Writing Without a Grain: Identity Formation in Three Works by Muñoz Molina

Writing Without a Grain: Identity Formation in Three Works by Muñoz Molina David K. Herzberger University of Connecticut The search for identity by fictional characters is a commonplace in twentieth-century narrative. Indeed, the acquisition of identity (national, religious, linguistic, etc.), as well as its loss, evoke critical concerns of modernity related to personal angst and cultural dislocations. Individual or group identities may be viewed in any number of ways, from the imposed filiations of nationhood to a complex of unpredictable alignments of self, family, race, gender, and other elements pertinent to identity formation . ' Identity is perhaps most usefully perceived, however, as the commingling of desire and place regulated by the preeminence of time (history ), the confluence of which is able to generate communal and individual securities among heteronomous subjectivities. Much of identity is therefore imagined or constructed and claimed through language (narration ), which is able to traverse time and location in an attempt to free from dissonance those whose identity is at stake.2 Such freedom is rarely achieved, since historical forces, personal tensions, and cultural alienations often mark not the solidity of identity but its uncertainty. Characters in twentieth-century fiction frequently explore ontologically slippery questions about where their identity might reside, but more importantly, they place in doubt the set of assumptions through which their identity may be imagined: who determines the historical meaning that frames them; how are they embraced by a community or exiled from it; is the concept of a stable identity even possible to begin with?3 While the questions posed in modern fiction tear at the firmness of identity and the process through which it is acquired, there nonetheless remains a longing for the continuity inherent in identity-making—a need, as Saul Bellow writes in Mr. Sammlers PUnet "[to] keep the wolf of insignificance from the door" (190). Identity at its core thus becomes a condition of human existence rather than merely an enunciation of difference within the asymmetries and hierarchies of power. Yet it is generally within the latter where identity must be formulated and sustained, hence it inevitably becomes subject to the paradoxes of resistance and redefinition. On the one hand, individuals seeking identity encounter discomfort born Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 2, 1998 2 4 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies of instability: how to position themselves and with whom to connect are not easily prescribed. On the other hand, the possibility of organizing the components of identity to form continuities from discontinuities fulfills the broad desire for what Edward Said calls "affiliation." It is ultimately this quest for affiliation which lies at the root of identity-making and which shapes the process whereby identity is at once desired and resisted. In Spain during the past half century the question of identity (both for the individual and for the nation) is convoluted by historical circumstance , political authority, and cultural tension. While other countries in Western Europe struggled with diversity, plurality, and even polarization within the frame of liberal democracy following World War II, Spain sought to diminish conflict and difference within the national community by establishing a clear dividing line between the "I" and the "not-I," the authentic self and the inauthentic other. Such a view of course relied on the concept of an essential core of values and ideas presented as natural and necessary, with the concurrent elimination of all that was considered alien. The creation of a comfortable and usable Spanish identity, in which truth and meaning were collapsed into a single concept, pushed difference to the margins and sought to banish it from national consciousness . The Franco regime attempted to impose homogeneity on the identity of the nation in a number of ways. Above all, the regime exploited the retroactive nature of affiliation and psychic identification through the rigorous appropriation of history. It established the history of the nation as a center from which it could perceive both the beginning and the end, then positioned itself as the inevitable outcome of all that had come before it. Of course, "all that had come before it" amounted not to everything, but rather emerged as a tradition constructed by desire and need. What...