Biblical hypotext and Jewish Haggāḏāh in El Árbol de la Ciencia: the book of Genesis according to Baroja

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a new overall reading of El árbol de la ciencia by means of a detailed analysis of its rich hypertextual dialogue with the book of Genesis. All through his novel Baroja manages to spread a set of clues or intertextual indications that let the attentive reader reconstruct the allegorical meaning of his work, beyond its merely autobiographical, philosophical or sociohistorical aspects, which have been largely the main topic of many papers and studies before. This new look at the polyphonic interplay between interwoven literary discourses (regarding western exegetical tradition, Jewish esotericism or medieval commonplaces) and the biblical text of Genesis provides us a more extensive and nuanced point of view about the meaning(s) of the novel, always open to the most surprising games of allusive reutterance and critical review of its inherited material.