Settled in Normal: Narratives of a Prozaic (Spanish) Nation

Settled in Normal: Narratives of a Prozaic (Spanish) Nation1 L. Elena Delgado is Associate Professor of Spanish, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois (Urbana). A specialist in modern and contemporary Spanish literatures and cultures, she is the author o/La imagen elusive: lenguaje y representaci ón en la narrativa de GaId ós (2000) and numerous articles on nineteenth-century literature, decadenthm, and modernities. Shewasaho guest editor of "Imperial Ducbsures " (Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2001) and Re/Constructions (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies , 2003). She is currently completing a book entitled "The Normal Nation" on the cultural construction of Spanish identity. This private world of loony bins and weird people which I always felt I occupied and hid in, had suddenly turned inside out so that it seemed like this was one big Prozac Nation, one big mess of malaise. —Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation Me habÃ-an dicho que es peligrosÃ-simo dejar el Prozac de golpe, sobre todo si uno ha estado tomándolo años.. .y que podÃ-a sobrevivir una crisis seria, un episodio depresivo, que podÃ-a sobrevenir un brote esquizoide.... —LucÃ-a ExtebarrÃ-a, Amor, curiosidad, Prozac y dudas .. .it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations. —Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents In his chapter dedicated to the essay, included in the Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture , Thomas Mermall claims that after Franco's death the issues of Spain's national identity and Europeanization lost their traditionally ontological and metaphysical dimension and acquired a more functional character (170). He argues, moreover, that the essay is precisely the genre that stands as concrete proof of Spain's stable European intellectual location (172). MermaU's contention, far from being controversial, aptly captures the general tone of recent analysis of Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 118 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Spanish cultural and political identity, both inside and outside of Spain. Thus, for example, noted Spanish historians Juan Pablo Fusi and Jordi Palafox argue that when Spain became a member of NATO (1981) and the European Union (1986), it at long last became Western and European , thus resolving the issue of national identity (Fusi and Palafox 442). And another equally distinguished historian, Javier Tusell, celebrated in 1999 the fact that the hagiographies of nationalism were in the process of being overcome in the entire Spanish state (243). If indeed Spaniards can now boast of having arrived "where her artists and intellectuals have long sought so fervently to be—integrally in Europe" (Mermall 172) it would seem to be a logical conclusion that the "anguish" over national identity, so crucial a component of Spain's modern intellectual tradition, would have ceased to exist. And indeed that is the conclusion of such a lucid intellectual as Eduardo Subirats, who remarked in the early nineties that in post-Franco Spain "el tema de España," so widely and bitterly debated in an essentialist and negative rhetoric during most of the twentieth century "se ha dado [...] por completa, rotunda y definitivamente zanjado" (143). But if in fact the question of Spain's national identity has now been resolved, how does one explain the renaissance of the political essay in Spain?2 Why have so many of those essays become unlikely bestsellers and elevated their authors to the rank of media personalities? And how should we interpret the renewed prestige of essay awards such as Premio Anagrama de Ensayo, Premio Espasa, Premio Jovellanos or Premio Nacional de Ensayo, all of which carry substantial monetary and cultural capital? In order to attempt to answer some of these questions, we need to turn our attention now to some of the titles published in recent years which, in one way or another, deal with Spanish cultural identity or the idea of the nation in Spain: Si España cae... asalto nacionalista al estado, by César Alonso de los Rios; Nacionalismos: el hberinto de L· identidadhy Xabier Rubert de...