Concealing the urban dominant: The socio-spatial dialectic and urban protest in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La saga/fuga de J.B.

Abstract

In the post-Fordist world, cities emerged as increasingly contested terrains upon which capital and ordinary citizens struggled to control the urban process. Henri Lefebvre discerned this contestatory dynamic early on and in response developed the ‘urban’, a concept that cleaves a critical pathway towards a host of material, cultural and ideological processes that attach to capitalist modernity. Around the same time, the Spanish novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was working to sketch the contours of his magnus opus La saga/fuga de J.B. Torrente would eventually come to recognize the roles that the urban process and the socio-spatial dialectic play in mediating contemporary urban life. The present article thus carries out first a close reading of Torrente’s personal journals to detail the ascendency of the ‘urban dominant’ as a central structuring component of his fictional writings. Thereafter, the critical analysis of La saga/fuga de J.B. will reveal that the ‘urban dominant’ stands concealed at the heart of this notoriously complicated novel. This urban cultural studies reading of La saga/fuga de J.B. will argue that, like Lefebvre, Torrente denounces capital’s static conception of space at the same time that he draws upon historical movements of urban protest for textual inspiration. And what will eventually emerge is that, beyond a master of the metafictional novel, Torrente was also an astute observer of everyday life in the urban context.