Carme Karr, an obligated intellectual | Quadern

Life is curious paradoxes: on the street that bears its name, a few meters from the house where the darrers anys will pass, on Duquessa d’Orleans street in the Sarrià neighborhood, have a good meal every day, all ells speak in italy. Most probably everyone knows that the lady who donates her name to the race at her school, the Italian School of Barcelona, ​​is going to learn Italy from Ben Petita. L’italià was the mother tongue of Carme Karr, one of the most relevant Catalan intellectuals of the first decades of the century: writer, journalist, musicologist, editor and feminist activist. To the extent that she is clear in understanding the intellectual and literary debates of those times, she Karr is going to disappear into a deep oblit. Fortunately, the Medusa publishing house recovers, with a proleg by Josep Lluís Martín i Berbois Volves, and the Barcino publishing house, with the edition and introduction by Lluïsa Julià, Clixés, two fundamental works to focus on the figure of Karr and in the forest poetics of her.

I just had someone when my mother, Emilia Alfonsetti, died; All the Spanish, Italian, French and Spanish are going to be the languages ​​that she learned as a petita. In fact, his father, Eugène Karr, was an industrial engineer who left Paris and moved to Barcelona on the occasion of his work for the celebration of the Universal Exhibition of 1888. Karr was born in 1865, and was formed between Perpignan and Barcelona, I spent my teenage years in Paris. Her education is going to be French; The romantic authors will be part of her six first lectures, but will later be interested in her seus contemporanis. “In 1901 I didn’t know how to write a mot in the Catalan language. Familiarized from early childhood with French literature, and later with Spanish and Italian, I spoke correctly in any language, Catalan, but it was not difficult for me to read. “Not for now to come and deeply admire our poets,” the author wrote. De fet, in the stories that make up You come back Yo Clixes We perceive the influence of authors such as Colette or D’Annunzio, but also of Víctor Català, to whom Karr sent Clixesinterested in what she said, said.

From literary modernism, Karr ens proposes a writing and a new look: stories that capture, quasi photographically, scenes and concrete situations with a style of carefree appearance, colloquial, concise, journalistic, but capable of penetrating the nature of the characters and , now, to portray the context in which they are inscribed. With some exceptions—the stories in the “landscape” section are set in a rural context and the influence of Víctor Català is most visible—, Clixes ia You come backKarr ens presents urban stories through which he travels through early-century Barcelona, ​​a Barcelona in which the manners and forms of social interaction are inscribed, and the distance between social classes is evident and codified. They implement the values ​​of bourgeois society, in which the woman occupies a subaltern and dependent position on the home. In open dialogue with the articles published by Female a feminist magazine founded by Karr that had as its main purpose the culturització and formation of gifts, the stories of Clixes and of You come backpresent, as contemporary Carme de Burgos would say, the modern dona: with a critical look, Karr captures the values ​​and gender roles, showing in this way the bourgeois hypocrisy on issues such as pure love, infidelitat o he prostituted her. “The disappearance of Jaume when she is home, and his delusion of love, are attuïment of her before the mysteries brutally revealed to her pure innocence in those hours of Saint’s Day; her happy motherhood, which extends so much of her life, that not only of the moral abandonment of her espòs, but also of her infidelitats”, we read ‘L’esclat’ (Clixes). Here Karr highlights the hypocrisy of the home and lovers who claim possession of her life, tot havent-abandoned her in the past. On the contrary, to ‘Dia ple’, he arrived: “But he would marry her, she? Ai! No no! Fora vincles tirans.” The protagonist, a widow, denies the possibility of a new marriage, while in ‘Consciència’ the protagonist considers the possibility of abandoning her marriage.

TO You come back trobem set stories that dialogue both Clixes pel that fa to the presentation of gifts that seek and claim the second emancipation, present decisions, treballant, obrint-se pas de la seva subaltern position and seek an equal relationship between you and your both men. Now, You come backIt is a despietat portrait of the Catalan bourgeoisie, which, from the proleg, Karr defines by its selfishness, which, for one thing, grants men a superiority and some rights that are denied to the lady, to whom, in turn, they become “in a frèvol being, in a luxe furniture”, and, in other words, it is characterized by an instinct of comfort that is imposable to dignity and that leads it to take pride in the greatest ximpleries. To the Ciutadanes section, to You come backtrobem relats com ‘Charitats’, on Karr penetrates the dins of the noble class: the languages—the Spanish of the baroness, the French of the institute and the Catalan of the service— allow us to portray in detail the social distance between classes, to the matteix times that shows the structural inequality of society and the hypocrisy of a wealthy class that is comforting to the poorest almoines.

The publication of these two titles is an important step forward in the recovery of Carme Karr. Her seus articles and her conferences are a fundamental complement to understand the fundamental role that she will play in the formulation of the feminist discourse in Catalonia and in the short voice of the dona, in the first place, in the right to the vote. Now, the dialogue between her six articles and her seventh work of fiction allows me to understand her commitment to the written word. The seva literature of her; In concrete terms, these two books cannot be understood without bearing in mind her strong faith in the transformative capacity of literature and, more generally, of the written word. Carme Karr promoted a new understanding of society and also of life for the future and in her strong defense of the need to review gender roles, literature was the ideal way to show the way forward. times, to show, as if it were taken from the majority of journalistic photographs, the situation and the context from which it is part and the cry on which it has arrived.

You come back

Carme Karr
Medusa Publishing
144 pages. 18 euros