Tiempo De Research Articles

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-

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.

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.

The Character of Lorenza and the Moral of Cervantes' El viejo celoso

THE CHARACTER OF LORENZA AND THE MORAL OF CERVANTES' EL VIEJO CELOSO* PATRICIA KENWORTHY, Vassar College Marital infidelity is clearly a theme that intrigued Cervantes, for his works contain several cases of adultery: the two versions of El celoso extreme ño, the «Curioso impertinente» of Don Quijote Part I, and the two entremeses , La cueva de Salamanca and£7 viejo celoso. In each case it is the wife who commits, or tries to commit (Leonarda's affair is frustrated by the unexpected return of her husband) or is assumed to have committed adultery . However, since the principal guilt for the sin lies with the husband, the critical focus has generally centered on the husband's character.(l) The woman's infidelity is seen as merely a facet of her husband's monomania. Camila's affair with Lotario is created by Anselmo's inordinate curiosity; Isabela, Leonora, and Lorenza are victims of their husbands' excessive jealousy; and Leonarda's success in deceiving her husband is a result of Pancracio's gullibility and obsession with necromancy. In this paper I would like to shift the critical optic to the woman, in particular to Lorenza, the unfaithful child bride ofEl viejo celoso. Eugenio Asensio argues convincingly that the entremés is a comic reworking of the plot of El celoso extremeño.(2) The detailed psychological portrait of Carrizales' prodigal career and obsessive jealousy, Loaysa's deliberate assault on the house/fortress, and the complicity of the chorus of servants in the novela are sacrificed to the rapid, farcical rhythm of the stylized deception of the entremés. The tragic moral intensity of the novela gives way to the immorality of Lorenza's implausibly rapid fall from innocence to hypocrisy. According to Asensio, this generic shift «convierte los personajes en títeres de retablo. »(3) Without wishing to exaggerate the psychological depth of Lorenza's character, I would like to trace in fuller detail her development. Lorenza is an intriguing figure for not only does she sin and escape punishment-in direct contravention of the literary edicts of Trentbut she also evolves from puppet to puppeteer. In this brief comic interlude we witness the birth of a woman and an artist. It is her role which gives an ironic twist to the harmonious resolution and message of the entremés as defined in the interlude's closing song. El viejo celoso opens with Lorenza's awakening from her child-like ignorance and simplicity. Up until the moment Cañizares forgets to lock the door of his house/fortress, Lorenza is, in effect, a non-person, a creature of Cañizares' obsession. The seventy-year old Cañizares married in order to have a pet, a plaything that would provide him companionship and 103 104Bulletin ofthe Comediantes amusement. Unable to consummate the marriage, he sought a widow to mourn his death-«me casé con doña Lorencica, pensando tener en ella. . . persona que. . .me cerrase los ojos al tiempo de mi muerte»(4)-not a wife. He bought a poor, naive, fifteen-year-old girl and then constructed an elaborate safe in which to guard his treasure. Inordinately jealous and desperately afraid of being cuckolded, he attempted to insure Lorenza's fidelity by the extravagant, but ultimately useless, precaution of isolating her from the rest ofthe world. After a year in this prison, Lorenza is sexually frustrated and bored to death. As she complains to her niece, Cristina:«estoy tan aburrida, que no me falta sino echarme una soga al cuello, por salir de tan mala vida» (206). Encouraged by Cristina and their Celestina-like neighbor, Ortigosa, Lorenza decides it is better to sin on the side of life-sexthan on the side of death-suicide. But how? In El celoso extremeño it is Loaysa who, attracted by the mystery of the house/fortress, breaks in to steal its treasure. The young Sevillian galán disguises himself as a musician, ingratiates himself with the black eunuch sentry and the female servants, and then provides the sleeping potion to insure that his amorous conquest of Leonora will not be detected by Carrizales. In contrast, the galán of the entremés is a silent...

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

The Impact of the Wars of Independence on the Institutional Life of the New Kingdom of Granada

In the following study we are presenting, as a supplement to our latest book, Las Instituciones del Nuevo Reino de Granada al tiempo de la independencia, a documentary study on the repercussions which the wars of independence had upon the institutional life of the provinces of New Granada that were still in the hands of the Spanish.Many of the documents which are cited here show us the innermost idéas of the Spanish leaders in those difficult days when so many institutions were crumbling not only overseas but in Spain itself. By comparing documents concerning the metropolis and the colony, we can gain a fairly good idea of the institutional comings and goings, the efforts to obtain regularity in the functioning of the various governmental bureaus, and the useless attempts to control the uncontrollable.