The Quest

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The Quest

by Pío Baroja

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Madrid around 1900; published in Spanish (as La busca) in 1904, in English in 1922.

SYNOPSIS

After his mother’s death, Manuel Alcázar, a young Spanish boy, struggles to survive on the streets of Madrid.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872-1956), considered by some the most influential Spanish novelist of the twentieth century, was born in the Basque region of northern Spain and raised largely in Madrid, Spain’s capital, where his family moved when he was seven and where he lived for most of his life. Baroja studied medicine, and worked briefly as a doctor before giving up this profession, first to run a bakery owned by his family and then to write. He published his first two books, a collection of short stories and a novel, La casa de Aizgorri (The House of Aizgorri) in 1900. A prolific writer, Baroja ultimately produced more than 100 books, including over 60 novels as well as volumes of memoirs and collections of short stories, essays, and poems. Among his best known works is a trilogy entitled La lucha por la vida (1904; The Struggle for Life, 1922-24), of which The Quest is the first part: La busca (1904; The Quest, 1922); Mala hierba (1904; Weeds, 1923); Aurora roja (1904; Red Dawn, 1924). Like The Quest, most of Baroja’s individual novels form part of a series of connected works. Altogether Baroja wrote 11 trilogies, as well as a series of 22 novels and novellas Memorias de un hombre de action (1913-35; Memoirs of a Man of Action) based on the life of a nineteenth-century Spanish adventurer to whom he was distantly related. Adventure features prominently among his more popular tales, including Zalacain el aventurero (1909; Zalacain the Adventurer), César o nada (1910; Caesar or Nothing, 1919), and (Las inquietudes de Shanti Andia (1911; The Restlessness of Shanti Andia and Other Writings, 1959). While Baroja’s earliest works also contain elements of adventure, they focus as well on the characters’ social and economic milieu. The Quest, for example, presents a gritty and often brutal picture of urban life in working-class Madrid, as the novel’s main character, Manuel Alcazar, is buffeted by socio-economic forces beyond his control.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Spain after 1898

Spanish life in the early twentieth century was overshadowed by a national catastrophe at the very end of the nineteenth, when Spain suffered a humiliating military defeat by the United States and lost the remnants of its once mighty world empire. The actual fighting in the Spanish-American War lasted less than three months, from May to July 1898, but the decisive and one-sided outcome shocked the Spanish public and revealed the weakness of Spanish arms. The Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war in December stripped Spain of the colonies over which the conflict had arisen: Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea, and Guam and the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean. In addition to marking the emergence of the United States as a world power and illustrating the decayed state of Spain’s military, the war left Spain with the self-image of a weak and backward nation. In the minds of many, Spain’s perceived stagnation and backwardness contrasted especially sharply with America’s forward-looking energy and drive. “What a country!” one of The Quest’s characters exclaims during a casual conversation about the United States: “That’s what you call progress!” (Baroja, Quest, p. 131).

While the novel focuses primarily on the textures and difficulties of working-class life in Madrid, such passages offer vital clues to the larger context in which Baroja wrote. Baroja was one of a number of Spanish writers whose work was deeply influenced by the shock of the Spanish-American War. Known as the Generation of 1898, these philosophers, poets, essayists, and so forth varied widely in their outlooks. While Baroja himself rejected the idea that he was a member of any cohesive group, literary critics have persisted in labeling him as the Generation of 1898’s leading novelist, citing some fundamental goals that he shared with this otherwise diverse group of writers. Chief among those shared goals was a desire to address Spain’s social ills, which had long included widespread poverty and persistent political instability. In addition, Baroja and other members of the generation wished to bring Spanish culture more into step with the rest of the continent by exposing it to recent developments in European intellectual life. Baroja was especially affected by the ideas of two influential nineteenth-century figures, the English biologist Charles Darwin and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (see below).

