To browse Academia. Keywords: Antonio Muñoz Molina, Lacan, phantasm, imaginary identification, identity construction. Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, This article explores the treatment of absences and the role they play in the narrations of Javier Marías's spectral narrators. Whilst some of their typically ghostly characteristics have been mentioned before their unstable identities and watchful attitude , this article aims to examine these traits in light of the theories around spectrality and link them with the portrayal of a variety of absences: negative forms, verbal absences and lack of witnesses all arise as dominant features in the lives of Marías's narrators.
The main objective is to determine the relationship between these absences and the uncertainty which permeates Marías's fictional stories.
Resumen Este artículo estudia la representación de las ausencias y el papel que juegan en los relatos de los narradores fantasmagóricos de Javier Marías. Si bien se han mencionado con anterioridad algunos rasgos típicamente espectrales de estos narradores la inestabilidad de su identidad o su actitud observadora , este artículo se propone examinarlos a través de las teorías sobre la espectralidad y relacionarlos con la representación de varias ausencias: las formas negativas, las ausencias verbales y la falta de testigos emergen como aspectos dominantes en las vidas de los narradores de Marías.
El principal objetivo es determinar la relación entre estas ausencias y la incertidumbre que caracteriza la ficción de Marías. Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura, Roland Barthes famously has noted the absence of the author and the primacy of language and textual complexity, nevertheless he still maintains that the "sway of the Author remains powerful" In a movement that resuscitates Barthes's dead author and gives new importance to the powerful sway of the author in narrative, many contemporary Spanish writers have turned to a self-conscious novelistic form.
In addition, many Spanish writers are challenging distinctions between history, fiction, and reality in an attempt to foster a new kind of literary product that draws on cultural discourse and not just on literary models. Therefore, the author reveals himself or herself in the text, showing the complicated process of capturing "reality" in fiction. However, unlike the deliberate authorial presence in much of Javier Cercas's work, for example, Etxebarria remains decidedly vague while aggressively suggesting the crossover between textual and extra-textual reality.
