Older Men, Gender Politics and the Powers of Dark Aesthetics in Marta Sanz’s Susana y los viejos

ABSTRACT

Marta Sanz’s Susana y los Viejos (2006) uses the well-known Biblical story as intertextual motif to draw attention to gender double standards within the Spanish context. This article examines the representation of ageing and older men vis-á-vis gender politics and the politics of care for the old. Focusing on the novel’s specific engagement with ‘dirty realism’ (stética feísta) and the caricatured portrait of social and personal interactions, the analysis will attempt to weave together the meanings that run through a narrative laden with intertextual and paratextual references.

Keywords:

• Marta Sanz
• Susana y los viejos
• Dirty Realism
• Ugly aesthetics
• Older Men
• Gender and Sexual Politics
• Dark Aesthetics
• Abjection
• The Gaze
• Contemporary Spanish literature

Notes

1 In her extended exploration of the influence of ‘dirty realism’ on Spanish writers, Cintia Santana draws on Javier Marías’ assertions in an interview, in which he stated that ‘[e]l realismo sucio es una plaga’ (‘Javier Marias: “El Realismo Sucio es una plaga” ’, Leer [April 1990], 34; original emphasis). Later, in 1996, Luis Antonio de Villena highlighted the impact of American dirty-realist works amongst Spanish writers, in particular the influence of authors such as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff and Jane Anne Philips, to the point that a ‘yanqui’ movement was constituted in the literary scene. See Cintia Santana, Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975–1995) (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2013), 6.

2 These statements are from Sanz’s interview with Karina Sainz Borgo, ‘Marta Sanz: “La estrechez de miras ha opacado a Galdós” ’, Vozpópuli, 4 January 2020, n.p., <https://www.vozpopuli.com/altavoz/cultura/marta-sanz-entrevista-perez-galdos-centenario-muerte_0_1315368601.html> (accessed 5 February 2022).

3 The roots of the ‘dark’ aesthetic in paintings from the fin de siècle can be traced to Goya’s Pinturas negras as well as the wave of pessimism and restlessness arising from the intellectual crisis and ideas of the Generation of 1898 artists. This tradition was documented by some of those artists. See José Gutierrez Solana, España negra, ed. & prólogo de Andrés Trapiello (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2000 [1^st ed. 1920]); and Darío de Regoyos & Émile Verhaeren, España negra, ed. & intro. de Servando Gotor (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016 [1^st ed. 1899]).

4 See Tamas Dobozy, ‘Towards a Definition of Dirty Realism’, Doctoral dissertation (Univ. of British Columbia, 2000), 1; available at <https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0089734> (accessed 9 June 2021).

5 See Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, eBook (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2018).

6 Edward H. Thompson, Men, Masculinities, and Aging: The Gendered Lives of Older Men (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 72.

7 Dobozy, ‘Towards a Definition of Dirty Realism’, 17 & 22.

8 Masochistic pleasure, as explained by Sigmund Freud, derives from a primary ‘erotogenic’ masochism, one of the derivative forms of which is termed ‘feminine’. In the phases of sexual development, the child sees the sexual opposites as being active (masculine) and passive (feminine) and at some point, as a result of seduction, the child’s sexual aim becomes a passive one. Freud further elaborates on how masochism originates from sadism turned upon the self. The title of the essay refers to the ‘beating fantasies’, one of which is a direct expression of the girl’s sense of guilt, which is the main factor that transforms sadism into masochism together with love impulse. See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. & ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud & assisted by Alix Strachey & Alan Tyson, 19 Vols (London: Vintage, 1975), XVII, (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works.

9 Santana, Forth and Back, 9.

10 Several authors mention the features of Sanz’s narrative style and have pointed out that the writer partakes of a new-realist style, which has been termed realismo sucio, expresionismo or estética feísta. For example, Blas Sánchez Dueñas supports Sanz's own view of her aesthetic style as a kind of uncanny and scary realism in which every ordinary action is besieged by estrangement, violence and injustice, and thus these horrors are bound to turn reality into in an uninhabitable world. See 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. 633); available at <https://revistas.uned.es/index.php/signa/article/view/6321> (accessed 23 March 2022). Other studies that have discussed Sanz’s literary aesthetics include Adriana Virginia Bonatto, ‘Representaciones de identidades femeninas a partir de tradiciones masculinistas en Susana y los viejos de Marta Sanz’, La Colmena, 94 (2017), 9–23 (especially p. 10) (available at <https://lacolmena.uaemex.mx/article/view/5152> [accessed 23 March 2022]); and Marta Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones: una aproximación a la poética realista en la obra narrativa de Marta Sanz’, in Escrituras del cuerpo: Marta Sanz, ed. Cristina Somolinos Molina, Olivar, 18:27 (2018), [1–14] (available at <https://www.olivar.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/OLIe021> [accessed 23 March 2022]).

