SOURCE: Spires, Robert C. “Rebellion against Models: Don Juan and Orestes.” In Beyond the Metafictional Mode: Directions in the Modern Spanish Novel, pp. 58-71. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

[In the following essay, Spires charts the development of the Spanish metafictional novel in the 1960s.]

The so-called “art for art's sake” movement of the 1920s and 1930s came to an abrupt end with the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Although it would be an exaggeration to say that novelistic activity ceased completely during the war years,¹ most of the works emerging from that period are significant for historical rather than artistic reasons. Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte [The Family of Pascual Duarte in the English version], published in 1942 and soon followed by other novels displaying similar techniques, was the first of a new group whose artistic merits enabled them to transcend their historical moment.

The novelistic movement initiated by Cela's Pascual Duarte extended until 1962, and although a plethora of labels have been applied to it, neorealism is perhaps the most widely used and accurate.² Such a term, however, should not lead one to assume that these novels merely document reality. Indeed, many of the neorealistic novels are noteworthy for their complex structures and lyrical descriptions, e.g., Carmen Laforet's Nada (1944) [Nothing], Miguel Delibes' El camino (1950) [The Road], Cela's La colmena (1951) [The Hive in the English version], Ana María Matute's Fiesta al noroeste (1953) [Northeast Festival], and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio's El Jarama (1956) [The One Day of the Week in the English version], to cite some of the more notable examples. The novels grouped under the rubric neorealism, however, display very little penchant toward experimentation with narrative modes. Prevailing wisdom suggests that the metafictional mode is incompatible with expressions of realism.³ Notwithstanding the temptation of such an easy explanation for the hiatus of metafiction in the 1940s and 1950s, the explanation seems less than satisfactory in view of Galdós's metafictional experiments combined with the realist mode of the previous century.⁴

For all practical purposes the end of the neorealistic movement can be pinpointed to 1962, the year Luis Martín-Santos published his novel Tiempo de silencio [Silent Time]. Martín-Santos's novel and its successors are generally designated as the Spanish New Novel, and although that term really never has been defined adequately,⁵ without question the movement marks a resurgence of narrative experimentation. By far the principal expression of such novelistic experiments takes the form of self-referential language. As opposed to what may be characterized as the transparent language of neorealism, the language of the New Novel tends to be more opaque; rather than looking through the language to the object represented, in the New Novel one tends to look more at the language itself.⁶ Another less prominent type of experimentation, equally anti-neorealist, involves the use of fantasy in the form of resurrected literary or mythical models. The use of such models is similar to the type of coding Jarnés and the vanguardists accomplish with parodies. Yet unlike the vanguardists, the creators of the New Novel show a major concern with the process itself of literary borrowing. Fiction representative of this new group explores from various perspectives the concept of the work within the work, of literature as a response to literature. Such novels are more concerned with challenging and thereby updating classical literary models than with merely parodying trite novelistic styles and themes. Within the general category New Novel, the strategy of transforming classical models qualifies as the most obvious expression of novelistic self-commentary.

The first notable example of a 1960s novel transforming a classical model is Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's Don Juan (1963). The model is identified by the title itself, and the transforming process consists of the speaker's efforts to challenge the model. The anecdote involves the speaker's chance acquaintance in Paris with Leporello, a man claiming to be the servant of the famous fictional seducer. The novel, then, presents a clash between the supposed “reality” of the speaker and the living “fiction” he encounters in the form of this servant and his master. In short, the speaker inadvertently finds himself enclosed within a literary model, and his efforts to break out of that model serve as novelistic self-commentary.

