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THE ART OF ENGINEERING: THE BRIDGE AS OBJECT AND METHODIN JUAN BENET'S FICTIONBenjamin Fraser

Online publication date: 22 October 2010

To cite this Article Fraser, Benjamin(2010) 'THE ART OF ENGINEERING: THE BRIDGE AS OBJECT AND METHOD INJUAN BENET'S FICTION', Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11: 2, 167 — 190To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14636204.2010.512756URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2010.512756

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THE ART OF ENGINEERING: THE

BRIDGE AS OBJECT AND METHOD IN

JUAN BENET’S FICTION

Los puentes ‘‘inmateriales’’ son tan utilizados como los que tienen soporte fısico.(Aguilo Alonso 8)

It is well known that prior to publishing what is arguably his novelisticmasterpiece (Volveras a Region, 1967) Juan Benet Goitia (1927�1993) was already anestablished civil engineer dedicated to the construction of numerous public worksthroughout Spain.1 Notwithstanding, Benetian literary scholarship has relegated thisfact to the status of a mere biographical anecdote such that it is difficult to findextended discussions of relevance to engineering work in studies of his literaryproduction.

As reflected in contributions by those who knew him to the ‘‘Acto de homenaje aJuan Benet’’ published in the Revista de Obras Publicas in 1994, a year after his death,Benet in fact straddled two worlds. Jose Antonio Torroja Cavanillas comments that‘‘Juan Benet fue a la vez ingeniero y escritor, o si se prefiere, escritor e ingeniero.Serıa difıcil decir que palabra deberıa preceder la otra’’; ‘‘[Juan Benet] cultivo porigual y de forma permanente su actividad o ‘su profesion’*de escritor y deingeniero, y no solo las amo a ambas por igual, sino que jamas renego de una de ellaspara dedicarse en exclusiva a la otra’’ (Baeza 63, 63�4). Felix de Azua and VicenteMolina Foix go further in this respect, suggesting that Benet identified himself firstand foremost as an engineer, and only secondarily as an author (‘‘siempre dijo ser uningeniero que escribıa, y nunca le oı cambiar el orden de las palabras’’, Azua, in Baeza65; ‘‘Juan Benet era Ingeniero de Caminos antes y despues escritor’’, Molina Foix, inBaeza 75). Although there can be no doubt that he excelled in both fields, lamentablyliterary critics have been slow in coming to assess how Benet the engineer necessarilyinfluenced Benet the author. Apart from a brief but compelling section at the close ofa recent essay by Tatjana Gajic (36�8), few critics have ever attempted a sincerereconciliation of Benet’s fiction with his profession as an engineer. A classic essay byPere Gimferrer makes an earnest attempt to document Benet’s exploitation of hisprofessional vocabulary as an engineer of roads, but then moves quickly from thistopic to the mythical and allegorical dimensions of the author’s works (49). Generallyspeaking, the tendency of critics has been to see his professional experience as onlytangentially relevant to his literary production, falling into a binary (engineering/literature) of the sort that is routinely exploded through his sophisticated and complexfiction. Marıa-Elena Bravo’s otherwise splendid essay (‘‘Juan Benet Before History’’),for example, is dangerously close to suggesting that engineering was, for Benet,

Benjamin Fraser

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 June 2010, pp. 167�190ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2010 Taylor & Francis

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Downloaded By: [Fraser, Benjamin] At: 11:40 22 October 2010

merely a job (‘‘Juan Benet was a scientist by training and an engineer by profession,but his true nature and his real creativity belonged to art’’, 147). This essay is thusa necessary first step in bridging the disconnect between these two perspectives, ofBenet-as-author and of Benet-as-engineer.

What literary critics do not commonly acknowledge is the extensive nature ofBenet’s professional experience as a working Ingeniero de Caminos (Civil Engineer).He joined the Companıa de Ferrocarriles de Medina de Campo a Zamora y de Oviedoa Vigo in 1956 (MZOV, which later became later Cubiertas y MZOV), received thehighest honor awarded by the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos (‘‘Colegiado deHonor’’), and formed his own engineering firm in 1989, la Companıa HidrocineticaRegional.2 A colleague who worked with him on a number of projects has spoken ofBenet’s passion for his chosen profession, noting that he ‘‘empezo a construir deforma desaforada ferrocarriles, canales, puentes...’’ (Joaquın Dıez-Cascon 5).3 Muchof his time was spent working on dams*Adrian Baltanas recounts that Benet wasparticularly known for a half-dozen such projects as well as publications related tohydraulic engineering, ‘‘El Vellon, Porma, Moralets, Santa Eugenia, etc. de variostramos del Acueducto Tajo-Segura, el proyecto de otras tantas presas por lo menos,su trabajo permanente como vocal del Comite Nacional de Grandes Presas, y toda unaserie de informes estudios y escritos dedicados a todos los aspectos de la ingenierıahidraulica’’ (Baltanas, in Baeza 66). As a way of honoring his accomplishments in thisarea, the Presa de Porma in fact now bears his name (Baltanas, in Baeza, 67).

Even though he may have worked on far more dams than bridges, the lattercertainly held a special appeal for Benet.4 There is, for example, a well-circulatedstory that while on a visit to Oporto, Benet was moved to become an engineer uponseeing the Ponte Maria Pia, which had been designed by Gustav Eiffel’s company. Thisanecdote is so widely known as to be almost de rigueur in touristic writings for generalaudiences that focus on the Portuguese city (for example, those appearing in recentissues of El Paıs and El Mundo).5 His awe of the construction of modern bridges is alsoevident in an underappreciated work titled Ingenieria en la epoca romantica: Las obraspublicas en Espana alrededor de 1860, where Benet as editor has revealingly includedphotographs of Spanish bridges of the mid�late nineteenth century accompanied byshort paragraph contextualizations (e.g. ‘‘Puente de la Cella. Huesca. Juan Laurent.1867’’, 60; ‘‘Puente de la Rochela en el ferrocarril de Tarragona a Mont Blanc. JuanLaurent. 1867’’, 63). The prose explanations penned by Benet and included in a bookintroducing readers to drawings of nineteenth-century cities by A. Guesdon may evenbe considered a form of ode to the bridge (e.g: ‘‘Puentes metalicos’’, 58; ‘‘Puentesde fabrica’’, 64). It is clear from these descriptive odes that Benet feels that bridgesare a triumph not just of instrumentalist engineering but of a praxis that is at oncematerial and immaterial, a product of the uncomfortable contradiction between handand head.

Although there are doubtless numerous ways to see how the work of Benet theengineer necessarily informed his literary work, this essay addresses one aspect of thisrelationship in particular. It is clear that the practice of bridge-construction*itself amaterially immaterial unity of thought-action*has left its stamp on Benet’s approachto writing. References to bridges certainly occupy a privileged place in his texts*thisis especially the case with El Puente de Dona Cautiva, which figures in both his firstnovel Volveras a Region (1967) and also his unfinished multi-volume work Herrumbrozas

1 6 8 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S


lanzas (begun in 1983). And yet the figure of the bridge appears in Benet’s writingsnot only as an object but also as a mobilizing concept and even, I suggest, a method.Lingering on the resonance of the ‘‘bridge’’ in his texts provides the opportunity toreconcile not only a number of binaries that appear throughout his fiction but also thecomplexity of his fiction with its critical reception.

The central premise of this study is thus far from extravagant*Juan Benet was noless an engineer that he was an artist. From this perspective there arises the need toreconcile more concertedly his engineering practice with his novelistic (and essayistic)production. The risk of this sort of reconciliation is that both the literary critic and theengineer may be disappointed, that from one side or the other (or both) the essay willread as too impressionistic. Nevertheless, such a challenge is implicit in any approachthat makes a claim to interdisciplinarity. The present essay thus emphasizes Benet’sself-identification as an engineer on the way to interrogating the binary categoriesdemolished through his fiction*in fact closing by synthesizing what are now twoclassic directions in Benetian literary criticism. Overall, it is an initial attempt toformulate a more pointedly interdisciplinary perspective on the work of this creativegiant who excelled in two fields that are seldom seen as relevant to one another.

