From Neo-Francoist Memory to Political Feeling in Narratives of Unearthing: Sánchez Dragó's Muertes Paralelas (2006) and Andrés Trapiello's Ayer no más (2012)

Abstract

This article analyzes the novels Muertes paralelas and Ayer no más as representatives of two clearly defined perspectives within the Spanish twenty-first century narrative production on unearthing the past of Francoism. The symbolic construction of unearthing permits an investigation of the remnants of a neo-Francoist vision of the legacy of the civil war, while opening the view of a political feeling by which personal memory inserts itself most profoundly as a commitment to a more comprehensive and lasting closure of the past.

Keywords:

• closure
• confrontation
• feeling
• memory
• unearthing

Notes

¹It is precisely in the year of 2000 when the television series Cuéntame cómo pasó started to be aired. The series has reached a high level of audience and has run for several years. The nostalgic and sentimental approach to the last years of Francoism and the transition has been then repeated in other series on the civil war. Also, several novels published during the first decade of the twenty-first century dealing with the civil war and/or its aftermath are constructed around sentimental stories. Established authors such as Almudena Grandes in El corazón helado (2007) and Antonio Muñoz Molina in La noche de los tiempos (2009), for example, elaborate on the question of memory with a plot of love affairs and vengeances, highlighted by extensive depiction of sexual moments. New authors have also emerged, such as Maria Dueñas with El tiempo entre costuras (2009), a melodramatic story of romance, betrayal, and espionage about a humble seamstress—an illegitimate daughter of a wealthy merchant—who learns how survive in Spanish Morocco during the civil war and to navigate Francoist and Nazi circles. It has been reprinted in the United States in 2011 for commercialization among the Spanish-speaking readers of the continent and adapted for the screen in 2013.

²A recent and extensive study on the topic is Santos Juliá's Historias de las dos Españas.

³See his Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la Transición.

⁴See Tortella, The Development of Modern Spain, particularly 395–99.

⁵Jo Labanyi acutely remarked at the start of the decade and before the financial crisis hit Spain: “If Spain's accelerated modernization, especially intense in the 1970s and early 1980s, and its successful integration in to the ‘New Europe’ have transformed it from one of modernity's losers into one of the post-modernity's winners, then there is a risk that the ‘ghosts of history’ will remain relegated to the margins and, indeed, that new ghosts will be created” (“Engaging with Ghosts” 8–9).

⁶See Navarro's general and documented analysis of the underdevelopment of Spain's welfare system in relation to other European countries in his Bienestar insuficiente. Years before the crisis and during the prosperous 1990s, Tortella wrote: “While both of these inherited conditions are present throughout the European Community, in Spain both inflation and unemployment are at levels well above the Community mean” (460).

⁷A comprehensive summary of the birth and formation of civic associations on historical memory, as well as a description and critical reflection of the political and legal processes, both nationally and internationally, can be found in the collective volume Qué hacemos por la memoria histórica.

⁸In a similar vein in El séptimo velo (2007), de Prada accumulates, together with love affairs and adventures, all the conventional topics about the Republic's chaotic government. In summarizing his version of confrontation, he does not hesitate to reach back to the sixteenth century to find in poetry the same problematic that would emerge once again centuries later during the Republic: “La tragedia de Estrada [un exiliado español en Francia], como la de tantos españoles de orden que repudiaban por igual la deriva revolucionaria de la República y el nacionalcatolicismo franquista ya la había compendiado, siglos atrás, Francisco de Aldana en un soneto memorable: El ímpetu cruel de mi destino/¡cómo me arroja miserablemente/ de tierra en tierra, de una en otra gente,/cerrando a mi quietud siempre el camino!” (169). The perennial confrontation, according to Prada's narrator, dates back centuries: if not as far as the birth of Iberia into history, as Sánchez Dragó would like to situate it, at least to the time of the Spanish Empire.

⁹Among his several books on this issue, Angel Viñas has recently published an essay on several documents that reveal specifically the financial support of Fascist Italy to the civil and military conspiracy in Spain, “La connivencia fascista con la sublevación y otros éxitos de la trama civil,” in the collective volume Los mitos del 18 de Julio, which include other essays by historians dismantling the neo-Francoist arguments about the “chaotic” situation in the spring of 1936 as a justification for the coup d’état.

¹⁰Antonio Muñoz Molina's La noche de los tiempos (2009) elaborates on the notion of the disaster in order to suggest that the failure of the Republic was a consequence of the two Spains. Muñoz Molina may have intended to inscribe as well Preston's idea of the “three Spains” (Las 3 Españas del 36). This idea assumes, in any case, the topic of confrontation between the “other two Spains,” which, in Preston's argument, refers specifically to the war between the Republic's and Franco's forces, without speculating about any trans-historical trend in Spain's character.

¹¹See González-Calleja, “La radicalización de las derechas.”

¹²The text of the Ley de la Memoria Histórica (Ley 25/2007) can be accessed online: <http://leymemoria.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/LeyMemoria/es/ley-de-la-memoria-historica-#a1>;.

¹³See her “Testimonies of Repression: Methodological and Political Issues.” Labanyi recognizes, however, that a Francoist vision is still hampered to reject any process of recovery of the silenced voices and any doubt about the legitimacy of Franco's uprising.

¹⁴See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

¹⁵For Paul Ricoeur, historical memory “consists in a genuine acculturation to externality. This acculturation is that of a gradual familiarization with the unfamiliar, with the uncanniness of the historical past. This familiarization consists of an initiation process, moving through the concentric circles formed by the family nucleus, school chums, friendships, familial social relationships, and, above all, the discovery of the historical past by means of the memory of ancestors […] personal as well as collective memory is enriched by the historical past that progressively becomes our own […] In this way, little by little, the historical memory is integrated into living memory” (394–96).

¹⁶David Harvey, in interpreting Benjamin's ideas, sees a crucial distinction between an “absolute” concept of time in history and a “relational” concept in memory in which the past is “internalized within a particular political subject” (128–38).