Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity

Arthur J. Hughes

Reflexive Writing and the
Negotiation of Spanish
Modernity

Autobiography and Fiction
in Terenci Moix’s Novels

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hughes, Arthur J., author.

Title: Reflexive writing and the negotiation of Spanish modernity: autobiography and fiction in Terenci Moix’s novels / Arthur J. Hughes.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2019.

Series: Currents in comparative Romance languages and literatures; vol. 255 | ISSN 0893-5963

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018044188 | ISBN 978-1-4331-5748-6 (hardback: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5749-3 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5750-9 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-5751-6 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Moix, Terenci, 1943– —Criticism and interpretation. Spain—Civilization—20th century.

Classification: LCC PQ6663.O348 Z68 2019 | DDC 863/.64—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044188

DOI 10.3726/b14128

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the author

Arthur J. Hughes is an associate professor of Spanish at Ohio University and the director of the Latin American Studies Program. He received his Spanish Philology Licenciatura from the Universidad Complutense, Spain, and a PhD in Hispanic literature and culture from Arizona State University.

About the book

Covering nine major works of Catalan writer Terenci Moix, Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity: Autobiography and Fiction in Terenci Moix’s Novels places Moix’s fictional prose against the backdrop of his autobiographical novels, thus highlighting the importance of the author’s daily life experiences and their transmutation into the virtuality of fiction. This study, the first to look at Moix’s works in both Catalan and Castilian, and in both autobiography and fiction, contests the implicit critical perspective that examines this period using the dichotomies of modernity/postmodernity and autobiography/fiction. It proposes Spanish modernity as a unique phenomenon that produces a distinctive personality as a result of the tensions of the period. Arthur J. Hughes’s examination of Moix’s modernity forces a new look at the notion of Spanish postmodernity usually assumed to be a result of the transition to democracy after the death of Franco, providing a new perspective on the separation of autobiographic and fictional genres that argues for the reflection of one in the other.

Advance Praise for

Reflexive Writing and the
Negotiation of Spanish Modernity

“In Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity: Autobiography and Fiction in Terenci Moix’s Novels, Arthur J. Hughes offers both a practical and theoretical description of the ways in which Catalonian novelist/essayist/autobiographer Terenci Moix (1942–1993) subverts sexual and political ‘norms’ by subjecting these questionable commonplaces to a dramatic reversal and augmentation. This volume shows clearly how Moix takes aim at the self-seeking about-faces and strictures that political, religious, and literary institutions have imposed on many of humanity’s original social and sexual pluralities.”

—Thomas R. Franz, Professor Emeritus of Spanish, Ohio University

“All writers occupy conflicted and contradictory ideological spaces that make it ill-advised to attempt to reduce their work to one set of guiding writerly principles, one particular vision of their personal and social lived experiences, one grounding sense of the self and a witness to history. Terenci Moix is a writer whose categorization has been so problematical that it can almost be said to have kept him from occupying a premier place in contemporary Spanish fiction. Moix is an outstanding writer, and he has much of an original interpretation of contemporary Spain to contribute. Arthur J. Hughes’s Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity: Autobiography and Fiction in Terenci Moix’s Novels is a nuanced examination of the many conflictual forces at work in Moix’s writing, only one of which is the relationship between Spanish and Catalan. In the process, Hughes provides us with a superb scholarly study that makes us aware, once again, of the tremendously contradictory forces at work in contemporary culture in Spain.”

—David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies, Faculty Head of Spanish and Portuguese, Arizona State University

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Placing Moix in Context

Chapter 1. Modernity, Autobiography, and Reflexivity

Chapter 2. Writing the Modern Self in Moix’s Autobiographical Works

Chapter 3. Playing With the Body: Monotheisms, Sexuality, and History in Nuestro virgen de los mártires and El amargo don de la belleza

Chapter 4. Transgressing Through Carnival and Violence in Món mascle

Chapter 5. Reflexivity, Space, and Gender in Sadístic, esperpèntic i àdhuc metafísic

Chapter 6. Aesthetics, Sexualities, and Excess in Amami Alfredo!: Polvo de estrellas: novela con soprano and La herida de la Esfinge: capriccio romántico

Conclusion: Navigating Discontinuity

Index ←ix | x→ ←x | 1→

Introduction

Placing Moix in Context

In Moix’s autobiography, the reader frequently comes upon the narrator’s complaint of a lack of agency in his childhood and adolescent years, to the extent that he portrays himself as a passive or unwilling participant in the activities and events that shape his early life. With an entire book devoted to his birth and childhood, filled with stories of his central role as a spoiled child, this accusation is a particularly striking one. This same charge is repeated about his adolescence: that he did not have one. The author cites a particular episode at the age of fourteen when his adored mother decides that her son does not need a high school diploma if he can only aspire to a future as a shop assistant (El cine de los sábados 408). This look at the future comes as a result of the young Moix’s absolute failure at traditional schooling, resulting in the entire family agreeing “Ya que este niño no sirve para nada, que estudie contabilidad, taquigrafía y mecanografía (409)” (Since this child is absolutely incompetent, he should study accounting, shorthand and typing) with the aim of getting him at least an office job. Looking back at this moment some thirty-five years later, on the occasion of his mother’s death, the narrator is still bitter, “La cagaste, mamaíta muerta, la cagaste (409)” (You really screwed up, my dear dead mother, you really screwed up), and calls his uncle an assassin, blaming the entire family for taking this momentous decision without bothering to ask him what his real interests were:←1 | 2→

Mother, father, aunts, uncles, whoremongers some and adulteresses others, all dead, already deceased, buried, incinerated, food/fodder for the flames or the worms, promoters of the disorder that converts my life in a permanent exile….How can you ask me to respect your memory when you weren’t able to show me any respect?1

The suggestion that a Spanish family of the 1950s would consult their child over his/her future is a strange one, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War when most decisions were based on survival and protection from what seemed to be a dangerous environment. Moix here claims a modern subjectivity that is quite unusual for his time, the desire to make his own way in life, and with a clear sense of an individuality outside of traditional structures.

Within the context of the Francoist Spain of his time, Moix’s complaint seems rather out of place. It represents the desire for a modernity in a place and time that is not quite modern, or as Stephanie Sieburth (233) puts it, of an “uneven modernity.” Modernization is well underway in Spain from the late nineteenth century, and produces undeniable progress in both the technological and democratic changes it engenders. Though this process is late in comparison with the rest of industrialized Europe, there is palpable hope that Spain is finally on its way to replicating what most of the Western world had already achieved. This process is interrupted in 1939 by the Spanish Civil war and its consequences: the death of half a million people; the installation of a repressive totalitarian regime, and the return to an almost predominantly agrarian economy and a traditional society. This is the Spain in which Moix is born, a society I characterize as “pre-modern” in the reversal of the gains achieved in the previous forty years.² The destruction of most of the country’s infrastructure reverses the advances in transportation and communication, creating a return to close-knit and inward-looking communities centered on immediate spaces and intimate connections. Communication with the outside world is cut and Spain is isolated, a situation the Franco dictatorship seizes on to secure absolute control and terminate an incipient democratic nation-state, installing a return to tradition and fifteenth-century Catholicism as the true identity of the nation.³ It is in this context that I place Moix’s remonstration against the passivity of his childhood as both impossible and also a sign of a more modern subject identity.←2 | 3→