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Abstract
Critics have been uncertain as to the genre of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré's 2000 book, Viatge d’hivern. The confusion, I argue, is due to the fact that the volume is a short story cycle, a literary form situated midway between the novel and the short story collection. Forrest Ingram differentiates among composed, arranged, and completed cycles, and Cabré's comments in his Epilogue to Viatge d’hivern indicate that the book is an example of the third category. While he composed its fourteen narratives over a period of years, when he revised them for inclusion in a single volume he discovered that various threads, some secret and others more obvious, connected the stories. In this essay I examine ways in which theme, structure, and motifs, as well as recurrent imagery and wording, form a web of associations among the individual units of Viatge d’hivern.
Notes
1Cabré is an accomplished violinist. See Aviñoa for an overview of the role of music in his writing.
2Since the publication of Ingram's study in 1971, a number of other terms have been suggested. Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris list story cycle, short story cycle, multifaceted novel, story novel, paranovel, loose-leaf novel, short story composite, rovelle, composite, short story compound, integrated short story collection, anthology novel, modernist grotesque, hybrid novel, story chronicle, short story sequence, genre of return, short story volume, and narrative of community (4). One of the reasons I prefer the term short story cycle is that it remits us to Schubert's lieder and Müller's lyric cycles.
3Cabré points out in the Epilogue that his characters, like their stories, “es basen molt en allò que no se n’ha arribat a dir però que hi és” (268).
4Cirlot notes that in Christian symbolism the crow is an allegory of solitude (71).
5According to Pere, Schubert is missing a tooth, and references to chipped, decayed, gold, or missing teeth proliferate in Viatge (28, 53, 57, 64, 68, 129, 142, 180, 192, 196, 262) in what is tantamount to a series of verbal winks at the reader.
6Variations on the form of characters’ names serve to link stories. A plaque on the organ played by Bach in “El somni de Gottfried Heinrich” reads “Olegarius Gualterius sauensis me fecit” (132).
7“El testament” made passing reference to a cop busy ticketing parked cars (35).
8The quotation from Laforgue that serves as the epigraph for “Pols” compares unopened books to prisoners who are unable to speak because they have been gagged.
9Earlier, Sr. Adrià applied the word esplèndid to her bust. Cabré is fond of repeating words in different contexts for comic effect or to produce echoes among stories. The detail that the husband and wife of “Dos minuts” have been married for twelve years reminds us of Oleguer's twelve-year confinement in “L’esperança” and suggests that marriage is comparable to a prison sentence. Objects also appear in different contexts in Viatge. A worn yellowish leather bookmark, mentioned in “Pols,” resurfaces in “El somni de Gottfried Heinrich” and “Winterreise” (79, 130, 253).
10“Ulls” also provides a humorous instance (104) of this narrative strategy when a character dismisses Rembrandt's The Philosopher as pretty but without value. Readers’ broader cultural knowledge highlights the character's ignorance.
11“Ulls” unfolds on several diegetic levels that present conflicting images of Barukh. Numbered sections 1 through 5 contain his sanitized versions of his past, and parentheses reveal Sarah's thoughts about him. Asterisks introduce factual accounts of his past and his dealings with people he has cheated and/or killed. In the first of these passages, he reads a letter in which his employer describes him as a smooth talker who cannot be trusted.
12The appliance repairman of “Dos minuts” intends to use his generous tip to take out to dinner a woman named Katty.
13Sibelius's Finlandia is mentioned in both, as are Fischer and Pere Bros, now referred to negatively as “el llepa” (203). It comes as no surprise that Quiquín describes the color of his lawyer's eyes, mentions a painting by Rembrandt, and when pressed on the issue of getting gainful employment, says he has an interview to be a washing-machine repairman. Part of the epigraph for “El rastre,” given in English, was quoted in Catalan in “Finis” (169).
14In “El rastre,” Quiquín describes the Israeli town of Dor as a tourist paradise that displays “la cara amable d’Israel” (211), but Itshaq, who took his life there in “Jo recordo,” did not find it paradisiacal.
15Cabré subtly ridicules Lambertini by giving him the same name as Barukh's horse (Lambertus) in “Ulls de gemma.”
16Her role in “Opus” was that of arranging recitals by Pere in France. “La negociació” reveals that one of the reasons for her indulgent husband's many businesses—including that of arranging assassinations—is that he needs to cover the losses occasioned by his wife's lack of managerial skills. Another minor character of “Opus” was a Vatican bishop who was trying to finalize the date for a recital by Pere at the Vatican. The bishop reappears in “La negociació,” as does a reference to a pianist who rescinded his contract “de manera tràgica” (226), apparently an allusion to Pere's suicide, mentioned in “Finis.”