Scripted Geographies : Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors [1 ed.] 9780838759417, 9780838756331

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Scripted Geographies

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Scripted Geographies Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors

Gayle R. Nunley

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

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䉷 2007 by Rosement Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8387-5633-6/07 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp. pc.]

Associated University Press 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nunley, Gayle R., 1958Scripted geographies : travel writings by nineteenth-century Spanish authors / Gayle R. Nunley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-8387-5633-6 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8387-5633-1 (alk. paper) 1. Spanish prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Travelers’ writings, Spanish—History and criticism. 3. Authors, Spanish—19th century— Travel. 4. Travel in literature. I. Title. PQ6137.N86 2007 868⬘.5080932—dc22

2005037909

printed in the united states of america

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For my parents and for Chuck

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: La manı´a de viajar: Reading and Writing Foreign Travel in Nineteenth-Century Spain

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1. Al sur fluye el Sena: Mesonero’s Paris and the Dilemmas of Reading Modernity 2. Miremos siempre hacia atra´s: Galdo´s Confronts the Italian Grand Tour 3. Esta corta travesı´a: Alarco´n and the (In)Definition of Spanish Orientalism 4. Una geografı´a aparte: Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano and the Quest for the Distant Other Epilogue: Scripting Geographies

169 217

Appendix: Listing of Foreign Travel Chronicles by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors Notes Works Cited Index

220 225 253 265

27 77 123

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Acknowledgements PORTIONS OF TWO CHAPTERS GREW FROM PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED WORK, as follows: ‘‘The Vision of Nineteenth-Century Paris in the Recuerdos de viaje of Ramo´n de Mesonero Romanos’’ (Symposium 47.3 [Fall 1993]: 220–36) provided the basis for the revised and expanded discussion of Mesonero’s travel writing in chapter 1; ‘‘The ‘Yodisea’ of Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano: Personal and Cultural Identity in Panoramas orientales: Impresiones de un viajero-poeta’’ (Letras peninsulares 13.2–3 [Fall–Winter 2000–2001]: 485–97) informed the expanded discussion of Panoramas orientales in chapter 4. It has often been said that though research and writing are often largely solitary endeavors, the resulting manuscript is inevitably a collaborative project. That has certainly been the case for the present volume. For funding my research travel to Europe, without which the identification and collection of the travel writings of Spain’s nineteenth-century authors could never have taken place, I would like to thank the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Vermont. I am grateful also to the UVM Interlibrary Loan Office for quickly processing so many hard-to-obtain book requests and to Jean Hannon of the Harvard Law Library, Charles Aston of the University of Pittsburgh Library’s Office of Special Collections, and the many other helpful librarians and archivists in the United States and Europe who have assisted me in the course of gathering materials. I also feel a great debt of gratitude to many former professors and present colleagues. Though I cannot begin to acknowledge them all individually, special thanks go to Tony Geist and Bob Russell, who first inspired me to major in Spanish during my undergraduate years at Dartmouth; to John Rassias, who helped me recognize why I wanted to become a teacher; and to Luis Ferna´ndez Cifuentes and Robert Hollander, with whom I studied at Princeton, who will always stand for me as consummate exam9

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ples of scholarship and humanism. On a personal level I reserve my deepest gratitude for my parents, to whom I owe so much, and for Chuck, who has shared in every facet of this project and without whose insight and literary sensitivity the results would have been much the poorer.

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A Note on Translations ALL TRANSLATIONS ARE MINE, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. OTHER THAN the occasional modernization of spelling archaisms, variations from the original quotation are always noted.

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Introduction: La manı´a de viajar: Reading and Writing Foreign Travel in Nineteenth-Century Spain El espan ˜ ol fuera de Espan ˜ a, forma, pues, ya un tipo aparte en nuestra sociedad moderna, tipo bastante comu´n para que salga de las condiciones de una mera excepcio´n y para que puedan y aun deban consignarse en esta obra los principales rasgos de su fisionomı´a. —Eugenio de Ochoa, ‘‘El espan ˜ ol fuera de Espan ˜ a’’ [The Spaniard outside Spain thus forms a distinct type within our modern society, a type common enough to be more than a mere exception, and to make possible and even warranted the description of his principal features in this book.]

BECAUSE THE LONG-MARGINALIZED STUDY OF TRAVEL WRITING NOW ATtracts the attention of scholars working from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, a few introductory words about the approach I adopt in this book are perhaps in order. Travel scholarship has sometimes been subdivided into a few basic categories, which, while not always easily separable in practice, can offer at least a useful point of departure. One such category, which might be called documentary scholarship, would include works that seek to uncover the events of specific journeys or that use what Elleke Boehmer has termed ‘‘the listing method’’ (1995, 6) to identify general characteristics of a wide range of texts. This is not what I have set out to do here, in part because several useful studies of this type already exist within the realm of Hispanist scholarship1 and in part because the particular issues I wish to explore seem to me to require a different critical approach. The other two most commonly evoked subclassifications of travel scholarship distinguish studies considered to be primarily belle-lettristic in focus (e.g., Porter 1991, 19; Pratt 1992, 10) from those in which the writing of travel is incorporated among 13

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the intertwining histories of cultural manifestation, imposition, expectation, and interrogation whose study forms the basis of that protean constellation of interdisciplinary approaches now commonly grouped together under the heading of cultural studies. Of these, the latter has been of most recent elaboration, and the critical insights it has provided have fundamentally altered our understanding of the writing of travel. Over the past twenty years or so there have appeared a number of extraordinary pieces of scholarship in which evidence from traveler testimonies of diverse types and sources is threaded together with examples and analyses drawn from an at times breathtaking range of disciplines (e.g., history, sociology, geography, popular culture, literature, art, economics) to uncover, through elaboration of the confluence of these interrelated cultural instances, fundamental structures and ideologies (e.g., notions of home, of nation, of self ) in the particular human communities or eras under study. I have found works of this type enormously inspiring and will draw from a number of them in the following pages. It might seem, though, that my own project would be more ‘‘bellelettristic’’ in its focus since the texts I study were written by literary authors. I would say this is true, presuming the term is understood simply as pursuing a scholarly objective primarily through the analysis of works of literature or art. It is not, however, my view that literary travel writing forms some kind of genre apart nor that the study of literary texts need proceed at the margin of significant societal issues. My interest in foregrounding the travel narrations of literary authors—and, specifically, the foreign travel chronicles of authors from nineteenth-century Spain—obeys different motives. I will take a moment to explain why these texts seem to me so fascinating and so especially well suited to the issues that concern me here. First I will note that the specificity of my focus was intentional. For one thing, when approaching travel writing if one does not seek ways to define the field of study to suit the scholarly purposes of the project, matters can quickly get out of hand, inasmuch as there is really no predefined corpus to work with (hence the difficulty of calling it a genre) but rather any number of written artifacts—from personal letters and foreign-emplotted novels, to virtually any text an author happened to write about a journey or while living abroad or even the practice of writing itself—that by one definition or another could be considered to fall under the rubric of travel literature. As Todorov wrote in Les Morales de l’histoire [The Morals of

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History]: ‘‘Qu’est-ce qui n’est pas un voyage?’’ (1991, 95, emphasis in original) [What is not a journey?]. By defining my corpus as I have I am also able to consider the individual works with a certain degree of detail. While it is certainly true that travel narratives, like any other document, form part of the general ideological dynamic of the period in which they were produced, it is important not to forget that they also exist—were written, were read—individually. Upon close examination any subgrouping of texts, no matter how closely defined that subgroup may be, will inevitably reveal both points of commonality and abundant, sometimes fundamental differences in perspective and goals. Though the existence of such individual variants may not necessarily destabilize general ideological patterns, they are not for that reason less worthy of our interest. While it is undoubtedly true, as it has become commonplace to observe, that every focus excludes, the reverse is also true. Breadth excludes as well. When texts serve as sources of supporting data in the service of broad theoretical agendas, they can sometimes come to seem far more homogeneous, far more obedient to overarching ideological paradigms, far less profoundly riven, than they indeed are. There is also little opportunity to consider the art of their fabrication, by which I do not mean to suggest that travel works should be interpreted as aesthetic artifacts divorced from cultural context but rather, to the contrary, that it is precisely in order to understand their place within their cultural context that one is well advised not to overlook their construction as texts. This takes me to one reason for my interest in works by literary authors. Although the practices and objectives of textual construction can be approached through the study of any piece of writing, literary authors often provide particularly intriguing case studies because they tend to approach the processes of verbal representation in such a conscious way. Their narrative renderings of the spaces of travel consequently often turn out to be surprisingly complex, particularly for a form of writing that so often proclaims its own stylistic transparency. While travel narratives by individuals working outside the literary profession are certainly not devoid of these qualities, scholarly investigation of the strategies and sometimes far-reaching consequences resulting from the careful scripting of travel experience can often be especially rewarding in the case of writers—such as literary authors—who possess a heightened awareness of both the

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power of language and the dilemmas and opportunities inherent in the presumption of recasting an external referent into text. My interest in these writers also stems in part from issues relating more directly to my field of Hispanist literary scholarship. The travel narratives produced by Spain’s nineteenth-century literary authors, though relatively abundant and—it seems to me—of significant scholarly relevance, have as yet received only the very scantest of critical attention. This lacuna should not continue to exist. In addition to marginalizing a body of work whose careful exploration promises to give us greater understanding of these writers’ literary praxis as a whole, it also excludes from scholarly dialogue texts that can offer an often unparalleled glimpse into their terms of engagement with some of the most significant intellectual and social issues of their time, and not only with respect to the assessment of the lifestyles and attitudes of the foreign nations they visit but also, inevitably, to their preoccupations and hopes for the culture2 of their own homeland, Spain. My decision to focus specifically on nineteenth-century texts gives these cultural assessments a certain contextual cohesion. As many commentators have observed, it was during this period that European practices of travel evolved from a largely aristocratic privilege into a ‘‘quintessentially bourgeois experience’’ (Duncan and Gregory 1999, 6). This evolution occurred, too, in Spain, where, with the advent of incrementally improving standards of living, a relative (albeit unstable) degree of political freedom, and the creation of increasingly efficient and economical means of long-distance transportation, the popularity of leisure tourism surged within growing sectors of the Spanish middle class during the Isabelline years and beyond. Even as early as the mid-1840s Breto´n de los Herreros found Spaniards’ seemingly unbounded ‘‘manı´a de viajar’’ [travel mania] a fitting subject for satire (1912, 408–10) while Eugenio de Ochoa’s ‘‘El espan ˜ ol fuera de Espan ˜ a’’ enthroned the Spanish tourist abroad as one of the defining ‘‘tipos’’ [types] of contemporary society (1851, 370). These changes, not surprisingly, affect the production of travel narration as well, significantly increasing the production of such texts while also broadening the travel writer’s implicit readers to include a growing portion of the incipient Spanish middle class. The identity of this more public reader (contrasting with earlier travel accounts, often produced exclusively for the king and his court) will prove significant, and it is for this reason that I will be concentrating on texts that were written for publication, such that

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the constructions of identity and difference they contain can be construed as forming part of the public discourse of their time. Though writers always ultimately stake out individual paths in their textual representations, the fact that these works were all produced within the same general chronological framework also leads their authors to construct the spaces of travel within or against much the same set of cultural preoccupations and many of the same commonly held notions about the process of reading and about the particular travel destinations described. In the case of nineteenthcentury Spain, one such issue assumes special significance, and that is the consciousness of belonging to a society in the throes of change. An example of this awareness is the frequent treatment of hot-button topics such as ‘‘europeanization’’ and ‘‘modernization,’’ which in one form or another appear in virtually all chronicles from this period regardless of travel destination and in most cases with a clear eye toward influencing attitudes of readers back in Spain. These texts’ equally ubiquitous engagement with literary issues— from the functioning of subtexts to the querying of the limits of representation—likewise routinely betrays a sense of the nineteenth century as an intellectual crossroads marked by serious reconsideration of long-standing artistic presumptions and practices. The third most common manifestation of this consciousness of mutability has to do with the fate of Spanish colonialism, with authors tending to share a clear and often painful consciousness of their nation’s rapidly diminishing colonial fortunes while in many cases—and sometimes quite incongruously—clinging to their stature as citizens of a European imperial power.3 My interest in chronicle-style travel accounts is basically twofold. First, they offer an especially good opportunity to consider those aspects of the reading and writing of travel that depend on its presumed status as referential discourse. This presumption of referentiality has important consequences in travel writing, much as in the study of autobiography, because it is both so pervasive and so unstable. As Michel de Certeau puts it in Heterologies: How can readers resist discourse that tells them what is or what has been? They must agree to the law, which expresses itself in terms of events. . . . The discourse gives itself credibility in the name of the reality which it is supposed to represent, but this authorized appearance of the ‘‘real’’ serves precisely to camouflage the practice which in fact determines it. Representation thus disguises the praxis that organizes it. (1985, 202)

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Chronicles, both by form and by content, are among the forms of travel narrative that appear most clearly to present themselves to readers as ‘‘direct, unmediated accounts of real life narrated by real individuals’’ (Molloy 1991, 16). And yet, of course, this notion of straightforward and accurate transcription is made invalid by the simple fact that travel narration is a verbal construction like any other, the creation of which is mediated by the author’s response to or manipulation of any number of structural and rhetorical choices regarding the selection, omission, ordering, and interpretation of travel experience. As I hope the chronicles I analyze in the four chapters that follow will demonstrate, skillful writers can make powerful use of this promise of referential transparency in pursuit of their own particular discursive goals. What draws my attention in looking at texts of this type is not merely the discovery that their referential pact is inevitably broken—that result is unavoidable—but rather how and why this occurs. In other words, I am interested in exploring the textual strategies through which individual authors manipulate generic expectations (resulting not only from the presumed referentiality of their text, but also from preexisting cultural attitudes and metaphors, textual or artistic models, historical or current events, and other similar sources of suasive authority) in the elaboration of their travel representations, as well as to what ends (cultural? literary? political?) they seem to do so. Chronicles again offer an interesting avenue of investigation in part because they generally seem focused on tasks of a much more mundane sort: that is, the often formulaic sequence of day-to-day and site-to-site touristic description that can on the surface seem so entirely guileless and unproblematic. Beneath the surface, though, there is—or at least can be—much more at stake. While the goals of the particular authors I study will vary from text to text (partly in response to destination, partly to their own individual priorities), all will manipulate the representations of travel experience in multiple ways and with implications that span both the ‘‘literary’’ and the ‘‘cultural’’ (to the extent those two could ever be separated) and that affect the construction of both the foreign Other and the sense of personal and national Self. In order to carry out the kind of analysis described it is important not to lose from view the textural richness of individualizing gaze. As such, the examples I give and analyses I offer will lean, to borrow Nicholas Thomas’s phrase, toward the ‘‘partial and illustrative rather than exhaustive and extensive’’ (1994, x). I will proceed in

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part by means of case study, focusing more detailed attention on those texts and travel destinations that I believe best illustrate the crucial issues underpinning the way nineteenth-century Spanish travel writers sought to utilize the spaces of foreign travel to respond to and to shape the literary and cultural perceptions of their time. My final introductory remarks therefore will briefly sketch out why I came to select the particular subset of destinations and texts discussed over the course of the next four chapters. For reasons not difficult to decipher (geographical proximity, cultural familiarity, and the like) most of the travel chronicles published by Spain’s nineteenth-century authors involve journeys within Western Europe. Among these, two particular destinations stand out in terms of both the frequency with which they appear and the heavy symbolic resonance with which they are typically invested. One is the city of Paris, explicitly cast by many nineteenth-century writers (Spanish and non-Spanish alike) as a space of unmediated modernity in all its promise and peril. The other is the ‘‘Grand Tour’’–style voyage to Italy, a land revered as both the center of traditional European high culture and the seat of the church, meriting definition by many travelers as the birthplace of Western civilization. Because of this symbolic investiture, accounts of travel to Paris and Italy can illustrate with particular clarity the often conflicted ways in which Spanish travelers of the time sought to construct their encounters with Western society and traditions. These destinations will provide the focus of the first two chapters, each beginning with an overview of some general characteristics of nineteenth-century Spanish travel writing on the destination under consideration, then moving to a close reading of one particular text in order to permit more detailed analysis of the sometimes complex avenues by which the passage from ‘‘general characteristics’’ to ‘‘individual textual construction’’ is effectuated in these often deceptively simple works. Chapter 1 will highlight the representation of Paris in the travel writings of Ramo´n de Mesonero Romanos, selected in recognition of both his importance as Spain’s first major nineteenth-century literary travel writer and his efforts to combine his interest in literary costumbrismo (i.e., sketches of customs and manners) with an enthusiasm for urban planning, which provide apt illustration of the dilemmas of modernity evident in most nineteenth-century Spanish chroniclers of Parisian journeys. In chapter 2, primary attention is granted to Galdo´s, whose surprisingly seldomstudied Italian travel narrative offers a rich exploration not only of

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Spain’s relationship to Western tradition but also of a variety of key issues regarding the nature of travel writing itself, including the pretense of objective representation, questions of authorial perspective, and a variety of other problematic (and typically galdosian) textual concerns. In the last two chapters, I turn to chronicles of non-European travels. Though such accounts constitute only a small fraction of all literary travel writing produced in nineteenth-century Spain, their analysis can offer an important corollary to the European journey as a means of understanding the ways in which Spaniards of the time sought to define the place that they and their nation should occupy within and against both the cultures of Europe and those of Europe’s ‘‘exotic Others.’’ I focus attention primarily on chronicles of journeys to points located within the so-called ‘‘oriental world,’’ both because these are the most numerous within the corpus of non-European travel and because the Orient was so clearly conceptualized at the time as the primary repository of ‘‘otherness’’ with respect to the European cultural space. Chapter 3 will center on chronicles of travel to what Said has called the ‘‘traditional Orient’’ of the Mediterranean basin, while chapter 4 turns to voyages into the ‘‘true exotic’’ typically associated with more distant ports of call. As in the first two chapters, the discussion of these non-European destinations will begin with a general overview, then focus on the work of a particular literary travel author. In chapter 3 that author is Alarco´n, one of the most prolific of nineteenth-century Spain’s travel writers, who produced his chronicle of orientalist travel to Morocco, Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de Africa [Diary of a Witness to the African War], while serving as infantryman in the Moroccan War of 1859–60. Chapter 4 considers similarities and differences among various types of transoceanic narration, before turning particular attention to Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano’s Panoramas orientales [Oriental Panoramas], one of only a scant few texts in nineteenth-century Spain in which an individual involved in the literary profession recounts a journey to the presumably ‘‘truly’’ foreign region of the Pacific Rim. Both chapters address—though via somewhat different perspectives—the difficulties that Spanish travel writers commonly encountered in carving out for themselves, and for the Spanish culture they presumed to represent, a stable location on the binary East-West paradigm that so often served to structure, at least on a superficial level, the travel works of European authors of the time.

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These chapters do not pretend to exhaust the many possibilities for analysis presented by the chronicles of Spain’s nineteenthcentury literary travelers. The list of authors and topics that merit further critical scrutiny is undoubtedly long. I would like to mention just a few of these here. The first has to do with fact that most of the travel authors mentioned in these pages are men. In nineteenthcentury Spain, perhaps even more than in some other European nations, international travel remained a predominantly male domain. In addition to the persistence of cultural attitudes tending toward ‘‘the masculinization of motion and feminization of sessility’’ (Leed 1991, 220), it was also the case that many Spanish travel chronicles of the time narrate work-related journeys. Both of these circumstances suggest limited publication of foreign travel works by women authors, as in fact proved to be the case.4 There was, however, one very important exception in Emilia Pardo Baza´n, who authored several accounts of European travel during the latter years of the century. I include reference to her representations of France and Italy in chapters 1 and 2; however, because her Parisian texts deal almost exclusively with the exhibits of the 1889 World’s Fair and feature only scant attention to the city itself, and the Italian narration likewise largely forgoes travel description in favor of meditation on the beliefs, political fortunes, and institutional hierarchy of Catholicism, I did not consider them appropriate for the role of highlighted case study in either chapter. Though they are indeed fascinating and important works, they do not reflect the broad range of diegetic and rhetorical practices that characterize nineteenth-century Spanish representational wrestlings with Parisian and Italian travel description as well as do the chronicles of Mesonero and Galdo´s. I would also like to say a word about chronicles of non-European journeys to points physically located outside the geographical/conceptual superstructure that nineteenth-century Europe knew as the Orient. This group of texts is small but intriguing, consisting almost in its entirety of a handful of brief narrations of travel to Latin America. While there are undoubtedly a number of ways in which these works might be approached, I found most interesting for my purposes the consideration of how nineteenth-century Spanish narrations of the Latin American journey might intersect (or not) with the tendency among European writers of the time to portray transoceanic travel as a quest for the ‘‘true exotic.’’ As I discuss in chapter 4, the Spanish handling of this issue turns out—as so often occurs—to rely on a more or less schematic European representational

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precedent in certain respects while adopting conceptual and rhetorical postures that ultimately draw these texts away from the exoticist model and into a more ambiguous relationship with the nonEuropean world. Latin American travel certainly reflects this tension, much as do the representations of North Africa discussed in chapter 3, and for some of the same reasons. Of all forms of Spanish travel narration included in my corpus, chronicles of East Asian voyages offer the most systematic presentation of the quest for the ‘‘true exotic,’’ and for that reason the highlighted case study for chapter 4 is of that group. It is an inevitable by-product of the case study approach that questions can always be raised about the particular choice of authors and topics, and I recognize that other organizational methods and selection processes might easily have been used, giving a somewhat different (though ideally not incompatible) contour to the study as a whole. I believe also, though, that the necessary lack of individualization resulting from the attempt not to proceed through selectivity— that is, undertaking to provide an exhaustive treatment of all available texts and destinations—would open itself to even more difficult questions. In the end, I hope that the analysis of authors, texts, and travel destinations that appear reflected in these pages will succeed in conveying some of the principal tactics and objectives of nineteenth-century Spanish approaches to the representation of otherness, while also communicating a sense of the breadth, richness, and complexity of the still relatively little known field of Spanish travel writing such that others might accept the invitation to carry scholarly investigation of these fascinating works forward along new paths. In drawing this introduction to a close I find myself thinking back to a passage from Edward Said’s groundbreaking study Orientalism: The Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. (1979, 177)

In my own experiences reading travel literature, I have found Said’s words an extraordinarily apt description not only of the handful of

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works of orientalist travel writing contained in the Spanish corpus, but also—and I think more fundamentally—of the practice of travel narration as a whole. Direct observation and circumstantial description of the places of travel are the presumed topic of the travel author, but these images of the world are always profoundly enmeshed in texuality and they are always secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. Tracing some of the ways in which that statement resonates throughout the corpus of travel narratives produced by Spain’s nineteenth-century authors will be the principal aim of the chapters that follow.

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Scripted Geographies

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Hay que desconfiar de la vista de pa´jaro, de los artı´culos a vuela pluma, de las sugestiones del ferrocarril y la fonda, de las inspiraciones del bau´l, la manta y el sleeping; pero, sobre todo, hay que estar en guardia contra las propias intenciones. —Emilia Pardo Baza´n, De siglo a siglo [One must be distrustful of the bird’s-eye view, of dashed-off articles, of notions from train or inn, of inspirations born of suitcase, blanket, and sleeping car; but above all one must be on guard against one’s own intentions.]

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1 Al sur fluye el Sena: Mesonero’s Paris and the Dilemmas of Reading Modernity Usos y costumbres, maneras y lenguaje, leyes y literatura, muebles y trajes, corbatines y almohadillas, todo nos viene de Parı´s. So´lo la moneda se nos va. —Mesonero Romanos, ‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ [Habits and customs, manners and language, laws and literature, furniture and suits, bow ties and pincushions, everything comes to us from Paris. All we send to them is our money.]

IN A TEXT ENTITLED ‘‘VUELTA DE PARI´S’’ [‘‘RETURN FROM PARIS’’], WRITTEN shortly after his first voyage to France in 1833–34, Ramo´n de Mesonero Romanos declared that ‘‘para los madrilen ˜ os, en especial, la visita a Parı´s es tan necesaria como para los musulmanes la peregrinacio´n a la Meca’’ (1:199)1 [For Madrid residents especially, the visit to Paris is as necessary as the pilgrimage to Mecca for Moslems]. Though clearly a humorous exaggeration, this remark nevertheless introduces several key ideas that will prove useful in approaching Spanish travel writing on Paris. The first is a matter of chronology. By issuing this matter-of-fact presentation of travel to Paris as a present-day ‘‘necessity’’ of the mid-1830s, Mesonero became among the first in Spain publicly to recognize the rapidly changing attitudes and practices regarding travel and tourism in early Isabelline society as well as the special aura accorded to the city of Paris as destination of choice. A few years later Mesonero’s close friend Eugenio de Ochoa would strike much the same tone in the popular Los espan˜oles pintados por sı´ mismos (The Spanish Paint Themselves, 1843–44) where he noted that 27

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todavı´a a principios de este siglo, un hombre que habı´a pasado la raya de Francia y penetrado hasta las murallas de Bayona, era ya una especie de feno´meno; . . . llegar a Parı´s era cosa excesivamente inverosı´mil, temeridad en que rarı´sima vez se creı´a. . . . ¡Que´ diferencia entre esto y lo que sucede en el dı´a! (1851, 369–70)2 [at the beginning of this century, a man who had crossed into France and made it to the walls of Bayonne was still a kind of phenomenon; . . . arriving in Paris was truly unheard of, a reckless act scarcely believed. . . . What a difference between this and what happens today!]

The existence of these and other published declarations of the sort is significant not only because they attest to the growing importance of travel (and specifically travel to Paris) in early Isabelline society but also because they reveal that these practices (and specifically the newness of these practices) was a matter of public discourse and public scrutiny at the time. Mesonero, moreover, was also willing to link these social and attitudinal changes to a precise event: the death of Fernando VII. He was, as it happened, actually en route to his first visit to Paris when he learned that the king had died, and his later reflections on that journey clearly reveal his awareness of the symbolic value inherent in this fortuitous pairing of travel to the icon of modernity and the end of authoritarian rule in Spain. Significantly, he saw a link between these events and the practice of travel writing as well: Al regresar a Madrid de mi largo viaje por el extranjero, en los primeros dı´as de mayo de 1834, todo habı´a cambiado . . . Al Gobierno absoluto del u´ltimo monarca habı´a sucedido el ilustrado y liberal de la ‘Reina Gobernadora’’; . . . No hay necesidad de repetir que . . . veı´a con placer el giro que tomaban las cosas, y . . . deseoso de contribuir con mis de´biles fuerzas al desarrollo de la cultura patria . . . me dispuse a poner desde luego al servicio de mi pueblo natal los estudios y observaciones que habı´a podido hacer en mis viajes a los paı´ses extranjeros. (5:205) [When I returned to Madrid from my extended foreign travels in early May 1834, everything had changed. . . . The absolutist government of the former King had been followed by the enlightened and liberal reign of the ruling Queen. . . . It is unnecessary to repeat that I was pleased at this turn of events, and . . . wanting to contribute in whatever small way I could to my country’s cultural development . . . I determined to put the studies and observations I had made during my foreign travels to the immediate service of my homeland.]

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By his own account he had completed his first series of foreign travel articles within months of returning to Spain, though their publication was delayed nearly a year by an outbreak of cholera in Madrid (5:206). His travel narrations therefore grow from a period of major political and cultural transition in his home nation and, as the following pages will show, his responses to these transitions will prove one of the fundamental organizing principles (or, in some cases, disorganizing principles) in all his travel works. Mesonero’s linkage of the post-Fernandine societal changes with both the practice and the writing of travel would prove prescient. The publication of books and articles on travel-related topics proliferated throughout the Isabelline years, and many of these—as Mesonero’s notion of the ‘‘necessary’’ Parisian voyage also correctly predicts—narrate visits to France’s capital city. This pattern holds true not only among writers like Mesonero, associated with Spain’s own political center, Madrid, but also among those whose works are more often associated with interests and themes of more regional focus, such as Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez (Valencia), Alarco´n (Andalucı´a), Pardo Baza´n (Galicia), and Rusinyol (Catalun ˜ a). Many of these texts mention no other French localities at all or include them only as sketchily described stopovers en route to the achievement of the traveler’s Parisian dream.3 By century’s end Spanish authors’ Parisian accounts would outnumber even runner-up favorites like those of Naples or Rome by more than three to one.4 This plethora of Parisian travel descriptions would, in turn, raise a variety of textual issues in its own right. One of the most important was the question of originality. Even Mesonero—a man who often proudly credited himself with having created the modern practice of travel writing in Spain5 —shows a clear awareness that his travel texts could rarely if ever aspire to serve as the vehicle through which readers would come to ‘‘discover’’ the city of Paris. As he well knew, not only would an important and growing percentage of his likely readership already have journeyed there for themselves, but essentially all would have been familiar with any number of previous representations of France’s ubiquitous capital city, whether drawn from the realm of literature, from earlier works of travel writing, or from myriad other sources. The problem of textual redundancy is, of course, not peculiar to Mesonero or to representations of the city of Paris. It is a characteristic of travel writing—certainly, of nineteenth-century travel writing—whatever the location described. Though there were many

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potential travel destinations around the globe that even highly literate readers would have known nothing specific about, even the vaguest awareness of a site’s geographical location—perhaps only its name—would typically be enough to trigger a series of preconceived expectations regarding its likely physical and cultural attributes among nineteenth-century readers. Within this context what is ‘‘different’’ about the problem of originality in writings on Paris could be seen as a matter of degree: that is, the unusually high level of certainty readers were likely to feel regarding the depth of their knowledge about the city prior to reading the travel account and the significance (favorable or unfavorable) they were likely to ascribe to events and circumstances associated with the Parisian urban model. Both of these issues affect the ways in which Parisian travel can be successfully portrayed to a nineteenth-century public. One more significant issue underlying Mesonero’s aforementioned comment regarding the ‘‘necessity’’ of travel to Paris involves the peculiar authority granted at the time (as now) to firsthand observation. As Crawshaw and Urry have noted, ‘‘In the history of Western societies, sight has long been . . . viewed as the most discriminating and reliable of the sensual mediators between people and their physical environment’’ (in Rojek and Urry 1997, 177). To be sure, for a Spaniard of Mesonero’s time the significance of an individual’s ability to claim not only knowledge about Paris but actual firsthand experience of the city would also have had much to do with questions of class consciousness: Mesonero’s use of the word madrilen˜os, for example, clearly cannot be construed as referring to all Madrid residents, but rather only to the subset of relatively welloff, literate city dwellers who would, not coincidentally, have composed the likely readership of El Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol [The Picturesque Spanish Weekly], in which most of his travel chronicles originally appeared. In another sense, though, the significance attributed to actually visiting Paris also offers testimony to the primacy granted to the interrelated concepts of individual experience and authenticity. These issues, which lie at the heart of many modern theorizations of travel and tourism (see, e.g., Boorstin, Culler, MacCannell), stand also as central concerns of most travel writing. As will be illustrated in the following discussions of Mesonero and Galdo´s, travel authors—like the aforementioned travel theorists—often offer divergent responses to the dilemmas posed by these twin issues, and these in turn help situate their textual projects in terms of

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a variety of broader ideological planes regarding such matters as the nature of knowledge, of modernity, and of literary practice. These, then, are a few of the issues of travel representation raised by Mesonero’s allusion to the ‘‘necessity’’ of the Parisian journey. A few words about his comparison of Paris to the city of Mecca are also in order. In one sense the analogy can be seen in terms of Benjamin’s now-canonical characterization of Paris as ‘‘capital of the nineteenth century’’: Paris, that is, as the city that gave geographical presence to the zeitgeist of nineteenth-century Europe much as Mecca is commonly said to do for the spirit of Islam. Nigel Thrift has termed this singling out of individual cities as the spatial incarnation of their age ‘‘the one city tells all myth’’ (2000, 245), and he is correct in noting that, once established, such conceptions tend to skew urban representation in accordance with their own particular premises. He is also undoubtedly correct in portraying this circumstance as a potential pitfall for those attempting to conduct sociological or geographical analysis. From the perspective of the travel writer, however, the existence of such myths can be immensely empowering. In the case of nineteenth-century travel accounts about Paris, for example, travel authors had the significant advantage of writing about a city that their readers were predisposed to consider to be of primary cultural significance and that, in addition, they were already well accustomed to understanding metaphorically. Moreover, because the range of metaphors in common usage was so extraordinarily varied in the case of the Parisian urban mythos (Paris as modernity, as refinement, as revolution, as materialism, as decadence, and so forth), travel writers attentive to their craft could with relative facility manipulate any or all of these available structures in order that they appear to offer ‘‘external’’ corroboration of the author’s own particular reading of places and events. In the process, of course, the resulting travel texts aided in the further elaboration and perpetuation of the Parisian mythos, which could in turn be built upon by future authors. If, as Tim Cresswell observes in In Place/Out of Place, ‘‘travel experience involves mobility through an internal landscape which is sculptured by personal experience and cultural influences as well as a journey through space’’ (1996, 53), then writing about travel experience layers yet further landscapes into the equation by introducing the effect of the readers’ own existing perceptions of the destination described, as well as the ways in which travel writers may seek to manipulate their own or their read-

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ers’ presumed cultural perceptions in the construction of their texts. As will be seen, this certainly proves to be the case with the Spanish writers studied here. Mesonero’s characterization of travel to Paris as a pilgrimage to Mecca may seem less apt in terms of the analogy’s obvious religious connotations, except perhaps as an ironic juxtaposition intended to underscore the absence of traditional spirituality in modern European society. While there is merit to this notion, the presentation of Paris as a site of pilgrimage can be understood in another sense as well. According to Erik Cohen, it is possible to conceive the difference between pilgrimage and tourism via their conceptualization of the location and value of the center: tourism, as Cohen defines it, tends to privilege travel ‘‘away from the cultural centre into the periphery,’’ whereas traditional pilgrimage proceeds ‘‘from the periphery towards the cultural centre’’ (1996, 94). Although the further elaboration by Cohen and others of the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism introduces a number of complicating factors (including, for example, what MacCannell has termed the ‘‘sight sacralization’’ of tourist attractions [1989, 42]), the preceding general schema does reflect a key aspect of the way the vast majority of nineteenth-century travel writers, whatever their point of origin, narrate the journey to Paris in their texts. Paris is indeed conceptualized as ‘‘the center’’ (though the center of what was often open to question) with the direct consequence that the travel author’s own cultural home—however it might be conceived—was perforce relegated to the periphery. Not surprisingly, this sense of moving from periphery to center often proved particularly painful for travelers from nineteenth-century Spain, where their nation’s ever-deepening fall from centrality in global affairs (i.e., the loss of empire and concomitant debilitation of political influence, economic might, and cultural splendor) was a matter of considerable, often obsessive concern, as was the deep-seated perception that the nation most responsible for usurping Spain’s erstwhile glory was none other than France. The various issues briefly sketched out—problems of originality, experience, and authenticity; the layering of narrative landscapes; the conceptualization of periphery and center—will crop up under various guises in all forms of travel writing considered in these pages. Here in chapter 1 I will consider more specifically how nineteenth-century Spanish writers sought to represent textually the infinitely represented city of Paris in light of these issues, beginning

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with a few general comments about the corpus of Parisian travel writing generally then turning to a detailed consideration of Mesonero’s own rendering of France’s capital. I have selected his work as this chapter’s case study for several reasons. First, despite their relatively early date of publication (virtually all appeared between 1836 and 1841), his travel narrations manage to capture or foreshadow virtually all of the principal descriptive and interpretative issues that would continue to characterize Parisian travel writing throughout the remainder of the century. Mesonero’s Parisian chronicles also occupy a significant inaugural—or perhaps more accurately, liminal—position with respect to several key components of what was considered to constitute literary and cultural ‘‘modernity’’ at the time. And finally, as I hope readers will agree, they are fascinating textual constructions in their own right. Travel accounts devoted to the same geographical destination can in many cases convey significantly different impressions of the location and/or culture described. This has to do with a number of factors, most basic among them the inescapable presence of an authorial perspective: simply put, to use Nigel Leask’s formulation, ‘‘most travel narratives are shaped by the dominant intellectual concerns of their authors’’ (2002, 2). Although it would be worth adding that this phrase is also valid in the active voice (authors also shape their travel narratives in ways that correspond to particular rhetorical goals), the general notion that the siting of geographical ‘‘meaning’’ is more a question of gaze than of that which is gazed upon is crucial to approaching works of travel narration. Few sites better illustrate this point than the travel literature devoted to the city of Paris. Although—as in most examples of travel writing about the same destination—Parisian travel texts often tread and retread much the same basic list of ‘‘important sights,’’ writers’ interpretations of their Parisian experiences can vary wildly. Politically focused authors such as Castelar and Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez highlight Parisian sights reminiscent of France’s history of republicanism, and as such stress the metaphor of ‘‘Paris as Revolution.’’ The painter-dramatist Santiago Rusinyol, meanwhile, organizes his Desde el molino (From the Windmill, 1890–92) largely around the metaphor of Paris as center of high art, thereby creating a text in which virtually all descriptions of the Parisian urban space are dominated by rich sensorial images of elegance and beauty: La simpatı´a que inspira Parı´s, ya a la llegada, no nace . . . de su grandiosidad, con ser tanta, sino de la atmo´sfera saturada de arte que aquı´ respira

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todo y que en todo trasciende. . . . La vista bien educada, raramente siente la molestia de una desafinacio´n de mal gusto: la mirada recorre con sosiego la gran ciudad [y] se siente aquı´ su armonı´a, la armonı´a de una orquesta colosal bien acordada. (1945, 117) [The sense of charm that Paris inspires, already on arrival, is not born . . . of its grandeur, though that is great, but rather of its atmosphere so saturated by art that it infuses and transcends all. . . . The cultured gaze is seldom jarred by any note of bad taste; serenely scanning the great city, one feels its harmony, the harmony of a colossal orchestra perfectly in tune.]

In other cases, the same author can adopt contradictory postures. This, for example, occurs with Alarco´n, who after heaping Paris with wild praise as a young liberal enjoying his first visit in 1855 (‘‘¡Oh! ¡la vida en Parı´s es un radiante suen ˜ o!’’ [1984, 111; Oh!, life in Paris is a radiant dream!]),6 presents the city in De Madrid a Na´poles (From Madrid to Naples, 1860) as little more than a festering breeding ground of moral depravity. Indeed, the newly minted archconservative Alarco´n had become by 1860 declares himself so overwhelmed by the ‘‘disgust and fear’’ the city provokes in him at every step that he is led to the bizarre announcement that the only event of his entire six-week stay that he did not find ‘‘depressing and horrible’’ was the premature death of the duchess of Alba: a result—we learn—of the fact that nearly everyone who attended the burial ceremony was from Spain (1954, 1224).7 Examples such as these bring to mind Hayden White’s comments regarding the creation of nonfiction works about topics or events likely to be well known to the text’s probable readership. In such cases, in which the textual function of introducing readers to ‘‘new’’ information is held to a minimum, the central task becomes ‘‘a redescription of the facts to be explained in a language which would sanction the [author’s interpretation] as the most adequate way of explaining them’’ (1978, 134). This is very much the process at work in many Parisian travel accounts. As different as their ‘‘redescriptions’’ may be, though, it is also worth noting that most such texts —including those of the various Spanish authors cited previously— generally continue to operate well within the parameters of nineteenth-century Paris’s particular incarnation of the ‘‘one city tells all myth’’: readers, in other words, would be no more bewildered to see Paris represented as a filthy center of moral depravity than they would be surprised to see it characterized as a center of high art or

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of republican Liberte´, E´galite´, Fraternite´, since all of these ‘‘urban identities’’—as well as many others—were well-established components of the Parisian mythos. Travel description thus becomes a function not only of an author’s individual concerns but of the attempt to gauge the representational strategies most likely to lead to the successful communication of those concerns via the travel text. As such, and writers’ occasional protestations notwithstanding, the approach utilized in travel narration often seems to have far less to do with the pursuit of originality than with finding ways to use the text’s very nonoriginality to further a particular ideological (literary, cultural, political, spiritual) vision. Among the various consecrated models of Parisian representation that nineteenth-century Spanish writers had available to them, a few are so ubiquitously employed that they merit at least brief introduction here. One of these has to do with the already mentioned question of Paris’s characterization as a center of pilgrimage. While it is true that in nineteenth-century Spain, the word peregrinacio´n [pilgrimage] was sometimes employed as a virtual synonym for viaje [journey], the frequency with which it and other religiously inflected terms appear in connection with Spaniards’ voyages to France’s famously worldly capital city is nevertheless striking. Particularly given Spain’s long-standing historical and cultural resentments against its neighbor to the north, it is indeed notable how many nineteenth-century Spanish travel writers describe their arrival in the city as the culmination of a lifetime of longing, how often the perception is expressed that merely by setting foot within its boundaries their life will be forever transformed, and how frequently the urban space itself appears to be endowed with spiritual, even miraculous powers. At the outset of her account of the 1889 World’s Fair, for example, Pardo Baza´n devotes brief consideration to the city of Paris, describing it in the course of a mere three pages as, among other things, ‘‘an oracle,’’ ‘‘Mecca,’’ ‘‘a fountain continually filled with urns awaiting its vivifying waters,’’ a place of ‘‘hymns’’ and ‘‘incensories’’ where health can be restored, and a city that, she notes quoting Hugo, ‘‘con la idea, con la espada, con la realidad, con el suen ˜ o, resconstruye, clava y erige la escala que une al cielo con la tierra’’ (1889, 1–3) [with the idea, with the sword, with reality, with dream, rebuilds, nails, and erects the stairway uniting heaven and Earth]. Galdo´s, too, borrows broadly from the lexicon of religious pilgrimage when describing his own 1889 arrival:

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Ya estoy en Parı´s. ¡Cua´ntos miles y millones de viajeros habra´n repetido esta frase sacramental desde que la capital francesa es centro de atraccio´n para Europa y llama al enfermo con las halagu¨en ˜ as promesas de la salud! (1973, 359) [Here I am in Paris. How many thousands and millions of travelers must have repeated this sacramental phrase since the French capital became Europe’s center of attraction and calls out to the sick with the enticing promise of health!]

Even Alarco´n, despite his declared repugnance for most things French, acknowledges Paris’s preeminent role in contemporary culture in De Madrid a Na´poles by likening it to earlier centers of both temporal power and religious veneration: En torno nuestro se alzan los templos de los modernos dioses. Estamos en la Nı´nive, en la Atenas, en la Roma (y bien pudie´ramos decir tambie´n que en El Escorial) del siglo XIX. (1954, 1205) [All around us towered the temples of the modern gods. We are in the Ninevah, the Athens, the Rome (and we could even say the Escorial) of the nineteenth century.]

Though a good number of such comments undoubtedly contain a considerable dose of sarcasm, the generalized reliance on religious language is nonetheless significant: more than a city of great economic vitality and rich cultural offerings, nineteenth-century Paris was indeed portrayed by many travel authors as the new ‘‘spiritual’’ center of European civilization and physical presence within its urban boundaries seen as fundamentally transformative. The spirit in question, though, was a decidedly secular one, with transformation resulting not from union with the divine but from immersion in the heart of the modern consciousness. The cultural secularism typically ascribed to Parisian society gives rise in turn to another area of commonality uniting many Spanish travel chroniclers of the time: that is, the sense of dismay verging on outrage regarding what many perceived as the absence of traditional moral and religious values in Paris itself and, more broadly, the culture of France as a whole. In this respect the experience of Paris departs significantly from the traditional pilgrimage model, which, as Cohen notes, presumes a sense of profound kinship uniting traveler to site (1996, 99). Nineteenth-century Spanish writers, in con-

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trast, were far more likely explicitly to cast themselves as outsiders within the Parisian urban space. In account after account Parisians’ aggressively secular spirit is held to be the cause of myriad societal problems and deficiencies. Indeed, it would be difficult to identify any single aspect of lifestyle, attitude, or personal habits—or, for that matter, any single element of the Parisian municipal space itself—that is not in one text or another decried as repulsively immoral. Sometimes this moral scolding seems offered with at least something of a smile, as in ‘‘Si quieres silla, daca la monedilla’’ [‘‘If you want a seat, hand over the money’’], from Modesto Lafuente’s Viajes de Fray Gerundio [Travels of Brother Gerundio], where he narrates his shocked discovery of the custom— ’’universally practiced in French Catholic churches,’’ he claims—of entrepreneurial priests’ charging worshipers for the right to sit down (1842, 60). Alarco´n again adopts a more apocalyptic approach. Noting bleakly that ‘‘I lament the illness, but know not the cure’’ (1954, 1229), he warns readers that the noxious microbes of Parisian society—from adultery and suicide, to impiety, greed, and deceit—threaten not only to destroy the remaining vestiges of French culture but also to infect any nation (including, of course, Spain) that blindly accepts its lifestyle as a model for modern civilization. Though the Seine River actually flows north to the Atlantic, Alarco´n’s remark that ‘‘al sur fluye el Sena’’ (1954, 1207) [southward flows the Seine] holds for him—as, in one degree or another, for many of his compatriots—a frightening element of cultural truth: ‘‘¡Yo anuncio a gritos que vamos por un camino espantoso,’’ he intones darkly, ‘‘y que en e´l fenecera´n todos los pueblos que tengan la insensatez de seguirlo!’’ (1954, 1229) [I cry out to you that we are going down a fearful road that will bring death to all peoples senseless enough to follow it]. Alarco´n’s clear utilization of Paris as a model (or, in this case, an antimodel) against which to judge the culture of Spain points to a third area of commonality shared by most nineteenth-century Spanish authors of Parisian travel narratives. While it is true that all travel narration inevitably operates at least on some level via the tactic of cultural comparison, in Spanish writings on Paris explicit juxtapositions of France and Spain are distinguished both by their vehemence and by the insistent frequency with which they appear. In describing their sometimes conflictive but always portentous reactions to Paris, Spanish travel authors seem to have found an irresistible opportunity to air their personal opinions not only about the

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city hailed, even by those who disliked it, as the de facto capital of modern civilization but also about its relevance for the particular form of ‘‘civilization’’ existing back in their own homeland, Spain. They are also, though often less self-consciously, confirming their texts’ linkage to the pilgrimage model. Travel authors from Spain did quite clearly view the journey to Paris as a movement from periphery to center, and it is their reaction to this realization that lies lurking in the myriad passages of cultural comparison scattered throughout their texts. In each of the preceding respects, as in many others, Mesonero Romanos provides a valuable case study of the portrayal of Paris in nineteenth-century Spanish travel literature. As a first approach to his travel writings, it can be useful to begin with Leask’s notion of considering travel narration in terms of the ‘‘dominant intellectual concerns’’ manifested elsewhere in the author’s literary production. In Mesonero’s case, two are of particular note. First, as anyone with even passing familiarity with nineteenth-century Spanish literature is likely aware, Mesonero’s literary reputation then as now stems mainly from his role as one of midcentury Spain’s principal costumbrista writers. Somewhat less widely known today, he was also a zealous proponent of urban reform who both participated in and assiduously chronicled Madrid’s struggle for municipal modernization during the Isabelline period. In addition to repeatedly pleading the cause of municipal renovation in countless publications (e.g., his Manual de Madrid [Manual of Madrid], and the Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol, which he founded in 1836 and continued publication through 1857), he was also active in municipal government, serving first as adviser and assessor to Joaquı´n Vizcaı´no, the marque´s de Pontejos, in his ‘‘brief, though intense and effective’’ (Prados de la Plaza 2003, 147) term as Madrid’s mayor from 1834 to 1836 and later as city councilor (1846–49), during which periods he submitted two extensive urban reform proposals (Ra´pida ojeada a la capital y medios de mejorarla [Rapid Glance at the Capital and Ways to Improve It, 1835] and Proyecto de reformas generales de Madrid [Project of General Reforms of Madrid, 1846]) to the Madrid City Council, which, in his words, proposed nothing less than ‘‘una reforma completa de la capital dentro de sus lı´mites de entonces’’ (5:242) [the complete reformation of the capital within its existing limits].8 These documents contain dozens of proposals including the redistricting of the city and creation of a new urban network of wide avenues and squares, daily municipal cleaning and implementation of sanitation reforms,

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the regularization of building codes and systematization of street names and house numbers, beautification projects including demolition of rundown or unsanitary neighborhoods, infrastructural and policy changes to facilitate capital growth and commercial development, and the creation of new leisure spaces and cultural facilities.9 Mesonero would continue to work tirelessly for the implementation of these proposals throughout his career and indeed could ultimately boast considerable success despite the acknowledged difficulties (occasionally opportunities) presented by surrounding events. Initial challenges included what he termed the ‘‘deplorable’’ state of Madrid in the 1830s (5:209) and the fact that even rudimentary reform measures ‘‘suponı´an esfuerzos gigantescos para su realizacio´n’’ given the regrettable ‘‘estado material y administrativo de la capital de Espan ˜ a en el an ˜ o de gracia de 1835’’ (5:211) [required gargantuan efforts to carry out given the regrettable material and administrative state of Spain’s capital in the year of grace 1835]. Rapid changeovers in city administration during these politically turbulent decades undoubtedly proved a hindrance as well. On the other hand, there is little in Mesonero’s proposals that would threaten (and, indeed, much that would satisfy) the interests of the city’s rising middle class and financial sectors or the members of the traditional moneyed elite. This clearly played to his favor, as did support by powerful figures such as the marque´s de Pontejos and marque´s de Salamanca and—on occasion—even events on the national scale such as Mendiza´bel’s mid-1830s laws of desamortizacio´n, or disentailment (which, by unleashing the demolition of scores of church properties in downtown Madrid, greatly facilitated the creation of new avenues and parks [Parsons 2003, 18; Prados de la Plaza 2003, 148–49]).10 In fits and starts, by the mid-1850s Mesonero was able proudly to proclaim that most of his recommendations were either under way or already complete (3:200), later noting with satisfaction in Memorias de un setento´n [Memoirs of a Seventy Year Old] that his reform proposals were eventually carried out ‘‘casi en su totalidad . . . con notable aumento de la riqueza pu´blica y particular, y del decoro y comodidad de la capital’’ (5:243) [almost in their entirety . . . with notable increase in public and private wealth and in the capital’s dignity and comfort]. It would probably not be an exaggeration to identify him as one of the two men (the other being the marque´s de Salamanca) most responsible for the significant transformations of the city center effected over the course of the century. Given the affinity for cultural description shared by costumbrismo

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and travel writing generally, and given Paris’s reputation as a global leader in both the world of letters and material modernization, it is logical to conjecture that these issues will turn out to play important roles in Mesonero’s representation of the Parisian urbanscape. As indeed they do: in his hands, costumbrismo and literary criticism, urban planning and tourist travelogue, are thrust together in sometimes uneasy mix to communicate Mesonero’s understanding of ‘‘el gran emporio de la cultura y civilizacio´n del continente europeo’’ (5:288) [the European continent’s great emporium of culture and civilization] and of the lessons that it might hold for the social, artistic, and municipal future of Spain. Mesonero’s most elaborate textual construction of Paris appears in his sole book-length travel narration, Recuerdos de viaje por Francia y Be´lgica [Memories of a Journey through France and Belgium], published first serially and then in book form shortly after his second northern European excursion in 1840–41.11 Although, as the title suggests, the text’s focus on Paris is not exclusive (ten other French and Belgian cities are given at least nodding consideration as well), there is little doubt that Mesonero’s principal interest in undertaking the journey lay in the possibility of revisiting France’s capital after a sixyear absence, just as his principal motive for publishing Recuerdos de viaje upon his return lay in describing Paris’s ‘‘ma´gico embeleso’’ (5:289) [magical charm] to his Spanish readers. Even a cursory perusal of the book’s contents easily confirms this decidedly Parisian bent: against Mesonero’s curt dismissal of most of his several dozen stopovers (with some destinations dispatched in no more than a couple of paragraphs, and few receiving more than a few pages’worth of attention at best), the detailed description of his impressions of Paris occupies more than seventy pages of text. With regard to how he conveys these impressions to his readers: as can be surmised by Mesonero’s declaration that he had set out on his journey in the explicit hope of helping Spain to ‘‘seguir la marcha civilizadora del siglo, . . . aprovechando los ejemplos de los paı´ses ma´s adelantados’’ (3:199) [follow the civilizing march of the century . . . taking advantage of the examples provided by the most advanced nations], there is much in his Recuerdos de viaje that betrays a clear affinity for the notions of ‘‘useful travel’’ that had so deeply influenced travel writing during the previous century (Batten 1978, 72) and that an editorialist signing himself only ‘‘El amigo de los viajes u´tiles’’ [The Friend of Useful Travel] had defined in an 1831 editorial in Cartas Espan˜olas [Spanish Letters] as the belief that

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‘‘cuando se viaja, no so´lo conviene llevar el laudable fin de instruirse, sino que tambie´n el viajero debe fijarse en algu´n ge´nero de instruccio´n que sea u´til a sı´ mismo y a su patria’’ (1831, 81) [when making a journey, it is not only suitable to do so with the laudable goal of instruction but, in addition, the traveler should focus on forms of instruction that will prove useful to him and his homeland]. Although this author’s impassioned defense of the superiority of ‘‘los viajes u´tiles’’ strongly suggests that their popularity was already in eclipse in late Fernandine Spain, we find Mesonero in the early 1840s still declaring his own unequivocal adherance to the ‘‘useful travel’’ model not only in word but in deed: as he would later report, most of the dozens of recommendations included in his two municipal reform proposals were directly inspired by the careful observations of Paris he had recorded during his visits of 1833–34 and 1840–41. In accordance with his declared approach, Mesonero takes some pains to present his text as an essentially transparent medium through which the reader may obtain detailed, presumably accurate information about the sites and cultural attributes he describes. In this sense, Recuerdos de viaje comes close—at least at some points—to the style of travel writing Mary Louise Pratt has identified as ‘‘scientific narrative,’’ in which sentimental anecdote is kept to a minimum and where ‘‘information is relevant (has value) in so far as it attaches to goals and systems of knowledge institutionalized outside the text’’ (1992, 77). In this spirit Mesonero fills page after page with descriptions of institutionally relevant—if not particularly glamorous— aspects of the Parisian urban infrastructure, ranging from the sewage disposal system, to the layout of streets, public transportation, architectural regulations, and various other ‘‘ingenious methods’’ (5:303) developed in the French capital that he believed might be profitably employed in the regeneration of Madrid. Indeed, the style and content of some passages come very close to those found in his formal urban reform proposals, especially the first (Ra´pida ojeada a la capital y medios de mejorarla), which—though written for Madrid’s then-mayor, the marque´s de Pontejos—the enterprising Mesonero, always eager to garner support for his urban reform programs, had published as a separately bound appendix to his bestselling Manual de Madrid in 1835. Other passages read much as a travelogue—that is, descriptive information devoted to monuments, museums, shopping districts, restaurants, and other topics likely to be of interest primarily to tourists—and these can be understood as

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functioning within the general rubric of ‘‘useful’’ travel information as well. But not all chapters construct Paris in such a straightforward utilitarian way. In some cases the more-or-less scientific narrative style Mesonero affects in his passages of ‘‘civic description’’ (Pratt 1992, 20) gives way to a decidedly more sentimental, which is to say autobiographically anecdotal approach to his topic. The focus of attention shifts from the ‘‘sight’’ to the ‘‘self,’’ as Mesonero offers his readers a series of costumbrista-style vignettes narrating his own alternatively comic, quixotic, or disturbing adventures as itinerant Spaniard in Paris, wandering alone through the streets of the city in the hopes of capturing its identity. It should be noted, though, that Mesonero would not necessarily have viewed this decision to include chapters with an autobiographical and episodic focus as being in disharmony with the notion of utility. He clearly wanted Spaniards, especially his fellow madrilenians, to read his book. He wanted them to learn of the pace of progress elsewhere on the Continent (and, most importantly his own personal interpretation of its relevance for Madrid), and he wanted them to be inspired to undertake their own Parisian journeys, thus guaranteeing that ever-greater numbers of Spaniards would see European modernization for themselves. By inserting himself into his text as its amenable protagonist, he may have hoped to create a work capable of communicating much the same municipal vision as his earlier Ra´pida ojeada a la capital in ways that would prove appealing to a far wider audience. The intercalated escapades of Mesonero’s autobiographical traveler persona, however, do introduce significant new factors into his text, moving Recuerdos de viaje both stylistically and conceptually toward the sentimental, anecdotal, and increasingly self-focused forms of travel writing that, as Charles Batten and many others have amply demonstrated, came to the fore during the romantic period and continued to dominate travel narration throughout the rest of the century and beyond. Here again we see Mesonero as a liminal figure. Though he himself was proudest of what he considered to be his inaugural position in the realm of Spanish travel writing, his works are in many ways documents of transition, evincing styles and ideologies that tug at once toward tradition and modernization. This circumstance not surprisingly leads him into more than a few interpretational predicaments. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, among others, has written of the tactics authors employ when attempting verbally to represent cities,

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and particularly such large and complex urban entities as would have been the nineteenth-century city of Paris. In Parkhurst Ferguson’s study of Paris as Revolution she focuses principally on the use of synecdoche, by which authors seek to define the city via the description of a discrete number of sites, monuments, and other ‘‘meaningful’’ fragments of urban life, which are individually and jointly presented as incarnations of the identity of the city itself (1994, 67). Mesonero certainly does this too, as will be seen in some of the examples given later, but his use of this synecdochic strategy also operates within a larger interpretational grid that comprises the verbal mapping of the city’s physical layout Mesonero provides to his readers early in his text. According to this schema, the basic structure of Paris is tripartite, consisting of the Right Bank, the Left Bank, and the islands of the Seine. Since, as Elsner and Rubie´s have put it, ‘‘the desire to map is never innocent’’ (1999, 2), it should come as no surprise that over the course of his travel narrative Mesonero will rely on this structure to subdivide the city in more than a merely topographical sense. Throughout his text the Right Bank will function quite explicitly as the space of wealth and material progress, with the Left Bank conversely associated with misery and material want, and the islands of the Seine used as geographical metaphor for the church and the life of the soul. This fragmenting of the urban space is anything but an example of heterotopia (the Foucauldian notion of the multiplication of spatial systems with no internal logic or order) but rather more of a presumed ‘‘semiotopia,’’ in which each element is portrayed as easily delimitable, meaningful, and—perhaps above all—explicable. Donning his urban reformer cap, Mesonero devotes a considerable portion of his book to showering praise on those areas of Paris that, in his opinion, best exemplified the ideal of the enlightened and efficiently functioning (orderly, hygienic) modern metropolis. His remarks betray a clear preference for Paris’s most elegant addresses, while displaying notoriously little patience for the less favored and generally less affluent neighborhoods, where, in his words, the forces of civilization had not yet fully succeeded in replacing ‘‘ominous traces of its former barbarism’’ with the ‘‘comfort,’’ ‘‘luxury,’’ and ‘‘enticing appeal’’ of modern life (5:292). Clearly, it is not coincidental to recall that it is this same basic set of (decidedly middle-class) values that give shape to his principal Madrid reform proposals as well. Handily, Mesonero’s aforementioned mapping of the Parisian

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urban space allows him to employ the city’s geography as both illustration and proof of his opinions. Throughout his narrative Mesonero presents the Left Bank in an almost unrelievedly negative light. Such is the case, for example, with the famous Quartier Latin, which Mesonero disparagingly characterizes as a ‘‘confusing chaos’’ (5:290) consisting of ‘‘un laberinto inexplicable de calles estrechas y tortuosas, de casas altı´simas e informes, por cuyas ventanas no penetro´ jama´s la luz del sol’’ (5:291) [an inexplicable labyrinth of narrow and tortuous streets, towering shapeless houses through whose window the sun has never shone]. Unlike his friend and fellow costumbrista Eugenio de Ochoa, who during his visit in 1855–56 bitterly lamented that recent urban renewal projects had begun to destroy the Latin Quarter’s charming ‘‘antigua fisionomı´a’’ (1861, 77) [aged features],12 Mesonero gives the clear impression that he would like to see the whole sector, with its anachronistic, age-blackened buildings ‘‘rara vez interrumpidas por modernas y brillantes construcciones’’ (5:317) [rarely interrupted by brilliant, modern constructions], demolished as quickly as possible. His denunciation, furthermore, is not limited to the barrio latino: virtually the entire Left Bank is dismissed as ‘‘dark,’’ ‘‘ugly,’’ ‘‘dirty,’’ and ‘‘monotonous’’ (5:298), a place where ‘‘la triste y sombrı´a mole de las casas, por la mayor parte viejas y ennegrecidas por el tiempo y la humedad del clima’’ (5:290) [the sad and dark mass of houses, most of them old and blackened by time and humidity] acts as a mute reminder of the daily misery of the quarter’s inhabitants. At one point, a carriage ride through the cramped streets of the Rive Gauche drives Mesonero to such paroxysms of despair that he cannot refrain from exclaiming: ‘‘¿Y para esto he andado yo trescientas leguas, para meterme en este tenebroso basurero?’’ (5:298) [And for this I have journeyed three hundred leagues, to find myself in this gloomy garbage dump?]. Against the messy vestiges of Paris’s ‘‘barbaric’’ past, Mesonero offers an alternative vision of the city: a glistening modern paradise that, as it turns out, is accessible to all who simply cross to the other side of the Seine. Specifically, it is only by reaching the aptly named vantage point of the Pont Neuf that newly arrived tourists (at least those arriving, as did Mesonero, from the south) will catch their first, inviting glimpse of ‘‘the most important and vital part of Paris’’ (5:290): the Right Bank. ‘‘Entonces, y so´lo entonces,’’ to use Mesonero’s words, ‘‘podra´ decir el viajero que ha hallado el Parı´s que buscaba, el Parı´s magnı´fico, el Parı´s animado e industrial que son ˜ aba su

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fantası´a’’ (5:291) [Then and only then can the traveler say he has found the Paris he sought, the magnificent Paris, the lively and industrial Paris of which his fantasy had dreamed]. Almost point for point, the Right Bank, thanks to the helping hand of Mesonero’s pen, turns out to be the Left Bank’s virtual polar opposite. In place of the ugly, decrepit hovels of Paris’s past, visitors to the Rive Droite discover a ‘‘majestic painting’’ filled with ‘‘enchanting galleries,’’ ‘‘lovely arcades,’’ ‘‘regal streets,’’ ‘‘delicious gardens,’’ and ‘‘a thousand other first-rate monuments’’ (5:291). Instead of dark and tortuous alleyways, they enjoy an orderly, comfortable, and extremely well-lit network of ‘‘calles interminables, derechas, uniformes, amplı´simas, cubiertas de edificios de elegante forma, fuertemente enlosadas con piedras cuadrangulares que ofrecen a los carruajes una superficie unida y so´lida, con a´nditos o aceras para comodidad de los transeu´ntes, alumbradas de noche por el gas’’ (5:292) [endless, straight, uniform, extremely wide streets, lined with elegantly shaped buildings, firmly paved with square stones that provide a united and solid surface for carriages, illuminated at night by gas]. In leading his readers across the Pont Neuf, in other words, Mesonero does not merely introduce the Spanish public to another arrondissement of the French capital: he takes them from a space of chaos to one of reason, from a world of darkness to one of clarity and light, from poverty to opulence, from barbarism to civilization. All this may make Mesonero sound like a sort of avant-la-lettre Haussmann, or even LeCorbusier (whose opinion of old Paris can be gauged by his remark ‘‘Imagine all this junk, which till now has lain spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted away’’ [cited in Vidler 1992, 199]). Though it would not do to carry this analogy too far, the preceding quotations from Mesonero’s Recuerdos de viaje do suggest a degree of resemblance among the three men’s notions of urban space, in terms of both Mesonero’s disdainful depiction of Paris’s older quarters as well as his portrayal of ideal modern city as being structured on the basis of clarity, uniformity, and reason. There is, moreover, nothing surprising in this discovery: as discussed by Harvey, Pinkney, and others, such ideas had been in the air long before the era of Haussmannization erupted on the scene in the 1860s. Somewhat more curious is the recollection that Mesonero, the self-described ardent urban modernizer, was also Spain’s preeminent costumbrista author, standard-bearer of literary style characterized by its often nostalgic renderings of traditional lifestyles and

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beliefs considered to be in danger of disappearing in the modern world. One may well ask how he hopes to harmonize these two intellectual vectors in his writings. In the case of his two formal urban reform proposals, for example, how could one not see his calls for the radical reconstruction of neighborhoods like Barquillo and Lavapie´s as standing in rather startling disharmony with the obvious admiration displayed in many of his costumbrista essays for the kind of traditional lifestyles that, by the midnineteenth century, survived in Madrid primarily in those very neighborhoods? Likewise, given his costumbrista fascination with traditional professions, is there not something disconcerting about the evident satisfaction with which he reports in 1854 that, thanks to the implementation of his urban reform recommendations, the streets of Lavapie´s had at last been ridded of the ragmen, masons, bakers, butchers, and other itinerant figures who ‘‘dominaban perpetuamente en ellas y hacı´an su tra´nsito y su aspecto peligroso y desapacible’’ (3:262) [constantly crowded them, making both their transit and appearance dangerous and unpleasant]? Though this juxtaposition should not be made excessively rigid,13 there is clearly a sense whereby, as Iris Zavala put it, ‘‘mientras en la letra escrita Mesonero siente an ˜ oranza por el pasado idı´lico, las viejas posadas y caminos, y ataca al vil metal que corroe las costumbres y convierte en prosaicos los rasgos psicolo´gicos nacionales—hidalguı´a, hombrı´a de bien, espı´ritu individualista, dignidad en el hambre—, en la realidad, e´l mismo contribuye a las reformas urbanı´sticas que aniquilaban el pasado. El Madrid que glorifica por medio de la literatura, lo destruye en la vida cotidiana’’ (1989, 112) [while in writing Mesonero yearns for the idyllic past, the old inns and roads, and attacks vile lucre that corrupts customs and debases national psychological traits such as chivalry, manly virtue, individualist spirit, dignity in want, in reality he himself contributes to the urban reforms that annihilated that past. The Madrid he glorifies through his literature, he destroys in his daily life]. One could add that in promoting societal change he was also hastening the demise of costumbrista literature itself. Again, in other words, we see Mesonero in his accustomed Januslike posture, his aspirations quickening to the tug of both tradition and modernization. There is no easy way to sweep these issues aside, particularly in his municipal writings, and perhaps no text he ever wrote draws together these contentious voices of his intellectual engagement more than the Recuerdos de viaje. Though his ‘‘urban reformer’’ persona appears to enjoy the upper hand much of the time,

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and though he clearly goes to some pains to prevent creating any impression of disharmony in his interpretative perspective, the reading of Paris he conveys to his audience is anything but the seamless package he would probably have wished. But it is also for that far more interesting. Despite Mesonero’s many claims of meticulous accuracy, his binary Left Bank/Right Bank opposition quite obviously leaves little room for nuance. In certain respects, in fact, it is patently misleading. The depiction of the Left Bank as a focal point of urban blight finds notable difficulty accommodating the presence of the Sorbonne, for example, not to mention the elegant aristocratic quarter of Saint Germain des Pre´s. The portrayal of the Right Bank as a space of uncompromised modernity, comfort, and cleanliness likewise finds scant corroboration either in the works of his own contemporaries or in the writings of present-day sociologists and cultural historians. Recuerdos de viaje, after all, describes the city as it existed in the period from 1835 to 1840, many years before the inception of the radical Haussmann renovations of the Second Empire and even prior to the passage of the 1841 law of expropriation of property that first stimulated the city’s program of urban reform during the latter years of the Rambuteau prefecture (Loyer 1988, 108). When Mesonero penned his narrative, despite his own authoritative claims to the contrary, the city’s ability to deal with its burgeoning populace and the resulting increase in traffic, sewage, and other effluvia of modern urban existence were almost universally decried as scandalously insufficient. As David Pinkney notes, centrally located on the Right Bank were some of Paris’s most sordid and pestilent slums (1958, 8), and, Mesonero’s glowing reports of wide vistas and perfectly quadrangular paving stones notwithstanding, most city streets were narrow, congested, and filthy, continually reeking of garbage and cesspool spillage, with paving stones that ‘‘quickly crumbled under constant wear and produced a surface that was jolting and noisy and offered an uncertain footing to pedestrians and horses alike’’ (1958, 19). If, as David Harvey notes in Paris, Capital of Modernity, 1848 can be seen as a year of symbolic demarcation (‘‘Before, there was an urban vision that at best could only tinker with the problems of a medieval urban infrastructure; then came Haussmann, who bludgeoned the city into modernity’’ [2003, 3]), Mesonero was firmly chronologically sited—perceptually as well—in the zone of ‘‘before.’’ Of course, as Johannes Willms notes, ‘‘everything depends on the

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point of view, and compared with the previous condition of the Paris streets, which innumerable complaints since the days of Mercier had made a familiar theme for every writer, Rambuteau’s efforts represented some minimal progress’’ (1997, 222). Mesonero’s visit, however, took place before most of these limited reforms had even been initiated, and in any case the fact remains that throughout the entire July Monarchy (1830–48) Paris’s urban infrastructure and quality of life were repeatedly recognized by social commentators and literary authors alike as being woefully—and unmistakably—inadequate. As Christopher Prendergast remarks in his 1992 study of Paris and the Nineteenth Century, ‘‘when in 1848 the Fourierist social critic, Victor Conside´rant, wrote that ‘Paris, c’est un immense atelier de putre´faction’ [‘Paris is an immense workshop of rot’], this was no mere metaphorical flourish, but a reflection of real material conditions’’ (1992, 77).14 Mesonero—nothing if not a careful observer—could scarcely have remained unaware of such problems. Consequently there can be little doubt that he drafted his Recuerdos de viaje with full knowledge that the city portrayed in his text is not the unadorned and faithful mirror of Parisian urban conditions that he so vociferously asserts it to be. This disjuncture, particularly in a document as self-declaredly utilitarian as Mesonero’s chronicle, offers a healthy reminder that the geography lessons of travel writing are never as transparent and guileless as they often appear. As to the motives of Mesonero’s textual machinations: in part they obviously have much to do with the fact that in describing Paris for his Spanish readers his primary interest was never really Paris at all: it was Madrid. If he chooses to portray the Parisian Right Bank as a place of wide avenues lined with architectural testaments to aesthetic and material ascendancy, there can be little doubt that it is in important part because the views along those rhetorical avenues incarnate the vision of municipal modernity that he, in his guise as urban reformer, was seeking to duplicate on Madrid thoroughfares such as the calle de Alcala´.15 Similarly, if the older, poorer quarters of the Rive Gauche throw him into despair, it is in good part because its dingy houses and narrow, winding streets remind him all too much of the ‘‘irregularidad y desnivel . . . mezquindez y ruindad’’ (4:289) [irregularity and unevenness, misery and wretchedness] that, in his view, characterized much of Spain’s own capital city at the time. Indeed, the Recuerdos contains numerous specific complaints about the current state of Madrid as

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well as suggestions for how to correct them (see, e.g., 5:293, 295, 298, 301–2). In short, Mesonero takes advantage of the sense of authenticity deriving from firsthand experience, increases its authority by employing a prose style of seeming utilitarian simplicity, and thereby transforms his textual Paris into what he hopes will be a convincing topographic advertisement for his own urban reform program. By situating the Seine as emblematic line of demarcation between two very different models of urban life—the city of the past (confusing, wretched, filthy) versus the city of the future (efficient, comfortable, elegant)—Mesonero seeks to prod his recalcitrant countrymen toward embarking on their own symbolic odyssey over the Pont Neuf by initiating the immediate, large-scale modernization of downtown Madrid. But that is not his only goal. Like the travel writings of Spain’s other nineteenth-century authors, Mesonero’s rhetorical representation of Parisian topography is an equally careful construction when viewed from a literary perspective. One example of this literary consciousness has to do with his use of ample intertextual allusion. As has been noted by Duncan and Gregory among others, travel narratives often display a ‘‘citationary structure’’ (1999, 7): that is, they are texts build upon a foundation of other texts. This is not to say, however, that the existence of these cross-textual contacts should be written off as a ‘‘given,’’ nor that they should be assumed to function identically from author to author. To the contrary, the sophistication and ideological implications of these intertextual manipulations can vary substantially, and, as a general rule, one finds that travel writers who are also literary authors lay hand to this particular rhetorical tool in an especially intense—and to all appearances especially intentional—way. In Mesonero’s case, a perusal of the index of his personal library holdings preserved by the Madrid Ateneo leaves little doubt about his interest in familiarizing himself with the textual representations of Paris crafted by other writers of his time. Of particular note, his collection contains many dozens of French titles, including a large number of Paris-focused works by contemporary novelists such as Hugo and Balzac and by French costumbrista-style authors such as Mercier and Jouy.16 Mesonero subtly incorporates liberal (though generally unacknowledged) echoes of many of these sources in crafting his Parisian urbanscape. Of these, the majority of the most unretouched borrowings are from Jouy: one of Mesonero’s first

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travel publications, an 1836 article in El Seminario Pintoresco Espan˜ol, for example, consists in considerable part of a direct translation of Jouy’s ‘‘Les Catacombes’’ (‘‘The Catacombs,’’ 1823, 2:428–38), while in the Recuerdos de viaje numerous passages display notable similarities to other Jouy texts, primarily from his popular L’Hermite de la Chausse´e d’Antin [The Hermit of the Chausse´e d’Antin], including ‘‘Mœurs parisiennes’’ (‘‘Parisian Customs,’’ 1823, 1:137–53), ‘‘Le Palais-Royal’’ (‘‘The Royal Palace,’’ 1823, 2:153–62), ‘‘Les the´aˆtres’’ (‘‘Theaters,’’ 1823, 5:280–89), and ‘‘Les fune´railles’’ (‘‘Funerals,’’ 1823, 7:81–89).17 Though Mesonero seems to have felt a particular affinity for the politically and socially circumspect Jouy, his familiarity with Mercier is also undeniable. One point of comparison may be worth brief mention here. It involves a text from Tableau de Paris [Parisian Tableau] entitled, appropriately enough, ‘‘L’E´tranger.’’ [‘‘The Foreigner’’]. In it, Mercier’s description of foreigners in Paris closely resembles Mesonero’s own narrated experience on various counts. Their arrival in the city, for example, unfolds in the much same way: Mercier: ‘‘De mise´rables chaumie`res en boue et en charpente, font, a` l’extre´mite´ des faubourgs, les avenues de la capitale. L’e´tranger croit qu’on l’abuse, ou est tente´ de retourner sur ses pas, quand on lui dit: Voila` Paris.’’ (1994, 1:501) [At the outer reaches of the suburbs, the avenues of the city consist of miserable mud and timber cottages. The foreigner believes he is being tricked, or is tempted to turn back, when someone tells him: Behold Paris.] Mesonero: ‘‘¡Que´ feo es Paris! ¡Que´ calles tan sucias y oscuras! ¡Que´ casas tan negras!’’ ‘‘¿Y para esto he andado yo trescientas leguas, para meterme en este tenebroso basurero?’’ ‘‘Reniego de Parı´s, reniego y me arrepiento de mi resolucio´n.’’ (5:298) [‘‘How ugly Paris is! What dark and dirty streets! What blackened houses!’’ ‘‘And for this I journeyed three hundred leagues, to find myself in this gloomy garbage dump?’’ ‘‘I renounce Paris, I renounce it and repent of my resolution to come here.’’]

