Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain:

The Difficulty of Coming to Terms

with the Spanish Civil War

Jo Labanyi
Spanish and Portuguese, New York University

Abstract  The essay argues that modernity is best understood not as the cultural
expression of capitalist modernization, but as a particular set of relations of present
to past. It examines the varying attitudes toward the violent past of the civil war
that have characterized Spain since the Franco dictatorship and continuing to the
present day. The obsessive memorialization of the Nationalist war dead throughout
the Franco dictatorship led, at the time of the transition to democracy, to a desire
to break with the past; it was not, as is often argued, a determination to forget, but
a decision not to let the past affect the future. Thus attempts toward the end of the
Franco dictatorship to deal cinematically with this violent heritage were followed
by a ten-year gap, until the appearance in the mid-1980s of a number of novels and
films representing the civil war and their escalation since the late 1990s to create
a memory boom, which has resulted in the publication of a large number of testi-
monies. The essay questions whether trauma theory, which has been so important
in Holocaust studies, provides an adequate model for understanding the belated
appearance of these memories, arguing that the reason is more likely to be a previ-
ous lack of willing interlocutors. Nevertheless, it concludes that the present urge to
recount every detail of the past is less effective in communicating the horror of the
war and its repression than are those accounts—in film at the end of the dictator-
ship and in fiction in the mid-1980s, with occasional more recent examples—which
acknowledge the difficulty of narrativizing the violent past as well as the importance
of transgenerational transmission.

Poetics Today 28:1 (Spring 2007)  doi 10.1215/03335372-2006-016

© 2007 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
90 Poetics Today 28:1

This essay will explore the intersection of two issues: the relationship of
memory to modernity and the memorialization of the Spanish civil war
in literature, film, and testimonies produced in Spain since the mid-1970s.
The connection between these two issues is important, since Spain’s his-
tory from the Enlightenment on has tended to be evaluated, by historians
and literary scholars alike, in terms of a certain model of modernity based
on capitalist modernization, which supposedly was realized perfectly in
the countries of northern Europe. The result has been an assumption
that the modern history of Spain has been marked by a failure to achieve
modernity—an assumption explicitly articulated by the title of Eduardo
Subirats’s classic cultural analysis of the beginnings of Spanish modernity,
La Ilustración insuficiente [The Insufficient Enlightenment] (1981).
In recent years, particularly since 2000, when the academic journal Dae-
dalus published a monographic issue titled Multiple Modernities (Eisenstadt
2000), the notion that there is only one model of modernity, represented
by the nations of northern Europe, has been challenged by cultural histo-
rians of those parts of the world relegated to marginality by such a model.
In the Hispanic field, a key example is Julio Ramos’s study of nineteenth-
century Latin America, Divergent Modernities (2001). However, the notion of
“multiple modernities” does not in itself avoid the problem of supposing
that certain models of modernity—those represented by the hegemonic
Western nations—are superior to others. So long as modernity continues
to be defined in terms of capitalist development, it presupposes a teleologi-
cal scheme which, although it may evolve at different speeds, in some cases
going via fascism or socialism, nevertheless has as its inevitable goal the

.  Subirats’s analysis is an eloquent expression of the intellectual position adopted by Span-
ish liberals who have argued that the remedy to Spain’s lack of political and economic sta-
bility in the modern period is the adoption of northern European philosophical, political,
and economic models. The insistence of such liberal analysts on Spain’s failed modernity has
tended to encourage two divergent responses: a fatalistic belief that Spain’s “belatedness” is
irremediable or a desire for fast-track modernization that sees the Spanish past as something
to be relegated to oblivion as fast as possible. Paradoxically, the idea of Spain’s failed moder-
nity has been perpetuated also by the political Right in Spain—dominated by the church,
industrialists, and the landowning oligarchy—which has argued that this failed modernity is
the source of Spain’s moral superiority to the nations of northern Europe. For an excellent
analysis of the historical construction and evolution of the pro- and anti-European positions,
see Juliá 2004. Shubert (1990) and Cruz (1996) have argued convincingly that the fact that
Spain did not develop a substantial middle class, defined in economic terms as an entrepre-
neurial bourgeoisie, until well into the twentieth century does not mean that Spain had not,
already by the mid-nineteenth century, become a society in which liberal, bourgeois ideals
had become the norm. In other words, Cruz and Shubert argue, it is possible for a country
to be modern in cultural terms without having achieved capitalist modernization.
.  See, for example, Ben-Ghiat’s (2001) analysis of Mussolini’s Italy as an example of what
she calls “fascist modernities” (in the plural). In his controversial book The End of History
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 91

establishment of global capitalism. Against this assumption, I would like

to suggest that it might be more useful to think about modernity—whether
in Spain or elsewhere—in terms not of capitalist modernization but of atti-
tudes toward the relation of present to past.
This unhinging of the term modernity from that of modernization supposes
a view of modernity based on cultural rather than economic factors. What
interests me in such a model of modernity is that it allows us to move
away from the assumption that modernity requires a rupture with the past.
The notion of progress, central to the liberal philosophy which has under-
pinned modernity, was based on the idea of a necessary rupture with a
stable order based on birthright, in favor of a new mobility based on merit,
incarnated in the “self-made man” who was able, through his own efforts,
to break with origins and create new wealth. For liberalism is the philoso-
phy of capitalism. As Walter Benjamin (1983: 172) noted, Baudelaire was
a brilliant analyst of modernity because he perceived how it depended on
a capitalist order based on fashion: that is, on ever-faster cycles of built-
in obsolescence. A problematic by-product of this notion that modernity
requires the jettisoning of the past is that it supposes that any desire to pre-
serve the past is by definition reactionary; in other words, that conserva-
tion is politically conservative. And yet the cultural history of modernity
is full of writers and artists who have expressed an attachment to the past
or have protested against the compulsory obsolescence required by moder-
nity, without necessarily being conservative in political terms.
The relevance of this discussion for my argument is that any model of
modernity based on the capitalist idea of compulsory obsolescence has no
place for memory. However, if we view modernity not in terms of capitalist
development but as a particular set of attitudes toward the relationship of
present to past, it becomes possible to elaborate a conception of modernity
that, while it accepts the importance of moving on and continues to believe
in the possibility of creating a better future, is also respectful of the need to
acknowledge the past. I say “set of attitudes” in the plural because, while
the past history of European modernity has mostly been based on the sup-

and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama argued that, with the fall of the former Communist
regimes of the Soviet bloc, history had reached its ultimate goal of the establishment of
global capitalism.
.  I thank my former French cultural historian colleague at the University of Southampton,
Jackie Clarke, for her insightful thoughts on this issue.
.  For an account of the cultural impact of liberal philosophy in nineteenth-century Spain,
see Labanyi 2000: 31–87.
.  For a brilliant philosophical discussion of the binary “reactionary”/“progressive” as a
product of modernity, see Moreiras 2004.
92 Poetics Today 28:1

position that the past must be left behind, it has also produced a significant
body of cultural work based on the celebration and elaboration of mem-
ory. It is no coincidence that it has been under late modernity—in the last
decades of the twentieth century—that, as the political master narratives
of progress were called into question, memory has reemerged as a major
topic of intellectual discussion.
The relationship of the dictatorship of Generalísimo Francisco Franco
(1939–75) to modernity is a vexed question. The regime has generally
been seen as rejecting modernity since its nationalist rhetoric attempted to
mask the regime’s illicit status, as one born of military rebellion against the
democratically elected Second Republic, by claiming to represent a return
to mythical origins, which the Republic had supposedly betrayed. In fact,
the regime emerged out of an uneasy military alliance (which adopted the
label “Nationalist”) between traditional landowners, the church, monar-
chists, big business, and fascism. While the first three (and particularly the
first two) had a vested interest in clinging to the past, the last two were
advocates of technological modernization (and, in the case of fascism, of
a certain kind of social modernization within totalitarian structures). All
of these factions were, however, united by their common dislike of the
Republic, instituted in 1931, because of its attempts to better the economic
and legal positions of the working classes and women (as well as its conces-
sion of autonomy to Catalonia). This Nationalist alliance, which rebelled
against the Republic in 1936 and came to power on its military victory in
1939, was driven by a desire to negate the Enlightenment belief in univer-
sal human rights precisely in order to implement capitalist modernization
to the maximum benefit of the dominant classes through the use of slave
labor (political prisoners) and state-controlled unions. For this reason, the
historian Michael Richards (1998) has argued, controversially but convinc-
ingly, that the Franco dictatorship should be seen as an example of conser-
vative modernity and not as a break with modernity as such.
This conservative modernity translated ideologically into a contradic-

