by Steven Moore
In parts 2 and 3, father and son make their way from Aragon to France, Germany, and eventually to Italy, their moral education tested again and again as they pass through such places as the Customs House of Life, the Palace of Sofisbella (“beautiful wisdom”), the Convent of Hypocrisy (where Gracián’s propensity for anticlerical satire kept him in hot water with the authorities), the Palace without Doors, the Cave of Nothingness (where three-fourths of humanity spends its time in Gracián’s elitist opinion), and finally the Island of Immortality, where those who make contributions to culture are rewarded. (The novel ends where it began, on an island isolated from women and the masses.) Ostensibly the pilgrims have been searching for Critilo’s wife, but in the allegorical scheme they are searching not for Felisinda but for Felicidad (happiness), which eludes them until they settle for the immortality that results from achieving clarity regarding the nature of the world and doing memorable work (such as writing a novel like The Master Critic). The goal is pagan and worldly, not Christian, and is achievable only by those sophisticated and educated enough to make the right moral choices.
Gracián’s world is closer to Dante’s hell than Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, and his worldview closer to classical humanism than to Christianity. To see the world as he sees it, Gracián provides both the reader and Andrenio with “a glass, which changed the common prospect of the world, and made all things appear with their natural defects, though disguised with the mask which fraud had put on them: for so ought everyone to behold this world with an eye different from the vulgar view” (7). Gracián’s outlook is bitter, pessimistic, misogynistic and misanthropic, as savage as Swift’s, but what is intriguing about The Master Critic is the almost surrealistic nature of his allegories, the “fantasical humour” (10) of his imaginative personifications. The effect is all the more startling because the narrative doesn’t occur in a dream or vision, as in most allegories, but in recognizable, realistic settings. Our pilgrims notice a shop advertising “ ‘here is sold the best and the worst,’ and going in, they found that they were tongues; the best were those that held silence” (13), which conjures up an image of tongues hanging from hooks like skinned ducks in a Chinese grocery store. Another shop promises “ ‘a sovereign remedy against all diseases,’ to which there crowded such a multitude of customers that the shop could not receive their feet, but their heads being empty, and without substance, were more easily contained in a narrow compass” (13), as though these customers had detachable heads that can float like balloons into tight areas. (The “sovereign remedy” is patience.)
Like López de Úbeda, Gracián is considered a “difficult” author, a proud graduate of the “literary school that relishes obscurity for its own sake,”49 and indeed without a well-annotated edition, most of the individual targets of Gracián’s satire are lost. He’s a bitter pill for some readers to swallow, his novel “rather a torment, and spectacle to exercise my patience, than a pastime for my pleasure,” as Critilo complains at one point (7). Borges dismissed “his Lilliputian genius, his solemn puns, his bows to archbishops and grandees, his religion of distrust, his sense of excess erudition, his honeyed veneer and deep-rooted bile.”50 Admittedly Gracián’s moral strictures are conventional enough,51 but the grotesquely imaginative way he dramatizes them makes The Master Critic a marvel to read, and makes it a shame this bizarre, hypercritical novel has never been fully translated into English. Consequently, it’s the odd man out in the literary tradition that includes Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, Emile, and Tarzan of the Apes.
