Raphael: The Madonna of the Chair (source: Wikipedia)
Spanish Literature Month (Plus), hosted by Richard and Stu, is rapidly coming to a close, but having
spent most of the month reading La Regenta, the massive 1886 realist
novel by Leopoldo Alas (a.k.a. Clarin), I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to squeeze
in a few comments on this extraordinarily rich book.
La Regenta’s first line - “The city was taking a nap”
– hooked me. Alas follows this with an ingenious, almost cinematic device, as young
canon-theologian Don Fermin de Pas mounts the church tower of the sleepy
Asturian city of Vetusta and withdraws from his cassock a long object - given
blatantly phallic suggestiveness enhanced already by the tower itself - that
initially frightens one of the two boys hiding in the belfry. It’s merely a
telescope, which Don Fermin trains onto the town below to spy upon its
inhabitants. The scene serves as a fine example of Alas’ ability to compound
humorous irony and sexual symbolism with both straightforward realist narrative
and a more meta-fictional suggestion of the author’s role, his own intent to
survey the goings-on of Vetusta. Over the next 700 pages, Alas picks apart this
provincial city to reveal its upper class as semi-aware somnambulists,
preoccupied with gossip and social machinations, pressed between civic and religious
institutions, and largely at the mercy of an entrenched psychosexual dynamic
that manifests itself in a Don Juan-style lecherousness or a paralytic state of
wretched and crushing repression.
La Regenta may cover terrain similar to many 19th
century realist novels – a broad scope married with a granular effort to
capture the world as it is; a reflection of the day’s philosophical and
political debates; a glimpse of encroaching mechanization and
industrialization; a dissection of the interactions of people across social and
economic strata; and a concern with the position of women – but its particulars
mark Alas as an author of unusual psychological astuteness who digs deeply into
the impact of the Catholic clergy on provincial life in Spain, offers a self-reflexive
awareness of the enterprise of literature, and wields irony with an acidity
that makes practitioners such as Flaubert and Eça de Queiroz seem almost timid.
Hacking away at social and cultural institutions of Vetustan life, Alas
excoriates small-mindedness and torpidity, referring to Vetusta (and this is
but a small sample) as “a muck-heap,” “an inescapable eternal tedium,” “a
quagmire of triviality,” “suicide by suffocation,” “the very worst town it was
possible to imagine” and asserting that “no one ever thought in Vestusta,
people merely vegetated.”
At the heart of La Regenta is the relationship
between Don Fermin and Ana Ozores Quintanar, the “judge’s wife.” Like Fermin, the
confessor in whom she quickly finds a sympathetic spirit, she is a member of
the town’s gentry, a relative newcomer to Vetusta and a person with a past. But
even at the novel’s beginning, Ana’s life holds out little promise for a future:
“And now she was married…To imagine anything in excess of the five feet and various
inches of the man by her side was a sin. It was all over – without ever having
started.”
With concentrated intimacy, the narrative follows Ana and
Fermin they navigate between their religious convictions and the pulsing
insistence of their corporal selves, trying to escape the confines of Vetustan
life as their penitent/confessor relationship edges towards something more
prurient. Compounding the situation is the pursuit of Ana by the town’s Don
Juan, Don Alvaro Mesia (whose refined seduction techniques are related so
granularly as to comprise a “How to Pick Up Girls” manual), and by the rivalry
of the two men as they jockey for Ana’s affections. Meanwhile, Ana’s husband,
retired magistrate and former actor Don Victor Quintanar, supplies comic relief
in his oafish obliviousness, hunting for game, bathetically re-enacting his
greatest moments on the stage, and tinkering in his study with mechanical
devices of his own invention (were this a contemporary novel, he’d be in his
man-cave with power tools).
