Pío Baroja & Science

Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

Penn State

Pío Baroja’s Parascientific Epistemology

Having been a medical student, then a physician for a short while, Pío Baroja was familiar with the non-social sciences of his time. He certainly found his way around the theories of Lamarck, of Linnaeus, and of Darwin, and had no qualms about making pronouncements about heredity, environment, and human behavior obeying some simple biological laws such as the survival of the fittest. But Baroja was also a moralist and chronicler of his epoch, as well as a curious spirit, so he incorporated disciplines such as history and anthropology into his cultural baggage, and certainly took from them what he could when creating his characters.

A familiarity with the sciences, particularly medicine and biology, was instrumental in Baroja’s career as a writer. Carmen Iglesias believes that medicine allowed him to delve deeper into his knowledge of human nature and to see mankind “[…] como sólo un médico puede, desde el punto de vista biológico y moral” (Iglesias 124). (… as only a doctor can, from a biological and moral perspective.) Oftentimes, Baroja’s approach, or method, resembled the scientist’s – particularly the sociologist’s and the biologist’s – in that he began not only by observing behavior, but also by putting his own behavioral patterns, or subjectivity, into the observation (and accepting that it could be no other way).

Such a lifelong and steady connection to Science, and a constant application of the Sciences, implies a theory of knowledge, an epistemology; in this case, Baroja’s epistemology. I am not, however, proposing that Baroja founded a system of knowledge, or that he was out to demonstrate how the sciences worked and how knowledge came about. Baroja’s epistemology simply suggests that Baroja stopped to reflect on the sciences, and then used some sciences in an effort to comprehend the nature of the world and of the human psyche. Now in light of Jean Piaget’s thesis that there are three different categories or types of epistemologies --metascientific[1], parascientific, and scientific[2] -- I propose that Baroja’s epistemology is “parascientific.”

Piaget described the parascientific epistemologies as those whose point of departure is indeed the sciences, but whose ultimate aim is to establish an understanding of a different order, “[…] un mode de connaissance distinct de la connaissance scientifique (en opposition avec celle-ci et non plus en son prolongement” (Piaget 16)[3]. (… a form of knowledge other than scientific knowledge (opposed to scientific knowledge and no longer stemming from it).)

In Baroja’s case, the knowledge resulting from an acquaintance with the sciences is one of the human condition, and particularly of how the human condition manifests itself through suffering. Initially, Baroja’s approach to suffering is scientific. The outcome, however, is something non-scientific: the story, the novel, as well as the personal viewpoints expressed in the novel. For example, being somewhat acquainted with Darwin’s theories, Baroja proceeds to draw his own conclusions, at times racist,[4] and even to preach hardness and immorality.[5] In El árbol de la ciencia a medical doctor affirms that in Spain, “[…] desde un punto de vista moral, hay dos tipos: el tipo ibérico y el tipo semita. Al tipo ibérico asignaba el doctor las cualidades fuertes y guerreras de la raza; al tipo semita las tendencies rapaces, de intrigua y de comercio” (El árbol 68). (From a moral point of view there are two ethnic types in Spain: the Iberian and the Semitic. To the Iberian type the doctor attributed the strong and martial qualities of the race; to the Semitic type the rapacious leanings toward intrigue and commerce.) These are obviously parascientific conclusions and pronouncements, especially coming from a man of science.

La lucha por la vida (The Struggle for Life)(1904) is yet another example of a parascientific approach to epistemology. Knowing Baroja’s acquaintance with the sciences, a novel with such a title points directly to Darwin. But that is where science stops and a detailed observation of the Madrid underworld begins. According to Longhurst, “[…] the life-in-the-raw approach hides a good deal of conscious contrivance and of the most deliberate kind of selectivity […] Baroja is uncertain as to whether he wants the reader to take for real life what is after all a literary artifact” (32). What Longhurst is suggesting is that in its oscillation between subjectivity and objectivity, The Struggle for Life presages, in fact, the impossibility of realism.

The title of Baroja’s 1893 doctoral dissertation was, “El dolor, studio psicofísico” (“Pain, a Psycho-physical Study”). Iglesias affirms that this was a “pretty bad” dissertation where Baroja “[…] defendía que la vida normal daba una sensación de indiferencia ni dolorosa ni placentera” (107). (… defended that everyday life provoked a sensation of indifference that was neither painful nor pleasant)

However mediocre, a dissertation such as Baroja’s not only announces all the novels that he had yet to write, but also points to an axiom. Pain was what the 21-year-old medical student chose to focus on for a dissertation; pain, both physical and psychological. In the beginning there was pain, and pain was personally, physically and psychologically with Baroja who sensed that it could be a subject of study. Pain could be held up to the light, scrutinized, prodded, dissected, analyzed, explained, and perhaps even eradicated.

