Camilo José Cela

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The Spanish author Camilo José Cela y Trulock (born 1916) was a prose stylist of extraordinary ability. He is generally considered the major Spanish literary figure of the post-Civil War generation.

Camilo José Cela was born in Iria Flavia, Galicia, where his father's ancestors - some renowned, some of peasant stock - had lived for generations. His mother was of English ancestry. When he was 9, his family moved to Madrid, where Cela later attended a number of secondary schools run by religious orders, finally graduating with an undistinguished record. At the University of Madrid he studied, in turn, medicine, liberal arts, and law but abandoned all three fields without earning a degree.

In 1942 Cela's short novel The Family of Pascual Duarte exploded upon the literary scene in Spain. After the upheaval of the Civil War the Spanish novel had almost ceased to exist. Baroja, Azorin, and Pérez de Ayala had little new to say, and Unamuno and Valle Inclán had both died in 1936. The Family of Pascual Duarte, somewhat like Albert Camus's The Stranger, which appeared in the same year, presents an alienated character whom fate seems to drive to unbridled violence. The violent actions of the protagonist, which cannot be fully explained sociologically or psychologically, are generally symbolic of the hopeless chaos of post-Civil War Spain.

This novel introduced the Spanish literary manner known as tremendismo, a neobaroque and neopicaresque style, which concentrates on the violent and grotesque. Tremendismo is marked by extravagant and strident diction pointed toward the ugly, by sallies of grimly ironic humor, and by the presentation of irrational and alienated characters.

After Rest Home (1943), which is based on Cela's experience in a tuberculosis sanitarium, and Las nuevas andanzas y desventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes (1944; The New Fortunes and Misfortunes of Lazarillo de Tormes), Cela changed directions and published The Hive (1950), which many regard as his greatest novel. In the beehive of metropolitan Madrid more than 200 characters, all of them fearful and lonely, pursue the necessities of food and sex. The novel emphasizes the grim impersonality of human relations and the pettiness of man's existence.

Since Cela preferred not to develop sustained characters in his novels, he turned to another type of literature, the travel book. His first, Viaje a la Alcarria (1948; Journey in the Alcarria), became a minor classic, and he published several others. In these books the author as wayfarer trods the roads of ancient Spanish regions such as the Alcarria, attempting to discover the heart of the Spanish land and people.

Cela also wrote short fiction with marked success. His Apuntes carpetovetónicos (1955) contains penetrating snapshots of provincial life. Of this type, his El gallego y su cuadrilla is a minor masterpiece. Cela's talents also lent themselves to novelettes, among which his best are probably Timoteo el incomprendido and Café de artistas, included in the volume El molino de viento (1956; The Windmill).

After 1956 Cela lived with his wife in Palma de Mallorca, where he edited the literary journal Papeles de son Armadans and continued to write a variety of literary works, none of them, however, novels. Cela's outstanding achievement was the cultivation of a style and manner which expressed not only his original and complex personality but also the preoccupations of modern man. After the Spanish dictator Franco died, Cela served as a delegate to the new constitutional convention. He also became somewhat known for a high lifestyle, driving at different times a Rolls Royce, a Bentley, and a Jaguar. In an interview around the time of his 80th birthday, he derided the notion of inspiration as a necessary ingredient for writers. "Picasso once said, I don't know if inspiration exists, but when it comes, it usually finds me working.' What a person has to do is sit himself down before a stack of blank papers, which is in itself terrifying. There is nothing as frightening as a stack of blank pieces of paper and the thought that I have to fill them from top to bottom, placing letters one after the other."

Further Reading

There are two studies of Cela's work in English: Robert Kirsner, The Novels and Travels of Camilo José Cela (1964), and David W. Foster, Forms of the Novel in the Work of Camilo José Cela (1967).

Among the Internet sites devoted to Cela's work is the Spanish language site maintained by La Fundación Camilo José Cela, found at . The 80th birthday interview quoted above can be found at .

Camilo José Cela
Camilo José Cela Sculpture in Guadalajara, Spain
Born	May 11, 1916(1916-05-11) Padrón, Galicia, Spain
Died	January 17, 2002 (aged 85) Madrid, Spain
Nationality	Spanish
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1989

This is a Spanish name; the first family name is Cela and the second is Trulock.

