Disinherited Trauma in Adelaida García Morales’ El Sur

O'Donoghue, Samuel (2020) Disinherited Trauma in Adelaida García Morales’ El Sur. Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America, 97 (6). pp. 983-1004. ISSN 1475-3820

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Abstract

Adelaida García Morales’ El Sur (1985) was written two decades before the surge of public interest in collective memories of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship at the turn of the twenty-first century. The novella has attracted a good deal of critical attention in the years since its publication, but most scholars have focused on the incestuous family drama at the centre of the work and addressed its allusions to post-war Spain only as a secondary feature. This article revisits El Sur with the aim of illustrating how its author anticipates the concerns of the memory movement that emerged two decades after its composition. Of particular interest is García Morales’ prescient and nuanced representation of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Thus while the novella dramatizes the potential for psychological damage in the second generation of the civil war, it illustrates the coping mechanisms that can mitigate the impact of parental trauma. El Sur resists the psychosocial determinism that the idea of communal trauma often entails and as a result makes a valuable contribution to the historical memory debates that came to prominence in the decades after its publication.