Scylla or Charybdis? Spain’s ‘Special’ Realism

Taking Lorca’s much-discussed claim for the realism and reality of La casa de Bernarda Alba as its starting point, this essay muses on Spanish literature’s tendency to revisit its allegedly inherent realist tradition. It looks at how this tradition was being seen widely as a weakness and considers how Damaso Alonso attacked such views as a myth, arguing that Spanish writers lie in fact between the Scylla of realism and a post-realist Charybdis, since they frequently look back to the artistic achievements of the Golden Age. The essay also recalls how Menendez Pidal identified a special ‘Hispanic realism’ and revisits his own discussion of the realism of Lorca’s play. The essay briefly recalls the post-war current of realist writing, describes the critique offered by novelists and commentators such as Goytisolo and Castellet, and closes on a personal note in describing a robust and more recent defence of a great realist novelist which, bizarrely, involved a critique of a course taught partly by the ...