INTRODUCTION

El Robinson Urbano’s article collection, of Antonio Muñoz Molina, was published for the first time in 1984 in Granada by the Selene publishing house in a desktop publishing of its author, who at that time was an officer of the City Council's Culture Delegation. This was the first work published by the Úbeda writer, in the end, one of the most prominent voices of the generation that emerged immediately after the Transition (understanding it as the period between 1975 and 1982) and, of Spanish letters of late 20^th and early 21^st century.

With two exceptions ¹ , the articles included in the said volume of El Robinson Urbano had been published between Friday, May 7^th, 1982 (the second number that the newspaper put out on the street) and Friday, April 8^th, 1983 in the Diario de Granada and under the same heading: El Robinson Urbano. This was a newly created newspaper with a progressive ideology ² that appeared in the city amid Transition. In total, there were 41 articles published under this heading in the local newspaper from Granada.

In a more or less casual way, as he has explained (Molina & A, 2011), the author began to publish his robinsonian articles once a week (in general, every Friday). He was still an unpublished writer: in those years he was working on the draft of what would later become his first novel, Beatus Ille.

Selene's 1984 compilation book would later be reissued by Seix Barral after a visit to the city by Pere Gimferrer. This editorial seal allowed the author to expand the framework of dissemination from the purely local to an already national scale. Seix Barral later published Beatus Ille, a title that began the author's novelistic career.

But Muñoz Molina did not only published articles during his collaboration with Diario de Granada but also news, interviews, reports, literary criticism, etc ³ , thus forging a fruitful journalistic collaboration during those two years, 1982 and 1983. The first thing he published, moreover, was not a column for El Robinson Urbano but rather an article on local issues and current affairs. This happened the day the newspaper began its operation, May 6^th, 1982. The article was titled "Los carteles del Corpus: persistencia en el error" and he signed it under the pseudonym Alberto Neira: "I was worried about the vulgar sound of my name, which did not seem literary to me”, explained the author (Ruiz Rico, 2012, p. 515).

Finally, the signature, the name of Antonio Muñoz Molina, was born for the Spanish letters the next day, in the pages of a newspaper, with the first article of El Robinson Urbano series, in the second issue of Diario de Granada, a newspaper of progressive ideology that had been born for the new Granada of the recovered democracy in those years of the Spanish Transition.

The article appeared on page 11 and was titled “Primer manual” (in the later edition in book format, Muñoz Molina would change the title to “Escuela de robinsones”, in a clear allusion to the title of the homonymous novel by Jules Verne). This column supposes, therefore, the journalistic and literary baptism of Antonio Muñoz Molina, and it does so in the last blows of the Spanish Transition (the Statute of Autonomy of Andalusia had not yet been approved, nor had this community even celebrated its first regional elections) and in the city where Franco's repression had reached one of its maximum symbols with the murder of Federico García Lorca in the first months of the Civil War.

Muñoz Molina can be considered, in this way, one of the first names to emerge from the literary generation of the post-Transition, that is, from the Spanish literature of democracy. Muñoz Molina is embedded in the generation just before, that new batch of authors that had connected with a new audience in the first stage of openness, democracy, and freedom unknown for four decades. José Carlos Mainer (2009, p. 68) has traced a brief tour of the names that compose it, beginning in 1975 with the publication of La verdad sobre el caso Savolta, with which Eduardo Mendoza (born in 1943) opens “the new narrative of action and fantasy”. Juan José Millás (1946) "wrote the first story that reflected the moral voids of the new era" in Visión del ahogado (1977); José María Guelbenzu (1944) gave shape in El río de la luna (1981) “to the bankruptcy of ideals after 1968; Luis Mateo Díez (1942) created new provincial customs in Las estaciones provinciales (1982); José María Merino (1940) “came of age to identity crisis novels” with La orilla oscura (1985); Javier Marías (1951) "reinvented a psychological novel (arbitrary, light, ironic, and at the same time disturbing) in El hombre sentimental". Marías's novel is already from 1986, precisely the year in which Muñoz Molina made his novel debut with Beatus Ille. The author of Úbeda, therefore, enters the history of Spanish literature through the same door that the immediately preceding generation had opened.

