Modes of Remembering
Modes of Remembering in Contemporary Spanish Novel
From the late 1990s until around 2010, one of the most important topics of discussion and driving forces of cultural production within the public sphere of the Spanish state was the question of the so-called “recovery” of the historical memory of the Civil War and its subsequent repression under the Francoist dictatorship. While the key words for the political elites on both side of the political spectrum were “consensus” and “reconciliation”, the generation of the grandchildren of the oppressed Republican part of the population has since the turn of the millennium, set out to reclaim knowledge of the destiny of their ancestors, and strong popular movements have developed alongside the activities dedicated to the exhumation of mass graves and the identification of their human remains (Ferrándiz 2014, Molinero, Peinado Cano, Renshaw, Tamarit Sumalla).
Although some cultural products can be identified as related to public debate on the Francoist political repression as early as the 1980s and 1990s, the material exhumation of bodies and objects from the mass graves has “marked a clear step change in the scale and tone of the public debate on the Republican memory, moving it from the commitment of a few individual authors and commentators in the 1990s to a concerted memory campaign with grassroots participation” (Renshaw 26). In this process the public sphere divided in two: one part argued that closed graves meant open wounds; the other, politically inspired by the conservative Partido Popular, claimed that the opening of the graves would not only reopen scars that has now healed, but also recreate a confrontation between the “two Spains” (Ferrándiz 2008, 178-79).
This polarization of the public sphere in the historical memory debate had the effect of turning the very activities of producing or consuming these cultural products into what Sebastiaan Faber with a concept borrowed from Edward Said has labeled performative acts of “affiliation” (2014, 103; 2010, 142). According to Faber, memory activists need not be related genetically to the victims of the past in a “filiative relation” (Hirsch, 2014) in order to share the indignation over the way in which the sufferings of these victims has been treated. Quite to the contrary, producers and consumers of cultural products related to the topic of the Civil War and postwar repression necessarily engage with these products with a pronounced ethico-political intention. And the cultural products themselves often seek to tell the “forgotten” stories of the victims and their suffering, and to provide their individual stories with an exemplary status, i.e. in a manner that invites to establish a relation to the past, not merely as past, but as a guide to action in the present (Todorov, 31). The increased interest in the cultural memory of the Civil War and the postwar repression has propelled a boom in narrative fiction and docu-fiction, primarily novels and films, and which adequately has been named “the Spanish affiliative memory novel” (Hansen 2013a, 98).
Seen from the perspective of contemporary literary history, the topic is a compelling challenge: we have seen an authentic wave of novels dedicated to one specific topic within a very narrow time span, framed by a context of massive enrolment in popular movements, national as well as local, which are dedicated to the same topic. This focused and high-voltage literary engagement with troubled memories raises anew the question of form and function of the literary discourse, and invites further investigation of the relationship between the novels understood as a form of aesthetic–artistic discourse and their social commitment. The important challenge is therefore to ask whether it is possible to formally describe the intensive production of memory novels as belonging to a coherent sub-genre marking a new type of texts.
After a short presentation of the hypothesis, research questions and methodological reflections, this article will engage in the analysis of how narrative form is related to ethico-political stance in what I propose to name different modes of remembering. Taking into account that the intensified globalization processes increasingly penetrate national memory in the form of the influence of transnational memory discourses (Assmann & Conrad), I shall finally propose how the described modes of remembering might be comprehended within a framework of a globalizing memory culture.
Dialogues on Past and Present
According to the American social anthropologist James Wertsch collective memory consist of processes of communication or, as he calls it, “mediated action”: texts are produced, circulated, consumed and discussed in continuously ongoing social processes. Consequently, cultural memory is disputed or negotiated through dialogue in the public sphere (Wertsch 2002, 13 ff.; 2009, 119).
