Camino de perfección and the Modernist Aesthetic

NOTES

• Those few scholars who have studied this novel from the perspective I have described have, I believe, provided valuable insights. See in particular J. J. Macklin, ‘The Modernist Mind: Identity and Integration in Pío Baroja's Camino de perfección’, Neophilologus, 67 (1983), 540–55; and Robert Spires, Transparent Simulacra. Spanish Fiction 1902–1926 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1988), 1–13. The present essay develops this approach further but reaches a conclusion significantly different from that of Spires.
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• The edition I quote from is that of Las Américas Publishing Company, New York, n.d. I give the chapter as well as the page-reference.
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• Obras Completas, Vol. VII, 893. The problem is mentioned obliquely but tellingly in the text of the novel itself when referring to Ossorio's inability to render artistically the mystical vision of Jerusalem: ‘Le faltaban los medios de representación para fijar aquel sueño’ (XVI, 76).
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• Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘Pío Baroja’, in Baroja y su mundo, Vol. II (Madrid: Arión, 1961). The only scholar, to my knowledge, who has attempted to exptain some of the puzzling inconsistencies and enigmatic references (e.g. the numerous references to cuarto oscuro) in Camino de perfección is J. L. Sanders in a regrettably unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘From Medicine to Psychology: The Early Work of Pío Baroja’ (University of Leeds, 1979). Sanders’ interpretation, based on Kleinian psychoanalysis, places Baroja in an altogether new light. Some of the examples I mention in the previous paragraph have been borrowed from this thesis.
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• An attitude, that is explicitly stated as being part and parcel of Ossorio's existentialist philosophy:‘… pensaba que… los acontecimientos no tienen más valor que aquel que se les quiere conceder’ (XX, 90).
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• Ossorio is still disorientated at this stage, but Baroja makes it clear that his position is quite distinct from that of Max Schultze. The latter is a pantheist: ‘Para mí esos montes—dijo Schultze— son Dios’ (XV, 67).
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• The theme of religion has been much better studied than that of art. In particular Macklin and earlier Francisco García Sarriá (‘Estructura y motivos de Camino de perfección’, Romanische Forschungen, LXXXIII [1971], 246–66; reprinted in the same author's Estudios de novela española moderna [Madrid: Playor, 1987], 53–74) have many pertinent comments to make, as have Weston and Noma Flint in their ‘Critical Guide’ to the novel (London: Grant and Cutler, 1983).
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• The phrase is from Martin Greenberg, The Terror of Art. Kafka and Modern Literature (London: André Deutsch, 1971).
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• I find myself in disagreement with John Macklin on this one point. He believes that ‘the final optimistic note… taken together with Ossorio's attitude to Dolores, points to a fusion of the natural and the spiritual’ (op. cit., 553). I see no such fusion, merely opposition, and this opposition is still present in Ossorio's mind in the final paragraphs of the novel.
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• The denunciation of artistic dogmas is common to Baroja, Gide, Lawrence and many others. Gide's critique of both Realism and Symbolism indirectly tells us a great deal about the directions of Modernism.
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• Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book, 2nd edition (London: Paladin, 1973), 205.
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• For a detailed analysis of the journey-narrative form see Juan Villegas, La estructura mítica del héroe (Barcelona: Planeta, 1973), 139–75, and Weston and Noma Flint, op. cit. for the deep structure of the vía mística.
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• In his book The Lessons of Modernism (London: Macmillan, 1977), Gabriel Josipovici notes that there is an image of the self as a stronghold, well bounded, possessive, capable of looking inwards and shutting out the confusions of the world outside, an image that had been taken for granted since the seventeenth century. But this self was a construction, built up to defend us from chaos and destruction. Art for the Modernists thus ‘becomes the means whereby the artist frees himself from the shackles of the self without disintegrating into chaos’ (at p. x).
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• Spires, op. cit., 12–13.
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• Spires, op. cit., 13.
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• See Macklin, ‘The Modernist Mind’, 553.
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• An example of underlying structures would be the mystical road detected first by José Ares Montes (‘Camino de perfección o las peregrinaciones de Pío Baroja y Fernando Ossorio’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos [1972], Nos. 265–67,481–516) and studied in detail by Weston and Noma Flint in their ‘Critical Guide’.
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