.  I use the term late modernity rather than postmodernity because I am arguing for a version of
modernity that is able to acknowledge the past while continuing to work for a better future.
This is very different from the ludic relativism assumed by the term postmodernity.
.  For an excellent overview of recent debates on memory, see Radstone 2000; Radstone
and Hodgkin 2006; Hodgkin and Radstone 2006.
.  For analysis of the appeal to a myth of origins in Francoist ideology, see Labanyi 1989:
35–41. In her major study of the moral values imposed by the Franco dictatorship, Martín
Gaite (1987: 17–37) stresses its cult of the past.
.  Autonomy was granted to Catalonia in 1932 and to the Basque Country in 1936, two
months after the Nationalist uprising. Discussions on Galician autonomy were aborted when
the region fell to the Nationalists in the first few days of the civil war.
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 93

tory attitude to the past. On the one hand, in order to satisfy the antimod-
ern factions that supported it, particularly the church, the regime’s ideology
was based on an exaltation of the premodern values of the fifteenth-century
Catholic kings who united the nation by driving out religious heterodoxy
( Jews and Muslims) as well as sponsoring Spain’s early modern empire
in the Americas. On the other hand, the regime adopted a typically fas-
cist rhetoric, justifying its violence as a break with the past necessary to a
national “rebirth,” proclaiming itself the “New State” and restarting the
calendar from Triumphal Year One (1939). As the regime’s foundational
moment—the instrument for wiping the historical slate clean—the civil
war was obsessively memorialized, exclusively from the victors’ point of
view, throughout the thirty-six years of dictatorship (see Aguilar Fernán-
dez 1996: 61–208). The Franco regime’s obsession with memorializing the
“Nationalist crusade” (as the civil war was renamed) ensured that the tran-
sition to democracy10 which took place after Franco’s death in 1975 was, by
way of reaction, characterized by a desire to break with this violent past.
It has become a commonplace that Spain’s transition to democracy was
successfully implemented thanks to the “pacto del olvido” (pact of obliv-
ion) whereby all political parties agreed to forget the civil war in order to
reach consensus.11 Santos Juliá (1999: 11–54) has argued that the “pacto
del olvido” was not a decision to forget the past, but a decision not to let
it shape the future. As he notes, there was no forgetting, for since 1975
historians have produced a vast output documenting the wartime repri-
sals (those which took place in the Republican zone as well as the much
more extensive and systematized extermination campaign organized by
the Nationalists) and its follow-up during the Franco dictatorship, particu-
larly in the period 1939–51.12

10.  The period known in Spanish as “la transición” is generally seen as lasting from
Franco’s death in 1975 to the election of the Socialist government in 1982. The negotiation
of the political transition was effected by politicians from within the Franco regime, notably
Gonzalo Suárez, who, as head of the newly founded center right party, Unión de Centro
Democrático (UCD, or, Union of the Democratic Center), became prime minister after
the first democratic elections in 1977, successfully negotiating through parliament the 1978
democratic constitution.
11.  The historian responsible for institutionalizing this notion is Aguilar Fernández (1996).
The alleged “pact of oblivion” of the transition, enshrined in the 1977 amnesty law which
pardoned all political crimes (including those of the Nationalist forces in the war and those
of the ensuing dictatorship), has become a major target of criticism in the recent campaigns
to exhume the victims of the Francoist repression buried in unmarked mass graves (see
Armengou and Belis 2004: 243–51). The existence of a “pact of oblivion” during the transi-
tion is taken for granted in recent studies of collective memory and cultural representation
in contemporary Spain (for example, Colmeiro 2005: 18–22).
12.  The most thorough investigation of the wartime and postwar repression estimates the
94 Poetics Today 28:1

I suggest that the “pact of oblivion” has become such a commonplace

because it allows the transition to be seen as a break with the past, mask-
ing—conveniently for both political Right and Left—the fact that it was
effected by politicians from within the former Francoist state apparatus. It
was crucial for the interested parties to see the transition as a break with
the past, not only in order to claim that Spain was freeing itself from nearly
forty years of dictatorship, but also in order to claim that the country was
making a “leap” into modernity—something which, as noted above, is
conventionally seen as requiring a rupture with the past. This “leap” into
modernity was understood primarily in cultural terms, for accelerated
economic modernization had already been implemented under the dic-
tatorship; particularly so after the rise to power in 1959 of the Opus Dei
technocrats, who opened the Spanish economy up to Western markets.13
The economic boom of the transition period, lasting to the mid-1980s, was
thus a continuation of that previously experienced in the later decades of
the dictatorship. The break marked by the transition was cultural in the
sense that Spaniards engaged in a frantic process of catching up with life-
styles seen as the hallmark of Western modernity (Graham and Labanyi
1995: 315–20, 326–30, 408–10). Such lifestyles were conceived as requiring
the excision of all reference to the past. Thus the Socialist government of
1982–96 launched a public relations campaign to market abroad Spanish
cultural products—for example, the films of Pedro Almodóvar—that pro-
moted a view of Spain as a young, brash, ultramodern nation that outdid
its European neighbors in its iconoclasm.
Some outstanding films made in the last years of the dictatorship—Víc-
tor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (1973), Carlos
Saura’s Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens)14 (1975)—did tackle the repressive past,
and historical studies of the civil war were written throughout the post-

number of those executed during the war in the Republican zone at around 50,000 and in
the Nationalist zone at around 100,000; postwar executions by the dictatorship are estimated
at a further 40,000, the last being a few months before Franco’s death in 1975 ( Juliá 1999:
407–13). The figures for victims of Republican repression are likely to be accurate, since
deaths were registered; those for victims of Nationalist repression are likely to be an under-
estimate, since they either went unrecorded (in the early months of the war) or (from late
1936) were attributed to causes—e.g., “hemorrhage”—that masked the violence.
13.  In 1959 members of Opus Dei secured key ministerial positions. From this date, they
issued a series of five-year plans designed to implement fast-track capitalist modernization
on an unprecedented scale (in the 1960s Spain’s economic growth rate was greater than
that of any other country except Japan). Opus Dei, founded by the Spaniard Escrivá de
Balaguer in 1928, is a lay Catholic organization devoted to furthering a mix of fundamen-
talist Catholicism and neoliberalism by placing its members in key positions of state power
(Graham and Labanyi 1995: 262, 423).
14.  The title refers to a Spanish proverb: “Raise ravens and they will peck your eyes out.”
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 95

