In February 1955, Mercè Rodoreda discovered that she had met Albert Camus and René Char during a trip to Paris. He invented this “tightrope walker story” for private reasons, as he admitted in a letter to Joan Puig i Ferrater, but the degree of fabrication of the anecdote is not as exaggerated as can be shown. Rodoreda, with Camus and Char but also with Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino and Elsa Morante, is one of the great European authors of the second half of the 20th century. To unwind the clichés who for a long time wandered around the Catalan writer, the exhibition Rodoreda, a forest of the CCCB, organized by Neus Penalba, also highlights this issue.
Rodoreda’s literary and journalistic debut took place after the Spanish Civil War, but the writer acquired artistic background during the years of exile in France. She is the mother of the intellectual ferment that Paris experienced after the Second World War, when the city began to cede, without reluctance, the cultural capital to the State Units. Here, on Rodoreda, come “about four hours a day” the classic and modern antics, and cultivate herself in every genre imaginable and in all the languages which she masters and which, if she does not master, she learns. In other places, the Catalan writer creates the seventh work of the tragic group of Europe.
As various critics have studied, Rodoreda will see the horrors of war and know them well. blond beer Nazis and their collaborators, French and Spanish, that we can write Nit I will drink (1947). It is taken from one of the first exhibitions of the universities of concentration, published in La Nostra Magazine of Mexico abans de les of Primo Levi and Robert Antelme. Penalba exposes the CCCB at the cost of the serious accusations of Josep Bartolí and the homonymous documentary by Alain Resnais (1956), both of which illustrate the barbarity of these anys. The use of recreation and literary imagination to represent the atrocity of the countryside and the European war will be a problem that arises later, during the last decades of the century, and among most writers like Jorge Semprún or Marguerite Duras.
Thus, the fact that the writer extracted material from life for literature does not mean that all six works are looking for biography. Well, on the contrary. For Rodoreda, literature is the name of literature and the dialogue with literary tradition is at the center of his creative project. For now, Penalba has spread over more than a thousand square meters of exhibition many names that will influence her and, as she continues through tributes, parodies, cryptic quotes or updates, Rodoreda challenges her with his latest work. Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Marcel Proust, Voltaire, JV Foix, Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare, Ramon Llull, Dorothy Parker and many others are on the reference list, so we will not be able to “determine what exactly will happen” because a good part of the library is lost.
He creates his seventh work from the tragic heart of Europe and is the mother of post-war Parisian unrest.
Quest Moltes auctorites They are shared by “the most representative people of the time”, directly with the Rodoreda mateixa. HAS Diamond Square (1962), for example, the writer is responsible for the theme of Being and nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre on “the final construction of all human life”, in the words of Armand Obiols; I know the couple has been enthusiastic since June 1943, when they recommended The flies (1943). Last installation of the exhibition, the water toll sweeps ocells, fang and cel, to also suggest to us this idea of buit and transcendence at this time.
Like her contemporaries, Rodoreda is fascinated by ancestral mites and the urban legends that follow them. The story of “the disconnection of the Seine”, a modern Mena of Ophelia that Penalba reveals in a raco museum, was supposed to inspire numerous suicides in his stories, just as it had touched the imagination of Rainer Maria Rilke, Céline, Louis Aragon, Man Ray or Santiago Rusiñol. In the latter two, the CCCB received a bust and photographs on the theme of “la discogneguda”, accompanied by handwritten annotations and unpublished texts in which Rodoreda speaks of his six “literary suicides” and from the Paris archives.
But there is a radical difference between her and these artists: Rodoreda only gives subjectivity and passat to the six heroines, she does not condemn them to objects of contemplation and design. I face goes further, as Penalba explains: the writer “captures cultural stereotypes about femininity: it complicates the beauty ideals of Noucentisme, overturns the traditional comparison between gifts and flowers, (…) and redefines the common things associated with bruixs and prostitutes”. Think of Cecilia CeRue des Camélies (1966), for example, that the commission is very skilfully associated with the sculpture of a “Mare de Déu de la Llet” from the 14th century.
As you know, the Catalan novelist was also interested in painting and explored different processes, techniques and styles, stimulated by the art brut of Jean Dubuffet and the primitivism of Paul Klee, and now imitating Vassili Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso or Joan Miró. Horse and knightone of the seven quadres on display at CCCB, is evident. Rodoreda will not, however, limit this plastic thinking to the cornices of the field: Death and spring (1986) —Penalba will show the attack Fam als ulls, cement in the mouth (2024)—, transferring the pictorial primitivism of the post-war avant-garde to the narrative text in the wake of Henri Michaux, from which the museum can see a rubbing, Rest in misfortune (1945), example with another tale, Paralysis (1978). On the other hand, it illustrates a magnificent video of Penalba on one of the walls of the CCCB, Mirall Trencat (1974) transforms certain scenes from French and American cinema by Mitjan Segle, with Madam of… (1953) by Max Ophüls, from visual image to written language. In this sense, Chapter I of the novel could be considered one of the first cinematic languages of all time.
Further proof of this dialogue with literary and cultural tradition, Rodoreda in the gairebé dona at the end of his life, which depicts the war of 36 in the novel La Seva Darrera. How much, how much war… (1980), which basteix intertextually on the classics of the Spanish Segle d’Or. Through mentions of works by Cervantes, Quevedo and Velázquez, and still lifes and watercolors by López Enguídanos and Goya, Penalba reveals how, with irony and expertise but also with admiration, it is these companions who demonstrate the absurdity, the family and the misery of Spanish Feixism -i, of the past, also of History.
The list of connections, rewrites, updates and references is endless and can be found in every work Rodoreda has received. Seva universalitat is therefore to do with the direct and personal participation of the author in the intellectual debates of the moment, with a “lucid vision” send the letter that it will also anticipate and question the questions of our being”, said Penalba. Thanks to this, literature has not lost its validity, it has not lost its relevance when it has been translated into other languages. “But this character of universal or classic, also and above all, is seen in the same “I am committed to the form”, affirms the commission. “With all great authors, Rodoreda knew that first and last is language, style.” the one who is humans”, now equal and different. People of innocents who, like Rodoreda, can neither be corrupted nor domesticated.
Rodoreda, a forester. CCCB. Ends May 25, 2026
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