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Cambridge University Press, , p. In a somewhat eclectic manner, Pombo blends this notion with his phenomenological conception of authenticity. In this text, Pombo juxtaposes the hugely divergent worlds of the imperious Santanderian aristocracy, ensconced within its privileged position in the Francoist oligarchy, and the Spanish working class riffraff.

Rafael is the name of an archangel who appears in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible. Pombo rarely, if ever, chooses biblical names for his protagonists, and thus this one stands out as particularly conspicuous, perhaps ironically so. Nothing that went into his total composition was 72 visual attributes of homosexuality that she perceives as inscribed on the body—greatly unsettles the anonymity and subterfuge of the homosexual presence in the household.

Esther is blackmailing unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: Y creo que si nos desprendemos de todo esto, nos desprendemos de una parte de nuestra personalidad.

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Tan precioso licor," p. Each deceit engenders another until finally everyone is beholden in one form or another to the child executioner, who has total mastery of his victims. His aunt Eugenia describes him as: Pancho in El hijo adoptivo is blackmailed by his former secretary, and lover, who has returned with his son, expecting the wealthy Pancho to adopt the son as his heir.

Nietzsche says the following in this regard: I would rather sublimate my impulses. First he must, as it were, burn a No into his own soul; he must brand his own impulses with contempt and become aware of the contradictions of good and evil. Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. Often the victimizing has sexual overtones, although these are more spiritual than physical. Era parecido a querer, en clase, masturbarse y correrse. Homoerotic intentionality is prominent and figures in the unfolding of an assortment of asymmetrical relationships of exploitation and domination, but it is not critical to the manner in which the protagonists come to the revelation of their authentic Being-in-the-world.

Both homosexuals and heterosexuals in this novel are equally abject, and devoid, it seems, of a commonsense ethical and moral orientation. The revelation of her tryst with Manolo, as well as having to 82 Kosofsky describes intimate male bonds as existing in two categories: In order to enforce distinction between the two, homosexual panic acts as a means of preserving the inviolate separation of desire and camaraderie.

University of California Press, , p. Pombo himself says, concerning the fate of those who dwell too deeply in their fantastic world of interior consciousness: That is to say, he probes the very nature of homosexual phenomenological consciousness to grasp the experiential field of the self as informed by the domain of same-sex eroticism. Pombo achieves this through a narrative approach that conflates the real and the imaginary irreality as existential ambiguity.

Existential ambiguity implies living in a liminal space that has no connection to a particular realm and that keeps the subject in a state of radical alterity and unremitting fear of oneself, and thus, the subject is removed from the possible attainment of a sublime aesthetic experience of Being. Existential ambiguity Zweideutigkeit for Heidegger involves our inability to distinguish one meaning from another. Therefore it is to be left behind in the move towards more authentic modes of existence.

However, in Los delitos insignificantes Pombo begins to address the question of homosexuality as a mode of Being. That is to say, homosexuality as homoerotic intentionality becomes the crux of phenomenological consciousness and the manner in which the subject engages or does not engage his experiential realm. The principal question that I will address in this chapter concerns homoerotic intentionality: For the beleaguered homosexual protagonist in Los delitos insignificantes, the disjuncture between his homoerotic intentionality and his feelings of disorientation within the overarching environment of heteronormativity inevitably gives rise to a state of existential dissonance.

By this I mean that the homosexual protagonist views his homoerotic intentionality as so fundamentally denatured that he cannot conceive of his existence as having any significance within the larger context of human social intercourse. See Ellis, The Hispanic Homograph: This story, much like other Pombian tales, involves a number of highly fraught triangular, and even quadrangular, relationships involving various protagonists: Ortega is one of the protagonists in the recitation of these transitional epochs, and also one of its victims, as the unfolding events in the story show.

More than anything, 86 Los delitos insignificantes certainly corresponds to a period of writing in Spain where homosexuality was increasingly deproblematized. Nevertheless, the deproblematization of homosexuality appears to be a rather anachronistic project in this respect. My contention is that Pombo had the particular strategy in mind, in keeping with his grand philosophical, literary scheme, of delineating homosexual abjection as insubstantiality. The solipsistic world Ortega inhabits precludes confrontation of the fear of, and engagement with the chaos inherent in, human existence—following Merleau-Ponty, Ortega is invisible to himself and to others, and he lies outside of what Merleau-Ponty calls the insertion into a sovereign vision that existence requires: In Los delitos insignificantes homoeroticism is depicted as a sphere of consciousness and existential intentionality: In Los delitos insignificantes, homosexuality is weighed down by ample doses of moral abasement, for this is the normal situation for homosexuals in National-Catholic Spain, especially in a Spain emerging from the throes of a noxiously homophobic dictatorship.

In his own way, Pombo is merely recounting the lives of homosexuals living in a society where homosexuality was indeed an affliction, not merely owing to homophobic oppression, but also because of the subjective nature of existential dissonance. Following Foucault, it is these discourses, particularly concerning biological reproduction as the teleological rationalization for sexual difference, that portray homosexuality as essentially sterile and unnatural.

The critical reception of this open and candidly dismal homotextual discourse was mixed and generally tended to conform to the prevailing modes of critique of the Pombian opus. Allen Lane, , p.

Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault Oxford: Clarendon Press, , p. In fact, as I argue in the introduction, Pombo has always seen homoerotic intentionality as a naturally occurring phenomenon within the realm of human sexuality, although invariably dissonant and fraught in its relationship with heteronormativity.

