Colección Támesis

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 195

CATHOLIC ICONOGRAPHY
IN THE NOVELS OF JUAN MARSÉ

Rosemary Clark draws on play theory to offer a comprehensive

account of the various ways in which Catholic iconography is
explored and subverted in the work of the outstanding post-Civil
War Catalan novelist, Juan Marsé.
The study analyses some works that have not been submitted to
much critical scrutiny, such as Imágenes y recuerdos and Marsé’s
latest novel, Rabos de lagartija. It also focuses on such highly
acclaimed works as La oscura historia de la prima Montse, showing
how religious and profane visions of love are subtly intertwined, and
Si te dicen que caí (Marsé’s most experimental novel), where Dr
Clark analyses the ironic interplay between the stories recounted
through a child’s perspective – ‘aventis’ – and the novel form itself.
The study draws on biblical topoi ranging from the Garden of Eden
to the Song of Songs, and shows how they are portrayed and ulti-
mately subverted in the playfully ironic world of Marsé’s fictions.

ROSEMARY CLARK teaches Spanish in the department of Spanish

and Portuguese of the University of Cambridge.
 ROSEMARY CLARK

CATHOLIC ICONOGRAPHY
IN THE NOVELS OF JUAN MARSÉ

TAMESIS
 © Rosemary Clark 2003

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
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without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2003

by Tamesis, Woodbridge

ISBN 1 85566 087 3

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA
website: www.boydell.co.uk

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Rosemary, 1952–
Catholic iconography in the novels of Juan Marsé / Rosemary Clark.
p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías ; 195)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–85566–087–3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Marsé, Juan, 1933– – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Catholic
Church – In literature. I. Title.
PQ6623.A745 Z65 2003
863’.64 – dc21 2003005014

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Great Britain by

St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
 CONTENTS

Illustrations.....................................................................................................vii
Abbreviations and Editions.............................................................................ix

Introduction: Subvert and Survive: playing with icons...................................1

1 Games of Hide-and-Seek: eluding the critical eye.................................20

2 Games of Make-Believe: playing with historical discourses.................51

3 Sexualising the Sacred: Vatican II as a ‘novela rosa’ in
La oscura historia de la prima Montse...................................................80

4 Catalonia and Paradise Gardens: eroticising Edens..............................115

5 Dark Angels and Bright Devils: games with ambiguous icons............149

Conclusion....................................................................................................194
Bibliography.................................................................................................198
Index...............................................................................................................xx
The author and publishers would like to record their
thanks to the Modern Humanities Research Association
for assistance in the costs of publication of this book.
 ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Sant Jordi. Front Cover of the Catalan Catholic Scouting

magazine Camins, April 1965..............................................................135

2 Porta “del Drac”, Pavellons Güell, by A. Gaudí. ‘En la imponente

puerta de hierro forjado campea un dragón alado hollando lirios
negros.’ (EAB, p. 125)..........................................................................139

3 Icons and Religious Images (Quenot, p. 75).........................................155

4 The Protection of the Mother of God (Quenot, p. 99)....................161

5 Capitanes y Caudillos. Front Cover of the Falange magazine,
Flechas y Pelayos, 1947........................................................................165

6 The Crowned Hermaphrodite. 17th century alchemical manuscript

(Leyden University Library, Voss. Chym. Fol., f. 91r).........................171

7 ‘Arc-en-cercle’. Paul Richer, Études cliniques sur la grande

hystérie ou hystéro-épilepsie. (Bethesda, MD: National Library of
Medicine,
1881) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

8 The self-crucified hysteric. Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’art

(Paris: Delahaye & Lecrosnier, 1887). (Courtesy of the Wellcome
Institute Library, London).....................................................................177
9 The representation of religious ecstasy as pathological sign. Paul
Régnard, Les maladies épidémiques de l’esprit: sorcellerie,
magnétisme, morphinisme, délire des grandeurs (Paris: E. Plon,
Nourrit et Cie., 1887, 95), engraving after a photograph from the
Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (Bethesda, MD: National Library of
Medicine)...............................................................................................179

10 The Nativity of Christ (Quenot, p. 98)..................................................185

 ABBREVIATIONS AND EDITIONS

Novels
EAB El amante bilingüe (Barcelona: Planeta, 1990)
ECL Esta cara de la luna (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1962)
1st edn in Biblioteca Breve, 1982
EJ Encerrados con un solo juguete (Barcelona: Seix Barral,
1960)
2nd edn, Seix Barral, 1989
ES El embrujo de Shanghai (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1993)
MBO La muchacha de las bragas de oro (Barcelona: Planeta,
1978)
PM La oscura historia de la prima Montse (Barcelona: Seix
Barral, 1970)
1st edn in Biblioteca Breve, 1990
RG Ronda del Guinardó (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984)
4th edn in Biblioteca Breve, 1991
RL Rabos de lagartija (Barcelona: Lumen, 2000)
STD Si te dicen que caí (Mexico: Novaro, 1973. Revised 1989)
2nd edn in Seix Barral, 1990
UDV Un día volveré (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1982)
2nd edn in Biblioteca Breve, 1989
UTT Ultimas tardes con Teresa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1965.
Revised 1975)
23rd edn in Biblioteca Breve, 1991

Relatos
HD Historia de detectives in Teniente Bravo (Barcelona: Seix
Barral, 1987)
TB Teniente Bravo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987)

Short Stories
‘La calle del dragón dormido’, Insula, 155 (October 1959)
‘La liga roja en el muslo moreno’, El fin del Milenio. Barcelona: Planeta,
47–72
‘Nada para morir’, Destino, 2 May 1959
‘Parabellum’, Bazaar, 1 (January 1977)
‘Plataforma posterior’, Insula, 127 (June 1957)
‘Un día volveré’, Los Cuadernos del Norte, Year 1, 4 (October to December
1980)

Miscellaneous
CC Confidencias de un chorizo (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977)
IRAP Imágenes y recuerdos. 1939–1950: años de penitencia
(Barcelona: Difusora Internacional, 1971)
IRGD = Imágenes y recuerdos. 1929–1940: la gran desilusión
(Barcelona: Difusora Internacional, 1971)
IRTS = Imágenes y recuerdos. 1949–1960: tiempo de satélites
(Barcelona: Difusora Internacional, 1976). Prologue Juan
Marsé; text José María Carandell; ‘acotaciones
iconográficas’, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
MC = Los misterios de Colores (Córdoba: Diario Córdoba, 1977)
MJM = Las mujeres de Juanito Marés, ed. J. Méndez (Madrid:
Espasa Calpe, 1997)
PH = El Pijoaparte y otras historias (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1981)
 INTRODUCTION
SUBVERT AND SURVIVE: PLAYING WITH ICONS

Juan Marsé is a hybrid whose vigorous non-conformity under the Franco

dictatorship, and since the Transition to democracy, has presented a constant
challenge to hegemonic discourses. Though a Catalan speaker throughout the
years of Francoist post-war repression of regional difference and language,
his brief schooling was in Castilian, as were the books he read and the films
he saw. A religious sceptic, he was brought up a Catholic in Franco’s Spain
and actually chose to involve himself in his local parish’s youth activities,
lured by the ping-pong tables, plays, music and girls that he depicts so
vividly in his narratives. The tensions generated by his negotiation of these
areas of conflict provide a powerful and ironic driving force in his narratives.
My aim in this book is to discuss ways in which over the last forty years
Marsé has represented the impact of Catholicism on post-war, post-Franco
and now resolutely Catalan Barcelona, where (apart from a year in Paris) he
has lived his entire life. To study his use of Catholic iconography in his
novels is to expose a hitherto unrecognised level and subtlety of critique in
his depiction of both Spanish and Catalan Catholic culture. The combination
of religion and politics can be contentious and yet Marsé has chosen to
approach it in a spirit of play. He frames narrative as play, and icons form
part of his narrative games.
To suggest that Marsé plays with icons is to focus on a point of conflict at
the centre of his depiction of Catholicism. For the believer, the icon is a
theophany, a sacramental presence, a place where the divine may actually be
encountered, not merely in the imagination but in reality. For Marsé, icons
are a visual form of narrative which combines a dense encoding of doctrine
and tradition with the powerfully immediate impact of pictures. To play with
icons can be seen as profaning the sacred: challenging doctrine and tradition.
Alternatively, it can be taken as an affirmation that icons, doctrine and tradi-
tion are susceptible to questioning and reinterpretation. To say that Marsé
frames narrative as play is not to say that he approaches Catholic iconog-
raphy flippantly. It means that the ludic character of his narrative games
needs reconsideration if the nature and impact of his subversion of Catholic
iconography through play is to be recognised and brought into the forum of
discussion of this under-estimated writer.
Marsé’s best-known works are his eleven novels, published between 1960
2 INTRODUCTION

and 2000, and the four ‘relatos’ grouped under the title Teniente Bravo
(1987). Less familiar to readers are his short stories, three of which were
published in periodicals before his first novel appeared in 1960, while three
were published in 1977, 1980 and 1990. Equally unfamiliar are the two
columns entitled Confidencias de un chorizo and Señores y señoras that he
wrote for the satir- ical magazine Por Favor in the mid-1970s. However, I
shall offer (in Chapter
2) what I believe to be the first study of a neglected area of his writing: three
volumes evocatively entitled Imágenes y Recuerdos (1971–76) to which
Marsé was the major contributor. I aim to indicate the wide scope of his
writing but also to offer detailed discussion of individual works. To achieve
these two aims, I shall study his development of strategies of subversion in
which Catholic iconography becomes a powerful critical tool.
Marsé’s writing is attracting increasing attention from scholars on both
sides of the Atlantic but it also has indisputable popular appeal. His most
recent novel, Rabos de lagartija (2000) won the Premio Nacional de la
Crítica, and prior to that, publishers faced with gaps of up to six years
between novels, have reprinted sections of existing works: Confidencias de
un chorizo in book form (1977), a collection of extracts about Manuel Reyes
(UTT and PM) entitled El Pijoaparte y otras historias (1981), six chapters of
La oscura historia renamed Los misterios de Colores (1993), and a selection
of pieces from nine already published works, renamed after his recent
literary alter ego from El amante bilingüe (1990), Las mujeres de Juanito
Marés (1997). Other literary prizes include the Premio Internacional de
Novela “México” awarded to Si te dicen que caí in 1973 by an international
jury of which Mario Vargas Llosa was a member, testifying to earlier
recognition of his skill as a writer, and the Premio Planeta for La muchacha
de las bragas de oro in 1978. My study will seek to explore how it is that
Marsé can be an astutely critical observer of his time and an imaginative
satirist capable of manipulating a medium as difficult as Catholic
iconography, and still enter- tain his readers.
One reason for his broad appeal is that Marsé engages with both the
complex visual medium of traditional iconography and the familiar terrain of
popular religious culture as he illustrates the interaction of Catholicism with
value systems in post-war Barcelona. Born in 1933, his depiction of the
Church draws on his own upbringing and personal contact with religious
culture, betraying a scepticism that he remembers as having coloured even
his earliest experiences. He has said of the church school he attended until
the age of thirteen:

Fue un colegio absurdo, disparatado, que se llamaba El Divino Maestro

[...]. [E]l maestro estaba loco, sencilla y llanamente [...]. Nos hacía pasar el
Rosario cada día. Nos enseñaba sobre todo Sagrada Historia [...]. Era un
carca rematado. El pobre terminó loco, pero loco de atar.
(In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995.)
Self-mocking irony colours his description of his First Communion at the
age of eight:

La hacíamos todos [...]. Bueno, nos interesaba, porque nos daban dinero.
Toda la familia, los familiares, los conocidos, los vecinos, y todo eso.
Entregábamos una estampita, que se hacían imprimir “para tiíta” y tal, y
por la estampita siempre te daban dinero. Siempre que te porfías te daban
dinero. (In conversation with Rosemary Clark 27, June 1995.)

There is dry humour too in his comments on the local church and the recre-
ational activities it offered that were not otherwise available in the wake of
war:

se organizaban partidos de todo, de baloncesto, había un equipo de fútbol,

se hacía teatro, nos enseñaban solfeo para cantar en el coro, y aprendí
solfeo, que siempre me encantó porque no lo he olvidado en toda mi vida
[...]. Y luego, había niñas también, del grupo ese de la casa de la familia –
huérfanas de la guerra.
(In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995.)

Adopted at birth into a Catalan family (his natural parents were also
Catalan), Marsé has experienced both the repression of Catalan culture
during the Franco years and its resurgence after the Transition to
Democracy. His education, early reading and professional activity have
therefore been in Castilian, while Catalan has been used with family and
friends. Faced with a Castilian-Catalan conflict under Francoism and, in a
different form, on into the present, Marsé has been quoted as saying, with
characteristically teasing ambiguity: ‘No soy ni un anarquista ni un
comunista militante. ¡No milito! Sólo milito en la literatura.’ 1 His statement
claims an area of neutrality in relation to politics, but at the same time
intimates that in literature there are battles he will fight which may or may
not be viewed as political. Catalans have sought to redefine their national
identity in terms of language, literature and culture, and one area in which
Marsé has been militant in his writing is as an analyst and critic of the
Church’s response to issues of Catalan national identity.
Differences between Spain and Catalonia have over the centuries been
reflected in their different relations with the Catholic Church. To help iden-
tify these differences and then trace them in Marsé’s narratives, I have
chosen to draw a distinction between what is widely known as Spanish
National Catholicism, and what I term Catalan Catholic Nationalism. Other
critics have talked of a ‘catalanisme confessional’ – a ‘política “creient” més
que de creients’ in contrast to the ‘catalanisme laic propulsat per l’Almirall’,

1 Colectivo Lantaba, ‘Yo no milito’, Cuadernos para el diálogo, 21 January 1978, pp.
44–5, 45.
or a ‘catalanisme catòlic’ which stemmed from ‘la corriente estrictamente
confesional dentro del mundo de la Renaixença’. 2 I shall speak of Catalan
Catholic Nationalism in opposition to Spanish National Catholicism in order
both to contrast and to compare them. Marsé depicts marked differences. He
then delights in ironically underlining similarities unfavourable to either or
both. The detail and complexity of his representations of these two separate
phenomena, and the validity of my distinction, will be confirmed as this
discussion proceeds and as I examine the discourses, myths, and finally the
icons by which they both seek to define themselves.
Marsé’s childhood coincided with the years immediately following a
Spanish National Catholic victory in the civil war. Many within the Church
– both Spaniards and Catalans – hailed this victory as an opportunity to reaf-
firm and expand a religious power base that had been largely lost over the
nineteenth century, and in the brief but cataclysmic years of the Second
Republic.3 A future Archbishop of Zaragoza hailed it as ‘la hora católica en
España’. In a book with that title, he declared his aim to be nothing less than
‘la recristianización de las masas españolas’, and he called on Catholics to
forward that aim:

Escribo con vistas a la acción y con la mira puesta en la coyuntura

providencial de esta hora católica española, que los católicos españoles
militantes no pueden, no deben perder, dejándose llevar de la inercia
intelectual de una mentalidad liberal y caduca, cuya influencia es hoy más
perniciosa que la mala voluntad.4

A visible symbol of that ‘recristianización’ was a focus on the rebuilding of

churches throughout Spain. Special supplements published by all the major
newspapers in 1950 to celebrate what had been declared in Spain an ‘Año
Santo’ give some idea of the extent of this work and of the propaganda
opportunity such reconstruction represented. Under the banner headline ‘La
reconstrucción religiosa en España’, ABC described Barcelona as ‘una de las
diócesis españolas donde la ferocidad antirreligiosa de la horda frente-
populachera causó mayores víctimas y estragos (ABC Suplemento Año
Santo, 1), and applauded the completed rebuilding of 52 churches, 41

2 Norbert Bilbeny, La Ideología nacionalista a Catalunya (Barcelona: Laia,

1988), p. 82. Vicente Cacho Viu, ‘Catalanismo y catolicismo en el ambiente
intelectual finisecular’, in Aproximación a la Historia Social de la Iglesia Española
Contemporánea (Madrid: Biblioteca ‘La Ciudad de Dios’, 1978), 297–318, p. 300.
3 For the nineteenth century see William Callahan, Church, Politics and Society
in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). For the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries see Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
4 Pedro Cantero Cuadrado, La hora católica en España (Madrid: Ruta, 1942), pp.
5–6.
convents, 19 hermitages, 5 seminaries and 10 chapels in Barcelona alone,
with many more ‘en construcción’ in that one city.
The Spanish National Catholic backlash drove Catalanism underground,
but there it found an ally in Catalanist elements of a Church that had itself
known persecution from Roman times through to Spain’s violent political
turmoil of the early twentieth century. One commentator has stated:

First Catalan identity and then Catalanism were forced to seek refuge and
a basis for recovery in the Roman Catholic Church. No protection was
afforded by the hierarchy, which identified with Franco’s ideal of National
Catholicism and collaborated in the de-Catalanization process. Even so,
the Church was the least Fascist of the various forces that lent legitimacy
to the Dictatorship and was so powerful throughout society that only from
within it was it viable to go beyond the action of tiny underground groups,
salvage the remains of an identity that the régime was bent on destroying,
and defend human rights.5

The alliance gave rise to what Marsé, in ironic reference to the persecution
of the Early Church in Rome, would later call ‘un ritual de catacumbas
elaborado con mucha fe y escasos medios, una forma de mantener el fuego
sagrado de la lengua y la identidad nacionales (EAB 132).
In the 1960s, the Church in Rome struck a blow at the confidence of
Franco’s Spanish National Catholicism and boosted Catalan Catholic
Nation- alist aspirations in several resolutions of the Second Vatican Council
(1962–5). The impact of Vatican II in Spain was particularly profound. In
the sixteenth century, at the height of the Protestant Reformation, Spanish
theo- logians had played a leading part in the redefinition of Catholic
orthodoxy at the Council of Trent (1545–63). After Trent, Spanish
orthodoxy was so strict that other Catholic countries were deemed to fall so
short of the required standard that after 1599, Spaniards were forbidden to
study even in Catholic universities abroad, and ‘The process of turning the
Hispanic peninsula into a kind of cultural Tibet was under way.’ 6 Vatican II
effectively reversed that process. As one Church historian has commented:

When Pope John XXIII announced in January 1959 the convocation of a

Council of the Church [...] he thereby summoned the Spanish bishops to
an intensive re-education whose effects on the Spanish Church are
incalcu- lable. The eighty or so Spanish bishops who attended [...]
discovered with varying degrees of ease or anguish that on the whole they
had more to learn than to teach. (Lannon 1987, p. 246)

5 Albert Balcells, Catalan Nationalism Past and Present (London: Macmillan,

1996), p. 133.
6 Stanley G. Payne, Spanish Catholicism. An Historical Overview (Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 46.
It is no exaggeration to say that what the Vatican II emphasis on human
rights, political freedom and the use of vernacular languages in worship and
teaching meant for Catalan Catholics is the subject of Marsé’s La oscura
historia de la prima Montse (1970). At the same time, Marsé parodies the
discourses of the Council, satirises its representatives, and strikes hard at the
core of the Catholic faith. When he first represents Montse as an icon, and
then subverts this sacred image, he is on dangerous ground, for to believers,
‘the icon is a sacrament of the Divine-Humanity of Christ. Ever since the
Divine Word assumed a material, human nature at the Incarnation, ever since
His human nature was transfigured by the light of the Resurrection, and His
body – composed of matter – was elevated to participate in the Divine Life at
the Ascension, henceforth, both human art and language can be baptized and
sanctified in the Church’.7 By using Catholic iconography in his narrative
games, Marsé transgressively affirms his own faith in the creative yet also
subversive power of play.

Play, creativity and an area of faith

Play has long been seen as more than a mere joyful expenditure of energy
or a time to relax from work. The social anthropologist, Johan Huizinga,
describes play as the basis of all social activity and communication: older
than culture because even animals play, and deeply rooted in every area of
human experience from the lowest to the highest and most sacred:

The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with
play from the start [...] language, myth, ritual [...], every metaphor is a
play upon words [...]. In myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of
civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft
and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of
play.8

More recently, the American psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson has used play as
a model for an exploration of our common cultural and political life. His
work has focused largely on children, but he argues that the creation of a
play area offers adults, as much as children, a ‘subjective sense of existence
as a playground’ where they may experience ‘the mutual legitimation of
playful imagination and of factual reality, and thus the credibility of reality
itself and

7 Boris Bobrinskoy, Preface to The Icon: Window in the Kingdom (London:

Mowbray, 1992). First published as L’icône (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987).
8 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 4–5.
of play itself’.9 Play provides strategies for dealing with reality, not escaping
from it.
Erikson first published Toys and Reasons in 1977, in response to the
American crisis of confidence after Vietnam and Watergate. The date
situates it between the publication in Spain of Si te dicen (1976) and La
muchacha (1978), Marsé’s two novels which most explicitly present
narrative as play; as ‘aventis’ in Si te dicen, and as the Tangram in La
muchacha. This is a coin- cidence, but there is a parallel to be drawn
between the Americans’ sense of having been deceived and Spain’s crisis of
confidence after Franco’s death, as dictatorship gave way to democracy and
the long process of rewriting recent history began. Erikson’s analysis of
American disillusionment (another word associated with play – or rather,
with quitting the game) is applicable to Spaniards during the Transition.
One’s mind turns, therefore, to Marsé and to his narrative games when
Erikson asks:

What relation may there be (beyond mere metaphor) between the playing
child and the playacting adult; between make-believe and belief; between
the legitimate theater and what we call the theaters of politics and war;
between playful vision and serious theory: between the child’s toys, then,
and aged reasons? (p. 26)

Marsé’s narrative games, so often framed by adults looking back on child-

hood – re-presenting or, more radically, re-creating it – explores that
relation. In his novels, play, among adults as well as children, provides
strategies for survival and subversion that explore the interface between
belief and make-believe.
Writing about America, Erikson notes in social and political
commentaries of the late 1970s a prevalence of images associated with play
and play-acting which show an intense concern over the intention to deceive:

it did appear that themes somehow related to play in all its various mean-
ings of grossly deceptive as well as imaginative make-believe character-
ized the mood of the commentators at that time, as if there were some
pervasive sadness over the loss of playful leeway, some deep anger over
the use of playacting for deception, and a universal, if vague, nostalgia for
some kind of new ‘vision’. (p. 19)

He points to the etymological link between ‘ludere’ – to play – and two

words associated with deception – il-lusion and de-lusion – and he warns
that if disillusionment is not to become destructive,

We must [...] come to grips with the ontogenetic sources of the aggressive

9 Erik H. Erikson, Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience

(London: Boyars, 1978), p. 25.
 and deceptive aspects of the human use of the natural propensity for
familial and communal interplay for, surely, it forms one basis for what
later becomes systematic and destructive in politics. (p. 56)10

Erikson uses ‘play construction’ to enable children to express with toys

what they cannot articulate in words:

Small patients, it is well known, in their fright and confusion turn to avail-
able playthings with a desperate neediness, often confessing and express-
ing on the toy stage much more than they could possibly say or probably
know ‘in that many words’. (p. 30)

He claims that play is essential for the individual’s full, healthy development
and interaction with the environment. Speaking of adults and children,
Erikson contrasts a healthy ‘generativity’ – defined as ‘the human form of an
instinctual drive to create and to care for new life, whether in the form of
progeny, of productivity, or of creativeness’ – with a ‘stagnation’ that leads
to a rejection of otherness. The failure to fulfil individual potential may have
destructive social and political consequences:

For the stagnating limits of generativity in man also mark the arousal of a
specific rejectivity, a more or less ruthless suppression or de-struction of
what seems to go counter to one’s ‘kind’ – that is, the particular human
subspecies or value system one wishes to propagate [...]. [T]his destruc-
tiveness periodically finds a vast area for collective manifestation in war
or in other forms of annihilation of what suddenly appears to be a
subhuman kind of man. (pp. 59–60)

He continues:

Politics at its most inspiring combines new aggregates of persons in a

vision of a regenerated, a ‘new man’ relatively adapted for the time of its
ascendency to the demands of factuality and actuality. At its ‘dirtiest’ it
exploits the need for illusions and permits the study of the reciprocal
collu- sion by which man’s inner deals with himself conspire with the
outer deals he is willing to acknowledge or grant to others. (p. 63)

At best, play allows a testing and pushing back of boundaries – one’s own
and those of one’s surroundings. It also requires freedom for spontaneous
experimentation:

Of all the formulations of play, the briefest and the best is to be found in

10 For a discussion of the sociogenetic and psychogenetic functions of play see

Erikson, pp. 29–39.
 Plato’s Laws.11 He sees the model of true playfulness in the need of all
young creatures, animal and human, to leap. To truly leap, you must learn
how to use the ground as a springboard, and how to land resiliently and
safely. It means to test the leeway allowed by given limits; to outdo and
yet not escape gravity. Thus, wherever playfulness prevails, there is
always a surprising element, surpassing mere repetition or habituation, and
at its best suggesting some virgin chance conquered, some divine leeway
shared.
(p. 17)

This definition contains an element of sheer hazard. Erikson suggests that

adults who ‘judge play to be neither serious nor useful, and thus unrelated to
the center of human tasks and motives, from which the adult, in fact, seeks
“recreation” when he plays’, are actually expressing apprehension
concerning ‘the often awesome suggestion that playfulness – and, thus, inde-
terminate chance – may occur in the vital center of adult concerns, as it does
in the center of those of children’ (p. 18). Cautious adults will not attempt
leaps that children consider a mere game – child’s play. They will also try to
prevent others doing so.
The psychoanalyst Michael Eigen challenges this adult caution. To do so,
he has coined a language drawn from religious mysticism to describe what
he terms an ‘area of faith’ in the child’s playful exploration of self and other,
and its progress towards the fulfilment of its potential in adult life, that urges
individuals to reach beyond perceived boundaries of the self. His description
of ‘a way of experiencing which is undertaken with one’s whole being, all
out, “with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, and with all one’s might” ’,
echoes Jesus’s words, ‘Amarás al Señor tu Dios con todo tu corazón, con
toda tu alma y con todo tu mente. Éste es el mayor y primer mandamiento.’ 12
And Eigen compares the revelation of the entirely Other to a dramatic
encounter with God from the closing chapters of the biblical Book of Job:

At this moment one is enlivened and quickened through the sense of

differ- ence [...]. This may be akin to Job’s and God’s wrath turning into
joyous

11 Erikson may have had in mind the following: ‘virtually all young things find it
impossible to keep their bodies still and their tongues quiet [...]; some jump and skip
and do a kind of gleeful dance as they play with one another’ (Plato [c.427–347 BC],
87).
12 Michael Eigen, ‘The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion’, International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1981), 62, p. 413. Matthew 22.37–8. Throughout this
study bible quotations will be given in Spanish to make clear the strong similarities
between original texts and Marsé’s mimicry but references will be in English. The
Spanish Bible used (Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1970) is a scholarly edition with
commentaries that have provided material for discussion in this study. Its date of
publication sets it midway between Vatican II and the death of Franco, in the year that
Marsé published La oscura historia de la prima Montse, and almost midway through
his career as a novelist.
 appreciation of one another’s mystery, a new found trust [...]. The real
here is self and other feeling real to one another. (p. 416)

Failure to accomplish the transition to the area of faith means that survival
strategies of defensive deception displace creative processes of experimenta-
tion:

In projective-introjective identifications the self may disguise itself as

another and another as oneself. The mind may capitalize on its invisibility
and defensively play such crosscurrents off against each other. Through
these operations the psyche can split itself, making a secrecy and hiding
possible, together with all the subtleties linked with self-deception [...].
They make possible seductive and tantalizing expressive styles, which
assault the true self feeling and intensify the life of bad faith. (p. 415)13

Eigen likens the exploding of the projective-introjective circle to rebirth, or

resurrection into a higher sphere of experience, dramatically framed in the
redemptionist language of wholeness and innocence, of freedom from Self
and joy in the Other: ‘The subject is reconstituted through a fresh realization
that all is not self in disguise and, as in transitional experiencing, tastes a
wholling innocence, although on a new plane’ (p. 415). 14 Eigen’s religious
language seeks to elevate and intensify the significance of the experience
described by resorting to the language of metaphysics. Yet this language
does not necessarily denote experience of the divine, any more than
Erikson’s ‘divine leeway’. Rather, the area of faith is ‘a founding principle
for the possibility of a fully human consciousness’ (p. 413) that will lead to
creative play, not deceitful play-acting.
Drawing together some of the major strands of my discussion so far, I
would compare Plato’s leaping children with a form of adult play which
shares many of the same characteristics: carnival. Plato framed play as
orderly and governed by rules: as dance, music or sport. Carnival too has
conventions, explosive energy and potential danger, but it also emphasises
the often grotesque humour of play, expressed through transformations,
fantasy and masquerade. Carnival also opens up for adults a legitimate play
area set apart from normal workaday tasks, where the norms and limits that
govern daily life are suspended and challenged. It breaks and subverts social
rules.
Mikhail Bakhtin identifies in carnival a dynamic creativity in the defiance
of limits and authority in a safe play area:

13 For a summary of projection-introjection theory see Robert D. Hinshelwood, A

Dictionary of Kleinian Thought ( London: Free Association Press, 1989), pp. 327 and
384.
14 The Redeemed are depicted reborn, purified, beyond suffering and in joyful
contemplation of God in Revelation 7.13 – 17.
 This experience, opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all
pretense at immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever-
changing, playful, undefined forms. All the symbols of the carnival idiom
are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay
relativity of prevailing truths and authorities.15

The grotesque is neither ugly nor shocking, but a ‘fanciful, free, and playful
treatment’ of forms in a state of becoming that defies stagnation:

There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal,

in a finished and stable world; instead the inner movement of being itself
was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incom-
plete character of being. This ornamental interplay revealed an extreme
lightness and freedom of artistic fantasy, a gay, almost laughing, liber-
tinage. (p. 32)

A mask is not defensive but inventive, even life-givingly so:

connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and
with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity
to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation
of natural boundaries [...]. It contains the playful element of life; it is based
on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image. (pp. 39–40)

Bakhtin’s analysis shows how carnival, like play, constitutes a relatively safe
area into which experience from potentially dangerous outside reality is
brought and used in games of transformation and masquerade. There may be
interaction with others, or a constant reworking and reinvention of self, but
there is always an element of risk and the chance of ‘some divine leeway’ to
spur players on to ever greater leaps of invention. And these traits will reap-
pear in my discussion of Marsé’s narrative games.
‘Aventis’, the storytelling game that provides the narrative framework of
Si te dicen que caí (1973), have received much critical comment. The
Tangram puzzle symbolic of Luys Forest’s reorderings of the past in La
muchacha de las bragas de oro (1978), published five years later, has in
contrast been ignored. The games played in the mind of the narrator of
Marsé’s most recent novel, Rabos de lagartija (2000), bring together these
two elements of storytelling game and puzzle in startling circumstances. The
jagged narrative is mediated through the dreams and imaginings of an
unborn, and once born incapacitated, ‘gusano’, whose fragmented telling of
episodes in the lives of others involves the reader in a challenging game of
hide-and-seek while whiling away the time for the narrator imprisoned in a

15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 10–11.
body that cannot determine its own movements. Like ‘aventis’, the intention
of the Tangram and the ‘gusano’s’ dreams and imaginings is ludic, but I
shall argue that their function as games in Marsé’s novels is to confront the
reader with the intention to deceive, and thereby to provoke engagement in
the narrative game.

‘Aventis’, puzzles and the dreams of the unborn

Critics who discuss ‘aventis’ as a game apply several different models of
play. Geneviève Champeau argues that as oral narratives, ‘aventis’ are a
robust form of popular entertainment not unlike carnival:

une explosion d’humour, avec un sens aigu du jeu et un plaisir constant de

raconter. Si te dicen que caí, un roman pour érudits? C’est méconnaître la
réhabilitation des formes de culture de masse et le retour au récit oral qu’il
opère.16

José Ortega sees them as a poetic device which uses fantasy to enable the
reader to come to terms with a brutally alien reality, reminiscent of Erikson’s
play construction:

se enmarcan ... dentro de la teoría poética que exige lo verosímil y lo

maravilloso. El suceso extraordinario no se excluye sino que sirve para
establecer una relación armónica entre el entendimiento del lector y el
acontecimiento narrado. La aventis [sic] es lo poético compensando la
realidad degradada.17

John Sinnigen links them directly with the need to come to terms with reality
that is at the heart of many definitions of play:

reproducen la confusión y el miedo del mundo adulto con la ayuda de la

imaginación infantil. Es decir, además de su función lúdica, las aventis
también son una forma de dar sentido a un mundo que parece que no tiene
ninguno.18

Nivia Montenegro, in her study ‘El juego intertextual de Si te dicen que caí’,
considers them a subtle literary game of intertextual referencing – which

16 Geneviève Champeau, ‘À propos de Si te dicen que caí’, Bulletin Hispanique,

85 (1983), pp. 359–78, 378.
17 José Ortega, ‘Los demonios históricos de Juan Marsé: Si te dicen que caí’,
Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 312 (1976), pp. 731–38, 736.
18 John Sinnigen, Narrativa e Ideología (Madrid: Nuestra Cultura, 1982), p. 93.
must be considered in relation to popular song, films and comics, and to reli-
gious texts and iconography.19
In the wake of Spain’s ‘Transition’ to democracy, ‘aventis’ are often
discussed with reference to their historicity and reliability as personal or
collective memory that challenges official discourses under the
dictatorship.20 In addition, their originality as a narrative device has led to
study of them as self-reflexive texts which explore the diverse nature of
narrative itself.21 Discussion has, then, focused on either their replication of
an outside reality that exists independently of them, or on their nature as
literary constructions in the mind of the narrator. In my view, in contrast,
they are about play. Marsé’s models for narrative – ‘aventis’, the Tangram
and day-dreams – present storytelling as imperfect action, and ongoing
activity, rather than as completed product. Narrative is about enjoying
playing creative games, not about reaching a final result.
Like toys, ‘aventis’ start with any material vivid enough to engage atten-
tion. No distinction is made between real events, rumour, cinema, fiction,
dreams, or the stylised visual narrative of comics or religious iconography,
for all are useful in the play area of the imagination. As Marsé explained in
an interview:
jugábamos a contar aventis en la calle, y siempre nos llegaban noticias de
familiares muertos, desaparecidos, exiliados, etc. Por eso esos juegos
constituían con frecuencia historias de violencia; en nuestros relatos
mezclábamos películas que habíamos visto con tebeos, novelas de
aventuras y hechos reales. (quoted in Sinnigen, pp. 112–13)

Where the narrative will go, and what sense is to be made of it, is never
certain. As one critic said of Si te dicen and Historia, in their ‘refusal to
adopt the traditional analytico-referential posture’:
both narratives leave their readers unable to reach definitive (authoritative)
conclusions about the incidents they narrate ...; they are a celebration of
narration that denies narrative authority or end.22

19 Nivia Montenegro, ‘El juego intertextual de Si te dicen que caí’, Revista

Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 5 (1981), pp. 145–55.
20 Ortega; William Sherzer, Juan Marsé: entre la ironía y la dialéctica (Madrid:
Fundamentos, 1982).
21 Champeau; Diane I. Garvey, ‘Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí: The Self-Refer-
ential Text and the Question of Referentiality’, Modern Language Notes, 95 (1980),
pp. 376–87; Linda Gould Levine, ‘Si te dicen que caí: un kaleidoscopio verbal’,
Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, vii, 3 (1979), pp. 309–27; Jo Labanyi,
Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
22 Currie K. Thompson, ‘Juan Marsé’s Teniente Bravo and the Playing Out of
History’, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 19 (1994), pp. 151–63,
155.
The seeker after truth, meaning, or even a coherent picture will be thwarted,
for this is essentially a game of invention. What counts is the players’
involvement. Marsé claims that in his own childhood:

Lo original del juego consistía en que los protagonistas éramos nosotros;

el narrador narraba en primera persona [...]. De repente podían intervenir
personajes completamente fantásticos: por ejemplo, Gary Cooper: ‘Al
apearme en el andén, allí estaba Gary Cooper ...’.
(quoted in Sinnigen, p. 113)

In Si te dicen too, the narrator Sarnita recalls how involvement is achieved

by mixing reality and imagination:

Java aumentó el número de personajes reales y redujo cada vez más los
ficticios, y además introdujo escenarios urbanos de verdad, nuestras calles
y nuestras azoteas y nuestros refugios y cloacas. (STD, p. 28)

Consequently, Marsé includes himself in his novels, as the ‘tocón’ in

Ultimas tardes (252), and thinly disguised as Joan or Juanito Marés in
Historia and El amante. Clearly these instances are intended as jokes, not
serious autobiog- raphy, unless ‘autobiography’ is viewed as ‘creatively’ –
and not necessarily truthfully – writing the self.
The child’s easy acceptance that fact and fantasy are inextricable consti-
tutes an ironic comment on a potentially more sinister, obscurantist blurring
of fact and fantasy in the adult world. With the ultimate meaninglessness of
‘aventis’, and primary function of entertainment as his starting-point, Sarnita
comments:

Las mejores eran aquellas que no tenían entonces tenía sentido ..., todo
estaba patas arriba, cada hogar era un drama y había ni pies ni cabeza pero
que, a pesar de ello, resultaban creíbles: nada por aquel un misterio en
cada esquina y la vida no valía un pito, por menos de nada Fu-Manchú te
arrojaba al foso de los cocodrilos. ... En realidad ..., aquellas fantásticas
aventis se nutrían de un mundo mucho más fantástico que el que unos
chavales siempre callejeando podían siquiera llegar a imaginar.
(STD, pp. 28–9)

When accused of torturing Susana, the child Tetas can protest with an
assumption of innocence:

¿se cree usted que tenemos una cheka, camarada? [...] el martirio de Santa
Susana virgen y mártir, una aventi inventada por Sarnita. (STD, p. 165)

Yet in the adult world, in the civil war, communists did organise ‘chekas’,
for interrogation and torture as barbaric as any martyrdom in the past, and
many
of the tortures the children replicate are drawn from these two sources. Thus,
notions of childish innocence suffer a blow here: Tetas’s protestations ring
hollow since the boys, in common with the adult Conrado Galán, do re-enact
scenes of sado-masochistic brutality. As play constructions their games may
indeed be seen as a working through of experience in the relative safety of
the play area, but their enjoyment of violence testifies to early corruption.
Faced in the 1970s with the conviction that ‘los hechos [...] estaban
siendo manipulados y alterados a través del poder’ – coincidentally, when
Erikson published Toys and Reasons (1977) – Marsé claims that ‘aventis’
offer ‘ un correctivo de la realidad falseada’.23 Yet even brief examination of
his claim makes it clear that this assertion is tongue-in-cheek; what his
‘correctivo’ offers is not a fuller truth than official versions of history, but
extravagant fantasies created by ‘los niños, con su imaginación contaminada
por las películas, tebeos y libros’. And behind the children is the ‘true’
narrator, the drunken old caretaker, Sarnita. There are no authentic children’s
voices in Si te dicen, only old men’s memories flawed with age and deceit.
As the opening line of El embrujo de Shanghai (1993) would later
acknowledge, ironically framed as the words a doubly fictionalised
character:

Los sueños infantiles se corrompen en boca de adultos, dijo el capitán Blay

caminando ... con su intrépida zancada y su precaria apariencia de Hobre
Invisible. (ES, p. 9)

In Rabos de lagartija (2000), the narrator’s position would become even

more radical in its affirmation of the effectiveness of fiction over reality:

tú lo has vivido, pero yo lo he imaginado. No creas que me llevas mucha

ventaja en el camino de la verdad [...]. Precisamente por eso, porque no lo
vi, puedo imaginarlo mejor que tú. (RL, pp. 18 and 38)

Marsé affirms that:

Esa mezcla de acontecimientos reales y de hechos ficticios, de personajes

reales y personajes ficticios, tenía que producir algo así como una tercera
dimensión de la realidad, al margen de la verdad y la mentira. Eso fue lo
que me interesó del tema. (quoted in Sinnigen, p. 112)

On the one hand, then, ‘aventis’ provide a space for play. On the other, by
drawing material from the adult world, they are exposed to its vices and
manifest its corruption. The child’s enjoyment of play for its own sake, may
provide validation of the novelist’s art – for art’s sake – a theme picked up

23 Quoted in Mercedes Beneto, ‘Con el último Premio Planeta a lo largo de la obra

de Juan Marsé’, Destino, 26 October–1 November 1978, pp. 32–3, 33.
later in Rabos, where David acknowledges concerning his as yet unborn
brother:

Lo que hará que ese piojo se convierta a su debido tiempo en un artista

será precisamente la ausencia de papá: se pasará la vida imaginándolo.
(RL, p. 56)
As such play is an apt model for Marsé’s approach to narrative. Yet, as I
move on to discuss the Tangram, a pervasive scent of corruption in narrative
play intensifies in Marsé’s narrative games.

The Tangram: manipulating the medium

What distinguishes the Tangram from the ‘aventi’ as a model for narrative
is its inbuilt rigidity. It is a geometrical puzzle with fixed components (five
triangles, a square and a rhomboid) that can form over two hundred figures,
but not an infinite number. ‘Aventis’, by comparison, have the virtually
limit- less flexibility of words, actions and subjectivities, and when used by
playful, imaginative, anarchic storytellers, they represent a virtually
uncontrollable challenge to official authority and censorship under
dictatorship. In La muchacha, the novel’s protegonist Luys Forest finds that,
as a symbol of his rewriting of history, the Tangram takes unexpectedly
intractable shapes in democratic post-Franco Spain, mocking his efforts to
control his representa- tion of the past. When Marsé equates the new
‘literatura de crónica’ of the Transition with the puzzle, it is clear that in his
view, democratisation brings its own constraints.
For Forest, history has fixed pieces, but he tries to fit them together into
shapes of his own devising. Ironically, both they and the Tangram ‘elude’
(‘play their way out of’) his control and his narrative takes shape independ-
ently of him. Other movers intervene, and over the course of the novel the
pieces combine to produce an entirely different configuration of
relationships from that with which Forest’s narrative began. Location and
the characters remain constant, but the shifting of the sand and sea into
which the house and its garden merge replicates the shifts in relationships
inside. Forest moves from being Mariana’s uncle, through being her lover, to
become her father, and all the other elements of his story must be shifted to
fit.
The ex-Falangist, Forest, has a dog, Mao, whose Marxist name suggests,
if not a change in political sympathies, at least a softening of attitude in the
former right-wing historian. Yet this reconciliation is illusory, for Mao’s
activities prove uncontrollable and disturbing. Forest believes that ‘Ese
ladrón de Mao, que lo trastoca todo’ (MBO, p. 22), is moving the pieces of
the puzzle. He himself takes elements of one story and places them in a
another context, but the dog’s interference is a source of irritation. Further-
more, the parallel works both ways: doglike, Mao persistently ‘husmeaba
corrupciones’ (MBO, p. 7), and in Forest’s niece’s view, the historian’s
‘perfil parecía husmear corrupciones’ (MBO, p. 181): sniffing out not to
eradicate but to enjoy. The dog’s finds are accompanied by ‘un dulce olor a
carroña’ (MBO, p. 47), and the implication is that what Forest is ‘digging
up’ from his past likewise spreads the sweet scent of corruption throughout
his narrative.
There is an increasing sense of menace. Forest discovers the Tangram
almost complete in a sinister configuration:

Vio en la mesa de mármol el Tangram casi resuelto en una incisiva daga,

incompleta. No tardó en aparecer Mao llevando entre los dientes la pieza
que faltaba y él se la quitó para completar distraídamente la negra figura.
(MBO, p. 85)

So too, the configuration of Forest’s chronicle robs him of past certainty as it

takes on a threatening form he rejects yet cannot direct. He is even deprived
of the ultimate control over his own life and death, and his attempt at suicide
ends in ignominious failure.
Marsé himself played with the ‘lying dog’ idiom when he described the
interplay between fact and fiction in La muchacha as:

una especie de chiste que consiste en que un cronista oficial del régimen,
que no es de fiar cuando escribe la historia de este país – miente como un
perro – ; en cambio, paradójicamente, cuando inventa en su obra de
ficción
– también es novelista – es cuando acierta, cuando alcanza la verdad.
(quoted in Sinnigen, pp. 117–18)

If we take him at his word, we may see his preference for the freedom to
invent as a validation of fiction over historical narrative. Certainly, the
Forest-Mao conflict illustrates Marsé’s conviction that:

cuando se escribe la historia, incluso con las mejores intenciones de lograr

la objetividad, siempre los planteamientos políticos enturbian la visión
de la realidad. Por eso [...], cuando quiero saber algo de la Francia del
XIX, me voy a Stendhal, [...] Flaubert, [...] Balzac. Me voy a los embus-
teros. Luego resulta que, además, es más entretenido.
(quoted in Sinnigen, p. 118)

Yet his scepticism about historical writing and his championship of

fiction hinges primarily on a belief in the value of chance and invention –
even lying, trickery and deceit – in storytelling. When narrative is seen as a
creative game, and its relationship with outside reality as incidental, there are
no holds barred in the playful combat between storyteller and listener in the
narrative play area.
False Documents: against regime language, a language of freedom
In 1977, like Erikson with politics, the American novelist and critic E.L.
Doctorow spoke of a crisis of confidence in American fiction which he
attrib- uted to the writer’s ‘inability to seriously believe in what he is
doing’.24 Concerning authors who, like Cervantes and Defoe in the past, ‘use
other voices than their own in the composition and present themselves not as
authors but as literary executors’ (p. 220), Doctorow commented:

the truth of the narrative is challenged by the author himself, the very
occa- sion is denigrated, and we have that shrewdest strategy of false
documenta- tion, the author as his own skeptical critic. (p. 221)

Paradoxically, he claims, greater authority accrues to the text through a

lie: ‘the novelist’s act of creative disavowal by which the text he offers takes
on some additional authority because he did not write it’ (p. 221). The
novelist parodies and thereby subverts the empirical methodology of the
historian who seeks truth (the pieces of the Tangram) through accurate docu-
mentation. The novelist enjoys the infinite flexibility of language and the
freedom to invent and is not bound by truth. Doctorow identifies one ‘power
in language’ said to be ‘residing in its manifest reference to the verifiable
world – let us call that the power of the regime’, and another ‘inhering in a
private or ideal world that cannot be easily corroborated or verified – let us
call that the power of freedom’ (p. 216). These, he concludes, give rise to ‘a
regime language that derives its strength from what we are supposed to be
and a language of freedom whose power consists in what we threaten to
become’ (p. 217). Thus Doctorow’s model of false documentation closely
parallels what I have already discussed in terms of Marsé’s designation of a
narrative play area.
Doctorow comments that three major American novelists (Norman
Mailer, Gore Vidal and Upton Sinclair) failed to win sufficient votes to enter
politics because ‘in this country there is a public conviction that literature is
play and that those who practice it cannot be taken seriously’ (p. 225). The
area allowed for such play depends on ‘the assumption that esthetics is a
limited arena where according to the rules we may be shocked or threatened,
but only in fun’ (p. 226). However, as Doctorow points out, and as Marsé
demonstrates, fiction has powerful advantages over factual discourses. The
author can give free rein to playful creativity even if the result is shocking or
threatening, and can challenge the reader to come to grips with texts of
unlimited potential. ‘Fiction’, says Doctorow,

is not an entirely rational means of discourse. It gives the reader something

24 E.L. Doctorow, ‘False Documents’, American Review, 26 (1977), pp. 215–32.

 more than information [...]. [A] sentence spun from the imagination, i.e., a
sentence composed as a lie, confers upon the writer a degree of perception
or acuity or heightened awareness, but in any event some additional
useful- ness, that the sentence composed with the strictest reverence for
fact does not. (pp. 215–16)

What matters most is neither ‘truth’ nor ‘reality’ but the text’s capacity to
jolt the reader: ‘At issue is the human mind, which has to be shocked,
seduced, or otherwise provoked out of its habitual stupor’ (p. 230).
Play can seem like an opt-out from engagement in outside reality. Graham
and Labanyi warn that ‘postmodernism’s emphasis on the irreducibility of
the particular, on plural cultures “at play”, tends to disguise precisely what
this is symptomatic of: namely, the increasing concentration of economic
power (multinational capital) which produces and reproduces the cultural
jamboree [...]. While we play, power operates elsewhere’. 25 Yet I, with
Erikson and Eigen, have argued that play is as necessary in adult life as it is
for the child because, like carnival, it is explosive and subversive, and
precisely because it functions at ‘the interface between a stasis imposed from
above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and
unofficial’,26 it has a powerful potential to effect change.
In the next chapter I discuss how Marsé establishes narrative play areas in
his novels, starting with Encerrados con un solo juguete. The strategies of
subversion that I shall identify in his first novel will then provide the basis
for further examination of how he explores and challenges critical opinion
(Chapter 1), historical dogmatism (Chapter 2), literary conventions (Chapter
3), religious myth (Chapter 4), and finally that most condensed and coded
form of visual narrative, the religious icon (Chapter 5). Of all the narrative
forms I discuss, the icon is governed by the strictest canons and conventions,
and it is here that we shall appreciate most acutely Marsé’s daring in taking
an art form as strictly framed as the religion it represents as the starting-point
for virtuoso performances of narrative invention that are essentially and fully
playful.

25 Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds, Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction.

The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 17–18.
26 Michael Holquist, ed., Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène
Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. xvi.
 1
GAMES OF HIDE-AND-SEEK:
ELUDING THE CRITICAL EYE

The hybrid has advantages in literature as in life. Foremost is the strength

derived from counteracting the debilitating effects of inbreeding; in addition,
being claimed by no single group, the hybrid is answerable to none. There is
scope in the marginality of hybridity that allows voices of power – regime
voices – to be challenged or mimicked, parodied, mocked and subjected to
critical scrutiny through the creation of languages of freedom whose strength
has been found to lie in their multiplicity and often duplicity.
This chapter looks at ways in which Marsé, the hybrid – Castilian-
speaking Catalan, churched religious sceptic, but barely schooled, having
started work at 13, but well-read – counters the voice of power of literary
critics by ‘playing’ across the lines of his non-conformity: his hybrid
freedom. He cannot match his contemporary and compatriot Juan
Goytisolo’s claim to be:

Castellano en Cataluña, afrancesado en España, español en Francia, latino

en Norteamérica, nesrani en Marruecos y moro en todas partes, … ese raro
espécimen de escritor no reivindicado por nadie, ajeno y reacio a
agrupaciones y categorías1

but he can come close enough to confound those critics who try to categorise
him too narrowly rather than confront his diversity.
This chapter will look first at strategies which, with the natural skill of the
mimic and an enjoyment of masquerade, Marsé adopts to elude the catego-
rising, controlling critical eye and to establish a narrative play area in which
he can call the shots – lay down the rules of encounter and change them at
will. It will then offer a re-reading of Encerrados con un solo juguete (1960)
to show how this first novel revealed Marsé framing the interaction between
the writer and the reader-critic as erotic encounters in the sexualised play
area of the bedroom in such a way as to explore them as both conflictive and
symbiotic. Erotic games in bedroom play areas represent the writer’s deter-
mination to elude control and defend a ‘divine leeway’ in his own world of

1 Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985), p. 38.

 GAMES OF HIDE-AND-SEEK 21

narrative creativity. However, because these erotic encounters transgress the

code of sexual conduct of what was, under Franco, the state Church, the
narratives which arise from them constitute a challenge to the moral hege-
mony of the regime. As a powerful voice in public and private life in
National Catholic Spain, the Church shows how ideology may penetrate
every area of experience, even the most intimate. Through his depiction of
the interaction of regime language and languages of freedom in bedrooms,
Marsé questions the autonomy and the motivation of players engaged in
amorous relations.
Encerrados began in a personal correspondence between Marsé, on mili-
tary service in Africa, and a girlfriend in Barcelona (PH, pp. 48–9). Later he
reworked this dialogue into a monologic narrative which retains much of its
intimate, autobiographical nature while also standing independently as a
work of novelistic fiction. Though begun in solitude, storytelling as part of
an erotic relationship provided Marsé with a ‘toy’ to while away hours of
idle- ness, and storytelling in bedrooms becomes Andrés’ distraction and
means of exploring different interpretations of reality over and against
official versions that he rejects, even as he rejects the world outside his play
area.
Marsé’s narrators inveigle – even seduce – interlocutors into their play
area. There they challenge and subvert the interlocutors’ assumptions by
implicating them in the very narrative the interlocutors seek to elucidate. So
too, the novelist’s play area is a place to tell his stories his way, and when
Marsé’s critics engage in discussion, they expose themselves to his scrutiny.
Their potentially conflictive presence then becomes an added source of
enter- tainment – another dimension to play. Roger Caillois comments:

Si individuel qu’on imagine le maniement de l’engin avec lequel on joue

[…], on se lasserait vite de s’en amuser, s’il n’y avait ni concurrents ni
spectateurs, au moins virtuels […]. On dirait qu’il manque quelque chose à
l’activité de jeu, quand elle est réduite à un simple exercice solitaire.2

In Encerrados, Andrés sometimes plays alone, but as we consider the

interaction between Andrés, Martín and Tina, a more coercive dynamic will
emerge. Tina becomes a prize for which the other two compete. She is
Andrés’ inspiration and Martín’s obsession, and we see her through their
eyes as they shape her to fit their desires. Tina tries to tell her own stories,
but her disempowered muteness at the end of the novel is a potent symbol
for a voice with stories to tell but no-one to hear them. I shall argue that
Marsé makes strategic use of female interlocutors in opposition to male
narrators, positioning women as reader-critics over and against male
narrators while at the same time making them the object of the eroticised
male gaze. This creates a narrative paradox at the centre of his writing,
located in the figure of

2 Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes (Paris, Gallimard, 1955), p. 93.
the transgressively eroticised woman to which he returns with obsessive
persistence. This figure has remained largely unexplored, and my discussion
of Marsé and the critics will focus on the novels where it features most
prom- inently: in Últimas tardes con Teresa (1965) and La oscura historia
de la prima Montse (1970), El amante bilingüe (1990) and El embrujo de
Shanghai (1993), and finally in Encerrados con un solo juguete (1960).

Framing critical voices

Critical writing on Marsé over forty years has often been a self-referential
exercise that loses sight of its object – the elusive narrator Marsé. Successive
critical models have been applied to his novels only to be discarded or modi-
fied and the exercise has acquired an apparent inner logic and coherence
over the years, its plausibility enhanced by an unbroken preoccupation with
the interplay between history and fiction, reality and imagination in the
‘post-war Spanish novel’, and later ‘post-Franco novel’. The critics who
construct and share such models acquire an authority that functions in
relation to the writer a literary regime language. On the other hand, and in
strong contrast, there are critics who look with fresh eyes at the interaction
between the author and his writings, and his relations with the wider culture
of the time that has produced him and continues to affect him. Their focus on
the writer as indi- vidual rather than as part of a movement – as autonomous
player rather than pawn of history in the literary chess-game – provides the
most satisfactory insights into Marsé’s rich and diverse languages of
freedom developed in constant opposition to regime voices.
To discuss Marsé as a member of a ‘literary generation’ reveals more
about the aims of the critics who choose this emotive term than about his
aims. The intimations of new life and of young writers breaking new ground
in the word ‘Generación’ give a pleasing sense of direction. ‘Generación del
medio siglo’, by grouping together novelists born in Spain between 1924–5
and 1934–5 whose works were first published in the 1950s promotes an
image of unity in opposition to the Franco regime that masks the very real
disparities between a Vázquez Montalbán and a Martín Gaite. 3 It also marks
a comforting distinction between the old, seen as responsible for, and
directly implicated in, the civil war and the young, innocent of involvement
yet suffering the consequences of their elders’ actions. Martínez Cachero
writes:

3 Enrique Margery Peña, ‘ “Últimas tardes con Teresa” de Juan Marsé. Una
aproximación a sus claves’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 279 (1973), p. 484. For a
discussion of the model of a literary generation see Christopher C. Soufas, Conflict of
Light and Wind. The Spanish Generation of 1927 and the Ideology of Poetic Form
(Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
 Para todos ellos, la guerra civil española y la posguerra, más los
acontecimientos mundiales coincidentes con esta última, fueron algo así
como el hecho generacional que actúa de eficacísimo revulsivo.4

An early statement by Juan Goytisolo seems to echo the same view:

Creo que el grupo de jóvenes que empezamos a escribir a partir de 1950

[…] tenemos como denominador común una actividad crítica, más o
menos despiadada según los casos, hacia el mundo concreto que nos ha
tocado vivir. Los escritores anteriores, salvo una o dos excepciones, me
parecen mucho más blandos, más conformistas y alejados, por tanto, de la
realidad nacional.5

However, as Goytisolo’s life and writings illustrate and as one critic argues,
by prescribing like-mindedness rather than describing points of friction, the
notion of a unified generation effectively excludes those who do not fit in
with a desired image and thus constitutes a means of political manipulation:

The literary generation is ultimately a selection from a given milieu of

those few writers deemed to be the truest embodiments of the literary
agenda of a specific period […]. The conferring of generational status has
become the surest way for Spanish criticism to place value on a type of
literary production. Authors and works that do not fit into such a category
find themselves at a striking disadvantage. Indeed, the naming of a genera-
tion is actually a political process that parades as a literary-critical and
historical exercise. (Soufas, p. 17)

Soufas claims that ideological bias is endemic to literary criticism:

Literary criticism is the product of a point of view rooted in certain histor-

ical and ideological assumptions about literature […]. [E]ntire social
classes and nations also produce biased and partial images, likened to the
upside-down image that the photographic camera obscura produces, which
have no objective status in nature but rather reflect a much narrower
national or class agenda. To this subjective, biased, partial image, which
parades as the complete and objective truth, Marx assigns the name ‘ide-
ology.’ (Soufas, pp. xi–xii)

Marsé the hybrid sets out to expose the critic’s ideological stance.
In an intriguing manoeuvre so smooth that he himself might not have
been aware of it, Martínez Cachero first underplays, then overemphasises
Marsé’s left-wing politics in order to include him in a literary generation.
Writing

4 José María Martínez Cachero, La novela española entre 1939 y 1969 (Madrid:
Castalia, 1973), p. 156.
5 Juan Goytisolo, ‘Para una Literatura Nacional Popular’, Insula, 146 (1959), p. 6.
under the dictatorship, he describes the members of the ‘generación del
medio siglo’ as ‘de ordinario universitarios’ (Martínez Cachero, p. 164),
which Marsé was not, and identifies ethical dissent, and political commit-
ment initially in the form of early right-wing activism, as the generation’s
unifying characteristic:

queda harto claro cómo estos novelistas prefieren lo ético a lo estético,

anteponen la política a la literatura y consideran – como antaño algunos
miembros de la llamada “Quinta del S.E.U.” – que el arte solamente se
justifica si está al servicio de una ideología. (Martínez Cachero, p. 157)

Later, in the 1985 post-Franco rewrite of his critique of the post-war novel,
he adds Marsé to a list which now emphasises left-wing militancy:

Militaron algunos en política – como García Hortelano y Marsé, miembros

del partido comunista – y el signo de su orientación y actuaciones
determinó su encarcelamiento, o dificultades con la censura, o el exilio
voluntario de Juan Goytisolo. (Martínez Cachero, pp. 174–5)

Lengthy footnotes draw some distinctions, and Martínez Cachero admits

that ‘Marsé nunca pasa de ser militante de base’ (Martínez Cachero, p. 175,
n.37), but the impression left by the main text is of cross-party, united, sacri-
ficial resistance. There has been a shift in the critic’s position but his aim
remains to place Marsé in a coherent group rather than acknowledge the
indi- viduality of a writer who consistently sets his characters in isolation in
oppo- sition to official discourses and social convention and allows them
constantly to retreat into their own play area and their own language of
freedom articu- lated through their narrative games.
Barry Jordan acknowledges the danger of critical models that paper over
difference in literary criticism:

The past is selectively reorganized in terms of an assumed present; the

possible discontinuities, contradictions and breaks of literary history –
indeed, a whole alternative conception of historical change – is politely
disregarded in favour of a progress in the novel, a critical narrative of
continuity.6

Nonetheless, writing fifteen years after Franco’s death, from outside Spain
and therefore with both hindsight and distance, Jordan depicts the
‘generación del medio siglo’ as cultural, intellectual and forward-looking
and defines an emerging ‘oppositional standpoint’ as ‘that of the losing side
in the civil war […] a literature whose emergence corresponds, not to the
traumatic

6 Barry Jordan, Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain (London: Routledge,

1990).
effects of the war, but to the first signs of cultural dissent and to the initial
formation of an intellectual opposition inside Spain’ (Jordan, p. 32). The
persuasive image of the continuum moving on from the resistance of the
early post-war years to later social and cultural conflict ensnares even
Jordan, who includes Marsé in this ‘generación’ of ‘cultural dissent’ and
‘intellectual opposition’ and so underplays the importance of this writer’s
distinctively popularist and essentially playful approach to narrative.
Gonzalo Sobejano quotes Marsé’s first four novels as examples of a
‘novela social’ symptomatic of collective unrest in the face of post-war polit-
ical crisis: ‘un tipo de novela que tiende a hacer artísticamente inteligible el
vivir de la colectividad en estados y conflictos a través de los cuales se
revela la presencia de una crisis y la urgencia de su solución.’ 7 Disregarding
Marsé’s sarcastic depiction of the lack of political commitment of workers in
Esta cara de la luna (ECL, pp. 72–3), and of Manuel Reyes in Ultimas
tardes and La oscura historia, Sobejano places all four novels in a
subsection of ‘crítica de la decadencia burguesa’ (Sobejano, p. 446), which
he defines as a trenchant form of social criticism:

1) trata del estado de la sociedad o de ciertas desigualdades e injusticias

que en ella existen, 2) las cuales carecen de sentido individual, ya que se
refieren a la sociedad en todo o en parte, 3) hace patente el estado de cosas
por medio de un testimonio, 4) el cual sirve de base a una denuncia o
crítica, 5) tiende a una realidad selectiva, y 6) crea un héroe múltiple o
personaje clase. (Sobejano, p. 300)

The comforting notion of different generations appears once again when the
four novels are said to exemplify the ‘escisión entre los padres, los que
vivieron la guerra, y los hijos, que nada quieren saber ya de ella’. However,
to emphasise in this way the symbolic function of youthful protest, rather
than the individual nature of Marsé’s characters, demonstrates a failure on
the part of the critic to apprehend what my re-reading of Encerrados will
show to have been this author’s early commitment to sharply differentiated
portrayals that makes Sobejano’s ‘tres muchachos [...] a la deriva’ into three
clearly defined individuals. José Domingo writes ‘en sus primeras novelas
[Marsé] abordaba una realidad social vista con una distanciación que les
privaba de verosimilitud y humanidad’, Buckley describes the ‘realismo
social’ of the 1950s and 1960s as a process where an earlier ‘mirada
apasionada del autor comienza a ser sustituida por el frío contemplar de la
cámara fotográfica’,8 and Sobejano concludes that in Encerrados, ‘recarga el
autor los trazos

7 Gonzalo Sobejano, Novela española de nuestro tiempo (en busca del pueblo
perdido) (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1975).
8 Buckley, Ramón, ‘Del Realismo Social al Realismo Dialéctico’, Insula, 326
(1974), pp. 1 and 4. José Domingo, ‘Del realismo proscrito a la nueva novela’, Ínsula
290 (January 1971), p. 5.
sombríos, de un naturalismo despiadado’ (Sobejano, pp. 447 and 448). The
result of neglecting Marsé’s playful experimentation with narrative and
narra- tive perspective from his earliest work on, has been critical comment
of a positivist empirical bias that has dismissed these early novels as worth
little in relation to social realism, a definition that Marsé rejects as a
fabrication by the critics:

En realidad, yo creo que ni siquiera mi primera novela tiene mucho que

ver con la vertiente del realismo y del objetivismo. Es una novela que va
ya un poco a contrapelo de lo que se estaba haciendo. Me parece más bien
decadente, intimista, con una atmósfera enrarecida [...]. Pero como salió en
un momento en que el realismo social y la novela objetivista estaban en
auge, fue automáticamente clasificada con esa etiqueta.9

Twenty years after Encerrados was published, Marsé would write:

La mili fue un paréntesis vacío de sentido que me abocó al aburrimiento y

a la vagancia más estériles, y para salir de eso me puse a escribir. Empecé
Encerrados [...] realmente para matar el tiempo [...]. [R]evisé el
manuscrito de la mili y descubrí que era no solamente un intento de
transcripción de una etapa importante de mi adolescencia, sino también el
reflejo, tal vez inconsciente, del callejón sin salida a que estuvo abocada
cierta juventud de la posguerra. (PH, p. 49)

Critics have focused on the ‘callejón sin salida’, interpreted in political

terms. Marsé suggests that ‘motivaciones políticas’ meant that attempts were
made to present Encerrados as a work of protest and himself as an ‘obrero-
escritor’: ‘un chaval que trabajaba en un taller de joyería, limitado a una vida
de barrio y con unas vivencias culturales prácticamente nulas, era algo así
como la llegada del mesías.’10 He agrees that ‘existía una denuncia indirecta
de un país y de una ciudad sometidos al franquismo’, but he insists that ‘era
una novela de una atmósfera decadente, opuesta a los parámetros del
realismo social’ (Freixas, p. 51). This emphasis on politics has meant that the
‘etapa importante de mi adolescencia’ has been passed over, although it is
through the inarticulateness and self-absorption of adolescence that Marsé
explores the interaction between self-determining monologue, shared or
competing dialogue, and silence that provides a seamlessly shifting narrative
focus throughout his writing.

