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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977
The concept of mass psychology seems to have been in the air in Europe by the end of the nineteenth
century. The purpose of the present study is to demonstrate that young Benito Pérez Galdós, in his
first published novel, La Fontana de Oro (1870), already had expressed many of the ideas which
were to be published later in the theoretical treatises on the subject even anticipating certain concepts
which would not be promulgated again until Freud's study fifty-one years later.
Among the Novelas de la primera época , the novels in which the emphasis is heavily placed on
political conflict are La Fontana de Oro and El audaz: Historia de un radical de antaño , 9 published
respectively in 1870 and 1871. The existence of sizeable groups in violent confrontation in these two
novels provides the opportunity for examining a Galdosian entity which we shall denominate, for
reasons which will become apparent, the «group-organism». In the formidable array of characters
engendered by Galdós' prolific literary creativity might be numbered the various groups of individuals
which seem to be brought into existence, quite often for a short period of time, for the purpose
of carrying out a specific task. These task-forces, it will be seen, often are portrayed not merely
as socially-organized groups or categories, but as living organisms in which the component parts
(individual human beings) surrender their personal identity in order to become organs or cells of
the larger organism 10 . The members of the organism will be observed to transfer control of their
individuality to the head (literal as well as figurative) of the conglomerate creature. The group-
organism may be well structured (e. g. a military unit) or quite unstructured, as in the case of a mob.
La Fontana de Oro , upon which we shall concentrate, offers prime examples of the group-
organism. As a location in which politically oriented groups were formed in order to put theory into
practice in the streets of Madrid, the café called the Fontana de Oro was an ideal breeding ground
for group-organisms. The fact that the group-organism was quite definitely felt by Galdós to be what
now is referred to as a gestalt seems evident, early in the action of the novel, when Galdós himself
9 The same can be said of many of the Episodios nacionales of the first two series.
10 In this respect it is interesting to compare Gerald Gillespie's ideas which equate couples in Galdós'
work to molecules and the individuals forming those couples to atoms. See: «Reality and Fiction in
the Novels of Galdós», Anales galdosianos , 1 (1966), 20-21. Cf. the statement in Torquemada en la
hoguera (1889): « Somos átomos, amigo don Francisco; nada más que unos tontos átomos. » Obras
completas , vol. V, p. 919. (See note 11 below for full title.)
11