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Chapter Title: CATALONIA AND PARADISE GARDENS: EROTICISING EDENS
Book Title: Catholic Iconography in the Novels of Juan Marsé

Book Author(s): ROSEMARY CLARK
Published by: Boydell and Brewer, Tamesis an imprint of Boydell & Brewer. (2003)
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4
CATALONIA AND PARADISE GARDENS:
EROTICISING EDENS
My discussion has already given an indication of the extent to which the

religious culture that surrounded Marsé in his early years provided him with a
source of potent stories and images that greatly enrich his narratives as well
as fuelling his critique of Catholicism in post-war Spain and Catalonia. One
religious myth in particular needs further exploration, because it underpins so
much post-war rhetoric, because it surfaces repeatedly in Marsé’s novels, and
because it is an endless source of controversial imagery and ideas that he
playfully exploits with knowledge and inventiveness. Linked in Chapters 2
and 3 with the Catholic doctrine of the Fall and National Catholic ideology, it
is the myth of the Paradise Garden. However, Marsé goes beyond the Garden
of Eden and the Fall in Genesis. Indeed, he uses two Gardens of Earthly
Delights – one from the Song of Solomon, and one from the story of Susanna
and the Elders in the Apocryphal Book of Daniel, each of which I shall intro-
duce briefly when their relevance to individual novels becomes apparent1 – in
which to set his reworkings of Eden within a wider context of sensual plea-
sure and call attention to the imaginative creativity of the narrator. The result
is a complex shifting of narrative perspective that moves constantly between
a pre-lapsarian paradise naivety and a post-lapsarian knowing critical aware-
ness: ‘Los sueños juveniles se corrompen en boca de los adultos’ are the
opening words of El embrujo de Shanghai (1993). With an adult awareness,
the paradise gardens in Marsé’s earlier novels are defined socially and politi-
cally as the preserve of a wealthy elite in a wickedly sharp critique of Catalan
Catholic nationalism; later, however, eroticised Edens are released from such
1 The story of Eden is found in Genesis 1.26 to 3.24. The story of Susanna and the
Elders, like that of Bel and the Dragon, is a Second Century addition to the Book of
Daniel. Written in Greek, unlike the earlier Hebrew chapters, it was not considered
canonical by Jewish tradition. The Thirty-nine articles of the Anglican Church accord
the Apocrypha a lesser status as books ‘the Church doth read for example of life and
instruction of manners; but yet it doth not apply them to establish any doctrine’ (Arti-
cles of Religion, VI., Of the Sufficiency of the holy Scriptures for salvation. From the
1662 Book of Common Prayer). The Apocrypha is, however, included in Catholic
bibles.
116 ROSEMARY CLARK
narrow specificity and are claimed by Marsé as the imaginative inheritance

even of children and of such hybrids as himself.
Gardens, both literal and symbolic, are a vivid element in Marsé’s detailed
mapping of Barcelona, viewed through the often desiring and always suspect
eyes of the venial author and his narrators. Gardens represent land and
possession, leisure and pleasure, inclusion and exclusion, and as part of the
urban landscape they can be read as a significant element in a social and
economic representation of the post-war city. The ruined gardens and
bombed sites of Encerrados, Si te dicen, Historia de detectives and Rabos de
lagartija co-exist in historical time – the 1940s – alongside the private
gardens of the wealthy Serrat, Claramunt and Valentí families, together with
that enduring symbol of the prestige of Catalonia’s late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century commercial and cultural success, the Parc Güell: open to
the public but a product of private wealth and patronage. The survival of
these sites of wealth and prestige through the war, the poverty of the 1950s
and on into the 1990s, once again allows Marsé to suggest, in a juxtaposition
of past and present through flashback already discussed in Chapter 2, that
wealth and the status quo endure unchanged.
To ask what Marsé’s depiction of paradise gardens gains by drawing on
biblical myths opens the way for new readings of familiar texts and is neces-
sary for two reasons. First, Marsé’s point of access to Paradise Garden myths
reflects the prevalence of Catholic doctrine and tradition in post-war Spain,
both directly, through the Church, and indirectly, through political and social
ideologies which have used religious myths to legitimise their diverse posi-
tions: notably Spanish and Catalan nationalist discourses. Second, these
biblical paradise gardens all have a figure of authority and a regime discourse
against which we see pitted the energies of a dissident or at least questioning
individual voice set up by the author Marsé to challenge regime authority.
Furthermore, authority associated with ownership is inscribed in a male
figure: God in Genesis, the King and Lover in the Song of Solomon (Cantar
de los Cantares), and the husband Joachim and prophet Daniel in Susanna
and the Elders. The voices that question gather around a female figure: Eve,
the Beloved, and Susanna, and frame desire as a source of tension between
owners and outsiders. Sex is set in place as a strategy of subversion.
In Chapters 2 and 3, along with critics such as Champeau, I have linked
Eden and the Fall with Spanish National Catholic rhetoric. I shall now
consider how Catalan Catholic Nationalists have also drawn on the biblical
paradise garden mythology to underpin notions of a specifically Catalan
Catholic identity and Catalan homeland that challenges assumptions of
Spanish hegemony enshrined in Spanish National Catholicism before recon-
sidering this specific model in the wider context of Marsé’s gardens.
A confrontation such as this between Catholics would be bound to delight
the sceptical Marsé, and his own ambivalence on the nature of Catalan iden-
tity means that he exploits rifts with mischievous humour and mixed motives.
CATALONIA AND PARADISE GARDENS 117
The divergence of interpretation of myths that the confrontation generates

also allows him once again to raise very specific questions concerning the use
of religious ideology for social and political ends. He is quick to detect flaws
in what the Catholic Church would like to present as monolithic doctrinal
statements and he exploits these flaws to challenge the authority of doctrine,
and he shows how the biblical and doctrinal source material that form part of
Catholic popular culture – preached from the pulpit, published in devotional
literature and voiced by churchgoers – may have an impact on wider social
and political issues, but are far from monolithic. His interest in religious myth
goes far deeper than merely reviewing popular culture and this chapter will
view how he embarks on an exploration of the power of myth itself to mobi-
lise and to polarise opinion.
Paradise Lost: Catalan Edens in La oscura historia and El amante

bilingüe
In La oscura historia, in the Claramunt’s paradise garden, Marsé launches
a carefully targeted attack on the Catholic Doctrine of Good and Evil in
which sin is defined as transgressing not only the codes of Catholic morality
but also of Catalanism. The obvious transgressor is the criminalised
‘charnego’ immigrant Manuel Reyes, but this is the first novel in which
Marsé creates a fully-fledged first-person narrator, and this significant figure
is the half-‘charnego’ and unashamedly transgressive Paco. The account of
Eden and the Fall he gives therefore shares the point of view of a
transgressive outsider while also having access to Eden, inverting the biblical
perspective of an authoritative God and seeking to seduce the inhabitants of
the paradise garden.
Though envious of their wealth and status, Paco is bitterly sceptical of the
religion and the social and political values of his Claramunt cousins. He
therefore frames his account of the temptation and fall of the Claramunt
daughters within a garden of earthly delights – a ‘hortus conclusus’ with
overtones of Eden, but his stated aim is to refute ‘uno de los mitos más
sarcásticos que pudrieron el mundo’ (PM, p. 7), the Claramunts’ Catholic
‘idea mítica del mal’ (PM, p. 103). A more obscure aim is to expose an
‘estrategia moral en función de una clase’ (PM, p. 7) which, for Paco – and
arguably Marsé too – conflates class and national identity in an attack on
Catalan middle-class Catholic exclusivity whose validity has been questioned
(Resina), but whose intensity is undeniable. Paco’s representation of the story
of Montse and Manuel sets out boldly to prove that Montse ‘no fue engañada
por el tipo, sino desengañada’ (PM, p. 129).
The origins of the Genesis accounts of the Creation and of Eden make
these ancient sacred writings particularly appropriate for Paco’s – and
Marsé’s – purposes, for the Genesis material is a national narrative, put
118 ROSEMARY CLARK
together in its present form when the Hebrews were in exile in Babylon
around 400 BC, by priests seeking to use the binding power of faith to forge a
sense of national identity in a defeated and enslaved people.2 Occupation and
exile are two sides of the same coin when a nation is taken over, its sover-
eignty denied and its identity threatened. The complex relationship between
religion and politics that attracts Marsé’s attention repeatedly as a novelist in
post-war Catalonia, and that draws Paco’s satirical comments as narrator in
La oscura historia, is reflected in the diversity to be found within what is
often erroneously assumed to be a single biblical narrative. In fact, there are
two creation myths, the second of which deals with Eden, whose underlying
aims need to be examined separately.
If the Genesis narrative is read as it now stands in the Hebrew priests’
version, it moves from the wider view of creation to the particular story of
Eden: from the universe to Adam and Eve, focusing on the relationship
between God and humankind in the intimate context of the ‘hortus
conclusus’:3 making their small society central to the wider world. The first
narrative in Genesis 1.1 to 2.4 (c.400 BC), known as ‘Yahwist’ because it
emphasises the authority of Yahweh, God, establishes this God’s supremacy
over all other forms of life; everything is his creation, and Eve’s disobedience
in the second narrative in Genesis 2.4 to 3.24 (c.1000–900 BC) therefore
seems a foolish denial of his goodness. As Genesis continues, this ominous
impression is reinforced as Eve’s son Cain murders his brother Abel, and
there follows an escalation of violence until:
Viendo Yavé que la maldad de los hombres sobre la tierra era muy grande
[. . .], se arrepintió de haber creado al hombre sobre la tierra y se afligió
tanto en su corazón, que dijo: ‘Exterminaré de sobre la haz de la tierra al
hombre que he formado; hombres y animales, reptiles y aves del cielo, todo
lo exterminaré.’ (Genesis 6.5–7)
Eve appears responsible for having initiated a terrible process of destruction

and despite the fact that the two stories came into being some six centuries
apart, this is a lasting impression that has led to the demonising of woman as
weak and transgressive in subsequent church doctrine.
The later priestly introduction asserts the supremacy of the Jewish Creator
God over all other deities and thereby defines the People of this God in oppo-
sition – as well as superior – to surrounding cultures and nations – particu-
larly powerful Babylon. Alone, of his own free will, and in a supreme act of
2 For a clear and very readable introduction to this topic, see Bernhard W.
Anderson, The Living World of the Old Testament (London: Longman, 1971), espe-
cially Chapter Six, entitled ‘Israel’s National Epic’ and Chapter Twelve: ‘By the
waters of Babylon’.
3 My discussion of the ‘hortus conclusus’ draws inspiration from the following:
Miró 1976; Coope 1973; and Parkinson Zamora 1984.
creation, God has brought order out of chaos, separated light from dark,
water from land, and created all living creatures, including the snakes the
Babylonians worshipped,4 which are consequently inferior to him. The Eden
story, though second in Genesis, is derived from far more ancient oral
sources first written down around 1000–900 BC and it shares much with
other surrounding pagan mythologies. Set within the ‘hortus conclusus’, it
addresses intimate social questions about cohabitation with others and with
an authoritative – indeed, totalitarian – God. After a brief summary of the
wider creation of the universe (Genesis 2.4b–7) it concentrates instead on the
fashioning of Eden (Genesis 2.8–17), of the first woman (Genesis 2.18–24),
and on the close unity between Adam and Eve, which the writer of Genesis
emphasises in a brief comment on Adam’s words:
‘Ésta sí que es hueso de mis huesos

y carne de mi carnes [. . .].’
Éste es el porqué el hombre deja a su padre y a su madre y se une a su
mujer, y son los dos desnudos, el hombre y su mujer, sin avergonzarse uno
de otro. (Genesis 2.23–25)
The intimacy between man and woman is an image of the intimacy between
God and his people, for God comes to talk with them and there is no shame or
separation between any of them. However, what might originally have been
an idyllic picture of innocence and sexual freedom, untrammelled by any
other restriction but that one fruit of the garden should not be eaten – that the
authority of God should not be questioned – is, in the priestly narrative, put in
the context of a national epic in which disobedience brings about the end of
Eden. Anderson writes on Eden in a chapter entitled ‘Israel’s National Epic’
that the writer:
was not interested primarily in writing about the antecedents of the

