5 - Ramón and the New Materialism: The Ecstasy of Objects

Summary

A ‘literary atom’, the greguería

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the new findings of modern physics reverberated through Spain, as elsewhere in the world, unsettling time-honoured beliefs in the solidity of matter and the groundedness of truth. Newspapers and magazines routinely featured news of scientific discoveries, often written in the new genre of ‘popular science’, thus providing the public with astonishing visions of the cosmos and the subatomic realm. Niels Bohr’s planetary model of the atom – a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons – suggested that seemingly solid matter consisted largely of empty space. Einstein's visit to Spain in 1923 prompted a media frenzy, as the press avidly covered his lectures, meetings with local scientists, and events held in his honour. In the wake of the discovery of subatomic particles and relativity theory, matter had suddenly acquired a paradoxical and ambiguous status, revealed as at once solid and ephemeral.

For Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the new physics exerted a powerful intellectual attraction, given that its field of inquiry intersected with his lifelong literary practice, above all in his Greguerías. A literary micro-genre of his own invention, the greguería is a humorous, metaphoric aphorism that posits the most unlikely likenesses among discrete things. To take a few examples from Novísimas greguerías (1929):

El automóvil que se exhibe en pleno relucimiento de aluminio es como una coctelera de las velocidades, las distancias y los peligros. (The automobile that displays itself, trimmed with gleaming chrome, is like a cocktail shaker of speed, distance, and danger.) (62)

Las rúbricas azules del gas Neon son las que legitiman la calle moderna, avalando el cheque granviario. (The blue flourishes of Neon gas are what legitimizes the modern street, endorsing the Main-Streetian check.) (24)

Existe la película del melón. El que se come todas las rajas de un melón se ha comido la serie de todos los episodios del ‘film’ melónico. (There exists the movie made of melon. Those who consume all the slices of a melon have eaten up the entire series of episodes of the melonic film.) (60)

El ventilador, además de afeitar el aire, borra las ideas.