Literature as a Response to Cultural and Political Repression in Franco’s Catalonia by Jordi Cornellà-Detrell (review)

This narrowly focused, impressively researched study from Jordi Cornellà-Detrell delves into the relationship between literary production and the cultural and political situation of Catalonia in the middle decades of the Franco dictatorship. The author’s approach is original and fruitful, producing a nuanced portrait of the period by analyzing the successive published versions of four novels: Sebastià Juan Arbó’s Tino Costa (1947, 1968), Xavier Benguerel’s El testament (1955, 1963, 1967), Salvador Espriu’s Laia (1932, 1934, 1952, 1968), and Joan Sales’s Incerta glòria (1956, 1969, 1971). Cornellà-Detrell argues that the texts’ modifications reflect the evolving role of literature in shaping mid-century Catalan identity.

Literature as a Response to Cultural and Political Repression in Franco’s Catalonia’s seven chapters include one that outlines the literary and linguistic context of the period, and one for each of the novels. Mikhail Bakhtin is the most influential theorist marshaled; his concept of the “polyphonic novel” is particularly germane to Cornellà-Detrell’s argument because such a text “reflects the struggle between the official standardised language promoted by the established power and the multiple social and geographical variants, characterised by their heterogeneity” (15). The number and variety of sources cited by Cornellà-Detrell might have sunk a lesser writer, but he makes expert use of them. The breadth of his preparation in Spanish and Catalan history and culture and the perspicacity of his textual analyses are evident throughout the book.

Cornellà-Detrell contends that the four writers of his corpus revised their novels at a moment when they feared that an “excessive emphasis” on standard Catalan—comprehensible given the external threats to the language—risked distancing literary texts from contemporary readers, unschooled in formal Catalan. The spoken language had continued to evolve, keeping pace with the country’s enormous social changes, and these authors understood that the vision of Catalan identity that each of them had embodied in earlier work was now practically unintelligible to younger readers. If their novelistic distillation of what it meant to be Catalan was to contribute to rebuilding the nation, the texts would have to be revised. But literature was considered a “symbolic collective item” (28) in Francoist Catalonia, and tampering with established texts provoked sectors of the intelligentsia.

Chapter 3 considers the four versions of Espriu’s Laia, “the fundamental work of his career,” set in the “territory in which his entire oeuvre takes place” (62). Espriu noted that his apprenticeship in Catalan began with Laia, and Cornellà finds that the novel’s forty-year evolution tracks the principal trends and controversies affecting the language in those years. In his judgment, the successive versions of Laia convert what was a Modernist epigone into a work better designed to “reinforce the unity and continuity of Catalan culture” (87). To this end, Espriu suppressed controversial voices, softened gender stereotypes, brought direct speech under the narrator’s control, rendered the chronotope “more distant and remote” (77), eliminated linguistic archaisms, and altered punctuation.

Benguerel’s El testament has been read (and critically dismissed) as a Catholic or a bourgeois novel, but Cornellà-Detrell sees it as an allegory of the post-war period, dealing with “the difficulties of communication in a social environment curtailed by repression and lack of freedom” (94). The novel explores silence as protest, the links between language and power under Franco, and the effects of class and social norms on communication. Stylistic modifications diminished mediation by the narrator and increased dialogism, leaving it to the reader to detect “obliquely expressed meaning” (111).

Sebastià Arbó’s Tino Costa was first published in 1947, when Catalan texts were rarely authorized, with the provision that it appear simultaneously in Spanish translation. With the latter’s success, Arbó switched languages, becoming a relatively well-known author in postwar Spain. He returned to Catalan in 1965 with a story collection, but “it was already too late...