Spain is different? : Historical memory and the ‘Two Spains’ in turn-of-the-millennium Spanish apocalyptic fictions

A study of historical trauma and religious imagery in turn-of-the-century Spanish science fiction.
 
Apocalyptic science-fiction exploded around the world at the end of the twentieth century, hand-in-hand with naturalistic secularism. In Spain, however, science fiction paradoxically embraced biblical plots, characters, and imagery. Drawing on critical theory, psychoanalysis, and biblical scholarship, Spain Is Different? explains this phenomenon through an analysis of the “Two Spains,” Spanish “difference,” and the “Pact of Silence.” Each collaborated to obscure accountable justice following the traumatic Civil War, and the resulting traumas manifest symbolically in these fictions.

The end of the second millennium witnessed an increase in science-fictional apocalyptic narratives globally. There is a noteworthy difference between such fictions from Latin America and the anglophone world and those from Spain, in which scientific explanations of events coexist with biblically-inspired plots, characters and imagery. This is the first book-length study of either science-fictional novels or apocalyptic literature in that country, analysing six such works between 1990 and 2005. Within a theoretical framework that includes critical and genre theories, archetypal criticism, and biblical scholarship, the book explains this phenomenon as a result of three historical factors: the ‘Two Spains’, Spanish ‘difference’, and the ‘Pact of Silence’, a tacit agreement that made justice and accountability impossible in the name of a peaceful transition to democracy. It repressed any processing of the historical trauma experienced during the Civil War and dictatorship, trauma that manifests itself symbolically in these fictions.