Fantasmas en un desierto que brilla o la soledad del lector de palimpsestos. Los relatos del regreso en Max Aub, Francisco Ayala y Arturo Barea

Resumen

Ghosts in a shining desert or the solitude of the palimpsests reader. Stories of the return in Max Aub, Francisco Ayala and Arturo Barea works

During the long years of exile, writers like Max Aub, Francisco Ayala or Arturo Barea wrote stories in which they fictionalized the returns of the exiles before their own returns occurred. This is the case of the works collected in Las vueltas 1965 originally written in 1947, 1960 and 1964, and of Max Aub’s story “El remate” 1965, of “El regreso”, by Francisco Ayala 1948 and of the novel La raíz rota by Arturo Barea 1951. In this article I intend to draw the common lines of meaning between all these fictions and compare them with La gallina ciega. Diario español, written by Max Aub during his trip to Spain in 1969, the first time he visited since his departure in 1939 by Cerbère. We will check there the confirmation of some of the fears of the exiles expressed in the anticipatory works, the strangeness in the new country, the tendency to read its landscapes and its cities like palimpsests inhabited with ghosts and the impossibility to trace a membership to any community other than that of exile.