Further intimacy is supplied both by La Regenta’s compact
temporal scope – much of the novel’s 350-page first volume unfolds over three
days and the entire novel over three years – and by Alas’ concentrated focus on
the psychology of his characters, keeping description to a minimum. Translator
John Rutherford notes that Alas fails to give us a physical portrait even of
Ana, other than repeated allusions to her resembling Rafael’s Madonna of the
Chair (minus child). But when Alas does employ description, it’s almost
invariably lyrical and edged with irony, for instance an observation of low
clouds “like great bags of dirty clothes unravelling upon the hills in the
distance,” or a description of “the moon standing over the horizon like a
lantern on the battlefield of the clouds, which lay about the sky, torn to
shreds.”
But the most arresting aspect of La Regenta is its
intense focus on sexuality, which, as Rutherford points out in his introduction,
would have generated a slew of critical works noting Alas’ debt to Freud, had
not Alas preceded Freud. At every opportunity, Alas mines Vetustan society for
the lifeblood pulsing beneath its listless exterior:
About the lady’s skirt, which was
of black satin, there was nothing exceptional, so long as she remained
motionless, What was really objectionable was something which looked like a
doublet of scarlet silk- quite alarming, even. The doublet was stretched over
some kind of breastplate (nothing less substantial could have stood the
strain), which had the shape of a woman excessively endowed by nature with the
tributes of her sex. What arms! What a bust! And it all looked as if it were on
the point of bursting!
Like the clothing of the wanton Dona Obdulia described
above, La Regenta possesses a sexual energy strained “to the point of
bursting.” Men swoon over glimpses of ladies’ ankles, knees brush against knees
at table, hands fumble for other hands, innocent games are played by persons
who are “the very opposite of innocent,” and nights are spent in torturous fevers
of repression (small wonder the city naps). The principal thrust of Alas’
examination of the church’s influence is its role in sublimating sexuality into
an ersatz spirituality and transforming human desire into tortured religious
mystical experience. He does this with a remarkable subtlety and modernity, even
including a humorous description of a priest masturbating (veiled such that one
could miss it if one blinked), and a suggested lesbian relationship. Alas is
merciless with the repressiveness and hypocrisy of the randy Vetustans inside
and outside the church and with the role that the church plays in tamping down
sexuality. The brief background he supplies regarding Ana’s youth reveals her
as the victim of a cruel society ready to read salaciousness into the most
innocent of childhood relations between members of the opposite sex. Don Fermin
likewise tries to stifle the stirrings of his body and bury them in high-minded
religious rhetoric, his desire funneled into a pursuit of power.
Alas’ caustic assessment of Vetusta, though, is but one pole
of a substantive, if often scathingly funny, dialectic he uses to explore the
many facets of this carnal/spiritual divide and of the role of religion in
furthering it. Some of his barbs hurled at institutionalized religion are
brutally sharp, both in rhetoric – referring to the religious as “millions of
blind, indolent spirits” – and in description, as during a religious procession
in which a hideous Christ sculpture is seen “lying on a bed of cambric…sweating
drops of varnish [and looking] as if He had died of consumption.” But Alas also
weaves into his portrait of religious oppression and sexual torpor a high level
philosophical examination conveyed via debates among the characters as well as
their genuine struggles of conscience and, occasionally, a more removed
authorial intrusion. Referencing philosophical and theological works, Alas
examines the role of religion in public and private life, delving even into the
question of God’s existence. His cast of characters displays degrees of
religious commitment, including a disgraced alcoholic priest and the town’s
only atheist. The latter is employed amusingly in trying to leverage public
opinion against Don Fermin, who represents the access of power against which
Alas launches his sharpest attacks, underscoring a distinction between an
edifying spirituality that serves the social welfare versus the institutional
church that primarily serves the wealthy and its own ends, and which, from
sheer inanition, even abandons any effort to convince peasants and miners of
lofty notions such as redemption. I should note that the poor do exist in and
around Vetusta, but they appear only on the periphery, just as they do to the novel’s
self-absorbed bourgeois principals. Yet the few scenes in which they appear are
memorable; in fact, it’s a servant who’s responsible for the unraveling of the
delicate house of cards built by elite Vetustans trying to have their cake and
make love to it too. Some of these injections of class awareness – such as when
Ana accidentally gets swept up in an evening passeggiata in a popular quarter – suddenly intrude with the force
of Daumier drawings, but with the natural energy and openness of the lower
classes leveraged against the frivolous and tortured pursuits of the upper
class.
