Spaces of Memory : The City of Antonio Muñoz Molina

« El aire de la ciudad hace hombres libres, decía un refrán medieval. En cualquier caso, es ese aire el único que respira con placer el Robinson urbano »1

1In the article « Escuela de Robinsones », which serves as a prelude to a series published between May 1982 and June 1983 in the Andalusian newspaper Diario de Granada2, the Spanish writer Antonio Munoz Molina describes urban space while, at the same time, tracing a sketch of the urban narrative and its < population >. Not surprisingly, he acknowledges that authors such as De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire and Joyce were key influences of his conception. In his literary works Munoz Molina concentrates on the description of a new type of hero whose < ancestors > include the above mentioned writers and their protagonists. In fact, sometimes the figures in his novels serve as both the writer / narrator and protagonist. In Beatus Ille3, for example, one of the main characters, Minaya, is writing his thesis, and Jacinto Solana, the first-person-protagonist of the novel, is a poet while also providing Minaya with the fragments of his diary.

2According to Munoz Molina, it is Joyce in particular who finally succeeded in portraying the « Urban Robinson », a character that drifts aimlessly around the labyrinthine metropolis, feeling isolated among the faceless crowd4.

3In his essay La literatura en la construcción de la ciudad democrática5, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán explains how the figure of Robinson Crusoe, representing the moral and ideological metaphor and parable about the value of the individual exposed to nature6, finally comes to enter the urban environment. Starting from the structure of the classical adventure-story (such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719), Vázquez Montalbán emphasizes that novels of the genre are essentially built upon the motive of exploring uncharted parts of nature. When every corner of the world is mapped, the adventure must necessarily end or seek refuge elsewhere. The city – as a scene of crime and taboo-breaking – is able to provide interesting themes7; therefore adventure moves to the city, and this is where Robinson, the prototype of the lonely adventurer, is stranded.

4Yet Robinson is not only the protagonist : « La mejor literatura de la modernidad la han escrito grandes robinsones urbanos »8, Munoz Molina observes in the first line of his article, and using a subtle trick he adjusts himself to this group of Robinsons : towards the end of the following page he no longer speaks of them in the third person, but in the first: « Tristemente, la noche se cierra en amenazas y sirenas para los robinsones urbanos. Nos dan a cambio, como reservas de sioux vencidos, lugares nocturnos donde aún podemos gozar los módicos paraísos del alcohol »9.

5These statements deserve further attention for several reasons. On the one hand, they illustrate an awareness of the significance of the city, of the life-forms it creates and the influence it exerts on an art-form like literature. On the other hand, Antonio Munoz Molina at a very early stage of his work as a writer has defined a phenomenon he will be concerned with throughout his literary production in the future. In an essay published in 199510 Thomas M. Scheerer comments about this fact in the following way :

Uno de estos rasgos es la experiencia del espacio urbano. Temprano, el autor ha descrito el núcleo de esta experiencia : la realidad urbana le proporciona la materia para la creación literaria y al mismo tiempo es el punto de arranque para la imaginación de mundos ficticios11.

6Antonio Munoz Molina moves within the urban space in every respect : his first literary texts were published in a newspaper – which is < the > urban medium par excellence according to Philip Fisher :

The newspaper is a training ground for the crowd and the city, the place where the habits of perception and imperception are formed and steadied. Explicitly the newspaper is an image of the total structure of the city itself. [...] It is a throwaway daily epic – an image of the cacophony of the city12.

7In his articles, Munoz Molina studies the urban species which he calls the « Urban Robinson » who – as it is underscored by the reference to Defoe – strays lonely through the city.

8Ten years later, in the early nineteen-nineties, the anthropologist Marc Auge13 reflected on the necessity of an « ethnology of loneliness » and defined the characteristics of urban space. According to Augé, anthropology – in search of new fields of investigation – ultimately becomes dedicated to the exploration of the city. The anthropologic need to define the urban space of our times as determined by streets, junctions, centres and monuments is reflected in Munoz Molina’s discourse on the city. Augé’ s and Munoz Molina’s descriptions of urban space are similar ; they both create an image of cities converted into museums – the so-called old places are no longer integrated into the living space, but instead receive a fixed place and are converted to spaces of memory14.

