Battered Bodies and Inadequate Meanings: Violence and Disenchantment in Juan José Millàs's Visión del ahogado

Battered Bodies and Inadequate Meanings: Violence and Disenchantment in Juan José Millás's Vision del ahogado Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Literatures at Harvard University. He is the author «/"Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narrative of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford University Press, 1996) and is currently working on two booklength projects, one tentatively tided Daring to Write, on Homosexuality in Hispanic Culture, and another on Modern Catakn culture. He has published extensively on Spanish, Latin American, and Catalan literature as well as on film, immigration, urbanism, and queer theory. For Mario Santana, my timely friend Desde una perfecta adecuación con la realidad, uno hará otras cosas, pero no escribirá. —Juan José Millas An Inadequate Introduction It is treacherous, no doubt, to take a literary text as the measure of a society: as treacherous, if not more so, as taking a family as the measure of a nation. Treachery, moreover, is scarcely gainsaid by invoking a social text to match a literary text or national sites to go with domestic sites. Such rhetorical plays, involving parallelisms and analogies , matches, correspondences, marriages, concordances, and other relations, are fairly standard fare for a wide range of realist-inspired, empirically oriented, numerically fashioned endeavors; but they persist even in many of the most linguistically attuned endeavors as well. These rhetorical plays, however , are perhaps at their most intense when one endeavor meets another, when realism, understood broadly, recognizes its own language, or rhetoric. Contemporary cultural critique , including cultural studies, is a case in point; for with its studied skepticism, its semiotic sophistication, and its contextual sensitivity, it grapples with nothing less than the meeting of rhetoric and reality and, within that, with the problem of adequation. It seeks, that is, to provide an adequate reading of social, historical, and political reality even as it disputes the very viability of an adequate reading (in part Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001 26 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies because it reads reality as susceptible only to readings, in the plural). Put a bit differently , it problematizes the reUtions between rhetoric and reality, words and things, texts and societies, families and nations, even as it sustains, extends, and alters them. Racked with paradox, cultural critique is treacherous because, even though it often debunks literary critique, it indicates, however ambivalently, that it too can never be completely adequate. Flirting with treachery, I want to take a literary text, Juan José Millás's Visión del ahogado (Vision of the Drowned Man), as a particularly inadequate measure of contemporary Spanish society. Paying special attention to the avatars of violence, I want to consider how Millás's text, published in 1977, reflects, represents, or corresponds to a moment in Spanish cultural history marked by the transition from dictatorship to democracy and characterized by change as well as continuity, expectation as well as frustration. I want to do so, furthermore, in recognition of the genetal inadequacy of such concepts as reflection, representation, and correspondence, many of which are crucial, in turn, to the concept of democracy . Interestingly, Millás's text makes only weak reference to the Spanish political situation —democratic, dictatorial, or otherwise —and is more explicitly concerned with the breakdown of reference as such, the loss of stable foundations, and the collapse of absolute truth: in short, with the crisis of adequation. And yet, as I will be arguing, the crisis of adequation bears not only on democracy, but also on what has come to be known, in Spain and elsewhere, as (the) disenchantment, el desencanto. José-Carlos Mainer has noted the lability, indeed the subjectivity, of such epistemic markers as "transition," "disenchantment," and "democratic affirmation," connoting respectively, for him, mere descriptive asepsis, militant irritation, or dogged optimism (11). All of these markers, to varying degrees and to varying ends, figure in my reading of (in)adequation for the not so simple reason that, as I have already indicated, no one marker is adequate to the diversity, let alone the totality, of my object of critique. A somewhat awkward, erudite term, "adequation" 'adecuación appears a number of times in Millás's text, almost always in introspective or...