Spanish Spaces

Front matter

Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures Series Editor Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Series Editorial Board Jo Labanyi, New York University Chris Perriam, University of Manchester Paul Julian Smith, University of Cambridge This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary hispanic and lusophone cultures and writing. The volumes published in Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments that have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary hispanic and lusophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

1 Jonathan Mayhew, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Contemporary Spanish Poetry 1980-2000

2 Mary S. Gossy, Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 3 Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television

Introduction

Memory: landscapes of the past in Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish films Forgetting: the landscapes of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

Crime scene: landscape and the law of the land

Crime, scene, investigation: women, detection and the city

Coasting: tourism and landscape

Immigration: north (of) Africa

Conclusion

Bibliography Index

175 185

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for their help: lan Biddle for support and the loan of his copy of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Mitch Rose for discussion of his work and directing me to other useful ideas, Kirsty Hooper for discussions about traces and tracing, Beate Müller for helpful comments on some sections of my work, Sarah Leahy for drawing my attention to the work of Fiona Handyside, Deborah Shaw for sharing her work on Guillermo del Toro, Belén Vidal for allowing me to see an early draft of her work on Torremolinos 73, and Tom Whittaker for sharing his work on landscape in Spanish cinema. Parts of Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 were given at conferences or as invited papers: thanks to participants and attendees who gave useful comments.

Part of Chapter 4 originally appeared as ‘Roads to Nowhere: How Terrorists Cross Space and Place in Cinema’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 82/3 (2005): 343-55. Part of Chapter 5 originally appeared as “Can the Contemporary Crime Thriller be Spanish?’, Studies in European Cinema, 2/3 (2005): 173-83.

All translations from Spanish and French are my own.

List of Illustrations

The orphanage and plain in El espinazo del diablo (dir. Guillermo del Toro; prod. Pedro Almodévar et al.)

The maquis in the woods in El laberinto del fauno (dir. Guillermo del Toro; prod. Belén Atienza et al.)

Conchita looks at the threatening plain in El espinazo del diablo

Rural landscape in Ama lur (dir. Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert; prod. Frontera Films)

Displaced interviewees: Bernardo Atxaga in La pelota vasca (dir. Julio Medem; prod. Julio Medem and Koldo Zuazua)

Arián is ordered to execute the hostage in El viaje de Arián (dir. Eduard Bosch; prod. Ángel Blasco)

Arián awaits death in El viaje de Arián

Pardo and his wife on the jetty in La caja 507 (dir. Enrique Urbizu; prod. Fernando Victoria de Lecea)

The luxury development that motivates the action of La caja 507

Charli’s discomfort in the country in La voz de su amo (dir. Emilio Martínez-Lázaro; prod. Andrés Vicente Gómez)

Charli on a Bilbao bridge at the end of La voz de su amo

Eva as detective in Mataharis (dir. Iciar Bollaín; prod. Santiago Garcia de Leániz)

Inés observes the city in Mataharis

Niña comforts Trini in Hola, ¿estás sola? (dir. Icíar Bollaín; prod. Fernando Colomo et al.)

Anna and Montserrat at the beach in Costa Brava (dir. and prod. Marta Balletbo-Coll)

The beach as pleasure and labour in Torremolinos 73 (dir. Pablo Berger;

prod. Tomas Cimadevilla et al.)

The hinterland that inspires aspiration in Torremolinos 73

Shared roots: Curro and Adbembi on the beach in Poniente (dir. Chus Gutiérrez; prod. Ana Huete)

The disappearing immigrant: Adbembi in Poniente

35 36

74 76

91 93

96 99

113 114

137 138

150 151 xii Spanish Spaces

20 Susanna and Said on the outskirts of Barcelona in Susanna (dir. and prod.

Antonio Chavarrias) 156 21 The deserted Moroccan beach in Tegal (dir. Ignacio Vilar; prod. Jorge Maroto and Mario Pedraza) 159

22 The romantic Spanish beach in Ilegal 160

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

Alan Jay Lerner

Despite all you may have heard to the contrary, the rain in Spain stays almost invariably in the hills.