The persuasiveness of the model is apparent when, after the very first encounter with Leporello, the speaker rather matter-of-factly concedes the servant's extraterrestrial ontology: “Al principio creía que iría disfrazado; ahora tengo dudas acerca de su realidad. Si hubiera de definirlo de algún modo, diría que es un fantasma”⁷ [“At first I thought he was just wearing a disguise; now I have to question his reality. If I had to define him in some way, I would say he is a ghost”]. The sensation of the supernatural soon takes on a pronounced literary connotation with the narrator's first visit to Don Juan's apartment: “Leporello abrió las maderas de una ventana, y tuve la sensación repentina de hallarme en el escenario de un teatro, o en algo que, sin ser teatro, fuese escenario, y que, sin embargo, no era fingido o falso, sino de la más depurada autenticidad” (p. 29) [“Leporello opened the shutters of a window, and I suddenly felt as if I were in the middle of a theatrical scene, or in something that, although not a theatre, was a staged scene but that, nevertheless, was not contrived or false, but rather of the purest authenticity”].

A fictional setting that somehow seems real signals the convergence of the supposed real world of the narrator with the fictional world of Don Juan. Soon he begins to feel that indeed he has crossed the threshold between the two worlds, and that in so doing he has fallen under the control of the author of the fictional world: “Llegué a sentirme como juguete en sus manos, o como personaje literario en las del mal novelista, que piensa y siente lo que el novelista quiere” (p. 40) [“I came to feel like a toy in his hands, or like a literary character in the hands of a bad novelist, a character who thinks and feels what the novelist dictates”]. Since various authors (dramatists and poets as well as novelists) can claim credit for versions of the Don Juan literary legend, the model itself rather than a single author must be responsible for the dictatorial control under which the speaker has fallen. The “bad author” to whom he refers, then, seems to be a creation rather than the creator of the model. Indeed, only the speaker's fictional self-consciousness serves to counteract the stifling constraints of this all-too-familiar literary model.

Since fictional self-consciousness does seem to combat the artistic infecundity imposed by the model, the speaker decides to further the cause of creativity by usurping the role of the model's fictive author. The speaker aspires secretly to become the fictive author of his own story. Leporello, however, knows about the secret heretical project and asks permission to read the manuscript. At that point the narrator/character/author confesses that the story is silly and that he does not even know why he bothered to write it. Leporello then answers him: “Yo sí lo sé. La escribió porque no tuvo más remedio porque una fuerza superior le obligó a hacerlo. Pero no se le ocurre presumir de haberla inventado. La historia no tiene nada suyo, usted lo sabe. Ni siquiera las palabras le pertenecen” (p. 255) [“Well I do know. You wrote it because you didn't have any alternative since a force superior to you forced you to do it. But don't think you have invented it. The story is not yours at all, and you know it. The words aren't even yours”]. Leporello seems to be suggesting that the superior force is the literary model itself, that no author can free him- or herself from the constraints of tradition and reader expectations. In this sense, then, Torrente's Don Juan raises the questions of authorial control and artistic originality. Authors, it seems to suggest, are less creators than imitators. Torrente's Don Juan therefore presents the conflict between the constraints imposed by past models and formulas on any novelistic expression, and the constant need to challenge all constraints so as to express the always constant yet always changing phenomenon of human existence. The modal violation occurring when a fictional character in a contemporary novel enters the world of a classical model and then attempts to write his own story is the textual strategy by which Torrente challenges the constraints of tradition, by which he strives for a new mode of expression. So intertextuality is simultaneously an obstacle and a creative force, but for it to be creative the existing prototypes must be transformed into new modes of expression. Such seems to be the message of Torrente's Don Juan.

As interesting and important as Torrente's challenge to literary models is to the Spanish novel of the 1960s, it fell to another Galician novelist, Alvaro Cunqueiro, and his Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes (1969) [A Man Who Resembled Orestes], to develop more fully the potential of transforming classical archetypes into new modes of expression. In so doing Cunqueiro points even more directly to the emergence in the mid-1970s of the Spanish self-referential novel.