dictatorship period. But few films15 and almost no fiction writing16 dealt
with the subject in the first ten years after Franco’s death, when the pro-
motion of an outrageous hypermodernity prevailed. The mid-1980s, how-
ever, saw the appearance of two major novels on the civil war: these were
first novels by young writers born in the mid-1950s ( Julio Llamazares,
Antonio Muñoz Molina), able to adopt a more detached stance toward
the topic, and—as we shall see—driven by a genealogical imperative to
transmit to future generations tragic events experienced by their elders.
Films on the war also began to appear regularly from the mid-1980s; key
examples are Jaime Chávarri’s Las bicicletas son para el verano (Bicycles Are
for Summer) (1984), Carlos Saura’s ¡Ay Carmela! 17 (1990), and Vicente Aran-
da’s Libertarias (Anarchist Women) (1995). Contrary to the situation with the
novel, these films were the work of established directors (Aranda was born
in 1921, Saura in 1932, Chávarri in 1943) seemingly driven by a nostalgic
desire to romanticize the Republic. Since the late 1990s, escalating after
2001, there has been a flood of novels and collections of testimonies on the
wartime and postwar repression as well as a significant number of fiction
films and documentaries. Among these, this essay will discuss the novels
O lapis do carpinteiro (The Carpenter’s Pencil ) by Manuel Rivas (1998a; written
in Galician), Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis) by Javier Cercas (2001),
and La voz dormida (The Sleeping Voice) by Dulce Chacón (2002). It will also
discuss the fiction films Silencio roto (Broken Silence) (Armendáriz 2000) and
El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) (del Toro 2001) as well as the film
version, by David Trueba (2003), of Cercas’s novel Soldiers of Salamis. Brief
mention will be made of a small number of edited volumes of testimonies
and documentary films.
This recent memory boom needs to be set in the context of the wider
debates on “historical memory” (the term used in Spain to refer to the
memory of the Republic and Francoist repression) that have occupied the
Spanish public sphere at the start of the twenty-first century. The pro-
cess of “digging up the past” has been literalized since 2000 by the exca-
vation of mass graves containing the bodies of victims of the Francoist
repression during and after the war, undertaken by the Asociación para
la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH; Association for the

15.  After Jaime Camino’s Las largas vacaciones del 36 (1976), another film on the war did not
appear until Jaime Chávarri’s Las bicicletas son para el verano (1984) and Luis García Berlanga’s
La vaquilla (1985).
16.  One collection of short stories set in the war—Juan Eduardo Zúñiga’s Largo noviembre de
Madrid (1980)—appeared during this period.
17.  The film takes its title from a famous Republican civil war song—a recycled version of
an earlier song from the 1808–13 war of independence against Napoleonic occupation.
96 Poetics Today 28:1

Recovery of Historical Memory).18 The ARMH was refused state financial

support by the conservative Popular Party government (1996–2004), whose
leader, José María Aznar, is the grandson of a leading Spanish fascist. The
present Socialist government, which was returned to power in 2004 under
the leadership of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose Republican grand-
father was shot in the civil war by the Nationalists, has taken a more sym-
pathetic stance. It set up a commission to address the rights of victims of
the wartime and postwar repression. The commission’s proposed law—
published on July 28, 2006—does not provide state financial aid for the
exhumations, but it requires local authorities to facilitate them, and also
encourages local authorities to remove monuments and street names dedi-
cated to perpetrators.19
Also relevant to an understanding of the current memory boom is the
emergence of a new wave of right-wing historical revisionism. This phe-
nomenon dates back to 2003, when the conservative Popular Party gov-
ernment was expressing its hostility to the work of the ARMH. These
revisionist works are authored by popular historical writers and not by
academic historians.20 Their common argument is twofold. First, they
argue that the civil war was provoked by the Republic (this argument, pre-

18.  See the ARMH’s Web site, www.memoriahistorica.org. The ARMH was founded in
2000 by Emilio Silva in the process of exhuming and identifying (via a DNA test) the body
of his own grandfather, murdered by the Nationalists in 1936 and buried in an unmarked
grave.
19.  The text of this proposed Law Recognizing and Extending the Rights of Victims of
Violence and Repression during the Civil War and the Dictatorship can be accessed on the
ARMH’s Web site, www.memoriahistoria.org. Its publication was preceded and followed by
massive indignation in the right-wing press (see the daily ABC for the two weeks starting July
24, 2006). In fact, while Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, who
headed the commission, stated in parliament that the proposed law was aimed at removing
the numerous monuments and street names that still publicly commemorate Nationalist
perpetrators, the text—in an attempt to placate the Right—asks for the removal of monu-
ments and street names that commemorate “one side in the war.” This wording instantly
proved problematic, with a report in ABC on the following working day ( July 31, 2006) that
the mayor of Ávila had responded to the proposed law by ordering the removal of a statue
recently erected to “Republican womanhood.” This proposed law was debated in the Span-
ish parliament in February 2007.
20.  This wave of historical revisionism started to attract public attention when Pío Moa’s
Los mitos de la guerra civil (The Myths of the Spanish Civil War) became a best seller in 2003. In
fact, Moa had been publishing attacks on pro-Republican accounts of the civil war since
1999. Moa admits to being a repentant former member of the Spanish Communist Party
and of the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization GRAPO (Grupos de Resistencia Anti-
fascista Primero de Octubre) (founded in the last months of the dictatorship and responsible
for kidnappings and bombings until 2002). Other popular historical writers who have con-
tributed to this right-wing historical revisionism are César Vidal, Francisco Olaya Morales,
José María Zavala, and Daniel Arasa. The works of all these writers are widely promoted
in bookstores.
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 97

sented as new, was in fact the standard version of the war promoted by the
Franco dictatorship). Second, they argue that there has been a cover-up
of Republican crimes by the left-wing historians who, since 1975, have set
out to document the previously silenced Francoist repression. The result
has been a “memory war,” with professional historians (and journalists)
responding by unearthing further dimensions of the Francoist repression.21
The vituperative rhetoric of the historical revisionists threatens to turn this
“memory war” into a competition to establish which political side has the
greater claim to victimhood.

In what follows, I would like to isolate some key issues arising from the
memorialization of the civil war and its repressive aftermath in Spanish
cultural production of the democratic period. More precisely, my start
date will be 1973, two years before the end of the dictatorship, since this
is the date of the first, and probably still the most significant, film on the
war’s repressive effects: Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. I shall start by iden-
tifying a strand of cinematic and literary texts which strike me as especially
effective in their treatment of the war through the motif of haunting, which
operates through suggestion rather than statement. I shall then discuss a
different strand of texts which, since the mid-1980s, have attempted a real-
istic reconstruction of the war. I shall argue that this second set of texts,
in its attempt to recount the “facts” with maximum verisimilitude, raises a
series of problems about the memorialization of a difficult past.
The reason for the adoption of the haunting motif in both Erice’s The
Spirit of the Beehive and Saura’s Raise Ravens was, at a practical level, the con-
tinued existence of censorship, which required indirect forms of expres‑
sion. In 1973, the year The Spirit of the Beehive was made, hard-line repres-
sion and censorship returned to Spain in the wake of the assassination of
Admiral Carrero Blanco, Franco’s prime minister and presumed succes-
sor, by the terrorist organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque for
Basque Homeland and Freedom). Raise Ravens was made in early 1975, as
Franco lay dying, and was not authorized for release till January 1976, two
months after his death.22
Set in 1940 (one year after the end of the civil war), as we are told at the
film’s start, The Spirit of the Beehive depicts the child protagonist Ana’s insis-
tence on facing the horror represented by the monster in James Whale’s

