The Beehive

THE BEEHIVE.
REIEW
I first learned about Camilo Jos Cela in my salad days, in Spain. He was a towering figure
(complex and theatrical noted one biographer) whose literary productionworks like La
familia de Pascal Duarte and La colmenarepresented significant milestones in post-war
Spanish literature. His membership in the Real Academia Espaola and his involvement
with the journal, Papeles de Son Armadans, which often featured authors not always
sympathetic to the Franco dictatorship, only added to his stature among many.
La colmena (The Hive) was one of those novels that I had failed to read in its entirety
during my time in Spain during the 1960s, in part because sections of the novel were filled
with the colloquial speech of the mid-XX Centurya vocabulary quite difficult for a nonnative speaker. Time passed, but the novel remained for me something that I felt compelled
to return to read again. After Cela received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989, I tracked
down an English translation of La colmena and shelved it on my bookcase with the full
intention of re-reading it as well as at least some of Celas more influential works.
The novel is substantial and innovative. Structurally, Cela organized his work into six
chapters that cover two consecutive days and an epilogue covering a third. Each chapter, in
turn, consists of a number of interlinked vignettes (some 215 in total) that scroll through
the actions of over 300 characters. With La colmena, Cela initiated a novelistic style
identified as objectivismoa written cinematic montage that, in essence, is a type of
documentary realism. In effect, the central personage of the novel is the city of Madrid (the
hive) whose character or personality is forged by the collectivity (that is, the over 300
people or bees who pass through the pages of the work). Seen from that context, the
biographies of the individuals are fragmented. We see them in the moment but, in most
cases, know little about them either before or after the three days framed by the novelist.
Most are left suspended by the end of the epilogue. Even Martn Marco, whom Cela
considered an indispensable character of the novel, is left in limbo.
An additional complexity to the work is the organization of the six chapters. They are not
sequential in regard to the documented time. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 cover day one
sequentially; chapters 3, 5 and 6 cover the second day. But the latter three are themselves
not normally sequenced in regard to time. Chapter 3 covers the afternoon of the second day,
chapter 5 covers the evening of the second day and chapter 6 covers the morning of the
second day. The epilogue takes place two or three days after the end of time covered in
chapter 5.
Apart its structural or technical innovation, it is also a perceptive snapshot of Spanish
society during three December days in Madrid in or around the year 1943, after the end of
the Spanish Civil War. That society is in clear crisis: economically strained, desolate,
malnourished and morally conflicted.
The Spanish Civil War tore at the very roots of civil society from Galicia in the northwest of
the peninsula through Castilla in the center, Catalua in the northeast and into Andaluca,
in the south. There was not a part of the Spains that remained at the margins. And the
Nationalists, in victory, did retaliate. Particularly in its early years, the Franco dictatorship
was vindictive and harsh. The society that Cela creates in La colmena lives in the wake of
that war and its aftermath, submerged in political suppression. But if the hive is in crisis, it
is not immobile, it is not stagnant, it is not without productive options.
It is important to point out that Cela fought for the Nationalists and that he long remained
supportive of the Franco regime. (In the post-Franco years, Cela did not enjoy
unconditional support from all segments of the social or intellectual spectrum.) An attempt
to understand La colmena as an indictment of the Franco regime is off course. That the
novel was banned in Spain until its fifth edition in 1963 was, arguably, for what the
conservative Roman Catholic Church saw as its sexual depravities and not primarily related
to any implicit political commentary. Prostitution, pre-marital sex and marital infidelity
engaged the bees in the hive and those activities were what most disturbed the deeply
conservative Catholic censors.
Cela etched a society in crisis. But many of the bees in the hive were, if anything,
industrious. In a war-torn world, the society that passes before the reader over three days in
December 1943 was populated with people of flesh and blood who had the capacity to
survive and in that survival could begin to lay the foundations for the Spain of the late XX
and the early XXI Centuries.
Celas La colmena is a snapshot of Madrid in a specific time and in a specific space. It is a
snapshot of the people who inhabited that time and that space who sowed the seeds of the
hives regeneration and redemption. How else to understand the final paragraph of chapter
6:
The morning unfolds slowly; it creeps like a caterpillar over the hearts of the men and
women in the city; it beats, almost caressingly, agents the newly wakened eyes, eyes which
never once discover new horizons, new landscapes, new settings.
And yet, this morning, this eternally repeated morning, has its little game changing the face
of the city, of that tomb, that greased pole, that hive.
May God have mercy on us all!
One final thought. Cela ends the novel with any number of unsolved histories. Who
murdered Doa Margot? What will become of the Gonzalez family? Will Victoria and Paco
survive? But perhaps the greater mystery seems to center on Martn Marco. We never do
learn what his family and friends read in the newspaper about him. We never do learn what
seems to threaten his future. Is it tied up with his lost identity card? Does he have some
connection to the murder of Doa Margot? Is it related to his emotional instability? Have
his politics placed him at odds with the regime? But I have come to suspect that we are
focusing on the wrong issue if it is seeking an answer about Martns situation. Rather,
Martn is the final confirmation of the hope that is rooted in the hive. He ends his time with
us energized, optimistic, confident. And like Spanish society as a whole, that energy is
confirmation of his eventual salvation. That is Celas message to us from the social crisis of
December 1943.

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