Postmodern Paletos: The city and the country in the narrative and cinema of international Spain

Abstract

Tensions between rural arcadias and urban blight and between enlightened civilizations and primitive wastelands have informed the stories we have told each other from the beginning of time. In the last half-century, such tensions have come to the forefront of the Spanish narrative imagination. Writing novels and directing movies in a society torn by the contradictions of official policies promoting rural life in the midst of a lived reality of starvation and immigration, authors and directors turned often in the Franco years to themes of city/country contact. In the years of the democracy, traditional rural/urban tensions have subsided. They have given way, nevertheless, to equally powerful center/periphery tensions pitting Madrid versus Spain's various regions and globalizing impulses against renewed localist fervor. Authors and directors continue to recur to traditional city/country imagery to portray these tensions. This dissertation studies how the traditional struggle between urban and rural has inspired the artistic imagination in the last fifty years, and in turn, how this struggle has correspondingly been shaped by these very representations. The study is based on close readings of the following works: from the 1950s, José Nieves Conde's movie Surcos and Jesús Fernández Santos's novel Los bravos; from the 1960s, Pedro Lazaga's movie La ciudad no es para mí and Luis Martín Santos's Tiempo de silencio; from the 1970s, Carlos Saura's La prima Angélica and Carmen Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás; from the 1980s, Pedro Almodóvar's ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! and Luis Landero's novel Juegos de la edad tardía; and from the 1990s, Julio Medem's Vacas and Suso de Toro's Calzados Lola.