SPAIN
"LA GENERACIÓN J.A.S.P. / "LA GENERACIÓN KRONEN"
"LA GENERACIÓN J.A.S.P. / "LA GENERACIÓN KRONEN"
NEW BOOK!
The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the ContemporaryPeninsular Novel by Nina Molinaro "ABOUT THIS BOOK Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness. Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain; and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative." Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. SPANISH ADVERTISEMENT ABOUT
"Coca Cola Treintaytantos" Generation J.A.S.P "Jóven Aunque Sobradamente Educado" "Playing for Real: Simulated Games of Identity in Spain’s Gen X Narrative" "Gen X cultural production is often described as nihilistic. Yet, at least in the Spanish context, what these writers accentuate is not the absence of meaning, but awareness of the profusion of competing versions of value and identity filtered through technology.[i] The reach and interactivity of media and technology offer contact with many more people, but each of these contacts appears both more immediate and more transitory. This disparity reveals a kind of absence—the awareness that connectivity does not necessarily lead to authentic connection, and in fact can confuse or supplant it. Despite access to expansive communication networks, individuals are simultaneously more distant from firm knowledge of the origin, authorship, and intention of information and identities on which they base their relationships. Spain’s Gen X authors present conflicting views of this ambiguity, sometimes seeing mobility and easy attachment/detachment as opportunities for redefinition and self-creation, and other times as a source of anxiety. Game theory and game studies provide alternative lenses to consider the innovations and motivations of Spain’s Generation X. Spain’s Gen X writers apply narrative approaches that reconfigure the networks of relationships perceived as shaping identity and contemporary reality. The speed, profusion, and anonymity of information and images make it difficult to determine who or what to believe, and suggest that the capacity to continually reinvent oneself and others is enormously powerful. In turn, Spanish Gen X writers frequently present the contemporary experience (and its narrative reflection) as interactive games in which representations of reality are simultaneously shaped and contested by varying and often anonymous “players” of uncertain number. Amid increasingly networked relationships, the capacity to shape, construct, contest, or affirm identity is played out through shifting relationships—what we could think of as games of identity—among authors, readers, critics, and other (potentially hidden or unknown) players mediating these representations." ~ Virginia Newhall Rademacher, Excerpt from Generation X Goes Global Generation X in Spain and Around the World Christine Henseler (Excerpt from Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age: Generation X Remixed) "Studies on Generation X literature have motioned toward the existence of GenX texts from other countries, but no scholar has looked more deeply into the web of interconnections that this global phenomenon portrays. While an examination of international economic, technological, and social landscapes goes beyond the scope of this book, it warrants pointing out how some GenX texts intersect with Spanish writers to present the making of a global flow of common relations. The confluence of political and commercial content varies in GenX texts depending on an author’s country of origin and their personal experiences. Speaking in broad strokes, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, authors such as Alberto Fuguet (Chile), Edmundo Paz-Soldán (Bolivia), Jáchym Topol (Czeck Republic), and Viktor Pelevin (Russia), all contended with the collapse of communist or dictatorial regimes and the surge of commercial capitalism into everyday life. To different degrees, these socio-political collisions became part of their generational identities and narrative strategies. Viktor Pelevin, in his novel Homo Zapiens (orig. Generation P, 1999), fed into the post-Soviet metaphor of a Russian “Pepski Generation.” His character used sarcastic, cynical, and humorous language, advertising images and jingles, and mythical figures and stories to create a prose of contrasting proportions that engaged with the Communist/Russian contention with commercial capitalism. Similarly, Jáchym Topol’s novel City, Sister, Silver (1994) captured the opening of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s.[i] He portrays myths, nightmares, and stories through rapid shifts in syntax, style, spelling, dialogue, tone and meaning, conjoining colloquial language and traditional literary forms. As translator Alex Zucker notes in the Preface to the novel, Topol changes language in response to the new political landscape. He uses atypical terminology, a variety of Czech idioms, dialects and slang plus assorted words and phrases from other languages, to rapidly shifting to identify the fast changing reality around him (viii). Chilean Alberto Fuguet, a writer who spent many years in the US and who consciously felt the need to identify a new, young group of writers, appropriated the designation “McOndo” to replace Gabriel García Márquez’s use of the town name, “Macondo,” in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). He substituted several globalizing brands—McDonalds, Macintosh computers, and condos—for a familiar, already globalized notion of Latin American magic realism. In societies where commercial capitalism had been part of the socio-political landscape for a longer period of time, the collision of worlds and languages is less obvious and conflicted. Their language seems to have ingested commercial culture, leading to more flat linguistic patterns and a more self-centered search for meaning. Faserland (1995) or Crazy (1993) by Germans Christian Kracht and Benjamin Lebert, 101 Reykjavik (2002) by Icelandic author Hallgrimur Helgason, Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995) by Australian Andrew McGahan, or Trainspotting (1996) by Irvine Welsch, display many similarities to Spanish GenX texts. They include varying degrees of sarcasm and humor, lack of critical distance and political engagement, violence and explicit