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Abstract
Counter nostalgia is an ethically-informed dialogic mirror of a complicated and at times irrational, conflicted Spanish past, without needing the recourse of postmodernist ironic devices. When Francoist censorship was at its harshest, Miguel Delibes (1920–2010) and Ana María Matute (1925–2014), in their early novels, combine mimetic realism that includes damning material aspects of their local Spanish social and natural environments with both nostalgic and counter-nostalgic discourses concerning the difficult, constrictive social realities of pre-civil war Spain. Using the Francoist censorship files, I show how censors allowed these challenging works to pass.
Notes
1 Bradley Epps, Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Later Narrative of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), 193. Epps describes how each of these new works, in various degrees and styles, ‘twists, blurs, stretches, smashes, or scoffs at mimetic representation, communicability, and referentiality. Language, turned into its own object, becomes opaque, restive, polyvalent, and at times even purposeless’ (193). My discussion here will show that under the censorship of the 1940s and 1950s critically acclaimed works of social realism also subtly used language as ‘its own object’. Thus, while there is admittedly a break in narrative styles in the 1960s, this break is, in part, owing to the new law of censorship—the Ley de Prensa e Imprenta (1966)—developed by the Minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne (available online at <https://www.boe.es/eli/es/l/1966/03/18/14> [accessed 21 April 2021]). This law permitted a degree of leniency regarding style and content; in the period of forming this law, between roughly 1961 and 1966, the changing censorship was noted in publications such as Luis Martín-Santos’ novel Tiempo de silencio (1962). As I have explained elsewhere, Martín-Santos’ novel appears on the cusp of this censorship change and the first edition was published in a semi-censored form that was apparent to most alert readers. None of the extravagant new styles of the 1960s could have been published without the more permissive censorship of the 1960s and 1970s, some of which is seen in publications from 1961–1965, prior to the 1966 Ley de Prensa e Imprenta. Censors were already becoming more permissive prior to a change in the law; however, this permissiveness is not consistently applied. Further, the 1966 law introduces a good deal of ambiguity and a double standard. While the law’s initial words seem to protect freedom of speech, it also proceeds to present a list of conditions that reduce that freedom. For more on Martín Santos’ Tiempo de silencio, see Susan Mooney, The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 2008).
2 Several works inform my understanding of Spanish nostalgia in Franco’s dictatorship. See, for example, Jeremy Treglown’s Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
3 I cite from Miguel Delibes, La sombra del ciprés es alargada (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1967); El camino (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1982); and Las ratas (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1973). For Ana María Matute’s works, I cite from Los Abel (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1948); Pequeño teatro (Barcelona: Planeta, 1954); and Primera memoria (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1960). The Francoist censorship files are stored in Alcalá de Henares, outside Madrid, at El Archivo General de la Administración, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, Gobierno de España (see <http://www.culturaydeporte.gob.es/cultura/areas/archivos/mc/archivos/aga/portada.html> [accessed 21 April 2021]). Literary manuscripts and censors’ reports are filed in this archive under ‘Grupo de fondos: Cultura’. The files (expedientes) on Delibes’ novels include: Expediente 1154-48, La sombra del ciprés es alargada; Expediente 5197-50, El camino; Expediente 3566-61 and Expediente 6317-61, Las ratas; Expediente 4897-66, Cinco horas con Mario. The censorship files on Matute’s novels include: Expediente 4030-48, Los Abel; Expediente 5122-54, El pequeño teatro; Expediente 545-60, Primera memoria. Further references to these sources will be given in the main text.
4 The mid-century nostalgia/counter-nostalgia of Delibes and Matute, one conservative and the other more critical, do not play on the kinds of ironies, such as camp and pastiche, of postmodern nostalgias as discussed by Linda Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism (London/New York: Routledge, 1989), 176–79.
5 Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Adiós a la España eterna: la dialéctica de la censura: novela, teatro y cine bajo el franquismo, trad. Rosa Pilar Blanco (Barcelona: Anthropos/Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1994), 48.
