Juanita la Larga: a Novel

Introduction

Introduction Noël Valis It is rare to find in the last works of old age the spirit of youthful glee, of sly merriment. Yet this is precisely the case with one of Juan Valera’s last novels, Juanita la Larga (1896), now graced with this lovely new translation. Its bucolic setting, gay Andalusian costumbrismo , and happy resolution of two favorite motifs of Valera, those of illegitimacy and the May–December romance, prompted José Montesinos to label the novel “the last classic idyll of Spanish literature.”1 Generally, readers of Valera’s work have agreed with the eminent Hispanist scholar, with the unfortunate result that less serious critical attention has been paid to Juanita la Larga than to Pepita Jiménez and the Andalusian writer’s opus as a whole.2 It is tempting xi 1. José F. Montesinos, Valera o la ficción libre (Madrid: Castalia, 1970), 149. For a discussion of the themes of illegitimacy and the May–December romance, see Paul Smith, “Juan Valera and the Illegitimacy Motif,” Hispania 51 (1968): 803–11; and Mario Maurin, “Valera y la ficción encadenada,” Mundo Nuevo, no. 14 (1967): 35–44, and no. 15 (1967): 37–44. See also Roxanne B. Marcus, “Contemporary Life and Manners in the Novels of Juan Valera,” Hispania 58, no.3 (1975): 454–66. 2. Some studies on Juanita la Larga include Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, “Juan Valera (1824–1905),” in Las mejores novelas contemporáneas 1 (1895–1899) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1957), 514–24; Matías Montes Huidobro, “Sobre Valera. El estilo,” Revista de Occidente, 2a época, 35, no. 104 (1971): 168–91; Germán Gullón, in El narrador en la novela del siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 1976), 150–55; Roxanne B. Marcus, “An Application of Jungian Theory to the Interpretation of Doña Inés in Valera’s Juanita la Larga,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 3 (1979): 259–74; Enrique Rubio Cremades, “Introducción biográfica y crítica,” in Juanita la Larga, by J. Valera (Madrid: Castalia, 1985), 9–55; Enrique Rubio Cremades, ed., Juan Valera (Madrid: Taurus, 1990); Paul Julian Smith, “Juanita la Larga: to interpret the book as the fond remembrances and idealizations of a blind old man, as, in a word, a mere bagatelle. But is this so? I should emphasize here that Montesinos, whose insight into Hispanic texts is unquestionable, does not actually misread, but, rather, underreads this delightful novel of Valera’s final years. To understand Juanita la Larga only as a rustic interlude is to ignore the extraordinary and subversive role played by one of the novel’s dominating motifs, namely, that of deceit. Indeed, there is an entire structural and thematic trajectory from deceit and illusion to authenticity and reality, in which Valera apparently arrives at truth through deceit. In analogous fashion, the Andalusian novelist also develops two other thematic motifs that undergo a similar metamorphosis , or conversion from one meaning to its opposite: the passage from impurity to cleanness and from illegitimacy to legitimacy. Both of these last-named themes may, in fact, be perceived as subordinate to the controlling element of deceit, since trickery implies a negative , inauthentic condition, stressing what is false and improper. What is it specifically in Juanita la Larga that manifests such convertible dichotomies? What aesthetic devices does Valera exploit in order to develop, with characteristic Jesuitic duplicity, his topsyturvy trajectory of reality? Finally, what, if anything, can we deduce from Juanita la Larga’s novelistic universe about Valera’s notions of Spanish society and the role of the individual within it? The Insistence of Meaning,” in The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 87–104; Ana Sofía Pérez-Bustamante, “Juanita la Larga: Valera y la novela como comedia,” in Juan Valera. Creación y crítica, ed. Cristóbal Cuevas García and Enrique Baena (Málaga: Publicaciones del Congreso de Literatura Española Contemporánea, 1995), 189–200; Robert G. Trimble, Chaos Burning on My Brow: Don Juan Valera in His Novels (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1995), 83–94; Teresia Langford Taylor, The Representation of Women in the Novels of Juan Valera: A Feminist Critique (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), Chap. 3, 39–61; and Thomas R. Franz, Valera in Dialogue/In Dialogue with Valera (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), Chaps. 4 and 7, 53–63, 97–107. The relative paucity of studies on this delightful novel, which I first remarked upon...