¹ This is the initial chapter of a book in progress on The Novelistic Art of Azorín. Since it is only an introductory analysis, it makes no pretension to completeness.

² Miguel Enguídanos, “Azorín en busca del tiempo divinal,” Papeles de Son Armadans, xliii (Madrid-Palma de Mallorca, 1959), 14.

³ This attitude is still overwhelmingly the prevalent one. Typical examples are the following: Eugenio G. de Nora, La novela española contemporánea, i (Madrid: Gredos, 1958), 259: “Catorce volúmenes de obras que se rotulan novelas, aparte de otros varios tomos de cuentos breves, debieran asegurar a su autor, gran escritor sin disputa, un lugar preeminente en la moderna literatura española de ficción. Pues bien: empleando el término con algún rigor, Azorín no es, pese a sus múltiples y valiosos intentos, un novelista”; Luis S. Granjel, Retrato de Azorín (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1958), p. 171: “A las novelas de Azorín no cabe, en justicia, conferirles tal calificativo”; and Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, Las mejores novelas contemporáneas, ii (Barcelona: Planeta, 1958), 166-167: “Don Juan y Doña Inés . . . aún titulándose novelas resultan ser, como lo son ... las restantes ‘novelas’ de Azorín, una galería de personajes, apenas ligados entre sí.”

⁴ Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Azorín (2a. ed., Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948), pp. 236-237.

^4a This article was submitted for publication before the appearance of José María Martínez Cachero's Las novelas de Azorín (Madrid: Insula, 1960). A first reading would.seem to indicate that this work contains a fruitful detailed discussion of the contents of the novels and that it is furthermore an excellent compendium of critical opinions, pro and contra. However, the question of form receives rather scant treatment in a ten-page chapter entitled “Azorín y la novela.” Moreover, the author's position seems to be essentially a traditional one that is incapable of appreciating the experimental nature of Azorín's contribution. Thus, his approbation of Tomás Rueda as “uno de los libros novelescos de su autor que más se aproximan a la novela típica o canónica” (p. 171) and of Don Juan: “Es muy lógicamente ordenada la disposición sucesiva de los 39 capítulos de este libro, lo cual hace deducir una coherente estructura” (p. 185), which leads him to classify this work as “una de las novelas ‘azorinianas’ más genuinamente novelescas” (p. 187). Tomás Rueda, in any event, seems to me to belong rather to Azorín's reconstruction of the classics than to his fictional efforts. There is a certain overlapping of the historically literary and the fictional in Azorín's novels, it is true, but if a demarcation is not made practically all of Azorín's work could be classified as novels.

The most sensitive and complete study of Azorín's novels in my opinion is the excellent doctoral dissertation, unfortunately unpublished, of Pilar de Madariaga: Las novelas de Azorín, estudio de sus temas y de su técnica (Middlebury College, 1949).

I shall refer to both of these works at length in subsequent chapters.

⁵ Manuel Granell, Estética de Azorín (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1949).

⁶ Julián Marías, “Dóña Inés,” Insula (Madrid, 15 Oct. 1953), p. 1: “Alguna vez he observado que las novelas más interesantes de este tiempo dejan un poco de descontento: no son del todo novelas, precisamente por intentar serlo a fondo, más de verdad que las tradicionales. Frente a buena parte de la novela contemporánea, los que creen que ésta no puede ser cosa sustancialmente distinta de lo que conoció el siglo pasado dicen que es ‘ensayo’ y hay que darles la razón, pero aclarando las cosas: ensayo de novela, intento de descubrir nuevas posibilidades de un género hasta ahora sólo explorado en algunas de sus dimensiones.”

⁷ José María Gironella, “¿Por qué no se conoce la novela española?”, Estudios Americanos, x (Sevilla, 1955), 150. In his rigorous exclusivism Gironella apparently stands in the tradition of Menéndez y Pelayo who looked on the “invasiones de unas artes en otras” as a sure sign of the “decadencia y próxima ruina de una literatura.” (M. Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de las ideas estéticas, Madrid: Colección de Escritores Castellanos, 1891, v, 449.)

