Leopoldo Alas Clarín: Life, Works, and Literary Criticism
Leopoldo Alas Clarín: Life and Works
Born in Zamora in 1852, Leopoldo Alas, known as “Clarín,” spent most of his life in Oviedo, first as a student and then as a professor of law. He died in the Asturian capital in 1901.
Clarín, one of the most well-read intellectuals of his time, was well known for his work. As a literary critic, he was feared, blamed for mercilessly criticizing bad writers. Despite its brevity, the narrative quality of his work makes him a very important writer.
He wrote two novels, La Regenta (The Judge’s Wife) and Su único hijo (His Only Son), some short stories, and a little more than a hundred short stories collected in several volumes:
- Pipa
- El Señor
- Doce cuentos morales
- El gallo de Sócrates
The stories are of two classes: satirical or of reflective tone. The first presents ridiculous caricatures. In the second, Clarín expressed personal concerns: love, religion, false intellectualism, selfishness, envy, and humility.
La Regenta: A Masterpiece of Spanish Realism
La Regenta is an exceptional novel that tells the story of a frustrated woman’s adultery. The real protagonist of the play is the provincial society that Clarín used to show the pettiness of Restoration Spain.
He severely satirizes the behaviors of the dominant class: clergy, nobles, and bourgeois. He reveals their frivolity, hypocrisy, pride, moral mediocrity, and misery. In La Regenta, as a naturalistic novel, the influence of the environment on the characters is very important. Both the outside world (the city, the street environment, social relations) and the immediate surroundings (his family, his childhood, his formation) determine them definitively. Even nature is related to the encouragement of the individuals.
There are two main features of the environment surrounding the characters: boredom and lust. In the closed provincial society, everything is repeated until boredom, and lust becomes the only way out of many frustrations.
Su único hijo: A Portrait of Societal Morality
Su único hijo is about the life in a small capital of a failed marriage. The relations of its components with a company of actors place the action in a foreign environment. Clarín harshly judges the morality of the society he portrays, whose face, concealed beneath a mask of outdated romance, reveals selfishness, greed, deceit, hypocrisy, and lies.
The characters live in the most extreme loneliness and are moved exclusively by material interest in a social environment that determines their behavior with a mixture of naturalistic determinism and some decadent sensuality closest to the literature of the century.
Communicative Functions in Language
All linguistic messages are issued with a particular intention because the issuer wants to accomplish something. That intention is the communicative function that defines the message. There are three fundamental functions:
- Representative function (or referential): The issuer intends to transmit to the recipient of his discourse some information on the reality that this unknown.
- Expressive Function (or emotive): The issuer intends to show their emotions and feelings, to manifest their mood. Attention is focused discourse, then, on the issuer itself.
- Appellative function (or conative): In messages that have this function, attention is focused on the receiver. The issuer intends to provoke a response from this. Such a response can be physical (the receiver carries out certain actions, as in “Do not miss tonight’s movie”), or verbal (the receiver in turn issues a reply message, as in “What time is it this morning?”).