Michael Flanders his book derives from my readings from the field of cultural geography in

an attempt to reflect on the terrain of the entity known as Spain, through the prism of my scholarly interest in contemporary Spanish cinematic and literary texts. A further motivation is the difficulties I and others wrestle with in Hispanic Studies as we try to investigate questions bounded by an idea of nation, in an era when the whole notion of a nation is open to dispute and indeed discredit. Some scholars now talk of an era of ‘post-nationalism’ and sometimes by implication post-nation-ism, but the concept of nation, including that of the Spanish nation, still has some currency. As Joan Ramon Resina puts it, ‘political subjects themselves continue to correlate with their national foundation in ways that cannot simply be bracketed out of the political discourse’ (Resina 2002: 377); the same could be said of cultural discourse as well. To take just one example, the field of Spanish film studies increasingly encounters difficulties over the now strongly questioned concept of a Spanish national cinema as if the latter simply reproduced an essential, authentic Spain within its films and were impervious to outside influence. Guarding against the impulse to be normative as to what Spanish cinema is has proved vital, particularly in an era of co-production and the ever-pervasive influence of American cinema (as first among other cinemas), but it does then raise questions as to what Spanish cinema actually is, and also it complicates the process of writing about the topic while trying to pick one’s way through a normative minefield. I have great difficulties with the idea of a cultural text simply acting as a surface which we can scrape away to find an essential Spain underneath, thus the avoidance of essentialism in Spanish film studies as well as Spanish cultural studies more widely is something I find welcome; but it sometimes conflicts with not only my desire but my academic responsibility to write about something called ‘Spain’.

Asimilar difficulty arises when talking of Spainin terms of cultural geography. Landscape in particular (I will talk later about definitions of landscape as well as of space and place) can come to function as a surface which points to a national or regional entity lying behind it. As Mike Crang observes, ‘landscapes may be read as texts illustrating the beliefs of the people. The shaping of the landscape is seen as expressing social ideologies, that are then perpetuated and supported through the landscape’ (Crang 1998: 27). If a landscape - or other spaces and places - can be read as a text, the same danger of essentialism lies behind it. Yet the desire persists to endow landscape, space and place with specific meaning, including that of national and/or regional specificity. ‘Spain’ as a term may be heavily compromised, to the point of cliché at times, but it must still mean something. Yet Spain is an intriguing case in this regard. We could, for instance, define Spain according to its territorial borders; but those borders have shifted over the years and continue to be contested today (most specifically in the Basque Country, some members of which look to independence from Spain). Or we could take the internationally familiar touristic spaces - beaches and bullrings - as quintessentially Spain, for Spaniards as well as tourists, since the Spanish stand to make tourist income from such spaces. But this neglects the fact that much of daily life in Spain does not take place in such spaces, that Spain has a varied terrain, that historically the meseta rather than the beach has been understood within Spain to represent the Spanish character (of which more below), showing a discrepancy in what the essential Spain might be depending on whether you are inside or outside it.

Or, indeed, we might consider the two phrases with which I headed this chapter. One is more accurate about the relationship of climate to landscape than the other, but neither comment attempts in fact to define Spain for us in any way. The first phrase, from Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady, is simply an exercise in English elocution, and geographical accuracy be damned: nonetheless the phrase makes sense even if it is inaccurate (one of the difficulties of life on the meseta is a paucity of rain), and endows Spain with some sort of meaning. The second phrase, part of the Flanders and Swann singing duo’s comedy routine, clearly riffs off the first. It is geographically more accurate, and yet correcting an erroneous impression of Spanish geography is hardly its point. Its purpose is to raise a laugh precisely by confounding a clichéd expectation. Yet in both cases the play on words evokes a notion of Spanish terrain with which we can interact if we wish. Indeed, the comments suggest that Spain can become a free-floating signifier which can be made to carry almost any meaning and weight. And with this we are back at the challenge of giving the term ‘Spain’ specific resonance while nonetheless allowing for it to be a flexible signifier if not a free-floating one. A subject (Lerner and Flanders in this case) may use “Spain” for his or her own ends which do not directly relate to the affirmation of the nation, but that nation is nonetheless evoked as a trace, and a trace that can be carried across texts.

