11 The testimonial novel and the novel of memory
When placing works of prose fiction within the framework of modernity, critics find that diverse styles and trends tend to conform to a basic structure, which Nil Santiáñez-Tió has termed a “spectrum of possibilities”:
This spectrum has two poles: the realist pole (transparent language, tendency toward a transparent linguistic code, metonymical structure, unity of structure and subject, temporal organization, relation of subject to his/her biographic and social context, predominance of story over discourse, preference for unity and consistency, tendency to global visions, subordination to the principle of non-contradiction); the experimental, modernist pole (experimental and dislocated language, a dense linguistic code, metaphoric structure, dissolution of personal identity, spatial organization, predominance of fictional discourse over story, a narrative distanced from direct communication, rejection of global visions, epistemological doubt).1
In 1983 I proposed that a similar polarity existed between the testimonial novel, on the one hand, and the poetic novel, on the other. But whether one speaks of “realist” as opposed to “modernist” prose or of the testimonial as opposed to the poetic novel, it is certainly the case that the idea of literary polarity derives from what we consider “modern” literature. Both poles may be present at the same time, in the same writer, and even in the same work. These poles may exist in a relatively pure state or as subtle variations that combine the magnetic attraction of one to the other.2
The tendency in the modern Spanish novel toward the “realist” pole developed during the second half of the twentieth century. This period was characterized – at least in the political sphere – by two phases: the first takes place between the dates of the “victory” and the death of General Franco (1939–75); the second follows from 1975, after Franco’s death, and encompasses the transition toward democracy and the nation’s acceptance of a new democratic form of government. In the first phase, which was defined by the dictatorship, the predominant realist pole gives rise to the “testimonial novel,” a genre that continues well into the 1960s. In the second phase, the “novel of memory” gains prominence. Though reflecting different circumstances, the “novel of memory” may be considered a literary successor to the “testimonial” novel. The purpose of this essay is not to recount the history of these two phases but to illustrate their salient features through reflections on certain key examples of this literary production.
The testimonial novel
In his presentation of the first edition of La colmena (The Hive), in 1951, Camilo José Cela declared that this novel was nothing but “a slice of life narrated step by step”: “Its plot unfolds in Madrid – in 1942 – among a swarm or beehive of characters who are sometimes happy and other times not.”3 In an interview one year after the publication of El Jarama (The One Day of the Week, 1956), Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio clarified his principal aim in these words: “A delimited time and space. Showing simply what happens there.”4
Narrating a slice of life or seeing what happens within a strictly limited time and space subordinates artistic construction to a series of reflections; these reflections simply bear witness to events. During the 1940s and 1950s readers and critics had become accustomed to escapist literature (generally in translation). Now they encountered a series of titles such as Nada (1945) (‘Nothing’) by Carmen Laforet, La sombra del ciprés es alargada (‘Long is the Cypress’s Shadow’, 1948) by Miguel Delibes, José Suárez Carreño’s Las últimas horas (The Final Hours, 1950); Cela’s La colmena (1951), Ignacio Aldecoa’s El fulgor y la sangre (‘Lightning and Blood’, 1954), Los bravos (‘The Untamed’, 1954) by Jesús Fernández Santos, El Jarama (1956), and Nuevas amistades (‘New Friendships’, 1959) by Juan García Hortelano. These titles and those of ensuing years – titles evocative of the world of work like Central eléctrica (‘Power Plant’, 1958), La piqueta (‘The Pickaxe’, 1959), La mina (‘The Mine’, 1960) La zanja (‘The Trench’, 1961) by Jesús López Pacheco, Antonio Ferres, Armando López Salinas and Alfonso Grosso respectively, convinced readers and critics alike that they were, in effect, witnessing the renaissance of an autochthonic novel of the “realist” type.
Thus from the 1940s to the 1960s, Spain’s novelistic production offered a range of works that represented quite an innovation for their time. These novels had in common the conviction that writing should revolve around, and incorporate, historical events and social contexts. Writing should reflect what was real rather than display itself as an autonomous work of art, created simply to flaunt the genius of its maker. To understand how this change in literary direction occurred, we need to take into account several interrelated factors: not only the personality of each individual writer, but also the influence exerted by two basic constructs: the historical climate, experienced by authors and readers alike, and the model or generic idea of what constitutes a novel. The construct of “historical climate” refers to general, collective trends in thinking, feeling, and action that arise when people share a common set of experiences, bounded within a given time and place and marked, at beginning and end, by significant changes and events. The construct of a “model” arises from specific literary texts that are produced within a given historical climate. This model appears as a generic ideal and suggests literary possibilities that writers may either emulate or strive to exceed during a given period of time.
The end of the Civil War (1936–9), the events of the Second World War (1939–45), and the succeeding post-war years define what we may call the first “historical climate.” In this climate, nationalist mythology and rhetoric no longer hold sway. Autarchic Spain, now isolated from Europe, moves from starvation to a prolonged scarcity. It is a time of repression, of the politics of purge, of isolation and misery. In schools and universities young people had to enroll for curricula consisting of thirteen years of religious education and five of a single party’s political indoctrination. For the most part, orthodoxy and the traditional Catholic theology of Neo-Thomism precluded any echoes or parodies of the ideas of a now distant “Generación del ’98” – a cultural and intellectual phenomenon that had gained greater prominence in the absence of more modern texts.
Soon after the end of the Second World War diverse ideas and feelings began filtering through existentialist themes: dereliction, nothingness, emptiness, the human condition, authenticity, risk and compromised circumstances. Poets invoked God. A few novelists indulged in the effects of violence (a trend occasionally called “tremendismo,” marked by darkness, turbulence, and despair). The theatre cultivated entertainment. Cinematography promoted a kind of “heroic” nationalism. Journals, such as Escorial, Índice, Ínsula and the more traditional Arbor, all of which express a more liberal viewpoint, also began to appear. The philosopher Ortega y Gasset organized a lecture series in the Institute of the Humanities. Pedro Laín Entralgo’s España como problema (‘The Problem of Spain’, 1949) was countered by Rafael Calvo Serer’s España sin problema (‘Spain Without Problems’, 1949). Guided by the teachings of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, philologists devoted themselves to dialectology. It is a time of half-shuttered houses, slow trains, and reconstructed temples; full military barracks, brothels, tuberculosis, burials; the triumph and death of the bullfighter Manolete; segregated beaches, safe-conduct passes, droughts, stagnation.