⁸ Memorias, Ch. xxvi in Obras selectas de Azorín (Madrid : Biblioteca Nueva, 1943), p. 1464.

⁹ For example, Baroja has this to say in La nave de los locos: “La novela, hoy por hoy, es un género multiforme, proteico, en formación, en fermentación; lo abarca todo: el libro filosófico, el libro psicológico, la aventura, la utopía, lo épico; todo absolutamente . . . Pensar que para tan inmensa variedad puede haber un molde único, me parece dar una prueba de doctrinarismo, de dogmatismo. Si la novela fuera género bien definido, como es un soneto, tendría una técnica bien definida.”

¹⁰ Albert Thibaudet, Réflexions sur le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), pp. 23, 24.

¹¹ E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Unicorn, 1949), p. 9.

¹² Guillermo de Torre, “Afirmación y negación de la novela española,” Ficción, 2 (Buenos Aires, 1956), 128. The opinion cited is that of Shipley, in Dictionary of World Literature. Torre's summary of Azorín is contained in the reference: “un sensible y no un imaginativo ... se mantiene en las márgenes.”

¹³ Camilo José Cela, “Prólogo a Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo: ‘Algunas palabras al que leyere’ ” (Barcelona: Destino, 1953), p. 9.

¹⁴ Thus Ortega, in Ideas sobre la novela: “Toda obra literaria pertenece a un género, como todo animal a una especie. (La idea de Croce, que niega la existencia de géneros artísticos, no ha conseguido dejar huella en la ciencia estética.)”

¹⁵ José Ortega y Gasset, “El arte en presente y prétérito,” La deshumanización del arte.

¹⁶ See G. Díaz-Plaja, Modernismo frente a Noventa y Ocho (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1951), pp. 90-95 on the formation of the concept of the “Generation of 1898” and its naming. Although Azorín is highly responsible for the popularization of the term, the “baptiser” of the Generation is the Duque de Maura. The previous appellation of “Generación del desastre,” as Díaz-Plaja shows, was the contribution of Andrés González Blanco and not of Maura, as attributed by Entrambasaguas, op. cit., p. 642.

¹⁷ “Prólogo,” Cuentos de Azorín (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1956).

¹⁸ On the anti-realism of Galdós, see Stephen Gilman, “Realism and the Epic in Galdós' Zaragoza,” Estudios Hispánicos (Homenaje a Archer M. Huntington) (Spanish Dept., Wellesley, 1952), especially p. 171. The same reaction against their original realism can be traced in the work of the other novelists cited.

¹⁹ The celebrated analysis of Azorín by Ortega is that of “Azorín. Primores de lo vulgar” in the second volume of El Espectador. In Azorín's art, argues Ortega, custom is the predominant material, but this does not mean that he is a costumbrista since costumbrismo, the copy of manners and customs, that is, of reality, cannot be art. Customs are in his case not an end in themselves but only an instrument with which he suggests to us the negative force of repetition, which constitutes, according to him, the basis of life. All differences and changes are, in the last analysis, only appearances; it is the power of persistence and the monotony of custom which represents the ultimate substance of the world. Everything that is becomes again, eternally. Through all the vicissitudes of time man's feelings and reactions remain. In “Una ciudad y un balcón” Azorín shows us three diverse moments of the same landscape contemplated by three men down through the centuries from the same balcony. Parenthetically, great changes are mentioned—the discovery of America, the Revolution, Socialism. Nevertheless, these variations are mere appearances. Landscapes change, and so do the individuals who see them, but something decisive remains identical: the sorrows and melancholy of man in the presence of the landscape. Azorín is not a writer of customs but the poet of the customary. This is essentially anti-heroism, for heroism consists in opposition to tradition and custom.

²⁰ Paradox, rey, passim.

