‘Callar, callar, es la gran aspiración que nadie cumple ni aun después de muerto’: A Reading of ‘Cuando fui mortal’ by Javier Marías
2007; Routledge; Volume: 85; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14753820701791510
ISSN1478-3428
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Modern Theater Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size *Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana, 3 vols (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002–07), I: Fiebre y lanza (2002), 15. Notes *Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana, 3 vols (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002–07), I: Fiebre y lanza (2002), 15. 1Isabel Cuñado, El espectro de la herencia: la narrativa de Javier Marías, Portada Hispánica 17 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 27. 2Javier Marías, Mientras ellas duermen. Edición ampliada (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000), 11. Given that Julián Marías, Javier's father, published his journalistic pieces in El Noticiero Universal, the newspaper in which the story appeared, throughout the 1960s and beyond, it seems likely that it was he who sent it off for consideration. See Julián Marías, Una vida presente. Memorias, 3 vols (Madrid: Alianza, 1988–1989), II: 1951–1975 (1989), 164, 225, 292. 3Javier Marías, Donde todo ha sucedido: al salir del cine, ed. Inés Blanca Muñoz (Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 2005), 62. 4Javier Marías, ‘Por qué no vuelven’, El País Semanal, 14 May 2006. 5Critics to have drawn attention to this aspect of Marías’ interest in ghosts include Cuñado, El espectro de la herencia, 29–31 and David Roas, ‘Perdidos en Redonda: Javier Marías y lo fantástico’, in Cuadernos de narrativa: Javier Marías, ed. Irene Andres-Suárez and Ana Casas (Madrid: Univ. de Neuchâtel/Arco, 2005), 217–30 (pp. 217–18). 6Javier Marías, Vida del fantasma: cinco años más tenue (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2001), 19–20. 7 Vida del fantasma, 20. 8Juan Gabriel Vásquez, ‘ “Tengo a veces la sensación de no estar ya vivo” ’, Lateral, 82 (2001), 13–15 (p. 15). 9Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco, ed., with introduction and notes, by Elide Pittarello (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006), 21. 10Alicia Molero de la Iglesia contends that it is Marías’ ‘tendencia psicologista […] la que mejor acogida tiene en sus cuentos, filtrándose a través de ella una conciencia por la que se vislumbra un sujeto creador muy próximo al de otras manifestaciones de su narrativa’; see her ‘El narrador psicológico de Javier Marías’, in El cuento en la década de los noventa, ed. José Romera Castillo and Francisco Gutiérrez Carbajo (Madrid: Visor, 2001), 257–66 (p. 265). Unfortunately, she offers this as the conclusion to an overview of his short-story output and does not elaborate in specific detail. The present article seeks to do so more fully. 11Interview conducted by Paul Ingendaay for the magazine BOMB in 2000. The text of this interview is available on the unofficial Marías website . 12Alexis Grohmann, Coming Into One's Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías, Portada Hispánica 13 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 25–54. 13 Mientras ellas duermen, 20. 14 Mientras ellas duermen, 20. 15Elide Pittarello, Entrevistos: Javier Marías (Barcelona: RqueR, 2005), 16–17. 18Fernando Savater, La infancia recuperada, 10th ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 2002 [1st ed. 1976]), 184. 19Savater, La infancia recuperada, 183–84. 16Javier Marías, Cuentos únicos, trans. Javier Marías and Alejandro García Reyes (Madrid: Siruela, 1995), 9. 17Marías has also written that, in La infancia recuperada, Savater ‘sin decirlo, bastante ha explicado sobre esta generación’, referring to the rootedness of many writers of their generation in the reading they undertook as youngsters; see Javier Marías, Literatura y fantasma: edición ampliada (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2001), 58. 21 Mientras ellas duermen, 16. 20 Vida del fantasma, 19. 22Javier Marías, Cuando fui mortal (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), 87. All further references are to this edition and appear in brackets in the text. 23The parallels between the narrator's father and Julián Marías, the father of the author, form an interesting subtext in this story. However, it is not my intention to explore them further here. 24Marías recently published an article in which he alluded to the death of his childhood doctor. This man, whose name was Castilla, shared several of the characteristics attributed to Arranz in ‘Cuando fui mortal’: these include his habit of speaking ‘entre dientes’ and placing soothing hands on the young Marías’ body. There is no question, of course, that Castilla, who the author evokes with great fondness, shared any of Arranz's less appealing traits. The article merely offers insight into how Mari′as’ childhood experiences have fed into his fiction (Javier Mari′as, ‘Una generación bien entera’, El País Semanal, 21 de octubre de 2007). 