When the magical soul expresses itself, quantum mechanics appears and the particles make literature

In his latest work entitled

, the filmmaker Carlos Saura articulates a documentary based on a series of interviews where he brings together painters like Miquel Barceló with graffiti artists like Zeta and muralists like Cuco, without forgetting a professor of Paleontology like Juan Luis Arsuaga, who, in one of his interventions, speaks of the duality of the soul of the human being.

Arsuaga tells us that, although, on the one hand, we have the rational and analytical soul, on the other we have the irrational and magical soul that is the origin of all artistic expression.

However, when the human being develops consciousness to a state in which language becomes the basis of his communication system, the duality to which Arsuaga refers is unified and the two aspects of it become complementary.

Where it can be well understood is in the art of the novel, whose origin is rational and Newtonian from, say, Cervantes until the 20th century, which is when the novel becomes "relativistic and quantum" —with "q"— according to the critic Manuel García Viñó in one of his studies entitled

.

In this way, with the arrival of the vacuum fluctuations that atoms contain, and their consequent projection in literature, the way of counting opens up to new forms, reaching the forefront in the interwar period.

With this, we find a return to the primitive duality where the unconscious, the magical soul, stars in the authorship of the novelistic expression.

Let us remember that Newtonian mechanics developed in the 17th century, when Isaac Newton synthesized the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo in his

, published in 1687, and where the dynamics of celestial bodies were studied.

As in the classic novel there are differentiated temporal sequences that are marked by approach, middle and end, in Newtonian mechanics space and time are still differentiated concepts.

The time in which the plot of the classic novel takes place is linear, quite the opposite of what happens in the quantum novel where, according to Viñó, the fragments follow one another as if they were scenes, each located in a different time to tell before what happens after.

If we follow Viñó's theory, we can specify that the first quantum novel that breaks with the mechanistic approach was produced by Proust between 1908 and 1922. In Search of Lost Time he speaks of a time "without past or future, which is the proper time of artistic creation” according to the French novelist and essayist Jean-Louis Curtis (1917-1995), according to the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss in his successful work

(Siruela):

“There is neither time lost nor time recovered in

(...).

One wonders if the children who play on the Champs-Élysées are still at the age of playing hoops or at the age of the first clandestine cigarette”.

With Proust, involuntary memory begins to distance itself from conscious memory, which brings us back to Saura's documentary, where there is an intervention by Barceló in which the Mallorcan painter comes to say that his own artistic expression, instead of going in progression, it regresses until it reaches the walls of the caves where human beings expressed their fears and desires 30,000 years ago.

For this reason, when Newtonian mechanics is left behind, it is when the duality of the soul is accentuated, the magical soul being the one that is expressed in art.

It is about the soul that Arsuaga refers to in Saura's documentary, a splendid work that invites reflections like the ones that occupy this piece today.

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