Exodus5 in a way that would satisfy modern historians and archeologists.
4 In a section on ‘The Subtil Serpent’ Norris mentions in the Babylonian creation

epic the Enuma Elish, ‘eleven demons with names like the Viper, the Dragon [...],
Scorpion-Man’ (Pamela Norris, The Story of Eve (London: Picador, 1998), pp. 21–5).
Norris suggests that these figures form part of a dense network of imagery which
supports the notion that ‘Behind the angel who refuses to honour Adam may be traced
the shadowy figures of the Canaanite monsters who opposed Yahweh at the beginning
of history, the great dragon Leviathan, the snakes and sky-dragons and the primeval
deep itself’ (Norris, p. 102). They will reappear in my discussion of icons which repre-
sent the battle between Good and Evil, and particularly of the Catalan icon of St
George, in Chapter 5.
5 ‘This decisive event – the great watershed of Israel’s history – was the exodus
from Egypt. Even today the Jewish people understand their vocation and destiny in the
light of this revealing event which made them a people and became their undying
memory’ (Anderson, p. 8).
120 ROSEMARY CLARK
His purpose was to confess Israel’s faith in Yahweh, whose saving deeds
had been manifested in Israel’s history [...]. To the Yahwist the meaning of
the Exodus was the meaning of all history, right back to creation.
(Anderson, p. 169)
Individual sin brings about the downfall of the nation. Anderson continues:
The Yahwist interpretation was based on the faith of the covenant commu-
nity. In the covenant faith, Yahweh is the sovereign Lord upon whose grace
and goodness, manifested in the great events of the past, Israel was utterly
dependent. But the Yahwist knew too from tradition that Israel was bent
upon flouting the authority of Yahweh in a spirit of murmuring and rebel-
lion, wildly and heedlessly betraying her Lord in order that she might
follow the devices and desires of her own heart. (Anderson, pp. 173–4)
The problem arises when Eve takes an initiative. Having been told: ‘puedes
comer de todos los árboles del jardín; mas del árbol de la ciencia del bien y
del mal no comerás en modo alguno, porque el día en que comieres,
ciertamente morirás’ (Genesis 2.16–17), she dares to embroider her account:
‘nos ha dicho Dios: No comáis de él ni lo toquéis siquiera’ (Genesis 3. 3 [my
italics]), and as she engages in dialogue with the serpent, her initiative makes
disobedience possible. She sees that the fruit is ‘apetitoso para comer,
agradable a la vista y deseable para adquirir sabiduría’ (Genesis 3.6), and
whether motivated by one or all of these attractions, the result is a transgres-
sion of the line laid down by God. The initial harmony between woman and
man, humankind and nature represented by the serpent, and between them
and God, shatters under the impact of doubt, recrimination, and finally
shame.6
6 The Book of Ezekiel contains what seems like a mythologised version of the
Genesis story which exploits resonances, easily recognisable to a Jew, which lead to
the association of the King of Tyre’s defiance of God with that of Adam. Describing
the King in his glory, Ezekiel also evokes the overlordship of God:
En el Edén, jardín de Dios, vivías,
Innumerables piedras preciosas
adornaban tu manto. (Ezekiel 28.13)
Both Eve and the King are tempted through their appetites and ambitions: she because
‘el árbol era apetitoso, agradable a la vista y deseable para adquirir sabiduría’ (Genesis
3.6), and he because, as the prophet tells him:
Tu corazón se había engreído
por tu belleza.
Tu sabiduría estaba corrompida
por tu esplendor. (Ezekiel 28.17)
Therefore, the King is cast down in a Fall which mirrors that of Eve, and of the
ambitious Angel of light, Lucifer, to be discussed in Chapter 5.
To defy God is to destroy Eden. Morality and politics come together

around the serpent tempter, Eve’s transgression and Adam’s collusion. In La
oscura historia, a similar combination of godlike authority (Luis Claramunt),
a tempter from outside (the Babylonian serpent or ‘charnego’ Manuel and
Paco) and women with a sense of initiative (Montse and Nuria), spell disaster
for the Catalan Catholic Eden. Marsé tacitly acknowledges this as he joins
battle with the Church in La oscura historia on the matter of Good and Evil
and authority in the context of a Catalan paradise garden and makes guilt and
punishment central to Paco’s relationships therein.
Paco’s feelings towards his Claramunt cousins are mixed. Despite his
hostility, he remembers the Claramunt home, during his childhood, as a
‘paraíso que anidó un día aquí, en estos jardines disimulados a escasos
metros del peligroso asfalto [. . .] las márgenes contemplativas y silenciosas
donde anidaron pájaros y rumor de aguas cristalinas’ (PM, p. 8). He recalls
longing to enter this paradise and briefly enjoying its sensual pleasures tinged
with the wicked attraction of transgression: ‘las meriendas de chocolate que
nos preparaba la abuela, los cigarrillos “Bubi” que yo le robaba a mi tío, las
lociones de masaje “Floïd”, que tanto nos gustaban a Montse y a mí, y cierta
excitante conversación con Nuria sobre “Rebeca”, la película-terrible-
pecado-mortal’ (PM, p. 56). Paco’s narrative foregrounds female temptresses
in this Eden but admits to being ready to be tempted:
en el jardín jugaba con nosotros una primita de trenzas rubias, llena de

pecas y de malignidad, que sonriente se acurrucaba bajo las lilas y se
empeñaba siempre en que adivináramos el color de sus braguitas – tierno
empeño que yo satisfacía con indiferencia y una secreta nostalgia en el
corazón: sólo me interesaba el color de las de la prima Nuria. (PM, p. 54)
Nuria is already the focus of his desire, as Montse becomes for Manuel, yet
from childhood on, their relationships are overshadowed by the censorious
authority of Tío Luis. To please him means conforming to prescribed rules
and rituals and learning obedience as Adam and Eve were intended to do.
Paco remembers that:
Para entrar en la torre de tus padres había que hacer toda esa serie de
operaciones que predisponen a las almas simples a la sumisión y al respeto:
introducir la mano entre las lanzas de la verja del jardín y abrir por dentro
levantando el pestillo, volver a cerrar, luego rodear el surtidor, apartar con
la mano una rama baja del sauce, subir los cuatro escalones del porche y
finalmente tirar de la campanilla, ni muy fuerte ni muy suave. (PM, p. 65)
Biblical myth blends with fairy tale and with the story of Catalonia’s own
patron, St George, as Paco imagines facing a trial of strength: like God’s one
prohibition in Eden, a chance to prove his worth through obedience and
122 ROSEMARY CLARK
self-denial. Yet even as he contemplates this possibility, he acknowledges

that he is no selfless George but a dragon, desiring only to possess and hoard.
Tormented by a precocious sexuality, the child Paco, like the adult narrator,
cannot tell what he wants more: to enter and possess the garden paradise, or
Nuria:
es como una obsesión de Príncipe Valiente, no consigo verte sin un fondo

de castillo con torres almenadas y dragón, aquel jardín, aquellas noches
estrelladas, un fabuloso decorado siempre unido a ti [. . .]. Qué bonito.
Había que matar el dragón para merecerte. Y me pregunto si ese telón de
fondo, ese dragón que había que vencer y ese castillo, eran un medio o un
fin; me pregunto si no me atraían más que tú. (PM, p. 107)
He confesses to Nuria: ‘me enamoré locamente, cierto. Pero la indecisa mano

que te acariciaba [. . .], mucho me temo que era y sigue siendo una garra’
(PM, p. 106).
This complex exploration of desire draws much from the Eden myth.
Marsé, through his narrator Paco, does not demonise the female temptress.
Rather, he revels in the sensuality surrounding Eve in the garden. And why
not? A recent re-reading of the Genesis narrative by a Christian theologian
seems to absolve Eve of all serious charges against her. Barr argues that Eden
marks a change in Adam’s and Eve’s fortunes but does not indicate sin, a
Fall, or a termination of the relationship between God and man. Barr’s
re-reading of the doctrine of Original Sin and Total Depravity seems bold,
but it is based closely on the text. He points out that the word ‘sin’ first
occurs after the expulsion from Eden, when God warns Adam and Eve’s son
Cain: ‘si haces el mal el pecado está a las puertas de tu casa. Su acoso es
contra ti, mas tú puedes contenerlo’ (Genesis 4.7). Even then, sin is there but
Cain has a choice and can resist it. Eve, too, in James Barr’s view, had a
choice. Indeed, while Cain acted from jealousy, Eve showed good sense:
At most the woman was attracted by the food value, the pleasant appear-
ance, and the educative prospects of the fruit. There is no indication that
the will to become more than human, to put oneself in the place of God,
formed her motivation: if it did, the narrative is at fault in not making this
important point clear.7
In Paco’s view, at least, Montse was enriched by her transgressive relation-

ship with Manuel. With Nuria,
Hablé de ciertos días en que su cuerpo parecía alcanzar una vida
7 James Barr, ‘The Authority of Scripture. The Book of Genesis and the Origin of
Evil in Jewish and Christian Tradition’, in Christian Authority. Essays in Honour of
Henry Chadwick, ed., G. R. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 59–75 (p. 65).
independiente de sus activos sentimientos, y de cómo a partir de entonces

su figura se concretó, dejó de ser aquella mareante gama de gestos
inconscientes y a menudo desequilibrados, adquirió peso y volumen,
gravidez, el sugestivo imperio de la contención. Eso, que en otras mujeres
más superficiales habría reducido su atractivo, en ella floreció en una
misteriosa cualidad sensual. (PM, p. 215)
Nuria too finds in transgressive relationships a comfort that is lacking in her

approved marriage. When she seeks Paco out in her marriage home in the
night, the garden of their shared childhood accompanies her:
Llevaba un pijama y su piel olía a jazmín. Temblaba y lloraba. Acogí con

