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...Novelas ejemplares, Joaquín Casalduero sees in "La fuerza" a replay of the human drama of sin and redemption. While attending with his customary perspicacity to form and narrative rhythm, he underlines in the tale's development the thrust of Christian eschatology and subsumes all issues of space to this movement. Rodolfo's trip to Italy, for instance, which clears the way for Leocadia's recognition of the various spaces of her sundering (inner space of the self, room as the locus of the rape, disordered social space of family and town), is understood as merely part of a social tradition: the formative voyage undertaken by young noblemen. The crucifix which Leocadia takes with her as a marker of space and identity (Rodolfo's) is seen by Casalduero with its full symbolic weight. Such a near-allegorical reading makes "space" a mere ground for the enactment of a symbolic sacrifice and undervalues the care with which location is deployed in the novella.
Ruth El Saffar tells us at the outset of her commentary on the novella that "neither the plot nor the characters are to be evaluated by realistic or naturalistic standards" (128). She assigns the novella to Cervantes's later works because of its "recourse to character types to present the universal problems of sin and salvation, its use of religious symbolism, its absence of historical or social detail, and its careful structuring of scenes" (129). In this context most references to space acquire a moral connotation: the family's climb toward the city and the young men's descent are seen as a move toward and away from civilization. The crucifix itself is a symbol of Leocadia's restoration, rather than a simple marker of place. While El Saffar's reading is perceptive and enlightening in many ways, it bypasses the issue of bodily agency within "place" as well as issues of orientation that underpin Leocadia's and doña Estefanía's reordering of fractured or disordered space.
In his study of "the literal and the figurative levels of meaning" (154), Edward Friedman navigates between the real and the symbolic in a reading that allows space, at most, an ancillary role. Leocadia's careful survey of the room where she is raped, an inventory that powerfully calls attention to itself, is principally the place where "she seems to intuit the recourse that will lead to justice" (130). The foundation of Friedman's reading is implicitly hermeneutical in that he sees the novella's ending--the projection of a just recovered harmony into the future--as a rhetorical move by the narrator that calls attention to the contrast between the plot as signified and the narrator's discourse as signifier. This efficient explanation suggestively frames ambiguities of plot and character development as well as the tale's thrust toward the symbolic. Issues of space, however, are necessarily secondary to Friedman's interest. His approach, on the other hand, goes directly to the source of the tension that has preoccupied so many readers of the novel and led them to elevate it toward the transcendent (as does Casalduero, and also Alban Forcione, who sees it principally as a miracle story) or to focus on its qualities as an esthetic object (de Rentiis). He suggests that "the relation between the literal and the generative levels of meaning is self-consciously ambiguous" (154), and that, while expected norms appear to win out (as does "la fuerza de la sangre" ultimately), the uneasy relationship between the narrative and its discourse allows for an ironic, counter-conventional (counter-romance) reading.
In Chapter 6 of his book on the Novelas, "'La fuerza de la sangre': Redemption and Identity," William Clamurro focuses on the endangerment and regaining of selfhood, a process which, in itself, is synecdochal for the endangerment and restoration of familial and social harmony. While not altogether embracing the transcendentalizing readings of Casalduero, El Saffar, and Forcione, Clamurro does refer to Leocadia's and Rodolfo's "recognitions" and marriage as mutual and miraculous redemptions. Clamurro, however, is mainly interested in the matter of identity, its loss and restoration. For instance, he sees Rodolfo's final speech (on beauty) and his discovery of a true love for Leocadia as the young man's passage from anonymity to fully formed selfhood; this transformation makes the marriage possible and represents, for Leocadia, the crowning of a long and arduous journey from a partial loss of self (the rape) to its full recovery in marriage.
Marcia Welles also concerns herself with identity in "Violence Disguised: Representation of Rape in Cervantes' 'La fuerza de la sangre'" by focusing on the text's "gender markings" (245). It is because the rape does not fully silence Leocadia that she can rise from her status as victim and that, with the help of doña Estefanía, she can manage to"[negotiate] a bond of mutual love--and pleasure--with her husband" (250). Welles is very clear in locating the development of the plot in the women's hands: "It is the bonding between women (Leocadia and doña Estefanía) that enables the plot to unfold, for they resist the cultural assumption of female passivity" (247). However, Leocadia's power of speech is ultimately related to her ability to reconfigure the locus of her agency, so that one can say that her speech, and that of doña Estefanía, can effect a positive outcome because it has formed and assumed responsibility for the space of its enactment.
Bypassed in all these commentaries or only referred to with respect to the configurations of power, as in El Saffar's examination of the initial encounter between Rodolfo and Leocadia, is the surprisingly prominent role given in the novella to the placement of events and to space in general. Although these are the principal questions addressed by the comments that follow, the latter may, on occasion, overlap with aspects of the analyses mentioned earlier. For instance this reading will intersect with Clamurro's in that spatial orientation is a constituent of identity; it will intersect also with Welles because the body in space is a gendered body and therefore the relationship of women to space is different from that of men.
In speaking to such spatial issues, we must begin with the notion that "[s]patiality is a primitive, so primitive that a sense of space must already be given, must already be constituted by us, on our side of things; we are not merely passive receptors of spatial information, we actively constitute the sense of space" (Morris 6). A reading of the novella which is framed by the understanding that we "actively constitute the sense of space" foregrounds the intimate interplay of spatiality and narrative at all of its key moments. It also broadens our notion of spatiality so that it encompasses from the top down, so to speak, cultural/ideological space (country, city), the space of deambulation (city, street, path), the space of habitation (homes, room), and the space "on our side of things." Thus my overall premise is that Leocadia's rape, a disordering and disorienting infraction, represents the breaching of boundaries and the disordering of space on all levels. The novella develops as a gradual reordering of such degraded spaces, principally through the agency of Leocadia and doña Estefanía.
Initially it may seem that a vertical cut down through the various layers of space, as above, may move us from the purely cultural to the purely physical. However, even the most immediate and apparently physical expression of,...
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