Narrating the Past

Narrating the past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar SpainAuthor(s): David K. HerzbergerReviewed work(s):Source: PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 34-45Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462821 .Accessed: 27/04/2012 09:57

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DavidK. Herzberger

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

DAVID K. HERZBERGER is

professor of Spanish and com-

parative literature at the

University of Connecticut,

Storrs. He is the author of two

books, The Novelistic World of Juan Benet (American Hispan-

ist, 1976) and Jesus Fernandez

Santos (Hall, 1983). His arti-

cles have appeared in Hispanic

Review, MLN, Journal of Aes- thetics and Art Criticism, Revista canadiense de estudios

hispanicos, Symposium, and elsewhere. The article published here is part of a larger

project on the relation between

historiography and fiction in

Francoist Spain.

Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery.

W. C. Williams, Paterson

HE NARRATION of time is a crucial determinant in the writing of both fiction and history in post-Civil War

Spain. It not only impinges on the way the present is bound to the past within the scheme of cause and effect but serves as well to show how truth and meaning relate to a discourse that urges the reader always to discern the temporal landscape beyond the text's internal configu- rations. For the writing of history, the contingencies of truth and meaning are profoundly unsettling in this period.' I do not mean this in a positive sense-that a cogent and restorative debate compelled the Franco regime to question either its significance or its authenticity within the flow of Spanish history. Unsettling here alludes to the ten- sions of narrative paradox. On the one hand, it suggests the absence of choices and alternatives in framing history within a discourse that narrowly construes truth. On the other, it insinuates the virtual capacity of discourse to deepen the resonances of dissent and to open narration to difference, not as a construct of reference, but within narrative structure and time. Matters of truth, meaning, and time (and, in this instance, the correlative issue of intellectual dissonance) are implicitly held up to scrutiny in all narrations. In Francoist Spain, however, they stand resolutely at the core of discourse and inhere critically in the authority asserted over the past by historians of the state. The full diversity of the past is therefore either expanded or constricted into particular types of narrative structures. Both prose fiction and historiography lay claim to the process of revealing the past in postwar Spain,

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David K. Herzberger

but their way of knowing history is contentious and contestatory, not only in intention but also in performance and experience.2

This essay focuses primarily on the way that one type of narration, the novel of memory, explores history and makes it discernible. By the novel of memory I mean, in the largest sense, those fictions that evoke past time through subjective remembering, most often through first-person narration.3 The past that each examines (the external referent of the text) is the past largely eschewed or ap- propriated by historiography under Franco, the lived past of the Civil War and the strains of dissent that anticipated the conflict and persisted in its aftermath. I am not concerned, however, with the specific content of these novels (i.e., I am not trying to get at the so-called facts of the matter as they may or may not have occurred in the real world). My aim instead is to disclose certain narrative strategies, as well as the conception of writing history these strategies convey, in order to reveal the imbrications of truth and meaning that lie at the heart of much prose fiction in Spain from the early 1960s to the present.

Historiography during the first two decades of the Franco era was largely intended to affirm the regime's morally correct role within Spanish history.4 The government therefore used strategies both to suppress and to engender the past, that is, to arrest dissonance in the discourse of history as well as to assert continuity between the glories of an imperial Catholic Spain and the illustrious present of the Franco era. Franco himself frequently linked his regime to the birth of Spain (e.g., "Para que la Historia de Espana no se tuerza- Historia de Espafia que es tambien la vuestra [del pueblo]-es necesario que continuemos fieles a aquel espiritu que ilumin6 el despertar de Espafia" 'In order that the History of Spain not become distorted-History of Spain that is also yours [the people's]--it is necessary for us to remain loyal to that spirit which illuminated the awakening of Spain' [96-97]5), and the historiographers insisted that a diversity of discourses on the past would compel the dehiscence of all that was held noble and authentic. Thus when a historian such as Rafael Calvo Serer writes, "No puede vacilarse en la repulsa de aquellos elementos que se hagan a si mismos inasimilables para la tradici6n unitaria na-

cional y ortodoxa" 'One cannot hesitate to reject those elements that make themselves unassimila- ble within the national and orthodox unifying tra- dition' (Diaz 72-73) or when Florentino Perez Embid affirms that diversity in evoking the past threatens "el sentido permanente de la historia [de Espafia]" 'the permanent meaning of the history [of Spain]' (149), the agenda of the government plainly crystallizes in the consequences of the official discourse: the rule of Franco has a firm hold not only on history but also on the truth of that history.

Certainly many of the "truths" of Francoist historiography have been denounced and sub- verted since the end of his regime, and recent historians in Spain have become aware that all historiographic assumptions are tenuous. But during the first two and a half decades of Franco's rule the state historians' pattern of writing and the structures of narration embedded in their discourse were largely mythic.6 The concept of myth that is crucial to Francoist historiography refers to the exaltation of the static, to the adherence to a pattern of discourse that eschews equivocation and ennobles all that is fixed and unvaried (see Barthes's Mythologies for a discussion of this concept). Myth embodies Perez Embid's "sentido permanente de la historia" and Calvo Serer's "tradici6n unitaria nacional y ortodoxa." It functions both to coerce belief and to compel silence in the laying out of history, and its overriding power for the state stems from the intransigence of tautology: its truths are a matter not of confir- mation but of affirmation; it turns not on the in- trusion of external facts but on the self-verifying immediacy of its own narrative structure. Myth in the hands of the regime is epic in scope and heroic in value. As Franco himself insists,

Nuestra victoria fue el triunfo de Espafia contra la anti-Espafia, la heroica reconquista de una Patria que se precipitaba por la pendiente rapida de su destruc- ci6n. Por ello, nuestra victoria fue y es para todos los hombres y las clases de Espafia. (21)

Our victory was the triumph of Spain against the anti- Spain, the heroic reconquest of the Fatherland that was moving headlong down the path of destruction. Therefore, our victory was and is for all men and for all classes of Spain.7

35

History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain

Such thinking sets Franco squarely in the line of "La Espana eterna" and legitimates the regime's rhetorical agenda, which is neatly compressed into the lapidary dictum "One Spain, one race, one religion." In short, the mythical conception of history serves as the founding matrix for historiography during at least twenty-five years of the Franco era, and its discourse of closure bears directly on the openly dissentious narration of history in the novel of memory.

