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Chapter Three Time and Space History versus Self-Reflexivity The two clearly defined critical positions set out by Gilman and Blanco Aguinaga on the "birth" of Fortunata previously discussed in chapter 1 reveal equally divergent attitudes toward history. The latter sets out "to show how history determines the structure of Gald6s's texts" ("On 'The Birth'" 15) and brusquely rejects, as "incorrect readings," those interpretations based on "triangular structures" associated with Ricardo Gu1l6n ("Estructura"), Boring (13-16), and the "formal mathematical abstractions" ofAgnes Gu1l6n ("Bird Motif" 17). Also to be considered is another influential approach to history exemplified by Kronik: a criterion which is semiotic and self-reflexive. Self-consciousness in the novel stands as a subversive threat to the mimetic enterprise, but it does not proscribe history. The novel can hardly do without history. However, it is not a lesson in history, for it is history in a fiction, history turned story.... Where his [Blanco Aguinaga's] phonemes are historical data, mine are novelistic structures. ("Feijoo" 41) This criterion seeks a separation between history and artistic creation, setting out from the basis that "a history, the chronological record of human events, exists out there, beyond the novel; another history exists within the text: the illusion of history that narrative spins" (41). Kronik goes on to affirm that "the historical context that exists beyond the text is momentarily dislodged by structures and patterns within the novel that govern its reading . The text becomes its own context" (45-46). My objection to this lies in the significant word dislodged, which for me connotes an undue displacement , typical of ahistorical approaches, of every reader's awareness, direct or assumed, of acknowledged realities outside the text. Something similar occurs later, when he asserts that "the historical can readily become the stuff of fiction, at which point it no longer is history and cannot be treated as such. In Fortunata y Jacinta a group of cafe patrons talking about Sagasta is a 85 Chapter Three group of characters talking about a character named Sagasta" (54). In my view the "Sagasta" who is a character in the novel is indeed fictional in his specific dealings within the novel-with Basilio Andres de la Cafia, for instance -but his presence in the novel is entirely motivated by the outside existence of a politician of that name who happened to be involved in important political decisions at that time. If he were simply a Perez or Martinez, the effect would be entirely different. In other words, the referential dimension of the figures outside the text so stressed by Blanco Aguinaga cannot be ignored for a full understanding of the novel, while at the same time the subordination of every character within the narrative to its internal structural imperatives is also evident. In this respect I am in full agreement with the commonsense eclecticism shown by Bly in dealing with the same subject , the significance of Feijoo: "if we choose to examine Part III, Chapter IV, first as a self-contained unit, we discover that the preeminence claimed for the Marxist or Semiotic perspective is unfounded; that instead an interdependence of both perspectives is the only possible approach ... ,just as the chapter itself ... has later to be linked with its companions in the rest of the novel" ("Ripples" 73).1 Blanco Aguinaga's concern with an historical perspective, then, is fully justified, but incomplete. Although he is not alone in doing so,2 he is right to emphasize the close analogical relationships between public history and private life. I concur, too, in his view ofhistory as more than "merely a context, a background within or against which the truly important events take place: the development of private lives, of universal, eternal problems and passions " ("Having No Option" 17). The process of making use of dates and political events in the structure and characterization of the novel goes far beyond the simple fixing ofthe action within historical circumstance. Sherman Eoff's comment in a once influential study, therefore, seems to me highly misleading: Gald6s takes note of political events relating to the Revolution of 1868, the interim between monarchies, the Restoration, and various affairs of public interest; but neither political history nor political theory concerns him seriously in his contemporary novels. Politics sometimes forms the topic of conversation-usually among minor charactersbut nowhere, after the semisocial El audaz, does it become a major force in his treatment of personality. (Novels 102) I seek to prove, on the contrary, that...

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