New Problems of Realism in Martín Rivas

Introduction

This article discusses the social and political projections of Martín Rivas (1862) and demonstrates how they are a feature of the novel’s poetics and mode of representation, which we can partially describe as realist. To read Martín Rivas as a realist novel is to think about how the national imaginary was constructed in nineteenth-century Chile, an assembly whose validity lasts until the first decades of the twentieth century. Martín Rivas also serves as an example for novelas de costumbres, loosely translated as novels of manners, a relevant set of fictional works published during the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, the outcomes of this study may be useful for the reading of other novels by Blest Gana, such as La aritmética en el amor [Arithmetic in Love] (1860) or El ideal de un calavera [The Ideal of a Rogue] (1863), and may be useful to our understanding of texts by other authors of the same period, such as Alberto el jugador (1860) by Rosario Orrego de Uribe, La diversión de las familias, Lances de Noche Buena (1865) by Moisés Vargas, or Los misterios de Santiago (1858) by José Antonio Torres.^[1]

There are two reasons why a realist reading of Martín Rivas should be considered a partial reading. First, because realism describes only incompletely the text’s hybridised mode of representation: Martín Rivas is woven from threads that are not completely amalgamated from romance and the modern realistic novel. Second, because Martín Rivas “twists” or amplifies its French model in a particular and characteristic way; as we see, instead of talking about “realism” we will have to talk about a local and particular assimilation of that form of aesthetics.

This essay will explore how this particular transformation of realism should be considered an adaptation which in part constricts its power. Realism’s capacity to represent is limited because it is forced to go back in time, resulting in a pre-modern function for a literary development that, by definition, is considered modern. This “pre-modern” function involves singing the praises of a social class that considered itself as naturally privileged, that is, an oligarchic bourgeoisie that dreams, in literary fiction, of being an aristocracy.

Realism as a Technology of Literary Writing

The notion of literary realism can be understood in four different but complementary ways: As a long-term development that shaped the modern fictional narrative from the fifteenth century onwards, an equivalent of what is known in the English-speaking world as a novel.^[2] As a specific mode of representation that crystallises in the European nineteenth century, during a period that is known in histories of literature as “realism,” especially as it pertains to France. This is considered to be the basis of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative programs, among which Naturalism and Socialist Realism stand out. Finally, realism is conceived as a technology of literary writing, a set of pieces and compositional rules that Latin American writers imported from Europe and used for their own purposes.

Realism’s enduring feature is a general trend in Western narrative that goes right along with the progression of modernity and capitalist expansion (Gramuglio 17–19). It is distinguished by its preference for particular aspects of the lived experiences of individual subjects. It finds formal expression in devices such as a proper name, a precise situation of the narrative in time and space, a causal sequence of events, and the development of a critical and original spirit in the narrator (Watt 9–34). These operations, which Ian Watt describes as a way of understanding the world, will be considered by Roland Barthes as a rhetorical code, the “concrete detail”^[3] that produces an effet de réel (Barthes 220–221). In terms of novelistic construction, this kind of realism is identified with the modern novel, since it implies the emergence of a personal narrator and the progressive incongruity of a direct and indirect means of representation (Kayser 64–65).

In its second sense, we identify literary realism with the école realiste, that is to say, the trend that took place in France during the nineteenth century, and which counts among its cardinal names those of Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers. Thinking of it as a mode of representation that evolves over time, this trend will gradually add five features: a historicist setting in the present time (Stendhal); a necessary correlation between the material environment and the subject (Balzac); ruthless objectivism (Flaubert); a grotesque aestheticism (Goncourt); and an overt political orientation (Zola) (Auerbach 443–498). Within the wide scope of Western culture, nineteenth-century realism implements a definite breaking down of the old rule of styles: it executes a “complete emancipation” (554); that is, realistic narratives interrupt a millenary tradition and consider the vicissitudes of subjects that are “low” or even “worse” than us to be worthy of sublime or elevated representation.

In a third sense, the realistic mode of representation is a starting point for at least two aesthetic programs that, originating in Europe, had a strong influence in Latin America. I am referring, in the first place, to Naturalism, especially as it is formulated in The Experimental Novel. Using the experimental method of the natural sciences as a starting point, Zola legitimises the knowledge of the novel, in keeping with Claude Bernard’s use of medical knowledge (Zola 41). Socialist Realism, an aesthetic project that originated in the Soviet Union, sought, for its part, the heroic construction of a popular subject. Heir to a certain romantic idealism (Zhdánov 76; Clark 28), it moves to link realistic aesthetics and revolution, that is, it proposes that social classes that advance politically and become mobile tend to use realism as a literary expression, which would explain the bourgeois realism in the nineteenth century as well as twentieth-century proletarian realism (Lunacharski 58–59).

Starting from these three historical incarnations of realism, an operational definition of the procedures that define narrative realism as a technology of writing can be attempted, that is, as a series of operations that can be exported to other contexts. Its cardinal features are particularisation of characters, times, and spaces; breakdown of the old rule of literary styles; historicism; originality; incongruence of direct and indirect narrative; and a personal narrator. This essay will explore a further feature which we should conceive of as a productive object, an imported technology like many others that have been imported throughout the history of Latin America. Its contours reveal themselves in a displaced and hybrid way; hence, displacement and hybridity will be the object of this analysis.

