Benjamin Jarnes

Benjamín Jarnés Millán (Elbow, October 7, 1888-Madrid, August 11, 1949) was a novelist, narrator of stories and short stories, essayist, biographer, literary critic and Spanish translator belonging to by age the generation of Noucentisme, although his literary production is framed within avant-garde prose, which is why he corresponds, due to aesthetic affinity, to the generation of '27.

Trajectory

Mural in tribute to Benjamin Jarnés in Codo, his hometown.

Plate at the writer's home in Codo

His family was very large: he was the seventeenth of twenty-two siblings, sons of the local tailor and sacristan, Pedro Jarnés Aznar, seven from a first marriage and thirteen from a second marriage to Bernabea Millán Villagrasa. This Pedro Jarnés was fond of poetry and wrote couplets and romances of the blind, some of which came to be printed.

He entered the Belchite seminary in 1900 and then the San Valero y San Braulio Pontifical General Seminary when he was ten years old, more to have a free education than for true religious faith, but later he passed, given the economic hardships of his family, to the Seminary of San Francisco de Paula, reserved for poor students, until 1909, the year in which he left after finishing the second year of Theology.

In February 1910 he joined the 21st Aragon Infantry Regiment, with a battalion in Barcelona, and a year later, in 1911, he was promoted to sergeant. Assigned to Zaragoza in 1912, he combined his profession as a military man with his teaching studies, enrolling that same year at the Escuela Normal Superior de Maestros as a free student, and that same year of 1912, the then Sergeant Benjamín Jarnés published a sixteen-page pamphlet entitled Military Obedience, which won first prize (a silver watch) in the literary contest held in the Corps on March 16, 1912.

He married Gregoria Bergua in 1916. Assigned to Jaca in 1917, he began his journalistic collaborations with La Crónica de Aragón, El Pirineo Aragonés, El Pilar and La Union. In 1920 he settled in Madrid. There he was a critic of the Revista de Occidente , directed by José Ortega y Gasset.

After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile in Mexico, and only returned, already very ill, in 1948. He also collaborated in the magazines Alfar, La Gaceta Literaria, Cross and Stripe, Ronsel and Proa. He publishes Mosén Pedro , edited by the Biblioteca Patria in 1924.

His first important novel, greeted and commented on by important writers, dates from 1926, The Useless Professor (1926), where intellectualism and the typical essayistic tendency among the members of Noucentismo can be appreciated. This work opens the Nova Novarum collection of the Revista de Occidente. It raises the art-life pair, with primacy of the second, through the introduction of different girls, Ruth, Carlota, Rebeca, Herminia, on which the individual episodes that make up the book revolve. It was augmented in 1934 with new heroines and many other tweaks.

Just published his next novel, El convidado de papel (1928), he received a letter of support from Azorín. In 1980 the unpublished work His line of fire was released, written in 1938 and corrected in Mexico two years later, in which he carried out a profound reflection on the Spanish Civil War. The town of Fuentes de Ebro (Zaragoza) has a secondary school that bears his name. In his hometown Codo is the house where he was born with a plaque that accredits him and also a street with his name.

Work

His library and personal archive have been located since 1995 in the Documentation Center of the Student Residence. The funds of this legacy are made up of 2,150 books, 70 magazines, 330 letters, manuscripts of some of his works, press clippings and various photographs.

The epistolary preserves letters written between 1923 and 1936, one of the most intense periods in the life and work of Jarnés, with a list of correspondents whose mere mention shows some steps in his biography, since he settled in 1920 Madrid and was introduced to Madrid's literary life, through the gathering of the Café de Oriente and the newsrooms of the Revista de Occidente and La Gaceta Literaria, until his collaboration in Spanish time in Republican Barcelona. Unpublished are La dama aventurera (Short novel), which was never published, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Novel), of which some chapters were published -" Prótula", "The pitcher and its shadow" and "Palmistry"-, in the second edition of The Useless Professor, from 1934.

