Spanish Post-War Novel: Exile, Realism, and Experimentation

Novel in Exile and its Aftermath

The memory of Spain and its consequences, the causes and effects of the war, and references to the places and countries where living conditions are frequent issues for all authors who experienced exile. Among the exiled writers, whose books were long banned by censors, are some of the most important novelists of the postwar period.

• Ramón J. Sender: Chronicles of Dawn
• Rosa Chacel: District of Wonder
• Max Aub: The Magic Labyrinth
• Francisco Ayala: (not set)

1940s: Existentialism and Sentimentalism

The existential novel emerged, with published novels that, although triumphant, included the war from the perspective of the victors. There were also sentimental novels, very far from the prevailing desolation, anguish, and uprooting that dominated the literature of the time.

• Camilo José Cela: The Family of Pascual Duarte
• Carmen Laforet: Nada

1950s: Social Realism

The first signs of the novel's renewal came in the fifties. A certain flexibility of censorship and the discovery of foreign novelists coincided with the emergence of new writers who conceived the novel as a critique of unfair social situations. Critical and social realism is represented by the so-called mid-century generation.

Spanish society became a narrative theme, and the collective protagonist gave way to the individual hero. Titles like The Hive by Camilo José Cela or El Jarama by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio are examples.

1960s: Experimental Narrative

Social realism was exhausted, and given the limited success of the project to change the political and social situation, novelists felt the need to seek new, more complex approaches and greater attention to literary language. Two main factors contributed to this shift: the influence of the great foreign novelists of the century and the discovery of the American novel of the moment.

• Luis Martín-Santos: Time of Silence
• Delibes, Cela, Torrente Ballester, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Benet, Juan-Eduardo Mendoza, Marsé: The Truth About the Savolta Case

Narrative Techniques

Among the narrative techniques incorporated into the novel of the 1960s, the following stand out:

• The importance given to the interior monologue, that is, reproducing the thoughts of the characters as they arise in their consciousness.
• Changes in narrative perspective: a novel can switch from first-person narration to third-person narration; the story also appears in the second person.
• The narrator allows interventions, sometimes ironic, about the narrative.
• The division into chapters is sometimes replaced by sequences separated by spaces, and even novels are written without any division of any kind.