Realism in fiction--> mimesis: the imitation of life
Realism harks back to Poema de Mío Cid (1140)- close up focus on things (cages, falcons, weeds).
Galdós: 1870 essay on art of the novel evokes mimesis. Aim: reproduce life objectively, depict things as they really are. "faithful mirror of society"
Leopoldo Alas, a.k.a. Clarín: reproduction based on scrupulously examined details
YET: Harken back to mirror imagery- reproduction is a visible, constant, verifiable reflection yet the fact that it is a moving image makes it subjective, variable, uncertain.
Narrators keep associating one with another, digressing from plot to atmosphere to character, while object become transformed into "synedochic close-ups and metonymic set-ups."
La Regenta features the gaze, the image of the tower, mud-stained envi, slavering appetites, the hund, and intertextual allusions
Fortunata y Jacinta: bird/egg motif, staff of St. Joseph, etc.
interplay of voices through monologue, dialogue and free indirect style. also: masks, play-acting, etc.
Galdós and Clarín: contradictory-unstable nature of mirror images (what is constant, what is variable).
E.G. In La Regenta, Ana sits with the ruins of dinner:a coffee urn, a glass emptied of anisette, a half-smoked cigar---in these "ruins" she see the world and her husband who can neither follow through smoking his cigar or loving a woman. She feels orphaned- her husband is no longer a regent or a real husband...(because he's impotent)
In Fortunata y Jacinta- unfaithful lover and philandering husband talks to his own reflection in the mirror .
1880s realist novel: uncertainty is the very muse that inspires the artistic and intellectual fascination with the unstable nature of the mimetic mirror.
Good art seems so life-like. Something amazing and anomalous in life is like a novel.
-balance between exactitud and belleza in writing.
Love triangles.
1. Ana-her husband, Víctor-her confessor, Magistral
2. Ana-her seducer, Don Álvaro--unknowing/impotent Víctor
Víctor, disconcertingly feminized in his vulnerability and passion for his friend Frigilis (who he views as Ana's competitor). Then Víctor transfers his affections to PErales and later to don Álvaro. In an ironic and predatory way (Víctor is himself a hunter), Álvaro construes Víctor as passive/feminine who must be hunted because he, Víctor, inhabits a space akin to Ana's virginal garden.
Ana, meanwhile, reluctantly keep company with Visita (treacherous), a former lover of don Álvaro who attempts to seduce him into seducing Ana in Ana's name... Ana later commits adultery with Álvaro, then there is a duel...Don Víctor pardons his rival at the moment that Álvaro's bullet pierces his full bladder. Víctor dies.
Narrator is "reliable and controlling". The narrator's eye appears to participate in the very masculine machine of Vetusta that he himself so confidently criticizes.
In Ch. 16 (the don juan play, ana is seduced from her balcony) "the mimetic imprint of this intertextual illusion frames and foretells the seduction that will take place on the balcony."
Ana sees herself in Tenorio's Doña Inez; she views Víctor as the Comendador (aging, fatherly).
Late 19th century, the word inconsciente begins to appear- "perception of those unnamed, shadowy forces and fusions that gesticulate below the surfaces, as it were, of the realist novel".
La Desheredada: story of Isidora Rufeta, the manner of a popular series novel sees herself as a changeling and rightful heiress to the fortunes and title of the Marquis of Aransis. The story of noble birth concocted by Isidora's father has contaminated the imagination of the Quixotic uncle, Don Santiago (a rural priest from somewhere in La Mancha). Later, Isidora's godfather proposes marraige to save her from prostitution. Isidora's extraordinary, even insane, powers of imagination almost "de-bench" masculine reason.
La desheredada becomes both a referential and textual enigma of disenchantment and disinheritance, at the same time gesturing as a realistic symbol of the Spanish state itself.
One critic, Labanyi, finds self-reflexivity to be the defining feature of the Spanish realist novel.
In a Quixotic fashion, people inevitably become, in part, the images they make for themselves .
No comments:
Post a Comment