It is this trace of Spain evoked in different ways, sometimes ways far removed from the easy equation of Spain with beach, bullring and meseta, that interests me here. The two quotations with which I began use the term ‘Spain’ specifically for their own purposes which have nothing to do with geographical representation, yet in doing so they call to mind myriad potential meanings and evocations which all coalesce around ‘Spain’ and have to do with its representation as territory, and as landscape, space and place. If we require a more scholarly example of the passing invocation of Spain we can find one on the opening page of Derek Gregory’s Geographical Imaginations (Gregory 1994: 3), where he begins with a quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s account of his Spanish geography lesson and the construction of a map of Spain. Spain is incidental to the points Gregory wishes to make and he never refers to it again, yet it is conjured up by his use of the example nonetheless, and indeed in ways which coincide with the ideas I will draw on here. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry talks of Spain becoming his friend and of its transformation into a fairyland as he maps it: this suggests the ideas I will draw on below, wherein the subject avows a desire of association for a Spain always in the process of becoming (like de Saint-Exupéry’s map), and the landscape of Spain as a space wherein the subject’s own desires can be realised, like a fairyland. My intention in this book is far from that of endowing ‘Spain’ with an essential meaning, but it is more tentatively to examine some examples of how others have used Spanish spaces in which ‘Spain’ comes to trace itself across more personal desires and motivations. The examples here suggest how landscape, space and place become the means by which texts, through their negotiations with these spaces, conjure up different meanings on the word ‘Spain’.

Dreams of presence and the desire of association

The undergirding theoretical strand from cultural geography I intend to use here has been elaborated by Mitch Rose. Rose finds that generally the body of scholarship on landscape as a cultural construct ‘has been conceptualised as simply a representation of culture and cultural ideologies, and the aim of landscape studies has been to read the landscape for a fuller understanding of the cultural system it reflects’ (Rose 2006: 538). In order to develop an alternative theory, Rose borrows a term from Jacques Derrida to talk of ‘dreams of presence’, which ‘mark both an imagination of, and a movement towards, presence. [Dreams of presence] are indicative of a fundamental inclination towards association, from which other conceptions of presence are derived and sustained’ (ibid.). He goes on to define these ‘dreams of presence’ further:

Dreams of presence emphasise not only the imaginative quality to culture (that is, an ‘imagined’ or ‘dreamt’ system of coherent, self-evident inherited fixtures) but, more importantly, its illusory realisation ... dreams of presence, like all dreams, are impossible possibilities. They signal things named, invested in, nurtured and cared for through a moving towards, rather than through a holding of. Thus, culture, as a dream of presence, is only present from a distance. It presents a set of possibilities held out towards us, clear from afar but always-already unattainable. To talk of dreams of presence, therefore, is to talk about the work of culture - that is, the movement of holding and caring, the performance of closure and encirclement, and the inclination to turn away from alterity. It is the ‘again and again’ desire for full presence that never arrives. (Rose 2006: 545)

Elsewhere he talks of dreams of presence as ‘our dreams of being a subject, our dreams of living in a world of constancy and transparency, our dreams of predictable expectations and outcomes, our dreams of being immune to the forces that constantly shift our desires’ (Rose 2004: 465). Thus dreams of presence do not assume, as givens, subjectivity, society, nation, but they do assume our desire for them to a greater or lesser degree. If it is impossible ever to give full meaning to ourselves as subjects or to the nations or regions in which we live, nonetheless we retain the desire to make ourselves and themselves mean something.

