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Queda” (“Taps”), was found among his papers, ready for publication.
Depending on one’s criteria for the determination of literary genre (in Sender’s case, a task made all but impossible by the author’s disdain for such classifications and his deliberate attempts, at times, to blur traditional genre distinctions), Sender’s total production of ninety-nine books (including the three unpublished novels) could be described as includ-202
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ing sixty-four novels or novellas, seven collections of short stories, five works of drama, two volumes of poetry, and twenty-one books of essays, personal narratives, and journalistic articles. Almost all of this last category consists of material published earlier in newspaper articles or in Sender’s literary column, “Los libros y los días” (books and days), which was syndicated in Spanish-language newspapers throughout Latin America from
early in the 1950’s until the author’s death. More than eight hundred articles appeared in
“Los libros y los días.”
Achievements
Ramón José Sender surely ranks as one of the greatest Spanish novelists of the twenti-
eth century. Marcelino Peñuelas, the Spanish critic, places him “at the head of the Spanish novelists of our time” and adds, in case there is any doubt, that he means by this to exalt Sender above Pío Baroja, generally held to be the preeminent Spanish novelist of the
twentieth century. Few, if any, Spanish writers of all history, except for Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Pérez Galdós, have had their novels so widely translated as has Sender.
Sender’s first novel, Pro Patria, was translated into ten major languages; by 1970, his novels had appeared in more than eighty foreign translations, according to Peñuelas. Thirteen of his novels have appeared in English, all in both British and American editions. In January, 1936, his first historical novel, Mr. Witt Among the Rebels, was awarded the National Prize for Literature, at that time regarded as Spain’s highest literary award. In 1966, the first three-volume edition of his monumental autobiographical novel, Crónica del alba (chronicle of dawn), received the City of Barcelona Prize. In 1969, Sender won the lucrative Planeta Prize from the Planeta publishing house for his rather mediocre novel En la vida de Ignacio Morel (in the life of Ignacio Morel).
Biography
Ramón José Sender, whose full name is Ramón José Sender Garcés, was born in the
village of Chalamera de Cinca, in the Aragonese province of Huesca, on February 3,
1901. His father was town clerk of both Chalamera and the nearby town of Alcolea de
Cinca. Both his parents’ families had long-standing roots in Alcolea, and the Sender family returned there in 1903, moving next to Tauste (Aragon) in 1908 or 1909. A composite
of both Alcolea and Tauste can be recognized as the scene of three of the author’s finest novels, A Man’s Place, Crónica del alba, and Requiem for a Spanish Peasant. His deep attachment to his native region and pride in his Aragonese heritage never left him.
From his earliest years, Sender rebelled against the authoritarian attitude of his father, a strict Catholic whose efforts to force his views upon the future novelist seem to have been decisive in determining Sender’s lifelong rebellion against the existing order of
things, including his rejection of the Roman Catholic Church. Sender’s attitude of rebellion and protest is evident in all of his writings, both journalistic and literary. His protests against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in 1927 led to his imprisonment for three
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months in Madrid, an experience that he novelized in O. P.
Difficulties with his father apparently led to Sender’s being sent to a Catholic boarding school in Reus (Catalonia) for the academic year 1913-1914, a year that forms the basis
for his novel Violent Griffin, which later became the second of the three parts of the first volume of his monumental three-volume autobiographical novel Crónica del alba. Only volume 1 of the series has appeared in English translation (as Before Noon: A Novel in Three Parts, 1957), and its first part initially appeared separately under the same title as the series— Chronicle of Dawn.
From 1914 to 1917, Sender attended the Institute of Zaragoza. During the next school
year, he worked as a pharmacy clerk in Alcañiz while meeting, through special arrange-
ments with the Institute of Teruel (in Teruel), the remaining requirements for his high
school diploma. During the next three years, from 1918 to 1921, he worked on the edito-
rial staff of La tierra, a small newspaper in Huesca published by the Association of Farmers and Ranchers of Upper Aragon.
Upon his return in 1924 from fourteen months of service in the Spanish army in the ill-
fated Moroccan War, Sender joined the editorial staff of the prestigious liberal newspaper El sol in Madrid. Following the success of his first novel, Pro Patria, Sender left El sol to devote himself full-time to freelance journalistic writing and to writing novels. During the next six years, he published six novels in addition to nearly two hundred articles in the newspaper La libertad and numerous articles in Solidaridad obrera, the organ of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (National Labor Federation) in Barcelona.
During the Spanish Civil War, Sender served in the republican army, rising to the rank
of comandante (major). His wife was executed by Nationalist forces in Zamora on October 10, 1936. Late in 1938, Sender, seeing that the republican cause was hopeless, fled to France and from there to Mexico City in March of 1939. From Mexico, he entered the
United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen
in 1946 and remaining in the United States until his death in 1982.
From 1947 until 1963, Sender was a professor of Spanish at the University of New
Mexico in Albuquerque; from 1965 until 1971, he was a visiting professor of Spanish lit-
erature at the University of Southern California. Upon retirement in 1971, he moved to
San Diego, California, where he lived until his death.
