Benjamín Jarnés: Aspects of the Dehumanized Novel

Extract

Ortega has maintained in his Ideas sobre la novela that action is not the essence of a novel, a principle which he corroborates by the fact that most plots are readily forgotten. For Ortega, the novel's essence is pure being or nonaction, manifested by the state of its characters. One of the most conscientious practitioners of Ortegan theory was Benjamín Jarnés, who in Locura y muerte de nadie (Madrid, 1929) wrote a novel revealing human reality stripped of its vital core: action, passion, and sentiment. The process of devoiding reality of its real content while leaving a mere semblance of reality as the remainder is, of course, “dehumanization” in the Ortegan definition of the term. Two further aspects of Jarnés' novel—the absence of a personality in his protagonist and the use of a highly abstract, cerebral language—serve to supplement the meaning of “dehumanization” at least as far as narrative fiction is involved. But Locura y muerte… also commands attention because its author reaches out into areas of cultural and philosophical significance in order to determine the causes of a comparable dehumanization in contemporary life at the same time that he depicts this life fictionally. My procedure in this essay will be to discuss first Jarnés' notion of the interplay between the masses and the individual personality; then, in the light of this, the attitudes underlying his approach to this particular novel; and, finally, the techniques involved in the verbalization of his novel.