No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
AN AUTHOR who reworks a story adapts the original in such a way that his new story, while obviously based on it, is endowed with new meaning. The original is usually adapted by means of a clear alteration of characterization and plot with a resultant change in underlying philosophy between the original and the reworked story. The Greek plays, for instance, have been altered in this way by Existentialists to diminish the role of fate and to emphasize human responsibility. Rarely is a story reworked in such a way that the meaning of the new work lies not in its difference from but in its similarity to the original.1 To effect this, plot and characterization are only minimally altered and crucial importance is given to a change of period. The new setting superficially disguises but in fact emphasizes the correspondence between the two stories. Some of the key problems encountered in this kind of reworking, such as the avoidance of mere imitation, archaism, and triviality of statement,2 can be revealed by a structural examination of Francisco Ayala's El rapto,3 a short novel based on an episode from Don Quijote.
1 Ayala has shown a continuing interest in the problem of the reuse of plots. In his article “Los dos amigos,” Revista de accidente, iii (1965), 287–306, he examined the attempts of post-Cervantes writers such as Philip Massinger, Nicholas Rowe, and Guillen de Castro to rework the plot of “El curioso impertinente” and found that major changes in characterization and plot led to divergent (and ineffective) results. His essays “El equivoco: realidad e invención” and “Experiencia viva y creatión poética,” in Experiencia e invención (Madrid: Taurus, 1960), deal with different literary representations of the same experience. In the first article, which concerns the plot of Le malentendu, Ayala examines the case of an author, Camus, who uses a plot, apparently without being aware that it is an old folk tale. The second deals with the representation of the same incident (the beard-washing ceremony) by Luis Zapata in his Misceldnea and by Cervantes a few years later in Don Quijote. In his previous fiction, too, in “Un cuento de Maupassant” and “Violation en California,” the question of different representations of the same experience is treated. All these cases are, of course, different from the kind of reworking Ayala undertakes in El rapto.
2 Jorge Luis Borges in his story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956), pp. 45–57, illustrates imaginatively the difficulty of avoiding these dangers when an author strives to achieve sameness in the reworked story.
3 El rapto, La novela popular, No. I (Madrid: Gráficas Aragon, 1965); and “El rapto” in De raplos, violaciones y otras inconveniencias (Madrid: Alfaguarra, 1966), pp. 7–100. All references to the text in this article are to the later edition in which the printer's errors of the first edition are corrected and some changes, which are discussed below, are made.
4 Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews, Book u, Chs. iv and vi, has evidently based his episode entitled “The History of Leonora, or the Unfortunate Jilt” on the same episode used by Ayala in this reworking. Fielding's episode, which has been criticized for not advancing the narrative's progress but which in keeping with his novel's subtitle is “written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes,” uses only some elements of the original plot and develops only one of the themes of Cervantes' episode.
6 In his perceptive article, “Cervantes y Francisco Ayala: original refundición de un cuento narrado en El Quijote,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, lxvi (1966), 133–139, an article based on the first edition of El rapto, Alberto Sánchez has pointed out some of the similarities between the two stories and some of the changes Ayala has made. He has not, however, gone into the question of the ultimate meaning of the reworking, of the structural complexities involved in achieving this meaning, and of the relationship this meaning bears to Ayala's work in general.
6 Miguel de Cervantes, Obras completas, ed. Angel Valbuena Prat (Madrid: Aguilar, 1960), pp. 1264, 1265.
7 Because of a change in the use of time with regard to the duration of the story's action, this ambiguous ending seems more fitting in the second edition of El rapto. At the beginning of the first edition the narrator reports that the action took place years ago: “De esto hace ya años. Debió de ser en 57 o 58” (p. 21). The action occupies only a few weeks, and an ambiguous ending at so distant a time in the past seems improbable given the omniscience and curiosity which characterize the narrator. In the later story the narrator uses the indefinite past: “De esto hace ya tiempo,” thus making it possible that the ambiguous ending coincides with the time of writing.
8 In a broad sense there is a parallel between Cervantes' and Ayala's use of the prologue. The mixture of biography and inventiveness of which the prologue consists recalls Cervantes' prologue to Don Quijote, Part i, where Cervantes presents himself as the author of Don Quijote participating in a fictional experience with an imagined character, creating in this way an appropriate mood for the story.
9 I have preferred the term “dramatic narration” to “free indirect style” or “indirect interior monologue” because of the predominant application of the latter terms to the presentation of pre-speech levels of thought process. Cf. Wolfgang Kayser, Interpretatión y anáXisis de la obra literaria (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1958), pp. 228–231, and Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, Calif., 1955), pp. 24–33. Ayala's technique serves not only to reveal unspoken thoughts but also to convey actual speech resulting from the intercourse of his characters.
10 See my El arte narrativo de Francisco Ayala (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), passim, and especially the analysis of El fondo del vaso, pp. 217–228.
11 Within El rapto itself there is a case of duplication of experience. Vicente tells Patricio of a strange experience he had in Germany, and Patricio in turn tells him of an incident, identical in all its essentials to the one Vicente has narrated, that had taken place in Spain.