The illness of the environment nature, culture and human life in The Time of the Doves.

Marti, Aina

The Time of the Doves is a Catalan novel by Merce Rodoreda published in 1962. She wrote this novel during her exile in Geneva in the years of Franco's dictatorship. In the prologue she expresses her desire to write in Catalan and to bring the culture of Catalonia to foreign lands (Rodoreda 8). This is important because one of the reasons for her exile plays a central role in the novel: the Spanish Civil War. The treatment of the war in her novel is not political, however, but rather is highly personal. The reader experiences the war through Natalia's (Colometa's) eyes, and this perspective is a very individual one: it is the vision of a mother alone in the middle of a violent conflict. There are almost no political features in this novel; instead the emphasis is on the emotion and subjectivity that make it possible to live humanely, even during war. Several aspects in The Time of the Doves are ripe for analysis: love, elements of premonition, which appear throughout the novel (the reason for the name "Colometa"), and narrative style. However, this article will focus on the war and its consequences on the environment, and will only refer to such topics when necessary. There are three main aspects to the relation between war and the environment.

For Natalia the foremost problem is that food resources are greatly diminished as a result of the civil war. That is, her life now has the single purpose of procuring the food necessary in order to feed her children. After her husband dies in the war this problem becomes much more acute. This situation has one main consequence: no non-material, cultural goal, such as education, has any place in her life due to the misery in which she lives. As if she were in a third world country, war reduces everything to the primal instinct to survive. As a result, the destruction of material resources brings about the destruction of culture and the relationship between human beings and their culture suddenly breaks down. Secondly, the novel presents a unique treatment of Natalia's physical surroundings. For instance, as she says in the novel, the city suffers from an "illness." She employs this noun, proper to living beings, to refer to the condition of the city. This illness has killed everything and everyone; after the war there is only death in the streets. The last salient feature of her environment is its relationship with Natalia's inner state. Sadness and the lack of resources, as well as happiness and the possession of them, are closely related. In this sense, the novel develops a relation between the protagonist's inner state and the external state of nature, showing the dependence between human beings and the natural world, to which, the novel suggests, they belong. The ecocritical approach that I will employ in this article treats the environment as an entire system consisting of human beings and the rest of living beings. In addition, my interpretation of the apocalyptic signs present in the novel will relate the personal experience of war to a universal perspective.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) held the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic captive to an uprising of military conspirators. Very quickly the radical left wing movements began to take to the streets in response (Esenwein 64-65). In Catalonia, especially in Barcelona, revolutionary groups such as the anarcho-syndicalist FAI/CNT gained great popular strength. Barcelona experienced some of the most violent consequences of the activities of these radical groups, including the burning down of churches and the rape of nuns, among others. In The Time of the Doves, Natalia recounts how she can see churches on fire and smoke everywhere as one of the firsts signs of war (114). Later, she goes to the house where she is working as a cleaning woman and her employer tells her how a group of revolutionaries wanted to kill her husband thinking that he was a priest (116). In Catalonia, revolutionaries took over the government, and the region became a major focus of the fight against the fascist forces. Some 7400 people were killed during the revolutionary period in Barcelona; as George Esenwein affirms, what took place in cities like Madrid and Barcelona was revolutionary terrorism. In the entirety of Spain, left wing organizations murdered 7937 priests, nuns and monks, 1215 of whom were in Barcelona, where left wing groups took control of the entire city (Esenwein 86). In chapter XXVI of The Time of the Doves, other signs of war appear, including the lack of fuel for vehicles and the consequent problems for obtaining food. Natalia now needs to fall back to a reliance on coal (113). Returning to more primitive resources in this way is the first obvious cultural change that war produces.

As Carole Counihan notes in The Anthropology of Food and Body, one of the ways that human culture manifests is through culinary habits. Milk is the first basic food lacking in The Time of the Doves (114), and rationing is mentioned by the grocer, who can only buy and sell what is permitted by the government (134). Alicia Guidonet analizes in her study "The Spanish Civil War and its Aftermath: Eating Strategies and Social Change" the methods to obtain food used by people who survived the Spanish Civil War. She shows that looking for food was people's main task during the postwar period. In this situation it was very important to optimize one's use of food and one's ability to obtain it. As a result, people divided tasks among themselves, which became an essential strategy for doing more in less time. These tasks included exploring the different channels of obtaining food, such as performing on-the-spot labor or creating social networks among groups of people to obtain different types of food. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that The Time of the Doves is set in an urban area, where it was more difficult to obtain important foods, such as milk or vegetables, than in rural areas. Therefore, building "relationship networks"--groups of people working to obtain food--became critical to survival. These "relationship networks" were characterized by a reciprocal relationship consisting of giving and receiving help (Guidonet 102). This relation of "reciprocity" is identical to what prevailed in older societies, and as a result there is a general return to an earlier stage in human civilization. A society in wartime involves the loss of almost every cultural advantage or progress achieved during peace, and the material destruction that follows war is the most visible part of the decadence it causes.

In this period eating was more than just a material fact of human life: it was also a symbol of power, culture and morality. From this perspective, in The Time of the Doves we see how the situation of Natalia changes from the beginning of the war up to its end. From chapter XXVI to XXXVI the author presents the complete 'food cycle' that prevailed during wartime, starting with the family's need to obtain it all the way to its complete absence and the deaths that result. From this scarcity, food also provides an ascending path toward life. Consequently, it makes sense to talk about "the whole of the dead," an expression used by Antoni Miralles in his article "En el forat de la mort:" "It was hard for me to get back on my feet again, but slowly I returned to life after living in the pit of death" (Rodoreda 158). In chapter XXXVII, Quimet, Natalia's first husband, is already fighting in the war. During one of his visits home, he gives Natalia two gold coins and advises her not to leave the house where she works because things outside are very difficult (Rodoreda 119). Quimet represents the provision of food, since he is almost the only food source for Natalia and her children. Quimet gets food on the front lines, where the soldiers are better fed than people in the city (123). Things go from bad to worse, and Natalia loses her job because the owners cannot pay her (120). However, she finds another humble job, not as good as the first one yet good enough to survive (122). Cintet, a friend of the family, also helps Natalia and gives her food when he is in Barcelona (125). Therefore, it is not just her husband who helps her but also friends of the family, in an example of the "relationship networks" established during the war among people who shared some kind of link. Enriqueta, a friend of Natalia, also gives apricot jam, a luxury food otherwise impossible to find, to Natalia's children (127). When Quimet appears the last time before his death, he tells Natalia that food has begun to be scarce on the front lines (132), a scarcity which Natalia soon begins to experience personally (134). For this reason, Natalia decides to take her son to a wartime home for children (135). When Quimet comes home, Natalia and her children have only three sardines and a rotten tomato for dinner (140). Natalia begins to sell everything she has at home to buy food, but the problem is not just the lack of money but also the general lack of food in the city (141). "I stopped in front of the shop with the oilcloth and pretended I was looking in the window, because to tell the truth I didn't see a thing: only patches of color, the dolls' shadows" (142). This paragraph shows that because of her hunger Natalia is in critical health. She is almost unconscious and she can see nothing but spots. The climax arrives when she, in despair, decides to kill her children and herself with acid. When she arrives at the shop to buy the acid, the grocer, Antoni, offers her a job as a cleaning woman in his home and gives her food. This moment represents the end of the cycle and a return to life. As Miralles affirms, Natalia was living in "the whole of the dead" until she meets Antoni, who gives her food and she feels alive again (179-188). Antoni belongs to a more powerful social class, and as a result a reciprocal exchange of goods begins between two persons who belong to different social classes, thereby starting a new relationship network.

