The period from about 1900 until the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) is often considered a second Renaissance in Spanish culture, a “Silver Age,” as José Carlos Mainer calls it. The novel of this period was particularly precocious, showing early signs of the artistic innovations that came to be called modernism in other European literatures. From 1870 onwards the novel had come into its own as a major cultural form in Spain for its ability to mirror a bourgeois society anxious to read portraits of itself. By the turn of the century, however, a growing intelligentsia was losing patience with middle-class values and their political and artistic manifestations. The Restoration government, which replaced the revolutionary initiatives of 1868–74, had created a peace and stability that Spain had not enjoyed during most of the earlier nineteenth century; at the same time, intellectuals were disgusted with its corrupt politics and support of conservative Spanish institutions such as the church hierarchy and the landed aristocracy. Modern philosophy and ideologies gave the intellectuals and writers the impetus they needed to seek new social and cultural forms.
“¡Adentro!” (“Turn inward”) exhorted Miguel de Unamuno in 1900, arguing for a reorientation of the collective psyche away from the material, scientific, technological aspects of life to the internal and spiritual.1 Writers of Unamuno’s era, who came to be known as the Generation of ’98, were born at the same time as Spain somewhat belatedly entered the modern age. Modernity was arriving in Spain in the guise of a more vigorous industrial-technological revolution, philosophical iconoclasm (Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), and social liberalism (democratic political ideas and workers’ movements). The writers were modernists in the European sense of the word, concerned with the effects of modern life on society and the individual, and they found in the novel a means to express their anxieties. Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936), Pío Baroja (1872–1956), and José Martínez Ruiz (“Azorín,” 1873–1967), the principal novel-writers associated with the Generation of ’98, all shared themes and forms with the major European and American modernists – Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner. They privileged individual consciousness over the detailed studies of social contexts we associate with the realist and Naturalist novel of the end of the nineteenth century, and thus they experimented with new novelistic forms that reveal the contents of the individual consciousness.
The modernist novel in Spain arose somewhat earlier than in the rest of Europe (around 1902 rather than with the onset of the First World War), a phenomenon perhaps explained by an earlier existential crisis in Spain. If the First World War was a culminating event in the European collective consciousness, in Spain intellectual ferment was occasioned in the 1890s by a corrupt government and stagnant social forms that appeared completely out of tune with the progressive socialist ideas and iconoclastic philosophies arriving from outside Spain. This ferment was exacerbated by Spain’s ignominious war with the United States in 1898 in which it lost the last vestiges of its colonial empire – Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. The label “Generation of ’98” derives from this event, although, as many critics of the label point out, the group of writers collected under the rubric was diverse and did not necessarily coalesce around this one single historical moment.
Each of the novelists usually considered “members” of the Generation of ’98 had his own personal history that intersected with modern life in a unique way, and each was conscious of creating new art forms in order to distinguish himself from the realist-Naturalist mode that preceded him. Unamuno called his original version of the novel nivola, in which he eliminated external descriptions to emphasize dialogue and internal monologue. His characters are more concerned with existential problems (Do I exist? How do I know I exist? Is there life after death?) than with “real world” issues, although the existential dilemmas are always embedded in concrete situations such as love and marriage. The same year as Unamuno published Paz en la guerra (Peace in War, 1897), a more conventional novel with realistic descriptions and historically recognizable events, he suffered a religious crisis and began writing intense, personal essays about his desire to reconcile the rational and the spiritual sides of life. He desperately wished to rediscover the innocent religious faith of his childhood that had been destroyed through his intellectual development and contacts with scientific thinking, especially positivism.
In 1902 he devised a form of narration that dramatized his personal anguish. Avito Carrascal, the main character of Amor y pedagogía (Love and Pedagogy, 1902), is an unapologetic positivist, who proposes to marry and raise a child in a completely scientific and predictable manner. His wife Marina is, on the other hand, an intensely religious woman, who attempts to introduce spirituality into their son Apolodoro’s life. Apolodoro eventually commits suicide over unrequited love, a sad ending to Avito’s experiment in unsentimental education. Many critics consider Amor y pedagogía Unamuno’s first nivola, although he did not articulate his theory for a new kind of novel until 1914 when he published his third, full-length novel Niebla (Mist). In the case of Niebla, not only did he strip his novel of external descriptions and depictions of social ills and institutions, but he also introduced a metafictional element: the characters discuss the process of novel-writing, specifically the kind of novel we are reading. Víctor Goti, friend of the main character Augusto Pérez, is writing a nivola, which he defines as having a great deal of dialogue and no plot or a plot that makes itself up as it goes along, just as life is lived: “whatever comes out. . . . makes itself.”2 Unamuno called this kind of spontaneous novel a “viviparous” narration (born alive), which he contrasted to the carefully structured “oviparous” novel (born from an egg).
