By Kyoko Canaway
People often try and divide literature into two distinct categories: the books you read to relax and step out of the real world, and the books that educate and inform you. It is therefore very easy to recommend subject specific books to friends and relatives in an attempt to educate them about the problems that we face within our current society. However, I believe that this logic is flawed. The desire to fight for the rights of others cannot merely be a logical response to a recitation of facts. It must also be an emotional response to the horrors faced by individuals, a genuine wish to improve their personal lives. It therefore follows that basic human empathy must be at the root of all social action, something that is very easy to forget when definitions of political correctness seem more important than the people it seeks to protect. In an attempt to combat this, I believe that literature that very plainly portrays the human experience of ostracization and dehumanisation is fundamental in broadening the collective mind of society, resulting in a solution to social injustices that does not merely rely on quotas and political policies, but instead enables individuals to view all other members of society as humans regardless of gender, race, sexuality or any of the other labels that are currently used to divide.
‘La Salamandra’ is a short story written in the 1940s by the Catalan writer Mercé Rodoreda while she was exiled in France, having been forced to flee Spain after the defeat of the Republicans by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It tells the story of a woman who is assaulted by a married man in the woods. Despite the fact that they are seen by his wife, the affair continues and the female protagonist lists the locations of their frequented meetings almost mechanically, as if reciting information that she has been forced to remember by her aggressor. As time passes, the other inhabitants of the village begin to ostracise the woman, muttering that she is a witch and punishing her by leaving animal carcasses outside her door. The voice of the woman in the short story never describes her emotional response to this, but we learn that she chooses not to attend a religious ceremony held in the village, instead watching the procession through her cat flap as it passes, as if she has accepted that she is somehow more animal than human. Her dehumanisation is finalised when the village people come to her house, capture her and burn her at the stake for fear that she is a witch. But that is not where the tale ends. In a sudden departure from the detailed realism of the preceding narrative, the woman inexplicably becomes a salamander and walks out of the fire. Now an amphibian, she can belong both in water and on land, or put differently, she is never entirely at home on land or in water. Initially, she sleeps in a muddy corner of a lake, where some eels peer at her curiously. When she wakes, she decides to go back to the village, finding her way to the house of her attacker and sleeping under his bed. Her crisis of identity is portrayed in painstaking detail as she sits in a patch of moonlight in the bedroom of the man that abused her but to whom she has also returned and asks with a human voice but in animal form if she is beast or woman, or half and half, or indeed whether she is on land or under water because she can no longer tell. Her traumas don’t end here. The man’s wife finds her under the bed one day and attacks her, chasing her out of the house and injuring her in the process. She has no choice but to return to the pond and the mud, where the eels torment her further, biting her already broken hand and disorientating her with their ceaseless motion. Eventually they succeed in pulling off her hand entirely and it floats down to rest in the mud among the roots of the willow trees.
Each image and each word of this tale are carefully chosen to perfectly communicate the ideas that Rodoreda herself wished to express, resulting in a text that is full of expansive imagery and multiple associations despite the limitations of a short story. However, it is not only the narrative style itself that is of particular interest in ‘La Salamandra’. Like many of Rodoreda’s other short stories, the experience of the female protagonist within the text draws on the experiences of many other women. The societal prejudices of rape and sexual assault are depicted, as the assaulter in the tale calmly watches with his wife as the woman he raped is burnt at the stake. However, the main focus is on the experience of the protagonist herself. Her gradual dehumanisation results in her literal and inexplicable transformation into an animal, more specifically, into an amphibian. This metamorphosis reveals the drastic measures forced on some women to enable them simply to survive within society. Even though the painful change into an animal enables her to live, she can no longer live as a human since she has the appearance of a beast, nor can she live happily amongst animals, having once been a human. This is exacerbated by the choice of salamander as the animal that she transforms into, since this creature can survive not only on land and in water but was also commonly associated with the element of fire, suggesting a fragmentation of identity as well as a lack of belonging. In addition to this, as an animal, she is speechless, something that makes her desperate questions of identity even more harrowing to the reader, as her despair can never be expressed out loud but remains trapped within her own mind.
These questions of sexual assault and fragmentation of identity immediately suggest a feminist reading, as the text harshly depicts the experiences of a woman in a society that is constrained by patriarchal norms. However, it would be a mistake to reduce it to this and nothing more. Rodoreda stated in an interview that she would not have called herself a feminist at the time that she was writing (1), something that supports multiple interpretations of this text that go beyond questions of gender. Although the struggles of an exiled woman clearly feature in her works, these short stories and particularly ‘La Salamandra’ focus on the struggle of any ostracised individual, clearly and emotively portraying the crisis faced by anyone who is dehumanised by society, whether that be because of race, gender, or sexuality.
At a time when social debates are becoming political debates, when choice of language is becoming more divisive than the causes they seek to describe, I believe that it is worth remembering the human experience that is at the root of all of this action, a reminder that is in every word of Rodoreda’s ‘La Salamandra’.