The title itself, Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes, points simultaneously to the hero of the classical model—Aeschylus's Oresteia—and to the departure from the model. That is to say, this hero only resembles the original. The title announces that Cunqueiro's novel is a rereading of the myth, a rereading that in turn has been read as demythification, revitalization, escapism, social criticism, a humorous blend of realism and fabulation, and finally a blend of self-conscious narrative and metatheatre.⁸ The variety of interpretations the novel has inspired attests to its artistic complexity, an artistic complexity grounded in the clash between the formulas imposed by the classical model and the contemporary novel's search for new modes of expression.

The clash between rigid formulas and artistic innovation is most obvious in the novel's exterior structure. On several occasions the narrative mode is interrupted by the dramatic mode in the form of segments of two plays embedded within the novel. In addition, the novel ends with six character sketches followed by an onomastic index of the remaining characters (except for Aegisthus, who is strangely missing from both lists), and each sketch and index entry offers a new caricature of the respective personages.⁹ The combination of theatrical modes of dialogue and a conclusion presented as sketches and indices clashes with what is conceived as traditional novelistic form. These nonconventional devices call attention to themselves as artifices, and such a flaunting of artifices is the most blatant expression of the conflict between the tyranny of literary models and the need to challenge such a tyranny. The challenge involves turning the conventions and artifices against themselves. First by exaggerating the rigidity of generic formulas and then by violating the very modes of literature, the novel offers a new set of formulas and models to express in contemporary terms an ancient conflict of human existence.

The conflict between original model and modern imitation is central to the anecdote of Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes. When the novel begins a stranger has arrived in the city, introducing himself as Don León. Since the people of the city have been waiting for a long time for the arrival of Orestes and a spy network has been set up to identify him and prevent his murderous revenge, all strangers are suspect. Yet as Don León's words, actions, and physical appearance suggest more and more that he is indeed the avenging hero, the people become increasingly skeptical of the whole myth. In fact, as the captain of the spy network explains, the situation has taken on an aura of play acting: “Y ellos, los reyes, no podrán morir si no viene Orestes. El pueblo estará ese día como en el teatro”¹⁰ [“And they, the king and queen, will not be able to die if Orestes does not come. That day everyone will feel as if he is at the theatre”]. The people, in short, feel that their own identity is determined by the fictional model, yet this identity is in conflict with their present context, a context totally lacking the epic dimensions associated with the model: “¡Coño, eso parece de la tragedia!—había comentado Eusebio. Pero él cobraba por descubrir a Orestes, y debía registrar al forastero que le señalaban en el aviso” (p. 25) [“Motherfucker, that business sounds as if it's right out of the tragedy—Eusebio had commented. But they paid him to investigate Orestes, and he had to check out the stranger described in the bulletin”]. Not only does the vulgarity underscore the degree to which pragmatic considerations have supplanted the cosmic forces behind the original myth, but the same vulgar pragmatism reflects how the myth has been reduced to mere formulas. Rather than a fiction, it is an anti-fiction suppressing both compassion and imagination.

The anti-fiction resulting when fiction is reduced to a rigid set of norms becomes evident when one of the city augurs responds to Don León's question about the theatre offerings currently available:

Yo también soy muy amigo del teatro, don León, pero a los augures nos está prohibido en esta ciudad, ya que el pueblo respetuoso teme que estando nosotros en los tendidos viendo la pieza, apasionados por el protagonista, o de una mujer hermosa que salga, hagamos suertes a escondidas dentro de una bolsa con habas blancas y dientes de liebre, y modifiquemos el curso de la tragedia, y llegue a anciano respetable un incestuoso, o Medea reconquiste a Jasón, y todo quede en besos a los niños.

[p. 41]

[I am also a theatre buff, Don León, but we augurs are prohibited from seeing it in this city, since the respectable people are afraid that if we are in the balcony watching the play, and become caught up by the protagonist, or by some beautiful woman who happens onto the stage, we may secretly throw dice made of white beans and rabbit teeth in a bag, and thereby change the course of the tragedy, and an incestuous person will achieve respectable old age, or Medea may reconquer Jason, and in the end everyone will be just one big happy family.]