²¹ See n. 19, above. It will be noted that my analysis of Azorín's development does not here take into account his early effort in the novel Diario de un enfermo (1901). This is because, although the latter contains the germ of many of the later artistic developments and is thus important in an over-all picture of Azorín as a novelist, it is essentially tentative, a premature effort of a would-be author rather than an unreserved artistic commitment. In this sense it is extra-chronological and has no direct connection with, nor influence on, the trajectory of Azorín's actual evolution as a novelist.

²² The criterion of the Generation of 1898 of authenticity, truth, as contrasted with that of Modernism, which is beauty, is the basic thesis of Díaz-Plaja's important study (see n. 16, above). In this connection it is significant that the declaration of Azorín quoted above specifically lists as his criteria not merely beauty but “la Belleza ... la Verdad . . . y el Bien.”

²³ “Lector,” Meditaciones del Quijote.

²⁴ Ideas sobre la novela, passim.

²⁵ “Dista mucho, dista mucho de haber llegado a su perfección la novela,” La Voluntad, Pt. i, Ch. xiv.

²⁶ “Se trataba, según palabras del autor a un periodista, de ‘renovar el procedimiento de la novela que agoniza entre ruinas’,” Angel Cruz Rueda, “Semblanza de Azorín,” Azorín. Obras selectas, p. 61. Enrique Anderson Imbert in La flecha en el aire (Buenos Aires, 1937), p. 40, cites a statement of Azorín in La Prensa of 16 December 1928 as follows: “En España vivimos todavía en plena tradición. Nadie toque a la novela y al teatro !—se grita en España. ¿Y es que la novela y el teatro pueden seguir en España, en el mundo entero, como han seguido hasta ahora? Desde 1925 es infantil escribir novelas y teatro como antes se escribía.” Azorín's interest in the theater coincides with the period of his “Nuevas Obras.” Doña Inés, which completes the first cycle of novels and serves as a transition to the new experimental prose works, is significantly—in view of the foregoing statement— published in 1925; Old Spam, the first of his plays, in 1926; Félix Vargas, the first of the new novels, in 1928. Pueblo, the last of this group of novels, bears the date 1930, and El escritor, the first of the final group of novels, 1942.

The indispensable relationship between crisis and experimentation in the development of the contemporary novel has been admirably expressed in a major critical study of Guillermo de Torre, who sees the search for a new novelistic form —as Azorín intimates also in the previous quotation—as a world-wide phenomenon: “Hay novelistas, sin duda, pero ¿hay la continuidad orgánica, el cuerpo sólido de una moderna novela española? Interrogación que se desdobla en otra más amplia: ¿acaso es éste un fenómeno exclusivo de la ficción en España? No; en mayor o menor grado, es lo mismo que sucede en todas las demás literaturas, puesto que la novela como género, desde la extinción del naturalismo, se halla en profunda crisis, en proceso de muda y transformación, sin haber hallado aún—empero muy sustanciales frutos—forma plenamente definida . . . Esta crisis, a lo largo de los últimos lustros, no ha significado nunca disolución o acabamiento; antes al contrario, supone un cambio experimental incesante, una metamorfosis enriquecedora sin tregua” (op. cit., p. 123).

²⁷ La isla sin aurora, Ch. xix.

²⁸ Idem.

²⁹ “Siempre habrá en el artista literario, en el poeta, en el pintor—recuerdo el caso del pintor Frenhofer, en la narración de Balzac Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu—, siempre habrá una sensación, un sentimiento, que no podemos expresar ...” Valencia, Ch. lxi. Both Azorín and Baroja apparently misinterpret the sense of Balzac's story, which is not a defense of the incomplete but a rejection of it. The contours of Frenhofer's painting become more and more suffused, more and more indefinite, until the “masterpiece” is finally nothing but an incomprehensible daub. The realist Balzac is most definitely not a partisan of the open form that Azorín sees as the ultimate perfection of the novel.

³⁰ In La isla sin aurora (Ch. xix,“El barco abandonado”) the dramatist, novelist, and poet find an abandoned ship, in the captain's cabin of which they encounter a sheaf of papers. On the first of these appears the title “Belleza de lo inacabado.”

