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

1. A Distopian Culture: The Minimalist Paradigm in the Generation X

3 u 1 A Distopian Culture: The Minimalist Paradigm in the Generation X Gonzalo Navajas The Humanist Framework In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre published a controversial and highly influential work, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism Is a Humanism), in which he provides a comprehensive foundation to his philosophical program, which is based on the rejection of universal axiological principles. In the book, he attempts to link his program to the humanist project that has been a central focus of modern thought from Goethe and Voltaire to the present. Sartre does not pretend to restore and save the classical tradition of thought, but he, nonetheless , establishes a connection between the nihilism and solipsism of his philosophy and the history of humanism, which, at least theoretically, posits a common and solidary destiny for all humanity. Without renouncing his negative critical methodology, Sartre inserts his philosophy within the modern paradigm in which the humanist ideal supplies the central justification. From this perspective, Antoine Roquentin, Sartre’s nihilist figure of La nausée (Nausea), would ultimately propose a renovated and more genuine view of the human condition. His critical examination of the philosophical tradition takes on an extraordinary dimension since, after assuming the burden of a past 4 GONZALO NAVAJAS that he considers false and illegitimate, he undertakes the task of exploring new venues that would be exempt from prior metaphysical presuppositions. He thus claims to uncover a freer form of humanism that potentially can provide a more valid path for a self that, in a Nietzschean manner, has overcome the restrictions of the past. For Roquentin, the old version of humanism is dead, but he can still act according to a new version of humanism in which the only framework of reference is absolute freedom without limits: “l’homme, sans aucun appui et sans aucun secours, est condamné à chaque instant à inventer l’homme” (L’existentialisme 38) (Man, without any support and without any assistance, is doomed to invent man at every moment). More than fifty years later, this radical proposal still resonates actively in the foremost critical movements of the end of the twentieth century that derive from the negative hermeneutics of the Sartrian model: deconstruction and postmodernity. In them, negation is an initial phase that eventually leads to the exploration of new forms of ethical and axiological assertion. Thus, these developments make apparent that the humanist horizon, albeit reconfigured and redefined, cannot be excluded from the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic debate. The Sartrian parallel is useful to frame conceptually significant segments of the current contemporary cultural condition. In particular, it provides a suggestive methodological tool for the analysis of the works of the authors of the so-called Spanish Generation X that produce their works in the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new century. For these authors , the Sartrian dichotomy between old and new humanism is irrelevant. That opposition implies a dialectical exchange between past and present cultural paradigms in which one is bound to prevail over the other. However, for these authors, one component of the dialectical opposition is missing and thus the confrontation cannot take place. As the narrator of Angel Mañas’s Ciudad rayada, Carlos, asserts, those who remain concerned with the cultural tradition are “fossils” that lack the conceptual and vital instruments to understand the current cultural situation and adapt creatively to it. Roquentin rejected the conventional humanist project because it relied on values that had become a subterfuge used to mask a strategy of ideological domination, but his rejection was the consequence of a rigorous examination of the cultural tradition. On the other hand, for the narrator of Mañas’ novel, that humanist enterprise is not even worthy of consideration since he has never been exposed to it and he lacks the motivation to know it: “A veces, cuando me encuentro con alguno [humanista], tengo la impresión de que vivimos en planetas diferentes, como si nunca hubieran sido como yo . . . Siempre he pensado que los fósiles son unos hijosdelagrandísimaputa” (Ciudad rayada 145) (Sometimes, when I run into A DISTOPYAN CULTURE 5 one of them [humanists], I have the impression that we live in different planets, as if they had never been like me . . . I have always thought that those fossils are real big sons of bitches). In the narrator’s language, the “fossils” are attached to a cultural paradigm that is obsolete and does...