La imaginación desmadrada de Juan José Millás: humor y melancolía en La soledad era esto
This essay explores Juan José Millás's novel La soledad era esto (1990) as means of interrogating current appropriations of disenchantment and melancholy in discussions of contemporary Spanish culture and society. Through a detailed analysis of this novel as well as theoretical studies of affect, this essay aims to achieve three goals. First, to analyze how psychological and ideological processes of melancholy are transformed in Millás's text into a sort of autobiographical simulacrum that deliberately blends fiction and autobiography, thus laying the groundwork for a possible challenge to the tendency to reduce literary works to mere historical documents, and the creativity of writers to psychological diagnoses. Second, to reformulate the medical and political conception of melancholy in an aesthetic conception that locates a strange form of knowledge in black humor—understood both as melancholia in the Hippocratic tradition and as a comedy of despair. Finally, to examine how this reformulation of melancholy in humorous terms interrogates cultural critiques of "desencanto," insofar as such interpretations may themselves be self-referential and disenchanted—while melancholy may work as a model for hope.
Stuck In La Prosperidad: Madrid's Metamorphosis from Dictatorship to Democracy in Juan José Millás's La soledad era esto
The 1980s in Madrid are remembered perhaps less as a grand spatial transformation on the scale of the Spanish capital’s eternal rival, Barcelona, and more as the cultural opening of la movida, a movement that saw young generations turn to popular music, recreational drug use, and more liberal attitudes towards sex. For example héctor Fouce sees enrique Tierno Galván, Madrid’s popular mayor from 1979 to 1986, as the “gran legitimador y capitalizador” of the movida, a sort of spiritual leader whose evocation of his city became the spatial and cultural backdrop of the movement (149). Nevertheless, as Madrid’s economy began transitioning towards the services sector, the rise of suburban areas of development marked the Spanish capital’s own spatial transformation into democracy. In parallel, with the 1978 constitution Madrid became a separate autonomous community, thereby extending the city’s influence beyond its borders with newly minted regional identity and political power. Madrid, under the auspices of the Partido Socialista Obrero español government, went about reinventing itself as a cultural and economic point of reference for a Spanish state that was trying to catch up to the rest of europe. It is in reaction to this cultural and spatial reinvention of Madrid that Juan José Millás writes a trilogy of semi-connected novels later denoted by publishers as the trilogía de la soledad. In these three novels, El desorden de tu nombre (1986), La soledad era esto (1990) and Volver a casa (1990), Millás highlights the internalized visions of his main characters, focused primarily on the mental and physical reactions of their bodies to a realistically represented Madrid enveloped in the cultural and economic shifts of the late 80s and early 90s. Among these novels La soledad era esto – abbreviated here forward as La soledad – stands out because the main
The Millennial of Castile (1943): the historical culture of Spanish Fascism
Abstract The creation of new symbols and historical myths were common practices of nationalist politics, especially in Fascist regimes. In 1943 the Franco regime organized the most impressive historical commemoration celebrated in post-war Spain: the Milenario of Castile. With its heterogeneous mixture of history and spectacle, the Milenario of Castile was by far the greatest historical commemoration promoted by the State during the 1940s. Taking the commemoration of the Milenario as a case study, this article examines the historical culture of Spanish Fascism, as well as the attempts of the Falangist intellectual elite to impose a concrete national narrative in post-war Spain. At the same time, the article analyses the historical discourses and aesthetics displayed throughout the commemoration, underlining its Fascist character, and consequently the transnational dimension of the Fascist politics of the past. Finally, the article reflects on the scope and limits of the process of Fascistisation in Franco's dictatorship, especially in its commemorative culture.