Naturalistic tendencies and the descent of the hero in Isla's «Fray Gerundio»

Russell P. Sebold

In a Spain that was still emerging from the rigid orthodoxy of the Counter Reformation, the slightest quarter given to scientific empiricism was considered a grave materialist threat. Among the few Spaniards who did study the new scientific trends of the Enlightenment in the first half of the eighteenth century were Jesuit teachers. Their Seminary of Nobles at Madrid was for all purposes «la gloriosa Universidad de las Hespañas», since its «Aulas en donde con novedad se enseñaban las Ciencias» contrasted so sharply with the «grave ignorancia, poca ciencia y mucho vicio» of the old Spanish universities¹. Father José Francisco de Isla, famous Jesuit satirist of pulpiteers, «solo daba algun quartel a la Physica experimental»², but his acceptance of certain materialist ideas had a profound influence on his novelistic technique.

Locke's sensualist empiricism is the critical point of view in Isla's early satires against Galenic medicine. Doctor Martín Martínez, a modern physician and associate of Feijóo, «creerá a sus sentidos, siempre que no hay razón evidente para la duda»³. Enlightened clerics like Isla permitted themselves rather unlimited freedom in negative scientific criticism of superstition and stupidity, whereas they feared the positive criticism that «por las ciencias naturales se havia atrevido a escalar hasta el Sagrado Alcázar de la Religión» (I, 110).

But Isla's religious fortress was as vulnerable to sedition as to storming from without. If his indulgence in the putrescent details of Fray Gerundio's family life is reminiscent of the French naturalists, his technique in creating characters is still more similar to theirs. It was to «creer a sus sentidos». Character descriptions in the Gerundio evince a journalistic clarity of detail and an autonomy of the facts of physical reality that recall the words Hippolyte Taine wrote a century later «ce que les historiens font sur le passé, les grands romanciers et dramatistes le font sur le présent»⁴. The personalities of Friar Gerund and the other inhabitants of his microcosm are reducible to the aggregate of their observer's sense perceptions of them, resulting in a materialist determinism. The description of Fray Blas, Fray Gerundio's mentor, is a pertinent example:

Pedantic pulpiteers with their scant theological training were such common figures that they had long before been criticized by Quevedo, Gracián, Calderón Gregorio Mayans, the Diario de los literatos de España and many other writers. Because of the preachers' flagrant ridiculousness it was possible to satirize them by merely recording reality with acute observation and wit. Such a technique recalls Isla's earlier use of John Locke's empiricism and is also indebted to Montesquieu, as we shall see. The heretical implications of materialist determination in characters conceived by a Jesuit are almost as interesting as the fact that Isla thereby anticipated the technique of the nineteenth-century naturalists.

Isla's descriptive technique is symptomatic of a revolutionary metaphysic that was to have an increasing effect on literature. Seventeenth-century literature had presented reality by «idealizing» it in both the literary and philosophical senses. Cervantes sifted it through the heroic imagination of Don Quijote. Particular characters in many French works of the seventeenth century were merely deductive derivations from Cartesian-like general preconceptions about character⁵. Still a third procedure had treated worldly reality Neoplatonically as the shadow of a higher reality residing in a sort of moral topos uranos. A coquette in Juan de Zabaleta's El día de fiesta is only the inverse of the pastoral novel's Neoplatonic ideal woman because, aping the Devil, «para engañar las almas haze quanto puede por transfigurarse en Angel»⁶. But Isla is an early participant in a total cultural shift toward philosophical and literary realism.

Shortly after the new sensualist philosophy had discovered an immanent existence in the facts of physical reality, when John Locke could trust his senses to «recall to my mind the ideas... which former sensations had lodged in my memory» and «at pleasure lay by that idea and taken into my view that of the smell of a rose, or taste of sugar»⁷, the Addisonian essay on the picturesque was born. If the philosopher's sense perceptions could penetrate the secret of existence, an inverse hypothesis was implicit. An individual's sense perceptions of his milieu, impressing themselves on his mind, could largely determine his psychology as well as knowledge. This idea developed through Locke and Montesquieu until Condillac, a direct precursor of Taine, formulated it in his celebrated allegory of the animated statue. The Rousseauist-romantic hero determined by pristine nature and the maimed characters of French naturalism determined by a proletarian milieu differ only as the positive and negative interpretations of the same philosophy, with realism forming a compromise between extremes. Likewise, the early empiricists' habit of observation was the common germinal technique of Rousseau's descriptions of nature, romanticism's investigation of the past, and naturalism's documentation of the present. Man was ceasing to be the subject and becoming the object of culture and inquiry. Under the scrutiny of the empiricists and positivists, he was losing the heroic and semi-divine aura with which literature and scholastic philosophy had endowed him in earlier periods. External circumstances, over which Don Quijote won many a painful but heroic victory, became more than the equal of the hero in the realistic novel and completely dominated him in the naturalistic novel, as Isla anticipated.

