{"id":511,"date":"2012-10-04T16:39:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T14:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=511"},"modified":"2012-10-04T16:39:47","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T14:39:47","slug":"charles-and-mariano-jose-a-zest-for-city-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/10\/04\/charles-and-mariano-jose-a-zest-for-city-life\/","title":{"rendered":"CHARLES AND MARIANO JOS\u00c9: A ZEST FOR (CITY) LIFE <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

A ridiculous moment in Dickens\u2019s \u2018paper\u2019 (as he calls them) on a charity dinner in his Sketches by Boz<\/em> (1836-37) provokes a strong sense of d\u00e8ja v\u00fa. Soon I identify it with a memory of reading Mariano Jos\u00e9 de Larra\u2019s articles back when I was a secondary-school student and again as an undegrad. Suddenly, I feel very thankful towards those who decided that I was mature enough to read Larra at 15, for that is a fond memory. As fond as that of later enjoying at 19 the whole collection of his 200 articles (within that massive survey course I mentioned two posts ago).<\/p>\n

When I google Dickens and Larra together, though, I come up with very little. There\u2019s a trivial article on Christmas dinners \u2013mentioning Dickens\u2019s tale A Christmas Carol<\/em> and Larra\u2019s acerbic report on overeating and bad table manners, \u201cEl castellano viejo.\u201d Google Scholar throws up a couple of references to Llu\u00eds-Albert Chill\u00f3n\u2019s Literatura i periodisme: Literatura period\u00edstica i periodisme literari en el temps de la post-ficci\u00f3<\/em> (UAB\/UJI\/URV, 1999). It looks very interesting. As MLA returns zilch when I check \u201cDickens and Larra\u201d, my guess is that Chill\u00f3n\u2019s might be the only volume where both writers are mentioned, even together in the same line, as (outstanding) practitioners of literary journalism.<\/p>\n

WordReference tells me, as I suspected, that there\u2019s no English translation for \u2018costumbrismo\u2019 though, very clearly, from a Spanish perspective (like Chill\u00f3n\u2019s) it\u2019s easy to see that this is what Dickens produced in the Sketches<\/em>. I marvel at how many of the characters and observations that later appear in his Oliver Twist<\/em> are to be found in the Sketches<\/em>: from the pompous parish beadle to the brutal ruffian with a dog, passing through the nightmarish suffering of the condemned at Newgate (and I have just read the first third). It\u2019s really fascinating to see how Dickens used similar material for literary journalism and for literary fiction within the short span of a couple of years.<\/p>\n

Larra (1809-1837) wrote a mediocre historical novel, El doncel de don Enrique el Doliente<\/em>, which follows from his play Mac\u00edas<\/em>. He was more in the line of Walter Scott (1771-1832) than of Dickens (1812-1870). The dates show how, although he was Dickens\u2019s contemporary, Larra belongs somehow to a previous literary generation, that of the Romantics, at least as a fiction writer (that\u2019s 19th century Spain for you\u2026). As a journalist, he\u2019s indeed Dickens\u2019s peer, though, as you may notice, he died the very same year Dickens finished the Sketches<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I still remember my brilliant secondary-school Spanish Literature teacher telling us cooly, with that glint in her eye, that Larra (the idiot!) shot himself dead minutes after his lover demaned that he returned the letters written during their adulterous (on both sides) love affair. He was only 27. His 5-year-old daughter, by the way, was the first to see the body (so much for having guns around the house, and for Romantic suicide). The Museo Rom\u00e1ntico of Madrid stil exhibits the very pistol Larra used \u2013a shocking sight! <\/p>\n

On a trip to lift up his recurrent depression, Larra visited London in 1835, yet he never met Dickens, as \u2018Boz\u2019 was still a nobody. A pity, they would have liked each other. And I realise that this is what the d\u00e8ja v\u00fa elicited: the memory of feeling as a very young reader that I liked<\/em> Larra, in the sense that I liked the brain (or mind?) producing that writing as much as I like today Dickens, and for similar reasons. Here are two young men \u2013Boz, Figaro\u2013 both very clever observers of their reality, which they portray under a stark light with a mixture of wryness and compassion. They both transmit an immense zest for life and an immense keenness on their task as recorders of the urban landscape that they daily examined. They do<\/em> care.<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019m 30 years older I can understand that whereas Dickens could cope with marital unhappiness and the ugly underside of English Victorian reality to die a most famous author at 58, Larra could not. His despair at Spain\u2019s backwardness \u2013not just Dolores Armijo\u2019s rejection\u2013 was too much. That he chose to die by destroying his own brain says it all. How very Dickensian, in an odd sense.<\/p>\n

Maybe one day someone will write one of those now fashionable novels or plays in which famous figures of the past meet and we\u2019ll have young Boz and Figaro be amazed at each other, as I am at both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A ridiculous moment in Dickens\u2019s \u2018paper\u2019 (as he calls them) on a charity dinner in his Sketches by Boz (1836-37) provokes a strong sense of d\u00e8ja v\u00fa. Soon I identify it with a memory of reading Mariano Jos\u00e9 de Larra\u2019s articles back when I was a secondary-school student and again as an undegrad. Suddenly, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oliver-twist","category-victorian-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}