A century later, another rogue Jesuit published another huge novel that likewise got him in trouble with the authorities. The History of the Famous Preacher Friar Gerund de Campazas (Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio de Campazas, alias Zotes, 1758) is one of the overlooked comic masterpieces of Spanish literature, and an exemplary novel of learned wit, that genre of huge, erudite novels like Gargantua and Pantagruel, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, St. Orpheus Breviary, The Recognitions, Bottom’s Dream, Palinuro of Mexico, Life A User’s Manual, and Darconville’s Cat, whose theme “may be seen in terms of a comic clash between the world of learning and that of human affairs.”52 Its author, José Francisco de Isla (1703–81), was disgusted by flamboyant preachers who saw themselves more as showmen than theologians, and churchgoers who attended Mass more for entertainment than edification. In a 1735 sermon, Isla condemned
those sermons in which the orator flashes in his movements, thunders in his words, fulminates in his discourses, sparkles in his thoughts, interweaving texts with subtleties, abrupt turns of phrase and borrowed wit; making sermons in the style of an anthology where the infallible and inspired truths of Holy Writ are presented on par with the ravings and falsehoods of the Gentiles.53
Since preaching against this style did no good, he decided to write a comic novel that he hoped would shame it with lethal satire. Setting his novel a century earlier, when the fad was at its height—under the influence of conceptismo and the baroque style in general—Isla introduces us to the Zotes family (Sp. zote=dunce), whose son Gerund is attracted to wandering preachers as other boys are to circus performers and delights in parroting their ludicrous spiels such as this one, tricked out with reckless Latin quotations from the Bible and context-free citations from obscure theologians:
Fire, fire, fire! the house is on fire! Domus mea domus orationis vocabitur. Now, Sexton, touch the loud-sounding bells: In cymbalis bene sonantibus. Do it so; for to toll the dead, and to toll for fire is the same thing, as the judicious Pecenelus remarks: Lazarus amicus noster dormit. Water, Sirs, water! for the world is burning; quis dabit capiti meo aquam? the interlineal, qui erant in hoc mundo; Pagninus, et mundus eum non cognovit. But what do I see! alas, Christians, the souls of the faithful are in flames! Fidelium animae! and the voracious element feeds on flowing pitch; Requiescant in pace, id est, in pice, as Vatablus explains it. Fire of God, how it burns! ignis a Deo illatus. But now rejoice with me, for behold there descends the Virgin del Carmen to deliver those who have worn her holy scapularies; scapulis suis. Let justice be done, says Christ; Mercy defend us! says the Virgin. Ave Maria.54
Gerund doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, but he is entranced by the sound and fury of such sermons, and the applause they win. His parents are impressed by his affinity for preaching and send him off at age 10 to be educated, first by a pompous Latin teacher with “slovenly taste” in writers, preferring those “who were most bombastic and unintelligible” (1.7). After studying with him for “Five years, four months, twenty days, three hours, and seven minutes” (1.10, one of many examples of Isla’s Sternean playfulness), Gerund returns home, where a visiting friar describes to him the nature of the religious life:
He told him there was no better life in the world than that of a friar, for that the dullest was always sure of his commons [room and board], and after assisting in the choir, it was all holiday; . . . Then the rout, and the racket, and the roaring, that they all make when they are by themselves! The merry mad tricks that they play with one another! . . . when their master has turned his back, or in those times of liberty and holiday which come every now and then, there are such doings are ready to bring the house down, playing at blind-man’s buff, leap-frog, and fulling-mills, with all the glee in the world. (1.10)
Heading this call to the religious life, Gerund joins a monastery and receives further miseducation from a ridiculous pedant, “scholasticated with . . . vain sophistries” (2.1), who leaves Gerund with the impression that philosophy and logic and mere word-games. At this point, the youngster falls under the spell of a successful preacher named Friar Blas, a 33-year-old fop popular with the masses. From him Gerund learns all the tricks of the trade: how to compose a sermon by plundering lexicons and concordances for rare words and flashy phrases (emphasizing sound over sense), following ignorant flights of word-association, plagiarizing other colorful sermons, bypassing the Bible in favor of ludicrous commentaries on it, enlivening it with joke
s and local references, and finally he learns how to perform this magpie melange in the pulpit like a ham actor.
