Power and Language in Jaume Cabré's Senyoria

The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. . . . Knowledge and power are integrated with one another. . . . It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.

Michel Foucault, "Prison Talk" 52

In Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, published in 1975 and translated into English two years later as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault contrasts two types of punishment. With monarchical punishment the populace is repressed through horrific public displays of executions and torture, such as that in 1757 of a man who had attempted to kill Louis XV. Disciplinary punishment, in contrast, gives so-called professionals (psychiatrists and parole officers, for example) power over the prisoner, and their judgment determines the length of his confinement. According to Foucault, the shift in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from spectacle to surveillance, from retribution to regulation, represents a desire "not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body" (Discipline and Punish 82). Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's idea of the Panopticon, which allows centralized observation of prisoners without their being able to tell whether they are being watched, as a metaphor for modern disciplinary societies, and he argues that all institutions — prisons, army camps, hospitals, factories, schools — resemble the Panopticon and thus a "carceral continuum" runs through modern society. Prisoners, soldiers, patients, workers, students, all are subjected to supervision/surveillance by others.

The question of how power is exercised and relations of power remain continuing concerns of Foucault's work, and they are a central theme in that of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré. "L'enfrontament individu-institucio, la llibertat de l'individu enfront dels condicionaments que imposa la societat" (Guia de lectura 21) is the ideological foundation of his novels, and Senyoria (1991) dramatizes how those who hold power (ab)use it to further their own ends.¹ As English historian Lord Acton warned, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely," a point made clear in Senyoria.

The novel is set at a moment of transition, beginning at nightfall on 11 November 1799 and ending on 1 January 1800. Light is giving way to darkness, autumn to winter, and the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Shock waves set in motion by the French Revolution have shaken the Spanish monarchy, and the first glimmers of Romanticism are visible on the horizon. Cabré makes use of a series of oppositions: the powerful/the powerless, law/justice, youth/age, life/death, the old regime/ the new Romantic spirit, center/periphery, Spaniards/Catalans, and the Spanish language/the Catalan. Monarchical punishment and spectacle still prevail, but the idea of disciplinary punishment and surveillance is making inroads.

Cabré's novels tend to be structurally complex, and he is fond of beginning them in medias res, showing the consequences of actions before narrating the actions themselves, and using various plot lines. He employs different temporal and spatial planes, analepses and prolepses, shifting points of view and levels of discourse, as well as fragmentation in his presentation of the different stories. Senyoria opens with a scene of surveillance. Overcast skies and rain predominate, but on those few nights when it is clear Don Rafel Massó i Pujades, the newly appointed civil regent of Barcelona's Reial Audiència, trains his telescope on the heavens — and then on the bedroom window of Donya Gaietana, young wife of the baron of Xerta, in hopes of catching her in a state of undress. Spying on others, watching their every action, is endemic to the world in which Don Rafel moves. Power, as Foucault reminds us, is intimately bound up with knowledge, and discovering others' secrets and weaknesses enables one to control them. A network of power relations undergirds the novel, and shifts in power are directly related to knowledge attained.

Senyoria has the essential ingredients of a first-rate novel...