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ArribaAbajoVillaamil -tragic victim or comic failure?

Alexander A. Parker


The modern tendency to interpret Miau as being more a criticism of its main character than a condemnation of a politico-social «system» conflicts with the way I first read the novel some thirty years ago and still read it. This paper will therefore be an attempt to justify an «old-fashioned» approach. No assertions one way or the other are susceptible of proof. I can do only what the critics I disagree with also do -affirm and expound a personal approach. The difference, I would venture to say, lies in whether one sees the human situation in the novel as an individual problem or as essentially a «poetic» statement.

The modern change of emphasis was apparent in the paragraph that Sherman Eoff devoted to Miau:

As the novel begins, the basic part of Miau's [sic] personality is assumed to have been formed during long years of government employment and a subsequent period of unemployment made even more painful by unpleasant relationships within his family. Although Miau's native temperament partly explains his adjustive reactions, his story is essentially one of maladjustment growing out of the circumstances of home and professional life. A well-meaning and affable, though mediocre, man is ill prepared for a harsh battle with the reality of unemployment because of his lack of stamina and his childish submissiveness, both of which have been engendered or at least furthered by his total dependence upon bureaucracy and a domineering wife. While feebly hoping for reinstatement, he tries to maintain his self-respect by remembering the esteem in which he was once held by his professional group; and he satisfies his need of affection with the love of his grandson Luisito. But his major reaction takes the form of puerile emotionalism, the shifting of responsibility to others, and passive resignation. An intensification of neurotic responses develops out of his inability to surmount his difficulties and leads to insanity, which enables him to achieve a temporary satisfaction in the guise of «philosophical» superiority over his immediate surroundings. Though he regains his sanity, he retains his emotional equilibrium and his feeling of relaxation only because of his decision to commit suicide, his final act of retreat from reality. Indirectly, of course, the novel is a demonstration of the evils of a government system that fosters irresponsibility and a lack of versatility in the individual.9


If Galdós's purpose were indeed to show why Villaamil was «ill prepared for a harsh battle with the reality of unemployment», then one could not possibly quarrel with this account. But Galdós's purpose, it seems to me, is to stress the fact of unemployment, and its effects, as examples of human relationships, of man's attitude to man. One is struck by the wrong emphasis that devotes seven sentences to the «psychology» of Villaamil and only one to the «system», whose evils are said to be demonstrated only indirectly. I do not agree with this particular statement of the evils, but in any case it will be argued here that the emphasis should be the other way: primarily on the evils (which are demonstrated directly) of a way of life rather than of a «government system».

  —14→  

This interpretation of Miau was extensively developed by Robert Weber. Though objectively based on the evidence of the two manuscript versions, the differences between them, as far as the point at issue is concerned, are subjectively assessed. While the first («Alpha») presents Villaamil and his suicide in a serious and sympathetic way, the second version («Beta») is held to show not an amplification but a fundamental change of attitude. Weber's general conclusions, in order not to be distorted by compression, require lengthy quotations.

In Beta, Villaamil's suicide is the result of his own pessimistic view of life, which eventually becomes his real Weltanschauung. His extreme concern for himself prevents him from realizing that life is not worthless because of a failure to get a government job or because his former associates fail to recognize as good a plan which Villaamil believes to be the solution to Spain's financial problems. In short, Villaamil is guilty of despair. The final outcome, suicide, viewed ironically, makes it clear that Villaamil's choice was not the right one.

[...] the accent seems to me to be on the individual more than on the system. Each of the characters, almost all of whom are presented in an unfavorable light, including the protagonist, Villaamil, is so concerned with himself that he consciously or unconsciously disregards the effects of such an attitude upon others. It is the individual, and not the system, that is responsible, in spite of the fact that Galdós never praises bureaucracy and its changing composition reflecting political shifts. If the system fosters mediocrity in Villaamil and others like him, it also tolerates the driving ambition of a Víctor and the narrow-mindedness of a devoted civil servant like Pantoja. Villaamil is so weak that his pessimism, which, he believes, conceals his lack of self-confidence, eventually prevents him from discerning a way out of his difficulties. His fatalistic attitude so narrows the possibilities that suicide seems to be his only solution. Galdós, I think, presents evil as a circumstance of existence to be recognized and fought by the individual. There is no panacea, whether embodied in an income tax or in a hypocritical identification with any system political, religious or social. The positive theme deduced from the many negative elements in the novel is that one should have sufficient faith in mankind and in one's self to preclude despair, that self-interest should always be tempered by a consideration of its consequences upon others.