The characters, therefore, are slaves to all past literary models. They cannot escape the model they are in, and are prohibited from using their creative imagination to alter other models. And whereas such exaggeration of their enslavement produces a comic effect, it also tends to reduce the literary work to its anecdotal level; it presents literature as nothing more than a finite number of plot situations, each so rigidly defined that plot is seen as another of the arbitrary conventions constraining literature's ability to express the ever-changing yet ever-constant essence of human existence.

Literature as convention becomes even more evident with the first example of a play within the novel. The official city dramatist, Filón el Mozo, has defied the law by secretly writing a theatrical version of Orestes' appearance. After a textual reproduction of Scene One, Scene Two of Filón's play begins and then abruptly ends at the moment Iphigenia looks out the window and is supposed to see Orestes. At this point the dramatic form gives way to the narrative form as the speaker intrudes to explain that the dramatist cannot finish the scene until Orestes actually arrives. In addition to mocking the conventions of plot, the mixture of dramatic and narrative fictional forms comically lays bare the illusion that fiction is about real people, places, and events. Not only do we have fiction within fiction, but the referent on which the completion of Filón's play depends is itself a fiction; the fictitious scene representing the arrival of Orestes cannot be written until Orestes (a fictional character) makes his appearance. Thus Filón's absurd fidelity to mimetic art directs attention to the absurdity of ever thinking that art and reality are one. Only conventions allow us to accept fiction as real. In short, this segment of a play within the novel comically exaggerates the conventions of fiction, and in so doing turns them against themselves. Rather than absolute laws, they reveal themselves to be arbitrary constraints or formulas badly in need of revitalization.

Since true revitalization demands certain commitments, the characters opt instead for embellishment. Filón el Mozo, for example, contents himself with imagining embellishments for Orestes' arrival scene, since he is unwilling to write his own ending. Even Aegisthus follows Filón's example as he dreams of ways to adorn the scene of his own murder:

Egisto, verdaderamente, lo pensaba todo como si la escena final se desarrollarse en el teatro, ante cientos o miles de espectadores. Un día se dio cuenta de que Clitemnestra tenía que estar presente en todo el último acto, esperando su hora. Podría Egisto, en la pared del fondo, en el dormitorio, mandar abrir un ventanal sobre la sala de embajadores, un ventanal que permitiese ver la cama matrimonial, y en ella a Clitemnestra en camisón, la cabellera dorada derramada en la almohada, los redondos hombros desnudos. Cuando se incorporase, despertada por el ruido de las armas, en el sobresalto debía mostrar los pechos, e intentando abandonar el lecho para correr hacia el ventanal, una de la hermosas piernas hasta medio muslo, o algo más, que la tragedia permite todo lo que el terror exige.

[pp. 79-80]

[Aegisthus really conceived of the whole thing as if the final scene were unfolding in the theatre, before hundreds or thousands of spectators. One day he realized that Clytemnestra had to be present during all the final act, waiting for her time. Aegisthus could have a bay window over the ambassadors' waiting room opened, on the wall in the background of the bedroom, a bay window that would allow the marital bed to be seen, and on it Clytemnestra in a chemise, her blonde hair spread out over the pillow, her round shoulders bare. When she gets up, awakened by the noise of the weapons, in her excitement she should bare her breasts, and in the process of attempting to get out of bed and run to the bay window, also one of her legs up to mid-thigh, or perhaps a little higher, for in theatre you can get away with whatever the dramatic situation requires.]

The embellishment he imagines, of course, merely transforms an epic tragedy into a titillating soap opera. Although he is a self-conscious fictional character and frustrated with his formulaic existence, his action here represents at best a half-hearted rebellion against the formulas; by ridiculously embellishing them, he underscores their authority over him.

