“Hacia un costumbrismo espacial: Larra y la ciencia–ficción de la vida cotidiana en Sin noticias de Gurb (Mendoza) y Plutón BRB Nero (De la Iglesia).” (2012)

On Nocilla and the Urbanization of Consciousness: Multiplicity and Interdisciplinarity in Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Fragmented Trilogy Benjamin Fraser The College of Charleston, USA Abstract: This essay reappropriates the segmentary form of the three works of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla project (Nocilla Dream [2006]; Nocilla Experience [2008]; Nocilla Lab [2009]) en route to an urban reading of its fragmentary structure. The project’s interdisciplinary push, overwhelming incorporation of both scientific and literary/cultural references, and method of collage evoke the shifting flow and complex nature of contemporary urban life. The ubiquity of references to urban communities within the text of Nocilla itself suggests connections to work by such figures as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Louis Wirth, David Harvey, Raymond Williams, Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, and Jane Jacobs. Moreover, the present essay’s extratextual references, drifting method, and punctuated structure constitute a fitting scholarly tribute to the interdisciplinary approach that Fernández Mallo has labeled “postpoetic.” Keywords: Agustín Fernández Mallo, cities/ciudades, Nocilla project/proyecto Nocilla, science and

literature/ciencia y literatura, urbanized consciousness/consciencia urbanizada

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omprising the novels Nocilla Dream (ND, 2006), Nocilla Experience (NE, 2008), and Nocilla Lab (NL, 2009), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy suggests numerous interpretive approaches. Nevertheless, going beyond its author’s postpoetic declarations (section 5, below)—his status as a degree-holding licenciado en Ciencias Físicas (sec. 9), the surge in “zapping” literature (a word evoking rapid channel changes), the persistent trope of postmodernism (sec. 10), and so on—perhaps the most totalizing and thus compelling reading of the trilogy is one grounded in the urbanization of consciousness. Make no mistake, the chaotic, cacophonous, and fragmented structure of the Nocilla trilogy seems to be sorely in need of some sense of unity: the novels are vertebrated not by traditional chapter titles or divisions but by a series of incrementally increasing positive integers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…, such as those similarly employed in this essay) that only occasionally reference the same previously introduced cast of characters. The effect achieved is one of narrative collage— interpolating brief enigmatic narratives, poetic images, and philosophical theorizations, along with direct quotations reappropriated from works of other notable figures across both artistic and scientific fields. These numerous semiautonomous subsections (which reach a total of over one hundred in each of the first two volumes) necessarily contribute to the trilogy’s fragmented character while at the same time linking up with a seemingly endless stream of extratextual literary, musical, filmic, and TV references (sec. 6). As this essay will argue, despite (or better yet, precisely because of) its difficult format and disparate content, the trilogy’s representation of a chaotic modernity squares with accounts of the urban experience by theorists from Georg Simmel and David Harvey to Henri Lefebvre and Jane Jacobs. Upon first glance, what makes this urban-centered approach to the trilogy so compelling is Fernández Mallo’s own inclusion of key references to cities and urban communities throughout Nocilla. More importantly, ­however, AATSP Copyright © 2012

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these myriad instances (and occasionally their curious absence; see sec. 2) accompany an interdisciplinary method, fragmented structure, and multiple narrative threads, which together evoke the multivocality and multiplicity that characterize life in today’s urban environments. In the thirteen numbered sections comprising this essay, I offer an additional tribute to the Nocilla trilogy by reappropriating its somewhat eccentric form, interdisciplinary push, and method of collage (for the sake of readability, however, the present essay’s transitions are decidedly less abrupt that those that appear in the Nocilla trilogy). The intent of embracing such an alternative organization for this essay is to give the reader a better sense of the brevity and topical variation that characterize Fernández Mallo’s numbered narrative fragments and, through that structural appropriation, to evoke the same sense of the shifting, chaotic, and multiplicitous ground of the modern urbanized consciousness that the Nocilla trilogy so carefully articulates. While the subsections of this essay may seem to move quickly from the relation of one of Nocilla’s themes to another (from cities, to music, to art, to science/literature, and back to urban communities and capitalism), it is important to appreciate that this essay purposely drifts from one topic to the next (just as does Nocilla) as an evocation of a mental state attributed to the urbanization of consciousness and discussed below (sec. 3). Ultimately, the trilogy is a self-consciously stylized product of the urbanization of consciousness not solely because of its focus on urban environments, but moreover because of the way in which even the most disparate disciplines acquire their force and meaning within an urbanized context, whether that context is explicit—as it certainly is in Nocilla—or merely implicit. This essay makes the case that Nocilla is a decidedly urban product, not because it faithfully represents the textures of urban life, but more fundamentally because of its articulation of an urbanized and drifting consciousness (Simmel 149–52; also Benjamin).

