Kultura (Skopje) (Mar 2014)
Inquiring Private and Collective Past Through Docu-ments: Spanish Memories of the War and Dictatorship Between Fiction and Public Policies
Abstract
A consistent portion of fictional production elaborated in contemporary Spain features the memory of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship as a recurring topic. Written by authors who cannot count on a biographical connection with the events they tell about, this kind of narrative displays a recollection of painful events which still appears to be rather traumatized and conflictive. The main focus of this paper is the analysis of a subject which can be recorded in a number of fictional recreations, i. e. the pursuit of personal and collective past through documentary investigations. After evaluating the context in which such ‘literature of memory’ is elaborated, the argumentation will delve into the conditions of the Spanish archival system, as for what concerns the accessibility of documents which are relevant to the study of the period which goes from 1936 to 1975. Through an analysis of some of Spain’s most prominent legislations and politics of memory, the ultimate aim is to verify whether the difficulty of the inquiry for documentary information portrayed in literary texts is a mere fictional exaggeration or is, in fact, a plausible description of the modalities of consultation of records connected with the recent past of Spain.
