History and Fiction in Galdos's Narratives

With its handsome dust jacket, high-quality paper, elegant, almost error-free, typeface, Geoffrey Ribbans’s latest book is a splendid testimonial to his contributions to Galdós studies over the last five decades. It is full of erudition (there are fifty pages of appendices and well over five hundred footnotes), judicious commentary and meticulous scholarship. It also shares a number of features with Stephen Gilman’s 1981 Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: undoubtedly it will be an indispensable tool for every student of Galdós’s work, yet, it is essentially a collection of seven previously published studies which have been joined together with additional material and revised to take into account recent studies by colleagues, whether they merit his generous praise or ever-polite disagreement. Furthermore, like Gilman’s study, Ribbans’s is not as comprehensive as the title might lead one to expect, for its focus is limited to a comparative study of the manner in which the public history of Spain between 1843 and 1883 is treated in the Novelas de la serie contemporánea and the Episodios nacionales. This means that only the social novels from La deseheredada to Miau and the episodios of the fourth and fifth series, along with the last of the third, are examined in extensive detail.

As an avowed believer in “the validity of objective history and the Aristotelian distinction between history and poetry” (p. 241), Ribbans makes no bones in his Introduction about his disagreement with those modern critical theorists who deliberately reject historical considerations in their literary criticism of nineteenth-century novels (Barthes, Derrida) whilst favouring those (Croce, Collingwood, Butterfield, White, Booth and the New Historicists) who do not. The historical events in Galdós’s novels have to be considered along with the literary form, but “from inside outwards” (p. 20). There can be no doubt that Galdós was greatly interested in history: he was a Hegelian who believed in its continuum as well as the interaction of political and social history, or as he put it “la historia grande” and “la historia chica.” Ribbans prefers to use Berlin’s metaphor of the hedgehog and fox: Galdós was predominantly a fox, in that he possessed “unsurpassed ‘powers of insight into the variety of life’” (p. 72), whilst at the same time being a hedgehog in his organization of detail. However, in such later episodios as De Cartago a Sagunto (1909), Ribbans reckons that the fox gives way to a chattering parrot!

The crucial question to which all this wide-ranging, theoretical discussion of the Introduction inevitably leads is how to define the historical novel. Following Avrom Fleishman and Kathleen Tillotson, who place a time-scale of forty to sixty years and twenty to sixty years respectively between events and their appearance in fiction, Ribbans argues that the episodios could be classified as “modern” historical novels, whilst those Novelas de la serie contemporánea that treat historical material could be called novels of the historical imagination, to appropriate Thomas Deegan’s phrase, for the time scale is considerably shorter.

It is this question of contemporaneity which Ribbans highlights, in his Chapter One review of the relationship of the two groups of novels, as one of the principal reasons why Galdós stopped writing the episodios in 1879 and resumed them in 1898: as a writer he needed to distance himself from the events of the period to better appreciate their significance. At the same time, however, he must have felt that their respective compositional techniques made it advisable to avoid simultaneous production. Neither is it insignificant that none of the social novels has a historical title and that they do not contain all the relevant historical events. The second part of Chapter Two outlines the essential generic differences in Galdós’s treatment of history: the episodios form a cohesive unit where the relation of historical detail is to the fore, whereas in the social novels, less of a unified...