Competing Social Values in Juan Marsé's El amante bilingüe

COMPETING SOCIAL VALUES IN JUAN MARSÉ’S EL AMANTE BILINGÜE by Andrew J. Deiser University of Arkansas at Little Rock NOT only has Juan Marsé’s 1990 novel, El amante bilingüe, generated its share of studies, it has also sparked a heated debate among literary critics. A brief overview of several scholars’ studies will serve to highlight their contrasting views of the novel. Focusing on the novel’s linguistic discourse, Milton Azevedo, in “Literary Dialect as an Indicator of Sociolinguistic Conflict in Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe,” asserts that Marsé brings to the fore the debate surrounding language in Barcelona by creating a “literary dialect” of the Andalusian vernacular of Castilian (130). Moreover, Azevedo claims of the novel’s protagonist, Marés: “the fact that he is the metamorphosis of a downand -out Catalan into a charnego underscores the tension in an environment where sociolinguistic conflict functions as a metaphor for cultural – and to some extent ethnic as well – friction” (131).1 Reading the novel as a political allegory, Carlos Moreno Hernández, in “Controversia de ley: El amante biling üe,” asserts that the novel represents “el caso de la situación lingüística en Barcelona con motivo del proceso de normalización del catalán impulsado por la ley de 1983” (1). In contrast to these critics, Joan Ramon Resina, in “The Double Coding of Desire: Language Conflict, Nation Building, and Identity Crashing in Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe,” suggests that the novel goes beyond both metaphor and political allegory by deeming it “[t]he most explicit literary intervention in Catalonia’s contemporary language conflict” (92). In a subsequent article titled “Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe and Sociolinguistic Fiction,” Resina takes to task several critics’ analyses of the novel – including those of Azevedo and Moreno Hernández – for failing to go “beyond the fictional argument to analyze the sociolinguistic premises in a way that includes 67 067-81 Deiser, A.J. 13/9/10 11:11 Página 67 the writing conditions and the author’s historico-political and professional conditioning” (2). Furthermore, in this same article Resina criticizes Marsé himself “for his avoidance of history,” asserting that “[a] sociologically valid and politically effective sketch of Barcelona’s idiomscape must be based on the present situation, but it needs to take cognizance of all the factors that make up this situation, since the ‘present’ is an abstraction for the cumulative history that converges in the moment of analysis” (10). In contrast to Resina, Stuart King, in “Desempeñar papeles y la desmitificación cultural en El amante bilingüe de Juan Marsé,” maintains that “Marsé nos presenta una sátira grotesca que de ninguna manera es un reflejo ‘real’ ni intenta ser fiel a la situación lingüística en Cataluña” (4). In order to get beyond these polarizing views to a more comprehensive interpretation of the novel, an approach grounded in an understanding of the social values associated with language use and ethnic identity in Barcelona is needed. With this in mind, the focus of this study will be the novel’s treatment of two social values, prestige and solidarity , both of which dictate language use and shape attitudes toward ethnic identity in Catalunya, especially in Barcelona where the struggle for linguistic hegemony takes center stage (Woolard 124). El amante bilingüe (henceforth El amante) begins with Juan Marés’s recounting of his wife Norma’s act of adultery with a charnego bootblack. Devastated by Norma’s infidelity, Marés sets forth on a process of self-transformation by assuming the identity of a charnego bootblack himself in order to win her back. Identity, thus, becomes the novel’s principal theme and is addressed on three distinct yet interrelated levels: Marés’s personal identity crisis; the question of ethnic, class, and linguistic identity in Barcelona; and, in a broader sense, the notion of Catalan national identity. Readers must also come to terms with the way in which Juan Marsé creates an undeniable link between himself and his protagonist, Marés. Following the opening scene, which takes place in 1975, the novel’s temporal setting jumps forward to...