The Hive (novel)

La colmena is a novel by Camilo José Cela, published in Buenos Aires in 1951.

Publication and analysis

It could not be published in Spain until 1955, due to opposition from Franco's censorship, despite the fact that the author was a protégé of Juan Aparicio, an influential politician in the regime. The appointment of Manuel Fraga and the insistence of the author led to the authorization of the first Spanish edition of a novel that would be included in the list of the 100 best novels in Spanish of the 20th century by the newspaper El Mundo.

The outer structure is composed of six chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter consists of a variable number of short sequences, which develop episodes that are mixed with others that occur simultaneously. In this way the argument is broken into a multitude of small anecdotes. The important thing is the sum of them, which makes up a set of crossed lives, like the cells of a beehive.

The space-time framework is very precise: Madrid in the winter of 1942, in the midst of the postwar period. The story is based on a small fictional space but with many characters that intervene little in the course of the work and give a choral social vision. Among the almost three hundred characters that appear, there are few of those from the more affluent classes as well as those from the working class and marginalized sectors, predominantly the lower middle class, the run-down petty bourgeoisie, whose illusions and projects for the future are deceitful and whose looks "never discover new horizons", in a life related as an "eternally repeated morning". The novel appears as the first part of a series that was to bear the title of "Uncertain Paths."

The desire to accurately reflect reality does not presuppose the absolute neutrality of the author, who intervenes in two contradictory ways. In most cases he uses the objectivist technique, that is, he limits himself to showing, describing from the outside, without penetrating inside the characters. Other times, however, he adopts an omniscient attitude and ironically comments on the attitudes of the characters.

Style

The style of The Hive presents an appearance of spontaneity that hides a careful work of perfection. The prose contains rhythmic effects, parallelisms, repetitions. The cut, abrupt and direct tone predominates, but sometimes lyrical fragments make their way, suggesting the poetic beginnings of the writer. In La colmena the temporal (three days) and spatial (one city) components are very small, which means that the elements that make up the intrigue (events, episodes, etc.) are subordinated to the elements of the plot. comment (subjective assessment). There is, therefore, a predominance of discourse.^{[citation required]}

The hive and the post-Civil War narrative

Published in 1951, some critics have valued the work as an example of the new perspectives of the Spanish novel, as a fusion of two literary traditions:

• The realistic tradition stirred by Pio Baroja with his novels open and with wide repertoire of characters.
• The formal renewal of the genre that had been carried out since the beginning of the centuryXX. and that will come to Cela through different currents: on the one hand the Spanish novelists prior to the Civil War (the novel of 98, especially Valle-Inclán, and the novecentist novel, especially Ramon Pérez de Ayala), and on the other, the European and American revitalizing novel (James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos). In fact The hive it looks a lot formally like Manhattan TransferTwo Passos.

Cela's novel presents a series of features that allow it to link with the two aforementioned traditions:

• It is one of the first post-war novels facing the reality of Spanish society with the intention to denounce it. This fact puts it in relation to Jean Paul Sartre and the social novel that is made in Europe in the 1950s.
• Collects influences from Spanish novelists prior to the Civil War:
  • Baroja: «The novel must reflect life».
  • Valle-Inclán: Collective character, deformative techniques of reality.
  • His humorous vision of life links with the work of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Wenceslao Fernández Flórez.
• It incorporates innovative techniques typical of the contemporary Western novel:
  • Objetivism of the Lost American Generation.
  • Critical realism: not only present reality, but also explain and denounce it (Faulkner).
  • Structural and thematic complexity: Joyce, Proust, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley.
  • Update of old motives of the Spanish literary tradition.
  • From the picaresque novel it uses the morality of survival and social vision dominated by unsolidarity.
  • Treatment of sex, which puts it in relation to Book of good love and The Celestine.

Some critical studies propose that this set of supposed innovations appreciated in Cela's novel would influence the novelists of the so-called '50s generation'.

Censored and self-censored passages

The hive was examined by civil and ecclesiastical censorship. The first was commissioned by the poet Leopoldo Panero, who advised its publication, "if the author attenuated certain scenes" and of the second, the priest Andrés de Lucas Casla, who made a very critical and unfavorable report that prevailed ("Does he attack dogma or morality? Yes. Does he attack the regime? No. Literary value? Scarce"); for this reason the work had to be printed in Buenos Aires in 1951 with some passages censored by Peronism. Later it could be published in Spain in 1955 without passages already censored in 1951 by the author, especially with explicit and lurid sexual content; This is known from a manuscript that belonged to the Hispanist Noël Salomon and rescued his daughter, Annie Salomon. The intact manuscript is part of the copy that the writer submitted to censorship in 1946 with the intention of transferring the original to F. Maristany of Ediciones el Zodíaco for its publication. Currently (December 2015) an unabridged critical edition is being projected that includes those omitted passages as an appendix.

Although the outline of the novel could date from 1944, Cela wrote:

I started this book in Madrid, in 1945, and the half I finished in Cebreros, in the summer of 48; it is evident that afterward I came back on it (from that date 1945-1950), correcting and polishing and sobando, removing here, putting there and suffering always, but the novel could well be rounded in the trance to which I now refer. Before, in 1946, my struggle with censorship began, war in which I lost all battles except the last.

Self-censorship is observable, for example, in a novel where there are so many characters, in the absence of the ecclesiastics, so present on the other hand in the life of the time. Then, of course, it was not even raised because of the same ecclesiastical censorship. On the other hand, any representative, even minimal, of the official Francoist power is also excluded.