sexuality. All present narratives that emulate linguistic patterns derived from everyday life—colloquialisms, neologisms, and references to film, music, and popular audiovisual culture. They also connect to technology on a thematic and/or stylistic level, using fragmenting techniques defined as televisual zappings, MTV aesthetics, and DJ remixings. Spanish GenX novels display significant similarities with the novels of their contemporaries from around the world. Contrary to the working-class individuals and slang found in Trainspotting or Sister, City, Silver, Spanish characters are mostly middle to upper class individuals and their vernacular language has been cleansed into a commercially viable form of yuppie counter-cultural slang. Spain’s texts are saturated equally with images from television, music, advertising and audiovisual culture, and they are marked by short sentence structures and linguistic transpositions of the English language. Characters’ physical or mental escapes and marginal positions are, in the case of Spain, often less politically direct in the questioning of societal norms and values than in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X or Viktor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens. Their narrative style is generally as flat as the work of the German authors, despite their indulgence in more lyrical and emotional landscapes. Sarcasm and cynicism is found less frequently, except in the work of Spain’s female authors. Women writers decry societal norms through alternative models of identity formation steeped in commercial culture and cyberculture, but they also engage with the effects of depression and drug use, as in Elizabeth Wurzel’s Prozac Nation (1994). In general, first-person interior monologues dominate, short sentences and fragmented forms simulate MTV editing techniques, and popular media culture composes individuals’ identities, their being. The above novels from the early to mid-1990s, display the making of a larger phenomenon, one that defines a series of mutual characteristics and cultural idiosyncrasies. These glocal expressions go beyond the novels mentioned above, to display a movement that mutates the GenX label according to the convergence of cultural signifiers at play in each individual country and in a variety of genres. The result is a series of generational labels/labs with distinct manifestations: in Germany, “Generation X” metamorphoses into “Generation Golf” or “Popliteratur;” in France the “Whatever Generation” comes to light with the work of Michel Houellebecq; in Chile and Bolivia the “McOndo Generation” features a newly defined Latin American boom; in Russia the “Pepski Generation” pushes whisky aside for a soda drink; in Iran, the “Burnt Generation” erupts and disrupts tradition; in South Africa, the so-called “Y-Culture” and Kwaito music - a blend of beat-heavy house music and African rhythms – embody Generation X; in China there emerges a GenX youth termed “Xin Xin Renlei,” and in Japan, the consumptive habits of the shinjinrui present compelling interconnections with the US and Spanish phenomenon.[i] In sum, to talk about Spanish Generation X narrative, one must understand how it relates to and positions itself within a much broader global dynamic and alongside a variety of different genres." "Spain and Its Lesbian Gen X"
"Several cultural critics have commented on the intersections between cultural production and capitalism, particularly in the age of globalization. Indeed, in Spain the neoliberal policies implemented from the late 1980s onward had a large role in limiting the literary expressions of identity to a field determined by the interests of the free market. This is true even for the “marginal” identities that straight Gen X authors like Lucía Extebarria might portray in their lesbian characters, which largely become normalized or else remain stereotyped as exotic, trendy, un-Spanish, and/or and pathological. When confronted by such characters in the novels of famous, and famously straight, authors, heterosexual readers often confirm their prejudices even as they congratulate themselves for their tolerant gaze. That is, such readers can comfortably identify with the authors, if not always with the protagonists, and lesbians can thereby be integrated epistemologically into a normalized heterosexist and capitalist order." ~ Jill Robbins, Excerpt from Generation X Goes Global |
Generation X" in Spain moves through two waves. The first one takes place during the 1980s and 1990s, and the second one in the twenty-first century. The authors of the second wave are called "Mutantes" and more information about this group can be found in Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age: Generation X Remixed, by Christine Henseler.
For an introductory article about the twenty-first century Spanish GenX writers called "Mutantes," see my article
Spanish Mutant Fictioneers: Of Mutants, Mutant Fiction and Media Mutations Introduction. Hybrid Storyspaces: Redefining the Critical Enterprise in Twenty-First Century Hispanic Literature Christine Henseler and Debra A. Castillo |
What Is “Video Clip Literature”?: Aesthetic Rebellion in Spanish Generation X Fiction
by Christine Henseler
Based on a presentation given at the Modern Language Association Convention in 2009, accompanied by examples on DVDA longer version of this piece can be found in my book Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age: Generation X Remixed
Several years ago I picked up a copy of the 1993 novel Héroes by Spanish novelist Ray Loriga. When I started to read the novel, I found myself nodding off, thinking about other things, and desperately wanting to check my e-mail. So I put the book down. Several months later, I picked it up again. I tried to read it. I put it down. And I thought to myself: okay, if I was able to get through Sánchez Ferlosio's El Jarama in graduate school, I should be able to get through this. I did eventually get through it, but I have to admit that, initially, I did not like the novel; it lost my thoughts in the blanks between each word, each paragraph, and each chapter. So when one day Bob Spires asked me “So, what do you think is the aesthetic value of Generation X texts?, I was speechless. My face was as blank as the spaces within which I had been lost in text.
