VALERA Y ALCALÁ GALIANO, JUAN. - Spanish writer and diplomat, b. at Cabra on 18 Oct. 1824, d. at Madrid on 18 Apr. 1905.
He was the nephew of the Duque de Rivas and his companion at the embassy in Naples. His political activity and his eagerness for knowledge made him an attentive traveler in many countries of Europe and America and an expert in the literary fashions of his time, which he, an aristocratic and conservative spirit endowed with a vast Greek and Latin culture, tempered with classical composure.
His uneven, yet always controlled, lyrical, dramatic, essayistic and narrative production culminates in the novel Pepita Jiménez (1874), a partially epistolary representation, often indebted to the language of the Spanish mystics, of the inner collapse of a young man, a candidate, but without a true vocation, for the priesthood, and who, after a struggle, skillfully reconstructed by the author in its phases, yields to the call of earthly love. « The enchantments of a nervous, agile and malicious style » of the « intellectual sybarite » that V. was do not suffice to save from a certain conventionalism the unfolding of the novel's plot, in which moreover « the ideas of the ancient Spanish mystics turn out to be quite antiquated in the attempt to make them clash with the modern sense of life » (M. de Montoliu). Other narrative works: Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino, El comendador Mendoza, Doña Luz, Juanita la larga. Interesting are the studies on Don Quixote, on Faust, on Shakespeare, on the Inquisition, on St. Teresa. In the Meta-fisica a la ligera, V., who also tried his hand in the field of thought, without however reaching, hampered by his skepticism, well-defined positions, attempts to rise from the concept of a confused « absolute » to the idea of God, not attainable by a rational process but reflected in the spirit of man, who « through this reflection guesses God, though he succeeds in conceiving Him only by analogy with his own soul, transferred to the plane of the magnificent ». V. lived his last years in resignedly endured old age. His work as a refined stylist and a detached evoker of reality has never been popular.
Bibliography4 works
Enzo Navarra