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Interior Duplication and the Problem of Form in the Modern Spanish Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leon Livingstone*
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit 2, Mich.

Extract

The interplay of illusion and reality as the subject matter of literature has, in the modern context, often been considered the particular invention and virtually exclusive province of Pirandello but, as one critic has aptly said in this connection, “it is so far from being a peculiarly Pirandellian theme as to be perhaps the main theme of literature in general.” In the case of Spanish literature in particular the reversible relationship of the real and the imaginative, of art and life, has been responsible for the Pirandellian type of inversion centuries before the advent of the Italian playwright. Américo Castro has written of Cervantes and Pirandello, while Angel del Río traces as far back as the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor of Juan Ruiz “a feature which, if not exclusive, is quite characteristic of Spanish literature … the intervention and even the personal appearance of the author in the work.” Significant, however, as is the appearance of what Joseph Gillet calls the “autonomous character,” the presence in a work of a fictional character who claims equality with his creator or of an author who projects himself into his work as a fictional being is only a symptom, or at best the result, of a general aesthetic which is the expression of a profound metaphysical concept. In short, it is the reflection of a particular concept of reality, the expression of a way of life. This is the conclusion of Américo Castro in the particular case of the Libro de buen amor in his study of which he arrives at the conviction that “the poet's manner of entering into his literary reality and installing himself in it, is characteristic of the Arabic way of life” (p. 406). The functional fluidity of the art of the work is that of the arabesque, of endless open lines alternating between “ins” and “outs” (p. 413). This aesthetic in turn is the product of a vision of the world in which things have no fixed, immutable position—as they do in the Occidental world, constructed out of the Greek idea of the substantial being of things—but are as real in the experience of the conscious person as in the imagination of the sleeper (p. 416). Consequently, in the literature which expresses this interpretation of reality, nothing is thought of or represented as absolute existence, bounded by either a real or ideal limit (p. 439). In the oriental concept of reality, Castro sums up, everything is interpenetrable and interchangeable (p. 439, n. 68).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1958 , pp. 393 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 393 Eric Bentley, ed. Naked Masks (New York, 1952), p. viii.

Note 2 in page 393 “Cervantes y Pirandello,” in Santa Teresa y otros en-sayos (Santander, 1929); Hisloria de la literaiura espanola (New York, 1948), i, 69-70. All translations in the text of this article are mine, unless otherwise noted.

Note 3 in page 393 “The Autonomous Character in Spanish and European Literature,” HR, xxiv (1956), 179-190. Many of the examples set forth in Gillet's penetrating study are unavoidably duplicated in this article, although independently arrived at. Gillet traces as far back as the 13th-century Libro de Alexandre and Libro de Apolonio “an incipient detachment of the author from the characters” (p. 180). His conclusion is, however, that the modern usage constitutes a “new attitude,” a technique deliberately practiced by the artist, in contradistinction to its application in the past, when it was just “a fortunate accident.” That the contemporary technique in its various ramifications is rather only a restatement in modern terms of a relativistic metaphysic that is constitutional in Spanish art is a major thesis of the present study.

Note 4 in page 393 “El Libro de buen amor del Arcipreste de Hita,” in La realidad hislôrica de Espana (Mexico, 1954), pp. 378-442.

Note 5 in page 394 “Il y a la réalité et il y a les rêves; et puis il y a une seconde réalité” (Si le grain ne meurt, quoted by Pierre LaFille, André Gide, romancier, [Paris, 1954], p. 188). La-Fille also speaks of the sense of “l'irréalité du réel… et une certaine réalité de l'imaginaire” in Gide.

Note 6 in page 394 Don Romualdo will be discussed later. The example of Putois is cited by Gillet: “Putois the imaginary gardener in Anatole France's Crainquebille. Created as a defense against a prying female by members of the Bergeret family, all drawing on a common mysterious fund, he came to life in a most convincing shape …. Putois had been there all along, inchoate but uncreated, yet potentially an authentic form of life, waiting in his limbo until the prejudices and fears and desires of the community drew together his disjecta membra and gave him shape” (pp. 186-187). Doctor Bianchon is cited by Castro: “También Balzac, en el delirio de su agonia, reclamaba como ultimo asidero para su esperanza, la presen-cia del doctor Bianchon, el médico de sus novelas” (La realidad histôrica de Es pana, p. 435).

