Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture

9. Reckless Driving: Speed, Mobility, and Transgression in the Spanish "Rock 'n' Road" Novel

153 u 9 Reckless Driving: Speed, Mobility, and Transgression in the Spanish “Rock ’n’ Road” Novel Jorge Pérez The literary production of Spain’s Generation X abounds in protean narratives that are open to the influx of other signifying systems.1 Film, music, and comics merge with literature generating a body of aesthetic codes that illuminates recent fiction in Spain. Unlike avant-garde novelists, who appropriated cinematographic techniques in order to introduce formal innovations in the genre and experiment with other possibilities of expression, contemporary authors encompass them as part of their cultural background, as an assimilated mechanism of story-telling and no longer as a sign of novelty. In addition, these interdisciplinary codes of communication in the Spanish postmodern market place are transnational, since they embody a global network of cultural references in which the United States is one of its most important nodes and a pivotal source of influence in the construction of imaginary landscapes. With this context in mind, this essay will explore the “rock ’n’ road novel”—a term that ensues from David Laderman’s concept of “rock ’n’ road movie” (19)—as a distinctive generic form of Spanish Generation X authors in the 1990s. We will see how this form comprises the transatlantic and multidisciplinary circuit of cultural exchange, as well as explore the politics that lies behind the works of such authors. I will examine the rock ’n’ road novel as an emblem of the mobile reconfiguration of the national public space, which 154 JORGE PÉREZ I would like to call “Superhighway Spain,” to capture the accelerated pace of the cultural transformations taking effect in the Iberian Peninsula. Imbued by the non-conformist aura of the road movie tradition and the rock universe, rock ’n’ road novels are eclectic literary endeavors that have developed against the backdrop of the eulogized socio-economic changes of post-Franco Spain. In so doing, they demarcate the asphalt as a liminal space where high speed and rock music coalesce to express insurgence and to celebrate individual wandering beyond the boundaries of mainstream society. In his thorough study of the American road movie, David Laderman describes rock ’n’ road movies as “road movies about rock musicians or fans on tour, or merely on the road” (19).2 Drawing on Laderman’s concept, I will refer to Spanish rock ’n’ road novels as road quests traveling the Spanish highway that are impregnated with the sensory power of rock. Such influence underlines the anti-establishment orientation of road narratives, in that rock music sensibility aggravates the road genre’s sense of non-compliance with the system and, more specifically, the “youth rebellion drive” (Laderman 19). Circumscribing myself to the temporal scope of this essay and volume—Generation X literary production—I will focus on three recent Spanish novels that operate along the lines of this sub-genre: Ray Loriga’s La pistola de mi hermano, initially published with the title Caídos del cielo (1995), José Machado’s A dos ruedas (1996), and Eugenia Rico’s La edad secreta (2004).3 Before I embark on analyzing these three novels, I would like to clarify my hermeneutic framework. To engage with the autonomous cultural practices of film and literature, with their individually-defined genres, languages and conventions, entails the risk of undermining the complexity of the bonds between them, which go beyond mere thematic impact to involve the reciprocal transfer of formal elements. There is a long tradition of mutual symbiosis between film and literature that surpasses the domain of influences and dependency , and is better conceived in terms of areas of convergences between both semiotic systems.4 These convergent lines materialize, above all, in the narrative dimension of both artistic disciplines. Thus, I argue, along with Millicent Marcus, that “there exists a universal, non-specific code of narrativity which transcends its embodiment in one particular signifying system” (14). From this perspective, films can be appraised as texts, producing textual models that, despite their audiovisual nature, satisfy certain needs of the novel, whether those needs are related to plot structures, character types, or other formal categories (Peña-Ardid 215). Hence, my look at the road movie as a textual paragon for fiction will focus on the localization of narrative correspondences between both disciplines rather than on appropriations of specific techniques of composition and montage. RECKLESS DRIVING: SPEED, MOBILITY, AND TRANSGRESSION 155 Similarly, the bonds between film and...