And Mesonero’s personal experiences in the city turn out to resemble those of Mercier’s ‘‘E´tranger’’ as well:

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Mercier: ‘‘[Les e´trangers] ne sont pas admis aux assamble´es particulie`res ou` l’esprit aimable et le caracte`re original se de´veloppent en liberte´. L’e´tranger, qui sent qu’on le traite ce´re´monieusement, e´prouve une sorte de geˆne.’’ ‘‘L’e´tranger qui n’a point d’amis, . . . marche au hasard au milieu de six cent mille aˆmes.’’ (1994, 1:499–500) [Foreigners are not admitted to private gatherings where friendliness and individual character can develop freely. Feeling he is being held at a distance, he experiences a sort of annoyance. The foreigner, who has no friends, . . . wanders aimlessly among six hundred thousand souls.] Mesonero: ‘‘Le falta la sociedad ´ıntima y privada, aquella que produce las verdaderas relaciones de corazo´n, . . . donde pueda aprender los verdaderos caracteres y costumbres de la vida privada’’ ‘‘El extranjero acaba por echar de ver que esta´ solo, en medio de un millo´n de personas; acaba por entregarse al fastidio.’’ (5:341) [He lacks access to intimate private society, the kind that produces true relations of the heart . . . where one can learn the true character and customs of private life.’’ ‘‘The foreigner eventually comes to realize he is alone in the midst of a million people; he then gives himself over to annoyance.’’]

Despite the absence of the kind of direct textual borrowing that is found in his handling of Jouy, Mesonero follows Mercier’s textual model of ‘‘foreignness’’ closely enough (including his statistically accurate update of the Parisian population to its correct 1840 tally) to suggest the likelihood of a direct connection between these texts. In any case, what is most of interest in the comparative juxtaposition of the two authors’ portrayal of the foreigner are the differences that come through by virtue of their very similarities. In describing ‘‘L’E´tranger’’ (meaning both ‘‘foreigner’’ and ‘‘stranger’’) Mercier is writing as a Parisian for the benefit of a predominantly Parisian reading public about an individual who does not—and apparently cannot—belong to their community. Mesonero, of course, is doing just the opposite. He himself is the foreigner, the stranger, writing for the benefit of a reading public who, were they to travel to Paris for themselves, would be slated to occupy in their own turn the role of foreigner/stranger as well. Mesonero’s adoption of this posture of cultural exclusion attracts notice because it seems curiously at odds with at least two of his textual goals: the desire to portray himself as a well-informed and authoritative re-

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porter of Paris’s municipal and cultural realities and the desire that his text should prompt Spanish readers to want to undertake travel to Paris on their own. Importantly, though, it is not at all at odds with other nineteenth-century Spanish travel accounts of visits to France’s capital, nearly all of which—as mentioned earlier—contain passages in which authors characterize their experience as one of alienation, loneliness and annoyance. It is, once again, that strange paradox of the Parisian pilgrimage: powerfully transformative, profoundly desired, the experience of the modern city is nevertheless portrayed in text after text in terms of a sometimes-pained, sometimes-boastful sense of antagonism. More than mere curiosities, the many textual resonances in Mesonero’s Recuerdos de viaje underscore a fundamental quality of his portrayal of Paris—one that he himself often explicitly denied—and that is the frequency with which his representation of the city intersects with his literary concerns. In this regard, it is important to note that he also inserts the literary component of his narrative into the Left Bank/Right Bank dichotomy, which functions as a central organizing principal of his text. In particular, he goes to some length to attempt to present Parisian geography as confirmation of the superiority of artistic classicism over the then-ascendant romantic movement Mesonero often claimed to despise.18 In this vein, evoking ‘‘las sublimes concepciones de Corneille y Racine, [donde] todo es armonioso y conveniente, todo noble y verdadero’’ (5:334–35) [sublime ideas of Corneille and Racine (where) all is appropriate and harmonious, all noble and true], he enthusiastically embraces the magnificent Right Bank—home of the Come´die Franc¸aise—as the municipal realization of the values of classical artistic aesthetics.19 The squalor of the Left Bank, in contrast, is held out as solemn confirmation of the depraved notions and ill-conceived sentimentalism of romantic art. Claiming that the continued existence of such lamentable conditions in what is otherwise the most modern of European capitals eloquently illustrates the true cultural legacy of ‘‘aquellos hombres exce´ntricos que gustan de trasladarse con su imaginacio´n y con su pluma a las e´pocas nebulosas y a los contrastes marcados’’ (5:292) [those eccentric men who like to transport themselves with their imagination and their pen to misty periods and to stark contrasts], Mesonero decries French romanticism as an artistic abomination that, ‘‘no contento con subyugar a e´l la literatura y las bellas artes’’ (2:62) [not content with subjugating literature and the fine arts], has actually set out to destroy the city of Paris itself, pre-

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venting its modernization and needlessly condemning a sizable percentage of its inhabitants to a life of medieval misery. As if in direct response to Hugo’s contention, in Notre-Dame de Paris [The Hunchback of Notre Dame], that ‘‘c’est une chose affligeante de voir en quelles mains l’architecture du moyen aˆge est tombe´e, et de quelle fac¸on les gaˆcheurs de plaˆtre d’a` pre´sent traitent la ruine de cette art’’ (1974, 34) [it is painful to see in whose hands medieval architecture has come to fall, and how the slap-dash plasterers of today are bringing about the ruin of that art], Mesonero declares unequivocally: Las ciudades modernas [han borrado] sucesivamente las ominosas trazas de su antiguo barbarismo. . . . Digan lo que quieran Vı´ctor Hugo y su comparsa de imitadores, esto vale ma´s que las tortuosas avenidas de la Cour des Miracles (hoy convertida en una bonita plaza), y que las puertas ojivas, ahora sustituı´das por do´ricas columnas, por elegantes balaustradas, por amplios y co´modos peristilos. (5:292) [Modern cities have over time erased the ominous traces of their former barbarism. . . . Say what they will, Victor Hugo and the hangers-on who imitate him, this is worth more than the twisted avenues of the Court of Miracles (now converted into a pretty square) and than doors of ogival arch, today replaced by Doric columns, by elegant balustrades, by wide and comfortable peristyles.]

Literature and urban planning are here, as elsewhere, inseparable. By explicitly equating the aesthetic battle between Classicism and Romanticism with his previously established Right Bank/Left Bank paradigm, Mesonero is able not only to discredit an aesthetic system he claimed to find personally repugnant, but actually to portray the rejection of that system as a prerequisite for the pursuit of progress and civilization. Here once again, though Mesonero’s eyes may be looking at Paris, his mind quite clearly is on Spain. As he noted regarding the Spanish literary culture of his day, ‘‘lo que a nosotros nos hace falta son Molie`res y Corneilles, no Hernanis [de Hugo] ni Jugadores [de Victor Ducange]’’ (5:329) [what we need are Molie`res and Corneilles, not Hernanis (by Hugo) or Jugadores (by Victor Ducange)]. He seems, moreover, to have viewed his own efforts to prod his fellow writers out of their dalliance in the romantic fold to have been a signal success, crediting himself in his memoirs with having sounded the alarm that led to the progressive disaccreditation and eventual disappearance of ‘‘that ridiculous sect’’ (5:220), with the result that

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once more ‘‘fructifica[ban] en el verdadero terreno de la razo´n y del arte talentos privilegiados, que llegaron a adquirir una inmortal corona’’ (5:220) [privileged talents once more blossom in the true soil of reason and of art, and thus have achieved an immortal crown].20 Just as Recuerdos de viaje deserves recognition as one of Mesonero’s key urban reformist writings, then, it also merits a place on the shelf alongside works like the popular—and hilarious—1837 essay ‘‘El romanticismo y los roma´nticos’’ [‘‘Romanticism and the Romantics’’] as one of his most pointed efforts in antiromantic literary criticism. The centrality of art and artistic allusion in Mesonero’s urban topography is evident in numerous other aspects of his text as well. Particularly notable in this regard is the frequency with which he seeks to illustrate his fascination with the elegance and splendor of Paris’s modern Right Bank neighborhoods via the use of theatrical imagery. In addition to presenting Parisians’ love of the theater as evidence of high culture, Mesonero repeatedly portrays the streets of the city as an immense stage, upon which is continually enacted the ‘‘varied and magnificent spectacle’’ (5:291) of contemporary life. In fact, the word spectacle (especta´culo), rarely employed elsewhere in the Recuerdos de viaje, appears more than forty times in the Parisian portion of the text. It is applied to everything from theaters to cemeteries, from church services to store window displays. The presentation of modern cities in terms of spectacle is certainly not peculiar to Mesonero. As critics writing from differing disciplinary perspectives have skillfully demonstrated, the representation of city life as representation is a relatively widespread textual strategy, and perhaps especially so with reference to nineteenth-century Paris (see, e.g., Mazlish 1994, Mitchell 1992, Prendergast 1992, Sennett 1978). As with most of the metaphors associated with the Parisian mythos, however, authors’ utilization of this relatively common ‘‘city-as-spectacle’’ paradigm can differ in the details in sometimes significant ways. Included here would be such points as the way the notion of spectacle itself may be conceived, the examples presented in illustration of the city’s presumed ‘‘spectacular’’ qualities, as well as the authors’ own implicit or explicit interpretation of the phenomenon’s cause and effect. In Mesonero’s case, passages describing the Parisian spectacle often adopt a tone of unmitigated enthusiasm. Among the city’s many ‘‘spectacular’’ offerings, he reserves special praise for one particular monument, the Royal Palace:

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El especta´culo, sobre todo, de las galerı´as del Palacio Real, de los Pasajes y Baluartes con sus innumerables tiendas, luces y movimiento, es sin disputa el ma´s grande, el ma´s bello y seductor que llama la atencio´n del forastero en aquella capital. . . . Resulto´ el ma´s magnı´fico bazar, ası´ como tambie´n la finca urbana ma´s productiva del mundo entero. (5:307, 313) [The spectacle, above all, of the galleries of the Royal Palace, of its Arcades and Bulwarks with their countless stores, lights and movement, is without question the grandest, most beautiful and seductive of all that attracts the foreigner’s attention in the capital. . . . It is at once the most magnificent bazaar and most productive urban real estate in the world.]

Standing here, in this former royal residence turned ‘‘urban real estate,’’ Mesonero declares that he has discovered, at last, the heart of Paris. His choice is in many ways apt. In addition to providing a timely reminder of the ancien re´gime’s displacement by the modern forces of capital,21 the Palais Royal’s graceful amalgam of ‘‘especta´culo’’ and ‘‘especulacio´n’’ [spectacle and speculation] offers a fitting microcosm for Mesonero’s textual conception of the modern city as a whole. The Palais Royal, then, is a ‘‘signifying structure’’ (Culler 1988, 167)—or synecdoche, to borrow Parkhurst Ferguson’s formulation—through which Mesonero will purport to incarnate the essence of the vast metropolis. And it is certainly true that the qualities he ascribes to the now commercially vibrant royal residence do reappear with singular insistence in his descriptions of other Parisian sites. Throughout his wanderings around the Right Bank Mesonero frequently expresses admiration for both the variety and quality of the city’s material treasures (products of especulacio´n) and the artfulness (especta´culo) employed in their exhibition to the public. Engaging in a bit of shopping on the Chausse´e d’Antin, for example, he remarks admiringly on the ‘‘magnificent effect’’ (5:304) provided by the beautifully arranged window displays, seeing in merchants’ tendency to ‘‘colocar diestramente en los ricos aparadores de su entrada todos los ma´s bellos objetos de su surtido’’ (5:304) [to place skillfully into the rich display windows at the entrance all of the most beautiful objects in their stock] a reflection in microcosm of the classical elegance of the city’s many public monuments and architectural splendors: both, he nods approvingly, bear testimony to a culture in which an appreciation of the importance of external appearance has provided a key ingredient of commercial triumph. From shopkeepers to hoˆteliers, from restaurateurs to architects, the

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members of the Parisian business community receive repeated praise throughout the Recuerdos for their apparently effortless ability to combine the twin impulses of art and profit into products and services capable of presenting both to their consumers and to outside observers alike the benefits of a lifestyle brimming with aesthetic splendor and material success. These perambulations around the city, it is perhaps important to note at this point, ought not be equated too closely with those of Paris’s most celebrated nineteenth-century strolling observer, Charles Baudelaire. Though Baudelaire’s textual Paris does take up certain similar themes, including attention to questions of spectacle and commodity, Mesonero’s perspective is on the whole quite different (as, to a measurable degree, was the city he describes). Mesonero, in a word, was no flaˆneur. For one thing, as Walter Benjamin notes in his famous study Baudelaire, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, prior to the Second Empire the possibility of aimless pedestrian wandering was significantly impeded by the difficulty and danger of negotiating the city’s narrow, unpaved, and largely sidewalkless streets (1989, 36).22 More than that, Mesonero’s Parisian walks are anything but strolls: they have a specific (didactic, information-gathering) purpose. He is no dandy, no decadent, no idler, anything but a self-described outcast from society. It would be ludicrous to conceive of his walking a turtle on a leash—as, according to Benjamin, was once the fashion among stylish Parisian flaˆneurs (1989, 54)—letting the turtle set the pace. If the term flaˆnerie is applied to Mesonero at all, it is more akin to David Harvey’s description of the figure of the Parisian observer in Balzac: ‘‘more than an aesthete . . . ; he is also purposive, seeking to unravel the mysteries of social relations and of the city, seeking to penetrate the fetish’’ (2003, 56). This effort to ‘‘unravel the mysteries’’ leads Mesonero (for that matter, Balzac as well) into decidedly dark alleys. The twin impulses of art and profit—though responsible for so many of the qualities of modern-day Paris that, in his guise as urban reformer, Mesonero so clearly enjoys—lead to a major dilemma with regard to the moral character of the city’s inhabitants. Time after time he describes Parisians as manipulative, grasping egotists interested in little other than personal economic gain. ‘‘El intere´s egoı´sta es la base principal del cara´cter de aquel pueblo’’ (5:341) [Selfish interest is the principal foundation of that people’s character], he laments; ‘‘Todo es nacido de un mismo deseo: el de adivinar los caprichos y necesidades del hombre para brindarle su satisfaccio´n a trueque del dorado metal’’

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(5:308) [Everything is born of the same desire: that of guessing a man’s whims and needs so as to be able to satisfy them in exchange for golden metal]. On numerous occasions, he expresses distress that the Parisians’ all-powerful ‘‘desire for profit’’ (5:347) has seemingly led to the creation of a society in which the contents of a pocket are prized more highly than the contents of a heart (5:341). Even family life has become commercialized: ‘‘La familia alla´,’’ he complains, ‘‘es ma´s bien una asociacio´n mercantil que una agrupacio´n natural. El marido y la mujer son trabajadores . . . y los hijos, mirados como re´ditos de aquel capital, son entregados a ganancias . . . para adquirir conocimientos que hagan ma´s crecido su valor’’ (5:341) [The family there is more a mercantile association than a natural grouping. Husband and wife are workers, . . . and their children, seen as interest on that capital, are geared toward profit . . . to acquire knowledge that will increase their value]. Parisians’ fascination with spectacle is blamed for a considerable number of character flaws as well. As a result of ‘‘el instinto normal de los franceses hacia los juegos esce´nicos y su fingida declamacio´n’’ (5:331) [Frenchmen’s normal instinct for theatrical games and fake recitation], a concern for appearances has, according to Mesonero, come to govern all aspects of life. Sincerity, trust, generosity, and even love have virtually disappeared. In their place there has arisen a culture based on chicanery and deceit, epitomized by the entertaining but treacherous saltimbanquis [itinerant performers] who prey on ‘‘la ciega confianza del vulgo’’ (5:347) [the blind trust of the masses] in local parks. In his travels around the city, he finds a similar sort of deceit at work in the Monte de Piedad, which, though purportedly set up to help the less fortunate, relies upon ‘‘medios poco escrupulosos’’ (5:322) [unscrupulous means] when doling out ‘‘su mentido socorro’’ (5:322) [deceptive aid]. Even the lovely confines of the Palais Royal offer no respite. Despite Mesonero’s enthusiastic praise for the palace’s many charms, he finds it necessary to issue the following warning to those among his readers who may be tempted to sample its treasures: ‘‘por mucha que sea su inteligencia, no por eso crea que dejara´ de ser engan ˜ ado mejor’’ (5:308) [no matter your intelligence, do not believe for that reason you can avoid being even better deceived]. If the preceding has a familiar ring, it should: Mesonero’s lamentations regarding Parisian concupiscence are certainly far from original. The same, for that matter, could be said of his allusion to trickery in the Palais Royal, described in virtually the same terms in

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both Mercier’s Tableau de Paris and Balzac’s Peau de chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin] (to cite only works that Mesonero himself owned).23 As mentioned earlier, though, originality is not really the issue here. Part of the credibility of travel narration derives precisely from its utilization of already-familiar topoi, and in Mesonero’s case, predictably, the speculation topos is quickly turned to his own ends as he assiduously avoids associating Parisians’ purportedly greed-induced immorality with the capitalist achievements he has elsewhere lauded, opting instead to ascribe the city’s state of moral dissolution to one central cultural failing: the generalized a lack of religious conviction among its citizenry.24 Claiming heartfelt faith to be disturbingly rare, he declares that the church’s role in modern Parisian society has largely been reduced to an empty—albeit beautiful—‘‘especta´culo’’ for touristic admiration: Revestidas por su mayor parte de formas teatrales y halagu¨en ˜ as, [las iglesias] pueden ser consideradas ma´s bien como pa´ginas brillantes del arte, que como tributos de un pueblo creyente a la fe y religio´n de sus mayores. . . . Se apodera de [la] imaginacio´n la idea de un inmenso vacı´o producido por la falta del culto, por la ausencia de la Divinidad, desterrada inoportunamente de aquel sitio para dar lugar al apoteosis de las miserables grandezas humanas. (5:311)25 [Bedecked for the most part in enticing theatrical style, (the churches) can be considered more as brilliant pages of art than as tributes of a pious people to the faith and religion of their forefathers. . . . The imagination is struck by the idea of an immense void produced by the lack of worship, by the absence of the Divinity, cast into untimely exile from that site to make way for the apotheosis of humanity’s miserable achievements.]

In this vein, it is interesting to note that although Mesonero had initially mapped Paris as a city with a tripartite structure (the Left Bank, the Right Bank and the islands in the Seine), the last of these three categories—identified as the space of the church and the clergy— receives only the scantest of attention in his text. In the modern Paris described in the Recuerdos, this clerical zone has—as has the church it represents—diminished in importance to the point that, as Mesonero laments, ‘‘apenas es apercebida entre la inmensa extensio´n de las otras dos poblaciones a derecha e izquierda del Sena’’

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(5:289) [it is scarcely perceptible amid the immense extension of the other two populations to the right and left of the Seine]. Similar denunciations of Parisian immorality, greedy materialism, and lack of religious conviction appear—often virtually verbatim—in a significant number of the Parisian travel chronicles produced by other Spanish authors of the time. Ferna´ndez de los Rı´os, for example, comments in his 1845 ‘‘Itinerario descriptivo, pintoresco y monumental de Madrid a Parı´s’’ [‘‘Descriptive, Picturesque and Monumental Itinerary from Madrid to Paris’’] that ‘‘desde que nacen se lleva una cuenta escrupulosa entre padres e hijos como entre personas extran ˜ as’’ (1845, 37) [from the time of their birth, parents and children maintain a scrupulous tab, the same as among total strangers] and that ‘‘el matrimonio [es] un negocio mercantil sujeto al capital o industria de cada socio’’ (1845, 37) [marriage (is) a business deal subject to the capital or activity of each member]. Modesto Lafuente’s Viajes de Fray Gerundio (1842) offers a variety of close textual echoes as well. For example: Que en los matrimonios franceses entre de ordinario para poco el amor, encue´ntrolo, yo Fr. Gerundio, muy natural y muy en armonı´a con sus otras costumbres y modos de vivir adoptados. En primer lugar, por el principio indicado del general apego a´ la numerata pecunia, palanca y mo´vil del edificio social france´s. (1842, 256) [That in French marriages there is generally very little love seems to me, Brother Gerundio, very natural and very much in harmony with their other customs and ways of life they have adopted. As prime example, their aforementioned general fondness for legal tender, springboard and motivating force of the French social edifice.]

Even Eugenio de Ochoa’s highly laudatory account of his Parisian experiences in the mid-1850s contains the admission that ‘‘un excesivo amor al dinero, una propensio´n fatal a esquilmar al pro´jimo por la parte del bolsillo, no con violencia, sino con man ˜ a . . . deslucen un tanto la fisionomı´a moral del pueblo de Parı´s’’ (1861, 597) [an excessive love of money, a fatal propensity to pick their neighbor’s pocket, not with violence but with trickery . . . takes something of the shine off the moral physiognomy of the people of Paris].26 In at least some cases, it is likely that these similarities bespeak the direct influence of Mesonero’s Parisian rendering on works by his successors. Beyond that, though, the existence of such an interpretative synchronicity among Spanish travel writers is worthy of note be-

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cause of what it implies regarding the relationship between France and Spain. In describing Paris, Spanish authors typically evince an awareness of writing from a position of cultural disadvantage, and their descriptions of French society generally betray a clear, often markedly disgruntled awareness of that nation’s existing and growing ascendancy in terms of political influence, economic might, colonial expansion, artistic prestige, and more. Within this panorama of France’s dominance in worldly affairs, the ability to accuse them of experiencing a catastrophic spiritual decline appears to have offered Spanish travel writers at least one opportunity to assert the fundamental superiority of their own home culture. It is an opportunity few would pass up. From the perspective of considering the Recuerdos de viaje as a ‘‘text of texts,’’ it is equally important to recall that Spaniards were not alone in their criticism of the Parisian lifestyle. Comparably bleak evaluations abound in the works of numerous contemporary French writers as well, most notably those affiliated with the romantic movement that Mesonero claimed so to disdain. Balzac (who, though not technically a Romantic, was clearly positioned by Mesonero on that side of the romantic/classic dichotomy) is again a prime example. Despite Mesonero’s memorable charge in ‘‘Las novelitas francesas’’ [‘‘The Little French Novels’’] that Balzac possessed the rare distinction of writing books that were simultaneously immoral, boring, and annoying (reprinted in Zavala 1971, 232), we have already seen that Mesonero’s characterization of the Parisian lifestyle often follows the balzacian model extraordinarily closely. The allusions to immoral speculation, to Parisians’ absence of human sentiment, degradation of the family, lack of spiritual belief: all find strong resonance, to cite but one noteworthy example, in Balzac’s justly celebrated opening passage of La Fille aux yeux d’or [The Girl with Golden Eyes]: Paris n’est-il pas un vaste champ incessamment remue´ par une tempeˆte d’inte´reˆts? . . . Il n’y a la` de vrai parent que le billet de mille francs. . . . Qui donc domine en ce pays sans mœurs, sans croyance, sans aucun sentiment; mais d’ou` partent et ou` aboutissent tous les sentiments, tous les croyances et toutes les mœurs? L’or et le plaisir. (1949, 5:255–56) [Is not Paris a vast field endlessly stirred by a tempest of interests? . . . There the only true parent is the thousand franc note. . . . Who, then, is master in this country without morals, without belief, without any feel-

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ing, but from which and to which flow all feelings, all beliefs, all morals? Gold and pleasure.]

A perusal of Mesonero’s personal library could easily uncover many similar quotations in texts by Balzac and others.27 While repeatedly denouncing the ‘‘almost incomprehensible’’ (5:341) social and aesthetic postures commonly associated with the romantic (i.e., ‘‘nonclassical’’) school, Mesonero knew its works well and used them recognizably and repeatedly in the construction of both the physical and the ethical components of his own Parisian cityscape. Again, an apparent motive is not difficult to discern: the incorporation of romantic models in the creation of Recuerdos de viaje’s textual representation of Parisian immorality can be seen as a continuation of Mesonero’s aforementioned effort to blame romantic writers’ sentimentalized depictions of the Parisian Left Bank for the continued existence of poverty and squalor in those areas of the city. Here, however, he broadens his charge by claiming to hold the romantics responsible for having infected the whole of Parisian society with the very atmosphere of degradation and immorality their literary works so often describe. This then is to be the ‘‘literary’’ variation on his ‘‘cultural’’ critique of the moral consequences of declining church attendance. As he notes in ‘‘Las novelitas francesas’’: Sangre y cadalsos por doquier; crı´menes espantosos justificados o convertidos en objeto de burla; la seduccio´n, la violencia, el adulterio, el incesto; tales son los materiales en que fundan el e´xito de sus obras aquellos autores. . . . Recorred ahora los diarios franceses y contad a cua´ntos desgraciados han conducido estas ma´ximas al Sena; cua´ntas seducciones, adulterios, violencias, separaciones han causado; cua´ntos hombres de me´rito se han dejado arrastrar de esta execrable manı´a. (in Zavala 1971, 233–34 and 234–35) [Blood and gallows everywhere; fearful crimes either justified or turned into an object of ridicule; seduction, violence, adultery, incest; such are the materials that the success of these authors is based on. . . . Now scan French newspapers and count how many unfortunate ones these precepts have led to the Seine; how many seductions, adulteries, acts of violence, separations have been caused; how many men of worth have allowed themselves to be dragged down by this execrable mania.]

Again drawing on the symbolic resonance of the Come´die Franc¸aise, he decries the romantic movement’s misguided determination to

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make the Parisian public ‘‘forget and even ridicule as silly’’ (5:335) the ‘‘sublime ideas’’ of classical dramatists such as Molie`re, Racine, and Corneille, thereby contributing to the creation of a culture in which the admirable classical values of truth, dignity, and sincerity— ‘‘la verdad esce´nica, la dignidad y la nobleza de la accio´n, la expresio´n sublime de las ma´s profundas emociones del a´nimo’’ (5:334) [theatrical truth, dignity and nobility of action, the sublime expression of the most profound emotions of the spirit]—had largely ceased to exist, having been replaced by the egotism and moral decay proffered by the worst kind of romantic art. Once more, the battle lines appear to have been clearly drawn. Nevertheless, as has already been seen to occur with other aspects of Mesonero’s neatly packaged Parisian schema, his effort to maintain the clear polarization of these binary opposites is not always successful. It is in this vein worthy of note that despite Mesonero’s occasionally rabid posturings, the romantic sensibilities he claims to disdain can actually be found lurking in quite a few aspects of his own text. Certainly both his costumbrista sensibilities and the insinuation of a budding sentimental pose into his erstwhile scientific narrative style can be linked to aesthetic developments associated with the rise of romantic consciousness. There are other points of contact as well. For example, though he was often given to scathing criticism of the inverisimilitude and histrionic bad taste of the romantics’ predilection for ‘‘marked contrasts’’ (5:292), his own Left Bank/Right Bank modeling of Paris is itself structured on just such oppositions: [Es] un pueblo en donde al lado del lujo ma´s asombroso reina tambie´n la ma´s horrorosa miseria; al lado de las virtudes ma´s nobles, toda la depravacio´n del crimen. (5:304) [It is a place where next to the most astonishing luxury there reigns also the most horrifying misery; next to the most noble virtues, all the depravity of crime.]

On other occasions, to cite just one more example, he indulges himself in what Parkhurst Ferguson has termed the ‘‘general romantic taste for panoramas’’ (1992, 67), traveling to emblematic elevated locations such as Notre-Dame and Montmartre from which to emit pronouncements on the physical and moral attributes of Parisian society:

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Considerado Parı´s desde una elevada altura, so´lo ofrece una inmensa masa de sombras cenicientas, una agrupacio´n de picos grises o negros, una montan ˜ a, en fin, de pizarras, en cuyo fondo mate y sombrı´o vienen a apagarse los de´biles rayos del sol . . . y los objetos lejanos de importancia, las torres, los arcos triunfales aparecen como encubiertos con una gasa ma´s o menos espesa, que por otro lado no deja de prestarles cierto realce y misteriosa hermosura. Resultado de esta constante humedad es el color sombrı´o que adquieren muy pronto los edificios, en te´rminos de llegar a ennegrecer completamente los de piedra y dar lugar en los intersticios de sus labores a un musgo verdinegro que a nuestros ojos no puede menos de desfigurarlos. (5:292) [When examined from an elevated height, Paris only offers up an immense mass of ashen shadows, a cluster of gray or black peaks, a mountain, that is, of slate, in whose dark and dull-hued background the weakened rays of the Sun fade away . . . and the far-off objects of importance, the towers, the triumphal arches, appear as if covered by a thickish gauze, which on the other hand does not fail to give them a certain splendor and mysterious beauty. Because of the constant humidity, buildings quickly take on a somber color and those made of stone eventually blacken entirely and in their crevices grows a greenish black moss that, in our eyes, cannot help but disfigure them.]

This last example is interesting for several reasons. In terms of Mesonero’s self-declared antiromantic bias, it is worth noting that in this attempt to convey a negative image of Paris—one in which not just the city’s older quarters, but the entire urban expanse is shown to have become infected with the darkness and decay of romantic blight—he not only adopts as his own a highly romantic lexicon of ‘‘shadows’’, ‘‘gauzes’’, and ‘‘greenish black moss’’, but also admits to having experienced for himself—albeit fleetingly—an uncharacteristically romantic reaction to the hazy and contaminated panorama he beholds: the perception that in darkness and decay there may indeed lie a ‘‘certain splendor and mysterious beauty.’’ Mesonero’s interest in achieving a bird’s-eye view from which to contemplate—and interpret—the city of Paris points to another significant issue as well. As Foucault and others have noted, the panoptical perspective is typically associated with the quest for control. As Barthes wrote a` propos of ascending the Eiffel Tower: ‘‘le vol d’oiseau . . . donne le monde a` lire, et non seulement a` percevoir’’; ‘‘Qu’est-ce en effect qu’un panorama? Une image que l’on cherche a` de´chiffrer’’ (1989, 8 and 11; emphasis in original) [the bird’s-eye view . . . presents the world to be read, not just perceived; What, in

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fact, is a panorama? An image one seeks to decipher]. Mesonero undoubtedly strives to use his panoramic perspective in exactly this way: to decipher, to control the city he finds laid out at his feet. If anything, though, he seems instead to discover Paris from above to be even more diffuse and difficult to read. Or perhaps more exactly, the reading it seems to put forward is decidedly unlike the image of reason, clarity, and efficiency Mesonero had tried to impose upon it in much of his text. The passage cited previously, in this sense, brings to mind a rather different notion of the scopic perspective, one put forward by Michel de Certeau and analyzed as follows in Prendergast’s valuable Paris and the Nineteenth Century: In de Certeau’s version of the view from on high, the ‘‘scopic’’ and the ‘‘gnostic’’ work together to produce a ‘‘fiction du savoir’’, a series of ‘‘totalisations imaginaires’’ fuelled by the viewing subject’s desire to be but a pure ‘‘point voyant.’’ Not surprisingly, knowledge here is linked to death; what is seen from on high are mere ‘‘cadavres,’’ a spectral parody of the real thing. (1992, 209)

As will be further illustrated in the final section of this chapter, this characterization turns out to capture Mesonero’s reading of Paris extraordinarily well. Thus far I have attempted to sketch out some of the principal thematic foci (modernity, spectacle, aesthetics, etc.) that give structure to Mesonero’s text. His treatment of these topics, as I have also sought to illustrate, creates what is essentially a series of overlaid binary pairings, with his beliefs regarding urban reform and literature finding physical incarnation in the layout of Parisian geography. The appeal of this binary model is certainly easy to understand, but it is equally obviously a construction whose point, as Frederic Jameson once put it, ‘‘is not its logical accuracy . . . but, on the contrary, its existence as a symptom’’ (1981, 254). The inevitable breakdown of this neat set of pairings underscores the profoundly conflicted reading of the city lying at the heart of his presumably—and insistently—unproblematic text. One of the most significant defining aspects of Mesonero’s Parisian chronicle, in fact, lies precisely in the extent to which the very aspects of both urban space and literary expression that he claims to find most reprehensible ultimately prove inextricable from other qualities he evidently, even effusively admires. The final section of this chapter provides further illustration of this point by focusing on one particular aspect of the text in

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which many of the principal binary components with which Mesonero strives to construct his urban schema come explicitly into play, ultimately projecting an image far different from the one he initially declares his intention to create. That aspect of the text involves Mesonero’s presentation of the requirements and customs surrounding the burial of the dead.

 Au cimitie`re du Pe`re Lachaise, un monsieur fort obligeant, et encore plus libe´ral dans ses propos, s’offrit pour indiquer a` Julien le tombeau du mare´chal Ney . . . Mais en se se´parant de ce libe´ral, qui, les larmes aux yeux, le serrait presque dans ses bras, Julien n’avait plus de montre. —Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir [At the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery, a very obliging man, even more liberal in his remarks, offered to show Julien the tomb of Mare´chal Ney. . . . But in separating from this liberal who, tears in his eyes, had nearly come to hold him in his arms, Julien no longer had a watch.]

The cemeteries of Paris held a great fascination for Mesonero. This, in itself, is not necessarily remarkable. As Chris Rojek as noted, ‘‘Black Spots’’ (as he terms locations associated with death) have long enjoyed favor as major tourist attractions (Rojek and Urry 1997, 62). In Mesonero’s case, though, the frequency with which his Parisian travel chronicles return, time and again, to burial sites and other death markers is indeed striking. For example, three of the six travel articles he published in 1836–37 after his first Parisian visit focus on ‘‘Black Spots’’ (‘‘Las catacumbas de Parı´s’’ [‘‘The Catacombs of Paris’’], ‘‘El Panteo´n Nacional’’ [‘‘The National Pantheon’’], ‘‘La Bastilla’’ [‘‘The Bastille’’]), as does the sole Parisian travel article he published subsequently to the appearance of his Recuerdos de viaje (1853’s ‘‘El sepulcro de Moratı´n’’ [‘‘Moratı´n’s Tomb’’]). Regarding the catacombs article, it is interesting to note that Mesonero had never actually visited the site for himself, thanks to Prefect Rambuteau, who closed the catacombs to tourist visitation, considering the presentation ‘‘a` la curiosite´ publique un pareil spectacle, peu digne d’un people civilise´’’ (in Prendergast 1992, 80) [to public curiosity such a spectacle, unworthy of a civilized people]. So keen was Mesonero to present this particular death ‘‘spectacle’’ to his Spanish readership, however, that he simply turned to Jouy’s

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visit to the catacombs, as recounted in the pre-Rambuteau L’Hermite de la Chausse´e d’Antin, and reproduced it in Spanish translation as centerpiece of his own travel representation. As in other aspects of his Parisian writings, Mesonero’s interest in places of death appears to have stemmed, at least in part, from deficiencies he perceived in the funerary practices of his native Spain. Although cemetery burial had been mandated by a public health regulation of 1787, the first public cemetery in Madrid was not completed until 1808 (Goldman 1979, 87).28 When Mesonero published his Recuerdos de viaje more than thirty years later, a majority of Spanish towns still did not practice cemetery burial, relying instead on the long-standing–though decidedly unhygienic–tradition of interring the dead in the walls and floors of churches (Gala´n Cabilla 1988, 256).29 Mesonero’s opinion of his nation’s slow progress in the matter of cemetery reform is made clear in his Manual de Madrid, in which he unequivocally denounces the ‘‘pernicious custom’’ of church burial and ‘‘la terrible y obstinada oposicio´n que la hipocresı´a, las preocupaciones o el intere´s egoı´sta presentaban a la construccio´n de cementerios’’ (3:319) [the terrible and obstinate opposition that hypocrisy, worry, or selfish interest has presented for the construction of cemeteries]. The problem was not only that church burial was not modern; it also presented a serious risk to public health (3:319).30 Given Mesonero’s strong sense of civic duty, it is consequently not surprising to discover that during both of his trips to Paris he was a frequent visitor to the city’s various cimitie`res publiques.31 The description of those cemeteries contained in Mesonero’s travel writings is significant not only for what it reveals about his opinion of Spanish health regulations, but also for what it implicitly suggests about his evaluation of French society as a whole. Upon his arrival in Paris during the 1840 voyage, one of Mesonero’s first outings was a trip to Pe`re Lachaise. Constructed in 1804, Pe`re Lachaise had been envisioned as a field of rest (champ de repos), a beautifully landscaped Elysian field separated both physically and psychologically from the city it served. Such a cemetery would seem to fit Mesonero’s needs quite well: not only did its beautiful landscaping offer a felicitous alternative to Spain’s current methods of cemetery construction, but its physical separation from the dissolute atmosphere of downtown Paris facilitated his desire to present cemetery burial as a moral and pious activity. It is thus not surprising to find Pe`re Lachaise cited repeatedly in Mesonero’s municipal works as a functioning model of ideal cemetery reform. A careful reading

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of his Parisian travel writings, however, reveals a rather more complicated vision of this aspect of urban modernity. Although originally conceived as an idyllic escape from urban concerns, by the time of Mesonero’s visit to Paris the picturesque rural atmosphere of Pe`re Lachaise was becoming increasingly compromised both by the steadily encroaching metropolis and by the fact that the number of funerary monuments had increased to such a point that the picturesque garden paths had begun to take on a decidedly more urban air. Tourists had, in fact, begun to express disillusionment. One American observer, for example, complained of monuments ‘‘huddled too closely together’’ with the result that the area had begun to ‘‘look more like a town or village than a cemetery’’ (in Etlin 1984, 367). Another noted with displeasure: ‘‘It is literally a necropolis. It has its paved streets and walks, its monuments of every size and fashion, so closely piled together, that nature is entirely banished’’ ( Jarves 1856, 65). Mesonero, despite his interest in sheltering the cemetery space from the moral ambiguities of Parisian city life, explicitly acknowledges this increasingly urbanized atmosphere on several occasions. Though its tree-lined pathways compare favorably with the barren confines of Spanish burial grounds, Pe`re Lachaise nonetheless produces in him the impression of a vast ‘‘Necropolis’’ (5:323), its more than fifty thousand graves combining to form a veritable ‘‘city of the dead’’ (5:323). No longer an Arcadian escape from the crowded streets of the capital, the cemetery has in some respects become the city’s mirror image, its thousands of stone mausoleums corresponding to the apartment houses of the Parisian skyline, its phantasmal inhabitants representing a veritable cross section of the urban populace. Reading on, it becomes evident that the Parisian cemetery has not only begun physically to resemble the city it serves; it has also begun to take on certain characteristics of the urban lifestyle. The chapter that immediately follows the description of Pe`re Lachaise deals with Mesonero’s first trip to Paris in 1833. Curiously enough, on that occasion as well, one of his first acts on arriving in the French capital was to go to a cemetery. Looking through a local newspaper he had noticed the obituary of a romantic playwright named Victor Ducange. Though virtually forgotten today, Ducange’s works were, at the time, exceedingly popular in Spain—a fact that the antiromantic Mesonero does not fail to bemoan with the acid observation that ‘‘nosotros les aplaudimos por varias razones: la primera porque van

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de esta capital, y ya es sabido que todo lo que va de ella es excelente’’ (5:328) [we applaud them for various reasons: the first being that they come from this capital and it is well known that everything that comes from here is excellent]. In Mesonero’s own view, while French classical theater did indeed merit the qualification as ‘‘excelente,’’ Ducange’s plays were nothing short of ‘‘abortos teatrales’’ (2:64) [theatrical abortions]. Nevertheless, despite his antipathy for Ducange’s style, he appears to have been eager to attend the playwright’s funeral and upon reading the death notice immediately set off for the cemetery of Montmartre, where the ceremony was to occur.32 In his account of the burial, as elsewhere in his portrayal of life in the capital, allusions to commerce and spectacle dominate. With regard to the latter it is interesting to recall that, by standing alongside Victor Ducange’s coworkers at the funeral, Mesonero was in essence participating in a spectacle held both by and for persons drawn from le monde du spectacle: the theater. As he eventually discovers, however, none (including the corpse) was better than a third-rate hack. To this atmosphere of mediocrity Mesonero adds a sense of artifice and insincerity. The onlookers display little genuine emotion, and religious sentiment seems virtually nonexistent. Mesonero, who did not even know the deceased, declares himself to have been one of the most visibly moved by the ceremony, and in fact he later learns that the mourners’ relatively sedate behavior apparently owed less to their respect for Ducange than to a selfish fear that the local theater critic, also in attendance, might take offense and write a bad review of their next play (5:329). To make matters worse a vague air of commercialism hangs over the proceedings. The chapter, which begins with Mesonero’s musing on the hourly rate charged by the hearse driver for transporting the corpse, ends with his strolling the pathways of the Montmartre cemetery hoping to ‘‘saborea[r] el placer de meditar sobre las tiernas inscripciones’’ (5:330) [savor the pleasure of meditating upon the tender inscriptions] chiseled into the grave markers. What he finds is a stone etched with the words Aquı´ yace N., bonetero; fue buen padre, buen esposo y buen ciudadano: pasajero, ruega a Dios por e´l. La viuda inconsolable tiene el honor de prevenir al pu´blico que sigue con el almace´n, calle de . . . nu´mero . . . (5:330; ellipsis in original)

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[Here lies N., haberdasher; he was a good father, good husband, and good citizen; passer-by, pray for him. The inconsolable widow has the honor of informing the public that she is still proprietress of the store at number . . . on . . . Street.]

To Mesonero, the Parisian custom of using tombstones for commercial advertisement (common enough to have been mentioned in a number of other contemporary travel accounts [e.g., Lafuente 1842, 189–90; Jarves 1856, 66]) stands as yet one more indication of the city’s wholesale perversion of moral values (faith, respect, love) in the name of profitmongering. Upon seeing the gravestone he abruptly flees the cemetery in distress. If Paris’s cemeteries seem to have taken on certain key characteristics of the Parisian lifestyle, it might also be pertinent to inquire whether Paris, as described by Mesonero, might be found to display certain characteristics of the cemetery as well. In reading Recuerdos de viaje, it appears that such is the case. One of the later chapters, for example, includes a rather unusual poem with which Mesonero seeks to complement his previous episodic narration of ‘‘the customs and society of that capital’’ (5:342). The poem tells of a woman who, because of her inability to pay her debts, was placed on ‘‘pu´blica exposicio´n’’ [public display] in front of the Parisian Stock Exchange (5:343). There, in a scene in which once again the twin themes of spectacle and speculation are intertwined, her creditors are given the opportunity to bid on her possessions. After stripping her of clothing and goods, the greedy public remains unsatisfied. One bystander then takes her teeth, another her hair, followed by her skin, her voice, even her ideas. By the end, only a skeleton remains. Paris’s Place de la Bourse has become yet another Black Spot. Mesonero compounds the calculated offensiveness of this romance by refusing to allow even the victim to escape moral sanction. Her possessions, as it turns out, though seeming to be of high quality, are in reality inexpensive fakes. The poem’s detailed inventory of the woman’s fraudulent riches includes such items as ‘‘un chal dicho de las Indias y en el hecho de Lyo´n,’’ ‘‘diez encajes de Bruselas tejidos en Charenton,’’ ‘‘aderezos de oro-sı´mil,’’ ‘‘sederı´as de algodo´n,’’ and ‘‘otros muchos objetos de equı´voca produccio´n’’ (5:343) [a shawl said to be from the Indies but actually from Lyon; ten items of Brussels lace woven in Charenton; adornments of fake gold; silks made of cotton; many other products of questionable source]. Her attractive physical appearance is revealed to be a prod-

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uct of artful deceit as well: the beauty ‘‘que a tanto necio embauco´’’ [that duped many a fool] was merely the result of the judicious combination of a ‘‘skintight corset,’’ some crinoline, a set of false teeth, a wig, and a large number of opportunely placed pincushions (5:343–44). In a culture ‘‘donde la fachada es todo, donde nada el interior’’ (5:344) [where fac¸ade is everything, the interior nothing], everyone, it seems, is capable of deceit. The poem is clearly unsettling and can be seen to offer a particularly gruesome parable of Mesonero’s assessment of the city as a whole. Whereas the Place de la Bourse had been included in one of the text’s earlier chapters as one of the admirable ‘‘first-class monuments’’ gracing Paris’s elegant Right Bank, we now discover it to be a place of avarice, public humiliation, and death. In a similar vein, when Mesonero visited Pe`re Lachaise, he commented admiringly on the cemetery’s attractive and efficient layout, its cleanliness, and the elegant opulence of its funerary monuments; its inhabitants, however, are all corpses. The same, it appears, might ultimately be said of every street in Mesonero’s Paris. In the ‘‘pueblo extran ˜ o, inmenso, agitado, y egoı´sta’’ (5:341) [strange, immense, agitated, and selfish town] that he describes—‘‘donde el engan ˜ o preside y reina tan so´lo el yo’’ (5:344) [where deceit presides and only the ‘‘I’’ holds reign]—all are eventually sacrificed on the altar of greed. Though Parisians have shown an astonishing ability to build beautiful monuments to themselves (la Bourse, le Palais Royal), they have, in doing so, lost their soul. To use Mesonero’s own image, the city they have constructed is in a sense an immense necropolis. Throughout the Recuerdos de viaje Mesonero’s touristic wanderings lead him frequently into the realm of the dead. He is a tourist who, in his words, when leaving the stock exchange ‘‘corre al silencio sepulcral del cementerio del padre Lachaise’’ (5:324) [runs to the supulchral silence of the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery] and who, after climbing the towers of Notre-Dame, ‘‘quiere bajar a las Catacumbas, . . . cuyo nu´mero de individuos esta´ calculado en ocho veces la poblacio´n viviente de la capital’’ (5:324) [wants to descend to the Catacombs . . . whose number of inhabitants is calculated to be eight times the living population of the capital]. Though various other Spanish travel writers find special significance in Parisian burial grounds (see, e.g., Castelar 1875, 43), Mesonero’s attention to images of death is rivaled only by that of Carolina Coronado, who devotes a significant part of her regrettably brief and incomplete journalistic series, ‘‘Un paseo desde el Tajo al Rhin’’ (‘‘A Stroll from

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the Tagus to the Rhine,’’ published serially in La Ilustracio´n, 1851– 52), to descriptions of Pe`re Lachaise, the National Pantheon, and the Catacombs, a tactic she justifies by proclaiming ‘‘la muerte, emperadora en Francia, como Napoleo´n, ha conquistado a la vida’’ and ‘‘el Parı´s de los muertos es acaso el verdadero Parı´s’’ (1852, 5–6:5) [death, empress in France like Napoleon, has conquered life’’; ‘‘the Paris of the dead is perhaps the true Paris’’). This vision of Paris as necropolis had a fairly established pedigree (again, in no small part thanks to Balzac) by the time Mesonero and later Coronado chose to make it their own and as such can be seen as yet another example of travel writers’ employing existing Parisian metaphors to suit their own ends. In the Recuerdos de viaje, one of the most powerful renderings of the Paris/death formulation occurs, perhaps not coincidentally, in the final description of the city included in the text. Shortly before departing for Belgium, Mesonero had the opportunity to witness the ‘‘magnificent spectacle’’ (5:348) of Napole´on’s interment at the Invalides. His narration of this solemn event—which, as he notes in an absurd but appropriate twist, he later had the opportunity to see reenacted by the local circus (5:336)—reveals the whole of Paris to have been transformed, quite literally, into a cemetery. Virtually the entire Parisian population participates in the burial ritual, lining the streets by the thousands as the funeral procession snakes its way toward the Invalides. What is more, a series of funerary monuments have been placed by government decree all along the processional route. In Mesonero’s words: Desde . . . el puente de Neuilly, hasta el templo de los Inva´lidos, en una distancia de dos leguas, puede decirse que era una serie no interrumpida de arcos de triunfo, de templetes alego´ricos, de pira´mides, columnas, obeliscos, estatuas colosales, ma´stiles y banderas, cuya descripcio´n serı´a interminable. (5:349)33 [From . . . the Neuilly Bridge to the Temple of the Invalides, for a distance of two leagues, it can be said there was an uninterrupted series of triumphal arches, allegorical temples, pyramids, columns, obelisks, colossal statues, masts, and flags, whose description would be endless.]

Were it not for the identifying reference to the Neuilly bridge, the passage could easily be interpreted as a description of Pe`re Lachaise, whose walkways were crowded, to quote Modesto Lafuente, with ‘‘obeliscos y columnas, y pira´mides, y templos y capillas, erigidos a´

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la memoria de los innumerables hombres ce´lebres que descansan en aquella populosa ciudad’’ (1842, 189) [obelisks and columns, and pyramids and temples and chapels, erected to the memory of the countless famous men who rest in that populous city]. Just as earlier in the Recuerdos the pathways of Pe`re Lachaise were compared to the streets of a city, here it is the streets of the city that have become the paths of a graveyard. Returning to the day of Mesonero’s arrival in the French capital, it may at this point come as little surprise to discover that here again the narrative develops around one of Paris’s Black Spots: El viajero . . . reconoce en fin que aquella verja que se abre delante de e´l es una de las entradas o barreras de Parı´s (la barrera llamada del Infierno), y que un giro ma´s que de´ la rueda de su coche, le da ya en el recinto de la inmensa capital. (5:288) [The traveler . . . recognizes at last that the grating that opens before him is one of the entrances or gates of Paris (the one known as the Gate of Hell), and that one more turn of the wheel of his coach will carry him into the enclosure of the immense capital.]

It is perhaps not coincidental that this image of Mesonero’s carriage’s rumbling through the ominous-sounding Barrie`re d’Enfer contains what appears to be not-so-hidden echoes of several significant intertexts. One of these would again be Balzac, an important point of reference throughout the Recuerdos de viaje and well known for his repeated portrayal of Paris as hell: ‘‘ce n’est pas seulement par plaisanterie que Paris a e´te´ nomme´ un enfer’’ (5:255) [it is not only as a pleasantry that Paris has been called a hell].34 Another would be the famous passage from Larra’s ‘‘El dı´a de difuntos de 1836’’ [‘‘Day of the Dead, 1836’’]: Vamos claros, dije yo para mı´, ¿do´nde esta´ el cementerio? ¿Fuera o dentro? Un ve´rtigo espantoso se apodero´ de mı´, y comence´ a ver claro. El cementerio esta´ dentro de Madrid. Madrid es el cementerio. (1960, 2:280) [Let’s be clear, I said to myself, where is the cemetery? Inside or outside? A fearful dizziness overtook me and I began to see clearly. The cemetery is inside Madrid. Madrid is the cemetery.]

A direct connection to both Balzac and Larra is indeed quite plausible, though with the crucial transformation—so typical of Meson-

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ero—that while Recuerdos de viaje directs its criticism toward a culture of which both author and readers are at most only temporary spectators, both Balzac and the anguished Larra—‘‘¡Necios! ¿Os move´is para ver muertos? ¿No tene´is espejos por ventura?’’ (1960, 2:280) [Fools! You are wanting to see dead people? By chance have you no mirrors?’’]—were speaking of and to their own city and their own countrymen. The third textual echo is from a far earlier example of ‘‘travel literature,’’ this one penned nearly six hundred years before Mesonero’s birth. Though the Parisian Gate of Hell lacks Dante’s explicit warning—‘‘Per me si va nella citta` dolente, . . . per me si va tra la perduta gente’’ (1970, Inf. III.1, 3) [Through me the entrance to the woeful city, . . . through me the way among the lost]—its textual function is somewhat analogous. Indeed, as Mesonero was fully aware, the Barrie`re d’Enfer was not merely an eerily named gateway into Paris: it was also the entrance to the Catacombs, that city beneath the city that had so fascinated him during his first journey, whose miles of subterranean roadways (carrie`res) contained the remains of some forty generations of Parisian dead.35 From the gates of Paris, to the gates of a cemetery, to the gates of hell, there is but little difference. To gain entry to the vast necropolis, there was no need for Mesonero to descend into the Catacombs. He had only to continue his carriage ride toward the center of town. In creating this fascinating and disquieting portrayal of the Parisian urban model, Mesonero not only provides an interesting case study of nineteenth-century Spanish cross-cultural criticism; he also, perhaps above all, offers a revealing glimpse into his hopes and fears regarding the culture of Spain. As in most other nineteenth-century Spanish travel texts, Paris functions in Mesonero’s Recuerdos de viaje as a sort of multipurpose cultural yardstick against which contemporary Spanish readers were invited to measure the relative strengths and weaknesses of their own nation’s social organization, aesthetic values, and ethical systems. Living at a time when the steady southward march of French cultural influence must have seemed virtually unstoppable (in his words, ‘‘todo nos viene de Parı´s, so´lo la moneda se nos va’’ [1:199; Everything comes to us from Paris. All we send to them is our money]), Mesonero believed it particularly important that Spaniards learn to recognize and intelligently evaluate both the admirable and the reprehensible qualities of Parisian society in order that they might make intelligent choices about the future development of their own culture.

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It was, in his view, a skill that most Spaniards had yet to master.36 He illustrates his point in the last stanza of his poetic parable about the public decortication of the young woman in the Place de la Bourse. There, in a rather gruesome epilogue, the young woman’s skeleton—dead, stripped of its utility—is claimed by a young Spaniard named Orfila who wishes to take it home for study. For Mesonero, such had been the Spanish experience: contact with France, among those who did not—out of envy or ignorance—reject such contact outright, had been largely reduced to a particularly distasteful form of cultural grave robbing, the rotting fruits of which were incapable of serving Spanish society in any way. Rather than copying any of the many admirable attributes of Parisian modernity (i.e., concern for public hygiene, efficient economic organization, rational architectural regulations, attention to individual comfort and aesthetic sensibilities), Spain had, in his estimation, settled instead for an unwary embrace of some of its more unsavory by-products, including a growing love of money (‘‘Or-fila’’) and a disreputable infatuation with the basest of artistic spectacle (Ducange). Mesonero’s hope, quite clearly, is to reverse that trend and in so doing help to assure that modernization in his own nation might lead, not to the destruction of the traditional moral value systems he cherishes, but instead to the creation of ‘‘una nueva era en el progreso verdadero y en los intereses morales y materiales de la sociedad’’ (5:214) [a new era in true progress and in the moral and material interests of society]. In The Fall of Public Man Richard Sennett evokes the dual nature of Paris’s unique aura when he observes that ‘‘Paris was the place in which all the fears and fantasies of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie were concentrated. [It was] a place of both fascination and horror to others’’ (1978, 129). This formulation, though it was not intended as a commentary on Spain, successfully encapsulates the vision of Paris found in nineteenth-century Spanish travel writing. Beginning with the Parisian chronicles of Mesonero Romanos, the pattern of simultaneous attraction and repulsion so evident in his travel narrations would subsequently reappear, in one form or another, in nearly all Spanish accounts of the French capital published during the course of the century. To be sure, not all authors shared identical cultural values and beliefs, nor did they all seek to analyze Paris according to the same set of criteria. Some, including Alarco´n, are harsher than Mesonero in their denunciation of Parisians’ moral failings; others, including Ochoa and Rusinyol, more benevolent in

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their depiction of a cultured society elevated by its devotion to intellectual endeavor, elegance, and art. However, in general terms, it is fair to say that Spanish accounts of travel to Paris almost always contain at least some echo of Mesonero’s dilemma. While nineteenthcentury Spanish travelers may, as Mesonero claims, have considered the voyage to Paris to be something of a ‘‘necessary pilgrimage,’’ it is also clear that the lessons of that voyage were contradictory indeed. But then how could it be otherwise? Writers setting out to describe Paris were, after all, attempting to represent textually a physical/cultural construction—‘‘the City’’—that it has become almost commonplace to characterize as fundamentally unrepresentable (see, e.g., Donald 1997, 186; Prendergast 1992, 22–23), and they do so furthermore as a means of encapsulating the spirit of that notoriously slippery concept known as ‘‘modernity.’’ In Mesonero’s case, this dilemma was made doubly fearsome because these two topics— the urban, the modern—form such an explicit focus of his text and because he himself appears so ill at ease with so many of the concepts (heterogeneity, fragmentation, ambiguity, motility, marginality, and the like) that are typically recognized as central to the urban and/or modern experience. Though Mesonero does deal with some of these issues (after all, it is he who initially ‘‘fragments’’ the city into Left Bank, Right Bank, and islands of the Seine), he tends to do so in ways that allow him to conserve a clear sense of order, of meaning. And though he is certainly willing to acknowledge the presence of change in modern city life—indeed he himself avidly promotes it in the guise of urban reform—, he clearly envisions a system in which not only the determination of which changes are (or are not) to occur, but also the effects those changes may (or may not) bring about, could be subject to careful control. When that conceptual schema is put in contact with Paris, Mesonero quickly finds himself in a bind. The project of pinning down, deciphering—much less controlling—the pace and direction of a continually transforming modern consciousness proves daunting at best. The serial novelist Ayguals de Izco put it well when he wrote in La maravilla del siglo (The Wonder of the Century, 1852): Los Boulevards son la expresio´n de Parı´s, porque sienten todas sus sacudidas. ¿Y co´mo quiere usted que le haga un verdadero retrato de ellos si no se parecen nunca a sı´ mismos? (1852, 183) [The Boulevards are the expression of Paris because they experience all of its shudderings. And how do you expect me to paint a true portrait of them if they never even resemble themselves?]

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Mesonero’s dilemma is that the promise of providing such a ‘‘true portrait’’ is a fundamental component of his text. The pretense of truthfulness and accuracy is, after all, central underpinnings of his claim to credibility and authority as well as being key components of the credo of useful travel (and useful travel writing) that Mesonero appears sincerely to wish to uphold. The problem is that Paris itself does not always cooperate. By his own account the city he encounters is composed of a shocking series of contrasts that—were this not unsettling enough—stubbornly defy his every effort to maintain them neatly delimited, instead swirling unbidden into repeated passages of his text (Ducange’s funeral, the bird’s-eye view, the romance, and so forth) in sometimes bewildering combination. Thus, while Mesonero’s urbanistic and literary goals encourage him to sketch the city’s municipal, artistic, and social realities as the result of a series of straightforward and mutually exclusive choices, his own narration belies such facile distinctions. The resulting portrayal of the Parisian urbanscape, though far messier than the schematic rendering Mesonero explicitly seeks to create, is also, for that very reason, richer and more perceptive than it initially appears. While he does seem somehow to remain ever hopeful that the processes of modernity may prove subject to human control and that Spain’s entrance into ‘‘the civilizing march of the century’’ (3:199) might therefore be realized without recourse to the darker components of Paris’s urban experience, there is always some sense that he intuits that whatever good is to be gained will inevitably also engender pain and loss, and that his gesture to his compatriots that they join him in the symbolic trek across the Parisian Pont Neuf is both an invitation and a requiem.

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2 Miremos siempre hacia atra´s: Galdo´s Confronts the Italian Grand Tour Italia, donde la gloria es un culto, el amor una religio´n, la fe un templo, la poesı´a un canto, la belleza un cielo y el arte un mundo. —Vı´ctor Balaguer, Recuerdos de Italia [Italy, where glory is worship, love a religion, faith a temple, poetry a song, beauty a heaven, and art a world.]

FOR THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELER TOURING WESTERN EUROPE, the visit to Paris finds both its most obvious companion and most obvious counterpoint in the tour of Italy. Among their similarities, these two sites not only share the distinction of having been exceedingly popular nineteenth-century travel destinations, they also distinguish themselves by virtue of the profound significance ascribed to them—and hence the considerable value placed on the ability to claim firsthand observation of them—by the traveling public of the time. That being the case, it should come as no surprise that travel writing about Italy also shares with its counterpart Parisian travel corpus a large number of important commonalities including the need to contend with an elaborate preexisting network of representation and connotation, as well as each of the other various textual dilemmas (originality, authenticity, etc.) presented as characteristic of Parisian travel narration at the beginning of the previous chapter. There are, though, equally important differences. For one thing, unlike the journey to Paris, travel to Italy in most cases did not consist of directed movement toward a single focal point, but rather the sequential and highly ritualized visitation of a variety of metaphorically valorized locales. Put another way, it was not a direct line but a circle, and this more dispersive structure lends to Italian travel writ77

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ing a narrative and representational dynamic of its own. It should be remembered too that until the latter part of the nineteenth century the various cities composing the typical Italian tour did not even all belong to the same nation, however they may have been conceptually identified as possessing an Italian cultural identity, and the metaphorical ‘‘meanings’’ ascribed to the various consecrated stopover sites (Florence, Rome, Naples, etc.) could in some cases differ among themselves at least as much as they might, in conjunction, depart from contemporary metaphorizations of Paris. Add to that mix the varying perspectives on Italy characteristic of authors of different nationalities, not to mention important individual distinctions from text to text, and it should be clear that travel writing on Italy is well positioned to offer its readers a degree of rhetorical richness and malleability comparable to that found in travel writing about that most protean of destinations: Paris. In the following pages I will consider the particularity of Spanish writers’ approaches to Italy, beginning, as before, with a few remarks regarding the corpus of Spanish chronicles in general before turning to a closer reading of what is in my view perhaps both the most interesting and modern travel narration produced in nineteenth-century Spain: Galdo´s’s Viaje a Italia (Journey to Italy, 1888–89). To situate Spanish travel writing on Italy it is useful to say a few words about broader European patterns of Italian travel narration. The voyage to Italy had of course already attained its status as one of the preferred subjects of European travel writing long before the nineteenth century began. During the Renaissance, Italy’s celebrated cultural achievements—both past and present—firmly established its reputation as source of inspiration and renewal for writers and artists throughout the European Continent (including Spain), such that a period of Italian apprenticeship came, in itself, to be seen as legitimization of artistic worth. The flow of travelers then further accelerated over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the heyday of the so-called Grand Tour, whereby the sons of wealthy British families would typically spend upward of a year in Italy as a formal part of their cultural and class education.1 This custom, though in its strict sense primarily a phenomenon of Britain’s ‘‘specific geographic, historical, and economic circumstances’’ (Porter 1991, 71), would significantly mark the forms of Italian travel and travel writing practiced not only by British authors but by those from other nations as well (as seen, for

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example, in Goethe’s Italienische Reise [Italian Journey] and the many French variants on the ‘‘Voyage en Italie’’). The general tour paradigm would continue to hold sway long after the actual practice of Grand Touring, in its original formulation, came to an end roughly around the time of the French Revolution (Robinson 1976, 13). Though both the typical participants in and material circumstances of the Italian journey underwent major redefinition over the course of the nineteenth century, the evermore middle-class public that flocked to Italy each year continued by and large to construct their visits as multicity circuits on the pattern of the hallowed Grand Tour route. Though this can no doubt be partly ascribed to savvy advertising by Cook and other providers of economical tourist packages, clearly their marketing tactics would have proven far less successful than they were had the powerful appeal of the Grand Tour, or more precisely its cultural connotations, not been so firmly grounded in the popular imagination of the time. Though this progressive massification of the Italian tour drew sneers from some (memorably Stendhal, who was already complaining in 1826 that ‘‘Florence is nothing better than a vast museum full of tourists’’ [cited in Culler 1988, 157]), it was nonetheless a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and one that had important cultural consequences. With regard specifically to travel writing, the burgeoning ranks of visitors to Italy created a large pool of new consumers and authors of first-person Italian chronicles, most of which, again not surprisingly, continue to look to the Grand Tour as their explicit model. As briefly suggested earlier, one example of this influence can be found in the multifocal structure of most Italian writing and another in the overwhelming tendency for travel authors to focus their narratives around roughly the same handful of meaninginvested urban centers. The general characteristics of European Grand Tour writing I have mentioned thus far all find ample echo in nineteenth-century Spanish travel chronicles. The tour mentality also exerted considerable influence on other aspects of the textual representation of Italy, including several that would prove of special significance for authors from Spain. Among these perhaps the most important were Italy’s conceptualization as (once again) a site of pilgrimage and the Grand Tour’s function, in Porter’s words, as ‘‘a paradigm of travel undertaken to the center of a self-confident cultural tradition for the purposes of self-cultivation and the reaffirmation of a common civilized heritage’’ (1991, 19). The importance of these points can

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perhaps be best illustrated via a brief comparison of Spanish travel accounts of Italy with those devoted to Paris. In many ways the two are very similar. Certainly this was the case in terms of their popularity as the focus of Spanish travel narration. While Parisian chronicles do outnumber those devoted to Italian sites by a significant margin, it is telling to discover that the description of Italy, Paris, or both is featured in 90 percent of all of the book-length accounts of European travel produced by nineteenthcentury Spanish writers. In the case of both sites, too, their marketing as an accessible leisure travel destination dates from the early Isabelline period. Mesonero’s Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol was again an important organ of diffusion, as in the 1836 editorial ‘‘La Italia,’’ whose anonymous author (conceivably Mesonero himself ) casts Italy as a desirable travel destination, noting in the process that ‘‘ningu´n paı´s [es] ma´s frecuentado ni ma´s descrito por los viajeros’’ (1836, 231) [no country is more often visited or described by travelers].2 By midcentury, as advances in long-distance transportation provided a major boost to the affordability and accessibility of foreign tourism, glowing accounts of Italy’s consecrated travel destinations began crowding the pages of an ever-greater variety of specialized travel journals like El viajero ilustrado [The Enlightened Traveler], and informative articles on Italian history and art become almost a staple feature in the pages of the Spanish press. Contributions by Spanish literary figures can be traced back at least to 1839 with the publication of Francisco Martı´nez de la Rosa’s ‘‘Un recuerdo de Italia’’ [‘‘A Memory of Italy’’] in the Revista de Madrid [Madrid Journal], and by century’s end the number of Spanish literary figures who had published first-person accounts of their Italian sojourns rivaled that found in any other European nation.3 Italy’s popularity as travel destination was undoubtedly partly due—as was true of Paris as well—to matters of simple geography. Those who departed, as was typical, through Catalun ˜ a were able to cross into Italian territory after a journey of only three hundred fifty miles along the southern French coast, making Italy Spain’s closest noncontiguous European neighbor. Even if measured from Madrid, the distance to the Italian border—at approximately seven hundred miles—was scarcely greater than the distance to Paris. Nevertheless, as the limited popularity of Spanish voyages to other nearby neighbors such as Portugal and Morocco indicates, geography alone does not suffice to explain a destination’s touristic appeal. In the case of Paris, as was discussed in the last chapter, this appeal derived in con-

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siderable part from the frisson associated with Paris’s notoriety as the so-called capital of modern civilization, and this sense of cultural centrality in turn provides the nexus linking the conceptualization of Parisian travel to certain aspects of religious pilgrimage. Among travelers to Italy, the notion of pilgrimage is extremely strong as well, though the terms on which it operates are significantly different. Whereas those making the trek to the French oracle of modernity typically did so in the hope of glimpsing Europe’s cultural future, Italy offered its traveler-pilgrims the equally alluring possibility of reliving Europe’s cultural past. While Spanish travel narratives about France tend to dwell on that nation’s modern conveniences and the diverse benefits and scourges brought about by contemporary society, the focus in Italian chronicles is far more likely to include a meditation on the bases of Western civilization and the historical evolution of its principal beliefs.4 Such perceptions build, of course, on a broad network of cultural associations whereby Italy had long been construed, both within Spain and beyond, as a geographical wellspring of European identity, its many cultural achievements serving, not infrequently, to bolster notions of European superiority. As might be expected, this aspect of Italy’s appeal is conveyed with particular clarity in accounts of visits to Rome, a city that could boast of having been the birthplace of the Roman Empire as well as the seat of the Catholic Church. In De Madrid a Na´poles, for example, Alarco´n describes his 1860 arrival in Rome as follows: Vamos a entrar en la ciudad dos veces reina del Universo; en la capital del Paganismo y del Cristianismo; en la morada de los Ce´sares y de los Papas; en la fuente de nuestro idioma; en la metro´poli de los pueblos latinos; en el centro de la historia; en el emporio de las artes; en el santuario de la autoridad; en el Jorda´n de todos los pecados; en la u´ltima posada de los peregrinos. (1954, 1422) [We are about to enter the city that has twice ruled the Universe; the capital of Paganism and Christianity; the dwelling of the Caesars and the Popes, the wellspring of our language; the metropolis of the Latin peoples; the center of history; the emporium of the arts; in the sanctuary of authority; the Jordan of all sins; the final shelter of pilgrims.]

The sacralizing lexicon of pilgrimage is brought to bear in many other accounts as well, for example in Amo´s de Escalante’s Del Ebro al Tı´ber (From the Ebro to the Tiber, 1864):

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Al otro lado de aquellas aguas soberbias que nos cerraban el paso estaba Roma; Roma la anhelada, el te´rmino de mi peregrinacio´n, la Ciudad Eterna, el solio del ma´s alto poder que acatan los hombres, la consoladora de las universales tristezas, el sepulcro de gigantes razas, el monumento de heriocas memorias, el refugio de grandes infortunios; Roma la patria de todo desventurado: ¡la ciudad del alma! (1956, 2:202, emphasis in original) [On the other side of those majestic waters that blocked our way stood Rome; Rome the longed for, the end point of my pilgrimage, the Eternal City, the throne of the highest power recognized by men, the consolation of universal sorrows, sepulcher of giant races, monument to heroic memories, refuge of great misfortunes; Rome the homeland to all of ill fortune: the city of the soul!]

In the case of Pardo Baza´n, whose 1888 journey was in fact a pilgrimage in the literal sense, this notion is enshrined not only in the work’s title, Mi romerı´a [My Pilgrimage], but in its predominant focus on the city of Rome (with only a few other Italian cities even meriting brief description) and on topics relating to the institutional church or the author’s own Catholic faith. Even the famously anticlerical Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez could not resist offering his own take on the pilgrimage paradigm in En el paı´s del arte (In the Land of Art, 1896), in which Rome is cast as hapless victim of centuries of papacy-induced degeneration: Con entusiasmo habra´n podido venir aquı´ en el curso de los siglos millones de peregrinos . . . pero yo no cedo a los creyentes que su anhelo fuese ma´s grande por llegar a esta ciudad. Sin ma´s vida que la oficial del Quirinal y del Vaticano, sin ma´s industria que la explotacio´n del viajero, envuelta en su manto de ruinas y fulgurando sobre su frente veintisiete siglos de historia, atrae todavı´a la atencio´n del mundo y conserva en su seno, como u´ltimo latido de aquella soberanı´a de la Roma cla´sica, un misterioso poder que no se apoya en la fuerza de las armas, sino en la ceguera de la fe.’’ (1967–87, 1:185) [With enthusiasm millions of pilgrims have come here over the centuries, . . . but I do not accept that their desire to arrive in the city was for that reason greater. With no more life than the official one of the Quirinal and Vatican, without more industry than the exploitation of travelers, wrapped in her cape of ruin and with twenty-seven centuries of history shining on her forehead, Rome still draws the world’s attention and holds in her breast, like the last beating of the sovereignty of classical Rome, a mysterious power not upheld by force of arms but by the blindness of faith.]

