Writing and Adapting Disability: Galdós’ Marianela and Pablo Messiez’s Los ojos

Abstract

Drawing on David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis to refer to both the pervasive presence of disability in mainstream discourse and the conventions used to represent it, this article compares how disability is handled in Benito Pérez Galdós’ novel, Marianela and in its theatrical adaptation, Los ojos, by the Argentinian playwright Pablo Messiez. In his novel Galdós seemingly follows the typical pattern of representing disability through his curing of Pablo’s blindness, but then he subverts that pattern by using Marianela’s death and burial to draw attention to the artificiality of the conventions aimed at eliminating disability from narratives. In his adaptation, Messiez shifts the focus from disability to nationality, transforming Nela and her mother into Argentine immigrants living in Spain. Through them he exposes the Otherness experienced by immigrants which marginalizes them, and he undermines the stigma of foreignness by redefining the concept of national identity. In so doing, however, Messiez eliminates Galdós’ challenge to mainstream representations of disability, allowing his play to follow the standard pattern identified by Mitchell and Snyder.

Key words:

• Benito Pérez Galdós
• Marianela
• 19^th-century Spanish realist novel
• Pablo Messiez
• Los ojos
• 20^th-century Argentinian theatre
• David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder
• narrative prosthesis
• disability as represented in literary fiction

Notes

1 David T. Mitchell & Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2014).

2 David T. Mitchell & Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Preface: Mapping Identity: Disability and Other “Marked” Bodies’, in their Narrative Prosthesis, ix–xvii (p. ix).

3 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6.

4 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 53–54.

5 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47–48.

6 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47.

7 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 53–54.

8 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6, 8.

9 Mitchell & Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 8.

10 Benito Pérez Galdós, Marianela, ed., con intro. & notas, de Magdalena Aguinaga (Madrid: Castalia, 2000). All references are to this edition.

11 Georgina Kleege, ‘Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York/London: Routledge, 2013), 447–55 (pp. 453–54).

12 David Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2014), 67.

13 Lennard J. Davis, ‘Introduction: Normality, Power, and Culture’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Davis, 1–13 (p. 5).

14 Michael W. Stannard, Galdós and Medicine (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 143–44.

15 Joaquín Casalduero, ‘Marianela y De l’intelligence de Taine’, in his Vida y obra de Galdós (Madrid: Gredos, 1974), 201–03; Joaquín Casalduero, ‘Auguste Comte y Marianela’, in Vida y obra de Galdós, 204–21; C. A. Jones, ‘Galdós’s Marianela and the Approach to Reality’, Modern Language Review, 56 (1961), 515–19; Marie A. Wellington, ‘Galdós’ Marianela and Diderot’, Folio. Papers on Foreign Languages and Literatures, 8 (1976), 1–13; Marie A. Wellington, ‘Marianela: nuevas dimensiones’, Hispania (USA), 51:1 (1968), 38–48; Mario E. Ruíz, ‘El idealismo platónico en Marianela de Galdós’, Hispania (USA), 53:4 (1970), 870–80; Geraldine Scanlon, Pérez Galdós: ‘Marianela’ (London: Grant & Cutler/Tamesis, 1988), 18–26; Michael Gómez, ‘The Molyneux Problem in Galdós’s Marianela’, Anales Galdosianos, 46 (2011), 47–65.

16 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ‘Introduction. From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York U. P., 1996), 1–19 (p. 1).

17 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Thomson, 55–66 (p. 57; italics in the original).

18 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Preface’, in her A Theory of Adaptation (New York/London: Routledge, 2006), xi–xviii (p. xvi), and 8.

19 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 18.

20 Los ojos (Madrid: Toñi Arranz Producciones), <https://tarranzproducciones.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/los-ojos.pdf> (accessed 27 September 2018).

21 Sergio C. Fanjul, ‘Messiez, autor del mes’, El País Madrid, 6 May 2014, <https://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2014/05/06/madrid/1399407791_236873.html> (accessed 12 September 2014).

22 Los ojos (Toñi Arranz Producciones).

23 Pablo Messiez, Los ojos: melodrama telúrico, in his Las palabras de las obras (Madrid: Continta Me Tienes, 2016), 65–129 (p. 65). All references are to this edition. I wish to thank Pablo Messiez for giving me a copy of the script before the play was published in this volume.

24 The play is available for viewing on Vimeo in three video segments. These divisions do not correspond to the structure of the play, which runs continuously without any intermissions. See Pablo Messiez, ‘Los ojos (parte I)’, Vimeo, <https://vimeo.com/35465311>, ‘Los ojos (parte II)’, Vimeo, <https://vimeo.com/35473020>, and ‘Los ojos (parte III)’, Vimeo, <https://vimeo.com/35484207> (accessed 11 September 2014).

25 ‘Telurismo’, in Pequeño Larousse en color, ed. Ramón García-Pelayo y Gross (Paris: Ediciones Larousse, 1972), 868.

26 Los ojos (Toñi Arranz Producciones).

27 Lerita Coleman Brown, ‘Stigma: An Enigma Demystified’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Davis, 147–60 (pp. 147–48).

28 Coleman Brown, ‘Stigma: An Enigma Demystified’, 148.

29 Coleman Brown, ‘Stigma: An Enigma Demystified’, 148.

30 Coleman Brown, ‘Stigma: An Enigma Demystified’, 149.

31 Coleman Brown, ‘Stigma: An Enigma Demystified’, 148.

32 Vanessa Ramiro, ‘Los ojos. De Pablo Messiez’, Revista Teatros, 29 November 2011, <http://revistateatros.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/los-ojos-de-pablo-messiez/> (accessed 12 September 2014).

33 Sosa is not mentioned in the play, but the script indicates that it is her version of the song that should be heard during the performance (90).

34 Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness, 96.

35 Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness, 76.

36 I wish to thank my colleague Elisa Lucchi-Riester for translating this song.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.