Narcís Oller i de Moragas (; 10 August 1846 – 26 July 1930) was a Catalan lawyer and novelist who initially wrote in the traditions of literary realism and naturalism, later adapting his style to the Modernisme movement, the Catalan equivalent of Art Nouveau. Despite his stylistic evolution, he is considered one of the leading Catalan authors of the 19th century.
He is best known for his novels La papallona (The Butterfly), which featured a foreword by Émile Zola in the French translation; L'Escanyapobres (The Usurer), regarded as his masterpiece; and La febre d'or (Gold Fever), set in Barcelona during the speculative real estate boom known as promoterism. His novel La bogeria (The Madness) was translated into English by Douglas Suttle and published by Fum d'Estampa Press in 2020.https://fumdestampa.com/product/the-madness/
Oller also translated works by Leo Tolstoy and Alexandre Dumas, père into Catalan.Casassas, Joaquim. Narcís Oller. Edicions 62, 2006.
His contribution was instrumental in the Catalan literary renaissance known as the Renaixença, and he helped pioneer a modern Catalan prose style.García i Barberà, Carme. “Narcís Oller i el Modernisme,” in Estudis de Literatura Catalana. Vol. 12, 1998.
Biography Narcís Oller was the son of Josep Oller i Yxart (1820–1848) and Rosa Moragas i Tavern (1821–1876). He was orphaned of his father at the age of two and went to live with his mother in the ancestral Moragas house in Valls, where he was educated in a wealthy, enlightened, and liberal environment. He studied law in Barcelona, graduating in 1871. He first worked as a civil servant in the Diputació de Barcelona and later set up practice as a procurator. He remained in this profession almost until his death.Pons, Agustí (1996). Narcís Oller i el seu temps. Barcelona: Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat. .
There are few remarkable events in Oller's life—he himself used to say that he lived "like a simple bureaucrat"—and biographical facts had little influence on his literary production. Oller was a moderate liberal, politically close to conservative Catalanism, and socially embedded in the bourgeois class, the world of which he portrayed in detail in his narratives.Castellanos, Jordi (1986). Narcís Oller i la novel·la del segle XIX. Barcelona: Edicions 62. .
Oller began writing at a young age; his early works, written in Spanish, are almost all lost or unpublished. Around 1877 he decided to switch to Catalan: “I finally saw clearly,” he wrote in his Memòries literàries, recalling this period, “that between the writer and his native language there is a bond so strong that it has no possible substitute.”Rafanell, Jordi (1990). Narcís Oller i el realisme europeu. Barcelona: Curial. .
Several factors influenced this decision, including the impact of the Jocs Florals of that year (when Jacint Verdaguer’s L'Atlàntida was awarded and Àngel Guimerà was named mestre en Gai Saber) and his participation in literary gatherings, especially the circle around the magazine La Renaixença. He embraced Catalan not only for sentimental or political reasons but also for strictly literary ones. By the late 1870s he was reading Émile Zola and other contemporary French authors, discovering realism, which in Spanish was already cultivated by writers like Juan Valera and Benito Pérez Galdós. His close friends, the critics Josep Yxart (who was also his cousin) and Joan Sardà i Lloret, persuaded him of the potential of realist and naturalist fiction and encouraged him to adopt these models, which were dominant in Europe at the time.Molas, Joaquim (1986). Història de la literatura catalana. Vol. 8. Barcelona: Ariel. . Once converted to realism, Oller saw no other way to reflect his environment faithfully than through the language of the world he depicted—Catalan. This attitude, both in theory and practice, was a constant in his literary career.
Oller enjoyed great respect and esteem among contemporary Spanish authors such as Galdós, Pereda, and Valera, with whom he maintained frequent relations. They often urged him to write in Spanish, citing reasons of fame and fortune. Oller, however, fully aware of what writing in Catalan entailed, never agreed.
In 1886 a polemic broke out in the Spanish press about the use of Catalan as a literary language, curiously concerning only prose. Galdós, for example, wrote: These statements echoed what Galdós had already written to Oller in private letters a couple of years earlier, including the blunt remark: “es tontísimo que V. escriba en catalán” (“it is very foolish for you to write in Catalan”). Oller replied on 14 December 1884 with a letter that amounts to a declaration of principles about his concept of realism: Rafanell, Jordi (1992). Epistolari de Narcís Oller. Barcelona: Curial. .
Novels
Within Ollerian narrative, three stages can be distinguished:
Apprenticeship At the end of the sixties, Oller had begun to collaborate in the press in Spanish, often using pseudonyms; around 1872 he started a novel, also in Spanish, which he did not finish. Around 1874 he began to consider writing in Catalan and between 1877 and 1878, as we have already seen, he finally chose to write in his language. Thus in 1879 he published the collection of stories Croquis del natural, which was received by critics as a turning point in Catalan narrative of the moment; that same year he won a narrative prize at the Jocs Florals with Sor Sanxa, a prize he won again the following year with Isabel de Galceran.