Gerund eventually delivers his first sermon, which begins:
To the auriferous age of innocence; lavabo inter innocentes manus mea: in uninterrupted track succeeded the argent season of defective sloth; argentum & aurum nullius concupiri. Yet the peccability of mortals arrived not to degree lethalic, but appropinquated to be nigrescent maculation on their pristine niveous candour; pocula tartareo haud aderant nigrefacta veneno. The astonished Gods, ego dixi dii estis, determined to obstruct the violation of established order by admonitory grace—admirably here, says the author of the Symbolic World, ante diem cave—and paralogized correction in preludes of castigation; corripe eum inter te & ipsum solum. (3.5)
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! The rustic audience goes wild, “though not a soul of them understood a word of it,” but afterwards Gerund receives a verbal smackdown by a Father Prudentio (one of Isla’s personae), the first of many he receives, none of which leaves a mark on him. Gerund gives two more farcical sermons—applauded by the “broad-shouldered, tangle-locked” multitude but derided by the learned—and is on his way to a successful career when the narrator makes a shocking discovery. Writing in the 1750s, he had been relying on a collection of manuscripts and memoirs written in the past about Gerund in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Greek. Our narrator, who considers himself a scrupulous historian, hires a multilingual Moor to translate all this material for him, and it’s the Moor’s translation he has been relying on up to this point in Gerund’s career. (If Cervantes’ Cide Hamete Benengeli doesn’t spring to mind, you haven’t been paying attention.) But then another multilingual visitor examines the originals, compares them to the Moor’s translations, and informs our author he’s been swindled: the Moor made up the whole story. The narrator is crushed to learn he has wasted two years on what he thought was a documentary history, but his visitor offers a solution: “If, as your Reverence calls it an History, you should call it a Novel, in my opinion a greater thing could not have been written, nor of more entertainment or utility” (6.4).
This metafictional end-run doesn’t bear close examination, for it would mean the Moorish conman shares Isla’s vast erudition and opinions, and it would undermine the author’s obviously sincere opposition to ridiculous preachers like Gerund by exposing his narrator’s naiveté. On the other hand, it is perfectly consistent with the fun Isla has been having all along with narrative conventions, many of which will sound familiar to readers of Tristram Shandy. The book opens with a dedication that parodies the unctuous, high-flown style of fawning authors, followed by a lengthy, moodswinging preface that is by turns contemptuous and solicitous of the reader. About halfway through the preface, the narrator loses his temper and demands, “Then tell me now, thou bevinegared mortal of reader! (for I am weary of treating thee with urbanity) . . . ,” then calms down a few pages later and entreats, “You see too, my good reader (now I begin to fondle you again and stroke your back). . . .” Isla’s chapter titles are often playful and teasing: the first promises to recount Gerund’s birth and early education, but doesn’t; the second, “without performing the promise of the first,” treats other matters; in the third, “the promise of the first is prosecuted,” but the author keeps us waiting until the fourth, “In which the promise is fulfilled.” Most are descriptive, but some are like the heading for 5.9, stating simply that the ensuing chapter “Is a good thing, and ought to be read.” The narrator often apologizes for going off on tangents or violating the conventions of fiction, and near the end of 4.3 he freezes Friar Gerund in position for several pages as he indulges in yet another digression. He abruptly ends one chapter “to take a pinch of snuff” before resuming (4.9), and two chapters later admits the shot of snuff made him forget what he had planned to write next—or did it? “But, besides, that very often a poor historian forgets, and, it sometimes happens, that whilst he takes a pinch of snuff, the thought which he had at the end of his pen is flown; who knows whether or not, upon this occasion, we have done it purposely, not to interrupt the thread of the narration? For our part we are determined firmly not to declare how it was, that we may leave the pleasure of guessing at it to the curious reader” (5.2).55 And then there’s the surprise ending, which exposes the whole enterprise as a cock and bull story. Isla has been called the Spanish Swift, but Quevedo or Gracián better deserves that sobriquet; Isla is the Spanish Sterne.56
Friar Gerund is a witty satire on the abuses of language and learning, mocking bad writers as well as the “huge mob of goosecaps” (5.7) who admire and encourage them. Although its focus is on Spanish preachers, the novel encompasses bad writers of every sort—theologians, historians, critics, translators—who use the smoke and mirrors of bombastic language and phony erudition to mask their paucity of thought. Isla doesn’t oppose figurative language or erudition per se—he’s a master of both—only its misuse by amateurs lacking the taste and education to use them appropriately. Just as Cervantes skewered authors of chivalric novels, Isla (who alludes to Don Quixote in his novel and clearly admired it) hoped to laugh these hacks out of existence. (Several times in his novel Isla acknowledges Molière’s 1659 play Les Précieuses ridicules as a model of corrective satire.) There are a handful of educated characters in Friar Gerund who periodically discuss the elements of style, which allows the novel to function both as a manual of rhetoric and as an anthology of execrable examples of bad writing, which Isla obviously had fun composing. (Others were taken from real sermons of his time.)