21.  See, for example, Rodrigo 2003; González Duro 2003; Torres 2003; Hernández Hol-
gado 2003; Armengou and Belis 2004; Espinosa Maestre 2005; Cenarro 2006. Paul Preston’s
book on the Francoist repression, likely to be a definitive study, is expected in spring 2008.
22.  The reason given for banning the film was its representation of Ana’s military father as
an adulterer (D’Lugo 1991: 137).
98 Poetics Today 28:1

1931 film Frankenstein, which haunts her after the film has been shown in her
village. As critical studies of the film (Evans 1982; Kinder 1993: 128) have
noted, the monster stands as an allegory of the violence of the civil war and
its repressive aftermath, which Ana’s parents do not want to talk about and
which in 1973 the censorship did not allow Erice to tackle directly. At the
end of the film, little Ana refuses the doctor’s injunction to forget the hor-
ror she has indirectly witnessed (the shooting by the police of the fugitive
she had befriended) and goes out to face the night, summoning the mon-
ster to appear to her. In so doing, Ana breaks with the traumatized silence
into which she has fallen as a result of her experiences—and which marks
her parents throughout the film.
A similar haunting by a dark past that cannot be talked about is depicted
in Raise Ravens. Its child protagonist—another Ana, played by the same
child star, Ana Torrent—refuses to accept that her mother, abused by her
military father (whose fascist past is mentioned), is dead. While on the one
hand Ana appears to be a classic trauma victim, visited by reenactments
of a painful past, on the other hand she voluntarily summons up the appa-
ritions of her dead mother, just as Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive persisted
in summoning up Frankenstein’s monster. At the end of Raise Ravens, how-
ever, Ana goes out into the sunny, modern outside world, apparently freed
from the haunting by the past that has possessed her for the film’s dura-
tion. This ending implies that the cure for trauma is to leave the painful
past behind. Ana’s concluding embrace of modernity is signified by her
skipping happily past giant advertising hoardings: this is the traditional
“happy end” of the modernization narrative.
I shall return to the issue of trauma toward the end of this essay. At this
point I should like to note Elizabeth Jelin’s (2003: 51, 64–66) observation,
in her book on the memory of past dictatorship in Argentina, that, in order
to work through political trauma, distance is necessary. As Jelin notes, this
requires a younger generation to come on the scene which, unencumbered
by the previous generation’s internalization of terror, is willing and able
to engage with the difficult stories of past violence. The different solutions
to trauma posed by Erice and Saura may be related, at least in part, to
the fact that whereas Erice was born after the war (in 1940, the year in
which The Spirit of the Beehive is set), Saura (born in 1932) was a child during
the war and, because his father worked in the Republican Ministry of the
Interior, experienced its effects at close hand (D’Lugo 1991: 13). Although
The Spirit of the Beehive was made two years before Raise Ravens, Erice is
thus able to adopt a second-generation perspective, in favor of confront-
ing a painful past which those who lived through the war found hard to
deal with. Having experienced the war as a child, Saura takes a halfway
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 99

position: in favor of probing the painful past but with the goal of leaving it
behind.
The generational issue is important in the case of Spain, since the
Franco dictatorship lasted for thirty-six years. Two new generations were
thus born during its time span. For the whole of this period, censorship
forbade any mention of the civil war that was sympathetic to the Republic,
which was persistently vilified. In its first two decades in particular, the
regime systematically instilled fear and shame into the Republican losers.23
The first novels to engage with the forcibly silenced memory of Republi-
can victimization in and after the war appeared nearly fifty years after the
civil war (in the mid-1980s): they were written by young writers born two
decades after the war (in the mid-1950s). The novels to which I refer are
Julio Llamazares’s Luna de lobos [Wolf Moon] (1985), which tells the story of
the postwar resistance fighters in the Cantabrian mountains; and Antonio
Muñoz Molina’s Beatus Ille (1986), whose student protagonist sets out to
research a “disappeared” Republican writer. In both cases, there was a per-
sonal motivation for the authors’ interest in probing memories of the past
at a time when the Socialist government was promoting hedonistic youth
culture. Llamazares was born in a remote Leonese village, later submerged
under the waters of a reservoir built in the Franco years, in an area where
tales of the rural guerrilla fighters who waged war on the Franco dictator-
ship until 1951 were kept alive by oral transmission. Llamazares (1997) has
told how, in Luna de lobos, he set out to salvage this oral inheritance, threat-
ened with extinction by the modernizing process. Muñoz Molina’s love
of literature was fired by his father, a landless laborer in the rural south
who learned to read through the Republic’s literacy campaigns and who so
valued books that, when his landowning boss’s estate was burned by anar-
chists at the start of the civil war, he risked his life to salvage the remains
of its library. It was from the charred pages of these salvaged books that
Muñoz Molina learned to read as a child (Muñoz Molina 1993).
For both these writers, as these authorial declarations make clear, novel
writing was from the start an exercise in historical witnessing. It is pro-
ductive to relate this impulse to what Marianne Hirsch (1997) has called
“postmemory”: the experience of those who grew up overshadowed by
their parents’ memories of traumatic events. If Muñoz Molina was moti-
vated to write by his father’s experiences under the Republic and in the
civil war, Llamazares took upon himself the responsibility to keep alive
the memories of a figurative family: his childhood village community.

23.  For analysis of the internalization of fear and shame by those defeated in the war and
their children, see Cenarro 2002 and Armengou and Belis 2004.
100 Poetics Today 28:1

Hirsch’s book Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory focuses

on the role of family photos in transmitting an unspeakable past across
the generations (specifically, in the context of Holocaust survivors). Both
Llamazares and Muñoz Molina wrote later novels—Escenas de cine mudo
(Scenes of Silent Cinema) (1994) and El jinete polaco (The Polish Rider) (1991),
respectively—which revolve around a younger generation’s exploration of
the historically embedded stories that lie behind family photographs from
the past. Family albums also played a key role, as the silent transmitters of
an unspoken past, in Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive and Saura’s Raise Ravens.
As Hirsch (1997: 9) notes, family photos are particularly evocative traces
of the past since they engage us in an “affiliative look”: that is, the family
members in the photo summon us to return their gaze in an act of mutual
recognition. The “affiliative look” provoked by family photos also reminds
us of the importance of the private sphere in keeping alive the memory of
what cannot be discussed in public.
The haunting motif through which the child protagonists of The Spirit
of the Beehive and Raise Ravens engaged with the past recurs in Llamazares’s
and Muñoz Molina’s novels of the mid-1980s. Both Wolf Moon and Beatus
Ille hand down a silenced past to their readers by exploring stories of the
“living dead.” In Wolf Moon, the rural guerrilla fighters are symbolically
converted, through sustained patterns of imagery (including the novel’s
title), into werewolves who live by the light of the moon, referred to repeat-
edly as the “sun of the dead.” This last image embodies the process of
transgenerational transmission, since the narrator-protagonist learned
it from his father as a child. The resistance fighters compare themselves
explicitly to the “living dead,” emerging from their underground hiding
places only after dark. Their story is threatened with extinction by the last
surviving resistance fighter’s expulsion from his family’s memory at the
end of the novel—but, in relaying his first-person narrative to contempo-
rary readers, the novelist is keeping him (and his already dead comrades)
alive. At the end of Beatus Ille, the protagonist meets in the cemetery, as
if emerging from the grave, the Republican writer Solana, whom he has
been researching. Although officially declared dead after the war, Solana
turns out to have lived through the dictatorship in hiding. Indeed, in a final
postmodern twist, we discover that Solana, far from being the dead object
of the protagonist’s study, is the author of the novel that we are reading, in
which the protagonist sets out to research his story.
Haunting is also central to Muñoz Molina’s The Polish Rider (1991), where
the secrets of the past hinge on the wax effigy of the mummified corpse
of an unknown woman who, in the nineteenth century, was punished for
her amorous transgression by being walled up and left to die. Not only
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 101

