SOURCE: Eller, Kenneth G. “Cela's ‘Anti-Novelette’: Café de artistas.” Hispanofila 97 (September 1989): 23-31.

[In the following essay, Eller regards Café de artistas as an “anti-novelette” and argues that the narrative technique, thematic concerns, and structure of this short novel complement each other.]

When Camilo José Cela was beginning his literary career in the early forties right after the Spanish Civil War, creative activity in Spain was in a paralyzed state. Oppressed by extensive governmental censorship, the few novelists who had not already left the country had little incentive and virtually no inspiration to produce anything of merit. Castellet described the situation as “átono” and “vulgar” (125). Reacting against these stagnant conditions, Cela soon began to reject the traditional styles and techniques utilized by his predecessors.¹ His novels became increasingly experimental in form. In Foster's view Cela was attempting to rearrange reality in order to portray human behavior and experience in a more meaningful, innovative manner (80). Recognized today as Spain's most successful contemporary novelist, he has been given the credit for having revitalized and modernized the Spanish novel (Foster 13).

As early as his second novel, Pabellón de reposo (Rest Home) (1943), Cela's experimentation with novelistic technique becomes evident when he gives his characters numbers instead of names and develops a structural pattern which is rigidly symmetrical to the “nth” degree.² In his fourth novel, La colmena (The Teaming Hive) (1951), he takes an entirely different approach. In an almost deliberately haphazard fashion he presents the low life of Madrid through a series of loosely connected vignettes. He deals with over 300 characters as they are “without any logical connection to a principal narrative thread” (Schwartz 40). Plot eliminated, the presentation is superficial and fragmentary. The next novel, Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo (Mrs. Caldwell Speaks With Her Son) (1953), is probably the most unorthodox of all to that point in his career. McPheeters claims “the work is about as much an anti-novel as has yet been conceived in Spain” (103). The work contains 212 selections, each about a page in length, which could be read in any order. The disjointed, fragmentary technique, however, is well suited to the novel's subject matter which revolves around the disconnected, illogical thoughts of a mentally unbalanced woman who becomes insane. In one instance, to demonstrate her increasing madness, a sentence is repeated twenty-four times, changing the order of words.

The novelette, Café de artistas, was published about the same time as Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo.³ Cela felt the everyday goings-on in an urban café were representative of the soul of Spain itself and underscored his attraction to cafés in the 1965 edition of the novelette by quoting his countryman, Santiago Ramón y Cajal: “When I am in the café, I feel more Spanish than ever.”⁴ The topic of daily life in a café with its “tertulia” is typically Spanish and is reminiscent of an “artículo,” “cuadro de costumbres,” or novel of a nineteenth century Realist, “costumbrista,” or even Naturalist writer. But an investigation of this short novel reveals that it has little in common with those past literary efforts by his compatriots. In writing Café de artistas Cela tried as hard as he could to defy and reject conventional writing methods, creating a work whose stylistic features as well as view of reality were innovative if somewhat shocking.⁵ If the 1953 novel Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo is Cela's anti-novel, the 1953 novelette Café de artistas is his anti-novelette. But the techniques used within this shorter form, instead of being random insertions of the author's fancy, actually accommodate the themes and motifs he wants to convey. The themes, the structure, and the style, I believe, complement each other in a skillful synthesis.

