Battered Bodies and Inadequate Meanings: Violence and ...and Inadequate Meanings: Violence and Disenchantment in Juan José Millás’s Visión del ahogado Brad Epps is Professor of

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001

Battered Bodiesand Inadequate Meanings:Violence and Disenchantmentin Juan José Millás’sVisión del ahogadoBrad Epps is Professor of Ro-mance Literatures at Har-vard University. He is the au-thor of Significant Violence:Oppression and Resistancein the Narrative of JuanGoytisolo (Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1996) and is cur-rently working on two book-length projects, one tenta-tively titled Daring to Write,on Homosexuality in His-panic Culture, and anotheron Modern Catalan culture.He has published extensivelyon Spanish, Latin American,and Catalan literature aswell as on film, immigration,urbanism, and queer theory.

For Mario Santana, my timely friend

Desde una perfecta adecuación con la realidad, uno haráotras cosas, pero no escribirá.—Juan José Millás

An Inadequate Introduction

It is treacherous, no doubt, to take a literary text as themeasure of a society: as treacherous, if not more so, astaking a family as the measure of a nation. Treachery,

moreover, is scarcely gainsaid by invoking a social text tomatch a literary text or national sites to go with domesticsites. Such rhetorical plays, involving parallelisms and analo-gies, matches, correspondences, marriages, concordances, andother relations, are fairly standard fare for a wide range ofrealist-inspired, empirically oriented, mimetically fashionedendeavors; but they persist even in many of the most linguis-tically attuned endeavors as well. These rhetorical plays, how-ever, are perhaps at their most intense when one endeavormeets another, when realism, understood broadly, recognizesits own language, or rhetoric. Contemporary cultural cri-tique, including cultural studies, is a case in point; for withits studied skepticism, its semiotic sophistication, and its con-textual sensitivity, it grapples with nothing less than the meet-ing of rhetoric and reality and, within that, with the prob-lem of adequation. It seeks, that is, to provide an adequatereading of social, historical, and political reality even as itdisputes the very viability of an adequate reading (in part

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cratic affirmation,” connoting respectively,for him, mere descriptive asepsis, militantirritation, or dogged optimism (11). All ofthese markers, to varying degrees and tovarying ends, figure in my reading of(in)adequation for the not so simple reasonthat, as I have already indicated, no onemarker is adequate to the diversity, let alonethe totality, of my object of critique.

A somewhat awkward, erudite term,“adequation” ‘adecuación’ appears a num-ber of times in Millás’s text, almost alwaysin introspective or reflective passages. Forexample, towards the beginning of the text,the narrator states that “la adecuación deJulia (the main female character) con elmundo resultaba natural y perfecta” (18).But this “natural and perfect” adequationis here a function of oblivion, of the ab-sence of memory. A bit later, the narratorspeaks of Jorge’s (one of the two main malecharacters) “adecuación con las cosas” (25).In this case, adequation is presented as afunction of sadness and internalized prohi-bition or repression. Later still, the narra-tor, adopting a sort of free indirect discourse,speaks of yet another instance of “adequa-tion,” or rather “inadequation,” with respectto the third main character, Luis, “ElVitaminas” (49-50).1 Here, the accent fallsmore explicitly on inadequation, with timeitself presented as an inadequate measureof sickness as well as of some forms of workand language. All three main characters areimplicated, then, in the problem of(in)adequation. And a problem it is indeed.For all three instances of adequation, dif-ferent as one is from the other, involveoblivion or repression or illness, that is tosay, either a forgetting of the misery of his-tory or a sad, sick accommodation or resig-nation to it. Whether taken together or sepa-rately, these instances of adequation are far

because it reads reality as susceptible onlyto readings, in the plural). Put a bit differ-ently, it problematizes the relations betweenrhetoric and reality, words and things, textsand societies, families and nations, even asit sustains, extends, and alters them. Rackedwith paradox, cultural critique is treacher-ous because, even though it often debunksliterary critique, it indicates, howeverambivalently, that it too can never be com-pletely adequate.

Flirting with treachery, I want to takea literary text, Juan José Millás’s Visión delahogado (Vision of the Drowned Man), as aparticularly inadequate measure of contem-porary Spanish society. Paying special at-tention to the avatars of violence, I want toconsider how Millás’s text, published in1977, reflects, represents, or corresponds toa moment in Spanish cultural historymarked by the transition from dictatorshipto democracy and characterized by changeas well as continuity, expectation as well asfrustration. I want to do so, furthermore,in recognition of the general inadequacy ofsuch concepts as reflection, representation,and correspondence, many of which arecrucial, in turn, to the concept of democ-racy. Interestingly, Millás’s text makes onlyweak reference to the Spanish political situ-ation—democratic, dictatorial, or other-wise—and is more explicitly concerned withthe breakdown of reference as such, the lossof stable foundations, and the collapse ofabsolute truth: in short, with the crisis ofadequation. And yet, as I will be arguing,the crisis of adequation bears not only ondemocracy, but also on what has come tobe known, in Spain and elsewhere, as (the)disenchantment, el desencanto. José-CarlosMainer has noted the lability, indeed thesubjectivity, of such epistemic markers as“transition,” “disenchantment,” and “demo-

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from easy; but that may be just the point.Adequation, particularly an adequation thatis “natural and perfect,” may be possible,sad to say, only through an act of oblivion,prohibition, or repression, through a kindof (self )-violence. I will return to all of thisin greater detail, but for the moment suf-fice it to say that in Millás’s text adequa-tion—its successes and failures, its crises andproblems, its bearings on democracy anddisenchantment—is bound up in violence,both symbolic and real. What is more, al-though the narrator presents adequation assomething personal (implicating Julia,Jorge, and Luis), it is also deeply political,implicating the “things” of the world. Theabsence of direct political meaning does notpreclude its indirect presence, quite the con-trary.

In a certain sense, adequation func-tions as a democratic concept, bespeakingequality, equivalence, and equalization (Lat.adaequatus, past participle of adaequare, toequalize; aequus, equal). In a certain sense:for in another sense, adequation functionsas a decidedly less than democratic concept,bespeaking an equality less free than forced.I am referring, of course, to the principle ofadequation effectively deployed by theFrancoist state, where equality, and for thatmatter freedom, continued to be importantsignifiers, whatever the reality thereby sig-nified. Of course, if adequation can bespeaka totalitarian equalization, inadequation,once put into play sociopolitically, does notnecessarily bespeak inequality or the non-viability of democratic representation. Ad-equation and inadequation are thus not re-lated in a stable, mutually opposing man-ner, one always “better” or “worse” than theother; instead, they are related ambivalently.In English, in fact, adequation and adequacyare the stuff of deconstructionist dreams:

“adequate” means both “satisfactory andsuitable” and “barely satisfactory or suffi-cient.” And although “adequate” does notcorrespond neatly to “adecuado,” althoughone word is not a truly adequate transla-tion—or is only an adequate translation—of the other, ambivalence attends “(in)ade-cuación” as well. As Millás’s text indicates,it is an ambivalence of ethical and politicaldimensions, an ambivalence that may betreacherous, but that is not necessarily dev-astating, and that may even be quite prom-ising. To put it more clearly (or lessambivalently), the ambivalence is such thatadequation may signify political inequality,non-representationality, and even violence,while inadequation may signify, if not ex-actly the opposite, something like an op-portunity for democracy itself.

The democratic opportunity that Ifind in and around inadequation is not easyand is certainly not the social effect of somepositive, straightforward literary message.If anything, Visión del ahogado indicates thedevastating dangers of adequation and itscollapse instead of the promising possibili-ties of inadequation (or of the suspensionof the adequate/inadequate pair altogether).And yet, the novel also indicates the perilsof fighting the crisis of adequation as wellas, indeed, the perilous opportunities ofaccepting it. These opportunities and pos-sibilities, admittedly beyond the novel, arenot of my imagination alone. GianniVattimo sees in the dissolution of strongmetaphysical concepts—and adequation issurely among them—an occasion for aresignified reality whose values are not domi-nation, homogeneity, and centrality. ErnestoLaclau and Chantal Mouffe see the disso-lution of tight universal concepts and “thede-centring and autonomy of […] differ-ent discourses and struggles, the multipli-


cation of antagonisms and the construc-tion of a plurality of spaces” (193) as anoccasion for an open, “unsutured” societywhose values are discontinuity, contin-gency, and difference. In a rhetorical flour-ish indebted to Lacan, Laclau and Mouffespeak of the “impossibility of society,” inthe sense of some utterly unified and self-same order, and argue, out of impossibil-ity, for a radically democratic society ofdiversity and plurality. For them, as forVattimo, failure to accept the dissolutionof strong notions of society, failure to ac-cept a certain inadequation or non-corre-spondence, can have devastating effects:from unbridled strife to totalitarian con-trol. Lest this all seem too theoretical andinopportune, we might recall that civilstrife and totalitarian control—operantterms in any modern society—are espe-cially resonant in Spain during the so-called Transition. Associated at the mostextreme with an expansive terrorism anda resutured Francoism, civil strife and to-talitarian control are specters of a past everready to return, or to continue, in thepresent.

One of the reasons it is treacherous totake one thing as the measure of another isthat it can entail a violent denial of differ-ence. Truth, after all, has long been reasonedas an effect of adequation—adequatiointelectui ad rem—and true adequation, toloop the loop, has long been “reasoned” asgentle, spontaneous, and self-evident, as“natural.” And yet, there is something elsein “truth,” “reason,” and “adequation,”something less than gentle. Spun a bitsharply, if the fit is not easy, it can be forced.Adequation can thus be an act and effect ofviolence, a coercive equalization that is of-ten as not the residue of hierarchization.This holds most clearly for the violence of

the totalitarian state, but it also holds forthe violence of ETA (Euskadi taAskatasuna) and GRAPO (Grupo deResistencia Antifascista Primero deOctubre). Both ETA and GRAPO claimto have the truth, to represent the people,to act in a way that corresponds to real-ity: violence matching, and purportedlybettering, violence. Insofar as relations ofequivalence or interchangeability are hereat issue, it bears noting that one violenceis not necessarily the same as another andthat the violence of GAL (GrupoAntiterrorista de Liberación) is particu-larly troubling because it issues fromwithin the democratic state apparatus it-self. The existence of GAL points to thecontinuity of totalitarian tactics in demo-cratic times and thus casts doubt on thedifference between one system and the other.And yet, as significant as the violence of andagainst the state is, there are obviously othermodes of violence as well. One is the vio-lence of the self and against one’s self, a vio-lence that does not issue, at least not di-rectly, from some external site, but that in-stead issues, or appears to issue, from within.Another is the violence of the home, thefamily, a violence of privacy and domestic-ity that is often, but certainly not always,sexual in scope. These last two modes ofviolence—self-violence and domestic vio-lence—figure prominently in Millás’s textas relatively internal and intimate problemsof (in)adequation: relative to what passesfor more public, socially visible, and his-torically momentous problems. Turningnow to the literary text, we may turn, if only(in)adequately, to something socially signifi-cant as well.

