Neither cheesy nor gore: a journey to the center of Mercè Rodoreda's work

Barcelona"For many decades, the adolescent ritual has been to read Rodoreda. I read Broken mirrorI loved it, but I didn't understand a thing. And at school they told me about the author's life, which doesn't help with understanding. Broken mirror"Laments essayist, literary critic, and professor Neus Penalba (Tarragona, 1982). For years, the work of one of the great authors of Catalan literature has been read in a partial and biased way. Mercè Rodoreda's literary magnitude has been conditioned by factors external to her work, by the endearing photograph of a grandmother obsessed with plants, by the need to canonize her as a literary icon from the 1980s onward. "There is a double substitution: one is the idea that Rodoreda is Colometa, perhaps thinking that our grandmothers didn't have enough imagination to create characters, and the other is that she is supplanted." The Diamond Squarewhich softens the blow and recreates characters that are far less strange. If those adults who think they've read Rodoreda reread The Diamond Square "Now, tell me if it's corny!" Penalba challenges.

This is what the enormous, overwhelming, and interesting exhibition that has just opened at the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) does, entitled Rodoreda, a forestCommissioner Neus Penalba, author of the essay Hunger in the eyes, cement in the mouth (3i4, 2024), takes us into the heart of Rodoreda's work to debunk one by one the "lazy clichés and accommodating stereotypes" and brings to the surface "the contemporaneity and radical nature of her literature."

Rodoreda, a forest It is not a biographical exhibition; it does not focus on the morbid details of the author's life so often recounted through the men who accompanied her—the marriage to her uncle, the abandonment of her son, her new partner, the role of her editor. Nor does it reproduce the historical context in which she lived—wars, exile, misery, and "the fervent desire to see everything in flames." The exhibition focuses on the incredible power, symbolism, beauty, and horror of her literature, drawing out roots and branches that connect with the visual works of other artists, whether in content or form. The romantic loves in her works can be expressed through two choreographies by Pina Bausch (one of hypnosis and one of rape), one facet of motherhood can be understood through the abortion-themed engravings of Paula Rego, and the bastardized Barcelona ofCamellia Street It is illustrated with photographs of prostitutes by Dora Maar and exile can be traversed, literally, by passing through Cabosanroque's installation, in which Ukrainian refugees recite texts by Rodoreda about war, which could be ours in the last century or hers at this very moment.

Nature and its meanings

"For too many years there has been this song that Rodoreda was an urban novelist, author of Broken mirror, The Diamond Square and Camellia Street"...who really liked flowers," says Penalba. The 2017 reissue of Death and Spring It helped to break through that superficial reading. The exhibition has just driven the nail on the head. "Botanical tropes, forests, flowers, are everywhere in her work, and in each work they convey different literary themes," explains the curator, describing the exhibition's layout. Sometimes the references to nature have to do with childbirth or breastfeeding, that is, with femininity, as The Diamond Square and in Camellia Street, and are represented by paintings by Suzanne Valadon, Picasso, and Ramon Casas. It can also describe the uprooting of exile in So much war!with Adrià Guinart, who wants to take a stand, and whose work is illustrated in the exhibition with Fina Miralles's iconic series of photographs pinned to the ground. Nature can be a kind of sinister womb that reproduces the structural evil of society, as Death and SpringPenalba connects this with dirty art, with Jean Dubuffet, with Goya, with Resnais. And even nature can be a bridge to the afterlife, with metaphysical resonances, and here the exhibition explores dreams, folklore, and spirituality through works ranging from Leonora Carrington to Josefa Tolrà passing through Tàpies, Vayreda, and paintings by Rodoreda herself.

"We delve into a forest of references, which are also those that nourished her as a writer; the great names of literature and film that she was able to see in Paris. And we do so to return to her literature without splitting it into two Rodoredas," says Penalba: neither is it the dark, terrible Rodoreda and gore of Death and SpringNor is it the sentimental Rodoreda settled in an eternal garden of Sant Gervasi or Romanyà. "Rodoreda's work is one, it is eclectic, it is difficult and perhaps we haven't read it well," the curator points out.

Light and darkness are two sides of the same coin. "Rodoreda chooses to look at the most terrible things with an innocent gaze and in Catalan that is unadorned, without pedantry or loaded adjectives; for me, this is typically Rodoreda's style," he states. It is this innocent and candid point of view that "allows the author to refrain from judging and to show the full spectrum of reality, from wonder to decay," but perhaps it is this that has confused the reader, who has imagined that the characters are the author herself. "Rodoreda does not write autofiction," Penalba insists, and this is evident in the exhibition in areas such as So much war! and Houses and streets"Her literature is difficult because these innocent characters are incapable of intellectualizing what they tell us, and we have to interpret it ourselves. And the problem is that we have been too innocent for many years," says Penalba. She has undertaken this exercise in interpretation thoroughly, drawing on the work of other scholars "who have toiled at the university to establish Rodoreda as a serious subject of study," and translates it into a wealth of materials, works, and references—complex and splendid—that address aspects such as desire, innocence, and the ultimate goal.

Total irradiation

Rodoreda, a forest The exhibition also looks outward to highlight the author's influence. Writer Martí Sales curates this blog for the exhibition, which showcases Rodoreda's impact on visual artists who have read her—hence the commissions for newly created installations by Carlota Subirós, Èlia Llach, Oriol Vilapuig, Mar Arza, and Cabosanroque—and also on writers such as Colmo Tóibín, Pol Guasch, and Mariana Enriquez. The exhibition also highlights Rodoreda's significant international reach, with her work already translated into some thirty languages ​​(220 volumes are on display, available to listen to in fourteen languages), a fact the CCCB aims to promote, as it has done previously with other successful literary exhibitions dedicated to Calders, Espriu, Joyce, and Kafka. The exhibition runs until May 25th, and two thousand high school students and thirty reading clubs have already registered. The extensive program of parallel activities, featuring Rodoreda specialists such as Mercè Ibarz, writers like Blanca Llum Vidal and Maria Sevilla, and artists such as Carlos Marques-Marcet, Laia Abril, and Marcos Morau, and including three city tours, will also broaden our understanding of the 20th century, which remains entirely alive and relevant.