The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain (review)

Writing a book that addresses the oeuvre of Latin American Boom writers with diverse literary styles and ideological positions is not an easy task; but what is certainly harder is writing one that makes an original intellectual contribution to the already vast scholarship on the subject. Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola’s book not only achieves this goal but also opens up new avenues for further studies on the Boom writers following his interdisciplinary line of inquiry. Moreover, while rigorously researched and written for an academic audience, the book also appeals to a broader educated readership interested in the subject matter and enticed, as I was, by its clear and simultaneously engaging prose.

The Censorship Files draws on a superb job of exhaustive archival research in the Archivo de la Censura of the last years of the Francoist regime. Herrero-Olaizola discloses invaluable material about the obstacles that lay behind the publication of Latin American Boom writers in Spain. The author gives more than just a descriptive account of the content of the censorship files and of the fascinating history of the arduous publication process of Boom writers, also theorizing the negotiations among censors, writers, publishers and literary agents in this very process. Especially compelling in this regard is the analysis of the role of Carmen Balcells in the marketing of Latin American writers in Spain and world wide. Engaging Pierre Bourdieu’s model of analysis of the literary field, Herrero-Olaizola compels us to consider how, in the case of Latin American writers published in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s, elite literature ‘moved from the field of the restricted into the field of large-scale production’ (27). The trajectory of Latin American writers published in Spain during late Francoism reverses the usual functioning of what Bourdieu calls the ‘economic world reversed’ of the cultural field. The commercial success of Latin American authors does not preclude their acquisition of literary prestige and, actually, is mainly due to the latter. This fact, as Herrero-Olaizola aptly proves, was possible thanks to the ‘spirit of cooperation between publishers, writers and censors’ (41). Francoist censorship authorities altered or overlooked censorship regulations – especially after the less strict conditions established by the 1966 Press Law – when judging Latin American writers. The regime was willing to mitigate its censoring scope in favour of economic profit and the promotion of a Spanish presence in the Americas.

Each of the four case studies presented by Herrero-Olaizola proves that the publication of Boom writers in Franco’s Spain was a matter of ‘negotiated censorship’, in which all parts were willing to give up something: the authors, especially in the cases of Mario Vargas Llosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, somewhat conformed to the censors’ requests and altered their manuscripts to expedite the publication of their works; the censors made ideological and moral concerns secondary to the expected economic benefit and the promotion of Spanish culture abroad. The chapter on Manuel Puig, arguably the best of Herrero-Olaizola’s case studies, exposes how in Puig’s case, apart from official censorship, there is ‘a form of gender-based censorship’ (143) that comes, first of all, from within the group of Latin American Boom writers who were wary about an overtly gay writer who offered a ‘campy’ type of literature. The author’s analysis reveals how the history of the Boom needs to be critiqued as an ‘allmale star system’ that exercised its own type of censorship regarding what type of Latin American intellectual was acceptable.

All in all, The Censorship Files offers not only a brilliant contribution to the study of Latin American Boom writers but also pertinent material for cultural historians concerned with the history of censorship in general, and the case of Franco’s Spain in particular. Last but not least, this book may also serve as a point of departure for a careful reflection upon the functioning of the literary field and, above all, upon how...