James Joyce's encounters with Spanish censorship, 1939-1966.

It is a well-known fact that James Joyce's books had to fight long fierce battles against various kinds of censorship in many different countries. To begin with, publication of Dubliners was delayed for several years while Joyce struggled with both English and Irish publishers about certain "offensive" words and phrases they wanted to eliminate. In 1917 he wrote: "Ten years of my life have been consumed in correspondence and litigation about my book Dubliners. It was rejected by 40 publishers; three times set up, and once burnt" (LI 105). Then, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was also rejected several times before it was published in the United States in 1916. (1) But the most famous case was Ulysses, which was accused of obscenity and banned in America until 1933 and in Britain until 1936. (2) It also had censorship troubles in other countries, such as Ireland, Russia and Germany. (3) Similarly, Stephen Hero was proscribed in Ireland on the grounds of "indecency." (4) With all these antecedents, one wonders about Joyce's encounters with Spanish censorship during Franco's regime. We know that Damaso Alonso's Spanish version of A Portrait was uneventfully published in Madrid in 1926, ten years before the Spanish Civil War broke out. But what happened after the war, when the dictatorship of General Franco was established? This essay sets our to trace the history of book censorship in Spain in order to provide a survey of the Spanish censors' attitudes towards Joyce's works in the Franco era.

If one took into account the long list of texts which harshly describe the scrupulousness and severity of the censorship policy during the Franco regime, (5) it would not be too difficult to imagine a grim picture for Joyce's writing in post-war Spain, or at least a no less complicated one than in Britain, Ireland or the United States. Indeed, it cannot be denied that at that time the Spanish censorship office exercised a tight control over the press before publication in order to determine what was morally or politically correct. From the establishment of the press laws of 23 and 29 April 1938, Spain embarked on a policy of cultural protectionism. The Ministry of National Education regulated the edition and importation of books and found for or against the banning of literature on moral, religious or political grounds. No book could be printed or sold without permission from the board of censorship. For every book, the censorship office opened a file which generally contained the application form signed by t he publisher or bookseller, a copy of the text (usually the galley proof of the book or the original version of the text that was to be translated), and one or several reports written by the censors. These reports included a questionnaire and a description of the book in which the readers justified their decision on whether the text should be banned, published or published with some alterations. Here are the items of a standard questionnaire, which illustrate the censorship policy in Franco's time:

-- Does it attack religious beliefs?

-- Morals?

-- The Church or any of its members?

-- The Regime and its institutions?

-- The people who collaborate or have collaborated with it?