Gender and Memory in the Postmillennial Novels of Almudena Grandes 9780367655235, 9781003129899

Citation preview

Gender and Memory in the Postmillennial Novels of Almudena Grandes

Almudena Grandes is one of Spain’s foremost women’s writers, having sold over 1.1 million copies of her episodios de una guerra interminable, her six-volume series that ranges from the Spanish Civil War to the democratic period; the myriad prizes awarded to her, eighteen in total, confirm her pre-eminence. This book situates Grandes’ novels within gendered, philosophical and mnemonic theoretical concepts that illuminate hidden dimensions of her much-studied work. Lorraine Ryan considers and expands on existing critical work on Grandes’ oeuvre, proposing new avenues of interpretation and understanding. She seeks to debunk the arguments of those who portray Grandes as the proponent of a sectarian, eminently biased Republican memory by analysing the wide variety of gender and perpetrator memories that proliferate in her work. The intersection of perpetrator memory with masculinity, ecocriticism, medical ethics and the child’s perspectives confirms Grandes’ nuanced engagement with Spanish memory culture. Departing from a philosophical basis, Ryan reconfigures the Republican victim in the novels as a vulnerable subject who attempts to flourish, thus refuting the current critical opinion of the victim as overly empowered. The new perspectives produced in this monograph do not aim to suggest that Grandes is an advocate of perpetrator memory; rather, it suggests that Grandes is committed to a more pluralistic idea of memory culture, whereby her novels generate understanding of multiple victim, perpetrator and gender memories, an analysis that produces new and meaningful engagements with these novels. Thus, Ryan contends that Grandes’ historical novels are infinitely more complex and nuanced than heretofore conceived. Lorraine Ryan is an award-winning lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Narrative Reliability, Racial Conficts and Ideology in the Modern Novel Marta Puxan-Oliva Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art Frances Restuccia Conceptualisation and Exposition A Theory of Character Construction Lina Varotsi Knots Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Jean-Michel Rabaté Double Trouble The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism Eran Dorfman Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning Wieland Schwanebeck Promiscuity in Western Literature Peter Stoneley (In)digestion in Literature and Film A Transcultural Approach Edited by Niki Kiviat and Serena J. Rivera Trans(in)fusion Reflections for Critical Thinking Ranjan Ghosh Ghostly Encounters Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Edited by Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy Gender and Memory in the Postmillennial Novels of Almudena Grandes Lorraine Ryan For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Literary-Criticism-and-Cultural-Theory/book-series/LITCRITANDCULT

Gender and Memory in the Postmillennial Novels of Almudena Grandes Lorraine Ryan

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Lorraine Ryan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367655235 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003129899 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To José, for everything.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii ix

1

Motherhood, Clothing and Class in Los aires difíciles

1

2

Memory, Gender and the Changing Spanish Family in El corazón helado

17

3

The Feminised Quest Romance in Inés y la alegría

37

4

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress and the Gendered Reading Trope in El lector de Julio Verne

59

5

Internal Exile and Resistance in Las tres bodas de Manolita

86

6

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness in Los pacientes del doctor García

113

Conclusion Bibliography Index

143 150 167

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following sources for their permission to reprint parts of the following articles/chapter. “Motherhood, Clothing and Class in Almudena Grandes’ Los aires difíciles.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 95:1 (2018): 113–131. “Memory and Masculinity in Almudena Grandes’ El corazón helado”, In: Lorraine Ryan and Ana Corbálan´(eds.), The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture. London: Routledge, 2016. 80–96. “The Gendered Reading Trope in Almudena Grandes’ El lector de Julio Verne.” Neophilologus 99:2 (2015): 253–269.

Introduction

Almudena Grandes is one of Spain’s foremost women’s writers, having sold over 1.1 million copies of her episodios de una guerra interminable, her six-volume series of historical novels. The myriad prizes awarded to her, eighteen in total, ranging from the 1989 IX Premio La Sonrisa Vertical to the 2018 Premio Nacional de Narrativa confirm her preeminence. Grandes’ novels have been translated into many languages and are known to both a non-specialist and a non-Spanish readership; in the Anglo-Saxon world; her best-known novels are The Ages of Lulú, The Frozen Heart and The Wind from the East. This monograph situates Grandes’ major historical postmillennial novels – Los aires difíciles; El corazón helado; and four volumes of Los episodios de una guerra interminable: Inés y la alegría, El lector de Julio Verne, Las tres bodas de Manolita and Los pacientes del doctor García – within manifold conceptual categories in memory, philosophical and gender studies that illuminate hidden dimensions of her much-studied work. I have selected these particular works because they respond to key and heretofore unanalysed themes in her historical novels, such as perpetrator memory and different aspects of gender memory. More broadly, this analysis seeks to establish Spanish perpetrator memory as a major force in the European canon of cultural perpetrator memory. Premised on a wide-ranging theoretical framework that ranges from fashion studies to psychology, it aims to provide a new insight into perpetrator memory itself, which is demonstrated to be a relational phenomenon, intimately connected with affect, gender, the family, and personal relationships. Similarly, it seeks to challenge defeatist perceptions of victimhood by offering a new vision of the Republican victim as a vulnerable subject who seeks to flourish in inimical circumstances, which causes us to revalorise resilience in studies of victimhood. Critics have principally analysed Grandes’ oeuvre within the prism of Republican memory. It is thanks to academics, such Sara Fernández Medina, Helena Talaya and Irene Andrés Suárez, whose edited volumes on Grandes have uncovered a wealth of insights into these novels, as well as the single articles of scholars such as Carmen de Urioste, Julia Barnes,

x

Introduction

Sebastiaan Faber, Sarah Leggott and Alvin F. Sherman that we have been able to consider Grandes’ work within the critical framework of Republican memory, space and exile. A problem particular to this approach is the scant attention paid to the representation of both the victim–perpetrator relationship and the variegation inherent in the perpetrator category in Grandes’ novels, which effectively means that the reader can only learn about the consequences of victimisation. Surely, no writer who aspires to represent the post-war period in all its full complexity as Grandes does can omit these issues, as to do so would be to present discrete, heroic and one-dimensional narratives that would deprive the reading public of a comprehensive and fully honed knowledge of the post-war period. Grandes is generally and, in my view, erroneously, perceived to be a sectarian writer who idealises the victims while condemning the perpetrators: in an interview, Joaquín Leguina criticised that “Grandes solo escribe de la Guerra Civil de forma maniquea” (qtd. in Riaño). This indictment ignores her oft-reiterated desire to convey the more expansive memory of both “héroes y villanos” (qtd. in Aunión) and her stated interest in the ambiguities of perpetration and the conversion of ordinary people into perpetrators. In a 2012 webchat with readers, she declared that “No sólo hubo perdedores en el bando perdedor, y eso lo tengo presente” (Grandes, El País 2012). Furthermore, her conceptualisation of evil is not binary and static, but balanced, predicated on an acknowledgment of the difficulties in categorisation. She avers: Siempre he pensado que un malo para ser malo de verdad tiene que tener luces, porque un malo completamente malo, no asusta a nadie. Es una caricatura. Todos los seres humanos tenemos luces y sombras. Creo que los malos, verdaderamente malos, son aquellos capaces de querer a los demás y tener debilidades. (qtd in Barambio) She adds: “creo que los seres humanos somos capaces de lo mejor y lo peor, en función de las circunstancias” (qtd. in Barambio). Thus, her novels manifest a considered and diverse engagement with perpetrator memory: El lector de Julio Verne is concerned with transforming the perception of perpetrators as reprobates to people with their own credible claims to humanity, who are influenced by social constructs that influence individual attitudes and behavior. Moreover, her redrawing of the perpetrators as the products of a fundamentally weak and corrupted social order in the same novel subverts the certainties that inhere in the easy dichotomisation of evil Falangists versus benign victims. Other novels, such as El corazón helado, Las tres bodas de Manolita and Los pacientes del doctor García, portray the confoundingly arbitrary nature of the individual motives that compel perpetration, as well as the gamut of consequences that arise from these acts. In these novels, the exaltation of the individual victim is complemented by the individualisation of the perpetrator, rendering Grandes’ treatment

Introduction

xi

of memory far more equitable than previously thought. In fact, she is the one Spanish writer who has most engaged with perpetrator memory in her work, developing an original and complex perspective into the issue that transforms cultural perpetrator memory in Spain into a nuanced cultural phenomenon that makes a significant contribution to European perpetrator memory. In this study, I analyse the gamut of perpetrator memories in her work, ranging from the victim–perpetrator affective relationship in El corazón helado, the role of the child, and perpetrator suffering in El lector de Julio Verne to the authenticity of perpetrator trauma, the imbrication between medical ethics and perpetration, and the stigmatisation of the perpetrator body in Los pacientes del doctor García. My analysis of gender memory is similarly wide ranging, spanning from the imbrication of motherhood and class in Los aires difíciles to the memory of the queer city of Madrid in 1930s Spain, and female exile in Inés y la alegría. These new perspectives suggests that Grandes is committed to a more pluralistic idea of memory culture, whereby her novels generate understanding of multiple victim, perpetrator and gender memories, an analysis that produces novel and meaningful engagements with these novels. Based on a theoretical framework of vulnerability and flourishing, I also critique the critical conception of the Republican victim as overly empowered in her novels, reimagining victimhood as a more multidimensional experience than heretofore perceived. Overall, I contend that Grandes engages in complex portrayals of victimhood and suffering that undermine those very black-and-white distinctions that critics have, heretofore, identified, a re-evaluation that makes a compelling argument for a more nuanced reassessment of the authoress, and more extensively, disputes the cultural memory boom’s tendency to Manichaeism. In this introduction, I verse on Almudena Grandes’ trajectory and unpack her literary influences, particularly her indebtedness to Benito Pérez Galdós. I proceed to assess the various criticisms leveled at her work and provide new interpretations for the salience of the emotions and agency in her work. I then examine the socio-cultural context of gender and perpetrator memory, outline the theoretical reformulation of the victim in her novels, and, finally, the chapters are summarised.

Almudena Grandes: Trajectory Almudena Grandes rose to prominence in 1989 with the publication of Las edades de Lulú, a bildungsroman that chronicled the sexual liberation of the eponymous Lulú under the tutelage of her older lover, Pablo. Despite the novel’s huge success, Grandes refused to become typecast as the high priestess of Spanish eroticism, embarking on a series of novels, Malena es un nombre de tango, Atlas de geografía humana and Los aires difíciles, that cemented her status as one of Spain’s leading women’s writers, a classification that she has virulently rejected: “La escritura tiene género, pero

xii Introduction también edad, nacionalidad” (Grandes, El País 2002). Grandes, who was born on May 7, 1960, depicted the lives of professional, liberal, middleclass women living and working in the capital city, Madrid. Their formative years took place during the aperturista period when Spain developed into an industrialised and consumer society where the sudden emergence of liberal attitudes coexisted uneasily with the force of traditional mores. They were a generation of women, who, having been inculcated with reactionary dictates, encountered a wide range of personal liberties and professional opportunities available to them when they came of age in the post-Transition period. From the outset, her novels demonstrated a concern with historical memory: Las edades de Lulú memorialised male prison confinement in the 1960s, while Malena es un nombre de tango traced a genealogy of maternal dissent from the beginning of the twentieth century. Her 2002 novel Los aires difíciles is critically considered to be her hinge novel, a novel that interfuses gender and memory, thus marking her nascent and more substantive commitment to the cultural memorialisation of the Franco dictatorship and Civil War, which officially commenced with the 2007 publication of her magnum opus, El corazón helado. Grandes’ rewriting of the transgenerational recuperation of memory has made her one of the most prominent members of el boom de la memoria, the cultural movement to recuperate the past in Spain, a contentious terrain in which Republican writers narrativise Republican counter-memory, the memory of the defeated Republicans of the Civil War and Franco dictatorship. Grandes was initially motivated to become involved in the movement for the recuperation of historical memory by her daughter’s partisan history books.1 Perversely, the political manipulation of Republican memory for electoral purposes reinforced Grandes’ commitment, and she has lambasted the state interest in the opening of graves as a cynical electoral ploy (qtd. in Marzo). She reserved her greatest condemnation for the 2007 Ley de la Memoria Histórica as she considers that its failure to overturn judicial convictions renders it somewhat pointless: “Si no se van a anular los procesos, no sé de que estamos hablando” (qtd. in Marzo). Grandes opines that the law was an overtly timid measure that was easily overturned by the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), upon their assumption of power in 2011 when they embarked on a process of what she terms contramemoria, the dismantlement of the advances made in Spanish memory culture (qtd. in Pigna). It is important to note the persistence of Grandes’ commitment to historical memory even during the recession period when interest in historical memory waned and when many of her friends dismissed her incipient project, Los episodios de una guerra interminable, as a foolish endeavor in the straitened economic conjuncture (qtd. in Roldán and Soto). The naysayers’ views reflected the increasing devaluation of historical memory in the recessionary period, when the issue was appropriated by the right to argue that the gravity of the present situation obviated a concern with the past and

Introduction

xiii

that the scarcity of resources made funding destined for historical memory unsustainable. For example, in the midst of debates about the transfer of Franco’s grave from Valle de los Caídos to his residence, El Pardo, PP politician Eduardo González Pons asserted that historical memory did not interest the Spanish populace, who were far more interested in reducing unemployment (Agencias). In April 2012, the PP commenced its fiscal abandonment of the recuperation of historical memory. Its first budget reduced the annual amount conceded to the recuperation of memory from 6.2 million to 2.5 million, a drastic cut of 59.6 percent (Herrera). However, Grandes’ interest in the issue transcended the altered national mnemonic panorama, for she has always been appalled by the divergence between Spain’s inertia in relation to memory politics and the vigorous attempts of other European countries to uncover their past, an abhorrence that compelled her to continue writing about this period (qtd. in Roldán and Soto). For her, the Argentine judge María Servini de Cubría’s indictment of Francoist torturers is a shameful reminder of Spain’s inability to render national justice (qtd. in Pigna). She also believes that Spain’s present and that future are predicated on the past, and she is that morally obligated to restore the memory of “muchos hombres y mujeres que se jugaron la vida para que nosotros tuviéramos democracia y libertades” (qtd. in Sainz Borgo). Her fictionalisation of the Republicans’ alienation marks her as one of Spain’s most socially committed writers, dedicated to reinscribing the lives of those who suffered marginalisation, due to their gendered or ideological nonconformity, into the contemporary Spanish psyche. An avowed admirer of the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936, she is resolute in her desire to retrieve what she judges to be an era in which Spain was at the pinnacle of its cultural and political prowess (qtd. in Anabitarte 4). The postmillennial novels of Almudena Grandes exemplify the predominant tendency of el boom de la memoria to corrode the Francoist vision of monumental history, a metanarrative that has become decidedly passé with the advent of an individualistic postmodernism. Michael Ugarte affirms that “with the end of the twentieth century, Franco (along with the authoritarian culture surrounding him) became somewhat of an enigmatic figure – strange, remotely connected to Spanish identity if at all” (617). His contention hints at the cultural shift that has been caused by the rise of “new history” (Burke 10), centering on the lives of non-elites and also the Spanish desire to extricate themselves from an insular past and position themselves at the vanguard of European progressive nations. These factors combined to create a distinct cultural phenomenon focused very much on the micro-social: it is how ordinary people react to their historically determined circumstances and negotiate the complex and interrelating web of personal relationships, the transformations of the social sphere and its separate units, and individuals’ private and often antithetical ideologies which primarily interest the cultural clerisy. This cultural trend is evidenced by films, such as La lengua de las mariposas, Laberinto del fauno and Pa negre; and novels such as Dulce

xiv

Introduction

Chacón’s La voz dormida, José María Merino’s La sima and Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina. For these artists, memory does not constitute a collective category but is instead an eminently subjective, cognitive, and emotional assimilation of key historical events, as a consequence of which the individual Republican is restored to prominence and his/her individual memory is privileged as a site of ideological and personal contestation and negotiation of the dominant memory. History as an explanatory framework has been displaced by memory, which, due to its perceived purity and correlation with authenticity, ethical propriety, and individual subjectivity, is considered a suitable conduit with which to express dissent.2 The cultural output of these writers has projected another vision of the conflict and its aftermath into that public sphere, one that has become firmly embedded in the Spanish national psyche.3 It has validated and fortified the civic movement for the recuperation of memory in Spain, lending further credibility to the human rights rhetoric that underpins their struggle. In other words, it instantiates the abstract notions of justice, dignity and inclusiveness, providing readers with an accessible representation of the violation of these principles and the catastrophic consequences for Republican subjectivity in the post-war period. Grandes has exploited intense marketing strategies and technologies, including book launches; interviews on her publisher Tusquets’ website and in the press; and cinematic adaptations of her books Las edades de Lulú, Los aires difíciles, Malena es un nombre de tango and Atlas de geografía humana, to increase her book sales and media visibility. Her weekly column in the El País Sunday supplement, her frequent televisual appearances in the left-wing Saturday night chat show La Sexta Noche, and her weekly column in Ángeles Barceló’s radio program Hoy por Hoy further bolster public awareness of her work. Her frequent “live chats” with readers of El País foments an intimacy between her and her readers, who engage in a new closer kind of relationship with the personable author that further reinforces her left-wing credentials. As one of the maximum exponents of el boom de la memoria, this use of marketing has been scrutinised, sometimes harshly by the very same critics who disparage the cultural commercialisation of the memory of the Second Republic and Franco dictatorship (Labanyi 119). As Nathan Richardson ironically muses: “One writes a novel of the Spanish Civil War, and one is a Spanish novelist, or at least a remunerated one” (6). Grandes vehemently rebuts such accusation, arguing that she bucks market trends for shorter novels by producing epic novels that stretch from 500 to 900 pages (qtd. in Siguenza). She also asserts that her novels counter the mediatic tendency to depict the 1940s and 1950s as a glamorous epoch in series such as Amar en tiempos revueltos (qtd. in Siguenza). Moreover, she contends that accusations of excessive marketing of cultural memory texts are tantamount to a devaluation of memory itself because they shift the focus to these cultural texts’ economic import rather than focusing on their social and political relevance (qtd. in Fernández Medina 31).

Introduction

xv

Her refutation of venality, however, does not eclipse her extreme savviness in negotiating the Spanish literary market to effectuate immense transformations in the public and critical perception of her. Undoubtedly, Grandes’ evolution from the titillating authoress of Las edades de Lulú, who posed in her lingerie for photo shoots reporting on the book, to the maximum exponent of historical memory attests to both her ability to prosper in an ever-dwindling market for readers and her attunement to the Spanish literary zeitgeist. The national tributes to her, which range from the naming of a library in Getafe, Madrid, in her honor to the receipt of an honorary doctorate from Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in 2020, not only affirms her place as Spain’s foremost female writer but also testifies to her canniness in dominating a Spanish literary prize terrain that has often been inimical to women writers. Spanish female authors, such as Lucía Etxebarría and Grandes, have frequently been perceived as lacking cultural capital, high-brow intellectual and serious academic engagement, and are more aligned to an inferior commercial capital that gratifies readers through depictions of sentimentality and gratuitous sex. It is now apposite to briefly examine some of these strategies that have allowed Grandes to maintain both her celebrity profile and her reputation as a serious, politically committed writer. Her veneration of male left-wing authors of the past, who were discredited during the Franco period, is evident throughout Los episodios de una guerra interminable, and positions her within a genealogy of male ideological dissent. Grandes explicitly advocates a left-wing stance through the citation of poems by Antonio Machado and Luis Cernuda, even taking the title of her novel El corazón helado from one of Machado’s poems. The invocation of Machado is consistent with the boom de la memoria’s exaltation of his work in titles such as Isaac Rosa’s El vano ayer and Benjamín Prado’s Mala gente que camina. However, Grandes’ overarching literary influence is the Canarian writer Benito Pérez Galdós: Los episodios de una guerra interminable are a patent homage to Galdós’s los episodios nacionales, forty-six novels written between 1872 and 1912 that fictionalise ordinary people’s reactions to historical events. The episodios nacionales’ unfurling of the fictional lives of Madrid’s plebian denizens against a backdrop of tumultuous change inspires Grandes’ own focus on the personal and intimate lives of ordinary people. Both Galdós and Grandes committed themselves to writing the fictional micro-histories of highly schismatic times, when national identity was fissured by internal political strife, thus eschewing the focus on “great events and men” to instate a more humane conception of the history of ordinary people. For her, Galdós was the first practitioner of micro-history: “Don Benito nos enseñó a contar desde abajo, nos enseñó que la vida cotidiana de los pequeños españoles era un camino para contar la historia pública de las naciones” (qtd. in Ramós 2019). Her references to his inspiration are constant: on the occasion of the author’s birthday, May 10, Grandes always makes a tribute, ranging from an article for the literary magazine Mercurio in May 2018 in an edition titled

xvi

Introduction

“Eterno Galdós” to an encomium titled “Viva Galdós” in her column in El País in May 2019. The authoress occupied a key position in the Madrid 2020 celebration of the centenary of Galdós’ birth, featuring in an interview on his influence on the current generation of writers in the Benito Pérez Galdós: La verdad humana exhibition in the Biblioteca Nacional. In her 2020 New Year’s message, she also invoked his sagacity to enjoin her readers to enjoy life’s quotidian pleasures. Thus, Grandes positions herself as a disciple of the master, expressing gratitude for his shaping of her work. Evidently, the authoress has derived from Galdós not only a background of social ideas that prioritise the hoi polloi’s efforts to resist the division, subjugation and terrorism unleashed on them by oppositional forces but also a way of inserting such ideas into novels by intermingling their fictional stories with the real lives of historical figures. It should be noted, however, that Grandes’ idolisation of Galdós is not tantamount to an equalisation with him. The press release for Inés y la alegría pictures her sitting at the knees of an aging Galdós’ statue in the Retiro park, an image that is suggestive of a small child learning from a wise grandparent, which represents her as Galdós’ dutiful pupil, devoted to her spiritual and literary master (Ezkerra). This reverence underlies her determination to transform the fallacious perception of him as a “escritor conservador, reaccionario y injusto,” and to redress the ignominious excoriation of him during the Franco dictatorship when the registration details of his birth were removed from the civil registry in Gran Canaria (qtd. in Ramós). In this sense, Galdós resembles many of the ostracised characters that proliferate throughout Los episodios de una guerra interminable. Her alignment with Galdós connects her to a longstanding literary tradition that revered the Canarian author as an inspiration for the literary representation of the marginal subject. His literary legacy has been uniquely intensified during periods marked by national exclusion because of his work’s exquisite representation of intolerance: his 1877 novel, Gloria, chronicles a young girl’s infatuation with a Jew, Daniel Morten, which incites unmerited condemnation, while the narrow-mindedness of the eponymous protagonist of the 1876 novel, Doña Perfecta, is vindicated by a prelate, a depiction that indicted the Catholic Church. Importantly, both left-wing authors in the Civil War, as well as contemporary writers committed to the recuperation of historical memory, such as Rafael Chirbes and Antonio Muñoz Molina, admired Galdós immensely. In Grandes’ words: Es muy curioso cómo la generación de la República en ningún momento dejó de amar y de exaltar la figura de Galdós, el ejército popular en las trincheras repartía ediciones populares de los Episodios Nacionales. Alberti editó a Galdós en Argentina, Cernuda escribió este poema, Max Aub escribió El laberinto mágico siguiendo el modelo de los Episodios Nacionales. (qtd. in Pacíos) Their respect for him recuperates an author whose memory has been alternatively idealised and vilified. Galdós was memorialised as a national hero

Introduction

xvii

through monuments, memorabilia, curricula and an enormous state funeral in 1885. His defining image as a white-bearded patriarch was quickly imprinted upon the national consciousness. However, he was ostracised by Franco, and in the 1970s, he was regarded by the intellegentsia as a somewhat irrelevant, provincial writer who was not compatible with democratic Spain’s embrace of internationalism. In the postmillennial period, Galdós’ ascendancy as a writer and his status as an early public intellectual make for commanding signifiers of Spanish prestige while also paradoxically symbolising marginality Therefore, these postmillennial writers espouse both the incontestably prestigious and marginalised Galdós. Both Grandes’ own self-created association with Galdós, and its critical approval by noted critics, such as Fernando Valls, have associated her with an unimpeachable literary pedigree that has imbued her historical novels with an uncontestable credibility. Indeed, the 2011 Premio Poniatowska de Novela’s award statement eulogised Inés y la alegría as “una obra narrativa, montada en la tradición galdosiana” (EFE). In a literary landscape where female writers often confront the obstacles of a deeply entrenched sexism and stereotyping (Henseler 24), Grandes’ forging of this connection positions her, not unproblematically, in the canon of venerable male authors, disarming detractors who would dismiss her as a mere “women writer” or “feminist writer.” Although Grandes has professed her admiration for female writers, such as Carmen Martín Gaite and Ana María Matute, she seems to accept and work within rather than contest the centrality of phallocentric literary traditions that have impeded the articulation of the authentic female voice, a discrepancy that has two mutually opposing causal explanations. Firstly, the particular nature of Spanish post-feminism illuminates this caution. Spanish post-feminism equates a diluted form of feminine selfrealisation with professional success, physical perfection and complete individualism, with no attendant scrutiny of the collective constraints that hinder an individual woman’s self-fulfillment. It is premised on an antipathy to the idea of “feminism,” held to be a man-hating, passé movement that holds no relevance for contemporary Spanish women (Hooper 72). In an interview with Yemini Pollini, Grandes reveals elements of this attitude, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of feminism as a movement that encourages self-victimisation (352). In line with Spanish post-feminism, she abhors the contextualisation of women’s writing within a limited historical conjuncture, which qualifies the extent of their achievement.4 In so doing, she manifests an ahistorical belief in the boundlessness of female progress. We can conclude that she regards the historically longstanding male dominance of the Spanish literary tradition as inexorable, and that the classification of female writers only serves to perpetuate their dominance by isolating women writers in an “inferior” literary category. It may also be attributable to a desire not to alienate male readers and to mark a distance from her reputation as a women’s writer, in the earlier

xviii Introduction part of her career, a moniker that was constantly rebutted by her. In a 2017 interview, she seems to rejoice at her increased number of male readers. She stated: Es verdad que, al principio, tenía muchas más lectoras que lectores. Y, sin embargo, escribir sobre la memoria ha acercado mis novelas a los hombres. A las mujeres les gusta la ficción pero la memoria histórica interesa más a los hombres. (qtd in Arjona) This is a dichotomous generalisation that both privileges male readers and fails to take into account the resonance her novels’ have for her loyal female readers. Ironically, however, the influence of Galdós enriches both Grandes’ writing and stature enormously by helping her to overcome the dilemmas inherent in female authorship and, simultaneously, to obtain awards previously inconceivable for female writers. Upon the concession of the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2018, which heretofore had only been awarded to seven women in comparison to sixty-eight men, Grandes stated her fervent desire that this gender disparity would be rectified in the future (qtd. in Aunión). In this regard, her achievements are paving the way for gender parity in Spain’s cultural institutions that previously associated women with low-brow literature in contrast to putatively male and more literary meritorious writing (qtd. in Aunión). The use of testimony, the featuring of real-life historical figures, ranging from La Pasionaria to the Nazi Hans Lazar, and her collaborations with historians have further cemented her status as a serious writer of historical fiction. Firstly, Grandes’ own academic training as a historian in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid endows her with professional-level knowledge to explore these topics and to establish relationships with witnesses. Her use of the testimonies of survivors, such as Isabel Perales, a child exploited in a convent in Bilbao, and her recourse to Juana Doña’s testimony, Querido Eugenio, in her 2014 novel, Las tres bodas de Manolita, validates her status even further, as she recuperates the voices and traumatic experience quelled through dominant state, academic, cultural or literary discourses. As Olga Bezhanova astutely notes, the use of testimony, prevalent in el boom de la memoria, gives the narrative a veneer of substance that enhances the readers’ engagement with the text (63). These testimonies expose the brutality of dictatorship and the legacy of “la muerte civil,” the social exclusion of the Republicans from civil society in the post-war period, revealing the alienation and isolation of vulnerable subjects who strive to discursive their memory and to obtain recognition for their suffering. The inclusion of testimony is at once a manifestation of Grandes’ redemptive ethics that reconverts both reader and writer into witnesses of traumatic experiences. In their study, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, literary theorists Shoshana Felman and Dora Laub verse on the importance of witnessing testimonies of trauma. This

Introduction

xix

witnessing, which can be defined as the acknowledgment of the traumatic occurrence, involves empathetic emotional responses or verbal and non-verbal expressions that acknowledge the weight and importance of the stories told. Primo Levi recalls a German guard gloating to prisoners that, in the case of their survival, nobody would believe their stories because of their absolute inconceivability (67). Frequently, this incredulity derives from the gap between the idiosyncratic and institutional idiom of abuse and an articulation of the victims’ plight that appeals to the general public. Testimony preserves trace elements of memories that have been eradicated, proving to be, in the words of Ariel Dorfman, “a very concrete form of reiterating their ethical superiority” (137), and the fictionalisation of this testimony engenders memorability, the ability to engage the public with this memory (Rigney 13). The reappearance of the same historical figures and places in the novels is another feature that strengthens the bond between Grandes and her readers. Antonio Ochoa, the stern adoptive father figure of Los aires difíciles, re-emerges in Los pacientes del doctor García as the aspiring boxing trainer of Adrián Ortega Gallardo. Similarly, there are allusions to Pepé el Portugués in Las tres bodas de Manolita and Inés y la alegría. The inclusion of these characters in the texts engenders a sense of community and, importantly, a temporal continuity that facilitates the imaginative entry into the past by fomenting the readers’ connection with characters, who by virtue of their constancy, are personalised for them.

Perpetrator and Gender Memory Grandes’ engagement with perpetrator memory is somewhat paradoxical, as why does such a putatively Republican authoress delve into perpetrator memory? In the transformed mnemonic universe of postmillennial Spain, Nationalist memory gives more cause for shame than pride because it is devoid of the social kudos now generated by Republican victimhood and the cultural memorialisation of same. This surge of Republican memory diminished a previously unassailable Nationalist social and cultural capital that had been on the wane since the transition to democracy. To wit, during the resurgence period, 1999–2007, the proponents of Republican memory gained public acceptance and even kudos, while the descendants of Francoist supporters were subject to a deluge of criticism that articulated the social unacceptability of their memory. The enormous success of the revisionist historian Pío Moa’s 2005 pseudohistorical apologia of Nationalist culpability, Los mitos de la guerra civil, and the vehemence of the November 20 demonstrations in el Valle de los Caídos manifest the persistence of a proFrancoist side, which begs the question: how do their families rationalise their forefathers’ suspected implication in atrocities, skulduggery, indifference or incidental profiting from the Francoist victory? The eruption of the so-called guerra de las esquelas (War of the Obituaries) in the principal Spanish newspapers, El Mundo and El País, in August

xx

Introduction

2006 reflected the fury of the Nationalist generation of grandchildren who believed that their forebears were being unjustly vilified. The publication of an obituary honoring the Republican aviator Virgilio Leret provoked a storm of counter-obituaries eulogising the Nationalist dead in a politically incendiary language, redolent of Civil War cant: terms such as “the Marxist hordes” and “Soviet Spaniards” reawakened bellic polarisations (Fernández de Mata 89). The latter possibility has a particularly personal resonance for Grandes, who hails from an ideologically polarised family, in which the communist, socialist and fascist members did not speak to each other for the duration of the Civil War (Crespo Buiturón 227). It was in the family itself that Almudena Grandes learned that Nationalist affiliation was not tantamount to callous mistreatment of others and unethical behavior, for her grandfather, a fervent Nationalist, who secured a sinecure in the Ministerio de Regiones Devastadas in the post-war period, resigned from his post in silent protest at the toleration of corruption within the ministry (Crespo Buiturón 229). Thus, Grandes’ successful representation of the filial negotiation of perpetrator memory in El corazón helado and El lector de Julio Verne mirrors her own reconciliation of her abhorrence of Nationalist misdeeds on the macro-social level and a personal respect for her honorable grandfather, a divergence that imbued her with a respect for diversity within the perpetrator category. Grandes’ implication in perpetrator memory can also be ascribed to the universal and national recognition of its relevance in the recuperation of memory. Theorists concur that a one-sided focus on victimhood is detrimental to the maturation of a pluralistic memory culture. In his seminal article on perpetrator memory, Richard Crownshaw notes that perpetrator memory, defined as the exploration of the memory of people involved in acts of repression and violence, counters the overemphasis on the victim, which conceals the complicated processes of large-scale national involvement in reprehensible crimes. He decries the dismissal of the perpetrator in our confrontation with the past because he believes that it excuses us from understanding the quotidian normative circumstances that convert normal people into perpetrators (78). Jonathan Dunnage concurs, noting that the “public reconstructions of the past according to victim–perpetrator/good– evil absolutes often fail to take account of the rather more blurred dynamics behind oppressive state rule and acts of atrocity” (92). The equation of the memory of victimhood with the recuperation of memory displays a very narrow grasp of what an inclusive memory culture entails. Offe warns that the memory of victimhood will not automatically transform the cultural values, attitudes and behavioral patterns that have been cultivated under the old regime: only the incorporation of both memories of victimhood and perpetration will create a more heterogeneous and inclusive society (197). Memory is concerned not only with suffering but instead with social, ethical and pedagogical issues, such as generating knowledge about the causes of acts of atrocity.

Introduction

xxi

Perpetrator memory is considered to be a nascent, if not underdeveloped, phenomenon in Spain, especially in comparison to other European nations. The prominent writer, Manuel Rivas, cleverly perceives inconsistencies in the right’s supposed Europeanism and their inability to confront their own national past thus: ¿Por qué despierta tanta hostilidad la memoria histórica en la derecha española? Esa derecha que gira al centro que no quiere que ningún votante la vuelva a rechazar por miedo, que se pretende homologable con los gobernantes franceses y alemanes, que si asumen la memoria de la resistencia antifascista, ¿por qué hace una excepción con la dictadura franquista, una de las más crueles y prolongadas de la historia? (214). The much-vaunted Ley de la Memoria Histórica did not initiate any judicial procedures against perpetrators. In its aftermath, 1,200 families of the Republican disappeared—estimated to be 50,000—entreated Judge Baltasar Garzón to take action to bring Francoist executioners to justice and to facilitate the carrying out of exhumations (Nolan 2008). The indictment of the Francoist executioners proved problematic as up to forty of them are now dead. Garzón, however, did proceed in October 2008 to request details of executions and victims’ documents from local councils and churches. All these plans were abandoned, however, when the Audiencia Nacional issued an injunction on 7 November 2008 that ordered Garzón to end his investigation. However, cultural perpetrator memory is generally considered to be a burgeoning genre in Spain, and numerous novels thematising Nationalist descendants’ discomforting coming to terms with the past have been published. It is clear that the second generation’s cultural commitment to perpetrator memory is being stimulated by the lack of political action, for it seems that the cultural arena has become one of the few public fora which can reinstate a more equitable version of national memory that would deal trenchantly with perpetrator memory. Among the most prominent are José María Merino’s 2009 novel, La sima; Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s 2011 novel, El día de mañana; and Javier Cercas’ 2016 novel, El monarca de las sombras. Interestingly, two of Grandes’ novels, El corazón helado and El lector de Julio Verne, form part of a growing number of novels, which include Javier Marías’ 1992 novel, Corazón tan blanco; Rafael Chirbes’ 1994 novel, Los disparos del cazador; Bernardo Atxaga’s 2004 novel, El hijo del acordeonista; and Andrés Trapiello’s 2012 novel, Ayer no más, that address the intricacies of male descendants’ confrontation with their progenitors’ malfeasances in the post-war period. These novels crystalise the construction and perpetuation of the inequitable system of social and economic privilege sanctioned by the Nationalist victory, and the sons’ refutation of this dubious paternal amorality. The father–son relationship has historically occupied a superior gendered position as a bond presumed to be

xxii

Introduction

crucial to the maintenance and perpetuation of male dominance, and hence, its fracturing destabilises patriarchal dominance in contemporary Spain. In this corpus, the recurrence of morally unscrupulous and status-hungry fathers deideologises the Spanish Civil War and el primer Franquismo, the early post-war period from 1939 to 1957, reconceiving them, in novels such as El hijo del acordeonista and El corazón helado, as periods when the arbitrary application of the rule of law facilitated the illegal expropriations of Republican properties. In these novels, three sons, Álvaro in El corazón helado, José Pestaña in Ayer no más, and Nino in El lector de Julio Verne, are university professors, while David in El hijo del acordeonista is an architect. Evidently, all these professions represent the sons’ alignment with a rational intellectual model of masculinity that transmutes their progenitors’ ill-begotten wealth into respectable bourgeois capital. Contemporary perpetrator fiction has developed into a subcategory of the memory genre, elevating the psychopathology of perpetration to the status of an issue worthy of consideration, thus facilitating the integration of the psychological and social motivation underlying perpetration into contemporary Spanish fiction. Intrinsic to this approach are the ideas that the perpetrator is a comprehensible human being and that perpetration itself is not merely accreditable to psychopathy but to the complex and mercurial combination of agency and volition, supra-individual forces, and the prosaic motives of greed and ambition that subtend the enactment of evil acts. This cultural perpetrator memory has unsettled citizenry complacency and ultimately ameliorated Spain’s democratic culture by forcing individuals to confront their descendants’ implication in acts of violence. It has ruptured the facile moral framework that has regulated the cultural memory of the Spanish Civil War and post-war period by presenting what Primo Levi termed “the gray zones,” the moral ambiguities of victimhood and perpetration. Nevertheless, Katherine Stafford avers that this genre’s “shifting of the gaze away from the Republican victim to the perpetrator risks leaving the victim once again in the shadows” (6), an idea that substantiates the idea of a Victim Olympics, wherein memory groups compete for scarce commemorative space (Hoffman 27). Certainly, the emergence of the genre raises questions concerning the reconciliation of the critical imperative to understand the motivations of all historical actors, both victims and perpetrators, with the moral imperative not to rationalise or mitigate the perpetrators’ acts or reduce the attention accorded to the victims, a dilemma I will address in my chapter on El lector de Julio Verne (Chapter 4). In my opinion, awareness of the perpetrators’ misdeeds, their inner lives, suffering and trauma culminate not in reduced status for the victims but rather in an enriched understanding of the past that allows readers to understand both victims and perpetrators. Influenced by European and South American models of perpetrator memory, Grandes´ multifaceted engagement with cultural perpetrator memory, which encompasses its relationship with medical ethics, affect, space and gender, means that Spanish perpetrator memory is

Introduction

xxiii

far more developed than previously thought, and deserves to be considered in the European pantheon of cultural perpetrator memory. The simultaneous conveyance of the memory of victimhood and perpetration is sustained by the gendered subject in these novels, female and male characters who demonstrate the primacy of gender and sexuality in the cultural memorialisation of both victimhood and perpetration. Importantly, Grandes does not succumb to the tendency to equate “gender” with “women,” an approach decried by Natalie Zemon Davis, who argues that women’s experience cannot be understood without considering its interaction with masculinity (93). Thus, studies of gender memory, such as Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini and Paul Thompson’s edited book Gender and Memory, considered both masculine and feminine memories, which are markedly different. As Gayle Greene notes, masculine memories do not invoke the constriction and lack of freedom and agency that feminine memories do. In her words: Though from one perspective, women might seem to have more incentives than men to be nostalgic – deprived of outlets in the present, they live more in the past, which is why they are the keepers of diaries, journals, family records, and photograph albums – from another perspective, women have little to be nostalgic about, for the good old days when the grass was greener and young people knew their place was also the time when women knew their place, and it is not a place to which most women want to return. (295–296) Greene’s comments indicate that our relation to the past is invariably gendered, determined by mnemonic structures that allot specific tasks to men and women, and memories that can both invalidate and substantiate sexist traditions. Memory is not divorced from the variables that define individual personhood, being essential not only to the constitution of identity but to the performance of gender. Grandes reconfigures the negotiation of masculinity as a search for perpetrator memory in El corazón helado and the rationalisation of a paternal perpetrator in El lector de Julio Verne. In these two novels, the memory of past inequities mobilises and legitimises burgeoning transformations in masculinity, spurring change and validating new masculine ways of being. Even more innovatively, Grandes’ recuperation of a distinctly gendered memory recovers the voices of a wide range of gender deviants, working women, an intergenerational family of prostitutes, homosexuals in 1930s Madrid, a female exilic entrepreneur and female “emotional communities” that had been rendered inaudible by traditional Francoist historiography. These characters attempt to determine their own life course in a society that annulled their personhood, and they gain strength from female “emotional communities” that provide them with solace and reassurance. This representation triggers different perceptions about female compromise by presenting the alternative view that a highly

xxiv

Introduction

restrictive gendered context impelled some women to defy, rather than acquiesce to, normative gender mores. The Primacy of the Emotions and Agency in Grandes’ Postmillennial Novels Although much praised and feted, Grandes’ postmillennial oeuvre has also been the subject of much criticism. Firstly, her evocation of implicitly depoliticised emotions in adverse historical conjunctures has generated myriad and conflicting critical perspectives. David Becerra Mayor takes issue with the narrative salience of the emotions, which, to his mind, obscures a muchneeded focus on the historical economic and social factors that continue to influence the current distribution of power in Spain (239). Citing the example of El corazón helado, Becerra Mayor argues that the ending, in which the protagonist Álvaro Carrión confronts his mother Angélica for her collusion in his father’s dubious enrichment, simply culminates in his mother’s invitation to a barbecue that symbolises the maintenance of the status quo. Both the title of the series Episodios de una guerra interminable and Grandes’ avowal that “todavía estamos pagando los platos de la Guerra civil” dispute his contention. Grandes’ derision of the present reality of Spain, which she has decried as “vulgar and aburrida,” makes the past all the more pertinent, as she projects her longing for communal values onto this past, which morphs into an inspiration for the transformation of the present (Grandes, “Memoria y Libertad”). Tellingly, her critique of recessionary Spain, the 2015 novel Los besos en el pan, was produced in a hiatus from the writing of Las tres bodas de Manolita, two novels set in two distinct time periods but united by the predominance of solidarity between beleaguered individuals. Relatedly, she has long bewailed the individualism wrought by the hyperconsumerism so prevalent in Spain, which stands in marked contrast to the values-oriented past (Grandes and Llamazares 77). The post-war past as a source of inspiration concords with the school of memory that views the past as an integral part of the present. According to Barry Schwartz, the negation of the accumulative character of collective memory, that is, its heritage from the past is erroneous, as “it is the past that shapes our understanding of the present, rather than the other way round” (Schwartz 922). His theorisation of the past as a vital component in the elaboration of the present effectively means that the past cannot be discarded and, furthermore, that one’s identity in the present is premised on continuity with, and learning from, this past, a perspective that Grandes advocated in her 2019 address to the RAE: “La memoria tiene que ver con el presente y con el futuro, y es un ingrediente fundamental para labrar la propia identidad, para saber quiénes queremos ser y a quiénes nos queremos parecer” (qtd. in Ramós). Grandes’ evocation of the past destabilises present meanings, which converts cultural memory into a profoundly dislocating, disorienting force that can alter the present. As Lisa Renée DiGiovanni so

Introduction

xxv

elegantly expresses it: “Authors like Grandes reshape otherwise disheartening stories of dictatorial repression into compelling narratives of resistance that serve as a source of inspiration and a model for cultural and political renewal” (143). For Becerra Mayor, the authoress’s avowed opposition to “la Historia con Mayuscula,” upon which her portrayal of the history of the emotions is partially based, is fallacious, because it devalues the scientific rigor and objectivity of history, resulting in a bathetic and partial rendering of it (241). He proceeds to inveigh against the simplicity of reducing the entire political history of the PCE in exile in France to two romances: La Pasionaria with Francisco Antón, and Carmen de Pedro with Jesús Monzón in Inés y la alegría. He opines that her subjectivisation of historical archetypes, for example, the perpetrator father in El lector de Julio Verne, depoliticises and simplifies complex historical conjunctures, lending itself to a one-dimensional and sympathetic perspective of the perpetrator that elides victim suffering (257). In contradistinction to Becerra Mayor’s criticism, Katarzyna MoszczyńskaDürst considers that the forging of micro-social communities, and personal and romantic bonds creates a complex ideation of collective memory, heretofore held to be the preserve of gubernatorial elites. She comments: El objetivo de este ejercicio de reescritura de discursos historiográficos consiste también en ofrecernos una denuncia social de la dictadura franquista que clasificaba ciertas vidas como abyectas y culpables, deshumanizándolas. La narrativa estudiada, al ubicarse en un espacio lleno de contradicciones, silencios y represiones, desplaza los usos hegemónicos y permite remarcar en la concepción de la memoria como una construcción esencialmente ideológica, compuesta por diversos estratos y horizontes axiológicos superpuestos, residuales y emergentes, en constante lucha por el poder. (29) According to this critic, love even serves a compensatory function for the protagonists’ yearning for the lost Second Republic, itself the symbol of a chimerical and egalitarian utopia (472). Francisco J. Sánchez posits that love in Grandes’ novels assuaged widespread disillusionment in the wake of the Transition. He draws on Paul Julian Smith’s theory of “the emotional imperative” which proposes that the domestic and familial space of inner emotions compels a confrontation with painful and inassimilable social and political issues: in effect, love can galvanise, or compensate for, social and political action (182). His idea that the unviability of these political projects can be palliated, or even substituted by interpersonal love, is not convincing, however, because it devalues both elements, the enormity of the political project, and the power of love, figured here as a mere salve for political disillusionment. In yet another critical interpretation of the emotional import of Grandes’ work, Ana Corbálan proposes that the readerly sympathy, created by this focus on the emotions, induces the reader to reflect profoundly on

xxvi

Introduction

the post-war years, which makes them more effective in generating empathy than historical monographs (107).5 Certainly, her contention is credible: for example, even at the height of their fame, the books of the famed Nazi hunters, the Klarsfelds, only sold 3000 copies (Fournet 14). In my opinion, Grandes’ exaltation of the emotions reflects the historical actuality of the period, the palpable sense of fear which the Francoist repression generated and the lack of a forum in which to debate important issues, which culminated in the de-politicisation and retreat to the private sphere of the populace (Gracía García and Ruiz Carnicer 60). For the majority, politics and civil society were regarded as diametrically opposed in this epoch, so much so that they completely abstained from political criticism (129). Francisco Sevillano Calero’s detailed exploration of popular opinion during the Francoist period, which reveals that the complaints of the population centered on the constraints imposed by excessive bureaucracy, the inadequacy of the Regime’s social policy and corruption, corroborates the existence of a highly depoliticised populace (60). The importance of the family in a deliberately depoliticised post-war Spain was instrumental in making the articulation of affect in the private sphere one of the only permissible expressions of selfhood in a highly repressive society. Theorists contend that overinvolvement with the family can lead to a lack of civic commitment and to the creation of a simplistic dichotomy between the family versus the state (Burlein 315), when the social sphere is actually constituted by the dynamic interaction between the two. If we extend Burlein’s critique to post-war Spain, we can observe that the postwar recoilment into the private sphere reinforced the idea that involvement in politics would be both foolhardy and injudicious. The repressive legislation of the post-war period initiated power relationships predicated on fear, which brings us to the psychoanalytic sense of trauma as “the wound of the mind – the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world” (Caruth 3). This social trauma comprised both physical and psychological wounding that was inexpressible in the public sphere, a silencing that only compounded the trauma and converted the experience of the emotions into a form of affective resistance. The state impingement into the most interior spaces of life meant that the private emotional space vindicated a division of the self and the social sphere, which meant that the emotions gained a primacy, serving as a powerful counter-hegemonic force, that would not have been conceivable in democracies. They animated and sustained the private worlds where people lived and formed their values, separate from the political world that most regarded with fear and emotional detachment. Thus, the centrality of the emotions implicitly revalues the domestic and private sphere, which was previously held to be secondary, if not inferior, to the public sphere, while also reconstruing memory as an intimate possession, replete with moral and ethical significance. While public narratives celebrated a belligerent Nationalism and exclusionary form of citizenship, a private subjectivity was cultivated as a way to process and negotiate fear,

Introduction

xxvii

preserve nonconforming identities, and consolidate a family unity that assumed a disproportionate importance. In these novels, vulnerable subjects’ emotional lives serve as a bulwark against macro-social depredations, permitting them a contemplative and private space of expressivity, affect, and reassurance that was lacking in the public sphere. More significant, the importance of the emotions in these novels causes us to rethink the inordinate emphasis on trauma in the cultural memorialisation of the past. As Antze and Lambek observes: “Increasingly, the only memory worth talking about, worth remembering, is the memory of trauma” (241). In a recent issue of Memory Studies, Sindbæk Andersen and Ortner decry the tendency to dismiss joyous memories, which can coexist with traumatic ones, as banal and unworthy of attention. The omission of joyous memories partially collapses the past–present–future continuum on which memory studies is predicated, because it affirms the idea that the past can only transmit negative lessons to us in the present (Sindbæk Andersen and Ortner 8). In their compelling study on the representation of victimhood, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman stress the automatic conjoining of the symptoms of trauma with victimhood to the extent that psychiatrists are now asked to corroborate trauma in the case of victims seeking redress or asylum (17). In a similar vein, Erica Bouris argues that the socially acceptable form of victimhood is predicated on the idea of the victim as a moral beacon, whose exemplarity is premised on their resignation to performing the powerlessness expectant of a victim in contemporary society (32). Thus, the socially credible version of victimhood has become coterminous with an impotent vulnerability and a lack of resilience, firmly divorced from individual strength and forbearance. Moreover, the dominance of this variant of trauma simplifies the composition of cultural trauma that is composed of both negative and positive elements. As a cultural process, trauma’s impact is twofold and contradictory: on the one hand, it fissures the “tissues of a community,” but, in contrast, its memorialisation involves “the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory” (Eyerman 2). The trauma of the Civil War splintered the social fabric, but its postmillennial memorialisation required novel and nuanced ways of conceptualising community and the relationship of self to society, which culminated in the reimagination of the emotional lives of victims and perpetrators in forms that were palatable to readers in a prosperous, postmillennial Spain that had become the world’s eighth largest economy in 2002. The prominence of memories of contentment in Grandes’ novels necessitates a reconceptualisation of cultural memorialisation, which is determined by not only the influence of the past, as I discussed earlier, but also presentist demands for its reformulation and the necessity of securing interest and acceptance of it in a competitive mnemonic marketplace. Joyous memories attest to the resilience of traumatised subjects, negating the automatic linking of memory studies with grievance and violence (Sindbæk Andersen and Ortner 6). The revalorisation of memories of happiness

xxviii Introduction imparts a positive perception of the past, causing individuals to identify and rethink certain elements of the past that are currently lacking in everyday life (7). If we consider the pedagogical import of joyous memories, in conjunction with Grandes’ insistent extolment of the past as a source of the waning Spanish values of solidarity and selflessness, we can immediately perceive that memories of contentment cannot be just reduced to manifestations of agency. Instead, they approximate to carefully deliberated historical lessons that indict the materialism of the present by exalting the capacity of beleaguered individuals to experience happiness in far more adverse circumstances. Relatedly, the individual agency accorded to her protagonists has proved to be contentious, with David Becerra Mayor accusing her of promoting “una lectura aideológica del pasado, en el que la noción de individualidad predomina” (270). Certainly, the protagonists of the novels invariably seem to triumph over adversities by dint of their ingenuity and resourcefulness, a somewhat discordant portrayal of a period that was not, in any way, characterised by individualism, due to the dire economic conjuncture, the predominance of National Catholicism and the creation of a militaristic society, that prioritised collective absolutes and homogeneous patterns of behavior. In novels, such as Inés y la alegría, El lector de Julio Verne and Las tres bodas de Manolita, the protagonists’ resilience counters the legitimised and omnipresent repression. The prevalence of the bildungsroman genre in these three postmillennial novels indicates that Grandes regards the post-war period as conducive to personal growth. Their protagonists’ upward personal and professional trajectories amount to a backward projection of capability, an unfettered developmental trajectory that is redolent of the oversanguine, even illusory, nature of neoliberalism. In fact, the only personages who do not dispose of any agency, enacted in the forms of spatial, emotional and cultural resistance, is the perpetrator, Antonino, in El lector de Julio Verne. However, as numerous critics of neoliberalism, such as David Harvey and Michael J. Sandel have shown, this ostensible enablement of the individual is fallacious, premised as it is on a disregard of the collective structures that determine individual attainment. In fact, both the novels’ emphasis on the emotions and individual agency seem to correspond to what Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” which can be defined as the neoliberal distortion of affect that entices individuals to believe in an incredulous “good life,” composed of individual autonomy and a satisfying love life, a delusionary affective panacea that conceals the harsh realities of contemporary everyday living in neoliberal societies (15). Grandes’ adamant disavowal of political correctness renders this disparity, the projection of neoliberal values onto the past, all the more incongruous. In a 2016 interview, she affirms: Hay un aspecto que me resulta especialmente odioso y que encuentro muy de moda, y es la deslealtad a los hechos históricos, y concretamente, la de exportar la corrección política contemporánea a hechos

Introduction

xxix

ocurridos por ejemplo en 1936 o en 1945. Hay autores que deciden escribir una novela con un personaje ideal que no va a estar ni con unos ni con otros, porque es un demócrata convencido, pero le horrorizan los excesos, y se dice: voy a triunfar. Para mí, en el treinta y seis, no había gente así y me parece una forma muy desleal de escribir sobre los hechos históricos. (qtd. in Fernández Medina 29) This rebuttal is at variance to the extraordinary ability of her characters to preserve their individuality, which does seem to reflect the contemporary neoliberal idealisation of the resilience of the human spirit but is far from contemporaneously accurate. However, prior to condemning this facet, it is necessary to reflect on current philosophical, psychological and medical theories of resilience. Resilience forms the cornerstone of the neoliberal conceptualisation of the subject: Bracke notes that in order to conform to Western neoliberalist discourse, one has to be seen to be performing first and foremost as “resilient” and as a “good subject” (840). She observes that “subjects are encouraged to regulate their conduct according to specific liberal virtues” (842). This variation of resilience actually requires subjects to cease to define themselves as distinctive individuals, enjoining them to transform into changing personalities in response to the designated roles given by society, oscillating between fulfilling expectations, preserving their private vision of themselves and presenting themselves as they want to be perceived by others (847). The inherent flaw in this version of resilience is that it charges all responsibility for change to the individual. A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal proposes a more considered definition: “Resilience is always contextual. It is a complex and dynamic interplay between an individual, the individual’s environment and sociocultural factors” (Balme et al. 4710). I postulate that the resilience of Grandes’ characters conforms to this more discerning variant because the characters’ ability to withstand is both facilitated but also truncated: for example, Manolita’s fortitude enables her to survive, but the cultural resistance of her sister, Isabel Perales, and her father in carceral settings do not allow them to escape death. Neither does the resilience of las rubias in El lector de Julio Verne result in an improvement in their economic or social stature. In Grandes’ novels, resilience does not obviate vulnerability or susceptibility to abuse, and its results are partially dictated by the environment, a representation that negates the critical dismissal of Grandes as a thoughtless historical chronicler. Second, it is erroneous to dismiss the restoration of agency as merely a grafting of neoliberal values onto the past because such an argument, unwittingly, reproduces the disempowerment of the victim as an individual, unable or even unentitled, to the dignity inherent in the capacity for autonomous action and the articulation of affect. In order to properly understand agency, we need to revise and dispel prevalent assumptions concerning both memory and victimhood. The capacitation of the individual subject, in these

xxx

Introduction

novels, is not reducible to an annulment of their victimhood or hardship but is rather a resignification of the victim to the more agentic state of a vulnerable subject, who is capable of resisting and even flourishing in inimical historical conjunctures. This perceptual shift necessitates a consideration of the conceptual underpinnings of victimhood: vulnerability, flourishing and interdependence, which, in broader terms, will challenge our view of victimhood in culture and society. Etymologically, vulnerability is derived from the Latin vulnerābilis, from vulnus – “a wound.” According to the Oxford Dictionary, vulnerability signifies exposure to the possibility of being harmed, either physically or emotionally, and being in need of special protection, or at risk of abuse or neglect. Vulnerability is an effect of the phenomenological, socially structured condition of “permeability” (Sabsay 286) which can be defined as the susceptibility to social rejection (287). Vulnerable subjects are frequently objectified, depriving them of their potential to self-determine and articulate their grievances (Nussbaum, “Frontiers of Justice” 214). As a consequence of this objectification, the vulnerable subject is perceived to lack power and is thought to be incapable of self-sufficiency or exercising agency. In short, the vulnerable subject is seen as weak and passive, conceptually antithetical to qualities such as capability, strength, autonomy, activity, well-being and other desirable conditions (Cunniff Gilson 82). Vulnerability causes interdependence, which increases the subject’s susceptibility to abuse, a vicious cycle that can only be reversed by the strengthening of the individual subject to a supra-individual level which pre-empts reliance on the other (85). Sara Hagalin’s study of vulnerability in American culture challenges the implications of this obligatory moral and physical dependence on the other, by classifying dependence as extraneous to the debate. She proposes the idea of “resistant vulnerability,” the idea that “suffering bodies do not need our protection and assistance” (4). Hagalin’s reconstrual not only discounts the very real dependence, whether desirable or not, that vulnerability implies for the subject, but also elides the potentiality of individual vulnerability to embed fragile subjects in protective communities. In that regard, leading philosophers’ and Hispanists’ perspectives enhance our understanding of the relationship between vulnerability and dependence. Judith Butler suggests that, in accepted thought, “vulnerability is the opposite of resistance” which “implies the need for protection” and strengthens “paternalistic forms of power” (“Rethinking Vulnerability” 10). The body itself, however, is simultaneously a conduit of social debilitation and the human capacity for resistance. In her words: “the body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well” (“Precarious Life” 249). “Bodily life” for Butler thus refers to an ambivalent site that oscillates between agency and dependency, which purports to refute the traditional liberal thesis of autonomous individuality. The abuse

Introduction

xxxi

of the body upends this ambivalence, forcing the person into an infantile and solitary regression that derives from what Butler terms the “primary vulnerability,” the inchoate defencelessness that rendered the infant body wholly dependent on parental ministrations and susceptible to abuse (“Precarious Life” 77). This primary vulnerability persists in modified forms throughout our lives, the sense of infantile dependency remaining latent or surging, and consequently, the subject is never certain of corporeal proprietorship, which can be revoked by social condemnation, unfavorable legislation or violence. However, the primary vulnerability is not wholly negative if we conceive, as Butler suggests, of the dyad of vulnerability and dependency as mutually constitutive, and hence as only threatened, but never undone, by acts of violence. Butler argues that when the wielder of power in a relationship, either personal or political, projects vulnerability and impotence onto the other, the very act of determining that subservience or weakness reveals the stronger individual’s insecurities (57). This would imply a co-ownership of vulnerability in the relationship or even point towards the reversal of the power dynamic. According to the philosopher, the panacea to vulnerability resides in an advocacy of the concept of a shared and communal self, which fosters a reciprocity that is attentive to the needs of others (59). Interdependence, for her, is an invaluable social resource that enables the individual to draw on communal assets of goodwill and help that enrich both the community and individual. As Butler states, “to foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way” (227). For Alasdair MacIntyre, vulnerability and dependence are inescapable, and hence we oscillate between different communities of “giving and receiving” throughout our lives (122). He avers that the paucity of references to this reciprocity overlooks the fact that vulnerability is not a condition of inferiority but instead inherent to the human condition at different stages in the life span, be it childhood, old age, or alternatively from the deprivation of resources that bolster a life of dignity, such as knowledge or emotional support (66). A more nuanced perspective on dependence as a prerequisite of individual survival has been propounded by Jo Labanyi, Pura Fernández and Luisa Elena Delgado, who stress the importance of “emotional communities” in Spanish culture, people bound by emotional closeness rather than kinship. They hypostasise the importance of re-evaluating social and historical actors’ need for emotional warmth, and in so doing, they expose the reductionism of viewing historical actors as calculated and self-interested, acting solely in function of their material needs. We can glean from this overview that vulnerability and dependence are an integral part of the human condition, and that victimhood is not tantamount to inferiority and neither does it preclude the experience of a personally enriching communality or flourishing, as I will later examine.

xxxii

Introduction

Communal relations, however, do not necessarily function optimally for the vulnerable subject. Alasdair MacIntyre issues a salutary warning regarding the transformative power of communal dependence, acknowledging that these structures of giving and receiving can also metamorphose into structures of inequitable power distribution, of domination and the withdrawal of resources (28). He states that self-interest may cause others to perpetuate dependence, which exemplifies a form of negative dependence and communality (73). Significantly, Butler herself recognises that human dependency can lead to vulnerability in unsupportive situations or when human beings are subject to conditions of precarity or threat (“Rethinking Vulnerability” 19). Caveats aside, a sense of communal belonging and control over one’s individual destiny is undoubtedly crucial to the individual flourishing process (Nussbaum, “Frontiers of Justice” 129), the transition from socially normative judgments to making independent judgments about what is beneficial for us. Flourishing is synonymous with a life of eudaimonia, defined as the Aristotelian belief, outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics, to live a life of dignity. Etymologically, it derives from the Greek word daimon, which means “an inner spirit or divine spark.” Aristotle held that all human beings should live a life of eudaimonia, which implied becoming harmonious (eu) with your inner daimon. To conflate with your inner daimon enables the individual to accede to their highest potential self, and to realise one’s optimum potential as a human being. It involves the following core capabilities: life; bodily health and bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; the freedom to affiliate with others; the ability to live in relation to other non-human beings (animals, plants, the environment); play; and control over one’s own environment. Flourishing cannot be reduced to the attainment of happiness or the optimisation of satisfaction, but is rather “a striving to achieve a life that included all the activities to which, on reflection, they [a person] decided to attach intrinsic value” (Nussbaum, “Frontiers of Justice” 119–120). In this sense, the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being is instructive: the former, which can be considered the affective cornerstone of neoliberalism, centres on the maximization of pleasure and pain-avoidance while the latter focuses on self-realisation and the obtainment of psychological well-being in order to live a meaningful life (Ryan and Deci 145). Thus, rather than conforming to the neoliberal construction of a satisfactory life, we can perceive that Grandes, in fact, contradicts it by espousing eudaimonic well being, synonymous with flourishing, which is an infinitely more complex route to personal happiness. Given that self-determined individual identities develop in the context of interpersonal bonds of affection and interdependency, any account of flourishing must include the often-limiting constraints imposed by social realities (Cunniff Gilson 74). Thus, vulnerability and flourishing are inextricably linked and connected with social variables that may propitiate, but

Introduction

xxxiii

also hinder, both states. Moreover, both sets of virtues (both independent rational agency and acknowledged dependence) are required to actualise human potentialities, to pursue “invulnerability,” a term that refers to the ideal of a sense of control and impenetrability (76). This review of vulnerability, dependence, community and flourishing causes us to dispense with the powerless victim/powerful aggressor dichotomy to reconceive Republican victims as vulnerable subjects who aim to flourish individually, and with the help of “emotional communities,” people bound by emotional closeness rather than kinship (Labanyi et al.). Victimhood is thus composed of acknowledged and unashamed dependence and independent rational agency, which can enable flourishing that can itself be stymied by social realities. Thus, victims in Grandes’ novels are vulnerable individuals who strive to obtain some of the prerequisites of eudaimonia, be it the sensual musical relief of the cloistered child, Isabel Perales in Las Tres Bodas de Manolita, the escape to the bucolic cortijo in El lector de Julio Verne, or the female exile’s founding of a restaurant, thereby establishing an unusual degree of control over a foreign environment in Inés y la alegría. Whether it be the solidarity of the male prisoners’ female family members in Las tres bodas de Manolita or the female exiles’ restaurant co-operative in Inés y la alegría, their individual efforts to flourish are inherently communitarian. These characters employ practical coping strategies and seek solace in emotional warmth, thereby mitigating the effects of collective trauma. Such a representation implicitly repudiates the reductionist logic that conflict can only culminate in trauma, positing instead eudaimonia and flourishing as individual and communitarian reactions to it, a redefinition that casts the Spanish memory boom´s depiction of victimhood, and the condition more broadly defined, in a different light. In the ensuing chapters, I will examine gender and perpetrator memories, as well as the reconceived memory of victimhood, through a wide array of theoretical approaches that verse on medical ethics, motherhood, exile psychology, and perpetrator trauma. In Chapter 1, “Motherhood, Clothing and Class in Los aires difíciles,” the interconnection between motherhood and class is explored in all its full complexity, focusing on the transmission and assimilation of class dictates and their subsequent shaping of the daughter’s life. The intricacies of the intersection of class, gender, memory and a radically transformed socio-cultural environment are all distilled in the clothing motif, which functions to manifest the evolution of class and social status during the period between 1936 and 1980. It is also a cipher for the inextricability of class norms imparted via the mother–daughter relationship. Departing from an interdisciplinary theoretical basis of fashion studies, sociology and contemporary Spanish history, Chapter 1 will consider the maternal conveyance of class and the daughterly negotiation of it. I postulate that Sara’s affiliation to the inflexible conceptualisation of class endorsed by her adoptive mother, Doña Sara, ultimately hinders, and annuls, her

xxxiv

Introduction

capacity to achieve her maximum potential during Spain’s apertura, when class divisions subsided due to Spain’s unprecedented prosperity. Thus, the adoptive mother is firmly positioned in this narrative as the wielder, not so much of inflexible gender expectations, but rather of mercantile class norms that ultimately prevent Sara from availing of increased social mobility from the 1960s onwards. This chapter is divided into two parts: an initial theoretical scrutiny of the relationship between class, clothing and motherhood, whereas the second part will examine their interrelated functions in the novel in question. The protagonist’s journey illustrates the inability to flourish due to classism and the consequences of ideological polarisations, and also demonstrates that perpetration is an affective and intergenerational phenomenon. In Chapter 2, “Memory, Gender and the Changing Spanish Family in El corazón helado,” I reconstrue the protagonist Álvaro’s affiliation with his grandmother’s memory, which, thus far, has been interpreted as a literary representation of the generation of grandchildren’s mobilisation to dignify their grandparents’ memory (de Urioste 74). I reread Álvaro’s recuperation of his grandmother’s memory as a process of historically gendered self-discovery that reaffirms the contemporary configuration of masculinity, repudiates patriarchal values, and showcases the emergence of the new man and neoliberal feminism. Based on a gender studies theoretical framework, my analysis proposes that Álvaro’s reverence for his grandmother’s memory is the outcome of a gendered process of identity work, spurred by a floundering father–son relationship and a subsequent yearning for a gender precedent that resonates with his own version of “feminist masculinity,” which he finds in the memory of his grandmother’s performance of female masculinity. Interwoven in my analysis is an examination of a highly affective victim–perpetrator relationship, in effect the marriage of Julio Carrión and Angélica Fernández, which causes us to rethink the victim–perpetrator relationship in terms of intimacy and self-interest. This chapter illustrates the gendered and affective dimensions of perpetration. In Chapter 3, “The Feminised Quest Romance in Inés y la alegría,” I classify both Inés’ culinary evolution and La Pasionaria’s political and amorous trajectories as what Dana Heller terms the “feminised quest romance,” a spatial and developmental trajectory in which the female protagonist acquires self-knowledge. Both women undertake involuntary exilic journeys that effect both positive and negative transformations in their professional and amorous lives, garnering wisdom and experience, but also becoming embittered, as is the case with La Pasionaria. In this chapter, I aver that culinary acts of consumption and preparation enable the consolidation, but also the transcending of schismatic class, gender and ideological barriers through the dual and often contradictory functions of the kitchen spaces in which the protagonist develops. I critically examine the treatment of cooking, which reveals the densely layered and deeply entrenched role it plays in the building of intersectional identities related to nation, exile, nostalgia and

Introduction

xxxv

gender. This analysis seeks to analyse the gendered implications of marginal figures´ attempts to flourish, to obtain eudaimonia, through domesticity and entrepreneurship in exile. In Chapter 4, “Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress and the Gendered Reading Trope in El lector de Julio Verne,” I examine the issues of perpetrator suffering and the multifaceted aspects of the child’s role in the perpetrator moral universe, which range from an affected individual to an active agent, thus disputing the view of the child as a victim or bystander in post-conflict situations. Based on a mélange of literary reception theory, and Spanish literary and pedagogical history, I explore the manifold and multileveled connections between masculinity, paternity, and the many kinds of popular texts that are incorporated as intertexts in the novel, and their significance in creating a gendered understanding of the perpetrator figure. In Chapter 5, “Internal Exile and Resistance in Las tres bodas de Manolita,” I analyse the ways in which imaginative spaces of resistance, the creation of a queer urban utopia, emotional communities, and the triad of female economic independence, bodily decline and sexuality function to reimagine and reconfigure this internal exile, defined as exclusion within one’s own community and homeland (Tabori 5). These marginal characters struggle to flourish, adopting a panoply of cultural, spatial and economic strategies that are inherently communitarian, and in so doing, they reassert their individual agency, instating their claims to a selfhood denied to them by an exclusionary and gendered construction of nationhood. I will also analyse the figure of the perpetrator, Roberto Conesa, in order to examine the struggle between the institutional sanctioning of perpetration and the individual conscience. In Chapter 6, “Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness in Los pacientes del doctor García,” I argue that the perpetrator voice and status is undermined in multiple ways, first through a progressive failure to adhere to medical ethics, which underscores Dr. García Medina’s narrative dubitability and inspires readerly distrust. I then examine the relationship between multidirectional memory, ecocriticism and perpetrator memory in the portrayal of Adrián Gallardo Ortega’s participation in the killing of Jews in the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, with the express aim of ascertaining the causation of perpetration and the authenticity of the ensuing perpetrator trauma. Departing from Erving Goffman’s conceptualisation of “stigma,” I finally examine the stigma of illness and the representation of the perpetrator body through the lens of economic, social and corporeal capital.

