In Pecado de omisión, Matute showcases the backwardness, paralysis, and loss of human potential that was Franco s Spain. A Tale of Two Stories Gerardo Piña-Rosales notes that a work of fiction puede evocar toda una generación, toda una época (481). It was all so terribly new for me, that up to that moment I lived, you might say, in a crystal urn (Díaz 28). She says, in translated words, that she saw the burnings, the violence, those bodies that would appear at dawn in the outlying fields.
From that moment onward, Matute s world changed dramatically the war would leave a deep wound in her soul and psyche. The outbreak of the conflict caught Matute s family in the Republican zone of Barcelona where they would remain for the duration of the war (Díaz 28). Matute was almost ten years old when the Civil War broke out and the umbrella factory her father owned was seized by the workers (Diaz 28 Wythe 21). By delving beneath the narrative level, we can uncover a subversive critique of Franco and his regime. (Díaz 82) A deceptively simple story, Pecado de omisión deserves a more detailed analysis. Much later, when a visit to the village brought him face to face with differences between himself and former friends, the boy kills his benefactor with a rock. For example, The wealthy village mayor took in an orphaned distant relative, but instead of educating the obviously intelligent boy, sent him to the mountains as a shepherd, where the difficult, primitive life and isolation reduced him to semi-animalism. Critics generally provide simple plot summaries of this story. 64Ģ From among them, Pecado de omisión is often reproduced in literary anthologies for undergraduate students of Spanish.
2 In fact, she was fined 50,000 pesetas for her part in creating and signing the Montserrat Manifesto of December 1970 protesting the arrest of clergy, university students, and writers who opposed Nationalist policies and positions regarding law, order, education, and censorship (Schwartz 115). For Janet Winecoff, among the most consistently striking aspects of Ana María Matute s work one which relates her to existential literature is the vision of the estrangement and alienation of the individual (62). Jones affirms that as a result of these moves, she had a sense of not belonging: in Madrid, she was the catalana in Barcelona, the castellana (Literary World 1 emphasis in original). Because of her father s business as owner of an umbrella factory, she would spend half the year in Madrid and the other half in Barcelona. She was only five years old when she wrote and illustrated her first story (Díaz 20-21). 1 Matute exhibited creative tendencies from an early age. Written in prose bejeweled with shimmering poetry, the stories in Historias de la Artámila contain a microcosm of life in Spain during the dark years of the Franco regime. Harper comments, authors like Matute viewed literature as an instrument that could change society by drawing attention to its injustices, and they used fictional worlds to document social problems (7). Referring to Franco as la momia (Schwartz 115), Matute has been a consistent critic of the dictator. Tender lyricism and social criticism imbue these melancholic stories. That same year saw the publication of Historias de la Artámila, a collection of twenty-two stories written by Matute and intended as an organic whole (Díaz 72). 1 In 1961, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde ( ) celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1936 military uprising that led to his thirty-six year dictatorship that came to an end only with his death (Preston 692). Consequently, for those interested in the first generation of postwar writers, a veritable treasure trove remains to be uncovered in Matute s prose.
Yet, despite Matute s literary prominence, relatively little current literary criticism surrounds her works. The recipient of many national and international literary awards, Matute was honored most recently with the Cervantes Prize (2010) which was presented to her by King Juan Carlos (see Harris). Cary Nelson, Advocacy and Undecidability (79) Ana María Matute (1926 ) has written extensively about the Spanish Civil War ( ) and its consequences. 1 An Analysis of Ana María Matute s Pecado de omisión through the Lens of Francoist Spain Aileen Dever Quinnipiac University Painting, sculpture, fiction, and music are all embedded in the vicissitudes of life.
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