[In the following essay, Durán underscores the influence of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote on contemporary Spanish fiction and identifies several important Spanish authors.]

Slowly but steadily the Spanish novel has been changing course during the last decade. The trend is toward a more complex, less realistic narrative, one in which the author is often obviously present, pulling the strings and organizing the scene. We may call this new Spanish novel a “self-referential novel,” as does Robert Spires,¹ or, as other critics do, “metafiction.” It is useful to compare this trend with the origins of modern Spanish fiction, the picaresque novel and Cervantes's Don Quixote. Indeed, many contemporary Spanish novels are indebted to these classic works, and even when they conquer new literary spaces, the extent of the conquest can only be judged by looking at the point of departure. Many of the best Spanish novelists of our time, writers such as Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite, Juan Benet, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, and even the older novelist Camilo José Cela, have been practicing the challenging art of metafiction, and in every case it may be possible to trace a link between their recent works and Cervantes's masterpiece.

Cervantes was not only a great writer of fiction but also a theoretician of literature: his ideas about fiction and about the theatre helped him in the writing of Don Quixote. The two outstanding literary events that took place in Spain during Cervantes's lifetime were the creation of a Spanish national theatre by Lope de Vega and, of course, the creation of the modern novel by Cervantes himself. These two events are basically antithetical but not unrelated. It can be said that all the critical statements made by Cervantes about the romances of chivalry can be applied as well to Lope de Vega's comedias, which are also an idealization of Spanish society and distort many aspects of daily life.

Cervantes had tried his hand at playwriting and failed to win the approval of the Spanish public: hence a psychological need to succeed as a novelist by writing a novel that is implicitly a criticism of the games of illusion which are at the heart of Lope's theatre. Ironically, this rejection of Lope as a model brings Cervantes to a close examination of daily life and the creation of the first realistic novel, yet he is forced to reproduce in it many instances of theatricality, because Spanish society had been thoroughly pervaded by the theatre and playacting had become the rule even in daily life. In Don Quixote it is not only the hidalgo who acts out his fantasies. Many secondary characters, such as Marcela and Grisóstomo, play at being what they are not, assume roles and don disguises. The spirit of carnival, as described by Bakhtin, pervades several chapters of the novel. Finally, in part 2 all the events in the Duke's palace are theatrical and can be compared to the “play within a play” in Hamlet.

As a keen observer and critic of Spanish society, Cervantes was aware that its obsession with the theatre and with playacting was sacrificing truth to illusion and blurring the borders between the real self and the self created by convention or by fantasy. Moreover, an important feature of baroque art is the blurring of the frontiers between the beholder and the work of art. Thus in Velázquez's painting Las Meninas the artist includes himself, and the act of painting the picture, in the picture, and the public, moreover, is also invited to enter the space which the artist is depicting, since the painter is facing and “observing” the spectator. Don Quixote, commenting upon the first part of Don Quixote, is simultaneously within and outside the novel, and Cervantes converts his hero into a reader, just like us, just as real—or, conversely, just as fictitious—as we ourselves are. This means that the games of illusion can be used to make statements about society and ultimately about epistemology and metaphysics.

As the gifted Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes puts it, “for me, the modern world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world and discovers that the world does not resemble what he has read about it.”² Lionel Trilling once wrote, “All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote: … the problem of appearance and reality.” And in The Order of Things Michel Foucault writes, “Don Quixote is the sign of a modern divorce between words and things.” Both the glory and the misery of our era are involved in this divorce, this bitter and perhaps hopeless separation. It opens the doors to modern philosophy, modern criticism, modern fiction. The Spanish hidalgo is both noble and pathetic in his naïve attempt to make words mean what they are supposed to mean and thus restore virtue and courage to a society that can only talk about such virtues. We know better, yet literature will be forever in his debt. In his obsession with books and the value of words, Don Quixote helps us understand our new obsession with literature as texts and intertextuality. Julia Kristeva's ideas about intertextuality, ideas which by the way are essential to our interpretation of the latest novels by Goytisolo such as Count Julian and Juan the Landless, also help us understand why Don Quixote thought knights-errant and their fabulous exploits had really existed, since they were mentioned by these same texts that talked about Charlemagne, whose existence chronicles had established as certain. All the traits of metafiction—the intruding author, discussion of the work's creation within the work itself, criticism of fiction and even criticism of the novel we are reading by the characters in the novel, the stepping out of the novel by the characters in the novel—are already present in Don Quixote. Such a fascinating subject allows for infinite variations, and contemporary Spanish fiction offers not a few.