The portrayal of the homosexual protagonist in Los delitos insignificantes differs substantially from previous depictions of the homosexual protagonist in the contemporaneous literature of s Spain. University Press of the South, , p. The novel attained very little notoriety, and is all but unknown today, except by a few specialists in Catalonian gay literature. Ultimately de Pedrolo was jailed for this work deemed subversive and in contravention of La ley de Peligrosidad Social by the Francoist morality police.

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He provided a more detailed analysis of Los delitos insignificantes in a prior article wherein he examines themes of repressed and adolescent homosexualities. As my analysis of the text demonstrates, there is a remarkable subtlety in what Pombo is attempting to show by virtue of a philosophical investigation of abject Being, as it relates to insubstantiality, and the invisibility of the homosexual subject. Erich Schmidt Verlag, , p. Ortega is fully engaged in the newly emerging Spanish culture and society, and he even possesses admirable literary credentials, but his personal life is another matter.

Much of the mainstream criticism of Los delitos insignificantes focuses, predictably, on just about every conceivable aspect of the text except the homosexual. While Weaver recognizes that Los delitos insignificantes is unquestionably a novel about a failed homosexual relationship between the two men, he finds greater resonance in the metaphysical aspects of the novel, where interiority in the form of excessive self- reflectiveness, psychic doubling, and insubstantiality come into play.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Homosexual Being Los delitos insignificantes deals with the following philosophical and cultural themes associated with various aspects of male homosexuality: As David Halperin amply demonstrates in his study of same-sex love in ancient Greece, the relationship between two men was generally one of stewardship involving an older man erastes of high social standing and a younger man of similar social standing eromenos. A relationship between a man of higher social standing and a slave, or even between men of similar age and rank, was unimaginable.

Although the act of sexual penetration was generally performed by the erastes, there is no evidence that this act imputed in any way to the participants a homosexual love relationship. Eroticism, as a form of homoerotic intentionality, becomes one of the key elements in Los delitos insignificantes for the manner in which the conflicting and countervailing notions of the epistemological and sociological boundaries between heterosexuality, homosexuality, or homosexual sexual desire play out in a sinister game of domination and subjugation.

The overarching mode of Being for him, in his cloistered and decidedly asexual homosexual life, is his paltry subsistence as a lowly clerk. While on the surface Pombo appears to succumb to a rather antiquated notion of homosexuality as a type of inversion of the typical male-female dimorphism in sexual intercourse, what unfolds is a tale that juxtaposes self-effacing nihilism with naked malice, with large doses of homoeroticism thrown in.

This is the first Pombian text to be set outside of London or Letona.

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Pombo deftly employs the metaphor of the sweltering heat of the Madrid summer to stoke the impassioned flames of desire and naked male sexual aggression. Pombo is thus setting the context for a torrid novel in which the culminating scene is a combustion of sex and suicide. Madrid is a new locale and offers all of the hedonism, excitement, and cultural effervescence of the changes affecting the new Spain.

The hunter and prey motif permeates this text as the psychosexual underpinning of the relationship between the two men. It is immediately clear that Ortega is not the first quarry that this rapacious hunter has set his gaze upon. A similar scenario plays out in El parecido, which I discussed in chapter II, although in the case of Gonzalo Ferrer and his deceased nephew Jaime, the relationship is portrayed phantasmally.

To be sure, this is a relationship based on the confluence of mutually fulfilling, albeit contrasting, human emotions. In the case of Ortega it represents the limbic state of his sexual self-repression and conformance with a regressive morality that impedes his true revelation, which can only be attained by the overcoming of his subjective nihilism. Merleau-Ponty refers to existential ambiguity as the instance where many meanings are experienced together, but where only singular outcomes can emerge.

Compulsory heterosexuality is circumvented by means of a perverse disruption of the dominant force: While leading a life of homosexual celibacy, Gil de Biedma was in the heyday of his notoriety as a writer who had openly acknowledged his homosexuality.

He had not, however, published any poetry with overtly homosexual themes. Pombo seems, in some respects, to be tongue in cheek chiding the deep admiration and respect that Gil de Biedma generally commanded in the world of gay letters, despite his veiled homotextual output, while Pombo, for the most part, suffered disparagement. There are very few instances in contemporary Spanish fiction where same-sex male prurience is so conspicuously expressed, and for Pombo this seems slightly out of character given the rather stoic descriptions of male eroticism that define his early novels.

LDI The number of references to male beauty that one finds in Los delitos insignificantes is unusually frequent for a major narrative of Spanish literature. I do not mean to imply that Los delitos insignificantes is campy in any respect but merely that it presents a form of physically sexual literature involving same-sex eroticism that had not been visible in Spanish literature since the early s. Los dos somos muy independientes. The notion of compulsory heterosexuality as obstacle is the force that, for the moment, keeps the two antagonists apart.

Butler, Bodies That Matter: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, p. Llegaba siempre muy puntual. Clearly Pombo is taking aim at a particular manifestation of homosexuality that is prevalent in many cultural and social settings within the larger gay community of his time, which sought outlet in campy, fetishized and effeminized locaza forms of behaviour.

Nunca me han gustado las mujeres. Yo no soy homosexual. Pienso en ellos todo el tiempo. Pero nunca he tenido relaciones con ninguno. Desde el principio mi vida ha sido un fracaso. Salgo a la calle, no tengo nada que hacer, bebo demasiado. Es como si me pidiera que le mirase mientras caga. Que oliera sus pedos. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", p.