I’ve scarcely begun to touch on the many marvelous elements
of La Regenta. Among these are individual portraits, delivered with an
irony reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis, of clergymen, businesspeople, and even the
incompetent town doctor (clearly inspired by Flaubert’s depiction of Charles
Bovary). The realism of the novel occasionally spins energetically out into an
almost Disney-esque magical realism, as when Ana’s delight in the countryside
is accompanied by a choir of frogs and birds, trees happily waving their
branches, and even a loathsome toad she fears can read her thoughts. Rutherford’s
introduction devotes much of its attention to the unusual narrative style of La
Regenta, which frequently pivots point of view even within a single
sentence, employs quotation marks to set off interior thought, and makes
frequent temporal shifts via flashback and recollection. La Regenta’s abundant
and occasionally meta-fictional references to literature, with Alas exploring
literature even as he’s writing it, make for one of the novel’s most engaging
elements. In addition to characters who display a fondness for poetry, there’s
a town poet who interjects lines that include words he himself
doesn’t understand. The wealthy Vetustans spend their evenings at the theater
much as they spend their Sundays at mass. Works by Spain’s great playwrights - Calderón de la Barca,
José Zorilla y Moral, Tirso de Molina - figure prominently (those who
participated in Spanish Literature Month’s offshoot Tirso group read will almost
certainly find much to appreciate in La Regenta). A performance of
Zorilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio in Vetusta’s opera house provides one of
the novel’s great set pieces (as well as one of the translator’s most entertaining
footnotes regarding this completely nutty piece), with as much sexual
subterfuge going on in the opera boxes as on the stage. Ana, a refined Emma
Bovary, prefers novels “with everything depicted in a lifelike manner and as it
really is,” though her intellectualism is repeatedly snuffed out by those
around her, who view writing by women as
“an unpardonable sin,” give her the nickname “George Sand,” and leave her
with few intellectual outlets other than “a communion across three centuries”
with mystical martyr Saint Teresa of Avila. Alas sensitively portrays Ana’s
entrapment, the chief option for elevation of her soul and for self-examination
in this most Catholic of worlds being the compartmentalized and close
institutions of the church, especially the confession box, a perfect symbol for
the claustrophobia and frustrated intimacy that characterize Vetustan life.
Despite Vetusta’s suffocating influence, though, both Ana
and Don Fermin achieve occasional heroic moments of edging up above Vetusta’s
mire, only to be sucked into it again. Ana especially, between her ecstatic
religious transports and sexual pining, has flashes of acute self-awareness
delivered with a strikingly modern, almost existentialist spirit:
Suddenly an idea came into her head as
if it were a bitter taste in her brain: ‘I am alone in the world.” And the
world was lead-coloured, or dirty yellow, or black, according to the time and
the day. The world was a remote, muffled, mournful murmur - senseless,
monotonous children’s songs, and wheels clattering over cobble-stones, making
windows rattle and then fading into the distance like the grumbling of
rancorous waves. Life was a country dance performed by the sun revolving at
speed around the earth, and this was what each day was: nothing else.
But these moments of awareness have nowhere to go in torpid Vetusta. Alas’ depiction, at once caustic and sensitive, of the crushing
influence of religion and provincialism and of the way they can dehumanize delicate
souls and enervate energetic bodies, seems, despite its 19th century
provincial setting, far ahead of its time. Once almost consigned to obscurity, La
Regenta belongs with the greatest of psychological novels. And thanks to
Spanish Literature Month, it certainly counts among the best books I’ve read
all year.
