Authorship at the Fogones: Gastronomy and the Artist in Post-Transition Spain Alison Heather Atkins Brick, New Jersey Bachelor O
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Authorship at the fogones: Gastronomy and the Artist in Post-Transition Spain Alison Heather Atkins Brick, New Jersey Bachelor of Arts, Spanish and Mathematics, Wake Forest University, 2005 Master of Arts, Spanish Literature, University of Virginia, 2007 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese University of Virginia August, 2013 Randolph Pope David T. Gies Gustavo Pellón Herbert Braun ii © Copyright by Alison Heather Atkins All Rights Reserved August 2013 iii Abstract This dissertation analyzes the representation of food in Spanish novels and cookbooks from the 1980s and 90s, a period in which Spanish cuisine gained an unprecedented level of international visibility and prominence. Using both cookbooks and novels published during the period, my project examines the tension between everyday and stylized food practices in order to explore how each text engages with questions of authorship and artistic creation. The first two chapters focus on cookbooks authored by alta cocina chefs as well as by gastronomic critics who have compiled signature recipes by the chefs. I consider how these texts engage with contemporary theories of authorship and creativity, establishing a complex relationship with the modern notion of author as individual, autonomous, and unique, a kind of genius figure. In Chapter 1, I analyze the ways in which the prologue writers and compilers of two cookbooks of the early 1980s, Carlos Delgado’s Cien recetas magistrales (1981) and the 1982 Grandes maestros de la nueva cocina vasca present the featured chefs as unique and autonomous creators as part of a process of establishing culinary art as a legitimate art form. Chapter 2 focuses on three chef-authored cookbooks of the 1990s: Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli: El sabor del Mediterráneo (1993), Karlos Arguiñano’s El menú de cada día (1992), and Pedro Subijana’s Menú del día (1992). I consider the problematic attempts by these professional chefs to affirm themselves as singular, creative “authors.” These two chapters identify contradictions related to the presentation of the nature of these chefs’ “genius” and reveal unresolved tensions related to the role of the artist, of the intended reader, and also of the gastronomic critic. Despite the problematic nature of considering singular authorship iv within culinary creation, these texts speak to the continued legacy of the Romantic author and the enduring idea of a single author as originator of a unified text. Whereas these chapters on cookbooks consider the way in which food practices are “written” and thereby offered up for aesthetic consideration, the final two chapters consider how aesthetic objects—in this case novels—utilize food, serving both realistic and metaphorical functions, in order to contemplate what it means to be an artist and author as well as the role of creativity within the everyday. In Chapter 3, I analyze the function of food in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s El pianista as a complex and ambiguous depository of memory. In this novel, culinary references prompt an exploration of how the negotiation of everyday practices in the present reveals modes of engaging with the past as well as the role and authority of the artist in contemporary society. Chapter 4 examines how the attention paid to quotidian food practices in Almudena Grandes’ Malena es un nombre de tango facilitates a breaking down of binary oppositions, accompanied by an affirmation of creative authorship by the main character Malena. Such explorations of the meaning of everyday food practices contribute to a more complete understanding of the presentation of cocina de autor chefs like Adrià as solitary geniuses, unprecedented and nonreplicable, and the declaration of their role as the vanguard of a radical gastronomic revolution supposedly emerging in Spain after the transition. v Dedication To my parents, who taught me the joy and art of a shared meal. vi Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Authorship in the Twentieth Century: The Romantic Author’s Legacy ...................... 3 Legitimating Culinary Art: The “Invention” of the Author ....................................... 10 The Words that Sustain the Art .................................................................................. 12 Cocina “de autor”: “Authoring” Innovative Culinary Art ........................................ 14 La cocina en su tinta: Late 20th Century Spanish Chefs Beyond the fogones ........... 17 The Role of the Culinary Critic ................................................................................. 22 “Authoring” Cuisine: Post-Transition Cookbooks and the Figure of the Solitary Genius ..................................................................................... 23 Representations of the Culinary Everyday in the Post-Transition Novel .................. 25 Chapter 1: Alta cocina Compilation Cookbooks: “Critical Anthologies” of Culinary Art ............................................................................................................... 27 1.1 Carlos Delgado’s Cien recetas magistrales: Diez grandes chefs de la cocina española................................................................................................. 28 The Chef as Unique, Autonomous Creator .......................................................... 28 The Formation of a National Cuisine................................................................... 34 The Role of the Critic .......................................................................................... 38 Affirming the Legitimacy of Culinary Art........................................................... 43 1.2 Grandes maestros de la nueva cocina vasca ....................................................... 50 Downplaying the Role of the Gastronomic Critic ............................................... 53 Chapel Masters and Divine Soloists in the Great Symphony of Basque Culinary Art ...................................................................... 57 Narrating the Lives of Culinary Masters ............................................................. 59 Recetas firmadas: The Voice of the Chef Makes Itself Heard ............................ 68 The Role of the Reader: Moving Beyond the Text .............................................. 77 Chapter 2: The Culinary Artist as Author: Cocina de autor Cookbooks of the 1990s ................................................................................................. 84 2.1 Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli: El sabor del Mediterráneo: An Exhibition of Culinary Genius ............................................................................. 87 Presenting the Artist ............................................................................................. 94 vii How to Create Innovative Dishes ........................................................................ 98 Increased Creative Agency for the Reader? ....................................................... 120 Adrià and Cataluña ............................................................................................ 126 The El Bulli “Team” .......................................................................................... 129 2.2 Comer bien en casa: The Culinary Artist “desciende al pueblo” in Karlos Arguiñano’s El menú de cada día and Pedro Subijana’s Menú del día................... 134 Narrowing the Gap Between Chef and Reader in Arguiñano’s El menú de cada día ...................................................................... 144 Arguiñano as Author .......................................................................................... 154 Chapter 3: The Artist’s Palate: Negotiating Aesthetics, Memory, and the Everyday in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s El pianista ........................................... 160 3.1 The Everyday and Sense Memory ..................................................................... 162 3.2 Two Diverging Visions of El Raval................................................................... 170 3.3 A Crisis of Authorship: The Artist at War ......................................................... 183 Tortilla de patatas and entrecôte Marchand au vin ........................................... 184 Dominar o empaparse: Two Models of Engaging with the Present .................. 191 3.4 Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau ............................................................ 198 3.5 The Other Cadaver: The Artist in Post-Transition Spain ................................... 202 3.6 The Violence of Artistic Creation ..................................................................... 207 Chapter 4. Mollejas, brotes de alfalfa y champiñones de lata: Food Practices and the Everyday in Almudena Grandes’ Malena es un nombre de tango ............. 210 4.1 Malena and Santiago: The Relationship between Production and Consumption ................................................................................... 224 4.2 Reina and Malena: The Aestheticization of Everyday Life ............................... 226 4.3 Reina and Santiago: Food Preparation and Consumption ................................. 230 4.4 The Affirmation of Creative Authority ............................................................