José Martínez Ruíz Azorín

JOSÉ MARTÍNEZ RUJZ (AZORÍN) (1873-1967)

He is the most representative writer of the generation ^ of 98 and the one who contributed the most to spreading his fame. As we said at the beginning of this chapter, Azorín used this name for the first time to designate a group of young people with heterogeneous tendencies but who agreed in his attitude of protest. He always remained faithful to the initial ideology; He was aware of the reform mission that competed with those of '98, and as long as he was on his side, he tried to fulfill that mission. Azorín feels himself a reformer from the first moment. And it is: he has at least reformed the language.

José Martínez Ruíz was born in Monóvar (Alicante) in 1873. The son of a lawyer and a teacher, his first training was very careful and typical of the Spanish middle class. He did his high school studies in Yecla, a town in Murcia that would leave deep memories in the spirit and long projection of him in his literary work. He began his law studies in Valencia and Granada and finally received his law degree in Salamanca.

From a very young age he dedicated himself to journalism and it can be said that it was his profession of all his life. He acted in politics; he was a deputy to the Cortes several times and became undersecretary of Public Instruction. After a long exile in Paris, during the Spanish civil war, he returns to Madrid, where he dies in 1967.
Azorín, notable as an essayist and columnist, is the least narrator of the prose writers of 98. His predilection for a deliberately fragmentary and repetitive style and his disdain for storytelling as such, did not allow him to create properly novel works. His style, of great brevity, simplicity and smoothness, is the result of a deep knowledge of the language. "His of himself pseudonym of him, Azorín, diminutive of goshawk - says Francisco Grandmontagne - evokes the winged, the swift, fast and cutting edge, essential qualities of his magnificent prose. "Behind this apparent simplicity hides a wise man artifice.

It is Azorín who initiates the novelty of riddling prose with semicolons; all his writings prove it: "The city rests deeply. In the late afternoon the tiny garden fills with shadows. They flutter soft, elastic, the first evenings. Far away, the bell of some convent rings. Twilight has come. A star begins to shine in the darkened sky... ".

We find ourselves before a great landscaper: landscapes of nature and of souls. Descriptive works worked without haste, without being run over, with a goldsmith's relish; newspaper articles that are equivalent to miniatures; visions of Spain —Castilla, Levante, Vascongadas— in which the gaze has stopped with delightful complacency; portraits and human physiognomies with all the purity and sobriety of lines compatible with the smallest detail. His pages on the towns and peoples of Castile are of inimitable beauty and sobriety and are true jewels of Spanish literature. His influence on Antonio Machado and other poets and prose writers of a Castilian spirit is great.

Azorín's ideas about Spain are those of his generation: first there is a violent attack on tradition, then a strenuous effort to value the national past; but together with adherence to the genuine, it will always require "a subtle bond that unites us to Europe."
Azorín's novels are almost completely devoid of action. They are subjective, with a philosophical background, probably autobiographical, and they only narrate what happens in the soul and in the thoughts of their protagonists. They are: The will; Antonio Azorín; The confessions of a little philosopher, with childhood memories of him, full of tenderness; Don Juan; Mrs. Ines.

Essays on Spain and its landscape: The Castilian soul, Don Quixote's route, Spain, The landscape of Spain as seen by the Spanish, etc.
Literary criticism: Classics and modern, Outside the classics, Rivas and Larra, Spanish readings, Lope in silhouette.

A fundamental factor in Azorín's work and a source of unexpected aesthetic emotions is time. In his works, the past is updated and the current is loaded with the past. To live is to see you come back... He sees everything as if it had not happened; or better, as if it were happening again. He himself confesses: "To know what time is, I have devoted long meditations." For him, the greatest tragedy of the soul is to feel that time passes.