6 For the violent impact of Francoist censorship, see: Miguel Abellán, Censura y creación literaria en España (1936–1976) (Barcelona: Península, 1980); Justino Sinova, La censura de prensa durante el franquismo (1936–1951) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1989); Xavier Moret, Tiempo de editores: historia de la edición en España, 1939–1975 (Barcelona: Destino, 2002); Elisa Chuliá, El poder y la palabra. Prensa y poder político en las dictaduras: el régimen de Franco ante la prensa y el periodismo (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2001); and Eduardo Ruiz Bautista, Tiempo de censura: la represión editorial durante el franquismo (Gijón: Trea, 2008).
7 See, for example, Lucía Montejo Gurruchaga, Discurso de autora: género y censura en la narrativa española de posguerra (Madrid: Univ. Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2010), 29–33.
8 See Fernando Larraz, Letricidio español: censura y novela durante el franquismo (Gijón: Trea, 2014). Larraz explains how these two novels, ‘las dos más influyentes novelas de la década’, had little to do with Francoism (in Cela’s, for the protagonist’s ‘flagrante degeneración moral’ and in Laforet’s, ‘por sombría y poco entusiasta de la nueva realidad social’ [166]). He goes on: ‘pero tienen en sí el residuo de lo posible porque cumplen con las características elementales de la prescriptiva franquista. Sin ser exactamente parte del proyecto cultural tradicionalista ni falangista, La familia de Pascual Duarte, Nada y casi todas las demás novelas de la alta posguerra poseen una preocupación existencial en la que converge el sustrato del credo literario de la época: la gravedad, el trascendentalismo, las preocupaciones antropológicas, los temas de Dios, la muerte, la culpa, etcétera, propios de una literatura católica; el realismo antivanguardista, el vigor, la herencia del 98, el compromiso social, etcétera, característicos del falangismo cultural. Quizá pretendieron superar en cierto modo los moldes impuestos, pero no acertaron a romperlos porque, no habiendo recibido otra formación, carecían de modelos disyuntivos. Esta deriva posible de lo útil-nacional a lo humano se ve en no pocas propuestas programáticas’ (166–67). Larraz’s claim that these postwar works do little to break with cultural Falangismo perhaps overlooks the mixed tonalities of these aspects. My interpretations point to a handling of nostalgia without reinforcing Falangismo.
9 In this article, I draw much of the authors’ interviews and literary historical information from extant works; I also use my recorded audio interview with Matute in Barcelona in the autumn of 2004, my written correspondence with Delibes and my archival research of the censorship files (expedientes) stored in the Archivo General de la Administración. Works used for Delibes include Miguel Delibes. Homenaje académico y literario, ed. María Pilar Celma (Valladolid: Univ. de Valladolid/Junta de Castilla y León, 2003); Antonio Corral Castanedo, Retrato de Miguel Delibes (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 1995); Ramón García Domínguez, Miguel Delibes: la imagen escrita (Valladolid: 38 Semana Internacional de Cine, 1993); César Alonso de los Ríos, Conversaciones con Miguel Delibes (Madrid: EMESA, 1971); Manuel Alvar, El mundo novelesco de Miguel Delibes (Madrid: Gredos, 1987); Ramona F. del Valle Spinka, La conciencia social de Miguel Delibes (New York: Eliseo Torres & Sons, 1975); Esther Bartolomé Pons, Miguel Delibes y su guerra constante (Barcelona: Victor Pozanco, 1979); Jesús Rodríguez, El sentimiento del miedo en la obra de Miguel Delibes (Madrid: Pliegos, 1989); María Luz Long, La repercusión del conflicto del 36 en la obra de Miguel Delibes (Madrid: Pliegos, 2005); F. Javier Sánchez Pérez, El hombre amenazado: hombre, sociedad y educación en la novelística (Salamanca: Univ. Pontificia de Salamanca/Biblioteca de la Caja de Ahorros y M. de P. de Salamanca, 1985); Miguel Delibes, La censura de prensa en los años 40 y otros ensayos (Valladolid: Ámbito Ediciones, 1985), and his España 1936–1950: muerte y resurrección de la novela (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2004). Sources for Matute include Michael Scott Doyle, ‘Entrevista con Ana María Matute: “Recuperar otra vez cierta Inocencia” ’, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 10:1–3 (1985), 237–47; Roy Joaquín, The Literary World of Ana María Matute (Coral Gables: Iberian Studies Institute, Univ. of Miami, 1993); Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier, Ana María Matute: la voz del silencio (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1997); Alicia