Reading Illness in fin-de-siglo Spain: Baroja’s Madrid Novels

Welcome to the AHRC-funded project on ‘Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)’ at the University of Exeter. As the Principal Investigator, my interest in this area of research has developed over several years, starting with representations of pathology in the works of turn-of-the-century Spanish author Pío Baroja. He studied medicine in Madrid and Valencia, submitting a doctoral thesis on ‘Pain. A Psychophysical Study’ in 1893, and practised for a short time as a doctor in the Basque town of Cestona before turning definitively to writing. His disillusionment with studying medicine is reflected in a famous semi-autobiographical novel, El árbol de la ciencia (1911) [The Tree of Knowledge].

Baroja had already begun writing as a young man. In 1890, at the age of seventeen, he published a series of articles on Russian literature, and would go on to write over sixty novels, as well as short stories, essays and memoirs. Yet, his understanding of medical theories of the period would profoundly inform his early writing, including the perceived neurosis from which his female protagonist Águeda de Aizgorri suffers in his first published novel, La casa de Aizgorri (1900) [The House of Aizgorri], and two years later his portrait of the tormented artist Fernando Ossorio in Camino de perfección (1902) [Road to Perfection].

Baroja’s well-known series of Madrid novels La lucha por la vida (1903-04) [The Struggle for Life] documents the poverty-stricken districts rife with criminal activity, in which the protagonist Manuel Alcázar struggles to make an honest living. These novels critique the inequalities of Madrid society through the perspective of a clinician who diagnoses the diseases suffered by the vagrants and prostitutes of the city slums through the lenses of gender and social class. The following example from the second novel of the series, Mala hierba [Weeds], describes the district of Las Injurias:

‘Peor aspecto que los hombres tenían aún las mujeres, sucias, desgreñadas, haraposas. Era una basura humana, envuelta en guiñapos, entumecida por el frío y la humedad, la que vomitaba aquel barrio infecto. Era la herpe, la lacra, el color amarillo de la terciana, el párpado retraído, todos los estigmas de la enfermedad y de la miseria’.[1] [‘Worse in appearance than the men were the women, — filthy, dishevelled, tattered. This was human refuse, enfolded in rags, swollen with cold and dankness, vomited up by this pest-ridden quarter. Here was a medley of skin-diseases, marks left by all the ailments to which the flesh is heir, the jaundiced hue of tertian fever, the contracted eyelash, — all the various stigmata of illness and poverty’.][2]

These themes about individual and social pathologies would culminate in one of Baroja’s best-known novels, El árbol de la ciencia, in which the author focuses on the trajectory of the fictional medic Andrés Hurtado. This character treats the poor echelons of society in San Juan de Dios Hospital, and finally marries Lulú, who shares a pessimistic vision of life. In all these novels, one of Baroja’s key preoccupations is found in his contradictory engagements with the cultural myths of degeneration and the prevalence of abulia (apathy or lack of willpower) that were widely debated by Spanish authors and intellectuals during this period.

Many of Baroja’s characters seek to overcome abulia through their partial recovery of willpower and energy, leading for example to the symbolic progress of Fernando Ossorio’s journey as he leaves Madrid and travels eventually to the Mediterranean coast at the end of Camino de perfección. Over the course of the novel, the protagonist attempts to discard the influence of his Catholic education and his experience of physical and mental symptoms, including hallucinatory visions. He finds a partial resolution to his neurosis by renouncing art, instead embracing nature and rebirth in the ambivalent conclusion.

My research for this Fellowship will include the analysis of widespread debates about abulia and neurasthenia, and how they inform the novels of Baroja and other Spanish authors, in the early twentieth century. I’m particularly interested in literary representations of Madrid in Spanish fiction, and the extent to which the language of pathology is connected to place in male and female authors of the period, such as Baroja, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Carmen de Burgos. I will also be considering the ways in which early twentieth-century representations of the body and ill-health may inform our readings of contemporary Spanish authors, especially the relationship between characters’ psychological symptoms and their urban environment.

In this project, we will consider different angles on the broad theme of the project, ‘Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures’. The Fellowship aims to draw connections between our analysis of the historical period 1870s to 1960s and present-day representations of illness, health and resilience in literature, journalism and visual art in English and other languages of the project. If you are interested in learning more about this research, please contact us.

Katharine Murphy is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, University of Exeter. She is the Principal Investigator for the ‘Reading Bodies’ project.

[1] Pío Baroja, Obras completas, 8 vols (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1946–51), Vol. 1, p. 461.

[2] Pío Baroja, Weeds, translated from Spanish by Isaac Goldberg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), pp. 200-01.