One of the most intriguing forms of dissent from the history propagated by the state was shaped by a group of Spanish novelists who published their first important works during the early 1950s-among others, Juan Goytisolo, Luis Goy- tisolo, Jesus Fernandez Santos, Carmen Martin Gaite, and Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio.8 Their social- realistic fiction stands as the dominant narrative force in Spain from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s and reflects a small but compelling cluster of literary canons: the belief that objective reality is available to the writer and translatable into a story; the perceived coincidence between the sign and its referent; the assertion that to narrate life is to re-present it in the whole of its authenticity; the faith that literary engagement can transform the world into something other than it is. Of course, not all Spanish novelists of this period adhered to the ideas of social realism, but the writers who did inscribed its precepts rigorously in their novels.9

Yet these novelists' dissent from history has something paradoxical about it. The paradox is not that dissent should spring from writers of fictions but that it inheres in narratives that focus ex- clusively on the present. The paradox is easily set straight, however, if we pursue the larger field of intention (i.e., what the novelists meant to reveal and transform) and context (the implicit dialogue that social realism maintains with temporal causality and historical narration). Since the domain of the past had become the exclusive (and ex- clusionary) enterprise of the state under Franco, and since writers could not directly contest the official version of that domain by narrating the past, social realists set about depicting the full scope of the real in the present. On the one hand, their novels convey a reality that is less discursive than experiential (i.e., it is "lived" life written into

discourse, rather than discourse reframed in another discourse) and thus less overtly vulnerable to corruption by other narrations. On the other hand, the causal arguments in these novels imply a past necessarily divergent from the one trum- peted by the historiography of the state. While Francoist historians sought to expurgate the contingencies of dissonance with a mythic historiography, the social realists contested the state's myths by creating a mythic discourse in reverse: their novels portray a specific present that suggests a specific past. Indeed, instead of implying the en- nobling continuity of an epic past, this fiction calls forth the bathos of the mock epic. Rather than en- noble the individual, the social realists esteem the virtues of the collective, and rather than deify the heroic, they celebrate the mundane and quotidian. In this way social realism places itself in what Paul Ricoeur in another context calls the "sphere of the horrible" (3: 188-89)-the countermyths of pov- erty, isolation, alienation, and the like that the state sets out not only to forget but to annul.

The novels of social realism do not, however, co- opt or manipulate the historical within a dissident narrative structure but, rather, convey the sense that history is received in an eternal and unvariable story that conforms to life itself. 0 Like historians of the regime, the social realists assume that lin- guistic existence is merely a copy of another existence outside language, which we commonly call the real. Such thinking, of course, affirms that the pure and direct relation of facts is simply a matter of getting things straight. And getting things straight, in turn, is coequal to affirming truth. Narration thus becomes for the social realists both sign and proof of reality, a mechanism enabling history to tell itself.

With the referential illusion firmly embedded in its narrative, social realism at once opens itself to the world and closes itself to the contingencies of its own storytelling. It urges a kind of necessity and certitude in what it relates (i.e., it imitates the actual) and thereby converts the real into a series of essences by reciprocally asserting both its own truth-value and the value of its truth. Within this scheme any particular myth (e.g., that Francoist values embody the values of Spain's Catholic past or that the Spanish people are the chosen of God) may be countered or neutralized by a divergent

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David K. Herzberger

myth (e.g., that the young bourgeois are bored or that the rural peasants are isolated and poor), but the mythic foundations of both discourses are bound up by the same narrative assumptions. The purpose of myth, as Barthes suggests, is "to immo- bilize the world" (Mythologies 155). Myth establishes the structure within which human beings must envisage their possibilities, and it advances a hierarchy of values and meanings within that structure. Thus it forecloses the possibility of change and affirms the constancy of its truth based on what it contends is the solid terrain of the real. There is a prevailing irony here, of course, since mythic discourse actually deprives things of their historic quality by denying origin and open- ness and emptying reality of happenstance. Like a parent responding to a child's persistent ques- tioning, myth says forcefully that things are as they are because that's how they are (Barthes, Mythol- ogies 153).

What the historiographic discourse of the regime achieved by mythifying the past in the sphere of the admirable, and what the social realists grafted on the past through mythic counterpoint in Ricoeur's sphere of the horrible, is eroded and dispersed in the novels of memory during the 1960s and 1970s. Though by no means single- voiced in its propositions or tied to a precise set of literary canons, the novel of memory portrays the individual self (most frequently, but not exclu- sively, through first-person narration) seeking definition by commingling the past and present in the process of remembering. This process may be ac- tivated either voluntarily or involuntarily, but it turns consistently on a bimodal correlation: the self in search of definition; the definition of self perceived always within the flow of history. His- tory is thus preeminent in these novels: it places the individual in "real" time and serves as the backdrop against which characters are revealed, ideas conveyed, and beliefs posited or disaffirmed. While any of these functions may be played out in the novel of memory, history emerges most resonantly as what Hayden White terms "the content of the form." It is offered both as a conse- quence of memory and as the originator of memory; it gives meaning to the narrative and shapes that meaning. Above all, however, history occupies the narration in a way that subverts the

structured tautness of mythic discourse and advances in its place the contingencies of time and meaning. Though clearly sharing social realism's opposition to the historiography of Franco's regime, the novel of memory differs from social- realistic fiction in stripping history of its structured oneness, of its mythical enactment of progression, and, most important, of discourse that prohibits dissent in the narrative capturing of the past.

