Making Time with Pedro Salinas: Víspera del gozo (1926)

Making Time with Pedro Salinas:

Víspera del gozo (1926)

The twentieth-century Spanish writer Pedro Salinas (1891–1951) loved the elements of modern life. In addition to dedicating poems to city streets, cinema, and automobiles, he avidly pored over newspapers and train schedules.¹ We can easily imagine these two forms of reading occupying Salinas as he traveled to and fro between his university postings in different cities—Paris (1914–1917), Cambridge (1922–1923), and Seville (1919–1928)—and Madrid, his hometown and the heart of his literary activities. While we do not know if these commutes inspired Salinas's second published book, reading and travel figure notably in it, as do train stations, hotels, and other aspects of urban living.

Now considered "one of the standard-bearers of vanguard art" (Spires, Transparent 144), Víspera del gozo appeared in 1926; its title maintained the forward-looking register of Presagios (1924), Salinas's earlier collection of poems, and it bore the newly-minted pedigree of Nova Novorum, the series of avant-garde prose sponsored by Ortega's Revista de Occidente. The volume contains seven narratives, six of which concern a character on the cusp—the víspera—of an event: in "Mundo cerrado," Andrés is on a train to visit a friend; Ángel spends most of "Cita de los tres" wondering if Matilde will arrive; Jorge fritters away a couple of hours before meeting his girlfriend, "Aurora de verdad"; and so on. Indeed, nothing much happens, and Antonio Candau, following Gustavo Pérez Firmat, has remarked that Salinas's book typifies vanguard texts in that it represents a "víspera de mucho y fiesta de nada" ("El presente" 42).²

The absent "mucho" of Candau's pithy description, however, has been the object of some discussion, as readers have focused on the missing, or at least long-delayed figure of the woman in Víspera. They see her variously as an invisible muse generating the narrative (Del Pino), an elusive emblem for the undecidability of reading (Gertz; Candau, "Entrada"), and a stereotypical object of desire (Spires, "New Art"). Others have concentrated on the awaited reunion with the female character, seeing it as a recuperation of pre-lapsarian unity (Feal, "Lo real") or, in a similar vein, the achievement of an all-encompassing moment of transcendence (Hartfield-Méndez).

Although these are worthwhile approaches, I would like to attend to the other half of Candau's characterization. Is it true that Víspera, as a "fiesta de nada," celebrates nothing, is about nothing? Certainly it contains no plot per se and very little action. Its characters do not develop in any noteworthy fashion, and at the end of the texts nothing seems resolved. But if these missing narrative dimensions constitute the "nada," Víspera also contains an "algo." Ubiquitous and pervasive, this "algo" appears in the first sentence of the book—"Pasó dos horas leyendo" (9)—and then everywhere after that: "cinco minutos más tarde" (11), "dos años de vida" (22), "las seis de la tarde" (31), "las seis menos cuarto" (49), "diez minutos" (54), "ese cuarto de hora" (59), "las diez" (87), "las ocho y media" (87), "treinta minutos más tarde" (90), "hace diez años" (97), "casi un mes" (97), "la una y treinta y cinco" (123), "las once y media" (146), "las ocho y cinco" (148).³ Even in the one text, "Delirios del chopo y el ciprés," that reduces the human element to a framing device—a train passenger disembarks to meditate on the merits of movement versus immobility, represented by the poplar and cypress—time consciousness remains an overriding presence in the images of months, seasons, and the passage from day to night.

Why this obsession with time? What did Salinas want to convey about it, and how might he have developed his ideas? One obvious answer points to Proust, master of time...