Little Stories

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Hacía tiempo que había concluido que en elfondo de las decisiones importantes no habíagrandeza o virtud, sino una puerta falsa queconducía al desengaño. (Visión del ahogado58)

Visión del ahogado is not, by mostmeasures, a story of great significance. Itcontains few specific historical and politi-cal references, few “important” names anddates, and little, if anything, “transcendent.”Published in the wake of Franco, it makesno mention of the dictator except throughtopographical allusion: his presence is sus-tained, but displaced, in the repeated placename, Caudillo de España. Published,moreover, in the year of peaceful generalelections and the Law of Political Reform,it does not narrate the struggle for politicalpower, the plight of the working class, orthe machinations of the rich and powerful.Nor does it narrate—depending on thenarrative’s chronology—the depletion ofFrancoism or the intricacies of the transi-tion to democracy. Instead, it centers onpetty crime, rather sordid affairs, adolescentobsessions, and small-minded pranks. In-deed, the smallness of the narrative is rein-forced by the vagueness of the temporalmarkers. The action, at its most recent, maytake place during the transition, but it seemsmuch more probable, according to calcula-tions by Gonzalo Sobejano and RobertSpires (100), that it takes place in the lastyears of Francoism, sometime between 1973and 1975. Through a careful reconstructionand reordering of the temporal markers—areference to a political assassination, the av-erage age of students, vividly vague memo-ries—it is possible to affirm that the textcannot be about the disenchantment becausethe action takes place before the disenchant-ment, at least as historically codified. Forthat matter, according to the same history,

even the text’s date of publication is priorto the disenchantment. And yet, it is justsuch historical precision around what isultimately a sentiment, impression, mood,or sensation that begs to be questioned.Disenchantment precedes and exceeds anydiscrete chronology; the disenchantment,in contrast, purports to crystallize and sig-nal something “in the air,” to name a Zeit-geist. As such, it is symptomatic of an anxi-ety regarding historical definition.

The disenchantment or el desencan-to—with the definite article in Spanish asprominent as it is unobtrusive—effectivelyvalidates a “before” and an “after” that is insome respects strangely comforting. En-chantment, that is, is saved even as it is ne-gated, consigned to a time when change forthe better was still thought to be possible.Of course, one of the more uncomfortableeffects of disenchantment is that it casts theenchanted time as benighted. In that sense,the enchanted time, as a sort of lostanteriority, is also profoundly false: an illu-sion or a pathetic innocence, a deceptionor a lie. So while the disenchantment ap-peals to a chronology of change it also sig-nals a diffuse continuity—or as Spires callsit, a “discursive continuity” (96)—from a“then” to a “now” by which things do notchange, at least not for the better. As Spiresso discerningly observes:

the strategy to blur temporal bound-aries suggests that the imprint of awatchtower system is as much in evi-dence in the infancy of the Spanishdemocracy as it was during the ma-turity of the Franco dictatorship.(101)

Interestingly, such organic or generationalmarkers as “infancy” and “maturity” areproblematized by the text’s insistence on


adolescence, itself a transitional time asmomentous as it is petty. Published in a timethat many consider momentous, and nar-rating a time that is necessarily before thetime of publication, Visión del ahogado re-lates moments whose pettiness, profuse anddiscontinuous, disrupts any sense of a story,or history, that depends on neatly definabledisruptions:

El tiempo transcurría con gran pro-fusión de acontecimientos íntimos ycon algún que otro suceso exterior(la aparación de un nuevo modelode la casa Seat, la ascensión inespe-rada de un equipo de segunda a laprimera división, y también el asesi-nato del presidente Kennedy, católi-co y anticomunista, que tenía loshombros muy anchos y la sonrisamuy brillante), que, como más tardese comprobaría, tampoco sirvieronpara crear una conciencia cronoló-gicamente ordenada en la que losaconteceres externos estuvieran registra-dos con un carácter sucesivo. Los he-chos, como las personas, se debatíanentre la identidad y el apelmaza-miento. (193, emphasis mine)

The intimate events of Millás’s text are notthose of some Unamunian intrahistoria, norare the external events those of some grandhistory: political assassination, sportingupsets, and marketing innovations seem tobe strung haphazardly together. If there is agrand récit here it is, ironically, in the dis-ruption, if not collapse, of the grand récit,whether intimate and interior or public andexterior.

And yet, among the plays of irony, thesmallness of Millás’s story is the sign of itsweakened grandeur. This might suggest thatsmall signifies grand, or grandly, but Visióndel ahogado is not about the hidden great-

ness of lowly individuals, the honor ofpetty thieves, or the magic of debased lov-ers. And it is certainly not about the la-tent heroism of the common citizen. Itappears to hold no humanist moral, noutopian message, and no redemptive les-son. Indeed what it is about, if anything,is the debilitation of humanism,utopianism, and redemption in general.What it is also about, as I have indicated,is the debilitation of the very principle ofadequation that allows us to say that atext is “about” anything at all. Anything,including nothing: for in the crisis of ad-equation we cannot even say that the text is“about” nothing. Death itself, that oncegrand signifier of nothingness, is here weak-ened to such an extent that it signifies noth-ing so grand as release or resolution or trans-formation. The text ends with a small-timerobber—Luis, “El Vitaminas”—broughtback from the edge of death only to bethrown into jail:

estaba en que se iba a morir, en quese ahogaba. Pero un médico ha di-cho que se va a joder, que un lavadode estómago y listo. (238)

The clinical, cynical tenor of this closingcomment, made by the meddlesome door-man of the building where “El Vitaminas”is finally discovered, indicates to what ex-tent the vision of the drowned man an-nounced in the title of the text is not a trueillumination, even a truly profane one.Hallucinatory and sick, “El Vitaminas” doesnot die; he is just fucked over.

Still, it is possible to recast the mostderisive and flippant of comments intosomething serious and profound. In thatsense, if Visión del ahogado is “about” thedeath of grandeur, it is about quite a bit. As

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if to drive this home, the text containslengthy, dense, and far from straightforwardreflections on life, liberty, and love; sadness,suffering, and fear; language and con-sciousness; aging and death. AsConstantino Bértolo and Esther Cuadrathave noted, there is more than a trace ofJuan Benet and, through him, of WilliamFaulkner in Millás’s dense reflectiveness.The effect is, however, quite different; forin Millás’s text, identifiable politicalevents and precise historical moments arenot merely washed away by smaller sto-ries, they are also belittled, as it were, bya certain philosophically reflective gran-deur that is, however, neither as consis-tent nor as dense as Benet’s. Sobejanoqualifies Millás’s text, with all its conver-sations, as monologic or, more precisely,as “plurimonologic” (207), a quality thatbrings to mind Benet’s much-toutedgrand style. But Benet’s grand style seemsto saturate his texts; it is the same for onecharacter as well as another, one event aswell as another (Inspiración 78). Millás’sstyle, in contrast, is far from grand or is onlyintermittently grand, punctuated as it is byeasily recognizable commonplaces and alltoo common situations. Even though Milláshas spoken of Madrid as “territorio mítico”(Rosenberg 154), the Spanish capital is notof the same order as Yoknapatawpha orRegión, and its reality, its presence on mapsnot of the author’s making, drags down themore grandly reflective moments.2 Just asthe passages of reflective grandeur may be-little rather than elevate the few precise his-torical and political events present in thetext, the passages that narrate small andrather sordid events belittle the momentsof grand reflection. Millás himself, in aninterview published in the late 1980s, saysthat Visión del ahogado oscillates between

narration and reflection (“En fin” 22), apoint that virtually all of his critics corrobo-rate. He goes on to say that he has attemptedto diminish reflection in subsequent texts,accentuating instead “narrative tech-nique.” The contrast between reflectionand narrative technique is instructive, butno less instructive are the author’s asser-tions that “la reflexión sirve muchas vecespara disimular carencias de oficio” (“Enfin” 22) and that “el oficio puede utilizarsea veces para tapar carencias” (Rosenberg143). These extratex-tual assertions dove-tail the narrative’s self-reflective concernwith falsity, simulation, masquerade, andlack, each one feeding into and off theother.

In Visión, lack is prolific: lack of tal-ent, intelligence, expertise, faith, commit-ment, endurance, health, love, and commu-nication, lack of adequate relations. If lackspurs desire, it also spurs simulation, thedesire for simulation, the simulation of de-sire. If lack constitutes a form of truth, italso constitutes forms of falsity, the lack oftruth. All of the characters of Visión, with-out exception, give testimony to the vagar-ies of lack; all are creatures of simulationand simulacra, acting as if in accord withpre-scripted roles and incapable of any “ex-perience” that is not surrounded by quota-tion marks. True things of fiction, all re-flect not just problems of social history butalso problems of narrative technique, ofstorytelling. And the problems of telling astory, whatever the author states, are not lim-ited to the presence or absence of reflectionalone. Ponderous as the moments of reflec-tion are in Millás’s text, they are part andparcel of the story here told. As I have sug-gested, it is a little story, little in its weak,reflective grandeur. It centers, in classicallytriangular style, on three people, two men


and a woman. After having robbed a phar-macy and wounded a policeman, Luis, “ElVitaminas,” hides out in the boiler room ofthe building where his estranged wife, Julia,lives with their young daughter. Soaked withrain, cold, lonely, and increasingly deliri-ous, Luis reflects, almost in spite of him-self, on his past. In the meantime, as Luisshivers with fever, in the apartment abovehim Julia and Jorge go hot and cold, talk-ing, avoiding talking, and having violent sex.Outside, the search for Luis involves a num-ber of less prominent personages. They in-clude policemen; inspectors; the doormanof the apartment building who is a retiredmember of the Guardia Civil (“El Ratón”);a barman (“El Cojo”); and Jesús Villar, thehusband of Rosario, a woman with whomLuis had regular sexual encounters in theschool bathroom when he was a teenager.Interrogated by the police, Villar makes aseries of calls to throw off the investigationand toy with and defer Luis’s capture. Villaris eventually found and beaten by the po-lice. Luis, babbling incoherently in a cor-ner of the womb-like room in which he hashidden, is also found by the police. Julia,engaged by the police to assist them, ispresent when Luis is caught. Jorge, how-ever, is absent, having left Julia, Luis, andthe entire situation in a final act of frustra-tion and failure. This, in broad strokes, andminus the reflection, is the story that Millástells. It does not, in itself, seem especiallysignificant. Of course, as I have suggested,the semblance of insignificance may be pre-cisely the point.

