Stuck In La Prosperidad: Madrid's Metamorphosis from Dictatorship to Democracy in Juan José Millás's La soledad era esto

The 1980s in Madrid are remembered perhaps less as a grand spatial transformation on the scale of the Spanish capital's eternal rival, Barcelona, and more as the cultural opening of la movida, a movement that saw young generations turn to popular music, recreational drug use, and more liberal attitudes towards sex. For example Héctor Fouce sees enrique Tierno Galván, Madrid's popular mayor from 1979 to 1986, as the "gran legitimador y capitalizador" of the movida, a sort of spiritual leader whose evocation of his city became the spatial and cultural backdrop of the movement (149). Nevertheless, as Madrid's economy began transitioning towards the services sector, the rise of suburban areas of development marked the Spanish capital's own spatial transformation into democracy. In parallel, with the 1978 constitution Madrid became a separate autonomous community, thereby extending the city's influence beyond its borders with newly minted regional identity and political power. Madrid, under the auspices of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español government, went about reinventing itself as a cultural and economic point of reference for a Spanish state that was trying to catch up to the rest of Europe.¹

It is in reaction to this cultural and spatial reinvention of Madrid that Juan José Millás writes a trilogy of semi-connected novels later denoted by publishers as the trilogía de la soledad. In these three novels, El desorden de tu nombre (1986), La soledad era esto (1990) and Volver a casa (1990), Millás highlights the internalized visions of his main characters, focused primarily on the mental and physical reactions of their bodies to a realistically represented Madrid enveloped in the cultural and economic shifts of the late 80s and early 90s. Among these novels La soledad era esto – abbreviated here forward as La soledad – stands out because the main character, Elena, offers a uniquely feminine perspective of self-transformation that parallels Madrid's own metamorphosis under the effects of a globalized yet disenchanted Spain.² To that end, several critics view Elena's transformation as optimistic and liberating, such as Samuel Amago, who writes that the novel suggests a "possibly positive open-ended conclusion" where Elena "takes control" of her transformation (68).³ However, I argue that a more pessimistic interpretation, such as one offered by Yaw Agawu-Kakraba and Dale Knickerbocker, is more in line with the minimal spatial transformations that Elena is able to realize during the course of the novel.⁴

Elena is a middle-aged homemaker stuck in an unfulfilling marriage. Her husband enrique, once a militant left-wing party member and student protester during the dictatorship, is now a consultant with ties to the PSOE government in power. Following her mother's death, Elena begins to attempt a personal transformation by smoking less hachís and walking the streets more often, despite general physical issues such as fainting spells and indigestion. She hires a detective, first to spy on Enrique, who is in fact cheating on her, and later uses the detective to follow herself to create a third person narrative featuring her movements and progressive changes. By the end of the novel, she has split from Enrique and prepares a place of her own in anticipation of a newly transformed life, though still bound by the same neighborhood spaces and personal experiences as before.

In this article, I posit that Millás presents both Elena's and Madrid's proposed self-transformation in La soledad as incomplete and unresolved. This partial metamorphosis is most visible from a spatial perspective, where Elena and Madrid intersect and overlap throughout the novel. At the same time, the fictional and perceived spaces of Elena's mental map of Madrid juxtapose the real, lived spaces of the city with the representational spaces of her ongoing negotiation with the urban environment. By investigating these multiple manifestations of Elena's conceptualizations of Madrid present in the novel, I conclude that her experiences in contemporary Spain mirror the ongoing struggles with the implementation of democracy...