Experiments in Genre: Baroja's Vidas sombrías and the Short Story in English

Abstract

Encouraged by the author's identification of his literaryinfluences—Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Stendhal— little critical attention has been paid to transnational connections that go beyond PíoBaroja's interest in nineteenth-century English, French or Russian literature, but which instead coincide with his own novelistic apprenticeship. This article considers Baroja's anticipation of changing paradigms in European and North American prose fiction, by suggesting alternative, but compelling, comparisons with the theories and practice of contemporaneous international figures, such as Henry James and James Joyce, among others. The article analyses Baroja's first published work, the collection of short stories entitled Vidas sombrías (1900), in the context of the English, Irish and American short story at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses firstly on the central importance of individual consciousness rendered through experimental narrative techniques in line with the fragment or ‘sketch’ of contemporaneous Anglo-American writers; secondly, pictorial and spatial form; and thirdly, the emphasis on the Gothic, supernatural or ‘uncanny’. Baroja's fiction, from its earliest incarnations, intersects with both the English and American tradition, simultaneously revealing nineteenth-century influences through Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism, in the transition to Modernism in all its varied forms.