So Bob, for more reasons than one, you have been motivating me for years (thank you). Your words inspired me to dig a little deeper, and to try to answer
this apparently simple, yet tremendously hard question. To start, I checked out a few book reviews of Héroes and found that critics repeatedly described the novel as a “record”. It became readily apparent that Loriga’s image as a bad-boy literary rock star on the cover of his novel, was complementing the nostalgic references to rock artists like David Bowie and Bob Dylan sprinkled throughout the text itself. And these references seemed to coincide with Loriga’s own enthusiasm of rock and roll stars, of Bob Dylan particular, as seen in several of his essays and in a special issue called “Dylan en versión española” in which Loriga recreated Dylan’s 1963 debut album, Freewheelin’:
by Christine Henseler
Based on a presentation given at the Modern Language Association Convention in 2009, accompanied by examples on DVDA longer version of this piece can be found in my book Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age: Generation X Remixed
Several years ago I picked up a copy of the 1993 novel Héroes by Spanish novelist Ray Loriga. When I started to read the novel, I found myself nodding off, thinking about other things, and desperately wanting to check my e-mail. So I put the book down. Several months later, I picked it up again. I tried to read it. I put it down. And I thought to myself: okay, if I was able to get through Sánchez Ferlosio's El Jarama in graduate school, I should be able to get through this. I did eventually get through it, but I have to admit that, initially, I did not like the novel; it lost my thoughts in the blanks between each word, each paragraph, and each chapter. So when one day Bob Spires asked me “So, what do you think is the aesthetic value of Generation X texts?, I was speechless. My face was as blank as the spaces within which I had been lost in text.
So Bob, for more reasons than one, you have been motivating me for years (thank you). Your words inspired me to dig a little deeper, and to try to answer
this apparently simple, yet tremendously hard question. To start, I checked out a few book reviews of Héroes and found that critics repeatedly described the novel as a “record”. It became readily apparent that Loriga’s image as a bad-boy literary rock star on the cover of his novel, was complementing the nostalgic references to rock artists like David Bowie and Bob Dylan sprinkled throughout the text itself. And these references seemed to coincide with Loriga’s own enthusiasm of rock and roll stars, of Bob Dylan particular, as seen in several of his essays and in a special issue called “Dylan en versión española” in which Loriga recreated Dylan’s 1963 debut album, Freewheelin’:
Images credited to "Dylan Versión española":
http://www.elmundo.es/magazine/num181/textos/dylan2.html
http://www.elmundo.es/magazine/num181/textos/dylan2.html
The perception that Loriga and his GenX colleagues have been influenced by formal and lyrical compositions of song has received valuable and serious critical attention. Eva Navarro Martínez superbly details how the novels of Loriga, Mañas, Prado and Maestre all present certain parallels with the work of Bob Dylan, Nirvana, David Bowie, Lou Reed or Jim Morrison. For example, she says that in Héroes, Loriga often plays with one idea, repeats it, and ends at the same place he began. Loriga also uses many periods and commas and simple phrases without connecting prepositions to emphasize the closed and independent nature of each sentence (Navarro Martínez 139). In addition, his prose ranges from the downright crude to the lyrical, much like in song and melody. The novel’s short and disconnected chapters allow readers to either read the novel sequentially or open the book to any chapter, skipping from one “tune” to another.
While I think that, indeed, the novel could be read as a record, or a CD, the development of a more multimedia environment in the beginning of the 1990s is such that a purely aural understanding of this novel is insufficient; it also reduces the narrative to a textual flatness supposedly steeped in the superficiality of popular culture—a criticism often used to discredit GenX texts. But it warrants looking more closely at a few passages in Héroes to realize that something else is going on here. In one passage, the protagonist contrasts the video recorder to the movie theatre, and embraces its capacity to capture, repeat, and reembody emotions stemming from rock and roll songs and stars. In another chapter, the young protagonist who has locked himself in a 6-meter large room, watches Japanese anime in silence while listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers at high volume. The emotional charge of this audio-visual convergence leads him to think of a series of disconnect material objects and elements from everyday life. When we read the book, the effect of this convergence does not really come alive, but thanks to the help of my wonderful ITS department at Union College, I am able to give you a sense of the emotional charge of the juxtaposition of Japanese anime, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the textual evidence of the protagonist’s triggering of material objects in the following rendition:
I believe this scene points to a very important phenomenon that gains contour in the 1990s, namely the increased mixing of media technologies by producers and consumers alike, what media guru Henry Jenkins’ has termed “convergence culture” and Lawrence Lessig has called “remix culture.” Going back to Héroes, then, one could consider Loriga a contemporary remix writer and the text could be said to anticipate the movement toward what we know today as an example of hybrid media. In other words, I suggest that the novel not just be analyzed as a narrative set to song, but rather as a vivid example of one of the first breakthroughs in the mixing of media and one of the most important media events in the life of Generation X’ers, namely as a powerful example of “Music Video Clip Literature.”
Although critics have used the term “video clip literature” to define the structural stylistics of GenX texts, they have only done so on a theoretical level, usually centering their comments on the negative, illogical, and emptying qualities of a particular narrative. The synesthetic complexity of music video clips is often denied value through the use of words like the downgrading of the plot and the characterization of the medium’s exposition as free-floating, decentered, fragmented, anti-narrative and lacking substance. In the field of Hispanism, for example, Carter Smith suggested that Mañas himself sensed that “his MTV-like prose style [threatened] to become as banal as MTV itself” (10). My first and main goal here today is to undermine some of the stereotypes that a mere theoretical examination of music videos has carried into the field of literary criticism. I would like to suggest that a better understanding of the effects of the medium’s strategies through first-hand examples allows us to value GenX novels from radically, even academically rebellious, angles.
