ABSTRACT
Overview Since the year 2000 and the fi rst public investigations of Franco-era mass graves, the approach to Spain’s history through memory has emerged in an explosive way in Spanish cultural production, as well as in the academic work that takes memory as its object of study. The authors included in Literary Labyrinths: Narrating Memory and Place in Franco-Era Barcelona anticipate this phenomenon by three decades or more and show, as Francisco Ferrándiz puts it, that “[. . .] these memories never stopped roaming the scarce spaces left for them to articulate and evolve during the dictatorship” (309). The recent trend in scholarship has been to look at memory-based cultural production that has been generated since the death of the dictator, Francisco Franco, in 1975. 1 Literary Labyrinths focuses on earlier works (published between 1960 and 1978, the year in which Spain’s democratic constitution was promulgated) and proposes a kind of memory that emerges from within and inseparable from its own institutionalized repression. During the beginnings of the now infamous pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting or pact of oblivion) 2 and even before the end of the dictatorship, these novels showed characters who struggled to produce narratives of the remembered past that entered into immediate confl ict with the offi cial, dominant version of Spain’s historical narrative, which had been formulated to cover over the horrors of the Civil War (1936-1939) and to legitimate the fascist regime (1939-1975).
