https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3077-925X
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Abstract
Traditionally, (men’s) sexualities have been dissociated from old age, stereotyped as ‘asexual’ or ‘in decline’. They have even been seen as unpalatable, conforming to the ‘dirty old man’ stereotype. Questioning these (mis)representations, this paper focuses on contemporary Spanish novels that challenge such dichotomous images, redefining ageing men’s sexualities as much more complex than has been acknowledged. It thus follows, that if Rafael Chirbes and Marta Sanz focus on the relationship between ageing men and younger women, other texts by writers like Álvaro Pombo and Luis Antonio de Villena complicate ageing gay men’s sexualities along race, class and gender lines.
Notes
1 Michael Kimmel, ‘Masculinity Studies: An Introduction’, in Debating Masculinity, ed. Josep M. Armengol & Àngels Carabí (Harriman: Men’s Studies Press, 2009), 16–30 (p. 16).
2 Benjamin Saxton & Thomas R. Cole, ‘No Country for Old Men: A Search for Masculinity in Later Life’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 7:2 (2012), 97–116 (p. 98).
3 Edward H. Thompson Jr, ‘Introduction’, in Older Men’s Lives, ed. Edward H. Thompson Jr (New York: Sage, 1994), xi–xii (p. xi).
4 As will become apparent throughout this essay, most of the secondary sources and critical texts I use to analyse my selected corpus of Spanish novels come from an Anglo-American (and French, in the case of Simone de Beauvoir), rather than Spanish, context. Surprisingly, no Spanish-language scholarship exists to date on the topic of ageing masculinities, let alone older men’s sexualities, in (contemporary) Spanish fiction. This article hopes to start filling this gap.
5 Roberta Maierhofer, ‘American Studies Growing Old’, in Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinary Intercultural Interaction, ed. Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999), 255–68.
6 Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Ageing in Contemporary Literature (New York/London: Praeger, 1990).
7 See Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road; Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown & Janice Rossen (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993); and Zoe Brennan, The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004).
8 Alex Hobbs, Ageing Masculinity in the American Novel (London/Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
9 See A History of Old Age, ed. Pat Thane (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005).
10 Thompson Jr, ‘Introduction’, in Older Men's Lives, ed. Thompson Jr, xii.
11 David Leverenz, ‘Ageing Beyond Masculinities, or, the Penis As Failed Synecdoche’, in Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World, ed. Àngels Carabí & Josep M. Armengol (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 63–91 (p. 63).
12 Leverenz, ‘Ageing Beyond Masculinities’, 63.
13 Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Norton, 1996 [1st French ed. 1970]), 107.
14 In Greek art, for example, one of Heracles’ labours was to fight against old age personified, ‘typically an emaciated figure with grotesquely swollen but flaccid genitals’ as Plautus’ plays tended to focus on older men’s ‘sexual, though impotent, proclivities’ (Tim Parkin, ‘The Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 31–70 [p. 54]). In the Middle Ages, a lustful old man (Senex amans) looking for sex with younger women was equally subjected to ridicule, as he was seen as ‘flouting the laws of nature and behaving like a madman’ since he would be easily cuckolded (Shulamith Shahar, ‘The Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 71–112 [p. 94]) Even at the end of the nineteenth century, as Simone de Beauvoir explains, the ageing process was still seen as the demise of masculinity, being medically attributed to a degeneration of the sexual glands: ‘At the age of seventy-two, Brown-Sequard, a professor at the Collège de France, injected himself with extract of guinea-pigs’ and dogs’ testicles […] Voronoff, also a professor at the Collège de France, thought of grafting the glands of monkeys upon elderly men’ (The Coming of Age, trans. O’Brian, 22). In twentieth-century Soviet Russia, experiments with hormones and glandular grafts from monkeys continued to be encouraged, which was expected to restore youthful vigour and even cure male impotence (Pat Thane, ‘The 20th Century’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 263–300 [p. 281]) While both experiments proved equally fruitless, they do point to the strong historical association of virility with youth, even rejuvenation and, by implication, of men’s ageing with weakness, physical decline and, ultimately, ‘feminization’. Ageing, in Beauvoir’s words, has long been in ‘complete conflict with the manly […] ideal cherished by the young and the fully-grown’ (The Coming of Age, trans. O’Brian, 40).
