Life and Death, Space and Time: «El sepulturero»

Edmund L. King

In any narrative that is an imitation, as Aristotle and Lessing would have it, of actions in the conventional world of time and space as we know it, there are necessarily two temporal orders. The one, which is the immediate object of our awareness, is the order of the words themselves and with them the order of presentation of matter and events in the narrative. The other, which we may discern readily, or perhaps only with some difficulty, if the author provides us with adequate information, is the chronological order of the events themselves in the fictitious or real -the difference is of no consequence for our present purposes- world of time and space to which they belong. The events may be simultaneous or they may precede and follow one another, and they may be represented as having little or nothing to do with one another, or as leading to one another, or in some mixture of these relationships. Moreover, the author may, presumably by design, fail to provide all the information we need to determine the chronological order, while at the same time implying that such an order exists. Let us call the first order -the order in which we as readers encounter the elements of the narrative in the narrative- the artistic order, and the second order -the order in which, with respect to one another, the events, as best we can tell, occur in time- the chronological order.

It is my premise here that narratives in which the two orders coincide rather closely -perfect coincidence is not conceivable in narratives of the slightest degree of complexity, that is, past anterior (pluperfect) explanations are unavoidable (e.g., sentences like John, who had already heard the news, was ready to go when I got there)- do not call into question the relationship between time and space and will in the vast majority of the cases encourage the inference post hoc propter hoc, a plausible sequence of events the more pleasing, we say with Aristotle, as it is the more surprising without ceasing to be plausible. This is a kind of narrative -not necessarily the only kind- that presupposes or represents a world that makes sense. (I leave room for a small body of works in which artistic order and chronological order coincide in a representation of events in the conventional world of time and space so preposterous in their apparent temporal relationship as to force upon us the author's presumed view, to wit, that the world is absurd. But usually, I think, though my acquaintance with narrative is not so vast as to allow me to make this statement without some reservation of modesty, this view is not projected by such a pure narrative procedure).

A further premise is that when the artistic order distorts or obscures the chronological order enough to make it at least slightly difficult for the reader to keep the chronological order straight or keep it in mind, this distortion is itself a quite literally significant element in the structure of the narrative. It means something, possibly about the nature of cause and effect, possibly about the relationship between time and space, possibly about the nature of literary art; possibly what it is trying to get at is «the meaning of it all». We can think at once of well-known narrators who introduce such distortions into their works in the service of extremely diverse expressive intentions. There are slick writers like Somerset Maugham and John P. Marquand (I am thinking about Cakes and Ale and So Little Time) who cleverly keep the place the same when the chronology is broken and keep the chronology continuous when the place changes, with no expressive intent that I can discern but with the practical purpose of holding the reader's attention, keeping him interested or amused, through such variation, carefully restrained lest it suggest to the reader something more than mere entertainment technique. Or, to take a very difference case, Dostoevski, in The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, where we find the author bringing one life along through extraordinary adventures and vicissitudes and a half-dozen chapters only to break the chronological continuity and go back in time to unfold an analogous narrative of another life more or less concurrent chronologically but necessarily sequential to the first artistically, and so on, until he gets at least some of the characters assembled in the same place, so the major drama can take place. To launch such a vast novelistic project necessarily requires some such procedure, but the procedure cannot fail to contribute -and if that is too strong a generalization, the procedure in Dostoevski's hands evidently does contribute- to the sense of the human drama as being a frightfully and inscrutably and mysteriously tangled web of motions and countermotions. Or take a work of less pretension, Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte, where the artistic order so thoroughly jumbles the chronological order that only with great trouble can we straighten it out and then come to the conclusion that through the jumbling Cela precisely means to say that there is no connection between one event and another in Pascual Duarte's life, that his life makes no sense.

I could go on with examples, borrowing those brought up by Joseph Frankin his seminal essay «Spatial Form in Modern Literature» -Flaubert, Joyce, Proust, Djuna Barnes¹. I have not wanted, however, to present a large collection or works displaying the characteristic that interests me here but rather to show, before I get to my particular subject, that different writers may use the technique of chronological obfuscation for different purposes. All readers of Gabriel Miró will agree that in his longer works, for example, the novels Nuestro Padre San Daniel and El obispo leproso², it is very hard -though not impossible- to keep track of time, and this is often true of the short stories as well. In my opinion, what Miró's subversion of the sense of time contributes to the total expressive intention of the works is approximately the same -even if the methods vary- whether it be in a long novel or in a short story. I shall therefore choose as a manageable work to study in this connection what I consider to be one of Miró's best short stories, «El sepulturero»³.

