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Performing and Critiquing the Human in Eduardo Mendoza’s Sin noticias de Gurb^1
Jerikho Ezzekiel Amores McGill University
Eduardo Mendoza Garriga ( 1943 ), a writer and translator native of Barcelona, has received
various literary prizes from Spain, among which is the prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize in
2016 for an outstanding lifetime writer in the Hispanic world. The aim of this working paper
presentation is to briefly examine the impact of urban development, though not entering the
urbanistic terminology, but rather through the lens of Eduardo Mendoza’s peculiar and eccentric
short novel Sin noticias de Gurb. The work has been translated later in several languages, such as
French Sans nouvelles de Gurb, English No Word from Gurb, German Nichts Neues von Gurb ,
among several languages. Mendoza has confessed as well that Sin noticias de Gurb is his
bestselling and most known work, especially among younger readers. As a holistic
characterization, Mendoza’s work demonstrates the capacity of writing and rewriting, or
fictionalizing, the city of Barcelona through the lens of modern picaresque characters while
offering both at the same time a critical and satirical message on the daily lives of the city dwellers
using humorous language as tradition and disruption, as Javier Aparicio Maydeu points out. That
is also one of the reasons for which literary critics and writers from Spain consider him as a
follower of Miguel de Cervantes, notably famous for Don Quixote, a novel meant as a parody and
a satire of chivalric novels but plenty of lessons about life, realism, and idealism. As a side note,
Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza also visit Barcelona, the only city both ever manage to
reach and to experience as reality near the end of the second part of the novel.
(^1) This paper was presented at Environment: Last Call, a graduate conference by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures held at McGill University on 28 September 2019.
Cite as: Amores, J. Ezzekiel. "Performing and Critiquing the Human in Eduardo Mendoza’s Sin noticias de Gurb." Environment: Last Call. McGill University, 28 Sep 2019. Conference Presentation.
While Sin noticias de Gurb first appeared periodically in Spain’s largest national
newspaper El Pais between August 1st^ and 25th^ of 1990 , Mendoza goes back later to his written
piece and decided to convert it into a short novel that would be published at Seix Barral in 1991.
How does this work relate to the actual debates on the environmental impact of tourism and
especially aggressive mass tourism, or, to say a buzz word, “overtourism” in Barcelona? The
answer may look straightforward but is effectively plenty of ambiguities, especially that the
problems and consequences both positive and negative are linked to globalization. While a serious
reader would consider Mendoza’s Sin noticias de Gurb as a lightweight reading, compared to a
toy for its use of colloquial language, such lightness rather enters the realm of a playful yet
profound social critique of ambitious urban projects from mid 1980s, especially regarding the
venue for the Olympic Games of 1992, a moment of intensified local modernization and
globalization of Barcelona, Catalunya, and Spain.
If that is then the case, the critiques focalize from an unnamed narrator which we consider
as an alien, along with a peer alien named Gurb who practically disappears for the great part of the
novel morphed into Marta Sánchez, a well-known pop star in the Hispanic world. And both aliens
just happen to arrive on the planet, on a town called Cerdanyola del Vallès, in the suburbs about
20 kilometres north of Barcelona city centre. While the main objective of their mission is, as
explorers, to understand and mimic human behaviours, its reflection of performing the human
indeed feeds itself with the notions of imitation, curiosity, and discovery of everyday life, all of
which the reader encounters narrated through language. Moreover, Mendoza’s novel unfolds their
direct participation in a human society, culturally, economically, politically, or even for pleasure.
Now, how do the generalized behaviours of humans judged and performed by the aliens in
Mendoza’s work intersect with the environmental critique?
similar in the early 1990s and today, but these same symptoms of urban areas have accentuated
and have become even more alarming nowadays, especially with “overtourism,” or the presence
of huge crowds in Barcelona (but in several major cities as well). A part is linked to the
accessibility of travel, tourism, and the impact of social media where users mark a desirable
destination as a checklist and at the same time as spectacle, thus determines later the popularity of
place for tourist to visit repeatedly and, of course, to cause pollution to the environment.
The literary text is a filter through which the unnamed alien’s voice and comments are
encountered as pieces of information like a report about the society it studies, imitates and criticizes
for its degrading urban environment. The unnamed alien narrator criticizes the human ways of
living and the problems that come with it. When the alien enters a local bar for breakfast, it decides
to browse the news. There, the alien boasts its sophisticated way of obtaining information, such as
the news, in contrast with the written language which the alien finds primitive, yet the structure
seems complex. For example, it compares a newspaper to a simple egg, supposing that a single
egg contains much more information than the newspapers published throughout the country.
Regarding the corporal aspect, the alien is originally an infinite but radioactive metaphysical form
and throughout the novel morphs into human bodies to participate in the world of humans while it
experiments, learns, and criticizes them. For David Knutson, such morphing points out the
narrator’s eccentricity. That is also why the alien constantly and systematically compares and
studies itself to humans, although most of its comments are negative with respect to its existence.
The alien also comments on aspects that urban living poses, especially how its radioactive presence
negatively affects certain urban ecology and order. When the alien analyses the composition of
water, the conclusion comes to hydrogen, oxygen, and excrement – but the latter is rather expressed
as “caca,” in colloquial fashion This shows how the humans living in urban areas are simply
indifferent about keeping the environment clean. As well, after walking on the streets, the alien
complains about pollution, having to suffer eye irritations, obstructed nose, and dry mouth, and
longs for the purity of the suburbs in Cerdanyola del Vallès. Part of the alien’s denouncing is
related to class inequalities, between the rich and poor, and how the rich have access to the best
services, as well as the best education, healthcare, and other commodities, as well as the high
probability of appearing on magazine and news covers which is the case of the travel partner Gurb,
who has had access to this luxury throughout the entire visit on earth.
Once the unnamed alien narrator poses its critiques about human life, it also performs
human actions as a learning experience. Beyond that, the alien performs actions like and for the
locals, in this case the Catalans, from which it picks up the distinctive accent when communicating
but the alien exposes the stereotypes of Catalans as well, being obsessed of discussing their work,
that, according to the alien, if the Catalans were able to do something, it is nothing else than to
become bosses of the world. Despite this satirical intention, the best thing of the alien’s living in
Barcelona is the obsession for eating churros which has become beyond a comfort food, especially
that the alien has been worried searching for its travel companion Gurb, the cause of all the havoc.
The alien character’s various metamorphoses into reputed historical figures consist of its
indeterminacy yet discovery of possible identities. It is as well an ironic way of escaping notice
which readers usually find humorous, odd, and yet critical on learning about being and performing
the inferior yet complex human. These behaviours consist mainly of what are socially and
culturally acceptable and adequate or common sense to humans, but not in the case of our learning
alien, whose ontology, phenomenology, and mechanisms Antonio Gomez Lopez-Quiñones takes
into further examination through the lens of Wittgenstein’s philosophical ideas. Yet the realm of
fiction is permissible for an array of being and performing regardless of limits of representation.
Giorgi Armani, President Eisenhower, singers Luciano Pavarotti, Gilbert Bécaud, Yves Montand.
Indeed, the identities of the alien are articulated on the appearances, such as the way it tries to do,
but these appearances on corporeal transformations are only one part. The alien’s identities reflect
better in its intentions, such as the thoughts it develops. Each time the alien morphs into a body,
the more it accumulates failures of intent, especially that every change not only catches attention
but leads the alien badly for example in the city jail. Perhaps, ending up in jail shows how the
alien’s incongruent metamorphoses throughout the novel as lacking stability, control, and
awareness of the concept of limit and its inclination to hedonism, as one of the ways the alien tends
to act while roaming around the city.
As a point for further reflection, Sin noticias de Gurb, Mendoza’s highly peculiar and
popular work, offers a bridge on how sociopolitical critique of the early 1990s may still prolong
to questions pertinent to the environment, especially considering the state of culture within the
literary representation of contemporary Barcelona. How? We can only say it outside fiction. But
fiction feeds itself from what is representable, from the chaotic urban spaces of Barcelona, but
such chaos seems to cause pleasure, such as laughter, to the reader once it becomes fictionalized,
since the reader is not only able to recognize the daily operations of their own city, but the city is
also converted to a subject matter of critique of moeurs. And perhaps, by recognizing the use of
humour and satire of customs, the reader may encounter pleasure or disgust, which of course is a
marker of their position and attitude toward the reading, either lightly or too seriously. Or perhaps,
taking a distance and embark on the points of critique. I end with an anecdote, when I was visiting
Barcelona, I ended up commenting on Sin noticias de Gurb , and we simply laughed. Thus I
considered this as a social phenomenon, since we encounter herein performances and critiques
toward our ways of living and travelling through humour, satire, and irony.
REFERENCES
Aparicio Maydeu, Javier. “Eduardo Mendoza y de la tradición como tentación y tentativa.” Una
comedia ligera by Eduardo Mendoza. Cátedra, 2019, pp. 13-87.
Fraser, Benjamin. “Hacia un costumbrismo espacial español: Larra y la ciencia-ficción de la vida
cotidiana en Sin noticias de Gurb (Mendoza) y Plutón BRB Nero (De la Iglesia)”.
Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura , vol. 8, n.o^ 1, 2012, pp. 47-61.
Gómez López-Quiñones, Antonio. “Mendoza/Wittgenstein: ¿de qué hablamos cuando hablamos
de un extraterrestre?” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea , vol. 39, n.o^ 1,
2014, pp. 151-180.
Knutson, David. Las novelas de Eduardo Mendoza: la parodia de los márgenes. Editorial
Pliegos, 1999.
Mendoza, Eduardo. Sin noticias de Gurb (1991). Seix Barral, 2019.
Ruiz Tosaus, Eduardo. “ Sin noticias de Gurb , la paradoja corrosiva.” Espéculo: Revista de
Estudios Literarios , vol. 25, 2003,
http://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero25/gurb.html.