This first stage, of learning and formation, is characterized by the author's permanence within romantic and costumbrist coordinates, although the influence of realism begins to be detected, especially in La papallona (1882), his first novel and the one that closes this first phase of his production. Transitional work, it is still very much tied to romantic schemes. Thus, the plot — a feuilleton — is based on the story of a girl, Toneta, orphaned, poor, naive, illiterate, and sickly, who is seduced and abandoned by a papallona (womanizer), Lluís, from a higher social class. The action unfolds in twenty chapters and is set in Barcelona, a working-class Barcelona in which the first symptoms of the profound changes brought by industrialization begin to manifest. The life of the city, however, remains very much linked to costumbrist schemes.
The presence of lurid elements, chance, and a moralistic and implausible ending (at the gates of death, Toneta manages to marry the seducer) are elements that reveal the romantic legacy of the novel. However, aspects belonging to the realist line appear, ranging from the accuracy of dialogues and descriptions to the explanation of the biological and psychological background of the protagonist.
The novel achieved great critical and public success and was soon translated into several languages (French, Russian, Spanish...). Presented by some critics as the first example of naturalism in Catalonia, Émile Zola, the theoretician of the movement, remarked in the preface of the French edition of the book that there were notable differences between Oller and this movement: Situated between Romanticism and Naturalism, La Papallona meant a significant change within Catalan novelistic: the overcoming of outdated literary schemes and the incorporation of our novel into the realist and naturalist line then predominant in Europe.
Consolidation
The first edition of the novel La papallona was published with a prologue by Émile Zola; the great public response it received gave Oller greater confidence as a narrator and in the literary model he had begun to follow. Thus, between 1883 and 1889, the author's most creative period took place: four novels and several collections of short stories.
In 1883, he published the tales Notes de color and later the novella L'Escanyapobres. The subtitle Study of a Passion, appearing in the first edition of this novel, already indicates a scientific and psychological intention. Set in an imaginary town—Pratbell—undergoing industrialization, it narrates the story of a couple of misers—Oleguer, the Escanyapobres, and his wife Tuies—whose passion for money leads them to isolate themselves and to the tragic death of the protagonist. Greed is viewed not only as a moral flaw (Oleguer's death, caused by his obsession with money, is clearly a "punishment") but also as a socially regressive attitude, since it hinders progress and productive investment that enabled the socio-economic transformation of Catalonia at that time.
According to Albert Balcells, imagination plays a more prominent role in ''L'Escanyapobres'' than in Narcís Oller's other novels. Sentimentality, otherwise present throughout Oller's work, is less important here, owing largely to two narrative techniques: irony and distancing. The distancing is evident in the caricature of characters and situations, which Balcells notes has been described as grotesque.
Vilaniu (1885) was created from the narrative Isabel de Galceran, responding to pressure from some friendly critics. The action takes place in a small provincial town, Vilaniu (a symbolic name that fictionalizes the author's native town: Valls), where the infatuation of a young lawyer for Isabel, the wife of the local boss Galceran, triggers slander, which ultimately causes the misfortune of her family. The plot includes many elements of the social and political life of the historical moment: the "decline" of small rural towns, the struggles between liberals and moderates... The novel, which today seems one of the least interesting of the author's works, represents a certain technical regression compared to L'Escanyapobres. Ambitiously conceived, it failed to develop a romantic theme based on realist and naturalist schemes.
La febre d'or is the longest of Oller's novels and undoubtedly the most notable as a historical source about an important stage in the country's evolution. In 1890, he published the first volume, written the previous year "in one rush", as he said himself. The plan for the work had been prepared for some time, but the news of the imminent publication of the novel L'argent, by Zola, on a similar topic, forced him to hasten its writing and edition. The second volume appeared the same year as the first, and the third in 1892. These circumstances surely contributed to many defects that prevented this novel, one of the author's best, from becoming a fully successful work.
The theme idea comes from the stock market fever of 1880–1881. Oller confessed that he wanted to "closely study the history and character of that madness".
Thus, in the story of Gil Foix and his family, he symbolically exemplifies those historical events.
The novel is divided into two parts, with very significant titles: La pujada ("The Rise") (the first twenty chapters) and L'estimbada ("The Fall") (the last fourteen). Oller narrates the rapid economic and social ascent of Gil Foix from the petty bourgeoisie to the upper bourgeoisie thanks to his skillful stock market speculations. La febre d'or is both the story of particular characters and the story of an entire era of Barcelona. Oller portrays the transformation of an industrial and cosmopolitan city, framed between the stock market fever of the early 1880s and the 1888 Universal Exposition. This was, in Oller's words, a "titanic effort that showed so well our hidden energies and our thirst for progress, which ignited my imagination, my Catalanism, and my faith placed in this people".
La bogeria (1899), based on a real event (the death of one of his clients), is a study of a psychological phenomenon—madness—its possible causes without reaching any conclusion, and its social consequences. The action takes place between the September Revolution of 1868 and the early years of the Bourbon Restoration, and more specifically during the years of the gold fever. The spatial setting is mainly between Barcelona and Vilaniu.