Terrorism as Memory: The Historical Novel and Masculine Masochism in Contemporary Basque Literature

Terrorism as Memory: The Historical Novel and Masculine Masochism in Contemporary Basque Literature Joseba Gabilondo Bryn Mawr College Any analysis of contemporary Spanish culture that takes into account the recent proliferation of literary and nonliterary historical discourses must take Basque literature into consideration. This essay argues that the recent multiplication of historical discourses has to be connected to attempts to imagine anew the national foundations of the democratic communities that make up Spain. To illustrate this assertion this study focuses on the recent historical fiction of two prominent Basque writers, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramon Saizarbitoria. By studying the way in which the historical fiction of these Basque writers articulates a specific national memory and subject position, we can draw some general conclusions about the formation of historical discourses in post-Franco Spain.1 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities discusses the importance of historical discourses in national processes of community imagining . When Anderson introduces his theory of the nation as an "imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (15), he underlines the importance of the historical convergence of capitalism, language diversity, and print (46). However , when attempting to explain the "attachment" (129) or "political love" (131) nations elicit from their citizens (without which nations would fail as social constructs) Anderson returns to language's natural fatalism—in the sense that languages are not chosen by the people— and its connection to history: "If nationalness has about it an auta of fatality, it is nonetheless a fatality embedded in history.... Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed" (133). The proliferation of historical discourses, such as in Spain, can be understood as a sign of change in the ways in which a nation imagines its historical openness in the face of language's fatality. In the case of the Spanish state, the political sanction in the Constitution of other historical national communities ("nacionalidades") and the globalization of a society isolated by 40 years of Francoism would explain this Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 2, 1998 114 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies need to historicize and re-imagine the openness of the closed Spanish state and its nation(s). The latest literary texts by key Basque writers Bernardo Atxaga (1951-) and Ramon Saizarbitoria (1944-) exemplify Basque literature's own turn to history. This turn represents a radical departure from previous production, for this time around Basque literature addresses the issue of terrorism, the problem at the core of Basque society, headon in its historical complexity. In the last few years, both authors have published an historical novel in which Basque terrorism takes center place in the process of imagining the history of the new democratic Basque Country.2 I am referring to Atxaga's Gizona bere bakardadean (1993; translated as El hombre solo and The Lone Man) and Saizarbitoria's Hamaika pauso (1995; translated as Los pasos incontables, henceforth Many Steps). Both novels tell the stories of protagonists who were involved in the Basque terrorist group ETA during the Franco era but, after democracy is restored, decide to lead a normal life in civil society. In the end, however, each protagonist is haunted and destroyed by an accidental encounter with present ETA members. In order to capture the radical departure these novels represent it is worth quoting Jesús MarÃ-a Lasagabaster's remarks about Basque literature: "It seems as if Basque writers are afraid to face historical and social reality, be it past or present" ("Introduction" 19). So far ETA has been approached by both Basque and Spanish literatures as either the leading political movement of Basque nationalism or the exotic political other of the Spanish state. In either case ETA's terrorism has merely served as political justification or background for the development of narratives that were little concerned with the Basque problem in itself. As DarÃ-o Villanueva already pointed out in 1987, this treatment was connected with a literary tendency, journalistic and otherwise, to feed on the immediacy of contemporary events: "The novel in genetal, not only those written by journalists, takes advantage of events deriving from the...