Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (review)

Abstract

VALis, noel. Sacred Realism: Religion and Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010. 356 pp.In Saaed Realism, Noel Valis invites us reconsider Realism in general, and Spanish Realist novels in particular, through rereading of highly relevant and diverse group of works. Valis focuses her well-known critical intelligence and sensibility on imaginative-moral played in modern Spanish narrative by a reenvisioned Catholicism, alternately accepted and contested, in an unsettling period of both secularization and religious revival (5). The author attacks dominant master narrative on secularization according which and religion are important in modern and, more particularly, Foucauldian secularized view of religion incompatible with modern rationality. How account then, she asks, for key figures of literary tradition such CS. Lewis and Graham Greene, who were believers? In open opposition these attitudes and discourses, she sees religion not simply disabling but also enabling, historically and imaginatively (9). The author's usual nuanced analysis does deny historical conflict between religion and secularizing modernity, but rather sets up to disclose what oppositional model masks: degree which both are intertwined, one embedded in other, mutually defining one another in periods of exchange and crisis (9). Her restorative and gently, if paradoxically, revisionist attempt bring back into critical consideration role of religion and in fiction (15) is highly successful and very engaging.I find particularly interesting her discussion on how many novels appear depend upon imaginative structures of belief convince readers of their fictional (18), and her view of how recognizable structures of religious imagination help Spanish novel make modern reality meaningful and readable by imbuing the profane with meanings that surpass or belie ordinariness of world (15). Also highly interesting is Valis's insight into debate on novel and female readership that accompanies its rise in modern times. She revisits debate from Church's contradictory position vis-a-vis imagination: its reliance on shaping by shaping imagination, well its distrust of imagination.An extensive array of literary works and historical essays of period are brought into discussion in writing that moves intelligently from history literature - from historical processes, events, and personalities fiction, novels, and writers. A well-documented commentary on historico-religious contexts of works she studies frames very engaging discussion on religious and literary imagination in Spanish novel from late eighteenth century 1950s, with brief but remarkable insight into both El Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote de la Mancha. Valis's analysis is organized upon what she posits three main periods of religious crisis: from late eighteenth century 1840s, Bourbon Restoration (1875-1902), and Second Republic and Civil War (19311939). These periods provide appropriate and specific historico-religious contexts for both works analyzed and issues explored.Jose de Cadalso's Noches lugubres (completed ca. 1774-1775, and published 17891790), Olavide's El evangelio en triunfo ( 1797-1798), and Luis Gutierrez's Cornelia Bororquia 0 La victima de la Inquisicion (1801) constitute first, and, I would add, surprising group of works examined by author from perspective of symbiotic relation between religion and novel: [h]ow does belief in something transcendent reveal itself in painful struggle with an uncertain outcome, with belief that something is true? (61). Her analysis of how, through their embodiment in poor, old of faith - vestiges of belief - become new relics is illuminating, and her proposal reimagine these works as part of field upon which freshly embryonic realism is born (61), is totally convincing. …