Sender remained an outspoken enemy of the Nationalist regime in Spain, and it was
not until June of 1974 that he returned to his native land, his first visit since his self-imposed exile in 1938. During this three-week stay, he was warmly received and highly
praised by the Spanish literary community.
Analysis
Though marked by great diversity, Ramón José Sender’s vast novelistic production
over five decades reveals a remarkable unity of vision. In substance, one finds that there are continuing, basic Senderian concepts and themes, found in large measure in his first 204
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novel, Pro Patria, as well as in his posthumously published works. In them all, one finds the author’s deep concern with social justice, with the struggle of the individual for self-realization, for love, and for an ideal that gives transcendent value to life. Sender’s writings serve as a vehicle for ceaselessly probing certain immutable problems of existence: the question of death or human mortality; the enigma of evil in the individual and in the world at large; the possibility of an ultimate basis for moral judgments; and the function of the mysterious and the nonrational in life. Ordinary realism is in a Senderian novel only the starting point or the springboard for reaching out for transcendent meaning, for discovery of the marvelous and the mysterious, for brief flights of poetic fantasy, and for a constant metaphysical-religious-lyric questioning of the ultimate nature of reality.
Sender’s novels usually move on three distinct levels: the realistic, the poetic, and the philosophical-religious.
Though neither an orthodox believer in God nor an atheist, Sender reveals in his novels
a deep faith in and reverence
toward humanity; in The Sphere, he elaborates his belief that the essential part of humanity is imperishable, believing (along with Benedict de Spinoza) that “man is an integral part of the infinite intellect of God.” An offense to humanity thus becomes an offense to God. Humanity, both its individual persons and in the abstract, is squarely in the center of Sender’s novelistic universe. Though his short stories, theatrical pieces, essays, and poetry have received very little critical attention, they all exhibit the same basic view of humans and explore the same fundamental questions to be found in his
novels.
Sender’s style is that of the author speaking directly and personally to the reader in
simple, clear, unaffected language, even when passages of the harshest realism are interrupted with flights of lyric fantasy or dialectical probing of philosophical-religious problems (from which inconclusive and eclectic syntheses are derived; Sender is never dog-
matic except to reiterate the impossibility of humanity arriving at absolute truth—at least in this life). In a taped interview at the University of Southern California on June 7, 1966, Sender named four Spanish authors as having greatly influenced him: Fernando de Rojas,
Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, and Baroja. Sender, like
Baroja, is a writer of substance, always with something worthwhile to say, and openly dis-dainful of mere style; he also is preoccupied with social, moral, and metaphysical
problems.
The influence of Valle-Inclán can be seen in Sender’s occasional juxtaposition of the
grotesque and the lyrically innocent and in the use of tragicomedy. His bitter social satire, his tendency to caricature and his austere humor (never far removed from sadness) may
owe something to Quevedo, the seventeenth century writer of Los sueños (1627; The Visions, 1640) and the celebrated picaresque novel, Historia de la vida del buscón (1626; The Life and Adventures of Buscon, 1657). Sender’s peculiar fusion of realistic and nonrealistic elements (fantasy, dreams, hallucinations, the mysterious, the marvelous, the magical, and so on) recalls not only the two levels of realism and fantasy in La Celestina 205
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(1499; The Rogue, 1634) of Rojas but also those in the greatest Spanish novel of all, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615).
Francisco Carrasquer calls Sender’s first novel, Pro Patria, a “provisional anticipatory synthesis of all of Sender’s work” and adds that it is such a great novel “that one cannot understand how a first work like it did not definitely consecrate its author.” Peñuelas also calls it a “great novel,” and he told Sender, “You have a few novels the equal of Imán [ Pro Patria], but none better.” Until recently, critics have tended to regard the work as simply a realistic account of the Moroccan War much in the style of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, 1968; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, 1969), published one year earlier in Germany. Pro Patria‘s fantastic, poetic, philosophical, and symbolic dimensions were long overlooked, but masterful studies of the work by both Carrasquer
and Peñuelas have helped to correct this misapprehension.
Pro Patria
Pro Patria tells the story of the Spanish military campaign to suppress the rebellion of the Moorish leader Abd-el-Krim in 1921 in Spanish Morocco. The story is told from the
perspective of Viance, a Spanish private who attracts misfortune (hence the book’s Span-
ish title, Imán, meaning “magnet”), alternating with that of a Spanish journalist, Antonio, and that of an omniscient narrator.
Harsh realism is especially evident in the first of the book’s three major divisions, “The Camp—The Relief.” In the tone and atmosphere set here for the rest of the narrative, there is an implied denunciation of the utter stupidity and uselessness of war, perhaps not only of the specific Spanish campaign but also of war in general—whether the novel is a pacifist work is subject to debate.