Note 7 in page 394 Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry (Baltimore, 1940), Ch. vii, “The Exaltation of Reality” (on Gongora).

Note 8 in page 394 Castro considers the metaphorism of both Gongora and Juan Ruiz Arabic in structure (La realidad …, p. 409).

Note 9 in page 394 I have in mind in particular the Ortega distinction between lyric poetry, which is subjective stylization, “unreality,” and the novel, fundamentally realistic in nature. It is noteworthy that in the hands of writers who express the concept under discussion the novel often assumes a lyric cast as, for example, the Sonatas of Valle-Inclàn or the subtitled “novelas poemâticas” of Pérez de Ayala. (See n. 13 below.)

Note 10 in page 394 This will be discussed later in this article.

Note 11 in page 394 I am not unaware that Stephen Gilman in The Art of La Celestina (Madison, 1956), rejects the classification of this work as a novel and labels it, as also the Libra de buen amor (in agreement with Castro), ageneric. But this seems to me to beg the question, which is whether the novel can be anything but ageneric when it attempts to portray a reality that is more profound than the merely sensory. Also highly debatable, it seems to me, is Gilman's contention that it is the Arcipreste de Talavera in the 15th-century Corbacho rather than the Arcipreste de Hita in the Libro de buen amor who “initiates what might be called the fictional relationship of author and character, a relationship consciously completed by Cervantes and Shakespeare (and hardly speculated upon again before the time of Pirandello and Unamuno)” (p. 200).

Note 12 in page 394 E.g.: “El Quijote alcanzó la significatión de un poema que simboliza el destino del hombre en este mundo” (F. Schtirr, “Cervantes y el romanticismo” Anales Cer-vantinos, i [Madrid, 1951], 43).

Note 13 in page 395 Promeleo, Luz de domingo, La caida de los Limones.

Note 14 in page 395 Cf. Castro: “La tendencia a equiparar el sujeto y el objeto es funcional en la poesia arabe y es auténtico aspecto de la estructura del vivir arabe” {La realidad …, p. 410, n. 39).

Note 15 in page 395 See also Ortega y Gasset: “En algûn instante casi 11e-gamos a dudar de si somos nosotros quienes miramos la figura ? si no es màs bien la figura quien nos esta observando a nosotros” (Papeles sobre Velàzquez y Goya [Madrid, 1950], p. 257). The exhibition of this painting in the Prado Museum in Madrid is brilliantly conceived to conform to the illusory effect. The canvas, to which an entire room is devoted, is reflected in a full-length mirror placed at an angle in one corner. The effect is astonishing, for the illusion is thereby so heightened that the reflection seems more real than the painting itself.

Note 16 in page 395 “Es el cuadro de mayor artificio para satisfacer el deseo de inmortalidad y conseguir burladero en que salvarse de la embestida de la muerte” (Don Diego Velazquez [Buenos Aires, 1943], p. 71); “Azorin … ha intentado en literatura lo que està conseguido en este cuadro” (p. 70).

Note 17 in page 395 See quotation from Huxley, below.

Note 18 in page 396 “J'aime assez qu'en une œuvre d'art, on retrouve ainsi transposé à l'échelle des personnages, le sujet même de cette œuvre. Rien ne l'éclairé mieux et n'établit plus sûrement toutes les proportions de l'ensemble. Ainsi dans tels tableaux de Memling ou de Quentin Metzys, un petit miroir convexe et sombre reflète à son tour l'intérieur de la pièce où se joue la scène peinte. Ainsi dans le tableau des Menines de Velazquez (mais un peu différemment). Enfin, en littérature, dans Hamlet, la scène de la comédie; et ailleurs d'autres pièces. Dans Wilhelm Meister, les scènes de marionnettes ou de fêtes au château. Dans La Chute de la Maison Usher, la

lecture que l'on fait à Roderick, etc…‥ Aucun de ces

exemples n'est absolument juste. Ce qui le serait beaucoup plus, ce qui dirait bien mieux ce que j'ai voulu dans mes Cahiers, dans mon Narcisse et dans la Tentative c'est la comparaison avec ce procédé du blason qui consiste, dans le premier, à en mettre un second ‘en abyme’ “ (Journal, 1893, p. 41; cited by LaFille, p. 206).

