Joan Ramon Resina,
Cornell University

To this date Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe, a novel published in 1990, remains the most explicit literary intervention witnessed thus far in Catalonia’s language conflict. Although essentially a pastiche of political figures and institutions of the first post-Franco Catalan government, the novel focuses on the social polarization around language triggered by the first steps towards the rehabilitation of Catalan after Spain’s transition to a constitutional regime in 1978. More concretely, this novel is the first literary reaction to the Language Normalization Law, approved in 1983 with the support of all political parties. At first sight, then, this work deploys precise temporal and spatial coordinates. Yet this very specificity occludes a thick historical soil and, I would argue, a complex sociological background, which must be brought into the interpretive purview inasmuch as the work claims to marshal a valid system of references.

The argument of the novel is widely known, especially after it became the basis for a successful film. Quickly summarized, the action begins on a rainy November afternoon in 1975, on or around the date of Franco’s death. Upon coming home, Juan Marés finds his wife, Norma Valentí, in bed with a shoeshine who speaks with a heavy Andalusian accent. This scene causes the marriage to break down and triggers off Marés’s crisis of identity. From this moment, Marés will do the utmost to reconquer his wife, who now starts working for the Language Department of the reestablished Catalan government. Her name, Norma, was used significantly by the relevant authorities to promote the Language Normalization Law of 1983. Assuming that she feels an irresistible attraction for Andalusian immigrants, Marés lets his identity slip into an alter ego. Juan Faneca, a character more in keeping with his wife’s secret passion, gradually takes control of his mind, his appearance, and finally his possessions. Suffering from an ever more acute split personality, Marés finally puts a patch over his right eye to obliterate the Catalan way of looking at things, and concludes with his own version of identity integration: a notorious final monologue delivered in a non-language made up of bits and pieces from Catalan and Andalusian. This self-made koiné goes beyond the debased language proposed at the beginning of the Transition with the motto "el català que avui es parla" ("Catalan as it is spoken today") and comes nearer to the regionalized Spanish that Pasqual Maragall not long ago proposed as the solution for Catalonia’s linguistic identity.

While most critics agree that the end of the novel leaves Barcelona’s cultural division intact and Catalan identity in suspension, none, to my knowledge, goes beyond the fictional argument to analyze the sociolinguistic premises in a way that includes the writing conditions and the author’s historico-political and professional conditioning. One after the other, critics are persuaded by a dated class/nationality correlation, which is further obscured by a shaky use of empirical data and an even more improper framing of the sociocultural conflict. Ute Heinemann, for example, speaks of the "exaggerated form of Catalanism, which he [Marsé] sees in the Catalan bourgeoisie" (1994, 149).

Although Heinemann speaks conveniently in terms of Marsé’s opinion, exercising a form of aseptic indirecte Rede, she embraces his point of view and takes for granted the objectivity of his political verdict. A few lines later she mentions Marsé’s gibe at Jordi Pujol, president of Catalonia’s regional government, who, in her opinion, "continues to be a strong identity figure for the Catalan bourgeoisie" (149). Leaving aside the confusion between identity and political representation, Heinemann fails to adduce the slightest sociological or historical criteria to substantiate the notion that the Catalan government’s linguistic policy is excessive. In view of this, it would appear pertinent to enquire of this sociolinguist exactly what, in her view, would constitute a legitimate language policy in general and in the case of Catalonia in particular? The question is pithy, to say the least, especially since her terms of reference extends exclusively to the Catalan bourgeoisie which, socio-historically speaking, provides a more than precarious basis for a coherent scheme of Catalan national sentiment.

In addition, it is by no means clear what these and other critics mean by "bourgeoisie." Are we to follow Marxist practice and understand by this term an elite in possession of the means of social production, or should we take it more nebulously as signifying voters for Mr. Pujol’s party, who between 1978 and 1996 made up the absolute majority of Catalonia’s voting population? Given the lack of clarity in discourse on these very specific issues and the generalised misunderstanding which emanates therefrom, the reader is left largely without alternative to infer that the latter is exactly the social cluster Heinemann has in mind.

Indeed this type of misconception is not infrequent among a body of critics who tend to construct the edifice of their sociological analysis on a residually partial interpretation of Marx. Starting from the derivitavely spurious premise that nationalism is, by definition, an exclusively bourgeois phenomenon, they produce a bourgeoisie wherver nationalist ideology exists, regardless of any other considerations of a socio-economic nature. There would appear to be no other way we could understand how professionally accredited language experts can conflate so facilely a national language with a specific social class. A conflation whose absurdity is, in this particular case, confirmed by the available data.