preocupación y tristeza su conciso cuerpo de niña: nunca sería fuerte esta
Claramunt descocada y precoz. (PM, p. 51)
Precocious like Eve, Nuria tastes of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil and is overwhelmed. Inasmuch as Eve’s choice constituted an act of
disobedience, she had to take the consequences, though Barr points out that
these were not as catastrophic as God’s words ‘ciertamente morirás’ implied.
Indeed, Adam and Eve might have lived forever had God not cast them out of
Eden to prevent them eating from the tree of life (Genesis 3. 22). Effectively,
God set a term to their suffering by expelling them – death would bring
release – and he also proved his continuing concern for them by making them
clothes of animal skins (Genesis 3. 21). Barr claims that ‘the Old Testament,
far from taking the universal sinfulness of man or woman as an obvious and
ineluctable fact, seems to insist upon the possibility of avoiding sin’ (Barr, p.
67), adding that Judaism as a whole ‘has refused to accept any sort of
doctrine of original sin’ (Barr, p. 68).8 Such compassion was not forthcoming
for the Claramunt girls from their family, only from their transgressive
lovers.
The exclusion of sinful women has a long history in Church and
pre-Church Jewish tradition despite the fact that Jesus, who is reported as
having mentioned sin, judgment and hell on many occasions,9 is nowhere
quoted as linking Eden or Eve to a Fall caused by Woman. St Paul, when
elaborating his doctrine of the Fall and Redemption, blames Adam not Eve:
‘por un hombre entró el pecado en el mundo y por el pecado la muerte, y así
8 Barr quotes Ps 18.21 to 24, but nonetheless argues that the Hebrew Bible places
no stress on Eve’s sin or woman’s wickedness (Barr, p. 70) – a point with which Norris
concurs (Norris, p. 41), providing in support of her argument a review of Old Testa-
ment women illustrating their diversity of behaviour (Norris, pp. 44–58). Barr
suggests that attitudes changed from the Hellenistic period onwards, when Rabbis
such as Ben Sira began to dwell on the pragmatic question of the trouble women could
cause in a man’s household.
9 Two famous examples are the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke
16.19–31), and the parable of the wheat and the tares. (Matthew 13.36–42).
124 ROSEMARY CLARK
la muerte pasó a todos los hombres, porque todos pecaron’ (Romans 5.12).
Or again: ‘como todos mueren en Adán, así todos revivirán en Cristo’ (I
Corinthians 15.22). Nonetheless, Paul is also held to have written: ‘no fue
Adán quien se dejó engañar, sino Eva, que seducida incurrió en la
transgresión. Se salvará, sin embargo, por la maternidad, si persevera con
sabiduría en la fe, la caridad y la santidad’ (I Timothy 2.14–15). Certainly, by
the second century AD, in both Rabbinical commentaries on the Hebrew
scriptures and in the Early Church, the notion that woman’s frailty required
male guidance and protection through marriage and domesticity to limit its
damage potential was commonplace.10 The second century Christian
Tertullian of Carthage warned women in the Church:
And do you not know that you are [each] an Eve? [. . .] You are the devil’s
gateway: you are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first
deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil
was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image,
man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had
to die.11
Tertullian is acknowledged as having had ‘a sharp and violent talent’,12 and

when writing on discipline, he identified the Church with God as Judge, and
with Good set against Evil, claiming that it was the Church’s duty to cast
sinners out as they had been excluded from Eden:
There is reason to believe in the correspondence between the free judgment

of God and that of the Church, when the Church has pronounced the exclu-
sion of the delinquent from its prayers, its assemblies, and all holy things.
This discipline takes three forms, – exhortation, censure, and condemna-
tion, the consequence of which is exclusion.13
The rhetoric of exclusion linked, via women, to sexual sin appeared again
in early Christian thought when Augustine of Hippo, in the fifth century,
admitted to often uncontrollable sexual desire and took this as evidence that
10 Norris offers a selection of writings from the Rabbinical tradition and Early
Church Fathers that illustrate a growing preoccupation with the dangers of female
allure and the need to curb female sexuality (Norris, pp. 66–82).
11 From De Cultu Feminarum, written in about AD 196–7, as quoted by Norris, p.
196. For the most part, Tertullian’s writings to women address questions of remarriage
and of appropriate behaviour in the context of a non-Christian society, rather than
demonising them. For a discussion of Tertullian’s position see Barnes, pp. 136–8.
12 Timothy.D. Barnes, Tertullian. A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1971), p. 3.
13 From his Apologia as quoted by E. de Pressensé, The Early Years of Chris-
tianity: A Comprehensive History of the First Three Centuries of the Christian
Church, trans. A. Harwood-Holmden (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1879), p. 78.
he, as much as any woman, was guilty of involuntary transgression.

Addressing God in dramatically emotive terms, Augustine wrote: ‘I, miser-
able wretch, having forsaken thee, did even boil up again with the fervour of
lust, following still my foul course and forsaking thee [. . .]. Where was I, and
how far off was I exiled from the dear delights of thy house?’14 Convinced
that Adam and Eve had enjoyed legitimate sexual relations before the Fall,
fulfilling God’s command ‘Sed prolíficos y multiplicaos’ (Genesis 1.28),
Augustine sought to explain why their first response to the knowledge of
Good and Evil – when ‘conocieron que estaban desnudos’ (Genesis 3.7) –
was to make aprons of leaves to cover their genitalia. What may equally be
seen as a new sense of vulnerability or shame now focused on a hitherto inno-
cent and innocuous aspect of Adam’s and Eve’s condition: their nakedness
and sexuality. Augustine concluded that sexual desire had been perverted by
the Fall:
After their disobedience to God’s instructions [. . .], immediately they were

embarrassed by the nakedness of their bodies [. . .]. The soul, in fact,
rejoiced in its own freedom to act perversely and disdained to be God’s
servant; and so it was deprived of the obedient service which its body had
first rendered.15
He then evolved the notion that Adam’s and Eve’s offspring would carry the
taint of their original sin:
the whole human race was in the first man, and it was to pass from him
through the woman into his progeny, when the married pair had received
the divine sentence of condemnation. And it was not man as first made, but
what man became after his sin and punishment, that was thus begotten.
(Augustine, p. 512)
It can be argued that Augustine distributed the blame equally between man
and woman, but his notion of original sin being passed on through birth, via
woman, can be compared with earlier biblical passages linking women, birth
and sin:
Mira que en culpa ya nací,

en pecado me concibió mi madre. (Psalms 51.7)
It is a short step to demonising woman as bearer of sin.

Preoccupation with the Fall has often distracted attention from what went
14 Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (London and Glasgow:

Collins Fontana, 1957), pp. 57–8.
15 Augustine of Hippo, City of God (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), p. 522.
126 ROSEMARY CLARK
on in Eden before it, at a time when nakedness and innocence were synony-
mous and all was harmony. One can argue that the words:
Dios creó al hombre a su imagen,

a imagen de Dios lo creó,
macho y hembra los creó. (Genesis 1.27)
suggest that each individual man and woman contains elements of ‘macho y
hembra’, or that man – ‘macho’ – is completed by woman – ‘hembra’ – to
achieve that image of God, male and female. With both interpretations, it is
clear from Genesis that originally there was a oneness of ‘macho y hembra’
which reflected the nature of God, and was shattered when Eve disobeyed
God’s injunction, and transgression first declared itself in knowledge of
difference revealed by nakedness. Their otherness has been problematised;
sexual difference is now a cause of shame. They now know evil as well as
good, and that knowledge is associated with their sexuality – an association
they signal with concealing clothes. Was their first knowledge self-knowl-
edge, manifested in an awareness of their own nakedness? Or on seeing each
other’s nakedness, did they also see their own through the eyes of the other –
and then of God – so that their shame was a consequence of another’s gaze?
Paco’s taste of paradise makes him aware of his own unadmirable motives
in reaching out to seize the forbidden fruits of the garden, but like Montse he
also experiences ‘desengaño’ when confronted with the motivations of the
Claramunts. In Nuria his sexual desire has awakened, and in the family his
desire for wealth. Both desires are to be frustrated by Tío Luis’s prohibitions.
In a passage redolent of sensual pleasure, Paco muses:
Recuerdo con emoción un olor a lilas en el jardín, un patético empeño por

prolongar ciertos juegos misteriosos y laboriosos a la incierta luz del
crepúsculo o en la penumbra del recibidor [. . .] aquella pervivencia fría de
la empuñadura de latón de ciertas puertas prohibidas, y con aullidos de
pariente pobre todavía hoy evoco la habitación de mis primas en la torre,
sus camas policromadas, cierto sentimiento de exclusión que había de
crecer y devorarme. (PM, pp. 56–7)
With hindsight and now based in Paris, Paco can mock a Catholic morality
that, in his mind, was linked to the sense of guilt he was made to feel as a
child. Nonetheless, he is quick to show how religion can be used to reinforce
questionable social and political strategies of exclusion:
En una familia católica cuya proyección futura reposa tradicionalmente en

los hijos varones, una conducta como la mía había de despertar
apreciaciones abstractas que tienen cierto interés como ejemplo de
estrategia moral en función de una clase. (PM, p. 7).
In recognition of the function of women as bearers of the next generation

and acknowledging that if the purity of a threatened race is to be preserved,
adultery ranks above all other sexual sins – it is the only one to feature in the
Ten Commandments – Jewish identity is passed on through the female line.
The transgressiveness of Paco and Manuel derives in part from their regional
otherness. Marking him from birth, like original sin, is the fact that Paco is
not entirely Catalan. His surname is from his father – a reminder of a
Claramunt from a previous generation led astray by a wandering ‘andaluz’:
‘Mis ojos eran la admiración de los Claramunt (reconocían en ese azul pálido
la marca de la familia), pero no el pelo, negra pesadilla gitana, y mucho
menos, mi nombre: Paco Bodegas. Nombre capaz de todas las vilezas’ (PM,
p. 55). The Claramunt Eden is a Catalan Eden and Paco’s racial difference
and transgressive character equally mean that he does not belong in the
Catalan Catholic home. He recalls, again in biblical terms, significant
renaming such as Abram (Abraham), Jacob (Israel) and Simon (Peter) in
acknowledgement of God’s purposes for them:
La ceremonia del rebautizo, en la que ofició la poderosa voz de tío Luis

[. . .]: alto, autoritario, investido de extraños poderes [. . .] me llamó en tono
atronador: “Francesc! Les nenes no es toquen!” [. . .]. [D]urante mucho
tiempo tal nombre se me antojó el justo calificativo que merecía mi
flagrante obscenidad, algo que de alguna manera me mostraba al mundo
con la tierna porfía de mis manos en la sedosa entrepierna de mis primas.
(PM, p. 55)
Numerous allusions in La oscura historia – often single words – show

