Teoría de la parodiael mundo narrativo de Eduardo Mendoza

Abstract

The present doctoral dissertation aims to define the concept of parody by a comprehensive approach to the literary theory and contemporary Spanish literature. In doing so, this thesis has been structured on two core ideas which articulate each of the parts in the essay: I Theory of parody and II Eduardo Mendoza’s narrative world. First of all, the construction of our theory of parody has been developed on a diachronic and synchronic research on this literary notion, understood as an interartistic method that has been observed from rhetoric, aesthetics, poetics, or psychoanalysis. Attending to the principal considerations of the diverse field of knowledge, and following Pozuelo Yvancos’ paper Parodiar, rev(b)elar (2000), three major stages will be stablished: premodern, modern and postmodern. These stages have affected the conjugation of parodied-parodistic, which can be observed according to the epistemological changes of language, as symbol, metaphor, and simulacrum of world. Meanwhile, a pragmatic view —using the act-speech theory— was incorporated, something that enables noticing the effects of parody inside the communicative literary system; in other words, the conditions needed for the establishment of a parodic use of language looked into by linguistics and philosophy of language. Secondly, we will turn to a particular Spanish literary oeuvre to go in depth in the study of narrative expression of parody with the parameters of Critical Theory. Eduardo Mendoza’s texts support the research due to his significance to literary context and his remarkable treatment of humour as an attitude, as an interpretative position; through a narratological analysis of its minimal elements and its structure, the dialectic relation between histoire and discourse has been revealed in its semiological and formalist implications which explain the parodic mechanisms and effects of his written novels, dramas and essays. By means of a comparative methodology, the reading of Mendoza’s creation assesses his long-favoured devices inherited from formalism and postmodern thoughts, ostranenie and desacralization respectively; both have been uttered by discourse levels (with madness, strangeness and the picaresque-detective universe), as well as by the narrative arrangement not only in its digressiveness, but in its spatial-temporality uniqueness. By integrating the diachronic variation, mythic and post-mythic, into the study of its illocutional execution as aesthetic mode, theory of parody reveals that it is its substantial duality and its comic nature what particularizes its artistic entity. Parody is defined thus as a specific relativizing (re)creative mode whose duplicity parodied-parodic is proved in the diverse manifestations of its states, and it is transferred to its communicational dimension as a textual hypertrophic superposition (hypertext and hypotext), double reception (conscious and unconscious) and its intentional ambiguity (imitation and innovation). Thanks to this theory of parody, texts as those of Eduardo Mendoza can be reconsidered in light of creation problematics, melting them in the premodern, modern and postmodern dialectic to constitute his narrative world. The resultant comic effect adheres to the chief centres of author’s literary work, and explains them as an alienating discourse framed by the literaturization of a fabulated memory