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Blasco’s rather ironic retooling of the pilgrimage model can no doubt be understood in part as reaction to decades of the kind of hyperbolic sacralization of the Roman (and, more broadly, Italian) geographic space practiced by Alarco´n, Escalante, and other writers. Interestingly though, despite his parodic rejection of the specifically religious component of Rome’s perceived cultural centrality, the journey to Italy recounted in En el paı´s del arte continues to operate very clearly within the general pilgrimage model. It is just that Blasco’s notion of what qualified Rome—and, more broadly, Italy—as sacred space derives from his own set of ‘‘dominant intellectual concerns’’ (to return to Leask’s formulation): in this case his dedication to the introduction of democracy to Spain and almost unbounded veneration for the ideals of the Roman Republic (e.g., 1967–87, 1:205–6). Though few other writers metaphorized Italy in exactly this way, the process at work is in fact quite typical: though texts could sometimes differ considerably on the specifics, in nearly all nineteenth-century travel narrations the voyage to Italy is construed as a profoundly meaningful and personally transformative journey to what Alarco´n aptly described as ‘‘the center of history’’: the geographic point of origin from which European culture—however that notion might be defined and valorized by any given writer—was perceived to have sprung. This circumstance brings back to mind Porter’s aforementioned characterization of the Italian tour as the ‘‘reaffirmation of a common civilized heritage.’’ Since Spain is not Porter’s focus, though, perhaps commenting a bit further on the applicability of this idea to Spanish writers is worthwhile. One reason Porter’s phrase is interesting is that it presupposes that there is a home culture in these texts. And indeed there was, at least with respect to Spain’s nineteenth-century writers. The fact that this is true (and remains true irrespective of travel destination described) is a signficant indicator with regard to the forms of cultural definition at work in this corpus. We are, for example, quite a long way from present-day resitings of the relationship between dwelling and identity, with its recognition of the existence of what Homi Bhabha has called ‘‘the people of the pagus . . . who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture’’ (1994, 164), and the radical dismemberment of notions of cultural integralism in favor of the representation of human communities in terms of flowing or contestatory space (see, e.g., Pile and Keith 1997 and especially Moore 1997, 87–106). Though there was certainly ample opportunity for nineteenth-century Spanish writers

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to dismantle the notion of Spain as a stable cultural entity (it was, after all, a time of resurgent regionalism, colonial defeat, and no fewer than four civil wars), there is scant move to do so. Instead Spain is conceived as a ‘‘nation’’ not only in the obvious political sense but also in terms of Anderson’s notion of ‘‘deep, horizontal comradeship’’ (1991, 7), and it is a conception that all of these authors— regardless of political or regionalist orientation—readily accept. The other question that Porter’s formulation raises has to do with the presumption of commonality between travelers’ home societies and the Italian culture they have traveled to observe—or, perhaps more accurately, to evoke. This, too, proves to be the case in works by Spanish writers, though here there is a notable difference. Whereas authors from nations such as Britain, France, and Germany tend to express a clear sense of identity between the culture of their present-day homeland and the grandeur of classical Italy, the same cannot always be said of their reaction to the modern Italian society they actually behold on their journeys. Trollope’s famous comment that the Grand Tour would serve to convince Englishmen they are better off at home (Anderson 2001, 65) is but one of many examples of this idea. This problematization of contemporary Italian society is particularly pronounced in descriptions of Italy’s South. Pelz, following Robert Prutz, speaks of ‘‘Italy’s double nature’’ (1992, 115–16), through which there is seen to be a fundamental distinction between northerly portions of the peninsula considered to embody familiar European values and southern zones portrayed as ‘‘foreign’’ enclaves of unreason and barbarity. Though both Pelz (1992, 133) and Calaresu (1999, 152) correctly point to accounts of Naples as a particularly common focus for such cultural juxtaposition, the latitude at which ‘‘southern’’ Italian culture was considered to begin could actually fluctuate wildly from text to text. Stendhal offers a characteristically extreme example, writing off virtually the entire peninsula save the small northwestern quadrant containing the industrial Piedmont and Florence as a space of non– or even anti– European barbarity: ‘‘Pourquoi ne pas voir que la civilisation s’arreˆte a` Florence? Rome et Naples sont des pays barbares habille´s a` l’europe´enne’’ (1973, 69) [Why not see that civilization stops at Florence? Rome and Naples are barbarian countries dressed up in European clothes.]. Turning now to Spanish travel authors, we find that the sense of cultural identification is not limited to evocations of Italy’s grandiose classical past but extends to broad sectors of contemporary Italy

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as well. This is not universally the case, of course: Pardo Baza´n, for one, crafts Mi romerı´a in important part through nostalgia for the past, conceived in both a political and a spiritual sense, as illustrated succinctly in the phrase ‘‘Miremos siempre hacia atra´s; el pasado se rı´e del presente’’ (1888, 153) [Let us look always backward; the past laughs at the present], which she offers in reaction to the ‘‘ridiculous’’ modern sculpture of the ‘‘ninny’’ [‘‘mamarracho’’] Victor Emmanuel (the first king of united modern Italy) that she encounters while paying homage at the home church of Saint Anthony of Padua. As a whole, though, Spanish writers tend to express a strong sense of cultural kinship with recent (i.e., not only postclassical but post-Renaissance) stages of Italian history. And it is southern Italy, especially Naples, that they usually like best of all. The reason is not hard to discover: ‘‘Hay mucho de espan ˜ ol en este pueblo napolitano,’’ as Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez put it, ‘‘ante cuyas originales costumbres queda embobada la gente del Norte’’ (1967–87, 1:207) [there is much of the Spaniard in the Neapolitan people, whose original customs leave those from the North dumbstruck]. The notions of kinship underlying this textual posture not only stand in clear opposition to the ‘‘Eintauchen in die Spha¨re des Fremden’’ [immersion in the realm of the foreign] that Naples represented for its Northern European visitors (Pelz 1992, 133), it also sharply contrasts with Spaniards’ own accounts of travel to Paris discussed in the previous chapter.5 There, despite the fact that France could certainly also have been construed as a ‘‘Latin neighbor,’’ there is a tendency to emphasize the unfamiliar, even incomprehensible qualities of Parisian life, often via explicit negative juxtapositions with the culture of Spain. In Italian chronicles, in contrast, this kind of stark oppositional characterization gives way to enthusiastic exclamations of deep cultural understanding. Galdo´s’s claim is typical: Los espan ˜ oles nos encontramos en Italia como en nuestra propia casa. No se´ que´ hay allı´ de comu´n. La raza sin duda, la lengua, las costumbres. . . . Fuera de esto hay mil cosas que aumentan la semejanza. (6:1687) [We Spaniards find ourselves in Italy as if we were in our own home. I don’t know what it is that we share. Race, no doubt, language, customs. . . . Beyond that there are a thousand things that increase the resemblance.]

While, to be sure, Spanish authors of Parisian travel accounts were no less capable than those visiting Italy of using the stark juxtaposi-

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tion of Europe’s northern and southern regions as a means of reaffirming Spanish cultural values, those writing on Italy found it possible to achieve this goal not through a process of differentiation but rather one of profound recognition. In addition to Italy’s perceived cultural, religious, and linguistic kinship with Spain, Spanish writers’ often euphoric response to their Italian travel experiences was also strongly influenced by history: specifically, the fact that large portions of the Italian peninsula had, until relatively recently, been ruled by a branch of the Spanish royal family. References to Spain’s glorious role in Italian history appear in nearly every text, as do exhilarating descriptions of visits to buildings, battlefields, and other sites reminiscent of the period of Spanish rule. In Del Ebro al Tı´ber, in fact, Escalante claims the possibility of reliving Spain’s military glories to be one of the principal sources of Italy’s touristic appeal and expresses considerable consternation that this lucrative commercial angle had yet to be fully exploited by Spanish entrepreneurs: Desde los Alpes al cabo Spartivento, de gra´fico nombre, desde el mar de Liguria al Adria´tico, ¡cua´ntos nombres eternizados en la historia patria! ¿Por que´, desden ˜ osos de la propia gloria, no hemos escrito un libro que guı´e al viajero espan ˜ ol en estos paı´ses? . . . Porque hay infinitos curiosos que buscan aquellos sitios, y el llevarles hasta allı´ y el ofrecerles memorias de ellos, vale dinero. (1956, 2:85)6 [From the Alps to Cape Spartivento, of graphic name, from the Sea of Liguria to the Adriatic, how many names eternalized in our national history! Why, disdaining our own glory, have we not written a book to guide Spanish travelers in these countries? . . . Because there are countless who are curious to seek out those sites, and to lead them there and offer them such memories is worth money.]

Such passages allow the writer a rare opportunity to realign the relationship between the traveler and Italy’s past. Whereas Italian history most frequently functions primarily in the role of cultural mentor, here were are reminded that the traveler’s home nation, Spain, had once stood in imperial ascendance over that storied land. The traveler assumes, however briefly, the hierarchical gaze so common to travel accounts produced by emissaries of empire to colonized lands, such as those discussed in the latter chapters of this study. The historical dimension of the Spanish tourist experience in

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Italy again suggests an important point of distinction with respect to contemporary accounts of travel to France: whereas Spanish travel writers visiting France frequently give vent to angry denunciations of that nation’s history of military and cultural aggression toward Spain (especially Napoleon’s bloody invasion of 1808), Italy seems instead to have offered a rare and, by all accounts, much appreciated reminder of Spanish imperial glory. Obviously, though, reflections on the days of the Spanish Empire, as do most of the musings prompted by the visit to Italy, look resolutely toward the past. As Emiliar Castelar wrote in his Recuerdos de Italia [Memories of Italy], seeming to capture the sentiments of many of his contemporaries: ‘‘En esta nacio´n ma´s que se vive, se recuerda. Es necesario mirarla histo´rica y este´ticamente. . . . De otra manera no se viaja, no, por Italia’’ (1883, vi) [In this nation one does not live, one remembers. It is necessary to contemplate it historically and aesthetically. . . . There is no other way, none, to travel through Italy]. Galdo´s’s chronicle of his fall 1888 tour of the Italian peninsula occupies a fascinating niche in the history of Italian travel narratives in nineteenth-century Spain.7 The account, best known today as Viaje a Italia,8 first appeared as a series of ten journalistic articles— Galdo´s called them ‘‘cartas’’ [letters]—composed between October 1888 and February 1889.9 While Galdo´s’s literary importance could alone suffice to justify careful analysis of these surprisingly littlestudied texts, they are of special interest for a variety of other reasons as well. First, just as Italian travel writing, with its primarily historical and aesthetic focus, complements consideration of the more forward-looking, materialist tenor of travel writing on France, so too does Galdo´s’s travel literature offer an interesting counterpoint to that of Mesonero Romanos in terms both of texual objectives and of literary style. As was discussed in the previous chapter, Mesonero’s overt commitment to the notion of ‘‘useful travel’’ leads to the selfproclaimed desire to produce travel writing ‘‘al servicio de la patria’’ (5:205) [in service to his country] and to the adoption of a narrative voice that presents itself as essentially transparent. Though Mesonero’s Paris is very much a textual construction, and a fairly complicated one at that, it does not advertise itself as such and in this sense recalls Wood’s description of the deceptively guileless appearance of maps: ‘‘Mirror,’’ ‘‘window,’’ ‘‘objective,’’ ‘‘accurate,’’ ‘‘transparent,’’ ‘‘neutral’’: all conspire to disguise the map as a reproduction of the world. (1992, 22, emphasis in original)

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Galdo´s, on the other hand, makes no pretense whatever of saving the nation via his travel observations and, far from disguising his chronicle’s status as textual reproduction, transforms the problem of representation into a primary focus of his text. This, of course, is a key element of its modernity. This significant difference between Mesonero’s and Galdo´s’s approach to the travel genre may be profitably viewed in terms of their response to the ‘‘referential pact,’’ which according to Lejeune governs reader expectations regarding texts that by virtue of generic identity or other means ‘‘claim to provide information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text’’ (1989, 22). As Molloy notes, a number of textual formats and genres—among them travel writing—share this basic premise and hence raise similar interpretational problems: Travelogues, first-person accounts of various types, testimonios, diaries, autobiographies, all ‘‘genres’’ or hybrid modes of representation that would have the reader believe he is dealing with direct, unmediated accounts of real life narrated by real individuals, are no exception: these modes of structuring reality through writing that claim not to obey preconceived structures are also dependent upon a textual (if sometimes unwritten) prefiguration. (1991, 16–17)

Though Mesonero does indeed manipulate reader expectations regarding his text’s referentiality, there is no indication whatever that he does so in order to question the fundamental ability of language to reflect external reality, but rather to facilitate his text’s ability to achieve its self-declared real-world goals (e.g., persuading Spaniards to modernize Madrid and readopt classical artistic ideals). Galdo´s, as will be illustrated in the remainder of this chapter, takes a far more radical stance, hewing away at travel writing’s referential pact from multiple directions at once. Making such a textual strategy work in a genre as convention bound as travel writing entails a number of challenges. For nineteenth-century readers the authority of travel narration—its credibility as an accurate reading of sites and events—depended to quite a large degree on the text’s ability ‘‘to satisfy a freight of generic and moral expectations’’ (Leask 2002, 13). Breaking with the ‘‘expected’’ format, content, or style of a travel chronicle was therefore something of a weighty matter. There were, moreover, few forms of travel writing more ritualized and convention bound than was the Grand Tour chronicle. In text after text authors recount visits to

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largely the same series of Italian cities, engaging in similar activities, musing on much the same themes (art, history, civilization), and describing the whole from within comparable class and cultural parameters. Though few writers—certainly few literary writers— approach these various generic expectations in an entirely unselfconscious way, the Grand Tour paradigm remains the basic authorizing conceit of most Italian travel texts. This was certainly the case in nineteenth-century Spain. Faced with this convention-inscribed straitjacket, Galdo´s— interestingly enough—initially accepts it. Indeed, one of the most immediately striking characteristics of Viaje a Italia is the extent to which it appears designed deliberately to mirror nearly all of the typical conventions utilized in the tradition of Italian tour chronicles. Galdo´s’s choice of travel itinerary offers perhaps the most obvious example. As William Mead notes in his study The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century: ‘‘As a rule the tourists wasted little time upon the country districts, which in general were thinly inhabited and destitute of the comforts of life. Italy was in a peculiar sense a land of cities’’ (1914, 272; see also Black 2003, 3). This characterization of the typical travel habits of the eighteenth-century English gentry could serve as a suitable description of Galdo´s’s journey as well. Despite the fact that he would soon write, in an account of his 1889 journey to France, that ‘‘el fondo de riqueza de datos viatorios, so´lo pertenece al que tiene valor para detenerse en . . . una aldea miserable, pero curiosa y tı´pica, en la cual tal vez se descubre mejor la personalidad de un paı´s que en los centros que la civilizacio´n nivela y uniforma’’ (1973, 355) [the full wealth of knowledge gained through travel belongs solely to those with the merit to pause in . . . a miserable, yet interesting and typical village, where the personality of a nation is perhaps better discovered than in its centers, leveled and made uniform by civilization], while in Italy he resolutely adheres to the consecrated list of urban cultural centers included in the traditional Grand Tour route, with not one encounter with an aldea—miserable or otherwise—to be found anywhere in the text. The specific touristic activities in which he engages also closely parallel those described in works by other European writers, as he devotes his narrative attentions—as per tradition—largely to descriptions of museums, Roman ruins, and other sites long conventionalized as markers of Italy’s foundational role as the artistic and cultural wellspring of the Western world. Incorporation of conventions peculiar to Spanish accounts of the Italian tour make a strong

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appearance as well, including favorable references to Spain’s onetime sovereignty over important sectors of the peninsula and the many significant contributions Spaniards had made to Italian history.10 In fact, the only major tour commonplace Galdo´s does not choose to reproduce is one that will remain likewise absent from virtually all other Spanish accounts of the Italian tour, and that is the sometimes pronounced transgressive dimension of Grand Tour writing, in which evocations of high culture are often interspersed with abundant episodes of sexual adventurism or other topics of moral controversy.11 Galdo´s’s omission of this specific topos, though, may again be construed as obeisance to the expectations of his own particular readership (not to mention the fact that any morally questionable passages he might conceivably have included would have remained hidden from public view, unable to meet the censorship standards then in force in the periodical press). Among other things Galdo´s’s decision to follow so closely the wellworn conventions of Italian voyage narratives not only ensured that his readers would—at least at first glance—feel comfortable approaching his text, but also virtually guaranteed that they would also already know a great deal of the information he would be likely to provide. As Galdo´s himself acknowledges in his chronicle’s opening section: Italia es conocida aun por los que no la han visitado, y las representaciones gra´ficas y descriptivas de sus monumentos son, diga´moslo ası´, del dominio pu´blico. ¿Quie´n no conoce las lagunas de Venecia, la logia de Florencia y la plaza de San Pedro? Se ha escrito tanto de Italia, que es difı´cil y temerario an ˜ adir nuevas descripciones a las tan conocidas hechas por las plumas ma´s ha´biles de todos los paı´ses. (6:1688) [Italy is known even by those who have never visited, and the graphic and descriptive representations of its monuments belong, shall we say, to the public domain. Who does not know the canals of Venice, Florence’s Loggia, and Saint Peter’s Square? So much has been written about Italy that it is risky and difficult to add new descriptions to those already provided by the ablest pens of every land.]

In this respect again Viaje a Italia closely adheres to standard genre convention. As occurs with respect to the representation of Paris as well, the inevitability of textual redundancy was an often worrisome concern among authors of Italian travel narrations, and disclaimers concerning the ever-growing difficulty of introducing new travel

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works into an already saturated market would eventually become so commonplace that their inclusion could almost be classified as an obligatory gesture.12 The most typical response to this generalized crisis of originality was for writers to preface their narratives with a formal defense of their work’s interest and utility, usually via the claim that one or another aspect of the text was somehow new or unique.13 In Viaje a Italia, Galdo´s obligingly adopts this convention as well, formally undertaking to identify a novel perspective around which to organize his observations and meditations regarding the Italian peninsula and its culture. In the final paragraph of the first section of his text, he lays out his strategy as follows: Unicamente intentare´ presentar algunos puntos de vista, resultado de la observacio´n personal, y ası´ estas cartas contendra´n apreciaciones artı´sticas e histo´ricas enlazadas con los nuevos aspectos que ofrece la moderna Italia transformada por la unidad. (6:1688) [I will only try to present some viewpoints resulting from personal observation, and thus these letters will contain artistic and historical appraisals combined with the new features of modern Italy, transformed by unification.]

By and large this declaration of textual objectives once again does little to weaken the narrative’s already evident ties to standard genre practices. After all, virtually every Italian chronicle ever written consists primarily of ‘‘artistic and historical appraisals.’’ Similarly, Galdo´s’s idea of including personal ‘‘viewpoints,’’ though frowned upon by some of the travel genre’s earliest practitioners, had long been a staple of nineteenth-century travel writing. Nevertheless, just when it begins to appear that Viaje a Italia is to be an entirely conventional work, Galdo´s does something that indeed breaks significantly with the Grand Tour tradition. It occurs in the closing words of his text’s first section, when he declares his intention to evaluate for his readers ‘‘the new features of modern Italy, transformed by unification.’’ The importance that Galdo´s intends to grant to the issue of unidad can be suggested by the fact that the term appears a total of twelve times in the chronicle’s first section alone. In many cases, these references clearly refer, at least at one level, to Italy’s recent war of independence and the subsequent political unification of the Italian peninsula. At times Galdo´s makes the connection explicit by

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pairing the term unidad with modifiers such as ‘‘recie´n conquistada’’ (6:1685, 1687) [recently won] and ‘‘conquistada no ha mucho’’ (6:1686) [won not long ago]. Elsewhere, he communicates this ‘‘revolutionary’’ notion of sudden and total change by providing a specific time frame for Italy’s cultural transformation: Los que hace veinte o ma´s an ˜ os visitaban la penı´nsula . . . y vuelven hoy anhelando renovar las dulces impresiones y refrescar el recuerdo poe´tico de las edades pasadas, encuentran una transformacio´n completa en el paı´s. (6:1686) [Those who visited the peninsula twenty or more years ago . . . and return today yearning to renew those sweet impressions and refresh their poetic memory of ages past, find the country completely transformed.]

Nevertheless, in reading through Viaje a Italia, it quickly becomes clear that Galdo´s’s understanding of the importance of unidad in Italian society is not limited to the military or political sphere. Instead, building upon the contention that ‘‘in Italy . . . everything is subordinate to unity’’ (6:1686), he undertakes over the course of his ten Italian cartas to identify the overt or hidden principles of unity underlying myriad aspects of Italy’s social, spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual life.14 In one form or another the issue informs Galdo´s’s meditations on each of the cities visited on his tour, making it the central unifying principle, so to speak, of his travel chronicle as a whole. This focus on unidad introduces a number of complexities into Galdo´s’s seemingly conventional travel account. While allusions to Italy as a land of conjoined opposites (Orient/Occident, Paganism/ Christianity, etc.) had long been a common feature of Italian travel accounts, Galdo´s’s declared intention to focus specifically on ‘‘the new features of modern Italy’’ is a rather striking departure from the pose adopted in most Italian chronicles, in which Italy’s engagement with modern life, if acknowledged at all, is typically seen as an annoying aberration wholly in contradiction with the ‘‘real’’ (i.e., traditional) Italy, as well as an unwarranted distraction from the only truly important incarnation of Italian culture: that is, its Classical past.15 A good example of the annoyance that the eruption of Italian modernity can sometimes produce appears in De Madrid a Na´poles, in which Alarco´n confesses to having experienced disillusionment upon arriving in Rome and discovering that the Eternal City was, at

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least in certain neighborhoods, virtually indistinguishable from any other modern European capital: La desilusio´n a que me refiero provenı´a . . . del aire moderno, europeo, insignificante, de casi todos los edificios; del modo de vestir, tambie´n a la francesa y comunı´simo, de casi todos los transeu´ntes, y del hecho de ver faroles de gas en las esquinas. (1954, 1423, emphasis in original) [The disappointment I refer to came . . . from the modern, European, insignificant look of almost all of the buildings; from the Frenchified and very commonplace style of dress of nearly all passersby; and from seeing gaslamps on the corners.]

Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez, though ideologically opposed to Alarco´n in so many respects, acknowledges a similar sense of deception when confronted with the unexpected and clearly unwelcome modernity of Italy’s North. As he notes in En el paı´s del arte, written only two years after Galdo´s’s Viaje a Italia: La Italia del Norte . . . cansa, al fin por su falta de cara´cter. Es una Francia adulterada. . . . Para ver la vida moderna, mejor es ir a contemplarla en el origen que en la imitacio´n, y el que viene a Italia busca lo tı´pico, lo genuinamente nacional. (1967–87, 1:178, emphasis in original) [Northern Italy . . . in the end becomes tiresome because of its lack of character. It is an adulterated France. . . . To see modern life, it is better to go contemplate it at its origin than through an imitation, and what those who come to Italy are seeking is the typical, the truly national.]

For Blasco as for many other Spanish travelers, Italy was only truly Italian to the extent that it could be placed in opposition both to ‘‘modernity’’ as a cultural notion and to the nation that during the nineteenth century so often served as modernity’s geographical surrogate, France.16 A slightly different problem arises when Viaje a Italia is viewed in the context of Galdo´s’s own creative production. Specifically, the portrayal of modern Italy as a haven of unidad appears to stand in obvious and perplexing dissonance with the decidedly less-than-harmonious visions of contemporary society familiar to readers of Galdo´s’s other works. One thinks, for example, of journalistic texts such as ‘‘Confusiones y paradojas’’ [‘‘Confusions and Paradoxes’’] and ‘‘E´poca de confusio´n’’ [‘‘Epoch of Confusion’’] (1923, 2:185–95

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and 3:7–17) or his well-known Royal Academy lecture, ‘‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable’’ [‘‘Present-day Society as Novelistic Source’’], in which multiple allusions to the existence of rampant confusion (e.g., ‘‘la confusio´n y aturdimiento en que vivimos,’’ ‘‘la confusio´n evolutiva que advertimos en la sociedad’’ [1990, 162 and 163; the confusion and bewilderment in which we live; the evolutionary confusion that we observe in society]) and concomitant loss of unity (e.g., ‘‘la relajacio´n de todo principio de unidad,’’ ‘‘la falta de unidades [y] de organizacio´n’’ [1990, 160 and 163; the slackening of every principle of unity; the lack of unity (and) organization]) leave very little doubt about Galdo´s’s views regarding the very much ununified nature of modern life.17 There consequently arises the question of why Galdo´s’s reading of contemporary Italian society should have been, at least in appearance, so entirely different. Making this seeming discordance especially perplexing is the fact that Viaje a Italia—like many other Spanish travel texts—features numerous passages that communicate that the cultures of Spain and Italy are, quite to the contrary, profoundly alike. How to account for this striking asymmetry? One response, undoubtedly, would be to explain the incongruity as a byproduct of the mode of production of Galdo´s’s travel writings: that is, to suggest that because these texts were written in relatively quick sequence, responding to journalistic deadlines and in the course of a fairly standard tourist sweep through Italy’s main sites, Galdo´s simply did not develop, or at least did not put into words as more than off-the-cuff jottings, a thoughtful approach to his encounter with Italian life. Or was it his determination to follow the conventions of the travel literature genre that imposed perspectival and narrative limitations on his text? Just perhaps, though, Galdo´s was a victim of neither circumstance nor genre but rather hoped to utilize his curious approach to Italian unidad as a means of revealing some fundamental aspect of his understanding of contemporary culture (that of Italy, Spain, or both) and of the possibility of achieving its representation in writing. It is my belief that the last of these options is correct, and I will focus the remainder of this chapter on the task of illustrating why. My analysis will primarily focus on demonstrating that Galdo´s crafts his travel chronicle from a posture of ironic distance, by which I mean, following Ernst Behler, that he practices a kind of ‘‘self-conscious saying and writing’’ that raises significant issues about ‘‘linguistic articulation, communication, and understanding in regard to truth’’ (1990, 111). It is through this practice

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of irony that Viaje a Italia breaks at last from its conventional framing and reveals itself a worthy companion to the interrogations of culture, language and representation found in Galdo´s’s other works. In this vein, and as a final note before turning to a closer look at the chronicle itself, it is worth mentioning that the composition of Viaje a Italia is contemporary with the production of Galdo´s’s far better-known epistolary novel, La inco´gnita [The Unknown], begun almost immediately after his return from Italy and completed in February 1889. In addition to the suggestive detail of their simultaneous composition, the two texts share a variety of other striking similarities, ranging from questions of format (both rely on an epistolary conceit), to subject matter (both contain discussions of Italian art and literature), to narrative perspective (both feature an outside observer attempting to understand and communicate the reality of his current surroundings). Other textual echoes exist as well, including the following remark from Manolo Infante’s first letter to Equis: Conoces a casi todas las personas de quienes he de hablarte. Mal podrı´a yo, aunque quisiera, desfigurarlas: y en cuanto a los sucesos que de fijo sera´n comunes y nada sorprendentes, el u´nico intere´s que han de tener para ti es el que resulte de mi manera personal de verlos y juzgarlos. (5:710) [You know nearly everyone I will be speaking to you about. I could hardly disfigure them, even if I wanted to: and as far as the events I recount, surely very commonplace and scarcely surprising as well, the only interest they can have for you is that which results from my personal manner of seeing and judging them.]

In this passage Galdo´s has his novelistic narrator echo in very much the same terms a concern expressed in the first carta of his Italian chronicle: the knowledge that readers would, at least in an external sense, inevitably be familiar with much of what he describes. The response to this concern is also parallel in the two texts, with both narrators’ suggesting the uncertainty of that premise of familiarity, noting the crucial role of individual authorial perception (‘‘my personal manner of seeing and judging them’’ [La inco´gnita 5:710]; ‘‘viewpoints resulting from personal observation’’ [Viaje a Italia 6:1688]) in determining what will be recounted and how. In the case of La inco´gnita, of course, Infante’s effort to provide Equis with a reliable and satisfying representation of this presumably well-known reality is plagued with ambiguities, contradictions, and,

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ultimately, failure. Compounding the limitations inherent in his first-person narrative perspective, Infante consistently allows subjective considerations to influence his reading of events. The supposedly objective observations collected in the course of his hapless ‘‘diligencias policı´acas’’ (5:809) [detective inquiries] cannot provide him with satisfactory answers to the various ‘‘inco´gnitas’’ [unknowns] surrounding Augusta’s presumed adultery and the circumstances of Viera’s death, leaving him submerged in ‘‘la mayor de las soledades: la soledad del no poseer y del ignorar’’ (5:809) [the greatest solitude, that of not possessing and not knowing]. Throughout La inco´gnita, such dislocations between textual premise and textual praxis repeatedly and emphatically focus readers’ attention on the dilemmas inherent in the pretense of narrating ‘‘la realidad.’’18 And that, of course, is what a travel chronicle was popularly considered to do: narrate the realidad of the individual traveler’s personal experiences and of the particular destinations described. I would like to suggest that the fate of narration in Galdo´s’s epistolary novel can provide important guidance for readers of the epistolary travel chronicle he produced at exactly the same time. As does La inco´gnita, Galdo´s’s Viaje a Italia seems to proffer a kind of referential contract, presenting itself as an essentially immediate and straightforward transcription of actual situations and events personally observed by the narrator himself and presumed to be already well known to the work’s audience. This appearance of accuracy and verifiable objectivity is further enhanced by the fact that the text’s formal characteristics align it not with literary fiction, but rather the (presumably) ‘‘nonfiction’’ genre of first-person travel chronicles. Each of these attributes has an incremental effect in directing attention away from the first-person narrator’s role as primary filter and interpreter of all experiences recounted in the text, resulting in an implicit presumption of representational transparency. Manolo Infante’s rather spectacular failure to live up to his own essentially similar narrative pretentions should, however, stand as a warning that readers of Viaje a Italia might be well advised to proceed with considerable caution. As Diane Urey and others have shown us, the play of authorial irony and manipulation of strategies of representation long recognized as fundamental to galdosian fiction also function as central mechanisms of his historically inspired Episodios nacionales [National Episodes]. As I hope the following close reading will con-

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vincingly demonstrate, those same processes are at work in the presumably ‘‘nonfiction’’ discourse of his Viaje a Italia as well.

 El poeta precede al historiador, y anticipa al mundo las grandes verdades. —Galdo´s, La inco´gnita [The poet precedes the historian, and foretells to the world the great truths.]

When Galdo´s’s journalistic chronicle of his voyage through Italy is subjected to careful examination, that tactics of narrative disruption come into play on virtually every level of its textual praxis becomes increasingly apparent. Throughout, reader assumptions and expectations—whether drawn from the conventions of Grand Tour writing or from the seeming evidence of Galdo´s’s own text—are routinely manipulated and undermined. This point may be illustrated once again through reference to Galdo´s’s itinerary. If, as indicated previously, it is true that his choice of touristic stopovers is utterly conventional, the order in which he presents them to his readers clearly is not. Traditionally, travel chronicles proceed—as might be logically expected—in chronological order. Galdo´s abandons this practice altogether. Instead, echoing Manolo Infante’s determination to ‘‘cont[ar] los hechos sin seguir la serie de los mismos, esto es, empezando por el medio, para caer luego en el principio y saltar de e´ste al final’’ (5:786) [to tell the facts without following their sequence, that is, beginning in the middle, then falling back to the beginning, and jumping from there to the end], Galdo´s’s first two published letters were about Rome (visited toward the end of his tour), the last two about Florence (visited near the beginning), with the remaining six texts skipping back and forth between northern and southern Italian cities without any regard to Galdo´s’s actual travel route.19 Far from attempting to minimize or apologize for the achronological presentation of his travel account, Galdo´s repeatedly underscores the capriciousness of his chronicle’s nonlinear organization, as when he notes at the beginning of letter three that no me sera´ fa´cil observar un orden meto´dico en esta reproduccio´n de lo visto, observado y sentido en Italia. Solicitado por la caprichosa arbi-

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trariedad de la memoria, que comu´nmente es enemiga del me´todo, me aparto ahora de las magnificencias del Vaticano y doy un salto de Roma a Verona. ¿Por que´ a Verona y no a otra ciudad de la penı´nsula? No lo se´. (6:1694) [it will not be easy for me to observe a methodical order in this reproduction of what I have seen, observed and felt in Italy. At the request of the capricious arbitrariness of memory, which is commonly the enemy of method, I turn away now from the magnificence of the Vatican and jump from Rome to Verona. Why Verona and not another city of the peninsula? I don’t know.]

In addition to its strong similarities to the textual posture adopted in La inco´gnita, this quotation inevitably brings to mind Memorias de un desmemoriado [Memoirs of a Forgetful Man], in which Galdo´s repeatedly frustrates the typical ‘‘referentiality pact’’ of the autobiographical genre (not to mention many of his readers) by casting his life story as a meandering conversation with his own less-than-reliable memory.20 The two texts are, in fact, remarkably similar in many respects: in both, Galdo´s manipulates reader expectations regarding ‘‘proper’’ methods of narrating presumably factual biographically grounded events. While memory’s role as an agent of narrative destabilization receives more radicalized treatment in Memorias de un desmemoriado, its use in Viaje a Italia—in which Galdo´s, after all, is claiming an inability to recollect accurately events that occurred, not over the course of a lifetime, but rather only a few weeks prior to his texts’ composition—plays an equally central role in establishing the decidedly slippery framework within which this contribution to the ostensibly referential genre of the travel chronicle demands to be read. If, in Mesonero, we find an author working to counter any impression of heterotopic dispersion in his geographic renderings and to assert the reliable transparency of his textual map, Galdo´s—as we begin to see—will follow almost the inverse pattern in his text. Though both men participate in the grandiose project of ‘‘modernization’’ that so marked nineteenth-century political and cultural praxis, the form of modernity sought by Mesonero in the 1830s and 1840s was intended to accentuate reason and comfort. For Galdo´s, nearing century’s end, it has quite emphatically achieved neither. Galdo´s’s manipulations of travel genre conventions can also be illustrated by reference to his declared textual focus: the issue of unity. As indicated, he lays out his narrative’s goals and methods in the opening pages of the first letter. Referring admiringly to the re-

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sults of the recent war of independence, he notes that the acquisition of ‘‘unidad polı´tica’’ [political unity] has allowed Italy, in a mere two decades, to transform itself from a collection of ‘‘estados insignificantes’’ (6:1686) [insignificant states] into a full-fledged ‘‘nacio´n de primer orden’’ (6:1686) [first-class nation]. Thanks to its newfound stability and concomitant upsurge in patriotic pride, he adds, ‘‘Italia ha sabido crear una administracio´n ido´nea, una Hacienda pro´spera; . . . ha creado un eje´rcito poderoso y una marina que puede compararse a las ma´s formidables del mundo’’ (6:1686) [Italy has had the sense to create an ideal administration, a prosperous treasury; . . . it has created a powerful army and a navy comparable to the most formidable in the world]. Elsewhere in the first section, this image of cohesion and strength extends into the international sphere, as Galdo´s praises Italy’s formal alliance with Germany and Austria, recently strengthened by the signing of an ItaloGerman military pact. Viaje a Italia, in fact, opens with an account of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s triumphal October 1888 visit to Rome: Hace quince dı´as pro´ximamente me encontraba en Roma presenciando los preparativos de las fiestas con que la capital intangible y sagrada de la moderna Italia ha celebrado la visita del Emperador de Alemania, Guillermo II. . . . Consideran los italianos la triple alianza como garantı´a firmı´sima de su recie´n conquistada unidad y ven en la visita del soberano ma´s poderoso de Europa como una solemne consagracio´n de aquel mismo principio. (6:1685) [About fifteen days ago I found myself in Rome watching preparations for the festivities with which the intangible and sacred capital of modern Italy has celebrated the visit of the emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II. . . . The Italians consider the Triple Alliance as the firm guarantee of their recently conquered unification and see the visit of Europe’s most powerful sovereign as the solemn consecration of that same principle.]

Via the accumulation of such remarks Galdo´s conjures an image of power, prestige, and success, all directly attributable to Italy’s recently acquired national (and international) unidad. These achievements in turn are said to be due to the extraordinary unity of belief existing among the Italian people themselves. Regarding the kaiser’s visit, for example, he reports that ‘‘el sincero entusiasmo con que los italianos se disponı´an a recibir al aliado de Humberto . . . era tan una´nime que no hay posibilidad de tergiversarla’’ (6:1685) [the sincere enthusiasm the Italians showed toward their emperor’s

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ally . . . was so unanimous there is no possibility of misinterpretation]. On the following page, similarly, he makes the even broader claim that ‘‘la unidad polı´tica no es ma´s que el resultado de la unidad de pensamiento en toda la familia italiana’’ (6:1686) [political unity is nothing more than a result of the unity of thought among the entire Italian family]. All this would be well and good if it were actually true, or at least— perhaps more to the point—if Galdo´s had made any kind of consistent or convincing effort to portray it as true. In fact, though, his apparently unequivocal paean to Italian unification notwithstanding, much of his chronicle’s first letter actually works to weaken, and in some cases explicitly contradict, the vision of national unity so carefully elaborated in the preceding passages. Already in the second sentence he admits that he never actually saw the kaiser’s triumphal arrival in Rome, which, throughout letter one, is utilized as a solemn symbol of contemporary Italian reality (6:1685). Moreover, while his decision to break with the conventions of travel literature and begin his chronicle out of sequence with an account of his visit to the birthplace of the Roman Empire—newly reestablished as Italy’s capital as a result of the war of independence—can in one sense be seen in conjunction with his comments regarding the grandeur and unity of modern Italy, Rome’s value as a symbol of Italian unity is considerably complicated by the fact that the city was itself, at the time, bitterly divided into two feuding sovereign states: one (restricted to the area around the Vatican) ruled by the pope, the other (consisting of territory forcibly wrested from papal control during the war of unification) governed by Italy’s emperor, Umberto, and serving as the seat of national government. At the time of Galdo´s’s visit, moreover, this divided city was a space of growing civil unrest and governmental vitriole, with the secular state’s suppression of many male religious orders and prohibition of pilgrimage, and the Vatican’s continued militant opposition to Rome’s selection as national capital (an 1886 papal decree, for example, forbade Catholics to vote or run in national elections) and open yearning to expel Umberto’s forces and regain control over the former Papal States (see Clark 1996, 81–88). Rather than attempting to downplay this discordant, even dangerous situation, Galdo´s makes it a principal focus of his text. Although the first half of his Roman letter does indeed offer examples of Italian unity, the second half is devoted almost in its entirety to examples of Italian discord. We soon learn, for example, that Italian

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public opinion is not really unanimous at all. To the contrary, the socalled blacks who support Rome’s return to papal control, though perhaps ultimately doomed to failure, resolutely refuse to accept compromise with their ‘‘white’’ opponents who, aware of their superior resources, have similarly little inclination to negotiate: El Papado . . . sostiene lucha implacable con el poder que le ha destronado. . . . La idea de reconciliar los dos poderes, por generosa que sea, no encuentra fa´cilmente prose´litos, y la divisio´n en ‘‘negros’’ y ‘‘blancos’’ es cada dı´a ma´s radical. . . . En cuanto a la reconciliacio´n, . . . tal como esta´n hoy las cosas, es sumamente difı´cil, si no imposible. (6:1688– 89). [The papacy . . . maintains its implacable fight against the power that dethroned it. . . . The idea of reconciling the two powers, as generous as it may be, does not easily find converts, and the division between ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘whites’’ becomes more radical by the day. . . . As far as reconciliation is concerned, . . . the way things stand now that would be extremely difficult if not impossible.]

The letter comes to an end, much as it began, with reference to Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit to Rome. This time, however, it is his audience with Pope Leo XIII (the same pope, incidentally, who had issued the Catholic voting ban) that attracts Galdo´s’s attention. Whereas the first paragraph of Galdo´s’s Roman chronicle presents Wilhelm’s triumphal meeting with Emperor Umberto, surrounded by unanimously enthusiastic citizens of the new Italian nation, as ‘‘a solemn consecration’’ (6:1685) of Italy’s apparently seamless transformation into a successful and united modern state, the last paragraph tells quite a different story. Underscoring the continued existence of territorial rivalries and enmity between church and state, Wilhelm’s encounter with Rome’s other sovereign, as Galdo´s observes, ‘‘debio´ de ser una fo´rmula de etiqueta absolutamente este´ril y . . . quiza´ molesto para una y otra parte’’ (6:1690) [must have been an absolutely sterile exercise in courtesy, and . . . perhaps uncomfortable to both parties]. It is interesting to note that many of these issues reappear in Viaje a Italia’s final letter, devoted to Florence. Indeed, although Galdo´s goes to some lengths to portray his Italian narrative as a haphazard ramble, lacking in any sort of textual development and distinctly lacking in closure, the first and last letters mirror each other in many important respects. In letter one, for example, Galdo´s first in-

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troduces the names of the three Florentine intellectuals who will together form the principal focus of letter ten: Machiavelli, Galileo, and, in particular, Dante. With regard to the last of these precursors, in letter one Galdo´s directly links Dante with the question of unidad by noting that ‘‘en todos los poetas de aquel suelo [desde Dante hasta Leopardi] ha sido la unidad una verdadera manı´a’’ (6:1686) [unity has been a true obsession among all poets from that land (from Dante to Leopardi)]. In letter ten he returns to the same issue, again comparing Dante to Leopardi and again describing Dante’s ardent devotion to the prounification Ghibelline cause. Also echoing letter one, he specifically cites the discord between church and state (‘‘la enconada lucha entre el Imperio y la Iglesia’’ [6:1703; the intense battle between empire and church]) as a principal obstacle to national unity in Dante’s time as well as a continuing present-day threat to national stability. Underscoring the latter point, Galdo´s closes his last letter with a parting image of himself standing at a Florentine overlook gazing out toward Fiesole, ‘‘hoy sede del ‘Papa negro’, o sea el general de los jesuitas’’ (6:1706) [today seat of the ‘‘Black Pope,’’ that is, the father general of the Jesuits]. As many of Galdo´s’s Spanish contemporaries would have been well aware, the Jesuits’ eviction from Rome to Fiesole (a description of the Jesuits’ vacated Roman headquarters appears in letter one [6:1689]) was a particularly delicate example of the tit-fortat church-state hostilities that had followed Italian unification and represented an ongoing source of bitter discord and simmering unrest (Bangert 1972, 439).21 By evoking this contentious issue in his text’s final sentence, Galdo´s closes his Italian chronicle as he began it, by focusing insistent attention on the as-yet unresolved sources of division in the newly ‘‘unified’’ Italian nation. While the tensions surrounding the reestablishment of Rome as the Italian capital offered Galdo´s a particularly fruitful means of illustrating the inherent instabilities of his ‘‘objective’’ presentation of contemporary Italian society, it is not the only aspect of his first letter that contributes to this process. A particularly concise example of Galdo´s’s habit of undermining his own text’s narrative authority appears in his discussion of another of recent Italian accomplishment: the creation of a national railroad. Described by Prime Minister Agostino Depretis as ‘‘inflexible girders reinforcing the unity of the fatherland’’ (cited in Seton-Watson 1967, 65–66), Italy’s twopronged North-South rail network, set up in 1885, was intended to

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stimulate the national economy while eliminating regional antagonisms. In Viaje a Italia, Galdo´s records his impressions of this significant postunification achievement in one seven-sentence paragraph. In the first sentence, he adopts the unproblematic, laudatory tone characteristic of his initial remarks about Italian unity: ‘‘La red de ferrocarriles es hoy tan completa, que puede visitarse co´modamente toda Italia en breve tiempo’’ (6:1687) [the railway network is today so complete that in a short time one can comfortably visit all of Italy]. In sentence two he adds that, in addition to being rapid, comfortable, and complete, Italy’s rail system is ‘‘incredibly inexpensive’’ as well. As the paragraph approaches its midpoint, however, problems begin to appear. In sentence three, we learn that Italian train service is not quite as ‘‘perfect’’ as that of France. By sentence four, the system has been downgraded to merely ‘‘acceptable,’’ as Galdo´s—his own initial assertions to the contrary notwithstanding— declares the urgent need for Italian trains to begin offering travelers ‘‘greater speed and comfort.’’ The inherent instability of the narrator’s presumably objective report becomes increasingly apparent as the paragraph approaches its conclusion. In sentence five Galdo´s undercuts his earlier respectful remarks regarding the prestige and power of the new Italian national army, confiding that Italy’s train system is, in fact, so woefully inadequate that ‘‘si Italia tuviera que movilizar su eje´rcito en pocos dı´as no podrı´a hacerlo por insuficiencia de sus medios ferroviarios’’ [if Italy had to mobilize its army quickly, it would be unable to do so because of the insufficiency of the railroad system]. In sentence six his paragraph’s opening focus on what the Italian system has to offer has entirely given way to an enumeration of what it lacks: ‘‘Le faltan vı´a dobles y carece de material suficiente’’ [It lacks two-way rail corridors and does not have sufficient equipment]. By the time the final sentence arrives, Galdo´s has set the stage for the wholesale contradiction of his own initial premise: ‘‘el movimiento ordinario de viajeros,’’ he concludes matter-of-factly, ‘‘reclama una completa reforma en los ferrocarriles italianos’’ [the ordinary movement of travelers demands the complete reform of the Italian rail system]. The system that had been so marvelously ‘‘completa’’ in the paragraph’s first sentence turns out to be in dire need of a ‘‘completa reforma’’ by its last. This seven-step progression from assertion to counterassertion is illustrative of a process utilized by Galdo´s throughout his Italian narrative. The specific focus of his textual machinations, however, varies

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from letter to letter in general accordance with the dominant metaphoric constructions assigned to each city within the tradition of Grand Tour chronicles. An example may be drawn from letter four, devoted to the city of Naples. In Italian travel chronicles portrayals of Naples are often built upon a series of picturesque tipos that are seen to incarnate the essence of southern Italian life. The most frequently evoked is the indolent loafer known as the lazzarone (Calaresu 1999, 145–50). The lazzaroni are described as follows in Charles Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie en 1785 [Letters on Italy in 1785], one of the many Italian chronicles included in Galdo´s’s personal library (Martı´nez 1990, 150): ` Naples] la plus grande partie du peuple ne travaille tout juste qu’au[A tant qu’il faut pour ne pas mourir de faim. On appelle ces gens-la`, Lazaroni. Les Lazaroni ne font pas de classe a` part; il y en a dans tous les e´tats. (1824, 335) [(In Naples) a majority of the population works only enough so as not to die of hunger. These people are called lazzaroni. Lazzaroni are not a separate class; they exist in all levels of society.]

The prevalance of this ‘‘type’’ is in turn routinely ascribed to the peculiarities of the Neapolitan climate. Again quoting Dupaty: Le climat a ici toute son influence; ici re`gne sans aucune contradiction, la le´gislation du soleil, c’est-a`-dire, un relaˆchement universel dans tous les rapports et dans toutes les parties de la vie ou civile, ou politique ou naturelle. (1824, 326) [The influence of climate here is total; the rule of the sun reigns absolute, without any contradiction, which is to say there is a universal relaxation in all interaction and in all parts of civil, political, and natural life.]

Similar ideas can be found in numerous other accounts of Neapolitan journeys, including Moratı´n’s posthumously published Viaje a Italia [Journey to Italy], which Galdo´s also owned.22 As in his Roman letter Galdo´s begins his account of Naples by focusing on the ‘‘complete transformation’’ (6:1686) of Italian reality purportedly unleashed by Italy’s recent political unification. As part of this task, and echoing his claims in ‘‘Observaciones sobre la novela contempora´nea en Espan ˜ a’’ (‘‘Observations on the Contemporary Spanish Novel,’’ 1990, 111) and elsewhere that costumbrista-style

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enumerations of social ‘tipos’ have little relevance in modern society, he explicitly seeks to distance his own impressions from those of earlier travel authors by declaring: Los infinitos escritores de todos los paı´ses que escribieron de Na´poles y de los napolitanos han creado un tipo especial de la ciudad y de algunos de sus habitantes. En la realidad no´tase ahora extraordinaria falsedad en tales pinturas. . . . El tan decantado tipo del lazzarone no existe ya. . . . Desde que se establecio´ la unidad italiana, se ha iniciado en Na´poles la regeneracio´n de las costumbres; se han creado no pocas industrias, entre ellas la de construcciones navales, que sustenta a gran nu´mero de trabajadores. El obrero napolitano es inteligente y activo. (6:1712–13) [The infinite number of authors from all nations who have written about Naples and Neapolitans have created a special ‘‘type’’ of the city and some of its inhabitants. In reality, the extraordinary falsehood of such caricatures is now obvious. . . . The celebrated ‘‘type’’ known as the lazzarone no longer exists. . . . Since Italian unification, a regeneration of Neapolitan customs has begun; more than a few industries have been created, including naval construction, which supports a great number of workers. The Neapolitan laborer is intelligent and active.]

In this vein, sounding a little like Mesonero describing the modern quarters of the Parisian Right Bank, Galdo´s nods approvingly at Naples’s ‘‘recent improvements,’’ ‘‘magnificent neighborhoods,’’ ‘‘sumptuous hotels,’’ and modern ‘‘hygiene’’ (6:1713). He further downplays the city’s stereotypic image by insisting that it is not nearly as picturesque, in terms of either ‘‘cara´cter’’ or ‘‘colorido’’ [character or colorfulness] as is typically reported in other travel works, and that ‘‘ya no hay allı´ la confusio´n y griterı´a de otros tiempos’’ (6:1713) [there is no longer the confusion and shouting of former times]. Though admitting that some engaged in the tourist trade continue to drum up business with ‘‘annoying clamor,’’ he quickly adds in a civilizing touch that many ‘‘display notable elegance’’ while doing so (6:1713). Having seen the pattern followed in Galdo´s’s description of Rome, the reader is not surprised that this carefully articulated image of Neapolitan modernity is negated by much of the rest of the text. The most explicit contradiction appears just a few paragraphs after the aforementioned claim that color, noise, and confusion no longer characterize city life, when Galdo´s abruptly announces that quite to the contrary:

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Es, en suma, Na´poles el pueblo donde se oyen ma´s gritos callejeros, donde la vı´a pu´blica esta´ ma´s obstruı´da por vendedores chillones, [y] donde se ven ma´s colorines. (6:1713) [Naples is, in short, the town where the most shouting in the streets can be heard, where public thoroughfares are the most obstructed by noisy vendors, (and) where the brightest colors are to be seen.]

Similar equivocations appear in other portions of the letter as well. The word pintoresco, for example, appears three times in the space of a mere two paragraphs to characterize diverse aspects of this purportedly no longer picturesque city (6:1713), and, despite Galdo´s’s aforementioned praise of Naples’s successful postunification transformation from a timeless land of indolent tipos to a bustling metropolis of active, industrious modern workers, his descriptions of Neapolitan lifestyles and attitudes, and even their presumably climatological causes are actually remarkably similar to those found in the aforementioned passages of Dupaty’s account, written more than a century earlier. Again from Galdo´s: Las familias instaladas a todas las horas del dı´a y parte de la noche en la delantera de las casas present[an] grupos de grandı´sima originalidad y escenas en extremo picantes. . . . El pueblo es allı´ como el principal duen ˜ o de la ciudad, hecha a su imagen y para su comodidad y recreo, pueblo que parece contento de su suerte, indiferente a la polı´tica y poco cuidadoso de los problemas sociales, que poco o nada le afectan. Sus necesidades son escasas por la bondad del clima y feracidad del suelo, y sus aspiraciones no pasan del pan de cada dı´a que jama´s les falta. (6:1713)23 [The families that spend all hours of the day and part of the night out in front of their houses create groupings of great originality and extremely zesty scenes. . . . The common people are the principal masters of the city, made in their image and for their comfort and pleasure, a people who appear content with their fate, indifferent to politics, and little concerned with social problems, as these little affect them. Their needs are few thanks to the benevolence of the climate and the fertility of the soil, and their aspirations do not extend beyond receiving their daily bread, which never is lacking.]

Galdo´s makes no effort to resolve or even explicitly acknowledge the textual tensions that result from such contrasting claims regarding the nature of Neapolitan life. As in his letter on Rome he takes as

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his point of departure the seemingly straightforward premise of identifying differences between the city’s present and past only to blur such distinctions via the presentation of myriad conflicting, even contradictory ‘‘objective’’ observations that combine to undermine narrative authority, destabilize the notion of lineal progress, and leave ultimately unclear where, if anywhere, the ‘‘true’’ nature of Italian reality may lie and how, if at all, it might be perceived and communicated. Given Galdo´s’s declarations regarding the presumed disappearance of tipos in modern society, it is interesting to note that his use of this self-declaredly obsolete representational model is not restricted to his letter on Naples or even to descriptions of Italy’s stereotypically premodern South. In Verona, for example, he describes the caretaker of Juliet’s tomb as ‘‘una mujerona alta, descalza de pie y pierna, buen tipo de raza piamontesa’’ (6:1697) [a tall and hefty woman, barefoot and barelegged, a typical example of the Piedmont race]. In Venice, similarly, he delights in the opportunity to ‘‘examinar los tipos y fisionomı´as de la raza’’ (1973, 329) [examine the ‘‘types’’ and features of the race]. In fact, in descriptions of both of these northern cities Galdo´s abandons entirely his erstwhile pretense of identifying the specifically modern attributes of Italian life. Of Verona, for example, he writes that allı´ es completa la ilusio´n de hallarnos en pleno siglo XV, y la civilizacio´n moderna, con su bullicio y el cara´cter burgue´s que imprime a todas las cosas, huye de nuestra mente ante aquella realidad de lo antiguo resucitado. (6:1696) [there the illusion of finding ourselves in the mid-fifteenth century is complete, and modern civilization, with all its hubbub and the bourgeois character it imprints on everything, flees from our mind in the face of that reality of the past resurrected.]

Here again we find that Galdo´s toys with perception, in this case limiting himself to a mild-mannered jostling of temporal progression by describing his impression of finding himself ‘‘en pleno siglo XV’’ first as a pleasant ‘‘ilusio´n’’ then, by the sentence’s end, as ‘‘realidad.’’ Elsewhere in his Veronese account he carries the process a step further by subjecting yet another travel genre convention to ironic manipulation: in this case, the presumptive difference between history and fiction. As do many nineteenth-century travelers, Galdo´s claims to have

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been drawn to Verona by a desire to see firsthand the city that had served as the setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.24 Most of his stay, in fact, appears to have been devoted to ferreting out aspects of Verona’s ‘‘actual’’ reality that might confirm the ‘‘dramatic’’ reality expressed in Shakespeare’s work. Judging by comments such as ‘‘desde que se entra en Verona, el drama de Shakespeare parece que vive a nuestros ojos’’ (6:1694) [from the moment of entering Verona, Shakespeare’s drama seems to come to life before our eyes] and ‘‘Verona es la misma que el gran poeta inmortalizo´’’ (6:1694) [Verona is the same as the one immortalized by the great poet], his efforts seem to have been largely successful. Galdo´s’s decision to interpret contemporary Veronese existence from such a perspective is of considerable interest for several reasons: not only does his effort confuse linear progression (construing nineteenth-century city life in terms of a sixteenth-century account of a presumed fourteenthcentury occurrence), it also blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction by portraying a literary work by a man who had not even been to Verona as the principal historical, sociological, even architectural authority on the city and the life of its inhabitants. Further confounding logical expectations, whenever Galdo´s encounters situations in which his firsthand observation does not corroborate the Shakespearean vision, he summarily rejects the former. Upon visiting the ancestral home of the Capulets, for example, he discovers a decrepit building that appears decidedly unworthy of having been the setting for the immortal tragedy: La casa en que vivio´ Julia Capuletti es hoy un parador de los ma´s innobles. . . . So´lo las piedras son allı´ venerables; . . . todo lo dema´s es profanacio´n y suciedad. La fantası´a no puede, ni au´n con grandes esfuerzos, restaurar la vetusta mansio´n. (6:1695) [The house where Juliet Capulet lived is now a truly ignoble inn. . . . Only its stones are venerable; . . . everything else is profanation and filth. Imagination cannot, even with great effort, restore the ancient mansion.]

After a brief period of consternation, Galdo´s ends his disillusionment by concluding that the Capulets, quite simply, must have lived somewhere else: A pesar de la inscripcio´n enfa´tica que los veroneses han colocado en la puerta del edificio, es muy dudoso que allı´ vivieran los Capuletti. Serı´a

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quiza´ casa de su propiedad . . . y vivirı´an en morada ma´s suntuosa, lejos del bullicio mercantil de la ciudad. (6:1695) [Despite the emphatic inscription that the Veronese have placed on the door of the building, it is very doubtful the Capulets ever lived there. It may have been a house on their property . . . with them living in a more sumptuous residence far from the mercantile hubbub of the city.]

At Juliet’s tomb, he experiences the opposite reaction. There, neither his frank admission that he believes the site to be apocryphal, nor his bemused discovery that the presumed sarcophagus actually looks rather like ‘‘una moderna tina de ban ˜ o’’ [a modern bathtub], nor even the ‘‘instalacio´n de ma´quinas de agricultura nuevas’’ [display of new farm equipment] arranged for sale at the entrance by an enterprising guide can dim his reverence for the sanctity of the site, where ‘‘peregrinos’’ [pilgrims] like him may gather to ‘‘venera[r] a Julieta y al poeta que la creo´’’ (6:1696–97) [venerate Juliet and the poet who created her]. ‘‘Cuanto Verona encierra,’’ he writes, ‘‘ced[e] en intere´s al modesto y dudoso sepulcro de aquella enamorada joven, que quiza´ no existio´ nunca, y si existio´, no tuvo la tra´gica muerte con que inmortalizo´ su nombre el gran poeta. La realidad se obscurece, y lo ideal y son ˜ ado vive eternamente en la memoria humana’’ (6:1698) [All that Verona contains pales in comparison to the modest and dubious tomb of that young woman in love, who perhaps never existed and, if she did, never had the tragic death with which the great poet immortalized her name. Reality dims, while what is ideal and is dreamed lives eternally in human memory].25 Galdo´s engages in similar strategies in his two Venetian letters. As seen in the letter on Verona, Venice is presented as ‘‘una ciudad arqueolo´gica que so´lo vive de lo pasado’’ (6:1702) [an archaeological city that only lives by the past], wholly unaffected both by the passage of time (‘‘Venecia es siempre la misma’’ [1973, 330; Venice is always the same]) and by the modernizing pressures of the ‘‘civilized’’ world (‘‘la vida es en aquella ciudad como una pare´ntesis . . . , ası´ los dı´as que allı´ se pasan vienen a ser una interrupcio´n de las condiciones normales en que vive toda la humanidad civilizada’’ [6:1700; life in that city is like a parenthesis . . . , and thus the days spent there are like an interruption to the normal conditions in which all of civilized humanity lives]). Galdo´s again echoes his Ver-

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onese letter by attempting to define Venetian reality through the filter of Shakespearean drama. In his second Venetian text, he writes: Como la ciudad no se ha renovado desde los tiempos antiguos, como toda ella es vieja, historia pura, drama palpitante, . . . lo pasado, revestido de las formas ma´s seductoras sale a nuestro encuentro a cada instante. . . . Estas palomas, decimos, comieron en la mano negra de Otelo. . . . En esta plaza trataban sus negocios mercantiles y de amores aquellos caballeros que pinta Shakespeare, Antonio y Bassano, comerciantes y aristo´cratas. (1973, 333) [Since the city has not been renovated since ancient times, since everything there is old, pure history, palpitating drama, . . . the past, draped in its most seductive forms comes to meet us at every moment. . . . These pigeons, we say, ate from the black hand of Othello. . . . In this square Antonio and Bassano, those aristocratic merchants painted for us by Shakespeare, carried out their dealings in business and love.]

Here, as in Mesonero, we see ‘‘reality’’ cast as spectacle. But the terms—and the implication—have changed. Mesonero, privileging transparency, links performance and its seductive potential to insincerity and deceit: its presence in French society standing as evidence of cultural defect, its purported absence in Spain forming a basis of what Zavala calls Mesonero’s concept of ‘‘manly virtue’’ (1989, 112). Clearly, none of this comes through in Galdo´s, whose ‘‘drama palpitante [de] formas seductoras’’ is not concerned with Italian societal pathology but with questions of textual representation. As in Verona, Galdo´s’s Venetian narration blurs the distinction between history and fiction and destabilizes temporal progression. The sentence about the city’s famous pigeons, for example, not only assumes that Othello was a historical figure but that the birds he fed centuries ago remain alive today. A similar idea also appears in letter six, his first Venetian text, in which he relates his impression of having seen ‘‘las mismas palomas que viveron en los tiempos gloriosos y decadentes de la repu´blica y durante la dominacio´n austrı´aca’’ (6:1702) [the same pigeons who lived in the glorious and decadent days of the Republic and during the Austrian domination]. Likewise, his claim in letter six that ‘‘el misterio de la vida veneciana . . . convierte la historia de este paı´s en puro drama y poesı´a’’ (6:1701) [the mystery of Venetian life . . . converts the history of this nation into pure drama and poetry] foreshadows the equation of ‘‘historia

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pura’’ and ‘‘drama palpitante’’ in the first sentence of the preceding passage. Similar blendings of past and present, fact and fiction, crop up in other Viaje a Italia passages as well. While in Florence, in what seems to be an oblique reference to Dante’s epitaph (‘‘Onorate l’altissimo poeta / L’ombra sua torna, ch’era dipartita’’ [Honor the eminent poet / His shadow had departed but now returns]), Galdo´s again evokes great art’s ability to vanquish temporal barriers, declaring that ‘‘la figura [de Dante] se nos acerca y podemos verla en todo su relieve’’ (6:1702) [The figure (of Dante) approaches us and we can see it in all its contours]. Surveying Pompeii (and here again Galdo´s adopts an idea found in numerous other Italian travel texts), he imagines himself to have been whisked back in time nearly two thousand years to eavesdrop on life in the Roman town prior to its destruction: ‘‘parece que nos hallamos por obra de casualidad en aquellas calles y plazas, y que los habitantes se han ido de paseo y que regresara´n antes que nosotros demos la vuelta grande a la ciudad’’ (6:1716) [it seems we find ourselves by chance in those streets and squares, and that the inhabitants have gone out for a walk and will return before we finish our great stroll about the city].26 Though these and other such comments are scarcely radical in and of themselves, they subtly reinforce the stronger treatments of these same issues in other sections of Galdo´s’s text. It is worth remembering that these jostlings of temporal and perceptual boundaries also find echo in the travel reminiscences of Memorias de un desmemoriado, in which Galdo´s further radicalizes his stance by claiming actually to have met various Shakespearean literary figures during his stays in Venice and Verona (6:1742) and to have spotted the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Denmark (6:1741). As briefly discussed earlier, a similarly flexible definition of ‘‘historical narration’’ is on repeated display in La inco´gnita as well, as when Infante says of Cisneros: ‘‘su feliz memoria, suplida a veces por ingeniosa inventiva, regalo´me aquella tarde mil ane´cdotas, picantes unas, despiadadas y terribles otras, ninguna inocente. . . . Era aquello la historia, compuesta y adornada a lo Tito Livio, como arte verdadero; historia no inferior por su trascendencia y ejemplaridad a la que nos cuenta en fastidiosas pa´ginas las bodas de los reyes’’ (5:731) [his happy memory, helped at times by ingenious invention, regaled me that day with a thousand anecdotes, some spicy, others terrible and cruel, none of them innocent. . . . It was history, put together and adorned as if by Titus Livius, like true art; history not inferior in its

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transcendance and exemplarity to that which tells us in tiresome pages of the weddings of kings]. One of the more interesting aspects of the inclusion of this kind of narrative play in Viaje a Italia is that it, too, ends up tying in with Galdo´s’s declared intention, back in the first carta of his chronicle, to construct the narration of his Italian travel experiences around the issue of unidad. Whereas elsewhere his initial treatment of this question involved exploration of the specifically modern aspects of postunification Italian society, here his representational strategies serve to posit instead a strangely ‘‘unified’’ view of Italian history achieved via the elimination of any meaningful differentiation between past and present, fiction and historical fact. Once more, in other words, Galdo´s finds a way to utilize the concept of unidad as a means of reworking a common characteristic of Grand Tour narratives. The widespread tendency among travel authors to consider contemporary Italian society—or at least those aspects they deem worthy of praise—as a virtual living incarnation of its glorious past becomes, in Viaje a Italia, a means of querying standard presumptions regarding the nature of historical narration and the verisimilitude of first-person experience. All of the preceding examples constitute further instances of resistance to the referential pact. However, though both the style and implications of Galdo´s’s representational model distinguish Viaje a Italia from the far more traditional conception of travel narration underlying Mesonero’s Recuerdos de viaje, it is worth repeating here that Galdo´s is able to derive particular power from his textual machinations precisely because they occur within a travel chronicle that often appears, just as aggressively, to adopt a wholly conventional format and perspective. Jonathan Culler’s assessment of Flaubert’s uniquely disquieting novels is instructive in this regard: Irony seems to depend, in the first instance, on the referentiality of the text: we must assume that it refers to a world with which we are familiar. . . . Referring us constantly to a known world, it [the ironic novel] makes relevant our models of behaviour and enables us to detect the foolishness of apparent meanings. (1974, 189) Flaubert is a particularly fascinating novelist because of the ways in which his works lead to a demystification of the interpretive process, subject it to the severest tests, display its artificiality with a maximum of self-consciousness by promoting an awareness of the novel’s deceitfulness as mediator. (1974, 232)

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It is the seeming realism of Flaubert’s texts, in other words, the seeming connectability of text to world, that renders flaubertian irony so powerful.27 In like manner one could says that it is because Viaje a Italia looks so much like a run-of-the-mill Italian travel chronicle, because it reinscribes itself time and again within the bounds of convention, and focuses so insistently on the most seemingly unproblematic of referential tasks (e.g., describing monuments, enumerating daily activities) that the sting of its irony is so sharp. Granted, this calquing of convention can also mean that the text’s dissident reading could remain unperceived. But that, as Culler has noted, is part of the ironic equation as well: Sarcasm may contain internal inconsistencies which make its purport quite obvious, but for a sentence to be properly ironic it must be possible to imagine some group of readers taking it quite literally, otherwise there is no contrast between apparent and assumed meaning and no space of ironic play. (1974, 188)

Booth offers much the same judgment of irony’s necessarily ‘‘troublesome’’ nature in The Rhetoric of Irony (1974, 44). From this perspective, at least, Galdo´s’s Italian journey could be said to offer a more sophisticated ironic engagement of the referential pact than, for example, his radically un- (or anti) conventional Memorias de un desmemoriado. Along with the various manipulations of textual structure, time progression, concepts of narrative accuracy, and the relationship between history and fiction discussed in the preceding pages, Galdo´s employs a variety of other strategies to ironic effect in his Italian tour. Perhaps the two most important have to do with his manipulation of the concepts of textual authority and authenticity. With respect to the first of these issues, we find Galdo´s in his chronicle employs to considerable advantage the fact that ‘‘the Continental tour seemed to be surrounded and regulated by a variety of guiding texts’’ (Buzard 1993, 156). That is, as we have already seen in Mesonero’s Recuerdos de viaje, Viaje a Italia frequently adopts a ‘‘citationary structure’’ (Duncan and Gregory 1999, 7). In Galdo´s’s case, one of the principal subtexts turns out to be the three-volume Baedeker Italian guide he had carried with him on his journey. In fact, comparison of Galdo´s’s descriptions of Italian cities with those in the Baedeker series contained in his personal library (Martı´nez 1990, 88) reveals that the historical and artistic overviews included in

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many installments of Galdo´s’s chronicle have often been copied virtually verbatim from Baedeker’s text.28 This is, to be sure, not the first time a travel writer can be shown to have turned to such an easyto-hand source of descriptive copy (see Calaresu 1999, 141); in Galdo´s’s case, though, it is a shortcut that also serves his textual purposes extremely well. For one thing, in contrast to some of Viaje a Italia’s emphatically subjective passages such as those previously cited, the intermittent doses of Baedekerese lend to extended sections of Galdo´s’s chronicle a marked tone of ‘‘scientific’’ objectivity. At times Galdo´s even narrates his own travel experiences by using the neutral thirdperson narrative style favored by authors of commercial travel guides. Such is the case, for example, with his trip to the Vatican in letter two, most of which is recounted via the impersonal passive voice: ‘‘en la parte de fuera se ven los polizontes’’; ‘‘a poco de traspasar la frontera, se encuentran los gendarmes’’; ‘‘subiendo la Scala Pia se llega al patio de San Da´maso’’; ‘‘por todas partes se ven uniformes magnificos’’; ‘‘se ven en algunos patios trozos que pertenecen a la Edad Media,’’ and so forth (6:1690) [outside the building policemen are seen; climbing the Scala Pı´a the patio of San Da´maso is reached; everywhere magnificent uniforms are seen; in some patios remnants belonging to the Middle Ages are seen].29 In lieu of direct attribution, Galdo´s indirectly acknowledges this important source of stylistic inspiration and informational content via the lengthy avowal of his great admiration for ‘‘las guı´as de Baedeker, esos libros inapreciables . . . que son modelo de imparcialidad, de me´todo y de rectitud’’ (6:1698) [the Baedeker guides, those inestimable books . . . that are a model of impartiality, method, and rectitude] included at the beginning of letter six.30 By copying the style and content of Europe’s most respected author of travel guides, Galdo´s by implication grants his own chronicle a measure of the ‘‘imperious and apparently ubiquitous authority’’ that Baedeker’s works had come to possess (Buzard 1993, 75). A similar process occurs with Viaje a Italia’s passages of artistic interpretation, in which Galdo´s frequently evokes another weighty extratextual authority: in this case the theories of ‘‘race, milieu and moment’’ advanced most famously by the noted French art critic (and Italian travel chronicle author) Hippolyte Taine. In fact, the extended analysis of the historical circumstances underlying Florence’s artistic superiority during the Renaissance in letters nine and ten is lifted almost point by point from Taine’s Philosophie de l’art

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[Philosophy of Art], which Galdo´s is also known to have owned (Martı´nez 1990, 105). Although Taine is only mentioned by name in letter nine, his artistic theories recognizably underlie many of the other artistic meditations included elsewhere in Viaje a Italia as well.31 Needless to say, Galdo´s’s decision to imbue his self-described ‘‘personal observations’’ (6:1688) with aesthetic analyses identifiably grounded in the work of one of the most respected art historians of the time functions in tandem with his liberal borrowings from Baedeker’s authoritative travel guides to augment his text’s illusion of accuracy and objectivity, while bolstering his own air of narrative authority. This seemingly cut-and-paste approach to text editing could perhaps leave Galdo´s open to accusations of practicing writerly laziness or—worse—of contributing to the transformation of travel into what Calaresu has called ‘‘largely a passive experience, mediated by the guidebook, in which new worlds were rarely confronted and old prejudices effectively confirmed’’ (1999, 141–42). However, it should perhaps by now go without saying that this is ultimately not the case, and that those passages in which Galdo´s seems to lean on textual authorities are just as rigorously undercut by other aspects of his narration. His reliance on the Baedeker model does not, for example, prevent him from misidentifying important dates in Italian history, as when he claims in letter nine (6:1702) that Dante had been dead for ‘‘five and a half centuries’’ (off by one hundred years) then proceeds, just one paragraph later, to state that the great poet lived during ‘‘the transition between the eleventh and twelfth centuries’’ (off by two hundred years in the other direction). Another more elaborate example can be found in the heavily Baedekerinfluenced letter two, principally devoted to a commentary on the vast holdings of the Vatican Museum. There, Galdo´s begins by evoking one of the more frequently vaunted sources of narrative authority available to travel writers: that is, the unique authenticity of perception deemed to result only from firsthand observation: Las maravillas de arte que . . . el Vaticano encierra son de tan notoria celebridad, que todo el mundo tiene de ellas noticia aun sin haberlas visto; pero la impresio´n que su vista produce no puede transmitirse, y aunque sean conocidas de toda persona ilustrada, las pinturas de la capilla Sixtina, por ejemplo so´lo pueden apreciarlas bien los que han penetrado alli. (6:1690)32

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[The artistic marvels that . . . the Vatican contains are of such notoriety that everyone knows of them without having seen them; but the impression produced by actually seeing them cannot be communicated, and even though the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, for example, are known to every enlightened person, they can only be truly appreciated by those who have entered there.]