Ignacio-Javier López, in one of the fewsustained readings of the text, sees the storyin familiar terms of adultery and quest, a“conjugación de quijotismo y bovarismo”(38). Sobejano, in contrast, underscores thestory’s strangeness (extrañeza), its senses of

estrangement. Indeed, Sobejano detects astrangeness of expression in all of Millás’stexts that, for him, “corresponds perfectly”to the strangeness of themes and the es-trangement of human consciousness (196).Though López raises interesting questions,Sobejano is, in my opinion, closer to thetruth, if for no other reason than that truthis here the uncanny effect of the persistenceand return of something familiar, yet (par-tially) lost. “Something familiar” might beFranco and Francoism, continuing, formany, even after their apparent disappear-ance, continuing, moreover, in the act ofwriting and publishing after Franco’s deatha tale that may very well take place before it.More generally, and hence more disturb-ingly, “something familiar” might be any-thing that forms part of a familiar story, atradition, a family. Millás’s text, profuse inquasi-philosophical reflection and sparse insocial, historical, and political reference,does relate some strangely familiar things.Among them is the persistence of violence,discipline, and punishment that may im-ply the return, or persistence, in a time oftransition, of the norms of social control.Millás’s text does not partake of the newer,sexier projections of Spain that accompanythe move to democracy; it does not bringto mind the Movida or the Destape; it doesnot present something wild, ecstatic, glam-orous, campy, or kitsch. Instead, it stays withwhat has not quite changed: the routines ofdaily work, the presence of the police, theeyes and ears of others. This is not to saythat the text acknowledges no social changewhatsoever. In what may be an allusion tothe 1973 assassination of Luis CarreroBlanco, a principal Francoist continuista, “ElVitaminas” apostrophizes the occupants ofan armored police jeep: “aún recuerdocuando gozabais de tal impunidad que no

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necesitabais viajar enrejados” (49). Nor isit to say that the text acknowledges nosort of political struggle. Jorge, seeing thecrowd at the entrance to the metro where“El Vitaminas” has injured a man, reflects:

el conjunto recordaba sin esfuerzo aun grupo de manifestantes que por-tara una pancarta incomprensible ydesproporcionada. (13)

But the references to the vulnerability of thepolice and the power of demonstrations—to what may be taken as the signs of politi-cal change—do not change the fact thatwhile the meaning of the crowd is incom-prehensible, the meaning of the police isreinforced.

The persistence and return of a po-liced reality should not be underestimated.Visión del ahogado is, as Sobejano notes, awork of close interiors and ever-vigilantexteriors. Even more, it shows how vigilanceis interiorized, domesticated, and, as Spiresremarks, “popularized,” uncoupled from acentralizing state apparatus and broughtinto play with popular culture (100). Themost insistent indication of the “domesti-cation” of vigilance is Julia’s bathroom mir-ror, its tain flecked in such a way that itrecalls a keyhole. The surface of reflection—so important to, but also against, narra-tion—is chipped in a way that calls forthan illusory depth and opacity, at once titil-lating and threatening. Standing naked be-fore the mirror, Julia sees both herself and ablind spot from which she can imagine thatshe is seen. Jorge sees something similar, andyet is more annoyed than excited. The dif-ference between Jorge’s and Julia’s reactionis touched by the difference of gender, a ritu-alized difference to which I will return.3 Forthe moment, what is important is the ex-tended play of vision and blindness, of voy-eurism, paranoia, and civil espionage. Jorge

watches Julia and “El Vitaminas,” whowatch him in turn, and each is watched, orbelieves himself or herself to be watched,by others, most intensely the police and theirminions. More devastatingly, each charac-ter watches, almost blindly, him or herself.Millás’s “scopic regime” does not have thedystopic intensity of Orwell’s or the pan-optic rigor of Foucault’s reading ofBentham, but it is arguably more chillingfor being more strangely familiar. Millás’spresentation of the scopic owes much to theless than grand formulations of reality foundin detective and police narrative. Yet, it isthe evocation of the everyday and, more ex-actly, of the persistence of the past in thepresent that marks Visión. The text’s epi-graph, attributed to John Le Carré, rein-forces this idea: “Fue de nosotros de quienesaprendieron el secreto de la vida: hacerseviejo sin hacerse mejor.” Things do not getbetter; they just get older.

The epigraph is well chosen, adequate,that is, to the story of inadequation andinadequacy that follows. In both, progres-sion appears more powerful than progress,and aging, not ethics, is the gauge of narra-tive development. Historical movement issimilarly implicated, textualized in terms ofdecay, decline, and degeneration. The lat-ter is an especially intriguing term, one thatreverberates in a variety of ways. Degenera-tion may be a general phenomenon, butaccording to a number of Millás’s critics itis the feature of a particular generation. ForSobejano, the characters featured in Visióndel ahogado are “los desplazados del 60,”adults who came of age in the 1960s andwho, torn between apathy and anarchy, borewitness to an advanced, decrepit Francoism(208). By coming of age, Sobejano means“going through” adolescence, the “age” inlife that Millás’s characters remember most


vividly. Both Jorge and Luis, “El Vitami-nas,” are all but obsessed with adolescence,a sexually tumultuous period marked by pos-sibility and opportunity, frustration andfailure. Generational coordinates abound.Constantino Bértolo, to whom the novelis dedicated, declares that

Visión del ahogado es una novelageneracional, la novela de una gene-ración fracasada y aplastada por suspropias falsedades internas como porla degeneración y fraude moral de lasociedad en la que ha crecido. (Papel203)

Sobejano, for his part, sees the text as a“cuadro de una generación frustrada que mirahacia atrás para comprobar su inerteprolongación en un presente sin esperanza”(209, emphasis original). The generation towhich Bértolo and Sobejano refer comes ofage, in short, in the shadow of Franco: aman who grows older without getting betterand, what is more, a man who grows weakerwithout losing power.

Leaving aside the Spanish penchantfor generational terms (few histories of lit-erature rely as heavily as the Spanish on“generation”), Sobejano hits on somethingcrucial when he describes the present ashopeless. Inasmuch as the date of the nar-ration (1973-75) approximates the date ofits composition and publication (1977), thepresent to which Sobejano refers is far fromstable. It is also, one might think, far fromhopeless, a transitional, politically tumultu-ous period of possibility and opportunity,of potential regeneration. And yet, if the ex-perience of adolescence is any indication,the upshot of so much possibility and op-portunity is failure and frustration, disen-chantment. On this score, Sobejano is em-

phatic:

El significado de Visión no sería otro queel fracaso de las relaciones amorosas yamistosas: la angustia de un convivir in-auténtico. (208, emphasis original)

The failure of human relations and theanguish of an inauthentic community:what Sobejano points to is a crisis of ad-equation or adequate relationality that, farfrom constituting an opportunity forsomething positive, generates only nega-tivity. Violence, sadness, melancholy, de-spair, anger, and aggression are the prin-cipal forms of negativity that Millás’s textshowcases. Violence, anger and aggressionare perhaps more socially visible, morespectacular, but, as Millás indicates, theyare often mixed up in sadness, despair, andmelancholy. Sadness, violence, and so onare the signs not just of some nebuloushuman condition but also of a certain—though perhaps ultimately equally nebu-lous—generation. Take, for example, thepreviously noted sadness and suffering ofJorge:

su adecuación con las cosas y sus es-casas tentativas de entendimientocon el mundo se habían producidosiempre por vía de la tristeza. (25)

Sadness may have been a sin in the MiddleAges, but in the Modern age it has becomea tremulous virtue, a sign that the subject isin tune with the sad truth of reality. ThroughJorge, Millás’s text shares a notion of realitywhose exponents include Benjamin,Adorno, and, however differently, Benet,and that suggests that to know reality is toknow sadness, suffering, and pain. And yet,the text also indicates that the truth-valueof sadness and pain goes the way of the

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truth-value of death—emptied, as indi-cated, of grandeur. Jorge’s “adequation withthings” may have “always” occurred throughsadness, but what the narrator signals is thatthis adequation is no longer functional, thatwhat was “always” adequate is so no longer.Coopted as an emotional response, sadnessis no longer an adequate measure of truthand reality.

Jorge’s situation is not unique. “ElVitaminas’s” suffering, pain, and sadness arelikewise undermined. After all, it is withregards to “El Vitaminas” that we read thatthe mythical, let alone redemptive, dimen-sion of sadness and pain is defunct. Thenarrator ponders:

de qué manera habían perdido estossucesos cualquier posible relacióncon lo mitificable—lo que se nom-bra triste y doloroso—hasta conver-tirse en visión espantosa [...] era unacuestión adyacente tal como pregun-tarse en dónde pudo conseguir elmuerto cuerda tan eficaz. (71)

Indeed, the narrative voice is so incisive thatno sooner does it assert the inoperability ofthe relation between the quotidian and themythic (as in allegory) than it asserts thatthis assertion is itself ancillary, like wonder-ing, after the fact, about the efficacy of sui-cide. The last remark is not a throwaway. Aprinciple of adequation, founded on sad-ness, suffering, and pain, is not replacedwith a principle of efficiency, but endures—in its inefficiency, its inadequacy—as some-thing frightful. Fright and fear pervadeVisión del ahogado, though they too arestyled as the emotional effects of Millás’sversion of the culture industry.4 They arenot, at any rate, incidental. In a short bookon the Transition published in 1980, Juan

Luis Cebrián underscores the importanceof fear. Cebrián describes:

un miedo tanto mayor y tanto másacusado cuanto más desaparece eltemor de los representantes del anti-guo régimen, cuanto más reverdecenlas antiguas formas, los antiguosmodos y los antiguos objetivos delgobernar. El miedo se enseñorea hoyde la actualidad española. (9)

For Cebrián, fear is the emotional mark ofthe Transition. For Millás, in an interviewwith José María Marco published in 1988,however, fear is the emotional mark ofFrancoism, of a time apparently before.Apparently before, because fear is a domi-nant factor of many of the novels that Milláswrites after Franco’s death, indeed well af-ter the Transition itself, deep in the midstof democracy. Visión del ahogado, publishedin the midst of the Transition, remains,however, special. In it, as in Cebrián’s work,fear is a function of a past that remains andreturns in the present and that shapes thefuture. At the same time, fear is a functionof the past as it passes into something else,a function, that is, of oblivion and loss. Fearis a function both of continuity and change,permanence and impermanence. This spinsa number of ways: one may fear that people,things, and relations do not change; that thetruth of reality is sadly the same as it everwas; that the transition from dictatorshipto democracy is more rhetorical than real.Alternatively, one may fear that people andthings have changed so much that no rela-tion is viable, let alone adequate; that truthcannot be measured even in terms of sad-ness and suffering; that the transition fromdictatorship to democracy has rendered thedream of a better society a frustrating fail-ure. There are, needless to say, other fears,


other modes of sadness and violence: fearsnot only of past and present Francoists,Communists, Social Democrats, and so on,but also of less politicized subjects not soreadily related to anything grand. Millás’s“little” story, shot through with reflections,is about nothing if not the (in)adequacy ofrelations and the treacherous interplay ofsadness, fear, and violence generatedtherein. Having touched on sadness andfear, it is to violence that I will now turn.

