The Catalan Modernist Novel and its Narrative Crisis

The Novel and the Modernist Narrative

The Crisis of the Novel

The emergence of Modernism in Catalan culture at the end of the last century did not, in principle, involve any literary innovation (it continued to use the structure of Narcís Oller). The new movement had to confront the novelistic crisis of Naturalism. The intention to include Catalan Modernism in the European cultural world implied, in the narrative field, a moment of complete disorientation. Thus, in the last decade of the 19th century, it is considered that the novel was still in the hands of the Naturalists and the last Realists (Oller, Dolors Monserdà, Bosch...). Meanwhile, from the modernist intellectual trenches, the short story was timidly attempted. If La bogeria somehow closed the session of 19th-century Naturalism, some notes d'excursions by Massó i Torrents already denoted a change that was to be completed in the first decade of this century.

Modernism and Naturalism

However, the modernist solutions to the crisis would never completely separate from Naturalism. In fact, the modernist novel incorporated a typically Catalan Naturalist tradition: the influence that the environment exerts on the characters, who fight against the elements that surround them. Although Modernism did not consider the laws of genetic inheritance as determinants of the characters' behavior.

Key Features

1. An outsider hero: Misunderstood and solitary, confronted with their social or natural environment, who fights against adversity to achieve self-realization and transform society. We find a clear influence of Nietzsche and Ibsen.
2. Psychological depth of characters: The narrator provides a subjective view of the conflicts experienced by the characters from their own psychological interiority.
3. Impressionism: As a result, descriptions depend on the characters' state of mind, and therefore the author uses rich adjectivization, personifications, antitheses, and the free indirect style.
4. Symbolism: Symbolic elements are common, such as the names of characters, objects, landscapes, and even infants (abstract and symbolic elements that actively participate in the work's coherence).
5. Use of a "ferreny" or "mascle" style: The name given to the modernist language used, a language with set phrases, rural colloquialisms, and dialectal forms.