1 - Ramón, the Artist and His Brand

Summary

Life. An incomplete approach

Ramón's life journey is, once again, paradoxical and contradictory. One possible image, which I owe to the great researcher on Gómez de la Serna’s literature, Ioana Zlotescu, is that of the margin: Ramón at the margins. Several key aspects, such as the discovery of Madrid's flea market, the Rastro, and the revaluation in all his works of everyday objects of negligible importance or quality, the corny, the use of literary forms that belong to popular or non-prestigious literary genres, the refusal to lead any cultural group or movement, the rejection of a position in the state administration or in an academic institution, etc. would give credence to this desire for selfmarginalisation with respect to centres of power of any kind. Nevertheless, this image is not enough, because, as I have already indicated, the opposite movement exists: from the margins, he goes to the centre of cities, to the centre of cultural life around powerful publishing and media groups. In reality, like so many other coordinates that could map his life and work, it is a constant swing or tension that he never resolves, perhaps because he finds in it the dynamism for pushing forward his work and his life, perhaps because it could not be otherwise, unfortunately for him. Another image helps to understand the articulation of this continuous contradiction or dialectic: the image of the circle of which he is the centre. In the circle, he goes into himself – it is a way of graphically exemplifying the materialism and radical subjectivism of his literature: everything refers to him, to his desire and his perspective or vision of the world – but it also serves to relate him in a tangential way to other realities he approaches. Focusing on his sphere, he includes in it his companions and moves with it to the limits of other cultural, artistic circles, with whose occupants he always interacts at a certain distance.

This dialectic of margin and centre is more shocking or visible in his early years. Ramón was the eldest of four brothers, Pedro, José, Javier and Julio, and he had a sister, Dolores. Javier became a respected translator and the director of the publishing house Ulises in the 1930s.