Such were the “years of penance,” as expressed in Años de penitencia (Carlos Barral) and of “infradevelopment” (Fernando Morán).5 The government that saw itself as “partaking of neutrality and not belligerence” was followed, from 1945 to 1951, by a government “of autarchy” (Ramón Tamames).6 The period between the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War also saw the transition from what had been a break in intellectual life before the Civil War to “the decline of an imperialist-totalitarian culture.” From that time on, the “reconstruction of reason” and the “recovery of liberal thought” (Elías Díaz)7 slowly gained ground. The semantic import of those times could be condensed into one word: anguish.
In those early years, the novelists who imparted privileged insights into their particular historical climate were Camilo José Cela, Carmen Laforet, and Miguel Delibes, all of whom saw the necessity for change. Wanting to shake off inertia with a flourish, Cela exposed the intractable roots of individual alienation in La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1942) – the confession of a man condemned to death. In Pabellón de reposo (Rest Home, 1944) he reproduced diary entries of patients ill with tuberculosis, and in La colmena he presented a panorama of hunger. Carmen Laforet, in Nada (1945) and La isla y los demonios (‘The Island and the Demons’, 1952), traced the pathways of consciousness from illusion through disenchantment toward the necessity of a renewed enthusiasm for life. In his seclusion, Miguel Delibes probed the hidden power of fear and set for himself, time and again, the task of searching for a way that is his own, as in La sombra del ciprés es alargada (1947), El camino (The Path, 1950), Diario de un cazador (‘Diary of a Hunter’, 1955), La hoja roja (‘The Red Leaf’, 1959), and other novels.
Other writers kept pace, presenting human consciousness in conflict (Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Los gozos y las sombras [‘Pleasures and Shadows’, 1957–62]), aspects of everyday life (Luis Romero, La noria [‘The Waterwheel’, 1952]), and abject failure (Suárez Carreño, Las últimas horas, 1950). According to Juan Benet’s considered judgment, Suárez Carreño’s novel
already contained in embryonic form all the elements of condemnation that would nourish Spanish literary production over the following fifteen years: the existence of a people without a voice, who suffered but nonetheless emerged unscathed; the coarseness, bad taste, and debased culture of the nouveau riche; the equivocal and dramatic situation of woman, who lives with one leg bent in submission to ill-gotten gain, and the other almost up in the air, seeking the love of intransigent intellectuals; the aversion, boredom, and – abounding throughout, although never stated explicitly – the intractable malaise of inaction.8
A close reading of the early novels of Cela, Laforet, and Delibes, as well as of works by lesser-known writers, yields a model characterized by the following: the author assumes a narrator who, speaking in the first person or through focusing, either merges with the protagonist or identifies closely with him or her. Narration becomes a confessional discourse tending toward monologue. Thus, as Spires has observed, the implied reader, invested emotionally in the story, must now make a decision either in favor of the individual’s role in society or against it. Time appears as a past sealed off from the present, over which the subject broods, yielding a retrospective view more linear than simultaneous. A past relived, framed by a broad evocative context, resounds within the consciousness of the main character, who chooses to recount several meaningful personal experiences. Space is experienced as a subtle state of being, delineated through atmospheric descriptions that focus on everyday objects. It is a reduced space, at times rigorously cellular.
Reflecting the coercions of an oppressive historical climate, the world of these novels revolves around an individual and his or her family, who form an isolated unit. Faced with an uncertain future, the protagonist gives vent to violence, suffers the emptiness of inner exile, or, paralyzed by indecision, becomes lost in monologues suffused with memory and endless waiting. Such early novels feature a person who, his or her development shaped by the interventions of those close to him or her, struggles to discover or attain an authentic self, a center toward which his or her desire for truth inevitably turns and through which he or she achieves a certain distance from a masked world. The main character lives through hollowness, repetition, nausea, guilt, struggle, agony. If and when they prevail, four solutions commonly occur: they die or simply close that painful chapter of their lives; their obsession burns out, or the deception that had blinded them is disclosed.
If these novels appear as a cluster or cycle, their common axis turns on a fixed chronology of determining events. Titles may refer to the protagonist (e.g. Pascual Duarte), the particular situation (e.g. Las últimas horas), or an overwhelming negativity (e.g. Nada, La sombra del ciprés es alargada). They are melodic novels presented in a low-key manner. Narrative flow, paced through evenly divided chapters, is uniform. Filtered through the consciousness of the main character, words render a transparent image of reality. This image, though personal, is not unique but common to all, thereby inviting comparisons. Language itself projects the emotional resonance of inner voices. The image of the road, so often present, denotes uncertainty; the image of the island, another common trope, expresses an inability to communicate. The phenomenon of discontinuity, which marks the modern European novel, surfaces, in this fiction, more in the disconnection among people than in the rupture of the classical unities of time and space. The many individual destinies represented in these novels ultimately converge in the vision of a person withdrawn into loneliness.
This lyrical, emotional emphasis on withdrawal reflected the deprivations of war and isolation. Further, the aesthetic criteria proffered by the regime reinforced this withdrawal, engendering a collective psyche that gestured towards the image of an inward-turning individual, imprisoned within a close family circle and bereft of access to a wider community. Randolph Pope has identified the symptomatic frequency of common images, themes, motifs and fictional characters in the novel of the 1940s: the backward-looking glance, jail-school, marginality, and the cult of the family (the sense of clinging to the family despite a stifling domestic life); hunger and misery; the figures of the indiano (a newly rich Spanish emigrant returned from Latin America) and of the inocente (“simpleton”).