9Finally, Munoz Molina’s novels tell tales of isolated individuals strolling around real but also fictitious cities such as Mágina, a small town that appears in several of Munoz Molina’s novels.

10The object of this essay, however, is not an analysis of these figures, but rather of the phenomenon that brings them forth : the city.

11In this exemplary analysis of the novels Beatus Ille (published in 1986) and Beltenebros (published in 1989) the functions and representations of urban space in the texts of Antonio Munoz Molina will be presented and discussed.

12The city plays a number of important roles. It is the centre of perception, serves as an object of desire on the level of discourse and acts as an organizing principle on the level of the story, both as a protagonist and as the scene of action. It thus becomes the crucial point of the narration : the protagonists move within the city, they perceive and (dis)organize their lives following its labyrinthine structure, they get lost in it, they want to escape from or return to a particular image of the city and they are confronted with their memories – voluntarily or by force, but always on contact with the urban space. The city or, more precisely, some of the places within it, create intersections for the time and space of the story and thus structure the temporal and spatial levels in this way. This method of organizing the framework of the narration repeatedly reappears in other novels by Munoz Molina – a phenomenon Thomas Scheerer calls the « gramática del recuerdo »15, the grammar of remembrance. Munoz Molina’s novels embrace several periods of time, including Civil War, dictatorship and the transition to democracy. The different levels of the narration are combined with each other by moments and phases of remembering, all produced by the perception of urban space. Thus the streets, places, buildings and monuments form the urban syntax and vocabulary. The protagonists, very often struggling for a better understanding, spend their lives analyzing and reading the text offered by the city. Minaya and Darman, the main characters of Beatus Ille and Beltenebros, two of Munoz Molina’s earlier novels, are two examples of these protagonists.

13Throughout the story Minaya, the protagonist of Antonio Munoz Molina’s first novel Beatus Ille16, is in search of the key to a number of secrets that can only be deciphered by decoding the grammar of remembrance : Minaya has to face his own past, but at the same time it is necessary to learn about the collective history of the city of Mágina.

14In 1969 Minaya returns to his hometown, Mágina, after a long time spent in Madrid. As he is standing in front of his uncle Manuel’s house, a window to the past opens for him. Before deciding to knock on the door, Minaya remembers the first and only occasion when he had entered the house. Twenty years earlier his parents had taken him with them to say good-bye to Manuel before their departure for Madrid :

Desde la plaza, tras los árboles, como un viajero casual, Minaya mira la arquitectura de la casa, dudando todavía ante los llamadores de bronce [...] Losas de mármol, recuerda, columnas blancas sosteniendo la galería encristalada […], aquel día, el único, cuando tenía seis años y lo trajeron a la casa y caminaba sobre el misterioso suelo entarimado como pisando al fin la materia y las dimensiones del espacio que merecía su imaginación17.

15In the course of the novel, Manuel’s house assumes the character and profile of a museum or an archive. The master of the house has arranged photographs, paintings and even entire rooms to celebrate the memory of his dead wife. At first, all the objects in the house seem to bear meaning only for Manuel. However, the more Minaya involves himself in his uncle’s history, the more he adds meaning to the objects and has to realize that all the residents in Manuel’s house are somehow connected with the hidden secret of the mansion. At the same time, the narrator of the novel uses the house and its interior as an itinerary through his own memory, following the principles of the mnemonic technique of mind-mapping.

16According to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, the house represents one of the main themes of the urban narrative genre : it is structured like a labyrinth, holds many secrets to be unveiled and evokes the mansions typical in the gothic novel18. At the same time Vázquez Montalbán points out that the house as well as the city are conventional territories within urban literature and need to be adapted to the demands of the 21^st century :

La evidencia de que la casa y la ciudad han sido los territorios convencionales más utilizados por la imaginación literaria en los últimos cien años, me lleva a pensar que una literatura con voluntad de ser consciencia tiene el desafío de cómo adaptar esos espacios continentes al contenido del siglo XXI. La casa como madriguera y como emisor y receptor de información con una humanidad virtual. La ciudad como museo del pasado más respetable y como etramado de madrigueras fortificadas y centros rituales de concentraciones humanas coincidentes protegidos por toda clase de garitas : supermercados, estadios deprotivos, cárceles e iglesias19.

