In the field of world literature, questions about the temporal versus spatial nature of worlding persist. One reason is the problematic nature of this dichotomy. Taking up Pheng Cheah’s calls for the temporal worlding of indeterminate becoming, my paper complicates the fate of spatiality in this move toward ontological open-endedness. With discussion of the vanishing point, I postulate that imaginative distancing in its relation to memory involves a spatialization that need not be circumscribed by global flattening of the humanist ethos central to the worldliness of world literature. In response to the connection Cheah draws between literature and worldliness, I claim that the latter is characterized by a spatiotemporal elasticity born from the proliferation of meaning in the former. At the extreme, this movement gestures toward the infinite held by the vanishing point, and there, indeterminacy appears absurdly paradoxical in our search for world value, as consciousness loses itself in the repeated and necessary attempt to transcend distance that cannot be measured.
Francisco Fuster's Aire de familia: Historia íntima de los Baroja is a welcome recent addition to biographical scholarship and cultural histories of the Baroja family and its legacy in Spain, not least because existing surveys have tended to vary in quality and accuracy. This problem has been compounded by the transposition from fiction inspired by personal experience back to autobiography in Pío Baroja's own memoirs Desde la última vuelta del camino, which the author began writing in 1941 when he was in his late sixties.Fuster's Aire de familia presents an evocative portrait of a well-known family of individualists, descendants of the mining engineer Serafín Baroja y Zornoza and his wife Carmen Nessi y Goñi. The volume eschews a dry, chronological account in favour of a thematic and anecdotal exploration of the family's peripatetic movements between San Sebastián, Madrid, Pamplona and Valencia, where they lost their eldest son Darío to tuberculosis in 1894. This episode was transposed to semi-autobiographical fiction in Pío Baroja's El árbol de la ciencia through the death of the protagonist Andrés' youngest brother Luisito, thereby changing the name and age of the sibling. Subsequent chapters of Fuster's book trace the experiences of the couple's offspring: 'El náufrago Ricardo Baroja', 'Las inquietudes de Pío Baroja' and 'Las vidas (im)posibles de Carmen Baroja'. The final chapters summarize the role of Julio Caro Baroja and Pío Caro Baroja, the children of Carmen Baroja and her husband Rafael Caro Raggio, in preserving the family legacy.
Several days' journey removed from the palace of Mulay Mohammad bin Abdallah, the sultan who ruled Morocco in the latter half of the eighteenth century, an anonymous Spaniard recorded a series of observations about the indigenous trees beyond the city of Mogador. Though most would be unrecognizable in Spain, one tree of particular note, the author remarks, bears a fruit that "se asemeja a nuestras aceitunas sevillanas" (Antonio Rodríguez Villa 298). The extensive roots of this tree, the argan, span out in all directions so as to support robust branches that grow up from the ground without a central trunk, and it is added that the inhabitants of the region depend on the abundance of its fruit for their cattle, cooking oil, and other necessities. This account comes from a member of the official entourage of the Spanish ambassador, Jorge Juan, during a six-month state visit in 1767 spent in the company of Juan's Moroccan counterpart, Ahmad bin Mahdi al-Ghazal, or 'El Gazel,' as he was known in Spain. 1 At this moment in history, both nations found sufficient diplomatic cause to reach out across the Strait, and al-Ghazal, for his part, had traveled to Spain the year before, in 1766, with a lavish retinue hosted by Carlos 1 Annotated editions and studies of José Cadalso's Cartas marruecas most often refer to the Moroccan ambassador as Sidi Hamet(e) al-Ghaz(z)al(i), or simply, Sidi Hamet El Gazel. Although subject to variation across historical accounts of Morocco, his complete name, as documented by Thomas K. Park and Aomar Boum 136, was abû al-abbâs aHmad bn al-mahdî al-ghazzâl al-andalusî al-mâlaqî, while in Arabic, the signature of the 1766 al-Ghazal journal in al-Arabi's critical edition with facsimile reads My use of the modern accepted spelling of "al-Ghazal" throughout this paper follows that of Nabil Matar 486-87.
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