11 This point is also made in 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).

12 See Bonatto, ‘Representaciones de identidades femeninas’, 10.

13 Marta Sanz highlights the interest of the realist galdosiana legacy in representing and constructing reality: ‘en esa aspiración está la conciencia de que la palabra literaria 'interviene' en lo real, es decir, la conciencia de que la palabra literaria tienen inevitablemente un alcance ideológico que puede ser, además, político; y en esa aspiración también reconocemos el riesgo estilístico, estético, de buscar fórmulas nuevas para hablar de sociedades en transformación’ (Sanz interviewed in Sainz Borgo, ‘Marta Sanz: La estrechez de miras’, n.p.).

14 Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [7].

15 Marta Sanz, Susana y los viejos (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006), 14–15. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.

16 See Becerra Mayor, ‘Marta Sanz: del realismo a la posmodernidad’, 31.

17 See Cristina Somolinos Molina, ‘Mujeres, cuerpos y trabajos en la narrativa de Marta Sanz’, in Escrituras del cuerpo: Marta Sanz, ed. Cristina Somolinos Molina, n.p.; available at <https://www.olivar.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/OLIe025> (accessed 23 March 2022).

18 Sanz quoted in Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [10]. Simó points out that Sanz gives consideration to the appropriate choice of stylistic form for the themes of a novel.

19 Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [11].

20 Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [11].

21 Clara’s misguided sense here serves as an example of the interplay in the novel between the illusory façade and the reality behind it: ‘Clara presenciaba una escena que era maternal y dulce’ (9).

22 Laura E. Tanner, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 2006), 25.

23 The fear of castration is used here in the Freudian sense of the fear that stems from the death of one’s ego.

24 I draw the argument here from Tanner’s discussion of the workings of ‘the gaze’ in terminally ill people and the way their gaze moves over its boundaries into the viewer’s own. See Tanner, Lost Bodies, 24.

25 Tanner, Lost Bodies, 20.

26 Tanner, Lost Bodies, 23.

27 Tanner, Lost Bodies, 23.

28 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U. P., 1982 [1^st French ed. 1980]), 4.

29 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Roudiez, 4.

30 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Roudiez, 4.

31 See Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 72–73. For further reflections on and meanings of the individual’s experience of illness and the possibility of impending death, see Arthur W. Frank, At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); and Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (London: Atlantic Books, 2012).

32 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Roudiez, 3.

33 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Roudiez, 55.

34 Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1994), 203.

35 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 203.

36 Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [11].

37 Sánchez Dueñas makes a similar point in ‘Relecturas y creación’, 646.

38 Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [11].

39 Simó, ‘La realidad y sus representaciones’, [11].

40 See Tanner, Lost Bodies, 21.

41 This characterization of the Spanish spirit is made in Valeriano Bozal, Otra España negra (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Univ. de Zaragoza, 2020), 14.

42 Bozal, Otra España negra, 14. Bozal echoes here some of the values associated with a failed and decadent society believed to be at the heart of the political corruption and Spanish crisis of 1898, extending into the twentieth century. Although this characterization is essentializing and thus problematic from a contemporary perspective, there was at the time a wider concern for the homeland and the ‘essence’ of the country and the reasons for the ills of society. Spanish intellectual thinking embedded a humanist vision which, in turn, has an essentialist component used by Generation of 1898 intellectuals in their endeavours for re-generation. Even José Ortega y Gasset in his famous essay España Invertebrada (1922) did not demystify the earlier rhetoric on the ethos of Spanishness and hence he appears to fixate certain attributes to the Spanish character. Some of these traits uncannily resonate with Sanz’s satirical depictions of social decadence portrayed in Susana y los viejos. Thus, it does not seem coincidental that Sanz retrieves the traditional rhetoric of the Spanish spirit as part of her ‘dirty realist’ narrative. As Ortega y Gasset asserted: ‘La raíz de la descomposición nacional está, como es lógico, en el alma misma de nuestro pueblo’ (España invertebrada, available at <http://juango.es/files/Ortega-Y-Gasset---Espana-Invertebrada.pdf>, 48 [accessed 29 May 2022]). See also Jerónimo Molina Cano, ‘La polémica del España invertebrada de José Ortega y Gasset en la fábrica del estado español', Revista de Estudios Políticos, 181 (2018), 13–38; available at <https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/RevEsPol/issue/view/3384> (accessed 17 August 2022).

43 I am using here the concept of the masquerade in its feminist tradition. See Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness As Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10 (1929), 303–13.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.