Spanish Novels: 1940s-1950s and Novecentismo Analysis
The Novel of the 1940s
The novel reflects the bitter everyday life and an existential approach. The main themes are loneliness, maladjustment, frustration, and death. Marginal, uprooted, disoriented, and distressed characters abound.
- Camilo José Cela: The Family of Pascual Duarte. This work initiates tremendismo, exploring the story in its most crude aspects: poverty, violence, etc. Pascual Duarte is a peasant dominated by vengeful and violent instincts, who ends up becoming a serial murderer.
- Carmen Laforet: Nada (Nothing). It tells the life of Andrea, a young orphan who arrives in postwar Barcelona to study at university. The novel, told in a memoir style, is a clear precedent to neorealism of the 1950s.
- Ignacio Agustí: The series Mar de Ceniza (Sea of Ash). This series depicts the historical and social evolution of the city of Barcelona, focusing on the family life of the Rius, dedicated to the textile industry, and their employees.
- Miguel Delibes: The Shadow of the Cypress is Long. His first novel.
The Novel of the 1950s
Renewal of narrative techniques:
- The structure of the story is usually simple. It concerns the linear narrative.
- The descriptions are concise and recharged as little as possible.
- Simplicity is apparent; there are many action novels that concentrate on a short time. It forces the author to a thoughtful concentration, arrangement, and linking of the various episodes.
- Character group: the real protagonist is the class that appears in the novel. There is always a synthesis taken as a representative character of that class or group.
- Objectivism: the writer merely records the outside without diving inside the characters. The novelist narrates.
- Dialogue has a prominent place in the novels. Many of them are dialogues.
- Language is chronicle style, naked and direct.
- Spanish society as a narrative theme.
The Novel in the 1950s: Generations and Social Realism
A. The Generation of ’36:
- Camilo José Cela: The Hive. A novel precursor to the social novel, it gives us a merciless vision of postwar Madrid society.
- Miguel Delibes: El Camino (The Way), Mi idolatrado hijo Sisi (My Beloved Son Sisi). These novels reflect specific environments: a Castilian village in the first, and a bourgeois family in the second. He realistically addresses the rural world in Diario de un cazador (Diary of a Hunter).
B. The Generation of the Mid-Century: The Neo-Realist Novel.
Increased interest in the linguistic, technical, and formal preparation of their works:
- Jesús Fernández Santos, Los Bravos (The Brave Ones)
- Ignacio Aldecoa, Gran Sol (Great Sun)
- Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, El Jarama (The Jarama)
Along with The Hive, these are the most important novels of the 1950s. Social realism shows increased concern for the complaint to the detriment of formal elaboration of linguistic expression:
- Jesús López Pacheco, Central Eléctrica (Power Plant)
- Alfonso Grosso, La Zanja (The Trench)
- José Manuel Caballero Bonald, Dos días de Septiembre (Two Days in September)
The Nineteenth-Century Narrative: Novecentismo
Novecentismo starts in the first decade of the twentieth century, reaching maturity in 1914. Avant-garde coexists and initiates the politicization of sunset literature. Ortega y Gasset, Eugenio D’Ors, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Gregorio Marañón, and Gabriel Miró are Novecentista writers. They share this concern with the problem of Spain, rejecting the dramatic and subjective vision of their predecessors by taking a balanced and intellectual approach. It produces a high intellectual climate and a new type of intellectual who are academics.
- Rationalism: cold and objective analysis of reality.
- Anti-romanticism: intellectualized expression of emotions.
- Defense of pure art: mere aesthetic pleasure; dehumanization.
- Aristocratic intellectualism: aimed at the minority.
- Carefully crafted style.
- Narrative models that continue the previous stages: traditional realism of Ricardo León and Concha Espina.
- Formulas that attempt renewal, beating the narrative and stylistic patterns of realism:
- Gabriel Miró (lyrical novel)
- Ramón Pérez de Ayala (intellectual novel)
- Wenceslao Fernández Flórez (humorous novel)
- Benjamín Jarnés (dehumanized novel)
- Ramón Gómez de la Serna (avant-garde novel)