Janus in "Real Sitio" (the dualism in José Luis Sampedro)

Abstract

José Luis Sampedro's literary line could be divided in two periods separated by his novel Octubre, octubre which marks the beginning of the trilogy termed by its author as Los círculos del tiempo (Octubre, octubre, La vieja sirena and Real Sitio).
From the very beginning, certain formal and thematic aspects have individualized the author, becoming of special importance his dualism, which, probably as a sing of personality, pervades all his work and reaches its summit in Real Sitio, his latest novel. Nevertheless, none of the antitheses brought about by this dualism eventually turns into disrupting parallelisms. lnslead, out of this struggle of contraries there springs an element of synthesis which includes every single contrary. This is undoubtedly so in Real Sitio, where this literary resource, yet again as a sign of Sampedro's synthetical personality, appears frequently, viz, in both narrativc lines, in hoth dimensional coordinates (time and space), in the homogeneity of two different social estates, and even in such a formal literary element as an external structure.

Real Sitio is, consequently, a dual and janic novel, even some references to Janus, Roman mythological god are frequently found, but although it might sound paradoxical, it is also a synthetical novel in wich the character lanus acts as the main integrating element closing the two ample narrative lines of the novel.