Leer entre líneas: una conversación con Marta Rigau

Una novela rarely says exactly what it means. A gesture interrupts a conversation, a detail disappears from a chapter or a character places an object where no one expects it. These small signals invite the reader to construct meanings that the narrative leaves implicit. Reading between lines is therefore an attentive practice: a way of connecting silences, contradictions and contextual clues without confusing suspicion with certainty.

For this conversation, we spoke with Marta Rigau, a literary critic and teacher of narrative analysis about interpretation, ambiguity and the pleasure of discovering what a text conceals. Her approach combines close reading with historical and genre awareness. As explained in nuestro espacio editorial, Desde el Redondal aims to encourage exchange among readers, and this conversation reflects that spirit: every interpretation can open a new route through a book.

La experiencia de una crítica que sigue leyendo

Marta Rigau has spent more than twenty years examining novels, short stories, essays and memoirs. Her work focuses on narrative construction, but she defines criticism as a form of companionship with texts. “A critic should remain capable of surprise,” she says. “When everything is explained too quickly, we may understand the book perfectly and yet have stopped listening to it.”

We asked how she maintains that openness when she already knows the conventions of a genre. Rigau points out that familiarity makes certain mechanisms more visible. She can recognize the economy of a detective novel, the moral pressure of historical fiction or the rules governing a fantasy world. Still, she tries to distinguish between recognizing a pattern and assuming its result. A suspicious disappearance may announce a crime, but it can also reveal family conflict, shame or a change in the narrator’s loyalty.

Her answer begins with a simple distinction: reading between lines does not mean inventing a secret message. It means asking what the text does with information, which details it selects and which ones it postpones. “The gap between what is said and what is withheld is part of the literary experience,” Rigau explains. “When the gap disappears, the reader has no place in the interpretation.”

Un método para detectar lo que el texto no dice

The critic proposes observing the narrative before interpreting it. The first step is to collect signals without immediately assigning them a meaning. Repetition, tonal shifts and awkward omissions deserve attention because they mark a point where the story’s usual equilibrium changes. A useful reading practice can distinguish several recurring clues.

• Silencios relevantes: a response that is too brief, a question left unanswered or a subject replaced by an unrelated detail.
• Adjetivos imprecisos: labels such as “strange” or “unfriendly” that reveal the narrator’s discomfort without explaining its cause.
• Contradicciones: statements that conflict with earlier events, dates, habits or established character traits.
• Cambios de tono: sudden realism, excessive formality or humor that appears precisely where tension rises.
• Objetos desplazados: recurring objects that acquire meaning through the places and hands in which they appear.

“Many of these clues can be innocent,” Rigau cautions. “Their importance depends on what surrounds them.” A suspect detail acquires force through accumulation and context, so the critic recommends comparing each signal with the passage that precedes it, the passage that follows it and similar scenes elsewhere in the book.

A second series of questions helps the reader test a hypothesis without pretending that all hypotheses carry equal weight.

• ¿Qué información has recibido el personaje y qué información se le ha ocultado?
• ¿Qué conflicto emocional o social explains the chosen tone?
• ¿Does the genre establish a specific code for this type of scene?
• ¿What evidence supports the interpretation beyond my own reaction?
• ¿What alternative reading would account for the same textual clues?

Rigau considers this discipline essential, especially with contemporary fiction, where the reader may know the historical context of a novel before its narrator does. An informed reader can identify irony, but an informed reader can also misread knowledge as authorial intention. The critic therefore separates three layers: what the text states, what its form suggests and what the reader brings to the encounter. Each layer contributes to interpretation, but none should erase the others.

Pistas, contextos y límites de la interpretación

The movement from observation to inference can be compared through several kinds of textual evidence. A single indication rarely settles a reading; the strongest conclusions usually emerge when independent details converge. The following contrast shows how a reader might move from a visible sign to a provisional meaning and then seek confirmation elsewhere in the work.

Señal textual	Inferencia posible	Contraste necesario
Un personaje repite tres veces que no recuerda un encuentro	The event may have been traumatic or deliberately hidden	Review earlier descriptions of that person’s memory and behavior
Un objeto aparece en escenas unrelated to the main plot	The object may connect characters or conceal a symbolic function	Examine its material condition, owner and frequency
El narrador corrige un dato después de haberlo contado	The correction may expose a lie or an unreliable perception	Compare the correction with dialogue from other characters
Una descripción permaneceahsolutely neutral and detailed	The scene may carry ideological or emotional significance	Check what other characters notice and what they choose to omit

The purpose of this exercise is not to force every ambiguity into a fixed category. Rigau recalls novels whose strength lies in their resistance to certainty, in which contradictory clues preserve several possible futures. “An interpretation must know when to remain provisional,” she says. “Ambiguity is not a failure of reading when it belongs to the design of the work.”

Context determines whether a detail becomes a clue. Family photographs carry different implications in a memoir, a crime novel or a historical saga, and the same object can acquire contrasting meanings across cultures and periods. The scientific essays collected in escritos científicos de Fontenelle offer another way to examine this process: scientific language turns observations into arguments, while metaphors and inherited references guide readers toward conclusions that require careful unpacking.

For Rigau, historical knowledge should sharpen attention rather than replace it. Knowing the conventions of epistolary fiction allows the reader to notice when a letter avoids a direct answer. Knowing the structure of a gothic plot reveals how architecture, enclosure and inherited objects distribute fear. The reader becomes more alert because historical context explains the operation of a detail without dictating its only possible interpretation.

Interpretación, canon y conversación entre lectores

The critic rejects the idea that a literary work possesses one definitive interpretation, but she also resists the claim that every reading is equally valid. “A text sets conditions,” she explains. “Those conditions can be respected, tested or violated, but the reasons for doing so should be visible.” An interpretation supported by the language of the book and the logic of its construction has greater strength than one based entirely on personal association.

These conditions also change the status of the reader’s emotions. A response may be subjective without being irrelevant. Discomfort can expose an ideological contradiction; attachment to a character may illuminate the persuasive technique used to present that character. Rigau asks critics to move between reaction and analysis, recognizing what moved them and then examining how the prose produced that response. “Affect is a trail of evidence,” she says. “It should not become a shelter that prevents examination.”

The same approach applies to adaptations. A television version or film may omit an internal monologue because the screen must externalize information, while a soundtrack may emphasize a detail that the novel leaves unspoken. Such changes are not automatically failures. They become meaningful when compared with the source and when viewers identify the interpretive decision behind them. The conversation between media can reveal which elements belong to the story’s argument and which were created by its form.

Rigau sees literature as a public activity conducted through books rather than a contest reserved for specialists. Her own reading notes often contain disagreements, corrections and unresolved questions. Those annotations preserve the provisional character of interpretation and prevent certainty from hardening too soon. Sharing them allows another reader to challenge the evidence, add a context or propose an entirely different route through the text.

Una lectura compartida empieza con la curiosidad

Close reading becomes more valuable when the reasons behind an interpretation can be discussed. For Rigau, the goal is not to display cleverness but to make the encounter with the text more precise and more open. “A good reading does not close a book,” she says. “It gives us a better way to continue reading it, including the parts we initially misunderstood.”

Readers who wish to share a passage, propose a book for discussion or suggest an author for an interview can use our formulario de contacto. Contributions may include a brief argument, an annotated fragment or a question that remains unresolved after several readings. The most promising discussions usually begin with a concrete detail and ask what work it performs within the whole.

A book creates that kind of exchange because its silences are never entirely silent. They contain invitations, tensions and unfinished negotiations between characters, narrators and readers. Sharing those discoveries turns private attention into collective reading. As Rigau concludes, “We read better when we show the path we followed and remain willing to discover that someone else sees a different sign.”