Positively Negative: Pío Baroja, the Essayist (review)

Published after his death due to the commendable efforts of both his mother (Sara M. Saz, Professor of Spanish, Colorado State University) and his dissertation advisor (Gonzalo Sobejano, Columbia University), Carlos Roberto Saz Parkinson's book on Pío Baroja's essays is a wonderful addition to Baroja studies and to the field of Peninsular Literature more broadly considered.

This is undoubtedly the first book to give full attention to the essays produced by Baroja, and it stands out not only for addressing this under-researched aspect of the author's literary production, but also for the rich dialogue Saz establishes between Baroja's work, the philosophy of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the essayistic traditions of Montaigne and Bacon. Central to Positively Negative is a hypothesis that distinguishes between Baroja's novels and his essays: "If Baroja's major novels are generally Schopenhauerian in tone, by contrast his essays often display a distinctly Nietzschean flavor" (25; the most definitive statements outlining this perspective do not appear until the work's dense conclusion 243-44, 255). The author mobilizes this provisional, dualistic model as a way of avoiding the difficulty of addressing the "contradictory psychological makeup" (29) that would be required of someone who subscribed to both Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean thought at once.

For Baroja, as Saz makes clear, writing is a power and an imperative. Baroja is an "outstanding individual" (27) who is doubly alienated, both from the academic establishment and the society at large (35). If his novelistic works often depict "characters struggling to lead full lives only to end tragically or pessimistically" (24), his essays—as carefully described in chapters 3 and 4—reveal, to a certain extent, the triumph of a vitality of negativity (the title's reference to Positively Negative) and a "tristeza activa" (105) over forces of resignation and withdrawal that plagued Baroja. Even if it seems at times that the author strives for a totalizing and coherent characterization of Baroja-the-person (Saz joins other critics in asserting that Baroja failed to live up to his hopes for an intense life [254]), his nuanced perspective on the notion of writing as a process nonetheless shines through—perhaps following in the footsteps of Montaigne's critique of the foolishness of looking for a "constant and solid view of man" (38; also 41, 50).

In this respect, it seems most important that Saz Parkinson frames his study in terms of autobiography (21, 25; i.e., Baroja's novels have been seen as "intensely autobiographical," and the essay is itself taken to be an autobiographic genre). To wit: the reader might deservedly expect to learn as much about Baroja as the topics and themes addressed in his work—knowledge of Baroja-the-person along with knowledge of the sources of his writerly inspiration (Nietzsche and Schopenhauer) (22-25) and the broader social context in which he wrote (a Spanish society that was "backward, repressed, unscientific, mediocre, vulgar, claustrophobic, sexist, shallow, and uncultured" 27). Saz splendidly explores the modern essayistic tradition through Montaigne saying that "The essayist cannot be separated from his writing" (39), and he accordingly finds himself searching occasionally for the "true Baroja" (28). This inquiry is vertebrated by a lively discussion that conveys the building momentum one might expect from the open questioning of a philosophical text itself. For example, Saz wonders why Baroja had a "need for an autobiographical outlet" when he already used the novel for this purpose, and, also, why he might have written thousands of pages of essays if they were such an "underappreciated literary form" (25); likewise, we read that "Lukács wondered aloud" (32) and that Baroja was (perhaps like his philosophical influences) "struggling uncomfortably with a number of questions" (73). The genre of the essay is, of course, well-suited to this sort of ongoing questioning, a fact upon which Saz's text astutely capitalizes.

Whatever one thinks about the possibility that Baroja's essayistic work moves...