Juan Marsé is a hybrid whose vigorous non-conformity under the Franco dictatorship, and since the Transition to democracy, has presented a constant challenge to hegemonic discourses. Though a Catalan speaker throughout the years of Francoist post-war repression of regional difference and language, his brief schooling was in Castilian, as were the books he read and the films he saw. A religious sceptic, he was brought up a Catholic in Franco’s Spain and actually chose to involve himself in his local parish’s youth activities, lured by the ping-pong tables, plays, music and girls that he depicts so vividly in his narratives....

The hybrid has advantages in literature as in life. Foremost is the strength derived from counteracting the debilitating effects of inbreeding; in addition, being claimed by no single group, the hybrid is answerable to none. There is scope in the marginality of hybridity that allows voices of power – regime voices – to be challenged or mimicked, parodied, mocked and subjected to critical scrutiny through the creation of languages of freedom whose strength has been found to lie in their multiplicity and often duplicity.

This chapter looks at ways in which Marsé, the hybrid – Castilian-speaking Catalan, churched religious sceptic, barely schooled, having...

Having depicted critical discourse as a pliable toy in the narrative play area in Chapter 1, I concluded that Marsé’s playful attitude to official discourses leads to a provocative challenge to the notion of ‘fiabilidad histórica’. History appears more intractable than literary criticism; in the popular mind and among historians, the conviction remains strong that history should and can be an accurate reconstruction of what has taken place in reality: history deals in research and the quest for truth; literature deals in imagination and fiction. Yet this is, of course, an oversimplification. Historians, like literary critics, may try to take...

Up to this point in my discussion of Juan Marsé’s multidimensional games of representation, fuelled by desire and imagination and daring to challenge official discourses in order to exploit existing textual conventions in inventive new ways, literary criticism and history have been viewed as two examples of textual convention whose authority he has dared to undermine. The textual games in my remaining three chapters, which consider religious discourses, are bolder still. For even today, the wars that are claiming religion as their cause in the new millennium offer chilling evidence of the passions roused and dangers inherent where that which...

My discussion has already given an indication of the extent to which the religious culture that surrounded Marsé in his early years provided him with a source of potent stories and images that greatly enrich his narratives as well as fuelling his critique of Catholicism in post-war Spain and Catalonia. One religious myth in particular needs further exploration, because it underpins so much post-war rhetoric, because it surfaces repeatedly in Marsé’s novels, and because it is an endless source of controversial imagery and ideas that he playfully exploits with knowledge and inventiveness. Linked in Chapters 2 and 3 with the...

With a noteworthy change of medium, the protagonists of Marsé’s two most recent novels – Daniel (ES) and David (RL) – are depicted struggling for self-expression not with words but with images: Daniel using coloured pencils in his attempts to represent a suggestive but elusive Susana, and David photography to capture the tension, vibrancy and danger of the 1951 Barcelona Tram Strike (Raguer ‘El día de los tranvías o la huelga que fue una fiesta’). Marsé’s interest in image has been evident from his first novel on. In Chapter 1 I showed how, inEncerrados, Andrés, Tina and Martín all cultivated and...

This study has examined how Juan Marsé uses Catholic iconography to powerful effect in his novels to explore and subvert the ideologies of the Catholic Church, Spanish National Catholicism and Catalan Catholic Nationalism. It has considered both the broad background of Marsé’s depiction of popular religious culture in post-war Barcelona, and has focused discussion on specific discourses of Vatican II, on myths of biblical Paradise Gardens, and on individual icons. It draws attention to Marsé’s preoccupation with the extent to which religious ideology can permeate public and private life, yet at the same time, throughout my discussion I have emphasised...