The Silver Age

Spain has traditionally boasted a Golden Age of the Arts, a Siglo de Oro, following hard upon the high point of Spanish empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recent critics have suggested that it would be equally appropriate to talk about an Edad de Plata, a Silver Age, extending from the final collapse of that Empire in 1898 to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. During these three decades, both artists and men of letters sought to portray the dramatic image of a Spain torn between the conservative and traditional values it had once fostered and the advent of modernity in its myriad forms. There is a general consensus that this Silver Age reached its climax with the so-called ‘Generation of 1927’: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca would then simply be the visible tip of an iceberg that includes the Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre, the great advocate of ‘pure poetry’ Jorge Guillén, the lyric poet Pedro Salinas, the surrealist Rafael Alberti, and neo-Romantic poets such as Luis Cernuda.

There has been a tendency amongst literary scholars to regard this Generation of 1927 primarily as an outstanding group of artists, poets, and playwrights, and to relegate their novels and short stories to relative obscurity. One of the reasons for this lack of attention to narrative may well have been the way in which the writers experimented with literary genres and the consequent difficulties encountered by critics when they attempt to comprehend (and classify) the actual nature of some of the literary artifacts produced at this time. The ‘tales of the avant-garde’ analyzed in this chapter clearly overflow the generic boundaries of poetry and prose, novel and short story, drama and cinematic image, and create what are in effect new modes of expression. And yet, in spite of the puzzling nature of these ‘tales’ (or, perhaps, precisely because of it) there is no doubt in my mind that a careful search amongst them would discover a trove of literary gems, comparable to the best works of the renowned poets and artists of the period. My search began in 1973 when I published, together with John Crispin, the anthology Los vanguardistas españoles, with the intention of informing the general reader that there was life beyond Lorca and the other great poets of the Generation of 1927.