Thus, each is both an affirmation and a negation of an indeterminate homosexual identity. A la recherche du temps perdu, the Baron de Charlus, so conspicuous in his effeminacy, ironically rejects anyone who looks or acts as he does as inauthentically male. Revista de literatura , pp. Pombo uses this motif to reflect the degradation that inheres in inauthenticity, that is, the failure to overcome abjection.

The theme of sexual conquest as an act of brutal male dominance is another of the primary motifs of this text, and it serves to reinforce the homoerotic dimensions of sex and power that Los delitos insignificantes undoubtedly are: Thus, by virtue of his radical alterity as a feminized homosexual, Ortega becomes symbolically relegated in Lacanian terms to the non-phallic imaginary. This is a topic that I discuss at length in chapter V with regard to Contra natura.

Si es que me ha dicho la verdad. Y eso es lo que me falta: Y esto no es una vulgaridad: Ultimately, it is the dialectic of confrontation with the hegemonic rhetoric of homosexual abnegation that sets Pombo apart from some of his Spanish contemporaries in Dollimore states: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, p.

Si quieres lo dejamos. The seduction of the intoxicated, oblivious heterosexual who in a state of inebriation submits to his subjacent homosexual tendencies his polymorphous Freudian perversity is reminiscent of the homoerotic According to Fuss: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, p. Nevertheless, the unambiguously sexual narration in Los delitos insignificantes is an indispensable element in the dialectic that Pombo uses to differentiate the ponderously metaphysical state of homosexual Being that characterizes the predominantly asexual characters in his early narrative—Pancho in El hijo adoptivo, Gonzalo Ferrer in El parecido, or any assortment of characters in Relatos sobre la falta de sustancia— from Ortega, who is on the verge of giving in to his erotic intentionality.

Ortega le besaba los pies. Eventually Tom of Finland became the de facto standard for this type of art and is memorialized in numerous anthologies of erotic gay art. Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide," p. To be sure, depiction of graphic sex is not at all uncommon in Spanish narrative, but this scene undoubtedly qualifies as unusual for a mainstream novel for its portrayal of graphic fellatio between men. Pombo endured some contumely—and in some cases complete neglect—from the mainstream critics for his brazen treatment of same-sex eroticism, however blithely they might have tried to dissimulate their discomfort.

One has to go back to the stylistically salacious literature of the Avant Garde, in the texts of Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, and to a lesser extent Juan Goytisolo, in the contemporary period, to find texts of similar expression. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes and develops the idea of sex as a dialectical interaction between the subject and his or her experiential realm. Humanities Press, , p. The process of reterritorialization involves the redefinition of a space wherein the possibility of a transgressive inscription of homotextuality can take place.

There is in this story of domination and subjugation, and awakening homoerotic consciousness on the part of both protagonists , a fundamental dialectic within the narrative concerning the nature of abasement and power that pushes the protagonists in diametrical directions with respect to their existential situatedness: According to Overesch-Maister, this situation arises in instances where the subject, afraid of being hurt by others, ends up hurting himself and Others by turning the conflict inward—a classical form of punishment of sin.

Both are equally degraded and, from the perspective of moral and ethical behaviour, behave insubstantially: It is in the aftermath of the tryst, and in the curious shifting of roles between the two men, that Pombo juxtaposes the diffidence of homoerotic intentionality with the domain of heteronormative prerogative.

Y esto era una novedad. En condiciones de enfrentarse ahora de igual a igual con Cristina, con su madre. LDI The conflation of existential malaise and intense physical homoeroticism completes the tableau that Pombo has been constructing in this tale of tormented homosexual subjectivity. His partner the activo or machista typically is not stigmatized at all, and, moreover, no clear category exists in the popular language to classify him. This transformation reflects the mutation from a state of homosexual interiority, in which Ortega experiences his homosexuality metaphysically as a state of abstract consciousness , to a state of homosexual phenomenology, in which Ortega experiences his homosexuality as an engagement with his sentient, conscious, and actantial self.

Le hizo sentirse menos humillado y menos confuso. Y era una novedad. No tiene ya la menor gracia. Moreover, this moralism conveys what Pombo has intended: Was it motivated by his fear of sex? Is suicide, or death, the ineluctable outcome for a homosexual whose existential dissonance within the heteronormative realm is irreconcilable?

La puerta de la calle. Ilegible es el sol desvinculador del mundo. LDI Ortega becomes, in the end, a lump of human meat weighing ninety kilos, devoid of the weightiness and significance that any real engagement with life would entail. Conclusion Los delitos insignificantes, like the majority of the earlier Pombian texts, is framed in a heterorelational model. Heterorelationality, as discussed in the opening chapter, describes a framework wherein the homosexual is completely subsumed by and acts entirely in accordance with his homoerotic intentionality as a spurious approximation of heterosexual behaviour.

The homosexual thereby sublimates his desire and projects it through an alien normative identity that usurps his voice and delegitimizes his Being. In the end, Ortega perceives his own situation experientially as discordant and inauthentic, as a result, he is seemingly incapable of breaking out of his suffocating interiority. Pombo addresses the problematization of homosexuality as an experiential phenomenon, its moral and ethical significance as radical alterity, and, above all, its inharmonious contextualization within heteronormativity and the greater context of humanity.

Pombo lived his childhood in a National- Jonathan Dollimore describes the discordance of an alienating homosexual experience in the context of heteronormativity as a fundamental aspect of a disembodied Being-in-the-world; a split personality complex, as it were. See Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: This is but one instance; there are a number of interviews where Pombo speaks of the harsh and oppressive conditions of living underground in the most repressive Franco years.

