On September 15, 1956, Borges had dinner at Bioy Casares’ house. They talk about Spanish writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “What mediocre literature!” Borges laments. Until he mentions The will, by Azorín, and wonders if “it won’t be better than all those books.” My answer is yes: I believe that The will It is one of the best Spanish novels of the 20th century.
It is 150 years since Azorín was born: I should be ashamed for not having said anything about him until now. As a writer, Azorín was a revolutionary; His revolution was above all stylistic: Azorín practiced severe liposuction in the cellulite Spanish prose dominant at the beginning of the 20th century (an operation not very different from the one that Hemingway would try years later with the Englishman). “His prose is the clearest, the most lucid, the most flexible of contemporary writers,” Baroja wrote in 1913. “He has turned a decorative and crude instrument into an instrument of precision.” Having said this, let us add that Vargas Llosa is right when he states that Azorín was a much more daring and complex creator in his articles or small essays than in his novels; In fact, as with other great peninsular writers of the 20th century – Ortega or Josep Pla -, most of what Azorín wrote was written for newspapers: mestizo chronicles, travel notes, dazzling evocations of the classics. This does not mean, however, that his novels are uninteresting: not even the avant-garde ones that he wrote from the 1920s onwards, in the best of which he anticipates by decades the static and objectual formalism of the nouveau roman French, nor the modernists of the beginning of the century, starting with The will, which is the first novel of a trilogy and also the most ambitious, complex and successful of those published. Its theme is the same as Hamlet and Baroja’s best-known novel; Around 1816, Lord Byron anticipated it in verses that could be translated as follows: “Knowledge is pain; those who know most / must lament the most for the fatal truth: / the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.” His argument seems irrelevant, or at least banal: taking advantage of the scheme of bildungsromanfrom the learning novel, The will narrates the aimless wandering of the omnipresent protagonist—a young intellectual afflicted by bad du siècle, an excess of intellectualism that leads to apathy—, the conversations with his teacher Yuste or his friend Olaiz, the faded love affairs with Justina and Iluminada. The fragmentary form of it, like a collage, its subjectivism, its anti-realism and its self-reflexive or meta-novelesque vocation shelve the narrative of the 19th century and open the doors to that of the 20th… But the essential thing is something else. I have said that the author of The will It is Azorín; It is not exact: the author is J. Martínez Ruiz, the name that appears on the cover of the first edition of the novel, from 1902, and Azorín’s real name; This, in fact, is the nickname of the protagonist of The will and the pseudonym with which Martínez Ruiz signed his writings more or less from 1904 onwards. The trompe l’oeil is unusual, but not gratuitous. Martínez Ruiz and Azorín are the same person and two different, almost opposite writers: the first, who existed as such until the beginning of the century, was a furious, rebellious, vitalist, libertarian, urban young man obsessed with the universal future; On the other hand, the second was a mature, conservative, skeptical, ironic, aestheticizing writer obsessed with the Spanish past and the Castilian landscape. The will masterfully dramatizes the combat between these two antagonistic individuals, the personal crisis that engendered the metamorphosis of Martínez Ruiz into Azorín and, in a certain way, the conversion of the novel’s protagonist into its author. Seen like this, The will It is not only a groundbreaking novel and a singular precedent of what we know today as autofiction; It is also, as far as I can see, a unique novel.
Martínez Ruiz published some dispensable books; Azorín, almost none: read Don Quixote’s route, Classic and modern, Apart from the classics, The villages. Lean The will.
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