There are authors with whom one meets at a given moment and, beyond that initial appointment, there is no reunion. Lives, from the first time, run parallel and separate. I suppose the reasons will be many and varied.
Let me draw attention to a case of misunderstanding marked by what we might call textbook syndrome. I was able to verify on many occasions that the life of a reader is gradually moving away from the authors whose books were required reading or appeared enclosed in the corresponding bold on the page of a Language and Literature book. Are readings or references bound by obligation and study. The reader, if he has not lost his way, flies towards the brilliant future of the new. It is logical: we have all done it, and along the way there are monuments reduced to ruins.
I remember when, with all the intentions in the world, I proposed in various reading clubs the return to two authors who lived under the weight of bold, of the oblivion of the ordinary reader: Meowfrom Benito Perez Galdosy Storiesfrom Ignatius Aldecoa. The experience, I daresay, was somewhat unsettling. As if the statues in a museum came down from their pedestals and began to walk. What determines a classic, citing Italo Calvinois his ability to never stop telling us things and not the amount of dust that can accumulate on his works.
From then on, Galdós and Aldecoa were never the same, setting us up for a future in which publishing news will continue to race to see who sits first in the queen’s armchair.
The writer that concerns me today, Luis Martin-Santos (1924-1964), has suffered, I believe, the same fate as the narrators mentioned above. Author of a landmark of the Spanish narrative of the 20th century: Time of silence (1962), a book that, for generations, has been required reading, suffered from the false belief that, from the age of seventeen, it was already read.
A novel that, like other contemporaries, reflected in its paragraphs the grayness and roughness that was lived then, stood out very brilliantly for the bold and groundbreaking treatment of language that distinguished it from the prevailing realism, thus setting foot in the future. and denying some stylistic habits that Martín-Santos found cumbersome.
Time of silence it was a draft of fresh air and a pike in Flanders. And there it was, amplifying the expansive wave with a new novel entitled destruction time, when death caught up with him prematurely. We are, therefore, before an unfinished novel that Gutenberg Galaxy now edited with rigor and enthusiasm under the responsibility and merit of Mauricio Jalon. The reader should not be dissuaded by the fact that he is faced with an unfinished book. Martín-Santos, despite everything, left enough material to have before us a novel and not a pile of scattered papers.
In this sense, the work of editing has been essential, incorporating elements not included in the known edition, dated 1975 and in charge of Jose-Carlos Mainer. I believe that the publisher’s decisions bring the novel closer to our times without undermining its original foundations.
destruction time forms a diptych together with Time of silencewith a somewhat expressionist, dislocated look at reality, which manages to exacerbate its grotesqueness and shame.
The recently published work by Martín-Santos is an initiation story with a “boy” who has just become a judge in a small provincial town and is accompanied by the insidious shadow of declassification. But, with the ground of the novel being like this, destruction time takes flight towards a polyphonic discourse, divided into several planes or areas that Martín-Santos alternates not chronologically, but responding to structural and narrative criteria.
The style and tone are impetuous and resounding. There is no fear of loaded phrases, on the contrary: stylistic richness is sharpness of gaze and slap to the assumed, well thought out. The ambition of the work grows in proportion to the milestone of Time of silence.
That’s why this post destruction time it must be greeted as an event, and I am not very sure that it was so. Compared to the 1975 edition, this edition incorporates a text by Martín-Santos himself at the beginning, unequivocally entitled, what i want to tell, which acts as a poetic or declaration of intent. Its inclusion seems key to an overview:
“The life of a man is not a precise figure. In this it differs from the work of art.”
“But if I have taken up the pen, it is to go beyond those accidental, mechanical and maniform determinations.”
“Confused words! Already at the beginning of my task I feel the ineptitude of the language to convey what is important! […] I’ll have to demolish the language.”
“I would like the rhythm of my story to be musical, despite being totally amusical, blind to the capture of sound beauty. It would be at least like me – from my ignorance – I imagine that the musical work is. A succession of themes of which some are repeated and amplified over time, while others barely begun fall into definitive silence”.
There is no place for an orthodox narrative structure. That was never in the spirit of Martín-Santos. The musical structure, with its loops and reverberations, is better suited to the novelist’s sensibility. Repetition and silence: the work, life. Beyond those accidental, mechanical and maniform determinations. This is how literature advances. Not in the shadow of repeated formulas.
read today, destruction time puts in evidence contemporary works who see themselves as one step ahead. The ability to get ahead has never had anything to do with chronology; the age of writing has never coincided with the biological age.
For this reason, like restorers of old canvases, editors, critics, commentators, prescribers of all stripes, readers, in short, we have the challenge of freeing our literary past from stigma. Gutenberg Galaxy he has done his thing.
‘time of destruction’
Author: Luis Martin-Santos
Edited by Mauricio Jalon
Editorial: Gutenberg Galaxy
352 pages. €21.90