Cultural Resentment and the Problematics of Hybridity in Felipe Alfau’s Chromos

Felipe Alfau, a Spanish émigré who resided in Manhattan, produced a small and relatively unknown body of fiction, poetry, and music criticism throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He published just one work during these years—a 1936 collection of interconnected stories and vignettes titled Locos: A Comedy of Gestures. After years of obscurity, Locos was rediscovered by Dalkey Archive Press in the 1980s, and subsequent interest in the book led to the release of his unpublished 1948 novel Chromos, which was finally published in 1990.¹ Alfau’s work, however, has garnered little interest in recent years—a point that is perhaps surprising given his novels’ seemingly contemporary examinations of immigration and transnationalism. Indeed, his experimental novels of the 1930s and 1940s are explicitly transnational works concerned with the intersection of Spanish and American cultural forms, and both novels depict an overt, self-reflexive exploration of cultural and national identity. Locos is set primarily in Spain but examines Spanish culture through the lens of Alfau’s own emigration: the Spain of Locos is described, repeatedly, as artificial and unreal. The trauma of immigration is implicit in the novel’s opening, and it begins with a metafictive preface in which the narrator fears that his audience will never be able to understand him. Chromos, in contrast, is centered on an émigré community of Spanish writers and artists living in New York. It focuses on a young writer named Garcia, who struggles to write a transnational best seller that speaks across cultures. Questions of cultural comparison, assimilation, and hybridity are central to Alfau’s work; in both novels, his protagonists tirelessly examine and reexamine their own national identities through the lens of American culture.

Indeed, the most significant aspect of Alfau’s work is not that his work anticipates questions of postmodernism—as the scant criticism often claims—but that his writing investigates complex questions of hybridity and assimilation.² Both Locos and Chromos focus on the psychological effects of redefining one’s identity through acts of cultural negotiation. In assimilating into the United States, the characters in Alfau’s texts embrace and reject disparate elements of both American and Spanish culture. They metafictively consider the repercussions of affirming themselves as American citizens and examine what elements of their Spanish heritage are effaced through the act of assimilation. Yet if American identity depends on conceiving oneself through a process of cross-cultural negotiation, Alfau depicts this process as explicitly difficult and troubling. To assimilate, in Alfau’s fictional landscapes, is to violently surrender a part of oneself. For the characters in Locos, Spain does not represent a nostalgic sense of belonging but rather a site of alienation and detachment. Toledo is “a hostile city which died in the Renaissance and yet lived the strangest, posthumous life[;] … a city of horror, of fearful dreams of the past, of dreadful historical nightmares” (10). To many characters in the text, the city sits “like a dead emperor upon his wrecked throne” (13). Unemployed, living in poverty in the United States, Alfau writes of his homeland as a decaying anachronism, a dying relic of the past that he can no longer access or understand. Indeed, after struggling to assimilate into life in the United States, he felt he no longer possessed clear national or cultural associations and, in an interview with Ilan Stavans, referred to himself as a “frontier man” (“Anonymity” 148) without a place or culture.³ For both Alfau and his characters, assimilation is tragic and traumatic; it is a jarring, debilitating re-creation of one’s identity.

Such a re-creation, of course, is often uncomfortable, unpleasant, and shocking, and in this regard, it seems unavoidable to begin a discussion of Aflau’s work without acknowledging the controversy that accompanied his rediscovery. The facts are relatively simple: Alfau’s revival was marred by the revelation that he was, in fact, an unapologetic fascist. In the 1993 interview with Stavans, Alfau states: “I am a traditionalist stubbornly loyal to what some would think are outmoded principles. … I think democracy is a disgrace” (148). It is...