The Spanish Novel in the First Half of the 20th Century: Baroja and Unamuno
Item 5. Spanish Novel of the First Half of the 20th Century: Baroja and Unamuno
In Spain, the twentieth century is divided into two unequal parts by the Civil War. For members of the Generation of ’98, narrative prose becomes an ideal instrument for the task of regeneration of the country, which was among its main objectives. On the other hand, attention is shifting from “what” to “how.” Highlighted in this generation:
Azorín
Azorín, as a great reformer of descriptive prose, wrote The Will, where apathy is one of the major ills of society. Syntax is simple but feature-rich and lexically precise, suitable for detailed descriptions of everyday reality, but not so much for narrative fiction.
Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s narrative production follows the same trend as his dramatic creation. The first phase corresponds to the modernist Sonatas cycle, four novels that are presented as the memoirs of the Marquis of Bradomín, a gallant representing a disappearing rural aristocracy. In the second stage, called “primitivism” (exaltation of a traditional world, rural and violent), stands the narrative trilogy Carlist War. The style is also elaborate, but now rough and torn.
Beginning in 1920, he reached the grotesque (gross and systematic distortion of reality with critical intent), which is exemplified in Tirano Banderas, a grotesque approximation of a Latin American republic ruled by a grotesque tyrant.
The Novel of Novecentismo and the Generation of ’27
The Novecentistas incorporate into the novel elements of avant-garde poetry with special attention to language. The effort resulted in materials of high artistic value, but far from most readers, because of the low value attached to the plot or to putting emotions in the background. Within the group of ’27 narrators were also important. This is the case of Francisco Ayala and Rosa Chacel, although almost all of them published the best of their work from the 1940s onwards. The novel of the Generation of ’27 shows an evolution that goes from the initial avant-garde to narrative realism in the service of social consciousness as it approached the Civil War and a memory of it after passing it.
The Novel in the 1940s
Once the war ended, there appeared at first novels in which the winners gave their enthusiastic version of it, or traditional novels such as the long series about a family history of industrial Catalans in the early twentieth century, whose most significant title is Mariona Rebull, by Ignacio Agustí. But soon an existentialist atmosphere will prevail, common throughout Europe and in Spain qualified for the results of the war, with people homeless and lost in a hostile world that they do not understand and which does not matter to them. This is the case of Camilo José Cela’s The Family of Pascual Duarte, which opened with a short-lived genre called “alarmism,” characterized by the accumulation of excessive scenes of violence and crude language. Also noteworthy are Nada by Carmen Laforet and The Shadow of the Cypress is Long by Miguel Delibes.
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno was Professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, where he was also rector. A writer with a strong personality, controversial and contradictory, a lively philosophical thinker. His works are an expression of the struggle between his desire for eternity, which can give meaning to life, and reason, which denies it. Although the natural means of expression of these concerns is the essay, Unamuno also transferred them to the novel and his dramatic attempts. San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, published in 1931, whose protagonist is a village priest who has lost his faith, but acts as if he had it to avoid the anguish of his parishioners living without hope. And Mist, in which Augusto Pérez, a fictitious entity, is confronted with the author, Unamuno, who had foreseen his death. Unamuno’s novels are built around the star that represents the idea that the author wishes to submit for discussion, such as envy, motherhood, or the difficulties of a purely rationalist education. What matters is the inner conflict, the interiority of the characters.
Descriptions are minimized, focusing the action on discussions or intensive conceptual monologues, with a dry, direct, and precise language. Thus, he does not seek elegance, but intensity, expressiveness.
Pío Baroja
Pío Baroja studied medicine but turned very early to literature. He is a pessimistic and irascible man, continuously showing his distrust of man and his future, and of political action. To Baroja, art is inferior to life, so his novels are based on an observation of it and tell it in a brief, simple, and straightforward way with the intention to entertain. He is characterized by:
- Prevalence of a character – dominant and active or passive, strong-willed – through which we enter different environments. This character, often on the margins of society and confronted with it, is often a reflection of the author.
- Description based on a few psychological and physical details to describe characters. Dialogues are abundant.
- Strong presence of the author’s comments expressing his personal ideas.
- Search for amenity (natural and spontaneous style) without a prior plan, which gives it a certain carelessness of expression. Syntactic simplicity, short sentences, and short paragraphs.
His body of novels is extensive. The main titles are in his first period (pre-WWI): The Way of Perfection, The Tree of Knowledge, Zalacaín the Adventurer…
A second period runs from 1914 to the Civil War. In this era are the Memoirs of a Man of Action, twenty-two novels on the merits of the Carlist Wars and Spanish history in the nineteenth century, based on the life of an ancestor.
The third stage, from the end of the Civil War until his death, is considered minor literature. To it belongs, however, an interesting personal memoir with the title Since the Last Turn of the Road.