UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Persistence of Memory: The Spanish Civil War in Contemporary Spanish Narrative Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zc0d8fj Author O'Neill, Matthew J. Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Persistence of Memory: The Spanish Civil War in Contemporary Spanish Narrative A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish by Matthew John O‘Neill June 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dr. David K. Herzberger, Chairperson Dr. James A. Parr Dr. Raymond L. Williams Copyright by Matthew John O‘Neill 2011 The Dissertation of Matthew John O‘Neill is approved: ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside AKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my profound gratitude to Professor David K. Herzberger for his willingness to adopt this project, his editorial suggestions, and for his patience in allowing its completion. Equal thanks are due to Professors James A. Parr and Raymond L. Williams for their participation and assistance in the completion of this project. I owe a special debt to Professors Candelas Gala of Wake Forest University and Ana María Fagundo of UCR, without whose insights and encouragement I would never have begun. Finally, my greatest thanks go to the friends and family whose support and good humor—not to mention insistence—have been of inestimable help to me along this study‘s completion. Most specifically, thanks go to my sister, Kimberlee O‘Neill, whose keen readings and idiosyncratic perspective on literature and history have forever altered my understanding of those disciplines and the power and value they can hold when we know how to read. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Persistence of Memory: The Spanish Civil War in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Matthew John O‘Neill Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Spanish University of California, Riverside, June 2011 Dr. David K. Herzberger, Chairperson The primary aim of this study is to examine the widespread and formative presence of the Spanish civil war in contemporary Spanish narrative. Parting from Marianne Hirsch‘s formulation of cultural production at a generational remove from any historical trauma—what she terms postmemory—and Pierre Nora‘s organization of cultural production around both singular and collected cultural artifacts termed sites of remembrance—lieux de mémoire—the study explores the ways in which five contemporary Spanish novels rely on the conflict and its aftermath for primary source material, adopt and reconfigure the narrative commonplaces constructed during the years v between the war and the reestablishment of democracy, and will continue to shape forthcoming narratives of similar thematic bent. The study analyzes novels by four different contemporary Spanish authors—Antonio Muñoz Molina, Luis Mateo Díez, Julio Llamazares, and Marina Mayoral—from differing critical perspectives; potential points of connection that can be drawn between these novels and other works of literature, Spanish and not, accompany each piece of textual analysis with the aim of underscoring the very public reckoning with the events and consequences of the war that has taken place since its putative end in 1939. The last two decades have witnessed a number of outstanding changes in public policy, culminating most recently in the 2007 Ley de memoria histórica, but these investigations, exhumations and legal proclamations only emerged after years of protestation and petition, both overt and subtle. One form that this resistance to collective national amnesia has taken is that of narrative produced since 1939, and this study separates one branch of that fiction—those novels that confront the war, written since Franco‘s death in 1975—and identifies the ways in which that fiction constitutes a multifaceted lieux de mémoire to mitigate the inevitable forgetting that accompanies the passage of historical time. The aim of the present study, then, is to demonstrate that, despite differing approaches to the representation of those particular historical events, memories of the civil war, and, in the case of these authors, postmemories, persist and form an important segment of the literary and cultural imagination in Spain today. vi Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 Endnotes………………………………………………………………...30 Chapter 1………………………………………………………………………...33 Endnotes……………………………………………………………….119 Chapter 2……………………………………………………………………….127 Endnotes……………………………………………………………….177 Chapter 3……………………………………………………………………….181 Endnotes……………………………………………………………….255 Chapter 4……………………………………………………………………….260 Endnotes……………………………………………………………….366 Chapter 5……………………………………………………………………….375 Endnotes……………………………………………………………….386 Bibliogrpahy……………………………………………………………………400 vii INTRODUCTION Imperfect Designs on the Indefinable: The Civil War, Postmemory, and Contemporary Spanish Narrative ―Literature, then, allows us to explain the nondefinable, and criticism provides us with the tools to attempt to put into words that experience.‖ —Robert C. Spires, Post-Totalitarian Spanish Fiction In his wide-ranging study of Spanish fiction between 1975 and 1989, Robert Spires wrangles literature, history, politics, criticism and theory, and science and technology, to approach an epistemic understanding of narrative in Spain after the death of Franco. Taking cues from Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, Spires develops his analysis around the concept of ―field,‖ which presents a radical departure from the Western philosophical tradition: ―Whereas intellectual communities since the Greeks have explained reality as a linear or causal process, the current community increasingly conceives of it as an interconnected network or field‖ (3). This approach presupposes the existence of interdisciplinary dialogue across time, an intertextual correspondence in which past, present, and future exist eternally interdependent, because, ―the person who discovers an area of knowledge is influenced by previously discovered fields that to one degree or another predetermined his or her discovery and that in turn will, to one degree or another, predetermine future discoveries‖ (3). The hope of this study is to outline the 1 manner(s) in which this dialogue connects earlier literary works and critical frameworks to literature relating to the nondefinable quantity in contemporary Spanish history; armed with a full field of literary and critical interconnections and aided by a theoretical tool— Marianne Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory, devised for a different discipline—it becomes evident that the civil war continues to emerge in Spanish fiction in a number of distinct ways. Javier Cercas is one contemporary author whose works, both fiction and non- fiction, engage the topic openly and do so, like Spires‘s analysis, from varying critical perspectives; as such, his works serve as a point of departure from which to consider the continued presence of the civil war in contemporary Spanish narrative. Cercas, in a 2002 short story titled ―La verdad de Agamenón,‖ describes the disastrous consequences of a meeting between a fictive version of himself, a Spanish novelist and journalist named Javier Cercas, and a physically identical man named Javier Cercas who works a banal, stable job as a mid-level administrator at the University of Granada. The narration, the reader eventually becomes aware, takes the form of an interview with a curiously well-read police detective, to whom the first fictitious Cercas explains the convoluted circumstances that precede his murder of the second Javier Cercas. The story revolves around questions of personal and professional dissatisfaction, the equal desires for novelty in daily existence and the reestablishment of normalcy after those new experiences, and the impact of personal agency in this dynamic of exchange. In the story, the two identical Javier Cercases, after an initial meeting, lock themselves in a hotel room for nearly a week to study and internalize the other‘s history, habits, and 2 idiosyncrasies in order to execute what will be the great coup: each will, for an agreed upon time to be determined, assume the life of the other. The reader follows the first Cercas—journalist, author, prominent polemic—as he assumes with relative ease the domestic banality of the second‘s life; he takes over the other‘s ordinary responsibilities at the university and becomes a husband and father to a new wife and children. His initial reaction to this shift is equal parts voyeur and well- trained actor: ―así era como yo me sentía: como un delincuente impune, como un espía y un impostor y un usurpador y un mirón de mi propia vida, pero nunca como un farsante, que era como me sentía cuando aún no había dejado de ser quien era‖ (285). In their concerted biweekly contact, he learns that the second Cercas has installed himself equally seamlessly into the first‘s life, and as they agree on the apparent ease of the switch, they continue the charade to increasingly successful lengths. The first Cercas recovers the pieces of his life that had been lost—his true marriage had ended, the self-centeredness and eventual success of his writing had led to alienation from friends and family—and though his