2 In approaching the trilogy through an urban lens, it is essential to recognize that the notion of place is highly important to Nocilla, even if its very structure prohibits a close engagement with any given location. Because the trilogy is constituted by a multiplicity of narrations, locations, characters, and topics, it is difficult at best to determine where the novels “take place.” Nonetheless, a relatively sizable portion of the early narrative action centers on the stretch of US Highway 50 that links the cities of Carson City and Ely (Nevada), a fact that roots the trilogy in the tradition of a Spanish cultural production strangely fascinated by the lonesome, crowded desert of the North American West.1 Yet, the trilogy’s initial desert setting—which is bolstered by occasional intercalated references to the real desert of Albacete (ND 91, 105; NL 33) and deserts in general (ND 108)—also serves to highlight the conspicuous absence of its logical counterpart, the city. As the forerunners of the still-forming discipline of Cultural Studies understood it, the city could in no way be defined without recourse to rural and unurbanized areas. Raymond Williams, for example, in his seminal text The Country and the City wrote that “the contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society” (289). The Nocilla project certainly presents us with a form challenging enough to permit a conscious assessment of modernity, commenting even directly on contemporary crises in capitalism (sec. 12), but it also uses the desert as a way of evoking the logical consequence of the continual and even accelerating process of urbanization and its accompanying population density. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, approximately half of the globe’s population now lives in cities—and as urban sociologists already realized some seventy years ago (Louis Wirth, quoted below in sec. 3), this increased urbanization has come to influence modern social life even among rural populations and can now be said to constitute the base of the modern experience, urban or not. Appropriately enough, however, the large urban centers of the contemporary world flood the pages of Fernández Mallo’s project (e.g., not only Carson City and Ely, but also Madrid

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[ND 115], Paris [ND 124], Chicago [ND 39–40], Copenhagen [ND 93], Prípat, Chernobyl [NL 13], Las Vegas [NL 38–39], New York [NL 58], Peking [ND 155], Bangkok [NL 66], and others). The idea of creating an urban literature is nothing new—Fernández Mallo’s trilogy must necessarily be contextualized within a tradition of Spanish urban literature that began over one hundred years ago. Noted “Generation of 98” author Pío Baroja’s novel Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901), for example, was in many ways a direct comment on the wave of urbanization that Madrid had undergone from the mid-1800s to the dawn of the twentieth century. E. Inman Fox writes in his introduction to the novel’s 1989 edition that “[p]ara comprender más claramente el cuadro que nos regala Baroja, conviene saber [que] [e]n lo que va desde mediados del XIX hasta 1900, la población de la capital aumenta de una manera asombrosa: de 298.426 habitantes en 1860 a 539.835 en 1900” (21). Nevertheless, while Baroja and nineteenth-century writers such as Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) and even Mariano José de Larra (1809–37) sought to give a more or less detailed understanding of the specific dimensions of city-life in urbanizing Spain,2 Fernández Mallo’s novel is relatively uninterested in the textures of city life. Even though Nocilla spends much time dealing with events taking place in specific urban centers, it is more interested in the mental conditions that the metropolis encourages and induces in the city-dweller. Accordingly, its focus drifts from one topic to the next seemingly at whim, juxtaposing the most disparate places and ideas and justifying its very interdisciplinarity character. Although there may be less attention placed on matters of poverty and industrialization in Fernández Mallo’s literary production than there may have been in the work of Baroja, Galdós, and even Larra (or in the Anglophone works noted in Blanche Housman Gelfant’s classic study of The American City Novel), Nocilla is no less exemplary of urban literature. That is, in articulating a vision of urbanization that goes beyond the physical conditions of cities and toward the mental conditions the metropolis creates, Fernández Mallo’s text refuses to reify urbanization as a thing or an object and instead recognizes it as a complex process. As discussed below, this perspective is itself one strongly rooted in the tradition of twentieth-century urban thought.

3 The true measure of the relevance of the urban approach to Nocilla thus lies not in the text’s mere incorporation of cities but in its more fundamental articulation of an urbanized and drifting consciousness. Fernández Mallo’s willingness throughout the trilogy to flow to and fro—from the desert to urbanized areas and back again, from one place to another, from the city to the beach and finally even an off-shore rig—squares with an understanding of “urbanization” as a process whose effects naturally extend each year farther and farther away from the sites of actual cities themselves. As early as 1938, in his essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” the urban critic Louis Wirth of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology argued for seeing even the most remote areas of the globe from an urban perspective: The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be “urban” is not fully or accurately measured by the proportion of the total population living in cities. The influences which cities exert upon the social life of man are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the city is not only in ever larger degrees the dwelling-place and the workshop of modern man, but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into a cosmos. (2)

From this perspective, the city exerts an influence on Nocilla not only in terms of Fernández Mallo’s routine references to large modern urban centers across the globe (above), but also in the sense that the trilogy’s very structure testifies to the effects that urbanization has had on contemporary thought in a more general sense. From this perspective it is not necessarily the

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mere referencing of cities that makes the work an urban product, but rather its emphasis on such qualities as multivocality, multiplicity, fragmentation, alienation, and chaos—all hallmarks of what goes by the name of urbanized consciousness.

