El escándalo by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (review)

Whether due to his position as a conservative reactionary or simply the result of unfortunate timing, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón has attracted a seemingly disproportionate amount of negative criticism relative to his contemporaries during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The circumstances surrounding this negative press, however, have more to do with the author’s socio-political ideology, which tarnished the literary legacy of his 1875 novel, El escándalo. Under this premise, in a new critical edition, Professor Ignacio Javier López examines the factors that led to the overwhelmingly negative reception of El escándalo, attributing this phenomenon to an erroneous conflation of social and political contexts with the aesthetic value of the novel.

López outlines Alarcón’s social and political trajectory from the author’s early participation in radical liberalism to his eventual conversion (or return) to traditional values by the date of El escándalo’s publication. In considering the author’s reactionary conservatism, which influenced his stylistic and ideological stance toward the novel, López explains that the years between the revolutions of 1854 and 1868 affected how Alarcón interpreted the events that transpired during the Sexenio Democrático. In spite of Alarcón’s own words stating a sudden change of heart “…me convertí repentinamente de demócrata en conservador, tomándole miedo al espíritu revolucionario” (42), López shows how this transformation was the result of a much slower progression, rooted in a complex interaction of social, political, and cultural effects, which influenced the author’s perception of this new world order.

Throughout the study, López exposes the processes that led to the interpretation of El escándalo as a poorly executed Realist novel. He effectively demonstrates how Alarcón’s social and political trajectory influenced his preference for Romantic techniques over the incipient tropes and experiments of the emerging Realist movement in addressing the polarizing social crisis depicted in the novels of this period. Furthermore, he clarifies, Realism was neither formerly practiced nor officially acknowledged as a literary movement until shortly after the publication of the novel and, therefore, the common evaluation of El escándalo according to the tenets of Realism fails to recognize its historical context. Instead, López’s study explains that Alarcon’s novel should be considered within the category of the novela ideológica española, which comprised part of the new novelistic orientation: “No se trata de simples modificaciones en la morfología de las obras sino de un uso diferente del género, que suponía una función diferente de la literatura” (50). Alarcón’s contribution with El escándalo in 1875 is fundamental to the rise of the new direction of the nineteenth-century novel.

From here, López describes the context in which the novela ideológica española emerged explaining that it confronted the social crisis that left Restoration Spain divided between conservatives and liberals. The content of such novels published around the crucial date of 1875 centered on the evolving crisis of la cuestión religiosa that examined the increasing secularization of modern society. Furthermore, López elaborates that the artistic debate between idealism and realism created greater focus on the role of the novel in contemporary society. While Valera opted for idealism, Alarcón and Galdós embraced the alternative mode of arte útil; however, two opposing ideological stances constituted this category. On the one hand, the tendency initiated by Galdós sought verisimilitude by emphasizing individual development through the characters’ experience in this complex historical moment. Alarcón, on the other hand, rejected the realistic depiction of the social crisis opting for an allegorical representation in which the author opposes Good and Evil, affecting both his aesthetic choices and structure of the novel derived from his affinity with Romantic techniques.

Here, López points out that Alarcon’s discursive application of Romantic tendencies are apparent in his use of the idealists’ redemptive and purifying love...