Art and science: the bridge in context

Despite the fact that ‘‘[e]ngineering as art long antedates engineering as a profession’’(101), as Robert Perrucci and Joel Emery Gerstl point out in their The Engineers andthe Social System, contemporary times have seen a progressive shift away from anunderstanding of engineering as an art form toward the notion of engineering as ascience. In the preface to Engineering in the Mind’s Eye, Eugene S. Ferguson frames thisshift as a post-WWII trend, characterizing it as a move ‘‘away from knowledge thatcannot be expressed as mathematical relationships’’ (xii). Ferguson paints a starkpicture of the present ‘‘scientific age [that] too readily assumes that whateverknowledge may be incorporated in the artifacts of technology must be derived fromscience’’ (xii). In such a context, it has become necessary to remind contemporaryengineers of their chosen field’s artistic legacy. For example, Henry Petroski lauds apublished statement made by the British Institution of Structural Engineers, writing inhis To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design that: ‘‘Since someengineers deny that engineering is either science or art, it is encouraging to see thissomewhat official declaration that it is both’’ (40, see also 80). Similarly, in adiscussion of famed bridge designer Robert Maillart, critic David Billington points outthe need for engineering to ‘‘explore structural form as it arises out of [both] aestheticfeelings and scientific ideas’’ (xiii).6 Benet himself was also clearly aware of the artisticinheritance of contemporary engineering, as he points out in an essay titled‘‘Ingenierıa e intimidad’’, originally published in the Revista de Obras Publicas in 1976:

Como todo arte habıa que aprenderlo en el taller *lo mismo que la pintura,la escultura, o la decoracion*, con la practica diaria, cometiendo dıa tras dıaerrores de todas clases, y sobre todo, teniendo que apechugar con las propiasequivocaciones. De poco servıan las lecciones de aula y las normas y criterios de

T H E B R I D G E I N J U A N B E N E T ’ S F I C T I O N 1 6 9


los libros; la experiencia de la obra, por ser tan individual e instantanea, se situapor encima de cualquier dictado teorico y solo gracias a los recursos de laimaginacion y las reglas de una razon acostumbrada a pensar en terminoscientıficos se puede adquirir un arte que en aquellos anos tenıa en cada casomucho de improvisacion. (75)

In the same article, in addition to comparing engineering to painting, sculptureand other arts, Benet bemoans the instrumentalization and lack of imagination thathave come to characterize the profession (‘‘la vulgaridad y falta de imaginacion dealgunos’’, 74).7 For literary scholars familiar with his challenging, enigmatic narrativetexts it should come as no surprise that the engineer-author stridently defends the roleof the imagination in the creation of the structures of civil engineering.

In attempting to explain the importance of bridges for Benet*particularly in lightof the fact that his work on dams appears to be far more extensive*it is important tosituate our understanding of the status of the bridge within the context of contemporaryengineering. A number of essays in the journals Ingenierıa y Territorio and Revista de ObrasPublicas8 testify not only to the history of interest in bridges but also to the progressivechanges that have transformed the nature of the field and that have ultimately seen theoutsourcing of bridge construction to the field of architecture. This last shift must havebeen particularly meaningful for someone like Benet who was driven to engineeringprecisely by the sight of a bridge and who commented explicitly on the proper role ofaesthetic questions and the imagination in structural work.

It is useful to begin by turning to Javier Manterola Armisen, who emphasizes thatthe history of the bridge is at least as old as that of other products of early structuralengineers: ‘‘El origen de una boveda, una viga, una cupula, se remonta a tiempos muyantiguos, y lo mismo podrıamos decir de un puente’’ (‘‘Arquitectos-Ingenieros’’ 18).Miguel Aguilo Alonso (9) quotes Abercrombie (1975) in asserting the bridge as theoldest problem of civil engineering.9 Despite the long engineering history of thebridge*or perhaps precisely because of it*modern bridges all too often are createdwith little or no concern for the landscapes on which they are built. ManterolaArmisen comments on this progressive conceptual detachment of the bridge from itsenvironment, noting that today it has been reduced to little more than an object.

Salvo en casos extraordinarios, cruce de grandes estuarios, situaciones geograficasdifıciles, la ingenierıa ha vencido a la naturaleza de tal manera que ya no se sientecondicionada por ella. El puente en lugar de acoplarse al lugar, de interpretarlo yde configurar con el un nuevo espacio, se desentiende de el y se instala a lamanera de los objetos fabricados en serie, que no tienen sitio ni posiciondeterminada y que se distribuyen libremente. Esta circunstancia unida a la cadavez menor presencia de lo resistente en la forma del puente, ha convertido alpuente en un objeto. Y esto, nos guste o nos disguste, ha sido buscado por elmundo de la ingenierıa. (Manterola Armisen ‘‘Arquitectos-Ingenieros’’ 21)

Recalling Benet’s denunciation of the instrumentalist approach to engineering,Manterola Armisen holds the profession itself responsible for this shift. Seeminglyconcurrent with this shift toward viewing the bridge as an isolated object, out of syncwith the terrain, there has been a tendency to cede ground to architecture*a shift



that he cautions should not be surprising (‘‘No nos debe sorprender entonces, que enesta situacion, sin problemas resistentes determinantes, los arquitectos, con un oficioproximo al nuestro se vayan acercando al mundo de los puentes’’, ‘‘Arquitectos-Ingenieros’’ 22). Newly under the purview of architects, the bridge becomes atriumph of design: ‘‘a los puentes les empieza a pasar lo que a los edificios, que sudiseno se convierte en rutinario, con ausencia completa de la tension creativa quedurante tanto tiempo genero tan bellos resultados. Y entonces lo establecido empiezaa cuestionarse y esas preguntas desembocan, casi obligatoriamente, en cambios en laestetica de las formas. [...] Es decir, los puentes se enfrentan con la nueva estetica,presente ya en muchas realizaciones de arquitectos y demas artistas plasticos’’(Manterola Armisen ‘‘Problemas’’ 61).10

If the design of bridges has increasingly fallen under the domain of architects, andnot engineers, then this would certainly explain the lack of information on Benet’sbridge projects relative to the more robust account of his work on dams. Yet it mayalso help to explain why the bridge*the structure appearing in the origin myth ofBenet’s passion for engineering*may exercise such a compelling function on both aliteral and conceptual level in his literary work. Simply put, since his profession inlarge degree prohibited him from working on material bridges, he worked onimmaterial ones instead, harnessing the creative forces that, according to manyengineers, are far from being accepted as a genuine part of the profession (above) inorder to construct imaginative works of fiction*keeping in mind, of course, that thecreativity requisite of engineering work is itself a mixture of material and immaterialconcerns. But there are other explanations to consider en route to understanding hisparticular love for the bridge. Apart from the story of his vision of the Ponte Maria Piain Oporto, Benet’s statement of his own literary preferences suggests that he wouldtake to an older, more established and historically significant work of engineering*that is, to the bridge instead of the dam. To wit: in a book of essays on the topic ofliterary production titled La inspiracion y el estilo Benet made clear both his disdain ofthe literature of the Spanish nineteenth century and his passion for the ‘‘grand style’’(ch. IV, 87�112).11 There is also the likelihood that his deep interest in militarystrategy encouraged him to privilege what has been a key node in battles in Spain aselsewhere; his own youthful experience of the Civil War (1936�39), in which he losthis father, would have strengthened this interest. But regardless of where hispredilection for bridges originated, there is no doubt that for Benet the bridge wasboth an object composed of equal parts aesthetic value and functionality. The bridge isfor him at once material and immaterial, aesthetic, historical and figurative. It is anengineering construction that foregrounds its own aesthetic dimensions (all the moreso when compared with, for example, the dam), but also one whose metaphoricalvalue was not lost on such a great mind. Like a bridge, Benet’s narrative is carefullyengineered to both juxtapose and bring together opposing planes of existence(whether Nationalists/Republicans, fiction/history, sound/vision or even at a muchdeeper level, space and time). While a complementary analysis might look at theliterary qualities of his engineering publications*the fact that the ‘‘prosodia de susnovelas’’ manifested itself also in Benet’s well-respected technical works (Azua, inBaeza 64)12*I hope to here argue for the influence of engineering on his literaryproduction.



