The hybrid has advantages in literature as in life. Foremost is the strength derived from counteracting the debilitating effects of inbreeding; in addition, being claimed by no single group, the hybrid is answerable to none. There is scope in the marginality of hybridity that allows voices of power – regime voices – to be challenged or mimicked, parodied, mocked and subjected to critical scrutiny through the creation of languages of freedom whose strength has been found to lie in their multiplicity and often duplicity.

This chapter looks at ways in which Marsé, the hybrid – Castilianspeaking Catalan, churched religious sceptic, barely schooled, having started work at 13, but well-read – counters the voice of power of literary critics by ‘playing’ across the lines of his non-conformity: his hybrid freedom. He cannot match his contemporary and compatriot Juan Goytisolo’s claim to be:

but he can come close enough to confound those critics who try to categorise him too narrowly rather than confront his diversity.

This chapter will look first at strategies which, with the natural skill of the mimic and an enjoyment of masquerade, Marsé adopts to elude the categorising, controlling critical eye and to establish a narrative play area in which he can call the shots – lay down the rules of encounter and change them at will. It will then offer a re-reading of Encerrados con un solo juguete (1960) to show how this first novel revealed Marsé framing the interaction between the writer and the reader-critic as erotic encounters in the sexualised play area of the bedroom in such a way as to explore them as both conflictive and symbiotic. Erotic games in bedroom play areas represent the writer’s determination to elude control and defend a ‘divine leeway’ in his own world of narrative creativity. However, because these erotic encounters transgress the code of sexual conduct of what was, under Franco, the state Church, the narratives which arise from them constitute a challenge to the moral hegemony of the regime.