Spanish Theater and Narrative: From Post-War to Modernism

Posted on Mar 22, 2025 in Latin

TP 40-50: Benaventine conventional surface comedy featuring conservative bourgeois characters, luxurious spaces, and refined humor. Key figures include:

  • José María Pemán: Known for historic theater pieces like The Divine Impatient.
  • Joaquín Calvo Sotelo: Famous for comedies such as The Visit That I Ring the Bell and serious dramas like The Wall.
  • Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena: Author of Who Am I?, Don Jose, Pepe and Pepito.
  • José López Rubio: Known for Twenty and Forty, Never Late.
  • Victor Ruiz Iriarte: Author of A Day of Glory, An Umbrella in the Rain.
  • Edgar Neville and Agustín de Foxá also contributed to this era.

Renovation and Breaking with Tradition

The era saw a renovation breaking with traditional forms, led by Jardiel Poncela and Mihura. Their comical, absurd humor often featured improbable situations. Poncela subordinated the theater to renew the commercial plot with labyrinthine structures and inconsistency. Mihura anticipated European absurd drama with parody and caricature, often using customs and formalities to prevent happiness, as seen in Three Hats, Three Dimly Lit, and a Gentleman, Ninette Murcia, and Peaches in Syrup.

Existentialism and Social Realism (50-60)

This period was marked by social realism, reality, and a critical attitude. Key figures include:

  • Buero Vallejo: Known for social and political commitment and a humanist conception, with works like Story of a Straight Man in the Hot Darkness, The Weaver of Dreams, The Skylight, Consequences, and Basement Family Civil War.
  • Alfonso Sastre: Focused on existential and nihilistic themes, with works like Uranium-235, Complaint, Tierra Roja Dictatorship, The Network, and The Mangled to Death Squad.

Generation of Half a Century

This generation included Lauro Olmo (Shirt, English Spoken), Martín Recuerda (The Wild Bridge, San Gil), Rodríguez Buded (Burrow, The Innocent), Méndez Rodríguez de la Moncloa, Alfonso Paso (Forty-Eight Hours of Happiness, The Big Fish, You May Be a Murderer), Alonso Millán (Cyanide, ¿Solo o con Leche?), Jaime Salon, and Antonio Gala, who explored difficult and symbolic themes in works like Green Fields of Eden, Rings for a Lady, and Why Take Ulises?

Breaking with Realism (70s)

The 1970s saw a break with realistic aesthetics, influenced by foreign trends, pilot visual sound technical innovations, audience participation, and stage snow. Key figures include:

  • Fco Nieva: Known for theater of farce (Funeral and Passacaglia) and chronic and printing (Shadow and Chimera Larra).
  • Fernando Arrabal: Influenced by Quevedo and surrealism, creating a theater of panic with confusion, terror, random humor, as seen in God is Mad?, The Striptease of Jealousy, Tricycle, The Graveyard of Cars, and The Garden of Delights.

Hispano. Social and economic inequalities, dictatorships, syncretism, revolutions, and costumbrismo of the 19th century influenced narrative traditions. Modernism consolidated and evolved into realism in the 1940s. Realistically reflects the lower Arzuela. Key figures include:

  • Mariano Romulo Gallegos: Author of Doña Bárbara.
  • José Eustasio Rivera: Known for The Vortex, addressing indigenous gender oppression.
  • Jorge Icaza: Author of Huasipungo.
  • Ciro Alegría: Known for The World is Wide and Strange.

Magical Realism and Beyond

Magical realism, influenced by European classical literature, used contemporary social and political issues, indigenous urban existential themes, and real-fantastico elements.

Spanish Structural Innovations (60s)

The 1960s saw structural innovations in novels, including sequences, missing elements, the importance of argument and counterpoint, fantastic and dreamlike elements, numerous perspectives, second-person narration, free indirect discourse, interior monologues, individual character treatment, failed flashbacks, and in medias res beginnings. Key figures include:

  • Jorge Luis Borges: Known for skeptical, chaotic, random, dense, and metaphorical symbols, with works like Stories, Aleph, Fuccciones, The Sand, and The Book of Babel.
  • Miguel Ángel Asturias: Author of The President and Flags, inspired by legends of Guatemala.
  • Alejo Carpentier: Known for the renewal of language and structures in Lost Steps, Of the Time, The War of Time, and Cathedral Baroque Concert.
  • Juan Rulfo: Author of the Mexican storybook Fields on Fire (victims of revolution devastation) and Paramao Pedro (Juan Preciado pp Comala bastard son).

Later Developments (70s)

The 1970s saw further developments with figures like:

  • Ernesto Sabato: Known for El Tunnel, expressing pessimism.
  • Julio Cortázar: Explored illogical life as a game in Late in the Game (story), Prizes, and Rayuela (questioning culture and civilization, collage).
  • Gabriel García Márquez: Author of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Buendia Macondo Bible) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera.
  • Mario Vargas Llosa: Known for The City and the Dogs, The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral, Pantaleón and the Visitors, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and By the End of World War.
  • Argentine authors Adolfo Bioy Casares and Manuel Puig (Betrayal of Rita Hayworth), Chilean authors Jorge Edwards (Persona Non Grata) and Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits), Mexican author Carlos Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz and Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate), and Uruguayan authors Juan Carlos Onetti (Juntacadáveres) and Mario Benedetti (Thanks for the Fire).