“Javier Tomeo uses these three characters to make a parody not only of a reclusive household – which echoes the lockdowns and quarantines brought by Coronavirus over the course of this year -, but also of the market economy….”
I don’t get used to the postmodernist self-reflectivity. There is something in the images that this ontological practice renders that gives me the feeling that we are becoming, paraphrasing Radiohead’s song, “Fake plastic trees.” Behind the fantasy of postmodern self-reflectivity, Postmodernity seems to become a reality show’s character that constantly hides behind an impossible being, which from a global perspective pretends to be a sort of cosmic multiplicity that is supposed to bring satisfaction to all humans despite their complex or simplistic – individuality. In order to illustrate this set of ideas, I am going to use the novella Beloved Monster (1985) by Spanish author Javier Tomeo, a work that has not been translated to English to this date, but that provides a fundamental cultural framework to locate the place of single motherhood and nihilist pathologies within modern Western societies. Tomeo’s novella echoes works like Samuel Beckett’s Company (1980)and Thomas Bernhard’s Yes (1978), as it successfully brings forward discursive obsessions as the stage of both narrative inspection and the re-construction of broken individualities. While reading Tomeo’s work, one gets the impression that the Spanish author met his characters walking through the landscapes of Bernhard’s novels like Gargoyles (1968), where a medical doctor meanders in rural Holland visiting ill individuals unable to attain physical normalcy, and ultimately meets a wealthy landlord only to confirm that the entire countryside is infected with both physical and mental disease.
Beloved Monster is one of those novellas that could be defined as dialogical, that moves away from the narrative attempt to incorporate monologues as the diegetic force that brings together the characters in one single discursive torrent, as it happens in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, or any Samuel Beckett’s novel. Even though the dialogue between Juan D. and H.J. Krugger – the main characters of the novella – often acquires the form of a monologue, what Beloved Monster does best is assembling a mise-en-scène in which the monologue turns into the personal revelation of the most intimate social fears of the characters. The novella’s plot is somewhat simple: thirty-year-old Juan interviews for the job of night guard with Krugger, who is the Human Resources director of an important foreign bank. As the interview unravels, the exchange between Juan and Krugger will progressively become more and more intimate to the point that Krugger will deem that Juan is unable to perform the job due to his mental obsessions, such as reading and listening to music. I must mention that at thirty years of age Juan is attempting to get a job for the first time in his life.
Hundred years before, Juan would’ve incarnated Jose Enrique Rodo’s free-spirited Ariel, a fictional character that was supposed to express both aesthetic refinement and intellectual strength within the Latin American realm. Nevertheless, in post-Franco’s Spain, Juan is only an unproductive young man that has lived all his life under the protection and financial umbrella of his mother, who according to Juan’s revelations has not allowed him to seek one single relationship outside his mother’s home, which is a metaphor of an oppressive and castrating world. This social lockdown – for which Juan only blames his mother – has not allowed him to acquire consciousness of his own personhood without referencing his mother, thus placing single motherhood as a postmodern cultural construction that imposes both reclusion and an unavoidable attachment to the realm of motherhood. Juan aspires to become a free spirit, but his mother has sentenced him to a perennial lockdown at home, for she constantly persuades his to hide from the sight of others due to the insecurities that his mother has inoculated in him since childhood. Such is the obsession of Juan’s mother with her only son, that at some point it seems that the ultimate purpose of Juan’s mother is to bring total humiliation as the sine qua non condition of his manhood. From this subordinated – castrating – perspective, Juan’s future only offers failure and frustration as his only means to experience life. This teleological condition, in which the future is anchored to the perspectives offered by the present, resembles Giovanni Sartori’s Homo Videns, which anticipated in the late 1990s that global society was going to be controlled through the mediation of screened gadgets, leaving humans disconnected from physical immediate reality, as if life was a virtual experience lived through the people showed in television as prototypes that offer either consolation or despair to the audiences.