The above characteristics defined the novelistic model of the 1940s and 1950s as a kind of existential confession, an existentialism “more vitalistic than philosophical,”9 a phenomenon that G. Roberts and O. Barreiro Pérez have studied in depth. In that confessional novel, the “I” makes an effort to accept a fantasy world informed by illusory ideals (peace, family harmony, health, affection, or purity). Evoking such illusions, the novel may contain certain traits of romance, as in Nada or Los Abel (‘The Abel Family’, 1948) and Pequeño teatro (‘Children’s Theatre’, 1954) by Ana María Matute, or tragic elements that degenerate into melodrama (Pascual Duarte). It is not a novel of lucidity but one imbued with illusionism. Traces of literary intertextuality are drawn from the picaresque genre and from writers like Baroja, Dostoievski, and Chekhov. Other traces derive from a scattering of foreign novels in translation (chosen by happenstance in an impoverished outdated market) and from influential films (Rebecca, Wuthering Heights).
If a novelist’s persona can succeed in interpreting the underlying structures of a given historical climate in the throes of change, the novel itself shapes that change and communicates its message to a new climate. Memory, presented as a selective process, and the technique of expressing the narrator’s own feelings of empathy through the consciousness of a naive, central character allowed Nada and El camino to forge the path to neorrealismo. La colmena bridged the gap between existential concerns and social realities. The image of the hive traced an underlying labyrinth of uncertainty, highlighted by its segmented design; glimpses of different lives exist juxtaposed yet without dialogue to connect them. La colmena’s narrative point of view, appearing “almost” objective, and its conversational technique were soon acclaimed and emulated. In some respects, Cela’s novel became a model. It also proved so innovative as to open new literary vistas.
The publication of La colmena in 1951 coincided with a transition to another historical climate, one ending in 1962. Within this eleven-year period, Spain moved from a “government formed by treaties with the Vatican and the US” to a “government with a Plan of Stabilization” (1957) (Tamames, La República); the aim of both entities was to articulate Spain’s position within Europe and her role as an anti-communist nation. A process of “intellectual liberalization and an international political opening, of dialogue with those in exile, of initiating ties between European thought, and of university crisis” also began to develop between 1951 and 1962. After 1956, “remnants of traditional integrismo” – a political affiliation advocating nationalistic goals – re-emerges as a viable voice, giving rise to “the technocratic ideology of economic development and the scientific criticism of ideological absolutism.”10
These are “the years without excuse” (Barral) and of “partial development” (Morán), a time when poets, through their art, seek “communication,” when poems speak of “solidarity.” Sponsored by the Ministry of Education, writers produce essays on cultural liberalization; other thinkers look ahead to an economic liberalization supposedly divorced from ideology. While support from North America achieves positive results, increasing contact with Europe and America, entrenched mythologies and nationalist rhetoric betray their inner exhaustion. Scarcity yields to a relative solvency, facilitated by the emigration of workers, by tourism, and by the investment of foreign capital. The Concordat with the Holy See (1953), an agreement that Spain signed with the Vatican, privileges canon law and thus almost erases civil law, consolidating the church’s grip. Initial economic improvement and chronic political stagnation make social problems more evident. Movies and novels bring Italian neorrealismo to Spain; a literature of testimony, of condemnation, of censured protest, disseminates its message.
Change, conflict, and scarcity are the order of the day: exodus from the country to the city, workers migrating to urban suburbs, housing shortages, soccer triumphs, incursions of the super-conservative order of the Opus Dei, founded in 1928, vicissitudes of a handcuffed opposition, early dialogue with Spanish exiles and the student protest of 1956, which cracks the façade of the National Movement. More and more intellectuals and professionals leave the country. “Spain is in Europe,” affirms Julián Marías, a little too optimistically, in 1952. Freedom should be a daily conquest, thinks José Luis Aranguren. Laín Entralgo publishes the book La espera y la esperanza (‘Waiting and Hoping’, 1957) and Antonio Buero Vallejo writes tragedies couched in a language of hope. In these years Ortega y Gasset, Pío Baroja, and Juan Ramón Jiménez all die. Enrique Tierno Galván’s sociology and the economic history of Jaime Vicens Vives negotiate the passage from an existentialist stance based on “scarcity” to a neo-positivistic endorsement of “growth” (Díaz, Pensamiento español). Dionisio Ridruejo, a former Falangist, becomes one of the leaders of the opposition. Journals start to appear – Papeles de Son Armadans and Boletín informativo de derecho político, edited by Cela and Tierno Galván respectively. Cuadernos del Congreso por la libertad de la cultura comes out in Paris; also Praxis, a Marxist publication. In spite of rigid censorship, the editorial initiative becomes more and more vibrantly alive. Spain insists upon becoming part of Europe, culturally, and above all – economically – a project never fully brought to fruition (“nothing ever happens here” is a phrase that keeps cropping up in the literature of this period.)
In the work of novelists who reflect the new historical climate, we may note a rejection of Cela’s sensationalism and a preference for Delibes’s reclusiveness, even as Cela furnished younger writers with the format of the “travel book,” a vehicle of first-hand knowledge of a now-forgotten Spain. Never were Spanish novelists less inclined to display genius or more seriously devoted to the representation of the real. Their gift to contemporary readers and writers is the unsparing apprehension of certain truths – social immobility (El Jarama); the widening gulf between social classes (Los bravos); the sense of belonging to, or alienation from, an inhospitable Spain (the first novels of Juan Goytisolo). These works define a new model – the “social” novel – also illustrated by the following contemporary texts: Aldecoa’s novel about the fishing industry, Gran Sol (‘Great Sole’, 1957); Las afueras (‘Beyond City Limits’, 1958) by Luis Goytisolo; Nuevas amistades (1959) and Tormenta de verano (‘Summer Storm’, 1962) by García Hortelano. The social novel divides into three currents: a first wave of neorrealismo (more transcendent and of a more consciously crafted artistic density); a social realism (combining proletarian and anti-bourgeoisie strains); and the critical or dialectical realism that informs Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1962), a novel by Luis Martín Santos that establishes yet a different model.