4 It is certainly de rigueur for urban theorists to point out that the twentieth-century urbanization of the world’s population—as highlighted by David Harvey in a now classic text, The Urban Experience—has taken shape along with the twin processes he terms the urbanization of capital and the urbanization of consciousness. This dialectical premise—in one shape or another—has been articulated by numerous theorists as an extension of Marx’s original social, economic, and necessarily philosophical critique of capital (Marx is also referenced occasionally in Nocilla). Self-proclaimed Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre (Elden 809; Fraser, “Toward” 341)—a significant influence on Harvey (Harvey, Justice 219)—has powerfully extended Marx’s critique of alienation (Critique 249) and related it to the spatial development and individual experience of the city (Right 167), for example, as has Marshall Berman in his All That Is Solid Melts into Air (a title that references Marx’s Communist Manifesto). One of the most well-known formulations of this cacophonous urban alienation remains that of Walter Benjamin—and undoubtedly so, as his ambitious work The Arcades Project, written during the 1920s and 1930s, focuses on the figure of the flâneur, drifting along Parisian boulevards. Yet, as Marxist urban critic Andy Merrifield points out (50–53), even Benjamin was heavily influenced by his predecessor Georg Simmel’s earlier and still classic 1903 essay titled, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Simmel couches his description of urbanized consciousness in terms of the “the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (149; emphasis original), further commenting that: Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. (149)

Simmel’s point is that, for the city-dweller, the “deeply felt and emotional relationships” (149) of rural or small town life are effectively obsolete. A consequence of the modern urban experience is thus the urbanite’s “blasé attitude” or “state of indifference” (Simmel 151, 153), which allows him/her to stay afloat in the rapid current of urban life. Simmel’s image of the modern urban pedestrian who is at odds with the chaotic environment of the city is a perfect point of entry into the Nocilla project’s cacophonous and constantly shifting prose. The reader accustomed to the rhythm of more traditionally structured narrative (comprised by lengthy chapters or extended sections) is challenged by the fragmented format and rapidly changing topics of the Nocilla trilogy, necessarily confronting his or her own expectations by asking, “What am I expecting from this text?” As with Simmel’s description of the urbanization of consciousness, here even more savvy readers will necessarily have to adopt a different set of expectations—if not a “state of indifference”—in order to cope with the “rapid crowding of changing images” (manifested in Nocilla’s narrative segments, reappropriated quotations, and so on) that comprise Fernández Mallo’s destablized, multivocal, and multiplicitous text. It is as if Nocilla were conscious of the dual nature of the image of the city: “As an image, the city is too large and complex to be thought of as only a literary trope. It has a double reference, to the artifact in the outside world and to the spectrum of refractions it calls into being in the minds of the author and reader” (Pike ix). Without ignoring the city’s built environment, the trilogy’s

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author directs himself more energetically to its image and its effects, a situation that perhaps calls for the unique perspective of a poet.

5 In order to fully appreciate the connection between the Nocilla project’s disparate prose fragments and the topic of urbanized consciousness, it is crucial to reflect upon Fernández Mallo’s own assessment of his creative agenda. The Galician-born author (A Coruña, 1967)—a frequent contributor to El País as well as his own blog titled “El hombre que salió de la tarta” (blogs.alfaguara.com/fernandezmallo)—coined the term “poesía postpoética” in 2000, subsequently becoming one of the figureheads for a new group of literary mavericks in Spain. Iker Seisdedos writes in El País that “[t]he Nocilla generation boasts the likes of Jorge Carrión, Vicente Luis Mora, Eloy Fernández Porta and Juan Francisco Ferré,” pointing out that the motivation to use the term “Nocilla”—the Spanish version of the Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread—in truth, came from a song by rock band Siniestro Total. Fernández Mallo situates his trilogy as yet another postpoetic salvo, writing in the backmatter of Nocilla Experience that “Proyecto Nocilla responde al intento de trasladar ciertos aspectos de la poesía postpoética, que en su día teoricé, al ámbito de la narrativa” (NE 205). The trilogy is indeed a transposition of Fernández Mallo’s creative poetic impulse to the realm of narrative, but one that nonetheless has an explicitly urbanized “poetic” methodology. Critic Jesse Barker points to two essays in particular where the Galician writer defines his postpoetic agenda (“Poesía postpoética” in Quimera [2006] and “Poesía postpoética” in Lateral [2004]) and recognizes the interdisciplinary and urban-influenced poetic perspective of Fernández Mallo’s work. In a prelude to his published interview with Fernández Mallo, Barker suggests that the author [p]ropone una apertura a otros modos de pensar, como las ciencias, la cocina, la publicidad, las artes visuales, entre otras, para infundir nueva vida a la literatura. Compara este procedimiento con la práctica situacionista de la “deriva”: vagar por la ciudad como una forma de investigación espacial y conceptual. Así, los situacionistas elaboraban “psicogeografías” de los aspectos de las zonas urbanas que escapaban al control del planeamiento racionalista. La diferencia es que ahora la post-poética propone un paso no por la ciudad, sino por las distintas zonas de conocimiento y expresión que conforman la cultura actual. (Barker 342)

