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

Publication: Joyce Studies Annual

Publication Date: 01-JAN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

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?

-- Do the censored passages qualify the whole content of the work? (6)

Official censorship was relaxed somewhat in 1966 with a new press law, Ley de Prensa e Imprenta, but it did not really disappear until the Constitution of 1978, which introduced full freedom of expression. With such repressive and Church-dominated censorship, it would be natural to expect the banning of Joyce's books for obscene and anti-Catholic comments, particularly in the first decades of Franco's regime.

Although I have not found any scholarly study on the censorship of Joyce's works in Spain, there have been some well-known voices which have referred to the political obstacles Joyce faced in getting his books distributed in postwar Spain. The novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, for instance, in the often-quoted article "Mis lecturas de Joyce. Recuerdos," offers a very interesting testimony. He remembers his first reading of Ulysses and describes the difficulties Spanish readers had to overcome in order to get a copy of Joyce's masterpiece due to Spanish censorship:

The Spanish reader could have access, at the end of the 1940s, to a Castilian version, the first one, published in Argentina; it may be a little exaggerated of me to say "could get to know" in the case of readers living in the Peninsula, since those years saw censorship at its most devious, and the purchase of a copy involved a series of discouraging and ridiculous formalities, such as the obligation of not lending it to anybody. (7) (my translation)

Joaquim Mallafre, the translator of the Caralan versions of Dubliners and Ulysses, also refers to the clandestine interest of readers of Joyce's Ulysses in an essay on the reception of Joyce in Catalonia:

The feeling that it is a transgressive experiment, ethically and stylistically, gives one's first approaches [to Ulysses] a tone, almost, of romance, and this would only be sustained by the difficulty of getting a copy during the Spanish post-war period: some writers have revealed that they discovered Joyce, like many other authors, in South American editions or in the back room of a bookseller who imported his works clandestinely, as in the early days of the banning of the novel. (8) (my translation)

How much truth is there in these nostalgic memories? Was Ulysses really forbidden in Spain? Where is the documentary evidence for the banning of Joyce's works?

I have examined the files from the censorship office daring from 1939 to 1966, that is to say from the end of the Spanish Civil War to the year the new press law was passed. These files provide a wealth of valuable and fascinating data about the interest of publishers and booksellers in Joyce, the editions printed or imported at that time and, most importantly, the censors' critical views of Joyce's writings. Unfortunately, I am afraid that nor every single document of the Joyce files has survived the passing of time. However, we have enough new archival information to dispel some doubts and draw some valid conclusions about Joyce's encounters with Spanish censorship. Moreover, we will see that sometimes these files raise questions rather than merely answering them, as they open new doors and invite researchers to continue working on the reception of Joyce in Spain.

The first Joycean text that came out in Spain after the Civil War is...

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