Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán

2. Recalcitrant Endings and the Disruption of Form

[38] 2 Recalcitrant Endings and the Disruption of Form The words in the story we are writing now might as well never have been used before. They all shine; they are never smudged. Stories are new things; stories make words new; that is one of their illusions and part of their beauty. Eudora Welty The story, as seen through the eyes of Eudora Welty, transcends the limitations of previous word application with each new writing /reading. Words acquire new meanings and language assumes new functions each time they are used. All utterances are heteroglot ; context gives rise to text. Welty’s subtle account of the writing (reading) process accurately portrays the plurality of meanings inherent in the short stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Works of illusion and beauty, her stories infuse new life into well-worn words: “They all shine, they are never smudged.” It is within these short stories, so much a part of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Portions of this chapter were previously published as an article, “Recalcitrant Endings in the Short Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán,” in Letras Peninsulares 11.2 (Fall 1998): 637–56. [39] periodical reading experience, that we can begin to explore the development of a distinctly female subject in Pardo Bazán’s short fiction . Closure is one of the most significant narrative structures found in the short story. Characterized by its brevity, “compression rather than expansion,” and its density, “concentration rather than distribution ,” the short story presupposes the imminence of the ending .1 In other words, short stories are highly concentrated toward their conclusions. As noted in chapter 1, the Spanish short story experienced important changes in its formal conventions of closure in the late nineteenth century. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, for example , ascribes some of these changes to Poe’s call for a striking conclusion : “one which would have a special impact on the reader and reinforce the single effect inherent in the story’s structure.”2 Ironic twists, shocking last statements, and other formal devices purposefully sought to refocus the reader’s attention by detaching the endings from the body of the text. Innovative methods of closure or, in some instances anti-closure, recast the structure of the nineteenthcentury Spanish story. One determining characteristic of the modern Spanish cuento began with the innovative endings of the nineteenth century. Short-story theorist Austin Wright underscores the significance of the ending to the story in his essay “Recalcitrance in the Short Story.”3 Wright suggests that there are two opposing forces at work in every formed piece of fiction: “the force of a shaping form and the resistance of the shaped materials.” The opposing form is that Recalcitrant Endings and Disruption of Form 1. Charles May, “Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction: ‘In the Beginning Was the Story,’” in Short Story Theory at the Crossroads, ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 62-73, quotation on 64. 2. Charnon-Deutsch, Nineteenth-Century Spanish Story 130. 3. Austin Wright, “Recalcitrance in the Short Story,” in Short Story Theory at the Crossroads, ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 115–29. Crafting the Female Subject [40] which he calls recalcitrance or, as it resists form, formal recalcitrance . The key to Wright’s theory is not to consider the work as “a fully realized entity” but rather as “an emergent hypothesis of reading”—that is, as process. Recalcitrance slows down or interferes with the process. The reader is actively engaged in the struggle between unity and the obstruction to that unity. “It is from this point of view,” he concludes, “form seen as behavior (constructive in the writer, perceptual in the reader), that the opposition of the two forces appears: the shaping force versus the resisting one.” This resisting force assumes various postures in the short story. For Wright the lack of temporal, causal, or overt thematic links, the rejection of conventional beginnings and endings, the rejection of overt action , and leaving things to inference all represent examples of formal recalcitrance in the short story.4 This chapter employs Wright’s theoretical framework to explore formal recalcitrance as a strategy of resistance, what I have termed disruptive reappropriation, in five short stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán. Two types of general recalcitrance common to all short stories, enhanced by or associated with the “shortness” of the...