Functions of the Rhetoric of Silence in Contemporary Spanish Literature

Janet Pérez

South Central Review, Vol. 1, No. 1/2. (Spring - Summer, 1984), pp. 108-130.

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Functions of the Rhetoric of Silence
in Contemporary Spanish Literature
PEREZ

JANET
Texas Tech University

"Silence can exist without speech, but speech cannot exist with-
out silence."' Silence precedes utterance and follows it, function-
ing in myriad ways to complement speech and facilitate its com-
prehension. Without intervals of silence between them, words
become an undifferentiated mass. The space between printed
words graphically recognizes those minimal silences which sepa-
rate the spoken word, conferring and maintaining individuality.
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester takes note of this function of the print-
ed space signifying silence and its power to modify meaning in a
section of La sagalfuga de 1.B. devoted to poems composed in an
artificial language consisting of seemingly random syllables, as-
sembled and reassembled by changing the relative position of the
intervals of silence. A graphic illustration appears below, where
the protagonist observes that the verse formed by the syllables

las cu la vi te ba fos can mol de ca

may be organized in several ways:

lasculavi tebafos can moldeca

lasculavite bafoscanmol deca

lascu laviteba foscan molde ca

and that each of these means something totally different.2 He

proceeds to recite three versions of a quartet (the first of a sonnet),
repeating the same syllables but varying the silences and providing
translations to Spanish whose content is radically different al-
though there is one instance of similarity between A and B.
This is but an exaggeration of the importance of silences or
 Janet Perez 109

pauses which are recognized by the common signs of punctuation:

comma, period, semicolon, question mark, exclamation point,
colon, ellipses-all serve to indicate pauses of varying quality and
duration. Their presence or absence may likewise have significant
effects for meaning or interpretation, for moving, extending or
compressing the interval of silence has the power to change the
meaning of many word groupings. For example,

Lirio del valle de dolor regado

Lirio del valle d e dolor regado

This line from Unamuno's Cristo de Velazquez, alluding to the

Virgin, signifies two different flowers, depending on where the
reader chooses to pause, or to extend the brief interval of silence:
"Lily of the Valley, watered by grief," or "Lily, from the grief-
watered valley." While Unamuno opted to allow the reader to
determine the placement and attendant meaning of the minimal
silences in this line, authors are able to fix or alter meaning by the
choice of punctuation and its location, as is illustrated by the
following passage from Benavente's Los intereses creados:

DOCTOR: Ved aqui; donde dice.. . "Y resultando que si no de-

clar6. . . "

Basta una coma, y dice: "Y resultando que si, n o declaro . . ." Y aqui:

"Y resultando que no, debe condenarsele . . . " Fuera la coma, y dice:

"Y resultando que no debe condenarsele . . . "

CRISPIN: iOh, admirable coma! iMaravillosa coma! iGenio d e la

Justicia! iOraculo d e la Ley! iMonstruo de la Jurisprudencia!. . .

The almost total inversion of the original meaning, changing a legal

indictment's accusation of guilt to exoneration, is facilitated by the
ambiguities inherent in Spanish syntax, especially in the third
person, but with a little reflection the reader will find instances
where similar reversals are possible in other languages. Regardless
of how significant for communication, however, the pauses indi-
cated by punctuation constitute minimal intervals of "background"
stillness; they are not perceived as silence per se. Greater duration is
necessary for silence to be perceived as such, and it is silence of
another and longer sort with which this essay is concerned.
The relationship between silence and utterance, between both of
these and communication, is enormously complex. There are si-
lences which communicate, susceptible of interpretation approxi-
mately as exact as that of the written or spoken word, and other
110 South Central Review

silences which mystify or confuse. And language does not always

communicate. Its import may be unclear, hermetic, absurd; it may
have little meaningful content, as with Lewis Carroll's "Twas
brillig," or no meaning at all, as with this example of Spanish "new
poetry":

Ar'ddid'arvvo v'ir 'arr

1. Keridod' ikkod'
d'ievvvv' re keridod' ikkod'
2. ed' div' id' irr er'kor 'ddrar
oddrad' vv'arravrad' vvad'
vv' od' ivvad' vvad' ddevvvv'
orarred'
3. keridod' ikkod'
d'ievvvv're keridod' ikkodI4

Despite the presence of such characteristic lyric devices as repeti-

tion, parallelism, alliteration and presumably rhyme, these verses
communicate nothing. Similarly empty of meaningful content,
exemplifying mere verbal noise although employing recognizable
words, are the following lines of a contemporary experimental
novel:

efluviales llamadas que Surtidor y AcuacQstica derramada

sobrencendidos lenguas siembran sus agrados entrelazando
Panspermia y Nervio entre filtros limbos de ebriedad
tintas de aludin6gena lascivia despiertan por flujos aludes
.'
tirantes de eruyci6n. .

Perhaps it was this sort of utterance which inspired some of the

famous commentaries on the eloquence of silence, or moved
Thomas Carlyle to affirm that "Speech is silvern, silence is golden"
(Sartor Resartus, 111, iii). Plutarch is quoted to the effect that "We
learn silence from the gods, speech from man" (Picard, p. 155).
The common denominator of many similar aphorisms is their
suggestion that silence is superior to utterance. Any given utter-
ance is finite (though susceptible at times of multiple interpreta-
tions), while silence, albeit theoretically not infinite, often has no
identifiable limits. Yet this does not mean that silence cannot in
varying contexts communicate very specific and translatable mes-
sages: "Yes," "No," "I don't know," "I love you," "X is dead,"
"The battle is lost," "Our worst fears are realized," "The time has
come," "There is no hope," and so on, and on. The interpretation
 Janet Perez 111