9 Ángelo Morino, ‘Una conversación con Juan Marsé’, El Viejo Topo (4 January
1977), pp. 41–4. Marsé mentions the critic José María Castellet who, he claims, tried
to label his work as social realism, and takes a kind of literary vengeance on what he
calls ‘una especie de patriarca de este movimiento, como demuestra su libro La hora
del lector, que yo ironizo en Ultimas tardes con Teresa’ (quoted in Morino, p. 42).
10 Ramón Freixas, ‘Hipnotizar por la imagen’, Quimera, 41 (1984), pp. 51–5.
 The publication of Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1965) provoked a sharp
response from Mario Vargas Llosa that proved ground-breaking in critical
writing on Marsé. Ultimas tardes had just won the 1965 Premio Biblioteca
Breve, and Vargas Llosa greeted it as ‘una explosión sarcástica en la novela
española moderna.’11 Arguably, his greatest tribute to Marsé’s writing is his
ambivalent reaction to the novel. Mistakenly beguiled into dismissing
Encerrados con un solo juguete and Esta cara de la luna as representatives
of a drab but still continuing social realism, 12 Vargas Llosa then ironically
compared Marsé’s creative dynamism in Ultimas tardes with that of God:
‘esa oscura fuerza incontrolable y espontánea que anima las palabras y
comunica la verdad y la vida a todo lo que toca, incluso a la mentira y la
muerte, y que constituye la más alta y misteriosa facultad humana: el poder
de la creación’ (Vargas Llosa, p. 1). His intention here primarily was to deni-
grate what he saw as intrusive and overly vitriolic authorial intervention in
what might otherwise have been a masterly text:

En muchos campos – pero principalmente en tres: la literatura, la

sociología y la política – el libro destila una agresividad tan hiriente y
corrosiva que su razón de ser, se diría, es la exclusiva provocación [...].
Más todavía: casi no hay una página en la que no invada el relato el propio
autor, para disparar sus flechas de humor ácido contra los indefensos
personajes y, a través de ellos, contra los seres, las ideas, las conductas y
los mitos que éstos pretenden [...] encarnar. (Vargas Llosa, p. 1)

Yet, at the same time, Vargas Llosa is excited by characters so vibrant that
they come alive to the reader:

Cuando un personaje se levanta de la horizontal y quieta realidad literaria

y anula la conciencia del lector y la reemplaza con la suya y le contagia su
espíritu y se consuma esa posesión mágica entre un hombre y un fantasma,
el novelista es un verdadero creador y su libro una auténtica novela.
(Vargas Llosa, p. 12)

They have to fight for their freedom against an author as tyrannical as God,
and Vargas Llosa’s imagery – of constraint and freedom in erotic intercourse
applied to the generation of narrative – returns us to Marsé’s narrative games
in bedrooms. If briefly in the text ‘Teresa se despoja de su camisa de fuerza
(“niña rica enferma de virginidad y de ideas reformistas”) y cobra una

11 Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Una explosión sarcástica en la novela española moderna’,

Ínsula, 233 (1966), pp.1–12.
12 According to Vargas Llosa’s damning critique, Marsé’s first two novels
‘pueden asimilarse a esa corriente narrativa, un tanto gris y monocorde, que se ha
llamado “naturalista” o “neorrealista” y que prospera todavía, a la sombra declinante
de Pavese, en Italia y en España’ (Vargas Llosa, p. 1).
personalidad singular, nítida y conmovedoramente auténtica’, too soon her
freedom is curbed and becomes ‘una liberación que nunca alcanzará porque
así lo decretó el autor’ (Vargas Llosa, p. 12). The characters’ frustration
becomes the frustration of the reader:

de pronto ese combate perdido es el mío, y mía también la confusión de

esa muchacha, y ella cree que el rufián guapo le gusta porque es un
militante, y yo creo que le gusta porque es un militante, y ella que le gusta
porque el militante es guapo, y yo creo que es porque es guapo. (Vargas
Llosa, p. 12)

Vargas Llosa concludes: ‘qué alto y fascinante monumento literario hubiera

sido éste si todo el aparato racional de la novela estuviera al servicio y no en
contra de este chorro vital (Vargas Llosa, p. 12). This critique pinpoints in
Marsé’s narrative games the question of control and freedom that will be
central to my discussion of private games in bedrooms in Encerrados, that
Vargas Llosa links to the public sphere of public political discourses in
Ultimas tardes. However, where Vargas Llosa argues that Marsé’s
manipula- tion of his characters is intrusive, I would reply that Marsé depicts
Teresa trying to write a public narrative for Manuel, as Manuel tries to
define her role in relation to his ambitions. What Marsé the author does is
deliberately and ironically lay bare – and thereby subvert – the mechanisms
of narrative control.
Vargas Llosa’s acknowledgement of Marsé’s sarcasm exposed the gap
between reality and representation in Ultimas tardes that is opened up by
foregrounding the intrusive narratorial voice. Subsequent critics could not
entirely ignore the authorial voice, though the champions of literary realism
now defined it as a return to personal engagement on the part of the novelist
labelled ‘realismo dialéctico’. Buckley comments:

La novela dialéctica nace cuando el novelista decide rechazar las voces

prestadas y descubre su propia voz, que le va a servir no ya para describir,
sino para dialogar con el mundo [ofreciendo] una visión dialéctica de la
realidad española basada en la confrontación de diferentes estratos (ideo-
lógicos, sociales) del país, que se refleja en la estructura misma de la
novela. (Buckley, p. 4)

Sinnigen equates engagement with political commitment, and argues that

Ultimas tardes depicts a rebellion so genuine and compelling that Marsé
writes about it in his next two novels as well:

Ante la miseria y la enajenación de una sociedad inamovible se rebelan

Manuel Reyes, Teresa Serrat, Montse Claramunt, Paco Bodegas, Java y los
faieros. Dadas las condiciones de su existencia, su rebeldía es inevitable y
admirable. (Sinnigen, p. 100)
At the same time, Sinnigen quotes Marsé’s own comment on the ironic
distancing of the narrative voice from the rebellion it depicts:

Lo que pasa es que la historia, a través del tiempo que ha pasado desde
que ocurrieron los hechos, está contada por el pariente pobre, alguien que,
de alguna manera, estaba muy próximo, desde un punto de vista moral, al
presidiario, al personaje “siniestro” que engañó a la Montse y fue la causa
de su muerte. (Sinnigen, p. 115)

Emphasising the creative, aesthetic aspect of Ultimas tardes as well as a

dialectical, ethical purpose, Shirley Mangini González presents this work as
a ‘novela de contraola’ which playfully challenges existing assumptions on
literature and thereby undermines the political and social premises behind
such assumptions (a notion I shall expand upon in Chapters 2 and 3).
Mangini argues that the ‘charnego’ protagonist of Ultimas tardes and La
oscura historia, Manuel Reyes, el Pijoaparte, is a classic ‘pícaro’, but that
he is medi- ated through ‘elementos literarios aparentemente antitéticos a la
picaresca’ which cast him as a romantic figure opposite Teresa in what is
effectively a ‘novela rosa’.13 This mixing of genres offers readers figures
they think they recognise but disconcerts with unexpected relationships and
circumstances that seem familiar but are out of context. Through this
dislocating technique ‘Marsé consigue una obra híbrida y original que le
permite una desmitifica- ción muy comprensiva de la sociedad española.’ 14
Society’s myths are enshrined in, and generated by, its literature, Mangini
argues. Surely, then, literature is where any attempt to subvert such myths
should begin. ‘Los personajes son ridiculizados porque son productos de
mitos sociales creados por el status quo’ to bolster ‘los falsos valores que
dicta la hipócrita sociedad de posguerra’ (Mangini, pp. 13–14). Ultimas
tardes starts with the destruction of what Mangini considers the ‘fácil
maniqueísmo’ of social realism, and goes on to expose the spuriousness of
the myths of all parties concerned.15 This

13 Shirley Mangini González, ‘Ultimas tardes con Teresa: culminación y

destrucción del realismo social en la novelística española’, Anales de la Narrativa
Española Contemporánea, 5 (1980), pp. 13–20, 13.
14 In ‘From Masquerade to Reminiscence: Modes of Parody in Juan Marsé’s El
amante bilingüe’, Hispanófila, 113 (January 1995), pp. 45–6, Gene Steven Forrest
would make a very similar observation on El amante bilingüe which, in his view,
‘chronicles Marsé’s reencounter, some twenty-five years later, with Pijoaparte and
Teresa’. He wrote of Juan Marés’ discovery of his wife in flagrante delicto: ‘Our
expectations of Calderonian revenge and violence are unfulfilled, and the convention-
ally dominant center (the husband) is displaced by its marginalized subordinate (the
wife) [...]. This episode, rife with anti-heroic and picaresque overtones, sets the stage
for a series of destabilizing and mocking assaults on established convention and
order’.
15 Sobejano describes Ultimas tardes as ‘una parodia – sarcástica – de la novela
social’ (Sobejano, p. 155). Comparing Ultimas tardes with the novela de caballería,
critic’s clear discussion effectively puts an end to the application of critical
models of literary realism to Marsé’s novels. It also opens the way to further
examination of Marsé’s strategies of ‘desmitificación’ and subversion,
though Mangini’s emphasis remains on Marsé’s careful articulation of a
social critique, rather than on the playfulness of his narrative creativity.
More recently, Carolyn Morrow16 has analysed Marsé’s strategies of
subversion in Ultimas tardes in terms of carnival, which I described in my
Introduction as an adult version of the child’s play area. Morrow argues that
‘the text underscores opposition to authority rather than stability and the
polyphonic nature of the self rather than a monologic entity’ (Morrow, p.
834). She brings the critic into the play area – as Marsé does – when she
suggests that ‘we as literary critics can engage in dialogics by “striving both
to recognise the mutual bearings of diverse voices and to answer them from
our own perspectives” ’ (Morrow, p. 837). Morrow’s approach to criticism is
anti-authoritarian, and she depicts Marsé’s characters in an open-ended state
of becoming as first they define self, and then play at representing selves:
‘The author remains concerned throughout with characters articulating their
ideas in response to one another while discovering their mutual affinities and
oppositions’ (Morrow, p. 838).
Morrow’s carnival model applies equally well to La oscura historia de la
prima Montse (1970), for here the narrator/reader-critic relationship takes
centre stage as Paco and Nuria vie to interpret Montse’s story. Their narra-
tive games in the context of transgressive adulterous erotic play constitute a
carnivalesque inversion of social order and an explicit assault on Catholic
moral teaching. Marsé has stated that ‘es una historia moral lo que pretendía
contar en Montse, una historia en la cual se toman unas posiciones morales’
(Sinnigen, p. 114), and he subjects moral positions to close critical scrutiny.
Nonetheless, this novel has long remained a critical blind-spot: truly
‘oscura’. This may be because it was preceded and followed by prize-
winning novels that would catch the public eye,17 but in my view, its
narrative complexity was not recognised at the time despite Vargas Llosa’s

and notably with a parody closely bound up with Spain’s sense of mythic identity,
Sobejano adds: ‘Amargo y pequeño Quijote de la narrativa social, este libro es en sí, al
modo como el Quijote fue el mejor libro de caballerías posible, una excelente novela
social, pero ya no derecha, ya no “objetiva”, sino más bien (siguiendo el rumbo marcado
por Tiempo de silencio) indirecta, subjetiva, expansiva, satírica, airada’. Sobejano then
casts Marsé as a healer of society’s ills, concluding that this novel ‘entraña una intención
saneadora, un mensaje purificativo’ (Sobejano, pp. 155 and 456).
16 Carolyn Morrow, ‘Breaking the rules: Transgression and Carnival in Últimas
tardes con Teresa’, Hispania, 74 (1991), pp. 834–40.
17 Ultimas tardes won the Biblioteca Breve prize (1965), Si te dicen the Premio
Internacional de Novela «México» (1973), and La muchacha the Premio Planeta
(1978).
illuminating critique of its predecessor, and because its discussion of Vatican
II can still be seen as intimidating: a view I contest on the basis of Marsé’s
playful treatment of the subject. Domingo considers La oscura historia more
effective than Marsé’s earlier supposedly social realist novels because it
shows greater personal involvement: ‘un punto de vista más personal, más
cercano a sí mismo [...]. [P]arece como si el novelista, ahora, pisa un terreno,
más firme, se halle directamente implicado en sus narraciones, llegue a sentir
la causa de sus personajes como suya propia’ (Domingo, p. 5). This senti-
mental view disregards the intrusion of the venal narrator Paco between
Montse and the reader.
William Sherzer18 views La oscura historia as ‘precursor of an often
underestimated later work whose philosophical value is of utmost
importance to Marsé’: La muchacha, whose vaunted ‘philosophical aspect’
is ‘the vision of the novelist who continually rectifies the reality he is
supposed to be chronicling’ (Sherzer, p. 159). Sherzer acknowledges that the
text does not reveal all at first sight (as Buckley’s ‘impassive camera’s eye’,
mentioned earlier, suggests) and argues that:

In the same manner in which Paco unmasks the double standard of bour-
geois Catalan society, the dialogue he directs constitutes a systematic
baring of Nuria’s immoral actions. While Montse’s character is stated
clearly from the beginning [...] Nuria’s personality and activity emerge
only gradually. (Sherzer, p. 160)

However, he falls into the trap of limiting Marsé’s purpose to yet another
critique of bourgeois hypocrisy, affirming that ‘Montse’s story, is a socio-
political cliché’, and ‘While Montse represented a stereotype, those who
struggle (in vain) against societal and personal hypocrisy, in Nuria we see a
much more complex personal conflict’ (Sherzer, p. 164). He acknowledges
that ‘Montse is the curious case of a tragic heroine whose development is
mostly absent from the text’ (Sherzer, p. 164) but fails to consider the func-
tion of that absence: a deliberate, cunning and effective strategy of subver-
sion on the part of Marsé which is once again focused in a silent female
figure. Instead he argues that:

The question of rectification of reality, of digging deeply to find the truth,

is evident from the title of the very first chapter [...]. In the words “detrás
de la fachada,” is represented the author’s intention to divulge that infor-
mation that is below the surface; not just any surface, but a façade, a struc-
ture built to obscure other realities. (Sherzer, p. 159)

18 William Sherzer, ‘Nuria as Protagonist in Juan Marsé’s La oscura historia de la

prima Montse’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 41 (1988), pp.159–65.
Writing a decade later, Abigail Lee Six notes that:
since the whole narrative concerning Montse and her Murcian, Manuel,
reaches us refracted through the prism of Paco’s psyche, I would argue
that the novel is at least as much about that as it is about the young lovers
them- selves, and given that Paco is deeply ambivalent about his mixed
Catalan and Andalusian blood, it seems crucially important to study the
pointers in the text that elucidate his anxieties.19

Instead of social realism or a social critique, we have insights into the

person- ality of one individual: ‘The text is laden with indications of Paco’s
discomfi- ture at his half-caste self-image, but these are repeatedly projected
on to his descriptions of other characters’ attitudes to him, rather than
recognized as a personal psychological problem’ (Lee Six, p. 360). Drawing
on socio- linguistic research,20 Lee Six begins with a brief but illuminating
outline of the major functions of code-switching and then comments: ‘In the
case of Catalonia specifically, language is the crucial factor in determining
Catalan identity, over and above factors that might play a more decisive role
for other nationalities, such as race, birthplace, parentage or political
sympathies’ (Lee Six, p. 361). There follows detailed discussion of three
passages from La oscura historia: ‘a real code-switching battle, in which the
antipathy felt by Paco for Salva is expressed through the former’s almost
openly nasty linguistic behaviour [...] a consummate performance of ruthless
manipula- tion, a hands-down victory for our narrator’ (Lee Six, p. 364).
Sociolinguistic theory provides analytical tools but Marsé’s narrator uses
them as toys in a game he wants to win:
Paco’s individual complexes and unique personality provide the driving
force behind his combative manipulation of the code-choice conventions
in Catalonia, enabling him to present himself simultaneously as
sympathetic social underdog and admirable survivor in a hostile milieu;
but the analysis made possible by code-switching research attests to a less
attractive aspect [...], that of a ruthless and cynical player of power-games
whose obsession with his unfortunate cousin [Montse] speaks more of
self-absorption in his own problems of identity than of altruistic concern
for Catalonia-crossed lovers. (Lee Six, p. 365)

19 Abigail Lee Six, ‘La oscura historia del primo Paco/Francesc: Code-switching
in Juan Marsé’s La oscura historia de la prima Montse’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies,
LXXVI (1999), pp. 359–66, 359.
20 Lee Six offers a very full bibliography which includes: for a general discussion
of code-switching Monica Heller, ‘Code-switching and the politics of language’, in
One Speaker, Two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching, eds
Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1995), pp. 158–74;
on Catalonia, Kathryn A. Woolard, Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of
Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford, CA: Stanford U.P., 1989) and Claudi Esteve
Fabregat, Estado, etnicidad y biculturalismo (Barcelona: Peninsula, 1984).
 Both the adult and the child Paco exploit the elusive qualities of language
and forge a language of freedom, but one that exposes their weaknesses to
public view.
As with Ultimas tardes and La oscura historia, critical attention has
focused on El amante bilingüe (1990) almost to the exclusion of El embrujo
de Shanghai (1993). El amante had an immediate and lastingly provocative
impact because, in the view of one critic, ‘To this date [it] remains the most
explicit literary intervention in Catalonia’s linguistic conflict’. 21 Norma
Valentí is put forward in the novel as an authority figure to be subverted.
Resina states that ‘Her name, in fact, stands for the 1983 Language Normal-
ization Law’ but is critical of what he sees as Marsé’s dishonest recourse to
‘the Sociolinguistic Fiction’: his ‘avoidance of history, his substitution of
allusion and myth for fully-fledged depiction, his recourse to comic book
models and to Hollywood films as so many narrative tools which make for
good fiction but poor sociology’ (Resina).
Marsé would probably thank him for the ‘good fiction’ and not lament the
‘poor sociology’, seeking narrative ‘toys’ rather than ‘tools’, and using soci-
ology as one more toy to play with and one more ‘authority’ to subvert. Juan
Vila echoes the notion of a language of freedom when he comments: ‘Le
triomphe de Faneca est avant tout la libération d’une langue qui subvertit les
normes sociales et linguistiques que représente Norma. La déroute de la bour-
geoise catalane le libère enfin d’une possession passionnelle et destructrice’.22
Forrest develops the carnival theme from Morrow’s article on Ultimas
tardes23 when he states that ‘Consistent with Marsé’s formulaic opposition of
the marginalized, eccentric individual to the official center, Faneca’s seduc-
tion of Norma clearly symbolizes an assault on the authoritarian “norm” ’
(Forrest, p. 46).
At the same time, there is an area of uncertainty in relation to this appar-
ently transparent female figure. Like Montse, she is kept out of the picture
for much of the novel, and when she is ‘on view’, her performance is
mediated through Marés’ gaze. Like Martín (Encerrados) and Manuel (La
oscura historia), her eyes are obscured – or, in her case, distorted – by
glasses. Perhaps her vision is faulty, explaining her failure to ‘see clearly’
her ex-husband Marés. Alternatively, she cannot be ‘seen’: eye-contact with
her is minimised while the impact of her body is emphasised. Vila, in
describing her relationship with Marés, posits her both as power – a judge
– and as a

21 Joan Ramón Resina, ‘Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe and the Sociolinguistic
Fiction’, Journal of Catalan Studies, iii (1999–2000) (www.fitz.cam.ac.uk).
22 Juan Vila, ‘Le corps palimpseste de l’amant bilingüe’, Hispanística XX, 9,
(Dijon: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Hispaniques du XXème Siècle de
l’Université de Bourgogne, 1992), pp. 253–66, 263.
23 ‘[Ultimas tardes] stresses the openly erotic moves of those at the periphery
which both threaten and attract those at the centre’ (Morrow, p. 835).
depersonalised and therefore disempowered conduit for language and sex.
She is ‘la lectrice à qui sont destinés les cahiers autobiographiques et
devient, de ce fait, la lectrice des corps et langues de Marés puis de Faneca.
Elle est le canal par lequel doit transiter toute parole pour être jugée’ (Vila,
p. 261). Vila also picks up Marsé’s allusion to the Good/Evil dichotomy that
is ever-present in his novels in image, myth, story and icon, and – wittingly
or unwittingly – depicts a manipulated Norma as both diabolically seductive,
and as victim of another devil, Marés: ‘la langue diabolique qu’utilise Marés
ne fait, en réalité, que traduire la vérité de Norma, rendre visible “la punta
rosada y diabólica de su lengua” ’ (Vila, p. 262). If, then, we reconsider
Vila’s depiction of a powerful Norma and an enslaved Marés who seeks
liberation, his subtext can well be read as indicating that the ‘déroute de la
bourgeoise catalane’ becomes a diabolical ‘possession passionnelle et
destructrice’ (Vila, p. 263). Marés achieves carnivalesque freedom, but
Norma has no voice of her own, only the borrowed voice of Normalisation.
Nor has she freedom of movement, being doubly confined by her glasses,
representing her literal and metaphorical shortsightedness, and by the glass
walls of Marés’ goldfish-bowl where she serves for the voyeuristic games of
Marés, first and foremost, but equally of all readers of the novel who specu-
late on her ‘lengua’ and ignore her silence.
Forrest compares Marés and Norma to Manuel Reyes and Teresa of
Ultimas tardes and suggests that the men’s ‘inner’ seductiveness is revealed
by their play with masking and disguise, while Norma’s lack of any
authentic ‘inner’ affections results in a hardening and fixing of all that she
has – her outer mask:
Teresa’s (Norma’s) voyeuristic attachment to the earthy charnego, no
longer mitigated by her idealistic – albeit superficial – espousal of progres-
sive causes and rebellion against a puritanical moral order, reveals little
more than the erotic fetishism of a woman who is incapable of authentic
love [...], she has become ossified and dehumanized, transformed into a
cultural archetype (her features are compared to those of the image of the
Virgin of Montserrat and her voice offers a ‘sugestión ligeramente
gaudiniana, como de cerámica troceada’. (Forrest, p. 48)

Lee Six picks up the religious motif and suggests that Norma can be seen as
a 1990s rewrite of the 1950s Montse in terms of contemporary Catalan ideals
of a more liberated womanhood: ‘just as Montse’s name seemed to typecast
her for the role of personifying the traditional rock-solid Catholic society
with its very own Virgin, so Norma … incarnates the contemporary
autonomy of Catalonia with its own “language police”.’ 24 However, Norma’s

24 Abigail Lee Six, ‘Blind Woman’s Buff: Optical Illusions of Feminist Progress
in Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies,
6, 1 (2000), pp. 29–41, 30.
autonomy as a rich modern Catalan woman is undermined by her desire for a
dominant – in this instance lower class overtly ‘machista’ sexual partner – an
attitude Lee Six considers indicative of ‘Optical Illusions of Feminist Prog-
ress’ in El amante bilingüe:

Norma may indeed incarnate the emancipation of Catalan women; she

appears to have succeeded in winning self-determination for herself, but
ultimately Marsé makes sure it is a hollow victory: the advances are
revealed to be quite superficial and any perceived threat that women like
her pose to their men’s sense of their own masculinity is shown to be illu-
sory. The changes in Catalan society that have enabled Norma to live a
public life so different from that of women like Nuria have not made the
slightest dent on [...] the social construction of desire: men still want
women in the subordinate position … and women still want men to be
dominant sexual partners. (Lee Six, p. 38)25

Using images of sight and blindness:

defective eyesight in the women characters appears like a set of reflecting

images in a hall of mirrors. The severely myopic Norma whose eyesight
has been corrected by glasses has a sort of distorted double in the
completely blind Carmen [...]. [I]f we venture to read Norma as a cipher
for Catalonia itself [...], this allegation of merely superficial self-
determination coupled with voluntary myopia and submission then
acquires a further dimension of highly charged political implications. (Lee
Six, p. 38)

Marsé’s use of sight, blindness and (self)-deception can be traced back to

his first novel, Encerrados. Early experimentation with narrative perspec-
tives begins with a series of ‘glass games’ that explore storytelling as both
self-reflexive and interactive – monologue and dialogue – always with a
potential for deception. His own start as a novelist is literally and metaphori-
cally mirrored in Andrés’ storytelling games. Conversely, Andrés’ determi-
nation to tell his own story in defiance of other narratives that would shape it
differently, provides a model for Marsé’s approach to narrative in his novels:
first as defensive, then inventive deception. Finally, Andrés’ exploration of
images of Tina, which becomes a form of dependency on her, illustrates the
dilemma of the narrator who is both manipulator and manipulated, like a
spectator gazing at an aquarium.

25 Drawing on the feminist bell hooks’ Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural
Poli- tics (Boston MA: South End Press, 1990), Lee Six argues that ‘it is when Faneca
makes his most objectionably “machista” remarks that Norma’s sexual interest in him
is sparked’ (Lee Six, p. 37).
Bedroom games: private spaces, own voices
Taken up with social realism, Gonzalo Sobejano echoed a common view
that in the title of Encerrados con un solo juguete,26 ‘encerrados’ denoted the
restrictiveness of a repressive dictatorship, ‘un solo’ the poverty of life under
Francoism, and ‘juguete’ a regression from sterile adult boredom back into
childhood with only one plaything – sex. He described Andrés, Tina and
Martín as: ‘tres muchachos que existen a la deriva, sin energías, sin
proyectos, sin trabajo. Lo único que les une y aparta, que les distrae y
preocupa, es un solo juguete peligroso: Eros’ (Sobejano, p. 447). This drasti-
cally reductionist interpretation ignores differences between the three young
people and in their capacity to play. It also neglects the implications for
Marsé’s storytelling of their triangular relationship. My reading will argue
that storytelling, not sex, is the toy in the title, and that far from being a
sterile pastime, storytelling gives Andrés and Tina a taste of autonomy in
their own play areas. By contrast, Martín’s failure in play is destructive.
Narrative play provides a measure of the success or failure of all three to
relate to the outside world they are about to enter and to define themselves as
distinct from it.
Marsé places Andrés, Tina and Martín in a transitional space, on the brink
of adulthood, with the break with childhood still to be completed. He then
traces their attempts to define themselves in opposition to the models
afforded by their parents and in interaction with each other in narrative play
areas. Simply to view the parents as authority figures – representing society
or the regime – fails to acknowledge that their impact on their children
differs in each case and affects how the young handle relationships with each
other and with the adult world.
The absence of fathers allows space for narratives about them based more
on speculation than on knowledge. It also intensifies relationships with the
ever-present mother. This is less problematic for Andrés and Martín, who
reject their father and coexist relatively peacefully with their mothers,
despite the mother’s emotional dependence in Andrés’ case, and financial
depend- ence in the case of Martín. For Tina, however, enforced proximity to
a mother she detests is a constraint she seeks to shed, while her father is the
focus of her dreams and hopes.
Cults of heroism fuelled propaganda on both sides in the civil war and
were common to the regime and resistance in the post-war years. Andrés’
dead father is held up as an example of selfless heroism which he rejects
along with the version of history it represents: ‘Verás, yo no soy
desinteresado ni bueno como lo fue él, no aspiro a nada [...]. Aunque quiera
no podría ser como él, creo que los tiempos han cambiado’ (EJ, pp. 104–5).
Andrés defines himself as the opposite of this ideal and scripts an alternative

26 It won the greatest number of votes (though not the prize money) when entered
for the Premio “Biblioteca Breve” prior to publication.
version of his identity: ‘No me conoce usted, se cree que soy un buenazo
como papá. ¡Pues sépalo, yo soy un vividor, un vivalavirgen, un puerco que
sólo piensa en chingar!’ (EJ, p. 216) It is ironic that in championing the feck-
less Tina he appears ‘desinteresado’ and ‘buenazo’, but by cultivating
transgressive behaviour and refusing to clean his bedroom, he achieves a
‘leeway’ which allows him to distance himself both from his father and the
past, and from a contemporary male role model, his sister Matilde’s fiancé
Juli Puig. Conformity is tempting: ‘[Andrés] imaginó que tal vez fuese
agradable meterse un rato dentro de Juli Puig – qué cosa: vivir un rato en él,
en ese confort cuadriculado y abrigado, un rato o puede que siempre: daba la
impresión de tenerlo todo hecho, solucionado’ (EJ, p. 40). But Andrés enacts
his revolt in two other bedrooms of which Matilde disapproves: one
belonging to Tina, whom Matilde will not even name, the other to the prosti-
tute Julita. These three bedrooms hold the familiar, and therefore comforting
marks of Andrés’ own transgression, and the girls represent transgressive
sexual relations:

Dos ceniceros repletos de colillas esparcían por el aire un denso olor y él

recordó sus propias palabras: ‘No quiero que toquéis nada de como está,
aunque nazcan setas entre el polvo [...]’, y la sonrisa de su hermana,
aquella sonrisa helada que le obligaba a hablar más de lo deseable, que le
empujaba a justificar sus actitudes más – lo reconocía – grotescas [...]. ‘Y
puede que ahora [Tina] está sola, esperándome junto a la radio, descalza y
con el jersey amarillo.’ Y todavía, como mal menor, estaba Julita. (EJ, p.
94)

Both also mean ‘horas salvadas (sin historia también: salvadas, rescatadas
simplemente a la vida manipulada a distancia como por un poderoso ser de
hierro, sin entrañas, inflexible)’ (EJ, p. 44). In the play area they afford,
Andrés rejects History and national narratives and devises his own story.
Martín never mentions his socially unacceptable father – rumoured to
have gone mad and died in prison, but the rumour means that his unusual
behaviour – remaining fully clothed on a hot beach in summer and haunting
Tina’s house – acquires a sinister twist by association, even before he resorts
to violence, blackmail and finally rape. Like Andrés, he seems marked by his
father’s character, but in his case, rejection of the transgressive model leads
him to work hard, dress with care, and look after his mother – in other
words, to conform to appear like Juli Puig. Martín’s mother went blind
working to bring him up well and is also metaphorically blind to his
increasing need to escape. Tina’s mother affords a comfort that is both
maternal and transgressively erotic:

Martín lloraba silenciosamente pero sin agitación alguna, inmóvil,

dejándose secar los cabellos y el cuerpo con una toalla que ella movía en
sus manos con hábil, maternal y suave eficiencia y sin dejar de desgranar a
 flor de labios la misma cantinela monótona y mimosa que antes había
dedicado a su hija: ‘¿Pero por qué? ¿Por qué eres así, criatura? Todo
pasará, cálmate, no llores [...]. Mira que yo sé mucho de esto, yo te
ayudaré, hijo, te lo prometí, yo te ayudaré ...’ (EJ, p. 65)

What Martín wants is Tina, and he resorts to violence and religion to force
her to comply. In Tina’s words:

le daba por llevarme a una iglesia para verme rezar, así, por las buenas, me
obligaba, me pegaba, quería que me confesara y cosas así para ... ¡yo qué
sé!, a lo mejor los curas tienen razón y todo nos irá mejor en la vida, eso
decía el chalao. (EJ, p. 185)

Martín’s recourse to Catholic morality fails and frustration, deflected away

from his own mother, is transferred on to the two other women and cycle of
violence begins. He has no play strategies to enable him to work out an alter-
native way ahead, and only violence to articulate his desire. Yet, he is not
punished for rape and can move away and start afresh – within the limits of
his own nature. The damage he has done, he can leave behind inscribed, as it
is, in Tina.
Tina conjures up around her father in far-off Brazil a fantasy transgressive
lifestyle and a transgressive self to share it:

No me parezco en nada a mamá, ni físicamente ni en el carácter [...].

Además, sé que estás casado y con hijos, pero no quiero que pienses que
eso podría ser un obstáculo para que me lleves contigo. Yo te comprendo.
¿Qué iba a hacer un hombre solo y todavía joven en un país extraño? No
creas, pues, que me escandalizo, yo no soy como mamá. (EJ, pp. 231–4)

In fact, mother and daughter are alike. Both take refuge from reality in one
bedroom, awaiting the father’s return and dreaming. Both have an allure
which draws Martín and Andrés to the bedroom 27 and represents a limited
form of power – its limitations revealed when Martín rapes Tina and her
mother colludes in that rape. This parody of ‘playing together’, causes a
break in the mother-daughter relationship and a breach in the eroticised play
area that is finalised by the mother’s death. Tina’s rejection of her is evident
in her attitude to the corpse:

27 In the bedroom Andrés’s gaze is drawn to her legs, tantalizingly revealed yet
showing the onset of age (EJ, p. 23). See also Martín’s awareness of her sexuality (EJ,
p. 31). Mothers similarly portrayed as erotic, combining sexual attraction with the
vulnerability of age, are Sarnita’s in Si te dicen que caí, Néstor’s in Un día volveré, and
Susana’s in El embrujo de Shanghai.
 frente al féretro y mirando con dureza el cadáver de su madre, mirándola
sin perdonarle todavía nada, ni una sola hora de su vida. Ni siquiera había
comprensión para su boca rígida ..., aquella boca un poco abierta que Tina
fue a cerrar con mano demasiado brutal. (EJ, p. 259)

The mother’s open but silent mouth is a warning the daughter does not hear.
Abandoned by her father, and now without a mother, Tina must find her own
voice or share her mother’s silence.
Andrés has his room and Martín can leave town. Tina’s fantasies are
circumscribed by the limited transgressive spaces allowed to her, and by her
need to be an object of desire in the gaze of others: the father she is trying to
convince of her ‘modern’ views; Martín and Andrés. Martín’s violence
provides Tina with a role in a drama of desire and jealousy that she is
prepared to play despite its dangers. Having seen Martín beating her, Andrés
comments: ‘al final me pareció que Tina sonreía, incluso su madre sonreía;
eran pequeñas y torpes sonrisas entre las lágrimas [...]. Era como si aquello
fuese un juego y no les disgustara del todo (EJ, p. 99). Thirteen years later,
in Si te dicen que caí (1973), Marsé would explicitly link sado-masochistic
violence with the frustrated ambitions of the ex-combatant Conrado Galán,
representative in the novel of National Catholic Spain. In Encerrados,
Andrés does not intervene because he perceives that mother and daughter
collude in the violence as later, in Si te dicen, Galán’s prostitutes would
collude. However, when Tina’s plea for gentleness raises expectations of
violence at Julita’s, Andrés refuses to ‘play along’:

–Tráteme con cariño, oficial. Porque nunca más volveremos a vernos y ...
–No diga tonterías. Ya está bien de jugar, ¿no crees? (EJ, p. 172)

His refusal forces Tina to face a reality she abhors: ‘Te diré por qué hemos
venido a tu sucia cueva esta noche: porque estoy harta de mamá y de su
dichosa felicidad perdida, su vieja historia de errores me crispa, su jardín,
sus amigos muertos, su juventud ...’ (EJ, p. 177). Tina’s disillusionment now
echoes that of Andrés, and on that common ground, their relationship
survives, each finding in the other an audience and a place where storytelling
can start afresh:

En el taxi que les llevaba de nuevo a lo alto de la ciudad todavía se

besaron, todavía quisieron de nuevo dar forma a aquellas imágenes de sí
mismos que tanto habían estado mimando, cuidando en sus menores
detalles [...]. Los últimos abrazos fueron como nuevos, y otra vez
empezaron a sentir los dos la necesidad, mirándose a los ojos. (EJ, p. 179)

Marsé would later describe a similar process of exploring self imaging

involving Manolo and Teresa in Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1965). He
would
then explain that ‘En cierta manera la novela no es otra cosa que una historia
de dos mitos, la fricción de esos dos mitos y las chispas que surgen de esa
fricción física y mítica’ (Sinnigen, p. 114). Play offers the possibility of
finding strategies of subversive evasion, but the options are only as great as
the imaginative daring of the players.
The narrative play area in Encerrados is neither a paradise of childhood
innocence nor an adult regression into the past; it is Eden after the Fall –
transgressive, eroticised, dangerous and combative. Tina can offer the
sensual pleasures of the ‘cajita de música’ that ‘tomas entre tus brazos y
vibra, vive, sueña tus sueños’ (EJ, p. 144). Equally, she can be hard,
dehumanised and threatening, ‘con los ojos redondos de desprecio, abiertos
y fijos como los de una barata y feroz muñeca de feria’ (EJ, p. 24). Her play
can be harmless, romantic play-acting, as at Julita’s. Alternatively, it can
collude dangerously with violence. The thrill of danger is one of the greatest
attractions of play, and danger and eroticism together make narratives about
her powerfully compelling to Andrés: ‘manaña iré a casa de Tina. Me gusta
estar allí, mirar lo que hacen, espiarles, en casa de Tina siempre pasa algo.
Hay como un peligro, ¿me entiendes? No sé, allí se vive’ (EJ, p. 98). To the
extent that danger becomes what Andrés seeks, his play becomes coercive.
Tina is caught between the conflicting demands of Andrés and Martín,
acting first to the one and then to the other, playing the temptress for Andrés,
and being forced to go to church by Martín.
If one takes this triangular relationship as a model for narrative games, it
would seem that Andrés wants transgression, while Martín demands submis-
sion. Andrés says ‘play’, Martín, ‘obey’, and Tina is offered two models: to
rebel or conform. That Martín tries first to force religious practice on her and
then rapes her shows how limited are her options and how hazardous. But
Andrés too leaves her little space for manoeuvre. Ultimately, she fails to
create her own play area, direct her own narratives and find her own voice.
Her powerlessness is symbolised by her need to view herself in mirrors, as
though playing to herself will provide a way of overcoming her impotence.

Games with mirrors: playing to the public

Within limits, Tina exploits the potential of performance and appears
briefly as she wants to appear. She chooses a café table because ‘Aquí nos
ven incluso desde la calle’, and Andrés muses drily that, in contrast to her
diffidence in private, ‘en público los besos de Tina eran largos, inter-
minables’ (EJ, p. 138). A bus window is a looking-glass where Tina projects,
views and refines her image:

ensayaba el efecto de su perfil sobre un fondo de caras anónimas,

oscilantes y resignadas; sonreía, estiraba el cuello y atusaba sus cabellos
 húmedos [...]. [N]o pensaba más que en su cabeza lustrosa y negra [...] y
en la mirada de alguien allí cerca. (EJ, p. 114)

Yet the mirror represents the gaze of others and she must ask Andrés:
‘¿Cómo me encuentras? Chico, nunca me dices nada ... ¿Qué clase de novio
tengo? No te comprendo, la verdad’ (EJ, p. 36). Her persistence reveals her
need to fit a stereotype framed in the gaze of another: ‘su deseo de que la
imaginaran poseída, segura y feliz’ (EJ, p. 115).
Martín both denies and exploits performance. His screening off of the
other’s gaze and dark glasses, like his reluctance to undress on a hot beach,
can be taken as a paranoid desire for concealment, 28 or as playing a ‘film
noir’ mystery man: in either case his act is as calculated as Tina’s:
sin mirar a nadie y sabiéndose observado. Cuidaba siempre la figura y la
expresión, se movía como dentro de una esfera de cristal que al menor
gesto temiera romper. No era timidez, pronto se daba uno cuenta que
aquella tendencia a la inmovilidad no era timidez. Andrés le miró de
soslayo y sonrió ligeramente. (EJ, p. 27)

Andrés responds, but watching Martín’s performance, perceives an invis-

ible barrier between them like a glass screen. Their childhood closeness has
not lasted on into adulthood. It is glimpsed in brief eye-contact, when Martín
does finally undress on the beach and experiences a sense of release – in
Andrés’s perception, at least:
por un momento pareció desarmado, sin afectación ni postura y con un aire
insólitamente inédito en sus bellas y graves facciones, como cansadas ya
de retorcerse y falsearse a sí mismas contínuamente: así le vio Andrés
durante unos segundos; y en seguida enfundó y guardó en su americana las
gafas negras. (EJ, p. 62)

The joking communication of their play-acting does not last and their gaze
parts:
– ¿Y cómo piensas irte? – dijo Andrés con indiferencia.
Martín se sonrió, golpeó amistosamente el hombro de su amigo con
el puño:
– Con nocturnidad y alevosía, claro.
Andrés también sonrió a pesar suyo: ese espíritu de burla era lo que
antes les unía. Se miraban sonriéndose ligeramente, muy juntos,
penetrados el uno del otro con una antigua conciencia juvenil que reptó
entre ruinas [...]. Luego dejaron de mirarse y quedó en sus rostros una
mezcla de hastío y de temor, apartaron despacio la cabeza para dejar
resbalar los ojos sobre la gente. (EJ, pp. 236–7)

28 Marsé will use this motif again, with emphatic persistence, in La oscura historia
with Manuel Reyes (pp. 132, 140, 149, 153, 155, 165, 173).
 The interaction here between Martín as actor and Andrés as spectator is
similar to Tina’s performing before Andrés’ desiring gaze and recalls
Caillois’ comment that ‘Les jeux ne trouvent généralement leur plénitude
qu’au moment où ils suscitent une résonance complice’ (Caillois, p. 97).
Martín has an independence Tina lacks, but Marsé’s foregrounding of the
spectator–narrator as controller and interpreter of their performance forces
the reader to reflect on the autonomy and motivation of spectator and
performer: narrator and reader–critic.
Earlier, as Martín is viewed by Tina’s mother, the narratorial voice is
complex and deceptive. Vestiges of a former lover’s romanticism and desire
vie with an older view coloured by age and disillusionment, and at the same
time, erudite language and a more explicit ironic comparison with film
models should warn the reader of a self-conscious, and therefore suspect,
authorial intervention:

la pureza de algunos rasgos, de su perfil soberbio y de sus ojos negros

dulcemente desalentados cuando podía sorprendérsele solo, sin que se
creyera observado, hacían pensar en un arcano origen noble, en la
virginidad perdida de un linaje errante y orgulloso, pero el tono insolente
en el vestir, la grosería del lenguaje y aquella sombra de bigotillo de
adolescente junto con ciertas posturas de indudable origen
cinematográfico (aquella manía de hablarle a uno ofreciéndole el perfil,
siempre como si hubiese un tercero escuchando) habían estropeado casi
por completo su capacidad de sinceridad. (EJ, pp. 75–6)

Images manipulate and are manipulated, but it is often hard to determine

who is manipulating whom at any one moment.
That images and mirrors can deceive is evident from Chapter 1 of
Encerrados, where Andrés’s narrative games aimed at defining himself in
opposition to narratives from outside demonstrate his desire to control his
storytelling as he controls the intimate world of the looking-glass. He is
simultaneously actor, spectator and scriptwriter. Almost imperceptibly, the
seeing eye moves from that of the omniscient author to the character Andrés
Ferrán – the object of the narrator’s gaze. The use of the third person, past
tenses and consciously literary similes initially suggest an author who
observes Andrés as an object. Then, privileged knowledge is assumed
without context or explanation and there is an intensifying of sensation and
emotion. Finally, observation is replaced by utterance from a new voice
unannounced, while the angle of vision takes the reader into the mind and
body of the awakening Andrés:

Tenso, haciendo un ciego esfuerzo en medio de un vacío vertiginoso, como

si todo su cuerpo estuviese pegado a un amasijo de goma o como si un
viento familiar lo chupara atrayéndolo hacia abajo, empezó a despertar y
supo de nuevo que la penumbra no sonreía, que el techo era alto, que la
 mesa y los viejos libros seguían allí [...]. Quiso saber más y se asomó a
mirar el suelo. Pero estaba limpio. “Quizá vomité en la calle, o en casa de
ella, o en el mismo bar, qué más da”, y dejó caer nuevamente la cabeza y
cerró los ojos. Se ladeó. Notaba un pedazo de sábana arrugada frente a los
párpados, rozándole las pestañas. No veía nada, no quería, respiraba en el
diminuto espacio donde se debatía su impotencia y su desidia de todas las
mañanas, acumulando ironía contra sí mismo. (EJ, p. 11)29

Briefly, subject and object, narrator and narratee, seem one and, albeit
briefly, Andrés takes over his own story.
The reader is lured into believing that what Andrés shows us is reality not
performance, yet shortly afterwards, the mirror shows Andrés cultivating
image even in private. The section ends as Andrés plays a private looking-
glass game, practising seeing not the self he experiences daily, but rather
what he ‘imagines’ a stranger would see:

se miró intensamente hasta que sus facciones dejaron de serle familiares,

hasta conseguir, por un hábito que según él era muy saludable, que su
propio rostro le pareciese el de un extraño – el de un tipo llamado Andrés
Ferrán [...]: la sorprendente fisionomía de un desconocido que de pronto
hacía una pregunta inesperada. (EJ, p. 13)

So convincing is his performance that Andrés himself is taken in until a

challenge from the astute Mauricio Balart, whose maimed hand testifies to
real past exploits in the resistance, catches Andrés out. The reality Balart has
experienced exposes the fragility of Andrés’ spurious projected image:

– En otros tiempos me hubiese dicho: este chico trama algo, algo

importante [...]. Ahora no. No creo, vaya.
Andrés asintió lentamente con la cabeza. ... Se sentía a gusto. El
hombre dijo:
– Y qué, chico, qué cuentas. ¿Nada?
– Eso. Nada.
Y dejó caer de nuevo la mirada en la mano. (EJ, p. 89)

Balart can tell image from reality. These are not ‘otros tiempos’ and Andrés
is a rebel without a cause. The history Andrés sought to escape has caught up
with him and his desire for fantasy must compete with the reality represented

29 A similar image of the subject lying apathetically on the bed, again in the
opening pages of the novel, introduces Miguel Dot in Esta cara. The scene is depicted
from Dot’s alienated viewpoint (ECL, pp. 8–9). These examples in the first two novels
display an interest in image, imaging and control which is evident in Marsé’s work
from the start, is central to our understanding of how he sees the function of the
narrator, and opens the way for my later discussion of Marsé’s manipulation of iconog-
raphy.
by Balart. Communication ends as eye-contact is broken. With the
audience’s gaze withdrawn, the difference between illusion (Andrés’s play-
acting) and outside reality (Balart’s hand) stares Andrés in the face. He can
accept it and engage with it, or reject it and resort once more to evasive play.
Encerrados denies the reader a happy ending. Tina’s conviction that
desire can be fulfilled only through the gaze of another outlasts the novel.
When barriers between her and Andrés have at last been removed, she must
still ask: ‘¿Qué haría yo, qué podría yo hacer, Andrés, para querernos como
las demás personas ...?’ (EJ, p. 261). For as long as Andrés can be actor and
spectator, he is secure in his own self-reflective mirror-world: ‘Nada. No
necesitamos nada de nadie.’ His isolation is fragile, however: in Tina, strate-
gically located as receiver of Andrés’ narratives and defined by others,
Andrés’ uncertainty finds an echo. Tina’s inability to find her own voice and
attempts at silent projection through images are a provocative symbol of
dispossession in a novel that has been judged too easily as unproblematic.
Marsé’s exploration of narrative play areas in Encerrados traces the
attempts of three characters to establish a ‘divine leeway’ for creative inven-
tion and to find their own narrative voice. Their narrative games in private
stem from their rejection of the outside world, and also reveal the frustration
arising from conflict with outside reality. But when these narrators experi-
ment with performance, cultivated in private with the aid of mirrors, ironi-
cally, they fall into the trap of play-acting with the intention to deceive that
is at the root of their rejection of public performance. In private, as in public,
then, both actor and spectator prove manipulable and manipulative.
Narrative freedom is not easy to secure. Its fragility is evident in Tina’s
failure to break free of seeing herself through the eyes of others, and in the
image of Andrés, the voyeur, locked in dependency on his object of desire.

The aquarium: the muted female voice

In Encerrados, Marsé explores the mechanisms that underlie myths of
private and public identity in such a way as to subvert the credibility of his
narrators and interlocutors. Play-acting is seen to supplant creative play, and
in their erotic encounters, the players’ motives are questioned. Andrés holds
images of Tina in his imagination like a fish in an aquarium: a prisoner for
his own delight. He visualises ‘los hombros desnudos de Tina, bajo una luz
azulosa y trémula, como dentro de un acuario, en aquella casa antigua de
largo corredor, cuyo jardín ruinoso y yermo [...], desplegaba cada invierno
sus muertas primaveras’ (EJ, p. 15). This image from the start of the novel
foregrounds the desiring gaze of the voyeur who crafts it, slowing the pace
of the narrative and multiplying adjectives to intensify details around the
partly naked central figure which tantalisingly combines eroticism and
death. At the end of the novel, when Tina moves out from one room into
the world of
work, Andrés still holds her in his imagination, locked in a stasis that rejects
change:

Andrés recordó aquella luz marina temblando en las paredes y la música

en la radio, la altura irremediable, tan infantil aún, de las cejas de Tina, sus
jerseys y medias y polveras y pañuelos con manchas de carmín en medio
de revistas ilustradas deshaciéndose sobre la cama. (EJ, p. 243)

Light and water create an insubstantial dreamlike image, seen in the mind of
the viewer, not in reality. At the same time, in Marsé’s aquariums, the
insider attracts, holds the gaze of the outsider and thus also has power.
Indeed, the aquarium, which reappears in later novels represents the
narrative paradox mentioned earlier in this chapter, indicating Marsé’s
commitment to complex narrative perspective from his very first novel, and
also marking the effec- tiveness of the interplay of performance and
perception that is a constant characteristic of his novels. Both narrative
complexity and performance have been used so successfully that many
critics have not looked beneath the surface of his deceptively playful
narratives and discerned the extent of his ironic commentary on reality and
representation.
In La oscura historia (1970), eight years after Montse’s death, her cousin
Paco contemplates images of her held in his imagination as in an aquarium.
What Marsé has done for the first time in this novel is create a first-person
narrator, Paco, and a fully-fledged interlocutor, Nuria, who modifies and
contests Paco’s versions of events. This device of dual narration allows
Marsé to embark upon a more extensive exploration of the potential for
narratorial deception begun with Andrés in Encerrados, while at the same
time highlighting the narrator’s self-conscious awareness that narratives can
be contested. Nonetheless, Nuria is female and open to seduction, and in
addition, entering into debate with himself, addressed as ‘tú’, Paco subjects
his own observation of Montse to scrutiny. On occasion it is detached and
almost scientific, and then he will foregound his subjective judgement on the
society that produced Montse, associated in his mind with personal experi-
ences of Sundays, stagnancy, and the enclosed world of the Catholic bour-
geoisie:

Tenías a la prima Montse en el tibio acuario de tus ocios domingueros,

estrecho recipiente de agua sucia y estancada al que de vez en cuando te
asomabas para mirarla con curiosidad, con cierto estupor y hasta a veces
con lástima, pero sin tratar de comprenderla jamás [...] realmente como si
tu prima fuese un ejemplar raro cuya vida y costumbres ofreciera cierto
interés biológico pero no humano. (PM, p. 117)

This passage picks up an image of a garden pond from earlier in the novel,
where it is a symbol both of stagnation and of Montse’s aspirations: ‘la niña
está sentada al borde del estanque y contempla con sus ojos muy atentos los
turbios peces rojos, soñando quizás con un mundo de luz’ (PM, p. 56). In the
course of the novel, Paco traces Montse’s struggle to fulfil her aspirations
despite surrounding stagnation in the context of the post-war Catholic
Church, and he returns to images of water several times: when he imagines
Montse briefly experiencing a limited liberation through her relationship
with Manuel amidst ‘algas y arena’ by the sea (PM, pp. 219–20); when he
witnesses her ‘rapto de los sentidos’ and seems to smell ‘algas’ in her
feverish sweat (PM, p. 121); and when she drowns herself (PM, pp. 271–2).
Each time, the occurrence of the image reminds us of the narrator, raises
questions about what he is trying to say in his storytelling, and what impact
his sexualised images of Montse are intended to have on Montse’s sister
Nuria.
Thirty years later, in El amante bilingüe (1990), Marsé would once again
use the images of a stagnant pond (EAB, pp. 137–9), and of a goldfish-bowl
which initially contains the object of (his virtual homonym) Joan Marés’
desire, and subsequently signifies its absence. El amante is principally a
third-person narrative, but it also contains three notebooks in the first person,
where the protagonist Marés remembers, or reconstructs, episodes from his
past, and contemplates them as an aquarium, though the ‘cuadernos’ are, of
course, intended to be read by his ex-wife Norma. Temporal inversions intro-
duced by the ‘cuadernos’ heighten dramatic irony in the story. The gold-
fish-bowl is first seen as the place where the adult Marés puts money he
earns but does not want (EAB, pp. 30, 35, 69). Only later is its origin
divulged, when he remembers as symbolic of his childhood visit to the Villa
Valentí his first sight of the goldfish as fire, light and metallic brightness,
and his fasci- nation with its frenetic activity:

A mi lado hay una mesita con libros, tallas policromadas y una pecera
pequeña con un pez dorado que da vueltas compulsivamente. En el agua
del recipiente centellea un rayo de sol y el pez de oro parece debatirse en
un incendio. Con la cara pegada al cristal de la pecera, estoy mirando las
evoluciones neuróticas del pez. (EAB, p. 134)

When it is lost in the murky waters of the stagnant pond, the phrase ‘Y así
me veo todavía’ after the paragraph break suggests that ‘condenado a morir’
can refer to the fish and the boy alike. The ambiguity is resolved by ‘a mí y
al pez’, but the association lingers in the reader’s mind:

Paralizado por la rabia, lleno de desconsuelo, permanezco allí imaginando

al pez de oro que nada en el fondo sombrío del estanque, entre líquenes
putrefactos y algas cimbreantes. En esas aguas verdosas y pútridas, pienso
con tristeza, el pez está condenado a morir [...].
 Y así me veo todavía, a pesar del tiempo transcurrido, a mí y al pez: yo
inclinado sobre el estanque como si fuera a beber en él, y el pez
removiendo el limo del fondo, [...] perdiéndose en la sombra, para
siempre.
(EAB, p. 139)

The image of a fire-encircled fish 30 suggests danger threatening the object of

his desire: initially the fish, and then Norma, the daughter of the man who
gave it to him. But danger also threatens the narrator, for the fish’s move-
ments are compelling and the desire to possess it, overwhelming. Compared
with Andrés’s amorous absorption in Tina, and Paco’s affectionate contem-
plation of Montse, Marés’ desire to repossess Norma has a frantic edge. The
war-cry that breaks from him when the fish escapes and Norma and he reach
orgasm together for the last time is the cry of the Catalan ragman: ‘Hi ha cap
peeeeeell de coniiiiiill!’ (EAB, pp. 139 and 211). A scavenger from the
streets, who lives off the rubbish of the rich and brings a whiff of poverty
into their houses, Marés’ cry fills Norma with ‘un miedo antiguo, irracional
y paralizante’ (EAB, p. 211) and she shuns the light. Does Norma for once
feel a shame she cannot confront in the gaze of the other? Or does she fear
confronting in herself the possibility of having been deceived? In either case,
the erotic relationship yields to performance and the fleeting communication
it represented is irretrievably lost.
In a conflation of seer and seen at the start of the novel, reminiscent of
Andrés’ mirror games in Encerrados, Marés has seen his despair at losing
Norma in the bedroom mirror, and he holds the image there, once again, as if
it were in an aquarium. Having glimpsed his wife’s adultery, his own cuck-
olding, and an anguish at losing her as acute as when he lost the fish, the
image remains in the mirror long after Norma has moved on:

al regresar a casa de forma imprevista, encontré a mi mujer en la cama con

otro hombre. Recuerdo que al abrir la puerta del dormitorio, lo primero
que vi fue a mí mismo abriendo la puerta del dormitorio; todavía hoy [...],
cada vez que entro desprevenido en ese dormitorio, el espejo del armario
me devuelve puntualmente aquella trémula imagen de la desolación, [...] la
certeza de haberlo perdido todo, incluso la propia estima. (EAB, p. 9)

Seer and seen, in a conflation of himself, the fish and Norma, Marés watches
himself in the aquarium and fantasises around projections of his own misery.
The partial mirror-image of the names Marsé–Marés tempt the reader to
wonder whether Marsé is not making an ironic comment on his own self-
obsession: on authors who speculate on themselves in endless narrative
games.

