Carmen Martín Gaite and the Writing of History

In May of 1966, Carmen Martín Gaite was struggling with her first large research project on the eighteenth century writer and political figure Melchor Rafael de Macanaz, and she was having quite a bit of difficulty finding her voice and finding a way to anchor herself in her work. She had already spent hundreds of hours doing archival research and had collected an enormous stockpile of facts. But, somewhat surprisingly for a writer of her stature at that time, she was indecisive, almost insecure when she wrote a letter to Juan Benet and pleaded with him to be her interlocutor on the project (Teruel 112). He agreed to the idea, but he did not agree to be a passive interlocutor—and, of course, he was not. Four months later, in September of 1966, when she wrote her essay “La búsqueda de interlocutor,” she dedicated it to Benet.

What these two writers worked through together, and what would shape Martín Gaite’s view of history going forward, were a couple of key concepts: 1) the idea that historical facts indeed exist, and that these needed to be attended to when writing about the past; and 2) the idea that historical facts are necessarily placed in narrative plots in order for them to gain meaning, which for Martín Gaite became a clarion call for the commingling of history and literature as the foundation of historiography. With these two concepts in mind, she found her historiographic voice.

We might ask, then, how does this relate to Martín Gaite’s legacy in historiography and her understanding of the Franco regime and the Spanish Civil War? Most obviously, she and Benet were two of the most important novelists to challenge the Francoist understanding of history, which had laid out the Civil War as a crusade, as a single plot, shaped by the rhetoric of the Reconquista. But Martín Gaite argued in many of her essays, and showed in her fiction as well, that stories awaken the past to indeterminate and diverse meanings rather than to fixed ones. This view then allowed her to explore the idea of how the past might be used in the present.

Most importantly, she explicitly challenged the foundations of academic history writing of the time. She claimed on many occasions that the past had nearly always been misunderstood in Spain, not because historians didn’t have enough facts (as with Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, for example), or even because sometimes they skewed the facts (again, as with Menéndez Pelayo),¹ but rather, Spanish academic historians for the most part simply did not get it right. The facts had traditionally created in Spanish historiography what she calls (in the title of her essay on the subject) “el miedo a lo gris”—a fear and even a repulsion toward uncertainty—and this idea, of course, is where Juan Benet as her interlocutor proved to be decisive. Ambiguity, contradiction and doubt thus came to form the core of the past for Martín Gaite.

Her legacy in historical writing in Francoist Spain and beyond is thus really quite striking: she sets historiography in Spain on a path where narration gives life to past time, but is not able to resolve its amorphousness. In fact, Martín Gaite will suggest consistently in her writing that amorphousness stands as the semaphore of richness and depth. However, it is important to point out that this by no means points to a postmodern perception of how to understand the past. It is instead a high modernist view of history in which storytelling allows narration to explore the world without degrading it into unvaried and simple truths on the one hand, or into no truths at all on the other.

Martín Gaite expressed her views at a time when academic historians were reluctant to challenge the dominant historiography of how to define the past in general, and how to define the Regime and the War in particular. As I see it, her challenge to Spanish historiography stands as her accomplishment and her legacy to those...