Reading Twentieth-century Spanish Literature: Selected Essays by Noël Valis (review)

In Reading Twentieth-Century Literature: Selected Essays, author Noël Valis shares a collection of critical essays that she published in various academic journals over a time period of thirty years (1983–2013). The eighteen articles included in the text explore several themes and topics of twentieth-century Spanish narrative and poetry, with a focus on certain aspects of each work that helps to create a cohesive literary study. Of principal interest to Valis are writing and the writer, the role of the reader, and the elusiveness of language as communication of life and self.

The first of two sections begins with two essays that explore questions of authorship, gender, and myth in early twentieth-century Spanish narrative. "The Novel as Feminine Entrapment: Valle-Inclán's Sonata de otoño" is a detailed and nuanced analysis that locates the power of the feminine in the novel and exposes the narcissism of its authorship (Valle-Inclán via el Marqués de Bradomín). With the essay "The Society Reporter, Status, and Writer Impotence in Felipe Trigo's El Semental," Valis examines how Trigo's satirical portrayal of a society reporter of early twentieth-century Spain questions the writer's place in modern society and also critiques conventions of class, gender, and style. This contemplation of the writer continues in analyses of Ramón Gómez de la Serna's El novelista (1923) and Carme Riera's Cuestión de amor propio (1987). For Valis, El novelista is an exercise in writing the marginal, avoiding the "center" of traditional nineteenth-century narrative that represents death. Riera's Cuestión de amor propio uses nineteenth-century confessional and epistolary forms of writing in a way that subverts and reframes them in order to reauthorize women's writing.

The role of the reader takes center stage in "Variations on Reading Pedro Salinas's Víspera del gozo" and "Reader Exile and the Text: Jorge Semprún's Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez." Noting Salinas's affinity for the contemplative reader, Valis shows how in Víspera del gozo (1926) the reader is an adventurer, experiencing the novel as movement and changing realities. Considering the role of the reader in Semprún's Autobiografía (1977), Valis concludes that the author's ideology and memory alienate the public as reader. In effect, the novel is not written for the public reader, but rather for the writer himself and the political party that expelled him.

In the three essays that complete the first section, Valis delves into questions of linguistic, narrative, and cultural change and transformation. She highlights the importance of metamorphosis in the poetic prose of Juan Ramón Jiménez's Platero y yo (1914 and 1917), and traces how Francisco Ayala's Diálogo de los muertos (1949) uses and alters the traditional genre of the dialogue of the dead. In "The 'Cursilería' of Camp in Ana Rosetti's Plumas de España," Valis looks at how the use of camp and lo cursi in the novel is historically and culturally relevant, going beyond a superficial portrayal of spectacle and recoding the cultural past within the present (the years of the Transition).

In the essays that comprise the second section of the collection, Valis analyzes several works of poetry. She begins with a study of sentiment in women's, or feminine, writing of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The works of Carolina Coronado, Casta Esteban, and Marina Romero are placed within a larger consideration of the place of self and the inner "treasure" of feeling in women's writing. Through the naming of self and sharing sentiment, the woman writer challenges her dependency on male approval and breaks the silence of fear and inadequacy.

This meditation on the self continues with "The Specter of Poetry," in which Valis considers the spectral/liminal nature of poetry. After locating the emergence of a new poetic self...