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Article Excerpt
The road story, regardless of its embodiment in film or fiction, is a distinctive American genre embracing "the nation's frontier ethos" (Cohan and Hark 1) and the fascination with mobility anchored in the national psyche. Indeed, mobility lies behind most versions of the myths that have shaped the construction of the modern American nation, with a collective journey as its genesis. In this sense, it is not surprising that the road has been a central image and theme in American culture, with a wide corpus of road novels and movies. The road symbolizes "American-ness," since it represents the frontier, and it is taken as a pervasive image of the American Dream. Consequently, the genre has received significant critical attention in the academic sphere of the United States. In the context of peninsular studies, however, there is a dearth of research on road narratives, a void that may be attributable to their lack of cultivation in Spain. This essay intends to fill such a gap by addressing recent explorations into this genre by contemporary Spanish writers. First of all, I will examine the origins of the genre and the reasons behind its late development in the Iberian artistic arena. Secondly, I will tackle the taxonomic difficulties associated with the study of this genre due to its hybrid nature as an amalgamation of several generic models. Finally, in the larger section of the essay I will discuss some of the main traits of road narratives in Spain, putting emphasis on the contradictory cultural politics at stage in these novels.
The Pre-history of the Spanish Road Narrative
The history of Western civilization abounds in narratives of mobility and displacement, be those stories related to exile, pilgrimage, migration, nomadism or any other ramification of the "enduring metaphorical power of wandering in the fantasy life and social repertory of the West" (Durham Peters 18). A compelling example of this is the exodus that lies behind the foundation of ancient Israel. As well as being ah integral part of the substratum of civilizations and national histories, the voyage is a universal device that structures the very act of narration. As Leo Marx states, the journey "as the organizing principle for a narrative is almost as old as storytelling itself" (13). This motif provides a framework with steps highly suitable to delineate the stages of a story. In fact, we can trace back a time-honored tradition of fictional journeys in Western literature that echoes the trend of society as a whole. Departing from Homer's Odyssey, the pattern develops through classics such as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), or Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), to comprise a wide range of variations and sub-types that have evolved until the present time. In Spain, this long tradition of journey narratives that serve as precursors of the genre includes emblematic works from El lazarillo de Tormes to Don Quijote (1605), from the "novela bizantina" to nineteenth-century travel novels, and it continues during the twentieth century with novels such as Pío Baroja's Camino de perfección (1902) or later Camilo José Cela's Viaje a la Alcarria (1946). A common feature of all these "trip books" is the quest motif accompanied, very often, by a cultural critique or a social commentary.
The theme of the quest journey becomes highly mechanized during the twentieth century with the spread of motorcycles and automobiles. The availability of motorized means of transportation redefines the journey tale in a drastic way, since it inspires the distinctive sub-category of the "road genre." Rapid motion further elaborates the paradigm and appends supplementary plot options. The thematic and structural possibilities made accessible to narrators of travel adventures by mass car culture are especially patent in the realm of film. An explanation for this singular car-film bond may be found in the fact that both cars and films flourished as industries around the same time, in the late 1920s, and soon became consumer commodities (Hey 194), as well as cultural icons that preserve the vigorous myth of desire fulfilled by the individual consumer. Therefore, though the car is incorporated in twentieth-century road novels, it is in movies that the mechanized road genre achieves its maximum degree of realization. Moreover, not only does the genre fully prosper in film, but it blooms within American cinema. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark claim that the "road movie is, in this regard, like the musical or the Western, a Hollywood genre that catches peculiarly American dreams, tensions, and anxieties, even when imported by the motion picture industries of other nations" (2).
This technological transformation of the journey narratives did not take effect in the same manner in Spain. The automobile appeared in the Spanish vanguard novel of the 1920s and the 1930s in works by authors such as Benjamín Jarnés, Antonio Espina, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Andrés Carranque de los Ríos, and Pedro Salinas, among others. These authors incorporate the car in their narratives as a symbol of modernity, and as ah effective ally to filter new ways of representing reality attempted with their vanguard novel. (2) However, historical circumstances prevented a further consolidation of the automobile in peninsular culture and the development of the road story. First of all, the fraticidal civil war paralyzed the incipient automobile industry and its artistic representation. Mass automobile culture in Spain arrived later compared to other Western countries. It was not until the late 1950s that the car industry started to burgeon in Spain, as a consequence of the tardy modernization and the Francoist tactic of autarky. (3) After the Civil War, the victorious rebel government devised a slow industrialization process relying solely on the country's assets, which inevitably prevented the country from acquiring technological innovations and, for that reason, delayed the development of certain industries. Furthermore, narratives that highlight motion and displacement were not well-received in a cultural environment dominated by the immobility promoted by the Francoist regime. Statism and eternal values were imposed from above, thus hampering the cultivation of a narrative genre that frequently gives prominence to a social critique of fossilized values.
Mobility constituted a menace to the concept of rural society imagined by Franco, who idealized an agrarian nation based on myths of rural Castilla, and initially tried to impede the migration of peasants to urban areas. However, the shortage of agrarian resources, the accelerated transformation of economic structures in the 1960s, and the triumph of consumer culture caused the migratory waves of the rural population to large metropolitan centers--mainly Madrid and Barcelona--in search of a wealthier life. As Tajana Pavlovid has noted, this new mobility, motivated by Spain's adjustment to a capitalist economy and the reforms of the technocrats, transformed Spanish cultural production, which also became more mobile (222). This social transportation was reflected in numerous novels and films that addressed the move from country to city and the tensions provoked by the consequent conflict of values. The popularity of these stories was especially noteworthy in the sphere of film with the thriving of the subgenre of paleto cinema, which Nathan Richardson defines as "comedies of backward rural immigrants in the city" (21). Yet, despite having a wide corpus of artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s dealing with social mobility, none of these works are strictly part of the road genre. This is because these narratives of displacement and immigration focus on the destination spaces rather than on the process of getting to those landing places. What is more, the trip in these texts is typically made by train, which effectively cancels the possibility of the driving adventure. (4)
The lack of road narratives set apart Spanish cultural production from other national paradigms that developed, especially in the realm of film, a body of road stories. While...
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