Longing for resistance: Nostalgia and the novel in postdictatorial Spain and Chile

In this dissertation I analyze how four contemporary Spanish and Chilean authors engage contentious memories about violent conflict, exile, torture and incarceration during the military dictatorships in Spain (1939-1975) and Chile (1973-1989). For Spain, I examine Soldados de Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas and La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacon. For Chile, I analyze Estrella Distante (1996) by Roberto Bolano and Ultimos dias de la historia (2001) by Roberto Brodsky. In diverse ways, these authors mourn the political and moral defeat of the regimes' opponents and vindicate their utopian discourses that were shut out of the public sphere. Central to my argument are the critical methods of Russian theorist Svetlana Boym who explores various conceptions of nostalgia. In The Future of Nostalgia (2002) Boym maintains that nostalgia, beyond its colloquial meaning as an idealization of the past, can take many forms: it can be meditative, analytical and even ironic. My project draws on the distinction that Boym makes between "restorative nostalgia" and "reflective nostalgia." While some novels demonstrate "restorative nostalgia," or a tendency that seeks to mend the incongruities of memory and reproduce for the reader an unambiguous---romanticized---portrait of the victims of the regimes, others manifest a tendency toward a type of "reflective nostalgia," one that displays the complexities of subjectivities and memories of repression. What largely distinguishes reflective from restorative nostalgic narratives is aesthetic form: the self-reflexive one favors the resistance to grand narratives, and the restorative form reasserts totalizing, teleological meanings. Uncritical nostalgic novels are restricted by a schematized grandiloquent rhetoric and overt recourse to myth, which ironically runs the risk of replacing one monologic discourse with another. In contrast, evaluative nostalgic narratives---with their structural openendesness and ideological indeterminacy---do not limit meaning, but provoke skepticism and further dialogue. This trait perhaps best bespeaks reflective nostalgia's potential to contest authoritarian discourses in Spain and Chile in the wake of the regimes. Ultimately, this dissertation addresses a larger question of how Chileans and Spaniards, through literature, are currently dealing with the lingering trauma of political violence in these postauthoritarian democracies.