Spanish Novel: Critical Realism to Present

Posted on Feb 6, 2025 in Latin

Characteristics of Critical Realism

  • Increased critical intent: The author selects aspects that serve their purpose of denunciation.
  • Use of characters representative of a class: Both individual and collective characters are typical of the class to which they belong.

Social Issues of the Novel

  • The rural world: Much of the population lived in rural areas.
  • The working class: Transformation of peasants into workers.
  • The bourgeoisie: Lounging, losing consciousness, believing they touch the sky of the nobility; therefore, poverty is not their responsibility.

Novel: Sleight of Hand, Juan Goytisolo.

  • Travel and journalistic documents: The author becomes a traveler who offers the country’s problems and the peasantry.

Social Novel Authors

  • Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (1927): Jarama
  • Ana María Matute: First Report
  • Ignacio Aldecoa: The Glare and Blood

Authors of Critical Realism

  • Juan Goytisolo: Sleight of Hand
  • Alfonso Grosso: The Trench

The Novel of the 1960s

Care about how to recount? Not what is being told.

Give special importance to language.

There are no chapters; narrative sequences are given by:

Features

  • Style and language: Freedom is handled with total style and language, with new possibilities: very long sentences, lack of punctuation, the presence of non-fiction pieces, mix of common registers and cultism.
  • Interior monologues: Free and disorderly, characters express their thoughts flowing.
  • Complex structure: The disorder haunts chronological jumps and temporary reversals from the past to the present. The diversity of views is reflected in the narrative counterpoint or kaleidoscopic structure.
  • Limiting the importance of the argument: The main thing is not the story but how it is narrated.
  • Multiple POV: Is shared by several characters (Perspective).

Authors

  • Luis Martín-Santos: With his novel Time of Silence (1962), he opens the novel of the 1960s. This novel receives very significant influences: the Latin American or Hispanic narrative and the so-called boom (of the 1960s).
  • Juan Benet: You Will Return to Region.
  • Juan Marsé: Last Evenings with Teresa is a sarcastic criticism of the progressive bourgeoisie.

Current Narrative

Features

  • Return to subjectivity; their desires go abroad.
  • Eclecticism calls into question traditional techniques.

Authors

  • Eduardo Mendoza (1943): The Truth About the Savolta Case and The City of Wonders. He introduces the Civil War.
  • Juan José Millás (1946): Vision of the Drowned. The despair of the juvenile world. Treats the world of youth that is in the periphery. There is a psychological touch, wondering what the future is.
  • Javier Marías (1951): A Heart So White.

Topics

  • They impinge on the psychology of the characters.
  • Description of ironic environments.
  • Mixed stories.

Camilo José Cela (1916-2002)

La Familia de Pascual Duarte (1942)

The novelty of this work consisted of a gruesome element abundant in scenes of gratuitous violence, told in a language that evokes rural speech, but is also very careful. Cela ensures that the reader finds likely both the accumulation of crimes and the action, taken from the picaresque novel, that the work is presented as if written in the first person by Pascual Duarte himself, a humble peasant.

The rural world of late Black Spain becomes the context that, together with the pressure of instincts, grips and determines the behavior of the protagonist, who is compelled to act with unbridled violence. The popularity of Cela’s work, favored by the scandal, led to the term “tremendismo” being coined to classify this novel, which departed from the existing narrative tendencies.

The Hive: The Hive (1951) is divided into six chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter contains a variable number of short-length sequences, which are developed with other mixed episodes occurring simultaneously. Thus, the argument breaks into a multitude of small stories.