The bridge as aura in Benet: from the concrete to theabstract

Manuel Vicent has suggested that Benet constructed all his literature as if it were adam13 (in Baeza 80)*notwithstanding, I believe that the more appropriate metaphoris that of a bridge. Not only was he driven to become an engineer by the sight of one,but he was quite serious about the appearance of bridges in literature as the followinganecdote illustrates. In the ‘‘Acto de Homenaje a Juan Benet’’ (Baeza) published in1994, the contemporary Spanish writer Javier Marıas shares a discussion the two hadover dinner regarding one of Marıas’s recently published novels:

Tambien recuerdo sobre todo una occasion, *la menciono sobre todo porquealgo tiene realmente de ingenieril*, en la que durante toda una cena [Benet] metorturo para decirme con la mayor elegancia, que una de mis novelas le habıagustado. Y en esa occasion recuerdo que estaba presente Blanca Andreu y algunaotra persona amiga, empezo por decirme: ‘‘Bueno, pues esta novela, sı, estabien, lo que pasa es que has cometido un error descomunal, realmenteimperdonable en este libro y claro, pues el libro ya no es lo que podrıa habersido’’. Yo empece a aterrarme, porque cuando alguien es el maestro y unoconsidera que su juicio es el mas importante ante la aparicion de un libro nuevo,pues bebe las palabras; y empece a pensar que me iba a poner algun reparo en laestructura, en la concepcion, me va a decir que estilısticamente es horrendo, ydijo: ‘‘Hay un problema gravısimo porque hay un momento en el cual tu hablasde un puente ferroviario’’, y era la unica nota que llevaba en un papel anotada,‘‘un puente ferroviario, y luego hablas y lo describes de la siguiente manera: ‘Elancho rıo de aguas azules, quebrado por el largo puente de hierros diagonalesentrecruzados’’’ decıa: ‘‘y claro, esto no puede ser porque, como no te has dadocuenta de que este puente es’’, y lo siento mucho, no recuerdo exactamente quefue lo que dijo, pero dijo algo completamente incomprensible para mı,pongamos que dijo que eso era un puente de vigas pudeladas de mispiquel aleberquisa, ‘‘Y claro si hubieras dicho que esto era un puente de vigas pudeladasde mispiquel a leberquisa, pues claro la novela habrıa sido muy otra, y cuanto nohabrıa ganado esta novela si hubieras dicho esto’’. (in Baeza, 69�70)

This humorous anecdote is revealing precisely because the humor has been addedafter the fact*in Marıas’s splendid retelling and his humorous attempt at reproducingthe technical vocabulary of bridge engineering. There is nothing at all risible fromBenet’s perspective, we are led to believe, in the assertion that the entirety of thenovel would have been different had the description of the bridge been more accurate.This anecdote testifies to the solemn respect with which Benet approached literature,engineering and suggestively, the intersection of the two.14

The bridge in Benet’s work is not purely material; it is not merely a physicalthing. Rather, the bridge functions in his fiction on a level that both enfolds and goesbeyond linguistic and conceptual representation. The bridge in Benet is both concreteand abstract, material and immaterial, tangible (historical) and symbolic, andultimately even methodological. It is for this reason that I have chosen the phrase‘‘the bridge as aura’’ as the title of this section*it is more than a mere structuring



literary device or a trace reflecting his non-literary profession. The bridge is at oncean object, a reference, a concept and a reconciliation*it is a way of suggestingconnections between the divergent scales of his work on Region, between the binariesthat structure his novelistic work (and as Julia Lupinacci Wescott notes, his essayisticwritings as well, 30) and which his work in turn dissolves. The ‘‘bridge’’ is ultimatelya method; a way of approaching reality as a complex experience while reducing itneither to a disconcerting and determining materialist fatalism nor to a free-floatingand naive idealism. The present analysis explores the bridge in two of Benet’s worksin particular: Volveras a Region and Herrumbrosas lanzas. The complex narrativestructure and purposely enigmatic presentation of characters in Volveras a Region,Benet’s first published novel, make a concise presentation of its plot difficult at best.Nevertheless, it may be said that the novel takes place in semi-fictional area of Spainnamed Region that has been ravaged by the Civil War, and that it is loosely centeredon the arrival of Marre Gamallo to the house of Doctor Daniel Sebastian in a smallwar-torn village. In a sense, however, it is the Civil War that is the real protagonist ofthe novel. The unfinished series titled Herrumbrosas lanzas, in which the militarycampaigns of the war in Region are detailed, in a sense constitutes a prequel toVolveras.

Although it is not the intent of this essay to compile an exhaustive list of theinstances in which Benet’s texts mention bridges, it is nevertheless instructive to beginwith a concrete case. The role of El Puente de Dona Cautiva in Herrumbrosas lanzas is,if not decisive, then nevertheless significant in Benet’s relation of military strategy.Circumstances at the end of volume one’s third book find the Nationalists withinshooting distance of the Republicans at ‘‘la casa del Perdon y el Puente de DonaCautiva, donde se estaba reorganizando la defensa del valle’’ (127). In the fourth bookof the first volume, Benet introduces a short history of the bridge into his military-style documentary narration, entirely in line with the novel’s masterful reconciliationof historical and fictional discourse. Thus Benet interrupts the narration of theNationalists’ bloody attempts to gain control of the bridge (158)*an important steptowards defeating the resisting Republicans*in order to discuss the history of thisfictional bridge and the surrounding area:

La construccion del Puente de Dona Cautiva se remonta a los finales del sigloXVIII, cuando un corregidor ilustrado cuyo nombre quedara perpetuado en lacorrespondiente estela de una de las pilas centrales, supo sacar de su concejo lossuficientes reales para erigir la primera de aquellas obras que habıan de promoverel fomento de la comarca del Torce medio. A pesar del puente, de la carretera deEl Salvador y Soceanos, del canal del margen izquierda (llamado por allı presa) yde unas pocas obras de arte, la comarca nunca se presto a ser fomentada, y laGuerra Civil la sorprenderıa poco menos que como la dejo aquel buen corregidor,don Gonzalo Alvarez de Buelnes, que para mayor honra de su memoria y de la delRey Nuestro Senor mando levantar, en plena euforia fomenticia, dos piramidescoronadas por sendos leones . . .(Herrumbrosas lanzas 158)15

Although this extended reference to the Dona Cautiva bridge is a somewhatisolated episode in Herrumbrosas lanzas, a work famously accompanied by a fold-outmap of Region and surrounding areas drafted by Benet himself, the bridge lingers over



Volveras a Region as a specter (9, 11, 41, 47, 56, 57, 61, 62, 62, 80, 82, 85, 86, 87,88, 258, 274, 284, 285�9). There too, the Bridge of Dona Cautiva appears as astrategic point for the Nationalist forces seeking to rout the Republicans.

The location of the bridge is a privileged point in the broader cartography ofRegion (‘‘a la altura de El Puente de Dona Cautiva, a menos de quince kilometros alnorte de Region, el valle adquiere su perfil en V cerrada, tan caracterıstico de lascuarcitas, y la presencia de la Sierra*tan nıtida y definida desde las terrazas deRegion*se oculta subitamente tras sus propios aledanos’’, 41), making its capturestrategically instrumental. As Benet’s narration conveys, the Navarese Nationalistleader Gamallo proposes to capture not merely Region but the entire Torce valley(80)*and a key part of this plan is to ‘‘establecer mas o menos a la altura del Puentede Dona Cautiva una fuerte y doble posicion que atrajera sobre sı la atencion delenemigo y ocupara todas sus fuerzas situadas aguas arribe de aquel punto’’ (80). Thelocation of the bridge is also a crucial component of Republican strategy (57) and ofcourse a terrain with which Eugenio Mazon is quite familiar (61). A prolonged battlealong the river near the bridge in September 1938 shows the Republican forcesdigging in their heels (‘‘Hasta el dıa 22 fueron capaces, con la concentracion de toda lacolumna de Mazon en un limitado sector frente al estribo del Puente*cavandotrincheras en las laderas y escondiendo los morteros entre las urces*, de sostener elataque enemigo que solo esporadicamente y durante pocas horas logro avanzar por laexplanada opuesta’’, 82), yet by the 27th, the forces disband and retreat from thebridge to higher ground (85), ultimately for good (88).

