Enrique Gómez Carrillo a la defensa de Clarín

Abstract

Enrique Gómez Carrillo at the age of seventeen published in the Guatemalan newspaper El Imparcial in February 1890 a two-part article entitled «El último folleto de Clarín.» It is a review of the sixth of Leopoldo Alas's Folletos literarios, Rafael Calvo y el teatro español, in which the freshly minted critic defends Clarín in the most laudatory terms against the attacks of the Salvadorean writer Francisco Gavidia, a close friend of Rubén Darío, both of whom Clarín's apparently anti-American stance had offended deeply. With this forgotten article Gómez Carrillo unleashed a lively polemic, both for his impassioned praise of Clarín as a critic and as a fiction writer and for his acerbic, burlesque tone. In this respect, he echoed Clarín himself, who by this time had become one of the most widely read and hotly debated peninsular writers in Spanish America. Critics have documented the literary relations between Clarín and Gómez Carrillo after the latter's arrival in Madrid and after Clarín reviewed Gómez Carrillo's first book in 1892, but this obscure article, which is reprinted here, pushes the contact back two years and is a demonstration of the sincere and disinterested admiration that Gómez Carrillo felt for Clarín at a time when he owed him no debts.