Abject Artwork: The Representation of Clara in Jose Carlos Somoza’s The Art of Murder

Abstract

Contemporary Spanish author José Carlos Somoza’s novel Clara y la penumbra (2001), translated into English as The Art of Murder (2004), is set in the near future and the plot concerns the world of “hyperdramatic” art, where human bodies are the canvases. The central protagonist, Clara Reyes, works as a professional human artwork and as such is a crafted image in which a Gothic move from interior depth to exterior surface is played out on the skin of her body, as a space for artistic discourse. The Art of Murder has drawn markedly limited scholarly engagement, which has not undertaken to explore the representation of Clara as an abject Gothic site, where subjectivity, image and corporeality are conflated to create the perfect canvas, aspects which will form the focus of my article. Whilst I acknowledge and am cognizant of the problems associated with accessing a work in translation, the technicalities and success or failure of the translation lie outside the scope of this article.