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Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 strength is applied intelligently to the weakest point of the intended victims' meeting place: « El monstruo oprimió con su más fuerte músculo la puerta de la casa » ( ibid. ). Galdós is not viewing the mob as a union of distinct personalities; he is painting a picture of a single monstrous creature operating in concentrated fury. As a result of Lázaro's recent awareness of the true political situation (the Absolutists' manipulation of radicals and people to destroy, rather than liberalize, constitutional government) and his warning, the mob-organism will have to contend with another organism: « pero al llegar al patio hubo un instante de vacilación, de terrible sorpresa. Doble fila de soldados apuntaban a la multitud... » (p. 172). The military organism is once more presented as an entity which, unlike the mob, is orderly, methodical, dispassionate, and well disciplined. When the door is knocked down by the « monstruo », the riflemen still hold their fire, merely aiming their weapons at the invaders. The commanding officer orders the mob to retreat. Only when one of the soldiers is felled by a shot (i. e., the military organism receives a wound) do the riflemen fire. After a brief skirmish, the undisciplined horde begins to recoil in confusion as foot soldiers advance against it. Simultaneously, a squad of cavalry gallops into the fray, proceeding along the Calle del Conde Duque as a battalion of National Guards advances along the Portillo impeding the rioters' escape. The cavalry, the National Guards, and the riflemen within the house may be considered several members of one organism. This military organism destroys that which has been variously labeled by Galdós « pólipo » and « monstruo ». Galdós states in the preámbulo to La Fontana de Oro that this novel is didactic in nature, having as its purpose the analysis of a complicated political situation in the Spain of 1820-23 for the purpose of avoiding a repetition, in Galdós' own time, of the misfortunes occasioned by political naiveté in the era described in the novel. The utilization of the device denominated by us as the «group-organism» serves several purposes. The spectacle of two branches of the same political persuasion (liberal) divided into two camps ( exaltados and prudentes ) capable of destroying the Liberal party and allowing the King to regain absolute control gives rise to two distinct, although related, themes which will be present in some form or another in much of Galdós' subsequent work. The first theme is that peace and compromise are to be preferred to the futility of violence and extremism (these last two qualities appear graphically in the form of antagonistic group-organisms). Deriving from Galdós' concern with the deep ignorance evinced by the organisms composed of pueblo , an ignorance which leads these entities to engage in self-defeating activities, there emerges a second theme which will be a constant in his work: the importance of education as the remedy for destructive ignorance. Precisely because the group-organism is easily led to engage in acts which the individual members composing ft might 26
Anales galdosianos [Publicaciones periódicas]. Año XII, 1977 eschew if in possession of their personal consciousness and because these acts can be violent, the group-organism attains, in La Fontana de Oro , the function of a dual symbol for ignorance and extremism. Galdós' weapons against this bicephalous monster, as may be seen throughout his work, are education and a spirit of compromise. What is of paramount importance to the present study, however, is that many of the concepts relating to mass psychology which were published in the late 1880's and early 1890's must have been in the air throughout a good part of Europe previous to 1870, when La Fontana de Oro was published, and most certainly were known to Galdós at that time. Galdós as a very young man, and in his first published novel, demonstrates familiarity with the socio-psychological «discoveries» promulgated by the theoreticians over two decades after the appearance of La Fontana de Oro . However, even more startling is the fact that in this early novel Lázaro marries Clara only after he manages to disengage himself from the bonds of the group-organism, a concomitance which is in perfect accord with Freud's affirmation, published in 1921, more than a half-century after the novel, that: «Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling» 32 . While not writing a treatise on social or psychological theory, but rather producing an artistic creation, young Pérez Galdós anticipated by fifty-one years Sigmund Freud's tracing to the libido the phenomenon which group psychologists had been labeling suggestion or imitation without further analysis. 33 State University of New York at Fredonia 32 Freud, p. 121. 33 Galdós' pre-Freudian insight into psychoanalysis has been recognized by Rodolfo Cardona with reference to La sombra : « this novel [ La sombra ] is probably one of the earliest works anywhere in Europe to present a complete 'case history' aimed at explaining the delusions of a psychotic individual, thus making this a remarkably 'Freudian' novel long before Freud had even begun his investigations.» Rodolfo Cardona, Introduction to La sombra (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1964), p. xix. Another critic believes that the works of Galdós in general disclose an insight into human personality superior to that of Freud's: «Galdós evinces an astonishing pre-Freudian grasp of the most enduring tenets of psychoanalysis. At the same time he discloses a conception of personality which is superior to Freud's and coincides with the view of man espoused by humanistic psychologists.» Arnold M. Penuel, «Galdós, Freud, and Humanistic Psychology», Hispania 55, 1 (March 1972), 67. 27
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