Unamuno introduced yet another metafictional element in Niebla. The author himself appears as a character who engages in an important conversation with Augusto. The wealthy Augusto has fallen in love with Eugenia, who already has a boyfriend named Mauricio. Eugenia, disgusted with Mauricio’s suggestion that she marry Augusto but continue their relationship on the side, breaks with him and finally agrees to marry Augusto. At the last minute, however, she elopes with Mauricio and writes Augusto a devastating farewell letter. In despair Augusto decides to commit suicide, but before doing so, he travels to Salamanca to consult with Unamuno, who tells him that he cannot kill himself because he is a fictional entity. Augusto, up to this point a passive character, begins to assert himself. He determines to prove his existence by committing suicide; he eats too much for dinner and dies, leaving the reader to decide whether it was Unamuno who killed him or if he killed himself. Other metafictional or self-conscious elements in the novel include a series of interpolated stories that mirror Augusto’s love dilemma in one way or another and an epilogue – Augusto’s funeral oration – spoken by his dog Orfeo.
Niebla is a ground-breaking work that points the way to the playful vanguard novel initiated by Pedro Salinas’s Víspera del gozo (Prelude to Pleasure) and Benjamín Jarnés’s El profesor inútil (‘The Useless Professor’) in 1926. The comic elements, especially the narrative irony present in Amor y pedagogía and Niebla, disappear in Unamuno’s later novels – intense stories of existential anguish. Abel Sánchez (1917) is a reworking of the Cain and Abel myth in which Cain becomes a modern hero for his struggle with envy. La tía Tula (‘Aunt Tula’, 1920), Unamuno’s only novel with a female protagonist, focuses on Tula’s overwhelming desire for motherhood and her reluctance to accept marriage or sex. As a surrogate mother to her dead sister’s children, she hovers between saint and monster, the two types into which many of Unamuno’s female characters fall. San Manuel Bueno, mártir (‘Saint Manuel The Good, Martyr’, 1933), Unamuno’s last novel, chronicles the despair of a priest who does not believe in everlasting life, but keeps up appearances for the sake of his congregation.
Religion is also central to Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s modern thematics. The Marqués de Bradomín, protagonist-narrator of his four Sonatas (Sonata de otoño [Autumn Sonata, 1902] Sonata de estío [Summer Sonata, 1903], Sonata de primavera [Spring Sonata, 1904], Sonata de invierno [Winter Sonata, 1905]) is “ugly, Catholic, and sentimental,”3 but his religion is of a modern variety that worships at the altar of sex and beauty more than at the cross. Valle-Inclán’s language is charged with religious references within a context of physical pleasure: “Concha had the delicate, sickly pallor of a mourning Mary, and she was so beautiful in that weakened, emaciated state that my eyes, lips, and hands found all their pleasure in the very thing that saddened me.”4
Like Unamuno, Valle-Inclán was aware that he was creating a new kind of literature, and by 1920 he was calling both his plays and his narratives esperpentos (‘scarecrows’), art forms in which he held up a distorting mirror to Spanish society in order to reveal its corruption and inequities. The grotesque images that result from Valle-Inclán’s inventive use of language and narrative techniques can fruitfully be compared to German Expressionist paintings filled with twisted, fragmented bodies often integrated with mechanical parts. Tirano Banderas (The Tyrant, 1926) is set in a Latin American country reminiscent of Mexico, where Valle-Inclán had spent time in his formative years. The progress of a dictatorship is narrated in staccato, stylized language that transforms real horror into an artistically rendered nightmare. The tyrant Banderas is often referred to as a mummy whose face wears a “green grimace.”5 Some critics argue that Valle-Inclán does not belong to the Generation of ’98, especially in his early works that seem to favor artistic elaboration over socio-political themes or existential angst. Such arguments indicate the futility of categories with rigid boundaries; all of Valle-Inclán’s narratives share with those of his contemporaries a modern view of life that finds artistic means to question the efficacy of traditional power structures (religion, aristocracy, political forms).
Pío Baroja also relied on artistic language, especially in his early novels, to convey a sense of anxiety about the modern world. His first important novel Camino de perfección (‘Way to Perfection’, 1902) established his idea of what a novel should be, a new conception of narrative that endured throughout his long career. He believed novels should be “porous” (loosely structured) and thus conform more to life’s unstructured path than to the traditional pattern of beginning, middle, and end. (Although Unamuno insisted that his novels were unfettered by a preordained structure, they are actually organized along lines more carefully planned than are Baroja’s.) To this end Baroja borrowed liberally from the picaresque tradition in which one central character, moving through the world, encounters other characters from various walks of life; these secondary characters rarely reappear in the novel. Camino de perfección’s Fernando Ossorio, like so many modern “heroes,” suffers a crisis and sets out on a journey of self-discovery that takes him to several important Spanish locales such as Toledo, saturated with religious history, and the verdantly natural Valencia where his story ends. Fernando begins as a painter, extolling the virtues of nature transformed by art, but ends up rejecting art (artifice) for unmediated nature.
