The representation of Paris in Spanish-American fiction
Description
This dissertation involves an examination of the image of Paris as it is developed in Spanish American fiction, beginning at the turn of the century with the modernistas and extending through highly complex contemporary treatments. No attempt is made to provide an exhaustive catalogue of Spanish American novels that take place in Paris, instead, there is brief reference to a number of works with discussion in detail reserved for the novels and short stories found particularly interesting or representative. These are Diaz Rodriguez's Idolos rotos (1901), Blest Gana's Los trasplantados (1904), Edwards Bello's Criollos en Paris (1933), Salazar Bondy's Pobre gente de Paris (1958), Elena Garro's Reencuentro de personajes (written in 1962; published in 1982), Julio Cortazar's Rayuela (1963), Julio Ramon Ribeyro's La juventud en la otra ribera and Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del metodo (1974) Over a period of nearly a century, Spanish American writers have treated Paris as a problem. Earlier writers play on the complex of pastoral associations through which Paris is regarded not as a city, but as the city (center of corruption, center of enlightenment) and Latin America, even its metropoli, as the countryside (a rural retreat that brings to mind ideas of spiritual regeneration and the values of childhood, or a sinkhole of numbing ignorance and ennui) Later novelists are keenly aware of the literary tradition that lies behind them and of the difficulty involved in representing Paris, a place that has become a commonplace. Both Cortazar and Carpentier tend to view the city as a text. Yet, although their vision is radically different from their predecessors, they, too, are trying to come to terms with the Other, and with the frightening intuition, glimpsed in almost all of these novels, that the real Paris--whether it is viewed as social body, a core of hidden knowledge or a foreign text--will always lie beyond the Latin American's ken. This manuscript is devoted to a discussion of the ways in which Spanish American writers have responded to the problems created by Paris, both as cultural and literary phenomenon, and of the strategies they have developed in fiction to communicate those responses