When Literary Realism Isn’t Quite “Real” Enough: Utopic Responses in Benito Pérez Galdós

Alrick C. Knight, Jr.

Throughout his career as novelist, playwright, journalist and politician, the Spanish luminary Benito Pérez Galdós (1846-1920)—considered by most to be second only to Cervantes in Spanish letters—never manages to distance himself from the civil wars, class inequalities and political corruption that marked nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Throughout his ouvre we confront a thinker who is clearly cognizant of the social, religious and epistemological tensions of his time, as well as their effect on aesthetics.

Although these issues always troubled him, the final phases of Galdós’s literary output evidence a person who, with increasing desperation, quests for answers. In the wake of the failed Revolution of 1868 (a bid for a liberal, constitutional government that ultimately could not make good on the promises it had made to Spain and itself), and spurred by the failure of subsequent attempts at widespread social change, Galdós’s literary response is remarkable. Saddled with the same social and epistemological burdens as their real-life counterparts, his characters frequently respond with acts of suicide. Even more intriguingly—and more characteristic of his final works—messianic interventions become a central motif, entailing a secular judgement followed by an anarquistic leveling of an unjust world. Crucially, this deux ex machina maneuvre suggests the last-resort necessity of utopic (next-world) solutions, a radical gesture that is not found in the author's earlier works, and which underscores the experimental gropings of a writer who experiences the modern world as increasingly complex and inscrutable.