Prose fiction (and art in general, as Gadamer shows in Truth and Method) mediates by self- assertion rather than by self-effacement. This is especially true of the novel of memory, but in an ironic sense, since what is asserted is the impossi- bility of narrative assertion. On the one hand, the novel of memory reveals (and asserts) the deter- minants of its own form, and thus lays bare the contingencies of narration as a way of knowing the past. On the other hand, the novel of memory is self-effacing in the content of its form, in what it proposes about the discourse of history. In contrast to the single-voiced discourse of myth that shapes social realism and Francoist historiography and asserts authority over the real (i.e., truth) and the meaning of the real, the novel of memory offers a different claim on history and historical truths. Propositional rather than assertive, this claim recognizes that to know the historical is to mediate and to narrate it with the voice of a subject in the present who is also positioned within history. If one of the proclaimed truths of our existence is that "being" means always being in time, it is a derivative but no less cogent conclusion that we are also in history-we belong to history. As Dilthey suggests, the only way to be objective about history is not to objectify it, not to devise a subject-object dualism that plays out the myths of a univocal epistemology. l Thus in a novel such as Juan Benet's Una meditacion the whole notion of creating a self is tied up with the narrator's ur- gency to find his place in time and history. Change is perceived as both virtual and real within the meditations of the narrating self. In the same fash- ion that Faulkner portrays post-Civil War society in Sartoris as "silent, sickly desolate of motion or any sound" (7), Benet's narrator establishes the diseased-body metaphor as the foundation of stasis:

37


Si el espiritu de postguerra fue o quiso ser una con- valecencia pronto se habia de convertir en un nuevo mal que. . . se hizo endemico como vino a demos- trar ... el resultado que obro sobre aquel cuerpo enfermo y mutilado por la guerra el conjunto de nu- merosas, horrendas y paralizantes medicinas que le fueron suministradas en la paz que sigui6. (88)

If the postwar spirit was or wanted to be a convales- cence, it was soon to be converted into a new illness that . . . became endemic ... as was later shown in the result that worked on that body, sick and mutilated by the war, by the collection of numerous horrendous and paralyzing medicines that were ad- ministered to it in the peace that followed.12 (97)

This notion of stasis is especially relevant to the writing of history, for it points to the paradoxical content of the narrative form. While Spanish history itself may appear mired in paralysis, Benet's prescription for narrating that paralysis is resolutely open and subjective. His rhetoric of ambiguity is rooted in what Robert Spires calls the "poetics of open spaces," which implies, for memory and history, a concrescence of a self and the past within a narration that actively controverts the closure of myth. In El angel del Senor abandona a Tobi'as Benet asserts that "solo la am- bigiiedad tiene capacidad para hacer historia" 'only ambiguity has the capacity to make history' (56), and he affirms this principle throughout his fiction. As the narrator proclaims in Benet's He- rrumbrosas lanzas, "En definitiva, el veredicto final acerca de un hecho asi, tan controvertido, no se halla ni se hallara en ninguna parte porque para cada momento la historia tiene muchas explica- ciones" 'Most definitely, the final verdict concern- ing such a controverted fact is not found and will not be found anywhere, because for each moment history has many explanations' (123). The chal- lenge for the novelist of memory, then, is not only to recover the past by setting narrative over and against the historiographic myths of Franco, as the social realists do, but to undermine the myth- generating mechanisms that constitute the founding matrix of such writing.

In the novel of memory in postwar Spain, history does not stand outside individual consciousness as a form imposed but, rather, impinges on the consciousness of characters and forces its way

into their considerations. History supervenes against the discourse of myth in these novels because it both shapes and is shaped by the private affairs of the self. In a practical sense, the most transparent manifestation of this reciprocity ap- pears in the mechanisms of plot. While the social realists transferred life to literature through logi- cal causality and traditional emplotment (i.e., by depicting past events accumulating to present consequences), the novels of memory turn on what Lennard Davis in another context calls "teleogenic" plots-the ordering of action and information to suggest "the transformation of past events by subsequent ones" (213). The novelists of social realism generally conceive their plots as reporting the real through a temporal unfolding that leads to an inevitable conclusion (in a narrative sense rather than a deterministic one). The novel of memory, in contrast, unravels the plot of the past and transforms the potential for historical knowledge into a web of relations and interactions between the self and history. Its teleogenic plotting thus works on two levels: (1) the fragmented com- position compels the reader to reconfigure the design of storytelling through the evocation of a past that is not static but dynamic and ever changing; (2) the external referent of the narrative, the history of Spain, is now an internal component of the self and thus open to re-formation as the individual claims authority not over truth but against myth.

