Novelistic characters as an analogy of projective life: a metaphysical foundation for María Zambrano’s ethics

Abstract

María Zambrano positions her poetic reasoning based on the coordinates of Ortega’s vital reasoning: she assimilates it at first, without subjecting it to a rigorous critical analysis, and she later distances herself to bring her poetic reasoning closer to more vitalist positions. On this journey of poetic reasoning, until it finds its definitive location, its metaphysical foundation of the analogy of novel characters as a representation of existential ethics is paradigmatic: in Ortega its development is insufficient, but she (more sensitive to literature) is capable of giving the metaphor more depth, with a bolder analysis, thanks to her understanding of the genre of the novel, which owes nothing to the theory of her master’s novel. She accepts Ortega’s premise that we are unfinished. But she takes the conclusions further to mark the terrain of her poetic reasoning, which rebels against the sacrifice of life to the being: Faced with life as a project, she understands, from Benito Pérez Galdós’ character Nina, that what we have to do to finish doing is not pre-determined. She rejects a programmatic life.