Literatura y filosofía: Sartre, Martín-Santos y Bartleby

Abstract

Luis Martín Santos has been, after his soon death, one of the most unfairly forgotten Spanish intellectuals. This situation happens to be even more unjust considering the success of his novel “Time of Silence” and his unfinished “Time of Destruction”. The works of this psychiatrist, philosophically formed in the existentialism tradition, tackle from psychiatric and medical studies to interpretations of Dilthey, Jaspers and Heidegger. Maybe the most important achievement made by Dr. Martín-Santos was the fact of pooling in his novels all the different fields he worked in, namely: existential philosophy, psychiatry and literature. This mutual influence leads to a clearly existential interpretation of the narrative subject and to a nihilist conception of freedom: the nothingness completely understood as Sartre did. And, consequently, the attractiveness of approaching the Spanish author through literary theories that are close to the French contemporary philosophy and the primacy, not only of the existential analysis in literature, but also of the influence of the literary character as a fiction that is able to create possible realities. That is why it is interesting to study “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a paradoxical example of the existential nothingness made flesh. To put it in a nutshell, the existential triviality, a sign of modern times, has been indeed very successfully portrayed by Martín-Santos.