The poetics of abstraction: Antonio Obregón's Efectos navales (1931) and the Spanish surrealist novel

Spanish narrative fiction of the 1920s and 1930s is still an area which has suffered from critical neglect. Numerous authors of the time who were engaging with avant-garde experimentation produced works which were only read by a minority, and seldom re-edited. Antonio Obregón is one of these authors, who heavily influenced by surrealism wrote two novels Efectos navales (1931) and Hermes en la vía pública (1934), in addition to a collection of poetry. In this article I examine Efectos navales, and attempt to come to a greater understanding of how it fits within the paradigmatic framework of the modernist novel, arguing that it relies on surrealism as a way of breaking with 19th century realism and naturalism.