A Meditation by Juan Benet

First published:Una meditacion, 1970 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: The 1920’s through the 1960’s

Locale: Region, a fictional town in northwest Spain, and its environs

Principal Character:

• The Narrator, a mature man trying to recall the events of the last forty years

The Novel

A Meditation consists of one long, rambling paragraph, without divisions, in which the narrator sets forth his memories of growing up in Region and the outlying area. There is no coherent plot. Instead, the work consists of isolated scenes, philosophical meanderings, fragments of speech, parts of a letter, and diverse reflections, all arranged in no particular order. Through recollection and reflection, the narrator hopes to understand better his own life, as well as the lives of his family and acquaintances. Memory becomes a tool in the process of existential self-creation, which serves to give meaning to the existence of the individual. As Region is a symbol of Spain and a microcosm of the world, the narrator’s meditation is an ambitious search for the meaning of not only his own life but also that of his nation and of human beings in general. At the end, however, the narrator is no closer to an understanding of reality than he was at the beginning.

Although memory is the operating force of the narrative, there is an element of will that assigns greater or lesser importance to every recollection. Will is not necessarily subject to reason or logic: It “has its own predilections.” For will, “the death of a blood aunt can be much less a reason for concern than the loss of a cigarette lighter.” Thus, memory dredges up and dwells on those incidents for which the individual feels a particular passion or interest. That is why seemingly unimportant details sometimes occupy pages, while major events may be mentioned only in passing. For example, on one occasion, the narrator’s family sends his cousin to pick hazelnuts outside the house of a prestigious clan with which his aunts have become obsessed, in the hope that the girl will be invited inside. On the way, the narrator, then a young child who is fascinated with his cousin, falls and scratches his knee, then runs to catch up with the group, so that he will not miss Mary’s entry onto the terrace. The episode is described in great detail. “I don’t know why I keep that entry so engraved in my memory, why I remember it with such insistence and precision, and why at times I see myself trying to inquire into its most insignificant details, as if the discovery of one of them might change the whole balance of the system remembered,” the narrator muses. Then he realizes that falling, shedding blood, and pushing himself to go on had taken on “heroic characteristics” in his then-childish mind. He had subconsciously transformed the incident into a sort of sacrifice, a proof of valor, that he must make on behalf of Mary, whom he greatly admired. On the other hand, when the narrator refers to Emilio Ruiz, a self-righteous, hypocritical man who hopes to marry into the narrator’s family, he remembers the name only vaguely, referring to him as “Emilio something Ruiz something.”

Illogically, an event as cataclysmic as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War takes on importance only because it allowed the narrator more freedom as a child, for, as the adults became more concerned with the war, their preoccupation with the children’s behavior diminished. The Civil War is the focal point of the novel. It is the chronological referent for all other events, which are often described as having occurred before, after, or during the war. Yet A Meditation is not a political novel. Juan Benet is interested in the effect of the war—and other occurrences—on the psyche of the individual.

The narrator’s recollections range from the humorous to the grotesque, from the trivial to the repugnant. Often, there is a note of irony. When his Uncle Alonso appears with an unmarried couple posing as husband and wife, the narrator’s scandalized family, which suspects the truth, entertains the pair only with reluctance. After raising eyebrows by retreating into the bedroom for a long period, during which time they make a shockingly loud racket, the guests further upset the family by splitting up for dinner. The lady pleads exhaustion and stays in her room, while the gentleman dines with the adults. (The children have been shooed away to protect them from corruption.) In spite of their prejudices, the staid aunts and uncles find their guest to be highly entertaining and soon are laughing and joking with him—much to their embarrassment when he is gone.

In another episode, a missionary with a reputation for saintliness gets his beard caught in a drawer. When one of the nephews suggests that the beard be cut in order to free the man, the missionary hurls a series of oaths and curses at him.

Much of the humor of the novel revolves around a liqueur created by the narrator’s grandfather. The potion is so strong and unsavory that guests routinely pour it into plants, which die shortly thereafter. Yet Mr. Hocher, a stubborn Swiss gentleman who is anxious to marry into the family, drinks it with apparent pleasure and compliments the grandfather on it constantly, thereby irritating the old man. These episodes not only relieve the tedium of Benet’s wordiness but also serve to point out the hypocrisy of society.

Other episodes jolt the reader by reducing the characters to grotesque, repulsive, animalistic beings. For example, one night, Jorge Ruan goes to the room of a woman known as Camila. As he ejaculates, he bites her earlobe, causing blood to run out of her ear at the same time that his own secretions flow from his body. Afterward, he places a dead rat on the pillow beside her. Later that night, a woman whom Camila desires and for whom she had been waiting, appears and places the dead rat between the girl’s legs. This episode underscores the spiritual ruin of the characters, who, alienated and frightened, seek temporary escape in sex, only to sink back into the depths of their misery after the act. Typically, Benet’s characters are emotionally uninvolved, even distant, during sex. Often they are nameless. The narrator is deliberately vague about the woman’s name: “I don’t think [she] was called Camila, as the few friends who knew her and dealt with her said.” The effect is to distance and dehumanize the participants. With irony, the narrator refers to the “cadaver” of the rat, thereby humanizing the animal and insinuating that it is more human than the people who handle it.

