Cela Trulock, Camilo José

b. 1916, Iria Flavia del Padrón (Galicia)

   Writer

   Cela's 1989 Nobel Prize increased his already high visibility. The Madrid daily El País claimed that his first novel The Family of Pascual Duarte (La familia de Pascual Duarte, 1942) was the "most translated novel of the Spanish language", followed by The Hive (La colmena, 1951). These two novels are the focus of most critical writing, with consequent neglect of twelve other novels, some eighteen short story collections, twelve novellas, a dozen travel books, poetry, theatre, more than twenty collections of essays, and numerous miscellaneous prose works. These include his unfinished memoirs, criticism, erudite lexicography of obscenity and vulgarity— the Diccionario secreto (Secret Dictionary) —a four-volume survey of sexuality, Enciclopedia del erotismo, volumes of sketches, vignettes, caricatures and limited edition works of difficult classification produced for the collectors" market. Since the Nobel, Cela has published steadily, including the novels Cristo versus Arizona (1988), El asesinato del perdedor (The Loser's Murder) (1994) and La cruz, de San Andrés (St Andrew's Cross) (1994). In 1995, he received the Cervantes Prize.

   Cela's style employs alliterative, rhythmic prose, parallelistic constructions, grotesque caricatures alongside moments of tenderness, occasional lyricism with ever-present ironies, abundant taglines and popular sayings, vulgarity, and obscenities in the context of academically correct passages. He playfully examines words and language, trivializing or reducing to absurdity, producing scenes, conversations and incidents capable of standing alone, while avoiding "closed" narrative, traditional plots, connected action and sequential chronologies.

   The Family of Pascual Duarte initiated, after the Civil War, the neo-naturalistic movement known as tremendismo. Emphasizing violence, the repulsive and ugly, tremendismo lacks naturalism's scientific pretensions, employing caricature, gallows humour, and deliberate distortions. La colmena, deemed the prototype for the 1950s and 1960s "social" novel, spurred Cela's 1957 election to the Royal Academy. Numerous picaresque elements, present in both works, constitute recurrent motifs, dominant in Nuevas aventuras y desventuras del Lazarillo de Tormes (New Adventures and Misadventures of Lazarillo) (1944), and reappearing in frequent portraits of beggars, the blind, prostitutes and a host of poor people in Historias de España: Los ciegos, los tontos (Tales of Spain: The Blind, the Idiots) (1958), Los viejos amigos (Old Friends) (1960), Garito de hospicianos (Poorhouse Inmates) (1963), Izas, rabizas y cotipoterras (Bawds, Harlots and Whores) (1964), and the seven volume series, Nuevas escenas matritenses (New Madrid Scenes) (1965). Characteristic traits include depiction of numerous mental and sexual aberrations, antiheroic figures, frequently deviant or nauseating behaviour, ugly, repugnant, malformed or mutilated characters, and the dehumanization of characters. Violent, sadistic, or irrational crimes appear in numerous short stories and novels, including The Family of Pascual Duarte, La Catira, San Camilo, 1936, Mazurca para dos muertos (Mazurka for Two Cadavers), Cristo versus Arizona, and La cruz de San Andrés. Mazurca, his second Civil War novel, awarded the 1983 National Literary Prize, reflects wartime violence, revenge and atrocities on a mythic scale. Man's inhumanity to man (and especially women and children) produces enormously shocking sexual violence and grotesque ways of dying (La Catira, Cristo versus Arizona), with victims fried, devoured by piranhas, entombed alive in salt, disembowelled, impaled, butchered and tortured in countless ways. Sadism, maso-chism, rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, homosexuality, lesbianism, necrophilia, paedophilia and incest abound, reflecting Cela's determination to shock any lingering sense of social propriety (for example, the narrator of Cristo versus Arizona figures among the most assiduous patrons of his mother, a prostitute).

   Alienation, despair, individual helplessness, isolation, callousness or cruelty of the strong, materialism, cynicism and absolute selfishness produce a fictional world seen as comprising only two groups, victims and executioners. Characters are typically amoral or immoral (sometimes quite zestfully so), with the few ethical or good ones appearing somewhat unintelligent. Cela's novels become progressively more experimental, moving from early traditional, confessional, picaresque formats to rambling, disjointed monologue, illustrated in the surrealistic Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to her Son (Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo) and in Oficio de tinieblas, 5 (Tenebrae) which abounds in references to farce, deceit, defeat, suicide, betrayal, alienation, prostitution and death. Fully developed characters are almost nonexistent after Pascual Duarte, and plots become more tenuous, incomplete, or diffuse. Lyric motifs, repetition, or thematic reiteration assume the structuring functions of plot. Settings— nearly always stylized save for the travel books— grow increasingly vague, disappearing altogether in Oficio de tinieblas. Stylized and mythically exaggerated settings reapppear in Mazurca and Cristo versus Arizona. Chronology, "story", and memorable characters, effaced in longer works, survive in Cela's brief fiction. Later novels, postmodern in their fluctuations, contradictions, and indeterminacy, openly criticize the Spanish "Establishment"—the government, church, military, judicial, penal, and educational systems—while continuing to catalogue injustices, abuses, and inhumanity.

   Major works

   - Cela Trulock, C.J. (1942) La familia de Pascual Duarte; trans. A.Kerrigan, The Family of Pascual Duarte, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1964 (novel).

   —— (1948) Viaje a la Alcarria, Barcelona: Ediciones Destino; trans. F.M.López-Morillas, Journey to the Alcarria, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964 (travel).

   —— (1951) La colmena, Buenos Aires: Noguer; trans. J.M.Cohen, The Hive, with A.Barea, New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953 (novel).

   —— (1953) Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo, Barcelona: Ediciones Destino; trans. J.S.Bernstein, Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to her Son, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968 (novel).

   —— (1969) San Camilo, 1936, Madrid: Alfaguara; trans. J.H.R.Polt, The Eve, Feast and Octave of St Camillus of the Year 1936 in Madrid, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991 (novel).

   Further reading

   - Cela Conde, C.J. (1984) Cela mi padre, Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy (a sometimes disconcerting biography of the writer by his son).

   - Foster, D. (1967) Forms of the Novel in the Work of Camilo José Cela, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press (formal approach to the early novels).

   - Henn, D. (1974) Camilo José Cela. La colmena, London: Grant & Cutler (a text-oriented study guide).

   - Insula (1989) 518–19(this journal contains a bibliography of Cela's works).

   - Kirsner, R. (1966). The Novels and Travels of Camilo José Cela, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (still the best study of the travel books).

   - McPheeters, D.W. (1969) Camilo José Cela, New York: Twayne (primarily a study of the first six novels, in English).

   - Pérez, J. (1988) " Mazurca para dos muertos: Demythologization of the Civil War, History and Narrative Reliability", The Contemporary Spanish Novel: 1936-1986, ed. K.Glenn, et al. (special number of Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 13, 1–2 : 83–104 (analyses Cela's subversion of official, or Francoist, historiography and postmodern narrative "unwriting").

   —— (1991) "Camilo José Cela: A Retrospective and Prospective Assessment", Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 16: 361–77 (assesses criticism on Cela up to the Nobel Prize).

   —— (1996) "Text, Context and Subtext of the Unreliable Narrative: Cela's El asesinato del perdedor", Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 21 (1996): 85–100.

   JANET PÉREZ