Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137379948
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This innovative book examines the emergence of a memory discourse in Spain since the millennium, taking as its point of departure recent grave exhumations and the "Law of Historical Memory." Through an analysis of exhumation photography, novels, films, television, and comics, the volume overturns the notion that Spanish history is pathological.

C H A P T E R 1

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Pathologies of the Past: Spain’s “Belated” Memory Debates

Spain’s current memory debates are arguably rather belated, and not simply because for many their appearance in public discourse has been tardy. If we take the notion of “belatedness” in a Freudian sense, as designating the manner in which the past is always already interpreted,¹ then Civil War memory in Spain is at least triply belated. Interpreted according to Regime dictates during the Francoist period, and reinterpreted according to the new memory horizon of the Transition to democracy, it has, since roughly the turn of the millennium, been undergoing a further revision that has aroused heated disputes in the political, civic, and academic arenas. The palimpsestic nature of Spain’s memory horizon testifies to shifting generational perspectives both on the past and on its significance for the present.

Nevertheless, there are dimensions of Spain’s memory debates that suggest a pathological relationship to the past. Replicating in some respects the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century metaphor of the nation as “ill,” a notion that also underpinned the military golpe de estado in 1936, they have frequently centered on the question of to what extent Spain may be afflicted by amnesia, a disease causing a deficit of memory. It has become a cliché to say that the Civil War was somehow elided from memory during the latter years of the dictatorship, and that it remained so, for different reasons, in the period of the Transition to democracy. The reality was more complex: the legitimacy of the Franco Regime derived directly from the Nationalist victory declared on April 1, 1939, and, despite the fact that celebrations of that victory altered gradually over the course of the Regime, the war remained a fundamental point of reference—sometimes explicit, sometimes unspoken—up to the dictator’s death.² Likewise, fears of a return to conflict and turmoil arguably determined the pragmatic approach to the past that has become known as the pacto de olvido of the Transition era. Yet, the notion of an amnesia afflicting all or part of the civic and body politic, which is not exclusive to Spain but is a frequent idea in cases of silenced or improperly recognized traumatic pasts, has led to the spilling of much academic ink regarding the status of memories that were frequently officially silenced yet all-determining. A word play on amnesia and amnistía has often been used to signal this unhealthy political and moral relationship to the past, bringing together the silencing of public memory with the judicial pardoning of those guilty of historical atrocities. Santos Juliá attempted to resolve the matter by arguing that the pacto de olvido of the Transition constituted a process of deliberate putting to one side of the past, what he called “echar al olvido.”³ Nevertheless, as Mark Osiel notes, such word play between “amnesia” and “amnesty” is ultimately the result of a category mistake in which the legal issue of amnesty is conflated with the epistemological issue of recognition, this being evidence, in his words, of a “belletristic sensibility at its most confused.”⁴

It is not my intention, in pointing to the pathological dimensions of such memory debates, to disqualify all discussions of memory as manifestations of some form of political, social, cultural, or ethical sickness. On the contrary, in this volume, I seek to highlight those civic discourses and cultural representations that explore the past with a view to, if not entirely mastering it, then at least acknowledging it in a manner that does not succumb to the stultifying effects of trauma. In this sense, I wish to move beyond any notion of the “belatedness” of Spain’s memory debates, and to posit the emergence of a body of thought in which the past is taken on board reflexively, as part of a future-oriented vision. In this view, the old binaries of amnesia and amnesty, of forgetting and remembering, are themselves pushed aside—Juliá’s echar al olvido applied to itself—in favor of a more nuanced view of the social and cultural workings of memory. This perspective is fully cognizant of the emergence, since the turn of the millennium, of a new memory paradigm centered on images of ruined bodies and ruptured genealogies, and it has been articulated most forcefully as a fundamental breach of human rights—which is exactly what the massive bloodletting on Spanish soil, and the accompanying repressive apparatus of the dictatorial Regime, meant for generations of Spaniards.⁵

