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

Afterword: The Moment X in Spanish Narrative (and Beyond)

235 u Afterword The Moment X in Spanish Narrative (and Beyond) Luis Martín-Estudillo The convergence of preoccupations and narrative strategies which brought young authors such as Lucía Etxebarria, Ray Loriga, José Ángel Mañas, Benjamín Prado, and Roger Wolfe to the forefront of the Spanish literary panorama during the early- and mid-1990s was almost immediately used to promulgate the existence of a differentiated promotion of novelists. The creation of groups such as “Generation X”—echoing an earlier American phenomenon —usually responds to the commercial interests of publishers or to the pedagogical/taxonomical/critical efforts by academics. Both are legitimate, but none should cloud our understanding of a more complex reality. Thus, instead of a “Generation X,” that particular junction of interests could be seen as a passing but significant moment in Spain’s recent literary history. “Moment X,” as I will call it, can be roughly identified with the 1990s, a period when these and a few other authors launched their aesthetic responses to the shock of a country which went from an instant of spectacular hype (which culminated with key international events hosted by Spain in 1992) to an almost immediate disillusionment marked by financial and political scandals and the growing sensation that what seemed to have become a dynamic society was, in fact, deepening its inequalities and creating new areas of exclusion. The aforementioned 236 LUIS MARTÍN-ESTUDILLO convergence between a few authors was to gradually disappear due to the predictable divergences which would progressively define their literary projects. This has resulted in a variety of narrative directions which I shall briefly exemplify toward the end of this afterword. In order to situate Moment X in the cultural map of contemporary Spain, it may be useful to mention the kind of intellectual anchoring of the novelists in question. In his essay in this volume, Gonzalo Navajas invokes Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy as embodied in his fictional character Roquentin to establish a comparative point of departure in his analysis of Generation X’s approach to Western tradition. Roquentin negates such tradition after getting to know it, while Mañas’s character Carlos (Historias del Kronen) despises it without having bothered to approach any of its major texts. Such lack of awareness of their cultural milieu and of their precedents, typical of some representative Moment X characters, leads to a “reduction of the self” viewed “as a fatal and unavoidable fact without the subject seemingly expressing its disagreement or protest” (7). This rejection of the cultural heritage left by their seniors is not accompanied by the construction of an alternative model which could fill the void left by that obliteration of tradition. Rather, it is marked by the adoption of elements that often originated in the mass-mediatic popular culture of English expression. Although some cryptic forms of knowledge are cultivated, the common approach to these cultural manifestations is to treat them as products for consumption (which is the case, for instance, of Vania in Gabriela Bustelo’s Veo veo, as Nina Molinaro shows in her essay). Cultural products are to be accumulated and exhibited as signs of group inclusion/exclusion rather than approached critically by the processing of their messages. Such a hermeneutic effort would imply a more sophisticated treatment of language than the one generally found in these narratives. What is seen by Navajas as linguistic economy, or by Cintia Santana (in this volume) as the literary recreation of marginal speech (cheli) in Moment X novels such as the widely discussed Historias del Kronen, may also be interpreted as a limit in the perception of the world and the ability to engage it in a fulfilling way. Besides a flexible and comprehensive notion of language, characteristic of the virtually immediate communicative exchanges of the Information Age (as Navajas sees it), this narrowing of the linguistic—and therefore, conceptual—horizon signals an inability to imagine possibilities which could influence reality beyond the presentness that frames the lives of these characters. This presentness has something to do with the demise of utopian discourses that haunts late modernity. The noticeable solipsism and the absolute contemporaneity which regulate the lives of Moment X characters are the prod- AFTERWORD 237 uct of their unwillingness to play by the rules set by bourgeois society and to locate themselves within a net of non-fungible historical signifiers where their existence could acquire some degree of transcendence...