In the social novel, broadly conceived, the novelist – tacitly a witness – lays out the inner life of the times for our contemplation; narration in the third person conveys both a limited point of view and an objective representation. The novelist may also structure narration so that multiple points of view become constitutive of a single event, rendered from several angles; or he or she may show us how different events define the same set of problems. Annotations, similar to stage directions, allow the narrator unobtrusively to construct scenes that develop through bits and pieces of conversation rather than dialogue. In this type of novel (according to R. Spires),11 the implied reader begins to feel identified with the anonymous narrator and thus is able to distance himself from the stagnant society that stands exposed in the text.
Time – unique and irretrievable in its passing – is experienced, in these novels, as an open “present.” A drawn-out circumspection results in extended scenes, either successive or simultaneous, and these approximate the feeling of real time. Scenic segments may last several hours, a day, or even a few days, time in which hardly anything (almost nothing) happens, and yet this “almost nothing” affects many. El Jarama succeeds in capturing the transient nature of life through the use of verifiable, palpably concrete nouns, appropriate to each person or thing. These nouns evoke, through that perfected sense of “yesterday will never return,” a vividly felt recognition of what is most real, most present to us, and therefore most perishable. El Jarama conveys a renewed experience of our own mortality that, some time later, the author will attribute to certain stanzas of Jorge Manrique’s medieval elegy of 1474. Space, concentrated in country, city, suburbs, places of work or leisure, usually emerges as reduced or confined within vast land- or city-scapes. Descriptions that focus obsessively upon objects, which acquire symbolic value, promote this sense of spatial reduction or confinement.
In the historical climate of the 1950s, contrasts marking the gulf between the “haves” and “have-nots” relegate the family unit to a secondary position, bringing forward the concerns of labor districts, economic groups, or social classes. The idea of a collective protagonist, conceived as the multitude in La colmena, now becomes the village community in Los bravos or groups based on age or neighborhood, as in El Jarama. In later novels, social class determines the collective identity of the protagonist. However, it is not yet the whole of the country represented through Madrid, as in Tiempo de silencio, nor is the collective protagonist emblematic of universal chaos, as in Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra (Juan the Landless, 1975). As represented in these diverse social sectors, people endure a given state of affairs, try to escape, and in so doing attempt to come to some kind of decision. Since the group is the protagonist, people remain subsumed within the collective; character appears flat, not rounded, for individual consciousness gives way to a foregrounded social situation in which everyone takes part. Fenced in, as it were, by obstacles at every turn, these groups, afflicted by poverty and subject to oppression, decay, alienation, and a paralyzing isolation, engage in either endless work or mindless partying as they desperately search for some kind of solidarity.
In these novels, plot usually consists of a short succession of hours, days, or weeks in which nothing occurs; suddenly something happens, but in the end, the event does not alter (or hardly alters) the situation. Typical of the proletarian novel is the fatal accident: a gypsy kills a policeman (Aldecoa’s Con el viento solano [‘With the East Wind’, 1957]); a girl drowns in a river (El Jarama); the village elder dies (Los bravos); the walls of a dam crumble (Central eléctrica); a net of fish crushes the owner of a fishing boat (Gran sol); the collapsing roof of a mine shaft buries a team of miners (La mina). Conversely, the police incident is typical of the anti-bourgeois novel, e.g. the apparent abortion of a young girl who thought she was pregnant (Nuevas amistades); the appearance of a dead, naked woman on the beach (Tormenta de verano). As a consequence of the police incident, a member of the idle rich does seem ready to change, but any inner recognition of wrongdoing dissipates as soon as the mystery clears up. In the proletarian novel, a fatal accident might provoke a change in the workers’ conditions. Soon after, however, a surface calm reasserts itself and life goes on as before.
If there are cyclical novels, their construction is predominantly spatial: social zones are clearly marked, allowing certain living conditions to complement one another in significant ways. Examples of these juxtapositions occur in the trilogies of Aldecoa and Juan Goytisolo. Titles often flaunt a collective sign (Los bravos), or allude to a stationary mode (Entre visillos [Behind the Curtains, 1958] by Carmen Martín Gaite), or to the possibility of hope (Central eléctrica). These novels, rather extensive, graphically present a segmented story line: scenes occur without transitions. Language refers directly to what is real, avoids descriptions and summaries, and allows characters to express themselves in everyday speech. At the same time, the prose of Sánchez Ferlosio, Aldecoa, or Fernández Santos informs the text with a discernible poetic quality, one of transparent cogency, a quality seamlessly allied to the inherent force of testimonial expression. A common image – that of a redoubt (reducto), a military term for a final retreat – figures the theme of the fruitlessness of daily work; the theme of being lonely in a crowd surfaces in the image of the barrier. Such images trace out the idea of broken threads, of a distinctly spatial discontinuity that marks the divided nature of social sectors.
During these years the socialization of literature develops in opposition to the political aesthetics of the 1940s. Economic differences between classes become more obvious, while the presence of the individual person and of the family milieu gives way to group enclaves, leading the reader to contemplate not only what the press had kept intentionally from view but other facts and experiences omitted from the novel of previous generations. The new model, then, evolved as a primarily testimonial novel in which the world appears impervious to change, either by individuals or by isolated groups. This is the novel of disillusion, suffering, and patience. In the early 1950s intertextual traces stem from picaresque literature and the work of Pío Baroja. A renewed impetus regarding the testimonial novel comes from several other sources as well: the North American novel (Hemingway, Faulkner); Italian neorealism in narrative and cinematography (Zavattini); Marxist criticism (Marx and Lukács, Sartre and Brecht, Gramsci, now more frequently read); and from the Spanish novel of the preceding generation.
A focus on realism, either expressed or implied, marked the existential novel of the 1940s and the social novel of the 1950s. While the “structural” or “dialectical” novel of the 1960s maintained a realist orientation, these novels expanded the experiences of testimony, encompassing a broader social panorama and deepening the expression of personal consciousness. Writers like Luis Martín Santos (Tiempo de silencio) and Juan Goytisolo (Señas de identidad [Marks of Identity, 1966]) restored an acute, limitless elocutionary potential and variety to the art of the novel. Novels that followed, however, did not sustain the realist aim. Attention shifted either to the text itself – a preoccupation with language, metafiction, and the theory of the novel within the process of novel writing – or to the task of recovering an appropriate, amenable kind of narrativity, parodic in many cases, which many critics understood as constituting a kind of plural model of post-modernity. Only in the case of novels by younger writers in the 1990s (the so-called “Generation X”) did people begin to speak again of neorealism. However, the task of tracing the causes of such a literary change goes beyond the confines of this chapter.
