The Man of Feeling Book

This book is a gift.

A few days ago, showing the center of Madrid to a visiting friend, we stopped at the bookshop patronized by Javier Marías. In Librería Méndez they are usually well stocked on his books. Because of its connections with Opera, I had wanted to read this particular one, but as it is an early work it is less easy to find. But there it was, and my friend very kindly offered it to me.

The opera link is with Verdi's Otello. This is another sample of Marías' interest in Shakespeare. In most of his works there is at some point a reference to the English bard. In this novel, though, as the link is operatic it is removed by one further step. The narrator in the novel is an opera singer who has arrived in Madrid to sing the role of Cassio at the Teatro de la Zarzuela. At the time Marías wrote this, the Madrid Opera was still under restoration. This particularity helps to date the novel. It was published in 1986.

The novel, like play and opera, is also about a love triangle, but this one seems a dislocated Othello. The viewpoint, the angle and the way the components move are modified by Marías. The variations themselves give additional dynamism to the plot.

My edition contains an Afterword by Marías. Authors and artists are often cryptic when they are asked to elucidate their work. Their utterances become yet another creation, another representation. That is not the case here.

Marías explains his method of writing. He claims that he sets off out of a lived image or single memory that has stuck in his mind and from this starting point his literary imagination meanders and projects, and the work gradually takes shape. Writing for him is a voyage of discovery. He trails the characters as they flow out of his pen. I was somewhat bewildered by this, since his books seem to be marked by a steady pace of someone who is not in the least hurried and who enjoys delaying his march but who knows very well where he is going.

In this Afterword, Marías also states, clearly, that his aim was to compose the temporal space of love, for love lives out of anticipation and of memory. Love is the feeling that requires most imagination; it only exists in the realm of the possible - past and future. For Marías, then, the sentimental man, or man of feeling (the English version is The Man of Feeling), is he who realizes that if love is no longer possible, he will feel compelled to step out of the domain of fortuity - of life.

Marías is very skilful in disorienting our sense of time in our in pursuit of that sensation of love, a sensation that cannot live in the present. A linear development of the story, understood as a fast succession of the "Nows" similarly to the way a film is composed of a rapid succession of still photos, would just not work.

Instead the narrator keeps jumping backwards and forwards from the moment in which he is telling his story. And to add to the disorientation, the "sueño" element is introduced as well. Indeed, the novel begins with a reference to a dream, a recent dream that repeats something that had happened a few years before, even if in a somewhat different order and in somewhat different tempi to the real version. And from there proceeds to tell us the dream, and what had happened, even if they are the same. Meanwhile the present continues, with further visits to a more distant past. But the dream returns.

Marías plays with the two senses of the word sueño, for in Spanish it means both "sleep" and "dream". And this double value is consciously spelled out in the novel. If Marías is constricted by the conflated meanings into one single word, he also plays and exploits its ambiguity. Rejecting Freudian ideas, he however acknowledges the revelatory power of dreams. But while dreaming one is also asleep, or living as if dead. Lovers are separated when they are sleeping, even if they are sleeping together. And for dreaming together, they have to be awake.

This is my third Marías. As the other two were from 1992 A Heart So White and 2011 Los enamoramientos my reaction to my familiarity with Marías writing is being formed following an inverted chronology.

His stamp is recognized in his circular writing. And in this novel this contributes to the synthetic understanding of the story. Marías literary techniques make me think of music structures. There are expositions, repeating themes, ritornellos, anticipations, subthemes, modulations etc. Although I admit that I felt this most clearly when I read "A Heart so White".

What is very constant, though, is the narrating voice. I feel as if I were always listening to that same voice.