³¹ “Desearía yo escribir la novela de lo indeterminado; una novela sin espacio, sin tiempo y sin personajes,” Capricho, Ch. xvii. This is the theoretically perfect realization of the anti-novel, which is a predominant strain in the novelistic form of the Generation of '98 novel. It will be treated in a subsequent chapter: “The anti-novel of Azorín.”

³² “Evocación de las bellas mujeres de Francia; duplicidad exquisita. Estar aquí y en el siglo XVIII francés,” Félix Vargas, Ch. iii. This double appeal is transmitted to the reader, as Ortega points out in his study of Azorín (loc. cit.), giving as an example the very title of a work like Un pueblecito which evokes a dual reaction of tenderness: enchantment and pain, for something simple, attractive, luminous, and distant, on the one hand; and on the other, poor and weak.

³³ Speaking reflectively in his Memorias Azorín attributes his spiritual formation to two different Spanish constitutive elements in his background: the peaceful Mediterranean heritage of the Levant, from the town where he was born, and the dour Castilian temper of the Manchegan town in which he was educated. This double tendency, neither element of which he can relinquish, is the key to his sensibility, he maintains: “Había en su mente como dos espejos: en uno se reflejaba la ciudad nativa y en el otro la ciudad electiva; la primera avecinaba al Mediterráneo, y la segunda la llanura manchega ... De las dos imágenes no se decidía por ninguna; con las dos estaba; pero a veces iba con resolución de una a otra, y en ésa se rebalsaba su sensibilidad . . . Las dos sensibilidades, la mediterránea y la manchega, eran necesarias en su personalidad; las dos se completaban y colaboraban en la obra,” Memorias, Ch. vi: “Su estética.” The mathematical solution of balanced division he rejects completely, in youth as in old age, for that of fluctuation: “Ahora ... en la vejez ... me veo sujeto a la misma fluctuación de siempre. Pero si antes la indecisión era subyacente, ahora es reflexiva. Y además, penosa por instantes. No sé hacia qué lado inclinarme; ni puedo discernir cuál de las dos . . . habrá sido más eficaz y decisiva en mi obra.—¿Y por qué no las dos con igual repartimiento?—Porque la sensibilidad no puede tener partijas, al menos en mí” (ibid., Ch. xiii; “Las influencias”).

³⁴ In characteristic fashion Ortega views the problem in its cultural perspective, tracing the historical development of this dualism. Since ancient times, he says, the chasm between man and his world, between spirit and matter, has been alternately widened and bridged. For ancient man this dilemma did not exist, but in the Middle Ages the schism was already acute, for medieval man speaks of the spirit as the enemy and contradictor of matter. The conflict was resolved in the Renaissance, which rejected this pessimistic dualism. Its resurgence in contemporary man is a complicated revival of the dichotomy of medieval times which no longer permits the latter's convenient “double-entry” truth. (See “Sobre ‘El Santo’,” Personas, obras, cosas.)

³⁵ “Vitalidad, alma, espíritu,” El Espectador, v.

³⁶ G. Díaz-Plaja, op. cit., p. 123.

³⁷ José F. Montesinos, Valera o la ficción libre (Madrid, 1957), pp. 77-78: “Todos los novelistas que fueron en el mundo pueden reunirse en dos grandes grupos. Esos dos tipos de novela satisfacen aspiraciones contrarias y aun contradictorias del espíritu, y en ellos cristalizan dos órdenes diferentes de materia artística. Son la fabulación desenfrenada e irresponsable y la elaboración novelesca de la propia experiencia. Los novelistas serán extrovertidos o introvertidos, inventarán vertiginosamente—como Cervantes o como Walter Scott—o trabajarán poéticamente sobre los datos de su propia biografía, sus inquietudes, sus pesares o sus ensueños—como Goethe, Chateaubriand o Benjamín Constant. En el síglo XIX la pura invención se había hecho difícil; quedó fuera del arte y se refugió en el folletín. La novela atenta al mundo externo, la novela que se llamará realista, se hará observadora, paisajista, retratista, atenta a modelos vivos y sucesos ciertos. Pero siempre habrá hombres vueltos sobre sí mismos, inquietos ante su propio destino, conmovidos por una experiencia amorosa feliz o desgraciada cuyo recuerdo piensan que no debe morir del todo. Es fatal que estos hombres se desdoblen o multipliquen en sus obras; sólo se ven a sí mismos y su personalidad destiñe sobre la de los otros personajes—o bien, cuando éstos no pueden estar al nivel del héroe autor, quedan disminuidos, indicados apenas, una vaga silueta.”

