Literature and Errancy. Digression and the Contemporary Spanish Novel

This research arose from a study of Javier Marías's novels and his stylistic digressiveness, and, in particular, from an attempt to explain the nature of his prose work Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time). This led me to engage closely with this text and gradually to extrapolate from this engagement a method for approaching and explaining the narrative, a method that can help elucidate to a remarkable degree many other narratives akin to Negra espalda that have been published in the meantime (due, in part, to their indebtedness to the latter).

Negra espalda is the most digressive of Marías's prose narratives. This digressiveness, however, is quite all-embracing: the work can be called an errant narrative on a number of levels. These I have abstracted to form the method that helps me approach and explain other prose narratives. The method or theory is the following.

1) Works such as Negra espalda and many other recent Spanish and European ones can be called generically digressive, errant, hybrid or indeterminate, and thus raise questions about the ontological status of the genre of the novel (e.g. what constitutes a novel?): they move across a range of genres of writing, from autobiographical, biographical, travel, diary and essay writing, to short-story or fictional writing more generally (Chambers calls this phenomenon 'genre-switching'); frequently the main narrators bear the authors' names, thus the works play an 'ontological hide-and-seek'.

2) They tend to be digressive as regards story line, and are ultimately plotless narratives; instead of plot events there is an emphasis on characters' consciousness (e.g. the diachronic syntax of narrative may be fragmented or the elements making up the narrative may remain episodic instances and, seemingly, impertinent [in relation to each other]; rather than diachronic progression there is digressive amplification of the narrative), although they are all in many ways concerned with remembering the recent past, especially Spain's Civil War and the Franco years, but also the European twentieth century as a whole.

3) They are stylistically digressive: one or multiple, shifting narrators and errant points of view make up centres of consciousness; they employ rhetorical devices, such as parentheses and interpolations, with dilatory effects; they are characterized by styles tending to move from the concrete to the abstract, tending towards aphoristic statements, and are also frequently conjectural, thus reflecting the movement of a mind discovering truth as it goes, thinking while it writes.

4) The processes of the creative imagination laid bare in these works// both in terms of which the narrative is shaped and in the way these processes are explicitly discussed in the works themselves // are digressive or errant; they are closely related to the workings of memory and often involve seemingly unconscious processes of association, in addition to breaking the 'pernicious rule of preconceived design'.

Many of these features are, in themselves, not new phenomena and can be traced back, especially through European Modernism and Spanish modernismo, to Miguel de Cervantes and to the earliest periods of Hellenistic prose fiction, when Historiae were 'stories' and 'histories' at the same time. In their particular combination and manifestation in present-day prose narratives, though, they do make up a new type of 'false novel' or 'errant text' that represents a significant development in Spanish literature, closely related to a European phenomenon.

I propose to discuss these aspects at length and analyze in detail, by way of these four categories, three of the most representative of these narratives (Negra espalda del tiempo, Sefarad by Antonio Muñoz Molina and La loca de la casa by Rosa Montero), and to explore the questions that their errancy raises, in the context of changes in the Spansih and European novel form.