Redondo Goicoechea, Ana María Matute (1926–) (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 2000); Rosa Isabel Galdona Pérez, Discurso femenino en la novela española de posguerra: Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute y Elena Quiroga (La Laguna: Univ. de La Laguna, 2001); Antonio Ayuso Pérez, ‘ “Yo entré en la literatura a través de los cuentos”. Entrevista con Ana María Matute’, Espéculo. Revista de Estudios Literarios, 35 (2007), <https://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero35/matute.html> (accessed 22 April 2021); Marie-Linda Ortega, ‘Inscripciones de las “dos Españas” en Primera memoria de Ana María Matute: la unidad de nunca jamás’, in ‘Una de las dos Españas … ’: representaciones de un conflicto identitario en la historia y en las literaturas hispánicas. Homenaje a Manfred Tietz, ed. Gero Arnscheidt & Pere Joan Tous (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2007), 103–12; Janet Pérez, ‘Ana María Matute’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 375 vols (Detroit: Gale, 1875–2006), CCCXXII (2006), Twentieth-Century Spanish Fiction Writers, ed. Marta E. Altisent, 187–96; Guadalupe M. Cabedo, ‘ “La madre ausente”: inconformismo social en algunas novelas de la posguerra civil escritas por tres autoras españolas: Carmen Laforet, Carmen Martín Gaite y Ana María Matute’, Cuadernos del Lazarillo. Revista Literaria y Cultural, 29 (2005), 57–61; and Nuria Cruz-Cámara, ‘La trampa existencial en La trampa de Ana María Matute’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 29:1–2 (2002), 269–83.
10 Gonzalo Sobejano, ‘The Testimonial Novel and the Novel of Memory’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Present, ed. Harriet Turner & Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2003), 172–92 (p. 176).
11 Sobejano, ‘The Testimonial Novel and the Novel of Memory’, 177.
12 Silver-Age writers include: Rosa Chacel (1898–1994) (Estación, Ida y vuelta [1930]); Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936); Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936); Pío Baroja (1872–1956); Azorín (1873–1967); Gabriel Miró (1879–1930); Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1880–1962); Franciso Ayala (1906–2009); Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963) and Ramón Sender (1901–1982). See Roberta Johnson, ‘From the Generation of 1898 to the Vanguard’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel, ed. Turner & López de Martínez, 155–71 (p. 170).
13 David K. Herzberger, Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1995). He does not discuss Matute’s novels, however, and only briefly mentions one of Delibes’.
14 As summarized by Susana Bardavío Estevan in her article ‘La infancia imposible: Los niños tontos de Ana María Matute o el fracas de la biopolítica franquista’, BSS, XCV:8 (2018), 999–1018 (p. 1000).
15 Herzberger, Narrating the Past, 62.
16 Herzberger, Narrating the Past, 64.
17 Neuschäfer, Adiós a la España eterna, 10.
18 For more on Saussure’s theory of language, see: Premier cours de linguistique générale (1907) d’après les cahiers d’Albert Riedlinger / Saussure’s First Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1907) from the Notebooks of Albert Riedlinger, ed. Eisuke Komatsu, trans. George Wolf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1996); Deuxième cours de linguistique générale (1908–1909) d’après les cahiers d’Albert Riedlinger et Charles Patois / Saussure’s Second Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1908–1909) from the Notebooks of Albert Riedlinger and Charles Patois, ed. Eisuke Komatsu, trans. George Wolf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1997); and Troisième cours de linguistique générale (1910–1911) d’après les cahiers d’Émile Constantin / Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910–1911) from the Notebooks of Emile Constantin, ed. Eisuke Komatsu, trans. Roy Harris (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993).
19 In my 2004 interview with Matute, she explained that the censorship constricted her rather than compelled her to write through it. She also expressed how, despite feeling solidarity with other engaged writers, she herself could not be considered entirely an ‘escritora comprometida’ because she would not subscribe to any ideology that was not her, because she was a free being, without political affiliation. It is helpful to remember here how Matute, from early on, had friendships with Juan and Luis Goytisolo, and José María Castellet, who did identify as ‘écrivains engagés’ (author's interview with Matute, November 2004).
