Las formas de recopilación y engarce en la narrativa breve de Francisco Ayala

Resumen

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the forms of linking and compilation in the short narrative of the writer Francisco Ayala within the broad tradition of the collection of short stories, specially, within the Hispanic one. The configuration and the development of the short story in the narrative tradition have been widely examined; however, the Hispanic research field suffers from a lack of studies on the compilation of short stories as a narrative modality. In fact, in the field of Hispanism, Ayala’s profile as a writer of short stories has received less attention in the abundant bibliography on his oeuvre, although some specialists have pointed to the importance of the way in which their stories have been collected. Thus, the aims of this research are as follows: to trace the historical development of books of short stories (starting from a diachronic perspective), from their medieval origins to the broad and heterogeneous panorama of the twentieth century; to situate Ayala in his literary context as a compiler of short stories; to analyse thematically and structurally the stories that form Ayala’s collections (above all, as a whole), taking into account their publishing history and the author’s own contributions to these works in their prologues; to link Ayala’s short stories with the traditional models of the genre and to determine their prevalence in the author’s work, as well as the originality of his work, and, finally, to define the models of compilation and linking used by Ayala. To fulfil these objectives, we use a triple methodology: historical, by situating the genre in its literary tradition and taking into account the modes of publication and edition of Ayala’s work; theoretical and genological, by defining the collection as a textual model and determining how Ayala used it; and critical, by carrying out an analysis of the studied literary texts. In addition to incorporating Ayala’s own theoretical considerations and the important contributions on narrative genres by different scholars, we consider ideas from the French and Anglo-Saxon philological fields, with their proposals for models such as the recueil and the short story cycle. Consequently, in this dissertation we study the collections of Ayalian short stories through a comparative analysis that examines the texts, necessarily, from the point of view of the history of publishing and as well as from a thematic and structural point of view. With this analysis, we conclude with the recognition of a narrative modality that could determine the idiosyncrasy of the texts it brings together. This model is to be characterised by the gathering of texts from an organic viewpoint that integrates them into a literary whole, differentiating subtypes according to their inclination towards the autonomy of their components (collections) or their interdependence (short story cycles). Likewise, we determine that the main model of books of stories for Ayala is Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares, with the juxtaposition of texts that also show internal connections that we readers are to decipher. Apart from this fundamental influence, the specificity of the author’s volumes of short stories is evident. We distinguish two main types in the analysed Ayalian works: those that are close to the short story cycle and those that are close to the usual collection. Both show their own particularities and do not respond entirely to the criteria of these traditional models. For this reason, Ayala’s work leads to a rethinking of these generic categories, although they can still be applied to the analysis of Ayala’s works and those of other contemporary writers.