Since the publication of his first title, El Robinson Urbano, and his first novel, Beatus Ille, a constant has been going through Muñoz Molina's work: throughout all these years, he will be publishing novels, essays, and articles with the same dedication, all as part of the same literary work, as he has stated (in Ruiz Rico, 2012, p. 153):

A series of articles has a double life: the first, at the moment of its immediate publication, and the second already filtered by time, when it loses the status of novelty and may or may not reveal its ability to last. Carefully selecting the articles that one considers worth putting together in a book is a literary task, even if they are books that do not attract too many people. […] I do not consider by any means that all of mine pass the test of time. But, in the set of my books, I believe that the volumes of articles are as representative of who I am and of my work as the novels.

The originality of this work is given, in part, by the very context in which Muñoz Molina's voice emerges as a writer; a dual context: the historical one, on the one hand (namely: the Granada of the Spanish Transition), and, on the other, the material type, that is, the pages of a newspaper (which is also a new appearance, precisely because there is again freedom and democracy in Spain after the end of Francoism).

The study of the articles of El Robinson Urbano aims to be a contribution to the study of this generation of writers of Spanish literature (a generation that arises, in a very specific and defining historical moment) but also a basis from which to address the relationships between journalism and literature. But, and this is perhaps the most decisive thing, the study of El Robinson's articles will offer an analysis of the first keys on which the later work of one of the most outstanding writers of current Spanish literature will emerge and settle. All this, moreover, on a poorly studied work by the Jaen author. The first doctoral thesis on this title was defended in 2012 at the University of Seville and there are hardly any studies ⁴ on it despite, as we defend, its already mentioned triple importance.

Finally, within the various approaches that could be applied to the study of El Robinson Urbano, this article will use the dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism that beats both within these articles and, perhaps for that very reason and how it will be explained later, in the very historical stage of the Transition and the immediate post-Transition (starting, as we say, in 1982). It is also about a dialectic that gives rise to others of an internal nature and that form the backbone of the work, namely: city-country, night-day, freedom-dictatorship, Robinson-Apollodorus, myth-reality, poetry-prose, seeing-writing, interior-exterior, feminine and masculine, journalism-literature, thinking-acting, interior travel-exterior travel, and so on.

This is also a novel approach in the study of Muñoz Molina's work. The use of this prism will yield results that not only seek to become part of the corpus of articles, essays, and books on the author's work but could also provide a different approach and a new and genuine light on other titles of the author of El jinete polaco, thus opening up a new avenue for future research.

OBJECTIVES

This work starts with the main objective of highlighting the importance of the dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism in the opera prima of Antonio Muñoz Molina. It is El Robinson Urbano, one of the least studied works of the author. On the other hand, the work of the writer from Úbeda has been analyzed from a multitude of points of view and approaches, however, the tensions between both cultural currents are a contribution that we consider new and that provides very enriching results in the research and consideration of the journalistic and literary universe of Muñoz Molina.

METHODOLOGY

In this research, a wide bibliography has been used on the two great themes on which it transits, namely: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Likewise, the original articles published by Muñoz Molina in Diario de Granada in 1982 and 1983 under the heading El Robinson Urbano have been used for the analysis. The collection of articles published by the author himself in Granada a year later, in 1984, includes a selection (not the entirety) of them with certain modifications (especially of the most local and current aspects of the city itself) and adjustments.

