Patri Urkizu’s Sekulorun sekulotan after 50 Years: Blind Streets of the Past and Future Potentialities

Abstract

It’s been 50 years since Patri Urkizu published his experimental novel Sekulorun sekulotan. From the perspective that half a century offers us, in this article we will review the novel from three areas: first, we will analyse what the difficulties that it poses to the reader consist of, taking advantage of the contributions of discursive analysis and narratology. The novel will then be placed in its historical context as a representative work of the experimental moment of Basque literature in the second half of the 1970s. Our goal will be to understand why formal innovations such as those proposed by Urkizu have long been considered unproductive, by suggesting a historical and literary analogy of Basque experimentalism with the beginnings of literary modernism. Finally, considering the current situation of the Basque literary field, updated readings of Sekulorun sekulotan in the 21st century will be proposed, relating it to the corpus of works translated into Basque from foreign literature.