Embodying the Humanities in Antonio Orejudo’s Un momento de descanso (2011)

Antonio Orejudo’s satirical campus novel, Un momento de descanso (2011), situates its academic protagonists in a climate of extreme devaluation of humanities disciplines. Orejudo’s protagonist, the Spanish literature professor Arturo Cifuentes, spends the novel performing an anachronistic “life of the mind,” producing a jarring disjuncture between the imagined role of the academic and the reality of his environment in both the American university obsessed with political correctness and limitless productivity and in the endogamous Spanish one that rewards sycophancy with prestige. Cifuentes’s representation of the “life of the mind,” defined using Erving Goffman’s concept of the performance, is always foiled by the physical body, either his own or someone else’s. Cifuentes’s experience diverges markedly from that of the autofictional narrator, also named Antonio Orejudo, who leaves academia to become a successful novelist after the manipulation of his body leads to the heightening of his imagination. The bleak representation of the academic humanities as inauthentic and performative serves to contrast the embodied experience of writing literature, wherein the hope for the humanities is located.