Appearing in the course of a letter that, as mentioned earlier, is primarily composed by using the ‘‘objective’’ passive reflexive characteristic of the informational travelogue, this passage’s questioning of the possibility of communicating travel experience to others immediately draws attention. It should be noted, though, that Galdo´s does not, at least in this particular instance, choose to cast doubt on the common presumption that, communicable or not, travelers’ privileged status as firsthand observers guarantees them an encounter with the true nature of the objects and events they set out to describe. That presumption, though, becomes subject to attack elsewhere in letter two, as in the various passages in which Galdo´s emphasizes the essential and rather arbitrary subjectivity of his analyses of the Vatican’s artistic treasures. He admits, for example, that his overall opinion of the museum’s holdings was negatively influenced by his own travel itinerary, which had led him to visit Rome only after already touring the artistically rich cities of Venice and Florence: ‘‘A fuerza de ver perfecciones,’’ he confides, ‘‘produ´cese . . . una especie de empacho, y no es de extran ˜ ar que sean miradas con indiferencia algunas obras capitales’’ (6:1690) [Seeing perfections eventually causes . . . a sort of indigestion, and so it is not surprising that some significant works are then looked at with indifference]. The Vatican’s architects share a measure of blame as well: according to Galdo´s the fact that the Sistine Chapel lies midway through the museum tour leads inevitably to an undervaluing of all of the works viewed during the latter half of the visit: ‘‘Despue´s de contemplar esta obra maestra todas las dema´s pinturas que el Vaticano encierra, sin exceptuar las celebradas estancias de Rafael, palidecen’’ (6:1691) [After contemplating this masterpiece, all of the other paintings that the Vatican contains pale in comparison, without excepting even the celebrated galleries of Raphael]. The ‘‘meaning’’ of these treasures and the measuring of their significance to Western culture, in other words, are not directly communicable to the firsthand observer, but rather are the questionable by-product of any number of

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arbitrary external circumstances ranging from a long-dead architect’s failure to appreciate the future tourist’s likely attention span to the vagaries of the traveler’s particular itinerary or sleep cycle. In other cases textual equivocating regarding the authority of firsthand perception touches directly upon the all-important question of authenticity. In describing Verona, for example, Galdo´s decries as a form of cultural profanation modern efforts to restore (i.e., replicate, and thereby inauthenticate) Italy’s decaying architectural treasures (6:1695). In letter six, he joins to this rebuke of architectural reproduction a similar denunciation with respect to the plastic arts, this time declaring in the spirit of benjaminian aura that ‘‘la gran pintura se desvirtu´a cuando se multiplica en cromos y estampas’’ (6:1699) [great painting is spoiled when it is reproduced in prints and engravings]. In light of such remarks, it is significant to discover just how many of Galdo´s’s experiences in Italy are, in fact, encounters with the inauthentic. For example, quite a few of the artistic ‘‘masterpieces’’ he has the opportunity to view during his travels turn out, in reality, to be nothing more than reproductions (see, e.g., 6:1692–93, 6:1719; 1973, 342). In one interesting passage of letter two, Galdo´s adds a second level of nonauthenticity to his experience of Italian art, by first criticizing Bernini for attempting unsuccessfully to copy Michelangelo’s style, then adding that many of the sculptures popularly attributed to Bernini are themselves merely copies done by anonymous collaborators (6:1692). Italy’s capital, Galdo´s complains, is so ‘‘materially plagued’’ with these copies of copies that ‘‘la primera impresio´n que el viajero recibe en Roma es la de verse como asediado por . . . esta manifestacio´n repetidı´sma’’ (6:1692) [the first impression the traveler receives in Rome is like that of being assaulted by . . . this unendingly repeated display].33 Galdo´s’s focus on the problem of authenticity ties in nicely not only with the similar questioning of other significant ‘‘givens’’ of the travel-writing enterprise (e.g., referentiality, authority) elsewhere in his text but also with present-day scholarship on what Urry (1990) has called the ‘‘tourist gaze.’’ Though some studies posit an exception for what is sometimes called the ‘‘posttourist’’ of the postmodern age (see, e.g., Boorstin 1982, Bryman 1995), most scholars continue to agree that the quest for authenticity has long counted among the most powerful driving forces in tourism practices. As MacCannell puts it, ‘‘The variety of understanding held out before tourists as an ideal is an authentic and demystified experience of an aspect of some society or other person’’ (1989, 94, emphasis in origi-

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nal). Put a slightly different way, such experiences are not only understood to be encounters with authentic objects (i.e., ‘‘the real thing’’), but encounters with authentic objects capable of communicating authentic meaning: readable, that is, as signs of some essential quality of the culture the tourist has come to explore. As Rojek and Urry, following Culler, have put it succinctly: ‘‘Tourists are semioticians’’ (1997, 4). Turning back to Galdo´s, there is no doubt that the sites of his travel narration do function as signs: but signs of what? Certainly not of authenticity, at least not in the traditional sense. To the contrary, by insistently subtracting credibility from the presumption of authenticity in both textual and touristic experience, Galdo´s seems intent on underscoring the danger—both for travelers and for readers of travel narration alike—of attempting to uncover meaning in the cultural artifacts that may fall under the tourist gaze. It is important to note, though, that while his methods sometimes involve the transformation of presumably culturally significant objects into empty signs (e.g., the fake Bernini sculptures), Galdo´s’s Viaje a Italia does not put forward the nihilistic notion that any pursuit of meaning is absurd, only that we must rethink where to find it. Again and again Galdo´s reveals that whatever meaning a particular object or site may have derives not from its own inherent authenticity, originality, or tradition-sanctified status, but rather from the traveler’s individual attitude toward it.34 A good example appears in Galdo´s’s narration of his visit to the site of Juliet’s sarcophagus, which, as mentioned, turns out to be empty, to be almost certainly apocryphal, and to look distinctly like a bathtub. Nevertheless his attitude remains one of reverence: A pesar de que el tal sepulcro tiene todas las trazas de ser enteramente extran ˜ o a la persona de la infortunada hija de Capuletti, nada contiene Verona tan interesante como aquel lugar, de suyo vulgarı´simo, mas trocado en lugar poe´tico por el pensamiento y la intencio´n de los que van a visitarlo. El encanto y la hermosura del sitio es obra de los peregrinos ma´s que del santuario. (6:1697) [Although the tomb gives every sign of being entirely foreign to the person of the unfortunate daughter of Capulet, there is nothing in Verona as interesting as that spot, in itself entirely unremarkable, but transformed into a poetic site by the thought and intention of those who visit there. The magic and beauty of the site are the work of the pilgrims more than of the sanctuary.]

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Although Juliet’s faux tomb might seem to represent a quintessentially empty sign, Galdo´s unquestionably accepts it as one of most profoundly meaningful objects in the whole of Italy. He has the same reaction standing before the ‘‘hermosa custodia sin hostia’’ (6:1703) [beautiful monstrance without host] of Dante’s empty funereal monument in Florence’s Santa Croce Church. In Pompeii the ‘‘unoccupied tomb’’ (6:1717) at which he pays reverent homage is the city itself: ‘‘el alma de aquella ruina,’’ he declares, ‘‘surge en la mente y en el corazo´n del viajero’’ (6:1717) [the soul of that ruin arises in the mind and heart of the traveler]. In each instance, an apparently empty receptacle acquires significance through an act of individual perception. This privileging of individual perception can also occur when the ‘‘authenticity’’ of the object being observed is not questioned. In Padua, for example, Galdo´s remains markedly unimpressed by the ‘‘true and authentic portrait’’ (6:1707) of Saint Anthony painted by one of the saint’s Paduan contemporaries, declaring the portraits done by Murillo some four centuries after Saint Anthony’s death to be far more in accordance with the saint’s presumed ‘‘racial type’’ (6:1707) and hence more profoundly authentic. In yet other passages, the meaning imputed to individual objects is shown to have demonstrably less to do with any inherent qualities of those objects themselves than with the circumstances under which Galdo´s came to observe them. Just as the Vatican Museum collection would have been more impressive had Galdo´s not already been ‘‘saturated . . . by artistic emotions’’ (6:1690) before seeing it, so too does he feel that Verona’s Roman amphitheater can lay claim to grandeur—but only among those tourists who do not, as he did, subsequently visit the more impressive coliseum of Rome (6:1698). In all of these many strategies for interrogating presumptions of authenticity, Galdo´s puts his own twist on the concept of ‘‘sight sacralization,’’ used by MacCannell to explain in part the mechanisms by which tourists come to ‘‘know’’ which sites are important as well as how they are expected to react to them. At a macrolevel, MacCannell studies this phenomenon as a ‘‘miracle of consensus that transcends national boundaries [and] rests on an elaborate set of institutional mechanisms’’ (1989, 42). This is no doubt true. In Galdo´s’s case, though, we repeatedly find institutionally sacralized objects and locations abruptly divested of meaning (in some cases later to be resacralized on other terms) or, conversely, items generally recognized as of lesser significance suddenly thrust to the fore. It

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happens time and again, and in each case Galdo´s uncompromisingly shows ‘‘institutional mechanisms’’ to be always subordinate to the vagaries of the individual gaze. And yet again, this aspect of Galdo´s’s narrative can be seen as profoundly linked with the chronicle’s overarching ironic leitmotiv: the question of unidad. In this case the focus falls upon the traditional presumption of unity between appearance and meaning. In example after example, Galdo´s reveals the fragility of notions that significance derives from within and that this presumably authentic meaning, once identified, will be invariable and unique. Instead, as in La inco´gnita, he utilizes his text’s first-person epistolary narration to focus attention insistently on the inevitable subjectivity of perception and, hence, the necessary relativity of all efforts to communicate ‘‘la realidad.’’ The result is a work in which, as Diane Urey has observed regarding Galdo´s’s novelistic efforts, ‘‘the language of the text proffers a literary, rhetorical, and cultural surrogate for a reality which we assume it represents—yet never does—but which it may supersede’’ (1982, 94). Or, as Cisneros tells Infante in La inco´gnita: ‘‘No averigu¨es nada, ni te metas a buscador de la verdad absoluta, que no encontrara´s’’ (5:789) [Do not verify anything or try to ferret out absolute truth, because you will not find it]. Obviously, this overt abdication of the search for ‘‘la verdad absoluta’’ again serves to distinguish Galdo´s’s approach from the more modest manipulations of touristic convention carried out by Mesonero nearly half a century before. And yet, in some ways, the two are not so dissimilar. Both faced problems regarding issues of originality, interpretability, and authenticity of experience, not to mention the considerable challenge of representing textually a profoundly valorized, richly metaphorized geographical setting (Italy, Paris) and concomitant need to work both within and against a well-established tradition of representation. Both, too, engage the thorny question of modernization and develop their linguistic constructions of geography in ways that serve their individual interpretations of that process and its intended or possible outcomes. Those interpretations are, undeniably, different, as are the two men’s approaches to the genre of travel representation itself. While Mesonero saw travel writing as a ‘‘patriotic task’’ (3:148) inextricably—if not entirely unambiguously—linked to his enthusiasm for the cause of Spanish urban reform, Galdo´s appears to find in the writing of travel experience a tantalizing opportunity to pursue, from a slightly different perspective than in his better known novelistic production, his on-

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going exploration of the nature of language and limits of representation.35 True to his initial declaration of textual objectives, Galdo´s in Viaje a Italia does indeed present his readers with ‘‘some viewpoints resulting from personal observation’’ (6:1685). Although his decision to organize these observations around the issue of unidad may initially seem a rather perplexing departure from the central concerns of his better known novelistic works, closer examination reveals crucial points of intersection. Throughout his chronicle Galdo´s confounds reader expectations, destroying consecrated notions of unity, creating others where none may logically be presumed to exist. As Luis Ferna´ndez Cifuentes has stated, Galdo´s’s writings act to ‘‘point to the false pretensions of all the supposedly unequivocal terminologies, fixed categories, and consecrated formulas, . . . constantly unveiling the inadequacies of rigid systems and dogmatic categories’’ (1988, 290). That observation clearly holds true for Viaje a Italia. As does Manolo Infante, the first-person narrator of Galdo´s’s Italian chronicle finds himself engaged in a form of ‘‘detective inquiry’’ (5:809) traveling about the Italian peninsula seeking clues to the true nature of Italian reality. Such an enterprise assumes, however, that there is a single unequivocal reality to be discovered, that the detective will be able to locate and comprehend it, and that he will communicate it objectively and faithfully to his readers via the language of his travel account. Viaje a Italia repeatedly demonstrates the folly of relying upon the integrity of all of these textual and extratextual assumptions. Once again echoing a common travel genre topos, Galdo´s writes toward the beginning of his sixth Italian letter that ‘‘la curiosidad natural de nuestro a´nimo y el ansia de nuestros ojos no se ve[n] satisfechos nunca sino ante la realidad’’ (6:1700) [the natural curiosity of our spirit and yearning of our eyes are never satisfied except in the presence of reality]. While such a remark may seem in curious disharmony with the freewheeling disregard for verisimilitude that characterizes much of his chronicle, it actually offers a concise summary of the narrative perspective adopted throughout the text. Obviously, however, the ‘‘realidad’’ Galdo´s attempts to identify and communicate extends considerably beyond the narration of his dayto-day travel experiences and accumulation of information on Italian history, geography, and art that might be conventionally expected to form the principal focus of his text. Indeed, one could say that it is precisely by delinking travel narration from its convention-

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ally imposed presumptions of accuracy and verisimilitude and doggedly refusing to provide comforting resolution to his narrative’s many tensions and ambiguities that Galdo´s, in the end, can claim to have provided his readers with a faithful ‘‘reproduccio´n de lo visto, observado y sentido en Italia’’ (6:1694) [reproduction of what has been seen, observed, and felt in Italy]. As he had remarked some years earlier in his ‘‘Observaciones sobre la novela contempora´nea en Espan ˜ a’’: ‘‘el novelista . . . tiene la misio´n de reflejar esta turbacio´n honda, esta lucha incesante de principios y hechos que constituye el maravilloso drama de la vida actual’’ (1990, 13) [the novelist . . . has the mission of reflecting this deep disorder, this incessant battle of facts and principles that make up the marvelous drama of present-day life]. In Viaje a Italia, as elsewhere, that is exactly what he does.

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3 Esta corta travesı´a: Alarco´n and the (In)Definition of Spanish Orientalism Si l’on demande ou` je vais, tu re´pondras que je suis en Afrique: c’est un mot magique qui preˆte aux conjectures, et qui fait reˆver les amateurs de de´couvertes. —Fromentin, Une Anne´e dans le Sahel [If anyone asks where I am going, tell them I am in Africa: it is a magic word that lends itself to conjecture and that makes lovers of discovery dream.]

IN THE REMAINING CHAPTERS I WILL TURN FROM EUROPEAN TRAVEL TO the much smaller but equally rich subset of Spanish travel narration devoted to non-European destinations. As will be seen, these texts introduce several important issues specific to the particular locations they describe, perhaps most notably the slippery question of orientalist representation; however, they also carry forward many of the representational and ideological concerns already evident in the European travel writings discussed in previous chapters. There is, for example, a continued preoccupation with issues of authenticity and the communicability of experience, and the utilization of a predominantly citationary structure with heavy reliance on preexisting cultural metaphors and textual models. Because the authors I am considering are all literary figures, the textual models they use— regardless of destination described—tend to derive from literary (or, more broadly, artistic) sources and to function within the travel narration in ways that not only condition the narrator’s apprehension and communication of a given travel experience but also engage broader concerns of literary praxis. Of the several areas of commonality uniting Spanish tactics of representing both non-European and European travel experience, one of the most important has to do with the position occupied by the 123

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traveler/narrator with respect to what Denys Hay has called ‘‘the idea of Europe’’ (in GoGwilt 1995, 1). As I have mentioned earlier, my decision to foreground the journey to Paris and tour of Italy in the chapters devoted to European travel derives in important part from the profound significance ascribed to both destinations (though for different reasons) in terms of their value as repository of European cultural identity. In a variety of respects, nineteenthcentury Spanish authors take on an essential European traveler identity when approaching both of these destinations, gravitating toward roughly the same set of ‘‘important’’ attractions in both locations as do travel authors from elsewhere on the continent, displaying clear knowledge of relevant European literary and artistic precedent, interpreting the significance of their various experiences and of the journey as a whole by using roughly the same set of dominant metaphors and subtexts as those found in other European works. Sometimes, though, it is this very high degree of synchronicity between Spanish and dominant European models of travel narration that itself gives rise to interpretational distinctions. One important example involves the common tactic of conceptualizing Europe and its cultures on a North/South axis, with the North strongly associated with those lifestyles, beliefs and attitudes typically identified as specific to modern European identity, and the South correspondingly seen as repository of lingering traditionalism. While the geographical parameters of this North/South delineation can vary from text to text as can authors’ individual attitudes toward the benefits or scourges of the modern consciousness, the basic North/South paradigm can be found in most accounts of Western European travel, by Spanish and non-Spanish authors alike. Clearly present in the accounts of journeys to Paris and Italy I have discussed in previous pages, it can also be found in the scattering of Spanish texts devoted to other European destinations (e.g., Blanco White’s Cartas de Inglaterra [Letters from England], Ganivet’s Cartas finlandesas [Finnish Letters]) as well as any number of the many accounts of European travel produced by other Continental writers. Spanish writers’ use of this standard geographical/cultural schema is, however, distinguished from that of their colleagues from nations north of the Pyrenees by the fact that Spain, both geographically and perceptually, so clearly lies within the southern tier of the North/South continental divide. The de facto southern perspective from which Spanish travelers—regardless of personal ideological

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leanings—would be seen to construct their representation and interpretation of foreign cultural models has important consequences. For example, even if its only binary corollary were the modernity/tradition pairing mentioned, the North/South dichotomy would clearly introduce an element of complication into travel narratives of those Spanish authors who sought to align their nation with one or another aspect of modern European identity. Just as potentially problematic, the North/South differentiation would have also conveyed to the nineteenth-century reading public a variety of other implied cultural juxtapositions, included among them a clearcut notion of cultural hierarchy (‘‘superior’ versus ‘‘inferior’’ ‘‘civilized’’ versus ‘‘barbaric’’) with the position of dominance and privilege again generally understood to be occupied by the North. By some measures even the term Europe itself was construed as belonging exclusively to the northerly side of the equation, as seen, for example, in the tendency among those who for geographical or ideological reasons aligned themselves with the northern identity to exclude southern Italy from the European cultural zone (see Pelz 1992; Porter 1991). Of special significance here, at least from the perspective of Spanish travel writing, is the fact that this same kind of ‘‘in Europe but not of Europe’’ attitude was—if anything—even more prevalent in descriptions of Spain, which, as the oft-repeated French phrase ‘‘L’Afrique commence aux Pyre´ne´es’’ [Africa begins in the Pyrenees] so clearly communicates, was unambiguously cast by an important number of nineteenth-century European writers and artists as a conveniently close-to-home incarnation of the Oriental exotic. While all this is important to Spanish representations of travel within Europe, it is no less so with regard to depictions of nonWestern lands. The image of Spain as an exotic (the Greek ⑀␹␱ meaning ‘‘outside’’) space with respect to European cultural identity was so ubiquitous both within Spain and beyond that even if the issue is not engaged openly in a given travel text (though it usually is), the relationship Spanish travel authors posit for themselves and for their nation with respect to the ‘‘idea of Europe’’ inevitably opens itself to question. This in turn affects textual processes of identity construction, narrative authority, the selection and interpretation of travel experience, and more. I will discuss these questions further in the following chapters through consideration of Spanish travel writings recounting journeys to points outside the boundaries of Europe and, in particular, to destinations located within the so-

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called oriental world that nineteenth-century Europeans so often identified as their binary cultural opposite. Our current understanding of this topic owes a great debt of gratitude to Lily Litvak, who during the 1980s put together a substantial body of scholarship on exoticism in nineteenth-century Spain (see Geografı´as ma´gicas [Magical Geographies, 1984], El sendero del tigre [The Path of the Tiger, 1986], El ajedrez de estrellas, [Chess Game of the Stars, 1987]). The extraordinary geographical, chronological, and generic sweep of these compendium-style studies (treating texts published from 1800 to 1913 on destinations throughout the globe and by authors of dissimilar professional and situational circumstance) continues to provide valuable contextualization for work in this wideranging and complex field, though it must also be said that these works’ conclusions regarding the exoticist impulse sometimes depart significantly from the mechanisms at play in the texts I consider here, no doubt in part as consequence of the extraordinary breadth of the materials that Litvak seeks to explicate as well as differences between her understanding of the ‘‘exoticist impulse’’ and my own.1 Other scholars have provided insight into the presence of orientalism in works of specific authors and venues, both from the colonial era (e.g., Charnon-Deutsch, Martin-Ma´rquez) and in postcolonial manifestations (e.g., Kushigian, Lo´pez Baralt, Pe´rez).2 These analyses offer many points of intersection, as well as occasional differences, with respect to the Spanish orientalist travel chronicles studied here, as I will discuss in the following pages. My consideration will begin with discussion of Spanish authors’ travel representations of what Said has called the ‘‘traditional Orient’’ (i.e., the southern and eastern Mediterranean basin, which served as primary geographical focus of much nineteenth-century orientalist activity and thought) and then move in the final chapter to chronicles of long-distance transoceanic travel, especially the journey to East Asia. Given the amount of critical work from a variety of disciplinary and ideological perspectives that has focused on the concepts and practices of orientalism, I should perhaps start with a word about how I will use the term in these pages. Basically, I will use orientalism and related terms (oriental, Orient) to designate the particular rhetorical and ideological constructions by which a sizable swath of land stretching from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Rim (along with its associated cultural systems) came to be identified as an ‘‘other’’ with respect to European society, which is to say, borrowing Elleke Boehmer’s definition, as something ‘‘unfamiliar and extraneous to

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a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined’’ (1995, 21). I will consider orientalist writing to be characterized grosso modo by the employment of a variety of representational and interpretational strategies that, as first carefully described by Said in Orientalism, work ‘‘to dichotomize the human continuum into we-they contrasts and to essentialize the resultant ‘other’ ’’ (Clifford 1988, 258). However, following the lead of Clifford and others, I will not presume that these strategies are either universal or seamlessly applied nor that the orientalist perspective need imply a uniformly oppositional stance. Though works of orientalist literature do feature frequent and often harsh juxtapositions of East and West and while their postures and goals do so often clearly participate in the dynamics of dominance (political, economic, ideological, etc.) central to Europe’s nineteenth-century program of colonialist expansion, a good many such texts ultimately operate on decidedly shifting terrain, with more than a few adopting postures that are, as Nicholas Thomas has put it, ‘‘at least at one level, sympathetic, idealizing, relativistic and critical of the producers’ home societies’’ (1994, 26). I do not by this mean to suggest that existence of such slippage always indicates an actual realignment of the author’s ideological perspectives. Orientalist representation is literally awash in what Ali Behdad, in a somewhat different context, has called ‘‘cultural transvestism’’ (1994, 59): that is, the adoption of a few external trappings of the ‘‘other’’ as putative proof of a fundamental reformulation of personal identity. In some cases, though, I would suggest that the textual blurring of the standard cultural dichotomies typically associated with orientalist rhetoric does indeed ‘‘disclose an ambivalence, a sense of its own authorities and assumptions being called into question’’ (Duncan and Gregory 1999, 5). This will prove to be particularly evident in the case of Spain’s contribution to the orientalist tradition. Though some of the ambivalences inherent to Spanish orientalist narration are easily identifiable in other works of European literature, others appear to be specific to (or at least exacerbated by) circumstances peculiar to Spain’s own historical and cultural condition. In this way Spanish orientalist writing offers strong support for Thomas’s contention that ‘‘it is becoming increasingly clear that only localized theories and historically specific accounts can provide much insight into the varied articulations of colonizing and countercolonial representations and practices’’ (1994, ix). As in previous chapters, therefore, I will begin with a short overview of a few gen-

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eral trends of Spanish orientalism before turning to a closer reading of one text, which I believe to offer a particularly revealing case study of the peculiar dynamics of Spanish orientalist travel narration, as well as being a work of significant merit and interest in its own right. In this case, the highlighted work will be Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de Africa [Diary of a Witness to the African War], the 1860 bestseller by Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n. In considering the predicament of Spain’s orientalist travel writers it is useful to begin with a few words about Spanish authors’ approach to artistic orientalism in general. As usual the Spanish pattern was in some respects not much different from other European national literatures of the time. As Ricardo Navas Ruı´z (1982, 50–59), Julio Ignacio Ferreras (1987, 31–34), and numerous others have discussed, the first major wave of romanticism was accompanied in Spain as elsewhere by a striking upswing in the production of novels, plays, and poems devoted to diverse oriental themes. Significant development of this trend began (as did so many others) in the early Isabelline period, with important early contributions by such authors as Martı´nez de la Rosa, el Duque de Rivas, and Espronceda, to be followed later in the century by the likes of Be´cquer, Zorrilla, Alarco´n, and Valera. In all of these authors’ works one finds abundant utilization of many of the standard metaphors and cultural cliche´s typical of characterizations of the representation of Orient and Occident elsewhere in Europe.3 Nevertheless, while the presence of a significant orientalist aesthetic in nineteenth-century Spanish letters points—quite correctly—to Spanish writers’ familiarity with and active participation in yet another major avenue of nineteenth-century European thought, as mentioned previously, the Spanish engagement with the orientalist topos also distinguishes itself in crucial ways. The most important of these distinctions is the strong tendency for Spanish orientalist literature to produce its sense of the exotic (here used in the generic sense of ‘‘culturally alien’’) without any form of geographical displacement: that is to say, that the setting of most Spanish orientalist writing is the nation of Spain itself. Most of the time, in what amounts to an intra-Spanish version of the North/ South paradigm discussed earlier, the space of this ‘‘oriental’’ Spain is very clearly identified with the nation’s southernmost region, Andalucı´a, usually through literary re-creation of the medieval Moorish ambiance of Al-Andalus or occasionally via focus on present-day ‘‘exotic’’ ingredients of Andalusian life such as Gypsy culture.

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The popularity of the preceding themes in nineteenth-century Spanish literature has, over the years, been analyzed from a variety of perspectives not always directly related to the question of ‘‘orientalist discourse’’ per se (e.g., association with the romantic era propensities for fantasy and local color, correlation with the popular historical novels of Walter Scott). There is, however, often a clear awareness that, even if the style and themes can all be correlated with trends in mainstream European romanticism, the fact that Spanish authors could so easily give them rein without ever taking their eyes from their own home society was indeed something unique. Deciding exactly what to make of that uniqueness, however, has proved a somewhat more complicated matter. Julia Kushigian, in her analysis of twentieth-century Latin American orientalist discourse, has interpreted the confluence of East and West in authors such as Borges, Sarduy, and Paz as a sign of Hispanic orientalism’s fundamental ‘‘generosity toward, and respect for, diversity’’ (1991, 3) and its determination to offer a ‘‘free and familiar investigation of our humanity’’ (1991, 16). Navas Ruiz, referring more specifically to nineteenth-century Spain, takes a different tack, foregrounding its function as a manifestation of Iberian patriotism, held in at least implicit juxtaposition to Europe: el orientalismo de los roma´nticos europeos cobra en Espan ˜ a un matiz patrio´tico, puesto que el oriente no so´lo no le era ajeno, sino parte de su historia. No tiene, pues, un sabor exo´tico, sino de algo propio. (1982, 52) [In Spain the orientalism of the European romantics takes on a patriotic hue, since the Orient not only was not foreign to them but rather part of their history. It thus does not taste of the exotic, but of Spain itself.]

And, indeed, one could find examples in the nineteenth-century corpus to support either of these readings, including at least certain portions of the orientalist writings of the author to be highlighted in the course of this chapter, Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n. That said, there are also abundant passages in Spanish orientalist writing that present virtually the opposite view or that point to the existence of other primary concerns such as the often intense preoccupation with complex and problematic issues such as religion, sexuality, and race (see, e.g., Martin-Ma´rquez 2001, 7; Charnon-Deutsch and Labanyi 1995, 251; and Charnon-Deutsch 2000, 181).

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In addition, while the orientalist trope does at times work to create a sense of Spanish national identity (‘‘algo propio’’), as Charnon-Deutsch has correctly observed (in Charnon-Deutsch and Labanyi, 1995, 263), it also lends itself to creating hierarchy and division within Spanish society, as those associating themselves with cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and other points within Spain’s more urbanized, industrialized, modernized North would often evoke an exoticized Andalucı´a precisely in order to distance themselves from it, thus justifying their own position within the ‘‘Northern’’ (‘‘European’’) component of the North/South dynamic. Chronology is another variable, including whether the author’s consideration of southern Spain’s Moorish heritage focuses on events of the past or of the present (the former being decidedly less problematic), and where the particular text’s publication falls with respect to nineteenth-century Spain’s on-again-off-again neocolonialist enterprises in North Africa and other parts of the so-called oriental world. The riddle of Spanish orientalism, in other words, proves resistant to interpretative formulas. What is, however, quite clear is that the predilection for seeking the non-Western other at home constitutes a significant departure from the general European practice of associating the Orient with geographical separation, and that this point of differentiation was already well established in nineteenth-century Spanish public discourse. Not surprisingly, therefore, it will prove to be one of the most profound preoccupations of Spain’s orientalist travel writers as well. How these and other related issues play out in the corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish travel chronicles will be the concern of the following pages. Spain’s peculiar historical relationship to the oriental world is undoubtedly at least partly responsible for another area of differentiation separating the Spanish engagement with orientalism from the corpus of northern European orientalist texts, and that is the popularity of orientalist travel writing itself. Whereas in France, a nation whose artistic predilections so often exerted considerable influence on nineteenth-century Spanish letters, the popularity of orientalist travel reached such extremes that in Porter’s words it virtually ‘‘came to assume the character of an obligatory journey, a challenge to one’s imagination and a test of one’s powers as writer’’ (1991, 165), Spanish authors’ interest in orientalist themes only rarely prompted them to engage in literary peregrinations to ‘‘exotic’’ foreign lands. Only a handful of Spain’s nineteenth-century authors ever published a work of orientalist travel narration at all, and—in

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contrast to the typical image of the French or British traveler inspired by a personal desire for immersion in ‘‘the otherness of the ‘un-civilized’ ’’ (Porter 1991, 164)—most of those who did so had undertaken their journeys only as a result of professional (usually diplomatic or military) obligation. On the other hand, it could also be said that this very difference itself gives rise to one of the most archetypically ‘‘European’’ attributes of these texts: that is, nearly all were produced in the course of service to the Spanish colonialist enterprise and as such are firmly aligned—usually explicitly so—with the pursuit of empire. A significant number of other factors, some perspectival, others simply circumstantial, work toward these texts’ incorporation into European representational and ideological schemas. One very simple example would be travel itinerary. Though the Orient of the time encompassed a wide variety of potential travel destinations, texts produced by nineteenth-century Spanish authors almost always involve journeys carried out relatively close to home in regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, most narrating visits either to the Holy Land or—by far the most common—to the areas of Spanish colonial activity lying in the western Maghreb.4 This pattern is generally similar to that found in British and French accounts as well, in which journeys to locations of special religious or colonialist significance along the Mediterranean periphery likewise enjoyed particular favor (though in their case rivaled in appeal by the journey to ‘‘exotic’’ Spain). Obviously, both for Spaniards and for their European neighbors, the Mediterranean basin’s status as preferred orientalist travel destination depended in important part on simple geography: such excursions promised access to a presumably authentic oriental world, yet without the elevated cost and considerable time investment required for transoceanic travel. Orientalist travel writers, in fact, often explicitly acknowledge North Africa’s unique combination of easy accessibility and exotic mystique. The´ophile Gautier offers a typical example, writing during a steamship voyage from Marseille to Algiers that nous allions donc, au bout de quelques heures, eˆtre dans une autre partie du monde, dans cette myste´rieuse Afrique, qui n’est pourtant qu’a` deux journe´es de la France, parmi ces races basane´es et noires qui diffe`rent de nous, par le costume, les mœurs et la religion, autant que le jour diffe`re de la nuit. (1978, 11:20)

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[We would thus, after a few hours, be in another part of the world, in that mysterious Africa, which is nevertheless no more than a two-day journey from France, among those sunburnt and black races who differ from us in clothing, custom, and religion, as much as day differs from night.]

It is interesting, as well as more than a little curious, to discover that Spain’s own orientalist travelers often incorporate the same kind of stark East versus West juxtapositions in describing their own journeys to the Mediterranean’s south shore. Domingo Badı´a y Leblich, an early nineteenth-century adventurer who gained considerable fame by traveling throughout much of the Arab world disguised as a Syrian prince named Ali Bey el Abbassi, set the tone for many later nineteenth-century Spanish chronicles when he wrote of his 1803 journey from Tarifa to Tangiers: La sensacio´n que experimenta el hombre que por primera vez hace esta corta travesı´a, no puede compararse sino al efecto de un suen ˜ o. Pasando en tan breve espacio de tiempo a un mundo absolutamente nuevo, y sin la ma´s remota semejanza con el que acaba de dejar, se halla realmente como transportado a otro planeta. (1943, 19) [The sensation felt by the man who makes this short crossing for the first time can only be compared to the effect of a dream. Passing in such a short period of time into an absolutely new world, without the slightest resemblance to the one he has just left, he truly feels transported to another planet.]

Some eighty years later, Jacint Verdaguer describes his own crossing to Tangiers from Ca´diz in much the same way, declaring in Records de la costa d’Africa [Memories of the African Coast] that, despite the brevity of the voyage, ‘‘to´t es nou allı´ pera lo viatget europe`u’’ (1906–7, 6:41) [everything there is new for the European traveler]. In En el paı´s del misterio [In the Land of Mystery], similarly, the diplomat and adventure novelist Jose´ Alvarez Pe´rez identifies Morocco’s combination of non-Western otherness and physical proximity as an important factor in favor of its potential (though, he laments, as-yet largely unrealized) development as a prime tourist destination: Con so´lo atravesar nueve millas de agua, podemos encontrarnos en plena barbarie. . . . ¿No es verdad que el contraste es extraordinario y que vale la pena hacer un viaje a este paı´s, ya que esta´ tan cerca del nuestro? (1875, 132)

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[By merely crossing nine miles of water we can find ourselves in total barbarism. . . . Isn’t it true that the contrast is extraordinary and that it is worth making the journey to this country, especially since it is so close to ours?]

Through these declarations—and there are many of them—Spanish authors would seem quite clearly to be answering the question of Spain’s situation within ‘‘the idea of Europe’’ head on, placing themselves and their nation unequivocally and fully into the European cultural camp. This tactic is striking both for the frequency with which it is employed and for the important change of direction it seems to suppose with respect to the marked tendency for Spanish orientalist literature to meditate upon the profound connection between the culture of Spain and Europe’s oriental ‘‘other.’’ Further underscoring Spanish travel authors’ interest in projecting a European cultural orientation, the East versus West cultural juxtapositions utilized in Spanish texts are often openly hierarchical, with abundant, sometimes openly disdainful reference to the inferiority of the non-Western world. These references can focus on almost any conceivable circumstance, practice, or belief, including physical appearance (‘‘Habı´a en aquellas sonrisas una expresio´n repugnante; brillaba en los inflamados ojos un resplandor de brutalidad espantosa; . . . Aquello era la manifestacio´n repugnante de la corrupcio´n oriental’’ [Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez 1967–87, 4:1142; There was a repulsive expression in those smiles; a glint of fearful brutality burned in their inflamed eyes. . . . It was the repulsive manifestation of oriental corruption]); religion (‘‘¡Oh, sı´! El especta´culo que presentan los mahometanos y los hebreos es la prueba ma´s evidente que pudiera alegarse de las excelencias de nuestra religio´n!’’ [Alarco´n 1974, 369; Oh, yes! The spectacle presented by Moslems and Jews is the most evident proof available of the excellence of our own religion!]); political ideology (‘‘Todo en Tetua´n se resiente del sello que han impreso en ella la servidumbre y la tiranı´a’’ [Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce 1860, 112; Everything in Tetouan reveals the mark stamped upon it by servitude and tyranny]); intellectual activity (‘‘entre ellos casi no hay poetas, y mucho menos historiadores’’ [Badı´a 1943, 36; There are scarcely any poets among them, much less historians]) and more. Thus, at least on one level, there is a clearly an impetus in Spanish orientalist travel writing, as in European travel writing generally, to structure representation via simple binary paradigms (e.g., East ver-

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sus West). This will be important, as is the fact that these paradigms—as is also customary—will tend to portray both sides of the equation as internally undifferentiated cultural blocks. That is, if words like Oriente and oriental flatten an extraordinary breadth of cultures into a single interpretational schema, an essentially similar process occurs in allusions to Europe (‘‘Europa,’’ ‘‘lo europeo,’’ ‘‘los europeos’’) as a single cultural entity. This tactic, as mentioned, may have offered at least some Spanish writers an appealing escape from the persistent North/South opposition that complicates Spanish accounts of European journeys. In the end, though, the result is just the opposite. The tendency for Spanish travel authors to employ standard orientalist oppositions between East and West turns out to be one of the factors that make most visible some of the principal differences separating Spanish chronicles from those produced elsewhere on the continent. The problem, of course, is that—as so many Spanish orientalist writings acknowledge freely—Spain’s relationship with the Mediterranean Orient does diverge from that of its neighbors to the north in numerous historical, cultural, and even purely logistical ways. For example, while French writers need to travel only about four hundred miles from Marseille to reach the port of Algiers,5 that journey can scarcely be compared with the few miles of water separating Spain from the Moroccan coast. This extreme physical proximity— Spanish travelers to the Maghreb could reportedly see the lights of Spanish towns while standing on the African shore—could scarcely help but affect the way Europeans (including Spaniards themselves) saw the relation between Spain and the Orient. More specific to the present context, it also profoundly complicated Spanish travelers’ ability to portray themselves as emissaries of ‘‘European civilization’’ during their journeys to non-European lands. Spain’s precarious status as a colonial power clearly played a crucial role as well. Consider, for instance, Rana Kabbani’s description of the European orientalist traveler as one who ‘‘begins his journey with the strength of a nation or an empire sustaining him (albeit from a distance) militarily, economically, intellectually and, as is often the case, spiritually’’ (1986, 1). Though this notion is applicable in a general sense to Spanish travelers, too, there is little question that both the extent of the ‘‘sustenance’’ (in the sense of direct protection or support) travelers might expect to receive as well as the degree of prestige or authority they would enjoy by virtue of possessing European citizenship would vary substantially depending on

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which European nation they called home. Unlike the many orientalist travel writers from Britain and France, for example, whose nonWestern peregrinations—whatever the author’s exact destination or personal political beliefs might be—inevitably unfolded within the general framework of their nation’s extensive political and economic investment in a burgeoning eastward-looking colonial empire, Spanish travelers set forth from a land whose imperial glories had by the nineteenth century largely passed into history and whose investment in Asia and Africa had in any case always been relatively slight. This circumstance, in addition to its undoubtedly significant role in limiting Spanish travel in the region, also affected the presentation of a fundamental component of the European orientalist project—colonialism—in those texts that do exist. Whereas French travelers, for example, generally portray their government’s colonialist activities in oriental lands as a demonstrable fact of life that individual authors might choose either to praise or to lament, Spanish writers tend to evoke their nation’s colonial enterprise by reference to either the past (as a lost element of Spain’s former glory) or, in some cases, the future (as a potentially obtainable fruit of national regeneration), but rarely as an unqualified identifying feature of their nation’s nineteenth-century present. Similarly, though Spanish travel writers for the most part continue to portray themselves as members of a superior European culture, such portrayals seldom attain the self-confident optimism and forward-looking expansionist orientation found in works of writers from ascendant colonial powers.6 Even the often jingoistic patriotism of the Moroccan War chronicles produced by writers such as Alarco´n and Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce occasionally lapse into a defensive, nostalgic, or wearily fatalistic mood, as when Alarco´n acknowledges the folly of his erstwhile hope that Spain restore its imperial grandeur by establishing a strong colonial presence in North Africa: ‘‘Cuando un pueblo se resuelve a no capitular,’’ he writes, ‘‘las victorias son vanas quimeras. . . . Para herir, pues, en el corazo´n al Estado, tendrı´amos que extirpar toda la raza, que hacerla desaparecer, que matar diez millones de hombres y ocupar veinte mil leguas cuadradas de territorio’’ (1974, 332) [When a people decides not to capitulate, victory is only a vain mirage. . . . In order to wound their state in the heart, therefore, we would have to exterminate the entire race, make it disappear, kill ten million men and, occupy twenty thousand square leagues of territory].

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The third, and clearly most significant factor muddling Spanish writers’ efforts to situate themselves and their culture exclusively on the European side of the standard orientalist dichotomy derives of course from Spanish history. As mentioned, preoccupation with the unique blending of East and West represented by the nearly eight hundred years of Moorish control of significant portions of the Iberian peninsula was central to Spanish orientalist literature generally, and orientalist travel narration is no exception. Not surprisingly, this is especially clear in accounts of the Maghreb, where buildings are routinely compared to the Alhambra or Giralda, the climate and terrain to those of Andalucı´a, and contemporary North African culture to that which flourished in Al-Andalus. While undeniably serving to increase the communicability of travel experience, such comparisons have other significant consequences as well. Though these passages can often be self-serving (with the Spanish incarnation of whatever physical or cultural feature being described often credited as possessing more beauty or sophistication than its North African counterpart), authors’ constant reminders of the intimate linkage between Spain and the presumably alien oriental world they have set out to explore cannot help but weaken the neat ‘‘East versus West’’ oppositions that most of these Spanish travel texts also freely employ. To be sure, the ability of any Western European convincingly to portray the Mediterranean Orient as an inherently unfamiliar domain was always a dubious enterprise: Europe, after all, had a long and well-documented tradition of interventionism in the region (e.g., the Punic Wars, the Crusades, modern colonialism), and educated travelers were overwhelmingly likely to have at least passing familiarity with many historical, literary, and artistic works—both classical and modern—devoted to such subjects, including, of course, the ever-expanding pool of orientalist travel chronicles published by their own contemporaries (see, e.g., Mitchell 1992, 309).7 Be that as it may, Spanish efforts to construe the Mediterranean Orient as an ‘‘unknown’’ were even more problematic, particularly considering that the vast majority of Spain’s orientalist travel narratives recount journeys to the Maghreb, where, as Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce noted with some measure of both pride and repugnance, reminders of Spain’s Moorish past were everywhere apparent, even in the names of the region’s inhabitants: Hay una multitud de familias moras que se llaman Vargas, Ferna´ndez, Garcı´a, Barradas, y Bohorques, ası´ como entre los hebreos que hablan el

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castellano anticuado en sus giros y corrompido con algunas locuciones a´rabes, no faltan Sotos, Enrı´quez, Alvaredas y Go´mez. (1860, 114) [There are many Moorish families named Vargas, Ferna´ndez, Garcı´a, Barradas, and Behorques, just as among the Jews who speak that old-style Spanish corrupted with Arab phrases there is no lack of Sotos, Enrı´quez, Alvaredas, and Go´mez.]

Though responses to these acts of recognition can vary from text to text, the irrefutable historical, cultural, and even genetic ties linking Spain’s orientalist travelers to the ‘‘exotic’’ cultures and peoples they observe and interpret are without question the single most frequently evoked, probed, and pondered issue underlying nineteenthcentury Spanish orientalist thought. Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n provides a case in point. In addition to being one of nineteenth-century Spain’s most prolific travel writers, Alarco´n was one of its most important authors of literary works devoted to orientalist themes. It is thus not surprising to discover within his literary production several texts in which these dual interests are combined. As did many of his Spanish contemporaries, Alarco´n most often sought to indulge his orientalist curiosity by examining his own nation’s past, and as such the preponderance of his orientalist travel writing involves domestic journeys, primarily—as is also typical—sited in Spain’s southernmost region, Andalucı´a. The principal text of this type is La Alpujarra [The Alpujarra], in which Alarco´n recounts his 1873 excursion to the fabled mountain region south of Granada, where, in his words, ‘‘cada pen ˜ o´n, cada cueva, cada a´rbol secular, serı´a de juro un monumento de la dominacio´n sarracena’’ (1954, 1496) [every rock, every cave, every venerable tree, would rightfully be a monument to Saracen domination]. Alarco´n, though, also produced a book-length account of a foreign orientalist journey, Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de Africa, where he narrates his participation as both journalist and soldier in the Moroccan War of 1859–60.8 This rarely analyzed text turns out to provide a compelling case study of many key issues relating to Spanish orientalist travel writing as a whole.9 Not only does Alarco´n, whose deep preoccupation with his nation’s dual (European and African) cultural heritage is well known, meditate at considerable length on the various aforementioned geographical, political, and historical peculiarities of his nation’s relationship to North African culture, he also eagerly employs a large number of the principal

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metaphors and interpretative postures typically associated with the European orientalist project. As a literary author, he adopts a representational approach that relies heavily on classical and modern literary treatments of travel within the southern Mediterranean region, thereby establishing a clear linkage between his Diario and the tradition of European literary orientalism. At first glance, Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de Africa might seem a rather different sort of travel writing from the chronicles I have considered up to this point. It is, after all, a work of war reportage, in which the author’s perspective and movements were to a large degree circumscribed by his military responsibilities, and whose primary goal was ostensibly to keep Spanish citizens apprised of the army’s day-to-day progress. Nevertheless, a perusal of the text quickly reveals that its military dimension, though thematically relevant, does not give rise to a work that is fundamentally different from any other text discussed in these pages. Alarco´n, for one thing, was certainly not the only Spanish travel author not to have the luxury of setting his own travel itinerary,10 and in any case his restricted liberty of movement manifestly does not impinge on his ability to engage in flamboyantly orientalizing flights of fancy regarding his Moroccan experiences. Moreover, while Diario de un testigo does include detailed descriptions of Spain’s military victories and other aspects of battlefield life, even a cursory reading reveals the considerable extent to which Alarco´n’s observations—even in the text’s most war-related episodes—are driven by an avowedly touristic fascination with Morocco’s oriental mystique. Indeed, as he himself openly acknowledged on repeated occasions, his decision to volunteer for service in the Moroccan War had been motivated as least as much by his lifelong fascination with North Africa as it was by his patriotic enthusiasm for the Spanish colonialist cause: El deseo que me asalto´ entonces de venir a la guerra y seguir la suerte de mis compatriotas y el anhelo anterior, que ha llenado toda mi vida, de visitar la tierra de los moros, vense ya realizados afortunadamente. (241)11 [The desire that then came upon me to come to the war and follow the fate of my countrymen and that earlier yearning, which has filled my whole life, to visit the land of the Moors have by good fortune now both been fulfilled.]

Though there seems no reason to doubt the sincerity of Alarco´n’s claim that he takes Spain’s military fortunes seriously, throughout

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the text we find his prose wandering time and again from its presumed task of ‘‘objective’’ battle description toward ever-longer passages of travel narration, evincing a clear fascination with the region and its inhabitants. Far more than the simple ‘‘fotografı´a de la campan ˜ a’’ (1954, 833) [photograph of the campaign] that Alarco´n claims—at least in some passages—to have intended to write, his Diario is also quite unmistakably a literary orientalist’s ‘‘a´lbum de viajero’’ (198) [traveler’s album]. Originally published serially in El Museo Universal, the Diario was quickly released in book form after Alarco´n’s return from the war in 1860, with a significantly revised reedition appearing in 1880.12 The text is divided into two roughly equivalent segments, each consisting of a series of dated entries corresponding to the original journalistic installments. The first half covers the Spanish campaign from the time of Alarco´n’s arrival in Ceuta through the fall of Tetouan and focuses principally on descriptions of battlefield life, while the second describes his roughly six-week stay in the city of Tetouan after the cessation of hostilities, allowing Alarco´n to devote more detailed attention to plumbing the mysteries of North African culture. There are, therefore, several easily identifiable points of differentiation between the two portions of the chronicle. These will prove significant, though it is equally important to note that the line of demarcation is anything but absolute: just as the militaristic verve Alarco´n frequently displays when recounting Spanish victories in part I continues to make sporadic appearance throughout part II, the fascination with the ‘‘oriental exotic’’ that takes center stage during his exploration of Tetouan is already easily identifiable in the narration of virtually every military activity recounted in the text. A good example of this point may be drawn from the Diario’s third entry, entitled ‘‘Al saltar en tierra’’ [‘‘Upon leaping ashore’’], where Alarco´n sets out to record his batallion’s debarcation in Ceuta on December 12, 1859. As Mary Louise Pratt has observed, ‘‘Arrival scenes are a convention of almost every variety of travel writing and serve as particularly potent sites for framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its representation’’ (1992, 79–80). Alarco´n’s Diario proves to be no exception, clearly staking out the text’s enormous debt to previous models of both military and orientalist representation and leaving no doubt about Alarco´n’s intention— amply confirmed throughout the remainder of his Diario—to take full advantage of the wealth of vying metaphorical structures and

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cultural connotations evocative of both seduction and repulsion that the term Oriente would have conjured among readers of his day. The first eye-catching aspect of the three-paragraph entry is its epigraph. Instead of the standard location and date notation that precedes most other installments of the Diario, this section begins with a Latin quotation: ‘‘Teneo te, Africa’’ (38) [I possess you, Africa]. Though it appears that Alarco´n was not aware of the phrase’s exact provenance (incorrectly attributing it to Scipio Africanus rather than Julius Caesar),13 his reasons for using it are not difficult to discern. With three short words, easily understandable even by a non– classically trained Spanish reader, he is able to establish a clear linkage, further exploited throughout his narrative, between the Roman Empire’s military enterprises in North Africa and Spain’s current Moroccan War, while implying his own ability to ‘‘possess’’ (i.e., read, understand) the exotic wonders he is about to behold. A more quintessentially orientalist arrival gambit, in other words, would be hard to imagine. The epigraph also serves Alarco´n well as apt introduction to the two-pronged narrative style he has chosen for his African adventure, which he himself described as having been motivated by both a sense of militaristic patriotism and personal orientalist zeal. As will also prove typical of Alarco´n, once he moves beyond the epigraph to initiate the description of the arrival scene itself, it is the latter of these two impulses that immediately moves to the fore. Indeed, though presumably reporting on a successful military landing, Alarco´n’s arrival sequence essentially ignores the subject of the Moroccan War altogether. Despite its repeated allusions to diverse conquerors, authors, saints, and explorers of the past, ‘‘Al saltar en tierra’’ includes no reference whatever to any individual, whether Spanish or Moroccan, involved in the present military conflict. Even more notably, notwithstanding the fact that Alarco´n traveled to Africa in the company of some ten thousand other Spanish soldiers (33), he narrates the entire episode of arrival from the perspective of the first-person singular (e.g., ‘‘¡Estoy en Africa!’’; ‘‘Me encuentro fuera de Espan ˜ a’’; ‘‘Me he alejado demasiado de mis lares patrios’’; ‘‘al sentir bajo mis pies la tierra africana’’; ‘‘al asentar mi planta en esta parte del mundo’’ [38, 40) [I am in Africa!; I find myself outside Spain; I have moved too far from my native land; upon feeling African soil beneath my feet; upon setting foot on this part of the world]), creating the clear impression that he stepped foot off the boat entirely alone. In this, the text can be said to build upon

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the self-centered focus already established by the epigraph (‘‘Teneo te, Africa’’), a point that is then further underscored by the emphatic final possessive adjective of the episode’s closing sentence, in which Alarco´n reprises the Latin quotation—this time in rather free Spanish translation—‘‘¡Africa, ya eres mı´a!’’ (40) [Africa, now you are mine!]. This blatant elision of the episode’s military dimension carries over into Alarco´n’s characterization of the adventure on which he is about to embark. Again he makes no mention whatever of his soldierly duties, preferring instead to present his journey as a mission of poetic exploration: ‘‘Africa,’’ he declares exuberantly, ‘‘es el ma´s vasto campo que au´n ofrece la tierra a la fantası´a de los poetas’’ (39) [The world today offers no vaster field to the fantasy of poets than Africa]. In this spirit, he proceeds to construct an inaugural description based almost in its entirety on a litany of common orientalist cliche´s. As Kadiatu Kanneh has noted, within the orientalist tradition the imagined space of Africa had ‘‘its own assigned codes and meanings, its own metaphors and myths’’ (1997, 267), and in the preceding quotation we already see quite a few of these on display, including the association of African travel with poetic fantasy, the reference to vast open space (previously unwritten, unknown), and—in a posture already evident in the epigraph—the portrayal of the African continent as an undifferentiated whole. The epigraphic declaration ‘‘Teneo te, Africa’’ introduces another strategy Alarco´n will develop further throughout his text: the presentation of the orientalist journey as a stylized erotic encounter in which the European male subject takes possession of the passive, feminized object of his roving desires. This cliche´—which, of course, has long been one of the staple representational strategies by which European power relations with oriental lands and peoples have been conveyed (Chaudhuri and Strobel 1992, 3)—appears repeatedly in the inaugural episode, as when, again describing Africa, Alarco´n reminds us that ‘‘la mitologı´a, siempre reveladora, nos la representa en una mujer bizarra; de porte oriental, casi desnuda’’ (39) [mythology, always revealing, presents her to us as a splendid woman of oriental bearing, almost naked], adding a few sentences later that it is the continent’s status as one of the few remaining ‘‘regiones vı´rgenes . . . no profanad[as] au´n por el compa´s de la ciencia’’ (39) [virgin regions . . . not yet profaned by science’s compass] that proves most enticing to the orientalist poet. The episode’s aforementioned final phrase (‘‘Africa, ya eres mı´a’’) obviously functions

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to similar effect, with Alarco´n’s loose paraphrase of the original Latin permitting him to take advantage of the continent’s conveniently feminine-gendered name to strengthen his image as amorous seducer. Alarco´n’s suggestion that Africa remains somehow impenetrable to scientific exploration (a claim clearly linked with yet another common orientalist image: that of the ‘‘dark continent’’) is again coherent with his evident desire to create a privileged and oppositional role for his own poetic sensibility. Indeed, the entire first paragraph of ‘‘Al saltar en tierra’’ consists largely of a lengthy enumeration of the myriad respects in which Europe has proved itself incapable of reducing the exotic plenitude of African reality to the rather dreary textbook schemas of scientific empiricism. Geography, Alarco´n notes, ‘‘au´n no puede determinar sus regiones, sus montan ˜ as, sus rı´os ni sus ciudades’’ (38) [cannot yet determine her regions, her mountains, her rivers nor her cities]; linguistics, likewise, ‘‘desconoce en ella ma´s dialectos que idiomas conoce en el resto del mundo’’ (38) [is unaware of more of her dialects than all of world’s known languages combined], while history ‘‘no registra los dı´as ni los siglos vividos por aquella parte de la humanidad’’ (38) [does not register the days or centuries lived by that part of humanity]. The list goes on to cite a host of similar failings in various other branches of the physical and social sciences—including, interestingly enough, ‘‘el arte militar’’ [military art] which, we are told, ‘‘no sabe a que´ atenerse’’ [does not know how to proceed] in the context of African warfare (1974, 39). Alarco´n concludes his enumeration by declaring that para las ciencias todas . . . desde las ma´s abstractas a las ma´s precisas: para todas y para siempre, . . . el Africa guarda en su corazo´n los caracteres del misterio; la duda y la desesperacio´n, la eternidad y lo infinito. (39) [for all of the sciences . . . from the most abstract to the most precise: for all and for always, . . . Africa keeps in her heart the qualities of mystery; doubt and desperation, eternity and infinity.]

As such, Alarco´n communicates clearly that within his schema the successful gesture of orientalist possession he presents so matter-offactly in the section’s epigraph could not possibly have been achieved by those who would approach Africa through any of the

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aforementioned means. While holding fast to the standard European notion of the Orient as a ‘‘legible space whose cultural inscriptions, however faint or obscure, could be deciphered by the educated reader’’ (Gregory 1999, 115), Alarco´n leaves no doubt that the author of this deciphering, when it does occur, will not be a scientist but a poet. That poet is, of course, to be Alarco´n himself. Throughout Diario de un testigo, Alarco´n returns with some regularity to the principal textual strategies used in the description of his arrival scene. Literary analogies and orientalist cliche´s abound, as does the kind of binary oppositional rhetoric (scientist vs. poet, European vs. African, etc.) employed in the creation of his narrative persona. With each succeeding installment of the chronicle, however, the inherent instability of many of these narrative ploys grows increasingly apparent. For example, though Alarco´n’s vaunted opposition between poetry and science was clearly intended to strengthen his authority as a self-declared ‘‘poetic’’ traveler, he cannot hide from his readers that both of the specific reasons for his presence in Africa fall squarely within the realm of ‘‘scientific’’ inquiry he explicitly claims to reject: associated with ‘‘el arte militar’’ by virtue of his enlistment in the Spanish army, he also takes on the mantle of social scientist (part geographer, part historian, part anthropologist) by providing in his Diario what he would proudly describe as ‘‘la u´nica historia circunstanciada y completa de la Guerra de Africa’’ (1954, 833) [the only complete and detailed history of the African War], including faithful verbal ‘‘photographs’’ of the land and peoples he encountered in the course of his journey. Alarco´n’s narrative approach brings to mind Crawshaw and Urry’s article, ‘‘Tourism and the Photographic Eye,’’ in which they observe that different gazes are authorised by different discourses. Examples include the discourse of education which conditioned the experience of the European Grand Tour, that of health which defines a type of tourism whose aim is to restore the individual to a state of physical well-being, and the discourse of play which surrounds what can be called ‘‘liminal’’ tourism. (1997, 176, emphasis in original)

Travel experiences, in other words, constitute themselves an interaction with the discourses by which they (or other experiences analogous to them) have previously been understood or defined. Travelers’ responses to these authority discourses are, in turn, an in-

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tegral element of what Urry a few years earlier identified as the ‘‘tourist gaze’’ in his important book of the same name. This notion is extremely useful, though as Urry himself notes its application is complex: the ‘‘tourist gaze,’’ as well as the discursive practices that condition and accompany it, vary ‘‘by society, by social group and by historical period’’ (1990, 1) and, I would add, with respect to travel writing, can also be subject to significant deliberate manipulation by individual authors. There is consequently likely no work of travel narration in which the path from authorizing discourse to textual representation is entirely transparent. Even so, Alarco´n’s case stands out. In Diario de un testigo, conforming to Crawshaw and Urry’s above characterization, we find an author who constantly seeks to corroborate his observations by grounding both his narrative and his own traveler persona in ‘‘authoritative discourse.’’ The problem is that there is not one such discourse but many, and these quite clearly pull him in different directions. Unable or unwilling to relinquish any of his divergent identities, Alarco´n faces the decidedly uncomfortable task of seeking to harmonize a series of ‘‘authoritative’’ perspectives that he himself portrays as being mutually contradictory. Not surprisingly, his efforts to derive some kind of satisfying equilibrium out of this curious admixture of vying narrative impulses meet with uneven success. Throughout, his sporadic efforts to portray his text nothing more than ‘‘objective history’’ conflict with his overriding poetic aspirations, while his attempts to create for himself a convincing military identity clash repeatedly with his evident orientalizing enthusiasms. Further complicating his enterprise, Alarco´n, an Andalusian writer deeply respectful of his nation’s strong North African heritage, cannot hide the mixed emotions with which he approaches the task of chronicling his participation in a colonial war in a land whose culture had given rise to the splendors of AlAndalus, against soldiers who might well be direct descendants of Spain’s Moorish inhabitants. It is for these reasons that Diario de un testigo occupies such an important niche in the study of nineteenthcentury Spanish orientalist travel writing. Though the specific confluence of personal and national identity politics that informs Alarco´n’s text may be unique, the narrative tensions found in his chronicle are not. To the contrary, the intersection of conflicting impulses played out with such intensity in Alarco´n’s description of his North African adventure conveys with particular clarity the pro-

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foundly vexed portrayal of the Mediterranean Orient characteristic of Spanish orientalist travel writing as a whole.

 Yo no se´ ya quie´n soy, ¡oh Mahometano! . . . ¡Yo vi la luz donde morir tu´ quieres; yo son ˜ e´ con tu raza en suelo hispano, y hoy, que piso a mi vez suelo africano, pienso que soy . . . el mismo que tu´ eres! —Alarco´n, ‘‘A Chorby, poeta marroquı´’’ [I no longer know who I am, Oh Mohammedan! . . . I saw light of day where you wish to die; I dreamed of your race on Hispanic soil, and today when I tread on African soil in my turn, I believe that I am. . . . the same as you!]

A representative illustration of the difficulties posed by Alarco´n’s effort to reconcile the vectors of his narrative identity can be found, not surprisingly, in his efforts to convey the nature of his participation in the war. On one hand, he clearly goes to some lengths, especially in the early installments of his chronicle, to characterize his military role as that of a simple ‘‘soldado raso del Batallo´n Cazadores de Ciudad-Rodrigo’’ (1954, 833) [private in the Ciudad Rodrigo Light-Infantry Battalion]. In this spirit, eager to convey an image of his own unquestioning patriotism and devotion to the war effort, he pads his account with frequent nationalistic outbursts regarding such topics as Spain’s imperialist destiny and the inherent valor of Spanish men. Likewise, in conformity with his desire to convey his own humble submission to the system of military hierarchy, he describes his commanding officers and other Spanish military officials with unswerving respect while stressing the close relationship he shares with other raw recruits. Seizing upon O’Donnell’s reported statement that ‘‘la campan ˜ a que hemos emprendido es la ma´s ruda y penosa que ha hecho eje´rcito alguno’’ (83) [this campaign is the harshest and most arduous that any army has ever undertaken], he underscores the intimacy of his bond with his comrades in arms through myriad accounts of shared suffering and privations, ranging from the unavoidable discomforts of sleeping in a tent, to the poor quality of military food, the harshness of the North African climate, and, of course, the rigors of battle.

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At the same time, however, it becomes clear relatively early in Alarco´n’s narration that the military identity he has crafted for himself is an uncomfortable fit at best. Despite his repeated textual assertions of unquestioning obedience, much of Diario de un testigo actually works to undermine the various authorized discourses (military, political, cultural) underpinning the war effort. As for the pretence of intrarecruit egalitarianism so important to his selfdefinition as simple private (‘‘soldado raso’’), it too turns out to be more rhetorical than real. Despite his many complaints about the ‘‘durı´sima vida de campan ˜ a’’ (230) [extremely hard life on the battlefield], for example, he himself admits—though ‘‘no sin cierto rubor’’ (72) [not without some embarassment]—that thanks to his literary connections his battlefield lifestyle actually included a variety of luxuries denied to other recruits. Upon finding himself uncomfortable in a standard-issue tent, he successfully requisitions a larger model, which, as he notes with obvious satisfaction, ‘‘ostenta todo el refinado lujo de una tienda de oficiales’’ (72) [boasts all the refined luxury of an officers’ tent]. Disliking Army rations, similarly, he uses his connections with high-ranking officials and the press corps to assure himself a steady supply of wine and other ‘‘vı´veres’’ [provisions] with which he hosts ‘‘esple´ndidos festines’’ [splendid banquets] for his friends (230). In the work’s second edition, he becomes even more frank about these privileges, admitting among other things that his deluxe tent was in reality even more commodious than those reserved for the army’s highest-ranking officials (1954, 856) and that his meals, in addition to being far more palatable than those of his comrades in arms, were prepared for him by a servant (1954, 857). Galdo´s, who was never one to miss such a clear-cut case of situational irony, would later play up these (and many other) inconsistencies in Alarco´n’s soldier persona to great effect in his own rendering of the Moroccan campaign, Aita Tettauen (the title of which is a maghrebi Arabic phrase roughly translating as The Song [or Cry] of Tetouan). Here, for example, is an extract from that novel’s description of Juanito Santiuste’s battlefield visit to his friend: Aunque era de soldados la tienda de Perico Alarco´n ofrecı´a dentro de sus paredes de lona refinamientos epicu´reos. . . . Del ma´stil que sustentaba todo el artificio de la tienda pendı´an objetos de puro lujo en campan ˜ a. . . . En una cesta, carin ˜ osamente colocada entre dos camas, se guardaban botellas de jerez y algunas de champagne, obsequio del gene-

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ral del Tercer Cuerpo. . . . Alarco´n y su amigo, decididos a regalarse con una cena opı´para, se sentaron junto a la mesa: comieron carne de lata, huevos duros, almendras, pasas y polvorones de Ceuta . . . y se fueron al amor de la hoguera, donde asaron batatas y se regalaron con cafe´ y charla sabrosa, hasta que el suen ˜ o les llevo´ a la querencia de sus camastros. (1942, 3:258–59) [Although Perico Alarco´n lived in a soldiers’ tent, within its canvas walls he offered up epicurean refinements. . . . From the tent pole that supported the entire structure there hung objects that were pure luxury in battle. . . . In a basket, lovingly placed between the two beds, were kept bottles of sherry and a few of champagne, a gift from the general of the Third Corps. . . . Alarco´n and his friend, intent on treating themselves to a lavish feast, sat together at the table; they ate canned meat, hardboiled eggs, almonds, raisins, and little pastries from Ceuta . . . and then on to the warmth of the fire where they roasted sweet potatoes and treated themselves to coffee and tasty chat, until drowsiness led them to yearn for their cots.]

For readers of Aita Tettauen and Diario de un testigo alike, the kind of special treatment that Alarco´n not only received but actually exalts in his text clearly gives the lie to any effort convincingly to cast himself as nothing more than a simple ‘‘soldado raso.’’ In the Diario’s second edition, in fact, Alarco´n himself all but acknowledges the emptiness of his infantryman fac¸ade, noting that if it were not for the many special considerations he received he would have quite simply had to leave the army: ‘‘los trabajos y privaciones del simple soldado,’’ he admits, ‘‘son superiores a mi viciada naturaleza’’ (1954, 856) [the work and privations of the simple soldier are beyond my corrupt nature]. One important element of Alarco´n’s evident disconformity with his military persona is the growing awareness that his army duties seriously interfere with the image of poetic explorer in search of ‘‘pure’’ oriental experience he had outlined with such confident strokes in his triumphal arrival scene. The reasons for his frustration are not difficult to discover: whereas most of the literary orientalists upon whom Alarco´n fairly transparently models his poet-traveler persona (e.g., Chateaubriand, Fromentin)14 were able—within the constraints imposed by transportation routes and the like—to indulge their touristic curiosities with a relatively high degree of personal freedom, Alarco´n is forced to spend a considerable portion of his journey surrounded almost exclusively by Spaniards, dressed in

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a military uniform that clearly identifies him as an enemy of the very nation whose culture he wishes to explore. This problem is particularly apparent in the first half of the book, in which Alarco´n finds his desire to immerse himself in Moroccan daily life constantly thwarted by his partisan role in the ongoing hostilities. Throughout this portion of the text, his desire for contact with ‘‘real’’ Moroccans is restricted largely to the silent scrutiny of dead enemy soldiers in the aftermath of military engagements and a few somewhat wary conversations with prisoners of war. His much-prized forays into the spaces of Moroccan life are compromised as well. While awaiting deployment in Ceuta, he was able to tour two Moorish structures: a vacant morabito (Islamic hermitage) whose resident holy man (‘‘santo´n’’) was reportedly recently killed by Spanish troops unaware of his religious vocation (48), and a semiruined serallo (Moorish palace) now flying the Spanish flag and serving as battlefield headquarters for General Zabala and his staff (49). Though he finds both buildings interesting, clearly neither can claim to provide the intimate experience of unmediated orientalismo for which he yearns. A similar scene occurs later in the campaign, when Alarco´n’s comrades come across a small nomadic settlement (‘‘aduar’’) near the entrance to Cabo Negro. Though obviously enthused by this discovery (‘‘este asilo de una tribu de pastores a´rabes ofrece ma´s intere´s, ma´s belleza, ma´s poesı´a que todas las capitales de Europa’’ [197; this refuge of a tribe of Arab shepherds offers greater interest, beauty, and poetry than all the capitals of Europe]), Alarco´n must nevertheless once again defer his desire for unimpeded contact with Moroccan ‘‘reality’’: the aduar too is abandoned, its residents, upon spotting Spanish uniforms, having quite prudently decided to flee to the hills in fear for their lives. It is not until part II after the Spanish victory over the city of Tetouan that Alarco´n at last sees the possibility to explore an ‘‘authentic’’ oriental space in the tradition of the peacetime orientalist wanderings of his literary models. When he does, his already limited willingness to adopt as his own the actions and attitudes of a simple ‘‘soldado raso’’ weakens still further. Essentially as soon as the Spanish army came within sight of Tetouan, the respect Alarco´n professes for his commanding officers does not prevent him from unceremoniously disobeying orders whenever he finds himself in a situation in which military discipline impinges upon what he calls his ‘‘afa´n de arabizar’’ (212) [eagerness to arabize]. One such instance occurs shortly after the battle for control of the city, when he learns that a

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Spanish delegation has been assigned to deliver a demand for surrender to the Tetouani governor. Overwhelmed by the desire to enter a space of ‘‘genuino orientalismo’’ (326) [genuine orientalism], he slips out of camp in order to ‘‘seguir extraoficialmente a nuestros mensajeros’’ (324) [unofficially follow our messengers] despite the fact that General O’Donnell had specifically ordered all Spanish troops to remain at their posts pending a formal cessation of hostilities.15 When the truce is signed Alarco´n is so overwhelmed with delight that he unilaterally decides to leave his batallion’s encampment outside the city, instead spending the six-week occupation living in a comfortable Tetouani household and sampling the local cuisine at restaurants and elegant soire´es. Here again his attitudes starkly contrast with those of his fellow Spanish recruits, most of whom— according to Alarco´n himself—regard both the city and its inhabitants with undisguised distaste (362). The process of dissociating himself from his erstwhile military persona reaches new heights in this part of the text as Alarco´n gives essentially free reign to his now-dominant self-image as orientalist poet. A good example can be found in the entry describing his visit to the Erzini Palace, where he disobeys a direct order from General Rı´os to respect ‘‘el secreto de la habitaciones cerradas, y sobre todo de las ocupadas por mujeres’’ (410) [the secrecy of closed chambers and especially those occupied by women] and sneaks into an odalisque’s occupied bed chamber in order to experience for himself—if only visually—the mysteries of Arab intimate life. In reflecting on this act of military insubordination Alarco´n shrugs off any potential criticism by citing his heightened poetic sensibilities: La bondad de mis intenciones me impulsaba al desacato. La curiosidad poe´tica me prensaba el corazo´n. . . . ¿Que´ me importaba la orden? El general no sabra´ nunca que la he infringido. . . . ¡Y la falta es tan leve! . . . ¡que esta´ justificada en un escritor! (410, first and last ellipses in original) [The goodness of my intentions pushed me to disobedience. Poetic curiosity pressed on my heart. . . . What did I care about the order? The general will never know I disobeyed it. . . . And this fault is so slight!. . . . and so justified in a writer!]

In the second edition of his Diario he justifies his unauthorized nighttime foray into Tetouan behind the Spanish negotiating team

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in much the same way, dismissing his dereliction of duty with one simple phrase: ‘‘lo primero de todo es el Arte’’ (1954, 985) [first and foremost is Art]. Not surprisingly the same general evolution seen in Alarco´n’s increasingly ambivalent portrayal of his role in the war carries over to his presentation of Morocco and its inhabitants. While Diario de un testigo’s treatment of this issue is conflicted from the outset, the more deeply Alarco´n penetrates into the oriental space of his narrative the more he will curtail his always rather halfhearted efforts to present North Africa and its inhabitants as an enemy culture, in accordance with what he perceives to be proper military ideology. The city of Tetouan again plays a crucial role in this process: after Alarco´n’s first emotional sighting of the city his entries feature markedly fewer assertions of cultural antagonism than those drafted earlier in the campaign, a tendency that accelerates still further during the extended sojourn within the city walls that occupies most of part II. Illustration of this perspectival transition may be drawn from the numerous passages throughout Diario de un testigo in which Alarco´n, as do most other Spanish orientalist travelers, seeks to communicate his experiences through analogy with his own nation’s Moorish heritage. Inasmuch as a considerable portion of the text’s first half focuses on the day-to-day conduct of a military confrontation between Spaniards and Moors, one is scarcely surprised to discover that initially such references most often draw upon events and beliefs associated with the wars of the Reconquest. Alarco´n’s first battlefield report, for example, receives its title from the popular generic designation for Reconquest tales, ‘‘Moros y cristianos’’ (62) [Moors and Christians]. In a later installment, likewise, he describes the injured General Zabala’s leadership at the battle of Castillejos through reference to El Cid: ‘‘¡Que´ glorioso infortunio! Esto recuerda en cierto modo la batalla ganada a los moros por el cada´ver del Cid montado sobre el hue´rfano Babieca’’ (141) [What a glorious misfortune! This is rather reminiscent of the battle against the Moors won by the cadaver of El Cid mounted on the orphaned Babieca]. The utility of such allusions—and there are many of them—is obvious: in addition to facilitating the communicability of Alarco´n’s foreign experiences by grounding his descriptions of North African lands in terms and images well known to all Spanish readers, evocation of the Reconquest also fulfills a clear patriotic purpose by comparing the current military exercise with the expansionist victories over Al-Andalus that served as prelude to Spain’s Golden Age of empire.

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In general, these passages serve to further Alarco´n’s soldierly goal of highlighting the religious and cultural incompatibility of the two warring parties. In this spirit his portrayals of both Spanish and Moroccan soldiers often play upon a variety of timeworn cultural stereotypes. The Spanish forces, for example, though comprising regiments from many regions of the peninsula, are repeatedly identified as ‘‘Castilian lions’’ (e.g., 134, 275) in probable reference to Castile’s dominant role during the Reconquest. Brave, proud, and noble, they are cast as Christian crusaders stalwartly battling to save their nation, their religion, indeed the whole of Western civilization from pagan savagery: Los barcos de todos los pueblos de Europa, al pasar esta noche por el Estrecho de Gibraltar, . . . enviara´n un saludo de entusiasmo y simpatı´a a los nobles soldados del Evangelio, a los mantenedores de la civilizacio´n, a los heroicos hijos de la inmortal Iberia. (94) [Ships from all the peoples of Europe, on passing tonight through the Straits of Gibraltar, . . . will send their greeting of enthusiasm and friendship to the noble soldiers of the Gospel, to those who safeguard civilization, to the heroic sons of immortal Iberia.]

Moroccans too are frequently defined by their religion though the comparisons are often decidedly less uplifting. As non-Christians they are diabolical (e.g., ‘‘demonios que saltan sobre las llamas del infierno’’ [139; demons who jump over the flames of Hell], ‘‘demonios huyendo delante de la cruz’’ [440; demons fleeing before the cross]). As non-Europeans they are barbarous and irrational (e.g., ‘‘fana´tica crueldad’’ [30; fanatic cruelty], ‘‘inhumanos marroquı´es’’ [131; inhuman Moroccans], ‘‘miles y miles de bestias feroces’’ [133; thousands and thousands of ferocious beasts]). In short, as Alarco´n fulminates in one particularly harsh passage, they are ‘‘un pueblo vil y miserable que es la vergu¨enza de la humanidad y el esca´ndalo de las naciones’’ (94) [a vile and miserable people which is the shame of humanity and the scandal of nations]. Adopting a far more overtly literary tone than that found in either Mesonero or Galdo´s, Alarco´n further reinforces the message of such passages with abundant allusions to and even direct quotations from a variety of well-known literary accounts of epic warfare pitting Christian armies against fierce non-Christian foes, including Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Liberated, 202, 264), Ercilla’s La Araucana (The Araucana, 274), Herrera’s ‘‘Por la pe´rdida del Rey Don

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Sebastia´n’’ (‘‘To the Loss of King Sebastian,’’ 348), Tassara’s ‘‘A la guerra de Oriente’’ (‘‘To the Oriental War,’’ 304), Ferna´ndez y Gonza´lez’s La batalla de Lepanto (The Battle of Lepanto, 110), El Romancero del Cid (Balladbook of the Cid, 242, 403), Camo˜es’s Os Lusı´adas (The Lusiads, 185) and—added to the second edition—Francisco Lo´pez de Go´mara’s Conquista de Me´xico (Conquest of Mexico, 1954, 913).16 This veritable avalanche of epic references was again duly noted (and frequently parodied) by Galdo´s in Aita Tettauen: ‘‘Pondra´s en endechas de prosa las carnicerı´as de ayer y hoy,’’ Santiuste tells Alarco´n one evening, ‘‘Tu´ eres el u´nico para esto, Perico. Verdad que encuentras el lenguaje muy acomodado a la expresio´n e´pica del valor castellano, y al impı´o desprecio con que se mira a los pobres moros’’ (1942, 3:262) [You will turn yesterday and today’s slaughter into prose lamentations. There is no one for this like you, Perico. You truly find language very well equipped for the epic expression of Castilian bravery and for looking at the poor Moors with impious disdain]. If the preceding examples of rhetorical chest pounding scarcely seem to correspond to the kind of objective and detailed account (‘‘historia circunstanciada’’) that Alarco´n claims to provide, their presence in Diario de un testigo is nevertheless unsurprising given the ambiance of national and religious enmity provoked by the ongoing state of hostilities. One of the more striking aspects of the Moroccan War, in fact, was its proponents’ unequivocal success in transforming a minor skirmish in Ceuta, a city that according to Tun ˜ o´n de Lara had previously been thought of primarily ‘‘as a residence of condemned prisoners,’’ into the basis of a veritable ‘‘oleada de frenesı´ nacionalista’’ [wave of nationalist frenzy] in support of Spanish colonial expansionism (1961, 182 and 127). And indeed essentially all contemporary literary chroniclers of the Moroccan conflict make at least as much use of the rhetoric of cultural hostility and military triumphalism in their texts as does Alarco´n. In Recuerdos de la campan˜a de Africa [Memories of the African Campaign], for example, Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce describes Morocco as a ‘‘tierra salvaje y maldita’’ (1860, 26) [savage and cursed land] inhabited by ‘‘ba´rbaros, mal cubiertos con andrajosos y sucios jaiques, saltando su´bitamente del fondo de los barrancos, de entre las pen ˜ as, de los montes inmediatos, como hienas sedientas de sangre’’ (1860, 45) [barbarians ill covered with their ragged and dirty jaiques, leaping suddenly from the bottom of ravines, from among the rocks, from nearby hills, like hyenas thirsty for blood]. The Romancero de la Guerra de Africa [Balladbook of the Afri-

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can War], also published in 1860 with collaboration by many noted midcentury poets, often adopts an even more strident tone as Antonio Alcala´ Galiano’s contribution suggests: ‘‘De salvajes es su aspecto; / Torpe su presencia y sucia: / Todo en ellos es extran ˜ o, / Y al par que espanta, repugna’’ (Roca de Togores 1860, 106) [Their look is of savages / Their presence clumsy and dirty / Everything about them is strange / And causes both fear and disgust]. In this regard, then, what is actually most interesting about Alarco´n’s reliance on images drawn from Spain’s Moorish past is not so much that he uses the Spanish Reconquest as a source of negative stereotypes regarding Moroccan culture, but rather that he does so while manipulating a second set of broad-brush cultural identifiers whereby the nearly eight-hundred-year history of Al-Andalus is unambiguously recast not as an age of religious warfare but rather as one of cultural engenderment. This perspective, though appearing with increasing insistence in the installments produced in or near the city of Tetouan, is already identifiable in many of the text’s combat reports, in which vitriolic spasms of Africa bashing such as those cited coexist with numerous passages in which Alarco´n acknowledges, often rather apologetically, that he finds himself unmistakably drawn to his battlefield foes.17 In one telling episode, he wanders away from camp to inspect the bodies of Moorish soldiers killed in a recent skirmish. His initial pose is characteristically that of the rabid patriot: Si he de decir la verdad, el primer sentimiento que me inspiro´ fue cierto disgusto. . . . Y es que aquellos adversarios me parecieron indignos de medir sus armas con las nuestras, es que los encontre´ demasiado viles y miserables para ocupar una pa´gina de nuestra historia. (100–101) [To tell the truth, at first it inspired a certain feeling of disgust. . . . It was that those adversaries seemed to me unworthy of crossing swords with ours; they were too vile and miserable to take up a page in our history.]

Soon, however, his artistic sensibilities begin to intervene, provoking an abrupt reversal of attitude: Luego—no se´ por que´ evolucio´n de mis ideas—, experimente´ una profunda compasio´n hacia aquellos desgraciados y, por u´ltimo, sobreponie´ndose en mı´ toda la devocio´n artı´stica, me sentı´ poseı´do de admiracio´n por ellos. (101)

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[Then—I don’t know because of what evolution of my ideas—I felt a deep compassion for those unfortunate ones, and in the end, with all of my artistic devotion coming to the fore, I felt possessed with admiration for them.]

Such passages, it is worth adding, are not limited to encounters with dead (i.e., nonthreatening) adversaries. In general, whenever his poetic vein is at the fore, the peoples whom Alarco´n’s militaristic impulses lead him to describe as repulsive subhumans whose death is to be sought and celebrated are recast as innocent victims of circumstance deserving of compassion rather than hatred (e.g., ‘‘compadezcamos una vez ma´s a nuestros inocentes adversarios’’ [204; let us commiserate once more with our innocent adversaries], ‘‘¡cua´n dolorosa iba a ser la perplejidad de los pobres moros! [215; how great must have been the perplexity of the poor Moors!], ‘‘una gente que admiro y compadezco’’ [414; a people I admire and feel compassion for], ‘‘¡Pobres desgraciados, tan heroicos como inocentes!’’ [499; Poor unfortunate ones, as heroic as they are innocent!]). Throughout such episodes, Alarco´n frequently underscores the stark contrast between his own sensibilities and those of his military comrades: (‘‘ ‘¡Cobardes!’ ‘¡Cobardes!’, gritan en este momento nuestras tropas viendo huir a los marroquı´es. ‘Inocentes!’, debieran decir’’ [199; ‘‘Cowards!,’’ ‘‘Cowards!,’’ our troops are now shouting on seeing the fleeing Moroccans. ‘‘Innocents!,’’ is what they should say]).18 In part II, though occasional bouts of ugly racial stereotyping and religious intolerance continue to erupt,19 Alarco´n’s increasingly poetic apprehension of Morocco leads him largely to abandon the oppositional rhetoric of military confrontation in favor of enthusiastic panegyrics of cross-cultural comradery. In this spirit, he eagerly takes full advantage of the weight of authority commonly ascribed to firsthand observation in order to accumulate reference to myriad aspects of Tetouani daily life that might provide ‘‘objective’’ proof of the profund cultural ties linking Morocco and Spain. Examples range from descriptions of the inhabitants’ clothing (‘‘una tu´nica . . . como los dormanes andaluces’’ [376; a tunic . . . resembling the dorma´n jacket of Andalusia], ‘‘una toca . . . por el estilo de las que usaban nuestras damas del siglo XV’’ [378; a headdress . . . in the style worn by our sixteenth-century ladies]), to their preferences in music (‘‘un estribillo mono´tono que se parecı´a a nuestra ‘can ˜ a’ ’’ [378; a monotonous refrain that sounded like our ‘‘can a’’ (a style of ˜

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Andalusian folk song)], ‘‘una salmodia lenta . . . como las notas ‘tenidas’ de nuestras canciones andaluzas’’ [416; a slow psalmody . . . like the sustained notes of our Andalusian songs]), questions of interior decor (‘‘sus casas esta´n amuebladas a la espan ˜ ola’’ [373; their homes are furnished in Spanish style], ‘‘me sente´ en una silla cuyo respaldo estaba adornado con una la´mina del Quijote’’ [375; I sat in a chair with a print from Don Quijote stamped on its backrest]), and, in particular, the local architecture (‘‘hallaba maravilloso parecido entre aquellos lugares y los callejones de Gracia por donde se entra en Granada’’ [343; I found a marvelous resembance between those places and the narrow streets known as the ‘‘callejones de Gracia’’ at the entrance to Granada], ‘‘la mezquita mayor es elegante a sumo grado y recuerda la Giralda de Sevilla’’ [349; the main mosque is extremely elegant and recalls the Giralda in Seville], ‘‘las casas de Tetua´n recuerdan en su mayor parte las de Andalucı´a’’ [366; most of the houses in Tetouan recall those of Andalusia], ‘‘visitar hoy a Tetua´n equivale a ver a Co´rdoba en el siglo XIII’’ [367; visiting Tetouan today is the same as seeing Cordoba in the thirteenth century]). The significance of such passages can be suggested by a comparison of Alarco´n’s lyrical embrace of contemporary Tetouani culture with the decidedly more ambivalent response of his fellow poet and war correspondent Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce, who grumpily pronounced regarding his visits to Tetouan and other Moroccan cities that ‘‘todos los encantos de la ciudades morunas pueden encerrarse en una caja de fo´sforos’’ (1860, 129) [all the charm of Moorish cities could fit inside a matchbox].20 In assessing these and other passages of Alarco´n’s Spanish-Moroccan comparison, it is always well to remember that, as suggested at the beginning of this chapter, writing about ‘‘the Orient’’ was always in some way also writing about its presumed cultural opposite, Europe. This was very much the case in Spain, where the question of European identity was such a hot-button issue, and indeed the Moroccan campaign itself, coming on the heels of France’s colonial expansion into Algeria, was broadly recognized even at the time as having far more to do with Spanish desire to recuperate faded prestige among its European neighbors than with any significant security threat in Ceuta. In the realm of orientalist travel writing, the Europeanist veneer of many accounts is likewise unmistakable, including authors’ wholesale adoption of the principal metaphors and representational stratagems of European orientalist literature and frequent outright declarations of their own European identity such as

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those cited earlier in this chapter. These postures, however, are seldom without some ambivalence. In Alarco´n’s case, in which ambivalence is apparent on virtually every page, the gaze he casts toward Europe is perhaps never more troubled than in his musings on Spain’s continued debt to its Moorish past. The evident joy—indeed, almost palpable relief—with which he plunges himself into the task of enumerating the myriad similarities uniting Morocco and Spain may perhaps appear unusual in a work of war reportage, but it is entirely consistent with his profoundly held belief, expressed in numerous texts published over the course of his literary career, that modern-day Spaniards, both by temperament and by genetic inheritance, possess a far higher degree of cultural kinship with North Africa than with Europe. Interestingly, one of his most detailed elaborations of this view appears in an article published just months before the outbreak of the Moroccan War. In ‘‘Espan ˜ a y los franceses’’ [‘‘Spain and the French’’], which appeared in El Museo Universal [The Universal Museum] in June 1859, Alarco´n—quite obviously already seized by the intense gallophobia so evident in the account of his 1860 visit to Paris—seeks to transform the implicit criticism of the phrase ‘‘Africa begins in the Pyrenees’’ (popularly attributed to the French author Alexandre Dumas) into a badge of pride. Declaring firmly that ‘‘entre ser un remedo de los franceses, o unos moros como Dios nos haya criado, preferimos esto u´ltimo’’ (1984, 150) [between being an imitation of the French or Moors as God created us, we prefer the latter], he exhorts his fellow Spaniards: Conforme´monos todos con nuestro africanismo; renunciemos a pasar por otra cosa; tengamos el orgullo y la conciencia de nuestra entidad genuina. (1984, 150) [Let us all accept our Africanism; let us renounce passing for something else; let us have pride and awareness of our genuine being.]

Detailed exposition of this cultural vision also appears in La Alpujarra (a work that Alarco´n explicitly sought to portray as a sort of sequel to his Diario de un testigo [1954, 1497]), in which the exploration of the final Moorish stronghold in Iberia—‘‘el alma y la vida de mi paı´s natal’’ (1954, 1495) [the soul and life of my native land]—is used as the basis for a detailed analysis of the jointly Christian and Moorish components of his nation’s cultural consciousness. While

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this dimension harks back to Navas Ruı´z’s observation regarding the linkage between Spanish orientalism and patriotism, it also bespeaks a variety of other preoccupations, including Alarco´n’s by this time driving concern with one of the central ideological constructs of so much of Spain’s nineteenth-century travel corpus: that is, the specter (welcomed by some, feared by others) of modernization. In Diario de un testigo, Alarco´n’s growing tendency during the Tetouani portion of his chronicle to interpret his travel experiences in accordance with the exigencies of his Africanist cultural vision leads him increasingly to reevaluate and at times blatantly refute some of his own initial ideological positions. Such is the case, for example, with the evolution of his attitudes toward the issue of Moroccan sovereignty. In harmony with the flag-waving tone of many of the Diario’s early installments, Alarco´n claims to begin his journey with a strong belief that expansion into Africa holds the key to restoring Spain’s former status as European imperial power and does not hesitate to identify all terrain crossed by Spanish troops en route to Tetouan as ‘‘ya territorio espan ˜ ol, suelo cristiano, patrimonio de Jesucristo’’ (96) [now Spanish territory, Christian soil, patrimony of Jesus Christ]. Later, however, Alarco´n—though without ever recanting his support of the Spanish military—eventually becomes convinced of the inevitable futility of such imperial pretensions and not only finds himself openly commiserating with Moroccans’ resentment of Spain’s military occupation of their territory (387), but twice even goes as far as to express the decidedly inflammatory opinion that the Moors’ armed resistance against Spain represents a modern moral equivalent of his own nation’s struggle, some decades earlier, to turn back the Napoleonic invasion (332, 475). In a similar spirit Alarco´n begins to invert some of the presumptions inherent in his earlier use of ‘‘civilization versus barbarism’’ sterereotypes. Such is the case, for example, in the following passage, where he explicitly refutes the image of Moroccans as irrational, anti-Christian savages that he himself had freely exploited elsewhere in his narrative: ‘‘Salvajes,’’ dije, y a la verdad que yo no concibo un grado de mayor civilizacio´n que el que revelan los moros. . . . La raza mora esta´ en plena posesio´n de su espı´ritu inmortal, vive ma´s que ninguna otra de sentimiento y de pensamiento, y ejerce sus facultades racionales con tanta sabidurı´a como So´crates y Cato´n o como los ma´rtires del cristianismo. (408)

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[‘‘Savages,’’ I said, and in truth I cannot conceive of a higher degree of civilization than that of the Moors. . . . The Moorish race is in full possession of its immortal spirit; it lives more than any other by feeling and thought, and it makes use of its rational faculties with as much wisdom as Socrates and Cato or as the martyrs of Christianity.]

Contemporary Spanish culture, meanwhile, becomes a more frequent target of criticism, as Alarco´n ponders what he considers its misguided tendency to ally itself with the morally bankrupt forces of Europe’s ‘‘decrepit civilization’’ (234). To gauge the evolution of Alarco´n’s thinking in this respect, it is useful to compare such remarks with one of his first efforts to characterize the relationship between the cultures of Europe and North Africa, penned shortly after his disembarcation in Ceuta: Y entonces ma´s que nunca me causo´ asombro y extran ˜ eza que a tan poca distancia de Europa, rodeado por sus buques, enclavado entre sus colinas, en contacto con las deslumbradoras verdades de nuestra civilizacio´n, subsistiese tal antro de oscuridad, tal foco de ignorancia, tal abismo de miseria. . . . ¿Que´ variedad de nuestra especie es e´sa que ası´ se diferencia de nosotros en sus inclinaciones, en sus instintos, en su sentido moral, en sus pasiones y en su inteligencia? (54) [And then more than ever I felt surprise and amazement that so close to Europe, surrounded by its ships, embedded among its hills, in contact with the blinding truths of our civilization, there subsists such a den of darkness, such a center of ignorance, such an abyss of misery. . . . What variant on our species is this that differs so much from us in its inclinations, its instincts, its moral sense, it passions, and its intelligence?].21

Before long this ‘‘den of darkness’’ will become the focus of ever more lyrical outbursts of affection and respect. This process of cultural reconfiguration is accompanied by a parallel shift in Alarco´n’s reliance on literary models. Just as he often seeks to enhance the grandiosity of his militaristic diatribes with allusions to the poetry of epic conquest, his efforts to stir feelings of cross-cultural kinship also tend to rely heavily on literary allusion, though in this case he quite understandably prefers texts that might offer a rather less antagonistic view of North African cultures. He finds ample source material in the ongoing vogue for orientalist literature, sprinkling his journalistic entries with direct or indirect references to a litany of works of popular contemporary orientalist

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fiction by authors including Espronceda, Zorrilla, Hartzenbusch, Byron, Chateaubriand, Florian, and Madame de Cottin.22 A good example of this tendency appears in the following passage as Alarco´n describes his first impression of the city of Tetouan: ¡Tetua´n! . . . Yo no se´ co´mo describı´rtela para que la veas, para que la imagines tal cual es, con sus montes y sus campin ˜ as, con su cielo y su arbolado, con su ambiente fanta´stico y sus vivı´simos colores. Mas, ¿que´ dudo? ¿Viste a Granada desde las alturas de Fajalanza? ¿Leı´ste, a lo menos, El u´ltimo abencerraje y la descripcio´n que hace allı´ Chateaubriand de la Damasco de Occidente? ¡Pues, Tetua´n es Granada! (202) [Tetouan! . . . I don’t know how to describe her to you so you can see her, so you can imagine her as she is, with her mountains and fields, with her sky and trees, with her fantastic atmosphere and brilliant colors. But, why do I doubt? Have you seen Granada from the heights of Fajalanza? Have you at least read The Last of the Abencerrajes and the description Chateaubriand gives us there of the Damascus of the West? Well, Tetouan is Granada!]

In this quotation, Alarco´n not only captures with particular vigor his heightened sense of the Moorish contribution to Spanish culture, he also underscores the highly personal nature of his relationship to the so-called exotic domain he has set out to portray. As a proud native of Guadix, Alarco´n throughout his career repeatedly identified the city of Granada as his own spiritual and cultural home. By equating Tetouan with Granada, therefore, he clearly communicates his intention of presenting his experience in the city not so much as a strange, perhaps frightening encounter with otherness, but rather, at least to a large degree, as a form of homecoming, a treasured moment of reunification with his own (and by extension Spain’s) inherently African soul. The allusion to Le Dernier Abencerage aptly underscores this point. By comparing his own first sighting of Tetouan with the inaugural description of Granada found in Chateaubriand’s text (a passage that appears paraphrased at considerable length a few pages earlier in the installment’s epigraph [193]), Alarco´n implicitly equates his own narrative persona with Aben-Hamet, the exiled Moorish hero whose emotional first glimpse of ‘‘the Damascus of the West’’ that passage describes.23 Throughout the narration of his Tetouani experience, in fact, Alarco´n repeatedly evokes a sense of profound personal identification with diverse North African individuals, in

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particular the poet Chorby, with whom he explicitly confuses his own identity in a noteworthy 1860 poem drafted during his stay in the city and inserted into the second edition of the Diario: ‘‘Yo no se´ ya quie´n soy, ¡oh Mahometano!,’’ he declares in that text, ‘‘¡pienso que soy el mismo que tu´ eres!’’ (1954, 262) [I know not who I am, Oh Mohammedan! . . . I believe that I am the same as you!]. Though this assertion of intimate personal identification with his erstwhile military adversaries may—once again—appear rather at odds with the Diario’s flag-waving reputation, it is wholly consistent with the cultural ideology Alarco´n had expressed with such vehemence only a few months earlier in ‘‘Espan ˜ a y los franceses,’’ as well as with his marked predilection throughout his literary career to hold out elements of his own autobiographical identity—the telltale Arabic prefix of his last name, certain purportedly Semitic characteristics of his physiognomy, boyhood memories of Guadix (‘‘ciudad morisca en que rodo´ mi cuna’’ [343; Moorish city where I was born])—as incontrovertible proof of the veracity of his Africanist cultural interpretations.24 This aspect of Alarco´n’s text recalls Brinker-Gabler’s claim in Encountering the Other(s) that ‘‘one of the characteristics of Western metaphysics is to deny the otherness of the other/s—or if not to actually deny its/their otherness, then at least to appropriate it, subsuming the other/s dialectically within the same of the absolute subject’’ (1995, 1, emphasis in original). Typically, though, this process of appropriation is achieved through what James Duncan has termed ‘‘disorientation’’ (in Duncan and Gregory 1999, 151–63), which is to say that the site of exotic travel is progressively familiarized via assimilation to the traveler’s home culture, thereby facilitating its intellectual apprehension (possession) by the West. In Diario de un testigo, though a dynamic of appropriation through familiarization does exist, it proceeds in the inverse direction: that is, not through the europeanization of the Orient but rather through the orientalization of Spain. The implications are obviously significant. As did so many European orientalists before him, Alarco´n embarked on his Moroccan journey motivated in important part by a search for origins. In his case though, it was not a ‘‘quest for the exotic’’ in the sense of ‘‘recovering ‘elsewhere’ values ‘lost’ with the modernization of [the traveler’s home] society’’ (Bongie 1991a, 5). Though the exotic critique of modernization is indeed a key characteristic of Alarco´n’s cultural assessments, in his conception it is Europe that frequently functions as the ‘‘elsewhere’’ of the equation. The space

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of the Orient (at least, in certain passages operating within a specific set of rhetorical parameters) becomes home. The preceding observations may seem to recall Kushigian’s study of twentieth-century Latin American authors’ handling of the orientalist model as a ‘‘liberating force’’ that strives toward ‘‘ending cultural dominations’’ (1991, 16 and 3). It would be difficult, however, to describe Alarco´n’s ultimate project (or that of his travel-writing contemporaries) in that light. Though it is true that the tenor of Alarco´n’s description of his North African adventure shifts over the course of his sojourn, it is important to add that the existence of such variations does not, in and of itself, imply any fundamental deepening of his understanding of so-called oriental reality. Indeed, despite his repeated assertions of objectivity (‘‘vengo aquı´ . . . decidido a no subordinar mi juicio al ajeno, dispuesto a observar por mi propia cuenta, a creer solamente lo que vea y toque, a reflejar sencillamente aquello que me salga al paso’’ [179; I come here . . . determined not to subordinate my judgment to another, prepared to observe for myself, to believe only what I see and touch, to reflect simply whatever crosses my path]) and of his text’s groundbreaking didactic value (‘‘vas a saber dentro de un momento la historia de este valle con ma´s exactitud y pormenores que todos los geo´grafos, estadistas y viajeros que te hayan hablado de e´l’’ [226; you will know in a moment the history of this valley with more exactitude and detail than all of the geographers, statisticians, and travelers who have spoken of it to you]), there is a clear sense, throughout Diario de un testigo, that Alarco´n never intended his voyage en Orient to be a journey of discovery. Quite to the contrary, its value to him lies almost entirely in the extent to which his firsthand contact with Morocco and its inhabitants might serve to confirm his own prevoyage expectations. As a number of contemporary scholars of orientalist representation have observed, this attitude is nothing new. As Timothy Mitchell has noted in ‘‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’’: ‘‘Europeans in general arrived in the Orient after seeing plans and models—in pictures, exhibitions, museum, and books—of which they were seeking the original; and their purpose was always explained in these terms’’ (1992, 309). Much the same notion underlies Walker Percy’s remark that ‘‘the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex’’ (cited in Culler 1988, 162). That such an interpretative

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posture should be present in Alarco´n’s Diario can stand, therefore, as yet further evidence of Spanish orientalism’s profound connection to representational practices elsewhere on the European Continent. More interesting, though, is the examination of the particular ‘‘symbolic complex’’ he employs in the elaboration of his orientalist vision and the uses to which it is put in his text. Alarco´n, for his part, does little to try to hide the substantial motivational and interpretational role to be played by his own preexisting notions of oriental life. As he admits in one candid passage: Recuerdo . . . vagamente que mi imaginacio´n de nin ˜ o se forjaba siempre la vida musulmana y a los mismos hijos del Profeta de una manera precisa y determinada, y que las la´minas de las historias y las descripciones de los viajeros me los mostraban del mismo modo. . . . Averiguar si en pleno siglo XIX puede la realidad corresponder a tanta poesı´a, tal es mi propo´sito en Africa. (180)25 [I remember . . . vaguely that as a child my imagination always constructed Moslem life and the sons of the Prophet themselves in a very precise and determined way, and that the plates in history books and descriptions of travelers showed them to me in the same fashion. . . . To verify whether, in midnineteenth century, reality might correspond to all that poetry, that is my goal in Africa.]

Africa by all accounts does not let him down. Throughout the portions of the chronicle devoted to the narration of the military campaign, Moroccan soldiers routinely appear to him as wondrous and inspirational reincarnations of the heroes of orientalist legend (‘‘yo no he visto jama´s figuras tan airosas tan elegantes, tan gallardas . . . ; era el especta´culo son ˜ ado por todos los que han nutrido su fantası´a con leyendas orientales’’ [90; I have never seen such graceful, elegant, gallant figures . . . ; it was the spectacle dreamed of by everyone who has nourished his imagination with oriental legends], ‘‘era un verdadero a´rabe de leyenda’’ [144; he was a true Arab of legend], ‘‘era un verdadero moro, esto es, un moro de novela’’ [188; he was a true Moor, that is, a Moor out of a novel]). This perspective remains essentially unchanged in the entries drafted during his stay in the city of Tetouan. Indeed, in one moment of supreme candor, Alarco´n openly admits to his Spanish readership that his presumably objective reports on the city’s layout and ambiance have markedly less to do with any actual characteristics of the urban space itself than with his own preconceived mental images of it:

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¿Era acaso la materialidad de un conjunto de edificios lo que yo consideraba con tal avidez, con tal emocio´n, con tal recogimiento? ¡Oh! . . . no. . . . Era la ciudad de mis recuerdos, la de mi son ˜ adora fantası´a, la de mis amores de poeta. Era la ciudad oriental, la ciudad a´rabe . . . ; era la realidad de mis ilusiones de nin ˜ o. (349, first ellipsis in original) [Was it perhaps the material nature of the grouping of buildings that made me gaze on them with such eagerness, such emotion, such absorption? Oh, no! . . . It was the city of my memories, of my dreamlike fantasy, of my poet’s loves. It was the oriental city, the Arab city . . . ; it was the reality of my childhood illusions.]

True to his word Alarco´n repeatedly portrays Tetouan’s residents as veritable walking archetypes of their respective races, religions, and societal roles. Spotting some North African Jews during the army’s triumphal march into the city, for example, he wastes no time in pronouncing that ‘‘la raza judı´a resultaba como yo la sospechaba, como la tenı´a en la imaginacio´n, como la habı´a leı´do en Shakespeare y otros poetas’’ (355) [the Jewish race turned out as I had suspected, as it was in my imagination, as I had read of it in Shakespeare and other poets]. His aforementioned encounter with the Moroccan odalisque proceeds in much the same way. Given the strong tendency among nineteenth-century European orientalist painters, including those from Spain, to represent the ‘‘exotic’’ oriental woman as whiteskinned (Martin-Ma´rquez 2001; Charnon-Deutsch 2000), Alarco´n is initially quite disconcerted—indeed palpably repulsed—by the discovery that the odalisque he himself has chanced to encounter is black: ‘‘¡Que´ desencanto! ¡La odalisca es negra! ¡No podı´a darse mayor desgracia!’’ (411) [What a letdown! The odalisque is black! Nothing could be worse!]. This unwelcome and ‘‘unpoetic’’ discovery, however, is quickly brought to hand as Alarco´n, his composure restored, begins in earnest the process of harmonizing this ‘‘Venus de azabache’’ (411) [jet-black Venus] with his grand orientalist designs. By the end of the episode, he declares his efforts successful: Aquella era la verdadera mujer de Oriente. Una joven ociosa, prisionera, consumiendo sus horas en el sibaritismo y la inaccio´n. . . . Ası´ habı´a adivinado el alma aquella vida; ası´ la habı´a leı´do en poetas y viajeros; ası´ la canta Lord Byron. Nada tenı´a ya que desear. (412) 26 [That was the true woman of the Orient. An indolent young woman, prisoner, consuming her hours in sybaritism and inaction. . . . That is

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how my soul had sensed that such a life would be; that is how I had read of it in poets and travelers; that is how Lord Byron sings it. I had nothing left to desire.]

Though beyond the scope of this project, the striking similarity between this episode and Galdo´s’s treatment of similar themes in Aita Tettauen is worth mentioning. Martin-Ma´rquez’s analysis of that text in ‘‘Here’s Spain Looking at You’’ is in this sense (as others) fascinating, and underscores the need for further consideration of Galdo´s’s anything but straightforward engagement with Alarco´n’s Diario. The processes at work in these passages may also seem reminiscent of chapter 2’s consideration of Galdo´s’s blending of history and fiction, observation and desire in the narration of his Italian travels. It is therefore worth underscoring that in terms of purpose they are quite different. Whereas for Galdo´s the refusal to grant hierarchical precedence to empirical evidence forms part of his chronicle’s teasing exposition of the fragility of notions of ‘‘authentic’’ reality, for Alarco´n, on the other hand, the privileging of fictional models serves actually to assert a reality: that is, the presumed ‘‘realidad de Oriente’’ that he claims to have identified through his investigations of orientalismo and africanizacio´n. Not surprisingly, Alarco´n’s outbursts of poetic exuberance whereby virtually every facet of Moroccan life is construed as confirmation of the veracity of one or another commonplace of his own prevoyage orientalist fantasies carry over to his characterization of his own narrative perspective as well. In this vein, it is interesting to observe that his vehement declarations of intense spiritual kinship with the city’s Moorish inhabitants notwithstanding, the Tetouani installments of Diario de un testigo feature numerous passages in which he continues to evoke the image of himself as European male conqueror with which he had set out on his journey several months earlier. The conflation of these competing self-images is perhaps nowhere as evident as in Alarco´n’s attempts to convey the emotion he experiences during his initial sighting of Tetouan. In that episode, which appropriately enough features lengthy citations drawn both from the realm of orientalist fiction (Le Dernier Abencerage) and the poetry of epic conquest (Gerusalemme liberata), Alarco´n’s aforementioned gesture of self-identification with the Moorish hero of Chateaubriand’s text appears alongside allusions clearly designed to reassert his status—sketched out so clearly in ‘‘Al saltar en tierra’’—as the virile emissary of a dominant European culture

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whose exploration of North Africa, cast as the feminized object of his desire, is construed as an act of amorous seduction. This pretense is evident in the Alarco´n’s description of his first glimpse of Tetouan, which he chooses to portray—despite his obvious awareness of the fierce Moroccan resistance to the Spanish army’s advance—as a sensuously recumbent woman passively awaiting her lover’s arrival: ¡Tetua´n! . . . ¡Todo ha surgido de una vez ante mis ojos! Todo, todo lo abarco de una mirada; todo se dilata bajo mis pies; todo lo encierro entre mis brazos cuando los tiendo hacia la llanura. . . . Alla´ se ve su lecho. ¡Alla´ esta´ medio escondida y como sepultada en los verdes cojines donde se recuesta! Unas suaves colinas, adelanta´ndose por en medio de la llanura, sirven como de almohada a la muelle deidad. (201) [Tetouan! . . . Everything has appeared at once before my eyes! I span everything, everything with my gaze; everything spreads out beneath my feet; I enclose everything with my arms as I stretch them out over the plain. . . . There is her bed. There she is half-hidden as if buried in the green cushions where she lies! Some gentle hills, advancing across the plain, serve as pillow for the luxuriant goddess.]

Again this posture finds strong precedent in the tradition of European travel writing. As Suzanne Zantop writes in her article ‘‘Domesticating the Other,’’ ‘‘the tendency to conflate land with woman’’ is particularly frequent in European accounts of territorial conquest, with the conqueror/explorer assigning to himself (and by extenion his nation) the dominant masculine role of ‘‘ ‘penetrating’ virgin territory and taking possession’’ (1995, 272). Or as Mary Louise Pratt has noted in a similar vein: ‘‘It is hard to think of a trope more decisively gendered than the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene. Explorer-man paints/possesses newly unveiled landscape-woman’’ (1992, 213). In this spirit, Alarco´n apparently finds no difficulty in recasting for the benefit of his Spanish readership (or, perhaps more exactly, for the benefit of the self-image he has, for the moment, chosen to espouse) the Spanish military seige and ultimate overthrow of Tetouan as an act of mutually yearned-for betrothal: Suelen los poetas llamar ‘‘la desposada del conquistador’’ a cualquier ciudad que abre sus puertas al extranjero. ¡Imagen exactı´sima! Ella traduce perfectamente lo que yo he sentido hoy al tocar con la mano la verdad, la presencia, el ser del orientalismo. (349)

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[Poets tend to call any city that opens its gates to the foreigner ‘‘the bride of the conqueror.’’ A truly exact image! It translates perfectly what I have felt today in touching with my hand the truth, the presence, the being of orientalism.]

It is worth noting that here again, as in ‘‘Al saltar en tierra,’’ Alarco´n clearly wants to reserve for himself a privileged status vis-a`-vis his comrades in arms as consequence of his ‘‘poetic’’ identity. As shown in the preceding passage, the erotic dynamics of territorial conquest were first understood by ‘‘poetas’’ not ‘‘soldados,’’ and in this spirit Alarco´n clearly suggests that the beneficiary of Tetouan’s sexual submission (‘‘Surge ante mi vista toda la ciudad . . . hela allı´ desvelada, entera, desnuda, sorprendida en su suen ˜ o solitario’’ [223; the entire city rises before my eyes . . . here she is awakened, complete, naked, surprised in her solitary dream]) is not to be the Spanish army as a whole, but rather his own first-person narrative yo. This proud assertion of his selection as Tetouan’s one ‘‘true’’ lover only intensifies once he actually enters within the city’s protective walls. As he exults a few pages later, again placing himself in opposition to his erstwhile army companions: ‘‘la generalidad del eje´rcito esta´ desencantada con lo que ha encontrado en el seno de la codiciada odalisca . . . yo, en cambio, estoy enamorado de Tetua´n’’ (362) [most of the army feels disenchanted with what they have discovered in the bosom of the coveted odalisque . . . I, on the other hand, am in love with Tetouan].27 As an interesting aside, it is worth mentioning in this context Serafı´n Este´banez Caldero´n’s claim, in his Manual del oficial en Marruecos [Manual for Officers in Morocco], that ‘‘las mujeres de Tetua´n tienen fama de ser las ma´s amables de toda la Berberı´a, y se pretende que e´sta sea la razo´n porque rara vez se concede a los cristianos el permiso de domiciliarse allı´’’ (292) [the women of Tetouan are known as the nicest in all of Barbary, and it is claimed that this is why Christians are seldom allowed to reside there]. The city’s reputation for inaccessibility to Western visitors—its traditional pudor, so to speak—functions rather as Don ˜a Ine´s’s convent walls do to intensify further Alarco´n’s self-image as donjuanesque conqueror.28 As these and other similar passages suggest, Alarco´n’s vaunted one-on-one contact with ‘‘oriental reality’’ is never actually used as the basis for a more profound, less cliche´d and prescripted rendering of North African society than that found in the Diario’s opening pages. Indeed, one could easily argue that he does little more than

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exchange one set of literary models (epic verse) for another (orientalist fiction) in accordance with the changing diegetic circumstances of his text. Although, as described, the latter installments certainly differ in important respects from those found earlier in the chronicle, Alarco´n remains throughout stubbornly unwilling ever to permit his firsthand contact with what he, in the preceding quotation, calls ‘‘the truth, the presence, the being’’ of Morocco to compromise his ability to construe his experience as confirmation of his own rhetorical goals. The difficulty for Alarco´n, of course, is that these goals so often appear to pull him in opposing directions. His pose as imperial conqueror—a man capable of claiming immediate possession of an immense continent after merely setting foot upon a narrow sliver of beach—sits rather uneasily with the poetics of pursuit demanded by his guise as European explorer, while both of these postures depend upon a premise of otherness that conflicts with the process of familiarization dictated by his Africanist sentiments. Similarly, while his status as loyal infantryman requires that he view the Moroccans with whom he enters in contact as his enemies, this notion is in dissonance both with his artistic sensibilities, which urge him to embrace ‘‘the sons of the Prophet’’ (180) as romantic incarnations of oriental legend, and with his awareness of his own morisco lineage, which prompts a profound sense of intimate personal identification with his erstwhile foes. His pretensions that Diario de un testigo should be read as a compendium of objective fact, meanwhile, clash with all of the aforementioned authorial guises, each of which demands the adoption of a narrative perspective formulated according to a distinct type of rhetorical paradigm (some oppositional, others conciliatory) through which the ‘‘true’’ nature of the oriental world is to be defined. That being said, however, when judging Diario de un testigo it is always important to recall that while Alarco´n may never succeed in harmonizing the contradictory attitudes and impulses that underlie his ‘‘pobre historia de poeta y de soldado, de admirador y enemigo de los moros’’ (316) [poor story of a poet and soldier, of an admirer and enemy of the Moors], in the end he can be accused of little more than presenting in rather sharper relief than usual the conflicted portrayal of North African cultures found in much Spanish orientalist writing. To his credit, moreover, he makes little sustained effort to hide from his readers the myriad dilemmas created by his travel experiences, instead transforming them into a central focus

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of his text. At one point, in fact, he even brings himself to acknowledge the fundamental fallacy of the pretense that his journey from Ceuta to Tetouan will in any significant sense put him closer to understanding (much less possessing) the truth of Moroccan reality: ‘‘todo el terreno que [hemos] recorrido,’’ he writes from Tetouan, ‘‘esta´ mirando a Europa; es, por decirlo ası´, la fachada de esta tierra, y sabido es, y si no sa´belo ahora, que de nada se cuidan menos los moros que de las fachadas’’ (350) [all the territory that (we) have covered is looking toward Europe; it is, so to speak, the fac¸ade of this land, and it is well known, or if not, it should be known as of now, that the Moors care for nothing less than for their fac¸ades]. Despite the swashbuckling bluster present in his inaugural cry of ‘‘Teneo te, Africa’’ and other passages like it, Alarco´n seems to know that Morocco, as occurs in his encounter with the odalisque of the Erzini Palace, will always remain beyond his grasp. But that, after all, was never his foremost concern. In Diario de un testigo de la guerra de Africa, the primary battlefront was never actually in North Africa at all. It was in Spain. The primary battle: not a short-lived military gambit to bolster Spanish colonial fortunes, but rather Alarco´n’s own ongoing struggle to locate and define the essence of the Spanish soul.

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4 Una geografı´a aparte : Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano and the Quest for the Distant Other En estos paı´ses, situados bajo la lı´nea ecuatorial, el europeo colonizador no hace ma´s que pasar. —Vicente Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez, La vuelta al mundo de un novelista [In these countries, located below the equator, the European colonizer does no more than pass through.]

WHILE MOST OF THE SPANISH AUTHORS WHO RECOUNTED TRAVEL TO non-European destinations ventured no farther than the perimeter of the Mediterranean basin, a few undertook journeys requiring extended transoceanic travel. Although some of the representational issues introduced in these long-distance chronicles parallel those seen in earlier chapters, the pursuit of the ‘‘distant other’’ also introduces certain distinctive features into authors’ efforts to communicate the spaces of travel and their own place with respect to the lands and peoples they set out to describe. More than in the other instances of travel writing examined thus far, the presence of passage—that is, the need to journey far from home in order to attain the vaunted goal of firsthand experience—will affect these conceptualizations of travel encounter (and, of course, its two fundamental components: observer and observed) in multiple significant ways. For one thing, these texts tend on the whole to assert a far more unproblematically constructed sense of ‘‘European’’ identity, lacking the pronounced sense of North/South hierarchy and other cultural bifurcations so characteristic of the conceptualization of Europe (and, specifically, of Spain’s relationship to that geographical/ideological entity) found in Spanish chronicles of both Euro169

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pean and North African destinations. The great distances involved and the element of nonfamiliarity that usually accompanied them also allowed authors to bolster their narrative authority by portraying themselves as possessors of knowledge that few of their readers could claim to match, while affording them a certain degree of representational freedom in both their travel descriptions and cultural assessments. It should be noted, though, that the last of these authorial perquisites is typically measurable mostly in textual details, inasmuch as representations of long-distance destinations were no more exempt than that of closer-to-home locations from reader expectations deriving from existing written or visual renderings of the peoples and cultures described. In nineteenth-century Spain as elsewhere in Western Europe, the particular set of expectations associated with the representation of transoceanic journeys tended to draw fairly heavily from two interrelated rhetorical models: the discourses of orientalism and of the exotic. The ways Spanish writers responded to these paradigms in their travel writings will form a principal focus of the following pages. Of the many concepts that have been associated with orientalist and exotic representation, a few will be of particular utility in the present context. From the realm of orientalism, the basic trope will be that of hierarchical differentiation, whereby European culture (and, of course, the traveler who acts as its emissary) occupies the superior role, in accordance with notions of ‘‘superiority’’ as defined within European ideological traditions. The exotic operates within a similar terrain of cultural juxtaposition, in its generic use as a descriptor indicating extraordinary difference, or conceived more precisely as also requiring an aestheticization of the other (e.g., Arac and Ritvo 1991, 3) or a nostalgia-based hierarchy reversal whereby the non-Western world is shown to have retained certain desirable traits or values considered lost during the process of European modernization: ‘‘The project of exoticism,’’ as Chris Bongie puts it in ‘‘Exotic Nostalgia,’’ ‘‘is to salvage values and a way of life that had vanished, without hope of restoration, from post-Revolutionary society (the realm of the Same) but that might, beyond the confines of modernity, still be figured as really possible’’ (1991b, 270). Though these characteristics, taken individually or in combination, can come into play in the depiction of an enormous range of travel destinations, most critics seem to agree that long-distance journeys greatly facilitate the creation of persuasive exotic representation. Todorov, for example, writes in Nous et les autres [Ourselves and

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Others] that ‘‘les meilleurs candidats au roˆle d’ide´al exotique sont les peuples et les cultures les plus e´loigne´s et les plus ignore´s’’ (1989, 298) [the best candidates for the role of the exotic ideal are the peoples and cultures who are most distant and least known]. Roger Ce´lestin builds on this idea in From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism, in which he attributes the declining viability of exotic representation in post–nineteenth-century society to what he calls ‘‘the shrunken surface, the fragmented Self, and the uttering Other’’ (1996, 27): The shrunken surface is the end product of the gradual disappearance of unknown territory. . . . The fragmented Self marks the breakdown of a unit essential to exoticism: a clearly delineated Self who relies on the certainty of his difference and, to a great extent, of his centrality and predominance, what we have called his power. The uttering Other is no longer the participant in a ‘‘negotiated reality’’ but the emitter of his own texts (even if these, too, are the products of a negotiated reality). (1996, 27)

In this assessment Ce´lestin has retained Todorov’s pairing of distance and nonfamiliarity in his concept of the shrunken surface but adds the existence of a self-confident observer and a unidirectional gaze as further components of the perception of the exotic. The schema will prove a useful one, and Ce´lestin is certainly also correct in noting that any number of twentieth-century developments (technology, education, etc.) have together worked to weaken the possibility of positing a direct correspondence between any human society and this ‘‘exotic ideal.’’ This should not, however, be understood as an indication that notions of the exotic were necessarily stable or straightforward in the nineteenth century either. In the Spanish texts under consideration here, for example, while it is indeed true that they scarcely ever provide a stage for an ‘‘uttering Other’’ whatever the destination described, the other terms of the exotic equation are often subject to considerable flux. In the preceding chapter we have already seen in Spanish representations of the journey to Morocco that a considerable degree of exoticism can be imputed to a location situated a mere few miles away from the traveler’s home, indicating that the conditions of distance and nonfamiliarity can function in a perceptual rather than literal sense. Spaniards’ constructions of Morocco also reveal that a single site can be perceived at once as both profoundly exotic and profoundly homelike. Though the sources of this

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particular representational peculiarity are multiple, as Alarco´n’s Diario de un testigo reveals it often relates at least in part to the second point in Ce´lestin’s schema: that is, the absence from the construction of the traveler’s own narrative persona (and own home culture) of the sense of assurance and unshakable hierarchy deriving from ‘‘a clearly delineated Self.’’ Similar kinds of representational flux occur in the narration of more physically distant destinations as well. This is not to say that there is any universally employed model of long-distance representation, nor even that narratives treating the same location will necessarily always present comparable characteristics. That is far from the case. However, it is fair to say that these texts all do engage, in one way or another, a core set of orientalist and/or exotic concepts relating to aforementioned issues such as distance, knowledge, cultural hierarchy, narrative authority, and definitions of Self. As mentioned earlier, nineteenth-century Spanish authors produced only a scattering of long-distance travel chronicles. This circumstance is consonant with the fact that such journeys did not respond to either the practical or the attitudinal concerns that tended to determine the travel itineraries of most writers at the time. Those who undertook their foreign sojourns primarily for professional reasons (e.g., diplomacy, journalism, military duty), for example, were much less likely to be sent across the globe than to one of the nearby European or Mediterranean nations with which Spain maintained its most important political, economic, and cultural ties. Even greater disincentives existed for the small but steadily growing group of travelers who indulged in foreign leisure trips, the most obvious of which were distance and cost. Though the nineteenthcentury globe was made a bit more ‘‘shrunken,’’ as Ce´lestin puts it, by the steamship and Suez Canal, long-distance travel was still a daunting undertaking. Travel to Asia often involved crossing thousands of miles of water each way, much of it in sweltering heat. Transatlantic voyages were time-consuming and expensive as well. For most Spanish leisure travelers of the time, in short, venturing beyond the European/Mediterranean theater was simply a practical impossibility. Another disincentive lay in the fact that most long-distance journeys failed to conform to authors’ marked preference for destinations where the experience of cultural difference was not likely to be too extreme. Even within the relatively familiar confines of Europe, one finds that the enticements of geographical proximity did

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not outweigh this urge for cultural kinship: Switzerland lies closer to Spain’s borders than most parts of Italy yet is only rarely the subject of nineteenth-century Spanish travel writing, and within Italy itself accounts of visits to the distant Neapolitan region, which Spaniards almost unanimously embrace as reminiscent of home, outnumber those devoted to the more easily accessible northwestern cities of Genoa, Turin, and Milan combined. It was thus presumably not inconsequential to those pondering journeys to non-European regions that so many such destinations not only were expensive and difficult to reach, but also promised to present the traveler upon arrival with a style of life in which few comforting refuges of familiarity could be expected to exist. Since the small number of Spanish writers who evinced a yearning for firsthand contact with ‘‘exotic’’ societies could satisfy their curiosity far more easily and cheaply and with a less overwhelming sense of culture shock by traveling to the Mediterranean Orient, it is hardly surprising that this is precisely what most of them did. When these considerations are added to the fact that the few wellknown nineteenth-century literary authors who did undertake transoceanic journeys (e.g., Zorrilla, Valera, Valle Incla´n) did not publish chronicle-style narratives of their experiences,1 we are left with what can only be described as a fairly low-profile collection of texts: few in number and rarely more than a few pages in length, most were never reedited after their initial publication and were written primarily by individuals who are seldom the subject of critical inquiry today. As such, one might question the reasons for studying them now. There is no denying that, from a purely writerly standpoint, these accounts seldom display the same degree of craftsmanship found (however differently manifested) in the works of the three authors whose travel narrations were highlighted in previous chapters. On the other hand, though, it would also be hard to deny that the particular function these writers effectively set for themselves— contributing to the construction of the nineteenth-century Spanish sense of identity a rendering of its relationship to cultures and peoples beyond its immediate geographic/cultural sphere—is an important one. That quality alone would certainly make this body of works worthy of scholarly consideration, though as I hope to show in the following pages Spanish representations of the distant other can be intriguing texts in their own right as well. Approaching long-distance travel narration can—at least in principal—present a dilemma in terms of how best to treat such a vast

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range of geographically and culturally distinct portions of the globe. In the present instance, however, this dispersive potential turns out to be of fairly limited impact since, as it happens, all of the transoceanic chronicles published by nineteenth-century Spanish writers narrate journeys to one of two regions: Latin America or East Asia. And even here the material is scant, with texts by a handful of rather tangential literary figures (Andueza, Martı´nez Villergas, and Salas y Quiroga on Latin America; Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano and Enrique Gaspar on East Asia) constituting the only chronicle-style narrations of any length.2 As for North America: though several Spanish literary figures (e.g., Juan Valera and Gabriel Garcı´a Tassara) were known to have visited the United States, they appear to have left no travel chronicles of their experiences.3 Because these travelers usually embarked on their journeys through professional obligation, it is difficult to assess individual intentionality with regard to the particular array of long-distance destinations that did (or did not) attract their textual scrutiny; however, authors’ individual representational and interpretational priorities certainly do come into play in the constructions of both observer and observed contained in these accounts. The texts’ effective selfcategorization into two distinct geographic/cultural blocks proves useful by facilitating illustration of the commonalities and variants found in Spanish renderings of distant places and peoples. In the following pages, as in previous chapters, I will begin by outlining some principal characteristics of these forms of travel narration before taking a closer look at a representative text. It should come as no surprise whatever that nineteenth-century accounts of the voyage to Latin America occupy a special niche in the schema of Spanish foreign travel representation. Though physically separated from Spain by thousands of miles, Latin America in any number of obvious ways—language, religion, architecture, among others—would have presented a profoundly familiar (in the sense both of ‘‘known’’ and of ‘‘recognizable as similar’’) face to Spanish travel authors and their readers. And, indeed, the pull of pan-Hispanic cultural commonality does make its presence amply felt in Spanish accounts of American journeys. On the other hand, though, that sense of familiarity or kinship finds itself deeply undermined by a variety of competing factors, most obvious among them being the decidedly less-than-warm feelings generated by Latin America’s recent wars of emancipation from Spanish colonial rule. Given that we have already seen how Spanish sensitivities regarding

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the loss of their colonial empire and concomitant fall from centrality in European affairs inform Spanish travelers’ representations of Paris, Italy, and in particular Morocco, it is logical to assume that such concerns will likewise play an even more pivotal role in travel depictions of the former colonies themselves. That indeed proves to be the case. Spanish constructions of the Latin American voyage, in other words, have a dual nature, at once working to familiarize and to defamiliarize their subject. This duality in turn is largely a direct result of the peculiarity of the institution whose ideological framework and historical vicissitudes most clearly undergird virtually all Spanish thinking and writing about Latin America at the time: that is, colonialism. As Nicholas Thomas has noted, ‘‘colonialism has always . . . been a cultural process; its discoveries and trespasses are imagined and energized through signs, metaphors and narratives; even what would seem its purest moments of profit and violence have been mediated and enframed by structures of meaning’’ (1994, 2). If, as Walter Cohen has persuasively demonstrated in ‘‘The Discourses of Empire in the Renaissance,’’ Spanish authors’ representations of its American colonization were never monolithically self-affirming (in Brownlee and Gumbrecht 1995, 260–83), in nineteenth-century Spain, the various ‘‘signs, metaphors and narratives’’ through which Latin America came to be imagined were extraordinarily vexed, torn between the rhetoric of the foreign and the rhetoric of home, between vague and often prideful notions of pan-Hispanic brotherhood and the often painful awareness of the ignominious dissolution of Spain’s colonial empire being effectuated, in nascent republic after nascent republic, across the American continent as the century progressed. It was the negative side of this ambivalence that, as Jose´ Joaquı´n de Mora complained in his 1853 article ‘‘De la situacio´n actual de las repu´blicas sur-americanas’’ [‘‘On the Current State of the South American Republics’’], most often seemed to gain the upper hand in nineteenth-century Spanish public discourse: La declamacio´n sobre los deso´rdenes de que han sido teatro todos los estados formados en el Sur de Ame´rica con los restos de la dominacio´n espan ˜ ola, y de que muchos lo esta´n siendo todavı´a; la amarga censura de la conducta, de las costumbres, de las propensiones y au´n de los alcances intelectuales de sus pobladores; los tristes vaticinios sobre su suerte futura, que acaban generalmente por el retroceso a su antiguo estado de

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barbarie, son temas frecuentes de los perio´dicos, de los libros de polı´tica y de las relaciones de viajes que salen diariamente de las prensas europeas. (1853, 30) [Statements against the disorder to which all of the states formed in South America out of the remnants of Spanish domination have served as scenario, with some still doing so today; bitter censorship of their inhabitants’ conduct, customs, propensities, and even intellectual capacities; sad predictions about their future lot, typically predicting a regression to their former state of barbarism: these are frequent topics of newspapers, political texts, and travel accounts appearing daily in the European press.]

If we examine the vocabulary of this passage (with its reference to Spaniards’ view of Latin America as a space of disorder, censurable customs, limited intellectual reach, and barbarism), it clearly demonstrates the extent to which nineteenth-century Spanish public discourse on its former American colonies coincided with both the hierarchical and ideological premises and the lexicon of contemporary ‘‘orientalist’’ thought.4 Such attitudes affected travel and travel narration in several important ways. In a practical sense, they suggest yet another reason for the paucity of Latin American travel texts. Since individuals quite logically tend to favor destinations they find appealing (Urry 1990, 127), the undisguised hostility that this kind of crudely hierarchical rhetoric lays bare would clearly have done little to spur interest in Latin America as the subject of leisure travel reading. According to Eugenio de Ochoa, colonial history dampened Spaniards’ interest in Latin American voyages in a second way as well, by implicitly associating travel to present or former colonies with the decidedly unpoetic dictates of economic interest or political duty: Va unida a [tales viajes] cierta idea mercantil que les quita toda su poesı´a; el hombre que va a Filipinas o a Ame´rica, aunque sea todo un tourista, nos recuerda involuntariamente el hijo o el sobrino del comerciante A o B, de Santander, de Ca´diz y de otros mil puertos, que emprendieron el mismo viaje en busca, no de roma´nticas ruinas o pintorescas perspectivas, sino de cargamentos de cacao y azu´car y de productos de la industria china. (1851, 370) [A certain mercantilism is inseparable from (such journeys), thus stripping them of all of their poetry; the man who goes to the Philippines or to America, though he may be a tourist, inadvertently reminds us of the

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son or nephew of merchant A or B from Santander or Cadiz or a thousand other ports, who undertook the same voyage in search not of romantic ruins or picturesque scenes but rather of shipments of cacao and sugar or the products of Chinese industry.]

And in fact, in conformity with Mora and Ochoa’s assertions, one finds that while the many lavishly illustrated travel journals popular in nineteenth-century Spain featured dozens upon dozens of engravings of ‘‘romantic ruins’’ and ‘‘picturesque scenes’’ scattered throughout Europe, the Mediterranean Orient, and Asia, as well as abundant translations of foreign travel texts about any number of distant ports of call, there was scarcely any discernible effort likewise to market the evocative appeal of Mesoamerican ruins or other ‘‘picturesque’’ enticements of the Latin American world through either visual or textual means. Quite logically, the preceding perceptions also profoundly influence those Spanish narrations of Latin American journeys that do exist. One finds, for example, that authors are often quick to corroborate the widespread vision of postindependence America as a space of disorder. This posture appears to have been appealing for several reasons, one being that it allowed them almost free rein in vaunting the bravery inherent in their decision to undertake their sojourn in America and explore its barbaric domain. Zorrilla, in one of his infrequent snippets of travel narration, strikes a typical chord when proudly recounting his courageous visit to the island of Saint Thomas despite warnings that ‘‘el co´lera, el vo´mito, el pasmo y las cuarentenas esperan con los brazos abiertos a los vagabundos europeos’’ (1855, 1:84) [cholera, vomiting, lockjaw, and quarantines await the European wanderer with open arms]. Likewise, the generally festive tone that the humorist Juan Martı´nez Villergas adopts in his 1858 Viaje al paı´s de Motezuma [Journey to the Land of Montezuma] (which, at forty-two pages, is by far the most extensive chronicle of a journey to postindependence Latin America in the corpus) cannot obscure the fact that he constructs Mexican space largely through reference to bloodthirsty bandits (1858, 9–11), threatening nature (2), fearful disease (3), incapacitating heat (1), nauseating food (36, 38), and myriad other forms of traveler unease or discomfiture. In such passages, the privileged aura accorded the intrepid longdistance traveler and the civilization/barbarism constructs typical of orientalist representation dovetail perfectly with the Spanish colonial paradigm. The fact that these allusions to life-threatening bar-

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barity appear in portrayals of the new republics built on the ashes of Spain’s crumbling glory is seldom far below the surface, as evidenced by the essentially universal tendency for authors proudly to evoke at every convenient opportunity the glorious history of the Spanish conquest. Martı´nez Villergas, for example, describes Corte´s as ‘‘el primero de los he´roes, el que ma´s talentos y cualidades maravillosas ha reunido para la guerra y el u´nico tal vez que hubiera podido realizar lo que todavı´a parece . . . la conquista ma´s civilizadora y gloriosa que hayan hecho los nacidos’’ (1858, 13; see also 8, 21) [the first among heroes, the one who possesses the greatest talents and marvelous qualities for war and the only one who could perhaps have carried out what still appears as . . . the most civilizing and glorious conquest ever achieved by mortal man], clearly insinuating on several occasions that Mexicans’ rejection of continued Spanish rule underlies most if not all of the primary ills plaguing ‘‘aquel desgraciado paı´s’’ (1858, 42) [that unfortunate country]. Zorrilla’s various writings on Mexico—though not travel narratives per se—are likewise largely remembered today for their often embittered oppositional tone. To be sure, Spanish travel chronicles need not adopt a castigating stance throughout. Ecstatic paeans to American nature (‘‘¡Oh! ¡Que´ maravilloso cuadro se ofrecio´ allı´ a nuestros asombrados ojos! Aquello es sublime y majestuoso’’ [Martı´nez Villergas 1858, 8; Oh! What a marvelous painting was offered before our astonished eyes! How sublime and majestic!]) are, in fact, fairly frequent. The problem, clearly, lies primarily with human-centered activities such as social organization, lifestyles, and beliefs. Though acknowledgments of the friendship offered by individual Latin American citizens are relatively common, the almost universal reliance on hierarchycreating cultural assessments of virtually all aspects of human activity obviously works to curtail the development of any stable sense of cross-cultural fraternity. The effect, instead, is the establishment of a fairly clear-cut opposition between observer and observed, with the former firmly aligned with the forces of ‘‘civilizacio´n’’ (i.e., Europe) and the latter, by contrast, largely circumscribed within what Mora termed ‘‘a regression to their former state of barbarism’’ (1853, 30). The title of Martı´nez Villergas’s chronicle clearly functions in this sense, with the (misspelled) titular identification of present-day Mexico with ‘‘Motezuma’’ evocative of what he will later describe as the ‘‘barbarous rudeness’’ of Mesoamerica’s preconquest cultures (1858, 26). If Latin Americans believe they can do without Spain’s

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colonial tutelage, Martı´nez Villergas and other Spanish travelers clearly imply, they do so at their peril. In harmony with this narrative stance, Spanish chronicles frequently suggest that the dangers of travel within the chaotic and uncivilized American sphere are particularly acute for citizens of Spain, here building on Spanish perceptions of lingering Latin American animosity toward their former colonial masters.5 In his ‘‘Apuntes de un viajero,’’ for example, Jacinto Salas y Quiroga openly admits that the trepidation with which he and a companion initiated their tour of Chile, Bolivia, and Peru led them to hide their Spanish nationality by pretending to be French (1838b, 592). Though Salas hastens to point out that he ultimately discovered this ruse to be unnecessary, a generalized fear regarding Latin Americans’ purported animalistic violence and desire for reprisals is easily identifiable in Spanish accounts of Latin American journeys and likely does much to explain the fact that most such chronicles recount visits to Cuba, which of course was not really a foreign destination at all, as it remained a Spanish possession until 1898. Interestingly, though, even the ostensibly ‘‘domestic’’ Cuban voyage appears to have been viewed with a considerable degree of concern. Salas y Quiroga’s description of his arrival in Havana harbor, though intended to counter Spaniards’ negative stereotypes, can give an idea of the fearsome images of Spain’s Caribbean possessions that swirled in the Spanish popular imagination of the time: Pero, ¿sera´ cierto, me decı´a yo, que es e´sta la ciudad de los robos y de los asesinatos? ¿Es e´sta, como nos lo han repetido siempre, la Sodoma del siglo, la poblacio´n que abriga en sus entran ˜ as la corrupcio´n en todas sus formas? ¿Es aquı´ . . . donde el juego y la prostitucio´n, la venalidad y el homicidio tienen su ma´s seguro imperio? (1964, 27–28) [But, can it be, I said to myself, that this is the city of robbery and murder? Is this, as we have always been told, the Sodom of the century, the population that holds within it corruption in all of its forms? Is it here . . . where gambling and prostitution, venality and homicide, hold their surest sway?]

One thinks here again of Mora’s previously cited assessment of Spaniards’ negative valorizations of Latin America as a whole, with that passage’s litany of denigrating stereotypes here augmented with the added charges of inhuman cruelty and moral corruption. To be sure, as is true of Spanish visitors to other Latin American

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destinations, chroniclers of Cuban journeys often work to dispel at least the most exaggerated stereotypes and to identify diverse aspects of the Cuban lifestyle likely to appeal to Spanish readers. However, this effort—whose typical purpose was, of course, to incorporate the island into the cultural construct of ‘‘greater Spain’’ to which it ostensibly belonged—always remains incomplete, with the island’s culture ultimately cast as an irreducibly ‘‘foreign’’ space. Interestingly, this is true even of those writing prior to the inception of serious Cuban unrest in the latter half of the century, such as the costumbrista essayist Jose´ Marı´a de Andueza, who wrote in 1841 with a mixture of fascination, opprobrium, and sadness that despite more than three hundred years of Spanish rule, la isla de Cuba tiene una historia escondida, misteriosa; tiene sus tradiciones populares que nadie ha dado a luz: indolencia forzosa de sus hijos, ignorancia evange´lica de los sucesores de Diego Vela´zquez. El primer cuidado del triste viajero ha sido recoger y guardar como un tesoro, apuntes importantes para esta historia. (1841, vii) [the island of Cuba has a hidden, mysterious history; it has its popular traditions that no one has yet brought to light: the compulsory indolence of its sons, the evangelic ignorance of the successors of Diego Velazquez. The first concern of the sad traveler has been to collect and preserve as a treasure important notes for writing this history.]

Once again in this quotation we see the typical combination of familiarization and distance, with gestures of incorporation—for instance, favorably rendered terms such as treasure and the assertion of Cuba’s profound linkage with Spain (‘‘the successors of Diego Velazquez’’)—paired side by side with orientalist-style constructions of otherness, including references to darkness, sloth, and ignorance (‘‘no one has yet brought to light,’’ ‘‘compulsory indolence,’’ ‘‘evangelic ignorance’’) and acknowledgment of enigmatic difference (‘‘hidden, mysterious history’’), the overall impression of which is presented as personally depressing (‘‘sad traveler’’). Even an enthusiastic Americanist such as Salas y Quiroga cannot avoid this dualism, as when he ponders the extraordinary differences between Spanish and Latin American customs: Cualquiera puede creer, al recordar el origen de aquella poblacio´n, su gobierno y relaciones, que son muchos los puntos de contacto que tienen con nuestros ha´bitos y costumbres las de aquellos paı´ses. Sin em-

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bargo, nada hay menos parecido que nuestro cara´cter moderno, y el de nuestros hermanos de ultramar. (1840, 270) [Anyone might believe, recalling the origins of that population, its government and relations, that the habits and customs of those nations would share many points of contact with our own. However, there are no two things less similar than our modern character and the character of our brothers across the sea.]

Though this passage ends with a somewhat incongruous allusion to pan-Hispanic fraternity (‘‘our brothers across the sea’’), the foreignness—and, specifically, non-Spanishness—of Latin American society is underscored throughout via the repeated use of nuestros (‘‘ours,’’ referring to Spain) and aquellos (‘‘those,’’ referring to Latin America). As for the final sentence: the extraordinary ambivalence of those two dueling uses of nuestro (the first ‘‘our’’ clearly exclusionary, the second purportedly inclusive) speaks for itself. In considering these characterizations of Latin American travel, it appears that a large number of the criteria that Todorov and Ce´lestin cite as favoring exotic representation are in ample evidence here: a distant location; readily available examples of ‘‘strange’’ customs, sites, and circumstances; largely subordinate, nonuttering others; a traveler-observer apparently intent on conserving a unified (here: European/colonialist) sense of self. And, as mentioned, an exotic aestheticization of difference is indeed identifiable in at least some representations of American nature. What is seldom in evidence, though, is any effort to exoticize Latin American society, either through tactics of aestheticization or—most especially—in Bongie’s sense of an evaluative role-reversal whereby the ‘‘uncivilized’’ becomes valorized for its successful retention of desirable lifestyles and values already lost, to its detriment, by modern European society. As Lily Litvak has observed, paraphrasing Jacques Berque, this is likely a response to colonialism: ‘‘la literatura colonialista no revaloriza la diferencia con Occidente como lo hace el exotismo, sino que postula el encuentro con dos civilizaciones como una irrupcio´n . . . del mundo civilizado en un mundo atrasado’’ (1986, 13–14) [colonialist literature does not valorize differentiation from the West as does exoticism, but rather postulates the two civilizations’ encounter as one where the civilized world bursts into a world of backwardness]. Though it should be noted that authors from some colonial powers certainly did produce highly exoticized renderings of their

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nation’s territorial holdings (one thinks, in particular, of nineteenth-century French accounts of Algeria), such a perspective is by and large absent from accounts of Spanish journeys to the Americas. After all, while French travelers in Algeria and Spanish travelers in Latin America both stood on land recently torn by colonial warfare, France had emerged victorious in its battle while Spain had been vanquished. Small wonder, in such a context, that nineteenth-century Spanish narratives of the Americas typically avoid even the appearance of questioning the superiority of European—or, more specifically, Spanish—social and ideological constructs and portray any Latin American deviation from that model as an ill-advised and often dangerous deficiency rather than a source of exotic fascination. It is interesting at this point to think of how Spanish writings on Latin America might compare, overall, with the accounts of travel to North Africa discussed in the preceding chapter. Though chronicles on these two locations do display certain significant differences (Maghrebi narrations, for example, routinely do include significant elements of exotic cultural evocation), there turn out to be some key similarities as well. Both, obviously, make ample use of structures characteristic of European orientalist representation, facilitating hierarchical cultural juxtaposition and the traveler-observer’s selfidentification with the ‘‘superior’’ (i.e., European) cultural schema. Both also tend to underscore this impression of cultural antagonism through reference to Spain’s actual history of military conflict with the societies in question: Latin America’s wars of independence, on the one hand, the Reconquest and contemporary Moroccan colonial campaigns on the other. What is perhaps most interesting, though, is that in both cases the efforts to construe the journey as an encounter with a strange or threatening ‘‘other’’ find themselves sharing the stage with a clear recognition of profound historical and cultural commonalities uniting that ‘‘alien’’ cultural space with that of the author’s (and readers’) own homeland of Spain. This curious balance between otherness and identity, between repulsion and attraction, can vary considerably from text to text, but both are almost always present. In neither case, then, does the opposition between self and other—presumed foundation of both orientalist and exoticist discourse—remain unproblematically intact. It should be no surprise that these particular discursive complications are far less urgently traced in Spanish chronicles of the voyage to the ‘‘extreme Orient,’’ a part of the world widely represented—

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both in Spain and beyond—as one with which Europeans would be expected to possess few if any historical, cultural, or even informational ties. Strengthening these perceptions, Spain (unlike Britain, Holland, and later France) had never viewed the acquisition of Asian colonies as a central component of its overall imperial project. Their only significant holding was the Philippine Islands and even that, though a source of national pride, had never become a focus of emigration and in part for that reason remained relatively little known in more than the most superficial sense to most Spanish citizens. In the words of Victor Balaguer, writing in 1895: Malaventuradamente, en Espan ˜ a, por regla general, reina profunda ignorancia en todo cuanto atan ˜ e a nuestro Archipie´lago, si es que no ocurre algo peor, que consiste por parte de algunos en mantener y propagar errores peligrosos. (1895, 6) [Unfortunately, in Spain, as a general rule there reigns a profound ignorance with respect to anything relating to our archipelago, if not something even worse, as occurs with those who preserve and propagate dangerous errors.]

Few Spaniards, certainly, ever visited the islands (or, for that matter, any other part of Asia) in person. Though the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 lessened both the distance and the danger of the trip, those journeying to the Philippine archipelago still faced the daunting prospect of spending five or more weeks aboard ship in order to cross nearly nine thousand miles of open water (see Gaspar 268), including a much-dreaded fifteen-hundred-mile journey from Suez to the Indian Ocean through what was variously termed the ‘‘infernal,’’ ‘‘asphyxiating,’’ and ‘‘unendurable’’ heat of the Red Sea (see, e.g., Haeckel 1883, 35–36). In addition to its geographical separation and noncentrality to Spain’s view of its imperial destiny, East Asia’s disconnection from the Spanish sense of cultural identity was, of course, underscored in myriad ways: from language, to topography, to the physical attributes of the region’s inhabitants, and beyond. For nineteenthcentury Spaniards, in other words, Asia was a part of the world that to a peculiarly high degree offered itself as a space of the ‘‘nonfamiliar,’’ identified by both Todorov and Ce´lestin as central to the construction of the exotic ideal. This does not mean that Spanish readers of the time would have had no preconceived notions of what Asia was like. As early as the 1830s Spanish periodicals such as Cartas

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espan˜olas [Spanish Letters] and El Correo de las Damas [Ladies’ Mail] were already featuring (usually anonymous) accounts of journeys to the ‘‘extremo Oriente’’ with titles like ‘‘Viaje al Japo´n: Ciudades, usos, mujeres japonesas, etc., etc.’’ [‘‘Journey to Japan: Cities, Customs, Japanese Women, Etc., Etc.’’] These texts, though, tend to rely heavily on that most pervasive metaphor of nineteenth-century orientalist representation: the identification of Asia, and particularly East Asia, as a fundamentally ‘‘unknown’’ or even ‘‘unknowable’’ space. As a result, interestingly enough, the portrayal of Asia as irreducibly alien (i.e., unfamiliar) would become an integral part of what made its representation seem verisimilar (i.e., familiar) to Europeans of the time. This circumstance proved quite handy for authors of Asian travel chronicles, inasmuch it allowed them to exalt their journey’s aura as an encounter with radical otherness and simultaneously heighten their narrative’s air of authenticity by, effectively, confirming their readers’ preexisting ‘‘knowledge’’ of oriental reality. Not surprisingly, it is a strategy that most authors readily employ. Within this corpus, it is Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano’s Panoramas orientales: Impresiones de un viajero-poeta that in my view provides perhaps the clearest—certainly the most unabashed—example of a nineteenthcentury Spanish writer’s account of a voyage into what he himself identifies as the ‘‘true exotic.’’ This 1894 chronicle—written, that is, almost at the close of Spain’s colonial era—also holds the distinction of treating a particularly broad range of ideological and representational issues drawn from the realm of European orientalist thought, including the role of literature and art in constructions of cultural identity, and thus provides a worthy transoceanic counterpoint to the Maghrebi narrations considered in chapter 3. For these reasons, as well as its being an intriguing (though also frustrating) text in its own right, Alcala´’s Panoramas will serve as the primary focus of my remaining remarks regarding Spanish representations of the ‘‘distant other.’’ Alcala´ is remembered today primarily, if at all, for his longtime friendship with Benito Pe´rez Galdo´s. He was, in fact, a frequent companion on Galdo´s’s foreign travel adventures, including the journey to Italy described in chapter 2 (see Galdo´s 1942, 6:1741). He was also, however, an author in his own right with many journalistic articles, works of poetry, short fiction, and literary translations from four different languages to his credit.6 Galdo´s’s prologue to Estereoscopio social [Social Stereoscope], one of Alcala´’s early poetry collections, can give an idea of his varied literary endeavors:

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a ma´s de sus numerosı´simas y hermosas poesı´as originales, ha traducido en verso las obras enteras de Leopardi, el Manfredo de Byron (ya publicado), el Caı´n del mismo autor, una buena parte del Hamlet, el canto primero del Paraı´so perdido, el de las Geo´rgicas y algunas poesı´as de Goethe, . . . habiendo hecho adema´s ensayos en la novela (La media naranja), en la zarzuela (El aire de una mujer), y teniendo como tiene un caudal extraordinario de artı´culos humorı´sticos y crı´ticos desparramados por toda la prensa. (1872, xxiv–xxv) [in addition to his numerous beautiful original poems, he has translated in verse the complete works of Leopardi, Byron’s Manfred (already published), Cain by the same author, a good part of Hamlet, the first Canto of Paradise Lost and of the Georgics, and some poems by Goethe, . . . having also tried his hand at the novel (The Other Half ), light opera (Air of a Woman), and having as he does an extraordinary wealth of humorous and critical articles scattered throughout the whole of the press.]

