor in Homer are heroes
all great, godlike, or renowned). Some in the Iliad are tempted to flee
from battle; some do. Fear and despair drive Odysseus, Achilles, Aeneas,
and more than once Gabriel to contemplate suicide. Just as unpredictably,
the brutal, single-minded Achilles can feel compassion or the dutiful
and compassionate Hector yield to brutality. For the moment, though, Gabriel
is stranded on a doomed vessel with the brave but broken Marcial. When
the latter dies, the boy loses hope and consciousness. (15: 246-47) But,
as will happen often in the First Series, Gabriel miraculously survives.
It is the true beginning of his odyssey. Moreover, as Odysseus’s
first thoughts when rescued after shipwreck are (while any remain alive)
for his men; Gabriel, recovering, thinks first of Marcial. (16: 247)
A central source of interest in the Odyssey – the hero’s dealings
with women – comes to the fore in the second story, La corte de
Carlos IV. Here Galdós introduces the two women who will matter
most for Gabriel’s journey and his representation of Spain: the
exquisite Countess Amaranta, Queen María Luisa’s lady in
waiting, and Inés de Santorcaz, the young seamstress Gabriel loves,
soon to be revealed as Amaranta’s illegitimate daughter. Other women
characters appear: Amaranta’s rival in intrigue, the Duchess Lesbia,
and the actress Pepita, Gabriel’s employer when the story begins.
Galdós frames all these with embedded and explicit allusions to
classical literature. Characteristically, this remaking of classical material
involves several intertexts. In atmosphere, it owes much to Goya, whose
mágicos pinceles adorn the voguish Olympian décor of the
royal palace, blending the mythological with the traditionally Spanish.
Gabriel observes how “el autor de los Caprichos se burlaba del Parnaso”
(La corte de Carlos IV, 22: 335): Goya’s muses suggest manolas;
his Cupids recall “los pilluelos del Rastro.” Other references
avoid that parodic note. The Odyssey remains an important structuring
presence. One prominent detail – the name “Lesbia” –
comes from Catullus, a favourite with Galdós’s sometime Professor
of Latin, Camús, whom he recalled admiringly for linking the Roman
past to the madrileño present, as with his “paralelos magníficos”
between Catullus’s fickle lover and “las Lesbias modernas.”
(Shoemaker, 269) Camús had done for Galdós what, in this
novel, the kindly priest Don Celestino, Inés’s adoptive uncle,
does for Gabriel, encouraging him to study “los clásicos
latinos.” (La corte de Carlos IV, 3: 266) But the dominant intertext
is the one Gabriel invokes when introducing Pepita, whose eyes are “capaces
[…] de decir con una mirada más que dijo Ovidio en su poema
sobre el arte que nunca se aprende y que siempre se sabe.” (1: 256)
Ovidian echoes abound in this episodio: the Ars Amatoria, Remedium amoris,
and Amores, the Medicamina faciei feimineae, Metamorphoses and above all,
the Heroides, which anticipate the depth and centrality of Galdós’s
presentation of women. Their role in the Episodios generally is remarkable,
given that wars and policies are made by men. In this novel, though, women
are as characteristically to the fore as in the Metamorphoses themselves.
The women of La corte de Carlos IV, moreover, resemble Ovid’s heroines
in that, as Gregory remarks of the latter, they “do not meditate;
they waver between extremes of right and wrong.” (xi) As well they
might, given the complex of stories within stories, enacted in this labyrinth
of courtly deception. Its historical intrigue revolves around the Infante
Fernando’s hostility towards Godoy, his mother’s lover, and
his desire to supplant his weak father Carlos IV. The fictional intrigue
turns upon the rivalry of Lesbia and Amaranta, supporters, respectively,
of Fernando and Carlos. (Lesbia is the keeper of Fernando’s treasonable
correspondence with Napoleon). The plot develops through insecure secrets
(Amaranta’s illegitimate child – later revealed to be Inés;
Lesbia’s multiple adulteries), espionage (in which Amaranta seeks
to employ Gabriel), stolen letters, and private theatricals. These complications
merge with the power plays that will enable Napoleon to occupy Spain;
Amaranta, Lesbia, and Pepita are both movers and victims of events. Galdós’s
paradoxical note of sympathetic condemnation in representing this itself
recalls Ovid, whose critique of decadence among Roman women also encompassed
a sense of emotional conflict. It displayed to readers their own desires,
their moments of violence or weakness, their surrender to forces beyond
their conscious wills. (Gregory, xviii-xix) Much the same is true of Galdós,
as he weaves Ovidian and extra-Ovidian motifs into his array of feminine
portrayals.
