The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel by Harriet Turner & Adelaida López De MartÍnez

The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel by Harriet Turner & Adelaida López De MartÍnez

Author:Harriet Turner & Adelaida López De MartÍnez [Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-03-15T16:00:00+00:00


This is an extraordinary passage. It upsets all our expectations as readers of Romantic texts. Concha has died, and instead of the sadly dignified treatment we are waiting for, she is broken up, metaphorically speaking, like this scene, into individual body parts. Indeed, there is a fetishistic obsession with body parts in all these texts. In the passage just cited, Valle’s first-person narrator-protagonist focuses first on Concha’s hair, literally attempting to separate the snarled strands from the door, then on her half-opened eyelids and eyes. Her body appears detached, indeed even seeming “to want to escape [Bradomín’s] arms.” In another passage, he describes her in these terms: “Concha’s neck flowered from her shoulders like a wan lily, her breasts were two white roses perfuming an altar, and her arms, with their delicate and fragile slenderness, seemed like the handles of an amphora circling her head” (p. 26). Elsewhere, I have noted how this breaking up of the female body into individual parts (evident in all the Sonatas) miniaturizes Concha’s presence, turning her into a kind of bibelot or decorative object. This is a good example of the highly self-conscious writing of decadence in which language creates figuratively and linguistically objects of art, verbal artifice. Images taken from nature, such as the lily and roses, are deliberately made artificial by association with cultural artifacts like the altar/amphora comparison in the passage just quoted.

Significantly, Valle symbolically connects this concentration on fetishistic images, such as body parts, with death, for in all these texts the metonymic parts singled out refer to a “whole,” which is either dying or, in fact, dead. In Sonata de otoño Concha’s body is simply the spectral remains of a dead love. More importantly, her death signals yet another end, Bradomín’s own future death, symbolically figured in fetishistic imagery in the last line of the text: “I wept like an ancient god upon seeing his cult extinguished!” (p. 86). In Sonata de primavera (Spring Sonata), a literal idol in the hex shape of a small wax figure bears a grotesque resemblance to Bradomín.14 Other decadent writers also stressed the connection between the imagistic fragmentation of the body and death. Dorian Gray’s picture clearly takes on a spectral life of its own, worshipped as a kind of idol of the self. But this strange vitality of the portrait also points to the death of a soul. Rachilde turns the dead body of Raoule’s lover/husband into a wax figure, made up of artificial and natural parts taken from the corpse and possessing a hidden spring which “connects with the mouth and brings it to life” (p. 366). Villiers de l’Isle-Adam simply bypasses the human altogether and creates a completely artificial automaton in The Future Eve (1886).

Asti Hustvedt has suggested that the decadent aesthetic “disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty.”15 Yet the body, even fragmented, is never entirely empty in these texts, for this void points to an absence, a



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