17The way Munoz Molina depicts the house and the city in Beatus Ille and Beltenebros shows that he already anticipates Vázquez Montalbán’s considerations, published some ten years after Beltenebros.

18The house becomes the central space of memory for its residents and a place to deal with and narrate history. Minaya reconstructs the events of the Civil War that took place in Mágina and thus not only traces the history of the Republican poet Jacinto Solana, but also solves the big family secret concerning the mysterious death of Manuel’s wife Mariana. Individual and collective history, as well as speaking of it – and this becomes unmistakably clear at this point – are inseparably connected. This idea is confirmed in the following sequence : Minaya realizes that a war-memorial made by the sculptor Utrera, a resident in Manuel’s house, shows Mariana’s face with a bullet wound in the forehead. The monument is sited at a central place in the city of Mágina. Later in the novel it will be revealed that it was Utrera himself who killed Mariana but could never get over his deed. His remorse leads him to construct a memorial for the war-victims that serves at the same time as a monument for Mariana. The sequence reveals the crucial importance of the monument, a place of collective memory in the narration, because it helps to solve one of the central enigmas of the novel. At the same time, the levels of individual and collective history are fused in the face of the sculpture. Utrera connects his individual memory of the murder of Mariana with the in a way superior collective memory of the war-victims.

19In the course of the novel, the fictitious city of Mágina continually becomes visible whenever Minaya moves in its streets. Above all, the monuments make it possible for the protagonist to recover the supposedly long-lost fragments of his personal identity and his family’s history in meticulous detail-work. (His) past assumes a face formed by the topography of the city which at the same time reflects the historical changes Mágina has been suffering throughout the years. For example, there is the statue of Orduña, a general of the Falange, which was disfigured and removed from its place during the Civil War. After the establishment of Franco’s dictatorship the statue had been reinstalled, but it still shows traces of the mutilation.

20In contrast to Mágina, Madrid appears as a « lugar no grato, lleno de un sinfin de impresiones y sensaciones tremendamente negativas : es la antítesis del espacio feliz »20. The city of Madrid is a place of violence and uncertainty with a great number of anonymous spaces such as the university cafeteria where Minaya sits and finds himself alone among the crowd. In fact, the characters of Munoz Molina’s novels never seem to feel at home in the big cities and always show a desire for the « other » : Minaya has no relationships, no history in Madrid and does not identify with the evidently threatening city :

Estaba solo para siempre y definitivamente muerto […] desde el día en que lo atraparon los guardias y lo hicieron subir a golpes y patadas de botas negras en un furgón [...]. Pero más hondo que el miedo a los pasos en el corredor... de aquellos cinco días le quedó a Minaya una ingrata sensación de impotencia y desarmada soledad que desmentía toda certeza y negaba para siempre el derecho a la redención, a la rebeldía o al orgullo21.

21The trauma of being arrested and tortured in one of the most notorious prisons of Madrid leaves Minaya defenceless and without any prospects for his future life. The feeling of loneliness and uncertainty he experienced before his imprisonment is even stronger when he is released again ; now he only wants to escape the threatening atmosphere of Madrid. In this state of mind Minaya comes across a document which gives him a pretext for contacting his only remaining living relative : his father’s uncle Manuel, a man he has seen only once in his lifetime. The document is about Jacinto Solana, a poet and hero of the Spanish Civil War (he was a soldier in the Republican Army and a member of the famous and politically militant group of poets called < generación del 98 >) who, by coincidence, was also a close friend of Manuel’s. Pretending to write his thesis about this poet, Minaya writes a letter to Manuel, in which he asks for the permission to visit him. Only a short time afterwards he thus receives an invitation to Mágina and returns to his birthplace.

22Nevertheless, Mágina, viewed from Madrid – the faceless < other > in the novel – as a < locus amoenus >, does not completely fulfil Minaya’s expectations : he can certainly fall back upon the topography of Mágina – which has been known to him since his childhood – as an organizing principle ; but what the city unveils in return is not the tranquillity he has been hoping for : the deceitful order Minaya is willing to accept in the beginning is shaken at the very moment when he believes all the puzzles solved. Jacinto Solana points out to Minaya that everything could have come out differently : « Y acaso la historia que usted ha encontrado sólo es una entre varias posibles »22, the poet, whom Minaya believes to be dead, sets him thinking. Throughout the novel, the two concepts of individual and collective history are continually questioned and juxtaposed. At this point the narrator’s discourse reaches a level at which any possibility of finding < the > history – be it individual or collective – is denied.

