In a Liminal Space: The Novellas of Emilia Pardo Bazán

Abstract

In Liminal Space: The Novellas of Emilia Pardo Bazan. By Julia Biggane. U of Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, 2000. 164 pages. Julia Biggane's concise, well organized and highly readable In Liminal Space: The Novellas of Emilia Pardo Bazan is welcome addition to Pardo Bazan studies. Biggane's monograph analyzes the twenty-one novelas breves that were produced by dona Emilia largely in the last two decades of her career, works that have been subject to continued critical neglect, due, in part, the author suggests, to anxiety about the indeterminacy and marginality of the early novella in (8). Biggane tackles much in disciplined way. Her analysis of each of the novellas focuses on thematic, structural and, in particular, narratological issues; her point of departure for the latter is the work of Gerard Genette and Mieke Bal, which she summarizes clearly, and applies effectively throughout the book in language refreshingly free of jargon. In Liminal Space is also valuable for its brief overview of evocative critical studies on the novella genre. For the author, the most satisfying approach to the elusive novella is Jean-Marie Schaeffer's foregoing of generic systematization for the concept of process: Concentrating on as process, writes Biggane, allows for difference, change, and semantic flexibility, whilst acknowledging that novellas need also to be read in relation to (sometimes normative) `generic intertexts' (10). Biggane concludes that the novellas written in Spain between 1860 and 1910 are examples of processive of genre (10), whereas the novela breve published in the magazines El Cuento Semanal, Los Contemporaneos, El libro popular, and La Novela Corta, hugely popular from 1907 to the mid-1920's in Spain, exhibits stable identity (11) since it conforms to much more rigid mold imposed by the exigencies of the publishing world and the reading public. The great majority of Pardo Bazan's novellas (fifteen out of the twenty-one) appeared in these publications. Although an overview of Pardo Bazan's novella production is problematic, the aims of In Liminal Space are to stimulate research in this area. Study of Pardo Bazan's short novel corpus is particularly relevant considering her clear inclination towards shorter fiction. One need only recall dona Emilia's sense of narrative economy expressed in an unpublished letter to Perez Galdos studied by this reader: she gently criticized the chapter on the growth of Madrid commerce at the beginning of Fortunata and Jacinta as unnecessary to the plot. Equally valuable and fascinating for any specialist of fin-de-siecle Spanish literature, is Biggane's study in the third chapter of the social and cultural phenomenon that the rise of mass-market publications devoted to short fiction represented in early twentieth-century Spain. These magazines flourished for various reasons, among them the rapid change in technological, and educational development, and the growing shift of the population to urban centers. The consistent editorial emphasis on quality flattered the readership, a new reading class with limited income and leisure time (80), thereby promoting new genre--different from the novel, which was still relatively expensive, and still associated, as Biggane notes, with the leisured upper-middle classes. An additional feature of this chapter is the author's overview of Perez de Ayala's contributions (about dozen novelas breves) to the mass-market magazines as point of comparison with Pardo Bazin's novellas. The fact that Perez de Ayala made substantial changes to some of his novelas breves when they were later published in book form, seems to indicate that he was writing for two different readerships, view that applies to dona Emilia as well. …