Psychiatrist and writer Luis Martín-Santos (Larache, Morocco, 1924–Vitoria, Spain, 1964) has been considered by critics on both sides of the Atlantic as one the most predominant Spanish writers from the twentieth century. The impact of his novel Tiempo de silencio (1962) and its repercussions have established him as one of the most influential authors of his time in Spain. Although this work received much attention since it was first published through the end of the twentieth century, scholarly interest in it has been scarce in the last fifteen years. This lack of new reflection on Martín-Santos has put both the author and his work in a time of oblivion.
Luis Martín-Santos died in a car accident on January 21, 1964. 2014 was then the fiftieth anniversary of such a tragic event, as well as the eightieth anniversary of his birth. No major commemorations were organized in Spain to remember such an important figure of the Spanish cultural and political life of the 1950s. This is a sign of how much he has been forgotten and the impact of his work relegated to a second place despite his relevance. Martín-Santos’ writing accomplishments have been praised by most of the most reputed Peninsularists all over the world: Gonzalo Sobejano, José-Carlos Mainer, Jo Labanyi, Jesús Pérez-Magallón among others. Moreover, he has also been praised by Comparatists such as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht who defends that Tiempo de silencio belongs to a small group of novels represented by James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu, and Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, that has in many ways dominated the literature of the twentieth century.
I intend to bring attention back to this contemporary Spanish writer and his writing and I do so proposing a new reading of his fictional work in which the political drive—prevalent in its criticism—is not the main guideline to its interpretation. Instead, I propose a reading based on the impact of Martín-Santos’ psychiatric essays on his work in fiction—mainly in his novel Tiempo de silencio and in his posthumous fragment Tiempo de destrucción (1975)—and their consequences, taking the idea of patriarchal masculinity and its impact on Martín-Santos’ characters as the path to follow in my exploration.1
In focusing on Martín-Santos’ own concept of literature as “desacralizadora” ‘demystifying’ and “sacro-genética” ‘sacro-genetic’ (Whittle), I demonstrate he was contesting not just the Franco regime but, moreover, the patriarchal system and functions of masculinity.2 Luis Martín-Santos declared at least twice that he believed in the twofold function of the writer; first in an interview with American scholar Janet Winecoff Díaz and then in a conversation with Catalan publisher Josep Maria Castellet that the latter published after Martín-Santos’ death. I confer on the novels a universal character by proving that they constitute an intriguing illustration of Martín-Santos’ concept of literature—and its responsibility to society—so influenced by existentialist psychiatry at the time, rendering the spectrum of their relevance far greater than that of a critical political portrait of the Spain of the 1950s.
My reading of these novels goes beyond the political. I do not refute existing scholarship, which focuses on the political regime contextualized in the narrations, the dictatorial regime of General Francisco Franco (1939–1975), because this is clearly a part of Martín-Santos’ project. Martín-Santos was an important member of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and suffered imprisonment three times for this reason, therefore a fierce opponent to fascism. Nevertheless, I am considering a distinct reading of his two main creative pieces that finds in Martín-Santos’ works a new dimension.
The resemblance between Tiempo de silencio and late 1940s and early 1950s Spain has been pointed out by many critics. The psychiatric charge conferred on all characters, however, and the elaboration of the relationships they establish within and among themselves—from the main ones to the supporting—and their consequences, have been less explored. I believe this is due to the fact that few have read his medical work and even fewer have linked it with a more psychosocial approach following a specific conceptual axis of thought. An accurate reading of those medical texts and their impact on the two novels leads to a deep revision of the reason why—beyond the political constrictions of the regime—the characters are trapped in their lives. There is an inner control that makes them act in a particular way in what seems to be a fatal pursuit of unhappiness. Beyond the dictatorial repression and its constraints—the legal system of the time—there is a much stronger and deeper force that makes Martín-Santos’ characters do the things they do, that leads them to frustration and sadness. To fully understand what Martín-Santos presents in his creative pieces, there is a need to reflect on them through an extremely detailed reading of his psychiatric work. I prove how much the latter influenced the former, and how it provides a framework for it. His vocation for psychiatry was initially awakened by the fact that his mother suffered from profound chronic depression. Later, he became a medical doctor and specialized in psychiatry at a graduate level, then became a scholar in his field and practiced as the director of an asylum in San Sebastián specializing in schizophrenia and alcoholism. He was intellectually shaped by the two most important psychiatrists of the time in Spain: Pedro Laín Entralgo and Juan José López Ibor, supporters of the Franco regime. The work of his two mentors and their German influences were considered very rightist and even fascist by the majority of critics and academics in the Western academic world of the time. Authors such as Nietzsche and Heidegger were indeed well-reputed and studied in Spain at that time, their influence decreasing in the seventies. Both, Laín Entralgo and López Ibor understood psychiatry as praxis of phenomenology. The latter developed a sophisticated theoretical corpus on it while practicing it medically. Since Spain remained being a fascist country after World War II, what might have been considered “suspicious” German authors’ works in the rest of the West achieved enormous success and allowed a country that had lost most of its intellectuals (in exile) to shine in a field that was “frozen” everywhere else. This fact allowed Spanish existential psychiatry of the time a level of sophistication unusual and nonexistent in any other discipline. It also allowed important German philosophic works from the first half of the twentieth century to resonate in a new environment increasing their presence and influence.
American scholar Wai Chee Dimock reflects in his essay “A theory of Resonance” (1997) on how a text sounds when it is read twenty, two hundred or even thousands of years after it was written in what she defines as a diachronic historical reading. Dimock declares:
Modeled on the traveling frequencies of sound, it suggests a way to think about what (following Ralph Ellison) I call the traveling frequencies of literary texts: frequencies received and amplified across time, moving farther and farther from their points of origin, causing unexpected vibrations in unexpected places. A theory of resonance puts the temporal axis at the center of literary studies. Texts are emerging phenomena, activated and to some extent constituted by the passage of time, by their continual transit through new semantic networks, modifying their tonality as they proceed. The “object” of literary studies is thus an object with an unstable ontology, since a text can resonate only in so far as it is touched by the effects of its travels. Across time, every text must put up with readers on different wave lengths, who come at it tangentially and tendentiously, who impose semantic losses as well as gains. Across time, every text is a casualty and a beneficiary. (1061)
So far, Martín-Santos’ creative work has been traveling for fifty years at least, and has mostly resonated with a political tone; few scholarly works have been devoted to an exhaustive study of Martín-Santos’ psychiatric work and its impact on both Tiempo de silencio and Tiempo de destrucción. Jo Labanyi’s Ironía e historia en “Tiempo de silencio” could be considered an exception as it acknowledges the importance of the psychiatric side of Martín-Santos and elaborates on the existentialist traits in Tiempo de silencio and on the impact of Freud on the work. However, there is no reflection on Heidegger’s influence on it. Furthermore, it is mostly based on Tiempo de silencio, references to Tiempo de destrucción are not very frequent in her analysis, besides Jo Labanyi does not develop links with the idea of masculinity. In my opinion, the relevance of including Tiempo de destrucción is crucial to fully unde...