I am in the process of finalizing my reading lists for my preliminary exam. It's actually an enjoyable process to dig back through texts and commentaries that I have not seen for awhile. It's like returning to a place I have never been before. Glancing at the index to a commentary on Martín-Santos'
Tiempo de silencio, I noticed an interesting subsection called "La humanización de los 'objetos'". Due to the borderline naturalism at work in Martín-Santos' text, humans beings are imprisoned in their social surroundings. The human as "object" is a given in
Tiempo de silencio. Díaz Valcárcel is interested in how dehumanized figures seem to suddenly regain their human "plenitude". Characters suddenly pop out of their stereotypes and decrepitude state and act as if they were full of exuberance. Of course, this is a strength of
Tiempo de silencio. It departs from the gutters and despair that dominate much of Spanish 1950s social realism.
For my part, I recently wrote on the nonhumans at work in
Tiempo de destrucción, which often possess more "agency" than their human counterparts. Perhaps we should re-write this subsection and call it "La valorización de los objetos", leaving all ironies aside about humans as objects and wonder about the rats, science experiments and chabolas hard at work in this text.
This is really interesting. I've also been looking at objects, in my case as they appear in testimonial literatures and find that often there is a concentrated focus on the description of the object, actively imbuing the agency that was lacking for the detained person in the object that is unaffected by human circumstances. Almost as if by nature of being inanimate the object enjoys a privileged existence, out of reach of the violence and this privilege is acknowledged, valued and then questioned by the writing survivor.
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MC, it is a really productive way of thinking through literature and culture. As for testimonial genres, this recent video (http://vimeo.com/29092112) from Ian Bogost might be useful in its discussion of localized encounters on the level of the esthetic. I think he makes a good point about suspending socio-political commentary -- momentarily -- in order to contemplate what is going on the surface of art.
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