Freedom and the Soul within the Mechano-Materialist System: The Bergsonian Presence in Pardo Bazán's Naturalistic Fictions

Abstract

The tensions between Pardo Bazán's Catholicism and her condition as even a mitigated‘naturalist’ writer have been the focus of commentary within literary and intellectual circles for over a hundred years. Such commentaries have tended to fall into three categories: those which claim that, if there are naturalistic elements in the writings of the Spaniard, these are—due to the author's ‘spiritualist’ stance—necessarily limited to the stylistic; those, which, while denying that what the author is doing in her works is Naturalism to the letter, concede that there is more going on than stylistic imitation; finally, those which, signal the thoroughly naturalist elements (formal and philosophical) of her work. This study argues that Pardo Bazán forges a synthesis between naturalist and religious views. However, whereas several readings have proposed Augustine as the figure who best illustrates this synthesis, this study suggests an alternative candidate: Henri Bergson. While convinced of the validity of the materialist/cause-effect view of the cosmos, Bergson, like Pardo Bazán, none the less carves out a space for human freedom from within this system by recourse to indeterminate and intuitive phenomena.