Las huellas de la Guerra Civil: mito y trauma en la narrativa de la España democrática (review)

Abstract

MORENO-NUNO, CARMEN. Las huellas de la Guerra Civil: mito y trauma en la narrativa de la Espana democratica. Madrid: Libertarias, 2006. 429 pp.Carmen Moreno-Nuno's Huellas de la Guerra Civil is an elegantly composed and theoretically inflected study of decidedly Spanish preoccupations that cleaved Peninsular Hispanism in the wake of what we know of as the (unfortunately coined) recuperation of memory. These concerns involve, among other issues, the complex relationship between history and in which selfconstituted ideological communities are invested with the power to articulate conceptions of the past, and how the judicial and executive organisms of the Spanish state can address the losses and injustices suffered by all victims of the Spanish Civil War (and the Francoist dictatorship). The contours of the historical landscape have shifted significantly against the at times rhetorically violent agitation of disparate voices sounding from multiple directions, each insisting on its own version of what constitutes the epistemes of the past. It is thus inevitable that Moreno-Nuno's beautifully written study is buttressed by a sense of political urgency - now both complicated and attenuated - associated with the first few years of the Spanish twenty-first century. If the contextualization of her readings refers us back to the immediate aftermath of 2000, with the first nonclandestine exhumation of a mass grave, Moreno-Nuno's close readings stand the test of time.The book posits the notion that fictional incursions into the memory of the war and the postwar period correspond to one of two (or sometimes both) historicoaffective approaches to reconstructions of a disastrous recent past: trauma and myth. The author makes a convincing case that four novels and one short story participate in the recuperation of memory, in effect prefiguring, even propelling, the boom that would land ten to twenty years after the publication of the texts that form the subject of this study: El siglo (1983) by Javier Marias, El pianista (1985) by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Luna de lobos (1985) by Julio Llamazares, El jinete polaco (1991) by Antonio Munoz Molina, and the short story Ucronia (1994) by Manuel Talens. Moreno-Nuno has chosen these works, she explains, because in them we find a deconstruction oflos mecanismos falsificadores del mito a partir de la representacion del horror de la Historia. En estos relatos, la representacion del mito coexiste con una representacion del trauma. . . . Todos ellos subvierten los discuros mitologizadores acerca del pasado que predominan en la Espana democratica, sacando a la luz la falsedad que acompana a la instrumentalizacion politica del mito. (97)An exhaustive arsenal of theory on myth and trauma is put to work in the first two chapters of the book, although such painstakingly deliberated coverage of these themes is indicative of the main weakness of Huellas de la Guerra Civil: repetition and discursive padding that delays, frustratingly, the sensitive and sophisticated analyses of the primary texts.It is in chapter three where the author shows us how disassembled appendages of myth (in this case the triumphalist rhetoric employed to construct upstanding Francoist functionaries) are reconstructed in the service of trauma narrative. Here Moreno-Nuno discusses Javier Marias's long-neglected novel El siglo, an autobiographically inflected work that features a Francoist informer (delator) as its protagonist. Moreno-Nuno prefaces the chapter with an informative summary of Marias's literary and personal biography. She argues that Javier Marias - after an early rejection of the Spanish Civil War as a subject of literary interest for him and his literary cohort (what by way of Marianne Hirsch we have come to think of as the post-memorial generation of the Spanish Civil War) eventually comes to embrace the war as the leitmotif of his fiction. …