Now, fifty years after Lorca's death, Spain is becoming in literature as well as in economics and politics an important part of Western Europe. It was Franco and his totalitarian regime that had drawn around Spain a wall of barren isolation; not even that wall could keep Spain apart for too many years, and by the sixties and the seventies international currents and fashions could be clearly detected on the local scene. Nowadays the doors and windows are wide open, and the predictable result is a joyous chaos.

Only textbooks explain literary history in terms of clearly defined waves of thought and feeling, of style and ideology, arriving neatly one after another and spreading their white and blue foam onto the sandy beaches of history. More often what we really see is a period of transition, hard to define and offering a blurred outline; several rival trends clash and mix before our eyes. This is what is happening now in Spain in the field of narrative literature. The novel and the short story dominate the literary scene; no main trend can be discerned, and no one can suggest a headline that summarizes the current situation.

For many years there was indeed a dominant trend: the gifted writers of the post-civil war period knew that they had to keep score; they were the only witnesses able to write down what was happening: newspapers and magazines were too heavily censored to be truthful. The avant-garde literature that had flourished in Spain in the twenties and the thirties, the golden era of Lorca, Alberti, and Aleixandre, was thus superseded by an era of realism. The labels were of course new: existentialism, tremendismo, et cetera. At bottom, however, it was old-fashioned nineteenth-century realism. There was no need to apologize, since Spain in many ways had invented realism way back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the picaresque novel and Don Quixote. Realism was needed once more, and it was readily available. Many excellent novels were written under this mantle. We need only mention the names of Camilo José Cela, Miguel Delibes, Ana María Matute, Ignacio Aldecoa, even the young Juan Goytisolo.

We all remember the first Italian films after Mussolini: The Bicycle Thief, Rome, Open City, the great fresh wave of films created by De Sica, Rossellini, Fellini. The best Spanish novels of the forties and fifties were very much in that vein, and they accomplished much the same task—with less ease, since Franco's censorship was always there to hinder the writers. As censorship weakened and Franco's ideology receded, the realistic novel lost its main raison d'être. Today both the press and the media in general can pinpoint the highlights and the shortcomings of the political and social situation, and therefore literature has been freed from the burden of having to say what no one else dares to state. (We remember how harsh censorship could be with respect to the theatre, movies, television, the daily press; it was much more lenient with the novel and even more so with poetry, the assumption being that poetry was read only by the “happy few.”)

Elsewhere the novel had abandoned on the whole the realistic paths so often and so successfully followed by the nineteenth-century novelists. Joyce, Proust, and Kafka had pointed out new roads. Both the French nouveau roman and the Latin American nueva novela offered a challenge. With Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, Fuentes, García Márquez, and Donoso active in Latin America, the Spanish novel was being pressured into a change of course.

Camilo José Cela, one of the most popular and prolific writers during the last several decades, joined the challenge with his Mazurka para dos muertos (Mazurka for Two Dead Bodies), which appeared in 1983.³ It became an instant success, was awarded a prestigious prize, and was reprinted ten times in two years: a best seller by Spanish standards, this novel is more than a rural recycling of Cela's early city novel, La colmena (1951; Eng. The Hive), a work which is still judged by many critics to be one of his best. Mazurca moves at a Proustian, deliberate, noble, slow pace. It is a novel composed of brief vignettes that fade out only to present the same character again a few pages later. A mosaic of people and situations, it demands strict attention from the reader and can at times become irritating because of the large number of non-Castilian words included; these are, of course, Galician words, but the reader is not aware that a glossary at the end of the novel explains and translates them. The result is a tense, mysterious style and a climate of magic and mystery, upon which the developments of Franco's uprising and the Spanish Civil War are superimposed and projected. The final impression is more heartening and pleasurable than the mood created by The Hive. Mazurca is a novel in which the presence of its author is felt on each page. We see him at each turn of the action, asking questions and soon afterward answering them, manipulating his readers in a good-humored way. We realize at last that we are reading literature, not a chronicle of real-life events, and that in literature human beings are always assured of having the last word.

