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Squires, Jeremy S.
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Squires, Jeremy S.
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Squires, Jeremy S.
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- PublicationOrphanhood as Genesis in Miguel Delibes’s La sombra del ciprés es alargadaMiguel Delibes's La sombra del ciprés es alargada (1948) has been read as a Catholic novel (Hart 1990), a demythifying novel (Agawu-Kakraba 1996) and an existentialist novel (Buckley 2012). These interpretations share a common focus on the young protagonist's obsession with death and on the malign influence of the doctrine of non-involvement (desasimiento), as propounded by the protagonist's teacher. However, this article contends that the genesis of the youth's angst is unresolved mourning related to orphanhood. The novel conveys this cryptically by various means: the doubling of the protagonist's identity thanks to his intense friendship with a fellow pupil, biophilic resonances and the self-subversive quality of the first-person narrative technique. Like Carmen Laforet's Nada (1944), Delibes's debut novel may thus be termed a work of inter-generational trauma.
405 - PublicationA Note on the Chueta Figure in Ana María Matute's Primera memoriaThe lyricism of Ana María Matute’s prose has sometimes obscured what Janet Pérez has rightly called her "determined sociopolitical engagement". A one-time member of the Turia group, which included the young Juan Goytisolo, she has been associated with other practitioners of the novela social, albeit often with certain reservations. However, such reservations may in part be due to the fact that what has gone unappreciated in Matute’s engagement (besides, as Pérez notes, its determined intent) is its subtlety. Her use of the chueta figure in Primera memoria, for instance, is both understated yet fundamental.
496 - Publication'El cazador-cazador' As Green Hunter and Renovator of Poetics in the Work of Miguel DelibesThe novelist Miguel Delibes (1920-2010) was both a passionate small-game hunter, who wrote several books on the subject during his lifetime, and a staunch ecologist. This article gives an analysis which reconciles hunting and biocentrism in his work and further probes the relation between the author's hunting books and his fiction. Beginning with a review of the history and culture of hunting in Spain, it emerges that Delibes applies an extremely strict definition to real hunting (la caza-caza), which he regards as a form of low-impact subsistence or self-provisioning and therefore ethically superior to stock farming. Additionally, the hunter identifies with animality and thereby overcomes the modern sense of apartness from nature. The article notes the stylistic affinities between Delibes' hunting books and his novels, beginning with Diario de un cazador (1955) - particularly their non-standard literary representations of nature - and suggests that the author renovated his fiction from the 1950s onwards by redeploying techniques he had first developed in the hunting books. Unconventional literary techniques figure prominently in this crossover.
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