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Abstract
The mystical or spiritual turn of Benito Pérez Galdós in the 1890s is well known and was remarked upon by his contemporaries. How did this shift towards the non-material dimension of human existence accommodate itself to the still powerful positivist predilection for explaining psychological phenomena in terms of physical and physiological causes? Nazarín (together with its sequel Halma) is a good example of an apparently spiritual quest (or rather quests, since several characters are involved), yet Galdós’ treatment of the spiritual cast of mind is anything but straightforward. Dostoyevsky, whose interest in abnormal mental states and behaviour was a dominant characteristic of his fiction, is a useful precedent with which to gauge the extent of the shift between 1868 (The Idiot) and 1895 (Nazarín). This essay compares the spiritual outlook of the protagonists of these two works and the way such an outlook is presented and handled by the respective authors.
Notes
1 There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Occultism, one of the more fanciful of the manifold reactions against the onslaught of nineteenth-century materialism, became fashionable throughout Europe in the later nineteenth century. See Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture (London: Steiner Press, 1973), based on lectures given in 1915. The best-known example of the influence of theosophy and the occult in modern Spanish literature is of course Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Before him, the Catalan poet and priest Jacint Verdaguer, an exact contemporary of Galdós, was suspended by the Catholic Church for holding spiritist seances.
2 See Pío Baroja, ‘Literatura y bellas artes’, in El modernismo visto por los modernistas, intro. & selección de Ricardo Gullón (Barcelona: Labor, 1980), 75–81 (p. 77). In the phrase ‘misticismo realista’ Baroja may well have had Dostoyevsky in mind. He had been reading the Russian’s work in French translation and had written a series of articles on him.
3 A. A. Parker, ‘Nazarín, or the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to Galdós’, Anales Galdosianos, 2 (1967), 83–99. On the alleged influence of Tolstoy, see Vera Colin, ‘Tolstoy in Spain’, Anales Galdosianos, 2 (1967), 155–66.
4 In his Critical Guide to Nazarín, Peter Bly gives a balanced summary of the similarities and differences with Tolstoy, and concludes, I think rightly, that ‘Galdós used the Tolstoyan reminiscences […] as ironic reference points’ (Pérez Galdós: ‘Nazarín’ [London: Grant & Cutler in association with Tamesis Books, 1991], 93). Thomas Franz, in an intriguing essay entitled ‘Rousseau’s Conversation with Tolstoi in Nazarín’, Chapter 2 of his book, Remaking Reality in Galdós: A Writer’s Interactions with His Context (Athens, OH: Strathmore Press, 1982), 26–53, argues that the character Belmonte in Nazarín is a literary version of an egotistical Tolstoy who fails to fulfil the Christian ideal. It is certainly the case that both the fictional and the historical characters share an overbearing manner, and if Franz is right this shows Galdós’ less than complimentary attitude to the Russian master.
5 In-text references will be to the following editions: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Alan Myers, with an intro. by William Leatherbarrow (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1992); I shall give part, chapter and page. See Benito Pérez Galdós, Nazarín, in his Obras completas, ed., intro., biografía, notas & censo de personajes galdosianos por Federico Saínz de Robles, 6 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1965–1968), V (1967), 1677–768; Halma, V, 1769–874. I shall give page and column.
6 For a list of parallels, see Romano Guardini, ‘Dostoyevsky’s Idiot: A Symbol of Christ’, Cross Currents, 6:4 (1956), 359–82.
7 Michael Holquist points out that etymologically ‘idiot’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘private person’ and that Myshkin stands for the isolated individual (Dostoevsky and the Novel [Evanston: Northwestern U. P., 1977], 111). That original meaning is not, however, the meaning given to the word by the other characters when they apply it to Myshkin. They mean a simple person or fool. And that is, I imagine, how most readers would take the word in both Dostoyevsky’s time and our own.
8 Arturo Serrano Plaja was able to write almost a whole book on the two novels: Magic Realism in Cervantes: ‘Don Quixote’ As Seen through the Eyes of ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘The Idiot’, trans. Robert S. Rudder (Berkeley/London: Univ. of California Press, 1970). For a short essay comparing the debt to Cervantes of both The Idiot and Nazarín, see Julian Palley, ‘Nazarín y El idiota’, Ínsula, 258 (1968), 3.
