An Ambivalent Attraction?: Post-Punk Kinship and the Politics of Bonding in Historias del Kronen and Less Than Zero

Abstract

Matthew J. Marr is an Assis tant Professor in Hispanic Studies at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent publications consider such topics as space and identity in Esther Tusquets's El mismo mar de todos los veranos and postmodern humor in the poetry of Ro ger Wolfe. He is the author of a forthcoming book en titled Postmodern Meta poetry and the Replenish ment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre: 1980-2000. Jose Angel Manas's Historias del Kronen (1994) is a novel that ostentatiously flaunts its literary kinship with other texts?with rock lyrics (The The, Nirvana), films {A Clockwork Orange, Henry: Portrait of a SerialKiller), and even a novel: namely, Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho (1991). So pronounced, in fact, is Manas's name-dropping that it has led one critic, German Gullon, to signal what he dubs pararreferencialidad as one of the book's most salient fea tures (xxiii). In short, Historias del Kronen assails its reader with a barrage of pop culture allusions in a kind of narrative offensive: one designed, it seems, to prove the author's incom parability (at least in the recent Spanish context) as a con noisseur of primarily nihilistic, violent, edgy?and almost always Anglo-American?music, film, and literature from the end of the twentieth century. This said, and especially in light of Manas's explicit attraction to the work of Bret Easton Ellis, it is curious that the former makes no direct allusion to