La Plaza del Diamante: The Other Side of the Story
In Writing beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis points out that displacing attention to the other side of the story is one of the strategies frequently used by twentieth century women poets when they rewrite classical or Judeo Christian myths. This narrative displacement "offers the possibility of speech to the female in the case, giving voice to the muted" (108) Such a change in perspective radically alters the nature of the story and its underlying assumptions. Eurydice's or Penelope's values, after all, are not those of Orpheus or Ulysses. Although DuPles sis's analysis focuses on the revisionary mythopoesis of poets whose language is English, the concept of the other side of the story is relevant to the writing of Catalan novelist Merce Rodoreda and her 1962 novel, La Plaza del Diamante in particular. The protagonist is a woman whose life, like that of Goethe's Makarie, would appear to be without external events, "a life whose story cannot be told as there is no story" (Eichner 620) Rodoreda, however, is well aware that female experience is not minor and that women writers can, in the words of Virginia Woolf, choose "to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important" (81) The protagonist of Diamante is a simple, unlettered, working class woman who recounts her courtship, marriage, the birth of her two children, her widowhood, and her remarriage. Natalia's narrative spans a period of some twenty five years running from shortly before the advent of the Second Republic into the post Civil War period. Chapters 1 17 portray her daily life and its "small headaches." In chapters 18 32, political events assume increasing importance and the headaches be come big ones. In chapters 33 49, Natalia gradually rebuilds her life in postwar Barcelona (Arnau 245 247) A series of binary oppositions structure the narrative: story/lack of story, speech/silence, presence/