Don Camilo José Cela Trulock, Marquis of Iria Flavia (Spanish: Don Camilo José Cela Trulock, marqués de Iria Flavia) (May 11, 1916—January 17, 2002) was an influential Spanish writer and member of the Generation of 1950.

Biography

Camilo José Cela was born in Iria Flavia, Padrón, Galicia, Spain of Galician and English parents. Before he became a professional writer, Cela attended the University of Madrid, where he briefly pursued a law degree. He also fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Franco, until he was wounded by an errant grenade and discharged. After the war, Cela dedicated himself to newspaper work and took several jobs of an essentially bureaucratic nature, including a position of censor that would later bring him criticism. In 1944 he married María del Rosario Conde Picavea with whom he had a son, Camilo José Cela Conde, 2nd Marquess of Iria Flavia, in 1946.

Cela published his first novel, La Familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte), when he was 26, in 1942. Pascual Duarte has trouble finding validity in conventional morality and commits a number of crimes, including murders, for which he feels nothing. In this sense he is similar to Meursault in Albert Camus's novel The Stranger. This novel is also of particular importance as it played a large part in shaping the direction of the post-war Spanish novel.

He published two travel books Viaje a la Alcarria (Journey to La Alcarria, 1948), and Del Miño al Bidasoa (From Minho to Bidasoa, 1952).

Cela's best known work, La Colmena (The Hive) was published in 1951, featuring more than 300 characters and a style showing the influence of both Spanish realism (best exemplified by Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Pérez Galdós) and contemporary English- and French-language authors, such as Joyce and Sartre. Cela's typical style—a sarcastic, often grotesque, form of realism—is exemplified in La Colmena. It should be also noted that, as with some of his other works in this period, La Colmena was first published in Argentina, as Franco's Roman Catholic Church-affiliated government banned it because of the perceived immorality of its content.

From the late 1960s, with the publication of San Camilo 1936, Cela's work became increasingly experimental. In 1988, for example, he wrote Cristo versus Arizona (Christ versus Arizona), which tells the story of a duel in the OK Corral in a single sentence that is more than a hundred pages long.

Statue of Camilo José Cela at Padrón.

In 1957 he was appointed a member of the Real Academia Española. Cela was also named Marquis of Iria Flavia by King Juan Carlos I. He was appointed Royal Senator in the Constituent Cortes, where he exerted some influence in the wording of the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

In 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability.^[1]

In his later years he was infamous for his scandalous outbursts: he boasted in an TVE interview with Mercedes Milá about his capability to absorb a litre of water via his anus, offering to demonstrate^[2]. He had already scandalized Spanish society with his Diccionario secreto ("Secret Dictionary", 1969-1971), a dictionary of slang and taboo words.

He described the Spanish Cervantes Prize as "covered with shit"^[3]. Subsequently, he was awarded the prize in 1995.

In 1994, he was awarded the Premio Planeta^{[citation needed]}. Some question the objectivity of the awards, and winners on occasion have refused to accept it.^{[citation needed]}

He died in Madrid from chronic heart disease on January 17, 2002, at age 84.

His will was contested because he favoured his widow and second younger wife Marina Castaño over his son Camilo José Cela Conde from a previous marriage^{[citation needed]}.

References

1. ^ Nobel prize citation
2. ^ Todos los títulos fueron suyos, Luis Ventoso, La Voz de Galicia, 18 January 2002.
3. ^ La leyenda del gran provocador, Ángel Vivas, El Mundo, 18 January, 2002.

External links

• BBC obituary
• Biography of Camilo José Cela
• Photos
• The Nobel Foundation has a site on him, including speeches, biography and bibliography.

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Literature Saul Bellow (1976) · Vicente Aleixandre (1977) · Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) · Odysseas Elytis (1979) · Czesław Miłosz (1980) · Elias Canetti (1981) · Gabriel García Márquez (1982) · William Golding (1983) · Jaroslav Seifert (1984) · Claude Simon (1985) · Wole Soyinka (1986) · Joseph Brodsky (1987) · Naguib Mahfouz (1988) · Camilo José Cela (1989) · Octavio Paz (1990) · Nadine Gordimer (1991) · Derek Walcott (1992) · Toni Morrison (1993) · Kenzaburo Oe (1994) · Seamus Heaney (1995) · Wisława Szymborska (1996) · Dario Fo (1997) · José Saramago (1998) · Günter Grass (1999) · Gao Xingjian (2000) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

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