Marsé drawing on another source of Catalan Catholic national narrative from
nineteenth century myth-making. The Renaixença looked back to – or rein-
vented – a remote past, bringing together catholicism and catalanism in
stories in which the great medieval monasteries of Ripoll, Poblet, and
Montserrat had provided centres of learning, and Catalan enjoyed the same
status as Castilian. The Church therefore claimed a place in the rediscovery
of a Catalan culture clearly framed as Catholic, in opposition to the culture of
non-Catalan and non-Catholic outsiders. One historian comments that, in the
wider political scene at the turn of the century:
Un sector muy destacado [. . .] protagoniza un movimiento intelectual de

inspiración católica caracterizado por su postura conciliadora, de amplia
colaboración con otros grupos nacionalistas, a la vez que ocupan en el
panorama cultural de Barcelona una clara posición hegemónica. ‘En cap
terra llatina’, podrá afirmar Carner en 1911, ‘està el catolicisme tan en
possesió del poder intel.lectual com en el dolç recó de Catalunya.
(Cacho Viu, p. 317)
That Catalan Catholic Nationalism was from the start as cultural as it was
128 ROSEMARY CLARK
political is illustrated by the influential ‘Núcleo’ or ‘Esbart de Vic’: ‘Un grup

d’intellectuals catalanistes que tenen llur centre vital a la ciutat de Vic, molt
influïts per l’ambient eclesiàstic i l’estratègia de l’Església [. . .], ruralista i
tradicionalista.’16 The cathedral town of Vic had a prestigious seminary that
housed such famous personages as Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902), Josep
Torras i Bages (1846–1916) and Jaume Collell (1846–1932), – all priests,
writers and fervent Catalanists. In praising Vic, Verdaguer linked politics
with religion and culture in defence of Catalan identity:
Un gran escut pels tronos i pel temple,

pel món un llibre obert.17
The most famous member of the group was undoubtedly Josep Torras i
Bages, whose impact as a theoretician of Catholic Catalanism has been
profound and lasting. This Bishop of Vic was also President of the Barcelona
‘Jocs Florals’ (a celebration of Catalan music, dance and literature) and a
member of the famous music society of which he stated proudly: ‘L’Orfeu
Català fou Crist’. His words show that, in his view, traditions give form and
expression to patriotism and ‘esperit nacional’, and thanks to its Catholic
Catalan traditions, Catalonia’s national spirit is unalienably Catholic.
Combining politics with culture, Torras founded several Catalanist Catholic
periodicals and the devotional society of the Lliga espiritual de la Mare de
Déu de Montserrat, and fought a dedicated battle for the use of Catalan for
preaching and teaching, stating bluntly: ‘l’ensenyar el coneixement de Déu,
això és, el Catecisme, als infants en llengua castellana, és un costum detest-
able, perniciossísim i destructiu de la fe’ (Pérez Francesch, p. 22). For Torras
religion and nature were one and the same thing, and this belief provided the
mystical foundation of his regionalism. He wrote: ‘La religió [. . .] és una
sobrenatural perfecció de la naturalesa, i per això cerca les entitats naturals
més que les polítiques, és a dir, més la regió que l’Estat, perquè és
divinament naturalista’ (Pérez Francesch, p. 12). The Church, therefore, is
crucial to Catalan national identity:
Potser no hi ha altra nació tan entera i sòlidament cristiana com fou

Catalunya. [. . .]. Mes activitat deu ésser educada, i la de la nostra raça fou
governada i dirigida, fou fomentada i educada, des que es pot dir poble
català, per l’Església, que l’engendrà en les ombrívoles valls del Pirineu.
Tothom diu que Ripoll és bressol de Catalunya on naix la nostra raça
bressada amb cants de monjos i al so de roncs clarins.
(Pérez Francesch, pp. 7–8)
16 Joan Lluis Pérez Francesch, ed., Torras i Bages. L’Església i el Regionalisme i

altres textos (1887–1899) (Barcelona: La Magrana, 1985), p. x.
17 Jacint Verdaguer, Obres Completes (Barcelona: Selecta, 1943), p. 424.
As early as 1879, Collell called on Catholics to become involved in the

Renaixença:
llama la atención sobre el interés que tiene para la Iglesia la presencia de

los católicos en el catalanismo; llamamiento hecho, en primer lugar, al
clero, ‘puix l’interessa més de lo que pot pensarse el profit d’aqueixa
restauració’. (Cacho Viu, p. 300)
The rhetoric of an article written on the death of Collell (Flama, March 4

1932) illustrates the conflation of culture, religion and politics in the minds of
Catalan Catholic nationalists at the time. We read of this member of ‘la
gloriosa escola vigatana’: ‘El canonge Collell fou un exemplar sacerdot, un
orador eximi, un poeta vibrant, un periodista de tremp i tot unit en aquell
amor a Déu i a Catalunya.’ The names of the publications for which he wrote
read like a hymn to the land: ‘Col.laborà a “El pueblo Vicense”, “El Eco de la
Montaña”, “La Pàtria”, “La Garba Muntanyesa” [. . .], “Muntanyes
Regalades”. The message is driven home in a quotation from Collell’s Himne
patriòtic per la restauració de Ripoll:
Llengua santa que de l’independència

n’és penyora que may pot fallar
florirà en nostre llavi a tot-hora
en lo temple com dintre la llar.
Ab la fe que a Ripoll hem jurada
tindrem pàtria i tindrem llibertat.
The poet-priest Verdaguer linked the initial building of Ripoll with a Catalan
crusade against the Moors during the Reconquista, and ascribed to the
monastery an eternal, universal spiritual significance within the context of
Catholic Catalonia:
Té son arc de triomf lo Cristianisme;

al rompre el ju feixuc del mahometisme,
Catalunya l’aixeca a Jesucrist.
Qui passarà per sota aqueixa arcada
bé podrà dir que, en síntesi sagrada,
lo món, lo temps i eternitat ha vist. (Verdaguer, pp. 390–1)
Verdaguer also wrote cycles of poems in celebration of Montserrat, and his

Virolai, banned under Franco, is now sung in Montserrat every day by
emotional Catalan crowds, for it celebrates Catalonia’s special status as the
people of Mary, while the rest of Spain must look at her from afar:
Rosa d’abril, Morena de la serra,

de Montserrat l’Estel,
130 ROSEMARY CLARK
il.luminau la catalana terra;

guiau-nos cap al cel
[. . .]
Dels catalans sempre sereu Princesa,
dels espanyols Estrella d’Orient. (Verdaguer, p. 181)
Written large across the façade of the Abbey of Montserrat are words
attributed to Torras i Bages that are not to be found anywhere in his published
works. In fact, this is a case where myth, not history, has been carved in
stone. The words are: ‘Catalunya serà cristiana o no serà’, and they illustrate
the extent to which, in Catalonia, nineteenth century Romanticism, with its
appeal to the myth of a vanished Golden Age or Paradise Lost fuelled notions
of a rural idyll with a distinctly Catholic Catalan flavour. The Romantic
notion of ‘Volkgeist’ served to underpin Catalans’ belief in their own
divinely instituted distinctive identity, as a recent commentator explains
about Catalan Catholic Nationalist ideology:
El Volkgeist era la creació indirecta de Déu en tant que era el resultat de

factors naturals que operaven en un període llarg de temps en un territori
concret. D’aquí se’n desprèn que la nació té un origen diví, y totes les seves
manifestacions són sagrades perquè són dons de Déu.18
The Romantic ideal of an idyllic country existence found a satisfying

Catalan model in the rural ‘llar pairal’ alluded to in Collell’s Himne.
City-dwellers, facing such unpleasant consequences of industrialisation as
the growth of an immigrant work force and urban slums, saw in the notion of
the idealised rural paternal hearth a symbol of social stability and Catholic
values.19 The destruction of war would reinforce this ideal. Albert Balcells
describes ‘pairalisme’ as ‘an ideology that confused patriotism with tradition-
18 Josep R, Llobera, ‘La formació de la ideologia nacionalista catalana’, L’Avenç,

63 (September 1983), pp. 24–35, 651.
19 This notion of the home as the basic building-block of society is close to that
outlined by Augustine: ‘Now the intercourse of male and female is the seed-bed, as it
were, of a city [. . .]. [T]he peace of a home is the ordered agreement among those who
live together about giving and obeying orders; the peace of the Heavenly City is a
perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God’
(Augustine, pp. 625 and 870). Menéndez y Pelayo commented that a valuable legacy of
Rome in Spain was the family as an essential element of social cohesion: ‘reorganiza la
propiedad y la familia sobre fundamentos tan robustos, que en lo esencial aún
persisten’ (Menéndez y Pelayo, p. 505). This writer casts the family as the image of
man’s relationship with God ensured through inheritance and the family home: ‘Sin un
mismo Dios, sin un mismo altar, sin unos mismos sacrificios; sin juzgarse todos hijos
del mismo Padre y regenerados por un sacramento común; sin ver visible sobre sus
cabezas la protección de lo alto; sin sentirla cada día en sus hijos, en su casa, en el
circuito de su heredad, en la plaza del municipio nativo. . . . ¿Qué pueblo habrá grande
y fuerte?’ (Menéndez y Pelayo, p. 506).
alism and idealized rural precapitalist structures’ and underlines its useful-
ness as an ideological weapon for fomenting Catalan unity:20
The men of the Catalan literary rebirth belonged to an industrialized city

but they exalted an idealized rural world and a glorified medieval past. This
conservative message made it possible to build an ideological bridge
linking the Barcelona bourgeoisie to craftsmen and countryfolk in opposi-
tion to the urban industrial proletariat. Respect for the Church and the sanc-
tification of Catalan civil law were channels uniting the bourgeoisie with
the populations of the rural and mountainous areas.21
Vicens Vives similarly linked rural and urban Catalonia as one nation
through the ‘llar pairal’: ‘del retorn sovintejat del ciutadà a la casa o al mas
dels avis, n’ha nascut l’íntima solidaritat entre el camp i la ciutat de
Catalunya’.22 The early ‘casa pairal’ was the rural ‘mas’, the basis of an agri-
cultural society, to which Catalan law made the first-born sole heir to avoid
fragmentation of the inheritance (Balcells, p. 20). The first-born was not
allowed to leave the land (Vicens Vives, p. 42) and the ‘llar pairal’ thus
becomes symbolic of social stability in Catalonia, with the woman’s function
of bearing heirs once again seen to be central:
L’element bàsic, indiscutible, de la societat històrica catalana no és l’home,

és la casa [. . .]. Casa i família, mas i terra, vet ací el poderós enreixat de la
subestructura social catalana abans i després del segle XIV, àdhuc fins als
nostres mateixos dies [. . .]. Cada català té la seva casa pairal.
(Vicens Vives, p. 33)
20 Compare this with the Spanish National Catholic use of a similar rhetoric which
glorified the peasant with the aim of sustaining Spanish agriculture at a time when
rural poverty and urban growth were leading to an exodus from the countryside.
Preston discusses the contribution of fascist ideology to an effort in post-war Spain to
develop such a rhetoric. He quotes the then minister for Agriculture, Rafael Cavestany,
as saying: ‘Frente a la estampa de las revoluciones triunfantes sobre la devastación;
frente al triste desfile proletario arrastrando irredimibles cadenas de la esclavitud,
opongamos la estampa del campesino, puesto en pie sobre su tierra con una casa al
fondo, a cuya puerta juegan sus hijos y por encima de todos una modesta, pero divina
cruz, meta de todos los caminos del espíritu y hacia la cual nos lleva nuestra fe y
nuestra ambición de españoles’ (Preston, p. 198). Preston also quotes as an ideologist
Fernando Sánchez Puerta, Las clases medias económicas (Madrid: [n. pub], 1951, pp.
189–90 and 195) ‘un país que es capaz de crear una clase numerosa de campesinado
con tierra es un país asegurado contra los disturbios sociales, porque el campesinado
propietario está interesado en la estabilidad por encima de todo’.
21 Albert Balcells, Catalan Nationalism Past and Present (London: Macmillan,
1996), p. 39.
22 Jaume Vicens Vives, Notícia de Catalunya (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1995), p.
42.
132 ROSEMARY CLARK
Vicens Vives drives his point home with a nice linguistic reference: ‘Som de
can Pau o de can Pere. Aquesta fusió entre la casa i la família ha estat
promoguda per l’estret lligam de l’home amb la terra en les diverses
colonitzacions del país’ (Vicens Vives, p. 34).
He also urges the Catalan to study the relation of man to nature in order to
understand his nation:
com ha establert aquest ordit de relacions materials i espirituals amb la

terra que el nodreix i els altres homes que li són consemblants, en una
articulació social definida i categòrica. En una paraula [. . .] com ha sorgit
la mentalitat que ens caracteritza dins la Societat Occidental.
(Vicens Vives, p. 17)
Catalans have, he says, a distinctive character formed by life in the mountains