DISCUSSION

RESULTS

It was Kant, in his work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, of 1764, who anticipated the romantic feeling by addressing the emotion of the sublime in contrast to that of the beautiful. As the Prussian philosopher observes (2011, p. 4-5):

The emotion in both is nice but in a very different way. The sight of a mountain whose snow-capped peaks rise above the clouds, the description of a raging storm […] produce pleasure, but linked to terror; instead, the contemplation of flowery meadows, valleys with undulating streams, covered with grazing herds; the description of the Elysee or Homer's painting of the belt of Venus also cause a pleasant sensation, but happy and smiling […] The night is sublime, the day is beautiful […] The sublime is, in turn, of a different nature. The accompanying feeling is sometimes one of a certain horror or melancholy.

This beautiful-sublime dialectic will also be typical of the romantic stage as a response, above all, to the annihilation of the mysterious in the natural world by scientific-technical development. In general terms, the Enlightenment advocates the beautiful, the day; Romanticism the sublime, the night. The rational, the diaphanous, the rectilinear, is beautiful; the magical, the irrational, the mysterious, the curved, is sublime. Again, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

Faced with fanaticism and the threats of reason and blind positivism, the romantics, says Berlin (2000, p. 33-34), promoted “a great return to emotionalism, which [gave rise to] a sudden interest in the primitive and the remote —for the remote in time and space— that manifested a longing for the infinite”. And there arises nostalgia and paranoia. The first, explains Berlin (2000, p. 142), “is based on the fact that we try to understand the infinite, but it is immeasurable, which is why nothing we do will give us satisfaction”. As for the second, paranoia, it is linked to infinity, especially history and self-consciousness. Berlin assures (2000, p. 145):

There is something behind it, in the dark depths of the unconscious or of history; there is something, however, that we cannot reach and that frustrates our dearest desires. Sometimes it is conceived as a certain hostile and indifferent nature; other times, like the lessons of history […] This paranoia, manifests itself in multiple ways, some crueler than others. It is revealed, for example, in the search for all kinds of conspiracies in history. Men are beginning to suspect that perhaps history is driven by forces over which they have no control […] Practically, he conceives it as a kind of huge and ironic Aristophanic force that mocks poor human beings, who try to build their little homes on the slope of what they understand to be a green and flowery mountain, but which is actually the great volcano of human history.

To begin with, this idea of infinity is clearly and centrally present in El Robinson Urbano in different ways, especially in the characters and the setting where the action takes place. On the one hand, Robinson and Apollodorus are eternal characters, they travel through time since immemorial times in such a way that El Robinson Urbano describes his adventures in the Granada of the Transition (which is also, perhaps because of that, the mythical Granada of the Alhambra) but they will disappear and go to another city where they will again undertake other future and timeless adventures.

There is also the city, the Granada-myth, eternal, therefore, the Granada in which “you always have to look for the most curved distance between two points” (“El extranjero de sí mismo”). As immediate references, is the city-labyrinth of Borges, is Baudelaire's Spleen of Paris (absolute reference of this work by Muñoz Molina), and the odysseic city of Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, already cited as a reference from the inaugural article of this series (“Primer manual”):

“Joyce had to come […] to give a definitive shape to the labyrinth and the urban Robinson’s profile. Ulysses, the first castaway and pilgrim of whom we have memory, no longer seeks his impossible Ithaca in the Mediterranean islands —stripped of all mystery or adventure by tourist cruises— but in the sad streets of Dublin. Ulises picks his nose while he looks at the shop windows. Ulises hardly does anything: he just looks, walks, murmurs, greets someone he knows, pure gaze without will or purpose”.

In this quote, on the one hand, a clear reaction of romantic inspiration is observed in the complaint of the loss of the mystery of the Mediterranean by tourist cruises, an issue that will be recurrent throughout these articles and that is continuously countered by a call to travel and urban adventure, precisely two elements that are also clearly romantic, as Safranski (2018, p. 193) argues, which even alludes to “the great misgivings”. Muñoz Molina, without going any further, appeals to "that arduous pilgrimage that most likely will never end" ("Juego de las conmemoraciones"). On the other hand, the aesthetic and ethical pillar of El Robinson is expressed as a diaphanous commandment: a robinson, the modern Ulises, is, Muñoz Molina writes, “pure gaze”.

