La literatura de la España vacía: la despoblación como motor temático en La tierra desnuda de Rafael Navarro de Castro y Lo demás es aire de Juan Gómez Bárcena

Abstract

Abstract

This article examines how contemporary narrative addresses the phenomenon of rural depopulation in Spain, focusing on two paradigmatic novels: La tierra desnuda (2019) by Rafael Navarro de Castro, and Lo demás es aire (2022) by Juan Gómez Bárcena. Within the framework of “rural literatures”—a term preferred over the more contested “neorrural literature”—the notion of a “literature of empty Spain” is proposed, understood as that in which demographic decline functions as a thematic driving force. Both novels unfold the historical and social causes of the exodus: labor precarity, female migration, youth uprooting, population aging, touristification, and real estate speculation. While La tierra desnuda offers a peasant biography, a narrative rooted in the author’s direct experience that recovers agrarian memory and reflects the disappearance of a millenary way of life, Lo demás es aire turns the Cantabrian village of Toñanes into a microcosm where testimonies, archives, and fiction intertwine to reconstruct centuries of local history. Moreover, these novels give voice to the inhabitants of their villages, distancing themselves from the urban-centric perspectives that permeate other recent rural works. Ultimately, the literature of empty Spain emerges as a space of cultural reflection that problematizes the consequences of depopulation and foregrounds the fragility of rural life in the face of modernization processes.