6 - The Undercurrents of History: Memory, Language and Fiction in Joan Sales's Incerta glòria

Summary

From the 1956 to the 1971 version: gendered voices, political engagement and censorship

Joan Sales's Incerta glòria (1956, 1969, 1971) is considered by a growing number of critics to be the best and most complex novel about the Spanish Civil War. The three versions of the text, each edition of which grew in length and ambition, significantly diverge from one another, and this poses intriguing questions for the reader. Sales's rewriting obsession is a telling confirmation of Blanchot's idea that writing always conveys the possibility of an outstanding work but also that, as the author experienced during his painstaking revisions, perfection can never be achieved, since to write ‘is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking’. In spite of the fascinating possibilities that this line of reasoning offers, researchers have generally overlooked textual problems, focusing their attention on the final version and neglecting its intricate genealogy. More specifically, critical approaches have centred on character development and the influence of Catholic thinking on the narrative. However, it is clear that the contrasting styles and changing content of Incerta glòria call for a new approach that extends beyond the idea of the text as a perfectly coherent, self-contained artefact and gives prominence to the multiple – sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary – strands of meaning that can be detected in its convoluted evolution. This chapter examines the causes and consequences of Incerta glòria's compositional development to demonstrate that, since each version presents thought-provoking variants which prompt disparate readings, the rewriting process undergone by the text should be an important source for critical debate.