Pombo states the following in this regard in the epilogue to Contra natura: The resemblance real or imagined to the actual experiential realm constitutes the key of his text, and the narrative, by its force of creativity and moral suasion, transforms itself into a transcendent ethics or aesthetics. What I have shown in this chapter is that Pombo very consciously and deliberately writes the experience of homosexual abjection and humiliation as homotextual narration. Pombo allows us to look into the heart of this despair. The conclusions that we draw from this image are that it is a desperate and forlorn existence that ultimately depletes the life of its subject.

Pombo is unique in his approach to literature about homosexuals in that his writing has a philosophical underpinning that warns us about our innate ability to subvert our own humanity by failing to understand and react vigorously and exuberantly to our life force— something he views as a moral and ethical responsibility. If one peels back the layers of the astringent prose that Pombo uses to describe this abjection, one discovers the starting point for a different path to authentic Being. Homophobia, then, becomes a primary contributing factor to his sense of existential alienation and subsequent reclusion.

According to Pombo, El metro de platino iridiado belongs to a new phase of writing, following on the heels of the ciclo de falta de sustancia, which deals primarily with topics of magnanimity, generosity, and virtue—in short, the good—as well as the ability of the subject to deal with the most excruciating and agonizing of circumstances in life in order to achieve authenticity in Being. In this chapter, I look at the three essential aspects of El metro de platino iridiado that relate to phenomenological homosexuality, namely: Pombo ratchets up the discursive intensivity with regard to his repudiation of a solipsistic hedonism that seeks fulfilment only through the self, and thus abdicates responsibility for the Other, in a universe of seeming moral relativism.

The narrative of El metro de platino iridiado represents, above all, an exploration of what Charles Taylor describes as inwardly-directed, atomistic individualism, that According to Pombo: The Narrative Structure of El metro de platino iridiado El metro de platino iridiado is a story that takes place in two different epochs: The chief protagonist, Gonzalito, embarks on a journey of self-discovery to England where he takes leave of the claustrophobic family household, his tormented experiences with homosexuality, and his anguished associations with Spain.

Later on, the forlorn protagonist Gonzalito returns to the home in which he grew up, and from which, in effect, he never left. In La Moraleja, despite a long absence from the household and the years of wandering in London after the death of his father, Gonzalito never stops being the coddled, preternaturally beautiful child who never lived up to his promise; he remains, as his nickname suggests, the infantilized Gonzalito.

As outlined above, there are three distinct narrative threads in the story—homosexual existential dissonance and within that realm, moral and ethical behaviour , avuncular love, and See Charles Taylor, Malaise of Modernity Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, Ltd. Gonzalito begins to emerge as a complex, fraught creature who has caring interactions with his sister, to whom he is exceptionally close and who ultimately suspects his sexual inclinations, his nephew, and his brother-in-law, who initially exhibits some measure of forbearance towards Gonzalito, but ultimately ends up psychologically eviscerating him.

Gonzalito eventually escapes the stifling atmosphere of Spain and La Moraleja and goes to London, where he discovers a world unlike any he had experienced in terms of his burgeoning homosexual consciousness. This journey, however, has disastrous consequences for him when he returns to Spain and re-engages with his family. For this reason, I devote less attention to this aspect of the text. In this section I explore the extremely interiorized world of Gonzalito, starting with his existential disengagement and continuing into his slip into dementia.

I conclude by looking at the consequences of his failings. He is seemingly devoid of any sense of meaning in his life; he is not, in the Sartrean sense, involved in the existential struggle to define himself against the nothingness of his fragmentary and nihilistic existence. Nevertheless, the aforementioned characters the two Gonzalos and Pancho are writers deeply immersed in writing who know firsthand the self-torment, as well as the utter sense of hopelessness and failure that writers often experience in their artistic struggles.

These protagonists also grapple mightily with a consciousness of themselves as beings consumed with erotic intentionality towards men, but they are incapable of expressing their desire, or of acting upon that desire in an authentic way. The outstanding characteristic of this dialectic is the dynamic, changing, and flux-like status of human consciousness, which nowhere can find permanence, surety, or absolutes, but must continually define its condition and nature through the choices it makes in life.

Essays in Existentialism and Philosophy The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, , p. For Gonzalito, the body is a form of oppression: In fact, the mass of humanity that Gonzalito encounters in these nocturnal perambulations represents all that is hideous inguapo, as he calls it. MPI Throughout El metro de platino iridiado Gonzalito is depicted as an asexual individual who eschews contact with most other Beings.

The only indication we have that he has had a sexual past emerges in the narrative flashbacks of his troubled legacy of self-discovery in London. The allusions to Nietzsche are apt in this case as the narrative seems to be setting Gonzalito up as a consummate nihilist by virtue of his repudiation of humanity. Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, pp. These characters always have a counterpart, as is the case in this text as well, who redeem their villainy in one way or another.

Gonzalito ultimately comes to experience homoerotic sex in London, although his initiation into sex is described as a wayward descent into self-degradation and humiliation. Thus, Gonzalito becomes a kind of unconscious desiring machine, in the Deleuzian sense. He goes about the execution of his nocturnal trysts as a kind of impassive, rapacious incubus who preys on his victims through the machinic force of his will to power.

Era ya de noche. MPI The image of Gonzalito lulling his prey—he is depicted as a rapacious wolf, who comes regularly to stalk readily available quarry—serves as metaphor for the ritual slaughter of the Other; the predator licking his prey as he prepares to consume it. Ultimately, as well, his engagement with same-sex eroticism transforms into an alienating experience that does not correspond to the jouissance that Gonzalito had imagined the sexual experience might be.