Baroja was Spain’s most prolific novelist of the pre-Civil War period; he published some eighty full-length narratives. Most critics consider his best to be those written between 1902 and 1912. Concluding this productive decade are El árbol de la ciencia (The Tree of Knowledge, 1911) and El mundo es ansí (‘The Way of the World’, 1912), which represent his interest in the role of science in the modern world and the relationship of writing to life, respectively. Baroja, who had a medical degree and was a practicing doctor for a short time, explored through Andrés Hurtado, the protagonist of El árbol de la ciencia, the limitations of science and philosophy in dealing effectively with the basic problems of humanity – poverty, disease, immorality, and loneliness. El mundo es ansí employs a variety of narrative techniques (witness narrator, letters, diary) to chronicle the life of Sacha, an intelligent Russian woman who marries a Spaniard. As Carlos Longhurst points out, the novel “is an exploration of the relationship between art and life, between an individual consciousness and the objective world, between an author and his work.”6
El mundo es ansí contains a number of references to feminism, a social movement that has not usually been taken into account in discussions of Spanish modernist or Generation of ’98 fiction. Feminism in Spain was less organized and militant than in the United States or England, but there were Spanish feminists who advocated greater social liberty for women (including equal educational opportunities, legal rights, and divorce). Carmen de Burgos (1867–1932) and Concha Espina (1869–1955), two women writers born about the same time as the “members” of the Generation of ’98, nonetheless are not included in that group of writers. Because novels written by women during the first thirty years of the century do not incorporate the kinds of narrative innovation and exploration of individual (male) consciousness that we have seen in the male modernist novel, women writers have been left out of literary history and the canon. Although perhaps only Carmen de Burgos considered herself a feminist, both women wrote about women’s lives in a way that depicted Spanish society as out of step with modernity in the way it educated and socialized women.
Carmen de Burgos’s fiction was published primarily in series of novelettes (La Novela Corta [‘The Short Novel’], La Novela Semanal [‘The Weekly Novel’], Los Contemporáneos [‘Contemporaries’]) that became very popular and widely read in the first decade of the twentieth century. Burgos used this popular venue to argue against unfair laws that condemned women for adultery but exonerated men (El artículo 438, 1921); that prevented divorce in situations abusive to women (El hombre negro [‘The Black Man’, 1912]); and that absolved men from responsibility for children born out of wedlock (El abogado [‘The Lawyer’, 1915]). A number of her novellas have now been collected in the volume entitled La flor de la playa y otras novelas cortas (‘Beach Flower and Other Novellas’).7 One novel in that collection, El veneno del arte (‘The Poison of Art’, 1910) satirically portrays the false pretensions of would-be artists and writers in early twentieth-century Spain. The parody of Madrid’s artistic circles forms the backdrop for several long monologues by a female artist whose sincerity and authenticity contrast sharply with other characters’ hypocrisy. Burgos also introduces alternative sexualities (homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestitism) in this and other novellas, a surprising thematic innovation for Spain at that time.
Although more conservative and religious than Burgos, Concha Espina also exposed the vulnerability and suffering of Spanish women. Her best novel La esfinge Maragata (Mariflor, 1914) chronicles the life of Mariflor, an intelligent, well-educated girl; when her mother dies and her father goes to the new world to seek his fortune, she is sent to live with impoverished relatives in the Maragata region. Most of the men of the Maragata region have also emigrated to America because of dire economic conditions in that part of Spain. The women are left to support themselves by working long hours in the fields and coping with heartless moneylenders to tide them over when the land is unyielding. Aside from the sharp contrast between male modernist narrative techniques and women’s more realistic style, it is interesting to note that male writers’ protagonists rarely have economic problems. They are supplied with a private income that allows them to concentrate on their personal development.