23Solana, who is unmasked at this point of the story as the narrator of the whole novel, lets the story end at its point of departure : the train station of Mágina. The situation Minaya is left in at the platform can be understood as the logical consequence of the < solution > Solana offers : there is no certainty about the past. There is no certainty about history. And there is no possibility at all of being sure about one’s identity. Minaya is just as empty as the train station. In the end, Solana tries to comfort Minaya by relativizing the importance of history : it is more important to tell a good story than to tell the truth, he observes. It remains unclear, however, if Minaya decides to escape once again to hide away in the anonymous space of the metropolis from the monstrosity of his discoveries or if he is able to face the fact that History, Memory and Identity are no stable categories linked once and for all to specific points considered to be meaningful.

24While in Beatus Ille Madrid embodies the faceless, threatening < other > the characters attempt to escape from, it is in Beltenebros23, situated in plain Francoist Spain, that the metropolis plays an important < active > part. Darman, the main character of Beltenebros, enters Madrid illegally. During the Civil War he fought in the Republican Army and later on remained an important figure within the Spanish Communist Party. On behalf of this party – forbidden during the Francoist dictatorship – Darman leaves his English exile and comes to Spain to kill a supposed traitor. Already at his arrival at the airport and throughout his stay in Madrid, the city is rather a menace to him than a place to live in – just as it is for Minaya in Beatus Ille. Darman feels strange and alienated ; the longer he stays the more he is haunted by the past. However, Darman decides to stay and to fulfil his task. This decision, contrary to Minaya’s in Beatus Ille, explains why the conception of the topography in Beltenebros works in reverse order : while in Beatus Ille the small town of Mágina that serves as Minaya’s exile is depicted in detail and Madrid becomes the < other >, the threatening menace, the image of Darman’s exile in England, where he feels at home and has built a new life as an antique dealer, remains diffuse as a concrete place throughout the novel. Madrid, however, is perceived and experienced thoroughly through Darman’s eyes. First of all, Darman moves within a space determined by « non-places »24 such as airports and anonymous hotel rooms. These places create an impression of arbitrariness and repeatability. Therefore Darman does not succeed in organizing his memories. The protagonist is fully aware of the problem when he states :

Es verdad que entonces me pasaba la mitad de la vida en los aeropuertos, y como en ellos ni el tiempo ni el espacio son del todo reales, casi nunca sabía exactamente dónde estaba y vivía bajo una tibia y perpetua sensación de provisionalidad y destierro, de tiempo cancelado y espera sin motivo. Inútil para cualquier forma no solitaria de vida, había terminado por recluirme en los hoteles y en los aeropuertos…25

25Even more thoroughly than Minaya Darman examines the confusing urban space he is surrounded by. Self-critically and almost cynically, he observes the influence which his life in various cities has on his personality. Moving almost exclusively within areas devoid of history and identity, Darman begins to lose his connection to real life. He remembers that he had gone through the same experience once before, when he was much younger. This means that during the past twenty years he has been leading a fictitious life, supported by the necessity to live under a false name and practise a false profession in a foreign country. Although he is aware of the development, he does not seem to be struggling for a solution. In contrast to Darman, Minaya clings to any possibility that allows him (at least seemingly) to detect some kind of organization in the background. This attitude finally makes him reconstruct the history of another person rather than his own when he engages in the reconstruction of Jacinto Solana’s biography.

26In a very similar way to Beatus Ille, Beltenebros too is structured by a present time of narration which is interrupted several times by a level of events which occur some twenty years earlier. Madrid serves as the link between the two temporal levels of narration :

El protagonista de [Beltenebros], – underscores Thomas Scheerer – un militante comunista que vive en la clandestinidad y que se empeña en llevar a cabo un asesinato, experimenta no sólo el Madrid de los sesenta, sino también y al mismo tiempo dicha ciudad veinte años antes. La modelación del espacio, constante pese a variaciones internas, encuentra un paralelo en la creación de experiencias temporales26.