We may cite El Jarama as the best example of the testimonial novel. This text exhibits, in a highly developed form, the cluster of characteristics that constitute the model: exposition; vividly lived, inner experiences; prosaic daily routines; chronological time; concrete spaces; revelations of the way things are (“immobilism”); the representation of a world inscribed within the historical reality that contains it; successive or simultaneous scenes; the presence of objects, evoked in precise details; a condensed experience of time; actions that, appearing insignificant, nonetheless become charged with intensity, communicating symptomatic values; half-developed characters; a distant stance taken by a camera-like witness; transparent prose, colloquial speech, and poetry. Poetry infuses the text because the author of a good testimonial novel must be a poet, in the same way as the author of a good poetic novel – Juan Benet, for instance, in Saúl ante Samuel (‘Saul Before Samuel’, 1980) – must bear witness to his world, whether immediate or mediated.
El Jarama, a testimonial novel, is also a poem. Critics12 have recognized its intrinsically poetic nature. Its symbolic qualities and values endow the text with a singular density, one enduring and inevitable in its expression. A poetic sensibility gives voice to those profound feelings that bear witness to a single moment in time – a unique, irrepeatable time, witnessed respectfully as truth. An honest respect for what is and what was, once upon a time, testifies as an act of love to the simple fact of life.13
The novel of memory
When General Franco died in November 1975, abrupt changes in politics were the order of the day, beginning with a period of transition. No perceptible break in literary production occurred, however. Faced with uncertainty, people suffered desencanto, a pervasive kind of “disenchantment.” While “disenchantment” may have been experienced somewhat prematurely, that mood was the logical consequence of four decades of dictatorship. Turbulence marked the transitional years, yet the period conveyed a hope of new horizons. In 1982 the triumph of social democracy brought many benefits, some of a contingent nature, others of lasting impact. Spain became more European.
The years of transition opened many pathways for the art of the narrative. A major development, arising from the legacy of the testimonial novel, was “the novel of memory,” perhaps best illustrated by the work of Carmen Martín Gaite, particularly her novel El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room, 1978). Just as we spoke earlier of “the ‘testimonial novel” and not of “testimony” per se, we refer now to the “novel of memory,” not simply to “memoirs.” Neither testimony nor memoir may assume per se the form of the novel. Testimonial writing captures a reality that the author has witnessed directly, while a book of memories represents, in writing, what the author recalls having experienced. The difference is instructive. If “history” is to be more than a catalogue of the facts of the past, the practice of New Historicism (Arthur Danto, Hayden White) is to construe historical writing as a “story.” The idea of a “story” implies the selective and interpretive consciousness of a storyteller. Yet the new historicists would never claim that what such a “storyteller” offers is a “novel” or a “fiction.” On the contrary, even new historicists present narrative as empirically grounded in fact. While imagination plays a role in interpreting facts, history, in their view, is not an imaginative art.
Travel books – Cela’s Viaje a la Alcarria (‘Journey to Alcarria’, 1948) or Goytisolo’s Campos de Níjar (‘The Landscapes of Níjar’, 1960) – are “testimonies.” While they may be imaginative or emotional in tone, these books bear witness from the perspective of the traveler (Cela, Goytisolo) to the actual state of affairs at a given time and place. Conversely, Memorias y olvidos (‘Remembering and Forgetting’, 1982) by Francisco Ayala is a book of “memories.” While it displays an imaginative writing style and records events – indispensable elements in any narrative – Ayala’s book is not subtitled “novela” nor does it belong to the genre of the novel. His book is a narrative of remembering and forgetting; the memories, the forgotten things, belong not to an imaginary subject but to the Francisco Ayala who has written and published the book.
These cautionary comments help explain why, strictly speaking, “testimonies” and “memoirs” are not considered here: they are not “novels.” From the 1940s to the 1960s the Spanish novel tended to bear witness to identifiable, contemporary realities; these realities called for close observation and criticism, hence the term novela testimonial. After a brief hiatus (1970–5), which featured a kind of exaggerated experimentalism, the novel recovered, in part, the “realist” accent of the testimonial novel. The aim of this new novel, however, was not to raise the reader’s consciousness of life under a now defunct dictatorship but to revisit and reassess one’s experience during that difficult time.
The novels appear within an historical climate characterized by obstructed beginnings and a transitional period of opportunity. As society manages to evade revolutionary change, transition itself becomes channeled into democratic reform. This climate gives rise to novels organized around remembering. Remembering often takes place through dialogue and finds expression in the self-reflexive act of writing, producing metafiction as well as incursions into a world of fantasy. Among these variants, our analysis will focus on the novel of memories – novels tilted, so to speak, in the direction of the “realist” pole – rather than on metafiction or fantasy, styles of writing that tend toward the “modernist” pole.
Autobiographical memory appears in dialogical form in Diálogos del anochecer (‘Dialogues at Twilight’, 1972) by José-María Vaz de Soto, Retahílas (‘Endless Recitations’, 1974) by Carmen Martín Gaite, Las guerras de nuestros antepasados (The Wars of Our Ancestors, 11975) by Miguel Delibes, Luz de la memoria (‘Light of Memory’, 1976) by Lourdes Ortiz, Fabián (‘Fabian’, 1977) by Vaz de Soto, La muchacha de las bragas de oro (‘The Girl in Golden Panties’, 1978) by Juan Marsé, and El cuarto de atrás (1978) by Martín Gaite, as well as others in the 1970s and beyond. The narrative of remembering informs amenable, impressionistic books like those of Francisco Umbral, as well as the fervent Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez (‘The Autobiography of Federico Sánchez’, 1977) by Jorge Semprún. The desire to recount one’s life in relation to the death of Franco, which marked the end of an era, compels this retrospective mode of storytelling. The act of recalling one’s personal history (evoking life as lived up to the moment the dictatorship ended or was about to end – a dictatorship, moreover, that had inscribed a writer’s biography from childhood to adulthood) – expressed a will to distance oneself from those events, thereby achieving a clearer idea about the meaning of existence. The narrative of remembering also surfaces in debased forms: remembrances of things that never happened or the evocation of events supposedly occurring in an inconceivable future. Falsified accounts, promoted by people skilled in public relations, won prestigious prizes and gained easy sales.
