On Doubling and Dis/ability: The Voice and View of Difference in the Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas

Abstract

The award-winning collection of stories by Cristina Fernández Cubas, La habitación de Nona (2015), focuses on the fear of difference that lurks within apparent normality. The title story features the classic Fernández Cubas strategy of a first-person narrator who imposes narrative authority and the view of normality, in tension with other characters’ perspectives that subvert the center of power. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Disability Studies, this essay analyzes how Fernández Cubas wields doubling, difference, and voices in “La habitación de Nona” to set up and subvert the able body as an unstable and mutable identity position. This approach departs from her treatment of disability in her inaugural story, “Mi hermana Elba.” In examining how society views and voices difference and disability as a social construct, Fernández Cubas critiques notions of normality and unveils the abject as the double that dwells within the self as well as the other.

Keywords:

• Disability
• ableism
• abject
• difference
• doubling
• identity
• body
• normality
• “La habitación de Nona”
• “Mi hermana Elba”

Notes

1 For critical discussions of the phenomenon of doubling in Fernández Cubas’s earlier works, readers may consult Bermúdez’s “Looking for Mom”; Bretz’s “Cristina Fernández Cubas”; Folkart’s articles “Almost the Same,” “Desire, Doubling and Difference,” and “The Ethics of Spanish Identity,” and books Angles on Otherness in Post-Franco Spain and Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium (131-65); Glenn’s “Gothic Indecipherability” and “Fantastic Doubles”; Gleue’s “The Epistemological and Ontological Implications”; Herrero Cecilia’s “Una interpretación ‘Junguiana’”; Ortega’s “La dimension fantástica”; Pérez’s “Cristina Fernández Cubas: Narrative Unreliability” and “Fernández Cubas, Abjection”; Poelen’s “Esquizofrenia”; Rueda’s “Cristina Fernández Cubas” and “Effects of the Double”; and Vosburg’s “Being Other in Another/’s Place.”

2 La habitación de Nona is Fernández Cubas’s sixth collection of short stories, following Mi hermana Elba (1980), Los altillos de Brumal (1983), El ángulo del horror (1990), Con Agatha en Estambul (1994), and Parientes pobres del diablo (2006), which won the Setenil Prize for the best Spanish work of short fiction and the Xatafi-Cyberdark Prize for the best Spanish work of fantasy or science fiction. Additionally, she has published several isolated stories in assorted venues. Fernández Cubas’s collected short fiction was re-published, along with a new story, in Todos los cuentos (2008), which was awarded with numerous literary prizes, including the Cálamo Bookstore Prize, the City of Barcelona Prize, the Salambó prize, the Qwerty prize, and the Tormenta prize. Moreover, Fernández Cubas has released two novels under her own name, El año de Gracia (1985) and El columpio (1995), and a third novel under the pseudonym Fernanda Kubbs, La puerta entreabierta (2013). Her corpus further includes the play, Hermanas de sangre (1998), and a book of memoirs, Cosas que ya no existen (2001), which won the NH Prize for short fiction. Her work has been translated into ten languages, including Phillips-Miles and Deefholts’s translation of Nona’s Room (2017).

3 While La habitación de Nona is so recent that few critical analyses have been published on it to date, Cristina Fernández Cubas’s work has been the subject of many scholarly studies. In addition to the articles cited above, readers may consult Glenn and Pérez’s Mapping the Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas (2005) and Andrés-Suárez and Casas’s Cristina Fernández Cubas (2007), which include bibliographies of the criticism published to date. Further essays since those works include García’s “The Lighthouse”; Higuero’s “El goce” and Reminiscencias postmodernas; Maginn’s “Feminismos posfranquistas”; Morales Rivera’s Anatomía del desencanto; and Morros Maestre’s “Irène Némirovsky y Cristina Fernández Cubas: Dos versiones de Jezabel.” The present essay is the first analysis of Fernández Cubas’s work through the lens of disability studies.

4 For a historical tracing and materialist critique of the growth of capitalism and its relation to issues of mobility and disability, see Oliver's The Politics of Disablement, Gleeson's “Beyond Goodwill: The Materialist View of Disability,” and Finkelstein's “Disability and the Helper/Helped Relationship: An Historical View.”

5 Another tale in the collection, “El final de Barbro,” explores sister identity as a tension of the individual/collective, rather than doubling. The story is narrated by a plural “we” that tells the story of three sisters who are often mistaken for triplets.

6 Here again, Fernández Cubas returns to a metaphor that pervades her previous works. In Liminal Fiction and Angles on Otherness, I discussed the imagery of space in Fernández Cubas's earlier fiction, showing how boundaries of space serve to illuminate the boundaries of identity, the inside/outside; for Fernández Cubas, these boundaries are never set in stone, but always constructed, permeable, permutable, and regularly repressed. In “Reading the Sign of Spain” Bieder analyzes the representation of nationality, space, and living abroad to show how, “within this ongoing project of identity formation, Fernández Cubas's narrators are subjects always in search of a center in order to be able to act at all” (42). Scarlett focuses on Fernández Cubas's pondering of how the outside dwells within Spanish culture through an intriguing analysis of her stories with Islamic or Near Eastern settings. Pérez underscores the spatial imagery of the abject part of identity that one strives to reject: “The Abject is repressed, unseen, hidden away (in Fernández Cubas's tales, concealed in attics, trunks, secret drawers, locked rooms, hidden compartments, behind convent walls, in a sealed family mausoleum)” ("The Seen" 132). For additional analyses of the motif of space in Fernández Cubas's fiction, readers may consult Higuero and Vosburg.

7 As a starting point for further exploration into the relation between space and the social staging of dis/ability, readers may consult Hales’s Beyond Disability: Towards an Enabling Environment; Imrie’s Disability and the City: International Perspectives; Gleeson’s Geographies of Disability; Swain, French, Barnes and Thomas’s Disabling barriers - Enabling Environments; and Wolch and Dear’s The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. For a theoretical overview and analysis of the practical application of housing for people with disabilities in Spain, see Pallarés Neila’s La protección de la vivienda habitual como exigencia del derecho a vivir de forma independiente de las personas con discapacidad. Olivera Poll’s “Discapacidad, accesibilidad y espacio excluyente” examines barriers of social design in urban spaces of Spain for people with disabilities. The website “Diseño para todos” contains a wealth of links to bibliographic sources and websites pertaining to universal design in spatial planning for people across the spectrum of dis/ability in Spain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica A. Folkart

Jessica A. Folkart is Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech. Her research interests center on identity, immigration, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and the body. She has published two books and numerous articles on contemporary Spanish authors, including Cristina Fernández Cubas, Najat El Hachmi, and Manuel Rivas. Her current research examines the cultural representation of liminal bodies.