[...] [Villaamil's] outstanding attribute is honesty -at least he is frequently referred to as el honrado. However, he seems to lack both the intelligence and aggressiveness to rise very high in the government. He spent much of his time drawing up a plan to cure Spain's financial problems, which, although in Beta is not openly ridiculed by Galdós, seems to be an oversimplified solution to a complex problem based upon a naive trust in the taxpayers' sense of duty. Villaamil's real difficulty arises when he becomes so intent upon being reappointed to the two months' service which would qualify him for a pension that he is unable to seek another means of making a living. His near monomania stems from the idea that he has a right to work in order to get a pension and then to live in blissful retirement. This assumed right, I think, is a manifestation of excessive self-concern, as is his eventual suicide. Galdós implies that society does not owe as much to the individual as does the individual to society.10


Apart from the last three sentences one need take no exception to each of these statements taken singly. Taken together, however, especially in conjunction with the last three sentences (with the astonishing implication that no man can assume a right to complete two months of a long professional career in order to qualify for the pension that career entitles him to), they can give a distorted picture of the novel -one that, moreover, is not easy to square with Weber's own placing of the novel within Galdós' development:

[...] all the characters, with the exception of Luisito, repeatedly act according to their ownselfish interest in both their private and public relationships. Although the theme of Beta is   —15→   essentially negative, the converse is implied by Galdós. Galdós decries hypocrisy and extreme selfishness and hopes for private and public charity in the Christian sense. Viewed in this way, Miau can be considered as an early announcement of the theme of charity -the opposite of self-interest- which is presented affirmatively in Nazarín (1895), Halma (1895), and Misericordia (1897).11


If it is wrong for an old man to claim the right to complete a professional career, and wrong to look forward to retirement; if it is wrong for him to think that society owes him a debt, how and where is the positive theme of charity implied? One cannot imply the converse of charity unless the need for it is really there -and the converse of charity means that someone is directly and undeservedly suffering from its absence.

Geoffrey Ribbans, in a review of Ricardo Gullón's Galdós novelista moderno, has recently suggested an interpretation of Miau that is substantially similar to Weber's.12 While I might not go all the way with Gullón I find myself more in sympathy with his standpoint than with that of his critic. Ribbans's conclusion is that the novel «puts forward the view that individual human beings are essentially responsible for their own fates, that they get out of touch with basic human realities at their peril and that self-delusion and self-imposed martyrdom are frequent and tragic in their consequences. 'La máquina burocrática destroza al hombre' only when he allows it to enslave him.» This, in my view, is to interpret Miau with the benefit of the hindsight derived from Nazarín, whose protagonist did not allow himself to be enslaved by the socio-economic «machine» and sought the «basic human realities» in the freedom of the open fields. For Ribbans the purpose of the episode that stresses the moments of peace which Villaamil enjoys on the outskirts of Madrid, after he has decided to kill himself,

is not to present his suicide as «un final trágico» in a society which has rejected him, but to display the wealth of the real world open and free to everyone which Villaamil has hitherto overlooked in his obsession with bureaucracy. For the first time he sees the beauties of nature, enjoys a good meal and even eyes the girls. He now roundly curses the State and his family to which he has devoted his life. As he watches the sparrows eating the breadcrumbs he has thrown them, he declares: «Coman, coman tranquilos... Si Pura hubiera seguido vuestro sistema, otro gallo cantara. Pero ella no entiende de acomodarse a la realidad. ¿Cabe algo más natural que encerrarse en los límites de lo posible?» Villaamil has not known either how to acomodarse a la realidad, encerrarse en los límites de lo posible, and he escapes only in a vain act of false martyrdom by killing himself.


