Baroja, Azorín y la teoría de la novela orteguiana

Abstract

Between 1912 and 1914, José Ortega y Gasset begins a series of reflections on Pío Baroja's and Azorín's most recent works, with the aim of studying the regeneration process in Spain. Baroja's and Azorín's works show, according to Ortega, two ways to understand Spain, to face the patriotic problem, and to confront the country's process of modernization, which (as the Madrilenian philosopher perceives) is to be attained through cultural renewal. Ortega's analytic perspective will derive soon in a reflection on the theory of novel as literary genre, based on these two writers, as a way to express the evolution and crisis of modern rationalism through the evolution of the novel genre. Thus, Ortega's theory of the nature of novel, in a diachronic view in Meditaciones del Quijote (1914), and in a synchronic view in Ideas sobre la novela (1925), aims at a double objective, through aesthetic reflection: a vision of the crisis of rationalist reason and emergence of a new vital reason, and the problem of facing the process of modernization in Spain, in the first years of the 20 th century. As a consequence, the aesthetic debate carried out by Baroja and Azorín on the basis of Ortega's reflections -which will explode in the quarrel between Baroja and Ortega (1924-1925)-, covers up an ideological debate, but is still a substantial element (Ortega conceives man as a "culture-being", while Baroja as a "race-being"), placed in the centre of the avant-gardist thought within modernity.