Regeneración

By the early years of the twentieth century, the Generation of 1898’s aspirations had been epitomized by the popular catchword regeneration or “regeneration,” which became a key concept for those who wished to improve Spanish society. Like much about the man, Baroja’s attitude to the Generation of 1898 and to regeneration was ambivalent and contradictory. For example, Baroja later denied membership in the Generation of 1898, yet he engaged in a brief creative association with the very man who coined that label, José Martinez Ruiz. Known by his pseudonym Azorín, Martinez Ruiz would soon become the leading Spanish literary critic of the day. In 1901, just a few years before Baroja wrote The Quest, Azorin, Baroja, and another writer named Ramiro de Maeztu formed a group called simply Los tres, the Three. Dedicated to the regeneration of Spanish society through such vaguely defined means as educational and economic improvements, the group broke up shortly after being founded. Its brief existence, however, is echoed in the novel when Manuel and two of his idle ne’er-do-well friends form a gang of the same name, the Three. The gang’s one escapade, a robbery, turns into a farce when the Three comically botch the job.

Historians have found the breakup of the real-life Three unsurprising, since each of the group’s members held strongly nonconformist, individualistic ideas that at times approached anarchism. Each, scholars have observed, also favored discussion over concrete action, a propensity that some have seen as applying to the Generation of 1898 as a whole. Indeed, at times the writers of the movement themselves lamented their preference for words over deeds. For example, in his novel La voluntad (1902; Volition) Azorín agonizes over his inability to act, a paralysis of the will he sees as stemming from too much critical analysis. Azorin’s novel also offers a portrait of Baroja in the character of Enrique Olaiz, a romantic who scorns the masses, exalts the gifted individual, and opposes any political system that relies on rigid dogma, whether it be socialism, democracy, or anarchism. Baroja’s own political views resist easy categorization, but he has been described as a mild anarchist who ideally preferred a stateless society but had no desire to see his views translated into action.

As Azorín’s novel Volition suggests, the writers of the Generation of 1898 grew acutely self-consciousness about what they perceived as a gulf between their discussions of Spain’s ills and their lack of concrete action to remedy those ills. Reflecting this self-consciousness, in The Quest Baroja satirizes the advocates of regeneration with a comical depiction of a Madrid shoe shop grandiosely called “The Regeneration of Footwear.” The shop is run by Manuel’s uncle Ignacio, a cobbler and “a mild liberal” who enjoys discoursing about “the future of Spain and the reasons for national backwardness—a topic that appeals to most Spaniards, who consider themselves regenerators” (Quest, p. 60). Enjoying the sound of his own voice, Señor Ignacio “swelled with enthusiasm over these words about the national sovereignty” but stopped short of political action, limiting himself to talking about what “he’d certainly do if he had a say in the government” (Quest, pp. 60-61).

Working-class children and family life in Madrid

Overtly political content is less prominent in The Quest than is Baroja’s vivid evocation of the sights, sounds, and smells of daily life in Madrid. Spain’s capital since 1561, Madrid has been the nation’s center not only politically and geographically but culturally as well. The city has long been divided into different barrios, or districts, each with its own style and flavor. These barrios have been further grouped into three categories-altos (high), centrales (middle), and bajos (low)—depending on the social rank of their inhabitants and on their position relative to the low-lying areas along the Manzanares River, which runs through the city. The Quest takes place largely in the barrios bajos, the poor districts near the river’s edge. Here, at the time of the novel, the city’s slums stretched southward towards the river along the Calle de Toledo (Toledo Street) from the Plaza Mayor (Main Square) near the city center.

The most dramatic change that occurred in Spanish city life over the course of the nineteenth century was a sharp rise in urban populations, not just in Madrid but in other cities as well. Like Manuel in the novel, peasants came to Madrid and other cities in hope of economic opportunity. Madrid grew earlier and faster than other cities. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly half its population was born elsewhere because the capital attracted hopeful immigrants from throughout the Iberian peninsula. By the late nineteenth century, major cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao had begun undertaking ensanches or planned expansions. In 1900 Madrid’s population stood at about one million; Barcelona and Bilbao both more than

