Narcis Oller and the Catalan Novel: From Romanticism to Naturalism
The Importance of the Lieder Theatre
The Lieder Theatre holds great significance in the history of Catalan literature for several reasons:
- Final recovery of Catalan theatre: Verdaguer and Oller became involved in poetry and novels.
- Projection of Catalan theatre works: Works like “Sea and Heaven” and “Terra Baixa” gained prominence.
- Representation of the best tradition of Catalan theatre: It achieved great public success.
Narrative: The Historical Novel and Realism
The recovery of the Catalan language in fiction was slow and difficult, especially for the novel. This delay was primarily due to the lack of a continuous tradition, as the narrative of great medieval novels, like Curial e Güelfa or Tirant lo Blanc, was cut short during the Modern Age.
The Beginnings of the Novel in Contemporary Catalan
In the early nineteenth century, thanks to the literacy of new social strata, there was a growing public readership for novels and a developing publishing industry, particularly in Valencia and Barcelona. Readers often resorted to foreign romantic novels translated into Spanish.
The dominant narrative style in Europe was the historical novel, influenced by the Romantic view that idealized historical characters and events, emphasizing emotion and dramatic plots over historical accuracy.
From 1830 onwards, the first Catalan writers began producing novels, albeit written in Spanish. These were historical novels dealing with general Spanish history, adapting models from renowned foreign authors like Walter Scott (Ivanhoe). Novels were often published in chapters, enhancing dramatic elements and incorporating sentimental and moralizing purposes.
Catalan literature also incorporated trends from French authors like Eugène Sue (The Mysteries of Paris) and Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers).
The use of the Catalan language in the novel didn’t occur until the 1860s. In 1862, Antoni de Bofarull published the first contemporary novel in Catalan: L’orfeneta de Menàrguens o Catalunya agonitzant, a historical novel set in the early fifteenth century, dealing with the Catalan succession crisis following the death of Martin I of Aragon.
The most important Romantic novelist was Martí Genís i Aguilar, whose work Julita (1874) introduced a new approach to the sentimental and idealist novel, but it didn’t have lasting influence.
Precedents of Realistic Fiction
Costumbrist prose opened a new path compared to the romantic novel by taking immediate reality as literary material. Values like imagination, emotion, and drama were replaced by observation, description, and humor, paving the way for the realist novel.
Writers were aware that traditional ways of life were disappearing due to industrialization and aimed to reflect them in their work with a sense of nostalgia. The most representative genre was the costumbrismo article (in newspapers) or the costumbrismo sketch (similar to theatre scenes). These were short, humorous pieces describing everyday scenes (celebrations, family life, street conversations, crafts) and typical characters (the grocer, the widowed barber), often set in working-class neighborhoods or rural areas.
Costumbrismo was characterized by its attempt to vividly reproduce the grace of colloquial language (how Catalan was spoken), the predominance of description over plot, and the abundance of spontaneous dialogues.
The work of Emili Vilanova (1840-1905) is considered the best example of costumbrismo narrative. It contains a wealth of customs and documents, through which the author, mixing humor, nostalgia, and tenderness, depicts the popular and elegant world of nineteenth-century Barcelona.
From Realism to Naturalism
Realism, the artistic movement of the mid-nineteenth century, was characterized by the immediate representation of reality through objective description.
Factors influencing its emergence include faith in progress, positivism, discoveries in natural science, photography, and the dissemination of new social ideologies.
In literature, realism promoted the realist novel, considered the most suitable genre for reproducing the real world. It abandoned fantastical, marvelous, and legendary themes to focus on immediate reality (everyday life). It also showed great interest in all aspects of society, even the unpleasant ones, analyzing them in detail.
The storyline aimed to portray both the social and family environments of the characters, their moods and conflicts, through detailed and objective descriptions.
Novelists often chose the omniscient narrator to maintain a neutral and objective perspective.
During the last third of the nineteenth century, naturalist writers attempted to demonstrate that their characters were subject to universal determinism: their character and behavior were governed by laws similar to physical or natural phenomena.
The naturalist author Emile Zola intended his novels to be scientific studies with a reformist purpose.
Literary critics Joan Sardà and Josep Yxart promoted realism and naturalism in the Catalan novel, influencing Narcis Oller.
Narcis Oller: A Vocational Narrator
Oller was born in 1846. Orphaned at the age of seven, he was educated under the guardianship of a wealthy lawyer uncle. After completing his law degree in Barcelona, he dedicated himself to his legal profession, which he combined with his literary vocation throughout his life.
Politically, he leaned towards Catalan nationalism of a conservative nature, representing the bourgeoisie, the social class he described in detail in his novels. He died in Barcelona in 1930.
Finding New Narrative Formulas
The publication of Pilar Prim (1906) marked the end of Oller’s novelistic trajectory and his last attempt to adapt to new narrative formulas, influenced by Modernism, which were becoming dominant in Catalan literature.
The Literary Career of Narcis Oller
Narcis Oller began his literary career writing romantic and costumbrist stories in Spanish. Several factors led him to switch to Catalan: his relationships with writers from the Renaixença magazine and the profound impression made by the Floral Games of 1877.
