Reflections of World War II in the Spanish utopian novel: Los días están contados (1944), by Cecilio Benitez de Castro

Abstract

after the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, literature resumed its previous course, at least in some of its modes, such as the scientific romance. one of its first examples in the postwar period is a beautifully written book that reflected, in form of a speculative parable, the contemporary conflict. this is Cecilio Benítez de Castro’s Los días están contados (1944), a novel in which a story of a total war on another planet follows another story of appalling violence that takes place within a primitive society isolated in the French Pyrenees, both reflecting the conflict then raging on Earth. Warlike cruelty as an inherent feature of sentient beings is thus underlined from a clearly pacifist perspective that emphasizes the tragic universal dimension of violence, in time and in space.