Catalan Literature Under Franco: Suppression and Resilience
Catalan Literature Under Franco
1. In early 1938, Minister of Interior Severiano Martinez Anido banned the public use of languages and dialects other than Spanish. Franco’s regime caused a complete break in linguistic standardization and cultural development.
The war’s end led to the extinction of republican institutions and the systematic elimination of cultural agencies. The post-war intellectual landscape was catastrophic. Catalan culture suffered an intense process of ‘espanyolització’ (Castilianization).
Many professional writers faced purges, deportation, or imprisonment. The Franco dictatorship cut off writers who had begun before the Civil War. Those who started writing in 1939 faced a desolate future, without references.
In the novel genre, the lack of writers, editors, and a reading public, along with external isolation from narrative models, forced production to remain faithful to traditional and outdated genres compared to modern techniques.
Catalan novel publishing faced a basic roadblock: censorship. Until the 1950s, collections devoted exclusively to novels appeared regularly.
In the 1960s, due to economic recovery, cultural barriers began to lift. A new press law allowed greater press freedom.
Until the late 1960s, our narrators focused on:
- The psychological novel and realistic recreation of a world, sometimes idealized, with constant references to the Civil War.
- Rupture with servitude, violating reality and plausibility.
- Recreation of 19th-century realism.
- A melodramatic or sentimental novel style.
- Catholic concerns.
Most of these works did not continue to circulate after the 1970s, once censorship was lifted.
2. Enric Valor’s literary value consists of two major contributions: The Tales of Valencia, five novels, and some short stories.
Valor uses an omniscient and subjective narrator technique. Thanks to his mastery of language, he writes with great precision, accuracy, and detail. He uses oral language resources from folk tradition, allowing the reader to fully identify with the stories.
His tales are based on oral narratives, which he transforms and reformulates, suggesting oral worship stories.
The short stories are notable for their rich language. They are sentimental and amorous pieces.
The novels share the same linguistic and stylistic features as the tales, but they more clearly reflect his biographical experiences.
The most important work is the Cassano cycle, consisting of three novels: No Promised Land, Beating Time, and The Horizon Beyond. This trilogy represents a recovery of collective memory between 1916 and 1939.
He uses first-person narration to provide more adequate material for fiction and increase the reader’s complicity.
Enric Valor created a rich literary record, showcasing all the expressive possibilities of the language.