The Nationalist capture of the bridge becomes an important loss for theRepublicans (86), who attempt to retake it that fall, with combat extending fromNovember into the first days of 1939 (285�6). Led by Constantino, Benet’sRepublican forces launch their attack: ‘‘Su objetivo inmediato era la reconquista de ElPuente de Dona Cautiva y su ultima finalidad la eliminacion de todas las fuerzasenemigas en la orilla derecha del rıo al objeto de agrupar y constituir un reducidonucleo de resistencia, aguas arriba de aquel punto, que lograse contemporizar hasta lallegada de una paz honorable’’ (286). Constantino in fact succeeds in recapturing thebridge: ‘‘En el mismo mes de noviembre el primer objetivo fue alcanzado, sereconquisto el puente*en la mas encarnizada lucha que se libro en la provincia entoda la guerra*y las tropas republicanas llegaron a realizar una penetracion de varioskilometros por la carretera de Burgo Mediano. Y eso fue todo’’ (286). Despite losingthe bridge to the Republicans, Gamallo’s forces occupy an abandoned Region inDecember without even having to fire a shot (286). The captains*who had formerlybeen fighting separately*reunite after retaking the bridge (287), but it is not enoughto defeat the Nationalists. At this juncture, Benet’s text shifts abruptly from thenarrative action of combat to remembrances of the war after a mere paragraph break(293).

Significantly, through repetition spanning the entire work (and concentrated inparts I and IV), the bridge becomes from its first capture by the Nationalists one of thesymbols of the ruin of Republican Spain, as emphasized at the close of part III of thenovel (‘‘Cuando sumidos en aquel sueno se insinuaron los primeros sıntomas de laRuina se debio comprender que el destino y el tiempo, una vez mas, se habrıannegado a financiar una inversion que solo en Teruel, en el Ebro o en el Puente deDona Cautiva podrıa ser amortizada’’, 258). The bridge becomes a focal point for the



historical and ideological tensions of the Spanish civil war and also, however, of thenarrative tensions unique to Benet’s first novel. Concretely, the bridge highlights theopposition between the Nationalists and the Republicans, as pointed out above.Benet’s narrations of the militaristic encounters at the bridge provocatively explorethe theme of brotherhood, a point made by critics who have studied fratricide and thebiblical story of Abel and Cain in his texts (Herzberger ‘‘The Theme of WarringBrothers’’, Sobejano, Orringer ‘‘The Biblical Perspective’’). Yet as one of the book’smost enduring images, the bridge itself (to which the novel’s narration returns againand again) also suggests a way of uniting the numerous oppositions in Benet’s text.

Critics have long underscored the dualistic relationship between history andfiction that characterizes Benet’s writings: Jose Rivero sees the cartography of themythic Region as a superimposition of the political upon the physical (153),Herzberger (‘‘Benet y la historia’’) notes that ‘‘el mundo benetiano esta edificado ysostenido no por la adherencia a una realidad concreta, sino por la construccion de unaespacio abierto donde reinan la contradiccion y la incertidumbre’’ (24; see also ‘‘JuanBenet and the Spanish Civil War’’), and Benet’s own persistent referencing of literaryfigures (notably Proust in Herrumbrosas lanzas, 176�8)and his literary deployment offootnotes both confront the opposition between literature and history. But there are anumber of other oppositions that inform Volveras a Region*dialogue and monologue,sound and vision, mobility and immobility, time and space. This is not an attempt touse the figure of the bridge to exhaust his work*it cannot*and it is thus importantto keep in mind Benet’s formulations of literature as purposely enigmatic and resistantto analytical frames (particularly in La inspiracion y el estilo, En ciernes). The bridge doesnot present a solution to this sort of Benetian enigma, but it does allow one way oforganizing approaches to the text without reducing its plurality of meaning*and Ibelieve a compelling one at that*one that reconciles the surface and depth of hiswork, a number of seemingly disparate thematic concerns, and the work’s underlyingphilosophical tension (Fraser Encounters with Bergson(ism), ch. 3).

Like a bridge, Benet’s novelistic production is a concerted attempt to reconciletwo parallel planes, commanding that the relative autonomy of each be read againstthe felicitous recognition of their interrelation. Benet’s works suggest that theseseemingly autonomous planes do, in fact, intersect with one another. Consider hisunorthodox implementation of dialogue. In an author’s note from the second editionof 1974 (reproduced in the 1985 English translation by Rabassa, but not the Spanishreprint of 1997), Benet mentions that the book was ‘‘a matter of continuousdiscourse, with very little dialogue, and with only a few*not many*periods’’ (vii;see also Una meditacion, which consists of one book-length paragraph). The warninghis novel elicited from one publishing house was perhaps representative in this regard:‘‘Your novel [ . . .] lacks dialogue. Don’t forget that almost all the public reads isdialogue, which is also the best exponent of a novelist’s skill’’ (viii). Benet’s clearaversion to writing tidy prose for the general public was, of course, one he sharedwith other writers*along with Tiempo de silencio (1961) by Luis Martın-Santos, Senasde identidad (1966) by Juan Goytisolo and the Antagonıa tetralogy by Luis Goytisolo(initiated in 1973), the book remains one of the most challenging texts of the period.But I hasten to point out that there is indeed a form of dialogue in his text, one thatwas in all probability quite unpalatable for readers insofar as it differed substantiallyfrom the representationalist tendency of spoken language. In the metonymical



associations he cultivated through descriptions of the land (of bridges also) there isindeed a conversation taking place between the two philosophical poles that informedall of his works. On one side there was the material world, matter, and on the other,the world of consciousness, memory. Benet’s writing was undeniably located at theintersection of these two planes, paralleling the earlier philosophical position of HenriBergson (1859�1941), whom he greatly admired (see Fraser, ch. 3 ‘‘Juan Benet:Recalibrating Space and Time in Region’’; also Orringer ‘‘Juan Benet a viva voz’’).The complexity of Benet’s philosophical tenets is paralleled in his sophisticatednarrative techniques, the subject of sustained attention (Nelson, Compitello ‘‘Volverasa Region’’). Josefina Gonzalez (1995) further undermines the objective character of thefirst chapter of Volveras by teasing out the ‘‘tension del lenguaje cientıfico con elpoetico’’ that obtains in what appear at first glance to be unproblematic objectivelynarrated descriptions of place (459). This tension has been framed in similar ways byother critics who have seen in Benet’s narrative sophistication a way of bridgingdifferent types of discourse, both within and beyond the text. For example, KenBenson writes that a characteristic of any and all of Benet’s novels is ‘‘la interrelacioncontinua entre pasajes ensayısticos y pasajes narrativos’’ (79). Pushing beyond theboundaries of literature in his discussion of Del pozo y del Numa, Stephen D. Gingericharticulates a conclusion that may be more broadly applied to Benet’s literaryproduction. In his view, Benet’s text offers ‘‘neither the solid, demonstrableknowledge of science nor the mysterious vitality of literature. On the other hand,another kind of discourse emerges, which floats between the two, partakingsometimes of one and sometimes of the other. This is an uncomfortable position,resulting at times in contradiction and confusion, but valuable nonetheless’’ (335). Ifmeaning is, for Benet, conveyed by differences and contradictions, as Spires contends(4), it is not merely the friction between the two (science/literature, but also time/space, art/engineering and so on) that is significant but rather their interconnection,a relationship expressed through the figure of the bridge.

At the level of content, Benet shows an intention both to simultaneously delineateand collide oppositions. This occurs frequently in Volveras a Region, for example,through the juxtaposition of sound and vision. The mysterious and mythic figure ofNuma, who presides over Region by galvanizing fear through the specter of violence,provides the clearest manifestation of this. He exists beyond the visual field, neitherseeing (‘‘recorre dıa y noche [la propiedad] con los ojos cerrados’’, whether themeaning is literal or figurative) nor being seen (‘‘Lo cierto es que nadie se atreve anegar la existencia del hombre, al que nadie ha visto pero al que nadie tampoco hapodido llegar a ver’’) (11). As the reader of Volveras a Region will no doubt remember,Numa’s presence is not so much felt as it is heard, almost solely through the faintsound of shots that punctuate Benet’s novel and even bring it to a conclusion, as onthe final page of the novel where ‘‘el eco de un disparo lejano vino a restablecer elsilencio habitual del lugar’’ (315). The text’s use of auditory description is toopervasive to enumerate, but includes frequent references not only to gunshots but alsoto the sounds of car motors and carriages, the cries, whispers and shouts of theregion’s denizens, the croaking of frogs, the buzzing of fans, the sudden explosion oflaughter, and perhaps most memorably, the barking of dogs which Benet occasionallyemphasizes further through footnotes that reference the likes of Faulkner, Nietzsche,and Stefan Andres (290, 312, 20).