Although the medical career was abandoned soon after the doctoral dissertation, pain continued to be one of the most important themes – if not the most important in Baroja’s novels. Baroja’s literary trajectory can easily be described as that of an explanation of pain. It is a constant effort to understand it, and perhaps come to terms with it. Flores Arroyuelo suggests that Baroja’s dissertation was surely a product of recent experiences. “En su sensibilidad, a flor de piel, todo lo que le rodeaba le hería, […]” (11). (His sensitivity was so heightened that anything could hurt him.) It is in this effort to discern the pain he is feeling that Baroja uses all the sciences at his reach. Needless to say, he is more acquainted with some sciences than with others.

If in the beginning there was pain, it was medicine that was first called to the rescue. Granted, Baroja does affirm that he chose a medical career for lack of anything better to do and that he pursued his medical studies as one would swallow a bitter pill (Iglesias 105). Nonetheless, his choice of careers could still be the product of his relationship with pain. His indecision as to what goals to pursue must have caused pain, as well as his hypersensitivity and his feeling of helplessness before the spectacle of selfishness and misery that the world presented to him (Iglesias 107). It could very well be that in 1893, the young medical student, in spite of feeling as jaded as he did, chose medicine because it was “the art of healing” (Flores Arroyuelo 12). In this sense, medicine was a possible solution.

Baroja’s youth coincided with an epochal enthusiasm for Science. There was widespread belief that Science would be a cure-all for humanity. Like Hurtado in El árbol de la ciencia, Baroja went to medical school full of illusions, hoping to find, “[…] una disciplina fuerte y al mismo tiempo afectuosa, y se encontraba con una clase grotesca […]” (El árbol 43). (… hoping to find a strong and welcoming discipline, and found a grotesque class instead…).

Before broaching the collapse of confidence in the ability of science, I would like to apply Piaget’s thesis to Baroja. I propose that Baroja’s point of departure was psychophysical pain, in its scientific manifestations, and that, as already mentioned, his point of arrival is literature. The present study will concentrate on Baroja’s work dating from before 1912, specifically two novels: Camino de perfección, (The Way to Perfection) 1902, and El árbol de la ciencia, (The Tree of Knowledge) 1911. According to Beatrice Patt, Camino de perfección is a pivotal point in Baroja’s development as a writer and thinker because it is with the publication of this novel that Baroja emerges as a serious writer.(88) As to El árbol de la ciencia, it can be read as a different, revised, more mature version of Camino de perfección.

According to Pío Caro Baroja[6], both Osorio[7] and Hurtado[8] are hypersensitive beings struggling to come to grips with certain issues, Hurtado with his search for a scientific truth, Osorio with his idea of a vital truth (Caro Baroja 18). As Longhurst notes, after El árbol de la ciencia, the publication of El mundo es ansí in 1912 closes the first -- or personal -- phase of Baroja the novelist: “After El mundo es ansí, between 1912 and 1930, Baroja was to devote himself almost exclusively to a long series of historical novels which dealt with aspects of Spain during the first half of the nineteenth century” (31).

Although it appears that Baroja pursued his medical studies without much enthusiasm, Beatrice Patt believes that this experience left a deep impression. “An abiding if not wholly unqualified admiration for science and the scientific method persists in his works until his last years; the number of physicians appearing on the pages of his collected works has been estimated at more than two hundred. For Baroja, at any rate, if literature was his wife, medicine was his mistress” (Patt 15).

E. H. Templin’s reaction to such a statement could very well be that, “Some sense and much nonsense has been written on the influence of medical science on Baroja” (Templin 168). Whichever be the case, we should also keep in mind that Baroja’s “[…] medical acuity has merged into a general more or less scientific method for describing generic and individual characteristics, with much more of the anthropologist than of the doctor, when dealing with tipos, and with as much or more of the painter than of any kind of scientist” (Ibid).

