Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain

Speaking for the Dead: History, Narrative, and the Ghostly in Javier Cercas’s War Novels

Speaking for the Dead History, Narrative, and the Ghostly in Javier Cercas’s War Novels Samuel Amago La literatura debe desobedecer pactos de silencio. —Manuel Rivas (qtd. in Pérez Oliva) Los muertos no mueren nunca. —Pedro Almodóvar (qtd. in Harguindey) A considerable number of novels dealing with the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath have appeared in recent years. Works such as Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado (2007), Benjamín Prado’s Mala gente que camina (2006), Manuel Rivas’s Los libros arden mal (2006), Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002), Javier Marías’s Tu rostro mañana: Fiebre y lanza (2002), and Andrés Trapiello’s Una historia de Maquis (2001), along with Javier Cercas’s tremendously successful Soldados de Salamina (2001), are just a few examples of how a generation of Spanish authors has revisited Spain’s traumatic national history and explored through literature the recovery and reconstruction of historical memory. A significant number of film narratives dealing with this period have also been produced, such as Vicente Aranda’s Libertarias (1996), Antonio Mercero’s La hora de los valientes (1998), José Luis Cuerda’s La lengua de las mariposas (1999), Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (2001), 243 244 Samuel Amago Jaime Camino’s Los niños de Rusia (2001), and the film adaptation of Cercas’s novel, also titled Soldados de Salamina (David Trueba, 2003).1 The recent release of Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fable El laberinto del fauno (2006), which powerfully links an archetypical fairy-tale structure to an idealized vision of the against-all-odds efforts of the maquis who continued to fight Franquism in northern Spain into the 1940s, shows that the Spanish Civil War and immediate postwar period continue to provide ripe inspirational material for the creation of memorializing narratives. Two generations after the end of the Civil War and a generation after the death of Francisco Franco, this conflicted period of history appears again and again in popular modes of cultural production. As we can see in both of del Toro’s Civil War films, Spain’s Fascist legacy and the pacto del silencio that followed it provide a fertile ground for ghostly treatments of Spanish history. El espinazo del diablo, for example, begins with a voice off screen that asks, “¿Qué es un fantasma?” (What is a ghost?). The viewer later learns that the voice belongs to Doctor Casares (Federico Luppi), who runs the orphanage that is later destroyed by the villainous Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who stands symbolically for the Fascist rebels who will later win the Spanish Civil War. After he is dead, Casares will continue to inhabit the orphanage as a ghost, settling in to watch over Spain—the film suggests—during the long dictatorship that was to come. Thus, Casares’s answer to his initial question is doubly signi ficant. What is a ghost? He answers, “un asunto terrible condenado a repetirse una y otra vez. Un instante de dolor. Algo muerto que parece vivo por momentos aún. Un sentimiento sostenido en el tiempo. Como una fotografía borrosa, como un insecto atrapado en ámbar” (A terrible issue condemned to repeat itself over and over again. An instant of pain. Something dead that appears for a few moments to still be alive. A feeling suspended in time. Like a blurry photograph, like an insect trapped in amber). It has now become something of a commonplace to refer to the cultural inheritance of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship in ghostly terms. Three excellent recent studies exemplify how Derrida’s formulation of “hauntology,” which he developed in Specters of Marx (1994) as a symbolic alternative to ontology (ghosts, after all, exist somewhere beyond the ontological realm), has been fruitfully employed to de- scribe a cultural milieu in which past traumas continue to haunt the cultural present: Jo Labanyi’s “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past?”, Anne E. Hardcastle’s “Ghosts of the Past and Present: Hauntology and the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone,” and Antonio Gómez’s “Fantasmagoría y violencia en El espinazo del diablo” (Gómez López-Quiñones, La guerra persistente) are fine examples of this trend.2 Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain (2006) represents yet another notable book-length...