ANARCHISM, SOCIALISM, AND CACIQUISMO

Like Seńor Ignacio in The Quest, many Spaniards at the beginning of the twentieth century felt as if they had no say in their nation’s political process. Under the Constitution of 1876, devised to quell the political instability of earlier decades, political power in Spain alternated between the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. In order to assure that each party got its turn in power, elections were fixed on the local level by bosses called caciques. Known as caciquismo, this artificial system brought political order, but at the cost of corruption and disenfranchisement. By the 1890s caciquismo was breaking down, and revolutionary political creeds such as socialism and anarchism were gaining ground, especially in the increasingly restless Spanish labor unions. In 1897 anarchists shocked the nation by assassinating Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas, architect of the Constitution of 1876 and long Spain’s leading political figure. Between 1890 and 1901, anarchists in other countries also assassinated King Umberto I of Italy, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Carnot of France, and President McKinley of the United States. While anarchism continued to exert popular appeal In Spain, such terrorist methods alienated many who, like Pío Baroja, might otherwise have sought to realize anarchism’s goal of a stateless society.

doubled their populations between 1877 and 1900, with Barcelona’s jumping from an estimated 250,000 to about 600,000 (Shubert, p. 48).

As the nation’s capital, Madrid offered a large number of jobs in the government bureaucracy, which expanded in the second half of the nineteenth century. These jobs became highly popular, with competition for them growing exceedingly fierce, a phenomenon known as empleomanía. Other middle-class professions—law and medicine, primarily—also saw rapid growth in Madrid. However, Madrid was not an industrial city, (in contrast to Barcelona, for example). Therefore, working-class opportunities in Madrid fell largely into three categories: construction trades such as carpentry or plastering; retail shops or street stalls; and small manufacturing workshops owned by an artisan and staffed by a few apprentices, often family members. Examples from the novel include the vegetable stand of Senora Jacoba, Seńor Ignacio’s mother, and the shoe shop of Senor Ignacio himself, where Manuel works, though the restless boy lacks the commitment to be considered his uncle’s apprentice.

The novel touches on a number of areas that defined working-class daily life in Madrid and other Spanish cities around the turn of the twentieth century. Most apparent to the reader of The Quest is the harsh existence of the novel’s main character, fifteen-year-old Manuel. The economic necessity to help support their families meant that boys in working-class urban families received minimal schooling and took jobs at an early age, often as early as seven or eight years old. Social historian Adrian Shubert has recently drawn on five published autobiographies of working-class individuals—four men and one woman—who grew up in Spanish cities in the early 1900s, and whose experiences were very close to those of Manuel in the novel. For example,

Leandro Carro, the second son of a shoemaker with thirteen children, began work at the tender age of 7, as the errand boy in a household goods store and then, at 9, was apprenticed to an iron molder. Largo Caballero also began work at 7, passing rapidly through a variety of jobs before finding his mètier as a plasterer.
(Shubert, p. 138)

Boys generally began working earlier than girls, because more jobs were open to them and because they were expected to contribute more to supporting the family. Girls found work as domestic servants in wealthier households, but not until their mid-teens, the age at which both of Manuel’s sisters find such work in the novel. When they were not in school or working, Shubert reports, children were often “left to their own devices, roaming the town and its surroundings and playing, boys and girls together, the same games, jumping onto passing freight cars, hanging from aerial trams and going into tunnels” (Shubert, p. 137). This account (based on the woman’s autobiography among the five from which he drew) also bears a strong resemblance to Baroja’s depiction of Manuel’s adventures on the streets of Madrid in the novel.

Shubert’s findings on family life likewise resemble Baroja’s picture in the novel. While the family was a central feature of working-class life, the autobiographies Shubert cites suggest that working-class marriages were often rocky and that domestic violence was common. For example, Largo Caballero remembers “frequent quarrels between my parents, which usually ended with my father hitting my mother” (Caballero in Shubert, p. 139). “The break-up of a marriage,” Shubert continues, “through separation or, probably more commonly, the death of one of the spouses, generally made a difficult economic situation even more desperate. The hardship facing a single parent was particularly intense if that parent was a mother” (Shubert, p. 139). In the novel, two of Manuel’s aunts are beaten by their husbands, and Manuel’s father was a brutal machinist who quarreled with his wife Petra constantly and often beat her. The father’s death, two years before the novel opens, has forced Petra to give up their comfortable apartment, take a job as a servant in a Madrid boardinghouse, and send Manuel to live in the country with a relative.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

The Quest opens one evening in a middle-class neighborhood of Madrid, in the boardinghouse of Doña Casiana, where Petra, the maid, has finished her nightly scouring and fallen asleep in a chair, her mouth open. A scrawny woman with greyish skin, Petra breathes shallowly and with difficulty. She awakens as a clock in the hallway strikes and resumes her chores. A few minutes later noisy activity erupts at the brothel across the street, Isabella’s brothel, and Petra chats with Dona Casiana, who wishes that she herself ran such an establishment: “That’s what pays,” she tells Petra over and over (Quest, p. 6).