Theoretically, Wertsch takes his point of departure in Michael Bachtin’s concept of dialogism (1996) in the sense that the different social discourses, partake in the cultural remembering of the Civil War and the postwar repression. This means that the novels participate as individual voices in a dialogue with other social discourses such as political discourse, newspaper journalism or academic historiography about the specific character of the memory in question. And as stated by Sara Santamaría Colmenero, the contemporary memory novel in Spanish not only participates in a dialogue with the direct adversaries of the recuperation project, but also, and perhaps primarily, in an internal dialogue within the intellectual Left on the various cultural and political perspectives of this remembering (Santamaría Colmenero, 18).
The topics of this dialogue are many, but one of the fundamental issues is concerned with the question of reconciliation. Is it possible to argue, at one and the same time, both in favor of the opening of the repressed memory of the losing Republican side and in favor of social and political reconciliation? The answer to this question depends to a large extent on the way in which the Spanish transition-to-democracy process is interpreted, and on whether and to what extent the existing political regime can be considered as legitimate and democratic. The contemporary Spanish novel is involved in this discussion, and some of the important collateral questions to ask will be which relation the texts establish between past and present, how they imagine the future, how they evaluate the transition process, and whether and in which sense they argue in favor of reconciliation between the polarized parties of the conflict (Molinero; Canales Ciudad; Yeste).
State of art and the concept of mode
The contributions to the study of the Spanish memory novel published within the last 20–25 years are many (Luengo; Moreno-Nuño; Schouten; Corredera González; Colmeiro), but none of them has made a profound description of the changes occurring in the formal development of the narrative register since the turn of the millennium. This, on the other hand, has been provided by the Memoria Novelada project, according to which the affiliative post-2000 memory novel typically is a means of postmemory or intergenerational memory, in the sense that it is the grandchildren of the victims who write and read these novels (Hansen and Cruz Suárez, 30). The texts are characterized by a strong hybridization of genres in an artistically elaborated discourse which blurs the distinctions between essay, biography and/or autobiography, historiographical discourse, journalism, and novelistic fiction, and in which docu-fiction, auto-fiction and meta-fictional comments are combined (Hansen 2012). While the pre-2000 memory novels dedicated to the theme of the Civil War were typically written as a mimesis of the processes of individual remembering, many of the novels of the new millennium engage in a description of the social processes that contribute to the construction of the cultural memory (Hansen 2013a). The plotline is often divided into two temporal parts, the world of the past and the world of the present from which the world of the past is told (Hansen 2013b); and an important number of novels engage in the deconstruction of the narrative template of the Two Spains (Hansen 2014) through the application of multi-perspectivist enunciation and focalization of the represented story (Hansen 2011).
These characteristics, however, are not sufficiently stable to claim the existence of a genuine and clear-cut sub-genre; rather, they seem to alternate and combine in different and ever-changing patterns. The question I would like to pursue in this article is therefore whether it is possible to establish a paradigm of analytical criteria related both to the text’s form and to its ethico-political position: a paradigm that would allow us to distinguish between different sub-sub-genres and to make a system out of the apparent variations in the use of the listed characteristics. The criteria of analysis that I would like to propose are composed of two different modal paradigms:
1. Narrative modes. It is my hypothesis that the narrative modes originally proposed by Astrid Erll (158 ff.) and subsequently modified to fit to a Spanish context by Elina Liikanen (43-53) might serve as the first set of analytical tools.
2. Ethico-political modes. It is my hypothesis that the way in which the novels approach the question of the relation between the past (the Civil War and the Francoist regime), the present democracy (resulting from the transition process) and the future (as an imagined and possibly utopian scenario) reveals the novel’s ethico-political position, in which questions of guilt and redemption, heroic action and betrayal, revenge and reconciliation, etc., are negotiated.
