SOURCE: "Cela's La Colmena: The Creative Process as Message," in Hispania, Vol. 55, No. 4, December, 1972, pp. 873-80.

In the following essay, Spires asserts that the theme of Cela's La colmena can only be understood by experiencing its form.

Camilo José Cela's La colmena has received almost universal acclaim as one of the most important post-Civil War Spanish novels largely on the basis of its interesting stylistic innovations and/or its social content, i.e., the social-moral atmosphere of Madrid immediately after the Spanish Civil War. Although these two aspects are of historical significance, to speak of the novel primarily in these terms tends to characterize it as a static document when in fact anyone who reads the work finds it to be first and foremost a dynamic, if perplexing, experience of discovery. The novel's dynamism can perhaps best be explained by studying the temporal and tonal paradoxes with which...