Genealogical Fictions This page intentionally left blank Genealogical Fictions Cultural Periphery and Historical Change in the Modern Novel JOBST WELGE Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Mary land 21218- 4363 www .press .jhu .edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Welge, Jobst, 1969– Genealogical fi ctions : cultural periphery and historical change in the modern novel / Jobst Welge. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4214-1435-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1436-2 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1435-X (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4214-1436-8 (electronic) 1. European fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. European fi ction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Brazilian fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Brazilian fi ction—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Families in literature. 6. Social change in literature. 7. Social change—Europe. 8. Social change—Brazil. 9. Genealogy—Social aspects. 10. Literature and history. I. Title. II. Title: Cultural periphery and historical change in the modern novel. III. Title: Historical change in the modern novel. PN3499.W45 2014 809.3'9355—dc23 2014011205 A cata log record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410- 516- 6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post- consumer waste, whenever possible. contents List of Abbreviations vii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s i x 1 Introduction 1 2 Periphery and Genealogical Discontinuity: The Historical Novel of the Celtic Fringe (Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott) 16 3 Progress and Pessimism: The Sicilian Novel of Verismo (Giovanni Verga and Federico De Roberto) 38 4 National and Genealogical Crisis: The Spanish Realist Novel (Benito Pérez Galdós) 61 5 Nature, Nation, and De-/Regeneration: The Spanish Regional Novel (Emilia Pardo Bazán) 87 6 Dissolution and Disillusion: The Novel of Portuguese Decline (Eça de Queirós) 120 7 Surface Change: A Brazilian Novel and the Problem of Historical Repre sen ta tion (Machado de Assis) 142 8 The Last of the Line: Foretold Decline in the Twentieth- Century Estate Novel (José Lins do Rego) 159 9 Death of a Prince, Birth of a Nation: Time, Place, and Modernity in a Sicilian Historical Novel (G. Tomasi di Lampedusa) 170 10 Epilogue: The Perspective from the End 194 Notes 205 Bibliography 233 Index 249 This page intentionally left blank abbreviations Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. CR Maria Edgeworth. Castle Rackrent; an Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires, before the Year 1782. Edited by George Watson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. EJ Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Esaú e Jacó. Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 2005. FJ Benito Pérez Galdós. Fortunata y Jacinta: Dos historias de casadas. Edited by Francisco Caudet, 2 vols. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. G Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Il gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 2003. HC Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Esau and Jacob. Translated by Helen Caldwell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. L Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Pantheon, 1988. LMN Emilia Pardo Bazán. La madre naturaleza. Edited by Ignacio Javier López. Madrid: Cátedra, 2007. LPU Emilia Pardo Bazán. Los Pazos de Ulloa. Edited by Marina Mayoral. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1986. ME José Lins do Rego. Menino de engenho. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2008. MV Giovanni Verga. I Malavoglia. Edited by Ferruccio Cecco. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. OM Eça de Queirós. Os Maias: Episódios da vida romântica. Lisbon: Porto Editora, 2002. TM Eça de Queirós. The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions: New York, 2007. VR Federico de Roberto. I Viceré. Turin: Einaudi, 1990. W Walter Scott. Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Edited by Andrew Hook. London: Penguin, 1985. This page intentionally left blank a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s This book certainly has a genealogy of its own. The remote beginnings may be traced back to the time when I lectured on Italian cultural history at the Univer- sity of Santa Barbara, in the year 2004. When in this context I was teaching Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, I fi rst began to explore the novel’s wider connections with the history of the Eu ro pe an novel— little suspecting in which directions it would take me in the following years. At the Freie Universität Berlin the book was conceived and realized in the form of a German Habilitation. The fi nal stages of rearrangement and revision for its present form were carried out at my present position at the University of Konstanz. In its various incarnations, then, the book has accompanied me to many diff erent places— the fi rst draft of the chapter on Machado de Assis was written in the Library Machado de Assis at the Academia Brasileira das Letras in Rio de Janeiro, and several other chap- ters were written in the study room of the Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm or in the library of the Ibero- Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin. The present form of the book owes much to the critical comments and help- ful suggestions of Joachim Küpper, Helmut Pfeiff er, and Jeff rey Schnapp, all of whom have accompanied, supported, and inspired me on my academic trajec- tory, for which I am deeply grateful. Individual chapters have also benefi ted from the expertise and advice of Oliver Lubrich, João Cezar de Castro Rocha, and Ber- thold Zilly. Their companionship and encouragement over the years has been in- valuable. For their interest and insightful input at various junctures I would like to thank Pedro Almeida Magalhães, Esther Kilchmann, Elisabeth Lack, and Marie Naumann. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the anonymous reader for Johns Hopkins University Press, as well as Carrie Watter- son for her superb copyediting work. Special thanks to Thomas Jorion for his generous permission to use his evocative photography for the cover art. Last but not least, I thank Robert Buch for unfailing friendship and the careful reading x Acknowledgments of the entire manuscript. Since the fi nal stages and beyond, a more incalculable debt is due to my wife Katrin and my daughter Carla Mia. A diff erent version of chapter 4 was published (in German), as “Nation, Genealo- gie und Geschichte in Benito Pérez Galdós’ Fortunata y Jacinta,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 57 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 378– 402. An earlier version of a portion of chapter 5 was published (in Spanish) as “Degeneración y crisis de la provincia en Los Pazos de Ulloa,” in Narrar la pluralidad cultural: Crisis de modernidad y funciones de lo pop u lar en la novela en lengua española, edited by Wolfgang Matzat and Max Grosse (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2012), 213– 25. A slightly diff erent version of chapter 7 is forthcoming as “Machado de Assis’ Esaú e Jacó and the Problem of Historical Repre sen ta tion” in the Luso- Brazilian Review. © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press. I thank the publishers for the permission to reprint. Genealogical Fictions This page intentionally left blank chapter one Introduction This book emerged through a series of questions that I asked myself when studying and teaching Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo (1958). While that text, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, has for various rea- sons often been seen as a rather isolated and “eccentric” phenomenon in the panorama of Italian literature during the 1950s, I began to notice certain simi- larities between it and Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), as well as other novels of the twentieth century, notably Thomas Mann’s Budden- brooks (1901). What these novels had in common was a concern with family his- tory that is echoed by the formal and structural makeup of this type of “genea- logical” novel. Given these similarities among diff erent novels of the twentieth century, I set out to formulate questions such as these: How can we defi ne the genealogical novel, and what is generally the function of genealogy and family history in the form and history of the novel? Are there possible connections be- tween the theme of genealogical decline and the location in a geo graph i cal periphery (Sicily, Macondo, Lübeck)?1 How are family history, genealogical suc- cession, and generational experience related to a bigger history, the history of the nation, as well as to social change and modernization? However, it soon occurred to me that what I had initially observed as a phe- nomenon of the twentieth- century novel could be explained only by retreating in time, by looking at the history and geography of the novel in the nineteenth century. Although Il Gattopardo was my fi rst stepping stone to address these problems, my analysis of this novel stands at the end of this book. I would now claim that Lampedusa’s novel represents a culmination and summa of a constel- lation of themes originating in a certain tradition of the nineteenth- century novel, involving the nation, the (regional) periphery, familial genealogy, and the question of historical change.