³⁸ Perhaps it is somewhat exaggerated to speak of the “Dyonisian fervor” of La Voluntad, as does Anna Krause in Azorín, the Little Philosopher. Inquiry into the Birth of a Literary Personality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1948), p. 276, but somewhat more justified is the reference to the “serenity of the Apollinian mood in the unique and personal prose style perfected in Antonio Azorín and Las confesiones” (idem). Werner Mulertt (Azorín, Spanish translation, Madrid, 1930) also comments on the transitional tone within the trilogy in question, but with modifications: “La aflicción por el derrumbamiento de sus deberes morales, el abandono a la corriente de la vida, son patentes en La Voluntad, especialmente en los capítulos finales, como tránsito a la desesperanza y a la neurastenia . . . Tampoco en Antonio Azorín faltan los finales henchidos de obscuros presentimientos . . . pero son ocasionales nada más, sin reflejar ideas preconcebidas . . . más de tarde en tarde emplea el procedimiento en Las confesiones de un pequeño filósofo” (p. 111)

³⁹ Superrealismo, Ch. i.

⁴⁰ “Campoamor,” Clásicos y modernos, Obras selectas, p. 1101.

⁴¹ César Barja, Libros y autores contemporáneos (New York: Stechert, 1935), p. 271.

⁴² “Y la sensación de la sensación que nos tiene prisioneros” (Félix Vargas, Ch. xxxvi). Azorín's surrealistic program is stated early in Félix Vargas as “Complacerse en lo inorgánico. Hacer algo en contra de las normas tradicionales. Nada de cosa pensada, deliberada. Lo subconsciente en libertad” (Ch. iv). The problem of the subconscious novel as thus outlined is concisely stated by Forster (op. cit., pp. 97-98) in the course of his analysis of Les Faux Monnayeurs as that of “the claim to be consciously subconscious; ” to which he adds his estimation of “the danger of Gide's position ... if he wants to write subconscious novels, to reason so lucidly and patiently about the subconscious; he is introducing mysticism at the wrong stage of the process. However . . . Les Faux Monnayeurs will be enjoyed by all. . . who weary of the tyranny by plot and of its alternative, tyranny by character.”