Being out of a familiar experiential realm and thrust into another environment forces the individual to come to terms with the vicissitudes of a spatial, cultural, and ultimately experiential disorientation: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Longman, , p. Human beings always have an inherited way of looking at things around them long before they begin to modify that way of looking and understanding. See Heidegger in Brice R. State University of New York Press, , pp. This interconnection to the Other does not issue from physical relationality the pure physical act en-soi, e.

The symbolic exchange can only come about when the significance of the relationship is mutually recognized, which for Gonzalito is decidedly not the case. It is by measuring the affect on Others that the self acquires a sense of the mattering of the interaction. Harvard University Press, , p. Eroticism for Gonzalito becomes a spurious undertaking, a recipe for the impossibility of happiness, which the London experience demonstrates unequivocally: Una gigantesca impaciencia le ocupaba ahora como una sustancia pegajosa.

MPI cadena de equivalencias de ser homosexual. Anagrama, , p. Unhappiness and tragedy seem to follow these characters, but this is the stuff of narrative. Nevertheless, homosexuality as phenomenological experience of Being is the condition that Pombo finds most suitable to convey allegorically in this case the profound difficulty of living an authentic life, particularly under conditions of acute oppression. Generally speaking, the avuncular relationship always involves an older man, who is a homosexual, and a nephew, who is not.

The inscription of avuncular homosexualism fulfils a type of unconventional literariness for which Pombo is becoming increasingly well known. Pedro ultimately dies from consumption. Thus, a pattern is clearly established; the relationship involving the older man and younger one will come to some type of grisly end, particularly in instances where the relationship has some sort of amorous nature.

Morality resides at the point of action. Routledge Classics, , p. Era un guapo adolescente, consciente, con toda probabilidad de serlo: The sexual imaginings, couched in an internal monologue, have all the lubriciousness of unrequited sexual lust, but this is a lust that Gonzalito does not contemplate as part of his reality: La camiseta blanca revelaba la espalda firme. MPI Gonzalito makes a meagre attempt to connect with his humanity, albeit vicariously through the erotic imagining of his nephew, who signifies not so much a sexual object-of-desire as he does an object-of-reflection for the irredeemably narcissistic Gonzalito, whose degenerate behaviour is best characterized by his regression into an infantalized stage of the imaginary.

E hizo que su sobrino metiera la cabeza por un hueco del matorral, entre el matorral y la pileta. The Making of the Modern Identity, p. Bernard Williams provides an extensive discussion of behaviour violates the very premise of phronesis. In the absence of mattering and recognition, humanity is eminently capable of sliding into unspeakable evil. The compelling moralistic force of El metro de platino iridiado becomes most manifest when protagonists confront the moral vicissitudes of life and, more particularly, their reactions to these circumstances.

Pero son, sobre todo, homosexuales. Eso es lo primero: Oponen la vitalidad a la belleza con coherencia suma: Lo funerario, lo concedo es bello: The novels of Carlavilla and van den Meersch invariably portray homosexuality as a type of metaphysical and physiological disease.

No one is spared his unfeeling self-importance and haughty disdain, least of all the exalted, vital women of his diatribe: Sadism, masochism, fetishism and homosexuality all exhibit the same kind of perverse expression of the sexual instinct, the same kind of functional deviation, which manifests itself in the fact that psychological satisfaction is obtained primarily through activities disconnected from the natural function of the instinct.

Until this defining event, Gonzalito had assumed that the relationship between them was on harmonious footing. Quien o quienes, por cierto, son o pueden ser con gran facilidad heroicos. Hay un verso de Eliot que nunca nadie, creo, ha comentado, donde se dice lo mismo que yo acabo de decir: Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. Moreover, Martin conceives of life and presumably art as informed by a rational mastery and domination of the material self.

Eliot," Criticism 47, no. This dialectic enshrouds the Pombian literary aesthetic, and it underscores the unbridgeable chasm that separates the immoral and moral protagonists in this story. Nevertheless, the text once transmitted as language assumes its own phenomenological identity, conveying a subjectivity in the intertwining among writer, reader, and text. Marenostrum, , pp. Pombo also expounds more fervently on the notion of morals and ethics as they pertain to the phenomenological intentionality of homosexual praxis.

By this I mean that, although Pombo does not altogether abandon the notion of homosexual existential dissonance as abjection in relation to denaturalizing heterologocentric epistemologies, he no longer views homosexuality in the context of its status as vicio, but rather as naturaleza in view of evolving societal mores. El metro de platino iridiado clearly serves as a philosophical admonition, of sorts, on the dangers of introspective pursuit of the will as subjective expressivism. In El metro de platino iridiado, we also begin to see in stark terms the countervailing forces of good and evil as exhibited by the radical and subjective choices the individual makes in relation to the subjection of the will, in other words, an overcoming of the nefarious aspects of the will to power.

In Contra natura , Pombo probes the emergence of a more visible, more self- confident, less self-effacing, and more existentially grounded homosexual subject in the rapidly evolving social, cultural, political, and historical circumstances of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, Pombo recognizes the contingency of this greater acceptance and visibility on a number of social and cultural factors that are subject to changeable historical circumstances.

Within the cultural, social, and political discourses of heteronormativity, not all of which are homophobic per se, the homosexual remains contra natura by virtue of his sexual praxis—that is, in consideration of sexual praxis as a fundamental aspect of Being within the greater experiential realm. Moreover, the homosexual remains at a distance from these mainstream discourses by virtue of his own self-segregation, where he is within the confines of the security and familiarity of his existential dissonance.