Landscape, in Rose’s terms, becomes both ‘an unfolding plane of sensory, affective, or perceptual markers registering and, thus, effecting the emergence ... of subjectivity’ and also the ‘active depositing of those markers’ (Rose 2006: 547). For my purposes, then, the landscape, space and place of Spain is not something off which we can read Spanish culture and ideology, but an entity that gestures towards an explicit or implicit desire to bestow ‘Spain’ with meaning, simultaneous with the emergence of subjectivity, even as that desire and meaning can vary. A particular advantage of Rose’s theorisation from my point of view is that it bypasses the temptation sometimes to be found in Spanish textual studies to scrape away the surface of the text - or indeed the landscape - and find the real Spain underneath, yet still allows the term ‘Spain’ to resonate with meaning. Spanish landscapes, spaces and places are not ‘a reflection of deeper cultural forces’ but ‘a consequence of the various practices surrounding and investing in the resources it [the landscape] provides’ (ibid.: 550). Rose’s ‘call to care’ ‘is defined by its direction - that is, by its orientation towards attachment - rather than in terms of where it arrives (culture, community, nationality, etc.)’ (ibid.: 543). ‘Spain’, then, is a constant cultural process of becoming that is conjured up by ‘care’ - in the case of Spain, a ‘commitment’ to it, perhaps presupposed by considering oneself as Spanish but always presupposed by a subject’s desire.

“Spain”, in this sense, never arrives, never becomes fully formed: it becomes an impossible possibility or a dream.

The idea of a Spain that is a promise never quite fulfilled may seem on one level nonsensical; Spain is not a term of potential but of actuality, expressing a concrete reality of a politically understood territory bound by the Pyrenees and France to the north and the Mediterranean to the south and east, with Portugal to its west: to enter this Spanish space you must go through some form of border control. It has cities and towns, landmarks, we recognise as belonging to Spain: Spain is where you will find them. If Spain has France and Portugal on its borders, the term ‘Spain’ serves nonetheless to distinguish it from France and Portugal. Such raw geographical data, however, take no account of the subjective desires from which arise the interrelation of Spanish space and place with the trace of ‘Spain’ invoked by those desires. Rose goes on to argue that ‘although cultural theory explains what we care for and how care transpires, there is no explanation or recognition of the call of care itself - that is, of the desire to associate and attach that is heeded through such performative gestures’ (Rose 2006: 544). What this book aims to do is to consider this ‘desire to associate and attach’ as it plays itself out across Spanish spaces through cultural texts. The role of landscape - and, by extension, I would like to argue, space and place more generally - is to ‘engender investment not by having or, much less, by “naturalising” meaning but by gathering other narratives, practices, and encounters around them’ (ibid.: 549). And, further, such landscape ‘speaks to people, beckoning them to care. In this sense, it engenders dreams of presences (expressions of care) that allow those living within the landscape to imagine, cultivate, and move towards their world (and their place within it) as present and, in the process, to experience it more intensively’ (ibid.).

Landscape: that with which we see

This particular idea can be taken in conjunction with John Wylie’s notion of the landscape as ‘that with which we see’. Wylie observes that ‘landscape might best be described in terms of the entwined materialities and sensibilities with which we act and sense’ (Wylie 2007: 215) and, further, ‘Landscape ... is a perceivingwith, that with which we see, the creative tension of self and world’ (ibid.: 217). The landscape, spaces and places I will discuss here are a means by which Spain can be perceived as an object of commitment. By this I do not mean that the people who move through these spaces necessarily demonstrate some sort of overt patriotism: indeed, the question of commitment in this book includes a chapter on the question of Basque nationalism, the implicit (or explicit) notion that Spain should be constituted or even shaped differently. Commitment here entails a sense of attachment to the spaces and places through which the characters I discuss move and act, a sense of association that never quite materialises but always hovers as a possibility, a trace within the many interpretative possibilities of Spanish space. It is an invocation or trace of Spain that echoes back and forth between landscape and subject, whether that echo carries positive or negative resonance for the latter. Wylie’s mention of self and world implies a subjectivity that previously came under scrutiny and into disrepute in landscape studies, since it could imply the subject as ‘master of all he surveyed’, the masculine gender here being appropriate as the landscape itself was considered as feminine, open to the male gaze (as critiqued, for instance, in Gillian Rose 1993). But Mitch Rose’s and Wylie’s theoretical frameworks bring the subject back in, but in a way that does not necessarily mean that the subject possesses the space (though it does not preclude it): the subject shows commitment to the space, and yet it is through that space that the subject demonstrates commitment, both to Spain as a term with meaning but also to other, personal desires.

