Modernism and the Generation of ’98: A Literary Analysis
Modernism and the Generation of ’98
Their themes and attitudes are consistent with those of poetry. The sensuality, the idealization, and stylization of reality are the basis of Valle-Inclán’s “Sonatas” and Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “Platero y yo,” peaks of modernist prose due to the accumulation of rhetorical devices and feelings, their escape from everyday reality, and their atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy. The Generation of ’98 retains aspects such as the renewal of modernist language, impressionistic description, and conjuring nostalgic idealization of the landscape.
- Reacts against the “vulgar” style of Realism.
- Collects the items and the ideology of Naturalism (Baroja).
- The intellectual and existential burden of German thought (Unamuno).
- Forms a new sensitivity based on linguistic accuracy or nostalgic recollections of Romanticism (Azorín).
Unamuno: The Intellectual and Existential Novel
Miguel de Unamuno, playwright and poet with strong expression of language and sensory images, especially in the idealization of the Castilian landscape, is now seen as an essayist, intellectual, and thinker, one of the most influential of our time, due to the depth of his thinking and his obsessions and existential concerns.
The novel is his authentic field test in which he answers to the above schemes of Realism. His novels, of existentialist character, pick up their intellectual attitude, his philosophical view of the world, and his ideological and existential concerns. He conceived the novel as a genre to express ideas, not a plot. His novel reflects his intention to renew the language, form, and narrative techniques, according to the tenets of modernism. Unamuno calls his novel a “Nivola” to distance them from the realistic. In Nivola, language is more intellectual, and the author fills the order of objective reality to be handled in accordance with the laws and standards that he imposes.
Baroja: The Social and Naturalist Novel
Of lonely and reclusive character, he maintains a radical pessimism about nature and humanity: “There is no source of clean water without men messing there with their legs and dirtying it. It’s in his nature.” Baroja does not blame a particular human group, but a corrupt global society.
- Beware of social or religious organizations, political parties, or collective initiatives because he regards life as a struggle in which the weak always lose.
- In the literary crossroads between despair and anguish of Romanticism, the deterministic view of the world, and impressionism descriptive and psychological environments of the characters or the tendency to evoke nostalgia.
Valle-Inclán: Avant-Garde Modernist Novel
He tries to make his life and work a constant aesthetic invention mixing reality and fantasy, mindful of the thematic and formal renewal of his work. In the novel, he stars in one of the largest contemporary breaks with the traditional concept of gender. He starts with the “Sonatas” in a more lush modernism, rich in images and bright, flashy language, where the sensory elements are used for the stylization and idealization of the Galician environment. In his second term, from 1920, classic styling rules deforming the grotesque, which leads to the limit of expressionistic realism, as it seeks to remove the mask from life by grotesque distortion and thus discover its authentic image. The absurdity provides a critical view of the world and of bourgeois society, as shown by his ruthlessly most corrupt and false side. But at the same time, it brings the renewal of the ways of literary genres and language.