Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2022)
Give the floor to the unredeemed perpetrator of the Spanish CivilWar. Paratopic enunciation in Hombre sin nombre (2006) by Suso de Toro
Abstract
The particularities of Spanish history –in which the dictatorship and the transition disregarded the injustices suffered by the losers of the war– conferred a hegemonic position to the discourse of the victim at the expense of the speech of other instances of participation in violence. This article analyzes the statute of marginality and social censorship to which, in a context of legitimate vindication of the victims of the civil war and the Franco regime, the testimony of the perpetrator has been relegated. This is undertaken through a double objective: to describe the paratopic space (Dominique Maingueneau) to which the counter-hegemonic discourse enunciated by the perpetrator is circumscribed; and analyze the novel Hombre sin nombre (2006) by Suso de Toro as a symptomatic example of this paratopic enunciation. This is intended to contribute to the study of censorship, prohibition, and secrecy in current literature through the analysis of a paradigmatic case: the ostracism to which the discourse of the perpetrator is subjected in a context of recovery of historical memory.
