The Society Reporter, Status and Writer Impotence in Felipe Trigo's El Semental

Abstract

Felipe Trigo's rapid rise to literary fame and almost equally rapid fall provide a useful point of departure for examining the changing place of literature and the writer's role in mass society. Relentlessly driven to professionalize the writing life, Trigo was obsessed with status. One of his boldest, yet little known, stories, El Semental, in which the first-person narrator is a society reporter, centrrs on the importance of the writer's status and authority and the role class and gender play in both shaping and destabilizing that status. El Semental has much to say about the fleeting, unstable nature of writing and the writer and in that sense represents the reverse of canonicity. By anchoring his narration in the lowly, sexually indeterminate society chronicler, who is also attached to the fading old regime, Trigo brings into ironic play the vexed issue of the writer's status in the incipient mass society of early twentieth-century Spain.