Thus, Pombo addresses questions that concern how the homosexual leads his life in these circumstances. The socio-political situation for homosexuals in many countries, dare I say much of the world, remains generally dire and precarious, particularly in regions where conservative, authoritarian, or fundamentalist-religious mores predominate—including in many former socialist or communist countries—and to the extent that these selfsame religious mores prevail in developed countries, there as well.

I argue that Pombo largely agrees with Dollimore, and the textual evidence in Contra natura clearly corroborates this notion of indeterminate and differently inflected sexualities and identities. In Contra natura Pombo fashions a narrative dialogue, cum dialectical critique, that trenchantly, and at times uncompromisingly, challenges manifestations of what Pombo perceives to be a dissolute, solipsistic postmodern homosexuality often characterized by nihilistic subjectivism, where gratification of the ego and intensification of pleasure assume paramount significance.

Moreover, I explore how Pombo interrogates same-sex eroticism as sexual praxis from the perspective of rigid gender roles and how these are informed by essentializing discourses of heterologocentrism male phallic and thus dominant top; female receptive and thus submissive bottom. Contra natura is written as a dialectical interrogation that examines the way sexual identities both homo and hetero are informed. As Pombo relates in the epilogue, Contra natura is essentially a story about two different ways of living the homosexual experience: Javier Salazar is a sixty-something retired editor of an influential magazine that deals with world affairs.

The first section of the narrative consists of flashbacks into the lives of Salazar and Allende in the Jesuit seminary where both were indoctrinated in the inflexible, dogmatic religiosity of National-Catholic Spain. In these flashbacks, the narrative examines, in starkly polemical fashion, the role of Christianity generally in the discursive evolution of morality, and the role played by the Spanish Catholic Church in the denaturalization of the homosexual. The solipsistic world of Salazar is laid bare, and he is depicted as a ruthlessly egotistical individual whose callousness and homophobia cause a young man Carlos Mansilla who is deeply infatuated with him to take his own life after being rejected.

Salazar, we come to discover, is an ascetic who eschews prurient gratification of any form as a means of human intercourse. The principal focus of the narrative, however, is the contemporary era and centres on the eventual reunion of Allende and Salazar, through a chance encounter and after a long hiatus. Salazar is a cold-hearted misanthrope who preys on the emotions and vulnerabilities of those who attach to him, as he did with Carlos Mansilla in the seminary. In due course, the lives of the four men intertwine during the unfolding of the drama.

Love as Eros, Homosexual Identity, and the Ethics of Being In Contra natura subjective nihilism emerges as the focal point of a dialectic concerning the phenomenon of love and sex between men, in particular the complex and byzantine love relationships between older and younger men. Pombo constructs the narrative of this text as an interrogation of the various forms of love that humans can have for one another, and how these types of love emerge in the authentic engagement with life, which the subject must strive for.

The narrative examines love and the expression of homoeroticism from two entirely different perspectives. This form of intersubjective engagement binds one to the other, not in the sense of possession, but rather in the sense of mutual mattering, caring, and recognition. Two of the protagonists in this story Salazar and Juanjo embody all that is solipsistic, dissolute, and self-indulgent with regard to sexual and emotional engagement with the Other.

Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, p. Moreover, the moralizing discourse of Contra natura purports to show that liberated sexuality as pleasure intensification reduces the subject to a libidinous, solipsistic apparatus. The so-called Dionysian mode of sexual Being, which professes to subvert heterologocentric discursivity concerning sexuality the scientia sexualis , results, in the end, in the mere objectification of sex itself.

For Salazar, in particular, but also for Juanjo, this mode of sexual Being leads to catastrophic consequences and ultimately an annihilation of the self.

It is the body made totally plastic by pleasure: Comer, follar y defecar: Allende also considers whether in fact normalization of the homosexual in the mainstream is within reach, or even desirable. Nevertheless, despite the rapid evolution in societal mores and levels of acceptance, and a relative openness to different expressions of sexuality, the singular identifying characteristic for homosexuals—and what signifies their difference within heteronormative society—is with whom they express their erotic intentionality.

It is in the context of the expression of this choice of object-of-desire that homosexuals merge into the consciousness of the mainstream as visible, and in some cases palpably threatening. Contra natura deals extensively with the erotic, amorous entanglements of the various protagonists within the context of this relatively unrestricted environment as concerns choice of object-of-desire, within a society where homosexuals no longer have to scurry furtively among the bushes in public parks or steal away to the squalid raunchiness of public washrooms for anonymous trysts—unless they do so by cultural choice, that is.

Of course this new freedom also entails negotiating the dynamics of love, among men in the case of Contra natura, and the dynamics of such relationships have their own complications and involve moral choices. Thus, it is in the framework of this new cultural and social setting where the protagonists of this narrative begin their engagements with one another, and where the ultimate confrontation between the clashing ideologies of homosexual Being unfolds.

Esta escena inicial, en la memoria de Salazar, no contiene apenas nada. CN 11 Homosexual courtship in the age of postmodern dissolution and clamorous identity politics is no longer a subterfuge of perverse anonymity where the homosexual skulks and lurks like a stealthy beast on the prowl for unsuspecting prey. In the new era, the homosexual brand is visible and, for the typically scornful Salazar, somewhat risible.

