Josep Pla and Mercè Rodoreda: Catalan Literary Masters
Josep Pla (1897-1981): Writer and Journalist
Josep Pla’s writing reflects his vocation as a writer. He is a marvel, unlocked to the environment around him. Pla acknowledges that the discovery of the outside world becomes imposing to describe. That’s the job of learning: the writer must know how to move discoveries. He knows bitterness because he chose a trade, and for him, it is a demanding job. Josep Pla manifests a passion for tight details and the selection of the adjective. Here lies one of his stylistic principles, a different kind of obsession: to find the accurate, sustained adjective. The prose of Josep Pla is such that the choice of the adjective is not intended to serve an objective. The writer uses the adjective to display their worldview.
The Preparation of the Sentence
For Pla, a sentence must have a closed, juxtaposed structure. It should not be artificially prolonged, should avoid abstraction, and must achieve a certain melodic unity. His literary fecundity is given by the amount of work. He worked as a journalist all his life and was a modernizer of Catalan journalism. Pla works from the autobiographical form. He does not qualify as a novelist as soon as he writes autobiography or memoirs. Pla draws much work from inside the scripts, but he does not leave aside the fiction. He emphasizes the autobiographical nature of his writings, which does not mean that he explains his life but rather elements of his own life adventure. In selecting this option, Pla opts for narrative clarity and legibility.
*Girona Works*
A book of travel through *Binder Gray*, childhood memories of the first and second intake of 1918-1919.
Mercè Rodoreda (1909-1983)
In *The Broken Mirror* (1974), we do not seem to find the uniqueness of the twentieth-century novel. There is an omniscient narrator who objectively describes details, such as the church next to the sea. *The Broken Mirror* highlights the opening of Mercè’s literary career in the Republican period. She posted a series of novels that she later rejected. In the pre-war phase, she entered the novel that made her a renowned author with *Aloma*. It was republished and almost rewritten. *Aloma* now has the usual themes of her first works. Poetic loads are also appreciated in *Aloma*.
The Experience of Two Wars
Few experiences disrupt a personal world like war. War appeared in her work in a particular circumstance, reflected in stories collected in *Twenty-Two Stories*, *My Other Stories*, *Cristina and Other Stories*, and *Silk and Other Stories*. Like many of Katherine Mansfield’s novels, much of the New Zealand war taught her different aspects of the short narrative genre. After living in exile, she moved to Geneva, shut herself in her home, and prepared her final Catalan literary novel. She collected and presented her stories for the 1957 Victor Català Award, titled *Twenty-Two Stories*, and used techniques of subjective and narrative poetry, writing, and spoken language to construct the interior monologue for her future novels.
*Diamond Square*
She worked with intensity in Geneva. Armand Obiols followed the process of writing and made a scrupulous critique of the work. The strength of *Diamond Square* lies in the choice of the character, who is no creature or animal but a queen. If the novel is to make readers great, it is because of the linguistic distillation work that Mercè Rodoreda invested in it. The next novel by Mercè Rodoreda, *On Camellia Street*, has a likeness to *Diamond Square* in that it is protagonized by a female who lives life from innocence to becoming mistress of her own destiny.