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This article argues that Antonio Espina’s first novel, Pájaro Pinto (1927), upends nineteenth-century understandings of development, not only through its rejec-tion of linear narration on a formal level, but also through its thematization of the concepts of youth, puerility, and maturity. After situating Espina’s novel within the context of the Rif War (1920-26), the literature of Europe’s “lost generation,” and the transformation of the Bildungsroman in the early twen-tieth century, it discusses the geopolitics of cultural development that underlies the influential view of modernist art put forth by José Ortega y Gasset in his essays “La deshumanización del arte” and “Ideas sobre la novela” (1925). It then analyzes Espina’s nuanced response to Ortega in Pájaro Pinto, highlighting especially how he draws from the aesthetics of film both to dehumanize his text and to advance a critique of the categories of humanity and dehumanization, puerility and maturity that structure Ortega’s thought. Finally, these observations are brought to bear on a reading of the story “Xelfa, carne de cera” in order to demonstrate how Espina unravels notions of individual and national formation, condemning both Spain’s colonial project in Morocco and the farcical maturity of the European metropolis.
