Copyright by Erik Ladner 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Erik Christopher Ladner certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Limits of Posibilismo: The Censors and Antonio Buero Vallejo Committee: Vance Holloway, Supervisor Matthew Bailey Virginia Higginbotham Cory Reed Seth Wolitz The Limits of Posibilismo: The Censors and Antonio Buero Vallejo by Erik Christopher Ladner, B.A. ; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2006 Dedication To my wife Maria Inez, for her patience, her support and her love, and to my son Alex, my greatest inspiration. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge a number of people that have helped me as brought this dissertation to fruition. First, I wish to acknowledge my director, Dr. Vance Holloway, whose input and counsel have been invaluable to me during the process of writing this text. I also wish to acknowledge the other members of my committee for their advice and contributions to my dissertation: Dr. Matthew Bailey, Dr. Virginia Higginbotham, Dr. Cory Reed and Dr. Seth Wolitz. I also wish to extend a special thank you to Robert Simon, who has not only been a good friend to me throughout this process, but also an invaluable sounding board for many of the ideas that are represented in this text. I especially want to thank my many friends and family for their help, support and patience as I have worked on this dissertation. v The Limits of Posibilismo: The Censors and Antonio Buero Vallejo Publication No._____________ Erik Christopher Ladner, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisor: Vance Holloway The intent of this dissertation is to examine the various means by which Antonio Buero Vallejo succeeded in expressing social criticism in his dramatic works and yet avoid the censorship of the Franco dictatorship. Much of the success of his theater is rooted in his ability to write theatrical works that on a textual level did not provoke the censors by directly stating themes that would be subject to censorship. Rather, they developed a progression of concepts on a textual and extra-textual level that, in their totality, produced associative ideas through which his social criticism was expressed subtly while still conforming to the framework of guidelines that the censors used to evaluate theater. Text and staging of his plays were mediated in a way that the combination of the two produced an effect on its audience that allowed them to interpret messages of social criticism while still adhering to the constraints of the censors. This was the product of his philosophy of posibilismo, or writing within the limitations of what is possible under censorship. This approach represented a contrast to the more vi militant theater of Alfonso Sastre, who criticized this accommodation of censorship as being conformist. What this study intends to present is to trace the development of various symbolic, allegoric and structural elements that posibilismo embodied as an approach to Buero’s plays to show how criticism is developed throughout the course of the works and how this criticism was interpreted by the censors. Based on the documentation of the censors located in the Archivo General de la Administración Civil in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, this dissertation will examine both the success and failure of posibilismo with the censors in order to better understand how Buero applied this approach and what limitations existed to its successful application. Besides the suppression of certain phrases in many of Buero’s works, three of his plays, Aventura en lo gris, La doble historia del Doctor Valmy, and a single performance of Palabras en la arena, were prohibited during the course of the dictatorship. The circumstances behind these prohibitions will be addressed with the intent of furthering an understanding of the censorial process. vii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Buero, Sastre and the posibilismo/imposibilismo debate .......................1 Chapter 2 The censors and their procedures.........................................................29 Chapter 3 The structural and thematic elements of posibilismo and the censors' reactions ........................................................................................................63 Plays subject to slight or no censorship ........................................................99 Chapter 4 Buero's censored plays .......................................................................138 Chapter 5 Conclusions .......................................................................................194 Bibliography ........................................................................................................211 Vita ....................................................................................................................216 viii Chapter 1: Buero, Sastre and the posibilismo/imposibilismo debate In 1939 when Francisco Franco and the Nationalist forces under his command emerged victorious from the Spanish Civil War, Spain was still an ideologically fragmented nation, its people divided in their political beliefs. Despite the flight of the Republican leaders as well as the hundreds of thousands that escaped Nationalist- occupied territory, millions of Spaniards who did not support Franco and his vision of Spain remained. In order to consolidate and hold on to power, the regime used censorship as a means of controlling information in order to promote its policies and values, as well as to silence the voices of dissent. The purpose of censorship was ultimately one of controlling thought in Spanish society in order to establish and maintain political control and develop a new society. All literature and press came under the scrutiny of the regime, ultimately giving the government control over what could and could not be said. To this end, language expressing opposition to the regime or promoting philosophies contrary to Nationalist doctrines (i.e. democratic ideals, socialism, communism, etc.) was prohibited, even to extent of revising or banning texts written prior to the Civil War. Unlike other dictatorships of the post-war era in the Spanish-speaking world, such as the military governments of Argentina or Chile, the goal of censorship in Spain was not simply to restrict political (leftist) ideologies. Censorship was also applied to promote moral and religious ideals, adhering to a strict interpretation of Catholic faith. The Franco regime, supported by the Falange party as well as Opus Dei, took an ultra- conservative position on issues of public morality and decency, prohibiting ideas and 1 actions that did not conform to the orthodoxy of the Church. Although many other nations legislated (and in some cases, still do legislate) certain moral restrictions on expression, such as a ban on pornography, Francoist censorship went much further in establishing a control over what was deemed acceptable for public consumption. Language discussing or alluding to anything deemed a sin by the Church, ranging from sexuality to suicide to questioning Church doctrine or practices were taboo in literature and repressed by the censors, unless such references were made in condemnation of sin with the end goal of promoting religious values. The intent of these prohibitions was to protect Spain from what the dictatorship saw as the corruption of traditional values that had occurred under the Second Republic. To this end, Franco saw himself not only as a military and political figure, but also as a defender of Spanish tradition and the Catholic faith. His intent was to protect the Spanish people from being usurped by what he viewed as foreign ideologies that eroded the Spanish heritage. This perspective especially applied to Communism and Freemasonry, which he not only viewed as a political threat, but also associated directly with atheism and the destruction of moral decency (Preston, pgs. 185, 323-324). It is in this context that the conservative Catholic values of the Caudillo and his supporters merged with political concerns to form a model for what Spanish censorship was intended to promote. During the course of the Franco regime, all genres of literature as well as mass media were subjected to intense scrutiny in order to ensure the ideological “quality” of what Spaniards read, saw and heard. Of the genres of literature that received examination by the dictatorship, the theater of Spain came under especially intense observation by the censors. Theater, unlike the novel or poetry, is not only a literary genre, but also a 2 performance-based art, like the cinema. As such, theater was included in the category of mass media and approached with a greater degree of vigilance. As a genre, theater has the ability to become a physically represented spectacle capable of affecting audiences not through cold words on a page, but on a visual and aural level as the actors interpreted the script into a live performance. This, combined with the fact that it is a medium designed for viewing by large audiences, made the theater a form of communication that could reach a large and general public and provoke dialog among the spectators; qualities that the regime did not wish to promote unless they controlled the messages being transmitted. Spain traditionally has had a strong theatrical heritage, dating back to even before the Golden Age, when the