It is not until Natalia marries Antoni that the topic of education appears in the novel. Antoni wants to provide education for Natalia's children and this is possible thanks to the economic and food resources they have available to them. Thus it is only after "returning to life" that the development of culture can resume, serving as a useful metaphor for the interdependence of life and culture in which the latter depends on the former. While this might seem obvious, when the context is one of war, it can prompt us to reflect that war involves death and destruction. In the novel, however, there are two kinds of death: sudden and slow. The latter is what Natalia and her children represent during the period of war in the novel. They are alive but they are nonetheless dying, and not in a hospital or in their beds: they are dying in the middle of everyday life, of the city, just like the other citizens. This little nuance shows that one can "live in death," a situation where culture has no place. Therefore, culture needs a "return to life," a life where basic necessities have been met. This return to life is to encounter oneself through culture or education, or at least to have this possibility.

In his book War in Human Civilization, Gat analyzes the relationship between human biological evolution and cultural evolution. He understands culture as the most perfect achievement in human evolution, with both biology and culture intimately intertwined. When culture appeared in human history it also had an influence on human biological evolution, which was in turn fostered by culture (Gat 152-153). Therefore culture has been linked to human life since the appearance of humans on earth, and its destruction will inevitably lead to the destruction of human beings. If culture is joined to human evolution it makes sense to talk about "barbarism" as a decadent human state where culture is lacking in human lives. One expression of this state is war. Previously I have discussed the relation between war and the destruction of material and spiritual goods, but now I will consider culture as a whole, that is, as encompassing both human matter and spirit, and their relation to the environment.

The Time of the Doves demonstrates the consequences of war upon the environment. Here the author's symbolic language is very important, because through it she achieves a unity between Natalia's individual point of view and the universal meaning that symbolism allows. Thus, a novel from the perspective of a single person is nonetheless able to express a common experience. Since Natalia is the novel's only narrator, the reader can only experience things through her eyes, which provides a very subjective perspective without the possibility of comparison. However, Natalia's experience is linked to the entire universe: her words, feelings, vision and descriptions present a sense of greatness that cannot be limited to an individual. I will analyze this relationship between the individual and the cosmic theoretically through the symbolism of apocalyptic texts.

Holistic theory views nature as a complete system, which includes human beings as part of this natural world. The relations between its members are very interdependent, which implies that damage to one of its parts affects the whole system (Yasunaga 12). This strong interrelation and interdependence among the elements results from the idea that everything is made up of the same matter and forces and, as a result, a deep union is possible (Donald 273). Natalia is entirely a part of her environment and as a result we can see how the destruction of war has a cosmic meaning. Moreover, the references to the apocalypse, to evil and death, support this universal approach to Natalia's suffering, and it is at this point that the holistic conception of nature can be read in apocalyptic terms.

Yarbro holds that apocalyptic texts are always written in moments of social, political or religious convulsion. As a result, they are not purely "sacred objects" but are connected to their context (Yarbro 20). There are thus certain moments in which one tends to experience life through a focus on its tragic features. Therefore, symbolism here becomes an important way to encounter the perception of the narrator. The first reference to the Apocalypse occurs during the first description of Enriqueta's home:

She had a picture that hung from a yellow ribbon, full of lobsters with gold crowns, with men's faces, and all the grass around the lobsters, who were coming out of a well, was brown, and the sea in the background and the sky up above were the color of cow's blood and the lobsters wore armor and were killing each other with blows from their tails. (Rodoreda 29)

The description of the painting shares important elements with the following passage of the Apocalypse of St. John:

9 Then the fifth angel blew his trumpet. I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The key to the big hole that has no bottom was given to the angel.

2 He opened the big hole and smoke came out. It was like the smoke of a very big fire. The sun and the air were made dark by the smoke from the big hole.

3 Then out of the smoke came locusts on the earth like big grasshoppers. They were given the power to hurt people the way that scorpions do.

4 They were told not to spoil any of the grass, nor any green plant, nor any tree on earth. They were told to hurt only the people who did not have God's mark on their foreheads.

5 They were told not to kill them, but to trouble them for five months. The pain they give is like the pain a scorpion gives when it strikes a person.

6 In those days people will look for death, but they will not be able to find it. They will want to die, but death will fly away from them.

