Tiempo de silencio and the Language of Displacement

Abstract

Sonaba el y he olido el timbre. The beginning sentence of Luis Martin-Santos' novel, Tiempo de silencio, is as grammatically dissident as the rest of the work.' There is something peculiar, even irritating, about the construction; it is unbalanced, awkward. It seems resistant to the reader's attempt to make sense out of it. The sentence affirms its own glaring contradiction: it is symmetrically constructed (two clauses nearly equal in length separated by a simple conjunctin), but the corresponding parts do not correspond. The imperfect in the first clause does not mesh with the present perfect of the second, and while the referents for the tele'fono and the timbre are at first glance identical, with the second reading it becomes questionable whether these two words refer to the same object. This sentence, like so many others in Tiempo de silencio, convoluted and paradoxical, is representative of the enigmatic, ambivalent, and ironic nature of the work, a text structured around a basic conflict: the opposition between symmetry and displacement.