The allusive/elusive character in three modern Spanish novels

Abstract

Upon reading a fictional text and envisioning characters, we allude through an intertextual field comprised of texts inscribed on paper as well in the mind. Our readings, therefore, are informed not only by the text at hand, but also by a vast body of received knowledge regarding both literary and worldly characters. This dissertation examines how our allusive readings of character are governed by cultural codes that channel our thinking (and imagining) along well-worn paths.

Because our concept of novelistic character became fully developed, indeed institutionalized, in nineteenth-century realism, this study begins with an analysis of Torquemada en la hoguera (1889), a late-realist novel by Perez Galdos. Through references to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Chapter One examines how realist novels participated in the great disciplinary enterprise of the nineteenth century to define, document, and classify the natural and social world. Paradoxically, the compulsion to describe and define fictional beings in meticulous detail both reinforces and threatens the realist enterprise: As the excess meanings accumulate, characters may expand beyond the narrator's disciplinary control, losing rather than gaining coherence.

The second chapter considers the representation of the feminine in a modernist text "Andromeda" (1926) by Benjamin Jarnes. All characters are of course gendered: we interpret them in terms of a vast composite of categorical knowledge relating to the masculine or the feminine. Jarnes's novella explicitly dramatizes this allusive, intertextual process of reading woman (in literature and in life) by invoking a multiplicity of heterogeneous texts and images.

The final chapter maintains this focus upon feminine character through an analysis of Miguel Delibes's Cinco horas con Mario (1966). Whereas Jarnes's "Andromeda" relies upon the cultural construction of the feminine as an "idealized and desired other," Delibes's novel partakes in the cultural practice of constructing woman as an "abject other," as a repository for all that Man loathes and rejects. Moreover, through an act of ventriloquism--placing an authoritarian discourse in the mouth of an abject, feminine character--this novel aims to invalidate the traditionalist discourse of the Franco regime.