Balzac, Flaubert, Clarín: Practices of Symptomatic and Surface Reading in Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta

Recent debates in the humanities regarding symptomatic reading, surface reading, and the limits of critique have drawn attention to the ways in which scholars read now, and have also impelled us to revisit the reading practices of previous historical periods. This essay studies how Spanish author Leopoldo Alas's novel La Regenta (1884–1885) synthesizes major nineteenth-century practices of reading literary texts, and of reading the social world as a text. More specifically, I read the plot of La Regenta, which depicts social life in the fictional Spanish city of Vetusta, as a literary dramatization of a theoretical debate concerning the relationship between what, following French philosopher Jacques Rancière, I position as the two principal practices of reading that emerge in the nineteenth-century. The first is a symptomatic practice in which the novelist treats society as a vast web of social hieroglyphs which must be deciphered to discover latent meanings. The second is a surface-oriented practice in which the novelist simply aspires to register the surface phenomena of the social world. Drawing on Rancière's study of the emergence of these competing practices in the works of two foundational novelists, Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, I show how Alas (commonly known by the pen name "Clarín") builds on their contributions by using free indirect discourse to link ways of reading to processes of characterization. He converts some characters into symptomatic readers and others into surface ones, and in this way his theoretical concerns regarding proper and improper ways of reading bleed into the social relations at the heart of La Regenta. While my own reading of Clarín's novel is thus symptomatic in nature, it nonetheless points toward an important aspect of his novel. Although the novel's narrator relies on a highly symptomatic approach in his reading of Vetustan society, he also produces a sustained reflection on the limits of symptomatic reading through a simulataneous, broad-based deployment of techniques of surface reading.

La Regenta is a realist novel that, at least on the surface, begs to be read as a faithful representation of social reality. It is also, however, a highly self-reflexive work of fiction composed of a vast web of literary and discursive referents. This tension between the novel as a historical document and as a literary text is reproduced on its interior through characters whom the reader encounters as representations of historical subjects living in nineteenth-century Spain, but also as readers whose thoughts, behaviors, and actions are determined by the texts they have consumed. The question of how to reconcile these two sides has long been central to La Regenta scholarship, as Lou Charnon-Deutsch highlights in "Between Agency and Determinism: A Critical Review of Clarín Studies." Charnon-Deutsch identifies two overarching trends in studies of Alas's novel. In a "postmodern" moment stretching through the 1980s and 90s, scholars privilege the textual nature of La Regenta and arrive at a radically deterministic view of subjective agency in which characters' lives are ultimately determined by language and discourse. Most importantly, these "postmodern" readers show that the novel's central character, Ana Ozores, whose slow fall into adultery forms the novel's principal plot, exists not as a willful human agent but as a "discursive playground, where a conglomeration of disparate, often contradictory discourses and desires determines her every word and thought" (146). If these readings tend toward a hyperbolic determinism in which characters are, in a sense, what they and the people around them read, Charnon-Deutsch signals a renewed discursive historicism as a way out of this "postmodern malaise" (150). More recent works by authors such as Jo Labanyi conceive processes of subject-formation in terms of systems of interrelated social practices "that impinge on human subjectivity, but do not construct it totally" (150). By treating La Regenta as a historical document which registers diverse aspects of these subject-forming practices, recent readers have been able to restore an important degree of agency to the subjects who populate the pages of Clarín...