Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (review)

In Sacred Realism, Noël Valis invites us to reconsider Realism in general, and Spanish Realist novels in particular, through the rereading of a highly relevant and diverse group of works. Valis focuses her well-known critical intelligence and sensibility on the "imaginative-moral role" played in modern Spanish narrative by "a reenvisioned Catholicism, alternately accepted and contested, in an unsettling period of both secularization and religious revival" (5). The author attacks the dominant master narrative on secularization according to which faith and religion are not important in the modern world and, more particularly, the Foucauldian secularized view of religion as incompatible with modern rationality. How to account then, she asks, for key figures of the literary tradition such as C.S. Lewis and Graham Greene, who were believers? In open opposition to these attitudes and discourses, she sees religion "not simply as disabling but also as enabling, historically and imaginatively" (9). The author's usual nuanced analysis does not deny the historical conflict between religion and secularizing modernity, but rather sets up "to disclose what the oppositional model masks: the degree to which both are intertwined, the one embedded in the other, mutually defining one another in periods of exchange and crisis" (9). Her "restorative and gently, if paradoxically, revisionist" attempt to bring back into critical consideration the role of religion and faith in fiction (15) is highly successful and very engaging.

I find particularly interesting her discussion on how "many novels appear to depend upon the imaginative structures of belief to convince readers of their fictional reality" (18), and her view of how recognizable structures of religious imagination help the Spanish novel to make modern reality meaningful and readable by imbuing "the profane with meanings that surpass or belie the ordinariness of the world" (15). Also highly interesting is Valis's insight into the debate on the novel and female readership that accompanies its rise in modern times. She revisits the debate from the Church's contradictory position vis-a-vis imagination: its reliance on shaping faith by shaping imagination, as well as its distrust of imagination.

An extensive array of literary works and historical essays of the period are brought into the discussion in a writing that moves intelligently from history to literature—from historical processes, events, and personalities to fiction, novels, and writers. A well-documented commentary on the historico-religious contexts of the works she studies frames a very engaging discussion on religious and literary imagination in the Spanish novel from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s, with a brief but remarkable insight into both El Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote de la Mancha. Valis's analysis is organized upon what she posits as the three main periods of religious crisis: from the late eighteenth century to the 1840s, the Bourbon Restoration (1875-1902), and the Second Republic and Civil War (1931-1939). These periods provide appropriate and specific historico-religious contexts for both the works analyzed and the issues explored.

José de Cadalso's Noches lúgubres (completed ca. 1774-1775, and published 1789-1790), Olavide's El evangelio en triunfo ( 1797-1798), and Luis Gutiérrez's Cornelia Bororquia o La víctima de la Inquisición (1801) constitute the first, and, I would add, surprising group of works examined by the author from the perspective of the symbiotic relation between religion and the novel: "[h]ow does belief in something transcendent reveal itself in the painful struggle with an uncertain outcome, with belief that something is true?" (61). Her analysis of how, through their embodiment in the poor, the old "relics of faith"—the vestiges of belief—become new relics is illuminating, and her proposal to reimagine these works "as part of the field upon which a freshly embryonic realism is born" (61), is totally convincing...