Table Of ContentConstructing Spain
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Constructing Spain
The Re-imagination of Space and
Place in Fiction and Film,
1953–2003
Nathan Richardson
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Published by Bucknell University Press
Co-published with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2012 by Nathan Richardson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richardson, Nathan E., 1968–
Constructing Spain : the re-imagination of space and place in fiction and film,
1953–2003 / Nathan Richardson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61148-396-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61148-397-0 (electronic)
1. Spanish fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and
society—Spain. 3. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Spain—History 20th century.
4. Spain—In motion pictures. I. Title.
PQ6144.R43 2012
863'.6409—dc23 2011041031
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Preface vii
Chapter 1 Spanish Territories, Global Geographies: 1
Exploring Space and Place in a New Spain
A Short Spatial History of Spain 4
Making Money Different(ly): Space and Capital, 10
or the Urbanization of Consciousness
Creating Space/Making Reality in a Third Millennium 22
Chapter 2 The Construction of Space and Place in Franco’s Spain, 31
1953–1970
Once Upon a Place: ¡Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall! 35
Este cuento se ha acabado: The Spanish State 51
in the Late Francoist Era, 1953–1970
The Ends of Spanish Space: Reivindicación del 56
Conde don Julián
Chapter 3 Building Beyond Spain: Readings from the 79
Spanish Novel, 1970–1989
The Beginning of a Promising Friendship: El invierno 91
en Lisboa and the Flows of Postmodern Space
A Nation-State of Shadows: Muñoz Molina’s 112
Beltenebros, 1944–1989
A ntonio Muñoz Molina (1991– ): Riding Beyond 138
the Storm
v
vi Contents
Chapter 4 Sacred Spain: Creative Destruction in the 147
Spanish Cinema, 1961–2000
The Postsecularization Thesis, or Buñuel’s Desperate 158
Call for Life: Viridiana
1975–1990: Secular Disenchantment and 171
Sacred Movidas
1990–2000: The Rituals of Design, Corruption, 175
and Consumption in El día de la bestia
1990–2000, II: Cyber-Messiahs in a New Spain: 189
Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos
Chapter 5 The World Will Be Redonda, or the Dark Back 211
of Community: The Narrative World of
Javier Marías, 1989–1996
Searching for Community in a Syrup-preserved World: 214
Todas las almas
The Rise of a Kingdom: Corazón tan blanco, 227
Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, and Other Marías
Challenges, 1989–1996
Arriving at Redonda: Negra espalda del tiempo 241
Chapter 6 Preserving the House While Pursuing the World: 261
Julio Medem’s Engagement with Basque Space,
from Vacas to La Pelota Vasca, 1992–2003
Vacas: Rethinking (Again and Again) Intimate 266
Basque Space
Expanding Basqueland: La ardilla roja and Tierra 279
Circling Eden: Los amantes del círculo polar 287
From Euskal Herria to Euskal Hirria, or How to 300
Build a New Basque City: La pelota vasca
Afterword: Spanish Grammars of Creation: Reconceiving, 313
Perceiving, and Practicing Space for the
Twenty-First Century
Bibliography 319
Index 337
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Preface
In 1953 dictator Francisco Franco signed a pact permitting the establish-
ment of U.S. military bases on Spanish soil. Fifty years later, in the spring
of 2003, the United States cashed in on the Franco-era military alliance, as
Spain’s conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar joined up with George
W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” in invading Iraq. I view these two Spain-
U.S. alliances as bookends to a study of the transformation of space and place
in Spanish society over the second half of the twentieth century.
The first event was a significant catalyst for pulling much of Spanish
society from pre-modern living conditions into the throes of the developed
world’s already late modernity. For the Francoist state, the pact ended four-
teen years of political, economic, and often cultural isolation. The economic
opportunity that came with international recognition helped end years of
poverty and hunger. Subsequent urban industrialization emptied out hundreds
of rural communities. The influence of Church and religion waned as the new
urban immigrants confronted the cultural complexity of city life. Spain’s
soon-to-be-famous tourist slogan, “Spain is different” proved more prophetic
than its promoters intended. In sum, while Spain’s transition from dictator-
ship, to democracy, to full fellowship in the community of developed states
was never a simple given, Franco’s 1953 pact marked the beginning of the
end of old Spain. It effectively sold out his “national movement” while pav-
ing the way for the economic windfall of the next two decades.
