A USABLE NOSTALGIA FOR SPAIN : ORAL HISTORY AND THE NOVEL

Gina Herrmann

1. Stealing words

In 1995 Ray Loriga published Caídos del cielo (translated into English as My Brother's Gun), a novel that could be considered the archetypal text of what novelist and cultural critic Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, in a 1996 lecture delivered to the Instituto Cervantes in London, has called the ‘Generation X, Y and Z'—any number of possible permutations of stylistic and thematic characteristics, national and market contexts, and authorial subject positions that conjure a group Spanish writers, most born after 1965, whose writings share an emphasis on a profoundly narcissistic, personal, moral, and ideological creed that reflects the impotence and disorientation of a particular segment of urban youth culture in an era of media immersion and technologically mediated relations (1996: 9). Although Vázquez Montalbán insists on the elasticity of such definitions, his lecture nevertheless addresses Loriga's early works as particularly noteworthy because their fictional world is inhabited by characters who belong to a social segment incapable of feeling fully integrated and who therefore hold a cynical and hopeless world view (1996: 9). Both the Spanish title and the English rendition of Loriga's novel capture some of the held assumptions of this school of writers. The Spanish title, Caídos del cielo , responds to the ethic of the novel—'fallen from the sky,' a context-less appearance on earth, with no originary version of the history of the self or the group—while the English transcription better reflects the violence of the plot. Told from the perspective of a younger brother, the story follows the misadventures of an unusually attractive adolescent male growing up in middle-class Madrid , who finds himself enraged with the security guard at an all-night convenience store, shoots the guard point blank, and kills him. What ensues is his younger brother's narration of his renegade brother's increasingly murderous Keroacian road trip, replete with references to popular culture—a journey that ends with the fugitive's death at the hands of the police.

According to Vázquez Montalbán, Loriga's work, and I would say this novel in particular, depicts a media-obsessed youth for whom culture offers no system by which one can organize consciousness, nor do relationships provide any context in which one could take on a project for the future: this is a world of utter nihilism (1996: 7 ) . Works such as those by Loriga, José Ángel Mañas, Lucía Etxebarría, and the filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar resonate, if painfully, for their realist portrayals of the narcissistic character structure as the prevailing psychopathology of our time.(1) The narcissistic personality type experiences the past as lost, and due to the failure to sustain an internal life, he or she lives in an eternal present notable for a sense of waning historical continuity. The quality of historical rupture stems from the epistemological counterpart to narcissism, solipsism, the belief that the self is the only object of real knowledge. Under the terms of this belief, historical memory is useless; individual subjectivity reigns supreme, and the shared spoken creation of mutual experience is lost or avoided. (2)

But the mutuality of experience and the continuity of history nevertheless survive in these texts as a kind of residue of desire, as potential vehicles for a sense of pertinence and containment. This telling point is illustrated in Caídos del cielo , where the younger brother recalls his now deceased sibling's attempt to record a sort of collective oral snapshot of the city:

Él se levantó un día y grabó en una cinta todo lo que decía la gente por la calle. Teníamos un pequeño walkman con micrófono que se podía disimular fácilmente debajo de la ropa. Se pasó el día dando vueltas, subiendo y bajando de autobuses y entrando en todos los grandes almacenes. [ . . . ] Grabó cosas como: Nunca, puede que sí, a mí también me importa, todo lo que quieras [ . . . ] estoy solo, ya no me importa, hemos ganado, las cosas que tú me dices, corre, corre, corre, [ . . . ]otra vez solo, si no fuera tan guapo, dios sabe que lo he intentado, nadie sabe cuánto, no me quiere [ . . . ] soy joven, ya no soy tan joven, dos niños solos, ¿no serán de nadie?, qué raro, solo, nunca había visto animales en el parque, si no llueve o a lo mejor llueve...y al principio y al final de la grabación:

Te quiero, ya no te quiero. (1995: 47-48)

[My brother once woke up and decided to tape everything he heard people saying on the streets. He had a small Walkman with a microphone that was easy to hide under his clothes. He spent the day walking around, getting on and off buses, walking in and out of all the department stores. Then he went back home. This is what he taped:

‘No way, maybe. It matters to me, too, Anything you want, [ . . . ] I'm all alone, I just don't care anymore, We won! The things you say to me, Run, run, run [ . . . ] All alone, again, If he wasn't so cute, God only knows I've tried, I can't tell you how much [ . . . ] I'm still young, I'm not so young anymore, See those two kids, all alone—they must belong to someone, I never saw animals like that in the park, Is it supposed to rain? They say it's going to rain . . .'

At the beginning and end of the tape, he put:

I love you . . . I don't love you anymore] (1997: 33-34)

What kind of gesture do these recordings capture? The young man who secretly records is a thief of orality, and the tapes themselves constitute an anti-Oral History in which there is no transmissible narrative, just the aesthetic of the sound-bite. But the impulse behind the act is indeterminate: does he go onto the streets seeking some kind of connection with the urban sphere that surrounds and saturates him as a palliative for the negative symptoms of our globalized disjunctive conditions? Does the brother pilfer words for the sake of locating himself intersubjectively in his environment, or does he do so for the purpose of verifying his utter eviction from it? The very last lines: ‘I love you [ . . . ] I don't love you anymore,' are the only words which, according to the surviving brother, actually were intentionally placed at the beginning and the end of the tape. While the ellipses between these statements comprise a story untold, the utterances themselves do indicate a beginning and an end—a process, a narrative, a history. This episode of failed history making, Oral History making, posits two opposing responses to history and memory: one of foreclosure, or a solipsistic stance regarding the epistemic value of memory and experience, and the other one of recovery.

We can find currently operative in Spanish imaginative and documentary cultural production two competing structures of feeling that correspond to these opposing positions about the uses of history in the context of Spain 's ubiquitous memory boom of the past two decades. The first is a narcissistic structure of feeling and the second is a nostalgic one. The narcissistic subjectivity eschews historical memory as an ontological category of identity in the present, while the nostalgic embraces it. (3)

Raymond Williams's cultural hypothesis of the structure of feeling calls attention to modalities of emotion as social , not as merely private or personal, and as a key to emerging social structures. The structure of feeling as experiential category refers to pervasive systems in process, or what he calls ‘social experiences in solution [ . . . ] meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the [ . . . ] nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences ' (1977: 132-34; emphasis added). The prevalence of a nostalgic structure of feeling has been identified by other critics of contemporary Western culture. Stuart Tannock, in his article ‘Nostalgia Critique', describes it as a nostalgic optic through which one can contemplate historical objects: ‘a turn to the past to construct sources of identity, agency, or community, that are felt to be lacking, blocked, subverted, or threatened in the present' (1995: 454). In the case of contemporary Spanish cultural studies, Noël Valis, Gonzalo Navajas, and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas have all investigated the artistic ramifications of nostalgic structures of feeling in different eras and genres. But what my application of the term has in common with the work of the latter two critics is a focus on what Navajas has called ‘assertive' nostalgia, or what Morgan-Tamosunas describes as the progressive: ‘potential of the nostalgic affective mode for articulating a more radical or progressive discourse than the ideological conservatism with which it is usually associated' (2000: 113).

Svetlana Boym in her recent book, The Future of Nostalgia , distinguishes between restorative nostalgia, which is of the retrograde type that seeks to reconstruct the past through absolute truths, from reflective nostalgia, which opens up onto the future through irony and pluralism: ‘[it] dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity' (2001: xiii). What concerns me here is this reflective nostalgia that fuels Spain 's recent confrontation with a present that is deficient because it does not make proper use of its past. This memory boom is the broad answer to the charges of two consecutive, institutionally sanctioned political platforms of historical amnesia. These are first, the Francoist erasure of the history and the memory (if not the very human existence) of the defeated of the Spanish Civil War, and second, the pacted transition to democracy in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that made forgetting an openly articulated necessity for the health of the new Spain.

2. The memory boom

One of the ways to access the versions of history of the defeated, whose participation in the war and the resistance were never culturally materialized within Francoist Spain, is through Oral History. Oral History has thus become the materia prima of the memory boom. If we return for a moment to Loriga's novel and the tension between narcissism and nostalgia as demonstrated by the protagonist's ambiguous intentions during his excursion with a hidden walkman, we see that the fact that this young man attends to the oral component of communal identity ironizes the Oral History frenzy while simultaneously viewing it as constitutive of a potentially empathic retrieval of mental habitus.

So as to leave little doubt about my claim for the primacy of Oral History in projects for the recuperation of historical memory and their attendant reflective nostalgic programme, I want to list some ventures from the late 1970s through 2002 that are based on oral interviews with the memorial generation of the Spanish Civil War and the anti-Franco Resistance: Historical Fiction Films: Vicente Aranda's Libertarias (1995), Ken Loach's Land and Freedom (1995), Montxo Armendáriz's Silencio roto (2001); Documentary Films: Jaime Camino's La vieja memoria (1978), and now his 2002 release Los niños de Rusia , Bruckner, Dore, and Sills's The Good Fight (1984), Lisa Berger and Carol Mazer's De toda la vida (1986) about anarchist women, Javier Rioyo and José Luis López Linares' Asaltar a los cielos (1996) and Extranjeros de sí mismos (2001), RTVE's production Las mujeres del 36 (1999), and Javier Corcuera's new documentary about the maquis, La guerrilla de la memoria ( 2002); Documentary Photographic Projects: Sofía Moro's Retratos de los excombatientes de la guerra civil ; Archival Associations and Associations for the Recovery of Mass Graves and the Disappeared: Dolores Cabra's Asociación de Guerra y Exilio and Emilio Silva's Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica ; At least five important works on the history of women in the civil war: Martha Acklesberg's ground-breaking study on the Mujeres libres: Free Women of Spain (1991), Fernanda Romeu's El silencio roto (1994), Mary Nash's Defying Male Civilization (1995), Shirley Mangini's Recuerdos de la resistencia. La voz de las mujeres de la guerra civil española (1997) , Tomasa Cuevas's Prison of Women (1998), my own Oral History project in which I have been collecting the full life narratives of Spanish and Catalan women who participated in the Spanish Civil War and the guerrilla; Histories of the Maquis: Ferrán Sánchez Agustí's Maquis a Catalunya (1999), Francisco Moreno Gómez's La resistencia armada contra Franco (2001), Secundino Serrano's Maquis (2001). And the list goes on. (4)

If Oral History is such a crucial and integral tool of the documentary and imaginative cultural products of Spain 's memory boom, then it follows to ask: what recourse to orality can the novel claim?

In so far as Oral History is an overwhelmingly liberal discipline that has traditionally sought to externalize the memories of its own ideological heroes, it has always been a nostalgic enterprise. Indeed, Fredric Jameson presents a case for the bonds between orality and progressive politics in his article about Walter Benjamin's nostalgia for the oral circumstance of storytelling events : ‘But if nostalgia as political motivation is most frequently associated with fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of Benjamin is there to prove it' (1969: 68). At play in these memory projects, then, is a high degree of esteem for the political protagonists whose experiences are the subject of recuperation and whose progressive ideologies serve as models for emulation in the present.

I am particularly interested in novels that take up the oral histories of the political heroes of a more radical era, enlivening them, narrativizing, even ironizing them as part of a particular ideological agenda for the public manifestation and literary materialization of the memories and the experiences of those who lost the civil war and suffered its subsequent repression. These novels rely on orality in order to make claims for the possibility of the revolutionary uses of nostalgia: community oral histories, local storytelling, and conversational reclamations of the past are intertexts or structural components, aesthetic models or ethical constructs for many historical realist novels that have been published in the last few years. However for the purposes of the present argument, I will focus on three novels: El pianista by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1985), Un día volveré by Juan Marsé (1982), and the 1997 novel Maquis by Alfons Cervera. These novels coincide in some very specific ways: first, they privilege the simulation of orality in writing; second, their plots involve the recovery of the Oral History of a member of the clandestine resistance movement against Franco; and finally, each novel presents, as a secondary character, a younger figure or group intrigued or obsessed by the hero maqui or civil war veteran. (5) The structure of two juxtaposing generations aligns the reader with the contemporary inquisitive figure; it works to place the reader in the position not only of curious passive recipient of the story of the past but in a circumstance akin to that of the oral historian, an informed interlocutor who ideally is going to circulate a transcribed articulation of the speaking subject's life experiences.

These writers share what Peter Brooks, in another article about Benjamin's nostalgia for the storyteller, describes as a longing for a past cultural context in which imagination is vested in the storyteller figure, the receptacle of collective memory: ‘The simulation of orality in their writing appears to want to restore the situation of live communication in a medium', the novel, which, according to Benjamin, ‘is necessarily marked by detachment, solitude, privacy, and lack of context' (Brooks 1987: 36). Oral tradition maintains contingent relations between imagination, memory, and the collectivity as they come together in a certain system of relations that cannot be replicated outside of oral communication. (6) And since the past needs to be resuscitated for the health of Spain , and because the past fades into oblivion at the edge of death, orality is conjured up as the salvation of memory.

3. Experience and empathy

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán is well known for his tireless critique of collective amnesia in Spain , his resistance to postmodernity, and his championing of proletariat culture and its oral traditions. (7) In the fictional world of the Barcelona underclasses that set the stage for most of Juan Marsé's novels, knowledge is constructed through ‘ aventis 'a word invented by Marsé that describes how history gets made and circulated by those who have no access to hegemonic plots. And a relatively unknown Valencian novelist, Alfons Cervera , has written a semi-biographical trilogy told through the oral collective memory of the armed underground movement, the maquis, in a small village in the interior of the Valencia province that was terrorized by the civil guard and local fascist functionaries in the immediate postwar period. Orality in these novels is highly self-conscious, for it is not only a theme of the stories but also a stylistic and structural principle: conversation, storytelling, even gossip are manifest.

Before entering into a close reading of the novels by Marsé, Vázquez Montalbán, and Cervera, I want to outline five premises of Oral History that illuminate their reading as well as that of other recent works that respond to a nostalgic structure of feeling. (8) The first four points I have taken from the theoretical writings of Oral Historians Luisa Passerini, Ron Grele, and especially Alessandro Portelli, and the last observation emerges generally from the ethics of Oral History methodology and from my personal interviewing practice.

First: Oral History projects have the potential to revive historical consciousness. They are cohort or transgenerational enterprises that contribute to a sense of community cohesion and group identity primarily for the testimonial subject but at times also for the interviewer.

Second: Oral History seeks out the articulated memory of people who could not or did not record their own stories—often the poor and multiply disenfranchised. Especially when Oral History is of a testimonial nature, in that it collects the crimes of a repressive regime, the goal is not simply to give voice to those who had been silenced but to fight distortions, false records, and false memory. (9) It is thus an opportunity to ‘democratize the nature of history, not simply by interviewing but by seeing involvement as a prelude to a method which allows people to formulate their own meanings of their past', often in response to competing versions of history that would seek to annihilate plurality of understanding (Grele 1992: xvi).

Third: Oral History sources are not objective. They are artificial, variable, and partial. They are subject to correction, contingency, and error. What counts in the use of oral expressions of experience is not necessarily an ‘adherence to fact but rather its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge' (Portelli 1992: 51). The structuring of identity and the epistemic potential of experience—whether individual or of the group—takes precedence over evidentiary claims. This last idea leads me to my fourth point.

Fourth: This recourse to orality (which in Spain continues and shows no sign of slowing) has deep theoretical and ethical consequences, particularly in the evaluation of the status of experience. It stands on one side of the current debates about the value of experience, not as infallible evidence, but as a fluid, flexible resource of knowledge that permits a plural understanding of both the history and the future of Spain . Especially when oral histories are set in the context of war and state-sponsored terrorism, the rehabilitation of evidence is an ethical position. The proliferation of Oral History projects and the nostalgic structure of feeling that frames them coincide in a philosophical reliance on the epistemic value of experience, in part as a counter to the postmodern and poststructuralist skepticism about it. In an attempt to expose the terms of the debate about identity, Satya Mohanty maintains that experience is the subjective ‘living through' of an event: ( Zammito 2000: 305). Alessandro Portelli defends the same position: ‘Subjectivity is as much the business of history as are the more visible “facts.” What informants believe [and what meaning they ascribe to their experiences] is indeed a historical fact as much as what really happened [ . . . ] the diversity of Oral History consists in the fact that [supposedly] wrong statements are still psychologically ‘true,' and that this truth may be equally [ . . .] important' (1992: 50-51). John Zammito offers a vigorous and convincing defence of the centrality of experience for knowing: ‘Experience always signifies an emergent, not an essence : it makes determinate claims even as it is constructed by and within a web of social and linguistic forces. [ . . . ]. Experience is a process, negotiated socially, which can lead to better insight' (2000: 294-95). (10) Oral History and the nostalgic novel come together in a mutually held agenda for the reinvigoration of the validity of experience as a reliable category for the interrogation of the uses of memory.

Fifth and last is the idea that Oral History insists on empathy. Successful testimonial events are the result of the interviewer's empathic stance toward the individuals communicating their experiences. This is where Oral History shares some of its provisos with the nostalgic mode, for both assume the empathic stance of the interlocutor or reader towards the speaking subject or protagonist. Whereas a position of empathy toward the narrating subject in the Oral History intersubjective circumstance appears to be simply a matter of proper ethical conduct, in certain schools of psychoanalysis, particularly those born from the Self Psychology theories of Heinz Kohut, the ‘sustained empathic introspective' inquiry on the part of the analyst is the basis of the cure for narcissistic character disorder (Stolorow and Atwood 1997: 44-45). According to Kohut, empathy is not just an affective response to the analysand, it is rather—and this is crucial for understanding the role of empathy both in reading and oral historical practices—is first and foremost an investigatory stance (Stolorow and Atwood 1997: 43). Peter Brooks echoes this sentiment about the points of contingency between interpretation and affective narrative engagement: ‘Lost in this kind of reading is the experience, or the illusion of the experience, of an exchange between living creatures, that human transaction which leads to reflection—and reflexivity—and in its wake to wisdom, in the form of counsel given and received. [ . . . ] the presence of a narratee-interpreter provokes a situation of transmission and transference, a situation which in turn makes necessary the interpretative response of this narratee' (1987: 28-29; emphasis added). Narcissism, as I discussed above, involves a trajectory of empathic failure in the personal history of the analysand, ‘and narcissistic texts, no less than narcissistic people, manipulate readers into withdrawing sympathy from deserving characters' (Berman 1990: 51). It follows then that nostalgic texts can do the opposite: they encourage us to maintain a prolonged empathic involvement with the text. The growth of empathy, it is suggested by these novels, can function as an antidote to narcissism. (11)

4. El pianista

Vázquez Montalbán brilliantly captures this dynamic of empathy as a method of historical inquiry in his 1985 novel El pianista . (12) Here a certain pathos surrounds the protagonist Albert Rosell, a musician who gives up a promising musical career in order to fight with a dissident Marxist POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War. El pianista traces an affective progression from narcissism to nostalgia by way of a regressive temporal structure that takes the reader from 1983 bourgeoisie Barcelona to the barrio chino of that same city in 1942 during the worst years of the postwar repression of the defeated, and then finally in the third section to 1930s Paris where the young Rosell must decide between his career as a pianist and his political ideals. In each chapter a choir of characters configures the sociopolitical and intellectual artistic climate of the moment. Montalbán begins with a narcissistic narrative circumstance, by which I mean that not only is the environment—the movida in 1982—representative of a narcissistic era, but given that the first group of characters we meet are cynical and disillusioned, the text discourages any identification with these ex-progressives who have become yuppie prototypes. The first chapter takes place on one night in which the group of friends decides to take a walk down the Ramblas and ends up drinking, reminiscing, and insulting one another in a trendy nightclub. One member of the group, Ventura , a man who is dying of some undisclosed disease, is fascinated with the old piano player at the club. Ventura notices the aura of a survivor in the withdrawn and talented musician. When the club closes, Ventura is tempted to follow the piano player home but decides to stay with his friends; instead, it is the reader who is able to follow the old musician down the dark streets into an apartment where he lovingly, tenderly attends to his ill, incontinent, mute, obese woman partner. The devotion and simplicity of the pianist's act of caretaking of this abject figure stands in stark contrast to the self-centered pandering of Ventura and his cohorts. The second chapter of El pianista takes the reader back to 1942, where a somewhat disoriented Rosell seeks out lodging in a dilapidated building in the barrio chino of Barcelona . His neighbors readily identify him as one of the vanquished class who have been recently released either from prison or concentration camps, where they had been held as a result of their participation in the Spanish Civil War. When he explains to his new neighbors that he is a pianist, they enthusiastically offer to help him find an instrument on which he might practise. The search for a piano begins a wonderful rooftop excursion through the barrio during which the group of characters stop and talk to others, all members of the demoralized, humiliated rank and file, who go about their business on their roof terraces. It is significant that the journey moves over the tops of buildings instead of in the streets, the down below that is controlled and patrolled by the Francoist civil guard who alternately intimidate or terrorize the vanquished proletariat (Balibrea 1998:128). The characters of the 1942 Barcelona confront a reality characterized by the institutionally enforced erasure of their version of recent history and a class-based discrimination against their cultural memory.

Among the neighbourhood characters that Rosell and his crew meet as they literally jump from rooftop to rooftop is the son of Señora Remei, who is burning all his pictures because the present does not validate his existence as a member of the defeated class. That is, the present, no longer contiguous to history, has been evacuated of narratives that capture his family's past as represented in his mother's old pictures. Lacking the circumstances and institutional permission to articulate their memory, these working-class figures are rapidly losing a collective identity that had been organically sutured to a more meaningful past through orality. The rooftop travellers eventually come across a man named Andrés, a survivor of a ‘concentration camp' (French, Spanish, or Nazi?), who presents himself as a sort of neighbourhood spokesperson. Andrés intimately knows the history of his neighbors and their peripeteia; from the small details of each family's daily chores, individual heartaches, and musical tastes, to the sweeping story of how the war pushed the whole community into tragedy, despair, but eventually, survival. Serving as the conceptual and affective heart of the novel, the moving monologue that Andrés delivers to Rosell and his companions comes exactly at the centre of the novel, on pages 134 and 135 out of a total of 268. It is through Andrés that Vázquez Montalbán renders explicit the relationship between the choral nature of locally inscribed memory, the value of oral histories, and how they at once recall and potentially recuperate the spirit of collective projects for the sake of endurance in a challenging or even life-threatening present:

Yo estoy aquí desde niño, [ . . . ] he vivido los mejores y los peores años de nuestra vida, conozco a los vecinos, casi todos han perdido la guerra y llevan la posguerra a cuestas como un muerto. [ . . . ] Y todos sabemos que tenemos siempre un pie en el cuello, qué pie no importa, y basta ver la cantidad de generosidad que aún les queda. [ . . . ] Me gustaría saber escribir como Vargas Vila o Fernández Flores o Blasco Ibáñez para contar todo esto, porque nadie lo contará nunca y esta gente se morirá cuando se muera, no sé si usted lo habrá pensado alguna vez. Saber expresarse, saber poner por escrito lo que uno piensa y siente es como poder enviar mensajes de náufrago dentro de una botella a la posteridad. Cada barrio debería tener un poeta y un cronista, al menos, para que dentro de muchos años, en unos museos especiales, las gentes pudieran revivir por medio de la memoria. (1985: 134-35; emphasis added)

[I've lived here since I was a child [ . . . ] I've lived the best and the worst years of my life here, I know the neighbors, nearly all of them lost the war and they bear the burden of post-war times as though it were a corpse. [ . . . ] And we all know that we constantly have a foot on our necks, it doesn't matter which foot, and you just have to see the generosity they still have left over. I would love to be able to write like Vargas Vila [ . . . ] so that I could tell all this, because nobody will ever tell it and these people will die when they die, I don't know whether you've ever thought about that. The ability to express yourself, to put down on paper what you think and feel, is like being able to send messages from a shipwreck, in a bottle, to posterity. Each quarter should have its own poet, or chronicler at least, so that many years from now people can go to special museums to relive memory .] (1989: 130)

These lines capture the politics of the orality/literacy divide that permits the victors an externalized printed history (Francoist historiography and public records) and a culture of monuments (from street names to the Valle de los Caídos ) while it simultaneously leaves the defeated with nothing but highly controlled speech and intangible signs of their history. The only objects the defeated could place in their memory museums, laments Andrés, are words. The whole episode romanticizes the figure of the storyteller, the power of his imagination put to use for psychic survival, and his talent for passing on recollected, that is, gathered and salvaged, experience. Experience is the very category that Walter Benjamin laments has been under contradiction since World War I: ‘For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.' Benjamin continues: ‘Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers' (1985: 84). Vázquez Montalbán clearly shares this view.

5. Aventis

In Juan Marsé's fictional world of postwar Barcelona , especially in his 1982 novel, Un día volveré , the entire barriada takes on the role of local chronicler and contributes to the reconstruction of their more politically active past. When Jan Julivert Mon, an ex-boxer, pistolero , and urban anarchist guerrilla, is released from jail and returns to the home he had left twelve years previously, the local characters try to put together the pieces of his mysterious and fragmented trajectory and in so doing reconstruct and relive their own protagonism, victimization, and ideological conviction during the difficult years of the Francoist repression in the 1940s. His homecoming sparks the magnificent, multivoiced, dark chronicle of the characters who lived the dramatic circumstances of the civil war, the urban resistance and its suppression, and who see in Julivert the hope of retribution. The people in town have all kinds of expectations about what Jan Julivert will do when he returns: he will fall in love with his sister-in-law, rejoin the resistance, and vindicate the wrongs done against him and the community. Julivert does none of these things. Instead, he finds work as the nighttime watchman and personal bodyguard of one Judge Klein, a Francoist henchman, who sent many of Julivert's anarchist comrades to their deaths after the war. When Julivert announces that he has taken this job, the folks assume that he has done so in order to murder the judge. But the ex-guerrilla ends up spending his nights either quietly knitting or dragging the alcoholic Klein from bars and gay hotel rooms. Refusing to rejoin his comrades in the resistance movement, Julivert retreats into an increasingly secretive and private space, which in turn generates a new round of questionable versions of history among his acquaintances and family. Had he and the judge been lovers during the war? Or had Julivert actually fathered Nestor, supposedly his nephew? Did Julivert bury his gun and money under a rose tree, or had the money from the bank robbery been sent to his comrades in France ? Has Julivert betrayed his political ideals, or had he never really been committed to the cause in the first place? We never know. The neighbourhood characters and the reader take up the same position of uncertainty regarding the subject who is supposed to be the source of history.

The presence of orality in Marsé's text functions according to the same intention that storytelling serves in the Arabian Nights: Scheherazade's narrations cure the state threatened by dangerous disequilibrium (Brooks 1985: 22). In the few first pages of the novel, the unnamed young narrator of Un día volveré recalls that when Julivert was first dragged off to jail, the streets were abuzz with rumour and tale-weaving or ‘ aventis ,' (a Marsé-ism that translates something like hearing and telling through the grapevine) but that after some years had passed and Julivert became more of a phantom than a living legend, he says: ‘Ciertamente, ahora nos parecía ya lejos el tiempo feliz de las aventis , en las que todo había resultado siempre inmediato y necesario como la luz, duro y limpio como el diamante. Ahora, a la distancia de seis o siete años, cuando ya había cambiado la escuela por el taller, el colmado por la taberna, sentíamos algo así como si el barrio hubiese empezado a morir para nosotros.' [‘Now the happy times of the aventis seemed so far off, the times when everything felt as immediate and urgent as light, as hard and clean as a diamond. At a distance of six or seven years, when we had traded school for the workshop, the snack bar for the tavern, we felt as if the barrio had started to die for us'] (1982: 17). (13) Even the minimum sense of hatred and frustration, he reports, the very source of solidarity against the right wing, had waned (1982: 18). Until the day that Julivert returned: ‘Y entonces, cuando el vecindario ya estaba sustituyendo su capacidad de asombro y de leyenda por la resignación y el olvido, [ . . . ] cuando la indiferencia y el tedio amenazaban sepultar para siempre aquel rechinar de tranvías y de viejas aventis , y los hombres en la taberna no contaban ya sino vulgares historias de familia [ . . . ] regresaba por fin a su casa el hombre que, según el viejo Suau, más de uno en el barrio hubiese preferido mantener lejos, muerto o encerrado para siempre.' [‘And then when the neighbourhood had already begun to substitute its capacity for marvel and legend for resignation and oblivion,

[ . . . ] when indifference and boredom threatened to bury forever the clanking of streetcars and the old aventis , and the men in the bars didn't talk of anything other than vulgar personal gossip [ . . . ] the man, who many in the neighbourhood would have rather kept at a distance, dead or locked up forever, returned.'] (1982: 18). And with Julivert's homecoming, the street regains its ‘pequeña crónica del barrio' [‘little local chronicle'] (1982: 17).

Of the three, Marsé's is the only text in which the heroism, selflessness, and noble commitment of the subject of the historical inquiry, that is, the enigmatic resistance fighter, remains unconfirmed. To the extent that Jan Julivert defies his community's (and the reader's ) expectation of revenge and renewed ideological enthusiasm, he is a fallen hero and stands antagonistically apart from the memory he is meant to represent. Nevertheless, his status as a figure that will not or cannot confirm the sense of solidarity once shared by his family and community still serves to instigate a cooperative narrative process through which those who knew him are able to resuscitate their own past of radicalism and subjugation: ‘Volverían a discutirse en la barbería y en la taberna su ideal político y sus supuestas traiciones al grupo activista que había comandado.' [‘They went back to arguing in the barbershop and in the tavern about his political ideals and the supposed betrayals he had committed against the revolutionary group he commanded'] (18).

This reading of Un día volveré picks up the fourth characteristic I outlined earlier about Oral History: that it is partial, fragmented, and variable. Marsé's text is far more interested in the production of different, even competing versions of local history than it is in truth or evidentiary claims. The reliability of experience is one of the overarching categories of exploration in Marsé's works. He intentionally puts experience, verifiable testimony, and corroborations of evidence under scrutiny in order to demonstrate how the affective and social meanings of events can be turned into a local history no less reliable than the hegemonic Francoist versions of history.

In the Oral History interview the speaking subject relates his or her past, and the interlocutor, the oral historian, often of a younger generation, receives that communication. Jan Julivert's absolute silence, coldness, and his ultimate defence of his private ideals and loves turns the Oral History situation on its head: the one who wants to inquire ends up being the teller, and that telling can only be rumour, aventis , imagination, and desire. But at the same time the inversion of the communication pattern still achieves one of the agendas of the three novels at hand: history as binding for the present and prescriptive for the future.

6. Maquis y los maestros de la memoria

Of the three novels under consideration, the most recent, Alfons Cervera 's 1997 Maquis , is the one that most overtly emulates an Oral History transcription. Not only does the novel have an autobiographical basis, but the acknowledgements at the end suggest that Cervera may have interviewed some of the elderly members of his own home town, Gestalgar, in the mountains of Valencia . The novel begins like an Oral History interview, with the speaker stating his name and defining his context: ‘Me llamo Justino Sánchez Aparicio y acabo de matar a un guardia civil.' [‘My name is Justino Sánchez Aparicio and I just killed a civil guard.'] (19). Maquis , in comparison to El pianista and Un día volveré , leaves no room for a disillusioned or ironic reflection about its subject or its agenda; the novel remembers the painful and terrifying, but noble and heroic, experiences of Valencian guerrilla fighters and their families. Maquis is pure, lyrical apotheosis of the resistance. The prose is constructed with a glorious grammar of recollection that is clearly influenced by Un día volveré , as evidenced by the fact that the novel is dedicated to Juan Marsé.

Maquis begins with an epigraph that functions as a disclaimer of sorts in that it privileges the generic categories of orality and memory over that of the novelistic. The epigraph reads: ‘Esto es una novela. Otra cosa, quizá, la memoria que inspira los hechos narrados en sus páginas.' [‘This is a novel. Or something else, perhaps, the memory that inspires the events narrated in its pages.'] (1997: 8). The plot is roughly as follows: The choir of voices, taken as a whole, rounds out the events of a period of some seven or eight years in which a group of young men, persecuted by the brutal civil guard who have taken over their town, Los Yesares, takes refuge in the mountain from where they carry out a violent resistance under the command of a valiant and cryptic figure named Ojos Azules. The counterterrorist attacks they deliver to the fascists below include the killing of a number of the Civil Guards, bombing the town's electric plant, and murdering a fascist teacher. The voices alternate between the experiences of the maquis in the monte and the suffering of their family members who remain in the town below. The wives and children of the maquis who refused to disclose the location of the rebel hideout are systematically intimidated and tortured by the civil guard. In the end it is one man who has fought with the maquis who betrays his comrades and leads the Civil Guard to their hiding place in the forest. After the surprise attack on the compound, two maquis successfully escape to France , two are shot by firing squad, another is killed by machine gun fire as he tries to flee. And the legendary leader, Ojos Azules, is taken off to the capital of Valencia , where he is to be shot by firing squad. However, and only to add to his mystique, the truck carrying him to the regional capital, a truck carrying both the prisoner and a number of soldiers, suffers a mysterious accident on a bridge en route. While the soldiers die, Ojos Azules appears to have escaped, and when the voices fade out at the end, his whereabouts are still unknown.

The bulk of the text, called ‘de los nombres y las voces,' is framed by the first person recollections of Ángel, the child of a maquis, and the maquis' wife, Guadalupe, the woman who is most sadistically beaten by the Civil Guard. Ángel's short monologue is fueled by a compulsion to sound the voices of his formative years. It is 1982, and Ángel, now in his early 40s, can still conjure the terror of his youth. The novel begins:

Yo sé mucho del miedo. Soy un maestro del miedo. [ . . . ] Yo nací cuando la guerra y a los cinco años, [ . . . ] se llevaron los guardias a mi padre, le molieron a palos y a los pocos días se fue para siempre al Cerro de los Curas, con la cuadrilla de maquis que mandaba Ojos Azules. Ahora estamos en mil novecientos ochenta y dos y después de tanto tiempo es como si aún fuéramos los mismos de entonces [ . . . ] Aquel día vi llorar a mi padre y sin saberlo supe del miedo y también supe que el miedo vivía en aquella casa con un cartel rojo y amarillo en la puerta donde ponía ‘Todo por la Patria.' [ . . . ] los guardias y el alcalde me llevaron al cuartel y me quemaron las uñas con un soplete de los de soldar metales. [ . . . ] Y cuando quiero recordar lo que pasó entonces y lo que pasó después voy dando saltos y confundiendo las voces y los nombres, como dicen que sucede siempre que quieres contar lo que recuerdas. A lo mejor, algunas veces, lo que recordamos es mentira. Pero no siempre, sólo algunas veces . No hay maestros de la memoria. A lo mejor es eso. Sólo del miedo que impide recordar con exactitud la manera en que sucedieron los acontecimientos. Entre los nombres está el de Sebastián y entre las voces, la suya. Sebastián era mi padre. Pero hay otros nombres que cuentan esta historia. Y otras voces. (1997: 14-16; emphasis added).

[I know a lot about fear. I am a master of fear. I was born during the war and when I was five some guards took my dad and beat him to a pulp with their batons and some days later he left forever, he left for the mountains with the squadron of guerrillas led by Blue Eyes. Now we are in 1982 and after so much time it is as if we were still the same as we were back then [ . . . ] That day I saw my father cry and without knowing it I understood about fear and I also knew that fear lived in that building with a red and yellow sign on the door that said: ‘Everything for the Patria' [ . . . ] the guards and the mayor took me to the headquarters and the burned by fingernails with a soldering iron [ . . . ]. And when I want to remember what happened then and what happened after my mind jumps around and confuses the voices and the names like they say always happens when you want to tell a story about what you remember. Perhaps sometimes what we remember is a lie. But not always, only sometimes . There are no masters of memory. Maybe that's the problem. Only masters of fear that prevents us from remembering exactly the way in which the events transpired. Among the names is that of Sebastian and among the voices, is his. Sebastian was my father. But there are other names that tell this story and other voices.]

This opening passage touches on all of the assumptions from Oral History that I offered earlier in this discussion. Ángel (or Cervera) sets up the reader for an affective stance that will be empathic toward the populace of Los Yesares; he does not claim veracity or coherence in the vocal narratives he will offer but holds as evidence of political terror the experiences they communicate; he defends the necessity of listening to these testimonial subjects as a challenge to the ‘masters of fear' who had tried to destroy their historical consciousness; and finally, Ángel salvages the words of those who could not save their own lives.

7. 1982, 1983

The narrator Ángel and the neighbourhood storyteller Andrés in El pianista take up the same public position with relation to the cohort they are inspired or exhorted to recollect. Like the whole of Maquis , the second chapter of El pianista sounds a polyphony of local memory that is generous and empathic in spirit, for the residents of Botella Street want to integrate Rosell into their community with its common political history. This necessity for collaboration has disappeared in Ventura 's generation of the 1980s, for the chaotic nighttime pilgrimage down the Ramblas that forms the framework for the first chapter stands starkly juxtaposed to the unifying expedition of the calle Botella residents in the second. Vázquez Montalbán exposes the ideological power of collected oral narratives through the storyteller/chronicler figure of Andrés. To the extent that he gathers and re-speaks the multiple voices of political, social, and geographic outcasts, he is the prototype of the community oral historian. In this regard, Gonzalo Navajas has said that El pianista ‘ is thus a historical enterprise that takes up a portion of unrecorded oral knowledge and transcribes it for the future in written form' (1998: 155). Spoken narratives keep the community united against a common enemy that morphs according to the vicissitudes of Spain 's political history but remains insidious nonetheless: the fascists of then and the tendency toward historical amnesia of now.

This ‘now' is as much the present moment for any reader as it is a recall of 1982 and 1983. It cannot be mere coincidence that these three novels take up specifically the strong cultural and political associations with the years 1982 and 1983 in order to centralize their narratives, thematize oral recuperations of the memories of political and social underclasses, and privilege nostalgia in the face of the pervasive pessimism, apathy, and individual hedonistic indulgences (stereo)typical of the movida . 1982 is both the date of publication of Marsé's novel and the point from which the narrator of Maquis initiates his commemorative chronicling of his town. 1983 is the year that opens El pianista . 1982 and 1983 function as historical and political markers of the Spanish left and the fusions of pasotismo , desencanto , and destape . 1982 is as much a political watershed as it is the apex of Spain 's Europeanized explosion in media, art, and leisure cultural pastimes. Not only did the PSOE overwhelmingly sweep the national elections with 47% of the vote, but the same year, and partially as a consequence of the Socialist victory, the Communist party (PCE) fissured, instigating the resignation of Santiago Carrillo. The slow and painful winding down of the communist party, the political entity that for nearly forty years had almost single-handedly constructed and disseminated leftist interpretations of the civil war and the ensuing resistance (often at the expense of alternative radical accounts), reverberates as a low hum behind the multiple voices of our three novels. The citing of the early 1980s in these novels invites reexamination of a temporal point at which certain radical political identities, legacies, and experiences could have been (but were not) incorporated into the legislative and the cultural processes of democratization.

The newly born democracy can trace no parentage either from its autarkic past nor from its republican or revolutionary heritages—and even less through a collective identity based on the hatreds felt between these legacies. These novels act out this opposition in part through their focus on peripheral, often abject characters from the autonomous regions of Spain and in liminal spaces within those autonomies—for Vázquez Montalbán, the barrio chino of Barcelona; for Marsé, the poor working class of Barcelona; for Cervera, the remote mountains of Valencia—in this way protagonizing the triply disenfranchised through class, political, and national geographic discrimination.

8. A Usable Nostalgia for Spain ?

The point of departure for much of contemporary Oral History work assumes that the memory of the past is constituted by the social needs of the present. In this light, the divisions between individual and collective cultural memory blur, while the conditions in which they originate come to the fore. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, in their important book Social Memory , maintain that ‘the way memories of the past are generated and understood by given social groups is a direct guide to how they understand their position in the present' (1992: 126). This idea leads me to introduce the present social and political conditions of the living protagonists fictionalized by Vázquez Montalbán, Marsé, and Cervera. What are the current, immediate sociopolitical needs of the leftist survivors of the Civil War and the Resistance? What kinds of correctives to false memory and false history can they expect to win?

It is easier to raise these questions than it is to answer them. Political scientist Paloma Aguilar studies these questions at length in her most recent project about the relations between political history, memory, and justice in the present: ‘Justicia, Política y Memoria: los legados del franquismo en la transición española.' An important part of Aguilar's work takes up what Fentress and Wickham describe as an economics of memory: ‘Social memory seems indeed to be subject to the law of supply and demand. Memories must be supplied, they must emerge at specific points. Yet, to survive beyond the immediate present, and especially to survive in transmission and exchange, they must also meet a demand [ . . . ] One task oral historians could set themselves is to explain how and why certain traditions fit the memories of certain groups' (Fentress and Wickham 201).

In response to the enjoiner to oral historians posited by Fentress and Wickham, I want to close by offering a short anecdote about the real material consequences of a nostalgic structure of feeling in eras of memory crises. One of the items I listed in my rehearsal of the various products of the memory boom is Montxo Armendáriz's most recent film, Silencio roto , released in the spring of 2001. It is a historical fiction film originally inspired by the Cervera novel Maquis and a 1987 history of the anti-Franco guerrilla movement in the Levante region by Valencian oral historian Fernanda Romeu. Instead of giving his film the same title as the novel, Armendáriz borrowed from Fernanda Romeu's second book, El Silencio roto , which is a collection of leftist women's prison testimonies. By taking the film title from a book of oral histories, Armendáriz consciously blurs the visual and written reconstructions of community storytellings and ‘real' Oral History projects since the film could not have been made without many hours of interviews with surviving guerrilla fighters and the people who served as their vital support systems.

The stories of the maquis are all the rage, and the vogue has brought notoriety to more than just the filmmaker and his actors. Historian Secundino Serrano published his history of the resistance, Maquis , so that it coincided with the release of the film. The book became an overnight editorial sensation, making it to the best-seller list. But others were left out of the limelight. Armendáriz, although inspired by the Cervera novel Maquis , ended up writing an original screenplay, a choice which meant a lost opportunity for national exposure for the little-known Valencian novelist. Neither does Romeu, one of the pioneer historians of the guerrilla , appear to have profited from the maquis bonanza. Each of the players in the maquis media story, with their relative successes and disappointments, can maintain that their experience of exteriorizing a history of the guerrilla fighters is a legitimate one, even if only some garnered fame from that experience. And while each version may be fallible and subject to correction, as a collection of stories about the developmental trajectory of this hit film, they serve to shed light on the matter that has engaged me from the beginning: the ways in which nostalgic and narcissistic structures of feeling offer competing responses to crises of memory.

The novels of Marsé, Vázquez Montalbán, and Cervera suggest that nostalgia is not merely a collectively felt subjectivity; it is a cultural and political resource that has the potential to impact the real material conditions of the protagonists whose experiences are the object of longing and of those who long for them. What is the potential power of literature, of reading , within the contexts of crises of memory and their concomitant projects for the historical, cultural, and psychological restitution of the victims of oppression? In an attempt to offer a preliminary response, I return to Peter Brooks's moving article about Benjamin, in which he defends the cognitive value of narrative: ‘Benjamin proposes [ . . . ] the notion of narrative as gift: an act of generosity to which the receiver should respond by an equal generosity, either in telling another story [ . . . ] or in commenting on the story told, but in any event by the proof that the gift has been received, that the narrative has made a difference . [ . . . ] The attraction [ . . . ] to situations of oral communication may be explained above all by their deep wish to make a difference through the transmission of experience' (1987: 28; emphasis added).

While the director, the novelist, and the historian vie for their due recognition, the maquis who have provided each of them, respectively, a film, a novel, and a history book, are engaged in struggles of their own. What, they ask, can this film, novel, or history do to help them in their battle for material and symbolic rehabilitation? Will legislators who see the film be compelled to vote in favour of pensions for the political prisoners of the dictatorship? Can these survivors receive moral rectification by having the terms ‘terrorist' and ‘bandit' replaced in the public record by the words ‘antifascist guerrilla'? What ‘gift' can readers give back in exchange for the storied sharing of experience? As the voices of the maquis remind us, there still remains the thorny question of whether or not oral histories and texts that make use of them can be vehicles for social justice.

Notes

(1)Jeffery Berman in his 1990 study Narcissism and the Novel describes the DSM III ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) diagnostic criteria for the narcissistic personality disorder: ‘(1) grandiose sense of self-importance; (2) preoccupation with unrealistic fantasies; (3) exhibitionism; (4) cool indifference or feelings of rage; (5) at least two of the following interpersonal disturbances: entitlement, exploitativeness, alteration between overidealization and devaluation, lack of empathy' (21).

(2) Cristina Moreiras-Menor gives extensive consideration to the consequences of a certain species of postmodernity that manifests its break from history through ‘wounds': spectacle and violence; or through trauma, that is, through a continuity with the Civil War and Franquismo. What troubles me about Moreiras-Menor's formulation is an apparent conflation between ‘trauma'and history, on one hand, and a disturbing lack of affect with ahistoricity on the other. These binarily based oppositions between historical and ahistorical trends in contemporary Peninsular fiction deny the highly complex points of relation between traumatic events as lived experience, the recollection of political memory as a current ideological agenda, and the historical situatedness of novels that supposedly refuse History its epistemic weight.

(3)Historian Jay Winter ponders the ‘memory boom' and its uses in Public and Cultural History: ‘One of the challenges of the next decade or so is to try to draw together some of these disparate strands of interest and enthusiasm through a more rigorous and tightly argued set of propositions about what exactly memory is and what it has been in the past. The only fixed point at this moment is the near ubiquity of the term. No one should delude himself into thinking we all use it the same way. But just as we use words like love and hate without ever knowing their full or shared significance, so are we bound to go on using the term ‘memory,' the historical signature of our own generation.'

(4)This list does not include the oral history projects that have been conducted with members of the postmemorial generation. Carrie Hamilton is carrying out important work about gender, transgenerational ideological legacies, and radical politics in the Basque nationalist context. See her excellent ‘Remembering the Basque nationalist family: daughters, and the reproduction of the radical nationalist family'; and ‘Changing subjects: gendered identities in ETA and radical Basque nationalism.'

(5)Juan Goytisolo, since 1991, has written and spoken about the need to reclaim and salvage oral patrimonies, particularly with respect to and lauding UNESCO's ‘Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.' He, like Vázquez Montalbán, Marsé, and Cervera, honors the presence of orality in writing: ‘Mis novelas Makbara y Las virtudes del pájaro solitario privilegian esta oralidad soterrada que subsiste en la escritura aunque de forma irremediablemente distinta de la de los juglares de la precaria tradición oral de nuestros días' ( El País 20 May 2001). [‘ My novels Makbara and The Virtues of the Solitary Bird privilege this latent orality that persists in writing though it is totally dissimilar to that of the bards of today's precarious oral tradition.']

(6)Brooks explains further: ‘It is not so much that the tale, short story or novella, stands in opposition to the novel—since one could find in many novels an effort on the part of the narrator to establish a dialogue and a transferential relation with the reader—but that by its example it challenges the novel to reclaim something that it has lost from its heritage: the situation of live communication, the presence of voice' (37).

(7) Vázquez Montalbán reflected on the relationship between past and current forms of political resistance, clearly lamenting the failure to pass on ideological heritage between the generation of the civil war and that of the transition: [ El pianista ] ‘es una novela sobre la memoria moral de los vencedores y vencidos en la guerra civil y sobre la moral de la resistencia de los años republicanos y de la postguerra, comparada con la resistencia antifranquista universitaria de los años sesenta y setenta, base social de los triunfadores de la transición. El pianista ha perdido la guerra civil, pero también ha perdido la transición rodeado de una joven sociedad emergente y pragmática, molesta por el peso de una memoria histórica como la española, tan dramática.' (1998: 147). [It is a novel about the moral memory of the winners and the losers of the Spanish Civil War and about the morality of the resistance movement of the years of the Republic and the postwar as compared with the resistance against the Franco regime of the sixties and seventies, whose social base was made up of those who came out ahead in the transition. The pianist, who has not only lost the civil war but has also lost the transition, is surrounded by an emergent pragmatic youth society that is annoyed by the weight of Spain 's dramatic historical memory.]

(8)I have in mind recent novels such as Javier Cercas's bestseller, Los soldados de salamina (2001); Josefina Aldecoa's triology Mujeres de negro (1999), La fuerza del destino (1997), and Historia de una maestra (1996); Ángeles Caso's Un largo silencio (2000); Juan Manuel de Prada's epic historical novels Las máscaras del héroe (1996) and Las esquinas del aire (2000).

(9)Passerini, in her groundbreaking Memory and Totalitarianism , insists on the use of Oral History to redress the wrongs of incorrect memory, that is, memory that has been falsified to the specious advantage of hegemonic interests: ‘The naïve claim of Oral History in its early decades, to simply give voice to those who had been silenced by history is almost derisory. Fighting silence is not enough; “silence” is not even an appropriate term for the task to come: what is to be fought is not only silence but distortions or “false memory”' (16).

(10)For futher reading on the subject of evidence and the uses of experience, see Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines .

(11)Empathy becomes the point of intersection between Oral History practice, theories of reading, and Kohutian psychoanalysis, a topic worthy of a separate study. The psychoanalytic theories of Heinz Kohut have only recently served as a critical optic of literary studies. Particularly on the point of empathy as an antidote to narcissism in the novel, see Jeffrey Berman's Narcissism and the Novel . Also J. Brooks Bouson's The Empathic Reader: A study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self ; and Lynne Layton and Barbara Shapiro's Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of the Self . The introductions to Berman and Layton and Shapiro offer informative overviews of the theories of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and its departures from Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalyses.

(12)Both Gonzalo Navajas and Mari Paz Balibrea have written about the recuperation of historical memory and the communal identities of the underclasses in El pianista . Balibrea's fine article on the novel largely coincides with my reading of the text. We part ways precisely in regard to the designation of the novel as ‘nostalgic.' While she claims that it is mistaken to read the novel as either nostalgic or postmodern, I insist, in keeping with the fundamental basis of my argument, that El pianista belongs to a nostalgia both utopian and progressive. By rejecting the possibility that the novel is part of Vázquez Montalbán's greater nostalgic project, Balibrea fails to consider that there are alternatives to the regressive, restorative, conservative forms of longing.

(13)Translations of Marsé and Cervera are mine.

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---(1998) ‘ El pianista y el estigma del desencanto', Revista Hispánica Moderna 51, 119-35.

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---(1997) trans. Kristina Cordero My Brother's Gun trans. of Caídos del cielo ( New York , St. Martins Press).

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