ArdavÃn, Carlos X.
Dr. Carlos X. ArdavÃn is Associate Professor of Spanish at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He has edited Valoración de Francisco Umbral (2003); Vida, pensamiento y aventura de César González-Ruano (2005); and AnatomÃa de un poeta: Aproximaciones crÃticas a José Mármal (2005). Dr. ArdavÃn has co-edited OceanografÃa de Xènius: estudios crÃticos en torno a Eugenio d’Ors (2005).
2006 0-7734-5790-9This book is an analysis of how several contemporary Spanish writers (Francisco Umbral, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel Vicent and Félix de Azúa) view Spain’s transition to democracy in their novels. These authors and their texts offer alternative narratives of the transition that disrupt and contradict the complacent and monological version elaborated by post-Francoist historiography; a version that is, fundamentally, a mythical narrative construction. How does fiction contradict the myth of the democratic restoration? By using – and abusing – memory. In these novels, memory is used as an epistemic instrument to investigate the recent and unresolved political past of Spain, and rebuild a solid collective and personal identity.
Taken together, the novels of this study suggest that there is a gap between memory and history, a sharp opposition between what the author refers to as a politics of forgetting promoted by the historians and politicians, and a poetics of memory fostered by the fiction writers, which establishes a dialogue with the transition’s history in order to apprehend its complexity through imagination.
A more extensive and profound knowledge of Spanish literature related to the issue of the political transition will serve to understand this complex event (the transition to democracy), and the origins and developments of post-Franco’s Spanish culture and society.
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