La representacion del otro nacional: Lo popular en la narrativa de Juan Marse
Description
Although the phenomenon of emigration is not unknown to the Spanish experience, the recent increase of immigration in Spain over the last decades has facilitated the development of a discourse that seeks to vindicate the public space, identity and voice of the immigrant subject and his/her culture in relationship to the hegemonic discourse. This new discourse opens the door and legitimizes, in one way, the study and analysis of a perduring migratory phenomenon: the Andalusian and Murcian migration to the Catalan region. The Catalan image, identity and culture have been constructed on the basis of the presence of these supposedly foreign elements: the Xarnegos, that is, these immigrants from the South, and their so-called popular culture The narrative of the Catalan writer Juan Marse, born in 1933, recaptures, with extraordinary literary force and beauty, the dynamic that occurs when the encounter between the Catalan national subject and the Xarnego Other takes place. His novels, particularly Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1966), La oscura historia de la prima Montse (1970) and El amante bilingue (1990) are literary spaces in which we are told, by means of different stories, one single story: the history of an unequal exchange which forces us to rethink the hegemonic story Chapter I of the dissertation sets forth and, at the same time, questions the presence-absence of Juan Marse and his work, and the presence-absence of popular culture, in academia and the world of literary criticism. Chapter II analyzes the presence and the role of religious discourse in the construction of the popular as the national other. Chapter III focuses on the issue of the role of language and its complexity in the formulation of national identity. At the same time it analyzes the role of the Andalusian immigrant in this process. Chapter IV studies the presence of popular songs and music which, in the novel, El amante bilingue, become a literary narrative voice. It is through this music and song that the national Other successfully vindicates his/her subjectivity and affirms a national identity that is hybrid, mestizo and different from the hegemonic national identity discourse