Through the Sartrean Lens: Existential Freedom in Camilo José Cela's La colmena

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Through the Sartrean Lens: ExistentialFreedom in Camilo José Cela's LacolmenaNicolás Fernández-Medinaa

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Through the Sartrean Lens:Existential Freedom in

Camilo José Cela’s La colmena

NICOLÁS FERNÁNDEZ-MEDINA

The Pennsylvania State University

Few post-Civil War Spanish novels have been subjected to such great scrutinyand interpretation as Camilo José Cela’s La colmena. Since its publication in1951, it has aroused a veritable torrent of critical literature, particularly withregard to the innovative narrative strategies Cela employs in laying bare oneof the bleakest periods in Spain’s recent history. Almost every critic who hasdealt with La colmena in any detail has commented on the various ways Celaengages and reflects upon the inexorable realities of the human condition, andthe diversity of scholarship on this subject has covered everything from man’stragic confrontation with mortality and the absurdity of existence, to thenature of subjectivity and the temporality of being.1 I believe, however, we canmake further progress on the existential problematic in La colmena, sincethere are certainly questions that still remain for consideration. My aim in

1 In Olga Ferrer’s assessment, Cela’s tremendismo in La familia de Pascual Duarte andLa colmena engages a transnational ‘angustia existencial’ (‘La literatura española tremendistay su nexo con el existencialismo’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 22:3–4 [1956], 287–303 [pp. 298–303]). Robert C. Spires examines the ‘profunda angustia’ in La colmena in relation to how itdeepens our understanding of ‘la frágil temporalidad del yo’. While his study presents us withone of the most cogent explanations of time in Cela’s novel, it only hints at the core individualistdimensions of existential anguish (La novela española de posguerra: creación artística yexperiencia personal [Madrid: Cupsa, 1978], p. 95). José Ortega’s treatment of Cela’s ironichumour seeks to define ‘la angustia del escritor ante la imposibilidad para transformar larealidad que moralmente le repugna’ (‘El humor de Cela en La colmena’, CuadernosHispanoamericanos, 208 [1967], 159–64 [p. 159]). For Ortega, the existential question in Lacolmena is really a facet of Cela’s own narrative awareness concerning the world’s absurdityand barrenness, and through humouristic reflection the author provides his readers with alooking glass into the human condition in its broadest understanding. In Sobejano’s reading ofLa colmena, anguish should be interpreted as a potent feeling of ‘desesperación’ associated withinner vacuousness, death and liberation (Gonzalo Sobejano, ‘La colmena: olor a miseria’,Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 337–38 [1978], 113–26 [p. 125]). For his part, Godoy Gallardobelieves Cela accurately portrays the individual’s concrete day-to-day suffering in an abjectworld: ‘La palabra colmena refiere a algo cerrado, enclaustrado, aprisionado, que se compone de

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what follows is to take up the discussion of how Cela’s novel lends itself to anexistentialist reading that directly addresses and accommodates theindividual’s conflict with the world. Drawing upon the insights of MarioCamus, David Henn, José Ortega and Darío Villanueva, I shall revisit MartínMarco as the troubled protagonist of this conflict, yet I intend to focusattention explicitly on the ontological implications of what it entails in termsof existential freedom.2

Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness will guide my analysis, andmy rationale for choosing this seminal existentialist text is three-fold. First, theontology Sartre proposes in Being and Nothingness, aside from representingone of the high-water marks of existential thought, centres on clarifying theindividual’s relationship with the concrete world. It offers us what Catalanoexplains as ‘an extended reflection on the relation of the free human organicbody to the world of things and peoples’.3 If not disregarded altogether, thesubjectivist perspective in La colmena is, for many readers, secondary inimportance to that of the collective perspective. J. F. Cirre’s opinion isrepresentative of this point of view when he avers that ‘la existencia en Lacolmena lleva implícita la renuncia del “yo”. Se comparte un destino y unacircunstancia general, de masas’.4 While there is little doubt that the collectiveperspective prevails throughout the novel, the fact is that the text is composedof a whole host of distinctive characters, each with a rather unique—andadmittedly, fragmentary—way of understanding the world. We need only

espacios menores, celdillas, en que pululan multiplicidad de seres que se muevenincansablemente y que viven, con angustia, día tras día’ (‘Funciones del espacio en el planodel contenido estructural de La colmena’, in La palabra en libertad. Homenaje a Camilo JoséCela, Colección Paraninfo, 2 vols [Murcia: Univ. de Murcia, 1991], I, 7–23 [p. 8]).

2 While elaborating on his cinematic portrayal of La colmena, Mario Camus notedthat ‘Martín Marco, aunque Cela nunca lo admitió y se enfadaba mucho cuando alguien ledecía esto, es el protagonista [de La colmena]’ (Historia, teorías y cine. 23 entrevistas,[Barcelona: Univ. de Barcelona, 2008], 102). Although David Henn is not particularlyinterested in Martín’s concept of self and freedom, he does observe that his plight fromChapter 1 to the ‘Final’ structures the novel in significant ways: ‘Marco se hace, poco apoco, el personaje de mayor importancia de La colmena. Desde un punto de vistaestructural, su presencia da cierto ímpetu y cierta coherencia a la narración’ (DavidHenn, ‘Martín Marco: el desarrollo de un protagonista’, Ínsula, 518–19 [1990], 33–34[p. 34]). For José Ortega, Martín is the clear protagonist of the novel for two reasons.Firstly, Cela defines Martín’s individuality; and secondly, Martín is the only character whoconfronts the question of his mortality (‘Importancia del personaje Martín Marco en Lacolmena de Cela’, Romance Notes, 6 [1965], 92–95 [pp. 92–93]). In his ‘Introducción’ to theVicens Vives edition of La colmena, Villanueva notes that ‘sin incurrir en la falacia delautobiografismo romo, no veo por qué abstenerse de sugerir que Martín Marco merece elcalificativo de alter ego del autor’ (‘Introducción’, in La colmena, ed. Darío Villanueva[Barcelona: Noguer, 1983], 5–99 [p. 54]).

3 Joseph S. Catalano, Reading Sartre (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.,2010), 70.

4 Raquel Asún, ‘Introducción’, in La colmena, ed., intro. y notas de Raquel Asún(Madrid: Castalia, 1984), 7–88 (p. 57).

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consider how doña Rosa, don Ibrahím, Celestino, Elvirita, Seoane, Victorita,señor Suárez, Pepe el Astilla, la Filo, and Petrita, to name a few, each furnishesuswith a distinctive perspective of the insular collective totality that Cela refersto as the hive. On closer inspection, then, La colmena, as Sobejano correctlynoted, does not only portray a more distended and ‘symphonic’ vision of reality,but it also illuminates an individualist, localized, and ‘cellular’ vision.5

Second, Sartre defines a set of existential concepts in Being and Nothingness,such as authenticity, bad faith, contingency, facticity, andnothingnesswithwhichto map the individual’s journey to freedom (what Sartre theorizes as thefoundation of being as such).6 These concepts can be profitably applied to Lacolmena to channel our reading ofCela’s rendering of thehumancondition.7Asweshall see, such concepts are thoroughly intertwined and complementary inSartrean thought, and they are all rooted in that most fundamental andintimate experience of anguish that underpins any consciousness of freedom. AsSartre points out in the Introduction toBeing andNothingness, we cannot simplyand straightforwardly arrive at a consciousness of freedomwithout first coming toterms with how anguish conditions our reality through questions of authenticity,bad faith, contingency, facticity and nothingness. For this reason, I will begin myanalysis of freedom with some observations on the organizing concept of anguishand return to it throughout this study.

