MEMORY of the PERIPHERIES: NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS of HISTORY in CONTEMPORARY SPANISH, BASQUE, CATALAN, and GALICIAN NOVELS By
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MEMORY OF THE PERIPHERIES: NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH, BASQUE, CATALAN, AND GALICIAN NOVELS by David Colbert Goicoa B.A., Columbia University, 1999 M.A., Brown University, 2009 Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Hispanic Studies of Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2013 © Copyright 2012 by David Colbert Goicoa iii This dissertation by David Colbert Goicoa is accepted in its present form by the Department of Hispanic Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Enric Bou, Director Date Recommended to the Graduate Council Julio Ortega, Reader Date Jon Kortazar, Reader Date Approved by the Graduate Council Peter M. Weber Date Dean of the Graduate School iv Curriculum Vitae David Colbert Goicoa was born in Boston, Massachusetts in October 1976. He received his B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from Columbia University in 1999 and his M.A. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University in 2009. Before pursuing graduate studies, he worked as a journalist and language teacher. He is the author of the forthcoming “From Paradise to Parody: The Transformation of the Rural Arcadia in Basque Film” (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies). v Acknowledgements I thank the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities for an invaluable 2010 dissertation research grant. Special thanks to Abby, for bearing all my absences and for being more in favor of the author of this dissertation than could be hoped for. Special thanks also to my father for so many Mondays with Miren. To Miren, for providing motivation and relief from thinking about nations and memory. Thanks for final readings and corrections to Abby, María, my father, and my mother (who has read so much of what I have written). Thanks also to the authors who met with me for this project, for their books and conversations: Jaumé Cabré, Alfredo Conde, Anjel Lertxundi, Suso de Toro, Ramon Saizarbitoria, Kirmen Uribe. Special thanks to Bernardo Atxaga for his warmth and for writing novels that have made me want to dedicate a career to literature and language. I must thank also my dissertation director, Enric Bou, for his support and assistance in all aspects of my career, and the other members of my dissertation committee, Julio Ortega of Brown and Jon Kortazar of the University of the Basque Country. To the other members of the faculty of the Brown Hispanic Studies Department who have offered kind guidance, especially Mercedes Vaquero, Stephanie Merrim, Nidia Schumacher, and Beth Bauer. To those who made Rochambeau welcoming when I first arrived, Marie Roderick and John O’Malley. And to Heather Johnson for answering so many questions. And to my friends who made graduate school enjoyable, especially those of the greatest cohort ever: María Pizarro, Arturo, Joserra, and the one who would have also liked to be a part of it, Felipe. vi Table of Contents Introduction i. On Peripheral Memory ii. Definitions and Key Terms: On Memory iii. Definitions: On the Peripheral Literatures Chapter 1 Toward Irresolution: The Fight over Historical Memory and the Spanish Novel 1.1. Introduction: Symbolic Skirmishes 1.2. Memory in the Fictional Mode 1.3. The Critical Call for Memory 1.4. Uncertainty in the Text 1.5. Memory as Medicine Chapter 2 Mala gente que camina, Soldados de Salamina, and La sima: Literary Intersections with the Memory Debate 2.1. Introduction 2.2. Prado’s Combat with Franco 2.3. Cercas’s Irresolution 2.4. La sima: Cenotaph as Monument to Uncertainty Chapter 3 Alternate Memories 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Civil War and Aftermath in the Basque Country 3.3. Basque Memory Tropes: Civil vs. Foreign War 3.4. Basque (Pre)historic Memory Chapter 4: Basque Narrative: Foundationalism and Literary Autonomy vii 4.1. Introduction 4.2. De-collectivity and Anti-foundation 4.3. Kirmen Uribe’s Dislocated Memory 4.4. Memory and Violence 4.5. Conclusion Chapter 5: Double Figures in the Peripheral Novel of Memory 5.1. Introduction 5.2. Atxaga’s Bilingual Perspective 5.3. Jaume Cabré’s Maquis Falangist Hero 5.4. Suso de Toro’s Un-nameable Horrors 5.5. Conclusion Conclusion/Afterword 1 INTRODUCTION i. On Peripheral Memory The impetus for this study comes in great part from my conclusion that discussions in the press and academic criticism on the recuperation of historical memory in Spain have failed to take into account a considerable part of the country’s population. Many have argued that decades into a democracy, the time has arrived to talk about and to study Civil War massacres and subsequent decades of human rights abuses, maintaining that the ethical duty to listen to silenced voices requires greater attention to the past. And yet, despite these arguments’ focus on those previously excluded from critical discourse, they have acknowledged hardly, if at all, the voices of the periphery. These discussions