15 Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘More Images of Eros and Old Age: The Damnation of Faust and the Fountain of Youth’, in Memory and Desire: Ageing—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed. Kathleen Woodward & Murray M. Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1986) 37–50 (p. 38).
16 In this sense, several scholars have noted the influence on the novel of (classical) materialist views, particularly Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), which Chirbes himself has recurrently acknowledged. Ángel Jacinto Traver Vera, for example, has explored Crematorio’s debt to Lucretius’ ‘materialist concept of life and universe, the human being as dust […] the violence in sex, the Hell in life, and the rebuttal of wealth as a factor of evils’ (Ángel Jacinto Traver Vera, ‘Lucretius in the Novel Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes’, Littera Aperta. International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 [2016] 5–36 [p. 5]; available at <https://www.uco.es/ucopress/ojs/index.php/litteraaperta/article/view/10804/10002> [accessed 9 March 2022]). Such materialist views are particularly reflected in Chirbes’ view of literature as a text both mirroring and denouncing reality, ideally with a moral purpose. Interestingly, the property bubble, and the associated corruption, described and denounced by Chirbes in 2007 was prescient, giving way to the 2008 financial crisis, which hit Spain particularly heavily. See also Sara Santamaría Colmenero, ‘ “La novela es indisoluble de la historia”: reflexiones políticas y literarias de Rafael Chirbes’, in El Universo de Rafael Chirbes, ed. Javier Lluch-Prats (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2021), 61–73, on Chirbes’ long-held belief in the interrelationship between history and literature.
17 Rafael Chirbes, Crematorio (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007), 15. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
18 Leverenz, ‘Ageing Beyond Masculinities’, 63.
19 As Pat Thane reminds us, the older man pretending to be younger has long been an object of ridicule, being often looked down on as a child. In the seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte, for example, Pantaloon becomes ‘an object of contempt, petulant, pretending to be young, falling in love with unattainable young women and being deceived on all sides’ (Lynn A. Botelho, ‘The 17th Century’, in A History of Old Age, ed. Thane, 113–74 [p. 138]).
20 Miguel Delibes, Diario de un jubilado (Barcelona: Destino, 2010), 15. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
21 Fiedler, ‘More Images of Eros and Old Age’, 38.
22 Bertomeu’s own daughter, Silvia, is depicted as a housewife and mother of almost forty-five who engages in an extramarital affair with a much younger lover, José María, a thirty-two-year-old man. Ironically, then, Silvia, despite being much younger than Rubén, falls prey to the very same fears as her father, also complaining about ‘caídas en la carne que ella detecta, manchas en la piel; el tiempo pasa deprisa’ (Crematorio, 101). Just as Rubén is scared of losing Mónica, Silvia is scared of losing José María. For, even though José María insists that he has always liked older women (‘siempre me han gustado las mujeres mayores que yo’ [Crematorio, 101]), and even as some adolescent men look to older women as being more experienced (Crematorio, 102), she is scared of looking at herself in the mirror, as an older woman being abandoned by a younger man would inevitably imply, for her, some kind of ‘íntimo cataclismo’ (Crematorio, 101). Ironically, then, Chirbes depicts Rubén and his daughter as two characters who, despite their different circumstances (especially their gender and age), experience similar fears of abandonment by their younger sexual partners.
23 Botelho, ‘17th Century’, 138.
24 Quoted in Blas Sánchez-Dueñas, ‘Relecturas y creación desde la subversión: Susana y los viejos de Marta Sanz’, Signa. Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica, 21 (2012), 625–49 (p. 627).
