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Rethinking «Pedro Sánchez»: A review article


Anthony H. Clarke



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JOSÉ MARÍA DE PEREDA. Pedro Sánchez. Ed. J. M. Conzález Herrán. Colección Austral, No. 149. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990. 432 pp.





It is 110 years since the publication of Pereda's Pedro Sánchez, the most Galdosian and possibly the most enigmatic of all his major fiction; but it is only during the last twenty years or so that the true face of this novel -or one of its most convincing faceshas begun to emerge. Montesinos's chapter on Pedro Sánchez was disappointing as compared with those on El sabor de la tierruca, Sotileza and Peñas arriba, and it was to Cossío's edition of the novel that the reader seeking elucidation of tricky points had to turn for three decades, not forgetting, of course, the fine earlier edition -for its rime by R. E. Bassett.

The present edition proposes an exciting new interpretation -indeed one which I believe will be a landmark in Pereda studies. However, in turn, it owes a great deal to the pioneering psycho-analytical-cum-literary essays on the novel by F. Pérez Gutiérrez, and, to a lesser extent, to G. Gullón's «El autor como narrador.» The involvement of Pérez Gutiérrez with Pedro Sánchez dates back to 1975 with his El problema religioso en la generación de 1868. The interpretation of Pedro Sánchez there is in part carried over into his more detailed account ten years later («¿Por qué Pedro Sánchez?»), and then recently resurfaced in modified form in his «Introduction» to the Tatín edition of the novel. Herrán's view of Pedro Sánchez could scarcely have come into being without the steppingstones provided by Pérez Gutiérrez's two earlier pronouncements on the novel, and their influence is handsomely acknowledged, but the fact remains that a more rounded and perhaps a more definitive reading of Pedro Sánchez is reached in the present «Introduction» and «Notes,» though further repercussions might be expected by bouncing these conclusions off Sotileza and Peñas arriba and then coming back to Pedro Sánchez.

I began by alluding to this novel as Galdosian and enigmatic. It is «Galdosian» in one very obvious sense, in that it is set in Madrid and is, in some respects, Perez's equivalent of an episodio nacional. All well and good, but it is also Galdosian in a much profounder and less obvious sense, one which underlines the debt of both Galdós (in Misericordia, for example) and Pereda to Cervantes. There is an ambiguity, an irony, a narrative duplicity and playfulness in Pedro Sánchez which we shall look for in vain amongst Pereda's other major fiction. Pedro Sánchez, the protagonist, presents in first-person narrative his own rise and fall, his emergence from the cocoon of his Montaña village and valley («eterno jardín») to sudden eminence in Madrid via various trials and «azares,» and his subsequent decline into a sad and lonely old age. Very little of this, save the journey   -202-   to Madrid, the «Posada estudiantil,» the literary scene, the July Revolution, corresponds to what is known of Pereda's own experiences (1852-54), yet there is an uncanny and allpervading sense for the reader who knows well Pereda and his work that at a deeper level the novel is not really about an invented and novelistically sustained character called Pedro Sánchez so much as about the author himself.

Pereda provides a pointer to the possible influence of the picaresque novel on Pedro Sánchez (taken up by many early critics, and more recently and most effectively by Gullón, though minimized in favour of other aspects by Pérez Gutiérrez and Herrán) in his unambiguous reference to Gil Blas halfway through the text. Certainly at the end of the novel the role of «escarmiento» -both punishment and lesson- is immense, echoing Guzmán and other picaresque precedents, but the question remains as to why, if Pedro is in some obscure and deep-seated way a «trasunto» of Pereda himself, should he have devised such a heavy-handed «escarmiento» and saga of quasi-biblical catastrophes at the end? Why should Pereda have created a first-person narrative in which there is no allusion to the protagonist's mother and, by contrast, as shown by Pérez Gutiérrez, frequent references, presumably symbolical, to «la Madre Tierra»? Why this cold, cruel Clara, appropriately linked in recent criticism to some of Poe's more atavistic creations (Pérez Gutiérrez, «¿Por qué Pedro Sánchez?» [113], El problema religioso [164], and Bonet) and to Dickens's Rosa Dartle (Clarke, «Asi que pasen ciento diez años» [21] y «Pereda's Pedro Sánchez» [197]? Why, in 1883, sandwiched between the relatively traditional and stable modes of El sabor de la tierruca1 and Sotileza, this symbol-laden, myth-making, self-revealing and self-concealing un-Peredian novel? One can see why, for example, ten years later Pereda should write the latter half of Peñas arriba in the spirit of the Book of job; but why, in 1883, write a Spanish Vanity Fair with complicated psychological hang-ups?