Lastly, Celamuch admired Sartre andwas quite conversantwith existentialphilosophy. Althoughwe cannot say for certain if Sartre’s philosophy influencedhis fiction directly, there is no denying that with La colmena he connected withthe prevailing existentialistZeitgeist thatwas sweepingEurope in the 1940s and’50s, thanks in large measure to the impact and global popularity of Sartre’sphilosophy and literature. Writing in 1962, Zamora Vicente observed that ‘losmotivos deLa colmena son siempre europeos […] JulesRomains (Les hommes debonne volonté), Louis Aragon (Les beaux quartiers) y, sobre todo, Sartre’.8McPhetters also took note of the manner in which existential themes prevalentin Sartre’s pre-Marxist philosophy infused Cela’s work, in particular the idea ofthe inescapability of nothingness, which is most comprehensively developed inBeing and Nothingness.9 Ferrer likewise has registered a Sartrean flavour in

5 Dru Dougherty, ‘Form and Structure in La colmena: From Alienation to Community’,Anales de la Novela de Posguerra, 1 (1976), 7–23 (p. 7).

6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York:Philosophical Library, 1956), 365.

7 I have decided not to expand on Sartre’s distinction of ‘Being-for-itself’ and ‘Being-in-itself’; that is, the important distinction between conscious and non-conscious beings and hownon-conscious beings are presented as objects to our consciousness. An analysis of this kindwould have taken our attention away from the subject of freedom. In using the term‘individual’, it is a given that I am referring in general to the ‘Being-for itself’.

8 Alonso Zamora Vicente, Camilo José Cela (acercamiento a un escritor) (Madrid:Gredos, 1962), 174.

9 D. W. McPheeters, Camilo José Cela, Twayne World Authors Series 67 (New York:Twayne, 1969), 47.

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areas ofCela’s oeuvre.10 And inmore contemporary scholarship, JohnRosenberghas examined the extent to which a critical reading of Sartre’s theory of the‘Look’ in Being and Nothingness can essentially recast the specificity of visualperception in La familia de Pascual Duarte in view of such themes as violenceand domination. ‘[N]o one has explored’, Rosenberg tells us, ‘the provocativeparallels betweenCela’s book and another fundamental French text of the sameperiod: Sartre’sBeing andNothingness […] both are powerful and often parallelexpressions of man’s troubled circumstance in the twentieth century’.11

One point must be perfectly clear before moving forward: the fact thatSartre’s philosophy opens up a critical space for a productive engagement ofCela’s view of the human condition in La colmena by no means implies thatCela himself was an existentialist in the strict sense of the term (herepudiated the label ‘existentialista’, just as he repudiated many others),or that through his fiction he wilfully participated in an existentialistmovement. That said, what any reader of Cela’s 1940s and ’50s fictioncannot deny is that he provokes and explores, whether consciously or not,deeply existential questions in his work. What is more, it is evident from theunderlying thematic foci of novels like La colmena that he was well-informedon the major philosophical arguments of his day. He did, after all, sit in onclasses of philosophy and literature in Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria beforethe Civil War when Ortega y Gasset’s raciovitalismo and Heidegger’sphenomenology of being were all the rage in university circles. During thispre-Civil War period of rather intense scholarship, he studied under PedroSalinas, and counted Julián Marías, at the time one of Ortega y Gasset’smost distinguished pupils, as one of his classmates and friends. Yet, as Celaadmitted, his penchant for philosophy took root earlier when he was ateenager:

A los catorce años pasé una grave enfermedad. Había acabado elBachillerato y tuve que hacer prolongados reposos. De Dick Turpin yBuffalo Bill paso sin transición alguna a la obra de Ortega […] y a losclásicos castellanos de Rivadeneyra […] La influencia de aquellaslecturas, unida a los descubrimientos de que antes te hablaba, que mehizo Pedro Salinas, marcó en mi formación una época benéfica yprofunda.12

10 Ferrer, ‘La literatura española tremendista’, 300.11 John Rosenberg, ‘Pascual Duarte and the Eye of the Beholder: Cela, Sartre, and the

Metaphor of Vision’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 14:1 (1989), 149–60 (p. 150).12 Marino Gómez Santos, Diálogos españoles (Madrid: Cid, 1958), 132. Cela reiterated in

1992 that ‘Ortega influenced me very much, just as more or less, in greater or lesser degreehappened with all the Spaniards my age and a bit older. Of course! And besides, Ortega wasthe one who opened the doors of Spain, the windows of Spain to Europe. We were stuck inourselves and he was the one who allowed an inpouring of fresh European air, right?’ (StephenMiller, ‘The Artistic Experimentation of Camilo José Cela: An Interview with the Writer inTexas on August 16, 1992’, South Central Review, 10:1 [1993], 12–21 [p. 15]).

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Much of Cela’s non-fiction writing during the late 1950s and early ’60s isrife with all manner of philosophical insights and inquiries. Take thededication in his short piece ‘Sobre la soledad del escritor’ of 1956 thatreads: ‘Para Kant, dos cosas llenaban su espíritu de admiración y de espanto:el cielo estrellado sobre su cabeza y la ley moral dentro de sí mismo. Alservicio de la ley moral han sido escritas las páginas que siguen’.13 Even hisacceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize, ‘Eulogy of the Fable’ of 1989, containsa rather extensive analysis of Plato’s Cratylus that can be read as anintelligent philosophical commentary on literary praxis.14 We know thatafter the war, Cela became a keen admirer of French existentialism inparticular. Critics such as Castellet, Nora and McPheeters have all directedour attention to the intriguing similarities between Camus’ L’Etranger of1942, and Cela’s breakout novel La familia de Pascual Duarte, alsopublished in 1942.15 When asked in an interview if Camus deserved theNobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Cela had no qualms about praising all ofFrench existentialist philosophy, yet he added with a nod to Sartre: ‘Quizápor escalofón hubieran podido dárselo también––y también me hubieraparecido magnífico––a Malraux o a Sartre’.16 In ‘Palma, cuerpo vivo(ensayo de planteamiento de un problema)’, a 1956 lecture/essay onurbanism and the modern city, Cela displays an impressive knowledge of awhole host of philosophical quandaries that put him in direct conversationwith the founding fathers of modern Western metaphysics: Descartes,Leibniz, Kant and Kierkegaard. His esteem for Sartre is incontrovertible inthis lecture/essay, and his perceptive remarks on the principal tenets ofatheistic existentialism confirm that he was well-versed in the underlyingarguments of Being and Nothingness:

A Sartre […] le importa el ser del hombre no más que como corolario deque hay ese hombre, con sus flaquezas y con sus virtudes, y de que esehombre está, heroicamente huérfano (postura primordial delexistencialismo ateo), a solas con su doliente corazón. El desconsuelo deSartre tiene sus más hondas raíces, sus más claras fuentes, en la fatalrazón de que el hombre que hay, en el rincón que fuere, está sin remisión

13 Camilo José Cela, Cuatro figuras del 98 y otros ensayos españoles (Barcelona: Aedos,1961), 384.

14 In his commentary on Plato’s Cratylus dealing with the nature of language, Celarefers to Unamuno, Saussure, Scheler and Wittgenstein to explain that literature is ‘aninstrument of creating fables […] founded upon two basic pillars […] Firstly aesthetics, whichimpose a requirement on an essay, poem, drama or comedy to maintain certain minimumstandards […] The second pillar on which literary endeavor rests is ethics, which complementsaesthetics and which has a lot to do with all that has been said up to now regarding thoughtand freedom’ (‘Eulogy of the Fable’, in Nobel Lectures from the Literature Laureates 1986 to2006 [New York: The New Press, 2007], 234–48 [pp. 244–45]).