Romance and the Modern Novel

The world represented in Martín Rivas appears, at least, under two modalities or representational regimes. Critics have called the first melodrama or romance, and this corresponds, in general, to the love plot of the novel, which follows a more or less fixed scheme, with more or fewer variations: mysterious birth, prophecies, adoptive parents, separation from lovers, incessant adventures, and final marriage (Frye, The Secular 4–5). Within this mode, we witness the arrival of Martín at the Encinas’ house, his overwhelming love for Leonor, the various obstacles that their love must overcome to achieve marriage, and their final union. In the background, Rafael San Luis’s fondness for the young Matilde Elías can be counted, his slip with Adelaida Molina, the unrequited affection that Edelmira Molina feels for Martín, and even Agustín Encina’s marriage to Matilde, towards the end of the novel. Much has been written, and very accurately, about the political meaning of these erotic strands. In his 1972 essay, “Martín Rivas o la formación del burgués” [Martín Rivas or the Making of a Bourgeois], Jaime Concha proposed that these romances had an allegorical character, symbolising a formulation for class consciousness in the Chilean oligarchic bourgeoisie (46). Doris Sommer, for her part, expanded this allegorical formation towards the project of nation building, encoded by pairs of lovers who represent “particular regions, races, parties, economic interests, and the like” (Sommer 5). The Latin American scope of her study allows us to discover similar structures in the contemporaneous fiction of a variety of different countries and oligarchies.

The relationships between romance and the modern – that is, realist – novel are intimate and conflictual. For Northrop Frye the novel tends to constitute a parodic displacement of romance, which remains as a structural core of a narrative fiction (The Secular 37–38). And, there is a relevant fact that makes them oppose each other. As I pointed out before, the realistic novel is transitive, that is, it violates the old rule of styles that prevented the representation of subjects “equal or worse than us” in sublime genres, and allows them to be “subjects of serious, problematic and even tragic representation” (Auerbach 529). Romance, on the other hand, clings firmly to its characterisations; the romance hero is just one degree below deity and is “better than we are” and our environment. Although this hero identifies as a human, his or her actions are always wonderful (Frye, Anatomy 33).

In Martín Rivas, the cohabitation of novel and romance has a dynamic that does not follow or, rather, that complicates Frye’s genealogy. Although Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), its French model, could be described as a realistic displacement of a previous, nuclear romance, in Blest Gana’s novel the love thread is much more naïve than in Stendhal’s novel. In fact, it lacks the parodic distance that Frye recognises in a realistic narrative.^[4] It is as if, in the hands of Henri Beyle, the novel moves the same distance away from romance as it covers when returning to Blest Gana’s hands. This new approach will imply the restoration of the superhuman or almost superhuman quality of its protagonists, which has relevant consequences for our reading. I will return to this later.

A Way of Wanting to Be

Blest Gana uses a cultural product, realism, in an openly ideological way, which originally had another use, also ideological. It works, to use the famous expression of Roberto Schwarz, as an idéa fora do lugar, a misplaced idea.^[11] Over the course of its long duration, the realist novel expressed the values of the bourgeois individual and allowed for a bourgeois exploration of a world beyond.^[12] In Martín Rivas, the novel’s mechanisms become displaced in the way that we have just seen. So, what is this new ideological use, this new impropriety?

The first thing that should be noted is what remains. It is a realistic novel, that is, it continues to serve the bourgeois interests of the Chilean oligarchy. Martín, above all, embodies utility – in various places, it is said that he sirve mucho [he is very useful]  – a classic value of the realist novel which, in this case, means drive and energy for business at the same time and a certain skill and discretion necessary for the clandestine affairs of the upper classes (Moretti, The Bourgeois 35–39; Concha 57).

But the nineteenth-century Chilean oligarchy is not purely bourgeois, or it is so in a way that is different from the European bourgeoisie. Until 1830 it was a group whose wealth had an agrarian base, the hacienda, which from this date on, understood the importance of properly modern mercantile and mining elements (Pinto et al. 34). The shifts in a realistic mode of representation feed an aristocratic fantasy that is recognised by historians of different stripes, and one from which some of them cannot escape.^[13] According to that fantasy, the Chilean aristocracy would in fact be “better than we are,” like the heroes of a romance, sublime even, like Leonor.

More interesting than this observation, however, is to consider the very displacement of the realistic mode of representation, whose misplaced use we can now appreciate in all its flagrant impropriety. This entails a technology of writing that is at the heart of bourgeois modernity, used by this social group for ends that are diametrically opposed to the ends for which it was conceived. Instead of an interclass portrait, we have a narcissistic painting. In part, this displacement restricts the powers of realism, since it limits its capacity to represent. The world becomes smaller in Blest Gana’s novels, and since the author assigns pre-modern functions to realism, he makes it go back in time. Indeed, this type of modern novel wants to fulfil a function similar to the epic’s in heroic societies, that is, the praise of a group that has naturalised its privileges. In this case, however, we have an oligarchic bourgeoisie that can only imagine itself as an aristocracy – which it is not, or at least not completely.

