Memory and Collective Defeat in Alberto Méndez's Los girasoles ciegos

Abstract

This article examines the themes of memory and collective defeat in Alberto Méndez's Los girasoles ciegos (2004), arguing that Méndez's four narratives have two potential affiliations: first, the generational, by which he can be related to the so-called mid-century generation of writers; second, the aesthetic, via his use of imaginative investment and speculative narrative recreation, which is consonant with postmemorial approaches. Nevertheless, Méndez's handling of the theme of collective defeat accords with neither of these affiliations, echoing instead recent historical research which stresses the sheer material difficulties of life in postwar Spain and the hardships imposed by the Regime on its own less-well-off supporters, as well as on former Republicans. Méndez's work thus highlights the importance of an attention to the dynamics of remembrance and the shifting nature of Spain's memory horizons over the past century.

Keywords:

• Spanish novel
• Spanish Civil War
• memory
• generación de medio siglo
• Alberto Méndez

Notes

 1. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti, ‘Cultural Memory: A European Perspective’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) in collaboration with Sara B. Young, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, Berlin, Walter De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 127–37 (p. 128).

 2. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 1997, p. 4.

 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill & Wang, 1981, p. 77.

 4. Hirsch, Family Frames, pp. 6–8.

 5. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 13.

 6. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 23.

 7. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 22.

 8. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover, UP of New England, 1999, pp. 3–23 (p. 9). See also Family Frames, pp. 101–4.

 9. With respect to Marías's novel, Todas las almas, for example, Faber examines the ‘intento de parte del narrador de asimilar sus vivencias a las del lector implícito’. Sebastiaan Faber, ‘Un pensamiento que hace rimas: El afán universalizador en las novelas de Javier Marías’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 56 (2003), pp. 195–204.

10. Alberto Méndez, Los girasoles ciegos, 17^th edn, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2007, p. 37. Further page references are given after quotations in the text.

11. When adapted for the cinema (Los girasoles ciegos, dir. José Luis Cuerda, 2008), this dialogue between fragmentation and cohesion was lost, as the film narrative smoothed over the fractures in the original by concentrating on the second and fourth stories. On the film, see Asunción Bernárdez Rodal, ‘De la violencia institucional a la violencia de género: últimas representaciones cinematográficas de la Guerra Civil en el cine español contemporáneo’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 34 (2009), pp. 61–75.

12. Santos Sanz Villanueva,‘Anatomía patológica de la derrota’, Revista de Libros, 86 (2004), http://www.revistadelibros.com/articulo_completo.php?art = 256. [accessed 5 April 2011]; Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, Barcelona, Tusquets, 2001.

13. Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones explores this lack of agency via the lens of Romantic irony in ‘El giro irónico de la violencia: la posutopía de la Guerra Civil española en Los girasoles ciegos y Capital de la gloria’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 34 (2009), pp. 99–113; Francisco Javier Maldonado Araque considers individual motivations in ‘La “primera derrota” de Los girasoles ciegos (guerra, vida y libertad en el Capitán Alegría)’, Voz y Letra, 20 (2009), pp. 73–90. Their discussions are, however, limited to Méndez's first story and do not broach the broader postmemorial and thematic issues I raise here.

14. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford, CA, Stanford UP, 2003, p. 5. See also Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York and London, Routledge, 1995.

15. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed., trans., and intro. Lewis A. Coser, Chicago, Chicago UP, 1992. In Spanish, the term ‘memoria histórica’ has come to dominate discussions about the legacy of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, and I have suggested elsewhere that this term is too limiting for the examination of collective memory and its cultural transmission. Nevertheless, in terms of the literal recovery of bodies in unmarked common and mass graves, or the recounting of specific stories of violence, terror, and silenced suffering, the notion of a recuperation or recovery of historical memory — in short, a correction of the official archival record via the recording of names and literal recognition of the dead — is entirely appropriate. See Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, ‘From the Recuperation of Spanish Historical Memory to a Semantic Dissection of Cultural Memory: La malamemoria by Isaac Rosa’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 16:1 (2010), pp. 1–12.

16. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 248.

17. Helen Graham, ‘The Memory of Murder: Mass Killing, Incarceration and the Making of Francoism’, in Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Ann Quance and Anne L. Walsh (eds), Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea/War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, Madrid, Verbum, 2009, pp. 29–49 (p. 29).

18. Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory, Houndmills, Palgrave–Macmillan, 2008, p. 48. See also Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, and her monograph, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

19. Fuchs, Phantoms of War, p. 48.

20. Fuchs, Phantoms of War, p. 49. The importance of generational counting, and the manner in which it takes a historical trauma or caesura as a base moment from which to count, is explored with regard to German memory horizons by Sigrid Weigel in ‘“Generation” as Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945’, The Germanic Review, 77 (2002), pp. 264–77. In this sense, the Spanish Civil War is an originary trauma to which different generations relate via their biological, experiential and temporal proximity or distance.

21. Méndez's brother has, nevertheless, claimed that the ambience of the work is derived from the area of Madrid in which he and his brother grew up (quoted in Eva Díaz Pérez, ‘El Premio de la Crítica recae por primera vez en una obra póstuma, Los girasoles ciegos’, El Mundo, 10 April 2005).

22. Juan Goytisolo, Libertad, libertad, libertad, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1978; Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás, Barcelona, Destino, 1978.

23. Cited in Raquel Garzón, ‘Alberto Méndez recupera la posguerra en Los girasoles ciegos’, El País, 20 February 2004.

24. Cited in Garzón, ‘Alberto Méndez recupera la posguerra’.

25. J. J. Long, ‘Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative and the Claims of Postmemory’, in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote (eds), German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990, Rochester, NY, Camden House, 2006, pp. 147–65.

26. Recent historical research has focused on this point: see Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 53; Javier Rodrigo, Los campos de concentración franquistas: Entre la historia y la memoria, Madrid, Siete Mares, 2003, p. 108; Graham, ‘The Memory of Murder’, p. 44.

27. For information on the movement, see its web site, www.memoriahistorica.org, and the book, Las fosas de Franco: Los republicanos que el dictador dejó en las cunetas, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2003, by Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías.

28. Richards, A Time of Silence, pp. 149–50.

29. Richards, A Time of Silence, pp. 109 and 127, respectively.

30. Paloma Aguilar outlines the Regime's shift from an ‘origin-based legitimacy’, derived from victory in 1939, to a ‘performance-based legitimacy’, founded on the notion of 25 years of peace and stability, in Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley, Oxford, Berghahn, 2002. In his review of Girasoles, Ewald Weitzdörfer criticizes Méndez for an inability to accept reconciliation or peace, a misreading of the novel that fails to appreciate Spain's shifting memory horizons in the past century: Alpha, 20 (2004), pp. 307–8.

31. Susana Narotsky and Gavin Smith, Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain, Berkeley, California UP, 2006.

32. Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction’, in Erll and Nünning, Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, pp. 1–15 (p. 5).