Burning the Citadel: Javier Marías’ Todas las almas and The Retelling of an Oxbridge Novel

Often recognized as one of the most prominent writers of 20th and 21st-century Spain, the late Javier Marías (1951–2022) is an unlikely contributor to the Oxbridge Novel, a genre that is routinely criticized for formulaic conventions and low literary quality. Indeed, scholars have described Marías’ narrative fiction as “difícil” (Moreno-Nuño 200) and even “pedantic, prolix, philosophical, and slow” (Wilson 40) due to the author’s extensive syntaxes, perplexing ideation, and clear disavowal of tidy resolutions and traditional morality. Likewise, scholarship has not discussed the academic genre in one of Marías’ most outstanding novels, Todas las almas (1989), and has instead focused on the relationship between the writer’s real-life experiences at Oxford and those of his first-person narrator protagonist. Such commentary foregrounds biographical material in the text as well as the influence of essay writing, epistolary novels, and the intertextual game of references across TLA and the other books that comprise his Deza Trilogy (TLA, La negra espalda del tiempo, and Tu rostro mañana).

However, it is my contention that TLA also borrows from a sub-genre of academic fiction, the Oxbridge Novel, and that the story develops its narrative thrust across the parodic incorporation and reconfiguration of conventions that are traditionally used to portray Oxford and Cambridge as cultural citadels. As I explain below, scholars regularly note the presence of foreign literature, film, and culture in Marías’ novelistic oeuvre, and they agree that imitation largely serves as an expression of appreciation or homage toward the foreign, classic works being referenced. However, I argue that commentators have not fully appreciated the critical and subversive aspects of imitation also apparent in TLA and the ways they serve to question the common depiction of intellectual labor at the university, the decency and legitimacy of its customs and administrative structures, and the purpose of a life that is dedicated to one of higher education’s most notable institutions. My focus on parody addresses a gap in criticism on humor in Marías’ writing and illustrates how the critical features of TLA represent a brief shift in the way the writer engages foreign texts.^[1] I conclude that the use and abuse of a classic sub-genre of British fiction allows the book to be read as a unique contribution to the boom of academic novels published during the late 1980s and early 2000s inside and outside of Spain.

Commentary Surrounding Marías and Todas las almas

My discussion of parody adds to conversations surrounding the influence of foreign texts in Marías’ novelistic corpus and the structural and thematic elements that comprise the internal narrative structures of TLA. Such discussions regularly highlight the author’s use of anti-mimetic narrative techniques that reject Spanish social realism and pursue new forms of literary innovation, experimentation, and style. Alexis Grohmann has led these conversations and writes that the incorporation of foreign texts defines the writer’s early novels and the first stage of his stylistic development (28). For Grohmann, Los dominios del lobo incorporates the adventure genre and “the America represented in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s Hollywood cinema,” (29) while Travesías del horizonte borrows the plotlines, topoi, and narrative style of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Arthur Conan Doyle (36). The metafictional devices and overblown stylistic recreations often make the imitation ironic, but for Grohmann, the works illustrate deep knowledge of their referents and suggest not only fascination and fondness toward the works they imitate but also the “adventures (and pleasures) of storytelling” (30-31).^[2]

Carmen María López López expands the conversation into the author’s later works by highlighting cinematographic influences that create “un juego de analogías, imaginación y visualización mental” with films by directors like Orson Wells, Alfred Hitchcock, and Daniel Vigne (“Cine e imaginación” 242). Many also cite Marías’ frequent references to Shakespeare, leading Antonio Candeloro to write that the English playwright—along with Thomas Browne, Laurence Stern, Alexandre Dumas, and others—serves as a “fuente central” for the author’s novels and the “aporías del tiempo” that define the narrative trajectory of his works (12-14). These theorists emphasize homage and the complicit, affirmational aspects of imitation as the primary narrative strategy when addressing foreign influences in Marías’ works, which moves in hand with Stephen Miller and others who see the writer as “more foreign than national” (59) for his indifference toward Spanish literary traditions and preference for writers outside of his home country (except Juan Benet and a few others).