Note 19 in page 396 Point Counter Point (New York, 1930), pp. 350-351.

Note 20 in page 396 Ibid., p. 350.

Note 21 in page 396 See LaFille, p. 209.

Note 22 in page 396 “Sa sensation intuitive d'une réalité insaisissable à nos sens” (LaFille, p. 188).

Note 23 in page 396 This may merely involve a transference of the author, as himself, to the scene of his own work, on the same plane of reality. This emerges very clearly in the discussion of Lope de Vega's practice of intervening in his plays in the guise of the character Belardo (José Maria de Cossio, Lope, personaje de sus comedias [discurso de ingreso], Madrid, Real Academia Espafiola, 1948). Cossio admits that Lope's projection of himself into his works involves no modification of his personality, that is to say, no conversion of himself into a literary character. (“No creo que se atribuya a Lope un solo papel ? accion que, de haber sido el suceso real, le hubiera parecido repulsivo ? desagradable” [p. 17], “Ciertamente, si entra Lope en este ajuste de cuentas con Belardo, no es dudoso que reconocerâ la fidelidad de su figuracion teatral a su autéhtica realidad humana” [p. 87].) Somewhat inappropriate, therefore, seems the statement attributing superiority on the part of Lope and his autoprojections to the technique of Renaissance painters who introduced self-portraits into their paintings (p. 2), particularly in view of the fact that Cossio's study does not (perhaps, by its very nature, cannot) include a consideration of Lo fingido verdadero, Lope's outstanding contribution to the play-within-a-play tradition. (See Roy Temple House, “Lope de Vega and ‘Un drama nuevo’,” RR, xin [1922], 84-87.) Moreover, Cossio's disparaging allusion to the Pirandello-Unamuno problem of the character in relation to his author establishes very definitely the disparity between Lope's technique and that of interior duplication (pp. 86-87). Since Lope and Belardo are on the same plane of reality, their “comun conciencia” can obviously involve no confrontation of reality with its other face, imagination.

Note 24 in page 397 Meiitaciones del Quijote in Obras de José Ortega y Gasset, i (Madrid, 1943), 65.

Note 25 in page 397 See n. 2 above. The parallel between Cervantes and Pirandello is not, however, complete for, as Castro indicates, in Six Characters in Search of an Author the anguish of the characters stems from their not having been fully drawn by the author, whereas in the Quijote they are conscious of possessing a real existence, recorded in literary form, and are principally concerned with whether the author has correctly interpreted them (pp. 226-227).

Note 26 in page 397 See La realidad …, p. 416.

Note 27 in page 397 Valbuena Prat calls it “One of the works in which appears the ‘play-within-a-play’ as Un drama nuevo of Tamayo y Baus and Six Characters in Search of cm Author of Piran-dello” (Calderôn de la Barca: Autos sacrammtales, LXIX [Madrid: Clâsicos Castellanos, 1926], 30). Valbuena also notes that “El lugar comun de la ‘vida comedia’ se da en todas las literatures, y antes de Calderôn, Lope habia tenido intuicion de un tema dramâtico anâlogo en Lo fingido ver-dadero” and alludes to the theme as a continuation of the tradition of Seneca in his Epistles (LXXVII and LXXVI) : “Quomodo fabula sic vita” (p. 28).

Note 28 in page 398 Valbuena calls it “Circunstancia que parece un anticipo de la famosa production de Pirandello” (p. 28).

Note 29 in page 398 Cf.:

Alitor. No, bien pudiera enmendar

los yerros que viendo estoy;

pero por eso les di

albedrio superior

a las pasiones humanas,

por no quitarles la action

de merecer en sus obras;

y asi dejo a todos hoy

hacer libres sus papeles. (11. 929-937) 30 There is naturally a gap in the continued practice of interior duplication in the rationalistic neoclassic period, but even here might be cited such a work as Moratin's La comedia nueva ? el cafe where the p)ay-within-a-play technique is adapted with fine satiric effect to the didactic precepts of the age.

Note 31 in page 398 “Realism and the Epic in Galdos' Zaragoza,” Estudios Hispânicos (Homenaje a Archer M. Huntington) (Spanish Dept., Wellesley, 1952), p. 171.

