Tiempos de ausencias y vacíos: escrituras de memoria e identidad by Txetxu Aguado (review)

In the first two sentences of Tiempos de ausencias y vacíos, Txetxu Aguado asks and answers the question that could easily undermine his entire study: “¿Produce cansancio la temática sobre la memoria y la identidad? Es inevitable afirmarlo” (11). With this in mind, one might reasonably ask, why write a book that seems to have been written many times before? Aguado is prepared with a rejoinder, of course, in which he lays out his plan as well as his justification. The book seeks difference, he argues, through the exploration of alternative memories and identities which have been confounded and often silenced by the traditional infrastructure of power in Spain. Aguado does not lay out explicitly how this authority has been sustained or precisely who stands behind it, though the hint of conspiracy among an amorphous “they” seems to uphold this base of power—those who remain linked (and thus link Spain) to the old Francoist order and social systems.

Certainly a large degree of truth underpins Aguado’s assertions (both about the newness of his study and the old Spanish power structures), though what he proposes to examine—the esthetic representations of memory and identity, primarily in the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century—falls closely in line with numerous other studies on memory and identity over the past several years. “Cansancio” aside, however, the question becomes whether what Aguado explores in the present opens the past to new ways of understanding how memory and identities can be defined and refined. On the whole, what emerges from Aguado’s book merits critical attention due in large part to the array of works included, which carry his analyses well beyond the canonical texts most frequently found in memory studies.

Aguado divides his book into two main sections-chapters one to six focus primarily on memory; seven to fourteen explore identity, though connections between the two concepts abound across chapters. In chapter one he lays out the theoretical and practical problems of discussing remembering and forgetting, with history wedged in between as a sort of disciplinary anodyne with its own subversive contradictions. Aguado synthesizes well and has a knack for pulling things from theory that are particularly relevant to postwar Spain and the Transition. He understands the contingencies of memory (related to remembering, forgetting, narrating, and agency, for example) and returns to this core idea with frequency. But it is memory in a particular context that most interests him as it relates to identity, and thus the critical question moves to the fore to shape his study: amid all of the memory narratives, testimonials, histories, and political agendas, “¿Cómo y dónde construir la memoria de la democracia española, la memoria de una convivencia razonable?” (27).

Following a brief overview of the Transition (hope, disappointment, despair, desire-all in conflict), Aguado moves to what he really wishes to discuss: how to create memory (and rescue the forgotten) in a way that is able to resonate strongly in the present without slipping into a paralyzing melancholy; how to use memory to nourish the living (culturally, socially, existentially) and hold out justice to the victims of injustice. He then uses the next six chapters to scrutinize these issues in the work of several writers, drawing on a wide range of narratives from the 1990s through 2004. The breadth of his critical reach points to the strength and shortcoming of his method. Often times the brief journey through many works (four or five pages typically) allows for a mixture of plot summary and commentary in the tradition of “explicación de textos,” thus giving the book the feel of a reference work on occasion, especially for specialists in the field who are more intimately familiar with works than the casual reader. (I confess that this occurred in my own case, for example, with Aldecoa’s Historia de una maestra and Marias’s Corazón tan blanco, which I...