A Specter Is Haunting the Recent Spanish Novel

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the two specters haunting the Spanish novel. The point of departure is that the specter haunting Europe is no longer communism, but neoliberalism. Ideology explains that we experience neoliberalism as a second nature. In this sense, neoliberal ideology is invisible: we cannot see its causes, only its effects. This chapter analyzes how the current Spanish novel legitimates and reproduces this ideology in an unconscious way, making the specter invisible. However, there is also another kind of novel: a political novel that deals with the Spanish crisis from a critical point of view. It aims to render the invisible visible because, as the writer Belen Gopegui said, ‘To write is to summon the specter,’ the specter of 1848.