The Country and the City in Twentieth-Century Spain

In his classic 1973 study of rural and urban spaces in English literature, The Country and the City, Raymond Williams asserts that ‘the English experience is especially significant, in that one of the decisive transformations in the relations between city and country occurred there very early and with a thoroughness which is still in some ways unapproached’ (1985, 2). If the significance of English experience of rural and urban spaces lies in its early industrial revolution, the concepts of the country and the city in Spanish culture are important precisely for Spain’s tardy industrialization. Williams continues: ‘even after the society was predominantly urban its literature, for a generation, was still predominantly rural; and even in the twentieth century, in an urban and industrial land, forms of the older ideas and experiences still remarkably persist’ (1985, 2). When critics emphasize the urban nature of modernism and postmodernism, Williams’s work is a welcome reminder of the cultural significance of the rural. If his final assertion that ‘there is almost an inverse proportion, in the twentieth century, between the relative importance of the rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas’ (R. Williams 1985, 248) is still pertinent to English culture, its relevance to Spanish is clear. Indeed, the work of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most influential and marketable twentieth-century writer both inside and outside that country, is imbued with rural culture.

While the nineteenth century is the key period of English industrialization and urbanization, in Spain (notwithstanding pockets of accelerated development like nineteenth-century Madrid, discussed below in chapter four) it is the twentieth century which has seen an analogous transformation of country and city. While in 1900 two-thirds of the Spanish working population were employed in agriculture, this figure had dropped to just under half in 1940 (Álvarez Junco 1995, 82), dwindling to a mere fifth by 1976 (Riquer i Permanyer 1995, 262) – the decade in which the rural exodus began to cease (Hooper 1995, 23). A curiously similar tendency may therefore be seen between late nineteenth-century English culture, when authors like Thomas Hardy retrospectively set their ruralist dramas in a period roughly fifty years previous, and late twentieth-century Spanish culture. It seems that the more agricultural work declines in a country’s economic life, the greater currency rural themes acquire in its cultural life.