Thus Pepita, specifically marked as an Ovidian figure, alternates between
ingenuity and hypocrisy, generosity and spite, her failings excused by
her lamentable education. (1: 256-57) In this, as in her seductive charm,
she prefigures her aristocratic friends Lesbia, and especially Amaranta.
Amaranta’s eyes are even more lovely, and deceitful, than Pepita’s;
in Bailén Gabriel describes them as “los Bonapartes de la
mirada humana, conquistaban al punto todo aquello a que dirigían
su pupila,” evoking both their beauty and their tremendous power.
(Bailén, 11: 484) The rivalry of between Amaranta and Lesbia in
court intrigue and the abuse of power has an impact much like that of
discord – or, as Achilles complains, of mere caprice – among
the Olympians on the mortals whom they govern. Lesbia, indeed, has virtually
no other function. Amaranta, by contrast, has roles both in the Ovidian
drama of the court and in Gabriel’s larger epic.
Initially a beautiful, distracting, temptress, Amaranta personifies material
and moral deception and the strategic use of the language of power. She
offers Gabriel dazzling rewards to accept the degrading role of spy. But
Gabriel will use to better purpose the arts of language in which she instructs
him, making her, in that sense, Athena to his Odysseus. She is also the
mother of the wise and pure Inés, who inherits her positive qualities.
This 15-year old seamstress, encountered while running errands for Pepita,
will be the love of Gabriel’s life, the Penelope to whom, after
all his trials he will return. Throughout the Episodios Inés will
guide his choices, sometimes directly, more often implicitly, as Athena,
the virgin goddess of wisdom and weaving, guides Odysseus. As the object
of both Gabriel’s and Amaranta’s rivalry with the afrancesado
Santorcaz, Inés also symbolizes Spain: an object of war and desire,
perhaps a Helen of Troy. Athena, we might recall, was also, reluctantly,
a patroness of war.
By the fifth episodio, Napoleón en Chamartín, war dominates
Gabriel’s world. Madrid tamely capitulates to the French; Napoleon
is there to witness his triumph. Like Odysseus refusing the offer of immortality,
Gabriel has refused Amaranta’s offer of high social advancement
if he will renounce Inés. He has, though, voluntarily renounced
her, and having lost all reason for living, he feels worthless and suicidal.
Yet by the novel’s end, he knows at least that he will always strive
to be worthy of Inés, just as he now commits completely to Spain’s
cause. These mood-swings again recall Odysseus, constantly thwarted in
his efforts to return to Penelope with honour, but never yielding entirely
to despair – though neither Gabriel nor Odysseus at such mid-points
can imagine what perils await them. The novel’s strongest epic associations,
however gather around the old soldier, Santiago Fernández, El Gran
Capitan, who, defying the French to the last, perishes in the fire that
destroys his handmade fortress. (Napoleón en Chamartín,
30: 655-56)
The immediate comparison is with Numantia: Don Santiago himself invokes
it, declaring that the madrileños should follow that example. (20: 618) But the Numantia legend itself echoes Virgil’s account of the
sack of Troy, and Don Santiago has close links with Hector’s fatal
destiny. Bidding farewell to his sleeping wife, he knows, like Hector,
what awaits. His love for Gregoria, so eloquently expressed that the listening
Gabriel can imagine her long-lost beauty, evokes the latter’s love
for Inés. The old couple too fell in love at first sight, enduring
years of enforced separation. Don Santiago’s admission that “Si
algo enflaquece mi ánimo, es la vista de mi inocente esposa”
(20: 617) also echoes Hector’s words to Andromache: “the pain
of the Trojans […] is nothing beside your agony.” (Iliad,
VI: 535-39) Of his motives in overruling that anguish, Hector declares: “All this weighs on my mind too, […] / But I would die of
shame to face the men of Troy / […] if I would shrink from battle
now, a coward.” (Iliad, VI: 522-25) In one of the Episodios’
key statements about honour, Don Santiago instructs Gabriel: “la
honra de la patria […] vale más que la propia honra […]
si me causa angustia y pesar […] la viudez de Gregorilla, mayor,
mucha mayor pena me causa […] que la capital de España se
entrega a los franceses.” (20: 617-18) The Gran Capitán does
not echo Hector’s words on fate – “it’s born with
us the day that we are born” (Iliad, VI: 582-84) – but he
faces his death in that spirit. Like Nelson, Churruca, and many unnamed
heroes, like Achilles, preferring a brief, dutiful, and glorious life
over a long, peaceful one, he values duty more than either self-preservation
or love, offering Gabriel and the future heroes of Zaragoza and Gerona
an exemplar for their own choices. There is, too, a wider political point.