Azorín’s narratives offer a sharp contrast to Concha Espina’s depiction of independent women. Azorín, primarily a journalist who wrote seven novels, began his novelistic career in that all-important year 1902 with La voluntad (‘Will Power’), a companion novel to his friend Pío Baroja’s Camino de perfección. The protagonist of Azorín’s novel is, like Fernando Ossorio, an intellectual in existential limbo, unable to find his way either in the Spanish provincial setting where he grew up or in the modern city. He ends up married to a domineering woman in a provincial town, his career as a writer and intellectual overpowered by these domesticating forces. The novel’s structure, like that of Camino de perfección, eschews traditional plot development and relies on parallel episodes that pair scenes of traditional Spanish society (church, family) with modern intellectual free-thinking. Azorín is credited with initiating in this novel and subsequent works a spare, luminous style that breaks with the tendency of the nineteenth century to construct dense sentences and weighty paragraphs: “In the distance, a slow, deliberate, melancholy bell rings. The sky begins to lighten indecisively. The fog extends over the fields in a long white brushstroke.”8
Azorín addressed feminism and women’s roles in a number of his newspaper articles, and in Doña Inés (1925), written in a period when feminism was gaining a firmer foothold in Spain, he created a strong independent female protagonist who does not appear to desire marriage. The wealthy Inés is somewhat beyond the bloom of youth and has had a series of unsatisfying love affairs. The last of these is a brief flirtation with a young poet in Segovia, where she has extensive property holdings. Inés provokes a scandal in the provincial town when she is seen kissing the poet in the cathedral. Subsequently, she divides her fortune among friends and relatives and moves to Argentina, where she founds a school for orphans and lives out her days in lonely self-imposed exile. Her story is complicated by the fact that her uncle is writing the biography of one of their female ancestors, who had a tragic love affair with a troubadour. The style of Doña Inés, as is typical with modernist narrative, is as important as its thematics, which center on the problem of time (human aging and the possibility of historical recurrence). Azorín incorporates many cinematic techniques (scenic juxtaposition, close-up, panning, cropping, fade-out) into the structure of the novel and employs an elliptical, poetic phrasing in many passages. The novel was published in the same year as the novels that are considered the beginning of a vanguard narrative in Spain. Azorín’s work of this period should be considered in the context of vanguard aesthetics, of which he, as a cultural critic, was keenly aware.
Gabriel Miró (1879–1930) and Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1881–1962) are somewhat younger than the authors who are counted as members of the Generation of ’98, but they are often included in it. They are also sometimes linked with a group called the Generation of 1914, whose intellectual leader was the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. In his Meditaciones del Quijote (‘Meditations on the Quijote’, 1914), Ortega introduced Spain to phenomenology, a philosophy that emphasizes the way humans perceive the world around them. Ortega’s Notas sobre la novela (Notes on the Novel, 1925) argued against novelistic realism and in favor of narratives that encapsulate the reader in their own artistic world. The novelistic art of both Miró and Pérez de Ayala reflects these interests; they seek complex linguistic and structural means to represent human perception of and interaction with the world. They play with time and space in ways that attempt to destroy traditional temporal linearity and project the human experience of memory and simultaneity.
Miró, who has often been compared to Proust for his slow-moving, exceptionally dense prose, wrote fiction that is sometimes hard to define as a novel. His Del vivir (‘Of Living’, 1904), El humo dormido (‘Slumbering Smoke’, 1914), Libro de Sigüenza (‘The Book of Sigüenza’, 1917), and Años y leguas (The Years and the Leagues, 1928) are series of vignettes in a rich and labored style that evoke the sensual experiences of his native Alicante. Like many Generation of ’98 fictions, they also have an important philosophical content, although Miró preferred to explore the nature of perception and the relationship of language to memory and lived experience. His full-length novels are concerned with the same issues of language and consciousness. Las cerezas del cementerio (‘The Cherries of the Cemetery’, 1910), like James Joyce’s Ulysses, intertwines intricate references to classic mythology and Biblical stories with actions of contemporary characters within a specific geographical location (Dublin or Alicante). Like Joyce, Miró also calls on regional and unusual linguistic forms to create a thick prose that requires a great deal of attention on the reader’s part. His best-known novels, Nuestro padre San Daniel (Our Father San Daniel, 1921) and El obispo leproso (‘The Leprous Bishop’, 1926) chronicle Spain’s laborious entry into the modern secular, technological world. In these novels, the conservative forces of the past (political reactionaries and dogmatic members of the Catholic church) are pitted against enlightened people from the city who wish to bring modernity to a provincial Spanish town. In each case, the story unfolds through the eyes of two highly sensitive characters – Paulina, the focus of Nuestro Padre San Daniel, and her son Pablo, the main character of El obispo leproso. The sensuality of these figures and others is both artistic and sexual, creating the opportunity for language and literary references that evoke numerous levels of meaning. Paulina’s and Pablo’s sensual and sexual awakenings parallel the rise of modernity in Spain in a covert way that allows the reader to experience the agony and frustrations involved in both.
Ramón Pérez de Ayala likewise masterfully combines a commentary on Spain’s backward institutions with a rich and complex prose style. His tetralogy, which includes Tinieblas en las cumbres (‘Darkness at the Summit’, 1907), A.M.G.D (1910), La pata de la raposa (The Fox’s Paw, 1911), and Troteras y danzaderas (‘Mummers and Dancers’, 1913) is reminiscent of Azorín’s La voluntad and Baroja’s Camino de perfección in that the protagonist Alberto Díaz de Guzmán, a budding artist and writer, searches for a meaningful life path in a stagnant, early twentieth-century Spain. Pérez de Ayala’s dense layering of Biblical and classical references coincides with Miró’s, and foreshadows the kind of modernist emphasis on linguistic pyrotechnics and literary allusion often first attributed to James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Pérez de Ayala’s verbal wit and irony carry a much sharper edge than Joyce’s, however.
