The Modern Novel

IN THE year 1944 the Barcelona publishing house Destine instituted a literary prize to honor the memory of the recently deceased writer Eugenio Nadal. By a curious coincidence the first Nadal Prize was awarded to a novel entitled Nada, written by a young girl in her twenties named Carmen Laforet.Nada had no plot. In it, nothing in particular took place, as doubtless befitted a novel with the title of Nothing. It consisted simply of a series of episodes from the life of a young philosophy student called Andrea, living in the house of some poor relatives in Barcelona.

The editors of Destino may have hoped that in crowning the young author with their new literary laurels they were helping to relaunch the Spanish novel after the shattering nightmares of the Civil War. What they in effect did was to consecrate a new style of novel writing which deserves the name of Nadalismo, a literary genre characterized by its studied addiction to plotlessness and inertia, and one which has had a crippling influence on Spanish fiction ever since.

If one disregards the novels that have been written since 1945 by exiles — the most important of whom have been the late Arturo Barea, Ramón Sender, and that versatile philosopher-historian turned novelist, Salvador de Madariaga — it can be said that the Spanish novel since the Civil War has been distinguished by two dominant traits: a marked penchant for Nadalismo and for the picaresque-grotesque.

Inside of Spain the Nadal Prize has become comparable in prestige to the Goncourt. The Prix Goncourt, however, is awarded to a recently published novel which has had time to arouse a reaction in French readers and to be dealt with by Paris critics. The Premio Nadal, on the other hand, is awarded to an unpublished manuscript. The judges must, therefore, rely on their own critical standards in awarding the prize, while the unestablished authors who submit their manuscripts, aware that they must find favor with a fixed group of literary censors, are under a strong temptation to try to conform to the Nadal style.

This style, as characterized by Nada, is marked by three main traits: amateurishness, plotlessness, and a morbid interest in the gloomier, sordid side of life. By the very nature of its operation, the Nadal Prize has been awarded to the young, and more specifically, to the inexperienced writers. The prize, in too many cases, has proved a reward for amateurishness, and this has resulted in a marked decline of official literary standards.

The studied plotlessness of the Nadal novel, clearly owes something to the influence of Pío Baroja (1882-1956). Baroja, who took up medicine and was a doctor as well as a baker and a lonely wanderer through Europe, was a neurasthenic irrationalist, or as he said of himself, a Jean Jacques Rousseau nihilist. His method of writing consisted of sitting down before a pile of paper and proceeding to write without knowing what was going to come of it. “I write my novels without plan,” Baroja used to say. To Baroja a plan was a falsification of inspiration and an excessively rationalistic approach to novel writing. We have only to compare Baroja’s improvisation with the slow gestation of theme, style, and structure in Thomas Mann, who stands at the opposite pole. Mann would take a theme, sketch it out briefly in a short story, and then develop both theme and plot into a huge work, as he did with “Tristan,”, which later grew into The Magic Mountain.

In Baroja’s novels, sometimes things happen, and at other times nothing definite occurs. Improvisation plays the central role. Occasionally it seems as though a plot were going to emerge, as in La Darna Duende (The Ghost Lady), which tells of a terrorist’s flight from Madrid to London, but the plot line soon disappears in a zigzag of incoherent happenings, and the reader realizes that what interests the author is not the plot or logical sequence of events but simply the things which keep turning up. The plot in a novel is what gives it direction, but in Baroja’s narrative movement there is neither beginning nor end, and consequently no direction. From this stems the general impression of melancholic drift, of resignation, of fatalism before the aimlessness of things, which form the core of his nihilistic view of the world. Baroja, however, while he never created any large-scale human characters, did achieve some extraordinarily suggestive and enchanting water colors, like that masterpiece Las Tragedias Grotescas (Grotesque Tragedies), a gallery of impressionistic sketches of the Paris of 1870.

The plotlessness of the Nadal novel has been accompanied by the almost total elimination of the classical narrator, and it is here that the trend in the contemporary Spanish novel coincides with the general trend in Western literature today. In Don Quixote, Tom Jones, or Tristram Shandy, to cite three classic examples, the narrator, though invisible, is ever present. It is through his eyes that the events are viewed, in his words that they are described. In the twentieth century, however, there has been a growing tendency to eliminate the intrusive narrator, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake and in the novels of Virginia Woolf, where the narrator dissolves into the character’s stream of consciousness.