9 Oxford Textbook of Medicine, ed. D. J. Weatherall, J. G. G. Ledingham & D. A. Warrell, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1987), II, 21.54. I have paraphrased to avoid the syntactical clumsiness of the original.
10 D. C. Taylor, ‘Epilepsy and Prejudice’, Archives of Disease in Childhood, 62 (1987) 209–11 (p. 210).
11 For many more instances of biblical transpositions, see Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Tres personajes galdosianos: ensayo de aproximación a un mundo religioso y moral (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964); Parker, ‘Nazarín, or the Passion of Our Lord’; Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1972); Gustavo Correa, El simbolismo religioso en las novelas de Pérez Galdós (Madrid: Gredos, 1974); Bly, Pérez Galdós: ‘Nazarín’; and the Introduction and Notes to Jo Labanyi’s English translation, Benito Pérez Galdós, Nazarín, trans., ed. & with an intro. by Jo Labanyi (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1993). Galdós’ title, Nazarín, is already indicative of where the inspiration comes from, but to read the novel as a mere translocation of the account of Jesus of Nazareth to the modern world, as Ziolkowski does, seems a trifle simplistic. Ciríaco Morón Arroyo points to the dangerous consequence of establishing too close a parallel: the account of Christ’s life is thereby devalued (‘Nazarín y Halma: sentido y unidad’, Anales Galdosianos, 2 [1967], 67–80).
12 More parallels are mentioned by Labanyi in the Introduction and Notes to her English translation of Nazarín.
13 The connection with the possessed women of the gospels is obvious. Far more interesting is the fact that Galdós makes a point of mentioning Beatriz’s anorexia, i.e., a physical, not just a mental, cause of her illness.
14 Nikolai Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality, foreword by Boris Jakim, trans. George Reavey (San Rafael, CA: Semanton Press, 2009 [1st ed. 1939]), 118.
15 As John Macquarrie reminds us repeatedly in his Two Worlds Are Ours: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005): ‘such an aberration [pantheism] is constantly hovering around the mystics’ (109). The problem is ubiquitous, found even in such an orthodox and loved mystic as St Teresa of Avila, as Macquarrie himself reminds us (173). Father Nazario, however, falls short of a full-blown pantheism that equates nature with a divine mind.
16 It is possible that Galdós is confusing John the Divine with John the Evangelist, as per Catholic tradition which lumps together the Apostle, the Evangelist and the Divine into one personality without any evidence. Why does Galdós allude to the Book of the Apocalypse? Is it because he knew that the book was written at a time of persecution of the Christians by the Roman Emperor Domitian (Nazarín is of course the object of persecution), or is it because its esoteric nature appealed to him?
17 In fact the symptoms described by Galdós are medically very accurate and coincide with the clinical manifestations of the disease: severe headache, chill, high fever, myalgia, prostration, dryness of the mouth, photophobia, mental confusion and incoherence, and, in severe cases, delirium.
18 Labanyi, in Galdós, Nazarín, trans. & ed. Labanyi, 204.
19 Gustavo Correa argues that Galdós offers two biographies of Nazarín, an internal and an external one, and that the internal one facilitates the knowledge of the ‘verdadero Nazarín’ (El simbolismo religioso, 176). This is to disregard the ambivalence of Galdós’ portrait. There is no ‘true’ Nazarín. There are interpretations or visions of him. If we can infer Galdós’ sympathy for such a figure, we can equally infer his scepticism about the practicalities of such an approach to life. There are rather more perceptive comments on the ambiguity of Galdós’ presentation of Nazarín in T. E. Bell, Galdós and Darwin (Woodbridge: Tamesis: 2006) and Peter Bly’s 1991 Critical Guide, even if the latter tends to overstate the ‘enigmatic nature of the work’ (88).
20 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), ed., with an intro., by Martin E. Marty (New York/London: Penguin, 1985), 413, 428.
I wish to express my gratitude to the Reverend Eamonn Rodgers for his invaluable comments on a first draft of this essay.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.