Again, a figure that has its roots in Romanticism, namely: the romantic voyeur (Safranski, 2018, p. 201) as a key character in the romantic and odysseic city, in this case, the Granada of the Transition, the ambivalent Granada that intersects in two simultaneous planes the mythical city and the present and luminous city of the recovered democracy, where "people write and paint, make music, imagine newspapers, and begin to use freedom", as they say in " Septiembre escueto y rosa”.

The city-labyrinth is an attack on the rectilinear of the Enlightenment. The romantics, Safranski breaks down (2018, p. 182), criticize that “what is straight and measured, although externally spacious, has the paradoxical effect of provoking a feeling of narrowness” so that, this author continues (2018, p. 182)

the "'infinite oscillations' of life" are extolled. The intricate, also the dark, attracts, as long as it allows digressions and ramblings, as long as it is open to surprises and allows "exciting confusion". For this same reason, the labyrinthine medieval city is praised and natural gardens are preferred to the well-paced French park.

Already in "Primer manual", as we have seen, the city is spoken of as an "urban labyrinth" and of the new urban adventure: "the pleasure, absolutely unprecedented until then, of touring the city without going anywhere and without having another company than one's own voice in conscience”. For this reason, it is denounced in the said article that "if one walks calmly and aimlessly through some American cities, one is a suspect for the police." This is another example of the Enlightenment-Romanticism dialectic as it recovers one of the romantic criticisms of the Enlightenment: the myth of human control, which today would be the denunciation of the big brother that modern cities are becoming (due to the digital technologies and computer advances), although they were made for emancipation: “The air of the city [makes us] free, a medieval saying went,” Muñoz Molina writes in that “Primer manual”.

This labyrinthine city appeals to the eternal adventure of walking through it, through its streets, the best method of discovering it: letting yourself go aimlessly. That is to say, the character of Robinson as opposed to Apollodorus, who is the character of recollection, of the room, of thought (Enlightenment) versus action and adventure (Romanticism) that Robinson represents. Although the act of looking, contemplative observation is clearly Enlightenment heritage (Berlin, 2000, p. 123).

But Robinson is also the flâneur described by Walter Benjamin as the anonymous inhabitant of the modern city, who knows it with his eyes and walking through it, making his own adventure with the walk, an adventure that is similar to writing: “The city revives in this warm and promising September like a blank piece of paper” (“Septiembre escueto y rosa”). In this way, walking, seeing, and writing is the same thing: it is knowledge through action and observation.

As Benjamin (2005, p. 447) writes: “Máxima del flâneur: in our standardized world, you have to go on the ground and thoroughly; strangeness and surprise, the most surprising exoticism, are very close”, so, he assures that the city appears as “the fulfillment of the old human dream of the labyrinth. To that reality, without knowing it, the flâneur consecrates itself”. (2005, p. 434).

The walk and the gaze appeal to that romantic and modern self, an expression of free and irrational subjectivity in the face of the oppression of an objective geometry of Enlighted inspiration (in the pessimistic version of the Enlightenment), it is the self that wanders through the city and discovers it by looking at it, it is the voyeur, the spy: "Robinson spies: he would like to have a thousand open eyes to receive all the things that the city has to offer in one swoop", Muñoz Molina writes in "Primer manual".

That gaze leads to writing, and writing leads to the café, to the Robinson's refuge, a refuge not secluded (like Apollodorus's mysterious and almost monastic apartment) but nestled in the very heart of the city. The cafe is El Suizo in El Robinson Urbano, where Robinson and Apollodorus often meet, and that cafe is the place where the birth of modern literature and journalism takes place, as Martí Monterde (2007, p. 273) has exposed:

The cafe was the writer's work cabinet […] throughout the 19^th century, but the 20^th century added the character of refuge of which the window would be a guarantor and a viewpoint at the same time. The flâneur's return to the café was uneasy, and the glass, transparent but solid, will be the ultimate distance, the essential distance that the individual will be able to maintain to avoid its dissolution into nothingness at all.

