Camilo José Cela (1916-2002) - surname in full Cela y Trulock



Spanish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989. Cela has explored the way novels are written, but also published non-fiction, such as DICCIONARIO SECRETO (1968-72), a thesaurus of forbidden words end expressions. His works are marked by overtones of existentialism, brutal realism and humor, and experiments with narrative time. In the author's pessimistic world the lives and violent emotions of several hundred personages are mixed together. Cela writes with great detail, describing landscapes and picturesque individuals, giving an aesthetic dimension to reporting.

"Through the process of thought man begins to discover hidden truth in the world, he can aim to create his own different world in whatever terms he wishes through the medium of the fable. Thus truth, thought, freedom and fable are interlinked in a complicated and on occasion suspect relationship. It is like a dark passageway with several side-turnings going off in the wrong direction; a labyrinth with no way out. But the element of risk has always been the best justification for embarking on an adventure." (from Nobel Lecture, 1989)
Camilo José Cela was born in Iria-Flavia into a large middle-class family. Cela's mother was of British origin and his father was a part-time author. He studied law at the University of Madrid and served as a corporal with Franco's army during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which is noteworthy because literary history knows more writers who were against Franco, starting from Hemingway, Orwell, and García Lorca. (Another Spanish Nobel winner, Jacinto Benavente, sympathized Franco.) Cela witnessed the cruelties of the war and was also wounded; later he used his experiences in many of his stories. After the war Cela resumed his studies, finally graduating at age 27. In 1944 he married María del Rosario Conde Picavea; they had one son, who became an anthropologist. The marriage ended in 1989. Just before the Nobel Prize Cela had met Marina Castaño, who was 40 years younger. Cela considered her as his muse. They married in 1991 and at the same time Cela lost touch with several old friends.

Cela's first novel The Family of Pascal Duarte (1942) was traditional in form. Due to its violent content, produced in the bitter aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, it appeared first in Argentina. The work had enormous influence during the decade after its publication. Cela employs techniques drawn from the Renaissance Spanish picaresque novel to give first-person account. In the purported autobiography, Pascal Duarte's prison memoirs, a primitive criminal awaits execution for the murder of his mother. His life reflects the crude reality of rural Spain in Franco's time - in Spain the book banned for some years, and eventually published in 1946. Cela's story, dealing with the darker side of life, cumulative violence, horror, and despair, was typical for the literary style called tremendismo (anguish plus violence?). Pascal Duarte is both a bloody criminal and victim of a destructive social environment. The modern classic can be interpreted in many ways - as the voice of a repressed people condemned by a dictatorial regime, or as a story of spiritual emptiness like in Albert Camus's novel The Stranger (1942).

LA COLMENA (1951, The Hive) captured three days in the life of Madrid in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the fragmented chronology, which took more than five years to write, appears some 250 to 360 characters. Cela used cinematic montage technique to great advantage. The Hive portrays the poverty, degradation, and hypocrisy of post-war society. In the center of the story writers sit for ours in cafés in winter, observing the world. "The customers of cafés are people who believe that things happen as they do because they happen and that it is never worth while to put anything right. At Doña Rosa's they all smoke and most of them meditate each alone with himself, on those mall, kindly, intimate things which make their lives full or empty." The work inaugurated a novelistic style known as objectivismo, a kind of documentary realism. Inspired by this new method of narration, writers used camera and taperecorder in order to eliminate the author's voice. However, Cela presents reality in satirical light, strongly colored. The Hive was originally published in Latin America; in Spain it was banned because it was considered subversive by the government censors.

"After the lunch time the waste ground is the resort of old people who come there to feed on the sunshine like lizards. But after the hour when the children and the middle-aged couples go to bed, to sleep and dream, it is an uninhibited paradise with no room for evasion or subterfuge, where all know what they are after, where they make love nobly, almost harshly, on the soft ground which still retains the line scratched in by the little girl who spent the morning playing hop-scotch, and the neat, perfectly round holes dug by the boy who greedily used all his spare time to play at marbles." (from The Hive)
Cela lived largely in Madrid until 1954, when he moved to Mallorca. There established a literary review Papeles de son armadans, which appeared from 1956 to 1979, and was known for its an anti-fascist line. During this time he started to publish his multivolume Diccionario secreto, a compilation of 'unprintable' but well-known words and phrases. In 1957 he became member of the Spanish Academy. In 1977 he was designated a senator by the monarchy.

SAN CAMILO, 1936 (1969) is Cela's bitter masterpiece, in which at times every woman is a whore, every man a pig, every person a liar and poseur. Cela used explicitly sexual language in this almost pornographic novel. Its stylistically complicated monologue is set on the eve of the Civil War. In MAZURCA PARA DOS MUERTOS (1983, Mazurka for Two Dead Men) Cela returned again to the war years. In the rainy Galician mountains, a local townsperson is kidnapped and murdered; at book's end, his killing is avenged by his brother according to the law of the mountain.

Consistently an experimental novelist, Cela's work of the 1940s and 1950s met with greater critical acclaim than his later t novels, which were attacked as unduly whimsical. Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son (1953) was written in the form of a madwoman's letters. VIAJE AL PIRINEO DE LÉRIDA (1965) was a travel book based upon notes of a trip made seven years earlier. IZAS, RABIZAS Y COLIPOTERRAS (1964) had pathetic and grotesque photographs of prostitutes. OFICIO DE TINIEBLAS, 5 (1973) was an atemporal anti-novel without protagonist, plot, character delineation, or development. It consisted of over one thousand unpunctuared short paragraphs and prose fragments. After its publication Cela 'abdicated' his novelist status and did not return to the genre for nearly a decade.

Cela also published books of travels - he enjoyed traveling in his Rolls-Royce - operas, poetry, essays, short stories, memoirs, and unclassified works, spin-offs of his narratives. Significant examples are the seven volumes of NUEVAS ESCENAS MATRITENSES (1965-66), APUNTES CARPETOVETÓNICOS (1965), LOS VIEJOS AMIGOS (1960-61), HISTORIA DE ESPAÑA (1958). Miscellaneous works include ENCICLOPEDIA DEL EROTISMO (1982-86), and DICCIONARIO SECRETO (1968-72), an esoteric investigation of obscenities and sexual terminology. VIAJE A LA ALCARRRIA (1948) presented on one level an escape from the urban milieu to country life. Among other works are CHRISTO VERSUS ARIZONA (1988), LOS CAPRICHOS DE FRANCISCO DE GOYA LUCIENTES (1989), EL CAMALEON SOLTERO (1992), MEMORIAS, ENTENDIMIENTOS Y VOLUNTADAS (1993), and LA CRUZ DE SAN ANDRÉS (1994), which won the Planeta award. In his novels from the 1990s Cela has exaggerated religio-erotic and sadistic themes characterizing his earlier works, and used unreliable, limited narrators who unwrite and rewrite the text. Or as Cela himself stated: "Novel is everything that says 'novel' underneath the title." Camilo José Cela died from chronic heart disease in Madrid on January 17, 2002. Before his death Cela was accused of plagiarism by a Spanish writer, Carmen Formoso Lapido, who claimed that her novel formed the basis for the La Cruz de San Andrés. Cela described the accusations as a "fallacy".