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59 u 4 Can Anyone Rock Like We Do? Or, How the Gen X Aesthetic Transcends the Age of the Writer Samuel Amago Criticism of the emerging canon of Generation X writers has emphasized the importance of a sex, drugs and rock and roll aesthetic linked to Anglo-American popular culture. What has tended to elude study is the prevalence of controlled substances in works by previous generations of Spanish novelists. Indeed, some of the foundational works of the post-Franco period are steeped in their own drug culture. Juan Goytisolo’s La reivindicación del Conde don Julián (1970), for example, cannot be understood fully without a consideration of the importance of hashish to the narrator’s ever-deteriorating mental state, while in Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), the hallucinogenic pills that C. ingests with the Man in Black play an important structural role. These novels’ adversarial critical stances vis-à-vis some of the most ingrained commonplaces of Spanish cultural history make them fine models for the Gen X project of the 1990s, which on both sides of the Atlantic has taken an iconoclastic approach to cultural tradition. Inspired in part by Robert Spires’s recent article, “Depolarization and the New Spanish Fiction at the Millennium,” in which the author problematizes generational shibboleths, this essay investigates how the Generation X aesthetic that came to the fore in the early 1990s might be profitably expanded to include work by writers born in the 1940s and 1950s. In the following pages, I explore 60 SAMUEL AMAGO some of the points of contact between younger Gen X writers and the more “mature” (Gracia 238) generation of Spanish writers that continues to write and publish alongside them—authors such as Nuria Amat (b. 1950), Carlos Cañeque (b. 1957), Juan Madrid (b. 1947), Eduardo Mendoza (b. 1943), Juan José Millás (b. 1947), Antonio Muñoz Molina (b. 1956), and Manuel Rivas (b. 1957). From this admittedly broad and varied range of writers—all of whom have drawn in one way or another upon some of the styles and themes that we now associate with Gen X literature—I focus here on Juan José Millás and Carlos Cañeque because of the critical acknowledgment that they received in the 1990s both in the form of the Premio Nadal—a prize that served to legitimize at least two Gen X authors—and that they continue to receive in the pages of academic journals and scholarly monographs. Juan José Millás is routinely recognized as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Spain today, sharing his position on the bestseller lists with younger writers such as Lucía Etxebarria, Ray Loriga, and José Ángel Mañas. Among other literary awards, he won the Nadal prize for La soledad era esto in 1990, and the Premio Primavera for Dos mujeres en Praga (2002). He is the author of more than thirteen novels, seven collections of short stories and essays, and he has been a regular contributor in the Spanish press. Carlos Cañeque has not enjoyed the same kind of success as some of his contemporaries, although he has recently begun to receive deserved critical attention for his first novel, Quién (Premio Nadal 1997) (Amago; Kunz). Cañeque has since published two other novels with major Spanish publishing houses, Muertos de amor (1999) and Conductas desviadas (2002); two books of nonfiction: Dios en América (1988) and Conversaciones sobre Borges (1995); and two books about Borges for children, El pequeño Borges imagina el Quijote (2003) and El pequeño Borges imagina la Biblia (2002); and several co-edited scholarly volumes. Taking as my point of departure these two Premio Nadal-winning novels of the 1990s, Millás’s La soledad era esto (1990) and Cañeque’s Quién (1997), I argue that the aesthetic that we have come to associate with Gen X is not entirely unique to younger authors such as Mañas, Etxebarria, and Loriga, but rather, that this aesthetic transcends the chronological paradigm of the literary generation and brings together a wide group of writers of varying ages who published novels in the 1990s. Like the Gen X writers with whom they share the pages of literary supplements and academic journals, older authors like Millás and Cañeque draw upon sex, drugs, rock and roll, and literary criticism as methods not only to reexamine our contemporary experience...

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