Metaphoric Commerce: The Greguerías novísimas and Their Circumstance

Metaphoric Commerce: The GreguerÃ-as novÃ-simas and Their Circumstance Juli Highfill is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan , Ann Arbor. She has recently edited a collection on the economy of cultural production in Hispanic literature for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. She is the author o/Portraits of Excess: Reading Character in the Modern Spanish Novel (Society of Spanish and SpanishAmerican Studies 1999) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "The Vitality of Things: The Spanish Avant-Garde in Commodity Culture, 19181936 " where she explores the intersections of economics and literature. .. .hubo un momento en que la modernidad habló por la boca de Gómez de la Serna. (Octavio Paz 187) I. Exchanging Things Consisting of a single sentence or paragraph, ^greguerÃ-a is a small epiphany, a brief insrant of (mis)perception that brings two or more disparate objects into a surprising , humorous relationship of equivalence; hence, Ramon Gómez de la Sernas succinct definition for his invented genre: "metaphor + humor = greguerÃ-a?1 Ramon's metaphoric practice is extreme in that it manages to unite remote, seemingly unequivocal terms in a discordia concours, or similarity in dissimilare (Cardona 167).2 And across thousands of greguerÃ-as, the sheer quantity of these surprising analogies reaches a critical mass that works to reweave the web of relations among things. By means of this multi-associative capacity, observes Luis López Molina, "seres, objetos, aspectos, actitudes, acciones , funciones y comportamiento se mezclan, encabalgan, interpretan y sustituyen, produciendo las consecuencias más insólitas" (113). Consider a series of examples, proceeding from simple to more complex metaphorical structures—all drawn from NovÃ-simas greguerÃ-as (1929)3: Los canguros son los bolsistas del Parque Zoológico. (107) El automóvil que se exhibe en pleno relucimiento de aluminio es como una coctelera de las velocidades, las distancias y los peligros. (62) Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005 120 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies El volante de automóvil es el atril en que va la novela de lo por ver. (56) Los relojes eléctricos ponen inyecciones eléctricas al tiempo, ya caduco , arterioesclerótico y dispépsico. (102) In the first three greguerÃ-as, we find simple, explicit metaphorical structures in which a copula, the verb ser, establishes an equivalence between disparate terms. The equation in the first example, likening kangaroos to stock brokers, turns upon a mere pun on the term "bolsista." The second greguerÃ-a creates a metaphor based on the visual resemblance between a chrome-trimmed automobile and a cocktail shaker. But this visual similarity serves only as a point of departure for a more significant equivalence based on dynamic functions, for the auto-coctelero mixes cocktails of velocities, distances and dangers. In the third example, a condensed but equally dynamic greguerÃ-a, a steering wheel is equated with a lectern, which in turn suggests a second metaphor likening the ever-changing road-side to the moving pictures in a reader's mind. The final more complicated greguerÃ-a dispenses with the copula and leaves the series of equivalencies implicit: electric clocks (as doctors) inject electricity (as medicine) into an aged and sickly Father Time. Through hundreds of such absurd and ludic equations, the greguerÃ-as evoke a world gone awry, akin to Batailles vision of a "purely parodie" world: Ever since sentences started to circu- ¿zft? in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth. (5) Of course with tongue-in-cheek, Bataille is likening copula to copulation, and similarly , Ramon's greguerÃ-as exhibit en masse a palpable desire for unbridled miscegenistic couplings. Through their countless nonsensical equations, things enter inro commerce , swapping properties, trading places, or becoming other things. Ramón argued that an unfettered metaphorical practice was particularly pertinent to the modern age: La metáfora es, después de todo, la expresión...