Significantly, the Nocilla project itself explicitly refers to the Situationists and the “Theory of Drift” by which Guy Debord and others implicitly rejected the over-codifed city environment produced by the bouregois science of urban planning. In Nocilla Dream, the narrator notes that “Justo en la franja limítrofe del sur de París donde Guy Debord y sus correligionarios Situacionistas en 1960 ponían en práctica su Teoría de la Deriva, ahora hay un gran número de casetas de obra habitadas y dispersas en aparente azar…” (124; continued on 134–35, 137). Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” originally published in 1958 in Internationale Situationiste, advocated “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances” (50) as part of a series of “psychogeographical articulations of a modern city” (53). In general terms, these articulations constituted an attempt to uproot the static understanding of the city and to emphasize a dialectical relationship between mind and matter on the way to making revolutionary action possible. Both Debord’s “Theory of Drift” and Nocilla’s textual meandering recall Walter Benjamin’s eclectic analysis of the Parisian arcades, which was already an accounting (a la Simmel) of the psychological shifts accompanying urban modernity. Debord’s psychogeographical approach to the city recalls Benjamin’s emphasis on “[a] different topography, not architectonic, but anthropocentric in conception” (86). Moreover, Benjamin writes of the flâneur that “his way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city

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dweller. . . . He seeks refuge in the crowd. . . . The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria” (10). Nocilla presents itself for consumption to the contemporary reader in the fashion of the varied spectacles offered by the arcades—each discrete narrative segment functions as an isolated commodity, all contained in a work that evokes at once the chaos of urban life in general (Simmel) and also the hustle-and-bustle of the crowded marketplace (Benjamin). And thus, in light of this critical tradition, Fernández Mallo succeeds in faithfully representing not the architectonic city nor the built urban environment, but the modern urban experience itself and its human significance.

6 Read in light of his conscious application of the Situationist “Theory of Drift” and the implicit resonance with Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, fleeting references to music (and to Anglophone indie music in particular) constitute one of the threads of continuity holding the drifting consciousness expressed through Agustín Fernández Mallo’s postpoetic-prose fragments together. In this way, the Nocilla generation’s figurehead maintains a Spanish tradition of extranational cultural references that points implicitly to the post-Franco impact of bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, the countercultural musical forms associated with La Movida, and the stylized punk literature and film of the turn of the century.3 The trilogy’s volumes abound with references to musicians both obscure and popular, including but not limited to: Daniel Johnston (ND 13), Steve Albini (NE 95), Radiohead (ND 50; NE 119), PJ Harvey (NE 128), The Wedding Present (NE 139), Beck (NE 154), Belle & Sebastian (NL 39, appearing also on the original cover of ND), and so on. Similarly, cultural references are not purely musical but refer also to visual media: among many others, films and television programs including Bertolucci’s El último tango en París (ND 148–49), La Matanza de la Sierra Mecánica de Texas (ND 195), Apocalypse Now (NE 17, 31, 59), Bladerunner (NL 15), and Michael Landon’s appearances in Autopista al Cielo (ND 148) and La casa de la pradera (ND 148). And, of course, the volumes evoke the presence of literary figures and critics including Marguerite Duras (ND 13), Allen Ginsberg (NL 78), Octavio Paz (NL 54), The No-Syndicate (NE 125), Juan Benet (ND 105), Paul Auster (NL 46–51), Susan Sontag (ND 149), Italo Calvino (ND 37; NL 18), Georges Perec (NL 65), and Julio Cortázar (NL 81). Nonetheless, the one literary figure whose shadow hovers over the entire project is none other than Jorge Luis Borges (first mentioned in ND 48), an inclusion pointing implicitly to one of the trilogy’s primary aims—that of reconciling the universal and the particular. Borges’s story “El Aleph”—a literary reference that is curiously absent from Fernández Mallo’s voluminous three volume text until well into the first section of the third volume Nocilla Lab (59)—famously told of a single point that was connected with all other points in the universe, a singularity from which all other points in the universe could be seen if not reached. One could say that the Nocilla project is itself a cultural product born of this singularity. Appropriating Louis Wirth’s reflections on the scope and scale of the city’s influence, one might say that the project ambitiously attempts to “draw the most remote cultural products and ideas into its orbit” (2); alternately, and making use of a felicitous description present in the trilogy’s text itself, one might say that Nocilla is indeed that “polo magnético que comenzó a atraer hacia sí a otros objetos para dotarlos de vida” (NL 20). In any case, the trilogy’s obsessive and almost overwhelming barrage of references (which might be considered another of its postmodern aspects; sec. 10) is geared to induce in the reader an effect quite similar to the “intensification of nervous stimulation” that Simmel once famously attributed to the metropolis.