25 According to David Becerra, Clara clearly represents the (female) working class, who have been relegated by capitalism to (underpaid and undervalued) care work, including caring for the sick and the elderly. ‘Susana y los viejos es, pues’, in Becerra’s words, ‘una novela sobre la externalización de los cuidados en un capitalismo en que todo se mercantiliza, incluidos los afectos, y que desplaza la crisis a las clases asalariadas, perpetuando con ello la reproducción del sistema’ (David Becerra Mayor, ‘Marta Sanz: del realismo a la posmodernidad [contra la posmodernidad]’, in Convocando al fantasma: novela crítica en la España actual, ed. David Becerra Mayor [Madrid: Tierradenadie Ediciones, 2015], 107–59 [p. 139]).
26 Marta Sanz, Susana y los viejos (Barcelona: Destino, 2006), 9. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
27 Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. O’Brian, 106–07.
28 Becerra Mayor, ‘Marta Sanz: del realismo a la posmodernidad’, 139.
29 Quoted in Sánchez Dueñas, ‘Relecturas y creación desde la subversión’, 627.
30 Sara Mesa, Cara de pan (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2018), 16. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
31 Ben Curtis & Steven Thompson, ‘ “This Is the Country of Premature Old Men”: Ageing and Aged Miners in the South Wales Coalfield, c.1880–1947’, Cultural and Social History, 12:4 (2015), 587–606 (p. 588).
32 Katharina Zilles, ‘Man Interrupted: Intersections of Masculinity, Disability, and Old Age in John Coetzee’s Slow Man’, in The Ages of Life: Living and Ageing in Conflict?, ed. Ulla Kriebernegg & Roberta Maierhofer (Bielefield: Transcript Verlag, 2014), 211–33 (p. 230).
33 Zilles, ‘Man Interrupted’, 230.
34 Zilles, ‘Man Interrupted’, 230.
35 Zilles, ‘Man Interrupted’, 230.
36 Maryanne L. Leone, ‘Reframing Disability through an Ecocritical Perspective in Sara Mesa's Cara de pan’, in Re-imagining Female Disabilities in Luso-Hispanic Women’s Cultural Production, ed. Esther Fernández & Victoria L. Ketz, Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 45:1 (2019), 161–84 (p. 161).
37 Noelia S. García, ‘Casi y el Viejo: en busca de un (no) lugar. La relación espacio-identidad en Cara de pan de Sara Mesa’, Esferas Literarias, 2 (2019), 103–18 (p. 103; emphasis in the original); available at <http://www.uco.es/ucopress/ojs/index.php/Esferas/article/view/12109> (accessed 16 March 2022).
38 García, ‘Casi y el Viejo: en busca de un (no) lugar’, 104.
39 Leverenz, ‘Ageing Beyond Masculinities’, 63.
40 Dustin Bradley Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation: Tragedy, Normativity, and Futurity (New York/London: Routledge, 2010), 6.
41 Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, 6–7.
42 Quoted in Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, 3. Indeed, research within gay male cultures suggests that the term ‘older’ may be used to describe gay men as early as thirty-five to forty years of age (7).
43 Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York U. P., 2005).
44 See Raymond M. Berger, Gay and Gray: The Older Homosexual Man (New York: Haworth Park Press, 1996 [1st ed. 1985]); Tim Bergling, Reeling in the Years: Gay Men’s Perspectives on Age and Ageism (New York: Southern Tier Editions, 2004); Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation; Growing Older: Perspectives on LGBT Ageing, ed. James T. Sears (London/New York: Routledge, 2010); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2010).
45 Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, 6.
46 Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, 6–7.
47 Álvaro Pombo, Retrato del vizconde en invierno (Barcelona: Destino, 2018), 13. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
48 Throughout the novel it is left unclear if Horacio is actually gay, or if he is trying to woo Lucas so as to simply diminish and hurt his son. Regardless, Horacio’s approaches lead Lucas to accuse the older man of being a ‘dirty old man’, which Horacio himself seems to recognize (Retrato del vizconde, 154).