Let us now stop to look at how two of these characters, these medical students, are observed in the light of science, and at how the author applies the sciences at his reach in an effort to explain the pain at the very core of their existence. This will demonstrate that Pío Baroja remains suspended between 19^th century realism and 20^th century relativism, between an effort to believe in the truth of the external world and the value of scientific enquiry, and a feeling that because of its distorting mechanisms, the mind can only know subjective reality.

Camino de perfección (The Way to Perfection), written in 1902, is a novel of youth, a bildungsroman of sorts. Fernando Ossorio, the protagonist, is a young medical student about to set out on a painful existential journey, knowing well that there might not be any light at the end of the tunnel he is willfully entering. I say “willfully” because at no time does Ossorio make any effort to talk himself out of his seemingly impulsive decisions, but then again he may have already attempted to do so – before the observer and the reader came into play. Perhaps this is not “said” in the beginning of the novel because it did not catch the “eye” of the observer, or because the reader and the observer arrived in medias res, after the die had been cast.

Although Ossorio does not hesitate to abandon his medical studies, the novel is clearly not about this decision, nor does it describe in detail the protagonist’s life as a medical student as does El árbol de la ciencia. Ossorio simply explains that he used to like medicine but that now it disgusts him, extraordinarily so. “Al principio me gustaba; ahora me repugna extraordinariamente” (Camino 8). He then explains that some “spring” (like a mattress spring or watch spring) has broken in his life. At this moment Ossorio and his observer go their separate ways, only to meet again a year later. By then Ossorio has abandoned medicine and has dedicated himself wholly to painting.

It is important to keep in mind that in the first two chapters of Camino it is Ossorio and the narrator who do the telling, whereas El árbol is always narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator who announces Hurtado’s fate at the end of the first chapter. “Su preparación para la ciencia no podia ser más desdichada” (El árbol 43). (His initial encounter with science couldn’t have been more ill-fated.)

In the very first paragraph of Camino, Ossorio is described both physically and mentally by a first person singular, a grammatical “I”, an observer, nothing else, an observer to the point that at times it is as if an “eye” were doing the talking and the writing. “Entre los compañeros que estudiaron medicina conmigo, ninguno tan extraño y digno de observación como Fernando Ossorio […]” (Camino 5) (Of all the medical students who studied medicine with me, none was as bizarre or as intriguing as Fernando Ossorio.)[9]

I used the word “intriguing” to translate “digno de observation,” but what the narrator is in fact saying is that Ossorio was worth “observing.” Now, observation is one of the first and foremost issues of the epistemology of biology. According to Meyer, the observer is, in fact, what makes the epistemology of biology so ambiguous.

“Quant aux sciences biologiques, elles semblent souffrir d’une sorte de dépression

épistémologique qui les condamne à hésiter entre une humilité exprérimentale

tenue pour le vertu meme, et une prétention <<philosophique>> […] Il semble que

la biologie […] perde son sang froid dès qu’elle consent à poser les <<grands

problèmes>>. […] Il semble que la biologie n’ait pas réussi à trouver, entre la

physique et la métaphysique, la place qui lui revient. […] C’est pourquoi, […] il lui

faut tenter de rester spectateur impartial” (Meyer 781-782). (As to the biological

sciences, they seem to suffer from an epistemological depression that condemns

them to hesitate between an experimental humility that is taken for virtue itself, and

philosophical ambitions. […] It appears that biology loses its cold blood the minute

it begins to deal with the great problems. […] It appears that biology has not

succeeded in finding, somewhere between physics and metaphysics, its own place.

[…] That is why […] he [the biologist] needs to try to remain an impartial

observer.)

Let us not forget that during Baroja’s lifetime (1872-1956) the biological sciences were already confronted with ambiguities such as those described by Meyer. Perhaps the biologist needed to try to remain an impartial observer. He needed to try, because that is all he could do, try. Baroja, in fact, plays with this impossibility of being an impartial observer. The first person singular telling the story could also very well be the third person singular being observed. Such is often the case with Baroja, often seeming to observe the medical student he once was, although Baroja does claim not to be Ossorio, and, in fact, clearly states that Ossorio was based on a medical student who had been an acquaintance of his (Patt 89).

From the very beginning of Camino, therefore, there is this ambition of scientific enquiry. The first person singular doing the talking and the writing is not saying that he/she wishes to go out and have a good time with Ossorio, or study with him, or play a trick on him, this “I” simply remarks that Ossorio is worth observing (for the sake of observing). Immediately afterward, Ossorio is quickly described physically (tall, dark, silent, with restless eyes, and melancholy expression), and mentally (either talented or slow, depending on other students’ observations). It is as if the “I” doing the telling, is eager to get these preliminary observations or niceties out of the way and get to the heart of the matter, which is nothing other than behavior.