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7 The inclusion of so many references in such a confined and fragmented prose-space permits (and perhaps requires) the reader to take a more active role, thus seeking out curious connections between so many seemingly disparate segments. As in the filmic Kuleshov effect—where it was shown in the early twentieth century that the meaning of cinematic images came not from their content (a given facial expression, for example) but from the wonders of the technique of montage—here the reader must fill in the gaps present in such a discontinuous narrative for him/herself, ultimately coming to discern hidden connections between one given idea or passage and another. Taking a moment to highlight two of these curiously entwined ideas, in particular, allows a glimpse of not merely the author’s impressive range of references but also his more consistent employment of a key theme—the dimensions of the creative process itself. First, the reader encounters intermittent references to Henry J. Darger, surely one of the most interesting if obscure Chicago artists of the twentieth century. Darger’s story, as Nocilla explains it most concisely and completely in Nocilla Experience (126–27), was that upon his death, his apartment was found to contain a 15,000-page manuscript and more than 300 watercolors depicting the epic story of the Vivian Girls. Darger’s textual and visual narrative portrays seven young princesses with male genitalia of the fictional kingdom of Abbiennia who fight valiently against adults who enslave and torture children with all the explicit violence of Goya’s uncomfortable series of images Los desastres de la guerra.4 Nocilla Experience’s persistent referencing of Darger—prompted, in part, by the character Marc’s listening to a song by indie musician Sufjan Stevens titled “The Vivian Girls are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and his Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies” (NE 33)—perhaps serves to highlight the seemingly inexplicable and ungraspable nature of artistic creativity. In addition, however, this portrayal of an archetypal figure of the solitary artist (in the characters of both Darger and Marc), evokes the tension between solitude and interconnection that is so important to the Nocilla project as a whole. Second, however, in his characteristic interdisciplinary (and here scientific) style, Fernández significantly has Marc envision Darger as “el fermión absoluto, el solitario por antonomasia” (NE 109, also 57), using the term for an elementary particle (“fermión”) named after the Italian Physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–54) (one that according to the Dictionary of the Real Academia Española is “similar to the proton and neutron”). Remembering Jesse Barker’s description above (sec. 5), the incursion of such scientific vocabulary into the realm of art accurately realizes one of the aims of Fernández Mallo’s postpoetic and interdisciplinary project. But Nocilla seeks to accomplish more than merely to “infundir nueva vida a la literatura” (Barker 342); in addition, the project seeks to connect the very idea of literary creation back to the extratextual, extraliterary notion of creation present in scientific accounts of the universe itself. This other pole of creation serves as the basis for numerous scientific digressions included in the text of Nocilla, such as the following:

8 Desde 1965 se sabe que el Universo se halla en expansión, ahora se ha descubierto que además se está acelerando, como si a grandes distancias existiera una antigravedad que, en vez de atraerlas, repeliera a las masas. Nadie sabe a qué se debe, por lo que esa antigravedad ha sido bautizada con el nombre de Energía Oscura. Lanzar una piedra al aire y que nunca regrese. Un anciano que cuanto más anciano menos arrugas tuviera. La lógica del náufrago y el mensaje en la botella, que se lanza para que no vuelva. Además, están los cuerpos que crecen indefinidamente, las parabólicas, las azoteas. (NE 120)

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9 Such digressions are, in fact, part and parcel of the method of an author who holds a degree in Ciencias Físicas and who, like other notable Spanish authors before him sees scientific production and literary production as being intimately connected.5 Fernández Mallo routinely turns to matters of physics by way of intercalating lengthy quotations by Richard P. Feynman (ND 54) and Martin Cooper (ND 136), for example, but also by weaving in passing references to Newton’s “Principio de Inercia” (NE 96, 111), Galileo’s “Principio de Relatividad” (NL 102–03), Einstein’s “Teoría Especial de la Relatividad” (NE 90), “Heisenberg” (NL 60), “agujeros negros” (NL 45), and so on—at times posing provocative philosophical-scientific questions for consideration (i.e., “Nadie sabe por qué poseemos masa, ni siquiera los físicos teóricos,” NL 44–45). The entire Nocilla project even begins with a quotation taken from B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot’s essay “Un Alan Turing desconocido” (ND 15). From a perspective foregrounding scientific content, it seems that the trilogy’s numerous fragmented and isolated subsections function as the narrative equivalents of subatomic particles, perhaps those “casualidades que, como las partículas y la entropía, tejen vida” (NL 33). The narration is constantly on the look-out for fundamental laws that might govern day-to-day experience: general laws (NL 15–16), universal laws (NL 21), an “antisymmetrical” law (NL 32), and another assurance that smoking will necessarily maintain the body’s proper water content (NL 97). Page 102 of Nocilla Dream even includes a list of formulas for common constants of physics. Notwithstanding this, Fernández Mallo is concerned not merely with the history of established science, but also with more marginal scientific works (transhumanism, NE 116) and pseudoscientific/occult events (“Las caras de Bélmez,” NE 98; demonic possession portrayed in El exorcista, NE 123–24), even expressing mystical awe at the quotidian science of affecting the gas bubbles in mineral water (NE 73). Nocilla intimates that, all things considered, science can only be one part of a larger puzzle to find meaning in “lugares donde no hay equilibrio” (NL 15). Moreover, the meaning of the trilogy itself can in no way be reduced to a mere scientific allegory given that there are also countless references to literary matters and ultimately, as we will see, the scientific and the literary aspects of the novel are complementary parts of a much more complex whole—a whole that Fernández Mallo ultimately comes to equate with the city itself.