Napoleon en Chamartín ends with French guards bullying their Spanish
prisoners into cheering the Emperor. But Gabriel insists that the all-powerful
Napoleon is no match for Don Santiago: “Algunos han dicho que nuestro
amigo estaba loco; pero ese que ahí va, ¿está en
su sano juicio?” (20: 657)
When Madrid surrenders, the outraged Gabriel desires to fight “allí
donde sepan morir antes que rendirse a los franceses.” (19: 616)
He soon will: escaping captivity, he arrives in Zaragoza for the siege
that destroys that city. Its legendary correlatives are Numantia (e.g.
chapters 4, 8, 25), and Troy’s ten-year resistance. The subplot
involving Agustín Montoria and María Candiola, evokes Hector
and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope – also, naturally, Gabriel
and Inés. However, Gabriel and Odysseus finally achieve their goal
of happiness in love; not so Hector and Andromache, nor Agustín
and María who, like the Gran Capitán and his Gregoria, illustrate
the risks that Gabriel’s love must run. More than any Homeric texts,
however, Zaragoza evokes the Aeneid.
Many scenes in this tragic slaughter of 53,000 people recall Virgil’s
account of the sack of Troy. Both cities, long besieged, fall only to
treachery: the Trojan horse; the miser Candiola’s betrayal (Zaragoza,
28: 739-40) of the secret passage from his house (like Andromache’s
secret walkway to Priam’s palace, discovered by the Greeks). Neoptolemus
kills Priam and Hecuba on Priam’s altar (Aeneid, II: 582-94); the
French profane that of the Virgen del Pilar. Like Aeneas’s dream
of Troy in flames, María Candiola’s dreams come true, and
Gabriel’s nightmare becomes waking reality. In their last defence,
the Trojans tear stones from towers to hurl upon the Greeks; in Zaragoza,
desperate soldiers hurl rocks and roof-tiles from the towers to kill more
Frenchmen. (28: 740) Here, as in Gerona, the horrors of bodies heaped
on bodies and serving as shields for those still alive, of fever and starvation,
cities and men fighting like automata, rival in their frightfulness Aeneas’s
account of his city’s end. Troy and Zaragoza resist to the last,
fighting from house to house. Both burn to ashes; virtually nothing remains.
The bare thousand left alive in Zaragoza seem matched with the handful
of Trojan survivors clustered about Aeneas.
Yet a Virgilian tenderness counterpoints these Virgilian horrors. Within
the siege is set the doomed romance of Agustín Montoria, Gabriel’s
comrade in arms, and María Candiola, beautiful daughter of the
city’s betrayer. Agustín, though destined for the church,
has no religious vocation; rather, he is an aspiring poet. with an “imaginación
brillante […] educada en la gran escuela de los latinos,”
(4: 665-55) and, as the siege will reveal, a man of action. He seems to
be what Gabriel, following Don Celestino’s advice from the second
episodio, might hope to become. When Agustín describes how he first
met María, the Virgilian intertext is evident. Father Rincón
introduces his young relative, praising her beauty above all God’s
other works. But Agustín invokes another comparison, awestruck
and adoring before “aquella obra maestra, que era sin disputa mejor
que la Eneida.” (5: 668) Shortly afterwards he tells Rincón
that the latter’s beloved Horace is worthless beside Virgil. And
he quotes: “Est mollis flamma medullas / interea, et tacitum vivit
sub pectore vulnus” (Aeneid, IV: 66-67; in Zaragoza, 5: 668) Ironically,
these lines (for him, the loveliest ever written) foretell the doomed
passion of Dido for Aeneas.
No less doomed is Agustín’s and María’s love.