15 McPheeters, Camilo José Cela, 47–49.16 Gómez Santos, Diálogos españoles, 162.

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lastrado por la gratuidad de los elementos circundantes […] Un análisispor lo menudo de la filosofía de Sartre […] nos daría, quizás, el clave deuno de los problemas más graves del hombre moderno: la gratitud de sudolor que, sin el consuelo de Dios, es insufrible.17

Ultimately, we do not know if Cela reflected upon Sartre’s philosophy togive shape to works like La colmena, but it remains evident that he was, likemany of his generational peers during this period, avidly reading Frenchexistentialist philosophy and engaging with some of the most hotly debatedquestions of the post-Second World War years regarding individuality andfreedom. It is reasonable to assume, consequently, that existential concernsof the French tradition found their way into his fiction. Cela’s own admissionin 1963 that, as a writer, he always upheld the sanctity of the individual,always remained steadfast to the belief that ‘[n]ada importa, nada, fuera dela verdad de cada cual’, is revealing in this respect.18 Indeed, we can draw acompelling parallel here between Cela’s authorial mission to portray theindividual’s subjective truth, and Sartre’s first principle of existentialismthat states simply: ‘Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself’.19

To appreciate the existential problematic in La colmena as it iselaborated in Martín Marco’s striving for freedom, we must take a fewmoments to flesh out the foundational concept of anguish. For existentialistthinkers, no matter if they are atheists or not, anguish is the most profoundand elementary human experience that we have to contend with in our day-to-day life. Kierkegaard first imbued anguish with existential meaningthrough the term anxiety, also translated as dread (angest). In hislandmark The Concept of Anxiety (1844), he famously elucidated anguish asa peculiar ‘dizziness of freedom’ that engulfs us when we take fullresponsibility for our actions and choices.20 In the later work The Sicknessunto Death (1849), he expanded the concept of anxiety to accommodate thetremendous sin and guilt that informed his orthodox Christianity. Anxiety,he postulated, originated in those individuals who acknowledged the ever-present (and downright terrifying) prospect of straying from their duty to atranscendent God. The only discoverable moral and religious truths, asKierkegaard understood it, remained in those individuals who were capable

17 Cela, Cuatro figuras del 98, 307.18 Camilo José Cela, ‘Última recapitulación’, in La colmena (Barcelona: Noguer, 1966),

16–19 (p. 18). In an interview, Cela reitearated that ‘the only way one can salve the violence inthe world all around us is by […] always trying to see to it that the individual is conscious ofhimself as an individual’ (Theodore S. Beardsley, ‘Interview—Camilo José Cela’, Diacritics,2:1 [1972], 42–45 [p. 44]).

19 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frechtman(Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1985), 15.

20 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically OrientingDeliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton:Princeton U. P., 1981), 61.

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of gazing inwards and reflecting upon the intense passion of faith thatcontinually renewed their bond to the Absolute (the ‘truth as subjectivity’argument that Climacus articulates most convincingly in the Postscript). It iswith this solemn duty to God in mind that he averred: ‘there has lived no oneand there lives no one outside of Christendom who is not in despair’.21 In theend, what Kierkegaard was getting at is that the individual who darescontemplate his or her subjective freedom irremediably lives in a state ofanguish, a state of ‘fear and trembling’, but this state has the potential ofbeing cathartic, invigorating, and can lead to a life of possibility.

Although several philosophers have plumbed the concept of anguish sinceKierkegaard (Jasper’s existenz, Unamuno’s sentido trágico, Heidegger’sangst, Marcel’s angoisse, etc.), Sartre offers us one of the most compellingaccounts of its day-to-day relevance for the concrete individual. In theopening pages of Being and Nothingness, he defines anguish in relation tofreedom as ‘the mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being; it is inanguish that freedom is, in its being, in question for itself’.22 EchoingKierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, Sartre goes on to clarify that, unlike fear,anguish has no object, no real thing in the objective world to attach itself, andthus originates from within the individual and is summarily internalized:‘anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of beings in the worldwhereas anguish is anguish before myself […] my being provokes anguish’.23Accordingly, then, ‘anguish is reflective apprehension of the self’; that is tosay, it is a manifestation of the individual’s consciousness of the contingentnature of existence. And for Sartre, contingency had to do with the idea thatany action, event, or incident obeys no plan whatsoever and lacks anyintrinsic meaning.24 This objectless nature of anguish, for instance,characterizes one of Sartre’s most recognizable existential sufferers in hisfiction: Antoine Roquentin. In the famed scene at the chestnut tree inNausea, Roquentin recognizes his anguish and is overwhelmed with therealization that ‘to exist is simply to be there […] here is Nausea; here thereis what those bastards—the ones on the Coteau Vert and others—try to hidefrom themselves’.25

But we must ask, how does this anguish first appear within us? Andlikewise, how does it inform our consciousness? In the chapter dedicated tobad faith in Being and Nothingness, Sartre agrees that we all feel anguishwhen presented with the possibility that we ourselves are the sole source ofmeaning in the world, that there is essentially life (consciousness and being)

21 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. WalterLowrie (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1941), 155.

22 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 29.23 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 29.24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 30.25 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander, ed. Richard Howard (New York:

New Directions, 2007), 131.

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and the infinite expanse of nothingness. The point is that some of us chooseto flee from this terrifying possibility, to lie to ourselves about what thispossibility truly implies in regard to freedom, which is equivalent to ‘hiding adispleasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth’.26 Anguish, then,takes hold of those of us who confront the prospect of freedom. From thisfoundational acknowledgement of anguish, we can choose to become who weare, to paraphrase Nietzsche’s subtitle to Ecce Homo. Consciousness ofanguish, then, is really consciousness of freedom in all its (potential) forms,and freedom as Sartre proposes, is not ‘a pure capricious, unlawful,gratuitous, and incomprehensible contingency’, but rather our possibility toattribute meaning to a world we are wholly responsible for creating.27

Although much more can be said of Sartre’s concept of anguish in Beingand Nothingness, its central argument is that the experience of anguishdiscloses a most disturbing and confounding truth: that each of us is flunginto a godless world without refuge or recourse and must make the best of it.In his brief study on La colmena, José Ortega suggested rightly that MartínMarco could be identified as a type of anguished individual in theexistentialist sense, for he is the only character in the novel who reflects onthe question of existence in any depth.28 Of the dozens of characters in Lacolmena who gaze with little wonder at the inimical world they inhabit, Celadoes indeed individualize Martín in this primary concern for existentialmeaning. Yet, much like Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin in Nausea, or MathieuDelarue in The Age of Reason and The Reprieve, his concern for existentialmeaning does not appear before the reader unexpectedly. Rather, it surfacesin a more profound self-understanding that advances in synchrony with hisexperience of the world. This point is of critical importance in appreciatingCela’s existential problematic in La colmena, and I will come back to it in amoment.