The inherent contradiction of the consciously subconscious is the basis of the frustration which Azorín himself admits, and which exposes him to the negative type of evaluation of his surrealistic experimentation which at times reaches the level of ridicule, as in the denunciation of Entrambasaguas (“el pastiche surrealista alcanza grados de involuntaria comicidad absoluta ...; el surrealismo ... le iba como a un Cristo dos pistolas,” op. cit., pp. 652-653). A serious and intensive attempt to evaluate Azorín's surrealistic contribution is the recent unpublished doctoral dissertation of Alma Coppedge Allen, Surrealism and the Prose Fiction of José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín) (Boston University Graduate School, 1960). Mrs. Allen's fundamental conclusion is that while Azorín incorporated many surrealistic principles and practices into his work and even initiated in the latter case some new ones of his own—especially a wealth of new surrealistic imagery—the basic spirit of the surrealist, who conceives of art as visionary, as an anarchistic rebellion against all canons of order, is lacking. Thus, she states that “a discussion of reality in Azorín is incomplete without some reference to his mystic search for a Higher Reality. In this respect, Azorín's search differed in kind and in spirit from that of the outstanding surrealists. A number of factors influence this statement: the author's complete lack of reliance upon the concept of disorder of the universe; his failure to support strongly a belief in the power of occult forces behind a mysterious or demoniacal world; his absence of uncontrollable outbursts of irrationality; and his refusal to worship religious revolt and spiritual destruction . . . His quest for a new, higher reality often resulted in complete mystic assimilation of the human and universal spirit. This process in Azorín seems highly demonstrative, not of denial, but of a supreme belief in a High Reality” (pp. 329-330). In fact, the note of contemplative tranquility, of lucidity, of ethical purpose, even of gentility, controls and virtually inhibits the announced surrealistic intent despite the wealth and intricacy of its technical execution. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Azorín is not so much a surrealist as an artist who takes advantage of surrealism. His addiction to the movement, in short, is not motivated by an arbitrary desire to follow the then-fashionable literary norm, but stems from his own crucial need for synthesis, for the union of opposites, the accomplishment of which, at first blush, seemed to him eminently realizable with the methods of surrealism. It was largely a question of a coincidence of apparent aims, which permitted Azorín to adopt those aspects of surrealism which seemed to suit his purpose, but without any need for him to subscribe totally to the surrealistic mystique. Moreover, the concept of a superreality is not an incidental or intermittent phase in Azorín's work but is inherent in his overall theory of art as the imaginative-intellectual creation of a new reality, as is attested by the evolution of his novels. Actually, Azorín's intermediate novelistic stage is not simply an incorporation of surrealism but is a mixture of the surrealistic subconscious and of expressionism which, as Manuel Granell, who stresses this latter aspect of Azorín's work, states, “gravita únicamente . . . sobre el mundo de la conciencia” (op. cit., p. 201). Granell divides Azorín's production into three stages: impressionism, expressionism, and post-impressionism or, adopting the term from Franz Roh's work, magic realism. In his evaluation of the expressionistic element of Azorín's second period, Granell defines the expressionistic work as one in which “los objetos representados se compenetran y confunden. En ellos se ha escamoteado el espacio y los volúmenes, y, por tanto, se ha perdido la auténtica profundidad. No hay ... un punto de vista, sino varios y simultáneos, con frecuencia casi opuestos . . . Las cosas ... no son cosas, en verdad, sino meros símbolos de ellas. Más que objetos reales, se pintan . . . ideas, imágenes oníricas. No debe extrañar, por tanto, que lo real figure a veces en el mismo plano que lo sobrenatural” (pp. 198-199). An excellent example of this technique is chapter xii of Pueblo, “Angulos,” in which the geometric projection of reality recalls the cubistic “El Circo Harris” of Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas.

⁴³ Op. cit., p. 145.

⁴⁴ See n. 42.

⁴⁵ Azorín's hostility to the theatre as an inferior form of art is constant. His own contributions to this field are a part of his “Nuevas Obras,” and parallel his novelistic creations in that they represent an attempt to produce an innovating form that will triumph over the limitations of the conventional type. His criticism of the latter is to be found as early as La Voluntad, in which he attacks its falsity—“El teatro es un arte industrial, ajeno a la literatura” (Pt. i, Ch. xiv)—and as late as La isla sin aurora, in which he deprecates its inherent inability to rise above literal reality—“El poeta veía en la infinita llanura todo cuanto quería ver; el novelista veía unas veces lo que deseaba ver y otras no veía cosa; el comediógrafo, por más que se esforzaba, no veía más que llanura inacabable y cielo infinito” (Ch. i); and again: “No podría ser ni novelista ni mucho menos poeta. El poeta se mueve en la región de lo indiscernible, y el comediógrafo en el terreno de los hechos concretos” (Ch. iv). The novel shares with the theatrical work the function of depicting characters (“El teatro es pintura de caracteres. Novelista y comediógrafo confluyen en el cruce de caminos” [Ch. iv]), but strives to share with poetry the aspiration to symbolism which the literal realism of the theatre automatically excludes.