One more step toward fantasy and away from realism is taken by Carlos Rojas in his novel El sueño de Sarajevo (The Dream of Sarajevo; 1982). Almost from the beginning, Rojas's novel reminds us of the celebrated masterpiece by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. We are in a private clinic, high in the mountains (although this time in the Pyrenees), and the essential ingredient is to be found in the conversations between the patients, the interplay of personalities, memories, value systems. Rojas's clinic is much more fantastic and Kafkaesque than Mann's, however. Within its impeccably white walls we hear dialogues in which the dead debate the living; we hear the voices of Descartes, Proust, and an enigmatic monk, Fray Antonio Azorín; we see and hear the ghost of Spain's most execrable king, Ferdinand VII, among many other voices belonging to the living and the dead. Fantasy and history mingle on each page until we are no longer sure of our own sanity.

Lest one think this novel is a new departure for Rojas—the winner of Spain's National Literature Prize in 1968 for the novel Auto de fé, the Planeta Prize in 1973 for Azaña, and the Nadal Prize in 1979 for el ingenioso hidalgo y poeta Federico García Lorca asciende a los infiernos (The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell)—I should state that this last novel is perhaps as complex and mysterious as “The Dream of Sarajevo.”⁴ Its main characters are Don Quixote, Lorca, and Sandro Vasari, who has written Lorca's biography. Hell, Rojas states, is nothing but an eternal memory. The novel offers us three different and irreconcilable versions of Lorca's life. We witness his last hours in Granada, surrounded by cruel and stupid killers. Other pages describe his escape and his life in the United States, where he has become a professor. The third version is perhaps closer to historical truth and describes his days of hiding in the house of his fellow poet Luis Rosales. We find in this novel echoes of Dante, Sartre, and Carlos Fuentes at his most complex and mysterious. It is an ambitious work, full of unexpected turns and dramatic climaxes, and reading only a few pages of it will give us the conviction that the time for realism is now irrevocably past in Spanish letters.

Another writer whose reputation has grown fast in recent years is Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, whose book La saga/fuga de J. B. (J. B.'s Saga/Flight; 1972) has become, according to a poll published in the magazine Hispania, one of the ten most popular novels in the Hispanic world during the last decade. Among his latest titles are Fragmentos de apocalipsis (Fragments of an Apocalypse; 1977) and La isla de los jacintos cortados (The Island Where Hyacinths Are Cut; 1980).⁵ Fantastic and whimsical details are so abundant that it is impossible to find a parallel to these novels in the whole panorama of Spanish contemporary fiction, unless we compare them to those of Alvaro Cunqueiro, to which they have a certain resemblance.

“Fragments of an Apocalypse” begins with the diary of a novelist who is describing his efforts and his creative process in trying to write a novel, all of which may remind us of Gide's book Les faux-monnayeurs and of a famous sonnet by Lope de Vega which tells us how to write a sonnet. Matters become complicated when we realize that the diary's writer, Justo Samaniego, is a professor who studies medieval manuscripts and that the texts of his diary are intermingled with fragments of manuscripts containing apocalyptic texts. These texts were written to explain and predict the future, a future which would already be our present, and in this approaching present we understand that the Vikings are planning to return to Villasanta de la Estrella in order to avenge their ancient defeat when they invaded the region in order to capture Esclaramunda, the beautiful mistress of Bishop Sisnando.

The scattered and contradictory fragments of this strange novel are finally fused, and the puzzle begins to take shape and make sense. In the meantime other strange events take place. Lenucka, the writer's mistress, disappears before his very eyes when he decides that he no longer will believe in her existence. Villasanta is destroyed because of the ringing of a gigantic bell, which descends in a huge parachute after the funeral of the Viking king Olaf, who is killed by Samaniego, who is eager to rid himself of his Oedipus complex. The characters travel through time toward the past and toward the future.

