The Chimera

The Chimera (1905), along with The Black Mermaid (1908) and Sweet Owner (1911) it is usually considered part of a kind of trilogy.
The Chimera, without renouncing a naturalism of Maupassantian lineage, is dominated by a modernist, decadentist and symbolist aesthetic, and even with influences of the nascent psychoanalysis. La Quimera, is a novel based on the life of the painter Joaquín Vaamonde, protégé of Doña Emilia.
In the prologue of The Chimera the author declares her intention to study an aspect of the “contemporary soul, a form of our malaise, the high aspiration” of the artist at the crossroads of the end of the century.
Doña Emilia considers, however, that Silvio Lago’s disease, the fictitious name of the protagonist painter, was to some extent typical of the hypersensitive souls of that time. These, at that time, sought to satisfy their spiritual or aesthetic longings in many different ways and from different perspectives, often painfully and from an exalted idealism.
It was the author herself who repeatedly indicated that Silvio Lago was a literary reference of a young Galician painter friend of hers. This is Joaquin Vaamonde. He painted a flattering portrait of him of which she was especially satisfied. The artist died prematurely in Meirás attended by the mother of the writer, as attested by the words of the novelist:

«A telegram has just brought me the news that the young artist Joaquín Vaamonde has died, in our Towers of Meirás, taken from him before his thirtieth birthday, by a disease that romanticism beautified, but that seen up close is frightful: tuberculosis.»

(Pardo Bazán, 1900)

If I may be allowed a brief digression, before indicating, for my taste and not because it is interesting, what idea I develop in The Chimera, I will observe that perhaps social satire has not been clearly defined, and we tend to confuse it with class and personal satire. Social satire is that which, in the vices and faults of classes or individuals, surprises the symptoms of decadence and decomposition of the entire society and anticipates History: such were some of Quevedo’s (not all, certainly); such, the famous ones of Juvenal, where the touch of agony of the Roman Empire resounds. Class satire is the one that sees only in the whole a factor, and to him straightens his shots. Thus, Alvarus Pelagius especially lamented the sins and excesses of the clergy. Personal satire heaps, on a few or on a single one, the faults of all; it is, of fixed, the most passionate and sañuda, and, as an example, I will cite the Parallel of Villergas between Espartero and Narváez. To be a victim of this last kind of satire, it is necessary to stand out.

Fragment of the work