usually cast Spain as a single nation, even if split along a left- right ideological fault line both during the Civil War and in the present. Spain, the argument goes, must cure the wounds of the past by airing them and allowing them to heal. Spanish society, by overcoming the resistance of Francoist recalcitrance, could act in unison, as a “nosotros.” For example, José Colmeiro writes, “En aquellos tiempos del tardofranquismo, sin saberlo estábamos recuperando o reconstruyendo lo que nos pertenecía aún sin tenerlo” (Memoria histórica 8).1 It has often been theorized that memory of a perceived common past, among other factors, constitutes group identity. Observations of how collective memory acts or ought to act furthermore either define or 1 This is not to negatively single out José Colmeiro, who has shown insightful interest in peripheral studies. For example, in his article “Peripheral Visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture,” he seeks to rethink Galician studies in the context of postnational and interdisciplinary cultural studies. 2 presuppose what the remembering collectivity is. In the Spanish context, the collectivity is most frequently ciphered as a single entity. However, these images of coherence are contradicted, or at least nuanced, by dissenting voices. Where do those who do not feel themselves to be part of the Spanish nation fit into the imagined monolith? Or those who conceive of themselves as part of a Spanish nation of nations, individuals with allegiance to one or more other cultures? Since political theorists and historians see self-conception as one of the primary defining factors of nation status, one need not be a peripheral nationalist to acknowledge the existence of other nations within the borders of Spain. Yet, too often the question of the existence of other cultural memories in Spain is shunted aside. The backrounding of peripheral memory corresponds to the relatively lesser attention paid in academic circles to those cultures that produce it. It must be noted that some scholars in Spain and abroad are in fact developing inclusive, comparative approaches to the literatures of the Iberian Peninsula. Such efforts are bringing to the fore peripheral literatures and rejecting the strictures that adherence to national or linguistic categories imposes. The volume A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (Cabo Aseguinolaza, Abuín González, and Domínguez), to cite one example, incorporates several studies on literatures past and contemporary in non-Castilian tongues. Perhaps most importantly, a significant number of its authors consider literary production in multi-lingual contexts, from medieval Iberia to modern Bilbao. Still, the extent that the other cultures of Spain have successfully entered into the mainstream cultural consciousness, beyond the political debate over the nation’s shape as an “estado de autonomías,” remains subject to debate. Some critics have argued that 3 writing and other language-dependent production in non-Castilian tongues often remains sealed within its cultural-linguistic community of origin. Basque critic Mari Jose Olaziregi argues for example that “only one Basque author ([Bernardo] Atxaga), a couple of Galician authors ([Manuel] Rivas, Suso de Toro) and a few Catalan writers ([Jesús] Moncada, [Quim] Monzó, [Carme] Riera) can be mentioned in the context of guaranteeing a hypothetical Spanish literary plurality” (“Canonical and non-canonical narrative” 326). Olaziregi further argues that “the institutional elements linked to literature (University, literary prizes, political presence, relationship to the media)” fail to respond to Spain’s reality (326). More recently, however, a number of scholars have undertaken studies of what is typically called fiction of historical memory written by peripheral authors. Manuel Rivas, who writes in Galician, tops the list of authors garnishing critical attention. Often, however, writers such as Rivas or Atxaga are mentioned as side notes in studies by Hispanist critics on Castilian-language writers like Eduardo Mendoza or Almudena Grandes. The purpose of this dissertation is to continue to fill this gap. I work with the premise that other nations, and thus other memories, exist in Spain. The premise is hardly a radical one. The nature and definition of “nation” is a much debated question, in academic as well as political contexts. The scholar of nationalism Anthony Smith elucidates the term by drawing attention to the idea of a pre- existing sense of common identity. He proposes that the nation is “a named and self- defining human community whose members cultivate shared memories, symbols, myths, traditions and values, inhabit and are attached to historic territories or ‘homelands,’ create and disseminate a distinctive public culture, and observe shared customs and standardized 4 laws” (30). The definition fits the cases of the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia, despite their internal dissention. A number of critics, such as Joan Ramon Resina and Ulrich Winter, have informed my research by theorizing the coexistence of national memories in Spain.