Note 32 in page 398 E.g.: “If the author's object in writing Narazîn and Hal-ma was to excite our sympathies for the poor and the oppressed, he comes nearer to achieving that object in Miseri-cordia. There is an atmosphere of unreality about the two former works which is conducive to impatience on the part of the reader. Not so in Misericordia …” (L. B. Walton, Perez Galdos and the Spanish Novel of the Nineteenth Century [New York, 1927], p. 208).

Note 33 in page 399 Vida y obra de Galdus (Madrid, 1951), p. 159.

Note 34 in page 399 Ibid., pp. 252-253. Another interesting treatment of the theme of the created character who comes to life, in this case the entire plot of a novel, is that of El socio, by the Chilean novelist Jenaro Prieto, published in 1928. It is interesting to note that Prieto bases his theme on a statement of Oscar Wilde, “The only real beings are those who have never existed … .” This is certainly not a surprising connection, however, since the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray probably best exemplifies among English writers the theme of the interaction of art and life. I can think of no exact parallel to Wilde's novel in Spanish literature although there is an approach to it in Unamuno's Abel Sanchez, where the Abel-Cain conflict of the two protagonists duplicates the painting of the Biblical theme by one of these characters.

Note 35 in page 399 The connection between the play-within-a-play and the invention and anticipation of reality, as in the Don Romualdo episode, is admirably exemplified in Schnitzler's The Green Cockatoo. Here the actor Henri fabricates out of whole cloth the story of his wife's infidelity with the Duc de Cadignan and proceeds to act out his murder of the latter. To his amazement and horror he later discovers that the infidelity is true, and in his blind rage makes the murder of the playacting a reality.

Note 36 in page 399 And a favorite of Unamuno's. See H. C. Berkowitz, “Unamuno's Relations with Galdos,” HR, win (1940), 322.

Note 37 in page 399 E.g.: “The book concludes strangely. After his death, Maximo Manso delivers, from the next world, a homily upon the fate of various characters in the novel. This, however, is quite in keeping with the whimsicality of the opening chapters—where Maximo assures us that he has no real existence but is merely a fictitious being called into shadowy life by an author …” (Walton, Perez Galdos, p. 154).

Note 38 in page 399 El amigo manso, 3rd ed. (Buenos Aires, 1948), p. 7. (The novel was originally published in 1882, Set personaggi … in 1918.) The technique of the incantation is, of course, borrowed from El diablo cojttelo.

Note 39 in page 400 E.g. : “—Hombre di Dios—le dije—, iquiere usted acabar de una vez commigo y recoger esta carne mortal en que para divertirse me ha metido? jCosa mâs sin gracia … !” (p. 259).

Note 40 in page 400 Cf.: “iQuién se llamarâ dueSo de si, quién blasonarâ de informar con la idea la vida, que no se vea desmentido cuando menos lo piense, por la despotica imposicion de la misma vida?” (p. 103).

Note 41 in page 400 Compare the theme of La Ma es sueûo and the following passage: “Todo esto que me pasa y que les pasa a los que me rodean, realidad ? es fiction?, es acaso todo esto un sueflo de Dios ? de quien sea, que se desvanecerâ en cuanto El despierte …” (Niebla, 6th ed. [Buenos Aires and Mexico, 1947], p. 102).

Note 42 in page 400 “Lo mâs liberador del arte es que le hace a uno dudar de que exista …. !Ser ? no ser! que dijo Hamlet, uno de los que inventaron a Shakespeare” (p. 164).

Note 43 in page 400 “Yo soy el Dios de estos dos pobres diablos nivolescos” (p. 146).

Note 44 in page 400 “Pues también Unamuno es cosa de libros” (p. 178).

Note 45 in page 401 This unavoidable liberty of existence leads to the anguish on which both Ortega and the existentialists insist. However, in this sense it is the antirational Unamuno who is the existentialist rather than Ortega, who rejects rationalism but not reason. The harmonizing of the relative worlds of the subjective and objective lead in Ortegan thought to a new concept of vital reason which does not separate life and reason but harmonizes them. I take this opportunity to rectify my qualification of Ortega as existentialist in a previous article (“Ortega y Gasset's Philosophy of Art,” PMLA, LXVII [Sept. 1952], 609-654).