Curiously, discussions of imitation and influence have been largely absent in commentary of Todas las almas, as discussions have centered on the author’s real-life experiences at Oxford and the game of referentiality across the Deza Trilogy. Grohmann, for example, notes a shift from the incorporation of material from other sources toward the use of “biographical elements” that are “submitted to the same process of fictionalization” in TLA that he exhibits in his earlier texts (122). Grohmann traces the fictional and biographical contours of the book, like Carlos Mainer, who reads TLA as a “juego personal” that expands into his subsequent novels like “un hilo que corre, se subordina, [y] se vuelve sobre sí mismo” (217-218). Similarly, David Herzberger describes LNE and TRM as “a metafictional and prescriptive commentary” that guides the reader through real-life and fictional aspects of TLA (107). Pozuelo Yvancos and López López examine further influences and see the introspective gaze of the narrator as the centripetal force that links the trilogy. The first notes the influence of essay writing and observes a consistent duality between self-reflection and narrative (Figuraciones 54), and the second describes the role of letter writing and the epistolary genre as sources for the unpredictable flow of ideas—what López López calls “cauces” and “ríos”—between the present and past (El discurso 35).^[3]

My discussion of parody adds to these conversations by showing that the text not only borrows from the author’s real-life experiences at Oxford and general categories of writing (essay, autobiography, epistolary writing), but that it also develops across the parodic use of conventions from the Oxbridge Novel. This adds a new element to the well-observed pattern of self-reflection and biographical experiences noted by Pozuelo Yvancos and López López, and it suggests a coherent, internal narrative structure through which the wandering “rivers” and “channels” of Marías’ writing typically move. Moreover, the use of parody adds another game of truth and fiction to the text, as the ironic recontextualization of conventions invites readers to observe the difference between old forms and new ones and suggests that some forms of fiction may offer less authentic representations of reality than others.^[4] Parody inherently demonstrates complicity or admiration in its repetition of a previous narrative form, but a consideration of the humorous, subversive aspects of the concept provides an extra component to our understanding of imitation in TLA, and it may suggest a deviation in the way the author traditionally engages foreign texts.

The Operations of Parody

Leading definitions of parody by Linda Hutcheon and Margaret A. Rose describe the parodic operations found in Todas las almas. Hutcheon describes parody “as a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (6). For Hutcheon, parody emits duality in its incorporation of a previous textual form and the subsequent ironic treatment that the reconstruction receives in its new context. Moreover, the definition illustrates that parody in 20th and 21st-century literature may encode any number of different effects or attitudes toward an antecedent. For this reason, Hutcheon argues that parody has a “pragmatic dimension” that is “context-and-discourse-dependent,” which invites readers to decode its formal characteristics and “theorize its inferences of intention” (xiv). Rose describes similar operations but foregrounds the subversive and humorous intentions of parody in order to highlight their importance in the history of the concept and to separate the term from similar forms of imitation.

Rose defines parody as “the comic reworking of preformed material” and writes that it uses humor as a vehicle for evaluating other texts and that it commonly directs its critical thrust toward naïve forms of mimesis (Rose, Pictorial 5-6). The process plays out through textual operations that subvert expectations and produce “collisions” between high and low culture and the serious and the absurd (33). In other words, the “banging” of materials creates humor and allows readers to see a situation from multiple viewpoints—that of the original text and that of a second, ironic perspective.^[5] However, as both theorists note, the context suggests an intention or effect that can be interpreted, and as is the case in TLA, that perspective may be presented as simplistic, reductive or naïve.

The understanding of parody here focuses on three textual procedures that are central to each of these definitions and distinguish the concept from similar categories. First, a parody imitates by incorporating characters, conventions, cliches, and other preformed material into its own literary form. Second, it reconfigures by creating ironic distance, often through humorous collisions, contrasts, and incongruities between conventions and expectations regarding high and low and the serious and the absurd. Lastly, it comments on a text, genre, author, and the assumptions or worldview that the textual antecedent upholds. The commentary encoded in parody is a point of emphasis for Hutcheon, Rose, and Juan Carlos Pueo because they do not want to confuse parody with satire or the carnivalesque.^[6] The difference, they note, is that these other forms comment directly upon social reality, whereas a parody always mediates its commentary through a textual antecedent.^[7] Pueo explains that “El efecto de la parodia (al menos, el efecto pretendido) no es sólo poner en cuestión el texto al que se refiere, sino todo lo que hay tras él. Un texto no acoge sólo una visión del mundo, sino una manera de representar ese mundo, y ambas se encuentran inextricablemente unidas” (112-13). The novel imitates the world of Oxfordian life that is apparent in the Oxbridge sub-genre, but its common portrayal as a cultural citadel—as I explain below—becomes a topic of derision and suggests that other attitudes and esthetics are essential to a more authentic understanding of the university both inside and outside of fiction.

Academic Fiction, the Oxbridge Novel, and Their Common Conventions

Todas las almas parodies characters and conventions from the academic novel and the specific sub-genre known as the Oxbridge novel. The academic novel, sometimes called the university novel or campus novel, is a predominately British and North American genre of fiction that dramatizes the work and lives of students and/or professors in higher education. Scholars commonly differentiate between stories that focus on students from those focusing on faculty, which Elaine Showalter calls professor novels or professorroman because they depict the growth (or lack thereof) of faculty in their careers (Showalter 2).^[8] Moreover, scholars typically distinguish between classic or traditional academic novels from contemporary or postmodern academic novels.^[9] The first, which comprises the Oxbridge sub-genre, is the predominant mode of academic fiction until around 1950 and possesses a pastoral vision of reality and an “idealism” toward Oxbridge and higher education (Robbins 251). These forms often seem “dated” to contemporary readers, and the genre has subsequently evolved into a more subversive, contemporary form where parody and satire have taken over as the dominant mode (Williams 563).^[10]

The “classic” Oxbridge sub-genre of academic fiction may focus on students or faculty, but the story always takes place at Oxford or Cambridge and engages the people and culture found there. Ian Carter identifies some 204 of these novels written between 1945-1988 that are set at a British university, and of those 204, 119 take place at Oxford and 26 at Cambridge (4). Carter observes that the predominance of Oxford and Cambridge in these novels contributes not only to a concretization of a literary form but also to a representation of Britain’s elite educational institutions as “cultural citadels” (Carter 215). For Carter, the term describes a reverential language and attitude toward Oxford and Cambridge and expresses a belief in the superiority of the two universities in comparison to others, the values of its people, and its role in protecting learning and culture (92). In other words, the sub-genre “inducts the reader” into Oxford or Cambridge “so that in penetrating closer to the heart of the college he or she can come more clearly to see, and value, what it is and what it is for” (Carter 92).

The 204 novels include titles like Death at the President’s Lodging (1936), An Oxford Romance (1948), and The Professor in Peril (1988), but scholars like Showalter, Williams, and Robbins identify Dorothy L. Sayer’s Gaudy Night (1936), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and C.P. Snow’s The Masters (1951) as the most celebrated and well-known prototypes of the classic sub-genre. Gaudy Night offers a traditional locked-room murder mystery where an Oxford education becomes the key to solving the murder; The Masters is a professor novel that showcases and romanticizes the careerism of faculty and administration at Cambridge as they attempt to find a new head of the university; and Brideshead Revisited is a sentimental romance told across the backdrop of the love of knowledge and learning at Oxford.

Like Todas las almas, classic Oxbridge novels depict the separate world of academic life and set their stories in the traditional cloister design of British campuses, which produce a “snug, womblike, and for some, suffocating” (Showalter 14) environment for its characters, who are “parceled in small, self-contained colleges, walled in with individual quads and locking gates” (Williams 566). The isolation of the campus plays into the idea of academia as a “separate sphere” with its own protocols, customs, and insular politics (Williams 566). The hermetic enclosure of Oxbridge habitually allows the genre to mix with locked door detective mysteries, love stories, and spy novels, and the separation of an internal and external world allows for a depiction of Oxford as an idyllic, pastoral paradise. Brideshead Revisited, for example, depicts “the experience of Oxford as a life-changing discovery of beauty” (Robbins 251), and The Masters as “one of the most reverent, idyllic, and utopian academic novels ever written,” as it assumes “the life of an Oxbridge don is one of the happiest and most significant that a man can lead” (Showalter 17).

