Playing at Life: Childhood and Play in 20Th-Century Spanish Literature and Film

Playing at Life: Childhood and Play in 20th-Century Spanish Literature and Film Makenzie Marie Seiple Greenville, Pennsylvania BA, Gettysburg College, 2008 MA, University of Virginia, 2010 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese University of Virginia December 2014 Randolph Pope David Gies Andrew Anderson Herbert Braun © Copyright by Makenzie Marie Seiple All Rights Reserved December 2014 Seiple ii Abstract This dissertation explores the representation of children’s play in eight literary and cinematic pieces from postwar Spain, ranging from 1955 to 1978. In analyzing these works, I draw on concepts from play theory, an interdisciplinary area of study encompassing research from a variety of fields, ranging from anthropology and sociology to psychology, biology, and even philosophy. As so many of these works have autobiographical components, I chose the novels and films found here focusing on writers who lived through the Spanish Civil War and/or the subsequent decade as children to gain an understanding of the effects of this experience on the child characters in their works. In this study, I explore the interactions between culture, identity, and play, as well as the use of play as a means of dealing with trauma or as a catalyst for memory. In chapter I, I analyze Juan Goytisolo’s novel Duelo en El Paraíso and Luis de Castresana’s novel El otro árbol de Guernica, considering the formation of play communities in each work and the effect of these groups on individual and group identity in a crisis situation. In chapter II, I look at the play space as a function of memory and as a space for opposition to Francoist ideology in Carlos Saura’s film La prima Angélica and Carmen Martín Gaite’s novel El cuarto de atrás. Chapter III deals with the concept of child phantasmagoria, the negative distortion of reality, and its relation to childhood trauma in Ana María Moix’s novel Julia, Víctor Erice’s film El espíritu de la colmena, and Miguel Delibes’ novel El príncipe destronado. In chapter IV, I examine role play in Esther Tusquets’ novel El mismo mar de todos los veranos in light of reversal theory as applied to adult play in order to determine its effects on the narrator’s relationship to social norms. Seiple iii Acknowledgements The following dissertation is the result of years of work and would not have been possible without the help of various individuals along the way. I would like to thank my dissertation director, Randolph Pope, whose comments on my work and encouragement to pursue this topic have been invaluable to me throughout this process. I would also like to thank my second reader, David Gies, whose endless enthusiasm for Spanish literature and film is an encouragement in itself, as well as my third reader, Andrew Anderson, whose several classes on twentieth-century Spanish literature, along with those of Mr. Pope, were instrumental in convincing this would-be medievalist to turn to contemporary Spain. I also thank my outside reader, Herbert Braun, for his willingness to be a part of this project. In addition to those directly involved in the dissertation process, I could not have made it this far without the help and support of my family, who have always pushed me to forge my own path and try new endeavours, as well as the students, faculty, and staff of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, who have always been there to lend an ear over my six years in the program. It has been a long road to get to this point, with many roadblocks along the way, but I am glad to have had the experience of working with all of the great people in this department. I feel truly blessed to have spent these past six years in the company of such a fine group of people in Charlottesville. Seiple iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter I – Playing War, Playing Peace: Play, Culture and Identity in 19 Duelo en El Paraíso and El otro árbol de Guernica Chapter II – Playing in Space and Time: Memory and Children’s Play 67 Spaces in El cuarto de atrás and La prima Angélica Chapter III – Playing Pretend: Child Phantasmagoria in Julia, El príncipe 125 destronado and El espíritu de la colmena Chapter IV – Playing a Part: Role Play in El mismo mar de todos los 175 veranos Conclusion 214 Works Cited 219 Seiple 1 Introduction No sólo repetíamos las canciones y los juegos de nuestros mayores y estábamos condenados a repetir sus vidas: nuestras imaginaciones y nuestras palabras repetían el miedo que fue suyo y que sin premeditación nos transmitieron desde que nacimos, y los golpes de aldabón en forma de argolla sobre las grandes puertas cerradas de la Casa de las Torres resuenan en mi propia conciencia al mismo tiempo que en la memoria infantil de mi madre. - Antonio Muñoz Molina, El jinete polaco A series of children’s voices permeate the novels and films of the Franco era in Spain. Whether they exist as a memory, lurk in the background, or take center stage, they are there, claiming their place in the Spanish literary and film canons. As evidence of the past, as a projection of things to come, they force readers and viewers to consider their own past and their own future in the murky backwaters of memory or in the realm of the imagination. They speak their own language, telling stories of a time in life that we may be hard pressed to recall clearly, evoking a state of mind that as adults we have long since left behind. The child character forces us to remember all that is universal about childhood, as well as everything that, as in the quotation from Muñoz Molina above, other generations of children passed down to us, be it joy or trauma. The games of these children, though they may be different in form, are our games, those we played with friends or with siblings or those we played in our own quiet corner. Seiple 2 “But,” says the child of these works, “I am different,” forcing us to also consider the time that has passed and our different historical contexts. For despite our similarities, this child is playing a different game, with different stakes. How can we understand these characters? And furthermore, why does it matter? These are the questions that led me to this dissertation topic. Reading novels from the postwar period, and later viewing films from the era, the children’s games struck me as a way of communicating with the adult world, a sort of encrypted message from the children we once were. Although written by adults and as such necessarily a reconstruction, these episodes from childhood seemed strikingly genuine and personal. And as I read and watched, I kept asking myself why these child characters were so important and what they could reveal about the culture from which they emerged. My interest in this topic began when reading Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de identidad (1967) for a course on the postwar Spanish novel, when I was struck by scenes from the main character’s childhood, several prominently featuring play, either solitary or in groups. I saw this play as a means of interpreting the experience of war, and wrote a paper discussing the formation of play groups in this novel and Goytisolo’s Duelo en El Paraíso (1955), which would later form the basis for the first chapter of this dissertation. As I wrote this paper and as I continued my studies in the doctoral program at the University of Virginia, I was left with the impression that I had only scratched the surface of a complex issue that involved the works of not just Goytisolo but also many of the authors from the postwar period. As I continued with this topic, I began to notice the strong autobiographical tendencies in many works dealing with childhood, not just in Spain but throughout the Seiple 3 world. It was this that led me to wonder about the relationship between the experience of living through war as a child, as many of the prominent writers of the postwar had done, and the depiction of childhood play. Although wary of making sharp distinctions between generations, I noticed differences between children in works by the so-called “niños de la guerra” or “generación de medio siglo” and those of their predecessors, even those writing contemporaneously. The experience of war had a great impact on these writers’ work, and among the writers themselves there is a tendency for those who were children during the Civil War to view themselves as fundamentally different from the generations preceding and following. Ana María Matute comments: “La guerra civil española, no sólo fue un impacto decisivo para mi vida de escritora, sino que me atrevo a suponer, para la mayoría de los escritores españoles de mi generación. Fuimos, pues, unos niños fundamentalmente asombrados. Los niños del largo estupor que podría decirse” (qtd. in Godoy 19). Many young writers of the postwar period echo this sentiment, calling themselves “niños de la guerra,” as seen in the epigraph which opens José Asenjo Sedano’s 1978 novel, Conversación sobre la guerra: “Nosotros fuimos los niños de la guerra…” (8). Several collections of testimonies and literary works from this generation have been published, such as Josefina Aldecoa’s Los niños de la guerra (1983), which contains short texts from ten writers born between 1925 and 1928. Although collections such as Aldecoa’s focus on individuals who had reached, as Aldecoa terms it, “la edad de la infancia consciente” (9) by the outbreak of the war in 1936, I found that many younger novelists, such as Juan Marsé (b.

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