La memoria republicana de la Guerra Civil en "El jinete polaco" de Antonio Muñoz Molina

Abstract

This essay examines how the Republican memories of the Spanish Civil War are represented in El jinete polaco by Antonio Muñoz Molina, published in 1991. The protagonists Manuel and Nadia evoke the past of Mágina, Manuel’s Andalusian hometown, during some intense days in New York. Manuel tells Nadia the stories about the war and the post-war repression that were shared in his family during his childhood and adolescence, and Nadia completes the view with the story of her father, an exiled major of the Republican army. In my analysis, I look at several aspects of the shared memories. I compare the structure of the narration and the narrated memories with features of the concept of collective memory, and I discuss the relation between collective memory and family memory in the light of the situation during the Francoist dictatorship. The stories about two crucial events, the beginning and the end of the war, are studied as examples of counter-memories that challenge the official version of the events. Further, I discuss how the impact of the traumatic events of the war and post-war can be traced in the narration. The reiteration of certain war memories as a means of maintaining the Republican identity is one aspect, another is the vague memories of certain cruel events, as the post-war executions. I also examine how the fear born of the post-war repression is transmitted to Manuel by his parents and grandparents. I conclude that Antonio Muñoz Molina in El jinete polaco not only gives voice to those who lost the war, but also establishes a counter-history that delegitimizes the official Francoist version. In representing the narrator’s recuperation of his family’s Republican memory, the author has anticipated a recent interest in recuperating the past in Spanish society, of which the law Ley de la Memoria Histórica, implemented in 2007, is an example.