True rebellion, as he learns from his friend Eumón, requires a much more radical approach. Eumón suggests the radical solution when he learns from Aegisthus that no one who knew Agamemnon saw the face of the victim after the murder. Eumón then speculates that the victim was actually Orestes who, impatiently waiting for his father to be murdered, arrived before the crime was committed, and thus Aegisthus erroneously killed the son rather than the father. According to Eumón, it is simply a matter of changing the story's sequence of events:

Fíjate en que todo está escrito. Todo lo que está escrito en un libro, lo está al mismo tiempo, vive al mismo tiempo. Estás leyendo que Eumón sale de Tracia una mañana de lluvia, y lo ves cabalgar por aquel camino que va entre tojales, y pasas de repente veinte hojas, y ya está Eumón en una nave, y otras veinte y Eumón pasea por Constantinopla con un quitasol, y otras cincuenta, y Eumón, anciano, en su lecho de muerte, se despide de sus perros favoritos, al tiempo que vuelve a la página primera, recordando la dulce lluvia de su primer viaje. Pues bien, Orestes se sale de página. Orestes está impaciente. No quiere estar en la página ciento cincuenta esperando a que llegue la hora de la venganza. Se va a adelantar.

[p. 98]

[You have to realize that everything is written down. Everything that is written down in a book takes place at the same time, exists at the same time. You are reading that Eumón leaves Thrace one rainy morning, and you see him riding along that road bordered by furze trees, and you suddenly skip twenty pages, and Eumón is now on a boat, and another twenty and Eumón strolls through Constantinople with a parasol, and another fifty pages and he is now an old man on his death bed, and is saying goodbye to his favorite dogs, at the very same time that his mind skips back to the first page, remembering the sweet rain that was falling as he left on his first excursion. Well, Orestes is leaving his place on the page. Orestes is impatient. He doesn't want to be on page one hundred and fifty waiting for the time of his vengeance. He is going to hurry things along.]

Eumón's solution does not merely question the conventions of plot, it challenges the very laws of fiction. In effect he exposes fiction as a totally arbitrary game that pretends that space and sequential order represent temporal progression. Aegisthus, or any other artist, has the power to change the rules of the game. Yet the rebellion implicit in changing the rules does involve certain consequences, for as Aegisthus reasons, his own role in the tragedy will be diminished if the victim was Orestes rather than Agamemnon. Eumón quickly tries to dispel his friend's apprehensions: “¡Tu valor no se discute, amigo!—afirmó Eumón abrazándolo—. ¡Ya verás como si profundizas en el asunto, terminas saliendo del escenario para platea, ves el argumento con nuevos ojos y acabas separando de ti el Egisto regicida!” (p. 102) [“Your valor is beyond challenge, my friend!—Eumón affirmed hugging him. You will soon see, if you delve into the matter more, that you will finally come down off the stage and take a place in the orchestra seats, where you will see the plot from a whole new perspective and will end up separating from yourself the regicidal Aegisthus.”] After first exposing the artifices of fiction, he now is attempting to incite to riot a fellow fictional character by encouraging him to defy the authority of the fictive author Aeschylus. Eumón's advice represents a violation of narrative modes. Yet the violation occurs within the embedded text. By advocating to Aegisthus that he step out of Aeschylus's fictional world, in effect he is encouraging him to place himself under the authority of the fictive author of the framing text. He is being encouraged to substitute the persona of Cunqueiro for that of Aeschylus. If he does so he will become a new Aegisthus (“acabas separando de ti el Egisto regicida”) contributing, of course, to Cunqueiro's new reading of the ancient myth.

Eumón's rebellious advice to violate the embedded text's narrative boundaries is, in the final analysis, a vital part of Cunqueiro's textual strategy for revitalizing fictional modes. Rather than a novel that pretends to mirror reality or that slavishly follows established norms, this novel mirrors itself by challenging fictional norms. Yet ultimately Aegisthus rejects the advice and chooses to continue his sterile, formulaic existence. Authentic rebellion is left in the hands of the protagonist of the second of Filón el Mozo's plays, Doña Inés.

