Luis Martín-Santos Facing Censorship: Editorial Vicissitudes of Tiempo de silencio

Abstract

The paper studies the relationship between Luis Martín-Santos and the Francoist censorship through the examination of the documents related to his literary and scientific production that are stored at the General Archive of the Administration. The analysis focuses primarily on the editorial vicissitudes of Tiempo de silencio: for the first time all the reports made by the censors and the correspondence between the publisher and state institutions are made public. This material allows to trace the trajectory of the novel and to explain the reasons that led to the significant moral suppressions of the first edition, and their partial reinstatement in the second. The discovery of the original manuscript has also allowed its collation with the princeps, showing a constant process of linguistic normalization. Furthermore, the presence of variants and some corruptions both in the first edition, and in the “definitive” of 1980, have been noticed.