Abstract
Miguel Delibes’s La hoja roja has been understood as a novel which, having been inspired by a neo-realist aesthetic, draws attention to the plight of the elderly and queries western tenets of progress. The article builds upon existing analyses by examining the work’s portrayal of a double obsolescence: the one urban, the other rural. Eloy’s civic-minded principles have become outmoded. On the other hand, his maid is an immigrant from the Spanish countryside, keen to assimilate to the city while remaining close to her roots. Both are marginalized by a form of modernization which corrodes communal bonds in the city and is dismissive of rural culture in toto. The article considers key elements of the novel’s treatment of progress: altered attitudes towards work, the phenomenon of circularity and repetition, the narrativizing of personal histories and experiences, literacy and illiteracy. It further examines the pathologizing of modernity in the shape of the maid’s dysfunctional boyfriend Picaza, the critique of photography, as well as the author’s intimated antidote to the alienating effects of modernity via a dialogue of tales across the rural and urban divide.
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Notes
“En mi obra hay ciudades tiernas y humanas, como la de La hoja roja, y pueblos mezquinos, como el de El tesoro o Las ratas” (García Dominguez 2005, p. 488).
Berry notes the trend towards the “dismemberment of work” (p. 166). However, for people belonging to traditional rural communities “Their work was mingled with their amusement; sometimes is was their amusement” (p. 182).
Ramón González notes that in La hoja roja “No hay casi argumento” (p. 51).
That is to say, when she marries Eloy, or when she potentially resumes her relationship with Picaza 5 years hence, following Eloy’s predicted death.
However, even the obscure motives of the original tremendista character, Pascual Duarte (Cela 1978), are perhaps more fathomable than those of Picaza.
‘“The illiteracy of the future,” someone has said, “will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography”’ (Benjamin 1999, p. 527).
See, for example, the work of the novelist Juan Valera (1824–1905).
In this regard, Eloy is notably unlike the hero of Delibes’s Diario de un jubilado (1995). Lorenzo retires at sixty, but retains strong drives with regard to both women and money. In Jesús Fernández Santos, Los bravos, Socorro is primarily a power emblem for the aging cacique, Don Prudencio.
The Homecomers was the working title of E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.
His Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja is in a similar mould.
References
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Cuadrado Gutiérrez, A. (2011). Memoria, soledad y muerte en La hoja roja de Miguel Delibes. Castilla. Estudios de Literatura, 2, 73–90.
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Squires, J. Obsolescence in Town and Country in Miguel Delibes’s La hoja roja . Neophilologus 100, 197–212 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9449-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9449-1