Foucalt, Feminism, and Power

Reading Esther Tusquets

Nina L. Molinaro

1991
126 pages
ISBN 0838752004

In novels such as El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978), El amor es un juego solitario (1979), and Para no volver (1985), Esther Tusquets has distinguished herself as one of the most provocative voices of post-Franco Spain. Departing from the more traditional referentiality that marked early postwar fiction by women, Tusquets claims the sophisticated textualities of Juan Goytisolo and Juan Benet for female experience. As her fiction has appeared in translation, Tusquets's unique challenge to the literary imagination has found an international audience composed of Hispanists and literary theorists alike. In this book Nina L. Molinaro addresses both groups, offering detailed readings that illuminate Tusquets's fiction even as they question some of the most pressing issues of contemporary literary theory.

Born in 1936, Tusquets shares the cultural heritage of Span's first postwar women novelists, writers such as Elena Quiroga and Carmen Martin Gaite. Her writing, however, marks a distinct departure from that of her contemporaries. Tusquets's central characters, all women, fasten on their own psychic development amid the sociopolitical drifts of contemporary, increasingly bourgeois Spain. Her narratives challenge traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and psychodynamics. Above all, Tusquets's fictions imagine power otherwise.

Through careful explications of vital feminist texts and Michel Foucault's influential theories of power, Molinaro's introductory chapter elaborates a feminized aesthetics of power and narrative. With clarity and grace, Molinaro pursues questions crucial to the work of Hispanists as well as literary theorist. How do narrative texts emerge from a position of difference, that of a female character seeking to understand herself and the narratives she has read? How does narrative manifest or alter feminist politics and Foucauldian micropolitics? What is the position of Spanish narrative in such international debates? In approaching these questions, Molinar aims at a "generative" rather than "prescriptive" method, its task being one of renewing and engendering the "heterogeneous" in critical discourse.

For Molinaro, answers emerge out of the recognition of narrative's centrality as procedure of exclusion and resistance. As she examines each of Tusquets's five narrative texts, Molinaro "analyzes a particular expression of narrative power in the process/product relationship, investigates the stories being told, and traces the effect of the discursive strategy and its production." In the case of El mismo mar de todo, the discursive strategies are substitution and intertextuality. El amore s un juego solitario is discussed in terms of simulation, while Varada tras el ultimo naufragio is considered for the way the author manipulates time to shape our perception of power relations. A chapter devoted to Siete miradas en un mismo paisaje explores the collection of interrelated stories as a series of strategic effects determined by supplementarity. With Para no volver, Molinaro radically revises our notions of narrative, suggesting how "retelling" defines narrative and psychoanalytic processes at the heart of contemporary power relations.

About the author:

Nina L. Molinaro received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Scripps College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from the University of Kansas. She is currently an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her research and teaching interests include the postwar Spanish novel, Hispanic women's fiction, literary theory, and feminism. She is the author of Policing Gender and Alicia Giménez Bartlett's Crime Fiction.