In attempting to eliminate both plot and classical narrator, the post-war Spanish novel has clearly exhibited two of the dominant features of the Western novel. The absence of perspective in the narrative has led to a kind of close-up focusing in the narration. Whereas the classical narrator tells of events that are past, the Nadal narrator relates what is going on in the immediate present, right in front of his eyes. The effect is one of a moving-picture camera linked to a tape recorder. This immediacy has resulted in a colorless, utterly impersonal, or objective, style.

The high point attained by this cult of immediacy was reached in 1955, when the Nadal Prize was awarded to El Járama (the name of a stream near Madrid), the work of a twenty-seven-year-old author named Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, of mixed Spanish and Italian parentage. This novel, if such it can be called, relates the conversations of a group of young boys and girls during a Sunday afternoon outing in the vicinity of Madrid. It is unquestionably a contribution to contemporary philology, in that it has caught the careless colloquialisms of today’s typical young people, but its theme throughout is boredom.

THE foregoing analysis of Nadalismo should not, however, lead one to suppose that all Spanish novelists since the Civil War have remained in its crippling rut. There have been exceptions, and the foremost of these is José María Gironella, a Catalan writer, now in his forties, who won the Nadal Prize in 1946 with his first novel, Un Hombre (A Man), since translated into several languages. Following this initial success he launched into a major enterprise, a three-volume trilogy devoted to the Spanish Civil War. The first of the three volumes, The Cypresses Believe in God, which appeared in English translation in 1955, realistically describes the atmosphere of a provincial Spanish town on the eve of the Civil War. The second volume, whose forthcoming appearance has been announced for some time, bears the title Un Millón de Muertos (A Million Dead). With The Cypresses Believe in God and its announced successor, Gironella has made a frontal assault on the theme of contemporary Spain and the trauma of the Civil War.

The same subject has also been tackled with the same emphasis on plot and the same desire to show up the confused loyalties and ambiguities of the Civil War by the young author Ana María Matute, born in 1926, in a novel called Los HijosMuertos (Dead Sons). Ana María Matute had already published various stories and novels before she finally achieved fame in Spain with a collection of tight little sketches, or modern parables, entitled Los Niños Tontos (The Foolish Children). In 1959 she won the Nadal Prize with a delightful autobiographical work, Primera Memoria (Earliest Memory), in which the themes of the Civil War and the division of Spain are pictured through the lives of several adolescents.

The third distinguishing feature of Nadalismo has been a pronounced addiction to the somber and sordid. Misery, for the Nadalistas, is not a component of a character’s particular situation but is itself a protagonist, who is depicted in all his grim and gory finery.

The predilection for describing the ugly and repelling has been matched by a parallel insistence on depicting the misery of certain strata of present Spanish society, a trend intended to constitute a kind of novelistic J’accuse against a society deemed unjust and cruel. Unfortunately, ethics here have tended to smother aesthetics. The leading exponent of this trend, in his work, and even more in his explicit approach to the novel form, is Juan Goytisolo, a young Barcelona writer who now spends much of his time in Paris.

Goytisolo first achieved prominence with a novel entitled The Young Assassins, a grim, primitive tale about Spain’s angry young men, the Spanish beatniks. A novel can never justify its aesthetic mediocrity with ethical reasonings, no matter how much they reflect sociological phenomena. In his subsequent works, such as the novels Duelo en el Paraíso (Mourning in Paradise), El Circo (Fiestas), and in travel books like Campos de Nijar (Fields of Nijar), Goytisolo has perfected his narrative style. His latest book, La Resaca (The Aftermath), which was published in Paris in 1958, is a series of rapid scenes in which he depicts the misery of Barcelona’s suburbs. La Resaca is not, strictly speaking, a novel, but a pamphlet of social accusation. Criticism of the existing regime predominates over artistic creation. There are no real characters, but simply ill-sketched figures. As a social pamphlet, La Resaca is a worthy book, a true testimonial of the revolt of the young Spanish generation against an incompetent and corrupt regime.

