Coming of Age in Franco’s Spain

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PREFACE

This project represents the culmination of more than four decades of study and reflection on Spanish post-Civil War fiction. As a college junior in 1968, I read Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Nothing, 1945), my first novel in Spanish, and I was completely enchanted by it. That same semester, I read my second, Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1942); this book, though quite different from Nada, also intrigued me. Both works were influential in my later decision to specialize in the Spanish novel of the Franco period. I eventually published articles on novels by Cela, Laforet, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite, Jesús Fernández Santos, Álvaro Cunqueiro, and Ana María Moix. Chapter four of this book is based on my article “Symbolic Portals in Laforet's Nada” which appeared in Anales de la Novela de Posguerra (Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies) 3 (1978): 57-74.An earlier version of Chapter five was published as “The Rite of Initiation in Matute's Primera memoria” in Romance Quarterly (Routledge, Taylor & Francis) XXV (1978): 153-164. Both are used by permission and acknowledged in accordance with publisher guidelines.

As I have taught Crónica del alba, El camino, Nada, Primera memoria, Entre visillos, and El cuarto de atrás in various contexts, I have been struck by numerous similarities among them, parallels that I believed merited further investigation. I saw that these novels of childhood innocence and youthful rebellion were at once subversive expositions of the destructive nature of Spanish Fascism and positive propositions for social change. During the worst of Francoist oppression in the 1940s and 1950s, these works offered voices contrary to the monologic voice of Spanish Fascism. They speak of the struggle to “come of age” and to form an authentic identity in a repressive society. Even in a time of widespread despair, they affirm values such as courage on behalf of the marginalized “other,” personal freedom, compassion for the weak, and hope, each in a unique way. The narratives themselves seem to espouse a common ethos and telos that were contrary to Francoist prescriptions for individual identity formation and a fascist value system. Though published three years after Franco’s death, Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás protests the same issue of the regime’s deformation of the authentic self but concludes with a message of personal recovery from the trauma of nearly four decades of fascist rule.

This study was made possible in part by a sabbatical leave grant from Baylor University in the fall of 2008. Publication of the work was supported by funds from the Baylor University Office of the Vice Provost for Research. I wish to express my gratitude to colleagues who have critiqued intermediate drafts, especially ← ix | x → Frieda Blackwell, Roberta Johnson, Paul Larson, Jan Evans, and Heidi Bostic. I am indebted as well to specific students, both graduate and undergraduate, who engaged me in challenging and fruitful conversations about these texts. Their names are: Scott Anderson (now my son-in-law), Lila McDowell-Carlsen, Hana Manal, Tara Amaya, Stephen Woods, Louis Mazé, Ana Luna Hoyas, Christian Álvarez, and many others. I was also inspired by my participation in the M.A. thesis defense of Casey Stanislaw, “Death of Celestina: Othering in Changing Times.”

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CHAPTER ONE

Overview

When worldviews clash

The Spanish Civil War was a struggle for the power to define cultural values and historical truth. Elaborating on the latter, David Herzberger posits the idea of the fascist bid for “authority over the past” in order to reconfigure historiography as a part of legitimizing the Francoist movement (Narrating the Past 2). In the fight to delineate values, partisans on both sides characterized the conflict as a clash between good and evil, right and wrong, while offering distinct versions of these moral binaries. In November of 1936, volunteers from abroad had begun arriving in Madrid to aid in the defense of the government of the Second Republic. Hugh Thomas comments: “The example of the International Brigades fired the populace of the capital with the feeling that they were not alone” (466). The arrival of reinforcements stirred Deputy Prime Minister Fernando Valera, nephew of nineteenth-century novelist Juan Valera, to broadcast the following manifesto on Madrid Radio: