Modern Times: Francisco Umbral's Chronicle of Distinction

Abstract

manners. The author of over one hundred books, Umbral is perhaps best known for his daily newspaper column, once in the Socialistsupporting El Pais, now in the maverick upstart El Mundo. An idiosyncratic chronicle of the Zeitgeist and the genius loci, Umbral's column (which has been run under titles which include the Baudelairian Spleen of and the Pleasures and Days), charts the specific intersections of time and space in a thousand book launches, film premieres, and press conferences. But in its knowing combination of politics and poetics, as in its fleeting references to such fashionable concepts as Vattimo's weak thought or Lacan's discourse of the other, Umbral's column has ambitions far beyond those of gossip writers in other countries or his rivals in Spain itself. For his aims are at once total and partial: to give a general account of the glittering social life of a Dior-issimo Madrid and a specific social critique of that same elite's decadence and arrogance as the ironically named Red Decade advances. As dandy and moralist, Umbral presents himself as a Proustian Marxist (La decada roja 56), an apparently trivial mondain whose devotion to the daily discipline of writing transmutes the ephemera he chronicles into the