Understanding Juan Benet: New Perspectives by Benjamin Fraser (review)

One might be excused for thinking Ben Fraser has tilted at windmills with his latest contribution, which sets out to help readers make sense of the writings of Juan Benet by attempting to combine civil engineering, Bergsonian philosophy, and cultural geography into a coherent explanatory framework. To the skeptic, such an amalgamation of seemingly disparate subject matters may smack of scholarly alchemy, conveniently combining in a single monograph recent intellectual issues that grace the pages of Fraser’s previous publications, which are legion.

And yet, much like Cervantes’s anachronistic knight, Fraser deserves praise for gaining much where much has been ventured. If the world of Benet is as “dazzlingly complex” as Randolph Pope suggests it is on the dusk jacket of Fraser’s book, then readers should not be surprised to find that Fraser has, in his slender volume (136 pages of text and notes), produced a fair share of gold from his scholarly alchemy.

To get at this gold, Fraser first sets the parameters of his focus, and thus readers’ expectations. His study is neither a compendium of previous Benetian scholarship nor an exegesis of Benet’s major works (3). Rather, it offers “new perspectives that allow us to gain a greater appreciation of the themes and qualities most central to Benet’s work as a whole” (17). Specifically, the themes of civil engineering, Bergsonian philosophy, and cultural geography, which comprise chapters two through four, respectively.

In his first chapter, Fraser offers an overview of the Spanish Civil War, drawing (primarily, though not solely) on Gerald Brenan’s seminal study and a Benet essay Fraser finds unfortunately peripheral in Benetial scholarship, ¿Qué fue la guerra civil? He sees a common thread tying together Spanish society’s prewar preoccupation with the “agrarian question,” the effects of the war on Spanish land and territory, and Benet’s singular interest in, and literary focus on, landscape. Given the explanatory intent of the Understanding series, as well as Fraser’s own intellectual interest in spatiality, it is unfortunate that a map or two was not included to orient readers less familiar with the war. That said, Fraser effectively links the significance of landscape in Benet’s depiction of Región to the role of land and territory (the agrarian question) in the war.

Fraser’s emphasis on land and landscape provides for a smooth transition to chapter two, in which he links Benet’s literature to his concrete engagement with the land as a civil engineer. He sees Benet’s involvement in, and writings about, public works as engaging with figures like Costa, who looked to material explanations for, and solutions to, Spain’s uneven process of modernization and, by extension, social strife. For instance, he notes how in Benet’s writings, “the bridge becomes a synecdoche for the historical and ideological tensions of the civil war... it symbolizes more universal themes of difference and (potential if frustrated) reconciliation” (52).

In chapter three, Fraser discusses Benet’s Bergsonism in Benet’s El angel del señor abandona a Tobías, “Un extempore,” Una meditación (specifically Bergson’s ideas on time and memory), and La inspiración y el estilo. Key to understanding Bergson, for Fraser, is recognizing the French philosopher’s insistence on the “fundamental reality of a temporal experience that is fluid, ever changing, and ultimately irreducible to spatial models” (55). And yet complicating matters is the fact that the human intellect essentially spatializes time (i.e., seeks to fix it in “static forms and immobile concepts”) in an effort to understand this reality (55). Fraser summarizes how Benet’s Bergsonism manifests in his writings in this way: “By plunging themselves headlong into the past, Benet’s narrators and characters isolate themselves from others, cut short the very possibility of action in the present, and detach themselves from a shifting and changing duration to relieve fragmented moments of the past in isolation from others” (66). He concludes the chapter by linking Benet’s notions of inspiration and style to the...