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Notes
[1] Robert Spires notes how for some thirty six years the regime abused language ‘by pretending through proclamations, slogans, and censorship to reduce it to an univocal tool of the state’ (Spires Citation1983, p. 146).
[2] In connection with this, Lacan says: ‘But, thank God, the subject inhabits the world of the symbol, that is to say a world of others who speak. That is why his desire is susceptible to the mediation of recognition’ (Lacan Citation1988a, p. 171), and ‘Speech is that dimension through which the desire of the subject is authentically integrated on to the symbolic plane’ (Lacan Citation1988a, p. 183).
[3] Lacan is of the view that the unconscious is structured like a language; he sees unconscious formations like dreams structured in terms of the associative language of metaphor and metonymy. It is the metaphorical and metonymical play of the signifier that generates the signified and brings about the coming-into-being of the subject (Lacan Citation1977, p. 285).
[4] For an interesting perspective on the importance Martín Gaite attaches to the role of the listener in a conversation, see Vila-Matas (Citation1978, p. 44).
[5] If the man in black stands for the model reader who is able to invest the text with meaning, then, as Elizabeth Ordóñez (Citation1983, p. 180) indicates, Carola (the unexpected phone caller, who could be the man in black's partner) represents, by contrast, the kind of reader who, expecting logical linguistic structures, is simply puzzled by Gaite's unconventional style and can make nothing out of the text. Thus Carola informs the narrator that ‘a él [the man in black] siempre le han gustado mucho los libros que se entienden mal, tenemos gustos muy distintos en eso’ (p. 140). And referring to the narrator's writing, Carola tells her: ‘desde luego, escribe usted en plan follón, se saca poco en limpio’ (p. 143). Interestingly, however, Ordóñez has also observed that as the telephone conversation proceeds Carola appears to undergo a change: ‘She finally becomes less the rival figure and more the inquisitive reader as she wishes, for apparently aesthetic reasons, that the narrator were the author of those old letters she has secretly read’ (Ordóñez Citation1983, p. 180).
[6] This retrospective re-creation of the past that the conversation between the narrator and the man in black gives rise to brings to mind Freud's concept of ‘retroaction’ or ‘deferred action’, which he broaches in some of his case histories, as for example in the ‘Wolf Man’ (Freud Citation1955b). Here Freud observes how his patient was able to understand some of his childhood experiences only in the light of events that happened much later on in his life. And after an even longer timespan, the patient was able to revive the past and interpret it further through therapy. The important thing to note about this retroactive movement is the gap, space or interval between the ‘original’ event and the ‘repetition’, which is also a re-creation, of that event later on through language in therapy. This gap or interval undermines certainty regarding the past in the sense that it opens up the possibility of multiple (mis)readings of the ‘original’ event(s).
[7] For Joan Lipman Brown and Elaine Smith (Citation1987, p. 68) ‘the cockroach becomes a symbol of the repressed past’ and for Catherine Davies (Citation1998, p. 243) it represents ‘the nightmarish or monstrous aspects of reality’.