7 The locusts looked like horses ready to go to war. On their heads were gold crowns. And they had faces like people.

8 Their hair was like women's hair and their teeth like lions' teeth.

9 Their bodies were covered by something like pieces of iron. The noise of their wings sounded like many wagons and horses running to war.

10 The locusts had tails like scorpions that could strike people and hurt them for five months. (9:1)

This painting appears twice more: in the middle of the novel, when the war is ongoing: "And she said the children had eaten a lot of jam, and while she was telling me about it they were standing on a chair in front of that picture of the lobsters with people's heads coming out of that smoky hole" (Rodoreda 130); and again almost at the end of the novel, "I left the kids in front of the picture with the lobsters and told them to look at them, and Senyora Enriqueta and I shut ourselves up in the kitchen" (165).

According to James De Young, the Apocalypse should be understood as an application of the "biblical world view," (34) which means a "way of looking at reality" (34). This approach to reality has three main historical moments: the moment in which the message is written and functions as a prophecy, the coming true of the events predicted in the prophecy, which is the moment of its realization and an advancement towards its fulfillment, and the moment of its total fulfillment, which in the case of the Apocalypse is the Redemption at the end of times (De Young 34). In The Time of the Doves, the three moments in which the Apocalypse appears are before the war, during the war and at the end of it. The first one can be understood as a prophecy, which is one of the meanings that the Apocalypse has in the Christian religion (De Young 8); the second is the moment in which the meaning of the prophecy comes true; the last one corresponds to the end of the war, when Antoni proposes marriage to Natalia. As I mentioned above, Antoni represents an exit from "the whole of the death," and thus the moment of Natalia's redemption. The Apocalypse of St. John plays another role in addition to that of predicting war: it structures the three main episodes of the novel. The first can be understood as an image of the second one. The primary meaning of this identification is the destruction that war involves, not just on the physical plan but the spiritual one. Moreover, the references to the Apocalypse involve another meaning, i.e., the universal dimension of Natalia's suffering and its relation to the entire world or environment. Hence, it is necessary to clarify what I mean by "environment" in this article.

According to Brandtz, an "environment" is the place where human beings live, consisting in the natural and non-natural structures that surround them. Brandtz supports his definition by referring to the meaning of "environ" in Old English, which was "to surround:" as a result, the lives of human beings take place in the middle of an environment that surrounds them. As Brandtz says, environments are "live-in areas." If environments are "live-in areas," they also include culture, because culture is brought by men (Brandtz 68-69). The interrelation between culture and the environment shows that the destruction of one of them implies the destruction of the other. The symbolism that Natalia employs when she refers to the environment needs, however, some explanation.

"Everything was still recovering from the long illness" (Rodoreda 147). Here, "everything" refers to her surroundings. When Natalia uses the expression "the long illness" she is referring to the war. "Illness" as a metaphor for "war" implies that the world--which for Natalia is just her world, in other words, her environment or surroundings--becomes a living being through her use of metaphor. Therefore, there is an idea and its image, as Richards notes (96): the image of war is that of illness and the image of the environment is the body. Here again we can understand this symbolism in the terms of a holistic theory that considers the environment as a body, as being alive and as a whole, which cannot be divided without being destroyed. Hence, holism provides a more feminine approach to reality, something that has typically characterized Asian cultures but has been foreign to Western civilization, where empirical methods approach nature as a system that can be divided up into its constituent parts.

It is, however, also possible to justify the use of this metaphor by way of contemporary linguistic theories. "War" is an intangible concept; even though it is visible through its consequences, there is nothing like "war" that we can hold in our hands. As Zoltan Kovecses affirms, metaphors for understanding intangible concepts have to do with the way in which world is understood by a person or a culture (2). He uses cognitive linguistic theory to understand metaphor, an approach that is very useful in this case. The use of the term "illness" as a name for "war" is the explicit metaphor, where "body" is identified with the "environment," although neither of these two words is explicitly mentioned in the text; nevertheless, what is sick is normally a body. "Illness" and "body" belong to the physical domain and are the source of the metaphor; "war" and "environment" belong to the abstract domain, which is usually explained through more physical terms, and which is the target of these words' respective metaphors.

