4 - Historical Uses of Myth in 1940s Spanish Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2023
Summary
Much attention has been paid to the relationship between myth and history in post–Civil War novels. Jo Labanyi’s Myth and History in the Contemporary Novel (1989), the most prominent study in the field, explores the political connotations of the historical use of myths in a number of works predominantly published in the 1960s and 1970s, although there is little mention of the novel in exile. Luis Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1961), Juan Benet’s Volverás a región (Return to Región, 1967), and Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen, 1973) exhibit a clear tendency to employ myth from an ironic perspective and, in so doing, to unveil “its distortions or limitations,” while also demonstrating “the impossibility of denying history.” These works stand in marked contrast to the use of mythical patterns in social realism novels of the 1950s. Notably, they differ in presenting a vision of history that invokes the idea of a lost paradise as “a revised version of Nationalist ideology” (44). The use of myth as a tool for conveying attitudes toward history in the field of poetry has not received the same attention. Exceptions include the pioneering studies of Carlos Blanco Aguinaga and José Ramón López García, although here the connections with poetry published by writers in Spain are of secondary concern.
This chapter addresses these shortcomings and considers poetry written in the 1940s in Spain and in exile as a continuum. Taking the preoccupation with myths as a starting point, the chapter articulates a conflictual dialogue with history. Through a comparative analysis of four books—Vicente Aleixandre’s Sombra del Paraíso (Shadow of Paradise, 1944), Emilio Prados’s Jardín cerrado (Enclosed Garden, 1946), Carmen Conde’s Mujer sin Edén (Woman without Eden, 1947), and Luis Cernuda’s Las nubes (The Clouds, 1937–40)—it considers the 1940s as a period of “latent exile,” during which a group of poets inside and outside Spain sought to balance memory and forgetting, avoiding the danger of retrospective reference imposing itself on how the present is imagined.
Uses of Myth and the Fear of History
In her monograph, Labanyi reviews different theories and emphasizes the inadequacy of the school of myth criticism, especially the ideas of Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and his followers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fractured FrontiersThe Exile Writing of Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain, pp. 110 - 144Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020