of silence, of what silence communicates, must be contextual or

circumstantial, just as with utterance. Altered circumstances affect
the import of silence, in the same way that words may undergo
changes of significance in another context. The human face, "the
ultimate frontier between silence and speech" (Picard, p. 99), may
offervital clues for the interpretation of both silence and utterance,
together with gestures, body-language and other forms of non-
verbal communication.
The fact that silence communicates in and of itself is recognized
by such fixed epithets as "eloquent silence," "pregnant pause,"
"ominous silence" and the like. Logically, silence is associated
with the ineffable, the inexpressible, the awesome or sacred,
horrible or sublime, but also linked to such communicable states as
guilt, anger, fear, inhibition, desire, embarrassment, confusion,
hostility and disbelief, to name but a few. All of these may be
conveyed in the narrative or theater by silence on the part of a
character or characters at a given moment-the inability or refusal
to reply, loss of words, etc. Such silences are relatively brief and
conspicuous, transmitting a meaningful and identifiable message,
translatable into utterance or other signs. And just as prescribed
verbal formulas exist for certain occasions (greeting, congratula-
tion, farewell, not to mention the stereotyped utterances which
accompany retirement banquets, funerals, graduation and mar-
riage ceremonies, and political campaigns), so also silence is the
culturally prescribed behavior at moments of religious observance,
death, tragedy and so on, signifying respect, sympathy, resigna-
tion and related reactions. Its significance in these contexts is
conventional and predetermined. Certain verbal situations also
typically elicit silence as a response. Silence is presumably the
specific reaction sought by the rhetorical question, which is de-
fined as a query "not requiring a reply or intended to induce a
r e ~ l y . In
" ~numerous other situations, any reply but silence might
be impertinent, so that the total of identifiable messages and
sentiments which may be communicated by silence is potentially
equal to the number and circumstances of situations in which it
occurs. Nevertheless, cultural behavior and traditionally deter-
mined associations tend to emphasize a fairly limited and specific
range of possible connotations of silence: it is associated more often
with sleep than waking, with night than day, with death than life,
with solitude than companionship, with sorrow than joy, with
distance than proximity, with ends rather than beginnings. Other
traditionally associated states link silence to tranquility, medita-
112 South Central Review

tion, reverence, secrecy, abandonment, paralysis, grief, the soli-

tary landscape (sea, desert, or empty space). The linking of silence
to negative concepts is more frequently exploited in literature (the
Gothic tale, the "whodunit" or thriller, Romanticism) than its
appearance in conjunction with positive sentiments and states, so
that unqualified silence is likely to be perceived as vaguely
menacing.
Philosophically, silence is identified as a "basic phenomenon"
(Picard, p. 21), a primary, objective reality which cannot be traced
back to anything else, replaced by anything else, exchanged for
anything else. Although it is usually cessation of noise which
makes us aware of stillness, silence is always present. Given its
ubiquitous nature and obvious significance, the number of books
on silence is surprisingly small. Among these, a goodly proportion
deal with silence as an element of prayer, the meaning of the vow
of silence, and the importance of silence for the mystic. Silence and
meditation, and the role of silence in concentration, thought and
consciousness, have also been examined. Other volumes treat the
healing power of silence and the ability of silent things to bring
hope, love, knowledge, faith. More recently, there has been con-
cern for silence as a victim of noise pollution; the quality of life is
threatened by the blatant world of noise. Most of the extant books
devoted to silence concern aspects other than the linguistic, literary
or aesthetic, although some limited note has been taken of silence
in the context of communication. Non-verbal language, the lan-
guage of behavior, is investigated in The Silent ~ a n g u a g e which
,~
points out some differences between polite utterance and real
meaning, but stops short of broaching the subject of silence per se,
though this is more meaningful, more polyvalent, than any of the
behavior, signs or gestures considered.
Silent gestures or facial expressions are potentially more power-
ful forms of communication than words, capable of modifying,
subverting or contradicting the utterances they accompany. Other
instances of silent, wordless communication occur in images, in
dreams, in various types of art (paintings, reliefs or tapestries, for
example), and in symbols such as the cross, the mandala or the
Falangist yoke and arrows. The importance once attributed to
omens testifies to the belief in wordless messages in the silent
flight of birds, the silent motions of nature and other events not
involving utterance. The artistic and communicative capacities of
silent expression and gestures are the basis of the art of mime, and
wordless story-telling is an aim of the ballet and other forms of
 Janet Perez 113

dance, although here, as with the tone poem, wordlessness does

not mean total silence, given the presence of music. Not surpris-
ingly, one of the few areas in which silence has been examined as
an aesthetic phenomenon is that of music, wherein the intervals
between notes are as important as the musical tones themselves.
"The sound of music is not, like the sound of words, opposed, but
rather parallel to silence" (Picard, p. 27).
The silent film has been studied more extensively than has any
literary genre in relation to silence, but silence as such is not the
primary focus of studies of the silent film. Moreover, the silent film
does not usually exhibit "literary silence" as opposed to acoustic
silence, since subtitles allay doubt and explain enigmas. Subtitles,
given the limited time at the disposal of the viewer, cannot achieve
the depth or completeness possible in fully written mediums such
as the novel. But literary silence-the omission of relevant, even
essential data-is not only not the aim of subtitles, it is contrary to
their function. The raison d'2tre of such captions is compensatory,
counteracting that silencing which occurred before the advent of
the soundtrack, or in the case of foreign films today, preventing
that silencing of meaning which results when utterance is incom-
prehensible. The silent film does not seek intentionally to withhold
essential information, but like the art of the mime, to convey it by
other means.
One of the first books to draw attention to the aesthetics of
silence and some of its metaphorical equivalents in modern art is
John Cage's Silence (originally published in 1939 and often reprint-
ed). The text comprises articles and lectures-some performed
within a rhythmic structure-on aspects of vanguard art (or anti-
art) such as atonal music and music without harmony, counter-
point or meter, and paintings consisting of an empty, all-white, or
all-black canvas. Exemplifying the same sort of phenomenon in a
semi-literary form is Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" which included
much silence, sounds (sneezes, burps, a watch ticking, paper
crumpling, claps, coughs, shuffling of feet) all rhythmically paced,
many mid-sentence interruptions, chaotic digressions and abrupt
switches. The common denominator of such experiments and of
several articles involves a break with the concepts of content,
control, interpretation and continuity. Ideas become unnecessary.
It is thus useful to avoid having an idea, and more so to avoid
having several, and on the visual plane, there is a similar break
with continuity and design. Symmetry is considered a way to
unfocus attention. Although Cage does not specifically discuss the
114 South Central Review