20 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981).
21 For more on how Catholicism was funnelled into Spain’s national narrative, see William Viestenz, By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2014).
22 In her consideration of Laforet’s writing tactics under harsh censorship, Stacey Dolgin Casado argues that Nada avoids cause-and-effect situations and in other ways avoids assigning definitive meanings, positive or negative. See Stacey Dolgin Casado, ‘Structure As Meaning in Carmen Laforet’s Nada: A Case of Self-Censorship’, in Studies in Honor of Gilberto Paolini, ed. Mercedes Vidal Tibbitts (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1996), 351–58. The textual ambiguities allow for nothing to give offense to the censor (353–57). At same time, the ambiguities open up readerly knowledge and understanding, ranging from the enigmatic title of the book to foundational situations for the protagonist Andrea, who must emigrate from the countryside and move in with her decrepit family in Barcelona. Dolgin Casado sees writers like Matute, Delibes and even Cela (La colmena) as following Laforet’s example of ‘sociopolitical cause-and-effect omissions’ (357).
23 In the abstract of his dissertation, Omar García suggests that under Francoist censorship ‘a particular kind of theater was created, which forms dialogues with the institutionalized censorship of this period’ and he claims that certain plays ‘become non-superimposable mirror images (“enantiomers”) of the society they criticize. […] [W]hilst many of the plays decontextualized the setting established by their authors, the “historical” character is maintained by the eruption of “chronotopic” elements which can be set in Spain at the time of the representation, be it hymns, military salutes, and other forms of non-dialogic elements of representation’ (Omar A. García, ‘Diálogos con la censura: el enantiomorfismo teatral durante el franquismo’, Doctoral dissertation [University of Miami, 2003], <https://scholarship.miami.edu/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Dialogos-con-la-censura-El-enantiomorfismo-teatral-durante-el-franquismo/991031447461402976> [accessed 1 June 2021]). Similar to Dolgin Casado but from a textual and semiotic perspective, García shows how critical playwrights under Franco made particular omissions while preserving other historical elements, giving an illusion of mirror-like reflection of a benign reality while embedding disparities that subtly challenge the Francoist version of reality.
24 For more on how the characters embody ‘un atraso vergonzante’ rather than a wistful nostalgia, see Tomás Salas, ‘La construcción del personaje en Las ratas de Miguel Delibes’, Espéculo, 45 (2010), <https://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero45/persrata.html> (accessed 1 June 2021). The censor clearly did not anticipate the book’s reception. Janet Pérez points out how the novel’s publication prompted public outrage regarding the subhuman conditions endured by the cave-dwellers depicted in the novel (Janet Pérez, ‘The Socialist Realist Novel’, in A Companion to the Twentieth-Century Spanish Novel, ed. Martha E. Altisent [New York: Tamesis, 2008], 60–74 [p. 67]).
25 Irene Gómez Castellano, ‘On Food, Hunger, and Parasites: Female Strategies against Censorship in Nada and Plaça de diamant’, in Dictatorships in the Hispanic World: Transatlantic and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Patricia Swier & Julia Riordan-Goncalves (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 133–60 (p. 144).
26 Cited in English in The New York Times’s obituary for Matute: see William Yardley, ‘Ana María Matute, Spanish Novelist Marked by Civil War, Dies at 88’, 1 July 2014, n.p.; available online at <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/books/ana-maria-matute-spanish-novelist-marked-by-civil-war-dies-at-88.html> (accessed 26 May 2021).
27 As Steven Crowell explains: ‘According to the theory of “engaged literature” expounded in [Sartre’s] What Is Literature?, in creating a literary world the author is always acting either to imagine paths toward overcoming concrete unfreedoms such as racism and capitalist exploitation, or else closing them off' (Steven Crowell, ‘Existentialism’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 9 June 2020, n.p.; <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/existentialism/> [accessed 18 May 2021]). Sartre’s ideas in What Is Literature? were first explored in his articles published in his journal of opinion, Les Temps Modernes, especially the essay ‘Présentation’ to the initial issue in October 1945. As these were articles, and many Europeans read French, his ideas circulated in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s, even if not openly in the Spanish press.