The only way I can think of to bring out the difference between the artistic and the chronological order of the elements of this or any other story so that it will be meaningful for the reader is to rearrange the elements and relate them in their chronological order. But if this procedure is to do any good at all the reader must have the story as composed by Miró clearly in mind and preferably at hand. What follows below is my rearrangement, in English translation, of «El sepulturero». Nothing is further from my expectation than winning friends for Gabriel Miró through this translation. Miró is the most untranslatable Spanish writer I know. My only object is to represent the various segments volumetrically in a way that will leave them easily identifiable, in a chronological arrangement that spoils the story and thus proves my point. For subsequent use, I am numbering each of the elements, some of which are rather arbitrarily isolated. The number in parentheses in each case indicates the place of the element in the artistic order. That is, if the segments are arranged in the numerical order of the parenthetical numbers, the result is the story as Miró wrote it. Italicized words are my additions to provide linkages destroyed by breaking up the artistic order. The reader will observe, by the way, that a few of the very brief past anteriors, grammatical or merely narrational (as in the very first element), have been left undisturbed, on the grounds that they do not significantly disorder the chronology.

1 [10] It was at the burial of the fellow we had forgotten... The whole night of his agony the rain was falling. And he sobbed away. When he expired, it did not seem to us that it was the rain but the sound of silence that persisted in our ears. 2 [11] The next day, the cemetery was all muddy. The cypresses, clean, tender, and fragant, were still shedding drops of rainwater. The family vault was one of the old ones, crumbling abandoned, with water cozing from its stones. The gravedigger appeared. He walked slowly, accompanied by a lanky, jaundiced girl; her apron short and patched; her shoes too big. She was having a snack of dark bread and sausage. He took a look at the coffin. He dug around inside his cheek with a straw, and said, as he planted a foot on the grave slab; «We can't bury him here. All the shelves are full up. The last one -he was an old man- we left him down in the bottom and didn't even seal him in». And since we persisted, he grabbed the rings on the stone. And when he moved it aside, the entire pit was revealed, all flooded. We couldn't repress a cry of horror... The flood of water had brought up the old man's body, contorted and swollen. He started at us from his empty eyesockets, protesting against this second death. Women came along, the cemetery crones who read the epitaphs on the niches and offer commentaries on the lives of the interred. They stood there contemplating the water-logged dead man. And after they too had exclaimed in horror, they noticed the girl, who was eating away while she leaned over the grave. The women edged closer to the gravedigger. Was the kid really well again? Wasn't she the one that had the malaria? The gaunt man affectionately scratched the nape of his daughter's neck with his straw. Yes, she was better. But since the fever left her weak and she would hardly look at food, he had taken to bringing her along with him to amuse her. And ever since then, the child was doing fine... Just look at her eat! The girl had her eyes fixed on the cadaver bulging with water as she ate away at the bread and the sausage. She ate lots of bread but she just nibbled at the sausage so it would last longer. 3 [7] One evening some years later, the fog and the clouds had come down over the city. Stones and trees were dripping, they looked aged, and from deep within them came forth the steaminess of youth in the summertime. And we got a whiff of our heavy clothes, and they gave us a soothing promise of wellbeing, of protection against the cold. Winter was coming closer and closer, and suddenly, like a frightened dove, a sweet wave of warm air blew in as if from a beehive; but it was soon broken up by a gust of autumn wind laden with the rain of short afternoons. And the bells, the bells in all the churches, started to nod up and down, falling all over each other, interrupting one another, the tiny ones, the strong ones, that broke their peals in half, scattering them through the cloudy haze... The bells reached into all the households... All Saints', the vigil of All Souls'... Frail grandmothers, their eyes beclouded, their foreheads like polished granite, poured out the oil into a glass, a cup, an earthenware jug, a chalice. They count off their dead: a husband, a baby boy, of whom they don't even have a picture; the grown daughter in her bridal dress; a widowed sister, the one that had such a bad time of it. And for each soul they light a wick. The little flame grows; then it flickers and sputters; at last it burns steadily. The odor of oil lamps reached down to the front door. And the little old woman takes a seat in the parlor, her eyelids droop, she dozes off, she sighs, she says a prayer, and she falls asleep again... 4 [6] The next morning our city, sunny and unpretentious, delighted in the sea air, which reached every corner. The smell was of harbors and distances. And when a passing woman would leave a trail of perfume behind her, we sensed still more the wonder of the far off, the aura of journeys. We were happy, full of confidence. But then a man passed close by us and gave us a rapid look. And yet that look stayed in our eyes a long time. And that man was like another man. Where had we seen him? We had seen him once in the cemetery. And we began to unwind our memories (of the gravedigging recounted above). 5 [8] The family go out all dressed in their best clothes. The grandmother is now the only one who still wears mourning. They are carrying chrysanthemums, a wreath, and some candles. They always forget to bring wire or nails to hang up their floral offerings; but they will ask the gravedigger for them. The cemetery is one big country fair. Venders cry their wares; young folk mill about. Some people are trying to find the gravedigger. So are we. Where can the man be? We have forgotten where a friend of ours is buried. 6 [9] Where is our friend the gravedigger? Bored and weary, he is out by the iron gate. He's wearing a new suit. Today he has a ring of friends around him. They are waiting to hear his stories. They ask him about his job. They offer him smokes. He sits down of a step; his back hunches over. He dangles his crusty hands over his knees. Families of the dead approach him. We ask him about our own dead friend. The gravedigger scratches his skull, which makes a sound like a block of wood. He was a young fellow, clean-shaven, pale... And we tell him how our friend looked when he was alive. At that point the gaunt man looks up and smiles at us. He doesn't recognize anything but corpses... And we shudder. That was the look of the man that walked past us in the city. Those eyes saw us as a dead bodies! 