Ossorio happens to be a collector. What he collects are scapulars, amulets, medals, and ribbons, from corpses. We can certainly agree with Templin who writes that for Baroja, collecting “[…] becomes a (solipsistic) chifladura, with no other justification than the supreme (and empty) one of the thing for an in itself” (Templin “Three Pivotal Concepts” 308). This is also, however, the narrator’s first observation having to do with Ossorio’s behavior. Ossorio takes from corpses and what he takes are what could be considered trinkets of superstition. After all, the function of amulets and scapulars is to protect the bearer from harm. Here we have a corpse, an object of study, on the one hand, and magic paraphernalia on the other. This is how the reader is led on to this way of perfection, as the title says, a way to perfection which is in fact the genesis and etiology of Ossorio’s degeneration or decadence.

Instead of listening to his professors, Ossorio stares at either ailing or dead bodies and sketches them. The narrator, in turn, contemplates Ossorio’s sketches with lukewarm admiration. They are very good, but they do not resemble the originals. “Who cares?” such is Ossorio’s immediate reaction. “Lo natural es sencillamente estúpido. El arte no debe ser nunca natural” (Camino 6). (What is natural is simply stupid. Art should never be natural.) Ossorio’s conviction is that art should never be natural because it is Nature itself. In this particular instance, Baroja’s itinerary goes from the scientific to the non-scientific, a personal opinion, even a paradoxical one, of art as nature itself. This is possible, of course, if one assumes nature encompasses everything, even the non-natural.

Baroja applies Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of the struggle for life to Ossorio, and this leads to Ossorio’s self-diagnosis, […] es que soy un histérico, un degenerado” (Camino 6). (It’s that I am a hysteric, a degenerate.) From there, Ossorio/Baroja proceeds to describe the genesis of his affliction.

At this point Ossorio becomes the observer and the observed. “Dès que l’on aborde en sciences humaines un problème quelconque,” Lucian Goldmann writes, “[...] on se trouve à l’intérieur d’un cercle qui est l’expression du fait que le chercheur fait lui-même partie de la société qu’il se propose d’étudier [...] (Goldmann 992)” (Whatever the problems that the human sciences are faced with, they are immediately put inside a circle that is the expression of the fact that the observer himself is part of the society he is studying…) From the very beginning, both Ossorio and his observer are inside this circle.

Baroja – who is inside the circle as well – uses medicine, biology (the theory of heredity), psychology, and sociology to sketch Ossorio’s trajectory from child prodigy to degenerate. Flores Arroyuelo writes that, “Fernando Ossorio es un tipo clásico de inadaptado, no sólo socialmento or artísticamente, sino incluso con la religión […]” (51). (Fernando Ossorio is a classic case of someone incapable of adapting, not only socially and artistically, but even as far as religion was concerned…)

At times it is as if Baroja were taking the writer and physician Max Nordau’s diagnosis of degeneration and applying it to his protagonist. “But the physician,” Nordau writes, “[…] recognizes at a glance […] the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria” (15).

It was a French psychiatrist, B.A. Morel, who popularized the term “degeneration” in the mid 1800’s, and described it as a morbid deviation from an original type. Nordau explains that when an organism becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, but will form a new subspecies capable of transmitting the deviancy to its offspring (16). So it goes with Ossorio who calculates that his intelligence began to wane when he was in secondary school, after his grandfather’s death, after he uncovered a painful family secret that deeply troubled his soul (he does not, however, reveal the secret to the narrator): “[…] de tal modo que me hice torpe, huraño, y mis brillantes facultades desaparecieron, sobre todo mi portentosa memoria” (Camino 7). (I became stupid, timid, and my intellectual prowess disappeared, especially my superb memory.)

Ossorio’s mother was so troubled by her son’s change for the worse that she sent him away to a seminary where he was to spend the next four years of his life and where he claims to have become vicious and ill-intentioned.

It wasn’t until his father’s death that Ossorio returned to Madrid, his native city. At eighteen he began to study medicine, “[…] y yo, que antes había sido un prodigio, no he llegado a ser depués ni siquiera un mediano estudiante. Total: que gracias a mi educación han hecho de mi un degenerado” (Camino 8). (... after having been a prodigy, I wasn’t even able to become a mediocre student. Result: I am a degenerate thanks to my education.)

Ossorio/Baroja uses the word degenerate often. As the etymon implies, degenerate comes from degeneratus, the past participle of degenerare. The word contains the suffix de, which substracts from, or lessens, and the verb generate, to produce, to reproduce, to multiply the genes, or the genus. According to Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language the degenerate “departs from its race or kind.” Another definition is: “having sunk to a lower order than one’s ancestors of former self.” To degenerate, therefore, is to subtract from the genes, to make them lesser or of lesser quality.

Once again, Nordau’s diagnosis perfectly fits both Ossorio and Hurtado. Nordau explains that all degenerates lack a sense of morality and of right and wrong (18), so do Ossorio and Hurtado at different points in their lives. This leads to what Nordau calls a moral insanity whose psychological roots are unbounded egoism and impulsiveness (18). Another fitting characteristic is the condition of mental weakness that is to be observed in the degenerate as well. Nordau came to these conclusions by studying psychologists such as Charcot, Lombroso, Broussais, Broca, and, obviously, Morel. Now it could very well be that Baroja used the Nordau shortcut. Given the symptoms and the diagnosis, Baroja proceeded to create a degenerate protagonist.

Baroja could also be thinking of Darwin’s principle of natural selection when he makes Ossorio reiterate that he is a degenerate. In this case, Ossorio is judging himself as he would a species. So perhaps Baroja is suggesting that this species, this Ossorio species, having undergone one transformation, will undergo yet another. We should keep in mind, however, that according to Darwin, species do not necessarily enjoy a fixed existence, but are rather a commodity or sorts that change in response to the demands of the marketplace, and allow him to establish the theory of their natural selection and transformation.[10]

What has happened to Ossorio in the course of the first eighteen years of his life is that he has gone from being “the fittest” to a lesser being. It is quite interesting that a novel entitled Camino de perfección (Way to Perfection) contains this trajectory in the very beginning. It seems to be the wrong way around. Instead of there being a survival of the fittest, we see instead the ongoing decadence of he who started out as the fittest, a child prodigy. Instead of there being a struggle for life, there appears to be a progressive renunciation of it. As the years go by, Ossorio progressively gives up on life. We should keep in mind, however, that Ossorio opted for the medical career after having lost his prodigious intelligence. The decision to study medicine, consequently, could be considered a life option, since the ultimate goal of medicine is to preserve and save lives. Ossorio decided to do this even after he considered his intelligence doomed. Soon afterward, Ossorio gives up on medicine, and decides to paint instead. Once again, Ossorio and the narrator go their separate ways and lose track of each other for several years.

It is at an Arts Exposition, several years later, that the narrator comes across one of Ossorio’s paintings. It is hanging in an upstairs room along with what the jury considered to be the worst of the worst. “El cuadro se llamaba Horas de Silencio. Estaba pintado con desigualdad; pero había en todo él una atmósfera de sufrimiento contenido, una angustia, algo tan vagamente doloroso, que afligía el alma” (Camino 9). (The painting was entitled Hours of Silence. Although it lacked consistency of technique it was infused with an atmosphere of contained suffering, anguish, something so vaguely painful that it afflicted the soul.)

Chance has it that the narrator and Ossorio meet again at the precise moment when the narrator is contemplating Ossorio’s painting. This allows Ossorio to further develop his definition of art. When they met a few years before he had defined it as nature itself, now he adds that art is life. This does not mean that art copies life, or that art needs to be a faithful rendering of life. The tautology “art is life” identifies and at the same time distinguishes life from art, since there can only be identity of a difference. According to Longhurst, 19^th century realism was built on the assumption that there existed a reality outside of the work or art, a reality that could be copied or imitated. Once this belief was shaken all that was left was the sense that reality is the creation of the artist’s consciousness. “[…] the world may still be there, but it is no longer seen with the same eyes” (Longhurst 11). Thus, art ceases to want to be mimesis and becomes an exploration of its own possibilities instead. As for life, it can be considered and defined as an exploration of its own possibilities as well.

Ossorio and the narrator further explore these issues when the narrator remarks that Ossorio has painted from memory, without models. Ossorio’s immediate reaction is, “¡Claro! Así se debe pintar! ¿Qué no se recuerda, lo que me pasa a mí, los colores? Pues no se pinta” (Camino 10). (Obviously! That is the way to paint. What does one forget? What is going on inside me? Colors? Then don’t paint them!) In other words, knowledge, in this case art, has ceased to be an effort to express reality or the outside world. If there is truth to be found, it is in the act of perception itself, whether this perception be the artist’s or the scientist’s. We are being catapulted back into Plato’s cavern after having realized that there are no truths outside.

Ossorio blames his bitter thoughts about his entire being on heredity. “Sí, la influencia histérica […] se marca con facilidad en mi familia. La hermana de mi padre, loca; un primo, suicida; un hermano de mi madre, imbécil, en un manicomio; un tío, alcoholizado. [...] ¡Si yo supiera para qué sirvo!” (Camino 13-14). (Yes, the hysterical influence, […] can easily be seen in my family. My father’s sister, insane; a cousin who committed suicide; one of my mother’s brothers, an imbecile in a madhouse; an alcoholic uncle […] If I only knew my purpose in life!)

Once again, Baroja’s point of departure is a scientific concept, heredity, which he is applying to a character, and taking it elsewhere, away from science. He is toying with the idea that heredity would provide us with certain answers, notably “[…] a key to historical evolution, the nature of races, the nature and cause of cultural flowering and decay” (Templin 169). He is going from an idea of predetermination to one of purpose, specifically the protagonist’s purpose in life. Templin believes that at times Baroja favors heredity over environment since he often points to the immutability of human nature. Yet, at the same time, Ossorio wonders what he is good for, because he wants to do something to rise above what he considers to be his dull and seemingly worthless human condition. What this something is he does not know, but he is out searching for it. This means that in spite of the fatality of heredity and of human nature, there is still a missing piece, the vital truth that will become Ossorio’s quest in life. In fact, as Templin writes, “Baroja combines the culto del yo soberano with the Darwinian struggle for existence […] and with a tincture of Macchiavellianism and of the Nietzschean Superman […] (Templin 170)”

Donald Shaw points out that Baroja learned form Schopenhauer that suffering is a basic element of life, that the amount of suffering is proportional to the intellectual consciousness (134). Ossorio is an illustration of this suffering to which Baroja gives different names, such as disgust, fear, bitterness, anguish.

The rest of Camino will be a search for the vital truth or the purpose, and the road will lead away from science as a discipline. It is a road that takes Ossorio from religion, to love, to moral ethics. Caro Baroja believes that in Camino Baroja spares the artist, whereas he kills the scientist in El árbol.

In 1902, Baroja did not appear ready or willing to describe his experiences as a medical student or to interpret his decision to abandon his medical studies. He would wait nine years to do so, for the beginning of El árbol, which vividly describes the protagonist as a medical student, could very well have been the beginning of Camino.

The first part of El árbol is entitled “La vida de un estudiante en Madrid.” (The Life of a student in Madrid) Now Templin’s question is: “Would it matter for Baroja’s purposes if they were students of some other science?” And the answer is: “Yes, to the extent that medicine places hand and mind in the human wound, is in contact with what one may call the religious realities of life and death […] no, because human wounds, including neuroses, are no more a monopoly of the medical profession than the broad scientific, philosophical and political discussions in El árbol de la ciencia […]” (166). This takes us back to the idea of a parascientific epistemology. As a matter of fact, Templin’s answer to the question, “How much does Baroja know about science?” is that only an expert could really tell, but that in any case he displays both professional and unprofessional attitudes toward it (167).

Both Ossorio and Hurtado fail to find the strong and welcoming discipline they were expecting medicine to be. They also have similar reactions when standing in front of death itself, in its most concrete and least mysterious manifestation – the corpse. The attitude is quite unprofessional. While Ossorio takes amulets and other trinkets from corpses, Hurtado and his companions show no respect for the dead. In mockery, they shake hands with them, put bugs in their mouths, paper hats on their heads. Baroja is also very anecdotal and farcical when it comes to the corpse stories. To give but one example, Hurtado’s companions talk about a brain being sent to a doctor’s house, the housekeeper believing that these were cow brains, and preparing them for dinner.

Initially, such anecdotes could be cast aside by the reader, and labeled nonsense – but in fact, they are there to be weighed against other attitudes toward the meaning of life, suffering and death. All this takes place in the human brain, the same brain that could very well be mistaken for a main course and served at the dinner table, warm and well-seasoned.

