Moix and signs: time and the revelations of memory in Terenci Moix’s autobiography

Vilaseca, David; Vilaseca, David

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.6.3.31

Vilaseca, David

Journal of Romance Studies (2006), 6, (3), 31–46.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.6.3.31
Language: English
Pages: 16

Abstract

This article draws on the early work of Gilles Deleuze – particularly on Proust and Signs (2000; first published in 1964) and, to a lesser extent, on Difference and Repetition (2004; first published in 1968) – in order to analyse the concept and the representation of time in Terenci Moix’s three-volume autobiography El peso de la paja [The Weight of Straw] – including El cine de los sábados (1998a [1990]) [The Saturday Matinee], El beso de Peter Pan (1998b [1993]) [Peter Pan’s Kiss] and Extraño en el paraíso (1998c) [Stranger in Paradise]. Treating Moix’s biographical narrative as a ‘search for truth’ (Deleuze 2000: 15) and as the story of the ‘apprenticeship of a man of letters’ (3), the article aims to demonstrate that for Moix (much as for Proust, according to Deleuze) the revelations of memory entail the laying bare of an ‘essential’ or ‘original’ time, a time which – contrary to all commonsense assumptions – cannot be conceived of as a chronological succession of spatial movements, but must be viewed instead as a virtual totality in which the past ‘is and […] coexists with itself as present’ (58). The article then turns to Moix’s Timaeus-inspired notion of an ‘eternal’ time vis-à-vis the normal ‘passing’ time and sees this, from a Deleuzian point of view, as the author’s attempt to install a domain of virtual transcendence as the ground for actual experience.

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