A more simplistic combination of the two paradigms, making a particular narrative mode the equivalent of a particular ethico-political stance, has previously been suggested (Hansen 2013a, 99-102). It seems more adequate, though, to represent the two modes as separate parameters in a sort of matrix system in which each of the combinations of a narrative and an ethico-political mode will be considered a second order mode of remembering. In what follows I will examine the two paradigms more closely and provide examples of novels characteristic of each of the described modes.[i]
The narrative modes
Elina Liikanen suggests a distinction between three different narrative modes in the contemporary Spanish memory novel: the experiential, the reconstructive, and the challenging modes[ii] (Liikanen). The experiential mode takes its point of departure in the mode of the same name in Erll’s theory, but whereas Erll’s experiential concept refers to a mode of narrating located within in the communicative memory (i.e. representing the past as a lived-through testimony of the victim or the witness in the voice of a first person), Liikanen’s concept makes reference to a story that represents the world of the past in mimetic form, inviting the reader to share the characters’ subjective experiences of past events (45), and as an example she mentions Dientes de leche (Martínez de Pisón). In most cases the narrator is an omniscient and impersonal third person narrator although an epistolary novel like Cartas desde la ausencia (Riverola) could be mentioned as an exception.
I find Liikanen’s description of the narrative mode precise and relevant in view of the large number of novels that conform to it, but I find the difference in interpretation of the concept between Erll and Liikanen unfortunate. For my part, I have therefore chosen to name this mode the “mimetic” mode. The novels of this mode limit themselves to making a mimetic or realistic representation of a possible world of the past told by a first person or a third-person narrator, while the narrator’s act of telling mainly is left out of the description. Understood in this way, novels like Inés y la alegría (Grandes), La noche de los tiempos de (Muñoz Molina) and La caída de Madrid (Chirbes) might be considered representatives of this mode of telling.
Elina Liikanen’s second narrative mode, “the reconstructive mode,” refers to novels that include reflections regarding the very process of telling the past in the present. Therefore the plot is divided into two temporal parts – the past as told, and the present of telling – and in this sense the narrative structure of the mode resembles the temporal division in the historiographical meta-fiction, as described by Linda Hutcheon (Hutcheon). The novels are narrated or focalized by a protagonist or protagonist–narrator who typically stumbles upon something mysterious, some kind of riddle from the past, and engages in a quest to find out what really happened. The protagonist’s quest drives the plot structure of events in the present through suspense, like a detective story, and the reflections upon the various obstacles that surface during the process of investigation take the form of meta-fictional comments on the story of the past (Martínez Rubio, 79). According to Liikanen, the majority of the novels consider these problems to be of a practical character and, hence, the novels do not contain profound or critical reflections on the adequate aesthetic form in relation to the representation of the ethical and/or political problems raised by the plot. The texts present the past as a social construct, and invite the reader to engage with the dynamics of personal and collective memory by adopting this construct as an element of his or her cultural memory (Liikanen, 49). Liikanen’s examples of this mode are Mala gente que camina (Prado), Soldados de Salamina (Cercas), Los rojos de ultramar (Soler) and El corazón helado (Grandes).
Liikanen’s reconstructive mode is also highly relevant, if only because of the very large number of novels that follow this narrative scheme, but it also poses serious problems. For one thing, the concept of “reconstruction” carries certain primordial connotations of a historical truth that it is the narrator’s task to rescue or reconstrue, which is opposed to the constructivist notion of history alluded to by Liikanen herself. I have therefore proposed to label it the “representative” mode, because this mode, contrary to the mimetic mode, does include reflections upon the processes concerned with the act of representing: i.e., producing, narrating and communicating stories –real as well as fictional – about the past. Secondly, Liikanen has probably been inspired by Erll’s description of the reflexive mode; but whereas Erll’s reflexive mode implies a more genuine second-order reflection on the processes of representation, Liikanen seems to underscore the superficial and practical aspects of the meta-narrative comments in her description and makes this difference one of the decisive distinctions between this and her third mode. I am not convinced of the appropriateness of the criteria of greater or lesser depth of meta-fictional reflections as a parameter of distinction between one and another mode of narration, and would rather suggest that the mere division of the plot into two intertwined chronotopes, and the specific character of the relation between them, should be considered the decisive feature of the mode. The specific relationship between the two partial chronotopes is dialectic or - following Bachtin’s terminology - dialogical, because if the chronotope of the present is concerned with the construction of the past chronotope, the past chronotope to some extent is determining the narrator-protagonist’s understanding of his own world and his interpretation of his position within it. To Liikanen’s list of examples I would add Tiempo de memoria by Carlos Fonseca (Fonseca).