El cuento secuencial de Francisco García Pavón: A propósito de Los liberales.

Abstract

The third among García Pavón's four book series of regional short-stories, Los liberales (1965), captures the most significant thematic, linguistic and formal features of the author's twenty five year career as a short story writer. This article focusses on the narrative strategies that make Los liberales a masterpiece of modern Spanish childhood autobiography, and a paradigm of the sequential short-story as a genre in its own right distinct from the novel and the independent story. Aspects such as: 1) the creation of a narrative consciousness that alternates irony wityh rhapsody, and anchors the resonance of historical events into experiences of growing up; 2) the locus of Tomelloso as an idyllic site subject to the socio-political convulsions of the nineteen thirties; 3) the construction of a «liberal» ideology based not on egalitarian practices, but in the exemplary nature of willful and progressive perso 31 Marta E. Altisent El cuento secuencial de Francisco García Pavón:... nalities; and 4) the recurrence of characters functioning as storytellers and mythmakers, surpass the boundaries of each tale and give the collection a richer and more cogent vision: that of La Mancha's Tomelloso as a Spanish literary topos which since Don Quijote has come to represent human endurance, native cunning, and creativity.