⁴⁶ They are actually inseparable, since they are all forms of art, that is, of the illusion of reality. Thus, in La isla sin aurora (Ch. xxii) Faust says to the poet, novelist, and dramatist who appear before him: “No sé cuál disciplina de ustedes es la que más me atrae . . . En realidad, las tres son una misma. Forjan ustedes tres la ilusión, y esa ilusión es el alma del mundo.”

⁴⁷ “El cuento es a la prosa lo que el soneto al verso . . . todo verdadero cuento se puede convertir en novela, puesto que, en realidad, es un embrión de novela” (Cuentos de Azorín. Con un prólogo del autor sobre la estética del cuento, Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1956, pp. 12-13).

⁴⁸ See n. 18.

⁴⁹ I have particularly in mind here Joseph Warren Beach's discussion of the elimination of the author from his work as a sign of modernity in the novel. (The Twentieth Century Novel, New York, 1932, Ch. ii: “Exit Author.”) A contrary opinion that substantiates the thesis of this study is that of J. Isaacs in An Assessment of Twentieth Century Literature (London, 1951) pp. 116-117: “It was Dorothy Richardson who said that she was interested in a novel not for what it said, but for the picture it gave of the author. The artist is himself his chief creation. The only real biography of Shakespeare we have is the sum total of his plays and his poems. For a long while, under the domination of the realist approach, we demanded objectivity and aloofness from the novelist. We were horrified when he abruptly intruded himself, as Thackeray did in Vanity Fair, and nothing was more maddening than to be addressed as ‘Dear Reader’. We were pulled sharply out of our daydreams, we were recalled violently from our holiday, we hadn't escaped after all. Nowadays, one of the most noteworthy things in fiction is the way in which the novelist not only intrudes, but makes his intrusion an integral part of the work of art he is presenting. The conscious novelist is himself not only a part of his novel, but often the most important part.”

⁵⁰ See my article “Interior Duplication and the Problem of Form in the Modern Spanish Novel,” PMLA, lxxiii (Sept. 1958), 393-406. A revised version of this article will constitute the second chapter of my study on Azorín.

⁵¹ Félix Vargas, Ch. xxxvi: “Un haz cuadrilongo de viva luz solar entra por la ventana; va hacia un espejo; refleja en la brillante superficie; atraviesa el ámbito de la sala; en el fondo, una puertecita que se manifiesta en otro cuadrilongo claro, radiante. El espejo en su cuadro brillador. Otro espejo reducido, en la penumbra, más lejos, irradia una luz tenue. Claridad del cielo; refracciones fúlgidas; luz directa; luz refleja; cuadrados que cortan cuadrados; volúmenes de fulgor; planos de las cosas; líneas que se cortan y tornan a cortar. Catóptrica de la materia y del espíritu.”

⁵² R. Pérez de Ayala, Belarmino y A polonio, Ch. ii: “A nada menos aspira el novelista que a crear un breve universo, que no otra cosa pretende ser la novela;” Ortega y Gasset, “Hermetismo,” Ideas sobre la novela.

⁵³ The general conviction of the negativity of self-analysis in the novelist is well stated by Guillermo de Torre: “Suele suceder que cuando el novelista se pone a pensar sobre las posibilidades e imposibilidades de su arte, estas últimas acaban por maniatarle” op. cit., p. 133.

⁵⁴ Andrés Bello, Gramática de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Colección de Escritores Castellanos, 1903), i, par. 291.