as evoked in the nation’s mythology:
La Muntanya vivia aleshores esplèndidament. Refugi davant els

musulmans, les seves valls eren curulles de gent: esglésies, monestirs,
viles, poblets [. . .]. Durant tres segles s’hi formà el millor de quà podem
ufanar-nos: l’esperit feiner, el seny, el sentit de continuïtat, la tradició
familiar i la responsabilitat social. (Vicens Vives, pp. 28–9)
Prolonged contact with the land has made Catalans hard-working ‘sedentaris’
with firm roots in their own fertile soil: ‘El mas es convertí en centre efectiu
de l’estructura agrària catalana, [. . .] donava una absoluta garantia de
permanència vital’. The ‘masover’ owed feudal duty to a proprietor, but not
even the proprietor could expel his tenant if the tenant kept the rules (Vicens
Vives, p. 38). Castilians, as viewed by Vicens Vives, lack such roots, being
restless wanderers ‘d’ascendència transhumant i nòmada’ (Vicens Vives, p.
46). For this Catalan historian, at least, the difference between them boils
down to ‘Les topades entre ambdues concepcions del treball – per al castellà
un “castigo divinal”; per al català, un “signe d’elecció” ’ (Vicens Vives, p.
46), and the notion of a Chosen and Separate People emerges again.
Logically, the southern immigrants drawn to Catalonia in the 1950s would by
definition be seen as feckless, propertyless ‘nòmades’, having no rural base,
family identity or claim on a Catalan nationalism of the soil.
Some lines from Collell’s Montserrat illustrate how land and language,
family and nation, Catalanism and Catholicism all come together in the
symbolic ‘llar pairal’:
En tot eix mar de planes i onades de muntanyes

la santa llengua’s parla de cent generacions;
i en totes les contrades, ciutats, viles, cabanyes,
la encesa barretina corona’ls honrats fronts.
[. . .]
la llet que du la mare té encar la saba nova

i’ls fills la escalfor senten dels vells escons pairals.
[. . .]
i sempre tindrem pàtria los fills de Catalunya
mentre al cel s’aixequen los pics de Montserrat.
(Flama, 4 March 1932)
Marsé uses these same terms to present a very different picture. The adjective
‘montserratino’ is inevitably, if subtly, pejorative. In Ultimas tardes (1965)
Marta Serrat’s unquestioning obedience to her husband is symbolised by a
thickening middle-aged leg of ‘sólida virtud montserratina’ (UTT, p. 137). In
El amante (1991), Marés is repelled by Norma Valentí’s entrenched
middle-class Catalanism yet sexually attracted to her, and his ambivalence is
focused as he describes her ‘boca grande y sensual, su larga naríz
montserratina’ (EAB, p. 55). He fears that like an unerring hound she will
sniff out his masquerade: ‘su sensible naríz montserratina es capaz de olfatear
la impostura y el serrín del falso charnego a varios kilómetros de distancia’
(EAB, p. 152). Her nose fails her. Perhaps the difference is not as strong as
she believed. However, in both novels, ‘montserratino’, indicating Catalan
Catholic traditionalism, linked women and sexual dependency. For all her
social and political freedom within a new democratic Spain, Marsé’s
message seems to be, Norma Valentí can still be manipulated by sex, as she
can by her Catalan Catholic heritage, both being inscribed in her attitudes and
behaviour by centuries of tradition. As Lee Six writes:
Norma may indeed incarnate the emancipation of Catalan women; she

appears to have succeeded in winning self-determination for herself, but
ultimately Marsé makes sure it is a hollow victory: the advances are
revealed to be quite superficial and any perceived threat that women like
her pose to their men’s sense of their own masculinity is shown to be illu-
sory. The changes in Catalan society that have enabled Norma to live a
public life so different from that of Nuria have not made the slightest dent
on [. . .] the social construction of desire: men still want their women in the
subordinate position [. . .]: desire remains inscribed within the patriarchal
pattern of male domination and female submission.
(Lee Six, ‘Blind Woman’s Buff’, p. 38)
The regime discourse of Eden appears capable of coexisting with progressive

Catalan nationalism, and it is where the two meet that Marsé launches some
of his bitterest attacks.
Transposed in his novels from the countryside to urban post-war Barce-
lona, the ‘llar pairal’ is an early victim of Marsé’s subversion. The distant
echo of a rural paradise provides an ironic comment on urban decay and
reconstruction. Ideals of family unity and stability are mocked by the frag-
mentation of old social structures that the Church would maintain if it could,
134 ROSEMARY CLARK
just as wealthy Catalan Catholic families would preserve their private

gardens and keep social change at a distance, if they could keep outsiders out.
Paco likens the Claramunts to Torras i Bages’s beloved ‘Orfeó’ (‘L’Orfeó es
Crist’): under the ‘batuta orfeónica’ of the patriarch, Tío Luis: ‘forman en
cierto modo un Orfeó, una modesta, paternal y graciense masa coral, y lo
prueba el hecho de que, cuando discuten entre sí por cuestiones de dinero, es
como si cantaran’ (PM, p. 51). Neither entirely Catalan nor sufficiently
moneyed, Paco adds: ‘Yo nací al margen de esta armonía casi litúrgica’ (PM,
p. 51). In contrast, his rival Salvador, from an equally humble background, is
Catalan and passed the culture test early on. As Nuria comments:
desde muy niño acompañó a su tío en sus rumbosas correrías por iglesias y
capillas, llevando una carpeta de partituras (Nunca ha querido hablar de
aquel tío, un viejo y zarzuelero tenor catalán que se especializó en bodas de
rito montserratino, adornándolas con cancioncillas de ‘mel i mató’).
(PM, p. 87)
Salvador could therefore join in with the Claramunts literally and metaphori-
cally when ‘El maravilloso Virolai montserratino, en ciertas solemnes
festividades, seguía expandiéndose gloriosamente por toda la casa y el jardín’
(PM, p. 52).
Salvador’s integration is also reflected in his participation in the scouting
movements that enjoyed Church protection and fostered the ideals of Catalan
Catholic Nationalism in the post-war period, already mentioned in Chapter
3.23 ‘Escoltisme’ gave young people the direct contact with their land advo-
cated by Vicens Vives as a formative influence in developing nationalist
sentiment, and away from spying Spanish eyes they could learn its songs and
lore and keep the flame of Catalan nationalism alight. These groups have
been widely recognised as a form of dissidence. A letter to the Presidency of
the Unió Excursionista de Catalunya in 1975 testifies to an enduring impact
on one member:
Jo vaig fer-me soci de la UEC en un moment que la cultura catalana sofria

una persecució total i la nostra entitat va oferir, a un grup de joves que no
volia rendir-se, l’oportunitat de fer sessions al seu local social. Va ser per
això que vaig fer-me’n soci. Ha estat per aquesta fidelitat de l’entitat a la
23 Disbanded after the Civil War, scouting movements such as Minyons de

Muntanya and Boy-scouts de Catalunya, with determined help from the priest Dr.
Batlle, reformed almost immediately. In 1956, with Batlle as their Consiliario
Diocesano Scout, the Delegación Diocesana de Escultismo was formed within the
Consejo Diocesano de Jóvenes de Acción Católica. The aim, in the words of Pius XII,
at the 1952 International Conference of Catholic Scouting Movements, was ‘El
apostolado en y por el Escultismo’. Quoted from ‘El Escultismo, gimnasia para el
cuerpo y el alma’, in Signo (21 July 1962). Catalan Catholic Scouting Movements
produced their own literature whose ideology and iconography merits attention.
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1. Sant Jordi. Front Cover of the Catalan Catholic Scouting magazine Camins,
April 1965
cultura del país i pel risc – i les complicacions reals – que aquesta actitud
digna i valenta va comportar-li que, malgrat que no tinc temps de practicar
l’excursionisme, he volgut continuar essent soci.24
24 Estanislau Torres, Excursionisme i Franquisme (Barcelona: Abadia de

Montserrat, 1979), p. 27.
136 ROSEMARY CLARK
At the same time, having taken their name from the army – ‘els soldats que
eren tramesos davant dels exèrcits amb la missió de reconeixer en camí i
preveure possibles emboscades’ – Catholic scouting sought to combine mili-
tary-style self-discipline with religious faith, ‘donant a l’Església i a Cata-
lunya un mitjà apte per a formar ciutadans conscients i homes de fe, educats
en el gust per les responsabilitats’ (Camins June 1965, p. 1). As an ‘escoltista’
(Christian soldier) – and a social climber – Salvador is portrayed as a
Ferviente amante de la Naturaleza, del excursionismo y la escalada con
riesgo. [. . .] Con su rostro enjuto, curtido por el aire y el sol, a aquella gran
cabeza cuadrada de cabellos cortos y brillantes como de rocío, su aspecto
habitual era el de alguien que acaba de salir de una ducha fría alegremente
reconciliado con el vigor de su cuerpo. (PM, p. 89)
Yet Paco’s narrative makes it clear that what is really at stake is neither
religious belief nor political idealism, however much they are discussed, but
belonging among, and being recognised by, a powerful chosen, separate,
Catalan Catholic few. Using the metaphor of the ‘Orfeó’, Paco situates power
and money at the heart of its harmony; Salvador joins ‘la mejor tradición
coral y mercantil catalana’ not ‘por motivos de parentesco o de lazos de
sangre, sino más bien por esa expansión emotiva que deriva de recíprocos
sentimientos de poder’ (PM, p. 51). Using metaphors from ‘Escoltisme’,
Paco describes how this ‘vencedor de picos inaccesibles’, whom Nuria erro-
neously chose to marry, now reveals a mountain’s harsh inanimacy: ‘una
serena cualidad mitad vegetal mitad mineral que cuanto más se esforzaba por
mostrarse humana – consejero y guía de juventud, catequista ferviente que
fue – más cruel resultaba’ (PM, p. 27). With hindsight, Nuria comments on
his relations with the ‘juventud del barrio’: ‘Se atrajo a los chicos sin poner
en ellos cariño [. . .]. Nunca los quiso como Montse’ (PM, p. 88). Nonethe-
less, Salvador enjoys success because he joins others like himself. Seeing
him among the powerful bourgeois ‘mandarines de la catalanidad’ (PM, p.
45), Paco ponders bitterly ‘¡Qué felices eran viviendo el mito de la cultura,
qué júbilo sordo, íntimo, cómo se les llenaba la boca de poder, de
compadrazgo y reparto de botín!’ (PM, pp. 46–7). Established in their wealth
and privilege, even repression under Francoism only adds spice to their asser-
tion of their distinctness: ‘una gratísima sensación de peligro inminente, de
heroísmo y de clandestinidad’ (PM, p. 43).
In contrast to Salvador’s collusion Marsé presents Paco’s disillusionment:
‘desengaño’. Paco will not play the game, join in the singing or speak what
he sees as the regime language of a group temporarily disempowered politi-
cally by Francoism but remaining powerful economically, socially, and
within those sectors of the Church that espouse its cause. In similar fashion
Marsé himself – Catalan by birth and bilingual – has throughout his career as
a novelist refused to use the ideologically charged regime language, Catalan,
in the public sphere of literary publication, preferring instead the more