In 1981 in the US and in 1987 in Spain, Generation X’ers proclaimed: “I want my MTV!” With this exclamation they rejected monolithic cable network television for music videos’ complex audiovisual layers that motioned to the increasing convergence, hybridization, and mixing of media as new, and some would say rebellious sites of storytelling. In the first chapter. of her book, Experiencing Music Videos, Carol Vernallis presents the two interpretations largely attributed to music video clips. On one hand, critics read them as narrative constructs that function similar to television or film. On the other hand, critics, especially literary critics, viewed clips as an essentially anti-narrative medium, “a kind of postmodern pastiche that actually gains energy from defying narrative conventions” (Vernallis 3). Music videos present a large range of both of these beliefs, but, as you know, most of them pertain to the non-narrative genre. This is because videos follow a song’s cyclical form and they consider a topic rather than enact a topic in linear fashion (Vernallis 4). In addition, music video, as a rapid multimedia genre, does not translate film narrative techniques directly, but presents readers with three stories simultaneously in one very short time and space.
What we find in music videos, then is that sound, image, and narrative each possess their “own language with regard to time, space, narrativity, activity, and affect” (Vernallis 13) and they shift in relation to one another. These three dimensions do not usually merge or move parallel but might play against or with one another to emphasize a chord, a color, or a feeling; they might move into the background or the foreground, they might harmoniously dissolve in a variety of spaces and times, or they might contradict each other and create a disheveled feeling of textured unrest and defiance.
This versatility allows music videos to become an inherently hybrid medium. Not only does this hybridity concern the interplay of the visual, verbal and textual, but the way in which they can cross traditional boundaries and create unexpected, unusual, and powerful messages. This remixing capacity ultimately undermines the image of this supposedly “empty” popular cultural phenomenon for one that allows for significant and self-conscious social and political content, that, in some instances can even lead to political action-- as when President Obama, during the campaign, appropriated the gesture of “brushing off” his shoulder from hip hop artist Jay-Z’s video called “Dirt Off your shoulders.”
I think it is worth pausing and stressing the potential of hybridity in music videos . Much of music videos power comes from the connections that are made between disparate elements and the spaces that are left blank in between each image—what many consider a source of confusion and decenteredness. Therefore, the next clip I want to show you presents four different examples of hybrid convergences to give you a sense of the different messages made possible in each:
The first of these clips, "Megalomaniac" by Incubus, comments on self-exhaltation and destructive behavior in the interplay between song and history, the second plays at the intersection between racial politics and musical genre, between contemporary hip-hip and the Beatles in "The Grey Album" by Dangermouse, and the third clip points to the destruction of the environment by playing with the effects of design technology in the construction of story in Coldplay's "Don't Panic."
Although critics have used the term “video clip literature” to define the structural stylistics of GenX texts, they have only done so on a theoretical level, usually centering their comments on the negative, illogical, and emptying qualities of a particular narrative. The synesthetic complexity of music video clips is often denied value through the use of words like the downgrading of the plot and the characterization of the medium’s exposition as free-floating, decentered, fragmented, anti-narrative and lacking substance. In the field of Hispanism, for example, Carter Smith suggested that Mañas himself sensed that “his MTV-like prose style [threatened] to become as banal as MTV itself” (10). My first and main goal here today is to undermine some of the stereotypes that a mere theoretical examination of music videos has carried into the field of literary criticism. I would like to suggest that a better understanding of the effects of the medium’s strategies through first-hand examples allows us to value GenX novels from radically, even academically rebellious, angles.
In 1981 in the US and in 1987 in Spain, Generation X’ers proclaimed: “I want my MTV!” With this exclamation they rejected monolithic cable network television for music videos’ complex audiovisual layers that motioned to the increasing convergence, hybridization, and mixing of media as new, and some would say rebellious sites of storytelling. In the first chapter. of her book, Experiencing Music Videos, Carol Vernallis presents the two interpretations largely attributed to music video clips. On one hand, critics read them as narrative constructs that function similar to television or film. On the other hand, critics, especially literary critics, viewed clips as an essentially anti-narrative medium, “a kind of postmodern pastiche that actually gains energy from defying narrative conventions” (Vernallis 3). Music videos present a large range of both of these beliefs, but, as you know, most of them pertain to the non-narrative genre. This is because videos follow a song’s cyclical form and they consider a topic rather than enact a topic in linear fashion (Vernallis 4). In addition, music video, as a rapid multimedia genre, does not translate film narrative techniques directly, but presents readers with three stories simultaneously in one very short time and space.
What we find in music videos, then is that sound, image, and narrative each possess their “own language with regard to time, space, narrativity, activity, and affect” (Vernallis 13) and they shift in relation to one another. These three dimensions do not usually merge or move parallel but might play against or with one another to emphasize a chord, a color, or a feeling; they might move into the background or the foreground, they might harmoniously dissolve in a variety of spaces and times, or they might contradict each other and create a disheveled feeling of textured unrest and defiance.
This versatility allows music videos to become an inherently hybrid medium. Not only does this hybridity concern the interplay of the visual, verbal and textual, but the way in which they can cross traditional boundaries and create unexpected, unusual, and powerful messages. This remixing capacity ultimately undermines the image of this supposedly “empty” popular cultural phenomenon for one that allows for significant and self-conscious social and political content, that, in some instances can even lead to political action-- as when President Obama, during the campaign, appropriated the gesture of “brushing off” his shoulder from hip hop artist Jay-Z’s video called “Dirt Off your shoulders.”
I think it is worth pausing and stressing the potential of hybridity in music videos . Much of music videos power comes from the connections that are made between disparate elements and the spaces that are left blank in between each image—what many consider a source of confusion and decenteredness. Therefore, the next clip I want to show you presents four different examples of hybrid convergences to give you a sense of the different messages made possible in each:
The first of these clips, "Megalomaniac" by Incubus, comments on self-exhaltation and destructive behavior in the interplay between song and history, the second plays at the intersection between racial politics and musical genre, between contemporary hip-hip and the Beatles in "The Grey Album" by Dangermouse, and the third clip points to the destruction of the environment by playing with the effects of design technology in the construction of story in Coldplay's "Don't Panic."