Benjamín Jarnés includes himself among those who propose to "raise the level of art through the arduous paths of intelligence, through the thin paths of sensibility". With his back to realism, he intends to elevate reality to a "poetic zone"; and make pure art ("art returns to its cell... Nudity"). Jarnés, we will repeat it, works his prose with refinement and -according to his words- & # 34; burnishes each word & # 34;. For all these reasons, Jarnés is situated in the avant-garde novel.

There are many autobiographical elements in his novels. In The Red and the Blue (1932), a title inspired by one of his favorite authors, Stendhal, (1932), he narrates the life of a marginalized man in the army and his protagonist "Julio Aznar& #3. 4; (Aznar was the second surname of his father) runs his same vital vicissitudes.

Julio Aznar had already been the main character in another novel by Jarnés, El convidado de papel (1928), about his experiences in the seminary in Zaragoza. He will become a recurring character in the work of the Aragonese, as he appears in several of his books: Paula y Paulita, Tántalo, La novia del viento, Eufrosina or grace. Jarnés also signed with the pseudonym "Julio Aznar" his last novel, Constellation of Phryné , in 1944.

In Nobody's Madness and Death, 1929, the problem of the meaning of life and personality is raised. In Zumbel Theory , 1930, he went so far as to describe a car crash over eight pages.

His work is characterized by

1. compositive freedom (in part of it they coexist the narrative, the lyric and the rehearsal),
2. the vastness of their concerns,
3. his solid humanistic formation,
4. their defense of modernity and
5. their inclination to exalt the highest values of the spirit (freedom, tolerance, imagination and humor, among others).

His novels reveal the most relevant characteristics of the «new art» diagnosed by Ortega y Gasset:

1. glowing metaphor,
2. funny ironies,
3. sharpness and arts of wit,
4. Fine eroticism,
5. morose tasting in sensations
6. eager for experimentation,
7. a deep lirism.

In the last thirty years there has been a true critical recovery of the author. Recently, Domingo Ródenas de Moya has also edited Elogio de la impuridad, Cervantes: biographical sketch, On artistic grace, and his abundant Critical Work.

Author's Bibliography

Autobiography

• Autobiography Edition of Ildefonso Manuel Gil; Zaragoza, Institución Fernando el Católico, 1988.

Biographies

• Mosén Pedro1924.
• Sister Sponsor, the nun of the sores1929.
• Zumalacárregui, the romantic leader1931.
• Double Bécquer agony, 1936
• Castelar, man of Sinai1936.
• Don Vasco de Quiroga1942.
• Manuel Acuña1942.
• Stefan Zweig, summit off1942. New edition with prologue of Domingo Ródenas de Moya in Qualea, 2010.
• School of freedom; seven teachers: Bolivar, Hidalgo, Lincoln, Martí, San Martín, Sucre, Washington1942.

Extensive narrative

• The useless teacher (1926); second edition 1934.
• Paper guest (1928).
• The Life of St Alejo, 1928
• Paula and Paulita (1929)
• Madness and Death of Nobody (1929)
• Theory of zumbel (1930)
• Viviana and Merlin1930;
• Scenes next to death (1931)
• The red and the blue (1932)
• Get it.1934.
• The bride of the windMexico, 1940
• The bride of the wind (1940)
• Dynamic Venus (Mexico, 1943).
• Friné constellation1944.
• Eufrosine or grace1948.
• The apprentice of witch (with the adventurous lady), 2007 (postuma)

Essay

• Your line of fire, composed in 1938, and corrected in Mexico two years later, printed in 1980.
• Exercises1927
• Rubber, 1931
• Book Fair, 1935
• Letters to the Ebro1940.

Theater

• Waiting room, 1936
• Get it.1935, farce.
• With Rafael López Rienda, The Hero of Legion1925, he committed three acts.
• Adaptation of the Volpone Ben Jonson, 1929.