The teleogenic plotting of history is perhaps most purposefully exemplified in Carmen Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atrds. The narrator-protago- nist of the book, a fictive Martin Gaite, shuttles back and forth in time during the course of the narrative, and the reflections she offers on her past are intimately bound up with the past of Spain. Her temporal divagations lead her first to contem- plate the stultifying myths of Franco's historiography, then to perceive how she has been deprived of history: "[Y]o entonces aborrecia la historia y ademas no me la creia; nada de lo que venia en los libros de historia ni en los periodicos me lo creia" '[A]t the time I scorned history, and furthermore I didn't believe it, I didn't believe a word of what was recounted in history books or in the newspapers' (54; 48). Throughout El cuarto de atrds Martin Gaite disaffirms not only the so-

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called facts of Spanish history but also its most compelling narrations. She refuses to embrace the "acontecimientos gloriosos" 'glorious exploits' (97; 91) of the regime's heroes, and she renounces in particular the cult of Isabel la Catolica, through whom historians have fashioned a line of progression directly to Franco himself. Indeed, what represents temporal reciprocity and continuity for the regime becomes for Martin Gaite the embodi- ment of stasis:

[N]o soy capaz de discernir el paso del tiempo a lo largo de ese periodo, ni diferenciar la guerra de la postguerra, pense que Franco habia paralizado el tiempo, y precisamente el dia que iban a enterrarlo me desperte pensando eso con una particular intensidad. (133)

I am simply not capable of discerning the passage of time all during that period, or differentiating the war years from the postwar ones. The thought came to me that Franco has paralyzed time, and on the very day that they were about to bury him I woke up, with my mind focused on that one thought with a very special intensity. (130)

The importance of Martin Gaite's perspective on time and history under Franco lies less with what she denounces than with what she conceives as the alternative. Instead of inventing new myths that dispute the old ones, she posits a counter- discourse in which history is awakened to the fragmented and indeterminate essence of the subjective:

[N]o somos un solo ser, sino muchos, de la misma ma- nera que tampoco la historia es esa que se escribe po- niendo en orden las fechas y se nos presenta como inamovible, cada persona que nos ha visto o hablado alguna vez guarda una pieza del rompecabezas que nunca podremos contemplar entero. (167)

We are not just one being, but many, exactly as real history is not what is written by putting dates in their proper order and then presenting it to us as a single whole. Each person who has seen us or spoken to us at a certain time retains one piece of the puzzle that we will never be able to see all put together. (166)

Thus when Martin Gaite contemplates a historical discourse of her own, she calls forth the cre-

ative authority embedded in the metaphor of her "cuarto de atras":

[E]l libro sobre la postguerra tengo que empezarlo en un momento de iluminaci6n como el de ahora, rela- cionando el paso de la historia con el ritmo de los sue- fios, es un panorama tan ancho y tan revuelto, como una habitacion donde cada cosa esta en su sitio precisamente al haberse salido de su sitio, todo parte de mis primeras perplejidades frente al concepto de historia, alli, en el cuarto de atras, rodeada de juguetes y libros tirados por el suelo. (104)

I must begin the book on the postwar period in a moment of sudden enlightenment like this one right now, tying together the march of history and the rhythm of dreams. It is such a vast panorama and such a topsy-turvy one, like a room where each thing is in its proper place precisely because it is out of place. All this goes back to my initial perplexities in the face of the concept of history, there in the back room, sur- rounded by toys and books strewn all over the floor.

(98-99)

In Cuarto Martin Gaite clearly opens the theme of history to the reader, but it is the novel's teleogenic plotting that impels her view of history beyond myth. It reveals the transformative power of individual memory to undermine the inertial monologism and fixed continuity of the past and to show instead that history is necessarily malle- able. Such thinking reverses the traditional for- mula of first-person plotting, "Once I was lost but now I am found," and posits in its place an open- ended "I" whose discourse is epistemically fundamental to both the self and the understanding (i.e., the writing) of history.

The conception of history as the discourse of remembrance configures the opposition to myth in other postwar novels of memory as well. Luis Goytisolo's Recuento, for example, relies heavily on the exigencies of memory to disclose the unreliability of a single-voiced historiography. As his title suggests, Goytisolo's concern is with retelling, with renarrating the past to lay out the historical in an alternative frame. His story overtly criticizes the political dissidence and barren lives of the young bourgeois in postwar Spain and grows harshly sardonic as it demythifies the Spanish left and exposes the sterility of its dissent. By reject-

39


ing the narrative of closure, moreover, Goytisolo vitiates the very concept of mythic historiography. In the first part of Recuento he strategically relies on the narrative traditions of social realism to portray bourgeois revolutionaries plotting against the regime. Clearly unsympathetic to the Franco government, he confounds the image of a heroic and imperialist Spain and posits in its place a movement of dissent bound closely to the rhetorical myths of the Communist party. But once these countermyths are established within the traditions of social realism, Goytisolo forcefully subverts their underlying structure. He does so through the mediation of Raul, who seeks a personal identity within a narrative of memory that reverses the spiraling energy of mythic discourse toward closure and stasis.

The hermeneutics of writing in Goytisolo's scheme claims historical authenticity not by the proclaimed objectivity of the referential illusion but by the insertion of a self (Rauil) into the tell- ing of a story whose implied referent is the fixed structures of mythic discourse. The narrative moves from the traditional perspective of third- person omniscience early in the novel to more stylistically and technically intricate machinations in the later chapters, where the retelling of the past grows ever more personal and subjective. The long and complex sequence on the history of Catalufia and Spain at the end of chapter 7 (277-91) illus- trates the intensity of the subjective within a discourse whose subject is history. The narrator first proposes "una historia intrincada" 'an intricate history' (278) and then lays out how such a history can be opened to diversity and dissent:

la tarea de construir una Espaia diferente en cuanto unidad voluntaria en el socialismo, unidad sin uni- formidad, unidad en la diversidad, descentralizaci6n compatible con el centralismo democratico, naciona- lismo revolucionario entendido como oposici6n al mundo capitalista. . . . (290)

the task of building a different Spain as it pertains to voluntary unity in socialism, unity without uni- formity, unity in diversity, decentralization compatible with democratic centralism, revolutionary nationalism understood as opposition to the capitalist world ...

