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Montesserat Roig's `L'Hora Violeta' Catalonia Preserved

The fictional and non-fictional writings of Montserrat Roig, popularly recognized as the quintessential representative of Catalonian nationalism and feminism, are singularly devoted to the recovery and revival of Catalonian history.  Aiming towards the unveiling of Catalonian traditions, myth, history and language, Roig‘s works unfold through a set of binary oppositions – the male versus the female; the public versus the private; the oppressor versus the oppressed; and official history versus the authentic her-story.  As such, her fiction invariably unfolds within a domestic setting and her protagonists, and voices, are female and distinctly feminine.

Roig's identification of the female as both carrier and purveyor of Catalonian language, traditions, myths, history and nationalism was circumstantially predetermined by the experiences of this quasi-national community during the Franco years.  To understand Roig's works as something other than a feminist treatise and to fully appreciate their complexity, an understanding of the politically history which informed and incited them, is necessary.  In brief, throughout the four decades of General Franco's dictatorship, the Catalan community, as were the Andalusia, Basque and Castilian, was oppressed through the government's determined efforts to forcibly impose the Spanish culture and language upon all.  The Catalan language and culture were outlawed, with the hope being that their de-legitimisation would, over the generations and years, lead to their obliteration.  Both, however, were kept alive within the private and feminine space of the home and, both were kept alive through the efforts of Catalan's women.  It was, thus, that Catalonian women played a fundamental role, not only in the rescuing of the national culture and historical memory but, in the survival of Catalonia herself.

Within the socio-political history which informs Montserrat Roig's works lays the key to the understanding of her literary productions.  Binary oppositions assume political significance, with the private representing the national space and the public symbolising the oppressive dominance of Franco's Spain; with the private and the feminine representing oppressed and the public and the male symbolising the oppressor.  Indeed, as one who lived during Catalonia's traumatic linguistic and cultural experiences under Franco, Roig's works can only be fully understood from this perspective and can only be fully appreciated  as a product of a literary mind which, itself, had been borne of a nation's cultural and linguistic trauma.  That she should select Catalonian as her linguistic medium of communication is, in itself, a political and feminist statement, as it is a reclamation of both her national heritage and an homage to the women who kept that heritage alive.

The ethno-political historical circumstances, as outlined in the introductory paragraphs, are the impetus behind L'Hora Violeta.  The dominant feature of this particular literary work is the relationship between feminism and nationalism, between Catalonia and her-story, as oppose to history.  L' Hora Violeta, which unfolds within the private sphere, is expressive of "la voluntad de trovar una solución comuna a la lluita catalanista I lluita feminista." In this work, as in all of Roig's literary productions, she gives voice to both a repressed national identity and an oppressed gender in a suppressed language.  Written in Catalan, Roig's ethnic mother tongue,  a language which had been kept alive by women, L'Hora Violeta may be interpreted as a determined effort to recover and express Catalonian her-story within the boundaries of fiction.  Indeed, in this novel, Roig engages in the recuperation of Catalonian women's history within an inter-generational fictional matrix, ultimately recreating Catalonia as the gendered nation; a nation whose survival, historical memories, culture and language was dependant upon her daughters.

Roig's works, especially Adeu Ramona, El Temps de les Ciereres and L'Hora Violeta – her trilogy and feminist saga -  are intent upon the resurrection of Catalan history and memory and, more specifically, on the recuperation of Catalan her-story.  Throughout the mentioned works, Roig excavates the fragments of her-story which had been buried, but nevertheless preserved, within the houses of Eixample, a Catalan neighbourhood.  The focus on her-storical memory is evidenced from the very first pages of L'Hora Violeta, when Natalia contends that "calia salvar per les paraules tot allò que la historia, la Historia gran, o sigui la dels homs, havia fet imprecís, havia condemnat o idealitzat."

The act of expressing her-story is synonymous with the act of remembrance.   In L'Hora Violeta, the expressed female/feminine/national memory assumes the form of a literary discourse.  Roig's history is a previously unexpressed and violently suppressed, one both within the context of Franco-ism and patriarchal culture.   It is a hidden and silent history without referent and which, despite literary expression, is a profoundly subaltern one, both because it is Catalonian within Castilian national boundaries and matriarchal within an uncompromisingly patriarchal culture.  As it is subaltern, without referent or precedent, the literary strategies with which this silent her-story are communicated seek the conveyance of the aforementioned and, as such, are secret personal diaries and fragmented memories.  The outcome is a labyrinthical narrative, suggestive of a fractured and lost world which has only survived in the depths of personal memories; a broken, fragmented and convoluted literary discourse which parallels, according to Roig, the workings of individual and collective memory:

"La memòria mai no es cronològica, o sigui, no es primer capítol, segon capítol, tercer capítol … no es coherent, no esta estructurada així – desprès en una novel, la intentem de posar ordre en aquest desordre – sinó que la memòria es radial."