Before her husband’s death two years earlier, Petra herself had rented out rooms from her own home; afterward the loss of his income forced her to become a landlady’s servant instead of a landlady, a change in social status that she accepts stoically. She arranged for her two daughters to become servants as well, and sent her two sons to live with her brother-in-law, a railway station manager in a small rural town. Now, however, she has received word that Manuel, her rebellious older son, is on his way into Madrid, and she wonders what has happened to upset her plans. As it turns out, nothing in particular has happened—Manuel simply got tired of living with his relatives, who prefer his gentle brother Juan to the lazy Manuel. Perhaps, her brother-in-law writes, Manuel can become an apprentice and learn a trade in Madrid.

With some trouble Petra persuades Dona Casiana to let Manuel live in the boardinghouse, and the landlady agrees that Manuel can run errands and help serve meals. Manuel soon meets the colorful characters who rent rooms from

HOUSES OF GOOD AND ILL REPUTE

Boardinghouses like Dona Casiana’s in The Quest were common in Madrid, where few people lived completely alone even if single. Instead, single men and women most commonly rented a room in a converted house or large apartment and, as in the novel, shared communal meals that were included in the rent. This respectable arrangement stood in contrast to the brothels (some 150 in Madrid) that were legal m Spain in the early twentieth century. Prostitutes were supposed to register with the state, although in practice many more did not (presumably the prostitutes whom Manuel encounters in the novel were of this second variety). In 1899, for example, five years before the novel was published, Madrid had some 2,000 registered prostitutes, while official estimates of unregistered prostitutes stood at some 7,000.

Doña Casiana, and who gossip incessantly about each other. They include:

Doñ Telmo, an old man who carefully wipes all of his plates and glasses before eating from them.
The Biscayan, a gigantic woman with thick fleshy features.
Doña Violante, an elderly courtesan.
Doña Violante’s daughter Celia and granddaughter Irene, both of whom spend their days and nights trying to find a wealthy man to woo.
The Superman, a blond, thin, and very serious young journalist.
The Baroness, a mysterious woman reputed to be an adventuress, and her pretty young daughter Kate.
A half-English student named Roberto Hasting y Nuñez, who believes with unshakeable conviction that he is the legitimate heir to a vast fortune that he plans to acquire by means of genealogical proof.

Again Petra’s plans are frustrated. Her son Manuel loses his place at the boardinghouse when he gets into a fight with a salesman who is also one of the boarders. The boy goes to live with his uncle Ignacio, a cobbler, who has a shoe-repair shop in the slums of the barrios bajos, the poor district down near the Manzanares River, which flows through the city. Señor Ignacio’s shoerepair shop, The Regeneration of Footwear, competes with another similar establishment across the street with an equally grandiose name, The Lion of the Shoemaker’s Art. Both shops are rundown, and the only sense in which Ignacio’s shop regenerates footwear these days is by dismantling old shoes so the materials can be salvaged.

Manuel begins working alongside his cousins, a tough older boy named Leandro and his frail, roguish younger brother Vidal, who is about Manuel’s age. Manuel meets the rest of his uncle’s family: Ignacio’s mother, Seńora Jacoba, who has a stand where she sells vegetables; Ignacio’s wife, a sour woman named Leandra; and Leandra’s pretty, cheerful sister, Salome. Salome lives with her two children at Senora Jacoba’s house, which is near Senor Ignacio’s, and in which the family often gathers; Salome’s good-for-nothing husband helps himself to the money she makes by sewing, and he often beats her as well. Once, when Manuel and Vidal return to Senor Ignacio’s, they hear Ignacio beating his own wife Leandra, and Manuel goes to spend that night at Senora Jacoba’s. Manuel also meets Vidal’s gang of friends, who call themselves the Pirates. Among them is a bragging bully nicknamed El Bizco, or Cross-eye. Vidal and many of the other boys their age have girlfriends, and El Bizco boasts to Manuel about his sexual conquests among the neighborhood girls, telling him that most of them are prostitutes, along with their mothers.

