Literary Traces of France in the Hispanic Novel of the XIX Century
The universe of letters and arts in France, Spain and Europe, in general, second half of XIX century, appears under certain aspects like the reflection of which it happens in the society of so then, and under others, like the expression of the rebellion but the absolute one against the dominant currents. In politics, this half of the century has been marked by the succession of several regimes. The technological and scientific expansion of the colonialism, progress, and mainly the development of the railroad, impelling the economic activity, has brought to this region a never well-known material of prosperity before. In spite of these changes, and in the picture of the cultural events, Spain saw in France an indispensable resource to reanimate the literary statusquo that has been by long time in a degenerated situation.
Nevertheless, the political control of the time had a totally chaotic atmosphere, but the world of science has followed in contributing discoveries. Then to this time that Pasteur has revealed the principle of the immunization that its introduction in the human body of a virus-bovine that would have to protect against the diseases transmitted to the man by the animals also emphasized certain biological connections between the human being and the animal world. The naturalistic writers, with the master Emile Zola, adopting certain new scientific theories, have introduced them in Literature. The result of this “applied positivism” in the dominion of the art has reduced the humanity to the rank of the “human beast”, simple product of the inheritance, the atmosphere and the instinctive behavior.
To the light of these radical changes in the world of Literature, and according to certain ideologies of the time, science would have to bring the well-being to the humanity, and therefore, with the dimension in that was taken in measuring the literary influence of France in Spain, it is necessary to confess and to admit that French Literature was not an only one of the main sources of Spanish Literature but fundamental and substantial source, through the centuries, for the entire world in all the aspects, literary, political or artistic in general.Therefore, nobody, through the history, can deny the extreme importance of writers like Montaigne, Montesquieu, Descartes, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and others before and later with their respective rhetorical worksthat have invaded the world from pole to pole with translations in infinite languages.
The history of this relation Franco-Spanish returns to the first literary slight knowledge showed by the famous masterpiece Chanson de Roland[1], near the year 1100, that seems to have influenced enough in the well-known Poema del mío Cid, in the middle of XII century. This history continues through the centuries until the great openings have known readings in France that came to serve and to offer susceptible examples to be imitated, in incalculable amounts.
Nevertheless, Spain had its part and the thinkers and writers of this country, like others, had eagerness and an insatiable thirst to visit France and to reach the abundant literary works that many of them have inspired to other writers and are participated in changing the sociopolitical structure of many countries. Therefore, the years 70 and 80, of XIX century, were of a literary agitation and the renovation came from France. But although it sounds retroactive, the fact that the reading and writing are products of the leisure, and the human being idle gets tired of anything and everything, so that we will find looking for the new features, fleeing from monotonies.
For the second half of XIX century and being born of a new novelistic prose in Spain, it will be necessary to state the amount of translations, readings, and references to Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. To this height, it is important to differentiate between knowledge and the influences. To which one talk about knowledge and result of the translations and readings, the French novelists were well known. In this dominion it will be necessary to mention, for example, the great unquestionable success of Les Misérables de Victor Hugo.
Therefore, and in the course of our subject of the Spanish narrative, in individual, the reader obtains a near encounter of the first one and the second full type of historical, social and political characteristics, in a mixture that a mirror of the daily life forms, reflecting the customs and the events that happen within socio-geographical Spanish framework. It is not stranger that, in spite of the Pyrenean ones which they mount between France and Spain, Francophobia in Spain and Hispanophobia in France, the Spanish town has welcomed the letters coming across from these borders being in mind a transculturation temptation more than acculturation. Then doubt does not fit that the Spaniards throughout history had very preservative positions that affirm the Spanish patrimony.
On the other hand, one finds influences in writers of predecessors, under the phenomenon of déjà vu and perhaps déjà lu of many literary works like in: the psychology of Taine and Ribot, the sense of inherited social means of Balzac, the election of complex personages to the way of the Goncourt brothers[2], certain flaubertenian pessimism[3], the introspectivity of the subject of Stendhal and the logical analysis of Zola. These influences brought to the Spanish novel of XIX century an irreplaceable conquest like the reflection of the inner man, of the free man, in permanent conflict with the sociopolitical and moral reality of their time.
The French novel has been an influence not only in the literary works but also in which they were political. In this course, in 1880, Engels wrote saying that he has learned more of Balzac than of all the professional historians, together statistical and economists. To this function, the novelists of XIX century were disturbed by the idea of XVII and XVIII centuries. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and Montesquieu had, of a varied angle, mined the supposition of which the social organization was structured "given-by-God"[4] that it never can be changed. Atmosphere and circumstance, more than immutable rules, formed the characters, customs and laws. These ideas helped in creating a political atmosphere that made the French Revolution[5] possible; the same Revolution, and its consequence, provided a demonstration that the society could be changed. And of the French Revolution of 1848, Alexander Herzen said to the Russian: “No living man canremain the same after such blow.”