27In the protagonist’s mind, the Madrid of the forties and that of the sixties are fused to a single place. The memories connected to the realms Darman recognizes seem to flood his thoughts. Thus he reaches a delirious state of mind, as the structures of space and time dissolve.

28The lines of the task the city is expected to fulfil here are not drawn as sharply as in Beatus Ille. While in this novel it is only at the very end that the loss of confidence in one’s own ability of perception sets in with full force and the supposedly clear structures are thus questioned only in retrospect, Beltenebros counts for its representation on the simultaneous destabilization of the main character and the reader from the very beginning. A major contribution to this destabilization is based on the fact that the figure of the narrator coincides with the main character, whereas the narrating voice in Beatus Ille often adopts the attitude of an outside observer who only watches and comments on what he sees without any attempt to analyze it. Darman, the first-person-narrator in Beltenebros, is obliged to fight the fact of an increasing dissolution of the lines between past and present in his mind. There are two aspects that complicate the situation : when twenty years earlier Darman had to kill a man called Walter, he murdered a friend. He could do so only because at that time he was convinced of pursuing the < right > political aim and never questioned the orders he received from the party-leadership. This made it possible for him to suppress his remorse. His present task is similar to the one he had to fulfil twenty years ago. Nevertheless, Darman has difficulty accepting and completing it. On the one hand, he still feels remorse for the assassination of Walter and, on the other hand, he is devoid of confidence in his own political conviction and questions the adequacy of his task. He no longer accepts the political leaders of the Communist Party as valid moral authorities.

29The uncertainties and confusions multiply because Darman has been ill since he arrived in Madrid and suffering from attacks of fever which impair his perception, on which he thus feels he can no longer rely.

30Philip Fisher describes this narrative technique in his essay entitled « City Matters : City Minds »27. The essential aspect of this technique, as Fisher understands it, is above all « a secondary act of capture that records not a doubling of material as metaphor or contrast does, but a slippage in confidence and certainty about seeing itself »28 – and this, he points out, determines the approach to a « literature of the city mind »29 in a decisive way.

31Re-perception – as Fisher calls the technique – has to do with a filtering of « perception through transformed ways of seeing usually dismissed as defective, overloaded, or peripheral: Illness and fever, the special alertness of the hunted man, hallucinatory, mad, or obsessed angles of vision »30. Antonio Munoz Molina uses this technique throughout the whole novel : from the very beginning, Madrid is perceived through the veil of Darman’s fever attacks and thus depicted in a deeply subjective, hallucinatory inner perspective ; there is no outside observer and the focus never changes, for Darman does not succeed in combatting his disease. The limits of space and time get blurred, and because the narrator cannot distinguish the lines between them any more, it is also impossible for the reader to do so. The image of the city becomes indistinct and infinite : « Percibía las cosas detrás del velo de la extrañeza y de la fiebre, al otro lado de las luces de la ciudad y casi del tiempo, como si todo hubiera ya sucedido y no me quedara otra posible actitud que obedecer y recordar »31, Darman thinks in Beltenebros while going to a nightclub in a taxi. The special condition Darman suffers from due to his illness forces him to question his life, his actual task in Madrid and the past.

32Beltenebros gives the impression that « traditional » places (« anthropological » places in the diction of Augé) that help to organize the spatial and temporal structures in Beatus Ille- hence the monuments, memorials and museums (to be understood in the figurative sense as well, as is the case with Manuel’s house) – are disputed in their functions. They no longer seem to provide the information that helps the protagonist to find his own identity. They are replaced by airports, hotel rooms, nightclubs, cinemas, taxis, and even public toilets.

33These places merely pretend to organize categories such as history, relationships or identity. Whenever there appears the deceiving certainty of already knowing a place, there almost immediately arises the question if this perception can be trusted. « Lo que de lejos me había parecido una decente casa de suburbio con jardín era en realidad uno de esos maltratados palacios italianos que tienen en los bajos grandes carpinterías y almacenes »32, Darman realizes when he approaches a meeting point. At the very next moment he has to face the fact that he is wrong for the second time – he states that he has no feel for the organization of space : « Por segunda vez aquella noche se me quebraba el orden del espacio : cuando creía estar ya muy lejos de los lugares donde sonaba la música, una puerta que se abría me la devolvió »33. This remark points out the perception of the city as a labyrinthine space, parallel to Darman’s difficulties concerning his navigation through his own personal remembrances and the time he is living in.