30 Marsé frequently uses the image of the scorpion which, when surrounded by
fire, is said to sting itself to death. Si te dicen que caí pp. 129, 174, 215 and El
embrujo de Shanghai pp. 84 and 96.
 El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), like La oscura historia, is a complex
first-person narrative. Marsé describes Susana as she is contemplated and
imagined by Daniel in a glassed-in gallery, moving as frenetically,
unproduc- tively, yet as fascinatingly as Tina, or a goldfish in a bowl:

desde la calle se la podía ver recostada entre muchos almohadones y

rodeada de afluvios aromáticos que humedecían la atmósfera y
emborronaban la vidriera, con su camisón lila o rosa y el pelo negro suelto
sobre los hombros, entretenida en pintarse las uñas con esmalte nacarado o
rojo cereza y leyendo revistas, a menudo escuchando la radio [...] y el sol
penetraba en la galería como en un acuario, bañando la pequeña cama.
(ES, pp. 31 and 39)

Susana has TB, and her aquarium offers security for convalescence.
However, it is also a ‘jaula de cristal’ (ES, p. 62). Trapped there, Susana is
vulnerable to both Daniel’s voyeurism initially, and later to El Denis’s desire
to take vengeance for Susana’s father’s cuckolding of him, by deflowering
Susana. At the same time, she can and does manipulate Daniel, and because
of her, El Denis meets a violent death. It is curious, then, that once improved
health and El Denis’s death release her from her gallery-prison and an
abusive relationship, of her own choice she retreats into another glass cage –
the cinema box-office. Daniel observes that:

ni ella ni el agujero que habitaba en el desierto vestíbulo parecían tener

relación alguna con el entorno, con el tráfico en la calle ni con los
apresurados viandantes, y ni siquiera parecía estar consciente de estar allí
metida, tan abstraída de todo y acaso ensimismada en la difícil renuncia de
lo que debía haber sucedido hace tiempo y no sucedió nunca. (ES, p. 191)

Whether Daniel reads her correctly or projects his own capacity to fanta-
sise on to her, what she symbolises for him, in her aquarium, is the starting-
point for narrative games in which she might or might not partici- pate, for
her voice is not heard: ‘Susana dejándose llevar en su sueño y en mi
recuerdo a pesar del desencanto, las perversiones del tiempo transcurrido,
hoy como ayer, rumbo a Shanghai’ (ES, p. 192).
What links the four novels I have discussed is the symbolism of
bedrooms, mirrors and aquariums – amorous encounters, performance and
vision/imagi- nation – all of which are present in Marsé’s very first novel,
Encerrados, and all of which serve as pointers to the complexity of this
author’s narrative games. What differentiates one from another is Marsé’s
experimentation with first-person narrators, moving from Andrés’ few
instants of direct perception, through the emergence of Paco as Marsé’s first
outright narrator arguing with Nuria over points of memory, imagination and
accuracy and projecting his desires and anxieties on to others, on to the
alternating third and first-person accounts of El amante. Then there is
Daniel’s complete and uncontested
narrative in El embrujo – uncontested, that is, until one considers his
inability to control the evocative yet elusive Susana. As interlocutors,
Marsé’s female figures can challenge the stories of the male narrators, but
they are open to seduction. As objects of a desiring male gaze, they exploit a
leeway for manipulation of the viewer. Either way, the intimate relationship
is rife with deception.
Discussion of the silent female figure Susana in Marsé’s much underesti-
mated El embrujo de Shanghai, will continue in Chapters 4 and 5 in the
context of Marsé’s imaginative exploration of biblical myth and icons.
Along with Tina, Montse and Norma, Susana remains in the reader’s
imagination as a curiously silent yet suggestive figure whose function is to
pose questions persistently, and persistently to deny definitive answers.
In the same way, Marsé challenges the critics, indirectly through silence
and performance, in his determination to exercise the language of freedom
open to the novelist. Critics come to his work and interpret it with an
ideolog- ical baggage of which they may be unaware or may deny, but which
he sets out to expose. Under dictatorship or democracy, coercive ideologies
are at work, and Marsé devises strategies which allow him freedom to shift
posi- tion, even to the point of subverting his initial narratorial privilege as
the voice of authority in the text. His success at defending his narrative play
area is a result of his determination constantly to take up transgressive
stances to guarantee a jealously-guarded autonomy – his own particular
identity. This he illustrates by Doctorow’s contention that

The novelist’s opportunity to do his work today is increased by the power

of the regime to which he finds himself in opposition. As clowns in the
circus imitate the aerialists and tightrope-walkers, first for laughs and then
so that it can be seen that they do it better, we have it in us to compose
false documents more valid, more real, more truthful than the ‘true’
documents of the politicians or the journalists or the psychologists.
Novelists know explicitly that the world in which we live is still to be
formed and that reality is amenable to any construction that is placed upon
it. It is a world made for liars and we are born liars. But we are to be
trusted because ours is the only profession forced to admit that it lies – and
that bestows upon us the mantle of honesty. (Doctorow, p. 232)

Marsé’s most recent novel, Rabos de lagartija (2000), offers one more
twist in the game of inventive storytelling – one which puts the narratorial
voice inside the aquarium and unequivocally reasserts the inventive power of
the storyteller in his own narrative play area. The first-person narrator, not
yet born, dreams in the warm fluid of his mother’s womb, and once expelled
into the world lies immobile, cared for by a cousin, unable even to speak
clearly but imaginatively creative. He gives us access to the mind of his
brother David, and together these two voices offer competing
interpretations of the
world outside. David’s visions draw on the fantasy world of the cinema 31 and
the drama of war: the Civil War, World War II climaxing in the bombing of
Hiroshima, and two questionable heroes – his father and an RAF pilot photo-
graphed on a magazine cover. David also lives amidst the silence and specu-
lation of repression in post-war Spain where nothing is certain. Civil Guards
prowl the beach at Mataró. Did David see an RAF plane plunge burning into
the sea or project fantasies derived from the magazine cover on to the scene?
The civil guards deny his story but David is not convinced:

Entonces qué pasa, jolín, por qué lo niegan, si están buscando ...
Abuela, ¿de verdad no has visto al avión inglés cayendo al mar? ¿Y el
abuelo tampoco lo ha visto?
Aquí nadie ha visto nada y te prohíbo que andes por ahí hablando del
avión inglés. (RL, p. 126)

Does the grandmother’s definite ‘el avión’ belie her denial or are we dealing
with David’s invention? His unborn brother foregrounds early on both
David’s subjectivity in narrative and, his own as ‘rapporteur’ of David’s
stories: ‘Lo que cuento son hechos que reconstruyo rememorando
confidencias e intenciones de mi hermano, y no pretendo que todo sea cierto,
pero sí lo más próximo a la verdad’ (RL, p. 20). Marsé has stated:

¿Quién hoy en día lee a Balzac o Dickens para conocer la Francia o el

Londres del siglo XIX? Nadie. A mí no me preocupa el Londres del XIX,
lo que me atrae es el Londres descrito, recreado por Dickens, aunque
después aparezca un historiador y exponga su escasa fiabilidad histórica.
Yo creo en el de Dickens. (quoted in Freixas, p. 35)

Challenging the notion of the ‘fiabilidad’ of those who witnessed historical

events, the unborn ‘author’ of Rabos declares – surely with a tongue-in-
cheek bow to his creator Marsé and Marsé’s reaffirmation of his language of
freedom in his narrative play area in the new millenium: ‘Lo que hará que
ese piojo se convierta a su debido tiempo en artista será precisamente la
ausencia de papá: se pasará la vida imaginándolo’ (RL, p. 56).

31 Among the films mentioned are The Four Feathers and the Sabu exotic adven-
tures.
 2
GAMES OF MAKE-BELIEVE:
PLAYING WITH HISTORICAL DISCOURSES

Having depicted critical discourse as a pliable toy in the narrative play

area in Chapter 1, I concluded that Marsé’s playful attitude to official
discourses leads to a provocative challenge to the notion of ‘fiabilidad
histórica’. History appears more intractable than literary criticism; in the
popular mind and among historians, the conviction remains strong that
history should and can be an accurate reconstruction of what has taken place
in reality: history deals in research and the quest for truth; literature deals in
imagination and fiction. Yet this is, of course, an oversimplification. Histo-
rians, like literary critics, may try to take an objective stance outside the
events they describe but at best the nature of the original events is uncertain,
and at worst selecting material and shaping a narrative betrays preconcep-
tions and ideological bias in historians as in critics. Moreover, in the post-
war Barcelona that Marsé depicts, any fact–fiction opposition has been
forever undermined by daily experience of the manipulation of information
for propagandist purposes. Marsé sets out to explore and exploit conflicting
historical discourses and present them as so many fictions vying with each
other in the play area of his own storytelling.
This chapter on Marsé’s games with historical discourses introduces as his
most straightforwardly historical work three as yet neglected volumes enti-
tled Imágenes y recuerdos. What Marsé does with history there will then
provide the basis for re-reading two novels which deal with the retelling of
history, but do so with playful allusion to detective fiction and autobiog-
raphy: genres concerned with uncovering truth and therefore particularly
appropriate for Marsé’s ironic games. In detective fiction, sleuths strip away
disguises and deceit to expose a crime and a criminal; in autobiography, a
subject purports to reveal – but often constructs – a self to present to the
reader. In Marsé’s novels, historical discourses become forms of disguise
and deceit. In Si te dicen que caí, which I discuss as detective fiction, the
rhetoric of the Falange Anthem alluded to in the title opens the way to a
parodic representation of Spanish National Catholic discourses. In El amante
bilingüe, Catalan Catholic Nationalist discourse is presented for scrutiny in
an alternating third- and first-person, Catalan and Castilian narrative that
questions the very nature of autobiography. Literary expectations are raised
52 ROSEMARY CLARK

only to be confounded as Marsé combines history and fiction in such a way

as to make each an ironic commentary on the other.

History and narrative

‘Historiography’, Hayden White argues, ‘is an especially good ground on
which to consider the nature of narration and narrativity because it is here
that our desire for the imaginary, the possible, must contest with the impera-
tives of the real, the actual.’ 1 White’s contrasting of actual and possible, real
and imaginary recalls the narrative games discussed in Chapter 1 and indeed,
he addresses the problem of how reliable representations of history can be
when narrative processes intervene between the events and their retelling.
White maintains that need not always constitute a narrative. Annals he
argues consist ‘only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence’.
Chronicles, in contrast, do take a narrative stance. Events are related in such
a way as to suggest direction and coherence, if not completeness: ‘While
annals represent historical reality as if real events did not display the form of
story, the chronicler represents it as if real events appeared to human
consciousness in the form of unfinished stories.’ In ‘history proper’ the
partial narrative viewpoint of chronicles becomes more obtrusive and the
presentation of events is completed by the narrator’s comments on their
significance: ‘The events must be not only registered within the chronolog-
ical framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to
say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not
possess as mere sequence’ (White, p. 5). The weakness in this argument is
that, even in annals, choice is active in the selection of some events, exclu-
sion of others, and manipulation of words on a page, all of which point to the
intervention of a chooser. Historiography is, then, even in its simplest form,
representation rather than reality, and the structural choices historians make
will affect the orders of meaning they instil into their narratives.
The form a narrative takes may also affect how it will be received.
Readers recognise precedents and expect to find again what they have
encountered before. Over time, narrative forms acquire content and meaning
associated with their specific characteristics. Beautiful people and
sentimentality; violence, interrogation and the piecing together of
information; the recounting of a life by the subject themselves: these signal
romance, crime and adventure or autobiography as clearly as stylised book-
jackets. Readers then bring to the text expectations associated with the genre.
If the historian’s duty is to his data, which must be presented in such a way
as to let it speak for itself, the knowing novelist can and does exploit the
conventions of genre to

1 Hayden
White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 4.
enhance, gloss, or undermine what the selection of material and the words them-
selves say.
David K. Herzberger suggests that novelists in Franco’s Spain seized on
the scope offered by fictional discourse as a means of undermining official
historiography:

While historiographers of the Regime seek to squeeze history into a tightly

constructed and monologically defined set of narrative strategies, writers
of fictions are able to controvert those strategies and assert dissonance
through a narrative set of principles of their own.2

Official historians are bound by what Doctorow calls ‘regime language’ to

promote the dominant ideology (see Introduction). Novelists can use a ‘lan-
guage of freedom’ and adapt their narration of the past to the requirements of
their storytelling – an activity designed to satisfy the reader: ‘to the historian the
past is the whole process of development that leads up to the present; to the
novelist it is a strange world to tell tales about.’3
As the comments from Rabos at the end of Chapter 1 showed, Marsé uses
history, but as a springboard for imagination. Refusing to be bound by
conventions of truthfulness, he sets out to explore the zone of
epistemological uncertainty where credibility usurps the authority of reality.
He once said: ‘a partir de cierto momento – que es lo que quiero conseguir –
se confunde la realidad con la ficción’ (quoted in Morino, p. 44). The
resulting game – literally ‘make-believe’ – is exemplified by the ‘aventis’ of
Si te dicen, where supposedly authentic children’s voices bear first-hand
witness to historical reality but also embroider it with fantasy and are them-
selves ultimately exposed as products of the distorting memory and imagina-
tion of the drunken adult Ñito. Like ‘aventis’, Marsé’s novelistic ‘make-
believe’ aims not to reveal what truly happened but to outplay existing
versions of events. Since versions offered by official historians as authorita-
tive and truthful can be shown to be outrageous in their inventiveness and
intention to deceive, Marsé’s fictions offer alternatives that deliberately,
unashamedly and playfully mix history with fantasy, falsehood and subjec-
tivity, claiming the freedom of false documents the better to parody
historical methodology, and exposing historical manipulation by self-
effacing but nonetheless powerful narrative voices: ‘historias inventadas que
se nutren de la memoria colectiva y mezclan la verdad verdadera con la
mentira mentidera’ (Por Favor, 11 September 1976). Marsé’s wordplay in a
satirical magazine underscores a belief in the relativity of knowledge – ‘true
truth’ as

2 David K. Herzberger, Narrating the Past. Fiction and Historiography in Post-

war Spain (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p.2.
3 Herbert Butterfield, The Historical Novel: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1924), p. 113.
opposed to just ‘truth’, and ‘lying lies’ as opposed to mere ‘lies’ – that typi-
fies his approach to the representation of history in fiction. It is in this narra-
tive play area of overt, unashamed inventiveness that he claims territory for
the novelist. By studying what he actually does with history, we shall get
beyond a preoccupation with a spurious realism to which he has never
aspired, and we shall realise the extent and complexity of the games he plays
through the ironic subtext on historical veracity that pervades his novels.

Imágenes y recuerdos: a history of the ephemeral

Marsé has commented that while preparing to write Si te dicen:

me estaba acercando mucho a la hemeroteca de periódicos buscando cosas

de los años 40, información que yo necesitaba. Y estaba con mucha
información. Y un día lo comenté con Carlos [Barral] y le dije ‘Estoy de
los años 40 hasta el gorro porque, como siempre me pasa, recojo como un
cien de información y utilizo a lo mejor un quince sólo. Pero me gusta
mucho por un lado, y por otro me cansa [...]. 4 Oye, aprovechando esto, si
hacemos un libro dedicado a los años 40.’
(In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995)

The result of this initiative is a kind of annals: three volumes, covering three
decades, entitled Imágenes y Recuerdos. Marsé collected material and wrote
the introductory texts to each section for 1929–1940: La gran desilusión,
and for 1939–1950: Años de penitencia, and he provided a prologue for a
third volume, 1949–1960: Tiempo de satellites.5 The books contain press
extracts, cinema posters, tickets, comics, postcards, cigarette cards and even
record- ings of songs and speeches on 45 rpm disks, shedding light on many
refer- ences obscure to any who did not live through the period
themselves and

4 Carmen Martín Gaite wrote of her own similar experience: ‘A raíz de la muerte
del general Franco, empecé a consultar esporádicamente algunos periódicos y revistas
de los años cuarenta y cincuenta, pero sin tener todavía una idea muy precisa de cómo
enfocar un asunto que inevitablemente me tentaba más como una divagación literaria
que como investigación histórica. En esta primera etapa, cuando estaba bastante más
interesada en la búsqueda de un tono adecuado para contar todo aquello que en el
análisis y la ordenación de los textos que iba encontrando, se me cruzó la ocurrencia de
una nueva novela, El cuarto de atrás, que en cierto modo se apoderaba del proyecto en
ciernes y lo invalidaba, rescatándolo ya abiertamente para el campo de la literatura’
(Usos amorosos de la posguerra española, Barcelona: Anagrama, 1987, p. 12).
5 The books’ full titles were Imágenes y recuerdos. 1939-1950: años de
penitencia; Imágenes y recuerdos. 1929-1940: la gran desilusión; and Imágenes y
recuerdos. 1949-1960: tiempo de satélites. Marsé features as author of the first two, and
José María Carandell of the third, with a prologue from Marsé, and ‘acotaciones
iconográficas’ by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Copies are held in the Biblioteca Nacional
in Madrid.
thereby providing a valuable source of information for readers of post-war
novelists.
As its title suggests, Imágenes y recuerdos is a collection of ephemera:
sounds and images on the retina and in the memory. As such, it stands in
marked contrast to the official historiography of the Franco regime in which
I would identify two characteristics. The first, a belief in an intrinsic,
timeless Spanish national character, means that ‘the importance attached to
“excep- tional men” and “saints and heroes” is closely tied to the essentialist
view of Spanish history in which the past is shaped by a cluster of salient
traits (an essential Spain, an essential man, archetypes, a way of being that is
inher- ently Catholic and Spanish)’ (Herzberger, p. 46).6 The second
represents history as linear and directional and looks to the past for
inspiration for the future. Listing dated precedents to reinforce a comforting
sense of fulfilling a triumphant destiny, a future Archbishop of Zaragoza
wrote in 1942:

Nos encontramos ante el hecho gloriosamente consumado mediante una

Cruzada imparejable, de un Nuevo Estado radicalmente distinto de aquel
anterior al 18 de julio de 1936 [...]. La misma cruz que enarboló don
Pelayo en los riscos de Covadonga (711), vencía en la batalla de las Navas
de Tolosa (1212) y brilló en las torres de Granada (1492), reconstruyendo
la unidad de una Patria y abriendo los caminos de un Imperio.
(Cantero Cuadrado, pp. 6 and 12)

One of Spain’s most prestigious historians, Marcelino Menéndez y

Pelayo, warned that loss of this crusading spirit would mean a return to the
Dark Ages:

España, evangelizadora de la mitad del orbe; España, martillo de herejes,

luz de Trento, espada de Roma, cuna de San Ignacio [...]; esa es nuestra
grandeza y nuestra unidad: no tenemos otra. El día en que acabe de
perderse, España volverá al cantonalismo de los Arévacos y de los
Vectones, o de los reyes de Taifa.7

Imágenes y recuerdos are chronological. Each volume covers roughly ten

years, and although Años de penitencia was published before La gran
desilusión, when taken in the order of the decades they describe, then
superfi- cially at least they suggest steady progress towards a better world.
There is a clear move away from disillusionment and economic depression
in the 1930s after the glittering but decadent 1920s, through a decade of
penitence with its distant hope of forgiveness and redemption, and on to the
technological mira-

6 Herzberger is quoting F. Morán, Explicación de una limitación (Madrid,

Taurus, 1971), p. 56. See Chapter 5, Illustration …..
7 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles, in
Obras Completas (Santander: CSIC, 1948).
cles of the 1950s. The organisation of material into chapters and use of docu-
mentary evidence contributes to a semblance of order. However, this is
eroded as Marsé subverts temporal sequencing and denies the forward march
of history by flash-focusing on topics vividly conveyed by pictures with rela-
tively brief texts that mix fact, fiction and even song, resist development or
direction, and instead celebrate the transitory. Readers cannot tell what is
true and what is not, while disturbing content in many images and texts
proves disconcerting. In a fictional frame, Marsé’s novels use much of the
same material, further blurring distinctions between documentary and
fiction, and in Imágenes, any initial impression of national progress over
three decades is undermined by a focus on fashion and cinema from outside
Spain, and by images of a reality in Franco’s Spain that is far from glorious.
Imágenes link public and private, state and family events:

se recogían los acontecimientos más importantes del año – tanto los

deportivos como los que tenían que ver con el mundo del espectáculo, el
cine; y más que una cosa política o sociopolítica, era para recoger
costumbres, la canción del año, y era un poco doméstico, e incluso familiar
[...]. [H]abía unas páginas dedicadas a la propia ama de casa para que
notara sus cosas personales, y para que pusiera incluso fotografías e
historias familiares. (In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995.)

Blank pages are included for personal additions, and by setting private
history alongside major public events and famous figures in politics, the
entertainment industry, and even the Church, they invite the general public
to see itself as part of Spain’s glorious National Catholic progress. However,
this juxtaposition also offers an ironic double-edged comment on the trivi-
ality of public spectacle and the presumption of private ambition: a view
supported by Marsé’s satirical parodies on media coverage of ‘major events’
in a fictional context in the ‘Información Gráfica de la Actualidad’ in Esta
cara (ECL, p. 8), and of social ephemera in Hola in Chapter II of La oscura
historia.
Imágenes mimic realist methodology, but because they date from the
1970s they can be read as an ironic retrospective comment on both the histo-
riography and the social realist fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. In a chapter
humorously entitled ‘Bajo el signo del piojo verde’, Marsé mimics the cheer-
fulness in the face of hardship promoted by the regime, but also paints a dark
picture of daily life alongside which the housewife’s triumphs on the blank
pages of an ‘anuario’ would look paltry indeed:

El hogar de español medio, al iniciarse la década de los cuarenta, en la

posguerra, tenía un invitado intempestivo y quisquilloso: el Piojo Verde
[...]. El Piojo Verde y el bacilo de Kock se aliaron en la posguerra para
aumentar aún más las angutias [sic] del pueblo. La chiquillería
incontrolada hablaba en la calle de los tuberculosos como de seres
 siniestros y fantasmales, como de vampiros que secuestraban y mataban a
los niños para beber su sangre. Se hablaba de desaparecidos, de detenidos,
de jóvenes viudas enlutadas que, cansadas de esperar al marido
desaparecido en el frente, escapaban de casa con sus amantes. En algunas
calles de las grandes ciudades había hombres derrotados, de un color de
ala de mosca, y en las esquinas el estraperlo de barras de pan y la
prostitución se hacía a pecho descubierto. (AP, p. 261)

Imágenes also acknowledge the readership’s desire for escapism in their

ironic celebration of the trivial and forgettable. A verse from a popular song
heading the page acknowledges a thirst for romance over reality that is
shared by romantic fiction and triumphalistic historiography:

Que no me quiero enterar

no me lo cuentes vecina,
prefiero vivir soñando
que conocer la verdad. (AP, p. 261)8

In these respects, because of their unashamed fascination with frivolity, tran-

sient charm, ephemeral sensual delight, fleeting humour and novelty, and
because they mimic the triumphalistic tone of official propaganda the better
to subvert it, Imágenes constitute a more radical refutation of Francoist
essentialist historiography than social realism could ever achieve.
‘Bajo el signo del piojo verde’ is subtitled ‘crónica familiar’, again with
ironic intent. Seven years after the publication of Años de penitencia, Marsé
would openly challenge a post-1975 ‘literatura de crónica’ that he saw as
prejudicial to the novel with his provocatively named La muchacha de las
bragas de oro. So-called ‘memorialist literature’ claimed to tell ‘the real
story’ of what had happened during the Franco years through personal testi-
monies refuting official versions of history. 9 Marsé’s attack is two-pronged:
first because Luys Forest, as ‘un cronista oficial del régimen, no es de fiar
cuando escribe la historia de este país – miente como un perro’ (Sinnigen, p.
117). Secondly, events are only part of the story; how they are perceived is
crucial: in White’s terms, ‘as if real events appeared to the human conscious-
ness in the form of unfinished stories’ (White, p. 5).
Marsé draws on personal experience in Imágenes, as he does in his
novels, but with the intention of giving readers a sense of how the world felt
in child- hood, not how it was:

8 Also quoted by Vázquez Montalbán in Crónica sentimental de una Transición

(Barcelona: Lumen, 1976), p. 22.
9 Two such works are Carlos Barral, Años de penitencia (Madrid: Alianza, 1975)
and Francisco Umbral, Memorias de un niño de derechas (Barcelona: Destinolibro,
1976).
 Deseé evocar con amplitud y profundidad mi infancia en el barrio, a aquel
chico con bufanda y botas claveteadas y relacionarlo con la noticia del
asesinato de Carmen Broto en la calle Legalidad y los dos o tres suicidios
que siguieron. Deseaba recorrer el barrio, la fiesta mayor, las batallas de
piedras, aquella sensación de que el tiempo estaba parado, de rechazo al
mundo de los mayores. (quoted in Beneto, p. 33)10

His own chronicles, like his novels, provide an intersection at which adult
nostalgia for the past meets with what Marsé would later call childhood
‘nos- talgia del futuro’ – a blend of the hope, dreams and yearnings that
colour vision before disillusionment sets in – a nostalgia he evokes at the
start of El embrujo de Shanghai (1993) in a quotation from Luis García
Montero’s Luna en el sur, and that he then explores throughout the novel:

La verdadera nostalgia, la más honda, no tiene que ver con el pasado, sino
con el futuro. Yo siento con frecuencia la nostalgia del futuro, quiero decir,
nostalgia de aquellos días de fiesta, cuando todo merodeaba por delante y
el futuro aún estaba en su sitio. (ES, p. 7)

With the future, the game would end as dis-illusionment set in. In Capitán
Blay’s words that start El embrujo: ‘los sueños se corrompen en boca de los
adultos’ (ES, p. 9).
The power to arouse strong responses and vivid memories of isolated
images and sounds is illustrated by one seemingly trivial piece of ephemera
which not only Marsé but Vázquez Montalbán and Martín Gaite all use as a
starting-point for explorations into their post-war past. Interpreted by the
legendary Conchita Piquer, the popular song Tatuaje was clearly a potently
suggestive symbol in the post-war landscape, drawing from each writer a
meditation more evocative of the time than any listing of events would be.
Tatuaje views the romantic image of a foreign sailor through a woman’s
empassioned gaze. It offers Vázquez Montalbán an opportunity to comment
drily on the distance between an ideal and a stark reality – the discrepancy
between a wealthy secular American culture accessed through film, and a
poverty-stricken National Catholic Spain:

alto y rubio como la cerveza [...] gallardo y altanero [...] el mítico, rubio,
alto marinero extranjero [...]: ¡Señores! En un momento en que la talla
media del homo hispanicus era el 1,58 y la brillantina abastecía el pequeño
derecho a ser Clark Gable todos los domingos. (Vázquez Montalbán, p.
24)

Vázquez Montalbán’s subsequent use of the song as the title of a detective

novel has drawn social and political readings from critics:

10 For further comment by Marsé on the autobiographical elements in Si te dicen see

also Colectivo Lantaba.
 Tatuaje tells the story of a tatooed cadaver that washes up on a Barcelona
beach, and of the probings of detective Carvalho not only into the back-
ground of the crime, but also and even more importantly, into the false
sentimental education from which the murder sprang, an education
symbolized by the lyrics of songs like “Tatuaje,” and the image cultivated
by singers like La Piquer.11

Martín Gaite discusses the song as a subversion of the moral teaching and
‘sentimental education’ of National Catholicism epitomised by the musical
tastes and romantic ideals of the Sección Femenina of Falange: ‘aquella
compota de sones y palabras – manejados al alimón por los letristas de
boleros y las camaradas de Sección Femenina – para mecer noviazgos
abocados a un matrimonio sin problemas, para apuntalar creencias y hacer
brotar sonrisas.’12 In Tatuaje, the treacherous kiss of the faithless sailor ‘se
convertía, en la voz quebrada de Conchita Piquer, en lo más real y tangible,
en eterno talismán de amor. Una pasión como aquélla nos estaba vedada a
las chicas sensatas y decentes de la nueva España’ (Martín Gaite, p. 154). As
such it performs ‘una misión de revulsivo, de zapa a los cimientos de
felicidad que pretendían reforzar los propagandistas de la esperanza. (Martín
Gaite, p. 152). To quote Vázquez Montalbán: ‘Las canciones populares,
porque las cantaba el pueblo, reflejaban unas creencias que, curiosamente,
nada tenían que ver con la superestructura moral que circulaba como una
nube inmensa sobre la geografía ibérica.’ (Vázquez Montalbán, p. 24)
In Imágenes, Marsé lists Tatuaje amongst other entertainments cheerfully
packaged to distract attention from real hardship:

los hombres y mujeres de esa España que había hecho la guerra civil,
escuchaba [sic] en sus casas el Diario hablado de Radio Nacional, el “ta-
ra-rí”, los primeros partidos de fútbol radiados por Matías Prats, el hombre
que había de restituir una épica al país, el serial radiofónico de Losada o el
“Taxi-Key”, la canción “Tatuaje” o el “Rasca-Yu” [...]. En el fondo, en
todos los hogares humildes, lo único que importaba era: ver de comer
mañana. No había otra ventana al exterior que la radio. (GD, p. 262)

However, the sailor reappears more menacingly in Si te dicen, against a

back- ground of apparently innocent entertainment under the protective eye
of the parish priests at the Fiesta Mayor, suggesting death and danger rather
than romance to the boy narrator:

Fue como una aparición fantasmal [...], un hombre alto y pálido que
avanzaba encorvado contra la noche; pudo ver un instante el brillo acerado

11 Patricia Hart, The Spanish Sleuth: the Detective in Spanish Fiction (London:
Associated University Presses, 1987), p. 84.
12 Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás (Barcelona: Destino, 1978), p. 151.
 de sus ojos, su abierto chaquetón azul de marinero y su alto pecho desnudo
y tatuado; asomaban rizos de oro bajo su boina y su barba era rubia como
la miel. (STD, p. 43)

He resurfaces among the clandestine opposition to Franco, the ‘maquis’.

Always in the background and never conclusively identified, he may be read
as a symbol of the continuing divisions within Spain. He is also purely a
fantasy figure in a game engaging the playful imagination of a bored child at
a church ‘fiesta’, just as it engages the adult imagination in Conchita
Piquer’s song of forbidden passions, revealing in these three writers’
dissident ‘crónica sentimental’ an underlying commentary on the lines
separating the permissible from the transgressive in National Catholic Spain.
In Imágenes, the disruption of the chronology typifying annals, and the
subordination of reason to sensibility that makes of them a ‘crónica
sentimen- tal’, are two ways in which Marsé moves towards what White
would call ‘history proper’. Past events are ‘narrated as well, that is to say,
revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not
possess as mere sequence’ (White, p. 5). With a flexibility that would be
taken up by the free narrative structures of Si te dicen where so much of the
same material reap- pears, Marsé chooses topics in such a way as to allow
allusion and irony to point up the divergence between official propaganda
and disturbingly conflictive images. In this way his critical ‘meaning’
becomes overt, as when he challenges the official depiction of a Spain’s
programme of national rebuilding in heroic defiance of World War II allies
angered at Franco’s collaboration with the Axis powers. A chapter entitled
‘Los frentes juveniles de Europa y los partisanos’ evokes the triumphalistic
‘muchachada adusta y arrogante, que, adoctrinada por el fascismo, gustaba
de desfilar con sus camisas de cuello desbrochado y mangas remangadas;
pechugones, altivos, con puñales al cinto, banderas desplegadas e himnos
triunfalistas’ (AP, p. 179). Within Spain:

En el colegio, los niños escribían a los soldados de la División Azul, que

luchaban en Rusia, y les enviaban dibujos y “aguinaldos” a través de la
Sección Femenina. En las esquinas abundaba el estampillado del Yugo y
las Flechas con las efigies de Franco y de José Antonio. Existían el
Auxilio Social y los Campamentos Juveniles. (AP, p. 262)

What Marsé underlines is the susceptibility of the young to the temptation of

image, using forceful language to describe their potential for corruption and
exploitation by those in power:

Sabido es que con la juventud se puede hacer todo, cualquier cosa; que su
imperiosa necesidad de seducir y dejarse seducir la inclina periódicamente
a prostituirse [...]. Los chicos de muchos países suspiraban por una camisa
 negra, un puñal en el cinto o unas botas claveteadas. Nadie les explicó que
detrás de toda esa fanfarria sólo había el horror y la muerte. (AP, p. 180)

He points up ironically that a uniform or boots, not any profound belief, fuel
this youthful enthusiasm, and in the transitoriness of the appeal lie the seeds
of disillusionment with the ideal behind it.
At times in Imágenes Marsé’s criticism is less direct, as when he chal-
lenges the regime’s monologic official mythology, with its notion of a Cath-
olic Crusade reaching back to the dawn of the nation’s history, by exploring
the ever-changing variety and diversity of voice in popular mythologies.
Against a stark background of Spanish post-war destruction and of
Germany’s defeat in Europe, he charts, tongue-in-cheek, the politically
prudent move away from the propagandist myths of compliant German
‘rubias y arias muchachas sobre la verde hierba, bajo el más puro cielo azul
en Agfacolor’ (AP, p. 179), and of stereotypical folkloric Spaniards favoured
by the Francoist media, towards new myths of an American Dream:

el cine no tardaría, a pesar de las ‘españoladas’ como complemento de

programa, en sentar las bases de una nueva mitología de emergencia,
provi- sional, parcialmente truncada en el 45: porque no había de quedar
de la Ufa ni el recuerdo de los fieles compinches de los días de gloria en
Agfacolor; quedaría el Clark Gable, la Bette Davis, el Gary Cooper …
(AP, p. 262)13

Marsé uses ‘mito’, ‘mitología’ and ‘mítico’ in his novels to denote relative,
transitory, often seriously flawed, but always beguiling enthusiasms. In
Ultimas tardes, which Marsé describes as ‘la historia de dos mitos, la
fricción de dos mitos’ (quoted in Sinnigen, p. 114), Maruja is a victim of
‘otro mito romántico de la universitaria, otra leyenda dorada de un
progresismo mal entendido’ (UTT, p. 123). Spain’s 1960s economic boom
brings with it ‘míticas suecas’ (PM, p. 180) who people the erotic dream
lives of the Barce- lona youth, and Montse falls victim to ‘uno de los mitos
más sarcásticos que pudrieron el mundo’ (PM, p. 7) – the Claramunts’
Catholic ‘idea mítica del mal’ (PM, p. 103). In both Imágenes and Si te
dicen, popular mythology forms part of Marsé’s ‘history proper’ precisely
because the structures and meanings it allows to proliferate provide a cogent
opposition to univocal, official historiography.
Marsé once described as follows the fruitful interaction between history
and fiction in narrative, in this case in Si te dicen:

13 ‘Esta crónica sentimental se escribe desde la perspectiva del pueblo, de aquel

pueblo de los años cuarenta que sustituía la mitología personal heredada de la guerra
civil por una mitología de las cosas: el pan blanco, el aceite de oliva, el bistec de cien
gramos [...]. La mitología del racionamiento [...]. El AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE aún
no estaba al alcance de los españoles. Pero la mitología sí.’ (Vázquez Montalbán,
pp.15 and 83).
 Existió una prostituta rubia platino, mítica para nosotros en aquella época,
que fue asesinada en el invierno del 49. Pero, al mismo tiempo que recojo
esta parte de la crónica, recojo también toda la mitología que se fue
tejiendo alrededor de este hecho, hasta el punto que, a partir de cierto
momento – que es lo que quiero conseguir – se confunde la realidad con la
ficción. (quoted in Morino, p. 44)

Faced with the uncertainty of reality ‘as it happened’, fictionalised history

becomes a telling, retelling and recreation of stories. The benefits that fiction
derives from the zone of uncertainty where credibility usurps the authority of
reality become evident when history comes into contact with existing literary
genres in works where the assumptions of both elements are brought under
scrutiny. The scrutiny is playful, but its mocking humour will prove a
powerful element in Marsé’s critique of the religious discourses that pervade
post-war official historiography.

Si te dicen que caí as an historia de detectives

In what seems an unlikely pairing, Marsé’s depiction of post-war Barce-

lona in Si te dicen que caí considers Spanish National Catholicism in a
narra- tive that owes structures, tone and much of its tension to detective
fiction: an ideology strong on morality in a fictional genre dedicated to
crime. Yet it is precisely his use of the literary subtext of the ‘novela negra’,
serving as a powerful weapon to subvert the National Catholic
historiography of the Francoist state, that gives this remarkable novel its
force. To subvert state propaganda would be daring enough, but to associate
the Catholic Church, which claims to speak with the voice of God and to
promote moral values, with a form of literature centred on crime and the
criminal mind, has a shock value, especially when the Church itself is
brought under investigation. The shock is intensified as the reader realises
that Marsé suggests an alliance between the Spanish Catholic Church and
the Nationalist regime that impli- cates the Church in State repression and
shows it colluding in crime in the immediate post-war years.
Others of Marsé’s works have already been considered as detective fiction,
notably Un día volveré (1982) (Hart) and Ronda del Guinardó (1984).14 In
addition, Historia de detectives (1987), in Teniente Bravo, is Marsé’s own
playful parody of the genre, whose child protagonist, David Bartra, returns
as sleuth in Rabos de lagartija (2002). However, a preoccupation with
‘aventis’ as a clever narrative device and means of exploring
representations of the

14 Georges Tyras, ‘L’inspecteur et son corps du délit’, Erotisme et Corps au

XXème Siècle, Hispanística XX, 9, Dijon: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches
Hispaniques du XXème Siècle de l’Université de Bourgogne, 1992), pp. 237-51.
Franco years has monopolised discussion on Si te dicen while, in my view,
Si te dicen que caí is Marsé’s first experiment with the processes of
detection, not in a quest for truth, but as an ironic parody of the official
historiography whose rhetoric he constantly borrows.
Si te dicen contains all the key elements of detective fiction, but in such
chaotic profusion that the reader is denied the final revelation of truth
expected in the genre and is forced to ask if the novel is not, perhaps, an
elab- orate joke. This is a genre associated with order and clarity, yet Marsé
creates confusion. Crimes abound and so do investigators as the principle
sleuth, Java, gathers around him a band of subordinates led by Sarnita. The
model of the structure of a detective novel that Tyras applies to Ronda del
Guinardó can equally apply to Si te dicen. Tyras explains that the typical
detective narrative has three parts: ‘le texte fonctionne comme un récit
présent lancé à la poursuite d’une histoire absente, qu’il s’agit de restituer en
fin de parcours narratif’ (Tyras, p. 238). A crime is committed (the récit
absent), then inves- tigated (the récit présent), and finally reconstructed in a
process that Tyras represents in a simple diagram:

I - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I------------------------I-----------------------I

[Récit absent] Récit présent Récit rapporté

R1 R2 R1

What this model reveals, in its separation of the ‘récit absent’ and ‘récit
rapporté’ as discrete versions of the same story, is the space created for
discrepancies between them (Tyras, p. 238). In Si te dicen, Sarnita’s voice in
the outer frame (‘récit présent’) echoes other voices in an inner past frame
(‘récit rapporté’), and together they exploit that potential for falsification,
posing the reader the impossible task of reconstructing a long obscured – and
indubitably deceitful – ‘récit absent’.
The Church is daringly implicated at every level of the story, aligned with
representatives of the Regime and lending itself to collaboration in crime.
The ‘parroquia’ is seen to function as a centre for the control and indoctrina-
tion of the young. A symbolic association is repeatedly established between
military and ecclesiastical power by means of two pictures: one, a scene of
battle and slaughter, appears in the palace of the Bishop of Barcelona and in
the apartment of the crippled war hero Conrado Galán (STD, pp. 14 and 85);
the other, which is even more ubiquitous, shows an execution by a military
firing squad with a priest looking on (STD, pp. 14, 21, 88, 199, 204). In
addi- tion, both the soldier Galán and the Bishop are linked to a criminal
under- world through their sexual attraction to, and manipulation by, the boy
prostitute Java. And like a leitmotiv introduced by the title Si te dicen que
caí, the Falange rhetoric of death in battle, linked with the Christian
Doctrine of
the Fall, shapes the novel’s narrative structure and suggests disturbing
conclusions. I shall discuss biblical myths of the Fall further in Chapter 3 in
relation to the ‘novela rosa’, in Chapter 4 in connection with Paradise
Garden myths, and in Chapter 5 when I study icons associated with the Fall.
Suffice it to say here that Marsé finds in the Fall a potent and dangerous
story for his narrative games, and in Si te dicen, its dark rhetoric is a
powerful element in his evocation of a sinister post-war city. In Champeau’s
words:

il ne s’agit pas dans ce roman de la mort glorieuse des soldats nationalistes

sur les champs de bataille mais d’une chute dégradante: celle de tout un
peuple corrompu et prostitué. Cette citation introduit une référence
explicite au franquisme dont elle ne rapporte le discours que pour le
subvertir. (Champeau, p. 359)

To the extent that ‘Le titre nous propose un fil directeur pour circuler dans ce
labyrinthe: le thème de la chute’ (Champeau, p. 360), and that thread repre-
sents a downward movement into the hellish world of post-war repression,
the Church’s message is exposed as appallingly pessimistic. The fact that the
Church is then seen to collude in the underworld life in hell, is a denial of its
mission of redemption and also runs contrary to the optimistic notions of
law, order and justice implicit in the rooting out of crime in detective fiction.
Problems reconstructing crimes start with the corpse – or corpses. Many
deaths are attributable to continuing warfare between Regime and Resis-
tance. However, the ‘puta roja’ and the drowned man are posited as
problem- atic and give rise to multiple investigations. In the case of the
drowned man, there is no real mystery as to how he died or who he is,
though mystery is generated for a time by the withholding of his name,
which points up the differences which have kept us from recognising him
immediately: the family that has replaced prostitution; the apparent wealth
after earlier poverty; and the bitter hostility in his erstwhile admirer, Sarnita,
that climaxes when Sarnita feeds Java’s viscera to the hospital dogs. 15 The
mystery to be solved, then, is how the child became the man that he did, and
what part he played – if any – in the death of the ‘puta roja’. And there is
also the irony that all his early ingenuity, ambition and scheming have led
only to the mortuary slab and a crude disembowelling.
Concerning the second problematic corpse, four names and numerous
stories are proffered about what might be one or four characters, denied indi-
vidual identity by the collective title ‘puta roja’. Whoever she is – or they are
– the search for her, as one critic points out, draws all the characters in the
book together in a speculative investigation which purports to establish her
identity and ponder reasons for her death, as is typical in a detective novel
(Gould Levine, p. 313). Yet, in effect confusion is merely intensified. Her

15 II Kings 9 describes the faithless Jezebel being eaten by dogs.

body manifests in stark detail the impact of life during and after the Civil
War, subsuming in one person the unremittingly harsh experiences of many.
She is, in fact, a victim of both sides in the conflict. Pursued as an anarchist
by the Catholic soldier Galán and ex-Falangist, Justiniano, she is robbed by
the ‘maquis’ as a rich man’s callgirl. Grotesquely humiliated in Conrado
Galán’s sado-masochistic tableaux, dressed in his military cloak and insignia
to symbolise the Glorious Crusade that crippled him, as a servant she also
has to satisfy the sexual appetites of the Baroness’s sons, while as a
prostitute she performs the same service for Java’s ex-‘maquis’ brother and
for Java himself. When she is killed, no-one knows which side did it, or
whether it was bad luck in the form of an unexploded shell. The scar on her
breast that tantalises Java may or may not be where a piece of microfilm was
implanted during the war, but while danger seems to circulate in her blood
like a disease, she is too fascinating to ignore and too dangerous to be
allowed to live.
In addition, the title ‘puta roja’ indicates transgression against both Church
and Francoist State. Her life of promiscuity and sexual perversion are in
direct opposition to the Catholic ideals of Virgin then Mother, and as a ‘red’
herself and niece of the anarchist Artemi Nin, she represents past and present
opposition to the National Catholic Crusade. The narrator Sarnita, and the
voices in his memory, ironically echo the pejorative title as their
imaginations feast on violent and erotic images of an elusive and alluring
female figure in what are at times childish, but nonetheless perverse,
imitations of Conrado Galán. Therefore, she is pursued both by the Church
which claims to want to reform her, and by the Regime which accuses her of
complicity in a murder, and her pursuers in both cases are the same people:
the Señora Galán and her son – active churchgoers and supporters of the
victorious regime; and the ‘detectives’ they use to track her down. If a
murderer is to be sought, both institutions deserve investigation. The Church
is inscribed in the narrative in such a way as to be implicated in the crime at
every level. The Capilla Expiatoria de las Animas del Purgatorio is the
meeting place of all the groups involved, and its name adds an ironic
comment on the penitential conditions of post-war National Catholic Spain.
As a ruin it evokes the crushing defeat inflicted on a population that resisted
Franco’s armies to the end, whose chil- dren play perverse games in the
ruins. As the church that will rise from the rubble, it represents the
triumphant rebuilding projects undertaken by the Church and the Regime
together, headed by the bishop, Gregorio Modrego y Casáus.16

16 In a homage to Modrego by his clergy we read: ‘De verdadero milagro podría

calificarse la asombrosa resurrección de los templos parroquiales barceloneses, casi
todos ellos calcinados por las llamas de la revolución marxista.’ Labor Pastoral de un
gran pontificado (Barcelona, 1962), p. 138. The writers claim that by 1962, a total of
318 churches had been built, rebuilt or repaired.
 The bishop in Si te dicen greets the boy prostitute, Java, with the memo-
rable line: ‘Llámame Gregorio’. The allusion is not precise, but Marsé
allows inference to take the place of fact, hinting rather than stating – as he
does when Gregorio waltzes with Java in a burlesque scene that is hardly
erotic, though the implication is there, and farcical enough to divert criticism
– almost. Behind it lie rumours concerning the bishop’s sexuality and
possible involvement with criminal elements in the city, but they remain
rumours and as such capable of giving the imagination – and the novelist –
the freedom to invent.17
In place of the revelation of actual or historical truth, what Si te dicen
offers is a series of ‘aventis’ which explore the limits of make-believe.
Readers are no wiser at the end of the novel as to the identity of the ‘puta
roja’, the cause of her death or the identity of her murderer(s), but many
imaginative options have been put forward. Critics have often argued that
the evocation of harsh post-war conditions is so vivid because the
withholding of information makes the text hard to read and engages the
reader in an active and absorbing process of enquiry. The withholding of
information is seen as a link between Un día volveré and detective fiction:
‘There is always some- thing we thought would be revealed in the book that
never quite is, and perhaps it is with the matter of this sensation of the
question unanswered that Marsé’s fundamental connection to the novel of
intrigue or detection lies’ (Hart, p. 183). But the link has not been made with
Si te dicen. One critic comments: ‘The novel reflects upon itself as narrative
by setting up the tradi- tional patterns of a “readerly text” only to subvert
them’ (Garvey, p. 377), but fails to perceive that detective fiction might be
one such traditional pattern. Another analyses the shifting kaleidoscopic
patterns that playfully promise a resolution of enigmas and then disappoint
the reader’s expectations, but she too misses the literary irony of using a
genre dedicated to truth in order to subvert the search for that truth:

17 Presenting at second, or even third hand, stories as colourful as his fiction,

Marsé has commented: ‘Es una historia que nos contó Jaime Gil, sobre un chorizo del
Barrio Chino, un chorizo que Jaime pescaba por la noche en el Barrio Chino, un chaval
muy simpático, del sur, también, que trabajaba de camarero, no sé, muy guapo, muy
simpático, pero que me parece que un poco fantasioso, pero de todos modos, algo
debía de haber de verdad. Y según él, el doctor Modrego y Casáus ..., pues era
homosexual y tenía esas historias.’ He added that Modrego was rumoured to own a
taxi company, and also that the murderer of the original ‘puta roja’, Carmen Broto
(now a personal friend of Marsé’s), when questioned in court, replied: ‘Pregunten al
obispo de Barcelona’. More interesting than the truth for our understanding of the
novel, however, are Marsé’s final words: ‘Pero todo eso es un maremagnum
insondable, ¿sabes? En fin, una investigación a fondo para saber hasta dónde está la
verdad y la mentira, yo no lo he hecho porque – bueno, porque no me ha interesado
para nada en concreto [...]. Para la novela lo que yo necesitaba era el rumor, ¿sabes?’
(In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995).
 Sarnita le dice a Sor Paulina, ‘todo acaba por saberse,’ para nosotros, esto
no es verdad. Marsé sistemáticamente nos niega la posibilidad de llegar a
una respuesta total a estas preguntas y nos frustra con la mezcla de
‘mentiras mentideras’ y ‘verdades verdaderas’ que hay en la obra.
(Gould Levine, p. 316)

Champeau, on the other hand, links Marsé’s allusions to the Fall with
detective fiction when she acknowledges an interaction between religion and
popular culture. She indicates how National Catholic ideology might try to
use literary genre only to find that, in the hands of a Marsé, genre can be
used to subvert its ideology:

s’il [Si te dicen] utilise le mythe de la descente aux enfers, c’est pour briser
les mécanismes d’une problématique manichéenne reposant sur
l’opposition du Bon et du Méchant à partir de laquelle Franco lui-même
interprétait l’histoire. C’est l’idéologie que véhicule aussi les formes de
récit de la ‘culture de masse’ – roman et film policier, film d’aventure,
bande dessinée – dont on connaît le rôle sous le franquisme et qui constit-
uent le bagage culturel des narrateurs ‘d’aventis’. (Champeau, p. 372)

Not only is the Church depicted in Si te dicen as supporting the Regime and
sharing its corruption, but its imprint is found even in a popular culture
compromised by its subtle infiltration: in this instance, represented by the
Doctrine of the Fall. I would add that by framing Si te dicen as detective
fiction, Marsé employs its conventions of investigation and exposure as an
ironic comment on techniques of obfuscation employed by State and
Church. He himself is not afraid to bring ideology into his narrative play
area, as a toy in his own games. If, for a moment, we consider Java’s fatal
fall as symbolic, other similar deaths come to mind in preceding works –
Palmita Pérez killed in a fall from a motorbike (ECL); Maruja tripped up by
her new sandals (UTT); Montse’s suicidal fall from a bridge – and all these
instances fit a model of punishment for transgression of social and moral
boundaries: pride, then a fall. In my view, the extent to which Marsé’s
novels employ religious subtexts in this way and admit readings that explore
ideological infiltration in popular literature has barely been addressed till
now. My discussion of reli- gious subtexts in detective fiction and
autobiography in this chapter, and in the ‘novela rosa’ in Chapter 3, at least
represents a start in this area of study.

Autobiography and reconstructing the self in El amante bilingüe

We have seen how the title Si te dicen que caí brings together the
Catholic Doctrine of the Fall and the rhetoric of the Falange anthem in a
detective story whose uncertain outcome is ironically prefigured in the
uncertainty of ‘Si ...’. In the case of El amante bilingüe, when the title is
taken together with
the icon of Catalonia’s patron saint, George fighting the dragon (discussed
further in Chapter 5), that is central to the autobiographical third ‘cuaderno’
and to the novel as a whole as twenty-third of forty chapters, the novel’s
association with autobiography becomes problematic. The duality of the
bilingual lover is echoed in the duality of George and the dragon, and in
both, Catalan confronts ‘charnego’ in a battle for dominance that has sinister
impli- cations for individual or national integration. The title raises some
positive expectations: perhaps the bilingual lover is a symbol of integration
and harmony across linguistic boundaries in a Catalonia confident of its
ability to handle cultural diversity within its frontiers. The fact that the
author is himself a bilingual Catalan, and is linked to the novel’s
protagonist–autobi- ographer by a partially palindromic, or reversed mirror-
image of the Marés/Marsé surname, raises further hopes of new insights on
problematic questions of personal and national identity. The inclusion of
three apparently autobiographical ‘cuadernos’ narrated by Marés in the first
person promises self-revelation that may reasonably be expected to shed
light on the bilingual lover of the title, and perhaps offer insights on the
author. However, expecta- tions are repeatedly thwarted as the reader is
forced to ponder whose story this may be.
What the novel does in its main third-person narrative is trace the disinte-
gration of an individual, Marés, mirrored in the confounding of his language.
The suggestion that the decidedly comic phonetically transcribed (and
thereby denaturalised on the page) conflation of Catalan and southern
Spanish that ends the novel might represent a viable alternative to a
Catalan/Castilian confrontation would be hard to defend. Resina gives
empassioned voice to Catalanist criticism of Marsé and eighty-nine other
‘Barcelona writers and intellectuals’ who in 1997, under the title ‘Foro
Babel’:

produced a document intended to disable the announced reform of the

language law […]. Foro Babel claims that it stands for bilingualism,
although, in consonance with its name, it promotes at best diglossia and at
worst division.

In an emotive attack on the legitimacy of such language, Resina asks:

what form should compromise take between a language brought to the

brink of extinction and the claims of those speakers of the dominant
language who wish to maintain the pressure on the vernacular? A bastard-
ized language, already audible in the substandard Catalan used by most
speakers […]?

Foreshadowing the formation of ‘Foro Babel’, Marés’ language catas-

trophe recalls the bible story about Babel: another myth of a Fall, which tells
how the people built a tower to climb to heaven, were cast down and were
punished for their presumption by losing the unity and strength they had had
in a single language (Genesis 11.1–9). The ‘cuadernos’ take three apparently
random episodes from Marés’ past that seem unrelated to their immediate
context and function as playfully voyeuristic experiments with
autobiography using mirrors, masks and shifting identities. The effectiveness
of these exper- iments is intensified by linguistic shifts from bilingualism –
or diglossia – to an explosion of language, that invites the reader both to
enjoy playing with the diversity of the medium and to speculate on the
potential for treachery in games of supposed self-exposure through language.
The Spanish Real Academia’s Diccionario de la Lengua Española
defines autobiography simply as the ‘Vida de una persona escrita por ella
misma’. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary appears to add little in ‘The
writing of one’s own history; the story of one’s life written by himself’. 18
However, for readers accustomed to Marsé’s deceptive narrators, the words
‘own history’ suggest possible manipulation of information – one’s own
version of events to fit a personal agenda – while the dislocation implicit in
the juxtapo- sition of ‘one’s life’ and ‘himself’ – why ‘himself’, not
‘oneself’? – opens the way to an exploration of a split between narrator and
narrated self which forms the basis of Marsé’s experimentation with the
genre, and with Catalonia’s confused identity, in El amante bilingüe.19
El amante is not Marsé’s first experiment with autobiography. As I
suggested in Chapter 1, the emergence of first-person narrators in his early
novels creates an illusion, at least, of ‘writing the self’ within a fictional
frame. However, by Si te dicen, the narrative voice has become so frag-
mented as often to be unidentifiable, and this foretaste of the erosion of a
unified, fixed identity culminates in the self-destructively divided character
of Juan Marés in El amante bilingüe. Here, the return of an alternating third-
and first-person narration emphasises even more strongly than in
Encerrados the dislocation between different projections of self, and
between the many selves of masquerade, and in that respect, El amante takes
a final step

18 Diccionario de la Lengua Española (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1984).

Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
19 Ruth Christie points out that even more traditional concepts of the genre show
some uncertainty as to whether the subject matter is some essential self that transcends
and stands outside experience, or whether experience shapes that self and therefore the
two are inseparable. She sums up her comparison of ‘essentialist’ concepts and those
which take experience into account as follows: ‘The ‘yo’ of autobiographical writing
refers traditionally, then, either to the writer, […] of the history or story, who is the
sum of his experience, or to the essential and unchanging self that lies behind, and has,
the experiences. Either way, it refers to the voice which transcends and authorises as it
speaks.’ Quoted from The Scripted Self: Textual Identities in Contemporary Spanish
Narrative (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1995), p. 73.
towards the subversion, rather than the affirmation, of the self who writes the
self.
To consider how Marsé writes himself into his novels reveals his interest
in games of illusion and the subversion of trust. For example, there is much
of Marsé in Andrés Ferrán, whose experience and sensations as a jeweller’s
apprentice – described in knowing detail – reflect the author’s own time in
the job,20 and I have called Encerrados Marsé’s most autobiographical novel
because it mirrored his formative experience on military service when
writing was a game born of erotic imagination in idleness. Similarly, in La
oscura historia (and Si te dicen) Marsé vividly evokes the life of the
‘parroquia’ of Las Ánimas del Purgatorio from personal experience, while
his narrator, Paco, like Marsé, goes to Paris for a liberating taste of life
outside Franco’s Spain in the subversive world of French cinema. And in La
oscura historia, bilingualism – a fact of life for Marsé – has emerged as a
contentious issue in his writing as the unbelieving half-Andalusian half-
Catalan Paco confronts a Catalan Catholic bourgeoisie which half-accepts
and half-excludes him on the basis of religion, nationality, language and
class. Clearly neither Andrés nor Paco is Marsé, but one might argue that the
author creates identities he may plausibly assume, with his dark, southern
appearance, ‘charnego’ friends and command of both languages. The illusion
of a narrator/narratee duality is equally strong in Si te dicen and Historia de
detectives, where Marsé inserts his own pre-adoption names – Roca and
Faneca – and Juanito Marés, among the gangs of boys who roam the streets
of post-war Barcelona, peopling it with their fantasies and with Juan Marsé’s
memories.
This use of his own identity should never be taken at face value, of
course, but as a game of make-believe. In the case of Marsé’s provocatively
‘machista’ casting of himself in Ultimas tardes – ‘bajito, moreno, de pelo
rizado, y siempre anda metiendo mano’ – giving Teresa ‘en las nalgas un
pellizco de maestro, muy lento, pulcro y aprovechado’ (UTT, p. 252), his
enjoyment of the joke is evident in the self-indulgent description. A later
comment, legitimising the episode as a literary experiment in blurring reality
and fiction, therefore has an ironic ring, as if the writer is taunting critics to
call his bluff and challenge his attitude. Yet, in commenting ‘me introduzco
yo mismo como personaje – el tocón en el baile de barrio – y ahí hago
desaparecer las famosas distancias entre el material que uno trabaja y el
novelista’ (quoted in Morino, p. 42), Marsé opens the way for games of
shape-changing and shifting identities, and for the projection of himself into,
and through, his writing, which follows a model of autobiography that does
not aim to reveal an authentic self, which may well not exist, but instead sets

20 This is also the job awaiting Daniel in El embrujo.

about creating new selves in, and through, writing.21 As Marsé said about
Manuel Reyes: ‘hay una proyección personal no de lo que soy, sino de lo
que me gustaría ser, que es otro asunto […]. Es un sueño lumpen que yo he
tenido’ (quoted in Freixas, p. 54). What we in fact have here is a licence for
an authorial intervention that is autobiographical in its revelation of the
desires and dreams of the author, but also an embryonic form of play-acting
games with mirrors, masks and masquerade that is brought to a
carnivalesque peak in El amante.
El amante bilingüe engages with history at a moment of critical intensity
in Catalonia’s re-creation of its past, present and its future self during
Spain’s transition and a powerful reassertion of Catalan national identity,
and these aspects of the novel will be examined further in Chapter 5.
However, by linking its search for its identity with that of Marés, and by
centring reflection on the processes involved on this ambiguous and
ambivalent, as well as bilin- gual, character, Marsé shifts the emphasis from
the political and social and locates it instead in the personal terrain of the
disintegrating mind of an unre- liable individual engaged in attempts
endlessly to rewrite the self.
I have remarked that Marsé’s rewritings of the past deliberately disrupt
linear time and narrative, together with the order and meaning those imply.
The ‘cuaderno’ episodes in El amante are dated 1975, followed by 1941,
then 1943, and this disordered chronology colludes with their uneven
distribution in the text – in Chapters I and VII in the first part, and in Chapter
III (sixteen chapters later) in Part 2 22 – to provide a provocative counterpoint
to the third-person account of Marés’ gradual decadence: three moments out
of time. And yet, the dating of the first episode – which recounts Marés’
discovery of his wife ‘in flagrante’ – in the month and year of Franco’s
death, on ‘Una tarde lluviosa del mes de noviembre de 1975’, both roots it
in ‘offi-