Names, Bodies, and OtherDamaged Goods

Men have always fought their misery withdreams. Although dreams were once pow-erful, they have been made puerile by themovies, radio and newspapers. Amongmany betrayals, this one is the worst.—Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts

It is tempting to say that the only ad-equate relation is one that recognizes its in-adequacy. Tempting, it is also too easy; forwithin the very text that is a inadequatemeasure of Spanish society, there is at leastone character who struggles to accept, in-deed to accentuate, his inadequacy in a des-perate effort to salvage something he cancall his own. Inadequacy and inadequationare, for this character, the stuff of a negativeauthenticity, shot through with gestures ofritualized mortification and fraught withyearnings for an authenticity more tradi-tionally positive (one need only think of theauthenticity of the ascetic). Perhaps not sur-prisingly, the character in question is themost self-violent in the text, physically sickand close to madness: Luis, a.k.a. “ElVitaminas.” To be sure, “El Vitaminas” isalso violent towards others (he wounds apoliceman), but what characterizes him is a

centripetal decline, a desperate, increas-ingly inner-directed movement of destruc-tion. It is as if “El Vitaminas” believedthat by destroying himself he could savehimself; as if by beating himself he couldovercome the distance between people,words, and things. As Bértolo observes,“El Vitaminas’s” only desire is for self-de-struction, but that too is a trap (Papel 204).Self-destruction is a trap, Visión indicates,because so many others have performed itto such an extent that it has become partof an appallingly predictable script, apose, and a cliché. It is not enough to seeka devastation to match the devastatingtruth of reality; nor is it enough to acceptinadequacy as adequate to (a negative)authenticity: in Visión del ahogado, self-destruction, willful though it may be, hasgone the way of sadness, suffering, anddeath.

Part of the problem with self-destruc-tion, at least as it is presented here, is that itrefuses to relinquish a sense of redemptionand, more intricately, a sense of the self. “ElVitaminas’s” self-destruction is thus vitiated,ironically, by the presence of codes of con-duct and reason, Christian, capitalist, andso on:

la suya es una memoria competitivay cristiana que fía a la voluntad loque no puede alcanzar con la inteli-gencia. De ahí que continúe, a supesar, buscando las pruebas de unasuperación que haga más llevaderosu desastre. (205)

Furthermore, “El Vitaminas’s” desire forself-destruction is a desire for the destruc-tion of an inauthentic self, a destruction thatwould recapture or redeem an authentic self.In contrast to the text’s epigraph, “ElVitaminas” appears to hold on to an idea of

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progress even as he lets himself go; it is asif he believed that he could make himselfbetter by making himself worse. But if“El Vitaminas” seeks adequation (a sadand suffering self to match a sad and suf-fering reality); if he attempts to accept hisinadequacy as adequate to authenticity; ifhe strives to redeem himself by destroy-ing himself, that does not mean that hehas got at reality, its truth. In fact, even asthe text suggests that “El Vitaminas” isclose to the truth of reality, it stresses thathe is still very far away. The following isillustrative:

Con las manos apoyadas en la rejametálica que rodea el amplio com-plejo deportivo, husmea el aire, re-gistra la interrupción momentáneade la lluvia, gira la cabeza a izquier-da y derecha comprobando con labarbilla la humedad de sus hombros:intenta protegerse a cualquier preciode la realidad. Y esta incapacidad queahora le impide aceptar como pro-pia la actual experiencia le conduceuna y otra vez desordenadamente aese sucedáneo de la experiencia quees la memoria. Descubre el barrio porcuyos laberintos hubo de destilar unaadolescencia inútil. La escasa genteque se cruza con él son los represen-tantes de todo aquello que el Vita-minas no quiso para sí. (49)

Grasping a fence, “El Vitaminas” strugglesnot to move to the other side but to remainaway, symbolically speaking, to guard him-self from reality. He is incapable of doingso, however, and also incapable of accept-ing (his) present experience as his own.Cebrián’s present fear and Sobejano’s presenthopelessness come together in “ElVitaminas’s” dilemma. Unwilling to be likeother people, he cannot “really” be himself;

unable to accept reality, he is unable todeny it.

So presented, “El Vitaminas” is a crea-ture of the culture industry, wherecommodification serializes and annuls per-sonal experience. Throughout Visión, char-acters reproduce gestures, words, and evenemotions seen in movies as if they were theirown; they replay, again as if they were theirown, the sentiments and rhythms of popu-lar songs. For example, translated linesfrom a song by Simon and Garfunkel areincorporated into the body of the narra-tive:

las palabras de los profetas, dice [“ElVitaminas”] como quien escucharauna guitarra, están escritas en lasparedes de los subterráneos y en losvestíbulos de las casas baratas. (202)

Memory, far from providing access to ex-perience, is instead a substitute or“sucedáneo” for it. What is worse, experi-ence itself is unreliable, its immediacy spu-rious, its intimacy fraudulent. Nowhere isthis more apparent than in the intensifica-tion of “El Vitaminas’s” sickness and hisattempt to make sense of it:

El resultado es desastroso: apenas haconseguido musitar dos oracionesque se despegan muy ligeramente dellenguaje oficial y establecido. Ade-más no significan nada. Pero ¿es quesignifica algo su modo de actuar? Talvez resida ahí la clave del asunto, dice,e inmediatamente: qué clave, quéasunto, qué residencia. Las fraseshechas le rodean y desprestigian suactitud. (204)

Everything, it seems, has been said, every-thing thought, everything felt. It is not justthat, as Martha Miranda maintains, the


characters pretend to be what they are not(527), but that, outside of pretense, theyare not anything at all. This holds for Jorgeand Julia as well, but for Luis, “ElVitaminas,” it has a special force, manifestednot only in his bodily discomfort but alsoin the very name by which he is known.Names, like everything else, are popularized,commercialized, and officialized to thepoint of banality. So stifling is this lack oforiginality that nicknames become des-perately feeble attempts to give the namean elusive body and to rescue the authen-ticity of the sign. If “Luis” is the official,duly registered name of the man soughtby the police, the nickname might justbe a way to elude “officiality” while pre-serving a sign of the self.

In Visión del ahogado, nicknamesabound: “El Ratón,” “El Lefa,” “El Cojo”and, most importantly, “El Vitaminas.”They also seem adequate to the person sonamed: “El Ratón” (the “Rat”) is the evervigilant doorman; “El Lefa” (slang for ejacu-lated semen) is Jorge’s and Luis’s sexuallyfurtive schoolmate who dies at a young age;and “El Cojo” is a barman with a limp. Inthe case of Luis, the nickname, “ElVitaminas” (“Vitamins” or “Mr. Vitamin”),is ironically motivated, insofar as the sicklyLuis is “reinforced” in name only. Or rather,the nickname impossibly supplies the bodywith the physical force that it is missing.Whichever way it may be, there is some-thing telling about the adequation of nick-name and body. For in all cases, the physi-cality signified by these nicknames is itselfdefective or damaged and signals, in turn,the impossibility of a perfect adequationbetween word and thing, name and body.What is most adequately named is the im-perfect body:

Luis amaba como pocas cosas su carade tuberculoso que era, al tiempo queuna advertencia—tal vez una ame-naza—, la señal evidente de una dis-tinción que hasta el momento habíafuncionado. (80)

Imperfect as this is, it is something. Jorge,on the other hand, does not have anythingvisibly “wrong” with him and yet does nothave anything that is “rightfully” his.

Seguramente Jorge ignoraba que quienno se deja motejar hace de su propionombre el peor de los motes, por cuan-to al confiar en él toda posible referen-cia a su persona admite al mismo tiem-po que nada de destacar hay en ella, nisiquiera un ligero estrabismo, una im-perceptible cojera o una disposiciónoriginal de los dientes; nada excepto lapaz mediocre que se adivina tras losnombres todos. (80)

So ill and imperfect is the signifying rela-tion that authenticity and originality, thatrefreshing other side of banality, are herethe accidental attribute of a set of teeth.

There may well be something moreexpansive in the “mediocre peace” that thenarrator finds behind all names, be it thepeace of the Francoist establishment, cel-ebrated with pomp in 1964 as “25 Years ofPeace,” or the peace of the Transition. Forall their undeniable differences, both modesof peace may not be just mediocre, but de-ceptive as well. And part of their deceptive-ness, a critical part, is violence. Again, evenat its most reflective, the text does not ex-pound on peace and violence in somegrandly historical sense, but remains focusedinstead on the small story of a small groupof characters. Theirs is the peace and vio-lence that is at issue, and as with the grandersenses there are undeniable differences in

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these smaller senses as well. Although “ElVitaminas” is the object of public concern,sought by the police and certain civiliancollaborators, and although he is consideredto be armed and dangerous, he is not nec-essarily the most violent. The most out-wardly violent character, the one whose ag-gressiveness is most morosely detailed, isJorge, the former friend of “El Vitaminas”and current lover of “El Vitaminas’s” es-tranged wife, Julia. This may seem para-doxical, for this outwardly violent charac-ter is depicted, in large measure, insidethe home. The outward violence is heredomestic violence, the violence that liesbehind the mediocre peace that lies, inturn, behind so many seemingly fineproper names. Domestic violence has onlyrecently been recognized in Spain as a le-gitimate social and political problem. AsAnny Brooksbank Jones notes, it is notuntil 1984, years after Visión appears, thatstatistics on domestic violence in Spainwere collected. Jones cites a number ofreports and affirms, in a way that inter-sects compellingly with Millás’s novel, that“domestic violence aids the smoother func-tioning of [the social] order” (97). Ofcourse, the social order that so smoothlyfunctions is one founded, as Jones implies,on force. And when the social order doesnot function smoothly, when violence “in-habits” the streets and even the police—as fearful forces of social order—are sub-ject to fear, often as not the domestic or-der is adduced as being either too violentor, indeed, not violent enough.

