Weary Old Dogs: Ageing Masculinities in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s Los perros duros no bailan

Abstract

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s short novel Los perros duros no bailan (2018) is the first of the prolific Spanish writer’s attempts at animal fable and allegory. This postmodern and highly intertextual novel explores the nature of masculinity and ageing in a hostile world of violence and conflict. The aim of this article is to analyse the role of the motif of the dog, and the way in which the author deploys it as mechanism through which to communicate issues around gender, age, history and Spanish identity.

Key words:

• Arturo Pérez-Reverte
• Los perros duros no bailan
• masculinity
• male heroes
• ageing
• dogs
• Spanish history
• intertextuality
• anthropomorphism

Notes

1 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Los perros duros no bailan (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2018). All references are to this edition and will be given within the main text.

2 For a more in-depth discussion on how and why Pérez-Reverte regards his own work as postmodern, see Rocío Ocón-Garrido, ‘Conversación con Pérez-Reverte’, España Contemporánea. Revista de Literatura y Cultura, 16:1 (2003), 99–112.

3 José Belmonte Serrano, ‘Introducción’, in Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Los héroes cansados: el demonio, el mundo, la carne, ed., intro. & selección de textos por José Belmonte Serrano, prólogo de Santos Sanz Villanueva (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1995), 23–57. For more on Pérez-Reverte’s stylistic evolution towards postmodernism in his novels, see Rocío Ocón-Garrido, ‘The Postmodern Traces of Pérez-Reverte’s Novels’, Doctoral dissertation (University of Texas at Austin, 2005).

4 Emilio Ramón, ‘Los perros duros no bailan: novela ejemplar cervantina y novela perez-revertiana’, BHS, XCVII:3 (2020), 289–303.

5 Ocón-Garrido, ‘Conversación con Pérez-Reverte’, 106.

6 For a study on how the physical deterioration of ageing is perceived as a threat to masculinity, see Jeff Hearn, ‘Imaging the Aging of Men’, in Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone & Andrew Wernick (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995), 97–115.

7 Edward H. Thompson, Jr, Men, Masculinities, and Aging (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 55.

8 See Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers U. P., 1994).

9 Nicola Evans, ‘No Genre for Old Men? The Politics of Aging and the Male Action Hero’, Revue Canadienne d’Études Cinématographiques/Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 24:1 (2015), 25–44.

10 Murray Drummond, ‘Sport, Aging Men, and Constructions of Masculinity’, Generations. Journal of the American Society on Aging, 32:1 (2008), 32–35 (p. 33).

11 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Carolyn A. Durham & John P. Gabriele, ‘Entrevista con Arturo Pérez-Reverte: deslindes de una novela globalizada’, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 28:1 (2003), 233–45 (p. 243).

12 Emilio Ramón García, ‘De hombres menores y mujeres formidables: el hombre a la sombra de Mecha Inzunza en El tango de la vieja guardia de Arturo Pérez-Reverte’, Revista de Literatura, 80:160 (2018), 541–65. Regarding the term ‘formidable’, Ramón García is referring to its critical use in Jorge Zamora, ‘ “Femmes fatales/femmes formidables”: mimetismo y subversión en El club Dumas o La sombra de Richelieu de Arturo Pérez-Reverte’, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 33:1 (2008), 153–74.

13 Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky, ‘Pérez-Reverte’s La Reina del Sur or Female Aggression in Narcocultura’, Hispanic Journal, 30:1–2 (2009), 273–84 (p. 282).

14 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2^nd ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005 [1^st ed. 1995]).

15 Mimi Schippers, ‘Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony’, Theory and Society, 36:1 (2007), 85–102 (p. 86).

16 Josephine Donovan, ‘Aestheticizing Animal Cruelty’, College Literature. A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 38:4 (2011), 202–17 (pp. 203–06, 210, 212 & 214–15).

17 Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 30; emphasis in the original.

18 Simon Keller, ‘Patriotism As Bad Faith’, Ethics, 115:3 (2005), 563–92 (p. 572).

19 Animal exemplum literature, a popular genre in the medieval and early modern period, is structured around animal characters that may be regarded as either objects of ethical imitation or as antithetical models of behaviour. For a perceptive study of the animal exemplum to which Los perros duros no bailan pays tribute (Cervantes’ El coloquio de los perros), see John Beusterien, Canines in Cervantes and Velázquez: An Animal Studies Reading of Early Modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 35–54.

20 For more on the links between animal abuse and domestic violence, see Angus Nurse, ‘Masculinities and Animal Harm’, Men and Masculinities, 23:5 (2020), 908–26; and Nik Taylor & Heather Fraser, Companion Animals and Domestic Violence: Rescuing, Me, Rescuing You (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

21 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, ‘Verano de perros y abuelos’, in his Perros e hijos de perra (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2014), 53–58 (p. 57).

22 Naama Harel, ‘Investigations of a Dog, by a Dog: Between Anthropocentrism and Canine-Centrism’, in Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, ed. Margo DeMello (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 49–59 (p. 49).

23 Óscar Sendón, ‘Del soldado de los tercios al reportero de guerra: el hombre de acción en José Ortega y Gasset y Arturo Pérez-Reverte’, Hispania (USA), 98:4 (2015), 679–88 (p. 685).

