They're better raw - the great Fortunata

The title of Fortunata and Jacinta is misleading, suggesting some sort of balance between the two characters, and Galdós does his best to increase the confusion.  The novel does not begin with Jacinta – it begins with a detailed history of the retail fabric trade in Madrid, including a baffling genealogies of the key families (“a tangle whose threads are almost impossible to follow,” I.vi.2, 83), much of the latter in a section amusingly titled “Still More Details about the Distinguished Family.”  “There’s more yet,” Galdós warns me (83), and he means it.

The novel is divided into four roughly equal parts.  It turns out that Jacinta only has a starring role in the first, and even there we meet Fortunata first.  It is a heck of a debut:  “a pretty woman, young and tall” – no that’s not so interesting, I have to skip a sentence or two:

The girl wore a light blue scarf on her head and a large, heavy shawl over her shoulders, and the minute she saw the Dauphin she swelled up at him, I mean, she put her hands on her hips and raised her shoulders with that characteristic gesture the low-class women of Madrid have, filling out their shawls with a movement that reminds you of a hen ruffling her feathers  and swelling out before coming down to normal size again.  (I.iii.4, 43-4)

And that’s not the best part:

“What are you eating, sweetheart?”

“Can’t you see?” she replied, showing it to him.  “An egg.”

“A raw egg!”

Very gracefully , the girl lifted the broken egg to her mouth for the second time and sucked it again.  (44)

There is no  way the heroine of the novel is going to live up to this introduction.  Talk about vigor: “Then she finished sucking the egg and threw away the shell, which smashed against the wall one flight below them.”

All of the business about birds and eggs and shells is going to return near the end of the novel.  This was vivid enough that, even seven hundred pages later, I knew exactly which earlier scene  Galdós was invoking.

It is not uncommon for authors of difficult novels to at some point give readers their theory of the novel, instructions on how to read their books.  It is also common for these instructions to appear near the end of the book, because writers are perverse cusses who enjoy suffering.  Galdós waits until five pages from the end, when a secondary character tells Fortunata’s story to a literary critic:

The response from the famous judge of literary works was that it had the makings of a play or a novel, although in his opinion the artistic texture wouldn’t be especially attractive unless it were warped in places so that the vulgarity of life might be converted into esthetic material.  He didn’t tolerate “raw life” in art; it had to be scrubbed, seasoned with aromatic spices, and then thoroughly cooked…  in the end they agreed that well-ripened raw fruit was very good, but so were compotes, if the cook knew what he was doing.” (IV.vi.16, 813)

As I read this, I remembered the woman they were discussing, who declared, almost eight hundred pages in the past, “’They’re better raw.’”

Dwight: thanks for the hosting and motivation and twenty-one posts!

His thick lips shone with the goo - non-Victorian Galdós

I was surprised at the earthiness of Fortunata and Jacinta, at its vulgarity.  Victorian English (and American, and for that matter Russian) novels distort my view of the literary world.  The French, of course, are hopelessly smutty, we all know that,  but shouldn’t the literature of Catholic Spain, home of the Counter-Reformation, be as demure as the Victorians?  Well, it ain’t, not Galdós, at least, who is very much in the tradition of the uninhibited Cervantes and Lazarillo de Tormes.

I am thinking of scenes or elements like:

The sexual symbolism of the dreams I have been writing about, with what appear to be phallic symbols and descriptions of female orgasms.

Straightforward descriptions of the mechanics of breast-feeding and to a lesser degree childbirth.

A lack of judgment by the narrator about Fortunata’s occasional turn to prostitution.  Some of the characters judge her harshly enough, but the narrator is neutral.  I do not remember more than a couple of clear references.  This is plain, yes?:

Sra. Rubín let herself be led along and mechanically got into the cab.  She had done the same before with whomever she’d picked up in the street.  (III.iii.2, 483)

Here is a passage which does not seem to be daring:

The bedroom was still totally dark.  She heard her husband’s breathing – harsh, then wheezing, rising and falling in pitch, as if the air got blocked in that chest by gelatinous obstructions and metallic strips…  The nonsensical thought – for it was sheer nonsense – that occurred to her was that she should slip out of bed, grope for her clothes, put on her underwear, go to the clothes rack, put on her dress.  (III.vi.6, 576)

As innocuous as this is, it is unimaginable in a Victorian novel in 1886 – “put on her underwear”!