Again, that modern literature that Muñoz Molina claims in "Primer manual": a "modern literature, seized by the moment, whose natural space was the hurried pages of newspapers", writes the author of Úbeda. The cafe, the bar, El Suizo, in the Robinsonian Granada, is the link between the city and the writer, the journalist, the chronicler, as Muñoz Molina says, and that connection is made through a clear bond: the window. Again, another romantic element, as Safranski (2018, p. 192) points out, that attachment (which connects with melancholy and adventure) to reality

the preference is shown through the window [...] the one who longs, looks through the window and hears the songs of the walkers about the trips that lead to a distance [...] The windows open their gaze to open windows, to images that lead to the unpredictable [...] [and it] calls to get going.

The inhabitants of the cafe (daytime) or the bar (nighttime), “look at the street like immobile fish behind the aquarium glass, because in those bars […] the neon tubes and the walls painted in a funeral green give the air an aquatic sadness”, writes Muñoz Molina (“El vino de Los héroes”).

The contemplation of the infinite reality that is never covered with the gaze was for the romantics (Safranski, 2018, p. 193) an invitation to travel (“Invitación al Viaje” is one of the articles from the Robinsonian series titled) since it announces a mystery and adventures to be pursued. Safranski (2018, p. 193) writes: “[It is about the] traditional motive of the great journeys and deviations, which begins with Odysseus and the legend of the Argonauts and reaches the modern age through the stories of madmen in the Middle Ages and the Flying Dutchman. From them, the romantics extract the journey without arrival or goal, the endless journey”.

The wanderer, who is sometimes in the pages of El Robinson Urbano also the madman, the wacko, the urban sleepwalkers, appeals not so much to the walker, the flâneur as to the figure of the excluded, the barbarian (as ironically said in “La feria de los bárbaros”), the clochard, the beggar, according to the dialectic (flâneur-clochard) established by Benjamin in his analysis of the modern city, which is labyrinthine and urbanely erotic, but also industrial and demystifying. There are dozens of references to the clochard in El Robinson Urbano, as in the articles "Capital de la locura", "El vino de los héroes", or in the "Primer manual" itself, in which the "man, the crowd, the lazy, the madman, the traveling musician, the boy who plays the trumpet […] the blind man who shouts […] the comedian with the clown's tongue and the hirsute Mormon”.

But, returning to the concept of travel, Robinson is, not in vain, described as a “perpetual flying Dutchman” (“Septiembre escueto y rosa”) which, when he steps on the streets of Granada, it “revives, in this warm and promising September, like a blank paper”. Robinson is always "ready to lose himself in a walk on the wild side, on the wild or dangerous side that promises so much" ("Breviario de impostores").

The trip, the adventure, is the antidote to flee from boredom, something that also connects with the very heart of the romantics. They saw geometrized space and time [as] the specter of a bad Enlightenment” (Safranski, 2018, p. 182). So "the discomfort for normality [of a perfect and objectively organized life] is concentrated in the fear of boredom" (Safranski, 2018, p. 182). With romantics, says Safranski (2018, p. 183) “boredom appears as the great theme of Modernity […] This ‘boredom’ can even create ‘horror’, which Kant calls horror vacui”.

El Robinson Urbano is practically an essay on this subject and, not in vain, the work has as its model and key reference Baudelaire and his Spleen de Paris. For this reason, Muñoz Molina writes (“Septiembre escueto y rosa”) that in “the cafes and squares […] there is the stimulating indication of an adventure whose first signs are shaping the image of a new city that is slowly opening up again”, and contrasts this with the “warfare flashes in the thicket of boredom” and calls for freedom from the “no less gloomy designs of the official gazettes”.