The point of departure is medicine, studying medicine, going to classes, hating the textbooks. There are the body parts and the vital organs thrown in a barrel, an eyeball floating next to a heart. (El árbol 57) Then there is Hurtado’s hope that perhaps physiology will be interesting, more interesting than a novel, because it studies the functions of life. “Pero se engañó […]” (El árbol 64). (But he was lying to himself.) The point of arrival is philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Kant and of Schopenhauer, and also literature. At times it is as if in El árbol, Baroja – the man of science – had gone back to double check the conclusions he had drawn nine years before in Camino. These conclusions have to do with the collapse of confidence in the ability of science and with the demise of both protagonists’ illusions. With El árbol Baroja is determined to explain and to understand how this has happened.

The Spanish title is El árbol de la ciencia. It is translated into English as The Tree of Knowledge, undoubtedly because science is knowledge, and it opens up the possibilities of the story. There was, after all, a tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. This could be a story about disobedience, or about how bliss was lost and pain made its way into the world. On the other hand, a literal translation of the title could possibly mislead a potential reader. A book called the The Tree of Science could be a simple classification of the sciences, some placed at the roots, others at the tip of the branches. This is not what Hurtado or Baroja are after. “A Hurtado no le importaba nada la cuestión de los métodos y de las clasificaciones, ni saber si la sicología era una ciencia o un ciempiés inventado por los sabios […]” (El árbol 73). (Hurtado couldn’t care less about the question of methods and classifications, or of knowing if psychology was a science or an insect invented by wise men…) The narrator, however, does stop to mention that this is not one of Hurtado’s preoccupations. This means that it was definitely taken into consideration, then discarded. The way of knowledge began with the question of methods and classifications, it began with an epistemology of science – medicine, biology, heredity, psychology… only to arrive at something other than science. “[…] lo que quería encontrar era una orientación, una verdad spiritual y práctica al mismo tiempo” (Ibid). (What he wanted to find was a direction, a spiritual and practical truth.) In other words, what he was searching for, at that point in his life was an answer to two of Kant’s three questions: What should I do? What can I expect? (The first question having been an epistemological one: What do I know?) Thus, like Kant, Hurtado is going from knowledge, to faith, or the possibility of faith; from science, to something other than science, to something parascientific.

“La ciencia entonces, el instinto de crítica: la cantidad de mentira que se necesita para la vida. Andrés Hurtado piensa que es Adán, él quiere y piensa tomar la fruta del árbol de la Ciencia, quiere apartar al árbol de la Vida, frondoso y que da la inmortalidad, y que tapa y aniquila al árbol de la Ciencia. El árbol de la Vida ha sido impuesto por la cultura semítico-griega y hay que reemplazarla por la cultura de los hombres del norte, por la mentalidad científica” (Flores Arroyuelo 108). (Science therefore, the critical instinct: the quantity of lies one needs to survive. Andrés Hurtado thinks he is Adam, he wants the fruit from the tree of Science, he wants to forget the tree of Life, for it is tufted and promises immortality, and it covers and threatens the tree of Science. The tree of Life was planted by the Greco-Semitic culture which has to be replaced by the culture of the North, by the scientific mind.) This is, precisely, the scientist that Baroja will kill in Hurtado.

In the course of Hurtado’s fourth year of medical school, one of his classmates suggests that they attend a class on venereal diseases given by a professor at San Juan de Dios Hospital. This experience renders Hurtado so depressed and melancholy that he wonders if Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be reduced to a mathematical truth. In other words, no matter how often Hurtado/Baroja repeats that classifications and methods are of little or no significance, there is nevertheless an eternal return to the sciences in this effort to comprehend pain. Here Hurtado is establishing an interdisciplinary relationship between the mathematical and psycho-sociological sciences. In other words, he is trying to explain the psychological by means of the mathematical. Piaget points out that mathematicians had no qualms about appealing to psychology. “Par exemple chacun invoquait au XIXe siècle les nombres naturels comme source de l’arithmétique et H. Poincaré encore fait l’hypothèse d’une intuition primitive du n+ 1 […]” (Piaget “Le système” 1201). (For example in the 19^th century everyone invoked the natural numbers as the origin of arithmetic and H. Poincaré has again put forth the hypothesis of a primitive intuition of n+1…) In El árbol it is the other way around, the psycho-social is appealing to the mathematical. Unfortunately, the mathematical remains mute and the world became a mixture of insane asylum and hospital for Hurtado. (El árbol 81)

