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

5. Narrative Beginnings and the Production of Difference

[124] 5 Narrative Beginnings and the Production of Difference A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by casual necessity but after which something naturally is or comes to be. Aristotle Narrative beginnings and endings, as Peter Rabinowitz has so eloquently argued, hold “privileged positions” within a literary text, for they are places of special emphasis for both authors and readers . Readers instinctively concentrate their attention, he maintains, on the material conveyed in the text’s beginnings, endings, titles, epigraphs , and descriptive subtitles—their sense of textual meaning determined, in part, by the “concentrating quality of a detail” articulated in these privileged sites. Providing “a core around which to organize interpretation,” these advantaged positions, moreover, inform the reader how best to focus his or her attention.1 While the subject of endings has received much critical attention and produced a con1 . Peter Rabinowitz, “Reading Beginnings and Endings,” in Narrative Dynamics : Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 300–313, quotation on 300–302. [125] siderable amount of research during the past few decades, the critical discourse on beginnings has been scant. Narrative theory, maintains Brian Richardson, has only recently begun paying attention to “this long neglected and little understood aspect.”2 Through her innovative experimentation with narrative structure, Pardo Bazán most assuredly exploited not only the closing, as we have seen, but also the opening positions of privilege in the nearly six hundred short stories that she wrote throughout her long and often controversial career.3 This chapter aims to examine the significant role played by narrative beginnings in the construction of an alternative female subjectivity in Pardo Bazán’s short stories. Simultaneously exploring and exploiting the limitations of conventional narrative design, these beginnings represent a fourth and highly original variant of disruptive reappropriation in Pardo Bazán’s short fiction. Expanding on Edward Said’s definition, to begin is to make or to produce difference, a difference that is the result of combining in language the customary with the unfamiliar.4 Beginning, moreover, implies return and repetition rather than simple linear progression . The beginning is the first step in the intentional production of meaning. Said, in addition, differentiates between beginnings Narrative Beginnings and Production of Difference 2. Brian Richardson, “Introduction: Beginnings and Endings,” in Narrative Dynamics : Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 249–55, quotation on 249. 3. Fedorchek confirms this position, noting that “the essence of her approach is to engage the reader as quickly as possible, certainly in the first paragraph, frequently in the first few sentences.” See Emilia Pardo Bazán, “Translator’s Foreword,” in “The White Horse” and Other Stories, trans. Robert Fedorchek (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 9–13, quotation on 13. 4. Said summarizes the methodology employed in his “meditative essay” as the following: “To make explicit what is usually allowed to remain implicit; to state that which, because of professional consensus, is ordinarily not stated or questioned; to begin again rather than to take up writing dutifully at a designated point and in a way ordained by tradition; above all to write in and as an act of discovery rather than out of respectful obedience to established ‘truth’—these add up to the production of knowledge, they summarize the method of beginning about which this book turns.” See Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic, 1975), 379. Crafting the Female Subject [126] and origins. Beginnings, he states, are secular, continuing activities while origins are more theological in nature. In practical terms, a beginning has a more active meaning while an origin is more passive . “A beginning,” he continues, “intends meaning, but the continuities and the methods developing from it are generally orders of dispersion, of agency, and of complementarity.”5 Predisposed to experiment with new forms and structures, Pardo Bazán, I contend, made use of these diverse narrative beginnings to construct alternative subjectivities for her female heroes. For these emergent female subjects, the beginning is crucial not only because it is the main entrance into the work but also because it determines much of the text that is to follow. “Without a sense of a beginning,” writes Said, “nothing can really be done, much less ended.”6 Because narrative beginnings both open up possibilities and expose further ambivalences , the beginning is where we...