Boredom, therefore, appears in El Robinson Urbano as a consequence, on the one hand, of the oppression of the modern city (failure, therefore, of the enlightened project of liberation), especially reflected in the organization of capitalist work, which implies a work that does not humanize and that does not leave time for personal fulfillment (Sennett, 2006). On the other hand, as a consequence of boredom in the face of the mechanization of the city, it already appears demystified and without magic; it has lost its aura because it is organized without charm, like a factory, like a technical mechanism.

For this reason, the Robinsons, one reads in "Primer manual", "those crazy people who walk around Granada, absorbed in their pilgrimage, are frowned upon by the authorities." The modern city that promised to be a factory for free men has ended up being a place of dehumanization and alienation, hence Muñoz Molina writes that, in the end, “the city's bitter hero [is the one who is assaulted] by the coming of the night lying in the armchair of a sordid office ”(“Manhattan Transfer”). And when the night is over, as a moment of adventure and liberation from the chains of the day, the urban robinson "meekly pulls off his mask in front of the mirror and then brushes his teeth and sets the alarm clock that will return him to the boredom of the accepted simulations. This is how Robinson surrenders over and over again” (“Breviario de impostores”).

Urban alienation occurs, as we say, in a specific space in which it reaches its correlate: the city without aura, without charm, with a technical geometry that leaves no space for the human, which crushes the being and its realization: “When one is born for the night and the city, every wall draws the shape of a cell and every hour is a nightmare of clocks that burst at dawn amid dreams" ("La trampa en el espejo"). Faced with this oppressive situation, "let's see who can or knows, who dares to erase the number of his identity card from his forehead" ("Breviario de impostores"), in a clear denunciation of the great brother of the modern city, absolutely current right now.

Given this, Muñoz Molina claims with writing a city that appears as a scene of adventures, often maritime ones: "Each sidewalk unexpectedly turns for Robinson into the beach of the country of the Feacios" ("Vindicación de la rodilla femenina"). "Granada is a great Alexandria that welcomes us all in its squares", is written in "Primer manual". “El Suizo, like the promenade in the living room, is an island” (“Elogio de El Suizo”). In “Un busto en el salón”, it is stated that “the Robinsons from Granada need from time to time to arrive at some island in the form of a public garden”. Or, in "Los niños terribles", the double duality of Granada is raised: "City or jungle".

There is, however, an uncompromising defense in El Robinson Urbano of the original and genuine values of the Enlightenment as a defense of reason and as a liberating project for the human being and for the sake of achieving a righteous society. For this reason, despite the vindication of the night as a space of freedom, of romantic mystery, of adventures, and expression of the true self in the face of the mere digits of an identity card, it is celebrated that "there are men born for the day" ("La trampa en el espejo"), and in "Las mañanas, el centro, la serenidad", what begins with an attack on utilitarian morality (which has turned the free citizen into a slave of production, with no free time for to be fulfilled, in a city that has become a factory) ends up being a song to the light, to reason, to moderation, and the calm of the mornings as a space of freedom, serenity, and roots, in the face of the exaltation of the sublime night, defended more as a game, therefore:

At nine o'clock in the morning, with my hands in my pockets or with an attentive gaze, I practice the minority pleasure of not going anywhere […] It is about doing nothing, obeying the steps indicated by chance and the plot of the streets, surrendering to the smell of damp grass, surprised when crossing some gardens […] [Robinson] loses himself in the labyrinth of white columns illuminated at their top by an other-worldly light, and when he returns to the street the daylight dazzles him, inviting him to continue his pilgrimage […] At nine o'clock in the morning, the exercise of laziness acquires the merit of a positive act, of a private rebellion [...] And so, just as there are work breakfasts, you have to invent pleasure breakfasts and make love appointments not in evenings, so discredited by literature and postcards, but in the first and sweetest hour of the day, in such a way that getting up early is not a punishment but an obligation of happiness […] Literature, which has always exalted the prestige of the night, only very rarely has dealt with the modest joys that mornings bring […] [Borges wrote that] "at that time I was looking for sunsets, suburbs, misery, now I look for mornings, downtown, and serenity ”.

The light of the Enlightenment appears vindicated in the face of the romantic night, which is, in El Robinson Urbano, the light of democracy in the face of the long night of Franco’s dictatorship. It is "the cowardly night of ferocious tyrannies", as described in "Escrito en las paredes"; the night where despite everything, the said article continues, there are people who take "into their own hands the freedom to say what cannot be silenced, knowing that it is likely that two handcuffs or a gunshot will break the cry they were writing".

The night, in this way, is no longer the romantic scene of adventures and transformation, but the threat of the day, evil, guilt, such as the one that the city harbors for the crime of Lorca, as described in "El ángel exterminador”, where the spirit of the distinguished poet from Granada is spoken of, precisely, not as a light that leans over Granada but as a shadow that “returns and appears again and again”.

Faced with that night and those shadows, the light of democracy that makes a city livable and breathable. "Fortunately, we have the day left," says Muñoz Molina, not in vain, in "Primer manual" because not only the air of the city makes free men, as it is said in this article, but also its light, which is the light of democracy and the free city. Of course, with the arrival of democracy as the achievement of enlightened values, the end of the story is not happily consummated.

For this reason, Muñoz Molina also warns of the vagaries and the return to superstition and folklore; this, in part, led by a certain nationalism of the land, so linked to a misunderstood Romanticism (Safranski, 2018, p. 165-166). On the return to folklore, there are several resounding examples. In "Granada contra Graná o qué hizo Hegel por Málaga", Muñoz Molina contrasts Granada "which in the space of a few centuries has given the world's imagination landscapes and memorable names", to that other city, Graná, described as

the provincial estate (not a closed paradise but a suffocating greenhouse) where all mediocrity has its seat in the Parnassus of vernacular essences and is surrendered to the cultural and thick cult of the jayuya, the poor man's potatoes, and the chisterazo de a Toma as sacred signs of what was previously called peculiar idiosyncrasy and today receives the name, already liturgical, of signs of identity.

This description is followed by the criticism, also directed by the left, which should represent reason and universal, enlightened culture, that "all the old local pork meat [...] returns, revived mummy, to incarnate in a stew of roots and antiques that a certain cultural left, supplies us like silly soup to remedy so many years of destitution”. It is the criticism, as it is written in said article, to the "slipper nationalists" and the vain and alchemist attempts to "recover the scattered ashes of the Andalusian Being", to the point that "being born in Andalusia is no longer a coincidence or a disgrace, but a rare metaphysical privilege”.

Muñoz Molina, in said article, uncovers the two keys to his ethics and his literary aesthetics: "in every city and the universe is encrypted", so that in the local microcosm there is also the universal, but not in the folkloric swelling of the traditional local traits; on the other hand, it is written in this article, "no one has the obligation to be a prophet in his land, but an artist must always be a pilgrim in his land."

This criticism is added to certain symptoms that the author detects of the failure of the enlightened ideals. It is in this sense that he warns of the "holy rejoicing of the irrational and miraculous" (in "Razón de amor") or the fanaticism of football as a pseudo-religion (in "Instrucciones para sobrevivir a los mundiales").

Against this, there is the resounding defense of reason and, as the work of reason, the modern city that makes free men and humanizes. "Any brief victory of reason becomes a miraculous event," he writes in "Elogio de El Suizo". For this reason, there is in this article a fierce criticism of the destruction of heritage as mutilation of memory (a city is "the long memory of itself", it is said) and charges against "the heroes of the pick-ax." Hence, in "Las mañanas, el centro, la serenidad" it is celebrated that "when streets are closed to traffic to impose on them the forgotten delight of walking calmly", and in "Un busto para el salón" it is praised that "with the Transition […] not only have some uniforms changed, albeit very slowly, but municipal fashion has once again slipped towards green”.