Such uneasiness, compounded by the pain felt over the loss of his little brother’s life, increases Hurtado’s need for truth and meaning. He does not quit his medical studies, like Ossorio before him, but rather goes on to become a doctor instead, and the scientist in him searches for what he calls a philosophy, “[…] que sea primeramente una cosmogonía, una hipotesís racional de la formación del mundo; después una explicación biológica del origin de la vida y del hombre” (El árbol 167). (... that would primarily be a cosmogony, a rational hypothesis having to do with the beginnings of the universe; and also a biological explanation of the origin of life and man.) Here, it is as if Baroja were unable to leave the man of science behind. It is interesting to note that more time separates Hurtado than Ossorio from the medical profession, but Hurtado is closer to the man of science than Ossorio. Furthermore, Hurtado’s objectives are far more scientific than Ossorio’s. Ossorio, however, was chronologically closer to the physician in Baroja.

Hurtado’s uncle Iturrioz, also a physician, rewords Hurtado’s problematic. “Tú quieres una síntesis que complete la cosmología y la biología; una explicación del Universo físico y moral” (Ibid). (You want a synthesis of cosmology and biology; an explanation of the physical and moral universe.) Such reflections, especially coming from men of science, can be analyzed in light of the epistemologist and biologist Nowinski’s hypothesis that one should expect to find specific methods of research every time one undertakes the study of phenomena in their historical development (dialectic methods). With this in mind Nowinski pays close attention to the dialectics of nature as opposed to the dialectics in the biological sciences (863).

By dialectics, I am referring to the split logos, opposing forces, the origin of movement and change. The dialectics of nature can be something as simple as life and death, night and day, whereas the dialectics in the biological sciences have to do with the dialectic methods that characterized the work of certain biologists, Darwin, for example. Nowinski reminds us that Darwin did not consciously apply the dialectic method. Darwin’s theory, however, is a historical biological one which allows us to follow dialectic thought in biology at the moment of its genesis (Nowinski 863-864).

When Hurtado’s uncle Iturrioz states that Hurtado is searching for a synthesis of cosmology and biology, he is perhaps suggesting that cosmology is the thesis and biology the antithesis. It is at this point that the epistemology being brought to the forefront becomes parascientific. Hurtado utters, “Uno tiene la angustia, al desesperación de no saber que hacer con la vida, de no tener un plan, de encontrarse perdido, sin brújula, sin luz a donde dirigirse. ¿Qué se hace con la vida?” (El árbol 167). (One has the anguish, the desperation of not knowing what to do with life, of not having a plan, of being lost, without a compass, without a guiding light. What does one do with life?) Even Kant’s epistemology becomes parascientific in these conversations, since the conclusion Hurtado draws from reading Kant is that all the marvels described by the philosophers were fantasies. I take it that this is Baroja’s interpretation of The Critique of Pure Reason, of Kant having put forth that the senses and certain categories (space and time) condition our entire knowledge. In other words, that man cannot strive for a truly objective way of knowing the world, all he can do is rely on the categories on his understanding, time and space, in order to arrive at his own interpretation of the world.

The conversation ends with Hurtado’s remark, “Podemos suponer que un tiempo y un espacio sigan para los demás. ¿Pero eso qué importa si no es el nuestro, que es el único real?” (El árbol 169). (Let us suppose that both time and space continue to exist after us, for others. But what does that matter to us, since only our own time and our own space have any reality for us?) Once again, Baroja is making a direct reference to Kant and the fact that these two categories imply an eternity that man cannot seize, but that he can conceptualize.

The only ending I am giving away is that, indeed, Baroja spares the artist in Camino and kills the scientist in El árbol. “Estas dos novellas paralelas y gemelas son las que más han hecho pensar a la juventud que las ha leído, porque en ambas se encuentran a dos jovenes con los problemas eternos, el amor, la religion, y la ciencia, tres palabras – solamente tres palabras – capaces de hacer morir o de prolongar la existencia” (Caro Baroja 19). (These two parallel and twin novels are the ones that have given the youth who read the most food for thought, because in both these novels we encounter two youths faced with the eternal problems, love, religion, and science, three words – only three words – capable of annihilating or prolonging existence.) In this case, the order of the eternal problems would matter, the point of departure being science, and the last stop, the parascientific, either religion or love. In between, the relationship with science, from belief, to doubt, to illusions lost.

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