The strange identity: the sexual alterity in «L’aprenentatge de la soledat», by David Vilaseca (2008)

Abstract

L’aprenentatge de la soledat (Learning to Be Alone), by the Catalan author David Vilaseca (2008), raises issues about writing, identity and sexuality. Drawing on cultural theory, psychoanalysis and queer theory, the narrator and protagonist, David —the author’s alter ego— writes a journal to shape his gay identity. Rather than proclaiming homosexuality, autobiography retrospectively shapes the self’s sexual identity. Vilaseca renders the story as fiction, not as an authentic personal diary, whereupon the novel is an example of self-fiction, but also a mixture of theory and personal experience. Specifically, psychoanalysis shapes the character as a depressed, paranoiac, masochist, reliant subject who feels terribly guilty and has a very complex relationship to his heterosexual past. The protagonist links his former life to an identity he no longer recognises —Catalonia, his friends, his family and, most remarkably, his mother. His becoming a gay man is achieved through the interaction with London’s gay scene and demands breaking with the past, which David seems unable to overcome; his incapability transforms him into a melancholic subject.