Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Project: Seeking Affective Engagement in the World City

In 1961 Lewis Mumford famously proclaimed that the world had become “in many of its practical aspects, just one city” (xi). This now commonplace idea suggests an unraveling of the great modern metropolises into an extended world city, full of jumps and gaps, connected by global networks of finance, politics and culture. As many have commented, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Project trilogy represents a world city now also interpenetrated by digital communications.¹ The trilogy’s first novel Nocilla Dream was published in 2006 and almost immediately became associated with the group of writers and critics known as the Mutantes, who had been calling on Spanish authors to embrace the social and technological context of the twenty-first century. Insisting that most Spanish literature was antiquated and had lost its relevance for inhabitants of a globalized Spain, the Mutantes practiced a sort of guerrilla criticism. They pushed at the margins for visibility, stating their case in blogs, conferences on “new narrative” and books published by the small press Berenice.² A favorable synergy formed between the group’s ideas and Nocilla Dream’s unexpected commercial success and the press baptized them collectively as the “Nocilla Generation.” Fernández Mallo’s novel and the Nocilla Generation idea went viral, spreading all over the Internet and more traditional media, even getting airtime on a national nightly news program (Gabilondo).

In the years since Agustín Fernández Mallo and his fellow Mutantes took the Spanish literary world by storm they have produced a large body of work that crosses all frontiers: fiction, poems, graphic novels, essays, blogs, videos, lectures, musical performances, artistic interventions and various combinations of these media/genres. Meanwhile, the original controversy over the cultural, political and artistic significance of their activities has only grown. Critical evaluations of their work, generally focused on Fernández Mallo, tend to address variants of the following two questions: does their embrace of new technologies reveal a new aesthetic and subjective sensibility or is it an empty exercise in avant-garde inspired experimentation?; does their work critically engage the contemporary world or does it amount to a celebration of global capitalism and its latest digital inflections? Answers to these questions mostly center on how the structure of Fernández Mallo’s narratives reproduce the structure of the contemporary world. The stories themselves are considered secondary, and the real point of his work is sought in the mechanisms that bind them together around a network or a particular aesthetic approach to reality. The individual narratives are often described as simulacra—games of illusion and mirrors that merely manifest an underlying structure. Thus Fernández Mallo’s poetic practice is also defined by disappearance and emptiness, qualities that lend themselves to distinct interpretations. For detractors, this emptiness forges a space of depoliticized postmodern play (Martín-Estudillo and Rodríguez Balbontín). For more sympathetic critics, it is a blank space projecting Spanish letters into the future (Henseler Spanish Fiction; Ortega).

Building on these structural analyses, this essay highlights the importance of the stories in the Nocilla Project, investigating how together they construct a narrative of the author’s artistic and subjective engagement of the contemporary world. I argue that the trilogy’s assemblage of miniature stories is not characterized by emptiness but rather seeks out the fullness of affective experience. Fernández Mallo’s obscuring of historical and cultural context favors a strictly phenomenal relation between subjects and the spaces and objects they encounter. Characters engage their realities outside of boundaries defined by personal identity and historical relations. The trilogy offers an extreme example of recent cultural tendencies that anthropologist Henrietta L. Moore has termed “self-stylization,” which give form to the self, others and the world by imagining new “styles of existence” (2). The intertwined narratives in the Nocilla Project reveal a forward-looking projection of the self as a participant in the world, aspiring to a poetics of attachment and belonging in an environment where everything is in a state of flux.

I describe this strategy mainly through a...