21 The editors of The Scripted Self write in their introduction: ‘underlying many
contemporary novels written in Spain is a concern with questions of identity, self, and
the relationship of these to narrative writing […]. The idea […] that the self is not
given, but is in some measure constructed, permeates contemporary narratives, and
results in explorations of possible, alternative, and multiple selves, stories we tell
about ourselves or which others impose on us. The self can thus often appear as the site
of competing narratives’ (Christie, Drinkwater and Macklin, pp. 1 and 11).
22 To give dates and simultaneously disrupt their order is typical of Marsé. In La
oscura historia, Paco’s return is not dated. The first dates given are 1957–8 (PM, p. 16)
and 1958 (PM, p. 20) from posters in the centro parroquial. Mention of the Volem bisbes
catalans campaign and the march of a hundred priests in Barcelona in protest against
police torture of students (PM, p. 47) allow the date 1966 to be put to Paco’s return. Then
his narrative goes back to the period 1944–47 (PM, pp. 52–3) when contact between his
mother and the Claramunts was renewed. Of Si te dicen, see Diane Garvey on Marsé
‘setting up the traditional patterns of a “readerly” text only to subvert them’ in relation to
time (Garvey, p. 377). Champeau suggested that Marsé’s aim was to ‘semer le doute et
[...] ébranler les certitudes. Ce qui est significatif ici, ce n’est pas l’ordre mais le désordre’
(Champeau, pp. 364–6).
cial’ history and allows the ironic hint of at least a symbolic coincidence
between the two occurrences. Both may be perceived as catastrophes: by the
political right and by Marés. Yet they also offer liberation: most obviously
for opposition groups including Catalan Nationalists and Norma, but also,
paradoxically, for Marés since Norma’s defection marks the end of a sham
marriage and releases him from social constraints into an existence that will
be of his own making.
Such claims as Marés’ ‘cuadernos’ make to be autobiographical must be
suspect as history in that they play shamelessly on the reader’s sympathies,
evoking painful memories of his brief and catastrophic relationship with
Norma Valentí, and of early adolescence. In an exercise in self-pity, Marés
says in the first: ‘Para guardar memoria de esa desdicha, para hurgar en una
herida que aún no se ha cerrado, voy a transcribir en este cuaderno lo
ocurrido aquella tarde’ (EAB, p. 9). In the second – a glimpse into his child-
hood home – he says: ‘Dejo escritos aquí estos recuerdos para que se salven
del olvido. Mi vida ha sido una mierda, pero no tengo otro’ (EAB, p. 37).
The third is an impassioned address to Norma herself, depicting
simultaneously the yearnings of the adult Marés for a paradise that never
was (nostalgia del pasado), and the child’s yearning for a paradise that never
will be (nostalgia del futuro), in a powerfully dreamlike conflation of times:
‘Estamos en 1943, tú aún no has nacido, amor mío […]. Estoy hablando de
Villa Valentí, el paraíso que me estaba destinado, perdona la pretensión, y en
el que tú nacerías cuatro años después’ (EAB, p. 125). The prototypical
autobiograph- ical novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, similarly takes the form of a
plea for under- standing framed in retrospect. Lázaro’s ‘caso’ traces his life
showing how one thing led to another, in a process of cause and effect, to
produce a situa- tion that can only be properly evaluated in the light of what
has led up to it: what may seem to be a descent into moral corruption, he
argues, can also be presented as a social rise. In El amante, the third-person
narration charts the dissolution of Marés’ identity in a downward spiral of
decadence, drunken- ness and effective schizophrenia, and mimics Lázaro’s
descent; the ‘cuadernos’ do not, however, even attempt to depict a
corresponding rise, only an obsession with the past and three attempts at
rewriting the self.
The ‘cuadernos’ offer not revelation, or an unveiling, but three images of
illusion: the mirror, the mask and the theatre. As the novel unfolds, illusion
becomes so powerful in Marés’ life that it spills over from the ‘cuadernos’
into the present and threatens to destroy reality itself through a deconstruc-
tion of the writer. Marés’ own image in the mirror in the first, the masks he
wears as the ‘guerrero del antifaz’ in the second, and his performance as
contortionist–actor in the third, all play their part in shaping, and un-making,
the ‘amante bilingüe’, and the reader is forced by a playful, carnivalesque
pushing of conventional boundaries to ask to what lengths bold autobiog-
raphy can go.
In the first ‘cuaderno’, Marés views himself caught as an image in a mirror
in the instant he faces irrefutable evidence of his wife’s adultery. Thereafter,
whenever he enters his bedroom, he sees the same vision of himself
modified by a slow dissolution reflected in the fading image of the cuckold:
‘aquella trémula imagen de la desolación, aquel viejo fantasma que labró mi
ruina: un hombre empapado por la lluvia en el umbral de su inmediata
destrucción, anonadado por los celos y por la certeza de haberlo perdido
todo, incluso la propia estima’ (EAB, p. 9). The image becomes fainter as
Marés’ grasp on his own identity is eroded. The mirror games that afforded
Andrés some free space for experimentation in Encerrados have, in Marés’
case, been seen as a kind of imprisonment in an unwanted past: ‘l’image de
Marés, prisonnière du miroir, symbolise la mort de celui qui fut le mari
Norma Valentí, mort qui est vécue et revécue sur le mode du châtiment
chaque fois qu’il entre “desprevenido” dans la chambre’ (Vila, p. 256). At
the same time, Marés’ use of the third person to describe ‘aquel viejo
fantasma que labró mi ruina’ can be seen as marking an attempt at
differentiation between man and image aimed at keeping room for
manoeuvre and control of the game.
Marés’ discovery of his image, recorded in the first ‘cuaderno’, is
followed up in the third-person narrative by accounts of his attempts not so
much to fix it in mirrors as to keep track of and exploit shifts and changes, a
process he embarks on using transitional public spaces: ‘Entraba en los
lavabos para mirarse en los espejos: en una ciudad esquizofrénica, de
duplicidades diversas, pensaba, lo que el ciudadano indefenso debe hacer es
mirarse en el espejo con frecuencia para evitar sorpresas desagradables ...’
(EAB, p. 84). In a bar in carnival time we see Marés craft an image attractive
to Norma, using disguise and staging a tableau in which he is the ‘charnego’
shoeshiner at her feet – fleetingly an accepted suitor – while she is cast as a
prostitute in the carnival costume she herself has chosen. Here too, Marés’
image is not fixed. Reflecting his wife’s insatiable desire for numerous
lovers, Marés’ reflection splinters into fragments as numberless as his rivals:
‘y se miró en el espejo modernista que lo repetía en otro aspecto frontal hasta
el infinito: un tipo rastrero, agazapado junto a Norma, alentando la mentira
con su aire de charnego esquinado y pestañón, un poco canalla’ (EAB, p.
99). The tableau he and Norma form is itself versatile. As Norma plays
prostitute to the shoeshiner’s lascivious handling of her foot, she can also
play the divine patroness to his supplicant – not the Virgin Mary but the
reformed prostitute Mary Magdalene – and enjoy the mingled sensation of
pity and power that results from his manipulation: ‘Viendo a este murciano
tuerto y renegrido echado a sus pies, agobiado por una vida oscura y un
trabajo oscuro, sintió de pronto un fuerte impulso de acariciar sus cabellos’
(EAB, p. 104).23
Marés, the distressed supplicant here, uses the same costume and speech

23 For a discussion of possible literary as well as religious precedents see Forrest,

p. 47.
to play the confident salesman and seduce the widow Griselda, the traveller
returning home to charm Señora Lola and the blind Carmen, and finally, at
last, Norma’s lover. The shattering of his image in the mirrors of the Café de
la Opera prefigures the conclusion of the novel, in which Marés’ single
personality will also shatter, and the process is marked by a growing sense
that games with images are taking over from reality and he is losing control.
With Griselda he is ‘agobiado por la máscara, sintiéndose tironeado cada vez
más pos los hilos invisibles de una marioneta que empezaba a no controlar,
estuvo tentado de descubrir su juego’ (EAB, pp. 107–8). Carmen cannot see
him, and Señora Lola fails to recognise him. As for the shortsighted Norma,
Marés ponders ‘la posibilidad de que Norma reconociera su cuerpo incluso a
oscuras’ (EAB, p. 211) – that in the intimacy of the sexual act something of
him will remain. She does not recognise him, however, and even the
conscience of his alter ego, Faneca, is clear of guilt ‘puesto que nada o casi
nada quedaba en ella del repudiado marido de Norma’ (EAB, p. 211). The
single identity known as Juan Marés has simply been expunged.
If the first ‘cuaderno’, through mirrors, reflects the shattering of the single
identity and the proliferation of many that is a driving force in El amante
bilingüe, the second begins an exploration of illusion facilitated by masks in
a context of disconcerting reversed chronology. Marés offers a glimpse into
his childhood as though to give insight into what lies behind his own schizo-
phrenic identity. The second ‘cuaderno’ begins with an image, used repeat-
edly by the author Marsé to capture once again the ‘nostalgia del pasado’
and ‘nostalgia del futuro’ where childish dreams and adult memory intersect,
which eloquently marks the corrosive passage of time. The wreck of a
foreign luxury car from his childhood – ‘El chasis herrumbroso del Lincoln
Continental 1941’ – is described by the adult Marés as ‘el esqueleto
calcinado de un sueño’ (EAB, p. 37). In Historia de detectives, the child
Marés dreams up stories in an identical car (HD, p. 39). Ironically, the burnt-
out car prefigures the burnt-out dreams of a burnt-out Marés with a face like
a mask wiped of all detail as a result of a terrorist bomb.
Marés appears in the ‘cuaderno’ in a plausibly childlike guise, masked like
the hero in the comic-book El Guerrero del Antifaz. When he removes the
mask, however, there is an identical one underneath. No authentic identity is
to be revealed in the past, only images of the future. The simple act of
polishing his shoes to start his first job marks the start of adulthood, but also
prefigures his future betrayal at the hands of his wife and a shoeshiner (first
‘cuaderno’), after which Marsé will resort to disguise and assume the
shoeshiner’s identity to seduce his own wife and cuckold himself in the
process. Mask overlays mask as Marés moves from illusion, through disillu-
sionment, and on to new illusions, not revealing authentic identity but
entirely eroding its credibility. There is no prospect of anything else, the
second ‘cuaderno’ seems to suggest. Even as the child-man Marés prepares
for work, his parents, an illusionist and a music-hall singer-actress, struggle
to sustain the romantic fantasies of popular songs (like Tatuaje, mentioned
earlier), enhanced by alcohol and nostalgia but nonetheless corroded by
time. In a poignant role-reversal, the child Marés gives money to his own
father, once again prefiguring his own future, as a street-performer living off
the charity of others.
The third ‘cuaderno’ moves on from mirroring and masking to perfor-
mance. It also picks up the confrontation between Catalan and ‘charnego’. In
the first, Catalan husband and ‘charnego’ lover confront each other over
Norma; now, a Catalan child mistakes the equally Catalan Marés for a
‘charnego’ and robs him of another treasure from Norma’s father’s house.
The later episode is a virtual mirror-image of the first, with Catalan and
‘charnego’ apparently facing up to each other over a prize. However, the
‘charnego’ shoeshiner is not eager to fight over Norma, and the apparent
opposition is further undermined by the fact that Marés – who narrates both
– plays the enraged Catalan husband in one and the ‘charnego’ outsider in
the other, calling on both languages to back up whatever identity he chooses and
exploiting the misapprehensions of his audience.
Marsé had used a very similar scene between two children in Esta cara
de la luna (1962) around a different point of conflict. In the earlier work
from the Franco years, a fight serves to highlight class conflict which,
ironically, breaks out at a charity benefit for poor children. The intended
recipient of charity attacks the middle-class Guillermo Soto physically: ‘una
patada terrible, certera, una patada de niño de suburbio’ before urinating on
him: ‘Yo berreando, ensangrentado y meado, mi mamá desmayada, ricos y
pobres consternados […]. Todo el mundo reñía al niño pobre, le llamaban
malo y demonio y le señalaban con el dedo’ (ECL, p. 159). Soto’s irony
demon- strates the shallow impact of such charity, though the effect of the
passage is burlesque rather than serious. The robbing of Marés in El amante,
written well after democratisation, is given nationalistic overtones in the
context of the Catalanist ‘vetllada patriòtica’. Marés has played the
‘charnego’ monster in Valentí’s play and has been killed by a Catalan St
George, but, the goldfish which symbolises for him the paradise of the Villa
Valentí and a share of the good life in Catalonia – a reward for his
collaboration – eludes his grasp. As the murky waters of the pond swallow
the fish that was his dream, so too they swallow Marés’ reflection: ‘Me miro
en esas aguas sin verme, una y otra vez’ (EAB, p. 137). The mirror image
returns to suggest the obliteration of iden- tity and the subject’s inability to
project even an image of himself.
Marsé might be suggesting that like the pond, the Catalan audience cannot
take the imprint of Marés’ true identity as it can a controllably stereotyped
masquerade. Equally, the image concerns dream and disillusionment and
indi- cates that Marés himself has no single recognisable identity to fix in a
mirror. What happens to him subsequently would take both interpretations.
With all facial traits obliterated, his already fluid identity is seen to be as
flimsy as the cardboard on which he inscribes ‘ MÚSICO EN PARO
REUMÁTICO Y
MURCIANO ABANDONADO POR SU MUJER’ (EAB, 52), or ‘MÚSIC CATALÀ
EXPULSADO DE TVE EN MADRID AMB 12 FILLS I SENSE FEINA’ (EAB, p.
173), in infinitely variable rewritings of his fragmentary personality.
Marsé’s playful experimentation with literary genres reflects an ongoing
debate on the relevance of the notion of genres as a critical tool. Todorov’s
essay on The Typology of Detective Fiction, underlines the potentially
restric- tive nature of such categories:

literary reflection of the classical period, which concerned genres more

than works, also manifested a penalizing tendency – a work was judged
poor if it did not sufficiently obey the rules of its genre. Hence such criti-
cism sought not only to describe genres but also to prescribe them; the grid
of genre preceded literary creation instead of following it. (Todorov, p. 42)

However, Todorov also sees in the transgression of prescriptive conventions

of genre a step towards establishing new norms:

One might say that every great book establishes the existence of two
genres, the reality of two norms: that of the genre it transgresses, which
dominated the preceding literature, and that of the genre it creates.
(Todorov, p. 43)

For Jonathan Culler, genre is to do with how meaning is conveyed, and he

points out that by breaking with convention, the writer opens the way for
new meanings:

once genres are treated as a set of norms or conventions which make

possible the production of meaning, much as linguistic norms do, then the
notion of genre is restored to a central place in literary theory […].
Generic conventions account for the meaning that is produced when a
work violates or evades these conventions, and generic codes are
postulated in order to explain the way we treat details in different sorts of
works.24

According to these criteria, Marsé’s novels may not be masterpieces in

Todorov’s sense if ‘The masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the
book which best fits its genre’ (Todorov, p. 42). However, as this chapter has
shown, they illustrate the notion that conventions of genre can be better
honoured in the breach than the observance, and in a playful pushing of
boundaries.
In the post-war period literature, even – or perhaps especially – children’s
literature, served as propaganda, ideology infiltrating at every level. Marsé
has commented that the famous and heroic comic-book detective, Roberto

24 Jonathan Culler, ed., Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1977), p. 11.
Alcázar, is modelled on the state icon, José Antonio Primo de Rivera,
founder of Falange, and Alcázar’s triumphs are then attributed retrospec-
tively to the dead leader: ‘el diseño, el dibujo, era en realidad José Antonio,
estaba sacado de José Antonio, y eso se ha comentado mucho, eso: el pelo
engominado, tipo guapo así’ (in conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June
1995). Marsé reverses this tactic in his novels when he uses official
historical and conventional literary discourses in such a way as to invert their
intended meanings. His history offers a ‘crónica sentimental’ which exposes
the rela- tivity of historical perception, and the enduring power of illusion,
and this is illustrated in one of the ephemera in Imágenes: a postcard with an
image of José Antonio in negative format. Spectators are urged to stare at it
for a minute and then close their eyes. The image, now in ‘print’ form on the
retina, can be projected onto the sky... fleetingly, like sentiment, but
nonethe- less dramatically. As a ‘crónica sentimental’, Si te dicen challenges
the triumphalistic high moral tone of Spanish National Catholicism with a
corro- sive eroticism, associated with violent crime and death in the context
of detective fiction, with Church and State implicated. El amante makes
autobi- ography out to be an exercise in writing and rewriting the self as
circum- stances and the run of play demand: now putting on one mask and
now another, as tides change in politics, and Catalan Catholic Nationalism
gives way to Catalan Linguistic Normalisation. As Lejeune comments on
irony:
on emprunte à l’adversaire la littéralité de ses énoncés, mais en
introduisant un décalage de contexte, de style ou de ton, qui les rende
virtuellement absurdes, odieux ou ridicules, et qui exprime implicitement
le désaccord total de l’énonciateur. L’ironie est une arme dangereuse et
délicate: dangereuse, parce qu’elle vole à l’autre son langage, elle lui
‘brûle’ son discours, qu’il ne pourra plus réemployer ensuite avec la même
efficacité; et, en même temps, l’assaillant est hors d’atteinte, puisqu’il ne
fait que répéter ce que dit l’autre, et qu’il peut, ironiquement, plaider
l’innocence. Il s’agit d’amener l’adversaire à ‘se suicider avec sa propre
langue.’25

When playful experimentation means pushing boundaries, bending rules and

defying limits, as it does for Marsé, in children’s games and adult carnival
masquerade, and demonstrably so in his use of genres, the subversion of
literary norms and conventions becomes a means by which the assumptions
they enshrine and the messages they communicate may be exposed for scru-
tiny and irrevocably subverted.
It must be said that the subversion of official discourses is not an end in
itself for Marsé, only the beginning of an ambitious reframing of history
evident in the move from a close involvement with the recent history of
Catalan nationalism in El amante (1990), through the exploration of dream

25 Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre. L’autobiographie de la Littérature aux

Médias (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 25.
and fantasy on an international stage in El embrujo de Shanghai (1993),
where history is mediated through the cinema – Capitán Blay (of Mutiny on
the Bounty) and Shanghai Gesture (1941)26 – and on to Rabos de lagartija
(2000). In Rabos, two dramatic historical events frame the narrative: the
atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 casts the world-wide shadow of
its fall-out over the entire text (RL, pp. 19, 42, 62, 72, 83, 100, 106,112),
while the death of the protagonist, David, in the 1959 Barcelona Tram Strike
brings into sharp focus local and personal tragedy (RL, pp. 343–4). Despite
these events, however, in this most ambitious narrative game, Marsé’s story-
line is derived from a poem by William Blake that brings together in a
Barcelona setting a curious romantic quartet: an RAF pilot of Irish-
Australian extrac- tion, a policeman from the repressive Brigada Político-
Social, the beautiful pregnant red-head Rosa Bartra, and her absent
‘maquisard’ or smuggler husband, Víctor. In bold defiance of historical
linearity of narration, this unlikely cast of characters is presented partly in
retrospect by Rosa’s as yet unborn child, and partly in prospect or prophecy
by her son David. Deprived of linear logic, the reader is challenged to a
game of interpretation as – like the Tangram – pieces of a puzzle are
presented – live and wriggling tails cut off lizards – while the key to the
puzzle, Blake’s ‘O Rose, thou art sick!’, is only presented in its entirety
midway through the novel.27 That Rosa Bartra is the sick ‘Rose’, and the
pilot Bryen O’Flynn’s plane has ‘The Invisible Worm’ painted on it seems
firm ground: the rest is guesswork. The ‘gusano peludo que envenena la
sangre de mamá’ (RL, p. 188) – David’s brother whose birth causes his
mother’s death – may prove a link between two real people who met in the
context of the WWII escape routes for allied combat- ants through Spain, or
may equally be the product of imagination of the child David, of an absent
father, captivated by a propaganda photo of a downed pilot on a German
magazine cover, feeding on war films (Guadalcanal) and resenting the
arrival of a new brother.
Hayden White points to

a distinction, drawn by Aristotle in the Poetics, between what can possibly

happen and what actually did happen, between what can be known
because it happened and what can only be imagined, and what, therefore,
the histo- rian can legitimately assert as a truth of experience and what the
poet might wish to entertain as a truth of thought or conceptualization.
(White, p. 147)

26 Fernando Trueba uses black and white photography for the dream scenes in his
2001 production of El embrujo de Shanghai to evoke the cinema of the time: ‘como las
películas que los niños de la posguerra veían en los cines de barrio, aquel cine de
Hollywood, que ya se ha perdido. He intentado recrear el cine de aquella época, el de
los años treinta y cuarenta’ (El cultural, 27 March 2002, pp. 42–5).
27 O Rose, thou art sick!/ The invisible worm/ That flies in the night,/ In the
howling storm,/ Has found out thy bed/ Of crimson joy,/ And his dark secret love/ Does
thy life destroy.
As White admits, however, this distinction is not watertight:

The difficulty with a notion of the truth of past experience is that it can no
longer be experienced, and this throws a specifically historical knowledge
open to the charge that it is a construction as much of imagination as of
thought and that its authority is no greater than the power of the historian
to persuade his readers that his account is true. This puts historical
discourse on the same level as any rhetorical performance and consigns it
to the status of a textualization neither more nor less authoritative than
literature itself can lay claim to. (White, p. 147)
 3
SEXUALISING THE SACRED: VATICAN II
AS A ‘NOVELA ROSA’ IN
LA OSCURA HISTORIA DE LA PRIMA MONTSE

Up to this point in my discussion of Juan Marsé’s multidimensional

games of representation, fuelled by desire and imagination and daring to
challenge official discourses in order to exploit existing textual conventions
in inven- tive new ways, literary criticism and history have been viewed as
two exam- ples of textual convention whose authority he has dared to
undermine. The textual games in my remaining three chapters, which
consider religious discourses, are bolder still. For even today, the wars that
are claiming religion as their cause in the new millennium offer chilling
evidence of the passions roused and dangers inherent where that which is
viewed as sacred is seen to be an object of mockery.
After the Civil War, as my Introduction indicated, the victorious regime
made an ally of the Catholic Church and drew on the Church’s authority and
its texts to reinforce the dictatorship’s own authority and rhetoric. In
Catalonia, however, sections of the Church would be actively engaged in
promoting Catalan nationalism in defiance of Francoist unitarian policy, and
before long ideological changes outside Spain would culminate in the
revolu- tionary social and political unrest of the 1950s and 1960s which
would bring the authority of Christian doctrine and of the Church into
question, even within the peninsula. The repercussions would affect not only
the public sphere but also – and equally problematically – the private spheres
of personal morality, conduct and belief. The Catholic Church’s response
would be to summon a Council – only the second such council in its long
history – to debate its position, determine its reaction and decide on policies
to be implemented world-wide.
In the context of Marsé’s depiction of the impact on Spain of the Second
Vatican Council (1962–1965), Chapter 3 examines his treatment of what has
been a major discourse in the Catholic Church both in Spain and worldwide
this century: one that has tried to offer practical solutions to practical prob-
lems arising from discrepancies between wealth and poverty, repression and
freedom. In the West the focus has been on an industrialised urban society of
which Marsé’s Barcelona has been typical, and Marsé has acknowledged its
impact by making the discourse central to La oscura historia de la prima
 SEXUALISING THE SACRED 81

Montse (1970), published three years before Si te dicen but depicting in its
outer narrative frame a more recent, liberal Barcelona of 1960s economic
growth, in strong contrast to the poverty and repression of the 1940s
depicted in Si te dicen and glimpsed briefly in La oscura historia. The
discourse, known as the Social Gospel, has roots in the late nineteenth
century1 and reflects a long-standing concern in the Church over social
justice and human rights. It has even been argued that the Social Gospel
shifts emphasis away from personal salvation and on to collective salvation,
and that the leading theologian of the movement, Walter Rauschenbusch:

extended the concept of sin from the personal to the collective, the ‘supra-
personal forces’ of the city councils, police forces, trades unions, industrial
companies and national states. These collectives had the poten- tial to
constitute either the Kingdom of Evil or the Kingdom of God. Personal
salvation remained an important part of the gospel, but the test of true
individual conversion was conversion to others. (Keeling, p. 3)

In this respect, the Social Gospel became a primary focus of the Second
Vatican Council that drew senior churchmen of all nations to Rome between
1962 and 1965 to attempt to change the face and practices of the Catholic
Church. In this respect too, in La oscura historia, it provides the primary
focus for Marsé’s critique of what the Catholic Church was – or was not –
doing about social injustice and human rights violations in Barcelona before
and after the Council.
To look at Vatican II, Marsé created his most self-consciously ambivalent
and deceitful narrator, and one of his most complex texts. It is no exaggera-
tion to say that Paco Bodegas’ narrative is, at one and the same time, a
commentary on Vatican II, an exploration of desire in himself and others,
and a parody of the ‘novela rosa’ – a genre in which sexual morality and
desire are central themes. The ‘novela rosa’ purveys idealistic notions of true
love which favour self-sacrifice over self-fulfilment, and devotion over
desire to such an extent that sex may be entirely precluded by propriety. For
that reason and because it promoted marriage and the family – and the
regime needed population growth after the war – ‘novelas rosa’ were
advocated as safe reading for women during the Franco years, their
considerable impact on post-war generations being well detailed in Chapter
VII of Martín Gaite’s Usos amorosos. In contrast, when Marsé frames his
critique of post-war Catholicism as a ‘novela rosa’, centred on the
relationship between the Catalan, middle-class Montse, and the southern
Spanish, unemployed

1 The Social Gospel Movement has been traced back to the work of Washington
Gladden in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1875. Gladden addressed employers in the
North Church on their responsibility to provide jobs for workers. For a brief account see
Michael Keeling, The Foundations of Christian Ethics (Edinburgh: Clark, 1990), pp. 2–3.
convict, Manuel, he reverses the priorities and sexualises the genre’s tradi-
tionally chaste and safely class-conditioned relationships. In doing so, he
violates the moral code behind the assumptions of the ‘novela rosa’ and, as
this chapter will show, challenges the traditional Christian morality that
underlies that code. The resulting tension between the sexual desires of pairs
of lovers on one level, and between the conflicting ideals each espouses,
gives rise to a sexual dialectic which runs parallel to an ideological dialectic.
Marsé brings many of the issues that preoccupied progressive Catholics at
the time into sharp focus in the relationships between the novel’s five young
protagonists, making the issues personal and their divisiveness painful, and
using the essentially romantic optimism of the genre to debunk the religious
optimism generated by Vatican II.
The conventions of the ‘novela rosa’ provide a starting-point for this
dialectic, but Marsé goes beyond their narrow limits of permissible non-
conformity – those apparent flaws that serve to make stereotypical heroes
and heroines unusual without flouting norms of decency – to defy the
constraints on eroticism traditional in the genre and explore both moral and
literary transgression. What ensues is a debate on Christian codes of sexual
practice – a topic much debated at Vatican II – that becomes directly
confron- tational in the novel. The resulting conflict of interests, intensified
by the profound religious scepticism revealed by both the author (discussing
the work) and his narrator (within the text), make this potentially the most
contentious of Marsé’s novels. Certainly, it is the one in which he strikes
most explicitly at the heart of what is introduced in the opening pages as
‘uno de los mitos más sarcásticos que pudrieron el mundo’ (PM, p. 7): the
Chris- tian myth of Good and Evil that is blamed for Montse’s tragic end.
La oscura historia de la prima Montse was a landmark in Marsé’s narra-
tive. Earlier novels had made passing references to social and cultural
aspects of religion2 but now Marsé made a critique of Vatican II central to
the story in a bold and precise attack on what many people today would still
champion as a monumental step forward for the Catholic Church. The novel
offers a detailed and damning portrayal of the impact of the Council on a
still powerful Catholic community in 1960s Barcelona, and though centred
on Vatican II, it effectively covers a period from 1947 to 1966, enabling
Marsé to set the Council against a backdrop of change and explore two
decades of particular religious activism in the Catalan capital.

2 I mentioned in Chapter 1 that in Encerrados the Church is felt to exert indirect

pressure: as ‘aquella Iglesia tan lejana, tan ajena’ (EJ, p. 163) preaching the virtues of
family life, through which Martín imposes on Tina (EJ, p. 185). In Esta cara, bishops
parade with politicians and actresses in the media (ECL, p. 8), and films depict the work
of priests in slum areas in an early allusion to the Social Gospel (ECL, p. 113). Catholic
charity is seen in action in the Navidad de los Pobres mentioned in Chapter 2 (ECL, pp.
158–9). I discuss Ultimas tardes later in this chapter.
 In the 1960s, the Catalan Church was actively involved in movements for
social and political reform (there is work to be done on the Catalan Marxist
Catholic, Alfonso Comín)3 and was also taking a lead in fostering Catalan
Catholic Nationalism.4 Hence the Vatican II discourses that it found most
attractive concerned political freedoms and social welfare rather than devo-
tional activities or mission. To that extent, the liberal, forward-looking
Catalan Church, represented in La oscura historia by Montse and Salvador,
offers an apparent contrast to the backward-looking, imperialistic, evangel-
ising endeavour that had characterised Spanish National Catholicism in the
Franco years, which would later be depicted in Si te dicen, and is already
evident in the paternalistic, virtually feudal charity of Tío Luis and Tía
Isabel. Concerning love, sex and marriage, Marsé shows traditional views
holding firm though challenged by the sexual revolution of the 1950s and
1960s.
The presence of Tío Luis, and the shadow cast over the entire novel by
Paco’s enquiry into Montse’s relationship with Manuel and subsequent death
make the apparent contrasts between tradition and progress seem spurious.
As though to push that message home, less than a decade later, at a time
when many of the Council’s teachings were being implemented in Spain,
Marsé would publish in Si te dicen an even more damning series of images
of a Catholic Church closely allied to the repressive Franco regime of the
1940s. That would then be followed in 1991 by El amante bilingüe, which
again uses retrospection to demonstrate how the legacy of the Catalan
Church’s powerful past can continue to make its impact felt, even in the
ideologies of what appear to be secular politics.5

3 A useful introduction, Albert Marzà’s Alfonso Comín, esperança en la història

(Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1995) presents Comín as ‘Una figura clau dels moviments
culturals, polítics i religiosos desenvolupats durant la resistència al franquisme’. An
industrial engineer by training, Comín and his wife lived in the working-class district
of Huelín in Málaga for four years (until police harassment and family problems drove
them back to Barcelona) in order to live and work among the poor. In 1964, members
of HOAC (Hermandades Obreras de Acción Católica) and JOC joined with Marxists
to found the Communist trade union Comisiones Obreras in the Church of Sant Medir
in Barcelona. See Paul Preston, España en crisis: la evolución y decadencia del
régimen de Franco (Madrid: Ediciones F.C.E., 1977), p. 107, and Pere Gabriel,
Comissions Obreres de Catalunya 1964–1989 (Barcelona: Empúries i CERES, 1989).
4 For an account of the activities of the JOC (Juventudes Obreras Católicas),
from a Catalanist perspective, see Josep Castaño i Colomer, Memòries sobre la JOC a
Catalunya 1932–1970 Barcelona: Institut Catòlic d’Estudis Socials de Barcelona, 1974),
pp. 113–85. On Catalan Catholic Nationalism in the 1960s, see Hilari Raguer, ‘Bonzos
incordiantes. Los católicos catalanes y el Concilio Vaticano II’, XX Siglos, 16 (1993), pp.
88–97.
5 Xavier Muñoz traces the involvement of Jordi Pujol in the 1950s and 1960s with
a ‘moviment inspirat an la confessionalitat i en el catalanisme’: CC, whose gradual
secularisation he also charts: ‘Un nom de guerra prou abstracte i prou suggeridor [...] la
sigla CC, que podia molt bé indicar els motius profunds que justificaven l’assamblea,
Crist i Catalunya, Cristians Catalans, etc. Aquest nom es va mantenir durant molts
 La oscura historia (1970), Si te dicen (1973) and El amante bilingüe
(1991) are the novels in which Marsé makes most extensive use of religious
discourses, exploiting a dual retrospective focus to juxtapose images from
the past and present to force comparisons and suggest that for all the
Church’s talk about progress symbolised by Vatican II, in over half a
century from the 1940s (Si te dicen) to the 1990s (El amante), time and
change have brought no real progress. This is a serious indictment, for the
Christian model of history, as represented in the Bible, is linear and
purposeful, moving through time from the Creation and the Fall (Genesis),
through the outworking of Redemption, to Final Judgement and a New
World (Revelation):6 in the words of St John, ‘En el principio existía el
Verbo [...]. Todo fue hecho por Él’ (John 1.1 and 3), and in the end, ‘Dios
mismo morará con los hombres. Se enjugará toda lágrima de sus ojos, y no
habrá más muerte, ni luto, ni clamor, ni pena, porque el primer mundo ha
desaparecido’ (Revelation 21.3–4). Church historians have optimistically
presented Vatican II as a new start for the Church. Lannon begins with a
bleak picture at the start: ‘The eighty or so Spanish bishops who attended
[...] discovered with varying degrees of ease or anguish that on the whole
they had more to learn than to teach’ (Lannon, p. 246). Ten years on, the
Church was able to resume its age-old prophetic mission to shape the future:

The Church survived the radical transformation of the political world

because it had distanced itself from the dictatorship more and more
earnestly during its final decade. Prophecy was the term in vogue in eccle-
siastical circles to describe that distancing process. Prophecy meant, on the
Old Testament model [...], denouncing injustice and corruption among the
rulers in order to defend the poor, the oppressed, the powerless.
(Lannon, p. 5)

Hermet measures the transformation statistically:

En 1962, lors de la première session du concile Vatican II, les 127 évêques
et supérieurs d’ordres religieux de nationalité espagnole ne formaient que
5% des 2 540 pères conciliaires réunis à Rome. Encore faut-il préciser que
95 seulement venaient effectivement d’Espagne [...]. Le groupe national

anys, d’aquesta manera inconcreta. Quan més tard es va formular, sorprenentment, va

prendre el nom de Comunitat Catalana, encara que evidentment aleshores ja havien passat
moltes coses noves’. Xavier Muñoz, De Dreta a Esquerra: Memòries Polítiques
(Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1990), pp. 82–4.
6 It is also contrary to the Marxist notion of history as progress. An interesting
study of the ‘dialogue’ between Catholics and Marxists in the 1950s and 1960s, and
especially during Vatican II is given in Albert Marzà Alfonso Comín, esperança en la
història (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1995).
 espagnol ne totalisait en dernière analyse que 3,7% de l’effectif de
l’assemblée conciliaire.7

Then:

Une “révolution” se produit dans le clergé après 1960, et plus

spécialement après le concile Vatican II. La grande enquête effectuée en
1969 auprès de 15 156 prêtres diocésains souligne que le clergé espagnol
ne peut plus être considéré alors, dans sa majorité, comme un clergé
conformiste. C’est ainsi que 91,7% des prêtres interrogés à cette occasion
reconnaissent la nécessité du Concile, et que 77,8% d’entre eux
approuvent les changements introd- uits par celui-ci dans l’Eglise et le
milieu ecclésiastique. (Hermet, p. 60)

Vatican II urged Catholics to make contact with the modern world and find a
voice that would enable them to share its views with anyone who would
listen: non-Catholics, members of other religions – even communists. It
called for a radical updating and openness that would challenge not only the
Church in Spain but also what was still effectively a totalitarian dictatorship.
Reactions to it were bound to vary and polarise, and in La oscura historia,
Marsé is quick to exploit the literary potential of the aspirations and conflicts
it aroused.
The erosion of any sense of direction, progress, or learning from mistakes
already studied in relation to Marsé’s treatment of critical and historical
discourses, and his use of narrative models which imply stasis or even
regres- sion, have dramatic consequences for his depiction of the Church.
When we compare images of the 1950s and 1960s in Prima Montse (1970)
with those of the forties in Si te dicen (1973), La oscura historia appears at
first sight to depict a benign, liberal, post-Vatican II Catholicism espoused
by a progres- sive Catalan Church. When subsequently the 1960s Church is
also exposed as crudely repressive, the effect is damning. In La oscura
historia, as in Si te dicen, the Church is implicated in the ruthless brokering
of power and wealth. It allows the docile collaborator (Java in Si te dicen
and Salvador in La oscura historia) to climb the social ladder while
preventing real social reform. The defence of the status quo in both novels
means that the Church (represented by the ‘parroquia’) and individuals (the
Galáns and Claramunts respectively) resort to deceitful manipulation. The
effects on Montse, driven to suicide, and Nuria (to despair and exile) appear
as catastrophic as the torture and killing in Si te dicen. In addition, the
Catalan Catholic Nation- alism that is treated with relatively gentle mocking
humour in prima Montse will be directly attacked as repressive and
retrogressive in El amante bilingüe (1991). Marsé exploits the ironic force of
hindsight and of prescience as the novels – both separately and together – move
backwards and forwards in time, recalling tragedies in the past and anticipating
others still to come.

7 Guy Hermet, Los Católicos en la España Franquista (Madrid: Colección

Monografías, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicos, 1981), p. 25.
 The effects of temporal disruption in La oscura historia are precisely
calculated. The outer narrative frame dates from 1966, after the Council, and
the opening scene shows piles of dusty religious publications in Catalan
abandoned in a condemned house:

torcidos pilares de volúmenes, tenebrosas materias esquinadas, una

confusa armazón de títulos metálicos, tintineantes, vernáculos:
Encícliques, homi- lies, discursos i al.locucions. “Instruccions i decrets
dels organismes postconciliars i de les Sagrades Congregacions. Selecció
de pastorals de bisbes nacionals i estrangers. Documents i declaracions
d’entitats i de personats significades dins l’Església”. Una finísima capa de
polvo los cubría. (PM, p. 6)

The books belong to Salvador Vilella; the narrative voice to Paco Bodegas.
Paco has restarted his affair with Salvador’s wife Nuria, and the combination
of the abandoned texts, the adulterous wife and the bulldozers outside the
window, spell out a triple message of destruction for Salvador, the
Claramunts, and the religious ideals they represent: ‘Fachada, he aquí lo
único que les quedaba a los Claramunt’ (PM, p. 5). The list is a foretaste of
what the novel has to offer: Paco’s fictions are convincing precisely because
Marsé is knowledgeable about the workings of the Council, the publications
it spawned, and its effect on progressive elements in the Catalan Church.
The opening chapters evoke pre-Vatican II parish life and the lay
apostolates that were already gaining strength. Like Imágenes (Chapter 2),
these scenes make their impact by recalling half-forgotten ephemera. Dated
by a portrait of John XXIII, Pope from 1958–1963 (PM, p. 20), and by
posters of sporting events from 1957–1958 (PM, p. 16), they capture the
mood of dynamic optimism and fearsome cheerfulness so often lampooned
in the novel, that followed Pope John’s election and almost immediate
convoca- tion of the Council. For those who have read, or will subsequently
read Si te dicen (whose outer narrative frame is set in the 1960s but whose
central section looks back to the 1940s), the plausibility of the images in La
oscura historia is actually enhanced by the contrast with images of
traditional, conservative Catholicism from the forties. We feel that changes
have occurred and have been acutely observed. A Church looking back on
the ruins of war has given way to the forward-looking work of lay Catholic
organisations whose dual focus on the deepening of personal devotion on the
one hand, and on actively working for social justice on the other, anticipates
many of the initiatives and emphases of the Council. Indeed, this novel
offers many points of access into little-known aspects of Spanish post-war
religious culture whose significance – as testified to by a religious sceptic
such as Marsé – is evident in the scope, depth and detail of his portrayal of it.
Marsé’s carefully constructed disruption of chronological time also
creates a synchronicity which throws differences between Montse, whose
conduct anticipates the teachings of the Council, and Salvador, who is their
major exponent, into sharp relief. Montse will be seen going into prisons
(Chapter IV) and slums (Chapter IX) to share her message; Salvador remains
in his opulent house in Pedralbes (Chapter III) or in fashionable venues with
his intellectual middle-class Catalan coterie (Chapter V). Images of a dead
Montse from a past time-frame are eclipsed in the present by the fast-talking
but morally bankrupt Vatican II man, Salvador. Yet Paco’s narrative
acquires the timelessness of play and allows endless new interpretations of
Montse, unfettered by diachronic constraints. In its stasis, the narrative
becomes like an icon, where the central subject is seen in timeless, not linear,
relation to the various elements of their ‘story’. The presence, all at once, of
many of the elements necessary to our understanding of the outcome of the
action, enhances the sense of dreamlike circularity that is so characteristic of
Marsé’s corpus of novels. It also reflects the novel’s puzzle-like character,
and results in a depiction of experience that is deeply layered rather than
superficial, and which confronts the reader with a complex, often contradic-
tory image to decipher. Synchronicity means that Nuria appears to the
reader, through Paco’s eyes, as Claramunt child (the house), Salvador’s wife
(the books) and Paco’s lover, all at once. We therefore read the rest of the
novel, including her early childhood, with the knowledge of her marriage
and adul- tery in mind: she is sexualised and transgressive from the start,
though even as Paco’s narrative presents this viewpoint, he himself refrains
from judge- ment.
Initial impressions are found almost always to be illusory, notably the
impression that this is a simple romantic story that ends badly. Montse is
presented as utterly different to her attractive sister: plain, pious and
archetypally ‘para vestir santos’. Yet, if we view Paco’s attempts to under-
stand Montse and reconstruct her past as the deciphering of an icon, the
elements of her story re-form to offer a different reading from the initial one.
Paco’s retrospective re-reading reveals a gradual but increasing conviction
that what first seemed symptoms of religious fervour were in fact conse-
quences of the repression of a sexuality as powerful as that of Nuria, but
initially not perceived as such. This realisation is strengthened as Montse
becomes sexualised in Paco’s observation of her developing relationship
with Manuel. The relationship begins as Catholic charity aimed at the
convict’s redemption: a practical demonstration of the Social Gospel. It ends
with a child conceived outside wedlock, and a Catholic conspiracy that
results in Montse’s death. What remains to be seen is how Paco will square
the suppos- edly liberal, post-conciliar progressive Catalan Catholicism
preached by Salvador with the drastic authoritarian action taken in the name
of class inter- ests to prevent Montse helping Manuel: no simple matter
because, paradoxi- cally, although Montse dies before Vatican II, Paco holds
her social action up as an example of what the Council would in due course
advocate in theory and practice, so exposing the weaknesses of the theory
and practice before
they are even framed by the Church. Paco therefore has the difficult task of
trying to expose the icon’s flaws without destroying what he himself refers
to in his closing paragraph as:

aquel viejo sueño de integridad, de ofrecimiento total, de solidaridad o

como quiera llamarse eso que la había mantenido en pie, con sus grandes
ojos negros alucinados y el corazón palpitante, frente a miserables
enfermos, presidiarios sin entrañas y huérfanos de profesión. (PM, p. 273)

Paco’s final attempt to assess the significance of his cousin’s life and
death is presented in the last pages of the novel as a convoluted inner debate.
He appears to be striving to reconcile two opposite extremes: the notion
expressed at the start of the novel that Montse was a ‘criatura desvalida y
mórbida’ (PM, p. 7), and the possibility introduced at the end, that ‘Montse
fue uno de los seres más puros que jamás existieron en este mundo’ (PM, p.
272). Should he – and should we, as we observe Paco’s deliberations – inter-
pret her as a victim of ‘la enfermedad o la autorrepresión’, or as proof that
‘la inocencia se compone de esa materia inmaculada cuya posesión sólo es
posible sin el egoísmo’ (PM, p. 272)? Is Marsé setting her up as a saint only
to reveal that she is just a sinner? The complex interaction between a sexual
dialectic and the narrative frame of a traditional ‘novela rosa’ that Marsé sets
in motion with such skill in this novel shows this view to be over-simplistic.
To construe La oscura historia in this way, with Montse as its romantic
heroine, allows us to gauge the effect of a potent interweaving of theme and
genre.

The ‘novela rosa’ and La oscura historia: the saint, the siren and
the sceptic
To those unaccustomed to the genre, to cast the plain, earnest Montse as
the heroine of a ‘novela rosa’ might seem an unlikely pairing. Yet if much of
the attraction of this romantic fiction is its comforting familiarity of plot and
character, the certainty that all will turn out well in the end and the
intimation that sex may be exciting but salvation endures, equally powerful
is the longing of a misunderstood individual to be valued for what they are –
to be truly ‘seen’ and loved.
Three ‘novelas’8 from three turbulent decades illustrate how persistently
desirable familiarity, certainty and the hope of salvation are. Matilde
Muñoz’s El triste amor de Mauricio, set in the brilliant but decadent 1920s,

8 Matilde Muñoz, El triste amor de Mauricio (Barcelona: Juventud, 1926)

(TAM). María Mercedes Ortoll, Almas generosas (Barcelona: Juventud, 1937) (AG);
María Mercedes Ortoll Desdichada por bonita (Barcelona: Juventud, 1943) (DB).
introduces the gifted but rich and spoilt painter Mauricio who loves Paulina
(Linuca) while acknowledging his unworthiness of her:

Es necesario que Linuca me perdone esta fortuna que me [...] convierte en

un ente caprichoso y frívolo [...]. Mientras mis rentas lo sean todo y yo no
sea nada, es inútil pensar que Paulina pueda mirarme de otro modo de
como miraría a un muñeco sin corazón y sin inteligencia. (TAM, p. 9)

Paulina despairs of his salvation: ‘después de una temporada en que creímos

redimirte has abandonado los cuadros, has dejado los pinceles y vuelves a
rodearte de amigotes’ (TAM, p. 8). Instead, she is attracted to one of
Mauricio’s tormented friends, the embittered and tubercular sculptor
Octavio, who sees Paulina praying in the chapel of her father’s new Sanato-
rium and is deeply moved. He begs her to pray with him and is inspired to
sculpt a Pietà for the building: ‘Así, ante el dolor más hondo que la
Divinidad ha podido ofrecer a los hombres, estos enfermos sentirán su
corazón confortado [...]. Yo querría [...] que esa imagen llevase el rostro de
Paulina’ (TAM, p. 31). Paulina marries Octavio, who soon reverts to type,
beats her and falls ill with TB. She is faithful to the bitter end, but now
Mauricio has grown up and they marry: salvation assured.
Elina Loring, the heroine of María Mercedes Ortoll’s post-war
Desdichada por bonita, promotes the image of an enterprising post-war opti-
mism. Her father, a businessman, travels widely and she works as a secretary
and translator when needs require. Martín Gaite comments that:

Se exaltaba mucho la figura de la secretaria, que era de hecho una de las

profesiones más extendidas en la posguerra, y que la Sección Femenina
recomendaba como particularmente idónea para la mujer. En un poema de
Francisco Javier Martín Abril, donde se describe a la secretaria como
humilde sombra en el despacho grande, se insiste en el aspecto, siempre
novelesco y emocionante, de la chica venida a menos que se ve obligada a
trabajar y que alimenta sueños de amor.9

Elina’s father’s speculation on diamond mines in South Africa means a

period of hardship and trial for her during which, alone and working in
Madrid, she must survive with honour in the face of poverty and constant
sexual harassment from men who think that pretty equals promiscuous.
Before Madrid, while on holiday with friends, she is attracted to, but judged
a frivolous siren by, the austere Capitán de Corbeta, Don Miguel de Velasco
Iriarte, heroic survivor of the sinking of the Nationalist’s warship Baleares
on 5 March 1938, and hardened cynic. Miguel fears Elina’s beauty: past
experience (‘He tenido mis aventurillas … a mi edad, negarlo sería estúpido

9 Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos de la posguerra española (Madrid:

Anagrama, 1987), pp. 145–6.
o constituaría una anormalidad’ DB, p. 14), accepted as normal by the
female novelist, has led him to conclude that:

La coquetería es innata en la mujer [...]. [L]es gusta exasperar a los

hombres, hacerles concebir mil esperanzas, desvanecerlas acto seguido
con un desplante injustificado, alimentar vivamente sus ilusiones, burlarse
luego de ellas, prometer, negar, arriesgar algo, batirse en completa retirada
a continuación. (DB, p. 12)

Yet in time he recognises her goodness:

Era tan bonita que tuve miedo [...] miedo de perderla, miedo de que otros
me la arrebataran, miedo de que su corazón fuese ligero e inconsciente,
miedo de que la admiración y el halago que por todas partes la seguía la
trastornara. Tuve miedo y sin razón, porque ella me quería y sus ojos me
lo decían elocuentemente a diario. (DB, p. 166)

Salvation is assured for the potential ‘femme fatale’ Elina and for her once
cynical, now devoted hero-husband.
The heroine of María Mercedes Ortoll’s Almas generosas (first published
in 1937 and frequently reprinted), cruelly nicknamed ‘Feíta’, is a close
match for Marsé’s Montse. Indeed, striking similarities show how familiar
Marsé is with the style and conventions of the genre, while differences point
the way to a shift in intention as he plays with the ‘novela rosa’, and with the
reader who expects one thing and is served another.
Almas generosas tells how, after overcoming trials to earn their
happiness, the orphaned Susana (‘Feíta’) at last marries her one true love, the
handsome, dedicated surgeon, Andrés. A classic romantic configuration of
four potential lovers keeps readers guessing until the end of the novel.
Andrés first loves Susana’s beautiful and ambitious cousin Angélica. They
plan to marry, and he is therefore devastated when his family faces ruin and
Angélica seeks a richer match. Susana, meanwhile, is loved by the crippled
narrator of the novel, Rafael. In time, naturally, Andrés realises Susana’s
worth, they marry and, to complete the happy ending, their poverty ends
when Susana’s father returns a wealthy man. Angélica’s glamorous marriage
to a Viscount proves disastrous and she comes home chastened, with a sickly
infant, to contem- plate the spectacle of her cousin’s happy marriage to the
man she herself once rejected, blessed with healthy children. The moral is
that this is ‘un relato en que demuestra que las cualidades morales aventajan
a veces a la belleza física en las lides amorosas’ (dustcover to the 1948
edition).
In the words of Susana’s rejected yet still adoring suitor Rafael:

Susana es la mujer a la que harían feliz el hogar, el marido y los niños y el

gobierno de una casa [...], la amable compañera que nos gustaría encontrar
 en casa simplemente bonita y ataviada y de la que quisiéramos recibir una
caricia entre amorosa y maternal después de la diaria jornada.
Angélica es el reverso de la medalla.
No ha nacido para el hogar.
Angélica es la hermosa a quien un marido ocioso gusta de lucir en fiestas
y teatros, a la que se viste lujosamente para realzar su belleza, es la mujer
de los tés, de los paseos, de las aventuras, de la inercia, que ríe
alegremente y, ya casada, tendría a su disposición nurses y niñeras para
sus hijos, que en vez de mimar besaría apasionadamente. (AG, p. 10)

In terms of plot, in La oscura historia Manuel Reyes is poor like Ortoll’s

Andrés. However, he is not of the same social class as Montse and when her
desire to help him, fuelled by the social gospel that prefigures the ideals of
Vatican II, becomes love, her family intervenes. She dreams of marriage,
wanting what ‘Feíta’ secures: husband, home and children – the ideal of
traditional Catholic morality and of the ‘novela rosa’. What she actually gets
is very different. Ortoll’s repentant Angélica is accepted back into the
family; Montse’s ‘novela rosa’ ends tragically. She becomes pregnant,
Manuel has an affair with her sister and is then bought off by the girls’
father. Montse, disabused about love and religious idealism, commits
suicide, killing her baby too, and her sister Nuria fares no better. Saved from
scandal by a respectable marriage to an admirable Salvador, Nuria’s
relationship is unhappy and ends in adultery and possibly voluntary exile,
again in contrast to Angélica. The story’s disastrous and doubt-filled ending
allows no moral conclusions to be drawn and leaves questions pending.
In terms of characters, Montse, like ‘Feíta’, makes up for what she lacks in
allure with virtue and piety. ‘Feíta’ cares for beggars and little children;
Montse visits prisons and slums, following church teachings on love, human
rights and social justice even to the point of crossing social and cultural
boundaries to contemplate marrying the unemployed southerner Manuel.
The opposition between spiritual and sensual, saint or siren represented by
Susana and Angélica is constantly reiterated as Paco contrasts the admirable
Montse with the attractive Nuria: the potential ‘ángel del hogar’ 10 and the
un-angelic ‘femme fatale’. The selfish Angélica drives men mad with
passion; Nuria, named – with equal irony – after the Catalan Virgin of Nuria,
tantalises Paco, her desire for transgressive sex symbolised by the fishnet
stockings left in the bedroom of her sister Montse’s lover Manuel – soon to
be father of Montse’s child. Blame for Montse’s death falls easily on Nuria,
for Montse’s discovery of her sister’s seduction of her lover is the
immediate cause of Montse’s

10 ‘Susana es de todo el mundo; se ha convertido en el ángel tutelar de todos los

que sufren. Es su papel en la vida’ (Ortoll, p. 129). ‘Dios [...] dispuso las cosas y te
trajo a este mundo con objeto de que fueses el ángel bueno de mi vida, mi esposa, en
una palabra’ (Ortoll, p. 176).
suicide. Yet it is hard to condemn a Nuria for whom the narrator Paco feels
compassion for she too is a victim in this story.
Names tell us what to expect of characters in these short novels, though as
ever, Marsé uses conventions ironically and thwarts readerly expectations.
Ortoll’s Susana is appropriately named after the archetypal chaste and
faithful wife of the Book of Daniel from the Apocrypha. 11 Montserrat, on the
other hand, whose name is constantly dissociated from its source through
abbreviation, does not follow her implied model. Named after the Virgin in
her advocation as patroness of Catalonia, one would expect of her chastity –
total abstinence from sexual intercourse before marriage then continence and
fidelity within marriage – and national pride in her homeland. The Abbey of
Montserrat has played a leading role in defending and fostering Catalan
national identity under Franco and ever since. 12 Yet Montse becomes preg-
nant outside wedlock and is the one Claramunt who does not try to induce
Paco to speak Catalan and deny his heritage from his ‘andaluz’ father. Paco
even imagines Montse with a carnation in her hair trying to blend in with the
‘charnego’ women visiting their men in prison – without great success, but at
least trying.
As for surnames, both Ortoll’s de Monteflorido and Marsé’s Claramunt
evoke images of mountain peaks to whose heights many may aspire but
which only the finest will attain. The metaphor indicates both social status
and moral stature, but here once again, the two authors make very different
use of it. Susana de Monteflorido is a prize to be won, not for the likes of the
crippled narrator Rafael, but for the heroic virtue of Andrés, as his (spiritual)
reward after the hardship, pain and sacrifice of an ascent through life in
which he leaves Angélica, and the lower (sensual) existence he would have
had with her, far below. Montserrat Claramunt represents the social summit
to which first Salvador and then Manuel aspire as social climbers. Andrés,
with manly decisiveness, wins Susana, while in a dramatic role-reversal,
Montse pursues Manuel with a decisiveness her family condemns. Resolved
to stand by Manuel, her action leads to a downward progress. From the
‘torre’ in the Avenida Mare de Déu de Montserrat (again recalling the moun-
tain shrine of the Catalan Patroness), she descends to the lower reaches of
the city to live with Manuel in one room. The Fall that started with her
transgres- sion of the rules of the Church and her own society, culminates
dramatically as she plunges to her death. Susana remains on a pedestal;
Montse falls from hers.

11 This story will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, as a Catholic Myth of

a Paradise Garden, and also in Chapter 5 as the source of the icon central to El embrujo
de Shanghai.
12 Josep Massot i Muntaner, Els Creadors del Montserrat Modern. Cent anys de
servei a la cultura catalana (Montserrat: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat,
1979).
 Marsé exploits this mountain imagery to infuse a Catalan Catholic
Nation- alist flavour into his ironic subtextual commentary on social
climbing and moral falling. Salvador, who woos Montse first (fruitlessly),
and then switches to Nuria (successfully), climbs mountains literally, as an
‘excursionista’. Catholic scouting movements in post-war Catalonia
provided a context in which young Catalans could escape surveillance, make
contact with their land, learn its language and be formed in opposition to
Francoist Spain. ‘Excursionisme’, also known as ‘Escultisme’, thereby
affords Salvador useful contacts among Catalan Catholic Nationalists. 13 Paco
observes him as ‘un ejemplo interesante de arribismo en la especialidad que
podría llamarse diocesana’ (PM, p. 87).
With these credentials, Salvador is elected by Luis Claramunt to be the
‘saviour’ of Montse and Nuria: it is Salvador – coming to buy Manuel off –
who catches Nuria leaving Manuel’s room and blackmails her into marriage
in return for his silence. When Nuria subsequently appears with a bandaged
ankle, leaning heavily on Salvador, with the climber’s ‘fuertes brazos
sujetándola sobre el abismo’, Paco jealously imagines a climbing accident
and ponders on the ‘agarrón salvífico del noble escalador de la J.O.C.’ (PM,
p. 260) which has saved Nuria from injury and the consequences of her
moral fall, and has won her saviour a place denied to Paco in the Claramunt
family. The ‘novela rosa’ narrator is typically an admiring advocate for the
heroine who points up the moral of the story. Rafael exclaims as he contem-
plates Feíta: ‘¡Qué lástima que todos no lleven reflejada en la cara la
hermosura del alma, que, si así fuese, la tuya sería bella entre las más
bellas!’ (AG, p. 47). His narrative reveals this hidden treasure first to the
complicit reader and then to the world – notably, to the object of Feíta’s
love, the hero Andrés – recording Feíta’s ultimate triumph. In contrast,
Paco’s response to his cousin Montse is complex and his intentions are very
different, reaching beyond her personal story and happiness and, despite
his affection for her, seeing her as a failure: a ‘criatura desvalida y mórbida
destinada a vivir con todas sus consecuencias uno de los mitos más
sarcásticos que pudrieron el mundo’ (PM, p. 7). Ortoll shows how ‘almas
generosas’ can triumph over selfish passions. Marsé’s Paco traces the
failure of piety and selflessness to make any significant impact in a world
dominated by middle-class Catalan Catholicism. The values Ortoll
propagates, Marsé labels myth and sets out to expose as dangerous
falsehood. Ortoll uses the framework of the ‘novela rosa’, with its subtext
of traditional Catholic morality, to preach on the value of Susana’s chastity
and the power of her charity; Marsé uses the language of the sexual dialectic
to lament in Montse an ineptitude made more crippling
by the idealism of the social gospel.

13 There is further work to be done on the subculture of Catholic Catalan Nation-

alist dissidence that grew up around the activities of ‘excursionisme’ which I discuss
in Chapters 4 and 5 in relation to myths and icons.
 Parodies of sentimental religious discourses appear interspersed
throughout the novel, their emotivity clashing sharply with the overall cyni-
cism of Paco’s narrative and undermining the force of Montse’s sincerity by
underlining her gullibility. When Montse visits the ‘primitos, Miguelín y
Rafaela, que superando la momentánea pobreza se quieren y se ayudan y se
portan como dos angelitos’ (PM, p. 83), the reader is induced to judge her
from Paco’s sceptical perspective. Marsé’s evocation of a ‘piadosa
Montseápolis’ in Chapter IX is close in style and perspective to a typically
sentimental article from Ancora, the magazine of the Congregaciones
Marianas..14 In the article, entitled ‘Por esas barriadas de nuestra opulenta
ciudad’ the writer – a catechist – combines stark detail intended to shock with
pious assertions concerning the essential goodness of humankind as God’s
creation, all couched in emotive prose: ‘Al bajar del trolebús nos acaricia un
viento un poco huraño. Realmente concuerda con el paisaje. Unas vastas
llanuras, descuidadas, recogen una porción de casuchas.’ The children he
encounters are victims of poverty:

Sus pelos, enmarañados, tienen grandes marcas de dejadez. Sus frentes

ostentan reliquias de alguna pelea. Sus labios, comprimidos del frío,
muestran, al abrirse, unos dientes podridos antes de nacer. Sus piernas
regularmente son delgadas. Sus cuerpos raquíticos; sus caras mustias; sus
manos despedazadas. En algunos se ven las huellas repugnantes de
enfermedades [...]. Uno de ellos, levantando dos deditos primeramente, y
luego todo él, me mira con cara que me mueve a risa compasiva.
(Ancora p. 50)

But what is poverty if the soul is pure?

A veces se topa con unos ojos brillantes. Tienen el brillo de las estrellas.
... Veo ahora que hay muchas almas puras. Miro ahora viendo que quedan
muchos ojos resplandecientes. Y, ¿en dónde? En una selva. En unas pampas.
En unos arrabales en que el mal va en brazos del viento, y el viento se recoge
en todas las ventanas sin cristales. (Ancora p. 50)

Marsé replicates the present tense, dramatic imagery and emotive language:

Muere el día alabando a la creación en su insondable y majestuoso

misterio [...]. Allí hace frío y las turbias olas lamen los pies de las
humildes barracas

14 Ancora (October 1944), p. 50. Marsé said of this passage: ‘está contado con un
estilo que pretende ser una parodia de las revistas de corazón’ (In conversation with
Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995). On his depiction of the discourses of lay organisations
such as the JOC, Marsé commented: ‘Hay una parodia de una especie de discursos
muy al estiloya la manera de las cosas de la época que – no recuerdo – los saqué de
revistas, de artículos [...]. En esta novela me gustó hacer muchas parodias’ (In
conversation with Rosemary Clark, 28 March 1996).
 que también merecen el nombre de hogar, verdaderamente, pues en no
pocas de ellas, dentro de su innoble apariencia, reinan la armonía familiar
y la resignación cristiana que todo lo ilumina y lo transforma. (PM, p. 81)

The ‘deditos’ of the catechist’s pupils are echoed in Marsé’s string of

infantilising diminutives, but Marsé’s phrase ‘se quieren’ quoted earlier
acquires new meaning as the ‘primitos [...] angelitos’ copulate with a brutal
desperation as soon as Montse leaves. Paco’s message is clear: Montse sees
the world not as it is but as she has been taught to view it, with:

una total imposibilidad de conectar con lo inmediato, una desmesurada

capacidad de proyección hacia el futuro mejor, como si la realidad que
veían sus ojos fuese igual a la de esas fotos cuyo primer término está
desenfocado en favor del último. (PM, p. 272)

Because she fails to engage with them, the help she offers is impractical.
Because of that too, she is never loved as Nuria is. Ortoll’s Andrés asserts
that beauty of spirit will win and hold true love as mere physical beauty will
not:

Angélica será eternamente la mujer en la que fijarán los ojos muchos

hombres y ninguno la amará. Susana es menos avasalladora y, por
consiguiente, no se la admira, pero se la ama de verdad.
(Ortoll, Almas generosas, p. 152)

The experience of Marsé’s Paco suggests that it is the promiscuous Nuria

who attracts, obsesses and can give endless pleasure.