Doña Inés is the protagonist of Azorín's famous novel of the same title published in 1925. In that novel Doña Inés, approaching middle age, falls victim to her own romantic idealism, which comes in conflict with a prosaic, pragmatic world. The literary name Doña Inés is thus identified with tragic, unrequited love. The Doña Inés of Cunqueiro's novel lives in an adjoining kingdom, and when Eumón learns that she is the referent for Filón's theatrical heroine, Eumón cannot resist a little spicy gossip: “—Me dice Egisto en confianza—explicó Eumón a Filón el Mozo—, que todo el desequilibrio de doña Inés viene de estar ella también a la espera de Orestes, sólo que para recibirlo con cama deshecha” (p. 167) [“Aegisthus tells me confidentially—Eumón explained to Filón el Mozo—, that all of Doña Inés's emotional problems can be explained because she is also waiting for Orestes, only in her case to greet him in bed with the covers thrown back”]. Such a lascivious remark humorously mocks the very romantic ideals associated with the name Doña Inés. It is the first step in departing from the model, in offering a new reading, in this case of a modern, rather than an ancient, classic. In fact, reading itself becomes the primary focus with the interpolation of this second play within the novel.

The focus begins to switch from the story to reading and readers when Eumón asks permission to read Filón el Mozo's play about Doña Inés. With the subsequent appearance of the dramatic mode, then, it is not a question of the illusion of real-life drama, but rather of the convention of written dramatic form. The dramatic mode appearing on the page represents the text Eumón holds in his hand.

The initial scenes Eumón reads concern the arrival of a mailman at Doña Inés's castle and the story the mailman fabricates to explain why he has no love letters for her. The explanation he offers is that a handsome prince called him aside in Florence and, continually glancing at his watch, asked him to tell Doña Inés that he would write her declaring his love as soon as he had time to do so. Doña Inés then takes the mailman's watch and, holding it to her ear, cries that its ticking is the very love message she has been awaiting. With this ending to the scene, there is an abrupt switch from the dramatic to the narrative mode: “Eumón de Tracia sacó su reloj y lo escuchó y se dijo que sería muy hermoso el tener un amor lejano y saber de él así. Y se dolió de sí mismo, que nunca lo habían amado tanto, ni se le habían ocurrido tales imaginaciones amorosas” (p. 178) [“Eumón of Thrace took out his watch and listened to it, and he said to himself that it would be beautiful to have a distant love and to hear about her that way. And he felt sorry for himself because he had never been loved that much, nor had he even dreamed such amorous thoughts”]. With the change of mode, suddenly the focus falls on Eumón as a reader of fiction rather than merely a character in it. By expanding the vision from the embedded text to the framing text, the text-act reader is signaled that the fictional mode involves not only a story but an implied reader of the story. The shift of focus suddenly reveals the role of Eumón as a text reader; it makes explicit what is conventionally an implicit dimension of the fictional mode.

This example of modal shift, moreover, lays bare not only the convention of the implied text reader but also that of a suspension of disbelief. By changing the focus from what is represented to the person reacting to the representation, the convention of a suspension of disbelief is turned against itself. Eumón, in his reaction to the play, is even more ridiculous than Doña Inés. Thus, rather than an enticement to accept fiction as reality, Cunqueiro's textual strategy is an invitation to contemplate how the illusions of reality depend on the comically arbitrary rules by which the game we call fiction is played.

The culmination of the process of turning the conventions of fiction against themselves, of rebelling against the constraints of both genre and mode, involves the recognition by Doña Inés of her purely linguistic-artistic ontology. When a musician visits Doña Inés in her tower and, after boasting how he creates reality with his music, challenges her reality by questioning if she is really the mistress of the castle, she indignantly responds:

¿Podría serlo otro? Yo soy el palacio, este palacio, este jardín, este bosque, este reino. A veces imagino que me marcho, que abandono el palacio en la noche, que huyo sin despedirme, y conforme lo voy imaginando siento que la casa se estremece, que amenazan quebrarse las vigas, se desgoznan las puertas, se agrietan las paredes, y parece que todo vaya a derrumbarse en un repente, y caer, reducido a polvo y escombro, en el suelo. Todo esto depende de mí, músico, de esta frase que soy yo, en una larga sinfonía repetida monótonamente, ahora adagio, después allegro, alguna vez andante.