⁵⁵ Tío Pablo's ailment, which he calls “Hoffmann's disease,” is a pathological sense of time which leads him to see always the future in the present (“En lo presente veía lo futuro”) but in a degenerate perspective, for it is always the decadent or tragic future which he perceives: “En el niño enfermo— amaba apasionadamente a los niños—veía al expirante. En la leve alteración de la amistad, presagiaba ya la agria y truculenta ruptura” (Doña Inés, Ch. xvi: “Tío Pablo y el tiempo”). This is abulia, the paralysis of the will of the Generation of '98, in a temporal interpretation. It is essentially the attitude of Azorín himself as reflected in the portrayal of his characters. Thus, for example, the description of Doña Inés: “Una observación atenta podría hacernos ver en el cuerpo de la dama que las líneas tienen ya un imperceptible principio de flaccidez. Se inicia en toda la figura una ligerísima declinación. En la cara, fresca todavía, la piel no tiene la ternura de la juventud primera” (ch.ii).

⁵⁶ M. Baquero Goyanes, “Elementos rítmicos en la prosa de Azorín,” Clavileño, iii (Madrid, 1952), pp. 25-32.

⁵⁷ “El autor, al llegar a este capítulo, da un regate violento ... En una obra humorística no nos parece ese rehurte una falta,” La isla sin aurora, Ch. xxiii.

⁵⁸ E. Anderson Imbert, “El pasado literario de Azorín,” Nosotros, lxix (Buenos Aires, 1930), 273-281. The subject is treated at length in Carlos Clavería's “Sobre el tema del tiempo en ‘Azorín’,” Cinco estudios de literatura española moderna (Salamanca, 1945), pp. 49-67.

⁵⁹ Op. cit., p. 267.

⁶⁰ “Como una estrella errante,” Blanco en azul. This volume of short stories belongs chronologically to the second period.

⁶¹ E.g., “Consideración en estos postreros días, de todo este ambiente del que se va a despedir el poeta y que ya no volverá a sentir más. Se repetirá acaso otro año el respiro estival en la soledad de Errondo-Aundi; pero no será este mismo ambiente; las aguas que pasan de un río—el río del tiempo—son las mismas y no son nunca las que fueron. Con toda el alma sé aferra Félix al momento presente . . . aunque torne otro año a Errondo-Aundi, no volverá a vivir lo que está viviendo ahora” (Félix Vargas, Ch. xxxix).

⁶² “Como una estrella errante,” Blanco en azul.

⁶³ Introduction to Blanco en azul.

⁶⁴ Ortega y Gasset, “La ciencia como poesía.—El triángulo y Hamlet.—El tesoro de los errores,” Ideas y creencias.

⁶⁵ “Pero lo fundamental en Zuloaga no era la veracidad o no veracidad de su pintura; el artista, en fin de cuentas, crea la verdad; la realidad circundante es una creación del artista,” Memorias, ch. xl. Once again this is sheer coincidence with the esthetic principles of Ortega; indeed, this particular tenet is the basis of Ortega's anti-realism.

⁶⁶ See also n. 31, above. In subsequent chapters the two fundamental aspects of the self-conscious novel of Azorín— the novel-within-the-novel (interior duplication) and the anti-novel (anti-style; anti-character; anti-plot)—will be examined in detail. In the meantime, it is interesting to note the connection between self-consciousness and anti-novel that Jean-Paul Sartre apprehends in the contemporary French “anti-roman,” which bears some points of resemblance to that of Azorín: “Un des traits les plus singuliers de notre époque littéraire c'est l'apparition, çà et là, d'œuvres vivaces et toutes négatives qu'on pourrait nommer des anti-romans ... il s'agit de contester le roman par lui-même, de la détruire sous nos yeux dans le temps qu'on semble l'édifier, d'écrire le roman qui ne se fait pas, qui ne peut pas se faire, de créer une fiction qui soit aux grandes œuvres composées de Dostoievsky et de Meredith ce qu'était aux tableaux de Rembrandt et de Rubens cette toile de Miro, intitulée Assassinat de la peinture. Ces œuvres étranges et difficilement classables ne témoignent pas de la faiblesse du genre romanesque, elles marquent seulement que nous vivons à une époque de réflexion et que le roman est en train de réfléchir sur lui-même.” (“Préface” to Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d'un inconnu, Paris: Gallimard, 2^e ed., 1956).