La memoria transgeneracional : Presencia y persistencia de la guerra civil en la narrativa española contemporánea

Abstract

A substantial number of literary works elaborated and published in contemporary Spain features the memory of the Spanish Civil War and successive Francoist dictatorship as a recurring topic within its plots. Brought forward by authors who are unable to resort to a biographical connection with the events they tell about, this kind of narrative tackles the literary explicitation of painful events which still appear to retain a traumatic and conflictive nature. This thesis aims at investigating the features through which the memory of the 1936-1939 conflict is still reflected in peninsular narrative written by the second and third generation. The main focus of the research therein presented is to define the modalities, strategies and main objectives intrinsic in transgenerational representation of the war and its mnemonic consequences, with a specific interest for the notion of inherited historical trauma, interacting with the suggestions coming from the socio-political debate taking place in Spain in the last two decades. In the first place, this work discusses the blurred notion of ‘memory’ from a semiotic and multidisciplinary perspective, specifically focusing on the controversial concept of ‘historical memory’ and attempting a multifaceted definition through the convergence of neurological, psychoanalytic, sociological and historical considerations. It then approaches the memory of the conflict as a diachronically differentiated emotional evolution, focusing on the diverse dominant discourses which, throughout the past seventy-five years, have recreated their own version of the war from its conclusion to present days (in particular , Francoism, the transitional period and the democratic state). The central core of the argument proposed in my work is a series of considerations related to the mnemonic persistence of the conflict in contemporary fiction, along with a specific interest for the generational factor (to address which reference has been made to Marianne Hirsch’s theories on postmemory); the influence of the market and the ‘hauntological’ motif in the recent super-production of mnemo-conscious fiction; the review of the main formal labels currently applied to the corpus which has been analyzed; the peculiar representational scheme of ‘the past seen from the present’; and, lastly, the fictionalization of violence. The work is completed by a specific commentary on four novels which have been judged particularly exemplificative, i.e. La voz dormida by Dulce Chacon (2002); iOtra maldita novela sobre la guerra civil! by Isaac Rosa (2007); El corazon helado by Almudena grandes (2007) and Ayer no mas by Andres Trapiello (2012).