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5 - Transitional Stories

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Summary

¿Transición? ¿La transición española? ¿Transiciones democráticas?

¿Transiciones, de dónde a dónde? ¿De qué a qué? ¿Un concepto

sociológico de transiciones? ¿Un simulacro?

Eduardo Subirats, Intransiciones, 13

In 2011, four novels connected with the years of the Transición were published in Spain. Their authors, all born between 1960 and 1963, were clearly shaped by the experience and memory of this period. Ignacio Martínez de Pisón (b. 1960), Rafael Reig (b. 1963), Antonio Orejudo (b. 1963), and Benjamín Prado (b. 1961) were born under Franco's dictatorship and were young men during the gradual easing of his regime and the arrival of democracy. Their literary education took place to a world dominated by the narrative of the country's successful democratisation, and their present work is cognisant yet critical of the changes that took place during those years. In this final chapter, I examine how Spain's political transition is recreated and remembered in Prado's Operación Gladio (2011), Reig's Todo está perdonado (2011), Orejudo's Un momento de descanso (2011), and Martínez de Pisón's El día de mañana (2011). While the stories told in these novels are not always directly connected to the politics of the late 1970s, the world and the characters portrayed in their narratives are unmistakably marked by the events of this period. More importantly, each novel emphasises that the Transición cannot be read as a ‘break’ from the past, that the latter should be examined for its endurance and its continued ability to affect the present. In Martínez de Pisón's narrative, for example, as the later years of Francoism blend into the early days of the political transition, change pervades the characters’ everyday lives—a change that is imperceptible until reflected upon from a temporal distance. In these authors’ novels, the intimate and physical connections the characters make to the years of the Transición are varied and unexpected; each novel revisits this period with an obsession that reflects what we have seen in the other works analysed in this book. In a close reading of these authors’ works, I highlight the impulse exhibited by both characters and authors to connect their present lives to the past through narration, and tie this process of remembering to the debate about historical memory in Spain.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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