The sub-genre deploys conventions that produce the classic, idyllic representation of Oxford as a cultural citadel. The first convention is an introduction that—very much like an induction ceremony—presents the institution as a place of importance, prestige, and drama. In Gaudy Night, the protagonist, now a successful writer, steps onto campus and is overwhelmed with nostalgia for the “grey-walled paradise of Oxford” where “only intellectual achievement counted” and people could work “uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, and blurb-writers” (Sayers 18–19). A smart and well-dressed porter, a stock character, also arrives in Oxbridge novels to welcome readers and to share knowledge of its history, people, and architecture. Carter writes that the character “never forgets a face” and serves as a gatekeeper to the institution who possesses knowledge of its history and inner workings while also assuring that threats to the college remain outside university walls (Carter 40).

Classrooms and the high table become common settings that illustrate the standards and culture related to learning and socializing. Classroom scenes, for example, are common in student-focused stories and are often led by austere, demanding professors who push their pupils to learn abstruse material and grow as scholars and humans. Latin, poetry, and the classics are common areas of learning in these scenes because they emphasize forms of thinking and knowing that are highly regarded within university walls and fully showcase the ability to exhibit culture. Moreover, high table scenes, along with a variety of other large and small banquets, become sites of leisure and intellectual discussion. In The Masters, for example, food and drink become the essential ingredients to difficult conversations about leadership and fuel the characters’ attempts to arrive at a “very substantial measure of agreement” (Snow 25).

Finally, Oxbridge novels incorporate plotlines about espionage and/or love stories involving students, professors, or the combination of both. Spy stories are common due to the universities’ fabled histories of producing agents for the Secret Intelligence Service, while romance taps into a common convention of popular fiction. The adherence to such formulas also leads to a satisfactory conclusion that suggests that the character’s time at Oxford or Cambridge has shaped their life and will influence it in the future. Not all satisfactory conclusions are happy, as the protagonist of The Masters fails in his pursuit of Cambridge’s top position. However, as Carter reminds us, the ending reaffirms because “the college has talked its way to an outcome that nearly everybody can accept. Collegiality has produced the right result” (Carter 57). Despite its denouement, the The Masters supports the overarching thesis of Oxbridge novels that the institution is honorable and merits defense and continuation.

Parody in Todas las almas

The first convention that Todas las almas parodies is the introduction of an Oxbridge novel through a mocking introduction of the dons, their labor, and the appearance of a porter named Will.^[11] The strategy manifests in the opening pages when the narrator introduces a thesis that he develops throughout the story: Oxford is a place of enormous unproductivity. The narrator writes that Oxford is, “sin duda, una de las ciudades del mundo en las que menos se trabaja, y en ella resulta mucho más decisivo el hecho de estar que el de hacer o incluso actuar” (Marías 18). The language establishes an economy of imbalances between the words “estar,” “hacer,” and “actuar.” At one level, the comment establishes falsity with a Baroque-era distinction between being and appearing that calls out dons who move in a state of “perpetuo ahogo y ocupación,” even though their classes are taught with “el más absoluto sosiego y despreocupación” (18). However, the fact that being is most important means that this is not only a world of hypocrisy and unproductivity, but it is also one of immense tedium.

The culture of inaction drives an “aletargamiento del espíritu” that is so profound that Oxford requires “tanta concentración y tanta paciencia, y tanto esfuerzo … que sería una exigencia desproporcionada pretender que además sus habitantes se mostraran activos, sobre todo en público…” (18). Rather than foregrounding a unique, demanding atmosphere of intellectual excellence, the narrator portrays Oxford as a failed workplace defined by unproductivity and boredom. Moreover, the idea that the “exigencia desproporcionada” is simply being or looking active suggests an invisible threat for those who work there. Life at Oxford is not only tedious; it poses a constant, existential risk of destroying the human will and letting one slip into a state of non-being.

The parody continues with Will, the porter of the narrator’s academic building who has been consumed by this very threat. Marías parodies the character by creating a 90-year-old porter who—like the great porters of the genre—has never forgotten a face, but confuses the faces of employees from the past with those in the present. When the reader first meets Will, he is reliving the morning after his wife’s death in 1962 and calls the narrator Mr. Trevor, a former don from that decade. The narrator understands Will’s condition as being symbolic of Oxford because he gives “cuerpo y verbo al estatismo o estabilidad del lugar.” Will represents statism and stability because he appears “menudo and pulido” with a black tie, white shirt, and a “mono azul,” while also loyally greeting visitors with a “mirada limpia” and a friendly waive of the hand (18-19). The description quickly becomes ironic, however, because Will “no sabía literalmente en qué día vivía” (18) and never knew if he “estaba en 1947, o en 1914, o en 1935, o en 1960, o en 1926” (19).