From the standpoint of its formal structure the work appears to have been organized traditionally through the use of chapters. Between chapters Cela makes indefinite lapses of time and changes the focus from one character to another—a rather standard technique. But he makes similar changes quite often within the chapters themselves which indicates that the chapters are arbitrary divisions. All the other basic techniques used in the work fall outside the limitations of established practices. A plot or story line is non-existent. Except for the mental and physical decline and subsequent death of the old man, Don Mamed, no evolution or development whatsoever of the characters can be seen. The classical or conventional pattern of exposition, crisis, and dénouement are likewise missing. The work, in addition, has no beginning or ending, the characters are not formally introduced, and we never do find out what happens to most of them at the end of the narrative. Cela discards these traditional techniques in all probability because they are irrelevant to his purpose. He is trying in a relatively few pages to make a caricature-like impression of what life is like on a daily basis for a group of unsuccessful, stupid writers and artists. Existence for them is monotonous, uneventful, and without direction. Their lives therefore do not fit into the scheme of a well-defined plot. The characters are, more than anything else, representative of a large similar group of people, rather than unique individuals whose complete history needs to be divulged.⁶ The impression of monotony and disorder in the characters' lives is enhanced by the lack of chronological references. The only specific allusion to time—the exact moment when worms start to eat the flesh of the recently buried Don Mamed—seems irrelevant and superfluous. Such pinpointing of time, more than anything else, is the author's way of making fun of those works where a careful chronology has been observed.

Cela furthermore does away with transitional passages, refusing to offer explanations to the reader. We are seldom told who is talking to whom. Occasionally a character carries on a conversation with himself or imagines a conversation. This is sometimes explained after the dialogue is presented. At other times the reader has to speculate on who said what to whom. The technique, however, adroitly makes an impression of the stark and cold reality of the café and the lack of close communication between the patrons. The main character, often identified as the “young man from the provinces,” is an outsider who receives little respect, attention or warmth from the others. When he talks, few listen. The general lack of authorial directions undoubtedly forces the reader to participate in the creative process by using his imagination to complete the narrative. Other techniques the author employs also make the narrative difficult to follow and at times we are left with the feeling that Cela is attempting deliberately to confuse us.⁷ In the first chapter, for example, he refers to the main character simply as “the young man from the provinces.” Then, at the beginning of the second chapter, the author acts like he has completely forgotten what he has written in the first chapter, because he focuses on other characters and waits to the end of the chapter to mention briefly and incidentally the character he has drawn in the first chapter, the “young man from the provinces.” In the following chapters he proceeds to assign to the young man from the provinces numerous different names without telling us right away that he is referring to the same person. The young man is alternately called Julito, Cándido, Enrique, and Esteban. In the final brief chapter Cela calls him consecutively all of these names with no further comment. Although this technique is bewildering, it serves to underscore the young man's identity crisis. Not having found his professional niche yet, he imagines at times he is a poet, at others a painter, and on another occasion an eloquent speaker.

Cela sometimes takes himself down to the same mentally deficient level as his characters, a technique which rebels against the tradition in which the narrator is a superior as well as omniscient being. The novelist will begin a series of short sentences with the same word and then make all the sentences structurally identical. Or, he will make an excessively obvious, unnecessary observation. The sentence “There are several kinds of painters: tall and thin painters, short and tall painters, and thin and short painters” (636) is more apt to come from a moron. Several times Cela writes as if he had suffered a mental lapse, abruptly changing to a topic which appears irrelevant to what he was just narrating. In chapter VII, he disorients the reader by inserting numerous paragraphs about shoe shine boys. Later we find out that a shoe shine boy apparently had been in the café selling cigarettes, although this is not really clarified and, even if it were, has hardly anything to do with the rest of the narrative. But this unusual style of writing matches the low mentality of the characters presented.

The reader may be further disoriented by the use of statements which seem to be puns or have a double meaning, but which are totally incongruous and meaningless. A good example is “The young man from the provinces was at a loss for words just like mayonnaise is when the lady of the house goes into the kitchen” (628).

Humor frequently results when the novelist juxtaposes ill-suited or unlike elements. The pathetically senile Don Mamed is initially portrayed as a “trembling old man with clicking false teeth who suffers incontinence and has a daughter who is a nun” (626). The unexpected reference to his daughter, which does not fit in with the other items described, produces an absurdity which is humorous. The incongruity of these unorthodox techniques serves to reinforce and reiterate one of the central themes of the work emphasizing that all of existence is essentially incomprehensible, monotonous, stupid, and absurd. Cela further strengthens this theme by repeating many times in the closing pages the phrase “¡Qué estúpida tristeza!”

