The Place of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

T HOUGH the eighteenth century is an epoch eminently prosaic, critics thave continued to ignore the one form of prose literature which was in the next century to become the most outstanding of literary genres. It seems to me--after almost ten years of research on the subject-that prose fiction in the century is of undoubted importance. No more than poetry or drama did it reach heights which compare with those of other epochs, but like them it was the means by which the Golden Age was remembered and preserved. Through it an expression was given to Neo-Classicism which in many ways was no less successful and typical. And, more clearly than in them, the novel was the means by which the future trends of literature were to be foreseen and anticipated. Historically it is essential. Up to about 1790 prose fiction in Spain consisted entirely of the dry husks of the Golden Age. There was, so far as is known, absolutely no knowledge of the contemporary European novel, save in the isolated case of Fenelon's Telemaque. Until about 1750 there was incidentally no Spanish prose fiction at all. After that date there appear a few imitations of Cervantes, of Quevedo, and of the novela de costumbres, of which the outstanding example is that unique medley of the picaresque and academic learning, Torres Villarroel's Vida, 1743-58. It was evidently still possible at this date to live and to act like a picaro; but it was never possible again to write like one: there are no imitations of the Vida. Similarly the various novelas de costumbres, such as Jara de Soto, El instruido en la corte y aventuras del Extreme-io (Madrid, 1789), Gutierrez de Vegas, Los enredos de un lugar (Madrid, 1778-81), and the entregas published by M. J. Martin, amply reveal some of the popular life and characters so vivid in the Golden Age. A second type of traditional fiction was created by Padre Isla's Fray Gerundio (1758). This was the imitation of the Quijote which most pleased the epoch and which was in fact for over thirty years accepted in place of the original as the only model of quijotesque writing worth attention. Until clear into the next century, following this model, the words quijote and quijotesco apply to a stupid or crazy nonentity whose andanzas are little more than a pretext for the unloading of erudition which may conceal a satiric intention. Examples are: F. A. Ponce de Le6n, Vida,