Authors such as Luis Barros, Ximena Vergara, and Manuel Vicuña have described with detail and intelligence the material grounds, ideas, and practices that characterise this bourgeoisie that seeks to be aristocratic. Such an aspiration could be imagined as possible because a substantial part of that social group had leisure time due to their rentier condition (Barros and Vergara 64). This allowed them to create a certain mythology around their own lineage, which usually went back to a conquistador or encomendero (98). Regarding social practices, Vicuña accurately describes the preponderant place of the tertulia, which favours inbreeding and allows the teaching – and control – of a code of conduct and a repertoire of gestures and expressions that was called buenas maneras, good manners (28–29). An important source of this repertoire is, precisely, Martín Rivas.

It seems more or less clear to me that Blest Gana’s use of realistic aesthetics is part of those practices, albeit on a much more abstract level than that described by these authors. This should compel us to look for other intellectual constructions similar to those of realism and read them from this perspective. I am thinking, for example, of the debate on historiography held by Andrés Bello, Jacinto Chacón, and José Victorino Lastarria in the 1840s. The issue under discussion was the way in which history should be written in Chile. Bello was in favour of the ad narrandum method, that is, the chronological recollection of past events and their transmission as an objective account, a preliminary step to any generalisation which would always be perceived as premature for a country where, in his opinion, “history has not been made” (307).^[14] Lastarria advocated a philosophical history or ad probandum, which did not relate the facts but used them “to trace a history of their influence on the society to which they belong” (Lastarria 100), that is, to discover the general principles that shape history (Dager Alva 99). Bello’s view is modern, particularising, typical of the bourgeois spirit; Lastarria’s leans toward an idealism that is liberal, certainly, but remains idealistic. Ana María Stuven points out that, behind his “philosophical history,” one can read in Lastarria a rejection of Providence as an engine of history, a secularising idea that accentuated free will^[15] and that put at risk two of the basic consensuses of nineteenth-century sociability: the structure of estates inherited from the colony and Catholic Christianity. Hence, Stuven conjectures that Bello defended a particular narrative method so as to avoid a religious discussion of unsuspected consequences for that time (241).^[16] Just as Blest Gana uses realism for the construction of the aristocratic dream, Bello uses the principles that govern modern experience, in this case, for the maintenance of an oligarchic order.^[17]

This particular way of understanding realism will eventually lose its validity during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Its last throes can be read in Casa Grande (1908), by Luis Orrego Luco, where the members of the oligarchy begin to be “worse” than we are, even capable of very grotesque crimes. The writers of this elite, already put into question, will abandon realism once they discover the avant-garde expression. Without the prestige of the second half of the nineteenth century, without continuing to be a nineteenth-century style of realism but a form once again displaced from itself, realism will be inherited, instead, by authors of the emerging Chilean middle class, such as Baldomero Lillo and Mariano Latorre.

Fuera de lugar [Misplaced]: The World

The way in which nineteenth-century Chilean realism works, as a misplaced idea, as a device at the service of a national oligarchy, is just one of the many possibilities offered by the novel in its worldwide spread. Franco Moretti, interested in studying this long-lasting phenomenon, proposed a simple rule: the modern European novel travels around the globe in the form of a compromise between Western formal influence and local materials (Distant 50). A careful reading of Martín Rivas allows us to think that this interaction is actually richer and more complex. The local materials in this case are less important than the work that Blest Gana carries out on realistic expression itself. The figure of Leonor, citizen of Santiago, would not change very much were she to be in Paris. It could even be said that the differences between popular subjects in both cities are surely not as great as the radical decision to represent them or refuse to do so.

The problem that this writing sought to solve was the creation of a literature that exalted a modern ruling class as if it were an old aristocracy. This solution surely changes if the problem is different. We can begin a fruitful exercise if we are able to distinguish the problems realism solves in each of the nations in which it is assimilated. In India, Meenakshi Mukherjee tells us, the problem is that “the characters in the work of these novelists [the authors of realist novels] seemed to lead lives of infinite possibilities, while the life of the nineteenth-century Indian – politically servile, economically deprived and socially circumscribed – seemed to them limited by comparison” (7). Certainly, we can see that there are very inviting possibilities when comparing both situations.

In Martín Rivas, there is a character to whom the novel delegates almost all its moments of humour: Agustín Encina, the afrancesado. A little cowardly, a little arrogant, he is nevertheless sincere and faithful to Leonor and Martín. The most striking thing about him is his way of speaking. He speaks with Spanish words but uses the French syntax: soy todo a ti (125), la amo de todo mi corazón (126), mi toda bella (131). Would this be a fairly obvious representation of Alberto Blest Gana himself, who had also been in France when he was very young, and who also tried to place Chilean issues under a realist lens, which he had read about in France, in Balzac and Stendhal? Perhaps we should think again about the value of the young Encina, no longer as a comic caricature but as a figure of modernity.^[18] He wins the jackpot, in any case: a very advantageous marriage to his cousin Matilde. That should not surprise us so much.