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“Fausto” and Marina: Cats, Sickness, and Twentieth-Century Spain
Samantha Penina Ruckenstein
For many people, life revolves around responsibility and compassion for their pets. Pets demonstrate an important human-animal relationship that exists across cultural borders. In this chapter, I investigate this relationship in two contemporary Spanish works of literature, Ana María Matute’s short story, “Fausto” (1956), from her collection El tiempo, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel, Marina (1999). In both works, the reader experiences a young girl accompanied by a pet cat. As Naama Harel underscores, “nonhuman animal figures in literature have been interpreted first and foremost allegorically, that is, as representing something else” (2020: 3). In these literary works, cats symbolize the sickness and death surrounding the protagonists, two young girls struggling in the post-Spanish Civil War and post-dictatorship era, respectively, in Spain. I have chosen these works as they both contribute to the literary trend focused on the social implications for Spaniards living in the second half of the twentieth century in Spain: a life filled with trauma from the past, political oppression, and economic devastation for many who were not in support of the regime. Indeed, Matute was writing during the dictatorship and Ruiz Zafón in the post-dictatorship era, which means that the latter author’s work has not been subjected to the same scrutiny as the former, who wrote under the dictatorship’s censorship policies. The authors’ personal experiences and opinions become evident in their respective works: Matute processing the events in real time and Ruiz Zafón as a means to recuperate the past. As Katherine O. Stafford notes, the death of Franco in 1975 allowed for authors to process the war and dictatorship within their works in a new way (2015: 133). Other scholars, such as Salvador Cardús i Ros (2000), Matthew John O’Neill (2011), and Sebastiaan Faber (2018), also reflect on the concepts of memory and trauma within Spanish society and literature, highlighting the trend that persists in the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I will investigate the effects of the war and dictatorship through the presence of the cats as companions to the young girls for the animals’ symbolism for poverty, sickness, and death in twentieth-century Spain, a time when the country was still in a state of recovery.
Ana María Matute (1925–2014) was a renowned writer from Barcelona, her work often centering on children’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), the dictatorship that followed (1939–75), and the post-dictatorship era (1975–present). She won many literary prizes, including the Premio de Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel de Cervantes in 2010 and was named a member of the Real Academia Española, holding her seat in office for sixteen years from 1998 until her passing in 2014. She is known for her novels and short stories for both adults and children, becoming one of the most recognized authors of her time. As noted by Blake DeLong and Juan Manuel García-Fernández, “la crítica ha identificado como elementos fundamentales de la producción literaria de la autora temas como la marginación, los valores materialistas, la infancia, la juventud y los ritos de paso, la crueldad, la división de clases sociales, la violencia o la Guerra Civil y los enfrentamientos cainitas entre otros” (2023: 43). These themes become critical elements expected from the author in order to best approach the era.
Barcelona-born Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964–2020) was a contemporary Spanish writer who started his career in young adult novels. His first work, El príncipe de la niebla (1993), won him the Edebé literary prize. El palacio de la medianoche (1994) and Las luces de septiembre (1995) can now be found in one volume, titled La trilogía de la niebla. From there, his 1999 novel, Marina, cemented his success in the field, acting as a transitional novel to his adult fiction series, “El cementerio de los libros olvidados” (2001–16). The saga was proclaimed an international bestseller with readership of La sombra del viento marking Ruiz Zafón as the most read Spanish author since Cervantes’ Don Quijote (Steenmeijer 2017: 190). After his death, a posthumously published collection of short stories was released in 2020.
“Fausto” by Ana María Matute explores the life of an unnamed girl living in poverty with her sick grandfather as her only remaining family. In the story, the girl comes across a stray cat and decides to take him in, naming him Fausto. The experience of postwar Spain is investigated through the child as the trauma of the war, her ailing grandfather, and her economic status culminate in her acting with violence against the cat. The young girl, instead of continuing a connection with the feline, ultimately kills it, unaware of the implications of her actions to her psyche. As DeLong and García-Fernández point out, “Matute narra la evolución psicológica de su protagonista anónima hasta el momento en que pierde la inocencia y alcanza la madurez” (2023: 44). The underlying tones of sickness, death, and poverty are intrinsic to the short story, amplifying Matute’s concern for Spanish society. Focusing on the idea of utility, the girl is confronted with the idea of “useless” beings, or as DeLong and García-Fernández suggest, the capitalist ideas of value or lack thereof which cause the child to internalize her own life and interactions with her cat (44). Written under dictatorship Spain, Matute provides commentary on the experience of a child during the postwar era.