The relationship of Isla's technique to the philosophy of the Enlightenment will become clearer in examining it in connection with the Gerundio's apparently incompatible sources: the Quijote and the picaresque novel. But first I should like to show how the Gerundio resembles the naturalistic novel in applied technique.

In his satirical character analysis of pedantic preachers, Isla argued that they were environmentally and hereditarily incapacitated to receive sound ideas. Friar Gerund's rustic village of Campazas explains much of his imbecility. But he also reflects the coarse stupidity of his parents, Antón Zotes and Catanla Rebollo, who conceived him out of wedlock. When itinerant preachers visited in Gerundico's home, «si por milagro les oia alguna cosa buena, no havia forma de aprenderla» (I, 15). The fantastic precepts of his Latin master, the Dómine Zancas-Largas, «como eran tan conformes al gusto extravagante, con que hasta allí le havian criado, le quadraban maravillosamente» (I, 53). The reader becomes convinced of the friar's helplessness as Isla gradually sketches in Gerundico's milieu from copious notes he took on the ignorant peasants and customs of Campos while residing at the Jesuit house in Villagarcía de Campos.

Note-taking, the technique of the nineteenth-century novelists, was declared by Isla to be a deliberate procedure for creating character. He referred to his progress on the «Don Quijote de los predicadores» in a personal letter in 1752: «Tengo ya echados muchos rasgos hacia esta obra y aun hechas algunas apuntaciones»⁸. The nature of these apuntaciones is declared in another letter written after publication of the first part of the novel: «El Antón Zotes que se tuvo presente en ella ['la obra'] fué el mismísimo compadre de madre y vecino de la Antigua, aunque no me ocurrió la circunstancia del parentesco espiritual, y por eso no salió a lucirlo»⁹. The negative half of this statement is even more indicative than the positive of Isla's method of copying character from reality. He also speaks of a barber in Campos, a model for other rustic characters, as «mi barbero, molde de vaciar Sanchos Panzas»¹⁰. Textual allusions to source notes on Campos are equally explicit. For example, the Zotes' home had a corral flanked by «cobertizos, que llaman Tenadas los Naturales» and an «estante que se llamaba Basar en el Vocabulario del País» (I, 2-3). And the good Tía Catanla greeted an aristocratic traveler «haciénole una reverencia á la usanza del país» (II, 133). Isla's stenographic descriptive style betrays its origin in notes, and his satires of sermons delivered by contemporary preachers reveal further note-taking.

The Gerundio's relationship to the naturalistic novel is also visible in its similarity of dénouement, for example, to the masterpiece of naturalism, Zola's Germinal. The coal miners' only hope in Germinal is a total evolution of society. Etienne Lantier, their leader, is ambitious and enthusiastic, but he and the other miners are eventually doomed by their proletarian milieu. Etienne's helpless ignorance even prevents him from understanding his Marxist books and reviews. Friar Gerund is much more stupid than Lantier; he is not even interested in the instructive books recommended by sage clerics. Isla affirms throughout his novel that individual preachers will improve only as a result of an improved theological atmosphere in the seminaries. These are Zola's terms of total social evolution. Isla left his history of the friar unfinished, perhaps primarily because his intended reformation of Gerundico would be logically inconsistent with the work's deterministic terms. There was at any rate no physical obstacle to a sequel, since the Inquisition's ban of the first part did not prevent the clandestine printing of the second outside Spain.

The circumstances of the friar's birth, his Latin master's resemblance to Quevedo's Licenciado Cabra and the Gerundio's determinism are obviously influenced by the picaresque novel. But the determinism of a work like the Guzmán de Alfarache, based on an absolute moral metaphysic derived from the ascetic literature of the Counter Reformation, is quite different. All pursuits other than the contemplative religious life predestined men to evil. The picaresque novelist could look in any direction for influences to doom the generic pícaro, a mirror of all evils. However. Isla does not deal with omnipresent evil but studies the specific problem of stupidity in a type of individual. He therefore clinically records only those influences bearing directly on the individual under analysis. This is stylistically revealed in his abandonment of the picaresque novel's first-person narrative form. One who considers the world entirely wicked has to identify himself with evil. Isla writes in the third person to avoid identifying himself with stupidity.

The Gerundio's determinism is still less compatible with the Quijote, its other source. Ironically, however, it is in a new determinism that the Cervantian and picaresque are harmonized. A surprising neoclassical interpretation of the Quijote's Renaissance poetics dissolves the antagonism between pícaro and caballero to allow the entrance of empirical determinism.

