2 - Games of Make-Believe: Playing with Historical Discourses

Summary

Having depicted critical discourse as a pliable toy in the narrative play area in Chapter 1, I concluded that Marsé’s playful attitude to official discourses leads to a provocative challenge to the notion of ‘fiabilidad histórica’. History appears more intractable than literary criticism; in the popular mind and among historians, the conviction remains strong that history should and can be an accurate reconstruction of what has taken place in reality: history deals in research and the quest for truth; literature deals in imagination and fiction. Yet this is, of course, an oversimplification. Historians, like literary critics, may try to take an objective stance outside the events they describe but at best the nature of the original events is uncertain, and at worst selecting material and shaping a narrative betrays preconceptions and ideological bias in historians as in critics. Moreover, in the post-war Barcelona that Marsé depicts, any fact–fiction opposition has been forever undermined by daily experience of the manipulation of information for propagandist purposes. Marsé sets out to explore and exploit conflicting historical discourses and present them as so many fictions vying with each other in the play area of his own storytelling.

This chapter on Marsé’s games with historical discourses introduces as his most straightforwardly historical work three as yet neglected volumes entitled Imágenes y recuerdos. What Marsé does with history there will then provide the basis for re-reading two novels which deal with the retelling of history, but do so with playful allusion to detective fiction and autobiography: genres concerned with uncovering truth and therefore particularly appropriate for Marsé’s ironic games. In detective fiction, sleuths strip away disguises and deceit to expose a crime and a criminal; in autobiography, a subject purports to reveal – but often constructs – a self to present to the reader. In Marsé’s novels, historical discourses become forms of disguise and deceit. In Si te dicen que caí, which I discuss as detective fiction, the rhetoric of the Falange Anthem alluded to in the title opens the way to a parodic representation of Spanish National Catholic discourses. In El amante bilingüe, Catalan Catholic Nationalist discourse is presented for scrutiny in an alternating third- and first-person, Catalan and Castilian narrative that questions the very nature of autobiography.