The Essence of Literary Realism and Its Spanish Legacy

Understanding Literary Realism

Literary Realism is a significant literary movement that emerged with the aim of depicting society and its environments as accurately as possible. Realist works often focus on settings and characters familiar to the writer, preferring to describe everyday life and portray ordinary, even vulgar, individuals and social currents. This approach is rooted in an aesthetic and ethical principle of objectivity and self-moderation, seeking to synthesize contradictions rather than highlight them.

Core Principles of Realism

The essential elements of Realism include:

• Faithful Reproduction of Reality: Realist works strive to present a truthful and precise representation of reality.
• Thorough Use of Description: Detailed descriptions are employed to create accurate profiles of themes, characters, situations, and locations.
• Focus on the Everyday: Ordinary, non-exotic life is a central theme, often addressing political, human, and social problems.
• Rejection of Sentimentality: Realism portrays humanity objectively, often revealing a raw and unvarnished reality.
• Colloquial Language: The language used is typically common and current, reflecting everyday speech.
• Objective and Critical Stance: Realism rejects both sentimentality and the purely spiritual, often resulting in works with an individualistic touch.
• Interplay with Environment: Characters are often presented as products of their economic and social environment, reflecting their social class, trade, and other societal influences.
• Exploration of Human Existence: Themes related to the problems of human existence are frequently analyzed.
• Authorial Analysis and Denunciation: Authors analyze, reproduce, and often denounce societal ills, transmitting their ideas as truthfully and objectively as possible.

In essence, Realism aims to reflect the truth as it is.

Realism in Spanish Literature

Realism found fertile ground in Spain, building upon precedents found in picaresque novels and Don Quixote. It reached its zenith in the second half of the nineteenth century with authors like Juan Valera, José María de Pereda, and Benito Pérez Galdós.

Influence of Naturalism and Regional Focus

While Spanish Realism reached a peak, it generally did not exhibit the same severity or programmatic rigor as the French Naturalist school, particularly that of Émile Zola. However, clear influences of Naturalism are evident in later Spanish authors such as Galdós, Leopoldo Alas "Clarín," Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. These authors often shared an anti-conservative ideology and, in many cases, a subversive stance, but without fully adopting Zola's scientific and experimental approach.

The realistic novel in Spain often reflected specific regional environments:

• Cantabria: José María de Pereda
• Andalusia: Juan Valera
• Asturias: Leopoldo Alas "Clarín"

Benito Pérez Galdós stands as an exception, preferring the urban environment of Madrid as his primary setting.

The Descriptive Sequence in Realist Texts

Description is a fundamental element in realist literature, providing detailed information about a person, object, or process. Its presence in texts often appears as a secondary consequence of a narrative or expository purpose.

Structural Components of Description

A descriptive sequence typically presents two main parts:

• Subject or Title: This can appear at the beginning or end of the descriptive text.
• Development: This is the fundamental part, presenting an enumeration of parts, relevant attributes, and characteristics of the object, person, or thing being described.

Expressive Characteristics of Descriptive Writing

Descriptive texts exhibit specific stylistic features:

• Predominance of Nouns and Adjectives: These parts of speech are crucial for detailing qualities and attributes.
• Use of Verbs: Verbs often describe states or actions related to the description.
• Syntactically Equivalent Elements: Sentences often feature parallel structures.
• Characteristic Tenses: The present indicative, with its durative value, is common, expressing actions or states that preface or encompass the current time. The past tense is also frequently used.
• Predominance of Coordination and Juxtaposition: From a syntactic standpoint, descriptive texts are characterized by a high frequency of coordinated or juxtaposed sentences, facilitating the enumeration of parts and properties.
• Employment of Figurative Language: Some texts utilize expressive resources such as comparisons, metaphors, and personifications to provide an enhanced and vivid picture of the reality being described.