Rete simbolica e dinamiche della memoria nella trilogia della guerra civile di Juan Eduardo Zúñiga

The aim of this PhD thesis is to explore Juan Eduardo Zúñiga’s private and literary path in order to illustrate the author’s intellectual complexity and especially to offer a critical analysis of the most significant part of his production, that is the so called “trilogy of the Spanish Civil War”, which includes the short stories of Largo noviembre de Madrid (1980), La tierra será un paraíso (1989) and Capital de la gloria (2003). Zúñiga (Madrid, 1919) is among the most distinguished Spanish contemporary writers but his work hasn’t been investigated at a profound level yet. The research aims to turn this initial disadvantage into a challenge, demonstrating how the author’s personal evolution intertwines with the historical context of the Spanish Civil War firstly and the Francoist regime secondly through a constant dialog with this period, especially when he recovers and saves from the oblivion the multiple voices of the Madrilenian intrahistoria, the real protagonist of the historical changes. Therefore the trilogy, which is almost an unexplored land, is at the core of the research. After a brief but necessary recap of the most relevant events of contemporary Spain and also Zúñiga’s biographical reconstruction (developed in the first part of the thesis), the study will focus later on two narrative aspects that define and identify the cycle (in the second part). Symbolism and Memory, effectively, permeate the trilogy due to their repetition and interconnection, making the whole organic, systematic and cohesive. The textus comes up as a real net, a bundle made of recurring “objects-symbol”, characters and themes. It is also a lieu de mémoire where the construction and the destruction of memories and identities (both individual and collective) are widespread narrative operations that show the historical Spanish society opposition between vencedores (the Nationalists) and vencidos (the Republicans). Specific short stories from the three volumes have been selected in order to illustrate and examine how symbols work and also how the dynamics of memory and oblivion structure the diegesis. The result is a complex panorama made of tradition and innovation created by Zúñiga to give testimony of the controversial age that he lived, as citizen and historical witness, in order to transmit and preserve the historical memory (memoria histórica) of the Spanish Civil War.