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78 u 5 Apocalypses Now: The End of Spanish Literature? Reading Payasos en la Lavadora as Critical Parody Luis Martín-Cabrera “La crítica ya no puede ni debe aspirar a fijar cánones, en un desesperado intento de poner un cinturón de castidad a la literatura considerada como una virgen idiota asaltada por los apetitos de los lectores concupiscentes.” —Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. La literatura en la construcción de la ciudad democrática. (Criticism cannot and should not aspire to establish canons, in a desperate effort to impose a chastity belt on literature considered as a stupid virgin accosted by the readers’ desires.) Specters The beginning of the 1990’s in Spain is distinguished by an unprecedented flux in the editorial market, together with the irruption of a new mass readership and a group of young writers who have come to be known as “Generation X” (Moret, Gullón, Bernardell etc.).1 The boom in the Spanish editorial industry comes at a moment in which, as Eloy Fernández Porta affirms, the convenient symbiosis between government projects and the world of culture has disappeared (35). The object of desire, integration to the European Union or the foundation of the “sociedad del bienestar”—the consumerist notion of social well-being based entirely on acquisitional power—have been swallowed into the black hole allegorized by the celebrations of ’92 (Moreiras-Menor, “Spectacle”). In this context, the younger generation of writers—Ray Loriga, José Angel Mañas, Benjamín Prado, Martín Casariego, David Trueba, and so on—is perceived by establishment-based criticism as a faithful reflection of this new era of superficiality and skepticism: l’ère du vide, as Gilles Lipovetsky defined it. There are countless testimonials and criticisms that comprise a devastating vision of the “new literature”; I will limit myself to that of José María Martínez APOCALYPSES NOW: THE END OF SPANISH LITERATURE? 79 Cachero, since his work on the contemporary Spanish novel is considered to be among the most authoritative of Spanish scholar-critics. In the three full pages which Martínez Cachero concedes to this generation , under the sonorous title of “jovencitos, no exageremos,” (youngsters, let us not exaggerate), he defines Gen X literature as a largely uninteresting form of ‘costumbrismo’, presented in the form of fragmentary portraits, in a style which is composed of short paragraphs, simple or very simple sentences, and a sadly limited vocabulary (495). Thus, the characteristics of this generation as articulated by institutional criticism would be, first and foremost, an apathetic attitude toward reality, the use of the techniques of collage and direct quotes from U.S. pop culture, the representation of large doses of violence, the exaltation of drugs and rock music in an escapist avoidance of unbearable reality, etc. The precursors of the generation, in the Borgesian sense of the term, would be Charles Bukowsky, Jacques Kerouac, as well Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver . . . (Gullón, “Cómo” 31). While one could debate the accuracy of this and other descriptions of the Generation X writers, what is most striking and relevant for this discussion is the persistence of the use of the “generational method” in both academic and media criticism. The invention of the “generational method” in order to study literature is generally attributed to Julius Petersen and his work Filosofía de la ciencia literaria (1930), although it is with the publication of Ortega y Gasset’s El tema de nuestro tiempo that the method became paramount.2 As a faithful Orteguian approach to culture, the “generational method” is broadly predicated on the assumption that national literature evolves from one generation (an elite of talented individuals) to another in a dynamic relationship with the masses, that is to say, the generation is in charge of shaping the esthetic and moral values of the “vulgar” and “amorphous” masses.3 The perpetuation of such an anti-populist hermeneutical method by contemporary Spanish critics poses two interrelated problems. On the one hand, it conceives culture in general and literature in particular as the domain of writers and a critics’ elite in charge of defining taste, literariness and even what should, and should not be included in a national canon. On the other, this very generational approach results in a gigantic simplification of different writers and works whose ultimate result is the suppression of historicity. According to Cristina Moreiras-Menor, the use of the “generational method” to refer to these young writers does not take into...

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