Cambridge Companion to Spanish
Novel
“Chapter 11: The testimonial novel and the novel of memory” – Gonzalo Sobejano
Comps people mentioned (highlighted in blue):
-
Camilo José Cela, La colmena (pg. 173, 175, 178)
-
Rafael
Sánchez Ferlosio, El Jarama (pg. 173,
179, 180-181, 183
-
Carmen
Laforet, Nada (pg. 175, 177-178)
-
Miguel
Delibes, Cinco horas con Mario (pg.
175)
-
Luis
Martín Santos, Tiempo de silencio
(pg. 180-181)
-
Carmen
Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás (pg.
184, 187, 189-191)
Important points (highlighted in red):
-
Tendency in the modern Spanish novel toward the “realist”
pole in the second half of the 20th century (172)
-
Testimonial novel – 1940s-1960s
-
Social novel – 1950s
-
Novel of memory – post-1975ish
General notes:
Introduction
-
Spectrum of prose fiction in framework of
modernity – two poles: realist pole and experimental, modernist pole (172)
-
Two poles on types of novels too – “testimonial”
novel versus “poetic” novel (172)
-
Tendency in the
modern Spanish novel toward the “realist” pole in the second half of the 20th
century (172)
-
During Franco’s rule (1939-1975) – testimonial novel
genre (173)
-
After Franco’s death (post-1975) – “novel of
memory” (173)
The testimonial novel
-
Idea of narrating a slice of life or seeing what
happens within a strictly limited time and space; artistic reflections simply
bear witness to events (173)
-
Idea that “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” (174)
-
Factors that led to transition to testimonial
novel genre (174):
o
“historical climate” – “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” ------ people of this time period
were collectively marked by the end of the Civil war, the events of the Second
World War, and the succeeding post-war years; was a time of repression
-
Desire for change and liberty during this
post-war period of repression (175)
o
Novelists such as Camilo
José Cela, Carmen Laforet, and Miguel Delibes
reflected this
-
Model of testimonial
genre (176-177):
o
“author assumes a
narrator who, speaking in first person or through focusing, either merges with
the protagonist or identifies closely with him or her”
o
Narration becomes a
confessional discourse tending toward monologue
o
Implied reader must
make a decision either in favor of the individual’s role in society or against
it
o
Time appears as a
past sealed off from the present; protagonist broods on past and relives it
mentally
o
Novel focuses on an
individual and his or her family
o
Common resolutions
to novel: protagonist dies, protagonist moves on from painful past, protagonist’s
obsession burns out, protagonist recognizes deception
o
Tone of negativity,
existentialism
o
Language projects
the emotional resonance of inner voices
o
Common images: the
road (symbolizes uncertainty), the island (represents inability to communicate)
o
Disconnection among
characters/people
-
Carmen Laforet, Nada
o
Very negative tone (177)
o
Some traits of romance (177)
o
Use of memory (178)
o
Technique of expressing the narrator’s own feelings
of empathy through the consciousness of a naïve, central character (178)
o
Neorrealismo (178)
-
Camilo José Cela, La colmena
(1951)
o
Cela declared his novel to be “a slice of life
narrated step by step” (173)
o
“Its plot unfolds in Madrid – in 1942 – among a
swarm or beehive of characters who are sometimes happy and other times not”
(173)
o
“Panorama of hunger” (175)
o
Narrative point of view that appeared almost
objective (178)
o
Conversational technique that was often emulated
(178)
-
Transitional period in Spain from 1952-1962; Spain
slowly became stabilized and independent from Vatican and U.S. treaties (178)
o
Process of intellectual liberalization
o
Change, conflict and scarcity (179)
o
Spain finally starts to “become part of Europe”
in terms of culture (179)
-
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, El Jarama
o
Author’s principal aim, in his own words: “A
delimited time and space. Showing simply what happens there” (173)
o
Idea of social immobility (179)
o
“social” novel genre (179)
o
“captures the transient nature of life through
the use of verifiable, palpably concrete nouns, appropriate to each person or
thing” (180)
o
Conveys a “renewed experience of our own
mortality” (180)
o
Fatal accident typical of proletarian social
novel – girl drowns in a river (181)
o
Best example of the testimonial novel (183)
§
Exposition; vividly lived, inner experiences;
prosaic daily routines; chronological time; concrete spaces; revolations of the
way things are (“immobilism”); representation of a world inscribed within the
historical reality that contains it; successive or simultaneous scenes; the
presence of objects, evoked in precise details; condensed experience of time;
half-developed characters; distant stance taken by a camera-like witness;
transparent prose, colloquial speech, and poetry
-
Social novel model (180-182)
o
1950s
o
Novelist appears as
a witness and lays out the inner life of the times for our contemplation
o
Narration in third
person – limited point of view but also objective representation
o
Use of annotations,
similar to stage directions
o
Reader identifies
with anonymous narrator
o
Time is experienced
as an open “present”
o
Space is
concentrated on places of work or leisure – concentrated in country, city, or
suburbs but confined to one area
o
Descriptions that
focus obsessively upon objects, which acquire symbolic value
o
Collective protagonist
– a community
§
“people endure a
given state of affairs, try to escape, and in doing so attempt to come to some
kind of decision”
o
Characters are flat,
rather than rounded, since focus is on collective social situation
o
“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”
o
“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.
o
Theme of
fruitlessness of daily work
o
Theme of being
lonely in a crowd
-
Luis Martín Santos, Tiempo de
silencio, 1962
o
Critical
or dialectical realism (180)
o
Collective protagonist – whole country of Spain,
represented through Madrid (181)
-
Younger writers of the 1990s – “Generation X”
(182)
The novel of memory
-
Sense of disenchantment after Franco’s death in
1975 due to people’s uncertainty of what would happen next (183)
-
Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de
atrás, 1978
o
One of the best examples of the “novel of memory”
(184)
o
Creation of the figure of “the man dressed in
black,” an intriguing example of an enigmatic being or the model of a
phantom-like interlocutor (187)
o
Blends memory, metafiction and fantasy (189)
o
Idea of the loneliness that lies at the root of
being and nurtures the desire for dialogical communication (190)
o
“Chapter I introduces the protagonist – Carmen Martín
Gaite – in the solitude of insomnia; Chapter II to VI consist of dialogues;
Chapter VII, the final one, returns to the protagonist, her solitude hardly
interrupted” (190)
o
All the events of the novel happen in one night
(190)
o
“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” (190)
o
Woman receives an unexpected visit from a stranger
(190)
o
The ‘man dressed in black’ represents an inner
spirit or the hidden sounding board of Carmen’s own consciousness (190)
o
Man dressed in black helps Carmen to write this
novel of memory (190)
-
“Testimonial writing captures a reality that the
author has witness directly, while a book of memories represents, in writing,
what the author recalls having experienced” (184)
-
Novels of memory in
1970s (185, 187)
o
Historical climate
characterized by obstructed beginnings and a transitional period of opportunity
o
Novels organized
around remembering
o
Remembering often
takes place through dialogue and finds expression in self-reflexive act of
writing
o
Desire to recount
one’s life in relation to the death of Franco, which marked the end of an era
o
Act of recalling one’s
personal history expressed a will to distance oneself from those events,
thereby achieving a clearer idea about the meaning of existence
o
Focus on dialogue; dialogue
as an emotional exchange realized between two speakers, each cognizant of past
and future
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