Characteristic of the 1960s novel (whether seen as “dialectical” or “structural”) was a self-dialogical mode of narrative discourse, articulated by the partial, even exclusive, use of the self-reflexive “you” (tú), equivalent to a split “I” (yo). In the 1970s writers divide this dual expression of the self into a dialogue between two different interlocutors. These interlocutors recall Berganza and Cipión, characters in Cervantes’s Coloquio de los perros (‘The Dogs’ Dialogue’, 1613): one character assumes the role of a protagonist, similar to the autobiographical Berganza, while the other’s parsimonious speech habits and supporting role remind us of Cipión. This “other” may shadow the protagonist, as it were, presenting attenuated versions of the protagonist’s ideas; he may also contest the protagonist by presenting a problematic, a failed, or even a phantasmagoric identity.
In the case of Vaz de Soto’s Diálogos del anochecer (1972), the first volume of a tetralogy, two friends, Fabián Azúa and Sabas Llorente, enact a dialogue in which each appears, at first, clearly differentiated from the other, each with a given name, marital status, biography, and distinct personality. At the same time, an ironic game of indistinction comes into play as the author shuffles and combines speech habits and psychological traits. As the novel progresses, one adopts the situation of the other, narrating his story as if he were the other. The second novel of the tetralogy, Fabián (1977), represents nothing more than the delayed publication of one day’s worth of conversations between Fabián and Sabas, omitted from Diálogos del anochecer for fear of censorship. Fabián presents Fabián as character and Sabas as his psychotherapist and as the composer of the dialogical novel that the two friends gradually construct. As the novel Fabián appears to write itself through the dialogical exchanges of Fabián and Sabas, one as friend, the other as composer, both acquire a more acute awareness of themselves as people and as characters in the novel. Self-consciousness develops to the point where Fabián’s story about personal communication and sexual fulfillment gives way to a series of digressions of every kind, mainly of a self-critical or metafictive nature.
In Fabián, Sabas seems to represent a constellation of interlocutive qualities and values. These values arise through questions and whatever else incites the speaker to continue his story, progressing through more or less extensive commentaries, finally resulting in momentary identification, productive discrepancies, corrective oppositions, and even contradictions. In sum, Vaz de Soto’s novels present interlocutors each of whom may be an unknown person, a marginal or “sub” interlocutor, recalling Cipión. But on occasion a true interlocutor appears with as much right as the other to his own novel. This insistence on a rightful place for him finds expression in the two titles that complete the “tetralogy”: Fabián y Sabas (‘Fabian and Sabas’, 1982) and Diálogos de la alta noche (‘Dialogues Late at Night’, 1982). In Carmen Martín Gaite’s Retahílas, in which alternating chapters present the speeches of aunt and nephew through the duration of one night, Eulalia is the protagonist and Germán the secondary character who plays more the role of a catalyst than of an autonomous speaker. As we shall see, in El cuarto de atrás Martín Gaite creates the figure of “the man dressed in black,” an intriguing example of an enigmatic being or the model of a phantom-like interlocutor.
No matter how shadowy the interlocutor may appear in the novel of memory, the impression persists that dialogue is always intended, even when unwitnessed. Matters of influence or first appearances have little bearing on the literary production of the novel of memory, for if Diálogos al anochecer precedes Retahílas, the theme of “the talking cure” already existed in Martín Gaite’s Ritmo lento (‘Slow Rhythm’, 1963). Similarly, although Fabián’s psychoanalytic dialogue was published two years later than Delibes’s Las guerras de nuestros antepasados, Vaz de Soto’s novel had been written at an earlier time. At issue is the collective will for self-expression, for dialogue, during the years of rupture and transition. This dialogue is not intellectual or contemplative: it is an emotional exchange, rendered through memory and realized dialectically between two speakers, each cognizant of past and future. It is a dialogue that uncovers religious anguish, deceptions that stem from an ideology in crisis, and palpable tensions between the individual and society. It is, in sum, a dialogue articulating a longing for communication and genuineness in the face of entrenched obligations imposed by the world’s social codes. It is a dialogue between what could have been, given an atmosphere of freedom, and what now, after so many years of oppression, will never be. It is a dialogue whose temperature, responding to the incandescent quality of words, rises to a feverish pitch – that insomnia and intoxication captured so well in Retahílas, Fabián, El cuarto de atrás, or in the second half of Luz de la memoria – a choked succession of recitations that induce an ever-rising pulse rate.
Not all novels of memories are figured as dialogues. Rosa Chacel adopts a discourse that shares the qualities of essay and introspection in the trilogy Escuela de Platón (‘Plato’s School’), composed of Barrio de Maravillas (The Maravillas District, 1976), Acrópolis (‘The Acropolis’, 1984), and Ciencias naturales (‘The Natural Sciences’, 1988). The trilogy reconstructs, through reminiscences, the feelings and thoughts of a girl up to 1914, of a girl grown to womanhood during the Civil War, and later a girl in exile. A continuous, self-correcting discourse, marked by indeterminacy, distinguishes the novelistic art of this writer. She also reproduces certain unexpected moments of epiphany, reflecting upon them with a kind of inquisitive obstinacy.