broadly-based Castilian that first gave him access to world literature and
represents a wider field of interaction. Until recently this has meant his exclu-
sion from the canon of Catalan literature – a position that some would still
deny him on the basis of his choice of language. Lee Six claims that for Paco,
at least, language choice signifies a choice to have himself excluded – like
Eve from God’s good pleasure – code-switching that reflects a desire to
distance himself from both the language and its cultural baggage in order to
establish a non-regime space for free play with identity across national
divides; in the case of Paco, this reveals ‘a self-consciously exploitative
approach from our narrator; he uses code-switching [. . .] as a weapon to fight
back at the Catalan establishment from which he chooses to exclude himself’
(Lee Six ‘La oscura historia del primo Paco/Francesc’, p. 365).
If we read Paco’s narrative as a deconstruction of a Catalan Catholic ‘llar
pairal’ that includes its history, myth, language and tradition of patriarchy,
the ideal, taken apart, is presented to us as seriously flawed. In post-war
urban Barcelona, it is an anachronism. As a means of prolonging authori-
tarian and exclusive social structures as effectively as conservative Spanish
National Catholicism, its survival causes one to ask whether Catalonia can
ever progress while it remains tenaciously rooted in the past. At the same
time, Montse’s story confronts Paco with questions he needs to answer,
which are to do with a pre-Fall attractiveness and an innocence that Paco
thinks he perceives in Montse as a product of the ‘llar pairal’, and that he
cannot easily dismiss. The Claramunt house, which once stood securely in its
‘hortus conclusus’ in a street named after the patroness of Catalonia, is about
to be destroyed by progress: ‘aquel jardín que el desnivel de la calle siempre
mostró en un prestigioso equilibrio sobre la avenida Virgen de Montserrat, al
ser ésta ampliada, quedó repentinamente como un balcón vetusto y fantasmal
colgado en el vacío’ (PM, p. 5). Tío Luis is dead and Tía Isabel is crippled.
As for their daughters, named Montserrat and Nuria after Catalan
advocations of the Virgin that symbolised post-war Catalan Catholic Nation-
alism,25 both have defied the codes which their names suggest they represent,
25 The Enthronement of the Virgin of Montserrat in 1947 drew some 75,000 people
to the monastery, where symbols of the banned Catalan culture proliferated. Speeches
were made in Catalan, the Catalan flag was flown from nearby mountain peaks and
illegally printed pasquines declared: ‘CATALANS! Montserrat és Catalunya. Mont-
serrat és símbol de les nostres llibertats, avui oprimides pels que deshonren aquest acte
amb la seva presencia. Es la hora de reviure el timbal de Bruch per a que la Moreneta no
s’hagi d’avergonyir de presidir un poble de mesells. Visca Catalunya.’ Quoted in
Massot i Muntaner, ‘Les Festes de l’Entronització i la Cultura Catalana, Serra d’Or
(April 1977), pp. 49, 55. In an attempt at post-war Castilianisation, Barcelona’s Calle
Virgen de Nuria was renamed Virgen de Covadonga. (Norman L. Jones, ‘El problema
catalán desde la guerra civil’, quoted in Preston, p. 398). As late as 1967, the statue of
the Virgin of Nuria was kidnapped to prevent coronation by a Castilian bishop.
138 ROSEMARY CLARK
first by taking ‘charnego’ lovers, and then by choosing suicide (Montse), or

separation (Nuria) as alternatives to the type of marriage ‘of social salvation’
represented by Salvador.
Paco’s narrative goes on to suggest that Catalan Catholic culture is not so
easily overcome by showing how elements of that culture which, in his early
years in Barcelona, served the family as a form of symbolic protest against
Castilianisation, now function as mechanisms of social exclusion. Published
twenty years later, El amante bilingüe (1990) depicts a Barcelona that seems
to be very different and a secularised Catalanism. Nonetheless, Marsé’s treat-
ment of these subjects, in a further reworking of Paradise Garden motifs,
forces the reader to question how deep apparent changes actually go.
The outer narrative frame of El amante is set in a post-Franco, post-1978
Constitution, autonomous Catalonia. Its main female protagonist, Norma
Valentí, is liberated, not tied to a life of domesticity in a protective ‘hortus
conclusus’, or under the aegis of either her father or husband according to the
model of the Catalan Catholic ‘llar pairal’. Both financially and sexually inde-
pendent, she has a successful career working on the Dirección General de
Política Lingüística programme for the ‘Normalització de la Llengua Cata-
lana’. What Marsé has done, then, in this novel, is to shift his markers of
national identity from religion and the land to language and the city in tune
with the times. The imagery of biblical gardens is in evidence, but the Barce-
lona they describe has been secularised . . . so is the Paradise Garden myth not
anachronistic?
Of course it is, and deliberately so, as the careful construction of the novel
shows. As well as its later 1980s outer frame, two of its three ‘cuadernos’
offer flashbacks to the 1940s, making them contemporary with Paco’s
earliest evocations of the Claramunt home in La oscura historia (PM, p. 53).
This would seem to be familiar ground. A boy from a poor background,
speaking Castilian and of ‘charnego’ appearance, peers through the gates of a
wealthy bourgeois paradise, longing to enter. The paradise is more explicitly
marked as Catalan than the Claramunt home by the street name translated
into Catalan, distinctive Catalan modernist architecture, and a dragon gate by
a world-renowned Catalan architect, Gaudí26 recalling Catalonia’s patron,
George, who fought the dragon:
En la Avinguda Mare de Déu de Montserrat hay una torre modernista de

cúpulas doradas [. . .]. Villa Valentí, el paraíso que me estaba destinado
[. . .]. En la imponente puerta de hierro forjado campea un dragón alado
hollando lirios negros. En la boca del dragón hay una mandarina podrida,
ensartada en la lengua afilada como un estilete. (EAB, p. 125)
26 There is also a direct reference to Gaudí: ‘un viejo templete gaudiano con
máscaras de metal’ (EAB, p. 127).
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2. Porta “del Drac”, Pavellons Güell, by A. Gaudí. ‘En la imponente puerta de

hierro forjado campea un dragón alado hollando lirios negros’
The Catalan Catholic names Montserrat and Nuria have given way to Norma
(as in ‘Normalització de la Llengua Catalana’), the Claramunts’ charitable
church activities have been replaced by a profession dedicated to the propa-
gation of Catalan language. The message is unmistakably one of a secular-
ised Catalan nationalism.
Nonetheless, the half-rotten fruit, strategically placed on the sharp tongue
(‘lengua’) of the dragon, awakens memories of the serpent in Eden and links
language (also ‘lengua’) to temptation and sin. In grasping the fruit the boy,
Joan Marés, repeats Eve’s action that led to the Fall. Furthermore, as I argued
in Chapter 2, in El amante, Marés’ Fall is linked to language, and to the bible
story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1–9). Whereas the people of Babel
build a tower to reach heaven, Marés longs to enter one – the Valentí’s
private ‘torre’. The people of Babel lose their linguistic unity, while Marés’
initial command of two languages collapses into a virtually senseless babble
made up of both. It has been suggested that
This self-made koiné goes beyond the debased language proposed at the
beginning of the Transition with the motto ‘el català que avui es parla’
(‘Catalan as it is spoken today’) and comes nearer to the regionalized
Spanish that Pasqual Maragall not long ago proposed as the solution for
Catalonia’s linguistic identity. (Resina)
140 ROSEMARY CLARK
Certainly Marsé’s ironic approach could apply equally to either option. Both
are contentious, and however one interprets the linguistic fragmentation of
Babel and Marés, it remains, as Marsé depicts it, a consequence and a marker
of transgression.
Marés’ contact with Víctor and Norma Valentí denies him what is effec-
tively a form of dual identity, whether it is labelled bilingualism, diglossia, a
debased language or a regionalised one – terms used with specific meaning
by Resina. The father initiates the process by assuming – wrongly – that the
dirty child speaking Castilian at his gates must be ‘charnego’ when Marés is,
in fact Catalan. Norma completes the destruction by repeatedly replacing her
bilingual husband, Marés, with ‘charnego’ lovers who, to her, are indistin-
guishable and disposable. When Marés himself assumes a ‘charnego’
disguise, she fails to recognise him even in the intimacy of sexual inter-
course, and what remains of his sense of his own identity collapses like the
tower of Babel.
Like Paco entering the Claramunt paradise garden, what Marés remembers
of his first visit to the Villa Valentí is a Catholic Catalanism of the 1940s in
which the only role he will be allowed to play is that of transgressive outsider.
In the hallway of Víctor Valentí’s anachronistic ‘llar pairal’, the child Marés
is confronted by images of Catalonia’s mythical medieval heyday: a tilework
image of Sant Jordi presides (EAB, p. 131);27 girls garlanded with flowers call
to mind the patriotic ‘Jocs Florals’; boys are dressed as medieval pages and
men as ‘caballeros cristianos [. . .] pertenecientes a los más claros linajes de la
nobleza de Catalunya’. In the patriotic play they enact, speeches ‘declamados
enfáticamente en catalán suenan como sentencias, parecen provenir de otro
tiempo, otros afanes y otro país’ (EAB, pp. 13–16). The play, set in tenth
century Catalonia, shows a small, beleaguered group of Christians confron-
ting mighty Saracen hosts, an implicit parallel being drawn with this clandes-
tine celebration of a Catalan culture under threat in 1940s Francoist Spain.
Marés comments drily on the ‘ritual de catacumbas elaborado con mucha fe y
escasos medios, una forma de mantener el fuego sagrado de la lengua y la
identidad nacionales’ (There is a section entitled ‘Les altres catacumbes’ in
27 The Saint George motif appears first in Un día volveré (1982), in stained glass
(UDV, p. 144). It guards the entrance to a wealthy middle-class home with many of the
features of the Claramunt house and garden. ‘La torre de los Klein se alzaba en la linde
de un frondoso parque rodeado por un muro de tres metros de alto erizado de vidrios
afilados. El descuidado jardín delantero estaba partido por un sendero de tierra roja
que conducía hasta el pequeño porche [. . .]. Delante del porche se abría una plazoleta
cubierta de grava con tres bancos de hiero pintados de blanco en turno a un viejo
surtidor. Por todo el flanco derecho de la torre, respetando solamente la puerta de
servicio, trepaba una hiedra reseca y polvorienta como un trenzado de cuerdas
podridas. El jardín cercaba la torre y se prolongaba tras ella, pero ya desfigurado por la
maleza y abandonado a su suerte’ (UDV, p. 95). The desiring gaze in this case belongs
to the delivery boy, Néstor.
Piñol, pp. 111–18), and on the ‘ambiente de fiesta familiar, floral y victimista’
(EAB, p. 132). Ironically, of course, the supposedly ‘charnego’ enemy in the
play is in fact Catalan: Marés, whom Valentí has cast as a monster to be
destroyed by the Catalan patron saint George. Marés’ cleverly feigned
southern-accented Catalan is the cultural marker that condemns the monster:
No te preocupes por el acento andaluz, deja que se note; es precisamente lo
que yo quería. [. . .]. Eso que tú sabes hacer con tu cuerpo: lo más parecido
a una alimaña que puedas. Porque representa que tú eres la Araña que Sant
Jordi ha de matar, ¿comprendes? (EAB, p. 133)
Looking back as an adult narrator, Marés wryly observes the obvious wealth
and power of the Catalan gentry who, despite Francoist repression, continued
to enjoy money and influence in the 1940s as their knightly counterparts had
done in Catalonia’s mythic Golden Age and – ‘también luchan en el campo de
las finanzas, la enseñanza, la industria y el comercio’ (EAB, p. 132) – and as
Salvador Vilella’s associates would in the 1960s Spain of La oscura historia.
Denied all but a victim’s role in the Valentís’ exclusive Catalan paradise,
Marés leaves the Villa Valentí with only an empty fishbowl. The goldfish
that was his fee for acting the monster has escaped into the murky waters of a
stagnant pond. Years later, when Norma Valentí has left him, the bowl
containing money he does not want symbolises once again the paradise he
has lost. Like the stagnant pond, the crumbling yet prestigious Walden 7 flats
designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, where he now lives alone,
suggest decay at the very heart of an even more recent Catalan national
revival in which Marés can find no place.
However, at this point, a transformation takes place in the novel which
indicates how Joan Marés’ failure may be said to have fuelled Juan Marsé’s
literary achievement. What Marés creates, in his own imagination (and his
‘cuadernos’) becomes a private paradise garden. In this ‘hortus conclusus’ he
can exercise at least some control over the images of Catalonia he conjures
up, and like the transparent fishbowl – at first a symbol of his double loss of
the goldfish and of Norma – his imagination can hold those images within his
gaze and play endlessly with them. What Marés’ ‘hortus conclusus’ comes to
suggest is the enclosed world of imaginative invention of his own creator, the
novelist Marsé, for whom narrative is a play area where he can, and does,
make his own rules.
Paradise Reclaimed: El embrujo de Shanghai

