La Regenta as Spatial-Form Narrative: A Twentieth-Century Perspective

Abstract

For more than twenty years now critical readers of La Regenta (1884-85) have been wrestling with the problem of its modernity.' Fascinated by the uneasy blend of apparently contradictory elements marking its transitional style, these Clarinistas have been struggling to articulate just what it is that makes Clarin's first novel different from the traditional realist novel and at the same time a harbinger of twentieth-century narrative. (In this they may remind us of their Flaubertian counterparts, who of late have also treated us to ever more subversive readings of Madame Bovary, once thought to be the standard text of French realism.) The consensus appears to be that La Regenta, notwithstanding its undeniable mimetic thrust and its obvious concern with exploring relationships between individual and society, does indeed transcend certain categories of nineteenth-century fiction. One way it defies a traditional reading, I would suggest, is by evoking in the reader a Gestalt-like image of interrelatedness that undermines the radical dualism-or non-relational thinking-dramatized on the level of story. I propose to show here that such a effect is achieved largely through techniques of characterization. The term spatial form brings to mind the image of a modern