The class-nation-language confusion is more emphatic in William Sherzer, a literary critic who specializes in Marsé’s fiction. Sherzer considers Faneca’s rejection of Norma (that is to say, the immigrant’s rejection of his integration through the Catalan language) as the author’s latest statement "on sexual-sociological preferences and politics, his ultimate ironic commentary on the hypocritical rigidity of bourgeois Catalan values" (1994, 411-412). In the rejection of these values (ranging from sexual to political, but curiously forgetting the one that is really at stake, namely language) Sherzer perceives "a somber and serious moment for Marsé, and the nobility and humanity that Faneca achieves while Norma recedes into her own stereotype constitutes similarly a critical moment . . ." (1994, 412). It is hardly clear how resorting to stereotypes would constitute "a critical moment," and why the "critical" quality of that moment is provided by the alleged humanization of the charnego stereotype (Marés’s other mask) in contrast to Norma’s definitive stereotyping. Sherzer is merely restating his parti pris through the rhetoric of authenticity, ignoring Marsé’s statement about the instability of identity (and hence of authenticity) in a split society. There is nothing new in this position. Sherzer had already speculated with the same polarization in his analysis of Ultimas tardes con Teresa, where he says about the immigrant Manolo: "He falsifies that [i.e. his] authenticity throughout much of the novel, but does not falsify himself" (1982, 205, my translation).

Predictably, Sherzer provides no explanation, not to say justification, for his harsh judgement on Catalan values, which he does not care to define or ennumerate. Again, nothing is solved by the precision that the values in question are bourgeois, because Sherzer too confuses nation with class. In his case it is not difficult to perceive not only ignorance of but also indifference to the enormous welter of social, historical, and cultural facts as intricately complex as they are sensitive. Hi critique of the Catalan sociolinguistic situation is undertaken without the benefit of a single item from the vast specialized bibliography of a notoriously complicated discipline. In addition, it would seem, Catalans are there merely to be spoken about, preferably in threadbare clichés, and not treated as subjects of their own discourse. By dispensing with even the semblance of informed scholarship, Sherzer condemns himself to seeing reality solely through fiction, losing his critical foothold and turning his article into an eulogy of Marsé, whom he sees as advancing "his own artistic immortality" with this novel (1994, 413).

Sherzer’s disorientation reaches its apex when, after applauding Faneca/Marsé’s rejection of Norma, he assures us that this is all "a plea for the social integration of the charnego, and, curiously, through integration a genuine normalization of Catalan culture" (1994, 412). Curiously indeed, because what could integration mean once Catalan culture has receded into a stereotype? And what might be the task of cultural and linguistic normalization, if not the correction of an imbalance through the intervention that Norma, in her sociolinguistic role, stands for?

I come to the third and last example of this genus of interpretive confusionism. It concerns an overall better informed article by Milton Azevedo, written ostensibly to illustrate the use of nonstandard spelling (which he calls "literary dialect") as a means of encoding sociolinguistic factors. Like the previous critics, Azevedo accepts unquestioningly the idea that Norma is the "typical product of an upper middle class upbringing of the fifties and sixties," someone who is not only educated and "proper," but also, according to Azevedo, "emotionally repressed" as well (127). Hence her sexual promiscuity with immigrants from the south of the Peninsula. Since Catalan males are presumably just as emotionally repressed as their female counterparts, she clearly needs the comforts and expertise offered by exotic aliens.

At this juncture one is distinctly alarmed by the commentator’s inability to fix upon the strictly symbolic meaning of this character as he is induced without the slightest protest to accept a class and moral characterization that is then transferred to language normalization itself. In a novel dealing with identity, it seems necessary to determine, first of all, who or what Norma is. Is she a prudish, nymphomaniac upper-class woman? A pastiche of Catalanism? An emblem for the Catalan language or for a campaign to extend its social use? Is she all of these things at once? And if so, what message does she convey? And how well does it stand empirical scrutiny? Deciding this point is crucial, but Azevedo does not disentangle the scientific grain from the ideological chaff. Echoing Marsé’s use of a stereotype about the alleged licentiousnes of Catalan women,⁽¹⁾ he elucidates Norma’s role as both a class and a linguistic signifier, creating a counterstereotype in the association of the Spanish language with a needy working class.

