Spanish Prose: 1910-1940 – From Avant-Garde to Social Realism
Spanish Prose: 1910-1940
1. Prose 1910-1930
1.1. Essayists
José Ortega y Gasset
Author of numerous essays, including: Meditations on Don Quixote (1914), Spain Invertebrate, The Dehumanization of Art (1925), and The Revolt of the Masses (1930). In The Dehumanization of Art, he takes a sociological analysis of avant-garde art. He posits that the new art divides the public into two kinds of men: those who understand it and those who do not. It is a hermetic, intellectual, anti-Romantic, and anti-realist art. It’s a pure art, detached from psychology, sociology, life, and personal experiences. Metaphor is, in his opinion, the most radical instrument of dehumanization.
Eugenio d’Ors
He advocated a return to classicism, emphasizing artistic creation, an elegant style, and a vital, upbeat attitude. He was also a renowned art critic, known for Three Hours in the Museo del Prado (1923).
Manuel Azaña
President of the Republic during the Civil War (1936-39). He published several essays on Juan Valera, Ángel Ganivet, and Don Quixote. His personal Journals, written at different stages of his life, are also of great interest.
1.2. The Novel
Several streams coexisted:
- A nineteenth-century realism style, seen in Concha Espina and Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, which takes a humorous and often ironic, skeptical, and disillusioned tone.
- The gallant or erotic novel.
- New works by renowned authors such as Pío Baroja and Miguel de Unamuno.
- A more innovative novel:
- The lyrical novel of Gabriel Miró, whose production is divided into two stages: the former still shows modernist influence, e.g., Cherries in the Cemetery (1910). In the second, he finds his own personal, elaborate prose that seeks formal perfection, where lengthy descriptions of feelings and atmospheres take precedence over minimal action. This is evident in Nuestro Padre San Daniel (1921) and The Leper Bishop (1926).
- The intellectual novel of Ramón Pérez de Ayala, who also authored newspaper articles, poetry, and essays. His first novels (AMDG, Troteras y Danzaderas, etc.) have an autobiographical character and content. His novels of the 1920s, most notably Belarmino and Apolonio, are intellectual novels where the action is less important than the thoughts on various topics. The novel is very much about the essay now.
- The avant-garde novel of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who was very prolific in essays, biographies, short stories, and plays. Most characteristic of his production are greguerías, which he defined as the union of metaphor + humor. These humorous images, with great wit, establish unusual and illogical relationships between two concepts or objects. They are built using various technical procedures: false etymologies, parodies of phrases and idioms, antithesis, paradoxes, and dilogías. Examples: “A kiss is hunger for immortality,” “Closing a door we take the fingers of silence,” “Lightning is an angry corkscrew.” In his novels, the action, very light, is replaced by rambling strings of greguerías, traits of wit and humor, and so on. He emphasizes the fragmentary and the presentation of everyday things. Eroticism is the most insistent, almost obsessive, theme. Some titles are: The Incongruous, The Novelist, The Knight of Gray Fungus.
2. Prose 1920-1940
2.1. The Novel
An experimental or avant-garde novel continues in the line of dehumanized literature. These novels are conceived as an intellectual game that aims to challenge the reader, disdaining the traditional novel’s purpose of telling a story. Thus, the action is minimized, and the characters are blurred. Originality, unusual scenes, fantasy and imagination, humor, wit, and irony are important. Metaphor and image, along with structural fragmentation, are two of the most significant features of such novels. This vein includes Benjamín Jarnés, Francisco Ayala, and Max Aub (the best work of the latter two will be in exile).
Another novelistic trend is socially committed, tending toward a realistic presentation of situations and characters, sometimes bordering on reportage, and using sober and straightforward prose, far from the metaphorical style of the modernists. It covers issues close to readers: the Moroccan war, rural environmental problems, the world of the mine, and so on. They focus, therefore, on daily life. Ramón J. Sender stands out in this line.
2.2. The Essay
Here too, the influence of modernism is felt. Many short essays were published in the Revista de Occidente, including some by María Zambrano, who, in exile, is revealed as one of the figures of the Spanish philosophical essay of the twentieth century. Others include José Bergamín and Ernesto Giménez Caballero, an impassioned advocate of the avant-garde.
José Díaz Fernández, in 1930, published an essay entitled The New Romanticism, considered a manifesto of rehumanized literature. He believes that the avant-garde technique is best for reflecting the peculiarities of modern society but advocates that the writer take sides in the conflicts of his time and defend in their texts the political and social causes they believe are just.