Modern Languages Open (May 2015)
Chronotopical Structure and the Dismantling of Historical Myth: The Representation of 1936 Madrid in Eduardo Mendoza’s Riña de gatos (2010) and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos (2009)
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s in Spain, a renewal of interest in the history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975) has resulted in a surge of cultural and historiographical production related to the subject, as well as instigating a robust debate about how these difficult periods ought to be officially interpreted and commemorated. This so-called memory boom indicates that there is still an unresolved tension in Spanish society, and while there are many who speak in favour of a final reconciliation, the means of best achieving it are so contested that old divisions appear to have been paradoxically widened rather than diminished. The two novels which are treated in the present study Eduardo Mendoza’s Riña de gatos (An Englishman in Madrid; 2010), and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s La noche de los tiempos (The Night of Memories; 2009) make an important literary contribution to the debate, and although they are very different in tone and style, they evidence a mature, considered approach to the issues. Drawing upon the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (the organisation of space-time in the novel), this paper will contend that the two works, in their different ways, inscribe and subvert the conventions of the classical historical novel in order to challenge historical myths and open up a dialogic space within which the reader can engage critically with the past. This narrative strategy prevents the war from being plotted as an inevitable tragedy, therefore emphasising the argument made by both novels that, contrary to popular belief, the civil war was not simply the result of a radical polarisation between the mythical “two Spains” eternally at war, but of a complex of factors, both national and international.
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