The Novel as Feminine Entrapment: Valle-Inclan's Sonata de otono

Abstract

A reading of the Sonatas (1902-05) is often an exercise in imagehunting: or expressed another way, it is a recreation, on Valle-Inclan's terms, of the process of evocation. But in remaking the poet's images, the reader is beguiled by the hypnotic current of the words themselves, the narcissistic reflection of the aesthetic object. Deceived by the surface (or image making) of Valle-Inclan's art, we interpret the text as an act of homage to the cult of the author, metonymically (and ironically) embodied in the central figure of the Marques de Bradomin. Indeed, the emphasis on memory, paramount in all the Sonatas, reinforces the notion of individual authorship, both within and outside the text. As an author of deeds, Bradomin extends his feats in time and space through el culto de los recuerdos (the cult of memory) just as the words on a white sheet of paper are made to last mnemonically by the process of repetition, alliteration, assonance, and adjectival expansion. But this act of individual assertion conflicts with an older tradition, based on collective memory-the oral capacity for mythmaking. Such distinctions are especially pertinent in Sonata de otofio (1902), which can be considered as paradigmatic of the Sonata form. In this essay I will argue that Valle-Inclan, by endeavoring to surpass the temporal boundaries of narration through the creation of a mythic patterning of events and characters, paradoxically ends up fashioning a verbal labyrinth from which neither reader nor creator can extricate himself. The birth of the novel seems to make inevitable not only the death of the author but of