Within La colmena’s categorically grim ontological framework, Celadedicates particular attention to the realities of Martín’s life. Doña Rosa’scafé, where Martín sets off on his journey to freedom through Madrid’s urbannetwork until the ‘Final’, constitutes a symbolic space of mindless andunexamined existence. The café also brings into focus, and tragically so, theinevitable fact of mortality. Death is so palpable in the café that not only isdoña Rosa personified as death (‘Enlutada, nadie sabe por qué, desde quecasi era una niña’),29 but its furniture is constructed from old tombstones:‘muchos de los mármoles de los veladores [en el café] han sido antes lápidasen las sacramentales’ (48). The café’s odd mix of patrons who while away theday in this world are utterly passive beings, mere recipients of experience

26 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 49.27 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 440.28 Ortega, ‘Importancia del personaje Martín Marco en La colmena de Cela’, 92–93.29 Camilo José Cela, La colmena, ed., intro. y notas de Jorge Urrutia (Madrid: Cátedra,

1997), 96. Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text.

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incapable of comprehending the ontological significance of time, choice, oraction. On this point, the omniscient narrator tells us: ‘piensan, vagamente,en ese mundo que, ¡ay!, no fue lo que pudo haber sido, en ese mundo en el quetodo ha ido fallando poco a poco, sin que nadie se los explicase, a lo mejor poruna minucia insignificante’ (48). The fragmented composition of the caféscenes speak, among other things, to the seemingly accidental manner inwhich individuals live their lives and spend the day bantering away aboutnothing in particular: ‘una conversación sobre gatas paridas, o sobre elsuministro, o sobre aquel niño muerto que alguien no recuerda’ (48). Oneindividual, don Jaime Arce, is struck by the idea that he might choose adifferent path in his life, ‘[porque] ahora anda buscando un destino’ (50).After little reflection, however, he sits back at his spot in the café:

con la cabeza apoyada en el respaldo de peluche, mirando para losdorados del techo […] Don Jaime no solía pensar en su desdicha; enrealidad, no solía pensar nunca en nada […] no piensa ni en los espejos, nien las viejas pudibundas, ni en los tuberculosos que albergara el café (un10 por ciento aproximadamente), ni en los afiladores de lápices, ni en lacirculación de la sangre. (50, 95)

The word ‘destino’ reappears in connection with the nameless poet whofaints in the café in Chapter 1. We know little about him, other than the factthat he is penning a long poem titled ‘Destino’ that would seem to offerinsight into his life. In reality, though, ‘no se da cuenta de nada’ (55). Theprostitute Elvira is one of the regular fixtures of the café. She contemplatesthe comings and goings of others and pays no heed to her own predicament:‘No hace nada, eso es cierto, pero por no hacer nada, ni come siquiera. Leenovelas, va al café, se fuma algún que otro tritón y está a lo que caiga’ (53).Doña Isabel Montes, the woman whose child died of meningitis, follows suit:‘ve pasar la vida desde debajo de la escalera de caracol que sube a los billares[…] es como una tonta que no dice nada’ (75). And we are told that Seoane,the musician, ‘es un hombre que prefiere no pensar’ (101).

Drawing on Heidegger’s binarism of authentic/inauthentic modes ofbeing, Sartre believed that we live mired in an inauthentic existenceconsumed by the daily pressures of conformity, routines, social rituals,rules, customs, and so on. This inauthentic existence, founded upon theinventions and falsehoods of bad faith, not only distances us from anauthentic existence wherein lies the true self, but it renders freedomimpossible.30 Cela endeavours to present his reader with a realistic portraitof the inauthenticity that characterized Madrid in the ominous years of theimmediate post-Civil War period, and indeed, critics have theorizedextensively about its fundamental socio-historical meanings. For Asún, this

30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 246–47.

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inauthenticity can be best understood as ‘un orden repetido y mediocre [que]rige la existencia cotidiana [en Madrid] al modo de un engranaje cuyaspiezas, a la vez desconocidas entre sí, a la vez intrínsecamente dependientes,dan el tono de un mundo consolidado, absoluto, implacable’.31 From whatCela revealed about his own practice as a writer, he wants his readers tograsp how completely and utterly his characters exist ‘inmersos en su propiainsignificancia’.32

On this topic of inauthenticity and freedom, Sobejano was the first torecognize how a principle of concealment (‘encubrimiento’) governs the novel.As Sobejano noted, there is a disparity at every turn between the individual’sactions and his inner truth (mostly revealed by the omniscient narrator).Although it is doubtful that Sobejano had Sartre in mind when he addressedthe ‘panorama de mentiras incomunicantes’33 that render any gesturetowards truth in the novel difficult, if not impossible, it is conceivable todevelop further this notion of concealment in light of Sartrean bad faith. Wesaid that bad faith manifests itself when we deceive ourselves about the rootcause of the anguish that can ultimately guide us to our consciousness offreedom. If there is one point this self-deception makes palpable andapparent, it is ‘an original intention and project of bad faith’ on our part.34

That is to say, I, the anguished individual, am conscious of my bad faith tothe degree that ‘I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which ishidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Better yet, I must knowthe truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully’.35 In evading thisinner truth that I feel, my consciousness intentionally ‘affects itself with badfaith’.36 Along the same lines as Sobejano, Michael D. Thomas shows by whatmeans Cela furnishes us with a world that ‘hold[s] almost no respect for thetruth; the unstable foundations of daily life are half-truth, exaggeration,gossip, and hypocrisy’.37 Similarly, Charlebois proposes that ‘a close readingof The Hive uncovers Cela’s strategic narrative plotting by way of ameticulously controlled narrative of disinformation’.38 Ultimately, whatmakes Cela’s treatment of inauthenticity so powerful and disturbing in Lacolmena is just how the collective evades the truth it senses stirring within,how it is repulsed by this truth, and how absolutely it deceives itself about itspossible meaning:

31 Asún, ‘Introducción’, in Cela, La colmena, ed. Asún, 29.32 Camilo José Cela, Mrs Caldwell habla con su hijo (Barcelona: Destino 1953), 17.33 Sobejano, ‘La colmena: olor a miseria’, 117.34 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 49.35 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 49.36 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 49.37 Michael D. Thomas, ‘A Frustrated Search for the Truth: The Unreliable Narrator and

the Unresolved Puzzle in Cela’s La colmena’, Hispania (USA), 85:2 (2002), 219–27 (p. 219).38 Lucile C. Charlebois, Understanding Camilo José Cela (Columbia: Univ. of South

Carolina, 1998), 35.