The ‘novela rosa’ and Vatican II: aggiornamento, ecumenismo y diálogo

The ‘novela rosa’ tells of true love surmounting every obstacle to unite
lovers. In Marsé’s parody of the genre in La oscura historia, all potential
‘novelas rosa’ end in disaster aggravated by some of the very factors of
social inequality that the Church’s Social Gospel, and signally Vatican II,
were supposed to resolve, not propagate. Class, money and regional
differences, which should not interrupt the course of true love or threaten the
harmony of the Church, are seen to signify power in the post-war Catalan
Catholic bougeoisie in Barcelona. The scope and severity of Marsé’s critique
of Vatican II discourses in La oscura historia are therefore best appreciated
when viewed in the context of his depiction of social inequality in his
parodies of romantic fiction where love relations are disrupted. In Esta cara
de la luna (1962), the relationship between the wealthy Catalan, Guillermo
Soto, and the Andalusian
nightclub dancer, Palmita, represents a first move in a game of cross-class,
cross-cultural affairs – between the Catalan bourgeoisie and southern
Spanish immigrant – rags-to-riches romances gone wrong that culminate in
Montse, so successfully as to be reworked in El amante bilingüe.15
In Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1965), which Vargas Llosa called an
‘inverosímil folletín’ (Vargas Llosa, p. 1), the relationship is first given
centre stage. The ‘folletín’ continues in La oscura historia,16 but now Marsé
locates the socio-cultural conflict within the Catholic Church at a moment
when, in theory at least, its progressive elements are committed to solving
problems of social inequality. El amante bilingüe shows such inequalities
persisting on into the 1990s, despite the drive for change from Vatican II. In
La oscura historia, Marsé disrupts linear history and uses what seems at first
an unfortunate anachronism – that Montse dies before the Council, appar-
ently breaking any logical link between them – to highlight the gulf between
conservative and progressive tendencies within the Church by juxtaposition,
so challenging the notion of unity and truth fundamental to the faith. What
Vatican II would preach, Montse has already practised, and has been
severely punished for doing so.
In the layout of characters, plot and thematic structures in Ultimas tardes,
Marsé observes the conventions of the ‘novela rosa’ but subverts their
conventional message to offer his own. The traditional constellation of the
four main characters is there – the lovers (Teresa and Manuel) and the
decoys (Maruja and Luis Trías) – but the female decoy is too dangerously

15 For a discussion of El amante bilingüe as a parodic reworking of Ultimas tardes,

see Gene Steven Forrest, ‘From Masquerade to Reminiscence: Modes of Parody in
Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe’, Hispanófila, 113 (January 1995), pp. 45–53, and on
La oscura historia as tragedy and El amante as a comic reworking of the same story,
see Abigail Lee Six, ‘Blind Woman’s Buff: Optical Illusions of Feminist Progress in
Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 6,1
(2000), pp. 29–41.
16 Forrest suggests that ‘El amante bilingüe chronicles Marsé’s re-encounter,
some twenty-five years later, with Pijoaparte and Teresa. Reincarnated as Faneca
and Norma, both are now middle-aged and retain little of their youthful appeal’ (Forrest,
pp. 45 and 48). Forrest’s comparison of the characters across the two novels presents the
later work as a parody of the earlier, and as far more cynical: ‘Teresa’s (Norma’s)
voyeuristic attachment to the earthy ‘charnego’, no longer mitigated by her idealistic –
albeit superficial – espousal of progressive causes and rebellion against a puritanical
moral order, reveals little more than the erotic fetishism of a woman who is incapable of
authentic love.’ In my view, however, the neatness of the parallel does not compensate
for the imprecision of the generalisation. Faneca is Marés, and a Catalan. Rather than a
continuation of the Teresa–Manuel paradigm, he represents an entirely opposite
movement: a rejection of the Catalan nationalism that was not an issue in the earlier novel
but is central to El amante bilingüe. Furthermore, we must question whether or not what
motivated Teresa was ‘authentic love’, and my discussion of the ‘novela rosa’ will go
some way towards answering this.
eroticised for the idealised ‘novela rosa’ marriage, while the male decoy is
so weak as to provide no effective rival. The plot moves from an initial
attrac- tion between the lovers, through misunderstandings and trials, until
finally they surmount all obstacles and are reconciled. At this climactic point,
however, their reward is snatched from them: fate intervenes and separates
them for ever. Selfish lusts and selfless love are in constant tension, with marriage
and happiness-ever-after held up as the prize that no-one fully attains. Relation-
ships across the social divide soon die and social differences are never resolved.
Love does not cross class and economic barriers and the expected happy ending is
withheld.
Parodic allusions to religion in Ultimas tardes underpin the novel’s ironic
maintenance of the status quo. It is not gratuitous that Teresa’s mother is
called Marta, like the dull but worthy biblical Martha who chose the quiet
way of service to others only to be eclipsed in the narrative by her more
famous siblings Mary and Lazarus (Luke 10.38–42). The Serrat surname
proclaims her Catalan. In her husband’s view – and it is through his eyes that
the reader sees her – these two characteristics define and delimit her. Her
virtues are those of the dull but worthy wife and homemaker and pious
Catalan Catholic, all summed up in submission to her spouse, devotion to the
Virgin of Montserrat, and bourgeois values:

su mujer poseía una pierna realmente catalana, recia, familiar, confortable,

tranquilizadora, una pierna que atestiguaba la salud mental y la
inquebrantable adhesión de su dueña, por encima de posibles pequeños
devaneos, a las comodidades del hogar y a la obediencia al marido, una
pierna, en fin, llena de sumisión y hasta de complicidad financiera,
símbolo de un robusto sentido práctico y de una sólida virtud
montserratina. Y dijo la pierna: ‘Como tú quieras, Oriol.’ (UTT, pp. 136–
7)

Marta echoes the Virgin at the Annunciation, when Mary’s obedience undid
some of the damage caused by Eve’s disobedience: ‘He aquí la esclava del
Señor; hágase en mí según tu palabra’ (Luke 1.38). Even her unpredictability
is predictable (to the outsider, at any rate) and limited in scope. Marsé – with
the sarcasm Vargas Llosa found explosive – adds:

Marta Serrat tendía a aprobar cosas a veces sorprendentes – por ejemplo,

el resistencialismo universitario de su hija en pro de la cultura – pero en
todo dejaba que decidiera su marido. (UTT, 137)

What chance has Teresa the rebel if her mother has learnt to keep her trans-
gression within permitted limits? And irony of ironies, Manuel, whom
Teresa has chosen as the symbol and means of her revolt, has identical
expectations to those of her father: ‘[Teresa ] [e]staba hermosa en la
sumisión (“la obediencia las favorece a todas – pensó él –, pero sobre
todo a las niñas
bien”)’ (UTT, p. 161).17 After all, Manuel aspires to join the middle classes
alongside Oriol Serrat.
In contrast to the predominantly secular Ultimas tardes, Marsé’s use and
violation of the conventions of the ‘novela rosa’ in La oscura historia have
the direct effect of foregrounding the religious question. Four lovers try to
come together despite class, regional, and now religious boundaries too: the
two Catalan Catholic Claramunt sisters, Montse and Nuria, and their non-
practising ‘charnego’ suitors, Manuel and Paco. However, the traditional
constellation of four is now upset by the intrusion of a fifth: the upwardly
mobile, practising Catholic and Catalan Salvador Vilella, who courts first
Montse, then Nuria, and having begun life with a social status as low as that
of Manuel, marries Nuria and realises his social ambitions. Marsé considers
Salvador unique. Literary antecedents have often been suggested for Manuel
Reyes,18 but of Salvador Marsé says:

es un personaje del cual estoy contento porque no lo he encontrado en

ninguna otra novela española. Es el producto de la parroquia, éste. Este es
auténtico – el arribista que se forma en un grupo de vida parroquial – esa
cosa tan curiosa diocesana que ... en fin, es un equivalente del Opus.
19
(In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995)

In creating Salvador, then, Marsé makes religion, not politics, central to the

17 Female submissiveness runs like a subtext throughout the novel. Manuel’s

sister-in-law is ‘de mirada cálida y sumisa’ (UTT, p. 27). La Lola tries to attract
Manuel with ‘sus continuas llamadas de mujer rechazada y ahora sumisa’ (UTT, p.
37). Maruja regards Manuel ‘desde una servidumbre de la carne (sus ojos mansos ...
anegados siempre en una curiosa mezcla de sumisión y sensatez’ (UTT, p. 73). As
Manuel looks at Teresa, ‘Volvió a llamarle la atención la actitud sumisa de la mucha-
cha’ (UTT, p. 80). Even the Serrat’s dog is female – another conquest of Manuel’s
‘tras haberse ganado definitivamente la sumisión de la perrita’ (UTT, p. 189). In
contrast, Manuel himself has a ‘manera de ladear la cabeza que sólo los imbéciles
confundían con la sumisión’ (UTT, p. 66). The same, but without any irony, is so of
‘Feíta’. ‘Había una dulzura, una sumisión en aquellos ojos de mujercita buena y
enamorada (Ortoll, Almas generosas, p. 138). Rafael ‘adivinaba sus ojos puros
alzados hacia él Andrés con la sumisión de su gran amor’ (Ortoll, p. 173).
18 ‘Pijoaparte tiene una raíz stendhaliana que nunca oculté; nunca he ocultado mi
admiración por la novela del XIX, y concretamente por Stendhal’ (quoted in Colectivo
Lantaba, p. 44). A year earlier, Marsé had said: ‘lo he concebido en la tradición de las
novelas del XIX: el joven de provincias, ambicioso e imaginativo, que tiene que salir
adelante en un ambiente catalán que le resulta hostil’ (quoted in Sinnigen, p. 114). Marsé
also claimed to have been influenced by Balzac (Rastignac), Henry James’s Princess
Casamassima, and even F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (quoted in Morino, p. 41).
Emphasis is often placed on Marsé’s childhood reading of comics, and these references
restore some balance by showing wider reading, and also the tendency to rework, rewrite
and parody.
19 The reference to ‘el Opus’ is to Opus Dei, discussed later in this chapter.
novel and targets the Church in a Catalan proponent of Vatican II ideals
provocatively named ‘Saviour’.
Marsé’s narrator now is dissident also. Paco, his first attempt at a first-
person narrator, is no adoring suitor like Ortoll’s Rafael but an unbe- lieving,
untrusting, unreliable fantasist with an acerbic sense of humour and
numerous axes to grind. Paco’s opening image (his adultery with Nuria and
the bulldozers moving in on the empty house) make the chances of a tradi-
tional happy ending remote, and abandoned on the floor lie Salvador’s dusty
Vatican II texts. By disrupting the linear narrative, typical of the ‘novela
rosa’, with daring anachronism that warns us of Montse’s death before her
story has even begun, once again Marsé links the Church’s most optimistic
endeavour with the Fall of the House of Claramunt and indicates that,
perhaps even for Salvador, whose books lie by his adulterous wife, disillu-
sionment has already set in.
Marsé’s narrative strategy, more complex than in earlier novels, makes
disillusionment central to the novel. Paco has returned from France after
Montse’s death, Nuria’s marriage to Salvador, and after Vatican II. He and
Nuria resume their liaison and together set about reconstructing – or rein-
venting – the events of their childhood and youth before the Council around
the life and death of Montse. Salvador and his books make personal seem-
ingly distant ecclesiastical events, now woven into the fabric of La oscura
historia de la prima Montse. The result is a dense and complex depiction of
the Church through conflicting accounts in a highly-charged sexualised
dialectic. The question of Catalan nationalism barely hinted at in Ultimas
tardes20 now emerges more assertively, and Marsé represents the impact of
Vatican II on institutions and individuals within the Catalan Catholic Church
in a series of simple equations that disrupt the comforting smoothness of
conclusion of the traditional ‘novela rosa’. The Claramunts are wealthy,
middle class, Catalan and actively Catholic; Manuel Reyes is poor, working-
class, unemployed, not Catalan and a non-believer. Both he and Paco
Bodegas are too alien in physical type and economic background, and too
hostile to the Church, ever to be accepted into the family. Salvador Vilella,
on the other hand, is Catalan, carves out a career first in church
organisations, then in the Claramunt family business, and is rewarded with
marriage to Nuria. Montse’s love and self-sacrifice fail; Salva’s ambition
and selfishness

20 Two examples where Marsé uses regional difference to sharp effect are: when
Manuel ironically notes that Teresa’s self-confidence, evident in her Catalan accent,
belies the apparent diffidence of her expressed views: ‘el singular acento catalán se
mostraba en todo momento ... como descarada manifestación de la personalidad’ and
yet ‘la hermosa rubia alardeaba de un extraña desprecio para consigo mismo y para el
obligado ejercicio de su condición de señorita’ (UTT, p. 80); and when Manuel himself
acknowledges that to achieve his ambition, he too must become Catalan: ‘la perderé,
no puede ser, no es para mí, la perderé antes de que me déis [sic] tiempo a ser un
catalán como vosotros, caaaabrones!’ (UTT, p. 195).
succeed. The power of love – a notion that fans the flames of religious and
romantic discourses – is thwarted in this most ironic novel.
Through Montse and Manuel, Marsé focuses on a dilemma that faced the
post-war Church, and on several attempts to resolve it. The dilemma was
how to show the love of God in a society sharply divided into rich and poor.
Should the Church accept existing social structures and advocate charity to
alleviate hardship, urging the rich to give generously to the poor, or should it
call for an end to inequality as the followers of Marx and Bakunin were
doing? A century earlier, the Bishop of Barcelona, had said: ‘Los libros
santos recomiendan y prescriben la limosna, y esto no se concibe ni puede
practicarse sin que haya ricos y pobres en mayor o menor escala’, 21 while the
Bishop of Vic, Antonio Palau, had passionately warned potential strikers in
1868:

Os conjuramos por las entrañas de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo que

abandonéis esta actitud que tanto zozobra y alarma causan a vuestras
autoridades y a todos vuestros conciudadanos; que volváis al trabajo [...],
la religión nos enseña la resignación y el sufrimiento.22

Playing again on anachronism, Marsé has this same message preached at

Manuel a century later at a Cursillo de Cristiandad, in a talk praising the
‘Obrero Ejemplar que no se mete en política ni huelgas ni manifestaciones de
protesta’ (PM, pp. 154–7) – an icon I shall discuss in Chapter 5. Because
Manuel rejects the message and the call to religious commitment, wanting
something better, doors to social advancement close: little has changed in
effect. Because Salvador Vilella accepts it, he gets what he wants – a ‘chalet’
with swimming-pool in the wealthy suburb of Pedralbes – thanks to a tactic
of conformity within the still powerful Church, Marsé’s message seems to be.
To consider Marsé’s treatment of Vatican II forces the reader to address a
question implicit in this novel and central to the critique offered in his work
as a whole: has the Church been willing and able to make any real progress in
satisfying social, political and spiritual aspirations in post-war Spain, or has it
merely talked of reform and modernisation while maintaining the status quo?
The elements of the ‘novela rosa’ in the narrative lead the reader to expect
true love to be rewarded, selfish ambition to be thwarted, and a final reconcil-
iation in which even transgressors can find a welcome in the sunshine of the
virtuous. Instead of reconciliation – religious or social – what Marsé explores
is mechanisms in Barcelona’s Catalan Catholic society that facilitate the
exclusion of unwanted intruders and keep wealth in the hands of the rich.
Including the unborn, then brain-damaged, narrator of Rabos de lagartija,

21 José D. Costa y Borrás, ‘Escrito Pastoral’, 28 April 1852, in Obras, i (Barce-

lona: [n. pub], 1864), p. 118.
22 Antonio Palau, La Corona de Aragón, 187 (6 July 1855), pp. 1–2.
Marsé’s narrators typically stand as outsiders in relation to the situations
they describe. In the case of Paco Bodegas in La oscura historia, such
limited contact as he has with the Church, and with Catalonia, is through his
Claramunt relations, from whom he feels separated by class, regional
identity and lack of religious belief. Later, when he observes how Salvador
uses the Church and Vatican II as a means of making useful contacts, scaling
social heights and snatching Nuria from Paco’s grasp, he loathes Salvador’s
ruth- lessness but admires the entrée he has gained into the Barcelona
bourgeoisie. With Manuel too, though Paco can identify with him as another
poor ‘charnego’, he realises that Manuel, like Salvador, will exploit the
mecha- nisms of Catholic middle-class charity – and seduce the vulnerable
Montse – to set his foot on the social ladder. These people – all involved
with the Church – alienate further an already hostile Paco, whose hostility
permeates his depiction of the Church and Catalonia, framed repeatedly
through outsiders.
In his initial evocation of the parish centre, Paco imagines an outsider
hearing snatches of a talk being given to ‘visitadoras’ (including Montse) in
an inner room. As the outsider listens, she watches street children, drawn to
the ‘parroquia’ by its recreational facilities, locked in bitter, silent combat.
The suggestion fundamental to Paco’s understanding of his cousin Montse’s
tragic fate is already there: that what goes on in the inner room is irrelevant
to what goes on outside the glass screen of the door, even though the subject
of discussion inside is how to reach people outside. The grandiose rhetoric
and calm confidence of the delivery are in stark contrast to the desperate
silent violence outside:

Sigue la mansa voz al otro lado del cristal: ‘... auténticas atletas de Dios
que vieron coronar triunfalmente un maratón espiritual cuando llegó su
mayoría de edad con el Decreto de aprobación como Instituto Secular ...’
Sobre el banco, a su lado, pelean dos niños estrechamente enlazados,
inmóviles, agarrotados por una rabia sorda, sin fuerzas y sin aliento, sin
gritar, porque aquí han aprendido a pelear sin gritos ... ‘... la Institución,
diáfana, clara, transparente a pesar de los malintencionados de turno que
quisieron en su día negarle el pan y la sal, tuvo la gran virtud de
anticiparse incluso a la “Provida Mater Ecclesia” en una labor nueva y
originalísima de proselitismo y atracción del pueblo llano y sencillo.’ (PM,
p. 17)

The mention of the Apostolic Constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia, in the

context we have here, relates ostensibly to women’s lay organisations within
Acción Católica, such as the ‘visitadoras’ to whom the talk is being given.
But, it inevitably sets a hare running which Marsé could safely expect to
provoke strong reactions in even a moderately aware Catholic readership.
The Constitution was promulgated on 2 February 1947 to provide a legal
framework within the Church for Secular Institutions. The first – and still the
most controversial – of these is Opus Dei. 23 The link with Opus Dei becomes
even more plausible when we find that Marsé includes the Founder,
Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, among theologians whose names give an
impression of erudition but little more, during a talk at the Cursillo de
Cristiandad attended by Manuel Reyes (the inclusion of one recognisable
odd-man-out, Dale Carnegie, jokingly tests the knowledge of the unwary or
ignorant): ‘monseñor Olgiati, dom Columba Marmion, pare Plus S.J.,
monseñor Escrivá, Tanquerey, Lercher, Janigusalls, Chautard, Civardi,
Coutois, Dale Carnegie’ (PM, pp. 177–8 [my italics]). Words, signifying
knowledge, mean power, and while ‘desfilan nombres y más nombres
extranjerotes, malsonantes, cumbres universales de orgullo y soberbia’ (PM, p.
178), the audience at the Cursillo – overwhelmed by the rhetoric – is urged to
reject political action in favour of religious resignation; to accept the status
quo:

La manera de alcanzar la igualdad social, dice el conferenciante, debéis

concebirla en términos de la más característica ideología cristiana: una
mayor laboriosidad, la capacitación profesional, la perseverancia, la
honradez y el comportamiento que inspire confianza en vuestros
superiores. (PM, p. 178)

The definition of Secular Institutions tells Montse how she should act as a
‘visitadora’, before Vatican II, anticipating what the Council would later
affirm:

Secular Institutes are not religious communities but they carry with them
in the world a profession of the evangelical counsels which is genuine and
complete, and recognized as such by the Church. This profession confers a
consecration on men and women, laity and clergy, who reside in the world.
For this reason they should chiefly strive for total self-dedication to God,
one inspired by perfect charity. These institutes should preserve their
proper and particular character, a secular one, so that they may everywhere

23 Opus Dei obtained the decretum laudis (an initial signal of approval) according
to the terms of the Constitution a mere three weeks later, on 24 February 1947. Pius
XII gave final approval on 16 June 1950. Hermet goes so far as to suggest a direct link
between the efforts of the Founder of Opus Dei to provide the organisation with a suit-
able ecclesiastical identity and this Constitution. He wrote: ‘La promulgation de la
“constitution” Provida Mater Ecclesia vient recompenser ses efforts, le 2 février, en
créant le cadre para-ecclésiastique des instituts séculiers auxquels l’Opus Dei sert de
prototype’ (Hermet, p. 236). Marsé has said the following about Opus Dei: ‘De entrada
es como una especie de sociedad secreta, y esas cosas me repugnan mucho. Y luego
que son una élite, y es que está vinculada al mundo del dinero’ (In conversation with
Rosemary Clark, 28 March 1996). For a more moderate, yet still hostile outline of the
organisation’s activities, see Preston, pp. 108–11.
 measure up successfully to that apostolate which they were designed to
exercise, and which is both in the world and, in a sense, of the world.24

The ‘visitadoras’ are told what it means to be ‘both in the world and, in a
sense, of the world’ in words overheard from behind the glass screen, from
the safety of the inner room in the parish centre. These would guide Montse
in her prison visiting:

¿cómo captarse a un preso orgulloso de su soledad, amargado?, me

preguntaba nuestra compañera Montse el otro día. Pues interesándonos por
lo que a él le interesa, por sus preocupaciones, compartiendo sus
sufrimientos y logrando serle útil, en una palabra, y termino, procurando
ser más humanos. (PM, p. 19)

The words echo the ideals of Acción Católica expressed in an editorial from
1962 in the organisation’s magazine Ecclesia, which urges its militants to
become involved in the world where they work:

nada mejor que prepararnos y preparar a los demás para una delicada
resonancia ante los problemas y las formas de vida en que cada uno ha de
moverse. Lo que presupone una sensibilidad y un conocimiento de las
condiciones espirituales, humanas, sociológicas y hasta materiales del
círculo, ambiente, más o menos abierto, en que el militante ha de moverse.
(Ecclesia, 29 September 1962)

What Paco is at pains to point out is that Montse did what she was told, and
was punished for the socially subversive potential of her actions, while the
Church – Acción Católica and Salvador, in terms that would be reaffirmed
by Vatican II – who had preached the message to her, would be her
executioners and remain in power.
It hardly matters whether or not the Secular Institute referred to is Opus
Dei. What Marsé achieves by the veiled, deliberately uncertain allusion is to
play on a disquieting sense that all these organisations are part of the same
monolithic Church: kindly lady visitors, abstract theologians and members
of the enigmatic Opus Dei. What does matter is that what is said behind
closed doors, in the inner room, does nothing to bridge the gulf between
insiders and outsiders or break down the structures of social inequality.
Those like Montse who try to do so are cast out.
In dramatic opposition to Montse’s exclusion from favour and ultimate
fall, Salvador’s inclusion through marriage and social rise to the heights of
Pedralbes furnishes another of the main dynamics of the novel. His confor-
mity to society’s rules provides a counterpoint to her disobedience, but his

24 Walter M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of Vatican II. The Message and Meaning
of the Ecumenical Council (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967), pp. 473–4.
 hypocrisy sets a double standard that Paco is quick to note, being a creature
of double standards himself. As Paco considers Catalan Catholic society’s
response to Vatican II, his own starting position is neither neutral nor
straightforward; rather, he constantly explores the slippage between words
and works: what is said and what is done – official discourses and deception.
Whenever Salvador features in Paco’s narrative, three words rap out a
persistent refrain: ‘aggiornamento’, ‘ecumenismo’, and ‘diálogo’. They were
key words throughout Vatican II documents and its secondary literature –
notably the Catholic press, and Paco’s use of them is invariably ironic, since
they are the focus of his three-pronged attack on Salvador, comparing theory
with practice, always in the light of what has happened to Montse, and
always acknowledging the mixed motives that colour his own commentaries.
In Vatican II discourses, ‘aggiornamento’ (updating) indicates a willing-
ness to let go of the past and find new ways forward into the future. One
leading commentator on the Council, wrote optimistically: ‘The accomplish-
ments of the first session insofar as they involved breaking out of tradi- tion-
caked attitudes made it possible to embark on genuine aggiornamento’
(Abbott, p. 184). He added: ‘Time and again, even the most casual reader
must be struck by the document’s evident openness to fundamental elements
in the intellectual climate of 20th-century civilization, to the dimensions of
human culture opened up by advances in the historical, social, and psycho-
logical sciences’ (Abbott, p. 185). Notions of openness and modernity led to
an emphasis on ‘ecumenismo’: initially a movement to promote union
between all the diverse elements within the wider Catholic Church, but at the
time of Vatican II, indicating a perceived need for ground-breaking dialogue
with other denominations, even other religions. The Council’s Declaration
on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions states:

The Church therefore has this exhortation for her sons: prudently and
lovingly, through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other
religions, and in witness of Christian faith and life, acknowledge, preserve,
and promote the spiritual and moral goods found among these men, as well
as the values in their society and culture. (Abbott, pp. 662–3 [my italics])

Dialogue is essential, the document states at the start, because of the

common dignity of all human kind: ‘For all people comprise a single
community, and have a single origin, since God made the whole race of men
dwell over the entire face of the earth’ (Abbott, pp. 660–1). An editorial in
the Acción Católica magazine applies the idea to Spain with a sense of
urgency:

El diálogo no es una moda [...]. Tenemos que ser capaces de dialogar. A

todos los niveles. En todos los terrenos. Es la única manera que se nos
ofrece de salvar a la sociedad española de ‘funestas consecuencias’. No
hay opción; sólo hay un camino: el diálogo. (Aún, 62, July–August 1964,
p. 3)
In contrast, many publications focus on narrower concerns. Construïm JF de
AC, the ‘Órgan d’expressió’ of the Juventudes de Acción Católica, wonders:
‘Els laics, poden dialogar amb els Pastors de l’Església?’ (Construïm, March
1966, p. 5). Tackling questions of sexual morality, one article entitled
‘Diàleg’ asks: ‘Es possible l’amistat entre nois i noies?’ (Construïm, January
1966, p. 9). The impression gained is one of a serious lack of communication
within church circles. Yet even this question seems like progress when
compared with an earlier leading statement in an article by the novelist
Mercedes Ballesteros which rules out any possibility of friendship across the
sexes: ‘El “compañerismo” entre chico y chica es una hipocresía como un
tren’ (Signo, 11 August 1962, p. 7). It is areas of timidity such as these that
Marsé is quick to seize on in his depiction of Vatican II and the tragic conse-
quences of Catholic morality for Montse Claramunt.
Dialogue, in post-war Barcelona, was also taken to mean the freedom to
speak Catalan, not merely in the liturgy, as advocated in the Vatican II docu-
ments,25 but in every sphere of life. The Catalan Church took up this cause
(discussed further in Chapter 4), and if at first Vatican II seems an unlikely
topic for a novel, Marsé’s discussion of ‘aggiornamento’, ecumenism and
dialogue is lively because he moves it off a theological plane into individual
lives, locates it in the context of a bitter social and sexual rivalry between
two men, the ‘charnego’ Paco and the Catalan Salvador, and because Paco’s
commentary on the Council and Catalan nationalism is hostile but scurri-
lously amusing.
Paco attributes Salvador’s rise to an ‘arribismo en la especialidad que
podría llamarse diocesana’ (PM, p. 87), but when he outlines just how he
imagines that his rival ‘aprendió desde jovencito a introducirse en esos
repliegues de nuestra benefactora y limosnera burguesía, esas blandas
cavidades de la caridad’ (PM, p. 87), his use of sexual imagery links Salva-
dor’s rise to his sexual exploitation of Nuria. Their loveless marriage
exposes the coldly manipulative nature of the social climber. It also shows
how effective his tactics have been. Yet if Paco’s tactics are less successful
in the short term, he admits to uncertainty about his motives in relation to
Nuria. In speaking of them, he mixes the language of romantic love and
heroism of the ‘novela rosa’ with a harsher language of aggression and
possession: ‘Porque me enamoré locamente, cierto. Pero la indecisa mano
que te acariciaba en noches serenas, en el jardín de tu casa, mucho me temo
que era y que sigue siendo una garra’ (PM, p. 107). The difference between

25 This question was addressed principally in the Constitution on the Sacred

Liturgy. ‘In Masses which are celebrated with the people, a suitable place may be
allotted to their mother tongue [...]. The competent territorial ecclesiastical authority
[...] must, in this matter, carefully and prudently consider which elements from the
traditions and genius of individual peoples might appropriately be admitted into divine
worship’ (Abbott, pp. 156 and 151–2).
Salvador and Paco is not seen, then, in simple terms of love and lust as in the
traditional ‘novela rosa’, but as a matter of their differing capacity for
genuine communication – dialogue with Nuria in the first instance, and by
extension with the world as it really is: a world that Vatican II challenged
Catholics to engage with, not exploit. This, in Paco’s view, is the issue on
which the two men join battle: a power struggle across personal, social and
political boundaries.
When Paco and Salvador meet and discuss Vatican II, Paco’s sense of
being an outsider has intensified after eight years in Paris. He comes to
realise that he has been unaware of changes that have occurred, notably in
the Church, and is easily wrong-footed. Worse still, he comes as a supplicant
before a powerful Salvador who, through contacts in high places, can bestow
or withhold the permission Paco needs to film in Barcelona. And as a
wanderer and a visitor – Nuria’s periodic lover – Paco cannot challenge the
superiority of a man who owns her, along with his striking modern ‘chalet’
in Pedralbes, complete with servants and swimming-pool. At the same time,
being an outsider as well as a rival adds an edge to his discussion of Vatican
II that brings into sharp focus both the opinions and the inconsistencies high-
lighted by their mutual hostility, not in terms of abstract theology but of the
reality of the death of Montse.
‘Aggiornamento’, ‘ecumenismo’ and ‘diálogo’ are all put to the test in
their first encounter. Salvador invites Paco to lunch at Pedralbes and, unex-
pectedly, Nuria – the symbol of contention – is present. Salvador opens
discussion on a dissertation he has written which, in his view, ‘me salió
ajustada a la línea del Concilio’ (PM, p. 34). He is to lecture on a
‘paradigmática fe en lo social y democrático’, arguing that ‘Nos conviene,
por otra parte, no desperdiciar ninguna ocasión de diálogo’. Paco initiates a
series of skirmishes rather than dialogue, in which each fights for supremacy
with opinions as weapons while Nuria – excluded from the duel – has no
voice and starts to drink.
Paco, who works in the avant-garde world of 1960s French cinema, can
see that he is being made to appear childishly inept by an urbane, updated
and liberal post-Vatican II Salvador. His opening gambit on arrival has
failed:

Me había procurado algo que provocara, ya de entrada, aquel espíritu de

indulgencia plenaria que él gustaba siempre de hacer gala: un escandaloso
Playboy doblado bajo el brazo y con la belleza mensual a doble plana bien
visible. Resultó una gansada totalmente ineficaz y, lo que es peor, de otra
época: mi sarcástico reloj de cuco se había parado en el año sesenta.
(PM, p. 26)

When Paco tries again, equally fruitlessly, to scandalise, Salvador claims the
high ground by informing him of radical updating (‘aggiornamento’) in
Cath- olic attitudes to culture and morality:
 – ¿Y qué clase de películas haces? – dijo Salva.
– Me avergüenza decirlo. Porquerías francesas, cine inmoral, ya sabes:
chicas en combinación y con liguero, camisones cortos y transparentes,
mucha cama, etcétera. Vosotros no podéis verlo todavía.
[...]
– No creas – dijo Salva europeamente – ahora pasan cada una... Hace poco
pude ver Viridiana en una sesión especial con coloquio organizado por
sacerdotes. Las cosas han cambiado mucho por aquí, y cambiarán mucho
más, ya lo verás. ¿No has probado esta mostaza? Es francesa.
Y europeando sobre la mesa, su mano posibilista y vernácula alcanzó la
transpirinaica y democrática moutarde. (PM, pp. 33–4)

Outmanoeuvred, but so dogged in his criticism that the permission to film

that he needs from Salvador seems in jeopardy, Paco’s ironic litany of the
buzz-words of Vatican II, deliberately misapplied to suggest they are mean-
ingless, now includes ‘vernácula’ as a reference to the Council’s advocacy of
the use of vernacular languages, which had been seized on by Catalan oppo-
nents of Franco’s one-language policy. As early as 1727, Catalan bishops
had forbidden the preaching of the gospel in any language but Catalan in
defiance of Philip V who, in 1716, had forbidden the use of Catalan in
official busi- ness. Peers comments: ‘During the eighteenth century, then,
the pulpit must have done a great deal to keep the vernacular alive.’ 26 The
campaign would receive new impetus in the nineteenth century from Bishop
Torras i Bages, and subsequently from Montserrat, but here Paco links
language to a ‘mano posibilista’ reaching out to grasp a foreign luxury.
Peers argues that ‘the Church has always been active in getting in touch
with the masses in their own language or dialect’ (Peers, p. 99); Marsé
points to inconsistency in the Catalan Church’s attitude to its twentieth
century masses – a failure in both ‘aggiornamento’ and ‘diálogo’. After
Salvador’s lecture, discussion among his Catalanist coterie turns to the
campaign to be allowed Catalan bishops in Catalonia.27 A drunken Paco, ‘in
vino veritas’, argues the case of the ‘charnego’ population of Barcelona:

26 E. Allison Peers, Catalonia Infelix (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938),
p. 99.
27 The 1914 Bases de Manresa had already attempted to ensure that only Catalan
bishops would be appointed to high office in Catalonia. The so-called ‘Volem bisbes
catalans’ campaign of 1966 was sparked off by the appointment of the non-Catalan
Bishop of Astorga, Don Marcelo González Martín, to the Archbishopric of Barcelona.
In the words of one Catalan Catholic historian: ‘El nomenament no feia altra cosa que
replantejar un problema secular, agreujat aleshores per les esperances que el Concili
Vaticà II havia desvetllat, en aquest com en tants d’altres aspectes, ensems que per la
repressió tenaç del règim franquista contra les llibertats democràtiques i nacionals de
Catalunya.’ Josep E. Piñol, El Nacionalcatolicisme a Catalunya i la Resistència.
1926–1966 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1993), p. 208.
 – Como somos mayoría, queremos obispos de Almería – le dije con mi
mejor acento andaluz. (PM, p. 47)

His point ignored, he is offered black coffee to ‘come to his senses’. The
restaurant – ‘La cova del drac’ – is Catalan, ‘Las altavoces amenizaban
vernáculamente la cena con distintas muestras de la Nova Cançó’, and a
resentful Paco watches ‘estos mandarines de la catalanidad’ playing what
seems to him a greedy power game: ‘cómo se les llenaba la boca de poder,
de compadrazgo y de reparto de botín’ (PM, pp. 46–7). Through its pro-
Catalan language policy, and in the person of Salvador, the Church is
associated with this exploitative and exclusive exercise of power, and
despite protestations of updating, in Paco’s view ‘tras las sonrisas liberales y
dialogantes asomaban inmovilismos tomistas’ (PM, 45).
Marsé’s accuracy in mimicking discourses is shown dramatically when
Paco challenges Salvador on the question of violence. Salvador condemns
violence in his lecture and receives a telegram of support which reads:
‘Reprobamos el odio y la violencia que aplastan los derechos de la persona
humana. Firmado: Jec, Jic, Jac, Joc, Jac/F, Jec/F, Joc/F, Hoac y M.S.C.
Minyons Escoltistes’ (PM, p. 43). There is mention of violence against
priests who marched through Barcelona in protest against police torture of a
student (PM, p. 44).28 Coincidental it may be, striking it certainly is, that
Marsé’s telegram is virtually an exact translation of a statement made about
the march by the same organisations. Its second paragraph begins: ‘Nosaltres
ens solidaritzem amb els sacerdots manifestants en la reprovació de l’odi i la
violència que esclafen els drets de la persona humana.’ It is signed: ‘JEC,
JIC, JAC, JOC, JEC/F, JAC/F, JOC/F, Delegació Diocesana d’Escoltisme de
Barcelona, M.S.C. “Minyons Escoltes” ’ (Piñol, p. 289). Paco’s mocking
mimicry is amusing but an unmistakable message is also punched home:

– Haz el favor de dialogar, Salva, sé buen cristiano.

... [Q]uise saber por qué insistían tanto en acusar de violentos a los
pueblos subdesarrollados y oprimidos que intentan rebelarse: ¿acaso no es
una forma de violencia, le pregunté, el poder que ejercen sobre ellos las
minorías privilegiadas? ¿No es una forma de violencia la ignorancia, el
hambre, la miseria, la emigración laboral, los salarios insuficientes, la
prostitución organizada, la discriminación intelectual, etc.?, le dije. ¿Por
qué nunca llamáis violencia a todo eso, reverendo? (PM, p. 48)

Once again, the style and thrust of this passage is close to that of actual
mate- rial in the popular Catholic press. An article from Signo (JAC),
published

28 For an account of the march on May 11 1966, see Piñol, pp. 214 and 288. Piñol
includes copies of a statement from the priests to Archbishop Modrego, and of the
letter to the Jefe de la Brigada de Investigación Social handed in to the Jefatura de
Policía in an appendix. (Piñol, 285–8).
three years before La oscura historia, asks ‘¿Dónde está la violencia?’ The
writer continues:
¿Qué es la violencia y dónde está? ... ¿No es un latifundio más violento
que una huelga clamorosa? ¿No es un secuestro injusto más violento que
una algarada estudiantil? ¿No es un proceso arbitrario más violento que un
grito descompasado y burdo? ¿No es una situación prolongada de
injusticia más violenta que una guerrilla?
He then quotes Vatican II to point out that the mere absence of civil unrest
does not constitute peace. There must be justice too:
La paz – nos dice el Concilio – no es una simple ausencia de guerra ni el
resultado del solo equilibrio de las fuerzas o de una hegemonía despótica,
sino que con toda exactitud se llama obra de justicia [...]. [D]eben
desaparecer las injusticias. No pocas de esas provienen de las excesivas
desigualdades económicas y en la lentitud en la aplicación de las
soluciones necesarias. (Signo, 11 February 1967, p. 3)

The rivalry between Paco and Salvador creates in the novel a ‘dialogue de
sourds’ in which Vatican II discourses and religious rhetoric are aired and
satirized. But beneath the undoubted humour of the parodies, a serious point
is made forcibly by Paco whenever he brings discussion back to the question
of Montse’s death. He challenges Salvador directly, asking: ‘Oye, ¿cuál es la
línea del Concilio?’
Salvador Vilella pareció asombrarse de mi lentitud mental. Luego
sonrió, sin que de momento se dignara contestar.
– Ya sabes, el diálogo, la convivencia, el aggiornamento – murmuró sin
ganas –. Pásame la fruta, ¿quieres?
– Cruel ironía la del destino – dije –. Recuerdo que a Montse la llamábais
borrega y tonta por situarse hace ocho años en esa línea que ahora,
precisamente, los nuevos vientos ecuménicos os recomiendan. (PM, p. 35)

His question is rhetorical and he answers it himself in an elliptical state-

ment that both identifies Montse with Vatican II as a precursor, and points
out one vital difference between her and Salvador: that for her, religion was
not a means to an end in a power game but a genuine, if tragically unrealistic
attempt to live out the faith she had been taught from childhood, believing in
a happy ending to her own spiritual and sexual ‘novela rosa’.

The ‘novela rosa’, the Fall, and Carnival

In its simplest outline, the classic ‘novela rosa’ follows the biblical narra-
tive pattern of Temptation, Fall, Redemption and final restoration of a
perfect and unbreakable union with the Beloved. It also echoes some of
its main
ideas. Temptation comes through a sinful woman and salvation through a
perfect one. The sin of the first Eve, the Temptress, makes her sexuality a
source of guilt to be concealed. The Second Eve, Mary the Mother of the
Saviour Christ, remains ever Virgin and sinless according to Catholic
doctrine. Immaculately conceived herself, the immaculate conception of her
child, and even childbirth leave her untouched by the inheritance of original
sin. Adam and Eve’s original estrangement from God, caused by Eve’s
disobedience in tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
that God had forbidden them to touch, makes them aware – and ashamed –
of their nakedness. Once symbolic of their obedience and innocence,
nakedness becomes the sign of their sin, to be concealed. Reconciliation
with God becomes possible through Mary’s obedience in agreeing to become
the mother of the Redeemer Christ,29 her words to the angel setting an
example for future generations of women: ‘He aquí la esclava del señor;
hágase en mí según tu palabra’ (Luke 1.38).
The ‘novela rosa’ reflects this typology of two kinds of woman: men are
tempted by erotic women and saved by virtuous wives. Lust is replaced by
love, and after sufferings in the world, a new paradise is created in the
perfect home, under the aegis of the Angel of the Hearth. A clear distinction
is drawn between the sexually pure, selfless and obedient heroine, whose
role it is to draw an often flawed and sexually experienced man into the
saving state of marriage, and the transgressive woman who has tasted of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, has preferred independence to
obedience, and lures men to follow her to destruction. In La oscura historia,
Marsé reverses the process of salvation typical of the ‘novela rosa’ and
suggests instead an alternative formula.
In La oscura historia, the religious discourses surrounding Vatican II
represent a voice of authority from the Church, mediated through Barce-
lona’s Catalan Catholic bourgeoisie, and echoed by Salvador. Against it,
voices of scepticism and dissent – languages of freedom for the individual –
rehearse their arguments, initially through Paco and Manuel, and later
through Montse and Nuria as they join in a transgressive sexual dialectic
which isolates Salvador as the voice of Vatican II and as Nuria’s eventual
husband in the only relationship to be institutionalised. After their marriage,
the sexual dialectic is prolonged in the adulterous relationship between Paco
and Nuria and serves to challenge Catholicism, in its discourses and
doctrine, and in the working out of its theories in practice, through
transgressive rela- tionships across religious, social and regional divides. As
outsiders, Paco and Manuel represent for Nuria and Montse a chance to
transgress the limits of their class. Nuria, like Teresa (UTT), does so for fun,
but Montse finds that the limits set by her society are contrary to the
principles of her faith – princi-

29 Whereas Eve gave birth to a murderer (Cain), in giving birth to the Saviour,
Mary is accorded the title of Co-Redemptrix with Christ in Catholic doctrine.
ples taught in her Church that would be ratified by Vatican II. Thus Catholic
teaching and Catholic practice are brought into confrontation and subverted
by transgressive dissenting voices.
In my Introduction I discussed play and carnival as models for Marsé’s
narrative: two activities that release a dynamic creativity that defies limits
and authority in a safe play area. I also quoted Bakhtin’s definition of
carnival as an ‘experience, opposed to all that was ready-made and
completed, to all pretense at immutability’ (Bakhtin, p. 10). Carolyn Morrow
picks up the notion of a challenge to authority in her excellent article on
Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1991), but to apply the parallel to La oscura
historia shows the later novel to be far more subversive.
Morrow observes that ‘Transgression stands out as a chief feature of the
carnivalesque’ (Morrow, pp. 834–5), which she links to Bakhtin’s notion
that the challenge to higher authority comes in carnival from the lower
nature. Bakhtin ‘explores ... the interface between a stasis imposed from
above and a desire for change from below, between old and new, official and
unofficial’ (Bakhtin, pp. xvi–xvii). Morrow remarks that ‘Although the top
may wish to excise the bottom, it remains tied to the low symbolically, for
the latter embodies a “primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life” ’
(Morrow, p. 835).30 In the context of Spain’s vertical social hierarchy or its
horizontal urban development, Teresa is mesmerised by Manuel’s otherness:
‘The novel stresses the openly erotic moves of those at the periphery which
both threaten and attract those at the center’ (Morrow, p. 835). She feels the
pull of the periphery, represented by Manuel’s habitat in Monte Carmelo,
and in Morrow’s view: ‘The text foregrounds the zone’s sex, dirt and decay
as a constant challenge to middle-class propriety’ (Morrow, p. 838). In
Ultimas tardes, however, the status quo remains intact. Teresa returns to her
family and accepts marriage, and the outcome of the novel’s dual dialectics,
as her relationship with Manuel ends abruptly, is simply one of poor sex and
poor politics easily dismissed as the romantic dreams of two fantasising
young individuals.
Despite superficial similarities between the rich blonde Teresa and Nuria,
Marsé’s treatment of them is significantly different. Adultery in Spain actu-
ally continued to be illegal until after Franco’s death,31 yet La oscura
historia (1970) opens scandalously with an intimate scene of adultery
between Paco and Nuria. That, however, is only an attention-catching
opening and Paco’s narrative goes on to explore what lies behind
Nuria’s defiance of the

30 Morrow is quoting Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
31 For details on the decriminalisation of adultery see Rosa Montero’s article on
‘The Silent Revolution: The Social and Cultural Advances of Women in Democratic
Spain’ in Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds, Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduc-
tion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 382.
authority of her husband and Catholic morality. He recalls her first distressed
visit to him in Paris: ‘en sus ojos una llamada de auxilio: harta de sinsabores
y bagatelas en un chalet de Pedralbes, ha llegado por fin, se ha desnudado, se
ha confesado, se ha ofrecido’ (PM, p. 28). When Paco – her sexual rather
than spiritual ‘confessor’ – returns to Barcelona years later, Nuria looks
every inch the rich man’s wife (PM, p. 27) as she greets him as her
husband’s guest, but the illusion soon fades as her continuing anguish is
revealed: ‘Sus hombros se estremecieron, y repentinamente, su aire juvenil e
intrépido, que yo adoraba, se esfumó. No pensaba encontrarla tan
desquiciada’ (PM, p. 31). When she joins Paco in bed ‘Temblaba y lloraba’
(PM, p. 51). This is a bad marriage, a façade that Paco’s narrative strips
away, as it does Salvador’s impassive ‘spiritual counsellor’s’ mask – his
‘serena cualidad mitad vegetal mitad mineral que cuanto más se esforzaba
por mostrarse humana – consejero y guía de juventud, catequista ferviente
que fue – más cruel resultaba’ (PM, p. 27). Despite the mixing of roles, once
Nuria ‘se ha desnudado, se ha confesado, se ha ofrecido’, salvation becomes
possible, but only through transgression. After prolonged misery in marriage,
Nuria’s experience, like Montse’s, recalls Paco’s claim that ‘lo poco que
hubo de solidario y civilizado en mi primera juventud se lo debo por entero
al trato con los cuerpos desnudos y a cuanto hay en ellos de hospitalario’
(PM, p. 7). Through the novel’s spiritual-versus-sexual dialectic, the stasis of
authority from above is undermined by dissent from beneath like the house
about to be demolished at the start of the novel. Yet the subversion has
another twist, for through Montse, Marsé also undermines religious
discourses from within.
In contrast to the traditionally ‘transgressive’ Nuria – the ‘femme fatale’
on the lines of Ortoll’s Angélica – it is Montse who effects in her
relationship with Manuel a radical inversion of the traditional codes of her
society: a carnivalesque exploration of ‘the interface between a stasis
imposed from above and a desire for change from below, between old and
new, official and unofficial’ (Bakhtin, pp. xvi–xvii). Believing in salvation,
she attempts first the social salvation of the convict, and then the salvation
through marriage of the man she loves. Yet instead of ensuring his rise, she
secures her own fall. Manuel, like Paco, is unacceptable to her family
because rigid social percep- tions deem him socially inferior; the arguments
they use, however, concern moral inferiority. Paco relocates their ‘moral’
strategy of exclusion in the social sphere:

En una familia católica cuya proyección futura reposa tradicionalmente en

los hijos varones, una conducta como la mía había de despertar
apreciaciones abstractas que tienen cierto interés como ejemplo de
estrategia moral en función de una clase. (PM 7)

Middle-class morality, he suggests, serves social ends. Paco has been made
to feel diseased, sick with a ‘maligna condición de pariente pobre’ (PM, p.
7),
and he suggests that the same becomes true of Montse. The chapter which
recounts her final capitulation to the temptation of a sexual relationship with
Manuel is entitled El contagio, ominously linking her relationship with him
with disease and ultimately death.32
However, even as Paco’s narrative reflects the family viewpoint, it also
frames Montse’s experiences with Manuel, albeit briefly, as a redemptive
rebirth. Nuria has sought social salvation through marriage to Salvador,
believing she needs to ‘definirse en el matrimonio si de verdad quería
definirse como mujer (no como cualquier mujer, sino como mujer de su
clase, que es la única clase donde ella podía realizarse con verdadera
emoción y sentido)’ (PM, p. 7). With her failed marriage in mind, Paco
suggests that it is in fact Montse who experiences new life with Manuel
outside wedlock. Reversing the rhetoric of death at the Cursillo, Paco uses
the imagery of sickness – Montse is ‘[d]efinitivamente contaminada,
enamorada’ – but reclaims it, associating her transgression now with
transfig- uration like that of Christ (Matthew 17.2):

Ya no era ella y sin embargo seguía siendo ella, ratificada súbitamente bajo
otra luz pero intacta su capacidad de secreto y de salud mental [...]. Así es
como la veo: un cuerpo nuevo que envuelve el mismo áureo ensueño de
siempre. (PM, p. 244)

In her sin, he depicts her as a saint. Sexual transgression has achieved for her
what socially correct behaviour could not get for Nuria. The view that Paco
wants to put forward – ‘Así es como la veo’ – is that the relationship could
have worked, had it not been for parental opposition that drove Montse to
suicide. Nuria’s marriage, on the other hand, is shown from the start of the
novel to be a bitter farce.
Insofar as La oscura historia uses humour and transgression to expose the
flaws of a hypocritical Catalan Catholic bourgeoisie, and of the Church
authority that bolsters its position despite protests to the contrary as repre-
sented by Vatican II, Bakhtin’s theories on carnival provide a useful critical
model both for Marsé’s critique of the Church and for his experimentation
with literature. As Morrow notes: ‘we now view transgression as advanta-
geous because “it breaks, frees, opens, makes possible fictional construction
and reconstruction, and guarantees authentic literariness” ’ (Morrow, p.
835).33 However, in my view, Marsé’s carnivalesque play has in fact a more
radical effect. He turns the carnival-authority model on its head and asserts
that it is the Church, Vatican II and the Catalan Catholic bourgeoisie that are

32 Imagery of sickness and health in relation to religion is central to my discussion

in Chapter 5.
33 The quotation is from Robert R. Wilson’s ‘Play, Transgression and Carnival’ in
Mosaic 19 (1986), pp. 73–89, 75.
grotesque as carnival is grotesque. He said of the Cursillo de Cristiandad ‘era
tan grotesco, tan tremendo, y al mismo tiempo tan patético, ¿no?, que queda
una cosa impresionante’. He continues: ‘Pero tomé unas notas, las guardé’
(In conversation with Rosemary Clark, 27 June 1995). 34 The result is a novel
which reverses the Christian dynamic of salvation, and the happy ending of
the ‘novela rosa’, and replaces notions of sexual morality and purity with
obscenity in a powerful carnivalesque inversion. In Manuel Reyes’ obscene
words in response to the obscenities detailed by various speakers at the
cursillo: ‘Yo no tengo dinero para barcelonadas, y nunca jodo en los
cementerios, coño, creo que no sería capaz de correrme, y además no sé
dónde está enterrado mi padre’ (PM, p. 168).
This chapter has shown how close familiarity with the discourses of
Vatican II and the conventions of the ‘novela rosa’ have allowed Marsé to
link these two discourses of optimism and salvation to particularly powerful
effect in La oscura historia de la prima Montse and use their own method-
ology and ideas to subvert the ideology on which they are based: Christian
doctrine mediated through the Catholic Church in post-war Barcelona. Marsé
uses observations and ‘notes’ to expose what he considers a grotesque
carnival distortion of reality and sex in the teachings of the Catholic faith.
However, his subversive games do not stop at secondary literature but offer
even more scandalous reworkings of the sacred texts and images of the
Church. My discussion will therefore move on now to consider how Marsé
plays with sacred biblical texts (Chapter 4) and sacred images (Chapter 5) to
affirm the value of strategies of evasion and invention in an endless game
which pits integrity against falsehood.

34 Marsé continued, concerning the three chapters about Colores: ‘me divertía
escribirlos. Era tan grotesco. Fue una experiencia que yo viví.’ Marsé attended a
cursillo about 5 years before writing La oscura historia. ‘Está en una masía. Y los
principales personajes son exactamente iguales [...]. Ese que hablaba sobre los
pecados horribles, que moría su hijo, no sé qué, y contaba que era por culpa suya, esas
cosas son auténticas [...]. Fui por curiosidad – por pura curiosidad. En esa época me
apuntaba a cualquier cosa [...]. Y fuimos yo y un periodista de La Vanguardia [...], y él
lo pasó fatal, y yo me divertí mucho, porque comentaba las cosas con los tíos, y me
interesó mucho. Y es que era tan grotesco, tan tremendo, y al mismo tiempo tan
patético, ¿no?, que queda una cosa impresionante. Pero tomé unas notas, las guardé, y
me olvidé de todo eso [...]. Mi amigo y yo [...] no confesamos ni comulgamos. Todos
los demás pasaron por todo eso – todos, todos.’ (In conversation with Rosemary Clark,
27 June 1995).
 4
CATALONIA AND PARADISE GARDENS:
EROTICISING EDENS

My discussion has already given an indication of the extent to which the

religious culture that surrounded Marsé in his early years provided him with
a source of potent stories and images that greatly enrich his narratives as
well as fuelling his critique of Catholicism in post-war Spain and Catalonia.
One religious myth in particular needs further exploration, because it
underpins so much post-war rhetoric, because it surfaces repeatedly in
Marsé’s novels, and because it is an endless source of controversial imagery
and ideas that he playfully exploits with knowledge and inventiveness.
Linked in Chapters 2 and 3 with the Catholic doctrine of the Fall and
National Catholic ideology, it is the myth of the Paradise Garden. However,
Marsé goes beyond the Garden of Eden and the Fall in Genesis. Indeed, he
uses of two Gardens of Earthly Delights – one from the Song of Solomon,
and one from the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Apocryphal Book of
Daniel, each of which I shall intro- duce briefly when their relevance to
individual novels becomes apparent1 – in which to set his reworkings of
Eden within a wider context of sensual plea- sure and call attention to the
imaginative creativity of the narrator. The result is a complex shifting of
narrative perspective that moves constantly between a pre-lapsarian paradise
naivety and a post-lapsarian knowing critical aware- ness: ‘Los sueños
juveniles se corrompen en boca de los adultos’ are the opening words of El
embrujo de Shanghai (1993). With an adult awareness, the paradise gardens
in Marsé’s earlier novels are defined socially and politi- cally as the preserve
of a wealthy elite in a wickedly sharp critique of Catalan Catholic
nationalism; later, however, eroticised Edens are released from such

1 The story of Eden is found in Genesis 1.26 to 3.24. The story of Susanna and the
Elders, like that of Bel and the Dragon, is a Second Century addition to the Book of
Daniel. Written in Greek, unlike the earlier Hebrew chapters, it was not considered
canonical by Jewish tradition. The Thirty-nine articles of the Anglican Church accord the
Apocrypha a lesser status as books ‘the Church doth read for example of life and
instruction of manners; but yet it doth not apply them to establish any doctrine’ (Arti-
cles of Religion, VI., Of the Sufficiency of the holy Scriptures for salvation. From the
1662 Book of Common Prayer). The Apocrypha is, however, included in Catholic bibles.
116 ROSEMARY CLARK

narrow specificity and are claimed by Marsé as the imaginative inheritance

even of children and of such hybrids as himself.
Gardens, both literal and symbolic, are a vivid element in Marsé’s
detailed mapping of Barcelona, viewed through the often desiring and
always suspect eyes of the venial author and his narrators. Gardens represent
land and possession, leisure and pleasure, inclusion and exclusion, and as
part of the urban landscape they can be read as a significant element in a
social and economic representation of the post-war city. The ruined gardens
and bombed sites of Encerrados, Si te dicen, Historia de detectives and
Rabos de lagartija co-exist in historical time – the 1940s – alongside the
private gardens of the wealthy Serrat, Claramunt and Valentí families,
together with that enduring symbol of the prestige of Catalonia’s late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commercial and cultural success, the
Parc Güell: open to the public but a product of private wealth and patronage.
The survival of these sites of wealth and prestige through the war, the
poverty of the 1950s and on into the 1990s, once again allows Marsé to
suggest, in a juxtaposition of past and present through flashback already
discussed in Chapter 2, that wealth and the status quo endure unchanged.
To ask what Marsé’s depiction of paradise gardens gains by drawing on
biblical myths opens the way for new readings of familiar texts and is neces-
sary for two reasons. First, Marsé’s point of access to Paradise Garden myths
reflects the prevalence of Catholic doctrine and tradition in post-war Spain,
both directly, through the Church, and indirectly, through political and social
ideologies which have used religious myths to legitimise their diverse posi-
tions: notably Spanish and Catalan nationalist discourses. Second, these
biblical paradise gardens all have a figure of authority and a regime
discourse against which we see pitted the energies of a dissident or at least
questioning individual voice set up by the author Marsé to challenge regime
authority. Furthermore, authority associated with ownership is inscribed in a
male figure: God in Genesis, the King and Lover in the Song of Solomon
(Cantar de los Cantares), and the husband Joachim and prophet Daniel in
Susanna and the Elders. The voices that question gather around a female
figure: Eve, the Beloved, and Susanna, and frame desire as a source of
tension between owners and outsiders. Sex is set in place as a strategy of
subversion.
In Chapters 2 and 3, along with critics such as Champeau, I have linked
Eden and the Fall with Spanish National Catholic rhetoric. I shall now
consider how Catalan Catholic Nationalists have also drawn on the biblical
paradise garden mythology to underpin notions of a specifically Catalan
Catholic identity and Catalan homeland that challenges assumptions of
Spanish hegemony enshrined in Spanish National Catholicism before recon-
sidering this specific model in the wider context of Marsé’s gardens.
A confrontation such as this between Catholics would be bound to delight
the sceptical Marsé, and his own ambivalence on the nature of Catalan iden-
tity means that he exploits rifts with mischievous humour and mixed
motives.
The divergence of interpretation of myths that the confrontation generates
also allows him once again to raise very specific questions concerning the
use of religious ideology for social and political ends. He is quick to detect
flaws in what the Catholic Church would like to present as monolithic
doctrinal statements and he exploits these flaws to challenge the authority of
doctrine, and he shows how the biblical and doctrinal source material that
form part of Catholic popular culture – preached from the pulpit, published
in devotional literature and voiced by churchgoers – may have an impact on
wider social and political issues, but are far from monolithic. His interest in
religious myth goes far deeper than merely reviewing popular culture and
this chapter will view how he embarks on an exploration of the power of
myth itself to mobi- lise and to polarise opinion.

Paradise Lost: Catalan Edens in La oscura historia and El amante

bilingüe
In La oscura historia, in the Claramunt’s paradise garden, Marsé launches
a carefully targeted attack on the Catholic Doctrine of Good and Evil in
which sin is defined as transgressing not only the codes of Catholic morality
but also of Catalanism. The obvious transgressor is the criminalised
‘charnego’ immigrant Manuel Reyes, but this is the first novel in which
Marsé creates a fully-fledged first-person narrator, and this significant figure
is the half-‘charnego’ and unashamedly transgressive Paco. The account of
Eden and the Fall he gives therefore shares the point of view of a
transgressive outsider while also having access to Eden, inverting the
biblical perspective of an authoritative God and seeking to seduce the
inhabitants of the paradise garden.
Though envious of their wealth and status, Paco is bitterly sceptical of the
religion and the social and political values of his Claramunt cousins. He
therefore frames his account of the temptation and fall of the Claramunt
daughters within a garden of earthly delights – a ‘hortus conclusus’ with
overtones of Eden, but his stated aim is to refute ‘uno de los mitos más
sarcásticos que pudrieron el mundo’ (PM, p. 7), the Claramunts’ Catholic
‘idea mítica del mal’ (PM, p. 103). A more obscure aim is to expose an
‘estrategia moral en función de una clase (PM, p. 7) which, for Paco – and
arguably Marsé too – conflates class and national identity in an attack on
Catalan middle-class Catholic exclusivity whose validity has been
questioned (Resina), but whose intensity is undeniable. Paco’s
representation of the story of Montse and Manuel sets out boldly to prove
that Montse ‘no fue engañada por el tipo, sino desengañada’ (PM, p. 129).
The origins of the Genesis accounts of the Creation and of Eden make
these ancient sacred writings particularly appropriate for Paco’s – and
Marsé’s – purposes, for the Genesis material is a national narrative, put
together in its present form when the Hebrews were in exile in Babylon
around 400 BC, by priests seeking to use the binding power of faith to forge
a sense of national identity in a defeated and enslaved people. 2 Occupation
and exile are two sides of the same coin when a nation is taken over, its
sover- eignty denied and its identity threatened. The complex relationship
between religion and politics that attracts Marsé’s attention repeatedly as a
novelist in post-war Catalonia, and that draws Paco’s satirical comments as
narrator in La oscura historia, is reflected in the diversity to be found within
what is often erroneously assumed to be a single biblical narrative. In fact,
there are two creation myths, the second of which deals with Eden, whose
underlying aims need to be examined separately.
If the Genesis narrative is read as it now stands in the Hebrew priests’
version, it moves from the wider view of creation to the particular story of
Eden: from the universe to Adam and Eve, focusing on the relationship
between God and humankind in the intimate context of the ‘hortus
conclusus’:3 making their small society central to the wider world. The first
narrative in Genesis 1.1 to 2.4 (c.400 BC), known as ‘Yahwist’ because it
emphasises the authority of Yahweh, God, establishes this God’s supremacy
over all other forms of life; everything is his creation, and Eve’s
disobedience in the second narrative in Genesis 2.4 to 3.24 (c.1000–900 BC)
therefore seems a foolish denial of his goodness. As Genesis continues, this
ominous impression is reinforced as Eve’s son Cain murders his brother
Abel, and there follows an escalation of violence until:

Viendo Yavé que la maldad de los hombres sobre la tierra era muy grande
..., se arrepintió de haber creado al hombre sobre la tierra y se afligió tanto
en su corazón, que dijo: ‘Exterminaré de sobre la haz de la tierra al hombre
que he formado; hombres y animales, reptiles y aves del cielo, todo lo
exterminaré.’ (Genesis 6.5–7)

Eve appears responsible for having initiated a terrible process of destruction

and despite the fact that the two stories came into being some six centuries
apart, this is a lasting impression that has led to the demonising of woman as
weak and transgressive in subsequent church doctrine.
The later priestly introduction asserts the supremacy of the Jewish Creator
God over all other deities and thereby defines the People of this God in
oppo- sition – as well as superior – to surrounding cultures and nations –
particu- larly powerful Babylon. Alone, of his own free will, and in a
supreme act of

2 For a clear and very readable introduction to this topic, see Bernhard W.
Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament (London: Longman, 1958), espe-
cially Chapter Six, entitled ‘Israel’s National Epic’ and Chapter Twelve: ‘By the
waters of Babylon’.
3 My discussion of the ‘hortus conclusus’ draws inspiration from the following:
Miró 1976; Coope 1973; and Parkinson Zamora 1984.
creation, God has brought order out of chaos, separated light from dark,
water from land, and created all living creatures, including the snakes the
Babylonians worshipped,4 which are consequently inferior to him. The Eden
story, though second in Genesis, is derived from far more ancient oral
sources first written down around 1000–900 BC and it shares much with
other surrounding pagan mythologies. Set within the ‘hortus conclusus’, it
addresses intimate social questions about cohabitation with others and with
an authoritative – indeed, totalitarian – God. After a brief summary of the
wider creation of the universe (Genesis 2.4b–7) it concentrates instead on the
fashioning of Eden (Genesis 2.8–17), of the first woman (Genesis 2.18–24),
and on the close unity between Adam and Eve, which the writer of Genesis
emphasises in a brief comment on Adam’s words:

‘Ésta sí que es hueso de mis huesos

y carne de mi carnes [...].’
Éste es el porqué el hombre deja a su padre y a su madre y se une a su
mujer, y son los dos desnudos, el hombre y su mujer, sin avergonzarse uno de
otro. (Genesis 2.23–25)

The intimacy between man and woman is an image of the intimacy between
God and his people, for God comes to talk with them and there is no shame
or separation between any of them. However, what might originally have
been an idyllic picture of innocence and sexual freedom, untrammelled by
any other restriction but that one fruit of the garden should not be eaten –
that the authority of God should not be questioned – is, in the priestly
narrative, put in the context of a national epic in which disobedience brings
about the end of Eden. Anderson writes on Eden in a chapter entitled
‘Israel’s National Epic’ that the writer:

was not interested primarily in writing about the antecedents of the

Exodus5 in a way that would satisfy modern historians and archeologists.