49 Eduardo Mendicutti, Los novios búlgaros (Barcelona: Fábula Tusquets, 2009), 185. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
50 María José Furió, ‘Eduardo Mendicutti, la militancia por la normalidad gay en la España contemporánea’, Centro Virtual Cervantes, 29 September 2015, n.p.; <https://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/septiembre_15/29092015_01.htm> (accessed 6 April 2021).
51 Furió, ‘Eduardo Mendicutti, la militancia por la normalidad gay’, n.p.
52 Furió, ‘Eduardo Mendicutti, la militancia por la normalidad gay’, n.p.
53 Robert Richmond Ellis, ‘Spanish Constitutional Democracy and Cinematic Representations of Queer Sexuality, or, Saving the Family: Los Novios Búlgaros, Reinas; and Fuera De Carta’, in Un espacio queer, ed. Kay Sibbald & Rosalía Cornejo Parriego, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 35:1 (2010), 67–80 (p. 70). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this article for pointing out how Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2007) posits a similar argument with respect to the image of the Muslim and the Muslim terrorist, who are feminized and queered in similar ways.
54 Luis Antonio de Villena, El exilio del rey (Madrid: Cabaret Voltaire, 2019), 58 & 11. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
55 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1997 [1st ed. 1990]), xxiv.
56 Segal, Slow Motion, xxxiv; emphasis in the original.
57 In American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2002), which remains probably the best study on the infamous practice of lynching in the Southern US, Robyn Wiegman demonstrated how the turn toward lynching as a white supremacist activity in the late nineteenth century implied the denial by white men of the black male’s newly gained right to citizenship and of the patriarchal power that ensued. Lynching’s twisted racial and gendered implications would seem to be confirmed, on the one hand, by its selective use as a punishment mainly reserved for black men accused of raping white women, and its combination with castration as the preferred form of mutilation for African American men. In Wiegman’s words: ‘In severing the black male’s penis from his body, either as a narrative account or a material act, the mob aggressively denies the patriarchal sign and symbol of the masculine, interrupting the privilege of the phallus and thereby reclaiming, through the perversity of dismemberment, the black male’s (masculine) potentiality for citizenship’ (83).
58 Segal, Slow Motion, xxxiv–xxxvi.
59 Wiegman, American Anatomies, 83–85.
60 Kimmel, ‘Masculinity Studies: An Introduction’, 26.
61 See Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road.
62 See Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road.
63 Rosa Montero’s La carne (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2016), for example, focuses on the relationship between its protagonist Soledad, a sixty-year-old professional woman, and a thirty-two-year-old gigolo, whom she pays for sex after she is abandoned by her forty-year-old partner. While acknowledging that ‘la carne tirana esclavizaba a todos’ (26), Soledad complains that ageing women have a hard time dating younger men, at least publicly, since ‘la sociedad aceptaba las parejas desiguales en la edad, siempre que la menor fuera la chica’ (42). ‘Las mujeres perdiendo como siempre: los putos eran más caros que las putas’ (10), she ruminates half-jokingly. While the topic of ageing women characters in Spanish fiction is certainly deserving of further critical attention, this is far beyond the scope and possibilities of this article, which has been limited to the study of older males only, albeit in both male- and female-authored fictions.
64 Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, with an intro. by Elaine Showalter (London: Verso, 2013), 77.
65 Beauvoir, Coming of Age, trans. O’Brian, 89. This does not mean, of course, that we can give up exploring the specificities of women’s ageing, or the strong historical link between sexist and ageist discriminations. On the contrary, it is precisely the strong connections between sexism and ageism, I do believe, that demand that we continue to explore the gendered effects of ageing on both women and men. Not despite feminist contentions, but precisely because of them.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.