The Detained-Disappeared and the “Grandchildren's” Autofiction: "Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre", by Cristina Fallarás

Abstract

In the time of crisis of the great narratives, literature continues to demand reconnection with the context as well as social intervention. From this point of view, autofiction can be understood as a means to express artistic self-consciousness that, at the same time, entrusts to literature the task of knowing the world and that offers (personal and subjective) explanations to the various social and political processes. Based on this hypothesis, this article aims to address this critical dimension of autofiction, connecting it with the so-called “subjective turn”. This turn affects a great number of current productions in which the transmission of historical knowledge and the understanding of the social is based on the individual’s experience. With this objective, we will study intersections and interferences between political and literary discourses through the analysis of Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre (2018), the recent novel by Cristina Fallarás. We will take into account the transnationalization of certain concepts in the field of repression and violence that originally come from contexts other than Spanish. In this way, we will reflect on the relevance of denominations such as “narrative of the postmemory”, “literature of the grandchildren” or “detained-disappeared” (originally applied by the sociologist Gatti to the Argentinian context, but possible to be extrapolated to the Spanish case) as notions that can explain certain artistic manifestations, such as Fallarás’ novel.