There is more: a card game in a cathedral, where an archbishop plays with several anarchists and finally exits, flying with the narrator and his lover on a sunbeam to bring to Mallorca an old and horrible dragon. After all these “happenings,” a Spanish Buddhist priest in a trance experiences a vision and speaks to us about the infinity of stars and the cosmos, a cosmos in which we search in vain for a nonexistent God. There is also a factory of female robots, of erotic dolls, made necessary because the conquering Vikings have captured all the real women. All this should make us declare once and for all that the famous old “realism” of Spanish narrative prose which Menéndez Pidal and other critics thought so basic and essential is definitely dead.

In “The Island Where Hyacinths Are Cut” we are again dealing with the diary of a writer, intended this time for his beloved Ariadna, who in her turn is interested in a professor of history. The professor's latest book tries to prove that Napoleon never existed but was the end product of a huge joke carried out by Nelson, Metternich, Chateaubriand, the English ambassador to La Gorgona, and all their respective mistresses during a long orgy. Even if Napoleon does not exist, however, we find in him the key to the plot and the guiding thread along a corridor of events that seems made out of soft, distorting mirrors. We realize at the end that this is a roman à clef which portrays real-life characters whom the author has known as a visiting professor at an American university. The plot and the complex intertwining tales, however, remind us most of a modern version of the Arabian Nights. In sum, any resemblance beween Rojas's work and a realistic novel is pure coincidence.

An author whose name could not be absent from my panoramic survey is Juan Goytisolo, as well known abroad as he is in Spain. His “Trilogy of Treason”—Señas de identidad (Identification Papers; 1966), Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián (1969; Eng. Count Julian), and Juan sin tierra (1975; Eng. Juan the Landless)⁶—has become a modern classic, a must on the reading lists of all graduate Spanish programs. The last two novels of the trilogy especially offer poignant, subjective visions that express social criticism through fantasy in a masterful way that has no parallel in Spanish literature, and very few rivals in world literature. The last novel seems to close a cycle; the author has spoken, for the moment at least, his final word about Spanish life and culture. His new books, published in the eighties—Makbara (1980),⁷Paisaje después de la batalla (Landscape after a Battle), and Coto vedado (Hunting Preserve; 1985)—are clearly less powerful than the novels of the trilogy. The author is groping for a new beginning, identifying with the Third World, criticizing Western values, but his new works lack the intensity that his complex love-hate relationship with his native land gave to most of his earlier novels. Only a few “true confessions” in his last book, essentially an autobiography, are of genuine interest to his many aficionados. His trilogy remains his best work and also the clearest example of the self-referential novel in recent Spanish literature, with the constant presence of the author as one more character or as the main character in the novel. In Juan the Landless he introduces us to his private world of dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, and toward the end of the novel we even attend a curious roundtable, a television talk show in which the author and his novels, including the one we are reading, are strongly criticized, even denigrated, by a panel of critics and average readers.

Another prolific novelist, one whose works are always highly original, mysterious, and baffling, is Juan Benet. He has successfully combined the gothic novel, allegory, fantasy, and social criticism in a series of novels each related to the others yet individual and unique. Benet is often obscure and has not yet had the chance to reach a vast audience, though most critics are aware that he is an important writer who deserves attention and needs critical elaboration. Benet's latest novel, Herrumbrosas lanzas (Rusty Lances; 1983)⁸ is perhaps one of the best of the series that starts with Volverás a Región (1967; Eng. Return to Región). The American critic and WLT collaborator Catherine G. Bellver, who teaches at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, has this to say about Benet's long (310 pages) 1983 novel:

Faulkner has his Yoknapatawpha County, García Márquez his Macondo, and Benet his Región—fictional places of personal invention nonetheless identifiable with geographical areas known to the authors. In his latest novel, Benet attempts to negate this duplicity by creating a momentarily credible and even palpable illusion of real places, people, and events. Benet, the civil engineer, goes beyond his previous precise lexical descriptions of the geography and geology of Región to provide us with a supplementary 1:150,000 scaled map of Región that seemingly establishes the authenticity of his setting but at the same time reminds the alert reader of the author's efforts at intellectual entrapment.