It is too early to know the long-term effects of Aznar’s decision to reunite
Spain with the United States in yet another military venture. It can be argued
that if the 1953 pact proved the beginning of the long end of Francoism, the
2003 pact led—by way of the political turmoil surrounding the Atocha train
bombings of March 11, 2004—to a more rapid ouster of a leader with his own
vii
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viii Preface
political and familial ties to those earlier days. But leaving March 11th aside,
Aznar’s relinking of Spain to U.S. policy, and the ferocious negative response
it received in Spanish popular culture, exposes the anxieties felt on the Iberian
peninsula in the face of the Spanish state’s ever-more prominent role in the
global arena. Aznar’s attempt to wiggle his way into the Bush-Blair fraternity
was not even thinkable without an awareness of the real material results of
Spain’s fast-track journey from pre- to postmodernity.
Moreover, like the 1953 pact, the 2003 pact facilitated the emergence of a
new kind of Spaniard. If the first took Spanish citizens from premodernity to
late modernity and perhaps into postmodernity, the second event led to the
mass emergence of a new kind of Spanish citizen, what we might refer to as
the Spanish citizen cyborg or the posthuman Spaniard. While mass gather-
ings are nothing new to the public plazas and avenues of Spanish cities—for
several years citizens throughout Spain had been uniting en masse to protest
ETA murders, for example—these were often events that everyone could
agree upon, semi-officially sponsored by way of the attentions of all major
media outlets includes the powerful government-supported national radio and
television networks. In these marches everyday citizens from all walks of life
joined hands with political leaders from across the spectrum. The anti-Iraq
war protests were, in contrast, often more grass roots affairs without orga-
nized political leadership from the top. Instead, Spanish citizens took advan-
tage of the latest telecommunications technologies to inform themselves
about international events and then to organize against local politicians. This
new dynamic of global information and local organization culminated in the
spontaneous antigovernment protests that upset the March 2004 national
elections just days after the Madrid train bombings. In a true grass roots
event, Spanish citizens, mostly from younger generations, employed inter-
net technology to cut through what proved to be blatantly false information
being spread through almost all national mass-media outlets. Then, employ-
ing mobile-phone technology, especially text-messaging, these mostly young
Spaniards organized widespread protests and motivated millions of first-time
voters to get to the polls.1
The turn of the Spanish citizenry away from mass media culture toward
personal telecommunications technology (from old to new media) coincides
with a more global shift in structures of power which itself may find some
significant bearing in the event of the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq. The war in
Iraq was hardly the smashing success originally promised. Despite a much
celebrated high-tech military and a North American business-management
model directing events from the top, efforts to secure peace—let alone to
create a safe haven for Western economic and political interests—lurched
forward in fits and starts. The war in Iraq called into question the great
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Preface ix
hegemonic forces of the last fifty years: not only has the United States
promoted itself as the world’s lone superpower, but U.S. business models and
cultural forms have globalized much of the planet. The greatest weapons, the
latest business practices, the smoothest of free markets have become stuck in
the sand of a likely unwinnable conflict.
On the week of this writing, the news magazine Time has named its “Person
of the Year” for 2006. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1982, Time surprised its
readers with the naming of the PC—the personal computer—as that person.
This year, the cover again sports a personal computer. This time, however,
its screen is made of reflective material. The image we see is our own. The
“Person of the Year” is, the cover declares, “you.” If 1953 was the beginning
of a new hegemony for Spain, will 2003 mark the beginning of new global
power structures, ones that have finally trickled down about as far as they can
go—to individual citizens themselves? While the study that follows has little
to say explicitly about the political relations between Spain and the United
States over the last fifty years, the global U.S.-led political, economic, and
cultural hegemony casts a far-reaching shadow over the historical events,
cultural works, and human activities that I discuss in the following pages.
The experience of space and place in Spain has evolved dramatically over
this period. Certainly U.S. economic attention and political clout have con-
tributed to the transformations of Spanish homes, towns, and cities from the
mid-1950s to the present. More importantly, U.S. cultural values have shaped
the way citizens have understood these cities, homes, and, finally, what I will
refer to throughout this study as “the space closest in,” their bodies. North
American cultural values have encouraged, often at a kind of hyper pace, a
vision of space and place that sustains an increasingly antihuman, antiso-
cial approach to the world we inhabit. Over this fifty-year period space has
become an ever-more abstract and, hence, abstractable and extractable entity,
something we can objectify and manipulate at will, something we can buy
and sell, destroy and rebuild as we wish without consideration for its more
complex lived nature. In this mindset, places—lived sites of meaningful
human contact—disappear, even if the market-driven idea of such locations
blankets our lives.
The works I read in the following pages document this transformation of
space and place within Spain over the last several decades. They point to spe-
cific Spanish responses to such processes. They suggest and signal alternative
ways of approaching space and, hence, living within and beyond Spain.
The date of choice for an ending, the year 2003, may yet prove inadequate.
It is quite recent. It does, however, mark a note of hope: a hope that the
struggles of U.S. political and economic hegemony arising from the Iraq
War and, more locally, the rise of the cybercitizens manifest in March 2004
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