La Historia en clave emocional en Inés y la alegría de Almudena Grandes

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Isabel Burdiel (2015) points out that since the realism of the 19th century – the genre which inspired Almudena Grandes for her ambitious narrative project Episodios de una guerra interminable – there has been a constant exchange of narrative goals, interests and strategies between historic and novelistic discourse. Our aim within the present paper it is to ask ourselves about the significance of the cultural representations of emotions within her literary discourse, in this case, linked to the concept of community, as well as the implications that such a confluence has within the fictional recreation of some aspects of Spain’s recent past, taking Ines y la alegria as an example. If it is true, as some historians state, that the rules that regulate emotions constitute social differences, and therefore, are a key aspect for explaining historical change, it seems that some of the time, works of fiction try to explain complex historical processes based on, not only individual, but also collective, emotional changes. According to Grandes’s social worldview, an individual’s sense of fulfilment only seems possible within the framework of a community that provides support and solidarity networks. In this sense, we can link her novel in an indirect way with the emergence during recent years – as Jo Labanyi (2016) states – of “communal options that reject market-oriented logic. A pattern of thought which prioritizes the relation and not the individual”.