"Marés," Azevedo claims, "telephones her, pretending to be a poor Southern shopkeeper" (127). At face value, this designation is suspect. In what capitalist society does a shopkeeper supply our image of the poor? Reading the passage scrupulously one notes that Marés does not claim to be financially strapped. He merely pretends to be monolingually Spanish. True, he will soon return to his lower class origins, but when he plays this telephone trick on his wife, he is merely testing the advantages of impersonation; he has not yet transformed himself into Faneca. At this point the social hiatus is still linguistic, and Azevedo’s assumption of the link between language and social class is seen, upon scrutiny, to depend on a misinterpretation of Marés’s phrase: "No zabusté cuánto l’agradezco l’atención que ha tenío con este pobre charnego..." ("You don’t know how grateful I am to you for being so considerate with this poor immigrant...") (Amante 28). In this passage the word "poor" is emotionally, not economically connoted, and conveys an unequivocally ironical undertone.⁽²⁾

Azevedo rejoins the other two readers in his conclusion that somehow the cultural integration of immigrants "in the last five decades" has been precluded by entrenched Catalan resistance and would ultimately necessitate a "compromise for the common good" (134). But what form should compromise take between a language brought to the brink of social extinction and the claims of those speakers of the dominant language who wish to maintain the pressure on the vernacular? A bastardized language, already audible in the substandard Catalan used by most speakers and which has not furthered its social presence in the least? (Segarra 98) Maintenance of Barcelona’s relentless castilianization? A survey conducted in 1997 shows that between 1985 and 1995 the number of youngsters who speak Catalan as their native language has dropped from 32% to 26% in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, while monolingual Spanish speakers make up 54% of the young. (Avui 11/02/97) This trend supports Fascist expectations that intensive migration and a differential birth rate would accomplish the extinction of the Catalan language that repressive measures alone could not ensure. A German book’s review published by Spain’s Ministry of Information and Tourism in its official Boletín de Orientación Bibliográfica (No. 61, January 1968) observed: "The book says that ‘while Catalonia’s upper class has been strongly Castilianized, in a relative sense, the Catalan factor is hegemonic in the middle and lower classes". Here the author fails to consider the demographic and linguistic role played by the human contingent of immigrants. [. . . The author] has not grasped this: a Castilianization from below, gradual and steady, attuned to the expanding rhythm of industry and propelled by different birth rates [of Catalans and immigrants]." (Termes 179).

Today’s situation bears out this gleeful prediction. Catalans are still compelled, through all kinds of discouraging measures, to use Spanish when addressing state functionaries, police officers, judges, and a good number of university professors. In addition, they have seen their language fall to a meager 20% of media space, with a negligible presence in areas like film, commercial products, and public services, all the while coming up against a strengthened Spanish monolingualism in everyday life. In Barcelona Catalan is now a minority language, despite or perhaps because of the ineffective language policy attacked by Marsé and deemed exaggerated by Heinemann, hypocritical by Sherzer, and uncompromising by Azevedo. In contrast to these views, the Language Normalization Law of 1983 has been more accurately described by Josep Murgades as "reservationist." It reinforces the existence of endogamous spaces of communication for Catalan, without procuring its diffusion throughout the social space (6). In the fall of 1997, the Catalan Parliament updated this ineffectual law without providing guarantees for its enforcement. At the last moment, the Catalan government caved in to the attacks orchestrated by the anti-Catalan Right and Left of the Spanish political spectrum, and produced a law explicitly devoid of coercive measures.

Marsé did not remain neutral during the public debate that broke out even before the contents of the new law were formulated. On 29 April, 1997, he and eighty-nine other Barcelona writers and intellectuals, associated under the label "Foro Babel", produced a document intended to disable the announced reform of the language law. Claiming that the Catalan language has achieved "normality," the document’s co-signers opposed any measures to improve its social scope, and vindicated the status quo in the name of Catalonia’s alleged bilingualism. Through its premature reaction, Foro Babel limited the options available to the parliamentary committee charged with drafting the proposed legislation. It succeeded by appealing not just to Catalonia’s present linguistic division but, more fundamentally, to the authority behind this division, even if this appeal remained tacit since, as Niklas Luhmann explains, authority does not require explicit justification. It is based on tradition, although it does not need to invoke it (108).

This is specially true in the case Foro Babel, given the corrosive nature of the operative political tradition for self-styled left-wing intellectuals. Foro Babel claims that it stands for bilingualism, although, in consonance with its name, it promotes at best diglossia and at worst division. And division is starting to eat away at the only credible identity trait left to Catalans, their language. Thus, on 11 September, 1998, the date of Catalonia’s national holiday, Jordi Sánchez, responding unwittingly to these pressures, proposed to dissolve the link between language and nationhood, so that in the future the Catalan language would not be, in his words, the compulsory toll paid by those who wish to feel nationally Catalan ("Catalanisme al segle XXI," AVUI, 11 September 1998).

