Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain

Abstract

Historiography in Francoist Spain (1939-75) sought to affirm the morally and historically correct role of the regime within the flow of Spanish history. As an important vehicle of dissidence, the novel of memory stands in sharp contrast to Francoist history: it explores the past largely eschewed or appropriated by the regime and contests the so-called truths that Franco shaped through the discourse of myth. This essay examines the role of subjective memory as a challenge to historiography and discloses the narrative strategies novelists used to counter the government's myths. Unlike Francoist historiography, the novel of memory lays out history as a series of disruptions and undermines the referential illusion of truth and wholeness in our understanding of the past.