Baroja's "Science" in Martin-Santos' "Time"

Abstract

LUIS Martin-Santos moved to San Sebastian in 1929 and, with the exception of his university years in Salamanca and Madrid, continued to reside in the capital of Guipuizcoa until his death in 1964. He was a medical doctor, a practicing psychiatrist, a novelist of great promise, and in his final years served as Director of the Psychiatric Sanatorium of San Sebastian.' Rather curiously, some half-century earlier San Sebastian had been the home of another fledgling novelist who went off to study medicine in Madrid and began an unfulfilled delving into the psychological rather than the anatomical realms of disease.2 This earlier novelist was of course Pio Baroja, whose most famous novel, El drbol de la ciencia (1911), deals with an intellectualized and disillusioned young medical student in Madrid.3 More than fifty years later, Martin-Santos gave us one of Spanish literature's true contemporary milestones, Tiempo de silencio (1962), whose protagonist represents a very similar personality determined by social forces akin to those operating in Baroja's novel.4 None of this similarity is pure coincidence, but a conscious interweaving of the earlier novel into the latter novelist's work. The modern reader's ability to experience both novels within the full range of their individual expression therefore depends upon recognition of those elements which are shared and those which are substantially unique to each work. The identification of similarities and divergencies enables the reader to perceive more clearly the degrees to which the respective novelists agree or remain separate in areas of detail, narrative tone, social analysis, structuring, and characterization techniques. The present study is an attempt to show how surprisingly similar El drbol de la ciencia and Tiempo de silencio are in spite of obvious differences in point of view, style, individual incidents, and the use of subplots or secondary episodes. That is, in spite of analyzing social and psychological mechanisms some fifty years apart and regardless of the techniques employed, Baroja and Martin-Santos utilize a fundamentally similar world and recreate it along recognizably similar lines. Let us begin with areas of obvious congruency and move toward parallels more subtly and intricately woven into Tiempo de silencio's fabric. El drbol de la ciencia's antihero Andres Hurtado lives on the Calle de Atocha near the Plaza Ant6n Mar-