The radial movement which Roig refers to in the preceding quotation is her-story, female history, as opposed to the dry and unimaginative, chronological  his-tory.  The first is more expansive than the second, embracing both the private and the public spheres and expressing both silenced memories and public discourse.  Certainly, memory is disjointed and its expression tends towards the convoluted but, as Roig herself indicates in the preceding quote, that is the very nature of her-storical memory, the peoples' history, as opposed to official his-tory.  Seminal dates in Catalan history appear in the novel but rather than look towards their strictly political implications, Roig focuses on the effects they had upon women.  She expresses those events from the perception of Catalan women and highlights their consequences upon the private sphere, as opposed to the public realm.  As one question Roig's treatment of her-story, one finds that it is premised on the conviction that

"la recuperació de la historia de les dones requereix forçosament una visió històrica que no es límit a l'àmbit públic, al poder o a la macropolitica.  Una part significativa de l'experiència històrica femenina s'ha realitzat en l'espai privat de l'àmbit domèstic, de la llar."

A close and critical reading of L'Hora Violeta lends to the realisation that while the novel is narrated in what is seemingly a realistic manner, switching between third and first person narratives, streams of consciousness and interior and exterior dialogue, it is an intensely subjective reading of history.  In essence, the novel can best be described as a disrupted narrative which expresses Catalonian history through the story of  several women, with the inference here being that national history exists within the memory and life of  L'hora Violeta's female characters.

The literary strategies and structure through which Montserrat Roig  narrates her story of female friendship and the intergenerational link between Catalonian women are designed to reflect the patterns of the thought process, on the one hand, and to expose the real, but untold, history of Catalonia , on the other.   Divided into five distinct, albeit interlinked parts, L'Hora Violetta moves through the subterranean consciousness of three women, Natalia, Norma and Agnes, reflecting upon the means by which each confronted her personal demons, survived her failures and, above all, were divided between submission to and rebellion against the men in their lives.  The first part focuses upon Norma's notes about Patricia, extracts from Judit's diary and Kati's letters to Judit.  This part  travels through Catalonian history, linking the private space with the public one.   The second part exposes the love triangle within which Natalia is trapped and, in so doing, links Natalia's story and circumstances to that of her predecessors.  The third part reflects upon Judit and Kati's friendship, representing a backwards movement in time.  The fourth part focuses upon another love triangle but one whose centre is Norma, not Natalia.  The fifth and final part, wherein Jordi abandons Natalia and returns to Agnes,  expresses Norma's subjective reading and interpretation of Homer's Odyssey and, in so doing,  links the lives of contemporary women with their mythological ancestors.

The complex literary structure through which Roig renders her female-centric tale is incontrovertibly informed and influenced by the author's interpretation, not just of history but of Catalonian history.  As Walters suggests, the novel's structure mirrors the human thought process and the circular and repetitious workings of memory.  Accordingly, it keeps going back and forth in time, linking the past to the present and quite often, merges the past with the present. The structure seeks the conveyance of the aforementioned and is an affirmation of the fluid and ephemeral nature of time.

As earlier mentioned, in L'Hora Violetta may be read as a quest for the recuperation of women's history through the exposition of the intergenerational relationship between three women.  While, and as shall be discussed shortly, recuperation primarily occurs through the narrative itself, as in the story it tells,  it also takes places through the novel's structure.  As noted in the above, the structure is both repetitive and circular, mirroring the thought and memory processes.  More importantly, it tells of the past and the present from within the confines of the female mind and through the hitherto silenced female voice.  The implication here is that history is preserved in the continuum of female memory.  By patterning the structure upon the memory process, Roig is identifying the female memory as the locus of history and as such, exploits structure for the purpose of recuperation of female history.

While primarily unfolding within the female memory and the private space, L'Hora Violetta is, nevertheless, a legitimate historical discourse, although one which is as ideologically driven as is official history.  The narrative is a valid historical discourse insofar as it interacts with history, exposes and expounds upon the consequences of the Franco-ism upon the Catalan community.  Nevertheless, as a historical discourse, it cannot be read as Roig's attempt to "salvar la historia, la Historia grande, es decir, la de los hombres, había hecho impreciso, había condenado o idealizado."   Certainly, she may have wrested history away from the male and Castilian dominated public sphere and most especially from fascist renditions but she does not recreate a grand history, clarify historical vagueness or liberate history from ideology.  Roig's history, even as it vocalises official history's silences through the injection of the private/female/Catalonian into the very the discourse, imposes vagueness upon history and effectively displaces the male and the Castilian from within its very matrix.  Roig's historical discourse, even as it violently reject the male/fascist/Castilian ideology, embraces female-centric, Catalonian and leftist ideology, thereby retelling a history which is as ideologically-driven as was the discourse which it rejects.  In other words,  and as the following discussion shall now try to establish, while she recuperates female history, presents history as her-story, projects womanhood as the focal point of nationhood and presents the female as the guardian of the national memory,  L'Hora Violetta is neither grand nor ideologically-innocent history.

The narrative sources from which Norma writes her female history, her Catalonian narrative, are as ideologically determined, as focused on the centralisation of one gender to the disadvantage of another, as locus-biased as is official history.  While the latter focuses on the public sphere as the locus of all action and on the male as the predominant, possibly only, actor, Roig focuses on the private sphere and on the female.  Were official history's prejudiced silenced derived from the very nature of its sources, mostly male-written documents, Roig's history derives from herstorical memories recorded in private letters exchanged between women and in a deeply personal female diary.  The very nature of her narrative sources suggest that authentic history is her-story, that history began with women and is carried through them and, most importantly, through the female memory. If history had silenced the female voice and displaced the private sphere, Roig's history will silence the male voice and isolate the public sphere.

As a narrative/herstorical source, Judit's diary allows Roig to recreate history as herstory and, as such, recuperate female history through the vocalisation of official history's silences but, by its very nature as a personal, subjective and private string of recollections, limits the author's capacity to save history from ideological determinism or to create a grand history.  The aforementioned should not be interpreted as a disparagement upon the use of a personal (fictional) diary as a historical source since, as Catherine Davies writes, personal diaries are integral to the recovery of her-storical memories because "diaries are historical and personal documentation," but as a clarification of the limitations which the narrative sources impose upon the narrative itself.

Certainly, diaries were the means by which women transmitted their personal herstories across the generations,  and is utilised, within the context of L'Hora Violetta, as the excavation grounds for the recovery of herstorical memories, lending to the vocalisation   of history's silences and the clarification of  its vague allusions to women and the private space.  Given the stated, the selection of a diary as an historical source constitutes an ideological statement.  Indeed, as Garcia argues, Roig's decision to present a (fictional) personal diary as a her-storical source and the key to the recovery of Catalonian women's memories, did not simply emanate from the fact that diaries traditionally functioned as the means by which women recorded those thoughts which they could never express in public but, from her determination to silence the Castilian, the male and the public, just as they had conspired to silence the female, the Catalonian and the private. As directly pertains to the question at hand, this means that herstory is as vague as history, as replete with obfuscations,  is as gender-centric and as ideologically-driven.  If history could not aspire towards the recreation and salvation of the grandness of the past, herstory, being guilty of the same prejudices and silences, cannot either.  Consequently,  even though it constitutes a recuperation of female history through the recovery of herstorical memories, it hardly constitutes a successful attempt to "salvar la historia, la Historia grande, es decir, la de los hombres, había hecho impreciso, había condenado o idealizado."

Judit's  diary, the primary source for herstorical memories,  begins on an unspecified month and day in 1958 and then travels back in time to 20th September, 1942, finally ending before it began, on the 1st November, 1950.  As it moves back and forth across the years, the diary communicates a cyclical notion of time which, as earlier mentioned, Roig, herself, emphasised in some of her non-fictional publications. Written during the post-war era, Judit's diary exposes and focuses upon familial and home problems – problems which have seemingly little significance outside the walls of the home.  Her her-storical memories are essentially fragmented recollections about her kitchen, her last son and her friendship with Kati.  Several diary entries are recollections of menus, preparing family meals and setting the dinner table.  While such thoughts may come across as quintessentially female, hardly bearing upon history or herstory,  the time-frame suggests otherwise.  As Bellver explains, the time-frame specific to L'Hora Violetta was, and remains, popularly referred to throughout Spain as the "Hunger Years." On the microcosmic level, the hunger years established women as integral to the survival of families and, on the macrocosmic level, intrinsic to the survival of the nation, of Catalonia, her culture and language.  The survival of Catalonia was, indeed, dependant upon the role which women played in the kitchen since, whether or not their families ate was ultimately dependant upon their own inventiveness, their capacity to turn limited and scarce resources into a family meal.  The physical survival of Catalonia was, during these years, inextricably linked to her daughters. That Judit's diary that her recollections and remembrances should so often turn to the kitchen must be understood in this light.