7 [3] With pitmen and gravediggers it is not a question of a category but of a lineage. In hamlets, except for the priest and, if there be a schoolmaster, except for the schoolmaster too, everyone is a farmer, everyone digs his own plot of ground; so they could all be gravediggers. And they aren't. The gravedigger's spade is hereditary, his house the one everybody points to. If his wife makes bread and lights a fire in the oven, don't you suppose the wood comes from the rotted coffins that her husband was burning up? If their daughter comes out on Sunday with a flower in her hair, which grave could her father have stolen it from? His laughter, the way he raises his voice, his lovemaking, his fruit trees, this watchdog, his water jug -they all bear the mark of his gravedigging hands. 8 [4] He is off irrigating or plowing the mayor's field. Opposite lies the village common; then comes the watering trough; then the hill; and, up above, the village, with clothes hung out to dry. Two partriarchal elms stand out, along with the bell tower and its bent weathervane; beyond, a deserted road; an enclosure; a cypress in each corner, and in the middle a plain, rickety cross, very black against the blue sky. Further on, the olive groves of the local rich man. Some boys come down the hill, stopping to catch frogs in the irrigation trenches, or to look for birds' nests, or to chew on their merienda. And suddenly they turn and run off to the village. They've seen the man who has no fear of the dead. 9 [2] Two youngsters are playing with their little brother. They are bored. What can they do? And they set to thinking and scheming, and decide to do something to scare the little one. They find their grandma's bonnet and a cloak of their father's and they dress up a hat rack. The little brother is so frightened of the ghost that he doesn't know which way to turn and bursts into tears. The big boys think it's great fun. But they have to calm him down. And they tell him: «It is nothing but grandma's bonnet!» And they laugh. «It won't hurt you!» And they take a good look at it. They fixed it up themselves, they explain in a loud shout so they can hear themselves say it. «It's just father's old overcoat!» And they move away from it a bit. «It's just a hat rack!» They look at it again. And they all dash off amid screams of fright. 10 [5] People who come back from the grave, the cries of souls in purgatory, lurid lights that follow people down the road when they pass by the cemetery at night, all the village tales about apparitions, all the frights that weigh upon children and give their elders goose pimples -all these come to a halt and surrender in the presence of the man who gets a notice one day when he is loosening the soil on a terrace, puts his hoe over his shoulder, and leaves his work, casting an ominous profile as his figure contrasts with the gaiety of nature, even though he have the same walk as any tired farmer. And he goes into his house and reaches for a rusty key and comes out again and takes the lonely little path and comes to the wall with the cross on it. The grinding of the gate cuts through the outspread afternoon. Then a few muffled chops break the fresh earth under the grass and weeds. Flies buzz crazily about the tombstones. A bird flies out of a broken niche up the spire of a cypress. Ravens cross the sky over the olive groves. And in the village the bells are tolling. 11 [1] Artists and churchmen, versifiers and philosophers have fashioned the biology and image of the amiable gravedigger. His hands are crusty with dirt and human substances, his fingernails stink of dead bodies; the voracious, cold flash of his look is like the eyes of birds of evil omen; his flesh is always livid and saturated with sweat; his entrails, dry. We go so far as to believe that he delights in cracking the skulls in the common pit. And, to be sure, he does break them open or scrape against them unintentionally, sometimes. The belly of the pit is full, swollen with corpses. It will hold no more. A centuryful of the town's past life is piled up and squeezed into it. The cemetery has to be enlarged! And out flies a bone splinter. On the other side of the wall the countryside is open, expansive, wild. The spade would go into the compliant soil joyfully and come out fresh and sweet-smelling. To the gravedigger, the world presents itself as an endless chest in which to store those poor men who die, who are not like him. They are not like him, indeed. Gods, sages, heroes, mystics have a presentiment of immortality. The gravedigger is the only one who can really feel it. In an earlier time it could also be enjoyed by hangmen. Undertakers? Not really. Undertakers are death's mediocre hired hands. Not priests, either. The liturgy they maintain is for the living. The gravedigger is left alone with the dead. He is bound to fell that they belong to him and need him; so he will never be permitted to be a dead man. He himself has no concept, no feeling, of the gravedigger... He won't find out what it's like from his colleagues, the other gravediggers, because that's what they are, colleagues. They are all immortal. Divinity creates life and remains in heaven. The gravedigger provides the room for death and shuts it up, and he himself remains on the earth. ...He splits the skulls in the common pit. In the meantime, the solemn worthies of the city negotiate papers for the new grounds that are needed. The good gravedigger may recognize the skull of some friend of his; but he does not, like the ill-fated prince, take it in his hands; rather, he sends it to the bottom of the pit with the broken tip of his alpargata. We say: His bread is an abomination! And we remember all about Charon, how he would snatch the coin from the mouths of the dead to pay the toll for the boat. Pay him a wage for his day's work and he will no longer wish for «overripe» bodies, people that have been dead for more than twenty-four hours. Dress him in a long, clean smock and he will look like a mason. Put a gold-braided cap on his head, the kind that goes with a uniform, and he will turn into a clerk, into a book page in the library. Make him the gravedigger of the great modern necropolis. Municipal offices: now the corpses are files, the gravediggers, file clerks. Now he is plural. And our gravedigger has to be singular. Even though his qualities of misfortune be found in the others, he is the unique man of the silences, the one who hears all his own steps in the echoes of the tombs and in all the pulsings of his own blood, of his own unique life, lived out in desolation. We take pleasure in finding him repugnant and horrible. Since we can't pierce the mystery of death or agree on what it really is, we organize the spectacle of the dead. And the gravedigger is our creation. And we want to look upon him so that we may curse him.