The enumeration of dates and shifts across time periods hyperbolizes the confusion in Will’s mind and suggests that any notion of statism or stability at Oxford is as ridiculous as the character representing it. The sense becomes more unsettling when the narrator identifies the false comfort provided by the porter’s friendly waive that, “le hacía sentir a uno el convencimiento de que en aquella ciudad inhóspita alguien se alegraba en verdad de verlo, aunque ese alguien no supiera quién era uno, o, mejor dicho, cada mañana lo viera como a alguien distinto del día anterior” (19). Will’s friendly gesture suggests that the network of human relations has failed and that the borders of reality and absurdity are so wide that a person can fall into a worm hole and not even realize it. Rather than reifying institutional prestige and organization, the character represents chaos, senselessness, and a world where tangible coordinates of reality are both difficult to find and impossible to interpret.

Teaching and Dining: High Culture Gone Wrong

Following the introduction, the novel incorporates and reconfigures two common settings in the sub-genre, the classroom and the high table. The parody unfolds as venerated people and cultural practices collide with lowly behaviors and a broken economy of proportions, heights, and expectations. The classroom scene begins with the narrator reminding readers that his professional obligations are minimal, and that he wears his don’s robe like a costume for the purpose of entertaining tourists. From there, he describes his class with nouns that are tagged with adjectives that demote their institutional values. His “escasas clases” reminds us that he barely works, and that his diverse groups of students demonstrate a “respetuosidad excesiva y aún mayor indiferencia” (23).

The imbalances of respect and indifference match the presentation of space as the narrator writes that he is “más cerca de ellos” in age to his students than to the professors, but that the design of the room allowed him a “distanciamiento…casi monárquico” between the lectern and the class, as well as steps (“yo estaba arriba y ellos abajo…”) that separated him by height and a black robe that showed his credentials (23). The “scarce” classes, “excessive” respect, “great indifference,” and “monarchical distance” devalue the act of teaching at Oxford and portray it as a performative activity practiced by individuals who neither care about their coursework nor each other. The idea is punctuated when the narrator admits to teaching an “etimología imaginaria” of words like “praseodimio, jarampero, guadameco y engibacaire” (25). He and the other don in the room know what he is teaching is invented, but it doesn’t matter because “A veces el saber verdadero resulta indiferente, y a veces puede inventarse” (26). The disproportion exists by equating “saber verdadero” with “indiferente,” which translates to irrelevant more than indifferent and subverts the notion of truth by exchanging it with nonsense. Not only is the work of teaching a rare activity at Oxford, but the substance of the work is so unimportant that one can simply make things up without any consequences.

Similarly, the high table scene creates collisions between the traditional appearance of Oxfordian high culture and the lowly behaviors of the characters. The scene opens as the narrator explains that it is called a high table because diners and guests sit upon a raised platform and not because “la calidad de la viandas o de las conversaciones sea muy elevada” (48). The collision of high and low continues with the description of the dons’ formal attire, as they wear robes and sit in a heightened position, but the narrator notes that the students leave as soon as they are full to avoid the “grave deterioro en los modales, vocabulario, dicción, fluidez expositiva, compostura, sobriedad, atuendo, comedimiento y general comportamiento de los comensales, que suelen ser unos veinte” (48). The enumeration of bad conduct by the dons eliminates any hope of basic decency and explains why the students demonstrate the same “hypocritical show of respect” toward the professors that is soon mirrored in the faculty’s attitude toward the warden.

Typically, wardens are the respected heads of the college in Oxbridge novels and exert authority through their access to the bursar and money. Ironically, the warden in Todas las almas is described as having a gigantic form with strangely tight skin and a completely hairless body (55). His only task at the meal is to say the opening prayer and then tap the gavel at the proper intervals so each food course arrives on time, but he uses the tool like a toy, which is explained as common “entre los hastiados o embriagados wardens de las mesas altas” (56). Moreover, the warden stares with “lascivia feroz e indisimulada” at the décolletage of Clare Bayes and risks braining the diners around him when the gavel almost slips from his hand (54). The chaos is punctuated by the description of the gowns as having a double function of concealment and aesthetics during dinners that become sloppy from booze and mushy peas and the appearance of the young economist Halliwell and his obsession with “un peculiar impuesto que entre 1760 y 1767 había existido en Inglaterra sobre la sidra” (52).