Notes 1 This second generation believes that it is their duty is to rectify a biased memory narrative in order that their children will inherit a democratic memory culture. In an interview, Carlos Iglesias, the director of Ispanski, a film that centers on the Republican children who were sent to Russia in the post-war period, affirms that his filmmaking is propelled by a conviction that his children should be aware

xxxvi Introduction

2

3

4

5

of the existences of these injustices that form a hidden, but significant, part of Spanish history; he, in fact, declares that his greatest reward is watching the reactions of his teenage children as they watch his films (qtd. in Villacastín). It should be noted that the authenticity of memory is frequently questioned. Gil Eyal notes that whenever the term “memory” is mentioned, “it elicits doubts, which, to be precise, touch not only on its quantity, but also more generally on its authenticity, validity and significance” (8). These, he suggests, are the wrong criteria with which to judge memory that cannot be expected to render an accurate reflection of the past. It should, he argues, be judged on its more practical merits, more specifically on “what it should do for the collective or individual subject” (6). These cultural artifacts’ recognition of the other combats a lack of empathy for the repressed, as their recognition of marginal memories indirectly leads to what Kaja Silverman terms “heteropathic memory,” which facilitates the incorporation of these alternative memories of the maligned and repressed Other into the individual psyche. Silverman emphasises that individuals do not internalise this form of counter-memory, but instead venture outside the parameters of their conventional memory to identify themselves, through an imaginative reconstruction, with the other person. Based on a newly found alterity, counter-memory forges an empathy with the other, while still maintaining the separate identity of the empathiser. This heteropathic memory may also lead to a social acknowledgment of past wrongdoings, because reading about the experiences of the repressed creates a relationship with alterity, thereby diminishing the individual’s attachment to national memory narratives (87). For example, when discussing Ana María Matute, she complains as follows: “Con Matute pasa por ejemplo, que es una grandísima escritora y tal, pero siempre está la necesidad de añadir la coletilla de ‘siendo en aquella época,’ lo que una mujer pudo escribir en aquella época” (Pollini 352). It is strange that Grandes interprets this as a diminishment of Matute’s stature because it could very well reflect a genuine desire on the part of the critics to stress the merit of her achievements, given the repression of women during the Francoist era. The consumers of cultural production concerning this period can be said to experience what Marianne Hirsch terms “affiliative postmemory” (“Generation of Postmemory” 112), in effect, a subscription to the tenets of the postmemory and an empathy with its proponents, while not actively being engaged in its recovery.

1

Motherhood, Clothing and Class in Los aires difíciles

Introduction Los aires difíciles is in Almudena Grandes’ own words her “novela de bisagra,” the novel that adeptly combines gender and historical memory, foregrounding her distancing from gender issues to what was to become the overarching motif of Grandes’ post-2004 oeuvre, historical memory (qtd. in Ortiz). It is a novel that symbolises her liminal status on the threshold of historical memory, but not as yet completely distanced from the gender issues that had dominated her previous novels. Defined by Grandes as “un ejemplo de las víctimas de la guerra civil de las que no se habla nunca” (qtd. in Anabitarte), the protagonist Sara’s life trajectory is determined by the strange circumstances surrounding her adoption by an affluent Francoist family. Her biological father, Arcadio Gómez Gómez, an ardent Republican, is released from jail in the post-war period following the intercession of Doña Sara, the employer of Sebastiana, Sara’s mother. This adoption evokes “the stolen babies” scandal in Spain, whereby 300,000 babies were taken from their parents and readopted in Nationalist families (Barreira and Maldonado). A network of nuns and doctors at certain hospitals took babies from poor families or single mothers and placed them with wealthy childless couples, both in Spain and abroad. Although the adoption is consensual in this case, it is motivated by poverty, which indicates how reproduction and parenting were balefully affected by the persisting ideological divisions of the post-war period. The adopted daughter unsuccessfully seeks to rationalise the contradictory forces of both adoptive and biological family ties and her desire to maintain a high social status with knowledge of the murky origins of her adoption and her tenuous status within her adoptive family. The novel also demonstrates how the dynamics of victimhood and perpetration penetrate the family, perpetuating intergenerational victimhood. In this novel, Doña Sara’s benefaction is not wholly magnanimous, for she later uses it as leverage to coerce Sebastiana into giving up her newly born child, who is also named Sara. As a result of this quasi-agreement, Sara is socialised in an upper-class household, but at the age of sixteen is returned to her parents by the callous Doña Sara, who, in Sara’s own words, was

2

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

tired of playing “mamás y papas.” Sara’s resentment at this abrupt severance from her former life leaves her with an intense hatred of Doña Sara and a desire for both the recuperation of her former status and vengeance for her adoptive mother's abandonment of her. Thus, directly and indirectly, according to Alicia Rueda Acedo, “la Guerra Civil está siempre presente en la vida de Sara” (249). The novel constitutes a homage to the unsung, indirect victims of the Civil War and the demoralised ideologues of the Second Republic, such as Sara’s father Arcadio, who had to endure being on the side of the “vencidos” during the difficult period of the post-war years, when those who had sided with the Second Republic were treated as second-class citizens. It also reflects a subtle type of perpetration that revolves around not only infliction of violence but rather estrangement from the biological family and class slights. The adoption normalises the repression of Republican family bonds, which is inextricable from the obtainment of high social class. While undoubtedly an accomplished fictionalisation of the long-term consequences of the Civil War, I believe that this text also represents an expansion of Grandes’ exploration of the mother–daughter conflict to the critically neglected relationship between motherhood and class. Unlike her earlier novels, such as Malena es un nombre de tango and Atlas de geografía humana, in which Grandes critiqued the maternal indoctrination of retrograde sexual mores, Los aires difíciles portrays the no less powerful consequences for the relationship of a maternal class transmission that serves to perpetuate the economic disempowerment of the defeated of the Spanish Civil War. In this novel, class norms inculcated by the adoptive mother initiate the daughter into the economic realm, its subsections of capital acquisition and symbolic value, along with class distinction, to the detriment of the protagonist’s self-esteem and relationship with her biological parents. Grandes’ fashioning of an adoptive mother figure as the transmitter of baneful class norms hypostasises the artificiality of the mother’s role in reproducing intractable class edicts. The adoptive mother ensures the transgenerational transmission of vulnerability and impedes her adopted daughter’s flourishing. In other words, the reproduction of class is demonstrated to be a social construct associated with the institution of motherhood and not a natural outgrowth of the mother–daughter relationship. In Los aires difíciles, the interconnection between motherhood and class is explored in all its full complexity, focusing on the transmission and assimilation of class dictums, and their subsequent shaping of the daughter’s life. The intricacies of the intersection of class, gender, memory and a radically transformed sociocultural environment are all distilled in the clothing motif, which functions to manifest the evolution of class and social status during the period between 1936 and 1980. It is also a cipher for the inextricability of class norms imparted via the mother–daughter relationship. Departing from an interdisciplinary theoretical basis of fashion studies, sociology and contemporary Spanish history, this chapter will consider the

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

3

maternal conveyance of class and the daughterly negotiation of it. I postulate that Sara’s affiliation to the inflexible conceptualisation of class endorsed by her adoptive mother, Doña Sara, ultimately hinders (and annuls) her capacity to achieve her maximum potential during Spain’s apertura when class divisions subsided due to Spain’s unprecedented prosperity. Thus, the adoptive mother is firmly positioned in this narrative as the wielder, not so much of inflexible gender expectations but rather of mercantile class norms that ultimately prevent Sara from flourishing and availing of increased social mobility from the 1960s onwards. This chapter is divided into two parts: an initial theoretical scrutiny of the relationship between class, clothing and motherhood, whereas the second part will examine their interrelated functions in the novel in question.

Class, Clothing and Motherhood Class, as defined by Rosemary Hennessy, is “a cultural system or set of status distinctions that refers to the distribution of resources that function as the markers of privilege” (58). In her words: “When class appears as the overlooked member of the race, class, and gender trinity, or when it appears as an obvious indicator of a person’s social status, class is often under-conceptualised” (55). She even goes as far as to categorise it as “the lost continent” of feminist scholarship. Presently, it constitutes a somewhat passé topic in scholarship, having been rendered obsolete by its perceived obviousness, and its incapacity to maintain its stature as a rigorous theoretical category in the face of the critical exaltation of concepts such as race and gender. Simon Duncan concurs, observing that “class itself is a dead classification from the past, given a sort of shadow life by the individualised processes through which people construct their lives” (62). Certainly, a cursory examination of current scholarship on the representation of motherhood in contemporary Spanish film and literature, and even gender studies itself, confirms that class is not a common analytical category, and this lacuna is precisely the reason why I frequently cite Anglo-American studies on gender and class.1 Paradigmatic of this critical neglect is the current state of Grandes’ scholarship, which has been predominantly analysed with reference to memory, gender, eroticism and the family, but with a conspicuous lack of attention to class. In Los aires difíciles, the mother is vital to the reproduction of class and gender norms. For Pierre Bourdieu, class itself is patrilineal, preordained by the father’s occupation, but its transmission and reproduction occur in the domestic sphere, the mother being entrusted by both state and society with the task of inculcating in the child what Bourdieu terms the “habitus,” which can be defined as follows: “The habitus is precisely this immanent law, […] laid down in each agent by his earliest upbringing, which is a precondition not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for practices of co-ordination” (“Distinction: A Cultural Critique” 81). The habitus

4 Motherhood, Clothing and Class coheres around a set of tastes, preferences and level of refinement that establishes one’s social class. The mother is the principal regulator of class in a patriarchal society, and she seeks to produce docile, submissive daughters who adhere to class and gender norms (Chodorow, “Reproduction of Mothering” 70). The daughter’s socialisation has two apparently paradoxical but actually confluent objectives: homogenisation with the same members of her class and differentiation from the members of other classes. Expectations concerning the behavior and life patterns of a group of people of the same class are unvarying. The process of differentiation, which ensures that each social class receives a distinct socialisation, based on the social expectations of their class, complements the homogenisation process (Poal Marcet 76). One of the main criteria on which the mother will be judged is on her daughter’s display of class. A perfect daughter will allay any doubts about the mother’s style of mothering, as the daughter validates her mother in a patriarchal society that attempts to quantify good mothering by daughterly adherence to normative gender expectations. The daughter’s class divergence from the prescribed path causes her mother to be judged as an irredeemably bad mother, who has committed some fatal error in the upbringing of her child (Caplan 72). Bourdieu inadvertently confers the mother figure with even more importance in this process by stressing that an individual’s social positionality cannot be ameliorated in later life as subtle class markers that become so ingrained as to be performed unconsciously, betray one’s origins and impede inclusion in the higher echelons of society (“Distinction: A Cultural Critique” 105). The corollary to Bourdieu’s theory is that the mother determines not only the expectations of the child but his/her objective chances of realising them. Importantly, even if the adult child manages to rise into a higher class, their success may be tempered by resentment at the mother’s transmission of lower-class norms, which they consider, in an adult perspective, to be the most significant obstacle to their level of acceptability in the class to which they have ascended.2 The mother is not only concerned with the reproduction of class dictums, however, but also with the visualisation of the family’s class status. In a patriarchal society, where women appear as objects, “whose function is to contribute to the perpetuation or expansion of the symbolic capital held by men,” they will be judged on their ability to sustain, perpetuate or even enhance the family’s social standing (Bourdieu 99). The mother’s persona and body materialise the family’s class in the public and domestic spheres and, accordingly, she is entrusted with the provision and maintenance of the visceral social markers of their status, such as clothing and furniture. In the words of Bourdieu: “It is women who see to and look after everyday life, the house and its internal decoration, the element of gratuitousness and purposefulness without a purpose which always finds a place there” (99). Thorstein Veblen expresses it more succinctly: “women’s dress puts in evidence her household’s ability to pay” (180).

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

5

In repressive, highly segregated societies, fashion accrues particular importance for women who are confined to the domestic sphere and denied the possibility of social recognition through professional advancement (Simmel 554). Georg Simmel cites the historical example of women in medieval Germany, who were restricted to the domestic sphere and, consequently, invented wildly extravagant attire to compensate for their lack of participation. He goes on to contrast this with women occupying preeminent roles in the arts, commerce and the humanities in Renaissance Italy who did not prioritise dress. Such a disjunction is premised on unequal power relations, as women in a patriarchal society interiorise a disinclination towards gaining power, naturalised as an exclusively male preserve (Janeway 61). Thus, women arrive at a purportedly mutually beneficial agreement with men by which they abdicate public power for a precarious type of private power: an arrangement that allows both men and women to “rule” in their respective spheres. Subtly concretising her concession to patriarchy, while indexing her family’s social class, dress manifests the status of the “kingdom” a woman rules (Janeway 56). Women in Francoist Spain were subjected to a regressive gender ideology that confined women to the domestic sphere and exalted the docile and asexual homemaker and mother, “el ángel del hogar.” Working women were required to possess “una licencia marital,” which proved that they had obtained their husbands’ permission to work. Laws such as the 1938 Fuero del Trabajo, which stated its main objective as being “to liberate the married woman from the factory,” cemented women’s exclusion from the public sphere. Such a historical conjuncture, which channeled the gamut of women’s potentialities into domesticity and maternity, made fashion Spanish women’s primary concern. In the scantly industrialised society of post-war Spain, fashion fulfills the classic function of emphasising a moneyed unproductivity as there was “a large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity for manual labour, and at the same time, large enough to form a self-sufficient, isolated social body who determined their own social rules of conduct” (Veblen 17). Such a distribution of wealth culminates in a relatively homogeneous style, and indeed, Spanish post-war high-class taste was somewhat predictable: the upper bourgeoisie had a predilection for “cinturas de avispa, vuelos en las faldas y zapatos de tacón,” while the aristocracy inclined towards the designs of the Basqueborn designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, who had emerged as their designer of choice in the early 1930s (Laver 351). In her essay on fashion in 1940s Spain, Kathleen Vernon explains the function of dress as follows: Clothing never lost its link to traditional femininity, its role in situating women as pleasing ornament and domestic decoration. This view of fashion effectively reinforced conventional divisions of labour. Clothing reigned at the core of women’s work and women’s place, a safe space of distraction and self-cultivation. (278)

6

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

Although fashion was utilised to impose a monolithic demure feminine identity and to consolidate the regime’s conservative prototype of Spanish womanhood, it, nevertheless, constituted one of the few domains in which oppressed women could express their individuality, be it by the idiosyncratic tailoring of a certain style to their own tastes, or the incitement of admiration for their beauty and elegance. High-class doyennes’ aesthetic perfectionism positioned them as the arbiters of taste within their social circles. For example, in her memoirs, politician Carmen Díez de Rivera recalled her aristocratic mother’s hauteur, friendship with Cristóbal Balenciaga, obsession with her own appearance and complete disinterest in her mothering role (Romero 59). Post-war clothing not only articulated class distinctions but also evoked the memory of how elite privileges were jeopardised throughout the preceding decade, as the clamor for workers’ rights gained momentum during the Second Republic and Civil War. The sewing of clothing in the post-war period, a seemingly innocuous activity, repudiated the supposed amoral values espoused by the Second Republic from 1931 to1936. In the words of Paula A. Cruz Fernández: Sewing knowledge, and thus the values that society expected of women, was passed from mothers to daughters in the household in the postwar period. As part of “sus labores,” women had to know the basics of sewing to allow them to dress the house and the family members, reembroidering the image of the Spanish family that had supposedly been diverted by the subversion of gender rules during the Second Republic. (275) In her autobiography, the author Esther Tusquets, a member of the Barcelonese upper bourgeoisie, recalls her aunt Blanca’s reprimanding of the servants for wearing inappropriate clothes that did not reflect their humble station in life (Tusquets 77). Furthermore, she perspicaciously observed the overtones of vengeance that subtended the post-war relationship between masters and servants. She writes: No importaba que dispusieran de dinero para comprarla: una criada es una criada, y no dejaba de sorprenderme la fealdad de las bufandas y jerséis que se tejían para los pobres, y es que ser pobre no consistía únicamente en no tener dinero, ser pobre suponía pertenecer a una condición distinta, y a una persona de esta condición no se le ocurriría jamás entrar en un buen restaurante, o en un teatro, o coger un taxi si no era de extrema necesidad, aunque dispusiera de dinero para hacerlo. Convencidas en el fondo muchas señoras de que la gente humilde no tenía la misma sensibilidad: su hambre era otra hambre, su frío era otro frío, ni siquiera el dolor por la muerte de un hijo era equiparable. A los vencedores de la guerra, no les había enseñado en este sentido

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

7

apenas nada: que fueran en tantos casos las criadas, los chóferes o las manicuras quienes habían hecho las denuncias y llevado a sus señores ante el pelotón les parecía sólo una prueba más de la inaudita maldad e ingratitud de aquella gente y de que no debes fiarte de nadie. (132) Thus, the aesthetic terrain in the post-war period was defined by its exclusivity, and both the acquisition and enjoyment of elegance and beauty were upper-class pursuits. In short, an unofficial but binding sumptuary law was enforced. Conceived as the instigators of social strife during the Civil War, the lack of aesthetic appeal of the poor’s apparel confirmed their moral baseness; in effect, it was the exteriorisation of their inner ugliness. A function of post-war vengeance, bland attire emphasised the ethical and economical insufficiencies of the poor, which in turn further justified the post-war cultural and economic impoverishment of them. It was only the onset of mass consumerism in the apertura period, 1959–1970, that led to the democratisation of the aesthetic realm (Valis 78).

Class, Clothing and Motherhood in Los aires difíciles In Los aires difíciles, Sara becomes accustomed to an exquisite aesthetic code during her childhood and early adolescence, and is later downgraded to the more anodyne and unglamorous world of her biological mother, Sebastiana. The disjunction between these two maternal aesthetic codes contributes to the fragmentation of Sara’s identity as a child and her adult endorsement of an immobile class system that belittles her due to her humble birth, while also instilling in her a profound sense of unworthiness. Throughout the novel, the aesthetic renders tangible opposing class systems and their maternal functions, by the association of higher-status women with culture and the lower class with nature. In this novel, there is a striking demarcation between the maternal images of Sebastiana, Sara’s poverty-stricken biological mother, and Doña Sara, her affluent madrina, a juxtaposition conveyed by the adult Sara’s association of her mother with “un delantal” and Doña Sara with “un collar de perlas” (305), images that conjure up cooking and elegance, respectively. Doña Sara implicitly denigrates Sebastiana by only ever commending her completion of household chores, such as her careful washing of curtains and her succulent roast chicken (40). For upper-class madrileños, housekeeping was considered “una tarea vulgar e impropia de una persona de un estatus elevado,” and they dedicated themselves to achieving distinction in four domains: decorative taste, fluid relationships with their social equals, charitable endeavors and the supervision of their children (Artola Blanco 57). Throughout the text, Sebastiana represents the most basic functions of the domestic sphere, cleaning, cooking and nurturing, all of which are inextricably linked with elementary natural processes. The narrator describes the young Sara’s perception of her mother in olfactory terms as “olía a limpio,

8

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

a agua y jabón” (44). She also evokes images of nurturing and caring in the young Sara – Sebastiana is presented as instinctively maternal, relishing “el olor de los recién nacidos, su dulzura” and breastfeeding (125). Throughout the text, Doña Sara exercises a more culturally instructive than nurturing function, while Sebastiana is inextricably related to caring and serving others. As an adoptive mother, Doña Sara never actually gives birth and neither does she carry out any laborious child-minding tasks, both devalued processes that “identify women with the lower ends of socio-cultural organisation” (Ortner 28). Her complete disengagement from the constant demands of childcare, and from the pain of childbirth, reinforces her role as the repository of class privileges and their visible articulation. Sara’s madrina epitomises the splendor of the upper bourgeoisie and their obsession with elegance. Importantly, she is divorced from labor and concentrates solely on the performance of her social role. Accordingly, she is a guide to discernment in both choice of social company, materials and fashion (305). Under Doña Sara’s tutelage, Sara undergoes a socialisation process that prioritises good taste and the performance of an elevated social position. Therefore, from the outset, Sebastiana and Doña Sara embody polar opposites of a femininity molded by class, a binarism that is most evident in their respective wedding ceremonies when attitudes to dress come to the fore. Practicality triumphing over fashionability, Sebastiana wore an unsuitable black dress on her wedding day simply because she could not countenance paying for a dress that would only be worn for one day. Leo del Val observes that “la tradición era vestir de negro para después poder utilizar la vestimenta también por luto. Sólo las familias pudientes se permitían llevar el vestido de novia de color blanco” (95). Doña Sara’s wedding trumpeted her enviable social position as an heiress to one of the biggest fortunes in Madrid: her dress was silk, she wore a tiara which could rival that of Queen Victoria Eugenia and the lavish reception was held in the Ritz (112). Being obliged to reflect on the economic feasibility of all activities, including motherhood, Sebastiana cannot engage with the aesthetic realm in any substantive way, while Doña Sara can exclusively dedicate herself to it. Therefore, Grandes portrays femininity and motherhood as multilayered experiences, consisting of higher and lower functions and, moreover, she implies that a woman’s capacity to dedicate herself to the higher or lower functions is very much conditioned by class. The experience of femininity intersects with class, condemning lower-class women to austere dress, while higher-class women’s economic resources permit them to attain aesthetic distinction. The function of clothing in this novel, however, is irreducible to the embodiment of different social strata, for it is also a key factor in Sara’s estrangement from her biological family. Carolyn Steedman asserts that from the age of seven upward, children are capable of class differentiation (52). Demonstrating a sensitivity to, and a preoccupation with, appearance, manners and clothing, Sara’s habitus is perceptible even as a child. The marked disparity between the meagreness of her parents’ household and

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

9

the abundance of Doña Sara’s gives rise to a tumult of conflicting feelings in the young child. Neither of the young girl’s parents measure up to her exacting aesthetic standards: Sebastiana is fat, and her hair is badly dyed, while Arcadio’s clothes are clearly well-worn, bearing the marks of constant mending. Further appalled by her brothers’ uncouthness, she longs to be reunited with her madrina, Doña Sara (47). These Sunday visits evidence the power of the habitus in influencing the young girl’s assessment of people. For Sara, her biological parents are the embodiment of failure, negative countermodels, who personify aesthetic dissonance and poverty, and therefore, deserve her rejection: “Casi siempre creía estar segura de que no le habría gustado ser como ellos” (47). She later refers to them as “dos pobres ancianos ignorantes” (52). The habitus inflects on, and distorts, Sara’s relationship with her biological parents because it endows her with expectations against which they fall decidedly short. Superseding biological bonds, the accouterments of social status condition Sara’s response to people, ultimately eroding her affinity with her impecunious parents. Her discomfort in her parents’ house constitutes a measure of the success of Doña Sara’s socialisation, for it indicates that the young girl’s identity and class are interwoven to such an extent that she is exceptionally attuned to appearance and etiquette and, moreover, is repelled by the markers of low social status. As a teenager, Sara’s habitus generates a set of expectations and behavior concordant with her elevated social position: she ponders on her subject choice in university, probably French; competes for consumerist supremacy with her friend, Maruchi; and envisages the prosperity of her married life with her boyfriend, Juan Mari. Her rivalry with Maruchi is symptomatic of the intraclass covetousness of distinction, the desire to outdo members of the same class by the display of more wealth and finer clothing. Given the comfort and ease of her life, her return to her humble parents in 1963, at the age of sixteen, is distressing, an anguish articulated by two markers of status and taste: black shoes and a blue carpet, respectively. Following her frank conversation with Sara about her origins and future destiny, Doña Sara instructs her to purchase functional black shoes for her sixteenth birthday because they are far more practical for Sara than the beautiful silk ones that the adolescent wants to wear for her sixteenth birthday party (115). The return of Sara to her parents augurs the primacy of practicality and the purchase of working clothes that optimise productivity. Upon return to her parents’ home, Sara reviles the blue carpet her parents had bought especially for her as a homecoming gift, as it is common and tasteless, a perfect symbol of her social demotion. Doña Sara’s socialisation of Sara has endowed the girl with acute aesthetic sensibilities, scant knowledge of the practicalities of everyday life and a sense of entitlement to the finer things in life. Henceforth, Sara’s actions prove the irreversibility of the social norms inculcated in her by her madrina. Her concern with the external markers of status is so intense that she even strives to renovate her parent’s flat by

10

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

buying them a television and redecorating their sitting room. She calibrates people in terms of clothing: for example, Señora Sevilla, her typing teacher, incarnates “la mujer mediana,” with her six pairs of shoes and her matching twinsets (207). Furious at Doña Sara’s treatment of her, Sara initially refuses to have any contact with her. In an altogether more practical vein, Sebastiana implores the teenager to reconsider her stance, her insistence being expressed in the most basic of social needs, eating: “El orgullo no te da de comer, Sara” (200). Tellingly, the narrator informs us that Sara “jamás se había aplicado ese verbo a sí mismo, alimentarse, dar de comer” (291). While her parents’ concerns pivot on the most rudimentary of needs, Sara’s cohere on the manifestations of high social status, such as decorum and elegant furnishings and dress. Her mother’s concerns with the travails of working-class life are incomprehensible to her and this lack of synchronicity contributes to the distant relationship between biological mother and daughter. In short, class norms erect a schism between the two women, which their biological kinship cannot dissolve. This transformation substantiates the idea that the class dictates welded into and communicated via the mother–daughter dyad corrode the nurturing essence of the relationship. Paradoxically, it is Sara’s alignment with the calcified bourgeoisie conceptualisation of class personified by her madrina that disables her capacity to flourish, one that should have been maximised in the 1960s, the apertura period in which Spain transmuted into a modern, industrialised society. The immense change in Spanish society during these years can be gauged by the following statistic: average income rose from US$290 in 1955 to $497 in 1965 and $2,486 in 1975 (Shubert 258). From 1960 to 1973, Spain was the second fastest growing economy in the world, surpassed only by Japan (Encarnación 39). The creation of a consumer society transformed social mores. In her history of the growth of consumerism during the 1954–1964 period, Tatjana Pavlović asserts that “a society of sacrifice become a society of leisure, much more in line with emergent global consumerism” (32). The modernisation process corroded previously implacable class divisions, both by its creation of well-paid employment and the democratisation of third-level education, which, until then, had been an elitist preserve. The economic miracle engendered “increased social and class mobility, creating a deeper and broader middle-class” (Mohammad 256). This period also foregrounded the transitional shift in gender ideology, as Spanish women participated in the new consumer society, which allowed them to determine their own personal lives. Unsurprisingly, Spanish women began to aspire to the prototype of “the new woman” who engaged in remunerated activity in the booming economy (Coca Hernando 56). Despite her lack of education, Sebastiana intuits that the vastly improved, changed opportunity structure can benefit Sara, but only with the help of her madrina. Poverty no longer has to perpetuate itself as industrialisation has extended the previously limited array of options available to the poor.

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

11

However, the mother clearly believes that being a good girl is, as Steedman so aptly puts it, “taking on the perspective of those who are more powerful than you” (63). Her insistence that Sara effect a reconciliation with her madrina is symptomatic of the permanence of class structures which had long induced a resignation of the Spanish working class to the dominance of a wealthy elite. Sara’s mother, however, is not wholly responsible for Sara’s eventual acquiescence to visit her madrina: rather, it is the negative memory of the futility of the class struggle of the Second Republic, imparted to her by her father, Arcadio, that strengthens her resolve to “acabar siendo de los que habían estudiado, de los que valían para mandar, de los que sabían, encontrar un buen trabajo, ganar dinero, vivir bien” (203). In contrast to the prevalent disinterest in the memory of the Civil War during this period, Sara questions her father about his role in it. Embittered by the incommensurate personal price he was forced to pay for his activism, Arcadio presents his younger self and his comrades as the ignorant stooges of infinitely smarter people, “los que valían para mandar” (202). The memory of the Second Republic reaffirms the hypercapitalism of aperturismo whereby a capital-hungry and economically backward nation unreservedly embraced Western-style consumerism. Furthermore, Arcadio’s disillusionment inadvertently vindicates the very intransigent class system that impoverished him and denied his other three children a decent education and the possibility of social betterment. Validating the futility of class struggle, it refigures social ascension as only achievable through the backing of the dominant class. Thus, paradoxically, the memory of the Second Republic, a political project that strove to attenuate stringent class differences and ameliorate the lives of the working class, functions as a salutary warning to potential disputants of prevailing class structures. In reconciling with Doña Sara, Sara implicitly rejects the much more democratic and meritocratic conceptualisation of class prevalent during the apertura period, subscribing to one that ultimately circumscribes her potentialities. In order to understand this self-limitation, it is necessary to explore the class positionality of Doña Sara and her husband Don Antonio. The couple personify the post-war upper class, whose class prejudices had only been accentuated by the Civil War when Doña Sara disguised herself to traverse the then Republican-controlled streets of Madrid (115). The Republican domination of Madrid proved to be a social leveler, as the inflammatory political situation made ostentation unthinkable for the rich, forcing Doña Sara to dress in nondescript clothing: “Sebas no fue capaz de reconocer a la primera a aquella mujer humilde, humildemente envuelta en un abrigo de paño gris con las coderas rozadas” (115). The equalisation inherent in her ordinary attire, however, only functions as corroboration of extant upper-class, pejorative views on the working class, and culminates in the post-war retrenchment of an inflexible class stratification. Throughout the war, the lower classes were excoriated as degenerate and envious of those who outranked them in intellect, class and financial wherewithal (Cazorla

12

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

Sánchez 52). This idea was premised on the work of the Francoist psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera, who sustained the view that the Republicans were contaminated with the Marxist virus, which presented itself in the symptoms of a proclivity to base emotions and a poor intellect (Ryan, “Sins of the Father” 245). In a patent subversion of Francoist thinking, Grandes reverts the aetiology of the virus, which in this novel originates with Doña Sara’s husband, Don Antonio, whose wartime sexual excesses afflict him with an unknown disease that leaves him paralysed and sexually impotent. His cowardice and libidinousness contrast with the idealism and undoubted bravery of Arcadio, who rises to be a captain in the Republican army, by virtue of his own merit. The couple’s ingrained class biases as well as the destabilising experience of the Civil War create a set of preconceived ideas about the primacy of consanguinity and the inherent lowness of the working class, which leads Don Antonio to disapprove of not only what he regards as his wife’s foolishness, but an unyielding refusal to adopt Sara. Class, for him, is based on kinship, and consequently he believes that Sara “debería seguir comiendo y cenando en la cocina, por muy bien que hubiera aprendido a utilizar los cubiertos” (105). This is, after all, a man who tolerates no childish blunders and whose class biases are not tempered, as is the case of Doña Sara, by a need for affective connection. Consequently, the relationship between Sara and Don Antonio is defined by its emotional coldness: Sara addresses him by the formal “usted,” and she instinctively knows not to contradict him or be demanding in his presence. For the couple, the destabilisation of their privileges during the war and their devolution to the status of ordinary, even despised people, fuels their constant reiteration of class divides in the postwar period. Their perspectives on clothing, the master–servant relationship and their attitudes towards the defeated are distorted by the traumatic memory of the brief egalitarianism of the bellic period. More important, it causes them to revile any idea of class mobility and to endorse a notion of high social class as hereditary and inaccessible to ordinary people. Although Doña Sara certainly does love Sara, their closeness does not cause her to interrogate or reformulate her perception of class differences, for she self-perceives as a Pygmalion-type figure who is performing an act of charity. As she tells Sara in their farewell conversation: “Yo me comprometí a hacerte una señorita, y bueno, yo ya he cumplido con mi parte” (124). Her self-presentation as a disinterested benefactress is hypocritical because she undertook to raise Sara primarily to assuage her own feelings of emptiness and lack of direction. At no stage, however, did her assumption of a quasimaternal role imply an unsettling of her class prejudices, which are blatantly manifested by her actions prior to, and ensuing, Sara’s Sunday visits to her parents. First, her madrina sends Sara on her Sunday visits in only barely acceptable clothing, an ill-fitting skirt from last season (41). On her return, she bathes and perfumes the child, a beautifying ablution that can be read as a symbolic re-entrance into upper-class life. The contamination inherent

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

13

in Sara’s contact with the poor, her own parents, is first purged by water, a purifying force, and is later superimposed by the smells to which Doña Sara is habituated. The erasure of any remnants of the visit, along with Doña Sara’s diatribes against Arcadio, signal the post-war repugnance of the working class, who the upper class considered untrustworthy, seditious and threatening. The scruffiness of the child’s clothing on her Sunday visits is indicative of the notion of adornment and elegance as exclusive manifestations of upper-class life, not only to be withheld from the resentful poor but not even to be seen by them. The child’s shabbiness demonstrates how limited Doña Sara’s concern for the child is, revealing as it does its spatial restriction to the house in Calle Velázquez. In the untidy flat of Calle Jerónimo, Sara interacts with her family, a set of people whom Doña Sara considers her social inferiors. While there, the child does not act as an extension of Doña Sara nor display her social prestige. This spatial demarcation is revelatory of the persistence of class prejudices that render Doña Sara’s relationship with the child Sara conditional, very much predicated on the child’s amenability to her madrina’s lifestyle and value system. Luxurious clothing is provided for Sara as a resident of the household in which she lives and its social reflection, but not to bolster her selfhood. However, it is in her post-1963 actions that Doña Sara reveals the extent of her class consciousness, a period in which her self-proclaimed generosity is exposed as tight-fistedness, self-interest and the maintenance of class distinctions. She pointedly disputes the wisdom of Sara’s accession to higher education: ensuring their rapprochement, she pays an infinitesimal sum for Sara’s secretarial course. Doña Sara’s failure to subsidise a proper education for Sara damages her adopted daughter’s employment prospects in the 1980s, when college graduates proliferated and diplomas no longer sufficed to secure sought-after positions (383). Later, Doña Sara offers to remonstrate with Sara’s married upper-class lover, Vicente González de Sandoval, in order that he might assume responsibility for Sara’s expected child. The latter action is interpreted by Sara as “una conversación de igual a igual,” with patent overtones of snobbishness and the imputation of an undefinable inferiority to Sara’s personhood (386). During her period as a carer in the employ of Doña Sara, Sara’s feelings of social inadequacy are aggravated by her realisation that Doña Sara, despite her assurances to the contrary, has not included her in her will. Her immense fortune is bequeathed to Amparo, a provincial cousin whom Doña Sara detests. In a sense, Doña Sara is responsible for Sara’s social immobility, her inheritance of her parents’ positions as pawns in the capitalist system. This unwanted generational replication is encapsulated by the frequent repetition of the following ironic description of Sara: “Era una trabajadora excelente, honrada, concienzuda, responsable” (406). The phrase denotes the implacability of the inequitable class structure that overshadowed Sara’s life: Sebastiana and Arcadio were workers, and now Sara, despite all her early promise, is one also. This reproduction can be attributed to the asynchronous nature of

14

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

Doña Sara’s socialisation of Sara, whereby she imparted class imperatives to her, but also exercised her own class prejudices against her adopted daughter, purposively refraining from making her a bona fide member of her own higher class. This asymmetry explains the bifurcated nature of Sara’s class positioning: while she adheres to upper-class norms, she is not a member of that class in any personally advantageous way, such as securing a sinecure and disposing of a large income. Her experiences of two social classes define her as a hybrid who externalises a class position, of which her present circumstances and life choices do not allow her to be a full-fledged member. Thus, Sara has to grapple with her overriding need to possess objects and clothing appropriate to the class in which she was raised, and her insufficient income to sustain high-level consumerism and a sybaritic lifestyle, a disjunction that leads her to commit a criminal act. Interestingly, Sara’s imperceptible progress from the apertura period to the 1980s is expressed through the metaphor of a train: “Algunos trenes circulan tan despacio que parece que no avanzan, que nunca han llegado a abandonar la estación, pero se mueven” (207). The train appears to advance slowly but suddenly accelerates, delivering a shocking blow to the hare who seems to run faster than it (381). Since the railways generated unprecedented economic and social mobility and, by so doing, fissured many premodern socioeconomic constructs, there is generally a conflation of trains with modernisation (Faith 54). Its usage here, however, reaffirms Sara’s incompatibility with the hypercapitalism of the 1960s onward, and thus functions as a symbol of regression. Sara envisages a type of social revenge, whereby she will stealthily undermine Doña Sara, a retrograde action that condemns her to social stasis, to a downward spiral of low-paid jobs, and in the 1980s, dependence on Doña Sara. Rather than fully utilising the evolution of social structures to guarantee her own independence, she is entrapped by Doña Sara vision of capital as hereditary and stagnant. As much as Sara was out of step with the apertura period, she certainly does not represent any of the dynamism of the Transition and the 1980s. These were both periods in which she was relatively young, only celebrating her fortieth birthday in 1986. Mark Allinson has defined presentismo, “living for the present,” as one of the most prominent features of the Transition (271). Arising partly from the precariousness of Spain’s economic situation and partly from the collapse of the culture of moral absolutism, this facet of the Transition led to a certain recklessness among Spaniards. John Hooper perceives the “enjoy, enjoy, enjoy” spirit of the Transition and asserts that such an explosion of carefree hedonism was inevitable after so many years of repression under Franco (80). Therefore, in the 1970s and 1980s, women’s gender ideologies began to be formulated from their own subjective desires and a perception of self largely untainted by rigid gender dictates. Yet, similar to her experience of the apertura, Sara is the very antithesis of the modern Spanish woman that emerged during the Transition, as she is employed in a job that forces her to regress rather than accelerate, thereby engendering

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

15

feelings of “fosilización” (406). Disillusioned with her unrewarding career, Sara eventually becomes a criminal, enriching herself by defrauding Doña Sara. This miscreance has clear parallels with the financial scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, surrounding, for example, Mario Conde and Mariano Rubio (Rueda Acedo 73). Ironically, it is a criminal act that is motivated by the acquisitiveness fostered in her by Doña Sara: “cuantas cosas bonitas, a menudo caras, se podrían comprar con ese dinero” (408). Given the obduracy of Doña Sara’s snobbishness and its implicit delimitation of Sara’s ability to achieve her maximum potential, it is imperative to ask why the young woman would continue to subscribe to a variation of class that does not favor her self-advancement, especially in an epoch, the 1960s, in which a more fluid vision of upward mobility had eroded class differences. Granted, her biological parents advocate a more servile interclass set of relations, their opinions could be, and were, easily dismissed by young women in Spain who disposed of their own incomes and attendant freedoms. The answer resides in the irreversibility of the habitus: ergo, the values and class norms imparted by the mother are so deeply rooted that they are virtually unchangeable in later life. Consequently, effective socialisation in specific class values during childhood ensures adherence to them throughout the person’s life and is thus crucial to the reproduction of class. Not only is this theory substantiated by Sara’s affiliation to discriminatory class injunctions, her distancing from her biological parents, and her defrauding of Doña Sara, but also by her selection of her lover, her inordinate valuation of beautiful objects and her sense of propriety. Sara becomes besotted with Vicente because, in both appearance and demeanor, he reminds her of the distinguished gentlemen who used to visit Doña Sara’s house (211). Vicente, the narrator tells us, “le devolvió el brillo” (114), presumably to be understood as the luster of social prominence and affluence. When they are together, she monitors her behavior in accordance with the etiquette taught to her by Doña Sara, only once failing to do so when she tries to steal complimentary hotel toiletries to give to her mother. Therefore, Sara cleaves to Doña Sara’s gendered, traditional vision of class wherein one’s romantic relationship leads to capital acquisition, which is then visibly articulated by the display of class in objects, dress and manners. She envisages capital as a given, to be provided by the male, and then symbolised by a woman, and consequently, the idea of a woman actively seeking and obtaining capital seems alien to her. In this novel, her first postmillennial work, Grandes offers no sense of closure on the mother–daughter relationship: indeed, the interaction between her two mothers and Sara is mired in an antipathy and mutual misunderstanding borne of class divisiveness. Sara’s adoption of Doña Sara’s class ideology attests to the formidable role played by the mother in the social reproduction of class, for not even the amplified opportunity structure in the 1960s alters the daughter’s outlook on class. More disquieting still is the fact that the daughter does not contest or negotiate childhood class norms

16

Motherhood, Clothing and Class

but readily accepts them, even when they impair her sense of identity and foreclose her possibilities of social advancement. The maternal transmission of class hinders her ability to flourish, thus perpetuating the victimhood of her parents. Class precepts supersede the biological nexus between Sara and Sebastiana, converting their relationship into something akin to a distant acquaintanceship, while it irrevocably binds Doña Sara and her adopted daughter in an ultimately destructive relationship. The maternal transmission of class imperatives is thus configured by Grandes as equally as pernicious as the imposition of gender norms to the well-being and happiness of the daughter. Furthermore, the adoptive mother commits symbolic and class violence that attests to the capacity of the family to perpetuate ideological divisions that harm family members. Their destructive relationship is the first iteration of complex and affective victim–perpetrator relationships within the family, a perspective that is complicated further in the next novel I will examine, El corazón helado.

Notes 1 One can conjecture that the paucity of class-based literary criticism could be due to Spaniards’ perception of Spain as a middle-class society. Seventy percent of Spaniards who earn between 14,000 and 42,000 euros a year consider themselves middle-class (Escolar 115). 2 Memoirs by leading British academics who hail from a working-class background lend credence to Bourdieu’s contention. Annette Kuhn bitterly observes that her proletarian childhood caused her to feel that “I never got it right” (8). Carolyn Steedman remembers feeling “both desired and a burden,” a further strain on the exiguous family resources (17). Furthermore, she blamed her mother for having tried to stymie her self-development by her incessant exaltation of humbleness (87). More than validating the prevalent blaming of the mother as the source of all their children’s adult misfortunes, Kuhn’s and Steedman’s writings indicate the irrevocability of class, for their adult discomfort can be interpreted as signs of their own inherent sense of inferiority deriving from their inability to shed their working-class upbringing.

2

Memory, Gender and the Changing Spanish Family in El corazón helado

Introduction El corazón helado was published in 2007, the year in which La Ley de la Memoria Histórica was ratified. It is a veritable tour de force fictionalisation of the vicissitudes of Spanish history, encompassing repression, memory and exile in the period from 1931 to 2005. In his review of the novel, Eduardo Mendicutti lauded it as “una novela apasionada, compleja, seductora, republicana y roja, muy roja. El corazón helado es una novela de perdedores, sólo que algunos de estos perdedores en realidad nunca se dejaron vencer y siempre conservaron la dignidad” (qtd. in Belausteguigoitia). The novel has been critically perceived as an exemplar of Grandes’ partiality and simplification of infinitely more complex historical debates. In his analysis of the novel, Gareth Wood contends that the final part offers an easy reconciliation that belies the multifacetedness of a trenchant confrontation with the past, which implies acknowledging that “una persona puede ser varias personas a la vez, que una situación puede encerrar su contrario, que la razón puede fallar al intentar abarcar la realidad” (195). Responding to Wood’s criticism, Julia Barnes avers that “Grandes believes that counter-discourses, even if they tend towards the Manichean, are necessary to change historical perceptions about the war” (8). In my opinion, these critiques do not encompass the novel’s full complexity, more specifically, the intersection of gender with perpetrator memory. This chapter is the first analysis of gender in a novel that has been the subject of academic criticisms of exile (Leggott), collective memory (Barnes), post-memory (Hines-Brooke; de Urioste), and the relationship between history and memory in the text (Wood). The remembrance of economic prosperity, exclusion and loss in this novel offers a privileged site from which to gain insight into various permutations of gender from 1931 to the postmillennial period. In this chapter, I range over the present and historical configurations of gender in relation to the father–son relationship, neoliberal feminism, the new man, and female masculinity, examining how different memories produce novel performances of gender. Accordingly, I reconceive the protagonist Álvaro’s affiliation with his grandmother’s memory, which,

18

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

thus far, has been interpreted as a literary representation of the grandchildren’s mobilisation to dignify their grandparents’ memory (de Urioste 74). I reread Álvaro’s recuperation of his grandmother’s memory as a process of historically gendered self-discovery that reaffirms the contemporary configuration of masculinity, repudiates patriarchal values, and showcases the emergence of “the new man” and neoliberal feminism. My analysis proposes that Álvaro’s reverence for his grandmother’s memory is the outcome of a gendered process of identity work, spurred by a floundering father-son relationship and a subsequent yearning for a gender precedent that resonates with his own version of “feminist masculinity,” which he finds in the memory of his grandmother’s performance of female masculinity. As part of my analysis, I postulate that Almudena Grandes challenges normative versions of masculinity in three strategic ways: the deconstruction of the Francoist patriarchal model of fatherhood; a comprehensive exploration of postmillennial Spanish feminist masculinity; and the revindication of female masculinity during the Second Republic as well as a contemporary autonomous, neoliberal variation of Spanish womanhood symbolised by Raquel. Interwoven through my analysis is an examination of a highly affective victim–perpetrator relationship, in effect the marriage of the protagonist’s parents, Julio Carrión and Angélica Fernández, which causes us to rethink the victim–perpetrator relationship in terms of intimacy and self-interest.

Gender and Nationalist Perpetrator Memory El corazón helado chronicles the investigation by a middle-aged son, Álvaro Carrión Otero, into his father’s past and his simultaneous discovery of a courageous Republican grandmother and the illicit enrichment of his father, Julio, during the post-war period. This dualistic narrative structure has been construed as the polarisation of memory and history, respectively (de Urioste 78). These separate thematic strands eventually converge in the form of a passionate love affair between Raquel Fernández Perea, the grand-daughter of the exiled Fernández Muñoz family, and Álvaro, the son of Julio Carrión González, the expropriator of the exiled family’s property. Memory functions in terms of present gendered and ethical expectations, and changing individual priorities, and in this vein El corazón helado provides an interesting insight into the mapping of transformed gender norms onto the recuperation of memory in current-day Spain. The distinctiveness of the novel’s representation of gender memory resides in its reconstruction of masculinity as performative and subjective. An appreciation of this innovation necessitates a brief overview of masculinity studies theory. The founder of masculinity studies, R.W. Connell, defined hegemonic masculinity as constituted by the domination of other men, bearers of what she terms “subordinate masculinities,” and women. Enlarging on masculinity’s misogynistic and homophobic overtones, Connell stresses that the feminine or even its intimation is virulently rejected by men whose very manhood is

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

19

staked on non-femininity (25).1 Connell’s theorisation has been criticised for its omission of the work of Judith Butler on the performativity of gender. Following Butler, Stephen Whitehead asserts that the malleability of gender necessarily means that women can perform hegemonic masculinity (58). Furthermore, theorists have lamented Connell’s inability to imagine “more egalitarian forms of masculinity” and to factor in men’s need for affection (Wedgewood 333). In her study of military cadets, Susan Faludi uncovered a hidden and caring subculture within a military training academy in South Carolina, whereby the men nurtured each other in order to withstand the rigor of military training (365). Similarly, Michael Moller’s survey of men found that the pleasures experienced in the family and with friends were highly valued by men, who affirmed their desire “for even greater social intimacy” (274). In fact, the family provides a reprieve for men, and for the articulation of thoughts and the display of emotions considered unmasculine in wider society (Kimmel 18), a finding that disproves the current theoretical tendency to treat “men as a social group existing outside familial relations” (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 62). At the midlife juncture in which he finds himself at the commencement of El corazón helado, the protagonist Álvaro wallows in self-loathing, despising his everyman status as “el español mediocre” (62), a feeling of insecurity only exacerbated by the shadow of his formidable father: “Mi padre era un hombre mucho más extraordinario de lo que hemos llegado a ser sus hijos” (69). Indeed, Julio’s predilection for performing magic tricks for them as young children invests him with a superhuman quality, as “el mago, el encantador de serpientes” (190). Sarah Leggott posits that Grandes’ portrayal of Julio’s entertainment of his children “reveals a human side to a father that could be cast as a villain in many accounts” (125), thus counteracting the Manicheanism of much of the boom de la memoria narrative. This playfulness ostensibly belies the stereotype of the malign perpetrator because Julio is shown to be capable of caring for his family (Andres-Suárez 172; Leggott 115). However, his penchant for magic, a talent synonymous with hoodwinking and falsity, signals his fundamental untrustworthiness. Ironically, Álvaro’s reverence of his father stems from Julio’s unknowability and disengagement from his family; Julio is patently disinterested in the emotional component of his fathering role, performing it in his son Rafa’s words “cuando le venía bien” and never attending his daughter Clara’s musical recitals (Grandes 265). His paternal role implies being an inspiring and aspirational male presence for his sons rather than forging an emotional connection with them. Traditionally in Western cultures, boys have a distant and emotionally remote relationship with their father, who is respected as the breadwinner and disciplinarian (Chodorow, “Femininities, Masculinities” 34). The divergence between the son’s emotional needs and the father’s emotional inarticulacy “promotes an emotional disconnectedness between father and son, and it emphasises a false sense of gender differences that are constraining, in profoundly different ways, for men and

20

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

women” (Willis 26). This affective absence causes Álvaro to inordinately value his father’s economic and social success arguably because these are the most salient and knowable facets of his father’s personality. The protagonist’s extolment of his father is not only a function of the emotional breach between them but can also be attributed to the inadequacy of familial memory within the home. Julio’s self-aggrandising references to the past allude only to his putatively glorious war feats as a soldier in La División Azul, the Francoist military contingent sent to Nazi Germany to aid Hitler in his fight against Stalinist Russia (Grandes 14). Álvaro’s meager knowledge of his father is constructed from typically bland family photos of “la familia numerosa,” and his father donning a División Azul uniform in Poland (62: 71). These photos allegorically symbolise the nationally legitimised variants of post-war Francoist masculinity, the patriarch and war hero. Tellingly, they reveal the rigidity of the social construction of masculinity in highly patriarchal societies, such as Franco’s Spain, where men’s behavior had to conform to an inflexible “performance on a pre-set stage, leaving only a few directions to be followed” (Benyon 15). Moreover, they underscore the familial adherence to National Catholicism, as the Francoist state glorified large families in order to reverse the declining birth rate, which they fallaciously attributed to the Malthusian social policies of the Second Republic (Nash 289). Assessed on a more profound level, these images are further revelatory of the hypocrisy underpinning the family image in Franco’s Spain and the patriarchal role. The war photos convey the notion of a distinguished military career, and enhance the aura of virility surrounding Julio Carrión González, who we later find out is simply a disreputable opportunist, having been simultaneously a member of both the Juventudes Socialistas Unifcadas (JSU) and the Falange. He was markedly apolitical, spurning ideologies in favor of an all-consuming obsession with enrichment, as Álvaro recognises: “no había llegado a asumir nunca, al menos ante mí, la ideología que en apariencia tendría que haberle empujado hasta el infierno ruso” (391). The exposure of Julio Carrión González’s duplicity shatters the post-war artifice of masculinity, edified upon military prowess and a paternal role. Thus, Grandes’ counter- normative depiction of the traditional family unit debunks the myth of a Francoist society founded on morally sound family values. Significantly, the father’s empty boasting of his past military service in Russia and Poland resonates with the change in masculinity wrought by the onset of consumerism in the apertura era, in which surface, not depth, became increasingly valued. Even the transmission of these putatively heroic feats is based on the shift from authentic masculinity to one that is shaped by consumer images, photos and films. It is a film about the Pacific War that compels Álvaro to question his father about his experience of fighting with the División Azul in Russia. His father’s reply equalises both sides, and even facetiously attributes the depictions of Nazi evil to Jewish prominence in the film industry (384). This exoneration of the Nazis is a distortion of history

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

21

that reaffirms his moral slipperiness. The transmission of gender memory is, therefore, reliant on what Alison Landsberg terms “prosthetic memory,” which she defines as follows: Prosthetic memory is a particular form of public cultural memory (the memory of a past that has not been directly experienced) that emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past. In this process, the person does not simply learn about the past intellectually, but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live in the traditional sense. (222) It does not arrogate an epistemological or ideological authority, rather favoring an affectionate and even entertaining engagement with the past that allows the second generation to freely negotiate the meaning of history through, in this case, a televisual experience that prompts further exploration into family memory. The third-person narrative that recounts Julio Carrión González’s brilliant economic trajectory, his rise from humble origins to great wealth, posits the Franco dictatorship and apertura era as periods of social mobility, when ambitious men like him could prosper. Julio is representative of an inequitable configuration of power, affluence and masculine respect that originates in the unjust post-war redistribution of Republican property and wealth, sanctioned by laws such as the 1939 Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas, which ratified the illegal expropriation of Republican property. Francoist masculinity, epitomised by bullfighters, such as El Cordobés, was anchored in an impressive masculine physicality and seductiveness. It was representative of what bell hooks terms “the aggressive dominator model of patriarchal masculinity,” which is calibrated by capital acquisition, drive and feminine conquests (27). Julio’s choice of wife is noteworthy on three counts. First, it is consonant with a self-made variant of masculinity, which seeks to expunge its unseemly origins by marrying well, a process that converts “Mr Van Rough into Mr Smooth” (Kimmel 86). In another vein, the marriage reinforces the economic consolidation of the Nationalist victory and the persistence of male hegemony in the industrialised apertura period: his wife, Angélica, the cousin of the Muñoz Fernández family whose property Julio illegally obtained, is a blonde beauty, who is described by her son as “la sueca imaginaria” (21). In the 1960s, las suecas, the bikini-clad female tourists who flocked to Spanish beaches, became objects of erotic fantasy for Spanish men, who imagined them as the libertarian sexual other (Crumbaugh 11). Although Angélica physically incarnates a potentially disruptive foreign sexuality, she is, in fact, only a suitable reflection of her husband’s elevated social status, whose comportment adheres to the conservative female archetype still prevalent in the apertura period. The very name, Angélica, invokes the “ángel del hogar,” the asexual and docile

22

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

prototype of womanhood propagated by the Francoist Regime. Throughout the novel, Angélica fulfills an ornamental function, her beauty inciting admiration for Julio, while she passively tolerates his infidelities (Grandes 171). Her marriage to Julio Carrión González, the instigator of the financial ruination of her cousin’s family, is charged with mnemonic significance because effectively she marries the perpetrator who has victimised and impoverished her mother, Mariana Fernández Viu, who herself was complicit in the misappropriation of her cousin’s properties. This explosion of affect into the victim–perpetrator relationship complicates and problematises the stringent demarcation between victim and perpetrator because it reconfigures the relationship in terms of intimacy and self-interest instead of resentment and redress. Angélica’s exhorting of Julio to marry her is actually couched in terms of future collusion in concealing his fiduciary crimes: “Mi segundo apellido es Fernández, y a lo peor, algún día te sirve para contestar a algunas preguntas” (898). Given Angélica’s mother’s relationship with Julio, who subsequently appropriated her property, the young woman’s obsession with him bespeaks a compulsion to reenact victimisation and trauma, and to preserve a relationship to an attractive man whom she idolised as a child. It could also reverse the power differential that she suffered as a child in which she became her mother’s unwanted competitor for Julio’s attention. The magic tricks performed by Julio for her as a child, which invoked his period combatting in the División Azul in Russia, entrance her, but also prefigure the deceit that will characterise their future marriage. The repetition of her mother’s sexual attraction to him, and her infatuation with him, constitute a particular dynamic of the victim–perpetrator relationship that can only be enlightened by reference to betrayal trauma theory (BTT) (Freyd 308), a concept that serves as a framework for understanding affective disruptions following interpersonal trauma in which victims have positive feelings towards their abusers. BTT highlights the importance of social relationships in comprehending post-traumatic outcomes. Specifically, BTT predicts that abuse perpetrated by an individual on whom a victim depends will culminate in different outcomes to traumas that do not entail betrayal or inflictharm in close relationships (Freyd, dePrince and Zurbriggen 12). BTT suggests that dependence or affect in the victim– perpetrator relationship causes the victim to adapt to the abuse in ways that preserve the relationship. This adaption may increase risk for later victimisation and also result in myriad negative psychological and physical health outcomes (Freyd 315). The irrationality of the victim’s closeness to the perpetrator can be explained by the development of relationship patterns in which close, interpersonal relationships are automatically associated with the abuse in question, in this case, deceit and the dissemblance of friendship and romance for the purposes of monetary gain. Victims expose themselves to revictimisation because they subconsciously expect this particular abuse to form part of all their subsequent relationships (Freyd, dePrince and Zurbriggen 13).

