Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture

11. Rocking around Ray Loriga's Héroes: Video-Clip Literature and the Televisual Subject

184 u 11 Rocking around Ray Loriga’s Héroes: Video-Clip Literature and the Televisual Subject Christine Henseler “Si pudiera vivir dentro de una canción para siempre todas mis desgracias serían hermosas.” (Héroes 127) (If I could forever live within a song all my misfortunes would be beautiful.) When Héroes appeared in 1993 with the image of Ray Loriga himself on its cover holding a bottle of beer, his long hair partly shading the provocative look in his eyes, many believed this new kid on the block was trying to buy into the recording business instead of navigating his way into the literary market.1 Critics indeed confused his literary sensibility with the record-like design of the novel’s cover, the intertextual references to the world of rock and roll, and the title of the book, taken from a David Bowie recording from 1977 by the same name. The permeating force of rock and roll on a textual and a paratextual level made some critics lose sight of the narrative’s innovative quality and see in Héroes nothing more than a mediocre text with superb musical qualities, a novel that, according to one critic: carece de la elemental estructura interna, desarrollo narrativo, modulación de voces , personajes y episodios que hacen de la novela lo que debe ser. Estamos más bien ante la llovizna de una conciencia rockera sensible, el pequeño infierno de un autor que puede ser letrista de rock de primer orden, pero que dista del hacedor de novelas medianamente profesional. (Dalmau) ROCKING AROUND RAY LORIGA’S HEROES 185 (lacks the elemental internal structure, narrative development, modulation of voices, characters and episodes that turn a novel into what it should be. We are rather before the drizzle of a sensitive rocker consciousness, the small hell of an author who can be a first class rock writer, but who is far from being the producer of halfway professional novels.) It is not enough to say that Héroes presents a rock and roll sensibility, that its chapters may be reduced to the lyrics of individual songs or that the entire novel may be equated to a rock and roll record. The text uses rock to produce a variety of temporal and spatial shifts that redefine the novel’s cultural enterprise. Rock cannot be taken at face value in this novel, it must be recontextualized and examined within a variety of frameworks: a visual framework as performed by the character’s dream sequences; a spatial framework that reduces his movements to his mind; a psychological framework of disengagement from reality; a temporal framework as defined by constant shifts between the past, present, and future; a cultural framework set in the globalized and capitalistic Spain at the end of the twentieth century; and a commercial framework that positions the individual and rock’s subversive qualities against the communal and commercialized experience of the masses and the literary market itself.2 In Héroes, Loriga appropriates song lyrics to provide an audio-visual world in which the word moves beyond the written signifier to include a cultural present made up of the sounds of life’s history to reflect, “the complex forms of incorporation and transformation that occur as specific cultural practices move between different configurations and domains of our lives” (Grossberg 177). Héroes appropriates rock and roll to construct a narrative subject identity that emulates the consumptive popular cultural reality of the 1990s. The text uses postmodern video-clip techniques to create a televisual subject who lives in a world of hyperappropriation where seemingly unrelated elements are remixed to produce new social meanings. Héroes emphasizes the idea proposed by Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson in relation to advertising that “texts become defined not so much by the stories they tell, but by the referential combinations they style” (93). In Loriga’s novel, the use of video-clip techniques and intertextual references to rock and roll songs clash in their temporal and spatial re-appropriations and break through the static condition of the protagonist to present a mythical subject in motion. The elevation of the subject to myth is not a foreign phenomenon to a generation of writers born between 1960 and 1975 who have matured in a relatively stable democracy, benefited from widespread technological transformations , and were absorbed by a “commodity culture [that] underscores the force 186 CHRISTINE...