The False-Bottomed Suitcase: Historical Memory and Textual Masochism in Carmen Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY THE FALSE-BOTTOMED SUITCASE: HISTORICAL MEMORY AND TEXTUAL MASOCHISM IN CARMEN MARTÍN GAITE’S EL CUARTO DE ATRÁS MARY T. HARTSON Podría decirle que la felicidad en los años de guerra y postguerra era inconcebible . . . La verdad es que yo mi infancia y mi adolescencia las recuerdo, a pesar de todo, como una época muy feliz. Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás AN abundance of memoirs relating stories of oppression and suffering at the hands of the dictatorship appeared in Spain after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975. Among these appeared Carmen Martín Gaite’s fictionalized memoirs El cuarto de atrás, which I contend is the author’s attempt to insert her own voice and story into this collective outpouring of grief despite the fact that hers is not, fundamentally, a tale of suffering. Throughout the novel the protagonist, who is identified with the author through a shared first name and general biography, struggles to reconcile her personal memories with the collective memory that was being expressed in the early Transition years after the fall of the dictatorship. In essence, many of the protagonist’s memories are positive , and by the narrator’s own admission, the years encompassing her childhood and adolescence were “happy” – a fact that creates a breach between her and a society that was expressing its experience of trauma in the many memoirs that appear during this period. Rejecting essentialist explanations of the past, the narrator repeatedly emphasizes and embraces the plurality of both individual experience as well as the historical moment. For the narrator, the years of the war and postwar have not been wholly negative, and the collective expression of pain does not reflect her own experience. YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 35 At odds with the collective, Martín Gaite seeks the authority to include her voice in the ongoing dialogue of the period. I propose that the apparently difficult process of remembering her past within the text constitutes a sort of textual punishment for the narrator/author that confers upon her the status of “victim” and thus liberates the her to join her voice to others. This new status affords her the moral authority to utter her memories of those years while she, as much as Spanish society, renegotiates her identity in the aftermath of the dictator’s death. Evoking a nighttime visit by an authoritative stranger who orders her to remember her past, the narrator/author is freed from the guilt implicit in its content – that hers was an essentially happy childhood. Throughout the book the narrator is subject to a variety of indignities: the imposition of this imperious late-night visitor; an angry and abusive caller, Carola, apparently this stranger’s partner; and an array of imagined self-punishments and accidents. These effect a sort of “shattering” of the self as described as part of the masochistic experience according to Leo Bersani following Freud’s discussion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which the individual’s desire to seek self-disintegration reflects the need to escape the uncomfortable sensation of the separate ego. The narrator ’s passivity before the manuscript whose pages accumulate without her intervention represents a manifestation of her sense of guilt – a feeling she alleviates through the masochistic psychological journey that is the process of writing this book. Thus, the act of writing serves as a means of legitimization for the author who manipulates her character’s status as victim to empower herself to experience the jouissance that results from a merging with the collective. The process of creating collective memory involves an ongoing negotiation of the meaning of personal experience with the prevailing perception of the group’s experience. The interaction between individual and collective memory is a dynamic process in which the individual experiences pressure to reconcile his/her own experience with that of society as a whole. Ángela Cenarro indicates the importance of reaching a consensus about the past in order to legitimize the dominant sociopolitical order. According to her, people interviewed about the past tend to present a personal narration that largely conforms to that of the majority, “Interviewees tend to present a coherent narrative about...