La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea Tatjana Pavlovic Keywords Tatjana Pavlovic, Ana Luengo, La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea, 1990s Spain, Memory, Spanish Civil War, Antonio Muñoz Molina, El jinete polaco, Félix de Azúa, Cambio de bandera, Rosa Montero, La hija del Caníbal, Dulce Chacón, Cielos de barro, Rafael Chirbes, La caída de Madrid, Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, lieux de mémoire Luengo, Ana. La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea. Berlin: Tranvía-Verlag Walter Frey, 2004. 287 pp. Centering on the invention and transmission of the politics of memory in 1990s Spain, Ana Luengo’s La encrucijada de la memoria analyzes six contemporary novels that explore the theme of the Spanish Civil War: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El jinete polaco (1990), Félix de Azúa’s Cambio de bandera (1991), Rosa Montero’s La hija del Caníbal (1998), Dulce Chacón’s Cielos de barro (2000), Rafael Chirbes’s La caída de Madrid (2000), and Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina (2001). The book is divided in two parts. The first part consists of three chapters (“Teorías y dimensiones de la memoria,” “Apropiación de la memoria colectiva en la novela,” and “La memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española”) that outline the author’s theoretical approach. The second part dedicates each of its six chapters to analysis of the novels. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire—the dependence of memory on concrete sites—Luengo regards these novels as “memory places” and their authors as bearers of collective memory, responsible for the transmission of historical knowledge (homo agens). Luengo demonstrates various means by which these novels appropriate the collective dimension of memory in order to reconstruct the fictionalized past of the Spanish Civil War. Her reading highlights the interface between individual memory and socially constructed, internalized collective memory. The novels are also analyzed within the context of the heightened scholarly attention to collective memory in literary, media, and cultural forms of 1990s Spain. The strength of Luengo’s book lies in her original choice of authors from diverse literary and political backgrounds, ranging from the leftist thinkers of the 1960s to journalists and philosophers of the post-Franco transition period, all of whom have achieved market success with their writings on the Spanish Civil War. Luengo further outlines five criteria used for selecting the six novels included in the study. (1) All the authors were born after the Spanish Civil War, from Azúa, born in 1944, to Cercas, in 1962. This choice emphasizes the transmission of collective memory rather than subjective memory, (auto)biographies, testimonial novel, or memoirs. (2) The novels are representative of a wide variety of geographical settings, some of which foreground the experience of exile: El jinete polaco in Andalusia; Cambio de bandera in the Basque country; La hija del Caníbal in Barcelona, Madrid, and Latin America; Cielos de barro in Extremadura; La caída de Madrid in Madrid; and Soldados de Salamina in northern Catalonia and France. (3) The works exemplify different genres: “Bildungsroman, novelas de memoria, policíacas, de supuesta investigación periodística” (103). (4) The characters have diverse ideological tendencies [End Page 280] on a diagetic level; they include anarchists, communists, Falangists, monarchists, and Basque nationalists. (5) All the novels are bestsellers, highly acclaimed by readers and the publishing industry, and they have been re-edited in Spain and translated into various other languages. Another merit of La encrucijada de la memoria is the author’s expert analysis of the historical and political contexts of the novels. Luengo shows that, while the previous generation of writers (in the Franco period) had often turned to the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression as a novelistic subject, the more recent engagement with Spanish history is a phenomenon stemming from the pacto de olvido forged during the Transition of the mid-1970s. Contemporary novels...