Villaamil had not previously known this wisdom because he could reach it only through his cesantía. It is beside the point to say that he ought to have looked for another job, for if he had found one this wisdom would never have been reached. To blame Villaamil, as Ribbans does, for being «a totally ineffectual old man who has given himself over body and soul to the false god of administration, so that he cannot conceive of any existence outside it», is to put the cart before the horse. Galdós is not interested in other economic forms of existence; he is feeling his way towards a spiritual form of existence. Nazarín and Misericordia will show us in due course what an existence outside the false god of modern society consists in, but there is absolutely no hint in Miau, prior to the dosing paragraphs, that any such alternative existence is possible. Galdós has a long way to go before he reaches the radical solution of Nazarín. The importance of Miau in his development is that it is transitional between the phase in which interest centres on the different ways in which social pressures crush   —16→   individual happiness, with the weaker members of society being driven to the wall in the disharmonies created in human relationships by social conflicts, and the phase in which Galdós becomes preoccupied with the question of individual liberty against the hampering and enslaving force of the economic ideals and sanctions which dominate human society.

Villaamil is crushed by a society organized solely on the basis of injustices that take no account of personal values, for their motive force is individual selfishness; this produces a kind of impersonal cruelty -an inhumanity- in society as a whole, which is to say in the State. The concept of the State as a bureaucracy, entailing a whole new class of civil servants, was essentially the creation of the nineteenth century. The general criticism implicit throughout Miau is of the inhuman, machine-like character of this bureaucracy, represented by the Ministry of Finance, against which the individual battles in vain for justice. Most of the civil servants in the novel are well disposed towards Villaamil on the personal level; they have a human sympathy for him, but they do nothing and can do nothing for him. Everything depends upon a higher power, the Minister, who is so impersonal that he never appears at all, though he is constantly referred to. At the end Villaamil attains to freedom of the spirit by throwing off the obsessive preoccupation with job and salary. This means seeing through and rejecting the inhuman structure of the State; it means, in effect, rebelling against the State in the name of his own individuality. But at this stage of Galdós' development the assertion of freedom takes the form only of freedom to die. Villaamil shakes off the crushing and enslaving weight of society and the State only by suicide. It is only by dying that man can be free, because it is only by dying that man can escape from men. The message and tone of the work are therefore, for me, essentially tragic. Disillusioned with society as organized on the foundations of nineteenth-century politics, the only value Galdós can here hold fast to is the freedom of the individual spirit, but he has not yet explored how far and in what ways this can be fulfilled in life rather than in death. It falsifies Miau to project backwards into it the results of the later exploration.

Both Weber and Ribbans place much emphasis on the strong comic vein running through the book, which they claim to be a sign that Galdós presents his protagonist ironically. I shall argue later that this is a comedy that is not incompatible with tragedy. In using «comic failure» in my title I do not wish to imply that the alternative to Villaamil's being a tragic victim is his being a laughable clown: I mean that he is treated compassionately and not presented as a satirical figure.

The keynote to the novel's tragic tone lies in this sentence near the beginning, which describes Luisito's feelings after his fight with Posturas in the schoolroom:

Su ira se calmaba lentamente, aunque por nada del mundo le perdonaba a Posturas el apodo, y sentía en su alma los primeros rebullicios de la vanidad heroica, la conciencia de su capacidad para la vida, o sea de su aptitud para ofender al prójimo, ya probada en la tienta de aquel día.13


Aptitud para ofender al prójimo -this has been the law of human life since Cain and Abel. It gives social life a logic of its own, as Villaamil comes to discover when finally he is denied entry into the Ministry:

En donde menos se piensa salta un ingrato. Basta que yo te haya hecho mil favores, para que me trates como a un negro. Lógica puramente humana...


(675b)                


  —17→  

This human logic finds expression, as it inevitably must, in the prevailing politicosocial system; the novel, however, is not primarily about the system but about the human heart -not only man's capacity to offend his neighbour but the cruelty or the insensitiveness with which he consistently and continually does so. The gentle, timid boy, Luisito, is stirred to anger by the sarcastic nickname Miau, which exemplifies here at the beginning the heartlessness of the schoolboys and the schoolmaster, and later the insensitiveness of men as a whole to their capacity to hurt. Villaamil, like Luisito, is stirred to anger by the taunts that hurt him, but only he and Luisito, of all the major characters in the novel, never take the initiative in reviling and hurting others. Yet Villaamil is «a totally ineffectual old man». The conjunction of these two facts is not comic satire but «human logic» as Galdós saw it in 1888. A cogent argument against the satirical interpretation is the fact that the persecution of the innocent Luisito opens the novel and sets the dominant key. Villaamil is placed in that key, and this establishes the theme. In the very first paragraph the persecution of Luisito is described like this:

Uno le cogía del brazo, otro le refregaba la cara con sus manos inocentes, que eran un dechado completo de cuantas porquerías hay en el mundo...