Apart from hybridity, these are also good presentations of what critics talk about when they say that something is “cut like music video” or they refer to “MTV style editing” because they usually refer to quick cutting and editing that disrupts, confuses, and leaves the viewers and listeners with more questions than answers. Edits come much faster in clips than in films, they are often disjunctive, and they serve as a rhythmic basis for the song; as such music videos in general are discontinuous, time unfolds unpredictably and without clear reference points; space is revealed slowly and incompletely, a character’s personality, goals and desires are only hinted at but never fully disclosed, and actions are incomplete.
The effects of MTV editing warrants a peek back in history when music videos were conceived as advertisements set in motion, and for marketing purposes alone, they gained “from holding back information [and] confronting the viewer with ambiguous or unclear depictions—if there was a story, it existed only in the dynamic relation between the song and the image as they unfolded in time” (4).
It is this unfolding that was meant to take on rebellious proportions, allowing teens to identify with new signifying practices steeped in speed and meant to confuse their elders while creating a “secret” signifying system steeped in the rapid succession of visual, aural and textual cultural referents.
If we compare the dynamic strategies of music videos to the novel Héroes, we can recognize that our own frustrations in reading the novel--my frustration in reading this novel—was undoubtedly related to my traditional need for linear, clear and connected prose. But by understanding the inner working of music videos, I have come to recognize that the protagonist escapes into a realm that is determined by a new set of laws and freedoms.
Music video clips give us a technological basis from which to make sense of a novel that deals with personal time and space in ways that appear illogical and emptying. By understanding the structural dynamics at play in music videos, especially as they have evolved in the digital age, we literary critics can make better sense of the narrative remixings at play in other GenX novels as well. For example, each mini chapter in Héroes works like a vignette, connected yet separate from the life of the narrator who seems to be falling in and out of dreams and memories in a series of temporal and spatial overlappings. The novel’s disjointed narrative style functions to erase conventional narrative expectations from the very first moment: it disrupts and interrelates the lyrical with the mundane, questions with statements, the aural with the visual, the first with the second and third persons, space and time, reality and dream, the past and the present…
A closer look shows that the novel shifts from spaces marked by society and related to the past, spaces marked by the individual and the present, and those determined by rock, myth, dream, and hope and representing the future. In other words, space and time are interrelated in the reformulation of the self in story in a way that makes sense if we look at the dynamics of music videos. Music videos “can heighten our awareness to the fact that lived time can be personal and subjective, and different from the rhythms of the environment and that of other people” (Vernallis 129). In other words, different temporal structures can take place simultaneously and subjectively. One excellent example of this temporal multidimensionality may be found in Eminem’s video clip “Guilty Conscience” in which an individual is about to entertain a criminal act, the camera stops his motion and Eminem and Dr. Dre sing to opposing morals and values.
It is this unfolding that was meant to take on rebellious proportions, allowing teens to identify with new signifying practices steeped in speed and meant to confuse their elders while creating a “secret” signifying system steeped in the rapid succession of visual, aural and textual cultural referents.
If we compare the dynamic strategies of music videos to the novel Héroes, we can recognize that our own frustrations in reading the novel--my frustration in reading this novel—was undoubtedly related to my traditional need for linear, clear and connected prose. But by understanding the inner working of music videos, I have come to recognize that the protagonist escapes into a realm that is determined by a new set of laws and freedoms.
Music video clips give us a technological basis from which to make sense of a novel that deals with personal time and space in ways that appear illogical and emptying. By understanding the structural dynamics at play in music videos, especially as they have evolved in the digital age, we literary critics can make better sense of the narrative remixings at play in other GenX novels as well. For example, each mini chapter in Héroes works like a vignette, connected yet separate from the life of the narrator who seems to be falling in and out of dreams and memories in a series of temporal and spatial overlappings. The novel’s disjointed narrative style functions to erase conventional narrative expectations from the very first moment: it disrupts and interrelates the lyrical with the mundane, questions with statements, the aural with the visual, the first with the second and third persons, space and time, reality and dream, the past and the present…
A closer look shows that the novel shifts from spaces marked by society and related to the past, spaces marked by the individual and the present, and those determined by rock, myth, dream, and hope and representing the future. In other words, space and time are interrelated in the reformulation of the self in story in a way that makes sense if we look at the dynamics of music videos. Music videos “can heighten our awareness to the fact that lived time can be personal and subjective, and different from the rhythms of the environment and that of other people” (Vernallis 129). In other words, different temporal structures can take place simultaneously and subjectively. One excellent example of this temporal multidimensionality may be found in Eminem’s video clip “Guilty Conscience” in which an individual is about to entertain a criminal act, the camera stops his motion and Eminem and Dr. Dre sing to opposing morals and values.
The clip literally stops the storyline and inserts opposing narratives while the video and its song continue. This multi-temporality evokes Vernallis’s observation that each medium can suggest different types of time, and each can undercut, put into question, or enhance the temporality of another medium (14). Similarly, in Héroes, the past, present and future are marked by different perceptions of time and space that rarely converge harmoniously, but rather shift and challenge each other’s storylines in palpable ways.
