Juan Benet and the French Nouveau Roman: A Contentious Connection Revisited

Juan Benet’s fiction tends to be envisaged as something of a rarity. In their conspicuous detachment from social realist techniques and concerns, Benet’s early novels yield all too readily to critical evaluations that locate the significance of these texts in their decisive rupture with the literary tradition that preceded them. Compared with the social realist works that had monopolized Spanish letters in the 1950s, Benet’s first novel, Volverás a Región (1967), is unusual to say the least. But the singular nature of Benet’s fiction is likely to be overemphasized if we search only within Spain for the stimulus that engendered it. An examination of Benet’s work that seeks to account for the author’s abnormality simply as a challenge to social realist hegemony will no doubt prove deficient. An analysis of Benet’s novels that fails to acknowledge their correlation with literary movements outside of Spain provides scant succor for perplexed readers who wish to understand the origins and meaning of the bewildering fictional world depicted in these texts. The metaphysical and aesthetic ideas latent in Benet’s novels can be comprehended fully only in their consonance with the philosophical principles underlying the evolution of the novel in France in the period immediately prior to the composition and publication of Benet’s first texts. To link Benet to the nouveau roman is not, as the first critics to tackle his works in the 1970s and 1980s feared, to diminish his originality. Rather, to frame Benet in the context of the broader international evolution of narrative fiction, with which the author was certainly familiar, is to provide an accurate and enlightening account of how his texts engage with and build on contemporaneous trends with his radical formal and thematic innovation.

This article will examine critics’ resistance to highlighting the connections between Benet and the French nouveau roman while advocating the utility of establishing this affiliation, which serves as a hermeneutic apparatus for Benet’s otherwise impenetrable texts. The underlying premise that art is incapable of rendering human existence comprehensible unites Benet’s literary theory and practice with the ideas espoused by mid-twentieth-century thinkers in France whose experience of war and totalitarian government caused them to cast doubt on humanist positivism and on the validity of man’s attempts to imbue his experience and his environment with meaning. Benet’s early novels give expression to a widespread suspicion of humanism, which was articulated compellingly first in the existentialist novel and subsequently in the nouveau roman, and which evidently struck a chord with Benet’s own experience of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. By examining the correspondences between Benet’s ideas on literature and those of mid-twentieth-century writers in France, not all of whose works the Spanish writer necessarily knew but which nevertheless bear striking similarities with Benet’s own, I intend to offer a more complete picture of Benet’s place both in Spanish memory writing and in the wider European trends from which his work stems and with which it engages.

The early efforts of critics to contextualize Benet’s fiction resulted in the virtually unanimous finding that the Spanish author’s work was completely different from anything that had preceded it. In the first monograph published on Benet, David Herzberger claimed that the author’s idiosyncratic style placed him “on the margin of the literary currents of the time” (2). Herzberger later reiterated the assertion in his preface to an edited collection authored with Roberto Manteiga and Malcolm Alan Compitello. In their preamble the authors observed that Benet’s writing is “more attuned to an extraordinary personal vision than to the literary trends of the moment” and they upheld the “uniqueness of his literary posture” (Manteiga, Herzberger, and Compitello ix). The consensus on Benet’s sui generis style can be attributed, in part, to the author’s acrimonious disapproval of the social realist tradition that had preceded him. Benet’s polemical views on social realism expressed in interviews and in his theoretical works give the impression that his is...