The Intercalation of Short Stories in Luis Mateo Díez: between Tradition and Reinvention

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the intercalated stories in three novels by Luis Mateo Díez: La fuente de la edad, Las horas completas and Camino de perdición. After a historical contextualization of the traditional resource of episodic intercalation, we proceed to analyse the methods employed by the author in the interpolation of secondary stories, their genre, function and implications for the main narrative. In La fuente de la edad, the stories are integrated into an itinerant narrative scheme, with antecedents in the works of Homer, Mateo Alemán and Cervantes. The latter's concern for the structural harmony of his works, which in some aspects serve as inspiration to Díez for his secondary stories, justifies the intertextual comparison established between the two writers. However, Díez also makes use of other intercalation mechanisms discarded by the author of Don Quixote, such as the framed story. In Las horas completas and Camino de perdición, Díez uses this resource by updating the old frames of the alivio de caminantes and sobremesa, respectively. The analysis reveals to what extent the pleasure of narrating characterises his characters, often linked to madness, misfortune, imposture and mythomania. We conclude that Díez moves at all times between homage to and subversion of literary tradition in his attempt to recreate the oral rite of the filandón leonés within the canonical genre, the novel.