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<p>Much attention has already been paid to the principal narrative situation in Valle-Inclán’s <i>Sonata de otoño</i> (1902) where the reader encounters a singularly untrustworthy and distinctly disconcerting first-person narrator. This article, however, will be concerned with the many other, secondary narrative forms either referenced in the text or exemplified by some small part of it, forms that have gone largely unnoticed or overlooked in existing criticism. These include instances of written history, such as family chronicle, noble genealogies, legal records, and hagiography; of oral history, such as partial life stories or discrete narrated episodes, dreams, gossip, and family lore; and of oral (though sometimes also written) fiction, in the guise of fairy tales. These multiple narrative genres are themselves often unreliable and unstable, and they can have changeable and porous boundaries. Furthermore, this blurred, indeterminate blending of the factual and the invented, of the accurate and the unverifiable or the falsified, extends also to the titles of nobility, characters’ names, familial relationships, geography, and toponymy that appear in <i>Sonata de otoño</i>. As they accumulate and interact over the course of the novel, all these features add significantly to the fundamental instability of the narrative discourse, serving to reinforce the effect of the already problematic first-person narration and creating a sense of pervasive doubt in the mind of the reader. This in turn serves to position the novel as a paragon of Modernism, located almost on the threshold of Postmodernism.</p>

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Family History, Chronicle, Genealogy, Story-Telling, Legend, and Lore: Narrative Genres and Irresolvability in Valle-Inclán’s Sonata de otoño

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月19日

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  • Andrew A. Anderson

摘要

Much attention has already been paid to the principal narrative situation in Valle-Inclán’s Sonata de otoño (1902) where the reader encounters a singularly untrustworthy and distinctly disconcerting first-person narrator. This article, however, will be concerned with the many other, secondary narrative forms either referenced in the text or exemplified by some small part of it, forms that have gone largely unnoticed or overlooked in existing criticism. These include instances of written history, such as family chronicle, noble genealogies, legal records, and hagiography; of oral history, such as partial life stories or discrete narrated episodes, dreams, gossip, and family lore; and of oral (though sometimes also written) fiction, in the guise of fairy tales. These multiple narrative genres are themselves often unreliable and unstable, and they can have changeable and porous boundaries. Furthermore, this blurred, indeterminate blending of the factual and the invented, of the accurate and the unverifiable or the falsified, extends also to the titles of nobility, characters’ names, familial relationships, geography, and toponymy that appear in Sonata de otoño. As they accumulate and interact over the course of the novel, all these features add significantly to the fundamental instability of the narrative discourse, serving to reinforce the effect of the already problematic first-person narration and creating a sense of pervasive doubt in the mind of the reader. This in turn serves to position the novel as a paragon of Modernism, located almost on the threshold of Postmodernism.