Everybody and none. Urban chronicle and recycling in Antonio Muñoz Molina's work

Abstract

Antonio Muñoz Molina began his literacy race as a cultural journalist at the Diario de Granada, in which he published his urban chronicles between 1982 and 1983. A year after those chronicles became his first book: El Robinson urbano (1984). In the prologue of the Seix Barral 1993 reissue, Pere Gimferrer warned about the stylistic care of Muñoz Molina´s prose and suggests that the urban Granada from the Beatus ille and Winter in Lisbon author could be any city or none. Both works are the ends of a trajectory marked by the flâneur, that figure that took form with Baudelaire, was interpret by Benjamin and became part of a literary tradition of walkers that tour the modern city with an amazed, receptive and critical look. Both, Un andar solitario entre la gente and El Robinson urbano, have a common integration of fictional elements in a referential genre like the journalistic chronicle. In this article I will try to highlight the links between these two literary works and relate them to which I consider the most relevant in this proposal that Muñoz Molina presents at this peculiar urban story form the XXI century.