Introductory Notes for Carme Riera PDF

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Notes on Carme Riera...

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SPLT57 (DL) INTRODUCTORY NOTES for CARME RIERA Some of these notes are taken from Kathleen Glenn’s “Voice, Marginality, and Seduction in the Short Fiction of Carme Riera” in Re c o v e r i n gS p a i n' sf e mi n i s tt r a d i t i o n.Ed i t e db yLi s a Vo l l e n do r f .Ne wYo r k:Mo d e r nLa n g ua g eAs s o c i a t i o no fAme r i c a ,20 0 1 .

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A professor, scholar, and creative artist, Carme Riera (1948) is an important figure in the contemporary literary world.

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Her attitude towards “feminism:” She tries to escape from assumptions about “female” writing. The resistance to be labeled is also part of the “backlash” that feminism suffered in the 70s. “These writers want their work to be taken seriously, to be valued for its artistic merits—not for the sex of its author—and to be read by men and women alike. They resist being relegated to the ghetto of literature BY AND FOR WOMEN” (Glenn 375)

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Seduction, in Riera’s texts is both theme and strategy. The letter is, thus, one of Riera’s favorite literary forms, inasmuch as epistolary literature (written in the form of a series of letters exchanged by the characters) is rich in stories of seduction, narration and love. As the protagonist Angela claims in “A Matter”, “Every piece of writing is a love letter” and “The text is nothing but an amorous pretext.”

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The narrator in epistolary narrative: The epistolary form prevents the possibility of an omniscient narrator interjecting explanations. Those who write letters relate only what they choose to relate, passing in silence over those matters that it is to their advantage to conceal. They resort to the letter to make a case for a particular cause of action, to justify their behavior, to overcome the resistance of their addressees, who must strive to decipher

the words on the piece of paper they hold in their hands and determine how much confidence should be placed in them. 

The narratee: Epistolary narrative is unique in that it makes the reader (narratee) almost as important an agent in the narrative as the narrator, “The letter writer simultaneously seeks to affect his/her reader and is affected by him/her”

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In the case of ‘A Matter of Self-Esteem”, every page is designed to entice Ingrid into seducing Miguel. Angela’s strategies include repeated references to the long-standing friendship and shared experiences that link the two women and a self-deprecating portrayal of herself as timid, foolish and insecure in contrast to her Danish friend, who has greater self-assurance and more extensive sexual experience.

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Miquel’s initial seduction of Angela is staged against a backdrop of other literary seductions, such as that of Ana Ozores by Alvaro Mesía in the 19th Century novel La Regenta, Melibea by Calixto in the 15th Century Spanish classic La Celestina and Gretchen by Faust, in Goethe’s work. Unlike the male authors, Riera breaks with literary tradition and chooses for her protagonist a 48 year-old woman. One of Angela’s conversations with Miquel revolves precisely around the curious fact that when male novelists portray a heroine who is in love, she is rarely over thirty. Older women are usually confined to secondary roles as mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law and are depicted as ill humored, hypocritical, avaricious, and antagonistic to the young. While Riera does not portray Angela as an admirable or heroic figure, she does give her a voice, a voice that Angela uses to dominate and control the text from beginning to end. Miquel, apart from a few grandiloquent and obviously untruthful remarks, is silenced and pushed to the margin of the text...