The Characters

A Meditation is filled with characters who are governed by strange fixations. For example, the grandfather is so obsessed with his liqueur that he is certain that Carlos Bonaval has stolen and commercially exploited the recipe. Cayetano Corral spends his entire life in his workshop tinkering with clocks. Jorge is fixated on rats. The Indian, who killed his father, masturbates incessantly in front of a picture of his mother. These traits serve to distinguish the characters, who hardly have identities apart from their manias.

Benet’s female characters are distinctly sexual beings. Mary, who left for America with her exiled husband, bore children, and returned with a new mate, is representative of the woman who seeks her authentic self by disregarding society’s norms and following her passions. Instead of finding freedom and happiness, however, Mary degenerates physically and emotionally.

No character acquires depth or develops through the course of the novel. Most are vague. For example, no one knows why the man called the Indian is known by that name; he is not, in fact, an Indian. Many of the characters are easily confused with one another, among them Mary, Leo, and Laura. Nor do the characters communicate with one another. Although there are fragments of speech throughout the novel, there is no real dialogue. There is no “I-you” relationship, but only one “I” existing alongside another. Even the letter from Cayetano Corral to Carlos Bonaval is more a treatise on psychology and physics than a personal letter, and it leads nowhere, for it is interrupted midway.

Only one voice emerges from the morass of words, that of the narrator. He is the existential “I” who confronts an amorphous world composed of “others.” Throughout the novel, he struggles to recall, as precisely as possible, those pertinent incidents and people that influenced the development of his “self.” The frequency of expressions such as “perhaps,” “I imagine,” “how can I know,” “I don’t remember,” and “I can’t visualize it” indicates that he is groping for accuracy. Others, such as “I am sure” and “I can still see it,” indicate that he is sure of his facts. At times, he contradicts or corrects himself. For example, he begins a scene: “The outbreak of the civil war caught us celebrating a birthday, under the wisteria.” Later, he thinks better of it and adds, “Excuse me, a baptism. Cousin Celia had given birth to her second son.” Yet it is not through words that he can capture the essence of his existence, for words convert experience into an “objective narration” that pulls together all the loose ends, destroying the chaos and incongruence that are the core of human reality. Cayetano Corral understands that thought cannot be fixed in words. That is why, although he makes notes constantly, he writes only with chalk and erases everything.

Gonzalo Sobejano has written that Region is the real protagonist of A Meditation. Indeed, the town suffers from the same disintegration that plagues all the characters; it is “a mummified Region, wrapped in decay, boredom, and solitude.” The narrator describes the trash around the trees as “a rotting offer to rottenness.” The rotting of trees—which are a traditional symbol of hope—conveys the despair that permeates Region.

Critical Context

Benet is considered one of Spain’s premier existentialist writers. Many critics consider A Meditation, Benet’s second novel, to be his best work. Benet’s previous novel, Volveras a Region (1967; Return to Region, 1985), had failed to attract critical attention, but in 1969, when A Meditation received the Biblioteca Breve literary award, the prize attracted readers’ attention toward Return to Region and Nunca llegaras a nada (1959; you will never get anywhere), an early collection of novellas.

Benet has written stories, novellas, plays, and essays in addition to his novels. Yet his work defies classification, for it consistently breaks with traditional boundaries of genre. In his fiction, he has cultivated a circuitous, wordy narrative almost devoid of plot and characterization. The first four—Return to Region, A Meditation, Un viaje de invierno (1972; a winter journey), and La otra casa de Mazon (1973; the Mazons’ other house)—take place in Region and have been customarily referred to as the Region cycle. Another novel, En el estado (1977, in the state), takes place in La Portada, an area similar to Region. Yet this last novel is different from Benet’s previous works in form and style. Nevertheless, in all of his fiction, Benet’s vision is one of man alone in an absurd and hostile universe, forced to reinvent himself in order to give meaning to his life.

Bibliography

Cabrera, Vicente. Juan Benet, 1983.

Choice. XX, September, 1982, p. 90.

Christian Science Monitor. XCIX, July 9, 1982, p. 14.

Compitello, Malcolm. Ordering the Evidence: Volveras a Region and Civil War Fiction, 1983.

Library Journal. CVII, May 1, 1982, p. 902.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 24, 1982, p. 7.

Herzberger, David K. “The Emergence of Juan Benet: A New Alternative for the Spanish Novel,” in American Hispanist. I, no. 3 (1975), pp. 6-12.

Herzberger, David K. The Novelistic World of Juan Benet, 1976.

Mantiega, Robert C., David K. Herzberger, and Malcolm Alan Compitello, eds. Critical Approaches to the Writings of Juan Benet, 1984.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, May 23, 1982, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXI, March 19, 1982, p. 55.