The Ironic Narrator in the Novel: Isla

T h e Iro n ic N a rra to ronmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA in th e N o v e l: Isla J. H. R . P O L T In the eighteenth century, when Spanish m odelswere inspiring the fathers of the English novel, Spanish writers tended to avoid the genre to which their country had given birth. The outstanding except tion to this trend was the Jesuit Jose Francisco de Isla, contem porary of Fielding and Sterne, and author of Spain’s most important eighteenth-century novel, the H isto ria del fa m o so predicador F ray G eru n d io d e C a m p a za s, alias Z otes. This work, published in two parts in 1758 and 1768 and translated into English in 1772, recounts how young Gerundio, dazzled by insubstantial pulpit fireworks, decides to become a friar and a priest. He receives a wretched education and is unwilling to study even when he has the chance; but he learns to combine the cheap erudition of manuals and the barbarous and even sacrilegious misuse of texts, sacred and profane, into an impenetrable style which brings him success as a preacher among the ignorant. He is encouraged by Fray Bias, while on the other side a series of learned greybeards lecture him in vain on what he should and should not do. Through Gerundio and his interlocutors, Isla parodies an absurdly flamboyant pulpit oratory and satirizes the cultural vacuity which makes it possible. He also depicts and satirizes customs and manners 371 372 / J. H. ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA R . P O L T and finds room—sometimes all too much room—for the propagation of sound doctrine. The purpose of the present essay is to glance at Isla’s work, not as satire nor as rhetorical treatise, but as a novel, a narrative. This has not been the way that critics have usually looked at F ray G eru n d io . The standard study of Isla, published nearly ninety years ago by his coreligionist Bernard Gaudeau,1 devotes two chapters, about a hundred pages, to “La Critique dans F ray G eru n d io ,” and less than half that amount of space—one chapter, forty pages—to “Le Roman dans F ray G eru n d io .” Moreover, these forty pages consist in the main of what the French call u n e a n a lyse of F ray G eru n d io , i.e., of a plot sum­ mary. In Francisco Aguilar Pinal’s splendid recent bibliography of eighteenth-century Spanish literature,2 we see that scholars who have studied Isla have generally concerned themselves either with his biog­ raphy or with the satirical aspect of his work. The chief exception has been Russell P. Sebold, who as long ago as 1960 wrote that “today we are more interested in Isla’s contribution to the art of the novel than in all the information about sacred oratory contained in the pages of the G eru n d io .” 3 In his edition of Isla and in an earlier article,4 Sebold has drawn our attention to F ray G eru n d io as a work of fiction. He has pointed out techniques of observation and creation which resemble those of the nineteenth-century Naturalists, and he has stressed the relationship between F ray G eru n d io and D o n Q u ixo te. In keeping with this line of investigation, I suggest that, contrary to the sage advice of Rabelais, we not break the bone and suck out the su b sta n tifiq u e m o elle but rather look, for a change, at the construction of the bone itself. If, as my Berkeley colleague Robert Alter says, “[factional invention for the self-conscious novelists of the pre-Napoleonic era is a process of intellection, simultaneously critical of its own operation and of the nonliterary objects toward which it is directed,”51 aim to show that Isla is indeed one of these “self-conscious novelists” and that his criti­ cal attitude is directed not only at Gerundian rhetoric but at the very vehicle of his...