There is, to be sure, a certain arbitrariness in the way I have segmented the work, but this has to do only with the subdivision of apparently sequential chronological units. That is, only the sense that temporal continuity is at least slightly broken leads me to separate 1 [10] and 2 [11], 5 [8] and 6 [9], and 7 [3] and 8 [4]. If each pair is coalesced into a single unit, my basic argument is in no way vitiated. The only feature of the disarticulation that is seriously debatable is the assignment of artistic segment number [1] to last place -11- chronologically, since the matter there has no evident place in the chronology of the «events» narrated and has all its verbs in a present tense which is mostly discursive and even when it is narrative is so in an exemplary fashion and not for the purpose of telling a particular story. Certainly, the matter in 11 [1] constitutes a brief, meditative essay that has no part in the narrative. It seems to me, however, that it must be considered chronologically last for either of two reasons. The first possibility is that the author had the various encounters with the gravedigger (I think they are as real as the thoughts with which he prefaces the accounts of them, but whether they are or not makes no difference for present purposes), and, remembering them, he was led into these reflections. Or, the second possibility: reflecting upon death, the author is led to think of gravediggers, and thus to recalling his experiences with «nuestro sepulturero». Either way, the opening essay is in some sense the last event in the narrative, and because it is plainly an account of what is going on in the author's mind, the vividness, wit, and extreme economy of expression (in the Spanish) -all that we mean by style- endow the author with considerable presence in the story. This may, in fact, be an artistic defect, but I would not like to give up 11 [1] for the sake of a more «perfect» story.