Both Rose and Wylie stress the role of what Wylie calls ‘landscape writing’ - personal, biographical and narrative accounts of the landscape, which, he argues, have recently burgeoned (the examples he mentions are all from the British Isles: Wylie 2007: 207). Such ‘writing’, Wylie argues, emphasises ‘the continuing trace of the subject, of subjects, howsoever ghostly, or embodied, relational and contingent’ (ibid.: 213). By this he means people’s narratives of their own encounters with spaces - encounters that are direct, active and engaged. An example is Wylie’s earlier account of his walk on Glastonbury Tor, that walk providing his own landscape ‘text’ (Wylie 2002). Elsewhere, he talks of co-presence, landscape and self together, which requires bodily presence in the landscape, of being- and becoming-in-the world (Wylie 2009: 279). As the saying goes, you had to be there. That is not what I offer here: instead we are looking at texts in which some people account for other people’s encounter with Spanish spaces; and these others are usually — but not always - fictional. We are not therefore talking of bodily presence in the sense Wylie means, but a multiplicity of levels within which the subjects of the narrative are ‘present’, but we are not. But Wylie also helps us to account for absence, drawing on Derrida’s notion that “the body” and its sensibilities are always a matter of prosthetics, augmentations, displacements, substitutions - different “appearances of flesh” (ibid.: 277). Although Wylie uses Derrida’s ideas in a different sense to what I intend here, these ideas nonetheless account for the layered experience that involves textual characters as well as both the producers and consumers of these characters. Wylie argues that Derrida’s questioning of the idea of presence can provide ‘a sort of ghosting and dislocating ... that thus entwines landscape with absence’ (ibid.: 280). If, as Wylie has said, landscape is that with which we see, ghosting and dislocation use landscape, space and place with which to see without us necessarily being bodily present.

Not only this, but textual landscape, space and place enhance our awareness of the multiplicity of ways in which the desire to bring ‘Spain’ into existence traces itself across the personal desires of subjects. Henri Lefebvre would argue against this in terms of film at least, commenting that film and images promote ‘error’ and ‘illusion’ over space, fragmenting it, detaching space from lived time, ‘everyday time’ (Lefebvre 1991: 96-7). On the other hand, Doreen Massey argues for space as ‘the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity/difference’ (Lury and Massey 1999: 231), and argues, referring back to Lefebvre, that if space is the product of spatial relations, then ‘for there to be relations there must be coexisting multiplicity’ (ibid.: 232). Karen Lury in the same piece argues that ‘Space and place are therefore useful as a way of understanding how film makes social relationships visible, or how they are articulated through the visual and aural capabilities of film and television’ (ibid.). Texts, then, including film and images, allow for this multiplicity to become apparent: experience of textual space is also in any case a part of our lived daily experience. ‘Seeing’ Spain, understanding Spain as a cultural process of always coming into being but never fully realised, involves not only people’s own personal experiences but also what others make of those experiences. This allows us, then, to draw on our own direct texts and as well as on those of others. But, further, the concept of fictional narratives, which I will largely be dealing with here, allows a further demonstration of a call to care by the fact that these are projections in the imagination of a negotiated sense of belonging; and because they are fiction they also suggest Rose’s emphasis on the desire to attach and associate. They are promises of community that are always coming into being but never quite arrive. They also point to what Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner describe as the performative aspect of landscape, space and place (Harper and Rayner 2010: 22).

Robert Rosenstone, writing about film and history, discusses Jill Godmilow’s film Far from Poland (1983), which deals with the Solidarity movement, and observes that if the director cannot tell the real story, she learns why nobody else can tell it either - for there is no real story to tell, but only a series of ways of representing, thinking about and looking at the Polish movement. Yet for all the open admission of the personal stake of the filmmaker-historian in the outcome of the work and the problematic of representation and knowledge that the film underlines, Far from Poland ends up by making strong claims for the importance of the history of Solidarity (about which we do learn a good deal). (Rosenstone 1996: 208)

I would suggest that Godmilow and Rosenstone’s way of presenting history on film could also apply geographically. In the case of Spain, there is only a ‘series of ways of representing, thinking about and looking at’ it, but despite the problems of representation and knowledge and the standpoint of the people who create texts and narratives about Spain, we can still learn something about it and the desire to associate with it expressed through the movement of people across its terrain.