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

23

Angélica’s abandonment of her family once she becomes Julio’s secretary, and her seduction of him, certainly indicates a desperate need to retain a relationship with him and a concomitant identification with his values. Her candid admission of her knowledge of his miscreances to him, “sé muy bien quién eres, Julio, un ladrón, un estafador, un impostor, un mentiroso, un golfo y un putero” (898), indicates her acceptance of these typically disqualifying qualities in a relationship punctuated by his extramarital dalliances. Her nonchalance is also a harbinger of the economic shift from an agricultural to a consumerist society in which the superficial values of glamour and success prevailed over the traditional and formerly highly valued male characteristics of stoicism and self-sacrifice. Simultaneously and contradictorily, it reproduces the marriage pattern of oligarchic Francoist families. In their insightful article on expropriations during the post-war period, Peter Anderson and Miguel-Ángel del Arco Blanco note that “marriages between Francoist property-holding families, closely interwoven with the local political elite, proved frequent and enduring” (78). Seeking to consolidate power in primarily rural settings, these marriages prioritised practicality and capital acquisition over affect. Julio and Angélica’s marriage is a simulacrum of this elite custom that excises the post-war spiral of greed and opportunism to legitimise Julio’s standing in the elevated social circles which he frequents. In terms of Grandes’ postmillennial oeuvre, it diverges from her typical representation of affect during the post-war period, which, in her subsequent novels, is invariably presented as a panacea that enables characters to withstand the period’s depredations. In these novels, male and female characters are able to transcend the limited confines of monolithic national identities and experience pleasure and solidarity, even in the midst of postconflict situations, through the fostering of enriching human connections. In this novel, this compensatory affect is replaced by a trauma-induced attachment to a perpetrator that conjoins intimacy, victimhood and perpetration in an uneasy triad that affirms the multidimensionality of the victim–perpetrator relationship. In this sense, it complements Los aires difíciles’ delineation of the perpetuation of victimhood and perpetration within the family, which, through the complex dynamics of motherhood, fashion and class engaged and moved beyond the labels of national markers, offering a way of imagining the heretofore inconceivable affective consequences of perpetration. El corazón helado causes us to rethink our knowledge of the affective culture of Francoist Spain, in which the quotidian relationships of amity and neighborliness were constantly unraveled and remade, by introducing another variant of social relations in a post-conflict setting: an affective and sexual victim–perpetrator relationship that is not induced by coercion and physical violence, but by a misguided and puerile sense of attachment as well as venality. This variation indicates that love, even in a distorted form, can form part of the victim–perpetrator relationship, which underlines the reductionism in conceiving the relationship solely in terms of domination

24

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

and submission because it demonstrates how a lingering childhood trauma and the desire for greater social status and wealth override the typical victim-perpetrator dynamic. In this case, the union of perpetrator and victim forms together a complex and highly emotive relationship, bound in secrets and silence that impinge on the next generation. As an adult, Álvaro asks his mother to explain the disjuncture between her own insistence on the ethical values of generosity and fairness to her children, and her abetting of Julio’s crimes (914), a query to which he receives no satisfactory answer. He realises that his entire childhood socialisation was erected on the basis of lies and deception that created a false high estimation of the moral propriety of both his mother and father. Angélica’s expression of grandmotherly solicitude, in order to quell his growing unease at her past, strives to reframe their damaged relationship in terms of an apolitical maternity that erases the past. However, his discovery of her collusion with his father belies the supposed apoliticism of the Francoist mother, who is revealed to be complicit in the obliteration of his familial and politically incendiary memory. Angélica becomes the guardian of the family’s status, warding off any threats to it by incorporating them within the family circle. Her subsequent invitation to Álvaro to bring Raquel to the family barbecue is couched in distinctly classist terms that neutralise any subversive intent to question the origins of their fortune: “y además estoy segura de que será una persona muy educada, muy culta, y de que sabrá estar” (1224). This praise assimilates Raquel in the high social class to which the Carrión family belongs in a condescending manner in which the savoir faire of her education will cancel out her presumably unacceptable family background. This snobbery is far more than a simple adjudication of value and status, as it exposes an abusive victimisation of a collateral victim of the war by another collateral victim, which negates the automatic assumption of complicity among victims. It is not only familial relations that are affected by memories of perpetration, but also the construction and transmission of masculinity itself. The omnipotence of patriarchy does not mean that the successful reproduction of masculinity is an a priori given. Masculinity should not be considered a static, unchanging entity, but one constituted and reconstituted by what Stephen Whitehead has termed “identity work,” which he defines as “the imminent search for existence and being male/man, the subject engages with and works on the historically and culturally mediated codes of masculinity that prevail around it” (216). Whitehead’s theory means that socialisation in the dominant gender norms does not equate to an automatic acceptance of these same norms. Enlarging on this possibility, bell hooks writes: Patriarchal culture is the system men were born within and socialised to accept, yet in all areas of their lives most men have rebelled in small ways against the patriarchy, and have resisted absolute allegiance to patriarchal thinking and practice. (108)

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

25

Despite his self-deprecation and patent inferiority complex in relation to his father, Álvaro embodies a shift in patriarchy, personifying a far more nurturing, ethical model of masculinity. Instead of being embittered by the disparity between them, he finds worth in an immersion into the intellectual realm, which acts as an explicit repudiation of his father’s masculine archetype. Álvaro’s assertion of his own subjective desires is manifest even as a young boy when his aversion to compulsory physical exercise causes family friend and his teacher, padre Aizpuru, to chastise and taunt him. Upon his mother’s learning of his nonparticipation in physical education class, she questions his sexuality: “¿a ti, te gustan las niñas, verdad, Álvaro? (181). Importantly, Álvaro objects to entering any profession that is related to the source of his father’s wealth, the construction industry, as despite his father’s pleas, he steadfastly refuses to train to become an architect. He belongs to a generation for whom their fathers’ fascist ideologies symbolise shame and lesser social status: in the university, Álvaro’s best friend, Fernando, boasts of his grandfather’s 16-year imprisonment and marshalls its memory to attract women (291-93). Furthermore, as Gareth Wood notes, the reference to grants challenges any presumption that he is the pampered scion of the upper classes whose university career was facilitated by his father’s affluence (190). Nevertheless, the proliferation of references to Julio’s immense wealth, and generosity towards his children, qualify this loss of social capital, somewhat, as evidently, in a hypercapitalistic society, Julio is still feted as a winner. However, Grandes’ chronicling of Julio’s financial skulduggery, the diminution of his sexual prowess and the onset of senescence undermine his capitalistic status. Adolfo, Álvaro’s brother-in-law, confirms his suspicions that Julio was using Viagra in his dotage, which may have provoked his heart attack (187). The use of the drug can be construed as an individual response to the feared loss of his physical and social seductiveness. Markedly, the character of Eugenio Sánchez Delgado, Julio’s wartime friend, serves as a counterfoil to Julio’s masculinity and validates the contemporary recuperation of memory. Eugenio is clearly inspired by Grandes’ grandfather whom I discussed in the “Introduction,” insofar as he too hails from a Fascist family, and renounces his well-paid position in a ministry, which required him to oversee the expropriation of Republican properties, a task he judged to be unconscionable (734). Implicitly reproaching Julio for his fraudulent dealings in the post-war period, Eugenio categorically declares the wrongness of the legalised expropriation of Republican property: “Eso es robar, Julio. Aunque haya una ley, aunque sea legal, aunque lo haga todo el mundo. Y por ahí no paso” (736). Grandes’ characterisation of Eugenio attests to her nuanced understanding of the variability of Francoist masculinity in Spain, which included disillusioned Francoist stalwarts who found their integrity compromised by the regime’s institutionalisation of repression, a theme she will explore more trenchantly in her 2012 novel, El lector de Julio Verne.

26 Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family In a similar vein, Álvaro’s performance of masculinity is at variance to the Francoist archetype of masculinity, for he is not dependent upon female subordination to obtain a sense of manliness. During his affair with Raquel he becomes the subordinate one, forever attempting in vain to grasp her personality and the victim of her obsession with easy enrichment (868). Far from pleasing men, Raquel uses and dispenses with them, deciding that while her first husband was suitable to enjoy cocaine-fuelled orgies, he wasn’t reliable father material (646). It is significant that the adult Raquel is not represented in terms of relationality, but is in fact, nearly always alone (except for her trysts with Álvaro), and she is the object of Álvaro’s pursuit, not vice versa. In fact, the coldly calculating Raquel is far more representative of hegemonic masculinity than Álvaro, who is blatantly unconcerned with the trappings of social success. Her profession, an economist, associates her with the masculine world of finance, and her quest for vengeance against the Carrión Otero family can be interpreted as a desire to redress her grandfather’s victimisation by humiliating a hegemonic masculinity. This female reversal of the unjust post-war hierarchisation of men, in effect, the woman as avenger, destabilises normative configurations of gender by invoking female aggression and rancor, characteristics typically associated with men. In her analysis of the novel, Irene Andres-Suárez perceptively notes that Raquel cannot be considered an unimpeachable retaliating angel who embodies her grandparents’ moral uprightness because she violates her promise to not use the information received for the purposes of vengeance and is also motivated by avarice (171). The latter compellent is far more complex than a simple ascription to greed would have us believe because it actually reveals a shift in archetypes of Spanish womanhood. Raquel is representative of the rise of a neoliberal feminism that prioritises capital acquisition and individual accomplishment. Neoliberal feminism tantalises young women with the illusion of leading and effectively managing their lives, unhampered by the social conventions that governed previous generations of women’s lives.2 Glorifying an entrepreneurial attitude to social activity, it idealises the selfsufficient woman who requires no help from men or the state (Rottenberg 4). Its icons are affluent, high-achieving women such as Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, both of whom perfectly incarnate neoliberalism’s individualistic bent, and the supposedly unproblematic reconciliation of economic success and family life. Indisputably, “the ideal feminine neo-liberal subject is one who faces adversity and makes the best of all situations” (Phibbs 28). Raquel’s fixation with scoring “el mejor pelotazo de mi vida” (821), and her disinclination towards forming a family, underscores her disregard of the family-oriented femininity that had previously regulated Spanish womanhood. Her avidness for consumerism and exotic holidays, and her inordinate appreciation of her ex-husband’s Harley Davidson, indicate that her evaluation of people is based on their capital goods, an acquisitiveness that crystallises the opposition between consumerism and memory.

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

27

Cristina Moreiras Menor’s comments elucidate the causation underlying this antagonism. El intento masivo que viven los españoles de cancelar un pasado que los sitúa en una posición de inferioridad respecto al resto del mundo se constituye como una necesidad primordial de ir en busca de nuevas señas de identidad que den entrada y permitan un proceso de identificación no demasiado doloroso ni demasiado problemático. La identidad total con el mundo del consumo y el espectáculo los desidentifica por y para siempre con ese pasado de represión, silencio y homogeneidad al que habían sido sometidos durante las últimas décadas. (75) Consumerism was incompatible with memory precisely because it served to assuage memories of backwardness and cultural inferiority. As such, it was a neutraliser, not a catalyst of memory. Raquel’s candid self-assessment as a degenerate Spaniard is an indictment of this new rich tendency so lamented by Grandes: “Yo no quería vengarme, yo soy una española peor, de las de ahora, y sólo quería hacer un buen negocio, ganar mucho dinero, pegar el pelotazo de mi vida, ni más ni menos” (968). Her statement, which rejects the incomprehensible past in favor of materialistic abundance, can be interpreted as evidence of her uncritical adhesion to neoliberalism. Her dismissal of vengeance as “un mal negocio” (967) pits redress for past wrongs against neoliberal dictates, imbuing the former with the negative valence of economic and social regression. Her pejorative description of memory as “una pasión torpe, débil, inútil, siempre porque jamás devuelve lo que has invertido en ella” (965), and her clear statement of her professional detachment “soy economista ya lo sabes” (966), even associates the idea of an admittedly dubious form of historical redress with intellectual irrationality and backwardness. Therefore, this is a specifically gendered and neoliberal rejection of the recuperation of memory that is reduced to a means of economic gain and voided of its ethical and social import. Raquel’s neoliberal feminism is corresponded by the feminisation of Álvaro, who becomes the object of female sexual pleasure, manipulation and rejection, with Raquel’s deceitfulness and later disappearance causing him immense pain. His masculinity is representative of what bell hook terms “feminist masculinity,” which comprises the traits of “integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous and connected” (118). For hooks, patriarchal culture’s injunctions of emotional remoteness and competitiveness among men makes “the man who dares to love” rare, and thus, she proposes the replacement of this belligerent and frequently misogynist patriarchal model with “a benevolent patriarchy,” which promotes masculine tenderness and kindness (125). Departing from hook’s definition, I will now focus on the relatively underresearched, yet hugely significant, rise of the Spanish new man and his mnemonic and gendered elaboration of an idiosyncratic

28

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

identity narrative in a postmillennial Spain characterised by hyperindividualism, hyperconsumerism and neoliberalism. The very antithesis of the virile macho man, this “new man” is characterised by an “unassertive manner, a desire for nurturing activities and a wish to express emotion” (Cornwall and Lindsfarne 58). His male subjectivity is premised on ethical probity, intellectual rationality, left-wing values, hypermodernity and a disidentification with patriarchal values. He is an aggregate of the permutations in Spanish gender ideology in democratic Spain that encompass the widespread incorporation of women into the workplace, the legalisation of homosexuality and the ever-accelerating secularisation of the populace. The problematics of forging a coherent male identity is exacerbated by the absence of venerable social models in the midst of the discrediting of the social institutions that once governed Spanish life.3 Álvaro’s masculinity is actually constituted by qualities traditionally considered feminine, such as nurturing and caring, and for him, fathering is an active responsibility for which he assumes equal responsibility to his wife, Mai. In this novel, this new man ideology dismantles the gendered division of labor that had traditionally complemented male supremacy in Francoist Spain. Álvaro’s sexually open marriage to Mai is based on equality, and each partner performs their equal share of household tasks (169). More important, his love for his son is articulated in unabashedly sentimental and sensuous prose that references the male baby’s smells and skin quality, and is so overwhelming that it surpasses his love for his wife (262). His willingness to change the baby’s diapers implies a gender equalisation within the family and is symptomatic of a participatory style of fatherhood, grounded in a new man ideology that celebrates and validates men’s feminine side. The capacity to experience the type of emotional pain suffered by Álvaro in the wake of Raquel’s disappearance is further indicative of his “new man” identity, defined as a man conscious and accepting of a wide range of emotions. Relatedly, an involved style of fatherhood is central to Álvaro’s older brother Julio’s self-conception: “Yo puedo ser un mal marido, Álvaro, pero soy un buen padre. A mí me encantan mis hijos” (206). Discarding all pretence, he leaves his wife, Asun, and children to be with his mistress, Verónica, even when this implies considerable financial hardship. Nurturing, enjoyment and tenderness all permeate his description of his children’s custodial visits, which culminate in the entire family watching the Disney Channel together (265). More impressively, he is penitent for having left his wife, and assumes full responsibility for her upkeep, bearing the financial brunt of the divorce himself. The dialogue between the siblings elides masculinist discourse of power or disparagement of lesser masculinities and women, representing complex relational male characters who self-define in terms of the quality of their familial relationships. The underlying implication of this dialogue is that contemporary Spanish masculinity is a self-generated construct, intimately connected with men’s needs for emotional expressivity and familial warmth.

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

29

At polar odds to his father’s ostensible compliance with National Catholicism, Álvaro and Julio exemplify an individuated male subjectivity that does not depend on the mandatory displays of masculine virility that conditioned their father’s masculinity. Men, especially upper middleclass ones are no longer afraid of being “more sensitive, caring, present and gender-equal” (Aitken 82). The brothers’ performance of fatherhood contradicts normative masculinist ideals centered on a distant and disciplinarian model of fatherhood by relocating it in the emotional realm. Their fathering is consistent with the contemporary fashioning of fathers as “coparents who are responsible for gender, cognitive, intellectual and academic development,” and fatherhood itself as a bond premised on a loving nexus (Aitken 225). These “new fathers” belong to the generational demographic of Generation X, born between 1965 to 1980, who have adopted an emotionally engaged model of fatherhood. In this sense, they personify the Spanish new father, represented in films such as El bola by Alfredo’s father, José, who is caring and respectful towards his son, Alfredo, and thoughtfully explains his viewpoint to him, rather than enforcing it. Similarly, in Los lunes al sol, Paula’s father, Rico, the bar owner, is an easy-going dad who does not police Paula’s nocturnal outings.4 The sternness and authoritarianism represented by the Francoist patriarch is subverted by this caring and tolerant father who prioritises the child’s well-being. Eschewing the authoritarian paternal archetype, their visions of fatherhood are based on respect for one’s fellow men, integrity and emotional closeness. The tension between the brothers’ parenting styles and Julio Senior’s model of fatherhood is demonstrated in their divergent opinions about male involvement in childrearing: when Álvaro soothes Miguelito, his father looks on in dismay, incredulous at any signs of male childrearing (205). When Julio Junior asks his father for money to cover his maintenance payments, his father refuses the money on the grounds that Julio has not kept up appearances, which entails simultaneously maintaining his marriage and mistress. Instead of paying maintenance and preserving his familial links with his children, he proposes that he simply replace them with a new family: “Muy bien, pues ten más niños, ahora tienes una mujer muy joven” (210). His hardhearted reply contradicts the rose-hued vision of Francoist familial solidarity by crudely reducing it to the reproductive function, and disavowing emotional connectivity as its fulcrum. Positing women as expendable fecund bodies, it exhibits the hallmarks of the most rancid variant of Francoist hegemonic masculinity. In contrast, Julio Junior’s resultant endurance of straitened circumstances privileges his non-materialistic, family-oriented conceptualisation of masculinity, encapsulated by his dismissive attitude to money: “¿Qué es el dinero? No fabrica nada, no sirve para nada, sólo para gastarlo, para conseguir placeres” (210). Arguably, the brother’s privileged economic position challenges their disdain for materialism as neither do they renounce their father’s largesse. The abyss between father and son originates in the obsolescence of an authoritarian model of patriarchal fatherhood, and the accretive effects of

30

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

transformations in gender ideology in the democratic period. Masculinity is constructed not solely through power relations, but by “their interplay with a division of labour and with patterns of emotional attachment” (Carrigan, Connell and Lee 112). The sophistication of postmillennial Spain, in which basic citizen’s rights have been secured, permits the citizenry to develop sexual, economic and social identities that would have been inconceivable for their parents (Kennedy 192). A neoliberal economic climate produces a distinct and autonomous gender identity, untethered to “the ties that previously bound both representations of the body and self to the symbolic collective or/of nation and non-identitarian notions of sexuality” (Venkatesh 4). The incorporation of two million women into the labor market in the post-1975 period has transformed masculinity as much as femininity, destabilising the traditional form of masculinity incarnated by Julio.5 The legalisation of homosexuality in 1979, and the introduction of same-sex marriage in 2005, propitiated a new climate of tolerance and inclusivity: in 2013, a survey revealed that 88 percent of Spaniards are accepting of homosexuality (Khazan). Furthermore, Spanish citizens’ inordinately enthusiastic endorsement of a dual identity, of being Spanish and European (Closa and Haywood 68), means that they no longer view national gender stereotypes as binding. Dematrikis Z. Demetriou, however, stresses that hegemonic masculinity’s responsiveness to the reconfiguration of gender does not necessarily culminate in the amelioration of previously subjugated groups’ circumstances or in increased equality. In concurrence with Demetriou’s contention, Singleton and Maher stress the superficiality of “the new man” ideology. As they note, “secondary involvement remains the norm, and Generation X men only take responsibility during designated small blocks of time” (237). Their contentions are affirmed by Álvaro’s callous disregard for his family, which is licensed by a male subjectivity partially wrought by neoliberal and consumerist dictates that prioritise individual preferences. This masculinity is typically post-moral in its conceptualisation of a flexible family form, judging it on its amenability to individual self-realisation. Giles Lipovestky describes it as follows: La familia posmoralista es, pues, una familia que se construye y reconstruye libremente como se quiere. Ya no se respeta la familia en sí, sino la familia como instrumento de realización de las personas, la institución obligatoria se ha metamorfoseado en institución emocional y flexible. (69) The post-moral family is a derivative of the “detached hyper-individualism” that reigns in the era of hypercapitalism and in the aftermath of the dissolution of the moral and social imperatives that once governed social life (33). In his analysis of Lipovestky’s scholarly writings, Flaquer contends that this familial model has culminated in an individualistic partnership, in

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

31

which each partner prioritises their own happiness, even before financial considerations (72). From the outset, Álvaro defines his marriage in terms of its impermanence, commenting that the first nine years of his marriage to Mai have been happy, and that neither one “había dado todavía señales de desánimo” (65). His description of their marital dynamics clarifies that there is a cogent demarcation of personal independence: “Ella guarda mi independencia y yo, la mía” (167). Although he appreciates Mai’s unobtrusiveness, he is plagued by doubts about the constraints and opportunity costs inherent in marriage and he ruminates on what he is losing out on in order to appear as the ideal couple (66). His evaluation of his marriage is disturbingly individualistic and refigures marriage as a revocable contract. Clearly, he envisions a liberated existence, one of satisfaction and fulfillment, a life built upon intentionality and individualism rather than obligation and role filling, and evinces no compunction in leaving his family for the more attractive Raquel. Hyperindividualism ultimately proves pernicious to the individual because it culminates in excessive behavior and pathologies (Lipovetsky 33), and certainly, Álvaro’s copious commentary on sexual euphoria attests to that symptomatology. His longing for the past seems to represent an escape from this hyperindividualistic and consumerist paradise, reconnecting him with an era in which collective ideals prevailed in both the gender and political terrains. The mnemonic rationale underlying Álvaro’s disenchantment with Mai certainly corroborates this contention. She not only questions the validity of the recuperation of memory, “Yo comprendo que es terrible, y que debe de ser muy duro vivir con algo así, pero me ha parecido un poco desagradable, la verdad, seguir dándole vueltas a una historia tan antigua después de tantos años” (392), but then excuses his father when they find the incriminating photos and documents (309). Mai’s family heritage, her grandfather was a Republican, makes her exculpation all the more disturbing to him. This betrayal of her family heritage, coupled with her moral relativism, means that she does not provide a distinctly feminine path to an authentic and equitable memory. It is significant that Álvaro’s recuperation of memory is both catalysed by a woman (Raquel) and validated by another, his grandmother, Teresa, a female prominence that undermines the patriarchal bowdlerising of memory previously discussed. The death of his father compels Álvaro to uncover the memory of Spain’s turbulent past via an investigation into the life and death of his grandmother, whose memory had been transmitted to him by an artificial rose-hued version of the past (564). In this sense, he is a member of “the generation of postmemory.” According to Hirsch: Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall, but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk

32

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. (“Generation of Postmemory” 107)

Growing up, his grandmother’s memory is only accessible through typical family photos of her wedding to Benigno (771), which reduce the complexity of her life to a preordained domestic existence and efface her defiance of local gender conservatism in the 1930s. Teresa González Puerto is the very antithesis of Angélica’s complementary femininity, emblematising as she does a defiant politically active female archetype during the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936. Her name is significant insofar, on first analysis, it ostensibly encodes an ironic subversion of another Francoist womanly archetype, the fifteenth-century religious icon Santa Teresa de Ávila. The post-war distortion of history resulted in the omission of Santa Teresa’s inquiring mind, her participation in religious reform, and her Jewish origins, and she was instead recast as a paragon of female docility (Graham 185). Teresa’s breaching of reactionary gender norms and her proactive involvement in political reform analogise her to a historically rigorous version of the female saint. Daughter of a poverty-stricken schoolteacher, she is obliged by circumstances to marry Benigno Carrión, an unprepossessing man who becomes besotted by her. In the first few years of her marriage, she resides in a state of tedious contentment, but the advent of the Spanish Second Republic in 1931 enables her self-realisation and stirs marital discord. The Constitution of 1931 afforded women the right to maternity insurance and legalised civil marriage, but it also aspired to redress discrimination in the workplace by ratifying pro-feminist labor laws (Ryan, “A Case Apart” 62). Furthermore, women’s increasing control over their own reproduction caused a fall in the birthrate from 27.55 percent in 1931 to 24.85 percent in 1936. This legitimised a new conceptualisation of marriage as a complicitous union based on the continuing satisfaction of both the wife and husband. In the first year ensuing its ratification, 7,059 demands were made, and 4,105 of them culminated in the granting of divorce (González Calleja et al. 978). The advances made in divorce, abortion and women’s incorporation into the working world as well as educational reforms “permitieron una transición hacia un modelo familiar teóricamente más libre” (Iglesias de Ussel and Klose 725). Grandes’ excerption of María Teresa León’s Memoria de la Melancolía in the prelude to the first part of the novel El corazón pays implicit tribute to the 1932 divorce law, referencing as it does León’s divorce from Gonzalo de Sebastián Alfaro, one of the most famous of that era (Torres 118). In this novel, these dramatic changes facilitate his grandmother’s political participation in left-wing groups, while also reversing the balance of power in Benigno and Teresa’s marriage. Teresa’s newfound

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

33

confidence imbues her with the courage to transcend gender limitations; to address ineffable themes, such as their nonexistent sex life (Grandes 228); to announce her intention to divorce her husband; and to withstand ostracism by the village women. Flouting convention, she ceases to invest time in grooming, instead becoming a well-known local figure who earns the respect of her co-ideologues (230). She also declares her intention to reprise her teacher-training, and admits to herself that she feels more comfortable speaking at political meetings than in the home. Later, Álvaro’s grandmother’s initiation of a relationship with their lodger, the guardia civil, Manuel Castro, annihilates Benigno’s masculinity, converting him into “una sombra” (229). The emasculating effect of this emergence of a political and sexually active womanhood attests to how both a dominant masculinity and a dominant femininity cannot coexist in the matrimonial unit in a supposedly progressive epoch. Teresa’s affair, her political activism, and her deprioritisation of the home approximate to a performance of female masculinity, the female assumption of the male role, and its attendant sexual and social privileges. In his groundbreaking work Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam contends that biological maleness is not a prerequisite for a male gender performance. He adduces a relatively prosaic example, the recent spate of James Bond films, to illustrate his contention. In his estimation, masculinity, understood as the efficient exercise of power, is most convincingly evoked by M, Bond’s female superior, in MI6, played by Judi Dench in these films (52). Under his trajectory of thought, masculinity is separated from its biological basis and is reduced to a performance of power, control and autonomy that may very well be enacted by a woman. Halberstam warns that this performance is socially condemned, invariably interpreted “as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment as a longing to be and to have a power that is always out of reach” (9). Furthermore, biological maleness does influence the distribution of cultural and political power, and consequently, men obtain disproportionately higher levels of both than women (16). Teresa’s performance of female masculinity subverts the traditional configuration of motherhood and fatherhood, and she becomes the primary quasi-paternal figure of respect for her son. His admiration for his mother rises in inverse proportion to his disregard for his father, who has always shown “una indiferencia por sus hijos” (225) and is obliged to coerce affection from the child by giving him pocket money. The sexualisation of his mother, implicit in her relationship with Manuel Castro, riles Julio into assuming the mantle of the patriarchal role of the man of the house (245). According to family lore, Teresa died of tuberculosis in 1937, a disease that conjures up dual meanings. Tuberculosis proliferates in times of social turbulence, thus increasing the possibility of contraction. It also features as a literary trope for the punishment of the adulterous heroine. The disease is charged with erotic and fatalistic connotations: Susan Sontag notes that the contraction of TB “was imagined to be an aphrodisiac, and to confer

34

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

extraordinary powers of seduction” (45). In fact, Sontag avers that disease was “merely another ideation of love” (21).6 This panoply of significations confers Julio’s mendacious attribution of Teresa’s death to this illness with particular weight because it encodes both a subliminal recognition of her brilliance and a condemnation of her adulterous affair. It implicitly medicalises an unconventional female sexuality and dissident female political activity, while acknowledging her intellectual qualities. Teresa’s actual death in Ocaña prison in 1941 symbolises the Franco regime’s obliteration of all vestiges of Republican female political participation, which formed the cornerstone of the post-war retrenchment of an ossified gender segregation (Graham 185). However, Grandes demonstrates Francoist masculinity to be not only deceitful and shoddy in the case of Julio, but her depiction of Benigno’s descent into alcoholism casts him as a figure of pathetic ineffectuality, whose degeneracy reiterates that Francoist masculinity is lacking in integrity and self-respect. Álvaro’s uncovering of Teresa’s life story causes him to be resentful of his father’s concealment of an important part of his heritage, namely, the existence of a cultivated and courageous grandmother who died for her political convictions. Visual autobiography is key to his revision of the life story of a woman typically held in photos to be modest and unassuming, in compliance with the era’s female archetypes. Photos are the mainstay of the generation of grandchildren’s unfurling of their grandparents’ past. Annette Kuhn maintains that photographs are wholly compatible with a revision of one’s life story, for they constitute polysemic memory texts. Photographs concretise historical periods, yet at the same time fulfill an intimate affective function by connecting the next generation with a past that was previously inaccessible, or available only in a fragmented and incoherent form (Barthes 87). They constitute some of the most effective mechanisms to ensure the continued impact of the threatened family past. Photographs, in fact, afford the viewer the opportunity “not only to touch that past but also to try to reanimate it by undoing the finality of the photographic take, thereby reindividualizing cultural history” (Hirsch, “Generation of Postmemory” 115). In this case, Grandes complicates their function, showing them to be both duplicitous and affirming, as Álvaro uses photographs to contest and resist the publicly sanctioned version of the history of his grandmother. Álvaro’s first sighting of Teresa, in a photo given to him as a wedding gift, presented a staid image of a bourgeois wife that suppressed all signs of her individuality (387). Whether postmemory is circumscribed to the “intimate embodied space of the family” (Hirsch “Generation of Postmemory” 22), or is extensible to strangers and participants outside the frame of intergenerational exchange, is not clarified in Hirsch’s formulation of the concept. In this regard, Álvaro’s mnemonic trajectory enlightens the importance of nonfamilial members in the trajectory of postmemory. A polyphony of marginalised voices, an array of remembrance agents and contradictory images become the mechanisms by which he uncovers his grandmother’s political

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

35

activism and her exercising of a self-determined femininity. It is a process in which the outgroup’s survivors enable the recuperation of the memory of one of the outgroup’s deceased members. It is specifically these nonfamily members’ memories that reshape Teresa’s memory, thus underlining the significance of friends and witnesses in regard to the reconstruction of the personal biographical past and its relevance for the present. Tellingly, the transmission of a counter-image that authenticates the verisimilar version of his grandmother’s life is facilitated by Encarna, his grandmother’s friend who lived with her lesbian lover, Amada, during the dictatorship. The protagonist’s memory work enables these three female dissenters to take center stage, and in particular, for the conveyors of a dwindling biological memory, Encarna and Amada, to negotiate their personal experiences through their acts of recollection. Their counter-memories revalorise atypical and individualistic performances of femininity in eras in which conservative gender norms prevailed. While the memory of his grandmother undoubtedly acts as an unimpeachable moral referent (524), it simultaneously vindicates Álvaro’s masculinity by providing him with a historical example of autonomous, connected masculinity, performed by a woman. His description of his admiration for Teresa highlights her simultaneously protectory and empathetic qualities: “tuve la sensación de que mi abuela Teresa, su presencia dulce y benéfica, seguía volando sobre mi cabeza, amparándome y protegiéndome a la vez” (544). Her self-fashioning and decisiveness in her personal life chimes with his feminist masculinity and the neoliberal emphasis on autonomy. Her personhood is refigured as adaptive and resourceful in macrohistorical contexts, where agency was historically denied to women, and if exercised, was excised from Spanish history manuals.7 Álvaro’s reference to her as “mamá” (918) substantiates the idea that she has replaced Angélica, now besmirched by her evident collaboration with his father, as a credible mother figure. Grandes’ denormalisation of traditional Francoist masculinity, her tempered portrayal of the “new man” role, and the invocation of neoliberal feminism and a defiant female masculinity refigure gender performativity as malleable and individualistic. Álvaro and Julio epitomise shifts in the gender order that have led to the formation of a new and family-oriented masculinity, which is paradoxically infused with a post-moral and flexible conceptualisation of the family. The sternness of the Francoist patriarch is subverted by this cultural exaltation of the caring, tolerant father, who prioritises the child’s well-being and enters into a loving relationship premised on mutual respect. Álvaro’s obsession with his grandmother’s memory is a product of a distinctly gendered search for a memory consistent with his new man identity that accepts the neoliberal feminism of a woman, Raquel, in the contemporary period, and the “female masculinity” of his grandmother during the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936. Her memory provides a much-needed and morally irreproachable foundation for Álvaro’s gendered identity, ensuing his disillusionment with his father.

36

Memory, Gender, Changing Spanish Family

Notes 1 Adrienne Rich concurs, defining patriarchy exclusively in terms of its rejection of women as “a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men, by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, traditions, law and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labour, determine what part women shall or shall not play and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male” (57). 2 Christina Scharff phrases it thus: “Young women reject feminism because they regard it as a collective movement, which robs them of the opportunity to navigate their lives self-responsibly, even if this involves dealing with structural inequalities on an individual level” (1). 3 It is important to emphasise that the emergence of “the new man” has not eradicated a traditional perspective on the division of household duties. A 2010 survey carried out by the professional association for self-employed people, Conae, found that 94.5 percent of self-employed women, compared to 56.6 percent of men, undertook household duties (Castro-Martín 448). Gerd Bohner et al. state that the unequal gendered demarcation of labor and housework is advocated by Spanish teenagers (469), the corollary to which is that the future family unit is unlikely to dispense with the traditional allotment of household tasks. 4 A generational coeval, former Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (b. 1960) can be considered an exemplar of this new relaxed model of fatherhood. For Zapatero, it is important that his two daughters respect his integrity and honesty, “que nunca tengan que vivir con un referente negativo de su padre, de su honestidad” (qtd. in de Toro 28). 5 Although Spain has made significant strides in gender equality, the trenchant measures needed to facilitate a healthy work–life balance for working women are conspicuously absent. Help for child-rearing is a largely private initiative in Spain, with the state only investing 0.5% of GDP throughout the period 1996– 2002; its dependence on income means that only 28% of mothers dispose of hired help (Diaz and Tobio 45). 6 For a wide-ranging perspective on the representation of tuberculosis in literature, please see Dan Latimer, “Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis: Literary Images of a Pathology,” MLN 105.5 (1990): 1016–1031. 7 As historian María Gallego Méndez sarcastically comments in relation to the omission of women from Spanish history: “las mujeres no hacían nada” (63).

3

The Feminised Quest Romance in Inés y la alegría

Inés y la alegría, the first book of Grandes’ six-part series, Episodios de una guerra interminable, chronicles the evolution of the protagonist, Inés Ruiz Maldonado, from a bourgeois young lady in Madrid to a Communist cook in a Maquis encampment in Bosent and exiled restaurateur in Toulouse. The titular alegría references the importance of happiness in all its guises, sexual euphoria, alimentary sustenance, and communal joie de vivre in the carceral, culinary, and communal settings in which Inés’ development takes place. These different forms of contentment act as emotional forms of resistance to authoritarian and exclusionary political structures that ostracise the subjective and liberal performances of Republican femininity. The novel forms part of a tradition of Hispanic culinary fiction, which includes Emilia Pardo Bázan’s 1917 book, La cocina española moderna; Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel, Como agua para chocolate; Rosario Castellanos’ 1971 short story, “Lección de cocina”; and Isabelle Allende’s 1998 novel, Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses. The novel taps into the celebratory impulse of ethnic, distinctive cuisine that has been popularised since the 1970s. It also provides a particularly perspicacious insight into the gendered dynamics of exile, in effect, the exilic reconfiguration of traditional masculinity and femininity in Toulouse, a new environment that proves conducive to female exilic and entrepreneurial success and the complex obverse trajectory of exilic alimentary emasculation. Inés y la alegría’s reclamation of a culinary discourse expounds the nonhegemonic emotional and female herstory, defined as the female version of history, in this case, the recovery of the leftist woman’s struggle for self-definition in inimical socio-historical circumstances, a recurrent motif throughout the six-part series. Cooking and cooked products became the historiographical sites of a generation of silenced women who reinvent the collective history of major events by inserting gender into the equation. Maite Zubiaurre contests the notion of cooking as a form of female disempowerment in Hispanic literature and instead convincingly argues that it is a skill through which women acquire self-knowledge and a modicum of power over their patriarchal surroundings (“Culinary Eros” 30). In consonance

38

The Feminised Quest Romance

with this critical perspective, the culinary exploits of this novel’s protagonist have, thus far, been critically interpreted as empowering. In his article on the culinary trope in the novel, Alvin F. Sherman asserts that cooking provides a liberating source of catharsis from a restrictive and conservative home milieu for the protagonist. According to this critic, the act of cooking transcends schismatic political boundaries to create a more communal society in the guerrilla encampment, which is consolidated by Inés’ nurturant and maternal ministrations (4). Curiously, Sherman does not observe any implicit disempowerment in Inés’ role as a “mother, nurturer and healer” (4), which corresponds to the Francoist designation of domesticity as the unique contribution of Spanish women to the patria (Morcillo 5). In this chapter, I aver that culinary acts of consumption and preparation enable the consolidation as well as the transcending of schismatic class, gender and ideological barriers through the dual and often contradictory functions of the kitchen spaces in which the protagonist develops. I probe the culinary function, which reveals the densely layered and deeply entrenched role cooking plays in the building of intersectional identities related to nation, exile, nostalgia and gender. This analysis also seeks to analyse the gendered implications of marginal figures´ attempts to flourish, to obtain eudaimonia, through domesticity and entrepreneurship in exile. Establishing the tenor of Los episodios de una guerra interminable, the novel is concerned with microhistory, or “history from below,” in Peter Burke’s words, which centers on people consigned to oblivion by traditional historiography, not only Republican women in exile, but also the Maquis guerrillas of the failed Valle de Arán invasion. Twelve thousand men participated in this attempted overthrowal of General Franco, which was doomed from the outset by insufficient support and the fact that they were outnumbered by the guardia civil 1 to 4 (Preston, “Resisting the State” 233). The invasion was not even recorded in the official Francoist discourse, which refused to grant any symbolic status to men whom they vilified as “bandoleros” (Moreno Gómez 690). Grandes considers the erasure of the memory of the 1944 Valle de Arán invasion to be symptomatic of the dysfunctional memory culture created by the Franco Regime and seeks to restore it into the Spanish collective psyche, based on the rationale that “ciertas derrotas, lejos de implicar deshonor, pueden ser más honrosas que muchas victorias” (Grandes, Inés 333). To her credit, Grandes acknowledges that the memory of the invasion was also deliberately expunged by the PCE (Partido Comunista Español), who, under Stalin’s orders, were keen for the guerrillas to disband. Grandes’ concern with overlooked counter-memories, neglected in the current recuperation of memory in Spain, is evident in her recuperation of the figure of the aristocrat Jesús Monzón Reparaz, the charismatic PCE leader in exile who was consigned to oblivion by PCE leader Santiago Carrillo’s internecine party machinations (Martorell 25). In the words of his biographer, Martorell:

The Feminised Quest Romance

39

Encarcelado por Franco, relegado al olvido por la dirección del PCE, Monzón, pese a su valiosa contribución a la historia de la España contemporánea, fue borrado de la memoria colectiva hasta el punto de que, durante la transición, ni siquiera era conocido por los propios militantes comunistas de su tierra, Navarra. (28) Martorell demonstrates how leadership battles between Carrillo and Monzón led to the Prague purges, in which Monzón and his former lover, Carmen de Pedro, were interrogated and dismissed from the PCE. Thus, Inés y la alegría rewrites the hagiographic memory of the Communist party in France through the recuperation of the figure of Monzón, and an unflattering chronicling of the petty jealousies and infighting that fissured the political party in exile. This rendering of an impartial and critical memory of exile is complemented by the fictionalisation of the amorous tribulations of legendary Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, whose figure is emotionally historicised in the novel, couched in a discourse of affect and relationships. The humanisation of this mythic Communist icon is achieved through the narrative emphasis on her vulnerability, her pride, loneliness and the emotional toll of ageing, an affective and corporeal representation that counters the tendentious dichotomisation of Ibárruri as either an asexual mother or nymphomaniac (Herrmann 52). My reading of the novel classifies both Inés’ culinary evolution and La Pasionaria’s political and amorous trajectories as what Dana Heller terms the “feminised quest romance,” a spatial and developmental trajectory in which the female protagonist acquires self-knowledge in order to flourish, a theory corroborated by Inés’ reminiscences at the end of the book: “Desde aquella cocina habíamos hecho un largo viaje, cosas muy grandes que a mí en ese momento me parecieron muy pequeñas” (668). Both women undertake involuntary exilic journeys that effect both positive and negative transformations in their professional and amorous lives, garnering wisdom and experience, but also becoming embittered, as is the case with La Pasionaria. Prior to this analysis, it is necessary to define the concept of the feminised quest romance. In traditional quest romances, women occupy a secondary role either as the inspiration or romance interest of the men, who are always the subject of the quest romance. Northrop Frye classifies the quest within the romance and avers that it consists of a tripartite structure of the perilous journey, the crucial battle and the exaltation of the returning hero. Joseph Campbell clarifies the exclusively masculine denotation of hero in epistemological terms, asserting that “a woman represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know” (116). In order to counteract the spatial and developmental stasis of the female protagonist in the traditional quest romance, Heller coined the term the feminised quest romance, defined as a spatial or figurative trajectory embarked upon by a woman to contest patriarchal assumptions of female docility and subservience (1–2). Rejecting the traditional romance plot of obedience to

40 The Feminised Quest Romance detrimental patriarchal structures, the feminised quest romance is strategic, composed of techniques to demonstrate women’s fortitude and capacity for self-invention. It implies the transcending of spatial boundaries, as the protagonist encounters other milieus propitious to her self-development. Importantly, Heller notes that, at times, “a woman’s quest may seem to be taking her in circles rather than in a linear direction. She may appear to be moving backward rather than forward, regressing instead of progressing” (33). This dynamic of advancement and regression typifies the fragmentation, discontinuity and digression that characterise female developmental experience, as well as the general response of social disapproval that is provoked by a woman’s resistance to traditional expectations. In this novel, the traditional and misogynistic female plots of female entrapment and confinement are unsettled because the regressive movement from one enclosure (Inés’ house in Madrid, the prison, the convent, Ricardo’s residence) to another constricted site (the guerrilla camp and exile in Toulouse) is ostensibly conducive to Inés’ personal and entrepreneurial development. However, I contend that the protagonist’s culinary feminised quest romance is ambiguous. I argue that while it positively functions to reconfigure ideological and gendered prejudices, insofar as acts of food preparation and consumption in traditional places enable Inés’ rejection of a confining female identity within restrictive spaces, these very same culinary acts crystallise the limitations of female political involvement and inadvertently perpetuate traditional stereotypes regarding female servitude, the gendered occupation of space and wifehood. I reconstrue notions of exile, cooking and female mobility in order to prove that cooking is both regressive and empowering, as the different kitchen spaces alternatively propitiate and hinder Inés’ feminised quest romance. In a similar vein, La Pasionaria’s exile in Russia consolidates her prestige as an international Communist icon, but also stages her amorous disenchantment, a dual experience that disputes the idea of the feminised quest romance as a solely positive trajectory.1 Cooking is primordial to Inés’ identity, an importance that is underlined not only by the constant evocation of her culinary skills with every aspect of her selfhood, from her sexuality to her family, but also from its placement within the narrative: we learn of Inés’ cooking skills on the very first page of the novel, before we meet her family or learn of the social variables that define her. Her predilection for cooking in her family’s house in Madrid, and later in her brother’s gubernatorial residence, is itself a violation of bourgeois class norms for which she is reproved by her maid Virtudes and sister-in-law, Adela, who consider cooking to be an activity unfit for an upper-class young lady. Her inchoate politicisation takes place in the kitchen of her house in Madrid where her maid Virtudes holds meetings of the JSU (Juventudes Socialistas Unidas). There, she becomes infatuated with Pablo, a railroad laborer and leader of the JSU who betrays her to the Falange. Importantly, the transcending of class norms in the kitchen

The Feminised Quest Romance

41

does not equate to a coherent and well-formulated resistance to normative gender norms principally due to Inés’ failure to challenge the circumscribed range of options available to a bourgeois young lady in this era, the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936. For example, she cares for her mother in order to escape an arranged marriage, and does not question the automatic relegation of female kin to this subordinate role. Similarly, she assumes an active role in the young socialists (JSU), but only as a provisioner of basic supplies and foodstuffs. Furthermore, her contrastive allusion to her brother Ricardo’s superior education and political knowledge emphasises her political ignorance and poor educational level, which seem to further contradict the idea of a purposeful political conscientisation. The regression implicit in her unquestioning assimilation of sexist gender expectations is countered by Inés’ establishment of a branch of el Socorro Rojo (Red Cross) to help Republican soldiers. This initiative represents a radical departure from her family’s right-wing political credo since she uses her conservative and Fascist mother’s legacy to care for her deceased mother’s political adversaries, an act of rebellion that prefigures the uneasy tripartite relationship between caring, the influence and inescapability of tradition, and political dissidence that defines the complexity of Inés’ relationship to the traditional female occupations of caring and cooking throughout the novel. Her nurturance crystallises the hypocritical sexual politics of leftwing socialist groups whose revolutionary ideas did not extend to a reconfiguration of gender roles (Nash 63). Bridenthal and Koonz observe that, although women on the Republican side were involved in war production and even construction work, this reversal of gender roles was effectuated to the detriment of their feminist ideals (472). Of further significance is the fact that women’s participation in the Republican cause took place, for the most part, at the beginning of the Civil War, when the Republican side were desperately searching for volunteers. After this initial threat had subsided, the battalions of female fighters were disbanded. Certainly, the Republican movement had no qualms in using stereotypical images of women in order to gain support. The Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas (Antifascist Women’s Organisation of the Spanish Communist Party) and the Feminine Secretariat of the Dissident Marxist Party targeted women with emotive poster campaigns, designed to provoke a decidedly maternal outrage against the atrocities being committed against their sons and husbands by the fascists (Nash 235). Therefore, even radical political affiliations did not help Spanish women to escape the pervasiveness of traditional thinking because the co-option of women into these associations translated into a worryingly high proportion of women occupying ancillary roles. Historians concur that left-wing rhetoric and the much-vaunted milicianas, female soldier recruits in the Spanish Civil War, did not effectuate a trenchant reconfiguration of gender norms (Nash 222). Therefore, Republican women were situated in a liminal place, between the putative liberation accorded by left-wing cant and the actuality of restrictive gender ideologies. Consequently, the

42

The Feminised Quest Romance

protagonist’s defiance is curtailed by left-wing traditional views on the role of women in society. Acts of food preparation and consumption in two spaces of incarceration, the convent and her governor brother Ricardo’s residence in Lérida, are linked alternatively with the jeopardisation of Republican female corporeality and sexual harassment, as well as familial rapprochement and the reassertion of Republican femininity. Culinary prowess reverses the isolation and alienation of the deviant female subject in castigatory spaces, allowing the protagonist to express her individuality. Inés’ complete isolation in the convent is alleviated by the Mother Superior’s dispatching of her to the kitchen where she perfects her cooking skills. In Lérida, Inés and Ricardo are ideologically opposed and barely on speaking terms. He even advocates her sectioning in a psychiatric hospital as a punishment for her violation of gender norms. However, Ricardo’s tasting of her soufflé elicits an appreciative response and she resolves to make more dishes to please him (194). Ironically, Inés’ conciliatory cooking is facilitated by a Sección Femenina cookbook written by the Marquesa de Parabere (194), which brings into relief the contradictory essence of the Falange’s women’s movement, la Sección Femenina, whose traditionalism promoted what Giulani diFebo has termed “Christian feminism,” which can be defined as “the regenerating and rechristianising mission, enacted through domestic and childbearing functions, confided to the feminine masses in the wake of the political and anticlerical turmoil of the Civil War” (178). This dignification of female domestic activities ostensibly allowed post-war women a channel of creativity in a very circumscribed environment. The endangerment of Inés, however, in this kitchen disputes “Christian feminism” by showing how domestic functions can act as forms of entrapment. Moreover, the cited Marquesa de Parabere cookery book is actually a subversive force, laden with a pro-gallic sentiment that arose from its aristocratic author’s Francophilia. Throughout her works, she extolled French cuisine and taste, and cast aspersions on Spanish claims to culinary greatness (L. Anderson 47). Although the descriptions of food and its common ascriptions consolidate social ties and individual skills, nurture-related images in both the convent and her brother Ricardo’s kitchen in Pont de Suert are associated with acts of willful self-destruction, which corroborate Heller’s envisioning of the feminised quest romance as partially regressive, composed of phases in which the female quester is actually declining. During the protagonist’s stay in a convent, she borrows a knife from the convent kitchen to cut her veins. In her brother’s residence, one of his friends, Captain Garrido, becomes infatuated with her, and begins to first pursue and then harass her, convinced that her affiliation to left-wing ideologies guarantees her promiscuity. His sexual assault takes place in Ricardo’s kitchen while she is making béchamel sauce, an attack that transforms the kitchen into the site of the encroachment of a reactionary gender ideology that jeopardises the

The Feminised Quest Romance

43

Republican female’s corporeality by the quasi-sanctioning of gender violence against them. Carlos Fonseca encapsulates it thus: La propaganda franquista denigraba la imagen de la miliciana, de las mujeres que habían participado en la guerra del bando republicano, un papel transgresor e inaceptable para un régimen que exaltaba la sumisión de la mujer y su papel como reposo del guerrero. El odio contra ellas era aún mayor que contra los hombres, y también el castigo. (197–198) The setting of the assault within domestic confines is charged with symbolic import. Grandes proves that, contrary to the prescriptions of contemporaneous moral treatises, the harming of the female body does not reside in venturing outside the house, which metamorphoses into a dangerous locale for women, its parameters abetting and shielding patriarchal transgressions. Female geographical immobility is not only clearly inimical to female selfdevelopment but also enables phallocratic abuses, which validates the feminised quest romance, predicated as it is on the indispensability of mobility to female self-development. Self-nourishment, a process of strengthening the body diminished by Garrido’s assaults, is integral to Inés’ plan to escape (280). This dietary change contrasts the institutional alimentary meagreness with a diet based on the protagonist’s urban bourgeois roots, which will propitiate the emergence of a female body over which she has full authority, thereby divesting Garrido of his former control over her body and the narrative of her own identity. Food even becomes a conduit of escape, which imbues the hegemonic space of her Falangist brother’s kitchen with subterfuge and female leftist resistance. Her preparation of doughnuts, a seemingly innocuous activity, for the guerrillas prior to her escape reinstates a purposeful inversion of gender roles, as her cooking skills are deployed for the benefit of her brother’s ideological adversaries in his very own kitchen. This defiance is a transgression of familial bonds, space and politics that confirms cooking as a form of resistance for subjugated women. The prelude to her escape to the guerrilla camp of Bosent confers her with agency, even endowing her with masculine proactive traits, as her escape is enabled through two masculine phallic symbols: the horse upon which she escapes and the gun with which she threatens Adele. This mode of escape represents a radical reversal of gendered power dynamics, reconferring her with the power wrested from her by Garrido during his attack on her. It is thus a symbolic vengeance for his sexual humiliation of her. In seeking relief from an intolerable situation, Inés attempts a departure to the guerrilla camp that consolidates her within the quest pattern, establishing herself in a place in which she will repeat a familiar code of domestic defiance and subjugation. In this new milieu, cooking conveys the ambiguities and tensions surrounding the female role in a hypermasculine

44

The Feminised Quest Romance

environment. Far from being a female culinary renegade, at times, Inés ostensibly embodies an exilic ángel del hogar, the docile and uniquely maternal archetype of womanhood exalted by the Franco Regime. Inés refers to the “satisfacción maternal que siente al ver comer a los guerrilleros, a quienes mira como una gallina mira a sus polluelos” (213), which emphasises the inherent maternalness of food. Pierre Bourdieu’s comments are apt: It is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning, the lessons which longest withstand the distancing or collapse of the native world and most durably maintain nostalgia for it. The native world is, above all, the maternal world, the world of primordial tastes and basic foods. (“The Bachelors Ball” 79) Indeed, the overdetermination of Inés’ maternal function is masterfully conveyed by the boiling-over of milk, the maternal food par excellence, that she prepares for the guerrillas (437). According to Kristeva, milk is the fluid that unites both baby and mother in a symbiotic dyad (El poder del horror 139), and thus, the connotations of excess conjured up by its boilingover denote an insoluble maternal bond. Nevertheless, the eroticisation of Inés’ food preparation imbues her with a pronounced sexuality that is at antipodes to the asexuality of el ángel del hogar. During the initial period of her romance with Galán, she is characterised as the purveyor of succulent food and erotic pleasure, who prepares a post-coital breakfast that is invested with sexual overtones. According to Levi-Strauss, food classifications can “be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas” (1). He observes that the sexual code often “becomes latent and is concealed beneath the alimentary code” (369), the corollary to which is that food expresses the subliminal currents of female sexuality circulating in the camp. Galán’s description of one of their meals as “un momento de incestuosa perfección” (Inés 225) ironically undermines the communal connotations typically ascribed to female nurturance and cooking by reinvesting it with incestuous overtones. A collective identification among people tenuously united by a political ideology in the guerrilla camp is consolidated by Inés’ cooking, and the consumption of her food sanctions novel performances of masculinity based on their memories of maternal nurturance. It is important to realise that eating is not a solely biological action but an act endowed with socio-cultural signification and historical resonance (Mintz 7). In simpler terms, our selection and consumption of food symbolises our personal preferences, inciting memories and consolidating identity. Food acts as a mnemonic, evoking familial memories that connect the isolated guerrillas to a more secure past while enabling them to display a tenderness antithetical to hegemonic masculinity. It is indispensable to remembering the past and to constructing a community from a collection of atomised males, which cauterises the

The Feminised Quest Romance

45

psychic scars wrought by separation from their families. The proliferation of allusions to Inés’ maternal qualities and the conversion of the guerrillas to errant children, “una clase de párvulos castigados sin recreo” (425), “como si estuviera alimentando a un niño pequeño” (363), “como una familia de niños bien educados” (441), reveals how cooking facilitates the enactment of kinship relationships, and the conveyance of intimacy and maternal care in an inherently alienating setting. The men’s expressions of hunger are outward manifestations of their sexual, emotional, and psychological deprivation, and their effusive appreciation of Inés’ culinary excellence functions to expose some of the hidden fears and anxieties of the men’s familial history. Nostalgia is the denotation of the Latin words, the pain (algia) of longing to return home (nostos) (Boym 5). The term is associated with absence and loss, in particular, the loss of childhood. Kant claimed that “what the nostalgic desires is not the place of his youth, but youth itself, his childhood. His desire is not directed at a thing that could be recovered but toward a time that is irretrievable” (Probyn 115). Nostalgia is often seen as a reactionary and regressive impulse, a form of escapism in which the past is idealised in contrast to an inadequate present, in effect, a hearkening back to a repository of lost values that validates a rose-hued vision of the past, rather than a catalyst for change (Spitzer 92). The culinary transformation of masculinity contradicts the regressiveness of nostalgia by linking memories of home to the emergence of a kinder masculinity. As an everyday gendered practice, cooking in the guerrilla encampment provokes the immediate visceral experience of the senses associated with home; the smells, tastes, and textures of foods; and specific dishes that engage humans in homemaking and remaking home in a different setting, which also render porous the divide between past and present. The alimentary materialisation of the guerrillas’ childhood satiates their nostalgia for home by allowing them to experience the emotional closeness created by family meals, and thus the guerrilla encampment becomes a rich and critical site for the performance of softer, more caring masculinities. El Cabrero, one of the guerrillas, relates that Inés’ food reminds him of his grandmother’s laborious cooking and the loving relationship they had during his childhood (Grandes 424). Through the power of food to evoke sensations and associations of the patria, El Cabrero is able to appreciate the guerrilla camp as a credible version of home and also to experience a new temporality that excises the traumatic events of the Civil War and postwar repression, reconnecting him to his prelapsarian childhood with his grandmother. Similarly, the savoring of Inés’ meat conjures up memories of Galán’s childhood (370). Furthermore, this female nurturance effects a transformation in Galán, who coaxes Inés to eat more during her illness, citing her nurturance as the reason for his attentiveness (432). Relatedly, his apology for his doubting of her loyalty following the spy episode manifests a nurturant masculinity created by the camp’s newfound culinary communality. Arguably, the

46

The Feminised Quest Romance

guerrillas’ gentler personalities, and the pronounced erotic overtones of the kitchen in Bosent transform it into a non-gendered space, a source of renewal for both men and women in which both the proscribed gendered traits of masculine affect and female initiative are sanctioned. The infantilisation of the men even suggests that these two anomalous gender performances are incommensurate, with Inés emerging as the superior mother figure to the guerrillas. In this guerrilla encampment, all culinary acts, from the obtainment of ingredients to the relationships existing within the kitchen space, are invested with political overtones. Finding the kitchen understocked, Inés threatens the local Falange provisioner, Ramona, who is reluctant to provide the guerrilla camp with food supplies. Inés’ determination to provide sustenance to the guerrillas, at whatever the cost, establishes a dichotomy between los años del hambre (the years of hunger) in Franco’s Spain and the camp’s relative abundance, as her resourcefulness in obtaining ingredients contrasts with the inability of the Franco regime to provide for the populace. This alimentary and quasi-maternal plenitude belies Franco’s image as a beneficent pater familias, who ensured his citizens-cum-children’s welfare, and reinstates a maternal figure as the lynchpin of the exiled community. The hunger and scarcity of los años del hambre (the hunger years) is stressed throughout the text. Inés notes the scarcity of food in both her brother’s house and in the convent, where the nuns use manteca instead of olive oil (Grandes 32). The allusions to scarcity wrest credibility from the culinary discourse propagated during the Franco era, which evolved into a contentious site of competing visions of nationhood, pitting the illusory Francoist myth of economic and alimentary abundance against the stark reality of widespread hunger during the early post-war years. These rivalrous conceptualisations of culinary nationhood alternatively oscillated between an impossible ideal of female culinary perfection or the more grounded reality of poverty-stricken housewives concerned with economising in the failing autarkic economy.2 Inés’ culinary powers are both a cipher and a recognition of the creativity and resilience of women who toiled daily, often in incredibly adverse circumstances, to ensure their family’s survival, which concords with Grandes’ much-vaunted reverence for the ingenuity of postwar women. In an interview, Grandes described Inés as the embodiment of “todos los significados de la alegría, y al mismo tiempo, la tenacidad, la perseverancia, la inquebrantable fortaleza de una asombrosa casta de mujeres que pudieron con absolutamente todo, absolutamente siempre” (qtd. in Campos Fígares and Rodríguez). Certainly, the kitchen space in Bosent rewrites predetermined ideological and classists scripts, replacing them with humane friendships. It exposes the exploitation of child labor in the post-war period, a theme that Grandes will later revisit in more detail in the next novel of the series, Las tres bodas de Manolita. In the Bosent kitchen, Inés becomes acquainted with the kitchen’s child workers, Mercedes and Matías, two children of twelve and fourteen years, respectively, who are used as free child labor.

