AFTERLIVES- EXPERIENCES OF SPACE AND TIME IN THE SPANISH REALIST NOVEL

This essay explores how the art of the realist novel consists mainly in its power to evoke an "afterlife" in the reader. The concept involves textual strategies that lead us to experience a new sense of self through a writer's manipulations of space and time. How does the story telling of a narrator keep pace with the lives of his fictional people? What are the effects of certain linguistic devices, such as the use of gerunds, pauses, and line breaks, in the creation of an imaginative mimesis of perception? An analysis of an episode in Don Quijote, together with ideas about realism in fiction (e.g., Benito Perez Galdos, Leopoldo Alas, Vladimir Nabokov, Americo Castro), displays how the notion of a reader's "afterlife" may, in the end, compete handily with those of the novel itself.