25Azucena Mollejo is wrong to maintain, as she does in her discussion of ‘Cuando fui mortal’, that the decisive factor had been her discovery of his philandering; see Mollejo's El cuento español de 1970 a 2000. Cuatro escritores de Madrid: Francisco Umbral, Rosa Montero, Almudena Grandes y Javier Marías (Madrid: Pliegas, 2002), 179. 26 Literatura y fantasma, 29–34. 27For a complete account of Julián Marías’ first trip to the United States, see Julián Marías, Una vida presente, II, 13–33. 30Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus, ed., with introduction and notes, by Robin Robbins (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2001), 130. 31Sir Thomas Browne, ‘La religión de un médico’ y ‘El enterramiento en urnas’, trans. with notes by Javier Marías (Madrid: Reino de Redonda, 2002), 240. 28Fernando Valls, ‘Un estado de crueldad o el opio del tiempo: los fantasmas de Javier Marías’, in Brujas, demonios y fantasmas en la literatura fantástica hispánica, ed. Jaume Pont (Lleida: Univ. de Lleida, 1999), 361–67 (p. 364); Enrique Turpin, ‘La sutil omnisciencia del fantasma: “Cuando fui mortal” de Javier Marías’, La Nueva Literatura Hispánica, 2 (1998), 127–42 (p. 130); Cuñado, El espectro de la herencia, 110. 29Javier Marías, El siglo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000), 13–14. 32See Elide Pittarello, ‘Haciendo tiempo con las cosas’, in Cuadernos de narrativa: Javier Marías, 17–48. 33In the essay ‘Mi libro favorito’ Marías wrote that his favourite of all the works that bear his name is his translation of Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. That novel in Marías’ eyes has the benefit of all Sterne's inventiveness and yet at the same time belongs at least in part to his skill. See Literatura y fantasma, 398–401. 34 La religión de un médico, 234. 35This passage, more than any other in ‘Cuando fui mortal’, reminds us that Marías’ preoccupations as a writer had shifted considerably in the period when he was writing Corazón tan blanco. The narrator's words here echo Juan Ranz's awareness of the precarious twists of fate that led to him being born. 36 Literatura y fantasma, 50. 37 Literatura y fantasma, 50. 38 Literatura y fantasma, 109. 39Browne, Religio Medici, 130. 40Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999), 113. 41The reappearance of this motif in Marías’ work may reflect a personal distaste for the stagnation of long-term cohabitation. See Pittarello, Entrevistos: Javier Marías, 34. 42Henry James, Washington Square, ed. Brian Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 220. Marías is an avid reader of James. 44Cuñado, El espectro de la herencia, 110. 43Marías has expressed his distaste for moral aims in literature on many occasions. See, for example, Pittarello, Entrevistos: Javier Marías, 28. 45Enrique Turpin suggests that the correct interpretation of ‘Cuando fui mortal’ relies on our realizing that Arranz is actually the narrator's father. The love affair between mother and family doctor would thus have been secretly devised by the adulterous couple (who did know one another before the Civil War began, we note) under cover of threats to the narrator's father; see Turpin, ‘La sutil omnisciencia del fantasma’, 138–40. Such an interpretation, though it cannot be categorically dismissed, strikes me as unlikely for several reasons. First, given that the narrator sets down the absolute knowledge he has gained concerning his childhood, it would be strange if he had not had access to such maternal scheming. Second, the affinities between Arranz and the narrator are more habits than genetic inheritance; the narrator is disgusted both at himself and the power of nurture over nature in the formation of his personality. 46William Shakespeare, Othello (London: Arden, 2003), 306. As well as the earlier evocation of Othello as an intertext for ‘Cuando fui mortal’, we note the recurrence of this Shakespearean image in Javier Marías, Negra espalda del tiempo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998), 89, 143, 282, 404. 47 Cuentos únicos, 183. The original English text can be found in Richard Hughes, A Moment of Time (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 140–45. 48 El siglo, 147. 49I would like to express my gratitude to Mr Eric Southworth and Dr Dominic Moran who were kind enough to read and comment on a draft of this piece.
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