The Feminised Quest Romance

47

The economic and social stratification of the post-war period prevents these children from assuming any identity other than that of obsequious domestic servants. Mercedes’s earnest assurances as to her meager appetite reveal the disallowance of a Republican childhood due to state policies that converted the children into an exploitable labor force. Appetite, which has previously been used to denote sexual longing and satiation, becomes a politically charged metaphor for the intellectual and developmental regression of these children, the socially imposed ascetism that condemned them to a third-class citizenship in Franco’s Spain, which is somewhat undermined in the novel. Maite Zubiaurre contends that the literary representation of the relationships between mistress of the kitchen and their maids in Hispanic culture is based on a power and class differentiation that institutes a hierarchical and unequal relationship (“Culinary Eros” 57). However, Inés instructs the servants to call her by her first name, thus transforming the kitchen into a democratic and egalitarian space that supposedly erases class distinctions, which are subsequently reinstated in the cooperative in Toulouse. To a certain extent, the novel idealises the guerrilla encampment’s kitchen space as a place propitious to female interclass camaraderie, romance, and the provision of maternal comfort and reassurance to lonely guerrillas. This saccharine version emphasises process, product and the community generated by cooking, a multidimensional representation that glosses over the exhaustingly repetitive nature of domestic and kitchen chores and the frequent lack of fulfillment and acknowledgment of female culinary labor. Inés’ lack of self-reflexivity on the prevalence of sexism within the camp and her failure to achieve more expansive self-development detracts from her putatively privileged status as a beloved cook. It is important to note that Galán’s gushing appreciation of Inés’ cooking and femininity is not tantamount to an equalisation of gender, as he remains chauvinist in certain aspects. During their reconciliation ensuing Inés’ alleged betrayal of the guerrillas, Galán even jokingly asks: “¿quien me iba a cocinar los huevos?” (422). This ribaldry endorses a male hegemony based on female care and a disregard of the multifacetedness of Republican female selfhood, which reveals a stagnation or even a perpetuation of the gendered status quo. It indicates that the gender binary promulgated by the Franco regime has not been overhauled by left-wing groups: after all, Jesús Monzón offers Galán a prostitute during their initial encounter. It could be argued that Galán’s reverence for Inés as the embodiment of the lost patria, “todas las naciones en una mujer” (340), ostensibly counters this debasement of the female, elevating her to the female national ideal. However, this veneration is wholly domestic, contingent on the performance of a female nurturance that may stymie female self-development. And indeed, Inés’ regret at relinquishing the business to Virginia, her daughter, at the end of the novel, “nuestra retirada me dolía como una herida infectada” (710), indicates an immersion in the domestic world to the detriment of the life-long cultivation of other personal facets.

48 The Feminised Quest Romance Furthermore, cooking in the guerrilla camp wrests gravity and kudos from female acts of bravery by interpreting them within a domesticating and trivialising discourse of culinary allusions. As she becomes more established in the guerrilla encampment, Inés begins to rely on a food supplier named Arturo, who is later exposed as a spy. Inés’ description of her capture of Arturo is suffused with culinary images, which frivolise and devalue a heroic act of female bravery: Se me ocurrió a tiempo que atar la mano de Arturo a su manga vacía no era tan distinto que preparar un pollo para meterlo en el horno, y eso fue lo que hice, dejando un cabo de cuerda colgada como si necesitara deshacer el nudo sin estropear las patas. (399) Her delivery of Arturo to the awaiting guerrillas is framed within this culinary discourse, which only perpetuates the lack of recognition of female fortitude in a highly politicised context, “Joder, parece el pavo de Navidad a punto de entrar en el horno” (403). Critic Cristina Carrasco opines that these feats are empowering as they indicate the female appropriation of typically male power and that culinary idioms politicise a previously marginalised female discourse (65). This contention concords with Homi Bhabha’s theory of “interstitial intimacy,” which “questions binary divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed” (13). Under this line of thought, politics and cooking complement each other to enable female self-realisation. While Carrasco’s point is enlightening, I contend that the domestication of female political actions obviates serious and higher-level female political participation, thus reaffirming the circumscription of the female to the kitchen. Despite the aforementioned permeation of the kitchen by political ideologies, this place also comes to signify a feminine withdrawal from bellic conflict: when the fascist airplanes fly over the camp site, Inés locks herself in her kitchen and begins to cook, rationalising that cooking prevents her from thinking. Her escape to the kitchen conveys the idea that the feminine experience of war must revolve around the domestic, a non-pressurising and emotive arena, which is, admittedly, consistent with the Episodios de una guerra interminable’s emphasis on the history of the emotions and the micro-social, rather than the macro-social, but is also in consonance with Inés’ formative educational and political exclusion in Madrid. Therefore, apparent progress in the feminised quest romance is undermined by a regressive and seemingly voluntary constriction to the kitchen.

Exile, Cooking and Entrepreneurship If exilic collective identity is typically embedded in patriarchal formations and fraternal bonding that exclude women from public life, then Grandes, in hypostasising the domestic and the culinary in exile in Toulouse, has reversed female exilic exclusion in two principal ways. First, she has effectively replicated it – by situating her narratives in a marginal milieu, the

The Feminised Quest Romance

49

kitchen, and then she has converted this place into an enriching source of entrepreneurial success and female self-actualisation. Inés’ experience of exile in Toulouse brings into sharp relief the empowering, but also disempowering functions of the culinary motif, which stimulates female initiative and entrepreneurship, but also matrimonial strife and emasculation. In order to understand the fusion of exile and domesticity, it is essential to first analyse exile. Exile connotes estrangement and alienation from home and is invariably associated with involuntary immigration, spatial and temporal displacement, and ideological conflict. However, Edward Said reconstrued exile as a potentially liberating experience, which should not be experienced as “a deprivation and as something to be bewailed, but as a sort of freedom” (380). It also confers the exile with the power to challenge the status quo and to initiate dynamic measures inconceivable in the homeland. Recent studies on female and masculine exile illuminate the difference in the gendered experiences of exile. In her study of the representation of the female exile, Kate Averis asserts that exile has inevitably been considered within a masculine frame of reference and, thus, the female exile is a relatively unexplored phenomenon. She argues for the need to “rethink and recalibrate the existing lexicon and to provide a more effective framework for the discussion of women’s experiences of exile” (3). Averis debunks the tendency to view female exiles in the defeatist terms of unassimilation, social marginalisation and a stalled developmental process. In lieu of this negative vision, she proposes that the spatial mobility and transition implicit in the exilic process facilitate “an ongoing process of becoming” (3). Believing that exiles have moved beyond interpellation by the nation state, Averis sees female exiles as potentially unshackled by the binds of the homeland, able to undertake feats that facilitate their self-development. Therefore, female exiles must not be defined in terms of lack, but rather in terms of selfhood, growth and even the disputation of the normative gender ideologies that regulated female exiles’ lives in their patria (homeland), all of which makes it fertile ground for the female romance quester. Averis later nuances her vision of the female exile by highlighting the importance of education and economic wherewithal in achieving this type of positive female exile. Inés’ political and domestic journey confirms this idea of the female exile as a process of self-development, validating the upper bourgeois’ female’s potential for cross-cultural mobility. Clearly, exile can permit females to live a life of eudaimonia that was denied to them in their home countries. The protagonist does not lament the loss of a restrictive homeplace, which was problematised by her ideological affiliation, but rather adjusts to and celebrates the possibilities for female selfdevelopment inherent in exile in Toulouse. Far from the representation of exile as “the recovery of an historically lost or dispossessed cultural heritage” (Moeller 14), the female exile is reconceived in this novel, albeit not unproblematically, as an important phase of female evolution. However, Inés still remains constrained by an exilic culture that prioritises the traditional performance of femininity, and even the purposeful depoliticisation

50

The Feminised Quest Romance

of women in left-wing organisations in exile (Yusta Rodrigo 10). Female exiles’ associations in France stressed that female politicisation must be compatible with their femininity, and even touted their domestic endeavors as a valid political contribution. The magazine UME, Union de Mujeres Españolas hypostasised the political contribution of motherhood to the patria in their bulletins. To cite just one example, in an August 1946 bulletin, the rhetorical question was asked: “¿Es hacer política trabajar para que el porvenir de nuestros hijos sea próspero y feliz?” (Yusta Rodrigo 8). In contrast, the competitive and hierarchical nature of traditional masculinity, premised on superior economic status and control of women, combined with the loneliness of exile, can isolate and alienate the exiled male from his homeland and the country of exile. The precariousness of the exiled male’s employment conditions, and the lack of respect afforded to them in the public sphere, culminates in depression and anxiety, as well as strained matrimonial relations (González Allende 12). For men, exile is akin to an upheaval that calls into question a masculinity that falls outside the confines of a gendered national identity. In the words of Iker González Allende: “El hombre desplazado no simboliza estos valores y es posible que crea que no ha sido capaz de proteger a los suyos o de vencer a la facción opuesta, sintiéndose de esta manera humillado” (11). Average men find themselves outcasts in the country of exile, bereft of the emblems of traditional male identity: jobs, homes and authority within their families. Female exilic cooking propitiates communality and female proactiveness in exile, but also serves as a cipher for national gastronomical insecurities and matrimonial conflict. Significantly, Toulouse is saturated with sweetness, with Galán and his men eating Russian tarts in the bakery there (72), and Inés relishing two helpings of chocolate cake (359). Mercedes’ appreciation of chocolate brings forth memories of the paltry diet suffered by her mother in Zafra (500), and the abundance of deserts, comprising fruit, natillas and tocinos de ciclo, in Inés’ restaurant, la Taberna Española, signals exilic plentifulness. These connotations of sweetness parallel their exile in Toulouse to a celebration, akin to a wedding or birthday when sweets are served (359), and where the exiles’ figurative craving for a homeland is satiated. Tellingly, sweets are only reassociated with Spain in the mid-1960s, by Inés’ sister-in-law and Spanish resident Adela’s post-prandial gifting of sweets to La Pasionaria in Toulouse (647), a period in which repression was attenuated in the homeland. Sweetness is charged with immense significance on multiple counts. In Sweetness and Power: The Placement of Sugar in Modern History (1959), Sidney Mintz made important observations about the centrality of sugar to capitalistic development. He examines how sugar and sweet foods entered Western society initially as a luxurious spice, used to show subtlety, status and wealth, suggesting that “sugar was one of the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with its use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently” (185–186). He contended that foods like chocolate induce a craving that can be associated with the sweetness of “mother’s milk” (362–364). Mintz also cites sweetness

The Feminised Quest Romance

51

as being a “drug-food,” again conjuring up the idea of desire, temptation and craving (362–364). If we follow Mintz’s line of thought, sweet foods are a mode of distinction, and accordingly, the proliferation of references to chocolate reconstrue exile as a motherland replete with opportunities for female plenitude, diametrically opposed to the patriarchal restrictions of the patria. In a chauvinistic society, such as Franco’s Spain, women were metaphorically consumed by men for sex, marriage or domestic servitude, valued only in sensual or capitalistic terms of appearance, and the ability to satisfy male needs. Inverting this consumption hierarchy, these female exiles arrive in a space liberated from a bellicose nationalism, with its damaging assumptions of homogeneity and gender normativity, and the new, defamiliarised exilic place makes possible a transgressive gendered positionality, and a resistant culinary preservation of their authentic political and gendered identities. In fact, the protagonist’s founding of a restaurant subverts her role as commodity to morph into that of producer. Thus, the city space of Toulouse imbues them with the agency to construct new identities premised on the disruption of patriarchal authority and the enactment of more autonomous gender roles (8). Importantly, exilic alimentary sweetness, and Inés’ subsequent success as a restaurateur in France, intersects with a longstanding Hispanic–Franco culinary competitiveness that had gained particular traction in the early post-war period, when, despite the widespread hunger, the Francoist New State sought to establish itself as a culinary powerhouse in order to eradicate the French influence on Spanish life, held to them to be antithetical to the values of post-war National Catholicism. The enviable exilic foodscape of Toulouse invokes the dreaded fn-de-siécle French dominance of a Spanish gastronomy that desperately and futilely sought distinction (Anderson 99). As Lara Anderson comments: “Spanish gastronomy was connected to nationalism and politics, as Spanish intellectuals and food writers attempted to codify or define the borders of Spain’s food nation” (117). Therefore, prominent cookery writers, such as Bosch Bierge, produced cookery books that attacked French cuisine, while staunchly defending Spanish gastronomy (117). Upon the onset of democracy in 1975, this exilic alimentary triumph is projected into the national gastronomical culture: when Inés opens her restaurant in Spain, a sign emblazons it as “el mejor restaurante español de Francia conquista Madrid” (Grandes 667). This cycle of culinary influence, first the exilic Spanish influence on French life, and then its subsequent projection into the gastronomic culture of the nascent and more pluralistic Spanish democracy, attenuates historical Spanish insecurities regarding the pre-eminence of French cuisine. It is noteworthy that Inés’ upward trajectory does not, in any way, imitate or seek to adapt to the country of exile. In lieu of an ersatz gallicisation, she forges a viable business by drawing on a diverse conceptualisation of her own culinary tradition. Rather than accepting a static liminality, Inés seeks to reterritorialise herself by embracing the hyphenated identity of exile, of between spaces, that allows her to be both cook and owner of a cooperative

52

The Feminised Quest Romance

restaurant, Casa Inés. This place consolidates exilic communal female bonds, and positions the female cooks as the guardians of Spanish cuisine and a distinctly Republican culture, which hosts politicised banquets, like the annual commemoration of the instauration of the Second Republic on April 14, and La Pasionaria’s fiftieth birthday party (645). These commemorative banquets celebrate the exiles’ sense of community and reaffirm their ideological beliefs, reinstating a notion of a far more inclusive patria than the one they left behind. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, banquet images maintain an essential relation to “struggle, triumph, and regeneration” (282). Perhaps most of all, as Paul Connerton cogently argues, rituals such as banquets help societies remember by invoking a continuity with the past, with the “historical narrative of a community” (35). In the context of exile, where widespread atomisation creates a need to emphasise solidarity and sameness, the regional distinctiveness so anathema to the Franco regime is mediated and moderated both in response to the French dismissal of Spanish regional cuisine and the exiles’ deep-seated need for emotional support, morphing into a unifying fulcrum of identity. The consumption of regional dishes in Casa Inés plays a key function in fostering a sense of belonging to a pluralistic exilic community in Toulouse. The culinary variation in the Spanish exiles’ diet counters the host community’s fallacious perception of exile as a unitary experience with given characteristics, not as a composite and variegated phenomenon. The serving of regional dishes, like the asturian fabada and cocido gallego, satiates the exiles’ nostalgia for regional gastronomy, reinstating a heterogeneous construction of nationhood at antipodes to the centralist homogeneous vision of nationhood propagated by the Francoist regime. These exilic commensal rituals strengthen feelings of security, affection and warmth typically attributed to family meals, enhancing the idea of a more inclusive patria, variegated by gastronomical regional distinctiveness. Nevertheless, departing from Becerra Mayor’s critique of Grandes’ grafting of neoliberal values onto harsher economic conjunctures, which I examined in this book’s “Introduction,” it could be argued that this representation of a fluid culinary communality reconfigures exile as a middleclass phenomenon in which the poverty and struggles of the exiles are considerably softened. In his study of ethnicity in America, Richard Alba perceptively notes that ethnic identity is only considered positive when it leads to upward social mobility (63). Therefore, the promotion of ethnic food and music involves the purging of unappealing idiosyncrasies, and consequently, the whole ethnicity is divorced from the diseased, huddled masses who arrive in the host country. This dichotomisation effectively means that individuals can retrospectively preserve a part of their heritage while jettisoning the more unpalatable aspects of it (97). This notion of a bifurcated heritage certainly obtains to exile. The fissures in exile identity, indeed the inability to formulate a coherent exilic identity in France, have been well documented. According to Scott Soo:

The Feminised Quest Romance

53

Existing divisions were accentuated by the phenomenal pressure generated by the demands of the Civil War and the de facto international isolation of the Spanish Republic. The victory of Franco’s nationalist forces, together with the onset of exile, further compromised the development of a discourse of national identity amongst the Spanish republicans. Bitter recriminations about the management of the conflict and the defeat of the republican forces stymied any significant long-lasting gesture of unity amongst the various groups in exile. Furthermore, the refugees’ conflation of nationalism with the dictatorship in Spain compromised the notion of an all-encompassing identity in exile. (6) Soo emphasises that commonality between the exiles was all too transient a phenomenon, celebrated in commemorative events, similar to the banquet in the novel, and by the veneration of certain iconic figures, such as Cervantes (8). Thus, the revalorisation of cooking in exilic culture risks reducing female exilic assimilation and integration to a question of cultural identity, when, in actuality, they were grappling with a panoply of problems ranging from impoverishment to ostracism in France. Furthermore, it gives a false impression of an unproblematic exilic unity that only needed to be conserved by alimentary rituals, thus erasing the historical reality of a splintered exilic group identity in France. The reversal of matrimonial gender roles in the novel does hint at a ruptured exilic male identity. Inés’ economic efficacy means that her husband, Galán, becomes a dependent: “Inés era la que ganaba dinero de verdad, la que lo mantenía todo” (544), which arouses feelings of male inadequacy. Smarting at his wife’s initiative and success, he describes himself as “quemado a los treinta y cinco, tenía tres hijos que mantener, una mujer que nos mantenía a los cuatro, ningún oficio, y menos beneficio” (569). His embarrassment at a friend’s sighting of him minding their children in the home during the working day reflects the conundrum of the exiled male: the difficulty in finding secure employment and the consequent relegation to effeminate, unremunerated work in the private sphere, which inspires feelings of entrapment and claustrophobia that are compounded by the exilic PCE´s disinterest in its members. : “la casa se me caía encima” (570). His wife’s economic ascendancy is jarringly brought into relief when she suggests that he accept a mid-management position, subordinate to Amparo, whose husband was Gálan’s subordinate in the Maquis (570). Neither does the offer of a job as a car salesman appeal to the reserved and proud Galán (571), but ensuing months of despair, he resolves to accept any employment offer, even as “un pescadero, representante, vendedor o lo que fuera, sin discutir el sueldo” (574). A plethora of eschatological, alimentary and libatory allusions underscore the devaluation of masculine labor and self-worth in the homeland. Galán’s return to Spain to participate in Clandestine Communist activities during the period 1945–1949 does not restore his self-confidence in

54

The Feminised Quest Romance

his masculinity, as he is coerced into sex by his unprepossessing landlady, Juana. Tellingly, he comments: “mi semen era lo único que podía hurtarle a mi miedo, el último reducto de soberanía donde aún tenía una oportunidad de hacerme fuerte y resistir” (568). This affirmation ostensibly conveys the renewal and restoration of his masculinity, but this reinscription is undercut by the eschatological reference to semen, which constitutes, in Kristevian terms, an abject substance that signifies the filth associated with marginal subjects. Thus, his forced sexual performance confirms Galán’s degraded status and exclusion from the economically productive public sphere. His liminal gendered positionality and economic marginalisation in both Spain and France indicts the implicitly national economic structures that alienate the exiled male, condemning him to stagnation in both the country of origin and the country of exile. The alimentary discourse pervading the novel is integral to both Galán’s emasculation and the later reinforcement of his masculinity. Firstly, it is cleverly deployed to undermine Galán’s scant feats of bravery as a clandestine operative in Spain: his escape from trailing policemen is effectuated in a French bakery in Madrid, where his body is left bruised and covered with the remains of “nata, crema, mermelada y sangre” (556). The qualities of viscosity, fluidity and stickiness that constitute “la nata” metaphorically accentuate his alienation from both the country of exile and the homeland, France and Spain, respectively. According to Kristeva, cream symbolises the separation of the mother and subject. In her words: Cuando la nata, esa piel de superficie lechosa, inofensiva se presenta ante los ojos, roza los labios, entonces un espasmo de la glotis y aun de más abajo del estómago, del vientre, de todas las vísceras, crispa el cuerpo. Con el vértigo que nubla la mirada, la náusea me retuerce y me separa de la madre, del padre que me la presentan. (9) By dismantling a milk derivative as a privileged metaphor for maternity and substituting it with a defective paternity, Grandes inveighs against nationalism, showing male well-being to be not exclusively grounded, or guaranteed, within either national or exilic spaces. The male body is cast adrift, feminised and divested of control over male sexuality, rendered ineffectual by a demeaning discourse of sexual transactionality and by the presentation of a luscious, injured male body, which is further diminished by Galán’s monotonous diet in Madrid (558). The memory of the futility of the armed struggle is symbolised by the souring of his admittedly excellent Rioja in Jesús Monzón’s house in Madrid (604) and his ingestion of quince jelly, an unappealing cheap dessert, indicates his failure to procure even feminine foodstuffs to assuage his hunger in Madrid (558). The contrast between his paltry diet and inability to enjoy foodstuffs with the copious references to his ingestion of meat, the male food par excellence, in the guerrilla camp (430; 370, 372) confirms his distinctly gendered and alimentary emasculation. Food and drink become the mediums through which the corporeal and

The Feminised Quest Romance

55

sensory boundaries of his masculinity are ruptured and his exilic alienation is compounded. Even olive oil itself metamorphoses into a disputant and subsequent affirmation of his masculinity. His steadfast refusal to collaborate in Inés’ plan to import olive oil on the grounds that he has more important affairs to tend to is a tenuous attempt to preserve his destabilised masculinity. Gálan’s subsequent recovery of his economic status through his importation of olive oil is an ironic restoration, but also feminisation of his masculinity, as he is reduced to selling the feminine substance that he had previously scorned (629). The family’s establishment of Casa Inés in democratic Madrid revalorises cooking as an attractive option for the second generation of female exiles who dispose of greater freedom to dictate their personal and professional lives: in this case, Inés’ daughter, Virginia, marries a divorced man to the chagrin of her parents. Her assumption of the family business converts the kitchen space into a multifaceted source of pleasure and entrepreneurial and personal self-actualisation that is markedly individual, in contrast to her mother’s purportedly collective restaurant cooperative. The kitchen as the site of intergenerational conflict about sexuality and cooking metaphorises the Transitional dialogue concerning Spain’s route to democracy, which alternated between advocacy of personal freedom and the intransigent right-wing predilection for authoritarianism. The location of Virginia’s restaurant in Chueca, which became Madrid’s gay area during the transition to democracy, reinforces the primordiality of sexual and personal freedom to authentic democracy.

La Pasionaria’s Quest Romance The female struggle to achieve self-determination, another feminised quest romance, in the highest political echelons is elucidated through the trajectory of the female PCE leader Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria. If domesticity, thus far, circulates in the narrative to constrict the flourishing of a female political consciousness, the food-based description of La Pasionaria as “un hada madrina alocada, promiscua y marxista dispuesta a convertir en una carroza la calabaza que encontrar más a mano” (466) encodes the crux of La Pasionaria’s quagmire: the social inadmissibility of a self-determined sexuality, absentee motherhood and her transformative political powers. In Women and Power, Mary Beard astutely comments that “for a start it does not much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it” (16). Female power is held to be an oxymoronic concept, and powerful females can be viewed as arrogant interlopers who occupy professional and inherently male territory on sufferance (17). She goes on to venture that the concept of power itself needs to be regendered, in effect, reassociated with femininity. Grandes presents La Pasionaria as a multidimensional figure – mother, lover and a key political actor – who had to balance normative gender

56

The Feminised Quest Romance

expectations with the patriarchal ire generated by her exceptional aptitude for political leadership. The daughter and wife of Basque miners, Dolores Ibárruri rose quickly through the ranks of the Spanish Communist Party, and in 1942, she was named the secretary general of the PCE in exile. Her meteoric political career transformed her into a cipher upon which detractors and admirers could encode deeply entrenched meanings of femininity, female leadership, sexuality and motherhood. Ibárruri was a paradoxical figure who embodied two irreconcilable female archetypes: for her admirers, she was the asexual proletarian mother who inspired a quasi-religious fervor, while her detractors vilified her as a voraciously sexual and powerhungry woman. The hardship of her life in a Basque mining community, and the deaths of several of her children in infancy, rendered her a coherent and convincing mater dolorosa, the maternal symbol par excellence in a JudeoChristian culture (Herrmann 42). In exilic mythography, Ibárruri fulfilled the matriarchal yearnings of historically dispossessed women, marginalised in tradition and history, and her perennial donning of funereal garb, along with the death of her son Rubén in Stalingrad, consolidated the image of her as the universal self-sacrificing mother. Nevertheless, “as a woman revolutionary, she was seen as both a sexual and political threat” (Byron 140). Her dispatching of her four children to the USSR during the Spanish Civil War symbolised this conflict between female political ambition and motherhood (Byron 145), and for many of the naysayers, confirmed her unacceptability within the canons of normative Spanish womanhood. La Pasionaria’s political success guaranteed her privileged living conditions in exile in the USSR, while problematising both her maternal and sexual personas (Byron 145). The sobriquet of “mother of the Republic” effectively neutralised her political power and effaced her sexuality, which was disallowed by this supranational maternal function that voided her of the particularities that constitute authentic female selfhood. Rather than focusing on her maternal qualities or lack thereof, Grandes reconceives La Pasionaria as a mother who experienced maternal emotions as one of the rare female actors in some of the most defining historical events of the twentieth century. The description of her son Rubén’s death and funeral in Stalingrad invokes the confusion and powerlessness of Ibárruri, who cannot understand the Russian eulogies (457), while also underlining her elite status amongst the Russian dignitaries. The unfurling of the unglamorous lived reality of motherhood against the backdrop of one of the central battles of World War II exposes the anguish of Republican Spain’s privileged icon by recentering the emotional experience of motherhood, frequently relegated to the sidelines in macro-history. Significantly, La Pasionaria’s reaction to the annulment of her feminine multidimensionality is contained in her “receta, de masticar la alegría cuando no hay nada más que llevar a la boca” (458). The alimentary obtainment of happiness resists reductive machista binary logic by revalorising both the emotions and the private sphere as buffers to the dehumanising rhetoric of the public sphere. Only the personal and meaningful consumption of

The Feminised Quest Romance

57

emotions will counter the alienating depersonalisation of the PCE and her concomitant mythic status. For the middle-aged Ibárruri, happiness was temporarily experienced in her relationship with the much younger Francisco Antón, an affair that elicited much negative speculation, which only served to highlight the intensely machista and somewhat puritanical biases of the PCE, an organisation that tended to judge the extent of members’ political commitment on their exacting moral standards (Kirschenbaum 584). In his autobiography, PCE leader Santiago Carrillo comments that Ibárruri’s status as a separated woman and her affair with Antón earned her unwarranted reprimands for which none of the male members, who had enjoyed several extramarital relationships, were censored (267). In short, Ibárruri was the victim of a double standard. Antón terminated his relationship with Ibárruri, having announced that he had fallen in love with a much younger woman named Carmen Rodríguez.3 La Pasionaria’s spatial withdrawal and melancholy in the aftermath of the ending of the affair further complicates her mythical status. Her selfimposed ascetism, “pobre Dolores, de colores, ni unos zapatos del tacón, ni teñirse las pocas canas que tenía” (26), signals a hindered quest romance in which the tribulations in a woman’s private life induce a self-willed stagnation that is only facilitated by the woman’s immense professional success. Ibárruri’s is a partially regressive quest romance in which her professional status protects her from the fallout following the affair. Interestingly, her reclusiveness is suffused with religious imagery that analogises it to a religious penance (696): “Pasaba el resto de su vida a oscuras, encerrada en una capilla pequeña, recibiendo unas pocas visitas y no todos los días” (696). This singular woman seems to have internalised a patriarchal society’s panoptic and regulatory gaze and thus her voluntary hermeticism conforms to the public perception of a need for punishment following her affair with Francisco Antón. The reader comes to realise that the divinisation of Ibárruri is contingent upon the suppression of her femininity, her passionate nature and her reclusion, which brings into sharp relief the problematics of female political leadership and the obstacles that thwart the feminised quest romance.

Conclusion The trope of the feminised quest romance highlights the need for two radically different characters, Inés and La Pasionaria, to undertake a quest for self-definition that implies a radical requestioning of established female norms in domestic and politicised settings that promulgated traditional expectations of normative female behavior. Female culinary and political excellence enable the protagonists to self-actualise, but the combination of amorous and professional success proves elusive. A life of eudamonia is stymied by traditional gender norms that limit the extent of these two singular female characters’ self-actualisation. For Inés, a traditional feminine activity, cooking, evolves into a subtle means of political and gendered

58

The Feminised Quest Romance

resistance and subversion in constricted domestic spaces that typically disallow feminine creativity and agency. Cooking is envisaged as an activity through which the protagonist can regain strength, enact less stratified class relations, and develop her entrepreneurial self, and thus ironically figures as a conduit of empowerment that purportedly subverts the primary fundament of the Franco regime’s gender ideology, domesticity. However, the novel simultaneously problematises the kitchen space, which is the site of amorous betrayals and repeated sexual attacks. Permeated by class and gender biases, the multiple kitchens in which Inés moves limit female political participation and stir marital discord. Thus, while cooking does enable the female exile to partially defy monolithic gender expectations, the extant force of normative gender norms inadvertently constricts her to the very parameters that shackled her individuality in the patria. The protagonist’s disconnection from meaningful political engagement reaffirms the connection between women and domestic ken, and therefore, the novel does not completely dismantle gender binaries. The quest romance of La Pasionaria demonstrates the problematic compatibilisation of her emotional and family life with her political pre-eminence, thus disrupting reductive binaries that seek to define women in terms of onedimensional maternal femininity or its obverse, non-feminine or inadequate female political leadership. Her quest romance reverses the normal terms of the proposition, whereby a woman transitions from the private to the public sphere; rather, her professional success militates against happiness in the private sphere, eventually leading to spatial and emotional regression. This emotional rehistoricisation is generated by a desire to reconstitute a female political leader as a historical, sentient and multidimensional subject who cannot be reduced to a mere object of history.

Notes 1 As La Pasionaria only appears as a secondary character in this narrative, substantially less attention will be given to her feminised quest romance. 2 The incompatibility of these two visions is illustrated by Ana María Herrera’s Manual de cocina, the Sección Femenina cookbook which prioritised the obtainment of the best ingredients and variation in family menus, a sophistication unattainable for the vast majority of Spanish women at the time who struggled to eke out a subsistence-style diet for their families (L. Anderson 79). Simultaneously, it contained recipes that disingenuously dictated low-protein diets for families, thereby affirming the regime’s propagandistic rhetoric on the advantages of autarky. 3 Internal disputes within the PCE caused Antón to fall out of favor with leading Communists, and instigated by Ibárruri, they demanded a confession from Antón for what was termed “fraccionalismo,” a deliberate disunification of the party. Involved parties have offered varying interpretations to explain Ibárruri’s behavior toward her former lover, with many positing that it was a case of vengeance against a man who had humiliated her (Morán 152). However, in his memoirs, Santiago Carrillo rebuts this suggestion, explaining that if judged guilty, Antón’s indictment would have ended La Pasionaria’s career, as consorting with traitors was judged to be equally as condemnable as actual treason.

4

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress and the Gendered Reading Trope in El lector de Julio Verne

El lector de Julio Verne recounts the childhood of a nine-year-old boy named Nino during el trienio del terror, the period 1947–1949, in the village of Fuensanta de Martos in Jaén. The novel was inspired by a visit Almudena Grandes, her husband, Luis García Montero, and his friend, the university psychology professor Cristino Pèrez Meléndez made to Morocco in 2004 (Grandes, El lector 405). Grandes was intrigued by Pérez’s reminiscences of growing up in a police quarters as the son of a guardia civil in the postwar period. The novel, which was voted the 2012 Book of the Year by El País readers, explores the ambiguities and fragmented identities of the lowranking guardia civil through a unique familial perspective provided by the child protagonist. It rejects the Manichaeism so prevalent in el boom de la memoria, which pitted virtuous Republicans against malign Falangists, and thus, it signals the maturation of Grandes’s unavowedly Republican stance to a more pluralistic and empathetic treatment of Francoist supporters, who were obligated by circumstances and family background to dissimulate obedience to the Franco regime. It constitutes a major critical intervention that forces the Spanish public to assume the dialectic between the memory of suffering endured and inflicted and the intertwinement between the two, which frequently poses a troubling moral equivalency. It forms part of a broader shift in contemporary Spanish culture away from the preoccupation with trauma and victimhood and towards a more nuanced engagement with the figure of the perpetrator, a subject I explored in the “Introduction.” For Grandes, this novel’s reclamation of the voice of low-ranking guardia civil, who were frequently victims of the system, represents a class-oriented perpetrator memory that acknowledges the variegation in types of victimhood in Spain (qtd. in Pacíos). The low-ranking guardia civil depicted in the novel are represented as victims of superior officers who are not their equals in moral caliber or ability for endurance, and are also victims of a repressive system that both impoverishes and socially alienates them. Therefore, her portrayal of perpetrator memory is an indictment of the hierarchical nature of Francoist institutions and a recognition of victimhood within the perpetrator classification, which implicitly critiques the sole emphasis on Republican victimhood.

60

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

The deployment of the child figure, Nino, normalises his perpetrator father, the guardia civil, Antonino, who is a repentant torturer of prisoners in the police barracks, by contextualising his actions within a vindicatory discourse of forced entrance into the guardia civil and the vivid descriptions of the psychosomatic symptoms induced by his participation in torture sessions. This humanisation of the perpetrator in this novel arguably veers into the characterisation of Antonino and his fellow guardia civil as victims, which achieves an ethically fraught equalisation between the victims of Francoist repression and their Nationalist torturers that could obviate the need for perpetrator atonement. In this chapter, I analyse both the issues of perpetrator suffering and the multifaceted aspects of the child’s role in the perpetrator moral universe, which range from an affected individual to an active agent, thus disputing the view of the child as a victim or bystander in post-conflict situations. Based on a mélange of literary reception theory, and Spanish literary and pedagogical history, I examine the functions of reading and the intradiegetic references to foreign and Spanish authors, both of which are charged with subversive gendered and political intent, and its significance for the understanding of the perpetrator figure. El lector de Julio Verne conveys an intimate, familial perspective into the taboo topic of perpetrator suffering, a topic that has recently emerged in historical research. In his 2012 book, The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston briefly verses on the remorse suffered by the perpetrators, which led to some being sectioned or alternatively leaving the key institutions of the Francoist state, such as the priesthood. To cite just one example, the remorse of the shameless social-climber Father Juan Tusquets at the brutality of the Francoist persecution in Catalonia compelled him to renounce the sinecures he had worked so hard to obtain (Preston, “The Spanish Holocaust” 522). Similarly, the work of Stephanie Wright examines the experience of traumatised Francoist veterans in military hospitals. Although Wright emphasises the social status accorded to the veterans, her detailed research demonstrates that the bureaucratic calibration of their injuries humiliated and emasculated them. For example, the amputation of the right arm was valued at 71–80 percent of a disability quotient, while this was reduced to 61–70 percent for the left arm. The much-prized pension was only allocated to those with a 91 percent disability, which impoverished most army veterans (78). Thus, perpetration did not automatically entail beneficial consequences and there existed a strict bureaucratic and social hierarchy of perpetrators. This emergence of perpetrator suffering in historical research disputes the putatively high social status of Nationalist males in Francoist Spain who were assured financial stability by their placement in public service posts, while their wartime feats were honored in commemorative acts (Cazorla Sánchez 36). Nationalist males during this period were represented as virile and masculine, “capaces de dominar y domar sus pasiones, emociones y deseos físicos, convirtiendo estos instintos primitivos en fuerza y acción” (Vincent 138). The novel’s recounting of a Nationalist familial memory of suffering that had been silenced and maintained within families and generations

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

61

for decades, without any parallel representation in an official jingoistic Francoist memory narrative, belies this celebratory tale of Nationalist male success and prosperity which omitted the hardships suffered by low-ranking Nationalists. A coerced conversion to National Catholicism was common during the post-war years, and the fear provoked by the repression forced people to externalise a spurious subscription to these values in the public sphere (Ryan, “Sins of the Father” 249). A detailed study of perpetrators in Galicia found that only 14 percent of perpetrators were actual adherents to the Franco regime (Ryan 252). The pervasive social fear–induced performances of masculinity that purposively concealed the ambiguity many Francoist supporters and reluctant adherents felt about the repression and were, hence, inauthentic reflections of their true character. Thus, the apparently compliant Francoist guardia civil’s actions corresponded, in some cases, to a meaningless and artificial actuation, prompted by self-protectory instincts. One of the most striking features of this narrative is its reverse characterisation of the Nationalist male perpetrators as pitiable and sick, a representation that contradicts the narrative of invulnerable Nationalist victors in the Spanish Civil War. Far from extracting benefit from their Nationalist status, the policemen are afflicted with all manner of psychological and physical ailments that challenge any presupposition that perpetration is a self-interested act that only negatively affects the victim. Rachel MacNair’s classification of perpetrator suffering enables us to obtain a more comprehensive insight into this phenomenon. She suggests that perpetrator suffering is, in fact, perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS), a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder. It causes intrusive thoughts and images and chronic emotional numbing, similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is more immediate in its effect (5). Reactions, such as rage, vomiting and other corporeal manifestations are typical symptoms manifested by the guardia civil in this novel. Thus, I can conclude that perpetrator suffering, in this novel, can be more accurately defined as perpetration-induced traumatic stress, a classification that demonstrates how involvement in acts of torture can produce involuntary psychic and somatic consequences. This diagnostic category widens the community of victims to include perpetrators, and demonstrates how perpetrators can be mere pawns, bereft of agency and frequently coerced into acts that are opposed to their own moral value-system. It challenges the rigid divide between victims and perpetrators that has characterized the Spanish memory boom by demonstrating the gradations of victimhood, which as I will later examine, also affects children. The novel’s innovative focus on perpetration-induced traumatic stress is complemented by a multidimensional perspective on the role of the child witness to perpetration.1 In his ground-breaking study, Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg poses these pertinent questions: What kind of responsible agent is the child? What kind of relationship do children have to the deeds and suffering of their parents? What does

62

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress it mean to suggest that larger social dramas of violence and retribution can be allegorised through the deeds of children and the familial inheritance of those deeds? (292)

The transmission of perpetrator memory by a child is controversial, since the child figure has principally been deployed in Spanish memory studies to transmit Republican counter-memory – the memory of the repressed, the vulnerable and the marginalised (Foucault, “Language, Counter-Memory” 5). The child protagonist supplies a defamiliarising gaze which functions as a vehicle for critique in the face of social conditions and historical facts that would appear to fully demolish myths of childhood innocence and incorruptibility in key films of the memory boom such as La lengua de las mariposas and Pan’s Labyrinth and books such as Jaume Cabré’s Yo confeso. These cultural representations of children subvert dominant ideologies of gender, class and politics by using the constituent element of Francoist society, the child, to revise its memory. The child’s innocence has undoubtedly marshaled the reader’s sympathy to Republican counter-memory.2 This being so, the use of the child, a symbol of innocence and virtue, to inspire sympathy for the perpetrator figure is a necessarily morally complex issue.3 In her reading of the novel, Victoria L. Ketz opines that the child protagonist proffers an unadulterated perspective on the dynamics of rural society in the post-war period, and his infantile voice engenders a complicitous bond with the reader who regards the child as exempt from the pressures of conformity binding the adults in the story (24). Thus, under Ketz’s line of reasoning, the instinctual, yet often insightful, perceptions of children, coupled with their restricted and not fully comprehensive understanding of larger factual contexts, provide a useful lens for presenting the inhumanity wrought by dictatorships. Critic David Becerra Mayor considers El lector de Julio Verne to be a deliberate deideologisation of the Civil War, asserting that the sentimentality created by the child protagonist deprives the reader of the opportunity for substantial learning about the post-war period. He opines that the primacy accorded to feelings in the novel does not lend itself to a politically and socially rigorous contextualisation (252). Becerra Mayor’s argument is not without validity: the use of the child’s perspective is highly emotive and could serve to disclaim the child’s father’s criminal responsibility by creating an affective bond between the reader and the perpetrator figure that might pre-empt the formation of a more critical and informed insight into the dialectic of repression and perpetration. Moreover, the overuse of childish nicknames, such as Regalito, Mediamujer and Cabezalargo, ultimately effects a certain comic diminution of the consequences of repression and perpetration for the village community, wresting levity from the violence that convulses the village. This comic use of the child figure is consistent with the Durkheimian construction of the child as a cognitively undeveloped “half-being,” the inferior of adults, rather than an actor in his own social world (“Childhood” 7).

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

63

However, these critiques fail to take into account the presence of the adult narrator and also the child as an afflicted individual and consequential actor in the perpetrator moral universe. Firstly, the influence of the adult narrator, the university professor of psychology Antonio Carajito and his temporal positionality, reduces the affective traction of the child figure by introducing a professional adult psychological perspective on these post-war occurrences. Writing in 1977, in the aftermath of seismic political and generational change, and in a more prosperous Spain, the adult narrator is far more focused on the economic opportunity structure of the post-war years, the repression, and social relations than a child narrator situated in the post-war period, and hemmed in by inflexible economic and social dictums, would credibly be. At variance to the overwrought style of the adult narrator, Hermano Salvador, is another key text of the memory boom, Alberto Méndez’s short story “La cuarta derrota o los girasoles ciegos.” The unemotional, sparse style of the adult narrator in this novel lends further credibility to his rendering of his post-war childhood. The adult narrator’s career as a psychology professor means that his narrative’s attunement to emotional subcurrents and the intricacies of affective relationships in his community is credible. Thus, the adult narration of childhood experience casts an astute presentist perspective on past experiences which counters the accusations of bathos typically levelled at novels featuring a child protagonist. Furthermore, it is reductive to simply view the child figure as a conduit of perpetrator memory, when the child itself is an actor in post-conflict situations, who possesses different levels of agency and powerlessness. The child witness to both perpetration and repression does not serve merely exoneratory or adjudicatory purposes wherein it pronounces on the moral caliber of the adults around him; rather, the childish enmeshment in these issues forms an integral part of the development of child subjectivity. The silence about the role of family members in the perpetration of repression against the Republicans, or indifference and failure to intervene, left unspoken memory remnants that were transferred from one generation to the next. In a reprise of Marianne Hirsch’s concept, Katherine Stafford has termed the Nationalist descendants’ grappling with their parents’ or grandparents’ involvement in the past as “nationalist post-memory,” which can be defined as the perpetrators’ descendants’ negotiation and rationalisation of the secrets of their parents’ past. “Nationalist postmemory” invalidates the current and exclusive association of Spanish postmemory4. Nino epitomises this second generation who had to grapple with the sins of the fathers in a familial climate of silence and fear, and whose historical self-understanding and fragmented personal identity is molded by paternal wrongdoing, a legacy that he is proactive in deciphering. Inescapably drawn into the maelstrom of cruelty around him, the young protagonist realises that he is not only reacting to his environment but has an active investment in understanding a milieu that will determine his character, enabling him to “completar el modelo del hombre que yo habría querido ser” (210). This initiative challenges

64

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

the current view of children as capable and participative decision-makers who have a stake in molding their environment (James and Prout 10). If we subscribe to this theory, we can perceive that the novel transcends an immediate focus on the duality of the victim–perpetrator binary itself to examine those children uninvolved in perpetration, but whose lives are negatively affected by their relationship to the perpetrator. These people, who comprise bystanders and second-generation descendants, have been categorised by Michael Rothberg as “implicated subjects,” people at an emotional and generational remove from acts of violence but whose lives are inescapably molded and shaped by them. In Rothberg’s words: “They may not be direct agents of harm, but they may still contribute to, inhabit, benefit, or are damaged from regimes of domination that they neither set up nor control” (“Implicated Subject” 5). Rothberg’s classification argues that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present. His idea of implication emphasises how social actors become inextricably entangled with histories and situations that sometimes surpass their agency as individual subjects. Thus, the connection between involvement, victimhood and culpability is redrawn to capture the complexity of effects of that experience beyond polarising typologies. The personal relevance of the event, and not the degree of suffering or wrongdoing; the meaning conferred upon the event, rather than the event itself, redefines the relationship of subjects to acts of atrocity. The idea of “the implicated subject” dispenses with reductionist thinking that either unfairly dismisses the bystander or non-involved party in acts of perpetration, or only considers them in relation to the perpetrator and victim.5 Clichés and silences are substituted by an empathy that is gained from realising that no matter who one is, one is connected into families, communities, and nations whose acts give rise to shame, more than pride, a realisation that engenders a humility that is the beginning of tolerance and gives rise to memory work, action, and engagement. The idea of the implicated subject reconceives the child figure in the novel as not just an arbitrary conduit of perpetrator memory but as an essential and involved element who is suffering, as well as countering, the effects of perpetration. The village children’s staunch ideological beliefs and the resultant distortion of their friendships corroborate the idea of the guardia civil’s children as implicated subjects. Paquito, the son of the cabo Izquierdo, is a gossipmonger who unfailingly adheres to the pro-Francoist ideology of his father and revels in watching villagers dance on the bodies of the slain Maquis (126). When there is an incident between the guardia civil and the Maquis, the children are often corralled inside by their mothers, and thus, their childish exploration and play are curtailed by their fathers’ active part in the repression (72). Even their friendships are dictated by ideology: Nino’s invitation to Elenita, the grandchild of Doña Elena, infuriates his father, who forcefully clarifies that it is not acceptable to interact with the “nieta de una roja” (279). On a visit to the rubias’ farmhouse, Nino

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

65

has to withstand Catalina’s diatribe against him as the son of a murderous guardia civil. Thus, the hidden subtexts of the children’s daily activities, their behavioral patterns and social interaction elucidate the micro-social effects of perpetration on this oft-ignored category of people, “implicated subjects,” who occupy the liminal category of being affected by, but not involved in, perpetration. A social variable decided before birth, that is, their filial connection to perpetration, and by extension, idiosyncratically determined degree of culpability, defines their compromised subjectivity and development in close-knit communities. However, the novel also demonstrates that social and intergenerational trauma does not necessarily result in the victimisation of children, who manifest a will to flourish, in effect, to live a life of eudaimonia, by employing spatial, exploratory and even intellectual counter-strategies, all of which I will now examine. The child figure actually transcends the agentic limits inherent in Rothberg’s classification because Nino is an acute observer and manipulator of circumstances who attempts to palliate the effects of perpetration on his family. He uses a repertoire of childish songs to protect his sister, Pepica, when she becomes frightened by the cries of Filo, Catalina’s daughter, who is being savagely beaten by his father’s colleague Sanchís. He assures her that the cries are part of a film and begins to sing the childish song “Vamos a contar mentiras,” a song that ironically was used to discourage children from lying in the post-war period. The repurposing of the song from a cornerstone of child morality to a psychological bulwark against the culture of repression indicts the inversion of morality in the post-war period when lies became indispensable to psychological survival and the preservation of childish illusions of a fair and just world. Ecopoetics further challenge this complex interplay between familial attachment, victimhood and perpetration, compelling readers to understand the ease of childish spatial disengagement from a repressive culture, which further validates the idea of the child as a powerful and agentic actor in the perpetrator’s moral universe. This ecopoetical motif presents certain physical places as being marked and even suffused by political and social convulsions and trauma. The uglification of nature, in the aftermath of Catalina’s virulent rejection of Nino as the son of a guardia civil, mirrors the child’s confusion and sadness: “El río me pareció más manso, más turbio, los árboles polvorientos como troncos de leña vieja, y los rayos de sol que acertaban a filtrarse entre sus ramas para dibujar sombras de luz sobre la superficie del agua, un truco barato, sin gracia” (209). The aging of the trees allegorically metonymises the cycle of life and death and the dwindling of their lifesupport capacities symbolises the ubiquity of death. The aquatic imagery evokes contamination and pollution, giving to understand that despite the child figure’s antipathy to the repression and violence, they are ubiquitous, seeping into nature itself. Following the killing of El Pesetillas in the village, the landscape reflects the grimness of the village atmosphere: “el sol picaba ya detrás de los cristales, y el paisaje negro, sombrío, de los cuerpos sin

66

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

vida desplomándose ante una tapia, parecía una ilusión hueca y tramposa, la dramática cáscara de una pesadilla incompatible con la realidad de una mañana de verano” (235), but later the sun morphs into a guarantor of universal security: “mientras el sol viajara por el cielo, todos estábamos a salvo” (235). The natural elements both imbibe and destabilise the hegemonic rhetoric sanctioning the killings, prompting the child to leave for an uncontaminated space, Pepe el Portugués’ house in the mountains, where the natural and harmonious order of daily life can be resumed. The contrast between la cuartel general that houses the guardia civil and the countryside in which marginal characters, such as Pepe el Portugués, Doña Elena, las rubias and the Maquis live, is crucial to the child’s understanding of and eventual rejection of the perpetrators’ hegemonic order. The external world of Pepe el Portugués’ windmill and surrounding countryside reveals the reciprocal human–nature connection, functioning as a synecdoche for the importance of a non-ideological collectivity united by goodwill and natural bounty. Pepe el Portugués’ house is associated with piscatorial and alimentary generosity, namely trout and rabbit, both of which Nino subsequently gives to his mother, a guardia civil’s wife. This offering transcends ideological divides and contrasts with the parsimony of the village residents who endorse a schismatic ideological ethos. By drawing on the stereotypical motifs that proliferate in descriptions of children’s affinity with nature, Grandes highlights the importance of these places to the protagonist’s development and the moments of joy located there. There, Nino enacts some of the core capabilities of eudaimonia, which include the ability to live in relation to other non-human beings (animals, plants, the environment) and play and control over one’s environment, which facilitates his flourishing. In effect, the child protagonist demonstrates his individuality through his ability to flourish in unregulated natural spaces that counter the village’s violent destructiveness. However, troubling questions remain: Does the identification with the perpetrator generated by the child’s perspective convert him into an object of sympathy, or empathy, and is the evocation of such emotions inappropriate for a perpetrator? Can this sympathy lead to the neutralisation and even trivialisation of the memory of perpetration of evil acts? Answering these questions necessarily involves understanding the exculpatory process that underlies the condoning of perpetrator memory. In this regard, the work of Kjell Anderson on perpetrators of atrocity is particularly instructive. The reprehensible acts of torture, maiming and killing of others are mitigated, on a micro-social level, through the “moral neutralisation” of these acts (42). For Anderson, moral neutralisation implies the dehumanisation of the victim and the justification of the perpetrator’s acts as unavoidable atrocities compelled by governmental orders or the suspension of morality in wartime. This classification redefines morally unconscionable acts as permissible and can even culminate in the redefinition of the perpetrator as a victim (K. Anderson 43). This moral neutralisation involves the discarding

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

67

of pre-perpetration values which are incompatible with the committed acts of perpetration. Importantly, Anderson warns that if perpetrators are incapable of moral neutralisation, they will experience a self-loathing “deviant identity,” with concomitant feelings of self-disgust and inability to live with themselves (44). The conveyance of the involuntariness of Antonino’s induction into the guardia civil could be construed as a mitigatory narrative that seeks to undermine the magnitude of the crimes committed and to diminish his agency, both of which are fundaments of moral neutralisation: “Mi padre solía decir que daría cualquier cosa por cambiar destino, y todos sabíamos que era verdad” (106). Nino’s father, who hails from a Republican family, is characterised throughout the novel as ineffectual and unable to mold any of his life’s circumstances. He remains unhappily in his job, resigned to the suspicion to which a professional of his familial background will be subject in a village such as Fuensanta de Martos, only a short distance from the village where he grew up, and where knowledge of his family’s Republican antecedents subsists in local lore. Antonino’s profession has been nothing but a source of chagrin to him, responsible for his straitened economic circumstances, his continual mental turmoil and his children’s social alienation. He is harshly rebuked by his superiors and is obligated to participate in the torture of the maquis, with no hope of ever being promoted (Grandes 287). His life-story crystallises how victims of a classist hierarchy can become perpetrators, and how their involvement in perpetration only compounds their victimhood. The young child intuits the hardships of his father’s life by the disparity between photographs of his parents as younger and happier people and their current discontentment, a disjuncture that highlights the bellic disruption of individual lives. Nino learns that his father’s enlistment on the Nationalist side was compelled by a desire to safeguard his family. The contrast between the serious downtrodden man Nino knows as his father and the smiling young man pictured in the photos hints at a trajectory of compulsory decisions that resulted in personal and professional unhappiness. Pepe el Portugués transmits a comprehensive account of Antonino’s beleaguered patriarchal heritage, telling the young protagonist of the killings of his Republican grandfather, uncle and two cousins (213). In fact, Pepe el Portugués strives to impress upon the young boy the hardness of Antonino’s life by contextualising it within a socio-historical context, which casts Antonino as an individual destined by both the Civil War and his family’s ideological affiliation to a life of struggle. The humanisation of Antonino through photos and micro-historical contextualisation refutes simple formulations of low-ranking perpetrators as mere pawns of their more powerful superiors and renders them relatable affective beings. To a certain degree, Antonino is constructed as a positive protagonist, and the reader is meant to understand by the end of the novel the circumstances that compelled him to unwillingly join the guardia civil and to commit torture. This historical contextualisation guides the reader out of a critical attitude

68

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

to the figure of Antonino and into an attitude of understanding and even empathy. Perpetration is shown to be determined more by situational (environmental, communal, social) contexts and pressures and not ideological animus towards the Republicans. The policemen’s constant reiteration of their powerlessness, their inability to challenge orders and their plaintive emphasis on the futility of regrets also concord with moral neutralisation and create reader sympathy. The collapsing of both victimhood and perpetration into a previously monolithic perpetrator category refutes a priori assumptions concerning both classifications, forcing readers to question the meaningfulness of the dualistic victim–perpetrator imaginary and ultimately compelling them to comprehend historical subject positions that strain their ideologically conditioned empathetic capabilities. However, it is the paradoxical juxtaposition of moral neutralisation and a deviant identity that reflects the sophistication of Grandes’s treatment of perpetrator memory. The psychosomatic symptoms endured by Antonino render tangible a deviant identity. Ensuing days of fighting against the maquis in the mountains and the killing of Cencerro, Antonino retires to his bed. Following the death of Cencerro, Antonino laments his unmanliness to his wife, describing himself in eschatological and corporeal images as “una mierda de hombre” (Grandes 82). His tortured state derives from the disjuncture between his personal high estimation of an honorable and just masculinity, and the immense social pressure exerted upon him to manifest the Machiavellian form of it countenanced by Francoist repressive policies. The recurrence of the psychosomatic symptoms of vomiting and self-soiling amongst the guardia civil, and their superiors’ alcoholism, attest to the perpetrators’ psychological angst. Their physical symptoms and vices indicate a deviant identity generated by their inability to come to terms with the moral ramifications of their actions. The narrative emphasis on the high probability of the guardia civil’s early deaths in the line of duty further underscores the impossibility of their professional conundrum. The dual conflation of moral neutralisation and deviant identity is problematic as it induces sympathy for wrongdoers. However, it is also historically consistent with the lack of agency of the guardia civil during this period. Viewing the job as a stable source of income in a dire economic conjuncture, the poorly remunerated guardia civil were reluctant to endanger themselves (Nieto 129). Nieto emphasises that many of these men from humble social backgrounds were not ideologically affiliated to the Franco regime. The poor social status of their job exacerbated their discontent: “estaban generalmente mal vistos por los vecinos de los pueblos, incluidos los partidarios del régimen” (212). Antonino’s request to Pepe el Portugués to finance Nino’s typing lessons, his frank admission to his son that his salary barely covers his living expenses, and the alienation of both Nino and his sister, Dulce, on the playground corroborate these historical facts. Thus, a guardia civil was not an enviable profession in Spain of this era and, evidently, did not inspire filial or social respect.

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

69

Certainly, this historically accurate invocation of a forced ideological conformity, powerlessness and an inability to determine one’s life trajectory could absolve the perpetrator of moral responsibility. However, this accusation is undermined somewhat by an even-handed depiction of the guardia civil’s violent actions in the public sphere and the consequences for its victims, particularly the female partners of the maquis, las rubias, whose homes are subject to frequent and violent encroachments by the guardia civil. The human devastation wreaked by the policemen’s shootings are unsparingly delineated in the narrator’s recounting of the dignified mourning of Laureano’s mother, whose son was the teenage victim of the guardia civil. Throughout the narrative, the unfairness of the guardia civil’s persecution of the maquis’ pregnant wives is emphasised, and even Nino’s mother, Mercedes, reproaches her husband for their tormenting of Carmen la Rosa, Cencerro’s pregnant wife. The condemnation of superior-ranking guardia civil also refutes allegations of perpetrator bias, indicative as it is of the maturity of Grandes’ considered treatment of perpetrator memory, which gradates perpetration into moral and professional categories (Grandes 364). In effect, the high-ranking Sanchís is crueller than the lower-ranking and relatively powerless guardia civil, such as Antonino. Grandes’ balanced treatment of perpetrator memory is further evidenced by her deliberate blurring of the ideological lines between Nationalist and Republican, and the facile conversion of winners into losers in post-war Spain. Antonino’s superior, the war hero and sergeant Miguel Sanchís, is the epitome of male aspirationality in the post-war period. Descended from a long line of guardia civil, he is enormously attractive to women, has a meteoric career, and is also a bully who enjoys intimidating his subordinates, women and children. He savagely beats Filo, Catalina’s daughter, and remorselessly kills a man in the mountains. His cold-heartedness contrasts with the loving care he dispenses to his lame wife, Pastora, whose place in his affections incites much speculation amongst the village women. Pastora’s position in the dominant perpetrator in-group is duplicitous, as she hides her past as a fervent Communist who was repeatedly tortured for her ideological beliefs, a past that is relayed by an itinerant horse trader and which the village women erroneously conjecture as further proof of her past as a prostitute. These dualisms of sadism and kindness, of a putative errant sexuality and political commitment instate a public–private divide, which militates against categorical judgments on the character or personality of the perpetrator by demonstrating that there is no one perpetrator type or one viable monocausal explanation for implication in acts of atrocity. Sanchís’ figure is further complicated, even rendered unknowable, by subsequent events, which reveal him to be a Communist infiltrator who transmitted important information to the Maquis and also organised the deaths of Maquis betrayers. The necessity of a pretence of unity amongst the guardia civil means that he is given an honorific funeral, but his wife, Pastora, is left

70

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

poverty-stricken and subject to intense police vigilance upon her move to Madrid. Sanchís is ultimately morally redeemed in the readers’ eyes, and the values he represents are shown to be the opposite of the murderous and indifferent will to inflict cruelty that he displayed in the earlier part of the novel. Sanchís’ multidimensionality underscores the heterogeneity of the perpetrator category that is frequently deployed as a capacious signifier that obscures the socio-economic and personal particularities of the wrongdoers. The refutation of perpetrator bias is also apparent in the damaged father– son relationship, which demonstrates how Antonino’s deviant identity detrimentally affects Nino’s perception of him. Similar to El corazón helado, paternal acts of perpetration create an unbridgeable schism between a father and a son who ceases to respect his father. The father transmits labor ideologies to his son, which determine the child’s perception of work, while also inculcating him with “the sexual and political values of the wider culture” (Pease 9). His indispensable role in the child’s socialisation defines the father as “an influential grown-up who plays a significant role in the development of a child’s relation to selfhood” (9). For Nino, his father is a model of regression and economic insufficiency. As the narrator, Antonino Carajito, states: “me pareció un hombrecillo patético, un pobre tonto solemne” (Grandes 197). The young protagonist develops a special grievance against the father who is the model of what he must become. To the extent that he is unable to control his life and to comply with the economic, social, and sexual prerequisites of hegemonic masculinity, grounded in moral edicts, Antonino appears a damaged person, unworthy of imitation. Antonino’s resignation to his profession’s travails indicates an internalisation of and a resignation to his economic and social substatus, a condition of inferiority that Nino refuses to accept. As he expresses it: “Yo no quería ser guardia civil, no quería compartir un único retrete con todos los culos de otras siete familias, ni detener a mis vecinos, ni llevarlos esposados por la calle” (33). Later ruminating on his classmates’ promising futures in their fathers’ businesses, Nino observes his father’s lack of a patriarchal lineage and his inability to bequeath him a sustainable source of income, which would keep him rooted in Fuensanta de Martos (36). In fact, Antonino’s profession conjures up images of confinement for Nino (32). Thus it is with the binds of obligation and his father’s moral reproachability that the relationship begins to unravel. Clearly, Antonino is both the embodiment and the victim of an intrusive patriarchal and repressive society from which Nino must flee, and hence, the uneasy relationship between them stems from a tension between an unfulfilled father and the son who is just embarking on his quest for selfrealisation. His unconvincing paternal model compels Nino to seek unconventional role models who embody the prerequisites of a moral hegemonic masculinity, the maquis guerrilla Tomás Villen Roldán, alias Cencerro, and Pepe el Portugués, alternative father figures vindicated by the gendered reading trope, which is the subject of the ensuing analysis.