(571b)                


Whatever can rightly be said about the ineffectualness of Villaamil as a social being, he is not, as a human being, un dechado completo de cuantas porquerías hay en el mundo. Like Luisito he is bombarded by them: he is the prójimo ofendido by his fellows, above all by the inhuman authority of the State which he cannot reach since it is not guided by justice but only by political influence and favour. Only two months' further service are required to entitle him to retire on a pension of four-fifths of his salary -without those two months of employment he has no pension at all. However comic a figure he may cut in everybody's eyes by his obsessive preoccupation with these further two months, the fact must never be obscured that for Galdós the failure to obtain them on the part of a man who has served the State honestly and faithfully is an inhuman injustice that cries out to heaven. The modern reader, secure in his own ability to make the best of a bad job in similar circumstances (and secure too in the certainty that he would never be asked to exercise this ability since such circumstances could nowadays never recur), should not forget that he too would clamour, if not to heaven, at least to every Court of Appeal against such treatment.

I am not competent to judge whether Villaamil's plan for reorganizing the national finances was feasible and, in the circumstances of the Spain of 1888, practical -Moralidad, Income Tax, Aduanas, Unificación de la Deuda. But I can see no sign whatever that Galdós himself holds the plan up to ridicule. On the face of it these seem to be measures making for a rational and simplified administrative order. The fact that the other civil servants ridicule them is no sign that the plan necessarily deserves the mockery of Miau, any more than Luisito deserves it in the first paragraph. It is one more sign that human hands (or mouths) are un dechado completo de cuantas porquerías hay en el mundo. Maybe it was -maybe it still is- naive to expect the taxpayer in Spain to make a truthful return of his income. But the point Galdós is making is that not to expect it, not to try it, is precisely a sign of la lógica humana. The fact that Villaamil advocates income tax instead of the various forms of property and purchase tax is significant, because this is a fiscal system that depends upon the State's trusting the good faith of the taxpayer. But this is precisely what the State   —18→   cannot and will not do, despite the fact that mutual trust among men should be the rule of all social living. The taxpayer is not a human individual to be trusted but an impersonal entity to be pursued and squeezed. The opponent of Villaamil's income tax proposal is Pantoja:

Cuando Pantoja y Villaamil hablaban de generalidades tocantes al ramo, no sonaban con armonioso acuerdo sus dos voces. Es que discrepaban atrozmente en ideas, porque el criterio del honrado era estrecho y exclusivo, mientras Villaamil tenía concepciones amplias, un plan sistemático, resultado de sus estudios y experiencia. Lo que sacaba de quicio a Pantoja era que su amigo preconizara el income tax, haciendo tabla rasa de la Territorial, la Industrial y Consumos. El impuesto sobre la renta, basado en la declaración, teniendo por auxiliares el amor propio y la buena fe, resultaba un disparate aquí donde casi es preciso poner al contribuyente delante de una horca para que pague. La simplificación, en general, era contraria al espíritu del probo funcionario, que gustaba de mucho personal, mucho lío y muchísimo mete y saca de papeles. Y, por último, algo había de recelo personal en Pantoja, pues aquella manía de suprimir las contribuciones era como si quisiesen suprimirle a él.