Bilingualism is an inadequate concept to describe Barcelona’s linguistic landscape. It does not denote universal competence in two languages, not even the equal share of the social space by both languages. Some of those who signed Foro Babel’s document are incompetent in Catalan, and a good number of them are diglossic, that is, they parcel out their use of both languages, which generally means that they relegate Catalan to strictly private and often irregular uses. Foro’s laissez faire, like laissez faire generally, stems from the perceived advantage of maintaining the social trend undisturbed. The trend is in this case favorable to the consolidation of the social and linguistic selections made by this group of highly visible writers and academics. The nature of the bilingualism they defend is crystallized by their passivity before the numerous provisions in Spanish law limiting the use of Catalan. For example, by their silence when, in 1989, as Marsé was writing El amante bilingüe, Manuel Alvar, president of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, appealed to the Spanish government to adopt a language policy parallel to that of the Catalan government. The purpose of this policy, it goes without saying, was to block the progress of Catalan in its own sphere. Foro Babel was again silent in the Spring of 1998, when Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a senator for the conservative Partido Popular tried to launch a Spanish language normalization campaign, grotesque as that may sound. A few weeks later, Marsé went on record as saying that the law was unnecessary and potentially dangerous in its application (Domínguez, xi).

Bearing these facts in mind, it might be appropriate to ask Azevedo just what he means by mutual compromise for the common good, and even more pointedly, what he means by common good tout court. Catalans already fulfill, de jure and de facto, the bilingual requirement. If Catalan as a social "good" or product is deemed, on the one hand, the preserve of an exclusive social class and, on the other, an unwelcome socializing tool, then something is amiss in this logic. Given the paradoxical nature of the diagnostic, is it at all surprising that confusion remains the "norm" for sociolinguistic discourse that lines up at Babel?

The issue would be less muddled if stricter criteria of identity were employed, keeping those pertaining to nation and language clear of class criteria. There are good reasons for doing this. First, because economic development has swept immigrants into the upward mobility that marks Catalonia’s (and Spain’s) transformation in the last four decades, without facilitating an equivalent cultural integration. And secondly, because the association of Catalan values and the Catalan language with the bourgeoisie is simply nonsensical, as has always been disputed by Catalans themselves. A respondent to a survey on Catalan identity expressed a fairly generalized view among the Catalan lower and middle classes when he states that "it is not necessary to call the upper bourgeoisie Catalan, but rather what it is and has always been, Spanish" (Sellares 1980; cit. Woolard 39). If language is considered the decisive criterium of identity, this respondent’s opinion is born out by the recent survey on language use among the young. In 1995, in Barcelona, the majority of Catalan speakers were middle class, followed by the lower and upper classes in a descending order that correlates with that of bilingual speakers. In other words, the sociolinguistic picture is exactly inverse to Marsé’s. Monolingualism is indeed the pattern in the haute bourgeoisie, but it is Spanish. On the other hand, the likes of Marés are statistically the least likely to feel alienated by a Catalan normalization campaign and, paradoxically, the most willing to exercise a genuine bilingualism (AVUI 11/02/97).

These correlations notwithstanding, it seems advisable to disengage vertical class criteria from horizontal phenomena, such as language dissemination, which present complicated ramifications and an unequal permeation of the social strata. But if class criteria are invoked, as doubtless they must at a certain level of inquiry, then those criteria need to be inserted in an analytical framework which understands the national community as a shifting, unstable formation. Such formation necessarily encompasses different but interrelated classes and, at least in principle, must be imagined as a speech community, no matter how criss-crossed by socially accented varieties of diction. Analyses like those criticized above take a skewed view of the cultural situation to the extent that they are anchored on a theoretical base (that of literary Marxism) which was productive in the fifties and sixties but had become a form of analytical closure by the mid-seventies. Around that time, Francesc Candel, a lower-class immigrant, found it necessary to refute a Marxist prejudice which, for left-wing Catalan intellectuals, had become self-defeating. Polemicizing against social-class historian Antoni Jutglar, Candel cautioned:

Unaware of the revision of Marxist orthodoxy in the still marginal practice of Cultural Studies that had emerged in England, Candel was made aware of the primacy of cultural space by his submersion in the reality of immigration and his broad understanding of cultural domination. With first-hand knowledge about the daily life of immigrants, their uprooting and slow re-rooting, their aspirations, self-interrogation and affirmation, past humiliation and new pride, he defined integration as participation in an activity called "culture," a part of which - but only a part - is the struggle for economic equality. ⁽³⁾The economy is for him an aspect of culture, not the other way around. Most significant, however, was his reformulation of the identity problem. Substituting the term "Other Catalans" for the term "immigrants," he implied that identity is a function of an encounter with an "Other," at the same time accounting for the fact that, as Rory Ryan points out, "identity relations between ‘dominant’ and ‘other’ are already deeply intertwined prior to the assertion of otherness. Mutual invasion has already occurred when otherness is recognized" (10-11).

By the mid-sixties, the first waves of post-War "immigrants" were consciously and unconsciously moulded by a cultural space that was no longer that of their origin; and Catalans were, in turn, obliged to define their identity vis-à-vis an Other that they would increasingly have to recognize as part of the Self. In that context "Dominant" and "Other" were highly ambiguous and reversible terms. Being at the receiving end, Catalans would normally have been expected to fulfill the role of the "dominant," yet their cultural specificity was curbed or frankly suppressed by every state apparatus. In its place, a government-promoted "immigrant culture" rose to "dominance" by default. The same culture that provided Catalonia with the patina of "Spanishness" that met the tourist’s eye also sustained the sentimental patriotism which the Spanish government cultivated among emigrants to Central Europe to ensure the repatriation of their hard-earned savings.

Aware of the inevitability of conflict and the need for dialogue, Candel regarded culture as a continuous transaction between power differentials. For him culture was neither an abstract entity nor a class tool, but the moral fibre of public life. And under the dictatorship, both Other Catalans and Catalans as Other were conditioned by the sheer fact of migration, which destabilized any definition of culture aiming to take hold of public life. Candel grasped that Spanish politics had deterritorialized both groups and joined their destinies. Hence he tried to foster mutual respect, and while acknowledging the individual right of immigrants to reject integration, he foresaw the distress that such reluctance entailed for those who, like Faneca, refused to take the necessary steps towards the possible community (1973, 262).

Viceversa, immigrants had the right to be fully integrated into Catalan society, but the local culture had the right to define the terms of integration. For Candel these terms were clear cut: acceptance of the Catalan language, social customs and culture, and respect for the historical and emotional content of a more or less defined Catalan way of life (1973, 245, n. 25). An assessment to keep in mind in face of Faneca’s protest that his readiness to fulfill these requirements is impeded by the entrenched resistance Azevedo denounces: "menda s’integra [. . .] hata onde le dejan" ("I integrate myself as much as they let me") (Marsé 220).

Furthermore, in contrast with most class accounts of the cultural conflict, Candel observed that hostilities flared up between members of equivalent classes across the cultural divide, that is, between individuals whose class positions brought them into everyday contact with members of the other group. This proved that the cultural conflict ran deeper than, or at least on a different track from, the class conflict. In fact, Candel suggested, if bourgeois culture is the form of cultural production under capitalism, then both left-wing and conservative cultural options under capitalist conditions are bourgeois, and attacks against Catalan culture in the name of some vague revolutionary culture were not anti-bourgeois but anti-Catalan (1973, 245, n. 25).

Candel engaged in debate with those who held an essentializing notion of culture either on the Marxist or the conservative side. In his riposte to Jutglar, he objected to the former: "Tú has confundido la idiosincrasia de un país, lo que hace que algo sea lo que es, con el modo peculiar de ser de las clases altas, de esas clases altas que más de una vez traicionaron al país y que son lo mismo en todas partes: sus intereses antes que nada." ("You have mistaken a country’s idiosyncrasy, that quality which makes something be what it is, with the peculiar manner of being of the high classes, those high classes which betrayed their country more than once and which are everywhere the same: their interests before anything else") (1973, 254). To the latter, in the person of Manuel Cruells, Candel remonstrated that "no es tracta de ser això o allò, que semblen puerilitats, coses de criatura [. . .], puix que no tots els qui diuen ‘sóc’ són, sinó que es tracta de no entorpir una realitat de poble com ho és Catalunya." ("the point is not to be this or that, which seems puerile, childish disputes [. . .], since not all who say "I am" are; the point is, rather, not to hinder the reality of a people such as Catalonia") (1973, 267).