The young Galdo´s would conclude confidently (if not, in retrospect, accurately) that ‘‘la senda aquella que pocos han empezado a recorrer con tan seguro pie como Alcala´ Galiano, no sera´ olvidada’’ (1872, xxiii–xxxiv) [the route that few have embarked upon with such a sure foot as Alcala´ Galiano will not be forgotten].7 Alcala´ maintained the family tradition begun by his grandfather, Antonio Alcala´ Galiano, and uncle, Juan Valera, of combining literary pursuits with public service, becoming a career consular official whose professional responsibilities led him, in his words, to ‘‘peregrinar, navegar, y ferrocarrilear . . . el inmenso globo que habitamos . . . de norte a sur y de este a oeste’’ (1894, 2)8 [peregrinate, navigate, and railroad-ate . . . the immense globe we inhabit . . . from north to south and from east to west]. This claim is not mere hyperbole. As demonstrated by Garcı´a-Romeral Pe´rez (1995, 37), Alcala´’s peripatetic diplomatic career eventually led him to postings in seven different nations on four continents: Vatican City (1866); Jerusalem (1867); Charleston, South Carolina (1878); Newcastle, England (1882); Singapore (1893–94); Lisbon (1908); and Tunis (1910). The firsthand experience with other lands, peoples, and literatures that these journeys afforded him is everywhere apparent in his literary writings: from his taste for translation, to the imitation of foreign (especially non-Western) models in his own fictional works, and, of course, to what is somewhat surprisingly his only published venture into the realm of travel narration, Panoramas orientales. Even a quick perusal of Panoramas uncovers a number of atten-

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tion-grabbing attributes with respect to its consideration of the oriental world. One is the discovery that, though primarily focused on Ceylon and Singapore, its point-to-point account of the long steamship voyage from Barcelona to the Strait Settlements also provides narration of stopovers along the southeastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea (4). Alcala´’s travel narration thus spans both varieties of ‘‘Orient’’ as they would have been conceived to exist at the time: that is, what Said has called the ‘‘Traditional Orient’’ of the Mediterranean basin as well as the ‘‘Extreme Orient’’ of Eastern Asia. Though the intercultural transferrability of metaphors is a notable component of the European conception of non-European cultures (see Boehmer 1995, 52), there also exist a significant number of representational strategies and popular connotations specific only to one of the two primary zones of oriental space, some of which—as discussed in chapter 3—were of particular sensitivity to authors from Spain. It will thus be interesting to see how Alcala´ negotiates the passage from one Orient to the next, and to consider in the service of what literary or ideological ends he does so. This aspect of Panoramas orientales turns out not to be the only one to call to mind issues raised in the course of chapter 3. Another appears on the cover page, where Alcala´’s choice of the subtitle Impressions of a Traveler-Poet, unmistakably announces his intention that the contours of his first-person traveler persona should not be understood to derive from his role as consular official—though that is what had made possible his voyage—but rather from his own selfidentity as wandering poet. This discovery raises the question of whether, within the narration itself, Alcala´’s insistence on this poetic identity will eventually lead him to retread Alarco´n’s rather fitful perspectival path, on which the acting out of tensions between the professional and artistic components of his narrative personality often virtually commandeers his narrative project, and whether too there will be a repeat of Alarco´n’s ‘‘poetic’’ predilection for constructing the space of his oriental encounters out of the pages of European orientalist literature. The short answer to both questions is yes: Alcala´ presents his readers with a narrative that is by turns a scrapbook of rather cliche´d orientalist travel impressions, a meditation on the role of literature—in particular, poetry—in the creation of cultural identity, a reflection on colonialism and the political, genetic, and ethical justifications of empire, and a voyage of personal discovery (or ‘‘Yodisea,’’ to use Alcala´’s own term: an odyssey of the self ). Also like Alarco´n’s text, and for that matter like most textual

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representations of encounters with difference, Alcala´’s chronicle is in many respects internally riven. The ways in which he attempts, and fails, to craft a cohesive response to the experience of the exotic will form the basis of the following commentary of his work.

 Quid brevi fortes iaculamur aevo multa? Quid terras alio calentes sole mutamus? Patriae quis exsul se quoque fugit? —Horace, Carmina II.16 [Why do we spend our short lives acquiring possessions? Why do we travel to lands warmed by a foreign sun? What exile from his homeland ever escaped himself ?]

One of the most inescapable characteristics of Panoramas orientales, at least on a first reading, is the exuberance with which Alcala´ seems to embrace the full gamut of opportunities afforded him by the oppositionalist vein of common orientalist cliche´: relying on representational mechanisms, that is, those that in Said’s consecrated phrase ‘‘promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)’’ (1979, 43). Though this strategy has been seen in the forms of orientalist writing discussed in chapter 3 as well, in those instances, it is worth remembering, the pretense of cultural opposition was seldom sustained. In Alcala´’s case, though, virtually every page of his chronicle seems focused on underscoring his overarching preoccupation with the preservation of East/West dichotomies by repeatedly and explicitly defining oriental cultures as irreducibly different from, incomprehensible to, and incompatible with the ‘‘familiar’’ world (shared by author and reader) of European society. The fact that his Orient is largely that of Eastern Asia obviously facilitates this task. Among other things, it makes available to him the powerful metaphor of immense geographic separation, ubiquitously cited in Western representations of distant others as a means of underscoring cultural opposition. Alcala´, not surprisingly, does this as well, in some cases by pairing the term Oriente with adjectives such as remotı´simo or extremo [very remote, extreme], in others by stressing the real or imagined ‘‘peligros y molestias’’ (4) [dangers and nuisances] he endured in completing the journey across ‘‘110 grados de la longitud terrestre, 2,200 leguas en lı´nea recta, o 6,960

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millas en curvas, subidas y bajadas durante cuatro semanas’’ (4) [100 degrees of terrestrial longitude, which is 2,200 leagues as the crow flies or 6,960 miles in curves, ups, and downs over the course of four weeks] in order to span the distance from Barcelona to Singapore. This geographical isolation, once firmly established, can serve as an explanation/illustration of oriental cultural impenetrability, as in the following passage in which Alcala´ seeks to convey the peculiarity and essential incomprehensibility of Chinese society via geographical analogy: ‘‘La China puede decirse que constituye una geografı´a aparte: la China es, como si dije´ramos, una especie de asteroide pegado a la tierra’’ (31) [it can be said that China constitutes a geography apart; China is, shall we say, a sort of asteroid stuck onto the earth]. These allusions to the geographical barriers separating Orient and Occident often function in tandem with equally daunting temporal dislocations. This tactic, as many scholars have noted, is also a commonplace of orientalist writing generally. In Litvak’s formulation: ‘‘Todo en Asia conduce al mito. . . . Todo es antiguo y remoto y va ma´s alla´ de la historia humana’’ (1986, 62) [Everything in Asia leads to myth. . . . Everything is ancient and remote and goes beyond human history]. These juxtapositions grow from the opposition of a European culture predicated on the notion of progress with an Asian worldview based on conservation of the past. As Alcala´ would have it: Viaje al extremo Oriente, no como los otros a trave´s del espacio, sino a trave´s del tiempo, pues cada milla recorrida era un escalo´n de oro por el que, remontando la escala de la Historia y el torrente de los siglos, me transportaba . . . a las regiones poeme´ticas de lo cristalizado, lo dormido, lo inmo´vil, lo que parece sustraerse a la rotacio´n del astro y del tiempo. . . . Viajar hacia allı´ no es avanzar kilo´metros, sino retroceder cronologı´as. (2–3) [The journey to the Far East, unlike others that move through space, but rather through time, with each mile traversed like a golden stair by which, descending the ladder of History and the rush of centuries, transported me back . . . to the poematic regions of the crystallized, of the slumbering, of the immobile, of that which seems to remove itself from the rotation of star and time. . . . To journey there is not to advance kilometers but to turn back chronologies.]

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Though the employment of images of temporal regression is not always dependent on geographical separation (as evidenced by the fact that they also occasionally appear in Spanish assessments of Morocco, located but a few miles from Spain’s coast), Alcala´ clearly links the two in the preceding quotation. In the same spirit he again cites China, the most geographically remote of the cultures he observes, as the most extreme example of this tendency: ‘‘toda su raza,’’ he claims, ‘‘se ha sustraı´do a la rotacio´n social y a la evolucio´n histo´rica’’ (33) [the entire race has removed itself from social rotation and historic evolution] to such an extent that the Chinese people—‘‘heteroge´neo con la humana especie’’ (34) [heterogeneous to the human species]—may not, in his estimation, even merit a place in the Darwinian schema of human development.9 Another prominent source of opposition between East and West can be located in Alcala´’s many allusions to perceived differences between the European and the non-European mind. Again following the well-worn cliche´s of countless other orientalist texts, Panoramas orientales features numerous denigrating references to the nonWestern world’s presumably nonintellectual, irrational, frequently inexplicable approach to life. Those identified as orientals— whether they might live in northern Africa or southeastern Asia— are routinely subjected to dehumanizing characterizations as savages, animals, madmen, or demons. Here, for example, is Alcala´’s description of the Arabs he briefly observes from shipboard in Port Said as his steamship prepares to enter the Suez Canal: [La] rojiza y movible luz da un tinte infernal a la nocturna tarea de los fellahs, diablos desnudos, relucientes y sudosos . . . con agilidad de monos, fuerza y sumisio´n de bestias y gritos de dementes, entonando una especie de canto llano frene´tico o discordantes y desaforados gritos. (7) [The reddish and movable light gives an infernal hue to the nocturnal work of the fellahs, naked devils, sweating and glimmering . . . with the agility of monkeys, the strength and submissiveness of beasts, and shrieks of the demented, intoning a sort of frenetic plainsong or discordant and terrible shouts.]

Needless to say, there is little here to bespeak an interest in ‘‘opening a dialogue and exchange with the east’’ (Kushigian 1991, 3). In Alcala´, as in nineteenth-century Spain generally, the dynamics of lat-

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ter-day colonialism made nonhierarchical representation infrequent and, when attempted, difficult to sustain. Residents of Eastern Asia sometimes do not fare much better than their African counterparts, though in Alcala´ their characterizations tend more toward the merely subhuman rather than the demonic. The Chinese, for example, are described as ‘‘ants’’ on four occasions (22, 32, 37, 39), and elsewhere as ‘‘beasts,’’ ‘‘centaurs,’’ and ‘‘burros’’ (38). Culturally, temperamentally, and genetically opposed to rational thought, ‘‘[un chino] residira´ treinta an ˜ os en Parı´s, y resistira´ a las seducciones de la diosa Razo´n’’ (34) [(a Chinaman) can live thirty years in Paris and will resist the seductions of the goddess Reason]. It perhaps goes without saying that Europeans, by contrast, are commonly cast as rational, logical, and mature, with ‘‘el cerebro ennoblecido con la llama del saber y las frentes coronadas por las divinas aureolas del pensamiento’’ (46) [their brain ennobled with the flame of knowledge and their foreheads crowned with the divine halos of thought]. Here again the ubiquitous image of irreducible physical separation reappears, though with a physiological twist: as Alcala´ explains, ‘‘el hombre blanco, rey antropolo´gico’’ (30) [the white man, anthropological king] will never be capable of more than temporary residence in the Orient, for the simple reason that ‘‘so´lo los sesos pasados por agua y por fuego, cocidos y casi fritos de indios, chinos y malayos soportan sin sombra ni sombrilla ni sombrero aquella temperatura pirome´trica’’ (21) [only the brains, passed through water, fire, cooked, and almost fried of Indians, Chinamen, and Malays can tolerate that pyrometic temperature without shade or parasol or hat]. This notion that sustained contact with the oriental tropics was detrimental to Europeans’ health is once again a commonplace of European discourse of the time (Duncan and Gregory 1999, 159). The opposition between intellectual and brute is, in turn, closely linked to yet other orientalist cliche´s that Alcala´ dutifully reproduces in his text. One of these is the tendency to describe the space of Asia as a realm of raw nature, where human intervention is largely irrelevant or even impossible. As in orientalist writings generally, Alcala´’s treatment of this topos often conveys a curious admixture of celebration and fear. Amid occasional assertions such as ‘‘El verdadero intere´s esta´ cuando, saliendo del recinto urbano, se lanza uno al mar de la verdura y se entrega al encanto de aquella forestal virginidad de la naturaleza que por todas partes nos rodea’’ (23) [what is truly interesting is when, leaving the urban enclave, one throws one-

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self into the sea of green and gives in to the charm of that sylvan virginity of nature that surrounds us on all sides] and ‘‘a´rboles de todas clases y climas se abrazan, se besan, se prestan sus mismos jugos, beben la misma vida en la misma copa’’ (25) [trees of all classes and climates embrace, kiss, lending each other their juices, drinking life itself from the same cup], the encounter with raw nature elsewhere becomes decidedly unpleasant or threatening. In such moments Acala´ finds himself constrained to admit a preference for the little manicured parks of Britain’s colonial capitals, where the potentially frightening exuberance of oriental nature is kept carefully under control by ‘‘la cuidadosa mano municipal inglesa’’ (23) [the careful municipal hand of the British].10 The intellectual versus brute paradigm is also visible in Alcala´’s assertion of the childlike qualities of Asian societies and individuals. In Panoramas orientales adult Indian men have a ‘‘simpa´tica expresio´n infantil’’ (30) [appealing childlike expression], while the Chinese live ‘‘en perpetua infancia e incapacidad de civilizada madurez’’ (33) [perpetual childhood incapable of civilized maturity]. Similarly, while Europeans are claimed to have produced much great art, non-Europeans are restricted to becoming great art. Asian painters and sculptors, though deemed capable of producing works of pleasing color and emotion, are said to have proved unable to duplicate Western artists’ supreme command of the human form: ‘‘la figura humana les escapa,’’ ‘‘los cuerpos [son] incorrectos’’ (36) [the human figure is beyond them; the bodies (are) wrong]. In contrast, three young beggar girls encountered in Ceylon ‘‘parecı´an tres figurillas de ha´bil artista’’ (19) [seemed three figurines by a skilled artist]; Singhalese men unabashedly display ‘‘su desnudez praxiteliana’’ (17) [their Praxitelian nudity]; indeed, ‘‘Ceila´n es una academia libre; el modelo esta´ en cada esquina’’ (20) [Ceylon is a free academy; there is a model on every street corner]. Such remarks, though highlighting the corporeal beauty of Ceylon’s native inhabitants, also reaffirm a basic paradigm of much orientalist writing— European as subject versus Oriental as object—and its corollaries: observer versus observed, adult versus child, authority versus incapacity, creative intellect versus raw material, artist versus artwork. In reading through the preceding paragraphs it can seem almost inconceivable that Galdo´s, in a newspaper article published only a few years before Panoramas orientales was written, should have characterized Alcala´ as a man of ‘‘entendimiento general y flexible’’ (1973, 277) [general and flexible understanding] possessing ‘‘tanta gracia

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y originalidad para expresar sus ideas, que su conversacio´n es encantadora y su compan ˜ ´ıa inapreciable’’ (1973, 277) [as much grace and originality in expressing his ideas as his conversation is enchanting and his company unmatched]. Though it would certainly be unfair to judge Alcala´ by today’s standards, even within the late nineteenthcentury context it is hard to associate words like flexible, grace, and originality with the kinds of strident orientalist textual posturing on which he chooses to elaborate his text. And as has already been seen, within the realm of orientalist representation there did exist ample precedent for softening the hard edges of such cultural juxtapositions, had he only chosen to employ them. One might then well ask why Alcala´ adopts this particular tone. It seems to me there are several reasons. One has to do with historical context, another with his audience. A third significant factor—deriving in part from the other two, but ultimately leading in a somewhat different direction—results from the specifically ‘‘poetic’’ identity Alcala´ has determined to inhabit in his text. With regard to the question of historical context, it is worth remembering that when Alcala´ wrote Panoramas orientales in 1894, Spain’s continued ability to identify itself as an imperial power— even a substantially debilitated one—had reached a critical stage. The growing resistance to continued Spanish rule in both of its most prized remaining colonies (Cuba and the Philippines) was no secret. Sa´nchez Fuertes reports that, thanks to widespread press coverage, ‘‘ample sectors of Spanish society’’ were already well aware of the atmosphere of prerevolutionary tensions in the Philippines as early as the 1860s, in part explaining the ‘‘psychosis about revolution’’ that took hold in national diplomatic circles after the Cavite uprising of 1872 (Solano 1989, 429). Also well publicized was the fact that this final death rattle of a once-mighty empire was occurring precisely at a moment of explosive colonial expansion by many other European nations, most especially Spain’s historical rivals Britain and France (the latter of which, adding further salt to the wound, was actively trying to gobble up the last of Spain’s scanty African holdings in Morocco and Guinea [see, e.g., Tun ˜ o´n 1961, 229]).11 Rodrı´guez Gonza´lez reminds us that perceptions of the so-called yellow peril of Chinese and Japanese expansionism were likewise widespread, with the Philippines by 1890 surpassing Cuba and Puerto Rico as site of Spanish military deployment of ships, personnel, and financial expenditure (in Rodao 1989, 211). The considerable malaise produced by the government’s stumbling colonial policies was

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further exacerbated by a host of other highly visible social and economic problems within Spain itself. As Alcala´ put it at the beginning of his Panoramas: ‘‘estamos al borde de la bancarrota y el Banco roto y el Estado roto, la cabeza rota y todas las roturas imaginables’’ (3) [we are at the brink of bankruptcy with a broken Bank, a broken State, a broken head, and every other breakage imaginable].12 As with Spanish depictions of so many other non-European destinations, in other words, Spain’s moribund colonial pretensions here once more suggest themselves as a key motivator of textual perspective. The question is how Alcala´ will respond to this acknowledgment of loss. Unlike Alarco´n, whose meditations on an earlier moment of anagnorisis in Spain’s declining colonial fortunes contribute to his text’s constant jumbling of cultural models and hierarchies, ultimately leading (at least in some passages) to a repudiation of the entire European imperialist project, Alcala´ would seem to have reacted to Spain’s end-of-century crisis in a very different, but in some sense equally predictable way: that is, by essentially denying its existence, emitting with last-stand bluster a veritable avalanche of inflexible East versus West cultural assessments through at least the veneer of unquestioned Eurocentric superiority and self-assurance. This posture is already familiar, at least in its general outline, from the Latin American travel narratives discussed earlier. In both cases, there is an attempt to consolidate Spain’s role as a specifically European entity, with ‘‘Europe’’ clearly conceived as an integral whole. This strategy serves to incorporate Spain into the dominant geopolitical and economic spaces of power, thereby facilitating the construction of Spanish identity within the text in ways that Spain’s own national fortunes, examined in isolation, would not have sustained: that is, as a viable imperial power. It is not inconsequential in this respect that the most immediate audience of Alcala´’s orientalist chronicle—first delivered as a lecture in May 1894 a few months prior to its publication in book form—were the members of Madrid’s Ateneo Cientı´fico, Literario y Artı´stico [Scientific, Literary, and Artistic Athenaeum]. The text, in other words, was written for what amounted to la cre`me de la cre`me of the intellectual and power elite of Spain’s capital city, by an author who just as clearly wants to stake his claim to deserving inclusion within those same ranks. This tight and highly homogeneous circle uniting author, text, and original audience informs the representation of both that circle itself and those excluded from its bounds. Here too a predictable result would be the adoption of rigid

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oppositional schemas and an airing of cultural and intellectual haughtiness, which are—at least in many passages—precisely what we find. It is likely in part for this reason that Panoramas orientales so insistently announces its own premise of exteriority. As Alcala´ reminds his audience on several occasions, the fact that he has traveled to the Orient should not, in and of itself, lead them to suspect that he has renegotiated in any way the Euro-centered cultural identity from which he scans, separate and above, the peculiarities of the oriental world: ‘‘No pense´is . . . que soy un renegado de mi civilizacio´n. Hijo de ella soy, en ella he nacido y por y para ella vivo’’ (41) [do not think . . . that I am a renegade from my civilization. I am her son, in her was I born, and through and for her I live].13 Because of this stance Alcala´ will typically not attempt to ground his claim to knowledge of the Orient on any kind of inherent, intimate familiarity with the cultures he describes. Instead, and again very much in tune with the erudite circle in which he delivered his talk, he will set out to convince his audience of the credibility of his sources. Alcala´ seems to derive his information about both the Arab and East Asian worlds in one of three ways: personal observation, clinical experimentation, or scholarly erudition. In the first category can be placed many of the more ‘‘picturesque’’ elements of his text— allusions, for example, to the vibrant colors of Asian clothing or the physical attributes of the different races he has occasion to observe, often from the safe distance of his steamship berth or, as in the following example, from the window of the Spanish consular office: ¡Que´ especta´culo fanta´stico ofrecı´an . . . aquellas razas asia´ticas con sus vistosos trajes y sus esple´ndidas desnudeces! Los membrudos malayos, los graciosos singaleses, los majestuosos chitties, con sus blancas togas, sus afeitadas cabezas y sus soberbios perfiles de emperadores romanos, y los klings como Antinoos de bronce, y los elegantes malabares, y los bengaleses, con los enormes turbantes que embellecen sus expresivas cabezas, y los parsis, adoradores del fuego, con sus blancas tu´nicas, y los amarillentos e impasibles chinos. (29–30) [What a fantastic spectacle those Asian races offered . . . with their showy garments and splendid nakedness! The brawny Malays; the amusing Singalese; the majestic Chitties with their white togas, their shaved heads, and proud profiles of a Roman emperor; and the Klings each like an Antinous in bronze; and the elegant Malabars and the Bengalis with their enormous turbans beautifying their expressive heads; and the Par-

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sis, fire-worshipers, with their white tunics; and the yellow, impassive Chinese.]

Occasionally his conclusions are based not on what he sees, but what he hears. His undisguised antipathy for Arab cultures, for example, is expressed by repeated remarks about the guttural ugliness of their language (6, 7), while his sympathy for the innocence and childlike openness of Malay society is echoed in his approving (and, simultaneously, deexoticizing) references to their language’s harmonious tones and ‘‘clara pronunciacio´n de vocales, que le asemejan al espan ˜ ol’’ (29) [clear pronunciation of vowels, which likens it to Spanish]. In contrast to Alarco´n, who seems eagerly to have pursued any available opportunity to converse with Moroccans despite the existing state of war, Alcala´ gives patently little indication that he sought to have much meaningful contact with the native inhabitants of any of the lands he visited on his journey. One obstacle, of course, is that as with most Western travelers he did not speak any of the local Asian languages. However, the fact that Singapore was a British colony would suggest that anyone with an excellent command of English, such as Alcala´, could have encountered local citizens with whom to converse. If he did, he certainly did not make room in his text for this ‘‘uttering other,’’ to use Ce´lestin’s term. Instead he chooses to adopt as his own that fairly standard strain of orientalist discourse in which, as described by Duncan, ‘‘the native is certainly not summoned in order to speak his mind . . . but rather to be seen, to stand in for the Orient, which is to say to add to the picturesqueness of the scene’’ (in Duncan and Gregory 1999, 157). It should be noted, though, that the representation of Asians in Panoramas orientales, as in many similar texts, does not always remain within the realm of ‘‘picturesqueness,’’ strictly speaking. It often functions in an explicit way to hammer home the notion of European cultural and intellectual superiority—a process in which, admittedly, the picturesque also plays a part, but via subtler means. In the few instances when Alcala´ actually encounters Asians (as opposed to merely describing them) the individuals involved are never portrayed as friends or confidants—much less ‘‘hermanos,’’ as in the case of both Salas de Quiroga and Alarco´n—but rather are most often cast as unwitting participants in some form of experiment designed to provide proof of one or another characteristic of the oriental world. For example, in order to prove that unquestion-

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ing obedience coupled with lack of personal initiative are inherent to Chinese culture, Alcala´ conducts an experiment at home with his Chinese servant: [Los chinos] son el ideal de la domesticidad, son la carne humana hecha ma´quina de servir. Le decı´s al chino: haz esto, y lo hara´ 365 veces al an ˜o con puntualidad de crono´metro. ¿No le decı´s nada? Vera´ muerto vuestro perro y no le levantara´ ası´ se cubra de gusanos. Yo deje´ durante una semana, para prueba, un sombrero en el suelo; mi chino respeto´ su inmovilidad, su esta´tica. (37) [(The Chinese) are the ideal of domesticity; they are human flesh turned into serving machine. You say to a Chinaman: do this, and he will do it 365 times a year with the punctuality of a chronometer. You say nothing to him? He’ll watch your dog die and do nothing until it is covered with maggots. As proof of this, I left a hat on the floor for a week; my Chinaman respected its immobility, its stasis.]

This type of empirical analysis is once again intended to underscore the barriers between East and West and to provide yet another example of the perceived rational, logical, and practical qualities of the European mind. A large percentage of the information included in Panoramas orientales, however, is obtained neither from personal observation nor from social experimentation. Despite his efforts to portray his account as an informal ‘‘velada familiar’’ (4) [family gathering] or ‘‘cuento sencillo’’ (3) [simple tale] of his travel experiences, most of Alcala´’s remarks are of a scholarly nature, the result of the author’s apparently broad familiarity with many fields of orientalist erudition. Having worked for many years in the Spanish diplomatic service, he is able to provide his listeners with detailed information regarding the colonial history, current governmental structure, population, racial composition, and principal economic interests of virtually every country, island, or promontory located between Barcelona and Singapore. He claims familiarity with not only Christian religious history, but also the precepts of Buddhism, the Hindu pantheon of gods, Confucianism’s ‘‘Ta-Hio’’ and ‘‘Tchung-Yung,’’ and the Islamic concepts of ‘‘Kismet y Kehfh’’ (at one point quoting from the Quran in the original Arabic). His knowledge of geography proves to be extensive as well: Panoramas orientales is filled with the names of exotic cities, lakes, and mountain ranges, most of them expressed in their original languages.14 In the realm of scientific in-

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formation, Alcala´—the well-prepared traveler—not only knows the Latin names of the plants he encounters when touring the Singhalese rain forest, he is also able to explain to his uninformed audience why it is that the Red Sea, with its ‘‘one hundred degree waters’’ that would ordinarily evaporate ‘‘at a rate of twenty-three feet annually,’’ is able to keep a relatively constant depth year after year (9). Most of this information, needless to say, derives from written sources (books, maps, political treatises) and thus could easily have been obtained prior to, or even in lieu of, actual contact with ‘‘oriental reality.’’ Alcala´’s familiarity with European erudition in the end reveals a good deal about the image he wishes to convey of the place he occupies within his own society but ultimately does little to support the contention that he, by virtue of his travels, has acquired any kind of significant personal experience of non-Western culture. Typically enough, the fact that Alcala´ so carefully safeguards his traveler persona from mingling with so-called oriental culture does not prevent him from vaunting his ability intellectually to apprehend (explicate, control, possess) the societies he observes. Indicative of this authoritative narrative posture, Alcala´ displays a clear predilection for appending the possessive adjective mi [my] to his description of individuals and attributes of the oriental world (‘‘mi chino,’’ ‘‘mi cava´s turco,’’ ‘‘mi cochero malayo,’’ ‘‘mis barcas graciosas, mis colores pintorescos, mis airosos turbantes’’ [37, 41, 42; my Chinaman; my Turkish cava´s; my Malay driver; my amusing boats, my picturesque colors, my elegant turbans]), as well as a certain taste for sweeping statements of cultural definition (‘‘El calor y el color: he aquı´ los distintivos del Oriente. En sudando y viendo telas rojas, azules o amarillas, Oriente tenemos’’ [6; Color and heat: These are what define the Orient. In sweating and seeing red, blue, or yellow fabrics, we have the Orient]). These tendencies obviously link back again to the always-simmering question of colonialism, and indeed we find in Alcala´—despite a protestation early on that he prefers not to comment on ‘‘el derecho natural o artificial, polı´tico o internacional de tales conquistas, compras o anexaciones’’ (12) [the natural or artificial, political or international right to such conquests, purchases, and annexations]—a decidedly benevolent view of the European presence in nonEuropean lands. True, he does admit that certain colonial powers— specifically Holland and Portugal—had at times become ‘‘odiosos por su tiranı´a y su codicia’’ (16) [hateful for their tyranny and

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greed], but his description of the institution of empire in general is highly laudatory, as is his characterization of the imperialist practices of both Britain and Spain.15 With regard to the Philippines, for example, his remarks give no sense whatever that he realizes (though as a diplomatic official he clearly does) the precarious nature of his nation’s continued ownership of a region consisting, in Salom Costa’s phrase, of ‘‘territorios poco colonizados, en los que se sostienen continuas campan ˜ as contra parte de la poblacio´n indı´gena, y sobre los que se dibuja cada vez con ma´s fuerza la amenaza potencial de otros imperialismos’’ (Solano 1989, 523) [littlecolonized territories, where continuous campaigns are waged against part of the indigenous population, and over which hovers with ever greater intensity the potential threat of other imperialisms]. Instead, he blithely portrays the islands’ colonial status as an unquestioned fact of life and seems primarily concerned with convincing his government to send to ‘‘our archipelago’’ (22) only highly educated, cultured colonists: ‘‘hombres doctos y honrados’’ (5) [learned and honorable men] who, unlike the questionable characters (‘‘semipersonajes’’) he observed with distaste on the boat to Manila, do not ‘‘com[er] con el cuchillo hasta las fresas’’ (5) [eat even strawberries with their knife]. However, since his actual journey did not lead him to the Philippines but rather through the British-held colonies of Ceylon and Singapore, most of his musings on European imperialism tend to draw their examples from Britain. For Alcala´, the British Empire and its colonial enterprise merit only the highest praise, as suggested by passages repeatedly stressing both the altruism of its goals and the happiness of colonized peoples. The inhabitants of Ceylon, for example, are said to be grateful to their English overlords, who ‘‘concluyeron por hacerla rica, pro´spera y envidiable colonia’’ (16) [turned it into a rich, prosperous, and enviable colony]. Just as residents of Ceylon live contentedly ‘‘al amparo de las leyes inglesas y la tutela de su colonia inglesa . . . sabiamente regida por un gobernador’’ (16) [under the protection of British law and the tutelage of the British colony . . . wisely ruled by a governor], Singapore, we are told, is inundated with residents of other Asian nations who flock to the British colony in the hope of living ‘‘al amparo de las libertades, leyes, policı´a, orden y limpieza brita´nicas’’ (36) [under the protection of British liberties, laws, police, order, and cleanliness].16 These characterizations also have ample precedent in European colonialist discourse of the time, from the avoidance of reference to

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colonial rebellion to the image of grateful savages and the notion that European colonizers deserve credit for ‘‘teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty’’ (Said 1979, 172).17 Enrique Gaspar’s 1885 Viaje a China [Journey to China], portions of which are devoted to British-held Singapore and Hong Kong, strikes virtually the same tone as Alcala´ with regard to its pronounced admiration for the European imperial project (and, specifically, that of Britain) as an extraordinary civilizing achievement. While in Hong Kong, for example, Gaspar reports ecstatically on the lovely European-style architecture, orderly urban grid and high culture of the British-dominated sectors of the city (‘‘Hong Kong es una maravilla. . . . Asombra ver lo que los ingleses han hecho de ella en tan corto espacio’’ [1885, 263; Hong Kong is a marvel. . . . It is amazing to see what the English have made of it in such a short time]), while recoiling with physical revulsion (‘‘Horror! Abomination!’’ [1885, 268]) at what he sees as the filth, stench, physical ugliness, and brutish primitivism of areas inhabited by the Chinese (see, e.g., 257, 268, 293, 341, 362).18 Nor, certainly, was Alcala´ alone within the context of latenineteenth-century Spain in terms of his blithely unproblematic presentation of the current and projected continued success of the Spanish imperial project in the Philippines. Essentially the same tone appears, for example, in Balaguer’s Islas filipinas [Philippine Islands], published one year later in 1895: Hay que . . . levantar el ideal de la Espan ˜ a ocea´nica, conforme con la gloria indiscutible de su tradicio´n y con los altos destinos a que por sus fastos es convocada, y sobrealzar el espı´ritu generador de la raza espan ˜ ola, que tan altas y nobles tradiciones tiene en su historia de la colonizacio´n. (1895, 7) [It is necessary to . . . raise up the ideal of oceanic Spain, in accordance with the indisputable glory of its tradition and the great destiny to which by its auspicious deeds it is called, and to hold high the generative spirit of the Spanish race, which has such fine and noble traditions in its history of colonization.]

Though Balaguer’s text, drafted in conjunction with his service as Spain’s minister of overseas possessions (’’Ministro de Ultramar’’) in support of expanding the importation of Filipino goods, is much more a political program than a travel narrative, the parallelism between its presentation of Spain’s Asian empire and that found in Alcala´ is nonetheless interesting. As Cook has noted, this kind of

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‘‘waxing, confident colonizing ethos’’ is characteristic of late nineteenth-century public discourse in nations undergoing periods of explosive imperial expansion (1996, 160). What is therefore striking—though, as mentioned earlier, not illogical—is the discovery of such bombastic imperialist bluster in Spanish texts of the 1890s, when Spain’s already precarious colonial fortunes were so fast approaching their end. It is thus not surprising to discover the same sense of hold-theline bravado in Alcala´’s treatment of the exotic. As Chris Bongie has noted, by the late nineteenth century there was no hiding that previous notions of the ‘‘true exotic’’ had been made hollow or irrelevant by the processes of global change: Fin de sie`cle writers . . . were forced to confront openly what earlier writers could more easily ignore: namely, the end of the exotic—that end which from the beginning haunts it and which, toward the close of the nineteenth century, would become ever more glaringly apparent. The initial optimism of the exoticist project gives way, in the last decades of the century, to a pessimistic vision in which the exotic comes to seem less a space of possibility than one of impossibility. (1991a, 17)

Said discusses a similar notion in Orientalism, citing as both symbolic and actual turning point the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869: To the West, Asia had once represented silent distance and alienation. . . . After de Lesseps no one could speak of the orient as belonging to another world. There was only ‘‘our’’ world, ‘‘one’’ world bound together because the Suez Canal had frustrated those last provincials who still believed in the difference between worlds. (1979, 92)

Thinking about Alcala´ in this context, what is again striking is that— just as in his treatment of the colonialist project—there is no ‘‘open confrontation’’ whatever with the demise of the notion of the ‘‘exotic ideal’’ as a credible metaphorical construction. To the contrary, if we return to Ce´lestin’s schema, we find that the cultural constructions of Panoramas orientales are built largely upon the presumption of a nonshrunken globe, a nonuttering Other, and a nonfragmented Self, as well as the unaltered perception of Asia as a fundamentally nonfamiliar space. Alcala´’s seeming insistence upon maintaining the notion of stark cultural opposition between East and West even with respect to the Mediterranean Orient (here breaking with the almost universal destabilization of this opposition in Spanish travel writing

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on that part of the world) can be seen in this light as well. If Alcala´’s seeming intention to out-orientalize the orientalists in front of his Ateneo colleagues makes Panoramas orientales start to read more and more as a discursive ‘‘last hurrah’’ in defense of a particular conception of personal and cultural identity whose credibility—to the extent it had ever been viable at all—was ever-more undeniably receding into the past, perhaps it is because that is exactly what it was. It would, however, be incorrect to imply that Alcala´’s cultural comparisons remain wholly static, nor that his role as traveler/emissary is not without certain ambiguities. As a professional diplomat, Alcala´ undertakes his orientalist voyage in the service of what he still clearly conceptualizes as a European colonial metropolis, and this consciousness informs much of his text. And yet, as mentioned earlier, he also adamantly insists upon creating for himself a corollary role as a free-spirited ‘‘viajero poeta’’ [traveler poet], an identity he moreover resolutely seeks to retain despite several times acknowledging its incompatibility with the demands of his more mundane consular career. Alarco´n’s Morocco comes clearly to mind, and indeed though Alcala´’s journey differs from Alarco´n’s in important respects, many of the tensions and contradictions inherent in both works share a similar source, or at least a similar form of manifestation: that is, the equivocal ‘‘poetic’’ identity of the autobiographical narrator. In order better to understand the position that Alcala´’s bifurcated textual narrator occupies within or against both Western and Eastern societies, it is thus useful to turn to consideration of how his efforts to portray autobiographical identity intersect with his discussion of the nature of poetic discourse and poetic tradition. In his opening remarks, Alcala´ makes it clear to his Ateneo audience that European voyagers to the East, having undertaken an extremely arduous journey not only through space but also through time, occupy a privileged position with respect to their home-bound compatriots, who—though perhaps believing themselves to be worldly or cosmopolitan—in reality ‘‘so´lo han visto el mundo desde el campanario de su aldea’’ (2) [have only seen the world from their village’s bell tower]. In so saying, the ‘‘traveler poet’’ of Alcala´’s firstperson narrative reserves for himself and readily accepts the cloak of authority and implied superiority conceded to him by virtue of his harrowing journeys. In fact, according his own less-than-humble self-assessment, he speaks to his Ateneo colleagues as a Western man who has successfully completed a voyage beyond the limits of the

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Western imagination, a modern man who has retraced the steps of a thousand generations back to the earliest days of creation, a mortal man who, as do his fellow-travelers Dante, Aeneas, and Ulysses before him, ‘‘sin haber muerto, vuelv[e], como quien dice, del otro mundo y de la otra vida’’ (3) [without having died returns, as they say, from the other world and the other life]. Explicitly staking out his position as epic hero of his own autobiographical tale, Alcala´ accumulates references to, and quotations from, works like The Iliad, The Thebaid, The Divine Comedy, The Lusiads, Gerusalemme liberata, and, most insistently, The Odyssey.19 Early in his narrative, for example, he seeks to justify his invitation to speak at the Ateneo by comparing himself to Ulysses, his language mirroring that used by Homer’s King Alcinous in Book IX of The Odyssey, as Ulysses is persuaded to tell the story of his life: Justo parece que quien, como dice Ulises, ha visto de cerca las ciudades, los hombres y las costumbres venga a contaros con intimidad de amigo el cuento sencillo de sus impresiones y a entreteneros un rato con un trozo, no de su Odisea, sino de su Yodisea, la Odisea de su yo. (3) [It seems fitting that one who, as Ulysses has said, has seen cities, men and customs firsthand should come and tell you the simple story of his impressions with the intimacy of a friend and should entertain you awhile with a portion, not of his Odyssey but of his ‘‘Yodyssey,’’ the Odyssey of his Self.]

Later, echoing Ulysses’s proverbial homesickness (‘‘Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home and his parents? In far lands he shall not, though he find a house of gold’’ [Homer 1963, IX.146]),20 Alcala´ curses the peripatetic life imposed upon him by his consular career and claims that during the whole of his absence from Spain, ‘‘[yo] suspiraba por mi Europa, por mi Espan ˜ a, por mi Madrid, por mi Ateneo, por vosotros’’ (46) [I sighed for my Europe, for my Spain, for my Madrid, for my Athenaum, for all of you]. Similarly, if his voyage to the Orient can be said to evoke Ulysses’s journey to the house of Hades (it might be recalled that, for Homer, travel to the underworld entailed a perilous journey across ‘‘desolate waters, the Ocean first, where no man goes a journey without ship’s timber under him’’ [Homer 1963, XI.190]), Alcala´’s return to Spain, too, takes on clear Homeric proportions: ‘‘Llega mi nave a Itaca, a mi patria, arribo a Barcelona’’ (41) [My ship arrives at Ithaca, my country; I reach port in Barcelona].21 Finally, lest this evi-

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dent epic subtext somehow be unnoticed, Alcala´ also sprinkles his discourse with numerous Homeric touches, including an occasional ‘‘aurora home´rica abriendo con sus dedos de rosa las puertas al sol’’ (3) [Homeric dawn opening with its rosy fingers the doors to the sun], as well as references to diverse Homeric characters including Circe, the sirens, Ajax, and Antinous, and to Homer’s descriptions of the ancient cultures of Sidon and the Egyptian Thebes. Alcala´’s insistent identification of his travel narrative with the tradition of Homeric epic, while obviously related to the creation of a heroic image for the text’s first-person narrator, is also linked to a broader effort to insert both voyage and voyager into a poetic tradition that was, or at least eventually became, synonymous with Western literary endeavor. Indeed, in consonance with the almost dizzyingly erudite tenor of his travel descriptions, Alcala´’s Panoramas orientales features references to literally dozens of Western artists, authors, scientists, historians, and philosophers, as well as numerous quotations of both poetry and prose offered (usually without translation) in seven different European languages. In this sense, it is worth noting that among the Western luminaries whose names crop up at one or more points in the course of his presentation, Alcala´ explicitly identifies himself with literary figures of the caliber of Goethe, Shakespeare, Hugo, Dante, Heine, Byron, Sterne, Jules Verne, Machiavelli, and, of course, Homer.22 The first-person narrator’s erudite posture ties in with his desire to create a stark contrast between his own familiar, European world and the strange, unfathomable world of the Orient from which he has just returned. It also represents a logical extension of his effort to create a privileged role for himself as traveler/emissary within the Ateneo context: possessing knowledge and experience granted to but few, he finds himself in a position of unchallenged authority with respect to his audience. This didactic model of uneven, essentially unidirectional discourse again echoes a pattern found in much orientalist writing, in which the voice of authority—intellectual, rational, didactic, superior—is commonly reserved for those of European descent. Alcala´ himself uses similar tactics in his descriptions of the childlike malleability of Malays, Indians, Singhalese, and other Asians who readily accept and implicitly require European guidance to improve their wretched living conditions, introduce them to the concept of liberty, and convert them into useful and prosperous inhabitants of the modern world. By using this textual strategy as a means of consolidating his authority over the intellec-

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tual elite of his Ateneo audience and of carving out for his poet persona a privileged position within the hierarchy of Western poetic tradition, Alcala´ treats his Spanish public with the same patronizing discourse usually reserved for communication with ‘‘inferior’’ cultures. While, as in the preceding examples, Alcala´’s presentation of his poet persona can be seen as an effort to place himself squarely within—indeed, at the pinnacle of—Western cultural tradition, in equally insistent ways the narrator’s self-ascribed poetic consciousness appears to function in a very different sense as a means to deny any possibility of philosophical, experiential, cultural, or even literary entente between the ‘‘traveler poet’’ and the Western society from which he embarks and to which he must eventually return. In this regard Alcala´’s construction of his relation to the Orient does not remain static, but rather evolves throughout his voyage at a pace that seems to be measurable in both a physical and—most especially—a poetic sense. As his ship travels farther from Barcelona, the cultures he visits appear to him both increasingly detached from his own Western experience (i.e., foreign, incomprehensible) and at the same time increasingly poetical. The first oriental space that Alcala´ sets out to assess for his readers is that of North Africa, which he briefly glimpses during his steamship’s passage through the Suez Canal. In contrast to most Spanish accounts of the Mediterranean Orient, which tend to present North African society from a perspective combining some degree of cultural antagonism with strong doses of fraternal compassion, Alcala´’s description is overwhelmingly, indeed scathingly, negative from beginning to end. Most of his remarks focus on his ship’s brief docking in Port Said, which Alcala´, quoting Dante’s Inferno (1970, III.25–27), presents quite unambiguously as an arrival in hell: ‘‘el barco se convierte en antro donde, como el Dante, se oyen ‘Diverse lingue, orribili favelle, / parole di dolore, accenti d’ira, / voci alte e fioche e suon di man con elle’ (6) [The ship transforms into a cavern where, as in Dante, there can be heard ‘strange languages, horrible tongues, words of pain, angry tones, voices strong and hoarse, and with them the sound of hands’]. The presentation of Arab culture’s hellish nature is reinforced by repeated allusions to the region’s unbearable heat. Passing through this ‘‘infierno geogra´fico’’ [geographic hell], Alcala´’s modern steamship is transformed into ‘‘un infierno flotante, la barca de Caronte transportando almas ma´s que cuerpos hacia una laguna Estigia’’ (10) [a floating hell, Charon’s ferryboat

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transporting souls more than bodies toward the lagoon of the Styx]. As mentioned earlier, this infernal imagery carries over to the description of Arabs themselves, portrayed as frenzied ‘‘diablos desnudos’’ (7) [naked devils] bent upon destroying Christian (European) civilization: Al otro lado y tras las montan ˜ as ara´bigas, la imaginacio´n ve alzarse el espectro del visionario Mohammed, quien, con un libro son ˜ ado en la siniestra mano y la cimitarra en la diestra, enloquece a medio mundo y le lanza contra el otro, arrastrando el torrente islamita con tal ´ımpetu que en ochenta an ˜ os la Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestina, Egipto, Africa, Espan ˜ a, caen bajo el yugo musulma´n, y aquellos semisalvajes, fanatizados, ebrios, epile´pticos, se lanzan a conquistar los paraı´sos de la tierra. (11) [On the other side and behind the Arabian mountains, the imagination can see arise the spectre of the visionary Muhammad, who with a fantastical book in his left hand and scimitar in his right, drives half the world mad and makes it take arms against the other half, dragging along the Islamic torrent with such force that in eighty years Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Africa, Spain all fall under the Moslem yoke, and those fanaticized, drunken, epileptic semisavages rush out to conquer the paradises of the Earth.]

This avalanche of negatively charged terms applied to Arab cultures (‘‘siniestra,’’ ‘‘enloquecer,’’ ‘‘yugo musulma´n,’’ ‘‘semisalvajes,’’ and the rest) is placed in opposition to ‘‘los paraı´sos de la tierra’’ (i.e., Christian Europe and, in particular, Spain). The implications of this passage (Arabs versus Christians, Satan versus God, Inferno versus Paradiso) can scarcely be missed. Perhaps not surprisingly, Alcala´ claims to find nothing even remotely poetic in either the sights (‘‘llanuras este´riles,’’ ‘‘monotonı´as perpetuas’’ [8; sterile plains; perpetual monotonies]) or sounds (‘‘discordantes y desaforados gritos’’ [8; discordant and terrible shouts]) of Arab lands. Poetry, to the extent that it appears in this portion of his narrative at all, exists only in the form of the dominant voice of the Western literary tradition and is applied only to the experiences or impressions of the text’s first-person narrator. The references to The Odyssey, which are particularly frequent in this part of the narrative, serve to compare Alcala´ with both Ulysses and Homer (that is, with both ‘‘traveler’’ and ‘‘poet’’); the allusions to the Inferno, similarly, recall Dante in his role both as poet and as traveler

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to hell. The Arab literary tradition, meanwhile, is here reduced to a series of ‘‘cuentos orientales’’ [oriental tales] whose purportedly inaccurate, even deceitful, portrayal of Arab culture is deemed neither educationally useful nor artistically edifying, but rather suitable only as occasional entertainment for the children of Western societies (3, 7).23 Upon exiting the Red Sea, Alcala´ appears to prepare his readers for further descent into the hellish netherworld of non-European culture. Indeed, in light of his aforementioned characterization of the Red Sea as a tributary of the Styx, his arrival at Aden, a rocky promontory located at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, might well be seen as prelude to yet another borrowing from Homer’s account of Ulysses’s passage to the house of Hades: ‘‘Thereby into Acheron flows Pyriphlegethon, and Cocytus, a branch of the water of the Styx, and there is a rock, and the meeting of the two roaring waters’’ (Odyssey 1950, X.160).24 Instead, however, it turns out that the rock of Aden actually marks the abrupt discontinuation of Alcala´’s self-ascribed cultural descent into hell. Shifting his literary frame of reference from Homer back to Dante, he notes that the climate of the Indian Ocean is only ‘‘purgatorial,’’ rather than ‘‘infernal’’ in its intensity (13); the obvious parallels with the trajectory of Dante’s celestial journey continue as Alcala´’s steamship reaches the island of Ceylon, which he confidently and unequivocally describes as an arrival in paradise. As he informs his audience (via imagery drawn from yet another icon of the Western literary canon, John Milton): ‘‘No os canse´is estudiando la cuestio´n; yo la he resuelto. El paraı´so no estuvo; esta´ allı´ todavı´a, no perdido, sino ‘regained,’ reconquistado’’ (17) [Do not tire yourselves studying the question; I have resolved it. Paradise did not previously exist; it is still here; it was not lost but rather regained, reconquered]. We are obviously now in the realm of the exotic. This rather extraordinary shift in perspective with respect to Alcala´’s characterization of his encounters with non-Western geography is accompanied by a new role for poetry within the text. As in earlier parts of the narrative, Alcala´ continues to fill his description of the ‘‘extremo Oriente’’ with numerous references to luminaries of Europe’s ‘‘great literary tradition’’ (33)—from Homer, Apollonius, Petronius, and Virgil, to Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Machiavelli, and Camo˜es, among others. Nevertheless, it is only upon passing the rock of Aden that Alcala´ will claim to have had contact for the first time with a society that is, in itself, poetic.

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Upon entering the Indian Ocean, the awestruck European voyager is granted rare access to ‘‘esas vastı´simas costas que llevan nombres de los imperios ma´s antiguos y poe´ticos de la historia’’ (14) [those vast coasts that carry names from the oldest and most poetic empires of history]. Once ashore, he continues his journey into a privileged natural domain of harmony and equilibrium. From the ‘‘inolvidables man ˜ anas de poema’’ (18) [unforgettable poemlike mornings] and ‘‘las variadas estrofas y mosaicos del gran poema de la vegetacio´n’’ (24) [the varied stanzas and mosaics of the great poem of vegetation] of his days in Ceylon, to the ‘‘poemas de la aguja’’ [poems of the needle] of Chinese embroidery (36) and the ‘‘frutas poe´ticas’’ [poetic fruits] in the local markets (28), everything, in Alcala´’s eyes, takes on a marvelous lyric quality that, he laments, is wholly lacking not only in the nonpoetic spaces of Arab North Africa, but also in his own Western society. The description of Eastern Asia as a land of living poetry ties in quite clearly with the artist versus art object dichotomy discussed earlier in this chapter. What is interesting in this case is Alcala´’s effort to sever the Mediterranean Orient from the more exotic, presumably purer Orient of East Asia, and the relationship he then seeks to establish between that ‘‘true’’ Orient and his own narrative persona. As is perhaps not surprising, the battle between Alcala´’s consular responsibilities and poetic aspirations becomes increasingly pronounced as the text and voyage progress: while his presence on the steamship in Barcelona’s harbor is, of course, due entirely to his consular assignment, the farther he travels from Europe—that is, the more he penetrates into the exotic ‘‘poematic regions’’ (3) of Asian society—the more pronounced the poetic (or, more generally, artistic) side of his personality strives to become. In the final pages of his text, for example, he repeatedly identifies himself as ‘‘poet and artist,’’ ‘‘artist and poet,’’ ‘‘watercolorist,’’ and ‘‘traveler poet.’’ He adopts, or at least claims to adopt, many of the antiintellectual qualities elsewhere applied exclusively to nonEuropean individuals: for example, in an abrupt reversal of the superior attitude he often evinces toward his listening public, the text’s last sentence finds him requesting tolerance from his intellectual audience for the ‘‘desatinos de mis locas impresiones de viajeropoeta’’ (47) [nonsense of my crazy impressions of traveler-poet].25 In the same vein, Alcala´ (as Alarco´n before him) also makes a point of attempting to establish a clear barrier between his text and

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the inhuman drudgery of Western analytical methodology. In his introductory remarks, for example, he declares unambiguously: No os alarme´is: no vengo a ensen ˜ aros nada, ni a probaros nada, ni a aturdiros con estadı´sticas, geografı´as y cronologı´as interminables. Detesto los nu´meros. . . . Con la ayuda de mis recuerdos y sin la impedimenta de pedantesca erudicio´n, voy a abrir ante vosotros el a´lbum de mi memoria. (3–4)26 [Do not be alarmed: I have not come to teach you anything, nor to prove anything to you, nor to bewilder you with statistics, geographies, and interminable chronologies. I detest numbers. . . . With the help of my memories and without the impediment of pedantic erudition, I am going to open before you the album of my memory.]

The problem with this and other similar characterizations within Alcala´’s text is, of course, that they are untrue: he quite clearly does set out to ‘‘teach,’’ ‘‘prove,’’ and ‘‘bewilder with statistics’’—or at least such is the overall effect of a narrative that, in addition to displaying a pronounced tendency toward intellectual name dropping and veiled intertextual allusion, is, the author’s protestations aside, a virtual cacophony of facts and figures, many of them technically or linguistically abstruse. In contrast to Mesonero’s, inclusion of factual data about the Parisian municipal system, which is consonant with his stated desire to improve ‘‘la cultura patria’’ (5:205) [national culture] through the sharing of knowledge, Alcala´’s tactics are difficult to characterize as anything other than—to use his own term— ‘‘pedantic erudition.’’ Alcala´’s increasingly equivocal handling of his own relationship to Western culture can also be seen in the progressive blurring, particularly toward the end of his text, of at least a few of the stark dichotomies purportedly separating East and West that, through so much of his narrative, function as fundamental paradigms of cross-cultural comparison. A good example can again be drawn from the evolution of his characterizations of the Chinese. As already indicated, China is portrayed through much of Panoramas orientales, as in many other texts of its type, as the geographic epicenter of Eastern inscrutability, inhabited by peoples who ‘‘con sus ojos oblicuos, parece como que ven las cosas oblicuas’’ (33) [with their slanted eyes, it seems as though they see things slanted] and who both ‘‘por su historia y su anatomı´a rechazan la confraternidad con las otras razas’’ (32) [because of their history and their

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anatomy reject brotherhood with the other races]. It is therefore somewhat curious to discover, toward the end of Alcala´’s narrative account, the appearance of numerous and apparently intentional points of comparison between Chinese and Western society. For example, just as Alcala´ refers to Western cosmopolitanism in the opening pages of his account, he later remarks of the Chinese, ‘‘eso sı´, la raza es de lo ma´s cosmopolita’’ (32) [I will grant, the race is highly cosmopolitan]. The Chinese empire, he notes, is also a colonial power: ‘‘El Asia casi entera es suya, y a no oponerlos un dique, Ame´rica, Cuba, Filipinas, quiza´ la Australia, concluirı´an por ser pasto de su explotacio´n’’ (32) [Almost all of Asia is theirs, and if nothing is done to curb them America, Cuba, Philippines, and perhaps Australia will end up as fodder for their exploitation]. Though the projection of a Chinese takeover of the Western Hemisphere may well contain an element of mockery, this remark at least suggests some recognition of what would have been patently obvious to anyone walking down a Singapore street, and that is that the role of the Chinese in Southeast Asia could not so easily be flattened into the schema of ‘‘passive orientals,’’ inasmuch as they were such serious competitors of the European colonial enterprise in both the economic and hegemonic spheres (see Webster 1998, 188). Continuing in this same tone, Alcala´ suggests a form of parity between Chinese and European intelligence and notions of family,27 also softening a bit the implications of his repeated comparison of Chinese with ‘‘hormigas’’ [ants] by later applying the same term to Europeans (‘‘una multitud negra y sin colores: el humano hormiguero’’ [41; a black and colorless multitude: the human anthill]). Even the much-touted notion of Chinese physical uniqueness begins to falter a bit, albeit again in terms that seem to betray a mocking wink. Remarking upon the ‘‘bien conformado y hasta blanco y limpio cuerpo’’ (38) [well-proportioned and even white and clean body] of certain Chinese residents of Singapore, Alcala´ is moved to make the rather bizarre observation that ‘‘algunos chinos, con ojos no tan oblicuos como se supone, vestidos a la europea, quiza´s, quiza´s parecerı´an curas o toreros’’ (39) [certain Chinese, with less slanted eyes than one might suppose and dressing in the European style, could perhaps, just perhaps resemble priests or bullfighters].28 In the end, Alcala´’s apparent muddling of racial and cultural distinctions in these and other similar passages never seems to signal any real willingness to abandon the concept of cultural opposition. Such a step would among others things considerably weaken the

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aura of authority and privilege he enjoys in his role as epic hero of his own ‘‘yodisea’’: a man who has personally voyaged into the heart of the oriental Other, possessor of secrets conceded to but few. While Alcala´’s sympathies with the more poetic aspects of Asian society do without question lead him to alter his characterization of the relationship between East and West during the course of the text, in most cases this evolution leads to the identification of a new system of cultural dichotomies, often via the reformulation or inversion of existing textual paradigms. This process is evident in the development of various key images throughout the text. As already noted, Alcala´’s descriptions of the Orient progress from the ‘‘infierno geogra´fico’’ [geographic hell] of Egypt (9), to the ‘‘calor purgatorial’’ [purgatorial heat] of the Indian Ocean (13), and finally to the ‘‘felicidad adamı´tica de paraı´so terrenal’’ [Adamic happiness of earthly paradise] of Singapore and Ceylon (42). The presentation of Europe, meanwhile, undergoes a mirror image negative evolution: from ‘‘paraı´so de la tierra’’ [paradise of the earth] (11), Europe slowly degenerates into a ‘‘purgatorio de . . . fogs y brumas osia´nicas’’ [purgatory of fogs and Ossianic mists] (18) and finally into an ‘‘infierno del frı´o’’ [hell of coldness] (41) at the end of Alcala´’s text. The same sort of pattern of inversion appears in the characterization of concepts such as liberty, maturity, and intellectual prowess—terms repeatedly presented in this and many other orientalist writings as fundamental attributes of European society, which over the course of Alcala´’s narrative are increasingly identified as characteristics of the Asian way of life. While Alcala´, as previously mentioned, on several occasions praises the English for introducing British liberties to their Asian colonies (29), admiringly agreeing with the patriotic lyricist of ‘‘Rule Britannia’’ that ‘‘Britons never will be slaves’’ (12), in the closing pages of his narrative he concludes that it is Asians who, though living under colonial rule, truly merit the title of ‘‘humanidad libre’’ (42) [free humanity]. Europeans, he now states, are not masters, but rather ‘‘lacayos [de su] civilizacio´n’’ (44) [lackeys (of their) civilization]. Western clothes ‘‘aprisionan y estorban’’ (41) [imprison and obstruct].29 The modern steamship, praised in the opening paragraphs of his text as ‘‘un palacio flotante, . . . la creacio´n magna, la ma´s alta maravilla que ha producido el entendimiento, la mano y la voluntad del hombre’’ (4) [a floating palace . . . the greatest creation, the finest marvel produced by the understanding, the hand, and the will of man],30 becomes little more than a ‘‘prisio´n flotante’’

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(23) [floating prison] as it approaches Singapore harbor. In the same vein the repeated characterization of Asians as children ‘‘incapac[es] de civilizada madurez’’ (33) [incapable of civilized maturity] is countered toward the end of Panoramas orientales with the following mirror image observation regarding European culture: ¡Ah! con razo´n le dijo a Herodoto aquel sacerdote de Sais: ‘‘Siempre sere´is nin ˜ os.’’ Y sı´ lo parecemos por nuestros caprichos sociales que contrastan con la severa quietud y dignidad del Oriente. (45) [Ah!, with reason that high priest of Sais said to Herodotus: ‘‘You will always be as children.’’ And we do indeed seem that way, with all our social whims, which contrast with the stern calm and dignity of the Orient.]

It is, however, important to note that the conceit of proposing ‘‘the regeneration of Europe by Asia’’ was not unique to Panoramas orientales, having been a frequent refrain of romantic orientalist discourse for many years (Said 1979, 115). Moreover, while these various inverse progressions do appear to reveal a desire of the ‘‘traveler poet’’ to realign the position he wishes to project for himself within the paradigm of East/West opposition, they do not in any way invalidate the notion that such opposition exists. To the contrary, the premise of cultural dichotomy—of otherness—is actually reinforced as a result of such inversions. Good illustration of this point can be drawn from the ways in which Alcala´ utilizes notions of light and darkness in the course of his narration. This image already appears on the first page of Panoramas orientales, where Alcala´ alludes to ‘‘el resplandor de estas luces ele´ctricas que nos alumbran’’ (1) [the brilliance of the electric lights that illuminate us], remarking to his audience that if ‘‘al ir a hablaros empezaba por pedir luz, de seguro me tomarı´ais por ciego o demente’’ (1) [in starting to speak to you I began by asking for light, you would certainly think me blind or demented]. In addition to what may be an implicit reference to Goethe’s ‘‘mehr Licht’’ [more light], this quotation is interesting for the ways in which it establishes certain ‘‘European’’ characteristics of the Ateneo context. Alcala´ who, at this stage of his presentation, does not yet wish to present himself as ‘‘demented,’’ clearly aligns the Ateneo, and thus the Western intellectual tradition it represents, with light (i.e., the light of knowledge, what he will later term ‘‘la llama del saber’’

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[46; the flame of knowledge]), and specifically with electric light (i.e., modernity, progress). In the same vein, early in the text there are other admiring references to Western technology, and particularly electricity, as when Alcala´ admiringly remarks that ‘‘con el auxilio de los focos ele´ctricos’’ [with the help of electric floodlights] the Suez Canal—‘‘a´urea vı´a que . . . suprime el enorme estorbo del ma´s inu´til, este´ril y antipa´tico de los continentes’’ (8) [a golden route that . . . eliminates the enormous hindrance of the most useless, sterile, and unappealing of the continents]—is able to remain open day and night, thus facilitating Europe’s easy access to and more efficient control over its Eastern colonies. Nonetheless, at the end of Panoramas orientales we find Alcala´ complaining loudly of the absence of light in Western cultures. The Orient, he now says, ‘‘es la luz haciendo sus alardes prisma´ticos condensada en materia’’ (36) [is light, making its prismatic displays, condensed into matter]. Europe, in contrast, is ‘‘la regio´n de las negruras perpetuas’’ (41) [the region of perpetual blackness]: ‘‘El Oriente es rojo, es una aurora; el Occidente es negro, es una noche’’ (41) [The Orient is red; it is dawn; the Occident is black; it is night].31 True to form, however, the exact implications of this inversion of cultural perceptions are less than clear, particularly when one attempts to isolate Alcala´’s own position within the apparently linear progression he seeks to create. The impression of a smooth transition from eurocentrism to europhobia, in brief, finds no real corroboration in the characterization of the narrative yo. Once again, Alcala´’s autoidentification as a modern-day Ulysses becomes significant. The hero of The Odyssey has traditionally been known as a leader who owed his success to his intellectual talents (wisdom, cunning, rhetorical skills) far more than to physical strength or brute force. In the words of Homer: ‘‘And as to stratagems, no man would claim Odysseus’ gift for those. . . . No, no boy could speak so well’’ (1963, III.38–39). In this sense, then, it is interesting to find in the following passage, in which a tropical rainstorm blows open the windows of his apartment, Alcala´’s identification with Ulysses temporarily disappears and is replaced with the figure of Ajax: Una noche el terrible viento inesperado y su´bito, el huraca´n de Sumatra, las abrio´ de golpe y porrazo . . . y ¡que´ porrazo! ¡Imaginad mis apuros al despertar, desnudo, sudoso, a oscuras, pidiendo la luz como el Ajax de Homero, tratando ¡vano empen ˜ o! de cerrar los 16 po´rticos abiertos! (27)32

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[One night the terrible, unexpected, and sudden wind, the hurricane of Sumatra, opened them with a bang, and what a bang! Imagine the fix I was in, to awake, naked, sweating, in the darkness, asking for light like Homer’s Ajax, attempting—useless effort!—to close the sixteen open porticoes!]

This passage is significant inasmuch as Ajax, a character in both The Iliad (from which the cited reference arises) and The Odyssey, was, as Ulysses, heroic, but his heroism was of a very different sort: ‘‘gigantic in size and of great courage’’ he was nonetheless ‘‘dull of intellect’’ (Bullfinch 1962, 253).33 In comparing himself to the powerful yet nonintellectual Ajax, Alcala´ can be said to take on an identity somewhat more in sync with his perceptions of his immediate cultural surroundings (one thinks here, for example, of his descriptions of the Chinese, who are said to lack any sense of inventiveness but who nonetheless have ‘‘increı´ble resistencia fı´sica . . ., arrastran[do] mercancı´as que exigirı´an seis remeros nuestros’’ [38; incredible physical resistance, . . . moving merchandise that would require six of our rowers]). In this sense, it is notable that at the time he adopts the Ajax persona Alcala´ finds himself ‘‘naked, sweating, in the darkness,’’ all of which are terms applied repeatedly throughout the text to the oriental world. Alcala´’s ‘‘traveler poet’’ thus finds himself living what is to his mind a quintessentially oriental moment. This illusion of assimilation is, however, ephemeral: unlike Ajax Alcala´ is so lacking in strength he is unable to close the windows to his bedroom. Wholly terrified by his experience with raw nature (untended, in this case, by ‘‘the careful municipal hand of the British’’) and left without light (electrical, intellectual, or otherwise), he has no alternative but to huddle miserably in his bed until morning. Alcala´ has here cast himself in a role quite far removed from Litvak’s assertion that renderings of the ‘‘fuerzas destructivas y desintegradoras que se yerguen contra el aventurero’’ [the destructive and disintegrative forces that rise up against the traveler] in the colonial landscape serve as ‘‘prueba suprema’’ [supreme proof] of the traveler’s own moral strength and that of ‘‘su ordenada sociedad’’ (1987, 196–97) [his orderly society]. The identity of the narrator is thus once again a conundrum. In his attempt to insert himself in his guise of ‘‘traveler poet’’ into the neat system of binary oppositions borrowed from the tradition of orientalist erudition and carefully elaborated in the course of his

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text, he seems to engage in a weakening of those dichotomies as well as his own clearly delineated cultural identity. At the same time, however, the Alcala´ who stands before the Ateneo audience, a triumphal orientalist Ulysses cloaked in his self-made cape of superiority, never displays any real willingness to abandon that binary paradigm, indeed relies heavily upon it as a means of underscoring the truly heroic dimensions of his journey while consolidating his position of authority within the Western cultural hierarchy. Historical and political awareness are, it appears, to remain at odds with poetic perception. The diplomat, in Alcala´’s own estimation, cannot coexist with the poet, and yet both strive for a voice within the text. Ultimately, though, they find ample terrain on which to do so within the framework of European orientalist discourse. The oddly bifurcated representation of the oriental ‘‘other’’ resulting from the conjoining of Alcala´’s twin concepts of self-identity is in fact nothing new. As Prendergast notes in The Triangle of Representation: The barbaric Orient and the poetic Orient are two faces of the same construction; they derive from the same logic: mysterious because other and, because other, inferior, however alluring. Either way, the Orient remains the object of the hypostasizing gaze of the West, which defines and demarcates the field of representation. (2000, 89)

This essentially answers the question of Alcala´’s concept of the ‘‘true exotic,’’ and here it is again worth returning to Ce´lestin, who suggests that textual treatments of this theme tend to fall into two basic camps: Exemplification is characterized by the appropriation of the exotic through its representation for the Center in terms of a type of language whose primary purpose is to unfold through classification, to provide a means of freezing, of incorporating, of controlling. . . . The second tendency, experimentation, is, on the contrary, stamped by the individual Western subject’s will to explore the exotic as a means of severing ties with Home, thus discovering or recovering material that confirms and strengthens individuality rather than serving, illustrating or reinforcing systems. (1996, 6, emphasis in original)

Had Ce´lestin needed to locate a virtual point-for-point exemplar of the first of these categories, he could have not done much better than Panoramas orientales. In this and so many other regards, it can be tempting to identify

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Alcala´’s text as a throwback to outmoded representational models. There is certainly some justification to this view, except that such a conclusion could seem to imply that earlier in the nineteenth century Spanish encounters with cultural difference had routinely been constructed in similarly schematized and derivative ways. As I have attempted to show in previous chapters, however, this was not the case. While Panoramas orientales, written almost at century’s end, is the most recent of the four texts receiving detained consideration in this study, its treatment of otherness is by almost any measure perhaps the least ‘‘modern’’ of all, if by this we understand the interposition of critical distance with respect to the validity of received knowledge and, as Prendergast puts it, a new willingness to engage with ‘‘increasingly ambiguous, or self-ambiguating, social forms of life’’ (2000, 19). It is, though, in part for this reason that Panoramas orientales is such an interesting text, with Alcala´’s essentially wholesale adoption of ‘‘European’’ identities and discursive practices offering an intriguing textual instance of the heightened sensitization toward definitions of national identity that accompanied the death throes of Spain’s colonial era. As did all of Spain’s nineteenth-century authors, Alcala´ enjoyed both the blessing and the curse of witnessing firsthand one of the most intense periods of cultural transition in his nation’s history, as successive governments as well as individual Spanish citizens picked their way fitfully but inexorably through the diverse processes of political, social, and ideological evolution that have come to be identified as characteristic of the modern Western consciousness. In one way or another, these issues inform all works of travel writing produced during this turbulent period, as authors struggle to master the literary, societal, and ideological implications of the encounter with otherness. Despite their many differences of style, subject matter, and interpretative strategies, Mesonero, Alarco´n, and Galdo´s— each in his own way—faced this dilemma no less than did Alcala´. For Mesonero the key issue was europeizacio´n, the difficulties inherent in crafting a coherent lesson for Spain from the Janus-like duality of Parisian modernity. Though Alarco´n’s focus was not Europe but Africa, his goal was much the same, inflected in this case by his own ideological agenda and often contradictory ideas on North Africa’s utility as a model for Spanish cultural identity. Alone among the four, Galdo´s seems to have constructed his narrative in such a way that he might elude the structural and interpretative pitfalls that the modern sensibility introduces on presumptions of textual referen-

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tiality. He was able to do so, significantly, not by claiming to have resolved his text’s internal disunities nor by seeking to hide their existence, but rather by harnessing those very dilemmas of representation into the central focus of his textual play. At several points in his 1894 Ateneo presentation Alcala´ Galiano reminded his audience that they should not interpret the ‘‘album of impressions’’ (40) he offered them as a collection of actual verbal photographs of his journeys, but rather as a series of ‘‘psychographs’’ (4) whose ultimate subject is Alcala´ himself: as he put it, his Panoramas orientales was at heart a ‘‘Yodisea, la Odisea de su yo’’ (3) [the Odyssey of his Self]. The phrase is felicitous. In fact, in coining it Alcala´ need not have been referring solely to his own orientalist travelogue. He might just as well have been speaking of any of the other travel chronicles discussed in the course of this study, or for that matter the genre of travel writing itself. This is not to say, of course, that travel narration presents a window onto the author’s ‘‘true identity’’ any more than it provides a simple transcription of the physical and cultural spaces of travel. To the contrary it underscores the necessary insufficiency of travel writing’s frequent veneer of providing an authoritative transcription of external reality and the particular form of authorial control resulting from the disparity between premise and praxis. Buzard has written that travel narration depends on a ‘‘paradoxical foundation: on the ideal that a written account may thwart the conventions or even transcend the inherent limitations of writing, making its way out of the textual morass and into a putatively direct and meaningful relationship with the places it describes’’ (1993, 156). And it is no doubt true that this notion of ideal transparent description reflects presumptions that many nineteenth-century readers would have imposed on the reading of travel texts. However, all it takes is a writer with an awareness of the power of language and of both the dilemmas and opportunities inherent in the project of textual representation quickly to transform this ‘‘morass’’ of referential discourse into a powerful suasive tool. The literary authors studied in these pages—albeit employing differing representational strategies and in the service of different literary or ideological goals—do exactly that.

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Epilogue: Scripting Geographies Conta´bamos, sin duda, los incansables viajeros con que una voz sobrenatural nos dijera desde lo alto: ‘‘por aquı´ se va, y nada ma´s que por aquı´.’’ Pero la voz sobrenatural no hiere nuestros oı´dos. —Galdo´s, ‘‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable’’ [We, the tireless travelers, were doubtless counting on a supernatural voice telling us from on high: ‘‘this is the way, the only way.’’ But the supernatural voice does not reach our ears.]

