Ghostly Presences and Blank Pages: Mirall Trencat, País Íntim , and La Meitat de L'ànima

Abstract

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 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—Merce Rodoreda's Mirall trencat, Maria Barbal's Pais intim, Carme Riera's La meitat de l'anima—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'ani ma is a text which does not reveal its secrets and which systematically casts doubt upon the explanations it sets forth