In El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), and on into Rabos de lagartija (2000),
Marsé continues to evoke a post-war Barcelona in which dissident Catalan
nationalism confronts Spanish hegemony: the ‘maquisards’ Kim Franch (El
embrujo) and Víctor Bartra are outlawed by the Franco state and Catalan
142 ROSEMARY CLARK
continues to feature in ever more varied displays of code-switching.

However, ‘reality’, ‘history’ and regime languages have now been drowned
out by make-believe and plausible, yet unreliable, languages of freedom. The
Catalan question has become another part of the scenery while the narrator
and the narrative game are given centre stage, just as ‘aventis’ were in Si te
dicen – that landmark in Marsé’s narrative development. Once again in El
embrujo cinema, imagination, disinformation and lies, together with an
underlying mythology of paradise gardens, come together but in a narrative
fusion of startling freshness. In place of the popular culture of Conchita
Piquer’s Tatuaje, Marsé’s love of more rarified literature and language now
becomes more overt: in his extensive quotation and narrative use of C. P.
Cavafy’s The city in El embrujo and of William Blake’s O Rose, thou art
sick! in Rabos de lagartija: poems that make fitting companions to some of
the Bible’s most personal and sensually evocative writings.
The Eden story in Genesis ends with a veiling of sexuality. In contrast, the
Song of Solomon is a eulogy to the naked body sung by lovers in a glorifica-
tion of erotic love, and Susanna and the Elders explores the erotic voyeuristic
potential of the ‘hortus conclusus’. When the Bible narrative is taken as a
whole and viewed as a story of human sin and divine redemption, the Song of
Solomon represents a dramatic step towards reconciliation and restored inti-
macy between God and his creation in the language of sexual intimacy. In the
Book of Daniel, Susanna is given a voice in telling her own story. Marsé
picks up both aspects as his ‘charnega’ Susana in El embrujo de Shanghai –
of a Catalan father and Andalusian mother: that transgressive and hitherto
fruitless coupling of the disparate – becomes an eloquent sexualised symbol
of the struggle to be heard of those who can too easily be silenced.
Marsé’s eroticising of the ‘hortus conclusus’ is playfully defiant, drawing
as it does on texts from a Catholic tradition that has consistently played down
eroticism. The Song of Solomon probably originated as a series of songs to
be sung at weddings, though critics overwhelmingly agree that it has a unity
that makes it stand as a single work.28 Because of its explicit eroticism it
raises problems of interpretation but has a place in both Jewish and Christian
canons and liturgies. For the Jews, as one of five books of Wisdom, the
Meguillot, it forms part of the redemption liturgy of Passover, where it
28 ‘Se le ha entendido como un drama amoroso, incluso como un drama en sentido

clásico [. . .], como una colección o antología de cantos eróticos diversos, o sea, un
“cantar (compuesto) de cantares”. Pero la lengua, las imágenes, los personajes, el
desarrollo gradual de la acción, demuestran claramente la unidad de la composición’.
Manuel Revuelta Sañudo, Introduction to ‘El Cantar de los Cantares’, La Santa Biblia
(Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1970), p. 1004. ‘The theory that the Song is a collection
of “wasfs”, or songs intended to be sung at a marriage, while it may throw some light
on the structure of parts of the poem, breaks down on account of the evident unity of
the book’. F. F. Bruce and Francis Davidson, eds, The New Bible Commentary
(London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1953), p. 547.
describes God’s love for his people Israel which he demonstrated when the
Angel of Death passed over Jewish houses daubed with the blood of a lamb,
and killed the firstborn of Egypt, thus securing the release of the Jews from
captivity (Exodus 12.21–32). Picking up the Passover imagery, Christians
consider that it depicts relations between Christ – the Lamb of God whose
shed blood brings salvation – and his Church.29 It is interesting to note that an
extract supplies the first reading in the Catholic liturgy celebrating St Mary
Magdalene (July 22), the redeemed prostitute who was the first person to see
the risen Christ: ‘Padre nuestro, tu Unigénito confió a María Magdalena,
antes que a ninguno, la misión de anunciar la alegría de la Pascua’ (here, the
Pascua de la Resurrección – the Christian Easter. Misal Popular Ibero-
americano, p. 1723). Where Genesis tells of the exclusion of a sinful woman
from the ‘hortus conclusus’, the ‘Cantar’ does the opposite when applied to
Mary Magdalene, offering hope of reconciliation even to the transgressor.
Now redeemed and a beloved Bride of Christ, Mary uses the words of the
‘Cantar’ to express her longing for her Lord: ‘La esposa dice: En mi lecho,
por las noches busqué al que ama mi alma, le busqué, y no le hallé. Me
levantaré, y daré vueltas a la ciudad, por las calles y por las plazas buscaré al
que ama mi alma’ (Song of Songs 3.1–2). The song’s eroticism is legitimised
by Mary’s spiritual marriage to Christ, transformed into a spiritual passion as
intense as the original physical passion of the ‘Cantar’.
An entirely symbolic interpretation of the ‘Cantar’ will, however, always
remain unsatisfactory for the work is long and passages describing the body
are explicitly and intimately erotic. We read of the female Beloved:
Tu ombligo es una ánfora redonda,

donde no falta vino aromático.
Tu vientre, un cúmulo de trigo, rodeado de lirios,
(Song of Songs 7.3–4)
and of the male Lover:
Sus labios son lirios

que destilan mirra virgen [. . .].
su pecho, una masa de marfil
guarnecida de zafiros. (Song of Songs 5.13–14)
Defying traditional notions of feminine modesty, male and female are equal
in their sensuality, female enjoyment of male beauty being as eloquently
evoked as male expressions of desire. When the balance of power is shown to
29 The Gospel of John recounts how John the Baptist greeted Jesus with the words:
‘ “He aquí el Cordero de Dios, que quita el pecado del mundo” ’ (John 1.29).
144 ROSEMARY CLARK
favour man it is because there exists a world outside the playground of the
‘hortus conclusus’ where the biblical regime language is male.
The Song of Songs describes man in images of power and freedom and
woman as dependent. He is the King, Solomon the Wise, or the shepherd
fearlessly roaming the mountains. He is gold, precious stones and ivory. He
is hard where woman is soft and consumable, like wine and grain. Like the
owner plundering his garden, he says of her:
He entrado en mi jardín,
hermana mía, esposa,
he recogido mi bálsamo y mi mirra,
he comido mi miel y mi panal,
he bebido mi vino y mi leche. (Song of Songs 5.1)
He comes and goes as he chooses and has sixty other wives and eighty concu-
bines (Song of Songs 6.8). She must remain in the ‘hortus conclusus’ that is
symbolic of her reserved status as his possession, and of her virtue:
Jardín cerrado eres,

hermana mía, esposa,
un manantial cerrado,
una fuente sellada. (Song of Songs 4.12)
‘Sister spouse’ underlines the fact that she is subject to males other than her
lover, for all must guard a virtue that defines her worth to them. Her brothers
punish her when she transgresses their rules (Song of Songs 1.69), and also
discuss her as a sexual object or possession as her spouse does: she is a form
of currency between them in brokering marriage as part of a network of
social relations:30
Tenemos una hermana pequeñita,

no tiene pechos todavía.
¿Qué hemos de hacer con nuestra hermana,
el día en que se trata de su boda? (Song of Songs 8.8)
If the watchmen of the city find her out alone, they may beat her with impu-
nity and expose her to public gaze and to shame:
me golpearon, me hirieron,
me arrancaron el velo. (Song of Songs 5.7)
30 Norris discusses the place of women as currency in marriage treaties between

men, policies on chastity, and responses to female transgression in her second chapter
entitled ‘The view through one painted eye’ (Norris, pp. 40–82).
As in Eden, so too in the ‘Cantar’, female sexuality has a ‘right’ role allotted
to it, but that role is defined in relation to male supremacy, enforced by male
control and symbolised by the confines of the ‘hortus conclusus’.
Susanna, in the Book of Daniel, fulfils that role. A virtuous wife, she is
falsely accused of immorality, tried and condemned. Vindicated by God
through the prophet Daniel, she appears to exemplify female beauty, virtue
and piety. She is ‘muy bella y temerosa de Dios’, and though ‘muy delicada y
de gracioso aspecto’ (Daniel 13.2 and 31), she fights to defend her honour.
However, like the ‘Cantar’, this is a story of transactions between men, and
as one modern Spanish commentator suggests, its purpose ‘es manifestar la
sabiduría de Daniel’. Almost as an afterthought, he adds a word in her praise:
‘También nos muestra un hermoso ejemplo de fidelidad conyugal’ (Revuelta
Sañudo, p. 1377). She is defined as the possession of her father and her
husband: as daughter of Hilkiah and wife of the rich and respected Joachim.
The garden where she bathes – the ‘hortus conclusus’ that symbolises her
virtue and integrity – belongs to Joachim. The lustful Elders – two judges –
are Joachim’s friends let in to the garden by him. They remain there by
deceit, but the fault surely lies with the carelessness of the master of the
house and his servants. It is Joachim who puts his wife’s virtue at risk, yet he
does not speak out on her behalf in court. Only when her blamelessness has
been proven does he respond, and then it is to praise the prophet Daniel, not
the virtuous Susanna. The story concludes with father and husband thanking
Daniel for proving at least that ‘nada malo se había encontrado en ella’ (my
emphasis), while praise for the prophet is unambiguous: ‘Daniel adquirió
gran aprecio por parte del pueblo desde aquel día en adelante’ (Daniel 13.63
–64). The men’s marriage investment is secure, two corrupt judges have been
punished, and God has been seen to be all knowing, all powerful and just.
The ‘hortus conclusus’ again symbolises female virtue, but as a site of
sensual pleasure the garden tempts violation, and is as vulnerable as the
woman within it. Susanna’s virtue is proven in court but as a married woman
she is acknowledged as sexualised and therefore a source of temptation to
corruptible men. Perceptions of the danger of such sexualised women has led
to a desexualising of Mary and redefinition of the biblical Mother as Ever
Virgin. As early as the fourth century, Ambrose argued that she remained so
even while giving birth and described her as ‘a garden enclosed’31 in such a
way as to make the ‘hortus conclusus’ synonymous with virginity. A
twelfth-century divine later wrote even more emphatically on the matter,
multiplying references to enclosure and describing Mary as:
31 This reference appears in a chapter on ‘The Second Eve’ (Norris, p. 246), to

which I would refer interested readers, for it offers a discussion of applications of this
motif to Mary and female chastity through the centuries more extensive than is
possible in this study.
146 ROSEMARY CLARK
that sealed fount, ne’er drying,

