-
Chapter Two
- Purdue University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
47 Chapter Two Reader/Text Solidarity in Decoding the Past in Carme Riera’s La meitat de l’ànima We long to communicate, to establish contact with our readers, as if we were touching them with words so as to awaken or caress them. Carme Riera “An Ambition without Limits,” Moveable Margins Carme Riera’s interest in vindicating the oppressed sectors of society through historical rewriting is clearly evident in her 1994 novel Dins el darrer blau. Nevertheless, throughout her literary career, the Mallorcan author has effectively evaded categorization and refused to be labeled as any one kind of contemporary writer. She deftly handles feminist narrative, the historical novel, the detective genre, and the epistolary novel, among others. Her novel La meitat de l’ànima [The Soul’s Other Half] (2004) also deals with themes of history and vindication yet from a personal instead of national perspective. In this novel, the protagonist sets out on a literary search to find out the “truth” about her mother and consequently about her own identity . The linear concept of personal history becomes clouded through information presented in found documents. Riera steps beyond the idea of official and unofficial history in this novel as she proposes that even the most intimate and personal of all experiences may be invented through the power of language and writing. If we are to gain knowledge about ourselves by looking back at history and making space for the forgotten voices, then we must do the same in our personal histories as well. With La meitat de l’ànima, Riera joins the ranks of authors writing in a self-conscious narrative mode that has come to define one of the current trends of literary production in Spain. 48 Chapter Two Cercas and Chacón revisit the Spanish Civil War through narrative journeys that unearth hidden voices from the past while pursuing very specific contemporary agendas, as we will explore in subsequent chapters.1 Cercas breaks down the distance between past and present by writing himself into the narrative as the main character trying to give voice to past injustices . Chacón inserts women’s experience into the wartime picture, and her vision brings feminist implications to the forefront of historical writing and to larger notions of history and historical documentation. However, Riera steps back from Spain’s particular history in order to articulate a much more intimate space in the text, a kind of textual self-consciousness. Riera highlights the constructedness of personal history that reflects the speculative nature of truth and of the past. Maryellen Bieder sees this revision of history as moving beyond the matter of national identity to embrace a more universal reassessment of the individual’s relationship with culture: “much of Riera’s fiction puts into play the constructedness not only of Catalan nationality but of language, gender and culture” (“Cultural” 55). However, by mingling the narrator’s personal history with that of post–Spanish Civil War espionage, Riera seamlessly combines the national with the personal to create a mystery that ultimately goes unsolved yet reveals the importance of voicing, uncovering, and legitimizing unofficial histories. Her textual self-consciousness emerges in a pact of complicity with the reader as the narrator addresses the reader directly, begging for help and insight into her problems. She expects the reader to respond in the only way possible, by reading. Simply by telling the story, the truth will be revealed, and by implicitly inviting the reader into the textual space as another character in the novel, Riera creates her own model reader. In a short essay that appears in the 1996 collection Moveable Margins, Riera writes: “I believe, as Umberto Eco assures us, it is the reader who truly completes the literary work with his or her active participation. In order that the heap of words that constitute a book have meaning, it is necessary that the reader confer meaning, something only he or she can do” (30–31). Nine years after writing this statement, Riera gives us a literary creation that embraces and celebrates the challenge of reading in La meitat de l’ànima. The “heap of words” that is the novel [3.80.131.164] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:04 GMT) 49 Reader/Text Solidarity only derives meaning from a reader’s perspective and, in this particular case, Riera relies on the idea of a model or ideal reader to finish the tale. Nevertheless, I argue that the backbone of this text is not the...