’I require gossip worthy of me’ - some last La Regenta notes, symbolic in some mysterious way, voluptuous even

Another readalong post, by Simon Lavery, on La Regenta covering one of the main characters, the bad priest, in particular how he is introduced in the first couple of pages of the novel.  Lavery covers almost every major technique Leopoldo Alas uses, just by looking at a couple of pages: the limited third person interplay of the narrator and the characters, the humor, the sharp metaphors, the too-muchness, and most importantly the character himself, “the duplicitous, manipulative ambition of this muscular priest, oozing barely repressed sexuality and male energy.”  It is a good trick the way Alas creates some sympathy for this fellow, even if some of it is sympathy for the man he could have been if he had not been pushed into the priesthood by his wonderfully awful, greedy, narrow-minded mother.

Poor guy, 35 years old, full of energy, the strongest man in town, and he lives with his mother over the Catholic supply store, which she secretly owns.  Here we have one more curious link to the 19th century French novelistic tradition – the priest joins, as a Spanish adjunct, the long list of fictional strongmen: Balzac’s super-criminal Vautrin, the Count of Monte Cristo, numerous Hugo characters, the Conan-like protagonist of Salammbô.  I don’t get it.

A much later example of the priest’s male energy:

The canon picked a rose-bud, with some fear that he might be seen.  The cool touch of the dew covering this little egg gave him a childish pleasure; it smelt of youth and freshness, but this did not satisfy his desires, his longing to bite it and enjoy its taste and contemplate the mysteries of nature hidden under the layers of satin.  (Ch. 21, 478-9)

Then a couple of lines later, the priest takes a big bite out of the rosebud – there is a lot of sexual sublimation in this novel – just before walking into cathedral, and one of the lushest scenes in the book.

The organs above him stretched forth their pipes in dazzling vertical and horizontal lines, like two suns, face to face.  Golden angels played violins under the vault, to which the organs’ plateresque reliefs climbed, and through the pointed windows and the rose windows behind the choir and high in the aisles light flowed into the cathedral, separating into tones of red, blue, green and yellow.  (479)

Everything in the cathedral becomes sensuous – “the smell of damp mingling with the smell of wax seemed delicate, symbolic in some mysterious way, voluptuous even.”  The scene gets weirder, more sexual, perhaps blasphemous, as everything in the cathedral contributes to his ardor.  That’s one side of La Regenta, of this kind of writing, the merging of the sensory world with the psychology of the characters.

The other is the big social world.  “They were burning in the holy enthusiasm of slander” (Ch. 22, 502).  These are priests, too, the canon’s enemies.  “’I require gossip worthy of me,’” one declares.  At one point in the novel, an actress “achieved a poetic realism whose full worth neither [her fellow actor] nor the greater part of the audience was capable of appreciating” (Ch. 16, 376) – a statement of purpose by the author.

Thanks to everybody who joined in on the readalong, however far you got.  The posts and comments along the way have been very helpful.

seemly abbreviations and a gongoresque style - some bits of La Regenta

The sarcasm of Leopoldo Alas can be a thing of beauty:

They were going to inspect the hunting dogs and a St Bernard which Paco had bought a few days before.  They were his pride and joy.  After prostitutes, the Young Marquis’s greatest admiration was for tame animals, in particular dogs and horses.  (Ch. 13, p. 284)

You may note that this is not elaborate or poetic prose.  Lively, but not fancy, and not afraid of clichés, which can generally be assigned to the characters, as here, not the narrator, although who knows – the usual slippery result of limited third person.  There is a hilarious example earlier:

The chef almost fell flat on his back from pure delight when, in order to ascertain the amount of boiling required by the peach preserve, Obdulia came up to him and, with a smile, slipped into his mouth the same spoon which had just been caressed by her ruby lips (the ‘ruby’ is the chef’s).  (Ch. 8, 173)

The narrator is so offended by the cliché that he has to protest that it is not his responsibility.

When he wants to, though, Alas can turn on the tap, so to speak:

Dull grey clouds, as broad as the steppes, drove up from the west and were ripped open on the peaks of Mount Corfín.  The rains poured from them on to Vetusta, sometimes cutting down aslant like furious whiplashes, like a biblical punishment, sometimes falling in a calm leisurely flow, in fine vertical threads.  These clouds passed over, and others came, and others – the first clouds back again, it seemed, after going around the world, to be torn open on Corfín once more.  The spongy earth was eaten away like the flesh on Job’s bones; a sluggish grey plume of mist was wafted over the sierra by the languid wind; the country extended, naked and frozen, into the distance, motionless like the corpse of a castaway shedding the water which has flung it ashore.  (Ch. 18, 401)

Five more sentences like this before Alas turns to a character and some stuff about hunting that is part of the plot.  The heroine, Ana, has something like Seasonal Affective Disorder, so the rains will affect her, too – the next chapter, about her illness, is one of the best.  Here is Ana’s husband, helping out:

Every day her abdomen had to be felt and questions asked about the lowest animal functions.  Don Víctor did not trust his memory and, watch in hand, he kept a record in a notebook where, using seemly abbreviations and a gongoresque style, he set down everything the doctor needed to know about these details.  (Ch. 19, 426-7)

When a new, younger doctor arrives, Don Víctor is thrilled, because he and the doctor can argue about politics and “the plurality of inhabited worlds.”  The husband is a marvelous fool.  I am leafing through the chapter – so much happens in it.  Ana is ill, and recovers, entering a new phase in her sainthood.  Meanwhile, the Don Juan character infiltrates her home by flattering her husband, although he “drew the line” at “the examination of the collections of plants and insects,” aside from a stuffed peacock.  “He would stroke its breast while Quintanar discoursed.   A great chapter, full of fine, strange things.

as if to make amends, and to deceive himself - La Regenta is a religious novel

Oh thank goodness someone has already written a better readalong piece about La Regenta.  It is by Scott Bailey.  He goes straight for the argument of the novel, which is about saintliness, or maybe just true religious feeling, and its place in the world.  His one-line summary of the book: “a devout woman whose world is controlled by selfish men is slowly poisoned by the toxic city in which she lives.”  The Catholic Church, the legitimate outlet for Ana’s mysticism, is completely corrupt; her confessor, the priest Fermín de Pas, the most toxic of all men.

Bailey compares Ana to the holy fool Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.  The major difference is that where Dostoevsky in some important way, however much he argues with himself, is committed to the positive example of the Russian Orthodox church, Leopoldo Alas, a secularist and cynic, does not have much to offer as an alternative.  He suspects that Ana’s enthusiasms are more psychological than spiritual, but he allows the possibility of a genuine mysticism.  Ana has plenty of doubts herself.

Each year, as soon as March began, Don Robustiano Somoza diagnosed all his patients’ illnesses as spring fever, although he had only the haziest notion of what he meant by this; but since the handsome doctor’s principal mission was to console the afflicted, and sense the climatological explanation usually satisfied them, he did not bother to search for another.  Spring fever it was (according to Don Robustiano) which prostrated the judge’s wife [Ana], who went to bed one night at the end of March uncontrollably clenching her teeth, and feeling as if her head were full of fireworks.  As she awoke the next morning and emerged from dreams of ghosts, she realized that she was feverish.  (Ch. 19, p. 420)

This is what I mean – Alas may not be a religious believer himself, but unlike the idiots who populate his novel – “spring fever”! – he takes Ana’s experiences as meaningful.

Despite almost every character’s preoccupation with adultery, La Regenta is only nominally an adultery novel.  Ana’s story is about her spiritual struggles, the priest’s is about his struggles with his vocation and, hilariously, his mother, and even the Don Juan figure’s story is less about sex than mortality.  All variations on the search for a meaningful life.

I found this very hard to see at first because of the imbalanced, show-off structure of the novel.  The huge first half covers three days and is almost all setup, one enormous scene that is largely dramatized exposition and barely goes anywhere but rather is.  The second half of the novel covers several years and is more conventionally structured – scenes, a story, character development, etc.  The usual stuff.  Lots of great individual scenes: a big theater scene, a Holy Week procession, an acidic inset story about the life and death of the – yes, “the” – town atheist.

“No, God doesn’t exist,” he was thinking, “but if he did, I’d be in a pretty pickle.”  (Ch. 22, 528)

The chapter that begins with the “spring fever” line, which works through Ana’s illness, is especially good.  It has, among other treasures, one of the narrator’s greatest cynical asides:

And as if to make amends, and to deceive himself, he heaved a large sigh and exclaimed: “My poor, beloved Anita!”

And, satisfied, he slept.  (424)

Bailey says he will post favorite excerpts next.  Good idea; me too.

the stupidity of people agreeing to get bored together for a day - general impressions of La Regenta

To remind myself how to write, I will gather some general notes about Leopoldo Alas’s gigantic 1885 novel La Regenta, perhaps still the focus of a readalong event.  Such a post is worth writing after my vacation, put perhaps not worth reading.  I will point the interested to this omnibus post by Dwight at A Common Reader and this post at seraillon.

The leading lady of Vestustan society, Ana, the judge’s wife, La Regenta, is changing confessors, upgrading to the powerful, corrupt vicar general, who quickly falls in love with her.  Meanwhile, the town Don Juan is in pursuit of her as well.  Ana’s husband, a fool who prefers hunting and abstract ideas of honor to the physical reality of his beautiful wife, is the fourth major character.  Dozens of minor characters populate the town, which is described thoroughly.  Alas makes Oviedo, in Asturias sound quite appealing to the tourist, but miserable to the Professor of Roman Law trapped among all of these vulgar rubes.  Alas is a recognizable type, the big city prof teaching at a cow college.  In Asturias, a fish college, I guess.