(637-8a)                


Pantoja is the example of the successful and respected civil servant. For such a one the State is supreme, an authority to be blindly served and worshipped. This makes him view humanity as an impersonal mass -in short, it produces in him an inhumanity towards humanity:

Según Pantoja, no debía ser verdaderamente rico nadie más que el Estado. Todos los demás caudales eran producto del fraude y del cohecho. Siempre había servido en Contribuciones, y durante su larga y laboriosa carrera fue cultivando en su alma el insano goce de perseguir al contribuyente moroso o maligno, placer que tiene algo del cruel entusiasmo de la caza: para él era deleite inefable ver a la grande y a la pequeña propiedad defenderse, pataleando, de la persecución del Fisco, y sucumbir siempre ante la superioridad del cazador. En todos los conflictos entre la Hacienda y el contribuyente, la Hacienda tenía siempre razón, según el dictamen inflexible de Pantoja, y este criterio se mostraba en sus notas, que jamás reconocieron el derecho de ningún particular contra el Estado. Para él, la propiedad, la industria, el consumo mismo, eran organismos o instrumentos de defraudación, algo de disolvente y revolucionario, que tenía por objeto disputar sus inmortales derechos a la única entidad dueña y propietaria de todo: la nación.


(634b-5a)                


En su trabajo era Pantoja puntualísimo, celoso, incorruptible y enemigo implacable de lo que él llamaba el particular. Jamás emitió dictamen contrario a la Hacienda; la Hacienda le pagaba, era su ama, y no estaba él allí para servir a los enemigos de la casa.


(635b-6a)                


Villaamil can be as ineffectual and spineless, as domestically disorderly as one pleases, but what the novel does not permit any reader to attribute to him is this totalitarian inhumanity. It is against this that he fights -with its own bureaucratic weapons, because he knows no others until he finally realizes that he can rebel against it. For Pantoja the individual does not exist as a human being with rights; justice is something that can be done only to the State. He would never give a penny of his own to help a human being in distress; Villaamil knows this and never approaches him for help. Yet -another aspect of la lógica humana- Pantoja is his friend. It is not that he is a positively malevolent man; his is the negative quality of lacking benevolence, and he lacks it because he is the loyal servant of an inhuman State.

The transference of the mocking epithet miau from the three women to Villaamil's plan for fiscal reform is for Ribbans a sign that Galdós himself is burlesquing it.14   —19→   Why should it not be in the second case, as in the first, only a sign of the inhumanity of his fellow-men, of their aptitud para ofender al prójimo? The mockery spreads from the public in the gallery of the opera-house, who direct it at his female relatives, to the schoolboys who direct it at Luisito, and then to the civil servants who direct it at Villaamil's plan. The latter first associates himself with Christ as follows:

el mote de Miau... Yo lo acepto. Esa M, esa I, esa A y esa U son como el Inri, el letrero infamante que le pusieron a Cristo en la cruz... Ya que me han crucificado entre ladrones, para que todo sea completo, pónganme sobre la cabeza esas cuatro letras en que se hace mofa y escarnio de mi gran misión.


(679b)                


Weber sees this as «ironic in tone». There is no reason why this should signify an absurd and blasphemous megalomania. Galdós is stressing that Villaamil is undergoing his passion as the victim of undeserved mockery and persecution. Villaamil's defiant acceptance of the epithet (despite its humanly understandable element of pride) need mean no more -and no less- than his «taking up his Cross», which is the traditional Christian way of denoting the acceptance of suffering. When Villaamil later varies the initials to Muerte Infamante Al Ungido, Weber comments: «In the fifth variation Galdós pushes the image still farther, as Villaamil remarks that he has been crucified. The irony is that whereas Christ was crucified to save mankind, Villaamil sacrifices himself because he is so egocentric that he sees no alternative».15 This is to take the metaphor all too literally. The irony is surely nothing of the sort. The irony is Villaamil's against his colleagues (an irony which Galdós is of course making his own). With his mind already partly unhinged he is not comparing his self-sacrifice to Christ's but is ironically contrasting the ignominy of his life and death with the redemptive sacrifice of Christ by the special sense he gives to ungido. The context, a conversation with Urbanito Cucúrbitas, is this:

Lo que yo te digo: hay que examinar imparcialmente todas las versiones, pues éste dice una cosa, aquél sostiene otra, y no es fácil decidir... Yo te aconsejo que lo mires despacio, que lo estudies, pues para eso te da el Gobierno un sueldo sin ir a la oficina más que un ratito por la tarde, y eso no todos los días... Y que tus hermanitos lo estudien también con el biberón de la nómina en los labios. Adiós, memorias a papá. Dile que crucificado yo, por imbécil, en el madero afrentoso de la tontería, a él le toca darme la lanzada, y a Montes la esponja con hiel y vinagre, en la hora y punto en que yo pronuncie mis Cuatro Palabras diciendo: Muerte... Infamante... Al... Ungido... Esto de ungido quiere decir, para que te enteres, lleno de basura o embadurnado todo de materias fétidas y asquerosas, que son el símbolo de la zanguanguería, o llámese principios.