His rescuer, as it turns out, is no less than Allende, the erstwhile seminarian who has rejected his religious upbringing and Catholicism altogether. In a paradoxical way, the narrative intimates that the homosexual ghetto, aside from providing a safe refuge from the relentless vilification and degradation occasioned by homophobia, also insulates the subject who lives there from engagement with the world at large, and removes him from the only means by which authentic existence can be asserted: No se trata tanto de que la sociedad le rechace como del rechazo que el propio homosexual, emparejado o sin emparejar, hace de su sociedad.

Consequently, the homosexual ghetto in a way paradoxically reinforces the dynamics of compulsory difference, much as Diana Fuss tells us heteronormativity asserts its own compulsory standards and practices by excluding what it is not. Salazar, Fuss says: The language and law that regulates the establishment of heterosexuality as both an identity and an institution, both a practice and a system, is the language and law of defence and protection: Of course, any sexual identity, based on the complicated dynamics of object choice, works through a similar defensive procedure.

In reality, Salazar is the type of homosexual for whom the trappings of homosexuality, as lifestyle, as identity, as political or social consciousness, are anathema: Claro que soy gay. It is also this indelible image, recounted in lusty detail, that informs the spectatorial relationships that he has with the men in his life: Salazar is obsessed with this image of sex between men as anthropological, as brutal phallocentric domination through penetration of the objective Other, and this is the imagery that comes to represent homoerotic intentionality in his consciousness.

Pombo uses Contra natura as a means of examining homosex from the phenomenological perspective of praxis: Allende concludes that an objectified, abstract amorphous Other is devoid of significance and exists merely for purposes of prurient gratification, and that ultimately there can be no significant symbolic exchange in a meaningless sexual relationship. The juxtaposition of Salazar with Allende, then, establishes the dialectical tension concerning Dionysian love versus the love of Eros, and explores the ramifications of pleasure See Merleau-Ponty in Silverman, Inscriptions: In his earlier days, that is, after deciding that he will fully embrace the existentially homosexual mode of Being, Allende is given to a life of hedonism and subjectivism that is founded on the principle, following Nietzsche, that rational hegemony and control fundamentally stifle, desiccate, and repress the subject, and on the principle that rational self-mastery leads to self-domination or enslavement: Although from the perspective of According to Charles Taylor, the anti-rational basis for moral considerations in sexuality—largely advocated by the poststructuralists, following Nietzsche erroneously, or so Taylor contends —stems from a fervent reaction to the Kantian notion of the primacy of the rational agent as an arbiter in our efforts to live according to the moral law.

See Taylor, Sources of the Self: CN 71 For Salazar, this type of engagement allows him to live in his emotional cocoon, far removed from any type of intersubjective relationship that has a consequent social responsibility. That is, the manner in which two individuals interrelate sexually and emotionally is determined by the boundaries of acceptable behaviour as determined by the prevailing mores of the dominant society.

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This is a deliberate ploy, I contend, that underscores the nihilism that characterizes the disaffected relationships of Salazar and Juanjo. For someone as emotionally impoverished as Salazar, sex is a spectacle that lacks basic emotions and feelings, and that becomes in the end a banal jouissance. Salazar appears to be interested in the sexual escapades of his love interests as a means of stimulating through onanism his own flaccid eroticism. Es insaciable en esto: Un cielo excremental de tiza rosa y mariposas y lombrices blancas resplandece en lacas de paneles y biombos chinos.

In stark contrast to Salazar, Allende embodies the radically reflective human being who is intensely stirred by his affective relationships, and more crucially by the consequences of his relationships as reciprocally intersubjective. A Alberto le gustaba que le diera Allende por el culo. The issue for Allende is whether to give in to his lascivious feelings for the young man by accompanying him in his time of acute grief, in expectation that perhaps some sort of sexual gratification will ensue: CN The centrality of this moral paradox for Allende pervades the entire dialectical framework of this text.

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That is, the phenomenological conscious self is rationally guided in its moral actions. Allende sees in Salazar a product of the barren, even sociopathic, ethos of his environment: Allende sees sexuality qua Dionysian prurient gratification as an impediment to a deeper moral understanding of himself. Ceder es maravilloso, entregarse es maravilloso, follar es maravilloso. Allende is confronted with the choice of acting out unconstrained his homoerotic urges or of conforming to a kind of amorous or affective relationship that is informed by passion, caring and a sense of indissoluble affinity with the Other: Salazar, on the other hand, proffers a rather jaded interpretation of the station of the homosexual in society—a life of perpetual marginalization that corroborates the existential dissonance to which the homosexual is condemned.

For Salazar, the homosexual is tainted and thus lives with the sense of marginality and morbid insignificance that mark his relation to heteronormativity: The crucial difference lies in the manner in which one inserts oneself, subjectively, into the discursivities of existence that this marginalization brings in its wake, and fights inexorably against the prevailing doctrines, whether they be socially, culturally, historically, or epistemologically constructed, that give rise to marginalization in the first place.

Salazar is a classical fence-sitter who observes life dispassionately and disdainfully with no redeeming decisionism in his engagement with anyone or anything. In the end, Salazar, notwithstanding his rigorous efforts to avoid the affective domain of his experiential realm, succumbs piteously to his human emotions, as he becomes fatally enamoured of Juanjo. Because of his unrequited love, Salazar is given to bouts of reckless drinking, drug-taking, and performing of the most degrading sexual acts, even draining his personal wealth in order to mollify Juanjo, who extorts him with threats of violence and the withholding of sexual favours: Salazar se arrodilla delante de su amado Garnacho.