Krugger’s interview challenges the life that Juan has endeavored since his childhood precisely because Krugger stops looking at Juan’s outer self and focuses on what he has to say about his candidacy to the job, which ultimately disqualifies him to become the bank’s night guard. It is not that the psychological pathologies of Juan reveal a prospective criminal, it is indeed the opposite, for Krugger deems that the castrating and inorganic social life of Juan would make him a mediocre employee without aspirations to excel within the company. Furthermore, this proclivity to failure makes Krugger decide that Juan would be a terrible guard as he would easily avoid confronting, for instance, a bank robber or would fall asleep during the night shift. While Krugger considers that Juan is unfit for the job, he does think that under the pathetic life of Juan there is one layer to be saved, which is Juan’s relationship with his mother. The way Juan narrates his lack of work experience through the situations he’s lived next to his mother, who has spoiled and overprotected him as her strategy to keep him always next to her, the reader gets the impression that Juan’s mother is a sort of Dra. Frankenstein who has created an anti-Prometheus, for Juan is neither the friend of humans nor he has received the “punishment” of the Gods thanks to the constant mediation of his mother. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, Juan suffers and remains chained to a present that doesn’t offer him any perspective of personal development.
In The Ecstasy of Communication – published the same year that Beloved Monster – Jean Baudrillard states that, “Public space is no longer a spectacle, private space no longer a secret” (130). Following this axiom, Juan tells Krugger at the beginning of the interview that, “I will have to answer all your questions, even those that may seem excessively intimate, and I will make sure not to avoid one single detail because it is in those details where revelations usually hide” (7). Juan says so as his strategy to set himself up to not getting the job, for he knows that he does not have neither the experience nor the desire to get a job that would take him away from the constant protection of his mother. Juan’s predisposition to reveal anything he’s asked about his private life is also understood as a necessary catharsis that will allow Juan to justify himself for his personal failures, as he is prompt to suggest that his mother is the only person that has kept him away from gaining more life and work experience. In a way, Juan’s plan is to use the interview to become Krugger’s psychiatric patient, but the Human Resources director refuses to assume that role and, instead, he uses the interview as a criminal interrogation that allows Krugger to reveal with impunity his most traumatic life experience, which happens to be an accidental crime committed when he was only a child.
Added to the discouraging words of Juan’s mother, who even dares to tell him that he would fail at anything that he ever attempts to do in life if he walks away from her, as Krugger learns about Juan’s mother, the Human Resources director begins to idealize her to the point of attempting to convince Juan that his life would be always more worth it – and even beautiful – if he stays next to his mother. Based on this, Juan gets the impression that his fate is to remain unproductive, aging next to his old mother. Even though Juan is not a child or a teenager, in the novel he symbolizes the generational clash between youth and adulthood, the latter characterized in Juan’s mother and Krugger. Javier Tomeo uses these three characters to make a parody not only of a reclusive household – which echoes the lockdowns and quarantines brought by Coronavirus over the course of this year -, but also of the market economy that relegates young people to a subordinated economic relationship with aging individuals, as it is the case of Krugger, who uses his established position in a company to dictate Juan’s future, which in the best case scenario would be that of a subaltern.
