Álvaro González Montero
Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts by Research
University of Leeds
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies
October 2021
The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others.
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Acknowledgements
I should like to thank my supervisors and mentors Professor Richard Cleminson and Professor Duncan Wheeler for their support and trust in this project. Their time, feedback and advice have been invaluable, helping me to become a better, more confident writer in the last two truly difficult years.
Thank you to my husband, Miguel, who has patiently heard me talk incessantly about the topic of this dissertation for years and still wanted to marry me. He has supported every single one of my decisions, as life-changing as they may have been and has always been present to give me much needed reality checks.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family in Spain, especially my parents, Carmen and Juan, and my grandmother, Paca, who have always, unconditionally, through time and space, believed in me.
Abstract
This dissertation studies the way Jaime Gil de Biedma conceptualises his own identity in his Diarios 1956-1985, the complete edition of his personal diaries. This project establishes the construction of the author’s identity in his life-writing works in connection to sexuality, colonialism and illness in Spain. Gil de Biedma (1929-1990) was an influential Spanish poet whose diaries represent an example of the finest autobiographical literature. This is a rare case of a Spanish author who provides a complex picture of what it was to be a gay intellectual in Spain and the Philippines during Francoism through life-writing. In addition, Gil de Biedma is one of the few Spanish authors to write extensively about his experience as an AIDS patient. By close reading a selection of fragments of the author’s diaries, as well as part of his poetry and essays, this study exposes the connections between sexuality, colonialism, and illness in the author’s autobiographical writing. This study claims that, in the nearly thirty years that his diaries span, Gil de Biedma’s strategies of representation of his own self are structured around the three symbolic axes of sexual desire, the colonial Other and illness, all of which are interconnected, thus showing a similar evolution towards a detached, cynical view of reality. In youth the author shows a fascination with the slums, coupled with an idealistic political and sexual outlook and an optimistic view of his diseased self. As he matures, Gil de Biedma’s thought and self-representation trajectory follows a more conservative trend. This dissertation shows Gil de Biedma’s journey in life-writing moves from dandy to camp, from exotic chameleon to postcolonial capital owner and from the little ill bourgeois to the willingly-unnamed illness sufferer that put an end to his self.
