As voces dos recordos: memoria oral, pasado traumático e novela na Galiza actual

Abstract

Voices of memories: Oral memory, traumatic past and the novel in contemporary Galicia

The fictionalisation of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in the Galician novel has experienced a significant evolution from a thematic and formal point of view. This evolution has been greatly influenced by the memory boom since the beginning of the 21st century, both in Galicia and the rest of Spain. Therefore, exploring the contemporary Galician narrative corpus requires an interdisciplinary approach to address not only the literary representations of history and memory, but also the functions acquired by those narratives in connection with the context as well as the cultural memory of the Galician people. This paper focuses on the relationship between memory and orality in some of these texts in order to analyse how oral memory emerges in the novel as a form of persistence of the past in current times. This oral memory becomes a key element in many of these narratives and faces a deliberate collective amnesia and the reluctance to remember, acting as a space for resistance that connects the past and present in the texts.