Ghostly presences and blank pages: "Mirall trencat", "País íntim", and "La meitat de l´ànima"
- Autores: Kathleen M. Glenn
- Localización: Catalan Review: international journal of Catalan culture, ISSN 0213-5949, Vol. 23, 2009 (Ejemplar dedicado a: The Catalan stage, modern and contemporary / coord. por Sharon G. Feldman), págs. 37-52
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
- Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
-
Resumen
Haunting, for Avery Gordon, "describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for granted realities," and for Jo Labanyi ghosts are "the form in which the past lives on in the present." Ghosts and haunting play a major role in the narratives that are the subject of this essay—Mercè Rodoreda's Mirall trencat, Maria Barbal's País íntim, Carme Riera's La meitat de l'ànima—and assume various forms. The Civil War is a ghostly presence in each of the books, there is a "real" ghost in Mirall trencat, and the specter of its author—the grande dame of contemporary Catalan literature—haunts the novel as well as some of Rodoreda's successors. Also important to this essay is the concept of the blank page, brilliantly illustrated in a tale by Isak Dinesen about the art of storytelling and the impact of silence. Both Rodoreda and Barbal, whose novels are characterized by textual lacunae and disruptions, employ a rhetoric of silence and frequently do not narrate important events. Riera too makes use of a discourse of silence in creating a work of sustained ambiguity. La meitat de l'àni ma is a text which does not reveal its secrets and which systematically casts doubt upon the "explanations" it sets forth
