Spanish Post-War Experimental Novel

The Experimental Novel in Spain: 1960s

Factors Influencing the Experimental Novel

Factors that influenced writers to make way for a new kind of novel included:

• The depletion of social realism.
• The need to recover fantasy in stories.
• A renewed concern for language.
• The influence of European and American writers (Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner).
• The emergence of the boom of the Latin American novel.

This movement began in Spain with Tiempo de silencio by Luis Martín Santos.

Key Features of the Experimental Novel

Features of this period include:

• Addressing issues such as childhood, adolescence, war, the passage of time, and the reconstruction of memory.
• Without abandoning social issues, it leaves room for the irrational, the dreamlike, irony, and humor.
• Technically, it focuses the story from the unique perspective of a single character or from multiple different characters, allowing for different interpretations.
• The author explores all the expressive possibilities of language.
• Disorderly chronological narrative using techniques such as ellipses.
• The narrator frequently speaks with their own comments.
• Dialogue becomes less important in favor of free indirect style and the interior monologue.
• The reader participates in the recreation and interpretation of the novel, as they must assemble all the pieces the author proposes.

Notable Authors and Works

During this period, authors included:

• Torrente Ballester: La saga/fuga de J.B. (1972, though conceived earlier)
• Camilo Cela: San Camilo 1936 (1969)
• Miguel Delibes: Parábola del náufrago (1973) and Cinco horas con Mario (1966).

Cinco horas con Mario is a novel with which writers opened a parenthesis in the experimental novel. It is an extended monologue in which the protagonist, of rigidly conservative ideology, reflects on her married life, with many reproaches towards her husband Mario (who held a liberal humanistic stance aligned with Delibes's own). Mario has just died, and she is watching over his body.

Luis Martín Santos

Tiempo de silencio (1962) perfectly represents the features of the experimental novel of the '60s. The novel is a profound journey through various aspects of Spanish reality in an atmosphere of moral misery, blandness, and degradation. Some features include a mixture of languages and different linguistic registers, meticulous dissection of reality, the use of irony, the interior monologue, changing viewpoints, and temporal breaks.

Juan Marsé

His most important works from or related to this period are: Últimas tardes con Teresa (1966), La oscura historia de la prima Montse (1970), and Si te dicen que caí (1973).

Juan Benet

He is the creator of one of the most outstanding novels of experimental fiction, Volverás a Región (1967), which is told in a piecemeal and consciously ambiguous manner, depicting the state of decay of Región, an imaginary place metaphor for Spain.

Juan Goytisolo

In the 1950s, he wrote social realism like Juegos de manos (1954), while in the 1960s, works like Señas de identidad (1966) led him into experimental narrative forms.