Post-War Spanish Literature: Trends and Themes
Post-War Spanish Literature
1940s Literature
Post-war writers rejected the notion of pure art, believing that literature should address the realities of Spain. Literary works were filled with existential angst, allegations of injustice, solidarity, and personal experiences. Censorship hindered freedom of expression, forcing several authors into exile. Others used symbols and allegories to represent the social and political situation.
Two main trends emerged:
- Conservative: This trend shared the ideals of the victors, extolling the new Spain and using timeless themes to circumvent the problems of reality.
- Rehumanization: This trend expressed anguish and despair through poetry, theater, and novels dominated by existential themes.
Literature of Exile
Common themes in exile literature include the evocation of Spain, memories of the war, the desire to reclaim the past, and the experience of exile. Key figures include Leon Felipe, Pedro Salinas, Alejandro Casanova, Max Aub, and Rosa Chacel.
Poetry
This period saw the decline of prominent poets and limitations on freedom of expression. The early years were dominated by poets of the Franco regime, characterized by escapist themes and exaltation of the regime. Their language was rhetorical, often using sonnets.
In contrast, other poets wrote about personal experiences using simple language, free verse, and surreal imagery. Luis Rosales’s The House On is a notable example. In 1944, poetry was renewed with Dámaso Alonso’s Children of Wrath and Vicente Alexandre’s Shade of Paradise. This “uprooted” poetry aimed to express societal discontent. Rehumanization poetry focused on existential angst and the theme of a chaotic and unreasonable God, employing a forthright, passionate, and alarmist tone, using both free verse and sonnets.
Theater
Theater was divided between escapism and humor. Bourgeois taste and the disappearance of avant-garde authors, coupled with censorship, led to a renewal. Propaganda theater and bourgeois theater dominated.
In 1949, Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Historia de una escalera renewed the theatrical scene, offering a critique of bourgeois theater. Another form of renewal was the humor of Miguel Mihura and Enrique Jardiel Poncela, who saw humor not just as entertainment but as a tool for social critique. This style is characterized by improbable situations, absurd dialogue, and gags. Examples include Poncela’s Eloísa está debajo de un almendro and Mihura’s Tres sombreros de copa.
Novel
Early post-war novels often reflected a conservative, Falangist ideology. The first signs of renewal came with Carmen Laforet’s Nada and Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte. These novels reflected a fractured, violent, and expressive reality, distinct from traditional realism.
Two main styles emerged:
- Alarmist: Characterized by themes of violence and hopelessness, autobiographical narrators, antiheroes with physical and psychological handicaps, impoverished and sordid settings, and a pessimistic vision expressed in direct and coarse language.
- Existential: Characterized by autobiographical themes exploring suffocating and conventional lives, first-person narrators, solitary protagonists, and a careful and elegant style.
Textual Analysis
A text, the maximum unit of communication, can be long or short. It is the product of an issuer expressing content with a particular intention. A text consists of organized ideas and statements with specific relationships. It revolves around a central theme and pursues specific objectives, such as persuasion.
Properties of a Text
- Consistency: This property ensures that the utterances of the text convey a complete and unique meaning. The overall coherence of the text relies on a central theme to which all parts are subordinate. Consistency within the parts of the text is crucial. Each part adds new information while maintaining thematic continuity and possessing individual meaning.
- Cohesion: This property ensures that the statements of the text connect effectively from a lexical and grammatical standpoint.
Mechanisms of Thematic Continuity
These procedures maintain the thread of the text:
- Lexical replays
- Relationships of meaning
- Words from the same semantic field (coreference)
- Substitutions
- Ellipsis (omitting repeated words)
- Discourse markers (connecting two ideas)
- Argumentative relations (addition, exemplification, opposition, causes, consequences, and conditions)
- Text organization (order, reformulation, introduction of a topic, and digression)