Las páginas literarias de “Triunfo” del tardofranquismo al comienzo de la Transición (1970-1978).

Since their birth, newspapers have been an instrument divided between a vocation – the information – and a status – they are part of the culture industry, in terms coined by Adorno and Horkheimer. The duplicity of their nature underlines the difference with the book, the other great symbol of the written culture; in our minds, books represent the Literature, the utmost and lasting expression of the human creativity, while newspapers are considered as an ephemeral and functional representation of the reality that they point out. This presumption is very constrictive because, as I tried to explain in my thesis, newspapers can be an example of great information as well as original literature. The 70’s have been the “golden age” of investigative journalism: we only have to recall the Watergate scandal, exposed by by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in their articles published in 1972 the Washington Post. Triunfo (Valencia, 1946 – Madrid, 1982), the magazine I analysed in my dissertation, gets into the same path, but with a macroscopic difference: the magazine founded by José Ángel Ezcurra y Carrillo became the point of reference of the Spanish progressive culture during the last part of the long existence of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, started in 1939, at the end of the Civil war (1936-1939), and finished only with the death of the Caudillo (1975). In the years I considered (1970-1978), Triunfo worked to put into practice the right strategy to fight with the arms at its hands against the censored and diluted Spanish reality. My aim was to identify and analyse the communicative strategies that Triunfo used to convey its messages, particularly in cultural and artistic contents. Literature was an instrument of protest and of action with concrete results in everyday life: this is one of the function that seemed to be assigned to the literary sections of the magazine. In order to avoid the dangers of the rigid censorship in matters of economy and interior policy, Triunfo used the cultural channel to deal with those subjects (freedom, democracy, women and homosexual rights, ecology, countercultures, etc.) that couldn’t be treated directly by the Spanish public opinion. The thesis is divided into three parts: 1. Definition of the “Periodística” and of the literary-journalistic comparative method. 2. History of Triunfo: commented bibliography, evolution of the magazine and comment on the editorial and contributors’ staff (from Manuel Vázquez Montalbán to Alfonso Sastre, from Julio Cortázar to Gabriel García Márquez, from Alberto Moravia to Jean-Paul Sartre). 3. Definition of the concept of Culture in the pages of Triunfo and analysis of the literary contents (narrative, poetry, dramatic representation and literary critic). After a focusing study of the magazine’s cultural matters, I can state that Triunfo was able to achieve its aim, that was helping to destroy the Francoist architecture from the inside, undermining the dictatorial construction with such weapons as information, education and, last but not least, of Culture.