Irony, the Grotesque, and the Dialectics of Reading in Luis Martín-Santos's Tiempo de silencio

Abstract

This article considers Martín-Santos's novel, Tiempo de silencio, from the point of view of the role that it casts for the reader and suggests that, although usually seen as a highly innovative text, it is actually quite traditional. In Libertad, temporalidad y transferencia, Martín-Santos compares the process of psychoanalytic cure to literary narrative, suggesting that the patient must develop a sense of ironic distance from life's events through the creation of an indeterminate space in which dispassionate interpretation is possible. Similarly, the reader of Tiempo de silencio must become detached from a text that is not just ironic but also grotesque. The novel functions rather like Iser's reception theory, forcing the reader to re-evaluate situations that are at first merely ironic but then evoke a troubling emotional and visceral reaction. It is this second move, however, that creates problems for the author's intended aim of liberating his reader from oppressive official discourse. The creation of ambiguities through the use of ironic discourse is undermined as grotesquery makes the weight of Martín-Santos's moral and ethical position clear, and thus undermines the existentialist aim of reciprocal respect for the other's, and hence one's own, freedom.