A disconcerting language

Valle-Inclán's Tirano banderas and the hispanic atlantic

Javier Krauel

pp. 297-322

in: Tania Gentic, Francisco LaRubia-Prado (eds), Imperialism and the wider atlantic, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This article analyzes Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas (1926) as a novel embedded in the historical context of the Hispanic Atlantic, but one that constantly exceeds the cultural norms constituting the Atlantic as the inaugural space of the modern/colonial world. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's thoughts on language, belonging, and cultural identity in Monolingualism of the Other, the article shows that the novel's disconcerting language, which is made up of musical modernista literary language, of grotesque, socially marginal linguistic elements, and of strange idioms that are paradoxically unable to tie speakers to a territory or to a social situation, makes the reader aware of the alienation constitutive of all languages and thus displaces the idea of Spanish as an imperial/national language.

Cited authors

Derrida Jacques

Del Valle-Inclán Ramón