Lèxic i Natura en les narracions d´Enric Valor

1. Introduction¹

Human interaction is not immovable; it is constantly evolving. This dynamism has extraordinarily intensified after World War II and the spread of industrialization. In Spain, this phenomenon has special significance during the last years of the Franco regime. These developments have motivated the deep social and economic transformation that marks the transition from a fundamentally agrarian society to a mostly urban one. This change has brought about a cultural and therefore linguistic revolution because lexicon that was crucial for daily rural life has become obsolete or has acquired new meanings due mostly to changes in the economic regime: industrialization, tourism, relevance of the service sector. To this, we must add an increase in literacy rates that has caused the standardization of language through schooling, mass media and leisure: cinema, TV, music and reading, which in turn has facilitated the dissemination of diverse learning methods. In addition, the spread of technology, in the last decades above all, has fomented the establishment of a society focused on information and communication. As a consequence, a rich vocabulary related to the pre-industrial society has entered into disuse or has changed its meaning in a short period of time. Traditional professions, deeply rooted in popular culture and in the performance of specific tasks, as well as the vocabulary related to them, have disappeared or have been transformed.

This process is evident in many contemporary Western societies. Nevertheless, our experience has individual peculiarities. It is crucial to remember the circumstances of the Catalan language when this process started: the introduction of Spanish, the forced bilingualization, marginality, and, in some instances, institutional persecution, as well as the elimination of the use of Catalan in education and mass media. The rural world was almost the last refuge where Catalan could be used exclusively and where a more traditional linguistic model was preserved.

Literature has always been a faithful mirror of social changes. This is particularly evident in authors devoted to the portrait of the life and languages of communities in specific historical periods. We can remember figures such as Narcís Oller, Llorenç Villalonga, Maria Mercè Marçal and Carmelina Sànchez Cutillas, who have become authors of reference from a sociological point of view for the process we have briefly described above. Nevertheless, the rapid and deep transformation brought about by these changes can produce as a result in literature that becomes incomprehensible for a modern and urban readership, especially for the youngest.

Since the 1960s, a key period in the evolution of society, there appeared writers like Miguel Delibes and Enric Valor who were conscious of the cultural changes undergone by their societies that had repercussions for the language. This linguistic transformation that transcended a mere alternation of languages was reflected in their work. As indicated by Pedro Cáceres (2010) in his article for El Mundo, the deep connection of Delibes with the rural world is also expressed through a lexicon that could require nowadays the use of a dictionary to be fully understood:

Within a few years, we will have to read Miguel Delibes dictionary in hand. Almost nobody will be able to understand the rural vocabulary he uses in his works… The use, tools, and words that described them have been lost.

Delibes incorporates into the fabric of his narrative the vocabulary and phraseology of rural life, as can be clearly seen in his discourse “El sentido del progreso desde mi obra” (1975) delivered at the Real Academia Española.²

Enric Valor not only faces this same evolution, but he also must deal with unique challenges related to the category of the Catalan language in Valencia, a complex stage characterized by the absence of linguistic normalization and an established narrative tradition, something not so evident in Catalonia proper.³ Valor aspires to create a literature that not only fills a gap in the Valencian rondalla and narrative tradition but also to serve as an impulse for the normalization of the Catalan language. As Salvador says (1999: 17):

Because, when carefully considered, the purpose of Valor in his rondalles is twofold: a narrative one–the passion of narrating– and an attempt to disseminate a region, a landscape, and a loved language.

This dynamic of cultural change is eloquently narrated by Valor through the musings of a character in Temps de batuda (1991: 98, 12):

As he was talking, the renter had been filling earthen jars and placing them in the four cavities formed by the saddlebags. I knew about those from when I was a child. All of this made me think: ‘Forms of life, of old civilization, still alive and useful, maybe pushed aside in a very near future by an easier mechanization process’.

This colossal task adopts as a point of departure a linguistic and literary model based on the rural world, which, as we have mentioned, represented the last bastion of a monolingual existence. Enric Valor, born in Castalla (l’Alcoià, Valencian), and with family roots also in Penàguila (in the same region), had close contact with the language of the Valencian mid-lands, which he used as a model in his works.