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

71

The Reading Trope The reading trope in this novel represents a panoply of issues such as the idealisation of the educational and cultural values of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1936), the educational regression of the Francoist period, and the young child’s rationalisation of perpetration and masculinity It paradoxically perpetuates and contests the dominant political and gender ideologies of the post-war period in ways that I will now examine. The library of the purged Republican schoolteacher and private tutor Doña Elena in las rubias’ farmhouse is indelibly associated with female growth and solidarity. In contradistinction to typically sexualised depictions of female space, el cortijo accommodates an alternative, all-female family of marginal women, ranging from rapadas, women whose heads were shaven by the guardia civil; estraperlistas, women selling foodstuffs on the black market; Doña Elena, and her granddaughter, Elenita; and the daughters of Catalina la Rubia, who are impregnated by their guerrilla boyfriends in exile on their brief surreptitious returns to the farmhouse. This elective family structure is akin to an inter-class family that willingly meets its members’ needs, be they intellectual, fiduciary or affective; Doña Elena collaborates in wickerwork with the other women, despite the fact that this was not a habitual activity for an upper-middle-class woman (170). Contrary to the villagers’ speculation as to the sapphic and mercenary nature of the women’s relationship, these private female bonds substitute ephemeral heterosexual dyads, annulled by the exile and deaths of their lovers, to provide homosocial psychological and physical intimacy to a group of women stigmatised by politicised and gendered hierarchies. In short, this non-biological family epitomises gyn/affection, which in the words of theorist, Janice Raymond, “connotes the passion that women feel for women, that is, the experience of profound attraction for the original vital female self and the movement towards other women” (10). These women realise that the only way to circumvent male ascribed inferiority is to uphold and celebrate, through a strong female bond, their distinctive gender attributes, as equal to men, challenging the basic distribution of power by showcasing the ability of women to live and to survive without men. This female growth is highlighted by the proliferation of allusions to plants and trees, symbols of housewifery and femininity that subvert post-war female stagnation. Nino’s conceptualisation of the female resistance to repression is couched in eco-economic references, specifically las rubias’ selling of “espárragos silvestres” (105) and “esparato,” thus aligning nature with a feminine survival imperiled by the local caciques’ control of the sale of this raw material (149). Attempted or actual economic autonomy consistently surfaces in Los episodios de una guerra interminable as a locus for women’s emancipation, independent economic wherewithal being reimagined as the empowering source of post-war women’s agency. In the farmhouse itself, the women’s

72

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

distinctively beautiful, transcendent garden experience contrasts with the oppressive expectations placed on them by village society, thereby disrupting traditional gender expectations. Nino describes the path from Doña Elena’s cottage on the grounds to the main house as “escondida entre árboles” and “rodeada de macetas” (188). The protectiveness of the trees implies that they are stable components in an otherwise inimical society that condemns Doña Elena to a rootless life, bereft of most of the members of her biological family. This arboreal shielding reconnects the marginalised teacher to the land, refiguring home as an individually defined concept, disconnected from institutionalised oppression in the wider society. Thus, Doña Elena’s immersion in a non-biological family, metonymised arboreally, enables her to survive her ostracism and spatial upheavals. The friendship between Doña Elena and las rubias is akin to a dialectical and constructive synergy, informed by the women’s utmost respect for each other, which permits them to approximate to eudaimonia, a life of dignity, albeit a limited form of it. Nino’s entry into this all-female word, then, acquaints him with another model of non-heteronormative relations that broadens his knowledge of gender relations. This wholly feminine library, where the child collects his books, is also charged with the import of socio-literary and pedagogical transformations from 1931 to 1947, in which children’s reading was exalted and subsequently deprioritised. The prohibited books in Doña Elena’s library are a paean to the democratisation of reading and education during the Second Republic, 1931–1936. The book trade flourished during this period when the Spanish public’s selection was widened by the translation of foreign adventure texts, such as the novels of Verne and Stevenson, and children’s texts, like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins (González Calleja et al. 1067). In fact, the president of the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, Manuel Águilar, declared in 1933 that “La labor del gobierno no puede ser más beneficiosa para la industria del libro” (1068). His encomium is corroborated by statistics: the budget devoted to reading increased 380 percent between 1930 and 1933, and in 1932 alone, 1,600 libraries were inaugurated (Esteban 85). The Plan de Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas was ambitious, planning to inaugurate 3,000 more libraries by 1933 and later to build 5,000 per year (Esteban 85). In Águilar’s professional opinion, reading had ceased to be an elitist preserve and had become accessible to “el obrero y empleado público,” who read primarily to inform themselves on current affairs and the pressing social problems of the era (González Calleja et al. 1066). Significantly, children’s reading was an integral pillar of the Republic’s promotion of reading because it was thought to encourage their parents to read. In their study of reading during the Second Republic, Ana Martínez Rus and Jesús Antonio Martínez Martín refer to the survey sent by María Moliner to rural libraries in Valencia in March 1936. She found that children were by far the most avid readers of the books made

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

73

freely available in the schools in this era (51) and that in towns, such as Cruz Cubierta, children encouraged their adult parents to read (55). The novels of Verne, Miguel Strogoff and Los hijos del Capitán Grant, featured amongst the most popular in the under 14 readership category (51). Primary school libraries had an explicitly social function, and they organised conferences and lectures that would interest pupils’ parents (56). Therefore, children were conceived as the inductors of their parents in reading, and thereby, the catalysts for the amelioration of Spain’s reading culture, a status that accorded them a pivotal role in the culture of the Spanish Second Republic. Nino’s interpretative literary agency, which I will explore, is a tribute to this childish cultural agency. Following Franco’s accession to power in 1939, Verne and Stevenson were targeted by the Franco Regime’s draconian censorship laws because their works were classified as “mala cultura,” which was described as “decadente y apegada a modelos extranjeros desnaturalizantes” (Ruiz Bautista 69). The novels of Jules Verne were expressly prohibited by the government which issued a reprimand to the Delegación Nacional de Propaganda for having distributed the works of Goethe, Verne, Dumas and Stendhal, amongst others (Esteban 9). Admittedly, some high-brow foreign authors, such as Balzac, were permitted for sale to the public, but only in an abridged, limited edition in the original language, which rendered them all but inaccessible for only an elite cabal of erudite readers. For example, Baudelaire’s La Fanfarlo was published in the original French in a limited edition of sixty copies (Ruiz Bautista 72). The scarcity of the classics led to a decline of the high-brow Spanish cultural scene: during his residence in Madrid in 1951, Jorge Semprún scathingly remarked that only a handful of people attended the annual book fair in El paseo de recoletos, probably due to the expense of the books (Fox Maura 172). The Second Republic’s democratisation of education was anathema to the Nationalists, who, from the outbreak of the Civil war, articulated their disdain for it, with General Millán Astray affirming that “la enseñanza era responsible de los males que aquejaban a la Patria” (qtd. in Serrano 29). Reading was converted into an indoctrinatory tool in schools during this era. An October 1939 order established the censorship and previous authorisation of school textbooks. All authors were obligated to present the originals for prior approval in the Ministry of Education (Sánchez Cuenca 45). The Libro de España, in which traditional Spanish customs and social mores were exalted, was compulsory in the primary schools (Sánchez Redondo 72). Reflection and independent thinking were discouraged, and memorialisation was to the fore (78). The teacher was an incontestable figure who was always to be obeyed, which reflected the militaristic tenor of Francoist society (82). In the post-war period, Nino’s reading of Benito Pérez Galdós ignites conflict with Don Eusebio, a weak man who is intimidated by Nino’s intellectual precocity and who restricts book lending to the older children (Grandes 124), which indicates the devaluation of culture during this period.

74

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

In this novel, the characterisation of Doña Elena as erudite and endlessly encouraging of Nino’s avidity for books, and Don Eusebio as anti-intellectual and pusillanimous, implicitly contrasts the Second Republic, which strove to maximise the potential of the Spanish people, with an inferior Francoist educational system, mainly concerned with indoctrination and the guaranteeing of future social obedience. Nevertheless, the Franco regime did not discount culture completely, for it fomented an escapist, low-brow culture, known as the culture of evasion, which was designed to distract the populace from the hardships of post-war life. José Angel Ascunce Arrieta phrases it thus: “las personas que para subsistir trabajaban intensamente en condiciones precarias necesitaban olvidarse aunque solo fuera para un rato, de la dura realidad. La novela, la radio, el cine, y el fútbol proporcionaron los escasos momentos de distracción y evasión” (432). Claire Colebrook observes that texts constitute active agents, which “work, perform, function and act in a dynamic field” (42). Expanding on this point, she contends that texts’ meanings expose the discursive system in which they circulate, and consequently, the reader’s decipherment of the text is contingent on the social conjuncture in which it is read (43). This social contingency means that the text’s reception is “significantly affected by the structures of social power, and consequently, the range and the overlap of meanings, the distinctions simultaneously elided and insisted upon, are all in themselves significant” (12). However, the text’s authority is challenged by emergent meanings which create new understandings and values that occasion recusant perspectives on the distribution of social power (Williams 25). Williams avers that the dominant culture can never contain “the full range of human practice, energy, and intention” (26). Taking Williams’ theory one step further, Stuart Hall postulated that all cultural texts have to be articulated, in effect interpreted by the reader or spectator in their own idiosyncratic manner (45). Evidently, the Franco regime’s simplistic conceptualisation of culture ignored the essential nature of reading, which involves the reader leaving the world behind to participate imaginatively in a text that casts its reader as a thinking subject, not an uncritical dupe. Clearly based on a vision of low culture as a self-gratificatory realm, the content of these low-brow texts was designed to submerge readers in fictional worlds whose vicissitudes were completely disconnected from post-war Spain and whose inferences were hence inapplicable to postwar life. In this novel, this culture of evasion fulfills distinctly gendered functions, providing solace for the females in the police barracks, while acquainting Nino with other, more empowering masculine frames of reference. Lowbrow books enable both female and male characters to create a meaningful moral framework with which to carve out their identity and judge one another’s character. Reading functions as a source of vicarious pleasure for the women in the novel. Sonsoles Mediamujer reads romance novels that in no way mirror her dire marriage prospects, which cannot compete with

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

75

those of her far more attractive sister, Marisol. As Carmen Martín Gaite recognised, female readerly identification with these heroines was in direct proportion to their level of desperation in the marriage market. Romance novels that fictionalised the unlikely marriages of debonair millionaires with lower-class girls and maids enabled them to believe that “when they least expected it, a joy would fall from the skies that would make them feel transfigured, different” (144). Nino’s mother is also an avid reader of novelas rosas, and similarly, Elenita, the object of his childish affections, is described as a reluctant reader by her grandmother, Doña Elena. Her reading preferences are strictly limited to love stories and she only gains knowledge of Jules Verne through Nino’s careful explanations. In this sense, the Francoist privileging of the male as more rational and intellectual than the female, who could be easily duped by inferior quality novels, is reproduced. However, the female immersion in this imaginary world not only symbolises the restrictiveness of post-war life for women who were condemned to second-class citizenship but also hints at a subtle rebellion against the passivity preordained for them by the regime. One of Sonsoles’ favorite books is the aristocratic post-war writer Carmen de Icaza’s noted bestseller Cristina Pérez de Guzman (405). Although the writer was praised by the Sección Femenina for her “heroínas activas y prácticas” (Abella, La vida cotidiana 76), critics have recently discovered feminist elements in her work. The protagonist of the cited novel is a sports-loving single mother, who uses her linguistic skills to obtain a job as a foreign language teacher with a wealthy family (Caamañó Alegre 428). Lending itself to dissident interpretations unimagined by the censors, the novel negates and erases the narrow, mediocre world of the post-war female by proposing a self-determined path to independence. The popular text, then, offers an escape from the insularity of post-war Spain while also exhorting female readers to forge an autonomous life. Reading proves far more liberatory for Nino, who uses it to alleviate the tedium of post-war life and to understand and negotiate his relationship with his perpetrator father. These books are the vehicles by which he makes sense of a harsh social system that compels his father to carry out unconscionable acts. Critics of the novel assert that the reading trope constitutes a means of survival for the nine-year-old boy, whose delving into literary works permits him to transcend the despondency of post-war life (Corbin and Estudillo 238). Certainly, throughout the narrative, the narrator hypostasises the centrality of reading to his affective well-being: “Yo leía otra clase de novelas (…) para soportar la calamitosa aventura de vivir en la casa cuartel de Fuensanta de Martos en 1948” (Grandes 145). In an interview with Jaime Pacíos, Grandes affirms that reading serves an escapist function for her young protagonist, but also states that it changes his mentality. I argue that the reading trope constitutes an incursion into post-war masculinities, in effect, that the young character’s discernment of masculinity is reflected in his choice of reading, which commences with post-war

76

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

cowboy novels and then progresses onto the novels of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Benito Pérez Galdós. The child’s reading of a diverse set of both low-brow and high-brow novels involves the challenging of patriarchal authority, facilitates a new masculine identity and the assertion of a distinctly gendered subjectivity. In El lector de Julio Verne, the father figure, Antonino, incapable of transmitting a coherent and aspirational prototype of masculinity, ceases to be a credible paternal figure for his son Nino, who then embarks on a literary and relational exploration of masculinity, which implies the selection of a credible masculine model among the various male prototypes of hero, adventurer and outlaw, who populate his fictional and social universes. Nino’s navigation of the post-war social terrain exposes a masculine nationalist universe punctuated by daily humiliations, moral ambiguity and crushing self-doubt, and these books enable him to navigate this ambiguous terrain and imaginatively overcome social trauma. These books also act as imaginative spaces that further his quest to live a life of eudaimonia, which is characterised by a control over one’s imagination, while also paying homage to the centrality of the child in the reading culture of the Spanish Second Republic. Ironically, it is Western novels, facile reading designed to induce acceptance to the post-war situation, that give rise to the child protagonist’s admiration for the adversarial masculinity personified by the regime’s enemy, the outlawed guerrilla force, the maquis. These cowboy novels invariably legitimised the use of extreme violence for morally justifiable ends, thereby validating the Nationalist use of force in the Civil War (Ascune Arrieta 448). They shape Nino’s outlook on masculinity by supplying him with gendered frames of reference with which he evaluates his alternative masculine role models: Pepe el Portugués and Cencerro. Nino’s first description of Pepe el Portugués draws on the images of masculinity found in the cowboy novels: “Parecía uno de esos pistoleros que salían en las portadas de las novelas que vendía la Piriñaca y que siempre prometían mucho más de lo que daban” (Grandes 54). Importantly, Pepe el Portugués’ impressive physicality is not the sole basis for Nino’s hero-worship of him, because he recognises that, in contrast to these novels’ heroes, Pepe is steadfast and loyal. Bringing his own criteria to bear on these adventure novels, the child is shown to be a critical receptor of the dominant images of masculinity. Nino’s criticism does not equate to an outright rejection of these novels’ representation of masculinity, for he later states that “en las novelas, yo había aprendido que los hombres valientes siempre matan de frente” (Grandes 62). The cowboy personages of these novels are unashamed individualists, seeking fortune in adverse conditions, and as such, incarnate a masculinity decidedly at variance with the collective subjugated Francoist masculinity. Most cowboys are renegades, unrelated to any institution, and operating in terrains relatively untouched by man, such as the desert or tough frontier towns. Similar to them, the fictional Cencerro, who is based on the real-life guerrilla Tomás Villen Roldán, is an outlaw surviving in the mountains and only traversing

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

77

public space to wreak destruction upon it. This communist hero, who commanded the guerrilla force in the Sierra Sur, committed suicide during a guardia civil attack on him (Nieto 205). According to Grandes, Cencerro was a modern-day Robin Hood, a defender of the vulnerable against the powerful (qtd. in Pacíos). The guerrilla fighter, who emanates virility and uncurtailed mobility, is likened to an insurmountable force of nature, who can easily outwit state forces. It is even implied that he is something of a superman, because Nino silently disagrees with his mother’s contention that “Cencerro es sólo un hombre, y ningún hombre puede escapar eternamente” (60). Although presumably surviving precariously in the mountains, he is associated with abundance, casually distributing bills with a note attached stating “Así paga Cencerro” (41). In this novel, Cencerro undoubtedly incarnates an authentic and moral hegemonic masculinity at antipodes to the weakened form Nino’s father and his colleagues symbolise. Evidently, cowboy novels nourish Nino’s imagination, and their masculine characterisations are mapped onto his social universe, allowing him to judiciously calibrate the adult males encountered in the village and to choose venerable male figures, psychologically unscathed by the severe injunctions of post-war gender normativity, as father figures. The Western novels’ incitement to action and their laudation of an individual restless masculinity is consolidated by the more intellectually worthy novels of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Benito Pérez Galdós, all of whom facilitate Nino’s gendered process of identity formation. Claire Colebrook affirms that literature is anchored in a specific historical context and is thus a vehicle for revealing and producing history (26). She further contends that “the specific historical context can be reawakened by an act of literary interpretation,” which converts the reading of literature a portal to another historical era (21). Colebrook’s statement is certainly applicable to the intertextual role of Stevenson and Verne’s novels. These nineteenthcentury books are metadiegetic elements which shape and drive the plot forward, quickening the narrative pace by presaging future happenings and also deepening characterisation. In the nineteenth century, the possibility of masculine self-actualisation was considerably augmented when British industrialisation and colonialism offered ambitious men the opportunities to amass great fortunes. These texts’ thematisation of masculine initiative and solitary expeditions propel gendered ways of being and codes of conduct, along with visions of aspirational male lives into Nino’s life, and in so doing, proffer a masculine countermodel to the monolithic and morally unsound masculinity of the post-war period. These authors’ visions of masculinity are concordant with the attainability of capital in both the authors’ respective homelands, France and Scotland, but at variance to the distribution of capital in the primarily agricultural society of post-war Andalucía. The reinstatement of intractable class divides in latifundista Andalucía in the post-war period resulted in a concentration of capital in the hands of

78

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

the landowning class, and consequently, low-ranking Francoist supporters, such as Nino’s father, had to eke out a living in a failing economy which discounted the individual qualities of energy, diligence and initiative as means of social ascension for men. It was this failing economic system that also led to his unwilling participation in the perpetration of torture. Contradicting this inert economic vision, Verne’s and Stevenson’s novels project a meritocratic ideal of masculinity into the young boy’s world. Conjuring up visions of utopias and exploration (Jules Verne) and limitless possibilities for individual self-realisation, either in tandem with the dominant order (Verne) or in a more dissenting way (Stevenson), these books represent the very antithesis of the poverty and intellectual stagnation of the post-war period, which resulted in a thirty-five percent illiteracy rate in Jaén (Cazorla Sánchez 89). Although Verne’s and Stevenson’s texts extol masculine individualism, their circulation between Doña Elena, Pepe el Portugués and Nino is communitarian, creating a cultural coterie of sorts in a country where cultural levels had plummeted as a consequence of the regime’s purposeful decimation of culture. Therefore, the books facilitate the child’s freedom of affiliation, which is one of the key prerequisites of eudaimonia. These foreign authors’ firm stances on the optimisation of an individual man’s capacity for accomplishment conflates with the ethos of the Second Republic, and thus, in both Nino’s obtainment and perusal of this reading material, he is related to a progressive liberal spirit that endorsed the supremacy of the individual man. The interpellation of Galdós’ novels into the narrative signals the indomitability of counterhegemonic intellectual currents: despite repression and censorship in Francoist Spain. Galdós is historically linked with the Republican cause, and he was hugely popular among the soldiers on the Republican front during the Civil War, where copies of his Episodios Nacionales were freely distributed (Grandes qtd. in Pacíos). Therefore, the child protagonist’s reading of Galdós explicitly positions him within an oppositional intellectual movement. Galdós remains tangential to a narrative dominated by the effect of Jules Vernes’ and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels on the young protagonist, influences which I will now analyse. Jules Verne’s novels glorified masculine individual endeavor and unfettered spatial and financial autonomy, and are critically considered to be odes to nineteenth-century capitalism “in its most potent forms of mercantilism and feats of engineering” (Capitanio 62). Paradoxically, although Verne was a Frenchman, most of his novels lauded British colonialism, a disparity deriving from Verne’s anglophilism, and the lackluster public reaction to French colonialism in France. Despite France’s pre-eminent position as the world’s second most successful coloniser, the French chattering classes remained in need of convincing of the merits of colonialisation, and Verne’s novels sought to stimulate an interest in exploration and adventure in them (Dine 185). The characters of Jules Verne’s novels, such as Captain Nemo, Robur the Conqueror and Impey Barbicane, “represented an egotistical machismo of scientific conquest taken

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

79

to extremes. They personalised the power of science, representing it less as a collective and institutional form of power than as a Promethean assertion of individual sovereignty and brain-power” (Maerteens 210). Verne’s characters were all virile professionals, who enjoyed unparalleled mobility, embarking on sea, land and air journeys (McLaren 36). In El lector de Julio Verne, Verne’s spectrum of globetrotting protagonists enhances the aura of sophistication surrounding Pepe el Portugués, who in the eyes of the naïve and awestruck young boy is a seasoned traveler, having been in France and Morrocco (110). Like Verne’s heroes, Pepe el Portugués is a loner, unencumbered by obligation and completely self-sufficient: “El era un hombre solitario que hacía su vida y no se metía en la de los demás” (118). His selfsufficiency is consonant with Verne’s extolment of self-contained individualism, but marks him as an outsider in the Andalusian economic and social system, which is striated by differentiated levels of collective belonging. He thus commands in the young boy a respect premised on an implicitly moral fusion of independent masculinity and alterity, which is at polar odds to the institutionalized masculinity epitomized by Nino´s perpetrator father. Indisputably, the intertextual references to Verne’s novels metonymically hypostasises the young protagonist’s intellectual and social isolation, and his yearning for a solid and venerable father figure. In Pepe el Portugués’ house, Nino receives a copy of Jules Verne’s Los hijos del Capitán Grant (Grandes 99), a novel that recounts two children, Robert and María Grant’s, successful search for their father, in much the same way as Nino encountered a credible paternal model in Pepe el Portugués. The journey undertaken by the Grant siblings, from Scotland to Australia via South America, parallels Nino’s admittedly less arduous journey to establish a filial nexus with someone he rates as a real man. Tellingly, Nino comments, upon returning the book, on “la sensación de orfandad que siempre me dejaban los libros que me habían gustado mucho” (124). The connotation of the absence of the book with orphanhood configures Verne’s novels as essential mediators of paternity, which, through Nino’s imaginative investment and engagement with it, deepen his understanding of masculinity and fill the void left by an inadequate father figure. However, this book also casts doubt on the activities and integrity of Pepe el Portugués when the young child finds a note in the book whose dedicatee is “Sotero López Cuenca, Comerrelojes” (125), one of the executed and traitorous maquis. He dismisses any hint of disingenuousness on the part of Pepe el Portugués by recalling that the book does not belong to his idol, and therefore, that the note could not possibly be connected with him. The young boy’s unwavering allegiance to this solitary individual reframes the father–son relationship as based on a voluntary affiliation to meaningful values and the organic creation of loyalty, thus debunking the social reverence accorded to biological paternal bonds in this period. Relatedly, reading is not conducive to the improvement of father–son relations. This is amply illustrated by Antonino’s ignorance of the rapidity

80

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

with which his son devours Verne’s books: when Pepe el Portugués gives Nino a birthday present of Veinte mil leguas de viaje submarino, Antonino incorrectly states that Nino has not finished the previous Verne novel (130). Verne’s novels create a fissure in the biological father–son relationship, which is attributable to Antonino’s correct perception of them as panegyrics to a masculinity premised on endless possibilities of mobility and enrichment. The content of the books only serves to exacerbate his inferiority complex about his lack of education, and his concomitant disproportionate reverence of educated people, just one of whom is the inept Don Esteban (142). Antonino’s intuition of the subversive impact of books on his relationship with Nino is inferred by his anxiety concerning the boy’s predilection for reading (291), which he deems unmasculine, and his curtailment of the young boy’s extracurricular activities. Alleging pressing financial obligations, not only does Antonino refuse to continue paying for Nino’s typewriting classes, but in an outpouring of frustration he demarcates Nino’s prospects: “Me gustaría que hablaras francés, inglés, que fueras a la Universidad, que le dieras la vuelta al mundo, que te leyeras todos los libros que se han escrito. Me encantaría de verdad, pero no puedo” (297). Importantly, Antonino’s reference to a round-the-world trip and books is made shortly after Nino selected La vuelta del mundo en ochenta días from Doña Elena’s library (278). Antonino’s allusions to it reveal his intuition of these books’ destabilising embodiment of masculine self-realisation for his young son, while also disclosing his awareness of his paltriness in the comparative framework engendered by Nino’s reading. In short, Verne’s novels set an unattainable standard against which Antonino falls decidedly short. Thus, his father’s reference to “todos los libros que se han escrito” (178) constitutes a hyperbolic venting of his anger at these usurpatory literary texts that have symbolically undermined his paternal role. Certainly, Verne’s novels seem to form the backbone of an organically created family, from which Nino’s biological family, with their dubious or inexistent reading habits, are excluded (124). These novels constitute the tangible stakes upon which the right to father the boy is adjudicated because they materialise the degree of knowledge and understanding which each paternal character, Pepe el Portugués and Antonino, possesses about Nino’s wants and needs. Thus, they constitute the ciphers of the functionality and viability of both the artificial and biological father–son relationships. The abandonment of Verne in favor of Robert Louis Stevenson marks a turning point in the protagonist’s conceptualisation of masculinity. Nino’s eventual preference for Stevenson is a categorical endorsement of an uninhibited, preindustrial masculinity, in diametric opposition to the buoyant capitalist one advocated in Verne’s novels. The Scottish author’s treatment of masculinity pivoted on two main interrelated concerns: the father–son relationship and a mistrust of capitalism. During the nineteenth century, Victorian fathers pressured their sons to accede to the bourgeois model of masculine respectability through individual endeavor and enterprise,

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

81

thereby inadvertently creating the very conditions of distance, all-consuming work and filial independence that would culminate in their estrangement from their sons (Villa 110). It was Stevenson’s personal experience of conflict with his own father, Thomas Stevenson, who heartily disapproved of his son’s chosen profession, deeming it both unwise and unprofitable, that explains the thematic recurrence of acrimonious father–son relationships in Stevenson’s novels (Jolly 5). Narrative features, such as the storms at sea, habitual happenings in Stevenson’s work, manifest the detrimental effect of unrestrained capitalism on the father–son relationship. Stevenson scholar Lucia Villa reasons that “water (streams, floods, seas) are traditionally associated with women, and hence, with dangerous forces that threaten patriarchal dominance” (112). The enforcement of bourgeois respectability lies at the heart of father–son contention in El lector de Julio Verne. Antonino’s pressuring of Nino to secure a well-paying job as firstly a guardia civil and later un secretario de ayuntamiento transforms him into a transmitter of emasculation, conveying to his son his own sense of inferiority, and his own need for Nino to surpass him both intellectually and economically. He tells him plaintively: “Yo, a tu edad, ni siquiera iba a la escuela, las cosas son así, y no tienen remedio” (Grandes 297), and later the narrator, the adult Nino, recognises that his father “estaría orgulloso de que me ganara la vida mejor que él” (39). The father is willing the boy to become something greater in order that he, the father, may be validated as a patriarch, capable of reproducing socially useful and economically independent citizens. The paternal circumscription to an intellectually mediocre and economically prosperous level contrasts with the protagonist’s longing, buoyed by his reading material, for a deinstitutionalised masculine development, anchored in the realm of his subjective desires (296). Throughout Stevenson’s novels, the recurrence of undependable fathers, such as the canny, semi-paternal buccaneer Long John Silver in Treasure Island, and the unreliable older males of Kidnapped juxtapose the impeccable moral credentials of the younger generation with the slipperiness of the older ones (Villa 113). In that novel, the swashbuckling pirate defied social conventions, and imparted a type of suspect education to the young Jim Hawkins. Denis Denisoff has classified Stevenson’s most likable heroes, such as Long John Silver, as “fledgling boys” who incarnate boyish enthusiasm over the limitations imposed by industrialisation (286). These boyish men’s positioning outside the economic system enables them to retain their youthful sense of adventure and initiate young boys in nonconformity (287). This intergenerational transmission conveyed an alternative version of masculinity, resolute in its determination to retain a preindustrial engagement with natural forces which fostered what Stevenson regarded as genuine masculine virility. The analogy between Pepe el Portugués and Long John Silver, which is premised on their marginality, quasi-paternal role and harmony with nature, is immediately discernible. The autonomy and simplicity of Pepe el Portugués life counterposes with Antonino’s lack

82

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

of control over his own fate, thus vindicating Stevenson’s mistrust of capitalism and his advocacy of an independent manhood rooted in nature and a preindustrial masculine liberty. Nino’s absorption of Stevenson’s masculine archetypes cauterises the biological father–son relationship, as the eventual triumph of Stevenson in the child’s reading preferences repudiates the fervent capitalism, endorsed by Verne, which had initially fissured the father– son relationship. Stevenson’s anti-capitalist inferences are corroborated by the child’s keen observation of the detrimental effect of work on his father and Pepe el Portugués’ recounting of Antonino’s background. The reading of these novels exceeds emotional and pedagogic functions however, by generating a sense of responsibility in the young protagonist. Tiffany Ana López’s concept of “critical witnessing,” which can be defined as “the process of being so moved by a reading experience as to engage in a specific action intended to forge a path toward change” (212), is particularly instructive in understanding the literary stimulus to protect his father. Critical witnessing defines reading as the development of social consciousness which impels the reader to act (213). Although Stevenson replaces Verne in Nino’s reading preferences, all three nineteenth-century authors play a role in preparing Nino to assume the mantle of adult masculinity, taking responsibility for the security of his father, who is fighting in the mountains against the maquis. Three novels – Jules Verne’s Miguel Strogoff, Galdós’s El diecinueve de marzo y el dos de mayo and Stevenson’s La isla del Tesoro – impart socio-cultural lessons on fratricidal conflicts and masculine self-responsibility which combine to spur the young protagonist to act in defense of his father. Miguel Strogoff charts the journey of a Siberian emissary, the eponymous hero, to Siberia to warn the Czar’s brother, the Grand Duke, of the imminent Tartar invasion. Its focus on internal national strife is insufficient for Nino to understand the paradoxical nature of national divides in Spain, which he comes to comprehend by reading El diecinueve de marzo y el dos de mayo. Galdós’ novel dramatises the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, Spaniards fierce resistance to it and the implementation of a pitiless repression in the aftermath of the French victory in 1802, which is analogous to the perpetuation of the civil war in post-war Fuensanta de Martos. In the midst of the chaotic mountain fight against the maquis, the narrator states “entonces comprendí que estaba viviendo en otro libro, aquella guerra sucia de civiles mal armados y mamelucos a caballos” (Grandes 366). The foreign invasion motif of Galdós’ novel confirms many historians’ positing of postwar Spain as a country transformed by the severity of Francoist repression into a colony or as a state of emergency (Preston 10). The Republicans were discursively excised from the national identity discourse, being frequently externalised as Soviet Spaniards, anti-Spaniards and Moscovite Slaves (Santabárbara 12). The narrator’s paralleling of the maquis to the defiant Spaniards who resisted the French invasion reinscribes the guerrillas within the parameters of Spanish national identity, and in so doing, ridicules the

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

83

Francoist national identity rhetoric. The character of Jim Hawkins in La isla del tesoro proves to be an impelling force for Nino, imbuing him with sufficient courage to continue his trek to find his father in the mountains: “Jim Hawkins rescató la Hispaniola sin la ayuda de nadie, me recordé a mí mismo cuando perdí de vista la casa cuartel” (366). La isla del tesoro metaphorises the culmination of Nino’s quest to rationalise post-war masculinity, as in the course of the novel Hawkins develops into an autonomous and decisive young man. Similarly, Nino’s mission to find his father reveals the extent of his intellectual and emotional growth, insofar as it illustrates his empathetic understanding of his father’s damaged masculinity, which the young protagonist has come to realise is dissonant with Antonino’s personal ideological convictions and character. His search mission signifies a rapprochement with Antonino, and, to a certain extent, a role reversal by which Nino assumes responsibility for his father’s welfare. Even more significantly, this disinterested act of protection of a family member is the first performance of Nino’s implicitly moral masculinity, which has been created by the extradiegetic glorification of intrepidness found in the novels. In the fourth part of the novel, the strength of the artificial father–son relationship and the attendant emotional distance of the biological one is reinforced. Readers learn that even during the 1960s, Nino’s father imposes the dominant norms of the then prevalent neoliberalist masculinity by lauding his other policemen sons Paquito and Alfredo’s earning power. However, Nino cleaves more to his alternative masculine role models’ oppositional worldviews, which inspire him to militate in the PCE (Partido Comunista Español) for thirteen years. His alternative autonomous masculinity enables him to withstand his father’s disparagement of his career as firstly a mechanic and later a university psychology student. The protagonist’s professional self-determination makes a selective tribute to Verne and Stevenson because he marshals the initiative of Verne’s heroes and the independence of Stevenson’s characters to carve out his unique career. This adult political dissidence challenges the Francoist ideal of the child as the lynchpin of the nation, who would reverse the national decline attributed to the Second Republic because Nino’s post-war gender socialisation culminates in a subscription to alternative political ideologies.

Conclusion El lector de Julio Verne enriches our understanding of perpetrator memory by exploring the micro-social, familial effects of the discomforting perpetrator memory of reluctant Francoists who had been coerced into supporting the regime and suffered an identity malaise as a consequence of their forced adhesion. Thus, El lector de Julio Verne expands the moral community of post-war victimhood which is revealed to have gradated levels of psychological and physical suffering that afflicted both the victors and the defeated. This novelistic recalibration of victimhood propels readers to

84

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

recognise that suffering is not the exclusive preserve of the Republican victim, and that victimhood and suffering existed in all ideological coteries. In this way, the novel dispenses with reductionist and simplistic thinking that insist that all perpetrators were aberrant, weak or suffering from mental illness, and issues an injunction to readers to transcend these stereotypes and engage in a trenchant exploration of the family background, motivation, familial dynamics and mentality of the perpetrator. It presents the child figure as significantly more than a conduit of perpetrator memory, revealing him to be an “implicated subject” and even active agent who seeks to flourish by attempting to obtain the imaginative and spatial components of eudaimonia. Masculinity, in this novel, is revealed to be an unstable and fraught social construct, which is created and recreated through the literary exploration of alternative masculinities, an intellectual journey that contests the idea of post-war masculinity as an inflexible and policed extension of subjectivity. For Nino, his father’s impoverishment and lack of agency means that paternal masculinity approximates to an ersatz version, possessed of only a superficial veneer of authority. Providing another historical repertoire of masculinities, Verne’s and Stevenson’s novels vindicate Pepe el Portugués’ and Cencerro’s individualism in a country where collective tenets, such as patriotism and religiosity, dictated men’s performance of their gender and even their participation in acts of torture His alternative father figures are proponents of unorthodox ways of life, who have effectively left civil society to live alone and to oppose the Franco regime, respectively. More importantly, these intradiegetic novels reframe capital as obtainable through individual effort and enterprise, thus implying that a man’s drive, industriousness and sometimes downright craftiness can ameliorate his social position. The child’s reverence of these fictional heroes amounts to a deliberate subversion of the hegemonic transmission of the dominant values of masculinity in favor of an autonomous one existing outside the ambits of accepted socio-gender norms. Thus, the reading motif within this novel juxtaposes the limited masculine world as perceived and understood by the young protagonist with an ideal world where masculine endeavor is richly rewarded and masculinity itself is unbounded in its potential.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Dr. Aránzazu Calderón Puerta, for her insights into perpetrator memory during our discussion of the subject in December 2019. 2 Interestingly, the child protagonist has become a national symbol of the Edenic lost childhood of the Spanish Second Republic and is associated with the evocation of an uncritical nostalgia (Gómez López-Quiñones 58). To cite just one example, the child protagonist of Luis Mateo Díez’s 2007 novel, La gloria de los niños, Pulgar, meets a host of unsavory characters in his search for his lost siblings, but his will to unite his family never falters. Mateo Díez’s novel is suffused with sentimentality and is clearly designed to create a nostalgia for a country in which moral absolutes and family unity prevailed.

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress

85

3 It is tenable that the predominance of child protagonists reflects the idolisation of the child. According to Giles Tremlett, Spain is the best country in the world in which to be a child (65). Spain is, undoubtedly, a child-centric country that places the child at the heart of the family, and thus narratives featuring child protagonists are more appealing to Spanish readers. 4 It is necessary to emphasise that Hirsch herself has asked but not answered this question: “Is postmemory limited to victims, or does it include bystanders and perpetrators, or could one argue that it complicates the delineations of these positions, which in Holocaust studies, have come to be taken for granted” (“Generation of Postmemory” 57). 5 Paradigmatic of this attitude is Judith Herman’s assertion that “all the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil” (7–8).

5

Internal Exile and Resistance in Las tres bodas de Manolita

Las tres bodas de Manolita can be classified as a bildungsroman, in which the immature Manolita, “la señora conmigo no contéis,” develops into a resourceful young woman.1 Similar to the majority of the post-war female characters in Los episodios de una guerra interminable, Manolita has strong ideas and preoccupations, which propel her to forge a path to self-determination. She is charged with her siblings’ welfare following the imprisonment of her father and stepmother in the post-war period and her brother’s disappearance. This reclamation of a specifically gendered memory was inspired by the social fragmentation caused by the Spanish recession. Importantly, Grandes took a hiatus from writing Las tres bodas de Manolita to complete a book on the Spanish recession, Los besos en el pan, which was published in 2015. Although set in different time periods, the two books are united by their concern with the concept of solidarity, a social phenomenon that came to obsess Grandes during the economic recession. The author opines that the current version of political and social solidarity, emblematised by smallparty and citizen-based movements such as Podemos and Ciudadanos, represents an individualised and geographically restricted form of solidarity that contrasts with the authentic solidarity experienced by historically alienated individuals. In her words: “mi punto de vista es el de los resistentes que son los que se levantan e intentan hacer. Pero la solidaridad es diferente a la anterior por el individualismo feroz de estos tiempos, porque no hay trincheras comunes y se expresa en acciones individuales admirables, no hay movimiento que recoja todo” (qtd. in Arenas). True to the series’ emphasis on the reinscription of alterity, this novel exposes and undoes the ostracism of a variety of marginals who defy heteronormative gender norms and are considered degenerate by extant state discourse: male prisoners, an exploited child, Isabel Perales García, a working-class heroine, the protagonist Manolita Perales García and three generations of prostitutes. All these characters can be defined as “internal exiles” (Tabori 22). Paul Tabori contended that exile encompassed not only expulsion from one’s native country but also exclusion from one’s own community in the homeland, a process he termed “internal exile” (23). In other words, an individual may be alienated from the community within which

Internal Exile and Resistance

87

she or he lives, even within his or her own country. The internal, in Tabori’s theorisation, refers to geographical parameters, but instead of being exiled outside of the nation state, the individual is marginalised within the state. Ostracism within the community is an unofficial internal exile whereby one exists but lacks any sense of belonging to the community and may even feel threatened by it.2 In a wide-ranging analysis, I examine the ways in which imaginative spaces of resistance; the creation of queer urban utopias; emotional communities; and the triad of female economic independence, bodily decline, and sexuality function to reimagine and reconfigure this internal exile during the period 1892 to the post-war period. These marginal characters adopt a panoply of cultural, spatial and economic strategies that are inherently communitarian, and in so doing, they reassert their individual agency, instating their claims to a selfhood denied to them by an exclusionary and gendered construction of nationhood. In effect, they strive to flourish by obtaining some of the prerequisites of eudaimonia, such as control over the imagination, freely chosen affiliation to others and control over one’s environment. I will also analyse the self-justificatory narrative of the perpetrator, Roberto Conesa, in order to assess whether institutional perpetration supersedes the individual conscience.

Resistance in Carceral Universes Las tres bodas de Manolita is Grandes’ most multi-dimensional portrayal of masculinity as the male characters are not simply the usual archetypes of incorrigible womanisers and feckless fathers that proliferate in her fiction. María Águilera Gamero opines that Grandes divides her men into hombres fuertes and débiles (strong and weak men) but, according to her, almost all of Grandes’ male characters are cowards who lack moral integrity or, alternatively, are underdeveloped reprobates, who are allocated little narrative space in which to develop their personalities (78). In this novel, Grandes engages in an active rethinking of the moral, spatial and physical manifestations of masculinity to produce an infinitely more layered discourse regarding the potential for masculine self-transformation that challenges traditional hegemonic masculinity itself. Illness and atonement shape and mold the identities of the Republican male prisoners in the all-male prison of la cárcel de Porlier, which morphs into a synecdochical space for the exclusion of those who challenged extant political and sexual discourses on morality and society. Foucault’s theory of “docile bodies,” which refers to the somatisation of the intense surveillant power in a penal and segregatory setting, illuminates the carceral enfeeblement of the male body. The possibility of being observed guarantees control in principle, “inducing in the inmate a state of permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault “Discipline and Punish” 201). Male bodies in la cárcel de Porlier are disintegratory corporeal

88

Internal Exile and Resistance

spaces of pain and abjection that present a varied physical symptomatology, cardiological, nervous and mental, which signal the deleterious effects of confinement on the male body. The narrator refers to Porlier’s male prisoners as “esos hombres quebrantados, frágiles y hambrientos” (Grandes 152). A prisoner, Domingo Girón, is described as having “el cuerpo consumido, más que flaco” (251), while the marquess, Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, is transformed into “un anciano al que apenas le quedaban fuerzas para sonreír” (154). In her study Carceral Geographies, Dominique Moran contends that the docile body is a façade that prisoners adopt while under observance, which does not equate to an internalisation of the penal institution’s values (22). Prisoners, she opines, transcend the boundaries of physical imprisonment to take control of their time-space through the creation of material and imaginary spaces that are unseen and not susceptible to regulation by the regime (22). Accordingly, male illness cannot be reduced to a debilitating force, for it also the catalyst for myriad strategies of resistance ranging from an epistolary and morally reconstitutive reckoning with the past to the creation of a euthanistic male homosociality.3 Manolita’s father’s, Antonio Perales García, illness evolves into a painful and unsparing psychological and moral retrospection which precipitates remorse for his past conduct: “en su carta, reconocía que no había sido ni un buen padre ni un buen marido” (136). Manolita later recognises that “la cárcel convirtió a mi padre en un hombre mejor, más consciente y sensible al sufrimiento ajeno” (Grandes 170). In trying to come to terms with his imminent execution, he is forced to confront his benign neglect of his family in pursuit of extramarital dalliances. The traumatic experience of prison is akin to a redemptive phase, which precipitates a self-critical meditation on his character flaws and the acknowledgment of this weakness to female family members. His expiatory withdrawal from the surrounding oppression into a selfcritical space controlled by his own imagination evidences what Goffman has termed a “secondary adjustment” that reinforces individuality, imbuing subjects with a degree of control over their hostile settings (“Asylums” 323). He defines it as “any habitual arrangement by which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization’s assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be” (189). Given the danger of direct resistance and the impossibility of physical escape, the individual retains his integrity by channeling his focus internally. In short, secondary adjustment implies individual practices of resistance that subtly undermine the institutional ethos. In keeping with Butler’s definition of vulnerability as communitarian, carceral constrictions give rise to new form of a somewhat macabre homosociality, as when two prisoners enable Dr. Velázquez to commit suicide. This act imbues male friendship with an immense significance and delineates how such intimacy can exist with, rather than be pitted against, heterosexuality. As the novel progresses, male homosociality will

Internal Exile and Resistance

89

be reassociated with homosexuality, which imbues it with a high degree of gender indeterminacy. Secondary adjustment and communitarian affect feature as forms of resistance that also mark the residence of Manolita’s twelve-year-old sister, Isabel Perales García, in a convent in the Basque country, which is based on the real-life story of the eponymous heroine, who, like her fictional namesake, was forced to carry out menial tasks in exchange for board and meager food allowances. Grandes encountered Isabel Perales in a left-wing meeting in Rivas, Madrid, in 2008, where she recounted her life story to the authoress. Her disfigured hands conveyed the awfulness of the state’s destruction of her childhood, but unlike the fictional Isabel, the real-life Isabel managed to make a successful life following her release from the institution, working as a seamstress and a dubbing actress in Spanish cinema. Perales’ testimony brings the reader into an immediate and compelling contact with those who have been degraded and victimised, legitimising stories of oppression of places and times that had not been institutionally sanctioned as sites of testimonial emergence until recently: in her video interview for this novel, Isabel Perales explicitly thanks Grandes for her witnessing of her testimony. The incorporation of her testimony illustrates the potential of language, literature and the mnemonic community created by el boom de la memoria to redo effacement, reinscribing the voice of the marginalised into the contemporary Spanish collective imaginary. This child character’s incarceration was validated by a pseudoscientific eugenics movement, led by Francoist psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nájera, who classified adhesions to communism, socialism and anarchism as a disease that had to be extirpated from the nascent Francoist state in order that “la raza,” defined as a patriotic and National Catholic variant of Spanishness, could flourish and predominate. Thus, he proposed a social panacea to the threat of their infiltration in society, namely a very severe discipline (12). As the Republicans’ traits were at antipodes to the prescribed national traits, the Republican prisoner or supporter had to undergo a transformation, which would involve the loss of freedom, hard labor in prisons, exile and the hereditary disgrace of their children in order to live peacefully in the New State (Vinyes 64). In relation to children, however, the regime transcended the parameters of symbolic violence and implemented their brutal repressive policy. Couched in the redemptory discourse so favored by the regime, the children were constantly told that their parents were reprobates and that they were now undergoing a type of purgatory in order to redeem their own parents (Pons Prades 254). Despite this, however, the children themselves were not exempt from the regime’s redeem and punish policy, as arbitrary beatings, food deprivations and acts of blatant sadism, one of which was forcing the children to endure the fierce midday heat, were commonplace in the orphanages (Pons Prades 257). Heavily influenced by Vallejo Nájera’s regenerationist thesis, this policy explicitly aimed to pre-empt any future communist threat to the state by

90

Internal Exile and Resistance

subjecting Republican children to a process of ceaseless indoctrination, as Aquilino García, a former resident of the Auxilio Social, bitterly recognises: “They forced us to sing hymns and wear uniforms honouring our parents’ jailers and killers, and to commemorate the death of the Nationalist martyrs of the Civil War, while blaspheming our own parents’ memory” (Vega Sombría 245). By 1942, 9,050 children were housed in religious schools. Essentially, these children were being punished for “crimes by association” (Leggott 69), a consequence of their paternal ideological affiliation. These organisations’ charitable rhetoric concealed a lucrative business venture for the convents, which obtained immense profits by dint of the children’s free labor. Commissioned by hotels and businesses to provide food, laundry services or sewing, the convents forced the children to work adult shifts and endure hunger and exhaustion (Vinyes 207). In Las tres bodas de Manolita, Isabel is obliged to wash clothes in caustic soda, which leaves her hands permanently disfigured, and thus, she is afflicted with what Charlotte Delbo terms “deep memory,” an ineradicable bodily memory of conflict and abuse. This theory posits the body as the register of memory and, by extension, as the repository of painful past experiences gradually integrated into the self (5). Delbo, an Auschwitz survivor, originally coined the term to refer to the permanence of the memory of the Holocaust. It creates, in the words of Haruki Murukami, “una especie de limbo de la memoria donde todos los recuerdos cruciales van acumulándose y convirtiéndose en lodo” (16), in effect, it constitutes a debilitating bodily force that prevents the individual from fully experiencing the present. This deep memory stands in contrast to the external memory, which can be defined as the social memory governing the individual’s intellect. Completely divorced from the sensory and emotive, this memory should allow the individual to verbalise the painful experience (Delbo 3). In this novel, the external memory cannot alleviate the psychic scars of deep memory, for Isabel’s trauma has no outlet for its articulation within the convent: “como los recuerdos dolían, no recordaba” (Grandes 321). Holocaust survivor Jean Améry posits that individual identity always relies on sustenance from either past achievements or future deeds to validate present subjectivity (58). This being so, the excision of the past from the child’s identity has the effect of placing all the emphasis on the future. Isabel’s happiness, following her release from the convent, is marred by the consumption that converts her as an adult into “aquel pajarito consumido y pálido” (Grandes 612). The indelible scars of the convent experience mean that her deep memory becomes a devitalising, sickening force that ultimately ends in her death. Despite her physical decline during her residence in the convent, affect, in the form of the kindness of one of the nuns, Madre Carmen, assuages the difficulties of Isabel’s confinement (348). Grandes thus represents the covert expression of female friendship, undergirded by an indirectly expressed sapphic longing, as an alternative to acts of futile and inconsequential rebellion such as the stealing and sharing of bread amongst the children. The

Internal Exile and Resistance

91

germination of lesbian attraction between Isabel and the nun forges an affective connection which counters institutional alienation: “El cariño de la monja le calentaba el corazón, pero aunque no sabía descifrar la naturaleza de los indicios que detectaba, intuía que podía llegar a ser peligroso para las dos” (348). Madre Carmen’s floral tending symbolically reaffirms her pedagogical and affective role in enabling Isabel’s flourishing within the convent. Their inclination toward a contemporaneously proscribed affective experience subtly indicts the sublimation of sexual desire expounded by National Catholicism, demonstrating the unstoppable circulation and even distortion of sexuality in a place dedicated to propounding the virtues of sexual self-abnegation. Together, Madre Carmen and Isabel demonstrate a model of vulnerability and mutual dependence that has them working together consensually toward self-love, affection and musical appreciation, a dyad that instates a non-hierarchical and cultural relationality in a rigidly stratified institution. In a similar manner to Antonio Perales’ epistolary reprieve in la cárcel de Porlier, Isabel’s physical imprisonment also involves the surmounting of her constraining time-space through the auditory stimulation provided by choral practice, which enables her to effectuate an intellectual and psychological fugue to connect with her private inner self (347). We glean Isabel’s newfound musical fervor at various moments: the fragments of music stored in the recesses of her mind facilitate her endurance of la hermana Raimunda’s disdain, and also enable her to detach herself psychologically from the mundane task of ironing (342). Martha Nussbaum’s comments on the cathartic power of music are particularly pertinent: “creating (or listening to) a musical representation, we show ourselves in it, and allow it to show us. We refuse to allow ourselves to be rejected by the angels, and we simply exist, tenderly and without resentment” (740). The child’s intense withdrawal transcends the physical in a way that suggests that the mind can be separated from the body as a survival strategy to overcome the suffering of the body, which substantiates Descartes’ theory of Cartesian dualism that propounds the separation of mind and body.4 Isabel’s Cartesian body is possessed of a special dignity that shows that she is capable of imagining her identity as an entity dissociable from her vulnerable and damaged body which has been instrumentalised in the convent’s quasi-industrial regime. Her imaginative segue into delusional daydreams of another life ostensibly reconceives her prison life as a “provisional existence” (Frankl 80), which accentuates the unrealness of the carceral experience: “sonar no le hacía daño y aceptar la realidad era muy dolorosa para ella” (Grandes “Tres Bodas” 347). Furthermore, her choral participation conforms to a type of self-preservation that affirms Viktor Frankl’s belief that “any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength must show him some future goal” (84). In channeling her sorrow into the social activity of the choir, Isabel forms attachment based on individual and collective future-oriented goals, such as her desire to become a nun in order to obtain an education and singing

92

Internal Exile and Resistance

for the Archbishop during his visit, rather than dwelling on her present tribulations in private. Music thus evolves into a particularly effective psychological defense mechanism that palliates her corporeal and affective vulnerability while providing a source of community in a relatively atomised institution. Similar to the child protagonist in El lector de Julio Verne, cultural spaces are indispensable to living a life of eudaimonia and to achieving a limited type of flourishing.

Perpetrator Memory The case of the real-life Roberto Conesa, a Francoist henchman, whose unscrupulous professional ascent in the Brigada Social is chronicled, expands Grandes’ exploration of male subjectivity. The rendition of his involvement in torture and killings, his meteoric rise in the Brigada Social, and the emphasis on the humbleness of his social origins, negotiates questions of causation, complicity and collaboration which troublingly and simultaneously ascribe and disavow perpetrator guilt and responsibility. His revulsion of torture is highlighted throughout the novel and contrasts starkly with the lack of narrative scope allotted to his victims. Conesa’s acts are alternatively presented as a blinding obedience to orders (452) and acts of vengeance for childhood slights, causes of perpetration that are divorced from ideological and national concerns. His maternally wrought emasculation as a child engenders a desire to assert his masculinity through unconscionable acts of violence. Far from being imminently condemnable as an immoral psychopath, Conesa is transmogrified into an understandable, if detestable, human being, grappling with a moral quagmire that is not apparently of his own making – “yo me limité a seguir los ordenes” (452) – and he also experiences the physical symptom of self-defecation that also afflicted Antonino in El lector de Julio Verne. However, the narrative focus on this symptomatology is not designed to inspire compassion for the perpetrator, but to hypostatise his cowardice: “Roberto el Orejas no era un hombre valiente” (598). During his wife Paquita’s babbling, Conesa is assailed by a sudden confessionary urge: En aquel momento, le habría gustado contarle una parte de la verdad. No toda, que era un traidor, un torturador, un hombre despreciable, sino una parte, confesarle al menos que trabajaba en la Policía y no en el Ministerio de Agricultura, que su trabajo era muy duro, que le exigía hacer cosas feas, complicadas, difíciles de entender. (469) These sentiments could be construed as a realistic transcription of the aforementioned moral dilemma or melodramatic self-pity, but, to my mind, they raise the issue of whether institutionally sanctioned perpetration annuls the power of the individual.5 As desubjectified beings, individuals are able to shift responsibility from the self to the system, and they are, in their own

Internal Exile and Resistance

93

opinion, guilty of acting within an unshirkable structure of auto-compliance, entering what Bauman has termed an “agentic state,” effectively the generation of heteronomous thought that gives the illusion of agency. Based on Stanley Millgram’s experiments on obedience and perpetration, Bauman holds that the capacity for rationalisation, inherent in modernity, conferred the perpetrators of the Holocaust with an agency that permitted them to carry out the extermination without remorse. To prove the magnitude of this impersonal, institutional power, Bauman invokes Gunther Anders’ 1959 construal of Heidegger’s conception of “the sensitivity of techne to the historical transmutations of forms of life, racing far beyond human imagining powers and in its turn overpowering the very human capacity that brought it in to being” (Bauman 146). He effectively suggests that bureaucratic rationality and technological advances diminished the capacity of the individual to engage in moral decision-making and self-reflection on their actions, as their only agency derived from institutional dictates. In his words: “once a contraption allowing the separation of technological capacity from moral imagination is put in place, it becomes self-propelling, self-reinforcing and self-reinvigorating, a routine conditioned reflex” (145). Bauman’s undervaluation of the role of individual human agency in the actions he describes effectively exculpates the perpetrators, reduced as they are to mindless automatons. In my opinion, Conesa’s blaming of the institution can be said to more accurately reflect a moral disengagement, a subliminal psychological process that enables perpetrators to construe a version of reality in which their own actions are not reprehensible and therefore do not lead to self-sanction (Bandura 62). In short, Conesa disowns his own moral failings, which are subsumed under the inescapability of institutional orders, a diffusion of responsibility that preserves intact the perpetrator’s identity as a decent, morally upright person. His invocation of the necessity of protecting Paquita, the wife he secretly despises, at the expense of his own happiness, corroborates his capacity for self-deception. Thus, rather than a routine-conditioned reflex, his malign acts correspond to a conscious set of decisions made to obtain a higher social status. The choice of verbs “se fue convenciendo” (Grandes 461) pinpoints the intricacy of the authoress’s portrayal of the perpetrator’s thought processes and reflects her commitment to portraying a wide variety of perpetrator motivation and experience. In this particular case, she clearly does not intend to humanise the perpetrator, but rather to portray his deceitfulness and to disprove the idea of the institutional supersession of the individual conscience in acts of torture.