Alongside the persistent references to the sounds that echo throughout Region,Benet also devotes considerable space to its visual appearance through extensivetopographical descriptions. Criticism has appropriately signaled that the first sectionof the novel is devoted to an exposition of the geographical space of the invented placeBenet calls Region*that is to a rigorous description, tending toward theexhaustive*of its spatial dimensions and properties. Asserting that there is a parallelhere to the Brazilian writer Euclides Da Cunha’s epic Os Sertoes (1902), Malcolm A.Compitello (‘‘Region’s Brazilian Backlands’’) charts out the novel’s development ofthe spatial character of Region, noting a progression in the first chapter of Volveras aRegion from questions of ‘‘Geography/Geology’’ to ‘‘Climate’’ to ‘‘Effects on Man’’.The quantitative descriptions of the landscape are geared toward a visual image of thearea, not unlike the map that accompanied Herrumbrosas lanzas: ‘‘El desierto estaconstituido por un escudo primario de 1.400 metros de altitude media, adorsado porel norte a los terrenos mas jovenes de la cordillera, que con forma de vientre de violinoriginan el nacimiento y la divisoria de los rıos Torce y Formigoso’’ (7�8, see alsoWood).16 The work’s nuanced presentation of sound�sight is at times synthesizedwith the pair mobility�immobility, as in the following example: the ‘‘campo calla[ . . .] Como parece recluirse en sı mismo e inmovilizarse en la cautela mesmerizadapor la amenaza del invierno’’ (259). The landscape, immobile, ties into the socialstagnancy represented by Dr. Sebastian’s house or more generally by the region’s lackof memory. Benet’s narrative does not merely contrast the terms of each such pairing,but attempts to fold them into one complex relation. Sound and vision are held in amore complicated relationship through the narrative as complementary aspects of anindivisible whole; the landscape itself is described through recourse to metaphorsdrawn from the realm of the auditory, as when the Sierra is said to have the shape of aviolin (8, above; also 39) or even the audible character of a sigh (36, see note 5). Asdiscussed in the next section of this essay, these Benetian oppositions (and still othersdiscussed in detail by Lupinacci Wescott and Epps) can be seen as part of an attemptto recalibrate the relationship between distant discourses and objects. In this respect,Benet’s novel Volveras a Region is representative of his writing more generally in that itconstitutes not merely a text but also a bridge of sorts*and perhaps even an engine.

The question of method: bridging autonomous planes

From its captivating first sentence, Volveras a Region is a novel of distance, ofmeasurement (even of its insufficiency): ‘‘Es cierto, el viajero que saliendo de Regionpretende llegar a su sierra siguiendo el antiguo camino real*porque el moderno dejode serlo*se ve obligado a atravesar un pequeno y elevado desierto que pareceinterminable’’, 7). It is a work that mobilizes the intellect in attempting to make senseof an inherently chaotic experience, and that simultaneously declares the tidycategories of the intellect insufficient for accomplishing this task. Key to thisrecalibration of thought is the reconciliation of the dichotomies it persistentlyformulates and tears asunder . . . history/fiction, sight/sound, mobility/immobility,and so on. The geography and landscape of this semi-fictional realm are riven throughwith a pointedly emphasized dualism that begs for resolution. Even traveling across



Region’s parallel valleys is difficult (‘‘Las pocas carreteras que existen en la comarcason caminos de manada que siguen el curso de los rıos, sin enlace transversal, deforma que la comunicacion entre dos valles paralelos ha de hacerse, durante los ochomeses frıos del ano, a lo largo de las lıneas de agua hasta su confluencia, y en sentidoopuesto’’, 7). Region is itself the product of a cartography that is at once imaginaryand real, as Compitello notes (‘‘Region’s Brazilian Backlands’’).17 As with the twohemispheres of the brain, we perceive two hemispheres in the landscape*the areafrom Region to the desert highlighted at the novel’s outset consists of ‘‘dos vallesparallelos’’ (7); further in the text the region is said to be formed by ‘‘la confluenciade los dos arroyos que casi por igual lo forman’’ (210). But what is perhaps Volveras aRegion’s most lucid moment is its formulation of a question that is as relevant tounderstanding the text’s narrative action (the disruptive and destructive consequencesof the civil war in Region) as it is a challenge to traditional forms of disciplinaryknowledge: ‘‘Hay que preguntarse por la razon que empujo al pensamiento a preferirla busqueda de una frontera inexistente, en lugar de optar por la investigacion de esenexo unico que enlaza fenomenos fısicos y psıquicos y constituye la esencia delcontinuo consciente’’ (281). Although it directly emphasizes the complex unity ofboth physical and psychic forces*a philosophical premise at the heart of his fiction(Fraser 2010)*Benet’s comment is significant from another perspective that goesbeyond the literary text and its social referent to square with recent methodologicalshifts within geography that have attempted to acknowledge the importance ofimmaterial and material realities.

The methodological sophistication of the relatively new sub-field of culturalgeography shows how the purportedly immaterial world of culture has a materialcomponent, and likewise how the supposedly material world of physical environmentsis in turn shaped by immaterial processes. As Alan Latham and Derek McCormackcompellingly argue in their essay ‘‘Moving Cities: Rethinking the Materialities ofUrban Geographies’’, what is needed in approaching cities is ‘‘a notion of the materialthat admits from the very start the presence and importance of the immaterial’’ (703).The reformulated Marxism of key geographical thinkers of the twentieth century suchas Henri Lefebvre (1901�91) has worked to acknowledge the dialectical relationshipbetween material and immaterial processes, as is perhaps most concisely stated byLefebvrian geographer David Harvey in this way: ‘‘Materiality, representation andimagination are not separate worlds’’ (322). That there are recent extensions of thisdialectical project is evident in the creation of scholarly journals such as Emotion, Spaceand Society (est. 2008) and Mobilities (est. 2006), which directly encourage work beingdone at the intersection of the three categories that Harvey links in his study.18

Similarly, it is also worth remembering the methodological shift offered bycultural studies, one that in a sense still remains on the fringe of literary studies. AsRaymond Williams retrospectively describes it in ‘‘The Future of Cultural Studies’’(1986), those who were the first to engage the eclectic and extra-literary approachthat characterized the precursor to Cultural Studies (at the time, under the banner ofmodern English studies: Leavis, Richards, Scrutiny) started by moving beyond theuniversities, demanding the relation of literature to the ‘‘life-situations which peoplewere stressing outside the established educational systems’’ (152) and engaging with awider range of objects that included popular culture, popular fiction, advertising,newspapers, etc. (153). Although this shift in the definition of suitable objects of



analysis has undoubtedly reinvigorated literary studies, the methodological approachof cultural studies as described by Williams has been slower to take hold. The culturalstudies method, he reminds us, exercised ‘‘the refusal to give priority to either theproject or the formation*or, in older terms, the art or the society’’ (152). Puttingthe object of art on par with an analysis of the society in which it was embedded wasintended as a corrective to the simplification of cultural processes offered by the base�superstructure model. The thrust of cultural studies was, then, a project ofreconciliation. If previous approaches to literature had been too hermetically withinthe literary text, Williams and others sought not to negate but to preserve thediscourse of art by pursuing it in articulation with broader social processes.

Taken together, the paradigm shifts offered by geography on one hand andcultural studies on the other provide a compelling reason to rethink Benetian criticismas a whole. Putting Benet’s literary works on par with his engineering praxis is not anattempt to give priority to his fiction or to his engineering, but is instead areconciliatory project bent on seeing the relationship between two mutuallyinforming areas of his thought and practice. Despite efforts to take his novelisticworks as a ‘totality’ (Rodrıguez), Benet’s creative output has never been broached as atotality that includes both his written work and his engineering work. This essay hasworked to begin just this sort of recalibration of Benetian scholarship, not by movingaway from previous scholarship, but instead by pointing to the very possibilitiessuggested therein. Not only was engineering an art for Benet (above), butreciprocally, art was itself an engine of sorts. Through his essays and novels, andparticularly in Volveras a Region, the author-engineer attempted to bridge theseemingly irreconcilable oppositions between mental categories such as thosediscussed in the previous section.