ON MARCH 20, 1787, SHORTLY AFTER DESCENDING FROM THE SUMMIT OF Mount Vesuvius, one of history’s most interesting travel authors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, sought to describe to readers of his Italienische Reise [Italian Journey] the profound impact of the experience of gazing firsthand into the legendary crater’s mouth: ‘‘Man habe auch tausendmal von einem Gegenstande geho¨rt,’’ he wrote, ‘‘das Eigentu¨mliche desselben spricht nur uns auf dem unmittelbaren Anschauen’’ (1979, 1: 280) [Although one may hear about something a thousand times, its peculiar characteristics speak to us only as a result of unmediated observation]. This commentary, variations on which have appeared in countless works of travel narration over the centuries, succinctly captures the source of the aura of authenticity that travel chronicles often appear to possess. Through the presumably unmediated quality of firsthand experience, travel writers project—and indeed frequently ascribe to themselves—an air of special authority as members of the chosen few for whom the usually irreconcilable gap separating Self from Other has been, at least for an instant, tantalizingly bridged. These notions are both a cornerstone of the genre of travel narration and one of its central dilemmas. While it may certainly be true, as Galdo´s observes in the course of his own Viaje a Italia, that ‘‘el natural da siempre tonos e inflexiones que nadie preve´’’ (1942, 217

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6:1700) [the real thing always has tones and inflections that no one foresees], as virtually every page of Galdo´s’s chronicle amply attests, the precise nature and dimensions, not to mention potential communicability, of those ‘‘tones and inflections’’ are anything but transparent. Though travel writings can and often do seem to encourage the blurring of distinctions between experience and text, the temptation to treat the language of such texts as, to borrow Hayden White’s phrase, a ‘‘transparent vehicle of representation that brings no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse’’ (1978, 127) inevitably draws attention away from essential problems posed by the fundamentally and irreparably mediated nature of the written word. The passage from ‘‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable’’ reproduced in the epigraph is, in this sense, suggestive: as occurs with Galdo´s’s imagined travelers lost amid in the confusions of modern society (1990, 161), clear passage through the prose of travel narration is simply not to be found. In short, as Duncan and Gregory put it in the introduction to their Writes of Passage: ‘‘all geographies are fabrications’’ (1999, 5). While most travel texts of course do provide a wealth of information about the various physical sites in which the traveler’s journey has taken place, and while the significance of this information clearly ought not be discounted, the reader must never overlook the fact that travel narration is the product of writerly processes of selection, organization, and characterization, carried out by particular authors in response to particular rhetorical goals. It is for that reason, in part, that generalizations about travel writing are often so very difficult: as seen time and again in the previous chapters, even when describing the same destination, travel authors tend to script their geographies in peculiarly individual ways. Observation, in other words, is not separable from the observer. As Goethe noted with characteristic prescience and elegance of expression: ‘‘Ich mache diese wunderbare Reise, . . . , um mich an den Gegensta¨nden kennen zu lernen’’ (1979, 1:61) [I make this wonderful trip, so that I might come to know myself through contact with difference]. Obviously, therefore, even within the relatively restricted realm of nineteenth-century Spanish travel writing, analysis of such individually diverse texts might follow many different routes. This book has sought to trace but a few. While the selected sampling of travel authors and destinations offered in the preceding chapters cannot pretend to exhaust the possibilities for scholarly investigation of this rich field of inquiry, the travel representations contained in the

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pages of Mesonero’s Paris, Galdo´s’s tour of Italy, Alarco´n’s Morocco, and Alcala´ Galiano’s excursion to Southeast Asia have, I hope, successfully illustrated how Spain’s nineteenth-century literary travelers engaged such crucial cultural and artistic questions as identity and otherness, representation and experience, modernity and tradition, through their essays in travel narration, while not avoiding the temptation to sweep under the carpet the myriad equally fascinating variations (and, at times, ambiguities) of perspective, textual construction, and presentation that individual authors brought to bear in order to craft a particular image of their travels for their readers. It is my belief that the revelations contained in these often humbly packaged texts can contribute to our broader understanding of the dynamics of cultural and literary self-representation in nineteenthcentury Spain, and beyond. The effort to begin shaking the dust of inattention from this little known body of writings will also ideally have served to reveal that the foreign travel chronicles of nineteenth-century Spanish authors are fascinating textual constructions in their own right, holding out a promise of providing scholars with new avenues for investigating the writerly praxis of some of Spain’s foremost literary figures and for acquiring a better understanding of the interplay of cultural premise and prejudice at work in Spanish society of the time. In the end, after all, as Eugenio de Ochoa had already recognized more than a century and a half ago, ‘‘la pintura del espan ˜ ol fuera de Espan ˜ a empieza y acaba dentro de Espan ˜ a’’ (1851, 371) [the painting of the Spaniard outside of Spain begins and ends inside of Spain]. But that is only to be expected. Travel writing is, indeed, a form of yodisea, to reprise Alcala´ Galiano’s memorable phrase—not in the sense that it should be seen as a transparent graph of the authorial self, but rather in that it provides a textual construction in which contact with otherness promotes, perhaps even demands, an exploration of the personal and cultural manifestations of the notions of individual and social identity. The geographies of Spain’s nineteenth-century travel authors fulfill that goal. And that alone would be reason enough to wish to accompany them on their journeys.

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Appendix: Listing of Foreign Travel Chronicles by Nineteenth-Century Spain’s Literary Authors NOTE: ALL OF THESE TEXTS PRESENT THEMSELVES AS CHRONICLE-STYLE accounts of the author’s actual travel experiences beyond the boundaries of Spain, and all were published during the author’s lifetime. I discuss the reasons for these decisions in the introduction. When a reedition is listed, the original publication date is included in brackets. When not indicated in the work’s title, the countries described in the chronicle are also listed in brackets.

 Alarco´n, Pedro Antonio. ‘‘Viaje a Parı´s en 1855.’’ Obras olvidadas. Cyrus C. DeCoster, ed. Potomac, MD: Studia Humanitatis, 1984. 99–146. ———. Diario de un testigo de la guerra de Africa [Morocco; 1860]. Reprint of 1st ed. Madrid: Ediciones del Centro, 1974. [The revised 1880 edition appears in Alarco´n’s Obras completas. Madrid: Fax, 1954.] ———. De Madrid a Na´poles [1861]. Obras completas. Madrid: Fax, 1954. 1198–493. Alcala´ Galiano, Jose´. Panoramas orientales: Impresiones de un viajero-poeta. Madrid: M. G. Herna´ndez, 1894. Alvarez Pe´rez, Jose´. Las cacerı´as de Marruecos: Aventuras aute´nticas de un espan˜ol [1870]. Barcelona: Sabadell, 1990. ———. El paı´s del misterio [Morocco]. Madrid: Medina, 1875. Andueza, Jose´ Marı´a. Isla de Cuba pintoresca, histo´rica, poe´tica, literaria, mercantil e industrial: Recuerdos, apuntes, impresiones de dos e´pocas. Madrid: Boix, 1841. ———. ‘‘La Habana.’’ La Ilustracio´n (1853): 352–54. ———. [pseud. ‘‘El fisgo´n invisible’’]. ‘‘Costumbres de la Habana.’’ Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol 20 (1840): 158–60. Aribau, Bonaventura Carlos. ‘‘Notas de un viaje: Fragmento’’ [France]. Revista de Espan˜a, de Indias y del Extranjero, 1.2 (1845): 331–43 and 1.3 (1845): 497–510. Ayguals de Izco, Wenceslao. La maravilla del siglo: Cartas a Marı´a Enriqueta, o sea una visita a Parı´s y Londres durante la famosa exhibicio´n de la industria universal de 1851. 2 vols. Madrid: Imprenta de D. W. Ayguals de Izco, 1852. Balaguer, Vı´ctor. Recuerdos de viaje [France]. Published without bibliographic information. Voyage undertaken in 1853.

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———. Mis recuerdos de Italia [1889]. Madrid: Progreso, 1892. ———. Islas filipinas: Memoria. Madrid: R. Angles, 1895. Blanco White, ‘‘Cartas sobre Inglaterra.’’ Series of six articles originally published in Blasco’s journal, Variedades o Mensajero de Londres (1823–25). Reprinted in Cartas de Inglaterra y otros escritos. Madrid: Alianza, 1989. Blasco, Eusebio. ‘‘Impresiones de viaje’’ [Switzerland, France; 1868]. Obras completas. Madrid: Leopoldo Martı´nez, 1904. 5:1–158. ———. Mi viaje a Egipto [1869]. Obras completas, vol. 6. Madrid: Leopoldo Martı´nez, 1904. ———. Mi viaje a Alemania [1892]. Obras completas, vol. 6. Madrid: Leopoldo Martı´nez, 1905. Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez, Vicente. Paris: Impresiones de un emigrado [1890–91]. Me´xico: Editorial Prometeo, 1943. ———. ‘‘Ta´nger la blanca,’’ ‘‘El moro en armas,’’ ‘‘Los ‘golfos’ de Ta´nger’’ [1894]. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1987. 4:1104–17. ———. ‘‘Argel’’ [1895]. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1987. 4:1117–44. Previously published in book form in the 1896 edition of Cuentos valencianos, under the title ‘‘En el paı´s de Barbarroja.’’ ———. En el paı´s del arte: Tres meses en Italia. Valencia: Pellicers, 1896. Castelar, Emilio. ‘‘Recuerdos de la emigracio´n: Mi primera semana en Parı´s.’’ Ilustracio´n Espan˜ola y Americana 16.3 (January 16, 1872): 35–39. ———. ‘‘Recuerdos de la emigracio´n: Los primeros dı´as del an ˜ o 1867 en Parı´s.’’ Ilustracio´n Espan˜ola y Americana 16.8 (February 24, 1872): 115–19. ———.Un an˜o en Parı´s. Madrid: El Globo, 1875. ———. Un viaje a Parı´s, durante el establecimiento de la Repu´blica. Madrid: Alaria, 1878. ———. Recuerdos de Italia [1872]. Madrid: A. Carlos e Hijo, 1883. Coronado, Carolina. ‘‘Un paseo desde el Tajo al Rhin.’’ Incomplete, published serially in La Ilustracio´n vols. 39 and 41 (1851) and vols. 5–6, 18–19, 38, 66, 78–79 (1852). Escalante, Amo´s. Del Ebro al Tı´ber [1864]. Obras, 2. Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles. Madrid: Atlas, 1956. 93:53–202. Espronceda, Jose´. ‘‘De Gibraltar a Lisboa’’ [1841]. Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles. Madrid: Atlas, 1954. 72:604–8. Este´banez Caldero´n, Serafı´n (attributed). ‘‘La gruta azul y una gira en el vapor ‘Colo´n’ ’’ [1849]. Obras, 2. Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles. 79:393–98. [Published under the pseudonym ‘‘Silvio Silvis de la Selva,’’ this text has been attributed both to Este´banez Caldero´n and to Juan Valera, both of whom visited Naples in 1849.] Ferna´ndez de los Rı´os, Angel. ‘‘Itinerario descriptivo, pintoresco y monumental de Madrid a Paris.’’ El Laberinto, bound at end of vol. 2.36 (October 20, 1845). Ferrer del Rı´o, Antonio. ‘‘Viaje marı´timo desde Ca´diz a la Habana.’’ El Laberinto 1.4 (December 16, 1843): 51–53. ———. ‘‘Recuerdos de un viaje a la isla de Cuba: Tres semanas en el campo.’’ El Laberinto 1.15 (June 1, 1844): 203–5. Flores, Antonio. ‘‘Viajes a las provincias vascongadas asomando las narices en

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Francia.’’ Published serially in El Laberinto from 2.2 (November 15, 1844) through 2.12 (April 16, 1845). Ganivet, Angel. Cartas finlandesas [1898]. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1951. 1:669–874. Gaspar, Enrique. Viaje a China. Barcelona: Cortezo, 1887. ———. Viaje a Atenas. Valencia: Aguilar, 1891. Gil y Carrasco, Enrique. ‘‘De Lyon a Parı´s.’’ El Laberinto 1.20 (August 16, 1844): 276–78 and 1.22 (September 16, 1845): 300–303. ———. ‘‘Diario de un viaje’’ [France, Belgium, Holland, Germany; 1883]. Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles. Madrid: Atlas, 1954. 72:359–400. Lafuente, Modesto. Viajes de Fray Gerundio por Francia, Be´lgica, Holanda y Orillas del Rhin. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipogra´fico, 1842. Martı´nez de la Rosa, Francisco. ‘‘Un recuerdo de Italia.’’ Revista de Madrid, 2nd series, 1 (1839): 543–52. Martı´nez Villergas, Juan. Viaje al paı´s de Motezuma [sic.]. Published with La vida en el chaleco. Havana: Iris, 1859. Mesonero Romanos, Ramo´n. ‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ [1835]. Obras, 1. Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles. Madrid: Atlas, 1967. 199:198–204. ———. Recuerdos de viaje por Francia y Be´lgica (1840–1841) [1841]. Obras, 5. Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles. Madrid: Atlas, 1967. 203:251–393. ———. ‘‘El sepulcro de Moratı´n en el cementerio de Parı´s.’’ La Ilustracio´n (1853): 297–98. ———. Unsigned travel texts attributable to Mesonero Romanos in El Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol: ‘‘Abadı´a de Westminster.’’ 1 (1836): 23–24. ‘‘La Bastilla.’’ 16 (1836): 149–50. ‘‘La Bolsa de Paris.’’ 19 (1836): 153–54. ‘‘La Bolsa de Londres.’’ 20 (1836): 161–64. ‘‘La Torre de Londres.’’ 22 (1836): 183–84. ‘‘Nuestra Sen ˜ ora de Parı´s.’’ 25 (1836): 201–3. ‘‘Las catacumbas de Parı´s.’’ 33 (1836): 265–67. ‘‘El Panteo´n Nacional France´s.’’ 41 (1837): 9–10. ‘‘El Louvre.’’ 91 (1837): 403–4. ‘‘Las castan ˜ uelas en Parı´s.’’ 28 (1840): 220–21. ‘‘Una visita a la Abadı´a de Westminster.’’ 8 (1840): 58. Moreno de la Tejera, Vicente. Diario de un viaje a Oriente [Algeria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Malta]. Madrid: Manuel Martı´nez, 1879. Navarrete, Ramo´n. ‘‘Bajos Pirineos: Aguas buenas y aguas calientes.’’ Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol (1850): 35–38 and 77–80. Nun ˜ ez de Arce, Gaspar. Recuerdos de la campan˜a de Africa [Morocco]. Madrid: Rose´s, 1860. Ochoa, Eugenio. Parı´s, Londres, Madrid. Paris: Baudry, 1861. ———. ‘‘Florencia.’’ Miscela´nea de literatura, viajes y novelas. Madrid: BaillyBaillie`re, 1867. 327–44.

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———. ‘‘De Jaffa a Jerusale´n.’’ Miscela´nea de literatura, viajes y novelas. Madrid: BaillyBaillie`re, 1867. 345–58. Pacheco, Joaquı´n. Italia, ensayo descriptivo, artı´stico y polı´tico. Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1857. [Although this work is identified as ‘‘primera parte,’’ no second part appears to have been published.] Pardo Baza´n, Emilia. Mi romerı´a. Madrid: Tello, 1888. ———. Al pie de la Torre Eiffel. Madrid: Espan ˜ a Editorial, 1889. ———. Por Francia y Alemania. Vol. 2 of Al pie de la Torre Eiffel. Madrid: Espan ˜ a Editorial, 1890. ———. Cuarenta dı´as en la Exposicio´n [France]. Madrid: Prieto, 1891. Pe´rez Galdo´s, Benito. ‘‘Excursio´n a Portugal’’ [1885]. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1942. 6:1675–85. ———. ‘‘Viaje a Italia: Las ciudades’’ [1888–89]. Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1942. 6:1685–1719. ———. Untitled journalistic articles on European travels [Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal; 1885–90]. Reprinted in Las cartas desconocidas de Galdo´s en ‘‘La Prensa’’ de Buenos Aires, ed. William Shoemaker. Madrid: Cultura Hispa´nica, 1973. 154–55, 251–92, 328–42, 354–82, 389–90. Ribot y Fontsere´, Antonio. ‘‘La isla de pinos’’ [1837]. Mi deportacio´n: Trobas marı´timas y americanas. Marsella: Mossy, 1839. 129–38. Rusin ˜ ol, Santiago. Desde el molino: Impresiones de un viaje a Parı´s en 1894. Barcelona: Yuste, 1945. [Despite the title, the texts actually date from 1890–92, when they first appeared serially in La Vanguardia.] Saavedra, Angel. ‘‘Un viaje a las ruinas de Pesto.’’ Revista espan˜ola de ambos mundos (1853): 171–86. ———. ‘‘Viage al Vesubio.’’ Revista espan˜ola de ambos mundos (1853): 756–66. Salas y Quiroga, Jacinto. ‘‘Apuntes de un viajero’’ [Chile, Bolivia, Peru´]. Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol 115 (1838): 592–95. ———. Viajes. [Cuba, 1840]. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1964. ———. ‘‘La Habana.’’ Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol 33 (1840): 258–59, and 34 (1840): 269–70. Taboada, Luis. Parı´s y sus cercanı´as, manual del viajero. Madrid: Ilustracio´n Gallega y Asturiana, 1880. Unamuno, Miguel. ‘‘Pompeya: Divagaciones’’ [1892]. Obras completas. Madrid: Escelicer, 1966. 1:515–17. Valera, Juan. Cartas desde Rusia [1856–57]. Series of short texts originally published in La Espan˜a (December 1856–March 1857). [Note, however, that these texts, while much more travel-oriented than Valera’s other writings, are snippets of private letters published, initially to Valera’s declared embarrassment but later with his consent, by their recipient, Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto.] ———. Cartas familiares [Germany, Poland, Russia; 1856–57]. Series of short texts originally published in Escenas contempora´ neas (November 1856–January 1857). [See the bracketed notation regarding Valera’s Cartas desde Rusia.] Valera, Juan (attributed). ‘‘La gruta azul y una gira en el vapor ‘Colo´n’ ’’ [1849]. Obras desconocidas de Juan Valera, ed. Cyrus C. DeCoster, ed. Madrid: Castalia,

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1965. 561–69. [Published under the pseudonym, ‘‘Silvio Silvis de la Selva,’’ this text has been attributed both to Este´banez Caldero´n and to Juan Valera, both of whom visited Naples in 1849.] Verdaguer, Jacint. A vol d’aucell: Apuntacions d’un viatge al centre i nord d’Europa [France, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Belgium; 1884]. Viatges. Barcelona: El Garbell Edicions, 1986. ———. Records de la costa de Africa [Morocco, Algeria; 1884]. Obres completes. Barcelona: Agustı´, 1907. 6:36–61. ———. Dietari d’un pelegrı´ a Terra Santa [1889]. Obres completes. Barcelona: Agustı´, 1906. 5:9–129. Zorrilla, Jose´. ‘‘Isla de Santo Toma´s’’ [1851]. La flor de los recuerdos. Me´xico: Imprenta Correo de Espan ˜ a, 1855. 1:82–91.

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Notes Introduction ‘‘La manı´a de viajar’’ (Travel Mania), is the title of a poem by Breto´n de los Herreros (1912, 2:408–10). The epigraph is from Los espan˜oles pintados por sı´ mismos (The Spanish Paint Themselves, 1851, 369). 1. Lily Litvak has published several very useful compendium-style works of this type, including Geografı´as ma´gicas [Magical Geographies] and El ajedrez de estrellas [Chess Game of the Stars]. These works, it should perhaps be noted, do not treat texts by literary writers. See also Garcı´a Romeral-Pe´rez’s valuable Biobibliografı´a de viajeros espan˜oles (siglo XIX) [Bio-Bibliography of Spanish Travelers, 19th Century]. 2. The nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor once defined culture as ‘‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’’ (cited in Baldwin et al. 1999, 6). I will employ the term in a similarly broad way, to include both ‘‘large C’’ (intellectual/artistic) and ‘‘small c’’ (way-of-life) cultural practices, and the ideological, attitudinal, and structural frameworks in which they develop. 3. To be sure, this is not to say that the issues engaged in these texts are wholly inapplicable to study of Spanish travel narrations written after the close of the nineteenth century. It is nonetheless true that, in the aggregate, recent Spanish travel narratives tend to introduce noteworthy differences in focus and in the conceptualization of observer/observed. While Goytisolo’s efforts to redefine the European traveler’s relationship to the ‘‘Orient’’ offer perhaps the most often cited example of this process, significant shifts in narrative practice and/or stated intention can also be found in the writings on Paris by such authors as Corpus Barga and Go´mez de la Serna and the representations of Latin America in authors of Spain’s post– Civil War diaspora, to give only a few well-known examples. Though cultural shifts are never absolute, I would suggest that the particular contours of nineteenthcentury Spanish society are significant to our understanding of the travel texts produced during that period. Seeing these texts as an identifiable corpus may—it is hoped—help scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century travel narration locate points of continuity and rupture with respect to the past. 4. Pardo Baza´n and Carolina Coronado both published works of foreign travel narration, though Coronado’s contribution to the genre was fairly limited. See the Appendix for more information. Private letters by several other women authors born or living in Spain (e.g., Ferna´n Caballero and Go´mez de Avellaneda) have been edited in recent years and sometimes include letters written during foreign journeys. However, inasmuch as I am concerned with travel narration as a form of

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nineteenth-century public discourse, I do not analyze private correspondence in this study.

Chapter 1: al sur fluye el Sena The title quotation, ‘‘Al sur fluye el Sena’’ (Southward flows the Seine), is taken from Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n’s De Madrid a Na´poles [From Madrid to Naples], reprinted in his Obras (Works, 1954, 1207). The first epigraph, from Mesonero’s ‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ [‘‘Return from Paris’’], appears in his Obras completas (Complete Works, 1967, 1:199). The second epigraph is from Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1964, 276–77). 1. All references to Mesonero’s works bearing a volume number are drawn from the five-volume edition of Mesonero’s Obras [Works] published in the Biblioteca de Autores Espan ˜ oles (1967). 2. See also, for comparison, Ochoa’s ‘‘El emigrado’’ [‘‘The Emigre´’’], also included in Los espan˜oles pintados por sı´ mismos [The Spanish Paint Themselves]. 3. Sometimes these descriptions present the French provinces as a sort of watered-down version (less impressive or less threatening, depending on the writer’s perspective) of the qualities of ‘‘Frenchness’’ archetypically incarnated by Paris. See, e.g., Antonio Flores (whose travel account ‘‘Viajes a las provincias vascongadas asomando las narices en Francia’’ [‘‘Journey to the Basque Provinces and Sticking my Nose into France’’] is mostly devoted to Spain but does briefly discuss a few southern French cities), who insinuates perversion into French townspeople’s reputed failure to maintain clearly the traditional distinction between ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ in their forms of dress (see El Laberinto [The Labyrinth], 2.10 [March 16, 1845]: 154). 4. In alphabetical order, the principal nineteenth-century Spanish travel works that describe the city of Paris are (year of publication in brackets) the following: Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n (various journalistic articles about his 1855 trip to Paris [1855], De Madrid a Na´poles [From Madrid to Naples, 1860]); Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (La maravilla del siglo: Cartas a Marı´a Enriqueta, o sea una visita a Parı´s y Londres durante la famosa exhibicio´n de la industria universal de 1851 [The Wonder of the Century: Letters to Maria Enriqueta, or A visit to Paris and London during the Famous Exhibition of World Industry in 1851, 1852]); Vı´ctor Balaguer (Recuerdos de viaje [Travel Memories, 1853]); Vicente Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez (Paris: Impresiones de un emigrado [Paris: Impressions of an Emigre´, 1890–91]), Emilio Castelar (‘‘Recuerdos de la emigracio´n’’ [‘‘Memories of Emigration,’’ 1872]; Un an˜o en Parı´s [A Year in Paris, 1875], Un viaje a Parı´s, durante el establecimiento de la Repu´blica [A Trip to Paris during the Establishment of the Republic, 1878]); Carolina Coronado (‘‘Un paseo desde el Tajo al Rhin’’ [‘‘A Stroll from the Tagus to the Rhine,’’ incomplete, 1851–52]), Angel Ferna´ndez de los Rı´os (‘‘Itinerario descriptivo, pintoresco y monumental de Madrid a Paris’’ [‘‘Descriptive Picturesque, and Monumental Itinerary from Madrid to Paris,’’ 1845]); Modesto Lafuente (Viajes de Fray Gerundio por Francia, Be´lgica, Holanda y Orillas del Rhin [Travels of Brother Gerundio Through France, Belgium, Holland and the Banks of the Rhine, 1842]); Ramo´n de Mesonero Romanos (‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ [‘‘Return from Paris,’’ 1835], Recuerdos de viaje por Francia y Be´lgica [Memories of a Journey through France and Belgium, 1841], numerous additional brief articles in El Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol

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[The Picturesque Spanish Weekly, 1830s–40s]); Eugenio de Ochoa (Parı´s, Londres, Madrid [Paris, London, Madrid, 1861]); Luis Taboada (Parı´s y sus cercanı´as, manual del viajero [Paris and Environs: Travelers’ Manual, 1880]); Santiago Rusinyol (Desde el molino: Impresiones de un viaje a Parı´s [From the Windmill: Impressions of a Journey to Paris, 1890–92]); Jacint Verdaguer (A vol d’aucell: Apuntacions d’un viatge al centre i nord d’Europa [Bird’s Eye View: Notes on a Journey to Central and Northern Europe, 1887]). Accounts of visits to the Paris World’s Fair of 1889 were published by both Pardo Baza´n (Al pie de la Torre Eiffel [At the Foot of the Eiffel Tower, 1889], Por Francia y por Alemania [Through France and Germany, 1890]) and Galdo´s (series of untitled journalistic articles in La Prensa [The Press, 1889]), but neither devotes more than cursory attention to the city of Paris beyond the World’s Fair gates. A smaller number of travelers pass through France without visiting Paris, usually en route to another destination or while touring northern Spain. See., e.g., Buenaventura Carlos Aribau’s ‘‘Notas de un viaje: Fragmento’’ (‘‘Notes of a Journey: Fragment,’’ 1845); Eusebio Blasco’s ‘‘Impresiones de viaje’’ (‘‘Travel Impressions,’’ 1868); Amo´s de Escalante’s Del Ebro al Tı´ber (From the Ebro to the Tiber, 1864); Antonio Flores’s aforementioned ‘‘Viajes a las provincias vascongadas asomando las narices en Francia’’ (1844–45); E. Gil y Carrasco’s incomplete ‘‘De Lyon a Parı´s’’ (‘‘From Lyon to Paris,’’ 1844–45); Ramo´n de Navarrete’s ‘‘Bajos Pirineos: Aguas buenas y aguas calientes’’ (‘‘Lower Pyrenees: Healthy Waters and Warm Waters,’’ 1850). Complete bibliographic information for all of these travel texts, as well as a variety of brief travel articles on French travel not itemized here, are given in the Appendix. 5. For examples of Mesonero’s claim to be the first nineteenth-century Spanish travel author, see, e.g., ‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ (1:199–200) and his review of Alarco´n’s De Madrid a Na´poles (1954, 525). The travel works published abroad by Spanish emigrants (e.g., Blanco White’s Cartas de Inglaterra [Letters from England]) were most likely unknown to Mesonero at the time. He was, however, probably aware that a few travel texts did appear in Spanish journals prior to the publication of his ‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ in April 1835. See, e.g., ‘‘Excursio´n al mar de hielo’’ [‘‘Excursion to the Sea of Ice’’] in Cartas Espan˜olas (September 1831), ‘‘Viajes: Los beduinos o los a´rabes del desierto’’ [‘‘Journeys: The Bedouins or the Arabs of the Desert’’] in Cartas Espan˜olas (March 1832), and ‘‘Recuerdos de mi viaje’’ [‘‘Memories of my Journey’’] in El Correo de las damas (April 1835). Many of these texts were anonymous or published under generic pseudonyms such as ‘‘El viajero’’ o ‘‘El viajante’’ (both meaning ‘‘the traveler’’). A large number were, most likely, translations. There is in any case no indication that any were written by Spanish literary figures. Moratı´n’s travel writings on England and Italy (written during the 1790s) remained unpublished until 1867. 6. See, also Alarco´n’s 1855 comment that ‘‘se´ que hay capitales ma´s grandes que e´sta; pero tambie´n se´ que en parte alguna hay la vida, el movimiento, la continua trasformacio´n, el incesante progreso, el foco de actividad que agita, conmueve, funde y regenera continuamente a Parı´s, desborda´ndolo sin cesar por la superficie del globo en oleadas de pensamiento, de novedad, de adelanto, de reproduccio´n. Ası´ Paris ha venido a ser el ideal de la vida culta’’ (1984, 106) [I know there are capitals larger than this one; but I also know that nowhere are there the life, movement, the continuous transformation, the incessant progress, the focus of activity that continually shake, emotionally move, melt, and regenerate Paris, spilling over endlessley across the surface of the globe in waves of thought, of novelty,

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of progress, of reproduction. This is how Paris has become the ideal of civilized life]. 7. Alarco´n’s first formal declaration of his newfound antagonism toward France appears in an 1859 journalistic article entitled ‘‘Espan ˜ a y los franceses.’’ [‘‘Spain and the French’’], in which he heatedly criticizes the effort to ‘‘desnaturalizar’’ [denature] Spanish culture via the imposition of French political, economic, social, and cultural practices (1984, 146–52). 8. For further information, see Mesonero’s comments on his reform projects in Memorias de un setento´n (Memories of a Seventy Year Old, 5:209–14) and Nuevo manual de Madrid (New Manual of Madrid, 3:270–71). 9. For an overview of Mesonero’s reform proposals, see Parsons (2003, 17–32; especially 19), Prados de la Plaza (2003, especially 147–56), and Ferna´ndez Garcı´a (1989, especially 570). 10. For more information on the key projects and dates relating to urban reform in Isabelline era Madrid, see Ferna´ndez Garcı´a (1989, 568–73). 11. The individual chapters of this book were originally published serially in El Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol [The Picturesque Spanish Weekly], mostly during the course of 1841. Many of Mesonero’s previous travel texts on Paris appeared without attribution in El Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol during the 1830s: ‘‘La Bastilla’’ (‘‘The Bastille,’’ 1836), ‘‘La Bolsa de Paris’’ (‘‘The Paris Stock Exchange,’’ 1836), ‘‘Nuestra Sen ˜ ora de Parı´s’’ (‘‘Notre Dame,’’ 1836), ‘‘Las catacumbas de Parı´s’’ (‘‘The Paris Catacombs,’’ 1836), ‘‘El Panteo´n Nacional France´s’’ (‘‘The French National Pantheon,’’ 1837), ‘‘El Louvre’’ (‘‘The Louvre,’’ 1837), and ‘‘Las castan ˜ uelas en Parı´s’’ (‘‘Castanets in Paris,’’ 1840). Later, he published ‘‘El sepulcro de Moratı´n en el cementerio de Parı´s’’ [‘‘Moratı´n’s Tomb in the Cemetery of Paris’’] in La Ilustracio´n (1853). An incomplete account of his 1833–34 journey through France and England was posthumously published in the second volume of his Trabajos no coleccionados [Uncollected Works]. 12. According to Ochoa: ‘‘En esta gran obra de transformacio´n algunos barrios han perdido enteramente y otros van camino de perder su antigua fisionomı´a. Entre e´stos el barrio latino, perforado en todas direcciones y cubierto de derribos, casi no recuerda ya lo que era en mis alegres tiempos de estudiante; . . . dire´ que lo lamento de veras’’ (1861, 75) [In this great work of transformation some neighborhoods have entirely lost their old physiognomy and others are en route to losing it. Among these is the Latin Quarter, pierced on all sides and covered with demolition debris, it now scarcely resembles what it was in my happy days as a student; . . . I will say I truly regret it]. A similarly favorable appraisal of the Left Bank appears in Vicente Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez’s Parı´s: Impresiones de un emigrado [Paris: Impressions of an Emigre´], written nearly four decades later in 1890–91: ‘‘El Barrio Latino es lo ma´s notable que tiene Parı´s. Esto parecera´ a muchos que hayan visitado la gran ciudad un tremendo sacrilegio; y, sin embargo, es una verdad irrebatible. . . . Del inmenso nu´mero de viajeros que diariamente llegan a Parı´s, pocos, muy pocos son los que visitan este barrio, que tiene ma´s importancia que el resto de la gran ciudad’’ (1943, 118–19) [The Latin Quarter is the most notable that Paris possesses. This will seem to many who have visited the great city a tremendous sacrilege; and yet, nonetheless, it is an indisputable truth. . . . Of the immense number of travelers who arrive in Paris daily, few, very few are those who visit this neighborhood, which has more importance than the rest of the great city].

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13. Parsons discusses this point, noting that Mesonero’s costumbrista-style articles also include present-day social satire, as well as texts of more nostalgic and picturesque tone, such that the tension between urban reform and costumbrismo need not be absolute (2003, 22–23). 14. Even in 1872, when much of central Paris had already undergone ‘‘Haussmannisation,’’ Emilio Castelar confesses his horrified discovery, upon arriving in the city, of mud-laden streets, swirling with dirty black water and polluted by noxious gas: ‘‘el pus que Parı´s destila,’’ Castelar warned his readers, ‘‘mancha a todos los hombres en la frente’’ (1872a, 35) [the pus that Paris exudes stains all men on their forehead]. To be sure, more favorable assessments appear in other Spanish texts, particularly those published toward the end of the century. For example, Emilia Pardo Baza´n states in her chronicle of the World’s Fair, Al pie de la Torre Eiffel [At the Foot of the Eiffel Tower], that ‘‘siempre he tenido a Parı´s en concepto de la ciudad ma´s pulcra del orbe, sin exceptuar a Florencia; . . . pero actualmente, con motivo de la Exposicio´n, . . . no se ve una mota de polvo; . . . los cristales se clarean, dia´fanos como el aire mismo’’ (1889, 83) [I have always considered Paris to be the most tidy city in the world, Florence being no exception; . . . but currently, because of the World’s Fair . . . there is not even a speck of dust; . . . the window-glass as diaphanous as the air itself]. At the same time, however, it is worth noting that one year after Pardo Baza´n’s comments, Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez, then living in Paris in political exile, offered a somewhat less glittering assessment of the city’s general appearance, remarking on the ‘‘aspecto sucio e intransitable’’ [dirty and impassable appearance] of many of central Paris’s public streets, due to a combination of crumbling asphalt, Parisians’ penchant for stealing the wooden pavers, and the resulting mud produced by summer rains [1943, 39–41]). 15. His plans for the widening, straightening, and beautification of the city’s principal thoroughfares, as well as the creation of new broad avenues and vistas, are outlined in both of his municipal reform plans. 16. His library includes nine volumes of Balzac’s works (including La peau de chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin], Sce`nes de la vie prive´e [Scenes of Private Life], and Sce`nes de la vie parisienne [Scenes of Parisian Life]; nine volumes of Hugo’s works, some translated into Spanish by Eugenio de Ochoa (including Notre Dame de Paris [The Hunchback of Notre Dame] and Les mise´rables); Mercier’s Tableau de Paris [Tableau of Paris]; Jouy’s complete Hermite series (including L’Hermite de la Chausse´e d’Antin [The Hermit of the Chause´e d’Antin]); and a variety of related costumbrista-style French works including Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un [Paris or the Book of the One Hundred and One], La grande ville: Nouveau tableau de Paris [The Great City: New Tableau of Paris], and Les franc¸ais peints par eux-meˆmes [The French Paint Themselves]. Mesonero’s extensive literary holdings are listed in the catalogue of his personal library published by the Imprenta Infante in 1875 (available for consultation at the Madrid Ateneo). A general summary of that index is provided in Chantal Colange’s ‘‘La bibliothe`que de Mesonero Romanos’’ [‘‘The Library of Mesonero Romanos’’]. 17. For more on Mesonero and Jouy, see H. Chonon Berkowitz, ‘‘Mesonero’s Indebtedness to Jouy.’’ 18. See, e.g., ‘‘El romanticismo y los roma´nticos’’ (‘‘Romanticism and the Romantics,’’ 2:62–70). In many cases (though not all), Mesonero’s attacks on romanticism spared romantic authors, such as Victor Hugo, who, in Mesonero’s opinion, possessed true artistic talent. His poisonous criticism was typically directed, rather,

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toward those whose works he considered to be excessively histrionic, vulgar, or immoral (e.g., Sue, Balzac, Ducange). 19. Mesonero’s assiduous efforts to present himself as defender of classical ideals are discussed at some length in Comellas Aguirreza´bal’s ‘‘La reaccio´n antirroma´ntica de Mesonero Romanos’’ [‘‘Mesonero Romanos’s Anti-Romantic Reaction’’]. 20. A similar commentary on Spanish literature’s largely successful avoidance of the French romantics’ penchant for ‘‘groserı´a’’ and ‘‘libertinaje’’ [coarseness and licentiousness] can be found in his ‘‘El forastero en la corte’’ (‘‘The Foreigner in the Capital,’’ 2:288). 21. A similar image appears in Mesonero’s description of Parisian hotels: ‘‘los primeros edificios particulares de Parı´s, los magnı´ficos palacios de la antigua nobleza, han sido convertidos en hoteles por el espı´ritu de especulacio´n’’ (5:299) [the principal private buildings of Paris, the magnificent palaces of the old nobility, have been converted into hotels through the spirit of speculation]. Mesonero’s fascination with the Palais Royal finds echoes in various other Spanish travel accounts, including those of Modesto Lafuente and Victor Balaguer, the latter of whom echoes the words of Lafuente’s Fray Gerundio when he declares in his Recuerdos de viaje [Travel Memories] that: ‘‘con razo´n se aplica al Palais Royal el nombre ma´s grandioso que pueda discurrirse, llama´ndole antonoma´sticamente la capital de Parı´s’’ (1842, 59) [with reason the Royal Palace has become known as the most grandiose imaginable, antonomastically it is the capital of Paris]. 22. This point is central to Benjamin’s celebrated treatment of the Parisian Arcades, an aspect of Paris’s urban infrastructure that Mesonero—for his part—seems to have found rather uninteresting. 23. Mercier: ‘‘Les yeux sont fascine´s par toutes ces de´corations exte´rieures, qui trompent le curieux se´duit, et qui ne s’aperc¸oit de la tromperie qu’on lui a faite, que lorsqu’il n’est plus temps d’y reme´dier’’ (1994, 2:938) [the eyes are fascinated by all these exterior decorations, which deceive the seduced curiosity seeker, who never realizes the deception until it is too late]. Balzac: ‘‘Si l’Espagne a ses combats de taureaux, si Rome a eu ses gladiateurs, Paris s’enorgueillit de son Palais-Royal dont les agac¸antes roulettes donnent le plaisir de voir couler le sang a` flots, sans que les pieds du parterre risquent d’y glisser. . . . Il ne s’y trouve meˆme pas un clou pour faciliter le suicide’’ (1949, 9:13–14) [If Spain has its bullfights, if Rome had its gladiators, Paris prides itself on its Palais-Royal, where the irritating rolling of caster-wheels brings the pleasure of seeing blood flow in torrents without the danger of having one’s feet slip. . . . There is not even a nail there to facilitate suicide]. For more on the mythification of the Palais Royal during the first third of the nineteenth century, see Hazan (2002, 32–40). 24. When discussing Madrid, interestingly, Mesonero has exactly the opposite reaction: while he finds the material aspects of city life (urban infrastructure, architecture, commerce) to be well below par, he offers a truly glowing appraisal of the moral rectitude of the Spanish citizenry (see, e.g., 5:342–43). 25. See also Mesonero’s reference to ‘‘el mismo no se´ que de yerto y cadave´rico que suele observarse por lo regular en la mayor parte de los templos franceses’’ (5:286) [the same vague rigidity and cadaverlike quality that are regularly observed in most French churches]. While he notes that church attendance has increased since his first voyage to France in 1833, he suspects that ‘‘la moda, la vanidad o hasta las oposiciones polı´ticas influira´n en estas demostraciones, ma´s au´n que la

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verdadera y so´lida piedad’’ (5:312) [fashion, vanity, and even political motives influence these demonstrations much more than true and solid piety]. 26. In texts written later in the century, the criticism of Parisian immorality continues but is generally less strident. See, e.g., Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez, who claims that the ‘‘invasio´n nocturna [de prostitutas] que sufre la gran ciudad es lo que la deshonra a los ojos del mundo; es lo que hace aparecer como centro u´nicamente de placeres y vicios a una poblacio´n cuyo vecindario es en su gran mayorı´a honrado, trabajador y virtuoso’’ (1943, 108) [the nocturnal invasion (of prostitutes) that the great city suffers is what dishonors it in the eyes of the world; it is what makes it appear to be only a center of pleasure and vice for a population which for the most part is honorable, hard-working, and virtuous]. 27. The following excerpt from the preface to the 1835 edition of Balzac’s Etudes philosophiques [Philosophical Studies] offers a good example: ‘‘[A Paris] les sentiments vrais sont des exceptions; ils sont brise´s par le jeu des inte´reˆts, e´crase´s entre les rouages de ce monde me´canique; la vertu y est calomnie´e, l’innocence y est vendue; les passions ont fait place a` des gou ˆ ts ruineux, a` des vices; tout se sublimise, s’analyse, se vend et s’ache`te; c’est un bazar ou` tout est cote´; . . . l’humanite´ n’a plus que deux formes, le trompeur et le trompe´’’ (1949, 11:208–09) [(In Paris) true feelings are the exception; they are broken by the play of interests, crushed in the cogs of this mechanical world; there, virtue is slandered, innocence is sold; passions have given way to ruinous tastes, to vice; everything is sublimated, analyzed, bought, and sold; it is a bazaar where everything is for sale; . . . humanity has only two forms: the deceiver and the deceived]. Sue’s Les Miste`res de Paris [Mysteries of Paris], though published a few years after the appearance of the Recuerdos de viaje, soon became one of the most frequent targets of Mesonero’s antiromantic ire. 28. It is interesting to note that Mesonero incorrectly credits the ‘‘enlightened albeit intrusive government’’ of Jose´ Napoleo´n with the idea of creating public cemeteries in Spain (3:319). In fact, cemeteries at San Ildefonso and the Reales Sitios del Pardo had been constructed under Carlos III (Gala´n Cabilla 1988, 291–92). Construction of Madrid’s first public cemetery at Fuencarral had begun in 1804 (Goldman 1979, 87). 29. For an explanation of the religious, economic, and cultural reasons behind the general lack of enthusiasm for cemetery burial, see Gala´n Cabilla’s ‘‘Madrid y los cementerios en el siglo XVIII: El fracaso de una reforma’’ [‘‘Madrid and its 18th Century Cemeteries: Failure of a Reform’’] and Goldman’s ‘‘Mitos liberales, mentalidades burguesas, e historia social en la lucha en pro de los cementerios municipales’’ [‘‘Liberal Myths, Bourgeois Mentalities, and Social History in the Fight for Municipal Cemeteries’’]. 30. According to Gala´n Cabilla, the high concentration of cadavers within an enclosed space produced a pestilential atmosphere within many churches, providing ‘‘un buen vehı´culo para la transmisio´n de las epidemias’’ (1988, 260) [a good vehicle for transmitting epidemics]. The periodic mondas, or mass exhumations, necessitated by the limited burial space available within church buildings led to even greater health risks (Gala´n Cabilla 1988, 260 and 282–83). 31. Of his Ra´pida ojeada a la capital [Rapid Glance at the Capital] he would later write: ‘‘haciendo la descripcio´n de los cementerios de Parı´s y de la ce´lebre Abadı´a de Westminster en Londres, me detenı´a en denunciar la mezquindez, insalubridad y repugnante aspecto de nuestros dos u´nicos cementerios generales, proponiendo

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en este punto las radicales reformas que juzgue´ necesarias’’ (5:210) [describing the cemeteries of Paris and London’s celebrated Westminster Abbey, I paused to denounce the wretchedness, insalubrity, and repulsive appearance of our two lone public cemeteries, proposing the radical reforms I deemed necessary in that regard]. 32. Mesonero’s account of Ducange’s funeral displays a certain similarity to Jouy’s text ‘‘Les fune´ railles’’ (‘‘Funerals,’’ 1823, 7:81–89). Blasco Iba´ n ˜ ez’s politicized account of the funeral of the communard leader, Joffrin, in chapter 7 of Parı´s: Impresiones de un emigrado (Paris: Impressions of an Emigre´, 1943, 81–95) also bears mentioning in this context. Though his account is clearly different in tone, Blasco, as does Mesonero, utilizes his observation of the funeral ritual as the basis for a meditation on significant elements of contemporary French life. 33. In a fascinating essay entitled ‘‘1840: Fune´ railles de Napole´ on, 15 De´ cembre’’ [‘‘1840: Funeral of Napoleon, December 15’’], Victor Hugo describes the same scene as follows: ‘‘L’avenue [de Neuilly] est de´core´e ou plutoˆt de´shonore´e dans toute sa longueur par d’affreuses statues en plaˆtre figurant des Renomme´es et par des colonnes triomphales surmonte´es d’aigles dore´s et pose´es en porte-a`faux sur des pie´destaux en marbre gris. Les gamins se divertissent a` faire des trous dans ce marbre qui est en toile’’ (1900, 24–25) [The Avenue (of Neuilly) is decorated or, rather, dishonored along its whole length by horrid plaster statues of famous figures and by triumphal columns topped with gilded eagles overhanging gray marble pedestals. The boys have fun making holes in the marble, which is made of fabric]. Throughout the text, Hugo repeatedly criticizes the ceremony’s reliance on cheap artifice (writing of the emperor’s funeral chariot: ‘‘Cet or n’est qu’en apparence. Sapin et carton-pierre, voila` la re´alite´’’ (1900, 19) [This is gold in appearance only. Pine and papier maˆche´, that is the reality] and the profiteering of the street vendors who work the crowds selling for pennies atrocious paintings (‘‘affreuses peintures’’) of Napole´on in his coffin. The essay was published posthumously in 1900. 34. According to Eugenio de Ochoa, the vision of Paris as an inferno soon became frequent among Spanish travelers as well: ‘‘Lo ma´s comu´n es que a poco de haber llegado a Parı´s, se apodere de ellos un deseo impaciente de volverse a sus hogares y perder de vista para siempre lo que ellos llaman con risible despecho, ¡este infierno!’’ (1861, 5) [Most typically, soon after they arrive in Paris they are overcome by an impatient desire to return home and lose sight forever of what they call with laughable indignation ‘‘this hell’’]. A different view is expressed in certain other Spanish texts, including Santiago Rusinyol’s Desde el molino, in which the traveler’s initial reaction to the city is described primarily as one of admiration and awe (1945, e.g., 117). 35. It is worth adding that Mesonero was not the only Spanish travel writer to see the symbolic potential of the Catacombs. Vı´ctor Balaguer, for example, in his Recuerdos de viaje, describes his reaction as follows: ‘‘Las catacumbas forman una ciudad de muertos bajo una ciudad de vivos, . . . otra inmensa capital sin habitantes pero con sus plazas, sus calles, sus fuentes y sus monumentos. . . . Es como una horrible y continua burla de esta vida de la que tan orgullosos estamos’’ (1853, 60) [The Catacombs form a city of the dead beneath the city of the living, . . . another immense capital without inhabitants, but with its squares, its streets, its fountains and its monuments. . . . It is like a horrible and endless joke on this life that makes us so proud].

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36. Mesonero discusses this problem in texts such as Recuerdos de viaje, ‘‘La vuelta de Parı´s’’ [Return from Paris’’], ‘‘El extranjero en su patria’’ [‘‘The Foreigner in his Homeland’’] and ‘‘El romanticismo y los roma´nticos’’ [‘‘Romanticism and the Romantics’’]. In his later writings, he displays an increasing impatience with what he views as Spain’s shoddy realization of modernizing reforms. A good example of this disillusionment appears in the poem ‘‘El nuevo Madrid: Romance jacarandino’’ [‘‘The New Madrid: A Jolly Ballad’’], which he published in the Ilustracio´n Espan˜ola y Americana in 1875.

Chapter 2: Miremos siempre hacia atra´ s The title quotation, ‘‘Miremos siempre hacia atra´s’’ (Let us look always backward), is taken from Mi romerı´a by Emilia Pardo Baza´n (1888, 153). The first epigraph is from Vı´ctor Balaguer’s Recuerdos de Italia (1892, 48). The second epigraph is from Galdo´s’s La inco´gnita (5:764). All quotations from Galdo´s’s work that bear a volume designation are taken from the 1942 Aguilar edition of his complete works unless otherwise noted. 1. The typical itinerary, activities, and goals of the Grand Tour have been discussed in a variety of works, including Jeremy Black’s The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century and Italy and the Grand Tour; Paul F. Kirby’s The Grand Tour in Italy; and William E. Mead’s The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. 2. Well-known authors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian chronicles include Addison, Boswell, Chateaubriand, James Fenimore Cooper, Dickens, The´ophile Gautier, Goethe, Smollet, Stendhal, and Hippolyte Taine. Italy was also a preferred setting for literary works, including Corinne, ou l’Italie [Corinne, or Italy] by Germaine de Sta¨el and many Gothic novels by Ann Radcliffe and others. Italian settings were equally popular in nineteenth-century Spanish literature (see, e.g., La conjuracio´n de Venecia [The Venetian Conspiracy]; Don Alvaro, o la fuerza del sino [Don Alvaro, or The Power of Destiny]; Don Juan Tenorio). Regarding Renaissance era travelers from France, see Eric MacPhail’s The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature. 3. In alphabetical order, the principal nineteenth-century travel works by Spanish literary figures devoted entirely or in part to Italy are (year of publication in brackets) as follows: Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n (De Madrid a Na´poles [From Madrid to Naples, 1861]), Vı´ctor Balaguer (Mis recuerdos de Italia [My Memories of Italy, 1892]), Vicente Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez (En el paı´s del arte: Tres meses en Italia [In the Land of Art: Three Months in Italy, 1896]), Emilio Castelar (Recuerdos de Italia [Memories of Italy, 1872]), Amo´s de Escalante (Del Ebro al Tı´ber [From the Ebro to the Tiber, 1864]), Francisco Martı´nez de la Rosa (‘‘Un recuerdo de Italia’’ [‘‘A Memory of Italy,’’ 1839]), Vicente Moreno de la Tejera (Diario de un viaje a Oriente [Diary of a Journey to the Orient, 1879]), Eugenio de Ochoa (‘‘Florencia’’ [‘‘Florence,’’ 1867]), Joaquı´n Pacheco (Italia, ensayo descriptivo, artı´stico y polı´tico [Italy, Descriptive, Artistic and Political Essay, 1857]), Emilia Pardo Baza´n (Mi romerı´a [My Pilgrimage, 1888]), Benito Pe´rez Galdo´s (Viaje a Italia [Journey to Italy, 1888–89]), Angel Saavedra (‘‘Un viaje a las ruinas de Pesto’’ [‘‘A Journey to the Ruins of Pesto,’’ 1944] and ‘‘Viaje al Vesubio’’ [‘‘Journey to Vesuvius,’’ 1844]), Miguel de Unamuno (‘‘Pompeya: Divagaciones’’ [‘‘Pompeii, Digressions,’’ 1892]). The 1849 article ‘‘La gruta azul y una gira en el vapor

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‘Colo´n’ ’’ [‘‘The Blue Grotto and a Tour on the Steamship ‘‘Colo´n’’] has been attributed both to Juan Valera and to Este´banez Caldero´n. Examples of early unsigned articles on Italy include, from El Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol: ‘‘La Italia’’ (‘‘Italy,’’ 1836), ‘‘Pompeya y el Herculiano’’ (‘‘Pompeii and Herculaneum,’’ 1836) and ‘‘Pompeya’’ (‘‘Pompeii,’’ 1837). Other texts on Italy adopted a more historical perspective (e.g., Angel Saavedra’s ‘‘Sublevacio´n de Na´poles’’ [‘‘Neapolitan Uprising’’] and ‘‘Breve resen ˜ a de la historia del Reino de las Dos Sicilias’’ [‘‘Brief History of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’’], Pedro de Madrazo’s ‘‘Italia’’ [‘‘Italy’’]). Complete bibliographic information for all of these chronicles is given in the Appendix. 4. It would of course be possible to enumerate additional factors that contributed to nineteenth-century travelers’ fascination with Italy. For example, authors of gothic and romantic literature, with their penchant for seductively mysterious evocations of the Italian peninsula, deserve a measure of credit, not only for promoting increased travel to Italy but also, perhaps more importantly, for influencing travelers’ interpretations of their experiences while there. See, e.g., The´ophile Gautier’s impression of Venice: ‘‘Nous croyions circuler dans un roman de Maturin, de Lewis, ou d’Anne Radcliff, illustre´ par Goya, Pirane`se et Rembrandt; . . . tout le me´lodrame et la mise en sce`ne romantique de l’ancienne Venise nous revenaient malgre´ nous en me´moire, assombris encore par des re´miniscences du Confessional de Pe´nitents noirs [by Ann Radcliffe] et d’Abellino ou le Grand Bandit [by Heinrich Zschokke] (1912, 69) [We felt as if we were wandering in a novel by Maturin, Lewis, or Ann Radcliffe, illustrated by Goya, Piranese, and Rembrandt; . . . all the melodrama and Romantic staging of old Venice came back unbidden into our memories, still shrouded by reminiscences of Confessional of the Black Penitents and Abellino, the Great Bandit]. Spanish travel chronicles, even those by presumably ‘‘realist’’ authors, also abound in the kind of viscerally emotional style and imagery generally associated with romantic works. Most notable in this regard, not surprisingly, are the numerous accounts of visits to ruins and the ascent of Mount Vesuvius, both of which typically give rise to lengthy meditations on such topics as the destructive passage of time, the inevitability of death, and the insignificance of the individual in the face of the telluric power of nature (see, e.g., Martı´nez de la Rosa’s ‘‘Un recuerdo de Italia’’ [‘‘A Memory of Italy’’] and the Duque de Rivas’s ‘‘Viaje al Vesubio’’ [‘‘Journey to Vesuvius’’] and ‘‘Viaje a las ruinas de Pesto’’ [‘‘Journey to the Ruins of Pesto’’]). 5. It might be added that this notion of kinship also contrasts with the description of Spain’s other nearby ‘‘Latin’’ neighbor, Portugal. Only one nineteenth-century Spanish author (Galdo´s) bothered to devote more than glancing attention to a Portuguese journey, and his ‘‘Excursio´n a Portugal’’ (‘‘Excursion to Portugal,’’ 1885) turns out to be built in important part on images of obstruction and distance: ‘‘entre Portugal y Espan ˜ a hay una barrera infranqueable,’’ ‘‘hemos sido dos vecinos de una misma casa, separados por un tabique,’’ and ‘‘Portugal continu´a distante de Espan ˜ a, no tanto como hace veinte an ˜ os; pero sı´ tan lejos de nosotros como pueden estarlo Holanda o Dinamarca’’ (6:1674) [there is an impassable barrier between Portugal and Spain; we have been like two neighbors in the same house, separated by a partition; Portugal remains distant from Spain, not as much as twenty years ago but still quite as distant from us as Holland or Denmark]. Descriptions of the Portuguese character depend on similar cultural juxtapositions: ‘‘Reina aquı´ una sobriedad de acciones y de palabras que a los espan ˜ oles, tan dados a hablar ma´s de

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la cuenta, nos parece algo sosa. . . . Si pudie´ramos ceder a esta gente algo de la estrepitosa alegrı´a andaluza, a cambio de sus apacibles modales y de este reposo espiritual, creo que ganarı´amos mucho en el cambio’’ (6:1677) [There reigns here a sobriety of action and word that to Spaniards, known as we are for speaking more than we should, seems rather boring. . . . If we could give these people something of Andalusia’s rambunctious happiness in exchange for their gentle manners and spiritual repose, I think we would benefit greatly from the transaction]. 6. Alarco´n, similarly, notes in his De Madrid a Na´poles that ‘‘fuera el cuento de nunca acabar, si yo hubiese de referir una por una todas las glorias de Espan ˜ a que recuerda el suelo italiano. ¡Basta decir que, desde los Alpes hasta el Etna, apenas hay un pueblo, un arroyo, una montan ˜ a que no hayan regado con su sangre nuestros mayores!’’ (1954, 1266–67) [it would be an never-ending tale if I were to recount one by one all of the Spanish glories that the earth of Italy recalls. It is enough to say that from the Alps to Etna there is scarcely a town, a stream, a mountain that has not been bathed by the blood of our ancestors!]. 7. Though not known as a travel writer, Galdo´s actually authored a number of texts, primarily during the 1880s, recounting his voyages to a variety of Western European nations. In Memorias de un desmemoriado [Memoirs of a Forgetful Man], Galdo´s explains his frequent escapes (‘‘escapatorias’’) from the Spanish capital as an effort to counterbalance the feelings of frustration and restlessness engendered by his professional responsibilities: ‘‘De los afanes literarios que hondamente embargaban mi a´nimo, descansaba con otros afanes que en cierto modo corregı´an los efectos de la vida sedentaria. Me refiero a mi aficio´n a los viajes’’ (6:1736) [From my literary activities which deeply weighed down my spirit, I would rest through other activities that in a certain sense counteracted the effects of my sedentary lifestyle. I am referring to my penchant for travel]. He published accounts of many of his travels—some within Spain, others to foreign destinations such as Portugal, France, England, Holland, Germany, Denmark, and Italy—in a number of periodicals, including La Nacio´n [The Nation], El Liberal [The Liberal], El Imparcial [The Impartial], El Dı´a [The Day], and Nada [Nothing], in Spain, and La Prensa [The Press] in Buenos Aires. Some of these texts appear in the Aguilar edition of Galdo´s’s works (1942, 6:1479–86 and 1675–1719), the remainder in Las cartas desconocidas de Galdo´s en La Prensa de Buenos Aires (The Unknown Letters of Galdo´s in The Press of Buenos Aires, 1973, 154–55, 251–93, 325–343, 354–83). Los artı´culos de Galdo´s en La Nacı´on [The Articles of Galdo´s in The Nation] features a few texts produced as a result of voyages (1972, see, e.g., 416–20) but no travel narrations. 8. Galdo´s’s Italian chronicle has appeared in book form under three different titles. The first was De vuelta de Italia (Back from Italy, 1912), followed by Excursio´n a Italia: Las ciudades [Excursion to Italy: The Cities] in Ghirardo’s 1923 collection of Galdo´s’s ‘‘obras ine´ditas’’ (Unpublished Works, 9:47–162), and finally Viaje a Italia: Las ciudades [Journey to Italy: The Cities], appearing in the Aguilar edition of Galdo´s’s complete works (6:1685–1719). These versions, however, are not identical and all three fail to include two of the cartas from the original journalistic series. For the sake of simplicity I will draw citations wherever possible from the readily accessible Aguilar edition and likewise utilize the Aguilar title, Viaje a Italia. Citations from the two omitted cartas will be drawn from William Shoemaker’s Las cartas de Galdo´s en la Prensa de Buenos Aires (1973, 325–43). With respect to the ordering of the ten letters, I will adhere to Galdo´s’s original indications rather than the reconfigured

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sequencing found in Aguilar. The sequence of the letters should thus be (1) Rome; (2) the Vatican; (3) Verona; (4) Naples; (5) Pompeii; (6) and (7) Venice; (8) Padua and Bologna; (9) and (10) Florence. 9. The complete series first appeared in La Prensa de Buenos Aires; however, many of the texts were published simultaneously in the Spanish press as well (see Garcı´a-Romeral Pe´rez 1995, 202). The chronicle’s inscribed reader, in fact, seems almost certainly to be Spanish, as is indicated for example by Galdo´s’s frequent attempts to communicate his Italian experiences via comparisons with Spanish geographical features and cultural practices that would have little if any meaning to readers outside the peninsula (see, e.g., his comparison of Neapolitan islands to ‘‘the Cies islands, at the entrance of the port of Vigo’’ [6:1712]). The chronicle also lacks any counterbalancing references to issues that would have particular meaning to a Latin American public. For example, while the recent achievement of Italian unity serves as basis for a discussion of Spanish national identity and the chaos of contemporary Spanish politics, there is no mention whatever of contemporary Latin American struggles with similar problems. In the same vein, study of Galdo´s’s various uses of we and our (nosotros, nuestro) to express commonality with his readers reveal that again, in most cases, his frame of reference is clearly Spanish (see, e.g., ‘‘our countryman’’ Alexander Borgia, ‘‘our plateresque,’’ ‘‘our domination [of Italy],’’ ‘‘our Ribera’’ [6:1693, 1695, 1711]). Such factors make it difficult to assign any profound relevance to the texts’ appearance in the Argentine press. 10. See., e.g., Galdo´s’s proud references to—among others—Gil de Albornoz (‘‘una de las ma´s interesantes figuras de Italia en el turbulento siglo XIV’’ [6:1710; one of the most interesting figures of Italy’s turbulent fourteenth century]), the Spanish popes Calixto III and Alexander VI, political figures such as the duke of Osuna and Carlos III, Jose´ de Ribera (whose paintings are said to give Naples its ‘‘character’’ [6:1711]), and the nineteenth-century landscape painter Martı´n Rico (credited with developing ‘‘a new Venetian genre’’ [6:1701]). In Venice, likewise, he delightedly reports his discovery of Spanish words in the local dialect (Cartas 1973, 329), while in Naples he finds a culture so like that of southern Spain that the two peninsulas could easily ‘‘seem the same country’’ (6:1711). 11. See, in this vein, Buzard who notes that ‘‘Adam Smith wrote scathingly that the typical Grand Tourist ‘commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home’ ’’ (1993, 99; Buzard draws the Smith quotation from The Wealth of Nations). 12. See Charles Batten’s discussion of the evolution of attitudes toward first-person narration in travel writing in Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature. Though focused primarily on eighteenth-century British texts, Batten also devotes some attention to Continental works and to the diverse problems and adaptations that attended the genre’s continued evolution during the nineteenth century. 13. Regarding this practice, Calaresu writes: ‘‘Many guidebooks included introductory letters to the reader, often claiming exclusive knowledge of new sites or routes. Despite these claims, the information and opinions in the guidebooks most commonly used by travelers are very similar, reflecting in part the common practice of wholesale lifting of passages from earlier guidebooks’’ (1999, 141). 14. Galdo´s evokes certain forms of ‘‘cultural unity’’ often cited by Italian chronicle

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authors (i.e., the union of Paganism/Christianity and Orient/Occident [6:1690 and 6:1706; 1973, 329]), as well as additional forms of ‘‘unity’’ linking art and life (e.g., 6:1692 and 6:1703), past and present (e.g., 1973, 333), poetic endeavor through the ages (6:1686), the Italian language from Dante to Leopardi (6:1703), etc. 15. This is not to say, of course, that references to current events are utterly lacking in Italian travel chronicles. Authors who visited Italy during its war of independence, for example, often provide abundant information regarding the war’s progress, inconveniences, and frustrations (see, e.g., Alarco´n’s De Madrid a Na´poles and Balaguer’s Mis recuerdos de Italia). What is unusual about Galdo´s’s text is his apparent desire to focus on the ways in which Italy’s present is specifically unlike Italy’s past. This notion of cultural transformation—particularly if presented in a favorable light—represents a significant break from the ‘‘eternal Italy’’ described in most travel works. 16. See also Castelar: ‘‘Yo, que cansado un poco de la polı´tica en Madrid, de la industria en Londres, de la vida en Parı´s, . . . me refugiaba en Roma para consumir algunos momentos en e´xtasis ante la historia, ante el arte, ante la religio´n, ante todo lo ideal’’ (1883, 36) [A bit tired of Madrid’s politics, London’s industry, and Paris’s lifestyle . . . I took refuge in Rome in order to spend some moments in ecstasy before history, before art, before religion, before all that is ideal]. And, from the French perspective, Stendhal: ‘‘Tout est de´cadence ici [Rome], tout est souvenir, tout est mort. La vie active est a` Londres et a` Paris’’ (1973, 21) [Everthing is decadence here (Rome); everything is memory; everything is death. The active life is in London and Paris]. 17. Augmenting the essay’s resemblance to Viaje a Italia, Galdo´s presents this search for unity by using the image of a journey: ‘‘Podrı´a decirse que la sociedad llega a un punto de su camino en que se ve rodeada de ingentes rocas que le cierran el paso . . . y los ma´s sabios de entre nosotros se enredan en interminables controversias sobre cua´l pueda o deba ser la hendidura o pasadizo por el cual podremos salir de este hoyo pantanoso en que nos revolvemos y asfixiamos’’ (1990, 161) [It could be said that society arrives at a point in its route where it finds itself surrounded by giant boulders blocking its path . . . and the wisest among us get enmeshed in interminable debate over which could or should be the crevice or passageway that could lead us out of the swampy hole where we writhe and suffocate]. 18. As many critics have observed, the ‘‘realidad’’ presented in Realidad, the similarly emplotted ‘‘novela dialogada’’ [novel in dialogue] Galdo´s produced later the same year, is in many ways no less ambiguous than that found in La inco´gnita [The Unknown]. The linguistically self-conscious qualities of both novels have been discussed by a number of critics: in addition to Urey’s Galdo´s and the Irony of Language, see also, e.g., Akiko Tsuchiya The Semiotic Consciousness in the Novels of Benito Pe´rez Galdo´s; Robert Russell, ‘‘La o´ptica del novelista en La inco´gnita y Realidad’’ [‘‘The Novelist’s Perspective in La inco´gnita and Realidad’’]; and Monroe Hafter, ‘‘Ironic Reprise in Galdo´s’s Novels.’’ See also Luis Ferna´ndez Cifuentes’s discussion of Galdo´s’s destabilization of notions of literary realism in ‘‘Signs for Sale in the City of Galdo´s.’’ 19. It perhaps bears repeating that I am using the sequence in which Galdo´s’s Italian articles originally appeared rather than the reorganized and abridged version found in the Aguilar edition of Galdo´s’s works. As for Galdo´s’s actual itinerary

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in Italy: though his exact route is unclear, the information included in texts such as Viaje a Italia, Memorias de un desmemoriado, and Galdo´s’s 1912 interview with Anto´n de Olmet (Los grandes espan˜oles [The Great Spaniards]), suggests he followed a fairly standard path. After entering Italy near Mont Cenis, he began by touring the northern cities of Turin and Milan, then worked his way south through Verona, Venice, Padua, Bolonia, Florence, Rome, and finally, Naples and Pompeii. He then traveled north to Genova, with stopovers in Assisi, Siena, and Pisa, prior to reaching the border crossing at Ventimiglia for the journey back to Spain. Viaje a Italia narrates only his journey from Verona to Pompeii. 20. The passage quoted from Galdo´s’s Veronese letter is, in fact, remarkably similar to the beginning of Memorias de un desmemoriado’s meandering narration: ‘‘Incapacitado para el orden cronolo´gico por la rebeldı´a innata de mis ideas, doy comienzo a esta primera parte de mi existencia por el fin o los medios de ella’’ (6:1729) [The innate rebelliousness of my ideas making me incapable of following chronological order, I will begin this part of my existence at the end or in the middle]. In this vein, it is interesting to note that Memorias de un desmemoriado, incomplete in so many respects, provides abundant information regarding Galdo´s’s travel experiences. Intent upon stressing the capricious nature of memory, Galdo´s opts not to mention—and many of his readers consequently may not know—that these reminiscences are not entirely the result of spontaneous mental reconstruction, but are rather drawn in large part from his previously published travel writings. 21. According to Bangert, ‘‘so uneasy and taut was the political life in Italy at the time [1892] that the members of the curia feared to bring [the Jesuit leader Anton Anderledy’s] body to Rome for burial lest they thereby create a public disturbance’’ (1972, 439). Galdo´s also discusses the tumultuous relationship between church and state in La inco´gnita (5:766). 22. Moratı´n’s description of Neapolitan beggars (1867, see, e.g., 1:343, 2:157) is, however, more threatening than that found in either Dupaty or Galdo´s. Moratı´n’s Obras po´stumas [Posthumous Works], the three-volume set that contains his Viaje de Italia in volumes 1 and 2, appears in Martı´nez’s catalogue of Galdo´s’s library holdings (1990, 158). Galdo´s mentions Moratı´n’s Italian text in his letter on Bologna (6:1709). 23. This description of Naples’s socially and politically apathetic populace, it might also be noted, clashes rather notably with some of Galdo´s’s earlier descriptions of the pan-Italian character, for example: ‘‘en Italia la vida polı´tica absorbe gran parte de las actividades,’’ ‘‘en Italia . . . todo se subordina a la unidad,’’ and ‘‘la unidad polı´tica no es ma´s que el resultado de la unidad de pensamiento en toda la familia italiana’’ (6:1687, 1688) [in Italy political life absorbs a large part of activity; in Italy . . . everything is subordinate to unity; political unity is nothing more than the result of the unity of the entire Italian family]. 24. For example, Alarco´n, although anxious to reach Venice, nonetheless decided to visit Verona because, as he explains: ‘‘¡Me llama Venecia . . . , y me llama con tan fuertes voces, que—bien lo sabe Dios—si pienso detenerme esta noche en Verona, Shakespeare tiene la culpa! . . . ¿Co´mo no visitar el nido de los amores de Romeo y Julieta?’’ (1954, 1315, ellipses in original) [Venice calls me! . . . and it calls me with such strong voices that—as God knows—if I am thinking of stopping this night in Verona it is Shakespeare’s fault! . . . how not to visit the love nest of Romeo and Juliet?]. See also, similar passages in Escalante (1956, 2:100); and Gautier’s Voyage en Italie (Voyage to Italy, 1912, 61).

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25. In humorous contrast, Galdo´s concludes his narration of Juliet’s tomb by deriding the ‘‘unrealistic’’ portrait of another Shakespearean character, Friar Lawrence, located near the sepulcher: ‘‘La guardesa asegura que aque´l es el retrato de fray Lorenzo, y aunque muchos se prestan a creerlo bajo palabra de persona tan respetable, otros lo ponen en duda. Pase lo del sepulcro, pero lo del fraile ya toca en broma’’ (6:1697–98) [The guardwoman claims that is the portrait of Fray Lorenzo, and although many are willing to believe it on the the basis of word of such a respectable person, others are doubtful. That story about the tomb is all well and good, but this business about the friar is a joke]. Though Viaje a Italia is not the only text in which Galdo´s discusses the tangible ‘‘realidad’’ [reality] achieved by great art (see, e.g., ‘‘Observaciones sobre la novela contempora´nea en Espan ˜ a’’ [‘‘Observations on the Contemporary Spanish Novel’’] in which he notes that ‘‘los apasionados de Vela´zquez se han familiarizado de tal modo con los seres creados por aquel grande artista, que creen haberlos conocido y tratado’’ [1990, 108; those who love Vela´zquez have familiarized themselves with the characters created by that great artist to such an extent that they believe they have met and interacted with them]), his decision to makes such extensive use of the topos in the context of a first-person travel chronicle is, nevertheless, significant in light of the autobiographical (hence presumably verisimilar) nature of the narrative. 26. To give only one example of the many other travel writers who make similar observations regarding Pompeii, Stendhal writes in Rome, Naples, Florence that ‘‘Ce que j’ai vu de plus curieux dans mon voyage c’est Pompeii. On se sent transporte´ dans l’antiquite´’’ (1973, 51) [The most curious thing I have seen on my voyage is Pompeii. One feels transported back to antiquity]. 27. Urey raises a similar point in Galdo´s and the Irony of Language, when she discusses the importance of the ‘‘generic identity of the text as a narrative form’’ (1982, 65) in the process by which readers prepare themselves for the task of ‘‘naturalizing’’ (1982, 65)—making intelligible—whatever it is that they are about to read. In the case of Galdo´s, generic and formal markers that appear to identify the text as ‘‘representational,’’ ‘‘credible,’’ ‘‘historical,’’ etc., can prepare the stage for the ironic undermining of those presumptions. 28. Compare, e.g., the description of Pompeii’s destruction and the principal revelations of contemporary archaeological investigation in Galdo´s’s letter five (6:1715–18) with the essentially identical observations and terminology used in Baedeker’s account (1890, 3:130–35), or the summary of the history of Padua and Bologna in Galdo´s’s letter eight (6:1706, 1708) and in Baedeker (1890, 1:248, 363– 64). Regarding the description of artists, compare, e.g., Galdo´s’s portrayal of the Veronese architect Sanmicheli (6:1698) with the corresponding passage in Baedeker (1890, 1:233). 29. He later turns to an impersonal use of nosotros (Si . . . seguimos hacia la Scala Regia, llegaremos a la capilla Sixtina’’ [6:1690; If . . . we continue to the Sala Regia, we will arrive at the Sistine Chapel]), finally providing the letter’s first and only use of a first-person singular verb in describing Michelangelo’s Moses (‘‘Entre´ en San Pedro Advı´ncula . . . Acerque´me al brazo derecho del crucero’’ [6:1691; I entered into San Pedro Ad Vincula. . . . I approached the right branch of the transept]). Most of the letters in Viaje a Italia contain no first-person singular verbs at all. 30. The fact that this declaration appears at the beginning of Galdo´s’s Venetian account, which, itself, can seldom claim to possess any of the characteristics cited,

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may be seen as yet another of Viaje a Italia’s long list of pointed textual juxtapositions. 31. Regarding Galdo´s’s use of Taine’s Philosophie de l’art, see, e.g., Galdo´s’s account of the decadence of Italian art after Michelangelo (compare Galdo´s 6:1692 with Taine 1921, 2:327–28), his evaluation of Machiavelli (compare Galdo´s 6:1704 with Taine 1921, 1:178–79), the lessons of Pompeiian art (compare Galdo´s 6:1719 with Taine 1921, 1:19), the tendency for artistic production to improve in unstable times (compare Galdo´s 6:1688 and 1973, 336 with Taine 1921, 1:129 and 1:167), the history of Florentine art (compare Galdo´s 1973, 336–38, with Taine 1921, 1:129, 1:167, 1:178, 1:183, 1:203). Taine’s ideas appear in other galdosian travel works as well (compare the discussion of Dutch art in Galdo´s’s 1973, 263 with Taine 1921, 2:32–33). Interestingly, Taine’s ideas appear as well in La inco´gnita, in which they are placed, again without attribution, in the mouth of Infante’s ‘‘padrino,’’ Cisneros (Galdo´s 5:727). 32. Similar remarks appear in other letters as well. See, e.g., letter six: ‘‘por muchas noticias que se tengan de una ciudad y por mucho que se la haya visto pintada, ya en cuadros magnı´ficos, ya en las tapas de las cajas de guantes, siempre la contemplacio´n real de la misma nos hace rectificar ideas e ima´genes’’ (6:1700) [no matter how much one has heard of a city or seen it painted, whether in magnificent paintings or on the top of a glove box, the experience of actually seeing it always causes us to rectify our ideas and images]. 33. One might recall here that the notion of reproduction plays a prominent role in Galdo´s’s textual narration as well: not only does he identify his Italian chronicle as a faithful ‘‘reproduccio´n’’ of his travel experiences (6:1694), but his account itself is constructed via the repeated and recognizable ‘‘reproduction’’ of both the form and the content of numerous other texts, including works from the tradition of Grand Tour travel narratives, Baedeker’s popular tourbooks, and Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art. 34. See, in this regard, the British Orientalist travel writer Eliot Warburton’s 1844 comment that ‘‘it is not what a country is but what we are that renders it rich in interest or pregnant with enjoyment’’ (cited in Duncan and Gregory 1999, 90). 35. Though little attention has yet been devoted to the tactics of representation in Galdo´s’s first-person autobiographical works (a corpus that would include both his travel writings and Memorias de un desmemoriado), there does, fortunately, exist a considerable and growing body of work on the treatment of historical narration in his Episodios nacionales, including major studies by Bly, Dendle, Ribbans, and Urey. Though novelized history and travel chronicle differ in important ways, they both pose similar problems regarding how and whether the representation of external reality may be effectuated in writing. I have found Diane Urey’s Galdo´s and the Irony of Language and The Novel Histories of Galdo´s extraordinarily useful. Interestingly, the latter text devotes sustained attention to Galdo´s’s use of travel metaphors as a tool for destabilizing notions of linearity in the third series of Episodios nacionales (1982, see, e.g., 20, 29, 76, 100). See, generally, Fletcher (1976).

