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“collective amnesia”. This reawakening has been a result of social, judicial, and political movements reclaiming the unearthing, literarily and symbolically, of the past (the atrocities and human right violations committed during the Civil War and its aftermath). The recent polemic surrounding the excavation of mass graves of the Spanish civil war and the dictatorship, and the creation of a myriad of grassroots organizations such as the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica speaks forcefully about the spectral nature of Spanish history. Thousands of unmarked burial sites in ditches along the roads still remain in the Spanish landscape, invisible but ever present, just like ghosts still awaiting their day of justice. The liminal and invisible position is an adequate metaphor of their non-existing status in the margins of the official history. Thanks to the work of grassroots movements, human right organizations and NGOs, they have become collective lieux de mémoire, highly symbolic sites of memory. Quite unexpectedly, memory has now come back to the center stage in discussions about what to do collectively with that past, with crucial political, legal and ethical repercussions. There are also important international issues at stake, with worldwide debates about the process of dealing with the traumatic memories of the past, and the extent that amnesty laws can be upheld for crimes against humanity under the principles of universal jurisdiction.
There has been also a simultaneous boom of narratives dealing with the past, in both Spanish literature and cinema. Best-selling novels such as Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina Manuel Rivas’s La lengua de las mariposas, or Jesús Ferrero’s Las trece rosas, and their respective successful film adaptations, immediately come to mind. We should not explain this reemergence as a simple derivative phenomenon or a market-driven fad. It is important to consider how these cultural narratives provide a certain language and tools to engage with the past and position ourselves historically, indeed to identify as subjects part of a collective. As Stuart Hall has noted, cinematic and literary representation are not to be seen as part of “a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak” (236-37). In that sense, we should examine how the collective memory of the past has been represented in those narratives, what points of enunciation have been deployed, and with what effects to the collective identity.
It is interesting that the predominant mode of Spanish cultural narratives about the past produced in recent years, particularly in the mass media of television and cinema, has followed a traditional realistic and costumbrista naturalistic style. Even the screen adaptations of non-realistic works of literature repeatedly recur to long-established realistic, linear modes of representation, often
against the grain of the original literary work. This is the case of well known film adaptations such as Tiempo de silencio, !Ay, Carmela!, or O lápis do carpinteiro, three very recognizable works dealing with the traumas of the past in Spain, from the postwar, the transition, and the globalization period respectively. Recent popularly acclaimed films dealing with this topic such as Los girasoles ciegos, Las trece rosas, Silencio roto, Libertarias, or El viaje de Carol, all have the same look and feel of conventional heritage drama productions. Some critics have pointed out that these works, in spite of their noble goals of making the traumatic past of repression and resistance accessible and understandable to contemporary Spanish audiences, mostly without direct access or personal recollection of those events, they have made it perhaps too palatable and too comfortable, thus neutralizing their potential as instruments for social intervention. These film and TV series, dressed in the polished style of costume dramas, can appear to reinforce the idea of the pastness of the past, easily accessible but just as easily disconnected from present day historical realities and social and political concerns6. This trend may suggest a certain aesthetic commoditization of the horrors of the past, somewhat domesticated for contemporary consumption, when not a nostalgic reinterpretation of the past, such as Fernando Trueba’s Academy-winner Belle Epoque. In some extreme cases, these representations are literally costume melodramas featuring glamorous TV actors and actresses, appealing to a retro aesthetic, with fancy period dresses and décor, as in the popular Spanish television soap opera Amar en tiempos revueltos, which has been a leader in television audience rankings in Spain for several seasons. As the title of the series already suggests, the postwar dictatorship is just a mere melodramatic backdrop for the conventional love intrigues and disputes characteristic of the telenovela genre.
The unproblematic transparent mimetic representation of the past, with its meticulously reconstructed mise-en-scene, and traditional linear structure, effectively sutures the discontinuities of the fragmented past, made out of silences and voids. This tendency to reconstruct the past as a narrative without fissures and safely removed from present day realities, thus paradoxically seems to replicate the straight and smooth official historical narratives that avoid challenging the status quo. Thus, many of these sanitized representations of the past dangerously follow the officially sanctioned discourse of reconciliation without apologies or reparations, and the erasure of potentially destabilizing counter-discourses, reinforcing the pastness of the past and its irrelevance to present day concerns.
On the other hand, some writers and directors dealing with the subject of the Spanish civil war and the dictatorship have recurred to other non-realistic modes, in an effort to better capture the work of memory, the experiences of trauma, the silences and the voids of the
NOTES
6 | Several cultural critics and intellectuals have noted the problematic ramification of this trend (Labanyi, Rosa).
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past, the historical discontinuities, and the elusive nature of historical narrativization. One recurring element used in these works has been the trope of haunting, which underlies the ghostly nature of the past in its ever-returning nature, projecting its shadow towards the present and the future. These haunting narratives thus make visible the disappearances and absences silenced in normative historical accounts, and replicate the process of confronting a difficult past that still needs to be dealt with in the present.
