Democracy’s Crown: Singular bowler hats, iterable individuals in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s El caballero del hongo gris (1928)

Abstract

In this analysis of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s avant-garde novel El caballero del hongo gris (1928), I examine the narrative centrality of the main character’s use of a bowler hat, which, after its invention in the mid-nineteenth century, would become a frequent cultural reference. I engage Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of ipseity and democracy to explore the opposition of the singular and the iterable via the transnational business exploits of the protagonist Leonardo and his bowler, to which he attributes his economic success and ascension in society. This particular hat—offering democratizing possibilities and social mobility—is compared in the text to a crown, a figure of sovereignty, while the character is likened to a prince, king, and president. Read against the backdrop of the collapse of parliamentarism during the 1920s and 1930s, the paradoxical associations of the bowler—fluctuating between the democratic and the authoritarian—allow for a reflection on Leonardo’s classism and disregard for social disparities. Asserting himself to be the singular “caballero del hongo gris,” he is confronted on separate occasions by two different doppelgängers sporting bowlers, who disrupt his ipseity and reveal an underlying anxiety about the prospect of an individual becoming iterable, namely substitution and death. I thread into my discussion this fear of death with Leonardo’s trepidation concerning the discontent of the majority of society. Menacing over his opulent lifestyle is the specter of an imminent catastrophe, a literary anxiety which symptomatically responds to the political and economic crises of the interwar period.