Given Benet’s penchant for relating seemingly disparate categories such asengineering and art, history and fiction, literature and extra-literary thought, the V-shape resolution point of the landscape at the Dona Cautiva bridge location (41) mightbe read as cautionary with respect to the limitations of purely disciplinary (i.e. notinterdisciplinary) inquiry. ‘‘En ese paramo, todos los caminos se pierden, divididos ysubdivididos en un sinnumero de roderas alucinantes cada una de las cuales parecedirigirse hacia una mancha que espejea en el horizonte’’ (42). As if they werethemselves travelers lost in Benet’s Region, contemporary scholars of literature findthemselves estranged from formerly entrenched modes of criticism. Faced with fadedsignposts that no longer point the way to biographical criticism, formalism,structuralism, the scholarly landscape may seem bleak, with innumerable roads,each of which seems to stretch on beyond the horizon. Volveras a Region points, not toa solution, but rather to a reformulation of this problem. As Bergson, Marx and urbancritic Jane Jacobs have all pointed out, it is sometimes more important to phrase thequestion correctly than it is to find a solution.19 Benet’s reformulation of the problemof literary criticism comes in the form of a bridge responding to the necessity toconnect two distant shores; the significance of bridging should not be lost on criticsapproaching his literary production.

In light of the above discussion, Benet’s fiction, particularly his first novel Volverasa Region, reveals itself to be a complex attempt to reconcile opposing categorieswithout resorting to a simplistic solution that would elide difference. Here it is helpfulto turn to an essay from Ingenierıa y Territorio in which Miguel Aguilo Alonso highlights



the very property of the bridge that makes its metaphorical use in explaining Benet’sfiction so appropriate. He writes that: ‘‘Los puentes comunican o reunen pasando porencima del obstaculo, nunca lo atraviesan, no se enfangan mezclandose con el’’ (8, seealso this essay’s epigraph).20 The bridge thus connects two shores without obfuscatingthe problems that necessitate its construction*whether those problems aretopographical, literary or conceptual. Benet himself has explained his inspiration tocreate literature using this very trope, the desire to ‘‘aliar dos categorıas que no sonmixtibles’’ (Torres Fierro n.p.).21 Whereas the act of bridging is in a sense simplistic,its elegance resides in the fact that it preserves the original problem intact, stillcomplex and still visible in the present.

Just as the question of method was of great importance for Benet’s engineeringand literary work (La inspiracion y el estilo), it is no less significant for Benetiancriticism. I bring this section to a close by seeking to bridge*in the sense ofreconciling without eliding difference*two critical approaches to Benet’s fiction. It isimportant to point out that these two approaches are notably, and necessarily,entwined with one another. The first is what might be called a materialist approachthat explored Benet’s work as an expression and reflection of the material destructionwhich resulted from the Spanish Civil War. Benet’s own words confirm theappropriateness of this critical approach; in the author’s note to the second edition ofVolveras a Region he writes that the novel treated ‘‘the development and consequencesof the civil war in a remote community’’ (vii). Pere Gimferrer has echoed thenovelist’s assessment: ‘‘Region es, a todas luces, y en uno de los niveles de lectura masvisibles, una representacion de Espana, y las dos novelas primeras de Benetconstituyen*lo cual no agota, ni con mucho, sus implicaciones*una reflexionsobre el destino historico de este paıs a partir del estallido de la guerra civil’’ (49). Ofcourse, this Benetian practice of concrete historical reference is explicit in the worksthemselves*as when the seemingly objective narrator of part I of Volveras a Regionnotes that ‘‘Todo el curso de la Guerra civil en la comarca de Region empieza a verseclaro cuando se comprende que, en mas de un aspecto, es un paradigma a escalamenor y a un ritmo mas lento de los sucesos peninsulares’’ (75), or through thetransparent critique of post-war Spain expressed in the statement that ‘‘La gente deRegion ha optado por olvidar su propia historia’’ (11).

The second tendency of Benetian criticism is to point to aspects of his fiction thatare less grounded in Spain’s concrete expression of historical and political materialrealities. From this perspective, scholars have asserted the symbolic function played bythe guard Numa in relation to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (mentioned perhapsmost recently by Rodrıguez), the self-reflexive quality of the work (Bravo ‘‘Region,una cronica’’), the relation of Volveras . . . to the epic (Orringer ‘‘Epic’’), and the keyrole played by temporality in the novel (Perez Magallon, Ortega ‘‘Estudios’’, Gullon‘‘Esperando’’, Pope, Mantiega and Fraser Encounters with Bergson(ism), ch. 3; ontemporality in Herrumbrosas lanzas, see Solana). Importantly, the now classic volumesCritical Approaches to the Writings of Juan Benet (ed. Mantiega, Herzberger, Compitello,1984), Juan Benet: El escritor y la crıtica (ed. Kathleen Vernon, 1986) and Juan Benet: ACritical Reappraisal of his Fiction (ed. John B. Margenot III), not to mention Rewriting theGood Fight: Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War (ed. Brown,Compitello, Howard, Martin, 1989), include a number of essays that either tieBenet’s works to concrete Spanish realities or emphasize a close-reading of their



formal aspects. The essays in question provide evidence that the literary potency ofBenet’s fiction is not restricted by its intertextual appropriation of the Spanish CivilWar as extra-literary referent but is instead bolstered by his innovative andcomplicated rejection of the formerly reigning neorealist style of Spanish narrative(see Herzberger ‘‘La aparicion’’ 25). Pointing out the possibility of simultaneouslyintegrating these two strains of criticism, Malcolm Compitello maintains that whileVolveras a Region is ‘‘the most complex and literarily challenging condemnation ofFrancoism produced from within Spain during the postwar period’’, it is possible forBenet’s fiction to denounce the material conditions created as a consequence of theSpanish Civil War and also to be considered ‘‘good literature’’ (‘‘Paradoxes’’ 17). Inthis light, the novelistic world of Juan Benet is not only a harsh denunciation of thedestruction engendered by the war, but also a philosophical and ultimately evenphenomenological underscoring of the rich complexity of an experience that is at oncematerial and immaterial. Although a handful of critics (such as Compitello, above)have been successful at blending these concerns together, generally speaking Benetiancriticism has preferred one road to the other (e.g. symbolic dimensions and myth inGarcıa, Martınez Sarrion; political and historical resonance in Ferran, Mota, Minardi),with very little attention placed on the link between the profession in which theengineer excelled and his noteworthy literary production (Francisco Garcıa Perezunderscores his ‘‘solida reputacion como ingeniero’’, 11).

The dissonance that results from these two established and necessarily entwinedcritical perspectives on Benet’s work is amplified through the novelist’s purposelyenigmatic style that*far from escaping from the reality of the post-war destruction inSpain, and particularly far from obfuscating his implicit critique of the Franco regimeunder which he wrote*nevertheless alludes to chaos as a primary/primal/primordialforce out of which oppressive social structures and ideology coalesce. His workpervasively calls into question the motivation of an intellectual design that isremarkably mobilized individually and socially to limit, restrict and reduce experienceto a series of codes, including but going beyond the Nationalist victory and thesubsequent Franco dictatorship. The priority given by Benet the author to enigmathroughout both his novelistic and essayistic discourse belies an attempt to delvebeneath the facile, tidy distinctions enforced by the intellect in order to uncoverprecognitive relationships in the act of formation. One clear example of this appearsin La inspiracion y el estilo, where Benet argues for the role of unorganized creativeforces in literary production. Thus he argues that an author’s style is ‘‘una zona desombras’’ that is not reducible to a ‘‘razonamiento matematico’’ like that professed byPoe in La filosofıa de la composicion (1848; Benet’s reference, 72). First comesimagination, and later comes analysis, which in the author’s view can nevercompletely explain its object*either analysis bases itself on an enigma or else it is‘‘una supercherıa que difıcilmente le podıa llevar al descubrimiento de cosas que noconociera de antemano’’ (72). Following Benet’s lead, critic David Herzberger (‘‘JuanBenet and the Spanish Civil War’’) points to the author’s desire to preserve enigma,while Janet Perez speaks of Benet’s ‘‘rhetoric of ambiguity’’. One must also consider,in this regard, Benet’s own foreword to the edited volume Critical Approaches to theWritings of Juan Benet (1984) where he suggests that: ‘‘value, enigma, and difficulty areindissolubly united in [a] work of fiction’’, and furthermore that ‘‘solving the enigmasand eliminating the difficulties [would] be a vain and counterproductive effort that



would ruin that possible value’’ (viii). Similarly, Robert Spires contends, correctly inmy view, that: ‘‘Rather than leading the reader from the word directly to the realobject, Benet forces him into the open space beyond words and objects wherepreconscious experiences are stored’’ (2�3). The difficulty of Benet’s novelistic workslies precisely in their curious doubling*of both material and immaterial forces*andin an untidy reconciliation of this provisional dualism. For Benet, history is fiction ishistory*at once crude, extravagant, unintelligible, destructive, base and in the endenigmatic.

When approaching Juan Benet’s texts, it proves helpful, finally, to turn to asection in Theodor Adorno’s complex Aesthetic Theory where the critic discusses whatthe book’s translator (Robert Hullot-Kentor) has rendered in English as ‘‘enigmatical-ness’’. ‘‘Artworks are enigmas’’, Adorno writes, ‘‘They contain the potential for thesolution; the solution is not objectively given. Every artwork is a picture puzzle, apuzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains avexation, the pre-established routing of its observer’’ (121).22 With this in mind, it isperhaps inappropriate to purport to ‘‘solve’’ the ‘‘problem’’ posed by Benet’s fiction.Ultimately it is not that his work means something but rather that it does something. Bybringing divergent discourses into relationship with one another, his fiction works tobridge two planes of thought that neither literary nor engineering perspectives havesufficiently reconciled.

Conclusion

Instead of seeing Benet’s civil work in engineering as disconnected from his art, theopportunity is for future interdisciplinary work to explore their interrelationship. Thisessay’s epigraph, penned by engineer Aguilo Alonso (‘‘Los puentes ‘inmateriales’ sontan utilizados como los que tienen soporte fısico’’, 8), juxtaposed immaterial andmaterial bridges on the way to setting up a number of reconciliations*most of allthat between engineering and literature. As both Ingeniero de Caminos and author ofsome of the greatest and most complex novels of twentieth-century Spain*as editorof the volume Ingenieria en la epoca romantica: Las obras publicas en Espana alrededor de1860 and as mentor to Javier Marıas*Juan Benet made his passion for bridgesknown. Although he probably spent more time working on dams than on bridgesthroughout his career, it seems reasonable to assume that the sight of the Ponte MariaPia in Oporto stayed with Benet to the end. The power of the legacy of this enduringmemory speaks also to the trends of his first chosen profession. The bridge is certainlya reminder of the times before engineering ceded some of its territory to architecture,and possibly also*for Benet*of the military campaigns that rocked Spain during theCivil War. Perhaps the real lure of the bridge for Benet has to do with its formerprominence as an elegant but orderly solution to complex problems of engineering.As Aguilo Alonso writes: ‘‘Puede no haber pilares o apoyos intermedios, pero elpuente empieza y acaba, nace y no puede ser indefinido’’ (8). From this perspective,the bridge thus appears in Benet’s fiction as a reminder of what his complex andenigmatic literary prose has never been and will never be.



Notes

1 ‘‘Como Ingeniero de Caminos, siempre se dedico a la concepcion y construccion degrandes obras publicas, sobre todo hidraulicas, entre las que se pueden citar, loscanales de Cornatel y Quereno, la presa del Porma, la presa de Eiros, la presa delAtazar, la de Santa Eugenia o la de Llauset’’ (n.p.). From ‘‘La trayectoria de JuanBenet como Ingeniero de Caminos’’ 9 November 2008 by Universidad Politecnicade Madrid (www.universia.es/html_estatico/portada/actualidad/noticia_actualidad/param/noticia/jhiga.html).

2 The revealing name of Benet’s company is itself a sign that there might be areciprocal influence of his literary passion on his engineering work. Joaquın Dıez-Cascon explains the story behind the name as it was related to him by Benet himself:‘‘En el ano 1987, crea la Companıa Hidrocinetica Regional. Es un nombre que tienesu misterio. ‘Companıa’ viene de ‘la companıa’. El siempre trabajo, no en unaempresa, sino en una companıa. Trabajo en la Companıa Ferrocarriles de Medinadel Campo a Zamora y de Orense a Vigo, la MZOV, pero siempre se decıa:‘¿Donde vas?’. ‘Voy a la companıa’. Por eso se le puso ‘Companıa’. Regional vienedel nombre de Region. Lo de ‘Hidrocinetica’ a mı me tenıa siempre quemado. Yun dıa le dije: ‘¿Por que le pusiste ‘‘Hidrocinetica?’’’ y me dijo: ‘No lo se. Yo tenıaun coche y un dıa oı que ese coche tenıa la junta ‘‘homocinetica’’ y me parecio unnombre tan bonito que le puse hidrocinetica, ‘‘hidro’’ de agua’’ ’. Y de ahı viene, esaes la razon que me dio el’’ (6). See also Cartografıa personal (304).

3 Dıez-Cascon lists the projects on which he worked with Benet: ‘‘Construyomuchısimos kilometros de tunel y bastantes presas; presas en las que tuvoparticipacion intensa como constructor. Empezo en Eiras, luego en el Porma, [laBuceda], Vallalcampo, Llauset, Santa Eugenia y Rialp. Yo trabaje con el en las dosultimas. En Santa Eugenia, el era constructor y yo consultor de la empresapropietaria, que era en esos momentos de Carburos Metalicos, que era una empresaque estaba radicada en Cataluna, y Rialp, que la proyectamos los dos’’ (5). Similarly,Enrique Perez Galdos at MZOV said Benet was ‘‘director de obra en los canales deCornatel y Quereno’’; ‘‘Puedo mencionar las presas del Vellon, del Atazar, lostuneles del trasvase Tajo-Segura, la presa de Bujeda, los altos del Villalcampo y deMoralets, y las presas de Llauset y Santa Eugenia entre las obras mas importantes enlas que participo Juan’’ (in Baeza, 76).

4 Cubiertas y MZVO did indeed serve as the contractor for the construction of theRande Bridge over the Ria de Vigo in Southern Galicia. Information on a limitednumber of the company’s projects are available on a searchable online database,although Juan Benet’s name is not specifically mentioned (en.structurae.de/structures/data/index.cfm).

5 For example, consider the following recent articles from El Paıs (2007) and ElMundo (2003), respectively: ‘‘Hay que pasear de noche para apreciar los lujosluminosos de una ciudad [Oporto] que fosforece de vuelta a los cincuenta, cuando elneon era la modernidad suprema; bajar al Duero por el Cais de Ribeira de lasprimeras pelıculas de Oliveira para ver, al otro lado del rıo, los rotulos inmensos ymelancolicos de las bodegas importantes en la ladera de Gaia: Sandeman, Calem,Burmester o Gilberts, bajo el puente de hierro de Eiffel, que animo a Juan Benet ahacerse ingeniero . . .’’ (Montes); ‘‘Desde el portal de Sandeman, antiguo conventodel siglo XVI, se superpone la inverosımil Oporto. La acercan varios puentes: el de



www.universia.es/html_estatico/portada/actualidad/noticia_actualidad/param/noticia/jhiga.html

www.universia.es/html_estatico/portada/actualidad/noticia_actualidad/param/noticia/jhiga.html

D. Maria, obra de Gustav Eiffel, que llevarıa a Juan Benet a estudiar ingenierıa . . .’’(Fluxa). The bridge itself, linking both sides of the Duero river, is named afterMaria Pia of Savoy, drafted by Theophile Seyrig and constructed between January1876 and November 1877 by Eiffel’s firm. The anecdote of the bridge appears alsoin the collection of Benet’s writings titled Cartografıa personal (172).

