On June 8, 1873, 150 years ago, a boy was born in Monóvar, who in the baptismal font received the name José Augusto Trinidad in addition to the surnames Martínez Ruiz. His interest in literature since childhood is evident in Las Concerationes de un pequeño filóspo (1904), and his first publications in the local press were early: he did so in 1892 under the pseudonym Juan de Lis and used several more. alternating with his name as J. Martínez Ruiz (or JMR), until 1904 he adopted his character’s surname (the protagonist of La voluntad and Antonio Azorín) to place it in a prominent place in Literary History. As a journalist for more than seventy years, Azorín made the periodicals not a tool for disseminating his ideas, but a necessary and effective place to carry out the reform of written language, reform of the regular style, adaptation to complexity. the reality of the modern world and the nineteenth-century rhetoric, ending, then reigning. Looking at it from today, it is clear that we are dealing with one of the “founders of modernity” as Pere Gimferrer rightly defines it.
Azorín is not a writer whose work allows himself to be confined to short descriptions. While many commentators insist on presenting him as a meticulous recorder of the reality we perceive, the objects we live with, and Spanish landscapes—rural or urban—or an impressionistic reader of classical and modern writers, read the simple pages without prejudice, show us something else. He is not a realist writer; its place is in the extensive legacy of Symbolism that spread across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author himself has repeatedly expressed his ideal of identifying objects of everyday experience with mystery, and his claim to intuit mystery as a component of reality itself. At the end of his novel Capricho (1942), we read: “Dear friends, the great mystery is the reality that surrounds us and of which we are a part.” Four years later, in Immemorial Memories, he says, “If literature has any value, it will be through the artist’s interest in the eternal mystery.” A creator, an artist, in his attention to the phenomena of life, must appreciate the quality of what surrounds him, the irreducible existence of each object, even the most humble and irrelevant, as well as the subtle resonances of each particle. World. Nothing is worthless; Everything is admirable for those who perceive that in the reality of things there is “something else” that makes them up. Reading Azorín’s texts enriches our sensitivity and enables us to sharpen our awareness of ourselves in our circumstances.
The attentive observer stance is inseparable from an emotional feeling and a caring attitude towards the observed world. The way of envisioning the landscape also responds to this attitude. Referring to the famous words of Yuste, a character from La voluntad, let us remember that it is the sense of nature that gives “an artist’s measure” and “the more artist a writer becomes.” knows better how to interpret the emotion of the landscape ». To interpret a feeling is not to write down the details of what is observed or to describe a place with supposed objectivity; to see the landscape as something intimate, the embodiment of one’s own soul (“the landscape is a state of the soul”, Amiel’s well-known phrase is one of the clichés of the time). Commenting on Antonio Machado’s poetry, he expressed it this way, using symbolist criteria that could be rightly applied to his literary work: “landscape and emotions are the same thing; the poet moves towards the depicted object and gives us his own soul in the way he describes it.
“Mystery”, “feeling” and “feeling” are terms that seem to conjure up the realm of the romantic even though they are not. If Antonio Machado, in his famous poem Retrato (1906), wondered whether it was “classical or romantic” without being concerned with a definitive answer that would resolve the apparent conflict, Azorín resolutely chose to include the second term in the first: “Romantic unrest in the classical line”. In the Confession of a Writer, an important text to know, emulating clarity and simplicity, its pages “show a self-conscious, romantic, restrained, repressed, classical power far from giving the full measure of free will”. This 1905 text, which could serve as the basis for all his work, resonates in various passages and finds a complement in certain lines of one of his last novels, La isla sin aurora (1942). it has nothing to do with the so-called rigorous realism sometimes attributed to him. In Chapter III of this novel, the narrator praises limitation: “The art of self-limitation will never lose its effectiveness. To limit oneself is to concentrate one’s powers, to acquire a power of depth, intensity, synthesis that we did not have before.” When the “poet” (a character named in the novel) quoting Goethe defended this criterion as a supporter of creation and love, XXIV.
The limitation facilitates another essential artistic activity that the Monóvar author has pursued since his first texts: nuance development. If we find precise reflections in this sense in Diario de un enfermo (1901), the 1942 novel precisely summarizes the criteria. “He always discovered new nuances in the unique landscape,” he says of the “novelist” character. For those who can see deeply, the same object is inexhaustible; and as such, if the novel is art, it cannot be reduced to intrigue or base its consistency on it, because “art is the capture and gradation of nuances.”
All this is proof that if there is anything that characterizes Azorín’s art, it is undoubtedly its complexity. Expresses complex emotions with a simple look. He tells us about phenomenal reality and mystery, which are an essential component of the same reality; it is a precise and direct language to evoke subtle sensations; indicates while evoking; the dream is transparent and clear without ceasing to evoke; it seeks limitation and manages to limit itself to gain depth and intensity.
Azorín is one of the most original novelists in Spanish literature; he is also a poet, a “poet in prose,” a man who creates personal worlds with personal style, who exalts repressed emotion and privileges sensitivity among all its circumstances. Gil de Biedma referred to him as “a great poet in prose, perhaps the greatest and most abundant poet in our literature” when the vividness of the clichés and preconceived ideas against which he was judged did not facilitate such recognition. The exaggerated poetic character of most of his works saves him from time, preserves the intensity achieved by the power of limitation, of domination, and makes it possible to pass the test that few texts can withstand: to achieve ever-accessible, renewed pleasure. . reader, re-reading.