PALACIO VALDES, UNTIMELY

Fifty years after publishing his first novel, El selnorito Octavio (1881), Armando Palacio Valdes published his last, Sinfonia pastoral (1931). Like much of Palacio Valdes's output, Sinfonia pastoral has been more popular with readers than with scholars, partly because of its sentimentality, but mainly because of its belatedness. Starting from Edward Said's reflections on "late style," this essay distinguishes between two varieties of untimeliness: by anticipation and by reversion. Untimely by reversion, Sinfonia pastoral looks back to Palacio Valdes's beginnings as a novelist and, concretely, to his second novel, El idilio de un enfermo (1884), which the later novel revises. The wager of the untimely work is that its time will come. For works untimely by anticipation, this day arrives by definition. Written ahead of their time, sooner or later the future catches up to them. But the untimely works by reversion face a less certain fate. When they come upon the scene, time has already passed them by. And yet their time may still come, if only for an untimely reader like the author of this essay. (GPF)