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Dictating fictions: power, resistance and the construction of identity in Cinco horas con Mario

2004; Routledge; Volume: 81; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/145382032000184318

1478-3428

Melissa Dinverno,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Interviews with Spanish Writers, ed., intro. and trans. Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 118. 2Leo Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, Diacritics (September 1977), 2–21 (p. 6). 3Ann Davies, ‘Who is the Model Reader of Delibes's Cinco horas con Mario?’, MLR, XCIV, No. 4 (Oct 1999), 1000–08 (p. 1000). 4See Ann Davies' excellent discussion of ‘collaborative readers’ and her account of critical participation in both the disparagement of Carmen as regime, as well as the vindication of Carmen as victim, in ‘Who is the Model Reader?’, particularly pp. 1000–02. An increasingly critical reading of Mario has developed in which some scholars have examined Mario's faults. See, for example, Miguel García Posada, ‘Cinco horas con Mario: Una revisión’, in Miguel Delibes: el escritor, la obra y el lector, ed. Cristóbal Cuevas García (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1992), 115–29; Nina Molinaro, ‘Confessions of Guilt and Power in Cinco horas con Mario’, Letras Peninsulares, VII (Winter 1995), 599–612; and Antonio Vilanova, ‘Cinco horas con Mario o el arte de entender las razones del otro’, in Miguel Delibes: el escritor, la obra y el lector, ed Cuevas García, 131–67. Others, such as Pauk, Bustos-Deuso and Highfill have perceptively pointed out the often overlooked irony: Mario chose to marry the conservative Carmen, a reality that Highfill most accurately treats as evidence of Mario's own gendered education under Francoism. See María Luisa Bustos-Deuso, La mujer en la narrativa de Delibes (Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones, Univ. de Valladolid, 1990); Juli Highfill, ‘Reading at Variance: Icon, Index, and Symbol in Cinco horas con Mario’, ALEC, XXI, Nos 1–2 (1996), 59–83; Edgar Pauk, Miguel Delibes: desarrollo de un escritor (1947–1974) (Madrid: Gredos, 1975). 5Highfill, ‘Reading at Variance’; Molinaro, ‘Confessions of Guilt and Power’; Davies, ‘Who is the Model Reader?’; Yaw Agawu-Kakraba, ‘Miguel Delibes and the Politics of Two Women: Cinco horas con Mario and Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris’, Hispanófila, No. 117 (May 1996), 63–77. See also Delibes' comments on his textual strategy of using Carmen as reactionary foil: César Alonso de los Ríos, Conversaciones con Miguel Delibes (Madrid: Editorial Magisterio Español, 1971), 86–89, 132–34. 6Highfill contends that through its textual strategies the novel ‘compels us to polarize Mario as good and Carmen as bad’ even as it ‘asks us to repudiate the Manicheism that historically has tormented Spain’ (‘Reading at Variance’, 72). 7An exception to this passivity would be Ann Davies' reading of Carmen as actively recoding Mario's discourse on literature as well as the intellectual hegemony he, the readers, and literary critics purport to hold. As yet, I believe this is the only reading that ascribes agency to Carmen, a line of thinking that I will also be developing here. 8Agawu-Kakraba, ‘Miguel Delibes and the Politics of Two Women’, 68–69. 9Miguel Delibes, Cinco horas con Mario, 17th ed. (Barcelona: Destino, 1994 [1st ed. 1966]). Further references will be to this edition, with page numbers given in parentheses in the text. 10Highfill explores the excessiveness of Carmen's character in terms of the negative literary, social, and political characteristics that simultaneously signify within the bounds of her figure, an excessiveness that threatens to push her character towards stereotype, and ultimately converts her into the textual scapegoat. I too will be dealing with excessiveness, though here in terms of Carmen's preoccupation with creating and containing her own identity, her concern with controlling the disruptions she reads in herself. 