The historical context from within which Judith's diary emerges, exonerates Roig from feminist accusation that L'Hora Violeta engages in the perpetuation of gender stereotypes.Judit's fragmented kitchen memories serve to rescue and validate the experiences of Catalonia's women during the post-war years and, more importantly, expose their interaction with historical and contemporary political events.  "La cuina es un petit regne," not because the capacities and abilities of women were limited to the kitchen but, because politico-economic events and circumstances had imposed a unique importance and significance upon the kitchen.  That this has never been mentioned before is because official memories and recollections are history, not her-story.  Indeed, her-story was silenced and in L'Hora Violetta, Roig is breaking both that silence and the artificially imposed boundaries between the public and the private spaces.

If the role of women as housekeepers, as cooks, is emphasised in L'Hora Violetta, so is the role of women as mothers, as the perpetuators of Catalonia.  As Judith writes in her diary, in July 1943, she gave birth to her son Pere; afflicted with Down's syndrome, Judit describes Pere as "es un fill de la Guerra, el meu petit Pere." The war and its atrocities are not just wounding, maiming and killing the males but are having a direct physical bearing upon women.  Judit, as a physical body, is responding and reacting to the war as a diseased time – a time which can only produce diseased children.

Judit's children or, at least as they are recollected within her diary, are a reflection upon history and the way that she reacts to, and interacts with them constitute her-storical commentaries upon history, or events which were the making of men.  Following his birth, the diary reveals that Judit concentrated all her maternal attention upon Pere, effectively neglecting her two older children.  That a woman who cones across as one with such obvious maternal instincts should neglect two of her three children is, in itself, significant.  Duplaa agues it to be historically significant insofar as the two older children were born under the Franco regime and were educated under Franco's dictatorship.  Her neglect is, therefore, expressive of her perception of them as the children of a dictatorship, of a regime which actively engaged in the attempted destruction of Catalonia, concomitant with the obliteration of her memories, heritage, language and culture.

Pere was conceived following his father's return home from a concentration camp.  The implication here is that just as her older children were living memories of Franco's dictatorship, Pere was a flesh and blood representation of the massacre of Catalonia.  Accordingly, Judit's neglect of her other two children should have extended to Pere, in consideration of the historical memory he embodied.  The fact that it does not is because, within the matrix of her-storical memory, as opposed to historical memory, Pere is not a living representation of a massacre but living memory of Catalonia's survival of that massacre, of her will to live and perpetuate.  Pere, in other words, is herstory and, accordingly, cannot be neglected as his siblings were.  Indeed, when Pere dies, Judit retreats into herself.  Her paralysis is expressive of exile within the homeland and, as such, is a political statement which directly bears upon both the  her-storical and his-torical conditions of Catalonia during this era.

Judit's diary further uncovers her-storical memories through fragments on her relationship with Kati.  An open-minded liberal with strong political opinions, Kati comes across as a living memory of the progressive ideas and ideologies which swept across Spain during the 1920s and 1930s.  From within the pages of Judit's diary and her own letters, Kati comes across as a formidable life-force and as described, a woman who defies the very strictures imposed upon her by her gender: "‘Volia conquerir el món, ser a tot arreu, saber-ho tot, conèixer tothom i, a més, ser bojament estimada." She is a reminder that, despite the silence of historical texts, women played a fundamental role in the propagation of progressivism.  More importantly, Kati functions as a window into the relationships which women formed outside of the family and the unwavering strength of those relationships.  Indeed, as is recollected, "Judit  va estrènyer la ma de la Kati.  M'agradaria que, passi, no te n'anessis mai del meu costat." Women derived their strength and support, not from the males as was popularly assumed but, from females.  Indeed, women are not complemented by males but by other women and upon uniting/bonding, form a whole:

"Eren els dos pols, l'un positiu i l'altre negatiu. La Kati era activa i nerviosa, mai no s'estava quieta. La Judit era lenta i solitària, no li agradava la gent. I tot i això, s'avenien molt."

Following the war, Kati proposes that she and Judit run away together.  Judit's refusal, while it can be interpreted as respect for societal conventions which solidly maintained that women, irrespective of their conditions, should never abandon their families and children, can also be interpreted as a rejection of exile.  Franco tried to exile Catalonians within Catalonia through a declaration of the latter's non-existence within Spain.  Judit's refusal to run away is expressive of her determination to reject exile and her commitment to the very being of her nation. Kati leaves but she later redeems herself in a single act of defiant courage; she commits suicide, rather than live under an oppressive government, a dictatorship which stifled the soul and sought the annihilation of natural freedoms.  As Judit's paralysis, Kati's suicide is a political statement.

