Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1989

from the Office of the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy

This year’s Nobel Prize for literature goes to the Spanish writer Camilo José Cela. With him is rewarded the leading figure in Spain’s literary renewal during the postwar era.

The background of Cela’s experience is the cruel Spanish civil war, which divided the country into two factions whose borders could cut right through ties of family and friendship. He himself was drawn into the fighting and was badly wounded.

Cela is a restless spirit. In him is united a marked fondness for experiment with a provocative attitude. At the same time he can be included in an old Spanish tradition of hilarious grotesqueness—which is often the other side of despair. Compassion for man’s hopeless suffering is there, but tightly controlled.

The basic features of his attitude are evident already in the book which made his name—The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942). It is a powerful, in parts gruesome novel, which in spite of being censored and banned had an almost unparalleled impact. After Don Quixote it is probably the most read novel in Spanish literature.

We seldom meet any characters in his books which are drawn in any detail. Instead, often like Mahfouz in Midaq Alley, Cela captures the crowd, the buzzing, as in The Hive (1951). The effect is attained by means of a feverish montage, which is reflected in other authors.

A sensation was caused in 1969 by San Camilo, which tells of the week before the outbreak of the civil war. The decisive factor was that the mighty flow of words with its pictures of violence and sexual obsession within the small sphere seemed to reflect happenings on the national plane.

In Oficio de Tinieblas 5 (Requiem of Darkness 5), 1973, and Mazurca para dos muertos (Mazurca for Two Dead), 1983, the experiments with form of language and content—in different ways—have been carried very far. The books are at once challenging and defiantly dark but also secretly enticing. The latter is a macabre but cheerfully obscene dance of death that is valid far beyond the depiction of Galician everyday life.

Especially noteworthy is what Cela has done as publisher of the literary magazine Papeles de Son Armadans. Many is the writer who has found an open forum here during years of hardship. In search of the Spain that Cela saw disappear in those years, he roamed far and wide. Perhaps the most enjoyable of all the accounts of his travels—at the same time humorous masterpieces—are Journey to the Alcarria (1948) and Del Mino al Bidasoa (From Mino to Bidasoa), 1952.

[© The Nobel Foundation, 1989.]