Again and again, away from the streetsand in the close space of the home, in whatMillás has called an “oquedad moral”(Rosenberg 153), Jorge beats Julia. He beatsher as he has sex with her, in order to havesex with her. Along with the violent yearn-

ings for authenticity, Millás’s text issteeped in violent masculine yearnings forfemininity. Jorge is not alone. JesúsVillar—whose wife had sexual relationswith “El Vitaminas” when they were inhigh school—fantasizes about hitting hiswife in the face with an ashtray. The vio-lent yearnings run through “El Vitaminas”too, though they run more explicitlythrough Jorge. What “El Vitaminas” andJorge yearn for is a woman they both“have” yet cannot have, a woman adequateto their needs, demands, and desires.Haunted by the past and rocked withyearning, both men end up leaving thesame woman; but only Jorge is depictedas doing so after engaging (her) repeat-edly in violently abusive sex. The differ-ence is significant, though in both casesthe sexual relation seems, as Lacan mightput it, impossible.5 Its impossibility, or in-adequacy, does not issue in anything verypromising, but rather in forms of violence—one directed largely inwards, the otherlargely outwards—that would overcome(‘superar’ 205) impossibility and inadequacyalike. Something similarly unpromisinggoes for the social relation, in part becausesexual relations are social relations. But thedifference between one man and anotherman, let alone the difference between themand the woman, is, I repeat, significant. “ElVitaminas’s” attempt to accept impossibil-ity and inadequacy entails doing violenceagainst himself. This is so largely because itis actually an attempt not to accept impos-sibility and inadequacy, but rather, througha play of established negations, to makethem good; it is not for anything that thenarrator describes “El Vitaminas’s” memoryas “competitiva y cristiana” (205). “ElVitaminas’s” attempt is arguably more in-volute than Jorge’s, but it is not for that rea-


son more troubling. For what Jorge at-tempts is to overcome inadequacy and im-possibility, not simply by accepting ordenying them, but by mastering them,willing and guaranteeing them. It is he,more than anyone else in the story, whotries to make things fit by force.

Force, for Jorge, assumes the form ofsexual violence. In Visión del ahogado, sexualviolence is at once coupled to, and displacedfrom, self-violence. It functions as yet an-other attempt to overcome impossibilityand inadequacy (even by willing impossi-bility and inadequacy to be) and as yetanother attempt to save the distance be-tween people, words, and things (even bywilling the distance to be). What Millás’stext indicates is how the attempt to savesuch distance can become mired in de-struction, how the refusal or inability togive up the ghost of adequation can be-come ghastly. This fearful vision, beyondsadness and suffering, assumes a varietyof forms and is at once masked and exac-erbated in consumer capitalism, wherenew and original products nourish theever-expanding banality of experience. “Escomo si no fuéramos capaces dealimentarnos con nuestra propiaexperiencia” (210-11), declares Jorge,caught between the hyper-mediated tyr-anny of mass culture and the nostalgia fordirect, non-mediated experience. Withfood for experience as well as for thoughtalienated and mass-produced, the subjectgrows grave with its own insubstantial-ity:

Donde debía haber carne, no haymás que un vacío atravesado por elviento. Alcanza [Jorge] como mucho,a ver pequeños jirones, algunos tro-zos putrefactos pegados a la osamentade su vida. Un esquema sin cuerpo.

(220)

The specter of such material consumption,the vision of the rotten remnants of a oncefull flesh, stands in stark contrast to thepromise of longevity, youth, beauty, andbodily gratification that characterizes themodern market. It also stands in contrast,and yet strangely subtends, the promise offulfillment through sex.

It is important to keep in mind thatthe promises shadowed forth in Visión delahogado are not gender neutral. When Jorgehits and penetrates Julia, he is striking outat an image of his own inadequacy. Thisis not to deny Julia’s materiality (textu-ally figured as it is), but it is to under-score that her body is, for Jorge, a mascu-line fantasy or phantasm (again, textuallyfigured). The text indicates as much, butit also indicates that Jorge is not exactlyaware of the phantas-matic nature of whatis, for him, Julia’s body: a body he projectsonto and over hers, a body of his making,a body, in short, that is “his.” This is thebody that Jorge attempts both to affirmand to deny by striking out against it. Heattempts to affirm it, violently, as the siteof something substantive, true, and real;and he attempts to deny it, violently, assomething phantasmatically of his mak-ing. In a state of generalized inadequacyand inadequation, then, Jorge strikes out,attempting to make Julia lie in for a truththat has lost both grounds and objects.Again, the text suggests that Jorge may notunderstand this, but that it is not for wantof trying. Jorge, though not physically illlike “El Vitaminas,” is nonetheless con-sumed by a feverish intellectual activity.Julia, on the other hand, remains for themost part impassive,

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tranquilamente instalada en una espe-cie de debilidad que la exime de in-tentar cualquier iniciativa. Aunque porotra parte no hay ninguna iniciativaque tomar. (220)

The contrast between activity and passiv-ity, insight and ignorance, masculinity andfemininity is only partially undercut by theassertion that there is no action, no initia-tive, to be had. As Jorge and, perhaps, thenarrative voice understand it, there is noaction to be had by Julia.

Jorge appears to believe that he, un-like Julia, can grasp the “reality” of the situa-tion, empty and factitious though it may be:

Jorge, por el contrario, se encuentrasometido a una gran actividad inte-rior. Comprende que en cierto modose ha hecho cargo de la situación por-que el guión exige de él una palabra,un gesto, algo que establezca por suparte lo que ya ha quedado estable-cido por parte de Julia. (220)

What Jorge understands, if anything, is thathis innermost acts, his words and gestures,are pre-scripted and externally imposed; heunderstands, that is, a diffuse but powerfulimperative to understand. And part of thisimperative, a dangerously essential part, isthat Jorge don a mask of meaning and be aman. Julia’s part, already obscurely estab-lished, is to play the willing victim whosealluring body will fill in (for) the fulsomeemptiness that Jorge dreads (the “vision” ofthe drowned man, of “El Vitaminas”). Andyet, early in the narrative, the feminine full-ness for which Jorge yearns is presented as afantastic sham. Julia’s memories and desiresof peace and happiness, her own innermostactivities, recall, for instance,

algunas secuelas habituales ya en al-gunos anuncios encargados de pro-

mocionar un suavizante para el cabe-llo o un abrillantador de dientes. (36)

They recall Adorno’s assertion that

the most intimate reactions of hu-man beings have been so thoroughlyreified that the idea of anything spe-cific to themselves now persists onlyas an utterly abstract notion: per-sonality scarcely signifies anythingmore than shining white teeth andfreedom from body odor and emo-tions. (167)

Reified intimacy, like banal originality,marks Julia as a thoroughly modernwoman, one about whom there is little tobe understood, as Jorge might put it, ex-cept, once more, the mediocre peace be-hind her name.

Mediocre as such peace may be, it isnot what characterizes Julia. Moved by an-ger rather than complacency, she too seeksto understand not heady metaphysical prob-lems such as the ends of life, but somethingtantalizingly closer to home:

Entretanto medita y se pregunta nopor el objeto de su vida, sino por laintención inmediata de sucesos [...]a través de los cuales se reconoce, yque actúan a manera de acotacionesen un texto cuyo único asunto pare-ce ser la dentellada atroz del tiempo.(35-36)

Like Jorge, Julia understands that she isprompted to act in a text not of her ownmaking. There is, of course, an authorialincision here: Jorge and Julia, as if they werethe heirs of Unamuno’s Augusto Pérez, con-front their confinement in a script signedby Juan José Millás. But there is something


even more incisive: time, aggressively per-sonalized, leaves the atrocious, figurativemark of its teeth—“la dentellada atroz”—on the text. We might wonder, after Adorno,if these teeth are not rotten with the beguil-ing gleam of progress. Regardless, the es-trangement of experience, the specter ofemptiness, and the inadequacy of significa-tion all contribute to make the female bodyso (in)significant a thing for Jorge. That thebody is thought to be a thing, if not theThing, to be seized in the name of truthpoints to what is at stake in the breakdownof linguistic confidence. For if truth has longbeen an effect of the adequation of thoughtto thing in language, it does not simplyturn into falsity when adequation is reck-oned inadequate. Instead, truth persists,but as a shadow of its former self, as amemory of a time when truth was(thought to be) adequately produced andmaintained.

With Julia, the problem of truth islinked, fearfully, to the persistence ofmemory. Here, an adequate solution seemsto be the erasure of thought itself. It is inthis light that we can return to the questionof Julia’s adequation:

La adecuación de Julia con el mun-do resultaba natural y perfecta, yaque el olvido de la existencia de unhorario no nacía de la erosión de unamemoria perezosa, sino de la ausen-cia de cualquier tipo de memoria.(18)

The absence of memory—and thus of his-tory, human time, and the more banalschedule, or “horario,” of day to day life—is alone capable of a natural, perfect, andtrue adequation. But while truth may para-doxically be “recalled” as oblivion in Millás’stext, it nonetheless persists as a memory that

is archaic in its own right. Or at least truthpersists as a fantasy of archaic memory, afantasy that is, moreover, sexual in scope.Troubled by the memory of an adolescencethat, “como el cadáver de Dios” (96), in-habits the heart of maturity, Jorge seeks to“lose” or “forget” himself in the eroticizedbody of Julia. Such ecstatic oblivion, thoughhardly novel, is inflected with a significantdifference:

Ignora [Jorge] que el olvido de Juliaprocede de una memoria centenaria.No sabe del tumulto, ni del rumorde voces que se escuchan tras los ojoscerrados de su amiga. El aprieta yolvida. (43-44)

The narrative voice, quite masculine it-self, “knows” and “remembers” what Jorgedoes not.6 The result is a disjunction be-tween Jorge’s ignorance and oblivion andJulia’s, a disjunction effected through theagency of something supposedly engen-dered long ago.

Carter Smith, in a Bakhtinian read-ing of the text, argues that two chronotopes,one bio-historical and the other abstract andahistorical “enter into a conflicting, dialec-tic relationship” (698). I agree, but wouldadd that the conflicting temporal relation-ship is dramatized as a conflicting hetero-sexual relationship, duly given to triangu-lation and homosociality, with Jorge andLuis playing off each other. Stereotype, con-vention, and normativity, by which some-thing historical is shaped into somethingahistorical, are here critical. In Visión delahogado an allegedly age-old memory re-turns, strangely full of forgetting, to awoman. But not to just any woman, for Juliais a mother. This is perhaps most evident inthe description of Julia’s recollection of herhusband: “la imagen de su marido se ha idohaciendo sitio en un interespacio amniótico

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de su memoria” (37). The “amniotic in-terspace” is itself an image that gives, as itwere, maternal body to memory. Myste-riously disjoining Jorge and Julia even asthey join in the sexual act, the age-old,archaic memory to which the narrator re-fers is thus that of the mother in general.7

She is, it seems, a mother held “respon-sible” for the inadequacies of truth andsignification. Such responsibility carries ahigh price. For Julia, cast in the role ofthe hopelessly responsible mother, is re-peatedly beaten while her daughterwatches on. The narrator stresses the ob-servant presence of the daughter on sev-eral occasions (88, 151, 181), as if thespectacle of sexual violence required notmerely a spectator, but one who will“learn” from what she sees. What the littlegirl presumably sees, and what we read, isan act of sex that slips, not quite seamlessly,in and out of rape. Even if Julia and Jorge’ssexual encounters are not read as rape, butas consensual sadomasochism, the violencepersists.

