20th Century Spanish Literature
Camilo José Cela (1916-2002)
Enormously prolific author, novelist, journalist, essayist, literary magazine editor, lecturer, Spanish scholar, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989, Cervantes Prize in 1995 and Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 1987.
Cela liked to attend the classes of Contemporary Spanish Literature taught by Pedro Salinas in the new Faculty of Arts. There he befriended the writer and philologist Alonso Zamora Vicente. He also sought out Miguel Hernandez and Maria Zambrano.
The Civil War broke out while Cela was in Madrid. He was over 20 years old and recently recovering from tuberculosis. Cela, a conservative, escaped to the Nationalist zone at the front and was wounded and hospitalized in Logroño.
After the war, Cela showed great indecision in college and went to work at an office of Textile Industries, where he began to write what would become “The Family of Pascual Duarte“.
He married María del Rosario Conde in 1944, with whom he had a son, Camilo José Cela Conde. Cela and Rosario divorced in the late 80’s. He married Marina Castaño, a journalist, in 1991, with whom he shared his last years.
The Family of Pascual Duarte
The Family of Pascual Duarte, published in 1942, is a novel by Camilo José Cela.
This novel founded the genre of “tremendismo”, which connects with the Spanish realist tradition: the picaresque, the naturalism of the nineteenth century, and the social novel of the thirties. It is a meeting point of styles that emerged in Spain after the war, within which we can highlight existentialism and realism. The characters live in an environment of marginalization, mired in ignorance, pain, and anguish, that makes the stories revolve around the grotesque or repulsive, thereby seeking to shock the reader. It can therefore be said that the stark reality is a kind of social criticism. The story has a tricky and sleazy plot, rich in scenes of violence.
It takes place in one of the busiest times of Constitutionalism in history, with sudden changes of government and Constitution, these constitutions being more theoretical than factual.
The novel has a clear religious influence, in part by the author himself, who was very devoted. The number of references to God in the novel are numerous, helping to give an atmosphere of confession and repentance to the work.
In 1975, the novel was adapted into the film Pascual Duarte, directed by Ricardo Franco.
The Hive
The Hive is a novel that could not be published in Spain until 1963, due to the censorship of the time. The novel contains many references to sex, the gay scene, and the prison at the time. These topics and the time when it was published (Franco being in power in Spain) led to its censorship. During Franco’s reign, Manuel Fraga, when he was appointed interior minister, authorized the first edition in Spain.
The space-time framework is very precise: Madrid in a few days in the postwar period. The author tried to reflect the social reality of the times by adopting an objectivist point of view but had to make a selection within this vast collection.
Willingness to accurately reflect the reality does not mean the absolute neutrality of the author, who speaks in two contradictory ways. In most cases, he uses the objectivist technique, i.e., merely showing, describing from the outside, without entering the interior of the characters. Other times, however, he adopts an attitude he calls wryly omniscient and describes the attitudes of the characters.
Miguel Mihura
Miguel Mihura is considered an author, actor, and theater manager. During the twenties, he worked as a journalist, where he met leading journalists of the comedy genre.
Although he began writing before the war, his recognition was delayed because he only regularly published from the fifties onward.
During the Civil War, he fled to San Sebastian with the Nationalist side and played for the Spanish Falange. He was an editor of propaganda for the soldiers at the front, and the theme of his work is freedom.
From the fifties onward, there is a small change in the work of Mihura: satire is imposed on mood. This shift, shown in The Case of Mrs. Super (1953), was consolidated in The Three Hats. He also participated in the script of the film Welcome, Mister Marshall in 1942 with Bardem and Berlanga.
Three Hats
Three Hats, a comedy written in 1932 and released twenty years later, is considered one of the masterpieces of comic theater.
This work involves, for its originality, a break with the previous comic theater. Mihura wrote it in about three months, and according to his own statements, created it “effortlessly” and “easily, joyfully, with feeling.” He believed he had found with this work a unique style without outside influence, and was proud of its “melodic virtue”, its rhythm, “that special rhythm that sounded like verse.”
When Mihura made it known to several entrepreneurs and actors in 1932, they did not understand it, and the work was not premiered for over 20 years, until in 1952 the Spanish University Theatre opened in the chamber for a single session, led by Gustavo Pérez Puig in the Spanish Theater of Madrid. The audience, composed largely of young people, welcomed it with great enthusiasm, and soon after it was released commercially, although the usual public theaters did not understand it, and it was withdrawn from the lineup after 48 performances. From this experience, Mihura decided to make another kind of theater more accessible to the public of his time, in line with the so-called “commercial theater.” The author himself said that this work fell as “unfriendly” because of the many difficulties to premiere it.
The first edition of this book was printed in 1947. Since then, numerous editions and reprints have been made, and it is currently one of the most published and best-selling works in the history of Spanish theater.