Paths of Evolution: A Reading of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Martín-Santos’ Time of Destruction

Abstract

This essay examines Luis Martín-Santos’ second novel, Time of Destruction, unfinished at the time of his accidental death in 1964, in connection with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). To date, Marisol Morales-Ladrón remains the only scholar who has dealt extensively with both texts (2005: 162-182), a sharp contrast to the numerous studies that have discussed the traces of Joyce’s Ulysses in Martín-Santos’ first novel, Time of Silence (1962). The publication, in 2022, of Mauricio Jalón’s new edition of Martín-Santos’ Time of Destruction, one with significant textual amendments to the first edition (1975), provides an ideal opportunity to expand the scholarship on this scarcely researched topic. The first section of this essay offers a brief discussion of the new edition of Martín-Santos’ novel and reconsiders it in relation to Joyce’s work. The second section proposes a reading of A Portrait and Time of Destruction in light of the tension that exists between the narrators and the two main fictional figures in these novels, Stephen Dedalus and Agustín. The final section considers both novels in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of history and morality.