It is difficult to date precisely the beginnings of Spain’s current memory debates. For Teresa Vilarós, they can be traced to 1992,⁶ a year that uncannily juxtaposed the centenary of the birth of Franco,⁷ and the quincentennial anniversaries of the “discovery” of America and the expulsion of the Jews from the Peninsula. This latter anniversary cast an unexpectedly dark shadow over the commemorations of the establishment of transatlantic Hispanic links, and was taken by some to be symptomatic of a country afflicted by the historical amnesia mentioned earlier.⁸ For others, nevertheless, 1992 confirmed Spain’s place in the Western democratic mainstream with the staging of the Olympic Games in Barcelona, the World Fair in Seville, and Madrid’s designation as European Capital of Culture.⁹ As Davis notes, in the mid-1990s, books and press articles did begin to tackle themes from the war and dictatorship,¹⁰ but it is clear that, since approximately 2000, popular and civic discourses on the legacies of the war and dictatorship have entered a new phase, emblematic of a changed paradigm in memory studies. These are discourses on the past that are shot through with the idiom of international human rights, as well as with borrowings from other historical memory debates, notably from Latin America and Germany. From this perspective, Spain has recently begun to construct not only a new moral social contract, via the upsurge of memory debates, but also a domestic legal framework for dealing explicitly with the violence of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. This has been given formal expression in the popularly named 2007 “Ley de Memoria Histórica,” promulgated by the Zapatero government, although it is worth noting that the term “memoria histórica” is not actually used in the official title of the legislation. The law refers, instead, to “quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la Dictadura,”¹¹ thus avoiding the problematic identification of “víctimas” as well as the arguably more problematic notion of a “recuperación de la memoria histórica,” a phrase propelled to public consciousness by the name of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), one civic group pushing for the exhumation of mass and unmarked graves from the Civil War era. The notion of a “recuperation” of memory is highly descriptive of the work of the ARMH, which has focused on disinterring the bodies of individuals denied a proper burial and left in pits and graves strewn across the Spanish countryside; it also appropriately expresses the movement’s desire to give public voice to the silenced stories of those who still recall the war before they pass away.¹²

Nonetheless, both “recuperación” and “memoria histórica” are problematic notions when lifted from this very specific context and taken as umbrella terms for civic debates and cultural memories of the war and dictatorship. The notion of recuperation establishes yet another unproductive binary—between concealed and revealed memories—that elsewhere, in discussing theories of cultural memory, I have tried to overcome in stressing memorial practices, performances, and pluralist debates rather than fixed positions or static memory horizons.¹³ The current Spanish designation of the country’s ongoing memory debates as a form of recuperation of the past unfortunately implies a simple process of recovery, enacted without difficulty or distortion, whereas collective and cultural memory is generally understood as a mutual and ongoing interaction between history and the present that tells as much about the present moment of interpretation as it does about the past. Furthermore, historical memory is only one potential aspect of the contemporary Spanish debate, and it is too restrictive. Maurice Halbwachs, as Lewis Coser notes, viewed historical memory as divergent from autobiographical memory, in that it was only indirectly available to social actors via documents and commemorative activities.¹⁴ The adjective “historical,” moreover, seems to point to the professions of the historian and archivist, and leads attention away from the dynamics of the shifting, conflicting, and at times biased perspectives that make up the constellations of cultural memory.¹⁵

