Self-Consuming Narrative: The Problem of Reader Perspective in "La fuerza de la sangre"

Abstract

La fuerza de la sangre can be summarized as a tale of rape, recognition, and redemption. In some measure, discussion as to the story's meaning has revolved around the unsettling fact that the story's protagonist, Leocadia, a victim of rape, ostensibly finds justice in marriage to her rapist, Rodolfo.' The heroine's redemption of her honor is the culmination of a series of recognitions, with Rodolfo finally recognizing his victim and their biological son born of rape. As the tale's title suggests and as its final sentence reaffirms, the force of blood is what will in the end bind together the estranged members of this family. Yet, the fact that the happy ending is contingent upon successful recognitions becomes rather perplexing when we realize the epistemologically tenuous, sometimes contradictory, and also anachronistic circumstances of recognition itself. This thwarting of recognition's smooth move from ignorance to knowledge,^ is inscribed within a more generalized problematization of the tale's whole internai epistemology, or basis for establishing knowledge within the tale. The effects of this are felt by the reader who, only by suppressing his own knowledge of certain problematic details, can make sense of a story that tends to self-consume at particularly crucial junctures.^ Consequently, Cervantes' reader is often left in a State of interpretative uncertainty, as a coherent reading of the tale is steadily undermined by certain curious and insoluble interpretative problems. What follows is not a solution to these exegetical problems, but rather an analysis of how these textual phenomena give rise to a reading experience which Stanley Fish would describe as progressive