In the Middle: Queer intentions in "El rapto del Santo Grial" (1984) and "Historia del Rey Transparente" (2005)

Abstract

This article examines non-normative figurations of the Middle Ages in two contemporary Spanish novels: Paloma Diaz-Mas’ El rapto del Santo Grial and Rosa Montero’s Historia del rey transparente. Drawing on Carolyn Dinshaw’s notion of a “queer touch across time”, this study focuses on how chronological narrative emplotment of conventional historiography is bent and even broken, as the two novels court a postmodern penchant for anachronism, non-linearity, irony, pastiche and “strangeness” that refuses to understand past and present as discrete and distinct. Both Paloma Diaz-Mas and Rosa Montero’s novels are presented as rehearsing familiar myths and stories – the Arthurian cycle, the Holy Grail, the heroic quest – in order to advance alternative, feminist inflected versions critical of a hetero-patriarchal system whose naturalised grounding in the Middle Ages continues to haunt the present.