By FERNANDO ARRABAL (Penguin; 1986)
Hildegart Rodriguez, a young woman who in early Twentieth Century Spain was raised to become a genius by her domineering mother, is a figure that continues to fascinate. Rodrigeuz’s story was adapted for film in 2024 by director Paula Ortiz as THE RED VIRGIN (LA VIRGEN ROJA), a title used previously by Spain’s Fernando Arrabal. His RED VIRGIN offered a literary take on the material that, in contrast to Ortiz’s straightforward rendition, was quite reflective of Arrabal’s surrealist orientation.
As translated by Andrew Hurley, the novel is told from the point of view of the mother, who goes unwed and unnamed, with Hildegart rechristened Vulcasais (“The fire enclosed in Matter, Vulcan, combined with Truth, Sais, are the elements of my daughter’s name”). The novel is related in 124 chapters, each of which starts in the middle of one page and continues onto the next (but never past); thus, the book is quite rigorous in its construction, although to what end I’m not sure.
It’s quite intriguing, in any event, in the way it presents the narrator’s near-inhumanly pious nature through her absolute determination to make a genius of Vulcasais no matter what she or anyone else has to say about it. In true Arrabal fashion, the text is peppered with religious themed hallucinations that lay bare the insane nature of the protagonist, whose attitudes and decisions tend to be informed more often than not by dreams.
Inevitably, Vulcasais rebels against her mother’s fascistic rule as she gets older and luminaries of the day like Freud, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells try to become part of her life. Ma, of course, will have none of it, growing increasingly dismayed by her daughter’s rebellious nature and, in conjunction with the historical record, eventually killing her, with the novel taking the form of a confessional letter to the dead girl.
The narrator’s unrelenting self-righteousness grows a bit suffocating before long, but that was likely the point. The protagonist here ranks with the castrating mother figures of Arrabal’s novel BAAL BABYLON (1959), play LE GRAND CEREMONIAL (1963) and film VIVA LA MUERTE (1971). Doubtless the premise has autobiographical significance for Arrabal, who as a boy was apparently voted the smartest child in Spain, an honor the adult Arrabal claims he neither wanted nor appreciated, which of course equates with the dilemma faced by Vulcasais.