Eduardo Mendoza's Post-Civil War Barcelona in Una comedia ligera

EDUARDO MENDOZA’S POST-CIVIL WAR BARCELONA IN UNA COMEDIA LIGERA by Kalen R. Oswald Albion College WHEN asked about the prominence of Barcelona in his novelistic work, Eduardo Mendoza stated in a 1995 interview: “Barcelona es mi ciudad. Yo nací aquí. [. . .] No es una ciudad mítica como París, Roma o Londres. Sin embargo ella siempre ha sido el centro de mi universo. En mis historias constituye mucho más que el lugar donde se desarrolla la acción, se va transformando un poco en la protagonista principal” (Cortanze 31). Soon after making this statement Mendoza published Una comedia ligera (1996), the sixth of his now eight novels that deal directly with the city of Barcelona.1 What makes this novel’s rendering of Barcelona unique is the time period portrayed. While most of Mendoza’s other novels take place during dynamic periods of development or transition, Una comedia recreates a post-Civil War Barcelona steeped in economic recession and urban stagnation. Mendoza states: A pesar de que mis anteriores novelas eran un poco pesimistas, siempre estaban situadas en momentos de vitalidad. La verdad sobre el caso Savolta, desde luego, La ciudad de los prodigios y El misterio de la cripta embrujada, incluso Sin noticias de Gurb, siempre trataban de grandes momentos históricos en los que unos personajes no sabían aprovechar las oportunidades. En Una comedia ligera ya no: ya no hay nada que hacer. (Santos 101) In this study I reexamine the image and function of the city in Una comedia in relation to the urbanization of consciousness and the politics of urban space as explained by the geographer and urbanist David Harvey. This approach permits a rich interpretation of the novel and provides valuable insights regarding the urban process of Mendoza’s city. 31 The work of David Harvey offers a solid theoretical base on which to build a framework for analyzing Barcelona and what its portrayal means to Mendoza ’s work. Harvey has established himself as one of the most accomplished figures in the discipline of geography, publishing several important books on the matter since 1969.2 Throughout his career he has endeavored to add a geographic component to the methodology of materialist studies. As he states in The Urban Experience: “Historical materialism has to be upgraded to historical -geographical materialism” (6). This subsequently links capital to the process of urbanization. Confirming the theories of many of his Marxist precursors , Harvey reminds his readers that accumulation relies on the exploitation of labor in order to make profits and strives to maximize those profits in the shortest possible time. As a result, space, time and money become securely bound together, which logically results in urbanization: Capital flow presupposes tight temporal and spatial coordination in the midst of increasing separation and fragmentation. It is impossible to imagine such a material process without the production of some kind of urbanization as a ‘rational landscape’ within which the accumulation of capital can proceed. Capital accumulation and the production of urbanization go hand in hand. (22) Due to the expansionary nature of capital and continuous advancements in technology, however, urbanization should not be understood as the end result of capitalism, rather a constant process in which capitalism replicates itself by the conquering, organization and reorganization of space, because space imposes upon us a way of understanding which will “reinforce existing patterns of social life” (250). Capital thereby manufactures “[. . .] a geographical landscape in its own image” (Spaces 177), a “physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time” (Urban 83). Harvey has dedicated substantial effort to the definition and analysis of the mechanism that allows capitalist urbanization to proceed on this course without inciting overwhelming resistance. He calls this process the “urbanization of consciousness” and maintains that it is the key to understanding and revolutionizing the urban experience (229-55). He describes how the capitalist notion of time/space/ money that leads to urbanization has altered the way in which we perceive ourselves in relation to others and our environment: Capitalism these last two hundred years has produced [. . .] not only a “second nature” of built environments [. . .], but also an urbanized human nature, endowed with a...