“La novela en el tranvía”

The origins of Galdós’ dynamic, critical and cervantine realism

Abstract

Starting from the analysis of the short story “La novela en el tranvía”, a reflection is proposed – not so much from the point of view of academic criticism, but, rather, from the point of view of the novelist (author) who lays claim to the Galdosian project in order to novelize the historical present as their own – around an observation that is rarely taken into account or has been undervalued. This is the observation that in Galdós’s narrative work, the tools and narrative approaches did not always fit the reductive model of the realist bourgeois novel of the 19th century, which modernist contemporaries, the Generation of 98 and later authors like Juan Benet in the 1970s, wanted to see or make us believe. This observation holds not only for Galdos’ late work such as El caballero encantado, but also to earlier novels such as El amigo Manso or, from his earliest works such as the short story “La novela en el tranvía”. In fact Galdós very early incorporated non-realistic, fantastic or symbolic features into his writing.