[p. 180]

[Could it be anyone else? I am the palace, this palace, this garden, this forest, this kingdom. At times I imagine that I am leaving, that I am abandoning the palace during the night, that I am fleeing without saying goodby, and as I imagine it I feel that the house shudders, that the beams threaten to split, that the doors come loose from their hinges, that the walls crack, and it seems as if everything is suddenly going to crumble and fall, reduced to dust and rubble on the ground. All this depends on me, musician, on this series of sounds that I am, in a long symphony, first adagio, then allegro, once in a while andante.]

Initially she merely seems to be affirming her ownership of the property when she says she is the palace, garden, forest, and kingdom. The meaning becomes more complex, however, when she speaks of the destruction accompanying her imagined departures from the tower. The key to decoding the meaning seems to be provided by her self-definition as a “frase.” Within the anecdotal context the word “frase” seems to indicate a musical phrase, one of its dictionary definitions. Yet within the structural context of a fiction within a fiction, the word “frase” also points at its more common meaning as a grammatical unit. In either case the use of the word reflects Doña Inés's awareness of being part of an artistic work. In fact, not only she but everything surrounding her is but a verbal construct, a constituent part of an artistic whole. If one of the constituent parts decides to rebel, therefore, the artistic whole may well crumble. Her self-awareness of the role she plays distinguishes her from all the other characters appearing in the novel. She is aware not only of her fictionality but also of her capacity to rebel, and finally is willing to face the consequences of such a rebellion, consequences that in effect challenge the very concept of artistic unity. Self-awareness of this magnitude violates the modes of fiction, for Doña Inés not only is destroying any illusion that she is a real person but is also rebelling against the literary model associated with her name, against the creator of that model, and finally against the very concept of absolute unity.

At first glance the section of Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes dedicated to Doña Inés seems to be an artistic infelicity; it appears to destroy the novel's structural and thematic unity. Yet I would argue that, on the contrary, it can be seen as an essential link in the novel's redefinition of artistic unity.¹¹ Doña Inés's appearance in a novel about Orestes in itself represents a defiance of literary models; she is a character from a modern novel invading the world of a Greek classic. Because of her role as intruder, along with her self-awareness of her linguistic-artistic ontology, Doña Inés represents the realization of a rebellion the other characters are unwilling to attempt. In fact, Doña Inés functions as a sign pointing toward artistic freedom. By recognizing herself as a convention or an artifice, she turns that convention or artifice against itself in a dramatic expression of novelistic self-commentary. The story of Doña Inés can be seen, therefore, as a fitting culmination to the central conflict of the novel, a conflict between the constraints of established conventions and models, and the need to find new means of artistic expression, new strategies for revitalizing ancient and modern myths, new readings of our literary tradition.

Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes represents a significant step toward the Spanish self-referential novel emerging in the mid 1970s. Cunqueiro, while still relying on parody and the foregrounding of literary codes (strategies that seem to carry the imprint of Jarnés on them), places major emphasis on a violation of the modes of fiction. The novelistic self-commentary, therefore, concerns the underlying laws of fiction more than mere stylistic constraints. Yet even his violations are only partial. When Eumón preaches rebellion to Aegisthus and Doña Inés does rebel by recognizing her artistic ontology, both are violating the boundary separating them as characters from the world of their respective fictive authors. But the violations are of the world of the fictive authors of the embedded texts. In the final analysis they are rebelling against the personae of Aeschylus and Azorín only to place themselves under the authority of Cunqueiro's persona. The boundaries of the framing text remain intact. In short, Cunqueiro artfully controls the metafictional mode so as to serve the cause of a novelistic expression that, while not pretending to duplicate, still resembles its classical models.