In the second division, “Annual—The Catastrophe,” the suffering of Viance from hun-
ger, thirst, and exhaustion reaches the limits of human endurance while the Spanish forces are routed. Through it all, however, Viance, though a common soldier (and symbolic of
the Spanish masses), engages in some metaphysical-lyric probing of the meaning of his
experience and of human life. Lying in the stinking belly of a horse, hiding from the
Moors, he senses “that his own matter is alike to that which encircles him, that there is only one kind of matter, and that all of it is animated by the same blind impulses, obedient to the same law.” One dark night inclines Viance “to believe in some kind of justice . . . [in] A kind of bright and translucent justice implicit in all things.”
In the third and last division, “Escape—War—Discharge—The Peace of the Dead,”
Viance escapes from his Moorish captors and returns to the Spanish forces, only to receive inhuman treatment from them and finally to be discharged, a bitter, disillusioned man contemplating suicide. The book’s social protest arises from the action itself; Viance’s officers treat him as the upper classes have for centuries in Spain treated the lower classes. Because Sender’s military service in Morocco occurred two years or more after the crushing defeat of the Spaniards at Annual, the events recorded are not autobiographical but are
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rather a composite of what the young author heard from others combined with his own
vivid imagination.
Mr. Witt Among the Rebels
The first of several historical novels published by Sender over four decades, Mr. Witt Among the Rebels portrays an insurrection against the First Spanish Republic in the province of Cartagena in 1873; the action occurs in Murcia and, strangely enough, it seems to foreshadow the Civil War, which was to erupt July 18, 1936, almost immediately after the appearance of the novel. Fused with the outer events of the revolution is the private, inner story of Mr. Witt, a balding English engineer of fifty-three, stationed in Cartagena and married to Milagritos, a charming and vivacious Spaniard eighteen years younger than he; the two contrast sharply in temperament and character. Events from the outside world invade the calm and quiet of their domestic life; Milagritos, passionate and nonreflective, wholeheartedly abandons herself to the uprising, while Mr. Witt, logical, reflective, and timid, retreats further into his private world: His “world” and that of the revolution are the two main poles between which the novel is built.
The characterizations of both Mr. Witt and Milagritos are superb, an admirable study
in contrasting human psychology. In the end, the uprising is utterly crushed; though
Milagritos knows that during the insurrection her husband acted perfidiously, she suspects that his actions were motivated by jealousy, a jealousy that confirms his love for her. Accordingly, she pardons him, and the two resume normal relations. The objective and the
subjective, the outer and the inner, are found here in delicate and subtle balance; a serene work, Mr. Witt Among the Rebels is probably Sender’s best historical novel and surely one of his finest works.
Crónica del alba
The monumental Crónica del alba narrates the author’s life from the age of ten to his mid-thirties, the time of the Spanish Civil War. The first part, bearing the title of the novel as a whole— Chronicle of Dawn—appeared in 1942 and was well received; it and the second part, Violent Griffin, are regarded by Peñuelas as superior to the remaining parts.
The novel is essentially a study in idealism, a returning to one’s origins to discover the sources of the idealism that led republican officers such as the protagonist José Garcés (obviously the author’s alter ego) to risk their lives in defense of the Second Spanish Republic. José, nicknamed Pepe (Sender himself was called Pepe by members of his family),
discovers love in the for
m of his sweetheart, Valentina, an embodiment of his idealistic values. Though Pepe’s grandiose dreams as a ten-year-old boy in the “dawn” of life contrast sharply with the cruel realities of defeat that José the mature man suffers at the end of the series (the “noon” of life), his devotion to Valentina remains firm. Lying ill in a concentration camp in Algiers as the Civil War ends, José writes his autobiography in a desperate attempt to remain a man “of substance.” “In a man,” he explains, “substance is
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faith.” Purportedly, he gives the three notebooks in which he has written his autobiog-
raphy to Sender the author, then dies.
Following a chronological order, the series follows José’s life from childhood through
adolescence, young manhood, and into maturity; through it all, he seeks to live up to the grandiose ideals he had conceived as a child, especially as Valentina’s sweetheart. An ancient document found in a castle by the young José declared that the men most needed to
ensure the greatness of Spain were saints, poets, and heroes, though “there can be no true saint without a touch of the poet, nor, finally, any of the three without some of the virtues of the others.”
In the last volume, Valentina assumes in memory the force of a pure ideal, no longer an
entity of flesh and blood but a mysterious influence, a dream, a secret nostalgia for some
“lost paradise.” It is a longing made all the more poignant by the harsh realities of civil war.
The Sphere
A revision and considerable augmentation of an earlier novel, Proverbio de la muerte, The Sphere could properly be called a new novel; its first Spanish edition appeared in 1947; its definitive edition, slightly augmented and retouched from the first edition, was published in 1969. Sender regarded it as his most serious work; in it, he presents his lifelong belief in the spheroidal nature of all reality. The title of the novel is itself a metaphor of the author’s monistic conception of total reality.
While crossing the Atlantic on the way to the Western Hemisphere after having es-