What emerges from the lengthy sequence that brackets the historical here points to the two important levels of the novel that oppose social realism: (1) the way in which history, still the referent of the narrative, is demythified through the draw- ing forth of a range of dialectical propositions; (2) the mediation of history by a subjective voice whose very subjectivity implies a hermeneutics based not on "being there" (i.e., the testimonial objectivity of social realism) but on narration and memory-history that is "true" not because it inheres in an abstract or found discourse outside the text but because it is tied to a subjective life that is always bound up with the past, with history. In the novels of memory this "withinness" supersedes "being there" and reveals that history (and historiography) must always be redeemed outside the static structures of myth and within the discernment of a narrating self. The double redemption of history and the self is embodied through the evocation of an individual past and, as Proust puts it, "the joy of rediscovering what is real" (3: 913). Proust's discovery of the real hinges, of course, on the way in which the self and history open the contingencies of their truths to each other and on the way in which these contingencies are narrated.

Thus when Raul contemplates his writing in relation to the past (both his own and that of events outside himself), he rejects "la prosa heroica de su epoca de militancia" 'the heroic prose of his mili- tant period' (626), that is to say, a single-voiced discourse. He first recognizes that discourse may congeal into a solidified mass of repetitive mus- ings: "Y es asi como, al tiempo que se establece ya en la primera infancia un determinado sistema de relaciones entre los nombres y las cosas, se excluye desde entonces cualquier otra posibilidad de sistema de relacion" 'And thus it is, from the time that in earliest infancy one establishes a specific system of relations between names and things, one excludes the possibility of any other system of relations' (621-22). But he opts finally for the creative dispersion of subjective narration over the sterile imposition of the referential illusion. In this way Raul combats the implicit agenda of myth through which change bears no meaning and meaning can undergo no change. This process is explicitly laid out by the insinuation of the "yo" (Raul) into a long narration of historical events

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that run from the founding of Rome through the growth of modern Europe and finally to Raul's own incarceration in the Model Jail in Barcelona. At the end of his historical discourse, however, Raul controverts the rigid chain of chronological progression, first by inserting himself squarely within it and then by undermining the possibility of temporal certitude:

yo aqui en este instante, o por el contrario que tal ca- dena no existe, que la alternativa de un hecho contingente no puede ser sino otro hecho contingente, dominio absoluto de lo arbitrario. (616)

I, here at this moment, or on the contrary, that such a chain doesn't exist, that the alternative of a contingent fact can only be another contingent fact, the ab- solute domain of the arbitrary.

Nothing can be preserved for the present without being changed, and Raul's insistence on the "dominio absoluto de lo arbitrario" confirms both his own indeterminacy in history and the tentative- ness with which his discourse exposes the aporias of being in time.

Another way in which the "withinness" of the remembering character shapes the narration of history pertains closely to the use of texts. Narra- tors who consistently evoke the past in the first person most often give their historical accounts the feeling of a memoir. First-person narration generally provokes anxiety over matters of truth, less because a narrowed perspective suggests overt unreliability (though it may, indeed, have this effect, as it does, for example, in Luis Goytisolo's La colera de Aquiles) than because special pleadings are inherent in a highly personalized discourse on the past and the associative uncertainties of memory. To diminish the imputation of unreliability in their treatments of the historical (and, conversely, to enhance the authenticity of their perspectives), narrators of memory often insert a wide variety of texts into their discourses: news items, reports, photograph albums, maps, portraits, and the like. These texts appear in narrated form, of course (with the exception of Benet's cartographic im- ages), and bear on two issues that directly confront all first-person discourse: (1) the preoccupation with providing corroborative evidence to buttress

the remembering narrator's evocation of events; (2) the fundamental role of interpretation in the discernment, not of the truth, but of the meaning of discourse. While social realism derives its historiographic impact largely from the way it col- lapses truth and meaning into a structure that seeks to close itself to interpretation (i.e., to make truth evident and available for all to see), the novelists of memory imply several possible an- swers and intimate that each text engenders several possible questions. In this sense the narrative not only states and asserts but also possesses a hori- zon of unasserted possibilities of meaning (i.e., propositions) that lie beyond intention and beyond myth.

For example, Juan Goytisolo's Sentas de identidad contains texts both as a sign of the real and as a mechanism for foregrounding the operations of interpreting. Alvaro Mendiola's reliance on photographs, postcards, letters, maps, and other documents to piece together the past (Spain's as well as his own) reveals the reciprocity between history as a formative component of the self and the self as a formative component of history. The texts validate the "realness" of the past (i.e., confirm that people, places, and events actually exist), but the meaning of this past has yet to be determined. What is crucial about the determination of meaning here (and in other novels of memory as well) is that Alvaro does not set out to reconstruct the past as past, as if it were an isolated whole within its own structure of meaning. Instead, he draws on texts as framers of experience and integrates them into his own thoughts, desires, and needs in the present. Alvaro does not stand apart from all that surrounds and precedes him; he is firmly attached to history; he is in history. As Joel Weinsheimer writes, summarizing Gadamer, "Our present, our difference from the past, is not the obstacle but the very condition of understanding the past. . . and the past to which we have access is always our own past by reason of our belonging to it" (134). The history that Alvaro is in, of course, is only know- able through his narration of it, laid out by the multitude of telescopic relations among the events, photographs, and documents of the past. The texts themselves stand inert and lifeless until they are awakened to meaning by memory and narration. Indeed, as Alvaro contemplates the past during