10 The literary form of the trilogy works together with the scientific content to foreground a tension between unity and entropy (in fact, the author’s “postpoetic” method might equally suggest the reverse: that the novels’ scientific “particle-form” works equally with the literary content). Just as the work seems to be recovering the structure of a more traditional novel (in NL, where for the first time we see three major section divisions [Part I, 11–78; Part II, 79–144; Part III, 145–80]), this form begins to rapidly unravel. This unraveling is highlighted through the progressive erosion of the section titles themselves (“Parte I: Motor Automático de Búsqueda,” “Parte II: Motor Automático,” and then finally only “Parte III: Motor [Fragmentos encontrados]”). After Nocilla Lab’s initial (and uncharacteristic) sixty-plus pages of uninterrupted narration, the incremental positive integers appear once again only to cede terrain in the second part to eight full color photographic images of television screens (NL 130–33), and ultimately, in the third and final part, to devolve (or morph?) into a graphic novel (NL 169–78). More so than the preceding two volumes (and masterfully in its first part), Nocilla Lab is guided by continual excursions into previous content. The section starts and finishes with the story of a man who returns to Chernobyl and is unable to locate his house (NL 15, 78)—but, even within the narration, previous references (to a Gibson Les Paul guitar, to the island of Cerdeña, to Coca-Cola, and to the magazine Mundo Obrero, for example) continually rise to the surface

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of the work’s sheets of narrative matter (perhaps evoking the ambiguity between the two views of reality suggested by twentieth-century physics; reality as wave and reality as particle). The third volume likewise sees a marked increase in the self-referentiality of the text, including even the titles of its previous volumes (ND in NL 31; NE in NL 65; and both in NL 66). Implicitly appropriating an early event in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, the narrator (named Agustín Fernández Mallo) soon meets a man claiming to also have the name Agustín Fernández Mallo (NL 188–22).6 Beginning on page 123, previous pages of the very novel we are reading are reincorporated into the text as entire paragraphs from pages 15, 51, and 78 reappear on pages 123–25. Such tactics, which are commonly associated with postmodern aesthetics, accompany literary meditations on the autonomy of literary creations, such as the following: que todo se parece a otra cosa es una ley universal, es el principio de la mímesis, de la creación tal como la entendemos desde que el ser humano ha interpretado y representado el mundo, y si bien esto es así, también es verdad que toda creación es autónoma y hasta el género más presuntamente real, el documental, no es real sino “realista”: emula a la realidad pero es un corta y pega, un producto de montaje, una construcción, de tal manera que podría decirse que “ninguna creación es la realidad, sino una representación, es una ficción”, y es ése el merengue que el arte ha estado batiendo durante siglos en solitario hasta que siguieron su ejemplo los telediarios, la política y la publicidad. (NL 22)

Despite the fact that the narrative later mentions “el momento en que la sociedad ejecuta el paso de la modernidad a la posmodernidad y caen las ideologías, izquierda/derecha” (NL 100)—a periodizing thesis position rejected by the more elegant approaches of David Harvey (The Condition, ch. 3) and Fredric Jameson (The Political 27–28)7—it is far less concerned with drawing divisions than making connections and pointing to the cohabitation of opposites. Its meandering psychogeographic (Situationist) style may also be compared to that of the work by Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari), which it mentions citing Mil mesetas (NL 34) and to which it pays homage through its push to write “sin raíz, rizomáticamente” (NL 26; see also the prologue to ND by Juan Bonilla titled, simply, Rizoma). Ultimately, both the scientific and literary explanations of the Nocilla trilogy’s hodgepodge of disparate ideas and events owe much to the very nature of the (contemporary) city as the complex site of multiplicity and multivocality. From a contemporary perspective, this evocation of the city was perhaps most famously articulated by Jane Jacobs:

11 Cities happen to be problems in complexity, like the life sciences. They present situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways. Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.” (Death and Life 433; emphasis original)

12 Urban critic Jane Jacobs’s now classic formulation of the city as a complex problem might just as well apply to the Nocilla trilogy, which itself needs to be understood as a problem in organized complexity. In her “attack on current city planning and rebuilding” (Death and Life 3), originally published in 1961, she pointed to the organic qualities of cities and took previous planning approaches (particularly those of Ebenezer Howard) to task for their reduction of the