literary applications of such ideas, the rejection of "meaning" or

"message" as elaborated by the artist in favor of the raw materials
(the sound itself, or the canvas, paper, etc.) is analogous to the
blank page purveyed as the ultimate poem. Clearly, this is a radical
form of silence, silence used deliberately for aesthetic effect, but
instead of communicating a fairly specific and re-statable message,
its intent is exactly the opposite. Here art uses total or unlimited
silence, silence without the clues or other associated elements with
which it is surrounded or combined and which (as in its use by
post-war Spanish writers) permit it to communicate something
quite specific.
Susan Sontag in "The Aesthetics of SilenceH8considers briefly
the artist's renunciation of his art, withdrawing into silence or
madness (p. 183), the "exemplary suicide of the artist" (p. 185),
silencing as penalty (censorship or destruction of the work), and
silence as metaphor, "an ideal plenitude to which the audience can
add nothing, analogous to the aesthetic relation to nature" (p. 191).
This metaphoric silence (exemplified by atonal music, the blank
canvas or empty page) is opaqueness which "induces spiritual
vertigo" (p. 191). So far as he is serious, the artist is continually
tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is
the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that
ambivalence concerning the audience which "is a leading motif of
modern art, with its tireless commitment to the 'new' andlor the
'esoteric"' (p. 183). Silence is also discussed in the context of the
contemporary ambivalence toward language, and Sontag affirms
that "as the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises" (p. 185).
Language, viewed as cheapened, inauthentic, contaminated, "is
demoted. . . Silence, then, is both the precondition of speech and
the result or aim of properly directed speech," and in such circum-
stances, "the efficacious artwork leaves silence in its wake" (p.
196). Similar points are made by Ihab Hassan, who mentions the
devaluation of language (below). Sontag's discussion of aesthetics
does not include specific uses of silence in literature, although she
considers silence "inescapably a form of speech. . . and an element
in dialogue," and observes that "to describe silence as a rhetorical
term is, of course, not to condemn this rhetoric as fraudulent or in
bad faith.. .the myths of silence and emptiness are about as
nourishing and viable as might be devised in an 'unwholesome'
time" (p. 196). As this essay will show, however, the "rhetoric of
silence" in the literary context has uses of a very concrete nature
much beyond the metaphorical or symbolic levels.
 Janet Perez 115

In "Frontiers of Criticism: Metaphors of silence,"' Ihab Hassan

terms his essay an experiment in paracriticism, repeatedly linked
with silence: "Criticism engages new sounds of silence," "McLu-
han heralds the end of print; the Gutenberg galaxy burns itself out.
Electric technology can dispense with words, and language can be
shunted on the way to universal consciousness. . . At a certain limit
of contemporary vision, language moves toward silence. Criticism
must learn to acknowledge this metaphor" (p. 37). Among
metaphors of silence Hassan includes several forms of anti-art: art
which deprecates itself or pretends to be absurd; the white canvas
or sculpture made of ice which melts into a puddle; art as a game;
art at random, or discontinuous form, in which the artist does not
impose a pattern (e.g., the Cut-Up method of William Burroughs);
and art which refuses to interpret (non-representational art, op art,
pop art, the non-fiction novel). Process art, funk art, computer art,
concept art, chosismc and tel quelisrne would be further examples.
Hassan's main concern is not silence but discontinuity: "If we need
a literary theory at all, it is a theory of discontinuity" (p. 47).
"Criticism should learn about discontinuity and. . . offer the reader
empty spaces, silences, in which he can meet himself in the
presence of literature" (p. 48). Discontinuity-interruption,
switching, omission-involves silences of varying length and may
be consciously manipulated to create literary effects. As one possi-
ble response to censorship, it is part of the rhetoric of silence and
offers a means of circumventing society's silencing of an artist or an
ideology. To this end, it is exploited by post-war Spanish writers.
Only two essays in George Steiner's Latzguage and Silence (New
York: Athenaeum, 1976) are actually concerned with silence, "The
Retreat from the World" (pp. 12-35) and "Silence and the Poet"
(pp. 36-54). These repeat points considered by Sontag: loss of
confidence in language (progression toward scientific annotation,
the use of formulaic and statistical means), a movement away from
content as in abstract art, atonal or electronic music, a diminution
of language as mass culture has watered down literacy and fewer,
simpler words are used. Steiner relates the poet's retreat into
silence or madness to "the possibility that the political inhumanity
of the twentieth century and certain elements in the technological
mass society which has followed on the erosion of European
bourgeois values have done injury to language" (p. 49), his under-
lying theme, which can be meaningfully compared to contempor-
ary Spanish authors' use of literary silence as a reaction to specific
political circumstances: censorship and the regime mentality or
116 South Central Review

ideology. A still more recent linking of repressive politics and

artistic or literary silence occurs in a passing comment made by
David William ~oster'' in the context of discussing Herndn Valdes'
Tejas verdes: Diario de un campo de concentracidn en Chile, which
alludes to the many who have remained silent or retreated into
silence to avoid persecution, and Foster's singling out of the
"allegation that strict silence is used as a strategy to destroy
political prisoners" (p. 48). In other words, silence may also be
used against the dissident writer as part of the jailers' attempt at
psychological destruction. Although he does not analyze the
specific functions of silence in the writing of Valdes, Foster ob-
serves his "artful strategy of interplaying silence and ex-
pressiveness" and concludes that Tejas verdes "expressively defies
the primacy of collective silence" (p. 49). There is thus an increas-
ing awareness on the part of critics of the multivalent aesthetic
dimensions of silence, and of the complexities of its causes, its uses
and its messages.
Webster's definition of silence includes forebearance from
speech, absence of mention, obscurity, secrecy and omission, all of
them likely to be considered faults in any traditional manual of
precepts for writers. Clearly, several of these forms of silence may
be involuntary, and in that event, their presence may be con-
sidered a defect, an oversight, an obstacle to communication. The
voluntary and deliberate uses of silence, however, are numerous
and polysemic, and serve many purposes in addition to the contra-
vening of censorial restrictions. There is the silence in poetry,
whose rhythm is not merely cadence and stress but regular,
predictable intervals of miniscule silences, as well as that "silence"
which results from poetry's elliptical nature, use of condensation
and allusion or metaphor. Dramatic silences incorporate another
dimension, being both physical (acoustic stillness) and literary, as
when the stage is empty or a character refuses to reply (like the
ghost in Hamlet which rejects repeated entreaties to speak). In
some dramatic works, silence itself is the most prominent element
(as in "Krapp's Last Tape" by Beckett), or silence may be employed
as a form of audience involvement: in Buero Vallejo's dramatic
portrait of Goya, El suefio de la razdn, set during the painter's
incipient deafness, there is a sequence in which actors are merely
to mouth the words, without articulating, so that the spectators-
in silence-share the protagonist's experience of definitive silence.
Silence may itself be the subject of a poem or narrative, and both
dramatic and narrative literature exploit situations such as the
 Janet Perez

inaudible confession or ominous pause.