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the course of the novel, he is struck by his obliga- tion to narrate that past: "Muerto tu (te decias), ,a quien correspondera contarlo [el pasado]?" 'If

you are dead (you said to yourself), on whom will it fall to tell it [the past]?' (230); "[S]u rebeldia contra la sociedad espafiola de su tiempo muri6 con el [su tio] como morira sin duda la tuya si no le das forma concreta y precisa si no logras encau- zarla" 'His rebelliousness against the Spanish society of his time died with him [his uncle] as no doubt yours will die with you if you don't give it a concrete and precise form, if you don't manage to give it shape' (346). History is thus set forth as a component of narration and is shaped by Al- varo's complementary needs to interpret the past and to define himself.

Goytisolo constantly moves the definition of self between past and present as his character erupts into the epiphany of knowing. Again, the role of texts is preeminent. This is most acutely exemplified in the final chapter of the novel, where Alvaro concurrently listens to fragments of tourists' conversations and reads a government pamphlet outlining the history of Barcelona. Now in the pure present, beyond memory, he absorbs the full extent to which the regime has appropri- ated the past and made it the enterprise of the state. Alvaro disdains the foreign words of the tourists just as he does the new buildings of Barcelona-both in their own ways have strangled the city and effaced its identity. Moreover, because the pamphlet is framed within the narrative by the persistent alienation that informs Alvaro's memory, it reveals how the government uses narration to abridge culture and rid it of its complexity and richness. The regime's official discourse (whose syncopating function has already been established by the intercalated texts of the press and the po- lice) is now exposed in all its sterility as antitheti- cal to truth. It reveals less about Barcelona-as is its intention-than about the reductivist efficiency and mythifying power of narration when ap- propriated by the government to provide historical continuity and orthodoxy.

Narrated texts also inform the historiographic concerns of El cuarto de atras. Though overrun by a number of texts (e.g., the "novela rosa," letters, detective fiction, poetry, songs, film, a book on insanity, and paintings) the novel is overtly

shaped by Todorov's view of the fantastic. As critics have frequently pointed out, Cuarto both embodies a fantastic novel and discusses the writing of a fantastic novel, and the two functions are central to its meaning. But what is most pertinent here is the way in which text, memory, and history are balanced on the fulcrum of interpretation to convey that history is always provisional. While Martin Gaite explicitly sets Cuarto over and against the texts of social realism as a mode of writing, she does not deny her novel a social agenda. Here the social coincides intimately with historiography and the appropriations of the past under Franco, as well as with the way in which the past is made known. From the cult of Isabel la Catolica and the myth of "la espafiola perfecta" (96) to the recurrent image of Carmencita Franco (with songs of the 1940s and segments from news- reels interspersed prominently), Cuarto affirms how interpretation of the past is always ongoing, always contingent on memory even when a text offers compelling evidence of truth. Memory for- gets, revises, and transforms, so that the past remains ever open to rewriting and reinterpreting in ways that defy the design of myth. The texts that Martin Gaite infiltrates in Cuarto are both in history (existing in "reality," outside her novel) and about history (used by the regime to tell its version of the truth). They are renarratized within the frame of memory, and what they recover is time itself. As Martin Gaite writes:

[C]uantos ratos perdidos, cuantas vueltas inftiles por esta casa, a lo largo de los afnos, en busca de algo. LQue busco ahora? Ah, ya, un rastro de tiempo, como siempre, el tiempo es lo que mas se pierde. (33)

How much time wasted, how many useless wander- ings back and forth through this apartment, down through the years, searching for something. What am I searching for now? Ah, yes, the track of time. As always, time is what gets lost most often. (25)

The reconciliation between a past once closed to interpretation and a memory with full desire to interpret recaptures history as subjective meaning engendered to annul myth. In short, nothing is preserved for Martin Gaite, nothing is remem- bered and given meaning, without being altered.

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David K. Herzberger

Luis Goytisolo's La colera de Aquiles speaks even more explicitly to the textual foundation of memory and narration and the contingencies of writing history. Its historical referent (the same anti-Francoist militants living in Paris that Juan Goytisolo portrays in Senas) is open both to the narration's changing paradigms and to the reader's creative interpretation. Matilde Moret's intercalated short novel, El edicto de Mildn, recounts her experiences with Spanish exiles in Paris, but as her narrative develops, it offers varied and conflicting perspectives on the same set of incidents. It can thus be seen as doubly contestatory: it directly subverts the myth of its own context (i.e., the framing narration of Aquiles, which, ironically, is por- trayed through a painting-a text-that may be purely fictitious); and it destabilizes a single-voiced discourse that asserts truths about the past (Matilde's recollections of anti-Francoist activities among the students). In addition to casting doubt on the mythical wrath of Aquiles (236, 239), the novel challenges all narrative that pretends to assert truths rather than to propose meanings. While the demythification of the Spanish intellectual left is deeply embedded in Colera, Goytisolo offers no alternative myth. Instead, his focus shuttles back and forth between the writing and the reading of texts, demonstrating how both activities are bound up with our understanding of the past. The entire process, however, is tied intimately to the inventing of texts and the creation of a self:

[A] trav6s de las obras de ficci6n, en medida mucho mayor que a traves de textos testimoniales o especu- lativos, el lector descubre en el mundo aspectos hasta entonces no imaginados que le ofrecen un conoci- miento inmediato asi del mundo como de si mismo.

