Moving Beyond the Frame: Literature, Madness, and Vincent van Gogh in Manuel Rivas’s Os comedores de patacas

Abstract

Manuel Rivas’s 1991 novel Os comedores de patacas may be taken, at first reading, as a meditation on the stereotypes of traditional Galician life, a nation whose main culinary food staple was the humble potato. However, as revealed in the epilogue, the novel’s title is not a reference to the local cuisine, but to one of Vincent van Gogh’s first paintings, The potato eaters. This chapter explores how–through intertextual references to the letters that the Dutch painter wrote to his brother Theo—Manuel Rivas in this novel links the madness to which many young people in Galicia fell victim in the drug crisis of the 1980s and 1990s to a series of universal expressions of psychological turmoil. Furthermore, I will contend that the ekphrastic elements of Rivas’ literary production allow for transnational artistic movements at the same time that they articulate a new artistic language through which to portray the modern Galician family.