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city to a flattened spatial plane. Instead, she argued that the city is alive, filled with a multiplicity of independent yet interdependent actors—an idea that she channeled into her creation of the enduring metaphor of the “sidewalk ballet” (50–54), one that has had such a wide effect on contemporary urban critics (notably including Barcelona’s Manuel Delgado Ruiz; see Delgado, El animal 19, 38, 74; Sociedades 129, 135–36, 245; and Fraser, “Manuel Delgado’s”). Jacobs envisioned the city as a place where, provided that the totalizing plans of urban designers had not completely crushed its living rhythms, people took part in a living narrative that was unpredictable, worth fighting for, and decidedly not a mere commodity (Fraser, “Kind of Problem” 268). The city potentially provided for an inclusive notion of community defined not in opposition to but in fact precisely through the concept of difference. Although Agustín Fernández Mallo does not reference Jacobs (or other similarly minded urban critics) in his project, he nonetheless seems to be intimately concerned with both alternative forms of community and also the attraction of—if not the potential of— the city. In Nocilla Dream, this is apparent not only when he writes of the impromptu housing thrown up in Paris (ND 124), but also when he devotes a segment to the very real urban commune Christiania in present-day Copenhagen: “En 1971, un grupo de hippies tomó una base militar abandonada en Copenhague, Dinamarca, y proclamó allí el estado libre de Christiania, una micronación. Tras mantener un pulso con el gobierno danés, en 1987 fue finalmente reconocida como un microestado independiente” (93). The mention of such micronations is in fact one of many innumerable recurring topics in the first volume alone (ND 38; the “Principado de Sealand,” ND 79; “Isotope Micronation,” ND 81; the micronation of the “Reino de Ergaland & Vargaland [www.krev.org],” ND 109–11; and also “Micropatología,” the science of studying micronations, ND 100). Significantly, Fernández Mallo seems dismissive of the commodification of place, as when he writes derisively of privatopias, McMansiones, and “los asentamientos urbanísticos elaborados con cubresuelos, edificaciones . . . baratas y fáciles de derruir . . . que se montan para generar ingresos antes de que las promotoras puedan abordar un proyecto más ventajoso económicamente” (ND 174; he also mentions no-lugares in ND 170). Such constructions have been widely equated with capitalist speculation and an increased encroachment of capitalism’s commodity form into cities, leading ultimately to intercity competition (Harvey, Justice 298) and what critics have called the “selling of place” (Philo and Kearns 1). Henri Lefebvre’s dictum perhaps says it best: Capitalism survived throughout the twentieth century “by producing space, by occupying a space” (Survival 21; see also Production). Nocilla presciently points to capitalism’s crossing of yet another break-boundary in coexisting forms of alienation that separate the individual from the use-value of his or her city environment: “El nuevo capitalismo, el del siglo 21, no sólo ofrece productos de consumo para sentir a través de ellos un estatus o una ensoñación, eso está ya superado, lo que hace es crear una auténtica realidad paralela que se erige en única a través de los medios de comunicación” (ND 159). The trilogy’s ultimate goal is perhaps to effect one of the necessary—if emphemeral— disalienations that, according to Lefebvre, run throughout history as humankind passes from one particular alienation to another (Critique 249). If this is indeed possible, Nocilla perhaps takes it upon itself to propose new forms of community or at least a new way of relating to one another in an increasingly complex society dominated by new representational forms of media. Throughout, the stress is on communication—not only through the trilogy’s difficult form, but also through its content. This is, after all, the effect produced through the character Agustín’s ruminations on his failed relationship (as privileged in the third volume, Nocilla Lab, where he wonders what keeps a couple together [NL 92]), or, for example, in the offhand remark that the Mediterranean Sea was in essence the Internet connection of the ancient world (NL 16). The city is, for the narrative voice of Agustín, “un cosmos en sí mismo” (NL 96), the terrain of the possible: “Sí, puedes vivir en una ciudad sin salir jamás, con la sensación de que todos los ámbitos de la vida se crean, se reproducen y se extinguen en ella. Y si no, no importa, la ciudad se los inventa” (NL 96).

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By the end of the trilogy (Nocilla Lab), Fernández Mallo’s initial focus on the desert landscape (Nocilla Dream) has gradually morphed into an emphasis on the beach landscape. Although the first is an inhospitable natural environment and the second an increasingly depopulated “leisure space,” both desert and beach are opposed to the bustling and complex community of the city.8 The final graphic novel segment of the trilogy, in fact, unites the beach and the desert in a single visual narrative that excludes the city, rendering it an implicit intertext. The graphic novel version of Agustín (drawn by graphic artist Pere Joan) moves from the shores of a beach to a Repsol oil rig where he meets the graphic novel version of Enrique Vila-Matas (who has appeared previously in the text of the trilogy). This encounter prompts the intercalated story of a man living in the solitude of a box erected in a nameless desert. In the penultimate sequence, the protagonist of the intercalated story is greeted by someone breaking through the wall of his desert box, freeing him from his isolation, saying “Entre. Le estábamos esperando” (NL 177). This final image of reconciliation serves as the fitting conclusion to an ambitious project whose method has been precisely that of a number of reconciliations: of poetry and prose; of science and literature; of the city and the desert; of musical, cultural, and filmic references from all over the globe; and of each narrative fragment with the next. At the nexus of each of these reconciliations there looms the image of the populated and complex city, the site which makes possible the collision of so many disparate ideas and different people.

