Spanish Experimental Fiction: Authors and Trends

The Sixties: Experimental Fiction

Novelists felt the need to seek new formulas, more complex approaches, and greater attention to literary language. Two main factors contributed to this shift in literature:

• The influence of foreign novelists of the century: Marcel Proust (French), Franz Kafka (Czech-German), James Joyce (Irish), and William Faulkner (American).
• The discovery of the American novel of the moment, with titles such as Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortázar, La Ciudad y los Perros (1963) by Mario Vargas Llosa, or One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez, and authors of previous generations such as the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier (Cuban), and Juan Rulfo (Mexican).

Authors of the Experimental Narrative

The decade opened with a significant title: Tiempo de silencio (1962) by Luis Martín-Santos. This novel, with all the narrative innovations of the great European and North American representatives, is the most demanding of this period. Its lexicon, novel technique, and the variety of narrative and stylistic procedures make this work a starting point in a different way to understand the novel. The protagonist, a scientist dedicated to research on wings, allows the reader to look into a variety of settings in Madrid: the marginal environment of the slums, the intellectual world, the middle class, and the aristocracy.

• The renewal of the narrative genre is linked by this time to already established names such as Miguel Delibes, with Five Hours with Mario (1966), Camilo José Cela, with his work San Camilo, 1936 (1969), or Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, with Saga/Fuga de J.B. (1972).
• To the same authors joined efforts of the previous decade, such as Juan Goytisolo, published in 1966 Signs of Identity, and new novelists, most notably Juan Benet and Juan Marsé, who published in 1967 two plays key to the new trend and will come back to Region Latest.

In this latest novel, Late Evenings with Teresa, Juan Marsé presents a critical and ironic view of the Catalan bourgeoisie through the history of relations between a young lower class and marginal individual, and a young bourgeois family.

The stage of the experimental novel closes with The Truth About the Savolta Case (1975) by Eduardo Mendoza, a novel in which, moreover, there may be a tendency to return to traditional narrative forms.