The answers to some, if not all, of these questions are to be found embedded in the «Introduction» and «Notes» to this edition. Steadily, lucidly, building on the early critical tradition to some extent, but more especially on Pérez Gutiérrez's contributions, and using an impressive battery of references to critical stances on the European novel as a whole, Professor Herrán nudges and pushes Pedro Sánchez and Pereda criticism onto a level of distinction and density which would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The exciting result, for this reader, is that Pedro Sánchez emerges -though there are important implications here for Sotileza and Peñas arriba as well- as the decided «oveja negra» of the canon, proclaiming clearly, in the light of Herrán's interpretation, our previous inability to fathom the depths of this novel and our easy acceptance of a century of received ideas. Further still, Pedro Sánchez's formal aspects -symbol and imagery; that epoch-making first paragraph's repercussions through the whole of the text, like the first paragraph of The Ambassadors-, its use of myth and murky evocation «à la Poe,» reveal a vulnerable, enmeshed author, whose critical parameters are far from being clearly established. It is interesting, of course, that Galdós left us no evaluation of Pedro Sánchez, apart from a brief probable reference to this novel in his reply to Pereda's Academy Speech. Had he done so, he could scarcely have failed -given his own approach to the novel- to perceive the density, the complexity, the ambiguity and the ludic irony of Pereda's narrative mode, hinting occasionally at the sort of effect that we familiarly associate with Galdós himself (Tormento, La de Bringas), but which we scarcely ever think to associate with Pereda.

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There is little point in giving a blow-by-blow account of Professor Herrán's «Introduction.» Suffice it to say that the picaresque vein is given a low profile, save in its relevance to «ejemplaridad,» «escarmiento» and the «melancolia/desengaño» characterizing the mood of the first-person narrative, viewed from the chastened last years of the protagonist's life. All this is dispatched in under three pages, leaving space for the aspects which are to form the cornerstones of his argument: possible links with the «Bildungsroman»; clear parallels with the theoretical grouping of Trilling («avant la lettre») of nineteenth-century novels based around the fortunes of a «young man from the provinces» (later telescoped by Donald Fanger to the Great Expectations/Illusions Perdues formula); probable points of contact with St. Augustine's Confessions (well covered previously by Pérez Gutiérrez), with the traditional folk-tale of the Middle Ages (seeking one's fortune from humble beginnings, obstacles in the hero's path, penetrating the «recinto encantado») and hence with mythic archetypes. All of this is put together in relation to Pedro Sánchez in the most convincing, yet succinct, manner, and it is held firmly in place by the clinching argument with regards to the biographical/autobiographical side. Following up Pérez Gutiérrez's revolutionary psycho-analytical interpretation, in which this fine critic suggests that in this novel Pereda reveals glimpses of another self («Esa biografía 'equivocada' de Pedro Sánchez, ¿no podría encubrir una tentación de Pereda, la de haber sido 'otro'?») Herrán goes a stage further: «la historia de Pedro Sánchez no sería la que Pereda habría querido vivir sino, al contrario, la que temió haber vivido; la que acaso estuvo a punto de vivir y, afortunadamente -porque supo tomar la decisión acertada- no vivió.» Only by relating this «otherness» of Pereda the man in Pedro Sánchez to the other two Peredian novels in which something of the same phenomenon occurs -namely Sotileza and Peñas arriba, where the protagonists, Andrés and Marcelo, make up, along with Pedro, a trio of autobiographical projections and distortions will it be possible to take this line of investigation and conjecture any further than at present. Herrán himself announces (note 38) his intention to explore the Pedro Sánchez/Peñas arriba link-up in more depth, along the lines indicated in his paper «Érase un muchacho» of 1987. Meanwhile we have, in this «Introduction,» an important addition to the critical canon. Together with a substantial body of scholarly notes -replacing Cossio's in most cases but, characteristically, quoting these where they cannot be bettered- and an authoritative text (the first edition of 1883, with variants from the 1884 and 1891 Obras completas texts, and comments on the variant readings where necessary), this «Introduction» forms one of the most satisfying offerings of Pereda criticism in recent years. The repercussions of Herran's interpretation will be at the centre of Pereda studies for many years to come, and in a very real sense -taking due account of Pérez Gutiérrez's perceptive reading of the novel- we can affirm that Pedro Sánchez will never be quite the same again.

University of Birmingham





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WORKS CITED

Bonet, Laureano. «Sonidos, imágenes, volúmenes: Pereda entre la risa abstracta y la tentación decadentista.» Ínsula 547-48 (July-August 1992): 19-20.

Clarke, Anthony H. «Así que pasen ciento diez años; el secreto de Pedro Sánchez.» Ínsula 547-48 (July-August 1992): 21.

-. «Pereda's Pedro Sánchez, the Dickens Connection.» 'Como se fue el maestro': For Derek W. Lomax 'In Memoriam' Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1995. 187-208.

González Herrán, José Manuel. «Érase un muchacho que emprendió un viaje.» Unpublished lecture given at the University of Birmingham.

Gullón, Germán. El narrador en la novela del siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus, 1976.

Montesinos, José F. Pereda o la novela idilio. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1961.

Pereda, José María de. El sabor de la tierruca. Ed. Anthony H. Clarke. Obras completas. 10 tomos. Santander: Tantín, 1992. 5: 13-314.

-. Pedro Sánchez. Ed. Ralph Emmerson Bassett. Boston: Ginn, 1907.

-. Pedro Sánchez. Ed. José María de Cossío. 1958. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968.

-. Pedro Sánchez. Ed. F. Pérez Gutiérrez. Obras completas . 10 tomos. Santander: Tantín, 1992. 5: 315-673.

Pérez Gutiérrez, F. El problema religioso en la generación de 1868. Madrid: Taurus, 1975.

-. ¿Por qué Pedro Sánchez? (La salida de Pereda hacia dentro).» Nueve lecciones sobre Pereda. Santander: Institución Cultural de Cantabria, 1985. 91-118.



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