The Discourse of Flanerie in Antonio Muñoz Molina's texts

Richard Sperber

Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin have shown that flanerie is anything but an aimless stroll. Walking through London, Paris, and Berlin entailed engagements with the latest modernity. Thought-provoking, exhilarating, and at times terrifying, flanerie adjusted to and documented the mobility of modernity, its aesthetic possibilities, and social risks. Antonio Muñoz Molina is one of the several contemporary authors who have closely coupled the development of their literary characters to urban preambulations. Their biographic growth, cultural and social adaptions, as well as epistemological insights, are do dependent on flanerie that his life twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts warrant the designation flaneur literature from Paris to smaller cities, including Spanish cities like Granada, Córdoba, and San Sebastian. Reflecting on Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin in these cities, his characters update and revise the canon of flaneur literature, stretching its discursive boundaries. This study examines not only the mobility of his characters but also draws attention to intercultural aspects of his flaneur literature which lie both in a uniquely Spanish perspective on flanerie as well as in often precarious encounters with cultural otherness. Walking through a Moroccan city or through Chinatown in New York, Muñoz Molina's characters broaden the Eurocentric horizon of canonical flaneur literature and the modernist one of his Spanish flaneur precursor, Frederico García Lorca, whose portrait of New York is revisited in Muñoz Molina's longest flanuer text. If Muñoz is generally regarded as an incisive chronicler of Spain's transition from Francoism to democracy and an attractive memorialist of the Spanish Civil War, this study bases its portrait of a much more globally engaged Muñoz Molina in his characters' movements from Spain into the urban centers of Euro-American postmodernity and its northern African periphery. -- from back cover