A ‘literary atom’, the greguería

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the new findings of modern physics reverberated through Spain, as elsewhere in the world, unsettling time-honoured beliefs in the solidity of matter and the groundedness of truth. Newspapers and magazines routinely featured news of scientific discoveries, often written in the new genre of ‘popular science’, thus providing the public with astonishing visions of the cosmos and the subatomic realm. Niels Bohr’s planetary model of the atom – a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons – suggested that seemingly solid matter consisted largely of empty space. Einstein's visit to Spain in 1923 prompted a media frenzy, as the press avidly covered his lectures, meetings with local scientists, and events held in his honour. In the wake of the discovery of subatomic particles and relativity theory, matter had suddenly acquired a paradoxical and ambiguous status, revealed as at once solid and ephemeral.

For Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the new physics exerted a powerful intellectual attraction, given that its field of inquiry intersected with his lifelong literary practice, above all in his Greguerías. A literary micro-genre of his own invention, the greguería is a humorous, metaphoric aphorism that posits the most unlikely likenesses among discrete things. To take a few examples from Novísimas greguerías (1929):