24 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Limpieza de sangre (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2002 [1^st ed. 1997]), 27; my emphasis.

25 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, El oro del rey (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000), 128.

26 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, ‘Cuatro héroes cansados’, in his Obra breve/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1995), 373–84 (p. 383).

27 Belmonte Serrano, ‘Introducción’, in Pérez-Reverte, Los héroes cansados, ed. Belmonte Serrano, 51.

28 José Belmonte Serrano & Yvette Coyle-Balibrea, ‘Arturo Pérez-Reverte and the Historical Novel’, Scripta Mediterránea, 16–17 (1995–1996), 59–70 (p. 68).

29 Michael A. Messner, ‘When Bodies Are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 25 (1990), 203–19 (p. 212).

30 Richard G. Bibriescas, How Men Age: What Evolution Reveals about Male Health and Mortality (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2016), 22.

31 Also included in Pérez-Reverte, Perros e hijos de perra, 71–75.

32 In what may perhaps rather unjustly be referred to as an exercise of self-plagiarism, we do indeed find other published stories and pieces by Pérez-Reverte that he re-styled to fit the mythopoetic plot of Los perros duros no bailan. Among them, for instance, is the essay ‘Bandoleros de cuatro patas’, first published in his column ‘Patente de Corso’ (XL Semanal, 1 April 2007), in which he describes the antics and ill-fate of a couple of wild dogs caught after they had killed a large number of sheep. The description of the dogs, the televised reporting of the incident and even the reference to Blade Runner are reappropriated in the novel to give Teo a dignified ending when, having for months lived among and become leader of a pack of wild dogs after being rescued by Negro, he is finally caught and presumably euthanized. ‘Bandoleros’ is also included in Pérez-Reverte, Perros e hijos de perra, 103–08.

33 ‘A pesar de ser homo faber y homo sapiens, soy también homo ludens’, Pérez-Reverte claims. He goes on to say: ‘Me gusta jugar mucho y la literatura para mí es un juego’ (Pérez-Reverte, Durham & Gabriele, ‘Entrevista con Arturo Pérez-Reverte’, 241). The trope of the ‘game’ recurrently appears in his texts both as a motif (for instance, the tin soldiers in El húsar [1984], the ritualized fencing movements in El maestro de esgrima [1988], chess in La tabla de Flandes [1990], the intertextual games in El club Dumas [1993] etc.), and as a technique through which to bind author, reader and characters together in a kind of relational triangulation: ‘Aunque es verdad que Pérez-Reverte escribe para divertirse, como él mismo ha manifestado, no es menos cierto que el lector, con cuya complicidad nuestro autor siempre cuenta, también participa de la fiesta. En el juego está la clave, la solución de la mayor parte de sus novelas’ (Belmonte Serrano, ‘Introducción’, in Pérez-Reverte, Los héroes cansados, ed. Belmonte Serrano, 37–38). The ways in which games and entertainment feature prominently and form part of his literary style, has led to what some critics regard as an unfair and condescending dismissal of his narrative as low, popular literature. See, for instance, Alexis Grohmann, Las reglas del juego de Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Murcia: Editum, Ediciones de la Univ. de Murcia, 2019), 10–11.

34 Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, ‘La Conquista y el problema de la modernidad hispánica: dos discursos sobre el pasado (post)colonial en la democracia española’, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 36:1 (2011), 101–32 (p. 125; emphasis in the original).

35 See Juan Manuel Ibeas Altamira, ‘De la guerra al ruedo: la suerte de los alanos’, in Animal y espectáculo en el mundo hispánico, ed. Ignacio Ramos Gay, Miríada Hispánica, 14 (2017), 43–51.

36 See, for example, John Grier Varner & Jeannette Johnson Varner, Dogs of the Conquest (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983); and Sara E. Johnson, ‘ “You Should Give Them Blacks to Eat”: Waging Inter-American Wars of Torture and Terror’, American Quarterly, 61:1 (2009), 65–92.

37 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552), ed. José Miguel Martínez Torrejón (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2006), <https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmcjm259> (accessed 5 June 2022).

38 See Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves, ‘Lo que nos hace humanos: deconstruyendo El pintor de batallas, de Arturo Pérez-Reverte’, Hipertexto, 12 (2010), 161–71.

39 Anne L. Walsh, Arturo Pérez-Reverte: Narrative Tricks and Narrative Strategies (London: Tamesis, 2007), 65.

40 Pérez-Reverte’s very personal take on Spanish history reconstructs a timeline in which identifiably Spanish political, religious and societal characters cyclically lead back to internal conflicts, hatred of the foreign or regional ‘other’ and civil wars. See Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Una historia de España (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2019).

41 Marion Schwartz, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1997), 10.

42 Pérez-Reverte, Una historia de España, 119.

43 Pérez-Reverte, Una historia de España, 219.

44 Ocón-Garrido, ‘Conversación con Pérez-Reverte’, 101.

45 Arturo Pérez-Reverte & Juan Cruz, ‘Cara y Cruz: entrevista a Pérez-Reverte’, El País, 18 April 2018; available at <https://elpais.com/cultura/2018/04/18/actualidad/1524047072_932404.html> (accessed 8 April 2021).

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