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Ironic distance in Baroja: César o nada

1980; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382802000357129

1469-3550

C. A. Longhurst,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: BAROJA, PÍO (1872–1956)CÉSAR O NADA [P. BAROJA]IRONY Notes 1. See for example Gonzalo Sobejano, Novela española de nuestro tiempo (Madrid 1970), 23. Sobejano's view of Baroja is a very partial one; it ignores the fact that there are novels of Baroja, and parts of novels, that have little or nothing to do with the ‘realidad social’. 2. J. T. Reid, Modern Spain and Liberalism (Stanford, California 1937). Gerardo Ebanks, La España de Baroja (Madrid 1974). Most of the existing Baroja criticism is expository and a great deal of it is vastly inferior to Reid's book, which remains the best exposition of Baroja's socio-political views. A praiseworthy exception to the general trend of Baroja criticism is Biruté Ciplijauskaité, Baroja’ un estilo (Madrid 1972), of which the later chapters constitute to my mind the most helpful criticism to date on the art of Baroja. 3. For me technique is anything that is concerned with the ‘how’ rather than with the ‘what’. I thus see technique as something much wider in scope than D. L. Shaw, who in his article on César o nada and El gran torbellino del mundo (‘Two novels of Baroja: an illustration of his technique’, BHS, XL [1963], 151–59) is concerned solely with the arrangement and distribution of the novelesque material. 4. The Roman setting, of course, also has a purpose: it allows the criticism of the Church, whose representames will play a crucial rôle in Part II; for ironically it is the Church, which César Moncada so much mocks and despises in Part I, that is instrumental in bringing about his downfall. 5. Ciudades de Italia (1949) is not a faithful account of personal experiences but a scissors-and-paste affair made up partly of passages copied from three novels, partly of geographical and historical data, and partly of fading memories. From the point of view of Baroja's biography it is almost valueless. Baroja's loss of memory in his later years is well known, and in Ciudades de Italia he even gets wrong the dates of his trips. There is no reliable biography of Baroja. The one by Sebastián Juan Arbó is untrustworthy because large parts of it have been indiscriminately copied from Baroja's unreliable memoirs. 6. All three quotations from Ignacio Elizalde, Temas y personajes barojianos (Universidad de Deusto 1975), 101, 70, 101. The regeneracionismo of los Tres may well be the same as that of the reformers mentioned, but the manifesto of Azorín, Baroja and Maeztu does not stand comparison with the reform programme of someone like Costa. It is an idealistic, well-meaning appeal, but the programme of reforms is given in a single sentence: ‘Poner al descubierto las miserias de la gente del campo, las dificultades y tristezas de la vida de millares de hambrientos, los horrores de la prostitución y del alcoholismo, señalar la necesidad de la enseñanza obligatoria, de la fundación de cajas de crédito agrícola, de la implantación del divorcio como consecuencia de la ley del matrimonio civil’. There is very little of real practical value in the manifesto; its significance lies much more in pointing to the collapse of traditional values and ideas at the turn of the century and in showing the philosophical inclinations of its authors. The full text can be seen in Granjel, Panorama de la generación del 98 (Madrid 1959), 220–23. All this is, however, a side issue. I am not really concerned with the question of how much regeneracionismo there is in César o nada but rather with Baroja's treatment of his material. 7. It should be said, however, that Giménez Caballero disclaims responsibility for the anthology; see ‘Baroja y su ralea’, ABC’ 10 January 1975. The compiler may have been the publisher himself, Ruiz Castillo. The charge of fascism that is sometimes made against Baroja is rather silly. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Baroja attacked both Hitler and Mussolini. See also ‘Los enemigos del liberalismo’, in which he denounces the dogmatism of both communists and fascists in no uncertain terms, arguing that ‘tanto fascistas como comunistas son enemigos de la libertad’ (OC’ V, 992–96). 8. Years later, in 1917 or 1918, Baroja tried to stand as a radical Republican candidate for Fraga (Huesca), but he desisted when it became apparent that another Republican candidate commanded greater support. 