The Economic Degeneration of Masculinity in Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla

Abstract

Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla has been proclaimed as “la novela de la crisis,” and it has garnered an impressive amount of distinction in the short length of time since its publication in May 2013. It was voted the 2013 novel of the year by readers of El País, and in January 2014 it won the Premio Francisco Umbral, as well as reaching its fifth edition. Unsparingly critical, En la orilla forms an integral part of the cultural requestioning of social values in the wake of the Spanish crisis, “la literatura de la crisis,” which stresses the human and material consequences of the suspension of human values stemming from the social endorsement of market imperialism. En la orilla thematizes the corrosion of moral character during Spain's economic boom, in its multiple forms, such as selfishness, disregard for the elderly, and arrant mercenariness, while also fictionalizing neoliberal Spain's exclusion of immigrants and the poor. Integral to Chiribes's historically contextualized critique of the recession, and the object of my study, is a perceptive vision of the historical degeneration of masculinity from the Second Republic, 1931–1936, to the present day. This article will first provide a brief overview of “la literatura de la crisis,” while the second part illumines the economic and ideological distortion of the father–son relationship in this novel.

Keywords:

• cultural memory in Spain
• historical memory in Spain
• la literatura de la crisis
• masculinities in contemporary Spanish literature

Notes

¹A subtle blaming of the unemployed person for his fate is perceptible in Spanish legislation and discourse. In 2010, the PSOE rescinded the hundred “days of grace” clause, and introduced a legislative clause requiring the unemployed person to be proactive immediately following cessation of his or her former employ (Delgado). Immediately following the 2011 PP accession to power, Mariano Rajoy assured delegates that he intended to reduce unemployment benefits (La Marea).

²In Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes, Beatriz's mother Herminia's addiction to pills and neuroses is attributed to her socialization as a wife and mother in first a convent school and then in Sección Feminina de Falange, while in Un milagro en equilibrio, the protagonist Eva Águllo's mother, Eva Benayas, is taunted by her Falangist husband for her Republican family background.

³The historicization of masculinity is beneficial as such an approach “permite analizar a los hombres no como seres dados, eternos e inmutables, sino como sujetos históricos, construidos socialmente, productos del tipo de organización social de género prevaleciente en su sociedad” (Lagarde 31).