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Reflections on Historiography in Montserrat Roig's L'hora violeta1 Akiko Tsuchiya Washington University in St. Louis Between the publication of her first book in 1970 and her premature death in 1991, Montserrat Roig, one of the most prominent Catalan writers of the post-Franco era, consistently explored the construction of the female subject in relation to Catalan history and to the question of national identity. Roig made her literary debut with the publication of a book of short stories, Molta roba i poc sabó ...i tan neta que h vokn (1971), for which she won the Victor Cátala Prize in 1970. This work was followed by a trilogy of novels on the lives of women of the Catalan bourgeoisie, from the turn of the century to the transitional years immediately following Franco's death: these novels include Ramona, adéu (1972) [Ramona, adiós], El temps de les cireres (1977) [Tiempo de cerezas], and L'hora viokta (1980) [La hora viokta]. The sequence of these novels shows an evolution away from a narrative mode marked by vestiges of neo realism, to one that questions accepted conceptions of subjectivity, referentiality, and historiography in an overtly self-reflexive way. Roig's preoccupation with the relationship between history, subjectivity, and representation culminates in L'opéra quotidiana (1982) [La ópera cotidiana], perhaps Roig's most accomplished work of fiction in the complexity of its explorations of the political issues of gender, class, and (Catalan) national identity within the frame of a highly self-conscious literary discourse.2 In addition to sevetal other works of fiction, Roig has also distinguished herself through her journalistic writings, including her book EL· catahns als camps nazis (1977) [Nochey niebh: ks cataUnes en los campos nazis], which is to become a key autobiographical intertext in L'hora violeta. In Roig's work, notions of sexual or national identity are intimately linked to the problems of historiography, or, more specifically, to the ways in which history is put into discourse.3 While the recovery of history —particularly the unofficial histories of the oppressed, the excluded, and the marginalized—is central to Roig's intellectual project, she simultaneously explores the nature of a historiographie process that enabled one master narrative to gain legitimacy over all others within a concrete sociopolitical context of Francoist Spain. Roig thus shifts our attention from "history," traditionally understood to be a chain of verifiable facts Arizona Journal of 'Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 2, 1998 164 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies or events "out there" in the real world, to the theoretical problems surrounding the narrative (re) construction of these events. A consideration of history as, above all, a discursive event in Roig's work allows us a vision of the ways in which notions of historiography shape historical discourse and, by extension, what we call the historical referent. To use David Herzberger's words in a different context, Roig's novels "have both history and the writing of history as referent" (9). Many of Roig's novels dramatize the process by which private narratives and fictions of socially marginalized or otherwise decentet ed individuals may be used to cteate an oppositional notion of collective history .4 As is the case in most totalitarian societies, Francoist historiography had as its goals the elimination of all counterdiscourses and the construction of the myth of a unified and homogeneous Spain whose essential "truth" was to be preserved throughout time.5 Such a historiographie enterprise inevitably led to the production of a hegemonic narrative from which all difference and relationality were erased, be they of gender, sexuality , nationality or class. Roig challenges not merely the false historical narratives generated by Francoist historiography, but more importantly the very conception of historiography that makes possible the production and reification of such narratives in the first place. L'hora violeta, published shortly after Franco's death, is exemplary in posing such a challenge. On one level, it chronicles the transition between dictatorship and democracy through the intrahistoria of three women, which focuses on their experiences in the private sphere of the home and the family. As Christina Dupláa has observed, Roig constructs a female "genealogy" as a way...

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