Raising the Dead: García Lorca, Trauma and the Cultural Mediation of Mourning

Raising the Dead: GarcÃ-a Lorca, Trauma and the Cultural Mediation of Mourning Melissa Dinverno is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Indiana University (Bloomington ) and has written on theory and politics of critical editing, the work of Garcia Lorca, and gender identity and feminism in 20th-century Spain. Her critical edition of Garcia Lorca's Suites is forthcoming (Cátedra , 2006). Currently she is writing a book on editorial theory and is preparing another on the contemporary cultural construction of Garcia Lorca. The dead embody, and therefore become so much of, what the living are unable to realize. -Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead Paul Valéry wrote (Felman 1990): "Our memory repeats to us what we haven't understood" (76). That's almost it. Say instead: "Our memory repeats to us what we haven't yet come to terms with, what still haunts us. " -Kai Erikson, "Notes on Trauma and Community" Cadavers Past and Present In a November 2002 op-ed article in El Pais, the historian Gabriel Jackson affirmed that "En España tampoco existe ya el tabú sobre los horrores de la época de Franco." Only three days earlier, however, Congress had agreed on a resolution which, despite morally recognizing and pledging support to victims of the Civil War and dictatorship for the first time since Francisco Franco's death, aimed precisely to contain efforts to recuperate that past. Acknowledging "la necesidad de recuperar la memoria colectiva," Congress emphasized both that this recovery occur "dentro del espÃ-ritu de concordia de la Constitución," and that its own recognition of these victims should not "reavivar viejas heridas o remover el rescoldo de la confrontación civil" ("El Congreso"). The barely-disguised anxiety regarding the wounds that the recuperation of a traumatic past might reopen finds a curious echo in the conservative government's 1997 recognition of the life of Federico GarcÃ-a Lorca, a figure emblematic of Civil Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005 30 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies War and Francoist victimhood. In preparation for Lorca's 1998 centenary celebration, José MarÃ-a Aznar's administration pledged 600 million pesetas for the year's activities, affirming "a los cuatro vientos" that "61 años después del fusilamiento que acabó con la vida de Federico GarcÃ-a Lorca, es el momento de olvidar viejas fobias y rencores" (EnrÃ-quez Gómez 76). As Juan EnrÃ-quez Gómez notes, the Parrido Popular's very public financing of institutions dedicated to Lorca and to a national celebration of Lorca's life could be read as: el primer paso de una serie de acciones encaminadas a lavar la cara de los sectores conservadores del paÃ-s en el Caso Lorca, iniciado con su fusilamiento , en el año 1936. (76) Indeed, Aznar himself recognized it as, in part, "un gesto para la concordia" (76). Despite his emblematic victimhood, then, Lorca becomes a politicized body mat mediates die active forgetting of a violent, turbulent, and traumatic past, a body through which a politics of consensus might be reinforced and affective engagements with the past evacuated. This collective memorialization of Lorca's life is thus promoted by the state as long as it grafts a harmonic national (and political) identity over the collective wounds of the past. More recently, Lorca's body is once again mediating the treatment of these collective wounds. Since 2003, the potential exhumation of Lorca's physical remains from a mass grave in Viznar, Granada, has, in turn, unearthed contentious issues regarding history, memory, and the encryption of the past. On both an international and domestic level, his body is being pressed into service as a tombstone, a literal and symbolic grave marker for those individuals that were apparently killed with him in August 1936,1 and for "todos los mártires del fascismo en España" that lie in oblivion (Prado 14). For as Emilio Silva, president of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), recognizes, and BBC journalist Katya Adler notes, "Lorca 's fame gives a face and a name to Spain's dead thrown in ditches." The polemic over whether Lorca's...