A bifocal geography of commitment

This book, then, will offer case studies from contemporary Spanish culture, drawn primarily from film and literature, in which we can explore how characters use the space and place with which they interact to show a call to association with the nation to some degree, a desire to shape, perhaps even possess, space as nation according to their lights, so that Spain becomes a promise of a certain fulfilment that never quite comes to fruition. I intend to draw out some of the meanings, some of the different desires to associate, that cluster around Spain. In this I cannot and do not aim to be comprehensive. Rather, I intend to demonstrate how some of these clusters of desires to care and association might form: there are, of course, others. The case studies I have selected arise from my own personal interests, sometimes drawing on previous research.

If my own personal interests are called into play, the question then arises: what stake do I have in talking about Spanish landscape, space and place, and textual negotiations of them? What of my own subjectivity? I agree with Gregory that ‘one of the implications of contemporary cultural studies is that we are all trespassers now’ (Gregory 1994: 134), but while Anglophone study of Spain must acknowledge and embrace the notion of trespass as both justification and warning, I do not want to leave it at that. I take further support from Gregory when he says that: “To assume that we are entitled to speak only of what we know by virtue of our own experience is not only to reinstate an empiricism: it is to institutionalize parochialism’ (ibid.: 205). It is hard to calculate how far I could arguably be said to know Spain even as a Hispanist, and whether I know more and better than the people in Spain who undergo in reality the textual problems and questions I discuss. But I believe my position as somebody studying these texts can also be included in the cultural geographical theorisation posited here. I talked above of the stake that people may have in a desire to associate in some way with a geographical entity that either is, or makes up part of, Spain. I also talked of Wylie’s idea of landscape writing’, of the subject's textual encounter with the landscape. This book, surely, is my own landscape writing; and yet my own position is inevitably compromised. Part of my ‘stake’ is quite simply a professional need to write books, to analyse cultural texts, preferably within a given theoretical framework. But that is - fortunately - only part of the story, for my choice of research field implies its own call to care. I find it hard to conceive of an encounter with a landscape that can be as direct as in Wylie’s suggestion of co-presence (all our encounters must be mediated in negotiation with the ideas and previous experiences we bring to the encounter), and firmly believe that many of our encounters of space and place are not experienced directly and are none the worse for that. I do, however, have to account for the fact that I, as I research and write, am often some distance away from the object of my study. But Wylie’s use of Derridean ghosting may allow me to do precisely this. While Rose talks of a desire for association, Wylie conceives of what he calls a ‘geography of love’ - at first blush a puerile-sounding term, but in fact both apposite and conceptually important for what I wish to do; for Wylie talks of love in terms of separation or space between:

Love may commonly be conceived in terms of fusion, of self with other, with self, even with place and landscape ... But it is actually this fusion of self and landscape, person and place, that love shatters ... the geographies of love might instead describe a separation or rupture - another articulation of distance, absence, dispersal.

To put this more positively, perhaps, the geographies of love would describe a certain exposure to the other. The gap, fracture or absence that is their original equally and always entails an openness, an originary exposure of the self to externality and alterity. (Wylie 2009: 284)

And, in support, Wylie quotes John D. Caputo: ‘to love the other on this model requires always to respect that distance, which means that love is not the desire to have the other for oneself or to get something back from the other in return, but the unconditional affirmation of the other’ (ibid.: 285).

While Rose stresses direction towards a desire to belong and to fuse with the object of the call to care, even as he acknowledges its impossible realisation, Wylie gives greater emphasis to distance, a gap between. While ‘love’ may be too emotive a word to describe my academic orientation towards Spain, we could perhaps see it as a geography of commitment that embraces distance and separation as well as a desire for association embodied in applying oneself to a field of study coterminous with a particular geographical area, in this case Spain. I can perceive myself as a ‘ghost’ (an intriguing idea for an academic), absent yet present in using the landscape, space and place with which both the textual characters, as well as the producers of those characters and thus myself, see Spain. John Durham Peters’ concept of seeing bifocally may also help here: