Abstract:In a recent essay on La Regenta, Cristina Pena Marin notes that the narrative of identity formation is discontinuous, and that attempts to produce a coherent I may involve the incorporation in the tex...In a recent essay on La Regenta, Cristina Pena Marin notes that the narrative of identity formation is discontinuous, and that attempts to produce a coherent I may involve the incorporation in the text of rejected elements—including other Is (1994, 138-9). This essay traces the interplay of rejection and incorporation in Ana Maria Moix's Julia, and its role in the identity formation of the novel's eponymous central character.2 Julia, Moix's first novel, is the narration of a sleepless night in which the twenty-year-old Julia looks back on the events that led to her attempted suicide. She traces the source of her present anxieties not to a particular event but to un largo y lento proceso which she recalls as un film entrecortado .. . con indudable continuidad a pesar de largas secuencias oscuras, veladas, olvidadas (47).3 The continuous, interrupted, sequence registers (but does not attempt to recover) que se habia perdido. This algo is not specified, but its loss is coextensive with una degradacion paulatina [del] extrano y peculiar universo llamado Mama (47), and its mnemonic plotting in the form of una pequena historia (47) is the motor of the narrative. Memory and film figure as crucial elements in the narrative's production of identity, but they are not its only elements. Outside of text identity is achieved not only within discourse— through rela tions with others in language—but also through the body and its rela tion to the psyche. Since within a text the bodily and the psychic figure exclusively under the sign of discourse, as discursive effect, their role in the narrative production of identity can often be under played. For example, Pena Marin suggests that narrative identity is achieved when a character says That is I, thereby revealing an iden tification between the discourse's subject ('I'), and the image of himRead More
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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