34In the course of the novel Darman’s problems connected with the supposedly forgotten memory of Walter, who had been his victim twenty years earlier, increase : he is not able to distinguish this case from his < actual > task.

35When his task is fulfilled, Darman finds out that neither his first nor his second victim had really been traitors of the Communist Party as stated by his clients. It is at the very moment when Darman – although too late – realizes he has been taken in in two ways that he suddenly manages to organize the events – both those that date back to a time more than twenty years ago and those of the present. A walk through the city helps him put his memories in order, although in the beginning he wanders about aimlessly, as a true Urban Robinson :

Caminaba por Madrid como si también se extinguiera lentamente mi vida en un prematuro anochecer […], perdido entre los vivos […], entre hombres que caminaban hacia un destino cierto en la noche, no como yo, que ya vivía entre los muertos, que recordaba otra ciudad y otras gentes ya exterminadas por el tiempo […] Y caminaba por los lugares más extraños de Madrid y todos los muertos del pasado me seguían, los muertos y los aparecidos34.

36In the end, the whole city turns out to be a space of memory for Darman. Whilst crossing it (first on foot, then by taxi), he relates certain places – the train station of Atocha, a warehouse etc. – to the events that occurred in the past. At this point, the protagonist finally conquers the life within non-places by recognizing and identifying them, relating them to specific incidents in the past. He thus not only detects his own history, but is also capable of clearly discerning the connections existing between his own history and a wider historical context : he had become the murderer of two supposed traitors to conceal and protect the identity of the real betrayer, who held a high rank in the Spanish Communist Party as well as in the Francoist police authorities.

37The novel ends at the Universal Cinema, a place that is of great importance for Darman, and with the death of the real traitor : twenty years previously, the cinema had been an important scene of action in Madrid. This place, which repeatedly becomes a mental point of contact when Darman thinks of the circumstances of Walter’s death, is now converted to the scene of the final showdown in the course of which the betrayer Valdivia is killed. The symbolic value of the incidents at the cinema is evident : on the one hand, Darman finally returns to an important location of his past, on the other hand, a semantic circle of the narration is closed at this point. While twenty years earlier Darman was betrayed and killed an innocent man, the real betrayer ends up in the very same place where the victim of his treachery had hidden.

38However, the end of the story is not a satisfactory one for the protagonist : although he has finally managed to decipher the past, the unveiled secrets are far from opening a way towards a clearly circumscribed identity based on the now reconstructed and complete image of history. On the contrary, Darman has to accept that his ideological and moral conception has broken into pieces just because he has successfully explored the past.

39As shown in our analysis of two novels, the representation as well as the perception of the city play an important part in the texts written by the Spanish author Antonio Munoz Molina.

40The urban space – be it Mágina, Madrid or New York (the list can be extended at pleasure, for the novels of Munoz Molina are set in various cities) – turns out to be the ideal place of discussion for terms such as Identity, Memory and History35. The characters of Munoz Molina’s novels find themselves obliged to face still unanswered questions concerning their individual as well as the collective history that can sometimes only be expressed in an urban context. The answers which come up repeatedly are questionable (as in Minaya’s case, where the supposed certainty about the past and its reliability prove to be unstable) or lead to frustration (as in Darman’s case : he certainly solves all the puzzles, but at the same time, and just because he solves the problems, his conception of identity, which is determined by political creed, loses ground).

41By means of the perception of the city and by constantly calling to question the reliability of this perception, Antonio Munoz Molina establishes a discourse concerning above all the credibility and reliability of History and Memory.

42Due to an increasing loss of anthropological places including historical and identificational aspects according to Marc Augé, it becomes more and more difficult for human beings to find their own stable position anchored between past, presence and future. This state is reflected by the protagonists of Antonio Munoz Molina’s novels, who in the end turn out to be what the author called Urban Robinsons.