Now, the fact that Julia is a motherand that Jorge beats her while her baby girlwatches intensifies the force of the act. Forin beating Julia’s maternal body, Jorge isbeating, in psychoanalytic terms, the sym-bolic site of the reproduction of the sym-bolic itself. He is also beating a woman.True, she is not a “real” woman, he not a“real” man, but rather they are textual ef-fects, things of writing and reading. Theirrelationship, we can remind ourselves, is notreally related to us, their violence not ours.So read, the writing is safely in place, com-fortably incommensurate with other places,our places, be they the home, the street, orthe chambers of government. The violenceof (in)adequation in the text may be put inits place as peacefully inadequate to us, to

our peace as well as to our violence. In asense it really is; textual violence is neveradequate to the violence outside the text,regardless of how we respond to the asser-tion that there is no outside-text. And yet,the inadequation of one to another does notmean that there is no relation or that mi-mesis is utterly inoperative. In Visión delahogado, where the characters seem to inti-mate that they are characters and that, inmany respects, we all are too, relations as-sume some violent forms, so much so thatrelationality per se seems suffused with vio-lence. Textual violence is and is not real vio-lence, but across the divide violence per-sists. Perhaps such violence persists, liketruth, in the place of truth, a diffuse andintense memory in its own right: “Con losdedos [Julia] busca a través del dolor lamemoria de los golpes” (87). Perhaps vio-lence is, as the text suggests, the only truthto be remembered, and forgotten, the onlytruth that never fails to make a return. Thisis not to say that truth, as violence, returnsalways and in the same way to everyone. Infact, amid the mundane figures of contem-porary Madrid, violence and truth hauntJulia in especially acute ways:

determinados fantasmas no son sinola huella de una hábil manipulaciónefectuada por el miedo sobre su me-moria más antigua de las cosas. Perosiente el temor, o la repulsa, de serdepositaria de unos fantasmas que yatuvo su madre, que se repetirán ensu hija, y que a ella le parecen las se-ñales que marcan la distancia entrela corrupción y el deterioro. (62)

What Julia finds so fearful is the idea thatshe is a repository of phantasms that markher within a matrilineal chain. Somethingcyclical, inescapable, and fatalistic is hereby


signaled, but there is more. In the dis-tance between her mother and her daugh-ter, a past decay (or corruption) and ananticipated decay, Julia senses that truthwould have a body still. And the bodythat truth here would have is cut in vio-lent contradiction, a body thought, willed,and desired as both living and dead. It isalong these lines that Jorge takes, or wouldtake, Julia’s body as the last adequate mea-sure of truth, as the repository of thephantasms she so fears. In saying that herbody is cut in contradiction, I mean thatJorge’s attempt to take it as the measureof something vitally true damages if notdestroys it. Lest this dynamic seem uniqueto Jorge and Julia, we might rememberthat Julia is not the only woman subjectedto violence in Visión del ahogado. Beforeher, there was Rosario, the object of “ElVitaminas’s” adolescent anguish. What“El Vitaminas” fantasized then, like whatJorge fantasizes now, is nothing less thanthe destructive certainty of masculine iden-tity:

alentaba el deseo de destrozar la vidade Rosario en beneficio del machoinseguro que en su interior buscabaafianzarse con la desgracia ajena.(154)

Weaving between Julia, Rosario,Jorge, and “El Vitaminas,” between adoles-cence and maturity, past and present,Millás’s text points to the violent repetitive-ness of sexual knowledge. Violence is herefundamental, because it maintains and evengenerates contradiction at the same timethat it aims to overcome it. Gender too ap-pears to be fundamental. What thereby ob-tains, in a chiasmus too tempting to resist,is something like the violence of gender andthe gender of violence. Exploring the ties

between violence and gender, a numberof feminists have pointed out the histori-cally established tendency to engender thebody in the feminine and truth—in suchabstract forms as thought, mind, andspirit—in the masculine. According tothis history, men create with their mindand imagination while women create withtheir body: or more succinctly, men pro-duce, culturally, and women reproduce,naturally. The primacy of maternity isreadily apparent in this history, not merelyas a feminine matter, but as a masculineidea as well. With regards to Julia, thephantasms that she fears as the archaic fateof femininity are, historically speaking, thephantasms of masculinity. These phan-tasms mark her body as a violently(in)adequate reserve of masculine truth.Indeed, the idea of the feminine body asa repository of truth—simultaneouslyholding and withholding meaning—seemshere untenable outside of violence. To putit more concisely, in Visión del ahogado, Jorgecannot think of (or desire) Julia outside ofviolence. In one scene after another, onebeating after another, Millás’s text is on thispoint implacable: “La violencia delata lafalta de sustancia. O la sustituye” (181).Violence discloses the lack of substance. Orit substitutes it, replaces it, takes its place.

To substitute a lack of substance doesnot necessarily mean that something is madegood; instead, it may imply a dizzying rep-lication of lack, a simulation. And yet, de-spite so much emptiness and falsity, it isimportant to note that violence discloses notso much the insubstantiality of the desiredobject (Julia, as objectified by Jorge and thenarrator) as the insubstantiality of the de-siring subject (Jorge). In Visión del ahogado,in short, violence substitutes a historicallyconstructed, peculiarly masculine lack.

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Through violence, the inadequacy ofmeaning and the lightness of being thathound Jorge, far from being resolved, aremade all the more unbearable:

Jorge la persigue [a Julia] a través delreducido espacio y golpea con preci-sión los lugares más deseados de sucuerpo desnudo: toma venganza deuna adolescencia determinada poraquellas caderas indiferentes a sudolor profundo; y crece su violenciaal tiempo que también, de algúnmodo, el objeto sobre el que la des-carga; y así el cuerpo de Julia pierdeo recupera sus límites al ritmo de suidentidad, que con la crecida de losgolpes atraviesa en sucesión los posi-bles modelos de todo aquello con loque Jorge no ha concebido nuncaotras relaciones que las basadas en laviolencia o la transgresión. (88)

In the close, domestic space of the apart-ment, Jorge pursues, beats, and penetratesJulia with willful precision. And as he beatsher, as he moves to master her, she, or moreprecisely her body, grows. Rising and fall-ing in her body, her identity is rhythmicallycoupled to his violence, created and de-stroyed by it, over and over. Coupled to vio-lence himself, Jorge may indeed be of lim-ited ideas, but these ideas are not, unfortu-nately, limited to him. The scene of violenceis here almost primal in its intensity, andbelies a disturbingly irresolute tensionwithin the home itself. For it is as if do-mesticity, symbolized as the placid and pro-ductive heart of culture, were unable to re-linquish a wildness that it deems its other:as if Jorge had to brutalize Julia to makeher fit for the home.

There is a profound domestic di-lemma in Visión del ahogado. Jorge takes theplace, sexually at least, of Julia’s sick anddelinquent husband. It is not the typical

adulterous affair because “El Vitaminas”actually encourages Jorge, his healthy andaggressive childhood friend, to take hisplace. While Sobejano touches on the text’srelation to realism (205), it is López who,as previously noted, situates Millás’s textwithin a realist tradition of adultery thatincludes Clarín, Eça de Queirós, Flaubert,Tolstoy, Galdós, and Fontane (40). López’sreading is compelling, but what I read isnot so much the maintenance of literarytraditions and established narrative framesas their violent simulation. Millás’s text, inother words, has more to do with thewrenching of tradition and the collapse ofmaster narratives so dear to postmodernitythan it does with the mimetic totalizationand “virile maturity” that Georg Lukácsfinds in the realist novel (71).8 In Millás’snovel, virility and maturity are adolescentillusions, fierce substitutes for a profoundontological emptiness. Adultery, betrayal,and crime are not situated and signifiedwithin a stable frame; instead, they are setimpossibly loose in a world made mean withmasculine meaning.

But if Visión del ahogado comes closeto laying bare the violence of establishedmasculinity and of male-ordered domestic-ity, it is not by refiguring meaning within afeminist frame and even less by appealingto “positive role models.” Julia, for example,repeatedly validates the violence against heras the only tangible value she knows:

Para Julia, que con los mismos ges-tos con los que intenta defenderseprocura asimismo provocar nuevosgolpes, aquello no deja de ser tam-bién en cierto modo una reivindica-ción: el dolor reivindica sus pechos ylos dos abanicos de sus nalgas, y supelo, que se le cruza por delante delrostro y le ayuda a sentirse bella y


codiciada. (88-89)

Such instances of complicity recur repeat-edly in Millás’s text, as if there were somemasochistic truth about women beneath allthe violence. I submit however that thisparticular truth constitutes yet another in-stance of masculine anxiety before the in-adequacy of truth in general. Moreover, thecrisis of masculinity in which the subjectmelancholically fixates on the body as therefuge of lost meaning is shot through withthe (dis)ordering of truth:

el desorden nuevo advertido por al-guna parte de su ser en una de lasmínimas terrazas se convertía bajo lasospecha en un desorden lógico(como si el orden, el número o lacausa tuvieran un fundamento razo-nable); es decir, en un desorden mo-tivado. (116)

For Millás, as the title of a later text, Eldesorden de tu nombre, indicates, the enig-matically motivated disorder is perhaps firstand foremost the disorder of the name: an-other name, an other’s name, your name.And the disorder of the name—the sign ofthe self—is of course often thought to beadequate to the disorder of the body: thetreacherous site, or repository, of truth.

An Inadequate Conclusion

la literatura es, de un lado, imposible, y deotro, necesaria.—Millás, “Literatura y necesidad”

la literatura sólo puede llegar a ser posibleen la medida en que se vuelve imposible.—Millás, “Literatura y realidad”

It may seem strange that violence and

disorder become the only truly adequatemeasure of truth. A disorderly word for adisorderly world, a disordered name for adisordered body: adequation, broken down,does not disappear, but seems to engenderbreakage. If Visión del ahogado is any indi-cation, the breakdown of strong metaphysi-cal concepts such as adequation, so crucialto truth, can have fearful repercussions, notso much because truth is untethered andset adrift, but because it is pieced (together)as broken. Broken down, truth persists, andreturns, as breakdown and breakage; disor-dered, it persists and returns as disorder. The“rabiosa voluntad de desorden” (64) thatJorge experiences as he hits Julia across theface—while her infant daughter watcheson—is therefore not just an attempt to dis-rupt the order of an already “broken” home;rather, it is an attempt to make a “private”(dis)order adequate to the more “public”(dis)order that Jorge encounters in the street.In this sense, Jorge’s act, far from goingagainst the dominant (dis)order, conformsto it. What is ironic is that Jorge, in onereflective passage after another, criticizesconformity, particularly as it is embodied,in his eyes, in Julia. But while Julia’s use ofpopular American and Mexican love songsmay be a symptom of conformity, Jorge’suse of violence is itself a symptom of con-formity, especially since the all too well-es-tablished violence he uses is sexual and do-mestic in order. I use the word “order” de-liberately because Jorge’s rabid will for dis-order, inasmuch as it is manifested in aneroticized assault on Julia, is inseparablefrom a will to order. Slapping Julia acrossthe face, he may keep her from fully facinghim (and himself from fully facing her) asan autonomous, equal subject, but he doesnot achieve the disorder that he wills. Afterall, disorder, at least when understood in

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terms of violent subjugation, paradoxicallyreplicates established order, the subjugationand violence that subtend it.

