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Epochal Allegory in Galdós's Torquemada: The Ur-Text and the Episteme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jeanne P. Brownlow
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Abstract

In the four-part novel Torquemada (1889-95), Galdos allegorizes the philosophical complexities of his age with a powerful negotiatory energy. Historical exigencies modify his miserly protagonist's figurai force by submitting the venerable sin of avarice to a secular revision that appropriately reflects the nineteenth-century positivist episteme. Since Dante's Divine Comedy provides the structural framework and the typological authority for the protagonist's successful social ascent, a sense of cognitive disjunction is inevitable. Comte's synthetic Religion of Humanity crosses with the medieval value system implied by Dante's Christian allegory, leaving the capitalist moneylender in a state of mortal anxiety and moral confusion. The epistemological dimension of Galdós's macroallegory equals in scope and signifying intensity the most famous twentieth-century models for allegorizing modern history —the archaeological, the tropic, the dialectical, the deconstructive—and underscores the role of positivism as a precursor of these oracular practices. (JPB)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , March 1993 , pp. 294 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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