Cervantine Parody and the Apocalyptic Tradition in Torrente Ballester's Fragmentos de apocalipsis

Abstract

tt ORRENTE's long and sometimes disappointingly obscure literary career reached its zenith to date in January of 1986 when he was awarded the Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel Cervantes. Like the Nobel Prize, for which Torrente has been mentioned frequently of late as a candidate, the Cervantes Prize is given not for a single work but the lifetime achievement of a writer who, according to the prize announcement, de forma sobresaliente, ha contribuido a enriquecer el legado cultural hispanico, and thus is not limited to peninsular writers. Following a promising beginning in which he won the Premio Nacional Literatura in 1939 for his modern auto sacramental, El casamiento enganioso, Torrente was relegated to some four decades of literary obscurity by the politics of the epoch. Fearing that his prior Galleguista activism would endanger his family, Torrente associated himself with Falangist intellectuals, idealists such as Dionisio Ridruejo who, like Torrente himself, rapidly became disillusioned with the course set by the Franco regime and drew away from politics altogether. By 1941-1942 when Torrente disassociated himself from politics, he had become tainted for liberal critics and writers by his erstwhile contacts with sindicalism and would be ignored by them for decades while suffering reprisals