According to Gianni Vattimo, in anage of disenchantment, characterized by theabsence of foundations, “the only possiblefoundation for the predominance of an or-der of meaning is force” (Transparent 95).It is worth tarrying with the word “founda-tion.” Vattimo does not “mean” that an or-der of meaning is impossible without force,or that meaning is always violent, but ratherthat the attempt to found an order of mean-ing, to ground it once and for all, is unthink-able outside of force. The danger of disen-chantment is the danger of groundlessness,of a lack of foundations, and the danger ofgroundlessness is that it may issue in thewill to deny groundlessness and reassertfoundations by force. In many respects thedanger of disenchantment resembles thedanger of full adequation, of taking onename, concept, thing, or person for an-other, of making them all fit, of denyinginadequation. I have already indicated howthe denial of inadequation is far fromstraightforward and may involve, paradoxi-cally, an apparent acceptance of inadequa-tion or a will to disorder as the only ad-equate response to an inadequate world.Different as they are, neither “El Vitaminas”nor Jorge gives up the ghost of adequationand neither gives up violence, whether di-rected primarily towards the self or towardsanother. I do not mean to suggest that onecan ever fully give up the ghost of adequa-tion or that it is a principle that can be castoff like a worn garment, but rather that theviolent turns of (in)adequation are crucialto the foundation of an order of meaning.

From the idea that a predominantorder of meaning is founded by force it isonly a small jump to the idea that the pre-

dominant meaning of order is force, thatthe meaning of order, its truth, is forced,violent, and hence at bottom even disor-dered. The idea that the meaning of orderis at bottom disorder is bound to the ideathat there is no bottom, or foundation, out-side force. This is most apparent in the or-der of Francoism, and less apparent in theorder that follows Francoism, and arguablyeven less apparent in the order of the home.At its most wily, the Francoist order, totali-tarian in scope, fosters the illusion of peace,of being on firm, “natural” foundations. Theorder after Francoism, democratic in scope,is considerably more complex, particularlyin the so-called Transition. Foundation hereassumes the form of a democratic constitu-tion and its ratification, both occurring af-ter the publication of Visión. The democraticconstitution is a far cry from the command-ing voice, however legally inscribed, of thelifetime leader. Still, as forceful a documentas the new constitution is, it would benaive to read it as if other forces—rangingfrom the police, the military, and state-sponsored terrorism to capitalism—werenot also at work. The troubling side ofdisenchantment is that little if anythingcan get better (only older) and that theold order and its disorders merely con-tinue in new guises. The order of thehome, spanning political regimes, is, asnoted, especially important.

Focusing on the violence of the homewithout losing sight of the violence of thestreet, Visión del ahogado comprises an in-dictment of the domestic order. True, inMillás’s rendition, the domestic order isbroken from the outset, with Jorge not ex-actly filling in for the absent husband andfather. Some readers might take comfort, Isuppose, in the fact that the home so vio-lently depicted is not that of a faithfully


married couple and might imagine thatthere would be no violence if the home werewhole “as it should be.” They might imag-ine that the true domestic order is an orderfounded not on the historical forces of do-mestication by which women and childrenare subjugated. They might imagine an or-der that held, once upon a time, when mar-riages did not break, at least not in a pub-licly, legally sanctioned way (divorce was notpermitted until 1981); when women’s rightswere an oxymoron; and when adultery re-ally mattered, morally and juridically. Theymight imagine a happy family, a stablehome, peaceful without being mediocre.What they might thus imagine, of course,is the Francoist family, its idealized versionat any rate, the one propped up and propa-gated with slogans, set phrases, and laws.However accurate such imaginings may be,for many Spaniards, the very idea of thehappy, stable family continued to arousesuspicion during and after the Transition.Indeed, it is possible, I believe, to readthe broken domestic scene in Millás’s textin the light of the official version of do-mesticity. Whatever the case, Millás’s textdoes not stage violence only in the street,but in the home, suggesting an imbrica-tion of sites.

Calling for the need “to broaden thedomain of the exercise of democratic rightsbeyond the limited traditional field of ‘citi-zenship,’” Laclau and Mouffe question “thevery idea of a natural domain of the ‘pri-vate’” (185). In addition, they assert that“neo-conservative discourse today is exert-ing itself to restrict the domain of the po-litical and to reaffirm the field of the pri-vate” (185). Part of the democratic process,they contend, is the opening of sites tradi-tionally held to be beyond or outside de-mocracy such as the home and, indeed, the

body. Lest this democratic opening betaken as absolute, Laclau and Mouffe ar-gue that democracy does not dispense witha certain closure. Accordingly, they set aprinciple of equivalence, by which all sitesare equalized, alongside a principle of au-tonomy, by which sites remain different,in a mutually limiting way (185) that isparticularly resonant for Spain. Drawingfrom the work of Claude Lefort, Laclauand Mouffe declare that

the radical difference which a demo-cratic society introduces is that thesite of power becomes an emptyspace; the reference to the transcen-dent guarantor disappears, and withit the substantial unity of society. Asa consequence a split occurs betweenthe instance of power, knowledge,and the law, and their foundationsare no longer assured. (186)

The result, they continue, is “an unendingprocess of questioning” (186) that was bydefinition inoperable under Franco andonly partially operable after the so-calledconsolidation of democracy. The problem,Laclau and Mouffe concede, is that theunending process of questioning, the split-ting of established bonds, and the disso-lution of foundations are not acceptedwithout question and can generate a widearray of reactive responses. One such re-sponse is nostalgia, from both the right(“Con Franco vivíamos mejor”) and, morecomplexly, the left (“Contra Francovivíamos mejor”). Another response, con-nected to nostalgia, is violence, be it inthe attempt, from a variety of political po-sitions, to reassert unity and foundationsor indeed in the attempt to disseminatesplitting and dissolution. If the former isa case of ordered disorder, the second is a

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case of disorder ordered, in the sense thatdisorder is willed; both, as indicated, per-petuate a principle of adequation. Butwhether it be nostalgia, violence, somecombination thereof, or something else al-together, the space that Franco leaves be-hind is neither discretely public nor pri-vate.9

Emptiness is not easily tolerated in theWestern tradition. Running against pleni-tude and fulfillment, in both the religiousand the erotic sense, emptiness can moti-vate penetration, occupation, inhabitation,expansion, colonization, and so on. If de-mocracy introduces a radical difference, andif that difference takes the form of—ormaybe even takes place in—an empty spaceof power, it is not a difference long-lived—if it ever truly existed. For the Transition inSpain is in many respects closer to a rupturapactada than to a ruptura democrática, closerto a planned or bargained break than a radi-cally democratic break. The bargainedbreak, whose aim was to ensure continuityand, as Tom Lewis puts it, “to gain breath-ing space for the new government by in-volving the Left parties in stemming therising tide of strike activities and popularunrest” (173), was thus not really a“break” at all. Then again, the idea of abreak that is truly one, of a reversal un-marked by what is being reversed, mayitself be a function of enchantment, thatis to say an illusion. Be that as it may, asLewis rightly notes, “[t]alk of a rupturademocrática after the end of 1977 becamestigmatized as immature political fantasy”(174). So one break becomes immatureand fantastic—and these terms, along withthe violence implicit in so many rupturesand breaks, swirl throughout Millás’stext—while the other, the break that isnot one, becomes mature and realistic,

indeed real. But breaks do not need to beabsolute, let alone clean, in order to bebreaks: a ruptura democrática does not nec-essarily imply a denial of all historical con-tinuity nor entail any more fantasies than aruptura pactada. At any rate, the rupturapactada was in the eyes of many less a breakthan a patching over of a potentially un-bearable gap: the gap—or as Laclau andMouffe would have it, the empty space—of democracy. This situation did not gounnoticed and gave way to a more tempo-rally acute sense of disenchantment.

The disenchantment in the wake ofFranco and in the midst of a transition to anewly (re)constituted society is, amongother things, the effect of an intolerance ofthe radical difference that democracy mightintroduce. In the same sweep, it is the ef-fect of a rush to fill in an ostensibly emptyspace of power with the same old thing orwith something similar to it. The rush seemsto be conditioned by the fear of an evenswifter return of totalitarianism, of absolutelythe same old thing, and by the fear of dif-ferent totalizing systems. Franco may be asmuch a ghost of the empty space of poweras Stalin, and it is perhaps not surprisingthat neither can be recuperated, in theperson of one of their followers, as a guar-antor of any social wholeness that is nottotalitarian. This is important, for

with totalitarianism, rather than des-ignating a vacant site, power seeksto make itself material in an organwhich assumes itself to be represen-tative of a unitary people. Under thepretext of achieving the unity of thepeople, the social division made vis-ible by the logic of democracy isthereupon denied. (Laclau 187)

The democracy that is constituted through


these specters does not, however, simplyaccept social division or respect the vacancyof power. It too strives for a kind of fulfill-ment.

In the “broken” home which one manhas left only to be replaced by another, thesituation is uncannily like that of the na-tion. A site of power is vacated (Luis, “ElVitaminas,” leaves), a difference is intro-duced (Julia is alone with her daughter), anda new guarantor of power arrives (Jorge).But what Jorge guarantees, in the use offorce, is the previously mentioned impossi-bility of sexual relation. This raises some in-teresting paradoxes. Laclau and Mouffe’snotion of the impossibility of society, bywhich they mean that society is not pos-sible as a closed, complete, and utterly uni-fied totality is here germane. Rather thanaccepting and managing impossibility,rather than accepting the vacancy soambivalently signified by “El Vitaminas,”Jorge strives to deny it, seeking instead arelation that is ordered under him. Or dis-ordered: for the relation that Jorge imag-ines as possible is one founded on force,ordered in and as disorder, planned to fail:

Jorge […] no tenía nada que planifi-car, excepto el fracaso. Ordenar elfracaso, disponer adecuadamente suspartes y digerirlo luego día a día.(227)

Ordering failure, it might seem that Jorgedoes indeed accept the impossibility of atotally sutured, fixed, and non-antagonis-tic relation, but what he does is strive,through the willful use of force, to makethat impossibility “his.” Ordering failure andwilling disorder is not the same as accept-ing or managing them. Quite the contrary,it is as if Jorge, intimating the impossibilityof utterly unified sexual and social relations,

sought to make his breakage adequate toa more extensive breakage that comes tohim only in images of violence.