Even if what I have said about the place of 11 [1] in the chronology of the story be a sophistical rationalization and even if the truth be that it has no place at all in the chronology, we see at once that its artistic location as [1] and its discursive verbal mode situate us in a space where all time is present, and we can proceed to review the disposition of the remaining segments from that atemporal sphere. To make this disposition easier to grasp, let me set it forth in its numerical nakedness in two different ways; first, the way in which it appears in the rearrangement above; second, the way in which it appears originally:

Chronological Order	Artistic Order	Artistic Order	Chronological Order
1	(10)	(1)	11
2	(11)	(2)	9
3	(7)	(3)	7
4	(6)	(4)	8
5	(8)	(5)	10
6	(9)	(6)	4
7	(3)	(7)	3
8	(4)	(8)	5
9	(2)	(9)	6
10	(5)	(10)	1
11	(1)	(11)	2

This schematization allows us to grasp certain formal characteristics of the story firmly and to speculate plausibly about their significance. Most striking of these, and this is evident even from the textual rearrangement in chronological order, is the submersion of [11] into the text at the extremely inconspicuous position 2 if we follow chronological order, with artistic consequences much greater than the mere numbers suggest for an episode and scene that are clearly not designed to be inconspicuous. The separate elements of the closing image will be harshly when not horribly striking, in and of themselves, for most readers. Floating on the surface of the water that has flooded the grave, «el difunto ahogado, el cadáver del viejo, hinchado de las aguas... miraba con las órbitas vacías, quejándose de dos muertes». Item: «mujeres-comadres de cementerio, que leen epitafios de nichos y comentan la vida de los enterrados». Item: «una niña larga, amarilla; su delantal, corto, remendado; sus botas, muy grandes; canija; la de las tercianas; ... engullía pan y longaniza; mucho pan; y sólo rosigaba la longaniza para que le durase...» Item: «el sepulturero... venía despacio; hombre aciago; se hurgó el quijal con un esparto verde». When these several units are combined into a single picture, the juxtaposition necessarily enhances the expressivity of each and lends, of course, general grotesque effect to the ensemble. After Miró gathers the characters together with preterites -apareció, miró, hurgó, agarró, apareció, tuvimos, acudieron, acarició- he then, with three telling imperfects -miraba, engullía, rosigaba- poses them in an immutable icon of life and death, a scene which, if relegated to position 2 in a chronologically ordered narrative, is necessarily beclouded in the reader's perception of the whole by the nine segments that follow it, as indeed readers of the present article will have noticed from reading the chronological version presented above. Obviously, the iconic character of the scene even in a merely formal way is emphasized by its artistic position at the end of the story, and it of course also in this way takes on special significance. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I shall try to explain more of what this significance is.

Miró once told Óscar Esplá⁴, one of the few friends with whom he was inclined to discuss such matters, that a human life is the traversal of a lighted space between two tunnels. Whether the particular image was original with Miró I do not know. Certainly others, from the Venerable Bede to Rubén Darío, have expressed similar ideas. It is significant, though, that Miró emphasizes not the dark tunnels but the light between them. Still, his works are replete with figures of orphans or orphanoids -men and women cut off from their neighbors, their origins, the Absolute (whatever it may be if it exists), and braving their way through life with such props and supports in beliefs and rituals as they can get hold of. I will point to only two of the numerous affecting expressions of this human pathos, one on what can simply be called the literal level, the story «Corpus», in which the literal orphan Ramonete cannot see God in the transubstantiated host because he is blinded by the glittering monstrance in which the host is encased. The other, the meditation on Ascension Day, in El humo dormido, which closes with a chilling accusation directed at God through Fray Luis de León's famous text describing the cloud that bears Christ (God the Son, the mediator) back to God (the Father):

¡Cuán rica tú te alejas; cuán pobres y cuán ciegos, ¡ay!, nos dejas!

God has, in other words, left man alone, poor and helpless in the world, an abandoned child, an orphan.

Life, for man the orphan, Miró says repeatedly, is existentially a place of unremitting uncertainty and fear, ending in inscrutable death. Why is this so and how is it related to our theme? Because life goes on in time. All man's efforts are directed towards thwarting the inexorable enemy, time: most elaborately, the Church and its rituals and myths; most elementally, eating to keep alive, even though one knows that time will win in the end. There is only one heroism: to see the world (life in time, or, better, time in life) as it is, certain to triumph over us in the end, and to love it (cling to life-time) even so⁵. Thus, the gravedigger's daughter, who has just barely survived an attack of malaria, looks certain death in the face and eats away to keep alive and even nibbles on the sausage slowly, so that the defiance of time will go on as long as possible. She is trying to beat time at its own game, the game of duration, in spite of the evidence she has before her.

Miró hints at many of the conventional aspects of the tempus topos -the lacrimae rerum, el dolorido sentir, time as the thief of beauty, Bergson's durée, Proust's recherche du temps perdu, no doubt others. He writes, though, not to repeat but to transcend.

