Searching the Soul of the City in Rafael Chirbes's 'Crematorio'

Abstract

This essay proposes an analysis of Rafael Chirbes's 2007 novel 'Crematorio' by looking at how the discourse of religion intersects with cultural understandings of the city in contemporary Spain. Published on the eve of the Spanish property collapse, the novel was intended, in Chirbes's own words, "to give an account of the state of our soul at the beginning of the 21st century, when all gods and utopias have been declared dead." This soul-searching narrative explores recent practices of urban development through ubiquitous discussions on both the city as an abstraction and several specific world cities (New York, Mexico City, or Berlin). As a result, 'Crematorio' brings to the fore a new ontology of space in contemporary Spain embedded in the fictional town of Misent, a ceaseless construction site in the eastern shore of the Peninsula that reproduces the all-too-familiar economic practices of the real estate boom and attempts a critique of urban modernity as an instrumental process complicit with the less-than-rational emergence of transient capitals of entertainment. Misent, however, also elicits a Derridean hauntology of space as the city operates under the influence of the Bertomeu family, which epitomizes almost allegorically the path followed by Spanish society since the 1960s. The death of Matías Bertomeu at the beginning of the novel certifies the exhaustion of the utopian mindset of a generation of Spaniards as well as the triumph of his brother Rubén’s capital, the designer of contemporary Misent. But as a narrative trigger, Matías’ death correspondingly enables a spectral quality of the sacred that calls for a double poetics of cremation, purging and consuming all that is corrupt, and exhumation, a discursive strategy by which the creation, alteration, and management of urban space (secular surface) is confronted by the very memory of that space (sacred underground).