Francesc Trabal

The work of Trabal is basically that of a journalist who, in time, became more and more inclined toward literature in the strict sense of the word, and wrote a number of novels that had a certain impact in the years prior to the Spanish Civil War. These novels are refined, artificial, and brilliant, and deal with the middle-class society of that period. They stand radically apart from their predecessors of the nineteenth century and attempt to establish links, in their subjects, structure and style with the models of the psychological technique practised above all by French writers such as Proust and Gide. Trabal's humour, more characteristic of avant-garde literature, tends slightly towards the absurd.

Francesc Trabal i Benessat was born in Sabadell on 5 May 1899. Brilliant and of restless disposition, he played an active and notable role in the Catalan cultural world of his times. By the time he was eighteen, he was part of a circle of friends that included a number of influential personalities in the world of art, letters and politics. Joan Oliver, his friend, colleague, travelling companion and facetious foil for many years, offers in his book Tros de paper (Piece of Paper), a cordial, anecdotal, sensitive and sufficiently rigorous sketch of Trabal for us to have a good idea of his character, activities and his group of friends in the years of his adolescence and young manhood. Again, thanks to the valuable information kindly offered by Joan Oliver, I can also say that Francesc Trabal was an enthusiastic, sociable man who was very much taken up with his cultural activities. Editor and eventually director of the newspaper Diari de Sabadell, he published there his curious, diverting articles about politics or pieces that were full of new jokes and tough brain-teasers, very much along the Dadaist lines of the épater-le-bourgeios posture. He encouraged and directed magazines, organised debates and associations, for example the Federació d'Associacions de Música (Federation of Music Associations) -a number of groups of music lovers that, located in each regional capital and all of them under the auspices of the Barcelona Music Association, were able to work the miracle that people in all the towns in Catalonia could go to their theatres and listen to the most outstanding musicians of the day. He also worked with others to create the publishing house "La Mirada" of Sabadell, which would subsequently merge with Proa to become the "La Mirada" Collection. It was in these Sabadell publications that his first book would appear in 1925 under the title of L'any que ve (Next Year), thereafter making him known as a humorist and writer who was part of the group that came to be called the Grup de Sabadell (Sabadell Group).

L'any que ve is a book of Trabal's jokes, illustrated by his own drawings along with those of Joan Oliver, Antoni Vila Arrufat, Ricard Marlet, Lluís Parcerisa, Josep M. Trabal, Armand Obiols and Miquel Carreras. The book is presented with a Prologue by Josep Carner, "Un Humor Indeliberat, Difós, Secret dins l'Automatisme Tradicional de les Paraules Òbvies (A Non-deliberate, Diffuse, Secret Humour within the Traditional Automatism of Obvious Words), which discusses the meaning of the book and the type of humour it represents. Carner describes the group as "... select spirits united by joyful cordiality, subtle curiosity, daily emulation ?" He goes on to praise the Sabadell Group, because it was "able to skewer our primary collective defect -Obviousness- on the spear of Suprasensitive humour. If we weren't so obvious, we'd be a bit more sophisticated and we'd gain from that ?" He continues, "The Sabadell Group sheds an elegant, purifying light, with very civil criticism and comforting causticity ?" This quote from Carner helps to explain what we feel on reading the book, while also capturing its humour. With this humour, the connection between drawing and text reveals the ineffectiveness of the word in expressing an idea. Here, we are quite close to avant-garde humour, its reflections on the inability of codified language for expressing highly subjective or new ideas, and its endeavours to discover ambiguous wordplays or multiple meanings. In brief, the influence of the trends of the period is hardly surprising in the case of a man like Trabal who made periodic trips around Europe and who kept up contacts he had made with people in other countries. In 1929, La Mirada brought out his L'home que es va perdre (The Man Who Lost Himself), a novel in which the hero, Francesc Picabia, who is emotionally unhinged for sentimental reasons, is subject to a progressive neurosis that takes the form of a penchant for losing things. The things he manages to lose range from a fountain pen to the Stockholm Parliament building, from a secretary to a hospice for Chinese Children. Whatever the case, what is important is not so much the verisimilitude of the events as of the characters and the simple descriptions of atmospheres and reactions, along with the book's delirious humour, absurd situations and complicated adventures that will all end in tragedy: the hero lost to himself, demented, devouring his lover. In 1930, La Mirada published Judita, the story of a sexual idyll that is locked into itself. The two main characters, who have lost their heads in their feverish, platonically idealised love, seek a hiding place for "just the two of them" and go off to live on a deserted beach in California, where disenchantment soon sets in and mystery is revealed for what it is. The hero develops a split personality as his view of things changes. His lover, Lidotchka, formerly sweet, passionate, generous sincere, and brimming with adventurousness and sensitivity, becomes the wearisome, pretentiously prissy, tyrannical and obvious Judita. The novel is narrated by the male character in the form of letters to a friend, which gives the reader an ironic view of the character and the situation. The amour fou of the first part of the book ends in a deadlock, which Trabal resolves in the least painful way: through the absurd. Judita, dancing in a field of flowers, ceases to torment her lover when she explodes into the air: "she went pop like an acorn, and flew into little pieces". This book reveals Trabal's great gifts as an erotic writer, one of the principal and constant features running through all his novels, even the more playful ones, for example, the book he published in 1931, Quo vadis, Sànchez?, which has a sporting background and is illustrated by Castanys. This work, which belongs among his writings of more simple humour (in subject matter, reactions, gags), offers a veiled glimpse of another of Trabal's constants: unfulfilment. His main character, a poor lower-class man, does everything he possibly can to be appreciated by the upper class he so admires and from which he only receives humiliation and slights. Following his failed psychological mystery, the novel Era una dona com les altres (She Was a Woman Like the Rest), Francesc Trabal returns to the theme of amour fou with his Hi ha homes que ploren quan el sol es pon (There Are Men Who Cry When the Sun Goes Down), a parody of the bourgeois sentimental drama within a caricatured naturalist line that was published by Proa in the "La Mirada" Collection in 1933. Three years later, in the same collection, he would publish a book entitled Vals, his most successful novel and one that was to earn him the 1936 Crexells Prize. Following the structure of a waltz in crescendo, Francesc Trabal, with a backdrop of civic sentiment and bourgeois dilemmas, tells the story and describes the failure of a sensitive, idle and romantic young man of twenty years of age, whose brand of romanticism makes him somewhat oblivious, a little cowardly and very unhappy. Apart from a kind of biological determinism with echoes of the nineteenth-century novel, Vals is written with narrative simplicity and fluidity, and the cinematographic resources of Trabal's language and the expressionism with which he reveals the key means by which the reader can decipher each situation, are a sample of Trabal's sensitivity to the aesthetic tools that his times presented and also of his qualities as a writer. Continue reading...