The key moment of the interview takes place when Krugger reveals – somewhat nostalgic and overwhelmed for Juan’s story – that he was responsible for the death of his mother. Even though this revelation carries a terrible truth, Krugger’s secret acquires a derisory dimension when he adds, “Do you want me to tell you about all my sleepless nights thinking about those damned garbanzo beans” (108). This revelation occurs only after Krugger has told Juan that he is not the right candidate for the job, thus he uses this opportunity, for he is not going to see Juan ever again, to tell a macabre, yet playful story from his childhood. When he was a child, Krugger put in his home’s stairs dried garbanzo beans, which made his mother fall to death. Juan replies, without feeling sympathy for Krugger, that “it was you the one who killed your own mother, it was you the one who placed those garbanzo beans in the stairs. Only God knows how come you could’ve done such a stupid thing. You placed a few dried garbanzo beans in each step of the stairs and hid waiting for the first victim. You were hoping to see one of the maids falling for your own amusement, but it was your mother” (108-109). After this exchange, it is made quite evident that between Juan and Krugger there is only place for antagonism, and even though Krugger’s moral quality has been fractured since his childhood, it is the Human Resources director the one who uses Juan’s virtues to disqualify him and even ridicule him. Right when Juan recovers some hope about getting the job, as he thinks that Krugger’s revelation gives him some kind of power over his potential future employer, Krugger officially tells Juan that his candidacy for the job has been dismissed, justifying his decision summarizing his impressions about the interview with the following words, “You have indeed some virtues, but your defects are nonetheless greater: you have read too many books, you enjoy music, you have never used a gun and, just to make your case worst, you have six fingers in each hand. Your mother knows it quite well: men like you must quit their attempt to become active members of society, before society rejects them due to their defects” (110-111). Krugger deems that Juan would be a deficient guard because his “hobbies” would potentially distract him while on duty, and since he lacks the experience of using a firearm, he is an imperfect candidate for the job. Juan could argue, in his defense, that the fact that Krugger is a matricide morally disqualifies him to decide upon the future employees of any company, in this case a bank, but the interview ends without any attempt of Juan to defend himself or verbally attack Krugger.
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In Abnormal (1975), Michel Foucault states, “There is, then, a transition from the monster to the abnormal. This transition cannot be explained by assuming something like an epistemological necessity or scientific tendency according to which psychiatry would pose the problem of the smaller only after having posed the problem of the bigger, the less visible after the more visible, the less important after the more important” (110). In Beloved Monster, the most visible layer of the characters is articulated through their neurotic discourse – on the one hand, Juan seems to have the voice of his mother constantly whispering inside his head that he is a failure, while on the other, the childish inner voice of Krugger makes him feel a constant guilt for having killed his mother, a voice that paradoxically gives him a sense of empowerment -, while the least important, in Juan’s case, is the anatomical fact of having six fingers in each hand, which in front of Krugger’s eyes places him on the side of the unproductive and abnormal members of society. Juan is an explicit active nihilist – borrowing Friedrich Nietzsche’s taxonomy of nihilism -, who clings to the possibility of an alternative future where he would be independent from his mother’s economic and psychological tutelage, while Krugger is an implicit passive nihilist, for he is unable to conceive any future that is not only the replication of his company’s organization. Furthermore, Juan often forgets his anatomical difference, and believes – as if having six fingers in each hand was a postmodernist symptom – that his hand’s “abnormality” would allow him to develop skills that a “normal” hand would never be able to perform.
As Juan walks out of the bank’s building, suddenly wondering about his mother and his reclusive life – mentally returning to the constant self-reflectivity mode that has set him up since childhood – we as readers are placed next to Juan. As the 21st century keeps unraveling, and the Coronavirus pandemic keeps molding our quotidian responses to both disease and pathways to a healthier human experience, the realms of the household and employment remain the most crucial issues of the time to come. As many humans worldwide, particularly young people, are losing their jobs, reality seems to replicate Juan’s reclusive experience as a metonym of both quarantine and lockdown, which in turn seem to offer unproductive responses to social and economic anxiety. Despite these challenges, which encompass physical and mental illness – and Coronavirus as well – young people will be the ones, through organized protest and the development of grassroots economic strategies, who will have to decide what is important and what is not in the task of moving global society forward as a project of healing and self re-discovery, for postmodernism has also brought to the ontological stage the constant interrogation of finding meaning in a life under attack by new diseases, while also lacking the motivation to find a way out of our self-imposed lockdowns.
REFERENCES
Abnormal. Michel Foucault. Picador, 2007.
Beloved Monster. Javier Tomeo. Anagrama, 1985.
Homo Videns. Giovanni Sartori. Taurus, 1998.
The Ecstasy of Communication. Jean Baudrillard. Semiotext(e), 1988.
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