Cela's scorn of past literary techniques is additionally expressed through parody. One of his characters tries to write a novel following a rigid, classical format, making sure to develop a story with an “exposition, climax, and dénouement” (630). His novel, excessively exaggerating human passions and emotions, is full of suspense, melodrama, and unlikely circumstances. Out-of-date and lacking in modern sophistication, the novel seems ridiculous—a parody of a nineteenth century romantic tale.

Cela also eliminates or distorts the principal motifs of traditional novels which usually were centered on interpersonal relationships, such as those between family members and lovers.⁸ The timid young man from the provinces is in love with an evil-smelling, obese, partially bald woman old enough to be his mother or grandmother. Romance, instead of being beautiful and natural with the woman or man idealized, becomes pathetic and perverted.

In diametrical opposition to the Realist school of the nineteenth century, Cela makes the majority of his characters less than credible as human beings. The brief, sketchy physical portraits of the characters are nothing more, nothing less than grotesque caricatures. The young man from the provinces, for example, has eyes which operate independently of each other and go in separate directions, but usually settle in an extreme cross-eyed position. All the customers in the café are said to have a gigantic Adam's apple and several women hide their baldness with a mahogany-colored wig. One character has six fingers; another resembles a mole-rat. The personality of several of the characters likewise defies credibility. The young man from the provinces is mostly depicted as a stupid idiot who aspires to be a writer but who has only attempted to write for street dogs and very small children. The eloquent, sophisticated speech he later writes is completely out of character. Cela's contempt for traditional characterization is also seen in some of the preposterous and sometimes obscene names he gives several characters. Two good examples are “Cándido Calzado Bustos” (Innocent Busts Wearing Shoes) and “Don Mamed.” The similarity of the latter to “mamar” (to suck) is probably intentional and gives the name a vulgar ring.⁹

The view of reality is further limited by the inclusion of a few surrealistic-like devices. During a moment of silence in the café, it is reported that “the serious angel of silence is moving about …” (625). In another instance, the young man from the provinces swears that his girlfriend starts to exhale smoke through her nostrils even before she lights up a cigarette (628). Towards the end of the work Cela whimsically uses the plural form when referring to the main male character and his female friend. Then all of a sudden and without explanation he returns to the singular. Perhaps this is done to create the effect that these two characters are representing major types frequently found in cafés. The severe criticism of writers and their works is thereby made more indirectly and appears less personal.

Unlike the typical novels of the past, no attempt is made to create a representative cross-section of society. To the contrary, the vision of existence and the treatment of individuals is highly selective. The characters' essentials and peculiarities are captured in only a few lives. When a character reappears, he is identified rapidly and succinctly. Cumbersome, wordy descriptions and unnecessary repetitions are thereby eliminated from the text. Schwartz observes that this rather fragmentary technique helps create the illusion of spontaneity (38). The few physical descriptions often serve to dehumanize maliciously several characters. Bird imagery is common. The main female character is called a pouting pigeon, her chest is compared to that of a turkey, and the bar patrons act like a flock of doves making an annoying noise. But the use of bird imagery is taken to the point of being outrageous. After observing that the senile Don Mamed looks like a fried bird, the author then says that the sight of the old man whets his appetite, giving him the urge to eat him, head and all!

Cela's description of Don Mamed's jokes is most original. Instead of simply saying that his jokes stink, he compares them to things they smell like. He doesn't mention just one or two things, but goes on to list nine altogether, markedly deviating from the usual technique of making descriptions.

Descriptions of the environment, traditionally used to set a scene, are likewise unconventional. What little description there is is made incongruous and ridiculous on purpose, as illustrated in this passage: “In the café one chews a dense and manual air, a type of air made out of the same sticky and stretchable material as one's bladder” (636).