That walled garden, fructifying
By the good seed in it sown:
She is that close-fastened portal,
shut by God gainst every mortal. (my emphasis)
Adam of St Victor (quoted in Norris, p. 247)
In open defiance of this diminishing de-sexualisation of women, Marsé’s

reworking of the Susanna story in El embrujo opens the gates of the paradise
garden to a series of transgressive characters who find in Susana Franch the
starting-point for their dreams and imaginings around a series of eroticised
female figures from the exotic Chen Jing Fang to Barcelona’s own more
domesticated yet still compellingly attractive Andalusian Anita Franch and
insistently Catalan Betibú.32 Susana struggles for self-definition against the
disease tuberculosis that comes loaded with a heritage of stereotypes, and
against those very dreams and imaginings. However, she is also endowed
with a limited but enduring power in the imagination of the voyeurs whose
source of inspiration she is.
Eden cannot be dated or definitively located but what power those age-old
myths do have! They underlie the two poems that Marsé chose to form the
narrative core of his two most recent novels – Cavafy’s The city and Blake’s
O Rose, thou art sick! – both of which view Paradise through an intimate
dialogue darkened by loss and death. To make them central to a novel would
challenge any writer. Marsé’s interweaving of them into his texts demands a
revision of the literary skill of this often underestimated ‘obrero-escritor’.
From Cavafy Marsé has taken the ‘nostalgia del futuro’ introduced in the
quotation from Luis García Luna at the start of El embrujo de Shanghai: that
longing for a time in a pre-fall Eden ‘cuando todo merodeaba por delante y el
futuro aún estaba en su sitio’. There is the traveller’s eager anticipation of a
new city – the novel’s mythic Shanghai viewed from a drab post-war Barce-
lona:
Dices: Iré a otras tierras, a otros mares.

Buscaré una ciudad mejor que ésta
En la que mis afanes no se cumplieron nunca,
frío sepulcro de mi sentimiento.
There is also the notion of a pre-existing imprint deep in the narrator–traveller’s
32 The cartoon character Betty Boop was dark, petite, curvaceous and alluringly
smiling and coy. A publishing tactic but nonetheless revealing of a perception of the
‘sales potential’ of Marsé’s eroticised female characters, in 1997 Espasa published,
with an introduction by José Méndez, a selection of texts entitled Las mujeres de
Juanito Marés from Teniente Bravo, Encerrados, Ultimas tardes, La oscura historia,
Si te dicen, Un día volveré, Ronda del Guinardó, El amante and El embrujo.
mind – memory, imagination or soul – of an inescapable seminal cityscape or

Paradise Lost of childhood like a scar on the adult psyche:
Nunca abandonarás esta ciudad. Ya para ti no hay otra,

Ni barcos ni caminos que te libren de ella.
Porque no sólo aquí perdiste la vida:
En todo el mundo la desbarataste. (ES, pp. 99–100)
From Blake he has taken an image of the woman as a blighted rose and has
used the poem’s sensuality and eroticism to infuse the same drab post-war
Barcelona with the riches of imagination of the child David, the unborn
brother and their mother – the Rose – Rosa Bartra. Out of drabness and sick-
ness comes rich lyricism; in the midst of war and conflict, paradise can be
regained, fleetingly. Once again the play area of the creative narrator is made
to transcend the confines of reality by releasing into that reality both myth
and poetry.
That transcendence increases with the integration into Marsé’s texts of
writings by an Alexandrian Greek, Cavafy, and an Englishman, Blake, and
indeed, the authors, writers and compilers of the biblical paradise garden
narratives. Significantly, too, Cavafy is quoted in Spanish in El embrujo
(1993), but in Rabos (2000) a Spanish translation is offered in an author’s
footnote, but in the text Blake’s poem is uncompromisingly in English, chal-
lenging the reader to link ‘gusano’ with ‘The Invisible Worm’ and take up
Víctor Bartra’s repeated: ‘Aprende idiomas, hijo . . .. ¡Puñeta, David, estudia
idiomas!’ (RL, pp. 178–9). If the paradise gardens of La oscura historia and
El amante can be seen as a response to two moments in the life of post-war
Barcelona when Marsé saw Catholicism and Catalanism together as meriting
sharp satirical comment, the sensual pleasure gardens of El embrujo and
Rabos generated in the minds of the narrator in tension with surrounding
reality – illustrate the continuing love affair of this writer with an image and
its mythology.
In Rabos de lagartija, languages flash and twist throughout the text like
lizards’ tails – words and imagination combining to form David’s own living
‘palabartijas’ (RL, pp. 70, 140, 154–5 and 225), or as Catalan as a marker of
anti-Francoist dissidence (RL, pp. 172–3), German reflecting David’s fasci-
nation with World War II Axis propaganda and film (RL, p. 69), French for
the glamorous image of French ‘maquisards’ (RL, p. 178), and English for
the RAF fighter-pilot Bryen O’Flynne (RL, pp. 146–7) and Blake’s dark
romanticism. Fused together, they emphasise rich diversity in expletives,
clichés and the apparently meaningless babble of the inarticulate:
No hay palabras, pero se oyen voces.

¡Zapastra!
¡Casumlolla!
148 ROSEMARY CLARK
¡Trinxeraire!
¡Lucía, cázame guerripa!
¡Nombre y apellidos!
¡Víctor Bartra Lángara! ¡Diligencias!
¡Achtung! (RL, p. 16)
Humour is effective, for when people laugh, they are disarmed: hence word-
play such as ‘itismailaif’ (RL, p. 134), David’s misconception about ‘ “El
Otorrino” de Córdoba’ (RL, p. 97) being a bullfighter rather than an ear, nose
and throat specialist (‘otorrinolaringólogo’), and – catching the reader out
laughing where to do so seems inappropriate – in the brain-damaged narra-
tor’s incomprehensible ‘cázame guerripa’.
In a brilliant balancing act, even as we laugh, Marsé’s conscious exploita-
tion of pathos takes the narrative into a darker area of tragic experience as he
transposes a story from a nineteenth-century English poem into a twen-
tieth-century Barcelona and also draws in yet another interpretation of para-
dise lost: the worm in the bud, the serpent in Eden, the child begotten of Rosa
Bartra and Bryen O’Flynne in a brief but laughter-filled adulterous love-
making. And so paradise is reclaimed – brought out of the constraints of a
narrow doctrinal focus on authority and transgression, and out too from a
narrow exploitation of a myth for political ends – brought into the play area
of literature where the narrator continues to struggle to forge languages of
freedom that will find hearers. In the closing words of Marsé’s most recent
novel:
y le dije a Lucía: alcánzame Guerra y paz. Pero tendré que repetirlo varias
veces porque, aunque me esfuerzo mucho, lo que me sale de la boca es algo
así como cázame guerripa.
Y es que todavía me cuesta mucho hacerme entender. (RL, p. 344)

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Boydell and Brewer

Tamesis an imprint of Boydell & Brewer

Chapter Title: CATALONIA AND PARADISE GARDENS: EROTICISING EDENS

Book Title: Catholic Iconography in the Novels of Juan Marsé

My discussion has already given an indication of the extent to which the

narrow specificity and are claimed by Marsé as the imaginative inheritance

The divergence of interpretation of myths that the confrontation generates

Paradise Lost: Catalan Edens in La oscura historia and El amante

Eve appears responsible for having initiated a terrible process of destruction

‘Ésta sí que es hueso de mis huesos

was not interested primarily in writing about the antecedents of the

4 In a section on ‘The Subtil Serpent’ Norris mentions in the Babylonian creation

To defy God is to destroy Eden. Morality and politics come together

en el jardín jugaba con nosotros una primita de trenzas rubias, llena de

self-denial. Yet even as he contemplates this possibility, he acknowledges

es como una obsesión de Príncipe Valiente, no consigo verte sin un fondo

He confesses to Nuria: ‘me enamoré locamente, cierto. Pero la indecisa mano

In Paco’s view, at least, Montse was enriched by her transgressive relation-

Hablé de ciertos días en que su cuerpo parecía alcanzar una vida

independiente de sus activos sentimientos, y de cómo a partir de entonces

Nuria too finds in transgressive relationships a comfort that is lacking in her

Llevaba un pijama y su piel olía a jazmín. Temblaba y lloraba. Acogí con

Tertullian is acknowledged as having had ‘a sharp and violent talent’,12 and

There is reason to believe in the correspondence between the free judgment

he, as much as any woman, was guilty of involuntary transgression.

After their disobedience to God’s instructions [. . .], immediately they were

Mira que en culpa ya nací,

It is a short step to demonising woman as bearer of sin.

14 Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (London and Glasgow:

Dios creó al hombre a su imagen,

Recuerdo con emoción un olor a lilas en el jardín, un patético empeño por

En una familia católica cuya proyección futura reposa tradicionalmente en

In recognition of the function of women as bearers of the next generation

La ceremonia del rebautizo, en la que ofició la poderosa voz de tío Luis

Numerous allusions in La oscura historia – often single words – show

Un sector muy destacado [. . .] protagoniza un movimiento intelectual de

political is illustrated by the influential ‘Núcleo’ or ‘Esbart de Vic’: ‘Un grup

Un gran escut pels tronos i pel temple,

Potser no hi ha altra nació tan entera i sòlidament cristiana com fou

16 Joan Lluis Pérez Francesch, ed., Torras i Bages. L’Església i el Regionalisme i

As early as 1879, Collell called on Catholics to become involved in the

llama la atención sobre el interés que tiene para la Iglesia la presencia de

The rhetoric of an article written on the death of Collell (Flama, March 4

Llengua santa que de l’independència

Té son arc de triomf lo Cristianisme;

Verdaguer also wrote cycles of poems in celebration of Montserrat, and his

Rosa d’abril, Morena de la serra,

il.luminau la catalana terra;

El Volkgeist era la creació indirecta de Déu en tant que era el resultat de

The Romantic ideal of an idyllic country existence found a satisfying

18 Josep R, Llobera, ‘La formació de la ideologia nacionalista catalana’, L’Avenç,

The men of the Catalan literary rebirth belonged to an industrialized city

L’element bàsic, indiscutible, de la societat històrica catalana no és l’home,

com ha establert aquest ordit de relacions materials i espirituals amb la

Catalans have, he says, a distinctive character formed by life in the mountains

La Muntanya vivia aleshores esplèndidament. Refugi davant els

En tot eix mar de planes i onades de muntanyes

la llet que du la mare té encar la saba nova

Norma may indeed incarnate the emancipation of Catalan women; she

The regime discourse of Eden appears capable of coexisting with progressive

just as wealthy Catalan Catholic families would preserve their private

Jo vaig fer-me soci de la UEC en un moment que la cultura catalana sofria

23 Disbanded after the Civil War, scouting movements such as Minyons de

Some images in the printed version of this book