The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Pen-insular Novel by Nina L. Molinaro

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Pen-insular Novel by Nina L. Molinaro Susan Mooney Molinaro, Nina L. The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Pen-insular Novel. Bucknell UP, 2019. 225 pp. Levinas scholars contend with the question of Levinas’s own Platonic resistance to valuing the realm of fictional narratives, along with other art forms; he views fictional narratives as complicating and distorting ethical inquiry. Nina Molinaro, with her admirable knowledge of Levinas’s whole oeuvre, is able to approach this delicate matter by pointing out the affinities between Levinas’s thought and narrative in this book. As Molinaro argues, Levinas’s own writing takes on narrative forms and trades in compelling metaphorical clusters; he himself uses narrative patterns to shape his thought. Throughout his philosophical work, Levinas explores synchrony and diachrony and relates them to the self and the Other. In particular, for Levinas, the self can never know the Other as they are on diachronous tracks, among other reasons: even in apparently synchronous moments of meeting, there is an unreconcilable difference in their beings and relationship because of their different relations to time. In The Art of Time, Molinaro, having already devoted earlier articles to applying Levinas’s thought to examine the work of Spanish women writers, maps these concepts onto some narrative features of a diverse range of novels by Generación X (Gen X) writers in Spain. Then again, The Art of Time’s surprising main contention is that Gen X narrative fiction “engages and discloses synchrony and diachrony because it most closely engages time” (125). The book’s overall structuring claim is that “the uniqueness of these writers, and their generation, lies in their unswerving interrogation of Levinas’s philosophy of ethical alterity, particularly as it manifests in temporality” (57). This is a difficult, and to some degree, unconvincing stretch. First, all narratives engage with time. More pointedly, the ethical implications of synchrony and diachrony and interrogations of alterity at the core of Levinas’s thought can also be observed in Peninsular works well before those of the Gen-Xers. For example, one could think of Ana María Matute and her intricate weaving of past and present (Primera memoria, Los Abel, among many others), Carmen Martín Gaite (Entre visillos), Juan Benet (Volverás a Región), Juan Goytisolo’s work written in exile (especially Juan sin tierra and Don Julián), and Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí, to name just a few; they all interrogate the ethics of alterity, often in a Levinasian sense, and all use narrative in inventive, ethical ways to question the self and shape time to help readers reflect and question Spanish history and contemporary readers’ place in it. Beyond Spain, the Latin American Boom writers tumultuously engaged in time-bending, subject-shifting narratives such as García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz; these narrative innovations with [End Page 871] temporality develop an ethical inquiry of the postcolonial subject and the Other. In recent years, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño made diachrony and synchrony a specialization. These writers and many others foreground their engagement with history and create narratives that make time intersect, bringing characters face-to-face with complex ethical inquiries. Clearly, this is not a domain unique to Gen X writers. Molinaro’s book examines nine diverse Peninsular novelists generally associated with the Gen X: Gabriela Bustelo, Marta Sanz, José Ángel Mañas, Tino Pertierra, Blanca Riestra, Belén Gopegui, Juana Salabert, Sergi Pàmies, and Luisa Castro. Yet, only the novels by these last four seriously reflect on and interact with the past and display the “art of time” as envisioned through diachrony. This discussion unfortunately only appears late in the book (at the end of chapter four and chapter five in a five-chapter book). In the foundational first part of this monograph, Molinaro creates for the reader an anticipation of historical narrative and ethical introspection. In chapter one, she expertly reviews Levinas’s thought across his major works and his life and how it intersected tragically with WWII and...