Anatomía del desencanto: Humor, ficción y melancolía en España 1976-1998 by Santiago Morales Rivera (review)

In Anatomía del desencanto: Humor, ficción y melancolía en España 1976-1998, Santiago Morales Rivera examines the effects of the post-Francoist emphasis on democratic disillusion, historical grievance, and recuperated memory on Spain's long cultural interest in melancholy during the last forty years. Morales Rivera constructs what he calls a cartography of the emotions through a focus on both melancholy and its satellite emotions, including fear, blame, and mourning, in a host of Castilian-language novels that appeared primarily in the final decade of the twentieth century. The lone exception is a short story from Cristina Fernández Cubas's Los altillos de Brumal (1983), which is the subject of the second chapter. For Morales Rivera, each of the authors studied, namely Juan José Millás, Fernández Cubas, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, and Javier Marías, contribute to a sentimental education that shows different affective possibilities at the end of the twentieth century and how each of those emotions are understood and historically situated in Spain.

Anatomía del desencanto distinguishes itself by approaching melancholy through the lenses of ironic humor and hermetic correlationism, deviating from the condition's primary link to fear and despondency that was central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings by Timothie Bright and Robert Burton (whose opus Anatomy of Melancholy inspires Morales Rivera's title). The depressive paradigm of melancholy influences later clinical understandings of this condition, with the most well-known case being Sigmund Freud's 1917 essay in which the unconscious loss of an intimate love object, and its subsequent introjection, explains how a sense of despondency can be without cause and predictive of a loss of interest in the outside world. Analysis of melancholy in contemporary Spanish culture tends to follow this depressive paradigm in examining the collective melancholy of an entire nation-state. In Alberto Medina's Exorcismos de la memoria (2001), for example, it is the loss of the dictatorial father that is incorporated into a collective Spanish consciousness, constituting a pathological introjection that allows Franco's absent-presence to haunt Spain's transition to democracy. Morales Rivera asserts that contemporary Spanish cultural scholarship such as Medina's adopts a noble form of melancholy capable of "inequívocas y poderosas formas de conocimiento" in reference to a post-Francoist depression that is inherently resistant to signification in a paradoxical and equivocal way (55). To this list Morales Rivera adds Teresa Vilarós's El mono del desencanto and Cristina Moreiras Menor's Cultura herida as examples of scholarship that adopt a "moral melancólica" in efforts to pathologize the desencanto of the last quarter of the twentieth century. To this status of knowledge, Anatomía del desencanto considers the possibility of melancholic irony as an alternative to signifying Spanish culture through an Oedipal identification with loss. Morales Rivera reveals how the black humor of the melancholic mode resists the paradigmatic way that analyses of the desencanto have approached affects such as mourning, fear, blame, and justice, thus offering an assessment of post-dictatorial Spanish culture that supplements the commonly-applied psychoanalytic focus on traumatic symptoms.

As indicated by Anatomía del desencanto's subtitle, Morales Rivera situates melancholy alongside humor and fiction. This imbrication allows the author to unearth a generation of Spanish novelists that reacts to the disillusionment of the Transition's utopic failures in a dialectical, productive fashion, especially through allegory and irony. In so doing, Morales Rivera resuscitates a separate melancholic paradigm associated with creativity and genius, a hallmark of the Neoplatonic Renaissance writings of Marsilio Ficino and a mode of work that Walter Benjamin associates with the dramatists of the Trauerspiel. Alienation from a world that has lost transcendent, overarching meaning both intensifies the melancholic gaze and resituates everyday objects and phenomena in an enigmatic, but creative, context. In this respect, Morales Rivera contextualizes the writers active in the 1990s...