Mercè Rodoreda: A Literary Journey Through Symbolism
The Psychological Novel
The novel emerges in psychological realism and the rejection of naturalism. The writer will have to follow a current of psychological-philosophical thought that dominated much of Europe. This novel is based on the psychological description of the intimacy of one or several characters and their reactions to certain facts. The parents of this new literary current are Freud, Bergson, and W. James.
In the contemporary novel, innovations arise where the narrator is a shift that will tend not to intervene in the course of the story. That is, show some facts that should be judged by the reader. Highlight the research of Freud, who, through psychoanalysis, showed that the subconscious is an essential element for understanding human behavior. Freud and Marcel Proust are introduced in Catalonia in the prewar period by D’Ors.
The first-person narration is based on associations of sensations and ideas rooted in Freudian thought, culminating in the world inside. This is apparent in Ulysses by James Joyce, where the narrator goes to the step flow of consciousness of the characters. This interior monologue attempts to understand the inner state of consciousness through language, to play the characters’ thoughts at the time of its formation. So the verbal discourse is full of contradictions, reiterations, heckling, unfinished sentences, and altered time in the novel.
Joyce and V. Woolf took the foundations of Freud’s subconscious and applied them to their literary techniques. It should be noted that the psychological novel in this century has enjoyed great prestige and found growing in our literature with authors like Mercè Rodoreda and Llorenç Villalonga.
Mercè Rodoreda
Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was born in the district of St. Gervasi (Barcelona) on October 10, 1908. She was a Catalan writer and received the Honor Award of Catalan Letters in 1980. Her work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. She is considered by many to be the most important contemporary writer in Catalan. Throughout her life, she mainly cultivated the novel and the story; however, she also cultivated poetry, theater, and even painting.
Her childhood was lonely, as she explains, and she soon met Verdaguer, Guimerà, and Víctor Català, and deep literary trends of the twentieth century. Her stories were first published as a collaborator in several magazines. This phase culminated in 1937 when she first attempted to win the Crexells Prize. Then, her work evolved at a pace with her life. Her body is a constant reflection on narrative over time.
Early Works
- Am I an Honest Woman? (1932)
- From Whom One Cannot Escape (1934)
- A Day in the Life of a Man (1934)
- Crime (1936)
While the narrative focuses on a teenage girl who says Aloma, a marginalized person as a result of their relationships and child to wait. From this, lonely and marginalized, we begin to see what are the characteristics and themes of her novel.
First, male-female relationships are posed as irreconcilable, as the bond between them begins with a subjugation of women in relation to men. At last, it masks a traumatic sexuality. Moreover, their heroines (Aloma, Colometa) have a false view of reality because they have built it from the glare of cinema and literature. That’s why when they say that life is not that fascinating dream, they are doomed to failure.
Here begins the elaboration of symbols such as home, garden, doves, flowers… items that were beautiful and away from the world and become the symbol of childhood happiness and innocence lost.
Youth and Maturity: Aloma (1937)
After the Civil War, she was forced into exile and went to Geneva, France. Though some have changed their assumptions, Mercè accentuates the pessimistic view that we found at Aloma. Put your characters in extreme situations, if necessary, suicide. From here, she is no longer the omniscient author who narrates the action but gives the floor to the characters and thus eliminates the distance with the reader.
So Colometa explains her story in the first person, a life marked by submission, passivity, abulia, depersonalization, war, the birth of children, the death of her husband… till you get the hope of a new life next to Antonio, the closest figure to that of the lover.
- Twenty-Two Stories (1958)
- The Time of the Doves (1962)
- Camellia Street (1966)
Old Age and Death
With a collection of stories, Mercè leads the break with her previous fiction. From now on, the interest is not the problem of marginalized women in a particular social and historical context, but of the human person as being confronted with the existential nature.
- My Christina and Other Stories (1967)
- The Hen and the River Boat
- The Salamander
- Mirall Trencat (1974)
Total Symbolism
Behind the mirror and looking, Mercè says: “Behind the mirror is the dream we would all like to reach, the dream that is our deepest reality. Without breaking the mirror.” The actual references give away the mystery and importance to obscurity.
- Travels and Flowers (1980)
- Quanta, quanta guerra… (1980)
- Death and Spring (1986)
Symbolism in Rodoreda’s Work
Mercè’s work focuses on close analysis of her characters that come to discover the meaning of life and their own identity. Her work is based on a series of images, symbols that evolve to become mythologizing items.
- Flowers and garden: childhood and happiness (the memory and nostalgia).
- The pigeons: secluded life of the protagonist, viewed as angels.
- Water: purifying and regenerating item.
The symbolic elements are a barrier for Mercè, and many more, but all are related to the progressive essentialization of the symbols of myth: the myth of nostalgic memory of childhood.
The resource of symbolism is very common in the literary works of Mercè Rodoreda, especially in her narrative. When used to express the constant inner thoughts of her characters, Rodoreda transforms the reader into an involuntary confidant who lives in the agony and anguish of the characters with only the word, symbols, and images.
The symbols are not presented with a great complexity when locating them, though not always so. The fact that the references used in their symbols come from her imagination, from her cultural knowledge acquired throughout her life, in some cases, such as the Catalan of Encantado. Without abandoning this true regarding, to create a symbolic language that can be interpreted by the reader without much difficulty and has a high degree of fabulation in many of her works, especially her last works as Travels and Flowers.
According to Pere Gimferrer’s Diary 1979-80, the result of finding formal and linguistic perfection, Rodoreda took meticulous care while making use of conceptual images and symbols.
Recurring Themes
The literary work of Mercè Rodoreda is characterized by the use of female main characters in her novels, with the exception of A Day in the Life of a Man and Quanta, quanta guerra…. This leads to Rodoreda being wrongly associated with the feminist movement, but in several interviews, Rodoreda rejected this.
Angels appear curiously in much of her work unintentionally. It reminds us that her grandfather told her that she had a guardian angel with whom she ended up in love. As she explains, it may be the product of this record that induced the angels to appear in their works without their awareness.