Spanish Literature and Theater Under Franco’s Dictatorship
Poetry in the 1940s
During the 1940s, the expression of religious and existential anxieties dominated Spanish poetry. Postwar poetry began with two books by authors of the Generation of ’27: Children of Wrath (Dámaso Alonso) and Shadow of Paradise (Vicente Aleixandre). Both opened the way for younger poets. These books reflect a pessimistic and anxious world, presented as a meaningless chaos. They show a deep dissatisfaction with reality.
Francoist Spain
Spain lived under the dictatorship of General Franco. Features of the period:
- Restriction of freedoms: speech, press, religion, association.
- Slow regeneration of Spanish culture, torn by the exile of some of the most prominent figures and conditioned by ideological censorship and repression.
- Autarky and general distress that led to gradual economic modernization.
Social Poetry
In the early 1950s, social poetry predominated in Spain.
The main characteristics of social poetry are:
- Responds to a conception of literature as an instrument of political and social transformation. It is a committed poetry that bears witness, a critic of the Spanish reality of the time, to stir the consciences of readers.
- Aims to denounce social injustice and lack of freedom, and flees the autobiographical expression of feelings.
- The desire to write a useful poem results in the use of plain language, deliberately mundane.
Poets of Half a Century
In the late 1950s, a new promotion of poets born immediately after the Civil War emerged.
Characteristics:
- Explicit ideological commitment disappears and the autobiographical component returns, in an attempt to integrate the individual experience into the historical circumstances.
- The most frequent themes are:
- Love and eroticism
- The passage of time and the evocation of adolescence or childhood
- Spain’s social reality, often as a background on which personal experiences are projected.
- Language is conversational and intimate, in contrast to the declamatory style of social poets.
Mihura and the Comedy of the Absurd
The comedy of the absurd seeks to challenge the sentimentality and hypocrisy of bourgeois conventions. A fundamental work of this genre is Three Top Hats by Miguel Mihura. Some humorous resources of this piece are the accumulation of useless objects on stage or objects not used properly.
Buero Vallejo and Social Theater
Antonio Buero Vallejo is the most prominent playwright of social theater. Buero’s theater aims to make the audience aware of the tragic condition of man, thrown into a life marked by pain and uncertainty. He supports his work by reading social cues.
Some dramatic strategies used by the author are:
- The use of characters who fail in their attempt to make society more just and free.
- The “immersion effect” that places the viewer in the minds of the characters.
Arrabal and Experimental Theater
Fernando Arrabal is the chief representative of experimental theater, which reacted in the 1960s against social theater.
Characteristic features:
- Works do not purport to offer a reflection of the reality of the time, but rather a parable or allegory about the human condition that must be interpreted. It is not a realistic drama, but a symbolic one.
- Nonverbal signs are particularly important.
- The dialogues, poetic and absurd, depart from ordinary language.
- This is a provocative drama, as seen in the presence of sex, violence, and madness.