Just as acoustic or physical silence is a prerequisite for the
perception of specific sounds, silence in the literary context is
ubiquitous and indispensable, even if not perceived as silence.
Literature and art are replete with silences-those things not
presented, not explained, not told-some germane and others
irrelevant. The presentation of "reality" is necessarily selective,
implying omission or silencing. Not only is everything which falls
beyond a given perspective or combination of perspectives si-
lenced, but much that is unnecessary-details of the character's
life, past or present, for example-must be silenced in the interests
of economy, coherence and impact. Such silencing of the relevant
but non-essential is indispensable to the short story and other brief
fiction, but normally does not complicate interpretation, prevent
comprehension or create mystery, and thus does not appear as
conspicuous or perceptible silence. For the sake of clarity, such
silencing may be termed exclusion; its aesthetic function is indirect.
It is deliberate, perceptible, conspicuous silence, whose effect is
direct, silence which elicits a specific reaction in audience or reader
(actively enlisting these as co-creator or interpreter) which may be
considered part of a self-conscious narrative technique.
The shapes and sizes of literary silence range from the single
word (for example, Cervantes' famous opening line situating the
residence of Don Quixote in "un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo
nombre no quiero acordarme") to substantial portions of the narra-
tive. Silencing of a place name or character's identity is so common
that many authors signal it by the use of an asterisk or initial. This
silence may or may not involve a significant message, but it
commonly functions to arouse the reader's curiosity. Silence in a
specific and limited form has long been recognized as a rhetorical
device. The Greeks called it aposiopesis, which Lanham defines as
"stopping suddenly in midcourse-leaving a statement unfinish-
ed."" Sudden breaking off or lapsing into silence, traditionally
associated with anger or embarrassment, was not always viewed in
a positive light as a literary device. Elsewhere it is considered a
figure of pathos.12 Rhetoricians do not consider other manifesta-
tions of silence and rarely use the word itself. While literary silence
clearly goes beyond aposiopesis, the difference may be explained
partly as one of degree: whereas aposiopesis operates on the level of
the sentence, the interruption midway of a statement, literary
silence operates on the level of the work (e.g., omission of the
conclusion, or beginning in media res), or of certain parts (trunca-
118 South Central Review

tion of scenes, omission of certain actions, failure or refusal to

make known things concerning certain characters), as well as
individual utterances. An obvious exception is the omission of
relevant detail due to authorial oversight, as when Sancho's don-
key, stolen by Gines de Pasamonte, reappears as Sancho's mount
in a later episode of Don Quixote without his recovery having been
mentioned. It is not the authorial slip of the pen but the use of
silence as a deliberate and self-conscious device which constitutes
what I term literary or narrative silence, and whose variations and
refinements of use make u p the rhetoric of silence.
The use of literary silence has varying functions, depending
upon the time and place of writing, including the avoidance or
passing over in silence of the sordid which characterizes Victorian
literature, for example, or the exploitation of silence to suggest the
awesome and horrible by writers of the Gothic novel and tale. The
contemporary Spanish novelist, Juan Benet, exploits this type of
silence in his novelette, Una tumba, some of the tales of Cinco
narraciones y dos fa'bulas and of Sub rosa, and the final novelette of
the collection Nunca Ilegara's a nada. And while the reader may be
required to imagine the exact agent or manner of the gruesome
death, it is abundantly clear that a hideous demise has occurred, as
Benet also manages to communicate in La otra casa de Mazdn. Benet
is a fully self-conscious literary stylist, and his essay collection En
ciernes (Madrid: Taurus, 1976) is devoted in large part to ambiguity
in narrative, and to a defense of his predilection for a literature of
silences, inexact, obscure, which does not dilucidate but "foments
the invention of that type of mystery which by its nature lies
forever beyond the power of knowledge" (pp. 48-49), dragging the
imagination toward a region of shadows, using reason "to oppose
itself to reason, to close the road to it forever with that which has
not been thought and is in the final analysis unthinkable" (p. 50).
This stance is analogous to the refusal to communicate or interpret
by the several forms of anti-art or literature mentioned earlier.
Another considerable body of fiction involving the use of silence as
a structuring element comprises detective stories and the thriller,
whose nature requires maintenance of silence concerning certain
vital details until as near the end as possible.'3 The Spanish
novelist, Francisco Garcia Pavon, exploits this type of silence in
many of his novels pitting the Manchegan police chief, Plinio, with
his intuitive logic and small-town cunning, against a variety of
seemingly insoluble enigmas (as in Las hermanas coloradas and
others). Because this type of silence is usually broken by revelation
 Janet Perez 119

of the mystery, it is temporary, and because its resolution does not

depend upon the reader alone, it must be distinguished from other
instances of literary silence which do not supply the answer.
In the case of the open novel, and in other narrative forms which
relate no conclusion, silences may extend beyond the end of the
text. "A text is always the result of an arbitrary decision to stop
writing at a particular point. The analyst is entitled to speculate
about what went on before the decision to stop was made, and
what might have gone on afterward; about what is excluded as
well as what was included."14 Authorial silence or reticence in a
situation of this type appears in Unamuno's proto-existential
novel, Niebla (Mist, 1914), in which the author provides conflicting
information concerning the protagonist Augusto's death, explicitly
declining to indicate the correct interpretation and thereby obliging
the reader to choose or to invent his own explanation. Unamuno as
author thus silences himself, failing to make known whether
Augusto committed suicide or died because his creator so willed it.
Unamuno's motives were not political, rather aesthetic and
philosophical, but it is because such silences form part of the
experience of the modern reader and because the need to explain
or interpret.is a normal reader response that silence can function to
express opposition, criticism or dissent, as well as to communicate
very precise messages, and is used to that end by many recent
Spanish writers.