By the way, in the world of the Spanish narrative, Balzac has been a teacher, a spiritual guide and a source of greater influence to many novelists of XIX century where the realism, with its pioneers Honoré of Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, and the naturalism, with its designers Auguste Comte[6] and Claude Bernard[7] and their executor Emile Zola, were two literary currents of extreme prestige and respect after the decay of the romantic season surviving of last XVIII century. In addition, in 1886, the work of Melchior de Vogüé, Roman russe, had appeared. Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoievski and others filled the bookstores of France with their works, chef-d'oeuvre, of greater success. At the same time, most of the Spanish writers dominated the French language that gave them access to read these works with sponge avidity. Always by means of the triangular translations, Russian/French/Spanish, that played a role of extreme interest and importance in transmitting ideas and theories from milieu to another one. In effect, these two currents, already mentioned, in addition to the costumbrism, that was purely Spanish, directed by Fernán Caballero and Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, did a literary revolution giving to conceive concepts, more or less, radicals in the sense of which the Spanish society adapts for its sociopolitical and historical conveniences. To mention, also, in the great world of the Spanish realistic narrative, Juan Valera and Benito Perez Galdós, and in the narrative of naturalistic tendency, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, are doing an emphasis to franchise this art.
Whereas in Spain for the realism and the naturalism are discussed, Emilia Pardo Bazán can for sure be to be considered the introducer of the naturalism of Zola in Spain but without having imitations and following models. She, in La Cuestión Palpitante y La literatura francesa moderna, has offered a very Spanish naturalism, until she took very opposite positions to the realism or the French naturalism. In this frame of the narrative creation, it is possible to be affirmed that if Galdós, for example, has a model, the only one that can be adduced is, without some doubt, the author of Don Quixote, Cervantes.
In addition, like in XVII and XVIII centuries, XIX century, in Spain, is going to know and to debate on the great authors of the critic, being something typically French and thanks to some writers, Spain is going away to locate with respect to the debates of ideas and theories that shake to the republic of the letters. A few French names that are due to mention are those of Sainte Beuve, Renan that has been very important for Clarin, F. Brunnetière and Taine. Such critics have participated in subsidizing the most suitable theories to the Spanish rate exerting in the field of Literature, politics, culture and religion.
In spite of everything, it was a whipping of many Spaniards on the matter of the French writers. For example, the fact that Larra, in 1836, fustigated Eugène Sue, Alfred de Vigny and George Sand. Victor Hugo and Dumas also entered Spain in the decade of 1830; often one was confused to them and mixed French traverse of the translations and writers like Sand, Balzac, Soulié, Sue, who were the literary models of some later peninsular novelists. When staring at some notes, here, more bond to remember what Montesinos whom from France revolution and arts confirmed thing that has brought many literary works and therefore novels and eruditions with aspects to the French taste. It would be necessary to indicate in the first place that one is often two texts that are twin, to say that among them a greater direct difference does not exist.
First of all, Fernán Caballero, acculturated in France and Germany, began its famous novel, La Gaviota (the Gull), that initially was written in French, La Mouette, with two citations of two French writers, P. Gaschon de Molènes and Alexandre Dumas, where this writer demonstrates to a great special admiration by Dumas, focusing his trip to the South of France, and to Balzac, those who describes as teachers, mainly in the novel of the historical sort. Of the first, he emphasizes its inimitable esprit, French esprit that is (...) understanding, grace and spark. More ahead, Fernán mentions the work of Victor Hugo Lucrecia and to Gil Blas, doing cultural references to the famous prolific French dramatist Alain-René Lesage[8], of XVIII century, and to his work Histoire de Gil Blas deSantillane that deals with the education and the adventures a young waiter passing from a teacher to another one.In chapter III, she indicates to François-Joseph Victor Broussais like French doctor of certain therapeutic theories based on the diet. Later, she emphasizes an appointment of Henri Blaze de Burey when he says: “How many ideas the tradition puts in the air in the germ state to which the poet gives life with a blowing”. Also, she mentions something of Madame Staël to the respect of the novel and says: “if Madame de Staël[9] has said that the life of a woman is always a novel, I believe that with equal manner she can say that the life of a man is always a history.” In addition, this author used many clichés of the French word in her novel, for example: espíritu fuerte/esprit fort, billarda/billard, blonda/blonde, paletó/paletot, patchuli/patchouli, buen tono/bon ton, puff/pouf, folletín/feuilleton... with expressions totally borrowed (perhaps she did not obtain the exact word that fits by them) like: ennui, au jour le jour, saint, ranz des vaches, malin, douloureux, début, madame, foulard, sans-façon, and others.
