ABSTRACT
Didalera, didal, dèdal, Daedalus “He mirat en el diccionàri ‘didalera’ ” (‘I’ve looked up “foxglove” in the dictionary’) (99). This is the fi rst line of a short story by Mercè Rodoreda called “Paràlisi” (“Paralysis”) 1 that has the unnamed protagonist looking up the word didalera , which sounds remarkably like dèdal , a word, which, in its turn, is taken from the Greek name Daedalus and refers to the unnavigable structure that he built, the labyrinth. “Didalera,” though, is the name of a fl ower, a “foxglove” in English, (fl owers being a constant in Rodoreda’s fi ction), and has more to do with a thimble ( didal in Catalan) than with a maze. Didalera, didal, dèdal, Daedalus. The phonetic game is unnecessary, though, for identifying Rodoreda and her character narrator with the architect of antiquity. In the same short story, the narrator, a Catalan woman living in Geneva, refl ects on her own identity and decides that she is “Mediterranean”:
Ginebra. Didalera. De fulles lineals. Sou ginebrí? La gespa dels parcs comença a estar cremada i els arbres ja es dauren tot i que encara som a l’estiu. Una ciutat de fulles, de camins verds, de jardins plens de fl ors com si hi nasquessin soles. Com el camí de la naturalitat, tan difícil. De l’espontaneïtat. Sóc catalana . . . Sí? Mediterrànea. Sirenes i dolfi ns i molts Ulisses. (Geneva. Foxglove. With linear leaves. Are you from Geneva? The grass in the parks is starting to look burned and the trees are all golden and it’s still summer. A city of leaves, of green paths, of gardens fi lled with fl owers as if they were born on their own. Like the path of nature, so diffi cult. Of spontaneity. I’m Catalan. . . . Yes? Mediterranean. Mermaids and dolphins and lots of Ulysses.)
(99-100)
The protagonist of “Paràlisi” shares a good deal in common with the story’s author. Mercè Rodoreda lived in voluntary exile from 1939 to 1972 and lived the last two decades of that exile in Geneva. The paralysis of the story’s protagonist (who is, herself, a writer) is a fi ctional revisiting of the author’s own affl iction: for four years, her right hand suffered from a partial paralysis that prevented her from writing and that she associated explicitly with writer’s block (Pope, “Mercè” 131). She broke the silence, though, while in Geneva, when she wrote one of the great novels of Barcelona’s literary history, La plaça del Diamant ( The Time of the Doves , 1962). 2 The silence that she broke wasn’t only her own. Like Salvador Espriu, Rodoreda is associated with the literary vindication of the Catalan language under Franco, although it was in part the fact that she wrote in Catalan that made her feel she had to leave the country. In Geraldine Cleary Nichols’s collection of interviews with women authors from Barcelona, Ana Moix and Monserrat Roig both claim that Rodoreda’s writing showed them that Catalan was still a living language and was valuable as a tool for literary expression. Roig, for example, comments, “Y si [Rodoreda] me impresionó tanto no es porque ella fuese mejor o peor que Virginia Woolf, por ejemplo, sino porque ella me estaba diciendo que en mi propia lengua era posible escribir” (And if [Rodoreda] impressed me so much, it wasn’t because she was better or worse than Virginia Woolf, for example, but because she was telling me that it was possible to write in my own language) ( Escribir 148-9). Joan Ramon Resina also argues that, “Rodoreda’s merit was to preserve the language, and thus the memory, that made it possible to hope for restoration of the community devastated by hatred” ( Barcelona’s 122). Enric Bou reads in Rodoreda’s treatment of space in La plaça del Diamant precisely an expression of the estrangement and alienation that came with exile (31). More than one critic, including Bou, has argued that to understand the Barcelona of La plaça del Diamant is to understand the narrator, Natàlia, and to trace her trajectory toward a sense of self.