Pérez de Ayala’s masterpieces Belarmino y Apolonio (1921) and Tigre Juan and El curandero de su honra (‘Tiger Juan’ and ‘The Healer of His Honor’, 1926) are the work of a mature writer who has found a truly original voice. He unabashedly incorporates elements of nineteenth-century realism (ironic portraits of members of specific institutions and classes) with an elliptical, lyrical style that draws on references to a wide array of literary sources. These works portray life – love, death, disillusionment, and renewal – in provincial Spanish towns through memorable characters, such as the two shoemaker-protagonists Belarmino and Apolonio or Tigre Juan, the misogynist herb vendor with a heart of gold.
Disaffection from the Restoration monarchy reached crisis proportions by 1923 after a series of disastrous military campaigns in North Africa. To quell the unrest, King Alfonso XIII ceded governing power to General Primo de Rivera, and Spain was ruled as a military dictatorship from 1923 to 1930. As is evident in the mature work of Gabriel Miró and Ramón Pérez de Ayala, the arts flourished in Spain in the 1920s despite Primo de Rivera’s repressive regime, a dictatorship with fascist leanings (though hardly to the extent of a Mussolini or Hitler). In retrospect, the genre of the novel may have been overshadowed by the brilliant poetic creations of Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Federico García Lorca, and Rafael Alberti (a group known as the Generation of ’27), but novels certainly shared in the creative wealth. Unamuno published his La tía Tula in 1921; Azorín’s Doña Inés appeared in 1925; Baroja continued to produce about two novels a year, including a series of historical novels; and Valle-Inclán produced his masterpiece Tirano Banderas (1926). It is worth noting that two of these older writers created – a rarity for them – female protagonists during this period when feminism had finally gotten a foothold in Spain in the wake of the First World War. Both Tía Tula and Doña Inés are strong, independent women who refuse to marry and both end rather badly, perhaps a commentary on the fate of women who tried to live outside the accepted boundaries of Spanish tradition even in the third decade of the twentieth century.
The 1920s saw greater cosmopolitanism in Spain, and Spanish literary production began to adhere chronologically more closely to artistic currents in the rest of Europe. Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963) had published a Spanish translation of the Futurist Manifesto in his journal Prometeo (‘Prometheus’) in 1909. José Ortega y Gasset devoted himself from the first decade of the century onward to importing European ideas into Spain, and in 1923 he founded the journal Revista de Occidente with the express purpose of making European (especially German) thought better known in his native country. Ortega also founded a novel series, Nova Novorum, in 1926 to create an outlet for new kinds of fiction writing. His essay La deshumanización del arte (The Dehumanization of Art, 1925) did much to vindicate the new art, an art of ideas designed to be understood by a select minority rather than by the masses to which realism appealed.
The novels of Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Azorín, Miró, and Pérez de Ayala broke new narrative and thematic ground and prepared the way for a significant, albeit brief, flowering of the vanguard novel in Spain from 1926 until about 1934. If the earlier modernist novel in Spain emphasized elliptical plots, individual consciousness, lyrical language, and dense literary references, the vanguard novel pushed linguistic virtuosity to its narrative limits. These novels also introduce a playful element that was not present in the earlier modernist novel; the serious philosophical and mythological themes disappear and are replaced by what Gustavo Pérez Firmat terms a “pneumatic” quality – a light, airy tone.9 In high vanguard novels the influence of film techniques often creates a fragmented (scenically centered) narrative that also draws on the spatial innovations of cubism and futurism in painting.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who spent a great deal of time in Paris, the capital of the avant-garde and its several “isms,” was a key figure in the introduction of vanguard aesthetics into Spain through his journal, Prometeo, and the tertulia Pombo, a literary group. He was interested in things and their relation to human beings (his Madrid apartment was a veritable museum). This preoccupation, which coincides with the attempts of impressionism, cubism, and surrealism to render human perception artistically, led to his development of linguistic means to explore the psychology of the interrelation of things and people. His invention of the greguería (‘aphorism’) around 1910 is central to this project of linking words, mental processes, and visual perception. For example, in the greguería “La ‘q’ es la ‘p’ que vuelve de paseo” (“‘q’ is a ‘p’ returning from a walk”),10 the visual form of the letters suggests a person first going one way and then another. The inventiveness of the expression both surprises and delights. The wit and emphasis on visual perception of the greguería, which Gómez de la Serna defined as a cross between metaphor and humor, became an important verbal vehicle for practitioners of the vanguard novel.