The choice of a word to designate a target concept is motivated by personal experience in which the senses play an important role. This is called "embodied experience" because the experience comes through the body's senses (Kovecses 284-85). In the cases I analyze here, embodied experience is crucial because the war and the environment are thought of in terms of "illness" and "body." This means that body is the basis on which the metaphor is constructed. Natalia knows from her daily life what it is to be sick and dying, as I stated above. Therefore, she has constructed a metaphor that is strongly influenced by the context or social situation through which she experiences the world. Moreover, her personal concerns are also important in constructing a vision of the world. Health, which is strongly correlated with hunger, is Natalia's most important concern during the war. Context and concerns constitute what Kovecses calls the "social-cultural experience." War is an illness and the environment is a body are two metaphors constructed on the basis of Natalia's embodied and socio-cultural experience.

The use of metaphor is one of the stylistic methods used by the narrator, who expresses herself through images. As Enric Bou affirms, Natalia presents a feminine perspective on the world surrounding her: feelings, emotions or intuitive perceptions are her typical literary resources (33). Helena Miguelez analyzes some of Natalia's speech characteristics, including her extensive use of idioms, colloquialisms, interjections and onomatopoeia (5). Natalia describes the natural world and her own experience in a very personal manner. Due to the subjective approach of the novel, her descriptions of her feelings and her surroundings might seem strange. Indeed the style of the novel could be described as naive, or, in Miguelez' words, as an example of "literary primitivism" (7), and as Natalia's personal creation. Therefore her style represents her form of being in the world; this idea is also introduced by Miguelez who affirms that "Natalia's speech is a vehicle for her personal conception of the world" (12). However, Natalia is not an isolated element, but rather presents a group of socially and biologically acquired characteristics that allow her to possess a unique conception of her surroundings. How her perspective is constructed and why it fits so well with this kind of language and her "being in the world" are also important questions whose answers allow us to understand her relation to external events.

Pilar Garcia explains how men and women have different interests and, therefore, their use of language is different (71). The words used in a conversation, especially in colloquial conversations, come from familiar semantic fields. As in the case of metaphor, explained above, common words are also part of one's experience of the world and reality. These differences between the speech of men and women have commonly been described as socio-political differences that support feminist theories. However, the fact that women are life bearers has been forgotten. The female condition hence implies a radically different approach to life, which is of no minor importance. Thus, female speech, far from being childlike or a mere consequence of socio-political imperatives, is full of sensitivity. On this point, maternity bears the whole weight of the differences between men and women and occupies their center. This characteristic provides women with a closer relationship to the natural world and life of every kind. From here, it is possible to deduce two main conclusions.

First of all, women's relationship with land and with the origin of life leads to a more concrete vocabulary, which easily relates to natural cycles or images. Secondly, the simplicity and expressiveness of women's speech comes from a strong link with human weakness. This sensitivity allows women to communicate via softness and delicate expressions or words to refer to certain facts or realities, rather than considering them as imposed gender euphemisms, in the way that Garcia holds in Como hablan las mujeres (7172). Hence, if the term "war" appears just once in the novel, this does not mean a lack of understanding on Natalia's part of what is really happening, as Miguelez suggests (19). Rather, Natalia's speech is full of images and metaphors, which reveal just how she deals with the world around her through symbolic perceptions phrased in colloquial women's speech.

To support this approach to gender-based linguistic differences it is important to consider the latest findings in science, which Cameron in her article "Sex/Gender, Language and the New Biologism" calls, disparagingly, the "New biologism." The groups of scientists that support this theory hold that behavioral differences between men and women are based on their genes, instead of being a result of a cultural process. Thus, linguistic differences between genders are also the consequence of different biologies. Evolutionary psychology provides the basis for these scientific conclusions, and one of its strongest points is that both sexes are differentiated by their reproductive biology, which in turn configures their psychological and cognitive differences. While men have a status-oriented and competitive speech style, women are co-operative and emotionally nurturing talkers.