In the historical part, in La Gaviota, several barons and French dukes obtain themselves to references to; it is mentioned in the war of Navarre, Napoleon and other kings who make of this writer a very expert person of history, music, science and even French Literature par excellence. Fernán Caballero does, also, reference to the homophonic of Charles-Paul de Kock[10] with the rooster (coq means in French rooster), and to the city of Paris: “The siflos of the gardens of Lutecia have become Teutonic’s gnomes of the Black Forest”, when Paris was called Lutetia in the past. More ahead, she mentions Joseph Joubert[11] and highlights his thought: "that the work of the dispute exceeds with much to its utility." In another space, Fernán does a reference to the fable La Cigalle et La Fourmi of La Fontaine.
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, another novelist of the time, does not hide his great respect and admiration to the French teachers. In this sense, he himself affirms saying: “I began rendering vassalage to Walter Scott, Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo; but I was later become fond of with greater vehemence to Balzac and George Sand[12], to find them more sensible and deep.” More ahead, Alarcón, in his novel El sombrero de tres picos (The Hat of Three Tips) that appeared firstly like Roman-feuilleton (to the French style), emphasizes his knowledge and his interest in the history of France and the fruit of the French Revolution of 1789, but Alarcón does not hide his patriotism and his love to his mother country in this regional novel which illuminates the customs of a very Spanish region, Garduña. He, in the last chapter of The Hat of Three Tips, sends his exclamation when he indicates that: “Garduña was done French.”
To illustrate the two mentioned currents already with jugement de valeur, and in special, the novel of XIX century, it will be necessary to focus something on its precursors where the pioneer has been without a doubt Balzac, remarkably in his unique style in creating an encyclopedic picture and in detailing of all the ranks of the society in his collection titled La Comédie humaine. The confusion between the fictional and the real thing is clear in worksof Balzac when he really made a pact with the reader: “Tout est vrai. On a tout dit.” Everything is true. We have said everything. In 1857, and on the other side, Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary, with an implacable objective picture of the bourgeois mentality that became both the masterpiece of the realism and the work that established the movement in European Literature in general and the Spanish in particular. A significant ramification of the literary realism was the naturalism, a movement of the end of the XIX and principles of the XX century that aimed on a nonselective representation of the reality. The French novelist Emile Zola was the explaining leader of the naturalism.
In something these theories were based on the thought of binary relations, called, nowadays, deconstructionist or post-structuralism, in a world of extreme values that looks for through a system of oppositions (love / hatred, good / bad, avarice / altruism) or in personages drawn like (the good woman / the courtesan, the good bourgeois / the swindler, the good worker / the thief. In this context, Juan Valera put much emphasis on the importance of the man like the fundamental axis of any socioeconomic and cultural development. If Balzac has designed more than two thousand characters in his novelistic works, Valera gave extreme interest to the personage. He indicates, “Everything happens within the soul of the personages, the universe is only perceived through the eyes of these personages so finely described”. On the other hand, Montesinos emphasizes that Valera is “a writer given to the study of the man, his actions and his movements, an observer of the human conduct.”
Nevertheless, Valera is a follower and partisan of l'école parnassienne, founded by Leconte de Lisle[13] and better well-known by Théophile Gautier[14] and Charles Baudelaire who proclaims “the art by the art” focusing the aesthetic values. Valera said to the respect: “I am in favor of the art by the art”. He expresses the feeling to the respect saying that “a pretty novel must be poetry and not a history; this, must paint the things that they are not but more beautiful of which they are.” Nevertheless, and in the personal aspect, Valera cannot deny his frenchizing even though he has been the enamored one with the French actress Magdalena Broban. The woman and the religious conflict were the movable reason for most of his writing and Jiménez Nugget is the reflection of this one tendency: “Roman de moeurs espagnol”, according to L. Louis-Lande. In addition, Valera wrote the first part of this novel in form of epistolary that it is a style of correspondences where he demonstrates a great tendency towards this novels genre sort that bloomed in France with Choderlos de Laclos[15], in his greater work, Les Liaisons dangereuses,[16] and that Mme de Sévigné, Voltaire and Rousseau have elaborated in the XVII and XVIII centuries successively.