What an event! - the baby in The House of Ulloa

Litlove, of Tales from the Reading Room, was reading a particularly male novel and had this amusing feeling:

I was also feeling incorrigibly feminine, and rather wishing that someone, in either of these novels, would have a baby or go shopping or need to sit down and speculate on another person’s emotions.

For all of their supposed realism and attention to the world around them, how many babies are there in 19th century fiction?  In L’Assommoir, baby Nana vanishes until she is old enough for Zola to find her interesting.  The House of Ulloa, though, has a baby, and what a baby:

The pink, waxen face; the moist, toothless mouth, like a pale coral taken from the sea; the tiny feet, whose heels were red from continuous and graceful kicking…  To this soft bun that still seemed to retain the gelatinous texture of the protoplasm, that lacked self-consciousness and lived only for physical sensations, the mother attributed sense and knowledge.  (Ch. 18)

That first line is from the point of view of the mooncalf priest “who had seen only chubby cherubs on altarpieces [and] limited knowledge of child nudes,” while the second, in a rare move, has shifted over to the mother.  The limited point of view in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s novels is almost always male – the priest, the lunkhead nobleman, and throughout the climax of the novel, an eight year-old boy who sees everything the reader needs to round off the novel, including a murder.  The baby features prominently; the climatic chapter actually ends with a struggle for the soft bun.

A page after the passage I quoted, the baby pees on the priest – “What an event!”  Other parts of the novel describe childbirth and nursing in ways that would be unlikely in Victorian novels, which are not allowed to get too earthy.  Zola was insistent on the importance of first-hand knowledge, of research.  Perhaps I see here a writer with her own expertise.

There is an outstanding baby, I should mention, in The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, the otherwise nearly unreadable Charles Dickens Christmas novella of 1848.

Let’s see, what else does Pardo Bazán write about?  It’s not all babies.  She’s good with a kind of parody Gothic:

In the shadows of this almost underground place, among the clutter of old junk left to the rats, the leg of a table sketched a mummified arm, the sphere of a clock became the white face of a corpse, and a pair of riding boots that stuck out among rags and papers and was eaten away by insect evoked the fantasy of a man assassinated and hidden there.  (Ch. 20)

Maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing there.

Pardo Bazán’s vocabulary can be surprising.  The first thing the translator does is apologize – don’t blame me, he says.  A long ride on a horse “had disjointed every one of his sacroiliac bones” (Ch. 1).  The dinner after a hunt is “the time for cynegetic anecdotes, and most of all for lies” (Ch. 21).  The word “cynegetic” (“of or relating to hunting”) shows up three times.  Pardo Bazán’s language creates an ironic distance.  She and her educated audience are in Madrid, studying the curious folkways of the Galician rustics.

A couple of chapters about local politics move too far away from the important characters.  They should have been told from the point of view of the priest, or the nobleman, neither of whom would have understood what the heck was going on, which is my point.  That would have made for better comedy.  Once that episode is over, the novel wraps up in a satisfying way – see above, eight year-old, witnesses a murder, etc.

Thanks to Ricardo and Stu for Spanish Literature Month!

flesh and blood in excess - The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán

I’ve got one last entry for Spanish Literature Month, the 1886 novel The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán.  My understanding is that in Spain this is and has always been a much-read book, of similar stature as Clarín’s La Regenta (1884-5) and Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-7).  In the edition I read, translated by Roser Caminals-Heath, the novel is 260 pages long, compared to the 800 plus pages of each of those other two novels, so the Pardo Bazán is the easiest one to deal with is what I am suggesting.

Look at those dates.  What a burst of books.

In The House of Ulloa a young nitwit priest joins a noble household in the Galician countryside where he is shocked by the young Marquis’s mistress and illegitimate son, as well as by the decay of the chapel, house, and entire way of life. He makes attempts at improvement; some succeed, some fail.   The priest has “an aversion to purely material things” (Ch. 6), a handicap in a Naturalist novel.

Pardo Bazán had absorbed her French neighbors pretty well, Zola and Flaubert and Balzac, so the novel is written with their bundle of tricks – a lot of good descriptive writing, a mostly limited point of view that freely moves among the characters, and a strong sense of how ordinary life functions underneath whatever excitement might be occurring in the plot.

Something like this, the description of an enormous uncle:

Constricted to a sedentary life, he clearly had flesh and blood in excess and did not know what to do with them.  Without being exactly obesity, his corpulence spread in all directions: each foot was like a boat, each hand like a carpenter’s hammer.  He suffocated in formal dress, did not fit in small rooms, panted loudly in a theater seat, and at mass elbowed his neighbors  to conquer more space.  A magnificent specimen suited for mountain life and the warfare of feudal days, he wasted away pathetically in the vile idleness of the city, where he who produces nothing, teaches nothing, and learns nothing is good for nothing and does nothing.  (Ch.9)

Nothing here would have seemed too out of place in the Zola novels I have read.

One reason to read a novel like this, even one less well written than Ulloa, is that it has an interesting, unusual setting.  The Galician mountains, Santiago de Compostela – where else can I read about these people, and these places?  Every place and every time should have its own Balzac, its own Trollope, its own novel of The Way We Live Now.

The House of Ulloa frequently reminded me of several different Eça de Queirós novels, the ones set in the countryside of northern Portugal, like The Sin of Father Amaro (1875) which also stars a young priest, or The Noble House of Ramires (1900), with another old aristocratic house in decay.  But Galicia borders Portugal; Pardo Bazán’s characters are practically neighbors with Eça’s.  This was not much of an insight.  Yet here I am, typing it out.

While I am wandering, readers of Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville may remember that one of the noblemen in that 17th century play was from the Ulloa family.  The name could hardly have a better literary pedigree.

I guess I’ll save the baby for tomorrow.