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Chapter 1 details how fascist law silenced homosexuals by literally removing them from sight, confining them in special institutions, and seeking to cure them of their perversion. This ineffectual act of erasure was supported by the cultural apparatus of the Francoist regime at large. This apparatus was carefully designed to perpetuate gender dichotomies and traditional heterosexism. This chapter explores how three important male novelists contest or succumb to the imposition of dominant notions of gender and sexuality through their representations of masculine and feminine identities , and how a younger novelist fully engaged in a postmodern aesthetic project parodies these writers. I trace a genealogy of novels that starts with Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), proceeds to Luis Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de Silencio (1961) and Juan Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (1970), and finally reaches Eduardo Mendicutti’s Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera (1982). Ultimately, I argue that Mendicutti responds to his canonical predecessors’ sexist allegorization of Spain by deploying—albeit in a problematic manner—transvestism as a trope for the new Spanish democracy. I would like to emphasize the strictly literary terms in which I am constructing this genealogy. In other words, I argue that each of these writers consciously engages—sometimes in clearly intertextual ways—with their predecessors’ allegoric figurations of the nation and progressively experiments with new aesthetic projects from tremendista realism to comedic postmodern parody. However, I must interpose a note of clarification regarding terminology . My use of the term “allegory” throughout this book is highly ductile. According to Sayre N. Greenfield, “‘Allegory’ can designate (1) a rhetorical 61 From Castrating Fascist Mother-Nation to Cross-Dressed Late-Capitalist Democracy Eduardo Mendicutti’s Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera Chapter 3 device, (2) a way of interpreting literary works, or (3) literary works of a certain form” (49). Due to the nature of the earlier works I discuss in this chapter—novels that had to elude fascist censorship to signify obliquely— I am obviously not referring to allegory as a codified, literary genre, or a specific rhetorical device, but rather, as a practice of reading, demanded by these texts, to assess them in all their complexity and richness. Some theorists prefer to distinguish between allegory as genre and allegoresis as practice of reading. For example, Maureen Quilligan states: Allegoresis assumes that meaning is not manifest and must be dug for, while personification manifests the meaning as clearly as possible by naming the actor with the concept. Allegories do not need allegoresis because the commentary, as Frye has noted, is already indicated by the text. (31) Others use allegory indistinctively. For example, Greenfield uses the term “for both genre and a perceived mode of expression or interpretation within the genre. By this range of meaning for ‘allegory,’ I imply that the nondeictic, ideally mimetic aspects of the allegorical text are more essential to the genre” (27–28). Angus Fletcher, one of the most famous theorists of allegory, prefers to speak of it as a mode—“a fundamental process of encoding our speech” (3). Fletcher also reminds us of the origin of the term and its simplest meaning: “allegory says one thing and means another” (2). It originates from the Greek “allos + agoreuein (other + speak openly, speak in the assembly or market). Agoreuein connotes public, open, declarative speech. This sense is inverted by the prefix allos. Thus allegory is often called ‘inversion’” (2). I find this definition particularly suggestive in the context of my reading of homosexual panic in the novels that follow. In a way, a queer reading such as the one I practice in this book—my lectura entendida —is always an allegorical reading, and vice versa, all allegorical reading (or allegoresis) engages in a queer reading practice, in an exegesis of that which means differently. To assuage possible fears that my readings fall into what Greenfield has termed allegory’s innate tendency “to be ideologically conservative” (28), I subscribe to a practice of reading allegorically that does not arrest meaning, that refuses to see the tenor as the exclusive meaning available in a text, and disregards other possible meanings suggested by the vehicle. Although some critics have accused allegory of arresting meaning by leading to only one kind of interpretation out of its many potential readings, I follow those critics who, 62 QUEER TRANSITIONS IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH CULTURE [3.15.229.113] Project MUSE...

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