Note 46 in page 401 “El género literario en filosofia,” La Torre, iv (Uni-versidad de Puerto Rico, 1953), 11-39, esp. p. 37; and, by the same author, “La novela como método de conocimien-to,” Presencia y ausencia del existencialismo en Espana (Bogota, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1953). The latter has also been published in English as “The Novel as a Means of Knowledge” in Confluence, in (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 207-219.

Note 47 in page 401 “Mi culto al quijotismo como religion nacional,” Del sentimiento trâgico de la vida, 7th ed. (Buenos Aires and Mexico, 1945), 255 and passim.

Note 48 in page 401 E.g., ?. Gomez de Baquero (“Andrenio”) in Pirandello en Espana (Madrid, 1928), p. 18: “La vida, en esa expresion, es una metâfora. El lenguaje figurado es peligroso en toda clase de teorias. No hay manera de proscribirle sin renunciar al colorido artistico de la expresion. Mas no se ha de tomar a la letra, sino teniendo présente siempre su indole ale-gorica.” Compare this statement by Unamuno in Très novelas ejemplares y un prôlogo (Buenos Aires and Mexico, 1939), p. 22: “Los pobres sujetos que temen la tragedia, esas sombras de hombres que leen para no enterarse ? para matar el tiempo—tendrân que matar la eternidad—, al encontrarse en una tragedia, ? en una comedia, ? en una novela, ? en una nivola, si queréis, con un nombre, con nada menos que todo un nombre, ? con una mujer, con nada menos que una mujer, se preguntan: 'iPero de dônde habrâ sacado este autor esto?' A lo que no cabe sino una respuesta, y es : 'i de ti, no !' Y como no lo ha sacado uno de él, del hombre cotidiano y crepuscular, es inutil presentarselo, porque no lo reconoce por hombre. Y es capaz de Uamarle simbolo ? alegoria.”

Note 49 in page 401 “Sus vitalizaciones son muy distintas de la abstracta per-sonificacion usual en la alegoria medieval europea”—thus Castro (La realidad …, p. 410), discussing the use of simile and metaphor in Arabic poetry; and cf. also: “Examinemos ahora el hecho de pasar una figura literaria a ser sentida como persona en verdad existente … De nada sirve que la logica racionalista disuelva estas figuras en temas impersonales” (p. 435).

Note 50 in page 402 It is worthy of note that the play-within-a-play technique and the adoption of a literary framework as the controlling boundaries of a work of art are found combined in a work as devoid of philosophic import as Tamayo's Un drama nuevo. In this play the characters are drawn from the literary world, evolved out of a reference in Hamlet (“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well.”) with an equating of the literary and the real—Yorick Walton, Shakespeare—that makes the treatment border closely on the Pirandellian technique without actually achieving it. The example, in any event, serves to point up the conclusion that interior duplication is merely one particular aspect of a broadly encompassing category of art-within-art, of art which is the expression of the mirroring of the raw materials of reality in art.

Note 51 in page 402 The same is true to a certain extent of Unamuno, for it is difficult to separate in him the real person and the self-created, exhibitionistic image. See A. Sanchez Barbudo, “Los últimos afios de Unamuno,” HR, xix (1951), 281-322.

Note 52 in page 402 Ed. Manuel Salas (New York, 1945). The device of pictorial comparison is used also by Pardo Bazàn and Baroja.

Note 53 in page 402 The essential role of mirrored reflections in the esper-pento is redefined in a recent study in which the form is characterized as “a representation, in puppet form, of a tragic hero who has been caught and held for a moment in the distorted shape bestowed on him by comic mirrors” (J. H. Brooks, “Valle-Inclàn and the esperpento,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, xxxiii [1956], 159).

Note 54 in page 403 E.g. : “Ahi tenéis a Nietzsche, que inventé- matemd-ticamente (!!!) aquel remedo de la inmortalidad del alma que se llama la vuelta eterna” and “la vuelta eterna, mez-quino remedo de la inmortalidad” (Del sentimlento tragico, pp. 89 and 49).

Note 55 in page 403 “Siendo el numéro de itomos ? primeros elementos irréductibles finito, en el universo eterno tiene que volver alguna vez a darse una combination como la actual, y por lo tanto, tiene que repetirse un numéro eterno de veces lo que ahora pasa” (ibid., pp. 89-90).

Note 56 in page 403 See n. 11 above.

Note 57 in page 403 ?í? Baroia: Obras complétas, i (Madrid, 1946), 255.

Note 58 in page 404 “Alguna vez he observado que las novelas mâs inte-resantes de este tiempo dejan un poco de descontento : no son del todo novelas, precisamente por intentar serlo a fondo, mâs de verdad que las tradicionales. Frente a buena parte de la novela contemporânea, los que creen que esta no puede ser cosa sustancialmente distinta de lo que conocio el siglo pasado dicen que es ‘ensayo’ y hay que darles la razon, pero aclarando las cosas: ensayo de novela, intento de descubrir nuevas posibilidades de un género ha.sta ahora solo ex-plorado en algunas de sus dimensiones” (Julian Marias, “Dona Inès,” Insula [Madrid, 15 Oct. 1953], p. 1).

Note 59 in page 404 See my article, “The Theme of the Paradoxe sur le comédien in the Novels of Pérez de Ayala,” HR, xxn (1954), 208-223.

Note 60 in page 404 Belarmino y Apolonio (Buenos Aires, 1939), p. 28.

Note 61 in page 404 E.g.: “Es un error representarse la novela—y me refiero sobre todo a la moderna—como un orbe infinito, del cual pueden extraerse siempre nuevas formas. Mejor fuera ima-ginarla como una cantera de vientre énorme, pero fini to. Existe en la novela un numéro definido de temas posibles … hoy … Es prâcticamente imposible hallar nuevos temas… . En suma, creo que el género novela, si no esta irremediable-mente agotado, se halla, de cierto, en su perfodo ultimo, y padece una tal penuria de temas posibles, que el escritor necesita compensarla con la exquisita calidad de los demâs ingredientes necesarios para integrar un cuerpo de novela” (Ideas sobre la novela, Obras de José Ortega y Gassel, 3rd ed. [Madrid, 1943], pp. 1013-1014).

Note 62 in page 404 “Yo, que siento bastante pesimismo ante el porvenir inmediato de las artes … creo que es la novela una de las pocas labranzas que aun puedan rendir frutos egregios, tal vez mâs exquisitos que todos los de anteriores cosechas”; and “Con la novela no se puede jugar. Es tal vez lo unico serio que queda en el orbe poético” (Espiritu de la letra, Obras, p. 1078).

Note 63 in page 404 Belarmino y Apolonio, p. 28.

Note 64 in page 405 Third ed. (Buenos Aires and Mexico, 1947). The theme, as the title indicates, is a refutation of the Calderonian idea of honor in El mêdico de su honra.

Note 65 in page 405 This section of the novel runs from p. 49 to p. 89.

Note 66 in page 405 Thus Erich Auerbach in Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N. J., 1953), p. 545, on “André Gide, in whose Faux-Monnayeurs there is a constant shifting of the viewpoint from which the events (themselves multi-layered) are surveyed, and who carries this procedure to such an extreme that the novel and the account of the genesis of the novel are interwoven in the ironic vein of the romanticists.” Friedrich Schiirr in “Cervantes y el romanticismo,” Amies cervantinos, ? (Madrid, 1951), 43-70, makes the same application to Cervantes. Schürr says that this explains the double perspective of characters who are both literary and real, defining romantic irony as “that particular form of suspension between illusion and criticism … [which] consists of the author's critically contemplating his own work, intercalating critical considerations on poetry in the poetry itself, rising above the latter, together with the reader, in full liberty and knowledge” (p. 50). I am indebted to my colleague, ?. B. Ashcom, for drawing to my attention a similar reference—as for many other helpful suggestions in connection with this article—that of Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, “Dos huellas del Esplandiân en el Quijote y el Ferules” in Romance Philology, ix (1955-56), 156-162, in which she says: “Hay también en el Esplandiân una curiosa actitud, muy alejada del género caballeresco y muy tipica del Quijote: el autor se asoma en la novela, barajando los pianos de realidad y ficcion para criticar ironicamente su propio libro ? los antécédentes de su libro” (p. 157).

Note 67 in page 406 “Se trata de una narración poemâtica escrita como un mero ejercicio al margen de una obra novelistica con otras preocupaciones y otros rasgos, que no la incluye necesaria-mente en su sistema” (La sala de espéra, Buenos Aires, 1953, “Nota del Autor”).