The huge and decrepit tenement building in which Ignacio’s family lives has a number of nicknames in the neighborhood, but it is most commonly called El Corralon, or “the Big Yard,” because of the great size of its main courtyard. The massive building is “a microcosm,” its many inhabitants living in a state of abject poverty, without hope or dreams of any kind:

It harbored men who were everything and yet nothing: half scholars, half smiths, half carpenters, half masons, half business men, half thieves.… They lived as if sunk in the shades of a deep slumber, unable to form any clear notion of their lives, without aspirations, aims, projects, anything.
(Quest, p. 79)

As the weeks go by, Manuel becomes familiar with several of his new neighbors, including:

La Muerta, the Death, a haggard old crone who begs in the main entrance.
EI Corretor, a proof-corrector, and his large family.
Milagros, one of El Correto’s daughters, and the girlfriend of Leandro, Senor Ignacio’s elder son.
Señor Zurro, who owns a second-hand shop.
Encarna, Zurro’s daughter, who harbors a passion for Leandro and thus hates Milagros.
Rebolledo, a dwarf who operates a portable barber stand.
Perico, Rebolledo’s talented son, an inventor and artist.

One day Roberto Hasting, the half-English student back at the boardinghouse, pays a visit to The Regeneration of Footwear, where Manuel is at work. Hasting was the only one of Dona Casiana’s tenants who befriended Manuel, and who spoke up on Manuel’s behalf after his fight with the salesman. Now Roberto wants the boy’s help in searching the slums of the barrios bajos for two women who he says can assist him in his quest for the fortune that belongs to him by right. Manuel goes with Roberto to La Doctrina, an area across the Manzanares River where the city’s ill and crippled beggars gather; they are cared for here by Catholic nuns and wealthy women volunteers. Later Roberto says that one of the women he seeks is a former circus acrobat, and the two continue the search in various taverns, as Roberto questions several exotic characters, including an old circus performer.

It is also in a series of dingy taverns that Manuel witnesses some of the ups and downs of Leandro’s turbulent and tragic relationship with the pretty but unfaithful Milagros, who drops Leandro for a young man known as Lechuguino, the dude. Enraged and unstable, Leandro finally stabs Milagros, killing her before taking his own life. Manuel, finding that Milagros continued to wear a locket with Leandro’s picture in it, is fascinated by the thought that Milagros probably loved Leandro the whole time.

The shock of Leandro’s death ruins Senor Ignacio’s health, and Manuel is sent back to Dona Casiana’s. Petra arranges jobs for him, first as an errand boy in a grocery store and then as a baker’s apprentice. Manuel hates both jobs, but especially loathes the difficult and grimy work at the bakery, where his responsibilities include stoking the fire and moistening the loaves as they emerge from the oven, tasks that leave him with dirty, burned hands. When he falls ill his mother nurses him back to health, but after recovering, he is again ejected from the boardinghouse when Doña Casiana catches him trying to seduce her niece. Out on the street, he runs into two of his barrios bajos companions, Vidal and El Bizco, who have been leading a life of petty thievery. Reluctantly—for he and El Bizco hate each other—Manuel lets Vidal press him into joining the other two in a gang they call the Three. Soon afterward, Manuel learns that Petra has fallen ill and is confined to her bed. Manuel attends her as she rapidly declines, and is with her when she dies shortly thereafter.

Grief-stricken and fearful, Manuel now has nowhere to go. He bids goodbye to Doña Casiana (who forgave him when her niece was discovered in the bedroom of another young man). He takes up with other homeless urchins on the street, sleeping in doorways, alleys, or hollows in the Retiro, the large park in central Madrid. For a while Manuel picks up odd jobs to sustain himself, but eventually he is forced to seek food at the María Cristina barracks, a charity establishment that serves the poor. There he encounters Roberto, who insists, “someday I’m going to be wealthy, and when I am I’ll recall these hard times with pleasure” (Quest, p. 207). Roberto brings Manuel up to date on his quest for the fortune he considers rightfully his. Manuel suspects that Roberto is “a bit off his base,” though he keeps his suspicions to himself (Quest, p. 208). Eventually Roberto produces a detailed family tree supporting his case, but Manuel remains unconvinced.