11Although Antonio Sobejano-Morán follows the Carmen/Mario, Closed Spain/Open Spain dichotomy (‘ “Dramatis Personae” y manipulación narrativa en Cinco horas con Mario y La cólera de Aquiles’, Crítica Hispánica, XVI, No. 2 [1994], 387–93 [p. 387]), at one point, he notes that Carmen's ‘remordimientos […] atormentan su conciencia y que son provocados en parte por el desajuste entre sus creencias tradicionalistas y el rechazo subconciente de las mismas’ (389–90). Sobejano-Morán's recognition of a kind of split in Carmen reflects the spirit of my exploration here. 12Of particular importance to my argument is Michel Foucault's work on power and the individual, particularly as it relates to his formulation of the ‘panoptic’ and the internalization of the mechanisms of discipline. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1st ed. 1975]). 13Ann Davies also discusses Carmen's preoccupation with reading. Though she focuses on Carmen's reaction to literary discourse, Davies posits that Carmen is able to read on other levels. Here, I am emphasizing these symbolic, non-verbal levels, but particularly the fact that Carmen represents people per se as texts, and is concerned with reading/writing others. Carmen's readings of these non-verbal languages show that although she lacks the kind of literary and intellectual education to which Mario had easier access, she is not ignorant, as has commonly been claimed by critics. In fact, she is quite adept at reading these languages according to the codes (albeit ultra-conservative) she has learned over time. 14Beyond the text of the Bible, Carmen and others continuously delineate a direct relationship between Mario and the written word (e.g. 210, 270–71, 293). For many, ‘los libros eran él’ (26). In an episode with a graphologist (270–21), Carmen's contradictory attitude towards the relationship between Mario and the letter reveals her anxiety regarding interpretation, that is, her potential inability to decode and therefore control the other. 15Phyllis Zatlin has rightly emphasized the significance of Carmen's mother in her formation (Phyllis Zatlin Boring, ‘Delibes' Two Views of the Spanish Mother’, Hispanófila, LXIII [1978], 79–87). However, the singling out of her mother would seem to underplay other aspects of her education, and simultaneously relieve both her father and the far-reaching government social programmes of any specific responsibility for Carmen's limitations. I agree with Pauk (Miguel Delibes: desarrollo de un escritor, 98) and Lowe that Carmen's respect for her parents and authority is paramount to her outlook, and would go even farther in suggesting that it is fundamental to her negotiation of identity and understanding of self (see Jennifer Lowe, ‘Five Hours and Ten Commandments: Carmen and the Decalogue’, Crítica Hispánica, XVIII, No. 2 [1996], 324–30 [p. 328]). 16Her mother's intuitive ability to segregate and categorize people fascinates her (76), as does her father's intellectual capacity to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ texts. 17Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, 15. 18 Interviews with Spanish Writers, ed. Gazarian Gautier, 115 and 121 respectively. See also Alonso de los Ríos, Conversaciones con Miguel Delibes, 103–06 and 133–35. 19See note 4 and Alonso de los Ríos, Conversaciones con Miguel Delibes, 90–92. 20Agawu-Kakraba, ‘Miguel Delibes and the Politics of Two Women’, 73. 21As Highfill rightly suggests (‘Reading at Variance’, 65), Mario's characterization gestures toward the fact that men also underwent a gendered education. Carmen Martín Gaite provides interesting insights into men's supposed desires and expectations, as well as their consequences for relationships between men and women, many of which find echo in the problems Carmen identifies in her marriage. See Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos de la postguerra española, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1994 [1st ed. 1987]), 51, 63, 65–66, 71–72. A re-reading of Mario and his gendered education has yet to be done and might take into account some of Martín Gaite's observations as a productive point of departure. 22Highfill, ‘Reading at Variance’, 63–65. 23Helen Graham, ‘Gender and the State: Women in the 1940s’, in Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995), 182–95 (p. 182). 24‘No hay nada más bello que servir’, Medina (12 julio 1942), quoted in Luis Otero, La Sección Femenina (Madrid: Editorial EDAF, 1999), 31. For ready access to facsimiles of Sección Femenina documents, see this work as well as Otero's La española cuando besa (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1999). 25‘No hay nada más bello que servir’ (1942), quoted in Otero, La Sección Femenina, 31. 26Graham, ‘Gender and the State’, 184. 