Several of Francisco Umbral’s novels evoke an individual and collective past, characterized by the drawn-out coercions of the Franco regime. Perhaps the best of these is his first, Memorias de un niño de derechas (‘Memories of a Right-Wing Childhood’, 1962) set in the 1940s and 1950s. Umbral’s novels adapt the form of a series of fragments, each almost monological, which evolve as sketches of local customs, news commentaries, short essays, and poetry in prose. The form of the monologue defines the units that comprise José Luis Castillo-Puche’s Trilogía de la liberación: El libro de las visiones y las apariciones (‘The Book of Visions and Apparitions’, 1977), El amargo sabor de la retama (‘The Bitter Taste of Broom’, 1979) and Conocerás el poso de la nada (‘You’ll Taste the Bitter Dregs of Nothingness’, 1982). By construing writing and reading as a retrospective act of confession (the confession of a former anguish) Castillo-Puche’s work explores further the theme of individual and general (Spanish) liberation in relation to the fanaticism and violence that provoked the outbreak of 1936 and its bloody consequences.
Other texts of reminiscence and reflection, composed during the years surrounding the disappearance of the dictatorship, take either a greater or lesser distance from the dictator’s death, offering a variety of intriguing perspectives. Carlos Barral, a demanding poet and influential editor, is the author of some “memoirs” of superb critical-historical value. These are divided into three volumes: Años de penitencia (‘Years of Penance’, 1975), Los años sin excusa (‘Years With No Excuse’, 1978), and Cuando las horas veloces (‘When Time Flies’, 1988).14 Before writing the third of these volumes, however, he published a first and only “novel,” Penúltimos castigos (‘Penultimate Punishments’, 1983), defined by one critic as “a great fraud, based on the lure of a feigned autobiography, proffered to the reader by an artist who takes over narration, and who, as a narrative presence, can project himself upon the figure of both the author and the character named Carlos Barral, who dies at the end of the novel.”15
In opposition to Carlos Barral, Juan Goytisolo, an apostate of testimonialism since 1975 (Juan sin tierra), published Coto vedado (‘No Trespassing’) in 1985 and in 1986 En los reinos de taifa (Realms of Strife). These form the first and second parts of an autobiography that adheres to the most established conventions of the genre. Recalling that Goytisolo, in the years between the publication of Paisajes después de la batalla (‘Landscapes After the Battle’, 1982) and Las virtudes del pájaro solitario (‘Virtues of a Solitary Bird’, 1988) – anti-novels of unrestrained vanguardism – had seemed to repudiate all forms of “realist” narrative, one critic expressed her bafflement in these words:
While we have come to expect the unexpected, we find it quite disconcerting that this author now does what he had rejected originally for his own fiction since Juan sin tierra. Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa may be considered autobiographies in every sense of the word: the writing focuses on tracing a life from its beginnings up to the present time of the story; the selection of certain episodes corresponds to whether or not each contributes to the understanding of a subject’s will; Goytisolo locates himself in a chronological, historical reality, and through the operations of memory, brings his own past into the present.16
An even more paradoxical case is that of Luis Goytisolo in his book Estatua con pal omas (‘Doves By a Statue’, 1992). The term “book” is necessary because this work has no subtitle referring to “memoirs” or “novel”; in fact, it does not belong to either of those literary categories. Goytisolo’s work first appears to be an autobiography, in the form of memoirs: it tells of a reality that the author lived, an experience that is personal, familial, and above all fraternal, as well as socio-historical. But those memoirs, subject to the narrator’s elaboration, suggest novelization, “having been made into a novel.” The book consists of nine chapters and a total of forty-five segments. Beginning with fragment 13, part of Chapter IV, the “memories” that compose the first text alternate with a second text relating to Imperial Rome. This second text is clearly a text of “historical” fiction, based on the writings of Tacitus, an acute observer of character and destiny. Through Tacitus, Goytisolo highlights the “novelistic” quality of History itself. Autobiography now passes into the realm of history, and from fiction to the historical novel, all within the same volume.
Whether structured by monologue or dialogue, the novels of memory constituted the high point in Spain’s literary production during the years immediately following Franco’s death. Carmen Martín Gaite deserves special mention, for in El cuarto de atrás she discovered an ingenious way to blend memory, metafiction, and fantasy. In Retahílas (1974), she construed plot as dialogue and denouement as cessation of dialogue, creating the most perfected forms of expression. The author defines “retahílas” as long-winded, tiresome speeches. In fact, they are dialogical pieces, one linked to the other. As in her other novels, the writing in Retahílas has a tripartite format: “Preludio” (narrated in the third person), the spun-out speeches (retahílas) of Eulalia and of her nephew, Germán (two in each chapter, from Chapters I to V, plus one scatter-shot speech by Eulalia in Chapter 
), and an “Epílogo” (narrated once again in the third person). The links, literal or semantic, operate without missing a beat from one “speech-string” to the other, emphasizing contact by words. The constant appeal to the person who listens (tú) exercises a conative function while the speaker’s unburdening of thoughts and feelings performs an emotive function. Privileging the combination of the two processes creates a singular fluency and freedom of emission that approximates the text to a poem, a poem inspired by memory arising from familial relationships rather than from a nameless collective.
Conversely, a collective vision predominates in El cuarto de atrás. In that novel one feels more intensely than in Retahílas the loneliness that lies at the root of being, a loneliness that nurtures the desire for dialogical communication. Chapter I introduces the protagonist – Carmen Martín Gaite – in the solitude of insomnia; Chapters II to VI consist of dialogues; Chapter VII, the final one, returns to the protagonist, her solitude hardly interrupted. As in Retahílas, everything happens in one night. Unlike that novel, however, the interlocutors of El cuarto de atrás do not occupy the same space (the world of fiction), but exist in two distinct realms: Carmen in her own lived reality, and her visitor in Carmen’s fantasy realm, each also existing in an intermediate zone between the bizarre and the marvelous (these distinctions assume, of course, that this “real” person and this “fantastic” entity each remain fictionalized as they establish relations with one another within the “novel”).
