Noucentisme

The division between centuries is never clear-cut: in Catalonia, Modernismeretained its force at least until 1911, the year which saw the death of Maragall and Nonell. In the meantime, however, a new movement had come to the fore – Noucentisme – which first made its presence felt a few years earlier, in 1906. Before this, even the most original writers were related in one way or another to the Renaixença, even though some of them, like Maragall, were directly concerned with the political and social events of the time. It is, in fact, a new sense of the relations between politics and culture which determines the next phase of literary activity – one which lasts, with certain deviations, until the Civil War. What crystallizes the Catalan political movements of the period is the colonial disaster of 1898: the effects of this on the Catalan economy and the growing sense of alienation from the central government were among the chief motives behind the foundation of the Lliga regionalista (1901) and the popular front movement, Solidaritat catalana (1906). Under the leadership of Enric Prat de la Riba (1870–1917), eventually to become the first President of the Mancomunitat (1913), cultural life comes to be regarded for the first time as an essential component in the political future of Catalonia.1 Thus 1906 is not only the year of Prat's own manifesto, La nacionalitat catalana , but also of the first International Congress of the Catalan Language (followed in 1907 by the foundation of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans ), and of the first important writings of Eugeni d’Ors (1882–1954) and Josep Carner (1884–1970), the leading figures in the crucial stage of Noucentisme.

The aims of the noucentistes were made insistently clear in the Glosari which Ors published over a period of twelve years under the name of ‘Xènius’. One of Ors's key phrases is ‘art arbitrari’: the idea that art should be ‘arbitrary’ in the sense of breaking completely with the existing tradition, with what he calls the ‘rusticity’ of nineteenth-century Catalan literature. Behind this lies the possibility of reinstating an alternative tradition, the one which had been broken off at the Renaissance.