Manuel seeks out Vidal and El Bizco, and the Three embark on a series of shady adventures that leave Manuel feeling remorseful yet unsure of what other choices he has in life. In one episode, they break into a house but find little worth stealing; attacked by a guard dog, they barely escape, selling their scanty takings to a trapero, or trash dealer. After a period of living on the streets, Manuel meets another trapero who calls himself Señor Custodio, and who offers Manuel a job and board. Tired of sleeping in the rough outdoors and with winter approaching, Manuel accepts. He finds life at Señor Custodio’s well run rubbish yard pleasant and interesting, particularly when he meets his employer’s attractive daughter, Justa. The flirtatious girl only teases him, however, and he is heartbroken when she decides to marry the son of a butcher. When he encounters the ragged El Bizco on the street, Manuel refuses to reconstitute the defunct trio.

Attending a bullfight with Señor Custodio’s family, including Justa and her suitor, Manuel is sickened by the spectacle. He picks a fight with the butcher’s son, but is manhandled and humiliated by the other boy’s friends. He passes that night walking the streets, and talks with two prostitutes he knew when he was keeping company with Vidal and El Bizco. As day breaks, Manuel struggles to make sense of his life. He decides that for some, life holds indolence, vice, and darkness, while for others it holds work, fatigue, and sunlight. The novel ends with Manuel’s conclusion that he should belong to the “the folk who toil in the sun, not those who dally in the shadows” (Quest, p. 289).

TAVERN LIFE

While bullfights, circuses, and inexpensive theater were all popular entertainments among urban working-class Spaniards at the time of the novel, by far the greatest amount of leisure time was spent in the many taverns that could be found in virtually every neighborhood. These drinking establishments offered male companionship (though less respectable women frequented them as well), often accompanied by a game of cards. In the novel Manuel drinks in a tavern and plays must a popular card game in such settings.

The struggle for life

In describing La Corrala, the great building in which Senior Ignacio lives with his family, Baroja calls it “a seething world in little, as busy as an anthill … a microcosm” (Quest, p. 78). As the comparison of its inhabitants to ants suggests, the grinding poverty of this miniature world has reduced the men and women who live there to the level of animals:

From time to time, like some gentle sunbeam amidst the gloom, the souls of these stultified, bestial men,—of these women embittered by harsh lives that held neither solace nor illusion,—would be penetrated by a romantic, disinterested feeling of tenderness that made them live like human beings for a while; but when the gust of sentimentalism had blown over, they would return to their moral inertia, as resigned and passive as ever.
(Quest, p. 80)

In other words, poverty’s dehumanizing effect on these people has been accomplished by stripping them of their feelings—not just any feelings, but the “disinterested” and tender feelings for others that, Baroja says, separate humans from nonhuman animals. The streets of Madrid are depicted as a similarly dehumanizing environment, in which the strong, driven by self-interest and lack of feelings, prey upon the weak, and in which anyone can fall victim to random, impersonal forces. By using such terms as “microcosm” in his description of La Corrala, Baroja implies that the larger world outside that of the novel works in a similar way.

Like the very title of the trilogy to which The Quest belongs, The Struggle for Life, this view of the world owes much to the influential ideas of English biologist Charles Darwin (1809-82), ideas that revolutionized virtually every area of intellectual endeavor in late-nineteenth-century Europe. In proposing a mechanism for biological evolution, Darwin suggested that all living beings are shaped by a harsh, impersonal, and unceasing competition for survival—and that humans have been shaped by such competition just like other animals. Published in his book The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin’s conceptions of nature and humanity had a huge impact on European thought, because they were easily (if often misleadingly) carried over from biology into other areas, such as social theory, politics, art, and philosophy. Darwinian theory, for instance, was used to reinforce ideas about the positive moral value of work, part of the social fabric in prosperous industrial societies such as late-nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.