27For interesting discussions and facsimiles regarding the regime's configuration of the ideal woman, see especially Victoria Lorée Enders, ‘Problematic Portraits: The Ambiguous Historical Role of the Sección Femenina of the Falange’, in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999), 375–97; Graham, ‘Gender and the State’; Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos; Aurora Morcillo-Gómez, ‘Shaping True Catholic Womanhood: Francoist Educational Discourse on Women’, in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, 51–69; Otero, La Sección Femenina and La española cuando besa; Rosario Sánchez López, Mujer Española, una sombra de destino en lo universal. Trayectoria histórica de Sección Femenina de Falange (1934–1977) (Murcia: Secretariado de Publicaciones, Univ. de Murcia, 1990); and Geraldine M. Scanlon, La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea (1868–1974), trans. Rafael Mazarrasa (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1986). 28Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 59. These women needed certification of Social Service completion in order to gain employment as well as ‘tomar parte en oposiciones y concursos, obtener títulos, desempeñar destinos y empleos retribuidos en entidades oficiales o Empresas que funcionen bajo la intervención del Estado […] para obtener pasaportes, carnets de conducir y licencias de caza y pesca, así como seguir perteneciendo a centros o asociaciones artísticas, deportivas, culturales, de recreo o análogas’ (Y [abril de 1944], quoted in Martín Gaite, ibid., 59–60). Despite the fact that women reacted in many different ways to the ideological project of the State and its mechanisms of gender re-education, and although these reactions lie beyond the scope of this section, it is none the less important to note that this kind of massive regulation of women's lives and attempt at systematic indoctrination regarding ‘correct’ behaviour profoundly affected women of different classes. 29Graham, ‘Gender and the State’, 187. 30 La madre ideal (1951), quoted in Otero, La Sección Femenina, 189. 31See Rosario Coca Hernando, ‘Towards a New Image of Women under Franco: The Role of Sección Femenina’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, XI, No. 1 (Spring 1998), 5–13, for a discussion of the female conduct models portrayed by the SF in its magazines. Coca Hernando reads a shift from the models of the earlier, more conservative women's magazines Y and Medina to those promoted in its later publication, Teresa (1954–1977) (6). 32See Otero for facsimiles of these publications and the disturbing marking of women's bodies (especially La Sección Femenina, 104–05, 151, 188–89 and La española cuando besa, 8, 14, 61, 65, 132–33, 137–38, 150–51, 183, 202). The Guía médica sexual from 1963 suggests in pseudo-scientific rhetoric that the characteristics of someone's gait can be read to distinguish their sex (quoted in Otero, La española cuando besa, 138). The manuals marked clothing as well, dictating guidelines down to the centimetre (Libro escolar de la Sección Femenina de FET y de las JONS, [1957], quoted in Otero, La española cuando besa, 8). 33 Vida íntima de la mujer [1961], quoted in Otero, La española cuando besa, 132. 34 SF Economía doméstica, para Bachillerato, Comercio y Magisterio, [1968], quoted in Otero, La Sección Femenina, 135. 35A few examples of the rules Carmen has internalized may be found in the novel at 75, 77, 128–29 (regarding greetings, see Otero, La española cuando besa, 61), 130, 174, 175, 187, 226. 36Graham, ‘Gender and the State’, 193. 37See in particular, Jaques Lacan, Écrits. A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977). 38This notion of reflection is fundamental to the novel and not only functions in relation to Carmen, but also between different characters (102, 197–98, 219, 234, 269). 39Carmen's use of ‘detonar’, which functions as a stronger version of ‘desentonar’, is significant in the sense that it indicates both her need for homogeneity as well as the real, cultural push for this in Spanish society during the postwar. ‘El buen tono’ (the opposite of something that ‘desentonaba’) was a common saying that characterized conformity to conventionalisms as a positive act (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 79–80). 