4 In a section on ‘The Subtil Serpent’ Norris mentions in the Babylonian creation

epic, the Enuma Elish, ‘eleven demons with names like the Viper, the Dragon [...],
Scorpion-Man’ (Pamela Norris, The Story of Eve (London: Picador, 1998), pp. 21–5).
Norris suggests that these figures form part of a dense network of imagery which
supports the notion that ‘Behind the angel who refuses to honour Adam may be traced
the shadowy figures of the Canaanite monsters who opposed Yahweh at the beginning
of history, the great dragon Leviathan, the snakes and sky-dragons and the primeval
deep itself’ (Norris, p. 102). They will reappear in my discussion of icons which repre-
sent the battle between Good and Evil, and particularly of the Catalan icon of St
George, in Chapter 5.
5 ‘This decisive event – the great watershed of Israel’s history – was the exodus
from Egypt. Even today the Jewish people understand their vocation and destiny in the
light of this revealing event which made them a people and became their undying
memory’ (Anderson, p. 8).
 His purpose was to confess Israel’s faith in Yahweh, whose saving deeds
had been manifested in Israel’s history [...]. To the Yahwist the meaning of
the Exodus was the meaning of all history, right back to creation.
(Anderson, p. 169)

Individual sin brings about the downfall of the nation. Anderson continues:

The Yahwist interpretation was based on the faith of the covenant commu-
nity. In the covenant faith, Yahweh is the sovereign Lord upon whose
grace and goodness, manifested in the great events of the past, Israel was
utterly dependent. But the Yahwist knew too from tradition that Israel was
bent upon flouting the authority of Yahweh in a spirit of murmuring and
rebel- lion, wildly and heedlessly betraying her Lord in order that she
might follow the devices and desires of her own heart. (Anderson, pp.
173–4)

The problem arises when Eve takes an initiative. Having been told: ‘puedes
comer de todos los árboles del jardín; mas del árbol de la ciencia del bien y
del mal no comerás en modo alguno, porque el día en que comieres,
ciertamente morirás’ (Genesis 2.16–17), she dares to embroider her account:
‘nos ha dicho Dios: No comáis de él ni lo toquéis siquiera’ (Genesis 3. 3 [my
italics]), and as she engages in dialogue with the serpent, her initiative makes
disobedience possible. She sees that the fruit is ‘apetitoso para comer,
agradable a la vista y deseable para adquirir sabiduría’ (Genesis 3.6), and
whether motivated by one or all of these attractions, the result is a transgres-
sion of the line laid down by God. The initial harmony between woman and
man, humankind and nature represented by the serpent, and between them
and God, shatters under the impact of doubt, recrimination, and finally
shame.6

6 The Book of Ezekiel contains what seems like a mythologised version of the
Genesis story which exploits resonances, easily recognisable to a Jew, which lead to
the association of the King of Tyre’s defiance of God with that of Adam. Describing
the King in his glory, Ezekiel also evokes the overlordship of God:
En el Edén, jardín de Dios, vivías,
Innumerables piedras preciosas
adornaban tu manto. (Ezekiel 28.13)
Both Eve and the King are tempted through their appetites and ambitions: she because
‘el árbol era apetitoso, agradable a la vista y deseable para adquirir sabiduría’ (Genesis
3.6), and he because, as the prophet tells him:
Tu corazón se había engreído
por tu belleza.
Tu sabiduría estaba corrompida
por tu esplendor. (Ezekiel 28.17)
Therefore, the King is cast down in a Fall which mirrors that of Eve, and of the
ambitious Angel of light, Lucifer, to be discussed in Chapter 5.
 To defy God is to destroy Eden. Morality and politics come together
around the serpent tempter, Eve’s transgression and Adam’s collusion. In La
oscura historia, a similar combination of godlike authority (Luis
Claramunt), a tempter from outside (the Babylonian serpent or ‘charnego’
Manuel and Paco) and a women with a sense of initiative (Montse and
Nuria) spell disaster for the Catalan Catholic Eden. Marsé tacitly
acknowledges this as he joins battle with the Church in La oscura historia
on the matter of Good and Evil and authority in the context of a Catalan
paradise garden and makes guilt and punishment central to Paco’s
relationships therein.
Paco’s feelings towards his Claramunt cousins are mixed. Despite his
hostility, he remembers the Claramunt home, during his childhood, as a
‘paraíso que anidó un día aquí, en estos jardines disimulados a escasos
metros del peligroso asfalto [...] las márgenes contemplativas y silenciosas
donde anidaron pájaros y rumor de aguas cristalinas’ (PM, p. 8). He recalls
longing to enter this paradise and briefly enjoying its sensual pleasures
tinged with the wicked attraction of transgression: ‘las meriendas de
chocolate que nos preparaba la abuela, los cigarrillos “Bubi” que yo le
robaba a mi tío, las lociones de masaje “Floïd”, que tanto nos gustaban a
Montse y a mí, y cierta excitante conversación con Nuria sobre “Rebeca”, la
película-terrible- pecado-mortal’ (PM, p. 56). Paco’s narrative foregrounds
female temptresses in this Eden but admits to being ready to be tempted:

en el jardín jugaba con nosotros una primita de trenzas rubias, llena de

pecas y de malignidad, que sonriente se acurrucaba bajo las lilas y se
empeñaba siempre en que adivináramos el color de sus braguitas – tierno
empeño que lo satisfacía con indiferencia y una secreta nostalgia en el
corazón: sólo me interesaba el color de las de la prima Nuria. (PM, p. 54)

Nuria is already the focus of his desire, as Montse becomes for Manuel, yet
from childhood on, their relationships are overshadowed by the censorious
authority of Tío Luis. To please him means conforming to prescribed rules
and rituals and learning obedience as Adam and Eve were intended to do.
Paco remembers that:

Para entrar en la torre de tus padres había que hacer toda esa serie de
operaciones que predisponen a las almas simples a la sumisión y al
respeto: introducir la mano entre las lanzas de la verja del jardín y abrir
por dentro levantando el pestillo, volver a cerrar, luego rodear el surtidor,
apartar con la mano una rama baja del sauce, subir los cuatro escalones del
porche y finalmente tirar de la campanilla, ni muy fuerte ni muy suave.
(PM, p. 65)

Biblical myth blends with fairy tale and with the story of Catalonia’s own
patron, St George, as Paco imagines facing a trial of strength: like God’s one
prohibition in Eden, a chance to prove his worth through obedience and
self-denial. Yet even as he contemplates this possibility, he acknowledges
that he is no selfless George but a dragon, desiring only to possess and
hoard. Tormented by a precocious sexuality, the child Paco, like the adult
narrator, cannot tell what he wants more: to enter and possess the garden
paradise, or Nuria:

es como una obsesión de Príncipe Valiente, no consigo verte sin un fondo

de castillo con torres almenadas y dragón, aquel jardín, aquellas noches
estrelladas, un fabuloso decorado siempre unido a ti ... Qué bonito. Había
que matar el dragón para merecerte. Y me pregunto si ese telón de fondo,
ese dragón que había que vencer y ese castillo, eran un medio o un fin; me
pregunto si no me atraían más que tú. (PM, p. 107)

He confesses to Nuria: ‘me enamoré locamente, cierto. Pero la indecisa

mano que te acariciaba [...], mucho me temo que era y sigue siendo una
garra’ (PM, p. 106).
This complex exploration of desire draws much from the Eden myth.
Marsé, through his narrator Paco, does not demonise the female temptress.
Rather, he revels in the sensuality surrounding Eve in the garden. And why
not? A recent re-reading of the Genesis narrative by a Christian theologian
seems to absolve Eve of all serious charges against her. Barr argues that
Eden marks a change in Adam’s and Eve’s fortunes but does not indicate sin,
a Fall, or a termination of the relationship between God and man. Barr’s re-
reading of the doctrine of Original Sin and Total Depravity seems bold, but it
is based closely on the text. He points out that the word ‘sin’ first occurs
after the expulsion from Eden, when God warns Adam and Eve’s son Cain:
‘si haces el mal el pecado está a las puertas de tu casa. Su acoso es contra ti,
mas tú puedes contenerlo’ (Genesis 4.7). Even then, sin is there but Cain has
a choice and can resist it. Eve, too, in James Barr’s view, had a choice.
Indeed, while Cain acted from jealousy, Eve showed good sense:

At most the woman was attracted by the food value, the pleasant appear-
ance, and the educative prospects of the fruit. There is no indication that
the will to become more than human, to put oneself in the place of God,
formed her motivation: if it did, the narrative is at fault in not making this
important point clear.7

In Paco’s view, at least, Montse was enriched by her transgressive relation-

ship with Manuel. With Nuria,

Hablé de ciertos días en que su cuerpo parecía alcanzar una vida

7 James Barr, ‘The Authority of Scripture. The Book of Genesis and the Origin of
Evil in Jewish and Christian Tradition’, in Christian Authority. Essays in Honour of
Henry Chadwick, ed., G.R. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 59–75, 65.
 independiente de sus activos sentimientos, y de cómo a partir de entonces
su figura se concretó, dejó de ser aquella mareante gama de gestos
inconscientes y a menudo desequilibrados, adquirió peso y volumen,
gravidez, el sugestivo imperio de la contención. Eso, que en otras mujeres
más superficiales habría reducido su atractivo, en ella floreció en una
misteriosa cualidad sensual. (PM, p. 215)

Nuria too finds in transgressive relationships a comfort that is lacking in her

approved marriage. When she seeks Paco out in her marriage home in the
night, the garden of their shared childhood accompanies her:

Llevaba un pijama y su piel olía a jazmín. Temblaba y lloraba. Acogí con

preocupación y tristeza su conciso cuerpo de niña: nunca sería fuerte esta
Claramunt descocada y precoz. (PM, p. 51)

Precocious like Eve, Nuria tastes of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil and is overwhelmed. Inasmuch as Eve’s choice constituted an act of
disobedience, she had to take the consequences, though Barr points out that
these were not as catastrophic as God’s words ‘ciertamente morirás’ implied.
Indeed, Adam and Eve might have lived forever had God not cast them out
of Eden to prevent them eating from the tree of life (Genesis 3. 22).
Effectively, God set a term to their suffering by expelling them – death
would bring release – and he also proved his continuing concern for them by
making them clothes of animal skins (Genesis 3. 21). Barr claims that ‘the
Old Testament, far from taking the universal sinfulness of man or woman as
an obvious and ineluctable fact, seems to insist upon the possibility of
avoiding sin’ (Barr, p. 67), adding that Judaism as a whole ‘has refused to
accept any sort of doctrine of original sin’ (Barr, p. 68).8 Such compassion
was not forthcoming for the Claramunt girls from their family, only from
their transgressive lovers.
The exclusion of sinful women has a long history in Church and
pre-Church Jewish tradition despite the fact that Jesus, who is reported as
having mentioned sin, judgment and hell on many occasions, 9 is nowhere
quoted as linking Eden or Eve to a Fall caused by Woman. St Paul, when
elaborating his doctrine of the Fall and Redemption, blames Adam not Eve:
‘por un hombre entró el pecado en el mundo y por el pecado la muerte, y así

8 Barr quotes Ps 18.21 to 24, but nonetheless argues that the Hebrew Bible places
no stress on Eve’s sin or woman’s wickedness (Barr, p. 70) – a point with which Norris
concurs (Norris, p. 41), providing in support of her argument a review of Old Testa-
ment women illustrating their diversity of behaviour (Norris, pp. 44–58). Barr
suggests that attitudes changed from the Hellenistic period onwards, when Rabbis
such as Ben Sira began to dwell on the pragmatic question of the trouble women could
cause in a man’s household.
9 Two famous examples are the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke
16.19–31), and the parable of the wheat and the tares. (Matthew 13.36–42).
la muerte pasó a todos los hombres, porque todos pecaron’ (Romans 5.12).
Or again: ‘como todos mueren en Adán, así todos revivirán en Cristo’ (I
Corinthians 15.22). Nonetheless, Paul is also held to have written: ‘no fue
Adán quien se dejó engañar, sino Eva, que seducida incurrió en la
transgresión. Se salvará, sin embargo, por la maternidad, si persevera con
sabiduría en la fe, la caridad y la santidad’ (I Timothy 2.14–15). Certainly,
by the second century AD, in both Rabbinical commentaries on the Hebrew
scriptures and in the Early Church, the notion that woman’s frailty required
male guidance and protection through marriage and domesticity to limit its
damage potential was commonplace.10 The second century Christian
Tertullian of Carthage warned women in the Church:

And do you not know that you are [each] an Eve? [...] You are the devil’s
gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first
deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil
was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image,
man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had
to die.11

Tertullian is acknowledged as having had ‘a sharp and violent talent’, 12 and

when writing on discipline, he identified the Church with God as Judge, and
with Good set against Evil, claiming that it was the Church’s duty to cast
sinners out as they had been excluded from Eden:

There is reason to believe in the correspondence between the free

judgment of God and that of the Church, when the Church has pronounced
the exclu- sion of the delinquent from its prayers, its assemblies, and all
holy things. This discipline takes three forms, – exhortation, censure, and
condemna- tion, the consequence of which is exclusion.13

The rhetoric of exclusion linked, via women, to sexual sin appeared again
in early Christian thought when Augustine of Hippo, in the fifth century,
admitted to often uncontrollable sexual desire and took this as evidence that

10 Norris offers a selection of writings from the Rabbinical tradition and Early
Church Fathers that illustrate a growing preoccupation with the dangers of female
allure and the need to curb female sexuality (Norris, pp. 66–82).
11 From De Cultu Feminarum, written in about AD 196–7, as quoted by Norris, p.
196. For the most part, Tertullian’s writings to women address questions of remarriage
and of appropriate behaviour in the context of a non-Christian society, rather than
demonising them. For a discussion of Tertullian’s position see Barnes 1971, 136-8.
12 Timothy.D. Barnes, Tertullian. A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1971), p. 3.
13 From his Apologia as quoted by E. de Pressensé, The Early Years of Chris-
tianity: A Comprehensive History of the First Three Centuries of the Christian
Church, trans. A. Harwood-Holmden (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1879), p. 78.
he, as much as any woman, was guilty of involuntary transgression.
Addressing God in dramatically emotive terms, Augustine wrote: ‘I, miser-
able wretch, having forsaken thee, did even boil up again with the fervour of
lust, following still my foul course and forsaking thee [...]. Where was I, and
how far off was I exiled from the dear delights of thy house?’ 14 Convinced
that Adam and Eve had enjoyed legitimate sexual relations before the Fall,
fulfilling God’s command ‘Sed prolíficos y multiplicaos’ (Genesis 1.28),
Augustine sought to explain why their first response to the knowledge of
Good and Evil – when ‘conocieron que estaban desnudos’ (Genesis 3.7) –
was to make aprons of leaves to cover their genitalia. What may equally be
seen as a new sense of vulnerability or shame now focused on a hitherto
inno- cent and innocuous aspect of Adam’s and Eve’s condition: their
nakedness and sexuality. Augustine concluded that sexual desire had been
perverted by the Fall:

After their disobedience to God’s instructions [...], immediately they were

embarrassed by the nakedness of their bodies [...]. The soul, in fact,
rejoiced in its own freedom to act perversely and disdained to be God’s
servant; and so it was deprived of the obedient service which its body had
first rendered.15

He then evolved the notion that Adam’s and Eve’s offspring would carry the
taint of their original sin:

the whole human race was in the first man, and it was to pass from him
through the woman into his progeny, when the married pair had received
the divine sentence of condemnation. And it was not man as first made,
but what man became after his sin and punishment, that was thus begotten.
(Augustine, p. 512)

It can be argued that Augustine distributed the blame equally between man
and woman, but his notion of original sin being passed on through birth, via
woman, can be compared with earlier biblical passages linking women, birth
and sin:

Mira que en culpa ya nací,

en pecado me concibió mi madre. (Psalms 51.7)

It is a short step to demonising woman as bearer of sin.

Preoccupation with the Fall has often distracted attention from what went

14 Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (London and Glasgow:

Collins Fontana, 1957), pp. 57–8.
15 Augustine of Hippo, City of God (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), p. 522.
on in Eden before it, at a time when nakedness and innocence were synony-
mous and all was harmony. One can argue that the words:

Dios creó al hombre a su imagen,

a imagen de Dios lo creó,
macho y hembra los creó. (Genesis 1.27)

suggest that each individual man and woman contains elements of ‘macho y
hembra’, or that man – ‘macho’ – is completed by woman – ‘hembra’ – to
achieve that image of God, male and female. With both interpretations, it is
clear from Genesis that originally there was a oneness of ‘macho y hembra’
which reflected the nature of God, and was shattered when Eve disobeyed
God’s injunction, and transgression first declared itself in knowledge of
difference revealed by nakedness. Their otherness has been problematised;
sexual difference is now a cause of shame. They now know evil as well as
good, and that knowledge is associated with their sexuality – an association
they signal with concealing clothes. Was their first knowledge self-knowl-
edge, manifested in an awareness of their own nakedness? Or on seeing each
other’s nakedness, did they also see their own through the eyes of the other –
and then of God – so that their shame was a consequence of another’s gaze?
Paco’s taste of paradise makes him aware of his own unadmirable motives
in reaching out to seize the forbidden fruits of the garden, but like Montse he
also experiences ‘desengaño’ when confronted with the motivations of the
Claramunts. In Nuria his sexual desire has awakened, and in the family his
desire for wealth. Both desires are to be frustrated by Tío Luis’s
prohibitions. In a passage redolent of sensual pleasure, Paco muses:

Recuerdo con emoción un olor a lilas en el jardín, un patético empeño por

prolongar ciertos juegos misteriosos y laboriosos a la incierta luz del
crepúsculo o en la penumbra del recibidor [...] aquella pervivencia fría de
la empuñadura de latón de ciertas puertas prohibidas, y con aullidos de
pariente pobre todavía hoy evoco la habitación de mis primas en la torre,
sus camas policromadas, cierto sentimiento de exclusión que había de
crecer y devorarme. (PM, pp. 56–7)

With hindsight and now based in Paris, Paco can mock a Catholic
morality that, in his mind, was linked to the sense of guilt he was made to
feel as a child. Nonetheless, he is quick to show how religion can be used to
reinforce questionable social and political strategies of exclusion:

En una familia católica cuya proyección futura reposa tradicionalmente en

los hijos varones, una conducta como la mía había de despertar
apreciaciones abstractas que tienen cierto interés como ejemplo de
estrategia moral en función de una clase. (PM, p. 7).
 In recognition of the function of women as bearers of the next generation
and acknowledging that if the purity of a threatened race is to be preserved,
adultery ranks above all other sexual sins – it is the only one to feature in the
Ten Commandments – Jewish identity is passed on through the female line.
The transgressiveness of Paco and Manuel derives in part from their regional
otherness. Marking him from birth, like original sin, is the fact that Paco is
not entirely Catalan. His surname is from his father – a reminder of a
Claramunt from a previous generation led astray by a wandering ‘andaluz’:
‘Mis ojos eran la admiración de los Claramunt (reconocían en ese azul
pálido la marca de la familia), pero no el pelo, negra pesadilla gitana, y
mucho menos, mi nombre: Paco Bodegas. Nombre capaz de todas las
vilezas’ (PM,
p. 55). The Claramunt Eden is a Catalan Eden and Paco’s racial difference
and transgressive character equally mean that he does not belong in the
Catalan Catholic home. He recalls, again in biblical terms, significant
renaming such as Abram (Abraham), Jacob (Israel) and Simon (Peter) in
acknowledgement of God’s purposes for them:

La ceremonia del rebautizo, en la que ofició la poderosa voz de tío Luis

[...]: alto, autoritario, investido de extraños poderes [...] me llamó en tono
atronador: “Francesc! Les nenes no es toquen!” [...] [D]urante mucho
tiempo tal nombre se me antojó el justo calificativo que merecía mi
flagrante obscenidad, algo que de alguna manera me mostraba al mundo
con la tierna porfía de mis manos en la sedosa entrepierna de mis primas.
(PM, p. 55)

Numerous allusions in La oscura historia – often single words – show

Marsé drawing on another source of Catalan Catholic national narrative from
nineteenth century myth-making. The Renaixença looked back to – or rein-
vented – a remote past, bringing together catholicism and catalanism in
stories in which the great medieval monasteries of Ripoll, Poblet, and
Montserrat had provided centres of learning, and Catalan enjoyed the same
status as Castilian. The Church therefore claimed a place in the rediscovery
of a Catalan culture clearly framed as Catholic, in opposition to the culture
of non-Catalan and non-Catholic outsiders. One historian comments that, in
the wider political scene at the turn of the century:

Un sector muy destacado [...] protagoniza un movimiento intelectual de

inspiración católica caracterizado por su postura conciliadora, de amplia
colaboración con otros grupos nacionalistas, a la vez que ocupan en el
panorama cultural de Barcelona una clara posición hegemónica. ‘En cap
terra llatina’, podrá afirmar Carner en 1911, ‘està el catolicisme tan en
possesió del poder intel.lectual com en el dolç recó de Catalunya.
(Cacho Viu, p. 317)

That Catalan Catholic Nationalism was from the start as cultural as it was
political is illustrated by the influential ‘Núcleo’ or ‘Esbart de Vic’: ‘Un
grup d’intellectuals catalanistes que tenen llur centre vital a la ciutat de Vic,
molt influïts per l’ambient eclesiàstic i l’estratègia de l’Església [...], ruralista
i tradicionalista.’16 The cathedral town of Vic had a prestigious seminary that
housed such famous personages as Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902), Josep
Torras i Bages (1846–1916) and Jaume Collell (1846–1932), – all priests,
writers and fervent Catalanists. In praising Vic, Verdaguer linked politics
with religion and culture in defence of Catalan identity:

Un gran escut pels tronos i pel temple,

pel món un llibre obert.17

The most famous member of the group was undoubtedly Josep Torras i
Bages, whose impact as a theoretician of Catholic Catalanism has been
profound and lasting. This Bishop of Vic was also President of the Barcelona
‘Jocs Florals’ (a celebration of Catalan music, dance and literature) and a
member of the famous music society of which he stated proudly: ‘L’Orfeu
Català fou Crist’. His words show that, in his view, traditions give form and
expression to patriotism and ‘esperit nacional’, and thanks to its Catholic
Catalan traditions, Catalonia’s national spirit is unalienably Catholic.
Combining politics with culture, Torras founded several Catalanist Catholic
periodicals and the devotional society of the Lliga espiritual de la Mare de
Déu de Montserrat, and fought a dedicated battle for the use of Catalan for
preaching and teaching, stating bluntly: ‘l’ensenyar el coneixement de Déu,
això és, el Catecisme, als infants en llengua castellana, és un costum detest-
able, perniciossísim i destructiu de la fe’ (Pérez Francesch, p. 22). For Torras
religion and nature were one and the same thing, and this belief provided the
mystical foundation of his regionalism. He wrote: ‘La religió [...] és una
sobrenatural perfecció de la naturalesa, i per això cerca les entitats naturals
més que les polítiques, és a dir, més la regió que l’Estat, perquè és
divinament naturalista’ (Pérez Francesch, p. 12). The Church, therefore, is
crucial to Catalan national identity:

Potser no hi ha altra nació tan entera i sòlidament cristiana com fou

Catalunya. [...]. Mes activitat deu ésser educada, i la de la nostra raça fou
governada i dirigida, fou fomentada i educada, des que es pot dir poble
català, per l’Església, que l’engendrà en les ombrívoles valls del Pirineu.
Tothom diu que Ripoll és bressol de Catalunya on naix la nostra raça
bressada amb cants de monjos i al so de roncs clarins.
(Pérez Francesch, pp. 7–8)

16 Joan Lluis Pérez Francesch, ed., Torras i Bages. L’Església i el Regionalisme i

altres textos (1887–1899) (Barcelona: La Magrana, 1985), p. x.
17 Jacint Verdaguer, Obres Completes (Barcelona: Selecta, 1943), p. 424.
 As early as 1879, Collell called on Catholics to become involved in the
Renaixença:

llama la atención sobre el interés que tiene para la Iglesia la presencia de

los católicos en el catalanismo; llamamiento hecho, en primer lugar, al
clero, puix l’interessa més de lo que pot pensarse el profit d’aqueixa
restauració. (Cacho Viu, p. 300)

The rhetoric of an article written on the death of Collell (Flama, March 4

1932) illustrates the conflation of culture, religion and politics in the minds
of Catalan Catholic nationalists at the time. We read of this member of ‘la
gloriosa escola vigatana’: ‘El canonge Collell fou un exemplar sacerdot, un
orador eximi, un poeta vibrant, un periodista de tremp i tot unit en aquell
amor a Déu i a Catalunya.’ The names of the publications for which he
wrote read like a hymn to the land: ‘Col.laborà a “El pueblo Vicense”, “El
Eco de la Montaña”, “La Pàtria”, “La Garba Muntanyesa” [...], “Muntanyes
Regalades”. The message is driven home in a quotation from Collell’s
Himne patriòtic per la restauració de Ripoll:

Llengua santa que de l’independència

n’és penyora que may pot fallar
florirà en nostre llavi a tot-hora
en lo temple com dintre la llar.
Ab la fe que a Ripoll hem jurada
tindrem pàtria i tindrem llibertat.

The poet-priest Verdaguer linked the initial building of Ripoll with a Catalan
crusade against the Moors during the Reconquista, and ascribed to the
monastery an eternal, universal spiritual significance within the context of
Catholic Catalonia:

Té son arc de triomf lo Cristianisme;

al rompre el ju feixuc del mahometisme,
Catalunya l’aixeca a Jesucrist.
Qui passarà per sota aqueixa arcada
bé podrà dir que, en síntesi sagrada,
lo món, lo temps i eternitat ha vist. (Verdaguer, pp. 390–1)

Verdaguer also wrote cycles of poems in celebration of Montserrat, and his

Virolai, banned under Franco, is now sung in Montserrat every day by
emotional Catalan crowds, for it celebrates Catalonia’s special status as the
people of Mary, while the rest of Spain must look at her from afar:

Rosa d’abril, Morena de la serra,

de Montserrat l’Estel,
 il.luminau la catalana terra;
guiau-nos cap al cel
[...]
Dels catalans sempre sereu Princesa,
dels espanyols Estrella d’Orient. (Verdaguer, p. 181)

Written large across the façade of the Abbey of Montserrat are words
attributed to Torras i Bages that are not to be found anywhere in his
published works. In fact, this is a case where myth, not history, has been
carved in stone. The words are: ‘Catalunya serà cristiana o no serà’, and they
illustrate the extent to which, in Catalonia, nineteenth century Romanticism,
with its appeal to the myth of a vanished Golden Age or Paradise Lost
fuelled notions of a rural idyll with a distinctly Catholic Catalan flavour. The
Romantic notion of ‘Volkgeist’ served to underpin Catalans’ belief in their
own divinely instituted distinctive identity, as a recent commentator explains
about Catalan Catholic Nationalist ideology:

El Volkgeist era la creació indirecta de Déu en tant que era el resultat de

factors naturals que operaven en un període llarg de temps en un territori
concret. D’aquí se’n desprèn que la nació té un origen diví, y totes les
seves manifestacions són sagrades perquè són dons de Déu.18

The Romantic ideal of an idyllic country existence found a satisfying

Catalan model in the rural ‘llar pairal’ alluded to in Collell’s Himne. City-
dwellers, facing such unpleasant consequences of industrialisation as the
growth of an immigrant work force and urban slums saw in the notion of the
idealised rural paternal hearth a symbol of social stability of Catholic
values.19 The destruction of war would reinforce this ideal. Albert Balcells
describes ‘pairalisme’ as ‘an ideology that confused patriotism with
tradition-

18 Josep R, Llobera, ‘La formació de la ideologia nacionalista catalana’, L’Avenç,

63 (September 1983), pp. 24–35, 651.
19 This notion of the home as the basic building-block of society is close to that
outlined by Augustine: ‘Now the intercourse of male and female is the seed-bed, as it
were, of a city [...]. [T]he peace of a home is the ordered agreement among those who
live together about giving and obeying orders; the peace of the Heavenly City is a
perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God’
(Augustine, pp. 625 and 870). Menéndez y Pelayo commented that a valuable legacy
of Rome in Spain was the family as an essential element of social cohesion:
‘reorganiza la propiedad y la familia sobre fundamentos tan robustos, que en lo
esencial aún persisten’ (Menéndez y Pelayo, p. 505). This writer casts the family as
the image of man’s relationship with God ensured through inheritance and the family
home: ‘Sin un mismo Dios, sin un mismo altar, sin unos mismos sacrificios; sin
juzgarse todos hijos del mismo Padre y regenerados por un sacramento común; sin ver
visible sobre sus cabezas la protección de lo alto; sin sentirla cada día en sus hijos, en
su casa, en el circuito de su heredad, en la plaza del municipio nativo ¿Qué pueblo
habrá grande y
fuerte?’ (Menéndez y Pelayo, p. 506).
alism and idealized rural precapitalist structures’ and underlines its useful-
ness as an ideological weapon for fomenting Catalan unity: 20

The men of the Catalan literary rebirth belonged to an industrialized city

but they exalted an idealized rural world and a glorified medieval past.
This conservative message made it possible to build an ideological bridge
linking the Barcelona bourgeoisie to craftsmen and countryfolk in opposi-
tion to the urban industrial proletariat. Respect for the Church and the
sanc- tification of Catalan civil law were channels uniting the bourgeoisie
with the populations of the rural and mountainous areas.21

Vicens Vives similarly linked rural and urban Catalonia as one nation
through the ‘llar pairal’: ‘del retorn sovintejat del ciutadà a la casa o al mas
dels avis, n’ha nascut l’íntima solidaritat entre el camp i la ciutat de
Catalunya’.22 The early ‘casa pairal’ was the rural ‘mas’, the basis of an agri-
cultural society, to which Catalan law made the first-born sole heir to avoid
fragmentation of the inheritance (Balcells, p. 20). The first-born was not
allowed to leave the land (Vicens Vives, p. 42) and the ‘llar pairal’ thus
becomes symbolic of social stability in Catalonia, with the woman’s
function of bearing heirs once again seen to be central:

L’element bàsic, indiscutible, de la societat històrica catalana no és

l’home, és la casa [...]. Casa i família, mas i terra, vet ací el poderós
enreixat de la subestructura social catalana abans i després del segle XIV,
àdhuc fins als nostres mateixos dies [...]. Cada català té la seva casa pairal.
(Vicens Vives, p. 33)

20 Compare this with the Spanish National Catholic use of a similar rhetoric which
glorified the peasant with the aim of sustaining Spanish agriculture at a time when
rural poverty and urban growth were leading to an exodus from the countryside.
Preston discusses the contribution of fascist ideology to an effort in post-war Spain to
develop such a rhetoric. He quotes the then minister for Agriculture, Rafael
Cavestany, as saying: ‘Frente a la estampa de las revoluciones triunfantes sobre la
devastación; frente al triste desfile proletario arrastrando irredimibles cadenas de la
esclavitud, opongamos la estampa del campesino, puesto en pie sobre su tierra con una
casa al fondo, a cuya puerta juegan sus hijos y por encima de todos una modesta, pero
divina cruz, meta de todos los caminos del espíritu y hacia la cual nos lleva nuestra fe
y nuestra ambición de españoles’ (Preston, p. 198). Preston also quotes as an
ideologist Fernando Sánchez Puerta, Las clases medias económicas (Madrid: [n. pub],
1951, pp. 189–90 and 195) ‘un país que es capaz de crear una clase numerosa de
campesinado con tierra es un país asegurado contra los disturbios sociales, porque el
campesinado propietario está interesado en la estabilidad por encima de todo’.
21 Albert Balcells, Catalan Nationalism Past and Present (London: Macmillan,
1996), p. 39.
22 Jaume Vicens Vives, Notícia de Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1995), p.
42.
Vicens Vives drives his point home with a nice linguistic reference: ‘Som de
can Pau o de can Pere. Aquesta fusió entre la casa i la família ha estat
promoguda per l’estret lligam de l’home amb la terra en les diverses
colonitzacions del país’ (Vicens Vives, p. 34).
He also urges the Catalan to study the relation of man to nature in order to
understand his nation:

com ha establert aquest ordit de relacions materials i espirituals amb la

terra que el nodreix i els altres homes que li són consemblants, en una
articulació social definida i categòrica. En una paraula [...] com ha sorgit
la mentalitat que ens caracteritza dins la Societat Occidental.
(Vicens Vives, p. 17)

Catalans have, he says, a distinctive character formed by life in the

mountains as evoked in the nation’s mythology:

La Muntanya vivia aleshores esplèndidament. Refugi davant els

musulmans, les seves valls eren curulles de gent: esglésies, monestirs,
viles, poblets [...]. Durant tres segles s’hi formà el millor de quà podem
ufanar-nos: l’esperit feiner, el seny, el sentit de continuïtat, la tradició
familiar i la responsabilitat social. (Vicens Vives, pp. 28–9)

Prolonged contact with the land has made Catalans hard-working

‘sedentaris’ with firm roots in their own fertile soil: ‘El mas es convertí en
centre efectiu de l’estructura agrària catalana, [...] donava una absoluta
garantia de permanència vital’. The ‘masover’ owed feudal duty to a
proprietor, but not even the proprietor could expel his tenant if the tenant
kept the rules (Vicens Vives, p. 38). Castilians, as viewed by Vicens Vives,
lack such roots, being restless wanderers ‘d’ascendència transhumant i
nòmada’ (Vicens Vives, p. 46). For this Catalan historian, at least, the
difference between them boils down to ‘Les topades entre ambdues
concepcions del treball – per al castellà un “castigo divinal”; per al català, un
“signe d’elecció” ’ (Vicens Vives, p. 46), and the notion of a Chosen and
Separate People emerges again. Logically, the southern immigrants drawn to
Catalonia in the 1950s would by definition be seen as feckless, propertyless
‘nòmades’, having no rural base, family identity or claim on a Catalan
nationalism of the soil.
Some lines from Collell’s Montserrat illustrate how land and language,
family and nation, Catalanism and Catholicism all come together in the
symbolic ‘llar pairal’:

En tot eix mar de planes i onades de muntanyes

la santa llengua’s parla de cent generacions;
i en totes les contrades, ciutats, viles, cabanyes,
la encesa barretina corona’ls honrats fronts.
[...]
 la llet que du la mare té encar la saba nova
i’ls fills la escalfor senten dels vells escons pairals.
[...]
i sempre tindrem pàtria los fills de Catalunya
mentre al cel s’aixequen los pics de Montserrat.
(Flama, 4 March 1932)

Marsé uses these same terms to present a very different picture. The
adjective ‘montserratino’ is inevitably, if subtly, pejorative. In Ultimas
tardes (1965) Marta Serrat’s unquestioning obedience to her husband is
symbolised by a thickening middle-aged leg of ‘sólida virtud montserratina’
(UTT, p. 137). In El amante (1991), Marés is repelled by Norma Valentí’s
entrenched middle-class Catalanism yet sexually attracted to her, and his
ambivalence is focused as he describes her ‘boca grande y sensual, su larga
naríz montserratina’ (EAB, p. 55). He fears that like an unerring hound she
will sniff out his masquerade: ‘su sensible naríz montserratina es capaz de
olfatear la impostura y el serrín del falso charnego a varios kilómetros de
distancia’ (EAB, p. 152). Her nose fails her. Perhaps the difference is not as
strong as she believed. However, in both novels, ‘montserratino’, indicating
Catalan Catholic traditionalism, linked women and sexual dependency. For
all her social and political freedom within a new democratic Spain, Marsé’s
message seems to be, Norma Valentí can still be manipulated by sex, as she
can by her Catalan Catholic heritage, both being inscribed in her attitudes
and behaviour by centuries of tradition. As Lee Six writes:

Norma may indeed incarnate the emancipation of Catalan women; she

appears to have succeeded in winning self-determination for herself, but
ultimately Marsé makes sure it is a hollow victory: the advances are
revealed to be quite superficial and any perceived threat that women like
her pose to their men’s sense of their own masculinity is shown to be illu-
sory. The changes in Catalan society that have enabled Norma to live a
public life so different from that of Nuria have not made the slightest dent
on [...] the social construction of desire: men still want their women in the
subordinate position [...]: desire remains inscribed within the patriarchal
pattern of male domination and female submission.
(Lee Six, ‘Blind Woman’s Buff’, p. 38)

The regime discourse of Eden appears capable of coexisting with

progressive Catalan nationalism, and it is where the two meet that Marsé
launches some of his bitterest attacks.
Transposed in his novels from the countryside to urban post-war Barce-
lona, the ‘llar pairal’ is an early victim of Marsé’s subversion. The distant
echo of a rural paradise provides an ironic comment on urban decay and
reconstruction. Ideals of family unity and stability are mocked by the frag-
mentation of old social structures that the Church would maintain if it could,
just as wealthy Catalan Catholic families would preserve their private
gardens and keep social change at a distance, if they could keep outsiders
out. Paco likens the Claramunts to Torras i Bages’s beloved ‘Orfeó’
(‘L’Orfeó es Crist’): under the ‘batuta orfeónica’ of the patriarch, Tío Luis:
‘forman en cierto modo un Orfeó, una modesta, paternal y graciense masa
coral, y lo prueba el hecho de que, cuando discuten entre sí por cuestiones de
dinero, es como si cantaran’ (PM, p. 51). Neither entirely Catalan nor
sufficiently moneyed, Paco adds: ‘Yo nací al margen de esta armonía casi
litúrgica’ (PM,
p. 51). In contrast, his rival Salvador, from an equally humble background, is
Catalan and passed the culture test early on. As Nuria comments:

desde muy niño acompañó a su tío en sus rumbosas correrías por iglesias y
capillas, llevando una carpeta de partituras. (Nunca ha querido hablar de
aquel tío, un viejo y zarzuelero tenor catalán que se especializó en bodas
de rito montserratino, adornándolas con cancioncillas de ‘mel i mató’.)
(PM, p. 87)

Salvador could therefore join in with the Claramunts literally and metaphori-
cally when ‘El maravilloso Virolai montserratino, en ciertas solemnes
festividades, seguía expandiéndose gloriosamente por toda la casa y el
jardín’ (PM, p. 52).
Salvador’s integration is also reflected in his participation in the scouting
movements that enjoyed Church protection and fostered the ideals of Catalan
Catholic Nationalism in the post-war period, already mentioned in Chapter
23
3. ‘Escoltisme’ gave young people the direct contact with their land advo-
cated by Vicens Vives as a formative influence in developing nationalist
sentiment, and away from spying Spanish eyes they could learn its songs and
lore and keep the flame of Catalan nationalism alight. These groups have
been widely recognised as a form of dissidence. A letter to the Presidency of
the Unió Excursionista de Catalunya in 1975 testifies to an enduring impact
on one member:

Jo vaig fer-me soci de la UEC en un moment que la cultura catalana sofria

una persecució total i la nostra entitat va oferir, a un grup de joves que no
volia rendir-se, l’oportunitat de fer sessions al seu local social. Va ser per
això que vaig fer-me’n soci. Ha estat per aquesta fidelitat de l’entitat a la

23 Disbanded after the Civil War, scouting movements such as Minyons de

Muntanya and Boy-scouts de Catalunya, with determined help from the priest Dr.
Batlle, reformed almost immediately. In 1956, with Batlle as their Consiliario
Diocesano Scout, the Delegación Diocesana de Escultismo was formed within the
Consejo Diocesano de Jóvenes de Acción Católica. The aim, in the words of Pius XII,
at the 1952 International Conference of Catholic Scouting Movements, was ‘El
apostolado en y por el Escultismo’. Quoted from ‘El Escultismo, gimnasia para el
cuerpo y el alma’, in Signo (21 July 1962). Catalan Catholic Scouting Movements
produced their own literature whose ideology and iconography merits attention.
1. Sant Jordi. Front Cover of the Catalan Catholic Scouting magazine Camins,
April 1965

cultura del país i pel risc – i les complicacions reals – que aquesta actitud
digna i valenta va comportar-li que, malgrat que no tinc temps de practicar
l’excursionisme, he volgut continuar essent soci.24

24 Estanislau Torres, Excursionisme i Franquisme (Barcelona: Abadia de

Montserrat, 1979), p. 27.
At the same time, having taken their name from the army – ‘els soldats que
eren tramesos davant dels exèrcits amb la missió de reconeixer en camí i
preveure possibles emboscades’ – Catholic scouting sought to combine mili-
tary-style self-discipline with religious faith, ‘donant a l’Església i a Cata-
lunya un mitjà apte per a formar ciutadans conscients i homes de fe, educats
en el gust per les responsabilitats’ (Camins June 1965, p. 1). As an
‘escoltista’ (Christian soldier) – and a social climber – Salvador is portrayed
as a
Ferviente amante de la Naturaleza, del excursionismo y la escalada con
riesgo. … Con su rostro enjuto, curtido por el aire y el sol, a aquella gran
cabeza cuadrada de cabellos cortos y brillantes como de rocío, su aspecto
habitual era el de alguien que acaba de salir de una ducha fría alegremente
reconciliado con el vigor de su cuerpo. (PM, p. 89)

Yet Paco’s narrative makes it clear that what is really at stake is neither
religious belief nor political idealism, however much they are discussed, but
belonging among, and being recognised by, a powerful chosen, separate,
Catalan Catholic few. Using the metaphor of the ‘Orfeó’, Paco situates
power and money at the heart of its harmony; Salvador joins ‘la mejor
tradición coral y mercantil catalana’ not ‘por motivos de parentesco o de
lazos de sangre, sino más bien por esa expansión emotiva que deriva de
recíprocos sentimientos de poder’ (PM, p. 51). Using metaphors from
‘Escoltisme’, Paco describes how this ‘vencedor de picos inaccesibles’,
whom Nuria erro- neously chose to marry, now reveals a mountain’s harsh
inanimacy: ‘una serena cualidad mitad vegetal mitad mineral que cuanto más
se esforzaba por mostrarse humana – consejero y guía de juventud,
catequista ferviente que fue – más cruel resultaba’ (PM, p. 27). With
hindsight, Nuria comments on his relations with the ‘juventud del barrio’:
‘Se atrajo a los chicos sin poner en ellos cariño [...]. Nunca los quiso como
Montse’ (PM, p. 88). Nonetheless, Salvador enjoys success because he joins
others like himself. Seeing him among the powerful bourgeois ‘mandarines
de la catalanidad’ (PM, p. 45), Paco ponders bitterly ‘¡Qué felices eran
viviendo el mito de la cultura, qué júbilo sordo, íntimo, cómo se les llenaba
la boca de poder, de compadrazgo y reparto de botín!’ (PM, pp. 46–7).
Established in their wealth and privilege, even repression under Francoism
only adds spice to their assertion of their distinctness: ‘una gratísima
sensación de peligro inminente, de heroísmo y de clandestinidad’ (PM, p.
43).
In contrast to Salvador’s collusion Marsé presents Paco’s disillusionment:
‘desengaño’. Paco will not play the game, join in the singing or speak what
he sees as the regime language of a group temporarily disempowered politi-
cally by Francoism but remaining powerful economically, socially, and
within those sectors of the Church that espouse its cause. In similar fashion
Marsé himself – Catalan by birth and bilingual – has throughout his career as
a novelist refused to use the ideologically charged regime language, Catalan,
in the public sphere of literary publication, preferring instead the more
broadly-based Spanish that first gave him access to world literature and
represents a wider field of interaction. Until recently this has meant his
exclu- sion from the canon of Catalan literature – a position that some would
still deny him on the basis of his choice of language. Lee Six claims that for
Paco, at least, language choice signifies a choice to have himself excluded –
like Eve from God’s good pleasure – code-switching that reflects a desire to
distance himself from both the language and its cultural baggage in order to
establish a non-regime space for free play with identity across national
divides; in the case of Paco, this reveals ‘a self-consciously exploitative
approach from our narrator; he uses code-switching [...] as a weapon to fight
back at the Catalan establishment from which he chooses to exclude himself’
(Lee Six ‘La oscura historia del primo Paco/Francesc’, p. 365).
If we read Paco’s narrative as a deconstruction of a Catalan Catholic ‘llar
pairal’ that includes its history, myth, language and tradition of patriarchy,
the ideal, taken apart, is presented to us as seriously flawed. In post-war
urban Barcelona, it is an anachronism. As a means of prolonging authori-
tarian and exclusive social structures as effectively as conservative Spanish
National Catholicism, its survival causes one to ask whether Catalonia can
ever progress while it remains tenaciously rooted in the past. At the same
time, Montse’s story confronts Paco with questions he needs to answer,
which are to do with a pre-Fall attractiveness and an innocence that Paco
thinks he perceives in Montse as a product of the ‘llar pairal’, and that he
cannot easily dismiss. The Claramunt house, which once stood securely in its
‘hortus conclusus’ in a street named after the patroness of Catalonia, is about
to be destroyed by progress: ‘aquel jardín que el desnivel de la calle siempre
mostró en un prestigioso equilibrio sobre la avenida Virgen de Montserrat, al
ser ésta ampliada, quedó repentinamente como un balcón vetusto y
fantasmal colgado en el vacío’ (PM, p. 5). Tío Luis is dead and Tía Isabel is
crippled. As for their daughters, named Montserrat and Nuria after Catalan
advocations of the Virgin that symbolised post-war Catalan Catholic Nation-
alism,25 both have defied the codes which their names suggest they represent,

25 The Enthronement of the Virgin of Montserrat in 1947 drew some 75,000 people
to the monastery, where symbols of the banned Catalan culture proliferated. Speeches
were made in Catalan, the Catalan flag was flown from nearby mountain peaks and
illegally printed pasquines declared: ‘CATALANS! Montserrat és Catalunya. Mont-
serrat és símbol de les nostres llibertats, avui oprimides pels que deshonren aquest acte
amb la seva presencia. Es la hora de reviure el timbal de Bruch per a que la Moreneta
no s’hagi d’avergonyir de presidir un poble de mesells. Visca Catalunya.’ Quoted in
Massot i Muntaner, ‘Les Festes de l’Entronització i la Cultura Catalana, Serra d’Or
(April 1977) pp. 49, 55. In an attempt at post-war Castilianisation, Barcelona’s Calle
Virgen de Nuria was renamed Virgen de Covadonga. (Norman L. Jones, ‘El problema
catalán desde la guerra civil’, quoted in Preston, p. 398). As late as 1967, the statue of
the Virgin of Nuria was kidnapped to prevent coronation by a Castilian bishop.
first by taking ‘charnego’ lovers, and then by choosing suicide (Montse), or
separation (Nuria) as alternatives to the type of marriage ‘of social salvation’
represented by Salvador.
Paco’s narrative goes on to suggest that Catalan Catholic culture is not so
easily overcome by showing how elements of that culture which, in his early
years in Barcelona, served the family as a form of symbolic protest against
Castilianisation, now function as mechanisms of social exclusion. Published
twenty years later, El amante bilingüe (1990) depicts a Barcelona that seems
to be very different and a secularised Catalanism. Nonetheless, Marsé’s
treat- ment of these subjects, in a further reworking of Paradise Garden
motifs, forces the reader to question how deep apparent changes actually go.
The outer narrative frame of El amante is set in a post-Franco, post-1978
Constitution, autonomous Catalonia. Its main female protagonist, Norma
Valentí, is liberated, not tied to a life of domesticity in a protective ‘hortus
conclusus’, or under the aegis of either her father or husband according to
the model of the Catalan Catholic ‘llar pairal’. Both financially and sexually
inde- pendent, she has a successful career working on the Dirección General
de Política Lingüística programme for the ‘Normalització de la Llengua
Cata- lana’. What Marsé has done, then, in this novel, is to shift his markers
of national identity from religion and the land to language and the city in
tune with the times. The imagery of biblical gardens is in evidence, but the
Barce- lona they describe has been secularised … so is the Paradise Garden
myth not anachronistic?
Of course it is, and deliberately so, as the careful construction of the novel
shows. As well as its later 1980s outer frame, two of its three ‘cuadernos’
offer flashbacks to the 1940s, making them contemporary with Paco’s
earliest evocations of the Claramunt home in La oscura historia (PM, p. 53).
This would seem to be familiar ground. A boy from a poor background,
speaking Castilian and of ‘charnego’ appearance, peers through the gates of
a wealthy bourgeois paradise, longing to enter. The paradise is more
explicitly marked as Catalan than the Claramunt home by the street name
translated into Catalan, distinctive Catalan modernist architecture, and a
dragon gate by a world-renowned Catalan architect, Gaudí 26 recalling
Catalonia’s patron, George, who fought the dragon:

En la Avinguda Mare de Déu de Montserrat hay una torre modernista de

cúpulas doradas [...]. Villa Valentí, el paraíso que me estaba destinado [...].
En la imponente puerta de hierro forjado campea un dragón alado hollando
lirios negros. En la boca del dragón hay una mandarina podrida, ensartada
en la lengua afilada como un estilete. (EAB, p. 125)

26 There is also a direct reference to Gaudí: ‘un viejo templete gaudiano con
máscaras de metal’ (EAB, p. 127).
2. Porta “del Drac”, Pavellons Güell, by A. Gaudí. ‘En la imponente puerta de
hierro forjado campea un dragón alado hollando lirios negros’

The Catalan Catholic names Montserrat and Nuria have given way to Norma
(as in ‘Normalització de la Llengua Catalana’), the Claramunts’ charitable
church activities have been replaced by a profession dedicated to the propa-
gation of Catalan language. The message is unmistakably one of a secular-
ised Catalan nationalism.
Nonetheless, the half-rotten fruit, strategically placed on the sharp tongue
(‘lengua’) of the dragon, awakens memories of the serpent in Eden and links
language (also ‘lengua’) to temptation and sin. In grasping the fruit the boy,
Joan Marés, repeats Eve’s action that led to the Fall. Furthermore, as I
argued in Chapter 2, in El amante, Marés’ Fall is linked to language, and to
the bible story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1–9). Whereas the people
of Babel build a tower to reach heaven, Marés longs to enter one – the
Valentí’s private ‘torre’. The people of Babel lose their linguistic unity,
while Marés’ initial command of two languages collapses into a virtually
senseless babble made up of both. It has been suggested that

This self-made koiné goes beyond the debased language proposed at the
beginning of the Transition with the motto ‘el català que avui es parla’
(‘Catalan as it is spoken today’) and comes nearer to the regionalized
Spanish that Pasqual Maragall not long ago proposed as the solution for
Catalonia’s linguistic identity. (Resina)
Certainly Marsé’s ironic approach could apply equally to either option. Both
are contentious, and however one interprets the linguistic fragmentation of
Babel and Marés, it remains, as Marsé depicts it, a consequence and a
marker of transgression.
Marés’ contact with Víctor and Norma Valentí denies him what is effec-
tively a form of dual identity, whether it is labelled bilingualism, diglossia, a
debased language or a regionalised one – terms used with specific meaning
by Resina. The father initiates the process by assuming – wrongly – that the
dirty child speaking Castilian at his gates must be ‘charnego’ when Marés is,
in fact Catalan. Norma completes the destruction by repeatedly replacing her
bilingual husband, Marés, with ‘charnego’ lovers who, to her, are indistin-
guishable and disposable. When Marés himself assumes a ‘charnego’
disguise, she fails to recognise him even in the intimacy of sexual inter-
course, and what remains of his sense of his own identity collapses like the
tower of Babel.
Like Paco entering the Claramunt paradise garden, what Marés
remembers of his first visit to the Villa Valentí is a Catholic Catalanism of
the 1940s in which the only role he will be allowed to play is that of
transgressive outsider. In the hallway of Víctor Valentí’s anachronistic ‘llar
pairal’, the child Marés is confronted by images of Catalonia’s mythical
medieval heyday: a tilework image of Sant Jordi presides (EAB, p. 131);27
girls garlanded with flowers call to mind the patriotic ‘Jocs Florals’; boys are
dressed as medieval pages and men as ‘caballeros cristianos [...]
pertenecientes a los más claros linajes de la nobleza de Catalunya’. In the
patriotic play they enact, speeches ‘declamados enfáticamente en catalán
suenan como sentencias, parecen provenir de otro tiempo, otros afanes y otro
país’ (EAB, pp. 13–16). The play, set in tenth century Catalonia, shows a
small, beleaguered group of Christians confron- ting mighty Saracen hosts,
an implicit parallel being drawn with this clandes- tine celebration of a
Catalan culture under threat in 1940s Francoist Spain. Marés comments drily
on the ‘ritual de catacumbas elaborado con mucha fe y escasos medios, una
forma de mantener el fuego sagrado de la lengua y la identidad nacionales’
(There is a section entitled ‘Les altres catacumbes’ in

27 The Saint George motif appears first in Un día volveré (1982), in stained glass
(UDV, p. 144). It guards the entrance to a wealthy middle-class home with many of the
features of the Claramunt house and garden. ‘La torre de los Klein se alzaba en la linde
de un frondoso parque rodeado por un muro de tres metros de alto erizado de vidrios
afilados. El descuidado jardín delantero estaba partido por un sendero de tierra roja
que conducía hasta el pequeño porche [...]. Delante del porche se abría una plazoleta
cubierta de grava con tres bancos de hiero pintados de blanco en turno a un viejo
surtidor. Por todo el flanco derecho de la torre, respetando solamente la puerta de
servicio, trepaba una hiedra reseca y polvorienta como un trenzado de cuerdas
podridas. El jardín cercaba la torre y se prolongaba tras ella, pero ya desfigurado por la
maleza y abandonado a su suerte’ (UDV, p. 95). The desiring gaze in this case belongs
to the delivery boy, Néstor.
Piñol, 111–18), and on the ‘ambiente de fiesta familiar, floral y victimista’
(EAB, p. 132). Ironically, of course, the supposedly ‘charnego’ enemy in the
play is in fact Catalan: Marés, whom Valentí has cast as a monster to be
destroyed by the Catalan patron saint George. Marés’ cleverly feigned
southern-accented Catalan is the cultural marker that condemns the monster:
No te preocupes por el acento andaluz, deja que se note; es precisamente
lo que yo quería. [...]. Eso que tú sabes hacer con tu cuerpo: lo más
parecido a una alimaña que puedas. Porque representa que tú eres la Araña
que Sant Jordi ha de matar, ¿comprendes? (EAB, p. 133)
Looking back as an adult narrator, Marés wryly observes the obvious wealth
and power of the Catalan gentry who, despite Francoist repression,
continued to enjoy money and influence in the 1940s as their knightly
counterparts had done in Catalonia’s mythic Golden Age and – ‘también
luchan en el campo de las finanzas, la enseñanza, la industria y el comercio’
(EAB, p. 132) – and as Salvador Vilella’s associates would in the 1960s
Spain of La oscura historia.
Denied all but a victim’s role in the Valentís’ exclusive Catalan paradise,
Marés leaves the Villa Valentí with only an empty fishbowl. The goldfish
that was his fee for acting the monster has escaped into the murky waters of
a stagnant pond. Years later, when Norma Valentí has left him, the bowl
containing money he does not want symbolises once again the paradise he
has lost. Like the stagnant pond, the crumbling yet prestigious Walden 7
flats designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, where he now lives
alone, suggest decay at the very heart of an even more recent Catalan
national revival in which Marés can find no place.
However, at this point, a transformation takes place in the novel which
indicates how Joan Marés’ failure may be said to have fuelled Juan Marsé’s
literary achievement. What Marés creates, in his own imagination (and his
‘cuadernos’) becomes a private paradise garden. In this ‘hortus conclusus’
he can exercise at least some control over the images of Catalonia he
conjures up, and like the transparent fishbowl – at first a symbol of his
double loss of the goldfish and of Norma – his imagination can hold those
images within his gaze and play endlessly with them. What Marés’ ‘hortus
conclusus’ comes to suggest is the enclosed world of imaginative invention
of his own creator, the novelist Marsé, for whom narrative is a play area
where he can, and does, make his own rules.