13 Although this essay has undoubtedly (and necessarily) left out countless subplots, seemingly disconnected images and postpoetic nuances contained in the narrative of the Nocilla project, it has attempted to do justice to the totality of the trilogy through the perspective offered by an urban reading. Just as it is impossible to explain the complexity of life in today’s large urban centers through recourse to a reductive and simplistic plan, it is difficult to explain Agustín Fernández Mallo’s accomplishment without recourse to an interdisciplinary method, such as the one I have employed in the present essay. The Nocilla project above all else points to the importance of connectivity, a lesson that should be lost neither on today’s urban dwellers nor on contemporary literary critics. Moreover, Fernández Mallo actualizes, albeit in literary form, the urban tradition of Benjamin and Simmel before him, whereby the chaos of the city suggests a wider approach to understanding modernity—for “modern metropolitan life, Simmel insists, actually opens up human potentiality, enlarges one’s frame of reference, lets people breathe and lose their fixed identities” (Merrifield 52). It is on the basis of these accounts that the success of the Nocilla trilogy must be judged, not as mere continuation of the Spanish urban literature of the previous centuries, but as a project that pushes beyond the fixed structure of individual narratives and the relative isolation of cities to more faithfully represent the drifting character of urbanized consciousness. Now if only the planning of cities were to also follow the lead of Benjamin, Simmel, and Debord, and likewise embrace, as Jane Jacobs once famously put it, an “esthetics of drift” (Cities 221)… NOTES 1  This group includes such works as Ray Loriga’s Tokyo ya no nos quiere (1999), Alex de la Iglesia’s film Perdita Durango (1997), Camilo José Cela’s Cristo versus Arizona (1988), and even a reference to an Arizona-based cryogenic laboratory buried in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Abre los ojos (1997). 2  Similarly, of course, Benito Pérez Galdós is a sharp-eyed chronicler of urban life in Spain, perhaps most sympathetically in Misericordia (1897). On this subject, see also the informative edited volume titled Madrid en Galdós en Madrid (1988). The reader can find references to urbanization and Madrid also in the work of early nineteenth-century critic Mariano José de Larra, for example, in the essay “Modos de vivir que no dan de vivir,” where he importantly captures the growing presence of large numbers of immigrants to the urban center of Madrid: “[U]na multitude inmensa [. . . cuyo] número en los pueblos

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es crecido, y esta clase de gentes no pudieran sentar sus reales en ninguna otra parte, necesitan el ruido y el movimiento, y viven como el pobre del Evangelio, de las migajas que caen de la mesa del rico” (243–44). For further reading on Larra and urbanization, see chapter 1 of Fraser, Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience; on Larra and Galdós, see Baker; and on urbanization and Spanish literature in general, see Baker and Compitello. 3  For example, see José Angel Mañas’s Mensaka (1995), Ray Loriga’s La pistola de mi hermano (1999), and Daniel Calparsoro’s film Salto al vacío (1995). 4  In Chicago, in November 2009, a museum recreation of Darger’s apartment was staged at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art [www.art.org/intuit-show.htm]. Readers may also be interested in Jessica Yu’s documentary on Darger, titled In the Realms of the Real (2004). 5  Two prominent examples are Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1906 for having discovered the neuron and who also penned a number of short literary works (Cuentos de vacaciones; see also Fraser, “Madrid, ciudad histológica”); and also Juan Benet, a practicing engineer who, along with Juan and Luis Goytisolo and Luis Martín-Santos, also became one of the most noted (and challenging) authors of the late post-war period in Spain (see Fraser, “The Art of Engineering”). 6  Fernández Mallo’s own persistent referencing of Paul Auster makes this explanation plausible. Hispanists will necessarily see a more appropriate intertext in El Quijote itself (importantly, an influence on Auster), which boasts similar self-referential events. 7  Critic George Yúdice, in his essay “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism,” gives voice to the notion that the significance of “heterogeneity” within the discourse of postmodernism corresponds to the “uneven implementation of modernization” and not to some “postmodern situational sleight of hand” (2). Whereas Yúdice is concerned specifically with Latin America in his essay, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the “heterogeneity” that is manifest in Nocilla’s topical drifting and its incorporation of urban centers from across the globe points also to the uneven geographical development of modernity. 8  Lefebvre denounced “the current transformation of the perimeter of the Mediterranean into a leisureoriented space for industrialized Europe” (Production 58, 122; see also, Goytisolo; Fraser, “A Snapshot”).

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