3 - Disembodying the Nation: The Rewriting of Laia by Salvador Espriu

Summary

The vanished voices of Laia: sexuality, witchcraft and death

Laia, with its four different edited versions (1932, 1934, 1952, 1968), is the text on which Espriu expended the most effort to improve his style, and this is why it can be considered the fundamental work of his career. He himself pointed out that ‘Laia es propiamente el inicio, la manera narrativa perdurable, el primer punto de la elipse.’ This short novel occupies a central space in the author's literary output, which is characterised by its organic nature: the whole body of his work can be read as a continuum interwoven with recurring themes, myths and spaces. If Espriu considers that Laia is the key element of his literary production, it is basically because it meticulously describes the territory in which his entire oeuvre takes place, it is the origin of a fictional world that the writer developed in many short stories, plays and, above all, poetry. Furthermore, Espriu's language was in great part forged in the rewriting of this text, as was remarked upon by the writer in an interview: ‘És a Laia on vaig començar amb molt de vigor el meu aprenentatge idiomàtic formal, literari, català. […] De mica en mica em vaig anar disciplinant en l'aprenentatge del català, aprenentatge que no acabarà mai.’ According to the author, his preoccupation with language started at the beginning of his career in the early 1930s and lasted all his life, and consequently the evolution of Laia, which encompasses almost 40 years, echoes the main trends and controversies that affected Catalan during the twentieth century.