After so many gray and dark years, the green and light of the Transition arrive, inserted, like Spanish democracy itself, in the tensions, excesses, and successes of the approaches of Romanticism and the Enlightenment.

CONCLUSIONS

The newspaper articles of El Robinson Urbano represent the literary and journalistic baptism of Antonio Muñoz Molina. They appeared in the local newspaper Diario de Granada in 1982 and 1983; a book that included a selection of them was edited by the author himself a year later. El Robinson Urbano, therefore, offers the basis for the study of the fundamental features of the original work of who would become one of the fundamental voices of contemporary Spanish-language literature.

The dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism offers a unique prism for the analysis of these newspaper articles. In the first place, due to the specific historical context itself, the Granada of the Democratic Transition and the freedom recovered after the decades of Franco's dictatorship.

Secondly, because of the broader historical framework of the West, Postmodernity (after Auschwitz as the absolute symbol of the first failure of Modernity, just as the romantic critique of the Enlightenment warned).

Third, due to the literary and journalistic tradition explicitly declared by the author in these texts, his baptism for Letters: modernity and Baudelaire's spleen, Joyce's wandering Ulysses, De Quincey's artificial paradises, journalistic romanticism, and Larra's testimony, Borges's labyrinth-city.

But also because of the themes (of romantic inspiration, as analyzed following Berlin and Safranski) that Muñoz Molina addresses in these articles: the urban adventure (Verne, romantic travel literature, etc.), making poetry out of reality, praise the modern city as a factory of freedom but also warn of the oppression that a city can exercise (if it becomes a factory, a golden cage: annihilation of the self, alienation), the mystery of the night, the night as liberation , the praise of the light of reason, and the emancipation of the self in the face of the night of dictatorship and superstition, but also the terror that beats behind the normality of the geometric light of day, the archetypes of the flâneur and the clochard as central characters of the modern city (Benjamin), the critique of the folklore of the terroir and postcard against the vindication of the artist of the microcosm anchored in his intimate community, the Literature of the romantic self and its link with articulism and, hence, with modern journalism. Both spheres, modern literature and journalism, also made their appearance in the 18^th and 19^th centuries in a common setting: the cafe (Martí Monterde).

The cafe, as a refuge for the writer in the very heart of the city, advocates for the gaze and it calls for action: writing and travel (the urban adventure). This is the name given to the exercise of the literature of reality anchored at the moment, in the now, which, as Muñoz Molina writes in El Robinson Urbano, finds its ideal support in the hurried pages of newspapers. One of the objectives of this writing is to tell the city, the everyday, to recompose the fragmentation of the city and the urban individual and weave a common thread, a story, a unifying narrative. And writing it for the record, to record it all now that the city, the world, and its inhabitants are moving faster than ever.

This exercise of recomposing is also linked to memory. A city, Muñoz Molina writes in these articles, is the “long memory of itself”. This return to the past is also romantically inspired; an incorrect interpretation of this was what ended up leading to crude romantic folklore (Safranski, 2018, p. 328) and fabricates what Vattimo (1990, p. 123) calls the myth of origin (as opposed to the myth of progress) that, in the end, has been the basis of many postmodern nationalisms, as a version of political romanticism, so criticized by authors such as Safranski (2018, p. 324, 325, 353) and by Muñoz Molina himself, as has been described.

Both the literature of reality and the literature of memory are the axes through which all the subsequent work of the Úbeda writer travels, whose last titles, in fact, return directly to the root established in the articles of El Robinson Urbano: Sefarad (2001), El viento de la luna (2006), Como la sombra que se va (2014), Un andar solitario entre la gente (2018). Practically the rest of his works would belong to the branch of memory literature, but especially Beatus Ille (1986), El jinete polaco (1991), and La noche de los tiempos (2009).

As a suggestion for future research, it would be necessary to analyze the work of Muñoz Molina under the prism of the dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This article serves as the first modest stone that makes the initial base of this possible line of research.

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