The cult of the sordid and somber has diverged into yet a third stream, one which might be called “the romanticism of the absurd,” a predilection for the lowly, the imperfect, the twisted, the meaningless. The leading craftsman of this trend, and indeed the most important writer to have emerged from Spain since the Civil War, is the Galician Camilo José Cela, who has elevated the grotesque to the rank of a literary category. His universe is somewhat akin to that of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, of the commedia dell’arte and Goya’s Caprichos, of Giorgio de Chirico, Solana, and Salvador Dalí.

In 1942 Cela published his first novel, Pascal Duarte’s Family, the work which really opened the post-war period of Spanish fiction. Pascal Duarte is a hapless fellow who tells his story from the prison cell to which he has been condemned. It is a story which is openly and intentionally picaresque in style and flavor.

Ever since the appearance of Lazarillo de Tormes around the year 1500, the picaresque has been a Spanish specialty. The pícaro, the rogue, is the antihero, and his appearance in Spanish letters has been said to attest the inner crisis of a decadent Castilian society which had lost faith in its own moral values. Cela’s resuscitation of the genre is a conscious or unconscious response to a society in turmoil and to a world where the dominant values have been shaken to their foundations.

The second major novel, or chronicle, of Camilo José Cela’s, La Colmena (The Beehive), was published in Buenos Aires in 1952. It offers a grotesque, picaresque, nihilistic vision of the life of a tentacular city, Madrid. There is no plot or theme, but only an overall impression of absurdity. It is, as its title suggests, a bundle of rapid, cell-like scenes involving hundreds of different Madrileños. Since then Cela has published a score of books, developing and exploring the manifold possibilities of the grotesque.

ONE does not have to look far for the causes of the poverty of post-war Spanish fiction. The war drove many of the strongest literary personalities into exile, and the dictatorial regime which followed has brutally imposed a cultural climate which leaves the writer with a reduced margin of free expression. Not only Spanish but foreign works deemed dangerous by the state or the Church have been banned, and this has resulted in a narrowing of the educated Spaniard’s cultural horizon. When Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, signed the international protest against the imprisonment of Luis Goytisolo, the brother of Juan and himself a writer, the Franco government promptly banned not only the publication in Spanish but the importation into Spain of any of the French philosopher’s works.

Censorship has aggravated Spain’s isolation from the rest of the Western world, which was fairly total until 1953 and which has been only partially mitigated since. Within Spain, all too little is known about foreign literature since 1935. Much of this ignorance is due not only to direct prohibition but to a general lack of interest on the part of readers and editors, who have grown accustomed to an insipid diet of tasteless, homegrown products. No Spanish editor, knowing that a work like Ulysses had undergone a lawsuit abroad for immorality, would dream of submitting a translation of it to the censor. The same anticipated veto naturally rules out a novel like Lolita.

Should one conclude from this that no change can be expected without a change in the prevailing political climate? Rather than answer this question explicitly, I shall let the following example speak for itself.

In 1951, a young writer named Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio paid for a private printing of a little book entitled Industrias y Andanzas de Alfanhuí (The Doings and Adventures of Alfanhuí). Alfanhuí is a kind of fantastic tale in the style of Jules Supervielle, although in symbolic value it is also faintly reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. It is a tale about the world of dreams, and thus inescapably symbolic, although it is more than likely in this case that the author was not fully conscious of the symbolism he was using. It is the dream exploration of the soul of a child at the delicate moment of adolescent flowering, when it first comes into contact with the great themes of human life — the awakening of sex, the occult roots of existence, the revelation of narcissistic self-awareness, the discovery of the radically different in girls.

In its wealth of imaginative invention, in the poetry of its descriptions, in the delicacy of its psychological insight, Alfanhuí stands alone among the works of Spanish fiction of recent times. Four years after its appearance, however, its author abandoned the genre whose possibilities he had just begun to explore, preferring in El Jírama to carry Nadalistic realism to its triumphant and absurd extreme. Alfanhuí was left a solitary poetic island in the midst of a gray and barren sea.