Space can also be presented in seemingly contradictory ways in music videos. PP Although the protagonist of Héroes locks himself into a small interior room, he is able to “wake up inside” and explore a variety of constantly changing exterior spaces through references to dreams, rock and roll songs and artists. Moreover, by shifting from one virtual place to another, he seems to acquire a better sense of personal direction. Similarly, one of music videos greatest pleasures is its ability to extend our sense of inside/outside beyond that of concrete physical boundaries and its capacity to guide us through an unfolding of multiple times and spaces. (Vernallis 111) This dychotomy is most beautifully expressed in this video by Oren Lavie called “Her morning elegance”:
Héroes constructs a narrative out of the layering of spaces and times, voices and bodies. Some scenes remain still and silent, others speed up and scream in disgust. Some scenes are riddled with questions, others with painful memories. And although the protagonist, as we readers, may appear lost in storyspace, his confinement allows him to travel in multiple spaces at once. The narrator remixes songs and memories, leaving blanks along the way, but ultimately providing his audience with a powerful convergence of voices and images, times and spaces. So, as to your question, Bob—what is the aesthetic value of GenX literature?--I would like to suggest that the structural dynamics of music video clips may provide us with an answer remixed for the digital age.
Works Cited
Smith, Carter E. “Social Criticism or Banal Imitation: A Critique of the Neorealist Novel Apropos the Works of José Angel Mañas.” Dec. 9th 2008.http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v12/smith.htm
Loriga, Ray. Héroes. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1993.
Navarro Martínez, Eva. La novela de la Generación X. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2008.
Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing Music Videos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
What Is Video-Clip Literature? Aesthetic Rebellion in Héroes by Ray Loriga by Christine Henseler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
[i] See “La generación Nocilla y el afterpop piden paso. Nacidos a partir de 1970. Trasgresores. Bloggers. Hibridan los géneros literarios” by Nuria Azancot.
For further reading:
Añover, Veronica. “Feminismo y literatura en la España del nuevo milenio: Encuentro con Lucía Etxebarria.” Letras Peninsulares 17.1 (Spring 2004): 181-92.
Arbilla, Iñaki. “Caminando por el lado de la literatura salvaje.” El Planeta June 1998: n.p.
Ballesteros, Isolina. "Juventudes problemáticas en el cine de los ochenta y noventa: comportamientos generacionales y globales en la era de la indiferencia". Cine (Ins)Urgente: Textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista. Madrid: Fundamentos, 2001. 233-270.
Begin, Paul. “The Pistols Strike Again! On the Function of Punk in the Peninsular ‘Generation X’
Fiction of Ray Loriga and Benjamín Prado.” Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular
Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture. Ed. Christine Henseler and Randolph Pope. Nashville:
Vanderbilt UP, 2007. 15-33.
Bengoa, María. “Las descaradas chicas Etxebarria.” El Correo Español 21 Apr. 1999: 56
....="Borrón y traje nuevo: Ray Loriga bucea en la pérdida de la memoria en su nueva novela." La Razón 27 Feb. 1999: 17.
Bourland Ross, Catherine. “Sex, Drugs and Violence in Lucía Etxebarría’s Amor, curiosidad,
prozac y dudas.” Ed. Alain-Philippe Duand and Naomi Mandel, eds. New York: Continuum,
2008. 153-62.
Colmeiro, José F. “En busca de la Generación X: ¿heroes por un día o una nueva generación perdida?
España Contemporánea 14.1 (2001): 7-26.
Dalmau, Miguel. ‘Voces de una conciencia rockera.” El Mundo 26 Nov. 1993: n.p.
Dorca, Toni. “Joven narrativa en la España de los noventa: la generación X.” Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos 31 (1997): 309-24.
“Drogas, Sexo, Y Un Dictador Muerto: 1978 on Vinyl in Spain.” March 25, 2009
<http://www.shit-fi.com/Articles/Spain1978/Spain1978.htm>
Echevarría, Ignacio. “Un artista del ‘rocanrollo’: el cuaderno de canciones de Ray Loriga.” Babelia 27 Nov. (1993): 11.
“El hombe que inventó Manhatten.” Clubcultura March 28, 2009. <http://www.clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/rayloriga/>
“El problema de las drogas en España.” August 1st, 2008. < http://www.romance-languages.pomona.edu/coffey/newspain/2004Projects/Pat_Andrew_Bobback/Drogas.htm>
Ernst, Thomas. Popliteratur. Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 2001.
Estafanía, Joaquín. “La marcha larga” El País Domingo 3/5/1998 July 30th, 2008 <hhtp://www.vespito.net/historia/franco/estft.html>
Estrada, Isabel. “Victimismo y violencia en la ficción de la Generación X: Matando dinosaurios con tirachinas de Pedro Maestre.” Ciberletras 6 (2002).
Everly, Kathryn. “Beauty and Death as Simulacra in Ray Loriga’s Caídos del cielo and El hombre
que inventó Manhatten.” Novels of the Contemporary Extreme. Ed. Alain-Philippe Durand
and Naomi Mandel, eds. New York: Continuum, 2008. 143-52.
---. History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representations of Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel. Purdue University Press, 2010.
Fernández Porta, Eloy. Afterpop: la literatura de la implosión mediática. Córdoba: Berenice, 2007.
Porta, Eloy Fernández, and Vicente Muñoz Álvarez. Golpes: Ficciones de la crueldad social.
Barcelona: DVD Ediciones, 2004
"Fotos de una huida." Ideal 6 May 1995: n.p.
Fouz-Hernández, Santiago. "Generación X? Spanish Urban Youth Culture at the End of the Century in Mañas's/Armendáriz's Historias del Kronen." Romance Studies 18.1 (2000): 83-98.
Galán Lorés, Carlos. “El estado de la cuestión." Insula 525 (1990): 10.
Gallero Díaz, José Luis. Sólo se vive una vez. Madrid: Ardora Ediciones, 1991.
Gavela, Yvonne. “Vértigo, violencia e imagen española de los noventa: novela y cine.” Diss. Penn State Univ. (2004).
Goytisolo, Luis. Mzungo. Madrid: Mondadori, 1996.
Graham, Helen, and Jo Labanyi, “Culture and Modernity: The Case of Spain.” Spanish Cultural Studies:
An Introduction. Ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 1-20.
Grasa, Ismael. De madrid al cielo. Madrid: Anagama.1994
Gullón, Germán. “Cómo se lee una novela de la última generación (apartado X).” Insula 58-90 (1996): 31-33.
---. “El miedo al presente como materia novelable.” Insula 634 (Oct 1999): 15.
---. “Historias del Kronen. Comentario. La novela neorealist de José Angel Mañas en el panorama
novelístico española.” Historias del Kronen. Barcelona: Destino, 1994. V-XXXII.
---. “La novela multimediática: Ciudad rayada, de José Ángel Mañas.” Ínsula 625-626 (1999): 33-34.
---. “La novela neorealist (o de la generación X) Novela española contemporánea < http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portal/nec/ptercernivel.jsp?conten=historia&pagina=historia2.
jsp&tit3=La+novela+neorrealista+(o+de+la+generaci%26oacute%3Bn+X)>
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1987
Henseler, Christine, and Randolph Pope. Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film,
and Rock Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2007.
Ingenschay, Dieter. “A dónde se han ido las abejas? Imágenes de Madrid (antes y) después de La
Colmena. Revista de Filología Románica III (2002): 131-51.
Izquierdo, José María. “Narradores españoles novísimos de los años noventa.” Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos 35.2 (2001): 293-308.
Kinder, Marsha. “Music Video and the Spectator: Television, Ideology and Dream.” Film Quartely
38:1 (1984): 2-15.
---. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New
York: Methuen, 1987.
Klodt, Jason E. “’Nada de nada de nada de nada’: Ray Loriga and the Paradox of Spain’s Generation
X.” Tropos 27 (2001): 42-54.
---.“Strangers in a Strange House: Spanish Youth, Urban Dystopia, and Care Santos’s Okupada.”
4/23/08 www.letrashispanas.unlv.edu/Vol4iss2/KlodtF07.html
“La generación de los mil euros.” El País 31 July, 2008.
Longhurst, Alex. “Culture and Development: The Impact of 1960s ‘desarrollismo’.” Contemporary
Spanish Cultural Studies. Ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2000. 17-28.
López Merino, Juan Miguel. “Sobre la presencia de Roger Wolfe en la poesía española (1990-2000)
y revisión del marbete “realismo sucio.” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios
<http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero31/rogwolfe.html>
Loriga, Ray. El hombre que inventó Manhattan. Barcelona: El Aleph, 2004
---. Héroes. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1993.
---. La pistola de mi hermano. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1995.
---. Tokio ya no nos quiere. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1999.
Luis Martín-Cabrera. “Apocolypses Now: The End of Spanish Literature? Reading Payasos en la
lavadora as Critical Parody.” Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film,
and Rock Culture. Ed. Christine Henseler and Randolph Pope. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2007.
78-96.
Machado, José. A dos ruedas. Madrid: Espasa, 1996.
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---. Hay una guerra,
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Añover, Veronica. “Feminismo y literatura en la España del nuevo milenio: Encuentro con Lucía Etxebarria.” Letras Peninsulares 17.1 (Spring 2004): 181-92.
Arbilla, Iñaki. “Caminando por el lado de la literatura salvaje.” El Planeta June 1998: n.p.
Ballesteros, Isolina. "Juventudes problemáticas en el cine de los ochenta y noventa: comportamientos generacionales y globales en la era de la indiferencia". Cine (Ins)Urgente: Textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista. Madrid: Fundamentos, 2001. 233-270.
Begin, Paul. “The Pistols Strike Again! On the Function of Punk in the Peninsular ‘Generation X’
Fiction of Ray Loriga and Benjamín Prado.” Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular
Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture. Ed. Christine Henseler and Randolph Pope. Nashville:
Vanderbilt UP, 2007. 15-33.
Bengoa, María. “Las descaradas chicas Etxebarria.” El Correo Español 21 Apr. 1999: 56
....="Borrón y traje nuevo: Ray Loriga bucea en la pérdida de la memoria en su nueva novela." La Razón 27 Feb. 1999: 17.
Bourland Ross, Catherine. “Sex, Drugs and Violence in Lucía Etxebarría’s Amor, curiosidad,
prozac y dudas.” Ed. Alain-Philippe Duand and Naomi Mandel, eds. New York: Continuum,
2008. 153-62.
Colmeiro, José F. “En busca de la Generación X: ¿heroes por un día o una nueva generación perdida?
España Contemporánea 14.1 (2001): 7-26.
Dalmau, Miguel. ‘Voces de una conciencia rockera.” El Mundo 26 Nov. 1993: n.p.