Homosexuality, Utopias and Urban Space Grandes examines the impact of a new age of gendered national debates, sexological polemics and rural–urban migration on Spanish manhood from the turn of the century to the post-war period. Throughout this multifaceted trajectory, male identity is shored up and shattered, symmetries are erected

94

Internal Exile and Resistance

and immediately problematised, and binary oppositions are dissolved. In Las tres bodas de Manolita, gender and spatial politics are inextricably linked, and space functions as a framework within which gender contextualises urban culture. Madrid is reimagined as a site of counter-hegemonic sexualities where subjects reimagine gender norms according to their individual desires, which recovers the expansive gendered and spatial memory of the 1920s and 1930s, an era in which liberal and conservative forces vied to instate their vision of Spanish masculinity. The relationship between La Palmera, Manolita’s brother Antonio el guapo, and the aristocrat Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent reflect the blurring of the rigid divide between masculinity and homosexuality in 1920s and 1930s Madrid, when the capital city morphed into what critical geographers Gill Valentine and David Bell term “a queer city,” defined as spaces of gays and lesbians or queers, including domestic spaces, existing in opposition to and as transgressions of heterosexual space (35). They contend that cities are not inherently sexualised, but rather are sexualised by the tense interplay between the imposition of heteronormative gender dictates and the subject desires of the individuals who negotiate urban spaces. For these theorists, queer space acts offer a radical and affirmative alternative to heterosexual space.6 Bell and Valentine state: “the presence of queer bodies in particular locations forces people to realize that the space around them, the city streets have been produced as (ambiently) heterosexual, heterosexist and heteronormative” (18). Similarly, obtaining visibility and space in oppressive locations and circumstances is an important queer tactic. Thus, there is a deeply constitutive relationship between queer citizens and city space, and cities often have a unique liberating effect for queer-identified people (Evans and Cooke 7). In the 1930s, the convoluted urban space of Madrid creates discernible, although not unlimited, ruptures in the heteronormative regulation of sexuality. This spatial shift reflected contemporaneous sexological and regenerationist debates, and the furor generated by increased secularisation and urbanisation. During the 1920s, a scientific counter-discourse, which hinted at a latent homosexuality within Spanish males, shattered national perceptions of a staunchly heterosexual male identity. The eminent scientist Dr. Gregorio Marañón’s study of Don Juan iconoclastically suggested that the Spanish seducer par excellence was intersex, defined by him as an amalgam of masculinity and femininity. In Marañón’s estimation, Don Juan was effete and “pseudovirile,” and his incessant pursuit of women was construed as a drain on scarce national resources (Wright, “Gregorio Marañon” 55).7 Dr. Marañón’s controversial theses incited widespread controversy amongst both his peers and the general public who became conversant with his theories through the celebrated review Sexualidades. His theories caused a public questioning of the contemporaneous dichotomous gender binaries and generated a panoply of conflicting viewpoints amongst Spanish sexologists. In 1932, Doctor Antonio San de Velilla emphasised that more draconian legislation was needed to eradicate homosexuality in his book Sodoma y

Internal Exile and Resistance

95

Lesbos modernas. In contrast, the liberal lawyer Luis Jiménez de Asúa advocated the decriminalisation of homosexuality on the contradictorily homophobic premise that homosexuality was an illness (Bejel 78). These sexological and identarian debates culminated in the legislative ratification of the question of homosexuality. The 1928 Penal Code made homosexuality a criminal offence, punishable by a two- to twelve-year prison sentence (Mira 73). Significantly, homosexuality had not been addressed in the penal code until that date. In 1932, homosexuality was decriminalised, and the 1933 Ley de Vagos y Maleantes stated its main aim as to forge a tolerant state that would protect and “help homosexuals” (Cleminson and Vázquez García 68). However, the magnitude of these advances was hindered by the social force of Catholic morality (52). These pioneering sexual advances are personified in this novel by the real-life figure of the marquess, Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, who incarnates the imbrication of this sexological ferment with the regenerationist debates centering on the future of the nation. This aristocrat, dubbed the Spanish Oscar Wilde, has been a perennial favorite of novelists and features in novels by Ramón de Valle Inclán, Carmen de Burgos and Gómez de la Serna. Scion of an aristocratic family, de Hoyos y Vinent enjoyed a cosmopolitan education in Vienna and Oxford. Upon his return to Spain, he transcended class privilege and conventional sexual mores to venture into the subterranean world of rent boys and to write enormously popular, semi-pornographic novels. His output was prodigious: during the period 1902–1939 he published thirty-eight novels, eight short novels, seven collections of stories and five plays, as well as articles in newspapers and magazines (Zamostny 299). The nobleman had a noticeable predilection for the sordid underbelly of urban life; an old friend of his, César González Ruano, remembers exploring with him the “bailes de máscaras en los barrios bajos” and the “bares de cante” in 1919, uncovering a “Madrid secreto y golfo verdaderemente fantástico” (Alfonso García 66). In her insightful study of the aristocrat, María del Carmen Alfonso García claims that the aristocrat’s forays into the demi-monde were propelled by his desire to enter a world in which socially prohibited passions were not regulated by the intricate laws of conduct and decorum that governed his high-class social universe (77). During the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936, the nobleman spurned his class in favor of anarchism and support of the less privileged. The vituperation that the aristocrat inspired during his lifetime and posthumously is not only a function of homophobia, but can also be ascribed to the national regenerationist debates that had intensified since the humiliating 1898 loss of the Spanish colonies Cuba and the Philippines. This enforced decolonisation provoked fears about racial and gendered degeneration and the effeminacy of Spanish men, which was perceived as having contributed to Spain’s humiliating defeat against the United States in 1898. For the regenerationists, effeminacy was equated with male intellectualism, which gave rise to a pathology, “neurasthenia,” that presented itself in the symptoms of

96

Internal Exile and Resistance

enervation, languidness and, of course, effeminacy. An explicit correlation between intellectualism and homosexuality also permeated this discourse; “un hombre perezoso, entregado al vicio o enervado por la profesión sedentaria, se afemina con facilidad” (qtd. in Cleminson and Vázquez García 184). The decadent Spanish nobility was the primary target of regenerationist discourse; critics alleged that their lack of virility, indolence and their poor education had not only undermined Spain’s colonial ambitions but had also oppressed the working class, whose natural vigor and stamina had been undermined by the improvident economic decisions of and exploitation by their aristocratic paymasters. Importantly, the aristocracy’s predilection for urban centers, thought to be foci of vice, was invariably cited as further proof of their innate degeneracy (Cleminson and Vázquez García 177). Despite this jingoistic discourse, the myriad legislative and social changes previously described produced a less homophobic Madrid that permitted an unprecedented expression of homosexual desire, while still enforcing segregational spatial injunctions that constricted homosexual desire to class-stratified milieus, which also promoted inegalitarian homosexual relationships. From the outset of the novel, the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936, is celebrated as “el tiempo de los maricones,” an era in which homosexuality flourished primarily in Madrid, which was transformed into a veritable utopia of queerness. In his description of the sexual subculture of Republican Madrid, José Esteban emphasises the city’s sexual liberalism that was akin to “un desmadre, una juerga y un Eros liberado” (37). However, the establishment of Madrid as a utopia is problematic on a temporal level. Lee Edelman’s study No Future excludes queer subjects from futurity altogether, which he deems to be based on reproduction. For Edelman, the future belongs to parents and their progeny, and is thus implicated in the repronormative and the antiqueer. Before Edelman, Leo Bersani’s Homos laid the theoretical ground for the logic of queer anti-relationality when he insisted on sexuality (mostly gay male) as an anti-communal mode of unbelonging. Thus, for Edelman and Bersani, queerness is theorised exclusively in relation to anti-futurity and unproductivity. In contradistinction to antirelationality, queer futurity, argues Muñoz, “does not underplay desire. In fact, it is all about desire” (30). Muñoz insists on the inextricability of utopian thinking and queerness – in fact, queerness can be apprehended only through the utopian: it is an “ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). His analysis counters critical utopianisms that discount homosexuality’s creative possibilities by anchoring the queer in terms of unproductivity rather than creativity. In this novel, the apparent subversion of immutable class relations in queer places conveys a similar utopian desire in that it potentiates the possibility of an alternative future by directly confronting what Muñoz, in a different context, calls the “poisonous and insolvent” conditions of the present, namely a rigid classist, homophobic and historically longstanding social stratification. Nevertheless, the underlying persistence of these biases

Internal Exile and Resistance

97

vitiates the present, undermining its capacity to elaborate a distinct and homophilic future. La Palmera’s ostracism in his home village, his forcible ejection from his home by his own brother and his impoverishment in Seville affirm the apparent unacceptability of homosexuality outside of the principal cities. Interestingly, the spatial expression of homosexual desire in both rural and urban spaces disputes the extant dichotomy of homophobic rurality and progressive homophilic urbanity. La Palmera’s attempted rationalisation of his attraction to Manolita’s brother, Antonio el guapo, is based on a contrast with his former lovers, virile agricultural laborers and truck drivers who had enjoyed brief and covert homosexual experiences in rural villages (109). This experimentation testifies to the far-reaching influence of the previously discussed sexological controversies that propelled the issue of homosexuality into the public sphere and sanctioned male sexual experimentation in conservative rural areas. The future potentiality inherent in queerness leads to the homosexuals’ viewing of their present situation, in which homophobia flourishes, as a form of dystopian endurance, which their queerness and their belief in a queer utopian future enable them to transcend (Muñoz 1). La Palmera’s queerness drives him to search for the ideal space where his sexuality can be fully accepted, which he finds in the city and, more specifically, in de Hoyos y Vinent’s palace. This spatial transition substantiates the notion that movement in space, more specifically from rural to urban space, constitutes a means of negotiating male homosexuality as it facilitates the enactment of an autonomous gender performance. The sexual liberation enjoyed by La Palmera in Madrid is reflective of the increasing social acceptability of homosexuality and urbanisation by urban liberals, an attitude that was equated with vice and moral decadence by a more conservative and rural public (Cleminson and Vázquez García 28).8 Initially, Madrid is an inhospitable and overwhelming space in which La Palmera earns his living as a dancing beggar in la Puerta del Sol, a precarity that comes to an end upon his acquaintance with the aristocrat, who arranges a well-remunerated job as a flamenco dancer for him, despite his paltry dancing skills. De Hoyos y Vinent’s tutelage shapes the course of La Palmera’s self-fashioning and, by extension, the impecunious young man’s confidence in his ability to control his own life, sexuality and spatial environment. The 1932 decriminalisation of homosexuality makes these characters’ traversal of the city a tribute to the decreasing hegemony of heteronormativity, which emphasises an entitlement to queer difference, the construction of mixed homosexual and heterosexual families of solidarity and support, and the advocacy of strategies of resistance to mainstream, heteronormative values. In this novel, the city of Madrid metamorphoses into a fluid and sometimes contentious site of homosexual encounters that unsettle gender binaries. In the early years of the Second Republic, de Hoyos y Vinent openly approaches La Palmera in the Puerta del Sol and invites him to dine with him. In 1935, La Palmera spots Antonio el guapo on a

98

Internal Exile and Resistance

street corner, follows him to his place of work, and once ejected forcibly by him, he pursues him to a nearby bar. It is noteworthy that La Palmera perceives a distinct curiosity, even openness, to his homosexual overtures in the staunchly heterosexual Antonio’s initial rebuff, which conveys the increasing legitimacy of homosexual desire in 1930s Madrid: El vendedor de semillas era demasiado deseable como para que fuera la primera vez que le abordaban desde la acera de enfrente, y aunque no parecía halagado por su interés, había sido capaz de detectarlo sin ceder el impulso de echarle a patadas. (Grandes “Las tres bodas” 107) La Palmera’s pursuit and propositioning of Toni converts the Madrid urban fabric, its streets, la Gran Vía and calle Santa Isabel, into a cartography of unrequited homosexual desire, and his pining for Toni projects this desire into the resolutely heterosexual space of Toni’s workplace, the seed warehouse (108). According to De Certeau, being a “walker,” a Wandersmänner, encodes a challenge to the city’s regulatory oppressiveness (128). Space has neither author nor spectator; and a walker is an easily forgotten passerby, who blends effortlessly into the urban topography (121), and therefore, his traversal invalidates binding urban rules, the invisible boundaries that dictate the movements of its denizens (Elkin 286). La Palmera’s solitary wandering offers liberty, in antithesis to the suffering subjectivity he experienced in the countryside, thus propitiating a transcendent, cathartic liberation from social ostracism. His trundling through the city streets resexualises the urban terrain, interjecting homosexual longing into the flamenco bar, which becomes the scene of La Palmera’s uneasy relationship with Toni, who tolerates La Palmera’s obvious infatuation with him because it grants him sporadic access to the beautiful Eladia, La Palmera’s flatmate and the object of Toni’s affections. The friendship between La Palmera and Toni creates a fusion between male heterosexuality and homosexual desire that acquired legitimacy during this period. Rather than a “geography of resistance” that challenges Madrid’s “geography of authority,” the urban fabric of Madrid during the Second Republic is constructed by the fluctuating balance of power between these two sexual landscapes, the heterosexual and the homosexual, a tension that challenges hegemonic masculinity and partially legitimises homosexuality. Madrid as homosexual utopia implies an impenetrable type of paradise, which ultimately fates the queer utopian to failure once social variables intervene to puncture this perfection: in this case, the apparently unlimited spatial unfettering of homosexual desire is undermined by spatial and linguistic class biases. De Hoyos y Vinent and La Palmera’s entrance into a posh restaurant is facilitated only by the marquess’s elevated social status, and La Palmera is studiously ignored by the fawning waiter. Similarly, the conveyance of class distinction is detectable in the marquess’s constant interjection of French phrases into his conversations with the uneducated La

Internal Exile and Resistance

99

Palmera, whose ignorance reveals his lack of refinement and humble social extraction. This inegalitarianism will be further perpetuated in the queer domestic place of de Hoyos y Vinent’s palatial mansion in calle del Marqués de Riscal, which previously housed a famous literary salon where the aristocrat hosted nobles and writers such as Carmen de Burgos and Emilia Pardo Bazán (Alfonso García 28). According to contemporaneous accounts, this was a distinctly snobbish milieu where las tertulianos condescendingly remarked on “las cosas que pasaban en Madrid,” and in which the session participants embarked on intense intra-class competition to outdo their social equals in witty repartee (28). Abiding as it does by a strict set of upper-class social rules and decorum, the insertion of homosexual desire transforms the palace’s elitist ethos by blurring class and spatial boundaries. Andrew Gorman Murray contends that a domestic gay space is established by “the deleting or limiting reminders of the discursive function between the domestic space and the heterosexual nuclear family or heteronormative socialisation” (108). Queerying domestic space implies the disputation of the inherent heteronormativity of domestic space, affirming non-normative socialisation and identity affirmation by “opening up the private space of the home, inviting in external non-normative counter-discourses, bodies and activities” (109). Although the palace does not entirely invert the power and privilege of the elite, it does sporadically, during the aristocrat’s legendary New Year’s Eve parties and Toni’s birthday party, provide a world turned upside down, a strange utopia in which everyone (elite and illicit) thinks and even acts according to counter-hegemonic principles. The palace is envisaged as a porous and fluid place that has ostensibly eradicated class and gender boundaries and is permeated with an uncontrollable sexuality, as the following quotation aptly demonstrates: Desde luego, debió enterarse, porque antes de que la derecha volviera al poder, el palacio de su familia se había convertido ya en la sucursal madrileña de Sodoma y Gomorra, un escándalo sin límite que cada mañana arrojaba un número indeterminado de cuerpos semidesnudos de ambos sexos que dormían la mona en los sofás, en las alfombras, y hasta en la cama de la señora marqués. Ahora parecía que sus fiestas no tuvieran más objeto que darle la oportunidad de renegar a gritos de sus orígenes. (Grandes 92) The sumptuous palace embodies and constructs queer space in an egalitarian manner, inconceivable outside its walls, with celebrities such as the actor Pepito Zamora and the exotic dancer Tórtola Valencia mingling with the proletariat at the New Year’s Eve parties. The narrator recounts: “no faltó de nada, hombres vestidos de mujeres, mujeres vestidas de hombre, bailarines desnudos, bailarinas desnudas, y hasta una vieja vedette retirada que se chutaba morfina” (119). The inversion of gender roles is sartorially

100

Internal Exile and Resistance

normalised by Eladia’s friend’s daring entrance in a male suit and another guest’s open fondling of a bare-breasted Eladia during the party (96). The palace features as a carnivalesque and disruptive place where no limits are imposed, and entry presupposes dispossession of sexual identities and gender conversion. Because the space of the palace develops as a space in opposition to the institutions of the family, heterosexuality, and reproduction, it further undermines the heteronormative logic of Madrid’s urban space. Toni’s homosexual interlude takes place during his birthday party held at the palace, when La Palmera has oral sex with him. The description of the encounter is deliberately ambiguous, inscribing both Toni’s reluctance and subsequent physical enjoyment, which causes the reader to doubt his heterosexual masculinity; “su cuerpo respondió por él para que su amante disfrutara de cada momento” (121). This ambiguity is further underscored by Toni’s purposefully open-ended riposte to La Palmera, “¿Te lo pasaste bien anoche?” (124), a query that disputes Toni’s putative ignorance of their sexual encounter and reconceives this incident as youthful male sexual experimentation (122). In so doing, Grandes further complicates and queers the ambivalent relationship between Toni and La Palmera, rejecting a sentimental (heteronormative) answer to a queer plot trajectory. The fluctuations in Toni’s masculinity reaffirm gender as socially constructed rather than a given and is evidently informed by the previously discussed scientific ideas about the fluidity of masculinity that had gained traction during the 1920s and 1930s. However, the palace’s privileging of elites who debauch by exploiting the workers of Madrid means that the space of de Hoyos y Vinent’s palace does not escape anti-egalitarian, stratified relationships based on class and gender. The aristocrat’s derisive allusion to Eladia as “carne de cañon” (135) denigrates the lower-class female, envisaged as simply a class interloper who is barely tolerated as a source of pleasure for elites. Furthermore, it is intimated that La Palmera acts as a procurer for the aristocrat, inviting “tramoyistas, soldados, chicos guapos” (90) to the palace, which legitimises homosexual relationships defined by their inequality. The presence of the lower-class body in this apparently utopian society compels its owner to redefine and reinstate borders, both internal and external, a concept that is anathema to the very notion of utopia. This ambivalence of the palace, its ability to inhabit both types of space, the hegemonic in terms of class, and the subversive/queer defines it as an ambiguous space that oscillates between the utopian and the banal, both defying and reinforcing class prejudices.

Female Work and Prostitution If the homosexual body symbolises a particular classed and social “internal exile,” the site of the post-war female body and prostitute bodies in this novel emblematise what Cunniff Gilson has termed “a negative vulnerability

Internal Exile and Resistance

101

stemming from the female body’s historical subjection to systemic violation, exploitation, objectification, and commodification” (75). If women are seen as vulnerable, it becomes the paternal powers’ responsibility to provide the necessary protection (Butler “Precarious Life” 109). Ironically, this patriarchal protection means that vulnerability and patriarchal dependence are locked in a complex dependency system that compounds female vulnerability (22). Indeed, it condemns the vulnerable woman to a life of inferiority and suggests they cannot act to escape their situation or take responsibility for themselves (32). The vulnerability of female internal exile is challenged in the novel by female characters’ obtainment of economic independence, which reduces their susceptibility to patriarchal control. The protagonist obtains a job in the bakery, Confitería Arroyo, through the intercession of her friend Rita whose aunt is the proprietress. The terms and conditions of the work itself are exploitative, and Manolita is paid only four pesetas a day, which, however, is sufficient to sustain her now reduced family, following her sister’s induction as a maid in another house. The proprietress is also chagrined to learn of Manuela’s literacy, preferring her to be illiterate and therefore more easily controllable, an attitude that seems to condemn Manolita to thankless exploitation. In post-war Spain, a confluence of legislative measures and discursive propaganda conspired to ensure the permanent reconsignment of Spanish women to the home. Under the Spanish Penal Code, women were considered as much a man’s property as his house and land, and a woman was required to obtain el permiso marital to travel abroad, open a bank account or engage in any commercial transaction. Work for women in the public sphere was regarded as an impermanent state, and correlated with poverty and desperation, thereby ignoring the reality that “women in Francoist Spain both needed and wanted to work” (Hudson-Richards 88). Consequently, a miniscule percentage of women, 12.1 percent, were registered in the official labour force in 1940 (102). These legislative measures were buoyed by a pejorative discourse that explicitly condemned the masculinisation of working women and its detrimental consequences for marital relations. This spate of legislation discounted the local, familial and personal circumstances, as well as personal motivation, that impelled women’s employment, and was evidently more prescriptive than realistic. It explicitly delegitimised and sexualised the small percentage of poverty-stricken, usually Republican, female workers employed as seamstresses, shop assistants or maids. By working, the protagonist dispels the notion of marriage as the Spanish post-war woman’s only goal in life. Grande’s choice of name for the young woman should itself be perceived as an introduction to the author’s counterdiscourse. Grandes named her in homage to the character Manolita of the 1984 film Las bicicletas son para el verano, a teacher who aspired to become an actress despite parental opposition and who subsequently married for self-interest (qtd. in Cruz). Both are female characters who tenaciously resist

102

Internal Exile and Resistance

the diktats of the patriarchal system, striving to find escape routes to avoid the seemingly inescapable destiny of domestic drudgery. Relatedly, the narrative emphasis on Manolita’s plainness can be classified as a feminist strategy to undermine the perennial association of female success with beauty in Spain. Furthermore, her resolve to walk to work and elsewhere, due to the unaffordability of the bus fare, disputes the notion, prevalent at the time, that women were constantly in need of care and protection: her action constitutes an impressive image of independence, which reverses the patriarchally imposed domestication and objectification of women. The description in a work of fiction of a woman walking alone, as Rebecca Solnit notes, is highly significant for our view of her level of autonomy and self-reliance (24). The protagonist’s subsequent train voyage to Bilbao to rescue her sisters Isabel and Pilar María from the convent consolidates this image of a female character predisposed to independent action, unafraid to traverse a public terrain in which women were frequently harassed. Unlike Manolita’s beleaguered literary antecessors, such as Gloria in Carmen Laforet’s Nada, Natalia in Mercé Rodoreda’s La placa del diamante, and Elena in Alberto Méndez’s classic short-story “Los girasoles ciegos,” Manolita does not suffer the repercussions of patriarchal ire at their violation of the gendered private/public divide in the form of male domestic violence and sexual harassment. Her singlehood liberates her from a negative masculine reaction and provides her with a mobility legislatively prohibited to Spanish women under the draconian “permiso marital,” which required a husband’s permission for the issuing of a passport to their wives or to open a bank account. Manolita exemplifies the rare self-sufficient post-war woman, and this realignment of post-war women with capital and mobility, however limited, explicitly dismantles the passive ángel del hogar stereotype. Certainly, it is tenable that Grandes was influenced by María Dueñas’ phenomenal 2009 bestseller, El tiempo entre costuras, which recounts the rise of the working-class seamstress Sira Quiroga to becoming the doyenne of a Madrid luxury fashion house. The conducting of all economic transactions by marginal characters – the exotic dancer, Eladia and La Palmera – further disputes the idea of post-war women’s economic subservience to men. Except for minor concessions, such as showing her breasts to the local idiot in exchange for bread, for the most part the protagonist survives outside the ambits of patriarchal authority. Her refusal to participate in a quid pro quo situation with her landlord Don Federico, by which she would sleep with him in return for a rent reduction, exemplifies this determination to forge her own path, however arduous that might be. In this way, Grandes rewrites women’s post-war roles to permit them more agency as the breadwinners, albeit inadequate, of the private sphere, and as independent of male economic and gendered authority. It posits the protagonist as the economic lynchpin of her family and also of her male relatives, and as such, is a strikingly divergent treatment of the theme of post-war female self-development, which is invariably depicted as

Internal Exile and Resistance

103

stymied by women’s position as second-class citizens or their imprisonment in novels such as Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida. In consonance with Grandes’ advocacy of communal values, Manolita’s triumph over adversity is not a wholly individual feat, however, because the construction of quasi-familial bonds to people marginalised under the monolithic and inflexible gender norms of the post-war period sustains her emotionally. Manolita’s deep friendship with some of the female members of “la cola de la cárcel de Porlier,” and her reliance on La Palmera, and the exotic dancer Eladia ironically culminates in the creation of “emotional communities.” The cola de la cárcel de Porlier creates an inter-class and mutually supportive unity that erases all differences: “como si todas las mujeres de la cola fuéramos una sola, como si todos los presos de Porlier fueran el padre, el hermano, el marido de todas” (253). As was the case with the all-female family in El lector de Julio Verne, these women’s release from constraining and phallocentric constructs allows for a homosocial microcosmic society that imagines affective relief outside heteronormal society: for example, the women swap jokes and recipes, and Manolita consoles Rita in the wake of her father’s death. The dearth of a credible mother figure in Manolita’s life makes this gyn/ affection all the more important. Nancy Chodorow contends that women’s need for female affection is prompted by their desire to “re-experience the sense of dual unity they had with their mother” (“Reproduction of Mothering” 199–200). The recreation of the mother–daughter bond and strengthening of women’s relational capacities can be found in the creation and maintenance of important personal relations with other women (200). The narrative choice of portraying Manolita as motherless, only burdened by a grasping stepmother, facilitates the creation of a familial intersubjective dynamic that takes the form of these women’s reciprocal care and compassion in counterpoise to the laws of patriarchy. The cola de la cárcel de Porlier provides a substitute matriarchal lineage, strengthening the protagonist’s will to persevere in a world in which she, at least, can rely on the affinitive understanding of her female comrades, who draw on their repository of female lore to orient the young woman. This gyn/affection, which I discussed in Chapter 4 on El lector de Julio Verne, the exaltation of female unity, would also refute the prevalent critical assumption that Grandes privileges heteronormative relationships (Cibreiro 130). In fact, the maturation and intense personal development Manolita experiences in the cola de la cárcel de Porlier makes her subsequent marriage a loving, mutually supportive nexus in which both partners find optimum satisfaction, because the confidence imbued from this experience of female unity cements her resolve to live life on her own terms. The prominence of an intergenerational family of prostitutes in fn de siècle Madrid brings gyn/affection further to the fore, but also exposes its fragility in a patriarchal society. This family’s tribulations epitomise the delicate equilibrium among female vulnerability, female economic and sexual

104

Internal Exile and Resistance

power, a regulatory state gaze, and patriarchal tutelage that transforms into exploitation. Female prostitution prospered in modern Madrid, a society in flux, which witnessed an increase in population of 500,000 from 1900 to 1920. This demographic shift occasioned a radical overhaul of social mores (Parsons 24), which changed the social perception of women and ushered in a new era in eroticism, whereby a proliferation of accessible erotic magazines and novels “favoreció un vigoroso debate nacional sobre sexo y sensualidad, a pesar del notable esfuerzo de la Iglesia y del Estado por reprimirlo” (Zubiaurre, “Cultures of the Erotic” 49). Spanish Restoration-era medical and legal discourses on prostitution regulated sex in the capital, expounding the indispensability of prostitution to the maintenance of an ordered bourgeois society. In a speech imparted in the Academia Médico-Quirúrgica Española in 1877, Doctor Isidoro de Miguel y Viguri stated: La prostitución es una necesidad social, porque representa una válvula de seguridad que protege las instituciones más santas, evitando el desbordamiento de las pasiones brutales, conservando la tranquilidad en el seno de matrimonio y haciendo el adulterio mucho más raro de lo que sería en el caso contrario. (15–16) A 1902 medical document condemned prostitution as a regrettable but inevitable vice in a society in which the virtue of women deemed respectable was paramount and masculine carnality was not satiated by conjugal rights (Eslava Galán 89). Consequently, prostitution became a legal and highly regulated activity during the first third of the century and would not be made illegal until 1935 (91). The legalisation of prostitution marked a consequential shift in established gender hierarchies and produced meaningful new identities for women working in the sex trade. The figures corroborate the centrality of prostitution to urban life: in 1902 there were 1,432 prostitutes registered, and annually, an average of 664 were treated in public hospitals for venereal diseases (Eslava Galán 72). Simultaneously, the prostitute was subject to intense medical and state regulation, which was predicated on a pathologisation of the prostitute’s body, deemed to be a contaminant source of illness, and their consequent spatial exclusion from the public sphere. The foundational medical document, the 1869 reglamento de higiene especial, restricted prostitutes to their brothels, banning them from even loitering in brothel doorways. The prostitute was considered a vector for disease, which, when transmitted to their clients, would then infect the upstanding women of society. The supposed physiological and olfactory differences of their putrid bodies putatively accounted for their lack of socio-moral rectitude. In his 1882 treatise El tratado de higiene privada y pública, Benito Alcina described the prostitute as a monstrous being who presented myriad corporeal aberrations, such as “todos los estragos de la sífilis, las perturbaciones del sistema nervioso, la corea, epilepsia, imbecilidad y locura” (567). Doctors, more specifically, los

Internal Exile and Resistance

105

delegados facultativos de higiene, visited legal brothels on a twice-weekly basis to inspect the premises and to subject the prostitutes to an excessively invasive examination, effectuated with a speculum, of “la cabeza, boca, pechos, ano y aparato sexual” (Alcina 10). Any prostitute suspected of harboring a venereal disease could be subject to compulsory hospitalisation in the San Juan de Dios hospital, a curative stay to be paid at their expense. The novel’s portrayal of a genealogy of prostitution, the travails of three generations of a family of prostitutes during the period 1892 to the postwar period, associates the profession with vulnerability, agency, love and exploitation. The female body is envisioned as a producer of pleasure, disease social mobility (and immobility) and money, a multifaceted portrayal of prostitution that is a patent homage to Galdós’ fictionalisation of a savvy prostitute in novels such as his 1881 work, La desheredada. Eladia’s grandmother, Doña Eladia Torres Martínez, commenced working in a brothel in la calle Flor Alta in the early 1890s, when urban prostitution thrived in the capital (548). The exclusive and reductive conflation of the prostitute with the sexual woman, and in geographic terms, erotic gratification with the capital city, served to dispel the pervasive fear of a powerful female sexuality that was commodified and confined to Madrid brothels, some of which resembled ultra-sophisticated palaces of pleasure. In the words of Eslava Galán: “el aspecto de estas casas recordaba más bien un salón de casa burgués, con muebles acogedores y de aspecto lujoso, con alfombras y cortinas que sugieran un espacio respetable” (784). The relegation of Fernanda, Eladia’s unprepossessing prostitute friend, to a primarily rural clientele reinforces the idea of Madrid as a capital of sexual dissipation and euphoria, which occupied a hallowed place in the rural sexual imaginary. Fernanda’s rural provenance also confirms contemporaneous fears of the susceptibility of poverty-stricken rural girls to prostitution, which was more highly remunerated than domestic service (Roigé 767). A mythical interpretation underlined these socio-economic fears, wherein morally “pure,” poor Spanish virgins moved from the countryside to corrupt Madrid, where their sexual ruination ensued. Shattering these sexual myths, this novel’s fn de siècle brothel can be construed as an all-female milieu that propitiated the fiscal autonomy and sexual empowerment of its household members. Certainly, Fernanda’s earthy summation of her period as a prostitute in Doña Victoria’s brothel challenges the non-agentic conceptualisation of the prostitute, bringing into relief her joy at securing a private and personal space and alimentary plentifulness: “Al principio, le parecía mentira que nadie la regañara y más increíble aún que su flan permaneciera intacto, esperándola, en una cocina tan transitada como aquella, pero así era” (Grandes 550). Her experience of infrequent pleasurable sexual encounters is joyously relayed to Eladia: “¿Tú puedes creer que me he corrido y todo?” (552), a confidence that is suggestive of an exuberant and willful sensuality rather than vulnerability. Eladia, another rural female migrant, is characterised as quick-witted and

106

Internal Exile and Resistance

savvy, and she quickly learns how to accentuate her beauty and to acquire a more sophisticated polish to entice customers. The brothel is congenial to the formation of a female friendship between Eladia and Fernanda, a bond that indicates a resistance to the commodification that reduces them to inert physical spaces of consumption and resignifies prostitution as an agentic profession, conducive to female sexual pleasure, solidarity and even female initiative. These women’s attachment to each other is fundamental to the construction of a strong female identity in a patriarchal society. Nevertheless, extant historical accounts belie this utopian vision of the brothel, which figures as a controlling and disempowering place. In their 1901 book, La mala vida en Madrid, sociologists Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós and José María Llanas Aguilaniedo stressed the appalling conditions endured by prostitutes: “Las mujeres viven bajo la dependencia de una dueña, y la pupila es una verdadera esclava, la esclava del prostíbulo, explotada y maltratada” (247). Upon entering the brothel, women were divested of their property, including personal clothing, and their only wages were tips bestowed on them by customers (252). Eladia’s various abortions testify to the brothel’s ownership of the prostitute’s body that is explicitly and medically regulated for the purposes of economic profit. Tellingly, the narrator relates that Eladia receives advice from three doctors that she would not survive another abortion (552). It could be surmised that childbearing presupposed a serious economic hindrance for the brothel’s madam, Doña Victoria, who is unwilling to support an expecting prostitute who cannot entertain clients and, thus, cannot earn her keep. Interestingly, this crude realism does not equate to a condemnation of prostitution per se. In the attempt to “unsex” herself by becoming a cleaning woman and to embark on the path of conventional virtue, Fernanda succeeds in divesting herself of independence, economic power and spatial independence. The diminishment of her earnings and her move into a rented, miniscule room indicate that the path to common goodness is a downward spiral of impoverishment, which seems to undermine the contemporaneous extolment of women’s virtue, while paradoxically validating the commodification of the female body. In contrast, and unlike most prostitutes, Doña Eladia’s socio-economic participation in a circuit of exchange and consumption endows her with the protection and safety engendered from relationships forged in the brothel, with Fernanda assuming the care of her young child, and her most loyal customer, the judge Don Evaristo, providing them with a flat (552). Her sexuality is totally and definitively disengaged from the circuit of biologically meaningful activity and is strongly situated in the narcissistic circuit of pleasure related to prostitution and its higher status derivative, being a mistress, which signals the sexual power, fiscal autonomy, and, more interestingly, the bourgeois circumspectness that has garnered her an apartment and a quasi-respectability: “Eladia siempre se había comportado como una señora, una mujer madura, con recursos, que salía poco a la calle, y no daba que hablar” (559).

Internal Exile and Resistance

107

Yet, the constriction of Doña Eladia to a luxurious house complies with the first article of El reglamento de higiene especial, which stipulates the necessity of “el impedir que la prostitución se manifieste de un modo escandaloso, afectando a la moral pública” (5). Her restriction qualifies the extent of her freedom because it demonstrates that the successful crafting of herself as a luxury commodity does not exempt her from submission to the state spatial disciplining of prostitutes that negates any symbolic value that they may accrue. Her only outing, weekly visits to the dressmaker (546), cannot be considered emancipatory, corroborating as it does the social disparagement of women’s predilection for luxury. Female acquisitiveness, sartorial splendor and women’s rapacious consumerism was a nineteenth-century social and literary topos, which denigrated women addicted to luxury and economic gain as vain, ostentatious creatures. In his 1869 philippic, “La moralidad en España,” J. Jimenos Aguis attributed the increase in illegitimate children to female avarice for the latest fashions (Aldaraca 22). María Pilar Sinués de Marco, the founder of the popular magazine El ángel del hogar, paralleled sumptuary extravagance to “the cancer of our sex” (105). Even Pope Pius IX, in his encyclical “Concerning Women and Luxury” inveighed against the link between women’s profligate spending on consumer goods and their idleness, sexual waywardness and economic improvidence (102). Undeniably, Doña Eladia’s apparent invulnerability, deriving from her control over her property and purchases, is neutralised by severely regulatory, even admonitory, medical and moral discourses. As much as Doña Eladia exemplifies the limited sexual and economic power of the prostitute, the fate of her daughter, Mili, illustrates their vulnerability to disease, self-destruction, death and male abuse. Mili epitomises the putative decadence of the sybaritic modern young woman, the woman of the jazz era, who was spatially mobile and indiscriminating in her choice of pleasures and lovers (Larson 57).9 Sartorial markers underscore the unassimilability of Mili to the superficial bourgeois society to which this house of prostitutes aspire, classifying her, in Mary Douglas’s terms, as “dirt,” defined as “matter out of place,” that “which blurs, smudges, contradicts, or otherwise confuses accepted classifications” (52). Mili’s fine clothing on her first return visit in 1925 marks her as a foreigner in the eyes of Doña Eladia’s granddaughter, the child Eladia: “parecía extranjera, quizás por su ropa, suntuosa y extravagante” (543), and her legs remind the child of “figurines de París” (543). This observation evokes the contentious nineteenth-century afrancesamiento of Spanish culture, lending credibility to Unamuno’s insistence on national traditions as the preferable mode to preserve Spanish identity, in contradistinction to Ortega y Gasset’s pro-European thesis. Thus, the abject and the deviant feature as a foreign encroachment that is markedly unwelcome in a house possessed of only a tenuous respectability. Her grandmother’s purchasing of fine clothing materials, metonyms of gentility, to dress Eladia’s dolls acts as a compensation

108

Internal Exile and Resistance

for the disappearance of Mili from her daughter’s life. If we reflect on the verb choices that describe this process of sartorial redress, “desintoxicarla, neutralizar las consecuencias de las visitas de Mili” (547), with the fastidious insistence on the pulchritude of the child Eladia before the attiring of the dolls (546), we can come to the conclusion that clothing serves to sever contact between her abject mother and the proper bourgeois order of this household of prostitutes. Unsurprisingly, given the child’s discernment to fashion, the child, Eladia’s description of Mili’s physical decline, on her second visit, is scathing of her sartorial shabbiness, referring to her as “aquella mujer flaca y mal vestida, sin abrigo, sin joyas y con los nervios de punta” (556). Ironically, the disparity between the two visits, and the resultant diminution of the child’s affection for her mother, chimes with the pro-consumerist movement, which had gained traction at the start of the twentieth century. At polar odds to the vilification of the acquisitive woman, this movement venerated sartorial splendor as a measure of Spain’s modernistic progress and sophistication, even touting female apparel as a cipher for female creativity and social prestige (Heneghan 30), a historical context that reduces Mili to a regressive figure. Mili’s deviances, her addiction to morphine and her drug-induced enfeeblement, confirm the extant discourse of deviance and decadence associated with the new woman who was held to exercise a pernicious influence on public morals, and whose narcissistic excesses and hedonistic pursuit of pleasure were deemed antithetical to the maintenance of family unity and even public health. Building on a Foucauldian perspective, Pura Fernández contends that the diseased body of the prostitute jeopardises the social body, and, consequently, her body is confined and medicalised (28-9). The proliferation of allusions to the family’s desire for Mili’s departure and their surreptitious disdain for her, “Fernanda habría preferido que Mili se quedara para siempre en la otra punta del mundo” (554), “Eladia le mandaba dinero a su hija para que no volviera” (556), “se alegró de verla marchar” (556), encodes an implacable social logic, combining medical, moral, and economic considerations, which ironically aligns itself with bourgeois propriety. It is significant that it is Doña Eladia, Mili’s mother, who expresses her wish to dispatch Mili to a sanatorium in an admonishment devoid of all maternal compassion, “estás hecha una mierda, das asco” (560), a chastisement that exposes the delicate equilibrium between respectability and deviance that Doña Eladia encapsulates. She clings to the invulnerability wrought by her status as the former mistress of a judge, the performance of conservative social mores and the ownership of her own property. The libertarian and diseased Mili, who has become an object of exploitation in the hands of her abusive and opportunistic lover, Trinidad, threatens to contaminate the hard-won bourgeois space and must be spatially cloistered or paid to leave (560). This gendered medical logic ensures the perpetuation of patriarchy and of bourgeois social, economic and familial arrangements that make Mili’s disappearance necessary.

Internal Exile and Resistance

109

The story of the prostitutes turns darker when Doña Eladia’s desperation to secure Trinidad’s interest in her makes her a victim of the very sexual desire that she so adroitly manipulated in her youth to secure her own future. Trinidad’s plans to prostitute the young Lali rupture the unusual female control of their corporeal and financial capital, in the sense that he will be the one who puts the female merchandise on the market and disposes of the capital derived from the sale. Doña Eladia dismisses her granddaughter Eladia’s burgeoning beauty, alleging that Trinidad would not be attracted to such a young girl. We could ascribe the grandmother’s self-delusion to the waning of her sexual allure, a discourse which effectuates a complete reversal of values in which her granddaughter Eladia becomes an unwanted competitor. Her identity is inextricably linked with the social evaluation of her beauty, and its fading will condemn her to an inferior position in the image-conscious world in which, thus far, she has reigned supreme. Aging subjects her to those laws of nature, patriarchy and of bourgeois culture that her unconventional economic independence had defied for so long. This treatment of a family of prostitutes in the fn-de-siècle, when prostitution became a tolerated vice, initially augurs well for female solidarity as the maid Fernanda helps Doña Eladia to rise to the top of the social pyramid in this novel, only for the family of prostitutes to be later ripped sundered by competition for male attention and respectability. Clearly, gyn/affection is corroded when female togetherness would only ensure their continuing vulnerability in a patriarchal system. Instead of fatalistically embracing this perpetual vulnerability, each woman actively seeks to improve her circumstances at the other’s expense – Dona Eladia is scornful of her drug-addled daughter; Mili abandons her child, Eladia; and eventually Dona Eladia refuses to recognise her granddaughter Eladia’s susceptibility to abuse by her lover, Trinidad, and to help her ill daughter, Mili. This hostility in a biological family tests the limits of women’s abilities to extend solidarity and comfort to one another, since doing so would compromise their pursuit of their own social ascension and amorous fulfillment. Instead, the female relatives form an hostile network, each defying socially prescribed roles, while paradoxically aiming for legitimisation, but also unable to extend solidarity to the rest. They stand in perfect antagonism, each hoping to leverage a more comfortable social position via patriarchal approval and affect, a conflict that presents us with a more comprehensive and nuanced insight into gyn/affection. Doña Eladia’s victimisation, Mili’s drug addiction and Eladia’s forced ejection from home convey the idea of exploitation, abuse and bodily decay as the pathological destiny of the sexed and oversexed woman. Their tragic fates stress the impossibility of social acceptance and invulnerability for these prostitutes whose economic and sexual power is transient, revoked by their own weaknesses and the inexorable decay of their bodies, which render them susceptible to male usurpation of their power. They will never

110

Internal Exile and Resistance

occupy the position of female subjects capable of threatening masculinity through the expression of an economically independent female agency, for their need for sexual validation renders them susceptible to the male appropriation of their erotic powers and financial wherewithal. It is enormously significant that it is only Fernanda, the servant and family friend, who attempts to protect Eladia from Trinidad’s unwanted advances. This annulment of the ties of kinship, together with the grandmother’s disingenuousness, culminate in the absolute absence of an emotional component in the young Eladia’s only familial relationship. This biological family of prostitutes is riven with deceit and treachery, which propels the young Eladia into a precarious adult existence, where she obtains support through her non-biological “emotional community,” consisting of Manolita, La Palmera and Toni. These close ties allow the former two to subvert baleful biological ties by establishing new allegiances and affiliations outside of the family, thus forming an alternative genealogy of mutual support. Eladia’s artistry as a flamenco singer and unrivaled beauty confers her with a superior agency and power that she will eventually use to save Toni’s life. The myth surrounding her virginity increases the ardor of her suitors, particularly one Alfonso Garrido whose brother implores La Palmera to sell it to him at any price. Eladia is trapped in a narrative that eroticises her virginity and, at the same time, makes it an object of self-determination, female abjection and the authentic expression of true love. She manipulates Garrido’s infatuation with her and obsession with being her first lover to guarantee preferential conditions for Toni in jail. Significantly, the interfusion of love and sexuality, which heretofore acted as a negative affective force in her life, acquires positive connotations, as it is her love for Toni that prompts her to sacrifice her virginity to Garrido. Unlike her female forebears, her sexuality initiates a different world of non-transactional and primarily emotive exchange and production, centered on self-sacrificing love and securing her lover’s future.

Conclusion Cultural strategies of resistance, the creation of queer utopias and an unconventional female economic agency constitute forms of resistance to a gendered “internal exile” that challenges gender norms from the fn de siécle to the post-war period. Marginal characters, ranging from the child Isabel to La Palmera to the servant Fernanda, construct reciprocal, quasi-familial bonds to other individuals alienated under the inflexible gender norms of this period, a reconfiguration of the family form that reiterates the centrality of affect, not kinship, to the maintenance of social unity. Encumbered by the myriad limitations of restrictive gender ideologies, these “internal exiles” imagine and attempt to enact gendered ways of being, and in so doing, they transgress normative gender, spatial and economic dictates, ostensibly counteracting their vulnerability. However, this resistance is not always viable,

Internal Exile and Resistance

111

for they oscillate between suffering and agency, and their odysseys to obtain a life of eudaimonia are truncated by corporeal disfigurement and death, in the case of Isabel and the male prisoners, and the prostitutes’ aging, drug addiction, and loss of economic control over their own bodies. Their failure to flourish confirms that Grandes does not adhere to a naïve, neoliberal optimism regarding the capacity of victims to overcome all obstacles.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Professor Olga Bezhanova for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 It is important to mention that the term “internal exile” has proven contentious. It is frequently confused with Paul Ilie’s concept of inner exile, which he defines as follows: To live apart is to adhere to values that do not partake in the prevailing values: he who perceives their moral differences and who responds to it emotionally lives in exile. Thus, a citizen can experience disaffection from the majority, even while dwelling in its midst. His exile resembles, in its internal morphology, the psycho-moral dimension of the emigré. In the Spanish exodus of 1939, many citizens who remained shared the marginality, alienation and general sense of loss vis-a-vis their devastated homeland that were experienced by the territorially departed. (2) Manuel Aznar Soler notes that the exiles tended to refer to Francoist Spain as “la España del interior.” Precisely, for this reason, he proposes the term “insilio,” which refers to the isolation and marginalisation felt by ostracised members of the community. The fact that my analysis moves beyond the post-war period has caused me to select the term “internal exile,” which did not originate in conceptual debates about Spanish post-war exile. It is, therefore, suitable for my analysis which is centered on the period 1892 to the post-war period. 3 Sharon Bird defines homosociality as “the nonsexual attractions held by men (or women) for members of their own sex” (121). Its cogent stratification of groups of males bolsters hegemonic masculinity. In her words: Homosocial interaction, among heterosexual men, contributes to the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity norms by supporting meanings associated with identities that fit hegemonic ideals while suppressing meanings associated with non-hegemonic masculine identities. 4 In Descartes’ words: “Minds are intangible, un-extended, and metaphysically prior to bodies. They are thinking things, entities capable of affirming, denying, judging, willing, unwilling, and having sense perception. Bodies on the other hand are tangible physical objects in the external world” (qtd. in Simmons 5). 5 The institutional obedience argument was most famously expounded by Adolf Eichmann in his 1961 trial in Jerusalem. He responded to fifteen counts of an indictment that included crimes against the Jewish people, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, in terms of obedience to authority and administrative efficiency, thereby disputing notions of guilt, responsibility, and individual agency. Eichmann did not incarnate the sadistic and pathological anti-Semitic Nazis of court testimony at the Nuremberg trials in Germany in 1945–1946, nor of immediate post-war historiographical representation. He was simply an obedient bureaucrat, who in Hannah Arendt’s famous summation, embodied a “banality of evil” that could easily manifest itself in much of humanity.

112

Internal Exile and Resistance

6 Binnie emphasises that “space is not naturally authentically straight, but rather actively produced and hetero or homo sexualized” (592). 7 Although Marañón advocated a more humane attitude toward homosexuality, he also endorsed preventative and corrective measures aimed at reducing homosexuality: “El papel de la sociedad, por lo tanto, frente al problema de la homosexualidad, es estudiar los orígenes profundos de la inversión para tratar de rectificarlos” (qtd. in Aresti 77). For example, in his preface to the 1929 edition of Alfonso Hernández Catá’s El ángel de Sodoma, Marañón claims that homosexuality is a sort of “deficiency in human evolution” (Bejel 68). However, as Alberto Mira has convincingly shown, the homophobic elements of Marañón’s thesis were ignored in the furor that ensued publication, with the conservative Spanish public preferring to interpret his findings as further evidence of a progressive, and for them, impermissible tolerance of homosexuality. 8 George Mosse underscores the perennial association of the city with vice. The city has been an object of dread for fervent nationalists since the nineteenth century: From the nineteenth century on, the guardians of nationalism and respectability felt menaced by the big city, the apparent centre of an artificial and restless age. Such cities were thought to destroy man’s rootedness. This led to alienation and unbridled sexual passion. Cities were home to outsiders and stood in contrast with more rural areas which “possessed no dark bowels within which vice could flourish. (32) 9 She also embodies Kristen Pullen’s definition of a prostitute as “young and attractive but always diseased or addicted; she has the accoutrements of wealth and luxury but is always lower class; she freely enjoys sexual activity but is always at the mercy of demanding customers and pimps” (5).

6

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness in Los pacientes del doctor García

Almudena Grandes’ 2017 novel, Los pacientes del doctor García, marks a change of genre and spatial focus for the authoress. This spy and thriller novel skillfully interweaves different war and post-conflict situations, ranging from the Spanish Civil War to post-war Berlin, from Argentina under Perón and Captain Jorge Videla to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, to create an international canvas of Nazi subterfuge, traumatisation, exile, perpetration, and identity distortion. The novel interweaves the trajectories of three protagonists: Dr. Guillermo García Medina, a Republican doctor who becomes a transport clerk in the post-war period; Manuel Arroyo Benítez, a diplomat and spy who goes into exile in Argentina; and Adrián Gallardo Ortega, a mediocre soldier turned boxer who enlists in the División Azul, the force sent by Franco to aid Hitler during Operation Barbarossa in World War II. Perpetrators and impostors abound: Nazi criminals converted into businessmen, doctors turned fraudsters and killers, boxers converted into participants in genocide, and domestic abusers in Argentina. The thread that ties together the various strands of this intricate perpetrator web is a medical discourse centered on notions of medical ethics, medical role responsibility, disease, death, and bodily decline of various kinds. Accordingly, Los pacientes del doctor García can be classified as a “medical text,” based on Ludmilla Jordanova’s definition, “in the general sense that it addresses pain, suffering and death” (52–53). The five sections of the novel – “Hospital de Sangre,” “Procesos infecciosos,” “Tumores infiltrados,” “Puntos de sutura,” and “Las cicatrices duelen con el tiempo” – denote pathologisation and medical intervention. They are especially resonant metonyms for the moral ambiguity of the doctor protagonist, and the interconnecting and insidious memories of genocide and exile portrayed in the novel. Throughout the novel, deviant and suffering bodies proliferate as means of negotiating multiple societal and historical memory discourses that are intercalated with failed masculinity, skewed medical ethics and eugenics. In Grandes’ poetics of remembrance, formal and covert medical encounters and conditions calibrate perpetrators of mass atrocities and adjudicate masculinity, while a rhetoric of bodily pain conversely conveys the Nazis’ privileged status in Germany and Spain, and indicts domestic

114

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

abuse in Argentina. Rather than an endogenous state, disease in the first two sections is paralleled to a migratory foreign commodity, which analogises the post-1945 Nazi encroachment on Spanish society, and in the latter two sections, the disease metaphor symbolises curation and the resolution of social trauma through intergenerational transmission and an exilic return to the homeland. Los pacientes del doctor García is similar to novels such as Julia Navarro’s Dime quién soy, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Beatus Ille, and José María Merino’s El heredero and La sima, insofar as it constitutes an exemplar of an evolved Spanish cultural memory that provocatively urges readers to think comparatively about Spanish national trauma in a global context by juxtaposing the Spanish Civil War with international events, such as the Holocaust. However, this novel’s striking originality resides in its exploration of Spain’s role in the protection of Nazi criminals in the post-war period, which originated in Franco’s wholehearted support of Hitler in World War II until defeat became imminent. In the words of Wayne H. Booth: When the Third Reich was at its height, he collaborated with it, granting invaluable logistical support to German submarine warfare, aiding in Nazi intelligence operations, sending Spanish workers to Germany, and dispatching volunteer soldiers to aid the Nazis in what became known as the Blue Division. (7) Following the fall of Berlin in 1945, thousands of Nazis escaped to Franco’s Spain where they received help in the form of accommodation and jobs from the Spanish-German association Hilfsverein, led by Clara Stauffer. Many of the arriving Nazis included elite Nazi leaders, such as the notorious Croat leader of the Nazis, Ante Pavelic; the founder of the Belgian Hitlerite Rex party León Degrelle; and Colonel Otto Skorzenzy. In an autarkic and poverty-stricken Spain, these Nazis enjoyed a privileged and affluent lifestyle, dining in the Ritz and Palace Hotels in Madrid and frequenting elite parties in el club Puerta de Hierro (Irujo 35). The development of Spain as a Nazi haven was of such concern to the League of Nations that it issued a request, la lista negra, for the deportation of 104 Nazis to Germany; the return of only 22 of them to the international authorities attests to Franco’s pro-Nazism (Irujo 76). The fictionalisation of the impunity accorded to Nazi perpetrators by Franco recovers a memory consigned to oblivion in official Spanish commemoration of the Holocaust, which tends to conceal Franco’s virulent anti-Semitism. From 2001 onwards, Spain initiated the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, and the deaths of over 7,000 Republicans in Mauthausen were first commemorated by the Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2005 (Baer 220; Brenneis 372). The memory of the Spanish diplomat posted in Budapest, Ángel Sanz Briz, the savior of 5,000 Jews, has been memorialised in various cultural outlets, such as the 2010 TVE

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

115

miniseries El Ángel de Budapest, and it occupied a prominent position in the 2018 Auschwitz “No muy lejos” exhibition held in Madrid. Sanz Briz’s memory has fallaciously reconceived the Franco dictatorship, which refused the entry of Jews into Spain as philosemitic, and only one 2014 exhibition, Sin miedo, revealed that the diplomat’s rescuing of the Jews had actually been a private initiative that had imperiled his meteoric career. Although there has been a plethora of historical books detailing Franco support for the Nazis, such as Nazis en Madrid and La lista negra, there has been no corresponding cultural treatment of the theme of Francoist support for Nazi criminals. For example, Clara Sánchez’s 2010 bestseller, Lo que esconde su nombre, chronicles a Spanish woman’s discovery of Norwegian Nazis in the Spanish coast. Thus, the novel’s thematisation of Franco’s wholehearted support for Nazi criminals following the Second World War inscribes this overlooked counter-memory into the cultural imaginary. Los pacientes del doctor García allows a privileged insight into the multiple facets of perpetration, such as the relationship between medical ethics and perpetration; the role of the narrative voice in conveying perpetration; multidirectional memory and perpetration; and the relationship between the body, illness, and perpetration. In this chapter, I argue that perpetrator voice and status is undermined in multiple ways, firstly through a progressive failure to adhere to medical ethics, which underscores Dr. García Medina’s narrative dubitability and inspires readerly distrust. I then examine the relationship between multidirectional memory, ecocriticism, and perpetrator memory in the portrayal of Adrián Gallardo Ortega’s participation in the killing of Jews in the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, with the express aim of ascertaining the causation of perpetration and the authenticity of the ensuing perpetrator trauma. Finally, I scrutinise the different corporeal manifestations of illness in the novel. Departing from Erving Goffman’s conceptualisation of “stigma,” I examine the stigma of perpetrator illness, and the representation of the bodies of various perpetrators, Nazis, domestic abusers and a participant in genocide through the lens of economic, social and corporeal capital.

Medical Ethics, Perpetration and the Narrative Voice The protean transformation of Dr. Guillermo García Medina is recounted in a first-person narrative which conveys the consciousness of a character who degenerates from the doctor-hero to a fraudster and killer of a murderer, Adrián Gallardo Ortega. The doctor-cum-perpetrator’s idiosyncratic thoughts, motivations, memories and self-image are mediated through the prism of a medical professional’s ethos that sanctifies the preservation of human life. It is correlated with virtue and civilisatory progress, and as such, inspires universal trust. Accordingly, can the interfusion of the privileged professional status of a doctor, ineluctably associated with personal as well as professional integrity and moral irreproachability, attenuate the moral

116

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

outrage caused by perpetration, eliciting what Suzanne Keen has termed “an emotional connection with the wrong character, the one who is unsavory, nasty or even vicious?” (74). Does elevated scientific knowledge obviate or even condone the doctor’s unethical actions or alternatively render his tenuous self-justification more credible to the reader? Prior to my analysis of medical ethics and perpetration, it is germane to reflect on the judicial treatment of medical perpetrators. Nazi medical experiments, conducted in concentration camps, are the most famous precedent of medical perpetration, and they elucidate both the necessity of medical ethics and the troubling impunity often accorded to medical professionals. In the early to mid-1940s, the Nazis “were developing a new branch of medical science which would give them the scientific tools for the planning and practice of genocide” (Maddrell 10). Nazi physicians carried out as many as thirty different kinds of experiments in concentration camps across Europe, including bone, muscle and nerve transplantations; sterilisation and fertility experiments; and injection of diseases. Particularly notorious was Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on female twins in concentration camps with the intention of gaining biological insight to more effectively multiply the Aryan race. The establishment of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics in August 1947 aimed to prevent similarly inhumane experiments from happening in the future. However, it is not accurate to say that all perpetrators were fully punished. High-ranking Nazi physicians, such as Reichsgesundheitsführer Kurt Blome, who conducted experiments including plague vaccines on prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp and who “assumed responsibility for all research into biological warfare sponsored by the Wehrmacht” (Maddrell 191), were acquitted without punishment at the Doctors’ Trial thanks to intervention by the U.S. government, in exchange for advice on chemical and biological weaponry. Many continued to practise medicine unhindered. Similarly, the International Military Tribune for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trial, was convened in 1946 to punish Japanese war criminals, including soldiers associated with Unit 731. As a result of the Doctors’ Trial, seven defendants were sentenced to death, sixteen to life in prison, and two others to more lenient terms. However, the associated physicians and researchers, who had as much (if not more) responsibility as the soldiers, were not tried for war crimes at all. In fact, they were given immunity from prosecution by the American government in exchange for the information they had gathered, and much of their bioweapons and human medical data were then co-opted into the American biological warfare program (Seaton 71). Clearly, medical perpetration is a complex issue that intersects with the high value placed on medical knowledge and the social status of the physician. Our response to the physician first-person narrator in Los pacientes del doctor García is rendered highly complex through a narratological duplicity that complicates a straightforward reader response. The alternative observance or non-observance of medical ethics provides a contestatory space

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

117

in which the reader assembles the information to judiciously evaluate the doctor’s self-justificatory narrative and to assess his moral degeneration. García Medina’s narrative unreliability is inextricably bound up with what H.L.A. Hart has termed “role responsibility,” the expectation of irreproachable personal and professional behavior from a doctor. Role responsibility assumes certain voluntary moral restraints, which means avoiding any personal behavior considered compromising to the professional medical role which involves not only objective clinical decision-making but the intricate management of the emotions (67).1 Initially, the characterisation of García Medina corresponds to the prototype of the sincere doctor-hero, a physician worthy of emulation and admiration. The invocation of his mother Rosa’s epilepsy, and her marriage to the dedicated neurologist who strove to attenuate its effects, endows the young doctor with an unimpeachable medical pedigree. Rosa’s premature death inspires the young physician to ameliorate health conditions, having witnessed their catastrophic effect on his family. His work in a Madrid hospital during the Spanish Civil War symbolises a vocational selflessness that confirms him as a doctor-hero. Confirming a priori assumptions about doctors, this first-person narration aims at establishing a relationship between the reader and a highly responsible, conscientious medical professional. The credibility of the doctor narrator is reinforced by his relationship with his patients, which exemplifies the humility, patient responsiveness and egalitarianism lauded in medical ethics research within the last twenty years, which has dismantled the doctor’s authority by instating the need for a palpable narrative medical humanity. Zaner affirms that the clinical encounter entails the patient’s dependence on the clinician, who should premise his treatment of the patient on a “clinical responsive ethics,” which involves reassuring or even healing patients through narrative, that is, by “telling them stories and listening to the stories they tell” (27).2 In effect, the physician must engage and accommodate patient stories, which were previously only acknowledged (980). This engagement places the onus on the physician to renounce any stance of superiority with respect to the patient and to instead prioritise an egalitarian patient–doctor relationship, a humility that is evident in García Medina’s initial medical transactions. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, García Medina learns that his grandmother has abandoned the city of Madrid for the provinces in order to seek medical treatment there, a move that indicates her lack of confidence in her grandson’s medical prowess: “Si me hubiera respetado como médico y nunca lo hizo, mi abuela no se habría marchado a Zarauz en junio de 1936” (257). The autonomy of the patient is conveyed by her dismissal of her doctor’s diagnosis of a brain hemorrhage and her insistence on speaking, despite the convolutedness of her post-stroke speech. Describing the prelude to her departure, García Medina emphasises the vulnerability and miscommunication that exists between doctors and disabled dependents, even when these relationships are also loving. As the grandmother is no longer articulate

118

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

but insists on acting as if she were, one of her maids telephones him at the hospital to report her progress. The doctor’s reliance on the maid’s reports reverses the power differential in the patient–doctor relationship and validates the patient’s autonomy and, in this case, erroneous self-diagnosis. Thus, familial experiences endow this medical professional with humility, a characteristic that makes his first-person narration more credible and causes the reader to regard him as a hero. Nevertheless, this professional exemplarity is belied by the protagonist’s propensity to misevaluate his patients. The etymological roots of the word diagnosis are “to know apart” (Charon 89), which is usually taken to connote the positive qualities of specificity and exactitude in the identification and healing of the patient’s malady. However, in this case, the idea of “knowing apart” enables the discriminatory apportioning of patients, and the legitimisation of sexist, medical dictates, with the result that the operative word becomes “apart,” with “knowing” only functioning to normalise ingrained prejudices. García Medina’s tendency to misevaluate his patients’ social class, and his female lovers/patients’ reactions to medical procedures is crystallised in his collaboration with Dr. Normal Bethune, the pioneering Canadian founder of El Instituto Hispano Canadiense de Transfusión de Sangre, which initiated a portable service of blood transfusions in the Republican Zone during the Spanish Civil War. His cooperation with Bethune leads to him becoming known as “el Bethune español.” However, this heroic status is undermined by the glaring disjuncture between his affirmations on professional ethics and his subsequent actions, which give readers the first intimations of narrative dubitability. His categorical profession of his remit “Era médico, mi única obligación era salvar vidas, no juzgar a los pacientes” (140) is ambiguated by his value judgement of the diplomat Manuel Benítez, alias Félipe: “Estaba salvando a un hombre que merecía seguir viviendo” (142). Even more disturbing, his putative clinical detachment is substituted by a visceral longing for vengeance for his subjection to a proletarian reverse snobbery during the Spanish Civil War. Distrusted by his working-class patients for his education and profession, he greatly appreciates Félipe’s cultivation and worldliness: “estaba sucumbiendo a un prejuicio de clase tan intenso, tan injusto también, como el que padecía” (146). His attentiveness to the social class of his patients as a factor in their medical care is at antipodes to his earlier claim that he extends equal treatment to all patients. The contradictions inherent in García Medina’s actions forewarn the reader of his lack of self-awareness, his skewed interpretation of incontestable medical ethics and consequent narrative unreliability. García Medina’s ethical inconsistencies are further illustrated in the relatively comic misreporting of his extraction of blood from Amparo, an incident in which the discourses of sexuality, female corporeality, and medical hubris overlap and interrelate. While caressing, Dr. García Medina surprises Amparo by deftly pulling out a needle and extracting the first sample of

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

119

blood for the nascent blood transfusion service. Ensuing the extraction, they make love and are surprised by Bethune who demonstrates a paternalistic attitude towards their relationship. The gravity of the medical procedure is subverted by the lack of consent of the female extractee, who becomes a mere pawn for his medical advances, and the conducting of a sexual relationship on the premises of a public medical establishment. Converting Amparo into a blood source makes for a cold clinical encounter, which completely overrides her needs. In fact, the suppression of the dissenting or even questioning female voice is consistently enabled throughout the novel by his spurious medical rationale. A doctor’s successful completion of professional duties implies objectivity and distance from his patients, but during the blood transfusion, Dr. García Medina loses his composure as the identities of physician and lover merge in his desperation to obtain blood for the blood transfusion service. Amparo’s words of alarm are unheeded and silenced, and she does not, in any substantive way, influence the hematological procedure. Her concerns about patient autonomy and informed consent, expressed both verbally and non-verbally, are met with sexual innuendo and outright dismissal (68), while García Medina and Bethune’s voices are authorised both linguistically and culturally. The doctor’s piquant retorts to Amparo sexualise and trivialise her queries and, by extension, the female body, reinstating a patriarchal and somewhat callous medical authority that does not trenchantly acknowledge the complexities of treating a patient with whom he has been intimate, while blatantly excluding women from an epistemological site of knowledge. On other occasions, the former doctor reasserts his authoritative medical persona to pre-empt authentic intimacy, a strategy that restructures and formalises the relationship between addresser and addressee into a hierarchy of superior and masculine medical ken and inferior emotional and ignored female desires. His reaction, upon learning of his fiancée Rita’s pregnancy, is twofold: as a doctor, he informs her that he can perform abortions, but as her lover, he expresses his wish to have the child (654). Tellingly, this is the second time that he recommends an abortion to a lover, apparently under the scientific objectivity of medical reasoning. During the Spanish Civil War, his recommendation that his lover Amparo have an abortion is based on a supposedly purely medical rationale, namely the high incidence of death in childbirth and rickets. The tenuousness of this medical objectivity is revealed by his disavowal of fatherhood and his abhorrence of the asymmetrical power differential created by Amparo’s pregnancy: “En este terrano ficticio, la ventaja era mía. En la realidad que acabamos de estrenar, la ventaja era mía” (176). His lover’s transformation from an easily controllable female lackey to a powerful matriarch revolts him: “la muñeca dócil, complaciente, que sabía anticiparse a todos mis caprichos se había evaporado en un minuto, sin dejar rastro en la prematura matriarca que se atrevía a mirarme desde un improvisado pedestal de dignidad” (177). His

120

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

coercive injunctions to abort once again evinces the paternalistic medical delegitimisation of female corporeal control. As he flees Madrid, García Medina reconstructs his identity in two divergent ways –as a transport official named Rafael Cuesta Sánchez; and a secret doctor, occasionally exercising his professional role by diagnosing the ailments of the high-ranking Nazis he encounters. Role responsibility is complicated when García Medina becomes embroiled in a clandestine Communist network based in Ciudad Lineal in Madrid, led by Jesús Monzón. In a reverie, García Medina waxes lyrical on how his covert resumption of the medical role restores his confidence as a useful member of society. However, the self-centredness of his discourse is striking, as he rationalises that his return to his profession excuses his cowardice in abandoning his hospital during the Spanish Civil War and for assuming a fictitious identity in the post-war period (274). In diametric opposition to his thoughtful caring approach to his grandmother’s illness, his ministrations to the clandestine Communists do not extend to any conversation or even the most rudimentary forms of acknowledgment, their names. These anonymous encounters denote the dismantling of a clinically responsive ethics, a rupture that symbolises the doctor’s ready dehumanisation of patients that are of no personal or familial relevance to him. It is apparent that the emotional needs of his patients only become relevant in familial situations, for example, his previously discussed solicitude towards his grandmother; and his re-establishment of a relationship with his sick child, Guillermo, whom he examines nightly while not disclosing his identity. These ethical flaws loom large when García Medina encounters former Nazi patients whose ailments are rapidly fathomed by the discerning former doctor. These uneasy encounters probe the relationship between role responsibility, professional morality and personal ethical obligations. At the behest of Clara Stauffer, the doctor now operating under the alias of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, imparts Spanish classes to the recently arrived Nazis, whereupon he meets the particularly antipathic Marcos, a militant in the Croatian Ustashi. Marcos’ jaundiced countenance and abdominal pains are secretly diagnosed by him as cirrhosis of the liver (477). For García Medina, the Nazi body is presented as the standard of truth against which the gregarious Nazis are revealed to be duplicitous: “Pero la muerte de Marcos les arrancó la piel, trituró la carne, dejó a la vista los huesos que yo no había sido capaz de adivinar” (481). The perception of a social and spiritual malaise is grafted onto the Nazi patient’s body, obviating any doctoral sympathy and very nearly interjection, a body-character dialectic that will be reversed during the hospital stay of another prominent Nazi, Hans Lazer, which I will later examine. García Medina’s surreptitious diagnosis raises the conundrum of whether a doctor may respond to the moral worth of his patients. The ethics of general medicine strongly discourage the moral evaluation of patients by physicians, and in every conceivable circumstance, would certainly disavow the

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

121

denial of care on this basis alone (Charon 72). The learning of the standard rules habituates the doctor to contextualise all clinical encounters within the context of certain values, and hones his/her ability to discern situations that jeopardise those very same values. Troublingly, García Medina’s clinical diagnostic ability is instrumentalised to effectuate a reversal of the power and class balance that allowed these Nazis to insult and patronise him as a lowly transport official and teacher of Spanish. García Medina debates the wisdom of alerting Marcos to his condition, a dilemma that reflects the conflict between professional morality and ordinary mortality. In an insightful article on medical ethics, Benjamin Freedman asserts that professional medical morality is distinct from ordinary morality insofar as it permits actions and sanctions that derive from membership in a professional community (627). The corollary to this distinction is that doctors may undertake actions, not countenanced by ordinary morality but in concordance with the values and ethical code of the medical profession. Marcos allegorically represents absolute bestiality, a monster whose acts have positioned him outside the protection of the binding rules of human morality. Therefore, ordinary morality might dictate that Marcos’ imminent demise is a long overdue case of providential punishment, whereas a doctor must disregard the patient’s trajectory, crimes and ideology to preserve his life. In this sense, normative social moral judgement dictating death for culpability in crimes against humanity, which had been consolidated by the hanging of leading Nazis in the post-war period and ensuing 1948 Nuremberg Trials, must be suspended in favor of a professional medical code that affirms life. Ostensibly, García Medina readopts his hero status, realigning himself with the role responsibility that pertains to him even as a non-exercising physician. As he states: “Yo no había dejado de ser médico y mi obligación era advertir a aquel enfermo que consultara con un especialista” (476). However, the rationale underlying his failure to disclose the diagnosis to Marcos reveals infinitely more prosaic and calculating reasons: De ahí en adelante, por más que personalmente le deseara la agonía más cruel, me convenía tener en cuenta que Amparo sabía que yo era médico, que para la misión de Manuel era esencial no despertar sospechas y, sobre todo, que podía permitirme el lujo de quedar bien porque aquel cabrón iba a morir igual. (476) By listing these banal motives, Dr. García vacates the narrative position of doctor-hero and segues into that of the unreliable narrator, whose advocacy of medical ethics is revealed to be superficial, interfused and indeed obscured by more base motives. He jumps from the normative adherence to medical ethics to his real self, without ever fixing permanently on one of the identities, a slipperiness that exemplifies Bakhtin’s notion of double-voiced discourse (324), whereby the interlocutor possesses two speaking selves, one of which has obliterated the identity of the other. This double-voiced discourse

122

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

is the product of an addled mind that oscillates temporally between past and present, striving to construct a false continuum between his former profession and his present connivance with the Nazis. The lack of coalescence between the first and second statements, a discernible tendency throughout the novel, is indicative of this unstable and protean professional false identity. Neither does the former Dr. García fully acknowledge the amorality inherent in his position as an intermediary who enables the transport of Nazi gold from Spain to European ports and who also kills the hapless Adrián Gallardo Ortega upon his return to Spain. His acknowledgment of his failure to control his feigned role as a Nazi sympathiser and intermediary is attributed to his friendship with Rolf Skorzenzy, while his killing of Adrián is paralleled to “un acto de servicio” (606). He patently deflects responsibility for his own actions and engages in myopic, self-pitying justification in which he becomes a mere instrument at the mercy of the circumstances. His subjugation to political ideologies is particularly suspect, as he previously declared that he did not take them into account in his work, a statement that, as I have previously evinced, is belied by his eminently partisan exercising of the medical profession. García Medina’s account of the causes of the killing of Gallardo Ortega is riddled with moral ambiguity and the violation of professional edicts because the former doctor justifies the murder by adducing vengeance for human rights violations and his close friendship with Manuel who is threatened by this man’s return (580). He oscillates from noble human rights avenger, who is prepared to challenge future judicial rulings on human rights, to a self-described “hombre corriente” who emphatically rejects his status as a human rights advocate (580). Paradoxically, this contradiction is resolved by his diffuse attribution of the killing to all three motives: love, the concealment of Manuel’s identity, and the massacre in Estonia, factors that underline his dehumanisation of Adrián: “ya había dejado de ser una persona para mí. Era una rata, una alimaña, un ser dañino que debía desaparecer y yo, el único que podía matarle” (580). This dehumanisation is eerily reminiscent of Adrián’s dehumanisation of the Jews in the Klooga concentration camp, which I will later examine. The same tendency to disingenuousness permeates his description of the actual murder of Gallardo Ortega, which is preceded by a conversation with the hapless boxer, a prelude apparently motivated by a desire for a more civilised approach to killing. However, in keeping with narrative inconsistencies, these motivations are eclipsed by the doctor’s acknowledgment of his far more banal fear of Gallardo Ortega’s boxing prowess, which would make the latter adept at self-protection, especially when confronted with a relatively inexperienced opponent such as himself (602). His paralleling of the crime to “un crimen de cirujano” (602) is a grotesque affirmation of the former doctor’s faith in an incontestable medical knowledge whose purpose has been distorted to commit a crime. The undercutting of his

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

123

authority throughout the text renders this medical parallel, which aims at legitimising the crime, unconvincing. His self-assurances, prior to the killing of Gallardo Ortega, flit from present to future, eliding the present in a curious non sequitur that enables him to cognitively dissociate from the act of killing itself, which is presented as an altruistic act: “Nunca había matado a nadie antes, me prometí que nunca mataría a nadie después, y me obligué a pensar en como un soldado, sólo en la gente que quería” (605). The shift in the conceptualisation of the killing from a minutely planned surgical operation to a self-sacrificing quasi-military action conjures up a mélange of professional detachment and false self-abnegation that confirms García Medina’s inability to assume personal responsibility for the killing. Even more disturbing, his ensuing experience of the psychosomatic symptoms of indigestion and bloatedness are accompanied by a sudden feeling of elation expressly designed to “exprimir de mi ánimo cualquier idea angustiosa relacionada con la culpa,” which converts the principal Madrid streets into sites of euphoria (605). His unacceptance of even a modicum of guilt attests to his desire to maintain his professional status through an externalisation of guilt and attribution of blame. Treating the crime as external enables him to reject a narrative incongruent with his self-identity as a medical professional in control of his circumstances. Instead of coming to terms with himself as a person with moral and ethical defects as well as base fears, García Medina alternatively adopts professional guises and postulates specious narrative arguments that reconceive him instead as a person-cum-professional with a problem to solve, thus distancing him from the disconcerting identarian implications of his financial skulduggery with leading Nazis and the killing of Gallardo Ortega. Grandes subtly undercuts the doctor’s authority, who, for his insincerity and vacillating commitment to medical ethics, appears not only unworthy of emulation but also criminal. Overall, his transgression of medical ethics ruptures the symbiotic bond of understanding between reader and first-person physician narrator, reducing the possibility of an empathetic response while hypostasising the culpability of the medical perpetrator. Grandes’ selection of a medical perpetrator is deliberate: it locates him with the tradition of the doctor-hero, which renders his moral degeneration all the more incongruous, a disjuncture that contests stereotypes of the perpetrator as an immediately identifiable reprobate. The continual violation of medical ethics forces the reader to reassess and reformulate his/her relationship to the physician perpetrator, culminating in a disidentification with a supposedly heroic character. The shift from hero to perpetrator universalizes the figure of the perpetrator by strongly conveying the human capacity for moral degeneration, while simultaneously, recounting the circumstances by which it happened. It, therefore, avoids a reliance on the overly capacious “anybody could be a perpetrator” argument, which does not engage trenchantly with the psychological motivation, territorial conflicts, and other myriad factors that cause perpetration. Grandes succeeds in both transmitting one

124

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

of the core messages of perpetrator memory and alerting readers to its causation, which attests to the complexity of her vision of perpetrator memory.