The order to execute her treacherous father creates a conflict of desire
and duty, as agonizing as that of Aeneas. Agustín, renouncing both
imperatives, vows to return to the cloister. After the execution, which
Gabriel must now oversee, Agustín finds María dead, her
body incorrupt, with no wound or blemish. (31: 749) This suggests a willed
death: perhaps a suicide like Dido’s; perhaps from a broken heart,
grieving for Agustín’s perceived betrayal of her, and for
her father. Perhaps (again like Dido) the conflict of these powerful attachments
has undone her.
For Gabriel, this tragedy precipitates a profound questioning of his own
humanity. Obliged to command the firing squad and order Candiola’s
execution, he enters a world of nightmare. This is cold-blooded killing,
not doing one’s duty in battle. It is his most abhorrent action
of the war, etched permanently on his mind (as his present-tense narrative
throughout Chapter 30 imprints it on the reader’s mind), rendering
him unable to separate waking life from dream. Yet before the end the
values of epic humanism are powerfully reasserted. When the French enter
Zaragoza, more sepultureros than vencedores, they weep for the destruction
and the many thousands dead (Zaragoza, 30: 748), as Odysseus weeps at
the bard’s tale of the end of Troy. (Odyssey, VIII: 586- 608) The
devastation evokes a last Homeric reference: “Era la ciudad de la
desolación, de la epopeya digna de que la llorara Jeremías
y de que la cantara Homero.” (31: 750) The story of Zaragoza and
the star-crossed lovers within it is framed and traversed by classical
texts, like the flames of love and war encircling and consuming the city.
In La batalla de los Arapiles, his last episodio, Gabriel’s journey
faces uniquely challenging obstacles. Just as he has located Inés
in Salamanca, she is again placed beyond his reach. She feels a duty to
stay with her father, the sick and angry Santorcaz, whom she has come
to love. Gabriel, frustrated like Odysseus beaten back from the coast
of Ithaca, finds his reaction complicated by the kind of factor which
often affects Odysseus too: a woman leads him astray. The temptation threatens
his good name, Inés’s love, and Amaranta’s blessing
on their marriage. His Circe or Calypso is the English noblewoman Miss
Athenais Fly, whose beauty enchants him, as Amaranta’s did earlier,
and whose attentions flatter his vanity. Her “glossy braids,”
richly golden like those of Odysseus’s temptresses, confirm for
him “la imagen de las trenzas de oro tan usada por los poetas.”
(La batalla de los Arapiles, 8: 1072) He frequently refers to her as ninfa,
hada, or hecichera – terms equally applicable to Calypso or Circe;
she admires him as a figure of epic and romantic fantasy. All this belongs
to her vision of Spain as somewhere primitive and exotic. “Sólo
en España podría encontrarse esto,” she says of Gabriel’s
quest for Inés; “¡Oh, qué aventura tan hermosa!
¡Qué romance tan lindo!” (13: 1085) Salamanca evokes
for her a dichosa edad, ruled by passion, when “El hombre lo atropella
todo por la posesión del objeto amado […] Por una mujer se
encienden guerras y dos naciones se destrozan por un beso.” (23: 1114) The former scenario evokes Gabriel and Inés; the latter,
as clearly, the matter of Troy. She herself makes the link explicit, finding
in Gabriel’s tale “¡Incomparable poesía! Después
de la Ilíada no se ha compuesto nada mejor.” (13: 1086) Briefly,
he lets himself identify her, and be identified by her as belonging to
that fantasy world.
But the fantasy is disingenuous; when she equates Gabriel with the ballad-hero
Don Galván, who rescues his princess, assisted by “una hada
o dama desconocida” (13: 1986), it is plain who will play that part
in Gabriel’s story, but less clear whether any role will be left
for Inés. Miss Fly has marked Gabriel for her own; her dubiously
honourable strategy of letting defamatory rumours about him spread interacts
with the Santorcaz plot-strand to drive him to ever more desperate courses.