Paradise Reclaimed: El embrujo de Shanghai

In El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), and on into Rabos de lagartija (2000),
Marsé continues to evoke a post-war Barcelona in which dissident Catalan
nationalism confronts Spanish hegemony: the ‘maquisards’ Kim Franch (El
embrujo) and Víctor Bartra are outlawed by the Franco state and Catalan
continues to feature in ever more varied displays of code-switching.
However, ‘reality’, ‘history’ and regime languages have now been drowned
out by make-believe and plausible, yet unreliable, languages of freedom.
The Catalan question has become another part of the scenery while the
narrator and the narrative game are given centre stage, just as ‘aventis’ were
in Si te dicen – that landmark in Marsé’s narrative development. Once again
in El embrujo cinema, imagination, disinformation and lies, together with an
underlying mythology of paradise gardens, come together but in a narrative
fusion of startling freshness. In place of the popular culture of Conchita
Piquer’s Tatuaje, Marsé’s love of more rarified literature and language now
becomes more overt: in his extensive quotation and narrative use of C. P.
Cavafy’s The city in El embrujo and of William Blake’s O Rose, thou art
sick! in Rabos de lagartija: poems that make fitting companions to some of
the Bible’s most personal and sensually evocative writings.
The Eden story in Genesis ends with a veiling of sexuality. In contrast, the
Song of Solomon is a eulogy to the naked body sung by lovers in a glorifica-
tion of erotic love, and Susanna and the Elders explores the erotic
voyeuristic potential of the ‘hortus conclusus’. When the Bible narrative is
taken as a whole and viewed as a story of human sin and divine redemption,
the Song of Solomon represents a dramatic step towards reconciliation and
restored inti- macy between God and his creation in the language of sexual
intimacy. In the Book of Daniel, Susanna is given a voice in telling her own
story. Marsé picks up both aspects as his ‘charnega’ Susana in El embrujo de
Shanghai – of a Catalan father and Andalusian mother: that transgressive
and hitherto fruitless coupling of the disparate – becomes an eloquent
sexualised symbol of the struggle to be heard of those who can too easily be
silenced.
Marsé’s eroticising of the ‘hortus conclusus’ is playfully defiant, drawing
as it does on texts from a Catholic tradition that has consistently played
down eroticism. The Song of Solomon probably originated as a series of
songs to be sung at weddings, though critics overwhelmingly agree that it
has a unity that makes it stand as a single work. 28 Because of its explicit
eroticism it raises problems of interpretation but has a place in both Jewish
and Christian canons and liturgies. For the Jews, as one of five books of
Wisdom, the Meguillot, it forms part of the redemption liturgy of
Passover, where it

28 ‘Se le ha entendido como un drama amoroso, incluso como un drama en sentido

clásico ..., como una colección o antología de cantos eróticos diversos, o sea, un
“cantar (compuesto) de cantares”. Pero la lengua, las imágenes, los personajes, el
desarrollo gradual de la acción, demuestran claramente la unidad de la composición’.
Manuel Revuelta Sañudo, Introduction to ‘El Cantar de los Cantares’, La Santa Biblia
(Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1970), p. 1004. ‘The theory that the Song is a collection
of “wasfs”, or songs intended to be sung at a marriage, while it may throw some light
on the structure of parts of the poem, breaks down on account of the evident unity of
the book’. F. F. Bruce and Francis Davidson, eds, The New Bible Commentary
(London, Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1953), p. 547.
describes God’s love for his people Israel which he demonstrated when the
Angel of Death passed over Jewish houses daubed with the blood of a lamb,
and killed the firstborn of Egypt, thus securing the release of the Jews from
captivity (Exodus 12.21–32). Picking up the Passover imagery, Christians
consider that it depicts relations between Christ – the Lamb of God whose
shed blood brings salvation – and his Church.29 It is interesting to note that
an extract supplies the first reading in the Catholic liturgy celebrating St
Mary Magdalene (July 22), the redeemed prostitute who was the first person
to see the risen Christ: ‘Padre nuestro, tu Unigénito confió a María
Magdalena, antes que a ninguno, la misión de anunciar la alegría de la
Pascua’ (here, the Pascua de la Resurrección – the Christian Easter. Misal
Popular Ibero- americano, p. 1723). Where Genesis tells of the exclusion of
a sinful woman from the ‘hortus conclusus’, the ‘Cantar’ does the opposite
when applied to Mary Magdalene, offering hope of reconciliation even to the
transgressor. Now redeemed and a beloved Bride of Christ, Mary uses the
words of the ‘Cantar’ to express her longing for her Lord: ‘La esposa dice:
En mi lecho, por las noches busqué al que ama mi alma, le busqué, y no le
hallé. Me levantaré, y daré vueltas a la ciudad, por las calles y por las plazas
buscaré al que ama mi alma’ (Song of Songs 3.1–2). The song’s eroticism is
legitimised by Mary’s spiritual marriage to Christ, transformed into a
spiritual passion as intense as the original physical passion of the ‘Cantar’.
An entirely symbolic interpretation of the ‘Cantar’ will, however, always
remain unsatisfactory for the work is long and passages describing the body
are explicitly and intimately erotic. We read of the female Beloved:

Tu ombligo es una ánfora redonda,

donde no falta vino aromático.
Tu vientre, un cúmulo de trigo, rodeado de lirios,
(Song of Songs 7.3–4)

and of the male Lover:

Sus labios son lirios

que destilan mirra virgen [...].
su pecho, una masa de marfil
guarnecida de zafiros. (Song of Songs 5.13–4)

Defying traditional notions of feminine modesty, male and female are equal
in their sensuality, female enjoyment of male beauty being as eloquently
evoked as male expressions of desire. When the balance of power is shown
to

29 The Gospel of John recounts how John the Baptist greeted Jesus with the words:
‘ “He aquí el Cordero de Dios, que quita el pecado del mundo” ’ (John 1.29).
favour man it is because there exists a world outside the playground of the
‘hortus conclusus’ where the biblical regime language is male.
The Song of Songs describes man in images of power and freedom and
woman as dependent. He is the King, Solomon the Wise, or the shepherd
fearlessly roaming the mountains. He is gold, precious stones and ivory. He
is hard where woman is soft and consumable, like wine and grain. Like the
owner plundering his garden, he says of her:

He entrado en mi jardín,
hermana mía, esposa,
he recogido mi bálsamo y mi mirra,
he comido mi miel y mi panal,
he bebido mi vino y mi leche. (Song of Songs 5.1)

He comes and goes as he chooses and has sixty other wives and eighty
concu- bines (Song of Songs 6.8). She must remain in the ‘hortus conclusus’
that is symbolic of her reserved status as his possession, and of her virtue:

Jardín cerrado eres,

hermana mía, esposa,
un manantial cerrado,
una fuente sellada. (Song of Songs 4.12)

‘Sister spouse’ underlines the fact that she is subject to males other than her
lover, for all must guard a virtue that defines her worth to them. Her brothers
punish her when she transgresses their rules (Song of Songs 1.69), and also
discuss her as a sexual object or possession as her spouse does: she is a form
of currency between them in brokering marriage as part of a network of
social relations:30

Tenemos una hermana pequeñita,

no tiene pechos todavía.
¿Qué hemos de hacer con nuestra hermana,
el día en que se trata de su boda? (Song of Songs 8.8)

If the watchmen of the city find her out alone, they may beat her with impu-
nity and expose her to public gaze and to shame:

me golpearon, me hirieron,
me arrancaron el velo. (Song of Songs 5.7)

30 Norris discusses the place of women as currency in marriage treaties between

men, policies on chastity, and responses to female transgression in her second chapter
entitled ‘The view through one painted eye’ (Norris, pp. 40–82).
As in Eden, so too in the ‘Cantar’, female sexuality has a ‘right’ role allotted
to it, but that role is defined in relation to male supremacy, enforced by male
control and symbolised by the confines of the ‘hortus conclusus’.
Susanna, in the Book of Daniel, fulfils that role. A virtuous wife, she is
falsely accused of immorality, tried and condemned. Vindicated by God
through the prophet Daniel, she appears to exemplify female beauty, virtue
and piety. She is ‘muy bella y temerosa de Dios’, and though ‘muy delicada
y de gracioso aspecto’ (Daniel 13.2 and 31), she fights to defend her honour.
However, like the ‘Cantar’, this is a story of transactions between men, and
as one modern Spanish commentator suggests, its purpose ‘es manifestar la
sabiduría de Daniel’. Almost as an afterthought, he adds a word in her
praise: ‘También nos muestra un hermoso ejemplo de fidelidad conyugal’
(Revuelta Sañudo, p. 1377). She is defined as the possession of her father
and her husband: as daughter of Hilkiah and wife of the rich and respected
Joachim. The garden where she bathes – the ‘hortus conclusus’ that
symbolises her virtue and integrity – belongs to Joachim. The lustful Elders
– two judges – are Joachim’s friends let in to the garden by him. They
remain there by deceit, but the fault surely lies with the carelessness of the
master of the house and his servants. It is Joachim who puts his wife’s virtue
at risk, yet he does not speak out on her behalf in court. Only when her
blamelessness has been proven does he respond, and then it is to praise the
prophet Daniel, not the virtuous Susanna. The story concludes with father
and husband thanking Daniel for proving at least that ‘nada malo se había
encontrado en ella’ (my emphasis), while praise for the prophet is
unambiguous: ‘Daniel adquirió gran aprecio por parte del pueblo desde
aquel día en adelante’ (Daniel 13.63
–64). The men’s marriage investment is secure, two corrupt judges have
been punished, and God has been seen to be all knowing, all powerful and
just.
The ‘hortus conclusus’ again symbolises female virtue, but as a site of
sensual pleasure the garden tempts violation, and is as vulnerable as the
woman within it. Susanna’s virtue is proven in court but as a married woman
she is acknowledged as sexualised and therefore a source of temptation to
corruptible men. Perceptions of the danger of such sexualised women has led
to a desexualising of Mary and redefinition of the biblical Mother as Ever
Virgin. As early as the fourth century, Ambrose argued that she remained so
even while giving birth and described her as ‘a garden enclosed’ 31 in such a
way as to make the ‘hortus conclusus’ synonymous with virginity. A
twelfth-century divine later wrote even more emphatically on the matter,
multiplying references to enclosure and describing Mary as:

31 This reference appears in a chapter on ‘The Second Eve’ (Norris, p. 246), to

which I would refer interested readers, for it offers a discussion of applications of this
motif to Mary and female chastity through the centuries more extensive than is
possible in this thesis.
 that sealed fount, ne’er drying,
That walled garden, fructifying
By the good seed in it sown:
She is that close-fastened portal,
shut by God gainst every mortal. (my emphasis)
Adam of St Victor (quoted in Norris, p. 247)

In open defiance of this diminishing de-sexualisation of women, Marsé’s

reworking of the Susanna story in El embrujo opens the gates of the paradise
garden to a series of transgressive characters who find in Susana Franch the
starting-point for their dreams and imaginings around a series of eroticised
female figures from the exotic Chen Jing Fang to Barcelona’s own more
domesticated yet still compellingly attractive Andalusian Anita Franch and
insistently Catalan Betibú.32 Susana struggles for self-definition against the
disease tuberculosis that comes loaded with a heritage of stereotypes, and
against those very dreams and imaginings. However, she is also endowed
with a limited but enduring power in the imagination of the voyeurs whose
source of inspiration she is.
Eden cannot be dated or located but what power those age-old myths do
have! They underlie the two poems that Marsé chose to form the narrative
core of his two most recent novels – Cavafy’s The city and Blake’s O Rose,
thou art sick! – both of which view Paradise through an intimate dialogue
darkened by loss and death. To make them central to a novel would
challenge any writer. Marsé’s interweaving of them into his texts demands a
revision of the literary skill of this often underestimated ‘obrero-escritor’.
From Cavafy Marsé has taken the ‘nostalgia del futuro’ introduced in the
quotation from Luis García Luna at the start of El embrujo de Shanghai: that
longing for a time in a pre-fall Eden ‘cuando todo merodeaba por delante y
el futuro aún estaba en su sitio’. There is the traveller’s eager anticipation of
a new city – the novel’s mythic Shanghai viewed from a drab post-war
Barcelona:

Dices: Iré a otras tierras, a otros mares.

Buscaré una ciudad mejor que ésta
En la que mis afanes no se cumplieron nunca,
frío sepulcro de mi sentimiento.

There is also the notion of a pre-existing imprint deep in the narrator–

traveller’s

32 The cartoon character Betty Boo was dark, petite, curvaceous and alluringly
smiling and coy. A publishing tactic but nonetheless revealing of a perception of the
‘sales potential’ of Marsé’s eroticised female characters, in 1997 Espasa published,
with an introduction by José Méndez, a selection of texts entitled Las mujeres de
Juanito Marés from Teniente Bravo, Encerrados, Ultimas tardes, La oscura historia,
Si te dicen, Un día volveré, Ronda del Guinardó, El amante and El embrujo.
mind – memory, imagination or soul – of an inescapable seminal cityscape
or Paradise Lost of childhood like a scar on the adult psyche:

Nunca abandonarás esta ciudad. Ya para ti no hay otra,

Ni barcos ni caminos que te libren de ella.
Porque no sólo aquí perdiste la vida:
En todo el mundo la desbarataste. (ES, pp. 99–100)

From Blake he has taken an image of the woman as a blighted rose and has
used the poem’s sensuality and eroticism to infuse the same drab post-war
Barcelona with the riches of imagination of the child David, the unborn
brother and their mother – the Rose – Rosa Bartra. Out of drabness and sick-
ness comes rich lyricism; in the midst of war and conflict, paradise can be
regained, fleetingly. Once again the play area of the creative narrator is made
to transcend the confines of reality by releasing into that reality both myth
and poetry.
That transcendence increases with the integration into Marsé’s texts of
writings by an Alexandrian Greek, Cavafy, and an Englishman, Blake, and
indeed, the authors, writers and compilers of the biblical paradise garden
narratives. Significantly, too, Cavafy is quoted in Spanish in El embrujo
(1993), but in Rabos (2000) a Spanish translation is offered in an author’s
footnote, but in the text Blake’s poem is uncompromisingly in English, chal-
lenging the reader to link ‘gusano’ with ‘The Invisible Worm’ and take up
Víctor Bartra’s repeated: ‘Aprende idiomas, hijo …. ¡Puñeta, David, estudia
idiomas!’ (RL, pp. 178–9). If the paradise gardens of La oscura historia and
El amante can be seen as a response to two moments in the life of post-war
Barcelona when Marsé saw Catholicism and Catalanism together as meriting
sharp satirical comment, the sensual pleasure gardens of El embrujo and
Rabos generated in the minds of the narrator in tension with surrounding
reality – illustrate the continuing love affair of this writer with an image and
its mythology.
In Rabos de lagartija, languages flash and twist throughout the text like
lizards’ tails – words and imagination combining to form David’s own living
‘palabartijas’ (RL, pp. 70, 140, 154–5 and 225), or as Catalan as a marker of
anti-Francoist dissidence (RL, pp. 172–3), German reflecting David’s fasci-
nation with World War II Axis propaganda and film (RL, p. 69), French for
the glamorous image of French ‘maquisards’ (RL, p. 178), and English for
the RAF fighter-pilot Bryen O’Flynne (RL, pp. 146–7) and Blake’s dark
romanticism. Fused together, they emphasise rich diversity in expletives,
clichés and the apparently meaningless babble of the inarticulate:

No hay palabras, pero se oyen voces.

¡Zapastra!
¡Casumlolla!
 ¡Trinxeraire!
¡Lucía, cázame guerripa!
¡Nombre y appellidos!
¡Víctor Bartra Lángara! ¡Diligencias!
¡Achtung! (RL, p. 16)

Humour is effective, for when people laugh, they are disarmed: hence word-
play such as ‘itismailaif’ (RL, p. 134), David’s misconception about ‘ “El
Otorrino” de Córdoba’ (RL, p. 97) being a bullfighter rather than an ear,
nose and throat specialist (‘otorrinolaringólogo’), and – catching the reader
out laughing where to do so seems inappropriate – in the brain-damaged
narra- tor’s incomprehensible ‘cázame guerripa’.
In a brilliant balancing act, even as we laugh, Marsé’s conscious exploita-
tion of pathos takes the narrative into a darker area of tragic experience as he
transposes a story from a nineteenth-century English poem into a twen- tieth-
century Barcelona and also draws in yet another interpretation of para- dise
lost: the worm in the bud, the serpent in Eden, the child begotten of Rosa
Bartra and Bryen O’Flynne in a brief but laughter-filled adulterous love-
making. And so paradise is reclaimed – brought out of the constraints of a
narrow doctrinal focus on authority and transgression, and out too from a
narrow exploitation of a myth for political ends – brought into the play area
of literature where the narrator continues to struggle to forge languages of
freedom that will find hearers. In the closing words of Marsé’s most recent
novel:

y le dije a Lucía: alcánzame Guerra y paz. Pero tendré que repetirlo varias
veces porque, aunque me esfuerzo mucho, lo que me sale de la boca es
algo así como cázame guerripa.
Y es que todavía me cuesta mucho hacerme entender. (RL, p. 344)
 5
DARK ANGELS AND BRIGHT DEVILS:
GAMES WITH AMBIGUOUS ICONS

With a noteworthy change of medium, the protagonists of Marsé’s two

most recent novels – Daniel (ES) and David (RL) – are depicted struggling
for self-expression not with words but with images: Daniel using coloured
pencils in his attempts to represent a suggestive but elusive Susana, and
David photography to capture the tension, vibrancy and danger of the 1951
Barcelona Tram Strike (Raguer ‘El día de los tranvías o la huelga que fue
una fiesta’). Marsé’s interest in image has been evident from his first novel
on. In Chapter 1 I showed how, in Encerrados, Andrés, Tina and Martín all
cultivated and refined their image in mirrors and in the gaze of others, and
Marsé’s fascination with film and repeated use of cinema clichés and idols
has been acknowledged, though a systematic study of this area remains to be
written: on the Bogartian mystery man in a belted and buckled raincoat, hat
over eyes, emerging from the dark in Un día volveré and Rabos de lagartija;
the vamp with fishnet (Nuria in La oscura historia) stockings or seams to be
straightened (Anita in El embrujo); the venial Chinese of the Fu Manchu
films; the airborne villains and heroes of WWII cinema; Gary Cooper, Gene
Tierney, and many more visual triggers to this writer’s inventive imagina-
tion.
These are powerful images that resonate in the minds and hearts – the
dreams and imaginings – of their generation and often beyond. More
powerful still are those age-old images that have crossed national and
cultural boundaries over centuries and have formed a potent source of shared
cultural experience: religious images drawing force from sacred histories
and myths. For all this broad – indeed, popular – base, the immediate visual
impact of images may be viewed as advantageous or as potentially
dangerous because they by-pass slower critical functions to penetrate and
mark the susceptible imagination. With religious images, such an impact
may lead to idolatry: the misdirecting of devotion on to the image rather than
the divine object of worship that it signifies. In the word of one Jewish
commentator:

The person who introduces into his worship an image may suppose that he
is indeed engaged in an act of worship to God but this is self-delusion. The
most solemn and threatening terms are used to warn the Israelites lest they
‘forget the covenant that the Lord your God concluded with you, and not
to
150 ROSEMARY CLARK

make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness, against which the
Lord has enjoined you.’1

In Judaism, as in Islam, visual representation of human forms – let alone the

divine – is almost entirely forbidden to preclude such misdirection. Within
the Christian Communion, while some likewise view the prohibition from
the Ten Commandments as covering all images,2 within the Catholic Church
images traditionally perform an intermediary function between the believer
and the saints depicted in paintings and sculptures, with the risk of them-
selves becoming objects of reverence. As part of the highly visually aware
Marsé’s experience of Church life, images and the potential for manipulation
and subversive re-workings that they offer – another chance to set languages
of freedom against a visual regime language – have proved irresistible.
Because of the function of images as a focus for devotion in the Catholic
Church, the relationship between the believer and the religious image must
be brought under scrutiny if the full extent of Marsé’s challenge to this
regime language is to be grasped. In order to do so, I propose to draw a
distinction between imagery and iconography and concentrate my discussion
on Marsé’s playful manipulation of what I term Catholic Iconography. The
distinction will best be appreciated by reference to the Orthodox Church
where icons are central to the liturgy as well as to private devotion, and the
clearly defined Orthodox view of icons gives sharp definition to aspects of
the complex relationship between the believer and the divine with which
Marsé’s subversion is directly concerned.
For the Orthodox, the icon is no mere work of art: it is nothing less than a
place where earth meets heaven, where humankind meets with the mysteries
the icon represents, and time touches eternity. The visible image is of
secondary importance; what is paramount is the invisible reality on to which,
in the view of the believer, the icon opens like a window. Only its function
makes it sacred as an object, but as a physical entity it is further dignified by
the notion that the prototype of the icon is Christ Incarnate, for in him the
invisible God took on a human form that could be seen, touched and
depicted:

Is Christ truly God and truly man, One in the same Person? The funda-
mental mystery of our Christian faith is based on the affirmative answer to
this question. Likewise the veneration accorded to the icon. If the Incarna-
tion is the basis for the icon, then the icon reciprocally affirms the

1 Lionel Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image. A Jewish View (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1997), p. 7. Kochan is quoting Deuteronomy 4.23.
2 ‘No harás escultura ni imagen alguna de lo que hay arriba en el cielo, o aquí
abajo en la tierra o en el agua bajo tierra. No te postrarás ante ella ni la servirás, porque
yo, Yavé, tu Dios, soy un Dios celoso.’ (Exodus 20.4–5).
 Incarnation. To deny the one, you must also deny the other. Consequently,
the icon par excellence is the icon of Christ Himself. (Quenot, p. 35)

Icons depict the struggle between Good and Evil, saints engaged in that
struggle, and mysteries such as the Nativity or the Transfiguration that form
part of the narrative of the Fall and Redemption. In every case their function
is to proclaim the presence of the Transcendent or the Divine in material
form to provide a place in which that presence may actually be encountered.3
Marsé’s approach to icons is radical in two ways. First, because it targets
the point on which Christianity stands or falls: the question of whether or not
God took on human form in Christ Jesus, and whether behind the imagery of
icon, myth, teaching and tradition there is, or is not, a window on to eternity,
a possibility of knowing the transcendent God and the chance of communion
with the mysteries these works of art depict. Secondly, because besides their
purely religious functions, icons can serve secondary ideological functions,
and Marsé’s use of them in his novels shows that to subvert the icon is to
subvert the ideology whose values it represents.
Claims that the divine intrudes into the material world are contentious
because they provide a basis on which codes of behaviour are prescribed and
the alternative to conformity is defined as transgression meriting
punishment. Eve’s transgression opened the door to pain, death, and their
attendant illnesses. The identification of sin with illness, with the danger of
contagion and threat of death, has made expulsion of the sinner – isolation of
the sick – acceptable for the ‘health’ of the body private and politic. Icons
celebrate moments of victory snatched from the jaws of death in the midst of
the battle against evil; they may depict death, but in the knowledge that
Christ ulti- mately defeated death. This is a thesis that Marsé contests: often
fiercely in the context of a post-war Spain where disease and death were part
of daily experience, featuring prominently in his novels. His close and
knowing reworking of icons – for the believer, windows on the Kingdom –
takes on the rhetoric of Death with Resurrection, sickness with healing, and
uses the Church’s own iconography to subvert its message and that of the
triumphalist rhetoric of both Spanish and Catalan Catholic nationalisms in a
society that this author depicts as permeated by literal and metaphorical
sickness.
As pictures encapsulating fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith,
icons have had an impact on thousands of people as a means of instruction in
the faith. They have also attracted non-believers both by their aesthetic chal-
lenge and because, being a densely encoded form of representation, they

3 ‘The icon accompanies Orthodox faithful from their cradle to their grave. When
confined to a museum, it no longer fulfils its primary function. Uprooted and reduced
to being an object of art, it still preserves, at least we think so, its spiritual energies
accumulated down the centuries by generations of the faithful who have prayed before
it’ (Quenot, p. 162).
exert a strong intellectual fascination. Like any visual medium they offer
wide scope for mimicry and play, but here the stakes are high because of the
sacred nature of their subject matter. As a form of regime language, they
tempt the iconoclast to subvert their form and sacred content. In societies as
eager to protect their faith as part of their identity as post-war Catholic Spain
and Catalonia have been, playing with religious icons has had for Marsé the
added attraction of engaging with danger by subverting the sacred.
For the believer, then, to trifle with icons is to trifle with God. Marsé
certainly does this, forging his own languages of freedom with playful irrev-
erence. He is not, however, flippant for he sharply challenges the assump-
tions on which Christian worship and the use of images and icons is based.
Whether or not Marsé himself perceives his play with icons in this way, or
whether only readers with an interest in religious culture do so, he sails
dangerously close to the wind and takes risks when he challenges the reality
of incarnation and gives religion a contentious role in his depiction of post-
war Spain.

Iconographic constraints and narratorial freedoms

Iconography can be viewed as a regime language because the icono-
grapher must acknowledge the supremacy of a truth beyond himself and
submit to the absolute authority of that supreme truth. In Orthodox iconog-
raphy doctrine and tradition dictate the choice and even the presentation of
subject matter with the intention of defending the original purity of the
mystery depicted. The artist’s personal experience and belief are set aside as
capable of distorting the original truth. A strict canon of practice limits the
iconographer’s room for manoeuvre. His task is to copy exactly the mystery
defined by tradition, not to offer a personal interpretation of it:
According to these sacred Canons, the themes of icons are traditional, that
is to say, canonically established and defined; they are not simply the
result of the artist’s personal creativity or imagination. The same must be
said for iconographic symbolism. Quite different from profane art, in
which symbolism expresses itself by means of allegory, the iconic themes
could never be the fruit of intellectual speculation, because the icon
directly reveals and reflects the sacredness of the mystery its portrays.
(Quenot, p. 67)

According to strict definition then, icons eliminate as far as possible both the
artist and changing concepts of reality open to intellectual speculation
because they seek to depict an unchanging, transcendent, spiritual existence.
Believers must accept the truth as it is portrayed according to the strict canon
and not try to change or modify the picture since to do so would interfere
with the doctrine represented in the icon, two being inextricably entwined.
As
3. Icons and Religious Images
an example of tradition versus the individual in art, but also in religious
doctrine, this position fosters unchanging immobility.
Religious images, in contrast, tell us more about the artist and his
approach to his work than about the subject matter itself, which Quenot sees
as dangerous because it can divert worship away from the mystery repre-
sented in the art and on to the image itself, which is idolatry. Citing female
sexuality as a potential source of danger, Quenot warns, concerning non-
iconic representations of the Virgin:

How many sensually beautiful women, objects of passion for their

painters, lent their features to pose for paintings of the mother of God?
Holy texts replete with a spiritual vision describe Her as being the most
beautiful, the most pure among all women. She who is so radiant with
holiness sees Herself endowed with the natural features of an ordinary
woman. What incongruity! (Quenot, p. 79)

The danger is that what will be produced is a picture of the painter’s lust,
rather than a depiction of the Mother of God. Therefore Quenot concludes:
‘Iconographers must also eliminate their personal sentiments and emotions
from the icon, to avoid imposing them on others, thus furnishing an obstacle
to prayer’ (Quenot, p. 72). Quenot’s view of realism has interesting implica-
tions for a writer who seeks to represent religious experience, for realism
must be rejected as diminishing the transcendent. Of Giotto and others
Quenot writes:

The art of the transcendent fades with their introduction of such visuals as
three-dimensional perspective, natural light and shadows, the return of a
realistic portrayal of people, and use of the emotional – in a word, an art in
total opposition to the hieratic art of iconography. (Quenot, p. 74)

He concludes on the divorce between eastern Orthodox iconography and

western Catholic paintings:

We must understand that nothing at all distinguishes the religious art of the
Renaissance or the Baroque period from the secular art of the day, except
for the ‘religious’ theme […]. An art becomes sacred only when a spiritual
outlook or vision becomes manifest in its forms, and when they in turn,
convey an authentic reflection of the spiritual world. (Quenot, p. 77)

An icon is such, then, because of a ‘spiritual outlook’ in the artists, and

presumably the spectator too, who must set aside all responses to the human
form – admiration, lust or aesthetic judgement – apart from worship of the
mystery depicted in the icon.
Erwin Panofsky, who has worked on classical as well as Christian art,
defines iconography more widely in terms of what lies behind the picture,
and therefore gives far more scope for speculation in its interpretation by the
artist and the spectator:

Iconography is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with
the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.4

What Quenot’s and Panofsky’s definitions of iconography have in common

– and this is a meeting-point that Marsé constantly exploits – is the
assumption that the primary function of an icon is not what first meets the
eye. Panofsky calls what is first perceived neutrally as ‘form’: a man
removing his hat. Experience and prior knowledge are needed to deduce
from that form some ‘meaning’: that the man is greeting me. Behind this
conventional act of greeting, he explains, there lies a history of medieval
soldiers removing their helmet to signify peaceful intentions. The literal
function of the form has been forgotten; the meaning has survived
symbolically.
With this separation of form and meaning, it becomes evident that
Quenot’s theory of the transparent truthfulness of icons – despite their speci-
ficity for the well-schooled believer – is hard to sustain in practice with a
wider or dissident spectatorship. Images do lie and are susceptible to gross
misinterpretation. At best, spectators with no religious education will miss
vital allusions. At worst, they bring to their viewing a personal and cultural
baggage – moods and mischief too – that makes the work of art susceptible
to divergent interpretations and disparate uses. This is so, of course, with
other supposedly precise forms of visual representation. Even in the realm of
scien- tific observation there is room for misinterpretation of images. In late
nine- teenth century Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot was gaining a reputation for
his work on nervous diseases and was supplementing words with drawings
and photographs intended to display pathological states with accuracy. On
the basis of this use of visual displays, Charcot argued that what was
depicted as religious ecstasy in paintings – ‘l’intervention du Bien dans
l’humanité, comme une manifestation de la puissance divine elle-même’ 5 –
looked remarkably like pathological convulsions and might merely indicate
sick- ness. Yet Sander Gilman’s discussion on The Image of the Hysteric
questions the reliability on the ‘scientifically observed’ appearances on
which Charcot and others placed so much reliance. Gilman argues that the
assumption that accurate observation of physical symptoms will lead to
accurate diagnosis of illness is essentially flawed, notably in cases of mental
illnesses (which are, of course, as invisible as the divine).
The problem lies with the image makers. Gilman refers to the house publi-

4 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: humanistic themes in the art of the

Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1939), p. 3.
5 Jean-Martin Charcot, Les Démoniaques dans l’Art (Paris: Delahaye et
Lecrosnier, 1887), p. 78.
cation of the hospital in Paris where Jean-Martin Charcot worked with the
mentally ill – a three-volume work interestingly entitled Nouvelle Icono-
graphie de la Salpêtrière.6 The icons here are sketches, etchings and photo-
graphs of patients suffering from mental illnesses, and they were made with
a specific intention in mind. The function of the work was to demonstrate
how invisible mental illnesses could be diagnosed from visible physical
appear- ances. Gilman points out that the pictures themselves became
prescriptive rather than descriptive. He describes an 1887 painting which
depicts Charcot’s patient Blanche Wittman, diagnosed as hysteric, is seen to
replicate the behaviour represented in an etching hanging on the wall facing
her: the dramatic ‘arc-en-cercle’ that Charcot had identified as a classic
symptom of hysteria.7 Gilman sums up:

Only the women see (and ‘know,’ that is, act upon) the image of the
hysteric. Their image of the hysteric, both as patient and as health care
practitioner is consciously formed by the visual image of the hysteric as
created by a male physician […]. Blanche Wittman […] learned from the
representations of the hysteric how to appear as a hysteric.8

Charcot, whom Gilman quotes as saying with the confidence of one who
believes himself undeceived, ponders on what he sees as deceitfulness in his
female patients

one finds oneself sometimes admiring the amazing craft, sagacity, and
perseverance which women, under the influence of this great neurosis, will
put in play for the purposes of deception – especially when the physician
is to be the victim. It is incontestable that, in a multitude of cases, they
have taken pleasure in distorting, by exaggerations, the principle
circumstances of their disorder, in order to make them appear
extraordinary and wonderful. (Gilman, p. 352)

6 Showalter argues that Charcot ‘explicitly set out to refute religion through his
practice of medicine. He and his assistants wrote essays debunking miracles of the
church, describing even Saint Joan of Arc as a case of hysteria.’ Elaine Showalter,
Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1977), p. 32. See
also Martha N. Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 34.
7 The painting by André Brouillet shows Charcot demonstrating Wittman’s
behaviour to colleagues as typical of hysteria. Charcot and his male colleagues face the
patient. She, and a female nurse, are facing the back of the lecture theatre where the
etching depicts the very symptom she is displaying. Gilman traces the standard repre-
sentation of the ‘arc-en-cercle’ (also called ‘arc de cercle’ by Charcot) in Greek art to a
painting entitled “Dying Baccante” in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, reproduced by
Jean Rosselot, ed., Medicine in Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 51.
8 Sander L. Gilman, ‘The Image of the Hysteric’ in Hysteria Beyond Freud
(London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 345–438, 345–6.
Gilman emphasises the propensity for at times unconscious deceit in those
who claim accuracy through ‘scientifically observed’ imaging.
To consider Marsé’s imaging as iconography brings into sharp focus the
emotional investment that individual characters make in a personal ‘más
allá’
– an ideal beyond the images used to represent what is out of reach: images
drawn from many sources ranging from popular culture to religious art,
which provide a goal for the characters as they attempt to shape their identity
and life. Paco alludes to an ideal in the ‘más allá’ that seemed to him to join
himself, Nuria, Montse, Salvador and Manuel – five apparently very
different characters – together at least in their aspirations:

cómo me gustaba imaginar que alguna vez debieron coincidir en el tiempo

aquellas distintas floraciones de un mismo ideal de la personalidad, una
melancolía que en cada uno de nosotros, perplejos dentro del cascarón
juvenil, alimentaba una parecida naturaleza mítica. (PM, p. 214)

In its emphasis on the subjectivity of the image maker, Marsé’s approach

to Catholic iconography deliberately pushes the conventions of iconographic
symbolism in a way that Quenot would reject. Yet it is precisely because he
is defying a strict and challenging canon of belief that the effect of his icono-
graphic mimicry is so powerful. He uses his own knowledge of Catholic
culture and his interest in its images with precision to exploit with immense
virtuosity the area for deliberate misunderstanding and reinterpretation of the
traditional message that images offer. He brings a religious world view into
contact and conflict with secular perspectives in the popular literary context
of the novel where it must vie with other forms of imaging which allow its
basic premises concerning a spiritual ‘más allá’ to be challenged at the point
at which they impinge on real life by characters whose ‘más allá’ is not
exclusively divine.

Male authority, female power: reframing regime languages

Eve’s transgression of God’s law, sin and redemption, sickness and
health, punishment and pardon, the immediate and everyday viewed in the
wider perspective of a divine or a dream-built ‘más allá’: these are
contrasting threads that run right through Marsé’s depictions of a post-war
Barcelona where regime languages and languages of freedom engage in a
combat that he frames as dangerous play. They also provide the means with
which he sets out to upset the traditional balance of power of the time by
giving a voice to the silenced and the transgressor, through image and icon
where words fail, or where the icons contain the seeds of their own
destruction to be cultivated and brought to fruition, mining away at authority
from within.
There is always a profound ambiguity in Marsé’s treatment of Catholic
iconography that manifests itself in his novels in an ironic approach to those
in power and a pervasive sympathy for the outcast and the failure. Personal
religious scepticism, together with a deep dislike of the Church as an institu-
tion that has at times abused its position of power or has not used its
influence well, war with personal nostalgia for a childhood play area at the
‘parroquia’ and enjoyment of a potent source of stories and suggestive
imagery. Since my aim is to demonstrate just how complex, nuanced and
sensitively sketched Marsé’s critique of Catholic iconography is, my
discussion will begin not with the obvious target of a male power figure in a
post-war society where, in both the public and private spheres, men were
endowed with authority, but rather with a female figure whose depiction
reveals the shifting ambiguities of this writer’s position.

Tía Isabel, Queen of Heaven: an icon of power?

Paco’s depiction of his aunt, Tía Isabel, frames her iconically as Queen of
Heaven – a figure of transcendent power who reigns as Mother of Christ and
Co-Redemptrix with the Saviour whom she brought into the world, thus
undoing the harm first wrought by Eve’s transgression. Paco’s parody of her
as Tía Isabel en su nube de púrpura (the title of Chapter IX) describes a
picture of the Virgin in the entrance-hall of the Claramunt home – a ‘tapiz
donde unos ángeles soplaban desaforadamente (sus carrillos hinchados me
admiraban por su realismo: oía el fffuuuuu...) una nube de púrpura que
sostenía a la Virgen’ (PM, p. 55). In iconography, purple signifies the
highest authority,9 and Isabel Claramunt is presented not just as the angel of
the home, the epitome of the domestic ideal, overseeing the education of her
daughters and servants but also exercising power outside the home – finan-
cial and social power – through charitable works. The image denotes power
and compassion like the icon of the Mother of God Enthroned, 10 and is remi-
niscent too of images of The Protection of the Mother of God and of the
Assumption, when clouds modestly intervene between the ascending figure
of Mary and the disciples left below. The clouds mark the difference
between the ascending Immaculate Mary and the rest of sinful humanity, but
they are

9 Daniel received purple robes as a reward (Daniel 5.29), and in the parable of
Lazarus, the rich man is dressed in purple (Luke 16.19). For the Byzantines purple was
the symbol of supreme power (Quenot, p. 115). Tía Isabel appears before a daunted
and apprehensive Paco with ‘su lento y voluminoso cuerpo severamente vestido de
malva’ (PM, p. 69).
10 According to Quenot, this is one of four principle icons of the Virgin recognised
by the Eastern Orthodox Church: The Mother of God Enthroned, Praying (Orans),
Merciful (Eleousa from the Greek “eleos,” mercy or pity), and “She Who Shows the
Way” (Hodigitria – from the Greek “hodos”, the way).
4. The Protection of the Mother of God
permeable, allowing glimpses of her: her icon providing a window on to the
Kingdom where she may be met in intimate communion.
Paco’s comparison highlights two aspects of the icon: the opulence
enjoyed by the Virgin with her attendant angels, and how insulated she is
from the world beneath. At the same time, he acknowledges that Tía Isabel’s
social concern is genuine, even as he points out how her privileged status
prevents the outside world ever actually touching her directly: indeed, when
the less fortunate – and more ambitious – such as he or Manuel Reyes pene-
trate the confines of her heaven, they meet with coldness, not compassion.
From her office at home she runs a charitable empire without ever needing to
leave the house. This modern Virgin Mother deals with need via the tele-
phone:

cada llamada transmite un grito de auxilio nacido quién sabe dónde, un

llanto sin consuelo, la voz de un niño de suburbio que tiene hambre o la de
una mujer desesperada que tiene el marido parado; y Tía Isabel empuña el
auricular, se sienta, coge el lápiz, toma nota con rapidez […]. [M]ientras
habla acaricia el hilo del teléfono: es el cordón umbilical que la une al
mundo y a sus dolientes palpitaciones de cada día […]. [E]l teléfono le
basta para controlar y dirigir su vasto y palpitante mundo de necesitados.
(PM, 69–70)

The mechanics of a maternal umbilical bond are there but power rather than
love is what flows out to the supplicant. Paco recalls ‘la frialdad mecánica de
este sistema de control telefónico, que podría hacer pensar en la centralita de
un hotel’ (PM, p. 69). He himself finds his aunt to be out of reach; the more
exalted she is, the more debased he feels. Quoting Jesus lamenting over a
rebellious Jerusalem (Matthew 23.37), he depicts her as a mother hen
longing to protect her young; but in Paco’s case – and that of her daughters –
she fails signally: ‘Me consta la amplitud y el calor de su ala, dispuesta
siempre a cobijar aterridos y sucios polluelos como yo; pero es inútil, ante
ella me sentiré siempre desvalido, verdaderamente huérfano, mucho más que
ante el resto de la familia’ (PM, p. 70). Dispensing charity without changing
economic and social structures creates dependency in the receiver and
further empowers the already powerful.
Montse differs from her mother in that she wants to give the ex-convict
Manuel access to work and thereby a place in a social heaven without
demanding subservience and conformity in return. However, as I remarked
in Chapter 3, Montse’s gullibility – a product of her ignorance of the world
outside her ‘torre’ – makes her vulnerable to exploitation. Again Marsé
shows in Paco’s conflicting responses to his cousin both the charm of images
of innocence and the disillusionment experienced by the spectator whose
knowledge of actual life conflicts with desires for a better ‘más allá’:
 Mi prima Montse estaba hecha de esa material tierna y vehemente que
envuelve nuestras heroicas quimeras de la mocedad […]. Nunca, ni en los
momentos que más ferozmente me burlaba de sus beaterías, fui insensible
a cierto confuso encanto de mi prima, a cierta maravillosa facultad para
traducir la más banal esperanza ajena en algún espontáneo gesto de
seducción o de entrega cuya significación real ella ignoraba, ese don que
poseen algunos cuerpos castigados por la enfermedad o la autorrepresión
para vibrar anticipadamente a las promesas más febriles de la vida. Si es
cierto que la inocencia se compone de esa materia inmaculada cuya
posesión sólo es posible sin el egoísmo, mi prima Montse fue uno de los
seres más puros que jamás existieron en este mundo. (PM, p. 272)

‘Si es cierto’: Paco’s scepticism wars with the attraction of the ideal, but
the Fall has occurred, sickness is abroad and Montse’s best efforts are
doomed from the start, even as she is marked by ‘la enfermedad o la
autorrepresión’. The first paragraph of La oscura historia ends ‘Fachada, he
aquí lo único que les quedaba a los Claramunt’ (PM, p. 5), and we are given
glimpses of Tía Isabel no longer ‘en su nube de púrpura’, but – like the
house
– a hollow wreck:

un navío todavía majestuoso y admirable, engalanado como el día de su

feliz botadura en una humilde parroquia, cuando partió al frente de
devotas congregaciones con vocación caritativa, pero ya qué roído por
dentro, qué descalabrada armazón de crujidos y misterio, con tantos
reveses, tantos rumbos equivocados. (PM, p. 80)

Even when she appears to offer an accomplished image of Catholic Mother-

hood, Tía Isabel is locked into her social and political context and cannot
understand or save either of her forward-looking transgressive daughters.
Where thick glasses symbolise Norma Valentí’s inability really to see the
problem posed by her Southern immigrant-looking, but nonetheless Catalan,
husband Marés, it is Tía Isabel’s ‘nube de púrpura’ – the mark of her regal
power – that renders her insensitive to the world she tries to help, while her
own mortality mines away at her physical health as well as her spiritual
initiatives. So, after the initial icon of power, Paco leaves us with the image
of a dreaming, sickly, old ‘abuela’ in a rocking-chair out at Sitges, dispos-
sessed of the world she once ruled and condemned to watch its unmaking in
her remaining daughter’s dissolving marriage.

The Christian Soldier

Almost a millennium of myth and political propaganda underlies the
tradi- tion of the Christian Soldier in Spain. Coinciding with the Crusades to
the Holy Land and modelled on the warrior skills of the Archangel Saint
Michael
in the Armies of Heaven, the cult of Santiago Matamoros, based at Santiago
de Compostela11 came to symbolise Spain’s own fight to expel Islam from
the peninsula and then to evangelise the New World. Subsequent warfare has
repeatedly returned to the figure and fostered a Spanish Crusade Mythology
which is concisely summed up by the front cover of the Falange children’s
magazine from 1946.12
A source of male authority and a perpetual defence for the Church against
the mining subversiveness of transgressive women, the chaste, obedient
Soldier of Christ must fight for public as well as personal salvation. In
Chapter 4, I mentioned Sant Jordi as a symbol of the Catalan Catholic
nation- alist fight against evil defined as outsiders who threaten Catalan
culture and identity, but Marsé’s exploration of iconography goes beyond a
simple iden- tification of a nation with its patron saint and explores the
mechanisms by which defining transgressive otherness as illness allows for
wider-reaching exclusion of the sick sinner. St Michael and St George are
just one element in a dense network of iconography that functions as an
ironic subtextual commentary on Catholicism in post-war Spain. The figure
of the Christian Soldier is a good point of entry into this network because it
resurfaces in several novels and because, being closely associated with
myths of Good and Evil, it provides a thematic link which serves to define
other icons within salvation narratives even as Marsé manipulates and
subverts their original intent.
The mystery to which icons of Christian Soldiers relate is rooted in
biblical stories which tell how the Angel of Light, Lucifer, like Eve and the
people of Babel, challenged God and suffered a Fall. Isaiah recalls Lucifer’s
overweening pride: ‘Te decías en tu corazón: “El cielo escalaré, encima de
las estrellas de Dios levantaré mi trono [...], seré igual que el Altísimo” ’
(Isaiah 14.13–14). God’s response was swift, and the Archangel Michael led
the heavenly army to victory over the ambitious rebel. The story is picked up
at the end of time in the Book of Revelation:

Entonces hubo una batalla en el cielo. Miguel y sus ángeles lucharon

contra el dragón. El dragón y sus ángeles no pudieron prevalecer, y no
hubo puesto para ellos en el cielo. Y fue precipitado el gran dragón, la
serpiente antigua, que se llama ‘diablo’ y ‘Satanás’, el seductor del mundo
entero, y sus ángeles fueron precipitados con él. (Revelation 12.7–9)

Of the four archangels, Michael is the Soldier (Raphael a Deacon, Gabriel

11 David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1978), p. 250.
12 A standard work on the Crusade myth is Herbert R. Southworth, El Mito de la
Cruzada de Franco (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1963). Franco is said deliberately to have
modelled himself on El Cid, in Paul Preston, Franco (London: HarperCollins, 1993),
pp. 640–2.
5. Capitanes y Caudillos. Front Cover of the Falange magazine, Flechas
y Pelayos, 1947
God’s Messenger, and Uriel is rarely documented, having been associated
early in church history with the Johannine heresy that saw John the Baptist,
not Jesus, as Messiah). The Dragon – the Devil or Satan – is viewed in
Reve- lation as the same serpent who, in the Garden of Eden, beguiled Eve
and caused the Fall.13 So Michael’s feat of arms sets a biblical precedent for
the Holy Warfare for God against Evil that was continued throughout the
Old Testament by actual warriors such as Joshua, Gideon and David. In the
New Testament, the warfare becomes spiritual, as the followers of Christ
meta- phorically don the armour of the Christian Soldier evoked in the
famous Pauline passage beginning: ‘Revestíos de la armadura de Dios para
que podáis resistir las tentaciones del Diablo’ (Ephesians 6.11–17).
What distinguishes icons of Michael, George and other warrior angels and
saints from more naturalistic representations of soldiers is the iconographer’s use
of strict pictorial conventions that suggest that the subjects are not of this world
and their battle, while real, is spiritual. This is a suggestion that Marsé constantly
rejects and subverts as his representation of icons asserts body over spirit. Icons
play down sensuality:

The nose is thin and elongated, giving a nobility to the face. It no longer
detects the scents of this world, but only the sweet odor of Christ [...]. The
mouth, being an extremely sensual organ, is always finely drawn and
geometrically, eliminating its sensuality [...]. As a sign of spirituality,
according to Cyril of Jerusalem (†387) the small mouth stresses that ‘the
body no longer needs earthly nourishment because it has become a
spiritual wonder.’ (Quenot, p. 97)

The colour and style of clothes is dictated by conventions not taste:

A symbol of sacrifice and altruism, red is an important color in Chris-

tianity. The tunic of Jesus in the praetorium is red, as are vestments for
martyrs, [and] the cloak of St Michael the Archangel [...]. But let us also
note that red can similarly mean egoism, hatred, diabolical pride and, by
extension, hell-fire. (Quenot, pp. 114–15)

Yet, in effect, as this quotation shows, convention opens the way to contra-
vention, and the strictest conventions leave room for ambiguity.
Marsé is not alone in having noted the feminising and de-sexualising
effect and the writing out of sensuality in iconography. Federico García
Lorca depicts a statue of St Michael in sexually ambiguous terms,
emphasising qualities of softness and fragility (lace and feathers), and
domesticity, together with explicit eroticism that invite mischievous alterna-
tive readings of this ambiguous icon.

13 There is a similar motif in the Apocrypha, where Daniel kills a Dragon

worshipped by the Babylonians. (Daniel 14.23–30).
 San Miguel lleno de encajes
en la alcoba de su torre,
enseña sus bellos muslos
ceñidos por los faroles.
Arcángel domesticado
en el gesto de las doce,
finge una cólera dulce
de plumas de ruiseñores.
[...]
efebo de tres mil noches.14

Marsé’s use of the icon of St Michael in Si te dicen que caí is a powerful

element in his inversion of the Christian myth of the Fall in which he depicts
Franco’s National Catholic Spain as a hell on earth. The regime, with its
fallen nature, is personified in the first instance by the crippled ex-Falangist
Conrado Galán, but also by children marked by sickness who partake of its
corruption and are more than capable of exploiting it. As part of his church
work, Galán puts on a play at the parish centre in which children re-enact the
fight between Michael and the Dragon: a piece of post-war political propa-
ganda as well as doctrinal instruction. At the same time, to satisfy in private
violent voyeuristic impulses fuelled by his impotence, Galán uses child pros-
titutes to enact sado-masochistic tableaux which replicate in theme and
presentation the same church play. In this way, the novel draws close paral-
lels between religious iconography and sado-masochistic pornography.
When the boy prostitute Java decides to take part in the church play after
acting in Galán’s private tableaux, he deliberately chooses the role of
transgressive Dragon rather than saint not only because it will afford him
personal satisfaction but also the better to exploit Galán’s known sexual
susceptibility for the entertainment of his watching friends. The role allows
Java a close physical contact with the actress Fueguiña, playing a scandal-
ously provocative and unequivocally feminine Archangel Michael, that
would have been illicit in any less ‘supervised’ context in Franco’s Spain.
Java’s enthusiastically lascivious play-acting constitutes a deliberate, yet
also comically playful defiance of the morality that Galán purports to
observe but is seen to violate as, even with the children in Church, he
becomes sexually excited by the encounter. The framing of an icon in two
such contexts demonstrates the voyeuristic potential of images which, in
their content if not in their original intention, have elements in common with
sado. The boys’ ‘playful’ torturing of Fueguiña, accompanied by Sarnita’s
excited ‘Tetas, trae las tenazas [...]. Vamos a retorcerle los pezones’ (STD, p.
113) mimics exactly the punishment meted out to Saint Agatha.

14 Federico García Lorca, ‘San Miguel (Granada)’ in Romancero Gitano (Madrid:

Cátedra, 1983), pp. 251–3.
 The narrator Sarnita revels in Java’s violently erotic performance and its
effect on the now powerless Galán:

Y caíste rendido, bramando, escupiendo fuego por los ojos y por la boca,
ella puso el pie sobre tu cabeza y tú ibas arrastrándote, tanteando con tus
garras sus botas altas, la faldita ya hecha jirones [...]. Encogido en la silla,
ronroneando como un gato, el alférez Conradito achicaba los ojos para
captar mejor los detalles. (STD, p. 100)

As Dragon, Java acts out his own corruption, while Fueguiña as Saint
Michael with her foot on the dragon’s head takes us back to Eden and to
God’s cursing of the serpent: ‘Yo pongo enemistad entre ti y la mujer, entre
tu linaje y el suyo; él te aplastará la cabeza mientras tú te abalances a su
calcañal’ (Genesis 3.15). These words describe both the immediate feud
between Eve and the serpent, and the redemption that will be wrought by
Christ, Son of the Second Eve, Mary – a redemption in which Mary is Co-
Redemptrix. Nonetheless, the interaction between Java and Fueguiña in their
play, has a more sombre message, for pain and humiliation, not redemp-
tion, characterise their sexual relations. A few pages later, Fueguiña plays
Mary in another production, now put on for their own entertainment by the
children, which mimics the colour-coding and stance of traditional iconog-
raphy, but is grotesquely scatological:

la Fueguiña ya estaba preparada de Virgen, sentada muy rígida en una

silla. Los cabellos sueltos, los pies desnudos y juntos, la túnica blanca y el
manto azul, y debajo nada, se le notaba [...]. La llevó al rincón, la hizo
sentar a caballo en el bidet, en medio de un fortísimo olor a meados, la
hizo juntar las manos a la espalda y se disponía a atarle las muñecas.
Entonces ella lo miró con ojos repentinamente furiosos. – Tú no– dijo, y
apartó los ojos de Sarnita para mirar a Java –: Que nadie me toque más
que tú.
(STD, pp. 108–9)

The scene is a blasphemously erotic, earthy depiction of a Virgin, made

more scandalous by Fueguiña’s collusion, and more poignant by her attempt
to control what is being done to her. It also replicates the violence against
women of Galán’s sado-masochistic tableaux,15 reflecting the reality of
sexual exploitation and violent repression in the society that has produced
these children, by a regime whose forms of torture, mimicked in Galán’s
tableaux, are also imitated by the children in their games (St Agatha again).
Furthermore, the play’s association with the Fall raises questions concerning
obedience and submission in the context of a ‘fallen’ regime in which

15 ‘llevarla a la silla y vestirla la capa pluvial, juntar sus manos tras el respaldo y
atarlas con el cordón morado, y chuparle los pechines mientras ella echa la cabeza
atrás, pataleando.’ (STD, p. 21).
patronage – even perverse patronage bought at any cost – offers at least a
small chance of achieving a better life. Si te dicen offers a parodic inversion
of the Fall by tracing the ‘rise’ of Java from street child to wealthy corpse –
a rise achieved by careful exploitation of a corruption that Java willingly
assimilates in childhood games, as a preparation for adult practice. Fueguiña,
on the other hand, both as Archangel and as Virgin, receives only violence
and is induced to collude in male-controlled voyeurism. Thus, once again,
Marsé confronts us with a silenced female who can act, but not speak about
her actions, whose power is limited by the roles allotted to her. As a figure
of power in this playscape, Fueguina’s St Michael is a parody that recalls
Flor- ence Nightingale’s poignant comparison of woman with

the Archangel Michael as he stands upon Saint Angelo at Rome. She has
an immense provision of wings, which seem as if they would bear her over
earth and heaven; but when she tries to use them, she is petrified into
stone, her feet are grown into the earth, chained to the bronze pedestal.16

Returning to a more traditional Christian Soldier, St George, if he existed

historically, was probably an early Church martyr killed in Palestine in about
AD 303 (Farmer, pp. 197–8). The mythic tale of his battle with the Dragon is
more recent still and only became popular in the west through the Golden
Legend – a compilation of the lives of saints collected together as late as the
thirteenth century and popularised in Caxton’s late fifteenth-century version.
As it stands, the story is strongly reminiscent of many fairytales: the country
terrorised by a foul-breathed Dragon appeased first by sheep then human
offerings; the princess dressed like a bride to go to her death; the appearance
of the Knight who binds the Dragon and saves her. Icons of St George reject
the love myth, traditionally showing him galloping away with a young male
slave on the croup of his horse leaving the princess at the palace gate. The
mystery of the icon proclaims a spiritual victory over evil and lust, and in
popular tradition George became the epitome of the Perfect Knight of
Courtly Love, personifying the ideals of Christian chivalry, and patron not
only of Catalonia and England, but Genoa, Venice and Portugal too. At the
same time, feminised in appearance and desexualised by his rejection of the
princess, perhaps he is brought on to a middle ground where male bonding
and a rejection of traditional social sexual pairings open up new possibilities
for reworking the icon.
In contrast to iconic models of the Christian Soldier pitted in combat
against the Devil, Jung suggests that rather than distinct and opposed beings,
the Soldier and the Dragon symbolically represent an inner conflict enacted
within the individual that will be resolved only by reconciliation of the two

16 Florence Nightingale, Cassandra: and Other Selections from Suggestions for

Thought, ed. M. Poovey (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1991), pp. 205–39, 228.
apparent opposites (Jung, p. 17). Jung draws on an image not from Christian
iconography but from alchemical emblemology. Represented as hermaphro-
dite, the archetype disarms the human and achieves synthesis between the
male ‘animus’ and female ‘anima’ within the human persona, as well as
within the Dragon, and between Man and Beast. For most people the dark or
negative side of their personality remains unconscious. The hero, on the
contrary, must realise that the shadow exists and that he can draw strength
from it. He must come to terms with destructive powers if he is to become
sufficiently terrible to overcome the Dragon. If the ego is to triumph and
move on through healing to maturity it must master and assimilate the
shadow (Jung, p. 112). Jung’s model does not follow the biblical narrative of
a struggle that must ultimately end in the annihilation of one or other
combatant. For the Christian, the dark, transgressive side of the psyche must be
acknowledged – in St Paul’s words: ‘todos pecaron y están privados de la gloria
de Dios (Romans 3.23) – in order that Evil may be eradicated and finally
destroyed. For Jung, the shadow must be assimilated for the psyche to reach its
full potential. In Christian myths George rejects the temptations of the flesh
represented by the Princess, but not in Marsé’s reworkings of these myths.
In his reworking of the George and dragon icon in El amante bilingüe
(1990), Marsé turns around the political situation of Si te dicen, and instead
of a Barcelona population living under an oppressive Spanish regime in the
1940s, Franco is dead, the 1978 Constitution has provided the legal frame-
work for achieving Catalan autonomy, and the drive is on to normalise the
Catalan language in public and private life. Defiantly Catalanist icons of St
George from the Franco period, in stained glass in the Klein mansion in Un
día volveré (1982) (UDV, p. 144), or in tilework in Villa Valentí (EAB, p.
131), evoke a past Catalan Catholic Nationalist Crusade. However, in these
two post-Transition novels, in crumbling but once wealthy houses harking
back to another age, they constitute an ironic comment on traditional power
structures, and in El amante provide the starting-point for a dissident
rescripting by Joan Marés in which Catalan nationalists allot the victim’s
role as Dragon to one they deem to be an immigrant from Spain’s poor
southern provinces.
As a disempowered Fueguiña colludes as victim in Si te dicen, so too the
lower-class Joan Marés colludes first with Valentí, and later with Valentí’s
daughter, in plays of domination and submission. Valentí wants a ‘charnego’
to act the Dragon to George’s Catalan Knight, and Marés agrees to do it. In
so doing, he has the chance to ridicule the conflict by taking the shape of the
comic cartoon ‘araña-que-fuma’ (already seen in Historia de detectives, p.
28), rather than that of a proper Dragon. Subsequently, he continues to play a
similarly submissive self-ridiculing role under different disguises opposite
Norma, whom he casts as power figure to his victim. In this re-ordering of
religious and sexual politics, St George is feminised. In Valentí’s play, the
spiritualised relationship between St George and Catalonia, traditionally
6. The Crowned Hermaphrodite. 17th century alchemical manuscript
symbolised by the rose he carries in the poem Marés recites, links George
with his co-patron of Catalonia, the Virgin of Montserrat, or ‘rosa d’abril’ of
Verdaguer’s Virolai, evoking Eve, the snake and the Christian salvation
narrative once more:

Sant Jordi duu una rosa mig desclosa

pintada de vermell i de neguit.
Catalunya és el nom d’aquesta rosa
i Sant Jordi la porta sobre el pit.
La rosa li ha donat gaudis i penes
i ell se l’estima fins qui sap a on;
i amb ella té més sang a dins les venes
per poder vèncer tots els dracs del món. (EAB, p. 136)17

As Marés scripts Norma as a figure of power, the dominant Christian

Soldier is effectively recast as female. Norma, like Fueguiña, is depicted in a
series of eroticised icons which conflate two Marys: the Immaculate Virgin
and the reformed prostitute, Mary Magdalene. As icons, both are seen as
intermediaries with power to intercede with God, and Norma is depicted
looking compassionately at the supplicant at her feet: ‘Viendo a este
murciano tuerto y renegrido echado a sus pies, agobiado por una vida oscura
y un trabajo oscuro, sintió de pronto un fuerte impulso de acariciar sus
cabellos’ (EAB, p. 104). Whereas Tía Isabel represents a subversion of the
maternal ideal, however, Norma as icon is sexualised – a whore with an ‘aire
de puta desvalida’ (EAB, p. 102) and a ‘rodilla de puta parisina’ (EAB, p.
105). Marés’ positioning of her foot, allied with the obvious fetishism of her
shoes, denotes erotic attraction in the supplicant before the icon: ‘Con ambas
manos, delicadamente, se apoderó del pie de Norma y lo encajó en el soporte
de la caja, delante de su bragueta’ (EAB, p. 103). Watching him in submis-
sion before her, Norma too experiences ‘la araña del escalofrío subiendo por
la tibia hendidura de sus muslos apretados’ (EAB, p. 107), responding sexu-
ally to the ‘araña-que-fuma’ Marés, even as she mimics the compassionate
attitude of the saint: ‘Ella ofreció un rato más su rodilla a la conturbada
frente y movió las manos abiertas en torno a su cabeza sin atreverse a
tocarla’ (EAB, p. 111).18

17 The poem on the cover of the Catholic Scouting magazine in Chapter 4 (Illustra-
tion 1) picks up similar themes and images – the knight, the dragon and the rose: ‘Sant
Jordi. Tot gentilesa, /en la lluita es arrogant, /té envestida i té destresa: /vencerà el
dragó gegant. /Sant Jordi té belles coses /és un sant i un cavaller, /i ens prodiga
excelses roses /d’un foc del cel matiner. /Cavaller, la llança empunya /amb serena
austeritat. /Gran patró de Catalunya, /senyoria, seny, bondat. /Sant Jordi tot mal
allunya /perquè té Déu al costat.’
18 Forrest likens Norma’s attitude to that of the Magdalene, and adds: ‘Approached
from either biblical or literary antecedent, this significant episode represents a radical
“conversion” of sorts in which the individual is subordinated either to a religious or
 For Marés, the role of Dragon as outcast and victim gives room for play
and for testing the boundaries of his very flexible identity with virtuoso
performances as Catalan or – increasingly – ‘charnego’. He needs Norma as
a public, and a justification for his performance. Norma, too, needs
‘charnegos’ to fulfil her linguistic mission, though the scope that Marés
gives her – asking vocabulary for car parts (EAB, p. 64) or lingerie (EAB,
pp. 27–8) – is a mocking comment on the processes of linguistic
normalisation. It is ironic that it is to the parody of a Dragon, the false
‘charnego’ Marés, that she is at first attracted, and that after a string of
‘charnego’ lovers, Marés manages to ensnare her briefly once more. Like
Jung’s two halves of the one nature, George and the Dragon, Norma and
Marés, Victor and Vanquished seem bound to each other in unceasing
amorous conflict that, with hindsight, we can trace in other, early novels.
Paco’s fantasy of himself as a ‘príncipe Valiente’ to Nuria’s princess, with
a Dragon to be vanquished mentioned in Chapter 4 (PM, p. 107) offers a
configuration similar to that of St George. Paco also alludes frequently to the
clawed beast within himself in relation to his desire for Nuria and for wealth,
admitting that ‘la indecisa mano que te acariciaba en noches serenas, en el
jardín de tu casa, mucho me temo que era y sigue siendo una garra’ (PM, p.
106), or that in the warmth of the ‘llar pairal’ that he only occasionally expe-
rienced, ‘Calor de hogar. Tu garra se enternece’ (PM, p. 120). He speaks too
of Salvador’s ambition with the image of predatory claws: ‘en silencio,
durante años, afiló las garras que un día caerían sobre las piadosas señoritas
Claramunt’ (PM, p. 87). The tantalising vulnerability of the woman in this
scenario is again evident in Un día volveré, where Néstor’s attempts to
beguile his uncle into marrying his mother, Balbina, involve trying to
suggest that a toy gecko stuck to the ceiling is threatening his mother:

– Tío, ¿estás durmiendo?