Es una escena bella y hostil. Como una cogida de torero. Gallimard, , pp. CN The juxtaposition of Salazar with Juanjo in this tableau underpins the dialectic that Pombo uses in his narrative to construe physical and emotional love as centrifugal and centripetal forces in the phenomenological experience of sexuality, and to explore how these forces govern our ethical and moral responses to the exigencies of the Other. Engaging in physical and emotional love with someone entails an act of conscious and physical immersion in subjectivity that corresponds to the very notion of what Merleau-Ponty calls an intercalation in the Other, from which the subject, however cynical and detached, is unable to dissociate himself.

In her study of phenomenology in the queer context, Sara Ahmed speaks of the importance of the lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness towards an object that becomes inextricably involved in our perceptions and understanding of our own experiential realm and existential orientation. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. For Salazar, this newfound situation is a God-like or epiphanic experience that robs him of his gravity, of his sense of grounding, and that pushes him to the extreme of life-ending, inauthentic behaviour: Al tragar el semen, sabe Salazar que ama a Juanjo … despavorido, enfebrecido, desatinado.

Salazar eventually kills himself, as did Gonzalo Ortega in Los delitos insignificantes, by throwing himself off the balcony onto the street. There is no question that both Ortega and Salazar represent the nadir of human existence in the Pombian taxonomy of substantiality and authentic behaviour.

However, their insubstantiality issues not from any intrinsic aspect of their homoerotic intentionality—although, to be sure, it is a source of tremendous guilt and self-loathing on the part of Ortega—but rather from their inability to move beyond their solipsistic nihilism and to engage purposively within the greater discursive framework of humanity of which they are part. The Indeterminacy of Gender Roles in Homoeroticism In this final section, I turn to a topic that resonates throughout the entire Pombian homotextual narrative, and certainly in Contra natura: I am referring to gender role-playing in homosex as a discursive construct of heterologocentric discourse.

Thus, sex between men was not remotely anomalous, but it was rigidly guided by a hierarchical system of positionality within the social structure. Nevertheless, in all his social interactions, Juanjo has to constantly remind himself and others that he in fact identifies as heterosexual, notwithstanding his insatiable affinity for sex with men. According to Jonathan Katz, to openly name heterosexuality and to speak explicitly and at length about it removes it from the realm of the taken-for-granted, subjecting it to the dangers of analysis, and the possibility of critique.

This difference, according to Wittig, manifests itself in a regime that regulates the way gender is perceived as a means of domination. Nevertheless, it helps to illustrate the ideological See Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, p. Beacon, , pp. The discourse of anal intercourse in Contra natura calls into question the epistemological grounding of masculinized top and feminized bottom inherent in heteronormative gender roles, and its ineluctable imposition on same sex relationships.

Moreover, he does not conceive of himself as a metaphorical woman in his submissive sexual posture to Juanjo. CN 94 The Greek concept of paideia refers to the education of young men, usually by older men.

Pombo, I believe, is playing ironically in his narrative with the idea of paideia to convey a sense that emotional and physical eroticism as Eros between two men or two women , particularly in a society that is inveterately homophobic, constitutes in itself a resistance to the force of heterologocentrism by virtue of its very enactment.

However, the notion of emotional love between men that is embodied and culminates in a sexual act is to this day evocative of an uncanny fear and dread. David Halperin, in his assessment of Greek mores towards homosex, alludes to men who depart from the cultural norm of manliness insofar as they actively desire to be penetrated by other men, and derive pleasure from it—i. Guy Hocquenghem, in his role as enfant terrible, strove for a privileging of the anus as a radical and revolutionary antithesis to phallic authority which typically denigrates the anus as an anti- erogenous zone—Hocquenghem called it, tongue-in-cheek, a trou-du-cul literally and figuratively an asshole.

This is the crux of literary phenomenology and symbolizes the function of the text as construing the imaginary world of sexuality. It is the language of the literary text, Merleau-Ponty informs, that makes palpable and discernible to us the phenomena that make up our experiential realm and that we use to gauge our Being in ourselves. In this text, Pombo weaves a dialectical narrative of expressive vigour to describe the multifarious worlds of homosexual identity in a Spanish society that is perceptibly different from previous eras in terms of its tolerance for—at least in terms of its perception of—homosexuality, and in which the homosexual, as something besides abject Other, seeks some type of authentic significance in his existence.

Hocquenghem says further that homosexualisms serve as a foil to the repressive institutions of bourgeois, heterologocentric society, and he repudiates the valorization of masculinity as a sign of superiority inherent to a civilization that is founded on the rudiments of physical force and dominance. Gallimard, , p. Pombo never actually states how he expects the homosexual existential condition as experienced through homoerotic intentionality to evolve, or whether it will be necessary in the decades to come to speak of homosexual identities as rooted in the maelstrom of sexual identity politics.

In the ultimate scheme of things, the fate of these downtrodden masses is no less precarious than his—the agents of oppression that act against them are not much different from those who would also destroy him. The narrative portrays solipsistic hedonism as one salient aspect of this existence; this is a form of Being that issues from the ghettoization and commodification of homosexual culture in postmodernity—liberation from abjection may give way to behaviour that allows free rein to any kind of self-indulgent, solipsistic behaviour, which leads ultimately to subjective nihilism.

Pombo concedes that his narrative concerning the different homosexualisms that exist within the domain of homoerotic intentionality represents but one particular authorial expression on this subject. The paucity of criticism of Contra natura suggests that perhaps contemporary critics have not quite figured out how to approach this text, either as literature or as social critique. At the very least, there is no doubt the novel will elicit some response.

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