Gómez de la Serna’s El secreto del acueducto (‘The Aqueduct’s Secret’, 1921) narrates a man’s obsession with the aqueduct of Segovia. His fascination with this great work of Roman architecture blinds him to his young wife’s adultery. Like many vanguard novels, what in a more traditional novel would lead to a tragic denouement (a jealous husband discovers his wife’s unfaithfulness), is converted into a voyeuristic situation as the husband resigns himself to observing his wife’s liaison with another, while he himself continues to have an “affair” with the aqueduct. El novelista (‘The Novelist’, 1923) is a highly self-conscious novel in which an author proposes a variety of plot possibilities, many of them ludicrous and clearly mocking traditional novel-writing. El novelista even parodies recent novelistic innovations such as Unamuno’s confrontation of author and character in Niebla. A Gómez de la Serna character who visits his author comes not to learn of his existential situation but to complain that he lost his job because of the denouement of the novel; he demands that the novelist use his connections to find him another position.
In 1926 Ortega y Gasset’s Nova Novorum series published Víspera del gozo by Pedro Salinas (1891–1951) and El profesor inútil by Benjamín Jarnés (1888–1950), two works often singled out as the initiation of the vanguard novel in Spain. Víspera del gozo and El profesor inútil are similar in structure and theme. The novel’s chapters are discrete units that defy the integrative plots of the traditional novel. In Víspera del gozo the protagonist of each chapter is a different man, but the experiences of each are similar. In each case the man is looking forward to an assignation with a woman (the expectation of pleasure), but the consummation of the love act is thwarted. These scenes, rather than focusing on the tragic nature of an unfulfilled love, are opportunities to explore the way human consciousness and perception work and how these processes can be expressed in language.
The first chapter of Víspera del gozo, titled “Mundo cerrado” (‘Closed World’), finds a young man on a train traveling to see a recently married woman with whom he was intimate years ago. He attempts to read a book, but his attention is drawn to the scenery outside the train window. Reading and the sights and sounds of the train and landscape intermingle in his experience:
And then, something ill-timed and fatal like those sudden distractions that assault us in the middle of reading without our knowing where they come from, as if an inner breath of air propelled them, thrusts between our concentration and the printed word a strange and impenetrable ingredient: unexpectedly, the locomotive would throw out here, toward our side and aided by the wind – coming from outside this time – billows of thick gray smoke, behind which perhaps the most exhilarating scene of the book was vertiginously fleeing, hopelessly expiring before our eyes.11
The idyll he had imagined with his former lover, whose name he has been imaginatively reconstructing during his train journey, is dashed when at the end of the train ride he learns from her husband that she has recently died.
In Benjamín Jarnés’s El profesor inútil, a schoolteacher on summer vacation takes a series of pupils for tutoring, but in each case his lessons are subverted by romantic temptations. These diversions give Jarnés the opportunity to transform sensual experience into startling linguistic effects. Unlike Salinas, who was primarily a poet and only wrote three narrative works, Jarnés wrote a series of novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His other major novels, El convidado de papel (‘The Paper Guest’, 1928), Locura y muerte de nadie (‘Madness and the Death of a Nobody’, 1929), Paula y Paulita (1929), Teoría del zumbel (‘Theory of the Top’, 1930), and Lo rojo y lo azul (‘The Red and the Blue’, 1932) have more developed plots than El profesor inútil without giving up Jarnés’s trademark linguistic innovation. Some of his novels (especially Locura y muerte de nadie, Paula y Paulita, and Teoría del zumbel) also recall the existential themes of Unamuno’s and Baroja’s novels, but Jarnés gives Unamuno’s existential angst a flippant twist that inscribes it with the vanguards’ desire to undermine the icons of Western culture (compare Dadaist Marcel Duchamps’s bearded “Mona Lisa” or surrealist Salvador Dalí’s melting watches).
Women’s novelistic production in the 1920s takes a decidedly different path from that of the male vanguard novel. Many women writers were deeply engaged in the feminist movement during this decade, and in the Republican political movement that promised the kinds of social reforms that progressive women advocated. Carmen de Burgos, even though she was Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s companion for some twenty years, does not appear to have been influenced by his aesthetics. In addition to the novelettes mentioned above, in 1924 – just two years before the date usually assigned to the beginning of the vanguard novel – Burgos published La entrometida (‘The Busybody’), a highly amusing portrait of a feminist’s attempts to make a living in Spain. The novelette contains much of the wit and humor of a vanguard novel, but with a less lyrical style. It also bears a serious social message that we do not normally associate with the novels of Gómez de la Serna or Jarnés.