Multidirectional Memory and Perpetration Interestingly, in Los pacientes del doctor García, perpetration is also compelled by a distortion of multidirectional memory which transforms into a geographically transferable incitement to hatred and gross human rights violations in this novel. In this age of globalisation, memory, and by extension, identity, is an infinitely changeable discursive construction, which willingly imbibes transnational identity shifts (Sarap 12). Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” enlightens the interrelationship between different memory cultures in a globalised world. He initiates a dynamic dialogue between Holocaust memory and apparently unrelated memories, such as that of decolonisation. Disputing the rivalry between different memory cultures, he conceives of their cross-fertilisation as mutually beneficial, even syncretic. In Rothberg’s words: “multidirectional memory is a process of ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing” (“Multidirectional Memory” 5). His theory discounts any vision of memory cultures as engaged in a competitive struggle for supremacy in inevitably limited discursive and material spaces. According to Rothberg, memory cultures have a fluid, reciprocal interaction, which enable them to assimilate aspects of each other’s trajectory. In his words: “Memories are not owned by groups nor are groups owned by memories” (3). Therefore, he suggests that we focus our attention on links and borrowings across both time and space (127). Rothberg’s envisioning of the cooperative nature of globalised national memory cultures and traditions has been debated amongst scholars, who have issued caveats reproaching the tendency to overestimate its emotional and affective traction. For Duncan Bell, memory is inherently personal and communitarian, produced and sustained by “thick relations,” in effect, interaction within a bounded temporal and spatial domain, and hence an amorphous global memory, premised on “thin global relations,” cannot be expected to exercise a similar moral authority or elicit an equivalent emotional response. The generic category of humanity is bereft of memory because it does not possess any of its constituent elements, such as “history, culture, customary practices, familiar life-ways, and a shared understanding of social goods” (18). Echoing Bell, human rights scholars Michael Humphrey and Estela Valverde claim that the reclamation of national rights within the rubric of international human rights can prove unviable unless a common moral national arena is created. However, is a global memory space really feasible? Duncan Bell proffers this answer: “memories are too closely bound to, and reproduced by agents of, communities defined by thick relations, when they escape the bounds of community, they lose much of their form and potency” (28). He observes that the tendency to valorise

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

125

deep cultures has not diminished because societies are constituted by distinct memories and identities. In a strikingly original treatment of memory, Grandes diverges from the representation of multidirectional memory as a panacea to internecine mnemonic competition to present it as a motive for perpetration. National memories of hatred and vengeance vindicate an act of genocide, which demonstrates the destructiveness of collective memory that does not necessarily limit itself to national borders and can, in fact, catalyse violence in other nations.3 National memories of hate and victimhood inspire both Adrián Gallardo Ortega’s and Jan der Vallender’s involvements in the killing of 200 Jews in the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia. Adrián’s friend Jan Schmitt de Wallander hails from a German emigrant family in Buenos Aires, where his father, Klaus de Wallander, establishes a successful jewelry business. In his native Germany, Jan’s brother Martin is killed in the First World War, and in the immediate aftermath of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, his other brother, Johann, commits suicide due to his inability to pay his Jewish creditors. These family tragedies embitter Klaus, who rails against the Jews and subsequently rejoices at Hitler’s rise to power. Upon Klaus’s death and the family’s move to Flanders, Jan joins the Nazi collaborationist group el Partido Rex, becoming “un soldado de Europa,” in order to honor his father and his own political convictions. Greene and Haidt suggest that the moral outrage resulting from a perceived violation of social norms can serve as the basis for acts of retribution, evoking what he terms the “deontic response,” referring to how some feel the world should be, according to social norms (519). If a victim or society feels norms have been transgressed, they may feel exploited and oppressed, leading to “an intrinsic desire for justice [which] can create a motivation to punish the transgressor” (519). The dehumanising rhetoric that Jan imparts to Adrián, which is premised on a mélange of the Hitlerite vilification of the Slavs as sub-human, and a paternally transmitted memory of past humiliations, allows him to dispense with moral considerations and to participate in the massacre of the 200 Jews in Klooga (Grandes 288). Disturbingly, the author does not employ any narrative strategies that might encourage the reader to view Jan in a negative light; on the contrary, Adrián lauds him as a courageous and generous friend who is honoring his father’s memory (289). It is tenable that Grandes is not condoning anti-Semitic tendencies but rather showing their development in Van Wallander’s character. Similarly, Adrián’s invocation of the memory of Spanish national wars serves to vindicate his actions: No se arrepentía de haber luchado en Rusia, en Ucrania, en Estonia, porque el odio justificaba su esfuerzo. El odio que sentía hacia los comunistas, los asesinos de Dios, la encarnación suprema y perfecta de los arrogantes desarrapados a quienes habían combatido los Garrotes de todos los tiempos. (330)

126

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

Memories of war unfold in an atemporal continuum that collapses notions of what is ethically and socially acceptable. Longstanding religious and ideological antagonisms activate and legitimise simultaneously notions of national exclusion and annihilatory violence, merging and rendering indistinguishable national conflicts and a supranational ethnic genocide. The distortion of multidirectional memory for the purposes of vengeance and the perpetuation of hatred necessarily raises the question of whether crosscultural memorialisation is beneficial to people and societies. In this case, the cross-fertilisation of memories implicitly contests the dictum that universal memorialisation is a moral and political imperative, which can only ameliorate social harmony. Rather, universal memory perpetuates divisions by preserving best-forgotten hatreds and fuelling animosity towards citizens who do not comply with the prescribed national identity narrative. This virulent stance is countered by Adrián’s ambivalence, conveyed through his relationship to the Estonian ecosystem, which exposes and dismantles the ideologies and master narratives that shore up Nazi ideology. The traversal of space is predicated on a connection with the environment. In the words of Rosa Braidotti: “the embodied subject is shot through with relational linkages of the symbiotic, contaminating/viral kind which interconnect it to a variety of others, starting from the environment or habitat” (122). Thus, the soldiers become responsive to the forests in which the massacre takes place. At the outset, Adrián’s indelible humanity is underscored by his appreciation of the dense Estonian forests, an affinity shared by Heinrich Beyer, the honorable German soldier who disobeys his commander’s orders on the grounds that women and children are amongst the victims: “al mirarle, Adrián volvió a pensar que era un doble casi exacto de sí mismo, un buen chico criado en el campo, capaz de sentir el dolor de los bosques que le rodeaban” (295). The exaltation of the two soldiers’ ecological consciousness valorises the central ecological value of the interconnectivity of man and nature, and reframes the killing of the Jews as an aberration that disturbs this unity. Their affinity for the woods exalts rootedness and a sense of cohesive national belonging in the face of exterminatory deterritorialisation. Furthermore, this sylvan commonality removes the two reluctant and sentient perpetrators from the realm of bestiality, perceptually interconnecting them with an Edenic world, at antipodes to the industrialised Nazi killing machine. However, the use of the tree trunks to support and divide the bodies of the Jewish victims erects a divide between man and nature, which culminates in the triumph of genocidal annihilation: “En menos de una hora, las cien mujeres estaban muertas, sus cadáveres apilados en una pira alargada de dos capas de cuerpos rematada por una última capa de troncos de un metro y medio de longitud” (289). Trees are inherently communitarian and reciprocal, sheltering their most vulnerable members. As Peter Wohlbeen points out: “Together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

127

of humidity. To get to this point, the community must remain intact, no matter what” (4). The felling of the trees and the odorous conflagration of the bodies of the Jews destroys the forest clearing’s ecosystem and, in fact, vitiates nature by creating an artificial binary between the victims’ charred bodies and the winners’ spoils. Both attitudes to food and the wounded post-apocalyptic ecosystem conflate to signal the disjuncture between the collective and individual attitudes to the massacre. In its aftermath, Adrián’s superior, Lieutenant Kleiber, orders them to a forest clearing unaffected by the killing where the soldiers enjoy copious rations of normally unavailable treats such as chocolate and vodka (298). Adrián’s instinctive return to the charred forest clearing and his vomiting of the food demonstrates his revulsion of the hubristic Nazi culture that thrives in the unaffected forest clearing (298). Thus, the confluence of ecological and alimentary plentifulness, and the obverse ecological destruction and rejection of food, crystallise the collective celebration and personal rejection of genocide which is rooted in the rhythms and alterability of the natural world. Finally, the forest trees morph into inexorable ciphers of justice, their regrowth wholly dependent on the uncovering and acknowledgment of the crime. During Adrián’s dislocation in the devastated post-war Berlin, he invokes the trees as incontestable sites of memory that metonymise universal human rights norms: Algún día, tendrían que pagar por lo que habían hecho, de eso estaba tan seguro como de que iba a morir, porque Alemania iba a perder la guerra, y eso significaba que, muchos antes de que los pinos y los abetos volvieran a crecer, alguien descubriría las piras de hueso carbonizados o algún prisionero hablaría. (303) This forest’s regrowth’s dependence on the rendering of justice indicates that the human relationship with the land, its inhabitants and elements is reciprocal, subject to a natural law that regulates their interrelationship. The Estonian woods, therefore, morph from a site of destruction to a catalyst for a restorative justice. Nature is portrayed as sympathetic to the victims, thriving when the boundaries of respect for fellow human beings are observed and floundering when the land–human nexus is disrupted. The division between victims and perpetrators is further ambiguated by the figuring of the perpetrator as victim. Heinrich Beyer’s refusal to shoot women and children results in his death. Arguably, his disobedience debunks the “ordinary man” argument, in effect that perpetrators are subjugated to the greater forces of consensus and coercion, which override the individual conscience. In this vein, it substantiates Christopher Browning’s remark that “human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter” (188). It is troubling, however, that Beyer’s heroism renders him a victim of the Nazis, thereby achieving an ethically disturbing parallel to the Jewish victims. Primo Levi avers that “to confuse perpetrators with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above

128

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

all, it is a precious service rendered, intentionally or not, to the negators of truth” (33). This idea of perpetrator victimhood relativises perpetrator guilt and undermines the position of Jewish victims as morally and ethically superior to the perpetrators, even lending credence to Nazi eugenics theory. The resplendent Nazi commander, Kleiber, is disquietingly compared to “un ser escogido, superior, de una especie distinta a la que pertenecían sus víctimas” (288). The shift from a Manichean and clearly reductive conceptualisation of the evil perpetrator/innocent victim dialectic to the blurring of victims and perpetrators in a capacious category of victimhood legitimises a flawed spectrum which does not take into account the asymmetrical power relationship between the two groups. This ennoblement of the perpetrator is not complemented by an equal consideration of the victims, who devolve into an undifferentiated mass of alternatively fearful and dignified individuals. Only one actual victim of the massacre, Esther, a prepossessing Jewess, is accorded narrative space. Similarly, Adrián’s stream of consciousness invocation of a contemporaneous victim of anti-Semitism in 1930s Germany, Anna, the beautiful Jewish wife of the world-renowned boxer Max Schmelling, mostly pivots on Schmelling’s devastation at his wife’s imperilment in the 1930s. Esther’s exceptional beauty and Anna Schmelling’s exalted class position qualify the import of this attention to Jewish victims, who are only valued for their outstanding qualities and not for their inherent humanity. The description of Esther is particularly problematic: En el primer grupo, distinguió a una mujer a quien una de sus compañeras llamó Esther. Debía de ser extremadamente joven, porque lo parecía. A su alrededor, había dos muchachas muy bajas, seguramente niñas cuyo crecimiento se había truncado antes de tiempo, y diecisiete viejas, algunas con rasgos juveniles, ancianas que tal vez no superaran los treinta años, pero ella aparentaba su edad, poco más de veinte. (293) Importantly, the other victims’ inferior physicality and age highlight Esther’s attractiveness, which results in an inappropriate and ultimately trivialising hierarchisation of the female victims. The later acknowledgement of the victims’ moral superiority constitutes an ostensible revalorisation of them: Los hombres que habían precedido y los que las sucederían en la muerte, eran seres humanos, y en absoluto inferiores. Al contrario, su superioridad era tal que se arrogaban el privilegio de convertir su muerte en un acto supremo de desprecio, de condena y rencor hacia sus verdugos. (300) The narration of the victims’ reactions as triumph adheres to a belief that the human spirit can remain resilient even under the most extreme conditions and that a sense of self can be maintained even in the most adverse

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

129

of circumstances. It is consistent with an overly optimistic representation of the victim, in effect, the myth of the stoic and enduring victim, who is not permitted to demonstrate the perfectly justifiable negative reactions of fury and bitterness (Dean 72). This treatment reveals a denial of the reality of the fear and belittlement of the victim and embodies a deep aversion to acknowledging the reality of victimhood, which can lead to a diminished sense of self. The line between victim and perpetrator is once again blurred by the emergence of Adrián’s dual identity and the onset of trauma in the aftermath of the massacre when he must recalibrate his understanding of the world. Van Alphen posits that if the prevailing symbolic order does not provide a discursive framework in which to insert a painful experience, the memory becomes traumatic (52). The narrative function is thus essential to the successful intertwining of memory and identity. The ineffability of the massacre in Klooga disturbs the temporal continuum linking the past and present, depriving Adrián of a coherent identity: “Ya no tenía país, ningún pueblo, ninguna casa a la que volver, porque había vuelto a nacer, completamente sólo y empapado en sangre, en los bosques en Klooga” (303). Paul Ricoeur posits the need for continuity in identity by dividing it into two categories: identity as sameness and identity as selfhood, both of which imply continuity. The sundering of the past only perpetuates the pain of a traumatic memory as it precludes the possibility of the narrativisation of the painful memory (85). Hence when the self or its socio-cultural anchorage changes and this permanence is lost, the individual may begin to experience “the dark night of personal identity,” the trauma caused by a fissure between past and present identity (14). Certainly, the binary opposition between past and present is unsustainable because identity and its subcomponent, memory, are derivatives of past experiences; memory constitutes, in fact, the pivot of our experiential capacity, as we conserve the past with our memory, and then actualise it in the present (Schwartz 912). Thus, it is not individuals who have experience but subjects who are constituted through experience. Evidently, as memory is the prerequisite of the temporal component of identity, a blocked memory can lead to a defective and bifurcated self-conception. Adrián’s involvement in the Klooga massacre is rationalised by exculpatory self-appellations that bifurcate the killer’s identity into the heartless, bureaucratic “soldado Gallardo Ortega” and himself, the repentant and traumatised “Adrián Gallardo Ortega.” This dissociation of the remembering self from the remembered self enables him to evade complicity and to allow his identity as a separate morally coherent personage to remain intact and socially acceptable. The latter personage, el soldado Gallardo Ortega’s digestive symptoms, vomiting and inebriation transform him into an object of sympathy, as he is clearly suffering from trauma, which entails the complete erasure of his former murderous identity, as is confirmed by his selfdesignation as “un muerto en vida” (Grandes 303). It also gives rise to a

130

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

suicidal ideation: “había decidido a morirme en Berlin” (303). He is condemned to a troubled existence because the silence which accompanies the repression gnaws at the memory, disfiguring it to the point that it renders him non-sentient: “Klooga le había arrebatado para siempre la capacidad de sentirlo, de acusar cualquier sensación más compleja que el hambre o la sed, el calor o el frío” (319). This inferred diagnosis of trauma renders his actions categorisable, and therefore, understandable within a medical frame of reference that creates readerly sympathy. It also reasserts the morality of the perpetrator, earlier conveyed through the ecopoetical motif, thereby framing Adrián’s wrongdoing in favorable ethical terms that further encourage readers to react to him as a repentant and moral being. His trauma, however, is incongruent with the murderous impulse that results in the killing of his old and hated rival, Alfonso Navarro López, in Berlin (336), which challenges the aforementioned dichotomy of soldier/ ordinary civilian, as the ordinary civilian, relieved of his soldiery duties, is shown to be quite capable of killing without remorse. The degeneration of the ordinary civilian Garrote into a ruthless and unrepentant killer annuls the exculpatory binary that mitigated his participation in the massacre. Relatedly, Adrián’s confessional guilt is shown to be untrustworthy. In typical Grandes’ style, the insertion of a frequently repeated aphorism “¿Qué has hecho, Adrián? No lo sé padre” (299) during Adrián’s sustained mediation on the killings in Klooga endows the narrative with a Christian subtext of guilt and remorse, which is at antipodes to the former’s boxer’s admission of his newly found atheism. This disparity wrests the confessional aside of credibility, and concurrently, causes the reader to dispute the authenticity of both Adrián’s morality and trauma His trajectory, which encompasses multidirectional memory, ecological consciousness and trauma, illustrates the consequences and aftermath of perpetration, demonstrating the capacity for self-deception that I examined in Chapter Five. It challenges the accepted notion of “multidirectional memory” as a catalyst for meritorious international remembrance by revealing how transnational migration can extend memories of hatred and resentment that, in turn, morph into virulent justificatory narratives for the next generation of perpetrators. It is essential to note that multidirectional memory also functions positively in the novel. During the Argentine Dirty War, Manuel’s daughter Simona’s boyfriend, a left-wing militant, is kidnapped, and thus Simona is in imminent danger. Manuel Arroyo Benítez devises a plan to return to Spain with his family in order to protect them. This imbrication of three distinct memory cultures – the memory of the Argentine dictatorship, the memory of exile and the memory of the repression of the Republicans during the Franco dictatorship – reintegrate a missing component of Manuel’s identity. His visit to the Spanish consulate symbolises this return to a past consigned to oblivion, surviving only in family photos and different identity documents (724). The preparatory journey that Manuel undertakes, prior to the return to Madrid, invokes memories of torture in Spain that parallel those used by the secret police in Argentina and during the Spanish

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

131

Civil War (726). Similarly, in the Spanish consulate, the attending diplomat recounts his memory of the denigration of Republican family members to Manuel. The two distinct memory cultures are united by the exclusion and persecution of citizens who do not comply with a rigid national identity. This entanglement of memories of exile, the persecution of left-wing dissidents in Jorge Videla’s Argentina and the institutionalised repression of the Franco dictatorship reflects the growing transnationality of memory in the 1970s when the Holocaust had become the dominant mnemonic paradigm (Novick 52). The sudden intrusion of multidirectional memory into his life enables Manuel, now Manolo, to reconstruct an identity, previously fragmented by the geographical and temporal disjointedness, into a coherent continuum that rationalises his transformation from the exiled diplomat and the spy of Nazi reprobates (Manuel) to the settled and bourgeois family man (Manolo). The subsequent relationship between Manuel and Simona is the union of two people possessed by persistent traumatic memories, and lived and embodied experiences of domestic and wartime violence (634). The couple’s Christmas sojourn in Fortín Tiburcio, the house where the domestic violence took place, prior to their forced departure for Spain, links the memory of domestic violence with the transnational issues of exile and repression in Argentina, reconfiguring a former space of oppression as conducive to universal human liberty. The conjoining of three memories – the Argentine dirty war, Spanish Republican exile, and the Holocaust initiate the reawakening of longdormant memories in the return flight to Madrid, where Manolo/Manuel is overwhelmed with memories of the Nazi exiles’ farewell party for him thirty years ago (729). Thus seemingly disparate memory strands coalesce in a mobile non-lieu, a space devoid of personal and collective memories, marked only by its transience and impersonality (Augé 67). The narration of his sense of failure, induced by the dismissal of his painstaking compilation of the names of Nazi exiles in Argentine and Spain, to his friend Dr. García Medina facilitates the superation of his trauma by discursively integrating this elided episode into his sense of self. The 400-page file marks the space of a shared and covert knowledge of Nazi atrocities and establishes a common grounding amongst the separated friends. Interestingly, the compilation serves as a catalyst for intergenerational understanding of the Spanish Civil War, as his son Juanito begins to question him about his participation in it (739). Thus, multidirectional memory disrupts any idea of an exclusively national memory, illustrating the unstoppable contagion of memory traces that catalyse a plethora of national, international and intergenerational memories that transcend time and space, and validate genocidal acts.

The Stigma of Illness and the Body Grandes privileges the endurance of individual pain in the midst of cataclysmic historical conflicts, accurately invoking female spatial confinement in a room in post-war Berlin following a tram accident, hospitalised Nazis

132

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

in post-war Madrid and an abused wife Simona in Péron’s Argentina, while also scrutinising male bodies that attempt to gain social and physical capital through boxing. Disease and bodily decay simultaneously perpetuate and dispute Nazi privilege by manifesting the magnitude, but also the speciousness, of their apparent social superiority. The deterioration of the perpetrator body crystallises the inequitable power relations and social attitudes that apparently exempt the perpetrator from harsh social judgment, as the perception of both perpetrator illness and the body is constantly transformed by social forces that create biased conceptions and experiences of health status, and by extension, perpetrator status. In a different context, the boxing motif elucidates how male aggression figures counter the diminishment of male physical and social capital, only to be upended by boxing fixing. Illness is a chronological and thematic conduit that links the Nazi characters in the novel, providing continuity to Grandes’ indictment of their crimes. The panoply of ailments afflicting exiled Nazis, such as appendicitis, cirrhosis of the liver and facial disfigurement, manifest a diminished and confused selfhood. Illness typically disrupts the unthought presupposition of all actions and cognition, refusing to allow autonomic processes to remain autonomic (Frank 72). Arthur W. Frank elaborates on its effects as follows: “illness [or, sometimes more significantly, its diagnosis] disrupts the lived experience of one’s body, leading to an overarching existential disruption of the ill person’s way of being in the world and their life world” (73). Society tends to categorise bodies into binarisms – whole and incomplete, abled and disabled, normal and abnormal, functional and dysfunctional – which can culminate in the stigmatisation of the disabled (129). Sander Gilman emphasises the extent to which the conceptualisation and representation of disease fulfills the function of othering. Drawing on illness, sexuality and race as categories of difference, Gilman refers to the analogies between “the ill and the perverse” (22). He highlights the sufferer’s sense of estrangement, caused by their separation from a former healthier life, their social marginalisation, and the consequent need for human affection and sociability. Arthur W. Frank stresses that the invalid is reduced to their physicality, and this loss of physical agency corrodes the personal sense of self, giving rise to an urge to formulate a different, more empowering narrative with which to counter their physical decline (83). However, Frank is at pains to emphasise that this positive reformulation of the illness narrative is impossible for most invalids (84). In fact, most invalids will suffer stigma, a concept that can best be elucidated by reference to Erving Goffman’s seminal work on the theme. He ascribes “stigma” to its Greek etymological roots, which signified “bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier” (Goffman, “Stigma” 1). In Ancient Greece, the signs were inscribed on the stigmatised individual in the form of a visible cut or burn, which confirmed that the bearer was a criminal or slave. The term describes the “situation of

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

133

the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance” (3). He identifies three types of stigma: stigma of character traits, physical stigma and stigma of group identity. Stigma of character traits are “blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering, or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour” (12). Physical stigma refers to physical deformities of the body, while stigma of group identity is a stigma that comes from being of a particular race, nation or religion. These stigmatised individuals can attempt to compensate for their stigma by emphasising another area of the body or an outstanding skill. Stigmatised individuals often ally themselves with other stigmatised people or sympathetic others for support. In Los pacientes del doctor García’s n broad panorama of invalids, the stigma of illness will be unfairly attributed (Simona), reassigned by death (in the case of her husband Renato), and apparently reversed by membership of the Nazi party (Beata Muller), wealth (Lazar) and boxing training (Gallardo Ortega and Ochoa). I suggest that the competing attitudes to these stigmata reveal illness to be a social construction, dependent upon social and economic forces that mold our understanding of, and attitudes toward not onlyNazi victims and perpetrators, but a victim of domestic abuse. Susan Sontag writes that all human beings must navigate “the kingdom of the well” and “the kingdom of the sick,” and thus we are all obligated, at some stage in our lives, to be citizens of the latter, more onerous kingdom (72). In this novel, the Nazis’ coursing through “the kingdom of the sick” intersects with class, physical fitness and ethnicity to ensure, but also dismantle, a cocooned experience of invalidity. In an era in which “physical fitness” was largely determined by governments and institutions who promulgated intolerance of biophysical deformities, the rare power to control and attenuate the symptoms of their illness is very much the purview of the individual Nazi in this novel. Far from being impossible, as per Frank’s caveat, family support, wealth and connections ostensibly appear to enable the Nazis to escape the invalidation of selfhood, symptomatic of illness, which is reconfigured from an inexorable affliction to an intricate relationship between the infirm body and its environment. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s definition of illness as not defined solely by embodiment or environment, but rather by the interactions between the two. According to her, illness does not figure as an objectively defined, solvable medical problem, but a material experience that is defined and disciplined through cultural discourses in which capital, gender and environment intersect (76). She posits that it is not an illness per se that causes a person to be categorised as sick, but their positionality within their environment. For example, a savant autistic child would be unfunctional in environments that do not prioritise learning, but high or even exceptionally high functioning in milieus that valorise their exceptional ability to produce knowledge. In short, the environment dictates the attitude

134

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

to illness and the treatment received by the invalid, which necessarily renders the body mutable, revalorised and devalued by social attitudes. In 1930s Berlin, Beata Muller, a fervent Nazi, is obsessed with protecting her only daughter, Agneta, from “contacto con los hijos de extranjeros, comunistas y judíos, todos igualmente sucios e inmorales, portadores de atroces enfermedades del cuerpo y del espíritu” (306). A tram accident in 1942 leaves her an amputee, but also confers her with the status of a privileged disabled person in the eyes of Agneta’s Nazi comrades, whose esteem for Agneta is contingent upon the quality of care given to her mother (308). Her mother’s demandingness and Agneta’s own considerations as to her status within the party convince Agneta to cede to her mother’s tyranny. The fact that this deference continues in the wake of Beata’s year-long unsuccessful rehabilitation reflects a conceptual shift in the overarching Nazi policy of physical immutability (an invalid is an invalid), deployed to alter the demographic structure, to physical reprogrammability (the ability to alter a person’s genetics or disability to comply with requisite national characteristics). In sum, Beata effectively avoids the social, legal and affective depreciation of the ill person; in fact, illness is a pivotal and valuable part of her self-fashioning, which violates the accepted norms of self-presentation in Nazi Germany. The Nazis’ utopian aspirations did not admit of the imperfections of illness, only requiring their presence as other and subsequent eradication to justify the elite status of the Aryan race. People with disabilities were the group upon whom the Nazis attempted most intensely to enforce their distinctions between the “sick” and the “healthy” with the ultimate aim of expelling them from the body of the German nation in order to rigidly circumscribe the limits of corporeal normalcy and its associations with national belonging and exclusion (Poore 67). In the Third Reich, negative eugenics were developed even further and turned into large-scale euthanasia operations intended to purge Germany of disabled people (87). In fact, the extermination of the disabled, blind and lame, enacted by the Aktion T4 scheme, was a prelude to the “Final Solution” (Kershaw 78). The esteem enjoyed by the crippled Beata illustrates that eugenic principles are applied differentially (or even ignored) based on Nazi membership, and the Nazi construction of genetic fitness is a negotiable and flexible social construct that can be endorsed or dismissed. In a similar vein, the imbuing of Nazi illness with connotations of class superiority in Spain refigures the Nazi body as a hermetic, indeed impermeable, guardian of a classed sovereignty, whereby corporeal surety in illness reveals the Nazis’ own sense of power and purpose. Paradoxically, illness, which implies the loss of capitalistic productivity and exclusion from capitalistic transactions, initially highlights these Nazis’ privileged position in the laggardly post-war Spanish economy. In the post-war period, 900 of the 4,800 businesses in Spain belonged to Germans, and Clara Stauffer’s Nazi network was heavily reliant on generous donations from German businessmen (Besas 84).

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

135

The convalescence of Hans Lazar, the press attaché to the German Embassy during the Second World War, in the Clínica Ruber in Madrid brings into relief the social assumptions about subjectivity, productivity and health that govern our understanding of illness and perpetrators. Lazar quickly gained prominence in Madrid society for his adroit manipulation of press coverage of the Second World War and the sumptuous parties hosted by him at his residence in Madrid. He was an avid art collector and antiquarian, who eventually ended up controlling the Madrid art market by buying much discounted artwork from impoverished families and selling it at a huge profit (Irujo 69). During his visit to Lazar, García Medina is overawed by the luxurious hospital surroundings and the costly apparel of the former Nazi. The hospital is an aesthetically perfect space, populated by beautiful nurses and hosting lavish hospital rooms that markedly contrast with the austerity of the hospitals he served in during the Spanish Civil War. Lazar’s hospital room presents a reversal of the typical body–space relationship of hospital rooms in which the body is immobilised, passive and dependent, and patient productivity and subjectivity are in decline. Typically, the patient’s capacity to control the perception of their body is jeopardised by its sub-status as a diseased body and the correlative inability to control bodily presentation to others. However, the body constitutes a socio-natural entity, with a high degree of responsiveness to society’s attitude towards and treatment of it (Shilling 22), the corollary to which is that affluence and high status produce more cossetted bodies, less affected by the decrepitude wrought by illness. Far from being a devitalising force, illness figures as a productive hiatus in the life of this important Nazi. Lazar’s drug-fuelled self-presentation constitutes a strategic form of resistance deployed to disguise the vulnerability of his diseased body. Grandes mines the rich narrative ambiguities of initial impressions to articulate the disparity that intervenes between the presentation of an active, organically healthy and high-class self and that of a self being declassed by illness. Lazar and García Medina engage in a productive discussion centering on the transfers of Nazi goods from Spain, which culminates in the establishment of the Sociedad Europea de Comercio Exterior; despite his pain, Lazar, donning silk pyjamas, retains his ceremonial manners (550). His hospital attire, then, does not reflect his confinement but rather his aliveness and control.4 In a covert glance at Lazar’s medical charts, García Medina discovers that the Nazi holds meetings “en los peores momentos de cada día como una especie de gimnasia de la voluntad” (553). The reconstrual of the Nazi’s pain as a beneficial, entrepreneurial force that sharpens his intelligence seems to corroborate the idea of Nazi superiority (553). The Nazi patient is seemingly exempt from the altered and degenerative form of embodiment precipitated by serious illness, and Nazism itself is shown as a stimulant of a stagnant Spanish autarky. One can perceive that economic considerations eclipse the dubious moral and health status of the invalid.

136

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

We are disabused, however, of Nazi bodily immunity when we learn that in reality Lazar is not pain-free during these meetings because, prior to the meetings, he is strongly sedated by morphine, a drug to which he has become addicted (553). Thus, a direct connection between individual character and medication, which was heretofore inoperative, is established to indict Lazar’s personal weakness, which confirms his stigma of character, as per Goffman’s typology. Medical terminology is deployed to emphasise and subvert the authenticity of the Nazi body, which, in this case, articulates deception, a radical disjuncture between surface and depth, of the feigned and the bona fide. Lazar’s sickness both confirms and inverts the fundamental premise of Nazi eugenics by initially figuring his body as a tractable instrument of his individual will that presents the desirable social qualities of intelligence, economic productivity, and decorum, a performance of a high social class that is invalidated by Lazar’s physical, somewhat declassé, symptoms, and his addiction to morphine. The former doctor expands on Lazar’s jaundiced appearance in comparative terms of ethnicity that analogise the privileged patient’s mien to that of a gypsy or “los tenderetes del rastro” (549), a parallel that, as the doctor acknowledges, belies the putative superiority of the Aryan race. Ironically, given Lazar’s prominence within the Nazi hierarchy in Spain, this parallel is consistent with the anti-Semitism directed at him.5 The mysteriousness of Lazar’s supposedly Turkish origins, his sallow skin and his cosmopolitanism led post-war personages, such as the British ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, to classify him erroneously as “un judio oriental muy siniestro” (Besas 35). In his diatribe against Lazar, the ambassador used a racialised slur to reduce Lazar’s status, referring to him as “la éminence grise o más bien jaune (amarillo) de la embajada alemana en Madrid” (Besas 36). The denigration of Lazar’s skin undermines the body’s role as what Emile Durkheim termed “a factor of individuation” (“Suicide” 102), which marks the boundaries of identity. Moreover, García Medina’s similarly racialised vilification of Lazar confirms his wavering clinical judgment, which I discussed earlier. Furthermore, it allows us to gauge the acceptability of these Nazis within Spanish society, as the press attaché’s only blameworthy deviance is his putative Jewishness, a disjuncture that confirms the Spanish post-war tolerance of Nazi eugenic dictates that villainised Jews. It is the group stigma of a historically victimised group, rather than the group stigma of the perpetrators, that prompts a harsher evaluation of Lazar’s illness. For both Beata and Hans Lazar, the interpretation and experience of illness is revealed to be situational, premised on the incongruity or congruency between a disability and its environment. The dividing line between normalcy and abnormalcy for these two Nazis is dictated by propitiatory environments that palliate the effects of illness, favourable conditions that are only revoked, in Lazar’s case, by persistent anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain. Therefore, it is the imputation of belonging to a historically victimized ethnicity, rather than a group of perpetrators, that ostracizes Lazar.

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

137

The dissolution of the commonly accepted categories of healthy and sick, worthy and unworthy form a part of a sustained critique of patriarchy that is divorced from any cultural and national specificity. In Argentina, Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s paramour, Simona Gaitan, endured a violent marriage that leaves her permanently distrustful of men. Simona is forced to bear the brunt of her husband, Renato’s, fury at the couple’s childlessness, despite the fact that it is he who is actually infertile (630). The aridness of the desertic area of Fortín Tiburcio, which evokes Renato’s male status as a failed landlord in more competitive states, prefigures his infertility, giving us to understand that his masculinity is flawed and not generative of growth (629). Refuting this aspersion on his masculinity, Renato marks his wife’s body as impaired and begins to regularly assault her. Whereas male disabilities center on questions of agency, female disabilities are often associated with shame (Miner 285). The novel inscribes Simona’s anguish as a supposedly barren woman in a pronatalist culture which esteems women according to their fertility. Her ensuing psychosomatic fever confines her to her bed, unattended and reproached as lazy and underserving of medical attention by her censorious sisters-in-law (630). Interestingly, the classification of gynecological abnormalcy is the result of dual medical and social processes, whereby the doctor’s correct diagnosis of Simona’s husband’s infertility is eclipsed by a familial rhetoric of patriarchal prejudice that erroneously stigmatises her as infertile. The implosion of her corporeal boundaries creates a female hyperbody, charged with contradictory significations whose very intimate interior is exposed and susceptible to both verbal and physical abuse. The familial stigmatisation of Simona’s body shows how the perception of the female body as deficit, a pathological condition, is a phenomenon brought about by patriarchal control, which is only undone by Renato’s death in a river accident, the aftermath of which is described in visceral terms: Renato empezó a aparecer tres días más tarde, el tronco con una pierna casi entera y medio brazo, después el otro, luego una mano, y así. La cabeza fue lo último que encontraron, y ni siquiera estuvieron seguros de que fuera la suya porque lo que apareció fue puro hueso. Lo demás se lo comieron los peces. (633) This dismemberment dehumanises him, placing him in the realm of the animal, which extends the perception of the body as a brutalised, stigmatised object. Indeed, it can be argued that, as per Erving Goffman’s definition of “the person with the stigma as something not quite human” (“Stigma” 205), physical abnormalcy has become cyclical, reassociated with the domestic abuser who represented it all along. The boxing trope within the novel destigmatises male physical and capitalistic decline, briefly restoring the equilibrium between male social capital and corporeality. Decaying male bodies expose and dismantle the

138

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

constructedness of Spanish hegemonic masculinity, understood, pace R.W. Connell’s definition of it, as the most successful, dominant variant of it. Grandes’ gradual discursive imbrication of pathology, medicine and masculine atypicality can be discerned in her clever conjoining of boxing and war. Boxing, the male sport par excellence, functions as a compensatory validation of masculinity for male characters traumatised by an untreatable disease (Antonio Ochoa) and also assuages the sense of failure engendered by a mediocre military career (Adrián). Adrián’s trainer Antonio Ochoa suffers from a hereditary degenerative disease that his father treats by initiating him in boxing (130). Antonio Ochoa’s analogisation of boxing to “la mejor medicina” (131) conceives of pugilism as a psychological panacea to the physical decline of the male body. In a similar vein, boxing proves to be a bulwark against emasculation for Adrián Gallardo Ortega, who enters the Nationalist army imbued with the illusory patriarchal authority granted by his illustrious forebears, the Carlist and landowning Garrido, but his subsequent mediocre trajectory proves him unworthy of assuming their mantle, a disappointment that compels him to adopt boxing as a sport. The alignment of corporeal and, by extension, masculine affirmation with ideological conformity is reiterated in Adrián’s fervent hope that boxing will improve his status in the Nationalist army. Physical character stigmata will be reversed by the intense corporeal experience of boxing, an undoing of capitalist stigmatisation by corporeal transcendence, or the illusion of it. This bodily rejuvenation can be crystallised by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “body without organs,” which was inspired by a radio play by Antonin Artaud, a schizophrenic playwright. They aver that capitalism and capital have a similar relationship to that which exists between “the body without organs” and “desire production.” In their words: Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. (10) This passage is germane to our understanding of the boxing motif within the novel. First, it establishes a relationship between the “body without organs,” understood to be an inadequate body, or the relationship of the individual to their body, and capitalism, as if the dynamics of the latter are responsible for the former, thereby cementing the relationship between culture and disease. To “make oneself a body without organs” is to eschew a stable body image, to experience a surpassing of normal physical limitations that is predicated on an idea of corporeal malleability, in effect, a belief in the limitlessness of the body. This intense corporeal transformation effectively

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

139

entails a discarding of identities and physical boundaries to transform into an invulnerable version of self. Thus, both Captain Ochoa and Adrián seek to reinvigorate the decaying body in a place in which they apparently shed the classed, social and capitalistic perceptions of their bodies. When Adrián becomes an outstanding combatant in the fascist boxing world, it seems that boxing has effectuated this change: “En el ejército de Franco, Adrián Gallardo no fue nada, ni siquiera eso, hasta que Antonio Ochoa le convirtió en el campeón de su brigada” (165). The physical courage necessary to compete in the boxing ring is reminiscent of the physicality and effort expended in “real,” masculine labor, imbuing both Adrián and his trainer, Captain Ochoa, with a meaningful masculinity denied to them by intellectual inadequacies and disease, pulling them back from the physiological and social precipices that threatened normal functioning. As men who have changed the perception of their bodies, they have managed “to repair the stigma,” to use Goffman’s term (“Stigma” 9), reinvesting their bodies with meaning in relation to both self and society. The boxing ring is the locus for a brute physicality and triumphant gendered individuality that reverses their social irrelevance. But, as with Lazar and Simona, the social perception of the body is deceptive, firstly undercut by its association with lower social class and then chicanery. Despite the initial euphoria of his rise in the boxing world, Adrián recognises that his boxing triumph is anchored in the more banal functions of the body, and therefore, lacks distinction: “Boxear no era combatir, y se parecía más a ganarse la vida con las manos, como los destripaterrones a quienes despreciaba su abuelo, que a labrarse la gloria con las armas” (165). The internal intraparty strife between the Falange and the army means that the outcome of the boxing matches is fixed, which, of course, recasts both Adrián and Captain Ochoa as impostors. Furthermore, the characterisation of the Falange boxing hero, and Adrián’s rival, Alfonso Navarro López as cowardly and self-serving creates a counter-discourse wherein Nationalist boxing prowess is dissociated from masculine strength. The devaluation of the recapitalised male body reflects the limitations of its social utility and symbolic value, and also demonstrates how the shifting variables of class and gender can resignify the same body.

Conclusion Los pacientes del doctor García’s exploration of three cases of perpetration proffers privileged insights into the narratological conveyance of perpetration, and its interrelationship with medical ethics, multidirectional memory, ecocriticism and the authenticity of perpetrator trauma. In a particularly sophisticated treatment of perpetrator memory, Grandes debunks the powerful imagery of the unimpeachable doctor-hero to complicate the relationship between the reader and the medical perpetrator, whose failure to adhere to medical ethics reveals his duplicity. A physician’s power over his patients

140

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

is misused to legitimate class and patriarchal biases, and eventually to condone murder, an abjuration of medical principles that increases awareness of how personal bias negatively impinges on healing relationships, and how medical imperatives can sanction perpetration. Gallardo Ortega’s and his friend Jan de Wallander’s participation in the murder of 200 Jews in the Estonian concentration camp of Klooga elucidates how memories of resentment and historical dispossession act as powerful catalysts for exterminatory acts, thus challenging the prevailing, and somewhat idealistic, view of multidirectional memory as solely a force for virtue. The novel’s representation of the sick perpetrator body causes us to reconceive it as far more than a biomedical fact, but rather as a set of understandings, relationships, and actions that are shaped by diverse kinds of medical and social knowledge and power relations, which are constantly in flux. Membership in the Nazi party ironically dispenses with the fixity of national corporeal identity endorsed by them to legitimise a more pliable and less harsh figuration of defective corporeality. The illness of Hans Lazar reveals a nexus of capitalistic productivity and corporeal immunity that ostensibly confirms his elite status in post-war Spain, which ironically is only undermined by the group stigma inherent in a racialised anti-Semitism. The mutually exclusive dual diagnoses of Simona’s infertility reflects the ambiguous parameters of normality and abnormality, which are used to legitimise or delegitimise patriarchal abuse. Masculine attempts to bridge the gap between disease, social failure and the weakened male body are transiently renewed by boxing, which, similar to the other cases, transmits a false perception of the body. Thus, the experiences of Nazi and perpetrator illness are molded by bias and forms of social classification and control, including social status, ideological affiliation and patriarchal prejudice, which resignify the perpetrator body as possessed of no intrinsic meaning, but only made and remade by social discourses.

Notes 1 In 1999, the statement produced by the Society for General Internal Medicine advocated “detached concern,” which defined the physician’s empathic response as “the act of correctly acknowledging the emotional state of another without experiencing that state oneself” (Brodkin et al. 841). 2 According to psychiatrist, Jodi Halperin, the rationale for “detached concern,” defined as the emotional reserve of the physician, is no longer tenable: the general medical consensus is that emotionally attuned physicians have an enhanced understanding of their patients who are then more likely to disclose sensitive information (qtd. in Childers and Arnold 31). 3 The distortion of multidirectional memory for the purposes of vengeance and the perpetuation of hatred necessarily raises the question of whether memorialisation is beneficial to people and societies. In his seminal book, Against Remembrance, David Rieff contests the dictum that memorialisation is a moral and political imperative, which can only ameliorate social harmony. He postulates that remembering is ultimately futile, since all individuals and societies

Perpetration and the Stigma of Illness

141

flounder, dwindle and die. Taking issue with George Santayana’s dictum that “those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it,” he refers to gross violations of human rights in Cambodia and Rwanda that disprove this much-cited injunction. Collective memory, Rieff avers, perpetuates divisions by preserving best-forgotten hatreds and fuelling animosity towards citizens who do not comply with the prescribed national identity narrative. 4 Recent research suggests that patients should be encouraged to wear their own clothing in order to bolster their self-esteem (McDonald et al. 1865), a privilege accorded to only a few invalids in this period. 5 For a detailed account of anti-Semitism during this period, please read Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida’s chapter “Antisemitism and Philosephardism in Spain, 1880– 1945.” See Bibliography for details.

Conclusion

In this monograph, the first single-study of Grandes’ postmillennial novels, I have analysed previously unacknowledged, but hugely significant, themes in her work, while also proffering a new interpretation of the much-studied theme of Republican victimhood. The basic thesis that I have presented in this book has been that Grandes memorialises an expansive memory that not only takes into account the intricacies of gender and perpetrator memory but also reconceptualises the Republican victim who is transformed into a striving subject who seeks to obtain the prerequisites of eudaimonia in order to flourish in inimical circumstances. I demonstrated that her memorialisation of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship is more complex than an unequivocal advocacy of Republican memory, as she memorialises the gender memory of the first third of the twentieth century (Las tres bodas de Manolita), the memory of a female exile (Inés y la alegría), perpetrator memory (El corazón helado, El lector de Julio Verne, Las tres bodas de Manolita and Los pacientes del doctor García) and multidirectional memory (Los pacientes del doctor García). When considered within these new conceptual frameworks, Grandes’ much-studied memorialisation of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship cannot be reduced to a schismatic revindication of an adamantly Republican stance. On the contrary, it demonstrates the variation that exists in her representation of both perpetrator and victim memories. As such, this monograph presents a more comprehensive insight into the authoress, deepening public and academic understanding of her work. More widely, my analysis has demonstrated that cultural perpetrator memory in Spain is a well-developed genre that can make a significant contribution to the European canon of cultural perpetrator memory. This monograph has also demonstrated the reductionism in viewing perpetrator memory as being solely based on domination and submission by revealing new insights that redefine it as an affective, gendered and relational phenomenon. In moving away from stereotypical visions of the beleaguered victim, it proffers a vision of a victim who is both vulnerable and resilient, thereby challenging the inordinate emphasis on trauma in studies of victimhood.

144

Conclusion

From Grandes’ 2007 magnum opus, El corazón helado, gender and perpetrator memory articulate a more complete revisioning of Spain’s tumultuous history, and in so doing, unsettle gender boundaries set by monolithic national and social imperatives. My readings analyse the gendered narratives that underpin second-generation identities, which enable them to make sense of silenced or intuited family histories. These characters mobilise familial narratives of wrongdoing to solidify their own generational and gendered identities. My analysis of El corazón helado reframes what is probably Grandes’ most-studied novel as a complex exploration of the gendered intergenerational transmission of perpetrator memory. It shows how both the female and masculine quests to avenge and uncover their grandparents’ memories interrelate with twenty-first-century gender models of neoliberal Spanish feminism and “new man” identities. Álvaro’s and Raquel’s trajectories would seem to signal that gender norms and memory need to coalesce, a finding that is disproved in the fourth chapter on El lector de Julio Verne. In this chapter, paternal wrongdoing is rationalised by an intellectual subscription to the alternative masculinities embodied in the child’s prohibited books, which enables the protagonist to reject his father’s model of masculinity. Fathers are central to perpetrator memory in Spain, as their sons attempt to understand how their fathers experienced the Franco regime’s strictures, the impact on their personalities and their sons’ upbringing. It could be argued that this emphasis on the father–son relationship inadvertently reifies patriarchal authority, relegating women to the sidelines. Indeed, Marianne Hirsch observes a tendency in perpetrator literature to infantilise and feminise victims in a manner that hypermasculinises the perpetrators, a fallacious binary that “can serve as a means of forgetting” (“Generation of Postmemory” 72). In opposition to this tendency, the enfeeblement of the male perpetrator body in Los pacientes del doctor García and the emotional fallout ensuing the rupture of the father–son relationship in the previously discussed novels delink patriarchy and perpetrator memory. In other words, the mendacious paternal transmission of perpetrator memory, the abysm in values between father and son, and the weakening of the male body voids perpetrator memory of the patriarchal dominance that undergirds it. In fact, the repudiation of perpetrator memory is predicated on an affirmation of contemporary and more equitable masculine norms and a rejection of the historically normative ones of stoicism and domination of women. Relatedly, the attention allocated to the mother–son relationship and matrimonial relationships in both novels reinstates women as influential actors in the formation of historical discourses. The assertion of a female mnemonic lineage rejects patriarchal values, bringing the forgotten women of the Spanish Second Republic and the Francoist period, Teresa in El corazón helado and Las rubias in El lector de Julio Verne, to the forefront of contemporary Spanish memory politics. Therefore, the search for memory reverses differential and detrimental gendered power relations that isolated women as second-class citizens.

Conclusion

145

The concern with masculinity recurs in my analysis of Las tres bodas de Manolita where I examined an intellectual cultural space that countered the debilitation of the male body and a contestatory queer utopia that legitimised homosexual relations in 1930s Madrid. The transience of this utopia, however, revealed the difficulties of overturning normative social mores and class dictates. My chapter on Inés y la alegría concentrated on the diminishment of exilic masculinity in the aftermath of female entrepreneurial success, demonstrating how exile sanctions atypical gender relations that threaten patriarchal dominance. Focusing on alimentary allusions that signified the weakening of male social status, it explored the emasculation of exiled men condemned to stagnation in both the country of exile and the patria. Moving beyond current readings that rely on reductive binaries of weak and strong men in Grandes’ work, I have demonstrated that her postmillennial novels are engaged in a conceptual mutation away from stereotypes of masculinity, thereby challenging rigid archetypes that negate men’s need for affect and affirming the existence of alternative masculinities forged in eras that did not allow for diverse performances of masculinity. Thus, the representation of gender history in these novels approximates to a fluid and uncertain screed that contests a past that was presented as fixed and static, thereby returning agency and an autonomous remembered past to the groups who were most marginalised from traditional narrative history, be they exiled women, prostitutes or institutionalised children. Grandes enjoins readers to engage with a gendered version of history that attests to the multiplicity of the female experience: for example, the novel Inés y la alegría presents an extraordinary affirmation of otherness through a multiple redistribution of traditional hierarchical spaces. The kitchen is the spatial nexus where the marginality of exiled women is reconstructed through the enactment of an ethics of care and the unifying function of cooking. The division between public (male) history and private (female) domesticity is blurred, and politics enters the private sphere of the kitchens. However, this alteration of the traditional configuration of power is not unproblematic, for domestic prowess culminates in the depoliticisation of the protagonist, which seems to suggest that the two spheres are incompatible even in supposedly more progressive exilic settings. Female solidarity plays a vital role in the evolution of the heroines of the novels El lector de Julio Verne and Las tres bodas de Manolita. For these female characters, sympathetic “emotional communities” drive individual agency and embody gyn/affection, the distilling of a uniquely feminine lore of wisdom to female friends. The affinity between these women exalts the concept of unequivocal female unity, not only by testing and transcending the limits of post-war female conventionality but also by rejecting the expectation of ostracism for the violation of typical female norms. It enables marginalised groups to resist dominant power structures by affirming one another in a society that denigrates them. These female emotional communities are the very antithesis of the only permissible forms of female associations, charities and the Falange Women’s Section, la Sección Femenina,

146

Conclusion

which cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into excellent helpmates. Notably, several women characters in the novels, like Inés, Manolita and Las rubias, work, itself an act of female defiance, because female employment was discouraged. Thus, their resolve to work translates to a disruptive narrative force that subverts male dominance. Some of these characters, such as Manolita and Inés, are motherless or suffer detrimental maternal intervention in their lives. Experiencing a dearth of economic and social power, these lone women resort to mutually supportive female networks as their ultimate weapon against oppressive social norms, opening new possibilities for each woman’s future and a type of collective joy and nurturing that is deeply renewing. However, gyn/affection is not a given; in Las tres bodas de Manolita, the capacity to extend female solidarity varies significantly, reflecting the dynamic changes in the prostitutes’ domestic circumstances, more specifically, their social stigmatisation and aging. Therefore, the novel offers a less sanguine vision of how women compete with one another when pursuing social advancement, which culminates in a diminished capacity for unwavering sympathy for other women. Clearly, these novels challenge normative ideas about masculinity and femininity that obviated stories deemed insignificant, putting into circulation parts of a gendered cultural memory that ruptures binary frameworks and shows us that there exists more than one gendered, typically patriarchal, account of history. My reconsideration of Grandes makes a major contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on perpetrator memory in Spain, suggesting new interpretive avenues, while revealing the manifold complexities of perpetration that transcend its simplistic ascription to malevolence. These nuanced representations trouble the official and divisive memory narrative, unsettling fixed and persistent paradigms that position perpetrators within overtly facile psychological categories. In the process, I argue for the need to move beyond the simplistic victimhood–perpetrator binaries in order to appreciate the potentialities of the cultural memory boom to deliver a more realistic and multidimensional representation of the post-war period, which dispenses with the divisions that have come to characterise it. In so doing, I have brought Grandes’ major works into dialogue with the heretofore unanalysed themes of ecocriticism, illness, medical ethics and the child. In regard to the first category, I engaged in a reading of the relationship between the female characters, the child protagonist, and the environment in El lector de Julio Verne, examining how the trees and countryside morph into a space of self-development for both groups. I expanded on perpetrator guilt and ecology in Los pacientes del doctor García, more specifically, the ways in which the forests are affected by the destructive Nazi power, which is only reversed by their transformation into allegories of redress in the post-war period. The environment is thus revealed to be a barometer of attitudes and ways of coping with perpetration in these novels.

