A Poetics of Time and Space: Ekphrasis and the Modern Vision in Azorin and Velazquez

Abstract

In 1917 Jose Ortega y Gasset observed that Jos6 Martinez Ruiz (Azorin) was at his best when writing with a rare book, the memory of an architectural monument, a deceased historical personage, or tarnished painting before him (2:164). Critics have long appreciated Azorin's literary intertextuality and his ability, in Harold Bloom's sense of the word, to veer away from a precursor text (always scrupulously identified), in order to create a thoroughly original work of his own. While commentary on the influence of painting on Azorin, his literary allusions to historical and fictional works of art, and the painterly quality of his prose have become topoi in the critical canon, a thorough study of the extent to which the visual arts constitute the other text which informs and contextualizes Azorin's thematics, style, and the structure of individual works is still to be had.1 In his Memorias inmemoriales Azorin tells us that he never thought of himself as a writer, but rather as a painter, and that when he sat at the typewriter, he imagined himself with palette and brush in hand (8:441). In point of fact, Azorin had a wide-ranging knowledge of