Tiempo de destrucción:  A stylometric examination of the posthumous publication of Luis Martín-Santos's unfinished work

1. Abstract

This study employs stylometric methods to disentangle questions of authorship and editorial intervention in a complex case study of the posthumously published novel, Tiempo de Destrucción. In 1964, a car accident cut short the life of the Spanish novelist Luis Martín-Santos, at a time when the literary community was anxiously awaiting the follow-up to his groundbreaking novel, Tiempo de Silencio (1961). A work in progress was found—according to Carlos Barral (of the publishing house Seix Barral): “Luis considered half of it to be almost definitive."

Littered with semi-legible marginalia and edits, the papers passed through many hands over the course of a decade. Using Rybicki, Hoover, and Kestemont’s work on collaborative authorship and rolling data (2014) as a point of departure, I identify the areas where Martín-Santos’s authorial signal is strongest and quantify the degree to which the editorial process and the text’s incomplete, fragmentary nature interfere with Martín-Santos’s authorial fingerprint.