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and autobiography, thus laying the groundwork for a possible challenge to the tendency to reduce literary works to mere historical documents, and the creativity of writers to psychological diagnoses.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.
PATHETIC ARGUMENTS
According to the prevailing view in some quarters, the Spanish transition was reached through a shameful connivance*a pact of silence*that swept under the rug the horrors of the civil war and the dictatorship, refusing to demand responsibilities and allowing an unquestioned democratization of former Francoists. The transition, thus, would have reached a political consensus at the cost of a serious moral failing and a blatant irresponsibility towards history. Such failings and oblivions, these critics contend, haunt Spanish politics and society in various ways, resulting in a pervasive malaise in Spanish culture that is diagnosed with predictable monotony*trauma, melancholy, the return of the repressed, a tumour, an open wound*without considering that physical and psychical pathologies that pertain to individuals, but cannot be easily translated to social bodies or processes, are poor metaphors for extremely complex, multilayered and contentious historical or cultural processes. The notion of a pact of silence calls to mind a conspiratorial vision of a cabal of politicians hatching agreements that subsequently have to be made to pervade the populace. Such a notion is grounded on an old-fashioned concept of power as an allcontrolling force wielded by an elite, with the populace limited to a passive or merely reactive role. The transition, however, was characterized by a continuous give-andtake between power and resistance, with the many political and popular forces in action striving to reach a balance that would satisfy a majority. The constant strikes and popular demonstrations that caused a stream of steady concessions by Franco’s heirs were precisely one of the transition’s most notable features. To suppose that there was a pact of silence is to fail to acknowledge that even a totalitarian regime could not have muzzled the politicians of various tendencies, nor the newspapers, independent publishers, novelists, workers, students, graphic artists or any other vehicle of public opinion. If the supposed existence of such a pact assumes the connivance of the political elite and the tacit approval of the Spanish people, then one would need to posit a generalized moral failing that would explain the pact’s commonality. Such widespread complicity has been postulated by Hugo Vezzeti in the case of Argentina’s military dictatorship, but to argue that a similar collusion took place in Spain will sound ludicrous to anyone who lived through the transition with even the most minimal political involvement. In contrast with this generalized moral and political failing, it is presumed that some critics have vigilantly remained above the moral morass of the majority, maintaining the truth at all costs, until recent times when the dead have resurfaced to remind us of what had been swept under the rug. One has to wonder why nobody spoke up about a presumed pact of silence before the mid-1990s. Ángel G. Loureiro
The relation of food quantity to rumination behavior.
Preliminary work suggested that the quantity of food ingested by retarded individuals who usually ruminated following meals was related to the frequency and duration of ruminating responses. This possible relation was experimentally examined by systematically varying food quantity from regular portions to satiation levels for three retarded individuals who exhibited high levels of ruminating. A clear functional relation of food quantity to ruminating emerged, with satiation procedures producing rapid and large decreases in the relatively high frequencies and durations of ruminating characteristic of baseline food quantity conditions.