Azorín and the International Modernism Movement

Azorín’s modernism refers to the vast international and cosmopolitan movement that developed in the first third of the 20th century. That is, on the dates that the writer produced his main works. In the same decade of the sixties of the XIX century in which Unamuno and Valle-Inclán were born, Italo Svevo saw the first light, Yeats and Gide. And of the seventy of Baroja, Azorín and Antonio Machado, are also Proust, Rilke and Thomas Mann.

One of the errors that criticism of our novelists of that time has incurred has consisted of circumscribing them to the field of the Hispanic, when they must be understood within the framework of that international modernism(o) which represented the formal renewal of the novel and the theater. What it is about is situating Spanish literature in the broader context of European letters.

Likewise, the sesquicentennial of Jose Martinez Ruiz It could well contribute to the recovery of a writer as long-lived and with such a wide production as Azorín was, since of the four aforementioned noventayochistas he is the only one who has sunk into the limbo of posthumous oblivion. Few voices have vindicated him after his death in 1967. Mario Vargas Llosa stands out in this, who dedicated his admission speech to him in the RAE, confessing his precocious and assiduous reader, but describing him as a writer “who chose, out of idiosyncrasy, laziness or asceticism intellectual, living confined to minor art”, determined to produce “discreet fictions”.

[La página que no escribió Azorín]

A statement that does not stop provoking the dissenting response of Camilo José Cela. However, with the critical insight that characterizes him, the author of The city and the Dogs recognizes that “Azorín’s novels deserve a place in the history of the European avant-garde”, and that his attempts “to renew narrative writing are still innovative”, “a premonition of something different” such as what they achieved “a Proust, a Joyce, a Virginia Woolf or a Faulkner”.

In any case, it is worth emphasizing that some of the substantial characteristics with which this other Modernism(o) is defined fit both the artistic essence of a Valle, a Baroja, a Unamuno or Azorín himself as well as that of Pirandello, Hesse, Pound, Jarry and the other “modernists”: fusion of symbolism and naturalism, aesthetic distortion of reality, search for totality, fragmentism, manipulation of the literature of the past… And in a very remarkable way, the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian of Nietzsche . Thus, we will be able to free Azorín and his contemporaries from their local cell, placing them in a broader sphere to which they are creditors.

The lyrical novel was a new modality of which Azorín continues to be one of the most prominent representatives

In The willYuste, mentor of the character Azorín, launches a proclamation shared by those modernists: “The novel is far from having reached its perfection”. In it there should be no fable, as in life that “is diverse, multiform, contradictory… anything but symmetrical […] as it appears in the novels…”. Here is the germ of a new modality, the lyrical novel, of which Azorín continues to be one of the most outstanding representatives in the panorama of international Modernism(o).

Review the set of his production and the constant presence of one of the patterns that facilitates the creation of an authentic lyrical novel will be perceived: the sentimental and aesthetic learning of a subject that instead of dialectically struggling against the objective facticity of a hostile world, identifies with it.

And recreates it, subjectivized, through a chain of images or sensations only unified by memory or consciousness of the character another self of the author who plays the same structural role as the lyrical self. In this regard, it is very significant that the writer ended up adopting the last name of the hero of his trilogy as a pseudonym (The will, Antonio Azorin y The confessions of a little philosopher).

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