Censorship, such as that imposed by the Franco regime in Spain

following the Civil War (1936-39) intends to silence dissent and
opposition, and a frequent result of censorial restriction and op-
pression is the exclusion of certain subjects, attitudes, events,
words or personages from literary representation, a passive re-
sponse or aquiescence. But an active response employing literary
silence in a variety of forms is also possible, so that the deceptive
appearance of acquiescence or silence functions as a device to
communicate something which cannot be expressed more directly.
Spanish writers under Franco developed a covert rhetoric of dis-
sent in which silence was manipulated to draw attention to things
whose mention in explicit form had been prohibited. Such silence,
at times metaphorical or symbolic, was also combined with clues
120 South Central Review

inviting collaboration by the initiated reader in deciphering the

cryptogram of silence. The examples which follow illustrate some
of the ways in which silence was used as an integral part of the
rhetoric of dissent to circumvent censorial repression.
One of the earlier examples of the use of literary silence by a
post-war narrator occurs in Camilo Jose Cela's first novel, La familia
de Pascual Duarte (1942). Silence is used in a number of ways, the
most conspicuous instance occurring when the protagonistlnar-
rator's diary is abruptly suspended, leaving the narrative incom-
plete. That entire portion of Pascual's autobiography which
touches upon political events in Spain during the years before the
Civil War and the time of its outbreak is left untold. No clue is
given to Pascual's activity during that time (although the reader
conjectures that he was imprisoned for matricide), excepting the
enigmatic dedicatory of his memoirs, "To the memory of the
eminent patrician, don Jesus Gonzalez de la Riva, Count of
Torremejia, who before his death at the hands of the author of this
manuscript called him Pascualillo and smiled." It is ostensibly for
his role in the death of don Jesus that Pascual is executed in the
penitentiary; no other pretext is offered. But there is more. The
province of Badajoz where Pascual lived was the scene of bloody
social uprisings and a reign of terror shortly before the outbreak of
the war. Most of the provincial aristocrats died in the class conflict
(probable context for the death of don Jesus). Pascual as narrative
consciousness is totally lacking in any externalization of social
resentment or awareness of social injustice which might have
motivated his killing don Jesus, and having been in prison during
the previous fifteen years, escaped the growing class con-
sciousness and enmity which induced the social-class conflict that
swept Badajoz in the twilight days of the Republic. The Count's
smile, his apparent lack of apprehension, his use of the diminutive
"Pascualil10"-all tend to substantiate Pascual's killing of him as
an act of mercy (euthanasia), an interpretation permitted by the
use of the verb rematar employed in the Spanish. Pascual is thus a
scapegoat, whose execution exemplifies an early miscarriage of
justice in Franco-held territory. There are other more subtle uses of
silence for critical purposes, directed against the traditional gov-
ernment in Spain (not specifically against Franco or even dictator-
ship per se). It is never stated or even suggested that waste and
inefficiency have perennially plagued government undertakings in
the peninsula, yet it is no mere coincidence that no project of a
public nature is presented as operative. Especially prominent in
 Janet Perez 121

Pascual's descriptions of his village are the non-functioning foun-

tain and the town-hall clock dominating the main square (the clock
hasn't told time in years, nor has the fountain flowed); their
presence is strictly decorative. Both are symbolically related to
time, their dysfunction signifying stagnation (i.e., that time and
change have been halted by the reactionary regime).
In a later work by the same author, La Colmena (The Hive, 1950),
silence concerning specific details is utilized to convey another
message of concrete political import. Cela here orchestrates a
structurally complex, plotless narrative, with numerous characters
(ranging from over 200 to 360, depending on who is counting).
Several names are repeated, possibly involving duplicates, and
other characters are apparently known by nicknames or aliases as
well as their legal names. However, all of those presented at any
length reappear in subsequent sections, with one exception
(perhaps unnoticeable if one does not search the novel looking for
such details): the only characters in this ample cast who do not
reappear are the obviously homosexual Seiior Suarez and his lover,
arrested on suspicion of complicity in the death of Dofia Margot
(his mother), not because of any incriminating evidence but be-
cause their life-style is unpopular with neighbors and authorities.
Taken to police headquarters for questioning, they simply disap-
pear for the remainder of the novel. Silence as to their fate serves to
suggest that disappearance is the lot of those who fall into the
hands of the regime's enforcers of law and order.
Techniques of silence are frequently combined with the conven-
tional device of the "found manuscript" (which terminates abrupt-
ly and inexplicably).The case of La familia de Pascual Duarte, already
mentioned, is one of these; the device is also used repeatedly by
Ana Maria Matute and Francisco Ayala. In each case, the narrative
is terminated at a suspenseful or climactic moment as the manu-
script unexpectedly ends, leaving the finder or editoricommentator
(and/or reader) to search fruitlessly for a possible continuation.
This device underscores the presence of silence, emphasizing the
incompleteness of the narrative as it stands, and impels the reader
to seek more deeply within the existing text for clues. In Los Abel,
Ana Maria Matute employs yet another technique, the "false
overture" (also used in a major novel of hers, Los hijos rnuertos, and
the novelette, Fiesta a1 noroeste), whereby an initial narrator or
narrative consciousness, ostensibly the protagonist, but actually
unrelated to the "message" portion of the narrative in more than
tangential fashion, serves to set the stage and then disappears. The
122 South Central Review

reader (and the censor is one of these) continues to be interested in

the fate of the "false protagonist," and may indeed pass over some
potentially censurable material because of this distraction. Because
emphasis and perspective also are related to "message," a long
initial silence concerning a given character (who may not even be
introduced until halfway through the narrative) suggests to the
reader accustomed to traditional narrative techniques that such a
character must be of secondary importance. Miguel in Los hijos
muertos (The Dead Children, 1958) is the bearer of the novel's most
powerful (and censurable) sentiment, an overwhelming longing
for liberty that prefers death to imprisonment. Escaping into the
winter landscape, he is hunted down and shot just like the wolves
that hunger brings out of hiding. This powerful metaphor of
oppression escaped the censors because previous silence concern-
ing Miguel made him appear insignificant in relation to characters
present from the beginning, more integrated into the action and
more important to the plot.
Another response by censored writers who wished to publish
their works, regardless, involved calculated autocensura, self-
silencing or excision of parts intuitively recognized as offensive to
the regime, or which were known for various reasons to be
potentially dangerous. Matute's original manuscript of Las lucier-
nagas comprised three parts, the last set during the postwar period
when the teenage protagonist, Soledad, and her lover, Cristian,
have been married, and Soledad and her son struggle to survive
near the prison camp where Cristian is confined. Sensing that this
portrayal of a relatively apolitical family's miserable existence
under Franco was a prime cause for the novel's prohibition, Matute
reworked the manuscript, omitting all of Part I11 and modifying the
end of Part I1 so that the novel terminates abruptly and somewhat
enigmatically, inconclusively, as the victorious Nationalist forces
enter Barcelona, and Cristian runs toward them, shouting, only to
be shot down. It remains for the reader to decide whether his shout
is of welcome, defiance or despair, but the resulting enigma is in
itself a sort of cryptic message which underscores the absurdity of
Cristian's death and the abuse of power which unnecessarily
eliminates an unarmed civilian. Silence envelops all at the end of
the published version (Etz esta tierra, 1955), with the guns of war
stilled and the January snow falling on a deceptively white land-
scape.
Two of the narratives of Francisco Ayala which employ narrative
silence to communicate a message of criticism are El keckizado and
 Janet Perez 123