(684b)                


He is being embadurnado -tarred and feathered- for public ridicule as a nincompoop; the tar and feathers are the insults of functionaries who are zanguangos, who live in idleness at the public expense; the insults replace the principles which Villaamil advocates and with which government officials ought to deal -«principios» which in fact have degenerated into beginnings (initial letters). These «principles» are susceptible of many interpretations and the young civil servants ought to return to school to study the meaning of the insults men hurl at their fellows. Irony, yes indeed; but not the irony that Weber suggests, and not irony on Galdós' part against Villaamil.

Of course there is a «comic vein» here, as there is all through the novel. But the «comedy» ranges from the tenderly wistful humour of Luisito's «visions», to the bitterly   —20→   mordant sting apparent here. Of course Villaamil is a «comic» figure. His obsessions make him, by the end, a rather tiresome bore; his importunity and his lackadaisical ménage are undignified, even grotesque; he gets more and more exasperating as he harps on his unhappiness, haunting the Ministry until he is ignominiously shut out; he becomes petulant, irritable and at the end almost delirious. In short, he has nothing at all of the self-possession and dignity of Nazarin. But he is made all this by his fellow-men, who include the female miaus; yet despite it all he remains a good man, and as such he does not deserve to be reviled and mocked, crucificado por imbécil en el madero afrentoso de la tontería. He is good as all men should be; and, as all men should be, he deserves to be respected and loved. But la lógica humana has different standards. Its Christs are mocked and crucified; so are its honest, well-meaning but ineffectual and petulant old men.

Humanity gets the State administration it deserves. The inhuman State produces a host of dependants who live on it. Nearly everybody in the novel lives on his colocación or in hopes of one; they live thus upon the crumbs that fall from the State's bureaucratic table. For all of them the one ideal is pay-day. Great political and social ideals are non-existent. Liberty, Fraternity and Equality have disappeared even from their lips. State bureaucracy has created a whole class of human beings whose horizons are limited entirely by the monthly paycheck. All generous, self-sacrificing ideals are gone: the selfish economic motive rules society as it rules the Exchequer that presides over it.

El trabajo concluyó aquel día más pronto que de ordinario, porque era día de pago, la fecha ventura que pone feliz término a las angustias de fin de mes, abriendo nueva era de esperanzas. El día de paga hay en las salas de aquel falansterio más luz, aire más puro y un no sé qué de diáfano y alegre que se mete en los corazones de los infelices jornaleros de la Hacienda Pública.

[...] En otros [departamentos], los habilitados mandaban un ordenanza con los santos cuartos en una hortera, en plata y billetes chicos, y la nominilla. El jefe de la sección se encargaba de distribuir las raciones de metálico y de hacer firmar a cada uno lo que recibía.

Es cosa averiguada que cuando Villaamil vio entrar al portero con la horterita aquella, se excitó mucho, acentuando su increíble alegría, y expresándola de campechana manera:

-¡Anda, anda, qué cara ponéis todos!

[...] Aquí está ya el santo advenimiento..., la alegría del mes... San Garbanzo bendito...


(682 a-b)                


La alegría del cobro, sentimiento característico de la humanidad, daba a la caterva aquella un aspecto simpático y tranquilizador. Era, sin duda, una honrada plebe anodina, curada del espanto de las revoluciones, sectaria del orden y la estabilidad, pueblo con gabán y sin otra idea política que asegurar y defender la pícara olla; proletariado burocrático, lastre de la famosa nave, masa resultante de la hibridación del pueblo con la mesocracia, formando el cemento que traba y solidifica la arquitectura de las instituciones.