6 Maillart was, in Billington’s view, a man who believed that ‘‘structure needed to beliberated from mathematical analysis, but at the same time it should be disciplinedby the results of physical testing and visual observation’’ (107). Despite emphasizingthat an emphasis on both aesthetic feelings and scientific ideas is critical (xiii, abovein text), scholars are often hesitant to pursue this need rigorously. The case ofBillington is instructive in this regard, as when he writes that ‘‘attempts to defineart, let alone engineering as an art, can lead directly into philosophical questionsbeyond the scope of this book [on Robert Maillart]’’ (108). As I explore in chapter 3from Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain, it is precisely this philosophical terrainupon which Benet does not fear to tread in his Region novels.

7 Benet’s complete statement reads as follows: ‘‘La aristocracia ingenieril se haarruinado y no porque ahora hay 6,000 ingenieros frente a los 600 que habıa hacemedio siglo; no porque a tenor de los tiempos se hayan evaporando sus privilegioscomo los de cualesquiera otras castas; no porque su actividad este ahora sujeta a lacrıtica de la opinion publica como cualquier otra actividad ciudadana; no porque lavulgaridad y falta de imaginacion de algunos haya destruido la mıstica que antes envolvıa a laprofesion; se ha venido abajo porque con el progreso se ha reducido a lo que enesencia siempre fue: una actividad mediadora, que rara vez encierra en sı misma sus propiosfines’’ (‘‘Ingenierıa e intimidad’’, original emphasis, 74).

8 Along with Cauce 2000, both journals fall under the auspices of the Colegio deIngenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos (www.ciccp.es). The Revista de ObrasPublicas is the longest-running of the three, dating to the publication of its first issuein May of 1853. See the essay by Fernandez Ordonez and Navarro Vera for moreinformation on the latter.

9 Just as the bridge preceded the dam, interest in the history of dams is a more recentphenomenon than interest in the history of bridges, as Fernando Saenz Ridruejonotes in his informative ‘‘Ingenierıa e historia’’ (41). Saenz Ridruejo mentions manyfigures, past and present, interested in the history of bridges: Pedro CelestinoEspinosa, the author of ‘‘Resena de varios puentes construidos en Espana desde laantiguedad hasta principios del siglo XIX’’ (1878�79); Luis Gaztelu; VicenteMachimbarrena, who would become the director of the Escuela de Ingenieros deCaminos; Antonio Prieto Vives, author of the 1925 work Archivo espanol de Arte yArqueologıa; Carlos Fernandez Casado (1905�88); Juan Jose Arenas, author ofCaminos en el aire; Leonardo Fernandez Troyano, author of Tierra sobre el agua;Eugenio Alonso Franco; Jose Ramon Navarro Vera, author of El puente moderno enEspana; and finally Carlos Nardiz, Segundo Alvarado and Manuel Duran*all ofwhom were interested in the ancient bridges of the Gallician region (40�41).

10 The aestheticization of bridges is nothing new, as Manterola Armisen notes: ‘‘Sinembargo, en el mundo de los puentes sı influyen los cambios producidos en elmundo de la estetica. Si repasamos su historia, el puente y su forma siguen elcamino de la arquitectura de los edificios. No es raro encontrar puentes romanicos ogoticos, neoclasicos, etc., como no podrıa ser de otra manera, ya que pertenecen almismo hecho edificatorio que los edificios. Esta tendencia se quiebra a principios del



http://www.ciccp.es

siglo XIX y la quiebra se prolonga hasta pasada la mitad del siglo XX. El diseno delos puentes encuentra su propio camino con bastante rigor desde que se enfrentacon el hecho resistente y constructivo, con las leyes que el mismo genera a traves deun analisis cientıfico y tecnologico, y experimenta, por tanto, un enorme cambiorespecto a lo que pasa en los edificios’’ (Manterola Armisen ‘‘Problemas’’ 60).

11 See also Cartografıa personal (124) and his essay ‘‘Los lımites de la literaturamedieval’’, published in the volume Edad Media y literatura contemporanea.

12 Azua mentions two such Benet publications in engineering in particular: ‘‘Solucionesconstructivas en obras de regadıo’’ and ‘‘Panorama actual en las relacionescontractuales en la construccion de tuneles’’.

13 Vicent writes that Benet ‘‘construyo toda su literatura como ha dicho EduardoMendoza como una presa, analizando profundamente la resistencia de todos susmateriales literarios’’ (in Baeza, 80). Mendoza’s original comment was that Benetsuggested by example that ‘‘hay que ser tan consciente y responsable del propiotrabajo cuando se escribe una novela como cuando se disena, calcula y construye unapresa; que hay que calcular la estructura, la resistencia, la funcionalidad y elcomportamiento de los materiales; y tambien asumir los riesgos’’ (in Baeza, 71).

14 I owe thanks to Dr. John Margenot III for suggesting this anecdote to me. Accordingto Dıez-Cascon, Benet’s serious approach to matters of literature and engineeringwas complemented by his reputation for constantly joking around.

15 The bridge (el Puente de Dona Cautiva) is also mentioned at the beginning ofVolveras a Region: ‘‘Es un lugar tan solitario que nadie*ni en Region ni enBocentellas ni en el Puente de Dona Cautiva ni siquiera en la torre de la iglesia de ElSalvador*habla de el aun cuando todos saben que raro es el ano que el monte nocobra su tributo humano’’; ‘‘En Region apenas se habla de Manutua ni de su extranoguardian: no se habla de el en ninguno de los pueblos de la vega, ni en Region ni enBocentellas ni en el Puente de Dona Cautiva’’ (9, 11).

16 Also, ‘‘La Sierra de Region*2.480 metros de altitud en el vertice del Monje (aldecir de los geodesias que nunca lo escalaron) y 1.665 en sus puntos de paso, loscollados de Soceanos y la Requerida*se levanta como un postrer suspiro calcareode los Montes Aquilanos, un gesto de despedida hacia sus amigos continentales,antes de perderse y ocultarse entre las digitaciones portuguesas’’ (36).

17 As Compitello points out: ‘‘Among the place names that are a product of hisimagination, Benet intersperses references to the real, if somewhat obscurelocations in Spain. A check of a detailed atlas reveals that such places as Raneces,Mampodre, Lancara and la Liebana do, in fact, exist’’ (44, n. 17).

18 For an extended look at Lefebvre’s dialectical perspective and the reconciliatorymethodological underpinnings of cultural geography, see Fraser ‘‘Toward aPhilosophy of the Urban’’, ‘‘Madrid’s Retiro Park’’, and ‘‘Manuel Delgado’s UrbanAnthropology’’. Similarly, Fraser ‘‘The Bergsonian Link’’ reconciles recentdevelopments in sound research with geographical method.

19 Marx: ‘‘Frequently the only possible answer is a critique of the question, and theonly possible solution is to negate the question’’ (Grundrisse 127); Bergson: ‘‘Thetruth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problemand consequently of positing it, even more than of solving it’’ (The Creative Mind 51,original emphasis); Jacobs: ‘‘Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one ofthe main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot



be thought about in the same way’’ (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 428,original emphasis).

20 The description by David Fernandez-Ordonez Hernandez is also relevant: ‘‘Lospuentes forman elementos singulares de lımite y al mismo tiempo de paso entre dosfronteras separadas y a la vez unidas por su salto en el espacio’’ (80).

21 Benet’s remark is intended specifically as an explanation of his work La otra casa deMazon, although it may easily be extended as relevant to his other works. Thecomplete quotation reads: ‘‘Allı querıa aliar dos categorıas que no son mixtibles y,de hecho, es facil ver que, en un mismo producto, lo tragico y lo comico seinsertan, pero no se combinan’’ (Torres Fierro n.p.).

22 Benet comments on the unintelligibility of civil war, writing that: ‘‘History hasclosed around this enigma. No document exists that can unravel it. General Duvalwas correct when he asserted that civil war tends to become unintelligible. TheHegelian march of the spirit and reason through history is only demonstrable whenit is reason*a written and obvious one*that moves the muscles of the runner.When they are moved by silent impulses*like avarice, incompetence, ambition,and the lack of courage*that march becomes unintelligible and, therefore,investigable. It is worth saying, belatedly and uselessly investigable’’ (‘‘MilitaryStrategy’’ 22).

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