Several cultural critics have advanced theories to explain the recurring presence of ghosts in contemporary narratives of the past. Some have argued that these ghosts reflect the postmodern disbelief in master narratives of progress, that the spectral histories of discontinuities and absences are a response to the need of creating new accounts of the past that do not replicate the official historical accounts, acknowledging the victims of modernity, those precisely disappeared from the historical record (Marcus). María do Cebreiro Rábade has referred to this haunting aspect as a defining characteristic of historically dispossessed communities. In her insightful examination of the “unspeakable home” of the stateless Galician nation, she notes that Galician cultural narratives are often marked with the overwhelming presence of ghosts. For Rábade, Galicia is symbolically represented in those narratives as a “community of the dispossessed” and a “nation of ghosts” (Rabade 244). More generally speaking, it can be argued that it is in those societies that need to confront their own (self) repressed histories that the spectrality of the past is perhaps more noticeable. In Spanish cultural studies in particular, Jo Labanyi, following Jacques Derrida’s formulations in Spectres of Marx, has presented in a series of articles a suggestive interpretation of the recurrence of ghosts in contemporary Spanish culture. Labanyi bases her analysis on a reworking of Derrida’s concept of “hauntology”, a neologism created in a typical poststructuralist pun as an alternative to ontology, to describe the spectral aspect of history, a past which is already not there but at the same time makes itself present. The spectrality of history requires a process of acknowledgement of the “traces” of the traumatic past, by allowing the repressed memories of the past to be told in ghost form. The ethical imperative emanating from these narratives is to give ghosts “a hospitable memory... out of a concern for justice (qtd Labanyi 2002, 12).
José Sinisterra’s play Ay Carmela, Manuel Rivas’ novel O lápis do carpinteiro, and Guillermo del Toro’s film El espinazo del diablo, among others, rely centrally on the trope of ghosts, to tackle the traumatic legacy of the horrors of the past in the present. It is intriguing that the same presence of ghosts occurs prominently in other internationally acclaimed recent films by Spanish directors, such as Alejandro Amenábar ́s The Others and José Luis Bayona ́s El orfanato, two of
the greatest international box-office hits of Spanish cinema of all time, with not apparent or obvious historical connections to the Spanish civil war or Franco’s dictatorship. The centrality of ghost narratives in these films and the present preoccupation with the resurgence of a national repressed past cannot be mere coincidences. We should remember that one condition of ghosts is their elliptical nature, as well as the fact that they don’t make themselves visible to everybody7. Also, the trope of orphanhood, like the trope of ghosts, has a well established connection in post civil war Spanish culture, by referring elliptically to the unspeakable horrors of the past and the traumatized identities of its victims (Nada, Primera memoria, Cría cuervos, El desencanto, El Sur, Los niños de Rusia, El espinazo del diablo, just to name a few). Even Pedro Almodóvar’s recent films Volver and La mala educación have a central ghostly component, where the main characters are haunted by the ghosts of the past, inevitably connected to the repressive national past. In these two cases, however, we encounter rather simulacra of ghosts, the disappeared who fake their return as ghosts (Volver), or the living who assume the personality of the deceased (Mala educación). But in either case, the emphasis is on the haunting nature of the past accosting the living, and its refusal to disappear. This connection should not be altogether too surprising, since the spectrality of the past and the postmodern recurring use of simulacra both refer to a void that needs to be filled in virtuality8.
We can see that Spain’s historical trauma is the originating cause of these narratives populated by ghosts. The spectral nature of that past, full of voids, omissions, and disappearances, cannot form a continuous narrative without distortion. Below the smooth surface of official accounts of history, lie those stories that have been silenced and erased, leaving only their ghostly traces, and therefore bound to return and haunt the present. Ghost stories construct a representation of the past “as a haunting, rather than a reality immediately accessible to us” (Labanyi 2007, 112). Ghosts, as embodiment of the past in the present, destabilize the accepted notions of history, reality, and self, and the clear demarcations that define them. Their here-but-not- here borderline existence, between the dead and the living, blurs the binary divide that constructs our perception of reality. Ghosts remind us that we need to confront our past if we want to move ahead and construct a better future.
It seems evident that the reappearance of ghosts in Spanish post- Franco culture has almost everything to do with the repression of the past, as an enforced prohibition during the dictatorship, and as a political taboo derived from the “pact of forgetting” during the political transition. The return of the past in spectral form would be thus a symptom of the collective inability to deal with it properly, but it can also offer the possibility of rectification, acknowledgement and
NOTES
7 | Natalia Andrés del Pozo makes a convincing argument for the historical symbolism of ghosts in Juan Antonio Bayona ́s El orfanato. Similarly, Acevedo-Muñoz has analyzed the national allegories of
the traumatic legacies of the repressed past in Alejandro Amenábar ́s Abre los ojos and The Others. These films project the still unresolved questions of the national past onto the global scene, which coincides with the transnationalization
of memories and policies dealing with the past and the establishment of universal jurisdiction.
8 | Interestingly, the Spanishness of some of these films almost entirely disappears, as in The Others, which was shot directly in English with a complete cast of English actors. Thus not only the past is spectral, the very core of the movie is built around a void, an unspeakable unheimlich place, like the spaces left empty by thousands of forced disappearances.
reparation. The mythical figure of Federico García Lorca, a symbolic national martyr of the Spanish fascist uprising, assassinated in the first weeks of the civil war for his political and sexual orientation, and still unaccounted for, is profoundly symbolic. Like a ghost, Lorca’s shadow is a powerful reminder of the unsettled nature of the collective past, still haunting the present. In the same manner as the spectral representations of the past in the literary and cinematic works seen before, this shadow projects the image of a nation full of ghosts, still waiting recovery, resolution, and reparation.
Works cited
ACEVEDO-MUÑOZ, Ernesto R. “Horror of Allegory: The Others and its Context” Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre. Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (eds.). anchester: Manchester UP, 2008. 202-218.
