Pío Baroja: Life, Works, and Influence on Spanish Literature

Pío Baroja: Life and Personality

Born in San Sebastián in 1872, Pío Baroja studied medicine in Madrid but soon left his practice as a doctor. He published his first books in 1900.

• Until 1911, he published 17 novels, constituting the most important part of his production.
• His fame was consolidated: His life became increasingly sedentary. In 1935, he joined the Royal Academy. The Spanish Civil War surprised him in the Basque Country, from where he went to France. In 1940, he settled again in Madrid. He died in 1956.
• He was a man of lonely and bitter mood.
• He was pessimistic about man and the world. However, he could feel tenderness for deprived or marginalized beings.

This complete and utter sincerity is a fundamental feature of his temperament. Baroja did not want to mislead or deceive.

• Finally, he always felt a yearning for action.

Ideology and Existential Pessimism

His design of life is inseparable from his temperament. His pages reveal some ideas about man and the world that fall in line with existential pessimism.

• He was distinguished by his radical religious skepticism.
• For Baroja, the world lacks sense. Life is absurd, and he harbored no confidence in man.
• His political ideology is marked by skepticism. In his youth, he had contact with anarchism, but he was attracted to its rebellion. He rejected communism and socialism but also democracy, which he thought of as "the absolutism of the number."
• His favorite characters are the mavericks:

1. The Man of Action, who stands against society, even without success.
2. The Apathetic, whose vital impulse has been paralyzed by a lack of faith in the world.

His Concept of the Novel

Although he confessed his little interest in ethical theories, he devoted many pages to talking about his work.

Features:

1. Above all, the novel is a many-sided, all-encompassing genre: we are faced with a classic open or permeable novel.
2. He stated his nonchalance for composition. He was against novelists who start with a definitive argument. His novels show a disunited way that allows many changes. What will matter are the episodes, anecdotes, etc.
3. Invention and imagination will be for him the supreme qualities of a novelist. He confesses to observing.
4. He does not want his works to prove a thesis.

What he calls a lack of composition are particular forms of composing and organizing fictional matter.

Style

It has often been stated that Baroja misspelled. It is obvious they are ungrammatical, but he attributed it to his origin: he is a Basque and not a Castilian.

• His style is consistent with his ideal of spontaneous narrative. He carried the anti-rhetorical tendency to extremes.
• A quick prose, nervous, that can be considered a vivid style.
• There is a sour tone in his style, which Baroja considered an accurate adjective.
• He preferred the short phrase and brief paragraph.
• This explains the story vividly and the amenity of his descriptions of particular significance.
• Naturalness: Baroja reaches eminent manifestations of authenticity in conversational dialogues.

His Work: Novels

He was a prolific writer. He wrote more than 60 novels, 34 in trilogies:

• Tierra Vasca: Zalacaín the Adventurer
• The Great Life: Camino de Perfección and Paradox, King
• The Fight for Life: La Busca
• La Raza: The Tree of Science
• Cities: Caesar or Nothing
• The Sea: The Labyrinth of Sirens

Between 1913 and 1935, he developed Memoirs of a Man of Action, integrated by 22 novels.

Other Works

He wrote many short stories and novellas, essays, travel books, biographies, etc. Memories are seven volumes that accumulate memories, trials, etc.

Significance

Baroja is a very representative figure of the sensitivity and spiritual environment of his generation. He is the novelist of contemporary Spanish literature, his talents for narration, and his capacity for building.