Contesting the capital of culture in Antonio Muñoz Molina's Los misterios de Madrid

ABSTRACT

This essay examines Antonio Muñoz Molina´s use of the Gothic mode and the misterio genre to destabilize Madrid's image as a politicized symbol of cultural modernity in his 1992 novel Los misterios de Madrid. The novel was a return to the form and function of the nineteenth-century urban mystery novel. The year 1992 was one of celebrations throughout Spain, and Madrid was designated the 1992 European Capital of Culture (ECOC). The ECOC title was meant to signal Spain's graduation to democratic modernity and its new identity as a European capital. Madrid of Muñoz Molina contests this politicization of Madrid´s identity by gothicizing the capital. This Madrid is enigmatic and threatening, and it is the home of the conspiracies that undermine the capital's new image. In a year that celebrated Madrid's entree into European modernity, Muñoz Molina uses nineteenth-century literary modes to question Madrid's success story.

KEYWORDS:

• European Capital of Culture
• Gothic
• Madrid
• Antonio Muñoz Molina
• 1992

Notes

1. Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda 1956) is one of Spain's foremost intellectuals and esteemed writers. He is the author of several prizewinning novels, including Beatus Ille (1986) El invierno en Lisboa (1987), and El jinete polaco (1991). He began his career as a journalist, and his articles continue to appear in El País and other newspapers. From 2004–2006 he served as the director of the Cervantes Institute in New York. In 2013 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. He recently published a nonfiction book, Todo lo que era sólido (2013), that examines the social and political consequences of the current economic crisis in Spain.

2. Madrid has often been characterized as a “producto del artificio […] [culpable de] todos los fracasos históricos de la nación a la que debía haber servido de dinámico centro urbano” (Juliá 317). Madrid's “historical and economic irrelevance” (Resina 60) gave it an air of “seclusion” and “abstraction” that served it well as the “empire's metaphysical center” but not as a city connected to Spain's material reality (60–61). This abstraction caused other Spanish cities to be culturally and economically dominant throughout the early modern period, but by the nineteenth century Madrid began to be presented as “the true national referent” (64).

3. The Transition (la Transición) refers to the period after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 until the victory of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español in the general elections of 1982. 1992 marked the ten-year anniversary of PSOE leadership.

4. This vision of modern, democratic Spain was not without controversy; the 1992 celebrations revealed an avoidance of “any real engagement with history understood as the cultural mediation of the past” (Graham and Sánchez 418).

5. Los misterios de Madrid was first published in twenty-seven entregas in the style of nineteenth-century folletines between August 12 and September 7 in El País before being published in book form by Seix Barral in the fall of 1992. Each entrega in El País was accompanied by an illustration by Gusi Bejer. The illustrations have not appeared in the book editions of the novel.

6. The Santo Cristo de la Greña is also a relic; the Cristo's fingernails belong to a Spanish conquistador who was killed in Florida by Seminole Indians. The Cristo is thus representative of both Spain's empire and Catholicism. According to the Diccionario de la Real Academia, “Greña” refers to “cabellera revuelta y mal compuesta” or “cosa que está enredada con otra, y no puede desenlazarse fácilmente” (“greña”). Referencing the nineteenth-century misterio's penchant for symbolic names, “Santo Cristo de la Greña” is suggestive of the difficultly of disentangling religion from public life and civic culture.

7. Elisa Martí-López's book Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain examines the Spanish translation of Sue and José Nicasio Milá de la Roca's 1845 Los misterios de Barcelona and the misterio genre's role in the development of the Spanish novel. For an analysis of a nineteenth-century Gothic representation of Madrid, see Delano.

8. Lorencito's attitude toward immigrants is inflected with a Gothic tenor; they are dangerous “others” who have invaded Madrid. During his investigation, Lorencito observes, “¿Cómo no iba a estar llena de peligros una ciudad poblada de moros, negros, y chinos?” (43). The Madrid that Muñoz Molina describes in his novel was on the precipice of an immigrant population boom, especially in the city center. In 1991, the foreign-born population of Madrid's Centro district numbered 3,948; in 2001, the number increased to 23,962 (Puga González 109). In 2001, foreign-born immigrants represented 22.6 percent of the population of the Sol district, 19.5 percent of the Embajadores district, and 18.8 percent of the Universidad district (Puga González 110).

9. Mágina is Muñoz Molina's fictional recreation of his hometown, Úbeda. Lorencito also appears as a character in El jinete polaco.

10. The chabolas first emerged as a result of the population shift from the countryside to the city. In 1957, an attempt to eliminate these dwellings, the government implemented the Plan de Urgencia Social, which would construct 85,000 homes (Calvo López 225). The plan was an attempt to “ordenar y acabar con el crecimiento urbano ‘desordenado’” (Carmona Pascual 333). The Franco regime used this urbanism as a tool of social control; the chabolas and peripheral communities were seen as chaotic and corrupt, vulnerable to “toda clase de inmoralidades” (Carmona Pascual 335). Pedro Almodóvar's film Carne trémula (1997) showed the contrast of the chabolas in La Ventanilla district that were to be torn down to make way for modern high-rises.

11. In Specters of Marx, Derrida teases out the double meanings of the word “conjuration.” Its first meaning in both Spanish and French is a conspiracy. Its second meaning is “a magical incantation to evoke or to bring forth the voice, to convoke a charm or spirit” (50).