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Chapter Eight Conclusion Galdos and Realism By all conventional standards Fortunata y Jacinta conforms to any general definition of the realist novel. Let us take for example the criteria adopted by Lukacs: (1) reflection of an epoch as a whole; (2) creation of a place and time precisely defined; (3) point of view which includes the historical level. (qtd. in L6pez-Lundy 151) In each of these categories, as we have, seen in chapters 3 and 4, the novel fits exactly. It closely mirrors its period; it is set in an accurately designated time and place; it is imbued with historical connotations. The novel is no less in tune with Erich Auerbach's well-known argument that "the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving" (463; also 491). It likewise partakes of the characteristics elucidated by Stern: "a close dovetailing of piecemeal meanings" (Realism 82-83), as in the widespread use of metonymy, "the charm of institutions" (91), so apparent in part I, and the use of "the middle distance" (113; also 121).1 Juan Oleza adds that "EI conflicto entre individuo y marco sigue siempre controlado, encauzado e interpretado por una autoridad superior ... Esta autoridad superior es la del narrador omnisciente, demiurgico y todopoderoso, que es el verdadero y gran protagonista de la novela del realismo" (17). While this criterion is generally applicable, there is in this respect, as I shall indicate , some deviation from the norm. Naturally, such overall definitions conceal evident differences.2 Perhaps the most important, at least for our purposes, concerns how broad a scope realist novelists allow themselves in their creation of an image of society. Making a very rough generalization, we may discern a first group of those realists who adopt a panoramic view and set out to provide a fictional 267 Chapter Eight microcosmos of large aspects ofsociety. The exemplar and inventor of this concept is Balzac, and its practitioners include Zola and Anthony Trollope. A second group is constituted by those who share a panoramic concept of society but who confine their broad examination within the pages of a single novel; examples are Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, and Alas, and, with some reservations , Stendhal. A third group, more radically separated from the other two, confine themselves strictly to a more limited range and create their works as self-contained, artistically conscious, closed artifacts; this direi;;tion may be represented by Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Indeed , James's objections on two counts to the earlier realist tradition point up the discrepancies between the various groups. Against the first type he fastidiously dislikes the monstrous scope of Balzac's enterprise, "his Frankenstein monster" (361),3 and implicitly condemns its recurring characters.4 He criticizes the second type for its diffuseness: hence the famous description of War and Peace and comparable novels as "large loose baggy monsters " (515) or the alternative image of "fluid-pudding," to convey "their lack of composition, their defiance ofeconomy and architecture" (Gard, prologue to James 7).5 Within this setup Gald6s occupies a middle position. On the issue of recurring characters and panoramic coverage, he stands somewhere between the first and second type, with an expansive approach comparable to Tolstoy's. As a result of dealing with a largely consistent segment of Madrid society within a closely defined timespan, he uses recurring characters extensively but with distinct limitations. Thus Gald6s does not create, in the manner of Zola's Rougon-Macquart extensive family, a vast tentacular network of related characters who each in turn becomes the protagonist of his or her own novel. This sort of more mechanical technique is used consistently and successfully in the episodios nacionales, where it is essential to create a consecutive historical continuity, but in the novels family links, though by no means insignificant, are more incidental. Two distinctive types of projection from Fortunata y Jacinta into other novels do occur, however. First, Torquemada and Villaamil both expand into protagonists, the former, exceptionally, into a series of four narratives. It is evident that Gald6s found in the subject of two eminently characteristic representatives of the society of his time-the moneylender and the redundant civil servant-a rewarding vein to explore further. Second, two characters, Dona Lupe and Dona Guillermina, have one limited but very appropriate function each in another novel, one, on her deathbed, as adviser to Torquemada , the other as a charitable...

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