L’ange de chair de Agustín Gómez-Arcos: la construcción de un mito intercultural

Abstract

This article centres on Agustín Gómez-Arcos's last novel to be published in France. A cross-cultural methodology has been followed in order to study a literary output stemming from the experience of bilingualism as well as from the association of two distinct cultural memories. The Spanish-born writer embarked on a journey where he delved into Spain's forgotten memory –he left a country devastated by a sanguinary civil war, in the throes of Franco's dictatorship; but he also combined it with an outlook on the French way of life, France being the country where he was living at the time. Agustín Gómez-Arcos thus developed a genuine cross-cultural project within his novels; this paper explores its outcome in the relationship between the writer and his French-speaking readers. This aesthetic and cross-cultural project would reach its conclusion in two novels left unpublished in spite of himself.