The Costumbrismo and Ideas of Juan de Zabaleta
In many respects Juan de Zabaleta seems close to the costumbrismo of the nineteenth century: the lack of narrative elements, the detailed description, the use of conversation in the presentation of types and as part of scenes rather than for narrative purposes, the urbanity of his style, the directness of his vision. The mental atmosphere of Zabaleta, on the other hand, is completely different: the curious time-lessness of his description, contrasted with the notion of transition; his choice of subjects for their moral value, contrasted with the search for the typical and picturesque; the sense of belonging to an ordered universe where laws may be broken but never repealed, contrasted with the irony of the later period where sometimes virtue is its own punishment. The list could be endless, for we are as much contrasting different ages as individual writers.