Pilar Prim

Pilar Prim is the last great novel of Narcís Oller and, from the aesthetic point of view, the most successful. It was published in 1906, just over a hundred years ago, after a long, doubt-plagued gestation, as Oller reveals in his Memòries literàries (Literary Memoirs).

Pilar Prim is continually nourished (especially in the opening chapters) by a great number of details drawn from the reality of the times (landscape, legal issues, manners and mores), which Oller's readers could clearly identity and the present-day reader can still recognise because at no point did Oller renounce the poetry of realism in drawing on his observations of the world as he laid the foundations of his literary constructions. In this case, the narrator offers a detailed description of a journey to Puigcerdà in the Pyrenean foothills. This was a trip Oller regularly made in the summer holidays so he knew the landscape of the La Cerdanya area well, just as he was well acquainted with the city of Barcelona and the legal conflicts that could arise from the provisions of a last will and testament. Even today, this first part of the book takes us on a journey through the territory of Catalonia, a train journey that is both real and literary. The reader is made to observe the features of the great panoramic sweeps, the railway stations, the industrial concentrations of the old textile colonies, recognising all the details of the countryside that form part of the novel and that, one way or another, are still part of our surroundings today. Along with them go elements that pertain to the customs of an earlier epoch, which we can perfectly well imagine in this natural setting.

Yet Narcís Oller goes one step further in his innovative progress in narrative technique, in particular with regard to creating characters with a convincing psychological presence. In this work, he constructs a complex, well-rounded, highly contradictory female character who is confronting a destiny against which she must rebel unless she is to disintegrate as a human being. The result is Pilar Prim, a character who stands out head and shoulders above the assortment of characters that were then to be found in novels and who, critics at the time, and even modern critics, have favourably compared with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Pilar Prim is what she is because of the psychological density Oller gives her and the efficacy of the literary technique he employs, which, in this case, incorporates the procedure that Henry James defined as "showing", meaning telling the story in such a way that it seems that the novel is speaking for itself so that the reader can directly witness the full array of passions and the actions of the characters without any interference. He achieves this by way of a fixed internal focalisation, which enables him to unfold the psycho-narration. This psycho-narration has the texture of an inner monologue in many of its fragments, reporting to the reader the innermost thoughts of Pilar Prim and Marcial Deberga, alternating the emphasis between the two characters so that the struggle between their doubts and passions is played out at this psychological level without anybody in their milieu realising. Only the reader knows. I shall return to this below.

From the point of view of its plot, Pilar Prim is not very complex and offers the reader just one line of action. The theme is the unveiling of a passion, the doubts it gives rise to and the obstacles it faces until its denouement. The story is that of a still-young woman who is obliged by the provisions of the will of her husband, possessive beyond death, never to marry again if she wants to retain the fortune she has inherited, and how she confronts the traps set by her family, the pressures of society, the conventions of the times and her own morality in trying to meet the amorous requirements of a man for whom, at first, she must compete with her own daughter. He is, it must be said, attractive and lively but totally given to the good life and high living, and without a fortune of his own. He is maintained by a wealthy aunt until she eventually decides to break the monotony of her life by marrying an old military man, a fortune-hunter who releases her from the tedium of conventionality, thereby leaving the nephew empty-handed. Continue reading...