Scatological absences and whispers in Fortunata y Jacinta

"Spanish nineteenth-century Realism is afflicted by a paradox concerning scatological matters that has been so far neglected. On the one hand, one of the key foundations of realist poetics is the will to give textual expression to the totality of life and language, including foul words and repugnant things and deeds, the miseries of the soul and the body, both of the individual person and of society. On the other hand, concrete realist novels incur in the notable absence of an excremental component, a lack that constitutes a noncompliance with that programmatic ambition of totality. In general, that is the situation in Fortunata y Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós. The present essay attempts a reflection on this excremental absence using as points of departure a theoretical argument and a set of textual evidences. First, psychoanalytical and Marxist theories predicate the idea that what is not said, what is muted in a discourse, could become the cardinal element of that discourse and its contradictions, its psychological and ideological key. Second, starting with the controversial scene of Fortunata ́s dream, the text occasionally breaks its scatological silence through a series of excremental whispers of sorts that are indexes of the importance and the potential significance of excrement in the novel. Keywords: Pérez Galdós; reality; realism; scatology; dreams"