History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

Conclusion

183 Conclusion As exemplified by the title of this study, the notion of culture is complicated and multifaceted. Cultural reproductions in the novel range from historical to textual violence, from documenting alternative historical voices to alternative present-day realities. Perhaps it is easier to understand the cultural instead of culture: “a cultural text is always part of a wider and more complex symbolic system, a field of struggle for the symbolic reproduction of a social reality that is ultimately elucidated at the political sphere” (Sarto, Ríos, and Trigo 4). An exploration of the political and its relationship to the cultural helps to understand the links between the various cultural references analyzed in the novels. The Spanish government recently passed the Ley de la Memoria Histórica de España. This legislation offers a political backdrop to the importance of historical memory as evidenced in the first section of this study.1 The law aims to recognize and compensate those who suffered violence and discrimination during the Civil War and resulting dictatorship. In very direct language the law addresses the unjust violence and “graves violaciones de Derechos Humanos cometidas en España entre los años 1939 y 1975” (“España” n.pag.). The law also deals eloquently with the complexity of national and personal memory , declaring that “[n]o es tarea del legislador implantar una determinada memoria colectiva” (“España” n.pag.), but rather personal memories of the victims and their families must form part of a new Spanish consciousness. On a theoretical level, the law recognizes the unjust and unbalanced reparations provided to the victims of the war and at the same time opens up an entire discourse silenced during the transition to democracy. This opportunity to literally unearth the past as mass graves are opened 184 Conclusion and symbolically the past is exhumed from under years of soil forces the Spanish social consciousness to turn to the idea of historical revision. Therefore, the thread that ties together the various cultural representations in the novels becomes more apparent given the current social and political climate in Spain. The novel as document and historical witness to the past and present gains more immediate significance when the country is faced with a historical and political reconciliation. The popular reaction to this law is perhaps best summed up in a quote taken from Carlos Cué’s article from El País, in which someone present at the hearing shouted in triumph, “Hoy, por fin, se ha acabado la guerra” (n.pag.). This feeling of euphoria is inspired by a political gesture that symbolically affirms the marginality of the victims of the war and the failure on the part of the state to react appropriately to their loss; however, it has nothing to do with anything concretely accomplished by the law. The promise of reparation that is the most important logistical element of the law is actually secondary to the symbolic gesture inscribed in the law, documented in the press, and circulated as a discourse of recuperation of historical memory. Perhaps the same can be said about the novels in this study, because the individual work is bound to the larger social discourse that it helps circulate or, in some cases, rejects. The historical novels that present a reinterpretation of history function as a group to question the role of history in present-day culture and national identity. The novels of the Gen X are often criticized as not literary enough to warrant distinction, but the discourse of isolation in a hyperreality strikes a meaningful chord in a literary environment so heavily influenced by technology. What Pierre Bourdieu calls a field of cultural reproduction would seem to support this notion of a conglomerate of works at a given time and space that operate in a similar, systematic way. In this system, the work or text loses individuality and becomes part of a larger discourse similar to Roland Barthes’s idea of how the individual author fades out of sight from the text itself, which takes on meaning from social conditions and circumstances . Nevertheless, the value of textual analysis remains paramount, as the individual works are the cornerstones of any larger cultural discourse and necessary for the constant circulation of ideas. Bourdieu and other cultural theorists recognize the 185 Conclusion importance of the tensions that exist between cultural production and consumption. In a market-driven global economy, the product is not...