Josep Pla - Notability of His Work

Notability of His Work

Pla had to live under censorship for much of his life: first during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, later in Italy and Germany (where he worked as a correspondent during the rise of the Falange), and during Francisco Franco's long rule. Although he initially sympathized with the dictatorship (he wrote in 1940 that it was "in the general interest"), his support only lasted a few months. He soon began to show skepticism, especially as it became impossible to publish in Catalan. Although he always maintained a moderate political stance that allowed him to publish, he was deeply uncomfortable with Franco's tireless censorship (he wrote in one of his diaries that it was "the worst that have known", carried out by "servants of fanaticism"). He hated the regime’s disdain for Catalan language and culture and its stubborn inability to turn itself into a democracy, not even a tutelary one.

The most important characteristics of the “Planian” literary style are simplicity, irony, and clarity. Extremely modest and sensitive to ridicule, he detested artifice and empty rhetoric. Throughout his literary life, he remained faithful to his own style: “the necessity of a clear, precise, and restrained writing” and his lack of interest in literary fiction, cultivating a dry style, apparently simple, practical, and devoted to that which is real. He was an acute observer of reality in its smallest details and he gave a faithful testimony of the society of his time.

His works show a subjective and colloquial vision, “anti-literary”, in which he stresses, nevertheless, an enormous stylistic effort by calling things by their names and “coming up with the precise adjective”, one of his most persistent literary obsessions. An untiring writer, from his viewpoint life is chaotic, irrational, and unjust, while the longing for equality and revolutions are a delusion that incites worse wrongs than those that it tries to put a stop to. Conservative and rational, he was not inclined to action, but voluptuousness and sensuality: the pleasure of putting the world down on paper. A good conservative, he ate well and drank better (as an old man, whisky made up a good part of his diet), an inveterate smoker, he wore a bowler hat from his youth and later was inseparable from his country beret. He hated banality, cultural affectations (he never included quotations in his works, despite being a reader of the classics) and “people who talk just to hear themselves.” So he wrote: “It is more difficult to write than to think, much more difficult: so everyone thinks”.