Pio Baroja and Valle-Inclan: Spanish Literature
Pio Baroja
He is the author of many novels. He ordered much of his abundant production of novels in various trilogies. The most significant titles are the trilogy The Struggle for Life, Shanti Andia’s Concerns, and The Tree of Knowledge.
The Struggle for Life
In this trilogy, the author narrates the adventures and offers us a vision of society and the environments in Madrid of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its pages constitute a true sociological and political witness of the time. In it, Baroja expresses his “Darwinian” idea of the cruel and dramatic “struggle for life”.
The Tree of Knowledge
A novel of philosophical and existential nature, and one of the best works of Baroja’s new developments. In everyday life, the author presents a bleak, pessimistic, and critical vision of the intellectual, cultural, political, social, and economic status of Spain at the time.
Pio Baroja’s Literary Features
- Taste for action
- Master of the description of social situations and people
- Critical analysis, pessimistic and skeptical of human behavior, both individual and groups or classes
- Flexible and spontaneous language
Valle-Inclan
The evolution of his narrative, drama, and literature ranges from close to a Modernism attitude and a form of expression increasingly critical and original.
The Grotesque
Valle-Inclan called “grotesque” the works created with a personal aesthetic used with the desire to reach a “renewal of pain and laughter” and show the absurdity, the “tragic sense”, and their disagreement with the Spanish life of his time.
Features
- Deformation of the situations and realities
- Distortion of language
- Degradation of the characters, seen not as heroes but bestialized, “objectified” such as puppets
- Simultaneous presence of grotesque and tragic aspects and parodies
- Absurd situations
- Intensification and hyperbole of the elements that make this situation
Highlights
Theater
Savage Comedy, Divine Words.
Savage Comedy and Divine Words
They develop the rural Galician January. Valle presents a world of passion and violence, a feudal and primitive world dominated by a womanizing, despotic aristocrat. Divine Words is the story of some families who are fighting to be exploited in fairs and markets, the deformity of a declined nephew.
The Scarecrows
Bohemian Lights, the author multiplies dramatic characters and spaces. Through the last hours and last night pilgrimage of a blind poet and his companion, it shows a kaleidoscopic view of life and the grotesque Madrid of the time. Also included are Spanish texts of the satire in the three works of Mardi Gras.
The Narrative Work of Valle-Inclan
- Modernist: The Four Sonatas
- Historical: The Glow of the Bonfire
- Esperpentic: Tirano Banderas and The Iberian Ring
The Sonatas
Valle-Inclan told in the first person the wanderings and episodes of the Marquis de Bradomin, a loving, cynical, and decadent character. He uses elegant language, careful and precious and full of images that seek to create sensations.
Tirano Banderas
Tirano Banderas is written using the technique of the grotesque.
The Iberian Arena
The grotesque vision of life and politics is also transferred to Spain in The Iberian Arena.