"Lo que no se puede decir no se puede defender": eludir para superar en la obra de Paulino Masip

From his exile in Veracruz, Paulino Masip writes a collection of short stories that prove to be remarkably impermeable to any issue connected with the Civil War and the Franco regime. La Trampa, 1954, is immune to the contamination with the literary tendency that prompts the exiled writers to include in their narrative ongoing as well as historical topics. Masip depicts a Spain dating back to the Golden age of the 20s and 30s; his characters seem to be drawn from of the popular theater and the chapters of the text could be taken from a folletín. Folletinesca is also the plot featuring an apparently simple and light narrative, since it eludes all political reflection and handles several literary topoi. La Trampa that titles the short story entails even the narrative voice that reveals to the most mindful reader the tools and devices of a genre that is dismantled from the inside. By doing so, Masip avoids directly facing up to the exile and challenges the reader with a taxonomic question: the variety of registers in the exile narrative discards the stereotype that expected this discourse to be exclusively about the Civil War and its consequences. It is therefore necessary to clarify whether the label of literature –or that of short story about the exile– can be consistent with literature in exile or about the exile. The two meanings can occur at the same time, but there are cases, and so is Masip, in which the timeframe does not call for a strictly coherent theme.