Modelo de interrelación espacios-personajes en "Bendíceme, Última", "Nilda" e "Hija de la fortuna"

Abstract

The following analysis is a contribution to the knowledge of the Hispanic Literature of the United States. It is based on the interrelation between spaces and characters in three novels that turn on the Hispanic individual and Hispanic American culture background. The three stories – Bendíceme, Última, Nilda and Hija de la fortuna – are very representative of the great ethnical and cultural Hispanic enclaves of that country. In these stories by Rudolfo Anaya, Nicholasa Mohr and Isabel Allende respectively, we try to approach the Hispanic American collective imaginary through two of its architectonical categories: the space and the character. The fundamental problem stems from linking both textual dimensions, that is, how the two interact. More explicitly, it is about following the vital course of the main characters from their dependency and / or interdependency relationship with space in each story. Space sometimes comes down to a mere pretext to refer to characters. Space generates two indispensable factors: it is the condition for action and movement. Character is also a pretext to refer to space, since the latter only forms and feels through the one character who treads on it. Each of these stories can make sense from many perspectives. Ours is semiotics. Semiotics allows to understand a text by researching and interpreting its significance systems. It is an analytical method that bestows a scientific seal upon the present piece of work. To that effect, we propose analysing a novel through its significance and understanding of its essential characteristics for an accurate approach to the Hispanic sociocultural experience of the United States. We take into account the three components in literary creation process: writer, text and reader. In this way, the external critic is not divorced from the internal one. Combining three novels is already an intertextual process on its own. Nevertheless, we have broadened the scope of the said process by opening new windows towards other Hispanic publications of the United States. Bearing in mind that the texts communicate to each other, we relate the concrete points of contact and discrepancy that result from that comparison. Each of the six chapters that make up this analysis helps to interpret and to understand these works. We start from the social and cultural environment immediately prior to the production of these texts before reaching a psycho-ideological reading of the contents. In the heart of the analysis, there are some essential topographic features useful to locate and portray the characters. Within a purely functional framework, we analyze the space and the character in the action. Actantial analysis gives way to a range of themes through which pathologies as well as instruments of domination and exclusion among Hispanics in the United States society emerge. From the general analysis, it is to be stressed that Hispanics of the United States constitute a heterogeneous group. Although Hispanics are made up of natives, immigrants and exiled, they’re still bound to their Hispanic umbilical cord. Most of them are Mexican American (of Mexican descent or coming from the territories previously belonging to Mexico). Others come from the Caribbean Islands (Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans). And finally, there are some Hispanics from Central and South America, and those of Spanish origin. The cultural diversity brings about nationalisms; hence the complexity of Hispanic-American cultural fabric. From analysis, topics inherently linked to social, cultural and economic expressions occurring in space are also to be stressed. We are referring to the border in its semiotic significance. The border represents a space responsible for migratory phenomena, and a booster for economic and cultural phenomena. So the border turns to be a driving force in statements on identity. The clash of cultures generated by the presence of the border make cultural exchanges possible. Beyond the border, the Hispanic of the United States can be acculturated, assimilate the Anglo American culture, keep his own culture or choose a mixed culture. As for the Anglo-American, this will result in his culture being influenced in return by Hispanics through gastronomy, fashion, language, etc. In relative terms, we will then have Anglo-americanized Hispanics and hispanized AngloAmericans. Apart from the border, we can emphasize mythical (Aztlán) and community (neighbourhood) spaces that connect emotionally to where people come from – in this case, Aztlán for Mexican American – and the community they belong in. This analysis model provides us with five types of interrelation. The basic one links the space to the character, the space seen as a character’s signal and vice versa. An emotional relation unites to the character with the space in which he stands. Space is therefore revealed here as fascinating or repulsive, with an impact on the state of mind, the personality, the feelings and the hopes of the character. The third interrelation is conjunctural. In this case, the space decides whether to accept the character or not, thus hurrying his success or failure. Fourthly, the space and the character depend one on the other by means of an action in which both are participants. Lastly, there is a psychological or chronotopical relation in which the pair spacecharacter found itself influenced by the time dimension. As a result of the latter relationship – that also challenges identity claims – some Hispanic characters are living halfway between two worlds that match two time space dimensions: there (where they come from) meaning yesterday (past) and here (United States) meaning today (present). All in all, the present research project is a contribution to finding into and out of written texts the people for whom analysed novels where created. Here you will find three cases about the origin and presence of Hispanic in the United States that help us know the mental structure, the relationships of the Hispanics among themselves and with Anglo-Americans. Else, we can learn a way of behaving and acting, world vision, knowhow, living and hoping of the Hispanic community which presence is still to be legitimized in the United States of America.