Finally, some digestive explicitness.  I do not remember anything scatological, but there is a magnificent scene with a priest who “positively could not sleep unless he had a lettuce or escarole (depending on the season) salad at eleven at night; well-dressed and tossed, with that indispensable touch of garlic rubbed into the salad bowl, and the special treat of celery too, when it was in season” (II.iv.3, 305).

Let’s watch the priest chew for a moment:  “His thick lips shone with the goo, and it trickled down the sides of his mouth in threads that would have run straight to his throat if the thick stubble of his badly shaved chin hadn’t stopped them.”

The inevitable result:

He didn’t finish the sentence, because from the pit of his stomach there emerged such a voluminous quantity of gas that the words had to scurry away to let it escape.  The burp was so loud that Doña Lupe had to turn away, even though Nicolás had put the palm of his hand in front of his mouth to act as a shield.  This was one of his relatively few polite habits.  (306)

Now imagine the scene as rewritten by Henry James or Anton Chekhov.

None of this has much to do with the art of the novel, this novel or any other.  Aside from that salad, I mean.  One of the great salads of 19th century fiction.

Pipes all over the place! - another dream, more patterns in Fortunata and Jacinta

Jacinta’s dream, early in Fortunata and Jacinta, is matched by Fortunata’s dream late in the novel.  A reminder, Jacinta is the angelic wife who is dying to have a child; Fortunata is the wild sometimes mistress.  At this point, Fortunata has worked herself up into a hysterical state about Jacinta and is currently not seeing the rakish Juanito.

Galdós plays a dirty trick by 1) not directly telling me the passage is a dream, but 2) letting me know it is a dream using verb tenses:

… her thoughts blurred in grief and pain and drowsiness finally overtook her.

She has a strong urge to go out, heads for Magdalena Street, and stops in front of the pipe store, obeying that instinct that tells us if we have a happy meeting at a certain place we can have it again if we go back to the same place.  Pipes all over the place! (¡Cuánto tubo!)  Bronze faucets, spigots, and a multitude of things to conduct water.  (III.vii.4, 609)

I have been reading the short fiction of Arthur Schnitzler, the most cleanly Freudian author I have ever seen, so I may be a little over-sensitive, but c’mon, right?  At this point, I remember, I had noticed the switch to present tense but did not understand that Fortunata was dreaming.  Here’s where I figured that out:

On Barrionuevo Street she stops at the door of a shop where there are bolts of material unwrapped and hanging in waves.  Fortunata examines them and touches some with her fingers to feel their texture.  “This cretonne is really pretty!”  Inside there’s a dwarf, a monster, dressed in a red cassock and a turban, a transitional animal, halfway along the Darwinian road, where the orangutans become man.

There’s that fabric again, always fabric.  Juanito’s family is wealthy due to their success as fabric retailers.  The dwarf is perhaps a stand-in for Fortunata’s impotent, unhealthy husband, although one could go in other interpretive directions.

Next comes “a huge grill for roasting chops, and underneath it the enormous flames.”  That might be symbolic of something.  Some piano music – that’s foreshadowing.  Seven mules “strung together like rosary beads” – no idea.  More fabric.  Here’s the culmination of all of this strange stuff:

The ground is damp and slippery.  Suddenly, oh!, she feels as if she’s been stabbed. (610)

And just a few lines later

Fortunata looks at him [it’s her beloved Juanito!] and feels such intense pain that she might as well have had a dagger driven into her.

If I duck back to Juanita’s dream, the one with the chalky baby, I find:

A long time passed in this way, the child-man looking at his mother, and slowly melting her firmness with the power of his eyes.  Jacinta felt something tearing inside her.  (114)

And now I will leap to the end:

Shortly after being left alone, Fortunata felt something strange happening inside her.  Her vision blurred and she could feel a mass breaking away from her that reminded her of when Juan Evaristo came into the world… (800)

When I think about the art of Fortunata and Jacinta, I do not always think of passages like these, which take a turn to the bizarre, or carefully planned patternings that span the novel, recurring nearly seven hundred pages apart from each other.  The novel did not always feel so tightly woven while I was reading it.  The more I look back on the book, though, the less I trust that feeling.

She lost count of the buttons she’d undone. There were a hundred, maybe a thousand. - realistic Fortunata and Jacinta

Fortunata and Jacinta is nominally a work of “realism,” whatever that is.  How odd that it is so full of dreams, mental illness, and saints, the same things I find in novels called Romantic or Symbolist  or what have you.  The reality of Benito Pérez Galdós is a strange one.  If you want to argue that it is therefore realistic, I salute you.