"El mensaje." The title of the former (The Bewitched) alludes to the
last of Spain's monarchs of the Hapsburg dynasty, Charles 11, who
died in 1700. Probably an imbecile, unable even to control his
physical functions, Charles I1 was the microcephalic head of a giant
empire, with the largest bureaucracy the world had known. Using
the device of the found manuscript, Ayala narrates the quest of an
Inca who inexplicably decides to journey from the Andes to the
Spanish court to present his respects to Carolus Rex. After years of
being shunted from one sub-secretary to another, he manages a
chance glimpse of the royal idiot-and withdraws in silence.
Concentrating on the journey topos, Ayala manages to suggest
that Spanish government has not changed in essence in the inter-
vening centuries: bureaucracy, usurpation, impenetrability and
absurdity remain, and for the average citizen, to communicate with
it is impossible. In "El mensaje," the manuscript found is a letter or
perhaps a business order form, left by a commercial traveler in the
waste-basket of a village rooming-house. Mysterious because it is
unintelligible, it becomes a center of controversy and after being
hidden away for a time by a fanatic, visionary spinster who
believes it contains a divine revelation, it disappears without
explanation and without the message's ever being decoded or
deciphered. It remains unclear whether, in fact, there was any
message, or merely doodling, whether it was in some other lan-
guage or code, or was simply garbled in transmission. The defini-
tive silence on Ayala's part concerning the content of the document
is accompanied by an incisive portrayal of the psychological limita-
tions of those interested in discovering the message, clearly sug-
gesting the self-serving motives or self-deception underlying each
suggested interpretation and imparting a healthy skepticism as to
the "revealed" nature of regime ideology or inspired ideological
writings.
Another special form of silence is found in narratives involving a
dead protagonist, unable to state his or her own case, whose
personality and actions must be reconstructed by the reader from
partial and conflicting accounts and perspectives of survivors.
Examples in post-war Spanish fiction include Elena Quiroga's Algo
pasa en la calle, and Miguel Delibes' Cinco horas con Mario. Both deal
with somewhat controversial and potentially censurable subjects,
unhappy marriages of sadly mismatched partners in a country
which until 1982 did not recognize divorce. Although both novel-
ists are relatively conservative, the widows in both reveal them-
selves via their introspective monologues to be egotistical, con-
124 South Central Review

ceited, vain, materialistic, shallow, inconsiderate, faithless in

thought if not in deed, unconcerned with their children and
husbands except as instruments for their own satisfaction-polar
opposites of their idealistic, intellectual and altruistic late hus-
bands. And in addition, they come from social backgrounds which
were on opposing sides in the Civil War, the dead husbands
coming from the defeated liberal ranks, the wives' families from
the conservative or reactionary bourgeoisie. The silence which
death has imposed upon the husbands is bounded by the unwit-
tingly self-condemnatory vacuousness of the wives (widows),
whose self-pitying chatter unintentionally exonerates the de-
ceased, and by implication, the liberal attitudes they personify.
Quiroga's novel, La enferma, has a protagonist who has not spoken
in some twenty years, having taken to her bed permanently after
being jilted, leaving the remaining characters to argue endlessly as
to the " t r u t h of competing versions of the events leading up to
that silence, a silence which becomes increasingly audible for the
reader, and is never broken by the author's presenting an "au-
thoritative" perspective. The supposed martyrdom of the pro-
tagonist becomes more and more doubtful, however, and rather
than the victim of a catatonic seizure, she appears by the end to be
willful, spiteful and spoiled, and her years of bedfast silence a
prolonged fit of pique. There are in effect two characters whose
actions the reader is invited to judge, the invalid and ex-fiance who
abandoned her (figures who, if translated to coetaneous Spanish
mythic types would be equal to the martyr and the exile). In regime
mythology, the martyr is identified with the Falangist war dead,
the exile with the deserter or the enemy, the leftist. The protagon-
ist's self-imposed silence, ever more clearly self-centered and self-
serving, manages to suggest that the motives of the "martyr" are
less pure than generally believed, and those of the exile less
reprehensible.
Objectivist narrative by the group of Neo-realists known in
Spain as the "mid-century generation" abounds in a special form
of authorial silence, the abstinence from evaluation, interpretation,
moralizing and other interventions or expressions of opinion. In
accord with precepts of the Objectivist movement in France, this
group also avoided "subjective" narration, the use of concepts
such as good or bad, psychological analysis and (presumably)
political engagement. In practice, however, what had been an aes-
thetic experiment in France became in Spain a mechanism for
circumventing the censors, producing a superficially impassive
 Janet Perez 125

narrative which contained little if anything explicitly objectionable.

The reformist and dissenting impact of the "Critical Realists" using
pseudo-Objectivist techniques resided in their selection of topics
and detail, rather than any overt critique or sermonizing. Subjects
were drawn almost exclusively from society's ills, so that however
noncommital the presentation, the portrayal was of socio-political
problems, problems implicitly the result of the ideology underlying
the conservative uprising which halted the Republic's reforms and
brought Franco to power. Explicit dissent or opposition propagan-
da, which would have been easily spotted by censors and deleted
or prohibited, was deliberately silenced in favor of implicit
messages conveyed via selectivity of subject, accumulation of
descriptive elements and a seemingly scientific accuracy of mea-
surement-precision and exhaustiveness in the presentation of
ambient and events. Avoiding direct presentation of authorial
viewpoint, writers communicated their non-conformity by cal-
culated narrowing of focus, choosing only those elements which
would contribute to a verbal picture which was itself a silent thesis.
Seemingly "impartial" description, with inflammatory rhetoric
conspicuously absent-the ostensible silencing of dissent-proved
bewildering to the regime's functionaries. Objectivist expression of
dissent by means of such highly visible and conspicuous silencing
of authorial opinion and comment may be judged an ideological
success although results were frequently an aesthetic failure.
Censurable material was also often presented symbolically,
especially in the area of the erotic. Strictness of moral censorship
fluctuated, sometimes excising all suggestion of sexual activity
outside marriage, sometimes permitting portrayal of adultery if
followed by appropriate, fulminating retribution. Authors unwill-
ing to follow the "party line" and treat extramarital sex as a matter
of crime and punishment might present the subject elliptically,
drawing that curtain of silence with which some Victorian nar-
rators shrouded erotic encounters, or employ otherwise indirect,
metaphorical or symbolic figures of rhetoric. Allusion and allegor-
ical expression were also combined at times with a symbology
including Freudian and Jungian motifs together with popular signs
or sayings. Ignacio Aldecoa's tale "El cobrador de tranvia" pre-
sents the ticket-taker's seduction of his girl-friend during an eve-
ning stroll by having the pair leave the road-the straight and
narrow path-to walk in the fields, where furrowing (with its
conventional sexual connotations) and the grain (a fertility sym-
bol), together with the over-heated night, left little to conjecture.
126 South Central Review

