Description:
Octavia Paz has said of Ramón Gómez de la Serna that he was «the great Spanish writer: the Writer or, better yet, Writing»,! la escritura, the Spanish equivalent of the Structuralists’ pet-word l’écriture. That is how prolific and pervasive a writer Gómez de la Serna was in his heyday. Paz compares Ramón (as he is known in Hispanic letters) to a modern Lope de Vega and agrees with the praise heaped on him by Valéry Larbaud, the French critic and translator who introduced the Spaniard to the Paris scene. «There was a time», Paz goes on, «when modernity spoke through Gómez de la Serna. He was so new that he continues to be so... With Ramón Gómez de la Serna and a few others... modern Spanish and Spanish American poetry is born ... speaking prose ... as a double heresy: prosaism and cosmopolitanism»,

It is a [act that Ramón is exclusively a prose writer (the few poems he ever wrote were promptly disavowed) and it is also a fact that Spanish aoant-garde begins in the twenties to take on a prose quality we are now more able to appreciate. Yet long before Ramón’s verbal dynamics had realized their full potential, his nonchalant use of metaphor had iniiltrated all spheres of Spanish literature. In a stimulating though very uneven book, Ramón Gómez de la Serna en sus obras.’ José Camón Aznar has succeeded in giving us a rudimentary impression of that infiltration. His bibliography of works by Ramón contains 189 books and essays published separately. It does not include ephemeral pieces which appeared in magazines and newspapers.


TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface..…xi

Introduction…..1

I. A Generic Setting for Ramón’s Novels..…5

II. El Incongruente, or The Image of Destiny…..26

III. El Novelista, or The Image of Inspiration…..37

IV. Rebeca!, or The Image of Illusion…..67

V. El Hombre Perdido, or The Image of Vacuity..…93

VI. The Novels of the Nebula: An Interpretive Synthesis…..131

Epilogue…..160

Supplementary notes…..163
List of Works consulted.....171