Casting a Digital Shadow: Juan José Millás and Current Human Experience

Twenty-first-century selves are often decentered, comprised of simultaneous multiple identities, and reflect an infusion of identities, some of which are partial. People are claimed to construct identities through social interaction. However, their others in the current context of the cyberspace age are frequently “shadow realities”, and the relationships they form are both poly-temporal and poly-spatial. This reality is well manifested in contemporary fiction.
Juan José Millás’s 2016 novel From the Shadows [Desde la Sombra] investigates the impact of the digital age on our way of constructing the self and forming relations with others. His protagonist needs no physical space, which serves very few of his necessities. Instead, he creates a mental studio, where he is constantly interviewed in front of a live audience following his whereabouts. Hiding in an old wardrobe, he lives in a parallel reality to the one held by another family and identifies himself as a ghost, i.e., a timeless and spaceless entity, active and popular on the net.
This chapter attempts to reveal how these two fundamental voids – the timely and the spacious ones – may lead to de-personalization, and to highlight its negative effects on one’s identity construction, manner of perceiving the world, and relations with society.