Abstract
The nineteenth-century notion of heroism that Marsé subverts in Rabos de lagartija is perhaps best encapsulated in Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 lectures, Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History, yet such a conception of history as the story of its “Great Men” has long been an object of critique.1 Indeed, it is not just that contemporary culture is suspicious of the “Great Man” theory of the past, but that the legacy of postmodernist—and more particularly poststructuralist—theory has lead us to question the very idea of history as an unproblematic narrative and straightforward assertion of stable identities or, indeed, of unified subjects. Despite the religious overtones of Carlyle’s text, and postmodernist doubts about a vision that tends uncritically toward what Nietzsche called “monumental history,”2 heroes still retain strong appeal today.3 Testament to this is a resurgence of interest, in recent historiography, in the critical study of heroes and the formation of hero cults, in contrast to the well-established tradition of distanced political and historical biography.4 Such examinations of heroism are, of course, neither partial nor undistanced per se. What they signal is a shift toward cultural (rather than political, military, or social) history, and they frequently draw their categories of analysis from narrative paradigms that have long been the subject of scrutiny in literary studies.5
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Notes
Thomas Carlyle, Collected Works, vol. 12, Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History ( London: Chapman, 1869 ).
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ), 57–123. (here 68).
Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals, Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 ).
By affect, I mean the appearance, since the mid-1990s, of the “affective turn” in cultural theory; for an important survey, see Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader ( Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 ).
Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 ), 12.
Max Saunders, “Life Writing, Cultural Memory and Literary Studies,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010 ), 321–31. (325)
Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 548–567. (here 552).
Jo Labanyi, “Doing Things: Emotion, Affect and Materiality,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11, nos. 3–4 (2010): 223–33. (here 231–32).
Isabel Estrada, “Cuéntame cómo pasó o la revisión televisiva de la historia española reciente,” Hispanic Review 72, no. 4 (2004): 547–64. (here 549). The differing names may also be taken as an example of the ways in which memory debates intersect with regionalist nationalisms in Spain, an area that remains understudied. For a more nuanced evaluation of Cuéntame, see
Paul Julian Smith’s excellent analysis in Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodovar (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006), 11–26. Cuéntame, it should be noted, appealed to a younger demographic than Amar.
Jeremy G. Butler, “Notes on the Soap Opera Apparatus: Televisual Style and The World as It Turns,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 3 (1986): 53–70. (here 53). Interestingly, Amar’s focus is on particular characters changes over the seven series, creating even greater looseness in the overarching plot lines.
Cynthia Duncan, “Looking Like a Woman: Some Reflections on the Hispanic Soap Opera and the Pleasures of Female Spectatorship,” Chasqui 24, no. 2 (1995): 82–92. (here 90).
Jennifer Hayward, “Day After Tomorrow: Audience Interaction and Soap Opera Production,” Cultural Critique 23 (1992–1993): 83–1. (here 97).
Mariadel Mar Chicharro Merayo and José Carlos Rueda Laffond, “Televisión y ficción histórica: Amar en tiempos revueltos,” Comunicación y Sociedad 21 (2008): 57–84. (here 5).
These particular emoticons are not graphic, derived from punctuation and other graphs, but small visual images of yellow faces. Emoticons have been viewed as “a surrogate for nonverbal emotional expression”; Daantje Derks, Arjan E. R. Bos, and Jasper von Grumbkow, “Emoticons in Computer-mediated Communication: Social Motives and Social Context,” CyberPsychology and Behaviour 11, no. 1 (2008): 99–101. (here 99). The encounter of emoticons in written texts involves identifiable neurological activity, raising the issue of the intersection between verbal communication and affect; see
Masahide Yuasa, Keiichi Saito, and Naoki Mukawa, “Brain Activity When Reading Sentences and Emoticons: An fMRI Study of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication,” Electronics and Communications in Japan 94, no. 5 (2011): 1797–1803.
Alicia Satorras Pons, “Soldados de Salamina de Javier Cercas, reflexiones sobre los héroes,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 56, no. 1 (2003): 227–45.
Derek Gagen, “Heroism in Defeat: Alberti’s Cantata de los héroes y la fraternidad de los pueblos and Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 83, no. 4 (2006): 349–66. (here 350–51).
Gagen, “Heroism in Defeat,” 360–61. I have commented elsewhere on the problematic nature of this view of the war, which offers a rosy bridging of the gap between good and bad and thus dangerously evokes the late Francoist notion of the war as a “collective madness.” See Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, “From the Recuperation of Spanish Historical Memory to a Semantic Dissection of Cultural Memory,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 16, no. 1 (2010): 1–12.
See Satorras Pons; Teresa Gómez Trueba, “‘Esa bestia omnívora que es el yo’: el uso de la autoficción en la obra narrativa de Javier Cercas,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86, no. 1 (2009): 67–83.
Marta del Pozo Ortea, “Soldados de Salamina: ‘Terapias’ para después de una guerra,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 24, no. 1 (2011): 35–49. (here 48). Del Pozo’s reading of a collective unconscious into which Cercas might tap is, unfortunately, somewhat simplistic in its utopian declaration that Soldados provides “una curación de nuestra propia picosis” (48), but the adoption of a Jungian perspective earlier in the article is productive in terms of an examination of narrative tropes such the quest, trails and travails, and heroic action.
Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, 27th ed. ( Barcelona: Tusquets, 2003 ), 23;
Javier Cercas, Relatos reales ( Barcelona: El Acantilado, 2000 ), 153–56.
José Carlos Mainer, Tramas, libros, nombres ( Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005 ), 106.
John Patrick Thompson, “The Civil War in Galiza, the Uncovering of the Common Graves, and Civil War Novels as Counter-discourses of Imposed Oblivion,” Revista Iberoamericana 6, no. 18 (2005): 75–82. (here 76). See also
Álvaro Jaspe, “The Forgotten Resistance: The Galician Rearguard 1936–45 and The Example of the Neira Group,” in Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea/War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Ann Quance, and Anne L. Walsh (Madrid: Verbum, 2009 ), 51–65.
Manuel Rivas, O lapis do carpinteiro, 12th ed. ( Vigo: Xerais, 2000 ), 10.
Felicity Callard and Constantina Papoulias, “Affect and Embodiment,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010 ), 246–62. (here 247).
Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 127–150. (here 127).
Radstone, “What Place Is This?,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011), 109–23. (here 120).
Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (2007): 89–116. (here 101).
Vítor Vaqueiro, Guía da Galiza máxica, mítica e lendaria ( Vigo: Editorial Galaxia, 1998 ), 50–57. I am grateful to Marti n Veiga for this reference. In Lapis Rivas associates “mal de aire” with melancholy. The classical explanation of melancholia is that it was caused by an excess of black bile, and melancholic humor was traditionally associated with the colors black and blue. Nevertheless, Shakespeare—like Rivas here—associates melancholy with green; in Twelfth Night he refers to “a green and yellow melancholy” (3.2.115).
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed./25th anniversary ed. ( San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012 ), 60, 59, respectively.
It should not be forgotten that the Republicans also presented the Civil War as a war against alien invaders; Xosé-Manoel Nüñez Seixas, “Nations in Arms Against the Invader: On Nationalist Discourses During the Spanish Civil War,” in The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, ed. Chris Ealham and Michael Richards (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–67 (here 45).
Francisco Ferrándiz, “Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2008): 177–92. (here 177).
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 ), 137, 150.
I do not mean to imply that Rivas’s borrowing of Nóvoa Santos’s term is anything other than a creative appropriation for new ends. Given Rivas’s environmental concerns, Nóvoa Santos may be of interest for his association of melancholy “saudade” with the Galician landscape; see Salvador Lorenzana, “Teorias interpretativas da Saudade,” in Filosofia da Saudade, ed. Afonso Botelho and António Braz Teixeira (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1986 ), 643–85. (here 677).
See Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War ( Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011 ), 164–66.
Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Narrative, Films and Discourse ( Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 ), 49.
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia ( London: Routledge, 1995 ), 10.
Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), 36–7;
Michael Richards, Time of Silence ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ). Labanyi notes the contradiction in Nationalist approaches to modernity in “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain.”
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© 2014 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
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de Menezes, A.R. (2014). Heroism and Affect: From Narratives of Mourning to Multidirectional Memories. In: Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137379948_6
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