Tiempo De Silencio Research Articles

Tiempo de silencio and Its Cela-like Resonances of the Generation of 1898

Tiempo de silencio has been shown to exhibit significant, independent similarities to El drbol de la ciencia and Troteras y danzaderas, in addition to Joyce's Ulysses. The situation becomes more complicated with the recognition that Martin-Santos's novel has additional similarities to Martinez Ruiz's La voluntad, Gutierrez- Solana's Madrid callejero, Valle-Inclhn's Luces de Bohemia and Tirano Banderas, as well as to Cela's La colmena. Of all the presences incorporated into Tiempo, Cela's is the most synthetic and instructive, because it shares and carries forward earlier echoes of the Generation of 1898. The recognition of this wide-ranging and pro- gressive re-elaboration invites reappraisal of Martin-Santos's contribution to twentieth-century narrative. Be- cause the reworked elements supply so much of Tiempo's material, it is evident that its most significant con- tribution is the massiveness of its shared framework, a massiveness of sharing that is the basis of so many subsequent contemporary novels.

Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

The historical uses of myth myth and nationalist Spain fiction as mask - Tiempo de silencio fiction as echo - Volveras a Region fiction as corruption - Si te dicen que cai fiction as release - San Camilo, 1936, Reivindicacion del conde don Julian, La saga/fuga de J.B.

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

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-

Tiempo de silencio and Ritmo lento: Pioneers of the New Social Novel in Spain

T HROUGH what twist of fate does one novel reap wide acclaim as innovative, while a very similar contemporary work receives only a few laudatory notices before passing into oblivion? This is precisely what happened to two novels which appeared in Spain in 1962: Tiempo de silencio by Luis Martfn-Santos, and Ritmo lento by Carmen Martin Gaite. The former was widely reviewed and enthusiastically hailed as a literary event; the latter, while also recognized as outstanding, nevertheless fell quickly into obscurity.1 Although even the two authors thought their works to be similar, to this date they have never been compared by critics. In my opinion the accident of fortune that occurred circa 1962 was made more permanent by literary histories written soon after that date. Inevitably, only a brief span of time elapses between modern novels and the reflections on them known as liter-

Tiempo de silencio and the Language of Displacement

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.

Repetition and Excess in Tiempo de silencio

Luis Martín Santos' Tiempo de silencio displays a peculiar vulnerability to commentary. The novel both invites interpretation and “thematizes” the invitation. In this essay I offer a reading of the novel that explores—and exploits—such vulnerability. More concretely, I offer a reading anchored in two related notions, repetition and excess, for in and through them the work discloses its hermeneutic complexity. Accordingly my discussion moves from substances to events; it moves, that is, from a consideration of how excess is embodied in certain emblematic substances (Secs. 1 and 2) to a consideration of the repetitiveness of the novel's events (Secs. 3 and 4). Such an exercise should not only shed new light on one of the most significant Spanish novels of this century but also, implicitly, raise important questions about the relationship between a commented text and its commentary.

Luis Martin‐Santos and Juan Goytisolo: Irony and Satire in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

The two perhaps most innovative and influential novels in post‐Civil War Spain are essentially comic in tone. They must be seen in the context of the novels of the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, but in order to really understand their radical import it is necessary to examine the nature of irony and satire and to discover precisely how these two artists employ them in their critical visions of 20th‐century Spanish culture. Tiempo de silencio is predominantly ironic, maintaining a subtle tension between the novel's tragic and pathetic subject matter and the comic effects of narrative language. This comic irony has its roots in Cervantes, but Martín‐Santos' satirical parodies on conventional literary styles clearly anticipate Goytisolo's more aggressive and concentrated attack on language itself. Unique to Conde Julián, however, is the sense of actual destruction that is achieved through its style ‐ an effect that has been associated with the magical powers of satirical poetry since the birth of comedy in ancient Greek phallic rituals. The comic response in art is always complex, and nowhere is the complexity more evident than in these two novels of post‐War Spain.

A Simple Question of Symmetry: Psyche as Structure in "Tiempo de Silencio"

OF THE FEW WORKS that Luis Martin-Santos has left us, roughly half belong to a genre that might be called philosophical psychiatry.' In these forbiddingly abstruse treatises, the author combines modern psychological theory and German philosophy into a pessimistic and jargon-ridden explanation of the mind of man. One imagines that most readers find these labyrinthine abstractions more confusing than illuminating. Since such rarified intellection appears to shed little light on the more concrete, more topical obscurities of Martin-Santos' fiction, it is not surprising that critics of his splendid novel, Tiempo de silencio,2 have largely chosen to ignore the existential psychoanalysis that obsessed its author. Instead, the novel has almost invariably been discussed as a roman engage. This approach has brought much that is valuable to the surface, for the novel is unquestionably a critique of modern Spain,3 but as a consequence of this sociological bias the philosophical and psychological ideas which underlie the work and give it a more universal significance have been relatively neglected.4