Ernesto Giménez Caballero: The Vanguard Years (1921–1931) (review)

Giménez-Caballero is largely remembered for his popular literary/artistic magazine La Gaceta Literaria and his fascist affiliations. The majority of his works, particularly his more creative and experimental ones conceived during the 1920s before his so-called conversion to fascism sometime in 1929, have been given short shrift. The fact is that Giménez-Caballero was thoroughly involved in Spain’s cultural scene throughout the Primo de Rivera years. He was not only quite informed through his travels and journalistic endeavors about how the various waves of –isms influenced the likes of Gómez de la Serna, Buñuel, Dalí, and Lorca, but also contributed to the period’s dynamic modernity with titles like Yo, inspector de alcantarillas. (Epiplasmas) (1928), perhaps his best-known work.

Anderson’s Ernesto Giménez Caballero: The Vanguard Years (1921–1931) seeks to remedy the deficiency of critical understanding of Giménez-Caballero’s early books published between 1921 and 1931. More concretely, he sets out to treat these early books “first and foremost as literary works . . . worthy of literary-critical analysis and judgment” (12). Excluding the introduction, conclusion, and the final chapter on Giménez Caballero’s overall avant-garde trajectory, Anderson strictly divides his study chronologically dedicating each chapter to one of the author’s works.

Chapter one begins with Notas marruecas de un soldado (1923), a type of travelogue that recounts Giménez Caballero’s experiences as a soldier in the Africa campaign during the Annual debacle. While Notas is not characterized by any real sense of literary novelty, Anderson argues that certain aspects of its episodic structure presage the types of formal innovations that Avant-gardists were perfecting at the time. In chapter two, Anderson delves into Carteles (1927) to explore the hybrid nature of Giménez Caballero’s style, which artfully melds his journalism and previously published book reviews into larger literary-pictorial compositions. Chapter three is devoted to Los toros, las castañuelas y la Virgen (1927), a collection of essays that span a broad range of topics from bullfighting to nationalism and bring to light Giménez Caballero’s uneven response to Spain’s modernization. Chapter four continues on to Yo, inspector de alcantarillas. (Epiplasmas), where Anderson focuses specifically on “narrative strategies and their connection to perspective and the ways in which human beings seek to understand (themselves and others), even if they do not succeed” (107). What is most revealing about this chapter is how Anderson manages to untangle the work’s temporal incoherencies and the various verbal constructions and syntactical disruptions at play throughout, particularly in the “Fichas textuales,” which is given considerable attention.

With chapter five devoted to Hércules jugando a los dados (1929), we return to Giménez Caballero’s penchant for recycling his journalistic pieces in larger compositions aimed at engaging an eclectic range of subjects (politics, bullfighting, film, sports writing, etc.). According to Anderson, the book is a “canny compilation” of the author’s previously published journalism that anticipates “what today would be called cultural studies,” and he defines best in this chapter a playful, elusive, and at times disconcerting “mode of writing” as one of the most identifiable characteristics of Giménez Caballero’s avant-gardism (138–44). In chapter six, Anderson tackles Julepe de menta (1929), where he analyzes further Giménez Caballero’s “dazzling and challenging style” without adding much to what we learned of the author’s techniques in his breakdown of Hércules jugando a los dados (183). Chapter seven is set aside for Visitas literarias de España (1925–1928) (1995), a compilation of diverse articles Giménez Caballero published in El Sol between 1925 and 1928 and edited by Nigel Dennis. The Visitas literarias, with their oftentimes biting observations of Spain’s educational system and their call for genuine intellectual reform, add new thematic depth, as Anderson proposes, to Giménez Caballero’s literary craft. Structurally speaking, however, we still find in this...