Thematic Representation and "Skiascopic" Vision in Ramon J. Sender's El rey y la reina

Unlike the many novels of Ramón J. Sender unfortunately relegated to critical neglect and oblivion, El rey y la reina (1948) ¹ has suffered no such ignominy. To the contrary, there exist a respectable number of studies that offer generous praise of the work, signaling its rich “thematic complexity” (Bertrand de Muñoz 38); its victimizing but tantalizing “inherent multiplicity” (Espadas 1); its challenging “multilevel combination of interpretations” (Jones 80); and its forceful “superimposition of thematic planes” (Sobejano-Morán 284). Appreciative of the novel’s thematic richness and structure, Juan Alborg approvingly declares that Rey “como construcción es una obra perfecta, por lo ajustado de su ritmo y la sobriedad ejemplar de sus elementos” (49). Although virtually all critics acknowledge that Rey is a multifaceted and multithemed novel that joins the real and the fantastic, the poetic and the prosaic, or perhaps History and “Moral Anthropology” (Mainer “Antropología”), most of them nevertheless ignore, at the operational level of representation, the vital connection between the two principal thematic elements of the work—that is, the outbreak of the Civil War and the intense and odd relationship which ensues between the eponymous Rey and Reina—Rómulo, the gardener and his employer the Duchess. Thus, any possibility for signification that may be inherent in an investigation of what Lubomír Dolezel calls “first-order thematic structures,” or “structural thematics”—the formation of thematic clusters at the level of structure, rather than of content—is foreclosed (89), thereby robbing the novel of its most profound signifying thrust. Rey is, in the final analysis, a cautionary tale about reception and perception, and in some ways, about the inability to see properly and holistically what is being portrayed and enacted. In this sense the novel is an allegory of thematic representation, as well as an exemplary tale of extraordinary subtlety and irony. ²

Critics pay little attention to the structural aspect of the work that considers the relational and representational problems of themes, although as will be seen later, José-Carlos Mainer comes very close to doing so. Just like the characters themselves, who refuse to view life and History in its totality, scholars overlook the relational import of the thematic clusters within the novel. They content themselves with concentrating on the seductive complexity of Rómulo’s and the Duchess’s quest for individuation and selfhood, which the author admittedly foregrounds in a variety of ways throughout the work. Therefore, what abounds in the critical literature is a body of cogent and excellently turned pieces that supports studies of what Dolezel labels “selective thematics” or “second-order interpretations,” a methodology which appropriates the terms of a “borrowed interpretive system,” be they Freudian, Jungian or even heraldic, and which are then applied in an “intuitive leap” to unanalyzed texture (93). Dolezel acknowledges that there is a surfeit of such studies, and he laments the absence of research that focuses on first-order thematics.

Part and parcel of the critical insight and “truth” that inform Rey are certain fixed ideas to which all those who have studied the work sooner or later feel obliged to subscribe: that the novel uses the Civil War merely as a persistent motif and as a backdrop for the erotic but platonic “love affair” between the gardener and his aristocratic noblewoman; that the Civil War is only a catalyst to advance the interesting and reticular “union” between a man of the people and a woman of the ruling class; that the work is not of the Civil War but in the Civil War. Thus, by reducing the Civil War to motival status and by minimizing the presence of the political, the referential and historical, critics go on to examine what they believe constitutes the essential thrust of the novel: the lyrical and poetical relationship of “self-revelation” cultivated by Rómulo and his Queen. With almost no resistance whatsoever, critics accept as the standard point of departure Eugenio de Nora’s early appreciation of the work that, “la movilización revolucionaria de...