One thing that immediately stood out to me in reading the beginning of Tropic of Orange was the very first image with which the novel opens. The scene described is of Rafaela Cortes, as she is sweeping aside the bodies of animals both dead and alive, tidying up Gabriel’s house. The image is so striking, as well as so deprived of context because nothing precedes it, that it seems to me that it necessarily takes on allegorical significance. The reader, not immersed yet in the literal action of the story, is passively compelled to parse this passage for figurative meaning; the scene cannot be read as an average moment of cleaning by Rafaela that accords with the plot of her overseeing the vacation home of Gabriel because no such plot exists when the passage is being read.
This technique of opening a novel with an imagistic passage rather than any sort of contextualizing information or even a stable account of the relevant characters is an interesting method for prompting the reader into a figurative interpretation. Generally, I would argue, the reader is naturally antipathetic to figurative reading; the impulse to interpret the text in this way is a kind of secondary after-thought that flows out of the latent acknowledgment that the text is either too rich or otherwise too defiant of the literal to be about simply what it purports to be about. However, in some sense, the fact that it is only an after-thought deadens the figurative meaning, marginalizes it. It is a seen as a complement to the literal, and an unnecessary one at that, fixed within the text simply for the sake of literary extravagance. Because of this, it often lacks the vitality of being the primary expression in a passage; it seems less like “what is being said” and more like a puzzle to be solved by means of the literal.
However, certain forms allow for the figurative to assume the favored role. The most obvious example is The Divine Comedy, and other such literary works that are unabashedly allegorical, that sacrifice the cogency and particularity of the story they are telling for the sake of the ideas that they are examining. Another form is the parable, which, when listened to, is constantly regarded in figurative terms. What is interesting about the first passage of Tropic of Orange then is that it manages this commitment to the figurative without then compromising the literal.
As to what the passage is meant to figuratively suggest, I have now no satisfying theories and imagine that the full novel will be required to adequately decode it.
I agree with you that the scene most likely contains figurative meaning. I also found it vaguely enchanting, too. That’s just me, though, as someone who likes to read in order to be swayed and taken along for a ride. I found that entire chapter to be a little enchanting, to be honest. Especially when Yamashita gets into the descriptions of the little orange in the tree. I also wonder what that image was about, and what significance there was about the orange falling from the tree and rolling out of Gabriel’s land without Rafaela’s awareness. Is that a part of magical realism? I hardly understand it myself.