The mourning novel in relation to the historical novel: an analysis of Santo diablo, by Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga

Abstract

We analyze what we call the novel of mourning in opposition to the novel of historical memory. While both assume a critical position with respect to the violence of the 20th century in Spain, they differ in how they deal with the losses of the past. The novel of historical memory, influenced by the internationalization of memory discourses and movements, seeks to combat the imposed forgetting through a literary recovery of forgotten cases from the past. The novel of mourning, however, seeks to break this dichotomy between forgetting/memory, understanding that the losses of the past are unrecoverable and that a more just future is only achievable by recognizing the past’s tragic nature: more than a (re)opening or closing of wounds, it means living with them, also permitting a way of relating to other tragedies that would otherwise be foreign to us. As an example we analyze Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga’s Santo Diablo (2004).