Spanish Narrative in the 1950s and 1960s: Social Realism and Beyond
Spanish Narrative of the 1950s: Social Realism
They continued to publish authors of the previous era, but significant events allowed us to speak of a new stage. We are witnessing profound renewal efforts, favored by historical circumstances: the gradual incorporation of Spain into the international sphere after previous isolation, a shy intellectual liberalization, the first entry of crowded foreign tourism, and possible travel outside, knowing a different literature. A new generation of storytellers shared common ideological assumptions and participated in similar thematic and formal concerns. Their proposal is the testimony of a social state from an ethical and civic conscience.
They claimed that literature served as a political lever, though few took an extreme position, and the majority insisted on artistic conditions of the literary work. The objectivist reality often influenced cinematic techniques. This technique adopted new narrative positions, avoiding censorship to some extent. Literature also fulfilled the role of providing information about the mass communication that others concealed.
Neorealism and Social Trends
Within the novel, it is possible to distinguish a neorealist trend and another social trend. In the former, the critique is more veiled, has humanitarian characters, and may be considered a first phase of the social political novel. It produces an oscillation between subjective and objective depersonalized lyricism. As for narrative techniques, two procedures stand out: objectivism (brief testimony, with no apparent intervention by the author; the extreme degree will be behaviorism: pure records limited to conduct, collecting individuals or groups and their words, without comments or interpretations) and critical realism (complaint of inequality and injustice from dialectical positions).
Themes and Settings
The themes of these novelists are barrenness, loneliness, social and war memories, and their consequences.
On the issue, a focus on the individual or group highlights that Spanish society was in full narrative conversion. The main semantic fields are the hard life of the countryside, the world of work, the urban world, and the bourgeoisie. Generally, the environments are outdoors: countryside, sea, villages, suburbs. The time of action of these novels is usually the present, as for the common attempt to illuminate the present. Space and time are often concentrated. The style is characterized by a deliberate lexical poverty and a populist approach to collect the more superficial aspects of popular or colloquial language registers.
The 1960s: Overcoming Realism
The 1960s were years of important economic and cultural change in Spain. A substantial transformation had occurred in the novel before 1962, which is considered the date of this new stage in Spanish narrative, the so-called Boom of Hispanic American narrative. Social realism was a movement that ended with low-quality imitators. The change was prompted after the incorporation of consecrated figures from Generation ’36 and ’50, and new historical circumstances: developing economy, increased contacts with the outside, some flexibility in censorship, though some novels were still banned.
Literary Factors and New Directions
Literary factors became much more decisive. There was reader fatigue with the social novel, too preoccupied with critical aspects, progressively abandoning interest in formal development. Literature above shows ineffective as a weapon to transform the world. The emergence of the Hispanic American novel and knowledge of the work of exiled authors contributed to the flowering of this new phase. The narrative work will undergo a series of important transformations in its entirety, adopting new techniques. The desire for renewal is total, affecting all the narrative elements.