Dead Woman Walking: “Historical Memory,” Trauma, and Adaptation in Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida

Does Eckhart Tolle’s popular writing about “pain body” have anything to do with the “historical memory” of the Spanish Civil War? I contend that it does, despite the self-help language with which Tolle describes how the past becomes part of identity and curtails achieving an ego-free consciousness. Like much self-help (or inspirational) writing, the notion of “pain body”––for Tolle an individual’s obsession with what he-she sees as past wrongs-–is too simple for those of us struggling with the vestiges of the Franco insurgency of 1936. At the same time there is a certain validity to the notion of “collective pain body” (Tolle 141). In this essay I explore the notion of trauma (another term for “pain body” of sorts) in Dulce Chacón’s stirring Spanish Civil War novel La voz dormida [translated into English as The Sleeping Voice] in conjunction with its lm adaptation directed by Benito Zambrano.