Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s “La novela del tranvía” (1882) and the Literature of Urban Transit

Abstract

This essay considers Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s “La novela del tranvía” (1882) in light of the literature of collective urban transportation in the nineteenth century. The first part of the study explores how the Mexican text represents the tram and how its narrator-passenger attempts to deal with the vastness and unfamiliarity of the urban space by projecting clichés and commonplaces onto his fellow travelers. The second part compares and contrasts the work with Benito Pérez Galdós’s short story “La novela en el tranvía” (1871), which similarly features a narrator who projects plots onto other tram passengers. The essay concludes with some reflections on the esthetic classification of the Mexican work.

Keywords:

• Tram
• omnibus
• Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera
• Benito Pérez Galdós
• Mexican literature 1800-1899
• Spanish literature 1800-1899

Notes

Notes

1 As Jennifer Terni notes, “prior to the Second Empire, the omnibus was arguably among the most socially mixed spaces in all of Paris” (221).

2 As Terni notes of the omnibus, “what struck commentator as most confounding […] was the way it combined both open and closed space, or a space that seemed to be both public and private at the same time” (225).

3 For discussions of the story, see Comfort, González, Orduña Carson, and Ramos.

4 For a taxonomy of omnibus/tram texts, see my “Reading (on) the Tram.”

5 On Hugo’s relation with the impériale, see Chenet-Faugeras.

6 This description recalls a passage from the 1839 text “Tribulations des omnibus: Complet!!!”: “c’est un déluge qui va de bas en haut et qui commence par les pieds des voyageurs. Chaque passage est une gouttière qui grossit son torrent des pluies des parapluies bourgeois” (n.p.).

7 On the geography of the story, see Orduña Carson.

8 The 2004 anthology Tranvías (Pérez Galdós and Gutiérrez Nájera), for example, places the two texts side by side and raises the question of a possible influence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Amann

Elizabeth Amann is a professor in the Department of Literary Studies of Ghent University (Belgium). She is the author of Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut (U of Chicago P, 2015) and The Politics of Adultery: Importing Madame Bovary (Palgrave, 2006).