If the confinement of man in time is the fundamental matrix of human pathos -the tragic sense of life- in general, it is doubly painful and challenging to the verbal artist, the writer, the poet. This observation takes us back to the famous chapter XVI of the Laokoon, in which Lessing, for the first time since Aristotle, has something new to say about «poetry» (he is setting off Homer against the descriptive poets of the eighteenth century):

If it is true that painting uses for its imitations means or signs quite different from those of poetry -painting, figures and colors in space; poetry, sounds articulated in time-; if, uncontestably, signs must have an appropriate relationship to what they signify, this truth must follow: objects existing next to each other, or whose parts exist next to each other, can be expressed only by signs existing next to each other, and signs following upon one another can express only those objects which follow, or whose parts follow, one another.

Lessing, much more the practical critic than the philosopher, was led to this insight -so fresh in its time and so obvious once it was made- when he confronted the literary situation around him:

Many of our most modern critics, seeing the points of agreement between painting and poetry, have come to the crudest imaginable conclusions, as if no such difference existed. First they force poetry into the narrow confines of painting. Then they make painting occupy the whole wide realm of poetry. Everything that is right for one must also be permitted to the other. Everything that in the one is pleasing or displeasing must necessarily be pleasing or displeasing in the other.

In sum, Lessing argues triumphantly that literature is a temporal medium and should accept the sequential, non-spatial character of temporality. How sensible, how much the practical voice of the Enlightenment! Even those descriptive poets whom the great German was inveighing against no doubt saw the merit of his argument. They were, in any case, something of an aberration in their abject submission to Horace's famous dictum. Surely it is no more possible to write (or of course to speak) without reference to both time and space than it is to exist outside of time and space. Indeed, while many, perhaps most, writers most of the time take for granted these ineluctable dimensions of reality and do not dwell upon them as such but rather accept them the way a fish accepts water, at some moments in history an exacerbated awareness of them becomes a prominent if not obsessive motive and motif of some, and perhaps most, writers. Such was the case in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The example of Garcilaso in his twenty-third sonnet will stand for a vast repertory of Spanish variations on the theme:

Marchitará la rosa el viento helado, todo lo mudará la edad ligera por no hacer mudanza en su costumbre.

Miró himself, evoking, I presume, this more than venerable tradition, in a letter to Andrés González Blanco ca. 10 March 1906, made a remark which merits much more attention than it has received. Speaking of the days he spent in the infirmary of his Jesuit boarding school, he says, «He sentido las primeras tristezas estéticas, viendo en los crepúsculos, los valles apagados y las cumbres aún encendidas de sol»⁶. The transitoriness of beauty is not the point for Miró; rather, the inescapable melancholy with which he experiences that transitoriness -we seem to need the word fugacity in English- is the fundamental aesthetic experience -tristeza estética- the experience of which his art is, to be sure, often the expression but also the experience to which his art is a response. What Lessing had seen as a practical matter, a fact of the verbal artist's life to which the artist should adapt himself, is seen by Miró to be a matter of life and death. Thou shalt not pass, he seems to be saying, as he pits his words against time, by representing actions iconically. The actions may be exemplary, like the game of the children in «El sepulturero», by definition not caught up in the chronology of the story and thus more or less iconic, or they may be episodes in the narrative dislodged from their proper place in the chronology, portions of time temporarily deprived of flux, subjected to the artist's will, and turned into icons much as the episodes of sacred history are spatialized in the stained glass windows of churches. It would be tautological to argue the particular effectiveness of the disposition of each segment in Miró's narrative. The sum total of the arrangement has whatever effect it has, and that effect is partially and in significant degree attributable to the spatialization of time, the detemporalization of episodes, achieved in the manner shown by the numerical charts above.

It is important to notice, however, that while Miró is crafty, he is not tricky. There is no magical realism here, no phantasy, not even any illusionism. Time is real. Time will pass, regardless of man's wishes. If man knows this, is there not only pathos in such awareness but a certain comedy in resisting time's passage, only nibbling on the sausage so it will last longer? The touches of witty irony and paradox throughout the story surely encourage this interpretation. And if time is indeed of the general essence, it is of the utter essence for the writer, so that the bravest actor of all in the pathetic comedy is the writer, and he is doubly so when he takes on time itself as his antagonist, bending it to his artistic purposes. It is much too easy to see life in time as tragedy (pace Unamuno). The heroic task is to see it, to play it, as comedy.