– Qué quieres.
– Hay un dragón en el cuarto de mi madre, en el techo, no sé qué hacer.
– ¿Cómo dices? ¿Un qué?
– Un dragón.
– Querrás decir una salamanquesa. (UDV, p. 83)

In Néstor’s ‘escena recompuesta, repensada’ (UDV, p. 107), his mother is

laid out on display for the male gaze (Jan Julivert’s) in which Néstor wishes
to awaken desire: ‘–Tío, espera. ¿Has visto que tiene un morado en el
pecho? Mira, aquí – señaló el pecho de su madre – . ¿No podría ser que ya
[la salamanquesa] la hubiese mordido?’ (UDV, p. 108). Though at times
framed

sexual ideal. Once again, Norma’s association with institutionalized power elicits a
parodic inversion of official culture (religion) and individual expression (eroticism)’
(Forrest, p. 47).
as figures of power – St Michael, St George or the Marys – or as figures of
erotic fascination – Nuria, Fueguiña, Norma and Balbina – none of these
women plays any role, or has any voice, beyond what is specifically
prescribed by the author’s or narrator’s controlling male voice, and their
subordination points to strategies of containment built into the social circum-
stances and expectations that the novels depict in association with traditional
Catholic morality.

Montse: mystic in ecstasy or the cry of the powerless?

It is in his depiction of Tía Isabel’s daughter Montse that Marsé embarks
upon his most sustained experimentation with religious iconography. Plain,
pious, repressed, yet impossible simply to dismiss with the pejorative term
‘beata’, as the novel itself will point out, Montse represents a risky break
with the popular female icons of Marsé’s earlier novels. These include
adolescent sex-symbols such as Tina Climent in Encerrados, tantalisingly
depicted through the erotic obsessions of Andrés and Martín, and Teresa
Serrat in Ultimas tardes, whose attraction, in Manuel Reyes’ eyes, is
enhanced by the glamour of wealth and a high lifestyle. Montse, in contrast,
is hampered by her supposed social and economic advantages and so
provides a striking example of Marsé’s capacity to break moulds and address
the thorny issue of belief in an entirely diverting way.
In Montserrat Claramunt, pious daughter of the church-going Catalan
Catholic bourgeoisie, we see Marsé addressing directly the religious content
of an icon, and of the myth from which it is derived. He then moves away on
to alternative explanations of the phenomenon of faith, and ultimately on to
secular reworkings of iconic and mythic models. In my view, after La
oscura historia, there is a rapid secularising in Marsé’s use of religious
material, evident in his reworking of what Quenot argues to be the most
sacred of art forms, the icon. In El embrujo de Shanghai, Marsé uses a
religious icon in an entirely secularised interpretation to institute within the
novel, through the characters he creates, a discussion of imaging that strikes
at the heart of notions of truth, and religious truth, that icons represent, while
Rabos de lagartija offers his most challengingly transgressive yet human
depiction of the Virgin Mother: husbandless and carrying the child that will
kill her – no dragon or serpent but a worm. In Rosa Bartra sickness and
seduction make this disempowerered female figure the focus of attention of
female gossip and male fascination, while Blake’s poem elevates her beyond
her immediate context to become a secular icon: a window into the ‘más
allá’.
In La oscura historia, the narrative of the religious sceptic Paco is a game
played with Paco’s cousin Nuria (Montse’s sister) aimed at reconciling
conflicting images of Montse, or fitting together the pieces of a puzzle
similar to Luys Forest’s Tangram (MBO) and just as susceptible to
manipula- tion of the truth. Within the conventions of Catholic morality,
Montse is at one and the same time portrayed iconographically as a Mystical
Virgin, and as a Fallen Woman. She is the happy Montse of her ‘feliz
maraña de obras de apostolado’ (PM, p. 7), and a suicide whose own death
kills her unborn child. Paco also observes behaviour which may indicate a
religious fervour as intense as that of a saint or mystic, or equally may be a
symptom of nervous anxiety, sexual repression, or hysteria. If Montse is
sick, does she mirror a sick society, and do the icons that society venerates
also express that sick- ness? Or is her sickness, in a perverse way, her
personal salvation?
Named after the patroness of Catalonia and a member of a powerful
Catalan family, Montse is doubly cast in the role of patroness within the
Catholic Church, to be appealed to (like her mother) by those needing help.
Again, like her mother, Montse fails and her dramatic ‘rapto de los sentidos’,
located at the centre of the novel (in the fourteenth of twenty-six chapters),
suggests that some of the clues to understanding her might lie in this curious
experience, be it spiritual or pathological or both. Spectators confronted by
this startling image, and not in possession of all the information available on
Montse, are forced to question what they are seeing: sickness or religious
ecstasy? And since the image is mediated through the narrator Paco, other
questions arise concerning his intentions in choosing such models, and his
methods of imaging. Even the term ‘rapto de los sentidos’ which heads
Chapter XIV is ambiguous, for it can refer equally to mystical rapture, when
the soul, in spiritual communion with God, loses touch with the baser senses
of the body, and to a rapture of the senses – an intense sensual experience
representing an extreme in the physical communion of sexual intercourse.
Paco’s religious and medical readings of Montse’s ‘rapto’ are inscribed in
his narrative at every stage, in imagery and allusion, drawing on observation
of her from childhood to her premature death. At the same time, being the
product of retrospection, they represent a considered reconstruction of events
only half known at the time of their occurrence, but subsequently and with
hindsight represented as part of a developing process. They include Paco’s
observation of the family, church, society and times that, in his view – or
views – have contributed to Montse’s tragedy. Through this conflation of
perspectives, Marsé foregrounds the hand of the iconographer, and as he
questions Paco’s intentions and exposes the subtexts that Paco discerns in
the intentions of others (Nuria and Salvador) who also engage in interpreting
Montse’s story, both author and narrator subvert the authority of the images
– and notably the religious icon – presented to the reader/spectator. The
image remains iconic both in its use of the doctrinal and pictorial
conventions of Catholic iconography, and in the purportedly scientific
approach to diagnosis of hidden illness through visible images of
pathological states, but by focusing on the mysteries of suffering it
foregrounds human frailty before divine truth.
 7. ‘Arc-en-cercle’. Paul Richer,
Études cliniques sur la grande
hystérie ou hystéro-épilepsie

Paco depicts Montse’s ‘rapto’ in three stages. The first is dramatic, resem-
bling that enacted by Blanche Wittman with the violent contortions and
dramatic ‘arc-en-cercle’.

Está boca arriba y formando un arco inverosímil con el cuerpo,

apoyándose sólo en los talones y en la nuca. Pero en seguida se derrumba
y trenza sus piernas en el aire, con un doloroso esfuerzo, con aplicación y
ansiedad, como si las adheriera [sic] a una forma invisible. (PM, p. 121)19

Richer’s drawing carefully drapes hair and dress so that, with the pointed
toes, the pose has an almost balletic quality. In contrast to this artistry, in the
second stage of her ‘rapto’, Montse burns with feverish heat and sweats as
she now lies passive in Paco’s arms, her hair not alluring but snakelike: ‘Su
cuerpo arde pegado al tuyo, las mechas mojadas se adhieren como negras
culebras a su cuello y a sus hombros, toda ella transpira una combustión
interna que la consume’ (PM, p. 122).
In the third, she clings to Paco, whose inner debate (he addresses himself
as ‘tú’) expresses uncertainty as to how to interpret what he sees, and his
embarrassment at Montse’s distress and desire, to which he cannot respond:

Con los ojos cerrados, te atrae hacia ella, tiembla ligeramente, es como si
tuviera frío y se abraza a ti, la boca abierta pegada a tu hombro [...]. Al
cabo, como temías, al resbalar aún más su arrebolada mejilla – luego su
boca – sobre la tela del pijama, roza apaciblemente tu sexo [...]. [D]eseas
librarte de este abrazo tembloroso e inconscientemente lascivo. (PM, pp. 122–
3)

Paco has observed such symptoms in Montse before. Earlier in the

chapter he recalls a previous seizure, as dramatic as the ‘arc-en-cercle’ but
with inti- mations of religious influence: ‘se dejó caer de espaldas en la cama
con los brazos en cruz y allí se quedó largo rato, riéndose, hasta que se calló
y poco a poco fue poniéndose rígida, pálida, los ojos cerrados, y nunca
supiste si se

19 For a discussion of interpretations of this phenomenon see Gilman ‘The Image

of the Hysteric’, pp. 362–5.
 8. The self-crucified hysteric. Paul Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’art

durmió o se desmayó’ (PM, p. 119). 20 Once again with carefully disposed

hair and clothing, the seizure mimics crucifixion and its representation the
canons of modesty of religious art, yet it begins with Montse laughing
uncon- trollably, even hysterically, at Paco’s chest hair – a nervous reaction
to a male sexuality she finds disturbing. Paco recalls Montse telling him that
loss of consciousness and psychic turmoil have also troubled her for some
time, and again he is uncertain how to interpret what she says: ‘Te hablaba
de que a veces se sentía tan mal, de que tenía pesadillas o creía que iba a
desmayarse [...]. Te hablaba de sueños que nunca supiste si los vivía
dormida o despierta’ (PM, pp. 117–18). Together with her gaucheness with
him, her attitude to her own body has always been noticeably awkward and
ambiguous:

Diríase que trata a sus pechos de una manera torpísima, o que los lleva sin
saberlo: te roza con ellos al pasar, se los chafa sin darse cuenta, se los toca
y al parecer los siente como si fueses molestas protuberancias cuya
utilidad no acabara de entender. No tiene aún conciencia de su cuerpo.
(PM, p. 98)

Paco’s uncertainty as an observer – inscribed in his inner debate – seems

disarmingly sincere in its apparent reluctance to draw too rapid conclusions
about these symptoms, and its desire to prevent the reader doing so too. Yet
his sincerity is deceptive and Paco’s reading of the signs has clear direction.
Montse ‘no tiene aún conciencia de su cuerpo’ (my emphasis); Paco sets out
to trace the awakening of that consciousness. What remains debatable is
whether that consciousness – or knowledge – constitutes health or sickness,
redemption or a fall, according to Catholic tenets, Paco’s views on sexuality,

20 Gilman illustrates ‘parodies of religious experience, from the position of prayer

to the position of crucifixion’ (Gilman, pp. 368 and 370).
Montse’s own notions, or the reader’s conclusions. Paco’s use of the
languages of disease and of religious ecstasy creates a dramatic tension
between hopelessness and death on the one hand, and life and hope on the
other, and this is sustained till the last pages of the novel and beyond.
The first reading, then, highlights similarities between Montse’s
behaviour and illness. The ‘arc-en-cercle’, replicating attacks of tetanus or
‘grand mal’ epilepsy, is also typical of hysterical seizures. In Paco’s view,
Montse’s condition has probably been provoked, and has certainly been
aggravated by unrealistic, even damaging, patterns imposed on her by a
Catalan Catholic society whose ‘mores’ Montse – unlike Paco himself, or
Nuria who survives
– has chosen to adopt. Though in the past Paco considered Montse far more
‘decidida y animosa’ than Nuria (PM, p. 51), in retrospect he remembers her
as a ‘criatura desvalida y mórbida destinada a vivir, con todas sus
consecuencias uno de los mitos más sarcásticos que pudrieron el mundo’
(PM, p. 7) – a further conflict in his depiction. He prepares the reader for
Montse’s untimely end by linking her with another cliché: the tragic
heroines of romantic nineteenth-century literature killed by tuberculosis. In
so doing, he also introduces two characteristics of TB which evoke a conflict
at the heart of Catholic morality: the spiritualising effect of approaching
death seen in increasing frailty and transparency on the one hand, and
heightened sexu- ality on the other. In Si te dicen, TB is seen as a disease of
1940s hardship. Symbolically, it represents the exploitation of the poor by
the ‘bloodsucking’ rich who, rumour has it, abduct poor children and take
their blood to cure their own tubercular offspring, as in the case of Luis Lage
(STD, pp. 240–1). In La oscura historia, Paco comments that Montse ‘Tiene
en el rostro esa gravidez de las tuberculosas, esa palpitación serena bajo la
piel transparente de la frente y los pómulos (PM, p. 98). Applied to a pious
daughter of the wealthy Catalan Catholic bourgeoisie in the 1950s, the
disease, in stark contrast to the rude health of Nuria and Salvador, places
Montse, alone, as victim, alongside the poor she seeks to help.
Comparison with an extract from Susan Sontag’s Illness as metaphor
shows how closely Paco’s depiction of Montse illustrates common precon-
ceptions about TB:

TB is understood as a disease of extreme contrasts: white pallor and red

flush, hyperactivity alternating with languidness [...]. TB makes the body
transparent. The X-rays, which are the standard diagnostic tool, permit
one, often for the first time, to see one’s inside – to become transparent to
oneself. ... TB was – still is – thought to produce spells of euphoria,
increased appetite, exacerbated sexual desire [...]. Having TB was imag-
ined to be aphrodisiac, and to confer extraordinary powers of seduction
[...]. TB is a disease of time; it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it
[...]. TB is often imagined as a disease of poverty and deprivation – of thin
garments, thin bodies, unheated rooms, poor hygiene, inadequate food.
The
 9. The representation of religious ecstasy
as pathological sign

poverty may not be as literal as Mimi’s garret in La Bohème; the

tubercular Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux camélias lives in luxury,
but inside she is a waif.21

During Montse’s ‘rapto’ – or bout of illness – she is consumed by fever and

bathed in sweat then pale and languid when ‘parece más tranquila [...], la
frente brillando como nácar’ (PM, p. 121). The cool pallor of mother-of-
pearl alternates with the twining of her legs around an invisible other
suggests sexual desire,22 and these symptoms are also common to hysteria.
Charcot, discussing representations of religious possession in Les
Démoniaques dans l’Art, wrote that the symptoms he called ‘attitudes
passionnelles’ – which, as Elaine Showalter notes, he ‘suggestively titled
“summons,” “amorous suppli- cation,” “mockery,” “menace,” “eroticism,”
and “ecstasy” ’23 – can indicate hysteria or possession: illness or either
spiritual or physical union. For Charcot, then, the links with religious
possession are so strong as to make the religious and medical conditions
indistinguishable, as indeed the mixing of medical and metaphysical
language in the titles given by the illustrators underline. Charcot comments:

21 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 12–15.

22 See also how Laura, in Miró’s Dentro del cercado, is spiritualised through an
association with death and TB. ‘Descaecida por las vigilias y ansiedades, blanca y
abandonada en el ancho asiento, su cuerpo parecía delgado, largo y rendido, de virgen
mística después de un éxtasis ferviente y trabajoso’. Gabriel Miró, Dentro del cercado,
in Novelas Cortas Completas, ii (Madrid: Felmar, 1976), p. 131.
23 Elaine Showalter, Hystories, p. 33.
 L’ecstase hystérique ne possède guère par elle-même des caractéristiques
spéciaux qui puissent permettre de les distinguer des autres variétés
d’ecstases. Nous la considérons comme une forme de grande attaque, frag-
ment détaché de la troisième période des attitudes passionnelles.
(Charcot, p. 107)

In a reversal of Quenot’s argument concerning icons and religious paintings,

Charcot affirms that the beliefs of the artist intrude on the depiction of spiri-
tual experience, sacrificing realism to theology:

[N]ous voyons que les artistes, dans les représentations qu’ils ont faites
des extatiques, ont négligé à dessein toute apparence de violence, tout
phénomène convulsif. Pour eux, l’extase est une attitude passionnelle; tous
leurs efforts consistent à exprimer, à rendre extérieure un phénomène
interne, en un mot, à traduire objectivement, par les traits de la
physionomie et les gestes du corps, ce qui se passe dans les régions de
l’esprit inaccessibles à la vue [...]. L’artiste a donc cherché à rendre une
pensée, un sentiment. Tout est mesuré, réglé, rationnel dans sa figure.
(Charcot, pp. 108–9)

Freud, who studied with Charcot, stresses the link between hysteria and
sexual, rather than spiritual passion that is familiar in works such as
Bernini’s sculptures of Saint Theresa and The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni:
‘Investiga- tion of the childhood history of hysterical patients shows that the
hysterical attack is designed to take the place of an auto-erotic satisfaction
previously practised and since given up’. 24 The seizure replicates the sexual
act: ‘What points the way for the motor discharge of the repressed libido in a
hysterical attack is the reflex mechanism of the act of coition [...]. [A]
convulsive hysterical attack is an equivalent of coition.’ 25 Echoing Freud,
Paco also points to childhood, and a loss of a source of comfort, to explain
Montse’s unease in his description of the ‘rapto’. At the same time, he
reprimands himself ironically for taking too seriously theories more notable
for their ingenuity than their reliability: ‘guárdate por una vez tus
consideraciones freudianas más o menos ingeniosas’ (PM, p. 123). He sees
in Montse a desire to ‘volver un poco al mundo feliz de la infancia [...],
cuando el cuerpo nos prometía una fidelidad sin límites y aún no sabíamos –
nadie nos lo había de enseñar – que también él puede imponernos un
destino atroz’ (PM, p. 123).

24 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, A. Freud, A. Strachey and A. Tyson, 24
vols. (London: Hogarth, 1955–1974), vol. 9, p. 234.
25 Mark Micale, on the notion that grande hystérie was viewed as an acting out of
female sexual experience, described it as: ‘a spasm of hyper-femininity, mimicking
[...] both childbirth and the female orgasm’. Mark S. Micale, ‘Hysteria and its
Hysteriography: A Review of Past and Present Writings, II’, in History of Science, 27
(1989), p. 320.
He depicts her as a victim of her lack of those natural physical attractions
that draw him – and many others – to Nuria, recalling ‘aquellos inútiles
muslos de muchacha fea y extraña’ (PM, p. 124).26
Finally, and recalling once again the silent female figure in Marsé’s narra-
tives, Paco’s repeated allusions to Montse’s isolation suggest a recent inter-
pretation given for hysteria: as a means of expression for those denied other
means of communication – a protolanguage for those who have no other.
Paco recalls her inability to defend her position when under attack from her
father, despite her conviction that it is defensible:

habla atropelladamente, sus dotes polémicas se revelan pobrísimas, por no

decir nulas, y particularmente patéticas: convencida de que debe haber una
explicación, un lenguaje que fue expresamente acuñado para expresar lo
que desea. (PM, p. 102)

In its compassionate depiction of Montse’s inarticulate ‘rapto’, Paco’s narra-

tive seems to echo Elaine Showalter’s warning that ‘If hysteria is a
protolanguage rather than a disease, we must pay attention to what it is
telling us’ (Showalter, Hystories, p. 13). Mark Micale writes that, as ‘an
alternative physical, verbal and gestural language’ hysteria is ‘an iconic
social commu- nication’,27 and it is that icon that Paco challenges the reader
to interpret. Montse’s iconic ‘rapto’ and subsequent suicide may be taken to
show that, ‘as a body language of women’s rebellion against patriarchal
oppression, [hysteria] is a desperate, and ultimately self-destructive, form of
protest’ (Showalter, p. 10).

The flesh and the spirit: re-siting salvation

As Paco traces the gradual changes wrought in Montse by her contact
with the ex-convict, Manuel Reyes, he inverts the metaphor of illness and
death and describes her sexual awakening and new life with Manuel in
Chapter XXI, entitled El Contagio. Surrounded by working people on a
popular beach, Paco imagines her at first apprehensive about the moral as
well as physical effects of the place: ‘Imposible no embrutecerse aquí –
pensaría

26 In Si te dicen, the narrator Sarnita attributes Sor Paulina’s religious vocation, in

part at least, to her lack of physical attraction, shyness and sexual frustration: ‘Era una
gordita tímida de busto hierático, acartonado, empaquetado, que ya prefiguraba este de
hoy bajo los hábitos [...]. Fue su último baile [...], pero tampoco esta vez encontró
pareja y al final tenía los pies deshechos de no moverse y unas ganas incontenibles de
llorar’ (STD, p. 178).
27 Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), p. 182.
Montse – hay una amenaza de contagio’ (PM, p. 218). Finally she accepts
the ‘contamination’ of contact:

Y fue al salir del agua cuando, con la piel grasienta y alguna mancha de
alquitrán, la arena empezó a adherirse, contaminándola [...]. Las olas se
abaten en la rompiente con estrépito, flota un pesado perfume a algas y
sudor [...]. Sintiéndose de pronto sola y cansada, se arrima a él [Manuel]
recostando la cabeza en su hombro [...]. Y abandonándose, Montse cierra
los ojos. (PM, p. 219)

The Barceloneta beach is a place of recreation for Barcelona’s proletariat,

including Manuel, who is undisturbed by the dirt. Paco emphasises the social
and economic gulf between Manuel and the Claramunts, who can enjoy the
clean beaches of Sitges, but the beach also acts as a social leveller where
Montse – albeit reluctantly at first – accepts Manuel and his world as her
own, while his arm around her suggests reciprocation, or at least compliance.
Paco then charts a gradual physical change in his cousin: literally and meta-
phorically she sloughs the skin of her previous life and lets a new sexualised
self – likened once again, as with her hair during the ‘rapto’, to a snake –
emerge in her life alongside Manuel:

arrodillada sobre la cama revuelta, la cabeza despeinada y ladeada, Montse

se entretiene arrancando cuidadosamente la piel de seda de sus hombros
quemados por el sol de las playas libres. Lo hace despacio, soñolienta,
replegada y absorta en sí misma, fascinada [...]. [E]l bromea dicéndole que
ya ha cambiado totalmente la piel, como las serpientes, dejándola tras de sí
con todo lo demás [...]. Y Montse se sonríe irguiéndose sobre las rodillas,
desperezándose con los brazos en alto, estatuaria en medio de sus
delicados, finísimos, lastimados despojos de seda marca Claramunt. 28
(PM, p. 214)

The snake now symbolises new life rather than illness, however.
Yet the beach also performs another symbolic function, prefiguring the
manner of Montse’s death. The heat, sweat, seaweed and Montse’s physical
union with Manuel recall the sweat of her ‘rapto’ seven chapters earlier, with
its ‘intenso olor a algas, como si acabara de surgir del mar’ (PM, p. 121) and
in the scent of sex, an ironic echo of the spiritual union of religious ecstasy.
Indeed, there is a network of water images in the novel, recalling Christian
imagery of baptism and rebirth but with the opposite consequences for

28 The Claramunts are ‘fabricantes de tejidos de seda’ (PM, p. 51) – luxury goods –
and Paco identifies silk with the Claramunt daughters: ‘la cálida y sedosa entrepierna
de mis primas’ (PM, p. 55). Silk later typifies the glamorous prostitute Aurora/Menchu
in Si te dicen. Its use in relation to the Claramunt girls is both apt, for the professional
association, and ironic in its suggestion of erotic glamour.
Montse. Paco suggests mystical aspirations in Montse’s childhood in a
memory in which ‘la niña está sentada al borde del estanque y contempla
con sus ojos muy atentos los turbios peces rojos, soñando quizá con un
mundo de luz’ (PM, p. 56).29 That image is then recalled with profound irony
as Montse plunges off a bridge to her watery death on a rain-soaked night.
Paco’s imag- ining of her death offers a tragic parody of her earlier childish
dreaming and the ‘rapto de los sentidos’, but in contrast to the intimations of
religious ecstasy in those earlier episodes, it shows her turning her back on
the statue of Christ which overlooks Barcelona but has not saved her. Her
rocking mimics an attitude of prayer but also shows mental perturbation:

de espaldas al Tibidabo y a su gigantesca imagen de brazos abiertos,

seguramente evocaría un instante el secreto de la vida perdido para
siempre, la mentira del pasado y del futuro. Y convocando ciegamente la
nada que se abría a sus pies [...], su memoria tal vez recuperó un lejano día
gris y una niña sentada al borde del turbio estanque del jardín [...]. Luego
su mente herida repitió una y otra vez el último gesto con los ojos
cerrados, ensayó hasta la naúsea aquella reverencia cada vez más terrible y
dulce, un abandono de todo apoyo engañoso, inclinarse apenas y dejarse ir,
una y otra vez, hasta lograr confundir pensamiento y acción en una especie
de loco extravío de los sentidos [...]. Y ya sin apoyo [...], giró lentamente y
sus ojos recogieron por última vez la engañosa luz de las estrellas, la
última promesa de la vida. (PM, pp. 271–2)

In the bible and Christian liturgy, water represents life, cleansing and,
through baptism, redemption and eternal life. The Children of Israel passed
safely through the Red Sea (which then closed on the pursuing Egyptians)
and began their new life as God’s Chosen People (Exodus 14.21–7). Jesus
entered the water of baptism and emerged to be acknowledged by the voice
of God as ‘mi Hijo, el Amado’ (Mark 1.9–11). Icons of the Nativity of
Christ, through the water and blood of birth, place the Virgin Mary outlined
against the mouth of a tomb-like cave, as a reminder that Christ was born to
die – and to rise again. To a Catholic, then, the imagery of water suggests a
possible rebirth and reinstatement of Montse, and perhaps of Manuel too.
That does not happen in La oscura historia.
A religious reading of Montse’s rapture leads to new insights on other
images besides water in the novel. The obvious image of light and darkness
suggested by the book’s title is evident in the symbolism of life and death
already mentioned in icons of the Nativity. ‘Truly’, Quenot writes, ‘light is
the theme of iconography’ (Quenot, p. 107). Light and Darkness accompany
the Good/Evil binary that Paco seeks to unravel over the course of his narra-
tive. On one occasion, Montse has a halo which, in iconography,
‘symbolizes

29 The goldfish is a symbol of Joan Marés’ aspiration after a ‘más allá’ in El

amante bilingüe.
the brilliance of Divine light in the person who lives in the intimacy of God’
(Quenot, p. 100). In the novel, however, it indicates delirium and despair
after her rapto. Paco leaves her: ‘los ojos bajos, el camisón pegado a la piel,
otra vez con su fealdad enternecedora, envuelta en una especie de halo
sagrado o delirante, ferozmente sola y sin remedio’ (PM, p. 124). The image
of light recalls the child Montse staring into the pond and dreaming of a ‘mundo
de luz’. In the course of her relationship with Manuel, as the opposition of
her parents and church intensifies, so does a quality of light in her, in Paco’s
view. She changes physically through suffering, and Paco speaks of himself
in the third person as he observes these changes, as if, through irony, he can
both perceive the light that would signal spirituality in her to a believer, and
as a sceptic deny it, misinterpreting it as illness, or a symptom of repression.
In the image he creates, of a serenity and harmony unrelated to the harshness
she is experiencing in the world, Montse appears imbued with a light from
within that transforms her plainness. Her severely confined hair is like a
helmet framing her face, or like the coif that hides the Virgin’s hair to
prevent human beauty detracting from her spiritual significance, but the
colours and light of iconography speak of spirituality:

[Montse] vuelve hacia él su frente vencida, tersa, de una hermosura

lumínica difícil de precisar. Según los cánones actuales, es fea. El pelo
negro partido en dos sobre la frente, peinado hacia atrás y recogido en un
moño, es como un melancólico casco que oculta las orejas y le da una
forma triangular a la frente de nácar [...]. Tiene en el rostro [...] una armonía
de expresión basada no tanto en la conformidad de los rasgos como en el color,
en cierta luz de la piel que trasciende desde quién sabe qué rincón abrasado y
amable del alma. (PM, p. 98)

When she talks of Manuel, ‘Su sonrisa se ensancha, es casi luminosa’ (PM, p.
100) – ‘luminosa’ agreeing with both the smile and Montse – and she has
‘los ojos inundados de luz’ (PM, p. 56). The ‘rapto’ takes place in the night
and is an experience of darkness. Yet this fits with the mystic’s Dark night of
the Soul which San Juan de la Cruz defined in the following terms:

para que una alma llegue al estado de perfección, ordinariamente ha de

pasar primero por dos maneras principales de noches, que los espirituales
llaman purgaciones o purificaciones del alma. Y aquí las llamamos
noches, porque el alma, en la una como en la otra, camina como de noche
a oscuras.30

Paco combines light with flowers – another iconographic convention – to

depict Montse’s desire for union with those around her. Lilies symbolise purity

30 Juan de la Cruz, Obras Completas de San Juan de la Cruz (Madrid: Biblioteca

de Autores Cristianos, 1972), p. 458.
10. The Nativity of Christ
in the Virgin and female saints. In Paco’s imagination, Montse goes to encounter
Manuel in prison for the first time as the mystic walks the path to union with the
Divine: dazzled but seeking renewal in spirit: ‘con la secreta esperanza de ser
recreada, renovada’. Swept along by the flood of gipsy women visitors
displaying – stereotypically – carnations, her sense of oneness with them is
evoked in her actions:

Camina decidida entre veinte mujeres apresuradas y vociferantes,

flanqueada por dos gitanas [...] con claveles en el pelo [...], sonríe en
medio de su feliz deslumbramiento: se siente arropada, en olor de
multitud, y avanza solidaria [...]. La joven Amaya embarazada sufre un
traspiés, se apoya en el hombro de Montse [...]. Montse rodea su cintura
con el brazo y avanzan juntas. (PM, p. 36; my emphasis)

Paco’s apparently pleasant imaginings are in fact bitterly ironic, for Montse
herself, like Amaya, will stumble, become pregnant and need support, but
she will not find it. Her mystic path will lead only to a brief union with
Manuel and to a brief, limited glory symbolised by the only poor parody of
an ‘agape’ love feast (of which the communion is a symbol) that they can
afford: ‘Se adentraba más y más en su diario deslumbramiento camino de la
pensión Gloria y hacia un alto en alguna tienda de barrio para comprar un
kilo de naranjas o una botella de Vino Común’ (PM, p. 214 [my emphasis]).
The gipsies’ carnations become a symbol of her real desire to identify with
‘charnegos’. Like the gipsy women visiting prisoners with her (PM, p. 36),
she wears a carnation in the ‘centro parroquial’ (PM, p. 21), and has a posy of
them in Manuel’s room (PM, p. 198), together with the washing she has done for
him, on the line she has hung for him, near the wireless she has given him along
with herself.
Whether we view Montse’s ‘rapto’ as psycho-sexual or religious, what
makes it irremediably self-destructive is that the foundations of her faith, as
Paco sets out to demonstrate, are themselves flawed. As an iconic
protolanguage, the ‘rapto’ reveals how extreme is Montse’s desire for union
with God and with those she seeks to serve, just as the icon of a Saint in
Ecstasy reveals to the believer the mystery of spiritual union with the Divine.
However, Paco’s reading of the icon points to the absence of the mystery and
the hollowness of the image. In so doing, it also exposes the tragedy of
Montse’s loss of belief. For Montse, this means her Catholic faith which, in
Paco’s view, may be one of the ‘distintas floraciones de un mismo ideal de
personalidad’ manifested by all five of the novel’s young protagonists, but if
so, it is a tragically destructive one. In one sense, then, Montse’s tragedy is
shared by all the young who must face disillusionment – the end of the game –
in a lying society. In another sense, her loss is worse because of the treacherous
deceit of a Church that promised so much more and gave so much less,
awakening hopes of heaven in her only to deny her entry there:
 [Montse] lucha desesperadamente al encuentro de aquellas normas y
principios que le han enseñado desde niña, aquellas fórmulas claras,
estables, convincentes e irreversibles de ayer, y que hoy, al parecer, todos
cuantos están en esta mesa han olvidado: ignora Montse que la palabra
viva, como todo lo vivo, traiciona, y más aún en materia de religión, y se
debate en una trampa. (PM, p. 103)31

The extent of her ‘desengaño’ and loss is best appreciated when we accept
that to read her rapture as an icon implies the presence of the divine acting in
and through her body. The fact that her body – the outward form of the icon
– lets her down, by its unattractiveness, its irrepressible desires and in its
conception of a new, transgressive life for Montse and for the child she bears
as a fruit of her own physical flowering, is a desperate final paradox: death
in life, subverting the assumption of a divine in-dwelling capable of
imparting life in death.

Susana: voyeurism and the reincarnation of the iconic mystery

Published twenty-three years after La oscura historia, El embrujo de
Shanghai (1993) illustrates the process of secularisation mentioned at the
start of the previous section while boldly appropriating a religious icon as
the focal point of the narrative. In contrast to its prominent role in La oscura
historia, the Church in El embrujo (once again represented by Marsé’s own
childhood ‘parroquia’, Las Animas) – has been relegated to the background,
mentioned only as an irrelevant distant patron and moral censor beyond the
fringe of the events recounted. 32 The question of dreams, fantasies and
‘desengaño’, however, is foregrounded even before the narrative proper
begins. The novel is dedicated to memories: ‘A la memoria de la Rosa de
Calafell. ...’ (ES, p. 5).33 There follows a verse about nostalgia over lost
fantasies and dreams: ‘nostalgia de aquellos días de fiesta, cuando todo
merodeaba por delante y el futuro aún estaba en su sitio’ (ES, p. 7). The
novel’s opening sentence, ‘Los sueños juveniles se corrompen en boca de los
adultos’ (ES, p. 9), continues the theme of disillusionment, but the words are

31 There is an ironic play on the words ‘la palabra viva’, for to the Christian, Christ
is God’s ‘Verbo de la vida’ (I John 1.1), ‘pan de la vida’ (John 6.35) and ‘agua viva’
(John 7.38).
32 ‘La Betibú era viuda y no tenía otros medios de vida que las faenas que hacía en
algunas casas y sus primorosos encajes de bolillos, muy apreciados por las beatas de Las
Ánimas y las señoras ricas de la barriada’ (ES, p. 25). Being without husbands, both La
Betibú and Susana’s mother are suspected by ‘cuatro beatas de la Parroquia’ of being
prepared to ‘aceptar de los hombres cierto tipo de ayuditas’ and of ‘devaneos amorosos.’
(ES, pp. 30–1).
33 The dedication alludes to where Marsé grew up (L’Arboç), has a house
(Calafell), and to the name of his daughter (Berta) and wife (Joaquina).
spoken by a fantasy film character: Capitán Blay (Bligh of Mutiny on the
Bounty, alias the Hombre Invisible), and Marsé thus makes plain from the
outset that El embrujo is an exploration of dreams and fantasies in Daniel’s
last weeks of childhood, before he joins the adult world of work. It is about
Daniel’s erotic fantasies concerning Susana, his morbid dreams about his
father’s death, Daniel’s and Susana’s exotic dreams of the mysterious ‘más
allá’ symbolised by a mythic Shanghai, and adventure fantasies they build
around Susana’s absent father. Daniel is between school and an apprentice-
ship, and Susana is in the limbo of disease, so as with Andrés and Tina in
Encerrados, their exploration of childhood fantasies is made freer by
parental absence and idleness: boredom and a discovery of the resources of
play. Their fantasies also feed on the unreliable yet entertaining flights of
fancy of the crazed Capitán Blay and fascinating stories of the lying yet eloquent
Nandu Forçat. Daniel’s experiences suggest that perhaps it is the madman and the
liar who hold the key to enchantment.
The narrative is constructed around the icon of the Virtuous Susanna
both in the sense that the novel inverts a bible story, and because it is about
the painting of an image: how the subject – Susana – is seen and read by
different spectators, and how images of her may serve different functions,
including the iconic function of offering a window on to a mystery. The
biblical Susanna is a model of female beauty and an icon of virtue and
piety. As a wife, though, she is sexually experienced and knowing, and it
is her knowingness that is Marsé’s starting-point in his exploration of the
icon.
Marsé’s Susana Franch has natural attractions enhanced by the delicate
sensuality associated with TB. Bringing her more within reach of a wider
public, TB also links her with a popular literary and musical icon, the cour-
tesan Marguerite Gautier – La Dame aux Camélias of Dumas’ novel and
Verdi’s La Traviata – and Susana lives in the Calle de las Camelias which
marks her with a tragic-romantic eroticism, arousing in the reader expecta-
tions with which Marsé, as ever, will play games. Her glamour is enhanced
by the drama of the threat of death, and by having a heroic father equally
endangered as a resistance fighter, and she is aware of her allure: alive to the
possibilities it offers for amusement in her disease-induced confinement.
Admirers become a necessity in whose gaze she enjoys new life. Her
attitude, until the close of the novel, shows neither the inward-looking
absorption of the mystic nor the heavenward gaze of the saint. It is outward-
looking, through the glass of the ‘aquarium’ where she spends her days,
towards the spectator, as in Rembrandt’s painting of the subject.
Unlike the biblical Susanna, obscured modestly – and supposedly safely –
from public view in her ‘hortus conclusus’, Marsé’s Susana is exposed to,
and thrives on, her admirers’ gaze. Gilman comments: ‘Rembrandt’s image
covers both the genitalia and the breasts, showing the viewer Susanna’s
gaze, a gaze as indicative of the revelation of the inner truth about human
sexuality
as the direct depiction of the genitalia would be.’ 34 Susana’s gallery likewise
both reveals and veils. Daniel stands fascinated, like a believer striving to
discern the mystery of an icon, trying to perceive her through the misted
glass and instead becoming the object of her detached gaze:

me pareció ver una mancha rosada girando como una peonza detrás de la
vidriera, junto a la cama, y era la niña tísica que bailaba abrazada a su
almohada. Fue sólo un momento, enseguida se dejó caer de espaldas sobre
el lecho, luego se incorporó y vi con claridad su mano limpiando el vaho
del cristal y seguidamente su cara pegada a él, pálida y remota, mirándome
como si flotara en el interior de una burbuja. (ES, p. 31)

Marsé inverts the bible story to make Daniel – named after the devout,
ascetic prophet – a voyeur, while the two ‘charnego’ Chacón brothers,
associ- ated in the story’s character distribution with the two Elders, protect
her.35 This passage, in which Daniel evokes the alternating frenzy of activity
and passivity, the frantic enjoyment of a fleeting life and the sickly pallor of
the TB sufferer, marks the beginning of a fascination with Susana that fills
his dreams with increasingly erotic images:

Imaginé también, ya de madrugada y flotando en una especie de

duermevela, y con una intensidad y una precisión que nunca antes había
gozado en mis delirios eróticos, sus pechos blancos como la nieve entre
sábanas blancas y sus febriles muslos de leche cubiertos de una fina
película de sudor agitándose inquietos en el sueño. (ES, p. 36)

Like Montse’s ‘rapto’, Marsé again describes the febrile gestures, sudden
collapse backwards on the bed and the sweating that are also symptoms of
hysterical attacks. However, whereas Montse is either unconscious of, or
only just awakening to, her sexuality, the adolescent Susana is precociously
and knowingly tantalising.
Susana increasingly takes the lead in the relationship with Daniel. She
enhances her pallor with glow-worms – a sinister reminder of the decay of
death, yet intensely erotic to Daniel – and goads and entices him: ‘¿Te
gustaría besarme ...? ¿Te gustaría, tonto? Pero un beso de tornillo.
¡Contesta!’ (ES, p. 138) In a role-reversal that picks up the imagery of La
oscura historia, just as Montse’s final yielding to Manuel is depicted as

34 Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: Wiley, 1989),

p. 44.
35 ‘se consideraban guardianes exclusivos de la niña enferma y responsables de
todo lo que pudiera pasar en torno al jardínya la torre’ (ES, p. 37). Their relationship,
in its attentiveness and denial of eroticism, resembles courtly love – more closely asso-
ciated with the glorious, if mythical, Catalan medieval Golden Age than with the
southern Spanish flamenco passion, inverting regional sterotypes.
‘contagio’, so too Daniel’s fascination with Susana, combining death with
desire, is associated with disease:

He revivido mil veces esa fosforescencia y ese ardor en la oscuridad, esa

mórbida combinación de sexo y enfermedad mortal y timidez, y siempre
me invade el mismo remordimiento, la misma duda: no sé si fue Susana la
que sólo permitió que le rozara los labios o fui yo el que no quise llegar
más lejos. Por supuesto que deseaba besarla, y desnudarla y acariciar sus
pechos y sus muslos de fiebre, y estaba dispuesto, si no había más
remedio, a contagiarme con su saliva y su aliento y a recibir mi ración de
microbios.
(ES, p. 138)

Like Montse, Daniel hesitates before embracing contagion. He tries to fix in

his drawing ‘los mórbidos elementos de una atmósfera intemporal y única,
preñada de sensualidad y de microbios’ (ES, p. 88), while fearing a growing
dependency that, like a disease, robs him of his freedom without affording
him an outlet for his desire:

cada día me veía más prisionero de un decorado venal y falso [...]; había
diseñado la galería como si fuera un invernadero, tal como la veía, pero en
ese invernadero nada podía florecer; había intentado reproducir en el papel
la frente tersa de Susana y la rosa aterciopelada y cada día más encendida
de sus mejillas, y sólo conseguí el pálido remedo de una pepona sin vida.
(ES, p. 114)

Like Paco trying to capture conflicting images of Montse from his own
memories and desires and from those of her family, Daniel tries to reproduce
the ‘muñeca delicada’ that Susana wants to be for her father, and the ‘pobre
tísica birriosa’ of Capitán Blay’s ‘delirantes expectativas’ (ES, p. 114). He
finally manages – from his own memory, not her life – ‘una figurita de
porcelana dentro de una caja de cristal’ (ES, p. 179) that he likes, but he real-
ises that it is not so much a portrait of Susana as ‘el dibujo de mi candidez’
(ES, p. 182).
At the same time, the ‘caja de cristal’ is actually symbolic of Susana’s
function within the novel, and in the minds of the male protagonists for
whom she is a source of images, a starting-point for stories and a focus of
eroticism. As an object of desire contained in the aquarium-like glass box,
Susana colludes in games of imaging and tries to manipulate the voyeurs.
Yet, even after she regains her health and is released from her glass-house by
her lover, El Denis, he inflicts confinement and brutal treatment in their rela-
tionship and Susana returns home. Home, but not to the past, for that, along
with the dreams of a better future that childhood held for her and Daniel, has
long gone. The icon has lost its allure; the ‘más allá’ is here and now. The
‘hortus conclusus’ has been violated and erotic mystery has given way to
drab reality: ‘Con poco más de veintitrés años, su frente seguía siendo
hermosa y su piel muy tersa, pero no quedaba ni rastro de la efusión rosada y
sensual de la boca, aquella enfurruñada plenitud del labio superior y su
turbadora ansiedad’ (ES, p. 191). Where before, disease and El Denis
imposed confinement on Susana, now she herself chooses the limited hori-
zons of a cinema box-office.
The close of the novel is ambiguous. Susana is in a limbo between the
reality of the street, and the second-hand fantasies of the silver screen:
‘dejándose llevar en su sueño y en mi recuerdo a pesar del desencanto, las
perversiones del ideal y el tiempo transcurrido, hoy como ayer, rumbo a
Shanghai’ (ES, p. 191). Her return to confinement after a taste of a wider
world seems regressive. With all Marsé’s silenced female figures she is held
for voyeuristic pleasure seekers in a vulnerable glass shell within which she
has only limited freedom. At the same time, her condition mirrors the
boredom of the voyeur and both are caught up in a form of play that mirrors
life: that may be a preparation for life, but that does not necessarily lead out
into life. Daniel is going off to do what Marsé himself did: military service
in Africa, meaning hours of idleness and boredom, but also an empowering
of the imagination that, in Marsé’s case, in his narrative play area, has
produced a literature with a sharp-edged subversive thrust that brings regime
languages into constant interplay with virtuoso displays of authorial
languages of freedom.

From Christomachotismo to the Sick Rose: revalidating the flesh

For believers, the prototype of the icon is Christ Incarnate, for in him God
took on a human form that could be depicted. Female icons serve to direct
the believer’s attention and worship towards contemplation of the mysteries
of a male Trinity, Saviour and act of Redemption in which Mary, as Co-
Redemptrix still only features in relation to her Son, typified by obedi- ence
and silent acceptance of the mission granted to her. However, as my
discussion of Marsé’s use of Catholic iconography has shown, the very
silence of iconic female figures conveys not absence but presence. Marsé has
chosen not to ignore his Catholic heritage, but, by knowing exploitation of
its regime language, to arm opposition to its aims even as he revels in its
aesthetic and conceptual richness. Brief quotations will show how precisely
Marsé’s strategies of subversion illustrate Philippe Lejeune’s comment on
the effectiveness of irony as an ‘arme dangereuse’ because ‘elle vole à
l’autre son langage, elle lui “brûle” son discours, qu’il ne pourra plus
réemployer ensuite avec la même efficacité [...]. Il s’agit d’amener
l’adversaire à “se suicider avec sa propre langue” ’.36

36 Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre. L’autobiographie de la Littérature aux

Médias (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), p. 25.
 In crudely ranting style, mimicking the brow-beating rhetoric of the
Cursillo de Cristiandad for men that he himself experienced first-hand,
Marsé conjures up an image of a modern Christian Soldier: the factory
worker called in as visual aid for a lecture: ‘Cristo repentinamente vestido
con mono azul de mecánico y manejando llave inglesa’ (PM, p. 154). The
rhetoric is as crude as visual representations of workers from publications
across the polit- ical spectrum which are also familiar to the narrator from a
church context: ‘se parece a la imagen ideal del obrero aséptico, sonriente, de
mandíbula cuadrada y guapo que él [Manuel Reyes] ha visto en los carteles
diocesanos del centro parroquial de Vich’ (PM, p. 154). The image is ‘aséptico’,
like the immaculate Salvador and in contrast to the Manuel of the
Barceloneta beach where Montse caught her ‘contagio’. He is ‘cuadrado’
like Matilde’s fiancé Juli Puig (EJ), in contrast to her transgressively scruffy
brother Andrés. He is contained by the Church’s social gospel, never
crossing the lines of permitted transgression. He is passionate, but only
about faith; forceful, but never against the status quo – today’s St Michael or
St George: ‘es el “Obrero Ejemplar que no se mete en política ni huelgas ni
manifestaciones de protesta, sólo en nuestros pecados, pudridero del mundo”
’ (PM, p. 155). This emotive exaltation of an ideal which places honour and
respect higher than social equality or better working conditions is
commonplace in the Catholic workers’ press of the 1950s and 1960s, and so
would resonate with Marsé’s readership. In an article in which ‘Un sacerdote
explica aquí sus experiencias obreras que le hicieron comprender que Dios
se hiciese carpintero’, we read:

jamás pude conseguir que Meok, el compañero ruso que trabajaba a mi

lado como electricista, me tutease: había algo que se lo impedía. Y
comprendí poco a poco que tenían razón [...]. Ahora ya sé lo que quiere
decir el ‘honor de ser obrero’.
(Boletín de Militantes de HOAC [Hermandades
Obreras de Acción Católica], July 1951, p. 8)

Suffering, both spiritual and physical, must be part of the ‘mentalidad

obrera’ as it was of Christ’s work, for it is his destiny, providing a mystical
link between man, labour and God:

El obrero no trabaja con este o aquel instrumento, sino con ‘su’

instrumento, aquel que casa con su mano desde siempre [...]. [N]o es por
casualidad por lo que Cristo quiso ser obrero. Amó la madera, cuyos
secretos conocía a la perfección, en una familiaridad de veinte años. Nació
sobre esa madera en un pesebre y quiso morir en el abrazo sangrienta de
su amiga, de su hermana la madera.
(Boletín de Militantes de HOAC, July 1951, p. 8)

Marsé coins his own new word – ‘Cristomachotismo’ (PM, p. 161) – to

describe an ideology of self-sacrifice and pain, passion and devotion, that is
close to the militarism of Crusade mythology, yet which was adapted and
flourished alongside the progressive ideology of the secular student-worker
revolts of the 1950s (Ultimas tardes), and in the post-Vatican II euphoria of
the 1960s. Here is the new icon for the age, combining the modest, self-
effacing humility of Christ’s human ‘father’, ‘San José Obrero’, 37 with
images of a struggling, suffering Cristo Obrero in a masterpiece of
propagan- dist control by the regime: ‘un Cristo más nuestro y más machote
que ninguno, un Cristo moderno, fuerte, animoso, paciente, cumplidor en la
fábrica y respetuoso con sus superiores’ (PM, p. 155). The impact of
Marsé’s irony is powerful because he knows his material so well. It is
devastating because he strikes at the foundations of post-war Catholicism
through its history, its doctrines, its myths, language and – most dramatically
of all – its icons.
In La oscura historia Marsé offers his clearest and most unrestrainedly
hostile critique of the Catholic Church and its icons. His most recent novel
Rabos de lagartija shows how his increasingly secular use of icons appropri-
ated from a regime language into the author’s own language of freedom,
rather than losing the impact of the icon’s dense meaning, proves capable of
putting that meaning to new use in a bid for diversity over exclusivity, for
revalidating the feminine alongside the masculine, the sick with the well, the
transgressor with her lover as the shadow is part of the whole and Catholi-
cism is part of his post-war Barcelona. In Rosa Bartra, Marsé’s transgressive
and silenced women – and with them those who contemplate their mystery –
come together and find a voice. It is not the Holy Spirit like a dove or shaft
of light that inseminates her but an RAF pilot from a plane shot down in
flames
– already fallen. She carries not the Saviour but a malformed foetus, yet one
who is effectively the teller of the tale Rabos de lagartija. Could the pun on
tales – tails be intentional? It does not really matter in the specific, because
this kind of game with words, stories and images is at the heart of Marsé’s
play with Catholic iconography. Standing at her door with soft red curls
tantalising the policeman Galván, heavy with the love-child of the pilot,
adul- terous wife of a disappeared ‘maquisard’ husband, alone in bringing up
her son David whose freedom to play she guards jealously in opposition to
the controlling Galván, Rosa is revealed as the Sick Rose of Blake’s poem.
Read- ings of her are also greatly enhanced by access to the riches of
Catholic iconography which arm Marsé’s strategies of subversive and ironic
re-appro- priation of the medium. His compassionate documenting of the
fragile and ephemeral infuses icons with the mortality of incarnation while
also displaying the rich and beguiling allure of the medium and of the icon’s
‘más allá’.

37 On May 1, ‘Desde el año 1955 se celebra litúrgicamente la memoria de San José

Obrero. La Iglesia recuerda así [...] el valor humano y sobrenatural del trabajo’. Misal
Popular Iberoamericano Madrid: Panamericano, 1974), p. 1659.
 CONCLUSION

‘Los sueños juveniles se corrompen en boca de los adultos.’

(ES, p. 9)

This study has examined how Juan Marsé uses Catholic iconography to
powerful effect in his novels to explore and subvert the ideologies of the
Catholic Church, Spanish National catholicism and Catalan Catholic
nationalism. It has considered both the broad background of Marsé’s depic-
tion of popular religious culture in post-war Barcelona, and has focused
discussion on specific discourses of Vatican II, on myths of biblical Paradise
Gardens, and on individual icons. It draws attention to Marsé’s
preoccupation with the extent to which religious ideology can permeate
public and private life, yet at the same time, throughout my discussion I have
emphasised that Marsé’s treatment of Catholic iconography is playful. In
leaps of imaginative invention, always tinged with irony and often with
nostalgia, he eagerly and mischievously exploits the wealth of a religious
heritage towards which he remains ambivalent. His approach is summed up
in a quotation from Nietz- sche that prefaces Rabos de lagartija:

No comprendo para qué se necesita calumniar.

Si se quiere perjudicar a alguien lo único
que hace falta es decir de él alguna verdad. (RL, p. 7)

There is room here for debate – room for play – and a welcoming of
openness to discussion. As a hybrid, Marsé plays across many boundaries of
nation- ality, class and ideology, and his games with Catholic iconography
demon- strate that hybrid freedom.
Storytelling is for Marsé a toy, a game and a narrative play area in which
to try out strategies of subversion and to entertain. I have described play as a
leap, an explosion of energy, as defying limits, as finding a ‘divine leeway’
for spontaneous, unrestrained, joyous experimentation, and I have argued
that these are characteristics of Marsé’s storytelling games too. Play is also
wicked, mischievous and provocative. It is Andrés and Martín in
Encerrados scandalising passers-by in the Parque Güell with obscene songs
sung loudly: ‘¡caritat caritat senyora, caritat pel meu germà, que va néixer
sense braços i no se la pot pelà!’ (EJ, p. 58). It is Juanito Marés in El
amante, contorted into
 CONCLUSION 193

the shape of the ‘araña-que-fuma’, hurtling at break-neck speed down a

smart suburban street on an improvised go-cart, yelling the ragman’s cry ‘Hi
ha cap peeeeeell de coniiiiiill...!’ – a war cry he will repeat at moments of
rage or sexual orgasm. It is children playing sado=masochistic games in
imitation of adult sado-erotic play in Si te dicen, and it is Paco and Nuria
playing at adul- tery and telling each other versions of the dark tale of
Montse Claramunt.
I have compared Marsé’s narrative play area with carnival, delineating a
common ground of explosively humorous subversion. With an allusion to
‘church’ that can be aptly applied to Marsé’s novels, and targeting an ‘upper
stratum’ that could well indicate that sacred area of the icon in a church
context, Bakhtin comments on the subversion of authority during carnival:

Not only does laughter make no exception for the upper stratum, but
indeed it is usually directed towards it. Furthermore, it is directed not at
one part only, but at the whole. One might say that it builds its own world
versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own
state versus the official state. (Bakhtin, p. 88)

Bakhtin adds that, when carnivalesque humour sets itself up – albeit playfully
– in opposition to authority, it exemplifies:

The acute awareness of victory over fear […]. [T]he defeat of fear
presented in a droll and monstrous form, the symbols of power and
violence turned inside out, the comic images of death and bodies gaily rent
asunder. All that was terrifying becomes grotesque […]. The people play
with terror and laugh at it; the awesome becomes a ‘comic monster’.
(Bakhtin, p. 91)

Play too acknowledges danger and death and brings them into the play area.
This is so with Marsé’s children ‘playfully’ rehearsing scenes of torture in
dark cellars, and with Marsé’s own depiction of Nuria and Montse
Claramunt, and with his startling representations of state repression,
religious power-broking, pain, disillusionment and suicide. Like carnival
Marsé’s play is hazardous, as though violence and fear can intensify
enjoyment as brief, ephemeral pleasure is snatched from life with a sharp
awareness of the pres- ence of death. He is not afraid to address these issues
and challenge the authority of regime languages in the freedom of his
narrative play area.
The ‘awesome’ that becomes ‘comic monster’ is for Marsé the Catholic
Church. He presents Catholicism, through its icons, myths and doctrines as
authoritarian and powerful. As a voice of authority in public, the Church is
seen in the novels to align itself equally easily with the authority of a
repressive Francoist state in Si te dicen que caí, and with a Catalanism once
in opposition to that state but presented as comparably coercive in La oscura
historia and El amante bilingüe. The Church is seen to preach – but rarely
practise – a morality based on its doctrine of Good and Evil that infiltrates
private lives, shapes
194 ROSEMARY CLARK

behaviour, and is held directly responsible for the tragic death of Montse
Claramunt. Whether, as a force in the background which affords Martín
powers of coersion in Encerrados (EJ, p. 185) and allows ‘cuatro beatas’ to
speculate on the morals of Betibú in El embrujo (ES, p. 30) and pronounce
on Rosa Bartra in Rabos (RL, pp. 26–9), or as central to a novel as it is in
Marsé’s critique of the methods of social control exercised by a powerful
Catalan Cath- olic élite in La oscura historia, the Church is a force to be
reckoned with towards which Marsé adopts a deliberately transgressive
stance.
Marsé’s transgressive play, depicted predominantly in children and young
adults, establishes in his novels a ‘language of freedom whose power
consists in what we threaten to become’, in defiance of a ‘regime language
that derives its strength from what we are supposed to be’ (Doctorow, p.
217). In relation to Catalonia’s campaign for the Normalisation of the
Catalan Language (what we are supposed to be), Marsé’s subversive play
with bilin- gualism in El amante should be seen in the wider context of the
infinite flexi- bility he claims for storytelling in his ‘aventis’ and in the
pungent refrain that runs throughout Rabos de lagartija: ‘¡Puñeta, David,
estudia idiomas!’ (RL,
p. 179). Confronting Catholic morality, Marsé’s ‘language of freedom’ takes
the form of transgressive sex and uses a strategy I have termed ‘sexualising
the sacred’ to locate sexual transgression at the heart of the Catholic Church
in what might be seen as a process of reversed infiltration and a challenge to
the divine authority at the heart of the faith. By exploring Catholic
iconography as erotic, Marsé exploits the subversive potential of this most
sacred pictorial form by reincarnating sanctity as sexual: by emphasising the
tragic frailty of the human body. In so doing, he undermines the religious
assumptions on which the conventions of the sacred stand, and ‘vole à
l’autre son langage […], lui “brûle” son discours, qu’il ne pourra plus
réemployer ensuite avec la même efficacité’ (Lejeune, p.25).
Marsé views the Catholic Church as a major deviser and propagator of a
‘regime language’ that appears to shift with the times and so persists as a
force of constraint despite change and modernity; one so closely interwoven
in the popular religious culture of post-war Barcelona, and so familiar to
those of Catholic background, as to be virtually invisible. Confronting his
readers through the silent figure of the transgressive eroticised female –
Tina, Montse, Norma and Susana – his novels demand a sharpening of
perceptions and a re-reading of regime languages which deny such figures a
voice, on whatever pretext. The figure has recurred at key points in my
discussion: as a female interlocutor posited as sex object or seducer in
Encerrados in Chapter 1; as the corpse of the ‘puta roja’ at the centre of an
investigation which will never reveal the cause of her death, but only her
sexual corruption and the forces deployed against her in Si te dicen in
Chapter 2; as the ‘ángel del hogar’ set on a pedestal and denied her humanity
in La oscura historia in Chapter 3; as subject to male authority –
dispossessed by being made a possession – in La oscura historia and El
amante bilingüe in Chapter 4; and as representing, and
 CONCLUSION 195

simultaneously subverting, Catholic icons of Virtuous Womanhood in La

oscura historia, El amante, El embrujo and Rabos in Chapter 5. I do not
claim that Marsé’s use of this figure constitutes a feminist stance. Rather, the
silenced female figure symbolises the male narrator’s own sense of
impotence in the face of a public that does not hear what he has to say.
I began my study with the image of Marsé on military service beguiling
the time with narrative games that became his first novel, and already
defining himself in opposition to his surroundings by a solitary engagement
in storytelling. I have argued throughout that his confrontations with regime
languages – and I have focused on the discourses of the Catholic Church –
express concern over the loss of what Erikson terms a ‘playful leeway’ in
life and in narrative, which Marsé has sought to defend by devising
strategies of subversion that will allow his own voice to be heard in critical
parody beneath the clamour of public rhetoric. His playful approach has
meant that his writing always seeks to engage with others, in collusion or
competition, thriving on both. But as well as being an iconoclastic humorist
with a wicked taste for scandalous subversion, he shows concern over the
damage caused by ‘playacting for deception’ in public life, and over the
vulnerability of the credulous – particularly the young – who are taken in by
it. He has commented that ‘sabido es que con la juventud se puede hacer
todo, cualquier cosa; que su imperiosa necesidad de seducir y dejarse seducir
la inclina periódicamente a prostituirse’ (AP, p. 180). Even as Marsé
ruthlessly exposes ‘nostalgia del pasado’ as self-delusion, he also regretfully
recalls the capacity of young people to feel ‘nostalgia del futuro’ as a
projection towards a personal ‘más allá’ that seems inevitably to end in
disillusionment.
What Marsé’s novels offer, in my view, is a space in which readers are
beguiled into engaging in games of make-believe – a play area where there
are no holds barred, where even the sacred can become a toy, and the chal-
lenge is to set fear aside and defy limits imposed on ‘what we threaten to
become’. Marsé’s use of Catholic iconography is subversive, but it also
demonstrates his sheer enjoyment of a source of potent narratives that is a
part of his own mythology. So it is that in El embrujo de Shanghai he can
make a religious icon central to his story, and make that icon entirely his
own. Viewed in that light, the closing words of the novel read as a
declaration of Marsé’s continuing belief in the recreative power of
storytelling as he closes with the image of ‘Susana dejándose llevar en su
sueño y en mi recuerdo a pesar del desencanto, las perversiones del tiempo
transcurrido, hoy como ayer, rumbo a Shanghai’ (ES, p. 192). His own
storytelling then moves on with a commitment to explore further the
potential of languages of freedom. In the closing words of Rabos de
lagartija – surely tinged with irony – which challenge the reader to engage in
a new round of the narrative game:

Y es que todavía me cuesta mucho hacerme entender.

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PERIODICALS

ABC Suplemento 1950 Año Santo.

Ancora (Circular de las Congregaciones Marianas)
Boletín de los dirigentes de la HOAC (Juventud Obrera suplemento)
Boletín de los militantes de la HOAC
Camins (Portaveu de l’A.E. Otger Cataló del Moviment Scout Catòlic D.D.E.)
Construïm (Organo d’expressió dels Moviments JAC-JACF rural)
Dirigentes (Asociación Católica de Dirigentes)
Flama (Federación de Jóvenes Cristianos de Cataluña) (Antiguos alumnos del
Colegio José María Jesús)
Flechas y Pelayos
Signo (Revista de los Jóvenes de la Acción Católica)