Spanish Narrative Prior to 1936: Prose & Avant-Garde
PRIOR TO THE SPANISH NARRATIVE 1936
The Prose of the Century
In the field of prose, a progressive crisis of realism is observed, giving way to innovative trends. Prose increasingly becomes the vehicle of narrative, moving away from the classic sense. The characteristic is an impressionistic prose dominated by suggestion, imprecision, a taste for vagueness and symbolism, quick brushstrokes, and a trend toward the unfinished and fragmentary.
Common themes of these early-century writings are:
- Voluntarism against apathy
- Passion against intelligence
- Personality problems
- Various social critiques
The crisis of the realist novel leads to a diversity of narrative experiments. Relevant authors of the period are:
José Martínez Ruiz, Azorín
Initially defending radical political ideas, he soon abandoned his youthful radicalism to join the Conservative Party of Maura. His most interesting literary works are:
- The Will (1902)
- Antonio Azorín (1903)
- Confessions of a Little Philosopher (1904)
- People (1905)
- Castilla (1912)
The first three are close to the essay genre. Azorín’s prose shows an absolute predominance of descriptive and discursive elements.
Miguel de Unamuno
His first novel, historical or intrahistorical, was Peace in War (1897). In 1902, he published Love and Pedagogy, a satirical and grotesque fantasy. The most important of his novels is Fog (1913), which presents formal innovations: the author becomes a character in fiction. Their transcendental theme is existence and personal identity. Unamuno’s novels are an intellectual game in which the reader is presented with multiple questions.
Pío Baroja
He is the quintessential novelist of his time. He wrote almost a dozen books of short stories and more than 60 novels. One can distinguish three stages of his work. In the first, and most important, he published, among others, The Trilogy of the Fight for Life. His characters are often misfits.
Ramón del Valle-Inclán
We can distinguish three periods in his work:
- The Modern Stage: His production until 1906 can be considered modernist. The most important works of the period were the four sonatas (1902-1905): Sonata in Autumn, Summer Sonata, Spring Sonata, and Winter Sonata. The series of sonatas refers symbolically to the season and geographical setting, mirroring the age of the protagonist. The painstaking care with language produces the brightest prose style of Spanish Modernism.
- The Primitive Stage: At this stage, he wrote the Carlist War trilogy. Violence, cruelty, and barbarism are common to these novels.
- The Stage of the Nonsense: The great novels of this period are close to the grotesque, not only in style, language, and character settings, but also in the importance of dialogue, which is subordinate to narrative and description.
The Prose of Novecentismo and the Avant-Garde
Novel Diversity
During this period, diversity is remarkable. Along with the nineteenth-century novel, short stories abound, including gallant or erotic novels. Authors who stand out are:
Gabriel Miró
Miró saw that the first stage is dominated by modernist aesthetics. In the second stage, he develops a very personal prose, in which lengthy descriptions of scenery and sensations matter most, with minimal action. His two most ambitious novels are Our Father St. Daniel (1921) and Bishop Leper (1926).
Ramón Pérez de Ayala
His first four novels, Darkness at the Summits (1907), AMDG (1910), The Paw of the Fox (1912), and Troteras and Danzaderas (1913), have a distinctly autobiographical character. They relate the crisis of individual conscience, alongside the types of liabilities and existentially disoriented characters common in novels of the century.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
He connected with European literature, trying new forms of expression. The greguerías are the backbone of his extensive work. They are defined by the creator as humor + metaphor, where disparate or remote things are bound together. The more distant the relationship between the realities, the stronger the image. This art of “greguería” is pure language game. He also wrote many short stories, memoirs, biographies, essays, and novels.
The Prose in the Generation of ’27
The Generation of ’27 saw a shift from a conception of avant-garde literature strictly as art to the consideration that artwork should also express the moral, social, and political concerns of the authors.
Ortega’s ideas about the novel had a decisive influence. Originality became important, as did unusual scenes, the use of fantasy and imagination, the creation of environments, as well as humor, wit, and irony.
Benjamín Jarnés
He is the most important of these avant-garde narrators. Some of his titles are Zumbel Theory (1930) and Scenes with Death (1931).
Francisco Ayala
Like Jarnés, he published several stories in the magazine Revista de Occidente. Then, following the Civil War, he resumed his writing in exile.
Max Aub
He wrote several novels characteristic of the experimental prose of the moment, such as Geography (1928) and Green Fable (1933).
Corpus Barga
He wrote avant-garde works such as Passion and Death, Apocalypse (1930).
Rosa Chacel
Her experimental novel, Station, Departure and Return (1930), a long introspective monologue, was her first novel.
Socially Engaged Novel
In the 1920s and 1930s, the socially engaged novel enjoyed great popularity in the editorial formula of collections of short fiction. Original novels ended up incorporating a new class of writers who have been labeled with several terms, including “another generation of ’27”.
Common characteristics of this group are socio-political commitment, a realistic aesthetic, social and political themes, and the projection of a better future reality from the fictional novel. Some names are César M. Arconada and Ramón J. Sender, who is the foremost novelist of the group.