El cuarto de atrás does not claim that a woman finds, by luck, a relative who adores her and in whom she confides (as in Retahílas); rather, the novel imagines that a woman receives an unexpected visit from a stranger. In spite of the indecisiveness with which everything is presented and the diverse roles attributed to him (interviewer, conjurer, adviser or collaborator in writing, intruder, dialogical “demon,” psychiatrist), the “man dressed in black” represents an inner spirit or the hidden sounding board of her own consciousness. From the virtual reality of the state described at the beginning of the text – being able to fall asleep or not – the protagonist proceeds to engage in actions that appear to take place during either sleep or insomnia. This baffling experience leaves in its wake, as a kind of testimony, two cups on a tray and a little golden box of pills, and comes to an end in a mix of bewilderment, a flickering of hope, and the loneliness to which she returns.
In El cuarto de atrás the nocturnal visit of the man dressed in black does aid Carmen Martín Gaite. He helps her write this novel of memory, composed with the explicit aim of avoiding “the books of memoirs” so abundant since Franco’s death and so bereft of imagination. In conversation with the visitor, as well as through intervals of monologue, Carmen Martín Gaite discloses in a vibrant and engagingly haphazard way memories of the war and the post-war period (forty years of her own life), availing herself of richly varied documentary evidence: songs and popular melodies, political allusions, observation of the habits and ways of romance, religion, public and private life, fashion, movies and literature, sports, trips, feminine writings, and a woman’s illusions and disappointments. Much of what encompassed the uniformity of the Franco Regime during its long mandate finds expression in this novel, a text animated by the agile word of one who now knows she has been heard and thus feels encouraged to keep on speaking/writing.
El cuarto de atrás, which explicitly invokes Todorov’s study of fantastic literature, proposes two principal ideas: dialogical relationships of one to an “other” can create viable connections, even though interlocutors may not exist (“You do not need the other to exist; if he doesn’t exist, you’ll invent him, and if he exists you’ll transform him,” says the visitor); secondly, invention constitutes the redemption of reality (“that capacity of Invention that makes us aware of being saved from death,” says the visited one). Denouement occurs when dialogue ceases and Carmen returns to sleep or insomnia, a disjuncture that casts doubt upon the meaning of the denouement itself. At the end, the little golden box suggests the solution (the remedy) for the kind of memory that breathes new life into a sealed-off past, upsetting the so-called order of that past. Memory causes the story’s conclusion to be inconclusive (imagination will reestablish the links). Memory retrospectively converts the epilogue into a potential prologue to new dialogical adventures. The book’s dedication to Lewis Carroll, “who still relieves us from so much common sense, welcoming us to his upside-down universe,” finds confirmation in the following reflection of the protagonist: “There is a point at which the literature of mystery crosses the threshold of the marvelous, and from there, everything is possible and believable; we fly through the air as in a fiction by Lewis Carroll . . .”
In the 1970s the “novel of memories” inherits the legacy of the “testimonial novel” of the 1940s to mid-1960s. Just as the testimonial novel trained its sights on the Spain of its day, the novel of memory sought to recover the inner lives of people who, in that recent past, had experienced the closure of a protracted process. Once completed, that past called for a kind of recapitulation, a view from a new vantage point, a view long desired and so patiently awaited. This sense of completion does not mean that the testimonial novel lacks continuity or that the novel of memories represents an inert prolongation of the testimonial novel. On the contrary, the potential that characterizes both the testimonial novel and the novel of memories opens the way to further innovation in the art of the Spanish contemporary novel.
Guide to further reading
1 N. Santiáñez-Tió, “Temporalidad y discurso histórico. Propuesta de una renovación metodológica de la historia de la literatura española moderna,” Hispanic Review 65 (1997), p. 279.
2 G. Sobejano, “Testimonio y poema en la novela española contemporanea,” Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, vol. I (Madrid: Istmo, 1986), pp. 89–115.
3 C. J. Cela, La colmena (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1951). The quotation is taken from the jacket of this first edition.
4 D. Villanueva, “El Jarama” de Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. Su estructura y significado (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1973), p. 65.
5 F. Morán, Novela y semidesarrollo (Madrid: Taurus, 1971). The term “infradevelopment” comes from the word “semidesarrollo” in the title.
6 R. Tamames, La República. La era de Franco, 7th edn. (Madrid: Cupsa, 1978).
7 E. Díaz, Pensamiento espanõl en la era de Franco (1939–1975), 2nd edn. (Madrid: Tecnos, 1992), Chapter II, pp. 42–61.
8 Juan Benet, En ciernes (Madrid: Taurus, 1976), pp. 94–5.
9 D. Villanueva, “La novela social. Apostillas a un estado de la cuestión,” ed. Víctor García de la Concha et al., Literatura Contemporánea en Castilla y León (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1986, pp. 329–48), p. 338.
10 Díaz, Pensamiento español, Chapter IV, pp. 87–107.
11 R. Spires, La novela española de postguerra (Madrid: Cupsa, 1978).
12 E. C. Riley, “Sobre el arte de Sánchez Ferlosio: Aspectos de El Jarama,” Filología 9 (1963), pp. 201–21, corrected version in Novelistas españoles de posguerra, ed. Rodolfo Cardona (Madrid: Taurus, 1976), vol. I, pp. 123–41; Villanueva, “El Jarama”; A. Risco, “Una relectura de El Jarama, de Sánchez Ferlosio,” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 288 (June 1974), pp. 700–11; R. Gullón, “Recapitulación de El Jarama”, Hispanic Review 43 (1975), pp. 1–23; F. García Sarriá, “El Jarama. Muerte y merienda de Lucita,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 53 (1976), pp. 323–37; G. Sobejano, “Retrovisión de El Jarama: el día habitado,” in Entre la cruz y la espada: en torno a la España de posguerra. Homenaje a Eugenio de Nora, ed. J. M. López de Abiada (Madrid: Gredos, 1984), pp. 327–44.
13 Sobejano, “Retrovisión.”
14 C. Barral, Años de penitencia (Madrid: Alianza, 1975); Los años sin excusa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978); Penúltimos castigos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983); Cuando las horas veloces (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1988).
15 Villanueva, “El Jarama”, p. 55.
16 C. Moreiras-Menor, “Ficción y autobiografía en Juan Goytisolo: algunos apuntes,” in La autobiografía en la España contemporánea, ed. Ángel Loureiro, Anthropos 125 (October 1991), pp. 71–6.