Historical Discourses

Any analysis of Spanish culture that takes into account the proliferation of literary and nonliterary historical discourses must include Basque literature. This chapter argues that this multiplication of historical discourses must be connected to attempts to imagine anew the national foundations of the different communities that make up Spain. To illustrate this assertion, this chapter focuses on the historical fiction written in the 1990s by two prominent Basque writers, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramon Saizarbitoria. By studying the way in which the historical fiction of these two Basque writers articulates a specific national memory and subject position, some general conclusions can be drawn about the formation of historical discourses in post–Franco Spain.

In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson discusses the importance of historical discourses in national processes of community imagining. When Anderson introduces his theory of the nation as an ‘imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’, he underlines the importance of the historical convergence of capitalism, language diversity, and print. However, when attempting to explain the ‘attachment’ or ‘political love’ nations elicit from their citizens (without which nations would fail as social constructs), Anderson returns to language's natural fatalism – in the sense that languages are not chosen by the people – and its connection to history: ‘If nationess has about it an aura of fatality, it is nonetheless a fatality embedded in history […]. Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed.’