Fu Manchu, Hollywood Cinema, and Orientalism in the Work of Juan Marsé

Abstract

Abstract Juan Marsé is one of Spanish literature’s most cinematic writers. Marsé himself has talked extensively in interviews about his passion for Hollywood cinema and the important role it played during his childhood in Barcelona. Critics such as Samuel Amell, Kwang-Hee Kim, and Jorge Marí have studied the influence of cinema on Marsé’s writing, both aesthetically and in terms of subject-matter. One aspect of Marsé’s relationship to twentieth-century cinema culture that has been overlooked by scholars, however, is his engagement with the medium’s Orientalism. Hollywood cinema has a long and sustained history of employing orientalist tropes and capitalizing on the widespread yellow peril discourse. An analysis of three of Marsé’s most critically-acclaimed novels, Si te dicen que caí (1973), El amante bilingue (1990), and El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), demonstrates how Marsé has recycled transnational tropes associated with the yellow peril, such as the figure of Fu Manchu, in ways that address concerns particular to the twentieth-century Spanish and Catalan contexts. Using Homay King’s theorization of orientalist mise-en-scène, this article argues that Marsé employs tropes borrowed from Hollywood cinema to highlight questions of identity, truth, and survival, themes that constitute an important through line in his writing.