The novel is written in the great 19th century tradition of Iberian imitations of French fiction, payback for the great French looting of 17th century Spanish theater.  Flaubert, Flaubert, Flaubert.  La Regenta is in some deliberate ways an imitation of Madame Bovary, including its satire of provincial Philistinism, its fluidly shifting points of view, its emphasis on physical detail, and the basic setup of the restless wife, dope of a husband, and flashy pursuer.

Big differences:

1.  Bulk.  The novel is 700 pages in John Rutherford’s Penguin edition, but the type is so small, the pages so large; the book is 900 or 1,000 pages in Spanish editions.

2.  Depth and intelligence (of characters, not authors).  The portrayal or even discovery of the interiority of the shallow, a Flaubert specialty, is one of the great contributions of modern fiction.  Several characters in La Regenta continue this fine tradition, include the Don Juan figure and the husband, who is not a simpleton like Charles Bovary but is nevertheless as great a fool.

But the heroine, Ana, is no Emma Bovary.  She is intelligent, mystical, even a little weird, with a visionary imagination.  There is a hint that she is synesthetic.

3.  Satire.  I argue that Flaubert’s satire is incidental to his art, a vengeful bonus of writing about Normandy.  Alas is much more interested in blood.  “There’s almost too much satire” says Dwight,correctly.

They talked about the horse, the cemetery, the sadness of that afternoon, the stupidity of people agreeing to get bored together for a day, the uninhabitableness of Vetusta.  (Ch. 16, p. 361)

And those are the characters!  The narrator is crueler.  seraillon has some amusing examples of the narrator who is anything but invisible – “a quagmire of triviality” and so on.  I was thankful when he got tired of mocking characters for their bad Latin.  The Professor of Roman Law who wrote the book found that a lot funnier than I did.

4.  What is important for Flaubert is creating elaborate patterns underneath the surface of the novel, patterns likely to be invisible upon the first reading of a book, even more so in one as huge as La Regenta.  My first guess is that Alas was not working at that artistic level, that he was writing a more ordinary novel, but I have obviously written myself into a trap.  How would I know? But right now, I don’t see it.  Whatever I write about for the next few days, it won’t be that.  Maybe someone else will.

A La Regenta readalong for July - and really also June - it's a long book - the profound self-pity of egotism aroused by its misfortune

My working theory is that long books make the worst readalong books, yet there has been interest in La Regenta (1885) by Clarín, also known as Leopoldo Alas, one of the gigantic classics of 19th century Spanish literature alongside Fortunato and Jacinta (1886) by Benito Pérez Galdós.  Emilia Pardo Bazán’s The House of Ulloa is also from 1886, but it is a more sensible length.

Alas was a professor of Roman law whose literary output amounted to just two novels and some short stories, while Pérez Galdós was some kind of tapas-powered fiction machine, writing over seventy novels, dozens of them forming a series covering episodes in 19th century Spanish history in what must be pretty thorough detail.  His models are French, Balzac, Hugo, and Dumas.  Alas is I believe closer to Flaubert and Zola, although less conceptual and physical.  Probably not so many loving descriptions of la comida Asturiana.  Just look at that bean stew, la fabada; Zola would give a paragraph to each variety of pork.

The story is of a married woman in a provincial city who is buffeted between a local Don Juan and a priest.  La Regenta is out for a walk on the promenade:

For a moment Ana was a part of this ragged sensuality.  She thought about herself, about her life devoted to sacrifice and to an absolute prohibition of pleasure, and felt the profound self-pity of egotism aroused by its misfortune.  ‘I am poorer than any of these girls.  My maid has her miller who whispers into her ears words which set her face alight; and here I am listening to these guffaws of pleasure which give rise to emotions I have never experienced.’  (194)

Working through that idea ought to fill up a novel, especially when the entire town is pulled in.  La Regenta is famous for having an enormous number of supporting characters.

I was impressed by the review at seraillon – if that post does not make the book sound appealing, nothing will – especially that the first half of the long novel covers only three days.  Intense.

Let’s try a page 99 test.  First non-dialogue line:

As soon as they were in Vetusta the orphan girl suffered ‘a set-back to her convalescence’, according to the family doctor, who was prudent and did not call things by their right names. 

All right, there we have an example of something else mentioned at seraillon, the ironic acidity of the narrator.  “[M]akes… Flaubert and Eça de Queiroz seem almost timid,” says Scott.

The Penguin Classics edition, tr. John Rutherford, I believe the only version in English, is 700 pages, and dense pages, inky.  The endnotes are in tiny print, and in two columns!  Twenty pages a day will need thirty-five days, which would put be right in the middle of July, which is as an accepted fact Spanish Literature Month.  So that is where I am aiming.

I am expecting as many as two other people to read La Regenta with me.  I hope many more enjoy whatever we think to write about it.

This will be what I read in June, when not reading other things.  Perhaps the 1818 edition of Frankenstein – I did not know there was such a difference between editions – for a June readalong suggested by Dolce Bellezza, then later Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) as organized by seraillon, if I have the fortitude for it after the bulk of La Regenta.