Baroja and other writers of the Generation of 1898 wished to expose Spanish society not only to Darwin’s but also to other recent ideas that had recreated the European intellectual landscape by the late nineteenth century. However, Darwin’s ideas may have seemed particularly relevant to Spain in the early twentieth century, a once powerful nation that had recently and cat-astrophically fallen victim to competitive forces in the Spanish-American War. Furthermore, the moralizing ending of The Quest —in which Manuel accepts the value of hard work—perhaps reflects the author’s endorsement of a work ethic that Darwin’s ideas reinforced, and that already existed in northern European countries like Britain. The novel’s ending can be seen as suggesting that only by adopting such values will Spain be able to compete successfully in a harsh world and emerge from the “backwardness” that seemed to plague it in the early twentieth century. Otherwise, Baroja seems to hint, Spain risks a future of dehumanized idleness similar to that which has robbed La Corrala’s inhabitants of drive and ambition.

Sources and literary context

Baroja’s own life in Madrid supplied the realistic details that bring the city to life in The Quest. Other experiences also contributed to the novel’s authentic feel: for example, Baroja’s familiarity with the daily routine of a bakery (he had run a bakery owned by his family) is reflected in the description of the bakery job that Manuel briefly holds. By the end of the trilogy Manuel has fully accepted the middle-class work ethic, which he first begins to grasp at the end of The Quest, and he achieves a modestly prosperous existence with a steady job. This overall structure recalls the paradigm of the Spanish picaresque novel, in which the adventures of a rogue or pícaro typically end with his achieving a secure if not extravagant bourgeois existence. Manuel’s avoidance of work—as well as the combination of humor and brutality in the descriptions of the hardships that arise from it—can be traced to this most popular of Spanish literary genres, the prototype of which was the influential anonymous novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times).

Other literary influences include novels by England’s Charles Dickens (1812-70), such as Oliver Twist (1837-38), which follows the adventures of a young urchin on the teeming streets of London. Also there are the realistic social novels of Russia’s Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) and Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) and the gritty nineteenth-century French novels of the basfonds (lower depths) that focus on urban poverty. Closer to home are the realistic novels of Spain’s Pérez Galdos (see Fortunata and jacinta , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Nonfiction writings that influenced Baroja included those not only of Darwin but also of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and his follower Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), both of whom depicted humans as solitary strugglers in an indifferent world and stressed the role of the individual will in facing the trials of life. In The Quest there is the minor character of a journalist nicknamed the Superman. His nickname is a reference to the so-called superman of Nietzsche’s philosophy, a hypothetical person of superior intellect and moral standards, whom humanity, according to Nietzsche, had the potential to evolve into. Critics have also seen a Nietzschean influence in the determined, self-disciplined, iron-willed Roberto Hasting, who reappears throughout the trilogy. Baroja himself named Darwin, Dickens, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as among his most important influences.

Reception

In keeping with Baroja’s prodigious output, all three novels in the trilogy—The Quest, Weeds (Mala hierba), and Red Dawn (Aurora rojo) —were published in the same year, 1904. All three books enjoyed both popular and critical success with Spanish audiences. Critic Gre-gorio Maranon praised the trilogy for opening the eyes of Spain’s middle class to the dire poverty that afflicted most Spaniards. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset—strongly related to but of a later era than the Generation of 1898—lauded both Baroja’s social conscience and the trilogy’s realism, dubbing the author el Homero de la canalla, “the Homer of the rabble” (Ortega in Patt, p. 94; see Meditations on Don Quixote also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Baroja’s work has generally been accorded less recognition among English-language critics than among those writing in Spanish; Spanish author Camilio José Cela (see The Family of Pascual Duarte , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times) later lamented the fact that Baroja never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, the leading twentieth-century American writers John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) both included Baroja among their most important influences. Hemingway, who admired Spanish culture in general and certainly enjoyed bullfights more than the novel’s Manuel, visited the older writer in Madrid three weeks before Baroja’s death in 1954. When asked to act as a pallbearer at Baroja’s funeral, Hemingway declined, saying that he felt unworthy to do so.