Chapter 3: Esta Corta Travesı´a The title quotation is from Viajes por Africa y Asia (1943, 19) by Badı´a y Leblich (pseud.: Ali Bey). The first epigraph is from Fromentin (1934, 6), the second is

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from Alarco´n’s Obras (1954, 292). The second ellipsis in the quotation is in the original text. 1. Lou Charnon-Deutsch expresses a similar reaction in Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press, in which she criticizes Litvak’s ‘‘promotional and uncritical’’ view of the European cultural model and failure to ‘‘explore in any but a superficial way some of the harder questions’’ posed by the Orientalist stance (2000, 181). 2. Charnon-Deutsch’s scholarship on exoticism in the nineteenth-century Spanish press and Martin-Ma´rquez’s work on Galdo´s and Fortuny are particularly germane to the texts I study here. Treatments of twentieth-century authors (Goytisolo for Pe´rez and Lo´pez-Baralt; Paz, Borges, and Sarduy for Kushigian) are also of interest, in part because of their often sharp differentiation from the contexts and perspectives of nineteenth-century Spain. For complete bibliographic references see the listing of books and articles appearing under these authors’ names in the list of Works Cited. 3. A fascinating illustration of the pervasiveness of this general pattern of Orientalist representation across genres, artistic movements, and decades can be found in Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s article ‘‘Exoticism and the Politics of Difference in Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodicals’’ in her coedited Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Charnon-Deutsch and Labanyi: 1995). 4. In alphabetical order, the principal chronicles of the Mediterranean Orient by Spanish literary figures are (year of publication in brackets) the following: Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n (Diario de un testigo de la guerra de Africa [Diary of a Witness to the African War, 1859–60]), Jose´ Alvarez Pe´rez (Las cacerias de Marruecos [Hunting in Morocco, 1870]) and El paı´s del misterio [The Land of Mystery, 1875]), Eusebio Blasco (Mi viaje a Egipto [My Journey to Egypt, 1869]), Vicente Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez (journalistic accounts of journeys to Tangiers [1894] and Algiers [1895]), Vicente Moreno de la Tejera (Diario de un viaje a Oriente [Diary of a Journey to the Orient, 1877]), Gaspar Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce (Recuerdos de la campan˜a de Africa [Memories of the African Campaign 1859–60]), Eugenio de Ochoa (‘‘De Jaffa a Jerusale´n’’ [‘‘From Jaffa to Jerusalem,’’ 1867]), and Jacint Verdaguer (Records de la costa de Africa [Memories of the African Coast, 1884] and Dietari d’un pelegri a Terra Santa [Journal of a Pilgrim to the Holy Land, 1889]). Though not a travel chronicle, per se, Serafı´n Este´banez Caldero´n’s Manual del oficial en Marruecos (Manual for Officers in Morocco, 1844) is of interest in this context as well. The Cro´nica de la Guerra de Africa [Chronicles of the African War], of which Castelar is coauthor, was not a travel chronicle, but rather a compendium of Spanish documents, letters from Spanish soldiers, and the like, first published in installments over the course of the war. Complete bibliographic information on all of the travel texts referenced appears in the Appendix. 5. In another variation on the North/South paradigm, southern France’s relative proximity to Algeria inspired some French orientalists to present it as a semiAfrican domain. See, e.g., Fromentin’s Une anne´e dans le Sahel [A year in the Sahara]: ‘‘J’ai passe´ l’e´te´ dernier en Provence, dans un pays qui pre´pare a` celui-ci et le fait de´sirer: des eaux sereines, un ciel exquis, et presque la vive lumie`re de l’Orient’’ (1934, 4) [I spent last summer in Provence, in a land that is preparation for this one [Algeria] and that makes one desire it: serene waters, exquisite sky, and almost the intense light of the Orient]. 6. Such attitudes are even identifiable in many authors who claim to prefer

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non-Western society to their own. See, e.g., The´ophile Gautier, who, despite his enthusiasm for indigenous Algerian culture, nonetheless enthusiastically joins the colonial governor in the inaugural celebration of the colony’s first rail line (a development that, of course, would inevitably facilitate efforts to cultivate, regulate, and otherwise further Westernize increasingly larger areas of the Algerian countryside): ‘‘C’est le commencement d’un re´seau qui va bientoˆt s’e´tendre de tous coˆte´s sur le territoire de notre belle colonie. . . . C’est un avenir voisin, plein de promesses, qui s’ouvre pour la France africaine’’ (1978, 11:130) [It is the beginning of a network that will soon stretch across all parts of our beautiful colony. . . . It is a future full of promises that is soon to open for French Africa]. 7. According to Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez these texts were well known in Spain: ‘‘Hace tiempo que los escritores europeos ‘descubrieron’ Ta´nger y gran parte de Marruecos, ası´ es que resulta ma´s que difı´cil decir nada nuevo’’ (Obras completas [Complete Works], 1967–87, 4:1105) [European writers ‘‘discovered’’ Tangiers and a large part of Morocco some time ago, and so it is more than difficult to say anything new]. 8. The following are other important Spanish chronicles of the war: Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce’s Recuerdos de la campan˜a de Africa [Memories of the African Campaign] and Jose´ de Navarrete y Vela-Hidalgo’s Desde Wad-Ra´s a Sevilla [From Wad-Ras to Seville]. Also of interest is Sous la tente: Souvenirs du Maroc [Under the Tent: Memories of Morocco], by Alarco´n’s friend the French artist Charles Yriarte. Alarco´n is mentioned in a number of passages of Yriarte’s text. 9. Alarco´n’s travel works have received surprisingly little recent critical attention. For consideration of Diario de un testigo, see: Luis Ferna´ndez Cifuentes’s study of Alarco´n’s travel writings (‘‘Los viajes de Alarco´n: Shakespeare tiene la culpa . . . ,’’ [‘‘Alarco´n’s Travels: Shakespeare is to Blame . . .’’]), Alberto Navarro Gonza´lez’s introduction to the 1974 reedition of the original 1860 Diario text, and Jose´ Schraibman’s comparative study of Diario de un testigo and Aita Tettauen, ‘‘Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n y Galdo´s: dos visiones de la guerra de Africa [1859–60]’’), [‘‘Pedro Antonio de Alarco´n and Galdo´s: Two Visions of the African War’’]. 10. Other authors whose travel chronicles resulted from professionally motivated journeys included Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano, Vı´ctor Balaguer, Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce, Joaquı´n Pacheco, el Duque de Rivas, and Juan Valera. Mesonero, though traveling to Paris on his own initiative, clearly also viewed his journey as a form of professional/ patriotic duty. The freedom of movement of more leisure-oriented travelers would also of course be constrained by a variety of factors including finances, transportation routes, and the desires of their traveling companions. 11. Quotations from Alarco´n’s Diario are drawn from the 1974 reedition of the original 1860 text unless otherwise noted. Parenthetic page references always refer to this edition unless preceded by the year 1954, in which case they they are drawn from the Diario’s revised second edition, reedited in the 1954 Fax edition of Alarco´n’s works. Interestingly, despite Alarco´n’s apparent desire later in life to portray his participation in the Moroccan War as an act of formal alliance with the forces of patriotic conservatism (see, e.g., the following comment from an unpublished autobiographical manuscript: ‘‘Los que le tratan con intimidad saben que para e´l la campan ˜ a de Africa fue como una penitencia o purgatorio que se impuso, a fin de rehabilitarse, para rendir pu´blico culto a sentimientos e ideas que habı´a combatido en su primera juventud y que ya veneraba en lo profundo de su alma’’ [1954,

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xii; Those who know him well know that for him the Africa campaign was like a selfimposed penitence or purgatory undertaken as a form of rehabilitation, to pay public homage to feelings and ideas he had fought in his earlier youth and that he now venerated in the depths of his soul]), the revised second edition of Diario de un testigo stresses the existence of tensions between Alarco´n’s soldierly patriotism and his poetic wanderlust with even more insistence than the original text. In his study [‘‘Revisio´n de Alarco´n’’] ‘‘Revision of Alarco´n’’, Joan Estruch Tobella discusses the inadequacy of attempts to analyze Alarco´n’s literary production as a direct transcription of his conservative religious and political views. 12. The Diario’s first edition was reprinted by Ediciones del Centro in 1974. The much revised 1880 second edition can be found in Alarco´n’s Obras completas [Complete Works] published by Fax. As previously mentioned, all quotations from Alarco´n’s Diario will be drawn from the 1974 edition, unless otherwise noted. 13. Alarco´n initially offers the quotation without attribution, then later incorrectly declares that the phrase was first spoken by Scipio Africanus (Diario, 1974, 40). He left these references unchanged in his otherwise greatly revised second edition of the Diario. In fact, the quotation is from from Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum, (Lives of the Caesars, I.59) and consists of Caesar’s purported response after stumbling as he disembarked in Africa in pursuit of Scipio: ‘‘Prolapsus etiam in egressu navis verso ad melius omine: ‘Teneo te,’ inquit, ‘Africa’ ’’ (Suetonius 1967, 30) [He had fallen when leaving the ship but turned this into a good omen: ‘‘Africa, I possess you,’’ he said.]. Though the misidentification is unlikely to have been intentional, it is interesting that Alarco´n appears to associate the phrase with Roman imperial glory (i.e., the conquest of Carthage) rather than with its actual, decidedly less glorious subject: civil war. 14. Chateaubriand is mentioned on several occasions in Diario de un testigo (Alarco´n 1954; 193, 202, 405); Fromentin’s Une Anne´e dans le Sahel is cited as a model of Orientalist travel writing in La Alpujarra (Alarco´n 1954, 1570). 15. In the Diario’s second edition, he admits that ‘‘el general O’Donnell ignora nuestra determinacio´n, para la cual no le hemos pedido permiso, adivinando que nos lo hubiera negado, como a todos’’ (1954, 985) [General O’Donnell is unaware of our decision, for which we have not asked permission, being convinced he would have denied it to us, as to everyone else]. 16. In addition to these accounts of Crusade-style battles between Christian and nonChristian forces, Alarco´n further manipulates the civilization vs. barbarism model through reference to classical texts such as Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum (38) and Lucan’s Pharsalia (84), both of which describe Roman military campaigns in Africa, and to paintings of classical battle scenes, including ‘‘los bajorrelieves de Fidias . . . que representan el be´lico poderı´o de Agesilao o de Epaminondas’’ and ‘‘grabados y tapices que representaban el Paso de Gra´nico, Marato´n, Los Campos catala´unicos o Queronea’’ (253, 283) [the bas-reliefs of Phidias . . . that represent the military might of Agesilaus or Epaminondas; engravings and tapestries representing the Pass of Granico, Marathon, The Catalaunian Fields, or Chaeronea]. 17. Alberto Navarro Gonza´lez discusses Alarco´n’s pro-Moorish sympathies in the introduction to the 1974 reedition of the 1860 Diario text (see, e.g., 14). As mentioned earlier, Alarco´n underscores his compassion for his adversaries even more frequently in the chronicle’s second edition (e.g., 1954, 940 and 998). 18. Though less emphatic, an identifiable distancing from his comrades in arms

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already appears in Alarco´n’s account of the very first Spanish victory in which he participates, as suggested by the following quotation, in which the term soldados [soldiers] appears to exist in tension with (though at this point not in outright opposition to) Alarco´n’s narrative voice: ‘‘Los soldados, no pudiendo contener su rencorosa alegrı´a, estallaron en vı´tores y palmadas; . . . Te lo repito: fue aquel un rato de verdadera fiesta: el soldado se divirtio´ honestamente y yo no hacı´a ma´s que pugnar por imaginarme lo que pensarı´an y habları´an de nosotros aquellos desgraciados circuncisos’’ (66–67) [The soldiers, unable to contain their rancorous glee, broke into cheers and applause; . . .; I tell you again: that moment was truly a party: the soldier enjoyed himself honestly, and I could do nothing more than struggle to imagine what those unfortunate circumcised ones must be thinking and saying about us]. 19. Alarco´n’s attitude toward Tetouan’s Jewish inhabitants is particularly harsh (see, e.g., 228, 354, 359, 367–68). 20. Similarly, the North African–style homes Alarco´n finds so attractive appear to others as miserable ‘‘casucas que ma´s bien parecen perreras que habitaciones para personas’’ (Ochoa 1867, 352) [hovels that look more like doghouses than human dwellings] while the North African music he finds so delightful is more commonly decried as ‘‘discordante,’’ ‘‘ronco,’’ ‘‘bien desagradable a todo oı´do habituado a la mu´sica europea’’ (Badı´a 1967, 23) [dissonant; hoarse; quite unpleasant to any ear accustomed to European music]. Not all Spanish writers were so negative, however. In Records de la costa de Africa [Memories of the African Coast], Verdaguer, for example, reacts much as Alarco´n, commenting during his visit to Tangiers that ‘‘no recordo que may n’hague´s sentida d’altra [mu´sica] amb tant gust’’ (1906–7, 6:43) [I cannot recall ever listening to any other (music) with more pleasure] and later, in Algiers, ‘‘re`s de me´s bellesa que exos antichs pala`us o senzilles cases dels a`rabes y juhe´us d’Alger’’ (1906–7, 6:47) [nothing more beautiful than those old palaces or simple homes of the Arabs and Jews of Algiers]. 21. Throughout the paragraph in which this passage appears, Alarco´n echoes ideas he had expressed the previous year in ‘‘Una conversacio´n en La Alhambra’’ [‘‘A conversation in The Alhambra’’]. The paragraph was later eliminated from the second edition (see Alarco´n 1954, 848). 22. See, e.g., the lengthy paraphrase of Chateaubriand’s Le Dernier Abencerage (Alarco´n 1974; 193), the passage describing an aduar a few pages later borrowed from Espronceda’s El estudiante de Salamanca (The Student of Salamanca, 199) and the following additional references to authors/titles: Zorrilla (405), Byron (Matilda, or Memories Drawn from the History of the Crusades, 405, 412, 419, 456), Chateaubriand (202, 405), Florian’s Gonzalve de Cordoue (Gonzalo of Cordoba, 405), Madame de Cottin’s Mathilde, ou me´moires tire´s de l’histoire des Croisades (Matilda, or Memories Drawn from the History of the Crusades, 405), Las mil y una noches (The Thousand and One Nights, 381), Los amantes de Teruel (The Lovers of Teruel, 381). Probably not coincidentally, Alarco´n displays a particular fondness for texts that involve tragic accounts of star-crossed lovers victimized by the Spanish Reconquest, an attitude that closely parallels his own belief that the complete assimilation of Moors and Christian Spaniards, already well advanced after nearly eight hundred years of cohabitation, would have soon been completed to the mutual edification of all parties had the Moorish expulsion—which Alarco´n repeatedly characterizes as both un-Christian and culturally counterproductive—never been carried out. See, e.g., Alarco´n 1954, 17–18 and 1663–64.

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23. It is interesting to note that, in some respects, the language of Alarco´n’s paraphrase of Le Dernier Abencerage is a good deal more similar to the portrayal of his own first sighting of Tetouan than it is to Chateaubriand’s original (compare Chateaubriand 104 with Diario 193 [the paraphrase] and 200–201 [Alarco´n’s sighting of Tetouan]). 24. The words Galdo´s puts in the mouth of Juan Santiuste in Aita Tettauen again play upon the equivocal literary self-image Alarco´n creates for himself in the Diario: ‘‘Juan contemplaba el rostro de su amigo, iluminado de lleno por la luz de la pro´xima vela. Con las vueltas del pan ˜ uelo de colores en su cabeza, Perico Alarco´n era un perfecto agareno. . . . ‘‘Si no estuviera yo despierto—pensaba parpadeando—, creerı´a que uno de esos caballeros de zancas a´giles, de airosa estampa y de rostro curtido se habı´a metido en esta tienda. . . . Perico, moro de Guadix, eres un espan ˜ ol al reve´s o un mahometano con bautismo. . . . Escribes a lo castellano, y piensas y sientes a lo musulma´n’’ (1942, 3:262–63, final ellipsis in original) [Juan gazed on the face of his friend, fully illuminated by the light of the nearby candle. With the colorful bandanna wrapped around his head, Perico Alarco´n was the perfect Muslim. . . . ‘‘If I were not awake’’—I thought, blinking—, ‘‘I would believe that one of those horsemen of agile leg, of elegant bearing and bronzed face had slipped into this tent. . . . Perico, Moor of Guadix, you are a Spaniard in reverse, or a Mohammedan with baptism. . . . You write as a Castilian, and you think and feel as a Moslem’’]. In this vein, it is interesting to recall that Alarco´n signs his poem by ‘‘Carta morisca’’ [‘‘Moorish Letter’’] using the pseudonym ‘‘Al-Arco´ n-Ben-Al-Arco´ n, Perico entre los cristianos’’ (1954, 326) [Al-Arco´n-Ben-Al-Arco´n, Perico among Christians]. 25. In the first edition, quoted here, Alarco´n goes on to attempt to prevent this ‘‘poetic’’ aspiration from communicating a weakening of his devotion to military duty. In the second edition, he largely abandons this effort, as suggested, for example, by the replacement of the original phrase ‘‘Mi corazo´n y mi inteligencia persiguen ideales ma´s sagrados’’ (180) [My heart and my intellect pursue more sacred ideals] with the more ambiguous ‘‘por ma´s que mi corazo´n de espan ˜ ol y de soldado persiga ideales ma´s severos’’ (1954, 910) [as much as my heart of a Spaniard and soldier may pursue sterner goals]. 26. It is interesting to compare the patent lack of any disjuncture between the North Africa of Alarco´n’s prevoyage fantasies and his depictions of ‘‘actual’’ North African reality with the expressions of disillusionment experienced by some other Spanish Orientalist travelers who set out on their journeys armed with similar idealized (often explicitly literary) notions of oriental life. In one memorable passage of Eusebio Blasco’s account of his voyage to Egypt, for example, the author counterposes his hope of beholding Arab women with magnificent dark eyes ‘‘como los que nuestros poetas de Espan ˜ a cantan a todas horas’’ (1880–1906, 6:50) [like those our Spanish poets sing at all hours] with his discovery that, in fact, ‘‘casi todos los ojos que se ven detra´s de la tela blanca o azul que segu´n su categorı´a usan estas mujeres para cubrirse el rostro, esta´n picados y carcomidos’’ (1880–1906, 6:51) [almost all the eyes that can be seen behind the white or blue cloth that, depending on their status, these women use to cover their faces, are pockmarked and eaten away]. His detailed explanation of the cause of this malady seems designed further to underscore the gulf that separates the idealized world of orientalist fiction from the decidedly less appealing ‘‘true’’ Orient purportedly encountered by the travel

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author: ‘‘Unas moscas que so´lo en Egipto se ven, y que abundan mucho eligen siempre los ojos para blanco de sus picaduras. Al picar, depositan unos huevecitos imperceptibles a la vista, que corroen la pupila y desfiguran el ojo completamente’’ (1880–1906, 6:50) [certain flies only seen in Egypt and that are very abundant here always select the eye as target for their sting. When they sting they deposit tiny eggs, invisible to the gaze, which eat away at the eye and disfigure it completely]. That this process does not occur in Alarco´n’s Diario is consonant with the notion that observation of African ‘‘reality’’ was never a primary purpose of his text. 27. This same episode, true to form, also features outbursts of epic bluster (e.g., the claim that Tetouan’s fall fulfills Herrera’s prophecy that ‘‘si el justo dolor mueve a venganza / alguna vez el espan ˜ ol coraje, / despedazado con aguda lanza / compensara´s muriendo el hecho ultraje’’ [348; if just pain leads to vengeance, there will come a time when you will avenge through death the outrage against Spanish valor, broken with sharp lance]) combined with intense cross-cultural comradery (e.g., ‘‘bien creı´a recorrer, como en un tiempo inolvidable, las afueras de aquella otra ciudad morisca en que rodo´ mi cuna y florecieron todas mis esperanzas’’ [343; I could easily believe I was traveling through, as in an unforgettable time, the outskirts of that other Moorish city where I was born and where all my hopes flourished]). 28. As mentioned earlier, even in the often exultant Tetouanı´ portion of Alarco´n’s narrative expressions of stark cultural opposition—even disgust—continue to appear. As Kabbani notes, this equivocal posture is frequent in European representations of oriental women generally: ‘‘Europe’s feelings about Oriental women were always ambivalent ones. They fluctuated between desire, pity, contempt and outrage. Oriental women were painted as erotic victims and as scheming witches’’ (1986, 26).

Chapter 4: Una geografı´a aparte The title quotation, ‘‘Una geografı´a aparte’’ [A geography apart], is taken from Alcala´ Galiano’s Panoramas orientales (1894, 31). The first epigraph is Vicente Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez’s La vuelta al mundo de un novelista (A Novelist’s Journey Around the World, 1967–87, 3:615). The second epigraph is from Horace’s Carmina II.16 (1995, 60). 1. Zorrilla wrote a variety of works about Mexico, where he resided for some eleven years, but none were travel chronicles (see, e.g., El drama del alma [The Drama of the Soul], part of El a´lbum de un loco [The Album of a Madman], and ‘‘Me´xico y los mexicanos’’ [‘‘Mexico and the Mexicans’’], presented as a letter to the Duque de Rivas and included in vol. 1 of La flor de los recuerdos [The Flower of Memories]). Juan Valera’s Cartas americanas [American Letters], Nuevas cartas americanas [New American Letters], and Ecos argentinos [Argentine Echoes] are works of literary criticism. Though several of Valle Incla´n’s literary works (e.g., Sonata de estı´o [Summer Sonata], Tirano Banderas) are set in Latin America, he published no chronicle-style description of his travels. Miguel de los Santos Alvarez’s Negocios de Me´xico [Mexican Affairs] is, as its title indicates, an economic/political document not a travel text. 2. The three fairly detailed chronicles of journeys to regions of Latin America (year of publication in brackets) are Jose´ Marı´a Andueza’s Isla de Cuba pintoresca, histo´rica, poe´tica, literaria, mercantil e industrial: Recuerdos, apuntes, impresiones de dos

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e´pocas [The Picturesque, Poetic, Literary, Mercantile and Industrial Island of Cuba: Memories, Notes and Impressions from Two Epochs, 1841] and related articles ‘‘Costumbres de la Habana’’ [‘‘Customs of Havana,’’ 1840] and ‘‘La Habana’’ [‘‘Havana,’’ 1853]; Juan Martı´nez Villergas’s Viaje al paı´s de Motezuma [sic.] [Journey to the Land of Montezuma, 1859]; and Jacinto Salas y Quiroga’s Viajes [Journeys, 1840] and related articles ‘‘Apuntes de un viajero’’ [‘‘Traveler’s Notes,’’ 1838] and ‘‘La Habana’’ [‘‘Havana,’’ 1840]. There also exist a handful of short travel anecdotes on Latin American sites by Antonio Ferrer del Rio (‘‘Viaje marı´timo desde Ca´diz a la Habana’’ [‘‘Maritime Journey from Ca´diz to Havana,’’ 1843] and ‘‘Recuerdos de un viaje a la isla de Cuba: Tres semanas en el campo’’ [‘‘Memories of a Journey to the Island of Cuba: Three Weeks in the Country,’’ 1844]), Ribot y Fontsere´ (‘‘La isla de pinos’’ [‘‘The Island of Pines,’’ 1837]), and Jose´ Zorrilla (‘‘Isla de Santo Toma´s’’ [‘‘The Island of Saint Thomas,’’ 1851]). With respect to Asia, the principal chronicles are Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano’s Panoramas orientales [Oriental Panoramas, 1894] and Enrique Gaspar’s Viaje a China [Journey to China, 1887]. Sombras chinescas [Chinese Shadows], published by Luis Valera (a close relative of Jose´ Alcala´ Galiano) in 1902, though lying beyond the colonial era scope of this study, is worth mention in part because it includes several fairly explicit references to Alcala´’s Panoramas orientales (see, e.g., Valera 1902, 4). Vı´ctor Balaguer’s Islas Filipinas: Memoria (Philippine Islands: Memoir, 1895), though not a travel chronicle per se, is also of interest. Patricio de la Escosura’s Memorias sobre Filipinas y Jolo´ (Memories of the Philippines and Jolo, Madrid: Simo´n y Compan ˜ ´ıa, 1883) is an administrative document containing no descriptive or travel information. Despite Spanish writers’ limited production of Asian narratives, the basic style and content of such texts would have been known to the Spanish reading public. See, generally, Rennie (1995, chapter 1). 3. Eusebio Guiteras, who was tangentially involved in the literary field as a translator of Virgil and contributor to various Spanish journals during the latter half of the century, published an undated account of a visit to New York entitled Un invierno en Nueva York: Apuntes de viaje y esbozos de pluma [A Winter in New York: Travel Notes and Jotted Sketches]. 4. It is interesting to contrast these attitudes with far less emotionally engaged depictions of South American travel analyzed in Angela Pe´rez-Mejı´a’s La geografı´a de los tiempos difı´ciles: Escritura de viajes a Sur Ame´rica durante los procesos de independencia 1780–1849 [The Geography of Hard Times: Travel Writing on Journeys to South America during the Independence Era, 1780–1849]. Of the four authors treated in that study, only one (Jose´ Celestino Mutis) is Spanish, and his journeys, made during the period 1760–90, significantly predate the wars of independence. 5. The feeling, it appears, was mutual. According to Ricardo Palma, writing in the 1890s: ‘‘Generalizada creencia es, en Ame´rica, la de que Espan ˜ a no nos perdona el que hayamos puesto casa aparte, desprendie´ndonos de su maternal regazo. Viene de aquı´ el que, en la crecida colonia de americanos viajeros que regresa a nuestro continente, no llegue a un diez por ciento el nu´mero de los que se decidieron a dar un paseo por Espan ˜ a, despue´s de haber visitado Parı´s, Londres, Berlı´n, Viena y las principales ciudades de Italia’’ (1899, 225) [It is a generalized belief in America that Spain does not forgive us for setting up separate housekeeping, leaving her maternal lap. This is why, among the large colony of American travelers who return to our continent, there are not even 10 percent who decided to pay a visit to Spain after having seen Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, and the principal

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cities of Italy]. For more information on Latin American voyages to Spain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Luis Ferna´ndez Cifuentes’s ‘‘Cartografı´as del 98: Fin de siglo, identidad nacional y dia´logo con Ame´rica’’ [‘‘Cartographies of 98: Fin de sie`cle, National Identity, and Dialogue with America’’]. 6. Many of his works, including a number of articles, short stories, and poems, appeared in Spanish periodicals including Blanco y Negro [Black and White], La Correspondencia de Espan˜a [Correspondence from Spain], La E´poca [The Epoch], Escenas Contempora´neas [Contemporary Scenes], La Esperanza [Hope], El Gato Negro [The Black Cat], El Heraldo de Madrid [The Madrid Herald], Ilustracio´n Espan ˜ ola y Americana [Spanish and American Enlightenment], El Imparcial [The Impartial], Revista Cristiana [Christian Journal], and Revista de Espan˜a [Journal of Spain]. Most of these texts have not been published elsewhere, with the exception of the twenty short stories reproduced in Alcala´’s Las diez y una noches: Cuentos occidentales [The Ten and One Nights: Occidental Tales]. Two of Alcala´’s translations of Byron were published in the Teatro espan˜ol [Spanish Theatre] series: Manfred (vol. 9, no. 2, series A, Madrid: A. Vicente, 1861) and Cain, Mysteries of the Old Testament (vol. 12, no. 8, series B, Madrid: Landaburu, 1873). A compilation containing his translations of Manfred, Cain, and Sardanapalus appeared in Madrid in 1886. 7. Galdo´s refers affectionately to Alcala´ at various points in his own writings (see, e.g., his Memorias de un desmemoriado [1942, 6:1739, 6:1741, 6:1749, 6:1765, 6:1767] and Cartas desconocidas [1973, 277]). 8. Because Alcala´’s Panoramas orientales is so frequently cited in the remaining pages of this chapter, it will henceforth be identified parenthetically only by page number, without year of publication. 9. Despite the authority with which Alcala´ pronounces upon China and its culture, it is not entirely clear from his travel narrative that he ever actually visited that country. He seems, rather, to have based his assessments on the observation of Chinese citizens working in Singapore. 10. A largely celebratory treatment of Asian nature appears in Balaguer’s Islas filipinas, though always with an eye toward Spanish economic investment potential. In one nearly three-page-long sentence devoted to the islands’ many treasures, for example, he lists such things as ‘‘sus selvas y bosques, apenas explotados, en que se encuentran las ma´s olorosas maderas del mundo y las ma´s preciadas; sus montes vı´rgenes, que ası´ vierten en fuentes el agua salutı´fera para el doliente y en rı´os el agua caudalosa para el campo, . . . los a´rboles, que extienden sus brazos para regalar frutos sabrosos, y tambie´n pan, y algodo´n, y alcanfor, y sa´ndalo, y canela, . . . las flores, que no se contentan so´lo, como las del ilang-ilang, en dar el ma´s rico de los perfumes, la mejor de las esencias conocidas, que se busca con afa´n y se cosecha con codicia, sino que, como las llamadas nepenthes, abren sus ca´lices en forma de jarras para ofrecer agua pura, regalada y aroma´tica al sediento y fatigado viajero’’ (1895, 39–41) [their scarcely exploited jungles and forests containing the most fragrant wood in the world, and the most valued; their virgin mountains, where water that brings health to the sufferer spills into fountains and abundant waters flow into rivers for the fields; . . . the flowers, like the ilang-ilang, are not content with having the richest of perfumes, the best of all known essences which are avidly sought and greedily harvested, but rather, like the so-called nepenthes, open their jar-shaped chalices to offer pure and aromatic water as a gift to the thirsty and weary traveler]. Lily Litvak discusses similar superlative-laden reactions

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to tropical nature in her article, primarily devoted to the writings of nineteenthcentury Spanish traveler-scientists, ‘‘Visita al paraı´so: Ciencia y mito en las cro´nicas de viajeros espan ˜ oles a Ame´rica en el siglo XIX’’ [‘‘Visit to Paradise: Science and Myth in the Chronicles of Spanish Travelers to America’’]. In many cases, though, including Alcala´’s, it is important to add that the passages in which Asia is portrayed as an edenic natural state (e.g., Alcala´’s claim that ‘‘allı´ esta´ el Ede´n perpetuo, aute´ntico, a` la porte´e de tout le monde’’ [17; there lies the perpetual, authentic Eden, within everyone’s reach]) coexist with others in which the portrayal of Asian nature reveals considerable distrust and fear. 11. In Orientalism Said defines orientalism as primarily ‘‘a British and French cultural enterprise’’ (1979, 4). 12. A number of studies of Spain’s presence in the Philippines have appeared in recent years, including Extremo Oriente Ibe´rico [Iberian Far East], edited by Francisco de Solano et al., and Espan˜a y el Pacı´fico [Spain and the Pacific], edited by Florentino Rodao. For an overview of the final years of Spain’s imperial presence in the Philippines, see Nicholas Cushner’s Spain in the Philippines (1971, 210–29) or, more generally, Renato Constantino’s A History of the Philippines (1975). 13. As Duncan notes, there was in nineteenth-century Europe a widespread ‘‘belief in environmental determinism which suggested that Europeans who remained too long in the tropics would themselves decay and degenerate into hybridity’’ (in Duncan and Gregory 1999, 159). 14. See, e.g., his description of the area surrounding the Suez: ‘‘Atravie´sanse primero . . . los pantanos del lago Menzaleh y luego el lago Abu Baillah, el Timsah, el Guisr, el Serapeum y los lagos Amargos . . . y al otro lado la Arabia, Jezirab-al Arab, las costas del Hedjad, la llanura de Tahama’’ (8 and 10) [First, are crossed . . . the marshlands of Lake Menzaleh, and then Lake Abu Baillah, the Timsah, the Guisr, the Serapeum, and the Bitter Lakes . . . and on the other side Arabia, Jezirab-al Arab, the coasts of Hedjad, the plain of Tahama]. 15. It is interesting to note that, in 1902 (after the loss of Spain’s last remaining colonies), Alcala´ criticized the possibility of future imperialist intervention in the Americas in his letter-prologue (carta-pro´logo) to Tijeretazos y plumadas [Snips and Flourishes], a collection of costumbrista-style vignettes by the Ecuadorian author Juan Leo´n Mera: ‘‘Porque ese libro, al propio tiempo que uno de gratı´sima lectura, es un vı´nculo literario que une nuestra vieja Espan ˜ a con sus hijos queridos de Ame´rica, de aquella virgen del mundo Ame´rica inocente que canto´ Quintana; de aquella Ame´rica que ha perdido su virginidad paradisı´aca y a quien yo invito a que pierda la inocencia que au´n le queda, pues hoy dı´a los pueblos inocentes son sacrificados por los Herodes-Pueblos, que los degu¨ellan y se los comen como nin ˜ os crudos; es decir, que se los tragan en nombre del principio de expansio´n, anexio´n y asimilacio´n, tres personas distintas y un solo diablo verdadero: el Imperialismo’’ (Alcala´, 1903, xxii) [Because this book, in addition to being very pleasant reading, is a literary tie that binds our old Spain with its beloved sons of America, of that innocent America, virgin of the world, that was sung by Quintana; of that America that has lost her paradisiac virginity and whom I invite to lose her remaining innocence since these days innocent peoples are sacrificed by the Herod peoples, who slit their throats and eat them raw like babies; that is to say, they swallow them in the name of expansion, annexation, and assimilation, three different persons but only one true devil: imperialism]. This passage, the vocabulary of which closely ech-

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oes that found in Panoramas orientales, is once again notable for its failure to criticize Spanish colonial activity (note, for example, the use of ‘‘beloved sons’’) while emphasizing the negative consequences of other types of imperial expansion and the impure motivations of other colonial powers (in this case, presumably, the United States). 16. For an interesting exposition of the ambiguities inherent in this attempted equation of imperialism and liberty within the context of European Orientalist colonialism, see ‘‘Imperium et Libertas: Conflicting Ideologies in British India, 1875– 1900’’ (Cook 1996, 113–45). A similarly benevolent attitude toward British colonialism appears in Sombras chinescas [Chinese Shadows], written by Luis Valera (yet another writer-diplomat of the Alcala´ Galiano clan), which praises the British success in transforming the ‘‘a´rido e ingente pen ˜ ascal’’ [huge and arid crag] of Hong Kong into a spectacular modern city that is ‘‘una maravilla de la paciencia y del arte humanos’’ (1902, 4) [a marvel of human patience and art]. 17. See Said, Culture and Empire (1993, e.g., 135), regarding Kipling’s treatment of colonial rebellion and Osborne, ‘‘Fear and Fascination in the Tropics’’ (in Winks and Rush 1990, 161), on native thankfulness. 18. See also Gaspar’s description of Port Said, which he repeatedly praises for its European appearance, comparing diverse parts of the city in the space of a single paragraph to a ‘‘puerto france´s,’’ ‘‘square a la inglesa,’’ a ‘‘provincia de segundo orden de Espan ˜ a,’’ ‘‘los alrededores de Roma,’’ and the ‘‘campin ˜ a de Pau’’ (1887, 234) [French port; English-style square; second-class Spanish province; the outskirts of Rome; countryside around Pau]. His conclusion: ‘‘Su porvenir es inmenso; ciudad brotada de la apertura de istmo, no hay nada en ella, fuera del sol, que acuse el cara´cter oriental’’ (1887, 234) [Its future is immense; a city sprung from the opening of the isthmus, there is nothing there other than the Sun that suggests an oriental character]. Compare this stance to the almost seethingly negative description of Port Said in Alcala´ Galiano’s Panoramas (e.g., 7). Both authors create sharp juxtapositions between the ‘‘Arab Orient’’ and the ‘‘Far East,’’ though their interpretations vary. 19. For references to The Odyssey, see pages 3, 5, 7, 10, 17, 27, 29, 37, 41. With regard to the other epics mentioned, see, e.g., The Iliad (27), The Thebaid (10), The Divine Comedy (6), The Lusiads (16), and Gerusalemme liberata (16). Allusion to the Hindu Ramayana appears as well (18). Alcala´ even proposes a new epic poem, La Foliada (i.e., The Leafiad), to be set in the oriental jungle (24). The word epic (‘‘epopeya,’’ ‘‘e´pico’’) also appears at various points in the text (see 14, 16). Alcala´’s close relative Luis Valera, who appears at times to offer a satirical take on Panoramas orientales in his own Sombras chinescas (1902), may be alluding to the insistently epic tone of Alcala´’s text when he muses about embellishing his account of his passage through the Mediterranean by ‘‘recordando de paso a Scila y Caribdis, a Ulises y a Polifemo y a las sirenas, con otros toques de erudicio´n que habrı´an de embellecer grandemente mi relato’’ (1902, 2) [remembering in passing Scylla and Carybdis, Ulysses and Poliphemus, the syrens, together with other dabs of erudition that would greatly beautify my tale]. 20. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from The Odyssey are drawn from the 1963 translation prepared by Robert Fitzgerald. 21. In the same vein, as Ulysses was condemned by the Cyclops’s curse to end his years of travels only to find ‘‘bitter days at home’’ (Homer 1963, IX.161), Alcala´

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upon his return to Spain notes that his arrival coincides with a moment of deepening national crisis (3). 22. Alcala´’s predilection for erudite references can be seen in his other writings as well. The short stories contained in Las diez y una noches: Cuentos occidentales [The Ten and One Nights: Occidental Tales], for example, contain frequent references to and quotations from many of the same works of classical and modern literature featured in Panoramas orientales. 23. In terms of the distinction Alcala´ seems to establish between the ‘‘Mediterranean Orient,’’ which he describes with obvious disdain, and the ‘‘remote Orient,’’ for which he appears to feel a certain admiration, it is interesting to note that he begins his account of his visit to Singapore with Vasco da Gama’s exclamation, from Meyerbeer’s opera La Africana: ‘‘Terra divina, tu m’appartieni’’ (22) [Divine land, you belong to me]. Vasco was referring to Africa. Alcala´, for whom Africa could scarcely be termed ‘‘terra divina,’’ chooses to refrain from any mention of La Africana in the portions of Panoramas orientales actually devoted to African lands, preferring instead to present Vasco’s words as though they were intended as a description of Singapore. 24. For reasons of clarity, the quotation from The Odyssey is, in this case, drawn from the translation by Andrew Lang et al., in The Complete Works of Homer (1950). 25. As part of his effort to create a ‘‘poetic’’ self-image, Alcala´ quotes amply from poems by other authors; oddly, however, he explicitly declines to read from any of his own poetic works, claiming that ‘‘el tiempo me impide recitaros’’ (26) [time prevents me from reciting to you] the poems inspired by his oriental travels. 26. Alcala´’s criticism of pedantry appears in his other writings as well. For example, his poem, ‘‘El infierno del pe . . . dante’’ [‘‘The Hell of the Ped . . . ant’’] included in Estereoscopio social [Social Stereoscope], offers a caricature of ‘‘Don Tiburcio, the pedant,’’ who is criticized for his tendency to ‘‘accumulate quotations and quotations’’ and ‘‘erudite dissertations’’ to prove the worth of his writings (1872, 98). 27. See, e.g., the episode in which Alcala´, having heard of the marvelous qualities of the abacus, marches into a bank and gives the Chinese teller a complicated arithmetic problem to solve, then laboriously verifies the total by using European mathematical methods (37). His allusion to the mementos of ancestors adorning the walls of Chinese homes likewise finds identifiable echo in Alcala´’s own introductory homage to his late grandfather, Antonio Alcala´ Galiano, whose portrait occupies a place of honor on the walls of the Madrid Ateneo where Alcala´ delivers his lecture. 28. As a variation on this notion, the fact that Chinese residents abroad are said to be unable to Westernize, though apparently an indication of their heterogeneity, is not at root far different from Alcala´’s descriptions of Westerners’ culturally, genetically, and intellectually predetermined inability to assimilate into the oriental environment. 29. Though Alcala´ criticizes Western apparel, he does not appear (as did some other Orientalist writers including Alarco´n) to have dressed as an ‘‘oriental’’ himself. As Ali Behdad notes in Belated Travelers, the donning of oriental attire functioned as an outwardly visible statement of the traveler’s desire to ‘‘live [in the Orient] as opposed to simply being there’’ and thus ‘‘underlines his mimetic desire for identification’’ (1994, 59). Although certainly many of those who engaged in

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this practice did not—in point of fact—truly identify themselves with the Orient in more than a superficial way, Alcala´’s apparent reluctance to allow his professed Orientalist zeal to take visible form would tend to corroborate the generally unconvincing quality of much of his text’s purportedly anti-European/pro-Asian rhetoric. 30. The steamship is praised at considerable length in essentially the same terms in Alcala´’s poem ‘‘El Tita´n’’ [‘‘The Titan’’], as a force that ‘‘abate las fronteras, los hombres hace hermanos, / y achica del planeta la vasta redondez’’ (J. Valera, Florilegio de poesı´a castellana del siglo XIX [Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Spanish Poetry], 1902, 4:325) [breaks down barriers, makes men brothers / and shrinks the vast roundness of the planet]. It is interesting to note, however, that while Alcala´, in Panoramas orientales, does occasionally acknowledge the kind of technologically instigated elimination of barriers evoked in ‘‘El Tita´n’’—his reference, for example, to an Orient now ‘‘a` la porte´e de tout le monde’’ (1894, 17) [within everyone’s reach]—much of Alcala´’s narrative stance depends upon an equally insistent personal and rhetorical need to conserve notions of distance and the traditional oppositions between East and West. 31. Critical references to Western and, particularly, Spanish society appear in Alcala´’s Estereoscopio social. The poem ‘‘Madrid,’’ for example, alludes to the city’s ‘‘frı´o glacial, verano que sofoca, casas de mal ladrillo’’; ‘‘teatros donde todos se fastidian’’; ‘‘luces de gas que entristece ma´s que alumbra’’; ‘‘pobres que casi van en calzoncillos’’; etc. (1872, 52–54) [glacial cold, asphyxiating summer, houses of bad brick; theaters where everyone is annoyed; gaslamps that sadden more than illuminate; poor who go around dressed in little more than underwear]. Descriptions, both favorable and critical, of other European cities appear in the poems ‘‘Londres,’’ ‘‘Parı´s,’’ ‘‘Berlı´n,’’ ‘‘Roma,’’ and ‘‘San Petersburgo’’ in the same collection. 32. Allusion to this episode of The Iliad also appears in Alcala´’s ‘‘El flautı´n’’ [‘‘The Piccolo’’], a short story included in Las diez y una noches: Cuentos occidentales (1900?, 148). 33. Their rivalry is recalled in book XI of The Odyssey. Ajax’s plea for light is found in book XVII of The Iliad.

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Index Addison, Joseph, 233 n. 2 Africa: tactics of representation, 141– 42. See also Mediterranean Orient; Morocco Alarco´n, Pedro Antonio: ‘‘A Chorby, poeta marroquı´,’’ 145, 160; La Alpujarra [The Alpujarra], 137, 156, 243 n. 14; as portrayed by Galdo´s, 146–47, 152, 164, 245 n. 24; attitudes toward Moroccan War, 135, 138, 144, 157, 168, 193, 242 n. 11; ‘‘Carta morisca,’’ 244 n. 24; ‘‘Una conversacio´n en La Alhambra’’ [‘‘A Conversation in The Alhambra’’], 244 n. 21; De Madrid a Na´poles [From Madrid to Naples], 34, 36, 37, 81, 92–93, 226 n. 4, 233 n. 3, 235 n. 6, 237 n. 15, 238 n. 24; Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de Africa [Diary of a Witness to the African War], 20, 128, 137–68, 172, 241 n. 4, 242 n. 9, 242– 46nn. 11–28; ‘‘Espan ˜ a y los franceses’’ [‘‘Spain and the French’’], 156, 160, 228 n. 7; interest in orientalist themes, 20, 128, 137–39; on Italy, 81, 83, 92–93, 235 n. 6, 237 n. 15, 238 n. 24; on North African beliefs and lifestyle, 133, 150, 151, 157–58, 244 nn. 19 and 20; on Paris, 29, 33, 36–37, 74, 156, 227–28 nn. 6 and 7; on Spain’s africanism, 137, 144–45, 153–60, 167– 68, 215, 244 n. 22; use of literary references, 138, 150–52, 158–59, 164, 166–67, 243 nn. 13 and 14, 244– 45 nn. 22 and 23; use of orientalist conventions, 139–43, 162–67, 251 n. 29 Alcala´ Galiano, Antonio, 153, 185, 251 n. 27 Alcala´ Galiano, Jose´: as seen by Pe´rez

Galdo´s, 184–85, 191–92, 248 n. 7; Estereoscopio social [Social Stereoscope], 184, 251 n. 26, 252 n. 31; Las diez y una noches [The Ten and One Nights], 248 n. 6, 251 n. 22, 252 n. 32; on Asian culture, 187–92, 196, 206–12, 213; on European culture, 194, 196, 197, 209, 210–12; on imperialism, 193, 197–99, 201, 209, 249 n. 15; on the Mediterranean Orient, 186, 189, 195, 200–201, 204–7, 210, 250 n. 18, 251 n. 23; Panoramas orientales [Oriental Panoramas], 20, 184–216, 247 n. 2, 248 nn. 8, 9, and 10, 249 n. 15, 250 nn. 18 and 19, 250–51 nn. 19–23, 251 n. 25, 251– 52 nn. 27–30; ‘‘El Tita´n’’ [‘‘The Titan’’], 252 n. 30; uses of exoticism, 184, 200, 206, 207, 214; use of literary references, 202–6, 212–13, 250– 51 nn. 19–23, 251 n. 25; use of orientalist conventions, 184, 186, 187–92, 194, 198–99, 201, 203–4, 211, 213–15 Ali Bey. See Badı´a y Leblich, Domingo Alighieri, Dante: in Alcala´, 202, 203, 204, 205–6, 250 n. 19; in Galdo´s, 102, 111, 115, 119, 237 n. 14; in Mesonero, 73 Alvarez Mendiza´bal, Juan, 39 Alvarez Pe´rez, Jose´, 132–33, 241 n. 4 Anderson, Benedict, 84 Andueza, Jose´ Marı´a, 174, 180, 246 n. 2 Apollonius, 206 Arac, Jonathan, 170 Aribau, Buenaventura Carlos, 227 n. 4 Asia: as travel destination, 20, 22, 172; principal chronicles, 247 n. 2; Spain’s colonial interests in, 183, 192–93, 198, 249 n. 12; tactics of representa-

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tion, 182–84. See also Alcala´ Galiano, Jose´; orientalism Ayguals de Izco, Wenceslao, 75, 226 n. 4 Badı´a y Leblich, Domingo (pseud. Ali Bey), 132, 133, 244 n. 20 Baedeker, Karl, guidebooks, 113–15, 239 n. 28, 240 n. 33 Balaguer, Victor: on Italy, 77, 233 n. 3, 237 n. 15; on Paris, 226 n. 4, 230 n. 21, 232 n. 35; on the Philippines, 183, 199–200, 247 n. 2, 248 n. 10 Baldwin, Elaine, 225 n. 2 Balzac, Honore´ de: and Mesonero, 49, 229 n. 16, 230 n. 18; on Paris, 56, 58, 60–61, 71, 72–73, 230 n. 23, 231 n. 27 Bangert, William, 102, 238 n. 21 Barga, Corpus, 225 n. 3 Barthes, Roland, 63–64 Batten, Charles, 40, 42, 236 n. 12 Baudelaire, Charles, 56 Be´cquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 128 Behdad, Ali, 127, 251 n. 29 Behler, Ernst, 94 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 56, 117, 230 n. 22 Berkowitz, H. Chonon, 229, n. 17 Bernini, Gionvanni, 117–18 Berque, Jacques, 181 Bhabha, Homi, 83 Black, Jeremy, 89, 233 n. 1 Blanco White, Jose´, 124, 227 n. 5 Blasco, Eusebio, 227 n. 4, 241 n. 4, 245 n. 26 Blasco Iba´n ˜ ez, Vicente: on Italy, 82–83, 85, 93, 233 n. 3; on North Africa, 133, 241 n. 4, 242 n. 7; on Paris, 29, 33, 226 n. 4, 228 n. 12, 229 n. 14, 231 n. 26, 232 n. 32; on tropics, 169 Bly, Peter, 240 n. 35 Boehmer, Elleke, 13, 126–27, 186 Bonaparte, Joseph (Jose´ Napoleo´n), 231 n. 28 Bonaparte, Napole´on, 71, 87, 232 n. 33 Bongie, Chris, 160, 170, 181, 200 Boorstin, Daniel, 30, 117 Booth, Wayne, 113 Borges, Jorge Luis, 129, 241 n. 2 Boswell, James, 233 n. 2 Breto´n de los Herreros, Manuel, 16

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INDX

Brinker, Gabler, Gisela, 160 Brownlee, Marina, 175 Bryman, Alan, 117 Bullfinch, Thomas, 213 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 117, 240 n. 31 Buzard, James, 113, 114, 216, 236 n. 11 Byron, George Gordon, 159, 163–64, 203, 244 n. 22, 248 n. 6 Caballero, Ferna´n, 225 n. 4 Calaresu, Melissa, 84, 104, 114, 115, 236 n. 13 Camo˜es, Luı´s,152, 202, 206, 250 n. 19 Castelar, Emilio: on Italy, 87, 233 n. 3, 237 n. 16; on Morocco, 241 n. 4; on Paris, 33, 70, 226 n. 4, 229 n. 14 Ce´lestin, Roger, 171–72, 181, 183, 195, 200, 214 Certeau, Michel de, 17, 64 Cervantes, Miguel de, 206 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 126, 129, 130, 163, 241 nn. 1, 2, and 3 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois-Rene´: in Alarco´n, 147, 159, 164, 243 n. 14, 244– 45 nn. 22 and 23; on Italy, 233 n. 2 Chaudhuri, Nupur,141 cities: and notion of modernity, 75; tactics of representation, 31, 42–43, 54– 55, 63–64, 75; urban planning. See Mesonero Romanos, Ramo´n; Madrid; Paris Clark, Martin, 100 Clifford, James, 127 Cohen, Erik, 32, 36 Cohen, Walter, 175 Colange, Chantal, 229 n. 16 Comellas Aguirreza´bal, Mercedes, 230 n. 19 Conside´rant, Victor, 48 Constantino, Renato, 249 n. 12 Cook, Scott, 199–200, 250 n. 16 Cook tours, 79 Cooper, James Fennimore, 233 n. 2 Corneille, Pierre, 52, 53, 62 Coronado, Carolina, 70–71, 225 n. 4, 226 n. 4 costumbrismo. See Mesonero Romanos, Ramo´n; Pe´rez Galdo´s, Benito

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Cottin, Madame (Sophie) de, 159, 244 n. 22 Crawshaw, Carol, 30, 143–44 Cresswell, Tim, 31 Culler, Jonathan, 30, 55, 79, 112–13, 118, 161 Cushner, Nicholas, 249 n. 12 Dendle, Brian, 240 n. 35 Depretis, Agostino, 102 Dickens, Charles, 233 n. 2 Donald, James, 75 Ducange, Victor, 53, 67–68, 74, 76, 230 n. 18, 232 n. 32 Dumas, Alexandre, 156 Duncan, James, 16, 49, 113, 127, 160, 190, 195, 218, 240 n. 34, 249 n. 13 Dupaty, Charles: on Italy, 104, 106, 238 n. 22 Elsner, Jas, 43 Ercilla, Alonso, 151 Escalante, Amo´s: on France, 227 n. 4; on Italy, 81–82, 83, 86, 233 n. 3, 238 n. 24 Escosura, Patricio, 247 n. 2 Espronceda, Jose´, 128, 159, 244 n. 22 Este´banez Caldero´n, Serafı´n, 166, 234 n. 3, 241 n. 4 Estruch Tobella, Joan, 242 n. 11 Etlin, Richard, 67 Europe: concepts of, 79, 83–84, 123–25; in Spanish orientalism, 125–26, 130, 133–34, 155–56, 169–70, 182, 193 europeanization, 17, 160, 215 exoticism: concepts of, 20, 21–22, 160, 170–73, 200; Spanish treatments of, 171–72, 181–82, 183. See also Alcala´ Galiano, Jose´; Ce´lestin, Roger Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 42–43, 55, 62 Ferna´ndez Cifuentes, Luis, 121, 237 n. 18, 242 n. 9, 248 n. 5 Ferna´ndez de los Rı´os, Angel, 59, 226n. 4 Ferna´ndez Garcı´a, Antonio, 228 nn. 9 and 10 Ferna´ndez y Gonza´lez, Manuel, 152 Fernando VII (king), 28 Ferrer del Rı´o, Antonio, 247 n. 2

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Ferreras, Julio Ignacio, 128 Fitzgerald, Robert, 250 n. 20 flaˆnerie, 56 Flaubert, Gustave, 112–13 Fletcher, Angus, 240 n. 35 Flores, Antonio, 226 n. 3, 227 n. 4 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de, 159, 244 n. 22 Fortuny, Mariano, 241 n. 2 Foucault, Michel, 43, 63 France: and Spain, cultural and historical ties, 32, 85, 87; tactics of representation, 93, 226 n. 3, 241 n. 5. See also Mesonero Romanos, Ramo´n; Paris Fromentin, Euge`ne, 123, 147, 241 n. 5, 243 n. 14 Gala´n Cabilla, Jose´ Luis, 66, 231 nn. 28, 29, and 30 Galdo´s. See Pe´rez Galdo´s, Benito Galileo, 102 Gama, Vasco da, 251 n. 23 Ganivet, Angel, 124 Garcı´a-Romeral Pe´rez, Carlos, 185, 225 n. 1, 236 n. 9 Garcı´a Tassara, Gabriel, 152, 174 Gaspar, Enrique, 174, 183, 199, 247 n. 2, 250 n. 18 Gautier, The´ophile, 131–32, 233 n. 2, 234 n. 4, 238 n. 24, 242 n. 6 Gil y Carrasco, Enrique, 227 n. 4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 79, 217–18, 203, 211, 233 n. 2 GoGwilt, Christopher, 124 Goldman, Peter, 66, 231 nn. 28 and 29 Go´mez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 225n. 4 Go´mez de la Serna, Ramo´n, 225 n. 3 Goytisolo, Juan, 225 n. 3, 241 n. 2 Grand Tour, 78–79, 84, 88–89, 143, 233 n. 1, 236 n. 11. See also Pe´rez Galdo´s, Benito Gregory, Derek, 16, 49, 113, 127, 143, 160, 190, 195, 218, 240 n. 34, 249 n. 13 Guiteras, Eusebio, 247 n. 3 Gumbrecht, Hans, 175 Haeckel, Ernst, 183 Hafter, Monroe, 237 n. 18

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Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio, 159, 244 n. 22 Harvey, David, 45, 47, 56 Haussmann, Georges Euge`ne, 45, 47 Hay, Denys, 124 Hazan, Eric, 230 n. 23 Heine, Heinrich, 203 Herrera, Fernando, 151–52, 245 n. 27 Homer, 202–3, 205–6, 212–13, 250 nn. 19, 20, and 21, 251 n. 24, 252 n. 33 Horace, 187 Hugo, Victor, 35, 49, 53, 203, 229 n. 16 and 18, 232 n. 33 imperialism. See Alcala´ Galiano, Jose´; Spain, and empire Italy: and Spain, cultural and historical ties, 85–87, 89–90, 235 n. 6, 236 n. 10; and Western tradition, 19, 81, 83, 84– 85, 89, 93; as pilgrimage site, 79, 81–83; as travel destination, 29, 80, 233 n. 1, 234 n. 4; national unification, 78, 91, 99–101, 102–3, 238 n. 21; principal chronicles, 233 nn. 2 and 3; tactics of representation, 77–87, 89, 104, 173, 234 n. 4; views on modern Italy, 84–86, 91–93, 237 n. 15. See also Pe´rez Galdo´s, Benito Jameson, Frederic, 64 Jarves, James Jackson, 67, 69 Jenneret, Charles Edouard. See LeCorbusier Jouy, Etienne, 49–50, 51, 65–66, 229 nn. 16 and 17, 232 n. 32 Kabbani, Rana, 134, 245 n. 28 Kanneh, Kadiatu, 141 Keith, Michael, 83 Kirby, Paul, 233 n. 1 Kushigian, Julia, 126, 129, 161, 189, 241 n. 2 Labanyi, Jo, 129, 130, 241 n. 3 Lafuente, Modesto, 37, 59, 69, 70–71, 226 n. 4, 230 n. 21 Lang, Andrew, 251 n. 24 Larra, Mariano Jose´, 72–73 Latin America: as travel destination,

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INDX

176, 179, 247 n. 4; principal chronicles, 246 n. 2; tactics of representation, 21–22, 174–82, 193 Leask, Nigel, 33, 38, 83, 88 LeCorbusier (Charles Edouard Jenneret), 45 Leed, Eric, 21 Lejeune, Philippe, 88 Leo XIII (pope), 101 Leo´n Mera, Juan, 249 n. 15 Leopardi, Giacomo, 102, 237 n. 14 Litvak, Lily, 126, 181, 188, 213, 225 n. 1, 241 n. 1, 248 n. 10 Lo´pez-Baralt, Luce, 126, 241 n. 2 Lo´pez de Go´mara, Francisco, 152 Loyer, Franc¸ois, 47 Lucan, 243 n. 16 MacCannell, Dean, 30, 32, 117, 119 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 102, 203, 206, 240 n. 31 MacPhail, Eric, 233 n. 2 Madrazo, Pedro, 234 n. 3 Madrid, urban conditions, 38–41, 46, 48–49, 66, 228 n. 10, 230 n. 24 Martı´nez, Marcos, 104, 113, 115, 238 n. 22 Martı´nez de la Rosa, Francisco, 80, 128, 234 n. 4 Martı´nez Villergas, Juan, 174, 177–79, 247 n. 2 Martin-Ma´rquez, Susan, 126, 129, 163, 164, 241 n. 2 Mazlish, Bruce, 54 Mead, William, 89, 233 n. 1 Mediterreanean Orient: concepts of, 20, 126, 131–33, 136, 182, 241 n. 5; principal chronicles, 241 n. 4; tactics of representation, 131–37, 171–72, 182, 189, 204. See also Alarco´n, Pedro Antonio; Morocco; orientalism Mendiza´bal. See Alvarez Mendiza´bal, Juan Mercier, Louis Se´bastien, 48, 49–51, 58, 229 nn. 16 and 17, 230 n. 23 Mesonero Romanos, Ramo´n: and costumbrismo, 19, 38–40, 42, 45–46, 62, 229 n. 13; and Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol, 30, 38, 80, 226 n. 4, 228 n. 11;

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and urban reform, 19, 38–46, 48–49, 53, 75, 88, 120, 228 nn. 8 and 9, 229 n. 15, 233 n. 36; ‘‘El extranjero en su patria’’ [‘‘The Foreigner in his Homeland’’], 233 n. 36; ‘‘El forastero en la Corte’’ [‘‘The Foreigner in the Capital’’], 230 n. 20; literary opinions, 49– 50, 52–54, 61–63, 67–68, 88, 229 n. 16, 229–30 nn. 17–20, 231 n. 27; Manual de Madrid [Manual of Madrid], 38, 41, 66; Memorias de un setento´n [Memories of a Seventy Year Old], 39, 228 n. 8; ‘‘Las novelitas francesas’’ [‘The Little French Novels’’], 60, 61; ‘‘El nuevo Madrid: Romance jacarandino’’ [‘‘The New Madrid: A Jolly Ballad’’], 233 n. 36; Nuevo manual de Madrid [New Manual of Madrid], 228 n. 8; on cemetery burial 66–67, 231 nn. 28 and 31; on Parisian lifestyle and values, 54–59, 68–70, 110, 230 n. 25; on Parisian urban conditions, 41, 43–45, 47–49, 53, 70, 105, 230 nn. 21 and 22; Proyecto de reformas generales de Madrid [Project of General Reforms of Madrid], 38; Ra´pida ojeada a la capital y medios de mejorarla [Rapid Glance at the Capital and Ways to Improve It], 38, 41, 42, 231 n. 31; Recuerdos de viaje por Francia y Be´lgica [Memories of a Journey through France and Belgium], 40–76, 226 n. 4, 228 n. 11, 230 nn. 21 and 25, 233 n. 36; ‘‘El romanticismo y los roma´nticos‘‘ [‘‘Romanticism and the Romantics’’], 54, 229 n. 18, 233 n. 36; views on travel writing, 28–29, 40–41, 76, 87–88, 98, 112, 120, 208, 242 n. 10; ‘‘Vuelta de Parı´s’’ [‘‘Return from Paris’’], 27, 226–27 nn. 4 and 5, 233 n. 36. See also Madrid, urban conditions Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 251 n. 23 Milton, John, 206 Mitchell, Timothy, 54, 136, 161 modernization, attitudes toward, 17, 73–75, 98, 120, 157, 160, 215–16. See also Paris Molie`re, 53, 62 Molloy, Sylvia, 18, 88

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Moore, Donald, 83 Mora, Jose´ Joaquı´n, 175–76, 177, 178, 179 Moratı´n, Leandro Ferna´ndez de, 104, 227 n. 5, 238 n. 22 Moreno de la Tejera, Vicente, 233 n. 3, 241 n. 4 Morocco: and Spain, historical and cultural ties, 136–37, 150, 153, 156–57, 182; as travel destination, 80; causes of Moroccan War, 152, 155; Moroccan War chronicles, 241 n. 4, 242 n. 8; tactics of representation. See also Alarco´n, Pedro Antonio; Mediterranean Orient Murillo, Bartolome´, 119 Mutis, Jose´ Celestino, 247 n. 4 Napoleo´n, Jose´ (king). See Bonaparte, Joseph Navarrete, Jose´ de, 242 n. 8 Navarrete, Ramo´n de, 227 n. 4, 242 n. 8 Navarro Gonza´lez, Alberto, 242 n. 9, 243 n. 17 Navas Ruiz, Ricardo, 128, 129, 157 Nu´n ˜ ez de Arce, Gaspar, 133, 135, 136– 37, 152, 154, 241 n. 4, 242 n. 8 Ochoa, Eugenio: on Italy, 233 n. 3; on Latin America, 176–77; on the Orient, 241 n. 4, 244 n. 20; on Paris, 27– 28, 44, 59, 74–75, 227 n. 4, 228 n. 12, 232 n. 34; on Spanish travel, 13, 16, 219, 226 n. 2; translator, 229 n. 16 Olmet, Anto´n de, 238 n. 19 orientalism: as applied to Spain, 125, 128–30, 131, 134, 160–61; concepts of, 20, 22–23, 126–27, 161, 170, 187, 214, 251 n. 29; Spanish treatments of, 123–37. See also Asia; Mediterranean Orient Said, Edward) Osborne, Milton, 250 n. 17 Pacheco, Joaquı´n, 233 n. 3, 242 n. 10 Palma, Ricardo, 247 n. 5 Pardo Baza´n, Emilia: as travel writer, 26; on Italy, 21, 82, 85, 233 n. 3; on Paris, 21, 29, 35, 227 n. 4, 229 n. 14; on travel, 26

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Paris: and modernity, 19, 28, 36, 37–38, 43–44, 75–76, 81, 227 n. 6; and spectacle, 54–57, 68, 110; as necropolis, 70–73; as pilgrimage site, 27–28, 31– 32, 35–38, 52, 75, 81; materialism, 55–57, 59, 60–61, 68–70; morality and religion, 34, 36–37, 56–61, 230 n. 23, 231 nn. 26 and 27; principal chronicles, 226 n. 4; tactics of representation, 31–38, 42–43, 75, 81, 85; urban conditions, 47–48, 66–67, 228 n. 12, 229 n. 14. See also Mesonero Romanos, Ramo´n Parsons, Deborah, 39, 228 n. 9, 229 n. 13 Paz, Octavio, 129, 241 n. 2 Pelz, Annagret, 84, 85, 124 Percy, Walker, 161 Pe´rez, Janet, 126, 241 n. 2 Pe´rez Galdo´s, Benito: Aita Tettauen, 146–47, 152, 164, 242 n. 9, 245 n. 24; and authenticity, 113, 117–20, 164, 240 n. 33; and costumbrismo, 104–5, 107; and narrative authority, 102–3, 107, 113–17; and representation, 19– 20, 88, 94–96, 110, 120–22, 215–16, 217–18; ‘‘Confusiones y paradojas’’ [‘‘Confusions and Paradoxes’’], 93; corpus of travel writings, 235 n. 7; Episodios nacionales [National Episodes], 96, 240 n. 35; ‘‘Epoca de confusio´n’’ [‘‘Epoch of Confusion’’], 93; ‘‘Excursio´n a Portugal’’ [‘‘Excursion to Portugal’’], 234 n. 5; history and fiction, 96–97, 98, 107–12, 164, 239 n. 25; La inco´gnita [The Unknown], 95–96, 97, 98, 111–12, 120, 121, 237 n. 18, 238 n. 21, 240 n. 31; Memorias de un desmemoriado [Memoirs of a Forgetful Man], 98, 111, 113, 235 n. 7, 238 n. 20, 240 n. 35, 248 n. 7; ‘‘Observaciones sobre la novela contempora´nea en Espan ˜ a’’ [‘‘Observations on the Contemporary Spanish Novel’’], 104–5, 122, 239 n. 25; on contemporary society, 93–94, 98, 122, 237 n. 17; on Italian unification, 91–95, 98–103, 112, 236–37 nn. 14 and 15, 238 n. 23; on Paris, 35–36, 227 n. 4; Realidad [Reality], 237 n. 18;

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INDX

‘‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable’’ [‘‘Present-day Society as Novelistic Source’’], 94, 217–18, 237 n. 17; use of irony, 94–95, 96, 107, 112–13, 120, 146, 239 n. 27; use of Italian travel conventions, 88–91, 97– 98, 104–7, 113–16, 121, 237 n. 14, 239 n. 28, 240 nn. 31 and 33; Viaje a Italia [Journey to Italy], 19–20, 78, 87– 122, 217–18, 233 n. 3, 235–36 nn. 8, 9, and 10, 236 n. 14, 237–38 nn. 19–23, 239 n. 25, 239–40 nn. 28–33. See also prologue to Estereoscopio social; Alcala´ Galiano, Jose´ Pe´rez-Mejı´a, Angela, 247 n. 4 Petronius, 206 Pile, Steve, 83 pilgrimage. See Italy; Paris; travel Pinkney, David, 45, 47 Pontejos, Marquis of (Joaquı´n Vizcaı´no), 38, 39, 41 Porter, Dennis, 13, 78, 79, 83–84, 124, 130, 131 Portugal, 80, 234 n. 5 Prados de la Plaza, Luis, 38, 39, 228 n. 9 Pratt, Mary Louise, 13, 41, 42, 139, 165 Prendergast, Christopher, 48, 54, 64, 65, 75, 214, 215 Prutz, Robert, 84 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 206 Racine, Jean, 52, 62 Radcliffe, Ann, 233 n. 2 Rambuteau, Claude Philibert Barthelot, 47, 48, 65 Raphael, 116 Rennie, Neil, 247 n. 2 Ribbans, Geoffrey, 240 n. 35 Ribot y Fontsere´, Antonio, 247 n. 2 Ritvo, Harriet, 170 Rivas, el duque de. See Saavedra, Angel Robinson, H. (Harry), 79 Roca de Togores, Mariano, 153 Rodao, Florentino, 192, 249 n. 12 Rodrı´guez Gonza´lez, Agustı´n Ramo´n, 192 Rojek, Chris, 30, 65, 118 Rubie´s, Joan-Paul, 43 Rush, James, 250 n. 17

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Rusinyol, Santiago, 29, 33–34, 74–75, 227 n. 4, 232 n. 34 Russell, Robert, 237 n. 18 Saavedra, Angel (el duque de Rivas), 128, 233 nn. 2, 3, and 4, 242 n. 10 Said, Edward: orientalist sites, 20, 126– 27, 186, 249 n. 11; Suez canal, 200; tactics of orientalist representation, 22, 187, 199, 211, 250 n. 17 Salamanca, Marquis of (Salamanca y Mayol, Jose´ Marı´a), 39 Salas y Quiroga, Jacinto, 174, 179, 180– 81, 195, 247 n. 2 Salom Costa, Julio, 198 Sa´nchez Fuertes, Cayetano, 192 Santos Alvarez, Miguel, 246 n. 1 Sarduy, Severo, 129, 241 n. 2 Schraibman, Jose´, 242 n. 9 Scott, Walter, 129 Sennett, Richard, 54, 74 Seton-Watson, Christopher, 102 Shakespeare, William: in Alarco´n, 163, 238 n. 24; in Alcala´, 203, 206; in Galdo´s, 108, 110, 111, 239 n. 25 Shoemaker, William, 235 n. 8 Smollet, Tobias, 233 n. 2 Solano, Francisco de, 192, 198, 249 n. 12 Spain, 19th-century: and empire, 17, 32, 86, 130, 131, 134–35, 174–75, 177–78, 181–82, 189–90, 192–93; and regionalism, 83–84; public cemeteries, 66– 67, 231 nn. 28, 29, and 30; travel practices, 16–17, 19–21, 27–29, 80, 131, 172. See also orientalism Sta¨el, Germaine de, 233 n. 2 Stendhal, 65, 79, 84, 233 n. 2, 237 n. 16, 239 n. 26 Sterne, Laurence, 203 Strobel, Margaret, 141 Sue, Euge`ne, 230 n. 18, 231 n. 27 Suetonius, 243 nn. 13 and 16 Switzerland, 173 Taboada, Luis, 227 n. 4 Taine, Hippolyte, 114–15, 233 n. 2, 240 nn. 31 and 33 Tassara. See Garcı´a Tassara, Gabriel

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Tasso, Torquato, 151, 164, 202, 206, 250 n. 19 Thomas, Nicholas, 18, 127, 175 Thrift, Nigel, 31 Todorov, Tzvetan, 14–15, 170–71, 181, 183 transoceanic journeys: tactics of representation, 169–74. See also Asia; Latin America travel: and tourism, 16, 117–18, 143–44; as pilgrimage, 32, 36; scholarship, types, 13–15. See also Italy; Paris travel writing: and originality, 29–30, 33, 34–35, 90–91; and referential discourse, 17–18, 88, 216, 217–18; as genre, 14–15; citationary structure, 22–23, 49, 113, 123, 236 n. 13; notion of authenticity 30–31, 115–18, 123, 184; types, 16–18, 40–42, 236 n. 12 Trollope, Anthony, 84 Tsuchiya, Akiko, 237 n. 18 Tun ˜ o´n de Lara, Manuel, 152, 192 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 225 n. 2 Umberto (emperor), 99, 100, 101 Unamuno, Miguel de, 233 n. 3 United States, 174, 247 n. 3 Urey, Diane, 96, 120, 237 n. 18, 239 n. 27, 240 n. 35 Urry, John, 30, 65, 117, 118, 143–44, 176 Valera, Juan: and Alcala´ Galiano, 185, 252 n. 30; orientalist literature, 128; texts from travels, 173, 174, 234 n. 3, 242 n. 10, 246 n. 1 Valera, Luis, 247 n. 2, 250 nn. 16 and 19 Valle-Incla´n, Ramo´n, 173, 246 n. 1 Verdaguer, Jacint, 132, 227 n. 4, 241 n. 4, 244 n. 20 Verne, Jules, 203 Victor Emmanuel (king), 85 Vidler, Anthony, 45 Virgil, 206 Vizcaı´no, Joaquı´n. See Pontejos, Marquis of Warburton, Eliot, 240 n. 34 Webster, Anthony, 209 White, Hayden, 34, 218

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Wilhelm II (kaiser), 99, 100, 101 Willms, Johannes, 47–48 Winks, Robin, 250 n. 17 women: representation in travel writing, 141–42, 149, 163–66, 246 n. 28; travel authors, 21, 225 n. 4. See also Coronado, Carolina; Pardo Baza´n, Emilia Wood, Denis, 87

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INDX

Yriarte, Charles, 242 n. 8 Zantop, Suzanne, 165 Zavala, Iris, 46, 60, 61, 110 Zorrilla, Jose´: in Alarco´n, 159, 244 n. 22; on Italy, 233 n. 2; on Latin America, 173, 177, 178, 246–47 nn. 1 and 2; orientalist literature, 128

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