28 For example, in Delibes’ 2004 book, España 1936–1950: muerte y resurrección de la novela, written at a time in which he had the luxury to look back over the tough Franco years and say exactly what he wanted, he makes virtually no reference to censorship. In Part II’s second essay (‘Novela de posguerra [1940–2000]’, 139–53), he delays the mention of censorship until page 145, when he vaguely notes that the country’s borders become more ‘permeable’ so that despite a zealous censorship some of the latest significant literary works (from outside) reach Spanish readers. Curiously, while mentioning no names of works or authors, he claims that the Spanish novel of the 1950s ‘se enfría, pierde pasión' (146–47). Delibes' book offers fleeting descriptions of his encounters with and impressions of postwar writers; while he does not celebrate any particular writer, his criticisms are also vague. Matute is not a good writer in his view because she chooses unusual names for her characters. He also distances himself from the so-called social realist and objectivist writers, despite the fact that some of his work shares an interest in presenting difficult material situations of the under classes (148–49). In this same book, he happily pronounces that, from early on in his career, journalism served for him as a ‘draft’ for his fiction, again without acknowledging the severe censorship regulating the media (160).
29 Delibes only really dares to treat the Civil War directly once censorship is no longer an issue, with his novel 377A, Madera de héroe (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1987). For a more sustained review of Delibes’ treatment of the Civil War, see Long, La repercusión del conflicto del 36 en la obra de Miguel Delibes.
30 For more on the Spanish figure of the orphan, see Jeremy Squires, ‘Orphanhood As Genesis’, BHS, XCII:1 (2015), 39–52.
31 Delibes has commented several times on how he stumbled upon the subversive usefulness of an already dead Mario and conservative protagonist for this narrative; see, for example, Alonso de los Ríos, Conversaciones con Miguel Delibes (Madrid: Ediciones Destino, 1993), 74–79. For a more in-depth interpretation of Menchu, Mario’s wife and the bearer of authority, see Melissa Dinverno, ‘Dictating Fictions: Power, Resistance and the Construction of Identity in Cinco horas con Mario’, BSS, LXXXI:1 (2004), 49–76.
32 For more on the Spanish body, see Elizabeth A. Scarlett, Under Construction: The Body in Spanish Novels (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1994).
33 See Margaret E. W. Jones, The Literary World of Ana María Matute (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1970) for a more extended overview of Matute’s style and themes and their relation to her early life experiences.
34 Gazarian-Gautier, Ana María Matute, 89–90.
35 Carlos Vadillo Buenfil notes clues in the novel that indicate that most of the past action occurs during the Second Republic (1931–1939). See his ‘A la busca de un lugar en el mundo: Los Abel, primer Bildungsroman de Ana María Matute’, Confluencia, 28:2 (2013), 149–62 (p. 150).
36 Vadillo Buenfil, ‘A la busca de un lugar en el mundo’, 151.
37 For a detailed discussion of the exemplary woman in Spain, see Fátima Gil, ‘Exemplary Women: The Use of Film and Censorship As a Means of Moral Indoctrination during the Franco Dictatorship in Spain’, Journal of Popular Culture, 49:4 (2016), 856–74.
38 Pat Farrington, ‘Documenta: Interviews with Ana María Matute and Carme Riera’, Tesserae. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 6:1 (2000), 75–89 (p. 76).
39 As indicated by the ‘P.’ for padre, this is actually a religious censor, not unusual among the censorship cadre; in Francisco Rojas Claro’s book, this censor’s full identity is Father Saturnino Álvarez Turienzo. For a fuller examination of the censors employed by Franco, see Francisco Rojas Claro, Dirigismo cultural y disidencia editorial en España (1962–1973) (San Vicente del Raspeig: Univ. de Alicante, 2013).
40 Primera memoria’s setting suggests the island of Menorca which was the only Balearic Island that remained Republican at the outbreak of the Civil War; the other islands sided with the Nationalists, and Majorca saw an invasion in the first summer of the war, which would not square with the action in the novel, that has the war occurring far away on the mainland. Matute was not aiming for a strictly historical realist narrative, but Menorca is further suggested as this island was the only one with a considerable Jewish history with episodes of violent repression.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.