Carmen Martín Gaite: Divagazioni su tema

ABSTRACT
In this dissertation I am trying to study Carmen Martín Gaite’s full work to identify the peculiarities and the recurrent themes of her writing. According to the objectives of this work I, therefore, try to have a look on the whole gaitian corpus including her tales, novels, critical/historical essays and a brief summary on her poetical/theatrical work.
In the first chapter I want to sketch the biography of the salmantine author, since 1925, year of her birth, to 2000, year of her death; in the second and the third chapter I, rather, want to examine her narrative production beginning with the first short novel, El balneario (1954), just to the posthumous novel Los parentescos (2001). By this analysis it is evident that Carmen Martín Gaite’s work develops from the objective realism with Entre visillos (1957), to a mixture of reality and fantasy, real life and fiction, as we can see in the following passage of her essay Cuadernos de todo:
La literatura se introduce en nuestras vidas de una forma insen-sible y progresiva y no sólo nos va conformando el pensamiento, sino prestándonos sus propios ojos, es decir, proporcionándonos patrones con arreglo a los cuales mirar lo que pasa, escuchar lo que nos dicen, adornar nuestros sueños e interpretar los hechos de la propia novela vivida.
If the breaking of the spatial/temporal limits is a recurrent theme in Carmen Martín Gaite’s work - I explicitly refer to her novel El cuarto de atrás (1978), completely based on this principle inspired, as the author herself declares, on the todorovian idea of fantastic -,
another important theme is determined by the meditation on the figure of the interlocutor - as proved by her essay La búsqueda del interlocutor y otras búsquedas (1982).
The figure of the interlocutor is very important in the whole gaitian work but, expecially in her novels such as Retahílas (1974), completely based on the dialogue between an aunt and her nephew, and in her essays like El cuento de nunca acabar (1997), which reaffirms the importance of the interlocutor and, at the same time, explains that its presence/absence can determine important differences between oral and written narration. As important as the figure of the interlocutor is the continuous, “intimate” dialogue between Martín Gaite and the other authors, as proves the following passage of her Cuadernos de todo:
Mis cuadernos de todo surgieron cuando me vi en la necesidad de trasladar al papel los diálogos internos que mantenía con los autores de los libros que leía, o sea convertir aquella conversación en sordina en algo que realmente se produjera. Los libros te disparan a pensar. Debían tener hojas en blanco entre medías para que el diálogo se hiciera más vivo. La escritura imita el pensamiento. Lo que dicen las letras van como pensándolo, rumiándolo. Y a través del lector inician el nunca acabado diálogo de la interpretación.
The discussed themes and the same nature of Carmen Martín Gaite’s writing arouse a great interest on the national and foreign literary critics; as José Jurado Morales remarks, Carmen Martín Gaite’s incessant activity actually «se ha visto recompensada con el tiempo por multitud de estudios e investigaciones. Tanta cantidad puede llegar a abrumar y a provocar la sensación de que la obra de Martín Gaite ha sido ya lo suficientemente estudiada».
Nevertheless it is important to notice that in Italy, Carmen Martín Gaite is a niche author, as only the academic environments know her work and, for this reason, (to let the reading public know her work), I consider that some “divagazioni su tema” agree with Jurado Morales’ deduction, that is «en una obra tan sugerente como la suya qued[a]n nuevas sendas por explorar» .