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Son las caras de las gentes que sonríen en paz, con beatitud, en esosinstantes en que, casi sin darse cuenta, llegan a no pensar en nada. Lagente es cobista por estupidez y, a veces, sonríen aunque en el fondo de sualma sientan una repugnancia inmensa, una repugnancia que casi nopueden contener. Por coba se puede llegar hasta al asesinato. (54)39

Against this rather monolithic ontological backdrop, Martín’s individ-uality is emphasized from the outset. The narrator is quite explicit about it:‘no es un cualquiera, no es uno de tantos, no es un hombre vulgar, un hombredel montón, un ser corriente y moliente’ (72). Martín’s individuality,however, has to be approached with some care, for the simple reason thathis aimlessness and poverty do in fact place him among the so-called‘cualquieras’ that litter La colmena. As Cela reminds us, his individualityis of a different sort: ‘[h]e’s more than a protagonist, he’s the nexus of all thesituations of the novel, or almost of all the situations of the novel’.40 Martín’sindividuality is substantiated not by his social responsibilities, economicstatus, appearance, interests, or relationships per se, but by his nascentawareness of his anguish, and the manner in which this awareness iselevated to a manifest consciousness through a series of revelations as hewanders Madrid and engages others. On this point, Amalia Barboza hasargued that Martín’s character belongs in the tradition of the tormentedurban drifter that perhaps conjures up the Benjaminian city of urban misfits,wanderers, and voyeurs.41 She proposes rightly that Martín’s movementthroughout Madrid not only reinforces the ‘lógica cinematográfica’ thatcritics have long recognized as one of the novel’s distinctive features, but alsobrings into view ‘los equilibrios precarios en las relaciones humanas’.42 YetBarboza does not go far enough in teasing out to what degree this spatialmovement also structures Martín’s existential journey to freedom. For themost part, critics have not registered how Cela employs a peripateticframework to portray Martín navigating a spatial order, on the one hand

39 Julita makes explicit this deception: ‘¡Si pudiera leer como en un libro lo que pasadentro de las cabezas! No, no; es mejor que siga todo así, que no podamos leer nada, que nosentendamos, los unos con los otros sólo con lo que queramos decir, ¡qué carajo!, ¡aunque seamentira!’ (306). It could be argued, however, that the anonymous man who commits suicide forsmelling like onions is one character who acts on his freedom. In Dostoevsky’s existentialphilosophy, suicide is oftentimes portrayed as the ultimate expression of freedom. Characterssuch as Ippolit Terentiev (The Idiot), and Kirillov (The Possessed), reveal how suicide can beunderstood as an act of sacrifice and freedom that can transform the individual into a Christ-like figure.

40 Miller, ‘The Artistic Experimentation of Camilo José Cela’, 14.41 Amalia Barboza, ‘Lectura sociológica de La colmena: apuntes hacia una sociología

hermanada con la literatura’, in Homenaje a Camilo José Cela. Coloquio internacional de laUniversidad de Dresde (11–12 de noviembre de 2002), estudios coordinados por ChristophRodiek (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2004), 83–102 (pp. 88–92).

42 Barboza, ‘Lectura sociológica de La colmena’, 90.

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(the outward landscape: Madrid’s urban topography, and Martín’s passagefrom city to country), and a subjective order, on the other (the inner self: howMartín bridges the gulf between inauthentic and authentic existence todiscover his freedom).

Martín’s journey is essentially mapped and realized through a spatial/subjective logic. Doubtless, Cela challenges his reader to consider to whatextent Martín’s marginalization and emotional frailty find commonexpression in the city’s dystopian elements: ‘Martín Marco, paliducho,desmedrado, con el pantalón desflecado y la americana raída […] el hombreque no ha pagado el café y que mira la ciudad como un niño enfermo yacosado, mete las manos en los bolsillos del pantalón. Las luces de la plazabrillan con resplandor hiriente, casi ofensivo’ (103–04). The more Martínnavigates Madrid’s avenues, bystreets, cafés and neighbourhoods, and themore he engages the city’s inhabitants, the more he ruminates on theproblem of existence. Thus, as he begins wandering through Madrid afterbeing escorted out of doña Rosa’s café at the opening of the novel, he stops ata plumbing store window and experiences the following revelation:

[L]os lavabos parecen lavabos del otro mundo, lavabos del paraíso […]Hay baños que lucen hermosos como pulseras de brillantes […] elegantescisternas bajas donde seguramente se puede apoyar el codo, se puedenincluso colocar algunos libros […] Hölderlin, Keats, Valéry, para los casosen que el estreñimiento precisa de compañía; Rubén, Mallarmé, sobretodo Mallarmé, para las descomposiciones de vientre […] La vida––piensa––es esto. Con lo que unos se gastan para hacer sus necesidades agusto, otros tendríamos para comer un año. (109)

While there is unquestionably a social message in these observations (thenarrator tells us in the same passage, ‘A Martín Marco le preocupa elproblema social’ [109]), they none the less refer us to the scatologicaldimension of existence that is constantly revisited in the novel. On almostevery page of La colmena, we have to contend with Cela’s ‘clinicalobjectivity’, as Foster refers to it, a particular mode of observing the realityof brute existence and the myriad of forces acting upon it.43 The novel’snumerous allusions to excrement and disease—chronic stomach aches,indigestion, constipation, bouts of diarrhoea, consumption, venereal

43 David W. Foster, Forms of the Novel in the Work of Camilo José Cela (Columbia: Univ.of Missouri Press, 1967), 71. Foster explains this objectivity as follows: ‘The amorality of Lacolmena with regard to what it reports is a significant characteristic of the novel, but it doesnot imply that Cela does not sympathize with the plight of his characters. He recognizes thepathos and tragedy of their situations […] Once the critic appreciates the extent to which Celawishes to take the pulse of life and to chart its vital functions, and once the critic understandsthe clinical objectivity the author wishes to simulate, then only can he accept the nature of theevents portrayed in La colmena’ (71).

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maladies, infections, fevers, fainting spells, insomnia—call attention to thephysicality of the body and its needs, functions, and slow but certaindisintegration. By invoking master poets such as Hölderlin, Keats, Valéry,Darío and Mallarmé within the scatological context, Martín is recognizingthat in spite of man’s frequently poetic and lofty admiration of the world, heis, in the end, made of flesh and blood, and thus faced with the inconsolablefact of mortality (the references to the Spanish Civil War and the SecondWorld War throughout the novel certainly add a tragic socio-historicaldimension to this realization). In one of the narrator’s remarks concerningthe nature of truth we read nothing of Keatsian transcendence, nothing ofHölderlin’s notion of spirit or of modernista ideals of any kind, but rather ofthe physical body and its most elementary needs and functions: ‘[h]ayverdades que se sienten dentro del cuerpo, como el hambre o las ganas deorinar’ (116). This plumbing store scene—the very image of ‘los lavabos’—makes evident what Sartre calls the facticity of being and its relationship toour concept of freedom: that is, the individual’s particular and concretephysical existence in the world that discloses how ‘the body is part of everyperception […] it is at once a point of view and a point of departure—a point ofview, a point of departure which I am and which at the same time I surpasstoward what I have to be’.44 Throughout the novel, Cela repeatedlyemphasizes the bodily ‘point of view’ of existence (the self as a body existingin a precise time and place), which is perhaps most poignantly illustrated inthe depiction of the hungry prostitutes Elvirita or La Uruguaya, who sell theirailing bodies without a second thought in order to meet their most basicsurvival needs. At this early stage, Martín begins to reflect upon the facticityof being, and while he may not be privy to the broader existential implicationsof this facticity in terms of anguish and freedom, he is nevertheless taking hisfirst hesitant steps at understanding it: ‘La vida––piensa––es esto’ (109).

As Martín advances further into Madrid’s landscape, the thought ofdeath comes to him as he reads the street names (urban signs) dedicated tothe memory of past writers and artists: ‘Éstos si que han tenido suerte. Ahíestán. Con una calle en el centro y una estatua en el Retiro. ¡Para que nosriamos!’ (112). By the time he wanders into his sister Filo’s home, he showsan increasing, yet still limited understanding of the problem of existence:‘A [Roberto] le es todo igual y piensa que lo mejor es ir tirando como sepueda. A mí, no; a mí no me es todo igual ni mucho menos’ (123). The factthat Cela depicts Martín as a penniless drifter who survives on the charity ofothers brings to the forefront the utter precariousness of life, a theme whichis perhaps given its most moving expression in the fragments dedicated tothe gitanito’s miraculous day-to-day survival: ‘Todo lo que pasa es unmilagro para el gitanito, que nació de milagro, que come de milagro, quevive de milagro y que tiene fuerzas para cantar de puro milagro’ (116). By the

44 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 326.

