The survival of postmemory in the current hispanic narrative: Un home que se’n va by Vicenç Villatoro, and El monarca de las sombras by Javier Cercas

Abstract

The concept of postmemory, coined by Marian Hirsch, refers to the process of subsequent generations elaborating the traumatic memory of the Holocaust. This concept has proven to be very analytically effectiven when applied to different areas, such as South American dictatorships and the Spanish Civil War. In this paper, we seek to apply it to two recent works produced within the Hispanic literary polysystem: one, from the Catalan system, Un home que se’n va by Vicent Villatoro, and another from the Castilian system, El monarca de las sombras, by Javier Cercas. Both authors belong to the generation of the grandchildren of those who directly suffered from the effects of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship. Fundamental aspects of Postmemory, such as the need for the inherited trauma to mature, the mediation and artistic manipulation of this trauma, and the exploitation of photographs as a means of emotional projection and recognition of the past, occupy an important place. The way these autor’s the literary recreations subjectivise their ancestor’s memory speaks about literature’s ability to artistically sublimate a traumatic inheritance in order to allow it to be assimilated.

Key words: Postmemory, Hispanic polysystem, Historical memory, memory places, Vicenç Villatoro, Javier Cercas