La torre de los vicios capitales (The Tower of the Capital Vices) by Terenci Moix: a Hymn to the Desiring Body

Abstract

From its beginnings in the 1960s, the works of Terenci Moix institute an incarnated subject, capable of developing forms of knowledge-pleasure that sharply break with the social order established by the Franco regime. If the vindication of an assumed homoeroticism distances it from the canon of the committed literature of the 1960s, this purpose does not cease to have a political dimension because it opens a space of resistance against the regime of national-catholic normality. In the short stories of La torre de los vicios capitales, the representation of the body responds to a complex deconstruction governed by three principles: the theatricalization of desire as a performative force that transgresses the moral order; the practice of transvestism which, by establishing a baroque conception of the subject, tends to undermine all normative identity; and an insistence on martyrology as an expression of an ontology of the body and its dependencies. So, we must read these stories in an openly queer perspective in order to understand the biopolitical dimension that characterizes Moix’s prose.