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time Martín makes his way to Celestino’s bar, his thinking on existence hasevolved considerably:

—¿Ha cobrado usted?—No, no he cobrado …

Celestino se acuerda de su maestro [Nietzsche] y se engalla.—Pero con sermones yo no pago el impuesto.—¿Y eso le preocupa, grandísimo fariseo?Martín lo mira fijamente, en los labios una sonrisa mitad de asco, mitad de

compasión.—¿Y usted lee a Nietzsche? Bien poco se le ha pegado. ¡Usted es un mísero

pequeño burgués!—¡Marco!Martín ruge como un león.—¡Sí, grite usted, llame a sus amigos los guardias!—¡Los guardias no son mis amigos!—¡Pégueme si quiere, no me importa! No tengo dinero, ¿se entera? ¡No

tengo dinero! ¡No es ninguna deshonra!Martín se levanta y sale a la calle con paso de triunfador. (132)

The reference to Nietzsche in this passage is neither casual norsuperficial and often goes unnoticed. We are told that Celestino’s one andonly book is Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality(1881), which he keeps with him at all times. Within its pages he finds somemeasure of solace, and often recites passages of the book to his clientele(including ‘los guardias’), who are unaware that what they are hearing isNietzsche’s moral philosophy. He also paraphrases passages aloud to himselfthat deal with Nietzsche’s will to power when he is alone and imagineshimself urging soldiers into an epic battle: ‘¡Ánimo muchachos! ¡Adelante porla victoria! […] ¡Y los débiles, y los pusilánimes, y los enfermos, deberándesaparecer!’ (242). In Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Daybreak is that pivotal early-period work that lays the groundwork for the socio-philosophical themes ofthe will to power and overcoming that are reprised in The Gay Science (1882),and then brought to fruition in the prophetic hero Zarathustra in Thus SpokeZarathustra (1883). A good number of the over five hundred aphorisms in thetext take up the revelatory task of envisioning what a life unshackled fromall traditional moral values would look like. It also champions the honest andcourageous individual who is considered, as Nietzsche saw it, ‘immoralbecause in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon atradition’.45 In Celestino’s and Martín’s dispute, Martín simply cannotaccept that Celestino, a self-described Nietzscheist, would concern himselfwith something as trifling and pedestrian as ‘el impuesto’ when more

45 Friederich Nietzsche, Daybreak. Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J.Hollingdale, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997), 10.

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pressing questions of basic existence are at hand: ‘¿Y eso le preocupa,grandísimo fariseo?’ (132).46 In this scene, Cela offers us our first glimpses ofMartín as the self-overcoming and somewhat nihilistic man. Even if onlymomentarily, Martín has chosen to rise above daily concerns in a small, yetsymbolic act of personal protest in Celestino’s bar, and it is this matter ofchoice, of essentially choosing the self, that brings him face to face with thecontingency of existence. As the narrator confirms elsewhere, Martín’sNietzcheism becomes more pronounced the more he questions the world,and the more he gazes within himself: ‘[e]n el fondo, Martín es también unnietzscheano’ (257).

Keeping in mind the novel’s complex chronological structure, there aretwo key episodes that follow the plumbing store scene (the question offacticity) and Martín’s altercation in Celestino’s bar (the question ofcontingency) that demonstrate how he is becoming conscious of the anguishwithin: the first has to do with his discovery of nothingness, and the secondhas to do with his consciousness of being in nothingness, a concept I willexplain in brief.47 First, we must return to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness tounravel some of the significance of nothingness.

For Sartre, nothingness, and negativity more generally, are an indispen-sable, ever-present, and unavoidable element of existence. ‘Nothingness’, ashis well-known phrase goes, ‘lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm’.48What Sartre called acts of nihilation—the conscious everyday acts we allperform, some trivial and some vital, that could go wrong at any moment orturn out other than expected—pervade our day-to-day life and deeply informour worldview. In Robert C. Solomon words, ‘all human consciousness isfilled with expectations, expectations that can at any time be thwarted […]and human existence is thereby something essentially open to frustration,disappointment, despair, all of which are experiences of nothingnessinvolving acts of nihilation’.49 Indeed, the concept of nothingness coverstremendous philosophical ground in Sartre’s philosophy, yet its foundationalargument—the argument that mediates experientially our concept of theself/world relation—can be summarized as follows: it is our consciousness ofthe possibility of nothingness that manifests itself most evidently in anguish,and it is this consciousness that establishes the basic condition for our

46 The mention of the pharisee here could very well be an allusion to Nietzsche’sphilosophy. For Nietzsche, the pharisee was a weak-willed individual who was constantlyscheming to get the upper hand. It is in the heart of a pharisee that ‘the conspiracy of thesuffering against the well-constituted and victorious’ takes hold, and where ‘the victorious arehated’ (Friederich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1967], 122).

47 Day one covers Chapters 1, 2 and 4; day two covers Chapters 6, 3 and 5; and theconcluding ‘Final’ covers a scene that transpires three to four days after day two.

48 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 21.49 Robert Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their

Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 269.

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questioning of existence that leads us to freedom. To put it another way, fromthe pervasive and ever-present abyss of nothingness (and negativity ingeneral), the individual acknowledges his freedom and takes responsibilityfor himself, which in itself represents a recognition of the nothingness ofbeing.

As Martín continues wandering about Madrid’s urban geographyafter leaving Celestino’s bar, he is beset with the consciousness of aprofound nothingness. He finds that he has little option but to acknow-ledge it, to fully reflect upon it, as the city’s bleakness engulfs him. In thefollowing scene, Cela does a masterful job of further conflating cityand self:

Martín Marco vaga por la ciudad sin querer irse a la cama. No llevaencima ni una perra gorda y prefiere esperar a que acabe el metro, a quese escondan los últimos amarillos y enfermos tranvías de la noche. Laciudad parece más suya, más de los hombres que, como él marchan sinrumbo fijo con las manos en los vacíos bolsillos […] con la cabeza vacía,con los ojos vacíos, y con el corazón, sin que nadie se lo explique, un vacíoprofundo e implacable. (240; my emphasis)

The manner in which Martín ambles through the city, the way he discoversits yawning nothingness as he contemplates his own nothingness, brings tomind Michel de Certeau’s theory of walking in the city. For Certeau, a web ofcomplex cultural and socio-economic practices, behaviours, networks,operations, and power relations structure the urban landscape, but‘walkers’, as bodies in movement, defy this seemingly rational frameworkand ‘elude legibility’. Certeau tells us that this ‘moving about that the citymultiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense socialexperience of lacking a place’.50 In La colmena, we can extend Certeau’sconcept of ‘lacking a place’ beyond spatiality alone and conceive it asMartín’s growing problem of self-grounding, of lacking a locus of meaningoutside in the world as he continually moves within what Certeau calls thecity’s ‘endless labyrinths’ and grapples with the inexplicable nothingness henow perceives within.51 Martín’s discovery of nothingness comes to a head ina chance encounter with the authorities. Police, guards, local security officersand community watchmen traverse the novel, and the State’s panoptic eyefocuses on almost every character at one point or another: ‘[l]os serenos estánsiempre muy al tanto de todo’ (217). Indeed, Francoist authoritarianism inLa colmena is woven into an intricate tapestry of violence, persecution,

50 Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, in Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. RaifordGuins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage, 2005), 449–461 (p. 458).