The Spanish Civil War, present already in Benet's first novel, Volverás a Región (1967), becomes the central issue in Herrumbrosas lanzas, the 1984 recipient of the Premio de la Crítica. This most recent novel by Benet traces the strategy planning, the conflicts and battles, and the personalities involved in the civil war as it unfolded in the mythical Región area. Early in the war, the city of Macerta succumbs to the fascists, but the capital city, Región, stays loyal to the Republican cause. For some, this work is an allegorical analysis in microcosmic form of the whole of the Spanish Civil War, whereas for others it may be a study of war on a more universal plane.

The world brought to life in these pages always remains Benet's very own, however. Despite the veracity given it by exact dates and allusions to the war elsewhere, Región is the same strange geographical place, isolated from the rest of Spain and forgotten by history. As the author affirms early in the novel, Región, the drifting remains of the Republican shipwreck, floated along peacefully during the war and, to the consternation of its nucleus of resisters, was ignored by the enemy because of its lack of strategic importance. This peripheral historical role helps to complete the vision of ruin and decadence Benet began painting in his first novel. The structural complications of his earliest work give way here to clarity and simplicity, but the underlying syntax of his prose reveals the hand of a literate and polished stylist.

I have included this review in its entirety because it gives us the flavor of a difficult writer, one who seems to want to create distance and suspicion between himself and his readers.

Finally, a first-rate novelist, Carmen Martín Gaite, has continued to produce excellent books during the eighties, including El cuarto de atrás (1980; Eng. The Back Room), which reminds us of one of her first works, El balneario (At the Spa), inasmuch as it is also a mystery novel. El cuarto, however, is much more complex and impressive. Its sources are found in Lewis Carroll and in Tzvetan Todorov's essays on fantastic literature, the dialogue is convincing and occasionally brilliant, and the mixture of realism and hallucination belongs to the great romantic tradition, the gothic novel, and Edgar Allan Poe.

To sum up, the cornucopia keeps pouring out hundreds of novels, many of which are very good by international standards. Among these novels the objective observer will find many divergent trends. Realism has not disappeared altogether, yet the present, and probably the future, belongs to an experimental and adventurous type of novel, one which combines realism and fantasy, everyday life and wild dreams. Cervantes found a viable formula a long time ago. Today each novelist strives for a personal, original approach. If only a few of them succeed, as they seem to be doing in recent years, the Spanish novel will enter the new Golden Age which many of us have anticipated for some time. The best is yet to come.

Notes

1. See Robert C. Spires, “From Neorealism and the New Novel to the Self-Referential Novel: Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra,” Anales de la narrativa española contemporánea, 5 (1980), pp. 73-82. Also, From Fiction to Metafiction: Essays in Honor of Carmen Martín Gaite, Mirella Servodidio and Marcia L. Welles, eds., Lincoln, Ne., Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1983, especially the essays by Manuel Durán (pp. 129-38), Robert Spires (pp. 139-48), and Ruth El Saffar (pp. 185-96), and also the excellent essay by Marcia Welles (pp. 197-208).

2. Carlos Fuentes, “When Don Quixote Left His Village, the Modern World Began,” New York Times Book Review, 23 March 1986, p. 15.

3. Camilo José Cela, Mazurca para dos muertos, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1983. For a review, see WLT 58:4 (Autumn 1984), p. 571.

4. Carlos Rojas, El ingenioso hidalgo y poeta Federico García Lorca asciende a los infiernos, Barcelona, Destino, 1980. For a review, see WLT 55:2 (Spring 1981), p. 282.

5. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Fragmentos de apocalipsis (1977) and La isla de los jacintos cortados (1980), both published by Destino in Barcelona. For reviews, see WLT 52:3 (Summer 1978), p. 439, and 55:4 (Autumn 1981), p. 645 respectively.

6. Juan Goytisolo, Juan sin tierra, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1975. For a review, see WLT 51:1 (Winter 1977), p. 67.

7. Juan Goytisolo, Makbara, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1980. For a review, see WLT 55:2 (Spring 1981), p. 281.

8. Juan Benet, Herrumbrosas lanzas, books 1-6, Madrid, Alfaguara, 1983. The review cited in the text is from WLT 59:1 (Winter 1985), p. 57.