The play of high customs and low behaviors, along with the monstrosity of the warden and the perpetual nonsense of the young economist, creates a full-blown dismantling of Oxfordian culture, political discussions, and hierarchy as they traditionally appear in the sub-genre. The scene closes with a toast to the queen at desert, which is performed with a “devoción monárquica” (66). The language equates the distance between royals and non-royals to the senseless, monarchical distance previously mentioned between the narrator and his students. It is the last gesture of the dinner and illustrates that the dysfunctional system of power and moral corruption at Oxford—and its feigned system of reverence—extends beyond the gates of the university.

Of Love and War: Twisting Common Plotlines

Espionage and love stories are common in Oxbridge novels, but Marías adds incongruous elements to the romance and plays the lowly actions of the characters against the perceived high drama of spying and infidelity. The love story in Todas las almas develops as an antidote to the narrator’s concern that there isn’t a single person at Oxford who has known him since childhood. A married woman, Clare Bayes, satisfies his desire because there is something about her that makes him think that she “…es la mujer que al primer golpe de vista más me ha conmovido a lo largo de mi juventud” (30). The language plays into love-at-first-sight clichés from sentimental romances and implies a deep connection, that of a soul mate, by suggesting that the two have known one another from another time. The idea holds, and the narrator imagines that she feels the same way: "Era que ella miraba también, y me miraba como si me conociera de antiguo, casi como si fuera una de esas figuras devotas y secundarias que pueblan nuestra niñez… (50). By describing his lover in this way, the narrator positions Clare as the solution to his need for a relationship with someone who has known him since childhood, and it also explains why he describes his friend Cromer-Blake as a “figura paternal” and “filial” for both him and Clare (37).

However, the fact that his relationship with Clare becomes sexual means that the narrator’s “family” at Oxford is also infused with incest and immorality. The sense is heightened when he refers to his relationship with Clare as “fraternal” (36) and that the two look at one another like “hermanos mayores” (65). Moreover, he describes his lover like a daughter. After the two sleep together, the narrator laments that he must "apresurarla, buscar los zapatos escondidos tras su llegada y alisarle la falda y ponérsela recta, rogarle que no olvidara el paraguas ni el broche hinchado en la alfombra ni el anillo dejado sobre el lavabo… (35). The words illustrate Clare’s indifference to keeping their secret, but the amassment of details also reads like a frustrated father trying to get his daughter ready for school. Furthermore, the narrator explains that he didn’t have to comb her hair but did have to make sure that her outward appearance was ready for her to go outside (35). The language expresses a failed relationship, and the incongruous element—their imagined ties as siblings and their father-daughter behavior—adds indecency and depravity to their time together.

The relationship with Clare endures long periods when they don’t see one another, and she ultimately ends their relationship and stays with her husband and son. In the end, the narrator learns that Clare does not want to end up like her mother, who abandoned their family after pursuing a love affair with John Gawsworth, the same poet whom the narrator is studying. The twist brings the story of the narrator’s research and love affair together and makes what would have been the potential for love into another failure. Far from describing soul mates, Marías’ love story shows how isolated environments allow perversion and immorality to enter, linger, and grow. It is not until the narrator later leaves the university that he can experience a happy relationship, which invites the reader to wonder about the secrets of those who stay.

Finally, the narrator’s relationship with Clare drives a parodic spy narrative. The novel incorporates the conventions of espionage through the narrator’s attention to the tradition of spy fiction at Oxbridge:

Todo Oxford… está plena y continuamente dedicado a ocultarse o escatimarse y a la vez a averiguar la mayor cantidad posible de datos acerca de los demás, y de ahí vienen la tradición—cierta—y la leyenda—cierta—de gran calidad, eficacia y virtuosismo de los dons o profesores de Oxford y Cambridge en las tareas más sucias del espionaje y de su perpetua y disputada utilización por parte de los gobiernos británico y soviético como prestigiosos agentes sencillos, dobles y triples (los oxonienses tienen el oído más fino, los cantabrigenses son más ruines). (40)

The reference to Oxford and Cambridge’s real-life relationship with M15 and SIS prepares the reader for an intriguing culture of espionage, but Marías showcases spying as a lowly, useless act. Rather than looking for important national secrets, the narrator explains that life at Oxford is a game in which everyone pursues information about one another while trying to reveal nothing about themselves. Knowledge can be exchanged for money, the narrator explains, but no character profits from this economy, and everyone lives in a constant state of paranoia over private matters that are only compelling because nobody has anything else to do (40).

The narrator’s affair with Clare, for example, makes them a target for the type of scandal that attracts such attention. Marías contrasts the drama of spy fiction against the ridiculousness of Oxfordian culture when the narrator and Clare are on their way home and are spotted by a don of Russian Literature. Like a scene from a spy novel, the narrator recalls the moment after leaving the train but can’t be sure that they do not have a shadow:

Luego, mientras por vez primera caminábamos solos y juntos por las calles de Oxford bajo la luna pulposa y móvil y de cara al viento, oímos sus pasos a poca distancia, detrás, resonando al mismo ritmo que los nuestros, o eso creímos—creímos que eran los suyos, y no el eco—. No nos dimos la vuelta ni cruzamos palabra hasta la despedida, y entonces dijimos tan sólo ‘Adiós’, sin pararnos y sin mirarnos… (38)

The mellow moon, wind, and echoes of footsteps play into the clichés of a chase scene from a film noir spy story. However, one must remember that the don is not a KGB operative but a professor of Russian—and not a particularly good one given his inability to finish his translation of Anna Karenina—and information about their love affair has no real value to anyone other than Clare’s husband. Even that, however, is questionable because it is implied that he is cheating on her, as the narrator thinks he sees him with another woman at a nightclub and later at the train station before he leaves permanently for Spain. The heightened sense of tension is therefore comically overblown, and the only real bit of information important enough to be hidden manifests later when the narrator accidentally discovers a secret relationship between his friend Cromer-Blake and someone else taking place in the senior faculty’s office.

Toby Rowlands, a former M15 agent, adds to the intrigue when he tells the narrator that he cannot ever discuss the things he did as a spy. However, the narrator imbues that past with suspicion when he says that Rowlands often shared stories about his work but that they only described “extrañas y confuses misiones…vagamente relacionadas con el espionaje o el seguimiento de personalidades neutrales en lugares tan alejados del corazón del conflicto” (139). On the one hand, Rowlands invites the drama of espionage, but the narrator also shows that he does not want his story of Oxford to become another “vulgar y corriente” cliché about the “vínculo entre ese servicio de las novelas y el cine y las dos principales universidades inglesas” (139). The quote shows the narrator’s awareness of the genre, but it also illustrates ironic distance that casts Oxford less as a training ground for secret operatives and more of a lowly trade that engages petty university politics and blackmail. The parody of spies and lovers ultimately reveals that the culture of Oxford is a place where talents are wasted, and drama must be invented in order to pass the time in a place where nobody seems to work.

The Oxford Ending

Oxbridge novels close with an ending that leaves a positive impression of the time depicted at the university, which carries the assumption that the character’s time there will influence their life positively and be remembered with nostalgia. However, the narrator of Todas las almas tries to distance himself as much as possible from his years at Oxford. He reminds the reader that such a moment of his life was a perturbation, and not a serious one, but “una de esas que tenemos de vez en cuando” (213). The comment shows growth from a negative state in the past to a positive one in the present, but it is also ironic because the narrator is downplaying the importance of the story that he has just told. Far from a life-changing moment of discovery, his time there appears as an insignificant moment of depression that should be recognized for what it is but should also be forgotten.

Likewise, the final pages sever the narrator’s links to Oxford by noting his separation from Clare and the death of his friends. As if their disappearance and passing were not enough, the ending also seems to negate and deny their very existence. The narrator mentions Cromer-Blake’s funeral, which is sparsely attended and includes only one family member; Toby Rowlands dies quietly and alone; and the narrator writes that he has lost contact with Clare and imagines that she’s started an affair with someone else. He also mentions Cromer-Blake’s death, writing that “intenté olvidar su muerte desde que la supe” (209). The use of the preterit adds an immediacy to the language and intensifies the speed with which the narrator has tried to forget his father figure at Oxford. There is little nostalgia for the past he left behind; he would prefer to forget his time at the university and the people he left there.

Lastly, the final pages include two images that suggest that the narrator’s newly found happiness derives from leaving a life of the mind. The narrator is now a businessman who oversees a lot of money and works with hardworking people like his colleague, Estevez. He is in a happy relationship in Madrid with a woman he has married, and he is the father to a child who provides him with new challenges. Notably, we see the narrator pushing his son in a baby carriage through Retiro Park, which mirrors one of the last images the character gained of John Gawsworth, who closed his life drunkenly pushing a baby carriage filled with beer bottles along Shaftesbury Avenue. After that, we see the narrator observe a handful of coins he kept from England. Previously, he had hoped to share them with Clare’s son, but then he says that he will give them to his real son instead. The first image illustrates the dangers of his continuation at Oxford, as his daily wanderings may lead him down the path of Gawsworth, and the second shows the joys of marriage and fatherhood that await him outside the university gates. But like all coins, it has two sides, and while it symbolizes the end of his affair with Clare, it also points to the character’s need to conserve something from the university and have that memory continue through his son. The coins express a desire to remember the friendships, personalities, and lifestyle that defined his two years at Oxford, but he wants to separate from that past and pursue a more fulfilling life elsewhere.

Conclusions

By emphasizing the critical aspects of parody, this study hopes to add to studies on humor and imitation in Marías’ novelistic fiction. Indeed, TLA borrows from the biographical experiences of the author and other general categories of writing identified in criticism, but it also develops across the parodic use of conventions from the Oxbridge Novel. On the one hand, TLA shows complicity and familiarity with the people, customs, and culture of the university and its traditional depiction in fiction, but the reconfiguration of the sub-genre also provides a systematic subversion of those same norms. Moreover, the parodic binding of old and new material allows the book to be read as a unique contribution to the international boom of academic fiction taking place during the same time as its publication.

In Spain, Todas las almas marks the beginning of a growing number of academic novels written by some of the country’s most notable novelists during the 1990s through the early 2000s. These include: Javier Cercas’s La velocidad de la luz (2005), Josefina Aldecoa’s El enigma (2002), Antonio Muñoz Molina’ Carlota Fainberg (1999), Antonio Orejudo’s Un momento de descanso (2011), María Dueñas’s Misión olvido (2012), and Bernardo Atxaga’s Nevadako egunak (2014), among many others. Notably, several of the novels were written by authors who had worked at universities abroad and features first-person narrator protagonists who share their names and autobiographical facts. Marías’ novel anticipates this phenomenon, and one wonders if his influence did not also help to inspire it.

Lastly, one must recognize the book’s affiliation with the boom of academic fiction in the United States at this time. Williams writes that some 70 academic novels were published between 1990 and 2000 in the U.S. alone, and they represent “The New Academic Novel,” or a more contemporary iteration of the genre where the professors are the protagonists, and they evolve from the stuffy, alien creatures of the 50s, 60s, and 70s to relatable, everyday denizens of the working class (567-568). Todas las almas shares the critical gaze, personal crises, and sexual frustrations of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995), and Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), but it does not engage the culture wars, midlife crises of professors, and the evolution of higher education toward a corporate, suburban, and middle-class experience. Instead, TLA showcases the opposite: what happens when professors and universities—and the novelistic forms depicting them—do not evolve in any way.

One notes familiarity and perhaps a subtle appreciation toward the culture of Oxford and the fiction that depicts it, but Todas las almas also exposes the dangers behind a premise that many people—and books like Gaudy Night—easily accept: the best life is one spent with an abundance of free time and the absence of work and responsibility. Instead, Todas las almas suggests that such a life leads to depression, alcoholism, and the erasure of a person’s sense of humanity. For this reason, the protagonist of Marías’ novel finds a more meaningful model for life in the complexities of everyday work and family than within the “grey-walled paradise” of Oxford. Todas las almas delivers a new, contemporary iteration of academic fiction from within the framework of an exhausted British genre and in doing so creates another surprise from a literary corpus known for defying classification.