51 Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, 454.

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repression and death.52 Although the police send Martín on his way aftera brief conversation, there is little doubt that with this encounter he reachesa pivotal moment of anagnorisis:

Martín aprieta el paso y no vuelve la cabeza, no se atreve. Lleva dentrodel cuerpo un miedo espantoso que no se explica […] Martín vadesbocado, el pecho jadeante. Las sienes con fuego, la lengua pegada alpaladar, la garganta agarrotada, las piernas fláccidas, el vientre comouna caja de música con la cuerda rota, los oídos zumbando, los ojos másmiopes que nunca. Martín, en medio del frío, siente en sus carnes un calorsofocante, un calor que casi no le deja respirar […] A Martín le duele lafrente, le da unos latidos rigurosamente acompasados, secos, fatales […]¿De qué tengo miedo? ¡Je, je! ¿De que tengo yo miedo? ¿De qué, de qué?[…] ¿De qué puedo yo tener miedo? ¿De qué, de qué? […] ¡Esto es paravolverse uno loco! ¡Éste es un mundo de locos! ¡De locos de atar! ¡De locospeligrosos! […] ¡Este mundo es una mierda! […] Lo que dan ganas es demandar todo al cuerno, ¡qué coño! […] Martín está rendido. (248–52)

Martín is fearful of the police, but their presence has precipitated in himsomething much more profound than fear alone: the objectless feeling ofanguish (‘un miedo espantoso que no se explica’ [248]). As Martín becomesconscious of his anguish, his eyes are opened to the absurdity of the world:‘¡Éste es un mundo de locos!’; ‘¡Este mundo es una mierda!’ (251). Accordingto Sartre, we recognize the absurd when we fully come to grips with theworld’s intrinsic lack of meaning, and it stands to reason why Martín feelscompelled at this juncture to ask the reflexive question: ‘¿De qué tengo yomiedo?’ This question urges him to become a spectator of himself and toponder upon his own facticity, something he was not prepared to do at theplumbing store window. Clearly, then, Martín has arrived at the reflectiveapprehension of self that Sartre identifies as anguish. When we arrive at thispoint, we are in fact standing at the very precipice of freedom: ‘there exists aspecific consciousness of freedom […] this consciousness is anguish’.53 Sartreelaborates upon this freedom in Part IV of Being and Nothingness as itconditions what he terms our ‘project’ of self-creation. Freedom, he argues, isnot a frame of mind, a concept, a belief, an idea, or anything of the sort, but

52 La colmena is rife with imagery and references to Francoist authoritarianism. DoñaRosa represents an especially ruthless facet of this authoritarianism. Sobejano said it wellwhen he noted: ‘es la opresora por excelencia’ (‘La colmena: olor a miseria’, 113). Doña Rosarevels in mocking the city’s weak and vulnerable, and reminds the regulars in herestablishment about the precariousness of life: ‘¡La culpa la tengo yo por no denunciaros atodos! […]¡El día que me harte vais todos a la cárcel, uno detrás de otro’ (187). The commonpractice of jailing supporters of the Second Republic—the ‘rojos indecentes’, as doña Rosarefers to them—is also brought to the fore by way of Martín’s friend Paco: ‘Desde que losoltaron anda por ahí como un palomino sin hacer nada a derechas’ (112).

53 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 33.

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rather it is our consciousness that we can attribute meaning to our worldthrough every choice and every action:

Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart ofman and which forces human-reality to make itself instead of to be […] forhuman reality, to be is to choose oneself […] Without any helpwhatsoever, it is entirely abandoned to the intolerable necessity ofmaking itself be—down to the slightest detail. Thus freedom is not abeing; it is the being of man—i.e. his nothingness of being.54

To appreciate Martín’s freedom, we must begin by attending to the about-face in his outlook on life that marks day two of his journey. In day two, heawakens with the prostitute Purita at his side, and he is described as atransformed man: ‘aquélla es su única noche feliz desde hace ya muchosmeses. Ahora se encuentra como nuevo, como si tuviera diez años menos,igual que si fuera un muchacho’ (315). Cela alludes once again to Nietzsche’sideal of overcoming to illustrate how far Martín has progressed in discoveringhis true self: ‘Martín tenía en la mirada casi el brillo del triunfador’ (319).55Martín’s encounters with Ventura, Nati Robles and Rómulo after leavingPurita do not really add anything substantial to his consciousness of freedom.Cela does, however, reiterate how Martín has gained a new knowledge of hismortality: ‘Yo creo que no hay tiempo para nada; yo creo que si el tiemposobra es porque, como es tan poco, no sabemos lo que hacer con él. Natifrunció graciosamente la nariz. —¡Ay, Marco hijo! ¡No me empieces acolocarme frases profundas!’ (202). Of note is the extent to which Martín’schoices and actions affect him from this point forward. After leaving Nati,he returns to doña Rosa’s café to settle his bill. In the café he asserts himself,he carries himself in a proud and dignified manner, and even challenges the‘enlutada’ doña Rosa (that is, he faces the symbolic image of death and thefact of mortality): ‘Esta bazofia [de café] que se la beba la dueña […]Se levantó airoso, casi solemne, y cogió la puerta con un gesto lleno deparsimonia. Ya en la calle, Martín nota que todo el cuerpo le tiembla. Todo loda por bien empleado, verdaderamente se acaba de portar como un hombre’(289; my emphasis). Before the ‘Final’, then, Cela leaves us with this defiant,

54 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 440–41.55 Although the word ‘triunfador’ (‘self-conqueror’) appears in a number of Nietzsche’s

texts, its clearest meaning in regard to nihilistic overcoming can be found in Thus SpokeZarathustra. In the Spanish translation, the reference to ‘triunfador’ reads as follows: ‘Unapregunta de hombre a hombre quiero formularte a ti, hermano mío. Arrojaré esta pregunta entu alma con una sonda para conocer su profundidad. Eres joven y deseas una mujer y un hijo.Pero yo te pregunto: ¿Eres tú un hombre que tenga el derecho a engendrar un hijo? ¿Eres tú eltriunfador, el vencedor de ti mismo, el soberano de tus sentidos y el dueño de tus virtudes? […]Yo quiero que tu victoria y tu libertad aspiren a perpetuarse por el hijo. Debes construirmonumentos vivientes a tus victorias y a tu liberación’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Así hablabaZaratustra, trans. Carlos Vergara, ed. Dolores Castrillo Mirat [Madrid: Edaf, 1998], 90–91).

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triumphant and somewhat Nietzscheist image of Martín acting on hisnewfound freedom.