Dwight wrote about a long, detailed dream of Jacinta, the wife of the novel’s cad.  The dream’s environment is amusing – Jacinta is at the opera, being punished by Wagner (“[e]xcellent music according to [her husband] and everyone who had taste,” 113), in particular “a descriptive piece in which the orchestra was imitating the buzzing with which mosquitoes amuse mankind on a summer night.”

Her ensuing dream is about her longing for a baby, so it is highly sexualized yet also strangely domestic, literally wrapped in fabric (“Everything was lined in the white flowered satin that she and [her mother-in-law] had seen the day before”).  The breast-feeding theme is explicitly introduced; it will become important at the end of Fortunata’s story, and is one of the many parallels in the scene between Jacinta and her husband’s  mistress, Fortunata.

The button theme, for example (the baby is trying to get at Jacinta’s breast):

The fourth button, the fifth, all the buttons slid through their buttonholes making the material strain.  She lost count of the buttons she’d undone.  There were a hundred, maybe a thousand.

Fortunata later has a button superstition – “’If it’s a button like this – white with four holes – it’s a good sign; but if it’s black, and it has three, it’s bad business’” (II.vii.2, 385). And here is where I pull my hair and say “Arrgh,” because I swear there is another important button scene that I have forgotten.  As if I was looking for buttons while reading the novel!  I should have been looking for buttons.

So the strange dream-baby, once given the breast, begins to change – “his mouth was insensitive and his lips didn’t move…  The touch Jacinta felt on this very delicate area of her skin was the horrifying friction of chalk, friction from a rough, dusty surface.”  Jacinta awakes from the incipient nightmare to find that the orchestra “was still imitating mosquitoes,” and to discover that her husband has still not arrived.

Where is Juanito, the husband?  Galdós tells us, or has the husband tell his wife, but not until ninety pages later (“’You were going to the Royal Opera that night…  You wouldn’t remember,” I.x.7, 204).  He was with Fortunata, his (at this time) former mistress.  Fortunata has contacted Juanito because their baby, their son, is dying.  The poor thing dies more or less just as Jacinta dreams.   Juanito buys a blue coffin for the baby, which may or may not have some relation to the “powder-blue bathrobe” Jacinta is wearing in her dream.  I am sure that garment or one much like it is somewhere else in the novel, too.  No, it’s not the colors, it’s the buttons that recur.  I am back to the buttons.

To recap:  Jacinta dreams about a dying or, I don’t know, calcifying child at the moment her husband is attending to his dying child.  And the word we use for this is “realism.”

What I seem to have done here is rewrite Dwight's post. Please, Dwight, consider this a compliment, rather than theft.

Sulfur people, lizard-belly green, and yellow that mixes poetry and consumption - beginning a week of Fortunata and Jacinta

Fortunata and Jacinta, the gigantic 1886 novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, is one of the two greatest Spanish novels of the nineteenth century, or so I am told.  A number of book bloggists have been reading it along with Dwight at A Common Reader, who just put up his twenty-first post about the novel.  The book can handle the attention.

The novel is long and quite complex; some of the complexity is of a nature I do not understand well.  Perhaps this week will be a series of admissions of failure and lists of subjects for future research.  Dwight has read it twice so I will pillage some of his stuff for assistance.

A plot summary does not make the book sound so complicated.  The two women in the title are in love with the same lazy, no good, rich, charming dog of a man.  The richer woman marries him; the poorer one steals him once in a while.  The wife cannot have children, the mistress can (or perhaps the problem is the husband’s).  Although the women are competitors, even enemies, the main ethical argument of the novel will likely create a deep sympathy for both, whatever mistakes they might have made.  The case for the poorer woman, the impulsive, vulgar, uneducated Fortunata, is harder to make so she gets most of the pages.  The case for sympathy would have been easy if Galdós made Fortunata more of a victim, but he takes the hard road.

The creation and peopling of Madrid fills out the novel.  Galdós reminded me of Balzac more than anyone else.  Not only does Galdós have a system of recurring characters much like Balzac’s, but his Madrid is as lifelike and interesting as Balzac’s Paris – I can say that with confidence on the basis of just one big book.  He suggests a world behind and beyond the story he happens to be telling.

Galdós is not always such an exciting stylist, but then again sometimes he is.   Here Jacinta, the wife, is walking through a market in a Madrid slum:

Jacinta ran into various ceremonial individuals.  They were mannequins dressed up as ladies in huge bustles, or gentlemen in flannel outfits.  Then caps, scads of caps placed high on racks and aligned with a stick; sheepskin jackets and other garments that looked rather – yes, indeed – rather like legless and headless human beings.  Eventually Jacinta didn’t look at any one thing.  All she noticed were some yellow men hanging from pitchforks, swaying in the breeze.  They were matching shirts and trousers sewn together that all of a sudden looked like sulfur people.  (I. ix.1, 133)

The novel is packed with clothes, a veritable steamer trunk, but those sulfur people are especially good.  More from the same scene:  “pieces of nougatlike stone cut out of a quarry; olives oozing out of barrels.”  One more example, as Jacinta becomes synesthetic looking at bolts of cloth:

Orange blazed out in some areas, screeching like an ungreased axle; native  vermilion, scratching one’s eyes; carmine, as bitter as vinegar; the cobalt blue, vaguely suggesting poison; lizard-belly green; and linden yellow, which mixed poetry and consumption, as in La Traviata.

I wish had been able to write eight hundred more pages like this, but he was actually writing a quite different book, so that is the one I will write about for the rest of the week.

I read and will always quote from the Agnes Moncy Gullón translation.

I tried my best and what I got for it was a kick in the jaw - Benito Pérez Galdós and Torquemada

Are Spanish novels long?  The 19th century ones, I mean.  The Spanish novel seems to face the “Russian novel” problem:  the standard “great Spanish novels” are a behemoth, Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) by  Benito Pérez Galdós (850 pages in the Penguin Classics translation, although I have seen a 1,000 page Spanish) and La Regenta (1884-5) by Clarín (a slender 750 pages).  And since neither novel has the prestige of War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov they mostly go unread, as does 19th century Spanish literature.  I haven’t read them either!

In fact, I discover as I poke around, Spanish books are short.  Clarín mostly wrote short stories, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón is best known for a novella, Emilia Pardo Bazán’s The Manor of Ulloa (1886) is short, Juan Valera’s Pepita Jimenez (1874) is short.  The intimidating figure is Galdós, not just because his great masterpiece is so long but because his body of work is gargantuan, 77 novels including a stunning 46 volume series of historical novels.  Over twenty of his novels are available in English, so you cannot say people have not tried to find English-language readers for Galdós.  A couple of years ago, studying the shelves of a good university library, I was pleased to discover that his novels were mostly quite short.

Galdós, following Balzac, used recurring characters, the best known of whom is probably the Madrid money-lender Torquemada who graduated from a small part in Fortunata and Jacinta to a series of his own novels.  Dwight, The Common Reader, has read the Torquemada novels (1889+) and made them sound most appealing.  I just tried them out myself, via “Torquemada in the Flames” (found in Great Spanish Stories, tr. Willard Trask), which I believe is a shortened version of the already short novella that begins the series.

Oh, it is a horrifying tale.  Torquemada is cunning and venal, a mean-spirited materialist.  When his son is afflicted with meningitis, though, he tries to reform.  He has picked up the idea that he will be rewarded by God – that he can save his son – by good works, but he is not in the habit.  Thus, when he gives coins to mendicant he cannot help telling them how virtuous he is, “’because I am poor too, and more unfortunate than you are – if only you knew it.’”  When he meets a freezing beggar, he cannot sacrifice his cape – “’If only I had on my old cape instead of this new one’” – but he does go home, retrieve the old one and give it away, which should count as a good deed, yes?

Much of the pleasure of this savagely ironic story comes from Torquemada and his ferociously perverse behavior, and also from his speech.  Here he is how the new, merciful Torquemada responds to a plea for clemency from one of his tenants:

‘And who told you, you foulmouthed so-and-so, that I have come to squeeze you?  I’d like to see any of you ill-conditioned hags maintain that I have no humanity.  Just any of you dare to say it to my face…’

And here is the lesson he has learned at the end of the story:

‘And I answer you that I tried my best and what I got for it was a kick in the jaw.  All the mercy I have, they are welcome to bash in my skull with!’

Dwight suggests (see the end of the above link) a Fortunata and Jacinta readalong for October.  This October, the one coming up.  I’ll do it, although I will likely need an October-and-a-half to finish the book.