The sixteenth century interpreted the Aristotelian distinction between the poetic universal and the historical particular as a moral difference. Poetry created character by representing people as they should be, through universal imitation, or blending in one individual noble traits of many individuals. History and realistic fiction represented people as they were. The moralists of the Counter Reformation favored the didactic possibilities of universal imitation, whereas the realistic pícaro was a reaction of the popular literary taste. Cervantes reconciled the cleavage by homologizing the extremes of poetry and history in a profound human dialectic between Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Sancho was ennobled and the knight was humanized¹¹.

Isla's profoundest literary insight was his awareness of the Cervantian synthesis. But his insight was strictly intellectual because of the eighteenth century's formalistic, neoclassical interpretation of the Quijote as pure satire. Satire could not leave the hero on the poetic mountain peaks of Amadís, and the age of Luzán was too myopic to see the tragicomic hilltops of Don Quijote. The neoclassicists thought Cervantes had dragged the hero all the way down to the level of historical reality where he could elicit only laughter. Satire of a hero required a total ironization, not only of heroic adventures, but of the very technique used to characterize heroes: universal poetic imitation. Since the epic hero was an assemblage of all that was noble in all heroes, Isla felt a satirical hero had to be an assemblage of all that was ridiculous in all heroes. This technique would achieve the same synthesis of universal imitation and historical truth, hut on the ground level of history, rather than on a middle ground.

This explains why Isla saw no difference between the sublime stupidity of his «Don Quijote de los predicadores» and the epic madness of Alonso Quijano. «No digo yo que en alguno de ellos ['los predicadores'] se unan todas las sandeces de mi querido Fray Gerundio; que aunque eso no es absolutamente impossible, tampoco es necessario... ¿Pues qué hice yo? No mas que lo que hacen los artífices de novelas útiles y de poemas épicos instructivos. Propónense un héroe, o verdadero o fingido, para hacerle un perfecto modelo, o de las armas, o de las letras, o de la política, o de las virtudes morales... Recogen de éste, de aquél, del otro y del de más allá todo aquello que les parece conducente»¹². Isla restates this concept of the satirical hero in the following paragraph by asserting that Quevedo used the same technique of imitation in the Buscón as Cervantes did in the Quijote. An analogy is set up between the «armas, o letras, o virtudes morales» of the hero and the «sandeces» of the anti-hero. Perhaps for the first time, the modern critical concept of the polarity between pícaro and caballero is sensed. In actuality, Isla perceived that the generic quality of the pícaro and the universality of the Aristotelian hero are essentially the same formal element. And on this perception he based his unique synthesis of caballero and pícaro.

It is symbolic that in the same context Isla insists, following Cervantes, that an epic poem can be written in prose. If Cervantes suggested the prosification of the hero, Isla completed it. The hero is so debased he can grovel in the mire with the pícaro. A vivid example of the quixotic hero's headlong fall into the mire is the inability of the Licenciado Quijano, a wretched descendant of Alonso Quijano el Bueno, to accompany Gerundico to Pero-Rubio because «quando ya estaba aparejada la burra, se le desenfrenaron tan furiosamente las almorranas (de que adolecía), que no le fué possible montar a cavallo» (II, 157). The subsequent history of the current of thought that underlies the Quijote's genesis is incomplete without Gerundio. Spanish literature was characteristically realistic from the Poem of the Cid on, but this tendency toward realism did not culminate in Cervantes' humanization of the knight errant. If it had, the chasm between the heroism of Don Quijote and the psychotic heroics of Maximiliano Rubín, Ana de Ozores and Fermín de Pas would be unbridgeable. The hero and his milieu had to be externally prosified before the realistic novel could prosify him psychologically. The significance of the Gerundio is in foreshadowing the descent of the novelistic hero through the real world into the gutters of naturalism.

Isla's interpretation of the Aristotelian hero literally demanded his note taking technique. The character of an epic hero could be derived from an intellectual idea of heroism or from the largely imaginary heroes of other epic poems. But social criticism through an example of existing error required strict correspondence with reality. The anti-hero became an assemblage of notes on actuality rather than a union of noble virtues in a symbolic figure-a «historical universal».

Isla's literary sources and classical poetics belong to a common European heritage. But his technical affinity with the naturalists owes still more to the similarity of intellectual atmospheres between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Montesquieu published L'Esprit des lois in 1748, four years before Isla began writing the Gerundio. Gustave Lanson has noted in Montesquieu that «une sorte de déterminisme naturaliste a précédé chez lui le mécanisme sociologique»¹³. However, Lanson failed to see the possible influence of Montesquieu's determinism on literature. Montesquieu shows the same approximation of psychology and the physiology of the nervous system as naturalistic novels do: for example, the final anatomical decomposition of Madame Bovary and Nana. According to Montesquieu, the psychology of people and individuals, their génie or inclination, is determined by their milieu, or climate and terrain. In L'Esprit des lois, he explains that the imagination and tastes of a people arise from the impressions made on their senses in the degree that the climate has made their nervous fibers more or less flexible and that «c'est d'un nombre infini de petites sensations que dépendent l'imagination, le goût, la sensibilité, la vivacit黹⁴.