Similarly, in another Aldecoa story, "La humilde vida de Sebastiiin

Zafra," the protagonist's seduction of his cousin Virtudes is con-
veyed via fairly obvious symbols: the two stand beside a river with
its evident Freudian significance and Sebastiiin toys with a rod, of
clearly phallic connotation, casting petals in the stream in a trans-
parent metaphor of defloration while a hot wind moans in the
electric wires. Allegory in the broadest sense, as Northrop Frye
defined it (i.e., something occurring whenever one says one thing
but means another) is pervasive, and when combined with silenc-
ing of specifically sexual terms or erotic acts, permitted the repre-
sentation of behavior at odds with official morality, an implicit
rejection of regime values.
Another rhetorical device employed to express silent rejection of
official ideology and values involved placing the official party line
in the mouths of the worst possible advocates. Dofia Rosa in La
Colmena is such an undermining mouthpiece: outspoken in her
attacks upon supporters of the Republic, she is fanatic in her Nazi
partisanship and admiration of Hitler. Fat, slovenly, drunken and
vulgar, she is physically repugnant and morally reprehensible to
such an extreme that her ideological preferences necessarily suffer
by association. An equally questionable advocacy is that of the
puritanical enforcers of public morality codes in Aldecoa's tale, "La
espada encendida," wherein a provincial mayor and his deputy
spend Saturday night flushing couples out of bushes in the park
and flashing lights in dark corners to frustrate attempts at furtive
intimacy. The narrative, advanced almost exclusively via the dia-
logue of the two functionaries, exposes their narrow-mindedness,
rudimentary culture, self-interest, fanaticism and lack of concern
for public welfare. So unenlightened are these political appointees
that their zeal for any policy should raise automatic doubts about
the policy itself-and perhaps those promulgating it. Nonetheless,
open criticism is conspicuously silenced and a less-than-careful
reading might suggest acceptance of the activity portrayed.
Silencing of specific time and place via the use of temporal and
spatial evasion also was a popular element of the rhetoric of silent
dissent for a time: stories which could never have been published if
set in Franco's Spain were customarily situated in other times and
countries. Alfonso Sastre's dramatic parable of revolt against dic-
tatorial oppression and tyranny is set not in the peninsula of
Franco's day but in Renaissance Switzerland (Guillermo Tell tiene 10s
ojos tristes). Official insensitivity to economic injustices, poverty
and lack of a minimum wage led Buero Vallejo to choose
 Janet Perez 127

nineteenth-century Paris for his denunciation of exploitation of the

handicapped and of inadequate educational facilities for the blind
and disadvantaged in Concierto de Sun Ovidio. Being relatively
transparent, with themes more easily recognizable, however, tem-
poral and spatial evasion lost their effectiveness fairly soon. Al-
though Gonzalo Torrente Ballester employed an abstract time and
imaginary setting in his political satire, Reptiblica Barataria, these
proved insufficient camouflage to obtain authorization for the
play's production. Nor did the use of imaginary time and space
gain a production permit for Buero Vallejo's Sinfonia en lo gris,
portraying the downfall of a dictator. And despite the use of
another country, Buero waited more than a decade for perform-
ance of his chilling indictment of torture by police interrogators (La
doble historia del Dr. Valmy). Sastre waited even longer, until after
the advent of the monarchy, for the first production of Flores rojas
para Miguel Servef, whose central issues of intellectual and religious
freedom remained as much alive as when the accused heretic
Servet (condemned by the Inquisition for his discovery of the
circulation of the blood) fled Spain, only to be martyred by Calvin
and the Protestant Inquisition in Geneva. Silencing of explicit
relevance for Spain was thus frequently insufficient if the censur-
able theme was too clearly or strongly represented.
The lapsed narrative or discontinuous narrative structure, in-
volving a temporary silence later broken unobtrusively or elliptical-
ly, was another device found in the rhetoric of silent opposition.15
Potentially inflammable material was "insulated" by long interrup-
tion of the story line via insertion of possibly germane but digres-
sive, non-essential description or events, or abrupt switching to a
secondary story line. The use of two or more parallel or intersect-
ing narratives often signalled the presence of "dangerous" ele-
ments in one of them. In "Patio de armas," Aldecoa narrates the
Fascist occupation of a northern Spanish town by German troops
during the Civil War, with the death or disappearance of suspected
Republican sympathizers, an explosive and censurable topic. A
conversation concerning the death of a Republican is suspended at
a crucial moment by a change of scene, and silenced for some forty
pages, to be completed later without indication of who are the
interlocutors in the dialogue, what are the antecedents, or where
the exchange is taking place. Only by identifying the speakers and
juxtaposing this half of the conversation with the first part can the
silence be broken and the message understood. Partial or tempo-
rary silence is thus combined with a sort of "red herring" tech-
128 South Central Review