Kat's death, however, does not imply the termination of her memory.  The very last words Judit writes can be interpreted as a testament to that particular her-storical memory:

"De vegades sento la seva anima que em ronda I em diu, tornaré, Judit, tornaré I ja no hi haurà res que ens separarà, ni cap llei ni cap guerra."

Kati lives on following a death which she, herself, selected and which occurred on her own terms and at her own hands.  She lives on in Judit's her-storical memories, not as a passing friendship, but as an embodiment of the Catalonia, the motherland, which Franco's fatherland, attempted to wrest away.  She also lives on in through Natalia, Judit's daughter:

"Té l'energia del meu pare, el vell Miralpeix, i també el bellugeig de la Kati, i això que no tenen cap parentiu. No ho sé…, sembla com si la Natalia s'hagués endut un bon tros de l'ànima de Kati."

Living on after a self-imposed and self-determined death, Kati ultimately represents the defiant motherland who, rather than submit to an oppressive masculine force, withdrew.  What follows Kat's death is Judit's quest for the motherland.  As the above quotation indicates, even after her supposed passage, Judit feels the motherland/Kati all around her,  and knows that she will return,.  She knows that Catalonia will be reclaimed by her daughters,  despite male-imposed laws and male-waged wars which strive towards the obliteration of the motherland. By writing in Catalonian, Roig is continuing the quest for the reclamation of Catalonia through the excavation of her-storical memories.

The fact that L'Hora Violetta unfolds within the parameters of female memory establishes the narratives historicity and, more specifically, its determination to legitimise her-story.  Past and present intertwine and memories, the ancient memories of women, are repeated and affirmed.  As Natalia observes, "Que no veus que ens repetim?  Que ja no diem res de nou?" The narrative, thus, repeats itself but repetition is not suggestive of redundancy but constitutes an affirmation of the centrality of women to history and the extent to which they bridge the past and the present, ensuring continuity.  Indeed, L'Hora Violetta is an attempt to recover the female past, to rebel against history's silences through the compilation and proclamation of her-story.  As Bellver maintains, through an exploration of Judit's diary, Roig records women's "silently heroic battles with the passivity their environment imposes and the pain this tension inflicts upon them." Roig is integrating the female voice into the public political discourse and more, importantly,  is claiming that the female voice was always there, as strong in the past as it is in the present.  Myopic and chauvinist history, however, refused its recording but, through L'Hora Violetta, Roig compiles and publishes that recording.  She is breaking the silence and exposing the porous, even artificial, nature of the boundaries between the public and the private.  Roig is not only recovering history but is defying it through the integration of her-story, private memories, with history, official public discourse.   Indeed, Roig recuperates her-story through the recovery of history's lost voices but, in so doing,  largely engages in the silencing of  the male, the Castilian and the public and, as such, fails in her attempt to "salvar la historia, la Historia grande, es decir, la de los hombres, había hecho impreciso, había condenado o idealizado" – create a whole history, a discourse which combines between the public and the private her- and his-torical memories.

Bibliography

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Charlon,  Anne.  La condicio de la dona en la narrativa femenina catalana.  Barcelona;  Edicions 62, 1990.

Davies,  Catherine.  Contemporary Feminist Fiction in Spain: The Work of Montserrat Roig and Rosa Montero.  Oxford, Berg, 1994.

Duplaa,  Christina.  La Vox Testimonial en Montserrat Roig: Estudio Cultural de los Textos. Barcelona: Icaria, 1996.

Falcon, Lidia.  El Varón Español a la búsqueda de su identidad. Barcelona:   Plaza and Janes, 1986.

Garcia,  Ana M. Brenes.  "El Cuerpo Como Ideologema En Ramona Adeu de Montserrat Roig," ALEC, 21(3).

Nash Mary.  Les Dones Fan Historia. Barcelona :  Generalitat de Catalunya, Institut Català de la Dona, 1993.

Nichols,  Geraldine C..  Escribir, Espacio Propio: Laforet, Matute, Moix, Tusquets, Riera Y Roig Por Sis Mismas,   Minneapolis:  Institute for the Study of Ideologies.

Roig, Montserrat.  L'Hora Violeta. Barcelona:   Edicions 62, 1980.

Roig, Montserrat.  L'art  de la memòria : Homenatge a Montserrat Roig.  Barcelona:  Club de Debat Joves-21, 1992.

Walters,  D. Gareth.  "Silences and Voices: Salvador Espriu, Montserrat Roig and the Experiences of the Franco Years."  Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 6(2), 2000.

 

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