Martín-Santos and the Bildungsroman

So I will be in Lexington to talk about Martín-Santos' final, neglected work Tiempo de destrucción.  While some dismiss the work as un(der)developed, as compared to his "obra maestra" Tiempo de silencio, I think Tdd actually surpasses his first novel.  In part, it gets beyond the parodic revulsion of Tds and actually looks towards building something that used to be called sincerity.

My reading of the novel mutated (I won't say evolved) over the course of several months due to a vast array of other (para)texts resting (actively) around my office.  Graham Harman's Tool-Being, an encouraging discussion of Heidegger, is certainly one of these books.  I really like his brief discussion of bilden- to building vs. forming: a translation based on a homonym rather than a transference of meaning.  Sometimes relating on the level of signifiers "transfers" another swath of meanings.  This thought made me think about Tdd as a Bildungsroman in reverse.  It is kind of like an anti-novela, but so much more... 

Here is the abstract:

Although Martín-Santos did not finish his work on Tiempo de destrucción, its ruins offer several contributions towards an understanding of his oeuvre. Instead of limiting itself to the scope of “los paisajes urbanos” in Tiempo de silencio, Tdd focuses on multiple sites physically and psychologically.  Indeed, as many Spanish writers expressed dismay with a “simple” social realism of the 1940s and 50s, Martín-Santos develops a novel of dialectic realism, relentlessly focusing on the relation between subject and the environment.  Tdd begins to unravel an osmosis of ideas and things in an almost inexplicable mesh.  The net result distorts the “superhombre castellano” into a satisficing strategy: it seems to work until we look too close.  Indeed, Agustín, the protagonist finds himself increasingly at odds with the gendered paradigms offered by “el hombre varón”.  Martín-Santos entangles this infamous noventayochista individual in a process similar to what Timothy Morton has recently described as queering nature.  Instead of reifying nature as a pure landscape outside of the metropolis, queer ecology thinks about it as a “perverse meme splice” in order to better re-evaluate the ambience of the home (oikos) studied in ecology.  Focusing on the obsessive repetitions and parodies in Tdd, I argue that these fragments of an unfinished novel begin to redistribute the role of science and psychoanalysis found in Tds, developed in a juxtaposed poetic ambience between cityscape and countryside.  It offers a glimpse into an ecology of things as well as an ecology of mind.