Millás’s text is an inadequate measureof Spanish society. Shot through with ref-erences to fraud, failure, falsity, inauthen-ticity, simulation, and insubstantiality, it isa fractured testament to the pervasive dis-enchantment associated with the dissolu-tion, not only of systems of total stabilityand projects of political redemption, but oftruth and meaning as well. It is also achronicle of violence: a disenchanted vio-lence that arises in the breakdown of anadequate notion of truth and that is itselfperhaps the frightful last gasp of adequa-tion whose tone is tellingly manly. The same(masculine) privileges and prerogatives thatare presumably without substance or objec-tive grounds are reasserted by Jorge but alsoby “El Vitaminas,” in and as violence. Theirsis not the violence of terrorism and the state-sponsored terrorist “resistance” to terrorism,but the violence of everyday life: the petty,banal, domestic strife of a society seeminglybereft of struggles more grandiose. It is inthese “little stories” that grand historicalprojects, including the project of democ-racy, are tested. They are tested inad-equately and for their own inadequacy, fortheir inability to saturate the social fieldas well as for their inability to discountlittle stories and their “personal” and “pri-vate” concerns. The democratic project,for instance, must grapple with the factthat these small stories, however told, areneither identical to it nor entirely differ-ent from it. It is in this tension, perhaps,that there lies something significant and,just possibly, promising for us all.

But what is the promise, for democ-racy, of disenchantment? I have perhapsbelabored the dangers of disenchantment—understood as the dissolution of, among

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other things, a principle of adequation—as they pertain not only to Francoism butalso to a good deal of anti-Francoism. Thedangers include the violence of(re)founding a dominant order of mean-ing (in which a lack of foundations is force-fully denied) or of guaranteeing disorderas a dominant order of meaning (in whicha lack of foundations becomes the adequate“justification” of a free play of forces).Visión del ahogado is in many respects anaccount of disenchantment (if not of thedisenchantment), where the absence offoundations issues in the loss of sociallyconstructive bonds. There is, however,another way of reading the text, one thattakes disenchantment, for all its negativ-ity, as holding a certain promise. Vindi-cating such weakened, humanist-ladenterms as “compassion” and “solidarity,”Vattimo claims that disenchantment neednot find its truth in oppressive force,whether exercised against the other, theself, or both. For him, disenchantment—and this I believe is important for the fateof the term in contemporary Spanishthought in general—includes:

the recognition that there are no ob-jective structures, values or laws andthat everything is posited, created byman (at least in the realm of mean-ing). (Transparent 97)

And created by woman, I might add. Forone of the things that Millás’s text stages isthe violent refusal, on the part of Jorge (andperhaps the narrator), to recognize Julia ascreative of any meaning that does not issuefrom the culture industry and/orphantasmatic conceptions of the maternalbody. Disenchantment extends to the so-called private, domestic sphere, but neednot, as it does in the text before us, extend

only as force and frustration. As Vattimosays, disenchantment

can be understood neither as thegrasp of a true structure of reality,nor […] as a ‘transposition’ into aworld of undisguised relations, thatis of pure relations of forces. (Trans-parent 99)

Indeed, “to the extent that it takes re-sponsibility for the creation of meaning, dis-enchantment assumes the form of a deci-sion for non-violence” (Transparent 94-95).And to the extent that the meaning that itcreates does not ground itself, its truth, in aprinciple of strict adequation, disenchant-ment becomes the site of democratic op-portunity, fractured and fluctuant in thehome as in the street as in the text.

************

To be sure, meaning, so configured,may still seem quite grand. As such, it givesthe lie to my claim that Visión is a smallstory holding no utopian message or re-demptive lesson. This is not necessarily a“good thing.” There is a risk—if that is in-deed the way of putting it—of extractinga new enchantment from disenchant-ment. Taking a clue from Visión, there isalso a risk of resuscitating the “drowned”and offering not just the opportunity foranother, better way of living but also foranother, more effective way of gettingfucked over, of fucking over. And so thenew enchantment that may be adum-brated in Vattimo’s “opportune” readingof disenchantment, pace Vattimo, and inmy extension of it to Millás’s text, mayharbor an opportunity for yet more dis-enchantment, more “adolescent” fantasiesand “adult” failures, more violence. To theextent that it takes responsibility for the


creation of meaning, disenchantment doesnot perforce assume the form of a decisionfor non-violence. Much as it pains me tosuggest it, responsibility may itself be aninadequate principle, even, or especially,when it bears on the creation of meaning,all of which does not mean, in this swirl-ing play of meanings grand and small, thatresponsibility can be simply thrown aside.Things, I would submit, are considerablymore complex, more treacherous even, andrequire a good deal of vigilance: which canalso be quite treacherous. This, at least, isthe meaning for which I, however inad-equately, take responsibility.

Notes1 For Luis,

el tiempo es un privilegio de claseque ni sucede ni dura, porque durardenota, más que una adecuaciónentre existir y ser, un trasiego con-fuso de ambas categorías, cuyo en-redo conduce finalmente a la renun-cia de las dos. Dura, verbigracia, unaenfermedad no atendida, un traba-jo improvento, o este discurso míocuyo final espera nadie para ni aplau-dirlo ni censurarlo. (49-50)

Time is inadequate because some things it tries tomeasure are simply too complex.

2 The relative lack of specific historical mark-ers does not mean that there is a lack of specific-ity altogether. For Smith,

a very specific urban space in Visión(a blue-collar neighborhood in anorthern quadrant of the city) is thelocus for the tensions and contra-dictions in the novel. (697)

It is interesting, however, that this “very specificurban space” is not named.

3 Julia’s moment of oblivious, “perfect andnatural” adequation with the world takes placebefore the mirror, in the “rutinaria compro-bación de su belleza” (17). It is as if the contem-

plation of her own beauty blinded Julia to every-thing else: “ella no se sentía vinculada al recuerdoni a la evocación, sino más bien a su propia imagen”(20).

4 Whether it is “El Vitaminas’s” fear of cap-ture or Julia’s “miedo antiguo que conservabaaún como reliquia de la adolescencia” (19), fear,overlaid with desire, saturates the text. The ir-ruption of “El Vitaminas” into Jorge’s sphere ofactivity is one of those events that:

si bien no suceden cada día ni cadahora suceden en todo caso con lafrecuencia necesaria como paraacabar por tomarle miedo al mundoen general y a la calle en particular.(12)

5 Lacan’s claim that “il n’y a pas de rapportsexuel” (35) should be read against a horizon ofideal reciprocity, correspondence, unity, andadequation. That sexual relation is impossible.

6 Jorge’s and Luis’s memories are explicitlyrelated, while Julia’s are only suggested throughthe memories of the men. Memory is thus givennarrative content in masculine terms. López isright to read the omniscient narrating voice asmasculine and as being close to Jorge’s and todescribe Julia as a desired object or voiceless, un-said subject (44).

7 Kristeva’s highly problematic theorizationof the archaic mother—as what cannot be seizedby rational thought yet undergirds significa-tion—is appurtenant to Millás’s figurations of femi-ninity. Expanding on the Lacanian notion of thereal as bound to death, Kristeva suggests that themother bears the chore of delivering the real intothe symbolic, and hence of bringing life to deathand death into life. Of course, such a suggestioncan have devastating consequences.

8 For Lukács, the novel as the art form of “vir-ile maturity,”

means that the completeness of thenovel’s world, if seen objectively, isan imperfection, and if subjectivelyexperienced, it amounts to resigna-tion. (71)

In Visión del ahogado, “virile maturity” is an ado-lescent fantasy and the very notions of objective

Brad Epps 53

vision and subjective experience are violently un-hinged.

9 The death of a dictatorial father does notlend itself to indisputable mourning because thefather in question is not indisputably loved andperhaps not even indisputably hated (one mayhave loved to hate him). Unlike Hitler andMussolini, Franco escapes retributive justice and,however pathetic his protracted agony, finds in-stead the symbolic sweetness of slipping “natu-rally” into death. To mourn Franco thus entailsmourning the conditions and circumstances ofhis demise. Given the circumstances of Franco’sdeath, melancholia is almost a constitutional risk.

Works CitedAdorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer.

Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. JohnCumming. New York: Continuum, 1987.

Benet, Juan. La inspiración y el estilo. Madrid:Revista de Occidente, 1966.

Bértolo Cadenas, Constantino. Apéndice. Papelmojado. By Juan José Millás. Madrid:Anaya, 1983. 183-223.

Cabañas, Pilar. “Materiales gaseosos: Entrevistacon Juan José Millás.” Cuadernos Hispano-americanos 580 (1998): 103-20.

Cebrián, Juan Luis. La España que bosteza:Apuntes para una historia crítica de laTransición. Madrid: Taurus, 1980.

Cuadrat, Esther. “Una aproximación al mundonovelístico de Juan José Millás.” Cuader-nosHispanoamericanos 541-542 (1995): 207-

16.Jones, Anny Brooksbank. Women in Contem-

porary Spain. Manchester: Manchester UP,1997.

Kristeva, Julia. Soleil noir: Dépression etmélancolie. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Seminaire XX-Encore. Paris:Seuil, 1975.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy: Towards a RadicalDemocratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.

Lewis, Tom. “Aesthetics and Politics.” Afterwordto Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain.Eds. Silvia L. López, Jenaro Talens, andDarío Villanueva. Minneapolis: U of Min-nesota P, 1994. 160-82.

López, Ignacio-Javier. “Novela y realidad: Entorno a la estructura de Visión del ahogadode Juan José Millás.” Anales de LiteraturaEspañola Contemporánea 13 (1988): 37-54.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: AHistorico-Philosophical Essay on the Formsof Great Epic Literature. Trans. AnnaBostock. Cambridge: MIT P, 1973.

Mainer, José-Carlos. “1975-1985: Los poderesdel pasado.” La cultura española en elposfranquismo: Diez años de cine, cultura yliteratura (1975-1985). Madrid: Playor,1988. 11-26.

Marco, José María. “En fin ... Entrevista con JuanJosé Millás.” Quimera 81 (1988): 20-26.

Millás, Juan José. “Literatura y necesidad.” Revistade Occidente (1998): 185-91.

———. “Literatura y realidad.” Revista deOccidente 85 (1988): 122-25.

———. Visión del ahogado. Barcelona: Destino,1989.

Miranda, Martha Isabel. “El lenguajecinematográfico de la acción en la narrativade Juan José Millás.” Revista HispánicaModerna 47.2 (1994): 526-32.

Rosenberg, John R. “Entre el oficio y la obsesión:Una entrevista con Juan José Millás.” Analesde la Literatura Española Contemporánea 21(1996): 143-60.

Smith, Carter E. “Between Two Chronotopes:Space and Time in Juan José Millás’s Visióndel ahogado.” Romance Languages Annual9 (1998): 697-703.

Sobejano, Gonzalo. “Juan José Millás:Fabulador de la extrañeza.” Nuevos ynovismos: Algunas perspectivas críticas sobre

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Battered Bodies and Inadequate Meanings: Violence and ...and Inadequate Meanings: Violence and Disenchantment in Juan José Millás’s Visión del ahogado Brad Epps is Professor of