(239)

In works of fiction, in much greater measure than in testimonial or speculative texts, the reader discovers in the world things until then unimagined that offer him an immediate knowledge of the world as well as of himself.

Fiction is superior to history here (and implicitly to myth), not because of the truth-value of its discourse but because of its propositions about truth. The epistemological fabric of narration always im-

plies the hand of the weaver, which in turn affirms the presence of a self through which meaning (here the historical meaning of intellectual dissidence) is mediated and engendered. It is in this sense that the novel of memory affords history the most di- verse and profound possibilities. As with Ricoeur, "the meaning of history resides in its aspect as a drama of the human effort to endow life with meaning" (White, Content 181). Time is always corrosive, and memory can never recoup time itself but can recover only the meaning of time for a remembering self. This is what the novelists of memory propose at every turn of their writing and what places their narratives in opposition to the assertive truths of social realism and Francoist historiography.

For the novelists of memory, as I have sought to show, the writing of history cannot be collapsed into the reductivist and debilitating paradigm of myth. Indeed, for the major lineage of Spanish novelists from the mid-1960s to the present (e.g., Juan Benet, Juan Goytisolo, Luis Goytisolo, Car- men Martin Gaite, and parts of Camilo Jose Cela and Miguel Delibes), memory saps the roots of myth-producing narrations and strips away their thick wrapping of narrative closure. Evoking the historical past for these writers is conceived not as experiencing that past as it once might have been lived but as filtering time through the consciousness of a remembering self at once in history and open to history. Thus time is not a chasm that is merely bridged to recover the historical. Rather, as Gadamer writes, it is "a ground which supports the arrival of the past and where the present takes its roots" ("Problem" 152). This interplay (or dialogue, as some would have it) between present and past defines the narrating selves of these works and their discourses on history. In contrast to social realism and the historiography of the state, therefore, the novel of memory lays out history as a series of disruptions-of time, of self, of narration, and, most important, of the referential illusion of truth and wholeness.

The remembering discoursers in the novels I have discussed are most often alienated and adrift in postwar Spain-in part because they bear the full weight of the past, in part because they know that this weight, while it can be grasped as meaningful, has nothing immutable about it ex-

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cept its inability ever to be defined once and for all. To respect the wholeness of the past means to leave it open to inquiry, to refuse to neutralize the contingencies of history by transforming them into the safe zone of myth. Indeed, the novel of memory works consistently to decenter the paradigm of myth and to reconstitute the center as a movable construct that always questions the past and remains subject to the hermeneutics of dissent.

Notes

I wish to distinguish here and elsewhere in my study between history (the occurrence of events in time) and historiography (the inscribing of events into a narrative form, the writing of history).

2The complex arguments linking historiography and fiction have been made elsewhere and are too lengthy to repro- duce here. For the present study I have drawn particularly on the works of White and Ricoeur, while the philosophical base of Gadamer's hermeneutics and Barthes's writings on myth (Rustle and Mythologies) have served as secondary but no less pertinent points of departure. I refer the reader to these writers, as well as to LaCapra, Cowart, D'Amico, Gearhart, and Morson for significant insights into the commingling of history and fiction and the way in which our knowledge of the past is shaped.

31 would classify as novels of memory such representative works as Juan Benet's Volverds a Regidn (1967), Una meditacion (1970), and Sau'l ante Samuel (1980); Miguel Delibes's Cinco horas con Mario (1966); Juan Goytisolo's Sefias de identidad (1966); Luis Goytisolo's Recuento (1973) and La colera de Aquiles (1979); Carmen Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atras (1978). The list could, of course, include many other novels, as well as related works (with complementary narrative strategies and problematic points of view) that Francisco Caudet identifies closely with the "boom" in the writing of memoirs in the past decade: for example, J. M. Gil Robles's La monar- qufa por la que luche (1976); Carlos Barral's Anfos de peniten- cia (1975); Jaime Gil de Biedma's Diario del artista seriamente enfermo (1975); Pedro Lain Entralgo's Descargo de concien- cia (1976); and Martin Gaite's Usos amorosos de la postguerra (1988).

4See, for example, Elias Diaz's fine overview of historiography during the Franco years, as well as Randolph Pope's thoughtful essay on the heroic and imperialistic writing of history in postwar Spain. Pope's study of Luis Goytisolo's Antagonia is also helpful in showing how history can be framed in discourse to serve as a crucial narrative determinant. Additionally, both Jo Labanyi (ch. 2) and Paul Ilie offer important insights into Francoist historiography and its relation to myth and ideology.

5All translations of Spanish quotations are my own except for those given for passages from Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atrds and Benet's Una meditacidn; translations of these passages are from the English-language editions listed under Works Cited.

6It is true that as early as 1951 Jaime Vicens Vives published the first issue of Estudios de historia moderna, in which he advocates a more objective approach to the writing of his-

tory, and Enrique Tierno Galvan, in XII tesis sobre fun- cionalismo europeo (1955), urges the regime to rid the academy of the "absolutismo ideol6gico" that contaminates the pur- suit of truth (Diaz 142). But the overriding concern with historical hegemony remained firm during this period, and historiography continued to prop up the myths on which the Franco regime had been constructed. For pertinent information on the current state of Spanish historiography and the trends that oppose the historiographic norms of the regime, see Diaz (265-81); Manuel Tufi6n de Lara; and Tufi6n de Lara and Jos6 Antonio Biescas.

