Catalan Identity in Post-Franco Era: Writing Desencant in Torrent’s Un Negre Amb Un Saxo

Imagine Spain as a tree, with different branches politically and culturally standing for its different cultures. What would it happen if these branches, except one, were transplanted to a shadowy area? Probably they would dry up and the Spanish tree would grow with just one branch, as monoarboreal formation. This metaphorical image may represent the Spanish State that Franco so enthusiastically envisaged. With his death and the establishment of democracy, the Spanish tree experienced a grafting process. The forgotten and dehydrated branches were grafted into the old tree. As is known, the success of grafting depends on the host for nutrition, deriving in our case from a grafting ‘complex’: how would these fit in the new democratic Spain (1978-1986)?The Catalan writer Ferran Torrent focuses on this context to point out that the host, the Spanish host, resembles too much to the Francoist one. In consequence, Torrent makes an explicit criticism of his contemporary democratic society regarding the failure of the culture that would represent his graft, Catalan culture.Always bearing in mind the cultural realm, others have used this metaphorical tree to represent contemporary Spanish society – a nice metaphor but the tree is finding it quite difficult to thrive, since as Torrent highlights, the trunk of that tree is rotten after years of Franco’s fascist dictatorship.