With a noteworthy change of medium, the protagonists of Marsé’s two most recent novels – Daniel (ES) and David (RL) – are depicted struggling for self-expression not with words but with images: Daniel using coloured pencils in his attempts to represent a suggestive but elusive Susana, and David photography to capture the tension, vibrancy and danger of the 1951 Barcelona Tram Strike (Raguer ‘El día de los tranvías o la huelga que fue una fiesta’). Marsé’s interest in image has been evident from his first novel on. In Chapter 1 I showed how, in Encerrados, Andrés, Tina and Martín all cultivated and refined their image in mirrors and in the gaze of others, and Marsé’s fascination with film and repeated use of cinema clichés and idols has been acknowledged, though a systematic study of this area remains to be written: on the Bogartian mystery man in a belted and buckled raincoat, hat over eyes, emerging from the dark in Un día volveré and Rabos de lagartija; the vamp with fishnet (Nuria in La oscura historia) stockings or seams to be straightened (Anita in El embrujo); the venial Chinese of the Fu Manchu films; the airborne villains and heroes of WWII cinema; Gary Cooper, Gene Tierney, and many more visual triggers to this writer’s inventive imagination.

These are powerful images that resonate in the minds and hearts – the dreams and imaginings – of their generation and often beyond. More powerful still are those age-old images that have crossed national and cultural boundaries over centuries and have formed a potent source of shared cultural experience: religious images drawing force from sacred histories and myths. For all this broad – indeed, popular – base, the immediate visual impact of images may be viewed as advantageous or as potentially dangerous because they by-pass slower critical functions to penetrate and mark the susceptible imagination. With religious images, such an impact may lead to idolatry: the misdirecting of devotion on to the image rather than the divine object of worship that it signifies. In the word of one Jewish commentator: