Spanish Literature: Valle-Inclán and Essayists

Valle-Inclán's Innovative Theater

Ramón del Valle-Inclán is considered the great playwright of the Generation of '98. His extensive theatrical work, though initially not always successful with the public, can be grouped into five distinct cycles:

• The Primitive Cycle: Includes his first poetic dramas, adaptations of conventional stories, and modernist verse plays that anticipate features of the grotesque and burlesque.
• The Mythic or Galician Cycle: Presents a mythical, primitive, violent, and sordid Galicia.
• The Cycle of Farce: Composed of three pieces for puppet stages. It breaks from the modernist approach and demystifies reality, moving closer to the vision of the grotesque.
• The Grotesque Cycle (Esperpento): Provides a grotesque vision of the Calderonian honor myth, the myth of Don Juan, and the Spain of his time.
• The Cycle of Autos and Melodramas: Two autos for silhouettes and two puppet melodramas. Although technically typical, they replace contemporary society with near-mythical, 'barbaric' themes (forces, wild and primary passions, and death).

The Early Twentieth Century Essay

Intellectuals of the Generation of '98 found the essay to be an ideal means of expression. Journalism allowed for intellectual engagement with political and social reality and reflection on personal and existential concerns.

• Miguel de Unamuno: His essays are an extension of his complex personality.
  • The Subject of Spain: Initially supported the need to Europeanize Spain for progress. However, his spiritual evolution led him to advocate for the Hispanization of Europe, seeking to preserve the essence of the Spanish people within history.
  • Existential Concerns: Focus on the conflict between reason and faith (the 'agony for God' – the struggle to create a God who can save one from nothingness).
• Ramiro de Maeztu: Passed through two stages. His first revolutionary youth stage excitedly described the ills of Spain. In his second stage, he extolled the traditional values of Spain and its role 'in America'.
• Azorín: His essays focus fundamentally on the passage of time and the landscapes and people of Spain. He attempts to capture the eternal in the fleeting moment. The landscape is viewed with a soulful, melancholy, lyrical, impressionistic, and suggestive gaze, attentive to detail. Azorín seeks the essence of Spanish reality, its soul, in the past, in 'intrahistoria', in the landscape, and its people.
• Antonio Machado: Covers philosophical, pedagogical, and other topics from a skeptical, ironic, and humanistic spirit that places human dignity at the core of its certainties.