Before discussing the ‘Final’, let us consider La colmena’s temporalstructure and how it has contributed to Martín’s journey to freedom thus far.Ever since Ilie first formulated the theory of ‘ahoridad’ to expound on theintransigent sense of so-called nowness we seemed to have lost sight of theways in which the text’s form accommodates an ulterior temporality that isconcrete, chronologically ordered, and more importantly, oriented toward thefuture.56 Reading the novel linearly as it is presented plainly reveals achronologically fragmented and disjointed narrative, yet the formal plasticityof Cela’s novel afford us other possibilities, as Dougherty has pointed out. Byintegrating the various narrative segments that develop particular scenesand recurring motifs, the novel’s intricate ‘inner structure’ comes into relief.This inner structure not only makes feasible a sense of chronologicaltemporality, but it also delineates with more depth and precision variouscharacters’ individuality.57 Following this logic of the text’s inner structure,if we keep our eye on Martín as we have done thus far and pursue theontological line of inquiry Cela utilizes to structure his advancement tofreedom, it becomes apparent that there is no obviating the question ofexistential time. To use Berdyaev’s definition, existential time ‘depends uponintensity of experience […] It is evidence that time is in man, and not man intime, and that time depends on changes in man’.58 The trope of the journey(space/self) that I have suggested organizes Martín’s urban wandering gainstraction precisely through its appeal to lived time (the novel’s scatologicaldimension and the facticity of being, for instance), the apprehension of self inanguish (the extent to which Martín’s encounters with people and placesmediate his confrontation with bad faith and the contingency and absurdityof existence), and the Nietzscheist ideal of overcoming (an ideal Martín comesto embody, and that resonates with Sartre’s proposition that human realityis inherently fluid and dynamic and has ‘to make itself instead of to be’).59Like nothing else, the peripatetic framework of Martín’s journey disclosesthe very process by which he becomes conscious of the fundamental unitythat binds space and (existential) time in freedom.

The much commented upon ‘Final’ brings Martín’s freedom to a climax,and demonstrates to what extent La colmena leaves readers with a future-oriented concept of freedom. A notable feature of the ‘Final’ is how deathpervades every page. Without a doubt, the ‘Final’ presents us with little elsebut the elemental materiality of death; that is, death not as an abstractconcept or possibility, but as a concrete reality of corpses rotting in graves:

56 Paul Ilie, La novelística de Camilo José Cela (Madrid: Gredos, 1978), 128–29.57 Dougherty, ‘Form and Structure in La colmena’, 10–12.58 Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (Westport: Greenwood Press,

1976), 206.59 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 440.

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‘Nadie se acuerda de los muertos que llevan ya un año bajo la tierra […] ElIlmo. Señor Don Raúl Soria Bueno. Falleció en Madrid … ¡Un hombre ilustrepudriéndose en un cajón!’ (330). Martín, unbeknown to him, is being soughtby the authorities for some unknown reason, which brings to mind doñaMargot’s unsolved murder and the ongoing police investigation. Ironically,Martín has left ‘sepulchral’ Madrid for the country, but he makes his wayinto the country to visit a cemetery: ‘Va al cementerio a ver a su madre, doñaFilomena López de Marco, que murió hace algún tiempo, un día de poco antesde nochebuena’ (323). It is winter, the season associated with death andnature’s repose, and Martín rests at the foot of his mother’s grave to reflectupon what in essence is death and nothingness.

As Sartre explains it, there are two ways of looking at death, and bothreveal the nothingness of being: a realist way, which contemplates death as alimitation of life; and an idealist way, which sees it as a part of life. ‘In eithercase’, Sartre points out, ‘[death] is a being which belongs to an existentprocess and which in a certain way constitutes the meaning of thatprocess’.60 For Sartre, death is not an enigma, a body-spirit transformation,or a type of mystical transcendence, but quite simply, death is a‘phenomenon of my personal life which makes of this life a unique life […]a life which does not begin again’.61 The stark recognition of human finitudein all its ontological dimensions and forms opens the door to ourunderstanding of just how we choose what we are to do, and who we willbecome. The fact that Martín is enveloped by death and the dead in the‘Final’, the fact that his fate hangs so perilously in the balance, the fact thatfriends, acquaintances, and family worry for his life, make this sense offreedom in the face of mortality absolutely vital to the dénouement of hisjourney in La colmena. The indeterminacy and irresolution of the ‘Final’, andthe more optimistic tenor evident in the concluding pages that Dougherty,Sobejano and Villanueva have all detected, speak directly to Martín’s life-affirming freedom.62 It comes as no surprise, then, that Cela ends Lacolmena with Martín’s project of self-creation and his boundless sense offuturity:

60 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 531.61 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 532.62 In Dougherty’s opinion, ‘by breaking the unity of place, [Martín’s] visit to the

cemetery breaches the hopelessness associated with “esos mirares que jamás descubrenhorizontes nuevos” […] As Martín escapes the limits of Madrid—the virtual cemetery—he alsodeparts the repetitious present […] toward the future and the new person he briefly aspires tobecome’ (‘Form and Structure in La colmena’, 11). For Darío Villanueva, the end leaves thereader with ‘la apertura esperanzada hacia la única solución posible: la solidaridad humana’(‘Introducción’, in Cela, La colmena, ed. Villanueva, 56). Gonzalo Sobejano tells us that ‘si nopuede calificarse [el “Final”] de esperanzador, sí al menos de caritativo’ (‘La colmena: olor amiseria’, 119).

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Si me voy a organizar. Trabajar todos los días un poco es la mejormanera. Si me cogieran en cualquier oficina, aceptable. Al principio, no,pero después se puede hasta escribir […] En sindicatos se debe estarbastante bien, dan pagas extraordinarias […] También se debe estar muybien en el instituto nacional de previsión […] Martín va entusiasmado conla idea […] ¡Hoy sí que estoy fresco y discurro bien! […]––Hoy verán losmíos que soy otro hombre. (332–34)

It remains clear that Sartre’s existentialism in Being and Nothingnessoffers us an effective exegetical foundation for appreciating Cela’s treatmentof the human condition in La colmena. In particular, Sartre’s concept offreedom as a ‘consciousness of being’ can open up new horizons for analysiswhen it comes to appraising the text’s complex inner structure, to borrowDougherty’s term, where Martín’s concept of freedom is most plainlyelaborated in relation to spatiality and subjectivity. In the end, however,we would do well to approach Martín’s freedom with some caution, for clearlyhis consciousness of its significance and implications is not profound ordeveloped enough to put him on a par with an existential hero like Sartre’sRoquentin, for instance. While there is no doubt that Martín recognizes hisnothingness on some meaningful level, while there is no doubt that he hasgained a more lucid appreciation of his freedom by the ‘Final’, he is still farfrom demonstrating Roquentin’s acute ‘consciousness of consciousness’ thatmarks the concluding pages of Nausea.63 In this sense, Cela’s Martín Marcocan be thought of as a subject teetering on the very brink of a prodigiousontological discovery, and as readers, the novel leaves us speculating onwhether Martín’s consciousness of freedom will in fact lead him to a broadersphere of transformative action and choice. As David Henn has suggested,Martín’s revelations of self and freedom can be seen as ironic practicallythroughout the entirety of the novel, yet he also points out that the ‘Final’changes everything by effectively dissolving this irony.64 The one thing thatthe nagging irresolution of the ‘Final’ does is that it compels us to reflectupon the whole length and breadth of Martín’s journey. Ultimately, whatmakes La colmena so effective, existentially speaking, is that it closes withan individual and his illimitable sense of futurity: this individual will eitherfulfil the ideal of Sartrean freedom and truly become who he chooses to be, orhe will utterly fade away into the background.

63 Sartre, Nausea, 171.64 As Henn explains, ‘el que las autoridades no vean a Marco sencillamente como un

poeta despistado e inofensivo, a los lectores nos hace empezar a tomarle en serio y a consideraren su totalidad la significación narrativa y la importancia fundamental de este personaje. ¿Esposible que esta presunta víctima sea, en realidad, auténtica víctima y que desempeñe unpapel simbólico en la novela?’ (‘Martín Marco: el desarrollo de un protagonista’, 34).

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