It is symptomatic that Isla's satire opens with a detailed geographic description of Campazas («Campazas es un Lugar de que no hizo mención Ptolomeo en sus Cartas Geográphicas», et cetera, I, 1-2) and that he mentions «los Philósophos modernos» in the same paragraph. It is then logical that like Montesquieu Isla explains bad taste as deriving from sensory impressions produced on the individual by his milieu: «Solo hay una diferencia entre la peste y el mal gusto... aquella cunde á ojos vistas, este se propaga sin sentir: por lo demás, assí ni mas ni ménos, se va extendiendo este por el comercio de los que se sienten tocados del gusto epidémico» (I, 115-116). Such strong impressions were made on the friar's senses by his home and education that they determined his tastes, and ultimately his genio or inclinación, both of which terms Isla uses in the same sense as Montesquieu. «[A Fray Gerundio] el genio y la inclinación le llevaban hacia el Púlpito» (I, 80). Fray Gerundio used mythology rather than Holy Scripture to substantiate a sermon because «algo mas se inclinaba a lo primero, por llevarle allí su genio» (II, 4). Without a knowledge of this sensualist philosophy, Isla probably would not have given a single direction to the determinism of the picaresque novel or emphasized the influence of material circumstances in his interpretation of the Quijote.

Isla's stenographic descriptive style and choice of factual detail arise also from the interaction of tradition and Enlightenment, and from the outgrowth of modern historical science from the new empirical approach to man. The Gerundio, like the Quijote, has a pseudo-historical form with a primary Arabic source and a plurality of secondary autores. The resemblance ends here. The Quijote is based on a poetic truth, the characters' personal interpretations of circumstances: for example, the baciyelmo and venta-castillo.

In contrast, Isla refuses to write «á imitación de aquellos Historiadores que no hacen escrúpulo de referir lo verosímil como cierto, sin detenerse en contar lo que pudo ser por lo que fue» (II, 157). This satirical declaration of strict adherence to historical truth is not jest. Anachronisms go unnoticed in the Quijote because of the caballero's idealistic interpretation of reality. But the Gerundio's references to concrete dates like «el 14 de octubre de 1753» (II, 208) prevents its «medieval» sources from creating a poetic truth. In fact, the success of the satire on oratorical pedantry is largely owing to the omnipresence of historical truth in the Gerundio; for the more closely a satire points to contemporary history the more effective it is. And effectiveness is insured by an intensification of the satire on historical scholarship as the satire on preachers progresses.

The Gerundio's «mas exactas y exquisitas indagaciones» (II, 157) of the most ludicrous facts seem to aim the historical satire at Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697)¹⁵. Bayle was a Cartesian who abandoned idealism to become one of the first French empiricists. Bayle attempted to distinguish falsehood from truth by careful collation of extremely insignificant facts. For this he was dubbed minutissimarum rerum minutissimus scrutator, a nickname that could also be given Isla for his attention to «los apuntamientos de donde sacamos estas menudencias» (II, 111). A fact for Bayle was an end in itself; once accumulated, sufficient individual facts would automatically arrange themselves into a total view of history. Ernst Cassirer has called Bayle the first positivistic historian and the originator of the ideal of historical exactitude¹⁶. This is essentially the same historical technique that the positivist Hippolyte Taine recommended to novelists a century later. The novel would be true to life if it was a composite of historically true notes, no matter how insignificant or vulgar. Zola welcomed the most banal fact, but rejected the slightest heroic fantasy, as did Isla.

Once certain traditional materials and new philosophical concepts were available for synthesis, a writer with sufficient originality could take advantage of the obvious implications. Since Isla worked with the antecedents of the philosophy of Taine, it was possible for him to produce independently much the same sort of novel as Zola later wrote working from Taine's ideas. Postulating Isla's technique as a prototype of that of the later generation of writers in no way involves direct influences. The Gerundio's determinism bears the same broad ancestral relationship to the highly developed pseudo-science of the roman clinical as Martínez' Medicina Scéptica bears to the medical science of the late nineteenth century. The character of Friar Gerund issues from an empirical analysis of a social problem confronting Isla's age, no less than the personality of Etienne Lantier derives from social conditions in nineteenth-century France. Friar Gerund is forever reducible to the eighteenth-century Spanish ambient.