was this story passed down to the protagonist as a child, but the unknown
woman turns out to be one of his ancestors, literally affiliating him with the
past. A similar affiliation with the past is produced by the chest of photo-
graphs inherited by the protagonist’s girlfriend from her Republican war-
hero father. Both the wax effigy and the photographs function as revenants
resuscitating the past in the present.
The haunting motif—dramatizing the afterlife of the past in the present—
recurs in the novel The Carpenter’s Pencil (1998b) by Manuel Rivas, also
born in the mid-1950s. The novel tells the story of the odyssey—through
a series of Francoist jails and into exile—of a Galician Republican doctor,
Daniel da Barca. This account is dictated to the narrator—a thug previ-
ously employed in the Francoist repressive apparatus—by the carpenter’s
pencil, inherited by him from the Republican artist he had executed in the
civil war after Galicia’s fall to the Nationalists. The voice of the dead car-
penter—which speaks to the narrator via the carpenter’s pencil which he
wears behind his ear—thus shares responsibility for the narration. In a key
passage which illustrates this theme of the past’s afterlife in the present, da
Barca talks of the “dolor fantasma” (phantom pain) which continues to be
felt after a limb is amputated. As da Barca puts it: “Dicen que es el peor de
los dolores. Un dolor que llega a ser insoportable. La memoria del dolor”
(They say it is the worst kind of pain. A pain that becomes unbearable.
The memory of pain) (Rivas 1998b: 119; my translation). At the end of
Rivas’s novel, the Nationalist thug narrator gives the carpenter’s pencil to
the Portuguese-speaking African prostitute who has been the recipient of
his narration in an affiliative transmission of the past to a contemporary
victim of history.
The haunting trope becomes explicit with the Mexican filmmaker
Guillermo del Toro’s choice of a literal ghost story as the narrative format
of his Spanish/Mexican co-production about the Spanish civil war, The
Devil’s Backbone (2001). In this film, a group of Republican orphans meets
the demands of the ghost of their former companion Santi by killing his
murderer Jacinto, a former inmate of the orphanage, who is working for
the Nationalists. This act of reparation may bring peace to Santi’s unquiet
corpse, but it does not mean that the past ceases to haunt the present. For
the film ends with the appearance of a new ghost: that of the Argentine
science teacher at the Republican orphanage, Dr. Casares, killed when
Jacinto blows up the building. The film’s closing image shows the ghost of
Dr. Casares standing guard over the orphanage’s burned-out shell as the
surviving orphans limp off into an unknown future. The filmic narrative is,
in fact, framed at the beginning and end by the voice-over of Dr. Casares’s
ghost (which we only recognize as such when we see his ghost at the end
102 Poetics Today 28:1

of the film), constructing the whole film as his retrospective account from
beyond the grave. This opening and closing voice-over comprises a philo-
sophical reflection on the question “What is a ghost?” One of the answers
given is that a ghost is unfinished business. This implies that the destruc-
tion of the Republic by the Nationalists is unfinished business demanding
the attention of future generations.
The film’s suggestion that reparation (in this case, the punishment of the
murderer) does not mean laying the past to rest in the sense of relegating it
to oblivion is reinforced by its penultimate image. As the trussed-up body
of Jacinto sinks to the bottom of the water tank into which the orphans
have thrown him, sending him down to be claimed by the unquiet corpse
of Santi (previously thrown into the tank by Jacinto), Jacinto’s childhood
photographs (which he was clutching when killed) float to the surface. The
photographic image is thus shown to function as an afterlife of the past,
literally resurfacing in the present. Jacinto has no respect for photographs,
because he wants to eradicate his destitute past as an orphan by achieving
material gain. When he finds in the safe at the orphanage not the gold
he is seeking but a bundle of his childhood photos, one of his Nationalist
accomplices exclaims: “Eso es todo. Recuerdos, fotografías, una mierda”
(That’s all. Mementoes, photos, shit; my translation). The Nationalists,
represented in the film by Jacinto and his accomplices, are thus, in line
with Michael Richards’s analysis, depicted as the representatives of capi-
talist modernity for whom future profit requires the destruction of the past.
By contrast, the Republicans—embodied in the film by the orphans, who
meet Santi’s demands for reparation, and by Dr. Casares, whose ghost
stands guard over the orphanage’s ruins at the end—are depicted as repre-
senting a version of modernity that engages with past injustice and regards
ruins as something to be cherished.
This version of modernity echoes Walter Benjamin’s (1992: 245–55) mes-
sianic notion of history, in which the seeds of the future are to be found by
salvaging from the ruins of the past the potential that was prevented from
finding realization. A further image of this Benjaminian conception of his-
tory is provided by the jars of preserved aborted fetuses in Dr. Casares’s
laboratory, one of which—aborted because of its deformed backbone—
gives the film its title. The recurrent images of this deformed fetus in its
amber liquid are echoed by the virtually identical images of the unquiet
corpse of Santi at the bottom of the water tank. This allegorical ghost story
contains a serious message about the need for a kind of modernity—repre-
sented in the film by the Republic—that engages with the past rather than
regarding it as something to be eradicated.
In contrast with the films and novels I have mentioned so far, which rep-
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 103

resent the civil war and its repressive aftermath indirectly through the trope
of haunting, the vast majority of the cinematic and fictional re-creations of
the civil war and its aftermath which have appeared since 1990 have been
concerned to give a realistic account. The many testimonies that have also
appeared since the late 1990s, whether in book form or as audiovisual docu-
mentaries, by definition adopt a documentary stance. This means that,
while the first group of texts focuses on the haunting presence of the vio-
lent past in the present, forcing us to confront issues of transgenerational
transmission and to recognize that the war’s unquiet legacy continues to
matter, those texts which opt for a realistic or documentary format attempt
instead to transport us back to the past. The attention to verisimilitude has
the effect of reinforcing the difference of the past from the present, with
the result that, at the end of the viewing or reading process, we feel a sense
of relief on returning to a present free from such barbarism. The realism
thus produces a sense of rupture with the past. In order to achieve this
realism, films such as Chávarri’s Bicycles Are for Summer (1984), Saura’s ¡Ay
Carmela! (1990), Aranda’s Anarchist Women (1995), or Armendáriz’s Broken
Silence (2000) adopt a heritage-movie style in their meticulous attention to
period costume and decor. Aranda’s film in fact starts with documentary
footage of the war, which dissolves into the fictional narrative. As Andrew
Higson (1993) has noted, the heritage movie tends to produce a sanitized
version of the past through its aestheticization of mise-en-scène, which can
create a nostalgic vision. Chávarri’s film reduces the war to a nostalgic re-
creation of bourgeois adolescent sexual awakening. The three later films,
despite their representations of violence, romanticize the Republicans: in
the case of ¡Ay Carmela! and Anarchist Women, as representatives of a free-
spirited eroticism; in the case of Broken Silence, as lost rural community.24
The documentary format of the testimonies (written and audiovisual)
that have proliferated in recent years likewise plunges the reader or viewer
directly into the past. This immediacy is the main attraction of collec-
tions of testimonies such as Jorge Reverte and Socorro Thomás’s Hijos de
la guerra (Children of War) (2001) and Carlos Elordi’s Los años difíciles (The
Difficult Years) (2002). The same is true of such documentary films as Jaime
Camino’s Los niños de Rusia (Children of Russia) (2001), which interviews
former child evacuees from the civil war who were sent to the Soviet Union;
and Javier Corcuera’s La guerrilla de la memoria (Memories of the Resistance)25

24.  Other films that adopt a heritage-movie style in order to represent the civil war as a tale
of lost rural community are José Luis Cuerda’s La lengua de las mariposas (Butterfly’s Tongue)
(1999) and Imanol Uribe’s El viaje de Carol (Carol’s Journey) (2002).
25.  The Spanish title has a double meaning, referring also to the memory process as a
resistance struggle.
104 Poetics Today 28:1

(2002), which interviews former resistance fighters who fought the Franco
dictatorship until 1951. As with the hyperrealist films just discussed, one
emerges from this immersion in the past with a sense of relief that things
like this do not happen today. These recent testimonies—some of them
originally broadcast on radio (The Difficult Years) or television (Children of
Russia)—are important for making the public aware of the sheer amount
of silenced memories that have lain dormant or untold for over sixty years.
The best of the audiovisual testimonies—I include here Children of Russia
and Memories of the Resistance—do, through their use of close-ups that cap-
ture minute facial gestures, transmit a sense of the continuing painfulness
of the memories that are recorded. But the printed collections of testi-
monies often threaten to swamp the reader with their detailed verbaliza-
tions, leaving no space for reflection. By far the most eloquent testimonies
included in Elordi’s The Difficult Years are those where listeners to his radio
program, instead of producing their own written accounts, have simply
sent in the farewell letters written to them from prison by their Republican
fathers on the eve of their executions. This leaves it to the reader to imag-
ine the emotions of all those concerned.
The least effective volumes of testimonies are those that present the
reader with such an accumulation of accounts of atrocities that they blur
into an indistinguishable mass. This is especially problematic given the
attempt by the editors of several of these recent volumes of testimonies,
including the two mentioned here, to avoid accusations of partisanship
by mixing accounts of victims on both political sides. While it is crucial
that we hear the voices of both sides, it is also important, if we are to
deepen our political understanding of the war, that it be made clear which
accounts are by victims of Nationalist violence and which are by victims of
Republican violence. Reverte and Thomás’s introduction to their volume
Children of War (2001: 13) declares that they have chosen to mix testimonies
by survivors on both sides in order to show that the suffering was the same
in each case. Despite the editors’ humanitarian intentions, this encourages
readers to attribute the atrocities of the war to some kind of abstract (or
specifically Spanish) inhumanity, eliding the very clear political issues that
were at stake on both sides.
There has to date been no attempt to gather the testimonies of perpe-
trators—whether Nationalist or Republican. To my knowledge, the issue
of perpetrators has been tackled by only two novels. One is Rivas’s The
Carpenter’s Pencil, already discussed, which has a Nationalist perpetrator
narrate the story of its Republican hero. The first-person narrative pro-
vides a subtle insight into the psychology of an uneducated peasant whose
only chance of exercising any agency is by doing the dirty work of the vic-
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 105

torious Nationalists. The novel’s layering of voices, with the perpetrator-

narrator’s account dictated to him by the pencil of the Republican car-
penter he had killed, focuses the reader’s attention on the telling in the
present moment rather than on the past events recounted. By contrast,
Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis (2001) adopts the docufable (fictionalized
documentary) format. The fact that Cercas, born in 1962, was only thir-
teen at the time of Franco’s death perhaps gives him the distance to feel
able to tackle the story of how a leading Spanish fascist, Rafael Sánchez
Mazas, who held office under the Franco dictatorship, survived a Repub-
lican firing squad in the civil war. However, the novel also represents its
author-narrator as massively ignorant of the civil war, which means no
more to him than the battle of Salamis between the ancient Greeks and
Persians (hence the novel’s title). Set in the present, the novel charts the
author-narrator’s attempts to identify and locate the unknown Republican
soldier who let Sánchez Mazas escape. The novel’s treatment of this con-
troversial topic attracted huge press coverage, making it a phenomenal
best seller (twenty-nine editions in its first two years). However, the nar-
rative shies away from tackling Sánchez Mazas’s political responsibilities,
veering off into an exploration of the unsung Republican who put compas-
sion before military obedience.
David Trueba’s 2003 film adaptation of the novel is more successful in
this respect, intercutting the fictionalized quest narrative with newsreel
footage of Sánchez Mazas’s political appearances and including moving
interviews with the three Republicans (included as characters in the novel)
who, in real life, offered Sánchez Mazas refuge after his escape and who
testify to the latter’s failure to honor his pledge to help them after the
Nationalist victory. Although both novel and film focus on the present-day
investigation of the past, they represent the difficulties of reconstructing
the past as purely practical (a matter of tracking down the evidence) rather
than inherent in the narrativization of a difficult past. As befits their use of
the docufable format, by the end all the facts have been unravelled, leaving
us with no unfinished business.
The only foray by a woman writer into the docufable genre—The Sleeping
Voice (2002) by Dulce Chacón, born in 1954—does not bring the investiga-
tion process into the narrative; the huge amount of research conducted by
the author is made evident only in the final list of acknowledgments. The
novel recounts the stories—often based on real-life testimonies told to the
author or published by others—of a number of female political prisoners
in Madrid’s women’s prison after the war and their female relatives. Unlike
Cercas, the author does not include herself as investigator in the narrative
but allows the fictionalized voices of her characters to speak for themselves
106 Poetics Today 28:1

(albeit in the third person). The result is immensely moving because of the
narration’s immediacy, requiring the reader to empathize with the charac-
ters. The novel stresses the importance of transgenerational transmission
at a thematic level, through the notebooks which one of the female politi-
cal prisoners, Hortensia (shot by firing squad after giving birth in prison),
bequeaths to her daughter. But by telling the story through the voices of
the characters at the time of the events, the novel focuses on reconstruct-
ing the past rather than exploring the process of telling these stories in the
present.
It should be clear from the comparative survey above that—with the
exception of certain recent texts such as The Carpenter’s Pencil and The
Devil’s Backbone—there has been an overall move from the use of the trope
of haunting, which characterized the films made at the end of the dictator-
ship and the novels written in the mid-1980s, to a preference for realist and
documentary formats. This overall move has coincided with the change
from a lack of interest in the memorialization of the civil war to the present
memory boom. Curiously, this memory boom has not translated into an
increased interest in the workings of memory but into an assumption that
the past can be unproblematically recovered. This sentiment is expressed
in the phrase “recuperación de la memoria histórica” (recovery of histori-
cal memory) that has, since the creation of the ARMH in 2000, become
obligatory when referring to the need for present-day Spaniards to engage
with the unresolved legacy of the civil war and the ensuing repression.26
In other words, what is tending to become lost with the current memory
boom is a sense of the difficulty of articulating the traumatic impact of past
violence.
Discussion of trauma has, of course, dominated the extensive scholar-
ship on the Holocaust.27 Trauma entails a blocking of memory and thus
an inability to construct a coherent narrative. Unable to master the past
through conscious recall, the trauma victim becomes the prisoner of invol-
untary reenactments of the traumatic event, which start to manifest them-
selves, in fissured form, at a later date. The cure for trauma is the successful
narrativization of the violent event, such that the person who suffered it
is able to situate himself or herself in relation to it as an agent and not as
a thing stripped of personhood (van Alphen 1999). The psychiatric treat-

26.  I do not mean here to hold the ARMH responsible for the unthinking use of this phrase
but, rather, the public figures who use it as a slogan without considering its implications.
Indeed, the ARMH’s excavation of mass graves from the Francoist repression has started to
trigger an interest, on the part of anthropologists, in the blocking of grief which the relatives
of the victims have endured (see Ferrándiz 2006).
27.  See, for example, Caruth 1995, 1996 and LaCapra 1996, 2001.
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 107

ment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), however, has been criti-

cised for offering war veterans a medically sanctioned narrative that too
easily explains away the horror of the violence that has been suffered (or
indeed perpetrated) by them.28 The implication of this criticism is that an
adequate cure for trauma is one that does not, in the process of making the
traumatic event manageable, sanitize its horror. For this reason, films like
The Spirit of the Beehive and The Devil’s Backbone, which draw on the horror
genre, are—in my view—more successful in dealing with a traumatic past
than those films, novels, and testimonies that adopt a realist or documen-
tary mode, precisely because they acknowledge the horror—that is, the
“unspeakable.”
I do not want to imply that the current proliferation in Spain of literary,
cinematic, and testimonial memorializations of the civil war is in itself a
bad thing, for the silencing of Republican memories under the Franco dic-
tatorship and the subsequent desire of democratic Spain to break with its
violent past have indeed prevented the public acknowledgment of count-
less stories of injustice. The problem is, rather, the assumption that it is
enough to recover what happened and that the recovery process is unprob-
lematic. It is perhaps understandable that, in a country that has seen nearly
forty years of dictatorship, there should have been a tendency to suppose
that, once censorship was removed, the stories of a terrible past could be
articulated without difficulty. But it is only by capturing the resistances to
narrativization that representations of the past can convey something of
the emotional charge which that past continues to hold today for those for
whom it remains unfinished business.
I should, however, like to note some dangers inherent in this argument.
There is a risk that, in foregrounding the resistances to narrativization,
we mimic—and perpetuate—the trauma victim’s inability to assimilate
the past rather than facilitating the process of working through it. The
influential Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard (2004: 27–29) has argued
for the need to avoid suture—the overcoming of traumatic narrative rup-
ture through the production of a seamless account—in representations of
the legacy of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Significantly, Richard
argues this in the context of her critique of the Chilean transition to
democracy, which, unlike the Spanish democratic transition, did institute
official mourning rituals for those who disappeared under the previous dic-
tatorship. However, in Richard’s view, this was done in Chile in order to
lay the past to rest as quickly as possible, so that it could be conveniently

28.  See, for example, Quintais’s (2001) discussion of the medical treatment of veterans of
the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa.
108 Poetics Today 28:1

forgotten. At the same time, there is an important similarity between the

Chilean transition to democracy, as analyzed by Richard, and that which
occurred in Spain: in both cases, the democratic regimes continued the
neoliberal policies of the free-market economy that had previously been
instituted under dictatorship. As noted at the start of this essay, the capi-
talist market economy is predicated on the production of the ever-new and
the compulsory obsolescence of the old. Richard makes this point, but
she also advocates avant-garde cultural forms that deal with the legacy of
the Pinochet dictatorship by breaking with testimonial realism and instead
opting for an aesthetics of rupture that mimics the workings of trauma.
This aesthetics of rupture represents the psychic aftereffects of the dic-
tatorship, leaving the past events beyond narrative. While in many ways
this indirect representation of the past through its aftereffects echoes the
use of the trope of haunting discussed above in relation to Spanish cultural
production, it differs from it in its stress on rupture, as against the empha-
sis in haunting on affiliation with an unspeakable past: ghosts summon us
to take responsibility for the past by intervening to correct its injustices.
In proposing an aesthetics of rupture, Richard explicitly argues for cul-
tural forms that keep open the wounds left by the dictatorship, restaging
the trauma rather than resolving the narrative fractures through the pro-
duction of a coherent narrative. Her argument is understandable, given
the haste with which the Chilean democratic transition attempted to close
those wounds. Still, one cannot help wondering whether her aesthetics of
rupture, which mimics the involuntary blocking out of the past that results
from trauma, does not in fact echo the rupture with the past encouraged
by the capitalist economy, which she also denounces.
We might take further this similarity between the rupture which charac-
terizes traumatic narrative (the involuntary blocking out of the past) and
that which results from the market economy (based on the requirement to
discard the old for the ever-new) and ask whether trauma—beyond its pro-
duction by specific acts of violence, of which the Holocaust is the extreme
example—is endemic to models of modernity that are based on capitalist
modernization. To phrase this question differently: does capitalist moder-
nity’s stress on the new and on the obsolescence of the past produce a
traumatic relationship to the past, which prevents us from establishing an
affiliative relationship with it? If this is the case, there would appear to be
a need to redefine modernity in such a way as to produce a nontraumatic
relationship to the past, in which we acknowledge that we are its heirs. In
the context of contemporary Spain, such a proposition would mean elabo-
rating a form of democracy that is able to acknowledge the legacy of the
violent past (while reflecting critically on its lessons) rather than repudi-
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 109

ating it. In terms of artistic expression, we may note that the democratic
period in Spain did see an aesthetics of rupture, which Cristina Moreiras-
Menor (2002) has taken as the expression of unresolved traumas left by the
dictatorship: but this occurred precisely in the literature of the transition
period that turned its back on the past and in many cases celebrated the
neoliberal market. By contrast, those novels and films analyzed here that
resort to the trope of haunting seem to me to have achieved a produc-
tive balance between acknowledgment of the past and a desire for change
through their understanding that what matters about the past is its unfin-
ished business, which requires critical reflection and action in the present.
Such a mode of representation accords with Richard’s advocacy of cultural
forms that represent the traumatic aftereffects of dictatorship—rather than
documenting the past events that caused them—but without opting for an
aesthetics of rupture that perpetuates the severance of connection with the
past.
In arguing for an aesthetics of haunting, instead of rupture, as a way
of dealing with a traumatic past, I would like to ask what trauma might
mean in the case of survivors of the repression of the Spanish civil war and
its aftermath. There were no doubt genuine trauma victims in the sense
(outlined above) that the term has acquired in relation to Holocaust sur-
vivors. But in the testimonies that have appeared in Spain since the late
1990s, there is no evidence of any traumatic blocking of memory; on the
contrary, the eyewitnesses appear to have perfect recall. What we do find is
hesitation about whether or not to talk about the repression and of course
a delay of around sixty years in bringing these memories into the pub-
lic domain. There are ready political explanations for this hesitation and
delay, given the vilification which the losers in the war—and their descen-
dants—had to endure during the dictatorship followed by the lack of inter-
est in their stories during the transition to democracy. One of the dangers
of trauma theory is that it can encourage an emphasis on the internal psy-
chic mechanisms that are responsible for blocking recall of the traumatic
event, deflecting attention from political explanations. In the case of the
Francoist repression, the resistances to narrativization have clear political
causes. The testimonies of repression that have appeared in Spain in recent
years do not suggest a biological inability to register the event at the time
but habits of silence induced by decades of repression and a lack of willing
interlocutors, which become hard to break. For this reason also, an aes-
thetics of haunting, which listens to the voices from the past that have not
previously been allowed a hearing, seems more appropriate in the Spanish
case than an aesthetics of rupture, which is predicated on the classic notion
of trauma as the blocking of recall.
110 Poetics Today 28:1

This point was brought home to me as a result of an incident which

occurred the first time I taught a course on the memorialization of the
Spanish civil war to final-year undergraduates at the University of South-
ampton in 1999. After the second class, in which we had discussed theo-
ries of mourning, melancholia, and trauma, a student (Natalia)29 came
up to me to say that she could now understand why her Spanish grand-
mother, whose father had been shot by the Republicans in the civil war,
had never talked about it in the family. Natalia knew the bare facts from
her Spanish mother but otherwise had only two indications of her grand-
mother’s pain. First, she had been brought up never to mention the word
snow in her grandmother’s presence, because it had been snowing when
her great-grandfather was taken to his execution. In other words, her
grandmother appeared to suffer from a classic traumatic reaction to this
memory trigger. Second, when Natalia was nine years old, her grand-
mother came to her room and gave her a photograph of the bishop of
Teruel (beatified by Pope John Paul II), saying she wanted Natalia to have
it since he had died with her great-grandfather. Natalia could now under-
stand that, with this gesture, her grandmother was offering her as a gift
the past that she could not tell. Natalia conducted a series of oral his‑
tory interviews with her grandmother as her project for the course over a
week in which her grandmother, now eighty-six, told in full for the first
time the story of her father’s imprisonment and execution. The transcrip-
tion of the interview shows that Natalia’s grandmother had perfect recall
of all the details: despite what appeared to be traumatic symptoms (trig-
gered by the mention of snow), this was not a case of a traumatic blocking
of narrative, but of no one in her family having before expressed an interest
in hearing her story. This suggests that the existence of a strong reaction
to a memory trigger, even in a person who has not talked about an experi-
ence of violence, should not necessarily be taken as an indication of the
presence of a traumatic blocking of memory.
As the story of Natalia’s grandmother unravelled, it became clear that
it was an especially complicated one: her father had been the Nationalist
colonel who surrendered Teruel to the Republicans, as a result of which
he was branded a traitor by the Nationalists. Only in 1972 had Natalia’s
grandmother been authorized by Franco to claim her father’s body from
its unmarked grave in order to give it a proper burial, on condition that
the media not be informed. This meant that Natalia’s grandmother had no
willing interlocutors on either side in the war, for she was an enemy of the

29.  I recount this with Natalia’s permission.

 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 111

Republicans and, for the Nationalists, the daughter of a traitor. This case
brought home to me powerfully that we should not assume too quickly
that those who do not articulate their stories are suffering from a trau-
matic blockage of narrative but that the problem may lie with the failure
of others to listen.
This incident, turning on the readiness to listen, also made me reflect
on the fact that we need to consider the question of what should be done
with Nationalist memories of suffering. I am not sympathetic to the claims
made by revisionist historians that, under democracy, there has been a
left-wing conspiracy that has denied Franco supporters the right to express
their memories of the civil war, for not only did the Right have a monopoly
over the memorialization of the civil war for the dictatorship’s nearly forty
years, but there has been no censorship since the Spanish Constitution of
1978, which reestablished democratic freedoms. However, it is true that,
as historians have unearthed increasing information about the extent of
the Francoist repression, it is difficult to feel sympathy for those who gave
this repression their explicit or tacit consent, even though it is clear that in
some cases they too have stories of suffering to tell. However, we should
perhaps ask whether we should only be interested in the stories of those
for whom we feel sympathy. Conversely, we might ask whether express-
ing an interest in listening to someone’s story necessarily supposes that we
should—or can—share their suffering. I should like to end by considering
what might be an adequate response to stories of suffering on the part of
the listener.
The refusal of realist narrative in those films and novels discussed above
which use the trope of haunting can be seen as a recognition of the fact that
no narrative of atrocities can do justice to the pain of those who experi-
enced such atrocities at firsthand. This seems to me a more ethical position
than the assumption, in those texts that opt for documentary realism, that
it is possible to re-create for the reader or spectator a direct experience
of the wartime and postwar repression as they were lived at the time. We
have seen how the delay in producing cultural texts about the war was not
only due to the Francoist censorship and the political transition’s desire to
leave the past behind, but also to the need for younger generations to come
on the scene who could tackle the subject with greater detachment. Dis-
cussing representations of the suffering of others, Susan Sontag (2004) has
argued for the need for a degree of detachment also in the audience. Writ-
ing specifically about photographs of victims, she insists that we should,
above all, avoid the bad faith of empathy, for it is a delusion for spectators
to imagine that they can share the suffering of the victims represented in
112 Poetics Today 28:1

the image: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is look-
ing at other people’s pain” (ibid.: 7). Instead, Sontag argues in favor of a
response in which emotion is tempered by a reflective distance, thus per-
mitting political analysis. There is a danger, in the texts that are opting for
documentary realism, of producing a “feel-good factor” that makes readers
or spectators feel morally improved by having momentarily “shared” the
suffering represented in the text, without going on to make any connection
with the present.30 The texts that avoid realism and focus on the past as
a haunting, rather than as a reality immediately accessible to us, retain a
sense of the difficulty of understanding what it was like to live that past, as
well as making us reflect on how the past interpellates the present. Such
an approach is not only helpful in dealing with the suffering of victims of
injustice but also, I suggest, opens up a way to deal with the suffering of
those whose politics we cannot condone.
The fight to defend the Spanish Republic in the civil war still produces
strong emotions among the international political Left, because it is seen
as the last European political struggle fought in the name of a passionate
belief that it is possible to break with the past in order to create a new
future. Ironically, it was this same modern desire to break with the past—
albeit one shorn of utopian ideology—that, at the time of the transition
to democracy in Spain, produced a desire to relegate the civil war to the
past rather than engage with its legacy. It is the late modern loss of belief
in the master narratives of progress that, in producing a revival of interest
in memory, has triggered the increased cultural memorialization of the
civil war in recent years. This same loss of belief in the master narratives of
progress has generated, in the Western world at large, a scepticism about
all forms of representation and about narrative in particular, which trans-
lates into a self-reflexive critical foregrounding of the mode of telling. The
films and novels analyzed in this essay which resort to the trope of haunt-
ing can be included in this self-reflexive trend, which calls into question
the ability of narrative to capture the real.

30.  There is also the much worse danger of graphic representations of violence appealing
to a morbid prurience on the part of readers or viewers. Such a response is encouraged by
the savagery of the deaths of the anarchist militiawomen at the end of Aranda’s Libertarias.
The jacket blurbs for some recent collections of testimonies also appeal to sensationalist
urges that may partly explain the success of such texts. See, for example, the back cover
of Zavala 2004, which promises “fusilamientos, violaciones, mutilaciones y decapitaciones,
infanticidios, enterramientos de vivos, cadáveres devorados por fieras” (executions, rapes,
mutilations and decapitations, infanticides, people buried alive, corpses devoured by wild
animals). This book forms part of the current wave of historical revisionism arguing that the
crimes of the Republic exceeded those of the Nationalists; its tactic is to produce such strong
emotions in its readers that critical reflection is blocked.
 Labanyi • Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain 113

This self-reflexive trend is generally referred to as “postmodern” rather

than “late modern,” since it is assumed that it represents a break with the
modern instead of a particular version of it. But the coincidence of this
trend with the turn to memory suggests that it is not effecting a break
with the past, but is redefining our relationship to it. The recent interest
in memory goes together with the questioning of the ability of narrative
to give us the real, since memory is a form of narrative that is notoriously
unreliable. What memory can do is communicate the importance of the
past in the present—that is, reestablish the affiliative link with the past that
capitalist modernization set out to break. Memory does so by representing
not the past directly, as realist narrative promises to do, but the effects of
the past on the present—its unfinished business. I have tried to argue in
this essay that realist narrative, by plunging us into the past, paradoxically
makes us experience the past as separate from the present. The trope of
haunting, which elides direct representation of the past in favor of the rep-
resentation of its aftereffects, stresses the legacy of the past to the present: a
legacy which—as in most ghost stories—is one of injustice requiring repa-
ration. Haunting requires the present to correct the past at the same time
that it establishes an affiliative link with it. It thus provides a figurative
analogue for a mode of relationship to the past which retains the modern
belief in the possibility—indeed the need—for a better future while also
demanding that the memory of the past be honored.

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