Identificador: TDX:567
Autores: Vernet Pons, Vicenç
Resumen:
La estrategia ficcional en la novela de Álvaro Retana, as an investigation work, analyses the narrative development of the writer Álvaro Retana (1890-1970) to be placed, as he deserves, in the group of inter-war period Spanish novelists. Álvaro Retana - contemporary of Hoyos y Vinent, Joaquín Belda or Rafael López de Haro, among others- has a literary production that stretches from 1918 to 1964, in which one has to point up his constant collaboration in the publications of short stories that had a great success and popular spread before the Spanish Civil War. Besides of being a novelist, he is related to the world of journalism, to which he contributes with the pseudonymous of Carlos Fortuny, and also he was related with the world of 'género ínfimo', as a songwriter of 'cuplés', costume designer, and composer. In the year 1939, after a war trial, he is imprisoned in the Porlier jail of Madrid, being sentenced to death. Later on in 1948 he is pardoned and he comes out of prison. He also had been in jail because of the publication of some of his literary writings under the Primo de Rivera´s dictatorship. Álvaro Retana was forgotten by the official critics and put aside by the Spanish Literary History. He is the author of more than a hundred short novels, and amongst his most famous long novels and essays we can stand out: Carne de tablado (1918), El crepúsculo de las diosas (1919), which depict the atmosphere of 'el género ínfimo' in Madrid and Barcelona; El octavo pecado capital (1920), Raquel, ingenua y libertina (1923), as the alternative to the erotic novel of French origin; the autobiography Mi alma desnuda (1923), in which the biographic fake is being played; Las locas de postín (1918), A Sodoma en tren botijo (1933), chronicle reports about the aristocratic and homosexual ambiences of Madrid; La ola verde (1931), essay about the generation of erotic novel writers from the inter-war period; La bella y la mandrágora (1953), a genuine political satire about totalitarianism; La reina del cuplé (1963), a novel which represents the nostalgia about the 'cuplé' times; and Historia del arte frívolo (1964), authentic visual encyclopaedia which is commented by all the music-hall artists from 1900 to 1964. Álvaro Retana is a writer who personifies 'the modernity', understood this one like an ideological fight which questions the stereotyped bourgeois values of the Restoration times, that satirizes a society which is still living according to the schemes and values of the 19th century, and closed to the European culture because of some rusty institutions such as the catholic church, medicine, law, politics and science. A humorist that through his novels shows to be the heir of the picaresque literary strategies, Rabelais, Cervantes, of the nineteenth- century French novel or Galdós, and constantly worried in order to endow the human being with an identity based on the liberty as today's democratic society understands it. He is an obvious precedent to take into account inside the so called 'Spanish artistic homocity', amongst which stand out Terenci Moix, Luis Antonio de Villena or Pedro Almodóvar.
Repositori URV