Similarly, Margarita Nelken (1896–1968) and Federica Montseny (1905–), both feminists and Republican activists, employed fiction to a socio-political purpose in the 1920s. Margarita Nelken’s La trampa del arenal (‘The Sandtrap’, 1923) introduces into the superficial materialism of traditional bourgeois life a “new woman,” appropriately named Libertad. Libertad lives alone and supports herself by means of a career in translating. Luis, married to a woman who thinks only of the external trappings of bourgeois society, is attracted to Libertad’s class-free and unpretentious values. Their budding relationship ends, however, when Libertad moves to Paris to accept a new job. Luis is left mired in his loveless marriage and unrewarding bureaucratic work – “la trampa del arenal.”
The same attention to class distinctions and to freedom from social constraints is also the focus of Federica Montseny’s autobiographical novel La indomable (‘The Indomitable Woman’, 1928). The novel centers on the difficulties that Vida, an intelligent, politically active woman, has in finding an appropriate mate. Although she has many feminine traits (she cooks, sews, cleans house, and has a nurturing personality), she is too strong for the men she meets, even those who are politically militant like her. Vida’s philosophically sophisticated ideas about the self focus on the social, rather than the individual; for her, society is a union of individuals who are interrelated. Her view of the self differs significantly from that displayed in the male-authored novels of the period, in which the protagonists are usually lovers. Unfortunately, neither Vida’s philosophy nor any of her fine personal qualities garner her the male companionship she seeks. Her activism and intellectual qualities are too threatening even to the enlightened men who are accustomed to more passive, less educated Spanish women.
Rosa Chacel (1898–1992), also a pro-Republic woman writer, did write a narrative with similarities to the male-authored vanguard novel, although with significant differences. Chacel, perhaps twentieth-century Spain’s most accomplished female novelist, had a closer relationship to José Ortega y Gasset’s circle than other women writers; those contacts induced her to attempt the kind of novel that she believed Ortega was theorizing in La deshumanización del arte and Notas sobre la novela. Despite similarities in plot structure and linguistic virtuosity to male vanguard novels, her effort, entitled Estación. Ida y vuelta (‘Station. Round Trip’, 1930), bears a more serious message about moral values. A young man, unofficially engaged to one woman in his apartment building, has an affair with another residing in the same edifice. When his fiancée becomes pregnant, he travels to Paris, but returns to his paternal responsibilities when the child is born. As in other vanguard novels, this simple set of circumstances is overshadowed by long moments of visual perception in which the protagonist paints verbal pictures of objects upon which his attention focuses. At the end of the novel, he is contemplating writing a movie script and proposes several alternative scenarios, suggesting the metafictional mode we associate with modernist and vanguard fiction.
Like that of so many of the artists and intellectuals associated with Spain’s “Silver Age,” Chacel’s contact with Ortega’s circle and the vibrant artistic life of Madrid in the 1920s and 1930s was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Chacel continued to write in exile in South America, but her production was slow and intermittent. In 1945 she published Memorias de Leticia Valle (Memoirs of Leticia Valle), a psychological study of the battle of wits and sensuality between an eleven-year-old girl and her much older tutor. Traces of Chacel’s vanguard beginnings are apparent in the novel’s elliptical style, but she had found her own voice with her move to the new world. Her masterpiece, La sinrazón (‘Unreason’, 1960), consummates her development of a complex style that reveals an individual consciousness’s engagement with its surroundings. Chacel had learned much from her apprenticeship in the Spanish vanguard and from European modernists, such as James Joyce (whom she read in Spanish translation in the 1920s); however, she moved beyond those models to incorporate a philosophical concept of the individual as a social as well as a metaphysical being.
Other writers of the pre-Civil War vanguard period whose careers continued in exile during the post-war period include Ramón Sender (1902–82) and Francisco Ayala (1906–). By the late 1920s, when these writers began publishing fiction, Spain’s political stability was collapsing. Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship ended and King Alfonso XIII went into exile, opening the way for the Second Republic proclaimed in 1931. The Republic suffered wild swings between leftist radicalism and conservative backlash that led to the Civil War in 1936. Both Sender’s and Ayala’s novelistic careers began in the vanguard style that emphasizes linguistic virtuosity over social thematics, but their interests shifted to incorporate contemporary political concerns within the growing social consciousness of the 1930s.
