Lullabies and postmemory: hearing the ghosts of Spanish history in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006)

Abstract

This essay frames a close reading of how the lullaby (“Mercedes' Lullaby”) self-consciously shapes Pan's Labyrinth from a transnational, transhistorical perspective that searches for precedents in the political use of the lullaby genre. It will review several literary examples of how the lullaby format was used by political prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath of repression (José Hierro, Miguel Hernández), and it will also connect the uses of the lullaby, a “motherly” genre, with the “silent” political strategies employed successfully by the “Madres de la Plaza de Mayo” during Argentina's period of guerra sucia from the 1977s onward to “voice” dissent on a public space. It will analyze the role of the children's song “El país de Nomeacuerdo” in a film that also portrays this period in Argentine history, Luis Puenzo's La historia oficial (1985). I will argue that all these cultural manifestations are intertwined with the beatiful and brutal form of the lullaby, whose inherent characteristics allow for a soothing but also haunting regression to the ghosts of our historical past.