But the Spanish religious authorities were not amused; the ridicule of preachers (no matter how well deserved) and the mockery of ignorant churchgoers didn’t sit well with them, nor did statements like Gerund’s defense of the flights of fancy in his sermons: “nowhere have I ever heard so many and so great lies as in the pulpit” (2.6 [2.9 in the original]). Isla was a little too complementary of pagans—citing Roman rhetoricians more often than Catholic theologians, and noting that analogues to the Ten Commandments could be found among the Egyptians and Greeks—and a little too harsh on popular collections of sermons like the Florilogio sacro (1738), which Gerund plunders shamelessly. Friar Gerund was an instant best-seller, selling out its first edition of 1500 copies in three days, and enjoyed wider popularity in translation, but the Inquisition almost immediately began investigating it and two years later placed it on their index of prohibited books, and expelled Father Isla from Spain. (He died in Italy in extreme poverty.) It may be little known today outside of Spain, but Friar Gerund’s learned wit, rustic realism, and playful execution make it one of the great comic masterpieces of the early modern era.
Though Friar Gerund has been called “the only 18th-century [Spanish] novel of any consequence” by at least one reference book,57 there is one more worth noting: Europe’s first capital-R Romantic novel.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a revolution in sensibility throughout Europe among certain individuals (it was never a mass movement), later called Romantics, who favored emotion over reason, passion over prudence, nature over civilization, the exotic over the conventional, the heroic over the ordinary, imagination over intellect, art over commerce, the individual over the community, defiance over obedience, subjectivity over objectivity, the old over the new—and in extreme cases—superstition over science, morbidity over health, and suicide over life. One such romantic is Tediato, the suicidal protagonist of José de Cadalso’s (1741–82) unusual novella Lugubrious Nights (Noches lúgubres, 1771). It’s a short work in dramatic form, divided into three nights: on the first, we learn from Tediato–who does most of the talking–that he has come to a burial vault on a dark, stormy night to steal the corpse of his lover, a beautiful blonde who died two months earlier. He has hired a gravedigger named Lorenzo to assist him with his dark deed, and they manage to dislodge the lid of her tomb enough to let the maggots scurry out, but fail to open it completely. Addressing his dead l
ove, he promises to return the following night to fulfill his Poëtic plan: “I shall return to your tomb, I will take you home with me, you will rest on a bed next to mine; my body will die next to yours, adored cadaver. Expiring I will set my domicile on fire, and you and I will turn to ashes in the midst of those of the house” (55).
On the second night, while waiting for Lorenzo, Tediato is arrested in a case of mistaken identity and thrown in jail. Instead of protesting, he perversely luxuriates in the chains weighing him down and his imminent execution. Released near dawn, he returns to the cemetery and stumbles over Lorenzo’s son, who unveils a tale of woe: “My grandfather died this morning. I am eight years old, and I have six brothers and sisters littler than I am. My mother has just died of childbirth. I have two brothers who are very sick with smallpox; another is in the hospital; my sister disappeared from the house yesterday” (70). Led to Lorenzo’s home, Tediato advices him what to do with his ailing family: “You are a gravedigger . . . Make a very big hole . . . Bury all of them alive, and bury yourself together with them. On your gravestone I shall kill myself, and I shall die saying: Here lie several children, as happy now as they were unhappy a short while ago, and the two most miserable men in the world” (71). On the third and final night, Tediato and Lorenzo meet again outside the burial vault, but the novella ends enigmatically as Tediato tells the gravedigger, “You will contribute more to my happiness with that pick, that mattock . . . vile instruments in the eyes of others . . . venerable in mine . . . Let’s go, friend, let’s go” (75–76). Does he plan to commit suicide and have Lorenzo bury him? Will the two commit a double suicide like the one he planned with his “adored cadaver” (returning her to his house so that they could die together)? Or will circumstances continue to thwart his suicide, tediously prolonging his miserable life?