History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

Notes

Notes 189 Introduction 1. Hyperreal and hyperreality are Jean Baudrillard’s terms that describe an advanced capitalist, consumerist society in which images refer to other images or to themselves and the representation of reality becomes obsolete and subsumed by the creation of a hyperreality dependent on the circulation and interrelation of simulacra. 2. Amago’s excellent introduction provides an overview of postmodernism and an alternative reading of the self-reflexive novel that “offers a functional, constructive alternative to the pessimistic worldviews” of some postmodern critics (14). 3. Novels such as Montero’s Crónica de un desamor and La función delta deal with feminist issues of single, working women coming to appreciate their independence and sexuality. Her Amado amo is a criticism of a corrupt corporate work ethic. Millás deals with the junction between the personal and the public persona and interpersonal relationships in La soledad era esto and El desorden de tu nombre. His El orden alfabético also exposes the corrupt nature of business and politics. Muñoz Molina writes a metaphorical tale of betrayal and intrigue in the noir tradition in Beltenebros. Other important authors in this vein are Javier Marías, Belén Gopegui, Cristina Fernández Cubas, and Soledad Puértolas. 4. See Christine Henseler’s excellent study Contemporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and the Publishing Industry and articles by Akiko Tsuchiya and Carmen de Urioste. 5. Etxebarria was accused of lifting passages from psychologist Jorge Castelló’s Dependencia emocional y violencia doméstica (2004) for her Yo no sufro por amor (2005). 6. This is the basis of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural production as the economic world reversed. The popularity of the poor, starving artist who had the passion for and soul of survival rendered a certain value to the artistic production that was not based on economics or capital value but rather on a different set of cultural values. I will return to Bourdieu later in the introduction. 7. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas edited a collection of essays, Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, that includes insightful and informative articles on the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, television news, the Internet, soap operas, and football, to name only a few. 8. From Baudrillard’s Simulacrum and Simulation. The hyperreal exists when information ceases to refer to an actual event and is consumed , interpreted, and dispersed without regard to verisimilitude. Both Baudrillard and Bourdieu use television news as an example of the hyperreal . The information or “truth” of the event becomes secondary to the reporting and distribution of selected facts, such as in war reporting. 190 9. Ortega y Gasset, for example, clearly envisioned artistic intellectualism as rejecting popular culture. As Graham and Labanyi explain Ortega’s case: “popular culture in its folkloric sense did not concern him” (7). 10. Lidia Falcón, “Violent Democracy.” 11. See Chapter 5 on Ray Loriga for a more detailed account of these phenomena. 12. In Eco’s The Role of the Reader, he defines the model reader as the reader the author has foreseen who is “supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them” (7). Part 1: History or Creating the Past Chapter One: Rewriting the Past as Cultural Capital: Sacred Violence in Carme Riera’s Dins el darrer blau 1. All English translations of Catalan are my own. 2. See the Introduction for a more complete rendering of Nietzsche’s ideas about history. 3. Carme Riera (Palma de Mallorca, 1948) published her awardwinning first collection of short stories, Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora [I Leave You, My Love, the Sea as a Token] in 1975. She then received the Prudenci Bertrana prize in 1980 for her novel Una primavera per a Domenico Guarini [Springtime for Domenico Guarini], the Ramon Llull prize in 1989 for Joc de miralls [Mirror Images], and the Josep Pla (1994) for Dins el darrer blau [In the Last Blue]. This novel has also been awarded the Joan Crexells Prize and the Lletra d’Or. It is the first novel written originally in Catalan to win the National Literature Prize in Spain. Other notable works by Riera are: Qüestió d’amor propi [A Matter of Self-Esteem] (1987) and Contra l’amor en companyia i altres relats [Against Love in the Company of Others and Other Stories] (1991). Riera published Cap al cel obert [Toward the Open Sky] in 2000, which was awarded the...