Spanish Contemporary Novel: Trends and Traits
The Contemporary Spanish Novel
Civil War + Dictatorship + Misery = Novel as a subgenre that reflects hard realities.
- Between 1940 and 1970: Vital disappointment and anguish.
- 1970s onward: New program since the return of freedom.
The contemporary novel is divided into three main categories:
1. Existential Novel
This reflects the disappointment and anguish of the human being. It is influenced by the existential picaresque novel of the Golden Age and the legacy of Pío Baroja.
Themes:
- Human destinies: Characters’ actions are errors; they move away from the monotony of their lives.
- The absence of communication: Isolation of the individual.
- The Civil War: An attempt to overcome the resentment of the war.
Characters:
Single individuals, conscious of their vital blur, experience extreme situations that lead to isolation, violence, and despair.
Space and Time:
Urban environments: the chaotic city, within hours or days.
Point of View:
First-person narrator (narrator = protagonist), showing their feelings and thoughts through monologue.
Style:
Functional speech prevails over the artistic, with colloquial language.
2. Social Novel
1950s: Slow economic recovery, socio-cultural change in Europe, and Spain’s opening up. Authors like Cela, Delibes, Aldecoa, and Goytisolo brought about a renewal of the novel. The plot becomes more important, as seen in La Colmena. Social claim is a common factor for all authors. The social theme of the Spanish novel is divided into three areas:
- Urban Life:
The city is the setting, where the characters are typically bourgeois. The lifestyles of these characters will be criticized in these novels. For example, Delibes’ Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí ridicules bourgeois behavior.
- The Working World:
This addresses the migration from rural areas to industrial work. The adaptation process and conflicts generated are reflected in works like Salinas’ Vísperas del Gozo.
- Rural Life:
The inhuman working conditions and the solitary lives of rural people are shown.
Traits of the Social Novel:
- Style: Sober and simple.
- Characters: The main character shifts from the individual to the collective, such as in Aldecoa’s Gran Sol.
- Space and Time: Specific physical locations (field, village, mine, coffee shop). Time is linear, in brief periods.
- Internal Structure: Long chapters without titles, each divided into fragments.
- Point of View: Third-person loses prominence, only engaging in what is seen or heard, without judging.
3. The Experimental Novel
Also in the late 1950s, the literary quality of the social novel was questioned, as the narrative subgenre had become depleted. The social novel’s wear and Latin American influences gave way to a reform that prioritized formal experimentation. The dialectical vision of Spanish reality in Martín Santos’ Tiempo de Silencio marked the beginning of this stage.
Innovations Include:
- Claim: Loses importance and sometimes disappears.
- Characters: Return to the individual character, always in conflict with himself, seeking his identity or dealing with a social environment that tries to destroy him.
- Point of View: The omniscient narrator adopts the vision of reality from several characters, creating a multiple point of view.
- Structure: The chapter disappears, and sequences are carefully arranged. The chronological order is sometimes broken by flashbacks or flash-forwards (technique of counterpoint).
- Form of Expression: The author’s comments and thoughts about some fact or character are included. The interior monologue is also used.
- Language and Style: Characterized by highly rhetorical speech, a variety of learned words, slang, etc. Use of abundant rhetorical figures. Abandonment of the syntactic structure of prose and verse. Mixing conversations in other languages.