"Todos los que viven allí están perturbados": the Spanish academic abroad in Marías and Muñoz Molina

The Spanish protagonist of Javier Marías's novel Todas las almas, a visiting professor at Oxford University, feels uncomfortable in his academic robes. Not because they of their presumptuousness, but because he fears that Oxford's academic robes might seem anything but academic when worn by a Spaniard. "Sobre mi", he confesses, "veía a veces un sospechoso y desagradable parecido con la ridícula y por fortuna abolida capa típica de mi país" (80). This cape, we know, was attacked by Enlightenment-era proponents of the Europeanization of a "backward" Spain. In Todas las almas, the cape serves as a fitting reminder of Spain's past isolation for a modern Spanish academic at one of Britain's most prestigious institutions. In Todas las almas and in Muñoz Molina's short novel Carlota Fainberg, Spanish identity and difference are confronted in the context of an increasingly globalized academic market, a market dominated by British and, especially, American institutions. Both novels' Spanish protagonists negotiate their roles in Anglo-Saxon academic communities on a largely personal or internal level. For Carlota's Claudio, this process involves eager assimilation into American academic culture and a rejection of Spanish traits he sees as anathema to success in the "rational" American environment. Claudio's counterpart in Todas las almas conceives of a superior Spanish identity in which British academic pompousness is equated with buffoonery and Spaniards, in spite of their own imperial past, enjoy both the "natural" intuitiveness of non-Westerners and the moral high ground over Western societies whose imperial hegemony is more recent in world memory. Both novels confront the Black Legend, Spanish Regenerationist philosophy, and the global role of Spain in the age of the European Union. I propose a reading of Todas las almas and Carlota Fainberg in which theories of Spanish difference intersect with Spanish perceptions of American and British cultures. In particular, I will address the protagonists' conceptualizations of American and British societies as "dominant" in opposition to a Spanish "minority", a millennium-era reinterpretation of the Spanish inferiority complex that continues to portray Spain as a nation at the margins of global discourses. Most importantly, I will contrast Muñoz Molina and Marías's protagonists' self-identification strategies in the face of these "dominant" academic cultures and attempt to situate their respective value judgments with respect to Spain's historic relationship with the English-speaking world. My theoretical approach includes an analysis of translation and bilingualism in the novels as well as an interpretation of the ethnic constructions inherent in each.

Catherine Simpson