History and Memory, Detection and Nostalgia: The Case of Dulce Chacón's Cielos de barro

Abstract

Dulce Chacón's Cielos de barro, winner of the 2000 Premio Azorín, is an unusual detective novel that proposes the social inequality and generalized brutality of human relationships characteristic of post-Civil War latifundista Extremadura as the motives for the bloody crime that is investigated in the text. Within a narrative space shared between an omniscient narrator and the voice of an aged, illiterate potter, a member of the province's poorest and most marginalized social group, the old man's self-reflexive discourse is privileged as his memories hold the key to solving the crime. In contrast, the voice of officialdom in the guise of the investigating officer is never textualized, and Chacón thus not only inverts a norm of the detective genre but also foregrounds the significance of the memory of a social collective that had remained outside official history.This paper assesses the significance and relevance of the detective genre to the articulation of social history and private memory, and the function of these in the resolution of a crime. With particular reference to Pierre Nora's work on lieux de mémoire, it attempts to establish parallels between concepts of history and memory and the essential elements of the detective text.