Gastronomía, subversión, y los usos políticos de la ironía en L'art del menjar a Catalunya (M. Vázquez Montalbán, 1977)

Abstract

This article deals with L'art del menjar a Catalunya by Vázquez Montalbán, considering the promoted link between culture, politics and identity which they aspired to consolidate in Catalonia during the Transition years. This was the author's first book on gastronomy and has always been read as a central piece in the symbolic re-establishment of Catalan culture after Franco. Although it cannot be denied that the volume collaborated in the process of recovering the hallmarks of Catalan identity, the reading proposed here aspires to qualify this commonplace. Read today, the book, which the author himself defined as a "chronicle of the resistance of the signs of Catalan gastronomic identity", surprises by the politically subversive value and little self-indulgence that it shows. To the well-known critical position of the author regarding the dissolution of the left and the inertia created by the consumer society, in L'art del menjar a Catalunya is added, for the first time, a suspicious and distant reading of the author regarding the essentialism associated with the identity dividers that were promoted by some sectors of political Catalanism. In the first part, the article analyzes the provocative function that gastronomy has within the Vázquez Montalbán imaginary. In the second, the subversive value of irony is highlighted, confronting a hierarchical vision of culture and pointing out the importance of the different processes of cultural hybridization that had taken place in Catalan society during the dictatorship. Taking advantage of some of the legacy of authors such as Josep Pla, the singular approach to Catalan gastronomy by Vázquez Montalbán helps him, indirectly, to expose his doubts both regarding the political context of the moment, and his own ideological convictions.