Spanish Post-Civil War Literature: Buero Vallejo & Martín-Santos
Spanish Post-Civil War Literature: Buero Vallejo & Martín-Santos
Antonio Buero Vallejo
Born in 1916, Antonio Buero Vallejo developed an early interest in reading, music, and painting. In 1932, he won a literary prize, and in 1934, he moved to Madrid to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He became involved in the Communist Party during the war but distanced himself years later. Arrested in 1939 and sentenced to death for his political affiliations, his sentence was later commuted to thirty years. During his imprisonment, he began writing, focusing on narrative and drama.
Buero Vallejo’s first play, which dealt with the theme of blindness, sparked a debate about the possibilities of theater. He also wrote about Miguel Hernández and, in 1963, declined an invitation to join the Council of Theatre. In 1964, he wrote The Double History of Doctor Valmy, a play about torture that was not performed in Spain until after the dictatorship ended in 1976. He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1971 and was awarded the National Prize of Spanish Literature in 1996 and the Cervantes Prize in 1986.
History of a Ladder
is the first work of Antonio Buero Vallejo, released in 1949 under the dictatorship of Franco. The play opens in the Spanish scene a trend of realistic social drama that lasted for several decades in the second half of the twentieth century.
The dramatic texts develop a story, in this case, the failure of youthful illusions and frustrated love, this plot is represented on stage by some characters, Fernando and Carmina, which provide, from the past, present and future their children, which are also called Fernando and Carmina, a future which can be seen much like the life they have had them.
All the work has occurred in only one scenario: a straight one-story building lower-middle class. Time is a key element in the work, which consists of two acts, separated by thirty years.
Like any dramatic text, in addition to the main text, as represented by the parliaments of the characters, contains secondary texts, dimensions, where the author explains the principal movements, gestures, actions, scenery etc. should appear on stage. They differ from the main text because they are in brackets and italics.
Although the tone of the piece looks like a romantic comedy, there is a fund of irony and bitterness in him, who come to the tragedy, the characters are aimed at an impasse, they will carve their shares his unhappy future. Like a modern tale of milk, which the author reminds us explicitly, by making Ferdinand kicked the vessel containing milk and stroke, the reader / viewer senses that the plans of the two young men will not reach performed. Appellate and expressive features are the dominant language, so rich in vocative
Luis Martín-Santos
Born in 1924. Cursa doctorate in Madrid between 1946 and 1949, years when working on the Higher Council for Scientific Research (portrayed in period of silence.
In 1950 he studied in Germany, in 1951 he was appointed director of the psychiatric hospital in San Sebastian and in 1953 married Laffón Rocío, with whom he had three children. His wife died in 1963 Dew as a result of a gas leak. Luis Martín-Santos Ribera died on February 21, 1964 in Vitoria as a result of a traffic accident the previous day.
Between the late 50s and early 60s was arrested several times for making propaganda of the then-underground Spanish Socialist Workers Party, which became a member of the Executive Committee, where trabaría friendship with the leader Enrique Múgica Herzog. Also part in his later years of life of the Academia Errante.
The work of Luis Martín-Santos can be divided into three sections: medical studies, essays and literary creation. On surgery and psychiatry wrote over fifty articles and two books, essays deal with literature, politics and Anthropology. In the purely literary, writes poetry, short stories and novels
Quiet time was published in 1962 with twenty censored pages, and can only be considered the definitive edition of 1981. In this novel the author using innovative interior monologue, the use of second person free indirect style, the stream of consciousness, derealization and myth, narrative procedures are being tested in the coming European novel from James Joyce but were unrelated social realism to the use of the time. All this contributes to what Martin-Santos himself called “dialectical realism.”
Although completed in late 1960, the novel could only see light in 1962 with twenty pages censored. In 1981 he published the final version of this novel, and without censure. In this novel the author departs from the realist novel, using three-person narrative, interior monologue, as they had done Proust or Joyce, the second person and free indirect style.