Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Telling of Memory in La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/174581510x12817121842092

1745-8153

Judith Meddick,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

This article argues that the return of the apparently absent past in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La sombra del viento represents trans-generational haunting as in the theory of Abraham and Torok. The belated emergence of memory a generation later symbolizes the longevity of the official history of the civil war in Francoist Spain and the connected erasure of Republican identity. The novel reflects the inter-generational silence about the war and the ensuing repression, but intertwines it with the recovery of the past to language. While the repeated telling of the apparently forgotten history characterizes it as a traumatic event, instead of an overwhelming experience, which could not actually be registered when it occurred, the indication of the past as traumatic relates to its designation as unspeakable in the previous generation(s). Though Ruiz Zafón's novel is set in the Francoist era, the article shows how its theme of trans-generational secretion of memory also applies to the Spanish Transition. It casts light on the effects of the so-called pacto del olvido on the succeeding generation. The need to put the identity of the silenced past into narrative points to the ongoing retrieval of memor y in present-day Spain and, vitally, its reading for the future.