Dehumanized Art and its Window onto the World: José Ortega y Gasset and Pedro Salinas

This article posits that Pedro Salinas’ Spanish vanguard short story, ‘Mundo cerrado’ (1926), utilizes Orteguian dehumanized aesthetic techniques so as to simultaneously critique Ortega’s underlying epistemological and sociological system. Most critics who link ‘Mundo cerrado’ with Ortega and La deshumanizacion del arte (1926) reflect upon how dehumanized art functions aesthetically in Salinas alone. My analysis differs, as it explores how dehumanized art does and does not function in both Salinas and Ortega; like Salinas, I do so in order to critique dehumanized art’s greater epistemological and social implications. Key to my analysis is the Orteguian glass window that appears in La deshumanizacion and apparently separates the aesthetic realm from the life of the world. A similar window appears in ‘Mundo cerrado’, but there it ultimately fails to maintain such Orteguian distinctions. What results is a ‘closed world’ for the story’s protagonist – and for Ortega himself.