(682 a)                


In this spoon-fed society honesty and competence have no place. Villaamil says to Urbanito:

Dime, ¿y tus hermanitos han cobrado también sus paguillas? Dichosos los nenes a quienes el Estado les pone la teta en la boca o el biberón. Tú harás carrera, Urbanito; yo sostengo que eres muy listo, contra la opinión general, que te califica de tonto. Aquí el tonto soy yo. Merezco, ¿sabes qué?, pues que el ministro me llame, me haga arrodillar en su despacho y me tenga allá tres horas con una coroza de orejas de burro..., por imbécil, por haberme pasado la vida creyendo en la moral, en la justicia y en que se deben nivelar los presupuestos.


(684 a)                


  —21→  

Honesty and competence have no place because everything depends upon favour and influence. The contrast with Villaamil in this respect is of course Víctor Cadalso. He is a man with no finer feelings, no sympathy or love for his fellows, whose only delight is to hurt them. His supreme quality is capacidad para la vida, o sea aptitud para ofender al prójimo. He is a successful civil servant in that he obtains his Colocación -not because he has any interest in serving the State as such, since his only interest is wealth and the life of high society. The State is the instrument for achieving his social ambitions. He robs the State; yet instead of punishment he obtains promotion because an old woman dotes on him. He degrades himself by exploiting her. She is rich, and because she is an aristocrat she is influential. Through her influence he gets on in the bureaucratic world, while his honest father-in-law is driven to suicide. The politics of patronage, by giving the politician plums to hand round to his friends, and to the friends of his friends, have produced the careerist on the one hand and the plebe anodina on the other. The standards of this world are economic; human relationships are founded on selfishness, not on justice and charity. Villaamil, the victim of the absence of justice and charity, comes through suffering to reject these standards, and to preach contempt for the State: «Despreciad al gran pindongo del Estado... ¿No sabéis quién es el Estado?... Pues el Estado es el mayor enemigo del género humano, y a todo el que coge por banda lo divide... Mucho ojo... Sed siempre libres, independientes, y no tengáis cuenta con nadie» (699 c).

Somehow the individual must struggle to escape from dependence on the monthly paycheck, to shake off the searing preoccupation with economic security in order to find the freedom of the birds:

¡Qué tranquilo he almorzado hoy! Desde mis tiempos de muchacho cuando salimos en persecución de Gómez, no he sido tan dichoso como ahora. Entonces no era libre de cuerpo; pero de espíritu sí, como en el momento presente; y no me ocupaba de si había o no había para mandar mañana a la plaza. Esto de que todos los días se ha de ir a la compra es lo que hace insoportable la vida... A ver, esos pajarillos tan graciosos que andan por ahí picoteando, ¿se ocupan de lo que comerán mañana? No; por eso son felices; y ahora me encuentro yo como ellos, tan contento que me pondría a piar si supiera, y volaría de aquí a la Casa de Campo, si pudiese. ¿Por qué razón Dios, vamos a ver, no le haría a uno pájaro en vez de hacerle persona?... Al menos, que nos dieran a elegir. Seguramente nadie escogería ser hombre para estar descrismándose luego por los empleos y obligado a gastar chistera, corbata y todo este malotaje que, sobre molestar, le cuesta a uno un ojo de la cara... Ser pájaro sí que es cómodo y barato. Mírenlos, mírenlos, tan campantes, pillando lo que encuentran y zampándoselo tan ricamente... Ninguno de éstos estará casado con una pájara que se llame Pura, que no sabe ni ha sabido nunca gobernar la casa, ni conoce el ahorro...


(700 b)                


This is the wisdom of the Gospels. Galdós, through Villaamil is echoing this counsel:

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?... Therefore take no thought saying, what shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?... But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.


