«A treballar, a escriure, a veure si faig alguna cosa que el dia de demà pesi en el meu país»: Resuming Writing and Gazing upon Spain in Mercè Rodoreda’s ‘Exhiled’ Letters

Abstract

Intimately connected with the trauma at first of the Spanish Civil War and, less than a year later, with the globalized wound of the Second World War, Mercè Rodoreda’s lengthy European exile can be interpreted as a painfully privileged point of view on the cultural diaspora of 1939 –doubly suffered by the author upon her departure from Spain and her separation, already in France, from the many fellow writers who opted for the American continent as the final destination of their exile–, and on the abandoned homeland, close and yet unrecognizable due to the implacable action of Franco’s dictatorship. My reflection aims to analyze Rodoreda’s epistolary corpus published to date, tracing among its lines both a generative philology of the author’s ‘post-war’ writing, to which she owes her canonization among Catalan-language writers, and a cartography of her gaze towards absence, doubly addressed to a Spain where democracy seems to never be restored, and to a Spanish-speaking America which, with its network of contacts and affections, becomes a preferential interlocutor.