Spanish Narrative Trends Post-Civil War to Late 20th Century
Spanish Narrative After the Civil War
After the Civil War, the Spanish narrative, as in lyric and drama, breaks with past trends. What is needed now is a new realism that aims to provide the reader with a witness of contemporary life.
The 1940s: The Existential Novel
The existential novel highlights at this time, centering on two themes: the uncertainty of human existence and the difficulty of communication between humans. The most representative writers of this period are Camilo José Cela and Miguel Delibes.
Cela starred in the revival of narrative in the war with The Family of Pascual Duarte, a prototype of the existential novel. This work falls within the current known as tremendismo, which is characterized by particularly severe in the presentation of the plot (often violent situations) for the treatment of the characters (usually marginalized people, criminals, prostitutes, etc.) and torn by the language. The Family of Pascual Duarte narrates the life of a man condemned to death for his crimes, and published simultaneously with some echoes of the picaresque novel.
But the novel that consecrated Cela as a novelist was The Beehive, which offers us a kaleidoscopic vision of Spanish society. Their manners and their evidential value anticipate the social novel.
Miguel Delibes begins its journey at this time, although it has a long history. Although his output is extensive, we highlight The Shade of the Cypress is Long, which falls squarely within the current existential, and Five Hours with Mario, a very new novel from the formal point of view.
Other very representative authors who begin their work in the 1940s narrative are Carmen Laforet (Nada) and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (The Saga/Flight of JB).
The 1950s: Social Realism
It is a trend represented by the authors of the so-called Generation of Half a Century. Its purpose is to show the living conditions of the Spanish under the dictatorship. His mood is anti-bourgeois, critical, and maverick. In this stream, there are two trends:
- Objectivism, which aims to reflect the external behavior and words of the characters, leaving it to the reader to draw their own conclusions about such behavior. Among the objectivist narrators must be mentioned, among others, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (El Jarama) and Carmen Martín Gaite (Between Curtains).
- Critical Realism, which projects the author’s ideology about the narrator and the characters and makes an explicit social complaint. Here we highlight Juan Marsé (Last Evenings with Teresa), Juan Goytisolo (Signs of Identity), and Ana María Matute (The Dead Children).
The 1960s: The Structural Novel
In this period, a renewal form and substance are produced, giving rise to this new trend characterized by:
- The introduction of dream and fantasy elements in the argument.
- The use of free indirect style and interior monologue.
- The timing jitter.
- The complexity of the figures.
The most representative writer of this trend is Luis Martín Santos, with his great work Time of Silence, the work of significant impact on the novelists of the era, which opens the structural novel model.
Time of Silence tells the story of Peter, a young doctor, a cancer researcher in Madrid, who is carried away to an engagement you would not like. Sign in bourgeois circles and frequent Madrid at night. But also in contact with the marginal world: a family frequented a slum to get mice serve him in his investigations.
He is involved in the death of a girl in this family are trying to save after an abortion, which have caused at home, and detained by police and accused of having been he who has practiced abortion. Since then strung a series of unfortunate events culminating in the tragic denouement of the novel.
The 1970s
We now have a group of writers that bridge to the realistic novel into genres like the detective story or the adventure story. Intimate topics are gaining ground and is recovered and cosmopolitan taste for linear narrative.
In this generation of writers must cite Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Eduardo Mendoza, Javier Marías, and Juan José Millás.
From the 1980s to the End of the 20th Century
The authors of the last two decades have very particular paths, and their topics are very varied (historical, adventure, autobiography, erotic, etc.) but all agree on one point: the tendency to realism.
These authors clearly emphasize Luis Landero, Rosa Montero, Soledad Puértolas, Gustavo Martín Garzo, Almudena Grandes, and Antonio Muñoz Molina.