In his essays in El nuevo romanticismo (‘The New Romanticism’, 1930), José Díaz Fernández articulated a vanguard aesthetic that retained stylistic innovations but incorporated socio-political content. Díaz Fernández exemplified his aesthetics in two novels: El blocao (‘The Blockade’, 1928) and La Venus mecánica (‘The Mechanical Venus’, 1929). While not officially subscribing to any stated aesthetics, the narratives of Sender and Ayala are excellent examples of how the formal innovations of modernism and vanguardism can be marshalled to moral and political purposes. Imán (‘Magnet’, 1930, published in English as Earmarked for Hell), still considered one of Sender’s best novels, combines poetic imagery with a vivid account of the disastrous Spanish colonial campaigns in Morocco in the early 1920s. Siete domingos rojos (Seven Red Sundays, 1932) chronicles the social unrest, especially the proletarian uprisings, that contributed to the pre-Civil War climate of the Second Republic. The loose structure, a series of incidents narrated from a variety of viewpoints (even that of the moon), is reminiscent of the narratives of Salinas and Jarnés, but the prevalence of blood and the color red carries a much more serious message about Spain’s growing political crisis.
Francisco Ayala began his career in a vanguard mode tinged with surrealism in five short narrations collected as El boxeador y un ángel (‘The Boxer and an Angel’, 1929). In “Cazador en el alba” (‘Hunter at Dawn’) the protagonist experiences a series of oneiric visions, narrated in a densely metaphorical style, that recall images from silent films. Ayala published a number of essays after his early narrative work, but returned to fiction only after the Civil War, when he introduced a profoundly moral content into his complexly layered prose. Los usurpadores (Usurpers, 1949) and La cabeza del cordero (The Lamb’s Head, 1949) are collections of short novels that represent the best of Ayala’s narrative art. “El inquisidor” (‘The Inquisitor’), published the following year but now included in Los usurpadores, focuses on the soul-searching of a Jewish-convert inquisitor and the moral dilemma he faces when condemning those whose Christian loyalties are in doubt. “La cabeza del cordero” reveals the moral anguish of a man who denied his relationship to a family member killed during the Civil War in order to save himself from the same fate.
Whether you call the period from about 1900 until 1936 the Generations of ’98, ’14, and ’27, the modernist/vanguard era, or, as José Carlos Mainer prefers, the Spanish Silver Age, it was an extraordinarily productive and innovative period in Spanish literature. Narrative was an important part of that exuberant artistic flowering, although it no longer dominated the literary world as in the late nineteenth century. In many ways, the new novelists sought to break with the realist-Naturalist tradition, although women novelists of the modernist era were less ready to abandon realist strategies that afforded means of addressing social problems. Novelists beginning their careers toward the end of the modernist/vanguard period, and who were caught up in the political chaos of the 1930s, returned to the social and moral issues we associate with Realism and Naturalism, incorporating the technical innovations of the modernist and vanguardist aesthetics. Some of these writers continued that fruitful marriage of style and social commitment in narratives produced in exile in the new world.
Younger writers who began their novelistic careers after the Civil War and expressed their reactions to Francisco Franco’s repressive regime in a covert fashion inherited the legacy of modernist/vanguard writers. It is difficult to imagine Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pasual Duarte, 1942), Carmen Laforet’s Nada (‘Nothing’, 1945), Ana María Matute’s Primera memoria (‘First Memory’, 1960, published in English as Awakening), Luis Martín Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1962), or Miguel Delibes’s Cinco horas con Mario (Five Hours with Mario, 1966) without the context of pre-war narrative innovations. Each of these writers resisted the restraints placed on his or her artistic freedom by a strict censorship through elliptical plot structures, poetic language, and linguistic representation of thought processes they had learned from their early twentieth-century predecesors.
1 M. de Unamuno, “¡Adentro!” in Obras completas, ed. Manuel García Blanco (Barcelona: Vergara, 1958), vol. III, pp. 418–27.
2 Unamuno, Obras completas, vol.II, pp. 894–6.
3 Leda Schiavo, “Introducción” to Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Sonata de otoño (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1989), p. 13, quotes the “Nota” appended to the first edition in which the Marqués de Bradomín is thus described. Although the note was dropped in subsequent editions, this description is widely known and cited.
4 Valle-Inclán, Sonata de otoño, p. 50.
5 Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Tirano Banderas. Novela de tierra caliente (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987), p. 62.
6 C. Longhurst, Pío Baroja. El mundo es ansí (London: Grant & Cutler, 1977), pp. 100–1.
7 Carmen de Burgos, La flor de la playa y otras novelas cortas, ed. Concepción Nuñez Rey (Madrid: Castalia, 1989). Other novellas by women writers of the period 1900–36 are collected in Novelas breves de escritoras españolas 1900–1936 (Madrid: Castalia, 1989).
8 J. Martínez Ruíz, Azorín, La voluntad, ed. E. Inman Fox (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), p. 61.
9 G. Pérez Firmat, Idle Fictions: The Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926–1934 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), pp. 40–63.
10 R. Gómez de la Serna, Greguerías. Selección 1910–1960 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968), p. 143.
11 Noël Valis (tr.) P. Salinas, “Prelude to Pleasure”. A Bilingual Edition of “Víspera del gozo.” (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), p. 24.