Three phases in the Miguel Hernández’s life: writing and ideology

Abstract

The article is not only about the danger of the removal of a strict historical temporality of literary texts, but also about the inevitable relationship between writing and ideology, that is, about how a writer’s ideology influences the development, scope and nature of their writing, and how that relationship gets embodied in practice in which it can be critically observed and examined. In other words, what we seek to discuss is the question of how the “aesthetic value” of a work – provided that such a critical category can be established – is determined or affected by the writer’s ideology, bearing in mind that ideologies, and historical junctures, fundamentally influence texts and art objects as they are created. In the case of the work and life of Miguel Hernández, which was as intense as it was short, it is necessary to take into account and to thoroughly understand the notion of “three times”: a paralyzed time, which is suspended in the past and characterized by the Catholic and the Baroque poetic traditions; a time of discovery and culmination of desire, i. e. the time of (historical) present, which preserves tradition, but also adopts modernity; and a dynamic and collective time, which is immersed into History, but is a signal of change and is therefore turned towards the future. The last two times merge into a powerful and convincing expression of a perfect reality and of an accomplished personal experience, i. e. into a dynamic and open “defi nite time”, which changes and makes us change.