With the emergence of the new self-referential novel in the mid 1970s, the Spanish novel becomes much more radical in its violations and much more concerned with fiction's modes of existence. Indeed, rather than merely exposing the artifices of fiction, the new genre foregrounds its own process of creation, its own coming-into-being. The conventions of narrative levels are all but annihilated as what is narrated and the narrating instance tend to fuse. While I am not suggesting that Alvaro Cunqueiro's Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes had a direct influence on the Spanish self-referential novelists, certainly it played a role in shaping reader expectations for the new metafictional movement. At the very least Cunqueiro's novel forms a link in an intertextual chain that helps us as critics to recognize more clearly, and perhaps appreciate more deeply, some of the techniques involved and effects created by the new wave of Spanish metafictional novels.

Notes

1. J. M. Martínez Cachero, La novela española entre 1939 y 1969 (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1973), has best documented the continuing novelistic activity of the war years.

2. Other terms applied to this novelistic movement include social realism, objective realism, behaviorism, Tremendismo, and variations mixing or modifying with other adjectives the terms listed. For the best panoramic studies of the postwar Spanish novel see: Gonzalo Sobejano, Novela española de nuestro tiempo (En busca del pueblo perdido) (Madrid: Editorial Prensa Española, 1970); and Ignacio Soldevila Durante, La novela desde 1936 (Madrid: Alhambra, 1980).

3. Alter, Partial Magic, obviously unaware of Galdós, sees a similar hiatus in the nineteenth-century realist novel. Alter attributes such a hiatus to the realist novel's function as a source of sociopolitical information (see “The Self-Conscious Novel in Eclipse” pp. 84-137).

4. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, indeed, argues that Ignacio Aldecoa's neorealistic El fulgor y la sangre (1954) is an example of “narrative metafiction,” or a type of novel whose metafictionality is conveyed allegorically. Such an open definition of metafiction does not correspond to my use of the term in this study. See Pérez Firmat's “Metafiction Again.”

5. The best studies comparing neorealism and the New Novel are: Janet W. Díaz, “Origins, Aesthetics and the ‘Nueva Novela Española,’” Hispania 59 (March 1976): 109-17; and Félix Grande, “Narrativa, realidad y España actuales: Historia de un amor difícíl,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 101 (May 1975): 545-51.

6. I present this thesis with various examples in my article “El nuevo lenguaje de la nueva novela,” Insula 396-97 (Nov.-Dec. 1979): 6-7.

7. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Don Juan (Barcelona: Destino, 1963), p. 20.

8. See, for example: Michael D. Thomas, “Cunqueiro's Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes: A Humorous Revitalization of an Ancient Myth,” Hispania 61 (March 1978): 35-45; Pacho Marinero, “Don Alvaro de Bretaña: Perífrasis y paráfrasis del tiempo,” Insula 308-9 (July-Aug. 1972): 23; César Antonio Molina, “Alvaro Cunqueiro: La fabulación sin fin,” Insula 413 (April 1981): 1, 10-11; and Jacqueline Eyring Bixler, “Self-Conscious Narrative and Metatheatre in Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes,” Hispania 67 (May 1984): 214-20.

9. I discuss how the sketch of Orestes complements the general treatment of the myth in “Mito-realidad: La dinámica de Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes”in La novela española de posguerra: Creación artística y experiencia personal (Madrid: CUPSA, 1978), 246-77.

10. Alvaro Cunqueiro, Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes (Barcelona: Destino, 1969), p. 24.

11. Bixler, “Self-Conscious Narrative,” in defending the Doña Inés section, argues that indeed it contributes to the novel's structural unity. One might argue that the chorus in the Oresteia was itself a metafictional device, perhaps even an inspiration for Cunqueiro's experiments with the mode.