In current Spanish memory debates, one of the crucial filters for the contextualization of memory—a filter often downplayed in analyses—is the period of the transition to democracy. An additional issue relates to the legitimacy and effectiveness of the democracy then established, as if democracy were some sort of finite object rather than an ongoing political process. The implicit pacto de olvido that characterized the political negotiations in the mid-1970s, and the related amnesia permitting an unjust amnesty, has been cited as evidence of the limitations of Spanish democracy, which is found wanting precisely in its attitude toward those who suffered at the hands of the Nationalists during the Civil War and the Franco Regime. Spain, it is true, did not confront the question of transitional justice during the Transition period; for some, this calls into question the depth and solidity of her democracy. From such a perspective, the 2007 “Ley de Memoria Histórica” can be interpreted as an indirect effort to revisit the amnesty legislation of the Transition period, which is now considered by some to be at best inappropriate and by others to constitute an evasion of moral culpability. But what is actually at stake in such debates is the nature of the pacted transition itself. Since the appearance of these new memory debates can be dated to roughly the turn of the millennium and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Franco, it is perhaps not surprising that they frequently also involve a reassessment of the Transition, the last point when the legacies of the war and dictatorship were necessarily to the fore in public and political discourse.¹⁶

Two significant popular books on Spanish war memory, Armengou and Belis’s Las fosas del silencio and Silva and Macías’s Las fosas de Franco, link the call for a more inclusive memory horizon with critiques of Spain’s transition to democracy. The former authors end their book with an explicit rejection of Spain’s Transition as exemplary, calling Spanish democracy “incompleta,”¹⁷ although they do recognize that the Transition should not be rejected wholesale, but rather its limitations exposed. For instance, Emilio Silva, cofounder of the ARMH, stresses the break on tentative moves to dig up Spain’s past that resulted from fears of instability following the 1981 coup attempt, noting that there were some exhumations of common graves just prior to these events, in 1979–1980.¹⁸ Both volumes attribute the failings of the Transition to the weakness of the political left at the time, arguing that the establishment of democracy was controlled from above by the political right and that the key betrayal of the victims of the war and Regime occurred with the amnesty legislation of the late seventies.¹⁹

The salient feature of Spain’s transition to democracy is that change was effected from within the Regime, “de ley a ley” in the famous phrase of Fernández Miranda, one of King Juan Carlos’s closest advisors of the period.²⁰ There was no political or legal rupture, no binary of before and after, then and now, and, hence, no legislative void resulting from an explicit overthrow of the political structures of the dictatorship. The Francoist Cortes voted itself out of existence, committing hara kiri as many have put it. The reasons for this gradual reform, which deliberately set out to avoid a complete break with the past, have been widely agreed upon by historians: the Spanish military and the Francoist “bunker” were significant limiting factors on any radical change, and the attempted military coup by Colonel Tejero in 1981 is generally seen as evidence of the military’s lukewarm, if not downright suspicious attitude toward democratization. Adolfo Suárez’s caution in moving toward political pluralism confirms the care with which political actors had to proceed at the time: in April 1977, he legalized political opposition, but excluded the Spanish Communist Party, the PCE, from the measure; he later took advantage of a right-wing terrorist attack on Communist lawyers (the so-called Atocha killings) to legalize the PCE on Easter Saturday 1977, when the political class was on holiday. The consequences of this slow “ruptura pactada,” as it has paradoxically come to be known, were that aspects of transitional justice were not—indeed, could not—be tackled at the time. Spain’s belated memory debates are, then, in large measure a result of the political limitations faced by Suárez and other political actors in 1975–1978. Any assessment of the Transition’s failings must take that potentially volatile and violent context into account,²¹ as should critics complaining that the left-wing opposition at the time was weak and let the Regime “off the hook.” Paul Preston notes the dilemma faced by left-wing sympathizers in Spain at the time:

The terrorist outrages of early 1977 inclined the left to moderate its aspirations. Hopes of significant social change were shelved in order that the urgent immediate goal of political democracy might be secured. The exuberance, joy and sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Embodying Memory in Spain
• 1   Pathologies of the Past: Spain’s “Belated” Memory Debates
• 2   Embodied Memory and Human Rights: The New Idioms of Spain’s Memory Debates
• 3   Disrupted Genealogies and Generational Conflicts: Postmemorial Family Narratives
• 4   Ghostly Embodiments: Enchanted and Disenchanted Childhoods
• 5   Heroism and Affect: From Narratives of Mourning to Multidirectional Memories
• Conclusion   Memory and the Future: Beyond Pathology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index