(Mat. VI, 25-33)                


But down the centuries the difficulty in implementing this counsel of evangelical perfection has always been to recognize the kingdom of God, and how to seek it in   —22→   the changing conditions of human society. One cannot say that here at last is the ineffectual Villaamil realizing what he ought to have started practising years ago; he can only realize it now, because only now is he free of the care of his family. And he is only now free because Abelarda is at last going to marry Ponce, and Pura and Milagros can therefore be entrusted to their care. He could have snapped his fingers at the Ministry at any time, but only now is he in a position to rid himself of responsibility for the miaus. Now that he is at last free, spiritually and physically -able, like the birds, to take no thought for the morrow- where is the kingdom of God whose seeking justifies this total detachment, especially when to it is added the anarchism of contemptuous disregard of the State? To this question the novel gives no answer. Villaamil has been a beggar ever since he became a cesante, but he has been a pitiful beggar; nowhere in the novel, either now or previously, is there any inkling of the begging of Nazarin and Benina, which is given dignity through the spirit of a self-sacrificing, universal charity. Miau poses the need for salvation through individual freedom, but having created this anguished yearning it leaves us, as it leaves Villaamil, facing darkness. This, as I see it, is what makes it a tragic work. It is made all the more tragic because of its «comic vein», since the fact that individual men are so ridiculous makes human life all the more pitiful. Galdós aimed at bringing not only a wry smile to his reader's lips but also a lump to his throat. Eoff and Weber have not responded -at least not with the lump.

The search for the kingdom of God and his righteousness means the assurance of a higher power that by standing for right and justice can give an unshakable value to human life and so make sense of it. Is there any such assurance in the novel? Is there a God? For Cadalso there is of course none. «No creo en Dios -replicó Víctor con sequedad-; a Dios se le ve soñando, y yo hace tiempo que desperté» (602 a). Yet God does appear, but he appears in fact only as the dream of a near-epileptic boy, who secretly carries his vision with him in a world of adults who are all «awake». This innocent human being who appears in the first paragraph as the victim of man's inhumanity, of persecution at school and poverty at home, who is thereby burdened with a sense of personal guilt for the misfortunes of his grandfather -if only he, Luisito, could learn his lessons better, his grandfather might get his post- constitutes the most moving part of the book. God is a small boy's naive dream, the projection of his own childish but very real need for love, kindness and sense of justice. Galdós is not here laughing -either cynically or humorously- at belief in God: the tenderness with which he presents Luisito from start to finish is the sign of a sad scepticism -sad because filled with compassion for those (perhaps like Galdós himself in 1888) whose hearts need more than a sceptical answer in order to find life bearable. Innocent children dream of God. because the deepest waters of human life are stirred by the thirst for love and justice, and these are to be reached in man's sense of ultimate dependence, not in his arrogant self-assurance. Villaamil, on his own level, thirsts for this too:

¿Por qué tanta injusticia en estos jeringados gobiernos? Si es verdad que a todos nos das el pan de cada día, ¿por qué a mí me lo niegas? Y digo más: si el Estado debe favorecer a todos por igual, ¿por qué a mí me abandona?... ¡A mí, que le he servido con tanta lealtad! Señor, que no me engañe ahora... Yo te prometo no dudar de tu misericordia como he dudado otras veces; yo te prometo no ser pesimista, y esperar, esperar, esperar en ti.


(662 b)                


  —23→  

Ineffectual? Yes; but to a large extent because the novel cannot tell us what and where is the kingdom of God that it bids us seek. Without such an answer it is difficult -unless one is still a child- not to be a pessimist. Because it gives a blank (not a negative) answer to the question, Villaamil's suicide is presented as the logical response to the pessimism of life. There is no way forward from and through the anarchical freedom of the birds.

It is misguided, therefore, to see in Miau, as Weber has done, a criticism of its characters for not being properly Christian, for not having a true sense of religion.16 Galdós himself, at this stage, reveals no sense of religion as this is understood by the believing Christian. The exploration of the spiritual validity of a dogmatic and institutional religion comes later, and is extensively conducted in Ángel Guerra. In Miau the only true «religion» adumbrated is obedience to the natural human law of compassion, charity and justice. Galdós criticizes not just his particular characters but all humanity for not practising it. This -and not at this stage the failure to choose the free life of the birds- is the «basic human reality» which, as Ribbans says, Miau tells us we neglect at our peril. But to keep the novel exclusively on the level of psychological adaptation, social effectualness and «sufficient faith in oneself to preclude despair» is to remain on its surface. Galdós at his best -and in Miau he is at his best- has depths which can be plumbed only if he is read with the heart and not just with an analytical intelligence. His own heart was more stirred by the tragic emotions than by the comedy of satire.

University of Pittsburgh