Descriptive symbolism is also twisted in the novelette. The work begins with a description of the revolving door of the café. The door, Cela claims, is a beautiful simile and an important metaphor. Rather than explain why this is so, he makes several asinine observations. The revolving door rationally could symbolize the lack of direction and the sense of futility of all the characters in the narrative. But Cela does not mention this at all, pointing out, instead, that more than one person can fit into each partition of the revolving door, if the entering individuals are “skinny and spiritual” (623). The incongruity continues as he compares the door's partitions to pieces of cheese which are supposed to be good for lactating mothers. These introductory paragraphs are then repeated word for word in the work's last chapter. Although Cela acts like he doesn't know what the symbolism of the revolving door is, it becomes evident through this repetition that the door symbolizes the daily, frustrating routine of a group of floundering, untalented and unintelligent artists whose existence is going in circles—like the revolving door itself.¹⁰

Shortly after the paragraph concerning the revolving door, the underlying theme stressing the emptiness of existence is re-introduced with the depressing, blunt, but unexplained statement: “Women get fat, but it doesn't matter. Women write their prose and their poetry, but that doesn't matter either” (623).

The fact that Cela was writing during a period of severe censorship in Spain greatly affected the content and form of his works.¹¹ Whenever he can, he seems to test the censor to see what he can get away with. According to McPheeters, this was Cela's way of “fighting the benighted censorship of his country” (43). Unlike most previous writers, with maybe the exception of Valle-Inclán, Cela will include something distasteful, offensive, and embarrassing. His disrespect for the reader's sensitivity and his lack of any sense of decorum appear to be one of his trademarks. In Café de artistas references are made to toilet paper, indigestion and gas, diarrhea, constipation, incontinence, hemorrhoids, and acne. Religion is irreverently mocked when it is observed that the main female character keeps the treasured rosary of her first communion in a box of suppositories. Such impropriety occurs blatantly and tersely with the intention of shocking the reader. The almost constant reference to taboo subjects—subjects not discussed in polite Spanish society of the mid-fifties—makes the novelette coarse and primitive as well as outrageously humorous. This is one way Cela modernizes Spanish literature, making it thematically more like the literature of other European countries, particularly France. By alluding all the time to offensive matters, Cela manages to protest the undesirable social conditions and the filth and squalor of his country.¹² Even though he wrote Café de artistas more than a decade after the end of the Civil War, he felt that nothing had changed for the better for his countrymen.¹³

Such a dim outlook is not dissimilar to that of the picaresque writer who, like Cela, twisted and deformed reality, exhibited a crude, critical sense of humor, and saw little or no beauty in a cruel, cynical world. Considering its content only, Café de artistas might well be seen as traditional, within the realm of the picaresque. While the work does represent a reaction against the conventional manner of writing of the Realist school, Cela, like the Realists, recreated a segment of contemporary society, although his view seems excessively narrow.

Despite Café de artistas's multitude of apparent incongruous elements, the lack of a plot, and Cela's unwillingness to offer explanations, a sense of unity and consistency, greatly facilitated by the brevity of the narrative, is maintained throughout. The relatively few characters are all successfully integrated at the café, the main focal point of the novelette. The author's intention to ridicule writers and their artistic endeavors permeates every page, yet his criticism is carefully balanced between humor and an unremitting, depressing pessimism. His continuous use of unorthodox techniques is in itself a device further supporting his principal critical motif, making his criticism more indirect and less personal and therefore less prone to censors' objections. Having given this “anti-novelette” rather close scrutiny, I can only conclude that it is an ironic masterpiece. On the surface it may seem intentionally devoid of any artistic merit, but the exact opposite is true, because the techniques used have been linked with the themes and motifs conveyed.¹⁴

Notes

1. Cela's first novel, La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), and his third novel, Nuevas andanzas y desventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes (1944), are substantially picaresque in content and critics have generally characterized them as “traditional” in form. For a discussion of the traditional aspects of these novels, see D. W. McPheeter's book Camilo José Cela and David W. Foster's book Forms of the Novel in the Work of Camilo José Cela.

2. The novel is divided into two parts. Each part has seven chapters which correspond to the seven main characters. The principal characters alternate in order of appearance according to sex: male, female, male. If a character has an interior monologue in Part I, he has a corresponding monologue in Part II. The second part of the novel relates the deaths of the seven main characters in the same order in which they have appeared in the first part.

