Galdós beyond Realism: Reading and the Creation of Magical Worlds (review)

This book is an exploration of inverisimilitude in Benito Pérez Galdós's works, but by studying the supposed limits of realism, and their transgression, it also provokes important questions about those very suppositions, and, therefore, takes us into the (perhaps) unanswerable question: What is realism? In his introduction, four main chapters, and conclusion, the author considers the relation of the novel's form both to its thematic range and to the author's ideological stance by asking whether verisimilitude is a "bourgeois" discourse, and whether its eschewing is a sign of Galdós's questioning of his class's legitimacy. Tangentially, McGovern's work is also a consideration of the reader's role in the realization of fictions.

The introduction lays out the author's purpose and method. Two goals motivate the book: to study Galdós's " 'experimental' or non-realist works" (11) and to "reconcile as much as possible the varied readings realized historically by Galdosistas" (12). Whether this periplus along the coast line of (Galdosian) realism is completely successful or not, its recruitment of the Galdosian critical tradition is of great usefulness, for it organizes large amounts of information on Galdós's art.

Regarding the theoretical framework, the author states at the outset that his "interpretations are most certainly influenced by my interests in post-structuralism, aesthetic response, and finally Queer Theory due to its licensing and authorization of non-traditional readings" (12). Though mentioned on a handful of occasions, this last theoretical approach is neither reviewed nor, indeed, applied in the study. On the other hand, poststructuralism and aesthetic response criticism are put to good use. Frederic Jameson (The Political Unconscious), Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination), Lubomir Dolezel (Heterocósmica), Marie-Laure Ryan (Narrative as Virtual Reality), Brian McHale (Postmodernist Fiction), Thomas Pavel (Fictional Worlds), Ruth Ronen (Possible Worlds in Literary Theory), Linda Hutcheon (A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction), Felix Martínez Bonati (La ficción narrativa [su lógica y ontología]), Tomás Albaladejo Mayordomo (Teoría de los mundos posibles y macroestructura narrativa), Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response), and Umberto Eco (The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts) are the principal theorists adduced by McGovern. He also recurs to an impressive group of Galdós scholars who have written on the particular novels examined in his book.

The "Magical Corpus," a distinct group of works considered in one section of the book,

may be termed post-realist, non-realist, or magical due to the presentation of supernatural elements and ontological worlds or zones whose rules of governance may only be explained in our 'real' world concept by the intervention of supernatural motivations. This trend in Galdós's work begins with his first novel, La sombra (1870), and then resurfaces in the metafictional, and magical, frames of El amigo Manso (1882).

McGovern suggests that

this same juxtaposition of magical and rationalist texts becomes perhaps the norm in his later works, beginning with La incógnita (1888–89) and becoming most apparent in his dialogue novels Realidad (1889) and Casandra (1905), and in the final four Episodios nacionales: Amadeo (1910), La primera República (1911), De Cartago a Sagunto (1911), and Caánovas (1912).

As McGovern notes, "The total break with rationalist writing will occur in his final two novels, both of which are designated as non-realist in their subtitles El caballero encantado: cuento real . . . inverosímil (1909) and La razón de la sinrazón: fábula teatral absolutamente inverosímil (1915)" (29). McGovern also includes Misericordia "because of the miraculous nature of many of the events which unfold in the course of the story and the critical polemic that these events have provoked" (29).

Chapters 1 and 2...