On the Archaeological Impulse in Contemporary Spanish Narrative Fiction

Abstract

The essay elaborates how Benjamín Prado's Mala gente que camina (2007) deploys an archaeological-historical methodology to uncover a largely unknown practice during Spain's postwar years: the removal of babies and children from Republican prisoners of war and their adoption by families sympathetic to Franco's regime. The novel, which forms part of an emerging sub-genre of self-reflexive historical fiction in which a first-person narrator, from the democratic present, investigates an episode of political violence occurring during the Civil War or the postwar, offers a metaphorical method of making buried history visible through a reflexive attention to the process of archival research. The essay concludes by theorizing how discourses of memory, the archive, and the use of archaeology as motif function together to comment on the ethical responsibility of the writer to engage with his or her political and cultural milieu. Through its reflexive narrative strategy and archival consciousness, Mala gente que camina reflects through fiction the democratic potential of a responsibly enacted archaeology of knowledge.