9. Alzugaray's ironic comment naturally suggests that the author is indicating that César's theorizing should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Yet, paradoxically, at the time of writing César o nada Baroja gave a talk to the radical Republicans in Barcelona in which he used precisely the same argument which César employs (OC, V, 535–37). But nine years later we find him arguing almost exactly the opposite! (OC, V, 370). 10. Shortly before César o nada appeared in book form it had been published in serial form in the Republican daily El Radical. The first instalment appeared in the very first number of El Radical on 6th March 1910, and the last instalment appeared on 26th May 1910. On checking this serialized version in the Hemeroteca Municipal in Madrid, I found that the additional chapter was already present, though with a different title from that in the book version; and just to confuse the issue further, it was not chapter XXII but chapter XXIII, either because of an error earlier on in the numeration of the chapters of Part II, which jump from IV to VI, or because chapter V was omitted and never reinstated in the book version. For publication in serialized form, the novel was split into 67 instalments (although 68 appeared, one of the extracts having been printed twice by mistake), but the instalments have no connexion whatever with the author's division of his work into chapters, the text having been chopped up in a most arbitrary and at times absurd manner, presumably at the convenience of the type-setters, which suggests that Baroja had handed over a completed manuscript. This inference is supported by the fact that the second number of El Radical carries a short editorial commentary on the novel which refers to events in Part II. As far as the two first-edition versions are concerned, we cannot be certain of how the removal of the last chapter came about. As Professor Harold Hall has pointed out to me, the difference between the two versions could quite simply be the result of a binder's error. One version has 30 signatures, while the other has only 29 signatures, the final signature of only 4 pages having been accidentally omitted in a number of copies. Most later editions would then have been derived from these incomplete copies. This seems an eminently plausible explanation of the discrepancy, and I am grateful to Professor Hall for his suggestion. 11. This represents a change from what Baroja had advocated in a newspaper article of 1902: ‘Los hombres que se sientan fuertes, a la conquista de la vida y del mundo. Los puños como cabezas de chiquillos, la inteligencia como una garra. ¡Adelante y sin piedad! La piedad es buena después de haber vencido’ (reproduced in Hojas sueltas, ed. Luis Urrutia Salaverri, [Madrid 1973], II, 53–57). But Baroja keeps changing his tune. For five months earlier, in an article on Nietzsche, he had started by saying: ‘sé de él lo bastante para que su figura me sea repulsiva; su desprecio por la piedad y por la compasión, antipático; su egotismo y su entusiasmo por la fuerza, desagradables’, and he had ended the article by expressing his reconciliation with Nietzsche on the grounds that ‘este filósofo que cantaba la crueldad, era tímido en la vida, caritativo y piadoso, y ante los dolores ajenos sentía su corazón de hombre rebosando piedad, la piedad dulce de la moral de los esclavos, tan denigrada por él, la piedad de las almas humildes y de los pobres de espíritu’ (ibid., 278). 12. Baroja, however, does not want to make it artistically incongruous, and so he carefully includes several cross-references between prologue and novel proper, for example, César's recent visit to Rome, or Laura's habit of going to Biarritz. 13. Baroja's anti-militarism went so deep that he even refused to do his military service. Anti-military statements in Baroja are common; see for example ‘El prestigio de los militares’ (OC, V, 221–23). Baroja, like Ortega, made no bones about his preference for Nordic and Germanic culture over Latin and Mediterranean culture (see for example OC, V, 517), and he liked to emphasize his Basque and Lombardic stock as being more truly European than that of Mediterranean Spain. Baroja, who called himself an ‘archieuropeo’, was also a moderate supporter of ‘europeización’, though what he wanted to import from England, France and Germany was not political systems but modern technology. And as for European imperialism, he more than once criticized the behaviour of the European colonial powers and—if I may ignore what I preach—his novel Paradox’ rey is a savage satire of precisely this. 14. This technique of ironic self-portrayal is subtly exploited by Baroja in El mundo es ansí, where it plays a much more central and crucial rôle. See my Critical Guide to El mundo es ansí (London 1977). 15. In the previously cited Critical Guide, 30.