7Franco's preoccupation with all that is illustrious in Span- ish history (including of course his own regime) is frequently bound up with the heroic. For example: "Todo lo grande que existe en Espafia no ha sido obra de la casualidad: ha sido obra de hidalgos, de santos y de heroes, fruto de grandes empefios, de minorias selectas, de hombres elegidos .. ." 'Everything great that exists in Spain has not been the work of happenstance: it has been the work of nobles, of saints and of heroes, the fruit of great boldness, of select minori- ties, of chosen men . . .' (96).

81 would also include Miguel Delibes and Camilo Jose Cela among the novelists closely identified with the origins of social realism, but both writers published their first important works during the 1940s. For a discussion of social realism as a generational norm during the 1950s and 1960s, see Gon- zalo Sobejano.

9Many novelists who write important works of social realism early in their careers expressly oppose that conceptual foundation in later years. This is true, for example, of Car- men Martin Gaite, Juan Goytisolo, and Luis Goytisolo, who in the past decade and a half have written complex novels of memory, which I discuss below.

10The representation of time in these novels is an example. When social realism implies temporal causal antecedents (i.e., argues that the past must have been thus to produce a present that is thus), it does so without accounting either for the aporias of time or for discourse as a conditioner of time. Social-realist fiction generally represents a brief period with external markers of time clearly delineated. This is true, for example, in such prototype social-realist works as Rafael San- chez Ferlosio's El Jarama and Jos6 Manuel Caballero Bonald's Dos dias de septiembre, in which the felt presence of time is at once specific and eternal. It is specific in the way that hours, days, and weeks oppress the characters and intensify their suffering but eternal in that the vastness of time afflicting the characters knows no origin and portends no end. These novels embody a sense of time as repetition and sameness and preclude the troublesome uncertainties of narrative that reveal the self engendering a personal and variable time per-

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tinent only to the experiencing individual. 1 White, Ricoeur, and Gadamer often draw on Dilthey's

writing to flesh out the fundamental issues that both philosophers and historians face in dealing with the past.

12I have modified Rabassa's translation of this passage to make it more faithful to the original Spanish.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New

York: Hill, 1972. . The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New

York: Hill, 1986. Benet, Juan. El dngel del Senor abandona a Tobias. Barce-

lona: Gaya Ciencia, 1976. . Herrumbrosas lanzas. Vol. 3 (books 8-12). Madrid:

Alfaguara, 1986. . Una meditacion. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970. . A Meditation. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York:

Persea, 1982. Caudet, Francisco. "Recuento, de Luis Goytisolo. Analisis so-

ciol6gico." Papeles de Son Armadans 88 (1978): 225-33. Cowart, David. History and the Contemporary Novel. Car-

bondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. D'Amico, Robert. Historicism and Knowledge. New York:

Routledge, 1989. Davis, Lennard. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. New

York: Methuen, 1987. Diaz, Elias. Pensamiento espanol 1939-1973. Madrid: Cua-

dernos Para el Dialogo, 1974. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Pattern and Meaning in History. Trans. and

ed. H. P. Rickman. New York: Harper, 1961. Faulkner, William. Sartoris. New York: Grosset, 1929. Franco, Francisco. Franco ha dicho. Madrid: Voz, 1949. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Ed. Garrett

Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury, 1975. . "The Problem of Historical Consciousness." Interpre-

tive Social Science. Ed. Paul Rabinow and William Sul- livan. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. 103-60.

Gearhart, Suzanne. The Open Boundary of History and Fic- tion. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Goytisolo, Juan. Senas de identidad. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1966.

Goytisolo, Luis. La cdlera de Aquiles. Barcelona: Seix Bar- ral, 1979.

. Recuento. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975. Ilie, Paul. "Dictatorship and Literature: The Model of Fran-

coist Spain." Ideologies and Literature 4 (1983): 238-55. Labanyi, Jo. Myth and History in the Contemporary Span-

ish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. LaCapra, Dominick. History, Politics, and the Novel. Ithaca:

Cornell UP, 1989. Martin Gaite, Carmen. The Back Room. Trans. Helen Lane.

New York: Columbia UP, 1983. . El cuarto de atrds. Barcelona: Destino, 1978.

Morson, Gary Saul, ed. Literature and History. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986.

Perez Embid, Florentino. "Ante la nueva actualidad del 'Problema de Espafia.'" Arbor: Ciencia, pensamiento y cultura 45-46 (1949): 149-59.

Pope, Randolph. "Historia y novela en la postguerra espafiola." Siglo XX/20th Century 5.1-2 (1987-88): 16-24.

. "Luis Goytisolo's Antagonta and Radical Change." Anales de la Literatura Espanola Contempordnea 13 (1988): 105-17.

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor. 3 vols. New York: Random, 1981.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. 3 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984-88.

Sobejano, Gonzalo. Novela espanola de nuestro tiempo. 2nd ed. Madrid: Espafiola, 1975.

Spires, Robert. "Juan Benet's Poetics of Open Spaces." Crit- ical Approaches to the Writings of Juan Benet. Ed. Roberto Manteiga et al. Hanover: UP of New England, 1984. 1-7.

Tuinon de Lara, Manuel. Metodolog'a de la historia social de Espana. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1973.

Tufi6n de Lara, Manuel, and Jose Antonio Biescas. Espana bajo la dictadura franquista. Barcelona: Labor, 1980.

Vicens Vives, Jaime. Approaches to the History of Spain. Trans. John C. Ulman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970.

Weinsheimer, Joel. Gadamer's Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Direc- tions, 1963.

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Documents

Narrating the Past