ABSTRACT
By way of entry While Natàlia’s narrative in La plaça del Diamant is carried forward by a succession of “ands” that exclude both perspective and decision making, El mismo mar de todos los veranos ( The Same Sea as Every Summer , 1978) is replete with “ors” that present the reader with a plethora of choices, although the narrative does little to point the way. In spite of their many differences, both of these novels gesture toward the essential need for a connection with an Other, the presence of an interlocutor, for the articulation of memory. This, Esther Tusquets’s fi rst novel, was published three years after Franco’s death, in the same year as the birth of Spain’s democratic constitution, and yet it still portrays a disoriented memory that is deeply rooted in a Barcelona described as being in fl ux. This novel shows, then, that the disruption of access to the past through memory, and the dominance of a unicursal narrative, did not disappear with the dictator. 1 El mismo mar tells the story of a brief love affair between the novel’s unnamed narrator-protagonist, 2 a middle-aged professor of literature and member of Barcelona’s haute bourgeoisie , and one of her students, a young woman named Clara. Clara comes into the narrator’s life at a time when she has sought solitude within which to deal with one of her husband’s many escapades with other women. Within the bounds of her relationship with Clara, the narrator revisits stories of her childhood and adolescence, while also exploring the possibility for a life that is different than the single path that was laid out for her as a member of her social group. Although
the narrator admits that telling stories of her past is always a part of her approach to new relationships, given the particular connection that she feels to Clara, she is able to narrate memories that take her back to a point of origin, the suicide of the love of her life, Jorge. The relationship with Clara, and the narrator’s ability, fi nally, to access and relate her own story, imply that there is hope for moving forward again from that point of origin, but in a different direction, one that is the product of choice rather than passive acceptance. In this volume, El mismo mar is the text that sheds the most light on the role of the interlocutor in the work of narrating memory, not solely because of Clara, who has received a good deal of critical attention, but because of the work that is left for the reader to do when Clara is no longer there to listen. 3
While some critics have addressed issues of class in the novel, and some studies have analyzed its use of intertextuality, the overwhelming trend in analysis of El mismo mar is to focus on questions of gender and sexuality. According to Mirella Servodidio, for example, “Tusquets’s fi ction establishes a homology between sexuality and textuality that gives shape and substance to an erotics of form. Unlike the forward movement of masculine narrative that leads to a single discharge of erotic energy, her fi ction turns back on itself in a prolongation of arousal and appetition” (174). In a convincing comparison between El mismo mar and Carmen Martín-Gaite’s Nubosidad variable , Estrella Cibreiro reads the novel as the portrayal of a search for feminine identity in post-Franco Spain. Elizabeth Ordóñez similarly reads it in terms of a “matrilineal quest” that moves toward transformation but results in the female protagonist’s reinsertion in the patriarchal structure. Linda Gould Levine’s take is two-pronged. On the one hand, she perceives in El mismo mar an accomplishment in the representation of female sexuality and new possibilities for feminine writing: “[. . .] just as the male artist has traditionally laid claim to the virgin page and duplicated the heterosexual act by spilling his <<seed>> upon it, Esther Tusquets suggests writing as lesbian activity, characterized by the gentle stroke of the woman artist on the body of her text” (“Reading” 207). Precisely because of the literary accomplishment, Gould Levine is especially troubled by the novel’s violent return to masculine normativity in the end and, like me, reads in the novel’s conclusion a betrayal of the reader that mirrors the multiple betrayals that are described in the course of the narrative.
