Matices en torno a El hombre perdido, de Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Abstract

This article seeks to provide a few reading cues for the novel El hombre perdido [The Lost Man] by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, an intense work, written in the first person by the nameless, “lost” character in his errancy in search of a “sign of life.” Its reading is made more complicated due to the impressive accumulation of complex metaphors and aphoristic (gregueristic) “illuminations” throughout the text. The novel condenses several characteristics of Ramonian aesthetics: from his obsession for the fugacity of life, a phantasmagoria charged with nonsense and with the absurd, inspired by Goya and related to the lucidity of Cioran, to its fragmentary, anti-lineal «atomized» structure.