Body talk: space, communication, and corporeality in Lucía Etxebarria's "Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes"
2004; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 72; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1553-0639
Autores Tópico(s)Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism
ResumoAwarded the Premio Nadal in 1998, Lucia Etxebarria's Beatrix y los cuerpos celestes has won great attention for its graphic portrayal of the vices and the vagaries of Spain's Generation X.1 Indeed, in many ways this novel epitomizes the characteristics of the fiction of the young writers of the 1990s, as outlined by critics such as Toni Dorca and Jose Maria Izquierdo. Among the more salient traits are the following: 1) a Spanish narrator-protagonist retrospectively telling of his or her survival in the city; 2) a fragmented, disordered, and often repetitive narration; 3) the use of metafiction, with its self-aware emphasis on the process of writing, and the use of literature as a therapeutic escape from hostile reality; 4) an emphasis on the oral, colloquial language of the youth culture displayed in plenteous dialogues or introspective monologues; 5) abundant references to mass popular culture, with the particularly strong influence of AngloAmerican culture; and 6) the preeminence of visual cultural stimuli, especially television, to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish between the virtual and the real. In her insightful analysis of Jose Angel Manas's Historias del Kronen, the prototypical novel of this generation, Nina Molinaro pinpoints the drive of addiction and the care-less attitude of these characters as the markers of ontological angst within an empty space of alienation:We are asked to witness nothing less than the fault line of ontology, or the ontological shift known in popular discourse as addiction, which literary critic Avital Ronell has suggestively called Being-on-drugs. ... Beneath the ideology of realism, which enacts a careful description of many of the endemic social problems currently confronting post-transition Spain, Historias del Kronen calls forth an acute vision of a much deeper crisis, a crisis in Being that displays through the literary performance of addiction. (293)This youthful culture-in-crisis is the product of a hypermodern Spain, where spatial boundaries of identity clash between the global context, Europe, the nation, and a plethora of regions; where individuals are bombarded by an excess of information and simultaneously suspended in a lack of communication; and where bodies are separated from one another by a tunel de relatividad (Etxebarria 14) that they themselves create in order to impose distance.2Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes certainly repeats the discourse of the writers of the 1990s, projecting stagnant cityscapes beset by drugs and blighted by indifference, yet the novel simultaneously seeks to generate an alternate way of relating within this realm.3 With the metaphor of space, seen as both outer space and as relations of places and bodies, Etxebarria captures the sense of internal individual exile and alienation from an unbounded external world. The bodies that populate these spaces are represented as detached and self-involved, marred by voluntary acts of surgery, scars, and starvation as the individuals strive to incorporate a subjective ideal of youthful, thin, and independent beauty. Consequently, all the spaces in this text house bodies in pain, where physical pain becomes an expression of or a diversion from psychological pain. In a novel that struggles to find meaning beyond the annihilation and alienation of the postmodern world, Etxebarria explores the potential of discourse to divulge the various perspectives implicit in relations of subjectivity. Ultimately the narrating protagonist, Beatriz, becomes a body that talks as she struggles to create cohesive intimacy, surmount spatial chasms, and adjust her perspective to comprehend the other bodies that drift within her atmosphere.Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes is the first-person account of a twenty-two year old Spaniard who recalls her crisis-driven childhood and teenage years when the intermittent violence and indifference of her parents, together with the general pressures of adolescence, drove her to focus all her emotions and energies on Monica, an older, worldly, and rebellious classmate who became her best and only friend. …
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