I was in Las Palmas and visited the family home of Benito Pérez Galdós, where he lived until he moved to Madrid at the age of 19. Some rooms are preserved as they were at the time of his birth; others house furniture and objects from the novelist’s later homes. Surrounded by things that Galdós had touched and books he had read, being there was for me, a self-confessed Galdosian, the closest I could hope to be to him.
Transfer of the well-known portrait of Galdós that Sorolla made to the writer’s house museum on the occasion of an exhibition that was held in 2013
Ángel Medina G. / Efe
According to his biographers, Galdós was a naturally temperate, benevolent, good-humored man, with whom it did not seem difficult to maintain friendship. A champion of tolerance, he was only intransigent with the intransigent, who were not few in the society of his time, marked by the belligerence of the apostolics and by the resistance of the Church to losing its privileges. In his novels, a reflection of a society subjected to the tension between the forces of progress and reaction, the two Spains that would freeze the hearts of the Spanish people of the 20th century are already prefigured.
When Galdós began to recount the 19th century, he became interested in very previous events and ended up talking about what he had experienced.
The writers of their time were at all times aware of the power of novels to build the imagination of a large community of citizens: in short, to nourish an idea of a nation. While writers like the traditionalist Francisco Navarro Villoslada gave shape to the historical and territorial daydreams of Carlism, others like Galdós tried to cement the imaginary of a unitary and liberal Spain. The National Episodes, the most ambitious literary attempt to give meaning to the collective history of the Spanish people, respond to that same objective.
When Galdós began to recount the Spanish 19th century, he became interested in events long before it and, when he finished telling it, he was already talking about a Spain that he had known. In some cases, the temporal distance was seventy years; in others, forty. Is seventy years too many? Is it few forty? For Galdós, where did the past end and the present begin?
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In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens talks about events that occurred seventy years earlier, during the French Revolution. In War and Peace, Tolstoy turns the Napoleonic campaigns with forty-odd years of delay into literature. In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal recreates the battle of Waterloo twenty-some years later. Which of them had the feeling of writing a historical novel, so to speak, and which a novel about the present?
There are historical events whose brilliance takes a long time to extinguish. For a 19th-century European, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns were certainly part of that group. The Galdós Episodes tell seventy years of the history of Spain, which are, rounding up, the first years of Spain as a nation, a concept that would not exist precisely without the heritage of the French Revolution and that in Spain would not have been defined as it was defined. of not mediating the War of Independence, a local version of the Napoleonic campaigns. If the novels of Dickens, Tolstoy and Stendhal belonged to the present for their authors, something similar would have to be said of Galdós’s Episodes.
The beginnings of Spain as a nation coincide with one of the episodes of the first series, titled Cádiz because Gabriel Araceli was there at those decisive moments. In that Cádiz besieged by Napoleonic troops (and in the absence of King Ferdinand VII, who remained confined in France), extraordinary Cortes proclaimed themselves repositories of the power of the nation, legitimized to create a new legal and political order.
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With the approval of the first Spanish Constitution, the old regime was replaced by the new liberal parliamentarism, and the sovereignty that had traditionally been attributed to the monarch came to reside in the representatives of society. From that moment on, subjects became citizens, equal in rights, subject to laws designed to put an end to the old estate privileges.
There, to put it too quickly and poorly, it all began. We know that Ferdinand VII, who declared himself happy to follow the “constitutional path” while doing everything possible to return Spain to absolutism, managed to delay things until his death in 1833. But that is another story.
Read also Ignatius Martinez of Pison
2024-03-07 23:31:05
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