Defining identity as collective development, Candel avoided the pitfall of making it depend on subjective acts of volition. Such acts determine individual positions and even temporary shifts in the social consciousness, but they are finally sterilized by the larger historical trends and by resilient cultural realities. On the other hand, Candel’s pragmatic, down-to-earth approach kept him clear of ideological simplifications which appear frankly dated by the time Marsé invokes them in El amante bilingüe. This novel’s thesis hinges on a reductive ideology and the emblematic use of dated terms without currency outside of Marsé’s novels and the articles of some of his commentators. This applies as much to the term murciano, once a Catalan metonym for immigrants due to the high rate of those from this Spanish province, as it does to the vaguer xarnego, also fallen into disuse, but recently galvanized by a few writers and critics in Foro Babel’s ideological orbit. Astonishingly, Gabriele Berkenbusch and Ute Heinemann produce, for the benefit of Marsé’s German readers, a complete typology of the xarnego by collecting his "semantic features" from the German translation of Marsé’s text. One may wonder about the critical self-forgetfulness that permits these German sociolinguists to take, without further ado, culturally mediated elements as their hermeneutic object. But they seem comfortably unaware of the similarity between their description of the "typical charnego" and that of the Jew in antisemitic stereotypes that are still well within memory.

In their summary of the xarnego’s attributes, this figure is said to possess "dark skin, strong teeth, dark complexion, curved nose, curly hair, long side wiskers, cat’s eyes" (Berkenbusch 61). Leaving aside the now unfashionable wiskers, the other traits might describe a Southern Spaniard, an Italian, a Catalan, or a Jew, the point being that the racial difference takes on relevance only when the reader’s point of reference is Central or North European. Berkenbusch and Heinemann could have dispensed with the xarnego’s likeness and simply reported that in the fifties and sixties the word referred to Spanish-speaking immigrants in Catalonia, regardless of regional origin.

They might have added that, although derogatory, the word had no racial overtones, merely linguistic. In the ninetheenth century it identified rural Catalans who had migrated to Barcelona. The word referred in a general way to someone who had come from elsewhere; thus it could be transferred to persons of different origin. In his book Els altres catalans (1964), Candel says that xarnego originally designated the offspring of Catalan and French parents. He notes that while in the 1960s the term applied primarily to needy immigrants, it was modified or entirely revoked upon a person’s learning the Catalan language (Candel 1964, 171-172). A decade later, in a sequel to his pioneering study on language conflict, Candel observed that the term was already falling into desuetude (1973, 300).

Marsé, a few other writers, and some of their academic readers have almost succeeded in giving it a political afterlife. Today the term is being adopted by those who vehementely oppose to be part of Catalan culture, long after this culture’s political correctness established that residence in Catalonia was a sufficient basis for social inclusion and identity. Sociologist Salvador Cardús denounces even the term "immigrant" as a population category, on the grounds that maintaining two distinct categories serves the divisive interests of politicians like Vidal-Quadras, of certain businesses which include part of the Barcelona-based publishing industry, and of intellectuals like those who chartered Foro Babel (AVUI, 6 February, 1998). Common to the spokesmen for these groups is an intemperate misconstruing of the social reality and a spurious criticism beholden to the structures of domination bequeathed by the Francoist dictatorship. Practically no reader has heeded Juan Carlos Curutchet’s observant comment on Marsé’s style as regards Ultimas tardes con Teresa:

Elicited by Marsé’s first literary success, this comment applies equally to El amante bilingüe. Marsé is indisputably one of Spain’s most skillful living narrators; yet, more than most contemporary novelists, he resorts to stock effects and lampooning, with the consequence that his genuinely dramatic subject matter tends to lapse into simplistic vignettes verging on false consciousness. Curutchet diagnoses as Marsé’s most serious limitation "su congénita, incurable propensión a extraer leyes generales de casos particulares, a disolver la diversidad de la realidad en caprichosas abstracciones que de ningún modo esclarecen su sentido." ("his congenital, incurable tendency to draw general laws from particular cases, to dissolve reality’s diversity in arbitrary abstractions which in no way clarify its meaning") (78).

One could add his avoidance of history, his substitution of allusion and myth for full-fledged depiction, his recourse to comic book models and to Hollywood film as so many narrative tools which make for good fiction but poor sociology. How useful or even credible is an account of the linguistically divided city that, in Balzacian fashion, mixes real and fictional characters but, unlike Balzac, neglects the city’s cultural archaeology? A sociologically valid and politically effective sketch of Barcelona’s idiomscape must be based on the present situation, but it needs to take cognizance of all the factors that make up this situation, since the "present" is an abstraction for the cumulative history that converges in the moment of analysis.

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