His mission for Wellington completed, Gabriel’s duty is to return
to camp with the map of Salamanca’s defences. He must take a different
path from Inés once again and thus abandon, perhaps forever, “los
amores de toda mi vida, el alma de mi existencia.” (24: 1124-25)
Unable even to bid her farewell, as Santorcaz, with cruel irony, sends
the coach containing both women swiftly ahead, Gabriel is left in the
dust. The shock reduces him to violent rage, and a savage longing for
death in battle: “En mi desesperada impotencia me arrojaba al suelo,
mordía la tierra y clamaba al cielo con alaridos que habrían
aterrado a los transeúntes… ¡Oh, Dios de las batallas,
guerra y exterminio es lo que deseo!” (24: 1124-25) Miss Fly’s
tardy return to camp and calculated silences create the impression that
he has dishonoured her. The calumny spreads quickly, damaging his repute
among the English and, as he believes, with Amaranta and Inés.
Now in despair, he volunteers for the most suicidal position on the battlefield
of Salamanca. Struggling to seize the French flag, he becomes like a beast
fighting with other beasts until, losing consciousness altogether, he
finally falls. (36, passim)
Miss Fly retrieves his body, and while he recovers from his wounds, she
makes her most determined attempt to win him for herself. His previous
despair paralleled Odysseus’s response to frustrated hope; her conduct
now echoes Calypso, who offers Odysseus eternal youth if he would stay
with her. To Calypso’s question whether she or Penelope is more
beautiful, Odysseus tactfully replies that she is, but his heart and honour
belong in Ithaca. Calypso graciously lets him go. Miss Fly too compares
herself favourably, and with increasing scorn, to Inés. Though
Gabriel acknowledges Athenais’s great merits and beauty, he insists
that Inés has long been etched in his soul. Athenais reacts less
than graciously, with angry insult. “Me debeís la vida”
(37: 1164), she reminds him, as Nausicäa reminds Odysseus; he vows,
again like Odysseus, that he will always remember her with gratitude and
admiration. (38: 1178-79) She declares that she will not remember him at
all (though she does retain a lock of his hair). Miss Fly is no wise weaver
like Inés, or her near-namesake Athena; aspiring to be a nymph
or goddess of epic fancy, she lacks the grace to be either.
Like Odysseus, Nestor, Aeneas, or others in classical epic who tell their
own stories, Gabriel, recreating himself in words, observes himself and
his listener-readers observing him. Neither formulaic modesty nor the
constraints of failing or distressful memory prevent them from ordering
events for their own purposes, and drawing attention to their own achievements.
Gabriel concludes that his quest has brought him knowledge of self, love
of others, and domestic happiness: “La vida fue mi escuela, y la
desgracia mi maestra. Todo lo aprendí y todo lo tuve.” (31: 1185)
His inner completion, well-merited good name, and joyful marriage to Inés,
attest a self-mastery and wisdom, perhaps surpassing even his heroic models.
The Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid all end tragically, with countless deaths
and irreparable devastation. Hector knows that war, defeat for Troy, death
for himself and his infant son, slavery for Andromache, are all inevitable.
Achilles, who took brutal pleasure in killing him, experiences deep compassion
for the dead man’s father, as he realizes their common fate –
a telling commentary on the gloriously brutal war that he and other Homeric
heroes have waged. The Iliad’s last words are: “Thus, then,
did they celebrate the funeral of Hector tamer of horses.” At the
end of the Odyssey, peace is still threatened by Odysseus’s vengeful
rage: only when Athena intervenes directly to stop further killing is
reconciliation assured. Revenge is merely measured and curbed –
only mythically replaced by peace.
For all Aeneas’s associations of virtus, pietas, and humanitas,
the Aeneid ends with him killing his helpless enemy on an impulse of perhaps
understandable, but nonetheless ruthless, revenge. Odysseus, heeding Athena’s
instruction, at least acknowledges a better way, perhaps without fully
understanding it. Achilles, in fellow-feeling and awed mutual respect,
can share the misery of the stricken Priam, sensing the common destiny
of men, helpless before the whims of the gods. And the voices of women
– Cassandra, Andromache, Hecuba, Helen – rise up as Hector’s
body returns to Troy – recalling all those that live, love, suffer,
and die away from the battlefield, victims, whether victors or vanquished,
of the innate human, or male, impulse to war. The Aeneid, though, achieves
no final reconciliation, no such reminders of a fuller humanity. Virgil’s
last image is of Aeneas, “burning with rage,” plunging his
sword into his helpless victim.
From such comparisons, Gabriel emerges well. He overcomes the desire for
revenge, even against Santorcaz, who kept Inés so long from him,
and tried to have him killed. Like the classical heroes, he fights savagely
on the field, especially at Salamanca. Yet only once must he kill in cold
blood, ordering the justified execution of Candiola, the traitor to Zaragoza.
The fatal word fuego becomes his personal nightmare, bringing him close
to self-destruction. The vengeful urge remains powerful: in Gerona, it
transforms Nomdedeu into a beast, and threatens to possess Andrés,
Gabriel’s friend and alter ego. Gabriel’s dominion over it
and himself, represents Galdós’s hope that man may change
his destiny by learning from the past. Yet if the myths (where Aeneas
is vengeful to the end, and even the level-headed Odysseus must be restrained
by Athena) hold archetypal, universal truths, then indeed the young Gabriel’s
dream of all men living in harmony is not for this world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED
Primary sources
Homer: The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 1990.
Homer: The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 1996.
Ovid: The Metamorphoses. Trans. Horace Gregory. New York: Viking, 1960.
Pérez Galdós, Benito: Episodios nacionales. 4 Vols, ed.
Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles.
1st edn, 4th rpt, Madrid: Aguilar, 1979.
[All references here to the text of the First Series are to Volume I of
this edition.]
Virgil: The Aeneid: An Epic Poem of Rome. Trans. L.R. Lind. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1975.
Other works cited
Alas, Leopoldo: “Benito Pérez Galdós”
in Benito Pérez Galdós: El escritor y la crítica,
ed. Douglass M. Rogers (2nd edn, Madrid: Taurus, 1979), 21-40.
Campbell, Joseph: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: MJF Books,
1949.
Gregory, Horace: Introduction to Ovid. The Metamorphoses. New York: Viking,
1960.
Knox, Bernard (1990): Introduction to Homer. The Iliad. New York: Viking,
1990.
Knox, Bernard (1996): Introduction to Homer. The Odyssey. New York: Viking,
1996.
Lind, L.R.: “Virgil and the Meaning of the Aeneid.” in Virgil,
The Aeneid: An Epic Poem of Rome (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1975).
Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino: “Don Benito Pérez Galdós”
in Benito Pérez Galdós: El escritor y la crítica, ed. Douglass M. Rogers (Madrid: Taurus,
1979), 51-73.
Shoemaker, William H., ed.: Los artículos de Galdós en “La
Nación. 1865-1866. Madrid: Insula, 1972.
Ribbans, Geoffrey: History and Fiction in Galdós's Narratives.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Professor Diane Faye Urey
Diane Faye Urey, a graduate of the University of Oregon, obtained her PhD in Romance Languages in 1977 from the John Hopkins University. After brief appointments in other US universities (one as Head of a Department of English), she began her long association with Illinois State University in 1981. Her quality was quickly recognized there in a series of awards for outstanding research and teaching. She became a full Professor of Spanish in 1988, and achieved the coveted accolade of Distinguished University Professor in 1998. She has served on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Anales Galdosianos, and as Vice-President of the International Galdós Association.
Among Galdós scholars, Diane Urey’s standing is unique. Her first book, Galdós and the Irony of Language (Cambridge UP, 1982) challenged readers and admirers of Galdós as a master of realism to read him in new, theoretically-informed ways, confronting them with new understandings of the manner in which that mastery was exercised, and of the kind of novelist he was capable of being. The challenge was all the more powerful because of its impressive theoretical coherence, and because Diane Urey’s own readings of Galdós were as responsive and as admiring as any of those which she set out to question. Indeed, her second major book, The Novel Histories of Galdós (Princeton UP, 1989), successfully undertook what no-one had yet attempted: to vindicate Galdós’s late historical fiction, not as the falling-off it was often assumed to be, but as a new kind of fiction, commendable in its own terms. Her eagerly-awaited Galdós and the New Reader will consolidate her theoretically-empowered renewal of admiratio in Galdós criticism by reinterpreting the key moment of his entry on the literary scene around and after 1870.
Diane Urey’s copious articles, book-chapters and scholarly papers have opened a range of wider critical debates on aspects of Galdós and Spanish literature of this time. Topics of major interest include women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, Galdosian theories of language, and the links between Galdós’s writings and mythological tradition (a theme relevant to her Sheffield lecture). She has made a whole generation of Galdós’s readers and critics think through their understandings of him afresh, and we are privileged to welcome her to Sheffield.
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