The voice of the text in selected prose works of Reinaldo Arenas

Abstract

In approaching the voice of the text in the prose works of Reinaldo Arenas, I have selected seven texts for analysis: El mundo alucinante, the five novels which conform the Pentagoma quintet (Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanqmsimas mofetas, Otra vez el mar, El color del verano, and El asalto), and Viaje a La Habana. Studies on Arenas's prose work to date have largely concentrated on parallels between Arenas's biography and aspects of his fiction, with emphasis on questions of fantasy and the carnivalesque. I explore the works from a purely textual perspective, taking as my theoretical framework the interplay between three approaches to the text; transtextuality (according to the theories proposed by Gerard Genette), narratology and focalization (Eduardo Serrano Orejuela and Mieke Bal). Through an examination of the structure and narrative voices in this body of prose works, I confront the symbolic and ideological voice of the text. A thematic function is evident behind the structural complexity of the works and the vertiginous reading experience created by the texts, along with the relationship the novels sustain with "history" and other external texts. My consideration of the voices which narrate the pieces and the perceptions through which events are depicted exposes close relationships between sections of the same text and between the prose works I explore. In turn, the characterisation of the narrators, heroes and protagonists of the works centres very acutely around the individual's Other, and reveals ideological and thematic implications that are consistent between the works. The treatment of these aspects in the seven texts engenders the reading process I describe as "vertigo"; it is through this process that the ideological notions regarding testimony and the subjectivity of history are revealed