nique to convey events which would be censored if related in

straightforward fashion. Similarly, statements which would be
excised if made in few words were reworked, with numerous
rambling parentheses or interpolations, a pretense of indifference
or forgetfulness on the part of the narrator. Such apparent careless-
ness or lack of coherence was in fact artfully calculated, as Cela
revealed many years later with reference to his use of discontinu-
ous narrative structure in La colmena. The use of the false overture
or false protagonist mentioned earlier is a variation on this tech-
nique.
Reiteration and parallelism were also effective in conveying by
suggestion and subtle emphasis certain messages which could not
be explicitly expressed. A phrase, a statement or a scene which
appeared innocuous on first occurrence could acquire increased or
altered significance if repeated. In Historia de una escalera, Buero
communicates a silent critique of the regime's economic policies
and the lack of upward social mobility resulting from the conserva-
tive forces in the country by having essentially the same scene
enacted by members of three generations, in different times but
similar cicumstances, thereby endowing with visible form the
silent futility of his characters' hope for change or progress. Alfon-
so Sastre uses the same device in Tierra roja to communicate a
diametrically opposed message: several generations' seemingly
futile revolts against capitalist exploitation serve to suggest that
each successive failure, each aborted strike, brings some impercep-
tible progress, leaving the oppressed closer to an ultimately suc-
cessful uprising. Silencing of that message, however, likewise
proved insufficient to obtain permission for the play's perform-
ance, either because the author himself was suspect or because the
portrayal of strikes was too recognizably revolutionary, regardless
of silence in the specific area of propaganda.
The Neo-Baroque tendency in contemporary Spanish narrative,
a trend which began to replace Objectivism in the late sixties,
involves another aspect of silence, hermetic, obscure or "secret"
c o m m ~ n i c a t i o nStyle
. ~ ~ becomes enormously verbose, indirect and
convoluted in an effort to suggest things which would be unintel-
ligible to the censors or overlooked by them thanks to such semi-
silent devices as circumlocution or periphrasis, a vague but lengthy
skirting of tabu words, concepts or incidents.I7Syntactic complexi-
ty, inversion, euphemisms and substitution of equivalent but less
emotionally-charged terms-silencing of specific vocabulary-
were similarly employed. Sheer complication and verbiage, seem-
 Janet Perez 129

ing to say nothing-silencing of recognizable communication-

would often conceal one or more observations recognizable by the
initiate after something resembling the proverbial search for the
needle in the haystack. Esoteric or technical vocabulary, scientific
terminology, foreign words or neologisms frequently replaced
suppressed or silenced, censurable elements from the popular
lexicon-for example, the use of medical terminology in place of
the corresponding obscenities or vulgarities in Cela's Oficio de
tinieblas, 5. One of the earliest instances of the use of baroque
syntax, complexities of expression and exaggeratedly uncommon
vocabulary to express the potentially censurable is combined by
Martin Santos with extended metaphor and long series of negative
inversions (description of objects in terms of what they are not) in
Tienzpo lie silencio to present the shocking extremes of poverty in a
shanty-town-a ticklish subject because officially such situations
were ignored, as the regime preferred to concentrate its efforts on
problems more easily solved, areas in which progress was rela-
tively rapid and facile.
Circumlocution, periphrasis, euphemism, indirectness, verbosi-
ty, syntactic complexity, vagueness, omission, oblique or elliptical
presentation, incomplete or truncated versions of events, impas-
sivity, selectivity, objectivism, accumulation of detail governed by
essentially negative criteria, temporal and spatial evasion, narra-
tive discontinuity, reiteration, parallelism, irony, allegory, the false
overture and false protagonist-all are characteristically combined
with silence in the rhetoric of opposition. Silence abounds on the
level of words and ideas, minor incidents and major events, yet
accompanying clues usually permit discovering the message of
dissent by inductive or deductive processes. It is perhaps a curious
footnote that the rhetoric of silence did not too often detract from
artistic merit, but contributed a subtlety and aesthetic refinement
frequently lacking in the first wave of publications not employing
silence, those works appearing after abolition of the censorship.

'Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. by Stanley Goodman (Chicago: Regnery,
1952), p. 28. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.
'(Barcelona: Destino, 1972), p. 339.
3 ( ~ a d r i dLibreria
: de 10s Sucesores de Hernando, 1924), 6" ed., final scene (p.
57). Ellipses in text.
4Francisco Pino, Antisalmos (Madrid: Ed. Peralta, 1978), p. 95.
130 South Central Review

5Asis Calonje, "Caudal de cajas ciberneticas," fragment published in Papeles de

Son Armadans, Ano 22, tom0 84, ndm. 250 (enero 1977), p. 49. Like the Antisalmos,
this passage might be considered a metaphor of silence in the same sense that
several forms of anti-art (discussed later in this essay) are part of the artist's retreat
into silence or a refusal to communicate and interpret.
6Thrall, Hibbard, Holman, A Handbook to Literature (New York: The Odyssey
Press, 1960), p. 416.
'Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 15.
' A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar/StrauslGiroux, 1982), pp. 181-204.
Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.
91n The Frontiers of Literary Criticism, ed. David H. Malone (Los Angeles: Hennes-
sey & Ingalls, 1974), pp. 35-52. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the
text.
"David William Foster, "Latin American Documentary Narrative," PMLA, 99, 1
(January 1984), 41-55. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.
"Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1968), p. 15.
"Sister Miriam Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Time (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1962), p. 389.
13Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) and The Poetics of Prose
trans. by Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), especially p. 46,
analyzes certain aspects of the detective tale, although he does not speak of silence
so much as an "absence" which is an integral part of the structure of the mystery,
whether "whodunit" or thriller.
14Robert Scholes, Semiotics and lnterpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1982), p. 16.
150ther narrators who employ this variant of silence are Carmen Martin Gaite, in
Entrevisillos and Ritmo lento; Jesus Fernandez Santos, in Cabeza rapada; and Luis
Goytisolo in Las afueras, to mention only a few examples.
16Techniques for achieving this variant of silence, the "secret" message, have
been studied by Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy: O n the Znterpretation of
Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).
"Such was the Franco regime's horror of "Reds" that a whole generation of
Spaniards grew up without using the word rojo. Little Red Riding Hood became
"Caperucita Encarnada" (Little Scarlet Cloak), while rojo signified not a color but a
term of condemnation. Another tabu concept was guerra civil (Civil War). For years,
the regme demanded that the conflict be termed Nuestra Gloriosa Cruzada Nacional
(Our Glorious National Crusade). Writers unwilling to do so presented the war
obliquely, without identifying it or the combatants specifically, a negative variant of
the silencing of dissent which silenced assent, lip service or acceptance of the official
rhetoric. This same negative variant could be applied on levels other than the verbal
as well, as in the silent refusal to employ myths and models promulgated by the
regime, such as the sacrosanct home and the MadonnalMother. Matute achieved
this by making most of her protagonists orphans, while Cela in La farnilia de Pascual
Duarte inverted the idealized mother archetype, employing another traditional
model but a negative one, from the classical Picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes.