Sites of Violence and Memory in Modern Spain by Antonio Míguez Macho

Author:Antonio Míguez Macho [Macho, Antonio Míguez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350199200
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Memory alephs: The symbolization of violence through places where ‘Nothing Ever Happens’

Aldara Cidrás

Memory alephs and the unspeakable

The memory of a civil war’s endless violence is the memory of hell. And hell – intangible, ethereal, penetrating – has no place: it occupies all spaces, both public and private. As Mephistopheles revealed to Faust in Marlowe’s famous work, hell is in the entrails: ‘Where we are tortured and remain forever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed.’1 Hell, translated into fear, inhabits every street, every house, every body. It is not limited to civil government buildings overtaken by the military or centres of confinement and torture. Necropolitics – of which war is its apotheosis – goes beyond physical spaces, permeating all aspects of people’s lives. The memory of the civil war is thus the memory of a place without limits, of a hell that is everywhere.

In this chapter, I will use an analytical approach to study the mechanisms of the symbolization of violence through widespread accounts that gather diverse memories of – and also transcend – the idea of event and place. To describe these mechanisms, I will propose the concept of the memory aleph. We will thus see, based on assumptions taken from the Spanish case, two phenomena. The first relates to how the memory of wartime suffering was constructed and transmitted by privileging incidents confined to specific spaces, even when these incidents were not necessarily the bloodiest. The second phenomenon concerns how these events transcended their episodic nature to express the atmosphere of violence and the terror of the entrails: to narrate the unspeakable. In other words, we will study how certain events came to represent the entire conflict, thus enabling its narrative transmission. Moreover, through metonymy, the cities in which such events took place came to symbolize the indelible impression of the violence of the coup and the war in the collective imagination.

In Borges’s eponymous tale, the Aleph is ‘the only place on earth where all places are – seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending’.2 Through an exercise in extrapolation, we can take the term and apply it to our aims by suggesting the existence of significative entities that we can call memory alephs. A memory aleph is the result of a mechanism of processing and codifying a plural, traumatic memory by unifying diverse accounts linked to places and events. Event and space, inseparably related, transcend themselves and symbolize something much broader than the occurrence or place itself. They act as key markers in the metanarrative that establishes a collective identity, driven by a disseminating agent of that memory. In other words, memory alephs are mnemohistorical figures – to use Jan Assmann’s terminology3 – that capture the process by which certain traumatic events went beyond themselves to represent both the interior and the entirety of the experience of tragedy. This occurs with the peculiarity that, through metonymy and as a way to enable its narrative transmission, the city or the space in which

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