Essay on Enrique Vila-Matas and the beginning of the avant-garde
The work of the author Enrique Vila-Matas, abbreviated history of portable literature is published in 1985, while the novel develops in the first half of the twentieth century, precisely in the twenties, just at the end of World War I.
In the twentieth century, throughout Europe, changes and renovations begin with the previous stage. After the First World War there is a deep crisis that questions all the values that took place so far.
The Catalan writer writes in a century that you can define postwar.
From 1939 to 1975 all Spain has been conditioned by the result of the Civil War. Literature and culture have been under suspicion of the Franco regime for many years. Censor laws affected both intellectual creation for the editorial industry. In the years of Franco, the number of consumers in literature lowered while radio, cinema and television always brought more people closer.
In this century there is great cultural and artistic instability at European level that results in the birth of new aesthetic movements with renewing attitudes for the culture and art of the time. In this period the European authors of different ideologies meet for sharing ideas, fears and ideals creating aesthetic, defined avant -garde or ismos movements.
The avant -garde share common features such as rebellion against previous proposals or the great interest in modernity, technological advances and industrialization.
The new forms of communication and the cosmopolitan city contribute to creating new models of artistic inspiration.
Originality and creativity are two fundamental elements in avant -garde artists. They have a provocative character, experience new thematic forms, new forms of expressions. Art for them must be self-sufficient.
In this period a novelistic current is developed where the inner monologue or flow of consciousness offers the reproduction of thought, ‘‘ The imitation of a phenomenon that does not appear in the eyes of the viewer, but which is not less real ’’ ’’ ’.
In Europe therefore different movements arise:
- The futurism that rejects the past, exalts nationalism, eliminates conventionalist images and the omission of the score.
- Dadaism that attacks the principle of reason, symbolizes absolute denial, anarchy and destruction. This movement despises traditional art and renounces meaning seeking improvisation and spontaneity.
- Cubism where the thread of the speech is broken, is played with the letters and with the verses.
- The expressionism that breaks with the previous tradition, where subjectivity is at the basis of everything, because the world must be expressed as the artist perceives it.
- Surrealism that arises as evolution of the previous and ismos of 1924. There is an interest in the subconscious, the mental dreams and processes not subject to the reason of man.
During the twentieth century another group is also developed that is called the generation of 27 that begins its activity in Spain due to the commemoration of the poet Luis de Góngora.
This movement has three fundamental stages:
- The training stage where the movement begins to develop assimilating modern and traditional currents.
- The consolidation stage where poetry has a new form immediately to political and social conflicts.
- The disintegration stage where the main feelings are nostalgia and immediate protests of the murderer of Federico García Lorca.
The authors of the generation of 27 share ideals and certain characteristics such as the balance between the concrete and the abstract, between the sentimental and the intellectual or the balance between the obvious and the hermetic. They share ideals of nature, freedom or progress.
All these movements and the political and social situation of the twentieth century have influenced the writing and the works of the author Enrique Vila-Matas, especially his work abbreviated history of portable literature that is presented as a mixture of all these movements;A mixture that the author has developed with style and caution without falling into something banal or already seen and heard by other writers.
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