Beyond sentimental or political reasons, there were also literary ones: strongly influenced by contemporary French authors, especially Zola, and convinced by the critics Josep Yxart and Joan Sardà about the narrative possibilities of European realism and naturalism, he saw no other way to accurately reflect the reality of his world than by using the language that described it: “I write novels in Catalan because I live in Catalonia, I copy Catalan customs and landscapes, the types I depict are Catalan, and I feel Catalan every day.”
His novelistic production was limited to six novels, but he also published numerous short stories and literary memoirs, which are valuable for studying his novels.
Oller’s contact with important novelists from within and outside Spain gave him an unusual reputation in Catalan literature at the time. Émile Zola wrote the foreword to the French edition of La Papallona, describing it as “a study of characters and a slightly idealized environment through a very precise observation.” Oller’s idealistic and moralistic tendencies, rooted in Romanticism, are a constant in his work, contrasting with the naturalist realism he attempted to follow.
Transition Phase Between Romanticism and Realism
In 1882, he published his first novel, La Papallona, which gained international fame and was translated into several languages. This transitional work contains romantic aspects, such as its plot, more typical of serialized novels (Tonet, a poor, illiterate, and naive orphaned girl, is seduced by Lluís, a “butterfly” from a higher social class, who leaves her pregnant), and the presence of dramatic elements, chance, and a moralistic ending (Tonet, ready to die, manages to marry her seducer).
However, realistic and even naturalistic aspects also appear, such as detailed descriptions of the environment (Barcelona’s artisan world undergoing industrialization) and explanations of the protagonist’s biological and psychological background.
Consolidation Stage: Between Realism and Naturalism
a) L’Escanyapobres (1884)
Considered one of Oller’s best works. Based on the theme of avarice, the novel is firmly rooted in Realism through its historical context: the description of rural society undergoing industrialization. However, as indicated in the subtitle (“estudi d’una passió”), it approaches Naturalism by studying the process of greed, personified in Oleguer, “L’Escanyapobres”, and his wife. The passion for money, described in erotic terms, is taken to its ultimate consequences: progressive isolation, fear, obsession, and ultimately, mental imbalance.
The nature of this passion is seen not only as a mental defect but also as immoral behavior (Oleguer’s tragic death can be interpreted as a “punishment”) that prevents the regeneration of society. The elimination of such regressive behavior represents the triumph of the new mentality of an evolving society, symbolized in the novel by the arrival of the railway in rural areas.
b) La Febre d’Or (1890-1892)
Oller’s most ambitious and realistic work, as its technique is based on observation. It creates believable characters and accurately portrays the transformation of a city of artisans into a bourgeois and industrial society within a specific historical context: the period of stock market fever that Barcelona experienced between 1880 and 1882, making the novel a rich social and historical document, especially of Barcelona’s upper bourgeoisie.
The novel is divided into two parts: La pujada, which depicts the rapid economic and social rise of the artisan Gil Foix to the high bourgeoisie thanks to his skillful stock market speculation, and L’estimbada, where the stock market crash and the protagonist’s ruin lead him back to his social origins and his carpentry trade.
c) La Bogeria (1899)
Oller’s most naturalistic novel, where Zola’s theoretical principles are the main topic of discussion among three characters. One of them, the narrator, questions whether the protagonist Daniel Serrallonga’s mental alienation is due to his genetic background (laws of inheritance) and exacerbated by social and family conditions (environmental determinism).
His thesis is that the human soul cannot be explained solely by deterministic laws or studied with the same precision as physical reality.
Technically, it is Oller’s most innovative and modern novel. It breaks with the third-person omniscient narrator and instead uses a first-person, internal (actively participating in the action) and limited (playing a secondary role as a witness) narrator.
Description is reduced in favor of narration and dialogue, and the objectivity demanded by realism is achieved through a combination of three narrative perspectives: Dr. Giberga, who provides the scientific and naturalistic version of the case; Armengol, who represents society’s irresponsible attitude towards the mentally ill; and the narrator, who offers a sentimental, spiritualist, or idealist point of view.
Pilar Prim (1906)
The author abandons the naturalist imperative and produces a psychological realist novel with new techniques: the use of symbols and vague descriptions to create atmosphere, the correlation between landscape descriptions and the characters’ moods, the exploration of their inner lives, and the enhancement of perspective and style through interior monologue and free indirect discourse.
Pilar Prim is the story of a woman struggling against a hostile environment that prevents her from loving according to her inclinations and her inner moral sense. Pilar Prim, a middle-aged widow, falls passionately in love with a young lawyer but faces numerous obstacles to fulfilling her love: family opposition (her daughter objects), moral prejudices, social conventions (a widow with children remarrying was frowned upon), and legal injustice (her husband’s will stipulates that she loses the usufruct of his property if she remarries).
In this novel, Narcis Oller revisits a common theme in nineteenth-century European literature: the oppressed and dissatisfied woman in a patriarchal and aggressively moralistic society.
Narcis Oller’s Work as a Whole
Narcis Oller’s work, modeled on Balzac, aspired to be a comprehensive novel of the time and place where he lived, namely Catalan society during the Restoration. To give unity to his novels, Oller uses recurring characters in different works, all set in urban (Barcelona) and rural (the archetypal villages Pratbell and Vilaniu, invented by the author) settings, and explores recurring sub-themes such as the railway, the stock market, and political corruption (caciquismo).