‘Artistic Thinking’ in Narcís Oller's La bogeria

NOTES

• Narcís Oller, Memòries literàries: historia dels meus llibres (Barcelona: Aedos, 1962), 305–08, extract reproduced in Sergi Beser's edition of La bogeria (Barcelona: Laia, 1980), 127–32. All quotations from the novel subsequently given in the text refer to this edition.
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• Oller to Galdós, 5 July 1891, apud W. H. Shoemaker, ‘Una amistad literaria: la correspondencia epistolar entre Galdós y Narciso Oller’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, XXX (1964), 292–93.
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• See E. Moliné i Brasés, ‘Figura i paisatge, per en Narcís Oller’, La Renaixença, 14 April 1897 (partially reproduced in Jordi Castellanos, El modernisme: selecció de textos [Barcelona: Empúries, 1988], 285—86), a key document for this major phenomenon.
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• Op. cit., 337.
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• Raimon Casellas i el modernisme (Barcelona: Curial/Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 1983), Vol. 1, 40.
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• See Memòries literàries, 305, 338–39, 390—91, and also Alan Yates, ‘Narcís Oller: esborranys de novel-les’, Els Marges, 10 (1977), especially 35—37.
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• Memories literàries, 307.
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• Memories literàries, 308.
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• Where Castellanos (loc. cit.) identifies ‘l'esforç per adaptar-se a la nova època’ insofar as this volume ‘incorpora tècniques impressionistes i subjectivistes a la descripció de la natura; les traduccions de Turgenev i Tolstoj indiquen la recerca d'una nova direcció narrativa, la que es concreterà a Pilar Prim’.
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• Wayne C. Booth, ‘Distance and Point-of-View: An Essay in Classification’, reprinted in The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Murray-Davis (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 172–89. I am indebted to Neil Roberts and Mick Hattaway (of the Department of English Literature, Sheffield University) for pointers towards a narratological approach which opens horizons beyond the New Criticism exemplified by Booth and also by Mark Schorer (‘Technique as Discovery’, The Novel: Modem Essays in Criticism, 75–92) and thus, as I have discovered in working on this article, beyond conventional readings of Oiler's later works.
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• Quoted from Diana Knight, ‘Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness’ (in Literary Theory at Work, ed. Douglas Tallack [London: Batsford, 1987], 9–27) who supplies an admirably clear digest and functional application of Genette's method as expounded in Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).
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• Knight, op. cit., 11.
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• See Paul O'Prey, Introduction to Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 23–24, and David Lodge, ‘Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction’, in After Bakhtin (London: Routledge, 1990), 25–44, especially 37.
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• Genette, op. cit., 243ff.
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• Knight, op. cit., 16, and Genette, op. cit., 228–31. Terminology used in the following discussion can be usefully checked in Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988).
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• Genette, op. cit., 67; Knight, op. cit., 18.
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• Genette, op. cit., 195ff.
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• See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1984), especially 181–268. Oller's problem can be traced back to the dilemma, in the Catalan literary context, over ‘impersonal’ narration (see J. Yxart's review of La Papallona, in El año pasado [Barcelona, 1887], 257–58), through uncertainties about ‘point-of-view’ (Vilaniu as ‘third-person’ recast of the ‘first-person’ Isabel de Galceran), to confrontation in La febre d'or with setting relativities of perspective into the fabric of the narrative (focused on the figure of Bernat Foix, and directly broached in Chapter II of the second part of that novel).
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• Knight, op. cit., 15; Genette, op. cit., 111–12.
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• Bakhtin, op. cit., especially 196–99.
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• Genette, op. cit., 85.
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• See Knight, op. cit., 23–25.
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• Letter of 18 April 1887, apud Shoemaker, op. cit., 283.
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• See ‘La novel-la d'un personatge sense novel-la: el Josep Rodon, de Narcís Oller’, Serra d'Or, IX (1967), No. 3, 53–58, and, in general, both of Beser's prologues to the text: the Laia (1980) edition cited here and the Marca Hispánica bilingual edition (Barcelona: Edicions del Mall, 1986).
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• Memòries literàries, 305.
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• The contemporary critic Moliné i Brasés was fixed in his old-fashioned view of La bogeria as a ‘monologic’ novel-la de tesi, and so was less than half-right in his perception that ‘Lo parer del metje Giberga es l'autorisat y'l que triomfa al capdevall, ab sa teoría implacable de la herencia’ (‘La bojeria, novela del nostre temps, per en Narcís Oller’, La Renaixença, 20 January 1899).
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• Op. cit., 270.
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• Expressed in his review of Walter T. Pattison, El naturalismo español (Madrid: Gredos, 1985), BHS, XLV (1968), 244, and expanded in concluding his prologue to the 1980 edition, 18.
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• Schorer, op. cit., 75.
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• Knight, op. cit., 14; see also Lodge, op. cit., 5 and passim.
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