Order and Meaning in Clarin's "La Regenta"

Abstract

Reading the one thousand and more pages of La Regenta (1884-85), by Leopoldo Alas (also known as Clarln), is an experience in entrapment. The more deeply we penetrate its reading surfaces the more exasperated and bewildered we as readers feel. Certainly like all novels, La Regenta refuses to be caught the first time around. Or the second or the third. The critical reader cannot keep the work complete and of a piece in his head; and as the sought for unity slips away, in its place a growing sense of despair and unease settles over him. Faced with such obstacles, he may even try to avoid, for a while at least, a text as disturbing and complex as La Regenta. Folded and double-folded in multiple layers, Clarin's novel has the fearful capacity to absorb, to pull the reader in. This of course is exactly what a great novel should do: it should uproot us from our unwanted and various selves and repot us in more conducive soil. But what if the readercritic stumbles in his understanding and experiencing of the text, and finds that apparently smooth, even impenetrable surfaces, once tapped in the right place, break into disquieting fragments? What if the order sought for isn't any order at all?