Simulated orality in Baroja’s dialogues. A comparison between camino de perfección and el árbol de la ciencia

Abstract

This work is part of a broader research project focused on the descriptive study of the syntactic- discursive style of several novels representative of the formal renewal at the end of the 19th century. When framed in the conceptual paradigm of orality-scripturality of Koch and Oesterreicher (2007 [1990]), the research includes the analysis of the figures of syntax, initially designed by Blanche-Benveniste (1985) and applied to the description of samples of mimesis of orality by López Serena (2007, 2022), in the dialogues of said works, in order to observe the simulation of the immediate communicative in a novelistic context in which several turn-of-the- century authors expressly showed the intention of reproducing the language spoken in his literary creation. Specifically, this article details the first results of the analysis of the dialogues of several fragments of Camino de perfección and El árbol de la ciencia, works by an author especially criticized by his contemporaries for his propensity for naturalness and whose examination will allow us to verify whether Baroja was a precursor of novelistic modernity in the literary simulation of orality, until now attributed only to post-war writers.