40Ann Davies suggests that the novel ‘constitutes [Carmen's] critical reading of Mario's own reading of her’ (‘Who is the Model Reader?’, 1004). I agree and would amplify this to include all those that enter Carmen's discourse. My contention is that she performs a critical reading of everyone in order to construct herself, though Mario is the text most disruptive to her endeavour. 41For a discussion of the use of the Bible and its implications for Francoism and Carmen, see Jack B. Jenlinski, ‘Mario as Biblical Analogue in Miguel Delibes' Cinco horas con Mario’, College Language Association Journal (Atlanta), XXXVIII, No. 4 (June 1995), 480–89. 42Self-evident in this belittling attitude is what Bersani has termed a ‘joy of self-confident strength’ (‘The Subject of Power’, 6). In Carmen's supposed mastery and synthesis of Mario's theories, we are witnesses to the jouissance of her exercise of power, her performance of what she senses is a resistance to Mario's past impositions. 43 Ibid., 20. 44Peter Evans, ‘Cinema, Memory, and the Unconscious’, in Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, 304–10; Graham, ‘Gender and the State’; Mike Richards, ‘ “Terror and Progress”: Industrialization, Modernity, and the Making of Francoism’, in Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, 173–82. 45Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–20 (118–19). 46Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1987), 116 (emphasis added). 47Juan J. Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime: Spain’, in Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century Spain, ed. Stanley G. Payne (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 160–207 (p. 197). 48Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime’, 178. 49Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime 1936–1975 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 530. 50Bersani, ‘The Subject of Power’, 4–5. 51The loss of the Church as its staunch advocate following the Second Vatican Council and the anti-regime stance of the majority of younger priests posed a major threat to its ability to contain and continue its authoritarian position. But encompassing more than this one important disruption, this decade is characterized by a continuous oscillation between resistance or liberalization and repression, a society in flux that experiences almost oxymoronic moments. In 1963, the same year the regime executed Communist Party activist Julián Grimau for supposed ‘civil war crimes’, the International Association for Cultural Freedom organized a conference on realism in Madrid, minor political reforms were instituted by the government, and Joaquín Ruiz Giménez's magazine (albeit one that may have played to Franco's advantage) Cuadernos para el Diálogo was founded. In 1964, strikes in Asturias were repressed by the State, yet writers, artists and intellectuals demonstrated against the violence. At the same time that Manuel Fraga organized the dictatorship's publicity campaign entitled ‘25 Years of Peace’, attempting to promote an image of security and peaceful co-existence as the outcome of the civil war, Catalan priests protested the repression of Catalan culture. The year 1965 saw widespread student demonstrations, the closing of major universities, and the dismissal of Professor Enrique Tierno Galván for his critique of the regime, and yet student pressure managed to eliminate effectively the SEU, the regime's long time student union which functioned as a system of vigilance of young people. Repression was clearly becoming a less effective tool as the adversarial relations of power were enacted time and again: repression now seemed to imply a subsequent counter-exercise of power by the oppressed. 52Borja de Riquer i Permanyer, ‘Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism’, in Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, 259–71 (p. 268). 53 Ibid., 267. Riquer i Permanyer notes the superficial changes the regime made in its administration and highlights the fact that these changes in no way abated repression as a fundamental socio-political tool of the State (ibid.). This political spinning was particularly important at the onset of the 1960s precisely since the country was emerging from economic crisis and a fundamental part of the 1959 recovery plan involved both foreign investment and open borders for more fluid movement of international trade and labour. Furthermore, the regime's application to join the European Economic Community was rejected on the grounds that it was not a democracy, which made economic recovery more difficult for Spain. In this sense, by definition, the dictatorship's anti-democratic nature became a hindrance to the plan for economic liberalization. 54Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 216. 55That Carmen's identity-building project was ultimately destroyed through sexuality resonates with the fact that the sexualized body, and particularly that of women, continued to be a major site of repression even into the 1960s. The body would soon become one of the fundamental sites through which political liberation was formulated during the Transition, specifically during the movida and destape. 56Peter Evans characterizes this late period of the dictatorship as a time when ‘increasing availability […] of American feminist texts and greater contact with the outside world led to ideological shifts […]. Even the Sección Femenina, keeping up with the times, began to support a policy if not actually of feminismo then at least of promoción (new opportunities for women)’ (‘Cinema, Memory, and the Unconscious’, 308). The tendency toward promoción within the SF did afford more opportunities for women, though they were still represented by Church and State as opportunities that needed to be regulated. Indeed, this shift in women's spheres generated new conduct materials, such as Dios y tú en la oficina (1964), which attempted to respond to and contain this social transformation. In her analysis of the SF magazine Teresa (1954–1977), Rosario Coca Hernando argues that in the 1950s and '60s, the SF adopted a conflictive stance regarding women in the workplace, attempting to both ‘control and promote the progressive incorporation of women into the labour market’ (‘Towards a New Image of Women under Franco’, 9). Significantly for our argument, she also suggests that the new, albeit contradictory, female stereotype promoted by the SF was not only economically, but also politically motivated in the sense that it ‘could ultimately be seen as part of a new image of itself that the regime was trying to project’, revealing itself as ‘a political power that was shedding its external fascist signs’(ibid., 6). Regarding the changing situation of women during the dictatorship and into the Transition, see especially Anny Brooksbank Jones, ‘Women, Politics and Social Change in Contemporary Spain’, Tesserae, I, No. 2 (Summer 1995), 277–94; Coca Hernando, ‘Towards a New Image of Women under Franco’; El feminismo en España: dos siglos de historia, ed. Pilar Folguera (Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias, 1988); Otero, La Sección Femenina and La española cuando besa; Sánchez López, Mujer española; and Scanlon, La polémica feminista. 57Amparo Moreno Sardá, ‘La réplica de las mujeres al franquismo’, in El feminismo en España: dos siglos de historia, 85–110, (particularly pp. 95–103). Coca Hernando also notes that despite the fact that the SF ‘launched, for the young middle class women of the 1960s, a new ambivalent femininity which combined both the traditional and the modern’ and which ‘did not amount to an opposition to the ideology of domesticity’ (‘Towards a New Image of Women under Franco’, 13), a generational shift can still be read in the role models promoted by official publications, specifically between the images of the ideal woman promoted in the earlier SF magazines Y and Medina, and the later Teresa (ibid., 6–7). Also see Coca Hernando's reading of three chronological stages in Teresa (1954–1977) which she believes are paradigmatic of the SF's ‘slight, but very visible’ (ibid., 5) shifts in the image of the ideal woman during the late 1950s and the 1960s. 58Moreno Sardá, ‘La réplica de las mujeres al franquismo’, 95–103. 59Moreno Sardá, ‘La réplica de las mujeres al franquismo’, 96. 60Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 64. Significantly, in 1987 Martín Gaite emphasizes a generational rift and the fact that gender definitions and education during Francoism are at the root of that gap. She dedicates her Usos amorosos to ‘todas las mujeres españolas, entre cincuenta y sesenta años, que no entienden a sus hijos. Y para sus hijos, que no las entienden a ellas’ (ibid., 9). Later, Delibes also referred to this gap between mentalities (Interviews with Spanish Writers, ed. Gazarian Gautier, 115). 61Graham, ‘Gender and the State’, 191. 62Highfill, ‘Reading at Variance’, 76–77.