Getting a Sense of Reality

Abstract

Abstract Earlier chapters have shown the extent to which the Francoist state sought to control ideas and promote a permanent culture of conservatism, and have discussed writings that contribute to this project alongside others that resist it. This chapter will relate these processes to particular forms of representation: ways of perceiving and constructing reality. An important implication of the regime’s insistence on authority, national destiny, and the supremacy of Catholic values was that ‘reality’ was not a category to be investigated or problematized, but to be defined and fixed by the authorities, directly through censorship and control of education and publishing, and indirectly through general pressure to conform to a conservative status quo. In such a context, the ideological implications of apparently purely formal questions come forcefully to the surface, sharpening aesthetic debates about realism, abstraction, and experimentalism.