From Imperial to National Identity: Revisiting the Realist Tradition in Spanish Literature

Abstract

In an essay titled “The Spanish Novel from Pérez Galdós to Marías: Tradition and Nescience, Rupture, and Europeanization,” Stephen Miller traces back two opposing traditions in the Iberian novel: Galdós sociomimetic novel versus Ortega’s proposal for a cosmopolitan, experimental novel. Following Octavio Paz’s and Harold Bloom’s description of literary modernity as a constant struggle against the anxiety of influence, an ongoing parricide that tries to do away with the past to position oneself as new, Miller describes Ortega’s critique of Spain’s history in España invertebrada and of Spanish literary tradition in Ideas sobre la novela as the foundational move of a Spanish literary modernity that has repeatedly rejected its own literary tradition in an effort to insert itself in what it perceives as a European, experimental (or elitist, to use Silva’s words) tradition. Thus, Ortega’s rejection would be reinstated by Torrente Ballester in his essay “Los problemas de la novela española,” materialized in Luis Martín Santos Tiempo de silencio, and a few years later reiterated by Juan Benet who offered, according to Miller, a personalized version of Ortega’s aesthetic project in La inspiración y el estilo (55). Ortega’s inaugural rejection of the Iberian realist tradition is tragic because it fails to recognize the evolution that Galdós’s sociomimetic project underwent in the last period of his life in novels such as Nazarín in which Galdós abandons realism, and pursues a more psychological approach.