Acceso usuarios
Adam L. Winkel
According to the 1946 Plan de Ordenación General de Madrid, the outermost ring of land around the Spanish capital would be dedicated to ‘expansion and relief of the city’. The easternmost border of this zone was the Jarama River, the setting of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s celebrated novel, El Jarama (1956). Sánchez Ferlosio expresses the attitudes of the city tourists and their local observers through a mix of dialogue and description that has brought El Jarama recognition as the quintessential novela social. Yet scholars have often overlooked the manipulation of language that standardizes and codifies the experience of the novel’s characters. Through this manipulation, it becomes evident that leisure space is subject to disciplinary forces that undermine its essence as a possible ‘counter-space’. I argue that a large part of this is due to the judicial presence following the novel’s main tragic event. The standardization of language and of the juridical field reinforces the construction of the leisure space that is already taken over by the expansion of the urban sphere of influence.