Women's experiences with the origin of human life allow them to possess a stronger sense of life and give them a link to natural experience, and, as a result, it is easier to have a united world perspective. In Natalia's case, there is a constant relationship between the environment and her inner state, especially in her worst moments:

Nothing but the smell of blood, which is the smell of death, and no one else saw what I saw because everyone had their heads down. And above those far-off voices that I couldn't understand a chant of angels rose up, but it was a chant of angry angels who scolded the people and told them they were standing before the souls of all the soldiers who'd been killed in the war. And the chant told them to look at the evil that God made pour off the altar, that God was showing them the evil they'd done so they'd pray for it to end. (Rodoreda 150)

This passage shows the strong presence of death and suffering in Natalia's life. A cosmic vision is also present here. She refers to the death brought into her life and surroundings by war as a bloody environment visited by angry angels. The presence of Evil here is strong, and this continues throughout the war.

This relation between Natalia and her surroundings is once again expressed through images and symbolic meanings. Her individual perspective must be interpreted in order that it may acquire a universal significance. Blood and war are strongly related to each other, and the smell of blood is subtly different from seeing blood. Smelling implies that it is not necessary to see blood in order to feel its presence. Blood is always attached to the idea of death. Natalia can perceive the harm unleashed upon people, the city and even the world as well, because her feelings go beyond herself. The expression "for it to end" suggests her broad perspective on suffering. Another passage which shows how Natalia bears great suffering is the following:

And I took off. Higher, higher, Colometa, fly, Colometa ... with my face like a white blotch above the black of mourning ... higher, Colometa,

all the world's sorrow is behind you, get free of the world's sorrow, Colometa (...) I ran home and everyone was dead. The dead ones and those who'd stayed alive. They might as well have been dead too and they acted like they'd been killed. (Rodoreda 151)

She feels "the world's sorrow" upon her, which shows her capacity for empathy and her relation with everything around her. Moreover, everyone is dead, even those alive, which is a way of expressing the moral destruction that war brings.

The Time of the Doves is an example of how human culture is reduced to ashes in times of war and, therefore, how human life is almost destroyed. The lack of material goods makes the attainment of spiritual goods like education or culture more difficult. Both matter and spirit are considered as part of human life, and they develop within an environment that allows for the latter's growth. Therefore, the relationship between a human being and his or her environment is interdependent: a proper human life cannot be understood if it is disconnected from its environment, and the environment can likewise not be understood without including human life in it. In The Time of the Doves, the narrator demonstrates a strong empathy for her surroundings, which manifests itself through the specific linguistic forms of imagery and metaphors that introduce symbolic meaning. In this way, the subjective perspective becomes a universal one. It is through language that we can understand the relation between Natalia and her environment. Interestingly, Natalia does not align herself with any political stance during the war yet her speech is full of emotional expression and the reader is introduced to Natalia's experience and world through this subjectivity. The narrator focuses the interest of the reader on Natalia's interests; as a result, the novel is not about politics but about women. Natalia is fiercely committed to her children and to nature as well. There are no political implications of Natalia's actions in the novel, but only a mother's concern. Natalia can be classified as a member of the group that Esenwein calls "non-political" and "forgotten women" (181). These women did not belong to any of the groups that were fighting each other during the war, they only wanted to be able to feed their families and to protect them while awaiting the end of hostilities. Their war was a daily struggle for survival, and, as Esenwein affirms, they were "anonymous heroines" (181):

They put up a sign on the shop door, and word flies through the neighborhood that you can get food today. Then the lines form. Sometimes they are five blocks long. Sometimes you wait all that time but just before your turn comes the shop closes. There is no more food. The women wait in line and talk or knit, the children invent games that they can play standing in one place. (...) The woman with grey hair and a gray frozen face and exhausted eyes reaches out to get her piece of fish. She holds it a minute in her hand, looking at it. They all look at it, and say nothing. Then she turns and pushes her way through the crowd and out the door. (Esenwein 181-182)

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Aina Marti

University of Kent