In Ruiz Zafón’s Marina, Óscar Drai is a student at a boarding school in Barcelona who one day wanders into an abandoned part of town. To his surprise, he comes across a home that, though it appears to be in disrepair, houses the Blau family – the older father, Germán, his daughter, Marina, and their cat, Kafka. Throughout the story, Marina takes care of her father who is presented as old and infirm. It is not until the end, however, that Óscar realizes that it is in fact Marina who is sick and dying. In the novel, the reality of Óscar and Marina in twentieth-century Barcelona is juxtaposed against the Gothic mystery that they are attempting to solve surrounding Mijail Kolvenik and his monstrous creations, corpses put back together with wood and other materials as if they were puppets. They first come across the story of Kolvenik as they watch a cloaked woman visiting an unmarked grave in an old cemetery. This leads the friends to follow the woman and undergo a fantastical experience filled with the questions of immortality and scientific possibilities that controlled the lives of Kolvenik, his wife, Eva Irinova, and his friend and physician, Dr. Shelley. Ruiz Zafón expertly merges the fantastical with the real within the novel, creating a Gothic fairy tale of sorts (“Carlos Ruiz Zafón on ‘Marina’” 2016). The plot of the story, taking place between 1979 and 1980, is recounted as Óscar Drai reminisces over the story of his life with Marina fifteen years prior as a teenager in post-Franco Spain.
The stories are not only connected by their feline symbolism, but also their names, which reference the German canon. In the case of the eponymous character, Faust, the German legend claims that his unhappy life leads him to accept a deal with the devil. Perhaps the most famous rendition of this story is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play from the eighteenth century. This narrative has since transformed into a narrative typology, that of “Faustian,” being a narrative that depicts a sacrifice or poor agreement even if it originally was meant with good intentions. At the end of the story, Faust dies, signaling the trope of death that comes with this reference. In Matute’s story, the young girl decides to take in the cat with good intentions. By naming him Fausto, the reader is forewarned of the turmoil to come, manifested in the girl killing the cat. Similarly, Ruiz Zafón’s Kafka is named after the writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Known for his use of realism and the fantastic, by referencing the author, Ruiz Zafón creates an uncanny feeling, foreshadowing the fantastic mystery that drives the second half of the book. In fact, this novel could very well be described as Kafkaesque as it provides a sense of imminent danger as Óscar and Marina become more involved in unearthing the concealed past of Mijail Kolvenik. As well, in the novel, Marina wishes to one day become an author. It is therefore no surprise that the girl names her cat after a prolific writer of the twentieth century.
Even so, there is a longstanding tradition of cats in literature, seen, for example, through Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland or even in Kafka’s short story, “A Little Fable” (originally “Kleine Fabel”). Within “Fausto” and
Marina, the cats act as symbols of the harshness of the world. Ruiz Zafón, by aligning with this representation of the cat through Kafka, also points to the limitations, difficult reality, and inevitability of death surrounding Marina and her impoverished and sick life. Even so, Jacques Derrida explains that humans have always placed “immense symbolic responsibility” onto the figure of the cat (2008: 9). The animal, this “other,” as called by Derrida, is therefore intrinsic to understanding the novels, holding a symbolic function just with its presence (3).
1 The animal, the other, is a partner in both stories, a sidekick to the young girls. They provide comfort, connection, and purpose. It is Marina who is concerned with Kafka’s wellbeing while away, needing Óscar to feed him. Her purpose, even though she is sick, is to care for the other. For Matute’s unnamed girl, she ultimately discards the other, killing the cat. Though traditionally, both “Fausto” and
Marina would be investigated through the figures of the human protagonists, I deliberately push my focus to incorporate the nonhuman animal in my analysis. As Harel says about the reader’s selective attention span, “What distracts the reader from the nonhuman figures? In a single word, the answer to these questions is anthropocentrism” (2020: 4). I therefore move away from this anthropocentric gaze to meditate on feline characters in their own right.