Tangled Locality in Miguel Delibes' ‘Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja’

摘要

The article suggests that Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja fell into critical neglect because its first editions blended image and text, and because the text itself is a hybrid of short story and novelistic genres. While the main story arc involves a rejection of rootless modernity and a reversion to country ways, the hybrid nature of the work conveys a more complex situation in which the cultural borderland between city and country is preserved. The narrator overcomes a sense of place-deprivation by reinhabiting, through memory, the places of his youth. Gradually, through a process of associative thickening, in which the reader also participates, the narrator builds a sense of dwelling. This communally experienced topography is infused with contestable, yet enabling, local stories. In tales dealing with the collision of modernity and tradition, the narrator maintains his double identity, even as he reclaims his past and villagifies his urban self. As a whole, the work reconfigures, rather than reimposes, the usual dichotomy of city and country.