Spanish Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Labanyi Jo

Author:Labanyi, Jo [Labanyi, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

11. Drawing by Lorca, Self-Portrait in New York (Antorretrato en Nueva York)

Censorship and literary anachronism

During the Franco dictatorship (1939–75), censorship and travel restrictions isolated Spain, particularly in the first two decades. In the mid-1950s, a new generation of ‘Angry Young Men’ emerged, of whom Juan Goytisolo became the most distinguished. The clandestine political opposition with which these young writers–mostly children of pro-Franco families–sympathized was organized by the illegal Spanish Communist Party. They thus imbibed an orthodox Marxist view of literature as determined by the relations of production, the result being socialist realism (called ‘social realism’ in Spain for reasons of censorship). Juan Goytisolo later savagely criticized the outmoded espousal of realism by progressive writers (including himself). In fact, most of this mid-1950s protest fiction, when read today, comes over not as realist but as drawing on symbolism to elude censorship–as, for example, in Goytisolo’s Mourning in Paradise (Duelo en el Paraíso, 1955).

In 1962, a literary newcomer, Luis Martín-Santos (1924–64), called realism into question with his Joycean novel Time of Silence (Tiempo de silencio). To imitate high modernism in the 1960s was also anachronistic. Many writers–politically committed or otherwise–fell silent for several years before coming back with their own experimental fiction. Salient examples are Goytisolo’s Marks of Identity (see Chapter 1), Day of St. Camillus, 1936 (San Camilo, 1936, 1969) by Camilo José Cela (1916–2002), and the Faulknerian Return to Región (Volverás a Región, 1967) by Juan Benet (1927–93). This new experimentalism was clinched by the mid-1960s triumph of the Latin American novel. Juan Marsé also abandoned realist fiction with The Fallen (Si te dicen que caí, 1973, banned in Spain till 1976): perhaps the most successful combination of experimental narrative technique with political analysis, achieved by making his child subjects, growing up in a poor district of post-war Barcelona, responsible for the blurring of fantasy and memory.

In the early 1970s, the Barcelona publisher Carlos Barral promoted the ‘New Spanish Novel’ and the critic José María Castellet published Nine New Spanish Poets (Nueve novísimos poetas españoles, 1970), launching a cohort of younger writers. The most enduring have been the novelist Javier Marías (1951–), and the poet Pere Gimferrer. Most were marked by a desire, in the Franco dictatorship’s closing years, to look ultra-modern and cosmopolitan by sporting a dazzling, promiscuous array of intertextual references to high-cultural sources and English-language pop culture.

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