Conclusion

147

Illness and bodily stigma in Los pacientes del doctor García provided a useful critical lens with which to reflect on the relationship between perpetration and socio-economic capital as well as patriarchal privilege. Their illnesses do not “other” the Nazis in ways that threaten their class status and self-perception, but instead consolidate their stature, a strange disjuncture that crystallises the shifting meanings of the perpetrator body. Grandes’ comprehensive engagement with perpetration is also evidenced by the use of the child protagonist in El lector de Julio Verne, which problematically encourages an emotional, empathetic response to the perpetrator, while also proving that the child figure can be used as a symbol of perpetrator memory just as effectively as it has morphed into a cipher of Republican memory, the memory of victimhood. The narrator puts an emphasis on his father’s personal story, his family ties and also the collateral suffering he experiences as a result of his father’s implication in torture, thereby creating awareness of the personal and emotional fallout ensuing perpetration. The novel subverts the normative portrayal of the perpetrator as a mindless functionary or an inherently malign human being, as Nino’s father is presented as bereft of agency and control over his own circumstances. This portrayal of a perpetrator’s inner life, feelings of self-loathing, perceptions of low social status and corporeal suffering necessarily demands a modicum of empathy on the part of both author and reader because it renders the perpetrator relatable and human. It demands that readers experience compassion for and understanding of the perpetrator in ways that supersede stereotypes, thus filling an important memory gap in Spanish memory culture. This corpus of novels explores the psychological motivations and consequences of perpetration, thereby enhancing Spanish memory culture. Firstly, Grandes addresses the taboo subject of perpetrator trauma. Eva Hoffmann postulates that since trauma involves “the persecution of subjects to whom all agency and principles have been denied,” perpetrators cannot be afflicted with trauma (62). Contradicting this view, Grandes offers perpetrator trauma as a new paradigm and legitimate field of concern in Los pacientes del doctor García, a problematic representation that may induce readerly confusion, opposition and even revulsion. On a social level, acknowledging perpetrator trauma and suffering is taxing because it entails a concomitant recognition of widespread social perpetration; it also negates the nostrum of perpetrators as villains whose deeds do not have psychological consequences for them or human beings unentitled to any public sympathy, beliefs that Grandes first contested in El lector de Julio Verne. This exploration of perpetrator trauma is just one manifestation of Grandes’ interest in the psychology of the perpetrator. Roberto Conesa, “El Orejas,” in Las tres bodas de Manolita alleges the validity of obeying orders as a justification for participating in torture, thereby inferring that his moral code is fundamentally altered as a result of the coercive power of la Brigada Social. In other words, the human need for group conformity leads

148

Conclusion

to unwanted personality changes and aberrant behaviors that surpass individual control. Used by the perpetrators themselves, this notion expresses the torturer’s need to self-perceive as a victim, affirming the capacity of ordinary people to create mitigatory psychological discourses that quell their moral conscience. Even in Las tres bodas de Manolita, the idea of perpetrator trauma is undermined by Adrián’s calculated killing of his boxing rival, which proves that while the creation of an altered, dissociated self can describe the initial short-term adaptation to the perpetrators’ own atrocities, it does not suffice to explain sustained wrongdoing. In the interest of providing a fuller portrait of perpetrator memory, Grandes also addresses the affective victim–perpetrator relationship in both Los aires difíciles and El corazón helado, which thematise families founded on post-war ideological divisions that are bequeathed to the second generation. The family plays an indispensable role in the formulation of individual memory, as it provides the necessary social frameworks for the formulation and social approbation of individual memory, and consequently, opaque or unknowable family origins culminate in the disjointed identities of the second generation. Grandes addresses directly the conundrum of an adopted mother’s transmission of victimhood in Los aires difíciles. This domestic plot is not developed in isolation but deeply embedded within a complicated set of social relations that pertain to motherhood, clothing and class, and give rise to the adoptive daughter’s uniquely classed victimhood. El corazón helado plumbs the motivational depths of a marriage between perpetrator and victim, particularly of the changing social mores, economic imperatives and psychological mechanisms that bind the couple together. The theory of “betrayal trauma theory” elucidates this atypical model of togetherness, which c an affective matrix that mistakes feigned affection in childhood with enduring love. It is precisely these novels’ difficult work of expanding the boundaries of Spanish collective memory, of exploring perpetrator memory in its full complexity, that demonstrates a relatively mature phase of Spanish cultural memory, one that may encourage a well-rounded understanding of historical events that have been rendered infinitely more complex by bringing to the fore multifaceted perpetrator memories that have long been on the periphery of collective moral responsibility. On a wider scale, this detailed analysis of Grandes’ treatment of perpetrator memory contributes to European perpetrator memory, of which Spain has never been considered a key actor due to the transitional collective remembrance mandate that parenthesised both sides of the Civil War, thus pre-empting a trenchant confrontation with the past. The diversity and depth of Grandes’ engagement attests to the strength of Spain’s nascent perpetrator memory culture, which has the potential to enrich the European culture of perpetrator memory. Based on my detailed reconceptualisation of victimhood in the “Introduction,” I have underscored how resilience morphs into a contemporaneously accurate form of resistance in these novels, thereby challenging

Conclusion

149

current critical thinking that regards it as a projection of neoliberal values onto the past. The multiple economic, spatial and intellectual forms of the will to flourish in Las tres bodas de Manolita demonstrate the limitations inherent in this understanding of resilience, which is revealed to be personal, communal and environmental, and not necessarily viable. In Grandes’ postmillennial novels, the reader is offered the privilege of sharing the mental states, the and interiority, of those characters who struggle daily to overcome obstacles such as poverty, fear and violence but do not relinquish their entitlement to a life of dignity, eudaimonia. Evidently, Grandes promotes an ameliorative social agenda that seeks to improve the present by infusing it with the values of the past. The novels are populated by autonomous female characters such as the titular Inés of Inés y la alegría and Manolita of Las tres bodas de Manolita, who subvert male privilege and challenge the gender subjugation of the post-war period. While the notion of the postwar and exilic working woman reinscribes female economic agency, the fate of las rubias in El lector de Julio Verne and Isabel in Las tres bodas de Manolita shows that the struggle to survive does not necessarily culminate in flourishing. Similarly, the gendered transmission of victimhood in Los aires difíciles demonstrates how an implacable classism reduces the adoptive daughter’s opportunity structure in a prosperous period. These texts retrace a futile form of resistance, which culminates only in irreparable loss, solitude, despair and death. The unviability of the resistance and resilience of las rubias, Isabel and the prostitute Doña Eladia testifies to the influence of the socio-historical milieu on individual resilience. Victims do not cease to become victims in her novels. These representations reveal Grandes’ understanding of victimhood and resilience to be far more nuanced than previously acknowledged by critics. Anchored in scholarly thought from a number of disciplinary areas, it is essential to emphasise that the uncovering of these insights has required a very varied theoretical engagement spanning Spanish literary history, philosophy, psychology, fashion, queer studies, history, trauma studies, medical ethics and exile. It has drawn on the work of a vast array of scholars, such as R.W. Connell, Michael Rothberg, Edward Said, Erving Goffman, Marta Nussbaum and Judith Butler, to name but a few. This interdisciplinary approach to Grandes’ work was paramount in illuminating the full ambition of her commitment to both gender and memory, which brings relevant new critical insights to bear on her work while also suggesting innovative interpretive pathways that should be of interest to memory and gender studies’ scholars. In this manner, my analysis attests to the transformative power of Grandes’ literature to not only subtly dignify the Republican victim but also set agendas and propel Spain into the European culture of perpetrator memory. Her work actively participates in creating a more mature and pluralistic national memory culture, navigating and blurring the boundaries between different gendered and ideological strands, thus forging an enduring repertoire of cultural remembrance.

Select Bibliography

Primary Sources Grandes, Almudena. Malena es un nombre de tango. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 1994. Grandes, Almudena. Atlas de geografía humana. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 1998. Grandes, Almudena. Los aires difíciles. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 2002. Grandes, Almudena. El corazón helado. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 2007. Grandes, Almudena. Inés y la alegría. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 2010. Grandes, Almudena. El lector de Julio Verne. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 2012. Grandes, Almudena. Las tres bodas de Manolita. Madrid. Tusquets Editorial, 2014. Grandes, Almudena. Los besos en el pan. Madrid. Tusquets Editorial, 2015. Grandes, Almudena. Los pacientes del Dr. García. Madrid: Tusquets Editorial, 2017.

Works Cited Abella, Rafael. La vida amorosa en la Segunda República. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996. Abella, Rafael. La vida cotidiana bajo el régimen de Franco. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996. Agencias. “Esteban González Pons: “El problema de los españoles no es Franco, es el paro.” El País, 30 November 2011. https://elpais.com/politica/2011/11/30/actual idad/1322654115_798303.html. Accessed 13 November 2012. Águilera Gamero, María. La narrativa de Almudena Grandes (1994–2004). Doctoral dissertation, Universidad de Córdoba, 2012. Aitken, Stuart C. The Awkward Spaces of Fathering. Sussex: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Alba, Richard D. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Alcina, Benito. Tratado de higiene privada y pública. Madrid: Colecciones Siglo XIX, 1892. Aldaraca, Bridget A. El ángel del hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Alegre, Beatriz Caamaño. “La vida sonríe a quien le sonríe’: Cristina Guzmán como modelo de feminidad falangista.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 85.4 (2008): 421–44.

Select Bibliography

151

Alfonso, García, and María del Carmen. Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, una fgura del decadentismo hispánico. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo Press, 1998. Allison, Mark. “The Construction of Youth in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s.” Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies. Eds. Barry Jordan and Rikki MorganTamosunas. London: Arnold, 2000. 265–73. Álvarez Chillida, Gonzalo. “Antisemitism and Philosephardism in Spain, 1880– 1945.” Spain, World War II and the Holocaust: History and Representation. Eds. Gina Herrman and Sara Brenneis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 65–83. Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Anabitarte, Ana. “Almudena Grandes: Lloro muchísimo escribiendo.” Babab 15 (2002). http://www.babab.com/no15/almudena_grandes.htm. Accessed 2 June 2014. Anderson, Kjell. “Who was I to Stop the Killing? Moral Neutralization among Rwandan Genocide Perpetrators.” Journal of Perpetrator Research 1.1 (2017): 39–64. Anderson, Lara. Control and Resistance: Food Discourse in Franco Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Anderson, Peter, and Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco. “Property, The Forging of Francoism and Collective Memory.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 30.2 (2017): 73–92. Andres-Suárez, Irene. “Memoria e identidad en El corazón helado de Almudena Grandes.” Almudena Grandes: Grand Séminaire de Neuchâtel, Coloquio internacional Almudena Grandes, 1–2 de junio de 2010. Eds. Andres-Suárez, Irene, and Antonio Rivas. Madrid: Arco Libros, 2012. 155–72. Añover, Veronica. “Encuentro con Almudena Grandes.” Letras Peninsulares 13.2–3 (2002): 803–13. Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. London: Routledge, 2016. Arenas, Paula. “Almudena Grandes: “Hay que ser muy valiente para pedir ayuda y también para aceptarla.” 20 minutos, 15 December 2015. https://www.20m inutos.es/noticia/2628233/0/entrevista/almudena-grandes/los-besos-en-el-pan/. Accessed 7 June 2019. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. London: Penguin, 2006. Aresti, Nerea. Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas. Los ideales de feminidad y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX. Bilbao: Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del PAIS Vasco, 2002. Arjona, Daniel. “Almudena Grandes: Tengo muchos lectores de derechas.” 13 September 2017. https://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2017-09-13/almud ena-grandes-los-pacientes-del-doctor-garcia-entrevista_1442905/. Accessed 15 January 2020. Artola Blanco, Miguel. El fn de la clase ociosa: de Romanones al Estraperlo, 1900– 1950 Madrid: Alianza, 2015. Ascunce Arrieta, José Ángel. Sociología cultural del franquismo (1936-1975). Colección Historia Biblioteca Nueva. Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2015. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Modernity. London: Polity.

152

Select Bibliography

Aunión, Juan A. “Almudena Grandes: Es un error pensar que la memoria tiene que ver solo con el pasado” El País, 24 October 2018. https://elpais.com/cultura/201 8/10/23/actualidad/1540290918_723626.html. Accessed 19 June 2019. Averis, Kate. Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing. London: Routledge, 2017. Baer, Alejandro. “The Voids of Sepharad: The Memory of the Holocaust in Spain.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12.1 (2011): 95–120. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Balme, Eleanor, Clare Gerada, and Lisa Page. “Doctors need to be Supported, not Trained in Resilience.” British Medical Journal 351 (2015): 4709–713. Bandura, Albert. “Selective Activation and Disengagement of Moral Control.” Journal of Social Issues 46.1 (1990): 27–46. Barambio, Yolanda. “Almudena Grandes. Los pacientes del doctor García. Entrevista.” El Tintero Editorial, 6 March 2018. https://eltinteroeditorial.com/ almudena-grandes. Accessed 7 May 2018. Barnes, Julia C. “How Does a Memory Become Collective?: The Creation and Actualization of Collective Memories in Almudena Grandes’ El corazón helado.” Letras Hispanas: Revista de literatura y de cultura 10.1 (2014): 5–16. Barreira, David and Lorena G. Maldonado. “30.000 bebés robados: la idea de Franco que aprovechó la democracia.” 27 September 2018. https://www.elespanol.com /cultura/libros/20180927/bebes-robados-idea-franco-aprovecho-democracia/340 967163_0.html. Accessed 19 September 2019. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography. London: Macmillan, 1981. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press, 2000. Beard, Mary. Women and Power: A Manifesto. Oxford: Profile Books, 2017. Becerra Mayor, David. La Guerra Civil como moda literaria. Madrid: Clave Intelectual, 2015. Bejel, Emilio. “Positivist Contradictions in Hernández Catá’s El ángel de sodoma.” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 25.1 (2000): 63–76. Belausteguigoitia, Santiago. “Mendicutti considera El corazón helado una novela dolorosa y sensual.” El País, 27 March 2007. https://elpais.com/diario/2007/03 /27/andalucia/1174947735_850215.html. Accessed 19 September 2013. Bell, Duncan. Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Refections on the Relationship between Past and Present. London: Springer, 2006. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. Mapping Desire: Geographic Sexuality. London: Routledge, 2003. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011. Bernaldo, de Quirós Constancio and José María Llanas Aguilaniedo. La mala vida en Madrid: estudio psico-sociológico. Madrid: Rodríguez Serra Editor, 1901. Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Besas, Peter. Nazis en Madrid. Madrid: La Librería, 2015. Beynon, John. Masculinities and Culture. London: McGraw-Hill Education, 2001. Bezhanova, Olga. “Writing Spain’s Fraught History: Testimony or Fiction?” Testimony and Trauma: Engaging Common Ground. Eds. Cristina Santos, Adriana Spahr, and Tracy Crowe Morey. Amsterdam: Brill, 2019. 61–86. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2012.

Select Bibliography

153

Binnie, Jon. “Relational Comparison, Queer Urbanism and Worlding Cities.” Geography Compass 8.8 (2014): 590–99. Bohner, Gerd, Soledad de Lemus, Rocio Garner Retamero, Jesús L. Megías, Pilar Montañes and Miguel Moya. “Intergenerational Transmission of Benevolent Sexism from Mothers to Daughters and its Relation to Daughters’ Academic Performance and Goals.” Sex Roles 66 (2012): 468–78. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Trans. Richard Nice. California: Stanford University Press, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Bachelors’ Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn. Oxford: Polity Press, 2008. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge Classics, 2013. Bouris, Erica. Complex Political Victims. New York: Kumarian Press, 2007. Bowen, Wayne H. Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Collaboration in the New Order. Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Bracke, Sarah. “Is the Subaltern Resilient? Notes on Agency and Neoliberal Subjects.” Cultural Studies 30.5 (2016): 839–55. Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. London: Polity, 2006. Brenneis, Sara J. “The Death of Historical Memory? Javier Cercas’s El Impostor versus the Legacy of Spaniards Deported to Nazi Camps.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 19.3 (2018): 365–81. Bridenthal, Renate, and Claudia Koontz. Becoming Visible: Women in European History. London: Routledge, 1997. Brodkin, C. Andrew, Frumkin, Howard, Kirkland, Katherine H., Orris, Peter, Schenk, Maryjean, Mohr, Sandra. “Choosing a Professional Code for Ethical Conduct in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 40.10 (1998): 840–42. Burke, Peter. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2001. Burlein, Ann. Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Butler, Judith. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance. Eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016. 12–27. Byron, Kristine. “Writing the Female Revolutionary Self: Dolores Ibárruri and the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of Modern Literature 28.1 (2004): 138–65. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: New World Library, 2008. Campos Fígares, Mar and Juan Carlos Rodríguez. “Entrevista con Almudena Grandes.”Álabe: Revista de Investigación sobre Lectura y Escritura 3 (2011). http:// revistaalabe.com/index/alabe/article/view/57/53. Accessed 8 Septemer 2019. Capitanio, Sarah. “Ici-bas and L’Au-de la” But Not as They Knew it. Realism, Utopianism and Science Fiction in the Novels of Jules Verne.” Jules Verne: Narrative of Modernity. Ed. Edward Smyth. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004. 60–75. Caplan, Paula J. Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship. London: Harpercollins, 1989.

154

Select Bibliography

Carrasco, Cristina. “La sártén por el mango: la cocina como resistencia en Inés y la alegría (2010) de Almudena Grandes.” Estudios sobre Almudena Grandes. Eds. Helena Talaya and Sara Fernández Medina. Granada: Valparaíso Ediciones, 2016. 59–77. Carrigan, Tim, Bob Connell, and John Lee. “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity.” Theory and Society 14.5 (1985): 551–604. Carrillo, Santiago. Memorias. Barcelona: Planeta, 2008. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, And History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016. Casanova, Julián. “Una dictadura de cuarenta años.” Morir, matar, sobrevivir: la violencia en la dictadura de Franco. Ed. Julián Casanova. Barcelona: Critíca, 2003. 353–78. Cazorla Sánchez, Antonio. Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975. London: John Wiley and Sons, 2009. Cercas, Javier. Soldados de Salamina. Madrid: Seix Barral, 2002. Chacón, Dulce. La voz dormida. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2002. Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honouring the Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Childers, Julie, and Bob Arnold. “The Inner Lives of Doctors: Physician Emotion in the Care of the Seriously Ill.” The American Journal of Bioethics 19.12 (2019): 29–34. Chodorow, Nancy. Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1994. Chodorow, Nancy J. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Cibreiro, Estrella. “Entre la crisis generacional y el éxtasis sexual: El dilema femenino en Atlas de geografía humana de Almudena Grandes.” Romance Studies 20.2 (2002): 129–44. Cleminson, Richard, and Francisco Vázquez García. ‘Los Invisibles’: A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850–1939. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2007. Closa, Carlos and Paul Heywood. Spain in the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Coca Hernando, Rosa. “Towards a New Image of Women under Franco: The Role of Sección Femenina.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 11.1 (1998): 5–13. Colebrook, Claire. New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Connell, R. W. and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19.6 (2004): 829–59. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Corbalán, Ana. “¿Episodios de una guerra interminable como producto de consumo?” Almudena Grandes: Memoria, compromiso y resistencia. Eds. Helena Talaya and Sara Fernández. Granada: Ediciones Valparaíso, 2017. 105–24. Corbin, Meghan and Luis Estudillo. “One Last Fight: Telling the Stories of the AntiFrancoist Guerrilla in Twenty-First Century Spain.” Hispanic Issues On-Line. Volume 12, (2012): 232–40. Cornwall, Andrea, and Nancy Lindisfarne. “Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology.” Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. Eds. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne. New York: Routledge, 1994. 8–56.

Select Bibliography

155

Crespo Buiturón, Marcela. “El corazón helado de Almudena Grandes: el miedo y la memoria frente al pasado reciente.” Romance Quarterly 60.4 (2013): 221–35. Crownshaw, Richard. “Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 75–89. Crumbaugh, Justin. Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain’s Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference. New York: SUNY Press, 2010. Cruz, Juan. “Si Freud me hubiera conocido, el complejo de Edipo se llamaría complejo de Almudena.” El País Semanal, 7 March 2014. https://elpais.com/e lpais/2014/03/04/eps/1393931435_882423.html. Accessed 19 March 2018. Cruz-Fernández, Paula A de la. “Embroidering the Nation: The Culture of Sewing and the Spanish Ideologies of Domesticity, 1930–1950.” Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion. Ed. Aurora Gómez Morcillo. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. 249–83. Cunniff Gilson, Erin. “Vulnerability and Victimization: Rethinking Key Concepts in Feminist Discourses on Sexual Violence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42.1 (2016): 71–98. Dean, Carolyn Janice. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. De Certeau, Miguel. The Practice of Everyday Life. London: Polity, 1984. Delbo, Charlotte. Days and Memory. Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. Delgado, Luisa Elena, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, eds. Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. Demetriou, Demetrakis Z. “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique.” Theory and Society 30.3 (2001): 337–61. Denisoff, Denis. “Consumerism and Stevenson’s Misfit Masculinities.” Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Eds. Robert Ambrosini and Rachel Drury. Winsconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 286–99. De Toro, Suso. Madera de un presidente: Retrato de Zapatero. Madrid: R.B. Libros, 2007. De Urioste, Carmen. “Memoria de la Guerra Civil y modernidad: el caso de El corazón helado de Almudena Grandes.” The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 87.8 (2010): 939–60. Díaz, Gorfinkiel and Constanza Tobío. “The Work-Life Balance I—New Gendered Relationships in Spain: The ‘Other’ in the Care Triangle.” International Journal of Iberian Studies 20.1 (2007): 41–63. Print. Di Febo, Giuliana. Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en España: 1936–1976. Madrid: Icaria Editorial, 1979. DiGiovanni, Lisa. Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film. Boston: Lexington Books, 2019. Dine, Phillip. “The French Colonial Empire in Juvenile Fiction: From Jules Verne to Tintin.” Historical Refections 23.2 (1997): 177–203. Dorfman, Ariel. Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2003. Duncan, Simon. “Mothering, Class and Rationality.” The Sociological Review 53.1 (2005): 50–76.

156

Select Bibliography

Dunnage, Jonathan. “Perpetrator Memory and Memories about Perpetrators.” Memory Studies 3.2 (2010): 91–94. Dueñas, María. El tiempo entre costuras. Madrid: Planeta, 2011. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide. New York: Free Press, 1897 (1951). Durkheim, Emile. “Childhood.”Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 3.3–4 (1982): 6–9. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004. EFE. “Almudena Grandes gana el Premio Poniatowska de Novela.” Diario de Navarra. 13 (October 2011). Accessed 17 February 2015. Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Encarnación, Omar G. Spanish Politics: Democracy after Dictatorship. London: Polity, 2008. Escolar, Ignacio. “La generación estafada.” Reacciona. Ed. Rosa María Artal. Madrid: Aguilar, 2011. 111–27. Eslava Galán, Juan. Historia secreta del sexo en España. Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1996. Esteban, José. El Madrid de la República. Madrid: Sílex, 2000. Evans, Jennifer V., and Matt Cook. Eds. Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Eyal, Gil. “Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory.” History and Memory 16.1 (2004): 5–36. Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ezkerra, Iñaki. “Los Episodios nacionales de Almudena Grandes.” 11 September 2010. https://www.lasprovincias.es/v/20100911/culturas/episodios-nacionalesalmudena-grandes-20100911.html?ref=https:%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F. Accessed 15 March 2016. Faber, Sebastiaan. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018. Faith, Nicholas. The World the Railways Made. London: Bodley Head, 1990. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: W. Morrow and Company, 1999. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009. Fernández, Pura. Mujer pública y vida privada: del arte eunuco a la novela lupanaria. London: Tamesis Books, 2008. Fernández de Mata, Ignacio. “In memoriam... esquelas, contra-esquelas y duelos inconclusos de la Guerra Civil Española.” Historia, antropología y fuentes orales 42.1 (2009): 93–127. Fernández Medina, Sara. “Entrevista a Almudena Grandes.” Estudios sobre Almudena Grandes. Eds. Sara Fernández Medina and Helena Talaya. Granada: Ediciones Valparaíso, 2017. 18–25. Flaquer, Lluis. La estrella menguante del padre. Barcelona: Ariel, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage, 2012.

Select Bibliography

157

Fournet, Caroline. The Crime of Destruction and The Law of Genocide: Their Impact on Collective Memory. London: Routledge, 2016. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2013. Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Freedman, Benjamin. “What really makes Professional Morality Different: A Response to Martin.” Ethics 91.4 (1981): 626–30. Freyd, Jennifer J. “Betrayal Trauma: Traumatic Amnesia as an Adaptive Response to Childhood Abuse.” Ethics and Behaviour 4.4 (1994): 307–29. Freyd, Jennifer J., Anne P. DePrince, and Eileen L. Zurbriggen. “Self-Reported Memory for Abuse depends upon Victim-Perpetrator Relationship.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 2.3 (2001): 5–15. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015. Gallego, Méndez, and María Teresa. Mujer, falange y franquismo. Madrid: Taurus, 1983. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Gilman, Sander L. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Cornell University Press, New York. 2019. Gracia García, Jordi, and Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer. La España de Franco (1939– 1975). Cultura y vida cotidiana. Madrid: Síntesis, 2001. Graham, Helen. “Gender and the State: Women in the 1940s.” Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Eds. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 182–95. Grandes, Almudena. “Memoria y Libertad.” 19 May 2009. http://www.elpais.com /elpaismedia/ultimahora/media/200905/18/sociedad/20090518elpepusoc_2_Pes _PDF.pdf. Accessed 14 May 2015. Grandes, Almudena. “Entrevista con Almudena Grandes.” El País, 21 February 2002. https://elpais.com/cultura/2002/02/21/actualidad/1014309000_10143 09303.html. Accessed 15 February 2016. Grandes, Almudena. “Entrevista con Almudena Grandes.” El País, 8 March 2012. https://elpais.com/cultura/2012/03/08/actualidad/1331226000_1331234877 .html. Accessed 15 February 2016. Grandes, Almudena and Gaspar Llamazares. Al rojo vivo: un diálogo sobre la izquierda de hoy. Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros, 2008. Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.2 (1991): 290–321. Greene, Joshua, and Jonathan Haidt. “How (and where) does Moral Judgment Work?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6.12 (2002): 517–23. Goffman, Erving. Asylums. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. Gómez López-Quiñones, Antonio. La guerra persistente: memoria, violencia y utopía: representaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil Española. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2006. González-Allende, Iker. Hombres en movimiento: masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939–1999. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2018.

158

Select Bibliography

González Calleja, Eduardo, Francisco Cobo Romero, Ana Martínez Rus, Francisco Sánchez Pérez. La segunda república española. Madrid: Pasado y Presente, 2015. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Queering the Family Home: Narratives from Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth Coming Out in Supportive Family Homes in Australia.” Gender, Place and Culture 15.1 (2008): 31–44. Hagelin, Sarah. Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. North Carolina: Duke UP, 1998. Hall, Stuart. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. Hart, H.LA. Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hartson, Mary T. Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film: Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age. Boston: Lexington Books, 2017. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Heller, Dana A. The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures. Houston: University of Texas Press, 1990. Heneghan, Dorota. Striking their Modern Pose: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón. West Lafeyette: Purdue University Press, 2015. Hennessy, Rosemary. “Class.” A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 53–73. Henseler, Christine. Contemporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and the Publishing Industry. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Hachette UK, 2015. Herrera, Elena. “La tijera del gobierno se ensaña con la memoria histórica.” Público, 14 April, 2012. https://www.publico.es/espana/tijera-del-gobierno-ensana-mem oria.html. Accessed 19 November 2016. Herrmann, Gina. Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Hines-Brooks, Shelly. “Una mirada a la transmisión familiar de la posmemoria en El corazón helado.” Hispanófla 173.1 (2015): 201–15. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, And the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Holm, Soren. “Not just Autonomy—The Principles of American Biomedical Ethics.” Journal of Medical Ethics 21.6 (1995): 332–38. hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004. Hooper, John. The New Spaniards. London: Penguin, 2011. Hudson-Richards, Julia. ““Women Want to Work”: Shifting Ideologies of Women’s Work in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1962.” Journal of Women’s History 27.2 (2015): 87–109. Humphrey, Michael, and Estela Valverde. “Human Rights, Victimhood, and Impunity: An Anthropology of Democracy in Argentina.” Social Analysis 51.1 (2007): 179–97.

Select Bibliography

159

Iglesias de Ussel, Julio, and Pau Marí Klose. “La familia española en el siglo XXI: Los retos del cambio social.” Familias: Historia de la sociedad española. Eds. Joan Bestard and Francisco Chacón. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011. 1001–23. Irujo, José María. La lista negra: los espías nazis protegidos por Franco y la Iglesia. Madrid: Aguilar, 2012. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Routledge, 2003. Janeway, Elizabeth. Man's World. Women's Place, New York, Delta, 1971. Jolly, Rachel. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacifc: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession. Sussex: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Jordanova, Ludmilla J. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Kaminski, Marek M., Monika Nalepa, and Barry O’Neill. “Normative and Strategic Aspects of Transitional Justice.” Journal of Confict Resolution 50.3 (2006): 295–302. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kennedy, Paul. “Phoenix from the Ashes. The PSOE Government under Rodríguez Zapatero 2004-2007: A New Model for Social Democracy?” International Journal of Iberian Studies 20.3 (2007): 187–206. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: A biography. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010. Ketz, Victoria. L. “Breaking the Silence: Narrative Strategies to Recuperate Historical Memory in El lector de Julio Verne.” (Re)collecting the Past: Historical Memory in Spanish Literature and Culture. Eds. Jacky Collins, Melissa A. Stewart, Maureen Tobin Stanley and Nancy Vosburg. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. 17–38. Khazan, Olga. “The Country that’s most Accepting of Homosexuality? Spain.” The Atlantic, June 4, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/ 06/the-country-thats-most-accepting-of-homosexuality-spain/276547/. Accessed 13 April 2015. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. “Exile, Gender, and Communist Self-Fashioning: Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) in the Soviet Union.” Slavic Review 71.3 (2012): 566–89. Kristeva, Julia. El poder del horror. Un ensayo sobre la abyección. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1990. Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. Verso, London. 2002. Labanyi, Jo. “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with The Spanish Civil War.” Poetics Today 28.1 (2007): 89–116. Laberinto del fauno. Dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2006. Warner, 2007. DVD. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in The Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, New York. 2004. Larson, Susan. Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900–1936. Frankfurt: Iberoamericana, 2011. Laub, Dori, and Shoshana Felman. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Laver, James. Breve historia del traje y la moda. Madrid: Cátedra, 1988.

160

Select Bibliography

Leggott, Sarah. Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. El pensamiento salvaje. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1964. Leydesdorff, Selma, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Richard Thompson, eds. Gender and Memory. New York: Transaction Publishers, 2007. Lipovetsky. Los tiempos hiper-modernos. Trans. Antonio Prometeo Moya. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006. López, Tiffany Ana. “Reading Trauma and Violence in US Latina/O Children’s Literature.” Ethnic Literary Traditions in American Children’s Literature. Eds. Yvonne Atkinson and Michelle Pagni Stewart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 205–26. Mac an Ghaill, Mairtin, and Christian Haywood. Gender, Culture, and Society: Contemporary Femininities and Masculinities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings need the Virtues. London: Open Court Publishing, 1999. Maddrell, Paul. Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945– 1961. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Maertens, J. W. “Between Jules Verne and Walt Disney: Brains, Brawn, and Masculine Desire in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.” Science Fiction Studies 20.1 (1995): 209–25. Marías, Javier. Corazón tan blanco. Madrid: Vintage Español, 2012. Martín Gaite, Carmen. Usos amorosos de la postguerra española. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2015. Martorell, Manuel. Jesús Monzón: el líder comunista olvidado por la historia. Pamplona: Pamiela, 2000. MacNair, Rachel. Perpetration- Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. New York: Praeger, 2002. Marzo, Irina. “Almudena Grandes ESCRITORA: Los padres de la transición tienen que entender que 30 años después ya no valga.” Diario de Córdoba, 23 April 2009. https://www.diariocordoba.com/noticias/cordobalocal/almudena-grandes -escritora-los-padres-transicion-tienen-entender-30-anos-despues-ya-no-valga_ 478053.html. Accessed 15 April 2017. McDonald, Emily, Dounaevskaia, Vera. and Todd C. Lee. “Inpatient Attire.” JAMA Internal Medicine 174.11 (2014): 1865–77. McLaren, Angus, and Todd McLaren. The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930. University of Chicago Press, 1997. Merino, José María. El heredero. Madrid: Seix Barral, 2003. Merino, José María. La sima. Madrid: Seix Barral, 2009. Miner, Madonne. “Making Up the Stories as we Go Along: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability.” The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ed. David A. Mitchell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 283–95. Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London: Penguin, 1986. Mira, Alberto De Sodoma a Chueca: Una historia cultural de la homosexualidad en España en el siglo XX. Madrid: Egales, 2004.

Select Bibliography

161

Moa, Pío. Los mitos del franquismo. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2015. Moeller, Hans-Bernhard. “Introduction: Exile Literature and the Role of Comparative Literary Scholarship.” Latin America and the Literature of Exile: Comparative View of the 20th Century European Refugee Writers in the New World. Ed. Hans-Bernhard Moeller. Romanistische Abteilung, Heidelberg, 1983. 7–22. Mohammad, Robina. “The Cinderella Complex—Narrating Spanish Women’s History, The Home and Visions of Equality: Developing New Margins.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30.2 (2005): 248–61. Moller, Michael. “Exploiting Patterns: A Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Gender Studies 16.3 (2007): 263–76. Moran, Dominique. Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration. London: Routledge, 2016. Morán, Gregorio. Miseria y grandeza de PCE, 1939–1985. Barcelona: Planeta, 1986. Morcillo, Aurora G. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain. Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Moreiras-Menor, Cristina. Cultura herida: Literatura y cine en la España democrática. Madrid: Libertarias/Prodhufi, 2002. Moreno Gómez, Francisco. La resistencia armada contra Franco. Tragedia del maquis y la guerrilla. Madrid: Crítica, 2001. Mosse, George. Nationalism and Sexuality. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Moszczyńska-Dürst, Katarzyna. De las intimidades congeladas a los marcos de guerra: amor, identidad y transición en las novelistas españolas. Madrid: Editorial Padilla Libros, 2017. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2019. Muñoz Molina, Antonio. Beatus Ille. Madrid: Planeta, 2002. Murakami, Huraki. Tokio Blues/Norwegian Wood. Trans. L. Porta Fuentes. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2007. Nash, Mary. Rojas: las mujeres republicanas en la guerra civil. Barcelona: Anagrama. 1992. Nash, Mary. “Pronatalismo y maternidad en la España franquista.” Maternidad y políticas de género: la mujer en los estados de bienestar europeos, 1880–1950. Eds. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane. Madrid: Cátedra, 1987. 279–307. Navarro, Julia. Dime quién soy. Vintage Español, Madrid. 2012. Nelkin, Dorothy. “The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation.” Journal of the American Medical Association 269.9 (1993): 1168–69. Nieto, Antolín. Las guerrillas antifranquistas, 1936–1965. Madrid: Ediciones JC, 2007. Nolan, Rachel. “Judge Looking into Fate of Franco’s Victims”, Der Spiegel Online. Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/01518druck-576051 OO.html [Accessed 5 December 2019]. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. Nussbaum, Marta. Frontiers of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Nussbaum, Marta. Sex and Social Justice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999.

162

Select Bibliography

Ortiz, María Paulina. “La gloria y miseria de este oficio es la soledad: Almudena Grandes.” 11 September 2012. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/ CMS-12210325. Accessed 15 April 2016. Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1.2 (1972): 5–31. Pa negre. 2010. Dir. Agustí Villaronga. Cameo Medio, 2011. DVD. Pacios, Jaime. “Almudena Grandes nos habla de El lector de Julio Verne.” Travelarte .com. http://cultura.travelarte.com/libros/2986-almudena-grandes-nos-habla-de -el-lector-de-julio-verne. Accessed 15 April 2016. Parsons, Deborah L. A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban spectacle. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003. Pavlović, Tatjana. The Mobile Nation: España cambia de piel (1954–1964). Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011. Pease, Bob. “Beyond the Father Wound: Memory-Work and the Deconstruction of the Father–Son Relationship.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 21.1 (2000): 9–15. Phibbs, Alison. The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative World. London: Polity, 2014. Phillips, Angela. The Trouble with Boys. London: Pandora, 1993. Pigna, Felipe. “Almudena Grandes.” https://www.elhistoriador.com.ar/almudena -grandes-por-felipe-pigna/. Accessed 15 November 2019. Poal Marcet, Gloria. Entrar, quedarse, avanzar: aspectos psicosociales de la relación mujer-mundo laboral. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1993. Pollini, Yemina. “Escribir es atravesar un espejo.” CELEHIS- Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas 11.14 (2002): 347–62. Pons Prades, Eduardo. Las guerras de los niños republicanos, 1936–1995. Madrid: Compañía literaria, 1997. Poore, Carol. Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Preston, Paul. “Resisting the State: The Urban and Rural Guerrilla of the 1940s.” Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Eds. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 229–39. Preston, Paul. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in TwentiethCentury Spain. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2012. Price, Maggi, Charmaine Higa-McMillan, Sunyoung Kim, B Christopher Frueh. “Trauma Experience in Children and Adolescents: An Assessment of the Effects of Trauma Type and Role of Interpersonal Proximity.” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 27.7 (2013): 652–60. Probyn, Elspeth. “Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood and Nostalgia.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2.4 (1995): 439–65. Pullen, Kirsten. Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ramós, Victoria A. “Almudena Grandes: Esta democracia tiene una deuda profunda con los luchadores del pasado.” XL Semanal, 19 October 2019. https://www .zendalibros.com/almudena-grandes-esta-democracia-tiene-una-deuda-profunda -con-los-luchadores-del-pasado/. Accessed 7 October 2020. Raymond, Janice G. A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. New York: Spinifex Press, 2002. Renshaw, Layla. Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. California: Left Coast Press, 2013.

Select Bibliography

163

Riaño, R. “Joaquín Leguina: “Almudena Grandes escribe novelas maniqueas de la Guerra Civil.” El español, 6 December 2017. https://www.elespanol.com/cultura /libros/20170905/244476466_0.html. Accessed 7 October 2019. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience. London: Virago, 1977. Richards, Michael. A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Richardson, Nathan. ““No pensar”, or does the Contemporary Spanish Novel of Memory really want to Know?: Tiempo de silencio, Corazón tan blanco, Soldados de Salamina and Beyond.” Letras Hispanas 7.1 (2010): 2–16. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rieff, David. Against Remembrance. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2011. Rigney, Ann. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35.1 (2005): 11–28. Rivas, Manuel. A cuerpo abierto. Madrid: Editorial Alfaguara, 2008. Roigé, Xavier, and Teresa M. Sala. “Visiones y representaciones de la familia (1889– 1970).” Familias: Historia de la sociedad Española (del fnal de la Edad Media a nuestros días). Eds. Francisco Chacón and Joan Bestard. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011. 809–50. Roldán, D. and A Soto. “Ser enemigo de la memoria es una cosa muy española.” Las Provincias. 24 October 2018. https://www.lasprovincias.es/culturas/libros/enemi go-memoria-espanola-20181024003126-ntvo.html?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fww w.google.com%2F. Accessed 12 February 2019. Romero, Ana. Historia de Carmen: memorias de Carmen Díez de Rivera. Madrid: Planeta, 2002. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. California: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. California: Stanford University Press, 2019. Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28.3 (2014): 418–37. Rueda Acedo, Alicia. ““Pagando los platos de la Guerra Civil”: dinámicas históricas e interpersonales en tres novelas de Almudena Grandes.” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 34.1 (2009): 249–74. Ruiz Bautista, Eduardo. “En pos del “buen lector”: censura editorial y clases populares durante el primer franquismo (1939–1945).” Historia contemporánea 16.1 (2011): 231–52. Rus, Ana Martínez, and Jesús Antonio Martínez Martín. La política del libro durante la Segunda República: socialización de la lectura. Madrid: Trea, 2003. Ryan, Lorraine. “A Case Apart: The Evolution of Spanish Feminism.” Feminisms Within and Without. Ed. Rebecca Pelan. Galway: University of Galway Women’s Centre. 2005. 56–68. Ryan, Lorraine. “The Sins of the Father: The Destruction of the Republican Family in Franco’s Spain.” The History of the Family 14.3 (2009): 245–52. Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “To be Happy or to Be Self-Fulfilled: A Review of Research On Hedonic And Eudaimonic Well-Being.” Annual review of psychology 52.16 (2001): 141–166.

164

Select Bibliography

Sabsay, Leticia. “Permeable Bodies: Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony.” Vulnerability in Resistance. Eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016. 278–302. Said, Edward W. The Edward Said Reader. London: Granta Books, 2001. Sainz Borgo, Karina. “Almudena Grandes: No hay héroes republicanos, sólo víctimas o verdugos.” Voz Populi, 17 September 2017. https://www.vozpopuli.com/alta voz/cultura/Almudena-Grandes-republicana-Guerra-Civil_0_1063393662.html. Accessed 10 September 2019. Sánchez, Francisco J. “Historical Memory in Post-Transition Narratives: Between the Canon and the Market.” Memory and its Discontents: Spanish Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century (Hispanic Issues on-line Vol. 11). Eds. Luis Martín Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini, 2013. 178–95. Sánchez-Redondo, Carlos. Leer en la escuela durante el franquismo. Cuenca: Ediciones Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, 2004. Sandel, Michael J. “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 21 (2000): 87–122. Santabárbara Alberto A. La historia que nos enseñaron (1937–1975). Madrid: Ediciones AKAL, 2003. Sarap, Madan. Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Scharff, Christina. Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World. London: Routledge, 2016. Schwartz, Barry. “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II.” American Sociological Review 61.6 (1996): 908–27. Seaton, Peter. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The Memory Rifts in Historical Consciousness of World War II. London: Routledge, 2007. Sevillano Calero, Francisco. Ecos de papel. La opinión de los españoles en la época de Franco. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000. Sherman Jr, Alvin F. “Food, War and National Identity in Almudena Grandes’ Inés y la alegría.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 93.2 (2016): 255–74. Shilling, Christopher. The Body and Difference. Identity and Difference. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. London: Sage, 79–95. Shubert, Adrián. A Social History of Modern Spain. London: Routledge, 2003. Siguenza, Carmen. “Almudena Grandes: “La verdad de este país es muy miserable.” El Público, 5 March 2014. https://www.publico.es/culturas/almudena-grandes-e ste-pais-miserable.html. Accessed 6 February 2015. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. Psychology Press, Boston. 1996. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” The American Journal of Sociology 62.2 (1957): 541–58. Simmons, Alison. “Re-humanizing Descartes.” Philosophic Exchange 41.1 (2011): 2–17. Sindbæk Andersen, Tea and Jessica Ortner. “Introduction: Memories of Joy.” Memory Studies 12.1 (2019): 1–5. Singleton, Andrew, and Jane Maree Maher. “The New Man is in the House: Young Men, Social Change, and Housework.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 12.3 (2004): 227–40. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Penguin, 2001. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Select Bibliography

165

Soo, Scott. The Routes to Exile: France and the Spanish Civil War Refugees, 1939– 2009. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Spitzer, Leo. “Rootless Nostalgia: Vienna in La Paz, La Paz in Elsewhere.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 19.3 (2001): 6–17. Stafford, Katherine. “Remembering the Perpetrators: Nationalist Postmemory and Andrés Trapiello’s Ayer no más.” Dissidences 5.9 (2014): 1–18. https://digital commons.bowdoin.edu/dissidences/vol5/iss9/13/. Accessed 9 November 2017. Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for A Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Tabori, Paul. The Anatomy of Exile. London: Harr, 1972. Torres, Rafael. El amor en la segunda república. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1986. Trapiello, Andrés. Ayer no más. Barcelona: Destino, 2012. Tremlett, Giles. Ghosts of Spain. London: Penguin, 2005. Tusquets, Esther. Habíamos ganado la guerra. Barcelona: Brugera, 2007. Ugarte, Michael. “The Literature of Francoist Spain, 1939–1975.” The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. Ed. David T. Gies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 611–20. Print. Valis, Noel. The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain. North Carolina: Duke U. P., 2002. Van Alphen, Ernst. “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999. 24–38. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1899. Vega Sombría, Santiago. De la esperanza a la persecución: la represión franquista en la provincia de Segovia. Madrid: Grupo Planeta, 2005. Venkatesh, Vinodh. The Body as Capital: Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2015. Vernon, Kathleen. “Women, Fashion and the Spanish Civil War: From the Fashion Parade to the Victory Parade.” The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s. Eds. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 273–90. Villa, Lucía. “Quarrelling with the Father.” Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Eds. Robert Ambrosini and Rachel Dury. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 109–21. Villacastín, Rosa. “Carlos Iglesias: Hace 20 años me habría planteado irme a Hollywood”. Diez Minutos, 52:1 (2002): 24–28. Vincent, Mary. “La reafirmación de la masculinidad en la cruzada franquista.” Cuadernos de historia contemporánea 28 (2006): 135–51. Vinyes, Ricard. Irredentas: Las presas políticas y sus hijos en las cárceles franquistas. Madrid: Temas de hoy, 2010. Wedgewood, Nikki. “Connell’s Theory of Masculinity–its Origins and Influences on the Study of Gender.” Journal of Gender Studies 18.4 (2009): 329–39. Whitehead, Stephen. Men and Masculinities. Oxford: Polity Press, 2002. Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Eds. Catherine Mukerji and Michael Schudson. California: University of California Press, 1991. 407–23.

166

Select Bibliography

Willis, Andre C. Faith of Our Fathers: African-American Men Refect on Fatherhood. New York: Plume, 1997. Wohllebhn, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate—Discoveries From a Secret World. London: Greystone Books, 2016. Wood, Gareth. “El corazón helado de Almudena Grandes y los hipertextos.” Almudena Grandes: Grand Séminaire de Neuchâtel, Coloquio internacional Almudena Grandes, 1–2 de junio de 2010. Eds. Andres-Suárez, Irene, and Antonio Rivas. Madrid: Arco Books, 2012. 185–96. Wright, Sarah. “Gregorio Marañón and the Cult of Sex: Effeminacy and Intersexuality in The Psychopathology of Don Juan.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81.6 (2004): 717–38. Wright, Stephanie. “Los mutilados de Franco: el Benemérito Cuerpo y la política social en la España franquista.” Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 5.9 (2016): 75–92. http://ruhm.es/index.php/RUHM/article/view/156. Accessed 17 October 2018. Yusta Rodrigo, Mercedes. “Género e identidad política femenina en el exilio: Mujeres antifascistas españolas (1946–1950).” Pasado y Presente 8 (2008): 143–63. Zamostny, Jeffrey. “Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent: Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism.” MLN 133.2 (2018): 297–317. Zaner, Richard M. Ethics and the Clinical Encounter. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988. Zemon Davis, Natalie. “Women’s History in Transition: The European Case.” Feminist Studies 3.3–4 (1976): 83–103. Zubiaurre, Maite. “Culinary Eros in Contemporary Hispanic Female Fiction: from Kitchen Tales to Table Narratives.” College Literature 33:3 (2006): 29–51. Zubíaurre, Maíte. Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.

Index

1869 reglamento de higiene especial 104 1928 Penal Code 95 1933 Ley De Vagos y Maleantes 95 1944 Valle de Arán invasión 38 abortion, Los pacientes del doctor Garcia 119 Acedo, Alicia Rueda 2 adoption, Los aires difíciles 1–2 affiliative postmemory xxxvin5 agency xxx agentic state 93 Aguilaniedo, José María Llanas 106 Águilar, Manuel 72 Águilera Gamero, María 87 Aguis, J. Jimenos 107 Alba, Richard 52 Alcina, Benito 104 Alfonso García, María del Carmen 95 Allinson, Mark 14 Amery, Jean 90 Anders, Gunther 93 Andersen, Sindbæk xxvii Anderson, Kjell 66–7 Anderson, Lara 51 Anderson, Peter 23 Andres-Suárez, Irene 26 Anton, Francisco 57 apertura 14 appetite, Inés y la alegría 47 Arrieta, José Angel Ascunce 74 Averis, Kate 49 Bakhtin, Mikhail 52 banquets 52 Barnes, Julia 17 Bauman, Zygmunt 93 Beard, Mary 55 Becerra Mayor, David xxiv–xxv, xxviii, 62 Bell, David 94

Bell, Duncan 124 Berlant, Lauren xxviii Bernaldo de Quirós, Constancio 106 Bersani, Leo 96 betrayal trauma therapy (BTT) 22 Bezhanova, Olga xviii Bhabha, Homi 48 Bierge, Bosch 51 biological maleness 33 Bird, Sharon 111n3 Blanco, Miguel Ángel del Arco 23 Blome, Kurt 116 bodies, Los pacientes del doctor García 131–9 bodily life xxx body, Los pacientes del doctor García 147 body without organs 138 Bohner, Gerd 36n3 Booth, Wayne H. 114 Bourdieu, Pierre 3–4, 44 Bouris, Erica xxvii Bracke, Sarah xxix bravery, Inés y la alegría 48 Bridenthal, Renate 41 Brigada Social 92, 147 Browning, Christopher 127 BTT (betrayal trauma theory) 22 Burke, Peter 38 Butler, Judith xxx–xxxii, 19 Calero, Francisco Sevillano xxvi Campbell, Joseph 39 Carajito, Antonio 63 Carrasco, Cristina 48 Carrillo, Santiago 57 child labor, Inés y la alegría 46–7 children: El lector de Julio Verne 61–6; indoctrination 89–90; perpetrator memory 61–2; reading 72–5

168

Index

Chodorow, Nancy 103 Christian feminism 42 class 3; clothing 4–7; Los aires difíciles 2, 7–16; Nazis 134 clothing: class 4–7; Los aires difíciles 7–16 Colebrook, Claire 74, 77 collective memory xxiv communal relations xxxii Conesa, Roberto 92 Connell, R.W. 18–19, 138 Connerton, Paul 52 consumerism 26–7 cooking: exile 50–5; Inés y la alegría 37–8, 40–4 Corbalán, Ana xxv cream 54 Crownshaw, Richard xx cruel optimism xxviii cultural memorialisation xxvii–xxviii cultural memory xxiv daughters, class 4 Davis, Natalie Zemon xxiii De Certeau, Miguel 98 de Marco, Maria Pilar Sinués 107 deep memory, Las tres bodas de Manolita 90 del Val, Leo 8 Delbo, Charlotte 90 Deleuze, Gilles 138 Delgado, Luisa Elena xxxi Demetriou, Dematrikis Z. 30 deontic response 125 dependence xxxi–xxxii Descartes, Rene 111n4 detached concern 140n1, 140n2 detached hyper-individualism, 30 deviant identity, El lector de Julio Verne 68 Díez de Rivera, Carmen 6 diFebo, Giulani 42 differentiation, class 4 DiGiovanni, Lisa xxiv disease, Los pacientes del doctor García 131–9 divorce, El corazón helado 32–3 docile bodies 87–8 Doctors’ Trial 116 Don Juan 94 Dorfman, Ariel xix Duncan, Simon 3 Dunnage, Jonathan xx Durkheim, Emile 136

Edelman, Lee 96 education 73 effeminacy 95 Eichmann, Adolf 111n5 El corazón helado 17–18, 144, 148; divorce 32–3; family 20, 71–2; fatherhood 28–9; fatherson relationship 19–20; feminist masculinity 27–8; marriage 21–3, 31–3; masculinity 21, 24–30, 33, 35; neoliberal feminism 26–7, 35; new man 28, 30, 35; postmemory 31–2; victim-perpetrator relationship 21–4 El diecinueve de marzo y el dos de mayo 82 El lector de Julio Verne 59–60, 145, 147; children 61–6; deviant identity 68; human-nature connections 65–6; implicated subjects 64–5; moral neutralisation 67–8; perpetrator bias 70; perpetrator memory 69–70; perpetrator suffering 60–1; reading trope 71–82 emotional communities xxiii–xxiv, xxxi emotions xxiv–xxvii; love xxv eroticisation of food, Inés y la alegría 44 escape, Inés y la alegría 43 Eslava Galán, Juan 105 Esteban, José 96 ethnic identity 52 eudaimonia xxxii–xxxiii, 49, 65, 66, 72, 76, 78, 84, 87, 111, 143, 149 eugenics 134–6 euthanasia 134 exile: cooking 50; female exile 49–50; Inés y la alegría 48–55; internal exile 86–7, 111n2 exile identity 52 Eyal, Gil xxxvin2 Faludi, Susan 19 family xxvi, 148; El corazón helado 20; El lector de Julio Verne 71–2 fashion 4–7 Fassin, Didier xxvii fatherhood, El corazón helado 28–9 father-son relationship xxii; El corazón helado 19–20; reading 79–82 Felman, Shoshana xviii female exile 49–50 female friendship, Las tres bodas de Manolita 90–1 female masculinity 33 female power 55

Index

169

female solidarity 145 female work, Las tres bodas de Manolita 100–10 feminine memories xxiii, 18 femininity 55 feminised quest romance 39–40, 57–8; La Pasionaria 55–7 feminism, Spanish post-feminism xvii feminist masculinity, El corazón helado 18, 27–8, 35 Fernández, Paula A. 6 Fernández, Pura xxxi Final Solution 134 Flaquer, Lluis 30 flourishing xxxi food: banquets 52; cream 54; Inés y la alegría 44–6; masculinity 54–5; maternalness 44–5; milk 44; sugar 50; sweetness 50–1 Foucault, Michel 87 Frank, Arthur W. 132 Freedman, Benjamin 121 French cuisine 51 Frye, Northop 39

Hall, Stuart 74 Halperin, Jodi 140n2 Hart, H.L.A. 117 hegemonic masculinity 18–19; El corazón helado 26, 30 Heller, Dana 39 Hennessy, Rosemary 3 heroes 39 herstory 37 heteropathic memory xxxvin3 Hirsch, Marianne xxxvin5, 31–2, 34, 144 historical memory xii–xiii Holocaust Memorial Day 114 homosexuality 30, 93–100 homosociality 111n3 hooks, Bell 24, 27 Hopper, John 14 Huffington, Arianna 26 human-nature connections, El lector de Julio Verne 65–6 Humphrey, Michael 124 hyperindividualism 30–1 hypermasculinity 144

Galdós, Benito Pérez xv–xvii, 78, 82, 105 García, Aquilino 90 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 133 Garzón, Baltasar xxi gender xxiii; feminity 55; masculinity see also masculinity gender history 145 gender memory xi, xxiii; El corazón helado 21; Las tres bodas de Manolita 93–100 gender roles, Inés y la alegría 41, 53–4 Gilman, Sander 132 Gilson, Cunniff 100 Goffman, Erving 88, 132 González Allende, Iker 50 González Pons, Eduardo xiii gray zones xxii Greene, Gayle xxiii, 125 Guattari, Félix 138 guerra de las esquelas (War of the Obituaries) xix gyn/affection 71–2, 145; Las tres bodas de Manolita 103–4, 109

Ibárruri, Dolores 56 identity work 24 Iglesias, Carlos xxxvn1 illness, Los pacientes del doctor García 131–9, 147 implicated subjects 64–5 individual identity 90 individualistic partnerships 30–1 individuals xxviii, xxxii, 92–3; flourishing xxxi individuation 136 indoctrination 89–90 Inés y la alegría 37–8, 149; bravery 48; child labor 46–7; cooking 40–4; escape 43; exile 48–55; exilic cooking 50; feminised quest romance 39–40; gender roles 41; masculinity 145; matrimonial gender roles 53–4; scarcity of food 46; sexual assault 42–3 interdependence xxxi internal exiles 86–7, 111n2; female work and prostitution 100–10; homosexuality 93–100 International Military Tribune for the Far East 116 interstitial intimacy 48 invalids, stigma 132–3 invulnerability xxxiii

habitus 3–4, 8–9 Hagalin, Sara xxx Haidt, Jonathan 125 Halberstam, Jack 33

170

Index

Jews 114–15; massacre of 125–9 Jiménez de Asúa, Luis 95 Jordanova, Ludmilla 113 joyous memories xxviii; omission of xxvii Ketz, Victoria L. 62 Kristeva, Julia 44, 54 Kuhn, Annette 34 La isla del tesoro 83 La Pasionaria 39, 40, 55–7 Labanyi, Jo xxxi Landsberg, Alison 21 Las tres bodas de Manolita 86–7, 145–8; deep memory 90; female friendship 90–1; female work and prostitution 100–10; homosexuality 93–100; lesbian attraction 91; male homosociality 88–9; masculinity 87–8; perpetrator memory 92–3; urban space 93–100; utopias 93–100 Laub, Dora xviii Leggott, Sarah 19 Leguína, Joaquin x Leret, Virgilio xx lesbian attraction, Las tres bodas de Manolita 91 Levi, Primo xxii Levi-Strauss, Claude 44 Leydesdorff, Selma xxiii libraries 72–5 Lipovestky, Giles 30 Los aires difíciles 1, 148; adoption 1–2; class 2, 7–16; clothing 7–16; motherdaughter relationships 2, 7–16 Los besos en el pan 86 Los pacientes del doctor García 113–15, 144, 147; medical ethics, perpetration and narrative voice 115–24; multidirectional memory and perpetration 124–31; stigma of illness and the body 131–9 love xxv low-brow books 74 MacIntyre, Alasdair xxxi, xxxii MacNair, Rachel 61 Madrid 94, 96; homosexuality 97–8 Maher, Jane 30 male homosociality, Las tres bodas de Manolita 88–9 Marañón, Gregorio 94 marketing strategies xiv Marquesa de Parabere 42

marriage 144; El corazón helado 21–3, 31–3; romance novels 75 Martín Gaite, Carmen 75 masculine exile 49–50 masculine memories xxiii masculinity xxiii; biological maleness 33; El corazón helado 21, 24–30, 33, 35; El lector de Julio Verne 84; food 54–5; homosexuality 93–4; Inés y la alegría 145; Las tres bodas de Manolita 87–8, 145 masculinity studies 18 maternalness, food 44–5 matrimonial gender roles, Inés y la alegría 53–4 medical ethics, Los pacientes del doctor García 115–24 memorialisation xxvii memory cultures 124 Méndez, Alberto 63 Mendicutti, Eduardo 17 Mengele, Josef 116 micro-history xv, 38 micro-social xiii Miguel Strogoff (Verne) 82 milk 44 Millgram, Stanley 93 Mintz, Sidney 50–1 Moller, Michael 19 moral neutralisation 66–8 Moran, Dominique 88 Mosse, George 112n8 Moszczyńska-Durtz, Katarzyna xxv mother-daughter relationships 103; Los aires difíciles 2, 15–16; see also motherhood motherhood: La Pasionaria 56; Los aires difíciles 7–16 mothers, class 3–4 mother-son relationship 144 Muller, Beata 134 multidirectional memory, Los pacientes del doctor García 124–31 Murray, Andrew Gorman 99 Murukami, Haruki 90 music 91 narrative voice, Los pacientes del doctor García 115–24 National Catholicism 61, 91 national memory xxi, 124–5 nationlist post-memory 63 nature, Los pacientes del doctor García 127

Index Nazis 114–15; Final Solution 134; illness 133–6; medical ethics 116–24; multidirectional memory, Los pacientes del doctor García 125–31 neoliberal feminism, El corazón helado 26–7, 35 neoliberalism xxviii–xxix neurasthenia 95 new man, El corazón helado 28, 30, 35 nostalgia 45 Nussbaum, Martha 91 obituaries xx Ortner, Sherry B. xxvii ostracism 87, 97 othering 132 Partido Comunista Español (PCE) 38 Partido Popular (PP) xii–xiii Passerini, Luisa xxiii patriarchal culture 24 patriarchal society 4 patriarchy 36n1 Pavlovic, Tatjana 10 PCE (Partido Comunista Español) 38 Perales, Isabel 89 perpetration, Los pacientes del doctor García: medical ethics 115–24; multidirectional memory 124–31 perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS), 61 perpetrator bias, El lector de Julio Verne 70 perpetrator memory, xi, xix–xxiii; children 61–2; El lector de Julio Verne 69–70; Las tres bodas de Manolita 92–3 perpetrator suffering, El lector de Julio Verne 60–1 perpetrator trauma 147 photographs 34 PITS (perpetration-induced traumatic stress) 61 Pope Pius IX 107 postmemory 34; El corazón helado 31–2 PP (Partido Popular) xii–xiii presentismo 14 Preston, Paul 60 primary vulnerability xxxi prosthetic memory 21 prostitution, Las tres bodas de Manolita 100–10 public cultural memory 21

171

queer city, Madrid 94 queerness 96–7 Raymond, Janice 71 reading 72–83 reading trope, El lector de Julio Verne 71–82 Rechtman, Richard xxvii regenerationists 95–6 relationships: father-son relationship xxii, 19–20; mother-daughter relationships 2, 103; mother-son relationship 144 repression 63 Republican memory xii, xix Republican victimhood xix, 59, 143 resilience xxix, 148–9 resistant vulnerability xxx Rich, Adrienne 36n1 Richardson, Nathan xiv Rieff, David 140n3 Rivas, Manuel xxi Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis 114 role responsibility 117 Rothberg, Michael 61–2, 64, 124 Ruano, César González 95 Said, Edward 49 San de Velilla, Antonio 94 Sánchez, Clara 115 Sánchez, Francisco J. xxv Sandberg, Sheryl 26 Sanz Briz, Ángel 114–15 scarcity of food, Inés y la alegría 46 Scharff, Christina 36n2 Schwartz, Barry xxiv Second Republic (1931–1936) 2, 52, 96; books 72–4; class 11; clothing 6; education 73–4; female masculinity 18; forgotten women 144; gender 32, 35 secondary adjustment 88–9 self-interest xxxii sexual assault, Inés y la alegría 42–3 sexuality 91 Sherman, Alvin F. 38 Silverman, Kaja xxxvin3 Simmel, Georg 5 Singleton, Andrew 30 social trauma xxvi solidarity 86 Solnit, Rebecca 102 Sontag, Susan 33–4, 133 Soo, Scott 52–3

172

Index

Spanish gastronomy 51 Spanish post-feminism xvii Stafford, Katherine xxii, 63 Steedman, Carolyn 9 Stevenson, Robert Louis 78, 80–2 stigma 115; illness and the body, Los pacientes del doctor Garcia 131–9 subordinate masculinities 18 sugar 50 sweetness 50–1 Tabori, Paul 86 testimonies xviii–xix Thompson, Paul xxiii Tokyo Trial 116 traditional quest romances 39 trauma xxvii trees, Los pacientes del doctor García 126–7 tuberculosis 33–4 Tusquets, Esther 6–7 Ugarte, Michael xiii urban space, Las tres bodas de Manolita 93–100 utopias, Las tres bodas de Manolita 93–100

Valentine, Gill 94 Vallejo Nájera, Antonio 89 Valverde, Estela 124 Veblen, Thorstein 4 Verne, Jules 73, 78–80, 82 Vernon, Kathleen 5 Victim Olympics xxii victimhood xi, xx–xxi, xxvii, xxix, xxxiii victim-perpetrator relationship, El corazón helado 21–4 Viguri, Isidoro de Miguel y 104 Villa, Lucia 81 vulnerability xxx–xxxi; internal exiles 101 War of the Obituaries (guerra de las esquelas) xix Western novels 76–7 Whitehead, Stephen 19, 24 Williams, Raymond 74 witnessing xviii–xix Wohlbeen, Peter 126 women, class and clothing 4–5 women’s emancipation 71–2 Wood, Gareth 17, 25 Wright, Stephanie 60 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez 36n4 Zubiaurre, Maíte 37, 47