3. Café de artistas first appeared in a periodical called La novela del sábado (Saturday's Novel) and was later collected with other novelettes in 1956 under the general title of El molino de viento y otras novelas cortas (The Windmill and Other Short Novels). Eugenio de Nora views this collection as a “representación deliberadamente caricaturesca del poblacho español … donde todo es grotesco, ridículo y mezquino, cuando no estúpida y ciegamente cruel” (129).

4. Cela's short story El café de Luisito (Obras Completas, 3: 124-26) and a good portion of his novelistic masterpiece La colmena also concentrate on people in cafés and bars.

5. In a footnote to the 1965 edition Cela reveals that his editor wanted to reject Café de artistas precisely because it lacked the three traditional elements of a story. Only when he promised to write in a more traditional manner in the future did his editor accept the article. Cela goes on to say, with tongue-in-cheek, that he has always been very respectful of the aesthetic ideas of his editors. He also admits that he promised his editor he would “improve” his technique just so he would be paid the 3,000 pesetas for publishing the novelette (3: 622).

6. Foster believes Cela wants to examine man on the universal, rather than the individual level. The novelist identifies individuals, but is always careful to avoid extensive characterization and personality development (152).

7. Most critics recognize that these confusing techniques make Cela's works “modern,” more similar to works produced elsewhere in Europe in the mid-twentieth century. “El escritor moderno disimula, y su texto exige a menudo la disección para entregarnos su sentido” (Paul Ilie 32).

8. Paul Ilie has discovered that close relationships between two or more individuals cannot be found as a central theme in any of Cela's novels (232).

9. The senile Don Mamed is probably the only character true to life. His not-so-funny jokes and boring anecdotes and his mental confusion and subsequent total decline are revealed quite realistically in the dialogues. When the friendly, well-meaning old man is cruelly mistreated and insulted by an insensitive, intolerant younger man, we feel sorry for him. But the other characters are too far removed from reality for us to care about them and their fate.

10. The use of inanimate objects to symbolize or synthesize human situations can be seen in Cela's other works. See Matías Montes Huidobro's study.

11. Cela tried for four years to get La colmena published in Spain, but no one would touch it. Finally he got it published with certain modifications in Buenos Aires in 1951. See David Henn's discussion of Cela's censorship problems (8, 9).

12. Noting the amount of humor in Cela, McPheeters refuses to place the novelist's works into the “social protest” category, which, he claims, takes itself too seriously (99).

13. In his 1962 note to the fourth edition of his novel La colmena, he asserts that life for his countrymen is still the same even two decades after the Civil War (Obras completas 7: 961).

14. Years after writing Café de artistas Cela continued to reject conventional literary patterns. For example, his novel Garito de hospicianos, written in 1963, lacks plot and character development and has been aptly described as a “series of unnumbered titled sketches of human beings and situations which have neither interconnection nor interdependency” (Foster's article 247).

Works Cited

Castellet, J. M. “La obra narrativa de C. J. Cela.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 28 (1962): 107-50.

Cela, Camilo José. Café de artistas. Vol. 3 of the Obras completas. Barcelona: Destino, 1965, 623-77.

Foster, David W. “Cela's Changing Concept of the Novel.” Hispania 49 (1966): 244-49.

———. Forms of the Novel in the Work of Camilo José Cela. Columbia, Missouri: U. of Missouri, 1967.

Henn, David. C. J. Cela, “La Colmena.” Madrid: Grant and Cutler, 1974.

Huidobro, Matías Montes. “Dinámica de la correlación existencial en La familia de Pascual Duarte. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 16 (1982): 213-22.

Ilie, Paul. La novelistica de Cela. Madrid: Gredos, 1963.

McPheeter, D. W. Camilo José Cela. New York: Twayne, 1969.

de Nora, Eugenio. La novela española contemporánea. 2 vols. Madrid: Gredos, 1962. 2/2: 111-30.

Schwartz, Ronald. Spain's New Wave Novelists 1950-1974. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976.