Social Realism and the Experimental Novel in 1960s Spain
Social Realism in Essays
Essays soon made it obvious that they advocated the value of social realism. It was believed that the writer, serving a will to transform society, must commit to addressing social injustice. Hence, they assumed a duty of complaint that could not find other adequate means of expression. Regarding the aesthetic orientation within the dominant realism, several attitudes can be noted, with the dominance of objectivism and critical realism.
Objectivism proposes a brief testimony, i.e., to give veracity to the third person so as to disengage the characters. Critical realism, however, does not merely reflect reality but highlights the misery and injustice in a spirit of complaint.
The Experimental Novel of the Sixties
From I960, the dominant realism in the Spanish novel began to show signs of fatigue. Spanish authors increasingly took into account the contributions of great foreign novelists, and, above all, the new Latin American novel.
In I962, Luis Martín Santos’s Time of Silence presented new narrative forms. The argument used performed a detailed description of the different social groups in Madrid at the time, from I962 to I975.
Also, writers who had published novels in the last decade added to this renewal effort, such as Camilo José Cela with The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942) and San Camilo, 1936. Miguel Delibes showed his ability to incorporate new techniques in Five Hours with Mario, a long soliloquy in which the protagonist disorderly evokes life and obsessions through the monologue and the splitting of the second-person narrator.
Bolder was Parable of a Shipwrecked Man, a symbolic and exciting story reminiscent of Kafka. This novel presented facets of later works such as The Holy Innocents. Torrente Ballester opened into the imaginative in his novel Don Juan.
Novelists of the “mid-century generation” would sooner or later follow the new novelistic roads. Juan Benet stands out with Volverás a Región, a novel where no action takes place and which occurs in a symbolic space, Region, where the memory of events experienced during the Civil War fills the narrative. Juan Marsé, with Last Evenings with Teresa, wrote a novel in which social withdrawal is mixed with the monologue. Juan Goytisolo, with Marks of Identity, critiques the bourgeois youth of the moment, approaching reality from different points of view. An exile returns to Spain, finds their roots, and realizes that they no longer belong to that world. Authors such as Francisco Luis Goytisolo and Threshold can also be highlighted.
Key Features of the Novel of the Sixties
- The narrator is not omniscient or objective; they fade into history, seeking the complicity of the reader. The second person is often used, allowing the splitting of the narrator.
- The temporal linearity of the story is broken, and flash-backs are used.
- Interior monologue is used to better reflect the stream of consciousness.
- The language is rich in rhetorical devices: metaphors, symbols. The dialogues use a variety of registers.