Dorca, Toni. “Joven narrativa en la España de los noventa: la generación X.” Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos 31 (1997): 309-24.
“Drogas, Sexo, Y Un Dictador Muerto: 1978 on Vinyl in Spain.” March 25, 2009
<http://www.shit-fi.com/Articles/Spain1978/Spain1978.htm>
Echevarría, Ignacio. “Un artista del ‘rocanrollo’: el cuaderno de canciones de Ray Loriga.” Babelia 27 Nov. (1993): 11.
“El hombe que inventó Manhatten.” Clubcultura March 28, 2009. <http://www.clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/rayloriga/>
“El problema de las drogas en España.” August 1st, 2008. < http://www.romance-languages.pomona.edu/coffey/newspain/2004Projects/Pat_Andrew_Bobback/Drogas.htm>
Ernst, Thomas. Popliteratur. Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 2001.
Estafanía, Joaquín. “La marcha larga” El País Domingo 3/5/1998 July 30th, 2008 <hhtp://www.vespito.net/historia/franco/estft.html>
Estrada, Isabel. “Victimismo y violencia en la ficción de la Generación X: Matando dinosaurios con tirachinas de Pedro Maestre.” Ciberletras 6 (2002).
Everly, Kathryn. “Beauty and Death as Simulacra in Ray Loriga’s Caídos del cielo and El hombre
que inventó Manhatten.” Novels of the Contemporary Extreme. Ed. Alain-Philippe Durand
and Naomi Mandel, eds. New York: Continuum, 2008. 143-52.
---. History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representations of Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel. Purdue University Press, 2010.
Fernández Porta, Eloy. Afterpop: la literatura de la implosión mediática. Córdoba: Berenice, 2007.
Porta, Eloy Fernández, and Vicente Muñoz Álvarez. Golpes: Ficciones de la crueldad social.
Barcelona: DVD Ediciones, 2004
"Fotos de una huida." Ideal 6 May 1995: n.p.
Fouz-Hernández, Santiago. "Generación X? Spanish Urban Youth Culture at the End of the Century in Mañas's/Armendáriz's Historias del Kronen." Romance Studies 18.1 (2000): 83-98.
Galán Lorés, Carlos. “El estado de la cuestión." Insula 525 (1990): 10.
Gallero Díaz, José Luis. Sólo se vive una vez. Madrid: Ardora Ediciones, 1991.
Gavela, Yvonne. “Vértigo, violencia e imagen española de los noventa: novela y cine.” Diss. Penn State Univ. (2004).
Goytisolo, Luis. Mzungo. Madrid: Mondadori, 1996.
Graham, Helen, and Jo Labanyi, “Culture and Modernity: The Case of Spain.” Spanish Cultural Studies:
An Introduction. Ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 1-20.
Grasa, Ismael. De madrid al cielo. Madrid: Anagama.1994
Gullón, Germán. “Cómo se lee una novela de la última generación (apartado X).” Insula 58-90 (1996): 31-33.
---. “El miedo al presente como materia novelable.” Insula 634 (Oct 1999): 15.
---. “Historias del Kronen. Comentario. La novela neorealist de José Angel Mañas en el panorama
novelístico española.” Historias del Kronen. Barcelona: Destino, 1994. V-XXXII.
---. “La novela multimediática: Ciudad rayada, de José Ángel Mañas.” Ínsula 625-626 (1999): 33-34.
---. “La novela neorealist (o de la generación X) Novela española contemporánea < http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portal/nec/ptercernivel.jsp?conten=historia&pagina=historia2.
jsp&tit3=La+novela+neorrealista+(o+de+la+generaci%26oacute%3Bn+X)>
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1987
Henseler, Christine, and Randolph Pope. Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film,
and Rock Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2007.
Ingenschay, Dieter. “A dónde se han ido las abejas? Imágenes de Madrid (antes y) después de La
Colmena. Revista de Filología Románica III (2002): 131-51.
Izquierdo, José María. “Narradores españoles novísimos de los años noventa.” Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos 35.2 (2001): 293-308.
Kinder, Marsha. “Music Video and the Spectator: Television, Ideology and Dream.” Film Quartely
38:1 (1984): 2-15.
---. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New
York: Methuen, 1987.
Klodt, Jason E. “’Nada de nada de nada de nada’: Ray Loriga and the Paradox of Spain’s Generation
X.” Tropos 27 (2001): 42-54.
---.“Strangers in a Strange House: Spanish Youth, Urban Dystopia, and Care Santos’s Okupada.”
4/23/08 www.letrashispanas.unlv.edu/Vol4iss2/KlodtF07.html
“La generación de los mil euros.” El País 31 July, 2008.
Longhurst, Alex. “Culture and Development: The Impact of 1960s ‘desarrollismo’.” Contemporary
Spanish Cultural Studies. Ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2000. 17-28.
López Merino, Juan Miguel. “Sobre la presencia de Roger Wolfe en la poesía española (1990-2000)
y revisión del marbete “realismo sucio.” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios
<http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero31/rogwolfe.html>
Loriga, Ray. El hombre que inventó Manhattan. Barcelona: El Aleph, 2004
---. Héroes. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1993.
---. La pistola de mi hermano. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1995.
---. Tokio ya no nos quiere. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1999.
Luis Martín-Cabrera. “Apocolypses Now: The End of Spanish Literature? Reading Payasos en la
lavadora as Critical Parody.” Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film,
and Rock Culture. Ed. Christine Henseler and Randolph Pope. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2007.
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